Wild Decembers (5 page)

“Later,” she says to the barely audible invitation. The floor is empty except for two old men dancing ceilidh in defiance of the boppy music that is being played, shouting to one another. “One, two, three, one, two, three,” to keep the beat.

“Please yourself,” he says, and moves off as if a little daunted, tapping the tables that he passes in some kind of pique. The Crock lisps a low whistle.

“Bet you’re the first lady ever to say no to him.”

“Oh, he’ll siphon off all the talent till he gets to the last dance.” That from Josephine, standing above them, her body like a blancmange in her off-white crocheted dress.

“Oh, Jesus, look,” from the Crock. They look. They see. Bugler is dancing with Lady Harkness, steering her solemnly, as if she were an ocean liner in her peppermint green; her smile seems to be saying that there is nothing in the whole world more beautiful than an old-time waltz.

Gradually, the floor fills up. Young men with young girls in bold improvisations. Breege thinks that by the time he asks her again she will be prepared. She will have gone down to the ladies’ and dabbed herself with Mrs. Flannery’s powder. It is in a floppy pink swansdown powder puff that is stitched onto a georgette handkerchief. The lady visitor from Boston brought it. It smells like the chemist shop in the city, the counter away from the dispensary, with toiletries and perfume bottles on a tray. The four corners of georgette are knotted to keep the powder from spilling. Mrs. Flannery mashes her hands. The atmosphere is hectic now. Howya. Howya Gussie. Howya Dessie.

Sy, the compère, is calling out the revels in store. First half, anything goes; around the house and mind the dresser. Interval for supper, with entertainment from the one and only Magdalene. Second half, rock, smooch. The one and only Magdalene is sitting on the stage, her ankle by way of a joke yoked to the leg of the piano with red crepe bunting. A gaudy stump. She smiles, tremulous. Sequins stitched to her black dress are likewise twinkling away. Sy says what an honour it is to have her in their midst. Yippees from the crowd. Barmaids, smiling, kerchiefed, weave through the mêlée with laden trays. Heads of hair mop the floor.

Young men, ardent, bold, throw their partners up in the air as if they were puffballs.

“I’ll kill him . . . I’ll kill that man.” Mrs. Flannery is seeing her husband’s ringed hand move slowly along the velveteen buttocks. Calls to him, simply calls his name, but peremptory. Standing on a chair, taunting—does he think he is a teenager and he the wrong side of fifty. Vixen-like, she is on the dance floor hitting him, aggrieved.

“Oh, a shit attack.” Eamonn saunters across to rescue matters with a “Now now.” Couples pause in their capers to look. A lull in the esprit. Music comes to a halt. One of the old men who had been dancing says a recitation to the kneeling monk in his aspic of stained glass:

My back it is deal
My belly’s the same
And my sides are well bound with good leather.
My nose it is brass
There’s a hole in my ass
And I’m very much used in cold weather.

As supper is announced, folding chairs are slung down and there is a crush to a desired table. No use being with a bunch of dopes. Piping-hot stew in big urns, one for each table, and twelve earthenware plates. Noreen shouting out the orders: “Who’ll be mother, who’ll be mother?” No one wants to be mother.

At their table it falls to Bugler to be mother. Sleeves raised, he ladles the stew onto the upheld plates. Says he can’t be too particular as to who does or does not like onions. Give them to your neighbour. Old Bill Muggavin with no teeth walks around looking for a place and tells the floating streamers that he lost his clock fifteen years ago. Words of praise for Bugler’s expertise. Comes from being on a sheep station. Fifty men in the mess. Half an hour at the most for lunch or dinner. Lambs and sheep in their thousands, waiting. Funny that you never got hitched up, Mick. From Josephine. Doesn’t answer. Rosemary’s face becoming fainter with the passing days. Not able to summon her up the way he used to, lying in his quarters at night, her photograph falling out of the last letter. Rebuke.

