by Neil Jordan
She was carried into the house by her father, her tiny cheek resting against the white crocheted shawl over the rumpled corduroy of her father’s sleeve. Her mother followed in a wickerwork nursing chair, carried by Dan Turnbull and two farm-hands, gingerly, like some exotic piece of china that might break at any moment. The house greeted her, as it greeted each newcomer, with a mysterious, unbreakable embrace.
Her eyes observed the house through a liquid prism, calm as pools of bog-water unruffled by any sentient breeze, disembodied as any ghost, carried by arms she was barely aware of through the front door into the yawning dark of the hallway, the oak staircase rising to the tall windows with their oblongs of grey Irish light. Her eyes closed at irregular intervals and the dark came in like a lake. They opened on a whim to see an entirely new vista, a nurse bending towards her in a different room, black hair brushing like wings off her face, sliding the bottle with India-rubber nipple downwards. The mother stretched in the verandaed room below her on the easy chair, wrapped in blankets, hand checking her vaginal stitches, father pacing the ground floor, now tinkering on the piano in the dining room, now sketching his sleeping wife with a soft charcoal pencil in the whey-coloured wash of light that seeped through those mildewed windows.
But his wife wasn’t sleeping; she had closed her eyes against the need to meet his. Some exhaustion had entered her very being, some rage against the flesh, the skin, the tissue and bone of the animal in her that enabled this birth. She spoke when she must of course—yes my love, tired, maybe, I suppose I must be, tea, yes please—but her soul, her heart, whatever flower she gave to him was a bloody mess and was in hibernation.
The child’s eyes opened in the room above and no effort of the suckling showed in them and she stared above the nurse’s crowblack hair at what was not there. No cognition, no recognition. Just a stare.
An isolate child. Her name could have been just that: isolate, Isolda, with its connotations of tranquillity in aloneness. Dark pools of eyes, darker than her father’s hazel, staring from his hand as he held her, in her mother’s christening robe, above the stone baptismal font in the Siena Convent. Legend had it that they never blinked when the cold water trickled down her creased forehead. The shrunken head of Oliver Plunkett, sliced free of its body in Tyburn more than two hundred years ago, in its glass casket across the nave, could not have been more still. The eyes seemed designed for that too-large house, with its dark brown timbers, its damp limestone, its draughts and its shadows. When speech came, legend had it too, it came early, and always seemed addressed to someone else. They thought she had a lazy eye at first, the mamas and the papas always addressed to a point beyond their shoulders. But when they called Dr. Quirk and he moved his finger in front of those brown orbs from left to right and saw them follow, they found nothing ocular at fault. And as they were blessed with ignorance of Dr. Freud, who had, in point of fact, not yet begun to formulate his theories, they put it down to fancy and imagination.
They called her Nina.
~
The sky has clouded over and the pencil shadows on the branches have softened into a gloomy wash. The light on the window-pane is warmer now, the only light around. The onset of dawn can be felt before it is seen. The cough of a pigeon can be heard as it wakes, the wind seems to quicken and the dead leaves shift and somewhere beyond the copse of trees, the whirring of wings. After a patriotic tune on a thin organ, after a considered series of electronic beeps, the radio comes to life in the empty room with news of high and low fronts, of millibars rising slowly. And then the weak daylight comes. The night will retreat into shadow once more, into the dark spaces that define the bright.
George must have woken that last morning, turned the radio on and left it that way, found no milk in the fridge and walked through the crusted white fields towards the house. For I had come down, half-dressed, to the sound of banging in the kitchen and found the door open, a bottle of milk rocking on the pine table, spilling to the floor. A set of milk footprints traced the passage of his boots from the table to the door. I cursed them silently while I cleaned them and thought once more of ending his tenure as gardener, handyman and general factotum. Where are you, my Adonis, with your spilt milk and your bleeding sparrows?
And his words echoed in my brain, You took my part, as I went about my day, that day that ended prematurely when I came upon him two hours later in the glasshouse. The broken glass clinked around his boots as he emerged from the curtain of dead tomato plants. And he repeated the phrase I had first heard beneath the apple tree. But it wasn’t his part I had taken. Heart, he said.
