Foreigners, Drunks and Babies

by Peter Robinson

  At the oddly firm emphasis of his words, enhanced by the si­lence they preceded, Jack moves uneasily on the edge of his seat, his knees apart, hands clasped between them, and head somewhat lowered, not seeming either about to go or to stay.

  As speechlessness reabsorbs the vestry, your dad’s on the point of returning to his writing, but, seeing his warden’s uneasiness, he asks, ‘Is there something else, Jack?’

  ‘It’s about some things my wife’s heard said, Bob,’ Jack begins, ‘a delicate matter, and I don’t quite know how to put it. But some of the Mothers’ Union and the Young Wives Group have heard a rumour and passed it on to Eileen. We don’t believe it for a minute, but it is being said around the parish, vicar, and I thought I’d better let you know.’

  ‘I’m glad you did, Jack; now, what are they saying?’

  ‘It’s quite outrageous, Bob, but they’re saying that when you’ve been having your music lessons on Thursday evenings, that’s not what you’ve been visiting the house for at all …’

  It takes a moment for Jack’s implication to sink in.

  ‘Oh,’ your dad says, ‘I see.’

  ‘And they’re saying that rather than be preached to by a … well, you know, they’ll go to All Saints. Of course, what they’re fancying isn’t true, I for one, and Eileen too, of course, we know it isn’t, but people will talk, and it’s a serious matter for the parish, and for your reputation, as well, Bob, and think of Valerie.’

  ‘Yes,’ your dad says. ‘Quite.’

  ‘What will you do?’ asks Jack.

  ‘I could say a few words from the pulpit, but that would be to acknowledge the rumour, and my parishioners would presume I’m making a denial, when there’s nothing to deny; no, that won’t do at all.’

  ‘No, it won’t, no.’

  ‘And a letter in the Parish Magazine would be unsatisfactory for the very same reason.’

  ‘Perhaps it would be best if you stopped visiting the house so regularly.’

  Your dad hasn’t seen this coming, and responds to it with a thoughtful nodding of his head that might seem to say he will take the advice, or think it over, or that he has already thought of this alternative himself.

  ‘Could you let me have the figures Rushworth and Draper forwarded, Jack?’ he asks, pointedly changing the subject.

  ‘I’ll drop them in on my way to work tomorrow, and now I’ll leave you to your paperwork.’

  ‘Yes, right, I’d better get on. I am glad you mentioned the matter.’

  ‘Right you are. Goodnight then, vicar.’

  ‘Damnation,’ your dad gasps beneath his breath, glancing down at the columns of couples whose confetti has been scattered across the church steps in weeks gone by, who would already have returned from their honeymoons, and, further down, the paired names whose married lives are to start come Saturday. How and when they’ll end, he can’t know, but plenty of them will before the grave, of that he can be sure.

  Closing the book without writing any more, placing the certificates on top of the dark red binding, he stands up, puts on his coat and scarf, then, switching off the light, steps out into the churchyard, closing and locking the door behind him.

  A sliver of moon in the clear night sky shines its reflected glow down onto him, onto the gravel path, the tall grasses between graves, their various styles of tomb and cross. He stands there still for a moment; then, half in darkness, begins to move on under the meshed stained glass of one of those sainted windows, and looks up at the heavens.

  Now his doubting steps slow on the path between the headstones. Your dad pauses and looks to the stars. On the low churchyard walls a system of letters and numbers marks out, as on a street map, the separate burial plots. They were all of them filled long before the close of the last century but one. Your dad’s eyes fall to gazing out across the roofs of his parishioners’ back-to-backs. The families have prepared their evening meals. Their tables overflow with the bits and pieces. They’re eating their hotpots, crowded around a large radio, or crouched in front of new black-and-white television sets.

  As your dad continues between the railed-off caskets, the draped urns, plain slabs and upright stones, he ponders his calling and ministry. He has need of their trust, for without it he cannot command their confidence. He needs his place, however small, in their lives. Without it, what help can he be? A social ministry: that’s how Bishop Martin described the challenges facing him. Then more and more he understands, your dad does, pausing between the graveyard and garden, that the rumours cannot be discounted. They will only grow and grow. And this is how it comes about that the music lessons stop: first your dad’s, then, patience and spare cash exhausted, yours and Andrew’s too.

