Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  ‘Come on,’ Patrick said, and they scurried from the shelter of the pampas, rapidly across the grass and into the jungle of longer grass and trees and shadows that lay across the back of the garden. There would be shelter here, dappled sunlight and dry ground and the friendly, purring tabby, perhaps, to stroke and tickle. But even as Patrick scurried into the long grass, the warm air filled, his head filled with angry voices, with the hard clatter of his father’s cane flung to the floor. The blackberries will be gone, he thought, and the tabby and her nest will be gone and the apple tree next-door will be – it will be cut down, someone will have cut it down and left it there, lying on the grass, and the leaves shrivelling away to nothing. He stopped for a second, his head swam; it will all be gone.

  ‘Go on, go on, what are you stopping for?’ said Margaret and she dug hard fingers into his back. ‘Go on, go on.’ And he stumbled on – and there were the long curtains of blackberry brambles, and there were the blackberries, green and small, all over there. You can’t pick them yet, but there they are. The apple tree would still be there too, he knew now without having to look – and there was the tabby stretched out and sleeping in her shady den; and she woke and saw them and stretched, her claws going out and going in; and she yawned and Margaret, on her knees, stroked the tabby’s soft fur; and the tabby began to purr.

  Patrick saw all this. He stood in the shade, and saw green sunlight shining through the beech trees. Margaret turned from the tabby.

  ‘What are you looking at?’ she said. ‘You look funny.’

  He shook his head. ‘Nothing,’ he said. But there was a trembling that he never had felt before, a shaking in the ground. Perhaps there will be an earthquake, perhaps someone will come with sharp shears and cut, cut, cut the blackberries away before the berries turn from green to black, perhaps there will be an explosion. ‘Nothing,’ he said, and now he too knelt and buried his face in the tabby’s warm, soft fur; and felt her purring. Nothing.

  7

  ‘Let’s go back the longer way. I’ll direct you.’

  Kinnagoe and the Spanish Armada was behind them now: as the car climbed the steep slope from the beach, the road turned sharply back on itself once, then twice, and Sarah looked from the passenger seat straight down the green hillside onto black rocks, white sand, turquoise shallows. The deeper sea was a dark, dark blue: somewhere out there the Armada ship lay on the seabed, undiscovered, its timbers gone, its metal remains barnacle-encrusted.

  Martin had been going on about this lately, to the children – but of course people had always said: this been the story; she could remember such tales from childhood. The surviving men came ashore onto the beach and the locals were waiting for them – and what happened then? Eaten, said some – said malicious young men, intent on terrifying their younger listeners; but her father frowned.

  Long ago, now.

  ‘Eaten?’ he said. ‘Were the Irish cannibals? Were our ancestors cannibals? Is that what you’re saying, girl? Eaten, is it?’

  ‘I didn’t say it!’

  ‘Eaten, indeed. Marched off, is what happened to them, and handed over to the English. Which was bad enough,’ he added, as though debating with himself, ‘but what choice did they have?’

  Now Sarah gazed down onto the beach. She remembered these old stories, remembered her father’s actual stories. Then she pulled in a deep breath and blinked, and glanced over her shoulder into the back seat, at Cassie, at Margaret and Patrick, red with sun and slack with tiredness after a long day in the open air. ‘We’ll go back past the farm,’ she decided suddenly. ‘Left at the crossroads,’ she said and settled back into her seat. Cassie stirred. Martin glanced.

  And at the crossroads, they turned left.

  After a few minutes, another ridge and now another view opening up: Lough Foyle in the distance, a sheet of water, blue and silver in the westering light; and bluer hills beyond. There was the church spire and the beginning of the town, and there! Sarah thought: there was home ground. She gestured then, suddenly, to the right: the land here fell into a shallow valley, in shadow already on this summer evening, into a landscape of small fields flecked with rushes. ‘There,’ she said to the quiet back seat, ‘that’s where I lived and Cassie lived when we were growing up.’

  There was a short pause and then questions began to bubble. What age were you? and where did you live? and where’s the house?

  Again, Martin glanced at her.

  ‘Do you want me to turn in somewhere?’