“You took my heart.”
5
HER MOTHER, IN the third year of the new century, decided Nina needed company other than imaginary. So she took the train to Dublin and visited, on Eustace Street, the Institute For Governesses, a grand-sounding title for the cramped fourth-floor room in which she interviewed lady after lady of the teaching classes. She settled on one, a Miss Isobel Shawcross, from the Kildare Shawcrosses, with a prim mouth and a carriage as straight as a pencil. The house was large, Mrs. Hardy explained, Nina was quiet and given to daydreams and prone to fill the empty spaces with her imagination. What she needed was the kind of diversion an early education could bring. Miss Shawcross nodded, and in her nodding an understanding seemed implicit, an understanding of young girls in empty houses with large imaginations. There were references to be examined, fees to be discussed, but from the moment of that nod Mrs. Hardy made her decision and Miss Shawcross found herself hired.
And found herself, one week later, drawn in a train over the Boyne river, with the mullet circling lazily in the waters below, a kingfisher skimming the waters, its wings blue over the alluvial flow which looked like nothing so much as the gathering froth on the glass of porter that Miss Shawcross was bringing to her lips. For the governess liked her porter, brown upon brown.
Dan Turnbull met her at the station, carried her many bags to the pony and trap. And his dark, wide-brimmed hat with the fisherman’s hooks and flies dangling over the edge framed her view of the streets. She could have looked left or right and been free of this impediment, but Miss Shawcross’s gaze was designed to mean business, and, meaning business, remained fixed on the road ahead. So the city quays were spooled to her against this dark foreground, like the lumpen mass of a projector against a cinematograph screen. They were mean, shabby and noisome, as she had of course expected. What she had not expected was the gathering charm, as the bustle of the North Quay modulated to the low swish of fuchsia hedges against the carriage wheels. There were splashes of red and orange against the irregular line of hedge to her left, since the fuchsia and the honeysuckle were in full bloom, and to her right were the tidal mudflats, the tilted masts of fishing boats at odd angles in the silt, as if they had been dropped from a great height by an unseen hand. The only sounds were the swish and crackle of the wheels against the hedge, the scraping of the mare’s hooves and the drone of bees’ wings round the fuchsia and the honeysuckle.
Miss Shawcross, who had an imaginative soul belying her rigid exterior, began to speculate on the new charge that awaited her and that act of speculation, assisted by the Guinness she had consumed, became a kind of waking dream. She saw an oval face with a fringe of curls, a bow-like mouth beneath large brown eyes, and the face moved towards her and away, drifting in and out of focus as if she, Miss Shawcross, far from being on a jaunting car driven by the fixture whose name she had forgotten up in front, was in fact on a giant, swinging pendulum. And her speculative faculties being so dulled by the Guinness, she let this dream occupy the whole of her for well-nigh twenty minutes and was therefore both surprised and unsurprised to shake herself out of it, raise her head to view an irregular driveway curve towards a grey limestone house with a girl framed beneath it, standing in the unkempt grass, staring at the approaching trap with those same unblinking brown eyes of which she had been dreaming. Dan Turnbull let the mare nudge her way through the wrought-iron gates. Lazi
ness had long inured him against attempting it himself, and besides, he admired the ingenuity, the sheer persistence with which she pressed the dappled plane of her forehead against the metal, gradually widening the gap to the screech of rusted metal hinges. Good girl, Garibaldi, there we go now. Garibaldi was a man, he had been told soon after he had named her, an Italian patriot, but he liked the name, so Garibaldi she remained. And the dead weight of the gates scraped off the mare’s broad flanks as she pulled the trap through. He could hear the slow, careful scraping of the hooves against the gravel, the metal hinged screech and a lightly snoring sound behind him, which he presumed was that school-teacher sleeping, like a cow, half upright. The gate swung back behind to its half-open state as the mare quickened her pace, scattering the gravel. Nina watched from the lawn, the house behind her at first, then shifting to one side as they headed towards the forecourt. Dan raised his arm in a lazy wave, which Nina imitated, a look of scientific curiosity in her upturned face. She walked, then ran, then slowed to a walk again, following the trap around the grey limestone walls.
