The All of It: A Novel (7 page)

“Of course,” he smiled. “Go on please, Enda.”

“Well, Mr. Dunne told us again to get in the car. Kevin shouldered our pouches and I saw him wet his lips the way he would when he was full of dread, but, I don’t know, for myself, the minute I was on the seat I couldn’t wait to feel how it would be when we were off and going—
it
taking
us
, you know. The speed and all. And it was wonderful, of course.
Beyond
me to tell of! The trees—there was a great long avenue of them; beech, they were—we railed past them so fast they came together in my eyes. It put me laughing, I loved it so!

“When we stopped, I just sat, stunned, you know, not thinking of where we were or of Mr. Dunne, just gone over with the joy of the ride. Mr. Dunne,
though, he brought me back, asked me, ‘So you liked it, Enda?’ and I told him full-hearted that I
did
, that as long as I lived I’d not forget it.”

He allowed himself the image of her young and, in the confusion and charm of her excitement, radiant. He added to the image a docile afternoon sun that warmed her hair….

“Father?”

“I was thinking of your pleasure in the ride,” he responded hastily.

“Mr. Dunne gave me three more before we left the place,” she boasted, “but that first one, well, like I said, it’s beyond me to tell how I loved it.”

He arched his brows: “You stayed how long on the place?”

“Near three months…. Mr. Dunne came to speak of Kevin as ‘his other right hand.’”

“And did you work too, Enda?”

She nodded. “I started very low on the ladder, at laundering, but in a bit the housekeeper; Mrs. Bowler, a queer one, but fair enough to us girls that did our work well, she put me to being one of the cook’s helpers. I never gave her cause for worry, did everything just as I was told and never raised a tongue about the hours…. When I say she was queer—she’d line us girls up to give us, you know, our orders for the day, and always, somewhere along the way, she’d get in a word about her notions of what she called ‘one’s station in life,’
meaning of course
ours
, not hers. She’d a bit of a pinched face, very like a marten. Haughty. Stuck on herself, as they say.” She smiled. “The
people
of the world, Father: the variety!”

“Indeed,” he laughed, “variety is the right word.” Then: “What caused you to leave the place, Enda?”

She frowned. “It’s hard to put into words, Father…. It was both of us wanted finally to go, not just Kevin, you shouldn’t suppose…. It was several things, starting with the fact of there being so many people forever at our elbows.
That
, and that all our hours and steps were spelled out for us, that we were
told
, you know, every move we were to make. And the
bells
!” she spat out the word.

“Bells?”

“All manner of them,” she replied vigorously. “The one rung mornings at half-five in the stable-yard to get the men up and going and again at noon sharp for their dinner-break and again at six, six being their quitting time, and inside the house, every minute, the mistress or guests—there were parties of guests forever coming and going—setting off bells and chimes and gongs, the maids tearing up and down the staircases and through the halls seeing to the answering of a fresh summons before there’d been a chance to finish with the errand of the one before it.”

“Frantic,” he murmured sympathetically. “And
the other reasons you left? They’d be ones of a deeper, personal sort, I’d suppose.”

She let her eyes be still in his gaze, then stated weightedly, “They were.”

“Tell me, Enda.”

She didn’t waver: “Mostly, it was the way things that were new to us kept coming at us, no end to them, and—I don’t know—after a while, it wore on us.” She paused, briefly considering, then qualified with: “I have to say, I don’t mean things as
things
so much; once we were shown the use of something that was new to us, its
purpose
, you know, that was that as far as we were concerned…. What I’m talking of had more to do with ourselves—” She fidgeted; then, in a rush: “that we were outlyers.”

He let her rest on the word, until: “You see, Father, the others, they’d all been raised on the place or close by to it and, well, they were
thick
, you know, in that way people are who’re known to each other right down to their socks. Some of them,” she hastened on, “were even knit by blood—cousins, and the cook an aunt to the head gardener’s wife—ties like that. But kin or not, like I said, they were that thick.” She emphasized her point by entwining her fingers.

“Ladled from the same pot of broth, as my mother used to say.”

