Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  Then she noticed a woman bending, cutting cabbage. The woman stood up and Maisie saw her give Michael what she had cut and stoop for more.

  After a while Michael and his mother began walking back to the house, stopping now and then to talk. As she came nearer, Maisie saw that the mother was tall, as tall as her son, and had thick, iron-grey hair. Even at this distance the tense, almost angry manner was apparent in her walk and her demeanour.

  She seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see Maisie, but perhaps to regard her as another pair of hands. ‘Will you do the potatoes?’ she asked by way of a greeting. Michael she seemed to regard in something of the same light – someone come to help with the continuous work of the farm and the house.

  ‘You’ll be needed to finish the milking,’ she told him. ‘The tractor’s broken down since yesterday, and your brother has his work cut out what with that and everything else. There’s never anything but work,’ she told Maisie with grim, bitter, satisfied anger in her voice.

  Her anger was there too in the way she clattered the plates as she washed them, handing them steaming-hot to Maisie to dry – there was nowhere to put them down. The two women worked, clearing the pile of dirty dishes, scrubbing the potatoes clean, preparing the cabbage. When the food was ready, Mrs Curran thumped the browned potato pie on the table.

  ‘Go and ring the bell, Missus,’ she said to Maisie. ‘It’s by the door.’

  Maisie found the rusty old school bell under a bush by the door.

  They sat round the table, Michael, his younger brother Liam, a heavy, full-lipped, ruddy-faced man who looked nothing at all like Michael (Maisie had not even known of the brother’s existence until now), Liam’s wife Annie (a thin wispish, beautiful woman, flat-chested in a flowered pinafore) and their son, Declan – and Mrs Curran.

  Maisie realised that not only was she now Michael’s woman, she was part of a tribe; through Michael, she was being drawn into this matriarchal tribe as a camp-follower. With each mouthful she became more and more uneasy, even slightly panicky. She wanted to get out of this place.

  The seat of power was Mrs Curran. Everything emanated from her, she worked ceaselessly. Even when she sat after the meal, in her chair for a while, she knew what was going on in every part of the farm and would not give the reins over to anyone else for a moment. And she knew exactly what she was doing, she thought everything out, through to the bitter end.

  Maisie thought that as soon as possible she and Michael would leave the farm.

  But that night, tired out, they slept well on the makeshift bed he had made them on the parlour floor surrounded by silver-framed photographs of a proud, handsome woman carrying a drooping bouquet of lilies, and a man so very like Michael in looks. The mattress was rammed between a roll-top desk spilling bills for cattle-feed, and a piano.

  When Maisie woke next day, Michael was already up working outside. There was a knock on the door. It was a young woman with bright tawny hair tied back from a freckled face, and a full figure, voluptuous, supple and strong.

  ‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ she said.

  ‘Oh – thanks. I’m Maisie.’

  ‘Oh, yes, I know,’ said the girl. ‘I’m Kate. Is there anything else you’ll want now? I could make you a bit of toast. Breakfast’s gone.’

  Nobody had said anything to her, but Maisie’s intuition was so sharp where Michael was concerned that she knew without being told that the girl and Michael had a sexual link. She thought, ‘I must be imagining this – it can’t be so – and yet it is.’

  ‘Thank you. I’m not hungry,’ she said. ‘I’ll get up now.’

  ‘Oh, don’t hurry yourself,’ said Kate, ‘you rest there.’

  ‘Are you Michael’s sister?’ she asked desperately, clinging to straws, knowing the answer. She was pale with fear, and the cup and saucer trembled in her hand.

  The girl smiled and shook her head. ‘There’s no sister,’ she said as she went.

  Maisie got up and dressed with quick, shaky hands, at the mercy of her instincts and passions. All her old life might as well have belonged to someone else. Here was Michael’s woman, pregnant, jealous, trapped like some poor bloody animal.

  ‘Will you hang the washing, Missus?’ said Mrs Curran, in the kitchen. Christ, thought Maisie, if she goes on calling me Missus I’ll kill her.

