The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  He laughed then and called to his companion, “Will we put them in jail?”

  “Not sure,” the other man said. They were all standing close together now. Tam could smell the alcohol and smoke on the breath of this smaller man. “Can you climb?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said.

  “I wasn’t asking you, actually.” He jerked his head in the direction of Teddy, who had stopped sniffling and was paying attention. “I want to know if he can climb.”

  Suddenly Tam realized that these were men much younger than her father, and the fact of this calmed her considerably. They obviously had no idea where she came from.

  “I can,” said Teddy in a surprisingly clear voice. “And so can she,” he added, wanting to be fair to her in everything.

  “That’s the ticket then.” The taller man looked at the watch on the hand that was not holding Teddy’s arm. “If you can get over that fence, that one, over there” – he motioned toward the farthest side of the airfield – “if you can get over that fence and out of our sight in less than two minutes, you win. If not, we win.”

  Both Teddy and Tam squirmed at the end of the men’s grasp. “Not so fast,” said the shorter of the two men. “There is something else. There is no school these days, correct?”

  Tam wondered if she should disclose this information but Teddy nodded.

  “If and only if you get over that fence in two minutes, we will not call the coppers. And if we don’t call the coppers, we want you to come back tomorrow morning early and climb back in using that exact piece of fence. If you don’t appear, the police will come to your house to get you.”

  Tam wanted to point out that it was far easier for them to crawl under the fence but doubted that facility of entrance and exit was what the man had in mind.

  “You don’t know where we live,” she said.

  “Ah, but we have ways of finding out,” one of the men said. “Isn’t that right, Teddy?”

  This knowledge of her friend’s name genuinely interested her.

  “Isn’t that right, Teddy?” the man repeated. Tam recognized his accent as being one not unlike her own, and one entirely different from Teddy’s. In the distance she could hear the sound of revelry by night, coming from a long, lit Quonset hut in the distance, one she had not paid attention to until that minute. It was a phrase she liked, the sound of revelry by night, but she wished she had noticed this revelry earlier.

  “Right,” said Teddy softly.

  Suddenly they were both running, she without any real memory of being released. They hit the fence at full speed and tore their way up the clanging chainlink, vaulted over the top, then fell into the weedy ditch on the other side. To get back to the road that led to Teddy’s cottage and the entrance to Edgeworth Hall, they had to run the full length of the airfield in the opposite direction. She didn’t look to see if the men were watching, but as they turned the corner she heard a masculine voice call out, “Nine o’clock tomorrow morning. Or the law. Your choice!” and then a lot of laughter, which made her realize that this might well have all been a joke. But, just in case it wasn’t, she ran faster and for longer than she ever had before.

  Several minutes later they slowed to a trot. When she could speak again, Tam asked him who the men were and how they knew his name. Was he known to the police? Had he a secret life of crime? Was that why he knew how to sneak onto the airfield? Teddy had suddenly become more appealing to her.

  “My sister’s used-to-be boyfriend,” Teddy wheezed. He stopped, leaned against a tree, and pulled out the handkerchief for which Tam had always had nothing but disgust – couldn’t he just hork and spit like the older boys at school whose attention she coveted? – and coughed into it once or twice before folding it neatly and putting it back in his pocket. But she was too intrigued by this mention of romance to think long about the handkerchief or to take into consideration that Teddy was on the edge of a full-blown attack of asthma.

  “Who is he exactly? Why was he there?”

  “A heartbreaker,” Teddy said, “that’s what my mother told my aunt. When he didn’t come to our house anymore, my sister locked herself in her room and played the radio and cried. My father says he’s a good-for-nothing toff, a real bad character. Rubbish, is what he said.”

  Tam digested this information.

  “He flies planes,” Teddy went on. “And I think he’s part of some university flying club or something. Or he might be in the Air Force. They have dances there at the airfield sometimes with boys who fly planes. That’s where my sister first …”

  Tam was filled with astonishment. No wonder the sister locked herself up in that room and cried. “Did he take your sister up in a plane?” she interjected. Teddy nodded, though Tam would later realize that this was highly unlikely. But at this moment she felt that there could be no real life after having, and then losing, access to flight. And yet, she had seen his sister recently; so she was out of her room. She had a new permanent hairdo, and she seemed serene, if a little vacant. The world of older girls was still mystifying to her. They were nearing Teddy’s cottage now. All the lights were on, as if there might be trouble. “I better go in,” he said.

  “If we don’t go back tomorrow,” Tam said, “I don’t know. Your father told you he’s a real bad sort.” And then, “Do you think he’s a bad sort?”

  “Yes … well, no. But tonight … he would have called the coppers for sure.”

  “I’m going back,” said Tam. “You’re going to come with me as well, because I am going to make that one take us up in a plane.”

  “Yes.” Teddy wheezed. “I suppose so.” She knew he thought there wasn’t much that she couldn’t accomplish.

  She turned to go, but he caught her arm. “Tam,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Oh nothing.” His nose was running. He reached for his handkerchief.

  “What’s his name, by the way?” she suddenly asked.

