Matters of Life & Death

by Bernard Maclaverty

  They made their way into the rooms and began to look at the paintings. After each one the man stepped closer to read the painting’s title aloud. As his wife gazed at the work she made disconcerting little noises with her mouth. The couple drifted into the room with the Inverannich works and the man blew out his cheeks. She hated being there, not declaring herself as the painter of these images. It was like overhearing herself being talked about. She had to get out. But they were friendly, wanted to declare their origins to anyone who would listen, wanted to acknowledge her, maybe share something with her in that polite North American way. The old man leaned towards her as she tried to sidle past him and said, ‘Such images. Such vital images he’s managed to capture.’

  She looked at him.

  ‘He?’ The word was out of her before she could do anything about it.

  ‘A woman painted these?’

  ‘Yes – me.’ She could have bitten off her tongue. He looked confused for a moment. Looked at his wife then back to the woman in front of him.

  ‘They’re your work? You’re the painter?’ She nodded but did not trust herself to confirm it by speech.

  ‘That’s wonderful.’ He smiled.

  ‘Yes, indeed,’ said his wife. ‘Wonderful work. You are to be congratulated.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She began to make her escape, self-conscious that her block heels were making too much noise on the wooden floor.

  MATTERS OF LIFE & DEATH 2

  Visiting Takabuti

  Nora woke. Her mouth was dry. The glass of water had grown bubbles overnight. She washed down her tablets and afterwards listened hard but could hear no rain, nor signs of rain. Rain would spoil everything. She swung herself out of bed slowly. These days she was like eggs. Too sudden a movement and she felt something would give. She’d been feeling like this for months now – but hadn’t had the courage to go to the doctor. What could she say? Last time, after checking her blood pressure, he told her she was showing signs of osteoporosis – effectively her inner scaffolding was dissolving.

  She eased herself into her slippers. They waited left on the left, right on the right just as she had withdrawn from them the night before. Outside it was dry. December dull but dry. She sat on the side of the bed thinking about the day ahead. It would be good to have the boys. She knelt and said her Morning Offering.

  On the way back from eight o’clock mass she took in the milk from the door. She made porridge, not forgetting the salt, and watched it boil – plopping into holes, blowing gouts of steam. When it was ready she tumbled it into her dish. Half a teaspoon of demerara sugar and the cream from the neck of the bottle. Porridge stuck to you – it set you up for the day.

  Nora lived in a small flat above a dry cleaners overlooking the main road. She no longer heard the constant traffic. Occasionally she got the smell of the dry-cleaning chemicals but that was not unpleasant – a bit like petrol – but lately she had wondered if breathing this stuff, day in day out, could be good for her.

  She put on her fedora-type hat, her good coat and knotted a cream silk scarf at her neck. Some strands of her white hair were sticking out and she tucked them in. On her lapel was a Celtic brooch of gunmetal and amethyst. She gave herself the once-over in the full-length mirror. She would do.

  It was not far to her niece’s place. She took her time, looking around her, nodding to various ones she knew.

  ‘How do you do?’

  ‘I’m grand. And yourself – how are you keeping?’

  ‘Well – thank you.’

  When she arrived she opened the door and walked up the hallway.

  ‘Molly, it’s only me.’

  ‘Aunt Nora.’ Her niece was at the kitchen table having a cup of tea and a cigarette.

  ‘Where are they?’

  ‘Out somewhere. I told them not to be long. And not to be getting dirty. Would you like a cuppa tea?’

  ‘That would be lovely.’ Molly made a fresh pot of tea.

  ‘This is very good of you – taking them off my hands.’

  ‘Don’t mention it. Sure am’n’t I the Aunt of Treats?’ Every so often she would see something in the paper which would be suitable and would ask Molly if it was all right to take the boys. They’d gone to the pictures – to films she had previously viewed and approved. Goodbye Mr Chips and Oliver Twist. Tony – the older boy – said he’d had nightmares about Bill Sykes and his horrible dog, that white snub-nosed thing. The one time it went wrong was when she brought them to Joyce Grenfell on stage. This actress was supposed to be very amusing but she was unsuitable for young ones. Thank God the boys were innocent and they came out none the wiser.

