‘This isn’t on the list,’ I said. But Christy was already walking up the avenue.
Mrs Blackall was in the courtyard. She was a tiny woman, really, but redoubtable. Beneath false eyelashes of flawless construction, her eyes had the triumphant spark of those who have eluded death. By something radiant in her nature, or excess of creams, her face appeared Vaselined, its features perfect but about to slide off unless she kept her head at a slight tilt towards the sky. Her hair floated in a wispy cloud of white, was thin in several places where the pink of her scalp showed like an egg, tender and vulnerable. She was wearing a fine dress of long ago, it was saffron, taffeta I think they call it, loops of several different necklaces that gave the appearance of a pale coil come apart, and satin slippers that had once been silver but the patina had cracked like porcelain and the soles made decrepit by the dirt of living. Her hands were cruel to consider, swollen, knobbed and knuckled out of proportion, but each of her fingers was ringed.
‘You’ve beautiful rings,’ said Christy.
She beamed and then pitched slightly forward. ‘They can’t be taken off,’ she whispered. ‘To rob them you will have to take my fingers.’ And she smiled quite happily at the ingenuity, then sang a little clutch of words in Italian, whether about robbers or rings hard to say.
Perhaps the clockwork of the Church calendar was intact inside her, or a childhood memory of an Easter ritual had resurfaced, when one of the groomsmen would whiten the stables and outhouses, for she had a bucket of lime poorly mixed and had been about the business of it when we approached. Splashes of whitewash had been daubed here and there at a height of four feet in an application a Junior Infant would have improved upon.
‘We’re not robbers at all,’ Christy said. ‘We’ll help you with that,’ and he had the suit jacket off and laid across the gate and was rolling up his sleeves.
‘O thank you, Frederick,’ said Mrs Blackall.
I wanted to say: but the memorial? This was not among the houses we were supposed to be calling to, but Christy took the sweeping brush and held it out to me. ‘You do the high, I’ll the low,’ he said.
Mrs Blackall was delighted. She clasped her ringed hands together. ‘Mr Choppin keeps white doves,’ she said, watching Christy stir the limewash. ‘Beautiful white doves.’
‘Is that right?’
‘O yes.’ She tilted her head to look up at where they were flying then, I suppose.
Christy looked up too. ‘Beautiful,’ he said.
Women enjoy watching men work, the same way men enjoy watching women dance. There’s otherness and mystery in it. Mrs Blackall stood and watched us working, or rather me working and Christy directing – ‘You might as well do all the way down’, ‘No harm to go over that bit again’ – a role natural to him. He knew encouragement dissolved resistance: ‘You’re a gift at this, Noe. Top class.’ And while I was slopping up the limewash, flecking face, clothes, hair and etcetera, he was standing back and surveying. ‘That’s her. Lovely job, wouldn’t you say, Mam?’
‘Father will be home before dark. We’ll hear his carriage. Jason says he won’t leave us. He never will.’
‘Of course he won’t,’ Christy said.
By a trick of time Mrs Blackall was a small girl then, a net curtain drawn aside and her face against the cool glass of the bedroom window.
Pieces of story she would discover intact in her. She would draw them into the air with a single phrase and be elsewhere for a moment, eyes distant and eyelashes winging as an image fleeted past. Christy would gently try and bring forth more, but like a fallen chandelier inside her the whole was shattered and beyond repair and there were only exquisite shards.
‘Shall we have tea, Thomas? We shall,’ she said after a while and went into the house and did not return.
I finished all the limewash there was, coaxed the pasty last of it on. There remained an unpainted fringe, two feet from the ground, but there was no more.
‘A Christian act,’ Christy said, admiringly. ‘Don’t you feel better?’
I couldn’t say I did. My hands were already calcifying.
‘We’ll see she’s all right and tell her it’s done.’
‘Yes, Thomas,’ I said.
Christy looked at me and smiled, as though I had come through a test.
