The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  I nodded in guilt.

  ‘Thanks be to the Lord, thank you, Sir.’ She pushed it quickly back into my hands. ‘Now take it back before someone finds it.’

  ‘If you had told nobody then who else could it belong to? Are you in trouble, girl? Last night I saw you run from your room as if being pursued. Is it a man from the village threatening you?’

  She shook her head violently.

  ‘Not a man, no …’

  She stopped, hearing footsteps at the bend. Whoever was approaching was whistling ‘The Blackbird’. Bridget suddenly sprang forward, tearing her clothes and skin on the briars as she tumbled down the gully into the field. Her fear was contagious. I put the cigarette case in my pocket, swung my foot forward and leapt before he came into sight. I slid down, winding myself as I banged against rocks before she caught me as my feet were about to strike the water. We huddled beneath the bushes there, our bodies packed together, our breath close until the man had passed.

  ‘My father,’ she whispered. ‘If I run across the meadow I’ll be there before him. Let me go now, Sir, or I shall be late.’

  She was trembling as I held my arm around her. I knew she would not pull away.

  ‘Don’t you know the danger of running around in the dark like that? When I saw you last night you seemed like a wild thing.’

  ‘I’ll not sleep there alone, Sir, not in that house. He leaves me there till dawn with not a soul else.’

  ‘There are neighbours on both sides of you. Can you not call out if you are in distress?’

  ‘And tell them what, Sir?’ Bridget turned towards me. ‘What will I tell them I see?’

  There was something about her voice, a violence below the surface which unnerved me. Which of us was the other’s prisoner in that glade? Had she tumbled down there to escape her father or lure me after her? She was waiting for a reply, her eyes defying me to speak.

  ‘How can I know what you could tell them? I have never been in your room at night.’

  ‘My father takes a lift home from the cart bringing the first load of flour to Drogheda each morning. It leaves at seven, has him at the bridge by a quarter past.’

  ‘That is a long time from sundown.’

  ‘The man who visits my room, tutor, will not leave until dawn or until I tell him to go. Do you understand?’

  It made sense to me suddenly, her counterfeit mysterious airs like a melodrama heroine, her running across the meadow in her night shift, this enticement beside the stream where we might be seen from the roadway. What was she but a labourer’s daughter without a dowry or education? What future could await her in this village or the city in the vale beneath it? Lying under the rough trunk of some farm labourer, a cabin of screeching children, her looks dissipated by the age of twenty-four? Her look of terror was the bait and I the dumb fish swimming towards it. The slight position I held in the world, the few possessions I had so recently despised all came back to me, suddenly precious at the thought that I might lose them. She rose up as though reading my thoughts.

  ‘I want nothing from you, especially a child. Do you hear me?’

  She began to race frantically across the grass towards her father’s cottage, her words, as she shouted back, distorted by the wind so I could barely believe I had deciphered them, that they came from her lips and were not an echo of my dream.

  ‘Get me pregnant, Johnny tutor, and I’ll claw your balls off.’

  The mood of the office had changed. At first it was just cigarettes, then change began to disappear, then banknotes from people’s purses and coats. An air of suspicion set in, destroying the ease of that summer, girls brought their bags with them to the toilets, people put their cigarettes away without passing them around. Library assistants always blame the cleaners. It’s a form of tribal snobbery, I suppose. No doubt the cleaners always blame them. Joanie suffered the greatest loss. She emerged from the cloakroom in tears one pay-day saying that her wages were stolen. The girls quietly had a whip-round and forced an envelope into her pocket when she was leaving at five o’clock.

  We blew it all that night in half a dozen pubs, could barely stand when we reached my flat. In bed, for some reason, I told her about my father’s mother who had died when I was nine. I remembered her as a great woman to walk, even in her late seventies, remembered one Sunday how she had brought me around the whole Botanic Gardens and then to the corner outside to buy ice-cream.

