by Neil Jordan
“Yes,” said Nina, “her hair.”
“No, her hair,” said George again, pointing down.
And Dan Turnbull thrust his pitchfork in the water below George and found it entangled in what indeed was hair, the hair of Miss Isobel Shawcross, governess, of the Kildare Shawcrosses, who floated to the surface like a flounder caught by a gaffhook.
~
The sun rises to more hoar-frost on the morning of the seventeenth of January. The fields are pure expanses of white and the sycamore by the gates is a palm of silver fingers appealing to the sky. A veil of mist lies inches above the frosted surfaces, curling round the sycamore and the black Ford car parked by the gates in which a lone policeman sleeps. A second car comes to relieve him as the mist disperses; men in uniform step out of it, stamp their feet, bang on the frosted window until the one who sat vigil awakes. They pour him tea from a flask and as the steam from their mugs drifts into the dispersing mists a third car joins them. Dr. Hannon now emerges, leading George gently by the hand. Then behind comes Janie. The girl who was so thin and freckled has gained something of a stoop. She has a hat pinned to her greying hair, is wearing a black coat with a black fur collar, thinking the colour, perhaps, is appropriate to the agony of the occasion.
“Come on, George,” she says to her brother, “tell the men now.”
But George has little to tell. His feet are sore from wandering, the laces in his shoes are missing and the leather edges have rubbed his sockless ankles raw.
He complains about his heels as Janie moves him through the gates and the policemen follow at a distance, thinking any speech, perhaps, is better than none. They move up the driveway, at George’s shambling, uncertain pace, round the courtyard at the back, through the arches round the outhouses. And George stops, in mid-stride, outside the orchard wall. He stares at the bare apple trees, as if remembering them bowed down with fruit. There is a slight, sad smile around the corners of his mouth, and his eyes are wistful. The group of policemen shuffle awkwardly behind him.
“Is it inside there,” Janie asks gently, “somewhere in the orchard?”
“The orchard,” George echoes.
“Not the orchard, Janie,” Buttsy Flanagan says, “we’ve checked the orchard.”
And George, as if in agreement, starts to walk again. Past the glasshouse to his right. Down the path of scuffed grass towards the river. And the procession follows.
George’s eyes are pale blue, the colour of cigarette-smoke, and Janie’s are brown. Time has not been kind to her eyes, to the lids above them, the circles beneath them, but there is still tomboy tartness to her face, an arresting slash of purple lipstick on the wide mouth, beneath the hungry hollow cheeks. In fact time itself has only served to enhance that waif-like, lost abandon. Even now, as she holds George’s elbow, allows him to lead her towards the river, Sergeant Buttsy Flanagan is eyeing not the moving ripples in the river, but the pendulum of Janie’s hips.
The grass beneath her impractical high-heeled shoes is scuffed from years of children’s feet into something like a path. And where the chestnut arches over the river, the branch above it still with the ringlet of scar on its bark, the ground below it still empty of grass as if from the memory of thrusting feet, there George stops. His blue eyes mist up. He pulls a crushed packet of Sweet Afton from his top pocket and fumbles for a light.
“You want a light, Georgie?” Janie asks. The policeman next to her proffers it.
The match flares, the smoke curls up and the mist in his eyes turns to tears. He could be remembering his sister’s small, half-naked body that used to swing like a knotted branch over that water, fall and float away as deftly as wood. The policeman, of course, presumes something else. He pictures George lowering an adult body into that water, with all the solicitude of deranged affection. He pictures the high tide carrying the body past the ruined shellfish plant, past the old breakwater, past the Lady’s Finger, out to sea.
10
DAN TURNED THE body over with his pitchfork once, then twice, and said to Nina in his lazy way, “Nina, lead the mare over to that bank so she can eat some clover.”
“Clover,” Nina said. She was staring at a picture she had seen before but she couldn’t remember where.
“Grass or clover, all the same to her, she’s hungry. Georgie, Janie, give her a hand.”
He had the body turned by now, in a tangle of floating seaweed. He was hoping they wouldn’t understand what they had seen.
