It Was Only Ever You (2 page)

They stopped at the roadside to strip off their shirts and Brendan pulled a packet of Woodbines out of his breeches and passed them around. ‘I’ve half a mind to take these trousers off,’ he said. ‘I’m roasted alive.’

‘We’d rather you didn’t,’ said Tony, who, despite his burly physique, had the manner and wit of an old woman. ‘I caught sight of your bollocks once and I’d just as soon not repeat the experience.’ He pulled a small hand-corked bottle from his shoulder bag.

‘Is that tea?’ Brendan asked as Tony perched himself on a stile at the side of the road. ‘Isn’t your mammy great altogether?’

‘She’s grand, surely,’ Tony said coyly, ‘and this is the finest and sweetest tea my mammy ever made me.’ Then he took a swig from the bottle and grimaced wildly.

‘You fecker – it’s poitin! Give us a swig!’

The other two made a grab for the flask, as Tony dived under their arms.

‘It’s tea, I’m telling you!’ he said, walking backwards down the road, waving the bottle at them and laughing, urging them to follow.

Brendan chased after him, but Patrick held back and started to pull his shirt off. Of the three, twenty-five-year-old Patrick stood out as the eldest and by far the best-looking. His luxuriant black hair was slicked back from his forehead in a heavy quiff and his white shirt-sleeves were rolled up to his shoulders to reveal muscular tanned arms. He had the tall, broad physique of his father, but unlike other men whose bodies were built more for labour than for love, Patrick carried himself with a nonchalant charm. However, while his peers envied Patrick, they could never hate him. Although he looked like a Hollywood idol and had all the girls round about driven pure daft chasing after him, Patrick was sound as a pound. There wasn’t an ounce of arrogance about him, unlike the la-di-da local gobshites that went off to London for a summer working the sites and came back with big ideas and cockney accents. Patrick, with his singing talent and his good looks, could easily go off abroad and make his fortune. But he didn’t. He was happy at home, working on the farm, and singing whenever he was asked. He wore his gifts lightly and was always sure to direct attention away from himself. Only last month, at a dance in Pontoon, he had cornered Mary McCarthy and gazed searingly at her, then, just as she was fit to fall into a swoon, gently delivered her to Tony Kelly who had been plucking up the courage to speak to her for six months. Tony didn’t mind that she had fallen in love with Patrick first. It was a rite of passage for almost all the girls in the town anyway and, sure, Tony was a little in love with him himself. Mary was engaged to him now and Patrick had made that happen.

Patrick laughed, watching big Brendan make a grab for Tony’s poitin flask, but as he went to place his shirt on the stile it fell on to the high soft grass on the other side. Reaching over the wall to get it, something caught the corner of his eye. It was a girl, standing stock-still in the middle of Mickey’s field. Facing her, not twenty feet away, was the bull.

‘Mother of God,’ Patrick whispered to himself. Without thinking, he clambered over the stile. Cautiously but steadily he began to walk towards the girl. Her body was paralysed with fear, he could see that from here. She was doing the right thing, standing still. As Patrick inched closer, the girl turned her head towards him. It was Dr Hopkins’s daughter, Rose, his younger sister Sinead’s best friend. There was a look of terror on her pretty face.

The bull seemed transfixed by a small, blue bag dangling from her arm. Rose must have been heading down to the lake for a swim and not known to avoid the field. Her flowery dress had a solid red ribbon around the hem, which was fluttering slightly as she struggled to hold her shaking legs steady. One gust of wind, and the red hem might set the bull charging.

As their eyes met, Patrick raised his palms up in front of his face and shook his head. He wanted her to stay exactly where she was. He was twenty feet to the other side of her now and knew he had to act fast. So he opened his mouth and he sang.

‘The pale moon was ri-sing, above the green moun-tain...’ Patrick’s broad, impressive baritone reverberated across the empty field.

As soon as she heard his voice Rose felt the frozen edge of her fear melt away. For a few seconds the bull just stood there, confused, then, slowly, he turned his head towards Patrick. As soon as he did so, Rose began to run.

Still distracted by Patrick, the bull scraped the ground with his left hoof. Once Patrick was sure that he had the animal’s full attention, he began to wave his arms wildly. Then, still singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’, he did a little dance before shouting, ‘Come over here and get me, ya big hairy bastard!’

