Annie Dunne (22 page)

I am sitting on the chequered knee-blanket Matt has carried up from his car. I am sitting there, half watching the girl and boy as they climb the old stones. The corn right enough used to be set up on top of them, on a framework of beams, so the rats could not reach the grain while it dried in the natural ovens of summer. Matt is talking to them, now and then brushing stray stalks from his trousers, laughing, talking, shooting the breeze he calls it, and indeed shooting his starched cuffs into the bargain. I suppose he is a dandy of sorts, what the wily local men might call a bucko. He despises the English or rather hates them as the old enemy of his youth, yet in the same breath of fact, isn’t he as close to an Englishman as makes no odds? He is more like the class of character a person might see issuing forth from Humewood in the old days, when there was still money and guests, and the old lady there was not inching quite so into decrepitude, along with her many-roofed mansion. The only thing flourishing there now I imagine is the rot in the roof beams, God help her, though there was a time naturally when pennies to her and her family were like rain in a filthy season, ever descending on them.

Curiously enough, there is a touch of my dream about it, because the sunlight is sitting on my knees through the thin cloth. I have that knee-warm feeling. I have many feelings, I suppose, turning all on the same sixpence. Sunlight, sunlight, there is ease in it, if no future, no guarantee of being there tomorrow. It is a moment of ease, of nice laziness, Matt cavorting now, on his own knees, indifferent to the grass stains, giving horse rides to his niece and nephew. The eggs that Sarah has boiled for us lie in their strange pyramid on the opened handkerchief she had wrapped them in. The sweetened water sits in its heavy earthenware jug, juggling, one might say, the very sunlight on its surface, a little splay of blowing and fading stars. Deep in the warm trees there will be animals, badgers asleep, foxes in their short cuts. Bullfinches, blue-tits, yellow-tits, mere sparrows, cascade at the corners of the picnic, where we have thrown our crumbs. If Matt is happy, the children are delirious.

Eventually, panting and hot, Matt sits down beside me. He chooses a boiled egg and sinks his white teeth into it, white against white, though different whites they are.

‘Papa, Papa, Papa!’ cries the little girl. ‘Don’t sit down!’

‘I must, I must,’ he says. ‘I am dying.’

‘Don’t sit down like Auntie Anne,’ says the boy. ‘Don’t sit down like a grown-up!’

‘Oh, thank you,’ I say.

‘But I must,’ says Matt, ‘or I may die!’

Nothing then for a little. I am tempted, sorely tempted to peer beside me at his knees. Does he feel yet the influence of the sunlight? Is there warmth gathering there?

‘This is one spot in the world,’ he says, ‘where Magritte might find an answer to his paintings.’

‘Who is that, Magritte?’ I say.

He does not even look at me. Why would he bother? I do not actually know what he is talking about. But I remember the rows he had with his eldest son over such strange names, the misery it caused them both, shouting, and doors banging. Although that son was an artist too and should by rights have been of like mind.

Then he says nothing a while, letting the sunlight stew along his clothes. The friendly smell of tweed rises from him. Single flies whine across us, firing off into the woods. That ease beyond price that is in the gift of summer has seeped into my marrow. Co-co-co-rico goes the wood pigeon, the only thing that it ever says, that it never tires of saying.

‘Realism, you see,’ he says, like another normal person might comment on the weather. ‘Ah well.’

He is dark to me really. I’m looking at him. An Irishman of middle years, of later years, a painter, teaching drawing to rascals of boys in the technical school in Ringsend, smiling out at the view. The woods above us are very dark too, despite the brightness of the day. To the best of my knowledge he is not known among artists. Yet he is at ease now, polished, starched, happy somehow. I must remember the strange name. Magritte. So I can talk to him sometime about these matters that preoccupy him. Magritte.

Suddenly, in the midst of all that peace, not least this peace between Matt and me, I want to ask about the children, I want to have his views on what I witnessed - to release me from my doubts and intimations, so I am no longer alone with them. Even the night before as I lay in bed, when a person is prey to fears, a strange thought came creeping into my mind. The thought was but a shadow, a hint. Something about Trevor, the little girl, a notion I could not make clear to myself.

