The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  In the middle of Easter week two years later while Kieran was painting window frames, he paused to open a fresh can, then realized he needed to go into the house to fetch a knife. As he walked back outside with the tool in his hand, he caught sight of his brother at the curve in the road, and beside him, not his father, but a stranger, a woman, in a blue skirt and what appeared to be a yellow blouse of some sort. On top of her head was a wealth of wavy dark hair, lifting in the wind. Niall was not looking at the house as he approached but rather at this woman to whom he seemed to be explaining something, moving his arms as if he were demonstrating an expanse of space or a length of time. The girl, for Kieran could see now that she was not a woman but a girl, walked with her arms crossed and her head down, obviously taking very seriously whatever it was Niall had to say. For the first time in months, Kieran heard his mother’s whisper coming from somewhere very far away, but he couldn’t make out what she was saying. He put the knife in his back pocket, picked up the paint can and the brush, and moved quickly around to the rear of the house, the shyness in him about the girl with his brother rising in his blood.

  Because the weather was so glorious, he had ridden the bicycle for three hours that morning, down to Waterville and along to Ballinskelligs, over the mountain and down into Port Magee, then swiftly back again because he had promised to paint the window frames. But now he wished more than anything that he was back on the bike again, heading up and over the rough road to Port Magee or in the opposite direction, over the Coomakista Pass and along the coast to Sneem. While he stood behind the cottage he heard the girl laugh as she and Niall came up the lane. It was unlike any sound he had ever heard before, and his mother was whispering about it, though vaguely, and in the new language she had that was barely comprehensible to him. And then he heard his brother laugh in a way that was full of happiness. He realized that he himself rarely laughed, even when his workmates teased or joked with him, and he wondered now about the origins of this spontaneous expression. The word delight came into his mind.

  He opened the can of paint and began to work on the outside trim of the window, through which he could see Gerry-Annie’s one table, and while he was working he saw Niall enter the dim interior, with the girl stepping lightly behind him. He could hear Gerry-Annie’s effusive welcome and the bustling noises that always accompanied her greetings. “Is it yourself then, Niall,” she was saying, “home from the city?” And then to the girl. “Welcome, welcome, Susan, to the parish of Dromid, to the townland of Garrane, and to the house of Gerry-Annie. What a treat on this bright day. Now, where has your brother got to? I’ll just step out a moment to find him.”

  Kieran dropped the brush, bent down to retrieve it, then stood and looked through the window. The girl was near the table, near him, close to the window glass, but her face was turned away from the light. He could see it though, her shadowed face, and suddenly it was as if everything he had ever wanted was in the way her eyes were looking at his brother. Niall sat down at the end of the table and the girl walked up behind him and placed her hand on his shoulder. Niall with “his Susan” in Gerry-Annie’s kitchen, and the way the girl’s hand had settled, white against the dark of his brother’s shirt, and the warm yellow of her own sleeve, her arm inside it reaching for his brother’s shoulder. Kieran wanted that quiet touch, that connection for himself.

  Susan. He allowed his inner voice to taste her name.

  Annie was near him now, telling him to come inside. But he could hardly hear her. His mother was whispering something that was both an echo and a premonition, and the sound was coming from somewhere deep in the valley. As Annie spoke behind him, the girl turned toward the window and, for one moment only, her eyes met his, her expression frank and open, a smile beginning to visit her mouth. He turned then and ran to the byre, rattled the bolt, pushed open the door, grabbed hold of the bicycle, and swung his leg over the crossbar. Soon he was on the road that climbed up and into the mountains, attempting to rise swiftly away from everything that was confused and changing inside him. There was no accounting for the combination of sorrow and panic that pumped through his heart, no accounting for his mother’s distant whispered cautions. From that moment on, the girl’s face would burn in his mind.

  That night at supper he was both silent and ravenous while Gerry-Annie talked. She asked him to explain his absence and what had got into him to cavort off like that, with his brother bringing his sweetheart up from town to meet him. “You know who she is, Kieran,” she was saying, “the jeweller’s daughter down in the town. She went away to school so you might not have seen her, but we all know who she is. She would be younger than Niall by some years, I’m thinking, but then wasn’t I myself eleven years younger than my own Gerry. I’d have thought you might have wanted to meet her, she and Niall being so thick.”

  And when he didn’t answer, she asked him why he felt that he had to eat his potato and her potato and all the bread in the basket. When he remained unresponsive, she began to speak again, as he knew that she would, about the girl.

  He learned then that she was the daughter of the same jeweller whose shop window he had often passed as a child walking on the street with his mother. He could recall now the way his mother had stopped by that window, her body swaying slightly, while she looked intently, but also somehow impassively, through the glass to the bright-coloured stones and gold and silver. He would watch her profile at such moments, and recalled now her fine white skin and perfect eyebrow, an atmosphere of trance around her. Finally she would sigh, as if dissatisfied by what she had seen, and turn away. Remembering this, he could hear the rustle of his mother’s clothing as she began to walk again. He realized that they had never stepped inside the jewellery shop, that its small objects had been only a pause in the gravity that pulled his mother farther down the street under the shadow thrown by the large church and through the door of the chemist’s shop. There was a bell on that door, and that bell was strangely ringing in his own mind here at Gerry-Annie’s table, along with his mother’s whispers, her warnings sent to him in words he could no longer comprehend.

