The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  She made a series of plans, attempting to resurrect the woman she had been before all this had entered her life. She crumpled up the botanical drawings and began to draw nothing but the planes, and when she found she could no longer do this from memory, she went to the library in Killorglin and borrowed a book entitled Aircraft of the War and traced the black-and-white photographs in it. She made alarmingly expensive phone calls to men she had known in the past, once even going so far as to invite one of these men, whom she had tracked to New York, to visit when she found he was miraculously unattached and planning, he said, a trip to Ireland, only to have to cancel the invitation with improbable excuses. Once she adopted a feral cat, named it Noxious, and spent hours trying to coax it out from behind the dresser. It came to her only when there was food in her hand, then seized its dinner, and retreated hissing.

  “Christ, Nox,” she said to it, “even you!”

  She went outside at night and circumnavigated the cottage in the dark, stumbling over uneven ground, anger and sorrow arguing in her head, looking in her own windows at the warmth of her own pointless domesticity as if she were a voyeur of her own life. There was her bed with its eiderdown, there was her table. A vase filled with silly wildflowers collected three days ago when she knew he would be arriving. There was the chair where she sat and read or looked at the book about aircraft. Tilting her head as far back as it could go, she staggered back and forth while gazing into the hard, cold sky, the darkly seductive dome above her, stars they would never see together, blocked out at earth level by the ebony shapes of the mountains, until she crashed into the cottage wall outside her bedroom window. There was her long nightgown hanging on the back of the door, looking just like her ghost, no, her corpse. And near it a calendar full of empty days, askew on the wall.

  She let the cat go back to the wild.

  Who was he, anyway, this mild-mannered weather man who hadn’t the courage even to break with her? Why were certain gestures and expressions of his so essential to her? Why even now did she want to stretch out at his side? If only she could leave. But she had lost her bearings. Her instruments were lying to her. She would not be able to make her way, even with familiar territory under her, toward any kind of landing strip. She traced several more planes, so furiously her pencil tore the onion skin on which she worked.

  When she slept at times like this, the dismantled village of her childhood came back to her in dreams. Sometimes Teddy strolled by, but only as he had been when he was a child. Sometimes her nan stood firmly in her path, holding a cardigan in her hands and scolding. Never her parents, and rarely Edgeworth Hall. It was the old people of the village who were most present in the dreams, walking through their vanished streets with baskets over their arms, their ancient Biblical names – Obadiah, Rachel, Kaziah, Eber – suddenly available to her, though she was certain she had forgotten them. Her father had torn their houses down and scattered them to the winds.

  Niall was trying to displace her. It was as if he had eviction on his mind. Had there been thatch rather than slate on her roof he would set it on fire. He would bring in the battering ram and smash down her walls, force her out into the open, all for the convenience of an uncomplicated life. She recalled his hands in her hair, the smell of him, the physical fact of him, and the betrayal she felt in the face of everything that had passed between them at such moments. It was unbearable. She would have to leave; she was certain of this.

  She stared at the phone that squatted mute and malicious on her desk. At times like this it would remain silent for over a week, once for ten full days. Sometime during these silences she would stop weeping, and the anger would float away like a cloud of mist rising up one of the mountains, then evaporating into the ether, and the terrible distance would set in. She was apart from her life, separated from her self. Her self would go into the town to shop. Her self would go for long walks down the road, but she, Tam, was nowhere to be seen. She had disappeared. She was floating overhead, unreachable. Even the dogs whose names she knew did not approach her but simply watched her walk by. She was a familiar stranger, not dangerous enough to bark at, but unworthy of engagement.

  On some morning or another in the midst of this, she would awake to a clear day, walk outside on the wet grass in bare feet, and be able to actually hear the animals in the fields or the sound of a distant tractor. She would turn on the radio and listen with some interest to the news, then sit at her desk and begin to add colour to the Spitfire she had traced days before. She would brush her hair, apply a bit of makeup, and gaze in the mirror with some admiration at the self she began to recognize again, knowing that this would be a day when he would call. Each piece of cutlery, the dishes on the shelves, the deep wells of the windows – all of this was possible again. The sentimental sailor’s valentine on the wall, the simple hearth with its glowing lump of turf, the delicately painted flower on her morning teacup, a blue willow plate, all of this in attendance under a dust cloth in her hand. When his call came, she would answer it after the second ring.

  And then there was the last time, the final time, the time that all the other times had been a rehearsal for.

  She could barely recall what she had said, except that the word hope had been tossed around by her in the most futile of ways. Give me something to hope for, she had said, or something to that effect. Give me something to look forward to.

  He had been pacing back and forth in the room, preparing to leave her again. “The only thing we can hope for is that this – whatever it is – will evaporate in the night,” he said, “that we will no longer want it.”

  “All right,” she said, “I will work toward that.”

  “Good,” he said, “that will be best. I will work toward that too.”

  She softened then, but only briefly. “Can’t we just talk about it?” She had been pleading, and she knew it. And she hated this in herself.