  ‘I wouldn’t do it if I didn’t enjoy it.’

  ‘There’s a lot they can learn over there.’

  ‘You never said a truer word. It’ll teach them a thing or two.’

  Molly poured the tea.

  ‘I mind the day you brought me. I didn’t sleep for weeks.’

  ‘Isn’t it only natural.’

  ‘Natural can be upsetting. I wouldn’t let them see their Daddy.’

  Nora raised the cup to her lips and sipped. She nodded as if she understood.

  ‘And how are you?’

  ‘On the up and up.’

  ‘I’m glad to hear it. Are you all set for Christmas?’

  ‘The Widows’ Pension doesn’t run to big presents.’

  ‘If you’re short I’ve . . .’

  ‘I’ll be just fine.’

  A door slammed and there was a blundering noise in the hallway.

  ‘Here they are now,’ said Molly. Aunt Nora drank off her tea just as the two boys burst into the room.

  ‘Hellooo – you two. Are you all ready for your wee jaunt?’ They grinned and whispered to each other. Tony was twelve and his brother Ben was two years younger.

  ‘Can we get sweets?’

  ‘Who do you think I am – Carnegie?’ Aunt Nora stood. ‘So we’re off to visit Takabuti.’

  ‘Who?’ said Tony.

  ‘Who’s he?’ said the wee one.

  ‘Get your coats on.’

  How she loved them – the both of them. And their wee uprightness. With their grey socks and jumpers to match. Their mother scolded and wrestled them into their raincoats.

  When their belts were tightened Aunt Nora held each of them at arm’s length.

  ‘Window models – would you look at them. Mr Burton would be jealous.’

  As they stood at the bus-stop she talked to people she didn’t even know – about the weather. The boys looked down.

  ‘You’re easy embarrassed.’ And they smiled and continued to turn away. ‘Don’t they look well? Fine and dandy.’

  ‘Is that their names?’ People at the bus-stop laughed. The seventy-seven came, the only bus to go across town.

  ‘Upstairs?’ said Tony. Aunt Nora pulled a face and nodded. The two boys dashed up ahead of her. She held onto the metal rails with both hands and hoisted herself up each steep step, complaining. The boys were together in a seat halfway up the left-hand side. Before she sat down the bell rang and the bus started. The back seat was empty and she half fell, was half catapulted into it. When she got her breath back she called out to the boys to ask if they were all right. They nodded and went on talking to each other.

  It had been years since she had travelled upstairs on a bus. You could see so much more. Across the trees to the ponds in the Waterworks, the green hills beyond.

  ‘Boys – look at the swans,’ she pointed and they turned. ‘The man swan is a cob and the lady is . . . ?’ The boys didn’t know. ‘A pen. A female swan is called a pen.’

  She wanted to add something about swans devoting themselves to the same partner throughout life but thought it unsuitable for boys of that age. And of no interest. She had retired from teaching some twenty years ago – or was it thirty? If she’d married she would have had to resign her post. That was accepted in those days. But she never did marry.

  Her own schooldays
had ended at fifteen when she was asked to stay on as a monitress. Then she’d gone to the newly opened St Mary’s Training College on the Falls Road. Her first school had been on the north coast – in Ballintoy. It had been such an excitement – to be on her own in digs. With the McBrides. Nicer people you couldn’t meet. She’d admired their youngest son, Arthur, almost from the beginning. His manliness, the light in his eye, the comical way he said things. ‘There’s no use hurrying if you don’t know the times of the trains.’ He had the north-east accent which made his sayings even funnier. ‘A man’s a man for all what?’ he would say and laugh.

