The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  He pushed the bicycle into a rack in front of the bank and walked beside the church until he came to the spot where he knew he must cross. Here he paused, trying to will his heart to stop beating so insistently, and wondering if he should turn back. There was the glass of the shop front, full now of silver and pearls, some of the jewellery hanging from black velvet, the rest positioned on the satin floor of the bay window. And then the small basket, the colour of cream, with its one mauve flower and the two perfect pale green leaves. He had come this far. He had taken the shirt from the hook on Gerry-Annie’s wall and put on his good shoes. To turn back now would be a kind of defeat, he told himself. So he walked in his uncomfortable shoes across the street, opened the door to what seemed to him to be a cacophony of bells, and entered the shop.

  She looked up then and said his name with surprise. Her wonderful hair was pulled back and her face was lit on one side only by the sunlight coming in through the window. He could see her father at the rear of the store seated on a stool and bent over something on a table under a strong light. The man looked briefly up at the sound of the bells, but soon turned his attention back to whatever he was examining.

  “What brings you here?” Susan was asking, a pleasant, courteous tone in her voice.

  Kieran wanted to tell her that she had brought him here, the thought of her strong in him night after night. “I’ve come from the trestle,” was all he could manage. “The work on it is finished.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I didn’t know you were working there above.”

  “Yes,” he said. “One month now.”

  “Niall never said in his letters.”

  The mention of his brother troubled him, that and the sudden thought of letters between them. “Niall wouldn’t have known,” he said.

  There was a display case in front of her, like a glass sepulchre from a fairy tale, and in it the bright stones of the rings looked harsh and significant. On top of it her two hands were nervously, yet almost imperceptibly, moving. Kieran felt that the silence between them was enormous and that he hadn’t the tools to break it. The ringing of the telephone at the back of the shop startled him, and then there was her father’s voice speaking about the time of a delivery.

  “I’ve come for the basket,” Kieran said. He could hear the father, still talking in the back.

  She glanced up at him, with a blank look that gradually moved toward comprehension. The cool courtesy left her demeanour, and she became visibly shy, as if he had asked her a question so intimate it could not be answered.

  Her father hung up the phone and the silence came again.

  “My own basket?” she eventually asked, in a voice so soft Kieran could barely hear it.

  “Yes,” he said, “in the window.”

  She walked out from behind the glass counter and crossed to the front of the store, where she bent at the waist and reached into the light to grasp the small object. She returned with it in her hand, saying that it would be dusty from being on display for such a long time.

  “I don’t mind,” he told her. His blood was booming in his ears. He could barely hear his own voice and was concerned that he might have spoken too loudly, might have even shouted. “It doesn’t matter,” he added as quietly as he could.

  She returned to her place behind the counter and placed the basket on top of the display case. Then she took a thin piece of cardboard from what must have been a shelf near her feet, folded it into the shape of a box, and filled it with tissue paper that she also took from the same mysterious spot. As she placed the basket in the little nest she had made for it, her hands shook slightly. He would remember this trembling, and would interpret it over and over.

  “What were you after from the window, Susie?” her father called from the back of the shop.

  “It’s just my little basket,” she answered, “that Kieran here wants to buy.”

  “He’ll be wanting that basket for a girl, I’d say,” the father said, laughing.

  Kieran placed some money on the glass counter and Susan took it and offered him some change from the cash register.

  “This is good, Susie,” the father called again. “Now you’ll have to be making another.”

  “Would you like me to put a bow on it,” she asked Kieran, “if it is for a girl?”

  “There is no girl,” he said quietly, “it’s for myself.” And then, with a great stab of courage, “It’s because of you.”

  She looked at him quizzically, and he looked back at her for as long as he could bear it. Then, when he turned his face away, she did something astonishing. She put her hand briefly on his, where it rested on the box. “Thank you,” she whispered.

  The bell that announced his departure from the shop rang in his mind all the way back into the hills. That and an after-image of her hands. The trembling. And then the warmth of the palm when she placed it over the roughness of his knuckles.

  The following dawn he rode into the town with a card made from the basket’s box in his jacket pocket. On it he had pencilled a map of where he was hidden, above Derriana Lough. He had drawn small wavelets on the lake so that she would know it was water, and had written the word stream alongside the line he had made for the watercourse that joined the five lakes. By the time he was making the road into the town he was running out of space and so he put an arrow there with the word town at the end of it in case she was confused. Then he turned the cardboard over and, having no envelope, wrote her name on the back of it. In the middle of the map he had printed the word please, just that, please, but had then thought better of this, and had tried to erase it with the dried-out rubber at the end of his pencil. The result was an unsightly smudge covering the word please, which was still visible if one looked closely enough. He drew a line through the word, as if to cancel such an audacious request, but in the end this looked too severe to him, almost discourteous, and when he tried to erase the line, he made a hole in the cardboard and cursed himself for doing so. A messy job all in all, and slipping it under the door of the jewellery shop was a great and terrifying risk, but one he knew he could not prevent himself from taking. He had been warning himself against it all night long. But by the first light he had lost the argument.