  She would ask Michael about Kate that night, when they were in bed – the only time they were alone together. But for several nights she could not bring herself to ask, afraid of the answer, though she hedged round the subject.

  ‘I’ve known her all my life,’ said Michael. ‘She’s part of things here.’

  ‘Part of you?’

  ‘I suppose you could say that.’

  Further than that Maisie would not press him, she knew she might not be able to bear the truth. And she even fancied his love-making was more casual. And yet surely if Michael was anything to this woman, she would not have treated Maisie herself with such equanimity. She wondered too how the family regarded her relationship. They seemed remarkably cool about it.

  ‘Does it matter that we share a bed?’ she asked.

  ‘No. It doesn’t matter a damn.’

  She must pull herself together. It all came from giving over her power to Michael; giving up her autonomy. She was in his power.

  ‘Why doesn’t it matter? Is it because sons may do as they like – bring home any loose woman they please?’

  She had no way of knowing what anyone here thought of her, and her relationship with Michael. No one said anything. Somehow it made things more dangerous. Michael’s mother, Maisie realised, frightened her. There was an unnerving silence behind her brief words, behind her actions. Michael had said his mother had a sense of humour, and Maisie had looked for it in the deeply lined face in vain. Perhaps it had left her one day – perhaps after days of rain had turned the fields to mud and the tractor had broken down again. And she had then changed into a witch.

  Maisie turned away on to her side and raised herself up on one elbow. Michael reached out and pulled her roughly, gently, towards him, pushing her under him.

  ‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Anyone can see you’re a loose woman.’

  Covering her body with his, he entered her without preamble. They came together then, easily, quickly, their bodies mated, knowing what to do; part of the earth’s weal. Afterwards he fell asleep on top of her and she had to heave him off.

  Anyway, there was a sort of joy in it, this brief, blunt kind of mating. But if the mated feeling enriched and satisfied some part of her, she knew she was in danger of losing something else, perhaps had already lost it – a kind of integrity, a singleness and uniqueness. She felt it seeping away from her, seeping out on to the floor of the hovel where she lay next to this man already deep in a heavy sleep.

  Although partly this was to do with living under the tribal roof. On this bloody farm, she thought. Sleepless, she decided she would begin once more to reclaim some of what she had lost. She would take things into her own hands. She would find them somewhere to live where they could be alone. She would look for a cottage to rent.

  For she wanted to stay in Ireland. The country itself refreshed and strengthened her like sweet, pure water. She imagined her child born here, brought up in the soft air and open vistas, and the rough, true, classless way of things here, the fields ploughed and open into furrows under the sky.

  2

  THE first night in the cottage that Maisie found for them, the fire smoked and a gale rattled at the windows. There was no electricity, and the oil lamp they took up to the draughty bedroom smoked too.

  ‘Put the bloody thing out,’ said Michael.

  In darkness so absolute, it made the sense of sight quite useless, they lay naked against each other. The bed was old and had a dip in the middle, where they lay together.

  ‘Are your eyes open?’ she asked Michael.

  ‘No, are yours?’

  ‘Yes, but I can only see blackness.’
r />   ‘Don’t try to see. Forget about seeing. Feel. Feel my hand.’ His hand, roughened with work now, roamed about her soft body.

  ‘There’s not a glimmer of light anywhere,’ she said. ‘We’re in total darkness.’

  ‘Yes, it’s wonderful. Don’t mind it.’ He was stroking her gently, firmly. Her heart was beating heavily, she did not know if she minded the dark, or if she was afraid of it; if she was afraid, there was nothing to do about it.

  ‘I want you to like this darkness,’ he said. ‘Give yourself up to it, give yourself up to me.’

  He shifted her carefully on top of him, facing upwards – there was hardly room in the dip of the bed for them to lie comfortably side by side. With one hand he held her pinioned to him, with the other he caressed her.

