Annie Dunne (13 page)

Because when I was young myself, with my famous hump, in well-starched dress and overblouse, I suppose my sisters were anxious for me. They sensed their own powers, they knew I was doomed to live a single lady. They knew no one would want to risk a tribe of humpy children! Oh, I understand it. Look at that girl with her bent back, my heavens - how does she endure? And because they were unhappy for me, they tormented me, they asked the odd boy of their acquaintance to ask to walk me out. Never! And they tormented me, and when they were done, they tormented me more. Such was their love. And Dolly now in America these eternal years, and Maud in her grave in Glasnevin. I cannot bear it all, I cannot. Lying there alone herself, without the solace of her three sons, the embrace of her Matthew. Matt, Matt! I must take a hold of myself now, I must not think these thoughts. At close of day I invented a sailor, a man I said I met in Dame Street, who loved me on sight, and asked to marry me, and then went down to the docks to board his ship and never came back and was likely lost at sea, maybe in the Antipodes! And I made him so fiercely and so well that after a year or two I came to believe in him, and truth to tell I still do. I seem to see him there, solitary in Dame Street with his sailor’s coat, talking to me of love and liking, and distant lands. Though I know he did never exist. And I seem to feel again that tender kiss he gave me as we wandered Dublin, in Pearse Street where the gasworks makes privacy for couples. How soft his rough palm on my cheek, how low he stooped, so tall he was, such honey in his words, deep dark honey in the hive before the keeper brings it out to the sunlight, for the honey is made in darkness! And I forbade my sisters ever to mention love again, for it was gone from me, gone in the tragedy of a shipwreck in the wild Antipodes. Wild nonsense, happy nonsense!

I stop on the green road. I am dizzy. The boy sails on regardless, carrying my purse tightly, held slightly aloft, like a dull lamp. And those few pennies in it, all I have. The sunlight blows against the girl, her dark brown hair knits itself into it, joins it, braids the lovely laces of the sunlight. Youth, life, love, my gentle charges, my care. God protect them. Has he protected them thus far? I am sorely frightened. What sloughs of despond, what pits of darkness have they seen? God enfold them, embrace them, retrieve them, perfect them, restore them. I cannot. All I have is the made-up love of a woman with a hump on her back like half the moon.

Chapter Eight

But the main road, when we meet it, brings composure. My heart lightens, the familiar spread of fields and houses, my cousins’ farm to the left, the kingdom of Humewood to the right, works on me like a regular prayer. Now my boots go differently. I am singing ‘Weile Waile’, to delight the boy, if my old crow’s voice can be said to give delight. But a child is merciful and loves what he loves, for a child’s reasons. The boy knows bits of it and if the girl knows, she would never sing it anyway. She listens though, she listens with a smile, enjoying the frightening song.

The riches of summer, the cargo of greens and bejewelled lights, hangs in the hedges, casual, at ease. The heat drives into everything. The world of Feddin and Kiltegan is crisp and dry. My shoes ring on the new tarred road. The accident with Billy nearabouts is only a memory. The children’s smaller legs flash along. Perhaps I have witnessed only a dark topic of childhood, particular to them, closed to the world of grown-ups. This is my hope.

I had only sisters to grow up with, so my knowledge of sister and brother is slight. For my brother Willie died away at the old war in 1917 - June the fourth was the day my father kept for him, though you could not know the day of his death for certain - when everything was otherwise, and Ireland was another Ireland altogether. There have been other Irelands too since, that have also passed away, so I must not entirely complain. But the world of my youth is wiped away, as if it were only a stain on a more permanent fabric. I do not know where this Ireland is now. I hardly know where I am. My father’s country had first a queen to rule it, and then a king, and then another king. It was a more scholarly, a more Shakespearean world, it was more like a story. Of course my father was part and parcel of that story, and no one wants to hear it now. People have other thoughts now. But they do not know all that they have lost. They tell the children in school how good the things of the present are, how much better than the terrible days when queens and kings of Great Britain and Ireland ruled us. They tell them about those fierce gunmen, Collins and De Valera, those savage killers in their day that thought nothing of murdering each other and far less of killing the likes of my father. Such days of absolute terror as we had in Dublin in those times, when the shadows of people shot at by soldiers of every hue, by snipers of every persuasion, as they wandered up the brown avenues and streets of our dark capital, would turn out in the light of morning to be mere drinking men wandering home, or worse, night-workers, women and young men, returning from their shifts in the cobbled glooms. Why, I myself and my sisters Maud and Dolly had to duck behind a quarter mile of sandbags along Dame Street to reach the gates of the Castle, with the young soldiers on sentry duty laughing at us, delighted by the spectacle no doubt now and then of our garters and stockings, and the unseen snipers firing betimes from their crow‘s-nests and niches in the old buildings of the city, firing at three young slips of girls. And because the young Tommies were sometimes handsome, we laughed too, and laughed at death, and scurried along, and laughed, and when we gained the castle yard we laughed loudest, and hugged each other, and we might be only returning haphazardly from a shopping expedition to buy bread and meat for our father’s tea.

