Shade (22 page)

The wind coursed through her hair on the journey home, as if the journey was one of air through her tresses, not through the glinting cottages of Slane, the dark streets of Drogheda, the moonlit low tide on the glittering wetlands. George wheeled to a halt in the gravel by their doorway and for some reason she hoped her mother was not up to greet her.

“Till tomorrow then, Private George,” said Gregory, dismounting.

“Goodnight Nina,” said George softly, as if Gregory didn’t exist.

She rose from the sidecar and kissed his dusty cheek, beneath the leather goggles. “Goodnight, George.”

Inside, the house was quiet. Her mother sat in the living room mixing a brandy and soda.

“You missed dinner,” she said.

“We had mackerel on the pier,” Nina answered, “in Clogherhead.” She heard the difference in her own voice and hoped, obscurely, that her mother couldn’t hear it. And, just as obscurely, she knew Gregory could. She walked through the hallway which seemed to shrink away from her, as if every angle, every plane, every parallel, bowed at her approach. She walked into the piano-room, with Gregory like a silent shadow behind her. She sat at the piano and began to play the Mozart, and when her memory of the Mozart failed, the bits of Schubert that she knew. Then her memory of the Schubert failed her in turn and she listened to the sound of the piano dying.

“I waited,” Gregory said.

“Did you?” she asked.

“Yes. I waited till it got too cold and I thought if you don’t come out I’m going, and I went to go in but heard something that made me think I shouldn’t.”

“Shouldn’t what?”

“Shouldn’t go in. Any further. But I could see your shadows on the wall, over the carvings. Then I walked back out.”

“Ah.”

“What? What does ah mean?”

“It means—Gregory, you’re crying.”

“I’m sorry—I feel—”

“How do you feel?”

“The way I felt when I came here first. When I saw you first.”

So she rose and put her arms around him and drew him down on to the small heart-shaped sofa and rested his head on the white skin between her neck and where her dress began, the dress that was still damp round the bottom, the white skin that would be brown in a few weeks, the first few weeks of real summer, and told him not to cry, reminded him of the days they had had, days on the white blowing sand, days round the tennis-court, days on the dunes, on the small canals of Mozambique.

“You don’t understand,” he said, “what you gave me was what I never had, you gave me a childhood and now it’s over.” And then her mother walked in.

What she saw was Gregory in Nina’s arms on the heart-shaped sofa, a child in everything but size, his lips on the delicate hollow beneath the nape of her neck. Her mother stopped momentarily in the doorway, her head to one side like a questioning bird. Her lipstick was smudged around the edges of her mouth in a way that gave her shock the appearance of a smile. An amused smile, as if a blemish had been exposed in a garment that she knew was flawed all along. She held the paper in one hand and a chewed pencil in another.

“Consecrate with oil?” she asked, with her mouth but hardly with her eyes.

“Anoint,” said Nina.

“Anoint,” she repeated. Then she scribbled in the clenched paper, her eyes darting from the crossword back to Gregory, now standing, his hand disengaging from Nina’s. “I think it’s probably best, after all, don’t you, Gregory?”

“What is best, Ma’am?” he asked.

“That you’ll be leaving soon. It’s an ill wind, as they say, a very ill wind. That blows no good.”

25

I
N MABEL HATCH’S
barn, I lay on the straw up near the top by the broken wooden wall looking out on the moonlit summer fields. And the hares danced, they definitely danced among the haystacks below. It had become the font of their going, their goodbyes, but I was alone there, enjoying my aloneness, wondering about that circular mound in Keiling’s field, that
mons veneris
where the stone woman tickled her own stone groin. I heard a footstep below me and saw a uniform walk in below me. “George?” I asked the uniform and the uniform answered “yes,” and this other George walked towards me, towards the uneven strawy steps the hayricks made, all on their own. He was lighter, this George, more delicate, more a Gregory than George, but Gregory needed to be George tonight, needed to be all that George had been, and this need added a solidity to his voice, added a weight to his step in the caked, straw-covered earth below.

“Is George coming up?” I asked.

“Does George normally come up?” he asked in turn.