“Aye,” she nodded, unsmiling, going on: “They’d
talk, you know, on and on about what they’d done together as kids, games they’d played and how one’d tricked the other, and all manner of celebrations and affairs they’d been in on, picnics and parties and sings and dances and the like, and who’d first walked out with who when they’d got to an age to think of such things and”—she raised her chin—“Kevin and myself…well, you know, Father, of our childhood, its irregularities as you might say, and being from the reaches how all we’d ever known for company was ourselves and our dad—” She lifted her shoulders in a concluding way, waited, then: “The worst for us was when we’d be sitting with them,
invited
by them, and they’d go into what Kevin came to call their ‘private gaggles,’ when something—we’d never have the least idea what—would set them off onto wigwagging and making faces, not a word of sense having passed between them, you understand, and us sitting right there, simple to what they were going on about….” Her mouth tightened: “It kept us forever awkward,” she finished.

“As indeed it would,” he said. Then, risking the insinuation: “It must have served to drive you and Kevin in on yourselves, closer together—”

She stayed him with a responding look that combined sorrow and futility. “Mostly,” she said hollowly, “it served to hurt our pride.”

“That too, of course,” he said with a clumsy
repairing haste, ruing deeply the venturing which, he could tell, had damaged her belief in his understanding. Fraught, he made a movement with his hands as of erasing, then plunged on with: “They must have been curious about you and Kevin, were they not?”

“At first,” she answered flatly, looking off.

“Plied you with questions, did they?”

“At first, like I said. The girls with me more than the men with Kevin.”

“Naturally,” touching a finger to his forehead, “they’d have wanted to know when and where you first took notice of each other, and how soon you were married after you first walked out together. That kind of thing.”

She nodded.

“And?”

“And?” meeting his gaze.

“You gave them some sort of satisfaction, of course?”

“In my fashion I did.”

“In your fashion, Enda?”

She stiffened and came back at him with: “That I lied to them? Is that what you’re getting at with me, Father?”

“Given your circumstances, I
assume
that you lied, Enda. And please don’t take that attitude with me. What I’m trying to get at is the scope of the lie. Its magnitude, its effects—”

“Oh,” she mused, “I just said we’d known each other all our lives, Kevin and myself, and that our getting linked, well, that when we got old enough, it just seemed like the next thing to do. I made it sound ever so middling and dull….” Her mouth lifted in a shrewd smile: “There was one girl full of airs, always peeking at herself in the glass, and she put it to me early on in front of all the others: ‘What was the cut of your wedding dress?’ I asked her back, ‘God in heaven, where would the likes of me ever get a wedding dress?’ That finished the curiosity.” She laughed. “Have you ever noticed, Father, how the ordinary sets to rest a person’s interest in yourself?”

At his according laughter, she made a shifting, energetic gesture and asked, “Could you tell me the time please, Father?”

He read his watch aloud to her.

“Kathleen Martin and Maeve O’Callaghan are coming on the hour with the others,” she said excitedly. “Catherine McPhillemy, God keep her, got them for me.”

He took in her maddening gladness at having Kathleen and Maeve to keen for Kevin. She knew—ah! he knew she knew; he’d said it from the pulpit a hundred times or more—of his disapproval of professional keeners. “Banshee lamentation,” he’d labelled the practice, “that robs a wake of its true grief and turns it wild.”

Had she not heard the words, or was he, as a priest, so little to her she felt no need to give him mind? And to spring it on him like this, as a fact of imminent occurrence, causing him this itch of pique, nettle that she was, sitting there before him, her excitement all unhidden, and himself cut by a blade of sudden hurt and the question as suddenly formed in his mind:
Am I, then, less to her than I would wish to be?

“Father?” she ventured timidly. “You look struck.” Her eyes, as his own met them, were soft and anxious, enormously proximate and warm. “You’re all right, Father?”

“
All right?
” he surprised himself by calling out, “When I’ve just learned I’m to look forward to a headache and to being deafened by the howling of she-wolves?”

She hooted, “Father!” and to his astonishment let out a high peal of a girlish giggle. “Father!” and again, the alluring giggle: “What a thing to say of Kathleen and Maeve!”

“Their
baying
,” covering his ears with a wild gesture (surely he’d gone crazy) and positively enjoying her delight at him as a sufferer.

“And them only wanting to keep the wake lively!” she defended through her laughter. “Father!”

And himself, then, giving over to laughter steeped in irony, for to Enda, of course (he should have known), keeners howl louder of life than of death.