  Then he remembered something else. There had been unusual objects in that window: plates and goblets that, to his mind, would never hold food or water. He recalled thinking they were woven somehow, as if they were made out of rope, and yet something rarer than rope, a property closer to lace, or the crocheted edges of the pillow slips on the beds of the house and the cloths that covered the tables. There were brooches as well, made in the same way. “Belleek,” his mother had said one day when he asked, her soft voice trailing over the word so that the last syllable was prolonged, then completed finally by the delicate cut of the “k.” He had thought she meant bleak, that bowls and plates punctuated by so many holes had a bleak hopelessness about them. They would hold nothing, he had concluded, and would be useless, in spite of their beauty.

  It was one of his workmates who told him where the girl lived. While explaining where his own farm was located, he said the words “You pass by the jeweller’s house,” and Kieran heard this, though the words were not addressed to him. Even more taciturn than usual with a shovel in his hands, Kieran nevertheless heard himself shout down the line of labourers, “And where is that then, your place?”

  “Near Carhan Bridge, first road to the right, then up a bit,” the young man said. “The jeweller’s is farther up the mountain, after you leave the woods, and we are the next lane that leaves the road, after his.”

  They were building a stone wall to surround the rose garden on the church grounds, just down the street from his father’s house. But he had not told his father that he was working in the town, though he would know by now, as Gerry-Annie would have said something about it when she went there in the afternoon to clean. And tonight, in all probability, she would tell him that his father wanted him to come by for tea after work the next day. He did not know if he could do this, his shyness and fear about the girl having extended in an extreme way to include the possibility
of his father, or anyone for that matter, talking about her. And then there would be the talk about Niall, his various Gaelic football triumphs – even a miraculous all-Ireland final in the stadium at Croke Park – and how he had top score three years running in science. The wonder of Niall’s many victories, how he already had a job waiting for him at the weather station, his father would want to talk about all that. The trophies Niall had won would be shining in the window facing the street, and that picture of him, panting after a game and holding one of the trophies, would be smiling down from the wall. No, he could not do it.

  He had seen the girl touch Niall, and he had seen him accept that touch as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. This confident brother of his hadn’t even looked up in the midst of such a miracle. In this way Kieran knew that her touch was something familiar to Niall. He shivered as he thought about this and dug the shovel deeper into the earth, imagining that white hand, the shock of it coming to rest on his own shoulder.

  He could see the painted green cross on the sign that hung from the outer wall of the chemist’s shop each time he straightened up after digging for a spell. Some other man in a white coat was in there now. He had no idea who; he had never been back. But each time he looked at the sign his mother’s voice became active, coming from the past now, and so far away, it was as if each word she attempted to say was freighted with such effort that the whisper was more like keening or a long-exhaled sob full of breath and blurred syllables.

  TAM HAS EATEN BACON AND EGGS, AND THICK SLABS of bread, and has returned to the waiting room feeling more alert. Nothing in the atmosphere beyond the glass has changed, however.

  Walking to the window she sees that a hint of sunlight might be yellowing the fog. Ghost air, she thinks, wanting it to at least move and separate, take some kind, any kind of form. A few other tired-looking passengers have returned to the lounge and sit reading or staring into space. There is no one now behind the ticket desk, and the aircraft beyond the glass still stands as if abandoned, as if it will never fly anywhere ever again. Now the yellowish light fades and an opalescent greyness settles over the aircraft until the outline of the tip of one wing disappears and the large bulk of the fuselage blurs. She wishes she could include this beast in her love of aircraft, but nothing in her stirs as she looks at it. Grounded though it may be, no real drama can be associated with it.

  The figures in the painting are coming in and out of focus as she stares at them: the man with the pie, the man with the white banner, that woman who put her in mind of her nan. There is a blue figure drawn in profile just below the powerful, banner-waving man who occupies the central portion of the mural. It has been possible to ignore this small person until now because of the hugeness of the man above, his laying claim to the space around him, and the way his athletic waving arms sweep everyone else out of the way, keeping the pace, his own pace. The victor, she thinks. “The victor, that’s me,” Niall had said, the bitterness palpable in his voice. “I swept him out of the way. I didn’t even give him his one small moment.”

  They had been sitting beside the window, watching the late-afternoon light pour down the mountain. He had wept then. She had never seen him weep before and she was frightened by the suddenness of this emotion. And she knew, she knew he would never weep for her. The memory of some of her own tearful nights returns to her; nights when she had walked alone, back and forth in her cottage, certain that what they had between them could never be sustained, knowing all the while that this was the cheapest kind of melodrama, hating herself and her weakness. She had lived through the war. She knew very well that tragedy could assume dimensions of appalling magnitude. And yet there she had been, safe in that country cottage, behaving like a spoiled child who had been denied ownership of something that had never been, would never be, hers. She had no entitlement to the loss she felt, and has none to the loss she feels.