‘They do seem happy,’ I say.

‘Oh yes,’ he says.

‘The girl has settled in,’ I say lightly, but inviting, I suppose, a comment.

‘She is happy as a sunbeam. Children that age are always happy.’

I hesitate. The seeds of dandelions bump along in the air. The little boy is puffing at the soft, round heads, laying them waste. One o‘clock, two o’clock, three o‘clock ...

‘Trevor loves them dearly, of course,’ I say.

‘What do you mean, Annie?’ he says, his face coarsened with puzzlement. ‘Trevor adores them.’

‘Yes. Yes, he does.’

He catches something in my tone, or so I imagine. At any rate, he is looking at me now as if I were that two-headed dog on the road to Enniscrone. Now it is him who doesn’t understand me. I am afraid to say anything further, but I must.

‘I caught the little rascals kissing the other day,’ I say, with a false laugh. My cheeks flush.

‘Ah well,’ he says. ‘Did you never practice your kissing as a little girl? I suppose you didn’t.’

Oh, why do you suppose that? Why, Maud and myself practised kissing till our lips were sore, in the privacy of the back scullery in our castle quarters.

‘Kissing!’ he says. ‘Quite natural, quite natural, Annie.’

He is the father of three boys, he must know. The wonderful flavour of the day reasserts itself. It is like Eden, my own father used to say, in the bright dispensations of the summer months. These days that, even as you live through them, seem like memories, caught up as they are in the lost happinesses of other, similar days.

He gives a little laugh, and takes his gaze off me, as if he thinks I am mad.

‘You know, Annie,’ he says, leaning back on the grass, chewing at his egg—already he has put the matter out of his head—‘you are doing a wonderful job with these children. They are as active as chimpanzees. How do you do it? I wouldn’t last a day. They are lovely, oh yes, but, heavens you would need to be in the first flush of youth for them!’

‘You have to know how to manage them,’ I say, a little dizzy now with relief, ‘like any other creature - how to farm them, in effect. Though, yes, there are nights when Sarah and I fall into bed with the gratitude of women reprieved.’

‘Well, I hope Trevor is good and grateful, and I’m sure he is.’

‘Well, we have heard nothing since he left to go. The little boy writes a scrap of a letter to him every day. Just scribbles and gobbledegook. I am keeping the letters. But I am hoping their father will write soon, or I will have to make up a letter, and pretend it’s from him.’

‘And their mother?’

‘Oh, just the same.’

‘They will be very preoccupied, setting up house.’

‘Oh, yes.’

‘And they are safe here. They know that. Nowhere safer than Kelsha and Annie. You are doing a tremendous job, tremendous. Yes, I am saying to you, Annie, I am admiring you for it.’

So I am silenced by that, how could I not be? It is praise from on high—I almost said, from the master. I luxuriate in it, I confess. For those moments I feel like the greatest minder of children, the greatest great-aunt that ever lived.

‘Ah, sure,’ I say, ‘it is a pleasure mostly.’

‘They are grand children,’ he says, watching them. ‘Grand.’

What I would like to say to him is, ‘Matt, Sarah too is on the brink of marrying. What will I do, what will I do? Who will take
me
in, and guard me, and be father and mother to
my
fears? Won’t you help me, Matt? Won’t you take me back?’

But pride, oh, and sense too, forbids it. Of course it does. I know the story of the world. Aching hearts and silences. So was it ever, so will it ever be. I must be tremendous Annie instead, on the dry grass as near to fire as makes no difference.

Oh, grind up the furze-root as you might, and feed it to us, you could not put the two of us a-ploughing. Grind up the furze, grind up the furze, but I fear it will be to no avail!

When he is going out the gate that evening, I give him a wrap of my butter, as a memorial of the day. He says he will spread it upon his bread in the morning, under the heats of Lathaleer.

