The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

  “So?”

  “They burnt the legs off them, then they threw the sinners into a bog to cool themselves.” The innocent blue eyes gazed into mine. “You’re shocked, Mr. Eyre?”

  “It’s hard to imagine those days. Everything seems so peaceful here now.”

  “Flurry was a dangerous man to cross, right enough. People think he’s a burnt-out case now”—how odd to have heard that phrase first in 1939—“but I’d do anything for him. Anything, Mr. Eyre. I joined his column when I’d got over my wound. That wasn’t the only time he saved my life. After that war ended, he was sickened of violence. You couldn’t know what it’s like to be on the run. Some of us it toughened, some was stretched too far. When I hear these brave boyos, who never slept on a mountainside or looked down the muzzle of an enemy’s gun—hear them blethering in the snug about Holy Ireland and the Border and how the Big Fellow betrayed us and Dev. is dragging his feet—”

  Seamus broke off abruptly. The hand that took up his glass was shaking. His sudden vehemence had almost startled me. The Irish, I thought, never seem so flagrantly play-acting as when they’re engaged in the real and the earnest.

  “Was Kevin Leeson in it?” I asked idly.

  Seamus gave me a guarded look. “Ah, he’s a great one for the politics. He’ll be a deputy yet, God help him.”

  “In the Trouble, I mean.”

  “Maybe so, maybe so. I wasn’t hereabouts then. He’s a main-chancer, a manipulator, wouldn’t you think?”

  Seamus’s obvious evasiveness annoyed me. “And is he a dangerous man to cross?”

  “Sure, why should you be crossing him?”

  The unsatisfactory end of that conversation was still echoing in my mind when I drove to fetch Harry the next morning. I knew now why Seamus stuck to Flurry so devotedly. I had a new light on Flurry himself. But why did Seamus clam up about Kevin Leeson?

  Kevin, with his neat suit and decisive manner, seemed so entirely the practical man of business. But so no doubt had the Big Fellow, Michael Collins, looked when he bicycled through Dublin with a price on his head, wrecking the Dublin Castle espionage system and ordering his ruthless retaliations.

  Collins, though—boisterous, moody, quick-tempered, rough-tongued, loyal, with a quixotic streak—might not the young Flurry have been the same type? And now he was a ruin of a man.

  It was a glorious day, as Seamus had predicted. The country had shrugged off the early-morning mist and lay stretched out before me in all its sweet colours. Harry was waiting at the stile, a satchel over her shoulder, and that absurd jockey cap not, I was relieved to see, on her head. She asked me how I was getting on in the cottage; she did not ask then, or any time later, how the book was getting on. She never pretended to an interest she did not feel.

  We drove, with the hood down, into Charlottestown and out west. The road swerved and switchbacked over low hills: one strand after another, pale in the brilliant sunshine, showed to the right beneath us, with stone-walled tracks running down to them. A magpie flew across the road. Another followed.

  “That’s all right,” she said.

  “Are you superstitious?”

  “Two for joy.” I was aware of her studying me covertly.

  We passed a cottage now and then; roofed or roofless, they had a derelict look. A man leading an ass, cleeves of turf on either side of it, waved to us.

  “What a God-forsaken country!” she said.

  “But it’s so beautiful.”

  “It bores me stiff. You can have it.”

  “Seamus said you wanted to go to the Morey. Some strand just north of it.”

  “Anything to get out of the bloody house.”

  “We shan’t meet him anyway. He told me he never goes there.”

  “Well, that’s something.”

  “Why, don’t you like Seamus?”

  “The Lissawn watch-dog? Oh, he’s all right.”

  “A faithful watch-dog, anyway. He told me about Flurry saving his life during the Trouble. He’s rather an impressive chap.”

  I swerved to avoid a collie that rushed out at us, barking frenziedly.

  “No!” she said. “You mustn’t do that. They never go under the wheels.”

  “All sound and fury, and signifying nothing?”

  “Are you afraid of dogs?”

  “I don’t like killing things,” I replied stiffly.

