The Ballroom (13 page)

They were outside almost every day now. Sometimes John was put to helping with the horses, or they might be humping warm kerns of milk and sacks of grain to the kitchens, or carrying the carcasses out of the slaughterhouse and sluicing the bloodied benches down, but mostly they were in the fields, planting and hoeing, turning the earth. The weather seemed to be set fair, but while the men bent to their work, the farmers gathered in small close packs, casting worried glances at the sky. John knew what those looks meant – the balance of it all. It was never good to have such fine long stretches in May; for the crops to thrive, the farmers wanted rain.

It was a strange, light feeling, to observe this and not to have the carrying of it – not to care. Not to have to think always about the weather and too little rain or too much.

At dinnertime they were allowed to take their breaks in the shade of trees, and if they were close enough, he and Dan lay beneath the old sentinel oak at the corner of the wood.

‘All right, fella?’ Dan greeted it like an old friend now, touching the bright new growth with a caressing hand. ‘Like being a lad again, in’t it? Like coming new.’

Dan seemed younger too now the fine weather had come, face like tanned leather, the bald patch in the middle of his hair shining like a conker’s skin. His stories coursed from him, oiled and easy in the heat.

Reminds me of the tropics, mio Capitane. Did I ever tell you about the Maui girls?

One of the last great whaling ships. Six months in the freezing south, the chase, and then blood and blubber and oil, and the money, and the soft southern seas with water like glass, and the soft southern girls, all wandering the sandy shores with nothing to cover their breasts at all.

At all, mio Capitane. At all.

His crackling, catarrh-laced laugh was like lightning striking the ground.

Sitting there beside him, on his own patch of warm earth, John only half listened. His skin was tight and throbbed with heat. A white mark showed where his rolled-up sleeves stopped, and, below, his hands and lower arms were brown. Dr Fuller had been right:
It looks like being rather a fine summer already, don’t you think?

But the women were pale.

He had been to the ballroom every Friday. The dances were easy enough: similar to ones he had learnt at home, but simpler versions, instead of the fine weaving of four-handed reels, the fiddlers’ bows scraping low and hard, there was Dr Fuller, leading a steadier, more English sort of playing altogether. Though they were similar enough for all that: a polka, a lancers, a march.

But the women there troubled him: those whose faces loomed, terrible in the lamplight; frail women who giggled and clutched at themselves like girls; women who jabbered like parrots and had hard bright eyes like a bird might. Women with yellow skin who gripped too tight, whose sour breath was a poisonous cloud he could not wait to escape. Silent women covered in a pale sheen like wax, so far inside themselves they hardly seemed to know he was there.

She was there too – the running girl – pale and watchful in amongst it all.

That first time, when Dan had brought them together, John was careful, touching her warily, as though she were an animal that might bite. But she was not the fierce, spitting thing he had first seen. Her eyes, so red and swollen before, were clearer now. The wound on her cheek had healed, and only a scar, thin and silver, showed where it had been. You had to look hard to see it. She moved clumsily, and it was clear she knew none of the steps. It roused a tenderness in him, this awkward movement, and as the music ended he bent so she might hear. ‘What do they call you then?’

‘Ella,’ she had said, as though handing him something she did not think he would want to take.

Later, sitting watching from a distance, he searched for her in the crowd. She was almost opposite him, eyes darting, as though danger might approach from any side.

Where had she come from that day, wild eyes on the horizon, until she saw him and fell? He thought he could feel it still, when they danced together, her desire to run, coiled and tight, still beating at her skin.

Now, sitting beside Dan, his back leant up against the trunk of the oak, John bent and rolled himself a cigarette. ‘Have you a light there, Riley?’

Dan, eyes still closed, brought a box from his pocket and chucked it towards John. John lit his cigarette and stared out towards the green swathe of the wood. ‘Do the women not get outside then?’

‘Whassthat?’ Dan opened a lazy eye.

‘Do they not go out at all then, the women? Do they not let them out?’

