An End and a Beginning

by James Hanley

  The tenderness that had stolen into her own voice surprised her.

  “Don’t you ever feel lonely here?” he asked her.

  The ice was still breaking. “So much of my life is here. Why should I be lonely?”

  After a slight pause she went on, “I have seen unhappiness before to-day, in this very house. How people will torture each other.”

  The slight movement of his head indicated nothing to the housekeeper. “You know what I’m waiting for?” he said.

  “Only what you may be expecting,” was her reply, and at once she got up and left the kitchen.

  “There are limits to everything,” she thought.

  5

  A letter addressed to Mr. Fury arrived by the faithful, though trembling, hand of Mr. Cullen, the postman. As the arrival of mail always meant something out of a bottle, Mr. Cullen and the housekeeper had repaired to a tiny, unused smoke-room, that had later become Mr. Patrick Downey’s study. It contained nothing but piled and sheeted furniture. There was no fire in this room, and there never would be. Mr. Cullen liked anything out of a bottle that carried the right label, and what Miss Fetch provided from the Downey store would be warming enough. It was not the first occasion that the postman had sampled it.

  “Your health, Winifred,” he said.

  “And the same to you, Michael,” she said, raising her glass. “And how are things with you?”

  Cullen tossed back his tot, then cleared his throat. They weren’t very well, but then they never were, not since those mad Downeys had gone away and left a whole village bereft of their splendid and generous company.

  “You’ve a visitor.”

  “I have.”

  “Most unusual, ma’m, most unusual. And who’d it be this time?”

  “I scarcely know myself,” Miss Fetch said, but it only brought a howl of laughter from Cullen.

  “Ah! Sure I love that, I do indeed. Not knowing indeed. Why ma’m, you know everybody in these parts, and some from across the seas indeed. Anything I can bring you up from below now I’m here?”

  “Nothing at all. And now you’ve had your medicine you can go, Cullen.”

  “Of course.”

  “Though I’m hereabouts on the usual evenings as you know,” she said.

  “As I know so,” said Cullen, showing the housekeeper a glimpse of his horse-like teeth. “We read the papers, ma’m, just like you do. Been in gaol the hell of a long day, and now out, and ’twas that brother of his that was here a long while back. Feller be the name of Desmond, I believe. An’ how’s he looking after his long voyage, eh, Miss Winifred?”

  “Good-day, Mr. Cullen,” she said.

  “Sure I’ll be up to see you Thursday be the stroke of the clock, so I’ll away now, ma’m, and God look to you. Bye-bye.”

  The moment the door shut behind him Miss Fetch climbed the stairs to her room.

  “A letter for the gaol bird,” she said with a smile, and she closed and locked her door. Within a few minutes she had steamed open the letter and read it.

  Gelton, Friday.

  Dear Mr. Fury,

  I’ve been trying to contact you for the best part of a week, and only hope this note reaches you, since it contains news of importance for you. It is that after nearly a year of effort we have at last been able to track down your sister, Maureen Kilkey. Our society found it very difficult indeed, considering that we have branches in almost every town in the country. I know how anxious you are to see her after all this time, and I enclose the address. Unfortunately she is still living with that queer gentleman known as Slye Esquire, though the elderly man who used to accompany them on their strange travels has just recently died in the Halifax workhouse. With best wishes, yours sincerely,

  Cornelius Delaney.

  “Just fancy that,” reflected Miss Fetch. “I never knew he had a sister.”

  She folded up the note, slipped it back into the envelope, sealed it, then placed it between the pages of a book, and promptly sat on it. When the opportunity arose she would slip up to his room and put it on the table by his bed.

  “It still seems very odd to me that he should be here at all, and odder still that his brother’s wife should be coming over here. It’s her home, of course it is, but a great barn of a place to come to indeed. The flights of fancy of these Downeys is enough to split the skull of any intelligent person so. Empty this ten years or more, the whole family of them away, and not giving a damn about the house. Perhaps she’s coming to see this visitor of mine.”

