Shade (4 page)
And found herself, one week later, drawn in a train over the Boyne river, with the mullet circling lazily in the waters below, a kingfisher skimming the waters, its wings blue over the alluvial flow which looked like nothing so much as the gathering froth on the glass of porter that Miss Shawcross was bringing to her lips. For the governess liked her porter, brown upon brown.
Dan Turnbull met her at the station, carried her many bags to the pony and trap. And his dark, wide-brimmed hat with the fisherman’s hooks and flies dangling over the edge framed her view of the streets. She could have looked left or right and been free of this impediment, but Miss Shawcross’s gaze was designed to mean business, and, meaning business, remained fixed on the road ahead. So the city quays were spooled to her against this dark foreground, like the lumpen mass of a projector against a cinematograph screen. They were mean, shabby and noisome, as she had of course expected. What she had not expected was the gathering charm, as the bustle of the North Quay modulated to the low swish of fuchsia hedges against the carriage wheels. There were splashes of red and orange against the irregular line of hedge to her left, since the fuchsia and the honeysuckle were in full bloom, and to her right were the tidal mudflats, the tilted masts of fishing boats at odd angles in the silt, as if they had been dropped from a great height by an unseen hand. The only sounds were the swish and crackle of the wheels against the hedge, the scraping of the mare’s hooves and the drone of bees’ wings round the fuchsia and the honeysuckle.
Miss Shawcross, who had an imaginative soul belying her rigid exterior, began to speculate on the new charge that awaited her and that act of speculation, assisted by the Guinness she had consumed, became a kind of waking dream. She saw an oval face with a fringe of curls, a bow-like mouth beneath large brown eyes, and the face moved towards her and away, drifting in and out of focus as if she, Miss Shawcross, far from being on a jaunting car driven by the fixture whose name she had forgotten up in front, was in fact on a giant, swinging pendulum. And her speculative faculties being so dulled by the Guinness, she let this dream occupy the whole of her for well-nigh twenty minutes and was therefore both surprised and unsurprised to shake herself out of it, raise her head to view an irregular driveway curve towards a grey limestone house with a girl framed beneath it, standing in the unkempt grass, staring at the approaching trap with those same unblinking brown eyes of which she had been dreaming. Dan Turnbull let the mare nudge her way through the wrought-iron gates. Laziness had long inured him against attempting it himself, and besides, he admired the ingenuity, the sheer persistence with which she pressed the dappled plane of her forehead against the metal, gradually widening the gap to the screech of rusted metal hinges. Good girl, Garibaldi, there we go now. Garibaldi was a man, he had been told soon after he had named her, an Italian patriot, but he liked the name, so Garibaldi she remained. And the dead weight of the gates scraped off the mare’s broad flanks as she pulled the trap through. He could hear the slow, careful scraping of the hooves against the gravel, the metal hinged screech and a lightly snoring sound behind him, which he presumed was that school-teacher sleeping, like a cow, half upright. The gate swung back behind to its half-open state as the mare quickened her pace, scattering the gravel. Nina watched from the lawn, the house behind her at first, then shifting to one side as they headed towards the forecourt. Dan raised his arm in a lazy wave, which Nina imitated, a look of scientific curiosity in her upturned face. She walked, then ran, then slowed to a walk again, following the trap around the grey limestone walls.
The sun to the left of the house, gently shivering fingers spreading over the orchard wall, illuminates Dan Turnbull, the horse and cart and the lady with the pencil-stiff back and the stiffer-brimmed hat, leaving the house dark behind it. The lady is standing in the cart now and the golden glow lends her an alarming theatricality. Dan kicks loose the wooden steps with his foot, holds her gloved hand and plots her delicate course down step after wooden step till her feet reach the gravel.
“This is Nina,” he says and yells, “Nina. Nina!” His voice, brown and oiled like old tobacco, incapable of anything but warmth. “How are you Nina, how are you.” His hands, like stooks of barley, their own smell, tobacco and engine grease.
I walked around the house, I remember, towards the dribbling horse and the woman with the dark hat. Dan kept calling even though I was walking towards him, but he was like that, Dan, he would repeat a thing even though you had already answered. He lifted me up with those barley-stook hands and I could smell the tobacco and he said, “Here’s the girl miss, Nina, here’s your teacher,” and I knew even then that she wouldn’t last long. Her dark brim dipped down towards me and she peeled off her glove and reached out her hand. Her breath smelt of malt and her nails were dirty, yet I took it.
