“Could you plough a whole afternoon on a ploughman’s lunch?” he asked. “The only people who eat ploughman’s lunch are city slickers who wouldn’t know the difference between a frog and a coulter.”
As she was at home all day on Saturday and Sunday, she wished to make the weekend dinners as memorable as she could. On the first Sunday she cooked them her favourite dish, goulash with paprika and yoghurt, and she was pleased to see that Kevin ate with relish. She was aware that Maureen was a rough-and-ready cook, that she served boiled potatoes in their jackets, parsnips in cubes and swedes in thick slices. As a little refinement which might show up Maureen, she mashed the parsnips with nutmeg and cream and the swedes with black pepper and butter, and in an ill-disguised attempt to elicit compliments she asked Kevin if he could taste the nutmeg in the parsnips.
“They taste more of parsnips than anything else,” he said, and Maureen and Billy Snoddy laughed at her discomfiture.
It was a cloudy afternoon and the four of them sat round the table in semidarkness because Kevin had just reminded them of the high cost of electricity. As he believed not only in dry but silent “packing,” Maureen and Snoddy were left to make most of the conversation, and most of their conversation was low. During the week she had mentioned it to Kevin, but he merely said that he had heard no low conversation, that Maureen and Snoddy spoke far too loudly for his taste. One of the allusions that came up oftenest and puzzled her most was the “Lad in the Corner.” Whenever Maureen referred to him, Snoddy would break into a paroxysm of belly laughter and Kevin would look serious and concentrate with greater force on his plate.
Halfway through the Sunday dinner Maureen and Snoddy began telling dirty jokes. Maureen started it by asking Snoddy if he had heard the one about the housewife from Kinnitty who gave a coathanger to the A.I. man for his trousers, and Snoddy responded with a story about a man from Borris who could tell the time by looking between a horse’s hind legs.
Maureen and Snoddy spluttered with laughter, and Kevin laid down his fork and knife and laughed too. Elizabeth was horrified to find Kevin revelling in such bawdy, and she said that if she heard another dirty story she would eat alone in the parlour.
“Then, I’ll tell a clean story,” said Billy Snoddy, “clean because there’s no sex in it.” And he began a long scatological story about a tobacconist from Camross who made excellent snuff by putting dried horse dung through his wife’s coffee grinder.
“Enough is enough,” said Elizabeth, getting up from the table.
“Hold your horses, woman,” said Kevin.
“What are you going to say to them?” she demanded.
“There will be no more dirty stories at table. Anyone who feels that he must release one will go out and do it in the yard.”
Maureen and Snoddy laughed at what they took to be a double entendre, and Elizabeth sat down again in the knowledge that without Kevin she was helpless.
Gradually, however, she managed to introduce several little changes as a civilizing influence in the house. In his passion for thrift, Kevin had decreed that the toilet paper at Clonglass should be two-column strips of The Leinster Express, and it was only after much argument about personal hygiene and the sensitivity of the female fundament that he agreed to her buying soft two-ply tissue from the supermarket. She bought an electric cooker with her own money, because she found that she could not master the timing of meals on the range, and she began lighting fires in the parlour to dry the damp walls and the musty air so that she could make the room her own while waiting for Kevin to build her music room.
The lack of anything that could be called music at Clonglass was one of the things that offended her most. Sometimes in the morning Maureen would listen to Irish dance music on the radio while waiting for the weather forecast, and whenever this happened Elizabeth would have her breakfast in the parlour, because there was nothing she abhorred more than the never-ending diddle-diddle-diddle of Irish music on Radio Eireann. The fiddle and the accordion were like the mist on Slieve Bloom, monotonous and eternal, filling the pit of her stomach with a dull cheerless ache. She had asked Kevin to bring her piano from Larch Lawn, but he said that he was too busy just then, that he would see to it the following week. She began going to Larch Lawn to play in the evenings, but as that was too much of a nuisance, she got Billy Snoddy and John Noonan to move the piano while Kevin was at the mart. After much huffing and puffing they put it on the trailer, but when they reached Clonglass, they found that it would not go through the parlour door.
“We’ll have to take out the doorjamb,” she said.
“We can’t do that till Kevin comes home,” said Maureen.
“You’re right,” said Snoddy. “It’s a decision for the man of the house and no one else.”
Helpless, she watched them carry out the piano again and stand it in the shed between a cultivator and a mower. She felt raw with defeat, with the awareness of having been mistress of her own house and farm while now she was less than a wife, and to soothe her nerves she sat between the cultivator and the mower, playing from memory Brahms’s intermezzo in E flat major.
“It’s a wonder you wouldn’t play something we can all hum, ’Galway Bay’ or ’The Mountains of Mourne,’” Kevin said when he returned from the mart. It was the sort of thing he would not have said a month ago. While courting her, he sat in silence through Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms as if they had transported him beyond the vulgarity of mere comment.
“I want you to put the piano in the parlour. We tried but it wouldn’t go in the door. We may have to tear out the jamb, I’m afraid.”
