“I’ve just caught Maureen and Snoddy in the dairy,” she told Kevin as she handed him his tea.
“What were they doing?”
“They were behaving as if they were married. But it wasn’t the doing of it that startled me, it was the way they were doing it—like animals from behind. Two sins in one, as if one were not enough. To add insult to injury, he winked and looked at me like a mad trombonist who was dissatisfied with the number of positions on his slide.”
“He should have been out at the hay on a fine day like this.”
“Is that all you’ve got to say?”
“What do you expect me to say?”
“I expect you to call him up here and sack him on the spot.”
“But I can’t sack him till I get well. Who would look after the place? You and Maureen?”
“Goodbye.”
“Where are you going?”
“Back to Larch Lawn. I refuse to be humiliated further in what should be my own house.”
“Be reasonable, Elizabeth. Wait for a week or two till I get my strength back.”
“I can’t make up my mind if you’re too good for this world or just too weak. I’ll come back to cook for you every day, but I’m not sleeping another night under the same roof as Maureen and Snoddy.”
She had made up her mind. She went straight to her bedroom and began packing her things.
Chapter 11
The day after Elizabeth left for Larch Lawn, Festus came to see him. Grey and careworn, he sat on the edge of the bed and told Kevin that the tigress had brought an injunction against him, prohibiting him from entering the house on the grounds that he was violent and abusive.
“She didn’t even tell me that she was contemplating legal action. She brought me my breakfast in bed with a letter from her solicitor on the tray. After twenty years of marriage and four children, she had as much consideration for me as she would for a worm. But I didn’t allow her to see that I was hurt. I laughed in her face, packed a suitcase, and set off for Clonaslew and the Widow Heaviside. When I told her my story, she laughed in my face and told me not to be silly, to go back to my wife where I belonged. She was horrified at my suggestion that I should share her house. Her house was her own, she said, and one ’husband’ enough in a lifetime.”
“Well, you’ve always said that you knew your women.” Kevin smiled.
“But in my wildest fantasies I wouldn’t have foreseen this. Now I have nowhere to live. I’m staying at Phelan’s, but I can’t live forever in a hotel. I was wondering if you would let me have Larch Lawn for six months till I’ve had time to look round.”
“Elizabeth is staying at Larch Lawn. She moved back there yesterday.”
“For good?”
“Who can tell?”
“You can put me up here, then. I’m no trouble. All I need is a room. Anything would be better than a hotel.”
“I’m afraid I can’t help. I’m trying to get Elizabeth to come back, you see. She’d never return if you were here.”
“You hard-hearted bastard.”
“I’m sorry, Festus, but there it is. And anyhow Larch Lawn isn’t mine to give away.”
“I wasn’t asking you to give it away. I’m willing to pay rent.”
“You look as if you could do with a drink.”
“I have a pain like a knife in my guts. I haven’t had a wink of sleep for a week. What I need is somewhere quiet for a month or two.”
“What about Lalor’s. It’s empty, isn’t it?”
“That’s all I get wherever I turn. Suggestions galore and never a helping hand.”
“In my present state there’s nothing I can do for you.”
“Goodbye, then, and may the devil protect you from warble fly, balanitis, pizzle rot, and the white scour, you ungrateful bugger.”
He closed the bedroom door, his shoulders stooped under the weight of self-pity. For a moment Kevin sensed O’Flaherty’s helplessness in his bones before returning to the subject that occupied him most—Maureen and Billy Snoddy. Snoddy came up to the bedroom every day to report to him as he himself used to report to his father before he became a dotard. Maureen brought him tea and made a string of none too subtle jokes about the Lady of Larch Lawn. Contrary to his inclination, he maintained an inscrutable silence with them both, knowing that he would need all his strength to confront Snoddy and that if he challenged Maureen now she would only lie to him in his all too obvious weakness. He told himself to remain calm, but remaining calm was not easy, especially in the face of Elizabeth’s mad trombonist, whom he kept imagining over and over again until he became so real that he could swear to hearing snatches of his music. Sometimes he could not believe that Maureen could be so shamelessly unfaithful and he would wonder if Elizabeth had actually witnessed the trombonist or if in her obsession with Snoddy she had imagined him. But on other days he would see his sister as a coarse-minded slut, driven by lust and a low peasant cunning that tried to conceal it.
Elizabeth came in the evenings, cooked him a meal, and sat at the bedside recounting the advantages of Larch Lawn over Clonglass.
“We could be very happy there,” she said. “All that’s needed is the will to move. Because you were born here, because it’s your father’s house, you think you are tied to it, but think of the unnecessary expense of spirit in a life with Maureen and Snoddy. I’m much better since I moved, and I’d feel even better if you were with me.”
“We’ll see” was his evasive reply. “I’ll wait till I’ve recovered first. A man should never make an important decision while he’s under the weather.”
