The Little Red Chairs (5 page)

Sing, my tongue, the Saviour’s glory,

Of his flesh the mystery sing,

Of the blood all price exceeding

Shed by our immortal King.

When the time came to turn her over she felt happier, it was more private, away from the lights that pulsed from the orifices of the wooden gods and goddesses. Away from his eyes also, that were so penetrating. She jumped at the feel of something warm in the palm of her hand and then realised it was a stone and she met its grasp as she would that of a trusted friend. Then he
placed different ones down the length of her body, as he massaged her legs, held her ankles and gave them a quick, smart swivel in both directions.

She did not want it to end. But end it soon would, as she could tell by the diminuendo of the pressure and the stones falling away off her body, onto the bed and onto the floor. Lastly, he placed the chinks of freezing marble over her lids and the thrill of the cold penetrated to behind the eyes and to her mind itself and she felt a flash of blinding light and was transported to the ethereal. Then, from a censer, he sprinkled water over her, like raindrops, but smelling of musk, which was meant to waken her up, except she longed to linger.

He left her alone to dress. The holy chant still filtered from the four corners and all the stones that he had applied to her lay in a rugged heap.

When she paid him, she was impressed by the fact that he refused a tip and moreover, escorted her down the steep stairs to the door. There with folded hands he wished her good health: repeating the word
Namaste, Namaste
, until she was out of sight.

Five women were waiting for her in the coffee shop that was known as the Parlour. A rustic room with basket chairs and a slab of slate for a table, it was where locals could exhibit their drawings, or their etchings, or leave stories they had written, to be read by others. A Book Club organised by Fidelma, the draper’s wife, held their meetings there once a month.

She would tell them about the coloured lights slicing the air in the room, and the effigies of gods and goddesses and she would tell them about the sacred music, the offer of the paper panties and the marvellous splay of his hands. But she would not tell them that when she got up from that treatment bed and he had
left the room, her energy was prodigal, a wildness such as she had not known since her youth, out in the fields when she pissed against trees, the way men did, pissed unashamedly. She would not tell them that.

Upcock

Upcock Upcock Upcock.

The beaters were flushing out the birds in the wood opposite, their cries high-pitched and faintly hysterical, coming near and far and intermittently, the sound of gunshot muffled by distance along with the joyous yelping of the hounds.

It was Fidelma’s favourite walk, a winding path by the river in the Castle grounds. The Castle with its turrets and ivied walls was a five-star hotel which attracted celebrities and regulars who came for the fishing and shooting. She could do that walk in her sleep, over the bridge, down three steps, by a sign that read
Please Close the Gate
and all of a sudden the sound of the river, squeezing its way under the bridge and then bursting out as it opened into a wide sweep, making its way upstream, girdling the small islands that it passed. The sound was like water bursting in childbirth, or so a woman who had had many children once told her, and she remembered it.

She loved those woods, especially in winter, trees without leaf, trunks sombre and grey, fallen boughs caught on one another and a hush, despite the roar of the river and the far-off sound and yodel of the hunters and their gillies.

It was where she could be most herself, more than in her own garden with its verbena and its roses, or in the rooms which she had so lovingly furnished, envisaging a different and more scintillating life. Rarely did she meet anyone, except for visitors from
the Castle who would politely salute and walk on. The path itself was muddy, embedded with bits of rocks and the raised roots of the trees forked crookedly. The walk took her to the far end, where path and river met, and there was a thick palisade of reeds to bar the way. Always on her return journey she sat on a bench, where a particular robin, or one identical to it, flew about, then hovered so close she could touch the little plump terracotta chest and the suede-brown wings, except at the very last instant it eluded her and flew back into the rhododendrons that grew densely under the thick cover of trees.

That bench and that robin were witness to her many secrets. It was there she shed tears at losing the shop, the boutique, as it was known. She never did believe she would lose it, it was her empire, her salon. The wives of rich builders and developers came from far and wide to try on the latest fashions and they would walk up and down past the long mirrors, pretending to hesitate, but already buying and concocting the lies they would have to tell their husbands. She was renowned for her modish collections, hats for all occasions, funerals, weddings, race meetings, garden parties (though there were none), knitwear in indigo and violet and silk shawls that cried out for the click of the castanets. Once, to the titillation of many, there was a pink corset in the window, made of broderie anglaise and studded with diamanté. She had bought it at Pigalle in Paris.

There were as well the less affluent customers, who paid on the instalment, knowing she would relent and let them have their finery long before the full amount was paid. There was Deirdre, who worked in the Castle, having to try on a dress for an American called Mary Lou, that her forester sweetheart was sending to her in Connecticut. Yet Deirdre believed that he was keen on her,
since he made her keep the dress for weeks, where she modelled it for him each evening in her apartment across the hotel yard. Then one Saturday morning she came to the shop in tears, saying, ‘I hate men, I hate men,’ as the dress had been posted to Connecticut.

But the boutique lost its cachet. She and Jack sensed it the day they read that there was a motorway to be built six miles away. It meant that ladies could then drive to the city for their couture and moreover, summer visitors would not stop to admire the novelties in her window. She knew for quite a while that their days were numbered and she hid the bills that came from wholesalers and stockists in London and Paris, deluding herself that with the coming season business would perk up.

‘God Almighty we’re paupers,’ Jack said the day he found the bank statements and he scolded her for her extravagant nature and sulked for days, eventually conceding that they would have to close down and sell the good stock to wholesalers in Galway and give the remainder to charity shops. After that, she began to notice a change in him. He pottered less in the garden that he had for years so lovingly planted and tended. He did the crosswords and then sat staring out, the pink of his scalp so scaly under the thinning white hair and his eyes had a kind of rebuke in them.

