by Molly Keane
“He’s paid for a day’s work, May. Not a night’s work.”
“I should have thought his huge wage could cover anything. Wait, Gripper, wait – do take that bitch away.”
June flashed on her big torch and the sisters went in opposite directions. Their manner of walking was as different as their natures. June accommodated her steps to Tiny’s shuffle and mild interests. May’s neat and solid behind and out-turned feet promised practical execution of her set purposes. Now it was a rat-hunt for Gripper – anything to divert his mind from thoughts of Tiny, even if it delayed their bed-time.
She went round the corner of the house to where broken terrace steps led down the falling slope to the river. On one side of the steps Jasper had kept careful clearings for azaleas and camellias – here there was a civilized courtliness from other days – although the grass was roughly cut where once there had been mown lawn. On the other side of the steps weeds and nettles, long grasses and Portugal laurels grew, darker than the night. Into the heart of this covert Gripper disappeared, Tiny forgotten. The hunting lust was on him now.
May lit a cigarette and waited, attentive to his sharp excited voice – obviously he had found other game than rats in that close covert. As she stood, solidly planted, patient for her dog’s pleasure, a fox crossed over the open space between the thicket of darkness and the grove Jasper kept inviolate from the encroaching deserts of present days. It was a small dark fox and lame as well; a vixen, dark as a crow, marauding from some stony mountain earth. She stopped for a moment, stilled with the calculating confidence hunted foxes show, before she slipped from sight, a creature apart, of another world, a fairy world.
Again, a fox. May coughed deeply, turned her head and spat. The horrid gesture only cleared her memory. Tonight she flushed and suffered as she had when romance first passed by, leaving her apart in her perpetual fight to be as others, better than others, never to be mortified as she had been on that bright day. This evening the past event, untouched by reason because it was too ridiculous, existed for her, fresh as ever in its cruelty. Leda, who had slipped from their lives as completely as the fox that had crossed her path tonight, was at its core.
Tonight, waiting for the dog, looking for him through the double darknéss of the laurel grove, that past morning was present for her as though she was still seven years old. Seven was her age when Leda first came to Durraghglass for the summer holidays, the time when Leda and April shut her out from their giggling best-friendship. She hung and listened on the outskirts of their talk, longing to know more about the cream cakes and chocolate of Austria. In love with beautiful Leda, she heard waltz music playing..… Now she was in her secret house again, her house built of bent laurel boughs in the heart of the laurels. In its neat lavatory, intent on a quick out-of-doors pee, she had unbuttoned her white cotton drawers from their anchorage to her liberty bodice when she heard two voices in the sunlight and, through the leaves, had a distant broken vision of Leda and April coming down the terrace steps. They walked in a very ladylike grown-up way. Leda, always so trusted and capable, carried Baby June. They set her down between them on a blue blanket, and played Mummie and Nannie, spreading out their skirts on the warm clipped grass. Far off in her laurels May was possessed by an immense wish to join them, welcome or not, to belong to the group so near and so divided from her. She had burst out of the thicket and started her run towards them when she was brought to a standstill by a spancelling of her knees, then of her ankles: it was her white cotton drawers, hanging like two balloons below her navy-blue skirt. And they had seen. And they were laughing at her – laughing till they fell over, rolled on the grass with Baby June, bit their handkerchiefs and screamed again with laughter.
Trembling in a hot brew of embarrassment, May went back again to hide in her dark house, utterly ashamed and affronted because Leda had laughed at her. Fumbling with the buttons on her bodice, her hand impotent to join them to the button-holes on her drawers, her love changed, a septic wound remaining. Hidden and comfortless she watched them through the laurel leaves, heads together, talking, talking. She watched until she saw Leda pick up Baby June, who wanted to practice her crawling. She saw a small object fall, unnoticed by the others, from the baby’s clutch and heard her furious howl. Baby June was still howling as she was carried up the steps. Through the clamour Leda’s Nannie voice came clearly to May in her hiding-place..… “Icky baby shutty-uppy or Leda pinch her icky botty.” Baby June screamed suddenly. Leda laughed and smothered her with kisses.