“Will she eat shamrock?” Nina asked. She had the loose reins of the mare in her hand and was leading her away from the image she wanted to forget.
“She’d eat anything,” Dan said.
“Clover,” said Georgie.
Nina drew the mare’s head down towards the grass and saw her lips curl back, baring long yellow teeth. She listened to the crunch of seagrass and shivered even though the sun was hot enough to make her cheeks burn. She remembered wishing her governess gone and wished now that she hadn’t wished that. Because if all of her fleeting desires came true, she didn’t want to think of what would happen.
“That was Miss Shawcross, wasn’t it?” she said quietly to Dan, who jammed his pitchfork in whatever seaweed he had so far collected, and took the reins from her hand.
“Don’t you bother your head about it.”
Dan lifted her first, then Janie and last of all George on to the cart.
“Is she drowned?”
“Drowneded,” echoed Georgie.
“We’re taking you home now Nina,” said Dan softly, “and I don’t want you to bother with what you’ve seen. Leave that to the peelers.”
“She’s still hungry,” said Nina, as Dan jerked the mare’s head upright, and whipped her into a smart trot down the sandy road.
“She is,” said Dan, “and I know a fine field of clover she can chew to her heart’s content.”
“Where’s that?” asked Janie
“Below the RIC barracks.”
She lulled herself into a dream as the horse trotted back, a dream scented with honeysuckle and clover and the smell of wet seaweed. In her dream the face turned over and over, the hair spreading out in the water like a scallop-shell. In her waking the river threaded its way above the hedges, a hot ribbon of silver.
The sound of humming bees droned towards her from the hedges and away to the dunes and made common cause with both her dream and her waking. Whatever made this happen wasn’t her, she sensed, but some part of her had seen it before it happened, so some part of her could at the very least have stopped it from happening. To know what was to come would be a burden, a terrible burden, even worse than knowing what was not to come. She would return, she knew, to the house, to father and mother and Mary Dagge, to her doll Hester and to a world without Miss Isobel Shawcross.
She tried to picture Dan’s arrival at the peelers’ station, sunlit swathes of green below the redbricked barracks, two peelers running towards them from the door, buttoning their tunics, serious, serious, all business. Dark glances towards her, the girl in the back, you, you of all people knew. But to her immense relief it wasn’t like that at all. An officer in shirtsleeves was lazily clipping the lawns, Dan pulled the mare to a halt, handed the reins to Nina, said, “One minute now,” left them on the seaweed-smelling cart while he walked forwards, shook his hand and whispered.
“She’s dead, isn’t she?” said Janie.
“You think so?” asked Nina.
“Well, I don’t think she was swimming.”
“Maybe she can’t,” said Nina.
“Can’t what?”
“Swim.”
The mare cropped at the grass by the roadside.
“Clover,” said Georgie.
“Stop saying clover,” said Nina.
“Grass,” said Georgie.
“That’s better. Grass.”
Louder voices on the lawn then, two peelers walking fast down towards them. Buttoning their tunics, just the way she’d pictured, to her shock and disappointme
nt, but not really her surprise.
“Make room there,” said Dan, and they clambered up, large laced boots and shining buttons. Dan thwacked the reins and drew the mare in a half-circle. She moved off unwillingly with the extra load.
“So where is she?” asked the first, fixing the last buttons on his greatcoat.
Dan shot the officer a disapproving glance.
“Across from the Lady’s Finger. I’ll drop off the childer first and take you there.”
“A bad business.”
“Maybe.”
So he left them by the gates to make their way up the avenue on their own.
“Don’t be bothering your little heads, now,” he said. “Nina will take you to Mary Dagge for your tea.”
The three of them walked over the crunching pale gravel, the death now unmentioned between them. To her two new friends, if friends they were, the sight of this gaunt facade was like another entrance, another house. They had seen its jumble from behind, the crumbling wall of an orchard, the long triangle of glass and rusted metal, the stone arch leading to the stables, but this looming thing, this dark rectangle with the sun now right behind its bunched chimneys, this was neither house nor home, church nor castle, this was some unimagined, unimaginable fact they would have to find new words for.