  He was about the same age as herself and was working in a pharmacist’s shop in Ballycastle. She smiled. The Encyclopaedia of Primary Teaching. She’d talked so much about it he’d offered to buy it for her. But she wanted to be independent. She saved everything she could from her early wages and sent away to England for it. The best money she’d ever spent. It came in three bound volumes containing methods and lesson plans and ‘pedagogical advice’. In a separate black box – illustrations relating to the lesson plans. The pictures had a great variety – some were famous paintings, The Death of Ophelia and And When Did You Last See Your Father?, some were drawings – Dürer’s Hands in Prayer, others were diagrams – the best way to light a camp-fire, a cross-section of a burial chamber in an Egyptian pyramid. In Ballintoy she had an easel at the front of the class on which she set such pictures. The children had walked to school in the rain, their clothes were grey, their slates were grey, as were the walls. The colours of the illustrations on the easel were vibrant, like stained glass.

  The first time she had permitted Arthur McBride to kiss her was on the deserted and windswept beach at Ballycastle. The sand was racing, as was her heart, at the things he was saying. And they stepped into the lee of Pans rocks and he kissed her as she held her hat to her head. Such was his caution – she had been staying with them for almost a year – because he feared his action was too premature. If she did not feel the same way it would spoil his chances of walking out with her again. He later said he feared the loss of her company, more than anything. And she could not understand this – what else was there, apart from her company?

  She had come this same journey two weeks ago to check that everything would be all right in the art gallery part of the museum. She had turned into one room and there in front of her was the most brazen picture she had ever seen. She had taken out her glasses and examined the label. Somebody-or-other at her toilette. The painter was French, of course. This bare-chested woman towered above her. Hester or Esther. She was stretching up to knot her hair, exposing even her armpits. The painting must have been six foot tall and it was done in the most realistic detail. She stared up in a kind of irritated amazement at it. A uniformed guard was pacing slowly around the room. He drew level with her.

  ‘Is this on permanent exhibition?’

  ‘Yes it is, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  She would have to find another route.

  By now others had come onto the top deck of the bus. A man in the seat in front of her read his newspaper. There was a photo of the Prime Minister on the front page. How could he take the country into war again so soon? Over such a thing as the Suez Canal. It had only been ten years. There should be no more wars – ever again. Because men will die and there will be widows and grieving sweethearts.

  The bus was approaching Shaftsbury Square.

  ‘How am I going to face those stairs?’ Aunt Nora shouted to the boys. People turned. The boys’ faces went red. She ordered them to ring the bell and go down the stairs in front of her ‘to cushion her fall’. They were to take their time and on no account were they to let the bus move off until she was on the pavement.

  She got down from the platform by herself and put her hands on the boys’ shoulders.

  ‘Holy mackerel. What a handling,’ she said. The bus drove off into the traffic. She gathered them close, one on each side, to cross the busy junction.

  The boys walked on in front, sometimes running and mock fighting, other times quietly in step.

  ‘Would anybody like an ice cream?’ The two turned. ‘Cones or sliders?’ They opted for cones. ‘Watch you don’t dribble on your coats – or your mother’ll crucify me.’

  They passed the University – red-brick gables set back behind green lawns. She felt the effect of such expansive and well-kept lawns was to hold the public at bay. How dare you – the grass said. The boys finished their ice creams and walked on the waist-high perimeter wall, their arms out for balance. It was tricky enough not to trip because there were still the stumps of metal railings which had been sawn off during the last war and never replaced.

  ‘Careful,’ she called out.

  After the Great War she moved back to Belfast and taught in St Anthony’s in Millfield, a poor part of the town. The windows of her classroom were of frosted glass except for the topmost pane and when the children had been set a task she would sit and stare through this pane at the battleship grey of the corrugated-iron roof of the parochial hall. Sometimes she cried – if she felt it coming on she turned her back on the class and pretended to look at the book shelf. She had developed the knack of weeping in silence. When it passed she removed her handkerchief from her sleeve, blew her nose and regained her composure. Only then did she turn to face the class.

  The boys were setting a good pace on the wall and she began to feel a little breathless. She had worn too many clothes and was beginning to perspire a little. She liked ‘there’ journeys because they seemed shorter. ‘There and back’ journeys were a different thing. The farther you got from home the farther you had to go back.

