Away

by Jane Urquhart

  The low rainclouds blowing in from the sea were obliterating the cliffs of his own landscape. He was soaked through and filled with a sharpness of sensation that made him want to see everything far away in a clear light – not just these stones glistening with rain and shifting under his boots but his own cottage surrounded by its three lakes, the land extending away from it a mile towards the cliffs. The little hedge school and the vast estate of Puffin Court. The gentle uplift of Doonfort, the track to his door. All this he wanted on a clear map, now, knowing that if he were able to arrange her presence there his geography would be changed forever.

  Suddenly and inexplicably he remembered his mother and the game she had played with him when he was a boy – a guessing game of question and response centring on the objects in their cabin. “What way are you?” they would ask each other until the accumulated answers brought the solution to the puzzle. Once, when he had been the fire and trying to confuse his mother, he had felt language grow and blossom in his mouth like flowers. “What way are you, Brian?” she had asked, and at the age of eleven he had said, “I am hot and difficult and lie under an open roof. I send my thoughts to the sky. I consume myself but am forever being rebuilt by others. Without me you would starve and freeze and your stories would remain untold.”

  Those words came back to him now. He had never, he knew, written or spoken better since.

  By the time Brian reached her cabin with the saddened priest in tow it was late in the afternoon. The weather all around the rocks of Rathlin and the coast of Antrim was in chaos.

  The girl’s mother let them in with a sigh.

  “He’s after marrying her,” the priest rasped into the woman’s ear. “It’s as I predicted,” he added without enthusiasm.

  Brian walked to where Mary sat, her face turned towards the grey, rain-streaked window.

  He would make her speak.

  He touched her shoulder. She looked at him, startled. “I’ve come,” he said, “because I am certain that you must be my wife. It will be good so. We will have children and I will be kind to you.”

  She turned again to the window, but she had heard him. He perceived that her eyes followed an individual raindrop down the left-hand pane of glass, then rose again to begin the journey with another. Her forearms jerked slightly as if they were being pulled by invisible strings. Brian crouched beside her so that his face was level with her hair.

  “I will not disturb the place you think you’ve gone to,” he said softly. “I will not force you back.”

  Because of the storm he could hear the surf pounding angrily, though the cabin was nearly a quarter of a mile from the shore. For reasons he did not fully understand he told her that the same sea washed the shore near the place where he lived.

  The girl brought one hand up to the cool glass, each finger connecting with a teardrop of moisture on the other side. She traced the rain absently, then regarded him with calm eyes.

  She is not afraid of me, he thought. I will make her speak.

  “Will you not give me an answer?” He was startled by the catch of emotion in his own voice. He waited. In the silence he remembered again his mother’s game. It was played, he knew, by mothers and children all over the county.

  “What way are you?” he asked.

  A slight smile visited the girl’s face. She looked directly at the man who had been, until this afternoon, a blur to her.

  The mother and the priest felt a veil fall between them and the couple.

  Wind rattled the door. Brian placed one hand tentatively on Mary’s forearm and asked again, “What way are you?”

  Waiting, he placed his forehead on his outstretched arm. His posture embarrassed the priest in its resemblance to impassioned prayer. Abruptly he knew that he had underestimated the extent of his friend’s loneliness.

  “Please …” Brian said to the floor whose flags stared blankly back at him. “Please speak to me.”

  The priest coughed, and the woman, remembering some distant moment of passion in her own life, turned her back on the scene. Then all three heard Mary’s voice. She had placed her hand on O’Malley’s hair.

  “I am here but I am not here,” she said. “I will be your wife but I will not be your wife.”

  “You are here,” said Brian. “You can feel the warmth of my hand through your sleeve. I can see the same raindrops as you can, running down the glass.”

  She looked at the schoolmaster’s hair and felt the texture of it beneath her palm, sensed the solidity – the actuality – of the body that crouched at her side.

  And then she fell weeping onto the schoolmaster’s shoulder. Unbuckling. Beginning to enter the world again.

  DURING her pregnancy her longing for beaches diminished, her mind turned inland.

  Sometimes this required an effort on her part but mostly the presence of the child in her body tied her to the earth, the cottage, the fire. She knitted small jackets and sewed small shirts, the shape of her thoughts changing with the shape of her torso. Responding to the gentle attentions of her husband, his kindnesses, she was pleased when he began to teach her to read and write. Soon she was able to mark out the English alphabet on a slate and to fashion her own name on the same black surface. The conversations of the men interested her, though she never participated, and this caused her to look forward to Father Quinn’s monthly visits in a way the girl on the island never could have. Quinn, himself, relaxed and relieved, believing he had cured the girl – brought her back with his holy water – and undistracted by the bulk of her present form, was at his most eloquent and didactic. Eventually Mary came to know the Supplement to the fifth, sixth, and seventh editions of the Encyclopaedia almost as well as the men.

