by Molly Keane
There was silence while they gobbled away, almost contentedly. April was the first to lay down her fork and speak: “The only time that I can’t hear the radio is when I’m eating toast.”
May looked scathingly at her transistor – she didn’t bother to say that it was not switched on.
“Too bad. And it’s almost Woman’s Hour,” Jasper was not at all ashamed to admit unpunctuality.
“And I have to be at Ballynunty by four o’clock.” May sprang from her chair, and dug into the blackcurrant mousse. “Alys hates the flower club ladies hanging about. She doesn’t know what to say to them.”
“And she’s so rich. Mustn’t annoy Alys, must you? How are you getting there? Bicycle?”
“Bicycle? With cherry blossom and pussy-willow and –” she hesitated, remembering the filbert catkins.
“Yes, dear, I happened to see you coming out of my nut-grove this morning.”
“Oh, well, I just cut a few twiglets. I only took them from the back of the tree.”
“That’s quite all right, of course. You’ll kill my tree quite as easily from the back as from the front.”
“That’s what you were discussing with your friend, the monk, I suppose.”
“Not a great horticulturist, my young friend, but pretty, don’t you think?” Jasper’s smile was maliciously non-committal.
April spoke decidedly from outside the matters under discussion: “Must bring my Tiger to the vet for his teeny-tiny pedicure.”
“I’ll cut his toenails – too easy – two minutes. Vets are only a waste of money. Right? Get it? You hold him. I’ll do it.” May sounded loud and brisk.
“Thursday’s his day. I’ll take the Renault.”
“Just an excuse for meeting Ulick – Thursday’s his day, too.”
“Poor old girl,” Jasper spoke with exceptional tolerance. “If she fancies him, let her. He’s her treat.”
“A most unsavoury treat. He and cousin Rowley were thrown out of Eton together. Remember?”
“Oh – that.” Jasper dismissed the idea lightly.
“Not ‘that’ at all.”
“Oh, never look back,” Jasper sighed. “Keep yourself up to date if you can.”
May took no notice of this, although she fancied there was a defence behind the gibe. What was he up to with that monk? She had read enough to hazard a guess. “I suppose I could drop her off in Ballinkerry and go back to Ballynunty.”
“Only twenty miles longer, and what about the petrol? You girls never think of that.” He shuddered as he crumbled a biscuit. “Gold, dripping away –”
June came in on the same note: “And it costs fifteen pence now to send a letter three miles – well – your guess is as good as mine.”
“Better, perhaps,” May agreed. “All the same, my bicycle is never off the road, and the hatch-back’s a must for the cherry blossom – right?”
“If we had the wheels back on the governess cart, we’ld save a lot of petrol.” No one listened to June. But when she went on: “I saw quite a nice sort of pony with the tinkers yesterday,” their attention was arrested.
“Tinkers back on the lower road? You locked up your hens, I hope,” May advised.
“Tinkers always make trouble –” Jasper was with May again – “snaring rabbits and disturbing nesting birds.”
“Ah, Jasper, what birds? Only moorhens on the river.”
“There’s a nesting swan there, too.”
“And she’ld eat them if they went near her,” June defended the tinkers conclusively. She was fond of a chat with the travelling people. Their cures and charms for horses’ ills interested her keenly. “And little Mummie always gave them a free run for their donkeys on the mountain.”
Silence fell as they accepted the memory; then May perked up again: “They don’t have donkeys any more. Fast cars and antique junk today.”
“They have a nice pony today too – and Mummie was really fond of the tinkers.” June’s voice was ponderous with memory.
June’s references to Mummie always sounded in the poorest taste. Guarding and keeping their own separate memories, no one replied to her. When they spoke again, it was together, and with separate changes of subject.
April said: “Then that’s decided. I’m to take the Renault.”
Jasper said: “Only instant coffee today. Call at Mahers for the high roast – and for God’s sake don’t forget eggs. I’ll write it down.”
May said: “Someone get it into her head that she’s not to start without me.” She hurried away, coffeeless, to arrange her branches, her Oasis, her wire netting, her secateurs and a collection of flower vases in the back of the Renault.
