Wild Decembers (30 page)

“You’re mad.”

“You left me to come here when I was pregnant. Remember . . . the egg stayed as an egg . . . It didn’t turn into a little person. Have you wondered how I felt . . . I was gutted . . . I am gutted. I said just now I was pregnant because I wanted to test you.”

“What’s wrong with you . . . you’re a pragmatic person. This isn’t you.”

“She’s what’s wrong.”

“She’s out of the picture.”

“I’ll believe you if you promise that you will never see her again.” And to make sure, she turned on the bedside light and held the bulb so close to his face he could read the wattage in singed black lettering.

T
HEY ARE HAVING
a picnic, Ger, Breege, and Mrs. Hegarty. The overhead lights have been quenched and in the windowsill there is a stout red Christmas candle in a coronet of holly. There is a happiness between them and they smile at the sounds of the snoring, monotonous, phlegmy, from two patients farther down. Mrs. Hegarty, little Kevin’s mother, has ventured out at last, because of the light being so dim and nobody able to see that her hair has been falling out. Only herself has witnessed it, tufts of it each morning on her comb, alarming her.

“Eeny, meeny, miney, mo, catch a beggar by the toe, if he hollers let him go, eeny, meeny, miney, mo.” As Ger says it he has already guessed that it will fall to Mrs. Hegarty to tell the first story.

“I will too,” she says, as if she has waited for this moment from the very day she was admitted. She begins it sitting on the bed, but as her courage increases, she stands, gesticulates, moves about in keeping with the anger that she has felt and has had to bottle up.

“I had a house that my uncle left me . . . A nice house with a nice name. Moss House. The lane up to it is mossy and a person can slip. Sometimes I let it, sometimes when it was vacant I’d go over and sit in the sitting room and look at my own things, my treasures. Then one day my husband asked me if his sister Ida could go in there for a bit. She had no home . . . Her husband had thrown her out and she was in a caravan. It was to be temporary . . . That was a year ago and she’s still in Moss House. She won’t go. All my things are flung up in the attic, my pictures and my bawneen cushions, getting damp up there, mildewed. She comes up to me last Easter in the chapel, it was Holy Thursday, and in front of the blessed sacrament she whispers to me, she says, ‘Eliza, we’ll each have joint ownership of Moss House, it’s only fair.’”

She stops then and turns to them, close to sobbing. “That’s what they’ve done to me, my husband and his sister, that’s why I’m here.”

“You’re all right . . . You’re all right,” Ger says, and pours her more lemonade.

“You’re next,” Breege says to Ger.

“Crikey, I don’t have a story, but I have a funny dream . . . Well, it’s not that funny . . . My wife and I are somewhere . . . Up home probably in Cappaderragh, and then we’re not there at all . . . We’re in the city and there’s a baby on a step, crying, crying its heart out, and my wife says to me, ‘Jesus, we’re going to have to do something,’ and we’re in this terrible fix looking up and down the street for the mother to come and take this baby and no one comes and the baby keeps crying and screaming and my wife says to me, ‘We’re going to have to take it, you see it’s an orphan,’” and looking first at Mrs. Hegarty and then at Breege he says, baffled, “I don’t even have a wife or a child . . . I’m not married.”

In the passage they see a figure advancing towards them with something bulky in its arms. It is Nuala, the stout nurse, fussing, scolding, and, seeing remains of the picnic, asks if it is a five-star hotel they think they are in.

“It’s Christmas, Nuala.”

“Christmas! I did a twelve-hour shift, two admissions and that Ryan woman broke windows again.”

“Sit down, Nuala . . . We’re telling stories.”

“Stories!” she says, and hands Breege the large bunch of heather with some sort of sarcastic grunt.

It is a vast bunch of two colours of heather tied with twine. Holding it is like holding an infant and she can smell the mountain off it, the misted, brooding mountain. She thinks that it must be Bugler, but equally she thinks that it couldn’t be.

“Big swank of a fella . . . tried to get past me,” the nurse said. When she heard him described and the hat he wore, she was certain that yes, it was him.

“Ah now, Nuala, you’re jealous,” Ger said.

“Of course I’m jealous . . . It’s always the young ones that get the flowers . . . that get the diamonds. Who gave me flowers? Nobody.”

“Here you are,” he says, offering her one of the mince pies, which she refuses, saying pastry gives her indigestion.

“You’re a hard woman, Nuala. You should have let him up.”

“Rules are rules,” she says, but she is no longer tetchy, she will be home having a footbath in an hour.

It was as the nurse snatched the flowers away from Breege, to put them in water, that the note fell out. Breege held it and looked at it. She did not want to read it in front of them, and sensing it, Ger and Mrs. Hegarty moved away. She thought, Suppose I don’t open it, suppose I just invent what it says, and then she thought of the morning on the road, how cold he was and how locked-in, when all she had wanted was one word, one word not to harm his future but to make her own less shorn. She had wanted so little, she had asked so little, yet that little would have been a lot. She opened it suddenly and without thinking, and looking down at the words she read them many times:

Dear Breege,

I picked this where we saw the salmon leap. Something will come to make things better. I’ll think of you and I hope that you won’t think too unkindly of me.

