The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

by Glenn Patterson

  “Does my grandfather know of it now?” I cannot think what possessed me to ask. The answer, as I might have expected, was a shake of the head. “Nisbet? Molly?” Two more shakes. The truth was beginning to dawn on me. “Have you told anyone at all?” The movement of the head was slower this time and all the more emphatic for it. “Not even . . .” I was unsure how I should refer to the person in question: “the father”, “your young man”, “lover”?

  Whatever I had chosen would not have been heard for her snort. “That twister? He is the last person I would want to know.”

  I was still trying to come to terms with the fact that I was the first. My earlier suspicion resurfaced. “Are you in need of money?” I asked carefully.

  She shot me a glance of such anger my face flamed like a lamp.

  “I mean,” I said – I had regained the bed and sat upon it heavily – “is there any way at all I can be of assistance?”

  She looked down at her palms, upturned on her lap. “Just being able to tell it is a weight lifted,” she said. “It’s enough to be thinking about carrying the baby without the secret forbye.”

  “Your own father and mother . . . ?”

  “Mother only,” she said. “She will be time enough finding out. I have a married sister up the country. I might be able to go there for a spell.”

  “I am sure there is no need. I will speak to my grandfather on your behalf.”

  She cut me short. “I have had plenty of nights already to think it through, and the air would be better for the baby out of town.”

  A thudding had got up on the street far below. Mrs Clarke, who kept the Hope Hotel in Hammond’s Court, off High Street, had lately taken to placing a drummer at the entrance to the court as a lure to patrons.

  “You must at least promise me you will wait until the last possible moment before leaving,” I told Hannah.

  “I’m only wee,” she said, and standing up bunched the front of her dress in her fist to demonstrate the slack. “It will be a brave while yet before I am showing.”

  She looked towards the door as though she meant to go, but remained where she was, smoothing out the wrinkles she had made.

  “And if you want to talk again, of course,” I said, trying to coax from her whatever it was that kept her standing, “you know my door. I will be the soul of discretion.”

  She nodded. There was definitely something more. “Another thing I have been thinking, nights when I have been sitting by the kitchen fire, is what might happen to my baby when she is grown – I say ‘she’, I don’t know why, it is just a feeling that I have. When she, or maybe he, is grown will the world have changed, I ask myself, or will poor people always want? Will my child want? That is the question more than any other that keeps me awake.”

  For several moments more I sat on the bed, searching for words of reassurance, and finding none. She dropped me another curtsy and reached for the door handle.

  “Hannah, wait!”

  I crossed the room to the writing desk before my window and settling myself in the chair took from the uppermost drawer a sheet of paper. Even as I selected the quill, though, I was unsure what it was I would write, even as I dipped the nib into the inkstand. Looking out to my right I could see, between Mrs Bateson’s house and Mr Shaw’s, the offices of the Bank of Ireland, whose arrival on our street a few years before, hard on the heels of the Nelson Club, had been the occasion of outraged letters to the press: “What next, a haberdasher’s on the Flags?” I had a sudden vision of banks and clubs and insurance brokers in an unbroken line from the White Linen Hall to Castle Street, on this side as well as that. (The haberdashery, I told myself, was hyperbole, but had I looked long enough and hard enough I might have seen any number of haberdasheries and silk mercers and gentlemen’s outfitters, lit up for Christmas, might have seen too a brand-new brougham being driven up the middle, a face peering out of it, rendered unrecognisable by age.) One way or another, I would not be in this house many years longer. My hand, as I was thinking this, had begun to move across the page, left to right, left to right, coming back to the inkstand five or six times in the course of each line. I felt as though I was reviewing the words, rather than writing them, and was pleased when I had reached the end to discover that I would not have changed a one. I appended my name and pressed down on it with the blotter.

  I offered the letter to Hannah to read before I sealed it. She shook her head. “I have not got to learning how yet,” she said. “My sister knows. Maybe when I am in the country with the child she will teach us both.”

  “Well then,” I was thrown for a moment, “it is addressed to the first-born daughter, or son, of Hannah . . .” Here I paused. “I did not know the surname to put to it, so I wrote ‘currently in the employ of Mr Samuel Dawe Semple, Donegall Place, Belfast’.” She nodded. We had each in our way grown up ahead of ourselves. “It sets out the means by which the child should seek me out if ever she, or he, is in need of assistance, me or my heirs and executors.” I pointed to the middle of the page. “This, with the line under it, is the address of my grandfather’s solicitor, and here below is the name of my friend Mr John Millar. I will make a copy for each of them in the morning and deposit them at the solicitor’s office with the express instruction that they only be opened in the event that some calamity should befall me.”

  “Your finger is shaking,” she said.

  I reeled it in under my thumb. “I have been scribbling all day,” I said, then regretting that I had made light of the ability to write, went back to the table for wax.

  “I did not mean to come looking for charity,” she said when at last she held the letter, sealed, in her hand.

  “It is not charity,” I said. “It is an offer of help with finding work. An insurance policy.”

  I opened the door for her.

  “I hope that will allow you to sleep a little easier tonight.”