* * *
Later in the afternoon, divided from each other and following their several pursuits, each one of the family felt a different and happier person. June and Christy were happy as they extracted a late lamb from an old ewe. On the farm, birth, death from natural cause, or from slaughter, took their inevitable turns and were dealt with as their turns came round.
Jasper, when he had washed up the luncheon dishes, paused to scratch Mister Minkles’ ear while he considered how best and most usefully to employ the afternoon. Clearing the briars, creeping from the meagre wood like wolves on his azaleas, was the most attractive idea – he loved brambling. It was quite a sport with him. Then there were the seedling conifers, choking under a spring growth of weeds, but such a bore to weed. Rain decided him; rain driving in to the slated side of the house, into the cold cheek of the mountain behind – the most important thing was to write up the garden diary, and work out and elaborate his new undertaking.
Alone in the house, empty of voices and welling with its captive smells, Jasper went upstairs. Coming to the window that looked down the flowerless slope to the river, he waited, considering, visualising what he might grow, and where. Given shelter from the screaming mountain winds, his plantings would survive, even thrive. Energy possessed him delightfully. His idea was born. He went on up the stairs two steps at a time in his haste to reach the nursery floor before the idea lapsed into futility. He was tolerant of his own limitations; he quite liked skating about on them.
Jasper’s present bedroom domain had been the day and the night nurseries. Mummie had made the night nursery into a bathroom, his bathroom, where he could tend his eye uninterrupted by his sisters’ necessities. The water did not run very hot up here. He always meant to put in an electric heater. At least it was his own masculine preserve, as Mummie intended it should be. In no extremity could a sister get in; the outer door was bolted firmly on the inside; and he kept his bedroom door locked as religiously as they did theirs. The short way between bedroom and bathroom, padding with the footsteps of Nannies long buried, was his private privilege.
Jasper took two ruled school copy-books, one blue, one red, and a hard-backed diary for 1981 out of the hinged box-seat below an iron-barred nursery window. The other window-seat housed the very expensive train set which he sometimes set out on the floor to while away an hour or two. Now, settling himself comfortably and carefully in the armchair where Nannies had dozed away before him, he opened an exercise book, the red one, to study the plans and drawings it contained. There was something he was going to add to them; it had been clear in his mind as he ran upstairs; now, diffused and blunted, the brightness that had filled the air stayed sullenly unwritten. Accustomed to such a hiatus between an idea and its setting out, he sighed resignedly, put the book down and, opening his diary, wrote: Met Brother Anselm. He agreed. … What had he agreed, or suggested, or promised? Jasper could not remember fully, so, giving it all up for the moment, he turned to the Leinster Examiner and its Woman’s Page – the cookery receipts on this were always open to criticism. Today “Meringues of which you may be proud” filled him with pleasurable scorn. After musing for a while on their probable disasters, Jasper fell asleep.
April, through a series of calm manoeuvres, had remained mistress of the afternoon’s proceedings. She was seated at the whe
el of the Renault, Tiger on her knee, safety-belt adjusted, before May appeared carrying a basket of mosses, a bunch of Mummie’s double pink primroses and a rusted wire wreath-frame, picked up in a wayside graveyard. She had lost control of the afternoon through her delay to adjust the binding of wool and bass on the handles of her secateurs – a non-slip device for her thumb and short fingers.
“Get in,” was April’s only response to all protests as to who should drive, or which road should be taken. As the engine started and the accelerator added its voice to the one-sided discussion, May, moss scattering from her basket and primroses dropping from her hand, was forced to clamber in or be left behind.
