Fig and the Flute Player

by Christine Harrison

  ‘You have so much guilt about the farm. It’s your mother – she’s a guilt-inducer.’

  ‘She’s had a hard life, my father was a weak man.’

  ‘What happened to him?’

  ‘He went to England and we lost touch with him. He started to come home less and less, until he didn’t come at all. We sort of forgot about him. He’s probably living in London somewhere – if he’s still alive.’

  ‘You look like him – in the photograph.’

  He started raking out the hot embers of the fire, making it safe for the night. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said, ‘I’m going to miss you tomorrow night. I hope the car gets you there all right, I’ve done my best with it.’

  ‘At least you’ll have a comfortable night without me,’ said Maisie as they both rolled into the dip in the bed.

  ‘Oh, I’ll probably stay on the farm and work late, it’s easier and means I haven’t commandeered all the farm cars. You can ring me at the farm. Now let’s stop talking.’

  Next day Maisie drove the rackety car to the farm and dropped Michael off there. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘the clutch is still slipping a bit.’ She kissed him and did not watch as he went through the gate. She reversed into an opening in the hedge and set off down the lane towards the main road to Dublin.

  Once she had said goodbye to her lover, she started in a determined way to recall her lost self. She would have enjoyed the drive if she had been in a better car – she several times heard alarming noises from it and expected it to fall to bits – but it got her there.

  She parked it in the college car park, which she found by means of a little map the university had sent her. Among the other cars it looked muddy, disreputable, an interloper. Still, she gave it a little pat.

  The first person she saw when she walked into the college was Philomena O’Grady, who came towards her as if expecting her, as if she had been waiting for her. ‘I came especially,’ she said, ‘when I saw your name on the programme.’

  They had lunch together in the students’ canteen. ‘Now I’ve caught up with you, you’ll not escape,’ said Philomena. They had spent the afternoon wandering about Dublin, with Maisie wishing it were Michael who was with her. It was a Michael sort of place – elegant and casual, human and fallible. Music spilled from every pub door, there were buskers and beggars in every doorway. They walked down Grafton Street looking at the clothes, window-shopping.

  After Maisie had given her paper, Philomena said, ‘You must stay with me.’

  ‘I have a room in the college,’ said Maisie. But Philomena had a ruthlessness that Maisie felt too tired to stand against.

  ‘Tomorrow we shall see more of Dublin,’ she said. ‘It would be stupid to go back without seeing the sights of this fine city.’

  Really, she was right.

  Maisie telephoned the farm, but, unable to get hold of Michael, left a message that she would be home at the weekend. Later that night, Philomena began to reveal her past and probe Maisie about hers. The Irishwoman was taking combs out of her hair, loosening it from its chignon. ‘When I saw you at the conference,’ she said, ‘I wondered what you were doing with the likes of a Michael Curran. Brandy?’

  ‘No. No, thanks. I thought you got on rather well together there, at the luncheon.’

  ‘Well, we understand each other – fellow-countrymen. We recognise the cut of each other’s jib, you might say. We came out of the same nesting box. Do you like my metaphors?’

  Maisie said nothing, absent-mindedly accepting a brandy. She was trying to distance herself from Philomena’s words, trying not to listen too closely, as the Irishwoman went on, ‘I can understand what he sees in you. Not what you see in him, though. He is not what you think. He is a bird of a different feather. He is storm-tossed – his boat has a ragged sail.’

  Maisie was beginning to feel angry at Philomena’s persistent probing. She left the brandy undrunk and said she was very tired and would like to go to bed.

  ‘Don’t you know by now,’ said Philomena, ‘that men do not want love? Do not know what to do with it. They prefer their toys, their subterfuges, their mothers, their tarts, anything, anything.’

  ‘I don’t know that,’ said Maisie quietly. ‘Where am I sleeping?’ She gathered up her things and Philomena showed her to a plain little attic room.

  ‘Sleep well, Maisie,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.

  Tired out as she was, Maisie lay awake, heavy-limbed in the narrow bed. The little attic room seemed to be like a ship’s cabin, adrift, the black sky above her and the sound of a gale getting up.