We went up the porch steps and into Blackall’s. The one-time land agent’s house, it was infamous in the parish, its history leaving a stain that had endured the way it might at a plague site despite the passing of a hundred years and the balm of generation. Horace, his sons George and James, George’s son Victor, were alien threads stitched into the story of the place. The people of Faha did not despise the Blackalls, they took a higher position and ignored them. So, when, through debt, drunkenness and the despair of solitude, the house and grounds went to wrack and the family disintegrated, Faha was looking the other way. I didn’t know anyone who had been inside Blackall’s.
The interior was dark and darker for coming in from the blaze of daylight. There was a front foyer of fine flagstones with a tall wicker basket for walking sticks, canes and umbrellas that had neither walked nor umbrellaed in decades and a hat rack with the hats of ghosts.
‘Mrs Blackall?’ Christy called, but didn’t wait for reply and headed on through into the reception room where two cats were lying by the windowsill in a lemon bath of sunlight. We didn’t attract their interest. Tearing to threads the Turkish rug had exhausted them. The room was grand in proportion but desperate in appearance, the walls once cream now skinned with a green mildew that was the living coat of the rain, a chaos of oddments, a credenza covered with cat-food tins, a long, narrow table that bowed under a yellow mountain of newspaper, a flittery straw hat on a tilted globe, an elegant wicker cage that made me think of India, its door open and bird flown, a wheelbarrow filled with men’s shoes I remember, all in general abandon overseen by oil portraits glowering and darkening like Hell’s gallery and six of those cartoon drawings of hunting scenes to which Siney O Shea said the gentry were partial.
‘Mrs Blackall?’
We went along the corridor past rooms colder than a cold day and mummified by neglect and heard the singing of the same phrase in Italian ascending the stairwell. Christy pointed a finger and followed it down the stairs. The kitchen was partly below ground and as you descended you felt you were visiting the buried. There, gaily, Mrs Blackall was between forgetting and remembering that she had come down to make tea. She had taken out a tarnished silver teapot, and into it she had spooned three heaps of tea leaves, and, when she forgot this, she had spooned three more, and when she forgot those, three more still.
‘Job’s done, Mrs Blackall,’ said Christy. ‘You’re all set.’
‘Most kind, Frederick,’ she said. A fine hairnet of cobwebs on one side of her head, she looked at us as if we were benign apparitions, which I suppose we were, and smiled a kind of small-girl smile, and I forgot the chore it had been, and that I was million-speckled with white.
She poured the tea. It came out in glops, lumpish and black.
‘There’s eating and drinking in that tea, Mrs Blackall,’ Christy said.
‘You don’t take milk, do you?’ Clutching on to her necklaces, she looked vaguely at the shelves and presses.
‘We prefer it black. Don’t we, Noe?’
‘Yes.’
He lifted the teacup and performed an impeccable demonstration of how you deny reality.
Tea parties no longer part of her days, Mrs Blackall was charmed. I cleared a space and she sat at the oak table with us, her ringed hand going to her necklaces and running gently down them, as though confirming all the pearls within her were still strung. Prompted by who knows what, she began to say the names of women. A Mrs Bainbridge, a Mrs Pilkington, a Doris, a Dorothy, I don’t rightly recall them now, but I understood they were the company she had kept, bridge-players, wives of captains, doctors, lawyers, I’m guessing, a little congregation of Church of Ireland gentry whose ghosts came downstair
s now and briefly populated the gloom of that basement kitchen while Christy and I negotiated the tea. When she had finished summoning the ladies and had fallen into one of those reveries that are the prerogative of age, Christy leaned towards her. ‘Mrs Blackall, you don’t know me, at all? Do you?’
The question stunned me, but upset her, like a test she didn’t want to fail. Her face clouded.
‘Christy,’ he said. ‘In Sneem. Years ago. Before you were married.’
The clouds didn’t lift.
‘Annie Mooney,’ he said.
Mrs Blackall went around in the past. I looked at Christy, he looked at her. And, in the suspended moments while Mrs Blackall walked the question around to each corner of her mind, I knew he had not asked it idly and I felt the same charge of the personal I had felt the night before when he had stood to sing.
Mrs Blackall blinked her eyelashes, twice, thrice, and returned to us.
