As he foddered the calves, he told himself that he was being foolish, that the moment of madness was truly over. He would not approach her, in case she should reject him, and she would not approach him again, lest he reject her a second time. Often he had wondered how a man and a woman, any man and woman, go to bed together for the first time. Though they may not have been brought up in an atmosphere of sexual taboos, they will be aware of the inviolable sovereignty by which each person owns himself and of the violence of the invasion of one body by another. For that reason they probably do not appoint a day or night in advance and write it down in their diaries. No, it must surely happen more spontaneously. They are together in the dark, like earthworms, one against the other, and in their egoobliterating reverie they both move like sleepwalkers in the same direction, owing their coupling to an undeniable throb of the blood. A brother and sister were different, however. Desire for incestuous union was not as sparkling as the desire of a boy for the girl next door. It was born in darkness, out of family secrets and unspeakable knowledge that put pain and distance between the two. Knowing this, neither brother nor sister could make the first move without fear of rejection and disgrace, of staking a lifetime’s peace of mind on an irrevocable throw of the dice. The long and short of it was that he and Maureen must and would remain apart.
He was silent at teatime, but Maureen prattled on about the funeral as if nothing had happened in the parlour. When he had tidied up for the night, he told her that he could not bear the house, that he was going to Killage for a drink. He would have preferred to stay at home, but he could not face a long evening alone with her, so he went to Phelan’s and found Festus O’Flaherty in a corner of the bar deeply engrossed in a study of his image in the mirror. Kevin wished to talk about cattle and O’Flaherty wished to talk about women, so they talked about women. Festus talked about his favourite train girls, what he called femmes trouvées or cailíní gan iarraidh, women who come into your life unbidden and leave before they have time to do you an injury, women who have one thing in common—the fact that they never snap back.
Kevin listened in near silence, and as he listened he discovered in himself a new sexual confidence which no amount of bravado from O’Flaherty could obliterate. For the first time he listened to his friend with less than adulatory attention. He had hit upon the truth that in sexual conversation among drinking men a little experience goes a long way.
Maureen was already in bed when he got home, so he sat barefooted in front of the range for half an hour, wondering if O’Flaherty had a sister. Finally, he decided that he would have to go out for a drink every evening for a week, so as to put distance between himself and Maureen and between himself and what had happened in the parlour. Then, after a fortnight or a month, they would be able to resume the innocent round of living they had known before their mother’s funeral.
He went to bed at one, and while he lay on his side waiting for sleep, he heard the tread of her bare soles on the linoleum as she felt her way along the corridor to the bathroom. She must have forgotten to close the bathroom door, because he could hear the splashing of her water like that of a mare staling into a gripe. At first he was conscious only of the sound, but gradually he became aware of its duration, and as he wondered when it would stop, he found that he had got an erection for the second time that day. However, it was not one of those erections that distract and torment until relief, manual or orificial, makes bodily ease and sleep a possibility. The feeling that accompanied it was dreamlike in its lack of urgency, so dreamlike that he had fallen asleep before he could hear the dribble of her “strippings” against the side of the bowl. He woke refreshed from what seemed like an interminable slumber to find another body in the bed beside him. He was lying on his side, facing the door, and beside him on the pillow was the dark outline of her head. He listened for a moment to the undeniable urgency of her breathing and decided that there was but one thing to do—pretend to be asleep.
He wasn’t wearing pyjamas, only a woollen vest, and she put her hand under it and gently felt the smoothness of his testicles through his barnacled scrotum. She raised her left leg over his thigh until he felt the fire of her vagina burning the eye of his penis, and then he gave a long canine snore and turned on his back, bearing her with him till she was firmly astride him. Still pretending to be asleep, he lay with his arms by his sides while she pulled up his vest so that her breasts were like crushed fruit against the bone and muscle of his chest. Breathing deeply and evenly, and without moving hand or foot, he gave her the freedom of his speculum, allowing her to impale herself to her heart’s desire. Her breath was coming in great snorts against his cheek, and as she heaved and plunged, he thought of Henry seeking solace against a wooden post and of Lot lying in a drunken stupor in a cave while his two exemplary daughters did what they could to preserve his seed because there was not a man in the earth to come in unto them after the manner of all the earth. So it was with Maureen.
And they made their father drink wine that night: and the firstborn went in, and lay with her father; and he perceived not when she lay down, nor when she arose.
At last Maureen arose, and he pulled the bedclothes over his head as if to hide from humankind, but he found himself immersed in the pungency of her sexuality. His bed was no longer a bachelor bed, which pleased him. Like a giant killer in a fairy story she had overcome his invincible virginity, but he could not sleep because of the raw chaos in his soul.
He had sunk so deeply into himself that she was almost upon him before he noticed her. She was making for him between the gaunt trees, Elizabeth Quane, tall and straight, in a heavy coat, muffled against the wind, with a brown ribbon in her combed-back hair. He did not move in recognition; he waited until she had come close enough to talk.
