Annie Dunne (21 page)

The children take the sweets like dogs to the edge of the group, and start to examine and eat them.

‘There will be mighty long eating in them,’ says Sarah.

‘How are you, Sarah?’ says Matt, now free to take off his hat.

‘Oh,’ says Sarah, and moves her head to indicate she’s well enough.

‘And Annie, how is Annie?’ he says, turning to me.

‘Annie is all right,’ I say.

‘How is the new missus?’ says Sarah brightly. ‘And when, when will we see her?’

‘She is down with friends at the Strawberry Beds, at the minute,’ he says, pronouncing ‘minute’ in his strange Cork way,
minyoot.

‘Friends from her days at Guinness’s?’ I ask blithely. Let no trace of bitterness intrude, at any rate.

‘No, Annie. Her nephew lives by the Strawberry Beds. In fact, he is the curate to the parish priest in that part of the world. He is a very admirable young man. Fluent in the Irish.’

‘Isn’t that great?’ says Sarah, a stranger herself to that language, unless Kelsha itself can be termed Irish, which I must suppose it is. Certainly the good nuns of the Loreto College in North Great George’s Street didn’t trouble themselves much with that old language of gobdaws and cottagers. Sarah’s schooling as I remember, conducted in Kiltegan, was over by the age of twelve. But for Matt, who it seems fired a few shots in 1916 down in Cork City, and so must be termed a patriot, Irish is a holy thing, despite the fact that his half-brother was a chaplain in France in the Royal Irish Rifles during the Great War.

‘It is wonderful to think that those two children will have the Irish when they are grown,’ he says, accepting a cup and saucer from Sarah.

‘I don’t see how it will help them,’ I say. ‘What is wonderful about it? No one speaks it.’

‘It is spoken, Annie, throughout the districts of the West, and some day it will be spoken again generally in Ireland. Isn’t it our own tongue?’

‘Not that I ever noticed,’ I say.

‘You are surrounded by things you never notice, Annie.’

‘I’ll thank you not to be rude to me in my own house.’

‘I’m sorry, Annie. I wasn’t being rude. I was being blunt, like yourself. You are one of that class of persons that can dish it out, but you can’t receive it.’

‘I can receive it well enough,’ I say, with an eerie calm. ‘What did you want to say to me?’

‘Annie, can we put the loaves in the pot-oven?’ Sarah says. ‘I can smell rain. Did you smell rain, Matthew?’

He lets his easel down and sits at the far edge of the table, and drinks a sip of his tea.

‘It hasn’t rained for two weeks, Sarah,’ he says, agreeably. ‘Do you think it will suddenly rain now?’

‘Go and put the loaves in, Annie,’ she says, ‘anyway.’

‘All right, Sarah,’ I say, and take up the three lumps of dough we have ready, and carry them out on their greasy tray. Outside the yard is a lovely bowl of warm sunlight, sweet and clear. There is about as much chance of rain as there is of gold falling from the sky.

Chapter Twelve

Every second day or so Matt comes to see us, bringing the past with him. That is how it seems to me. I cannot get out of my head all those years of work, raising the three boys in the place of my sister, who lay all the hours above in her bed, in the return of the house. She lay there for years amid the daytime songs of the blackbirds.

At the end of the garden was the monastery wall, and beyond that the monks paced their avenues, with their prayers and their secret thoughts. The huge sycamore opened and closed the doors of the seasons, letting in that miserly Dublin light in winter, doling it out in summer through its million singing leaves.

By the summer of 1950, when myself and the century were surprised to find ourselves fifty years old, the two eldest boys were almost grown - in a measure of time that seemed only the downturn of a sparrow’s wing - lounging in the deck chairs in the back garden, with their outlandish beards, their queerly coloured suits and ties, watching their father fuss over his apple tree, his roses. It was one of those magisterial summers that come once in a decade, in twenty years, when all the rivers of the country run low and the old roads of these backwoods districts turn into whitened ribbons.