‘No, dear, I don’t think so,’ she said. But she stayed in the realm of that question for a time, and then her entire face had a kind of light come to it, and she looked at Christy the way you look when something that was always right in front of you has just come apparent. ‘O now,’ she said, ‘I know you now,’ and she reached across and touched his knee, and from that seemed in some way gladdened or consoled. But she said no more and Christy didn’t press further on the thinness of her memory.
Before long we were back in the sunlight and crossing the courtyard to the bicycles.
‘Her tea tasted like blackbirds,’ Christy said with a small chuckle, taking his jacket from the wall and putting it on.
The sky was as blue as earlier, the stables and what was finished of the outhouses whitening by the moment.
‘Who is Annie Mooney?’
Christy didn’t change his expression, he just paused, a count of one, two, three, in which he turned the back pages of his history, then he said, ‘She was my greatest mistake.’
For a moment, he didn’t take his eyes off mine. Then he gave a little toss of his head, as though motioning back a swarm of regrets, and with that he mounted the bicycle, pushed off into the centre of the road and let the hill take him.
12
That evening, by the grace of God, we did not go to Craven’s. I was exhausted and Christy was quiet in himself. At twilight, when it was time to bring the furniture back inside, Doady, with the percipience of Kerry people, said, ‘Leave them. It won’t rain tomorrow either.’
The aired sheets, towels and clothing she had already restored to their presses. Christy and I carried in the mattress, and on Doady’s instruction set it upside down and back-to-front on the bedframe, an age-old recipe for renewal about which I chose not to think closely.
Ganga, who was enthused by all novelty, loved the idea of the furniture in the garden. He went out and sat in an armchair and discovered the thrill of a room of air. ‘You feel like the King of Munster,’ he said. Joe lay like a wolfhound at his feet.
The evening was balmy. Lidded by a night haze, the heat of the day did not escape. The midges had gone to Boola.
Whether Ganga recognised that Christy was folded up inside himself, whether he thought it an obligation to entertain lodgers, or he himself wanted entertainment, he took from his jacket pocket the pack of cards, removed the two jokers, turned over the top card, the ace of hearts, and said, ‘I’ll deal.’
We played Forty-Five, outside in the April garden, in the slur of the river-sounds until night fell. We played after that too, shadow-bats like fragments of dark dipping and swooping, and all but the company become insubstantial. We played the way all card games were played in Faha, not to make money, but to pass the time, provide a way to escape reality and by the happenstance of chance allow someone to believe good fortune existed. We played until Doady said she couldn’t tell the knave from the king and Ganga said no word of a lie in that.
Certified by the blurred divisions of the gloaming, Doady told the news she had in a letter from Kerry.
‘Mrs O Dea is on her way out.’
Not knowing who Mrs O Dea was, we were sparing in our sympathy, but nodded a nod and the phrase on her way out hung there and the image of a doorway through which Mrs O Dea was to pass was carpentered into reality.
Gadge Gallagher, a widow, had gone a step further and died, Lord have mercy on her. She had lived in some mountainy townland far from the church. Fearing that she would go to her Creator without receiving Communion on her deathbed, one Sunday Gadge had secretly saved a host before it melted on her tongue, brought it home in a linen handkerchief she had from Quills in Kenmare and preserved it in the ciborium of a purple hatbox beside her bed, a china plate next to it as paten. It was not a theft because Father Fahy had put the host in her mouth himself, Doady said, lest our minds be gone that way. In any case, Gadge Gallagher’s strategy had proved effective, she said, up to a point. The poor woman had taken a turn in her bed, blessed herself and reached for the hatbox.
No one played a card. Gadge Gallagher’s salvation hung in the balance. Doady had the cuteness to hold her whist.
‘And?’ said Ganga, laying his cards face down till he heard.
‘And,’ said Doady.
Savouring the turn in the story, she said no more. She looked above us into the immensity of the firmament. ‘And,’ she said again, forefingering the bridge of her glasses and with the unbounded theatrics of all the O Siochrus milking all the udders of the pause.
‘And?’ Ganga opened his two hands to receive the ending.
