The Old Jest (17 page)

Aunt Mary was leaning on the terrace wall waiting for them.

‘You've been ages. I thought you must have missed the train.'

‘We've been having a lovely row,' said Nancy.

‘Poor Harry! He'll need a drink. Do take off that silly hat, Harry dear.'

Harry pulled his arm away from Nancy and took off his hat. He looked most put out.

‘Apart from anything else,' said Aunt Mary, ‘you'll be bald by the time you're forty. It's such a ridiculous habit men have.'

They climbed up the steps towards her.

‘After all, God gave you a very good thatch. I hope, dear child, you didn't stroll around Dublin city in your bare feet.'

‘I couldn't bear them another minute. I took them off down the road. I'll just go and change. I'll be down in a minute.'

She went into the house and ran upstairs.

‘Mary,' the old man's voice was calling. ‘Mary, Mary, Mary.'

She closed her bedroom door carefully. Drifting up from the terrace, she could hear Aunt Mary's voice rushing along as if too much had to be said in too short a time. Harry laughed. That was good anyway. She took her notebook from the drawer and opened it at a clean page. Joe Mulhare, she wrote. Full stop. Joe Mulhare. joe mulhare. JOE MULHARE. Joe. joe, joe. Joe Mulhare.

Nancy spent the next morning picking fruit and vegetables for Bridie. The last of the loganberries, which grew against the high grey wall of the garden and had to be stretched for. Tiny prickles scraped at her arms and juice from the berries stained her fingers purple. Then she sat on a stool in the yard outside the kitchen and podded peas into a white china bowl. Swallows preened above her on the wires and swooped and darted from time to time through the broken windows of the yard buildings. The cat was stretched in the middle of the yard, his expectant eyes watchful. She hoped he wouldn't mind the move. Cats were funny creatures; perhaps he would keep coming back and back here, finding his way across the hills from Laragh, or perhaps he might pine away and die, lonely for his own haunts, his swallows, his mice, his enemies, with whom he fought at night. Bridie would be very upset if anything were to happen to him. She would miss his company in the kitchen, the long conversations of miaows and words that they each seemed to enjoy. Would it be possible that Aunt Mary too might pine away, her roots like the cat's too old for transplanting? My most beautiful and tender memories will always be of this place, even this simple moment – the drone of bees, the smell through the kitchen door of baking bread, the shadows on the cobblestones, Bridie rattling her sweeping brush out of an upstairs window. I have inside me that gentleness, that calm, from which to begin to explore the real life that waits. I can never be undermined because of that. Maybe that is just hopefulness. Though nothing will ever be the same, I can draw on the strength that this way of living has given me, like Joe Mulhare can draw his strength from his image of his father.

‘Have you got them peas done yet?'

Bridie bustled and creaked out through the door. The cat whisked his tail in some sort of salutation.

‘Nearly.'

‘Well get a move on with them. She wants her lunch on time. It's her golf afternoon.'

She bent down and picked up a handful of pods from the basket and ran her thumbnail along the spine of one of them, tumbling the peas into the bowl. ‘They're good the peas this year. Last year they were bullets. I never understand.'

Nancy put a pea in her mouth and bit the sweet juice out of it.

‘Will you mind leaving here, Bridie?'

Plink, plink, plink, plink. The peas dropped swiftly from her short flat fingers. ‘It's all the one to me where I am. Why should I mind?'

‘You might miss your friends and things like that.'

‘I might if it was America I was skiting off to, or over the water even. But it's only down the road. I'm fully occupied wherever I am. It's young ones like you that sits around with their heads in the clouds taking half an hour to shell a few peas that has to fret about things like that.'

‘I'm not fretting.'

Plink, plink, plink.

‘I'm glad of that. You've all your life in front of you and God is good.'

Plink.

‘Did you know my father, Bridie?'

There was a short pause.

‘I did.'

Plink, plink, plink.

‘And then again I didn't.'

The cat sat up and began to scratch its ear.