  She placed her hands over her belly. Her baby, growing there in its own dark world. She stroked her belly gently, as if soothing the baby to sleep, and fell asleep herself.

  She woke next morning to Philomena standing by the bed with a cup of tea. ‘It’s raining,’ she was saying, ‘but it will be clear by lunchtime. Breakfast is nearly ready.’

  She had made a wonderful breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and honey. They sat opposite each other; between them was a bowl of fruit, dull, smoky-red apples and a bunch of dark grapes. Philomena poured coffee.

  ‘We’ll do the galleries and museums,’ she said, ‘and we’ll have a pub lunch.’

  All morning, she never stopped talking wittily, quite brilliantly. But Maisie was quiet as she followed Philomena up and down museum steps, in and out of great doors, stood with her in front of ornately framed pictures; sat with her and tried to decipher the handwritten menu in a pub, where a beautiful greyhound sat delicately shivering by the empty stone fireplace.

  Someone Philomena knew joined them briefly in the pub and was introduced: ‘Annie Dillon, Celtic Studies’ – a white-faced young woman dressed like an Edwardian widow in black weeds. Maisie took the girl’s thin white hand which was smudged with black – perhaps newsprint – and the fingers heavy with many rings. Everyone was talking and swearing and calling out the names of friends. There was a smell of fish and malt and wood – and Philomena’s soft, velvety perfume.

  ‘I’ll have just bread and cheese,’ said Maisie. ‘I’m not really hungry.’

  ‘I can’t eat all that,’ she protested when it came, a half loaf of home-made bread and a huge wedge of cheese. She offered some to Annie, who put a piece of the cheese into her black beaded bag for her supper.

  ‘She only pretends to eat,’ said Philomena, when she had gone. ‘She’s anorexic, poor girl.’

  When they left the pub at last, it had stopped raining and the sun had come out. There was more to see. A room full of Irish gold treasures. The Book of Kells. It was while they were looking at the opened Book of Kells, that suddenly Maisie could bear it no longer. ‘I’m going back,’ she said.

  Then again she said fiercely, ‘I’m going back.’

  Philomena knew there was no point this time trying to keep her. She shrugged and walked off, as if she had been jilted.

  With a sense of release, Maisie made her way from the university to the car, abandoning things she had left at Philomena’s house, including her notes and a book that she was attached to. In a very short time now she would be back with him. She would see him again, touch his arm, hear his voice.

  As she was driving out of Dublin the sky was glorified by a sunset such as she had never seen. The heart of the sunset was molten-gold, a bright, streaming, living gold that brought to Maisie’s mind the gold room in the museum with its treasures of gold cups, reliquaries, croziers, vases and necklaces, but it was the gold of a thousand million such treasures melted down and flung against the sky, and even then its glorious brightness could only have been spilled from the sun, the most powerful source of brilliant light in the universe. The clouds were tinged with all shades of yellow, ochre to citrus, and then to green and to a deep purple, and the outer clouds were dark purple and even darker, nearly black – night’s harbingers.

  Maisie parked the car and wound down the window, making the colours leap more brightly in the air. It was such a sight a
s should have made the people come out of their houses to see. If it had been a display put on by the city council, perhaps they would have done so.

  She wondered if Michael was watching it. She wanted to keep it to show to Michael. Look, Michael, at this beautiful sunset I have found for you. But you couldn’t do that, take these things to give to your loved person, they weren’t even yours, they could not be had. They spoke not of having, but of not having. Rather, they spoke of relinquishing. And as she watched, imperceptibly the dark shades of night, the purple and grey increased as the gold gradually lessened, giving itself up to oncoming night in a slow renunciation. Maisie wound up the window and sped on her journey. She was so glad to leave Dublin which did not hold her lover, and travel out into the hills which did.

  On the way back the fan belt went and she was held up trying to find a garage to fix it. At last she drove up the lane to the little white, low-lying house nestling in the rain. There was thin smoke coming from the chimney and the other farm car was parked outside. He was at home. Maisie felt a quick rush of joy at the thought of seeing him, without having to wait.