  Driving Westward

  ‘Terrible over there, it is,’ said the staff nurse, doing her duty by a nearest and dearest. Sarah was taking a breather, a break from her daughterly bedside vigil, with a cup of hot tea in her hand, standing by the ward bay’s curtains.

  ‘I was in Donegal on holiday the other year,’ she said – to pass the time of a late, wet, winter Tuesday. ‘We met a couple on the way to Galway … Californians.’

  ‘Is that a fact?’ said the nurse.

  The visitor took a sip of tea and let her tired eyes close. Certainly it seemed long ago and far, far away that they had taken that vacation out west to the sea. The rain would come; the rain would come … and wash them all away.

  Sarah saw herself and her boyfriend of then beside a rough stone wall, their thumbs extended, spirits played upon by feet on accelerator pedals. How they would rise when a foot did, and the car slowed. As that beige Ford had drawn into the kerb, Sarah picked up their rolled sleeping bags, and he their large frame-rucksack. Her boyfriend, in the peak of health you’d think, had run ahead of her towards the stopping car. Wearing a bright-coloured silk headscarf, the woman in the passenger seat had wound her window down.

  ‘We’re heading for Ballyshannon,’ the boyfriend said, though they were in fact hoping to reach a village not far from Galway City.

  ‘Just hop in,’ the woman replied. ‘We’ll take you a way down the road.’

  The driver and his passenger were in what seemed to Sarah like late middle age.

  ‘My name’s Freddie,’ the passenger said, ‘and this is my husband – Arthur.’

  ‘Tim,’ said her boyfriend, ‘and Sarah.’

  ‘What a lovely Biblical name!’ Freddie exclaimed, and Sarah wondered if she meant Tim’s or her own.

  Arthur was accelerating the little English car they had hired. Freddie had taken a guidebook out of the glove compartment, and began to read aloud.

  ‘There one may imbibe’, she read, ‘the all-pervading mists of the Celtic mythology …’

  ‘You don’t mind, do you?’ asked Freddie, interrupting herself and addressing their two hitchhikers.

  ‘No, not at all,’ said Sarah for them both.

  So Freddie began again: ‘… the Celtic mythology barely suppressed beneath a thinnest veneer of Christianity, as, for example, in the stone crosses of County Sligo, the landscape of Ireland’s greatest poet and mystic, William Butler Yeats.’

  Arthur was wearing a tweed hat that he’d bought, he would tell them, in Donegal. He was a large man, thick-necked, his casual wardrobe predominantly check. Freddie was thin, very thin. Her hair, if it was her hair, had kept much of its colour, but the face was deeply lined, the nose beaked.

  She had put her guidebook down a moment now their car neared the outskirts of Ballyshannon.

  ‘Which route will you take from here?’ asked Sarah.

  Arthur and Freddie were free as birds, they said, and could go any route they pleased. They had it in mind to head, it seemed, for Galway City.

  ‘Oh,’ said Sarah, hinting, ‘we’ve rented a cottage just north of there.’

  ‘Lucky coincidence,’ Arthur was saying. ‘We’d be glad to share our journey there with you young people, wouldn’t we, hon?’

  Divided by its river, the town of
Ballyshannon sprawled across steep slopes near its estuary mouth. A bridge connected the two sides, the two countries. On the southern bank a Garda checkpoint was slowing traffic down. Below them, dark waters churned into the Atlantic breakers. A church, high above them, crested the northern hill. Since a small bridge further upstream had been blown just a few months before, this crossing was now the only road connecting County Sligo through Leitrim to Donegal. A strategic point, it was, in the campaign against the Provos. By means of strict searches the influx of arms into the sole county of Eire north of the river Erne could be significantly reduced. The Provos’ training bases and jumping off points in the Republic might then be strangled. That was the idea. Bridget Rose Dugdale herself had been familiarized and briefed in Donegal.

  The hired car descended a steep main street running south to the bridge. Freddie had taken up her guide-book again: ‘… and the old Celtic Twilight of cottage and curragh …’

  Sarah began to sense that Arthur might just be a little bit irritated at the strain of his wife’s hoarse voice. It was thin, low, and slightly parched – an invalid’s voice, so Sarah imagined.

