The pendulum swung back. He could not bear the thought of being without woman – the carnal pleasures, the emotional intimacies, the feeling of completeness. But the door had opened and he could not unknow all he now knew, or unfeel all he felt. And he was the better for it and would not be without this knowledge and experience. He has a theory that the current states of male and female are transitional, intermediary, that mankind is still evolving, and that human evolution will eventually culminate in a single form that contains and integrates both male and female elements in a sophisticated hermaphroditic self. He is convinced the evolutionary pressure is increasing and change is imminent, and he finds the idea of such change philosophically and aesthetically pleasing.
Up ahead in the twilight, the old iron railway bridge soars high above the road. Soon the stars will rise and brighten. On the far bank of the river the willows lean low over the water, and behind them the old oak and beech trees exude a powerful feeling of sadness. He peers into the darkness beyond, imagining the eyes of creatures looking out from fringed ferns and mosses. His thoughts are pulled under to where the mundane world gives way to another dimension. Rocks and roots and drowned men’s bones on the riverbed, boughs, branches, the hulls of old boats resting at angles of repose. Reeds and rushes and pondweed waving in the cold, murky darkness as little currents and eddies mysteriously arrive and depart, before an eerie peace is restored again. He imagines it all, imagines a time before the river ran through this naked earth, before flowers and glaciers, before the age of reptiles. He feels himself a protean creature and there is something he is meant to understand in that watery world, something fugitive and fleeting and very old.
RUTH CALLS HIM the following evening. ‘So, how’s your new charge doing?’
‘He’s still a bit wary,’ Luke tells her. ‘But he’ll come round. And he’s eating now, which is a good sign.’
For a few minutes they talk about the dog. They slip into natural conversation with ease, as if they’ve known each other for a long time. They talk about Dublin – the pubs and restaurants they both know – and Clonduff, and each other. Her family farm, three miles from Ardboe, is run by her sister and her sister’s husband. She went to university in Cork. She lives in Rathfarnham and spends an hour and twenty minutes in traffic every morning.
She calls again the next evening. They talk for an hour. She tells him she’ll be visiting her mother at the weekend and could drop by to see Paddy, if it suited him. When he hangs up, he crosses the kitchen with a spring in his step, and circles Saturday on the calendar.
‘See that corner?’ he says, pointing to the field below.
It is Saturday and they are walking along a headland, the dog at their heels. ‘There’s a sinkhole down there, to the right.’ He stops, leans towards her and points at a spot in the distance. ‘See the dip in the land? One morning when I was about eight we came out here to find the ground had caved in overnight. No forewarning – it had been a perfectly ordinary green field the day before.’
‘I never heard of a sinkhole,’ she says, frowning. ‘We have a turlough on our land. My sisters and I were always afraid to go too near it when we were kids. Lambs and sheep got sucked down into it, my father said. Maybe he just said that to keep us away from it.’
She leans down and touches the dog’s head and he runs off ahead of them and sniffs in the undergrowth. He’s a different dog since she arrived.
She frowns often, in concentration, just before she speaks. Stop that frowning, he wants to say, you’ll get wrinkles. Already, starting to look out for her. He shouldn’t do that.
She’s looking south, to the hills beyond Collon whose slopes are dotted with windmills. You’re lovely, he wants to say.
‘The wind farms are popping up everywhere, aren’t they,’ she says. ‘They’re over our way too.’
‘They’re ruining this valley. I can’t abide them, or the pylons. I objected to them all in the planning stages, but to no avail.’ There was a time, a few years ago, when he was consumed by wind farms, constantly on the lookout for new ones on hillsides as he was driving. He went around the town drumming up support for a protest or petition until finally the council called a public meeting, at which he spoke. He briefly flirted with the idea of running for election, going into politics. His father’s imprint on him, the impulse to serve.
‘I hate pylons too,’ she says. ‘I don’t think the windmills are as bad.’
‘But they’re ugly-looking brutes.’