When she knew she was alone May came out of the laurels into the sunlight. She crossed over the terrace steps to the place where the girls had sat. Smelling round the site like a small animal, she found what Baby June had played with and dropped. Her hand pounced down, her thumb and finger gripped pliers-like round Leda’s mascot and treasure. It was a fox, a fox from Austria so small and perfectly made it could have fitted in a match-box. The fox had a name – Fritz-Max-Hans. Immediately May knew what she was going to do with him. She set out for her garden, the third of four box-edged plots inside the walled kitchen gardens. She dug a hole between the fairy-rose bush and the mustard and cress. When she had buried Fritz-Max-Hans she felt better, stronger. Even tonight she was happy to remember she had yielded nothing. She had kept her own reserves when, late on that evening Leda, her darling, aware of a day of pain and sulks, came to sit on the edge of her bed, to say: “You know, don’t you? Leda loves little May.” Leda took her hand gently. She took the wrong hand. Her fingers explored it, more curious than caressing. May took her right hand out of Leda’s and gave her the left – Leda patted it absently and went away.
Confirmed in her sense of defenceless outrage, June walked along the familiar wet track to the farmyard.
To her left the white cherry blossom flowered smokily in the half-darkness. On her right a grove of laurel and rhododendron hid the lean old house and its troubles. In the close shelter she heard the dive and chuckle of a bird, surprised out of its sleep. As June smiled and listened, and then walked on, the true importances of her life – and tonight Sweetheart and her litter were of first importance – came to comfort her, in her thought for their necessities, and her power to give them relief.
The farmyard was darker than its approaches – a well of darkness inside its high broken walls. A keyhole of starless sky showed through the empty belfry topping the archway over the gate. Water dripped quietly and constantly from broken shutes into the black depths within buildings. Manure, old and fresh, fumed peacefully in the cold air. June went her uncritical way, between pools and lesser puddles, towards Sweetheart’s shed. A small light beamed weakly through the top of the door. The farrowing light must be failing. Anxiety came back to June and she hurried forward.
“Is that you, Miss Baby?” It was Christy Lucey’s voice, sounding to her full and happy with its assurance of help and companionship.
“Back again, Christy? Jesus, child, good man you!”
“Ah, no distance, Miss – I wasn’t real happy over the old light. I got a fizzing out of it, and a murmur. Would she be as good without it, I wonder would she?”
“I wonder would she?” June echoed.
“My mother says she would,” Christy delivered a statement from his mother – she was his oracle in almost everything.
June pushed open the low half-door and joined Christy. Together they turned the light of their torches (his was a bicycle lamp) on the long pale sow and her piglets, pink as the insides of wet sea shells.
“The small fellow is doing great now,” Christy commended the frail runt of the litter.
“You couldn’t beat the old Aga,” June said.
“And I made five decades and sent up a short one to St Francis for him.” Christy’s reproof was unintentional, but June recognised it.
“St Francis should be it,” she agreed, allowing credit where it belonged. They had a second agreement over the fizz and murmur in the farrowing light. It would be safest to turn it off, leaving June’s p
owerful torch to shine down from the cleft, hollowed high up through the wall to hold a lantern, or a bottle, or just to let in a shaft of light.
“My mother says she’ld be as good without too much of that old electricity in the air,” Christy quoted his mother again as he closed and bolted the top and bottom halves of the door and stood with June and Tiny and his leaning bicycle, all together in the deepening night. “I’ll light you back to the house,” he offered. He mounted his bicycle, balancing and wavering along beside her until she was through the dark trees and laurels. Then he put on speed and rode away.
June ran both her hands lovingly down Tiny’s dipped back. In her gesture she seemed to be acknowledging all the solace that came to her through Christy Lucey’s usefulness and companionship in everything that mattered most. “Four miles here, Tiny,” she said aloud, “and four miles home. Four and four is eight, isn’t that right, Tiny?”
