Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  Rose pointed to a picture on her previously bare wall. It was a nineteenth-century painting of gipsies telling the fortune of two young ladies.

  ‘I wondered where it had come from,’ said Maisie. ‘It’s very charming. It does something for this room. Makes it come alive.’

  She went over to look at it more closely. The two young gipsies, a man and a woman, were leaning against the cottage wall. The woman, a baby in her arms, was reading the palm of one of the ladies. The pastoral background and the details of the clothes and flowers were painted with an unpretentious skill and fidelity. The whole thing romantic but not cloying. It wasn’t the sort of picture Rose would have chosen for herself, but its giver made it immediately precious to her.

  Standing there, hearing the buzz of conversation, and looking at the picture, Maisie remembered that she was pregnant, that her life was veering out of control. Almost simultaneously she experienced one of those flashed moments which happen outside of time. It was just seeing the picture of the gipsies, the bright colours of their clothes, the baby’s fingers on its mother’s tambourine, and knowing, for sure, that she, Maisie Shergold, was pregnant and wasn’t going to do anything to alter that. For a split second her spatial sense shifted, and she was looking down on everyone in the room, frozen in time and was also acutely aware of her mother, in another room, resting on a bed. She became aware, too, that Glantz was watching her, and she moved towards him. He was still half-listening to Irene.

  ‘We are discussing the life force,’ he said, as Maisie joined them. It turned out that Irene was talking about the life force and Glantz was talking about how far a neurosis could be said to be genetic.

  ‘The past can sap the life force,’ said Maisie.

  ‘You must keep the past in its proper proportion, though we are part of everyone and everything we have ever known,’ said Glantz. ‘A tangled web. We must spin new living threads.’

  ‘But the old threads,’ said Michael, joining them with a fresh drink in his hand, ‘will always be there. You cannot just cut out the past – like surgery. Things that happen become like imprints on the soul. We are our past as much as our present.’

  Glantz smiled. ‘I think I would have great difficulty with you, Michael. You are a Celt, they never let go of their past.’

  ‘No,’ said Michael, ‘no matter how much we try to run, it’s there. Have you never had fears that your work might affect you, drive you mad, in fact? Draw you into the maelstrom?’

  ‘It is a danger,’ said Glantz. ‘I always keep a careful eye on that. I keep an eye on myself, though Freud said a degree of neurosis is of great value as a drive, especially to a psychologist.’

  Michael felt warm to him, and sorry for him. ‘Let me get you a drink,’ he said. ‘You’ve been clutching an empty glass too long.’ He brought him a drink and, even more helpfully, introduced him properly to Imre Thèk.

  The two men fell on each other and were soon deep in talk, finding their minds akin, Europeans bred in the bone. Usually they had to contend with the uniquely detached English mind, but in each other they had met another who understood the meaning of politics, the possibility of anarchy and revolution, death and the end of civilisation.

  Irene still sat there, between them, with her orange juice, looking like a ripe juicy fruit herself, a manifestation of the life force.

  Then Leo was calling out like a schoolmaster, ‘Those who want to drive there come with me, those who want to walk, go with Maisie, and someone go and see if Evelyn is ready.’

  He managed to herd everyone to the ‘End of Empire’ in time. A table for eight was laid for them. The atmosphere was serene and ordered, colourful and sensual. White napkins folded into water-lilies, naïve exuberant peacocks, dancers, warriors and lotus flowers enlivened the walls, over all poured a seductive, restful pink light from the table lamps. The waiters were grave and silently, soothingly attentive, without excessive fuss. There was a wonderful delicate aroma of Eastern spices.

  Rose, in her sari, sat between Leo and her grandmother. They settled down, Glantz dropping his menu on the floor; Indian music flowed like a fountain, plashing the air gently, quietly, just enough.

  Maisie looked round the table at the faces, at these people all entwined in her life. Leo and Rose, their heads together over the menu. Irene, flirting with Michael over the chapattis, Michael looking withdrawn, unattainable. Glantz trying not to look so often at Rose in her beautiful green and gold sari, her earrings catching the lamplight. Her mother and Imre Thèk enjoying their day in London.

