Give me grace, O Lord, to withstand the perils of pregnancy and all its indignities.
O Lord, hear my prayer and, if it be your will, may I never fall again.
Though the saying of the prayer gave her comfort as she crept up the stairs on hands and knees or leant against a wall until the cramps left her legs, she could not help wondering if it was the kind of aspiration the Good and Bounteous Lord wished to hear from a member of the Irish Countrywomen’s Association.
Pregnancy was not her only worry. Her psoriasis, which in the September sun seemed to be receding, had become uglier, angrier, more obnoxious. She could not bear to look at her hands, because when she did, she asked herself if her child would inherit her condition. Her thoughts became so obsessive that the burden of them was almost unbearable. The dark miasma that had surrounded Clonglass had come to envelop the once-airy Larch Lawn, and she was powerless to escape its influence, and Kevin was powerless to protect her against something that only existed in her thoughts.
One night while he was reading, she became so restless that she went out to the gable of the house for air. A full moon with a big sad face was sitting on the hedge by the gate. The slight haze in the east had given it a softly yellow hue, and above it was a wavy wisp of cloud like an eyebrow over an eye. She stood looking at it for a long time, seeing it finally as an all-knowing Oriental face impassive in the midst of adversity. It was such an unusual moon that she could not help thinking of it as a heavenly sign that she had come to the end of her suffering. She returned to the house and sat at the end of the table writing her diary:
I am heavy like a cow in calf. I can’t even play the piano. I lie on the settee and roll off it on all fours like a whale with arms and legs. Kevin makes fun of me and I laugh, but I know that this is not a joke. On good days I pray that my child will be handsome and intelligent and, more, that he will develop as a man. I never developed as a woman. At twenty I was as I am now—more or less. In Dublin an enthusiastic student tried to convert me to Marxism, but I laughed at the absurdity of his great exemplar. His favourite quotation—“The workers have nothing to lose but their chains”—seemed so puerile, so simplistic, so untrue that I was convinced that a woman who could see through such vulgar trumpery at twenty must have great things in store for her. But today I am merely that young woman. On bad days I am unable to pray. How, I ask myself, can I pray to a God who may be plotting my destruction? Then I shudder at the thought that I may never suckle my child, that this unnatural charade will have been for nothing. Tonight, however, it suddenly came to me that I have come through. I saw a moon that was obviously meant for me, a sad but wise moon with a face that had known jaundice and sorrow but goodness too. I know that I have come to the end of a long night, that tomorrow I shall find strength to burn the next letter without reading it, that God is good, not indifferent or bad.
She closed her diary and went out again to the gable. The yellow haze had lifted. The moon was plain-faced and bright, the wavy eyebrow gone.
December was dark and wet. Light came just before nine and failed again at half-past two. Clouds, low and grey, rolled over empty fields into the east to be followed by even greyer clouds from the west. Now and again a watery pool of light in the grey would hint at a far-off sun, slipping elusively over the horizon on its short journey from southeast to southwest. In the garden the dark trees dripped endlessly on poached turf, showering her with droplets whenever she went to the clothesline; and in the house, in spite of the central heating, sudden draughts made her shiver in such a way that she thought the baby in her womb shivered too.
Her baby was now a living presence, kicking and elbowing, filling her with weird spasms of excitement. But in spite of the Oriental moon, she had not altogether conquered her anxieties. She managed to burn the letters without reading them, telling herself in the day that irrational fear, not God, was her greatest enemy; but in the night she would wake up hot and trembling after shouting for human comfort in the nightmare of a fire-licked forest.
On the Saturday before Christmas she drove up the mountain to Patsy Darcy’s for her Christmas turkey. She was delighted to get away from the house, to relax behind the wheel of the Mercedes, driving northwards into moorland under a washed-out sky. She would have found it difficult to squeeze into her Mini, but the Mercedes was roomy and comfortable, purring quietly but powerfully on little hills and taking off like a greyhound from blind crossroads. Sometimes, for fun, she would imitate Kevin, leaning over the wheel with her left hand on her knee, and she would wonder how it felt to drive with a trailer in tow and if peace of mind would perhaps return in February with the birth of her child.