The difference in their age had begun to matter, she had just turned forty and Jack was in his sixties, no longer the ‘Brooding Heathcliff’ that used to sign birthday cards to her. He wanted less and less to meet people, keeping her to himself, shutting the world out, drawing the heavy velvet curtains too early on a bright evening. If she announced that they might invite a few friends, he worried, began to wonder what time these friends might arrive and more importantly, what time they would leave. Only on Christmas morning did he become his old self, in his
maroon smoking jacket, fires in both grates, himself and old Dr Carmody sitting on the chaise longue, recalling their fishing feats, mostly at night, on camp stools, waiting for the fish to bite and the lure, oh yes, the lure of the fly in the dark, like love itself a conundrum. That moment was then the cue for Jack to open the drawers of a little bureau, with its tray of flies, boyishly calling out their names: Cascade, Green Highlander, Collie, Munro Killer, sparkling away in their louvred confinement. Later, he and Dr Carmody did their party piece, singing the love duet of Molly Bawn and Brian Og, in which Jack impersonated the wronged Molly –

Oh Brian you have been drinking, Brian Og,

I can tell it by your winking, Brian Og.

Since you ’listed in the army

No more those eyes can charm me,

Oh I hate you, oh I love you, Brian Og.

Then they vowed that come the spring, they would go over to Lough Corrib, that vast archipelago of blue, with its three hundred and sixty-five islands, one for every day of the year, and troll for the brown trout and the occasional salmon, come there after running the many rivers.

Opposite to where she sat the water was a boggy brown, but not too far along it was a dark violet colour, always changing, the way the sweep of the current changed, but as she saw it, her own life did not change at all – the same routine, the same longing and the same loneliness.

Father Eamonn was the only one she could confide in. He was from the south and had been defrocked, a disgrace he had
brought upon himself by loving a woman. She knew how isolated he must be in that bungalow, looking out at the mist, nursing his sin, unable to walk because of his arthritis, along with suffering from gout.

It came about that they met in the library and had a brief conversation and subsequently, they began to discuss different literature and loan each other their favourite books. He had all the Catholic writers that were new to her – Bernanos, Gide, Mauriac – and she gave him the story of Abelard and Heloise, the twelfth-century lovers, nun and priest, who, for their illicit and rhapsodic passion, were forced to withdraw to a contemplative order, never to meet again.

Once a month they drove to Strand Hill and sat on the bench facing the rocks that looked as if they would growl, the waves pounding in and the surfers in black, with the stealth of seals, far out, seen and not seen in the troughs of the waves. They discussed the Russian writers, she sometimes having copied out a paragraph to read to him and one day he put it to her that the reason they loved books was because the crimes in people’s hearts were rendered more fatefully and more forgivingly in literature. It was that day or perhaps a different day she told him how much she yearned for a child and how this yearning intensified with time, so much so that she imagined holding it in her arms, hearing its first disconsolate cries.

Twice in her married life she was pregnant and Jack bought her pieces of jewellery, but she lost it both times, and believing the failure to be hers, she grieved alone. One summer Jack booked a holiday in Italy and everywhere they went, she kept seeing paintings of the Nativity, mother and child depicted in such sumptuous colours, their expressions so serene, adhering to
one another, and she found, when they came out into the hot street, with awnings over shops shut for lunch, that there were tears in her eyes and down her cheeks.

She once considered going to China to adopt a child. Why China she could not say, except in a dream, she was already in labour and the midwife at her bedside was Chinese, holding a rod of bamboo with three green shoots. According to her reckoning, she had a few years at most, which was why she went to a psychic for guidance. The woman listened attentively and told her she must pray more, pray to her Earth-Angels, out of doors, close to nature and her prayer would be answered. It couldn’t not be. Without even thinking, she looked both ways, then waded through the rushes, over the clumps of seeping fern and at the water’s slobbery edge, she knelt, feeling the shock of its coldness, as she cupped it in her hands, then brought it to her face again and again. But for the prayer to be efficacious, the psychic told her she had to plunge her face right into the water, and so she did, staring down through those teeming whorls of dark, praying as she had never prayed before. Afterwards she got up, flattened the dents on her knees, dried her hands on the wet grass to no avail and walked on, her hair still wet and water streaming from her eyes.

It was where a young tree had fallen onto the path that she stepped to one side and almost collided with a figure who had come on her unawares, her sudden scream breaching the quiet of the oncoming dusk. He apologised. It was Dr Vladimir. She recognised that voice, so low and distinctive, not like any of the voices she was accustomed to. She recalled the morning weeks before, when Dara brought him to the shop to ask for rooms to rent for his practice. She had gone there to do a bit of dusting, pick
up the circulars and flyers that had accumulated, crestfallen at the emptiness of the place. The drawers still had labels in her own neat handwriting – plimsolls, children’s socks, ladies’ hosiery and lingerie. The two men had come on her unawares, Dara blowing between his mittened hands and the stranger with such a steadiness in his gaze that it unnerved her. Dara had put the question to her at once, while the doctor walked around, admiring a few antiques that they were intending to send to auction – the tall silver and glass floor lamps, mirrors, the pale Flemish tapestry with its fauns and its cupids, and the gentleman’s travelling trunk that seemed to intrigue him so. At first she demurred, then said they intended to sell, not rent and Dara countered with the fact that the place would be kept warm and aired and free of rats, until purchasers materialised from the great blue yonder.