Sons of Fortune

by Malcolm Macdonald

  As an application of theory it worked well. As a technique it was laden with disadvantages. It took a long time, so that Above had run out of good things before Below reached any conclusion. It was dangerously noisy. And it left embarrassing marks on the bed and painful blood blisters on Below.

  A week after the grown-ups returned to England, Boy found himself (both of himself, in fact) wandering disconsolately in a little wooded dell just off the main road to Clifden, as burdened and shivery as ever. If only it wasn’t so dangerous with the hands!

  He leaned against a tree that lay at an obliging oblique. He tried it. It hurt. He lay still, then rubbed his forehead on its cool bark. He opened his eyes and looked down.

  For a fleeting instant he saw the green-clad woman lying at his feet. (Nature serves up metaphors, too—in breastworks of cloud, in forked boughways, in folded crannies of earth.) She fled, of course, vanishing in the bosky verdure beneath and all around him.

  But it was a matter of moments to resculpt her in the soft, damp earth and leaf mould. He worried at his hands taking part in this activity, and he even tried a few bungling attempts to manage with just his feet; but then he decided that his hands did no more here than they did in making the bed.

  There was no point in sculpting arms and head. Common clay could converse with the foul and corrupt Below. But Above could find no adequate companion for his spiritual intercourse there. At the last trembling moment his imagination failed him. His memory did not; but in no circumstances was he going to re-create that horror. He had to find out what she-Below was like before the ceaseless traffic ruined it.

  Mary Coen! That was when he thought of Mary Coen. No traffic there! How do you ask? If you wanted to compare the palms of your hands, you’d say: “Mary, can I have a peep at your hand?”

  “Mary, can I have a peep up your skirt?” She’d run forever.

  “Mary, d’you know about artists?”

  She wouldn’t know a thing about artists.

  “Mary, would you ever help us win a bet?” Out of character; she’d never believe it.

  “Mary, this terrible foot-and-mouth disease has taken a new turn. Would you like me to make certain you’re safe?”

  She’d get one of the other girls to look.

  “Mary—I’m desperate…please!”

  Well, now!

  “Mary, for pity’s sake…please?”

  “Mary! If you don’t, I think I’ll die. Honestly, I’m desperate. Just look at me. Please—oh, please!”

  “Mary, I love you! I’ve always loved you.”

  God, it might do the trick! He’d go and try it on her at once.

  ***

  “Indeed I will not!” she said. She did not even stop in her work of trimming the lamp wicks.

  “Oh,” Boy said, deflated. Having funked the passion he had opted for the flat request. He stumbled up from the table and went over to the window. A large, hot tear rolled down his cheek. He felt so ashamed.

  But, paradoxically, the shame gave him all the boldness his spirit had lacked earlier. He turned and came back to the table, sitting down and drawing his chair as close to her as he could. “Please!” he said. “I’m desperate to know.”

  She didn’t look up. “It’s no business of yours,” she said.

  From this side, her right side, you couldn’t see any of her hideous burn scars. She was very lovely, with that natural, sharp-lipped, wide-eyed, bright-eyed, green-eyed, freckle-skinned, turned-up-nose, dimple-chinned, flame-haired Irish loveliness. On the other side, though, her head looked like a clot of chewed-up newspaper plastered thinly on a skull that seemed to be on the verge of breaking back through in a dozen places.

  “Please!” He choked on the word and gently touched her arm.

  She looked at him then, ready to get angry. But when she saw the tear on his cheek, her eyes softened.

  His misery, and the hope he still nurtured in the depths of hopelessness, strengthened him to look at her scarred half without flinching.

  She tenderly stretched forth a finger and touched his wet cheek, as if she had to feel the reality of it before finding belief. She looked at the tear on her finger. “Does it mean so much?” she asked.

  He gulped miserably and nodded, unable to take his eyes off her.

  “Why?” she asked, amazed.

  “I don’t know,” he lied. “It just does.”