“I didn’t recognize you at first. I thought you were a loafing tinker or an unseasonal tourist who had mistaken Slieve Bloom for Macgillicuddy’s Reeks.”
“I was passing in the car, and I thought I’d come up here for a walk.”
She looked at him quizzically, because it was a lame excuse. Midland farmers, he realized, don’t spend February days like nature poets under trees. He wondered if she thought that he had come to her wood to relieve himself, and he felt that he would prefer her to think that than that he had come to be alone. He got to his feet because he did not like having to look up into her face.
“I come here because of the river,” she said. “I’m interested in music. I sometimes come to listen to the trickle of the water.”
He looked into her grey eyes to see if she was making fun of him, but he could see that she was serious, her face composed, her delicate ears pale at the rims.
“When we were growing up, Maureen and I used to come here to swim in the summer. That was before my father sold it.”
He wanted to bring the conversation round to a subject that did not embarrass him, but the thought of Maureen made him distinctly uneasy.
“As soon as Daddy bought it, Murt and I began coming here every day to play in our tree house. It was the only tree we could climb at the time.”
They walked along the rutted path with exposed roots like eels petrified in the act of wriggling.
“Do you ever think of Murt?” she asked when they had come to the river.
“I think of him every day.”
“You shouldn’t feel guilty. It wasn’t your fault.”
“I miss his conversation most, not for what he said but for the way he said it.”
“I miss him too. I’m sorry I never thought of him while I had him—there did not seem to be any need to. He was always there, in and out, coming and going on a tractor. It seemed at the time that those days would last forever. When I think of him now, I see him on a tractor, looking over his shoulder after putting it in reverse.”
She was looking down on the brown water of the river flowing smoothly over coarse gravel, and he noticed the vulnerable look in her eyes, as if in her expectation that life would bruise she had n
ot been mistaken. The vulnerability was expressed not merely in her eyes, which looked as if she were in the habit of wearing spectacles and had forgotten to put them on, but also in her nervous smile, which made her mouth look askew. “Askew,” he thought, was the wrong word, because it implied imperfection when what he meant was that her face had a look of inwardness and spirituality, achieved rather than bestowed. As he gazed at her, he felt that he’d been seeing her face in a mirror all his life and had now seen it plain for the first time, at once familiar and strange.
“I’ve had a lovely letter from his girl friend,” she continued. “I’m willing to admit that she knew him better than I did.”
“I’m afraid I never met her.”
“He never mentioned her to me, but now I’m tempted to go to see her.”
“I don’t think he’d have married her,” Kevin said.
“I don’t think he’d have married at all.”
They walked to the road, she with her head flung back as if it were held by the brown ribbon in her hair.
A rare woman, he thought, but not a comfortable woman. Though she is vulnerable, she is not to be crossed lightly.
“I was sorry to hear that you lost two young bullocks with blackleg,” he said when they reached the car.
“I sent for O’Flaherty, but they were dead by the time he arrived.”
“He’s a good vet, but even a good vet can do little about blackleg.”
“I don’t think he’s a good vet.”
“Well, if ever there is anything I can do—”
“Come down for a while tomorrow evening. There are one or two things I want your advice on.”
He watched her retreating figure in the rearview mirror as he drove off, and he found himself thinking of sanity and intelligence, of a mind that could penetrate and illumine the fuscous backwaters of life. He was going back to the darkness of Clonglass, of Maureen and Billy Snoddy, while Elizabeth bore with her to Larch Lawn a nimbus of discriminating light.
Chapter 6
The days lengthened as winter lightened into spring, but he did not find a corresponding lightening in his step. It always roused his sense of wonder to see reddish buds in December preparing so soon after autumn to burst forth greenly in spring, but though it was now the end of February he could discover no vernal hope in his soul. No matter where he went, he could find no more than a few moments’ peace, and these only after six or seven pints with O’Flaherty in Phelan’s. He tried to prolong these moments by going home for a nightcap with his friend, until Mrs. O’Flaherty came downstairs one night and demanded to know if Festus was a homo or a hetero. If he was the raving hetero he boasted to be, his proper place at two o’clock in the morning was with his wife in bed, not keeping the children awake with drunken guffawing and dirty stories that only showed his hatred of women.
Billy Snoddy’s vigilance had changed the timing of Kevin’s romps with his sister. Their afternoon couplings had ended. She now came to his bed in the middle of the night, though not every night, nor indeed every week, but irregularly, perhaps once one week, twice the next, and not at all the following week. The lack of regularity in his sexual diet had a disturbing effect on his metabolism, resulting in gripes and flatulence, but knowing not the minute or the hour had at least one advantage. As in practice it meant fewer performances, the pain in his testicles had abated. He was now prepared to accept that it was not a sign of incipient cancer, that it was no more than the ache which any good Irish Catholic would expect to experience after an excess of sexual indulgence. He was sufficiently religious to pray at times for strength to refuse her, but in the darkness of the night he could not find it in himself to deny comfort to a woman in need.