“He does sometimes, sometimes he doesn’t, sometimes he’s up here and I come up to him.”

“Well then,” he said, “George is coming up to you now.”

And there were shadows everywhere but on the outside, outside that broken rectangle of wood, so all I could see was the uniform, the uniform shape and the promise of the man beneath, wearing it.

“George,” I said, “you’re late.”

“What time did I say?” he asked and I answered, “I don’t remember but whatever time, this wasn’t it.”

“I’m sorry,” he said.

“So you should be,” I said. “Sit down there now George, with your back against mine, I don’t want to see your face this time either.”

“This time,” he said, sitting down, “what about the last time?”

“The last time I didn’t see your face George, and you know why I didn’t want to see your face.”

“Tell me again,” he said, “why you didn’t want to see my face.”

“Because, you know, I wanted to imagine you were Gregory.”

“Why did you want to imagine George was Gregory?” he asked and I could feel the rough hairs of his uniform collar against my neck.

“Because then I could kiss you George, the way I would have kissed Gregory.”

“The way you would have kissed Gregory what?”

“The way I would have kissed Gregory if he had not been Gregory, if he had not been my half-brother, if he had been another called George.”

“Can you kiss and not see?” he asked softly.

“Yes,” I said, “if you close your eyes and turn your head a half-turn and reach your hand around to mine and bring it to yours.”

And he did that. And I felt his lips, the delicate ones, and his cheek, the downy cheek, and it was all like a membrane of water, any minute ready to burst.

“Can George do this, then?” he asked, and his hand travelled from my chin down my neck to the hem round my front.

“Did he or can he?” I asked.

“Did he?”

“He did and he can,” I said and
it
became like a game then, a game called Did George: did George do this, do this, do this, that and that. I said, “That’s what he did, just that, again that, but never so well, never so artfully. Are you remembering this, George?”

“Yes,” he said, “I know with certainty I will never forget this.”

“Good,” I said, “because it can never, ever happen again,” and the straw was around us now, if we wanted to be hidden we had ample means. The straw was under my arms, my knees, worrying the crack in my bum, the chaff in my mouth then, I ate
it
like manna,
it
was wet and dry at the same time, wet but left me thirsty, wet but left me dry somehow, and then I heard the owly cry again and listened for the beat of wings and then heard them, and opened my eyes in time to see the brown owl flying over him, above him, whose face I miraculously didn’t let myself see. And I turned my face away and saw through the broken beams the hayricks outside, the moon playing on them and the hares, the hares were gone and the taste of the chaff had turned dry and ashy, all of a sudden, inside my mouth. I felt the uniform retreat from me, slide itself back down the impromptu stairs the hayricks made, and wondered if the man inside it was crying the way I was.

26

L
IKE MOST EVENTS
, though, their departure did not have a clear beginning and an end, a definable moment which they could isolate and say, that’s when it happened, that’s the way it was, the way I will remember. The summer days drifted, the heat-haze grew in the fields, the golfers plied their mashies and niblicks up and down the untamed course. Gregory and George arrived and departed, as if they both had grown into mechanical extensions of that motorcycle and sidecar. They sweated in their uniforms but kept them on, returned for day-long marches round Baldonnel, rifle practice on Richmond Hill, a two-month bivouac in the fields near Londonderry. Seven shillings each, with meals, bed, boots and clothing.

And one day on the Baltray side of the river, across from the fish factory, George picked out from a small rocky pool four oysters the swirling water had left behind like an afterthought. He prized the shells open with his army knife and offered one to each of them, Gregory, Nina and his sister Janie. When they declined on grounds of taste, of the dull, brackish water in which he found them, he ate them himself, tilting the open briny shell towards his lips and swallowing the contents.

“You are barely civilised,” Janie said.

“An asset to any battle for civilisation,” said Gregory.

“What could be wrong with them?” George asked. “They’re only oysters.” But on the fourth mouthful he gagged, coughed and began to choke. Nina slapped his back till his face turned blue, then Gregory took over, with harder, manly strokes across the broad expanse of khaki.