Doady leaned in over the table. Across from her, in mute manifestation of the married, Ganga leaned forward too. She lowered her voice. ‘Didn’t Sullivan the undertaker find the host after, stuck to the roof of her mouth.’
Doady sat back, made a little nod, her glasses flashing.
The conundrum landed, we were silently all Sullivan then, trying to decide which way to send the host.
Gadge Gallagher’s soul lay suspended in the air.
To resolve the impasse, Doady played a trump and left the story there, leaving the finer points, physic, metaphysic and ecclesiastic, to private debate.
As was customary, the card game made elastic the time and assured the playing of another hand after This will be last hand so, and another after that. Dissolving the grit of reality, it left us to float free as the stars appeared. Christy drank a dozen cups of tea, played inexpertly, losing to Ganga who took victory each time with a little doubled-up kink of laughter. Christy relished it, I think, enjoying the company and privacy accorded by the cards. As the river sang on, soft and blind in the distance, not for the first nor last time was there the sense that Faha had slipped its moorings and slid away from the country, which sped on, without noticing the lack.
In the end Doady concluded the game by a tactic cunning and adroit. She took the pack for a shuffle, pocketed it in her housecoat, and began the rosary. That put the kibosh on it.
The rosary was said in most houses then, but in few midnight gardens. The version that night was murmured and swift. By native decree, and the proven truth that no nation spoke faster, punctuation in prayer had been long ago dispensed with, breathless delivery was acceptable to the Lord who could pause, parse and separate the string of prayers in His own time.
Our prayers said, we went inside and left the furniture. On the bottom step of the Captain’s Ladder, Christy paused. ‘Ye’re great people,’ he said, nodded towards Ganga who swelled a little with the compliment, and climbed to his bed.
I carried the cups to the basin.
‘Doady, do you know an Annie Mooney?’
She turned and looked in a way that made me feel I had just become interesting.
In the dark of the attic bedroom later, I crept under the blankets. Christy was laid out straight, hands folded on his chest. I couldn’t tell if he was asleep.
I lay like him, face to the thatch, but after a while, because human beings are helpless when seeded with story, I turned towards his bed and said, ‘Annie Mooney is M
rs Gaffney, the chemist’s wife.’
Whether he heard or not, he made no sound or movement.
13
Good Friday was not only sunny, it was warm. Actual temperatures had an anaemic unreality then, nobody in Faha knew them, or if they did would not have paid them one whit of attention. Numbers were displaced by something more tangible. A ball, a bundle, an armful and a fistful were measures. People knew what a perch was, and a rood, and could show you by walking in a field. So, what the mercury rose to in the weather station at Birr, County Offaly, was irrelevant to Fahaeans. But once you walked outside, the flesh of your body told you you were out of your element. It was like arrival in, if not quite Mexico, maybe Marseilles. By eight in the morning the haze that hung over the near bank of the river was lifting. By nine the grass was drying, and by ten the air was thickening with heat, and many were relieved to discover that the houses they lived in, unbeknownst to their architects, could not have been better constructed to keep the cold inside. The depth of the stone walls and the small deep windows defeated the angle of the sun. While in Faha the dictionary of rain ran to many volumes, it was quickly apparent that for sunshine there was only a single phrase: it was roasting.
In keeping with the local phenomenon of rain-denying, whereby whole parishes refuted claims that it ever rained in them – Was it raining over in Faha? Really? We only had a drop – now an equal competition for the sun had begun. It was hotter in Boola than in Faha, which was nothing to the heat in Labasheeda, mind, over in Kilmurry the sun was fierce, in Kildysart the skin would burn off you in about three minutes flat. In Cahercon, two. With an acuity that was both pagan and inside the origins of the Church calendar, it was understood that to be favoured by the sun at Easter was to be favoured by the Son, and in this heat and light you couldn’t speak against that.
The favour brought with it its own challenges. Farmers, who only now realised they had been waiting a lifetime for dry weather, were spirit-quickened, wanted to profit from the fine day, but were bound by adherence to the regimens of Good Friday.
This Is Happiness Page 9