The Old Jest (10 page)

She opened the press and took out some yellow butter on a plate.

‘I won't say another word until you sit down.'

A pot of jam, a knife, a plate. In silence she put them on the table. The table was pale and grained and glowed with much scrubbing. The cat's tail quivered for a moment and then the end of it flipped, striking the table a hard blow. Nancy cut a piece of bread and then sat down. Her hands moved in the light. The rest of her, face and body, was shadowy, almost invisible.

Harry rattled a chair across the flags and sat down opposite her. ‘Why do you wear black?'

Her hands moved busily.

‘Young people shouldn't wear black. Something bright, gay, pretty.'

‘I like it.'

‘Black is … well … I'm not saying you don't look nice … but … Maeve thought so too. Black she said …'

‘I'd like to be beautiful.' She took a bite of bread and jam and chewed at it for a moment. Beads of raspberry jam stuck to her lips. ‘Burn the topless towers of Ilium. Nothing less would do.'

‘I can't get a word you're saying. Your mouth is full.'

‘Sweet Helen make me immortal with a kiss.'

‘You and your Shakespeare.'

She looked at him with amusement and said nothing. Just chewed.

‘Where did you run off to anyway?'

She licked at her sticky lips.

‘Just along the beach for a walk. I felt so odd. It was so beautiful after all that rain. Still. Shriven.'

‘What an odd word to use!'

‘It just came to me. Purified. It must be marvellous to feel like that … like sometimes you find white bones. Lovely white smooth bones.'

She began to cut another piece of bread.

‘I often wonder if you feel purified after making love. Absolutely purified. It must have some sort of effect like that on you. Does it?'

She pointed the bread knife at him across the table. To his annoyance he felt his face getting red.

‘I don't know,' he muttered.

‘Crumbs!' she said.

She buttered the bread and spread some more jam on it. The cat, for some reason of its own, began to purr; otherwise the silence might have been alarming.

‘I'd better go,' he said eventually.

She didn't appear to have heard him. She licked some jam off the end of the knife.

‘You mean you've never … never … well …?'

She leaned forward into the light and stared somewhat severely at him.

‘You've never … you know …?'

‘You're idiotic,' he said crossly. ‘I refuse to answer questions like that.'

‘Fucked?' Malicious voice.

He got to his feet and stood looking silently down at her.

‘How extraordinary! You're so old.'

‘Mary …'

‘Oh you can tell her this too. Only you wouldn't dare. I know all sorts of words like that.'

‘You're a dreadful little brat.'

‘Haven't you even got the curiosity to try? I suppose you won't tell me truthfully.'

‘Mary should have sent you to a decent boarding school. My parents always thought that too.'

She burst out laughing.

‘Standards, manners, traditional …' His voice petered out at the sound of her laughter. ‘You know what I mean.'

‘Lovely sacred moo cows.'

‘I'm going now.' He moved towards the door. ‘You'll have a word with Maeve tomorrow … explain ‥ apologise …'

She didn't reply. Half light, half shadow, like a ghost she sat, and the cat opened its yellow eyes and stared at him.

‘You will, won't you?'

‘Maeve.' She sighed.

‘Of course you will.' He spoke the words without conviction.

He opened the door and stood looking at her.

‘I'll tell you one thing,' she said. ‘I'll have done it by the time I'm twenty-six.'

He slammed the door and hurried down the passage. She listened to his feet on the flagstones rushing him away from her.

‘I really want him to love me,' she said to the cat. The silly orange brute didn't care. ‘I'm crying.' She touched her cheek with a finger. ‘If I really were a sorceress, cat, I'd make him love me, but then that wouldn't be fair.' The cat adjusted its position slightly and went to sleep. Nancy rubbed at the tears with the sleeve of the black dress, then she got up and put the bread, the jam and the butter back carefully in their places. She wiped the crumbs off the table into the palm of her hand and went and threw them into the sink, mainly to discourage the mice, but also the mild anger of Bridie, who was never at her best in the morning. The cat's tail trembled as she turned out the light and left the room.