  Later they sang ‘Happy Birthday’ to Rose, who scowled at them all and told them to shut up, the waiters looking on grinning, showing a gold tooth here and there.

  And then they lingered over almondy Indian ice cream and many coffees before they all found their way back to the house in twos and threes. Maisie walked back with Michael and Glantz.

  ‘I must go soon,’ said Glantz, ‘I am going back to my own flat tonight. Rose needs the room.’ He was very glum, and Maisie felt sorry for him, and she and Michael tried to cheer him up. Rose was a silly, immature girl, they said, he could do much better. It was supposed to be a temporary arrangement, leaving the swan room, said Glantz, but he knew really it was more than that, a chance to get rid of him, make a break.

  When they got back Glantz went round everyone saying his farewells as if they were last goodbyes. He left Rose until last, but Leo cut it short by offering him a lift to his flat.

  When they had gone, Rose, to everyone’s relief, began to cheer up at last. She liked having her grandmother there, and she was going to share a bed with her. Thèk was in the swan room.

  The party was breaking up. Irene had gone with Leo, Michael and Maisie said goodnight, and Rose, happy now, made some lapsang tea and took it to bed.

  ‘How do you stay so all right, Grandma, so happy?’

  ‘I don’t stay happy. I have good days and bad days, like everyone.’

  ‘No, basically you’re happy.’

  ‘Well, I suppose I’ve accepted the fact that life is a gift-horse, and you don’t look it in the mouth.’

  ‘I’ve broken off with Bernard.’

  ‘That’s good, dear, you’ll find someone more suitable, one of these days.’

  ‘Bernard was very intelligent, Grandma.’

  ‘Yes, I know, Rose, but he was a bit stale, wasn’t he?’

  ‘What do you mean? Mouldy?’ Rose began to laugh, with a nice little feeling of relief.

  ‘Yes, a bit mouldy, quite an interesting mould on him, I expect, but you don’t want that sort of thing, not at twenty years old. Goodnight, dear.’

  Imre Thèk lay in bed, looking at the stained-glass swan, and thought, as he did every night of his life now, of the nights he had spent in his cell, the iron sound of the slammed door, the stain on the ceiling which was his only mental stimulus, apart from his own thoughts and memories and fears. He switched on the bedside radio, and found a late-night concert. He wished Evelyn would come to say goodnight, and was glad when she did.

  Michael and Maisie got ready for bed, and talked about what they were going to do. ‘The most sensible thing,’ said Michael, ‘is to follow our hearts. That is the only guide – the other things are false guides.’ He touched the smudgy bruise on Maisie’s neck. ‘It’ll be gone soon.’

  ‘I don’t know what to do,’ said Maisie.

  ‘I’ll tell you what to do,’ said Michael. ‘You must do what I say. Come to Ireland.’

  ‘But I’m not the sort of person who can go about just letting life wash over me, just bumping into things.’

  ‘Now you’re with me,’ said Michael, ‘you have to be like that.’

  ‘Why?’ The idea of not being autonomous was startling, and strangely seductive.

  ‘Because I’m like that. Give yourself up to me, let me lead you.’

  ‘Lead me where?’

  ‘Oh, just round and about and up and down in this world. First to Ireland.’

  ‘My
work. What about that for a start?’

  ‘Leave it, girl.’

  And so, in her heart, she changed. She said goodbye to everything without regret. It was easy.

  She slept in Michael’s arms, her mind settled and made up to leave her life behind and go with him to Ireland and up and down the world and see where he led her.

  PART FOUR

  Ireland and London

  1

  IRELAND had been waiting, quietly, to change Maisie.

  Michael had led her to a different country, a foreign place, somewhere where things were not as she had expected and, in their newness, startled and surprised her. But in all this, part of Maisie was left behind. And, in all this, the balance of power between her and Michael had shifted. It had shifted to Michael.

  Even while they were crossing over, waves and wind howling and hungering round the boat, it had started then. Maisie had not realised until now to what extent she had, in fact, held that balance of power. But now, among his own people – even on the boat he met those who knew him, called out to him, calling him Mick, and a group on deck playing the spoons drew him into their circle. He was going home. She was setting out in an unknown country. She was his girlfriend, his woman.

