The Last Storyteller (41 page)

I walked up and down the road, in the dark, feeling the silent hugeness of the empty countryside. A hundred slow paces; turn. A hundred slow paces; turn. Make the car the middle point. Fifty paces either side. Turn. All car doors and windows open. Still the faint odor. Of my own shame. Some more matches added sulfur, burned off some more methane. I braved the car.

For as long as I was on the road I always knew two things: the time of the day and the points of the compass. I knew how to get to Dublin by the smallest roads. Why didn’t I go directly? Safety: the major routes might have police roadblocks. And shame: I was fit only for hidden places. From now on I would have to slink about the world.

Miss Fay’s house had no lights. She was still, I would discover, living in a nursing home. Six months rehabilitating. I had a key, of course, and found no trace of recent life. The broken chair still sat propped against the kitchen table from Stirling’s brutal visit.

Yet even that vile recollection didn’t ease my pain. In that remorse I learned so much: That any attempt to ease guilt by justification is false. That the crimes of another appease none of one’s own offenses. That, if one is being truthful, the greater pain is that of the offender. I know now that I would much rather be a victim of violence than a perpetrator.

Nonetheless I tried, for the first time, to find traces of the assault on Miss Fay—which had long been cleared up by May, the housekeeper. Why hadn’t I done this before, when I’d stayed here after Venetia went from the seashore? Like a mad person, I now scoured the floor on my hands and knees. Shattered spectacles? Traces of blood? I found none, and the broken chair became the poem.

Little sleep came that night, and then only a troubled rest. My limbs ached, I might have caught a cold, I heaved and twitched. Went downstairs, made cocoa, no milk. And nothing to eat, none of Miss Fay’s baked comfort. Sat and struggled. For an hour. Back to bed and woke at seven, after two hours of drunken slumber.

The newsagent at the corner of Brighton Road had the earliest opening hours in the district. A distance to walk, but it’d do me good. Had the shootings made the pages? I bought all the daily newspapers; only one ran the story, in a “Late News” column on the right-hand side of the front page:

Back at the house, I made tea. And more tea. And yet more tea. At half past eight, and knowing that it was futile, I again telephoned the old number I had for you, children—well, you know this anyway. Nobody answered. I know now that the two of you had long ago left. By boat to London, you told me years afterward, then trains to Southampton, where you boarded SS
United States
and crossed the Atlantic, and I lost you for the second time. And I knew it. Osmosis or something, or instinct.

Never again
, I swore.
If I can find a way into your lives, I will. And stay there. But how can I, being as sullied as I am? What right do I have to share anyone’s life, except in fleeting tangents?

The next day, May, the housekeeper, appeared. She looked at me wide-eyed, in shock.

“Oh, sir, is it you? Did you hear the news on the wireless—that fella was killed? God, I hope you killed him, God, that’s a terrible thing to say, but you shoulda seen what he did to Miss Fay, broke her bottom teeth and all. She’ll have to get new ones and they only a new set from last year; I found the old spares and took them into her—she was bleeding here on
the floor, right over there, and that chair bursted when I came in that very morning, and she still crying. Oh, I hope you killed him, he deserved it.”

With no unease I said, “I wish I had.”

That morning, under May’s directions, I at last went to Miss Fay’s nursing home. Beforehand, I managed to find irises, her favorite flower.

She knew, she said, my step in the corridor. “But I was waiting for it.”

“I’m sorry I’ve been missing for so long. Are you all right?”

“They tell me I went fifteen rounds, but I say no, that it was a technical knockout in the first round.”

I’d forgotten her fandom of boxing. “How bad—I mean—what was damaged?”

“The arm’s the most troublesome. They’re still trying to knit it.” It lay alongside her like the corpse of a doll, swathed in white. “I don’t mind if you punch him, Ben.”

I said, “Haven’t you heard?” I showed her the newspaper. “The funeral is in a few days.”

Miss Fay looked at the paper, paused, looked at me.

“He shook me like a rag,” she said, “nearly choked me.” She pawed at her throat. “Then he threw a few hooks. Got me with an uppercut. There was a weight difference. And he had the reach. I was blue from here to here.” She drew a line from her left eyebrow to her jaw. “James would have said I had the blues.”

