Wild Decembers (11 page)

“Lady H., I’ll be needing that drier for Breege anon.”

“Sorry, Jo . . . Sorry.” Lady Harkness mimics the fright of a little girl and shrinks back under the glass dome, blinking ceaselessly in a feigned apology.

“So you’re for the chop,” Josephine says.

“I just want it washed and set.”

“These ends are all broken. I can’t let you out like that, no hairdresser would.” Ignoring Breege’s protestations, she takes the scissors and nips rapidly, the pieces like little question marks on the floor with coils of hair from early on.

“I don’t want short hair,” Breege says, standing up. She is almost in tears.

“Okay. Okay. So who’s the lucky man?”

“There isn’t.”

“There is . . . I’ve just had one of my hunches,” and skimming some of the tears onto her forefinger she walks around the salon, triumphant.

“Teardrops,” she says.

“Josephine, you’re beastly,” Lady Harkness says.

“I’m only joking,” she says, but once she has Breege captive at the backwash she pursues her quest. She hopes against hope that it is not the new technical teacher with his sloppy cardigan and his macrobiotic diet. She has come to the definite conclusion that it is someone who has recently arrived. She thinks down one side of the street, then up the other, out the two roads, the lake road, the chapel road, then her guesswork takes her up the mountain and she suddenly realises who it is, recalls all that blushing and mopiness the night of the dance and hiding in the cloakroom with Ma Flannery.

“It’s the Shepherd . . . It’s the Shepherd,” she says to herself. She can hardly wait for lunchtime, to have her ladies combed and primped so that she can shut the shop, go into the kitchen, make herself a cup of coffee, and then sit down to ring the Crock. Dynamite. She is not going to tell him in one swoop. He will have to guess. She will tease it out. She will give him one or two clues, then put him off his scent. It will kill him that she detected it first. It will kill him anyhow. Him always gawping after Breege and sending her that valentine and hiding behind the laurels to see her getting it from the postman, then opening it up.

“I
WILL LAY
a trap for her.” From the moment Josephine told I him, the Crock was berserk. Could it be. Ivory Mary and Micky Dazzler. Could it be. And she so modest and her long chaste white nightgown on the clothesline that he often went to and touched, imagining her wearing it at night with a candle beside her bed, and him getting in the window and scaring the bejesus out of her, lifting the gown to see her white legs and her white thighs and her furry Mary. It could be. He should have smelt a rat at Christmas time. She bought three pairs of socks in the drapery and Joseph only received two. Bugler and herself meeting at all hours, anywhere, everywhere, a spider getting into her web, hi diddle diddle, their springtime rite. The boathouse, he reckoned, would be one of their couches. Easy as pie. Bugler had reason to go down to see his pedigree herd, and she went twice monthly to the graves to cut the grass and tidy them. In the boathouse, pillowed, heave-ho; whispering levitation, a water lily stuffed into her mouth and Bugler brandlebuttocking her. Ivory Mary no more. Mary Magdalene now. “I will lay a trap for her.”

I
T WAS ABOUT
a month in all that she lived this heightened state, this vertigo, finding messages here, there, and everywhere to unsettle and stun her. She had a secret, a purse of secrets.

Peace O Queen
I will hie me to the myrrh mountain
To the Frankincense Hill
You are all fair my darling
No blemish is you
My love is a light illuminating the shadows
By night I thought of thee
The utterance of thy mouth.

Her energy was prodigal. She painted windows and wainscoting, and the hall, which had been a weeping shade of blue, was now a silted gold.

“You have gold on the brain,” Joseph said to her.

Before he wakened she was out in her little plantation, searching, reading, rereading, memorising, then tucking them into an old purse that she hid under the laurels. The first communication had been puzzling—“I beheld thee and.” It was in capital letters and had been left in the milk parlour beside the old churn where she kept eggs and vegetables to keep cool. The second was on a large sheet of paper, folded into a tight pert square. She had found it when she went out one night to get wood and read it in the back kitchen by a faint light:

Oh you Queen Sabbath
Oh anointed bride.

The page was daubed from having been in a dirty pocket. She took it upstairs, read it again, thought to leave it under her pillow, but was so smitten with it that she brought it down to the kitchen where Joseph was having his supper.

“You look wild,” he said, and fearing that he might see it tucked inside her blouse, she rushed over and threw it into the range. She could picture the shape and the curve of each letter, vowels and consonants, and the way the two lines ran on from one another, the only disappointment being the ink, which was faint. “Oh anointed bride.” Curling now into a crescent of pale ash.

In bed she allowed herself to dwell on them. It must be Bugler. It had to be. After all, he had left the words of the song secretly like that and another morning a can of fresh mushrooms. On Saturday night when she got back from Mass she went to the dairy knowing that there would be something waiting. She had felt it when she prayed. What met her first was the smell, the pungent smell of wild thyme, something about it so suggestive, a dark green spray of it laid along the letter, perfuming the words:

Tell me my true love
Where do you pasture
Where do you fold at noon
Follow the sheep’s tracks
And graze your kids
Close to the shepherd’s huts.

That he had dared use the word shepherd was a further proof, and she walked up and down the yard to control her nerves.