The large front door was ajar and Nina pushed it open with her shoulder. The sound of a piano, soft and measured, came from the living room. She held the door open for Janie and George and looked down at George’s bare feet as he tested the tuft of the carpet, his splayed toes pressing it as if he expected it to ooze between them like mud. Then she walked towards the sound of the piano. George and Janie followed, stepping in her brief footprints in the carpet, fearful that the area outside them would indeed turn to mud, the kind of mud that sank for ever, that they would vanish beneath that red and purple leaf-shaped pattern, hardly leaving a ripple.
Nina walked over the varnished wood round the doorway on to a different carpet. George and Janie stayed by the door jamb, as if another carpet was more than they could negotiate today. Her mother wore a cream blouse, hair falling around her sculpted cheeks in an untidy but not unpleasing tangle. A glass with a lemon-slice held back the pages of The Well-Tempered Clavier. The pearly notes cascaded round her and she looked at her only daughter through a concentrated haze.
“Nina, you’re a disgrace,” she murmured, looking at her stained white smock and her smudged shoes, then towards the door. “And who are these two other disgraces?”
~
“Would he have placed her in the river, Ma’am?” the nearest policeman asks Janie in a low mumble, designed to be unheard by George.
“Did you put Nina in the river?” Janie asks George, her teeth clenched, her fist scratching at her watery eyelids.
“The river,” George repeats.
“Is she in the river, George?” Janie asks again.
“She’s in the river,” says George, “and the seaweed is her hair.”
“Not her, George,” says Janie. “Nina. We’re talking about Nina.”
“What was that about seaweed?” Buttsy Flanagan asks.
“We found a body once, when we were children, tangled in the seaweed—”
“Her hair,” says George.
“Isobel Shawcross,” says Janie. “Check the coroner’s records. She drowned.”
“The river took her,” says George.
“Took who?” asks Dr. Hannon.
“Took Boinn—”
“Who’s Boinn?”
“Only one place the river could take her,” says a policeman. “Out to sea.”
“You don’t understand,” says Janie, “he’s confusing one thing with another—”
“Why did the river take her?” asks the doctor.
“For her hair—”
“Jesus Christ—”
“Let him speak—”
“She’s not in the river, Georgie, is she?” asks Janie. “That would be too simple.”
“Much too simple,” says George.
“Why did you kill her, George?” Janie says slowly.
“Kill who?” says George.
“Nina,” says Janie, and her closed fist scratches again at her eyelid.
“Didn’t kill Nina,” says George. “I killed Hester.”
“Oh Jesus,” says Janie and walks away.
“Hester?” asks the doctor. “Who’s Hester?”
They are being led to a conclusion and maybe George, with some defensive, fractured intuition, is leading them to it. Dr. Hannon enquires about Hester, Buttsy Flanagan about Isobel Shawcross, George smokes one cigarette to its end and holds his hand out mutely for another. They walk back from the river as the light fades and a consensus is emerging from the interstices of their conversation, from what Janie can remember of their childhood narrative, from the dementia of her grief and her unwillingness to penetrate it.
And the conclusion when arrived at is, like all conclusions, the most convenient.. That he lowered the body into the water with all the care of deranged affection, that the tide, which would have been high then, would have carried it past the ruins of the shellfish plant, past the limestone tower at the old breakwater out to sea. And besides convenience, there is a mystery to this conclusion, there is a pleasing poetry to it, the body never found, the lapping waters of an infinite, open grave, the sense that, whatever the warp-spasm that came over George, he deposited Nina, Boinn, Hester, in the arms of the river, in the body of the ocean she loved with some warped version of the same emotion.
So there would be, conveniently, no body to be dealt with, no visit from the State Coroner, no grave to be dug; and the sentence, when it came to be passed in Drogheda District Court, would be one of guilty but insane. There would not be even the inconvenience of a change of residence for George: the ward in St Ita’s would become his prison, and out of his barred window he could look towards the same insane sea.