  Brian managed his two fields and taught the hedge school when the weather and the season permitted the children to attend. He was delighted by his bride; her quiet good nature, her domestic skills, her cleverness. His life was rich; they never once discussed the time that she had been away. Unlike Father Quinn, he believed it had been the strength of his own love that had caused the change in her – that and her removal from the island. Her mother, mad with joy at her daughter’s alleged return to the world, sent verbal messages with the passengers on the ferry and, sometimes, a garment for the anticipated child.

  At first Mary had searched for the other one. Walking to the cliffs, she had climbed down to the shore by the steep descent known as Grey Man’s Path, mornings, before her husband had awakened. But the sea had shown her nothing but drumming surf and, it being autumn, its coldness had denied her entry. She returned, pale and private, to a room full of silent questions where Brian had prepared the breakfast and the tea. She felt as though she had been betrayed by something she could no longer imagine. In her dreams, sometimes, she dived into green and her fists clutched dark, wet curls. But once she was pregnant even these dreams visited her less and less. Before leaving the island she had placed the little circle of black and red-gold hair inside the case for a pocket-watch from which the timepiece had been removed, and now this lay, undisturbed beneath her undergarments in the upper right-hand drawer of a chest. Sometimes, when she was arranging laundry, or searching for a garment, the cold surface of metal touched her hand and she remembered, but she closed the drawer again and turned her back to the wall of her house that was nearest the ocean.

  In the evenings Brian continued to teach her as though she were one of the children at the school.

  She knew English, it being encouraged on the island by the priest who believed it was necessary for any kind of advancement. He had even, in his leisure time, taught a handful of the boys to read and write in this language; it had never occurred to him that a girl might need this skill. During the time, however, that Mary had been known for the curse or the gift of eloquence, it had sometimes been English words that sprang to her lips – often thoroughly confusing the adults who happened to hear her. But most of the time her speeches were composed of a combination of this relatively unknown language and Irish Gae
lic, leading to the supposition, on the island, that her announcements were aimed at no one in particular and need not be paid attention to at all.

  Now it was the shape of the English words that caught her fancy, their silence on the slate after the deliberate noise of putting them there. She said to her husband that they were like a collection of sticks and stones tossed up on a beach. He told her then of the game one plays with an unbroken paring of an apple, tossing it over the shoulder, and the shape it makes on the floor forming the first letter of the name of the one you will marry. But they did not attempt this, knowing B’s and M’s to be an unlikely outcome of such a venture.

  Finally Mary was able to read aloud and copy lessons from a Schoolbook filled with simple rhymes intended for children. There was something in the clean music that brought to her traces of songs and poems she herself had made during her last months on the island – songs she had remembered and forgotten at the same time. They made her pause in her reading sometimes, and look towards the window and the sea.

  But the repetition of the lessons, in time, robbed them of their strange significance. Soon she was able to recite:

  I saw a ship a-sailing,

  A-sailing on the sea.

  And Oh, it was all laden

  With gifts for you and me.

  There were comfits in the cabin

  And apples in the hold.

  The sails were made of silver,

  The masts were made of gold.

  without recalling a foreign shore spilling from a pale hand. And finally she was able to write the word “away” on her slate without looking up and around to determine whether its awful power had caused the calm solidity of the evening to disintegrate and waves to wash over the cabin.

  By the time the baby, Liam, was six months old, she had learned so many words that she carried on her studies on her own. The book she liked best was Easy Lessons in General Geography. On its maps she was able to see the island of Ireland shrink in comparison to the other, larger land masses, and her own island, Rathlin, disappear altogether from some representations of the world. She examined, with astonishment, engravings of deserts, jungles, and mountain ranges, exotic beasts that jumped or thundered through life in vast inland territories, birds too huge to fly, mice too huge to scamper, and strange human figures dressed as birds or beasts themselves. She learned that there were thousands of different languages in the world and wondered about the possibilities and the clamour of unfamiliar collections of sounds.

  Night after night the small book in her hands overwhelmed her. The very idea of Poland left her stunned; its cities and rivers and paintings and population and indistinguishable sounds all going on while she was quiet in their cottage. And when she had recovered from Poland the page describing Holland would disorient her to such an extent that she would have to put the book down so that she could compose herself before facing Silesia.

  “Is it true, then?” she would ask Brian after being shocked by the Maltese Islands or Tasmania, her eyes huge as if seeing it all there in front of her.

  Laughing, he would cross the room, stand behind her with his arms encircling her neck so she felt the dry wool of his jumper next to her cheek. “Soon I’ll teach you Latin,” he would whisper, “and Greek.”

  Italy. Greece. Their temples built themselves in her imagination. She needed, she said to Brian, an example of the colour turquoise, as that was the colour of the sea there. He searched for days and then appeared with a shard of china where two and a half turquoise birds were frozen in flight. The baby clasped it in his fist and then put it in his mouth from where it was rescued shining. “It’s a sky colour,” she said then, “a colour of birds.” “So I believe,” Brian replied. Mary carried the fragment in her apron pocket from then on, so that it would not harm the baby. It nudged in her a frail image of a landscape shown to her by a pale hand, but the memory was confused with the jumble of information gathered from her recent reading.