He said at last, smiling, mocking despair: “Whatever’s to be done with you?”

She ducked her head: “Ah now, Father—”

Then, calming: “But there’s plenty of time still for you to tell me more,” and, picking up: “Was Mr. Dunne surprised when you and Kevin decided to leave?”

“Oh, that he was indeed,” she answered readily, her mood quieting to match his. “He offered Kevin more in wages and said he’d speak to Mrs. Bowler too about a bit more for myself, made a point of asking us if we felt we’d been wronged in any way. Kept at us, you know. But Kevin stood firm. When he saw we were bent on going, he told us he was sorry to lose us and if we ever changed our minds and decided to come back, he’d always make a place for us.” She smiled proudly.

“You’d considered of course what you’d do next?”

“We had,” she said definitely. “Whenever we’d the chance, we’d talked of little else.”

“And?”

“Well, we had it in our hearts to be near the sea again….” Her face took on a ruminative look. “That we’d grown up close by it, I don’t know, it was in our blood, the smell of it and the fogs…. I know fogs put some people off. Take poor Eileen McCafferty now, fogs are a torment for her, nothing but ghosts in them as far as she’s concerned. That’s from her dad’s drowning, of course….
But for Kevin and myself growing up, whatever variety and lift there’d been to our days had come from the sea, the clouds blown in and the storms and fogs, and then those grand days of a bright sun and wind that’d make us feel like lambs, running and cuffing each other, nothing able to tame us, not even our dad raising his arm to us and pointing to the work still to be done….” She smiled. “So we figured to move in stages southwest from Ballymote, towards the coast.”

“And?” his eyes fixed on her.

“I still can tell you these forty-eight years later the main places we passed through, and myself nor Kevin not ever been back to any one of them since!”

“Tell me.”

“Well, there was Tubbercurry and Swinford—Kevin caught a runaway horse for a man in Swinford and the man gave over a five-pound note to him as a reward like! Imagine! In those days, that was a fortune! And at Ballyvary, we saw a good-sized place burn to the ground. Not a thing could be done.”

“That’s above Castlebar, isn’t it, Ballyvary?”

“Aye…. Now, Castlebar! We couldn’t get away from there fast enough!”

“Why?”

“There’d been a bachelor murdered in his bed the night before we got there, and the place was
alive with the strain of it. Us being strangers, Kevin said it was best not to linger. Kevin got the full of it from a cartwright he helped put iron-shod on the wheels of a wagon….” She clucked her tongue. “Terrible, a thing like that…. It happens more now, murder and the like. Even on an everyday basis, over the merest things, you see tempers being let out at an awful rate, isn’t it so, Father?”

“Indeed. Temper’s a raw-willed thing…. But go on, Enda. Did you get to Westport?” he asked eagerly.

“Westport!” she beamed, “I’ve the loveliest memories of Westport.”

“Back then,” he put in hurriedly, “it was completely lovely. Now, it’s a bit overrun with people and traffic. Almost too lively for a place of its size. Americans like it, and Germans.
Tourists….
They change a place.”

“Aye, they do. But those many years ago, like you said, it was completely lovely…. We were a week there, Kevin having got work with a builder. Mr. McEvilly was his name. He’d a face sewn over with purple veins, but such a nice disposition. It was him as put it to Kevin that, to his mind, the coast running out towards Roonah Quay was as beautiful as could be found anywhere in the world. It was him too that gave Kevin the
map
.”

“The map?”

“Aye, I’ve got it still. If you’ll remind me, I’ll show it to you sometime.”

“I’d like that.” He hoped she saw how enormously pleased he was that she’d made the offer.

“Mind,” she larked on, “we couldn’t read, of course, but Kevin—it showed the trust he had in Mr. McEvilly—he’d ticked off all the places we’d been to, and Mr. McEvilly’d put circles around them on the map. As I said, you’ll see it for yourself another time…. When Kevin first showed the map to me, I didn’t have the wit to take it at its value. He told me, ‘Look, here’s where we started, here’s where we’ve been, and here’s where we are’—pointing, ever so excited. But it struck me as daft, all the days we’d trudged, the
distances
, Father, and him holding a piece of paper no bigger than a square of handkerchief, nattering on and on, telling me that what I remembered as a full day’s hard walk was no more than the length of a daisy petal!”