“I am so sorry. I am so sorry.”

“He’s dead now,” she said. “Good riddance to bad rubbish.” She paused. “You know, Ben.” When she used my name, she usually had something portentous to say. “It’s the only time that I’ve been glad James was dead. If he’d seen all this”—she fluttered a hand to her face—“he’d have asked you to kill him.”

“Well, someone else did.”

She looked at me, and I saw the query travel across her mind. Or did I imagine it?

“How is Venetia? Is she any better? I thought her lovely but very reduced. Now we know why.”

I told her. The whole story. And I lied: “That’s why I’ve been away so long. Looking for her.”

“Another disappearance. Dear God. Poor you. I wonder if she’s so
damaged that she can’t be herself anymore. She needs to go into a convent or something.”

“If she’s still alive.”

“Well, at least,” said Miss Fay, “that fellow can’t get at her anymore.”

I muttered, “I wonder if he already had.”

“Oh, my God,” she said, and we left it at that.

It was the first time I’d allowed the thought to have free rein. And yet—did I believe that Stirling had killed Venetia? I feared it—but I didn’t believe it, and I hope that you can understand that.

We made our arrangements. I would visit every day. Stay in the house. Endure May, maybe even note down some of what she said. And then bridge Miss Fay’s homecoming until she was ready to go back to her Civil Service office.

“Don’t tell your mother,” she said. “Say I fell. I had a letter from her—you haven’t seen them lately?”

“I owe them a visit.” In truth, I hadn’t been able to face their new house. Or the idea of them having such a small place, so little to do.

They couldn’t have been expecting me, could they? Their appearances and demeanor said otherwise. So ready did they seem, and so excited, that I came to believe Miss Fay had sent them a telegram.

What had I anticipated? A dreary cottage, a small house with cramped space around it, too close to neighbors, no style. Do we ever look closely enough at our parents? How could I have imagined that either of your grandparents would have settled for something low and cheap?

They had bought what they called a “bungalow”—which it was, if the definition of a bungalow is “built on one level only.” This was no bungalow; this was a Georgian villa, from around 1730, with decorations at the windows as fond and delicate as lace. Somebody had later added a frieze under the roofline, with carved shamrocks and four-leaved clovers; it should have looked hokey but instead gave an unexpected elegance. Between
two pillars the white front door stood as framed as a girl in a ball gown.

Your grandparents looked ten, twenty years younger. They had a fresh joy—in their new home, in their refurbished selves. The house had first attracted them because it had a three-acre garden; as Mother said, “I can be at one end and your father at the other.” She didn’t add—but she might have done; I saw the idea in her face—“And I can still keep an eye on him.”

Each cultivated a separate herbaceous border. “Women only like fussy flowers,” my father said, “and men-men-men like strong, muscular stuff.”

Mother said, “But isn’t the point at least to have flowers and color? And not just green and gray shrubs? That’s not a herbaceous border, that’s a funeral.”

Harry had brought to new heights his pastime of writing to newspapers and politicians. “The-the-the
Irish Times
published two of my letters in the last month,” he said. “About the first cuckoo.”

And he was off. For as long as I could recall he had spent the early days of summer standing by fences listening with his ear cocked. That night, he’d say, “I think I heard it, but we’ll know tomorrow.” When tomorrow arrived, everything would repeat itself—until the day he came running to find us.

“He’s here, he’s here. He’s up in Treacy’s paddock. All the way from Africa to us, eh?” Or “He’s ba-ba-back, he’s down by the well, I knew he’d come here first,” and he’d juke for joy and delight around the kitchen on one leg. It mattered not a whit to him that letters had already appeared in the
Irish Times
from people in Longford and Carlow and Galway saying they had not only heard but seen the first cuckoo of summer. “Bloody liars,” he’d scoff. “Fabulists. Inventors.”

In idle moments I often wonder about Harry and the cuckoo. If you think about it, I was his cuckoo; his own son turned him out of his nest with Venetia. I’ve never succeeded in getting my mind around that. Best, after all these years, to leave it.

