Wild Decembers (33 page)

L
IFE AT THE CASTLE
was ordered, ordained, a place renowned for an atmosphere that combines grandeur with freedom, guests coming and going with their children and their dogs and their fishing tackle, throwing their coats down in the great hall as if it is home, because the very essence of the castle is to make guests feel at home. They wander down the hall and glance at the paintings of ancestors, in browns and vermilion, some jowly, some overthin; they warm themselves by either of the two fires, remark on the nice peat smell, and maybe help themselves to a drink from the small impromptu bar, where there is a pencil and notebook to jot down what they have taken. The clock chimes quarters of an hour, the thick brass weights an intriguement to children, who are allowed to run up and down the hall in the half-hour just before dinner.

Rosemary likes her new surroundings. It was, after all, how she imagined her homecoming, a honeymoon of sorts. She has passed four days without breaking down and even rationing the number of times that she rung him. Her hunch tells her that by Sunday he will search her out. He will ask Duggan where she was dropped off. When she phoned there had been no answer. She has been successful too in persuading the manager that her fiancé is joining her at the weekend, coming expressly to discuss wedding plans. She believes it to be true. She has written several letters, nice letters, ugly letters, haughty letters, begging letters, and prides herself on the fact that each day as the postman came to deliver and collect the mail she has not been tempted to run down and hand them to him. She has reread them in the order in which they were written, the hour of day or night at the top of each one—how he conned her, conned her parents, broke her trust, how she was a person who worked for the couple, how disillusioned those recent days had been, how foolish she had been to allow for months of separation knowing that men lust for a woman, any woman that is there. Having voiced such sentiments she apologised for them and said she could not express herself in any other way and had she not done so it would chew away at her and make their future intolerable. By writing, it was all behind them. She let him know that since she came she had felt something was amiss, but now that it was out in the open she was able to forgive him his bit of wanderlust, and what is more, that they were the most important thing in life to each other.

For those few days she has decided to pamper herself; she has ordered the best wines, has had massages in her bedroom and purchased a few elegant garments from the showcase down in the hall. In her bedroom, looking out at a small lake on which there is invariably one boat or two, with men fishing, she is stoical. Fishing and fish are very much part of the place, fish large or small in glass cases with wisps of grass and greenery around them and the date each one was caught, the fly it was caught with, and the name of the proud fisherman. Yes, her letters have been harsh, she has said things which needed saying, galling things, cutting things, but she has also left him in no doubt as to her love. Bugler’s nightly, juggernauty ride is worth everything else. It is evening when she has had a few gins and then some wine that she has dialled his number, and getting no answer, she thinks of him on his way to find her, as hungry, as yielding, as she herself. If he did not appear by Sunday she would be driven out there and she would wear the red tailored jacket bought from the showcase in the lobby.

When the receptionist dialled her room and asked her to come down, she was certain that it was about the bill and the various extravagances. Coming down a long carpeted staircase, moving with studied hauteur, she saw the two uniformed guards, a man arid a woman, standing by the desk and she was certain that it must be her father who had been taken ill. She said so as she crossed towards them.

“It’s Michael Bugler . . . He had an accident,” the woman guard said.

“What kind of accident?”

“A serious one.”

“Take me to him,” she said, looking at each of the faces.

“Look . . . We might as well tell you . . . Joe Brennan shot him. Dead.” (

It took almost a minute to sink in, and then she began to hit out with words, with fists, with righteous anger. Why had they not found her sooner. Did they not realise that she was his fiancée, next best thing to a wife. Where was the body. She wished to be taken there at once.

“Nobody knew where you were,” the guard said flatly.

“Get me out of here . . . I have to arrange a funeral.”

“It’s been taken care of . . . Breege Brennan is burying him. His body is coming down from Dublin later on today. They had to do an autopsy.”

“She’s not burying him . . . They’re killers. Those Brennan people.”

“Well, he’s in their grave or he’s going to be.”

She went behind the bar counter then, and picking up a bottle of brandy, she poured herself a tumbler, drank a mouthful, and putting the glass down said decisively, “I’ll have him dug up out of there.”

“The state gave her permission,” the woman guard said.

“Fuck the state . . . This is unnatural. This is bizarre,” she said, screaming now as the woman guard held her arm, saying she knew that it must be terrible.

“I loved him . . . I adored him . . . Go up and read my letters. They’re on my bed. He was my soulmate . . . My shepherd.”

“I know . . . I know,” the other woman said.

