“I’ll wait till you’re ready,” he said, and immediately wondered if he meant it.
Their honeymoon was like no honeymoon he had ever heard of. They spent the days motoring about Connemara, stopping off to sit on wind-scoured beaches, cross rocky stretches of mean land, or to drink a sour pint in a wayside pub. It was an alien country with an alien people, and after one day he longed for rich acres and powdery clay and the company of men who made a good living from good land. Elizabeth, on the other hand, seemed to find spiritual rest in the harshness of the life. She wore a headscarf like the women, watched wildlife for hours on end, and spoke endearingly to wild-eyed schoolchildren. They came back to the hotel in the evenings for a late dinner, and after a drink in the bar they would go to bed. Elizabeth always read for an hour before turning off the light, and he waited in the knowledge that she was her own woman, that nothing he could now do would change her.
In the centrally heated darkness he would fondle her for an hour and maybe rest the long-suffering Fagin between her thighs. One night he was so exhausted that he himself fell asleep while Fagin kept vigil in her silk knickers, and when he woke again she was kissing his cheek and madly biting his earlobe, and Fagin was safely ensconced inside her.
“I put him in myself while you slept,” she said. “But don’t move yet. Just leave him as he is, resting warmly and snugly for a second.”
After a time they both began to move together like driftwood on a turning tide. As he thrust against softness, there was vengeance and harshness in his heart, and then he saw the warm water of the Gulf Stream lifting a rare sea plant in a fringe of seaweed, and he discharged.
What a relief! At long last, for better or worse, they were man and wife, and the headlines in The Leinster Express would not shout, MARRIAGE ANNULLED, FOGGAGE LECTURER FAILS TO CONSUMMATE. It was the most wonderful thing that had ever happened to him. It was like passing your driving test after failing ten times, after giving up all hope of success.
“We can go home now,” he said.
“It was worth waiting,” she replied.
Part Two
Chapter 8
Throughout her twenties, living in lonely bed-sitters in Dublin, Elizabeth longed for a man who would sweep her off her feet. She knew that marriage was something that would never come easy to her, but she felt that the right man would be powerful enough to shield her from what she imagined to be the horrors of it. She waited and waited, but the man with powers to sweep never appeared. Instead, she had gone out with a succession of weedy little men—solicitors’ clerks, naive young doctors, chartered accountants, and civil engineers—men who loved themselves with single-minded determination and sought a woman to help them love themselves even more. She had become accustomed to little men from life’s infantry, so she was anything but prepared for an English technical journalist called Alexander Utley.
He arrived unexpectedly with the force of Strongbow and the self-confidence of a lieutenant-colonel, and before she could pronounce his unlikely name her hymen was a broken cobweb, a flimsy piece of gossamer on a wilting stick. For that she did not blame Utley but her unworldly upbringing at Larch Lawn, followed by a cold convent, silly girl friends, and empty afternoons in the desert she found in Dublin. In her innocence she had dreamt of upright men of unimpeachable ideals, men who would seek her out for the clarity of her intellect and the purity of her character, men who would not only talk but listen and in the simplicity of her conversation hear the echo of a chord which they had hitherto sought in vain. Utley flattered her into thinking that he had heard the chord and wished to hear it again. In the summer dusk he spoke from beneath a mantle of English idealism, bemused her with talk of the essential fidelity of Albion, and left her smarting with an uncharacteristic suspicion of men. For months she lived entirely among women, until the resultant ennui drove her to a dance in the Four Courts.
“Are you a solicitor by any chance?” asked a barrister who had trodden twice on her toes.
“No, I’m a schoolteacher.”
“What a pity.” He smiled. Then he quickly looked at his watch and said, “I’m only here for a brief or two.”