On the grassed-over cover of the rusting manhole of the old septic tank, they gather and drink coffee from a policeman’s flask. He spices his cup with whiskey, raises the metal hip-flask towards Janie with an enquiring eye. She nods.
“A bird,” Buttsy Flanagan informs her, “never flew on one wing.”
“Hester,” says Dr. Hannon, “was your . . .”
“Nina’s doll. Nina’s ghost. Whatever Nina wanted her to be.”
“Her familiar.”
“Yes,” says Janie, “she became familiar all right.”
“And Boinn?” says Buttsy.
“Get a guide-book of the locality,” says Janie. “You’ll come across her.”
“A legend,” says Dr. Hannon.
“Again,” says Janie, “Nina’s. And I think I’m going to cry now.”
The rusting cover of the manhole reads Twyfords Adamant and Janie’s heel scrapes over it as she turns away and weeps.
11
HESTERTHE PESTER. Her inanimate eyes seemed to know it all that afternoon, seemed able to decipher Dan’s whispers, when he entered and conferred with her mother, seemed able to interpret her mother’s gasp when she held her mouth and turned away. “My God,” her mother said out loud, then, “Nina,” and she took her and wrapped her arms around her as Dan led her two new friends towards the front door. She would remember that holding, those arms stroking her hair, the comfort of being comforted, in years to come, when no comfort was forthcoming. She would remember the sound of her father’s feet, the sight of him as the door burst open and the two of them held her, together. She would wonder what it would take to recreate that, the three of them wrapped around each other-—the death of another governess, perhaps. She felt privileged by death that evening, as her mother and her father let her play with Hester till the sun went down, watched her with moist, attentive eyes, before accompanying her up to her room, to sleep.
Sleep, of course, was late in coming, for Nina if not for Hester. She lay there, thinking of cause and effect. She had wished her governess gone and now her governess wa
s gone. She looked at the moon through the half-drawn curtains at the window, and wished it gone. But her wish had no effect: the indistinct half-globe stared down at her as if teasing her with its continued presence. She wished the curtains would close of their own accord, blocking out the moon, but of course the curtains stayed, limp and inanimate. She thought of Miss Shawcross’s definition of her doll, inanimate, lifeless, ceramic and horsehair. For a moment she wished Hester gone, then instantly regretted it; but Hester remained, sleeping on the crook of her arm, in her Puritan bib and smock.
And then the light darkened imperceptibly on Hester’s ceramic cheeks and Nina looked back at the window and the moon was gone, behind a thin strip of cloud shaped like an orange-peel. For an unending moment she was filled with a bottomless terror and wished the moon back again. And the moon indeed came back, as the cloud changed its shape from an orange-peel to a wisp of hair, exposing the half-finished globe once more. And although she knew the moon exposed itself independent of her wishes, she was still not certain that her wishes had no effect. If her wish cohered with what inevitably would happen, did her wish not in some way conspire with what would happen? If she had not wished, would what had happened have slipped into the realm of that which would not happen? And if, having glimpsed a vision of Miss Shawcross’s hair under water, mingling with the seaweed, she had warned Miss Shawcross of the imminent dangers of water, would Miss Shawcross have still ended thus, under the limp seaweed in the waters of the Boyne? Or would she have dismissed Nina’s inner world as adroitly as she dismissed that of her doll, now named Hester?
If she had wished, then, that George had not taken the course he did, would she rather than I be standing now by the upper window, observing, since observation is all I am, the lone policeman’s breath on the cold air, his stamping feet on the hoar-frosted grass by the gates? Had she been at the left-hand window in the dining room on the first storey, could she have transferred her gaze to the pale light spilling in through the right-hand window, from a moon very like the one she wished away, spilling its light over the frozen fields? And since we are supposing here, as she loved to suppose, could she have seen the mauve fleur-de-lys of the wallpaper print of forty-five years ago, could she have followed that pattern to the door? Could she have walked to the accompaniment of distant piano music from downstairs, towards that door?