Patsy Darcy was in the yard mixing boiled potatoes with crushed oats in a wooden tub. Tall, white-haired, and mad as a March hare, he straightened his back and peered at her with one frail hand over his eyes. He had spent his middle years in an asylum without uttering a word until one day he made a joke of such ingenious obscenity that the doctor, in a fit of unaccustomed and unprofessional good humour, discharged him on the spot. Now he lived alone on his ruined farm with six dry cattle, a sheepdog, and a flock of turkeys which he fattened for the Christmas trade. His grandmother was killed in 1920 by drunken Black and Tans who ran her down in their Crossley and dumped her broken body on a roadside dunghill. Though Patsy did not remember her, he never forgot her death, not even in the years of silence in the asylum. Now, as a gesture of reparation, or perhaps as a means of setting to rights what he saw as the unfinished business of history, he gave each of his turkeys, irrespective of its sex, a typically English male Christian name—Herbert, Harold, Kenneth, Alec, or Graham—and in preparation for the knife and the table fed them all they could eat in an old cow house warmed by a storage heater that ran on peat briquettes. In spite of the questionable view of history to which they owed their full crops, his turkeys were highly prized. Everyone who considered himself anyone ate “a turkey of Patsy Darcy’s” for Christmas.
“You want a turkey, hee,” he shouted and ran towards the house with his bottom sticking out behind.
She stood uncertainly in the yard, inhaling the sour smell of mash from the tub until he returned with a lantern, which he held before him shoulder high.
“You want a turkey, hee.” He hopped with glee to her side.
She followed him into the dark cow house, where two splay-footed birds, heavy as pregnant women, were pecking in the glow of the heater.
“I’ve only got two left and one of them is bespoke.”
“One will do.”
“This is George. He’s twenty-two pounds,” he said after reading the label on the bird’s neck.
“A smaller bird would have done, but I’ll take him.”
“He’s not as heavy as David, but David, surname Lloyd George, is not for sale. I’ve earmarked him for myself.”
“Lloyd George wasn’t English,” she told him.
“No, but in his time he ate many an English turkey.”
He was standing over her with shaggy shoulder-length hair, the lantern lifted to her face so that she could get the smell of stale sweat from his oxter.
“As a little favour, I ask all my customers to refer to their bird by its Christian name, especially at table on Christmas Day. You will say, for example, ’Another slice of George, my dear?’ or ’George’s neck and giblets will make fine soup tomorrow.’ It’s a small enough favour. Otherwise I don’t sell. Do you promise to call him George, hee?”
He had moved closer to her, fixing her with mad, staring eyes. She felt his gaze like a cold wind on her body, prematurely exposing her child to the icy rudeness of the world. The walls seemed to move towards her under the light of the lantern. She felt her legs shake, and the next thing she knew she was hurrying towards the car.
“Come back,” he called. “He’s a lovely bird, every bit as good as David, surname Lloyd George.”
She drove furiously down the lane, watching his wild waving in the rearview mirror, glad to have escaped fro
m she knew not what enormity. It was not Patsy Darcy she feared most, however. It was the mad subterranean current in her life, and she prayed aloud as she hugged the wheel: “Protect me from the dark, O Lord, and give me the sanity of cleansing light.”
She bought a frozen turkey in the supermarket in Killage, because now she could not bear the thought of plucking a fresh one. Carrying it to the car in a plastic bag seemed such a sane, uncomplicated thing that she could have cried with relief. And when someone spoke to her in the street, she smiled with pleasure because it proved that she was herself after all, recognizable to others as an ordinary, simple human being.
The following day Kevin said that they could not allow Maureen to eat her Christmas dinner alone.
“But if we invite her, we’ll have her for the whole day and maybe the whole night too,” Elizabeth said.
“No, we won’t. I’ll drive her home as soon as dinner is over.”