As the bull started to charge, Patrick turned and ran as if all hell was after him. He could feel his heart banging in his chest as the galloping hooves of the heavy animal reverberated through the soft ground beneath him. His friends were shouting frantically from behind the wall, ‘He’s up your arse! Run!’ Patrick had barely made it over the stile when the bull stopped a few feet short of the stone wall. His nostrils flared as he shook his flat square head.

‘Jesus, Patrick, you pure lunatic, you could have been killed,’ Tony said.

As the bull began to turn, his adventure over, Patrick picked up a stone from the ground and threw it at his ear.

‘Feck. What the hell are you...?’

‘I have to go back for her,’ Patrick said to his friends, ‘make sure she’s safe. Keep him busy.’

Before the other two had the chance to object, he climbed over the wall back into the field. As he ran across the flat meadow of daisies and dandelions towards the mirrored glint of the still lake, Patrick could see that Rose was well clear of danger, but he still followed her.

He caught up with her at the old boating jetty where they all swam. She did not seem surprised by his sudden appearance. Perhaps she knew he would follow her. Patrick felt a pinch in his stomach when he thought that.

‘How’ya now?’ he said.

She looked up at him shyly from beneath long black eyelashes.

‘Grand,’ she said.

Rose had the type of elegant, refined beauty about which his mother might remark, ‘That girl has a touch of Grace Kelly in her.’ Sleek blonde hair sat in lush waves across her delicate shoulders. Her skin was pale silk, and her cheeks and lips were tinged with soft pink, as if God had remembered the rouge. She had an almost overt perfection to her appearance, which, when she was younger, had made her appear prim. As she grew into a woman it had made her astonishingly beautiful. He remembered his father and his pub cronies saying about Grace Kelly one night, ‘That woman’s face is a caution. It doesn’t do for a woman to be too beautiful.’ ‘You wouldn’t know what kind of trouble they’d lead you into.’ ‘A plain woman will never stray too far from the house.’ ‘Marriage makes a woman plain in any case – that’s the proper order of things.’ ‘All the same, I’d do time for a kiss from them perfect lips!’

Rose was his sister’s wee friend. He had never paid any attention to her before now. She was just the blonde quiet girl in the background of his life. Yet now he was noticing that her rosebud lips were set in a closed smile, pouting. He thought of reaching across, touching them gently with his thumb to see if they were as soft as they looked. He had done that a hundred times before with other girls, but with Rose he felt unable to. She was too much for him. Too beautiful.

So, he looked down at his feet and said, ‘That was some bull.’

‘It was surely,’ she replied.

He looked up at her again and she was smiling. Her teeth were straight and white and her blue eyes turning sapphire in the sunlight.

‘Yeah, that was some bull,’ he continued, gravely adding, ‘It might have killed you.’

‘Might have,’ she said brightly.

‘And me too. Did you see the way he was chasing me across the fields? I tell you, he was going at some speed.’

She shrugged, and smiled a little bit. Not a big smile. Just a small one, her eyebrow raised slightly.

She was mocking him!

‘That was some stupid thing you did coming through the field like that with everyone in the town told there was a bull in it.’

The happy glint dimmed in Rose’s eyes and she lowered them.

He had upset her and immediately felt sorry.

‘There was no sign,’ she said, still looking at her feet.

Patrick remembered that, being part of the professional class, Rose’s family lived slightly apart from the ordinary town people. As the local doctor, her father was liked and respected, but his wife was aloof. Mrs Hopkins was not interested in local news and Rose was never let out to dances or to the pictures like other girls. It was possible then that she had not picked up news from around the town about Mickey’s new bull.

‘Well anyway,’ he said, making his voice as soft and gentle as if he were talking to a child, ‘you’re safe now.’

She rewarded him with a smile as dazzling as a film star’s and Patrick felt that his legs might go from under him.

‘Are you going in for a swim?’ he asked.

It sounded like such a stupid thing to say now, but she laughed, as if he were the wittiest man in the world.

‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘What about you?’

Spurred on by her smile and the aftermath of his bull- chasing, Patrick ripped off his shirt, breeches and pants, and then right there, stark naked and in full view of Rose Hopkins – the doctor’s daughter – he ran down the jetty and threw himself into the freezing water. When he came back up to the surface he saw her standing there on the edge laughing and clapping. Patrick felt as if he was the funniest, cleverest man in the world.