“My tiny one,” she said.
~
An oil-tanker drags its way through the already open gates, trundles up the driveway and parks in the gravelled yard. It sits there, diesel fumes steaming from its rusted exhaust pipes, beeps its horn, waits, beeps its horn again and waits again. A barrel-chested man in blue overalls gets out and lights a cigarette. He calls George’s name, George who ordered oil for delivery on this sixteenth ofJanuary, nineteen fifty. A radio bleeds from his cabin, a politician’s voice talking about the rural electrification scheme and its implications for counties Roscommon, Sligo and Leitrim. He listens to the voice, the silence around
it,
smokes his cigarette to the butt and walks towards the kitchen door. He pushes it open slowly, calls George’s name again. As his voice dies away, echoing through the empty scullery, he notices the purse on the pine table. He listens and when the silence seems absolute, he lifts up the purse, opens its clasp. He sees the wrapped notes inside but must think twice about it since he closes the clasp again, puts it down, walks back into the yard.
He walks down the path of packed mud towards the glasshouse, still calling, “Is there anyone there for Jaysus sake?” and only stops when he notices the streaks of red, frozen on the crushed grass, like deft calligraphy against the white hoar-frost. He follows them step by bloody step to the shattered glasshouse door, edges it aside and enters a warmer world, where the pale sun works its magic through the windows and falls directly on the syrupy pool of copper-coloured liquid. He says nothing, stares with a child’s curiosity and only makes a sound when he notes his own footprints: like George’s in the milk, but russet-coloured with day-old blood, the broken oval of the sole with the minute squares of rust inside it. He gasps, an emphysemic sound, through lungs long ruined by cigarette-smoke. He seems to want to run but resists the urge. He lifts his foot instead, grabs his ankle with his right hand, twists his shoe to stare at the sole. He replaces it carefully on the unbloodied portion of the glasshouse floor, steps carefully outside and does the unexpected. He wipes his feet on the frosted grass, an automatic cleansing. He feels either tainted, implicated, or simply repelled.
Then he runs back up the pathway of frozen mud, through the low stone arch of the outhouses, jumps into the cabin of his oil-tanker which lumbers into life, spewing clouds of diesel as
it
performs a groaning turn and hauls itself out of sight, leaving a pale mist of fume, through which the fagade behind gradually defines itself.
T
HE HOUSE THAT
Isobel Shawcross entered through the back, by the kitchen door, was a big house, a very big house. And Miss Shawcross’s first instinct was to make it smaller. She walked through it as though used to houses far bigger than this, infinitely more opulent, without the workaday scramble of its kitchen, the bicycle upturned outside the scullery door, without the irregular brass fittings of the ribbed stair-carpet that ascended towards those rectangular Georgian windows with their cubes of dusty light; as if she was used to houses infinitely more organised. And she sensed, though she can’t have known it then, that this was a house whose irregularities consumed things: trinkets, penknives, cutlery, haircombs of whalebone and ivory, odd socks and shoes, letters, laces and lapis lazuli rings. She would lose things in this house, she sensed, but she could never, then, have known how much. She could never have known that the losses would extend far beyond the contents of those stout leather valises that Dan Turnbull heaved in, one balanced precariously on his oily crown, one beneath his oxter and the third pushed by his hobnailed boot over the flagstoned floor.
“Let me show you to your room, Ma’am. And Ma’am?”
Miss Shawcross turned, in the scullery hallway.
“Yes?”
“I haven’t got three hands. Could you help me with that bag?”
She hesitated for a moment, and her nostrils did a birdlike twitch which Nina, and Dan, would remember as particular only to her. She bent then, took the valise in both hands and stood aside while he made his angled way, up the stone stairway, into the carpeted hall, up the wooden staircase with the high windows bleached by the afternoon light, on to the upper floor. There were doors to either side, all of them half opened, revealing further evidence of that disorder she had already divined. But her room when she reached it was a miracle of neatness. A smooth coverlet over a plain oak bed, a writing table by a window with a charming gothic arch.
“I’ll leave them here, Missus.”