  ‘Slut’s Alley,’ she’d said, pointing down the road bordering the river, ‘that’s what they called it when I was a girl in the fields out there.’

  I lay with my head against Joanie’s breast, trying to remember more. Had she shown me a small house where she had lived, a hill, something to do with horses and a tram? All I remembered was the ice-cream, a sliver of cone stuck between my teeth as she told me I was the spit of her father, and wondering if I asked her would she buy me a second one.

  ‘Your granny might have known her,’ I said to Joanie. ‘You could ask, but I can’t remember her maiden name.’

  Joanie was silent, I wasn’t even sure if she was listening. It was only after I had almost forgotten what I had said that she replied.

  ‘I’ll not ask her. I’ll not be in that woman’s debt for anything.’

  But yet often in midweek when we were at our most broke Joanie would arrive with money borrowed from the old woman. No pay-night could match the unexpected joy of those sprees, the doubles bought, the full bottle at closing time, her persistent moaning during sex. And never would I have to fight harder to persuade her to go home and to persuade myself to make her go before this room wound up her special flat.

  Because deep down I knew that our being together was a spree and had to be kept at that, a defiant fling against the world by a girl embarking on womanhood and a man leaving his youth behind. Left alone here to cope with the mundane tasks of living we would quarrel before long, retreat into sulks, tear each other apart. And yet by then I wanted it to be more and felt that she did too, but Joanie was frightened of any show of affection that went too close. Her favourite phrase was that she was my mistress, letting the word hang in the air as though it belonged to another century, that we were drawn together by sex and nothing else. She hated any term of affection. Brittle and bright in her white stockings and tops she held me for that moment only, her cries echoing through the empty showrooms below my flat, down the crumbling stairways as she came repeatedly on her back. Sometimes afterwards, if her pleasure had been too great, she would not let me kiss her. She’d talk of other men she’d had, either real or imagined, her voice shriller than necessary as if to drive her emotions back. Did she love me? That is the question I still keep asking myself. Perhaps in as much as she allowed herself to love anything. I told myself that it was the child which held her back, that she kept for her daughter alone a space in her heart. I know even less now than I knew then, not even if I loved her in return. She could annoy me intensely with her attempts at ostentation, her shame at the cottage she was born in, her dreams of mock Victoriana tacked on to the bricks of some new estate, her flight from everything that both she and I were made of. And yet I kept thinking that I still didn’t know her, that there was a different Joanie living in the secret world of that cottage, that there was something I was missing, something that was strangely familiar, some part of her I was failing to decipher.

  Once I gave in. It was my thirty-first birthday but I had not told Joanie so. Indeed, I had forgotten myself until I looked at a paper that morning. In bed that night she was staring at my face. I suddenly realized how old I must look to her, how many years had passed since those mornings when I had run through the fields, feeling the future open before me. When had it gone stale, like a summer you’ve kept waiting for before realizing the leaves have crinkled up into autumn? That childish sense of destiny had somehow sustained me, made me oblivious to how my youth had slid away. Joanie smiled, noticing my seriousness. I didn’t want her ever to leave, to have to pass those last hours of every
night alone, the grey light on the quays when I could not sleep, the red glow of a cigarette growing less and less discernible through the window.

  ‘Stay with me, Joanie,’ I said. ‘Not just for this night but every night. Bring your child. I don’t mean here but some house we could rent. It could be good, just the three of us, no one looking over our shoulders.’

  ‘I’ll stay tonight if you want,’ she said. ‘You know that’s no problem.’

  ‘Joanie, I want you to come and live with me. Do you not understand? You hate that cottage, I virtually have to kill to get you to go back to it. Let’s start together, I honestly don’t mind about the child.’

  She rolled over on her back and was silent. I had wanted her voice to be ecstatic, her arms to be flung around me.

  ‘Just like that, and leave her?’ Joanie’s voice was doubtful.

  ‘Leave who? I want you to bring the child with you.’

  ‘Leave my granny?’

  I laughed and then stopped, seeing her face.