That night in a dream a bird lay next to her on her pillow, its beak soft, not needly, and from its soft beak drops were squished into her ear. They were gold drops. Within the dream she heard Joseph say, “You have gold on the brain, Breege.” In the morning the bird was gone. Monday she went to the village to enquire about the dress. She had seen it all summer on a hanger outside Mrs. Bolan’s drapery, locals and visitors stopping to admire it. It was a black crêpe de Chine with cloth roses appliquéd throughout that from a distance looked like real roses in bloom. Only close up could one see the fine needlework, the scarlet threading shot with gold.

“You remember the black dress,” she said. Mrs. Bolan remembered, raised her hands in an exclamation, and said, “Do I not.”

“Is it gone?”

“Well, it was gone, and then one morning it was back on the doorstep,” and shuffling off into the back, still grousing, she returned with it on its hanger, a ruff of white tissue around the collar to keep it from getting dirty.

“Wasn’t it waiting for you?” she said to Breege, and holding it up estimated that two and a half inches would have to come off the bottom. Yet in the tiny fitting room she changed her mind, said it was the perfect length, as it came just to the calves of the leg, a flattering thing on a young woman. In there, both of them sneezed uncontrollably because of the bales of cretonne curtain material that were stacked against the wall.

“It’s made for you,” Mrs. Bolan said, adding the proverb about there being no need to gild the lily. Unlike other older people she did not begrudge young ones their style and the fancies that they got into their heads. She put her open-mindedness down to the fact that she read novels and was always pestering the librarian for another book by Tolstoy. He was her favourite because the book lasted an entire winter and she loved reading about balls and hunts and Natasha eloping in the dead of night. Seeing Breege, the face so cream-coloured with the eyes an inky black, reminded her of Natasha and of being young herself once and her husband proposing to her as they cycled down the lake road.

“What’s the big occasion?” she said then.

“Oh, nothing,” Breege said evasively.

“Ah, go on . . . a twenty-first or something?”

“Could I pay in instalments?” Breege said.

“Of course you can pay in instalments . . . that’s what friends are for,” Mrs. Bolan said, then unzipped it, helped her out of it, and in the shop folded it carefully and put it in a cardboard box, like a sleeping doll being put there to sleep. It looked so beautiful, so poised.

“And sure if you don’t pay up, I know where to find you,” she said, winking, as she copied in her cash-book the first deposit of five pounds, then drew a rudimentary calendar for the amounts owed for the next seven weeks.

Breege hid it in the very back of the wardrobe with coats and a bolster to keep him from seeing it. Joseph had his own wardrobe, but for some reason he kept his best suit and his overcoat in hers. After he had gone to sleep she would get out of bed and try it on. Even the roses seemed to breathe in the panel across her stomach. When Bugler saw it he would guess it was new; it smelt new.

To keep them from getting damp she changed the hiding place of the letters. She brought a biscuit tin from the house and put them in the dairy, adding each one as it came.

To a mare among Pharaoh’s cavalry.
I compare you my darling
Your cheeks adorned with bangles
Your neck with beads
Your groove a pomegranate grove.

She looked it up in Joseph’s dictionary: “The pomegranate has been known to man since time immemorial; largely regarded as a symbol of fertility, possibly because of the large number of seeds contained in the fruit. The Phoenicians took it from Western Asia to Carthage.” He had requested a meeting for the Sunday at two.

She chose the corner of the field that was farthest from the road. There being no wall to sit on, she piled a few stones together and made a perch of them. It was stifling. The dress was hot and so were her black stockings. She was really dressed for indoors and for nighttime. No matter where she moved to, the sun bore down. There was no shade to be found anywhere. One half of the field had been ploughed and the earth looked cross and disgruntled at being overturned. By contrast the young grass seemed to drink in the sun and gave back rays of greenish golden light. She listened, not knowing whether he would come on the tractor or on foot. What would they talk of? Not Carthage and pomegranates, not the myrrh mountain, and yet not their own mountain with its rock face and morsels of earth in the crevices. A black cat came sneaking through the grass to look at her, a mis-curiosity. Black cats that were supposed to be for good luck.

After a little while she realised that he was not coming and that those letters were not in his hand at all. She felt helpless, helpless to get up though the sun beat down on one side of her neck.

Joseph was dozing on the outside step when the telephone rang. He decided to let it ring, assuming it was Lady Harkness trying to coax Breege to make pies and scones for her. It stopped but then started almost at once, and he went into the house in an exasperation. There was no hesitation, simply a voice, a woman’s voice overloud, overenthusiastic, saying, “You ought to know where your sister is . . . look in the dairy and you’ll find out.” Then there was laughter at the other end as the phone was slammed down.

Out in the dairy he knew even as he lifted the lid of the biscuit tin, knew it by the smell of the thyme, smelling its way into the letters, knew their poison. When he read the first few words, he put them down, mortified by the lewdness, the vileness, the ravishment.

He met her out on the road, but heard her footsteps before he saw her, the brazen high heels on the hot dust-baked surface. Then he saw her as he had never seen her before, a Jezebel in a clinging dress with a gash of sunburn shaped like a fish down one side of her neck. She smiled at him to brave it out, but there was no braving, as she saw by his eyes.