The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Teddy fixed the gutters and painted the rooms. He built a hot press and installed wiring for the hot water tank and lights and an electric cooker. They were lucky to have the electrical services in place, he told her, something that had not yet happened deeper in the peninsula. Then he worked on the rusted outdoor pump until it spat clear water. Neighbours called and referred to her as Mrs. O’Brien and neither she nor Teddy corrected them. She sewed curtains and baked lamb chops. It was summer and the sun stayed in the sky until well after ten p.m. In the lowering light she looked at Teddy’s smooth face and long lashes while they played board games or did crosswords in a newspaper they had bought in the small shop two miles away. He had found work, as his grandfather had years before, in the Gap of Dunloe, driving a donkey cart loaded with tourists. His grandfather had had to stay in the vicinity during the season as the eighteen miles between Clooncartha and the Gap was such a distance in those days, but Teddy could drive the Vauxhall there and back. There had been some fuss about his English accent until the grandfather had been cited and remembered. “And then,” he told Tam, delighted, “it was as if I was a long-lost member of the tribe coming home.”

  There was a sailor’s valentine framed and mounted on the bedroom wall. It was made from the tiniest delicate pastel shells, mauve, pink, and white, fashioned into the shape of a heart, and surrounded by rosettes made out of a deeper shade of pink, the whole thing under glass and bordered by worn green velvet. His grandfather had been on the ships for some time, Teddy told Tam when she asked, while he was engaged to his grandmother. It might have been Ceylon he was near, or the West Indies, some place, anyway, where you could collect such shells, and he made this for his intended bride on the long passage back. “In this family,” he said, standing behind her and encircling her with his arms, “we are romantics.”

  Teddy was more interesting here. She was changed as well: calm and domestic, letting each day fall into her life as the rain fell outside the door. She found she could make accurate drawings of the planes she had flown during the war, and she began to do that during the long afternoons while Teddy made his way with a cartload of tourists back and forth through the Gap. She liked the results, and wondered if she might publish a book of them. Remembering a man her father had known in London who was said to be in the business of publishing, she sent a few examples in the mail after finding the address of his publishing house in the Kenmare library. He didn’t reply right away, but when he eventually did he returned the drawings and wrote that there was a house in New York that he knew was putting together an encyclopedia of war aircraft. She should try them. They might very well be looking for someone to illustrate the English planes. So she sat down at the kitchen table and wrote a letter to America. When she was finished, she folded it up and put it in a brown envelope along with a drawing of a de Havilland Mosquito Mark 6, her favourite aircraft from the war.

  Teddy’s allergies vanished. Perhaps, he maintained, laughing, because I am in my natural habitat. He made suggestions about her drawings of aircraft. Having been involved with the smallest details of the machines, concerning himself with their well-being, they had become like family to him, and Tam agreed it was so for her as well. “A family we lost,” she said.

  There were no members of his human family, however, beyond the most distant of cousins, left in the Parish. Tam liked this peculiar combination of anonymity and belonging, a secure new start. She hadn’t known him long, this adult Teddy, but the child she had known lived inside him. She felt they were ancient.

  He found his grandfather’s hip waders and some old rusty fishing gear in a little cow byre behind the cottage. The river out back, as expected, was filled with salmon. During the day it was silent and dignified, moving with slender solemnity through the fields. But at night they could hear it carrying on a conversation in the dark. Teddy could hardly wait to get at it. There was no stopping him now, he told her.

  Unfortunately, because of her contact with the London publisher, her parents, and through them Reggie, had discovered her whereabouts and had begun to send letters full of questions and accusations through the post. Teddy was deemed by her mother to be ungrateful after the kindness she had shown him by giving him a job. Reggie allowed that somehow he had always known Tam was unreliable, deceptive, and unsure of her own mind, and Teddy, he wrote, was a vile seducer who would abandon her in the end. She laughed out loud reading this, remembering how Teddy’s father had called Reggie a “bad sort.” It was difficult to imagine Teddy in the role of a Lothario, leaving as he did each day, with his lunch in a brown bag, to drive a cart pulled by a donkey through a sylvan glen filled with rocks, emerald green grass, and falling water.

  There was a letter from the American publisher as well, asking to see some more of her drawings.

  Teddy drowned a year later while fishing behind the house. It had been raining for weeks and weeks and the little solemn river he waded into must have developed a strong-enough current that it had caught him offguard. When he hadn’t returned for the evening meal she had gone out back of the house to call him. She thought her voice wasn’t carrying because of the wind, and so when he didn’t reply, she had climbed the low stone wall and headed down to the river. He was only about fifty feet downstream. Someone long ago had built a fieldstone weir there, and though not much of it was left, Teddy’s body was bumping up against the stones that remained.

  There had been a full Irish wake in the cottage, with whiskey and the repetitive saying of the rosary. The cart drivers and their wives embraced her and wept. People became drunk and delivered piercingly beautiful eulogies. Neighbours carried his coffin to the church. She responded with such gratitude to these rituals she felt she would never leave the place. She believed she needed nothing more.