  It was his last week at the hut, and the loss of it would now be magnified by the fact that it had become the only place where he could imagine her coming to him. Donal’s story all those years ago, the poem he had said on the mountain under the stars, had bitten deep into Kieran. I came unto him / the sheep were gathered by him. Over and over again since that night, his mind had painted the picture of a girl climbing a slope toward him with a whole valley behind her and the sea beyond. Her eyes would be down on the path until she saw him, and her stride would be measured and purposeful. It had always been like that, he decided. Even before he knew Susan, he had had a thousand prompts for the moment.

  When he caught first sight of her early on his last Sunday afternoon in the place, his heart recognized the picture she made stepping from rock to rock on the edge of Wattle Lake. Even though she had not yet reached him, it was as if they were old lovers now, with just a faint shyness, like ripples in the water, and the rest of it calm, reflective. There would be little talk between them, he knew, and there would be no resolution. He would have to search for her over and over again. All through his life there would be this distance. But now, where he stood, with two lakes between them, he could see her coming closer and closer.

  He waited until she had reached the Lake of the Dreaming and had raised her eyes to his. Then he moved toward her. “Come here to me,” he said.

  THE RÁS

  She has slept again, this time lying full out on a banquette. The faux-leather upholstery is stuck to her cheek on this third morning so that she feels she is peeling a part of herself from the surface as she rises to a seated position. She had succumbed to the bar in the evening, along with a few other Irish passengers, and in their company she had drunk a full bottle of wine so that she is now thirsty and diso
rientated. She hadn’t gone to the hotel. Remembering a tale about Ferry Command, how the crew of the first transatlantic aircraft during the war had spent their Gander nights in a railcar on a siding near the runway, she had felt that succumbing to a real bed in a comfortable room would be, in some mysterious way, an admission of defeat. But now she has to admit she longs for a bath: the immersion and the heat.

  It is only when she looks toward the mural that she realizes it is the sunlight that must have wakened her, the same sunlight that is raking across the picture. The oranges and yellows have intensified, and the expressions on the faces of the children appear to have altered in this changed light.

  When she glances out the window, she sees that there are two airliners: the one that brought her here and another, both of them gleaming and wholesome, beyond the plate glass. Healthy, she thinks. Those are healthy planes. Now she notices that the waiting room is full of fresh passengers. The employee she had spoken to yesterday had been correct in his predictions. “This fog will clear off by morning,” he had said, his pronunciation so similar to Niall’s, “I can feel it.” He had consulted a paper on the counter. “And the Shannon flight from New York is scheduled to arrive on time.” She can barely believe that she has managed to sleep through the arrival of the second Constellation, amazed that the noise of it would not have wakened her. Perhaps it taxied up to the terminal while she was talking, while she was talking with the loquacious Irish. Someone, speaking about the Easter Uprising, had used the word penultimate, and she had immediately thought of Niall.

  It was he who had taught her the meaning of the word, using it in relation to a gale that had ripped a half-dozen slate tiles from the roof. “This is the penultimate gale of the winter,” he had said, explaining that there would in all likelihood be one more. Would ultimate be the correct word to describe their last moments together? she wonders now. She doubts this. The word suggests some kind of victory. “The victor, that’s me all right,” he had said, his voice filled with bitterness and loss.

  She had been surprised when he had begun to speak while he was preparing to leave, having been so often silent after conflict, or after love. With his back to her and one arm in a shirt, he said, “You insist you want to know something more about me. So here it is: my brother and I were in a race together.” He turned toward her and sat down on the bed where she still lay. “We were in a race together, just before I was to be married.” He put his other arm into a sleeve but had not buttoned the shirt. “Neither of us knew the other would be there. But Susan,” he said. “Susan knew. She knew and she told neither of us. Had I known … had I known the damage.” He had stood, walked over to the mirror that hung above her chest of drawers, and raked his hands through his hair. Once, a year or so before, when he had caught her looking at her own reflection in this same mirror, he had told her that his mother had spent good deal of time studying her face in an oval mirror that had hung on her bedroom wall. “Not in a vain way,” he had said, “but more as if she was trying to come to an understanding of her own character.” That mirror had vanished shortly after her death, he told her. “My father must have taken it down.”

  “What sort of race was it?” she asked him.

  “The Rás Tailteann,” he told her as he walked back to her bedside. “I had been training the previous year in Dublin, was on the Dublin team, and eventually became captain. I knew Kieran was mad for his bicycle, but I never knew, never dreamt, what it could mean to him. I never thought … well … I wouldn’t have believed that he could have entered something that organized. Who could have known it?”

  He walked to the chair where his clothing lay, put his trousers on, returned, and sat again near her on the bed. His shirt remained open. Beneath it was the flannel undershirt he always wore. Because of the damp, he had told her. There was something so ordinary and touching about that garment, a leftover habit, she always thought, from his childhood. “I couldn’t believe the cut of him,” he said. “He was practically unrecognizable. The arms on him! The legs! He had increased in size – you would think that was impossible, but he had. I hadn’t laid eyes on him for months, not since Christmas, though some people had seen him here and there and had reported the sightings to my father. He’d already begun to disappear, you see, and had been gone for a couple of months in the autumn. No one, my father said, knew where he was sleeping, what he was doing. Maybe Gerry-Annie. He came back to her for the winter, you see …” He paused and bent over to pull on his socks, then straightened and gazed out the window. “His face when he saw me!” he said.