  Deprived of sight, the other senses reared up in the dark. She heard the sound of the gale rocking the house; her lover’s breath; her own breath. And she breathed in the smell of his flesh, his hair; her own flesh, warm, sweet, moist; the slightly musty bedroom unused all winter; the rough, clean linen. The taste of each other, like apples. And touch.

  She lay helplessly cradled into his body, held there by his arm; she could not have moved if she had wanted to. She cried out, in the dark little house, rocked by the wind, herself rocked in the man’s arms, she cried out that love had veered at the last moment away from its object, how it had been scattered at the last, the very last moment, to the winds. How wishing to bring her lover closer had only parted them.

  After they had made love, they stayed in that position, she lying on him, and talked softly.

  ‘You’re glad to be away from the farm,’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ said Maisie, ‘I want you to myself.’

  He said nothing for a while, but lay stroking her belly.

  ‘I shall have to see a doctor, I suppose,’ she said, ‘before long.’

  ‘You’re not worried. No hurry is there?’ said Michael.

  ‘Well, no – but I’m getting a bit, well, in medical terms I am an “aged primate”.’

  ‘That sounds terrible.’

  Maisie laughed quietly. ‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ she asked.

  ‘I must go over to the farm in the day.’

  ‘Oh, why?’

  ‘They need another hand there. The tractor’s still broken. It’ll take a while to mend it. It holds the work up, everything takes longer. I’ll use the farm car, if I can keep it going.’

  Maisie was silent.

  ‘Will you be all right here?’

  ‘Yes, I suppose I will. I’ll get some work done – the Dublin paper needs a conclusion.’

  ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘The treatment of scours in cattle.’

  He gave her thigh a painful little pinch. ‘What’s it about?’

  ‘The golden age of the medieval ikon,’ she said, rubbing the place. ‘I’ll have to rewrite it so that I can read it – and write a conclusion. I’ll do it while you are stirring the silage or whatever you do.’

  ‘A farm is a lot of hard work. Unremitting. Sometimes I feel guilty to have escaped.’

  ‘What made you leave?’

  ‘One of us had to go – Liam or me. We couldn’t both come into the farm, and split, it would be nothing. Anyway, I was restless and only interested in music. There was an idea afoot that I should go in for the priesthood – I was a bit of a favourite with the priests at school, I’ll never know why – and I fled from the prospect. I’ve done what I wanted and left my mother to the same old grinding work. When I do come home I have to help.’

  ‘You’re like the prodigal son – in reverse.’

  ‘Well, I didn’t notice any fatted calf.’

  ‘You’re the one who has prospered,’ said Maisie. ‘Your mother is – quite formidable. She affects them all, all of you, you are all marked by her. I would have been if I had stayed.’

  ‘I’m glad you didn’t get drawn in.’

  ‘Is Kate drawn in?’

  ‘Inextricably.’

  ‘She’s not one of the family?’

  ‘As near as dammit.’

  ‘I think she loves you.’

  After a while Michael said, ‘Don’t worry about her.’ He slipped her off his body and tucked her in beside him and went to sleep.

  How love spoils everything in life, all other pleasures, thought Maisie. A curse. A sickness. And how jealousy spoils love itself.

  Next morning she woke up nearly falling out of bed. The wind had gone and sun shone on the window-sill.

  It was nearly midday before Michael could start the car, he had practically to take it apart and put it together again. Maisie hoped he would not be able to start it, but at last she heard the engine running smoothly and Michael, his face smeared in oil, was off to the Currans’ farm.

  When he had gone Maisie felt emptied. The pain of being separated from him made time on her own, instead of being rich and significant as in her past life, a time of barren waiting for his return.

  She got out her papers and shuffled them about, staring without comprehension at footnotes she had made. She made herself a cup of coffee and ate a biscuit, then, thinking she should eat more sensibly, took a piece of cheese and an apple. She sat on the doorstep in the sun. She ate her apple, noticing how the overgrown garden was sprinkled with celandines. After a while she looked round for sticks to light the fire; perhaps it would burn better today. She found a stiff brush and swept the bits of carpet. She made the bed and opened the bedroom window. Then she started making a thick broth with vegetables and barley. Peasant food. Tomorrow she would have to go to the village for supplies. She put the iron pot of broth in the oven beside the fire and hoped it would cook there.

