At half-past nine they said goodbye to Susan and climbed the side of the hill above the village while Grouse, Roarty’s springer spaniel, followed at heel. Roarty was wearing a buff donkey jacket over an Aran sweater and carrying a rucksack large enough for the most ambitious sportsman. They climbed slowly, pausing every so often to look back at the straggle of houses and the snakelike village street below. On reaching the plateau they loaded their guns, and at a signal from Roarty, Grouse went ahead, quartering the ground with eager thoroughness. He was an experienced gundog. No matter how fiendishly he worked, he kept his mind on Roarty, ready to obey his every command. Soon he turfed out a jack hare from a mound of rushes. Roarty swung his gun barrels over its ears. It cartwheeled in mid-leap and went down, shot cleanly in the head. In spite of his morning tremor, there was nothing the matter with Roarty’s shot.
They decided to walk the snipe downwind to make for easier and quicker shooting. The snipe would rise facing them, against the wind, and as it paused for a second before turning, it would present a more stable target than in a going-away shot. Their downwind approach would be less silent, of course, but after a bright, calm night the birds would be sitting well in the early morning.
Potter’s turn came next. With a loud ‘scaap’ a snipe rose out of a poached track before him. He snapped it as it hung momentarily in the air before turning on its zigzag retreat. He was not so lucky the second time. With a white-and-brown flicker another snipe rose close to him. Caught off guard, he decided to let it come out of its jinking flight before trying a going-away shot. He must have misjudged the distance or failed to make enough forward allowance; and Roarty, a hundred yards away, raised his hands in mock horror. Just then another snipe rose before Roarty who raised his gun in an effortless swing and snapped the bird in mid-jink as the very best snipe shots do.
By lunchtime they had traversed the hill and tried all the favoured spots, the pools and drains and the spongy patches that Roarty knew so well. Potter was pleased with the morning’s sport. He had bagged a pair of hares and eight snipe, with a kill-to-cartridge ratio of four to five for the snipe. A piercing hail shower coming in from the north-east took their minds off sport for a while. They made for the shelter of a ruined cow house which had been turned into a makeshift sheep pen, Potter running with his side-bag bumping against his hip.
‘How did you do?’ asked Roarty as they found shelter in the lee of the drystone wall.
‘A pair of hares and four couple. How about you?’
‘A jack hare and seven couple. One of my better days. I only wasted one shot.’
They lit their pipes as the hailstones whitened the greenish-brown mountain and hopped off the rocks in front of them. Grouse came up with his snout to the ground and sought the warmth of Roarty’s leg. Roarty chucked him under the chin and gave him a digestive biscuit.
‘On a morning like this he’s worth his weight in gold,’ Potter said.
‘A pedigree retriever would be wasted here. Grouse has a nose and brains, and kens how to use them. He’s an all-rounder; he can do a bit of everything.’
‘I was just thinking that. If everyone went about his work with such intelligence, we’d live in a better-run world.’
‘I wish McGing was as efficient,’ Roarty said. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve heard from him?’
‘He knows the culprit, he says. All he needs now is the evidence.’
‘Well, I hope for your sake he finds it. Being shot at can’t be good for your peace of mind.’
‘It pulls you up short, I can tell you. Makes you dare to think beyond the next drink.’ With a sense of absurdity, he realised that he was describing his feelings from what he perceived must be Roarty’s point of view.
‘It’s good to be confronted with evil now and again. It makes you aware of the residue of good within you.’
Wondering if Roarty might still be imprisoned in the theology he had imbibed in his seminary days and reluctant to get involved in such metaphysics, he took out his handkerchief and sneezed into it.
‘“Evil” is a short word with a big, big meaning,’ he said. ‘I prefer to say “disorder”, or maybe lawlessness or criminality.’
‘If you’d sensed the physical presence of evil, you wouldn’t think of it as just lawlessness. I know because I’ve sensed it. It’s a smell that pervades the whole house and lingers in every room, and when you go outside you can still smell it on the wind.’
‘Whatever it is you’re talking about must be within. The mind that apprehends evil does so only because it’s a vestigial presence in the mind itself.’
‘Then how do you explain this? I’ve been aware of evil as a continuous presence for the past fortnight. Sometimes it smells like a field of rotting cabbage and sometimes like sweaty feet. I was glad of the smell on the wind this morning. It went some way towards smothering the other.’
‘But there was no smell on the wind this morning,’ Potter said, drawing on his pipe. ‘At least none that I could detect.’
‘There’s something the matter with your sniffers, then. I saw Grouse from my bedroom window with his nose to the wind, and I wondered what could be troubling him. That was a good half hour before I got the smell myself.’
Dogs and men, we are all deluded thus, Potter quoted to himself, puzzling if he had got it right. Two months ago he had seen Roarty as a practical, no-nonsense man, the sort of man who has never been troubled by a thought or intimation contrary to his declared system of beliefs. Perhaps he had been taken in by his picturesque beard and slow but amusing turn of phrase. Now he wondered if Roarty, for a reason he could not begin to guess at, was troubled by some mildewed kernel within.