  And with the rough weather, and the early stages of pregnancy, she was feeling slightly queasy. She said nothing at first and tried to ignore it, but later had to go and lie down in the cabin, covered over with her big travelling-coat. She lay there with closed eyes and wondered who this Irishman, this Mick Curran, was to her. And how it was she had become Mick Curran’s woman. He no longer dressed with the slightly eccentric dash he had assumed in London. Now he wore his native clothes, a becomingly rough old coat, loose sweaters and soft corduroy. He was going back home.

  The crossing over, they spent their first night in a large, turn-of-the-century hotel. It had once been a fine establishment, but now it was run down, its tennis courts and exotic gardens all grown over into a tangled mess of vegetation, strangled in briars. The food was good, only Maisie still felt a slight nausea which would not quite leave her. Michael ate steak and drank whisky. He said he was going to hire a car and show her a bit of the country. She could see he secretly thought Ireland was something special, his treasure.

  And so they drove about his place, his country, mile after mile, and sat by streams and lakes, walked by the sea on firm hard sand, wandered over springy hills of short tufted grass. They ate in little cafes and in castle dining rooms and drank in dozens of pubs. In these pubs they listened to endless talk – talk about the Irish government, the English government, the drug-smuggling that was said to go on in the coves round the coast, talk about life and death and have you heard this one, now listen, then. Sometimes the old men played on fiddles, listening as they played, carried into some other region, lost in it, their faces concentrated, a gap-toothed grin of self-forgetful joy. Maisie would watch her lover as he sat in these dim little pubs, a jar of Guinness in front of him, his dark head against the wooden settle. At home in his native land. At night they put up all over the place, in cottages, pubs and hotels. Once or twice they stayed with people Michael knew. They never stayed more than one night anywhere.

  Gradually Maisie’s sickness left her. She noticed that her breasts were getting heavier, but that was the only outward sign. She reckoned the child had been conceived the day of the visit to the catacombs.

  The shift in the balance of power had made them hunger more for each other sexually, made them new to each other. But they spoke less intimately to one another, their verbal intercourse became less probing, more concerned mostly with day-to-day things.

  Although they spoke less to each other, they were unusually inseparable, touching each other often, living side by side through the days and nights. Physically, sexually, they were at the height of their passion for each other. Mentally there was not so much a rift as a lull, as if they had got to know as much as they wanted of each other. There was no more questioning, they rested in what they knew, knowing there was a divide between them. Unbridgeable. This fed their sexual craving – as if sex might take them across this divide. But it never did.

  One morning, they made love out of doors. It was late March now and the sun had some warmth in it, though the air was cold. The night before they had stayed with one of Michael’s musician friends and his girlfriend and had shared a bedroom with the couple’s six-year-old child – it had precluded even the most furtive love-making.

  So in the morning they stopped near a copse of beech trees, growing in a scooped-out valley. Here they found a soft place to lie in the moss and last year’s leaves. Michael folded his coat under Maisie’s head, and they made love there without undressing, finding their way to the warm flesh through layers of clothes.

  Afterwards Michael lay for a while, heavily on her. She did not mind. She lay still, with the man’s heavy weight on her. The hollow where she lay cradled her body, and she thought when she died how she would like to be buried in this place. Unvisited, unmourned. Birth and death clung together like two halves belonging to each other, part of each other, one thing. She felt Michael’s heartbeat which throbbed from the very centre of the earth, and the sap of the trees and every living thing ran in her veins. They made their way back to the car, leaving the copse to busy crows building their ramshackle nests in the top branches.

  Wherever they went Maisie’s eyes drank in new sights. Unexpected things gave her a deep pleasure – there were more animals and birds; for the first time in her life she saw kingfishers, and otters. Used to surroundings teeming with the human species, it was healing to know a more balanced world.

  The people they met seemed classless.

  One day they met a young woman walking in the middle of nowhere. She was carrying a baby in a sling made of her jacket. It was such an unusual sight – to see this woman, so far from any village or town, she seemed so independent, unafraid. She spoke to them briefly, politely, saying there was a wind getting up. Maisie caught a glimpse of the baby’s curled-up fist.