  Then she got on with her writing.

  Michael came in just before dark, she heard his car coming down the lane. She saw as he passed by the window that he looked tired, in need of a wash, like any man at the end of the day, and she loved him more for the ordinariness. He came through the door. He kissed her.

  ‘What have you been doing?’

  ‘Making broth for my beloved,’ she said. ‘And you?’

  ‘Tinkering with the tractor, washing out cowsheds. Oh, good. The fire’s not smoking.’

  They sat down and ate their meal, and afterwards Maisie washed up and tidied the little kitchen.

  ‘Could you live like this always?’ Michael asked her.

  ‘I might like it.’

  ‘You’d soon miss the libraries, theatres.’

  ‘Well, Dublin’s not far away. How is your mother?’

  ‘As ever.’

  ‘Annie and Declan?’

  ‘Oh, Declan sent you this.’ He searched in his pocket and found a scrap of paper with a drawing of something that could be anything. ‘What is it supposed to be?’ asked Maisie, smiling.

  ‘It’s you,’ said Michael, putting on his glasses. ‘He’s fallen in love with you. Look, those are your eyes, I hadn’t noticed before that one is bigger than the other, let me look.’

  He turned Maisie’s face to him and stared at her critically. ‘Yes, I believe he’s right.’

  Maisie laughed and put the picture in with her Dublin notes. ‘And Kate?’ she asked, watching his face.

  ‘She wasn’t there today.’

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘I don’t know. Probably her grandmother is ill – she lives with her grandmother, who is ninety years old and losing her marbles.’

  ‘It’s a wonder Kate isn’t married, such a pretty girl, and strong-looking, just right for a farmer’s wife, I should have thought.’

  ‘She won’t marry until her grandmother dies,’ said Michael.

  ‘Oh,’ said Maisie, ‘would you like some pudding? I forgot – I made a bread-and-butter pudding.’ She took it out of the oven, it smelled of oranges and nutmeg.

  ‘It looks delicious,’ said Michael. ‘I love puddings.’

  ‘We’re getting short of food,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go to the shop tomorrow.’ />
  The next day Michael dropped her off at the village on his way to the farm. She intended walking back, a matter of three miles or so, it would help to pass the day.

  Mrs Maloney in the general shop was friendly and inquisitive. ‘You’re in Murphy’s old cottage,’ she said, ‘that’s nice. The cauliflower are the best buy and there’s some lovely apples.’

  Maisie bought more than she meant to. ‘You’ll not be carrying it all back yourself,’ said the woman. ‘Oh, no, not at all. I’ll not hear of it, Maloney’ll bring it for you in time for lunch.’

  So Maisie enjoyed her walk back unencumbered, stopping to pick a few early primroses on the way. However, the groceries did not turn up until just before Michael came home, and he had to wait for his cauliflower cheese.

  And so the days passed. Maisie borrowed a bicycle from Mrs Maloney and began cycling to and from the village. She felt very well physically; her mind began to slow down.

  One afternoon Michael drove out unexpectedly from the farm. He had brought Declan with him and they had tea and made smoky toast over the fire.

  ‘Come back to the farm with us now,’ said Michael, ‘I have to take Declan home.’

  ‘I’ll stay and keep the fire going,’ said Maisie. When he came back, they sat by the fire and talked.

  ‘Will you come to Dublin with me?’ she asked, sure that he would.

  ‘Oh, I want to, I want to show you Dublin, all my haunts.’

  ‘The Book of Kells.’

  ‘But I must stay – there’s so much work – I can’t leave yet.’

  ‘I hadn’t thought of going without you.’

  ‘You’ll soon be back. Only one night away. I’ll finish off in the top field. I will soon have served my sentence and be free again.’