Annie Dunne (4 page)

Oh, Billy Kerr knows all this, if he knows nothing else, as he hovers there expertly amid the gleaming colours admitted by the door.

‘What’s up with you, Billy Kerr?’ says Sarah, coming in the door behind him, so he has to dislodge himself off the threshold. To my surprise his manner changes. He is very mollifying and stooping with her.

‘How d’you do, Sarah?‘ he says.

‘I do the same as most people at first light, bestir myself and set about my business.’

‘Of course you do.’

‘Your washing water is in the bedroom, Sarah,’ I say.

‘Thank you, Annie,’ she says, with especial kindness. ‘Shut the lower door, Billy Kerr, or you’ll have the hens in.’

Stooping, stooping. I am disturbed. I was ever disturbed I suppose by a man coming to the house. Perhaps it is characteristic, or historical. Half the castle regiment used to call at my father’s door for my little sister Dolly, and by heavens I never tired of seeing them on their way. I would not see her go with a soldier. And as for the young policemen that desired the same happy thing, they got even shorter shrift, because well I knew the extent of their wages, by listening to my father for twenty odd years. I would barely open the door to them. And Dolly used to accuse me of jealousy, but if it was that, it made no essential difference. She had to be protected. And Maud getting into a big moil of anxiety about it, as if worrying alone would fix such a thing.

‘What is it you came up to us to do?’ I ask him, as his eyes follow Sarah disappearing into our bedroom, rolling up the grainy sleeves of her blouse. We will be rubbing at those sleeves now on washday and she will regret her indifference then.

‘Hah?’ he says, as if that were English enough for me.

‘Is there a job you’re midway through, or what? I don’t remember sending down for you, if I may say so without offence.’

‘Sending down for me?’ he repeats, smiling, not bothering further to express his mockery.

‘Well, we have a world of work,’ I say.

‘I have my own work below,’ he says. ‘But I was of a mind to come and visit you.’

‘Visit? Is it visiting this is? At seven o’clock in the morning on a mere weekday? With the calves to muck out and the pony and the cows to milk and the water to fetch?‘

‘Winnie Dunne below thought it might be all right. That you might have something wanting to do. A fence or a heavy weight for moving. Or the like.’

‘Is it shillings you’re after? Because there isn’t a halfpen ny in the house till I sell my eggs in Kiltegan.’

‘I don’t depend on your shillings, Annie Dunne,’ he says, and laughs.

I am a little flustered now, confused. It’s an ill thing to mention money before a labouring man. I don’t know why I was betrayed into such a foolish remark. I am angry with myself. But I don’t know what the man wants. His bravery in front of me is confounding.

Now Sarah comes out again all spick and span from her washing. She has pinned her nice white hair into a bun. Usually it washes about her cheeks like hanging ivy. She has used the old brown hair hook that my mother left behind her. My mother pinned her exhausted hair with it in her last illness. I found it on her bedside table at close of day, and so kept it in her memory.

Sarah heads for the boiling kettle and relieves it of its turmoil by pushing it back on the crane, and she scours out the teapot with a splash of that water and then drops in four spoons of tea and wets it as suddenly as she can with a deluge of water. The four spoons don’t inspire. A spoonful for each drinker and one for the pot. The children are not interested in tea. So in the normal manner of things she would put in only three spoonfuls.

Billy Kerr is emboldened by all this to step further in from the door and he is smiling widely at Sarah, who probably is paying him no heed. He can count as well as me, we all went to the same school in our day, though he went ten good years, and more, it must be, after either of us. He is nodding his head as if someone has said something that he is assenting to. But no one has spoken. Sarah puts three blue and white cups on the table and sets the pot by them and the bowl of sugar lumps and the jug of milk. The broken light feasts on the turns of the glaze on these poor objects. Sarah lifts her face and without either happiness or sadness, or seemingly anything in between, says,

‘Tea for thirst.’

‘Aye,’ says Billy Kerr, and comes in further again.

I go over and take the arm of the little boy and shepherd him from the table. I cannot drink tea in this little muddi ness of confusion.

‘I’ll fill the bucket,’ I say, as neutral as an ambassador.

‘Oh, will you not drink your tea?’ says Sarah, genuinely surprised.

‘Put the cosy on it, Sarah, dear.’

‘All right, Annie,’ she says.

I find myself nodding to Billy Kerr. It is difficult to leave a room without even a bare nod, but I would rather I had omitted it.

‘All right,’ he says, whatever he means by it. It is just an echo of Sarah maybe. ‘Good day to you, my little bucko,’ he says to the boy as the child passes, being towed by myself, my defeat no doubt plain and clear by the redness I feel flaring on my cheeks.

And I go out into the yard, trailing doubt like a comet trails a fiery tail.

Chapter Three

I stand in the yard as still as a cow with her calf when the air presses down heavy in the summer. The bucket creaks ever so slightly in my hand.

What is this growing old, when even the engine that holds our despair and hope in balance begins to fail us?

She is old, yes, Sarah Cullen, as I am myself. She was born in the last flutter of the old century, in the winter of 1898. I was born two years later, it is the same gap oddly enough that is between the children.

She was a beautiful little girl, with a tousle of wheaten hair. Nothing afflicted her, joy jumped in her marrow.

There is only a whisper of time between then and now, it seems to me. The clock of the heart does not follow the one on the mantelpiece.

Oh, I thank God for Sarah Cullen. I have spent these years with her now, after Matthew turned me from the house in Dublin. It was a crime I will ever hold against him. To take up with another woman when my sister Maud was only two years in her grave. I did briefly have a hope that he might be glad of a female to serve his household, now poor Maud was gone. But that was not to be. He wished, it seems, to marry again, and he was not interested in his sister-in-law with her bowed back. While Maud lived, he used to jest, ‘Annie, you carry the moon on your back,’ which was a nice thing to say. But I do not think it looked to him like the moon when his mind turned to marrying a second time. But there. It is an ill story, maybe even a filthy story. That was a terrible time, and Sarah Cullen took me in.