  They also met, from time to time, couples and bands of people who were dressed in an exotic but practical way, in flowered skirts and cotton and leather cummerbunds and feathered hats; these people were usually accompanied by wild-looking lurcher dogs. They spoke with accents from Bristol and London – they were English hippies.

  Sometimes they drove through villages of the utmost melancholy and desolation – a huddle of ill-built houses, made of slabs of concrete. A garage, a pub. The only sign of life the graffiti.

  One evening, just as it was getting dark, they picked up a little family on the road. The man was young, very correct and stable-looking, the woman slight and pretty; they were carrying what looked like all their worldly goods, slung about them. Their little girl was carrying a cat in a cage. They were moving house, they said calmly, inconsequentially. They spoke Gaelic to each other. This family was dressed in layers of clothes, perhaps wearing as many as they could to lighten their burdens. They wanted to be dropped at a crossroads. Here there were no houses in sight, or anything else, but they seemed sure about what they were doing.

  They also saw the same tinker several times in different places. Always, when they saw him, he was reading a book, sitting peacefully by the roadside, his horse tied up nearby. Maisie wanted to know what he was reading.

  She did not know where they were going – just let Michael lead her where he liked. She did not know, half the time, whether they were north, south, east or west.

  Then one day they pulled up outside a farm, a farm like many others they had seen. Michael sat silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Well, Maisie. Let’s go in.’

  He opened the car door for her, and she followed him through the cross-bar gate, which he closed behind them, across a path of planks laid on the mud, into a farmyard. Two sheepdogs rushed out barking, scattering hens, then quietening suddenly.

  They passed a milking shed where a man was working. Scarcely looking their way, he answered Michael’s greeting
. There were three cars in the yard, one partly dismantled.

  The farmhouse door stood open, muddy sacking on the doorstep. Several cats crouched about on the window-sills. A pile of mud-caked wellingtons was heaped just inside the door.

  It was dark inside and smelled of bread baking. After a while, Maisie made out a room that seemed entirely comfortless except for one easy-chair by the stove. There were piles of newspapers in the corner, a stuffed horsehair sofa which was broken, a flitch of bacon hung up among the cobwebs, a flagged stone floor, a television set. There was a glass-fronted bookcase full of books. On the walls there was a calendar from the Irish Farmer and Stockbreeder and a picture of the Pope before last.

  In the darkest corner of all, a small boy was playing with a basket of kittens. He had a rabbit’s paw on a string and was teasing them with it.

  ‘Hallo, Mick,’ said the child.

  ‘Hallo, Declan,’ said Michael. ‘Where’s your grandmother?’

  ‘She’s not here,’ said the little boy, ‘perhaps she’s in the field. I’ve called this kitten Mouse.’

  Michael went over to the boy, who let him pick him up without a struggle, but without much collaboration.

  ‘That’s a funny name for a cat,’ said Michael.

  ‘It’s a kitten.’

  ‘It’s a nice name for a kitten,’ said Michael.

  ‘Who’s that lady?’ asked the boy, not looking at Maisie.

  ‘This is my lady – she’s got a funny name too. She’s called Fig.’ He put the boy down.

  ‘I’ll call the tabby one that,’ said the little boy, picking up another kitten. He shot Maisie a small quick smile, full of humour.

  Maisie smiled back and followed Michael through to the kitchen. The mother cat jumped off the table where it had been helping itself to the newly baked soda bread laid out to cool on racks.

  ‘Wait here,’ said Michael, ‘I’ll go over to the field and find her.’

  Maisie waited. She looked around the kitchen. A pot of something was cooking on the stained AGA. More piles of newspapers in the corner. A stack of washing-up waited to be done in the sink and overflowed on to the floor. The long trestle-table was laid with a crumpled white cloth, clean apart from the cat’s muddy paw-marks, and good cutlery. A bowl of primroses was set in the middle of the table beside the bread. Then she watched Michael from the window. He had put on wellingtons and was walking across the field; she watched as he walked away from her, his shoulders moving slightly as he walked, in that way he had.