“Miss,” said Isobel Shawcross. “Miss Isobel Shawcross,” she added, gazing out of the window at the white bundle swinging from the chestnut tree far below.
~
But now, in the present, in the time that moves at a constant measure, that neither speeds nor slows, at ten twenty-one on this sixteenth of January, a policeman passes through the sagging gates on a black bicycle. The white beard has all but vanished from the lawns, leaving such an even glisten of dew that it could be dawn again. It is Buttsy Flanagan from the station up the river beyond the docks and cement-works, the RIC barracks burned down in the Troubles and restored by the Civic Guards. He cycles slowly, as if unwilling to arrive. And having arrived at the circle of gravel behind the house scoured by the oil-tanker’s tyres, he examines the scene slowly, with a methodical, almost disinterested ease. He notes the crushed grass, the footprints, the pool of dried blood in the glasshouse. Each breath emerges from him slowly, visible in the cold morning air, like a laboured questionmark. He knew George, knew Nina Hardy, knew George’s sister Jane, but can no more connect the memories from his childhood with the scene before him than he could with a witch’s sabbath. He remembers three figures on a hayrick, swaying on the back of an unsteady tractor in the late evening sunlight. He remembers the beautiful girl, the woman really, in the floral print dress, walking past the pennant of the eighteenth-hole green towards the tennis-club dance. He remembers the scent of heather and cut grass and the sound of a Percy French song drifting from the clubhouse. Oh the nights of the Kerry dances, oh the ring of the piper’s tune, lingers on in our hours of madness . . . The conclusive line evades him for more than a minute, then, in the way of memory, comes just when he has stopped straining for it . . . Gone, alas; like our youth—too soon! He wonders idly how one sentence can contain so much punctuation. Then he hears the sound of a car chugging beyond the gaunt bulk of the house, and he feels relieved, that whoever has to plumb the realities of the scene before him, it will not be him. At least not him alone.
The car stops by the gates, deposits a policeman who closes them ceremoniously; his presence draws a knot of children coming home from school for lunch, whose presence in turn stops the milk van on its rounds, and a tractor carrying a mound of winter feed. By lunch time the sun has broken through the clouds, the grasses are dry, the inquisitive crowd by the gates has grown and the lawns are progressively trodden by policemen moving with large, somnambulist steps. There are no raised voices, no eruptions of emotion and the tragedy, if tragedy it was, seems already to have happened a long time ago. Another car arrives, dispenses policemen who proceed to traverse the grounds the way the first ones did, while those who have already traversed stand stamping their feet in the cold winter sunlight, smoking, talking in lowered voices. Towards evening a third car arrives, an unmarked one this time, pushes its way through the knot of the curious, waits while the gates are opened, then crunches its way up the gravelled driveway to the back of the house, which is revealed to be in fact the front.
Buttsy Flanagan stands in the low arch that encloses the courtyard and recognises the utterly silent, bowed profile in the back seat. He sees a man emerge from the front, in a white hospital coat, open the back door, hold an expectant arm forwards. He sees George emerge, place one enormous fist in the crook of the white-coated arm. He waits as George is led towards him, moves to one side and walks with them, following the irregular trail of blood towards the glasshouse. He observes George’s eyes, mute and uncomprehending, then follows again, when doctor and patient move, under whose impulse he cannot be sure, towards the river. There is a boat rocking in its concentric circle of waves, two policemen dragging the silt below with lead-weighted lines. George stares, his eyes sunk behind flickering lids, and stays mute. Then he disengages his arm from the doctor’s, turns and shuffles slowly away. The doctor moves to intercept him but Buttsy shakes his head, rapidly, surreptitiously. They let George walk then, and let themselves follow along the curve of river, up the rough field of marsh grasses that leads to the copse of ash and elder. They follow him through it with difficulty, an irregular path through the brambles and the darkening trunks. The light is now failing and they hold their breath as they walk, anticipating some Armageddon. They hear voices beyond them, ghostly voices drifting tonelessly through the ash trees. A shape up ahead, the curved eaves of a cottage from a forgotten fairytale. The voices continue, unaware, it seems, of the sound of three approaching pairs of feet. Then George edges the door open with his twine-laced boot, pushes it open and the voices grow, in volume but not in tone. And George sits down on the scuffed leather car seat, places his head close to the vibrating fabric of the radio speaker and listens to the evening news.