All the anxiety of these recent years has been the fear of losing my last niche in the world, the left side of Sarah’s bed, and this little farm. All I have brought to her is a few of the hens, those Rhode Island Reds kicking about the yard, an almost laughable thing, and the strength of my own body. My fortune currently is the mere strength left to me, and the knowledge I have of the tasks of each day, of the byre, of the dairy, of the dunghill, of the well, of the fire. If that went, all my value would be at naught.

The county home is a fearful place. That is where the homeless and the country destitute go, the withered girls and the old bachelors finally maddened by the rain. This I know, because I have seen it with my own eyes. It is a terrible fact to me that my poor father died there, alone and astray in his head.

The Wicklow rain has madness in it like an illness, an ague.

I am thinking these thoughts as I stand, stymied, in the yard with the boy. The bucket is in my hand but I cannot go forward.

I can see, beyond the boundary of the green road, the stooped figure of Mary Callan, returning from the well.

She is a devil for disturbing the mud and the twigs at the bottom of any well. It is a penance to have to share a well with her, as we do. In the old days it was said that the first draw of water in the morning pulled the luck of the well into your bucket. She is certainly old enough to believe that, for she must be in her nineties. She has a field and a milking cow and a house with one room, and now the luck of this day in her brimming bucket. It will be an hour at least before the muck settles.

Sometimes too she brings that old blackened kettle of hers straight to the well and fills it. It leaves such a scum on the surface. You cannot truly clean a vessel that touches upon the fire, and I am sure she makes no attempt to clean it. She is a bad, old-fashioned woman.

But that is not the only thing that keeps me there. I feel like a woman that has left her gloves on the bus, beautiful soft leather gloves on the Dublin bus, and does not know it immediately, but senses powerfully her loss. It is that I have left Sarah alone with Billy Kerr.

The boy is looking up at me in puzzlement.

‘We must go back in, child.’

And back in I go, the boy still anchored by my hand, from the pleasing sunlight to the kitchen draped in its share of shadows. The little girl has already wandered off.

Sarah stands with her back to the turf warming her long bones and Billy Kerr sits in an easy and accustomed manner on one of the stone benches in the elbows of the fireplace. Neither is speaking. There is a sort of tea-drinking silence that country people have perfected over centuries. A lot can get said in those silences, they are dangerous elements.

‘What is it, Annie?’ says Sarah.

‘I can’t get the water now, Mary Callan has beaten me to it. That’s the danger of delay,’ I say, nodding to Sarah. ‘Now, that cow of hers,’ I say, but Billy Kerr interrupts me with a look of surprise.

‘What’s the matter with her cow?’ says Sarah.

‘What, Annie Dunne?’ says Billy Kerr, sceptically.

‘Blood in the milk,’ I say, authoritatively. ‘It should by rights be slaughtered.’

‘You think so, Annie Dunne?’ he says. ‘That’s a mite unchristian. She owns nothing else. She lives from that cow.’

‘She’s a dirty old woman that lives in filth, is the truth,’ I say, and immediately regret the flush of anger in my throat. My father used to say, some people misinterpret friendliness for foolishness. No danger of that in my case, I expect. But there is another foolishness, the foolishness of the angry woman.

‘You wonder why do I speak for her?’ says Billy Kerr. ‘Indeed, and I hardly know her, though she has lived there across your green road for all the years of my life. I am not acquainted intimately with her cow neither, having seen it only in the distance. But, the fact is, she is my mother’s cousin, and a clean-living sensible woman. Nanny Callan, she is called by our lot.’

‘Blood in the milk,’ I say again, without any relish, the gate of talk pushed open for myself, sadly. ‘I am afraid of what she leaves in the well. She has only the one bucket, I know, for milking and fetching water.’

‘I’m sure Mary Callan has more than the one bucket,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘Don’t the tinkers go about with buckets for twopence? Anyway, she is my cousin. That should be enough for you, to quieten your talk of her.’

‘Sure everyone is cousins here,’ I say, exasperated, more by myself than by him. What do I care for his damn cousi nage. Nothing.

‘He might be a cousin of yourself, Annie,’ says Sarah, in a reasonable, innocent tone, not by any means feigned.

‘Well, I hope then, not too close, for the purposes he has in mind!’

‘What do you mean, Annie?’ she says, with her guileless open face, with a curtain of fright down it now.

‘He knows what I mean.’

‘I do not,’ he says, with an air that would convince a judge.

‘Oh, he does,’ I say.

But I am not at all sure. And Sarah won’t look at me now. It is not her fault. She has fallen a-dreaming. It is her trick, her way of - I do not know exactly, of putting up with me, maybe. God help me! It is like Billy Kerr to rattle a person’s head. I must get him from the house. Oh, he delights in vexing me.

‘Mary Callan wouldn’t have much truck with two pences and tinker’s buckets,’ I say, like a leaking tap. There is polite scorn in my voice that would sap the strength of a lion. ‘There was never any money in her house, I’d be sure and certain. She is that old sort of cottier. The walls of that little one-roomed house are only mud. The hungers of the last century took her lot. In 1872, it is well remembered, when there was half a famine here, it nipped and tucked her kin, seven or eight of them that lived there. She and her father was left. She but a waif that time of fifteen years. She is said to be one hundred and two years old.’

What am I talking about? It is like the geese gabbling.

‘Annie Dunne,’ says Billy Kerr. ‘You are a humorous woman, in a manner of speaking.’

‘We will go down to Kiltegan in a while,’ I say to Sarah. ‘Don’t linger there too long.’