Chance Developments (11 page)

His mother wrote to him from Sligo. “My dear Ronald, your father and I are very happy. I have never seen him more contented, as I hope you will agree, if you are able to come and see us at the end of this term. I think he has forgotten all about the school—already—after only seven weeks away! Can you believe that? For forty years, or close enough, it was his life, day in day out, and then in the space of a few weeks it was as if he had never been a teacher. I am astonished, but I think it's good for him to have a whole new life.

“He has been brushing up on his Irish. There is a man near here who has had some Irish poems published and they talk together. Your da says that his words are coming back to him. He says that they have always been there, but they have been asleep for a long time.

“There is a woman in the village called Brenda Hallissey. She is a very good dressmaker and is teaching me some of her skills. I am making a waistcoat for your da out of some material I found in the attic. It is very thick tweed and I have to be careful not to get the needle in my fingers, but it will be a very fine garment I think. Brenda says that I have a talent for this sort of thing, but I am not sure whether she is just being polite. They are very well mannered in these parts.

“Your da is planting potatoes and some beans too. He says that we can live off the land here once we get the garden broken in. The uncle let it go to weeds and it is taking a lot of time to get it sorted out. Your da says that we have all the time in the world now that he has retired, but I say that you never know when the Good Lord will decide it's time to go, and so I have told him not to waste time in getting his potatoes and beans in the ground.

“And make sure that you don't waste time either. You know what I mean by that: do not wait for ever. The man who waits for the right girl may find that the right girl has herself not been waiting. That's a thought—just a thought, but, like at least some thoughts, it happens to be true.

“Your ever-loving mother.”

He first saw her when she drove past him on the road into the village. Because it had to serve another village as well, the school had been built between the two, so that the children of neither would be unduly favoured or inconvenienced. This meant that Ronald had a half hour's walk to do his shopping every Saturday morning. He enjoyed the walk, though, unless the rain was heavy, in which case he would take his bicycle, protected by the tent-like waterproof cycling cape that his father had used and had now passed on to him.

That Saturday was a fine day and he had been obliged to remove his jacket for the heat. Halfway through the journey, he had stopped at a place where the road for a brief time followed the shore of a lough, and there, under the shade of a rowan tree, he had sat on a half-buried boulder and looked out over the water. He was there for half an hour—he had plenty of time to reach the village before the shops closed at one o'clock; there was no need to hurry.

There were things to look at. Vetches—plants that as children they had known as
poor man's peas
—grew along the ground here, their tendrils reaching out for some stalk, some salience that would allow them to grow upwards. It was death to eat these peas, they said, and a dead cow in a field would as often as not be pointed to as a victim; but he knew—because his father had demonstrated it to him—this particular variety was harmless: bitter, yes, but not poisonous as legend claimed. There were rushes too, and snipe would sometimes rise up out of these, or perch on some stone or tuft and launch into their characteristic song that sounded so much like a squeaky door being moved backwards and forwards on its hinges.

He heard the approach of a car—a rare event, as there were few motor vehicles in the area, and if one were spotted, then everybody would be curious as to who it was. He craned his neck to give him a better view of the road, which was a good twenty yards away. The noise grew louder until, appearing from behind a rise in the ground, the car swept past him. He saw the driver, a man in a flat cap, and on the elevated seat behind, as if riding some winged chariot, a woman in a high-buttoned white coat. Her bonnet was kept in place by a veil tied over it and then fastened below her chin, but this was of light muslin and did not obscure her face to any great extent. She turned, and looked at him; she had not expected, he thought, to see a man under a tree in that remote spot, and he was sure he saw surprise in her expression. On instinct, he raised his hand. She returned the wave and then, in a cloud of dust thrown up from the unpaved road, the car disappeared from view.

He lowered his hand, still raised in salute, and in a sudden moment of needless embarrassment he saw that the thumbnail had a line of black dirt under it. He had dug out potatoes that morning, and although he had scrubbed his hands with a pumice stone, he had missed the earth under that nail. She could not have seen it, of course, but now he prised it out with the tip of his penknife blade. He felt warm. He felt his heart beating more quickly, as if to remind him that something special had happened.