Matt was at war with his eldest son. at war with the greenfly. But he set a shining hubcap he had found on the Shelly Banks into the grass, for a birdbath, and he would go up to his studio on the first floor, and sit there for hours, drawing the birds that came to drink. And Maud alone a-bed throughout. What was wrong with her, the doctor could not say. She grew fat and sick and queerly happy there. At night, of course, Matt left us, entering that return bedroom, closing the door.

He had painted country scenes on the panels of his doors downstairs, and in the bathroom he covered the failed, foxed edges of the mirror with tiny, painted flowers. He read Dickens and Shakespeare in the fading light from his garden. He polished his shoes, and brushed his hats, and was grateful for his ironed shirts and trousers. In the deep reaches of the night, when I could not sleep, the eldest boy perhaps out on the town I knew not where, I would set up my ironing in the stove-warm kitchen. Eventually the boy would return, with his wild hair and eyes, exhausted, excited, uneasy. If Matt heard him entering the hall, the clicks of the door betraying him, he would come down all hissing anger and fear. Otherwise I gave the miscreant cocoa in my lair, and looked at the boy’s sleepy face, and wondered what life he was leading. Was there true adventure in it, and was it all bravado, exhaustion and desperation? He was studying to be a sculptor at the College of Art. One day he brought home a beautiful wooden figure of Christ praying, which surprised us all. I had imagined wildness in his work too, scandalous things.

By contrast, his brother, the children’s father, was all early nights and decency and thoughtfulness, making him the apple of Matt’s eye.

I peeled the potatoes in the scullery, made the meals, scrubbed the tables, polished everything that could shine, brushed out everywhere, scoured, seared, ordered the larder under the stairs, killed the mice, banished the spiders, trapped the summer flies on fly paper, washed, dried, ironed, folded the clothes, the sheets and linens, went to my rest as tired as a wolf, as easy in my conscience as a lamb. It was a world for me, a sort of paradise, Elysium. I would lie in my bed thinking of everything, and I would dream of Matt, a strange dream where I opened his bones with a little saw and instead of marrow in them there was quicklime. In that dream then afterwards - how I put him together again I do not know - we would sit together in the dining room, side by side, the sunlight flooding down on our four knees. It was a queer little dream of peace and quietude, in which there was no Maud.

Then suddenly there was no Maud, the poor girl died, Maud died and there were frightening changes. The queen was gone from the heart of the realm, and I had not even known she was queen. Matt and I argued about everything, the very morning of her funeral we argued, when the eldest boy said he would not go. And it was then also in all honesty I noticed that he was in the upshot a tender boy enough, because the reason he would not go was plainly, his love for Maud was too great to bear the clap-trap at the grave.

There was a sea change everywhere in that city household. My paradise was falling to perdition. Matt’s eyes looked hurt and full of hate in the same instant. He would sit at the polished tea table, holding his face in his hands, dropping tears onto the bright wood. The eldest no longer came to sit with me in the kitchen, he stayed out later and later, until, in a great morass of fury between himself and his father, he slouched off to Spain.

Matt taught not just children their painting but also the odd grown-up student, the odd lonely spinster or man with an artistic bent. Someone called Anna started to crop up in his talk, such as it was. ‘Tea with Anna’ was the ominous phrase, in Lipton’s or the Monument Creamery. I watched him go out and come in for a few months. I watched him, feeling more and more like a beaten dog. What had I expected? We were at each other’s throats morning, noon and night. But still, but still and all. Can I confess it? I knew what the love of woman and man was, I had more than a hint of that, because—and I will not ask God to forgive me this, because he made us so—I desired that small, rotund individual of a man.

Ah but, then came his announcement:

‘All right, Annie,’ he says, ‘and you will be as likely glad to hear me say this, considering, but I have asked Anna Smith to marry me, and I think that will mean you finding another berth.’