The sun to the left of the house, gently shivering fingers spreading over the orchard wall, illuminates Dan Turnbull, the horse and cart and the lady with the pencil-stiff back and the stiffer-brimmed hat, leaving the house dark behind it. The lady is standing in the cart now and the golden glow lends her an alarming theatricality. Dan kicks loose the wooden steps with his foot, holds her gloved hand and plots her delicate course down step after wooden step till her feet reach the gravel.
“This is Nina,” he says and yells, “Nina. Nina!” His voice, brown and oiled like old tobacco, incapable of anything but warmth. “How are you Nina, how are you.” His hands, like stooks of barley, their own smell, tobacco and engine grease.
I walked around the house, I remember, towards the dribbling horse and the woman with the dark hat. Dan kept calling even though I was walking towards him, but he was like that, Dan, he would repeat a thing even though you had already answered. He lifted me up with those barley-stook hands and I could smell the tobacco and he said, “Here’s the girl miss, Nina, here’s your teacher,” and I knew even then that she wouldn’t last long. Her dark brim dipped down towards me and she peeled off her glove and reached out her hand. Her breath smelt of malt and her nails were dirty, yet I took it.
“My tiny one,” she said.
~
An oil-tanker drags its way through the already open gates, trundles up the driveway and parks in the gravelled yard. It sits there, diesel fumes steaming from its rusted exhaust pipes, beeps its horn, waits, beeps its horn again and waits again. A barrel-chested man in blue overalls gets out and lights a cigarette. He calls George’s name, George who ordered oil for delivery on this sixteenth ofJanuary, nineteen fifty. A radio bleeds from his cabin, a politician’s voice talking about the rural electrification scheme and its implications for counties Roscommon, Sligo and Leitrim. He listens to the voice, the silence around it, smokes his cigarette to the butt and walks towards the kitchen door. He pushes it open slowly, calls George’s name again. As his voice dies away, echoing through the empty scullery, he notices the purse on the pine table. He listens and when the silence seems absolute, he lifts up the purse, opens its clasp. He sees the wrapped notes inside but must think twice about it since he closes the clasp again, puts it down, walks back into the yard.
He walks down the path of packed mud towards the glasshouse, still calling, “Is there anyone there for Jaysus sake?” and only stops when he notices the streaks of red, frozen on the crushed grass, like deft calligraphy against the white hoar-frost. He follows them step by bloody step to the shattered glasshouse door, edges it aside and enters a warmer world, where the pale sun works its magic through the windows and falls directly on the syrupy pool of copper-coloured liquid. He says nothing, stares with a child’s curiosity and only makes a sound when he notes his own footprints: like George’s in the milk, but russet-coloured with day-old blood, the broken oval of the sole with the minute squares of rust inside it. He gasps, an emphysemic sound, through lungs long ruined by cigarette-smoke. He seems to want to run but resists the urge. He lifts his foot instead, grabs his ankle with his right hand, twists his shoe to stare at the sole. He replaces it carefully on the unbloodied portion of the glasshouse floor, steps carefully outside and does the unexpected. He wipes his feet on the frosted grass, an automatic cleansing. He feels either tainted, implicated, or simply repelled.
Then he runs back up the pathway of frozen mud, through the low stone arch of the outhouses, jumps into the cabin of his oil-tanker which lumbers into life, spewing clouds of diesel as it performs a groaning turn and hauls itself out of sight, leaving a pale mist of fume, through which the fagade behind gradually defines itself.