  “And you an Irishman! But of course you’re not. You’re a West Britisher. Don’t frown like that, my pet. It spoils your beauty. I’m one too.”

  After ten miles or so, the road degenerated into a narrow stony track, which writhed downhill, with hair-pin bends and occasional rises so steep one could not see over the top of them till one reached them. And then suddenly below us was spread a superb sandy bay, low hills on either side, rocks at the far end, and beyond them a peacock-coloured sea.

  I stopped the car, to look at the map. The U-shaped bay appeared to have no name. We left the car in a field at the end of the track, crossed a shallow stream on stepping stones, and started walking to the sea’s edge. The tide was right out. There were hoof-prints of cattle in the sand, leading away to the grassy slopes on our left. Far behind us towered Slieve Carvy.

  The sands were as Seamus had described them, firm at first but then queerly clogging, so that every plodding step was an effort. Harry had taken off her shoes—she wore no stockings; her feet, like her ankles, were small and delicate. We scrambled about on the rocks for a bit, then climbed the grassy hillside which separated the bay from the estuary to our left. The stream we had crossed was running out to sea, hugging the side of the bay below us. A light, steady wind blew from the west. An upturned curragh lay nearby, supported on stones.

  Harry opened her satchel: soda bread thickly buttered, slices of ham, farmhouse cake, two desiccated oranges, a half-bottle of whiskey. She seemed less fidgety now, less contrary.

  “Tell me about your girl friend,” she said presently, lying back on the sward. “Is she pretty? What’s her name?”

  “Phyllis. Yes, quite pretty.”

  “You don’t sound very enthusiastic.”

  Well, perhaps I wasn’t. But I was not telling Harry so. She pumped away for a bit, in spite of my lack of response: her curiosity about Phyllis seemed indefatigable. After a while, I found myself more at ease with her, talking freely, but feeling a perverse pleasure in over-colouring the picture of my fiancée, and at the same time conscious of a certain disloyalty to her.

  “That’s better. You’re quite human after all. I thought you were just an old stick of a highbrow. So you’ll marry and live happily ever after.”

  Something in her tone made me sit up and look at Harry. Her eyes were wet, little diamonds on the lashes.

  “Aren’t you happy, then?”

  “No,” she said in a very small voice. Then she began to weep, quite soundlessly, the tears welling out like a natural spring. When a woman cries, I still get a violent reaction from it: either I melt, or I turn to stone. In those days I had no defences against the unaccustomed intimacy of it. Phyllis was a stiff-upper-lip girl.

  “Harriet. What is it? What’s the trouble?”

  “Flurry.”

  “But he’s—surely he’s not unkind to you? You two seem to get on so well.”

  “Oh, he does his best. But the fighting he was in—it ruined him. He’s no good any more. Except fishing. And we’re so poor. If only he wouldn’t drink so much. I’m useless.” Her incoherent words faded out.

  “But you’re a beautiful woman,” I found myself saying. “Attractive, and—”

  “Everyone hates me in this God-forsaken hole.”

  “Oh, come now, Harry!”

  “They only put up with me because of Flurry. The great hero,” she said bitterly. “They don’t know what he’s like. Irishmen have no use for women, except to breed from. You’ve got to be a mother, or a whore.”

  Her fingers were tearing at the short grass.

  “Wouldn’t you like to have c
hildren?”

  “What a hope! He—we can’t. I’m sure that priest thinks I use contraceptives.”

  What could I say? All this childish self-pity; yet it made me feel oddly protective—and far more mature than I really was.

  “He’s got such a terrible temper. You’d never guess it.”

  “Father Bresnihan?”

  “No. Flurry.” She had stopped weeping. Her green-brown eyes, opaque—like pieces of toffee, I absurdly thought—stared into mine. “When he’s in drink, he hits me.”

  I must have looked sceptical. It had suddenly occurred to me that this woman might be a practised or a pathological liar. And on the instant she scrambled round, knelt close to me, and pulled up her jumper. She wore nothing beneath it. Her dazzling white body was covered with little bruises.

  “Now do you believe me?”

