On Mondays and Fridays he washed and shaved and drove to Larch Lawn to see Elizabeth. She had shown herself to be a woman of parts. Four months ago farming talk for her was something to be scoffed at; now she could discuss dry stock and tillage for two hours without once putting a foot wrong. She had begun reading The Farmers’ Journal, and already she knew enough to keep the foreman and the farmhands on their toes. At first he went to see her to give encouragement and advice, but soon he saw that she was in need of neither. She no longer asked questions; she just told him what had happened on the farm in the last few days and gave at least two good reasons for each of her decisions.
In Kevin’s eyes the death of Breffny had achieved one good: it made Elizabeth see him as a man. It made her feel for him, at least for a time, and her sympathy gave him a strange, unexpected pleasure, like a pervasive warmth in the stomach after neat whiskey on a cold night. He would sit at the kitchen table drinking the glass of ale she had placed before him while she told him about a new topic she had discovered—what had happened at school that day. At other times he would watch her move about the kitchen like a water bird on long, perfect legs, her heels sharply clacking on the tiles, making a coldly impersonal sound that might inspire fear in unruly infants. She always wore a tight dark skirt with a slit that accentuated the roundness of her little bottom, and a white blouse that made him wonder if the bra inside it was empty or half full. Her brown hair was straight, drawn back tightly over her ears in a ponytail, which she secured with a ribbon that matched the colour of her skirt, and as she talked she would run her long fingers over her temples, smoothing hair that was already faultless in its smoothness.
The overall effect of her body was one of icy elegance, which was somehow belied by her pallid face, her weakest feature. She had a sharp, slightly squarish jaw, square front teeth which her upper lip did not quite cover, and greyish eyes that stared more often than they smiled. Her voice, however, was unforgettable. It pursued him into the fields, ringing in his ear in moments of silence, nudging him into surprised remembrance. Unlike women in fur coats he had seen in Phelan’s, she did not speak as if she were afraid the words would melt in her mouth; she intoned them through her high, thin nose like a lady archbishop with a heavy cold reading an admonitory epistle from St. Paul.
One evening as she let him in, she told him that she had been practising on the piano. She gave him a drink and put him sitting by the bright little turf fire in the parlour while she played with her back to him, rocking gently on the stool, one ear inclined to the keyboard as if the very act of listening could elicit perfect music. He sat awkwardly, with the firelight on his face and the glass on the arm of his chair, wondering what on earth he would say to her when the piece was over. He only knew about fiddle and accordion music, and this could not be compared with any sound he had heard from either of those estimable instruments. Luckily, when she finished, she closed the piano and said something about the hard weather, a remark to which he responded as if it were manna from heaven.
That was the first of many evenings in the parlour while she played things she called sonatas as if she had forgotten his very existence. He now realized that the piano was her instrument of defence. She was not an ingenious conversationalist. They had exhausted such obvious topics as her brother, the farm, and the school, and now she was making him listen in silence to the only conversation that came naturally to her. She put him in mind of the young widow Festus once courted in Abbeyleix. Whenever Festus put his hand up her skirt, she would cry “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph!” and reach for the pack of cards on the mantelpiece. “But they’re the Devil’s prayer book,” Festus would say to her as he inspected the hand she had dealt him, and she would invariably reply that “a prayer book is a prayer book, be it God’s or the Devil’s.” Kevin would have preferred cards to music, because they would have encouraged a kind of conversation he could understand, but Elizabeth was not the widow from Abbeyleix, nor he himself Festus O’Flaherty.
Sometimes he asked himself why she encouraged him in his visits. Did she really enjoy his slow talk or was she using him as a shield against loneliness while she waited for a doctor or a vet? She was an unusual girl; she rarely went places where she might attract the attention of eligible bachelors. For all her education, perhaps she was a realist who did not consider it beneath her to turn to the one man who had beaten a path to her door. Or perhaps she was a woman who sought simplicity in men, who would turn her back on the moral uncertainties and sophistication to which she herself was prone.
Whatever the answer, he realized all too keenly that he could easily make an ass of himself. Festus had already begun to make jokes about his “floozie,” and what Festus said today the neighbours would say tomorrow. Though he was reluctant to be swayed by country gossips, he was determined not to repeat the mistake of Robert John Carroll, who lived a life of exemplary devotion to a widow and died a virgin for his pains. Robert John fell irretrievably in love with her as he saw her tears stain the wood of her husband’s coffin. For twenty years he went to see her every evening, neglecting his own farm to help on hers. After ten years without overt progress the neighbours said that he was a right eejit. Then, as the widow’s daughter reached puberty, they said that he was no daw, that he had more than one iron in the fire, or more than one fire for his iron. But when the daughter married a younger man and Robert John got the cold shoulder because his help was no longer needed on the farm, they said that they had foreseen the ending from the start, that there was no fool like a widow’s fool. Kevin thought of Robert John growing old alone, watching the widow from a distance at Sunday Mass while she made novenas for her long-dead husband, and he told himself that Elizabeth was a virgin, not a widow.
