Foggage

by Patrick McGinley

  “Can’t you wait till I finish my drink?” he said.

  “I’ll wait outside in the car.”

  “You too have domesticated a tigress,” Festus said when she had gone.

  “You didn’t rush,” Elizabeth told him in the car.

  “You forget that Festus is my friend.”

  “If he were your friend, he’d have some respect for your wife. He’s little better than a savage. He denies the first law of civilization—the acceptance of women.”

  She drove in sullen silence until they were a mile from home. Then she said without turning to look at him, “Life at Clonglass is impossible. If you don’t get rid of Maureen and Snoddy, I’m going to return to Larch Lawn. It’s the obvious place for us to live, a big comfortable house away from the chafing of mean and disgusting natures.”

  “Give me a day or so to get back on my feet,” he replied, wondering how long he could put off the day of reckoning.

  Chapter 10

  Kevin did not get up the following day. He had a relapse, and like any wife who never misses a trick, Elizabeth predicted it.

  “A man who preaches the conservation of grass should first consider the conservation of his strength,” she told him as she brought him his mid-morning Bovril.

  Dr. Blizzard came after lunch, chided him for getting up from his sickbed without permission, diagnosed pleurisy, and forecast a further month in bed for him.

  Kevin’s sickness was a sore trial to Elizabeth. Left to cope with Maureen and Snoddy alone, she found that their coarseness at table was too much for her. She spent most of her time in the parlour, and rarely if ever even ate in the kitchen. The grey blotches between her toes had spread, filling her with a sense of fragility and self-loathing.

  “I’m sure it’s the house,” she told Dr. Blizzard. “I had a perfectly healthy dog, a big Labrador, that went down with an allergy within a month of moving to Clonglass.”

  ’I’m sorry I don’t follow,” said the ladylike Blizzard, his back forming a perfect curve as he stooped over her feet.

  “It’s because I’ve moved house. Though I don’t like saying so, it isn’t as clean as the house I’ve been used to. Hence the allergy.”

  “Very unlikely. Allergies, you see, are commonest in hygienic environments. Asthma and hay fever are almost unknown in primitive societies. In other words, the more parasites, the less chance of allergy.”

  “What is it, then?”

  “You have a foot fungus, nothing very serious. We’ll have you right in next to no time.”

  “What are you going to give me for it?”

  “Tablets.”

  “Antihistamine?”

  “Certainly not.”

  “That’s what the vet gave my Labrador.”

  “But you’re not suffering from an allergy.”

  “What kind of tablets?”

  “Now, don’t worry your pretty little head, my dear. Just take them three times a day and watch the blotches disappear.”

  After two weeks the blotches had got worse. They also appeared on her hands, and her fingernails thickened and changed colour.

  “It isn’t a foot fungus,” Dr. Blizzard said when she went back to him.

  “Is it a hand fungus?” she asked sarcastically.

  “I fear I’ve been treating you for the wrong disease. You are suffering from psoriasis, my dear.”

  “Are you sure it isn’t an allergy?”

  “Certain.”

  “Can you cure it?”

  “No, there is no cure for psoriasis. All that medicine can do is to minimize the effects. I can only prescribe sunlight and tar ointment.”

  She drove up to Dublin the following day to see a specialist. He examined her feet and hands and told her that she was host to a fungus with which he would deal very expeditiously. He gave her a prescription she could not read, but, when she presented it to a chemist, she received a bottle of the tablets that Blizzard first prescribed for her. She threw the tablets in the Liffey and made several telephone calls until she found another specialist who could see her at short notice. When she told him about the conflicting diagnoses, he replied that he would quickly end the conflict by taking a scraping for analysis and that he would get in touch with her before the weekend with his definitive findings. His finding was that she was suffering from psoriasis, and he too prescribed sunlight and a tar preparation.