He listened indulgently as Roarty defined the two manifestations of evil: evil that has a physical embodiment and evil that is unrelated to anyone or anything—the most frightening form known to man. He and Roarty lived in two separate worlds, which in some ways seemed odd since they were such kindred spirits. Perhaps Roarty expected him to give a sign, to say something that would confirm the reality of those shadowy perceptions of his and free him forever from the burden of self-doubt. Knocking out his pipe against a stone, he asked himself if Roarty might be a latent homosexual who had missed a turning, a haunted man who turned to the contemplation of imponderables as a means of escape from his predicament.
‘Were you afraid the night you were shot at?’ he asked as if it followed logically from his discourse on evil.
‘I was too angry to be afraid. I didn’t enjoy having my sleep so rudely interrupted.’
‘You’re rather isolated up there in that cottage. Why don’t you come down and stay with me? You’d have the pick of three spare bedrooms. You’d be living above the bar, an inestimable advantage for any drinking man.’
‘It’s very kind of you, I’m sure, but I think I’ll stay put for now.’
‘It was just a thought,’ Roarty said, tickling Grouse behind the ears.
The hail shower was over. They headed downhill without a word while Potter wondered if Roarty had arranged their snipe shoot, less for the bag than the conversation.
19
Sunday, 19 December
A ‘large grebe’ on the Lough of Silver turned out to be a goosander, rare in these parts. Took off for the Lough of Gold with a ‘kraah’, leaving me alone with a moorhen flashing white underparts. Failed to see Roarty’s black water bird. A manifestation of evil visible only to himself?
Potter put away his diary and heaped more peat on the fire. The weather had turned even colder. A damp, creeping cold that seeped through your clothes, a cold that only whisky could keep from freezing the very marrow of your bones. Here the days were noticeably shorter than in London, though Donegal was only three degrees farther north. The mornings were the worst time as he drove to work with the headlights on, the upturned collar of his overcoat rubbing chill into the back of his head while his feet threatened to freeze in his damp gumboots.
That morning he had awoken in confusion. It w
as so dark that at first he thought the alarm had gone off too early. Peering through the curtains, he discovered that a thick fog had descended on the glen, delaying the coming of day. The sky seemed to have swallowed the hilltops, and the cottages down by the shore loomed vague as ghosts through a heavy shroud of grey. He went to early Mass and ran into Nora Hession who told him that she would call up to see him that evening. He kept thinking of her throughout the morning and spent the afternoon by the loughs watching waterfowl through his field glasses. Nothing he did pleased him. He simply could not escape from the hell that was himself.
Surely, he reasoned, there must be a way out of this maze of imaginary obstacles, if only there was a thread they both could agree to follow. We all make our own difficulties, and to compound them other people then present us with a set of more ingenious difficulties. Everyone means well; everyone is acting in good faith; yet the result is a shambles that no one desires. Even if he could convince her to come away, she would only pine and lose her sweetness and the peace and wellbeing she was so good at conferring. Life, it seemed, was fraught with possibilities that did not beckon, bridges that loomed but led nowhere. As he poured himself a drink, he wondered if there was any point in drinking it. Absentmindedly, he turned the newly washed sheets he was airing on the back of two chairs before the fire.
It had been a disastrous week, beginning with Gimp Gillespie’s sensational article in one of the Dublin Sunday papers. Under the cumbersome heading ‘Exploitation, Reformation, and Attempted Murder in Donegal’, Gimp told the story of an English engineer who was very nearly murdered in his bed as the representative of a foreign company trying to get its hands on the most valuable deposit of barytes in the country. At first the engineer, a certain Kenneth Potter, appeared to be well meaning, if a trifle naïve. Apparently, he had come to Donegal with the intention of converting the people to Lollardism, which for the benefit of his readers, Gimp described as pre-Lutheran Protestantism. In the pursuit of his programme he founded an Anti-Limestone Society and converted many of the innocent locals to his beliefs, only to be exposed by the vigilant parish priest who saw in the Lollardism and Anti-Limestone Society a smokescreen for surreptitious exploitation.
Potter could hardly believe that he was reading about himself. He had seen Gimp Gillespie as a friend, an amusing hack who found literary fulfilment in innocuous notes on bumper potato crops, marauding foxes, and shoals of mackerel off the coast in season. After enjoying his hospitality, drinking his Glenmorangie, and eating his roast snipe carefully skewered by their own beaks, how could he pen such libellous twaddle? The following morning a telegram from head office summoning him to Dublin took his mind off Gillespie, at least temporarily. As soon as he saw the look on his American boss’s face, he realised that Gillespie had done even more damage than he’d imagined.
‘I can explain everything,’ he had assured Ben Shockley, a heavy man with a formidable crew cut that did nothing to reduce the size of his head. ‘It’s all in the imagination of a provincial journalist with no respect for the truth.’
‘Did you or did you not found an Anti-Limestone Society?’ asked Shockley with trans-Atlantic directness.
‘Yes, but—’
‘And did you say that you were bringing Lollardism to Donegal?