He got up the following week, but he remained near the house, not wishing to tempt providence again by premature exposure to heat and cold. The days were uncommonly warm for mid-September, and he strolled in the yard watching the restless Henry, or in Rowan’s Field watching Snoddy draw in bales of barley straw for bedding and fodder. He felt as if he’d been away for a long time. Everything looked slightly unfamiliar, as if he were seeing it in a dream, and when he got up on the tractor and started the engine he took childish pleasure in selecting the gears. He was pleased with this year’s winter barley. He would sow again in October, and he would sow more this time, because income from winter fattening was unlikely to improve. Thinking about something other than Maureen and Snoddy had cleared his head. From his tractor seat the world looked a much saner place than from the sickroom window.
While still too weak to work, he went for walks in the fields and laid plans for the coming winter and spring. After he had been on his feet for a week, he went for a longer walk. It was a calm day with a bluish haze over Slieve Bloom and the smell of burning stubble from a nearby field. He watched a neighbour hauling a burning tire over the barley stubble and made his way along the tree-lined lane that led to the Grove, pleased that his legs no longer trembled and that he no longer needed his overcoat to keep warm in the sun. The warmth of the sun on his neck and his awareness of returning strength gave him a sense of physical well-being that only increased as he squatted at stool in a clump of ferns in the shade of a slender larch. He was fond of squatting in brakes. He firmly believed that the best reason for living in the country was the ease with which a busy man could respond to nature’s call in the open air, a pleasure that far excelled huntin’, shootin’, fishin’, and tumblin’ in haystacks. He was particularly fond of responding to the call in the Grove, if only because the aspiring larches and the nervous melodies of the birds took his mind off the incongruity of evacuation and filled him with intimations of airy eternities.
Pup usually accompanied him on these expeditions, and more often than not joined him in the payment of nature’s tribute. Pup took the manner of payment seriously. He would quarter a clearing before choosing a clean patch of ground, then arch his back and, in pressing, grimace as painfully as if he were passing razor blades. Kevin, at least on this occasion, paid his tribute less histrionically, but he could not help thinking that in coming to the Grove he had behaved mo
re like a dog than a horse or bull. A horse will eliminate, as Festus would say, at full gallop and a bull will do the same without pausing in his grazing; but man and his best friend concentrate on defecation to the exclusion of all other activity, though Festus had told him that he once knew an Englishman who played the tuba on the commode. Perhaps this was why the Anglo-Saxons were superior to the Celts in science and technology. Quite simply, they had mastered the means of doing two impossible things at the same time.
He was so enchanted by the felicity of his thought that an alien smell had enveloped him before he became aware that it was not his own. He looked to right and left and over his shoulder, and he saw Pup’s dead body hanging from a drooping branch of the Pooka Tree. Having wiped himself with a handful of fern leaves, he hitched up his trousers and walked uncomprehendingly round the object that was once his dog.
“Who could have killed a harmless pup?” he asked aloud.
“Snoddy,” he said. “It was no one but Snoddy.”
“Where is Pup?” he asked the Ruminant when he got back to the house.
“That’s something I had meant to tell you. He vanished a fortnight ago and I haven’t seen him since.”
“Come with me. I’ve got something to show you.”
They walked down the lane and along the road to the Grove while Snoddy talked of the moisture content of this year’s barley and Kevin listened in silence as if the barley wasn’t his.
“That’s Pup,” Kevin said when they reached the Pooka Tree.
“That was Pup.”
“He was a stupid dog, but he did nothing that deserved hanging. Did you do it for a cod or for revenge?”
“What do you mean?”
“It was you that did it, wasn’t it?”
“If you want to know, it was Her Ladyship, she of Larch Lawn. Pup was always trying to sniff her knickers, and she couldn’t understand it, simple woman.”
Kevin lashed out with his fist and caught Snoddy on the tip of the chin. Snoddy reeled, tried to recover his balance, and fell backwards over a log with both his legs in the air.
“If you want to live to draw your pension, you won’t mention Elizabeth like that again.”
Snoddy got slowly to his feet and shook himself like a dog that had come out of a river. Then he bent his head and rushed at Kevin like a butting goat. Kevin sidestepped and tried to trip him, but Snoddy gripped him round the waist and brought him down with a dunt. Kevin tried to turn, but in a flash Snoddy was standing over him, twisting his left arm and crushing his windpipe with his boot.
“I’ve taken your measure and it’s short,” Snoddy said. “I was wondering when you’d lose your temper, and now you’ve lost it. At first I thought it would be over Maureen, and then over Elizabeth, but life was more ingenious—you lost it over a dog. We can live in peace, you and me, provided you live and let love. You can have Her Ladyship and I’ll have your sister, and I promise to say nothing of what went before. But I think Maureen would be happier if you followed your wife to Larch Lawn.”
When Snoddy had gone, he picked himself up, sore with humiliation. He was still weak, and Snoddy had taken advantage of his weakness, but he would never give him such an opportunity again.
Dinner was on the table when he got back, and Snoddy was sitting in his place.
“That’s my place you’re sitting in,” he said.
Snoddy got up and went to the other end of the table. “I’m a reasonable man. I sat in your place and did your duty while you were in bed, but now I’m willing to play second fiddle again. It’s the way of the world, a day up and a day down.” He winked at Maureen.