In her pleasure at tonight’s devotion to duty June was happy to forget how often Christy might neglect his work in hand at Durraghglass to cycle home, obedient to some trifling necessity of his mother’s, or, perhaps, to attend the celebration of the Mass on some obscure saint’s day. In spite of these negligences, usually noted by May, Christy’s value to June was immeasurable. Eager and ignorant he had come to her, and she had schooled him and put manners on his horsemanship, and skill and knowledge into his stable management. Everything that was expert in him came from June, as his dark, nervous good looks came from his mother; but his unshakeable nerve – due to lack of imagination coupled with unquestioning trust in his favourite saints – was his own. This nerve and courage June had not taught or transferred, and the reason for this shamed and distressed her. In middle age, and after many falls, both had left her. “But, Jesus, child,” she told herself, “keep it quiet. Play the buggers along.” “The buggers” was her collective name for her family, or for any group unsympathetic towards her.
Much of her alienation from her sisters stemmed from those early days after Jasper’s accident, when the two older girls were not displeased to see the baby wonder toppled from the importance that her abilities, her tiny size, and her funny ways had given her with both Mummie and Jasper. After the accident, if she asked a question, the answer was short and cold. If she made a joke unsmiling faces told her laughter was unseemly. Under orders from Mummie, they were silent about her guilt, but their eyes showed what they thought of her: murderess of robins and blinder of brothers.
Her refuge from the chill and change was in the stableyard. The two stable lads Marty Cullinane and Robbie Ryan had no consciousness of her guilt, only of her bad luck and her misfortune. They had, of course, a proper respect for the disaster, sending up occasional prayers for Master Jasper’s recovery, but their sympathy and warmth went out to Baby June.
Her happy hours were spent in the stables or on the farm. Cats bearing kittens in the hay-loft, squealing mares in season paying mysterious visits to the stallion and back again, no one explained these things to her, but she gathered all essential knowledge by listening to vague comments. After all, who wouldn’t guess what the bantam cock was up to? Once she stood on a wooden bucket and looked over the door of a loose-box at a mare foaling, absorbing facts without any hidden excitement. Always, her pony and other people’s unruly ponies were there to be got ready for children’s classes in local shows. In those days before pony clubs she learned from the lads how to trim out a pony and plait it up; how best to catch a judge’s eye in the ring. Often on a dark evening she would sit on Marty Cullinane’s knee in the saddle-room, embroidering a tray-cloth for Mummie, leaning back in his arms and yawning. At other times the lads cleaned their tack and talked about greyhound racing, while a coal fire burned in a small iron stove, and an oil-lamp hanging on the wall filled the place with the shadows of saddles.
All this was clouded in half remembrance, but it had shaped June’s whole life at Durraghglass. For her education she had never gone further than the convent school in the village. Mummie was too conscious of her disability in reading or writing to send her away to that famous school for the upper classes that educated her elder daughters. Being what was called “a little slow” was a more subtle deformity than May’s hand, April’s growing deafness, or Jasper’s one-eyed state.
Mummie spent herself in lavishing comfort and protection and absolute love on all her children. They must have only the best, and the best cost money. In spending money and selling off land when the banks got nasty, she was regardless of future years. Although she had longed for their happy marriages, and often visualised such blissful states, only April’s – brief and perhaps not ideal – had consummated that wish. Through the years she was contented and fulfilled to have them round her, loving and subservient to her loving will; adorably distressed (hide it with what confidence they might) by her long, cruel illness. The word she never spoke, “cancer”, goes slowly with the elderly. For her own sake and for theirs she refused its reality. But there were many times when she could envy their father that lone shooting accident on the mountain, where he had been found dead with a brace and a half of grouse in his game bag and an empty whiskey flask in the heather beside him. Her silences had been as protective as chain-mail against any murmuring of rumour about his death: no other cause for it than accident was considered. They all sustained the legends and memories of him – a marvellous shot, a brilliant horseman, and April had his looks. Darling Mummie, in her many widowed years, engrossed herself entirely in her children’s lives, ignoring while protecting their various incapacities with such considered and perfect tactfulness that she possessed them as though she was within the cage of their ribs, measuring the beat of their hearts.