“But she’ll degrade everything with coarse talk. I had intended opening a bottle of wine—”
“What has that got to do with Maureen?”
“Oh, invite her if you must.”
“I’ll tell her to behave. She’s my own sister. I can’t leave her to spend the first Christmas since my father’s death in a lonely house alone.”
“If you invite her, you’ll have to look after her.”
“If nothing else, she’ll wash up after dinner and you can put up your feet.”
“That’s all I need, Maureen splashing about in my kitchen.”
Christmas Day was dry with an icy wind flinging dust and twigs against the windowpanes. They braved the cold to go to early Mass, and at one Kevin drove to Clonglass to fetch Maureen while Elizabeth made the bread sauce. Maureen arrived in a grey overcoat and a woollen scarf swaddled three times round her neck. Elizabeth had misjudged the turkey. She had expected it to be done at two, but when she tested it, she decided that it would take another half-hour.
While they waited, Kevin poured himself a pint of ale and sat down to talk to Maureen.
“Are you going to offer me a drink?” she asked him.
“I didn’t know you wanted one. Is it a glass of ale that’s on your mind?”
“No, it’s a glass of whiskey. The cold got into me cycling to Mass this morning, and it’s still in the marrow of my bones.”
He gave her a glass of whiskey with plenty of water, and when she had drunk it she asked for another. Elizabeth frowned as he poured it, but Maureen was eager for warmth and her brother was not averse to pleasing her.
While they talked about their dead father, Elizabeth busied herself between the cooker and the table, aware of her awkwardness but glad that at last the turkey was done.
“He lived long enough,” Kevin said.
“That’s what I thought the day he died,” Maureen replied. “But now I’m not so sure. He took with him what warmth was left in the house. It was a cold stand at the best of times, but Mammy’s death made it colder and Daddy’s froze it altogether.”
After Kevin had carved, they all sat round the table with the light on because it was already dark outside. Kevin poured himself another pint of ale, saying that he was dispensing with dry packing for one day in the year, and Elizabeth reluctantly shared her bottle of claret with Maureen.
“Do you remember what Old Lar Gorman used to say to us on the way home from school?” Maureen asked Kevin, and when he said that he’d forgotten she choked with laughter and spilt her wine over the linen tablecloth.
Elizabeth pretended not to see or hear. She was determined to ignore Maureen for an hour, but she could not help telling herself that the meal she had slaved so hard to prepare had been reduced by contamination to pig’s swill.
“Do you remember what we used to do in the Grove on the way to the moor with the cows?” Maureen asked Kevin.
The whiskey and wine had taken their toll. She was poised over her plate like a clumsy clucking hen, and every now and then she would laugh trumpetingly and put out her tongue before lifting another awkward forkful. There was nothing for Elizabeth to say, because the subject of conversation was a mystery to her. It was as if Maureen realized that her sister-in-law had spent her formative years in a convent and was determined to talk only of things that happened while she was away. Elizabeth told herself to hear no evil, but when Maureen began tugging at Kevin’s sleeve she had to offer up a little aspiration to maintain her equanimity.
“God forgive me, I nearly laughed out loud at Mass this morning when I saw Billy Snoddy going to the rails for Communion. I never see him but I think of the Lad in the Corner, and I never think of the Lad in the Corner but I go into kinks laughing. Do you ever think of the Lad in the Corner, Kevin?”
“I have more to think about than that.”
“He changed Snoddy’s life and he changed mine. And when you think about it, he changed yours and maybe Elizabeth’s too.”
“Who, may I ask, is the influential Lad in the Corner?” Elizabeth turned to Kevin.
“Will I tell her, Kevin?”
“Can’t you think of something better to talk about on Christmas Day?”
“The Lad in the Corner is not for ladies.” Maureen giggled.
Kevin looked warily at Elizabeth as his sister spluttered with suppressed merriment and upset an empty wineglass with her arm.