  “He must just have been surprised,” Tam said.

  “No, yes, of course he was surprised. There I was, captain of the Dublin team. He was surprised, but that was not the look I saw. Something dark and unidentifiable came over his face. I had lifted my hand and was about to walk over to him, and then that look. It stopped me in my tracks, though it wasn’t until much later that I knew what his face – what that look was telling me.”

  Tam wanted to know what he thought the look meant, but she was afraid he would close down if she questioned him too much. “He would have been on the Kerry team,” she said instead, leading him gently forward.

  “Kerry claimed him ultimately, yes, but he rode as an independent. I didn’t think a man like him would ever be in Dublin for any reason, much less for the beginning of a bicycle race. He knew nothing of cities. But he would have ridden up on his bicycle, which had, I couldn’t help but notice, new gears.”

  He explained that he himself had stayed out late the night before drinking with his mates and there was the thin air of a hangover around him the morning of the start. “There were all these patriotic speeches delivered in Irish by the organizers,” he told Tam. “They were insisting that we were all riding for the unification of Ireland: something larger than ourselves to work toward, something to keep us all going. They kept saying we were the new Fiana, the new warriors – it wouldn’t be like that now, I shouldn’t think, but the Rás itself was only in its third year at the time, and there was still a lot of politics mixed up in it. It’s a cruel thing, a race like that: sometimes you do need something larger than the self at work; sometimes you’d be working for the team, or the county, or the glorification of Ireland or whatever. But mostly it’s personal, though at the time I believed there was nothing personal, no real personal aspiration in me. I was a natural athlete, I knew that, but that ability seemed completely neutral. I rarely even thought about it. In many ways it meant nothing to me. Nothing.”

  Not nothing, Tam thought. She knew the competitive side of his nature. Often he would clock the time it took him to ride to her house, and would tell her about his speed on one occasion or another. But she would not contradict him now. “The ability or the race?”

  “Either … neither.”

  A silence entered the room. Niall was holding one shoe, and his expression was pensive and faraway. Outside there was the full calm that sometimes follows the cessation of rain. Drops of moisture beaded the clothesline but the glass of the window was dry. Tam wanted him to come back to her. She touched his arm. He straightened his spine, looked at her, and began talking again.

  He recalled very little about the start of the Rás, he told her, beyond glimpses of his brother, hunched over his bike and, Niall said, “with a fierceness in him you could feel twenty yards away.” The city fell behind them and the roads twisted toward one horizon or another. “One hundred plus miles, Dublin to Wexford,” he told her.

  There had been wind that day, and rain. The macadamized surfaces were slippery, and mud from those that were not macadamized was thrown into your eyes and nostrils. The jerseys they all wore became saturated and sagged heavily down onto their thighs. There was no hope of drying your clothes in the places … mostly private homes … where they were billeted at night, so that you knew that you would be taking the dampness of County Dublin and County Wexford with you the following day to Kilkenny. “The only hope,” said Niall, “was to wear the w
retched articles of clothing at the bar in the evenings where there might be a fire. We called the evening drinks the Night Stages and found that powerfully amusing.”

  Why was that amusing, Tam wanted to know. He told her then about how the race was divided into eight stages. “A series of punishing distances,” he said. “Like stations of the cross.”

  The nightly sessions in the bar were an antidote of sorts to the day’s suffering and, he added, an acknowledgement of more to come. “That first night I didn’t see my brother in any of the bars I walked into,” he said. “And the following day I didn’t see him at all.”

  He had thought that Kieran might have dropped out some time early during the second stage; the going was bad and he himself was suffering, vomiting more than once from the exertion. But by the time he reached Waterford, there was talk of Kieran among the cyclists. It was said he had crashed near a bridge just the other side of Dungarvan and that the bicycle was so ruined he had thrown it in a ditch and had stolen an under-geared specimen from a local farmyard, catching up with the bunch an hour later. He was a galloper, they said, and had broken away from the pack on this ordinary bicycle, sprinting up the hill and disappearing into the distance. But, at the end of that second day, when Niall himself looked up from the chain he had been attending to in Kilkenny’s main square, he saw Kieran sail down the main street on the undamaged bicycle he had referred to as the Purple Hornet. He sensed something then about his brother that he had never suspected before. Kieran, he realized, would be spoken of and interpreted during the course of this race, and perhaps elsewhere as well. His silences and distances would inspire fantasy. Stories would be told about him, theories would be developed. Later that night, one of his teammates told him that Kieran was billeted nowhere, had refused to be billeted. “He apparently wanted to sleep outside on the edge of town,” Niall told Tam, something about night air, a beneficial change in the ozone that he was said to have claimed would occur when sunlight absented itself from oxygen.