  “No,” he said. “I won’t talk about it anymore.” He stopped moving, turned toward her. “I won’t do it, Tamara. Not ever again.”

  “You are saying never.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that’s what I am saying.”

  “Not even if …”

  “Not even then.”

  Once, a few years back, she had decided to join the people of Cloomcartha, farmers and their families, on an annual trek over two mountains on the old butter roads and the tracks only the keepers of mountain sheep knew. On the other side they were to meet the few remaining inhabitants, a couple of old bachelors and their dogs and pasture animals, in Gloragh, a collection of rough cottages deep in an unvisited valley. She had been charmed by the idea of this, the sense of inclusion. Speaking to him about it, she had laughed and said she might get lost. “If you do get lost,” he said, “I’ll have to come to look for you.”

  He would not say that now.

  “You can leave,” she said. She was standing with her arms crossed and something unidentifiable roaring in her head. “I think you should leave, Niall. Now.”

  But he did not leave. Instead he crossed the room toward her and pulled her roughly into his arms. The desire had come again then, ferocious and with a mind of its own, and she felt herself rising to meet it, encouraging it, as they wrestled each other toward the bed. “This is the way it is, Tamara,” he said. “This is all we can hope for.”

  Afterwards they had lain bathed in sweat, silently facing each other, and soberly looking into each other’s faces. Then, without a word, he had risen and walked naked around the room, picking up his clothing and hers, sorting the garments and placing them on two separate chairs. He said nothing. But as he dressed to leave, he turned back to her and began finally to talk.

  That night she circumnavigated her house under a partial moon. Then she stood motionless at the end of the drive until the lights of the mountain farmsteads went out one by one. Later she twisted in the sheets: the pain terrible in every kind of way. By morning that frail possibility of going forward with what they had been to each other, that
fragile light, had been put out.

  The next day the wind shrieked and hail tossed itself against the glass of the bedroom window. But by afternoon, a square of sunlight moved steadily across the floor, then inched up the fireplace wall. The phone was silent all through the daylight hours. Then the darkness came again.

  The next morning she dressed and began to pack. By noon she had called the airlines and had booked the flight. There was that man in New York, though she had no clear memory of him, only that he had survived his missions, and that he had taken to her. There was the publisher, and the illustrations for the warplane books. There might be some kind of life in that. She didn’t know, but she was convinced that everything here in the Iveragh had been annulled.

  Nitall had opened himself to her; a river of speech had flowed out of him. And then he had firmly closed everything down. “I want no part of it,” he had said.

  The majority of her life has been swallowed by waiting, she thinks now. He took your life, her inner voice says, but even as it says this she knows how extreme the thought is. And yet, here she is, still waiting. She, who has flown every kind of questionable warplane, sits here waiting at the end of the second day, waiting for the most domestic of aircraft, grounded by fog. She thinks of Niall here in this very room, on his way back from New York, waiting while a plane, destined to return him to Ireland, refuelled. He had not found his brother, would never find him, and would not recover from his loss: the injured brother, the brother with a heart large enough to be broken.

  No amount of speed or distance can change what is unchangeable. It really doesn’t matter whether the fog clears, whether the journey is interrupted, or whether it is ever resumed. The brother is probably dead by now. She will never have a child. Her father will continue to destroy the English landscape. She will continue to trace obsolete machines on paper, the remnants of her previous life. And the man with the white waving banner in the mural, the one with all the power? He will completely adopt his own father’s quiet, ordinary life.

  She asked Niall once about meteorological predictions: how accurate were they when all was said and done? The good weather, he had told her, the high pressure systems, sometimes change their minds and drift off to other zones. “But you can count on the gales,” he had said, “the storms. The bad weather arrives right on time.”

  BELLEEK

  After three or four weeks of training and isolation near the lakes, Kieran turned his attention to the condition and maintenance of the bicycle, his beloved Purple Hornet. It would need gears, he felt sure, and this worried him, but his knowledge of mechanics was scant, and Kirby had said nothing to him about this. Kieran had often polished “the Hornet” and, on occasion, he had sanded and painted it – always the same dark purple. He had replaced its seat and its wheel guards. (Kirby had always raised his eyebrows in admiration whenever these overhauls had taken place.) He, Kieran, couldn’t count the number of chains and tires that had come and gone over the years, and once or twice, when he had been feeling flush after a good spell of work, he had bought a new wheel. But in his heart he feared that gears couldn’t be added to a bike as old as his was. There was the bicycle store in Killarney, where he had purchased the tires and wheels, but he had kept his conversations there short. Even the thought of asking about gears humiliated him. It was likely every other cyclist in the country knew perfectly well you couldn’t put new gears on an old bike. It sounded like something people would say: “You can’t put new gears on an old bike.”

