The Night Stages (18 page)

“Sometimes those fires were my own. Sometimes they were the fires of the valley people, fires that came up the mountain. And I’ve seen other fires,” Tim insisted, “fires from long-ago times. I’ve seen armies crashing in the air.”

“You mean the men talking in the mountains,” Kieran said.

“No, I mean armies from so long ago, nobody could say whose armies they were. I am well above the current talking.” Tim pointed toward the heavens. “I own the sky.”

“There’s the mountains, and then there is the rest of it down there,” Donal told Kieran when they were approaching the end of a day. They looked toward the lowlands, where small white houses grew in the fields like safe flowers. “There are those who go into the mountains with sheep, and there are those who can barely leave their hearthstones,” Donal said when they had moved far enough into the mountains that even the house of Tim the Sky was no longer visible. There was nothing judgmental in this remark: it was a statement of fact.

During the two weeks that Kieran was with Donal, the weather was mild and calm. After each rain there would be a full rainbow joining one mountain to another, and then the sun. Some nights were so still the stars shone as brightly in the still lakes as they did in the sky. Sometimes you could see the stars in the dog’s eyes. As they bedded down at the end of the last day, Kieran heard Donal say a poem, his voice so private and quiet it was as if he were praying.

Kieran sat up in his blanket. The poem went deep into him and made him alert to a kind of thrall that he suddenly knew he had always been susceptible to. It was not like the poem about the books that Annie had sung for him in Irish, then later recited in English, though he felt there was certainly a lament in it, or some sadness he couldn’t name. He sensed
that his mother was nearby, though he could neither hear her nor see her. He knew it wasn’t her that he wanted, but something, someone, as yet undefined for him. He thought he might weep and his voice was unsteady when he asked Donal what the words meant.

It’s a poem I keep in my mind, Donal told him. It was said to me long ago by a girl I loved.

She had left her home at dawn, Donal said, once when he was for the first time booleying alone. And she had climbed and walked all through the mountains until she found him, bringing food, but mostly bringing herself to him. “I remember when I saw her I said, Come here to me, and she did that. It was all I was to know of women,” Donal said, “and it has been everything I have kept with me always.”

“What happened to her?”

“She went to Africa with the nuns, she having taken the vow herself. And before she left, she said that poem to me.”

“Could you not make her stay?”

“I could not. She had received the call.”

Kieran lay down again, the thought of the girl in the mountains who had gone to Africa fierce in his mind.

As he was sliding into sleep, Donal added, “We were both very young, and yet she knew me well. And she said the poem in Irish, which made it much more beautiful. But I said it tonight in English so that you would understand.”

T
here is no suggestion of either day or night out on the tarmac now. The interior lights of the airliner have been shut off and the shape of the fuselage is now barely discernible in the fog. It is as if this weather pattern is attempting to extinguish the length and breadth of time, to make it immeasurable. Tam looks at the clocks, wondering as she does so which hour she inhabits: the afternoon of the place she has abandoned, the early evening of her intended destination, or the midpoint of this waiting room stasis. She feels wretched, too exhausted to fight the futile and mostly painful longing, sometimes bordering on panic, that has always been a part of her involvement with Niall. No amount of thought on her part, no amount of examination or interpretation had been able to explain it, dismiss it, or satisfy it. It has followed her across the ocean and is seated beside her here on this leatherette bench. All this humiliating, helpless sorrow.

She closes her eyes and finds herself listening to the sounds around her. The couple directly behind her are arguing: she can hear the blame in their whispered exchanges. A baby begins to cry then falls silent, comforted, Tam assumes, by food or by being held. Nearby someone is pacing: the subtle tap-tapping of their footsteps slowly increases then just as slowly decreases in volume. There is something palliating in this sedate form of advance and retreat. Her head begins to nod.

When she opens her eyes, she is drawn once again to the stories the painting tells, and notices, for the first time, that although oranges and yellows are plentiful, these are actually night scenes set against a midnight blue sky. The exception is the part on the far right of the picture, which she has now come to call the arrival zone. There the figures are bathed in theatrical morning light: the maternal woman who put her in mind of her lost nan, the bird standing guard over the two eggs in her nest. And yet the children who are gathered there are still shadowy, even under the assault of such radiance and in the midst of such an eruption of blossoms. She considers the possibility that they might be hiding.