My marching papers and no mistake, nor no thank you either. Came then sorrow, and grief. I fetched about me, writing to this cousin and that, saying I would be happy to work my way for any bed they could give me, and put the few sixpences I had saved into hens or whatever I might.

At first I had a yearning to stay near the great city, and felt I might, and wrote especially to my cousins, the children of my father’s brother, that kept the huckster’s shop in Townsend Street, hard by Trinity College - their mornings full of fellas in those blue and red scarves, south Dublin kids. One of those children of my uncle had gone to be a priest, and was now,
mirabile dictu,
auxiliary bishop of Dublin, the Very Reverend Patrick Dunne, Bishop of Nara.

Let me tell a strange thing, but Nara is a district of North Africa, and I do not think the said Patrick ever has been to see his flock, but at any rate, haven’t the bishops divided up the world for themselves like the Roman emperors did before them? I wrote to him too, when I was declined by his siblings in the huckter’s shop, and he said to me that he had a fine housekeeper, was hoping I was keeping well, and please to remember him to Matt, and he would pray for me, and was of the opinion that God would bless me, as a good woman and a hard worker, and he signed himself with the very undignified name of
Pat.

So, yes, briefly I cursed a prince of the church, and thought of that great palace of his in Haddington Road, and the number of empty bedrooms in it, and I hope the good natives of Nara will forgive me my blasphemous contempt. Finally, finally, I thought of Sarah Cullen in her little farm of seven acres, with six further acres of scrubby woods, and by heavens she wrote the most charming of letters on blue paper with red lines, and I remember it to this day:

The rescue of Sarah. And well I know the trouble the composition of that letter would have caused her, and the hours she must have spent that Sunday morning framing it in a way she would have liked to have it framed herself, to spare me the proper shame that Matt had put on me.

All these matters his presence brings back like a forceful fire. And now Sarah with her own threat of marriage. I do not understand it, I do not understand the nature of my fate, my ill luck, my true place in the world. It is not enough to be a slave to work. It is not enough to treat those around me with all the respect I can muster, and in Sarah’s case, the love and affection I have for her. His presence in this time of frailty further reduces me with the recollection of past frailty.

And yet I would not forgo his presence. It seems to a part of me like enormous luck to have him in the district—no doubt, no doubt the foolish, fond part of me.

I do not care about Anna and try not to think about her. I lie beside Sarah in the night-time, sweating, in a fashion I never sweat. It is like I am unwell, but I do not feel unwell. I do not understand it. I think I do not want to understand it.

We are having a picnic up by the corn-stand, myself, the children and Matt, him in his tweed suit and polished brogues, all brown and green he is, the colours of the crab-apple. We are not twenty yards of the roofs of the house and outhouses, but we hold our picnic there because the little boy thinks the circle of cut-stones, that indeed do look for all the world like great big stone mushrooms, ten of them in a circle, he thinks they are something to do with picnics, and if not picnics, fairies. The little boy has an interest in fairies, though Matt is not a one to fuel that interest, Matt is practical, citified. No, it is a great-uncle of the boy‘s, a man called Pat O’Hara that was mayor of Sligo in Forty-two, an uncle indeed of the child’s mother, who has told him all about fairies and fairy lore, not to mention the two-headed dog that he saw one night in the lights of his Ford on the Enniscrone road. I know the details of this because the child tells me over and over these matters, and forgets he has told me, and tells me again with all the freshness of a Biblical child recounting miracles, tales of a certain Jesus Christ just passed through his district. The boy loves and even reveres all his relations. I think he thinks we are nearer gods than mortals, it must be so. His grandfather, his mother’s father, in his sailing days, the boy tells me, fetched into Liverpool one journey’s end, took a room in a rundown boarding house, and was awake the whole night with someone sighing in the room, and betimes falling in beside him in the bed, but of course, when he lit his candle, not a soul was there to be seen. And he left that place in the morning, and heard much later that the landlady had murdered her husband, because he was found under the floor of that very room, as dry as the carcass of a mouse. These are the stories of a boy.