  And still, in spite of this realization, the pain returns and her eyes fill. She wants a cigarette, but when she pulls the pack out of her bag it is empty.

  Each summer there had been a carpet of montbretia, a vividly orange, lilylike flower, on either side of the lane that led to the cottage, making a ceremonial border for any arrivals. When she had asked about these flowers early on, the neighbours had told her that the plants were not native, had been introduced to the region in an Englishman’s garden, a garden from which they had escaped. Once they were free, they had flourished, and by August each year, they filled hedgerows, untended fields, and all graveyards, and, in combination with the pink of the foxgloves, gave an exotic southern feel to a territory dominated mostly by bog and scant pastures. Once when she pointed to the montbretia, Niall told her he didn’t approve of invasive species. He had laughed then, and embraced her, another variant of invasive species.

  They had been together so infrequently and with such difficulty, and yet the idea of him had surrounded the past few years like a damp climate, the air thick with it, so that everything she did or said or thought in his absence seemed to her muted and pale, although he would have known none of this. Near him she had had the sense that she was emerging, sometimes with such swiftness that she had been taken aback by the space her body occupied in a room, the range of her gestures, and the startling sound of her own voice, the joy in it. Afterwards she would wonder if it would have been wiser to be more restrained, less actively delighted. Still, it was her reaction to him, the emergence of a more vital self in his presence, that had made her believe he was essential. But now she wanted to believe he was not essential, any more than the abandoned cottage or the small grey car, whose trunk she had slammed shut for the last time, was essential. She could leave it all behind.

  During the blank periods that followed Niall’s withdrawals, she would sometimes try to develop a case against this attachment, which offered only the part of the path where she stood, its pebbles and surrounding foliage and not a life in what she let herself see as the bright fields beyond. Nothing about her girlhood or young adulthood could have predicted such an impossible absorption in her – a trap really, and one of her own making. But despite this, the future had marched, anyway, into what there had been between them until her own stubborn resilience had begun to seem like a resolution of a kind.

  He had walked in and out of her life, fully realized, cohesive, then collapsing into his several disparate parts. She recalls the familiar pattern of his retreats, the purposeful way he collected his things, buttoned his shirt, pushed his arms into his coat sleeves. Once, she had asked him why he had always seemed so eager to leave her, withdrawing so casually, so cheerfully, as if they might have been meeting again in the evening or the following day. He would step back into the crowded river of his life, the science of his work, his family, while for days afterwards she would keep the hours she had spent with him near at hand, looking for gemstones, then later searching for flaws.

  Each episode of the mural bleeds into its neighbour’s territory, she thinks: there are no disparate parts. She assumes that this fluidity, if that was what she should call it, must have been part of the artist’s intention. Composition, she remembers, from an art class at school. The composition of her own life has been altered, with the difficulties of romance dominant and everything else in shadow. And here she is fully halted in the midst of trying to fix that, as if fate were reluctant, in the end, to endorse her attempts to restore balance.

  For a few moments she pictures the artist who has painted this mural that has been her companion for more than twenty-four hours. Kenneth Lochhead – a tall man, she suspects, a man fully in control of the long, narrow world he has created on the wall. How satisfying it must have been to see it emerge, fully realized, to know that you have made permanent these departures and arrivals. But would it have served as an antidote to whatever may have been troubling him at the time, if there in fact had been anything troubling him at the time? She doubts this. There is no balm in Gilead.

  GENTLEMAN

  A dozen years before he bega
n to work on the mural, and a few years after the war he had been too young to participate in, Kenneth had left his colonial country and drifted south for an American education. He had spent his childhood years in the company of borrowed Victorian monuments and borrowed English architecture and responded immediately to the brazenly individualistic city of Philadelphia, where he had been accepted into the School of Fine Arts. He was barely out of adolescence, and was as restless and jittery as the streets he began to explore as soon as he arrived. Having become immersed in this busy geography, all his previous notions about art were shaken out of him. Now he wanted his work to be tough, reckless, under construction. There was always the noise of something being built in this city. It beat up against the walls of the school all day and muscled its way into his dreams at night. He loved this, wanted to throw himself into the pulsing heart of it.

  And then he met Harding. Sturdy, almost corpulent, and well into late middle age, this teacher had walked into the first mural class with a black-and-white reproduction of Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s Allegory of Good Government in his hands and had tacked it up on a bulletin board on the back wall of the studio. “This has remained in the hearts of men,” he told his eleven students, “because of the importance of its subject and the beauty of its execution. But it has also remained because it is fixed in place in every way it is possible to be fixed in place.”

  Kenneth looked at the men riding the dignified, high-stepping horses: their plumed hats and belted tunics. A falcon perched on the hand of one of them suggested privilege, class. In spite of their relatively small scale, they occupied the top of the picture plane, as they would have done in life.