The question of whether Snoddy was dipping his wick in the same oil jar plagued him daily. He kept an eye on them both in the afternoons, but he was too tired to stay awake at night in the hope of surprising them. One day he would tell himself that if Snoddy was servicing his sister she would hardly have to turn to her brother for solace; but the next he would ask himself why she no longer seemed to need the solace of a regular prod. Perhaps he was servicing her but without distinction, so that she had to turn periodically to her prepotent brother for a booster.
He tried to ignore Snoddy but with little success. Though Snoddy could not be faulted in his work during the day, he displayed a moral superiority and axiomatic incisiveness in the evenings which Kevin found difficult to stomach. He had a way of summing up conversations which was enough to daunt any conversationalist, and his summations found force in his unassailable sense of moral ascendancy, of having Kevin and Maureen in his waistcoat pocket.
Kevin knew that he should act. He should tell Snoddy to pack his bags and scram, or arrange for him to have an accident that would make the packing of bags unnecessary. A fatal accident would be the easier solution because it would be final. The other solution could only end in the spread of gossip about himself and Maureen, which was the last thing he wanted. Though he knew what he wanted to do, he put off doing it from one day to the next. He felt as if he were living in limbo, beyond the flow of grace, condemned forevermore to unease and inaction.
For comfort in his misery, he began visiting Elizabeth Quane twice or three times a week, but he found that his gloom was proof against her conversation. She talked mainly about farming, and when she did not talk about farming, she talked about Murt. He thought that sad. She was an intelligent woman. She could have talked about anything, but clearly she thought that that was not true of him. In her newfound interest in farming she stopped making jokes about PTO shafts and timothy, but she still made fun of him for being much in demand among Macra branches as a speaker on foggage. One cold evening she made him a bowl of pea soup, and when he said that it was good and thick, she replied that she had put lots of foggage in it. In other words she did not see him as a man, did not feel the pull of his flesh and blood.
At the beginning of March, Concepta came with her pampered brood. She was in the habit of coming to see Maureen once a month, and in winter her husband, Monty Kilgallon, often came too, because he liked to tell his staff that he’d spent the afternoon shooting with his brother-in-law. He was a bank manager who suspected now and again that there was more to life than bank balances. He saw the countryside as a playground, and banking as a means of ensuring that the right people played in it. If it had not been for a congenital inability to sit upright on a horse, he would long ago have realized his secret ambition of riding to hounds and being called a fearless horseman by The Leinster Express. As a substitute for such fame, he took a sheaf of magazines on shooting and fishing, and to prove to himself that he had read and marked them well he liked to go out with Kevin’s gun whenever he came to Clonglass. Kevin detested the sight of him, detested his ostentatious deerstalker, his bright tan shoes, and the carefully planted smell of pipe tobacco that emanated from the pockets of his tweed hacking jacket. Kevin’s greatest regret was that once after spending two hours searching the moor for him he pulled him out of a boghole into which he had sunk to the waist.
“Where is Kilgallon?” he asked Concepta as she pulled up in the yard.
“You mean Monty? He’s in Dublin on business, so disappointed that he couldn’t come. There’s nothing he likes better as relaxation from banking than a good conversation about farming.”
“He’s lucky that he need only talk about it.”
Concepta got out of the car and looked at the soles of her shoes in case she had trodden on anything which a bank manager’s wife should not tread on.
“Come into the house and change into your old clothes right away, dears. Uncle Kevin’s place of work is not as clean as Daddy’s,” she said to the children in the back of the car.
Three of them emerged dutifully as she spoke, and daintily picked their way across the farmyard. They were dressed to the nines, but to let Kevin and Maureen see that farmyards were not as clean as banks, Concepta always made them take off their finery on arrival and put on the old
clothes she brought in a shopping bag. To bring them already dressed for the farm would, of course, have been too simple, too obvious, too lacking in point. All the children had what Concepta and her husband called “quality names.” The two girls, aged seven and eight, were called Jocasta and Jacinth; and the boy, who was four, was called Breffny. Concepta was obsessed with the need to preserve the purity of these beautiful names against the despoliation of “common” children who referred to her young as Joc, Jass, and Breff. In a moment of self-revelation she confided to Maureen that if ever God and Monty Kilgallon gave her another child, she would call it Paul or Alice or some other name that could not be savaged by the hoi polloi in their passion for vulgar abbreviation.
“It’s a wonder you wouldn’t wash that car of yours,” she said to Kevin. “There’s enough dung on it to manure a square perch.”
“Ach, sure it’s a great protection against the weather,” Kevin said with mock seriousness. “I’ve never washed a car in my life except when I wanted to sell it. It pays, you know. When I scrape off that crust of cow shit, it will shine like new.”
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