As the car bounced its way into and over the potholes and fissures in the drive she retrieved everything neatly; she put the primroses back among their leaves; perched the skeleton wreath on her knees and, after they reached the road, was still talking uninterruptedly to April, to the air, to herself. … “How right I was to nip into the churchyard and pick up a couple of these wire jobs. … Everyone manages to die in Lent so I’ll fill up a few minutes of my lecture demonstrating a pretty wreath for a grave, people love anything to do with death, don’t they?. … Steady, April, steady up! Look OUT! We’re coming to the tinkers’ camp … those ghastly children … we could do with less of them, actually … all the same, take care, awfully expensive to kill one. I wonder which pony June fancied? They all look terrible. And what about that mobile home? – cost a fortune. …”
On either side of the road bedding and bright clothes blew out against the further blue of the mountains. Pieces of furniture, old wash-hand stands, garlanded jugs, milk-glass, oil lamps, stood for sale – indoor stuff, indecent in the cold spring air. A beautiful young woman, with dyed blonde hair and strong bare arms, emptied a dish of water onto the road and walked slowly up the steps of an expensive caravan. A boy sat on the lower step trimming a stick. Well-dressed children wandered abstractedly, silent as their dogs. Here time had lost all its measurements. Untouched and unimpressed, May held to her principles. “Fancy, hens too,” she said. “Stolen, you bet. Thieves and pigs they all are, aren’t they? And rich as Croesus … idle, shiftless lot.” She dismissed the Travelling People and silence fell between the sisters until May was deposited with her equipment at the door of a rather grand and trim Georgian house. Sweeps of raked gravel lay before it; early daffodils drifted upwards to well-kept woodlands; far below, visible but beautifully distanced, the river – so mean in its beginnings at Durraghglass – turned magnificently through famous salmon pools and streams, all with their names, all with their records.
Happily indifferent as to whether May was, or was not, with her, April paused cautiously at the monstrous Gothic gates, a grandfather’s terrible erection, before proceeding on her long drive back to Ballinkerry.
Ballinkerry had no more charm than most Irish villages. A tidy little stream, neatly bridged, and bordered by pleached lime trees, ran down the centre of its main street before it dived underground to carry the town’s drains to the river – in its larger way it followed the same system as Durraghglass. Old dark shops with pretty pillared windows had nearly all been demolished, to rise again as supermarkets. Pubs with snugs – secretive corners for private talking and drinking – were now bars with Lounges where ladies might sit and drink, together or alone, without embarrassment at their lack of an escort.
Of the original shops remaining, Ulick Uniacke’s was by far the prettiest. Restored with perfect restraint, its position was calculated to catch any passing trade on the road between Dublin and Cork. Shabbily unpretentious as it looked, visitors usually found in it a treasure-trove of pretty things. Behind the shop was the surgery where major operations were performed on larger subjects.
At the shop-front April came to a halt and set about reversing into a space between Ulick’s station-wagon and a tiresomely parked motorbicycle. In her avoidance of the frailer impediment April backed smartly into the station-wagon. Happily impervious to the clang of the impact, she drove out and was about to repeat the performance when Ulick came out of his shop and opened the car door. He was laughing heartily. “That’s my girl,” he said, “hit me again. Why don’t you?”
April hadn’t heard the crash and she didn’t hear him now, so her composure was complete. “Well, my dear, here I am,” she stepped from her car, graceful as a girl in a ’thirties car advertisement – there ought to have been a running-board. Her tiny dog was neatly disposed under her arm, a small parcel was in her hand. They kissed, cheekbone to cheekbone, while he tried politely and insistently to take her parcel. She held on to it decidedly.
“Not yet, pet.” He always made her feel so young. “Tiger must have a little runny-runs – he’s been round the world this afternoon.” Tiger, shivering inside his soft coat, that drifted in colour with her soft tweed, refused to oblige.
“I know he’s waiting to do it indoors,” Ulick picked him up, he was one of the few who were not afraid of Tiger, and directed April towards the shop. “He does love you,” she paused to say it. “Aren’t you flattered?”
“Loathe the bugger, actually. If he’s not weeing against one of my chairs, he’s displaying against my leg – embarrassing little toad.” But his smile held complete acceptance of anything April chose to bring to his shop. April gave him back her most beautiful smile. It was nice that he appreciated Tiger.