  She took the hand that touched her arm and held it. She looked around her in a quandary, shrugging her shoulders. “If I do,” she said at last, “you won’t go giving out about it? No one else will know?”

  Boy looked shocked at the very idea. “Of course not,” he said.

  “Why me?” she asked then. “Or will any girl please?”

  He looked at her in an honest scrutiny that imperceptibly turned to adoration—an adoration that had already (or was it long ago?) filled his body but that only now spilled over into his consciousness. It was true! She alone would do—but not for his original reason. He loved her! He worshipped even her scarred half-face. Without thinking, he moved his lips nearer hers. She took a deep, blissful breath but did not close her eyes—indeed she watched him like a ferret for any sign of flinching in him.

  Their lips moved closer. She turned slightly, so that more of her scars faced him. She was infinitely watchful for any sign of rejection.

  But he found himself staring at that veined and polished flesh in mute craving. He loved. He loved it. He loved her all. To touch any part of her was ecstasy. He took her head in his trembling hands and turned it so that only her scarred half showed. Reverently, then, he kissed her eyesocket, her hairless scalp, her sharp and crusty ear, the drum-taut skin, the bone. Pure, ineffable love welled out of him and flowed over her, transmuting all it touched.

  They kissed then, lips to lips. She, too, seemed on the point of crying. But she pulled away and began to busy herself once more; having come up through a harder school than Boy could ever conceive, she neither trusted nor tempted luck too far.

  “I’ll not say yes,” she said. “But you know where the road does come up from the second bridge?”

  “By the little wood?” Boy’s heart gave a lurch; it was the wood where his half-formed earth partner lay waiting.

  She nodded. “I’m away to Clifden tomorrow evening to take the venison and things off the car. I’ll pass back that way at about four.” In her part of the world, “evening” began at two in the afternoon.

  “Won’t they check on your times?”

  “Ah, I’ll say I was after meeting Over-the-wall Joyce. He’d tell ye how to build a clock.”

  “I love you, Mary,” he said.

  Her hand flew to her mouth and then to cover her eyes.

  He left her then because he did not know anything else to say.

  ***

  Next morning he was awakened by the sound of her singing in the courtyard below!

  Oh were I at the moss-house where all pleasures do dwell

  By the streams of Bunclody or some silent place…

  She had a clear, vibrant, girlish soprano that suddenly seemed to Boy the essence of everything desirable and feminine; it made him curl and stretch and tingle for joy. Was he not to spend—what? five minutes? an hour?—with her. Mary Mary Mary Mary…She walks in beauty, like…Thou art lovelier far…And sighed his heart toward the Syrian tents…Clasp’d by the golden light of morn, like the sweetheart of the sun…Five minutes with her would seem an eternity of happiness. An hour! He’d die.

  How he survived the eternities of that day until four o’clock, he did not know. In fact, he did not wait so long. At half-past-two he thought, Suppose she comes back early! His stomach hollow, his heart bursting, he raced up the hill to the main road and then sat sweating and disconsolate for over an hour. She did not come hobbling up the lane until nearly half-past-four.

 
“I was after meeting Over-the-wall Joyce,” she said.

  “I don’t want to…uh…any more,” Boy blurted out, surprising himself, for he had not intended to say any such thing.

  “I wasn’t going to let you, anyway.” She rested her baskets and stood four-square to him, a cheeky smile on that half of her face capable of any expression.

  “Mary…” he stammered, shuffling half a pace toward her. He reached out, almost overbalancing himself, and took her hand. Once he had re-established contact, it was easier to move closer. “I’ve thought about you all day,” he said.

  Her lips curled in a sneer that was half deprecating, half aimed to rebuke him. She had obviously intended to be truculent and hard-to-get at this encounter. But then she looked into Boy’s eyes. Really into them. And all her truculence evaporated; that mournful, meek sincerity vanquished her. Poor Boy was such an obvious victim of this flood of love that she forgot herself entirely. Suddenly it seemed marvellous to her that she, from whom all turned in embarrassment (when they did not accept her as a neutered bit of furniture), could have kindled such adoration and craving in him. She had always thought of him as impossibly beyond her reach.