  On a Saturday morning she went out to the yard to expose herself to sun and fresh air. Henry had come out of his loose box to look at her over the bars. Since Kevin had taken to his bed, Snoddy had been stall-feeding him, too afraid to lead him out to graze. He was a noble prisoner, perhaps a kindred spirit. She recalled that in her first weeks at Clonglass she used to go out to the field where he was tethered and listen to the tearing sound the grass made as he pulled. He was alert, almost fearsome, always ready for aggression, unlike his tame castrated sons in the next field. She wondered if he would ever come to know her well enough to trust her. If he should come to the gate where she stood, she would reach out a gentling hand and touch his wrinkled dewlap. But gentling was not for him. His pander had put a ring in his nose so that he could lead him to whichever heifer he pleased. Now his life was entirely devoted to service. A reputable butcher would not look twice at his tough and sinewy flesh. All he possessed was his hide and oft-proved prepotency.

  She walked across Rowan’s Field to a larger field with three young oaks beyond. Under each tree was a jungle of tall nettles, and she could not help wondering why the cattle had not trampled them when they were small. They must have wished to shelter under the trees from time to time, but perhaps the nettles had grown while they were grazing other fields. It was early morning, and the grass was still too wet to lie on, so she chose an upturned bogey in a corner and stretched her legs in the life-giving sun. Beyond the hedge was another hedge and another hedge, and somewhere in the distance were the changing blues and greens of Slieve Bloom. She could not see it at will in her mind’s eye. It was a day of white clouds, limbless monsters crawling on their bellies, crowding together like angry buffalo, blotting out the sun for minutes at a time. Now the field was in shadow, and half of Slieve Bloom would frown while the other half smiled in the changing light.

  Her eye rested on eleven of Kevin’s cows at the far end of the field, and she thought idly that she was looking at the loveliest of all midland scenes—cows chewing the cud in a field, lying with their heads up, their forelegs folded and their tails tucked away, their smooth backs and rumps curving to the ground. They were facing in different directions, some looking at one another, some back to back, some side by side; and yet there was an inevitability in their positions as if they had been posed by a supreme painter.

  The sun warmed her feet and she closed her eyes to find the hedges rushing up to jostle her. Life, she felt, had robbed her of experience in its proper season. She had spent her girlhood in a convent and her early womanhood in a Dublin bed-sitter, so that when she came to her husband she was incapable of throwing the ballast of the past overboard and sailing before the wind without looking astern. In her lack of experience she had fallen under the spell of an empty youth which was now in danger of becoming an empty middle age. Her fear now was that she would die before she saw life plain, before reaching maturity and unhurried objectivity, before learning to enjoy lark song as much as “The Lark Ascending.” If only she could do something inexplicable, or at least something she herself could not explain, something truly surprising like composing an étude for the piano. It would be a means of escape from the limitations of the conscious life, of allowing darkness expression, of transcending the maze of fields and hedges that hemmed her in.

  She had been lonely after Murt’s death, and now she was still alone, her isolation expressed in the self-loathing she felt when she looked at the lesions on her hands and feet, a disgusting leprosy that forced her to wear gloves to church and to the shops, that made her envy even Maureen and Billy Snoddy. She had been born with a s
ense of her own beauty, an awareness of the desirability of her body, but now her body was not her own. She had become host to a parasite, and Blizzard had told her that there was a one-in-ten chance that her baby would come into the same inheritance. She turned her head away from the sun in disgust as she saw a baby girl with a blotchy face, ugly and grey.

  Impatiently, as if trying to escape, she walked down the field, veering towards the lane so as not to disturb the ruminating cows. The two that were standing followed her slowly, then eyed each other vacuously as she vanished through the gate. All round her was the wreckage of rusty machinery peering out of grass and nettles—an old cultivator, an old plough, a disc harrow, the cutter bar of a mower, a seed hopper with a dent. Henry was still looking over the bars, staling on a half-eaten turnip, a Friesian bull with a white scrotum, heavy and smooth, not wrinkled and shrivelled like his master’s. Yet it wasn’t absolutely smooth; you could just discern the outline of the two stones inside it. He was looking at her bare white legs as if she were a Friesian heifer, unaware of her psoriasis, and she felt as if she had glided through the closed gate, touched the great warm valise, and felt the weight of it in her hand.

  I’m going mad, she told herself. Slowly but surely, I’m losing my reason.