As she dished out the steaming parsnip cubes, she bubbled with good humour. She joked with Snoddy about Kevin’s mustard, and Kevin could see that she knew about his humiliation in the Grove. During his illness they had become accustomed to referring to him ironically as the Man Upstairs, and now they talked about him in his presence as if he were still upstairs. Looking at Maureen, he realized that if he were to be master in his own house he would have to reassert himself forcefully and soon.
After they had eaten he said that he was going to lie down and took his mug of tea upstairs. He did not go to bed, however. He sat on the table by the window, sipping his tea and looking down on two old hens feathering themselves under a tree. After five minutes Maureen crossed the yard with an empty basin, and Snoddy followed her round behind the hay shed.
He took another five minutes over his tea, then went downstairs and out into the yard. This year’s bales were stacked high in the hay shed and a red metal ladder stood against them. Carefully, he climbed up to the top and looked across the flat bed of bales under the corrugated iron roof. It was the obvious place, the most comfortable place, but they weren’t there. Next he went into the old stable and looked into the empty mangers, then into the cow house, but it seemed that they had vanished into thin air. He opened the door of the old dairy, where he now kept the oats crusher and the freezer, but all he disturbed was a rat that jumped into a corner behind some hundredweight bags of pollard. Weak at the knees, he sat down on one of the bags and wondered if they had gone out into the fields, but there were so many fields and so many hiding places under hedges.
Beside the freezer was a pair of Elizabeth’s pink Wellingtons, and as he looked at the pointed toes, he was shocked at the sense of loathing that burst inside him. Loathing for what? he asked himself and waited in vain for an answer. He had often seen his wife in pink Wellingtons without looking twice at them, but now, as they stood before him, his loathing gave way to a sense of constriction. Without her, he would be a freer man, but would he be a happier man? Since his marriage he felt as if he had a firmer stake in the land, and at times he even felt at peace with himself. But the price was high. A man, it seemed, was not complete without a woman, but in giving him a sense of completion she surrounded him with a moat of ifs and buts. In spite of all, he was strong enough to go his own way, but as he went his way he was aware of a sense of abrasion.
Like all men, he was subject to irrational impulses, but never more so than since he married her. Was what Festus said true, that women were less rational than men, the vectors of the dread disease of unreason? If only he could wash from himself the taint of the irrational, leach away his petty preoccupations with people and events, with Elizabeth, Maureen, and Snoddy. They were the grist that the quern-stones of the mind ground and ground until they ended by grinding their own edges. The only escape was to think of open fields of barley shaking in the wind, a world of sanity, of evident cause and effect, compared with the steaming ragout that was life in the kitchen. He thought of his old relationship with Maureen, gentle and comforting and seemingly endless, like summer drizzle slanting over unclipped hedges. They had lived together in unconsidered ease and now that life was lost, never again to be recovered. Perhaps Festus was right after all. A bad woman was bad, but a good woman was worse.
As he raised his head, a beam of sunlight from the open door caught a pinch of fine dust drifting down from between the timbers of the ceiling. He stored the oats in the loft above the crusher, and the only access to it was up some stone steps built outside against the gable. He went into the stable and took down the horsewhip that hung coiled above the door. Outside, he cracked it a few times as if testing a stiff wrist, and Henry, hearing the snap, bellowed and came out of his loose box. He tiptoed up the steps and opened the door of the oats loft. The two of them were only half clothed, lying on a bed of uncrushed oats, Snoddy driving downwards and Maureen’s hips rising against him. Snoddy looked up, but before he could wink, the whip had cut across his narrow backside. As he swore hell-fire, Kevin brought down the whip again beside the first red line. He raised it a third time, but Snoddy rolled over on his back with Maureen on top for protection.
Staring at her dimpled buttocks, Kevin coiled the whip, closed the door, and bolted it from the outside.
“You’ll pay for this, you madman,” Snoddy called after him, but he went down
the steps without replying.
He went into the kitchen, took down his shotgun from above the dresser, and put two cartridges in the breech. He climbed the steps again, opened the door, and motioned them both to come out. Snoddy had pulled up his trousers and Maureen had pulled down her skirt, and there was a hollow in the heap of oats where they had lain.
“You’ll rue this,” said Snoddy, feeling his backside with his fingertips.
“I’m going to give you one minute to clear off this farm. If you don’t hop to it now, I’ll pepper your whipped arse with the best buckshot.”
“You’ll have less to say when Her Ladyship hears about your dirty tricks.”
“Scram,” he said, bringing up the gun barrels and cocking the safety catch.
He poked him in the back with the muzzle and marched him down the lane. Seeing one of his neighbours leaning over a gate, he raised the gun and fired one barrel in the air. Snoddy gave a jump and began running with his hands over his head.
“If you ever show your frog’s face on my farm again, I’ll tear you apart limb from limb,” he called after him.
“What was all that about?” the neighbour asked him.
“He’s been hanging round Maureen ever since he came here. Didn’t give her a minute’s peace, the mangy bugger. And when I warned him off, he had the gall to say that I fancied her for myself—my own sister!”
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