Spring came slowly. The buds burst on the boughs, on one tree today and on another tomorrow, but he felt no answering burgeoning in his blood, unusual in a man whose life had always reflected the changing rhythm of the seasons. He did not even look forward to the farmer’s first day of spring, the day he’d drive the cattle out to grass once more. He felt that he was trapped in an iron cage to which only Elizabeth had the key. Moreover, he felt defiled by his proximity to Billy Snoddy. He felt that he must cleanse himself—of Snoddy, of Maureen, of the daily expectation of cataclysmic retribution. That he would achieve by an act of courage requiring a moral effort and personal upheaval beyond any he had hitherto experienced. In short he would marry Elizabeth. The thought of marriage to her filled him with a sense of uncertainty and inadequacy. Marriage, he had learnt from O’Flaherty, was an act of such irrationality that only a man who was head over heels in love could enter into it without heart-searching trepidation. As he himself was far from being in love, he could feel in his bones the force of the manly reluctance which he must now overcome.
The marriage, however, was worth making because of the good that would flow from it. As a married man living in harmony with a satisfied wife, he would be less vulnerable to any gossip that Snoddy might broadcast about himself and Maureen. In fact, once married, he would tell Snoddy to take a long walk on a short pier. And moreover, he could not forget that as Elizabeth’s husband, he would be a more substantial man with weightier opinions because of the prospering farm that went with her.
Though he would not marry her merely for her farm, he could not ask for her hand without acknowledging that there was no hunger like land hunger. Unlike sexual hunger, land hunger was never satisfied. You could inherit land, you could buy it, or you could marry into it, but still you craved for more. Ye shall eat the fat of the land, the priests said. And if you went to the bank for a loan, the bank manager would ask how many acres you had to your name. He would give a well-heeled farmer a loan of £50,000 but he would refuse to lend a cottager £500 towards the price of a secondhand car. Everyone respected land and also the men with a stake in it. Even Billy Snoddy, a cynic without a rood to build a house on, was in the habit of saying, “Your best friend is your farm” or “Land, like money, talks and talks.” But la
nd for Kevin meant more than money. It was a deeply sensuous experience. It sprang under your boot as you walked; it almost hugged you as you stretched on it in summer; it yielded like a woman before the coulter; and in the end it received you as if you were its own. As he felt the pull of the land in his bone marrow, he admitted that marriage to Elizabeth required less moral courage than he had at first envisaged. And as he thought of her milch cows walking sluggishly home in the evening, heavy with milk, their hind legs chafing the blue veins of their elders (what she called udders), he experienced an indescribable sense of comfort, as if he had already laid his head upon her breasts.
But he had not laid his head upon her breasts; he had not even laid a hand on her knee. At the rate he was progressing, he would take a lifetime to get within kissing range, and how could he ask her to marry him without first caressing her? He pondered this conundrum for four days, and on the morning of the fifth the answer came to him. He would surprise her. He would propose first and kiss later.
He waited until the black buds of the ash trees had burst on the bough, then he entered her parlour and said to her across the room, “Elizabeth, will you marry me?”
“I wondered when you were going to ask me that,” she replied.
“You already know the answer, then?”
“No, I don’t. I never cross a bridge until I’ve come to it.”
“You’ve come to it now.”
“Today is Monday. I’ll tell you on Friday.”
“I’ll let you think in peace then,” he said and left the room.
On Friday she told him that she would marry him in Killage parish church on May nineteenth, on the feast of St. Prudentiana, Virgin, daughter of a Roman senator. The piano was between them when she said it, and he walked round it to embrace her. She caught his clumsy hands and squeezed them but turned away when he tried to kiss her.
“You were sufficiently original to propose without once kissing me. Now I shall be sufficiently original to deny you a kiss till we’re married.”
“It’s more odd than original.”
“No, it isn’t. We’ll enjoy ourselves all the more when we’ve got a licence.”
“Is it because you don’t wish me to touch you?”
“You mustn’t ask me questions, Kevin. You must take me as I am or not at all.”
As he drove home, a half moon was riding over the Grove. He stopped the car and walked into the darkness under the trees, crossing little clearings of pale light where her father had cut some of the larches for fencing. He sat on a log and rested his back against a tree trunk, listening to the flutterings of nervous wood pigeons in the branches. He could not see the moon from where he sat, but her watery light had washed the little clearing at his feet, giving the shadows of twigs, sticks, and young ferns the quality of exaggeration. The same moon was looking down on every hedge and field, on every road and lane in the midlands, all of them bathed in the same levelling light, dim and shadowy so that outlines merged, so that you could not say where one object ended and another began. In his parlour he knew that at this moment her light was picking out the transoms of the windows but not the mullions, that the white-painted horizontal bars would look as if they’d been heaped with snow, that the pattern of the windowpanes would lie obliquely across the bare tabletop, and that Maureen and Snoddy in the kitchen would be utterly unaware of it. He closed his eyes to listen to the night sounds, but all he could hear was the measured pessimism of his own voice within him.