‘Nah.’ Dan shook his head. ‘Keep them damsels lily white.’

‘But do they not get any air?’ He was impatient now. ‘Are they locked up all day?’

‘S’far as I know. Aye. Why?’ Dan’s mouth lifted in a crooked half-smile. ‘Is there one you’re thinking of,
mio Capitane
?’

John shook his head as a whistle blew and they hauled themselves up off the ground, making their way back to the acre of potatoes they were weeding.

As he worked, the thought of her and of the other women trapped inside was like a stone in his shoe, a small one, one you might walk a few miles with without breaking your stride, but there nonetheless, making itself known.

It was with surprise that he began to think of her when he stepped outside in the cool of the mornings; mornings that carried the sweet dank dewiness that came before warmth. A smell that lifted him and put him in mind of times on the road when he had walked all night, when the sun rose and people came out of their cottages just to stand and greet the day.

He began to notice things more closely: the brightness of the old oak’s new leaves; the way the swallows flew in the sun, more sure now, as though they gloried in it, their breasts flickering like silver as they span, weaving light.

It did not seem fair that he should see these things and she, and the other women, should not.

And so he began to store up the sights he saw so he might have something to tell her on Friday, in the ballroom, something smuggled from the bright world to the dark corridors inside.

But when they danced together it was late, and she seemed tired, and smelt of harsh soap and closed spaces, and had wary, shadowed eyes. They marked their brief circles on the floor, and the words dried on his tongue and he was dumb and useless, telling her nothing. When they had done, he took his seat in the furthest corner and did not look out again, turning his cap over in his hand.

Useless.

Useless.

Is that all that you can do?

That night he dreamt of Annie, and in the dream she held their daughter in her arms, and both of them were ragged, like a garment chewed by moths.

He reached for his daughter, but she had no face, it had been eaten away, and he could see right through her to the vastness and the howling space beyond. When he woke, he was pasted in his own sweat and turned on his side, breathing fast into the darkness.

He saw his dead daughter, laid out in her box.

So few people had come to wake her. Those that did ducked into the room and stood awkwardly, not taking the chairs he had laid out or the whiskey he had bought, and leaving as soon as they could. There was no snuff by the body. No clay pipes to smoke. Annie had wanted none of it; it was Irish, she said, and part of his curse. So there was no music or wailing. Where were the women who could have wailed for him, who could have sung their
caoines
over the body of his child? They were back in Ireland, and he had left them, left the land he had promised his father to protect.

When the few people had gone, Annie stood, moving past him. He caught her wrist as she went.

‘Don’t touch me.’ She slapped his hand away.

So he sat and drank the whiskey. It was the first time he had been alone with death. In Ireland, death was not a time to be alone. He reached for his daughter. Let his finger trace the edge of her ear. Let it linger over her mouth. He remembered the feel of her warm gums, when sometimes, when she was crying and Annie was sleeping, he had given her his knuckle to suck.

As he drank, he felt it: the claggy pull of the land, reaching out, even from this distance, pulling him and his small family back down into it, because he had broken his promise. He had walked away. He was no man at all.

At the end of the whiskey was blankness. At the bottom of the bottle was a cold bare morning in which his wife was gone, tucked away in a back bedroom of her parents’ house as though their marriage had never been.

He buried his daughter and went out into the country, looking for work on the land, but the harvests were over and the jobs were thin. He found his way to the edges of the towns, ragged places where ragged men stood in lines, waiting for those who might hire them for a day.

He looked for his father wherever he went. Sometimes, for a second, he thought he saw him: that way he had of putting his hands in the pockets of his trousers, or shaking those pockets for coins for a drink. His heart lurched at the sight – he wished to tell him he was sorry. But when he looked again, it was never him.

He found the odd day of work. Sometimes, if he was lucky, a week of digging in thick November mud. But once the farmer had his turnips and swedes safe in, once his beet crop was cosy for the winter, then the hired men were turfed off. He became ill, too fevered to move from the barn where he was sleeping until the farmer chased him out with dogs.

