Annie Dunne (2 page)

The lights in the room are always evening lights.

These are important matters.

‘I was afraid of the sandwiches,’ says the boy, eating fiercely.

‘Why?’

‘Because of your butter.’

‘Well, there is no butter on them,’ I say, tenderly. I would not take offence at a little boy. We were careful, Sarah and I, not to put butter on the bread. Our country butter has no salt and the children will need a few days to get used to it. We were fearful they would reject the sandwiches and all the work that went into them.

Sarah seems to loom a little, up the top of the kitchen in the shadows, and there are many shadows. She is like a person not used to houses, strangely, but a creature from out of doors, a hare, a bittern. But her face is smiling, beaming, she keeps turning her head like a lighthouse engine, and shines her yellow smile down on the children.

Her head is a mass of powdery white hair, whereas mine is a mute grey, and she smells of something, not unpleasant but difficult to identify, not sweet or perfumed. It may be the starch in her blouses under the forgiving blue and white overdress, it may be the very starched nature of her own skin, kept scrubbed and soaped by means of a daily wash-down at her jug and basin in the bedroom.

There is nothing in the house that we have not scrubbed.

She is not beautiful in any accepted book of beauty, but she is appealing, covetable. She is also thin and so seems tall, like many of her family, and to the children she must seem almost endless, she goes up and up and only ends in the clouds of her hair. Her mother and my mother were sisters, but I do not think a stranger would see a resemblance.

For seven generations my family were the stewards on the Humewood estate, and hers were the coppicers, when coppicing was still a trade. If wooden staves from foreign parts had not become the fashion, the hazel woods so combed and cut by Sarah’s grandsires might still be scenes of dexterity and expertise. And but that my father was not inclined to the land, he might have followed a similar course, and never left these districts - and saved himself a lot of trouble later. Such things bind us, Sarah and me, though more truly it was necessities, economies, that carried me back here to her. I was happy with my lot in Dublin, with Maud and Matt, rearing the three boys, but that’s all history now. Time runs on and has no width. Those small boys are men, and Maud is dead.

Oh, we are blessed in the company of these children. It is our chance. It isn’t that we don’t know it. A glee suffuses us, like beaten egg whites folded into sugar.

When the children are fed I bring them over to the wall, the blind wall of the alcove one side of the fire, where the hag’s bed should be, except there is no hag now to sleep there.

Properly speaking the hag was the old mother of the house, who would give up her room and her marriage bed when her son wed, and brought a fresh bride into the house. I suppose Sarah and me are the hags now. Neither of us ever had the luck to be mothers, though. When we were young women we wanted to be.

It is there in the alcove, as small as any hermit’s cell, where once a bed of branches and straw abided, that we have measured the children over the few years of their lives, when we have had our chance at them.

The little boy is four, and when I press him against the damp plaster I see there has been no great leap of height in the intervening year.

The girl, now six and a bit, has sprung up by three inches and more.

The boy’s hair is black as a blackbird and it rests against the plaster like a smudge of soot. He is placid and willing, and stands there like a little sentry, smiling. I am afraid in my heart I believe a boy is worth two girls but I cannot help that prejudice.

It is like checking calves, measuring them. As if while they have been away from our care, we have feared for their progress, their feeding and their watering. My hands are trembling as they rest lightly on the slight shoulders of the boy. There is a shivering in my stomach, I am almost sick for a moment. Perhaps it is the stooping over, he is so small and neat. His face is as clear of blemishes as the surface of a well. Such a smile, an excellent smile like a person might draw, and indeed I am sure his grandfather Matt, as a respite from teaching those ungrateful children in Ringsend, has often drawn him, he is so suited to sitting still. As good as a landscape.

It is true that I don’t really understand what a girl is, though I was one myself in the long ago. To look at me I am sure there is no trace of that, no lingering section of me which would tell you that once I ran about the lanes of Kelsha, Kiltegan and Feddin as slight as a twist of straw.

‘Am I very much bigger?’ says the boy almost sadly, as if catching my thoughts.

‘You are not,’ I say, laughing my laugh. ‘You are most certainly not. But you have sprung up a little.’

‘How I will ever get to the top of my father’s head I do not know,’ he says.

‘Is that your ambition?’

‘Daddy says one day I will be as tall as him. But he doesn’ t want me taller. He says I will have to leave home if I grow taller.’

‘Perhaps you will not grow taller.’

‘Oh, I am sure I will,’ he says sadly, all three foot of him.

‘I think your sister might get there before you,’ I say, and the girl smiles in sudden triumph.

‘He would not like that,’ she says.

‘Who?’

‘Him,’ she says, meaning, I suppose, her brother.

The boy gazes at the might of his sister. There is a look in his eyes of simple fear. I do not understand the fear at all.

‘You will need to eat your cabbage,’ I suggest to him.

‘Now?’ he says doubtfully.

‘No, now you will go to bed. The owl is awake in the wood. Time for mortals to be a-bed.’

The whole of the world is still. The beech trees along the border of the wall are quiet tonight. The woods themselves must be halted above on the ridge. And there is no thrashing about of branches to disturb the children, who, after all, are city children, and need time to adjust, and not just to the butter. Salted, unsalted, that is the difference, salted and unsalted life. They cannot be immediately at home, it is not possible, no matter how deeply I revere them.