“You don’t know . . . And you won’t know,” she said, and then she did something that made them sorry for her. She crossed to where the grandfather clock was, opened the glass-fronted door, and grasped the weights with a savagery to still them, and then put her hand up to move the thick black spidery hands back by half an hour, and for an instant the clock made a stutter as if to strike the noon, but was stopped and did not beat, and pointing to its yellow worn face, she said, “Half an hour ago I did not know it, half an hour ago he was in the fields, his hat, my hat, pushed forward to keep the light out of his eyes,” and she picked up her glass and raised it to the man she had loved, truly loved.

Quite suddenly she looked about as if embarrassed and asked the woman guard if she could ask her something alone. It was with a child’s face and a child’s need that she asked it: “Can you come upstairs and help me pack . . . I’m going out of my mind right now.”

A
RAINBOW BRANCHED ACROSS
the sky and lingered, inside it a second rainbow, a fledgling, the band of colours miraculously reversed. Earlier there had been a fall of sleet, pellets of it dropped onto the coffin like little eggs, then the first sods of earth were thrown in according to custom. There were not many mourners; the canon, pleading arthritis, had sent a visiting curate who did not know the locals and was hesitant as he began the prayers. It was a small funeral, partly because Bugler did not mix and also because there were only two boats at the quayside to bring people across. Lady Harkness wore a black hat with a cockade of black feathers and the sisters prayed fulsomely.

Breege was the one people shook hands with, because it was her family grave, and she thought, They think I am a fallen woman and soon they will think it even more.

It was at the second decade of the Rosary that they heard footsteps and a voice ringing through the cold winter air: “Wait . . . Wait for me.” It was Rosemary in a bright red jacket carrying a red rose and an envelope. Hurrying past the gravediggers as they shovelled, she kissed the rose, then the envelope, then threw them in and looked around as if to defend herself, but was silenced by the intoning of the prayers, the repetition of Hail Mary, Holy Mary, Pray for us sinners, Now and at the hour of our death, Amen.

Afterwards, as they moved slowly away, she called to Breege, “I want to talk to you.” They stood stiffly and as if something drastic were about to occur.

“I’m not going away . . . I am not giving him up . . . I loved him and he loved me. Can you understand that?” The voice calm, overcalm, each word enunciated.

“Yes,” Breege said, quiet, numb.

“Is that all you can say?”

“He would not want us to say more.”

They stared at each other then, fearing each other because each held a secret that would never be disclosed.

The rain was coming on heavier, the rainbow at its most exquisite, just before extinguishment, the greens and blues and violets fading to a breathtaking gentleness, almost transparent now as the water seeped into the colours. People looked up and remarked on it. O’Dea, fearing that there might be an outburst, crossed to the two women and said, “Let’s adjourn, ladies . . . Let’s go and drink the good man’s health.”

While they waited their turn to get into the boat, he pulled Breege aside and whispered it: “The double rainbow, that was something else . . . Mind yourself and mind that child.”

She thanked him without having to say a word.

Mountjoy Prison

Dear Breege,

They moved me here four days ago. It’s worse than the previous place, rougher. At six o’clock we go down in the yard for exercises. A fellow shouts at us to fall in and fall out, so you fall in and you fall out. Then it’s back to the cell, an entire day ahead of you. They’re all townies in here. Trying to make out that I’m insane. A fella was thrown in yesterday, on the booze for days, his shirt hanging out. Tried to kill me. One screw has it in for me. Makes me empty chamber pots on our wing. I will not empty chamber pots. I told him so. He has me down to see the psychiatrist. Oh, sweet Jesus! The fields and the fresh air, I’d give anything for one minute of them. I’ll be old before I come home. Gone old. I thought of a poem that I learned in the fourth class. Maybe you learned it too: “To a child dancing in the wind.” I’m glad you wrote to me . . . I can’t tell you what it meant. I thought maybe that you’d hate me for ever. Now I know you don’t. I have that to live for. One mad minute stretches into a lifetime.

Your loving brother,
Joseph

I
T IS BREEGE
now that is holding it together. The same fields, fallow in the depth of winter, a few store cattle, the odd fall of snow, black frost and white frost both, raw mornings, and yet the purplish sap of spring bubbling inside the slender branches. Everything so very quiet and unfeuding, Yellow Dick’s Bog a still-life of tranquil grasses and the pink stakes driven in to the mountain road weathering in the wet.

Rosemary is up there. Breege knows it by the lights in the windows each evening, and sometimes she looks up towards them and wonders if the old wars are brewing again and will they, as women, be called on to fight the insatiate fight in the name of honour and land and kindred and blood. Will their hearts too turn to treason.

Shaped by that place and that loneliness, she thinks that the longing which ran in her listening and ran in her veins was answered so, and holding her belly, she reaches back, back to those nameless and spectral forces of which she is made, and reaches to him too in the hope that there is communion between living and dead, between those who even in their most stranded selves are on the side of life and harbingers of love.