  ‘But you hate her? You spend half the night thinking up plans to poison her off.’

  ‘She’d like that, wouldn’t she, the shame of me packed away off her hands. She’d think she’d have won a victory for herself.’

  Her voice was flat and vindictive. I’m too old, I told myself at first. That is what she is thinking, but she doesn’t know how to say it to me. And then I sensed that she was hardly even aware of me, that her thoughts were firmly back in that cottage, in her other world I was excluded from.

  ‘Joanie, I’m not discussing your granny, I’m talking about the future, about us, you and me and your child. What is it? Is it leaving your sister you’re worried about? We could find a way for her too.’

  ‘Sitting snug up there alone with those cosy rooms finally to herself. Oh, my granny would have the last laugh to herself all right.’

  Joanie sat up in the bed. Her hands were folded across her stomach and she was half rocking herself. That night I didn’t have to force her to dress. We walked the mile and a half out to her home in silence. At the corner she never acknowledged me or looked back. She walked up the hill, this time ignoring the town houses and bright cars, her eyes fixed on the dark windows of her granny’s cottage as though it were an heirloom some thief had tried to wrestle from her.

  The first thing to do was try and appear calm for the rest of the evening, be seen about the house, complain of a headache and go to my room. The next thing was to wait, counting each chime, like a slow torture, from the clock in the hall. The last thing was to leave the house quietly. The back stairs were in semi-darkness. Only a single oil lamp near the bust of the Italian girl shone its weak light out in a dim circle. I crept past it and down, out the side door across the back lawn towards the woods. Some fields were to be crossed, the overgrown ramparts which a Dutch king, now snug in his crypt in Delft, had dug with his battle-tired men, and then I was safe among the foliage.

  At worst now I might be mistaken for a poacher. I kept close to the river, crossing it once by two planks strung across the water, one for my hands three feet above the other. It was a quarter moon, just bright enough to discern the rough track through the trees. I left the sound of water and ventured deeper through the old woods. None of the serving girls would walk this way at night, though it saved half an hour on their journey down the avenue of stiff regimented boughs. Many had died here of hunger and smallpox, but it was not the ghosts of their own class who frightened the girls but a past master, a hanging judge said to ride here by night, his name more real to them, a century after the last worm had crawled from his bones, than the place names of Boston or India.

  I did not meet him that night. Two startled rabbits crossed my path, a badger raised his head and sniffed, slipping into the undergrowth, and once I heard footsteps which ceased when I did. As I walked on I knew I was being observed by no spectre but by old Matthew, a crouched figure of blood and flesh and hunger. I would have been frightened of being seen by anyone else but he seemed no more than an animal in the wood. I felt the cigarette case in my pocket and stopped, emptying the contents out on to the clay track. I threw matches down and walked on, listening to the eager footsteps shuffling out from behind the trees.

  I came to the wood’s edge near the ruins of a burnt-out cotton mill where disturbed rooks circled with rasping cries, slipped past the lights of a cabin and paused by the barred gates of the asylum. Nobody screamed from behind the walls that night, instead from the gatekeeper’s cottage a child sang a song without words.

  I crossed the road, then froze at the hedgerow. The boy, Turlough, was there, looking around him lost as he tried to find his way home. I waited till he was past before plunging down the slope to leap across the stream. Up till now I had not allowed myself to think of what lay ahead. Instead, I had focused on every bird’s late cry and creature’s blind haste, never so aware of every leaf and burrow hole as I tried to obliterate the thoughts of it from my head.

  But now the time for control was gone. I thought only of Bridget. I forgot dowry and doubts and the ordered universe of walls. I was an animal stalking through the undergrowth and she was my prey. There was no longer any part of her body my mind could not conjure, no part I would not make my own. I crouched down crossing the meadow, and approached the cottage from the rear. The kitchen window was small, set deep into the wall. I watched her through it. Her hair was still damp from washing, she knelt with her head bowed over the fire to dry it as though she were at prayer. The room was spotless, with little furniture. Over the fireplace a large cross hung, the crumpled body of her Saviour suspended between nails. On another wall the cross of her namesake was nailed over the door. I rapped three times on the glass and she turned her head sharply and then stopped, her face concealed by the fan of hair. It was only when I rapped again that she rose, struggled to make out my face in the window, and then ran to push open the back door.