  She went in.

  He looked awful. He was crying and kept saying, ‘Oh, Maisie. Oh, Fig.’

  At first Maisie thought he was ill. And then it dawned on her, with a great sickening flood of feeling, that there was someone upstairs and at once she knew it was Kate.

  She took this information in without being told. She knew it, but fed it to herself as little by little as she could to protect herself from shock, but still she felt as if she had been hit by something heavy, as if a car had knocked her over. She did not know what to say, words had become redundant.

  Then Kate came downstairs, her blouse unbuttoned and done up hastily with a brooch, her skirt twisted, her feet bare. She looked calm, though, as if nothing was amiss. She’ll offer me a cup of tea in a minute, thought Maisie. And that is what she did.

  Maisie stared at her and then at Michael, and then she gathered up her books and one or two things – anything that was upstairs she left, she would not go up there. Michael stood like a man just woken from a dream.

  She threw the things in the back of the car and without looking back she drove away.

  3

  SHE did not remember how she got back to the house in London. One or two things stood out in her mind: she remembered leaving the car in some back street, where there was a crowd of children playing, because the car park was full. By now the children had probably vandalised it, which did not matter one way or the other. She remembered sitting in a cafe for a long time, or maybe it was not a long time, where there was one of those noisy, hissing coffee-machines. Somewhere she had glimpsed, in a busy shopping street as she passed by, a beautiful hippie couple sitting on the pavement with their dog. The couple were kissing each other with spontaneous, graceful movements, oblivious of passersby. The girl had long hair like a Rossetti painting.

  Then she had a flashed picture of Philomena in a blue nightshirt, standing in the bedroom doorway, and she supposed she must have stayed the night there. That was about all. She did not recall a journey, except being in a taxi. She had been in one place, and now she was in another.

  She did not remember coming into the house, picking up the mail, climbing the stairs of the silent house. She was scarcely aware of taking off her coat, putting on the kettle.

  Perhaps it was the jet of steam filling the kitchen that clicked her mind into the present, and the wave of physical nausea that helped to drag her into her real situation and surroundings. After she had vomited into the bathroom basin, emptied herself as it were, she began to be aware of herself as sentient – and the real pain started. She washed her face and made herself a cup of instant coffee, which she did not drink. She drank a glass of water.

  There was the rest of her life to get through. There was the next hour to get through.

  She dragged the duvet off the bed and wrapped herself in it. She lay on the floor and reached out to sleep, her only refuge; it lifted her in its arms and carried her down muffled corridors.

  It deserted her just before dawn. Opening her eyes suddenly, she wondered what dreadful thing had happened.

  Then the pain began again.

  There was the rest of her life to get through. This dark hour before the day began, to get through.

  She crawled out of the duvet and went into the kitchen. She found a bottle of wine with some left in it and washed down two aspirin tablets with the horrible vinegary stuff. The flat was stone-cold, the central heating had been turned off while she had been away. She sat in an upright chair, wrapped again in the duvet, and waited for the dawn.

  When it came, bleakly beautiful, the pencilled sky over the chimney-pots, she dressed and went out into the empty streets and made her way to Kensington Gardens. The paths were strewn with magnolia petals. She sat beside the Round Pond and tried to turn herself into a statue, her warm flesh into marble or stone. She wanted not to be. To disintegrate. To become water, or stone. Or any dead thing. To fracture into pure matter, no longer to be herself, Maisie Shergold, who looked away from the sharp green new leaves, the flowers and these shiny, bright-feathered ducks, as if it all hurt her eyes, hurt something inside her. But she couldn’t manage to disappear, or leave this too solid world; there she still was, living, breathing, getting cold sitting there, even beginning to want a cup of tea. And for the first time since she got back to London she wondered where Rose was. There had been no sign of her last night, the house had been empty. She remembered she had gone back with her mother and Thèk and supposed she must have stayed on in Brighton.