She was so taken by his unprofessional line in selfridicule that she forgave him his clumsiness and took him home to meet Attracta Craig, with whom she shared a flat in a red-brick house in Ballsbridge. Attracta never went to dances. She sat at home reading Byron as a funnel-web spider might sit at home weaving, and whenever Elizabeth invited a young man back for coffee, Attracta would close the collected letters of His Lordship and ask the unfortunate fellow if he played the hurdy-gurdy. As she waited for his hesitant reply, she would roll her bulbous eyes and uncross her legs so that her nylons rustled against her underskirt and the fragrance of freesia filled the room. The fragrance invariably unnerved the young men, none of whom knew the precise meaning of hurdy-gurdy and not a few of whom obviously thought that it had something to do with unnatural sex. Then Attracta would ask the visitor if he had heard of Anthony Van Hoboken, and when he said no, she would explain at great length that Hoboken was a Dutch musicologist who compiled a catalogue of Haydn’s music and, more important, that Haydn composed for the hurdy-gurdy.
Soon the young man would be appealing to Elizabeth for rescue or wondering when it would be politic to leave. Elizabeth would do her best with coffee and biscuits to recover their pre-Hoboken sense of togetherness, but Attracta would administer the coup de grace with a question about what Pitt the Younger and Guillaume Lekeu had in common. After an uncomfortable silence, she would tell the young man that something important happened to them both at twenty-four, that Pitt the Younger became prime minister and Lekeu died of typhoid. Following a tour d’horizon of Lekeu’s musical career, the young man would try to laugh, but neither biscuits nor coffee, neither chocolate-backed digestives nor freshly ground mocha, could medicine him into self-forgetfulness; and he would invariably hurry away after a half-hearted kiss in the hallway, stumbling down the garden path as if pursued by Medusa.
On the way back to Ballsbridge, Elizabeth was careful to brief her barrister before introducing him to Attracta. She told him that Attracta was a dear friend who must be humoured in her tiresome obsession with the hurdy-gurdy, Hoboken and Lekeu. The barrister said nothing, but when Attracta asked him about the hurdy-gurdy, he told her that he once heard it played beautifully in Spain by a butch lesbian. Then all became clear to Elizabeth. Her young men had evidently thought that both she and Attracta were queer, and it occurred to her that that was what Attracta had meant them to think.
She was so grateful to her barrister that she went out with him six times in a fortnight and invited him to Larch Lawn for Whit weekend. He seemed to get on like a house on fire with Murt, but after he left on Sunday evening Murt told her not to invite him again.
“Why?” she asked in amazement.
“Because he made a pass at me in the bathroom this morning.”
It was the last straw. She stopped going to dances, and soon she stopped going out with men altogether. After a year she could bear Dublin no longer, so she said goodbye to Attracta and came back to teach in Killage, resigned to the limitations of country life and the indignities of spinsterhood in a society of men-befriending men and pregnant women. She immersed herself in teaching during the day and music in the evenings, while always in the background, coming and going, busy with his own life, was her brother Murt. Without him she could not have survived. She cooked his evening meal and washed his shirts and asked him every day what he had been doing on the farm; and he did his jobs in the yard and in the fields, ate his food without comment, and now and again told her a piece of gossip. She was always grateful when he told her something, even something in which she was not interested, because it showed that he considered her his equal, that he did not think that only men could make men’s talk. Their conversations never took wing, however. They consisted of a single statement followed by a single comment, or a statement followed by questions and laconic answers.
“What did he die of?” she would ask.
“Constipation.”
And if she replied that the whole country was dying of constipation, he would merely say, “I only know what Young Dunne told me.”