Voices bassooning. Rifled crackers. Excitable whistles. Lady Harkness with fingers in both ears. The holly pickers ogling people to buy a last book of tickets. Get lost, Brud. Get lost, Ned. Sy promising that very special moment. So close to Breege does Bugler sit that she wonders, Is it accidental because of the tight squeeze, fourteen at a table meant for twelve? Joseph two tables away with his back to her. Bugler being quizzed about life in the outback. “Ah now” is all he will say. On his other side a cripple. Paralysed from the chest down. Road accident. Fella coming out a side road at a hundred miles an hour. Big settlement. Lucky not to be in a six foot by three foot. Words of sympathy. Never know the hour or the minute. Thankful for small mercies. Bugler offers a hand. Cuts the mutton in chunks with the short scissors which the cripple carries in his blazer pocket. Then a cry. An outcry. Where’s the wine. Where’s the bloody vino. Bottles slammed down, bottles with pictures of neat, ordered vineyards, and a view of a castle. Castle Gondolfo. Isn’t that a summer residence of His Holiness the Pope? Some gulping the food, others complaining of it being rough and ready. Assumpta, just back from Sun and Sea, thinks they could at least have been given a starter at that price—twenty-seven fifty. A melon fan or soup. How was the holiday, Assumpta? Brilliant, absolutely brilliant, nothing to beat the South of France. From Lady Harkness a yodel. Vacationed there in the hills above Nice. What a clientele. Sir Winston Churchill in one villa, Lord Beaverbrook in the next. The Aga Khan sending an emissary to her table. His Highness thought her the most beautiful woman in the dining room. Sir Clifford going mad, quite mad. Bought a pistol. Josephine galled at the cheek of Assumpta and her South of France when it was Lourdes with a group from the diocese, invalids. Dipping them in the holy baths and wheeling them around the grounds at Rosary time. Seconds for some, but not all. Lady Harkness averring that the best way to cook game is to do it while they’re still warm.

Forget that rubbish about letting birds hang for a week. Game should be cooked straightaway before they toughen. Husband and wife, a wealthy couple who had been thought to have separated, at a table, cooing. The hypocrisy of it. Brian, an off-duty guard who was called to the scene, admitted that it got quite nasty. A certain person, the husband in question, meeting another person in his factory and growing attracted to her. What started out as a cup of coffee and a cheesecake ending in a full-blown affair in a hotel on the coast. Shocking altogether—wife having to go to casualty that Saturday night and husband wrote off two cars. Brian is begged to enlarge but won’t. Professional ethics. Says then that attraction is just addiction, nothing more. Is shouted down. Whoever heard such bollocks. Attraction is attraction, eh, Breege? She doesn’t answer. That gal is deep water from Lady Harkness. Lady Harkness with choker of black seed pearls, polite to all, but haughty. Shameless about the use of the only telex that is supposed to be for emergencies, for accidents, deaths, power cuts, yet receiving such trifles as:

Good morning, Lady Harkness,

A beautiful frosty morning.

Your account from. Bunting and Knowles for a memorial stone—overdue.

A Christmas card from Daphne and John in the Seychelles.

The minutes of the meeting for the Royal Foundation for the Blind.

At last the estimate for the garden wall opposite the library window which collapsed. A bit steep.

Magdalene sings while they eat. A light, sweet, tinkly voice. All about love. Waiting for love or just seeing it passing by like thistledown. She has donned black satin gloves, her arms reaching out to her audience, wooing them. Bugler is asked if he thinks she has It. He looks and listens. Seems a very nice girl. He is next to Breege. She can feel his wandering touch. They talk to everyone else at the table except each other. Two months passing on the tractor and now this, this. Baked apple and ice cream topped with lit sparklers are being passed around. A feverish feeling.

Sudden darkness. Screaming. Jesus Christ. Is it a bomb? Sy announcing, “Yous are all to kiss the person next to you, and if there’s no one next to you kiss the wall.” “I have no wall.” “Kiss my arse.” Bugler turning to Breege, her blouse so cold and starched, her lips full and violet colour from the down spotlight. Drinks her in. Slow count to five. “Wakey wakey” from Sy. The moment has passed. Lights come brazenly on. “You dirty things. Was that nice?” Yes. No. No. Yes. Sy swears to God he read in a book that an apple a day keeps the doctor away and a birdie a day keeps divorce away. Bugler slowly detaches himself with Aré you okay to her. She daren’t answer. Had no idea she would be so. So. The lips slightly parted, disclosure in the parting. Deep water.

Rita, with cabbage crown and a frilled cabbage miniskirt, comes across, throws her arms around him, and says feck. She was next to a fella with no teeth. Elbows the cripple to hoof off in his wheelchair, sits herself next to Bugler, inclining onto his lap. Hey ho . . . Here we go. Has a request. Her kid sister, Reena, would like the next dance. Okay? And wouldn’t mind being brought home. We’ll ask you in for coffee and peppermints. A rose on the breakfast tray and a fresh egg in the morning. Ever put your hand in under her after she lays, going bloody berserk and then klook-klook-klook. Does he keep hens? No. Pity that. Great comfort. Klook. Klook. Klook. An egg flip for the constitution. She pulls him onto the floor. Chalices of Irish coffee, foam-crested. Elderly people asking for pots of tea.