‘Come in,’ he shouted. ‘It’s warm, I promise.’

Rose took off her shoes and laid them carefully on the mossy wood, then sat down on the edge of the jetty and dipped her toes in the water. She let out a shiver. ‘It’s cold as ice!’ she squealed, then said, ‘I’m not as adventurous as you.’

He swam towards her, making long broad strokes with his arms, trying to impress her. He trod water in front of her, his breath heavy with the cold. He could feel every inch of his naked body tingling, the chill of the water fighting the heat of his nakedness. Rays of sun bounced off his skin and looking down at his arms he saw how tanned he had become. With his long narrow face, broad nose and coarse curls, Patrick was told he was the most handsome boy in the town. He didn’t care much about that, but he also knew when he fixed his vivid blue eyes on something, be it girl or bull, what effect they had.

He fixed them on Rose now and said, ‘You’re as adventurous as any man, I’m thinking.’

‘What makes you say that?’

Patrick’s limbs were getting tired and he suddenly regretted his spontaneous urge to strip naked.

‘Facing down a big bull, there’s not every man would do that.’

He felt stupid having a conversation, with her fully dressed in the warm sunlight and him naked in the freezing lake. What had he been thinking of?

Then Rose did something entirely unexpected. She closed her eyes, pointed her toes and slid herself, fully dressed, into the water with the smoothness of a raw egg sliding down the edge of a cold plate. Before her head went under, Patrick heard her say in a clear voice, yet not much louder than a whisper, ‘Save me. I can’t swim.’

*

Rose didn’t know why she did such a reckless, stupid thing. It was the same passionate impulse that had led her to take the back route down to the lake, after she had seen Patrick Murphy and his friends taking the road in that direction with their swim bags. Her parents had gone down to Galway for the day and she had stayed behind in the house on her own.

Her mother had wanted her to go with them. She was quite insistent but Rose had said she would prefer to stay at home and sketch. Eleanor Hopkins had no reason not to trust her daughter. Rose was a quiet, studious young woman who, aside from a friendship with young Sinead Murphy stretching back to their first years in school together, spent most of her time drawing and sketching, for which she had some considerable talent. There had been talk of sending her up to Dublin to art school, when the time came. But the idea of that made Eleanor uncomfortable. Rose had grown into a beauty and Eleanor knew all about the great responsibility beauty could bring and the terrible pitfalls that came with male flattery. Including a backstreet abortion in a filthy room above a shop in Dublin’s seamy streets, which had robbed a demure young girl of her capacity to have children. It was a dark secret that, as a medical man, her husband suspected, but never referred to. Rose was adopted from a convent shortly before the Cork doctor moved his practice and family to this Mayo town. Rose did not know she was adopted and her parents never discussed it, even between themselves. Although their daughter’s astonishing beauty was a constant reminder of her provenance, they kept it a secret from her. It was their shame, not hers.

Eleanor loved Rose even more than if she had given birth to her from her own broken womb. Now she was determined to keep her daughter away from boys for as long as she could.

Perhaps, then, it was a rebellion against her mother’s anxiety and persistent cloistering that had caused Rose to chase Patrick Murphy and his friends down to the lake that day. The very moment her mother’s back was turned she had faced off a bull and then slid into a lake in the hope that a young man would save her from drowning.

Rose felt the freezing water creep through the roots of her long thick hair as the ends floated up to the surface then, as she sank, tangled about her face in a slimy curtain. She struggled to hold her breath and after a few seconds felt the panic rise up in her, willing her to flail around and struggle against the water to reach for the air again. As she was about to open her mouth, she felt the force of Patrick’s body push against her as he carried her in his firm arms up towards the surface of the lake. They burst out of the water and sucked in great breaths together, gasping and clinging to one another.

Rose had not intended to drown. All she had known was that she had wanted to embrace the moment, to keep the adventure alive. When Patrick had saved her from the bull, the feeling of having been rescued was sweeter than she could have imagined. In those moments, as she was running across the fields, heart thumping, blood pumping through her small breasts, her feet running so fast across the soft grass, she felt as if she was flying. So, she thought, this is what love feels like: to surrender and be saved. She wanted to do it again.