‘That’s maybe because you have a very refined sense of the aesthetic, Mr O’Brien!’
He smiles, and then jostles her playfully. They talk again about the city. At the mention of place-names his mind roams the streets. She walks the pier in Dún Laoghaire on Saturdays. She mentions friends, but never a boyfriend.
They are walking side by side, her legs extending alongside his, almost touching. He takes shorter strides to keep in step. He thinks of her bare legs inside her jeans. She walks a step or two ahead of him. Nice round bottom, no visible panty line. Hate that word, panties. Too American. Something smutty and pervy sounding about it. Prefer the hearty Irish knickers. Imagine her slipping them off … her soft vagina. The words from a book that gave him his first erection at twelve or thirteen. A Thousand and One Nights, maybe. A harem, a young master returns to his private quarters after a long day, passing though internal courtyards and a corridor of cells where the soft vaginas of his concubines await him.
They trudge up the incline in the middle of the field. When he turns around he sees Ellen at the clothesline behind her house. The wind blows up from the river. Scudding clouds pass overhead. He steals a look at Ruth. Hebrew name. The name evokes thoughtfulness. Cannot imagine a Ruth who isn’t kind.
The air brightens. The sun breaks through and running shadows chase the fields. In the distance, the town, the church spire, Blake’s hill crowned with oaks. They stand and look back the way they came, at the house and the avenue.
‘We weren’t always here,’ he says, looking at her. ‘My family, I mean. We’re not landed gentry.’
‘No?’ she says, teasingly.
He smiles. ‘Can’t you tell?’
They are walking along the boundary wall towards the quarry.
‘The first Luke O’Brien came over the Knockmealdowns from Tipperary, on foot,’ he says, ‘sometime in the late 1890s, and dropped down into the Sullane valley. He was only sixteen. Apparently he made his way out to the Ardglass peninsula and appeared unheralded at the front door of Valentine and Alicia Bagenal. Or so the story goes! The Bagenals were landlords; they had a huge estate – over ten thousand acres at one stage.’ He stops and looks at her, fearful of overstating his pedigree.
‘I’ve often passed by here,’ she says. ‘My father is buried in the graveyard up the road there and I just assumed – because of the long avenue and the big house – that this was an Anglo-Irish, Protestant place, like all the others.’
‘My grandmother was Protestant, she converted to marry my grandfather,’ he says. A thought strikes him, a coincidence: If, like in Judaism, Christianity had followed matrilineal descent, he would be severed from his source religion at the paternal grandmother stage. Just like Leopold Bloom.
‘Family lore has it that Luke – after reaching Ardglass – found a grey stallion straying on the road. He used a piece of old rope to fashion a bridle and then walked the stallion up to the hall door of Bagenal’s manor house and somehow gained a foothold there – first in the household, and eventually, years later, in the heart of the only child in the family, Elizabeth Alicia Bagenal, my grandmother. He must have acquitted himself fairly well, because they got a fine house built and four hundred acres of land at Coole Quay, two miles downriver from here, as a wedding gift. They moved up here to this place in 1928.’
‘So ye’re castle Catholics, then.’
‘Mongrels, more like. And this place is smaller than the Coole place, so it must’ve been a bit of a come-down.’ He never knew if the lan
d at Coole was sold or lost or swapped, or why his grandfather moved the family to Ardboe. These are questions he wishes he had asked his father, ones which he must remember to ask Ellen sometime.
‘Still, not bad for the descendants of a young lad who came over the mountains,’ she says.
‘Not bad at all!’ He gives her a broad smile. ‘The lad brought no one with him from Tipperary and never went back, and nothing of his past life was ever known. So we have to attribute all our congenital faults and failings to the Bagenal side of the family.’
He has read the records at Waterford Museum. The Bagenals were tough landlords, merciless when it came to evictions. The knowledge that a propensity for cruelty runs through his bloodline sometimes disturbs him.