  As it turned out, you could put new gears, three speeds of them, on an old bike. The man in the Killarney cycle shop was firm on this, you could, but you would have to have the money necessary to buy those gears and then you would have to pay for the fitting of them. The amount was more than Kieran’s depleted savings could provide, although he had been very stringent with his cash and had taken to hunting rabbits with snares he had made with wire, rather than buying meat at the butcher’s in town. They tasted well enough roasted over the spit he made for the fire, but their screams when they were captured put him in mind of a child being murdered in the night and caused him distress. Sometimes his mother spoke after the screaming subsided and only a faint whimpering remained. He knew he would have to become a labourer again for three weeks or so. He would have to get a job somewhere, and apart from evenings and weekends, the training would have to be maintained by cycling back and forth to the place of employment.

  As if reading his thoughts, the man in the shop told him that word had it that the railway was hiring for the repairs on the trestle bridge that crossed the mouth of Valentia River just at the edge of Cahersiveen. “Perhaps the strength of you,” he said, “would be what might make them want to take you on so late in the day, the work having already begun and all.” He should ride over there now and see if there was use for one as tough as he appeared to be. “And the climbing,” he said, “would be good for the legs of a cyclist training for the Rás.”

  Why did he think he was training for the Rás? Kieran wanted to know.

  Hadn’t Michael Kirby himself told the man so. He’ll be in here for the gears, Kieran will, Kirby had apparently said, once he figures out that he has to have them, though God alone knows where he’ll get the money. In his opinion, the man continued, God himself had injured that trestle just so Kieran could work on it. “Get over there and start climbing. And tell them John Kelly from Killarney Cycles sent you. We’re counting on you here for the glory of the county.”

  “I won’t join the team,” said Kieran. “I’ll be in it as an independent.”

  “That may be,” John Kelly answered, “but if you win, the team will claim you in the end.”

  Kieran liked the work on the trestle, the climbing, and the heaviness of the winching. With no fear of heights, he became almost immediately fond of hanging by a rope over the slow, muscular progression of the river, or of watching the same river develop opaque bars of light when the sun shone between the slats that held the rails in place. He could see the whole town from there, the mountain behind it where Susan’s house was, and he believed he could even pick out the shop window behind which he knew she would be standing at the counter, her head bent or her face turned, perhaps, toward the light and the view that would include the trestle he stood on. Sometimes, if he held the shop window in his gaze long enough, he imagined he could see the little basket she had made with its one flower, still unsold, and on display, though he knew this was impossible.

  Even when he had made enough money for the gears, he continued to work on the trestle. He was determined to stop eating the rabbits, and wanted to buy some meat from a butcher. Certainly he would need more cash for the months ahead when he would return to Gerry-Annie’s. It was a point of pride with him now that he would pay his own board, and he intended to buy a pair of boots for Annie, ones that he knew she wanted. They had fur around the ankles and were made of rubber so that her feet would remain dry on her walks in and out of town to clean for his father. There was a red umbrella as well that he had seen her eyeing in the window of Mary Margaret’s shop. He liked to think of her telling his father that it was he, Kieran, who had bought these items for her, and pictured how the old man would shake his head in amazement at what his son could provide.

  The work was completed finally, and he and the other workers took down the scaffolding and collected their last pay packets from the temporary railway office that they then also dismantled. The Purple Hornet, beautifully fitted with its new gears, waited at the wall of the road, as alert as a dog in the presence of sheep and, to his mind, as full of anticipation of an important task about to be undertaken. It was November. There were only five more months before the Rás, and they would be months of rain and storm; often he would be training, he knew, in the very teeth of the gales that would soon begin to cartwheel in from the Atlantic. At Christmas his brother would come again, home from Dublin, but he didn’t want to think about any of that, liking the notion of the girl alone with her father in the shop
and then later in the evening with both her parents in the house above.

  There would be the evening fires at Gerry-Annie’s for him, and food he had bought himself boiling over them. There would be the books that Kirby had given him to read and long sleeps taken in the hours of full blackness, night after night until the days came longer again and the Rás grew even nearer. He wanted the dark season, the company of Gerry-Annie, and the punishing rides through the calamitous weather. But first there was something he knew he had to do.

  He had brought his only good shirt and one pair of decent shoes with him that last morning to the trestle, stopping by Gerry-Annie’s to collect them on his way to work. Annie said nothing about his absence, though he saw the look of relief on her face as he walked through the door. She wondered out loud if he was going to a funeral, as she had never known him to voluntarily take that shirt down from its hook on the wall. He smiled at that observation but didn’t explain. “Perhaps I’m thinking of going to Mass,” he joked.

  “You could wait till the roof was slated before that would happen,” she said.

  After he had finished work, he walked behind one of the abutments of the trestle and removed his boots and changed his shirt. The shoes were a bit small, so he took off his socks as well, while light and shadow from the river simmered on the concrete he leaned against. His trousers were spattered with paint from the trestle and mud from the road, but he was hoping that only the top half of him would be observed, that and maybe a glimpse of the shoes as he entered. Once he was on the bicycle the shoes felt uncertain and slippery on the pedals, but despite this he was on the main street of the town in minutes.