  She started walking slowly back to the house, though she did not go straight back in a determined way, but wandered up and down other streets, taking a longer, more circuitous route.

  ‘Empty,’ she thought. ‘That is what I am. A hollow woman. Never to be solid flesh again.’

  She noticed, without emotion, a tramp asleep, or dead, among the gravestones of St Mary Abbot’s churchyard, his head resting on a black plastic bag for a pillow, full of his worldly goods.

  She came upon her own house as if by accident. Her key in the door, she heard the telephone ringing somewhere inside the house. As she went upstairs it stopped. Rose’s door was locked.

  As Maisie opened the door of her own room, the telephone began ringing again. She picked it up, her hand shaking.

  It was Rose, she sounded odd.

  ‘Mummy. Oh, thank God you’re back. Something dreadful has happened. I’ve been trying to get in touch with you. Oh, Mummy. Please get down here – oh, why didn’t you ring from Ireland? Nobody knew where you were.’

  ‘Rose, where are you? What’s happened? What’s the matter?’

  ‘Please come down. I’m in Brighton.’ She was crying.

  ‘Yes, yes, of course. What’s happened? Please say.’

  ‘Oh, Mummy. Grandma’s dead,’ said Rose, her voice breaking.

  ‘No,’ said Maisie. ‘No. She can’t be dead, Rose.’

  ‘Yes. She died the day before yesterday. It’s so awful, it’s so awful. Daddy’s here – he came this morning. Imre’s in a terrible state – like a sleepwalker. Daddy is seeing to everything – he’s doing everything.’

  ‘She wasn’t ill,’ said Maisie sharply.

  ‘She had a stroke,’ whispered Rose. ‘Imre found her on the kitchen floor. She’d probably been there for three or four hours, the doctor said.’

  Oh, God, thought Maisie, it can’t have happened. Not like this, without warning. Maisie felt angry with her mother that she had not been able to warn them, prepare them. What was she thinking about? Being so heartless.

  ‘I’ll come straight down,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, yes, Mummy. I’m so glad you’re back. You didn’t leave a phone number in Ireland and I didn’t know how to find you. We were going to get in touch with the police this morning – to find you.’

  ‘I was going to telephone you and I didn’t do it. I’m sorry, Rose. But I never thou
ght anything like this would happen.’

  ‘You just forgot about her,’ said Rose, sobbing. ‘You should have looked after her.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Maisie.

  She put the telephone down. She went out of the room and sat on the stairs, looking down the spiral to the well of the staircase.

  Strange sounds came from her, long moans and dry, orphaned howls, the empty house echoed with them. Maisie could hear these strange sounds winding and curling their way up the staircase and down it, the sound falling down into the well and then rising like smoke. After a while the sounds stopped, but she sat there for a long, long time.

  Then she got up and went back into her room. She checked the bag she had brought from Ireland – it was still packed, and most of the things so hastily flung in she would need.

  As she had a wash and looked round the room before leaving, she felt as if she was being watched by someone. This eerie feeling persisted right up to the moment Rose answered the door of the Brighton flat. Maisie put her arms round her daughter, and they clung together in an embrace. Well, it’s taken something like this, thought Maisie, finding some solace and relief in finding the barriers between them genuinely down at last. ‘Daddy is out, seeing to things,’ said Rose.

  Imre Thèk looked shocked and haggard. He was in the kitchen washing out tea-towels and keeping himself occupied. But the look in his dark eyes was hard to take and Maisie held him and kissed his unshaven cheek.

  ‘I’ll make some coffee,’ he said.

  They sat round the kitchen table drinking coffee, surrounded by everything that reminded them of the dead woman. The cups and saucers with the gold band she used often … Maisie remembered her mother’s thin fingers, her wedding ring and another ring with an amethyst and the exact way her hands moved, lifting a cup to her lips. The coffee pot with its pattern of little golden bees among flowers, little golden bees, whose wings seemed to buzz, they were so marvellously painted. Golden bees more alive now than the woman who had made her breakfast coffee every morning.