Fond love,
Mick

If she keeps staring at the candle flame, at the way it veers, she will not cry, she will be able to hold back her tears. Then she is unable. The tenderness of the words becomes harder to bear than all the cruelty. The tears, the trapped tears of shame and love come pouring out of her.

“They’ll soon stop,” she says, embarrassed, as Ger hands her a wet flannel to wipe her face.

“I’m all right now,” she says, though she is still crying.

“This guy . . . Is he why you’re here?”

“Yes.”

“And the song you sang this morning . . . Is that your story?”

“That’s my story, except that I can’t tell it,” she says.

“Good God . . . A love child,” he says reverently, and raises his hands as if he is saying a prayer.

“My brother will kill me.”

“No one’s going to kill you . . . We’ll mind you.”

“How, Ger . . . How?”

“We’ll tell him for you.”

“Ah no. I’ll tell him myself . . . I have to.”

“Is he a free man . . . this fellow?”

She turned then to the window and looked out at the stars, the same stars as he had driven home under. What would she not have given for just one minute of his being allowed up, just one minute for something to be said to bind them. What would she not have given.

“If he was a free man, I wouldn’t be in here,” she said, in a breaking voice.

J
UST AS IT
fell to Duggan to bring Rosemary there, it fell to him to take her away. They stood, as he put it, like two pillars, next to the tractor, down at the end of the track, not speaking, Rosemary holding a suitcase and wearing a headscarf.

“Let me know where you are,” Bugler said after she got into the car.

“Find me,” she said, shouting it through the half-open window.

She shook then so that Duggan had to light her cigarettes for her; her moods changed by the minute, missing Bugler, then abusing him, calling him all the nasty names she could think of, then asking for them to stop by a pub to get her a brandy for her nerves. She drank it in the car. Afterwards she was subdued and then got a little maudlin and said life with Bugler would be hell but life without Bugler would be a worse hell. She asked him if he had ever been in love, but did not wait for the answer.

When they passed the green gates and the sloping lawns of the castle, she asked what it was and he told her.

“Let’s drive in there,” she said.

“It’ll cost you an arm and a leg.”

“I don’t care . . . I don’t bloody care . . . Let the bastard pay for it.

And going up the drive she got out a little mirror to make herself dishy before she went in there.

A
SWIFT FALL OF
snow was what met Bugler when he raised the blind. He had never seen snow before except in a paperweight in Rosemary’s family drawing room. He stood by the window and watched it, the sheer zest of it, the flakes spinning, chasing each other through the air, a coat of it like ermine on the young conifers and along the top rung of the gate under which Gypsy lay, plaintive. New Year’s Day. A day of resolutions.

Dear Brennan,

This is Bugler writing, and what is more, writing on an auspicious day. I am giving up the fight over the mountain and with it I could say giving up a part of myself. I do it on account of your sister. Let’s meet and talk things over.

Mick

Unshaven, in a tremor, Joseph began to walk back and forth, digesting the contents of the letter. Its brevity was galling. He saw treachery in it, something in it above and beyond what it said. Bugler intended wooing her, which is why Rosemary had been jilted. Walking around the kitchen he slopped the tea, and with each reading became more crazed; he saw red, as he put it. “I am seeing red,” he said as before his eyes there came some forgotten picture of a gored bull, its entrails puddling out. There was still time. He could persuade her, and if she defied him, he could keep her in there for a long time, for ever.

He was kneeling now, imploring her, and it was as if she answered back and said to fear not, his fears were unfounded. In his frenziedness he saw her come through the kitchen door in the tweed coat with the little squirrel collar, and for a moment he would have sworn that he heard her. The kitchen without her was no kitchen, cold, vacant, everything out on the table—marmalade, sugar, mustard, spilt cornflakes, spoons, knives, forks, table mats with pictures of wild birds, all needing a wipe. Three milky roses, dried and with the pink dredged out of them, were in a jug where she had put them the morning she left. When he broke it to her, she did not answer, she did not remonstrate, still a mute, but the look she gave him he would never forget.

He made to throw Bugler’s letter into the stove, changed his mind, withdrew it and put it in his breast pocket, then lifted the telephone and slammed it down, cursing whatever bureaucrat had cut it off. The bill had not been paid. Bills were not paid. Bugler’s doing. His stock now reduced to seven, and he would have to sell two more—“What you have done to me, what you have done to me,” he shouted out, invoking Bugler’s name. Feeling suffocated, he opened the door to let the fresh air in, and he was still talking to himself, remonstrating, gesticulating, when the Crock arrived, a crust of icicles on his nose and a black pixie cap that made him look like a wood sprite.