Secreted in the snug – not unlike a sedan chair for two – which he had bought when the Fisherman’s Bar was demolished, Ulick and April settled down to an interesting trade conference. April produced from her handbag the notes she had been reading in bed the previous night; she referred to them long and silently before opening the parcel she had brought with her. “I know you can’t keep your hands off it,” she said teasingly, although his: “Let me, ducky,” had escaped her.
At last the treasure was disclosed: a china rabbit, night cap on head, flowered gown to the feet, seated on a chaise-percée.
“Heavenly, isn’t he?” April said. “Red Anchor, don’t you think?”
“No, dear, not Red Anchor,” he wrote to her on a pad – it saved time and shouting – “but very pretty and quite special – a comfit box, perhaps.”
“Malade Imaginaire – Molière’s date.”
“No,” he wrote firmly, “but very French. Is that a carrot in his mouth?”
“No. Parsley.”
How had she guessed? “Oh, RAVISHING.” He put it in capital letters.
“How much?” she asked. When he wrote down a figure she shook her head decisively.
“Well,” he wrote, “what do you want?”
April referred again to her notebooks; their pages were closely written over with the astounding prices asked by major London stores for their importations from Italy of astoundingly beautiful clothes. She marked a choice with her little gold pencil and blandly named a sum.
“Darling, you must be out of your mind,” he wrote.
“All right, darling, when you feel rich.” She took up the rabbit and started to re-dress him in his cottonwool and tissue-paper wrappings.
“Oh!” he said, forgetting to write, “be careful, let me.”
“Please. Don’t touch him.”
Their eyes met. Steel met flint.
“Oh, very well,” he wrote, “but you can’t expect a bonus on the re-sale.”
“I do expect a bonus,” April said. She went on: “In the drawing-room at Durraghglass, under one of the Chippendale mirrors (earliest Chinese period) there is a Leeds teapot in which every year a wren builds her nest. I wish you could see it.”
“Oh, so do I. Why don’t you ask me to tea some day?”
“We can’t disturb the wren, can we?”
“You could let me know when she’s finished hatching.”
“And another thing – Jasper calls you ‘nasty Ulick’.”
“Rude. And common.”
“You did seduce poor little Cousin Rowley.”
“Can’t he let bygones be bygones?
”
“Not just Eton. He knows all about that procury little gaming club.”
“Darling, you know I came out of all that without a breath on my reputation.”
“Yes. And silly old Rowley’s still inside, doing a little time.”
“And loving every minute. He’s made dozens of just good friends.”
“Dirty talk,” April said reprovingly. “I must get on. I have to collect May from her flower club at Ballynunty.”
“Oh, very well,” he wrote, “you can have your bonus.”
April straightened Tiger’s coat as if he was all that mattered to her in life, before she put the rabbit into Ulick’s hands. Evil as he was, he had never failed her over the agreed monies.
“Cheque or notes?” he said. And she heard him.
“Notes,” she said. She felt darling Mummie’s precious little rabbit deserved something really touchable and countable.
“Shall we have a cup of tea?” he suggested when the notes had been given and counted. One of the pleasant things about Ulick was his supply of really good China tea. Another pleasant thing was his supply of invariably clean English bank notes – no haggle about the Punt and its wavering values.
“What a lovely evening, isn’t it?” April spoke on a full, pleased note. She could see the strange colour and feel the airy, silky warmth of that Italian knit which Mummie’s rabbit would provide. “And you will remember to collect my order from old Horrids?” She drank some tea in a dreamy languid way; then looked at him mischievously across her cup. He understood the importance and value of real clothes – true couture stuff. Again, age for ever distanced, she was the present moment – young in looks, in heart untouched. She had no heart. She waited. There was something else. At last he said it: “Shall we roll a joint? What do you think?”
May waited, flowers in her hands, flowers at her feet. She looked a composed, decisive person standing there in her dark-brown stockinette slacks and white Connemara cardigan, her strong, smoke-grey hair moving prettily in the breeze, her smile ready to gleam open and stay, fixed open, on her face. She could talk through it, and keep talking, ruthlessly. Nothing vulnerable about May. Only May could guess at the cringing second self she must defend so long as they both should live.