  She smiled. “Maybe she’ll call it her duty. Maybe she’s coming to rescue the old house before it falls down altogether. Well, well! A lovely young creature she was the time she ran away from here, and nobody cried about it, and nobody will now. The father never gave a damn, and as for the mother—oh well, let’s forget the mother, God rest her. All them years away, and only the son wrote me, actually wrote me a letter from time to time from that far away China where he’s stationed, just to find out whether I was dead or alive. A nice boy, and the only decent one of the lot of them. Now I wonder if that man is in or out. I’ve not seen a sign of him since lunch time.”

  As close as her own skin was the thought of the nearness of this man, the very height and weight and pressure of a stranger in the house.

  “I’ve been afraid of him ever since he came, though I’ve given never a hint. And in some strange way he’s afraid of me.” The thought depressed, worried her. She expected the worst. But she had only to press harder upon her rosary beads and the fear vanished.

  “Perhaps he’s asleep,” she thought, “or maybe reading. There’s lots of reading in that room. But never a sound. I wonder if he went out, after all. Walked the country flat since he arrived here, the poor man. Something preying on his mind, no doubt. We’ll see.” She went down to the hall, and a moment later gong strokes battered the air.

  “If he doesn’t hear that he’ll hear nothing at all.” She stood in the hall, waiting, listening. But there was no movement, no other sound. “Gone off again, I expect.”

  She went back to her room. Stood in the window, she watched the light begin to go. She looked at her clock. “I’ll give him till five, and not a minute longer.”

  In a few minutes she would carry out her usual task, the ritual, the duty to do. She would visit every room.

  By a long, hallucinatory thread Miss Fetch unwinds life, and each room in this silent house has its day and hour. In the morning the doors are unlocked, the curtains drawn, the windows thrown open. And at night they are closed again, and Miss Fetch locks darkness out. Everything is remembered, nothing forgotten. This is the world. She moves, and the thread moves, from room to room, from door to door. Her very approach to them is concerned, cautious, as though behind any one of them life may still be found, as if the very knob she turns still retained the warmth of the departed hand, the very lintels the shadow of the rubbed shoulder. She throws open a door and stares inwards, as though its occupant had only just left, and will at any moment return. Looking in, remembering. For Miss Fetch moment and touch carry a mark of the eternal. And standing motionless, and so silent that in a faraway room she may hear the tick of her own clock, hear the very draughts that sweep down the passages, lifting the carpets under her. In a distant kitchen she would hear the drip of a tap. By a heaviness of carpeting, by the very weight and shine of its oak, any passage seems the final one, the secret way out for the life that has fled from it.

  She stood now, with her hand on the knob of the tall white door, and seemed so tense and concentrated in this act that she was quite unaware of the loud bang of an outer door, of the footsteps upon the blue tiled hall, and the soft thuds as Peter Fury walked down the passage in which she stood, and passed her by. Reaching its end he came to the flight of stairs that carried him to his own room, and she did not hear the closing of his door. He had spoken to her as he passed behind her, but she had not heard, had said “good afternoon,” and she had not answered. Miss Fetch saw only a cripple’s w
heel chair standing in the window of this long, high-ceilinged room, and remembered the woman who had once sat in it. The sheeted furniture looked like a line of icebergs, but they were old in Miss Fetch’s eyes, and would never melt.

  “Often enough I wheeled her about in that chair,” she thought, “often enough,” remembering a winter afternoon when the woman had gone out upright, and returned broken.

  “A towering old tree and the unruly horse. A terrible thing to happen. And yet somehow her crippled days were happier. She thought the chair her cross. She liked suffering, she liked being crucified. The poor weak woman she was. And not a soul turned up here when she died, except the daughter who was too late, but the husband never cared, and I was glad he never came. Went a bit light in the head, poor woman. Many’s the time she’s said to me, ‘Has the paper come, Winifred?’ and it hadn’t of course, it was always late arriving.” She walked up to the window, the chair, stared down at a great pile of old newspapers, and a smile suddenly parted her lips. “I just picked up one of them old ones and give it to her, and she read it, though some were ten years old, but she didn’t notice the difference at all. ’Twas only Father Breen and me that followed her to the Ballin yard.”