12 August

Looking back at things, I feel that perhaps my small glass of whisky was to be blamed for my behaviour to Harry and my subsequent tears. I feel extraordinarily tired and rather hot in the head. It has been a rather curious day. I have never seen a gun at such close proximity before. The soldiers carry them, of course, and people hang them on their walls as somewhat bizarre decoration; I also remember that Uncle Gabriel used to go shooting, but somehow those guns have never had any direct connection with me before. The one he held in his hand so close to me made me very frightened. He has none of my features; I examine them minutely when I think he isn't watching me. I wonder what he looked like when he was my age, way back in the last century. Anyway, common sense tells me that it would be a ridiculous coincidence to meet one's father under such circumstances. I still wonder. I also wonder what happens to all the certainty you have when you are young … very young, he would say. I used to be so positive, I knew so much. Miss Know All, Bridie would call me when she got too exasperated with me. It all drains away, leaving you alone, like standing on the top of a mountain with a cold wind blowing. No protection. I wonder, do other people feel this desolation? Aunt Mary says I think too much about myself. Desolation, isolation. Harry would never feel like this. I think that must be why I love him. He is truly safe and beautiful. Beautiful Harry. I would love to see how his body looks when he is naked, coming stark out of the sea, shining with wetness and drops running from his hair down over his face and shoulders. I have only seen children's bodies, and my own, of course, which isn't exactly awe-inspiring. Curiosity killed the cat, Aunt Mary would say. Aunt Mary is right about a lot of things.

The next morning was brilliant very early. The sun crept under Nancy's sleeping eyelids long before seven. She could hear the swallows rattling under the eaves and the early morning crooning of a pigeon. Above her head the cracks tracing their way across the white plaster of the ceiling turned into the face of the man on the beach. Up till that moment the cracks had always formed a picture of an old woman with a watering can, but now she had disappeared and he stared gravely at the window.

‘An omen,' said Nancy sleepily, being at an age when omens were of great importance. She pulled the sheet up over her face and went to sleep again. When she woke again about an hour later, the birds were in full song and she could hear the water from Aunt Mary's bath gurgling down through the pipes. The old woman was back in her place, watering away eternally at nothing.

In the dining room Aunt Mary had the paper neatly folded and propped against the coffee pot.

‘Good morning.' She raised her cheek slightly for a kiss, but didn't take her eyes from the page in front of her. It was the racing page, quite incomprehensible to Nancy.

‘Why don't you read the news?' Nancy sat down and began to peel an orange.

‘Coffee?' Aunt Mary put the paper down beside her plate and picked up the coffee pot. She poised it somewhat threateningly over Nancy's cup.

‘Please.'

‘I never read the news on racing days. Such terrible things keep on happening.' She replaced the coffee pot on its stand and propped the paper up again. ‘I like to enjoy myself on racing days. It's perfectly simple.'

The waving branches of the trees, which now stretched themselves too close to the windows, made shadow patterns on the wall.

Bridie tapped through the hall with her broom, brushing yesterday's dust out into the garden, from where it had come in the first place.

Aunt Mary put little dabs of butter and marmalade on her toast before each bite, an operation she was able to perform without taking her eyes from the paper.

‘Some people,' said Nancy, just to be annoying, ‘say that gambling is a sin.'

‘There are some people who would say that sitting still and breathing is a sin. Did you sort things out with Harry?'

‘Sort of.'

‘A little politeness is important.' She sighed. ‘I suppose I haven't brought you up very well.'

‘Don't be silly. I'm beautifully brought up. I don't eat peas off my knife or belch in public and then say pardon. Even Bridie thinks I'm not too bad. I just … well … have my own agitations.'

‘I do wish you'd take milk in your coffee. It's so bad for your heart like that.'

‘We don't talk much, do we?'

‘I wouldn't say that, dear.'

‘We say things to each other, make a noise, but we don't talk. People who live in the same house hardly ever seem to talk to each other. Who do you talk to?'