  ‘What? No. Why would you turn in?’ She looked across at the fields, her voice resuming its habitual sharp tones. ‘There isn’t anything to see.’ The house was still there, as it happened: but in someone else’s hands now. It had been tarted up, so she had heard. Running water, now, and the works. Well, it would, wouldn’t it? The Stone Age was over.

  She spoke quellingly, and the children were duly quelled; Cassie looked; the temperature inside the car, having crested, dropped. Martin drove on, Sarah looked out at the fields skimming by.

  It had just been a notion and she regretted it already.

  Patrick piped up.

  ‘You’re a closed book,’ he said, ‘so you are.’

  She turned, stared at him: this little boy, all bare, sunburned legs and a red face.

  ‘Says who?’

  ‘Says –’ But Margaret elbowed him in the ribs and he said, ‘nobody. Says nobody.’

  Sarah twisted forward again, and said nothing more.

  A closed book? The injustice of it all.

  Her children knew that a family had existed, didn’t they? Nobody could say that she didn’t pass on information. About a father, Brendan, whom she had just about tolerated; and Cassie, devoted Cassie, who was still here, still with them. A farm: they knew about this too. This was all known: had been discussed, even, around the kitchen table. Even her mother, her long-dead mother, was mentioned. A closed book?

  ‘Six, seven,’ Sarah had told them recently: the meal over, her hands on the green-and-white checked oilcloth spread across the table.

  ‘Six, seven?’ cried Patrick. ‘Six is my age!’ He paused to think about this.

  Margaret asked, ‘Can you remember her?’

  ‘I remember her well enough,’ Sarah said. And then, ‘and that’s when Cassie came to live with us.’

  It was so easy, she thought – as the children’s eyes swung around to Cassie – it was so easy to deflect.

  Though it was true: Sarah could remember her mother fairly well. Time blurred the edges, certainly: certain elements sanded away over years. She thought, once: what colour were her eyes? God knows. Was she tall or not so tall? – though nearly everyone is tall to a child, she thought, so no point even thinking about that one. But her mother had – she had dark hair, very dark, and very pale skin; a dusting of freckles in summer. Freckles, Sarah thought, and long, capable fingers.

  So yes: she remembered her well enough.

  Certain memories emerged from this jumble of snatches and threads. A mild evening in late spring: the fields greening, everything growing as it should, a dry spell of weather, though not too dry; all well. Sheets floating on the line strung out across the farmyard, her mother sitting on the doorstep, a girl cuddled close – just the one girl. The hawthorn hedges lining the long driveway in bloom, white and creamy-pink, and their sharp and almost acrid scent filling the air. ‘Look, but don’t touch,’ her mother said, as she had said so many times before. ‘Never touch – see the thorns?’ The little girl saw the thorns, she nodded. ‘And never, ever break a branch and bring it in the house. Never, ever.’ The little girl said, ‘why?’ – but she knew the answer. ‘Because of the fairies,’ said her mother. ‘The hawthorn belongs to the fairies and it belongs outdoors, where they belong. You don’t want to make them angry.’ The little girl nodded. ‘Will you remember that, Sarah?’ The child nodded. She knew the fairy ring in the field, that her father would not plough, that he skirted, walked around. A wide berth, he called it. ‘Give it a wide bert
h, Sarah,’ he said, ‘and I will too, and that’s the best way.’

  And now her father appeared, around the corner from the barn: he picked the child up and threw her in the air and caught her and set her down again, gently on her sturdy legs; and they were laughing together, young mother and young father and little girl, all laughing together, as the sheets floated in the soft evening air. ‘My great girl,’ said her father, and he ran a brown thumb along the child’s temple. ‘What a great girl.’

  This was what Sarah remembered – as if she herself had not been there, as if the cosy child was some other little girl, some other unrelated little girl, as if Sarah was hovering elsewhere, maybe near the floating laundry, watching. Perhaps this was why she remembered so well – because of this sensation of feeling like a viewer, a peeper, a watcher. There were other memories too and they were the same: as though she was touring a picture gallery, taking in this or that framed scene from history, in the days when her father still stood tall and upright, when he laughed and took her hand and her mother’s hand. It was all too long ago.