“Can’t lose you, George, Kitchener needs you,” he said, and George coughed one last time, spat up whatever inside the shell had choked him. It rolled in the dry sand, gathered a coating of fawn, wet as it was, with his spittle.

“Ugh,” said Janie, disgusted by the whole procedure. But Nina watched it roll across the sand, back into the pool from which it came. She saw it gleam there, beneath the water, reached down her hand and rippled it back and forwards and drew it up again.

It was small, imperfectly round, with glints of turquoise beneath its creamy surface, unmistakably a pearl.

“You’re full of surprises, George,” she said.

“Here,” he said. “Consider it yours.”

“You swallow shellfish and spit up pearls.”

“Shall I try it again,” he asked, “eat half of the riverbank and make you a necklace?”

“No, George. One is more than enough. To remember you by.” She inserted it in the stitching at the hem of her dress.

“You’ll lose it,” Gregory said.

“No,” she said, “I’ll stitch it in tonight.”

As she stitched it in, alone in her room, not in her dress but in the lace hem of her peacock-blue shawl, she noticed the chestnut tree bending, in the evening light, over the roof of the courtyard outhouses. The branch parallel to the river, dipping under a considerable weight. She finished her stitching, rolled it in her fingers under the lacy hem to see it was secure. Then she left the window-frame, and emerged minutes later, crossing the courtyard, her white dress itself pearly against the dying light. She walked underneath the archway, past the glasshouse, down the long field towards the hulking figure, rocking on the swing beneath the chestnut tree.

“You came to me tonight,” George said.

“I was in my room,” she said, “how could I?”

“I don’t know how, but you walked across the fields and you got your feet wet and you knocked on my window and I climbed out and we walked across to Mabel Hatch’s barn and listened to the rain falling on the roof.”

“It’s not raining, George.”

“I know. I fell asleep. And in my dream you came to me.”

“Is that the first time I came to you?”

“Yes,” he said, “but there will be others.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t know, but something about the way you looked at’ me when you were bending over me and your hair fell on my face. An owl flew in one end of the haybarn and out the other. A brown owl. And I thought, if you come to me like that, on the odd night, it won’t matter. The brown owl will fly over us occasionally and the rain will drum off the roof and if I can’t have you, at least I’ll have this.”

“What will you have?” she asked him.

“I’ll have the other you. And nobody can do anything about the other you, it will always be there with the river and the mudflats and Mozambique.”

“And let us not forget Mabel Hatch’s haybarn,” she said.

“Did you stitch in the pearl?” he asked.

“Yes,” she said. “I stitched in the pearl.”

And she held up the hem of her shawl for him to feel it, and he eased his swinging as his large fingers turned
it
round and round in its lace bedding, and she thought what a fine job Dan Turnbull had done on the swing all those years ago that it still could bear the weight of what he had become.

They left the next day.

~

“We came to the quays to wish you off,” says Janie, “having no idea there’d be so many, khaki uniforms twenty deep along the quayside and the band playing ‘God Save The King’ and that little politician, Redmond wasn’t it, giving a speech from the raised platform and the other crowd dropping their banners of protest from the upper window of the Seamen’s Union building. Her father, your father, held both of our hands and her mother said, My father built that ship, built the quay that holds that ship, what was its name, the
Kathleen
Mavourneen.”

“He was in love with her,” Gregory says, “I knew that when he walked up the gangplank with me and refused to look back. He said if he did look back he would never have gone. And he said he knew Touchstone can’t love Rosalind, knew it was a dramatic absurdity. And I know I treated his emotions with a frivolity that he must have found contemptible, because, to tell you the truth, I envied him for having any coherent emotions at all. I had none then, or none that I could understand. I was leaving a place that had given me a childhood, and given me whatever manhood I would ever have, and as I was standing there and the boat drew away I couldn’t help wondering what was it that had turned the stuttering boy I met into the kind of man he was now. All I knew was that he loved her in a way I wanted to love her, but I knew of course that I couldn’t. If Touchstone loving Rosalind was a dramatic absurdity, Orlando loving Rosalind would be a dramatic obscenity.”