They had settled to their new life so fast. Mother had begun something she’d longed to do: serious, time-consuming cooking. My father said she was “fattening him up like a gamecock. Any-any-any day now I’ll be ready for the table, but you’ll have to do the carving, Ben.”

She cooked pheasant for lunch, astringent with lemon and rich with peppered cream. The diced potatoes had been first pan-fried, then finished off in the oven; the turnips came from the fields across the road. My father said, “I-I-I steal them for her; she’s turning me into a thief.”

They asked little about my life—and never would again. Perhaps they felt their own existence too special and even fragile; they wanted that glass never to break. And in this I found the first mild abatement—only temporary, of course—of my appalled state, because they looked content. By the time I left, Mother had begun to search for her glasses in that concentrated way that said the crossword loomed.

On my way back to Dublin, I stopped at the storage warehouse. Perhaps if I touched my own things I would see a future for them and for me, too. Their abundance took me by surprise—both in number and depth. I had more possessions than I’d realized, and they had more grace than I’d remembered.

As I drifted among them in the late shadows of the day (the warehouse had no electric light), touching this, stroking that, I began to see that someone had added things.

The buhl cabinet; that small Hepplewhite chair—I hadn’t taken those. A sideboard just inside the door (I’d missed it on the way in) gave me my answer. On it sat a little boy’s cowboy hat—black, and the white braid all around the crown descended into a cord that I used to tie around my neck. Pinned to it a note: “Remember this? You used to wear it to bed. I kept it where I could always find it. Much love, Mother.”

James Clare had had a saying: “No matter how bad things are, the universe has a way of healing. All you have to do is watch out for it.” At that moment, though, I couldn’t see the universe’s smaller fingers at work—I couldn’t see at all for the tears in my eyes and the hatred in my heart. Of myself. The next day, I received confirmation of that opinion.

“Weird.” How I loved that you used that word. I had only heard it as an adjective in gothic tales. Both of you employed it back then to describe anything out of the ordinary. Here I bring it into play because, for the second day in succession, I felt that people had been waiting for me. Weird.

My intention had been to file some overdue reports at the Folklore Commission. I also wanted to check the appropriateness of having written up the polio-quarantine experience; we had rules about collectors breaching family privacy. An account of it (more or less what you’ve read earlier) lay in my bag anyway, though I had, of course, excluded my own involvement, and my bullying of the health authority official to change the doctor’s verdict.

Valerie, the girl who supervised the typing up of every field report and expense account, looked embarrassed when she saw me and stood from her desk. I couldn’t imagine why; by now I had cleaned up to my former appearance, and had also managed my facial expression better. Whatever lay inside did not, I felt sure, show to the world.

“You’ve to go upstairs,” she said. Normally she overused my name: I was “Ben” this, that, and the other—“from Easter to Christmas and the whole way back again,” as John Jacob used to say. Today, she didn’t say “Ben” once and she shifted on her feet, a sure sign of awkwardness.

“Upstairs” meant the director’s office. “I’ll tell them you’re on your way,” she said and picked up the office telephone.

“Them?”

She didn’t answer.

“Them”—two senior officials—sat in front of the director, who sat behind his desk. A third chair waited, at an angle whereby all could see me. How long ago had this been planned and how quickly set up? Nobody had known I was coming in that day.

The director hid behind a cloud of smoke from his vast pipe. In Irish he told one of the two men, “You’re the one who wants to do this.”

I’d never liked this other man. He had a ferocious adherence to the Irish language, and had repeatedly castigated James and myself for not submitting our reports in the native tongue. James argued that we hadn’t heard it in Gaelic, and that had we translated, we’d have lost a great deal of nuance and color.

That argument didn’t wash. As James said, “Well, some folk are more folk than other folk.” Nor did I like the man’s sloppy mouth and his wet lips.

He addressed me using the formal Irish: “
A chara
.” Pronounced “a-korra,” it means “my friend”; every official communication in Gaelic began with it. Impersonal, not friendly, it meant nothing. He launched, in Irish, into his complaint and was interrupted by the director.