“Have you tried getting it through the right way?” he asked.
“I didn’t try. I left it to Billy Snoddy and John Noonan.”
“I don’t know about Noonan, but Snoddy has two left feet.”
After trial and error and an irreverent commentary from Maureen, Kevin and Snoddy managed to get the piano through the door, only to find that there was no room for it inside.
“We’ll have to move the sewing machine,” said Elizabeth.
“It’s my sewing machine and it was Mammy’s before me,” said Maureen.
“How often do you use it?” Kevin asked.
“Maybe a dozen times a year.”
“How often do you play the piano?” he asked Elizabeth.
“Every day.”
“Then, we’ll put the piano in the parlour and the sewing machine in the shed, at least till I get time to build a music room.”
“A judgement of Solomon,” said Billy Snoddy, opening his frog’s mouth in silent laughter.
It was a victory for Elizabeth but a minor victory. She realized that without Kevin’s backing she would have been defeated, because Snoddy would have acted on Maureen’s instructions before he acted on hers.
“She’s determined to humiliate me,” she said to Kevin in bed that night. “I’m helpless, utterly helpless, in the face of her l.p.c.”
“What’s that for Christ’s sake?”
“Low peasant cunning. She does everything she can to make me realize that this is her home, not mine. When I change things in the kitchen, she keeps changing them back, and she’s dirty, she doesn’t wash except on Sunday. I’ve been thinking. We’ll never have a moment’s peace together while she’s here. She’d be better off helping Concepta in Roscrea or in service in Killage.”
“I can’t ask my sister to go into service. Maybe the answer is marriage.”
“Marriage to whom?”
“I don’t know.”
“We must face the truth, Kevin. No sane man would marry her, she’s so coarse. She and Snoddy are always laughing and spluttering over their food, and when you ask her what’s so funny she says it’s the Lad in the Corner. Who is the Lad in the Corner?”
“I don’t know,” he lied.
“I was certain you must. I thought it was a private joke between the three of you. You see, Kevin, I’ve begun to imagine things. That’s what this house is doing to me.”
In spite of the strain of the kitchen, she glowed in the privacy of the bedroom, stretched beside him in the dark listening to the sombre timbre of his voice. Compared with the chill and spiky years of spinsterhood, marriage was an intimation of something warm and soft, at least for a good part of the time. If only they had the house to themselves, she would open like a flower in the morning sun, cast off all girlish inhibitions, and see the earth perhaps as Kevin in his simple goodness saw it, with a bullock’s eye or a horse’s eye, bright and clean, unsullied by history, unfalsified by philosophy.
She hadn’t rushed into marriage with both eyes closed; on the contrary she had approached it critically and with several reservations about the nature of sexual intimacy. She had feared that after years of self-denial she might be frigid, but experience soon proved that her worst fears were unjustified. Though Kevin enjoyed four orgasms to her one, she contented herself with the thought that it was early days and with thanking God that she had got over the first nervousness. And as she listened to his measured breathing in the dark, she would think that he would never know the nature of the things that he had unwittingly taught her. Sometimes she would wake up in the night to find him caressing her body with his hands as he slept. She would creep closer to him, basking in his warmth, reminding herself that she had finally put behind her the feelings of self-loathing that she had found to be the curse of spinsterhood.
When, after the first month, she discovered that she was pregnant, she was overjoyed. For some reason she expected that infertility should go with a tendency to frigidity, but now she had proved herself to be a woman in the fullest sense and she could not but warm to the man that had made her achievement possible.
She woke in the morning to find that he had left the bed. His place was cold; he was probably already giving the calves their mash. As she dressed, she noticed a blotch of grey skin between her toes, and when she examined the soles of her feet she found another ugly patch. She sat on the edge of the bed wondering what it could be. Was it to do with her pregnancy? Or was it to do with Clonglass? A germ from Maureen? A microbe picked up from Snoddy? She opened the bedroom window and took a deep breath with arms outstretched. The cool unhurrying air filled her lungs, and her head swam upwards, reminding her of a party in Dublin when a quantity surveyor whom she had admired briefly for his beard gave her her first cigarette.
Chapter 9
Kevin had hoped that his marriage would clear the domestic air, but it only added a touch of sulphur. For the first few days after their honeymoon he managed to avoid being alone with Maureen, but when she goosed him playfully in the parlour, he knew that marriage meant nothing to her, that not even Elizabeth’s presence in the house would stop her. Before he was back a week, she followed him into Rowan’s Field and told him that being a “widow” did not agree with her, that a woman who is used to a regular poke needs to be weaned gradually. She wasn’t sleeping at night, she was off her food, her bowels were bound and loose by turns, and she woke up with a blinding headache in the morning.
“But that’s because you’re pregnant!” He smiled.
“How many times have I to tell you that it was a false alarm? I’ve stopped having periods, which means that I’m always ready for you.”
“Look, Maureen, I’m married now. It would be adultery as well as incest if I lay with you.”