  “Reginald.” Teddy was looking nervously at his own door. “My sister called him Reggie.”

  Tam married Reggie three years later, the summer she turned seventeen, he having been deemed suitable by her parents because of Cambridge, the Air Force, and certain Byzantine and ancient family connections stretching back to the Wars of the Roses. By then the village of St. Derwent was completely gone and the airfield, being in a position to protect the Cornish coastline, was fully operational. The war was in full swing, and Reggie was a glamorous flying officer (whose squadron was sometimes stationed at St. Derwent), and she was once again languishing in the dormitory of another boarding school from which she wished to bolt. She once told Niall that the mere sight of walls covered with ivy could bring out the truant in her.

  Reggie, who had been much taken with her during the holidays of the summer before, seemed to her to provide the perfect avenue for escape. She had made flying lessons a condition of their engagement, having never until then managed to get up in one of the planes, and these he had arranged for her at a nearby private field, never once, she later realized, believing that she had been serious. He found her interest in flying amusing rather than alarming, assuming it was a feminine whim, and that one experience behind the controls would frighten the wits out of her and that would be that.

  “My little shrinking violet,” he sometimes said to her teasingly during their intimate moments, and before she had achieved her licence and joined the Air Transport Auxiliary, “the Spitfire pilot.”

  REGGIE HAD PROVED TO BE UNKILLABLE DURING the war, perhaps because of his unflagging good nature that in no time had begun to wear on Tam’s nerves. He was not a particularly skilful pilot but was for some reason blessed with such reliable good fortune that his mates began calling him “Lucky Lenthall.” His surname, which Tam had never been fond of, was pronounced in the same manner as the beans that went into the making of a soup that she had always refused to eat. She sometimes thought of this when their leaves overlapped, or when his squadron was posted near enough to the home base
of the Air Transport Auxiliary that she saw him regularly. During these spells of togetherness she would try not to be put off by the way he talked like a two-year-old while nuzzling her neck, his saluting and heel-clicking whenever she asked him to do something for her, the dandruff on the collar of his uniform. But things of this ilk would always slip into her mind the moment he suggested she remove her clothes. When he was far away, however, she could muster some fondness for him, mostly based on her completely reinventing his character to fit that of the other airmen who were regularly in her vicinity. She often thought of them in a way that she never thought of her husband. And she was thinking of them now, looking at the few figures in uniform on the mural. All the bright, handsome young men whose lives were often over in an instant, and who were at times intense in their dealings with others, at times witty and seemingly carefree, and always touching in the way they walked cheerfully toward their machines and leapt eagerly on board.

  Back on the ground at St. Derwent, Teddy had shown himself to be a gifted mechanic: as if the planes were enlarged examples of the model vehicles he, in the past, had handled with such tenderness. He was sensitive and patient with them, and they, in turn, appeared to respond to his attentions in an almost human way, their engines bursting into life, their fuselages shining in the sun.

  He had been a true innocent, Tam remembers telling Niall, utterly incapable of duplicity. If he thought there was a problem – mechanical, social, or personal – he would do his best to identify it and then make an honest attempt to solve it. It was almost, she mused, as if the machines knew this. And people too. They liked him and trusted him, but nobody got stuck on him. Teddy was needed to accomplish certain tasks, and he was comforting to have about, but he did not have the knack of being emotionally essential. “Poor Teddy,” she added.

  “But you miss him,” Niall said.

  “Oh, yes,” she said, turning her face from his as if ashamed. “Poor Teddy. I miss him.”

  RAGE

  During the first year after his mother’s death in the autumn of 1943, things had come to an impasse regarding Kieran. He had spent the previous six months avoiding school and collapsing into rages whenever anyone suggested he do anything at all. Now he no longer needed to run away from the school, as the Brothers flatly refused to take him and his tantrums back under any circumstances, including the circumstances threatened by the truant officer if one of their charges remained on the loose. Father O’Sullivan visited the house frequently and attempted to talk to the boy but found he could interest him in nothing at all beyond tales of Jaweh at his most vengeful and bloodthirsty. Any attempt at the Rosary was met with either a complete withdrawal or a tantrum, and finally the fear of the latter resulted in the priest removing himself entirely from the huge project that the boy had become.

  Almost everyone in the town had a theory as to how Kieran might be trained, and few were shy about offering their advice. Shouting, strapping, confining, singing, set-dancing, Bible memorization, manual labour, and even the questionable idea of a chemistry set were suggested to his father as possible cures for his behaviour. Kieran was talked about in shops, pubs, market stalls, caravans, cottages and byres, and at the weather station, where the men spoke to his father about him metaphorically in terms of various kinds of – mostly bad – weather. Niall, who on calm days was fond of his younger brother, had taken to giving him a wide berth on weekends when he was home from the Dublin University. The knowledge of the younger boy’s volatility, and the attention that was drawn to him as a result, seemed to him unbalanced and unfair. More than once he said, you’re too old now, Kieran, for the temper. It looks very bad on you.