6
THE HOUSE THAT Isobel Shawcross entered through the back, by the kitchen door, was a big house, a very big house. And Miss Shawcross’s first instinct was to make it smaller. She walked through it as though used to houses far bigger than this, infinitely more opulent, without the workaday scramble of its kitchen, the bicycle upturned outside the scullery door, without the irregular brass fittings of the ribbed stair-carpet that ascended towards those rectangular Georgian windows with their cubes of dusty light; as if she was used to houses infinitely more organised. And she sensed, though she can’t have known it then, that this was a house whose irregularities consumed things: trinkets, penknives, cutlery, haircombs of whalebone and ivory, odd socks and shoes, letters, laces and lapis lazuli rings. She would lose things in this house, she sensed, but she could never, then, have known how much. She could never have known that the losses would extend far beyond the contents of those stout leather valises that Dan Turnbull heaved in, one balanced precariously on his oily crown, one beneath his oxter and the third pushed by his hobnailed boot over the flagstoned floor.
“Let me show you to your room, Ma’am. And Ma’am?”
Miss Shawcross turned, in the scullery hallway.
“Yes?”
“I haven’t got three hands. Could you help me with that bag?”
She hesitated for a moment, and her nostrils did a birdlike twitch which Nina, and Dan, would remember as particular only to her. She bent then, took the valise in both hands and stood aside while he made his angled way, up the stone stairway, into the carpeted hall, up the wooden staircase with the high windows bleached by the afternoon light, on to the upper floor. There were doors to either side, all of them half opened, revealing further evidence of that disorder she had already divined. But her room when she reached it was a miracle of neatness. A smooth coverlet over a plain oak bed, a writing table by a window with a charming gothic arch.
“I’ll leave them here, Missus.”
“Miss,” said Isobel Shawcross. “Miss Isobel Shawcross,” she added, gazing out of the window at the white bundle swinging from the chestnut tree far below.
~
But now, in the present, in the time that moves at a constant measure, that neither speeds nor slows, at ten twenty-one on this sixteenth of January, a policeman passes through the sagging gates on a black bicycle. The white beard has all but vanished from the lawns, leaving such an even glisten of dew that it could be dawn again. It is Buttsy Flanagan from the station up the river beyond the docks and cement-works, the RIC barracks burned down in the Troubles and restored by the Civic Guards. He cycles slowly, as if unwilling to arrive. And having arrived at the circle of gravel behind the house scoured by the oil-tanker’s tyres, he examines the scene slowly, with a methodical, almost disinterested ease. He notes the crushed grass, the footprints, the pool of dried blood in the glasshouse. Each breath emerges from him slowly, visible in the cold morning air, like a laboured questionmark. He knew George, knew Nina Hardy, knew George’s sister Jane, but can no more connect the memories from his childhood with the scene before him than he could with a witch’s sabbath. He remembers three figures on a hayrick, swaying on the back of an unsteady tractor in the late evening sunlight. He remembe
rs the beautiful girl, the woman really, in the floral print dress, walking past the pennant of the eighteenth-hole green towards the tennis-club dance. He remembers the scent of heather and cut grass and the sound of a Percy French song drifting from the clubhouse. Oh the nights of the Kerry dances, oh the ring of the piper’s tune, lingers on in our hours of madness . . . The conclusive line evades him for more than a minute, then, in the way of memory, comes just when he has stopped straining for it . . . Gone, alas; like our youth—too soon! He wonders idly how one sentence can contain so much punctuation. Then he hears the sound of a car chugging beyond the gaunt bulk of the house, and he feels relieved, that whoever has to plumb the realities of the scene before him, it will not be him. At least not him alone.
The car stops by the gates, deposits a policeman who closes them ceremoniously; his presence draws a knot of children coming home from school for lunch, whose presence in turn stops the milk van on its rounds, and a tractor carrying a mound of winter feed. By lunch time the sun has broken through the clouds, the grasses are dry, the inquisitive crowd by the gates has grown and the lawns are progressively trodden by policemen moving with large, somnambulist steps. There are no raised voices, no eruptions of emotion and the tragedy, if tragedy it was, seems already to have happened a long time ago. Another car arrives, dispenses policemen who proceed to traverse the grounds the way the first ones did, while those who have already traversed stand stamping their feet in the cold winter sunlight, smoking, talking in lowered voices. Towards evening a third car arrives, an unmarked one this time, pushes its way through the knot of the curious, waits while the gates are opened, then crunches its way up the gravelled driveway to the back of the house, which is revealed to be in fact the front.