‘Full of charm. Airy fairy. If that's what you were going to ask me?'

‘Something like that.'

Plink, plink.

‘There you have it.'

‘It's not much to go on really.'

‘Here one minute, gone the next. That was the make of him. Unreliable, I'd have said, if anyone had asked me.'

‘Miaou!'

‘He wants his dinner. He came from abroad …'

‘He was foreign?' Nancy was startled.

‘Not at all. He was from the West somewhere, Clare, I think, but he came here from abroad. He had a lot of funny ideas and he went off abroad again. After the wedding. He never came back after that at all. I think She said he was killed somewhere. I don't know …' She frowned as she thought back. ‘India. Would that be right? India, I think it was.'

Plink, plink, plink.

‘India.'

‘How amazing!' She thought of him stretched in the moonlight beside the Taj Mahal.

‘He was a travelling sort of man. Not one for marrying at all.'

‘Why did he then, I wonder?'

Bridie sighed. ‘He had to see her right. He was a gentleman, if nothing else. Maybe if she hadn't died he'd have come back sometime, if God had spared him. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn't.'

Nancy digested this. The cat stood up on its toes and danced around a little.

‘Do you mean I'm …' She paused, wondering how to put it so that she wouldn't upset Bridie.

‘I always told her you'd ask one day, and there's no point in telling lies, and what of it anyway?'

The bowl was full. Bridie stooped and gathered up the pods from the ground into her large white apron.

‘I suppose,' said Nancy at last, ‘they loved each other.'

‘I suppose they did. What would they want to do that for if they didn't? Bring the bowl into the kitchen while I get on with the lunch. You seem to think I've nothing to do but gab.'

One of her hands held the apron bunched in front of her; with the other one she touched Nancy on the shoulder.

‘What of it anyway?' she repeated. ‘You're young and you've been well rared. We all love you.'

Nancy nodded. Bridie's hand was heavy on her shoulder. A whole weight of years of love and people giving and taking.

‘God is good.' The words sighed out of Bridie's mouth as if for once she might have had doubts. She moved into the darkness of the house.

‘Don't go bothering Her,' she called back, her voice confident once more, ‘about that sort of thing. She's enough bothers on her as it is and bring in them peas.'

He was lying on the beach when she arrived at the hut. Quite motionless, like the. cat. His eyes stared up at the floating clouds. He had taken off his shirt and neatly tucked it under the back of his neck, and she could see that a long puckered scar disfigured his thin body. It ran from just below his collar bone down the left-hand side of his chest and disappeared inside his trousers.

‘Hail fellow well met, All dirty and wet; Find out if you can, who's master, who's man.'

He didn't move, just spoke the words up towards the clouds.

‘How did you know it was me?'

‘I,' he corrected gently. ‘Disrespect for the language does no service to the world.'

‘Who said that anyway?'

She sat down beside him.

‘Said what?'

‘That … hail fellow … I've always heard it.'

‘The mad Dean. The chap who invented your name. I knew it was you, dear child, because no matter how hard you try to creep up on me, you haven't yet got control of your arms and legs … in fact I may as well say here and now that I hope you never have to make your living by creeping up on people.'

He stared at the clouds and she stared at the sea, which changed in colour from green to blue to grey with each movement of the waves.

‘How did you get that scar?'

‘These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'

Silence.

She turned and looked at him. He had a faint smile on his face.

‘Ypres. Wipers. The young man, boy I should say, he was about your age, I was with was hit by a shell. I've never worked out which of us was the lucky one.'

‘It's horrible!'

He put out his hand and took hers. He ran her fingers all the way down the scar, pressing them into the soft puckered flesh. Her fingers cringed away from the feel of it, but he held them tight and wouldn't let them go. Down under the top of his trousers to the hard jutting bone of his hip and then back again up to his shoulder. Then down again. His ribs moved gently like a calm, rippling sea. The scar itself was quite unlike the grainy flesh around it to touch; it was like a long, macabre mouth, with the pale marks of stitching criss-crossing the lips, pulling it awkwardly together. He let go of her hand.