‘That was a joke.’
‘You’re off your rocker, Potter, and I’m not joking. I’m surprised they didn’t shoot you and have done with it.’
‘The whole thing has been twisted and exaggerated out of all—’
‘Don’t you see you’ve set back the business of this company in Ireland by at least ten years? You’ve dragged the image of Pluto in the mud. This is a politically sensitive field we’re in, where charges of exploitation come easily, and tub-thumping politicians are only too ready to get up on their high horses. My mission was to keep a low profile and maximise profits in peace. I don’t want trouble. I don’t want publicity. And what do you do? You go up to Donegal in plus-fours, 12-bore in hand, to preach Lollardism to the natives. You’re a dangerous simpleton, Potter. You’re not fit for the field. I’m recalling you to head office and a desk job, because that’s all you’re capable of doing.’
‘Get stuffed,’ said Potter.
‘Take that back,’ said Shockley.
‘You can stick your low profiles and your maximisation of profits. I know when I’m not wanted. I’m going back to Donegal to pick up my things.’
‘The sooner the better,’ said Shockley. ‘Please don’t consider yourself under any obligation to give a month’s notice.’
He discovered from Shockley’s secretary on the way out that all operations in Donegal were being suspended and that the other engineers in the northern part of the county were also being recalled. He did not care. He was no longer under obligation to please anyone except himself and Nora. He would drive back to Glenkeel a free man, or at least a freer man.
Nora came at six and set about cooking a dinner of casseroled hare over the peat fire. The conditions were far from perfect. It was an old hare that had not been hung long enough, and he did not have all the necessary ingredients. He skinned and jointed the hare for her, while she busied herself with the vegetables. He drank a whisky and water, and she had a glass of wine. As they waited for dinner to cook, they lay behind the curtain over the bedclothes and he fondled her and told her how much he loved her. She seemed chirpy enough. She certainly didn’t seem troubled or unhappy. At times it seemed that nothing had changed between them but he could not conceal from himself the niggling unease in his mind. They didn’t make love because somehow lovemaking was not on the cards. This was not because of anything either of them had said but because of a haunting presence lying between them in the bed. It was all very strange, so strange that he kept asking himself if he was imagining it all.
‘I’ve been meaning to tell you, Ken. I’m pregnant.’
‘Are you sure?’
‘Yes, I’m in my second month.’
‘It’s the best news I’ve heard.’ He kissed her and, grasping her hand, put it to his cheek. ‘It’s the best thing that could have happened to us. You’ll have to come to London with me now.’
‘I can’t,’ she said. ‘My life is here with people I know. Why don’t you stay with me? Then we could both be happy.’
‘What would we live on? I’d have to take up lobster fishing with Rory Rua.’
‘You could get a job inspecting the roads or something.’
‘They’d only pay me a pittance. I love you, Nora. I want you to live in comfort. We can’t do that here.’
‘I’ve told you before, I don’t like cities. I like the country and the sting of the sea air.’
‘What will become of you? What will you live on? And what will the Canon say?’
‘He’ll say, “God looks after his own”.’
‘You have a touching faith in the Irish clergy.’
‘I’ve already told him.’
‘You told him before you told me!’
‘I had to. He heard me being sick in the bathroom this morning.’
‘And what did he say?’
‘He put his hand on my shoulder and said I must make my confession at once and ask for absolution, and that everything would be all right then. He got his stole and heard my confession in the parlour sitting by the empty fireplace.’
‘And you were kneeling, I suppose?’
‘Well, yes.’
‘And you told him about us?’
‘I had to tell him everything. If I didn’t, I wouldn’t get forgiveness. At the end of it all I felt weak. He helped me to my feet, and the power from his hand went right through my body like a dart of electricity.’
‘Did he say anything while this transfer of power was going on?’
‘He took my hand and told me not to worry, that my sin was forgiven, just as Mary Magdalene’s was forgiven. He said she was the first person Christ appeared to after the Resurrection. Suddenly I got my strength back.’
‘I c
all it cheek. I have a good mind to go down to the parochial house and thump him.’
‘What’s got into you, Ken?’
‘So you don’t mind being compared to Mary Magdalene? She was a prostitute for God’s sake.’
‘You don’t understand, Ken. The Canon is a very holy man. He’ll see I come to no harm.’
‘You don’t have to rely on the Canon. I’ll make sure you have everything you need. The baby you’re carrying is yours and mine. We made it together. It belongs to us both. And I’m proud of what we’ve achieved. I’ll support you and the baby. You won’t have to rely on hand-outs.’
‘Then stay here. We don’t need riches. As the song says, “All you need is love.”’
It was hopeless. They were going round in circles. Still, he made one last attempt. ‘I love you, Nora. You’ve given me feelings I never had with any other girl. I’m determined to see my young son or daughter grow up. I promise you, I’ll stay in touch. I’ll be back.’
‘The thing I need now is peace. Just to be left alone. My sister Maggie is a nurse. I’ll be in good hands.’
‘So which is more important, our feelings for each other or the baby?’
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