‘I often imagine – it’s a hunch I have – that, in the long tradition of risk-takers and chancers and those seeking their fortunes, my grandfather might have hopped into a field that day and led the stallion out and up to the big house. Which would mean’, he says, smiling wryly, ‘that the foundation of the union – the foundation of this whole family – is based on a fabrication, a deceit!’
He offers her a hand when they climb over rocks. The way she hops down, like a young girl, delights him. His mind is racing with thoughts of how to delay her departure.
‘Are you in a hurry?’ he asks. ‘Would you like to stay for dinner? I can rustle up a mean steak and mashed potato, if you’d care for it?’
She looks down. His heart sinks.
When she lifts her face, she is smiling. ‘I don’t eat meat but mashed potato will do the job,’ she says, a little apologetically.
‘Ah, a vegetarian? What about fish?’
She shakes her head. ‘No fish either. But I swear, when it comes to mashed potatoes I could eat you out of house and home!’
‘Well, in that case – and,’ he says with a flourish, ‘if you’ll deign to dine with a man who might be descended from an imposter – let us proceed!’
He puts on some jazz. They work together, she frying garlic, onion and tomatoes, he cooking pasta.
‘How long are you a vegetarian?’
‘Since I was fifteen. My father found a pup abandoned in a ditch one day and brought her home. Tammy. She was the first dog we ever kept indoors. Anyway, almost immediately I went off meat.’
‘Because?’
‘It didn’t make sense to eat meat any more. I thought: how can I eat a little lamb and not eat Tammy?
‘That’s very admirable.’ He is nodding, frowning a little. He wants to say something more, that he too identifies with her feeling for animals. Even as the thought arrives he can hear how hollow it would sound.
‘There’s nothing admirable about it – giving up meat was no sacrifice for me. Honestly, it’s a lot easier for me not to eat meat. All my family eat meat. I probably come from one of the biggest meat-eating families in the county! And I ate enough meat in my first fifteen years to last me a lifetime. Look’ – she offers her arm – ‘if you press here I’ll moo! And I was reared and educated on the backs of slaughtered animals.’
‘Jesus, when you put it like that.’
‘It was all very painful for a long time. I read everything – the philosophy, the accounts of animal experiments and vivisections. I was consumed. I saw animal suffering everywhere. On the city streets, on the journey home at weekends – hungry horses in mucky fields, livestock trucks packed with cattle or sheep, a circus parked on the edge of some town, the animals locked up in dark containers twenty-three hours a day.’ She stops suddenly. ‘Anyway, enough of that!’
He is opening a bottle of red wine.
‘Can I tempt you? You could leave your car here and call Dillan’s. Or, if you like, you’re welcome to stay over – there are five spare bedrooms up there to choose from.’
‘Oh, go on then. I’ll have a small glass. I can still drive with one.’
She eats slowly, small forkfuls of pasta. He does the same. Tasty dish, he thinks. Will leave a nice aftertaste of garlic.
She leaves her fork down before talking. His mother used to talk with her mouth full. Her teeth are small, white, even. He watches her chew. He should give up meat. He’s vegetarian in mind and spirit anyway. How to reconcile eating meat with mercy for animals? Impossible. Ashamed whenever he allows himself to think about it. Weak in will, in body. Too much appetite. Need to curb the base appetites, refine the soul.
She is telling him about her sisters, both older. Rosaleen the eldest, married to Gabriel, inherited the family farm. The middle sister, Kathy, is a teacher in Cork. Three sisters. He wonders if they look alike … The dark-haired Mulvey sisters. Could make a ballad out of it, like ‘The Galway Girl’. ‘The Lass of Aughrim’. If you’ll be the … as I’m taking you mean to be …
He makes them coffee. He tells her about Lucy in Australia, his mother’s death.
‘So why did you take a career break?’ she asks. ‘Was it for a specific purpose?’
The sudden pressure to justify this idle life, to explain who and what he is now. A man without a job or a mule or a mission.