June never forgot how Mummie had refrained from blaming her about Jasper’s eye – only a mournful head-shaking over the robin that escaped. She remembered, too well, those dreadful returns from the oculists’ to Durraghglass – Jasper silent and avoiding her, Mummie cheerfully despairing. When, a few years later, even the kind nuns treated her as slightly abnormal (dyslexia not thought of then), Mummie had been wordless in her acceptance of another maimed child. Forget all that, let her get on with her riding.
The baby wonder was provided with ponies to show, and ponies to hunt and sell. Later came the years of that wonderful little mare Magic Flute, by Sorcerer out of Bird Song. Together she and June became the terror of every Ladies’ Race in the South of Ireland. When Magic injured a fetlock so badly that she had to be destroyed it was June, her heart breaking, who led the mare out for the vet and the humane killer, and saw her drop. Such close contacts with the hard realities to be met, endured and accepted, gave June a stoic ability in her conduct of stables or farm. She was a true part of the land, but her farm accounts, almost a tally of stones, were intelligible to herself alone. She could, however, translate them with minute accuracy for the income tax forms, over which Jasper fought a sick delaying action with the accountants. It was her illiteracy that gave June a peasant’s clarity of memory. She forgot nothing. The past was hers, and its voices. Only the future, with its hazards and terrors, ran back and forwards through her mind, the mind of a cute little animal.
“Bedtime now,” she said to Tiny, who slobbered affectionately along beside her, “and ready for the fray in the morning – isn’t that it, love?” She left the cold night for the cold house, for her bedroom and its kettle and cocoa, its blue hot-water bottle and its blue pyjamas. “Blue for you, Baby. … Mummie always said.”
* * *
In the kitchen Jasper, too, boiled up his nightly kettle. While it simmered to a boil, he opened a crack of the window so that Mister Minkles, that knight errant, might get back to bed when the fancy took him. Still waiting, while the Aga gave out its slow heat, he looked around. Unperturbed at the waste of disorder he had as though spewed and forgotten. The white fish mites, that came out from warmth and darkness to speed about the floor, were a matter of indifference to him. The same indifference ignored the floor they darted on. He simply did n
ot see the tiles, blurred with kitchen and outdoor dirt, nor did he smell the cats, nesting in their cardboard boxes. His mind was, for the moment, fixed on the bedtime drink he was about to create – in the most trivial cooking task he looked only for perfection. Now it was Complan; Complan in the one large cup remaining from the Good’s breakfast set, decorated with wandering violets. In any other cup Complan would have seemed undrinkable. He added a strip of orange peel (cut thin as lemon zest for a Martini) to the white paste mixed in his cup; then the careful stream of boiling water; after that a capful of whiskey, a coffee-spoonful of brown sugar and a very light grating of nutmeg. Every night he reached the same exact repetition.
When he had filled two hot-water bottles, bed and Hillier’s catalogues, old and new, seeds and shrubs, were waiting to lull his mind from daily unfulfilled and irritating responsibilities. No dog followed him up the three flights of stairs to the level of the old nurseries where he slept. On his way he switched off all the lights that his unthinking, uncaring sisters had left on. He looked forward to bed. Bed was the only place where he cared to take the patch off his blind eye and wear his spectacles comfortably. Tonight he was frustrated in his pleasures. The bulb in his bedside light gave out a wavering click and died. Furious with annoyance, he decided against the agonizing decision necessary before going downstairs to find a new bulb. Rather than do that, he lay sleepless in the dark, while documents relating to secrets of his own and matters to confer with Brother Anselm were scattered in his special disorder on the tables to the right and left of his pillows. Tomorrow would be another day, and he could do something about everything then.
Bedtime for April meant a continued discipline. It was her pleasure to rule her body so that she might dress it for her private eye’s delight – her clothes must retain their elegance and meaning. She loved to feel beautiful stuffs in her hands and would buy lengths of wool or silk that pleased her though they might lie for years, folded away on a shelf in her cupboard, before the idea for their proper employment came to her.