  Kieran began to suffer from migraines. His gentle father could minister to him with damp cloths and soft words when he had the headaches, but the tantrums put the man’s wits astray. He was heartsick for the boy and blamed himself as he hadn’t the inner fortitude to whip him, though he doubted, and likely correctly, that a beating of any kind would produce the desired results, and believed that it might in fact make things worse. With the shame and grief of his wife’s death all around him, he could not commit an action for which there was no guarantee of a positive outcome. Often that meant no action at all.

  And so the father of the boys became prematurely old and absent. Even Niall’s repetitive triumphs on the sports fields and in the classroom could not shine through the vague, sad mist that surrounded him. Niall would later tell Tam that there were times when he felt he had simply slipped his father’s mind. But, truly, there had been a kind of elderliness about the father’s character as far back as anyone could remember, an adherence to schedules and habit, and a love of simple comfort. He grew roses and fed birds and took the same walk each evening, past the courthouse, then up the hill to the High Street, then down Market Lane and along by the shops and pubs of Main Street until he was back at his own gate. He now took longer walks each evening, his head down and his hands clasped behind his back, contemplative, strolling with apparent calmness through the capricious variations of weather he had forecasted at the end of the previous day. And then he stepped back inside, and under a roof he kept in perfect repair against the storms he himself had predicted, he prepared to endure his son’s chaotic, unpredictable anger.

  Coming and going from the house more often now that there was no woman in it, Gerry-Annie watched the child’s behaviour with a look of disapproval but said nothing. She had no children of her own but had come from a family of eleven. Her siblings had been far from subdued but in her world no child could ever have stood centre stage for more than a moment unless they were sick and dying, and even then the attention from adults was, by necessity, brief. In between these emergencies, any behaviour of this nature would have been ameliorated by the fists of older brothers, and nobody would have thought any more about it.

  One day, while Annie was mopping the tiles that covered the floor of the long entrance foyer, Kieran rounded the corner at the far end with a full tray of Waterford crystal in his hands, his mouth open in a howl of rage. He came to a stop when he saw her, then flung his burden in her direction. Not one shard of glass came within five feet of her person, but Annie had a temper of her own. In seconds she had the boy’s collar in one fist and his hair in the other and was holding him at arm’s-length several inches from the floor. He kicked like an angry donkey, but although he was now almost twelve, he was still small enough that she was considerably larger than him and he was unable to extricate himself from her grip or make contact with the arms he was wheeling in her direction. But it wasn’t until he began to swear energetically that Annie took extreme measures. “You’ve the mouth of a Black and Tan on you,” she announced just before she forced his head into the pail full of brown and soapy water. When that head emerged still cursing, she plunged it in again. And when his head came back up with soapy bubbles ballooning out of his nose she threw her own head back and laughed a loud and protracted laugh, and as she did, the boy produced a tentative smile in return. “Go get a cloth,” she said, prodding him with the handle of the mop. “You’ll be picking up every piece of that glass, and you’ll be doing that carefully. If there is one speck of it left, or if you cut yourself, that head of yours goes right back in this water.” The broom handle was exploring Kieran’s ear. He stuck out his tongue. Annie lifted the mop to cuff him, but he had vanished before she could even take serious aim.

  He fetched some rags and he carefully picked up the glass. He rolled up the collected shards in a cloth and took the bundle to the bin. And more than once he smiled radiantly, and not a little insolently, at Gerry-Annie, who was standing like a sentinel in the hall. She ignored his cheekiness. It was only cheekiness, after all.

  When she returned to the house the following Friday, he was down the stairs to meet her in an instant. Throughout the morning as she involved herself in a number of tasks he trailed around behind her picking up various objects and putting them in places they didn’t belong so that she would be required to speak to
him. It turned out that he liked the sound of her voice, which was firm without being high or sharp; there was not a trace of hysteria in it no matter what he did. “That’s enough of that,” she would say, often without even turning around, or “Put that back this instant.”

  He was also pleased and impressed by the ways she described his own face to him. “You’ve the devil in you as vigorous as a viper,” she would say, or, “You’re as anxious for trouble as a ram in full rut.” Eventually she set him to polishing silver, which he did with uncommon enthusiasm, blackening his clothes in the process and bringing a wealth of further insults down on his head. She filled the laundry tub with water, handed him a cake of lye, and made him scrub his own shirt. He liked the washboard, he liked the lye, he liked the way his hands felt in the warm water. Later in the day, when the shirt had gone from wet to damp, she heated an iron on the stove and showed him how to press the wrinkles out of the cotton. Then she told him he would be finishing the job by himself, and she would be calling the guards if there was one scorch mark on the garment. She made him dust the sideboard in the dining room, every picture in the house, and the stairs and banister. All this was very satisfying to him; he would do anything she said.

  His father noticed the change in him. But even when a full week had gone by without a tantrum, he was still apprehensive. When three weeks passed without an incident, he nervously asked Niall, who was home from college for the weekend, what he thought accounted for the serenity in the house. Niall announced, with a smirking irony, that his brother had fallen in love with Gerry-Annie. Their father laughed for the first time in a year but had to admit that Annie had Kieran doing housework and he seemed to have taken to it.