‘I took a few months’ unpaid leave to look after Josie when she was ill. Then, after she died, I went back to work for a year before taking the career break. I had – have – this idea for a book on James Joyce that I’m working on. Well, at times. But I spent the first year or two doing up the house – the interior. I’ve to tackle the exterior yet, as you can tell. I put in a new bathroom, got new light fittings, new carpets … Spent all my savings at auctions!’
‘The house is lovely, you did a great job.’
‘Then, one year led to the next and before I knew it, here I am into the final year. So I’ll probably be back in school next year. It’s either that or resign my permanent job. I have to let the principal know by January.’
They move to the drawing room, carrying their mugs. He switches on the lamps.
‘Ah-ha!’ she says, inspecting one of the shelves. ‘I can see the fondness for Joyce.’
‘The love of my life … to date.’ He smiles mischievously. Time to take things up a notch. ‘Joyce and my aunt Josie, my two great loves,’ he adds.
She tilts her head to read the titles along one shelf, then removes a book.
‘Pox: Genius, Madness and the Mysteries of Syphilis.’ She gives him an amused look. ‘Interesting reading material!’
Stick with me, baby, he wants to say, I won’t bore you.
She flicks through the pages. ‘Abraham Lincoln had syphilis? Jesus. And Hitler. Holy moly … And Joyce!’ She looks at him, incredulous. ‘No!’
‘Afraid so.’
‘Jesus,’ she whispers, flicking back to the contents page, then forward to the index. ‘All the geniuses … I knew about Nietzsche and Beethoven and poor Karen Blixen getting it off the husband. But all these …’
A little shiver runs through him. He became obsessed with syphilis after he discovered Joyce had it and spent hours online reading about it. Treponema pallidum. A type of bacterium called a spirochete. A parasite that slips through the warm moist skin of the genitals. All the suffering it caused for centuries, all the havoc it wreaked in people’s lives. In existence for eons, before crossing the species divide. Found in a twenty-million-year-old fossil – trapped in the airtight guts of a termite. Wreaking the same havoc in the lives of termites or gnats or mice. Everything is relative.
‘But Joyce?’ She’s frowning again. ‘Is it generally known he had it?’
‘It was sometimes speculated about. More has been written about it lately, but it’s painful stuff. And Stephen, his grandson, is still alive and lives in Paris. He has a reputation for being difficult – and fiercely protective of Joyce. And can you blame him? I would too, if I were him.’
Must be nearly eighty now, Stephen Joyce. The last link. Called his granddad Nonno. Holding Nonno’s hand as a little boy going along the street. Touch of the hand still on him. Nonno wrote him a story about a cat and Alfie Byrne, the Lord Mayor of Dublin. Sent him a little
cat filled with sweets. My dear Stevie.
‘How did he catch it?’ she asks. ‘From prostitutes?’
‘Probably.’
Suddenly, he feels disloyal, like he’s talking about his own father. Slightly sick too. Doesn’t like to think of all the suffering. And no cure until penicillin. Sir Alexander Fleming. A farmer’s son from Ayrshire. He married a nurse from Mayo. All the good one person can bring into the world. Works the other way too. Alas, his cure came too late for Joyce.
‘Come on, have your coffee,’ he says.
She puts the book back, sits on the sofa, he on the armchair. For a while they are silent. He is nervous, out of practice. Do what you always did, he thinks.
‘So, Miss Veggie … how old are you?’
‘I’m thirty-six. And you?’
‘Thirty-four.’
‘Single?’
She nods. ‘Et toi, Monsieur?’
He nods. ‘Also single.’
They smile at each other.
‘For long? If I may be so bold to ask?’ he says.
‘Ooh, almost four years. I’m divorced, actually. I was married for eight years.’
He did not see that coming. A husband. Ex-husband.
‘Kids?’
She shakes her head. ‘No. Now, your turn.’
‘Never married. A five-year relationship ended in my late twenties, and since then … a few short-term ones. Nothing serious.’ He pauses. Never a right time to divulge the other. Best to get it over with at the start. Then they know. ‘The last girl I was out with was about two years ago.’
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