“If a real lady saw the Lad in the Corner, she’d die of shock,” Maureen said. “Some ladies are so refined that they would faint at the smell of him.”
“Who is the Lad in the Corner, Kevin?” Elizabeth demanded. “I must and shall know.”
“It’s no subject for the dinner table,” Kevin said uncomfortably.
“How dare you!” Elizabeth shouted. “How dare you come here on Christmas Day and scandalize my husband and me with disgusting innuendo!”
For a moment a tense hush hung over the table while the wind snarled in the chimney. Then Maureen hooted contemptuously, drank the last of the wine from Elizabeth’s glass, and said very quietly, “He was my husband before he was yours.”
“And what does that mean?” Elizabeth demanded coolly.
“Only this. He lay with me before he lay with you. And if it pleases Your Ladyship, he lay with me after as well.”
Elizabeth felt the strength ebb from her arms and legs. The fork fell from her fingers and she swallowed against a rising tide of nausea.
“How dare you say such a thing on Our Lord’s birthday,” she managed to get out.
“Come on, Kevin”—Maureen laughed—“tell her why you turn to me. Tell her why she’s no good in bed.”
Elizabeth looked at Kevin, but he emptied his glass and stared at a clean plate.
“How can you sit through all that and say nothing?” she asked him.
“You have no idea of the secret acts that tether a man to a woman’s apron strings. If you come to bed with me, I’ll show you,” Maureen said.
Elizabeth had no idea how she got up the stairs. She was lying on the bed sobbing wildly, a great weight on her belly crushing both herself and her child, her skull contracted into a hard knot of pain. She was all alone, far from the comfort of human voices, scrabbling in the dark, now on her feet, now on her hands and knees, exposed to searing winds, but before her was a black forest where no breath of air disturbed the thick undergrowth between the trees. It was a place of warmth and secrecy, and there she was going for shelter and forgetfulness, away from the rough edge of the world.
Chapter 13
“Why did you have to go and say that?” Kevin asked.
“She brought it on herself with all her fine airs. I’m not good enough for her and neither are you.”
“It was a senseless thing to do.”
He drove her home in silence and cleared away the dinner things when he got back. He felt at once benumbed and afraid of the outline of something he could not quite discern in his mind. After a while he went upstairs to find her asleep over the bedclothes, and he got a blanket from the linen press and spread it o
ver her shoulders.
He went up again before bedtime and said to her, “Elizabeth, you mustn’t worry. It isn’t good for yourself or the child.”
He felt such a rush of tenderness for her that he wanted to hold her in his arms all night as she slept, but he felt too formless, too remote from what he normally regarded as himself, to make a move in her direction.
“Please go away… and switch off the light,” she said without opening he eyes
He went to the linen press again for blankets and sheets and made a bed for himself in the next room. For a long time he lay in the dark, unable to think or sleep, and then suddenly he heard a cry.
“Was that you, Elizabeth?” he asked at her door.
“Get the doctor quick” was all she said.
He telephoned Dr. Blizzard, cursing with impatience as the phone rang and rang.
“What’s the matter with her?” the doctor asked.
“She isn’t feeling well.”
“Give her a cup of tea, and I’ll come to see her in the morning.”
“I’ve already given her tea,” he lied. “Something upset her at dinnertime and she hasn’t been herself since.”
“I’ll come to see her in half an hour,” Blizzard said with mild annoyance.
He did not spend long in the bedroom, and when he came downstairs he looked seriously at the floor.
“I don’t know what you did to the girl, but something has upset her badly.”
“It wasn’t me,” Kevin said lamely.
“I’ll ring the hospital and ask them to send an ambulance right away. I’m afraid she may be heading for a miscarriage.”
He drove behind the ambulance to Portlaoise and sat in the waiting room barely noticing the coming and going of people in the corridor. It was a long night, as long as many a winter, and he had sunk so deeply into himself that the nurse was standing by his side before he looked up at her.
“Your wife’s had a baby boy,” she said.
“How is she?”
“Very weak, but otherwise as well as can be expected.”
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