Blotched from crying, Mrs. Flannery asks Breege to stay with her, not to go back up. They are in the ladies’ room. Someone has draped the pale blue lavatory paper around the mirrors. Mrs. Flannery bemoans how much she loves that man. Would cut her wrists if he went with another. Asks in God’s name why she flipped. Why she made such a show of herself. Entreated to be told what exactly she did, then begs not to be told. Says then how kind Patrick was, how affectionate when they went into the garden to patch things up. She weeps afresh at that hot bitch sleeping only a wall away from them for two more nights. Loud cheering as obviously the winners of the raffle are announced. Breege longs to be back there, on the verge of the skaty dance floor.

“Come on . . . We might be winning something,” she says, and coaxes the woman up.

Bugler, with his jacket off, is onstage singing and holding the cookbook, which he must have won. It is a song about a town in the North devastated by war, his voice almost breaking as he laments a community divided. Magdalene watches enrapt. Buttons of his bandit shirt have come undone, his torso dark and bony. The crowd show their approval by joining in. Good on you. Well sung. Encore. When he comes off the stage, various girls touch him and he touches them back. Magdalene is helped down and walks beside him, her long velvet glove nestled to his bare arm.

“Micky Dazzler,” the Crock says as Bugler on impulse hands his winning trophy to an old woman who has jumped up to kiss him.

“Micky Dazzler.” Joseph is beside Breege now. Soon time to go. She sees her own hand twining and retwining a bit of her own hair in the gilded mirror. Crestfallen.

The tractor was back. In its old familiar place under the hawthorn tree. In the moonlight, veiled in frost, it seemed like a glass coach. Joseph crosses to it, scolding it at first for being so presumptuous as to come back without an invite. Bugler usually brought it up home, up to the Congo, but must have been in one big hurry to get on that dance floor. Having scolded it, he mellows somewhat and begins to talk to it in a maudlin way.

“Oh, dear Dino, charmed to see you, how do you do, we thought you had gone up yonder for good and now it seems you’re back—do you prefer us, Breege and me . . . Go on, say it, you’d sooner us than the Shepherd. Micky Dazzler he has just been christened, in case you don’t know . . . Oh, what a swell, an all-round man, can cut a dash on the dance floor, level a field, shoot game, and click the girls. Three cheers for Micky Dazzler, hip hip hooray.”

When he touches a knob on the dashboard, music starts to pour out, and he draws back from it alarmed.

“Jesus. He’s got a stereo in you . . . Well, I’ll be damned,” he says, searching for the place he had accidentally touched.

“For God’s sake, Joseph.”

“Listen, Breege . . . Listen. . .” She is dragging him away.

“What’s the hurry? What I say is true . . . The Shepherd is number one, and very soon, he will be growing rye . . . Rye fields in Cloontha and cranberries on his marshy land. I have it this evening from his very own lips. But a word in your ear, Breege . . . Tricky Micky means to take us over. Treasons, stratagems, and spoils.”

“What’s wrong with rye . . . What’s wrong with cranberries?”

“Everything!”

Turning to face the carved bowl of the mountain, glassy in the moonlight, he delivered his ode—

“Who came first, Bugler or Brennan? The Brennans came first, the Brennans of the moor. The Buglers played bugles and came hence from Wales with the soldiers . . . Welsh men . . . And on the last day the Brennans will be first, for many are called but Brennans are chosen.”

The dance hall was deserted, spare tables and folding chairs stacked in a corner, with Eamonn and two girls sweeping up the debris, sweeping it into the middle of the floor. There were cans, cigarette packets, a pair of red braces, and several odd earrings that sparkled untowardly in the dust. Rita is looking for Reena. Reena is looking for Rita. They miss because of going in two different directions, one to the ladies’ room, one to the car park. They meet back in the hall in a hail of risen dust.

“Where’s Bugler?” from Rita.

“He’s gone.”

“He’s gone! Where to?”

“He went with Magdalene . . . And the harp.”

“Jesus Christ, in holy feck’s name, you mean to tell me that you let him go?”