With him there was never any possibility of going from the particular to the general, of pushing a conversation out of its familiar shape for the sheer delight of creating surprise or laughter. He did not make conversation; he made statements which, if they were to be made at all, had to be seen by him to be self-evident. Yet he did not lack intelligence or imagination; he merely aspired to the condition of silence. He saw each remark as a balloon which must not be allowed to rise, but must be pricked and replaced by an entirely new balloon, which in turn must be replaced as soon as possible by another. To talk to him, therefore, was to officiate at the birth and violent death of at least five conversations in as many minutes. It was as if the lines of his thought converged unfailingly on a point rather than widened into multifariousness, as if he never had an association of ideas, never saw an unlikely yet revealing relationship. She might have found this irritating, but she didn’t. She accepted his ways, even to the extent of enjoying his “conversation.” Talking to him had become a game for her, the object of which was to deny him the opportunity of puncturing the balloon. It was a game at which she was near adept, at least sufficiently adept to keep the balloon aloft for all of fifty seconds.
When she first came home, she would sometimes go to a neighbour’s house to ramble, but there she found herself among women who talked of nothing but child-bearing, child-rearing, disease, and sudden death. At mealtimes the men would come in with talk of cattle and crops, filling the stuffy kitchen with the fragrance of open fields, with meadowsweet, hawthorn, and new-mown hay. But they were jealous of their fragrance. They kept it to themselves, never sharing it with what in their eyes was all too plainly the “weaker sex.” She would have liked to talk seriously to the men about the cattle mart, about how to judge the beefing quality of a bullock by its conformation, but because they were as likely to talk to her about dry stock as Wittgenstein she gave up her forays into neighbours’ houses and confined herself to things she could do alone. Once or twice she tried to have a farming conversation with Kevin and Murt, and when they laughed incredulously she took to making jokes about timothy, cocksfoot, and fescue, which they found more acceptable, because it endowed her in their eyes with a recognizable “personality.”
Her half-conscious life might have lasted into old age if Murt had lived. His death brought her the pain of self-awareness and the realization that she’d loved him as she had loved no other man, that his words were more precious for being so few, that she was now without a cloak on a cold day. When the wake and the funeral were over and the house was quiet again, she looked round and saw not people but cattle. On her walk to the Grove after school, for every man she met she counted threescore bullocks. Clearly, if she wished to live here, she would have to live like the men, through the medium of cattle.
In an odd way the discovery pleased her. She would become a farmer, and as a farmer she would be taken seriously. Her land and house, her crops and herd would furnish her with a recognizable personality in public places. She would attend farmers’ meetings, ploughing matches, land auctions, and agricultural shows, and if she wished to talk to her foreman about the beefing quality of a bullock, he would nod respectfully and feel the loose fat between the animal’s hind legs, behind the spot where the scrotum used to hang. She would not draw attention to herself by becoming a farmer overnight, however. She would continue to teach for a time, until she had acquired enough knowledge to wear a pair of dirty Wellingtons with the natural confidence of a man.
The first few months were a time of pain. She missed Murt as she might miss an amputated leg or arm, but gradually the business of supervising the running of the farm took her mind off the emptiness in her heart. Then Kevin was an invaluable support. He reminded her of Murt. He had Murt’s laconic turn of phrase, his seriousness about land and cattle, and his bland unawareness of everything else in the world. At first she saw him as a man who drew strength from his limitations, from his ability to conserve his conversational ingenuity, to make one word go a long way. She felt that it would take a lifetime to get to know him, for the simple reason that he doled himself out in drops, not coffee spoons. He would sit at her kitchen table, silent between sentences and unaware of his silence, while she wondered what on earth to say to him. Admittedly, she had invited him to discuss farming, but even farming conversation sometimes flags, and soon she had to speak to him through music, which, she knew, must surely illumine the purity of his innocent soul. After a month she began to sense that he came to her to lay some dark personal burden on her shoulders, and though he never said a word about himself she knew that she had lit a spark in his life as indeed he had lit one in hers.
His effect on her was purely physical, having as much to do with his distinctive personal smell as his personality. He never had a bath, she knew; yet he never smelt of sweat. He was one of those men, mentioned ironically by Montaigne, who are naturally sweet-smelling, or, more accurately, who smell of the rain-washed earth. Whenever he left the room, he left a hint of himself behind, which tantalized her into wishing that she could throw away her eau de cologne and rosewater and take on with him the smell of tilled fields and trodden grass. Then she would tell herself that she must not romanticize the man, that he was a farmer in dirty Wellingtons, more at home talking to heifers than women, insensitive to all ways of life except his own. She told herself that life with him would pummel and bruise her, but when he asked her to marry him she never for one moment thought of saying no.