  She thought, after some years had passed by, that perhaps it had begun with the farm. This stealth, this caution. Knowledge of the farm coloured the opinions of others, long ago. She was the child of a farmer; there was always plenty to eat; there was land; there was a natural advantage there, over other children, other families. A dead mother was a disadvantage – but being of farming stock provided a balance. She understood how people thought: and it made her wary.

  What else: red-checked cloth on the table; and the gleaming copper bowl with a wide lip that was her mother’s pride and joy: set on the broad window sill in order to catch the scant light. Her dowry, she called it once. ‘All I had with me,’ she said ruefully, and her father laughed and gently touched her hair with a finger. ‘I wish this house wasn’t so dark,’ she remembered her mother saying: only once; and her father sighed and nodded. ‘I know.’

  The farm: it was not a pure blessing, in spite of what people thought. Much of their land was damp and low-lying: rushes sprouted instead of good grass; endless labour was required to keep the fields drained. And the house was low too, as well as dark; the chimney smoked. Her father took these facts to heart, more and more as time went on: he took them to heart as he took to heart her mother’s death: in silence, for the most part, though with occasional bouts of incoherent anger, with the heel of his hand punched and punched against the wall.

  Sarah took them to heart too, in the shape of a recurring dream: of water seeping into a drainage ditch in her father’s fields. It is choked with rushes, this ditch, and very deep; and she is standing in it. The water rises, passing her ankles and her knees, her waist and eventually her neck. As it reaches her chin, she begins to scream: the rushes close in and stops her mouth. She woke always in a sweat, tears in her eyes. And around the table, after her mother died, conversation had come to dwell on drainage ditches: in their sparse conversation, in their thoughts, in their sleep. After all, their collective destiny depended on such facts.

  All this she remembered.

  Of course there were other events, other occasions to remember – years after her mother passed away, after Cassie had come to live with them; and not all of them sour and sad. A morning or a summer evening, say, on the beach. For they had their pick: beaches and coves below the fields; rocky foreshore, the lighthouse up the coast. Warm sand and calm, icy water, an apple pie spiced with a few cloves, knocked up that morning by Cassie; and out at sea, a ship slipping past on its way up to the docks at Derry. Or another spring evening, and the smell of green grass in the air and the noise of corncrakes calling, a creeeeak, a rasping in the long grass. Brendan sitting on the step, cleaning – something, his boots maybe; or sharpening a blade; Cassie on the step too, quiet, her face turned up to a bright sky.

  And later, once the war began, the sound of explosions would bring them together. ‘Don’t worry, Cassie,’ fourteen-year-old Sarah would say, ‘it’s a torpedo, it’s a ship, out at sea, it won’t come to us.’ There was an echo of an echo in the walls, the faint breath of a vibration in the granite on which the house stood: the ship, the explosion was near, very near, and Cassie shivered in the bed. ‘A torpedo,’ she whispered in the darkness, turning the word over and over, ‘a torpedo.’ A ship was sinking, out there: in a day or a few days, bodies would wash up on their beach; anything could become normal, given time. ‘Go to sleep now, Cassie,’ Sarah said; but the two girls lay awake in the darkness, and thought about the ship sinking, a few miles away; the fire and the panic and the rising water. In the next room, surely Brendan lay awake too; for the following morning, there might be something approaching tenderness, gratitude, palpable in the air.

  Harmony springing from sources expected and unexpected, in other words – even if these episodes were few and far between.

  What else? As the car, with Martin at the wheel, had crested the hill, as one view – sea and hills and Scottish islands on the horizon – had sunk away and another opened up, Sarah looked across the rushy fields. An old photograph: a family photograph, which – she often thought – surely must have been an unusual household item back in the day? A photograph of her father and her grandparents there on the kitchen wall, with his brothers – long since emigrated and forgotten – taken long, long ago, at the turn of the century. Black and white and severe, the lot of them – even her father, then aged ten or thereabouts: uptilted chins, stern expressions and uncomfortable Sunday clothes, all collars and wires. Sarah pulled a face herself. Think of the expense of it.

  ‘What?’ Martin said.

  She shook her head. ‘I was just thinking.’