‘Horrible!' she said again.

She looked down at her fingers, which had never touched anything like that before.

‘Now,' he ordered, ‘you do it. You touch it yourself.'

Gently she ran her fingers up to his shoulder.

‘You see.'

She buried her fingers in the sand. The top layer was warm and dry, but below the surface it was cold and damp and abrasive.

‘I take it your journey yesterday went according to plan.'

She nodded.

‘Joe…'

‘I make a point of never knowing people's names.'

‘I liked him. We went on a tram.'

‘A tram is a very fine invention.'

‘He said to tell you that … Broy says that he thinks you ought to move on. It would be best.'

‘Ah!'

He sat up and dusted the sand from his shoulders. She wondered if he were going to move on then and there.

‘If you go into the hut,' he said, ‘and feel in the pocket of my coat, you'll find the whisky. I think we should have a drink.'

When she came out with the bottle and two mugs, he was sitting there with his shirt on once more, neatly buttoned up as far as the collar stud.

‘Is that more acceptable? Not very, I fear. My father always said that no gentleman should appear in public with his neck unclothed.'

‘I'm hardly public.'

She handed him the bottle. She knelt beside him, holding the two mugs out towards him. He opened the bottle and poured carefully.

‘I suppose this means you'll go away?'

He nodded.

‘In a day or two.'

‘Where will you go?'

‘Away.

‘I wish that occasionally you'd answer one of my questions.'

‘You always ask the wrong ones.'

‘Will you come back?'

He took a drink from his mug.

‘Not here.'

‘So I will never see you again?'

‘Probably not.'

‘I don't like that.'

‘You'll get over it.'

‘I wish you didn't have to kill people.'

‘Somebody has to.'

‘I really don't understand why.'

‘You will one day.'

‘And there is no hope without it?'

‘No.'

She made a hollow in the sand for her mug.

‘May a daughter kiss her father goodbye?'

She crept right up beside him. He put his arms around her and held her close to him. One heart seemed to beat in both their bodies. His cheek against hers was as abrasive as the sand had been.

‘You won't let them catch you, will you?'

‘I intend to die in my bed, child, with my bottle of claret.'

He let go of her and looked carefully at her face.

‘I must be getting old.'

‘Why do you say that?'

‘Because for the first time for many years I regret having to say goodbye.'

The radiance of the smile she gave him made him tremble.

‘What a lovely thing to say to me!'

‘It won't be the last time that men say that sort of thing to you. I mean it. Now drink your drink, child, and go.'

‘I don't want it, thank you.'

‘I'll leave everything as I found it.'

‘Don't worry …'

‘I'd rather you didn't come down here for three or four days. Make it a week.'

‘A week,' she repeated.

He held his hand out to her. She shook it very formally.

‘Goodbye.'

‘Goodbye, Nancy. Oh, by the way …'

‘Yes?'

‘Joe Mulhare is a good young man. Remember that if you meet him again.'

‘Yes.'

She climbed up through the blocks, and when she got to the line, she turned and looked back. He was sitting as he had sat before, staring out to sea. He didn't move.

Friday Evening

I think I'll stop writing in this book. I find it harder and harder to put down in words my direct thoughts about what happens day by day. It seems to me that I will have to work out some sort of filtering system in order to put ideas clearly on to paper. You have to work these things out for yourself. Everything perhaps. Yes. Now that I know that my father is dead, I will have more room and time. I will never know now whether his second toe is slightly longer than his first one. I don't mind about his death nor do I mind about my own anomalous situation. As Bridie said … what of it? I thought I would mind forever. Maybe when I am old and sitting by the fire, I will pick it up all over again and worry and wonder. Now there is no time. It is hard to be young and not quite grasp what it is you are trying to understand, but exciting. I have felt lifted by some excitement or other in the last few days. Like being on the edge of an earthquake.