  “It will, when I have finished black-leading the grate,” she said, as matter-of-factly as she had reported boaking in the bucket.

  And I listened to her every step of the way through the house to the kitchen and the remainder of her chores.

  *

  There had been for several years past, on the Millfield side of Smithfield Market, a stallholder, an ancient Tyrone man, with cataracts in both eyes, who notwithstanding knew the place of every item laid out for sale on his stall, and knew too from long practice the exact position of each and every person who stopped there to browse.

  “That is a solid silver knocker,” he would say, before you had even stretched out a hand to it. “From a door in St James’s in London that was persuaded it was no longer in need of it.” Or, again, “Is it a garnet ring in particular you are looking for? There is an interesting tale goes with the one you have in your hand, which I will throw in for free.”

  Often it seemed as though the goods were only props, or prompts, and what he really traded in was the stories.

  “That will be the Garrick, you are looking at there,” he said to me on the afternoon following my interview with Hannah, when I paused – barely broke stride – before a coat, such as coachmen then sometimes still wore, with three layered capes at the shoulders. “You have to try it on to appreciate.”

  “Thank you,” I said, “but . . .”

  “No, do, try it.”

  His eyes were directed, sightlessly, to a point somewhere to the right of my head, but his ear was fixed firmly on my face. Whatever possessed me, I did as he suggested. It drowned me.

  “There,” said the blind man, smiling. “You will not get a better coat in all of Ireland – the weight of it.”

  I was about to excuse myself by saying that the weight, on as warm a summer’s day as we had had that year, was half the problem, when I became aware of a specific bulk in the inner pocket below the left breast. I reached my hand in and pulled it out again quick, as though the metal object I had touched had been red-hot instead of cold.

  “A box-lock, double-barrel, tap-ac
tion pistol,” he said without the least alteration in tone. “From the reign of the last King but one, still in good order. Other necessities in the patch pocket front right.”

  I felt in there too; in number if not in detail the items accorded with what I understood the necessities to be. I withdrew my hand.

  “Have you been in the Lamb and Flag?” I asked him.

  “The what and what?”

  I could think of no reason why he had singled me out other than that he had seen, or at least heard‚ me in dispute with the fixer. But then had he not accosted me just now before I had even opened my mouth? I came at the thing from another direction: “What made you so sure I would be interested?”

  “I was not at all sure. As I recall, it was you who showed the interest.”

  “I glanced at it.”

  “And hesitated, as did a dozen others today, but none of them put it on when I urged them to. There is always a good reason for our decisions, don’t you think?”

  I felt in the pockets again. My fingers closed around the twinned barrels. “How much?” I asked.

  “For the coat as you stand up in it?”

  Market-goers continued to push past in both directions, stallholders to call out their wares, yet we might have been the only two in the whole of that square.

  “As I stand up in it.”

  “Five guineas.”

  I laughed. I had scarcely half of that left to my name.

  “Two.”

  “Three.”

  “I will have to think.”

  “Two pounds twelve and six.”

  “I will still have to think,” I said. Prudence prevented me from adding that I would do my thinking on the short walk to my house and back.

  “I cannot say it will be here when you return,” he shouted after me. “A coat the like of that.”

  I called back over my shoulder, “You said it yourself: no one else has tried it on.” And yet the possibility that someone else might, the moment my back was turned, struck me as in every sense just. I stopped myself from rushing, if anything walked slower than I would have normally, took extra care removing the money from its tin box, replacing the box in the drawer, covering it again with shirts and linen. (The box itself was hidden not from my grandfather – he positively encouraged thrift – but from whichever enterprising burglar discovered his moral aversion to locked doors.) I was more than half hoping as I made my way back that the coat would indeed be gone. Already in those brief contacts between fingers and barrels I had felt a “charge”, as might be said now. I had to remind myself that the gun was only one means to an end and not the end in itself.

  But the coat was not gone, and as quickly as the doubt had entered it left again. I watched the old man as I approached, observing the telltale twitch of his head as he picked out my footsteps from the scores competing for his attention, coming closer, closer, stopping at last directly in front of him.

  “So, you thought?” he said.

  I placed the coins in his hand without another word. He weighed rather than counted them, giving them several flips in his cupped palm. They moved little, barely mustered a jingle.

  “You had better look on the ground at your feet,” he said. “You seem to be missing half a crown.”

  I did not even pretend to look, but placed that coin too in his hand. He gave the augmented pile another flip. He was satisfied.

  “Health to wear,” he said, and I put the coat over my arm.

  “Health yourself.”

  A dozen yards on I stepped into a courtyard of blank walls and emptied the contents of the pockets into a felt bag that had formerly held a pair of my boots: a brass-topped ramrod, a tooled horn containing priming powder, a waxed wrap of what I assumed were flints, another, larger wrap of what I knew to be lead balls. The pistol came out last. The butt, as gently curving as the head of a walking stick, was of walnut, the barrels, which had been soldered one on top of the other, brass. The whole lot was not much longer than the powder flask. It was – down to the promise in the laurel wreath, engraved around the maker’s name, that the bearer would prevail – perfect.