  And she had deeply mourned him, his illuminating optimism, and the way he had refined the simplicity of their life together. Everything about him had been so eager and fresh. She couldn’t imagine him without his childhood looks still alive in his physical being. The appearance of one line in his brow, one grey hair would have cancelled, somehow, who he was, had been, or so she thought, seeking consolation in the face of such a premature death.

  She will often recall him standing at the window the day before he died, looking out at the rain. We’re receiving a desperate drowning, he had said. He had been with the cart drivers long enough by then that some of their language had crept into his own speech, though he wouldn’t have known that anymore than he would have known that the word drowning would have predicted his own end. The bright water of his ancestors, quick with silver fish, had reached out to claim him at his most perfect, while Tam had walked steadily on, deep into the adulthood she had always thought she wanted as a child.

  Child, she thinks now, looking at the mural. There is one particularly introspective child, a young man really, who stands with his hand touching the trunk of a tree, inward-looking, dreaming, and blameless. He does not cause, would never cause, damage. Beside him stands a dark-haired woman, arms raised, palms open. Is she reaching for something or has she been sent some kind of airborne message: a passenger pigeon, perhaps, or a kite? No matter. She is filled with expectation, the way she herself had been filled with expectation.

  At the opposite end of the picture there is a benign-looking man, the only figure in the painting who carries even the trace of a smile. Plump, bald, and bearded, he appears to be a chef or baker, judging by the apron he wears and the pie he carries in his hands. Behind him a tree is hung with bright blossoms. Is he delivering the pie to the swan that unfurls its wings in his line of vision? Tam thinks not. He is out of a fairy tale, a children’s book. He is Simple Simon’s pie man, or the baker in Pat-a-Cake.

  Even the smallest children, however, ignore him. They are vagrants; they don’t appear to belong to anyone. Though they gather sometimes in company, each one is alone, each one is silent. Whatever the experience is, they are unable to speak about it with her, the viewer, or with any of the larger figures
in the mural. They ignore the adults, who, in turn, are indifferent to them. Nothing, no one holds them. The children of the Killeen, Tam thinks, remembering the sites here and there on the peninsula that were said to be burial grounds for unbaptized infants. No one had ever been able to say how old these places were, when they had been in use, so she’s had trouble believing that the jumble of rocks and rushes she looked at were connected to personal sorrow. Too much weather had blown through, she had thought, too much unmeasured time. And yet now, here these disregarded infants are, stationary, lonely, trapped in a painted landscape and full of longing for their unlived and unremembered lives.

  MOSEL

  He enjoyed the work on the blossoming tree, the nest, the echoing nest of the old man’s cupped hands, and the fruit pie he carried in them. “ ‘A pocketful of rye,’ ” he sang quietly as he painted, “ ‘four and twenty blackbirds diving in a pie.’ ” The tree appeared to explode from the man’s head, as if a vigorous dream could no longer be contained and must now be permitted to enter the world. Around him, everything planted demanded to be harvested.

  Kenneth was remembering something that had happened to him about ten years before, in the days when he had been a student and had been travelling in the vague, unfocused manner that had interested him at the time. It all seemed so long ago and yet now he found that he was placing that younger self, alert and curious, here and there in the painting.

  During the months he had stayed in London he had discovered the work of J.M.W. Turner and, in particular, that artist’s smaller sketches and watercolours. He had read everything he could find about the painter and had spent time in the Tate Gallery’s archives, falling into the intimate drawings and practical lists contained in the pocket-sized travel notebooks with such concentration that years later he would be able to remember Turner’s laundry items and the price of the hotels where the artist had stayed.

  Finally, Kenneth had decided to make a pilgrimage to Germany in order to follow the river journeys Turner had twice taken in the 1830s. He spent some time on the Rhine, hitching rides up and down its shorelines, some parts of which had clearly suffered damage during the war, then moved down to Koblenz, where the secondary Mosel River, smaller and more complicated, looped away from its more celebrated parent. After wandering through the gingerbread architecture that lined the streets of the old town, he strolled down to the harbour, and at the end of one of the wharfs he stepped unnoticed onto a departing barge, where he found a seat on a convenient coil of rope. Terraced vineyards laddered the slopes of the mountains while under him the currents twisted and the river turned back on itself, changing direction over and over.

  Here everything was smaller than on its doppelgänger, the Rhine. Houses, castles, churches had been placed in more discrete positions in relation to the landscape, and the cliffs shouldered less-forbidding fortresses. He was as delighted by all this as he had been by the toy towns his mother had always put under the tree at Christmas when he was a child, and he reached again and again for one of the small sketchbooks that he, like Turner, always carried with him. The landscape had not been bombed. It was impossible to believe there had ever been war here, never mind a war so recent and so hateful. He recorded this thought, as Turner might have done, on the bottom of one of his sketches. Then, remembering miniature pencil-drawn riverbanks and Mosel townscapes falling like sentences or musical scores down the pages of Turner’s notebooks, he tried to reproduce exact copies with his own hand, until he remembered a story an essential teacher had told him and stopped.