  “Harriet. You poor thing.” My hand reached out involuntarily and touched her body. I was looking into her eyes now, and I caught a triumphant gleam in them. The next moment she had fallen forward on me panting.

  Why didn’t I take her then? I often wondered about it in the following months: I still do. I was not a virgin, nor undersexed. Harriet excited me tremendously. A man’s perverse impulse to postpone a pleasure? The too sudden offering of that pleasure? The wish to master, not be mastered—to make the running? A residue of loyalty to Phyllis? It is difficult, perhaps, for young people to comprehend to-day: but then we were less frank, or less purely animal, about sex. A man felt he was committing more than his body to it, particularly if he had been brought up in a God-fearing household.

  We tumbled and wrestled a while on the short-cropped grass. It turned imperceptibly into a sort of innocent trial of strength. Harry’s arms were strong, but finally I held her, pulled the jumper down to cover her body, and sat beside her. She laughed at me, not in the least chagrined. We might have been two children romping on a village green: I had not even kissed her. But I knew this was only a beginning. No doubt she did too.

  “You’re quite strong, Dominic. For a book-writer.”

  “I don’t like being raped,” I said, smiling at her. “You do have lovely hair.”

  “Nicer than Phyllis’s?”

  “Much nicer.” No cock crew. And I didn’t give Flurry a moment’s thought, while his wife and I kept up a desultory, teasing conversation. That was the strangest thing of all. Harriet’s bruises had absolved my conscience, perhaps.

  I remember I asked her about the Kevin Leesons. “Maire turns me up,” she answered. “She’s so pi, and always running with tales to the Father—when she has a moment to spare from breeding children. She’s got six already! It’s indecent.”

  I laughed. In her moments of gaiety, Harriet was so infectious. Her malice was clean somehow—unlike that of my London literary acquaintances.

  “And what about Kevin?”

  “Oh, Kevin’s a dark horse.” She gave me a veiled look, as if trying me out, when she said, “He’d like to make a pass at me.”

  “I don’t wonder. Has he?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to know?”

  “I can’t think why you’re bored here—the femme fatale of the whole neighbourhood.”

  “Maire keeps him on a tight rein.”

  “And he keeps an eye on everyone else.”

  “I dare say,” she commented indifferently. “He fancies himself as a little Napoleon in Charlottestown. Finger in every pie. You know.”

  “But why’s he a dark horse, apart from his habit of making passes at you?”

  “I never said ‘habit.’ Oh, I dunno: he goes off on mysterious journeys, and he never tells even Flurry where he’s been. And last month I overheard him talking to a man in the office behind his shop, and do you know?—the man was talking in a German accent.”

  “Well, that’s no crime. Yet. What were they saying?”

  “Search me. I couldn’t hear them clearly. And then that old fool Peadar started nattering at me.”

  I looked up. The tide was coming in: the waves were already breaking under the bluff where we sat, and the stream was appreciably deeper.

  “We’d better go, hadn’t we?”

  “If you want to. Oh! We forgot to drink any of the whiskey.”

  “I didn’t need it.”

  I pulled Harriet to her feet. We stood like that a moment, looking gravely at each other. Then she smiled a secret smile and came into my arms.

  Her lips were unbelievably soft, with a taste of the salt spray on them, and her breath sweet. Her tongue, like a little fish, darted and wavered inside my mouth. I’d never known such delight till now. We must have been kissing a long time, for I was awoken from my trance by Harriet looking over my shoulder and then pushing me gently away.

  “If we’re going across the strand, we must start now.”

  We scrambled down, on to the sand. The river was deep now. “You can give me a piggy back, darling.”

  The water came up to my thighs, and in the middle there was a patch of what felt like quicksand, but we got through and I put her down.

  “Your trousers are soaking.”

  “Who cares? Good lord, what on earth’s that?”

  Down the hillside to our right a procession was moving. After the solitude and silence of the empty bay, it came as something unnatural.