And like old friends fond of each other’s company, we make a plan for one of the days to drive in his Ford into the Glen of Imail, and choose some wild spot there with the children, and picnic again.

Strange days of peace, considering.

That evening I play with the children with an odd abandon. It is the game they love,
How Many Miles to Babylon?
They take turns, dutifully, but with ferocious desire in their eyes.

I put the little girl up on my knees for the umpteenth time. My lap is sore and rubbed by them. My old dress has taken a drubbing. But, what do I care?

‘How many miles to Babylon?

Three score and ten.

Will I be there by candlelight?

Sure, and back a
-gain.‘

And when I reach the
gain,
I let her down suddenly between my legs, holding her hands, her scream echoing in the lime-washed room. The little boy is already jumping and clamouring for his go. Sarah is laughing in the shadows.

Candlelight, candlelight.

Chapter Thirteen

An old woman, one of the O‘Tooles, that lived in the last house except one on Keadeen - the rabbit man is the last—has died, and Sarah has gone up the mountain road to lay her out. She is a woman I never knew, and abided her last days in a tiny thatched cabin with mud walls, all half sunk back into the wild earth from which it was made. How lonely she will have been. Neighbour she had none, except the rabbit man. And he is a man of few greetings mostly. The odd time there is the summer of talk in him. But when you might see him on the road betimes, and when that usual mood is on him he will barely greet you. And when you turn your head again to see him, he will be gone, gone out of sight entirely, plunged up silent and quick into his woods, like a spirit, like a vanishing sprite.

So that old woman cannot be said to have had a neighbour.

I did not even know she was there until her family came in and asked for Sarah. For Sarah is always called on for the laying out, and when she was younger, and a child was sick in a neighbour’s house, oftentimes she was sent for, for to suggest a remedy. Of course there is the good doctor, Doctor Byrne, but he must have money for his work. Sarah will take no money, nor nothing else in kind. It is a part of her secret, a reclusive gift.

But I notice these years she is never sent for. It is to do with the tarring of the roads, the demise of the traps, the death of things we knew in general. A gift like hers is no longer trusted, being a home-made thing. The shop-bought bread, the shop-bought medicine, it is all part and parcel of the same thing. At least now, when a last woman is to be taken from the mountain, where she must have lived in secret penury, the family have the justice and the ceremony to call on Sarah.

She has gone up the hill with her candle, her basin and her cloths. She will wash that old lady for the last time, and burn the clothes after at the back of the midden. She will lay those cool cloths along arms and withered legs, she will scour out the old body, and plug her gently, and fold those arms of long work and toil. If she was a child of Mary at school as a little girl, she will have a blue habit folded in a drawer and Sarah will put that on her, as a mark of her goodness, or at least, former goodness. If there are scapu lars sewn into her knickers, she will snip them out and give them on to the eldest girl among her surviving relatives. They are all people that have left this district. Her great-uncle was the famous silent man, Wesley Mathews, who spoke but seldom. It is said that when he went to America he was conversing with a neighbour on the last day. The neighbour says to him, ‘Wesley, see that blackbird. It is the blackest blackbird I ever seen.’ Wesley said nothing, but went to America the next day. Fourteen years later he returned, and met the neighbour on the road. ‘It is,’ he said.

But that is a story told about many places, and it may have no truth. Sarah will not be thinking of such a thing while she works.

Then poor Father Casey with his onerous gout will come up past us here in his car, driven by his man German Doherty, humming no doubt one of his dancing tunes. Because German Doherty plays in the ceilidh band, and after the harvest they are called on to visit the houses, when people want dancing and happiness. He cuts a sharp figure there with the priest, German Doherty does. They will sweep up the mountain, German dodging the worst of the ruts in the track, and singing. Then that old woman will get her oils and her solemn prayers. At the close, Sarah will place a candle in her hands, and open the window. And when the wind blows out the candle, that will be called the fleeing of the soul, up to the heavens.