In late May 1944, just in advance of the invasion of Normandy, Tam had been required to conceal each of the ten Spitfires she delivered from factories to a variety of airfields to protect them from being seen from above by those who would want to destroy them. She recalls now the strangeness of this; the bumpy journey of the grounded aircraft lumbering away from the smoothness of the runways toward a landscape in full flower. One Spit was placed in an orchard.
Another was squeezed between rows of poplars, its beautiful thin wings only inches away from bark. She had loved these aircraft because of the solitude of their single seat and their apparent lightness in flight. She loved their manoeuvrability. But on the ground they became less organic, more ungainly and machinelike. She abandoned them under willows, beside ancient oak trees, and once in the centre of a famously tall growth of rhododendrons. At night she dreamed anxiously that the moonlight, or even the starlight, might cause a metallic glow to emanate from them, silvering the trees and bushes from within rather than without, and alerting the enemy. But by day she would forget her night fears and set out once again on a round of deliveries, and of camouflage.

Niall told her it had taken him five stubborn years before he would allow himself to begin to look for his brother. Embarrassed about his need to do this, and unnerved by his sudden fear of disgrace, he said nothing to anyone: nothing about what he was thinking and nothing about what he was planning. Even when nothing of the sort was going on, he would say he had a meteorological conference or some other kind of appointment in London rather than admit to the sense of shame that prompted his search.

“Your father,” Tam had said when he told her this, “your father would have known there was no conference.” This insistence on secrecy and shame was confusing to her.

But his father was retired by then, he told her. After years and years of launching weather balloons and drawing up charts, he had turned away from meteorology as if it had never existed for him. He had become an older man. He sometimes worked on the
Irish Times
crossword; occasionally he went for a pint in the pub at the end of his evening walks. Now and then he would ask his son how things were going at the station, but not as often as one might think.

McWilliams, however, as chief at the station, would give help and advice at every opportunity, and in such a warm way that Niall would only realize later that the wide conversation he had with the man had been laced with instructions. Niall adored him, and would eagerly comply with anything the older man wanted him to do. He told her that McWilliams knew everything about everything, that he was animated, life-enhancing, a born teacher, a sage. As his own father greyed and withdrew, became hard of hearing and querulous, this other, more ebullient man became, for Niall, an essential guide.

Yes, McWilliams knew everything. He talked about the blue rays in the sky, how they scattered toward the earth, diverted from the direction they had intended to take. He said that Irish lakes were dark because of the molecules of peat that intercepted the path of light. He could name the date and duration of each of the most famous gales of the Iveragh going back two hundred years. He knew about fogbows, rainbows in various shades of grey made of fog, the droplets composing them being too small for the spectrum of colour. He had
anecdotes about ice: a French cavalry, two hundred years before, had captured the Dutch fleet brought to a halt by being deeply frozen into a bay. The only naval victory won on horseback! He knew that there were twenty thousand windmills in Germany in the mid-eighteenth century. He could list the artists who best depicted storms, and remarked how few of them could paint rain. He would conjecture the numbers of thousands of miles one wave had travelled before it broke on a Munster shore. He claimed that several of the colourful birds he kept in cages throughout his house had been blown into his hands during a gale that was the result of a hurricane in the Caribbean. “Blow-ins,” Niall said to her. “Like you.”

A few years later there actually was a conference. Niall, visiting her after a month apart, told her this as he was leaving her house. London, he said, in May.

She asked him if she could go with him and he was silent, thinking.

“One night,” she said. “One morning. Waking up together.” The tone of her voice was humiliating to her, the supplicant in it. She would not say it more than once.

Three nights, he eventually agreed. But not London, somewhere near Gloucester instead. There was a village there, he told her, where Francis Drake had lived in a large house that was now an inn. McWilliams had told him it was rumoured that Drake had not written his
The World Encompassed
there
because that book had been assembled by his great-nephew, another Francis Drake, thereby leading to centuries of confusion. “The old slave driver,” Niall had added, though whether in reference to the elder or the younger she wasn’t sure. And it was right on the estuary of the Severn River, this village, at the very bottom of a forested gorge, Niall had assured her. Its climate would be detached in some way or another, a self-perpetuating system. She suspected he wanted to take the story of this isolated weather back to McWilliams.