When she moved into Clonglass, what surprised her most was the character of the house. She could not believe that one house could differ so much from another only a quarter of a mile away. It was an old two-storey stone-built house with small deep-set windows that revealed the uncommon thickness of the walls. The kitchen was the most distinctive room, large and dark, with a flagged floor, an old but comfortable chaise longue bought long ago at some country auction, and a big black range with lion’s feet on which stood a variety of blackened pots and pans and above which hung a clothesline laden with socks, shirts, and towels. In one corner was a lovely pinewood dresser with large plates bearing pictures of rivers and anglers and cattle drinking, and in another was a television set which no one watched except Maureen, while on the shelf by the window was a small wireless which was turned on twice a day, once for the weather forecast in the morning and again for the weather forecast at bedtime. The life of the household found its keenest expression in the kitchen. Here meals were cooked and eaten, and here Kevin lay on the chaise longue by the range at the end of the day while Maureen knitted and watched television and Snoddy swallowed and read the local newspaper.
Behind the kitchen was the parlour, a large damp uninhabited room with a round mahogany table and six highbacked chairs in the centre and a sewing machine in one corner. By the window was a leather-covered sofa and by the opposite wall was a small sideboard where Maureen kept her best china and Kevin kept his ale and whiskey. On the low mantelpiece were an assortment of family photographs and two shields and a cup that Kevin had won for clay-pigeon shooting. No one used the parlour except at Christmas, wakes, and weddings. It was a private shrine dedicated to an obscure family history and without which the house would no longer be itself. Breathing its musty, immobile air on her first day, Elizabeth opened the window and let in the enlivening breath of summer.
She had come to alien territory. While Larch Lawn was open, sunny, and smiling, commanding a view of the road to Killage, Clonglass hunkered behind trees and hedges that enclosed the inhabitants in a sheltered maze. However, the look of the house gave only the merest intimation of the brooding life within. Kevin went about his work in silence while Maureen chattered and Billy Snoddy watched everyo
ne else with the alert cunning of a dog fox. On the first day she merely observed and said nothing, but by evening she had realized that she could do one of two things: fall in with their badgerlike ways and become one of them or by imposing her own ideas on them bring light and sanity to the house. In her favour was the fact that the enemy was plain to be seen—it was Maureen. It was with Maureen that she would have to struggle for supremacy in the kitchen, a struggle in which she would get little solace from Kevin, who saw the house merely as a place to eat and sleep in. The open world of the fields was his kingdom and all else was at best a source of distraction. So it would have to be a struggle between women, and she sensed that in this house a woman’s business was soon done.
Mealtimes provided the first bone of contention. Kevin seemed to eat nothing but beef, beef made uneatable by an excess of English mustard. For their first meal together she cooked lamb stew, and when she gave him the first plateful Maureen laughed and said, “God mend your wit, you poor misguided woman. Sure, that man has tasted no meat but beef for the last three years.”
“He tasted braxy mutton in Portumna,” said Elizabeth, feeling foolish at having shown such ignorance of her husband, and at the same time certain that for her sake Kevin would eat the stew. But all he said was “Where’s that beef, Maureen?” and cut himself six thick slices from the joint.
To add to her troubles she was still teaching and therefore absent from the midday meal five days a week, which meant that from Monday to Friday Maureen cooked the main meal of the day, that in a sense she was still the housekeeper. Elizabeth asked Kevin to have something light at lunchtime, bread and cheese perhaps, and to postpone dinner so that she herself could cook it in the evening, but he told her succinctly that only men who didn’t have to work for a living have dinner in the evening.
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