  He walked off the barge at Cochem, intending to hunt for the locations that had so intrigued Turner in 1835 and 1839, but it was September, and the wine harvest celebrations were in full bloom all along the shore. Vintners stood happily behind cloth-covered tables under striped tarpaulins and handed out free samples of their wine. Kenneth did not know German so attempted to speak to them in French. Turner, he said, peintre Anglais du dix-neuvième siècle. They shook their heads or simply looked confused but handed him small bright glasses filled with clear yellow liquid as a reply. In spite of its coolness, the Riesling tasted of sun and flowers, and after he had drunk a few glasses, everything around him was infused with warmth and a peculiar but not unpleasant heightened clarity, partly due to the wine but also due to the afternoon sun that bounced off the river and drenched the stone walls he passed with trembling, liquid light.

  He followed a bicycle path along the river and into a neighbouring village where a smaller but no less vibrant festival was unfolding. There was a dark-haired girl there, presiding over a stall, while an old man, having succumbed to sun and wine, slumbered in a chair behind her, his chin on his chest, his white apron covering a large belly. Kenneth thought the man looked like a slumbering Bacchus and pulled his sketchbook from his pocket in order to draw him, but while he was making the first tentative strokes, the girl came to his side and put her hand over his on the page. “Nein,” she had said quietly, “Mein fader.” She was trying, Kenneth supposed, to protect her parent from the embarrassment of interpretation.

  After he had pocketed his sketchbook, the girl gestured to one of the small tables that were set here and there on the grass by the river, and as if he had always known he would do so, Kenneth put his satchel on the ground and sat down. The autumn sun was so low that everything, even a blade of grass, stood dwarfed by its own shadow. A moment later the girl placed two full glasses on the cloth that covered the table and sat opposite him, examining his face in the rich light of late afternoon. Barges slipped by them on the river. Her dark hair seemed to blend into the bushes growing behind her, and her pale face was difficult to read. But, eventually, she took his hand and moved her thumb back and forth in his palm.

  They danced that night, after the girl had brought him a sausage wrapped in pastry and a warm bowl of sauerkraut. Her revived father was playing an unidentifiable instrument as part of some kind of band and seemed unperturbed by the attentions his daughter was paying to the stranger. There were lights on and in the river, and the village on the opposite shore blazed with its own festivities. When the band paused between songs, a faint similar music could be heard travelling across the water.

  Near midnight a gang of young men drew Kenneth away from the table and made clear that he should join them in the construction of a temporary bridge. Almost anything that could float was pressed into service: barrels, dismantled fences, rowboats, scrap lumber, tables, even a dead sheep, went into this frail, brief act of engineering, a large necklace strung across the neck of the river. When the chain of objects reached the opposite embankment, Kenneth found the girl and, hand in hand, laughing, they made the unsteady, hilarious journey to the other side, falling twice or three times into the river, then clamouring back onto the makeshift bridge via a floating wheelbarrow or wagon. On the far shore the dance they joined seemed simply to be a continuation of the one they had left behind. Morning found them doused by dew and sleeping in each other’s arms. Kenneth pushed the girl’s hair away from her face and kissed her on her lips and forehead before joining the young men who were, one by one, quietly returning home across the floating path. He had left his satchel near her father’s stall. It was as he bent to pick it up that he realized, after she had requested that he stop drawing, neither he nor she had uttered another word.

  A year later, just before he left Europe, he returned to the Mosel in winter, a season so estranged from the one he remembered it was as if he were visiting another country altogether. He spent one night in a small riverside hotel in Koblenz, and the following morning he once again boarded a barge that was heading downriver toward Luxembourg, delivering its store of empty, blackened wine barrels to the villages en route. The golds and lime greens of the terraced vineyards, even the fawn colour of the Roman walls that had pinned each plantation to its slope for two thousand years, had changed to the dark purples and dung browns of a time of stasis. The passing river barges hauled hills of black coal and girders of steel; the ochre coils of r
ope and pale yellow crates of wine that had surrounded him on his late summer journey were nowhere in evidence. The birds were larger, darker, and flew more purposefully through the cold sky along the path of the river valley. The river itself was the colour of gun metal. Half-heartedly, he looked for signs of the girl but found he could not even identify the spot where her father’s stall had been situated, and he realized then that the stall, the bridge, the full architecture of that harvest night had been temporary and easily dismantled. He did not feel any sadness about this. He had been blessed, he knew, by the wholeness of the experience. It was something transitory that could nevertheless be kept intact and undamaged in his mind.

  The next afternoon, back in his room in Koblenz, he opened the curtains and was met with the full brunt of the Fortress of Ehrenbreitstein lit by the low winter sun. It had been built a thousand years before, placed so firmly and permanently into the stone cliff of the opposite shore, it was difficult to see where the rock ended and architecture began, and all of it now washed with this metallic, copper radiance. Turner himself had been intrigued by the improvised bridges of the Mosel, which he had rendered with the most minimal of brushstrokes in his pictures, as if making a statement about that which was tentative and fleeting. But it was the enduring fortress that fully absorbed the nineteenth-century painter’s attention, and for years he painted Ehrenbreitstein over and over, using chalk or watercolour or oil, making it pierce, like the blade of an axe, through the mists of the two rivers that pooled and joined at its feet.