He stood up and resumed his walk. Who was this young woman and where was she going? She had smiled at him as she waved, but that meant nothing, he knew; she would have smiled at anyone who waved to her from under a rowan tree in the middle of nowhere—of course she would.

At the grocery store, Heaney's,
he
asked about the car. “There was some sort of beautiful car went past this morning. A lovely piece of machinery. You wouldn't know whose it was, would you, Mr. Heaney?”

“A car with a young lady riding in the back?”

He nodded, casually, trying to create the impression that the question was not important.

The grocer was measuring flour, and he dusted his hands on his apron. “Now that would be Mr. Farrell. Well-off fellow. He bought that place up at Kilconnell—you know the one—ten miles over that way, maybe a bit more. Dublin man. Made a lot of money building houses.”

“You'd need money to buy a car like that,” said Ronald.

The grocer agreed. “But give me a jaunting car any time.” He paused. “Why would you be asking?”

“Just interested. As I said, it was a beautiful car.”

“And the girl too,” said the grocer. “That's his daughter, Anthea. She comes in here from time to time, but not on Saturdays. She goes off then with a cousin to see some aunt or other. Every Saturday. Nice girl, I'm told.”

He bought his supplies, packed them in the knapsack he had brought with him, and began the journey home.
Every Saturday…
If he were to wait on the road next Saturday, he would see her again. He would wave, and it would be as if they were friends—of a sort. He wanted to meet her. He wanted to tell her about the school. He wanted to sit there by the shore of the lough and watch the snipe. He wanted to lie back and look at the sky with her, at its cloudlessness, and tell her how the sky made him dizzy to look at when it was empty like that; and tell her other things that he had nobody else to talk to about: how he missed the company of his father, and of his friends in Dublin; how he felt that while they were enjoying all the
craic,
life was passing him by in this small place; how it somehow seemed that life was a sentence we had to serve in whatever way we could, hoping at least for remission at some point along the journey.

Once back at the house, he put his supplies in the food cupboard and went to the small living room at the front of the house. The afternoon sun warmed this room, and he could sit there and read the newspaper he had picked up in the village—published the day before—and look up the hurling results, which he followed closely. A friend from schooldays played an active role in the Gaelic Athletic Association and was keen for him to do so too.

He put down the newspaper and rose from his chair. He went outside, and stood for a while in the shadow of the house, feeling the breeze on his face. There was a smell of peat smoke, drifting from one of the houses further down the road; it was a smell that he had missed in Dublin, where coal, rather than turf, was used; it was a smell that reminded him that this was where he belonged. He felt unsettled—he had convinced himself that he could never stay in this place, but now he was not so sure.

He wondered if he could wait until Saturday to see her, but knew, of course, that he had no alternative but to do so. And it was while he was wrestling with this that he realised how he would be able to ensure that he met her next week. It was an outrageous notion, and he flushed with shame at the thought that he—the teacher—could do such a thing. It was almost as if the decision to act was being made by somebody else altogether—by some agency, some other presence, that was within him, operating through his mind, but at the same time nothing to do with him. This, he thought, is how it must feel to be possessed; to be aware that what you did was the act of something, some other person, within you that was not your real self, not the self that looked out on the world through your eyes when you awoke each morning, that accompanied you through the day, that experienced and remembered the things that happened to you, that whispered to you of memories, of love, of regret—of all that made us who we were.

He went that afternoon to the house of the local carpenter and his wife. They had two children in the school, and these children watched him through a chink in a door, awed by the presence of the teacher in their home on a Saturday afternoon.

“You fix furniture, don't you, Noel?”

The carpenter replied that he did.

“Upholstery too, I hear?”

Again the carpenter nodded. “You'll need to provide the fabric yourself.”

“It's not that,” he said. “I was wondering whether you could let me have some tacks. You use those, don't you?”