  She turned and left the room, locked the door. She stood at the next door, and thought quickly, “She’ll be here herself soon, and I’d better get it ready. Just imagine it, this is the one the daughter was born in,” as she opened the door and entered. And nothing had changed. Miss Fetch looked at the canopied bed, the dressing-table, the stool, the carpets, and against one wall the pile of toys, and books. “The first time I ever came into this room I remember sitting down on that chair and staring at the walls, at the pictures. No, it’s just the same now, as it was then,” and she looked from one wall to another, the murals had always fascinated her, the riot of colour. “A lovely place to be born in,” she reflected, as her mind travelled back to the stone cottage of her father, and her own tiny room, with its chair and table and bed, and its plain, whitewashed walls. She stared up at golden-winged angels still trumpeting their descent out of blue sky, down through sheafs of rolling white cloud. She saw the birds that flew in and out of trees dense and burdened by their summer flesh; saw ballet dancers reaching for the moon, and in a far corner a ship of gold that waited for the traveller. She walked along the room and looked at this ship, and on its prow she still saw the spread-winged bird of ill-omen.

  “Nothing changes in this room. Not a thing. It was always a nice, warm, colourful place. I remember them days, I do indeed. The eating and the drinking, and the dancing and shouting that went on, and the galloping horses all over the place.” She remembered this, heard the sound of their hooves on rough winter grasses.

  “Six of them they had, and lovely creatures they were indeed, and I remember the names of them so. There was Monarch, and Johnny Boy, and Starlight, and Lucifer, Bright Morning, and Silver Shield. Lovely things they were, and all of them buried hereabouts, and lots of lovely golden dust they kicked up for the Downeys. Lots of it. How fortunate indeed that this house has escaped the petrol of the bright and murderous boyos, with their cheap raincoats and their petrol tins. The lovely places that went up in flames. Terrible days they were indeed, sometimes you could hear the air itself exploding. Ah! it’s all over now, and a fine lot of shells they are that’s standing about after the flames.”

  From room to room, from hour to hour, from memory to memory. She shut the door and went down the passage. It was almost dark. “I wonder if he’s up there, I wonder. The man must be hungry. Perhaps I should strike the gong again. He may have fallen asleep.” And once more the thundering sounds reverberated about the house. There was no answer.

  “Well then he must do what he wants to do. I can’t go on waiting and waiting,” and she went off to the kitchen. “I’ll leave something out for him, and if he’s hungry enough he’ll be down for it,” she thought.

  Quiet afternoon grew to quieter evening, but the night was violent.

  “I’ll clear out of here,” Peter said to himself, and knew he wouldn’t. Stretched on his bed he, too, had watched the light go, the darkness come down. In the long afternoon he had travelled much, a dream journey; from a tiny Gelton street to the sprawling American town; from behind the shelter of a priest’s back to another place in the far north, where always there had been the clean snow line. From Tilsey’s steam-filled restaurant to the stone quarry, and from the stone quarry to the bare tree.

  “Mother and father. Both of them. Gone! And I can’t believe it. I can’t even believe myself. Oh God. If only I’d seen them, just the once, before the ship sailed, before the bloody bullets struck.” Stretching and stretching in the bed, aching and grinding between yesterday and to-morrow. Longing for the meeting with the beautiful woman; dreading it; excited by it, numbed by it.

  “Smashed. Scattered. Finished. Just like that. The Cromwellian touch. God! Why do we leave our country, and why do we hate it?”

  The gong again. “Tea,” he thought. “The old bitch is going to roar teatime into my ears.”

  And the gong again. Supper.

  But already he was undressing in the now darkened room. He climbed into bed and lay there, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. The bed was warm, the bed was safe. One night was just like another. “Christ! If I could sleep.”

  Tossing and turning; sitting up and lying down again, stretching and curling, and rolling, this way and that, waiting for sleep, hoping for it.

  “For what can one pray?” It was always the same. If only he could drown, drown in innocent, disarming sleep. If only he could.

  “If mother had been alive, if it hadn’t happened. Christ Jesus! I curse those bastards who pulled the trigger to save Ireland. Blast them. Blast them.”

  Over and over, and over and over, the blankets like sails, the blankets twisted and tugged and tossed, in the safe bed, the imprisoning room. “What the hell is the matter with me?”