  The sneer turned into a shy smile.

  “I don’t know what to say to you,” Boy told her.

  “Nor me.”

  Awkwardly they moved together until their heads were touching. This time she put her good half against his cheek. He thought she was the softest, most fragrant, most tender thing he’d ever felt. He wanted to kiss her but was afraid to move, afraid to break contact.

  “Boy?” she said in a voice lost at the edge of control.

  He put his arms around her. The firm, hot fortress of her body strained against him. “Ah God, I love you,” she moaned. “I’d camp in your ear if that’s all the room you had for me.”

  “Oh, Mary!” he said, loving the word. “Mary, Mary, Mary…”

  “I’ll do anything, Boy. Just you say.”

  They kissed. And again. They kissed long enough for Mary to remember they were still on the highway. She broke from him and picked up her baskets.

  “Don’t go!” he pleaded.

  “I’ll just hang them on the ditch,” she said. “We’ll stroll in there. We can’t stand courtin’ out on the road.”

  Her hand was warm and excitingly sinuous as she limped ahead of him.

  “How old are you?” he asked.

  “Twenty-three.”

  He was surprised. He knew she was older than he was but not by six whole years. The family often called her “little” Mary Coen, even though she was by no means small; to Boy it had always made her seem much younger. He had not yet caught on to the fact that when rich people said “little” they meant someone who’d take less than the going rate.

  “Too old for these capers!” She laughed.

  His face fell.

  “What’s wrong?” she asked.

  “No, no. Nothing’s wrong,” he assured her. He could not tell her that while he had been thinking about her age, she had unwittingly led them to his earth-wife’s grove. Instead he tried to steer her to the farther side.

  But she had her eye on the conveniently leaning tree. “Would you look,” she said. “Wasn’t that made for us!”

  She turned and leaned against one side of it, unaware that she was standing between the ankles of Boy’s surrogate. “Now!” She waited to be kissed.

  He attempted to kiss her while, with his feet, he tried, sweep by sweep, to obliterate the work of his hands.

  The magic was not there. She felt it and wondered what was making him shuffle like that. “God, is it ants?” she asked in alarm, trying to remain in a near-kiss while she looked down.

  “No!” he cried, equally alarmed, clamping his mouth on hers and bearing her back until leaves and sky and clouds filled her eyes with their shimmering reflections.

  He forgot his stupid bit of earth modelling then and lost himself in the glory of being against her. She closed her eyes and sighed as she settled herself deeper upon the tree; in passing, it seemed, she moved her crippled left foot to a more comfortable position on the other side of the trunk. This brought Boy, suddenly, into the firmest possible contact with her, there. And it was a contact he could hardly lose, whether he stood up or lay upon her; all movement was Above, all togetherness Below.

  He trembled with the intensity of his yearning. He felt hollow. The blood seemed gone from his limbs. He could not remember ever having felt like this before. It was not a mere hunger for her sex, though that was, of course, the burden of it, he wanted to possess all of her and never to relinquish her. He wanted to mingle all of him with all of her. So when he pressed his cheek and the side of his head so firmly to hers, it was half in hope that some miracle of fusion would follow, sinking the one flesh into the other.

  It astonished him, too, how just to clasp her waist with his hand or to touch knee upon knee could conjure up the whole of her as an image in his mind. Not a clothed image, either. All there, except…

  That…what could you call it? The filthy, schoolboy words didn’t even occur to him. That smooth, bony softness…that hard softness pressed him and called up no image of itself. Except that he could see how he could tuck around there and the way everything would fit.

  She felt him trembling and clasped him to stillness with her firm hands. “It’s all right,” she said. “Don’t fret so.”

  “I don’t know what to do,” he whispered.