  Arthur was quiet at the wheel, his eyes never glancing from the road.

  ‘Your cute little lanes just scare the hell out of me,’ he said, ‘and these toy-town English cars, how do you ever stretch out and relax?’

  Freddie hardly seemed to notice her husband’s difficulties. She would stare out animatedly, gazing and scanning across the windscreen, then read a little more from her book.

  At the vistas of stone-walled plains stretching to the horizon’s mountains, clouds in convoy under-lit from the Atlantic, Sarah could feel her spirits lift – as if she too were washed and refreshed by shafts of sunlight breaking through those clouds beyond the river Erne.

  ‘Oh, look right here. It’s so beautiful!’ Freddie exclaimed. ‘Now, Arthur, can’t we stop and take a photo?’

  In Bundoran, though, there was nothing picturesque to stop for. The road was high-cambered and some lumps of tarmac had cracked and fallen off from each side. Arthur sped on through, gusts hitting the car, blustery, fierce from the ocean. Pastel shades of the house paint daub had faded to a washed-out pallor. The woodwork of window frames, lintels and doors had swollen, cracked, the colour peeled away. Sarah suddenly remembered a family holiday in Aberdovey, when she was five years old, crying as she clutched at her mother’s skirts. They were locked out of the holiday boarding house from ten in the morning till six at night. Sarah’s tears were lost amidst the rain that soaked her face. That was the weather for bingo and penny arcades, places they would never go, thought Sarah all those years later. On rainy days the men would make a killing.

  Out in the open lake country, the sea to their right, mountains were rising steeply to the left of the road.

  ‘That must be Ben Bulben,’ Freddie would speculate at every other turn. ‘We’re planning to do a pilgrimage to Yeats’s grave,’ she said.

  Now Freddie was talking about the publishers Allen and Unwin. She had approached them with a manuscript. They had been civil enough to reply by return of post.

  So Freddie was a writer!

  Sarah was wondering what kind of books she wrote, and whether she ought to have heard of her.

  In Drumcliffe churchyard, under Ben Bulben, Freddie’s dependence on her husband became yet more obvious to Sarah.

  ‘Don’t forget to take your tablets, hon,’ he said. ‘You know how forgetful you’re getting.’

  ‘It’s my veins. I have very weak veins from the course of medication,’ Freddie had turned to Sarah and explained. She could feel herself adopting her friendly, concerned face as she listened.

  The sky was overcast, but there was light enough for a photograph, so Arthur posed Freddie beside the stone with its proud, defiant phrase:

  Cast a cold eye

  On life, on death …

  Sarah read it out under her breath, and tried to imagine herself doing just that.

  ‘His wife had a man’s name too,’ Tim said. ‘George heard voices.’

  Sarah was staring at the headstone, feeling some intangible hollowness in this pilgrimage to the final resting place of an illustrious corpse. Did she expect some ghostly visitation? There was simply the rustling of branches up above them.

  ‘Won’t you look at his check pants – a typical American, isn’t he?’ Freddie was saying as Arthur splayed his legs and rocked forward to take the shot.

  Sarah and Tim looked momentarily nonplussed.

  ‘Do you know why golfing trousers have such loud checks?’ Tim asked.

  ‘No, I don’t know why golfing trousers have loud checks. Why do they?’ Sarah said in a singsong voice, to show she knew it was a joke.

  ‘So the balls can see the golfers in the rough!’

  ‘Where did you get that one,’ she asked her then boyfriend, ‘from a lolly-ice stick?’

  ‘Why, that’s good,’ said Freddie. ‘Just come and listen to this, Arthur dear.’ And she repeated the joke.

  The Yeats Tavern would provide them with some light refreshments. A family of tinkers had encamped in the yard of that bar across the road. Freddie was imagining for their benefit the carefree life those travelling people must be leading. She was describing to Sarah the caravan they’d overtaken earlier that morning, brightly painted and gay.

  ‘One thing I can’t meet halfway,’ said Arthur, ‘and that is laziness. Bums, I call them. Bums.’ Arthur was ordering some sandwiches and beer from the bar. Sarah helped him carry them over to where Freddie and her boyfriend were sitting in an alcove.