  He slept and woke, slept and woke. Miss Fetch heard the sudden shout in the night, and she stiffened herself in her Polar cold bed.

  Only once before had she heard it. “At first I thought it was an animal.”

  The shout died away, the warm beads curled about her finger’s bone, sleep pressed gently upon her eyelids.

  Wind blew into the room, tugged at the curtains. The man in the bed stretched and twisted under the sheets. Three times he had awakened with a jolt, had sat up and lighted the candle, and three times blown it out.

  “Fifteen years ago. All that time gone,” he told himself in the darkened room, safe under the blankets. “I can’t believe it.” He thought of the holy woman in the near-by room. In a dream he had stripped her naked. “Little she knows.”

  Over and over, longing for sleep. He got up and went to the window, looked out at banked-up darkness that yielded nothing. Barefooted, he resumed the clock-like pacing of the room. And after a while he flung himself down into the warm, suffocating bed. He fell asleep. He dreamed again. The years fell upon him like knives. He leapt from dream to dream, from road to road, and the signpost to cactus land was always there. And the waiting woman. “Got you.”

  She was everywhere he walked, everywhere he looked. Behind a door, running down a corridor; she was stood in a mile-long street, she lay log-like on his bed, she turned this and that corner, she walked behind him, counted his every step; she cried into his rejecting ear, “Got you.”

  A light shone upon her face. “Stroke my hands. Feel my feet,” said the woman in the dream, as he turned over and over, as the sweat came.

  “Each time I wake I know I’m alive.” He woke in cold, aching misery, drew the blankets over his head; against the cold of the room, the touch of the woman.

  “Got you.” He shouted, and it woke the housekeeper.

  “Poor creature,” she thought, “’tis a nightmare he’s having so.” The man is years from the house, and she would never have reached him. “How dreadful!”

  But the cringing man in the bed was a
nother’s responsibility.

  The dream has claws, the dream pulls. Towards the lock, under the stone. The great clock grinds out purposeless hours as he stares at a wall, at a hole, at a watching eye. The voice climbs over his shoulder, a sudden bark, an eye lurked, the iron feet went walking up and down. Into the mile-long days, the towering nights. The cell is an island of ice, peopled with regrets. The spirit clings as the light begins to fall, and the silence comes again. The rub of the stone, and the rising dust. He is bent double in mist, under the merciless, unclosing, watchful eye.

  A letter from Kilkey. A letter from the world. Hope leaping towards a face on the wall, behind the bars, inside the keyhole. A figure transfixed upon straw. The frenzied dreams in the murdering silence. The images of the night, the seized hands and the smiling breasts, the wave-like legs, the downpouring, scalding rain of secret passion. Feelings crawling in the slime, leaps into the abyss. Roads leading to the end of the world. Clutching at nothingness, eating oneself alive. The wall that moved, that rose higher than the lighthouse without lights, the rocks without hold, over seas without sound. A ladder built in the brain, and the pain of remembering. Another letter, out of the clouds, out of the world.

  “My dear son—try to forget—try to be brave—learn to be good.”

  The shape under the tree, the shape of yesterday. “Learn to be good——” and her eyes and hair and mouth shining towards him through the barebone branches of an islanded tree.

  “Oh Christ! I’m afraid. I’m afraid!”

  She heard yet another shout, heard a sudden hammering on the wall, a heavy thud.

  “God save us, what was that?”

  Miss Fetch got up at once and put on her dressing-gown. Taking up the candle she left the room and made her way down the passage and up the short flight of stairs that would take her to his room. She stood outside his door, she crossed herself, she listened, and always she was afraid. “What on earth has happened. What’s going on in there?” Then she heard a sound, a sudden loud noise. Quietly she turned the doorknob, and fearing what she would, pushed it open and peeped round. The man had fallen from the bed, lay sprawled across the floor. The wind tossed up the curtains, it found a way to his hair. Miss Fetch closed her eyes, opened them again, looked down at the man. This was new to her, this man upon the floor looked like another person. She saw the drawn-up knees, the hands behind the head that seemed to be clenching the air about.