“Marriage has solved your problem but not mine. I’m at my wits’ end. If you refuse to help, I’ll have to turn to Snoddy, and you wouldn’t like that now, would you?”
“I thought you had turned to him already.”
“Dead mutton is no substitute for beef gristle.”
He could not bear the thought of Snoddy spending his coppers at the first standing, so he promised to give her an average of two twankydillos a week for the first month, followed by one twankydillo a week for another two months. Then he would reduce the dosage to one a fortnight, and finally to one a month. When he told her that after six months she would have to do without, she said that his solution was more Catholic than Christian, that she would get better treatment from an Anglo-Irish Protestant.
Giving her what she considered to be her due wasn’t easy. She could not come to his room at night because of Elizabeth, and he could not go to hers for the same reason. Elizabeth was at school during the day, but they could not go to bed after dinner because of Snoddy. As a makeshift solution, they devised a signal to fox him. Whenever Maureen was desperate, she would put a dollop of mustard on the side of his plate, while on other days she would leave it in the pot. On Mustard Days, as she called them, he would go out to the field with Snoddy after they had eaten and return later alone to give Maureen her glissando before the pianist came back from school at four.
To complicate matters, he was worried about the effect of ignoring the Foggage Principle. Now he had two women to satisfy and only a limited amount of oil in the tank. Unfortunately, he could not increase his sexual vigour by a liberal application of nitrogen, so the alternative was to introduce rationing. He had long been of the opinion that three times a week was enough for any God-fearing Christian. It was certainly enough for him, because he had found that if he did it more often he suffered agony in his back and briefcase. The answer was to limit Elizabeth to one a week, much though he disliked denying a newly married woman her sexual dues. Then, as he reduced Maureen’s quota to one a week, he could give Elizabeth an extra tossication and show her that marriage improved with practice, that quite possibly the best was yet to be.
He now felt doubly guilty. He suffered not only from a sense of impending retribution for his incest with Maureen but also from an aching awareness of his betrayal of Elizabeth. His anxiety was aggravated by the constant bickering between the two of them. They even disagreed over which of them should darn his socks. Consequently, when he wanted something done, he often did it himself rather than give them further cause for wrangling.
Until he married Elizabeth he had not been aware of the special quality of his relationship with his sister. They were twins, they had grown up together in the same house, sharing every experience from swimming as children in the Grove river to grieving as adults over the death of their mother. They shared so many potent memories and knew each other’s quirks so well that conversation formed only a small part of their communication. In fact, they knew each other so well that if they had been struck deaf and dumb for a month they would not have felt out of touch. In many ways Maureen was a more complex person than Elizabeth. She was a contradictory mixture of lust, religion, and superstition. Going to bed at night, she would pray to the Holy Souls to wake her at a certain time in the morning, and if he went to her bed and they came together, she would exclaim, “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph, it was like going up with Krakatoa.” In her everyday round the saints were never far from her thoughts. If a hen was laying out, she would pray to St. Anthony to lead her to the nest, and if Monsignor was boring her with a lecture on systolic and diastolic pressure, she would say, “Sacred Heart of Jesus, for mercy’s sake take him away.” Though Kevin said none of these things, he had an instinctive understanding of them. He understood Maureen better than he understood Elizabeth.
He had no childhood memories of Elizabeth. Sex with her lacked old association. In bed with Maureen he would imagine her as a girl climbing a tree in the Grove with pink winceyette knickers down to her knees. But in bed with Elizabeth he had to live in the thinness of the present. She had spent her adolescence in a convent, and he knew nothing of her until she returned from Dublin five years ago. Their bodies were also different. While Maureen’s was big and comfortable, generous as the earth and so round and full that your hand never felt a bone, Elizabeth’s was thin and hard, appealing to the form-seeking intellect rather than the blood. Consequently, his blood told him at night that sex with his sister was more “natural” than sex with his wife, but in the morning the intellect would say that the blood led to darkness and death, that only conscience could point the way to light and life.
She was fond of Judy, a big black Labrador that went with her everywhere. In the mornings the dog would accompany her to school, where she would lie in the hallway all day waiting for classes to end. Whenever Elizabeth drove to Killage to shop, Judy would sit beside her with her snout resting on the open window, sniffing the hedges and the rushing air. Kevin could understand her affection for the dog, especially when he remembered that Judy was the only company she had at Larch Lawn after Murt’s death, but he was not prepared for her emotional behaviour when Judy became ill shortly after her move to Clonglass. Within a week of arrival, the dog began acting strangely. She lost her appetite, her stomach swelled, and her breath came to smell of rotten cabbage stumps. Elizabeth took her to Festus O’Flaherty, who promptly diagnosed severe constipation, due, he said, to the stress of moving from one house and townland to another. He dosed her with liquid paraffin and gave her an enema of soapy water to ease what he described as the “obstruction.”
“I told you it was the move that caused it,” Elizabeth said to Kevin when she came home. “I know because I haven’t been too well myself.”
“Nonsense, it was something she ate,” he replied.
“Your friend O’Flaherty agrees with me.”
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