  “No more do I, I never yet did this.”

  “I just want to be with you always and always hold you…and love you…and be like this.”

  “I thought it couldn’t happen,” she said, also whispering now.

  “If we kept our eyes shut,” he suggested, “could we take off our clothes?”

  “Why with our eyes shut?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The whole idea seemed to fizzle out until he felt her hand snake between them and begin to thumb open the buttons of her bodice. He did not shut his eyes. Instead he half lifted himself off her and joined in. She left herself then and popped his few shirt buttons much more swiftly. In the same movement she pushed the shirt off his shoulders. He shrugged out his arms and returned to the last few buttons of her high collar.

  There was no fear in it now. Nor haste. It became the most natural, leisurely, lovely thing anyone could do. As soon as they were both bare to the waist and clasped again in each other’s arms and tenderly running their hands over their nakedness, Boy was struck at his own lack of disgust or even of hesitation. Both had vanished along with that half of their clothing.

  He spidered his hands around her rib cage and closed them over her breasts. She made a little noise and reached her lips up to his. He kissed her and went on caressing with his hands.

  They were nothing like the breasts of his imagination. Not that they were softer or harder, bigger or smaller, firmer or squashier. The only word that fully described the difference was “real.” Mary’s were real. He bent to kiss them and discovered he was ejaculating. The really surprising thing was that it was so joyless and remote, a reflex rearrangement that lacked all hint of passion.

  The only course was to ignore it, which was easy enough, especially as it made no detectable impression on his physical state or the intensity of his longing for her.

  When her skirt was open, there were only two red petticoats for him to unbutton. They drifted to the foot of the tree, a cardinal splash on the green. She was naked to her boots now. She did nothing to help but lay on the tree looking at him with a fond, almost mesmerized smile as he pulled his trousers down over his boots.

  Her skin was white as marble, delicately veined. The burns finished at her collarbone; the rest of her was as perfect as the untouched half of her head. Everything he had ever longed for was now so close—the thought pulsed in him like a magnificat.
r />   “Let me see,” she said. “I never yet did.”

  Her hands sanctified him. All they touched belonged to her already.

  “One eye! It’s like no animal’s.” She looked up at him. “See, if you will,” she told him.

  His eyes dwelled in hers. He thought this empty pressure inside him would force him apart. He rested his palms on the tree beside her head and, gently slow, lowered himself upon her. Thrill was in the warmth in her. Heat! He soaked it from her.

  She would not be still with him. She strained. Retreated. Writhed. Arched. Clung. All slow, with immense strength but no vigour. The movement, in both, became too complex for him to follow with his mind. He felt his mind surrender its grip on him, on them, on the day. He drowned in her then, in all the sensations of her. He almost became her.

  Where they were soft, where they were firm, where the sun blinded white skin, where eyes held pools of unfathomable black, where heat endured, where breezes harboured cool near them, where hair entangled, lips crushed, blood hammered, throats cried—there she was, there he was, between each eternity and the next. And for all eternity. He wept at her goodness. And they were stilled at last.

  “There!” she whispered. “Don’t!” She found dry patches on her hands and forearms to wipe his tears away.

  “Oh, Mary,” he said. She swam before him. “There’ll never be anyone else for me.”

  She blinked. The smile on her lips became resigned. She looked away. She slumped. “That can’t be, Boy,” she said. “And well you know it.”

  Until that moment he did not know it. Oh, he had known it in a general way, but he had never thought of including himself in the rule, nor of exempting himself from it. Now, in that dreadful, flat finality of her tone, so swiftly on the heels of the tenderest, most lovely thing they could ever have done together, he knew it to be true.

  He looked at her and almost did burst apart this time. His insides yearned hollow for her. She had become all his world, not in spite of her scars, not because of them, but simply with them, too.

  “We shall make it happen,” he promised. “I would give up everything, except you. I would give it all up for you. I will never give you up for anything.”