I’m leaving the sunlight for the moonlight, it said. For a long time the sunlight has been dim, but on the darkest day it is clearer than the brightest night.
“I’m getting married, Daddy,” he said the following day as he turned his father on his left side, but his father did not seem to hear.
“Have you seen Donie Dunne today? Is he still sitting outside the house?” he asked.
“Didn’t I tell you the other day he died of constipation.”
“Donie Dunne will never die. He’s like me. He will live forever. There comes a time in a man’s life when all he can do is breathe and stay lukewarm in bed, when it takes as much energy to die as to live. Donie Dunne and myself have reached that stage.”
His father crossed his hands over the bedclothes and sniffled. “He always gave off a strange smell, did Donie,” he said. “I remember your mother, God rest her, saying it after he came here to a threshing.”
“He’s now giving off gases in Killage churchyard.”
“I wonder if he eats goody.”
“Not unless the Devil cooks it.”
“Have you heard the latest about Dev?”
“He didn’t kill Michael Collins after all.”
“No, he’s going to introduce the British Landrace to Ireland, but he’s going to call it the Swedish Landrace. No other breed of pig will be allowed in Ireland’s four green fields.”
“But the Landrace is Swedish,” Kevin said.
“No, it’s British, at least as British as Dev is Irish. The bloody Spaniard, he’ll wreck us and fuck us in his black overcoat before he releases his death grip on the country.”
Kevin felt confused. Since his mother’s death three years ago, his father’s mind had been anchored in the 1930s, but now he was going on about the British Landrace, which wasn’t introduced into England until after the war. He looked at the withered face dotted with the brown and black spots of old age, and he wondered what macabre phantoms were fleeing through his addled imagination. Was this to be the final dissolution, a concourse of pigs and republicans presided over by Eamon De Valera?
“I’m getting married, Daddy,” he said again.
“If I live till you get married, I’ll live to be as old as Methuselah.”
“What else do you want before I go?”
“I want you to stop talking about that bloody Spaniard for a start. Never mention his name to me again.”
“But I thought you liked to talk about him.”
“He’s dead and never saw my age.”
“If you want to talk about him, you’re welcome. He froze this country into a mould that won’t be broken for three generations.”
“Why do you humour me?”
“How?”
“Talking like this. You know that Dev is dead, that you sold the mare, that the Grove is Quane’s. You must be sick to death of seeing me here.”
“I like to hear what you have to say,” he lied in order to soothe.
“You think the words of the half-dead have more pith in them than the words of the half-alive.”
“Maybe.”
“I’d swap places with you if I could. I would rather be half alive than half dead. When are you going to throw your leg on a woman?”
“I’m marrying Elizabeth Quane on the nineteenth of May. The Grove will be ours again, as if we’d never lost it.”
“That’s what the bachelor life does to you, makes you soft in the head. Next you’ll be telling me that Dev is still eating goody in the Vice-Regal Lodge. He died, I tell you, on the twenty-ninth of August, 1975, and they wrote ’Aged Ninety-two’ on his coffin.”
His father closed his eyes and allowed his chin to droop on his chest. Kevin closed the bedroom door and went downstairs with a sense of besiegement.
Snoddy was in the yard and Maureen in the kitchen making bread.
“I’m marrying Elizabeth Quane,” he said, sitting down behind a newspaper.
“You’re what?”
“On the nineteenth of May in Killage. You’re the first I’ve invited to the wedding.”
“Thank you very much.”
“What else have you got to say?”
“You’ll live to rue it. She’s a cold fish and a cold lady. Gentleman John, if he ever gets that far, will feel the difference.”
“She’s a landed woman.”
“She’s landed you, all right, and you haven’t the sense to ask yourself why.”
“She just likes me gimp, said it herself. There are ladies who get sick of cake.
They get hungry for soda bread.”
“You know nothing about her. She’s fierce and fanatical. You can tell by the straightness of her back and the way she looks down her nose as she walks.”
“That’s because she’s shortsighted from reading books.”
“She’s read you like a book, you oul’ eejit, and she’ll bleed you dry as a keck, wait and see. Where are you going to live, the two of you?”
“Here, where else?”
“With me and Billy Snoddy. She won’t like that.”
“Billy Snoddy will go as soon as you drop your burden.”
“I’m not dropping anything.” She laughed.
“What?”
“I went to Dr. Blizzard a few weeks ago with a pain in the back as an excuse, and he told me that I’d reached the menopause.”
“And what in God’s name is that?”
“The change of life. It came to me earlier than most women.”
“So it was cloudburst after all—after all I’ve been through because of you.”
“Who’s going to be the woman of the house when she comes?”
“My wife, who else?”
“Well, I’m not taking any orders from any Quane.”
“I’ll change her name to Hurley to make it easier,” he said, getting up to go.
“I hear you’re marrying into land,” Billy Snoddy told him that evening.
“All you need to know is that I’m marrying.”
“It won’t make any difference between you and me. You’ll need a farmhand now more than ever, with two women to look after instead of one.”
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