The carpenter left the room. Through the crack in the door the children watched him. He saw their shadows at the bottom of the door, thrown by the afternoon sun shining directly through the windows behind them.

“I know you're there, Padraig and Brigid,” he said in a loud voice.

The shadows froze, and then the carpenter returned with a small paper bag. “There's about thirty in there,” he said, handing the bag to him. “Will that be enough for whatever it is you're doing?” He paused. “I could come over and give you a hand, you know. There'd be no charge.”

Ronald shook his head. “That's good of you,” he said. “But not this time, I think.”

It was cold for spring, and he hugged his knees as he sat and waited for the sound of the car. Mr. Heaney had said that she went every Saturday to visit her aunt, but he had not said anything about her going at the same time each week. Ronald was a creature of habit, who liked to keep to a routine, but not everybody was like that. She might have decided to go in the afternoon instead, or possibly in the evening, and he could hardly sit out there all day in that weather. He looked at his hands, and thought:
These are the hands of a criminal.
But then he put the thought out of his mind.
I'm not stealing anything or harming anybody, I'm simply
…

His thoughts were interrupted by the sound of an engine somewhere in the distance. It was a strained sound, as if it were struggling up a hill, but then it relaxed as the driver changed gear. Now it was louder.
Sit still
, he told himself.
Look the other way—gaze out at the water of the lough
.

He focused on a duck, an eider, that was leading a brood of early hatchlings in a sedate line across the surface of the water. He counted the ducklings. Six. And how many would survive the next few weeks? Two? One? In an attempt to keep his mind off the approaching car, he tried to envisage their fate: the fox, for whom they would be a tasty appetiser, a voracious rat, a harrier or other bird of prey.

He was thinking of birds of prey when he heard the popping sound. It was not very loud, but it was audible enough, and now he could legitimately stand up and look towards the road. The car had stopped, and the driver was climbing down from his elevated seat.

Ronald walked towards the road.

“Having a problem?” he called out. “Broken down?”

Roger Kelly turned round, surprised by his sudden appearance. “Blow-out,” he said. “A flat tyre.”

Ronald shook his head. “Can I help you change the wheel?”

Roger gestured towards the rear of the car. “Thank you. I'll get the jack and the spare.”

Ronald saw that the young woman was getting out. Another young woman—the cousin, he assumed—was with her.

“What is it, Mr. Kelly?”

“A flat tyre, miss. Easily fixed. Especially with some help.” He nodded in the direction of Ronald, who smiled, and glanced at her shyly.

“That's very kind of you,” said the young woman.

“Not at all,” said Ronald as he stepped forward and offered his hand. She shook it.

“My name's Anthea Farrell,” she said.

He gave her his name.

“You're the teacher at that school,” she said. “The national school. That's you, isn't it?”

She looked down at the ground.

“I am,” he said.

There was something in her expression that puzzled him. She seemed amused.

“You'd better help Mr. Kelly. I have my camera. I shall take a photograph of the lough.”

“It's a fine view,” he said.

She looked out over the water, as if seeing it for the first time. “I should like to walk round it one day. Have you done that?”

He felt the back of his neck becoming warm. “I have,” he said. “I could show you, if you like.”

“I would like that.”

“Tomorrow?” he said.

She adjusted her veil. “I think that would be very pleasant. We could fetch you in the car.” She looked at the driver, who threw a glance in Ronald's direction. “Well, Mr. Kelly?”

He nodded. “As you say, miss.”

She smiled at Ronald. “Eleven o'clock in the morning?”

“That would be perfect.”

“Unless, of course, you'll be at Mass then.”

“I shall go earlier,” he said quickly.

He helped Roger Kelly replace the wheel with the spare. While they worked, both Anthea and her cousin took photographs. As the punctured wheel was laid aside, the driver ran his hand over the tyre. “Two tacks,” he said curtly. “You see? Here and here. Unusual, that.”

Ronald peered at the tacks as they were extracted from the tyre. “You'd think people would be more careful,” he muttered.

The driver looked at him sideways.