  Pup came up behind and sniffed her calves, then poked his nose up her skirt as if he expected her to be in heat. She turned sharply and pushed him away with her shoe.

  “It’s strange how that dog’s always sniffing your legs,” Maureen said from the door of the shed.

  “It’s stranger how he never sniffs yours,” Snoddy joked in the darkness behind her.

  “Ach, sure he’s used to mine. He’s known them since he was a month.”

  “Or maybe he’s just partial to a whiff of the water of Cologne.” Snoddy laughed.

  Ignoring them, Elizabeth went into the house for her purse. The lowness of their conversation had reinforced her sense of defilement. She felt that she must escape, and one way to escape was to do the weekend shopping in Killage.

  As a little treat, she decided to take the Mercedes. She had a car of her own, a new Mini, but now that Kevin was out of circulation she enjoyed nothing better than driving his dirty Mercedes. In fact, it was one of the few things at Clonglass that she liked better than her own possessions at Larch Lawn. When she had done the shopping, she put the bag on the back seat and said a prayer for her unborn baby in the musty church. Then she remembered that she must call at Larch Lawn for some sheet music, and she brightened at the thought of sitting for ten minutes in the parlour while she sipped a dry sherry and listened to the emptiness of the house.

  The men were in the fields, the farmyard empty except for a low trailer. She wandered from room to room, asking herself how she could conceivably have left, and then she sat with her sherry, looking out at the soothingly familiar scene.

  “You have a very fluidic personality,” he told her across the table. “Almost pantomorphic, I should say.”

  They were sitting in the hotel lounge, looking across the road and the valley to the Glen of the Downs, and beyond the wooded slopes on either side were six fields, gold and green, near the horizon. It was a sunlit Sunday morning, and she drank three schooners of dry sherry and wished that lunchtime would never come.

  “You have a fluidic personality,” he repeated, and she wondered if all Englishmen spoke his lingo or if it were only technical journalists.

  “If you’re not hungry, I’ll cook you lunch,” she said.

  “How very Irish! Now what would you cook me if I were starving?”

  “A pantomorphic pastry.”

  “But what did you mean?”

  He had auburn hair and a walrus moustache that made her wish to touch the corners of it with her cheek, and when he laughed he revealed an arc of ivory-perfect teeth and closed his sea-blue eyes.

  “I meant that I have nothing planned. Lunch will take a long time to prepare, too long perhaps for a hungry man.”

  “I must plead a previous engagement. I must look up a friend in Arklow, but I shall come back to take you out again this evening.”

  They returned to the hotel at seven and sat at the same table by the window. The slopes of the Glen were now a dark green, and on the horizon was a pool of sky beneath a thunder cloud. In the reflected evening light the six fields, gold and green, had melted into what looked like a flat and fishless sea, and she felt that at any moment a white yacht would heave in sight between the sombre slopes.

  “The Glen looks thickly wooded from here,” she said.

  “In the distance it is a carpet of green but on the nearer slopes you can make out the shapes of individual trees. What do they remind you of?” he asked.

  “Big green cauliflowers.”

  “No, you are wrong. They are like monstrous heads of broccoli. ’Tis broccoli lends enchantment to the view, or words to that effect.”

  She could not get a word of sense out of him all evening, nothing but conventional phrases turned inside out to look like new and fag ends of quotations that teased her memory of old advertisements and poems from her school anthology. His moustache, however, lent enchantment to his views, and she could see the hungry eyes of older women turning to their table, to the slopes of the Glen, and back to Alexander Utley.

  As Attracta had gone down the country for the weekend, she invited him back to the bed-sitter for a cup of Algerian coffee and a large digestive biscuit. The coffee and the biscuit made him dull. He fell asleep on the settee, and when she woke him at twelve he asked if he could stay the night.

  “No need for a bed. I’ll camp right here,” he said.

  “There are two beds, and you can have one of them.”

  She decided to let him have her own bed. The thought of his naked legs stretching luxuriously between her sheets would provide celibate titillation as she herself curled up under Attracta’s freesia-laden duvet. She woke in the dark centre of the night to find him naked beside her, his hand already on her breasts, his moustache tickling her cheek. She moved in a dream, the duvet slipped to the floor, but he kept the cool night air from her body and whispered in her ear at the end, “Have you ever seen the inside of a tumulus?