  ‘It’s you, Sir,’ she said.

  ‘Let me in, girl, quickly before somebody sees us.’

  She remained blocking the door.

  ‘You’ll stay until I tell you to go? You will?’

  ‘Quickly, Bridget, let me in.’

  ‘Promise first.’

  I promised and she stepped back, closing the door behind me as I entered.

  ‘Till just before dawn,’ she whispered, almost to herself.

  ‘You may wish yourself well rid of me before then for all you know of what I may do.’

  ‘What you do is of little consequence,’ she murmured, ‘just be here and watch.’ She paused for a moment near the table. ‘And don’t leave me your bastard to carry in my father’s name.’

  Once I had been at the heart of everything in work. Now I was not told about the trap that was set, the marked five-pound note left in a girl’s locker. It was an August afternoon when the heat in that cramped room was at its most oppressive. Joanie had just returned from the ladies when the Senior Assistant came in. There was a hush that was louder than any whisper along the table. He nervously cleared his throat.

  ‘We all know that money has been going missing,’ he said. ‘Now I’m asking everyone at the table to empty their pockets and purses. I’m not forcing people but if anyone does not agree I shall have to call the police in.’

  Billy lowered his paper and looked over at me. I knew what he was thinking, how the fun of that summer had drained from the office, the laughter and trust, the ‘spurious camaraderie’ our bosses had complained of. Each of us felt like a criminal as we emptied our pockets, embarrassed for no reason at the trivial personal possessions on display. Joanie scattered the contents of her bag on the table, a large assortment of different types of cigarettes and a few crumpled notes. The Senior Assistant picked up a five-pound note from among them. The letters I.L.Y.A. were written clearly across it, the first and second pairs of letters in different hands.

  ‘Are they your initials and did you write them?’ he asked the two girls nearest him. They nodded. Joanie looked
coldly in his face.

  ‘What are you talking about? He gave that to me after our first night together.’ She pointed across at me. ‘I.L.Y.A. I love you always. I’ve kept this in my purse ever since.’

  ‘In two different letterings?’

  ‘I.L. with his right hand, Y.A. with his left. To show that he loved me with both his body and his mind.’

  Nobody believed her. The room looked on as Joanie stared at my face. The Senior Assistant walked awkwardly towards me. He was one of my best friends, a man I could trust with my soul. He didn’t want to ask me and I didn’t want to answer him. I felt violated as if my whole world had been inexplicably snatched away.

  ‘Is that true?’

  I nodded and lowered my head. He gave the note back to Joanie and walked towards the door.

  ‘Don’t I get an apology?’ she demanded.

  He stopped and looked back at the contents of her bag.

  ‘You’ve varied tastes in cigarettes,’ he said.

  Joanie looked him up and down contemptuously.

  ‘I’ve better taste in men.’

  At five o’clock I went into the gents and remained there until I was sure she would have left the yard, then took my coat and walked out. But I knew I was only stalling the moment. She was waiting outside my flat.

  ‘The bitches, they set me up, the jealous bitches.’

  The shopkeeper was piling up his couches in the hall, sodden with drizzle, up-ended to reveal the bad lining and cheap wood. I walked past him, ignoring her, and she followed me to the bend of the stairs.

  ‘You don’t believe them, do you? You would take their side against mine.’

  ‘I love you always. What would you have replied if I had said that to you?’ I had the key in the lock, the words spoken to the badly painted door.

  ‘You never did say that, did you?’ She paused. What did I expect? Her hand suddenly to be on my shoulder, her voice to ask forgiveness?