I thank God for the windless night.

The children are in their bedroom sleeping as deep as river stones. I am thinking of the little boy in his nest of sheets and blankets. The sheets are like white card they are so starched.

I was so eager to make their bedclothes agreeable and nice, I am afraid I was a bit loose-handed with the starch bottle. No matter. The old brown water bottle softens them a little. I know he will have his small feet set on it, in a kind of friendly fashion.

He has an odd attitude to mere objects, he imparts characteristics to them. The water bottle hence is his friend. The old blue coverlet, with the scenes of country life stitched onto it, is his friend. He has greeted everything in the house with a kind of satiated longing. I wonder what his dreams might be.

Perhaps he sees the long road to Kelsha unwinding in his sleep, the sparkling hedges, the unknown farms. A little boy’s thoughts, what may they be?

The kettle is back off the flames on its grubby crane - the grease of cooking defeats even us - because I could not be tempted to tea now so late, as it might have me stiff in the bed with sleeplessness, which would be an awful occasion. I will be depending now on sleep for my recuperation, the friendly sister of sleep.

A day of hardship is a long day, good times shorten the day, and yet a life in itself is but the breadth of a farthing. I am thinking these thoughts, country thoughts I suppose, old sayings of my father.

My father liked just as much as myself the empty spectacle of the fireplace, or did until the great restlessness took a hold of him. After that nothing suited him.

Everything seems far away as I sit there in the gloom of the lowering turf. Everything seems to stand off in the distance, like those deer that slip from the woods at dusk to crop the soft grasses. I am thinking about nothing, slipping from one idle thing to the next as one does beside a fire. For instance it strikes me for no reason at all that the deer are in their Sunday coats, every day of the year.

Jack Furlong the rabbit man goes in after the rabbits but I know he would not hunt the deer. There are thousands of rabbits up on the knolls where the trees end. He is a tender man but it is his work to kill them.

Billy Kerr would harass the deer if there was any profit to himself in doing so, as he is a man without qualities. There is probably a Billy Kerr, or someone like him, in all human affairs. Otherwise all would be well, continually.

But no life is proof against the general tears of things. And as I sit there alone between the sleeping children and the sleeping Sarah, the coverlet over her face in our bedroom behind me, I am not thinking of Billy Kerr in any especial way. My mind is drifting, there is a measure of ease. The children sleep without a sound, the ashes of the turf collapse with a familiar noise the size of mice. I can hear over my head in the wooden loft the tiny dance steps of the real mice as they cross and re-cross in a strange regularity, always going to the limits of the loft and heading back across the boards intently, as if drawing a great star on the dusty boards.

After a while I am disturbed by a little mewling sound, which at first I imagine is coming in from the henhouse. It is built up against the south gable of the house or nearly, and we are therefore neighbours to the hens.

But I fancy it is not the hens. Hens make a sound of outrage when the foxes come down from the trees. This is not a sound of henny outrage, but something softer and darker. I start up from my chair when I realise it is coming from the children’s room.

To their door I dart, lifting the metal latch as gently as old practice can manage, and peer into the glistening dark. What little light follows me in the door now finds the turns and angles of things, the dull brass on the beds and the like. I wonder is it the boy awake and confused by the strange surroundings? But no, it is not he, but the soft swan of the girl in her white nightdress. Her covers are down in the chill bath of stray lights, her little legs are up at the knees, her head of dark hair twists and turns, and out of her red mouth issues the curious sound of something akin to distress.

Of course I creep over to her. I know it is wrong to wake a sleepwalker, but she is not walking. All the same she looks like she is awake in another setting, dreaming she is somewhere with her eyes open. The eyes are not looking at me or anywhere, they are focused on invisible things.

Perhaps I ought to wake Sarah because Sarah for all her silence often knows the solutions to matters that to me seem tangled and dark. The limbs of the little girl are rather beautiful in the murky light, she reminds me of something, maybe my own girlhood, maybe my own early softness and slightness, before my tussle with polio. I do not know.

The little girl cries out. I risk putting a hand on her forehead and immediately her eyes change as I stoop there over her. She lets out a pure thin scream, I never heard the like.

‘What is it, what is it?’ I say.

‘The tiger is in the room,’ she says.

‘There are no tigers in Wicklow,’ I say, but, God help me, I gaze about nevertheless in the fear of seeing one. ‘Bless us, child, there is nothing. Now,’ I say, sitting on the edge of the little bed and stroking her head. Her hair is soft as first grasses. ‘Now, there is nothing to fear. Here you are in Kelsha. You are safe and sound tucked up in your bed. I am here and Sarah.’

The little girl starts to cry. It is a slight, distant, private crying, melancholy and affecting. I am ashamed of myself suddenly for thinking littler of her earlier than her brother. My heart goes out to her, as whose could not?

‘Oh, Auntie Anne,’ she says.

‘Oh, dear,’ I say.

I gather her in my arms. She is only gentle bones. To think a person is a soul wrapped in this cage of bones. What an arrangement, how can we possibly be protected?