He wandered then, too weak for labouring, finding what food he could. Stealing if he had to, while the illness took root.

He remembered little for a long while after that. He knew he had been taken to a workhouse, where he sweated on a mattress in the corner of a room full of hundreds of other men, like living ghosts. When he became well again, he found he could not speak, as though all the words inside him had been pushed to the bottom of a dark well.

One day doctors came, examined the men. Took many of them away at once in carts. They stared at him, asking him questions, but he had nothing whatever to say to the world.

They kept repeating one word.
Melancholia
, they said to him,
melancholia
– a litany, an incantation, over and over again.

He lay now, curled around his memories, and thought of the things he had wished to tell Annie: how he had felt when their daughter was born, as though part of him was born again too. How he loved to watch them both when things were still. How when their daughter was feeding he would close his eyes and feel her, like a small fire lighting the room.

He remembered how, when her time was near, Annie wished to have the child out of her – screamed to have it out. Now, lying there on his narrow bed, the sleeping men around him, he felt the same; he could feel words inside him, clamouring to come out. He had been too full for too long.

He knew why Annie had come: she had come to haunt him. For wanting to speak to that girl.

He turned on his bed. Pushed the image of his wife away.

He would write to her. To this Ella. This odd, lonely girl. Write to her of what he saw outside.

It was one small good thing he could do. And if she didn’t want to read it, he would write it nonetheless. He had had a book once. A commonplace book. He had lost it somewhere along the way.

B
EYOND THE WINDOW
the season was changing. The grass was bright, and the sun, streaming through the day room in the afternoons, filled Ella with a bitter longing she could taste. But inside, everything stayed the same. Each Monday the doctor still played his piano and the dog men came and carried someone away. Last week they had taken the woman with the red-marked face – shouting about her girls, about how her girls were coming to get her, and how they wouldn’t find her now.

In the laundry it was always hot, and it always stank, so badly it made your eyes water. But something had changed there at least: there had begun to be grass stains on some of the men’s clothes. A small knot of anger lodged in her chest at the sight of them, and she looked up to where the sun burnt an oblong shape on the wall. Were they outside now, these men? Why should they be outside when she was locked in here?

She thought of the dark one, the one who had come to her when she ran. John. He had asked her name and told her his, but other than that he did not speak. He was holding on to something, she thought, a secret, or many secrets. Closed around them like the hard shell of a nut.

She pressed armfuls of laundry into the drum of water, added a bucket of soap, then swirled the washing with a stick. As they sank, an arm of a shirt rose up, filled with a sudden dancer’s grace. She watched as it fell again, claimed by the knot of clothes. She had no such grace when she moved. She wasn’t the worst – there were plenty who could hardly put one foot beside the other – but there were plenty too who seemed to know just what to do: Old Germany for one, and John who, despite his silence, danced with lightness and ease. Clem might have been the best of all; she never jerked or stumbled, but moved like water and seemed to know all the steps. Many of the men fought to dance with her, and when they did so, even though they tried their best to gain her attention, they didn’t seem to touch her. Their gazes slipped off. Ella thought she knew why that was: that it was the doctor Clem liked, the one who played the piano in the day room and violin in the band. She had seen the way Clem’s eyes would search him out.

She caught him sometimes – the doctor – dropping Clem a smile from the stage in a quick, absent way. And she saw Clem gather that smile like so much treasure, putting it away somewhere safe. Ella imagined she would bring it out later, turn it this way and that and wonder what it meant. But she saw the smile fade as soon as his eyes moved on, and she thought it didn’t mean what Clem wanted it to. And that was a secret too.

The only time they were allowed outside was at recreation, but there was little to look at there – only the high-sided walls of the echoing yard, only the other women fratching as they were kept in line, only Clem, who walked with her book held up at eye level, so she could read it while she moved. Although she had a new book every week, there were two she seemed to read again and again: the small, red-covered one she had that first day in the laundry, which she carried with her everywhere, and another, thicker book, brown, with gold writing on the spine.