  Her grandparents – her father’s parents – had farmed those same boggy fields: Sarah had put this part of the story together herself, slowly over the years making sense of her father, slowly learning to forgive and understand him. As she looked out now on these fields and views, it was easy enough to see them through his eyes: to see that these prospects had been open to him too, as he made his way as a boy down to school. For a few scant years, until all that ended and his parents set him instead to work on their farm’s wet fields.

  These gleaming views of ocean and land and sky: how he must have drunk them in as he made his way, a little boy, along to school. And when school ended for good, when farm chores began, how his world must have shrunk and shrivelled, as he stopped taking in these views.

  ‘What was her name?’ Margaret asked, leaning across the table, her hands on the oilcloth. ‘Granny’s name: what was it?’

  ‘Mary.’

  ‘Mary what?’

  ‘McCallion. Mary McCallion. A local girl: a townland or two away. He married her in, what, I think it was 1922 – and I was born three years later. But no more children, after that.’

  Patrick and Margaret studied her across the expanse of table; Cassie leaned against the sink, watching them, watching her.

  How her father must have seen in her mother a second, magical chance: Sarah had no doubts about that; her memories were too clean and clear. And how betrayed he must have felt when she died, from causes mysterious, neglected. How the family were observed now, and pitied: a certain amount could be done for poor Brendan and his motherless daughter; help given, up to a point, on the farm. These were specific troubles, and they could be remedied; it was the unspecified that caused trouble. ‘Don’t be telling her too much,’ Brendan told Sarah, when Isobel came visiting. ‘Don’t be letting on.’ Letting on about what? ‘Just don’t be letting on.’ Sarah took to keeping her cards close to her chest, holding Isobel, holding everyone, at arm’s length.

  God knows what people thought. Sarah had traced and imagined it all.

  ‘And that’s when Cassie came to live with us.’

  The children’s eyes swivelled to Cassie, who had turned again to the sink.

  For this was the solution found – rapidly – for Brendan’s pressing domestic problems. A girl picked, plucked from the county home at Lifford: a parentless
girl of fourteen or so. A bit simple, they said – but a good girl, no trouble at all. Clean and quiet; not much talk out of her. She could run the kitchen, at least; she had a good touch, a dab hand; she made the lightest, the flakiest pastry. Cassie came to the farm: for Sarah, a strange presence at first, but one who she became fond of, grew to depend on, grew to love, in time.

  ‘Is she a bit simple?’ said Isobel.

  ‘Not as simple as you.’

  But, all water off a duck’s back, for Isobel.

  And for Brendan: an answer to a prayer on the domestic front.

  All this Sarah knew.

  Later, another photograph was arranged, to hang beside that stern earlier photograph on the wall. Brendan arranged a family photograph of the three of them, taken in a studio in Derry and hung on the kitchen wall. A little less stiff, perhaps, than that earlier one – though not by much: in this photograph he was seated stiffly on a heavy mahogany chair, against a pale backdrop, and staring – a look of belligerence, almost – into the camera; Sarah herself smiled self-consciously; Cassie, in her Sunday best, broad-shouldered and broad-faced, sweet-faced, looked into the distance.

  *

  ‘Smile now,’ the photographer commanded. ‘Like this,’ he said, and he smiled, exposing yellowing teeth. His smile faded as he glanced and then looked for a beat, two beats, at the hot scene before him: at Brendan, scratchy and reddening on this summer day in thick wool, his Sunday suit; at Sarah and Cassie in hats and Sunday best too; at the heavy, black mahogany chair that formed the empty centre of this family group. ‘I need,’ he paused and rubbed his jaw, assessing what he needed, blinking a little at the challenge ahead of him. ‘I need –’

  They had taken the bus into Derry on this August afternoon for the express purpose of having a family photograph taken; braved the covert looks and (more usually) stares of their fellow passengers; elbowed their way through the Saturday shoppers to the photographic studio on Waterloo Street. ‘Like this,’ the photographer said again, pleadingly this time, and now Sarah tried to oblige. Not very successfully: the photographer’s tired face fell a little in disappointment. The small room was sweltering. She pulled a wider smile and he straightened up and brushed his hands down the front of his shirt. ‘That’s more like it.’