  In the middle of the driveway, in front of the University’s main door was a memorial for the Great War – a winged female figure holding up a wreath which she is about to put on the head of a young soldier. Arthur McBride. All those years ago. He had enlisted without telling her. At the time it was the thing to do because the country was in a good mood and proud of itself. The place was flag mad – especially in Belfast. When he said goodbye to her, he took both her hands in his and kissed them. Adieu, he said to her left hand. Adieu to her right. Then her lips. Adieu. She often wondered why he had chosen the French. He was of a poetic turn of mind – very fond of Burns and had many of his songs off by heart. But to say goodbye that way? She told him that she loved him and only him. She promised never to love another.

  In the Museum she made the boys hang their coats in the cloakroom. They’d feel the good of them when they went back out. She hung up her own coat but kept her hat and scarf on. In the middle of the entrance hall was a massive marble statue of a seated Galileo. The boys stood whispering in front of it. A statue of Robert Burns 1759–1796 was in the corner. ‘Ae Fond Kiss’ came into her head. ‘And then we sever’. How cruel and clever of Burns to rhyme it with ‘for ever’. Because Arthur never came back. His family got word that he was missing in action. And they told her because they knew what was between them.

  ‘Aunt Nora,’ Tony was trying to get her attention. ‘Where first?’

  ‘This way,’ she said.

  The roller-ball clock was beautiful, glittering as it moved. The boys put their faces close to the glass case. It was an inclined metal plane with a shallow groove, along which a silver ball rolled, zigzagging from one end to the other. When the ball reached the bottom it struck a catch reversing the tilt and rolled back the way it had come. Each journey took a known amount of time and the hands moved on accordingly. She got her glasses out. When she snapped the case shut it popped too loudly and echoed. She read out the label for them. ‘These clocks were not novelties but were serious attempts at timekeeping before the introduction of the pendulum.’ The air was full of small mechanical sounds, tickings and scrapings.

  She led them from room to room – pointing out what she thought would interest them. A one-hundred-and-thirty-five-million-year-old amethyst geode from Brazil – like a shark’s mouth jagged with j
ewels instead of teeth. A ball made of rock crystal quartz ‘for looking into the future’ she said in a mysterious voice. Fossil sea scorpions that were four hundred and twenty million years of age – imprinted in shale.

  ‘And you’re only ten,’ she said to Ben, winking.

  ‘Ten and a bit,’ he said. ‘Nearly eleven.’ His voice was pitched high.

  ‘So you are,’ she smiled. ‘So you are.’

  The boys crouched to stare into the glass eyes of stuffed animals.

  ‘How lifelike,’ said Aunt Nora. Brown hares standing on their hind legs boxing. White hares in their winter coats, hiding in the snow. The boys straightened up and wandered the corridor ahead of her.

  ‘Left here,’ she called out. There was a sign for a café. ‘Would you like a lemonade?’

  She sat opposite them drinking her tea. They had bottles of lemonade with straws – two in each bottle for greater purchase – and were sucking hard, indenting their cheeks.

  ‘Easy,’ she said. ‘No noises when you reach the bottom.’ The boys looked at each other and tried not to laugh.

  ‘No bottom noises,’ said the wee one. Then they did laugh.

  ‘It comes down your nose – the fizz,’ said Tony.

  ‘Oh don’t . . . please.’ There was silence except for the noise of spoons being dropped one after another into a drawer in the kitchen. ‘Are you looking after your mother these days?’ They both nodded. ‘Good – because she needs a great deal of looking after. She’s only a slip of a girl herself.’ She blew a thin stream of air to cool her tea and sipped it.

  Tony said to her, ‘I liked the clock with the silver marble.’

  ‘The hares were brilliant. Boxing.’ Ben bunched his wee fists and faced his brother.

  ‘There’s more,’ said Aunt Nora.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Wait and see.’

  When they were finished they set off again along polished corridors. She felt refreshed having taken the weight off her feet for a bit.