  Her legend, which had preceded her to the mainland, stayed with her, of course, and denied her the kind of easy company another young wife might have had with those of the same sex, so she was often alone when Brian was working. But she was not unhappy. The world held her full attention, the same world from which she had been parted two years before. It absorbed her in exaggerated ways. Its vastness – continents, seas, and solar systems – described in the book seemed to break through the bounds of her body while she was reading. And the rest of the time the particularities of her daily life with its attendant objects and rituals gave her calm pleasure. The child alone was universe enough for her, his perfect body in her hands: the clear eye and small ear, sweet breath and smooth skin. But blankets and buckets, water or milk in a jug, a shelf that displayed her few pieces of blue willow china, a cast-iron pot, a knife, puddles outside the door, turf ready for the fire all gave her joy.

  Brian had not called her back but she had come nevertheless into the world he had offered to her. The other had drifted away on a concealed current, floated elsewhere, visiting her only occasionally at night in dreams that disappeared in the new light of these mornings at the sound of the child’s awakening cry.

  ON a sunny autumn day in 1845 the Sedgewick brothers were working on their shell collection – a full morning dedicated to conchology.

  Osbert had his watercolours arranged in front of him – rose, a touch of ochre, soft grey, eggshell white, burnt umber – and his thoughts moved cheerfully back and forth, as he worked, from these colours to gold, which he had been reading about in the eighth edition of the Encyclopaedia the night before; that pure substance, stabilizer, he believed, of the universe. He imagined veins of it as the earth’s ligaments, a binding force without which the planet would simply fly to pieces. He disapproved of mining it, he had explained to Granville, for precisely this reason. All this removal of purity from the ground could lead only to disastrous consequences. Some of the sorrows of Ireland, he maintained, were undoubtedly based on the fact that gold was not prevalent in the makeup of the country’s rocks. Instead of trying to get the precious metal out of the earth, he told his brother, scientists in the unhappy countries should be trying to invent ways to get more of it in.

  Granville was busily writing down facts, and being so occupied was not nearly as happy as his brother. “Solenisis,” he wrote doggedly, “or shell of a razor fish. Sometimes seen burrowing in sand but known to possess the ability occasionally to move rapidly through water by opening and shutting its valves. Water enters through the inhalant orifice and exits through the efferent orifice.”

  “Tellina solidula,” he wrote next.

  The brothers sat in leather chairs with their backs to a cabinet filled with similar and very dirty hundred-year-old puffins’ eggs. As this strange bird (sometimes called the sea parrot) laid its eggs at the bottom of a muddy burrow bored into a cliff, it had been impossible for Henry Austin Sedgewick the First to lay his hands on a pristine specimen. Subsequent attempts to remove the grime had been to no avail, and now they stood, row upon row of them, covered with a thin veneer of hundred-year-old mud, the least dusted collection on the property. On the bottom shelf, to the left, was a small gathering of black, leather-like cases, known to protect the eggs of a certain variety of shark and called “mermaid’s purses” by the peasantry. Near them, mounted on a silver stand, was a shark’s tooth which was said to have facilitated the teething of Osbert and Granville themselves and whose presence in the house was a result of a bit of folklore collected by their father.

  “Stories are getting grim at firesides these days,” said Granville abruptly, turning his attention away from the task at hand.

  The sunlight that moved through the dusty bubbled glass of the large arched window on the other side of the room chose this moment to expose the extent of wear on the northern side of the Persian carpet. Two and a half hundred years of Sedgewicks had trod there, carrying their prized specimens to the cases that lined the walls.

  “Political talk?” enquired Osb
ert. “Uprisings?”

  “Not exactly,” said Granville. “Tinkers, travelling people are bringing tales of incredible hardships in the West.”

  “Terrible hardships in the West,” agreed Osbert. “Always have been. Some of them are without windows and, as a result, without views. Sublime scenery though. Do you remember our puffin hunts with Father in Donegal? We must go back … perhaps next year. This shell needs just a suggestion of red ochre.”

  “Yes, but now they say that there’s not enough to eat.”

  “Never have had enough to eat,” said Osbert. “Subsist on potatoes, for God’s sake.” He scrubbed, almost with annoyance, at the ochre. “Remarkable root, however,” he added, “in that one can subsist upon it. Solanum tuberosum. Who brought it from Peru – Raleigh or Drake? Thought they were truffles, didn’t he … or they?”

  “Raleigh never visited Peru.”

  “Are you certain?”

  “Quite.”

  “Well then … must have been Drake.”

  “They’re saying,” Granville persisted, “that there is something wrong with the potatoes.”

  “Insects, I expect. Filia beetles undoubtedly. Tiny things but rather wonderful when examined microscopically. The adult is about one-sixteenth to one-eighth of an inch long. I drew them once, I think … can’t remember.”

  “They say the leaves turn black and there’s a sweet, rotten smell,” said Granville, “and the potatoes decompose before you can get them out of the ground. James Flanaghan told me that last year’s harvest, in the West, was partly ruined but that this year’s is non-existent.”

  “Is Flanaghan the one who told you that remarkable story about that robber … what was he called?”

  “Black Dan O’Reilly.”