  “It’s an ancient burial mound,” he said when she failed to reply. “That’s what you’re like inside, a narrow entrance followed by a narrow corridor with a wide central chamber beyond.”

  Tears welled in her eyes and ran between her lids but she did not speak. She lay weeping on the bed while he made thumping noises in the next room, and when she woke in the morning he had already gone. She never saw him again, but she would never forget him, nor her callowness, her naiveté, her soon-to-be slaughtered innocence.

  She sorted out some sheet music and returned to the car to find Pup sitting on the back seat chewing the pork steak she had just bought and a torn packet of biscuits beside him. He had hidden in the back unbeknown to her, and now he was so pleased to see her that he darted out and sniffed her knees and thighs. Looking round to see if anyone was watching, she went into the shed for a length of rope. She dropped the rope on the front seat beside her, and Pup jumped in and sat on it. When she was halfway home, she backed the car into a laneway and set off smartly between the overhanging trees in the direction of the Grove. When she came to the Tree House, she tied a noose on one end of the rope and flung it over a branch above her head. Pup was circling round her, trying to lick her hands and legs, making silly supplicating noises, but she slipped the noose down over his ears, tightened it, and pulled the other end to hoist him off the ground. He made a few pathetic attempts to scratch at the rope with his forepaws as she tied the loose end to a lower branch, and she turned away because it would not have been civilized to look. She had seen a dog hanged once before. She had seen her father hang a stray collie that had been stealing eggs.

  With an absence of guilt that surprised her, she drove back to Killage for more pork steak and arrived home about noon, feeling in need of another sherry. Absent-mindedly, she opened the
door of the dairy to put the pork in the freezer, and the first thing she took in was Billy Snoddy winking at her. It was only after she had recoiled from the devilishness in his eye that she saw clearly what he was doing. Maureen was bending over a tub with her skirt draped over her head, and Snoddy was standing behind her, enjoying her final, or at least her penultimate, favours. She closed the door before he had time to smile at her, hurried into the house, and put the meat in the fridge.

  After drinking a schooner of sherry at a draught, she ran upstairs to tell Kevin, but when she saw him sitting up in bed absorbed in one of Murt’s books, she wondered if what she had seemed to see had really happened.

  “What are you reading?” she asked, for something natural to say.

  “A paper on piss: ‘The effects of urine and its components on the botanical composition and production of a grass/clover sward.’”

  “If Murt was alive, you could talk to him about it.”

  “If you make me a cup of tea, I’ll talk to you about it.”

  She smoothed the coverlet and kissed his cheek. Then she took her diary from her bedroom and sat for a long time at the parlour table with pen poised as if she could not bring herself to write. At last she began, her hand moving slowly across the page as if the choice of words were important:

  I can barely believe what I have just seen in the dairy, Billy Snoddy copulating with Maureen as she stooped over a tub of molassed beet pulp. He had gripped her round the waist with both hands, and he was bending at the knees, in and out, in and out, like a deranged trombonist in a Bruckner symphony. I was so frightened that I did not look a second time, did not look to see if he had possessed her per anum or per cunnum. Strange how I can write those words in Latin but not in Anglo-Saxon, they are so coarse. But how can I think such thoughts and remain a good-living woman, going to Mass and the sacraments, the First Fridays and rosary and benediction? Perhaps God, not the devil, sends me these thoughts so that I can triumph over temptation for his greater glory. I am certain that the greatest saints had disgusting thoughts, that their sainthood resided in the moral value of their struggle against them. The greatest sinners, someone must surely have said, are potentially the greatest saints. But perhaps I delude myself, refusing to see that in living with Maureen and Snoddy I have become one of them. The thoughts I had about Henry this morning could have been Maureen’s, they were so lewd. I wouldn’t have had them a year ago. And then what I did to Pup was done by a “me” I’ve never known before. If I allow myself to drift, shall I too find myself in the dairy with Snoddy? Are all human beings more similar than dissimilar? Now that I’ve put it on paper, I know what to do.