  As it debouched on to the strand, I saw that it consisted of about twenty men, all in black. The object carried by those at the front, which I had mistaken for a curragh, was a coffin. At the head of the procession, as it re-formed on the strand’s edge, stood Father Bresnihan. Harriet gripped my arm painfully, shivering. I could see a cottage, half hidden in a fold of the hills above us to the right, and in the distance, parked near my own car, I could now make out another vehicle, a hearse.

  “Why are they bringing it this way?”

  “There’s no road from the cottage, I suppose.”

  Harry and I were both whispering.

  “But the river. Are they going to swim across it?”

  No. There must have been a ford at that point; for the cortège splashed across and set off over the strand, plodding through the sand at a purposeful, short-stepped pace. Not a word had been spoken. I could not even hear the men’s footsteps. The whole thing was incredibly bizarre: they might have been a troop of ghosts.

  “The Irish love funerals,” whispered Harry, still clinging to my arm.

  The cortège made a detour round a shallow, saucer-shaped depression in the sand, a hundred yards away from us. It receded into the distance, still at that plodding quick-step, splashed over the river where we had crossed it on stepping-stones, and stood around the hearse with heads bowed while the coffin was slid into it. Behind us the waves sounded louder, stealthily encroaching upon the strand.

  “D’you think Father Bresnihan saw us?” I asked, thinking of our linked arms and her reputation.

  “Don’t be so wet.”

  The hearse bumped on to the stony track. The mourners formed up behind it, and the cortège moved off up the hill. My eyes followed the black-clothed figures till they disappeared round a last bend. The afternoon sun was declining: the rugged stone walls up the hillside were touched with gold.

  “Are you scared of the Father?”

  “No. But—”

  “He’s only a man. Like the rest of you.”

  “Aren’t you a Catholic, Harry?”

  “No. Our children would have to be, if—”

  “We’d better be going, hadn’t we?”

  “If you want to drive for miles behind them. They’ll spread out, right across the road. They don’t like you to overtake a funeral cortège in Ireland. Disrespectful to the dead.”

  We were sauntering across the strand. The satchel swung from her hand, and a rising wind blew Harry’s dark hair over her face: the sunlight fetched glints of red from it. Her right hand as in mine.

  We skirted the shallow depression, and found ourselves on a dune of firmer sand, with sparse clumps of wiry grass dotted about on i
t, and a little cache of bones where a sheep had lain down and died. Out at the sea’s edge a flock of terns flashed and gyrated, like a mobile gone mad. There was a screaming of gulls.

  Harry put her arms round my neck, sank to the ground with a fluent movement, as if she was a wave-nymph drawing me down. How well I would get to know that liquid, yielding, compelling movement of hers! It was so utterly different from her rather gauche, graceless walk. I had no sensation of falling to the ground: it was like being lowered on a cloud.

  Her saffron-coloured skirt had ridden up high. She was wearing nothing beneath it.

  “I love you,” she said, her eyes closed.

  “Not here.”

  “Why not?”

  I had a momentary revulsion, knowing now she had come out here to seduce me.

  “The bay’s a fine and private place, but none I think should there embrace,” I muttered in her ear.

  “Oh lord! Poetry!” Her body stirred under mine. “Don’t you want me?”

  “Of course I want you.”

  “Well then … oh, you are a cold fish.”

  “I want you naked.”

  “Take off my clothes then.”

  “People could see us.”

  “What people? You just said it’s a fine and private place.”

  There were diamonds again on her closed lashes. I kissed them away, but new ones started.

  “You don’t love me.”

  “I do.”

  “Say it.”

  “Darling Harriet, I love you.” My voice was so shaky I could barely control it. I felt like crying myself.

  She opened her eyes, smiling into mine, a quirk at one corner of her red mouth. I rolled off her and put my head on her breast. It felt burning hot, like a fever patient’s. There was a smell of sweat, delicious to me. Everything about her was delicious. A hand ruffled my hair, then tugged at it viciously.

  “I believe you’re a tease, Boo.”

  “I’m not. It’s just that—”

  “I ought to be angry with you, rejecting my advances. You’re the first man—” she broke off.

  “—who’s rejected them? How many have you—?”

  “Now he’s jealous!” she crowed. “Dozens and dozens.”