We had had a settled world enough, and we saw the Viceroy stream in through the gates in earlier times with all his bright and golden retinue, we watched our father drill his bright-booted men about the parade ground, recruits and shooflies and sergeants and inspectors and supers and chiefs like himself, and we saw the companies of the army wheel about, and make their music, and their shouts. And the milk dray came up through the frosted mists of every winter morning, and brought in the chill milk to the families that were ensconced in that castle, all those families, Irish and English, Scots and Welsh, and all their ceremonies and importances. It was a little watered and milky world in the middle of the distressed city, paupers and beggars everywhere, poverty everywhere, but also a strange gaiety, a strange peace, people of the beautiful Dublin sunlight, though it was rain mostly afflicted the roofs of that city. And that was the world that Willie died to protect, from the ambitions and ravages of the Kaiser, who was our king’s cousin for all that. He died in mud like a beast for us, our Willie, so that everything could continue as before, and despite that he did that, and gave his life, it never did.

This is the world of thought I bring into Kiltegan village, hardly a metropolis to rival anywhere, though when my father was a child he said he thought it was as grand as Rome or Byzantium itself. We have passed the village gate of Humewood, which White Meg my grandfather used as entrance when he was steward there, because the steward’s house is just yards there within. I think after all I did see him in my girlhood, though he died when the century was but five or six years old, so I might have been the little boy’s age when I saw him. Oh, never a word did he speak as he came up the village road, so people say, like it was a song, nor looked right nor left, nor greeted nor offended anybody, but fetched himself in the gates of the estate as if a sort of solitary God. Because of course, thinking on the reason now, he was the link between the grand and polished owners of Humewood and all the plethora and generality of working people, the estate carpenters, the stonemasons, the coppicers like Sarah’s own father, the tillers, the gravel men, the fencers, the roofers, and even the great host of gardeners that pulled the granite levellers across the acres of lawns, and tore out plants and planted in new ones in a dizzying cycle, though on some estates the garden workers were thought to be domestic and part of the household. Those house people my grandfather never approached, they were the hosts belonging to the head housekeeper and the head butler. Sixty servants roamed the great house in my grandfather’s day, and nigh on two hundred men worked on the thousands of acres, and most had houses in the village or within the closely pointed walls. And those two hundred were the army of my grandfather.

All gone, all changed, all thrown away. Silence has generally fallen. Oh, on many an old topic. There is a solitary lady now living there, the last descendant of the original Humes, and she does not even bear the name. Who knows if she is lonely or content? She has a handful of servants now and there seem to be less of a force to go to harvest and go to sow, and yet she does well enough. The Land Commission and the new laws have surely trimmed her acres, but not as bad as other places. Seven generations of stewards were my people, and it is as if the story was never told, never heard, not even lingering enough to be forgotten, much less mourned.

This is why I am wary of bringing my thoughts into the village, though thoughts are silent. Because I suppose the general story of Kiltegan has knocked us off our perches, and there are people to enjoy that, and watch and wait for a chance word misplaced, mis-said.

To my eyes this is a ruined place. The walls still stand, but they are drear and painted only by the rain. The promised land is sore neglected.

The children have borrowed my silence as they do. The boy carries my purse at half mast, not exuberant now, casting an eye about at the seeming emptiness of the houses. The road is roughly tarred, and motor cars and trucks have torn at its edges, and the neat old cobbles of yore peep out like wide, blind eyes. You have to watch out for melted patches, or they will ruin your shoes.

Still and all, old thoughts aside, it is Kiltegan. The general shapes are true, and it is childhood also for me to walk here, despite everything, despite my bitter mind. I bought bull‘s-eyes here and Peggy’s-legs also with my own father when he was yet a young man, visiting his home district in the summers with his single boy and threefold belles of girls. The policeman, in his summer civvies, in times all fled.

Oh, what a mix of things the world is, what a flood of cream, turning and turning in the butter churn of things, but that never comes to butter.

The children race into the village shop, the bell ringing out with a metal sound across the once-metalled street. At least in here nothing has been changed. The jars of boiled sweets still hypnotize the children after school. Even the newcomers to the shelves, the factory bread in its greaseproof wrappings, seem old sights now. Who would have thought it, years ago, that a woman would not wish to bake her own bread, that source of pride and difference, like the very waters of your own well, sweeter and better than all other wells of the parishes. Sweeter and better was your own bread, and yet here they reside, these trim, similar, thin-crusted loaves that everyone wants to buy. Nevertheless, still on the counter sits the ribbon box, the very selfsame box that used to torment Dolly and Maud and me, our hands sweating at the thought of touching the blue, the red, the yellow ribbons. You would dream in the hot nights of that box and see in your dreams the many coloured bands spilling from the plain wood, spilling and whirling in your dreams. I hardly know why, now! A sprat of colour for a hat, a summer flourish. Oh, the ways and manners of our youth grow strange and small.

‘Annie Dunne,’ says Mrs Nicodemus.

‘Ma’am,‘ I say. She is ever just Ma’am for some reason, perhaps for that her first name is Honoria, and her last that strange Greek name she got from her husband, as full a Wicklow man that ever was, but whose great-grandfather was a traveller in linens in Ireland that settled at length in Rathdangan.

Mrs Nicodemus is small and straight, and the curiosity is, she also like me has a slight bow in the back, but this is said to be caused by an injury as a baby, when she was dropped by her father when the midwife gave him a hold of the newborn child. Therefore she could not be said to be in a position to hand on her affliction and indeed her sons and daughters are perfect and true. Moreover she is so pretty, or was, that it makes her affliction like a graceful note, like the flaw in a beautiful woman’s face, the beauty spot as it is called. Beautiful as she was, I know she does not like me, though I do not know the reason for it.