  The transfer complete, I carried on to a clothes stall at the furthest corner of the square from the old man’s – coats and trousers and breeches and dresses tumbled together as though they had been stripped from the victims of some catastrophe rather than traded. I showed the stallholder the coachman’s coat. He turned up his impressively carbuncled nose. “These are not much in the fashion now, to say nothing of the season.” Then, rubbing the nap of the collar between his fingers, “I will give you five shillings.”

  “Seven and six,” I said.

  “Six and that is my last.”

  So I added the Garrick to his mausoleum and continued on my way, let him smirk all he liked at the thought of getting one over on me. Let him smirk.

  *

  It was that time of the year when the sun in its pomp had to be dragged from the sky at day’s end. I imagined Hyperion’s horses, which Bright was so fond of invoking, somewhere on the western side of Black Mountain – Lough Neagh sounded about right – straining at their traces. Eleven o’clock would sound and still the mountain top was stained red from the struggle. The streets and lanes and fields round about were full of people who could not settle to bed while it was yet so light and who unwittingly became extras in the drama unfolding in my own private theatre. I felt as though I was getting to know the town a third time, not now through the eyes of a child, nor of a youth given the licence of a wage and fellows his own age to spend it with, but through those of a man groping towards an understanding of the thing to which his life thus far had served merely as prologue. I was conscious suddenly of the opportunities that buildings presented, the archways, the buttresses, the shadows they cast, for the skip and a jump that could take you out of one street into another, as completely as if you had been translated into another plane of existence.

  I mingled with my townsfolk on their circuit of the White Linen Hall, or at least on that half of it that afforded me a view of the Royal Hotel; I walked in their company the road out to Ormeau, joined them in their admiration of the Marquis’s new house, now almost complete – all those chimneys! Those lights! – and stepped aside to allow them to pass in the entries around Hill Street, off one of which, as Bright had told it, cocks were sometimes fought. I squeezed and wriggled my way to the front of them as they lined the pavements of Donegall Square for the annual parade of the town’s Masonic Lodges; the following evening, the final Saturday in June, I stood shoulder to shoulder with them in one of the largest public gatherings in years (“a hanging crowd,” the man behind me said nostalgically, causing the hair on the back of my neck to stand on end), as Mr Wallace, Lord Belfast’s solicitor, attended by the Seneschal and the Sovereign, Sir Stephen May, stepped on to a platform beneath a dolphin-headed lamp standard. The solicitor carried a letter, which, even before he had finished unfolding it, provoked such a tumult in the whole assembly that the Sovereign himself had to ring a bell to bring it to order.

  “Please, gentlemen and ladies, ladies and gentlemen,” he called at the very top of his voice, then yielded the (temporary) floor to Mr Wallace.

  “His lordship earnestly desired that I communicate the contents of this letter to you, so if you would have the courtesy to hear me out,” the solicitor said, making no special effort to ensure that people could hear him even if they would. “He begins, ‘I am most anxious that all opposition to the Belfast Harbour Improvements should cease, if possible’ ” – this to a few ironic cheers, quickly quelled – “ ‘but I cannot but give my most decided opposition to the intended Bill if the rights of the Lords of the Soil are not in some way protected.’” And this to catcalls so general and protracted that the solicitor was obliged once more to await the intervention of the bell.

  (Many of those catcalling I had seen on parade the day before in their sashes, their aprons and their collar jewels; I had seen Wallace and the Sovereign too, several
of the lesser Chichesters and others of the Mays, their in-laws; Brothers all in Masonry.)

  When at last Wallace deemed it worth his while to try again it was to outline to the assembly a proposal that Lord Belfast hoped, should it meet with the concurrence of his father, would prevent him from being placed in the disagreeable situation of further obstructing the Bill: namely that the Lord of the Castle nominate half the members of any new Ballast Board that the Act might bring into being, and co-opt on to it besides the MPs for Belfast, Antrim, and Carrickfergus, which was to say – although he was much too coy actually to come out with it, even through this elaborate ventriloquism – his father’s cousin, a neighbouring landlord, and himself.

  Beyond these words the solicitor was not able to go, nor was there this time any let-up in the hullabaloo. (If the bell was rung again I did not hear it.) I roared as loudly as any gathered there my outrage that the Lords of the Soil and Castle should try to hold the town to ransom in this way. I wondered though how many others had right there in their pockets the means – should the need arise – to prevent it?

  It was the last thing I looked at before going to bed. It was the first thing I looked at in the morning. I would kneel before the pistol and its “necessities” spread out on the carpet and call to mind Gelston, on the day of the protests against the Cantonese merchant ship, loading the Ballast Office’s guns. Time and again I followed the routine – half-cock, powder, patch – up to the point of ramming the ball home. For I remembered too what Gelston had said that day, that after the ball was in it was easier to discharge the gun than unload it.

  In the dawn light I peered along the topmost barrel to the wall of the Castle gardens, where weeks before Lord Belfast had sat on his grey mare, admiring Mr Sinclair’s hunting pack. The dogs returned every second or third day, but of Lord Belfast there was no further sign, and each morning I would tap the powder back into its horn, shake the balls and patches into my palm and pack the pistol away again.