Aunt Mary looked a little alarmed.

‘I have friends …'

‘Oh I know … I know that. You have your bridge friends and your racing friends and the people you knew in your childhood days and all that. That's not what I mean. Don't you ever need to tear yourself open and get out all that stuff that's burning you inside?'

‘You sound as if you need a surgeon rather than a friend. Tut! It's part of the mythology of youth that people go round burning themselves up inside. It's not like that at all, pet. Most people lead and want to lead calm, equilibrious …' She laughed and repeated the word … ‘equilibrious lives.' She reached out and touched Nancy's hand. ‘There's no point in making life more difficult than it has to be.'

There was a long silence. Aunt Mary began to gather up her letters, read and neatly tucked back into their envelopes, and her ivory paper knife and the case for her glasses.

‘She bade me take life easy, as the grass grows on the weirs …'

‘Yes. You, my dear child, are young and foolish.'

‘And you are full of tears?'

Aunt Mary stood up, the letters dangling from her hand.

‘I am content. It's all I ever asked to be.'

Her next hours would be filled with getting the old man up and dressed. Clean. His breakfast inside him. Humouring him, soothing. Content or not, strain showed in the stretched lines of her face.

‘You'll be in, won't you? Round the place. You'll keep an eye on him?'

Nancy nodded.

‘You won't let him sit too long in the sun? It makes his head ache.'

‘I know.'

‘Of course you know, pet. I'm an old fusspot.'

She moved slowly towards the door. She moved always with grace, no slouching, her back straight without conscious effort. Old-fashioned, Nancy thought. I love her but I don't want to be like her. She paused in the doorway. ‘You'll
…?'

‘Yes. I'll watch him like a hawk.'

‘And there's raspberries to be picked. All, dear, don't just take the ones you can see.'

‘I am the world's greatest raspberry picker.'

‘I should be back by about half past six. You'll make sure he eats some lunch, won't you?'

‘I'll shovel it into him.'

Nancy picked up the
Irish Times
.

Two civilians shot near Navan. Burning of military stores in Carrick on Shannon. Discharged prisoner shot by roadside near Limerick. Military activity in Dublin, many persons arrested. Well known journalist shot by sentry. Fighting resumes in Armenia. Shocking Galway crime. Lady Walsingham has left London for the Riviera. Lord and Lady Kilmaine, who spent last week in Dublin, have arrived in London. Arrivals at Kingstown per Royal Mail steamers include … She dropped the paper on the floor. Written there in black and white it all seemed meaningless. I should have been a seagull, she thought, watching it all from the clearness of the air. Then I could have remained indifferent with impunity. There would have been no demands. She thought of flying on the wind, watching the houses creeping out pitilessly over the green fields, the smoke from the burnt-out buildings, the bodies uselessly crumpled by the roadside, the Royal Mail vessels back and forth, winter and summer on the grey, black, blue-green moving sea, and the gulls floating on its swell as they float on the air.

‘Are you sitting there all day?'

Bridie banged a tray down on the sideboard.

‘You gave me a fright. I was just thinking.'

‘You'd do better to be out picking the raspberries before it rains.'

‘It's a gorgeous day. It's not going to rain.'

‘Fine before seven, rain before eleven,' said Bridie with morose conviction. ‘Were you eating bread in my kitchen last night?'

‘I was.'

‘Crumbs.' The single word was a small explosion of severity.

‘I thought I'd cleared it all up.'

‘Didn't you get enough to eat below?' She began to pile plates on to the tray.

‘I didn't stay. It was awful, I ran out on them. I went for a walk on the beach.'

‘What did you do a thing like that for?'

‘Impulse.'

Bridie gave a little snort of laughter.

‘Impulse? If your aunt and I had had the impulse when you were little to give you the odd rat-tat on your backside, you wouldn't be impulsing round the place now. What did they think of you at all?'

‘I don't know and I don't care.'

‘You,' said Bridie, crashing the coffee pot down on to the tray, ‘are supposed to be a lady. You were rared to be a lady.'