  Above their heads, where they consumed the food, there hung a really garish painting. It showed the snowy-haired, monocle-wearing poet in a composite landscape of symbolic towers, mountains, roses, swords, mists, and swans …

  ‘The ceremony of innocence,’ said Freddie, and began to tell them about her daughter.

  Yes, Arthur and Freddie had a daughter too. Nancy, it turned out, was an aspirant poet. Right now she was taking an MFA at Stanford University. Freddie had to explain for the benefit of their English acquaintances what those initials stood for.

  ‘Like a creative writing course,’ she said.

  Some of Nancy’s work had been published in the little magazines.

  When Freddie asked Sarah and Tim if they wrote too, all Sarah could do was wince inwardly at the thought of her boyfriend’s scorn as, flicking through a school exercise book she used for recipes, he found two poems she’d composed at school, plus a sonnet to him when they first got together, and where she had copied out Louis MacNeice’s ‘Thalassa’ in her neatest hand.

  ‘“Our end is life. Put out to sea.” What’s that supposed to mean?’ he said.

  ‘Well, either you are or you’re not,’ said Freddie firmly, after Tim shook his head and Sarah simply shrugged.

  Back in the car, they were crossing a moor with low ridges of rich brown-striated green. Groups of men with shovels were loading the dried bits of what looked like turf on the backs of trucks. Arthur was saying that if an American firm were to move in they would develop a machine to express the moisture, so as to transport the turf, packaged, in handy brickettes – and sell it back to the farmers. Everyone laughed at the very idea.

  Further on down the road, Arthur told them the story of Ben Franklin in London, how he didn’t go out drinking with his associates, but, rather, calculated exactly the wastage of hours for self-improvement and financial betterment incurred by their merrymaking. Time is money. That’s what he’d said. Time is money. But now Arthur and Freddie were taking a holiday … before it’s too late, thought Sarah.

  ‘Some people say he was a real stuffed shirt, Ben Franklin, but I say he was some smart guy.’

  So how did Arthur make his money? It turned out he was a professor of business studies. Invited over by Queen’s University, Belfast, to give a lecture series on sound investment practices, he had brought his wife with him for the vacation they would take afterwards. Freddie was
hoping to pay a visit to Allen and Unwin’s offices on her way back through London to the States.

  Now a crossroads in the distance seemed blocked with trucks and vans. Livestock straggled off to left and right. Boys with dogs were trying to stop the flocks straying towards lake edges nearby. In Maam Cross it was market day.

  ‘Gee, Arthur, we have to stop … We have to get a picture of this!’

  But of course they would, and Arthur was also in need of the comfort station. He entered the general store and bar of Maam Cross’s one public building, a hotel that catered for the local gentry.

  Freddie was telling Sarah that the mountains of the West of Ireland were so fine and the light through clouds so lovely as it flitted over the fields, so fleeting, that she despaired of ever capturing it in words. She would love to put the place into a book.

  ‘I’ve just finished reading Watership Down,’ she was saying. ‘Richard Adams is such a fine writer. Have you read him? No? You really should!’

  Arthur and Tim were returning from the hostelry.

  ‘Now, that camera of mine’s in the trunk,’ he reminded himself.

  Opening the car boot, he took from his jacket laid across the luggage there an extremely compact black oblong.

  ‘They’re a new line,’ he was saying to Tim, ‘a recent development – cartridge load, self-focus, not on the market yet. How did I get one? I did some research for the outfit that makes them. What kind of shot do you want of this, honey?’

  ‘How about one of those sheep,’ his wife replied.

  A huddle of long-fleeced muddy ewes, white with a jumble of black heads and legs, had just huddled their way into the square glass space of Arthur’s viewfinder. It was like a flat arrowhead advancing, just below the centre line. Freddie said she loved the idea of their warmth. They were such quiet, unaggressive creatures – domesticated, tender, like a gentle human nature ought to be.

  A boy in late teenage was driving the sheep towards a lorry with slatted sides for livestock transportation. Two types of buyer were circulating among the local men. There were reps from industrial combines, stud farms and distributors. Then there were the city men in small vans, bidding against the country gents. These were men in well-made brown leather shoes, tweeds, with flat or, occasionally, deerstalker hats.