The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  ‘The mother’s death, maybe? Here in the cottage.’

  He looked surprised that I knew of it. He pointed up beyond the cottages towards the crest of the hill overlooking the new cemetery. I could see the outline of an overgrown path leading to the pile of black stones Bridget had been staring at.

  ‘That happened up there, well over a decade ago now. I don’t think her father was right in the head for a long while after, the poor man. An oul’ tinker who passed filled his head with nonsense. Do you know what them people do when a person dies, eh? Only pile everything the person owned up in their wicker tent and set the tent and all in it alight. Well, I suppose there’s no fights about who gets what with everything burnt to ash, but it’s no wonder they’re always squatting on the roadside without a farthing in the arse of their pants. That might be all right for the likes of them, but it was sheer madness for settled folk.’

  As he spoke the pile of black rocks became the outline of burnt walls.

  ‘If a man isn’t used to whiskey he shouldn’t take it,’ he said and spat again. ‘If you ask me it was the second fire drove the child wild. Every scrap of her mother’s clothes piled up in the kitchen and paraffin oil splashed over them. Off she took by herself screaming so it took half the village combing the hillside to find her. Up there she was on that headland by the dairy gibbering away in the cold of dawn. The old women around here say a changeling came and stole her body, if you believe that talk. They wanted to tie her down and burn the spirit out of her with a hot poker. All of them cackling away like hens in the doorway. Her father had to beat them away. He called a real doctor and paid him with silver. He used words we didn’t understand but can’t you see from the cut of the child? It’s pure madness, man, and it will not be long taking over. It’s the gates of the madhouse for her and her father’s old age to be spent alone. Good day to you now.’

  He turned abruptly and walked towards the cottages. The damp dew was penetrating through my boots. I was the villain and yet had escaped retribution. I stood excluded from the villagers by my accent and clothes. But more than everything I had seen or done it was Bridget’s words that haunted me. Standing in the brightness of that morning, I could sense the emptiness, the black hole she spoke of, as though it would engulf her and myself and our entire world. I climbed up on to the road and tried to walk briskly away. I stopped at the bridge and looked down at the mud. I could see the marks of the wheels where they had pulled the old man’s body out and there, like the only evidence that the night had taken place, were the crumpled white cigarettes I had left in the woods for him. I checked my pocket suddenly and felt a stab of fear when I realized the cigarette case was missing.

  We were both silent in the bed, thinking of her father. My penis had hardened again in that moist embrace, only now it felt like incest as she rolled me over and climbed on top. I wanted to say something, explain how I felt. She stretched herself so tight it seemed my foreskin would burst.

  ‘You’re different from the rest,’ she said. ‘I’d have a child for you if you wanted.’

  ‘You have a child already, or have you forgotten?’

  ‘I’d have another one for you, another daughter.’

  ‘And how do you know I’d marry you?’

  ‘I never asked you to. I’ll be your mistress, your best one, even bring you other girls if you wanted.’

  Her breath was coming faster and suddenly she started to moan. I tried to hush her but she grabbed my fists and pushed them back against the pillow. The sheet had ridden off her, her skin glistened like a drenched leaf in a deodorant commercial. I felt her eyes no longer saw me, her voice as she rocked herself was like an old mourner keening. There was a light on the landing and the door slid open. Joanie never even turned to look at her granny as she pushed herself towards her climax. The old woman was shrunken and wrinkled like a grape left too long in the sun. I might have been invisible as she stared at her granddaughter’s buttocks. Joanie came with a low animal cry. I was still stiff but numb as if my penis was no longer mine. When I came it was like something frozen had slid out from me.

  ‘You bitch,’ the old woman said. ‘In this, your father’s room.’

  Joanie ceased moving and straightened her back up. She looked over her shoulder tauntingly.

  ‘Don’t you mention his name in here. At least I know who my own father was.’

  I had never felt as strange as this, like I were dead and could still hear voices around my bedside. The awful feeling returned that this had already happened if I could only remember, that it wasn’t Joanie’s father but something else, a memory, a dream I had forgotten which haunted me. There was a slurping noise as Joanie slid off me and my penis slipped out of her. The two women stared at each other. I could see Joanie’s features on the old woman like a crinkled photocopy. The old woman looked down at Joanie’s clothes scattered along with the contents of her bag on the floor.

  ‘That’s my mother’s cigarette case,’ she muttered weakly, ‘I told you before you can’t have it.’

  Joanie’s teeth flashed above me as she smiled. She knelt up now so that no part of her body even touched mine.

  ‘I said at least I know who my own father was.’

  The old woman looked down again at her worn slippers. She shuffled awkwardly, then turned and was gone. Joanie fell back on the mattress beside me. I heard her giggle to herself. I knew I was redundant. She was buried among the bedclothes, the odd sliver of flesh glimpsed in the moonlight like a corpse in a shallow grave after weeks of torrential rain. I could hear her laugh as I put my clothes on and walked out through the hall. I stopped at the front door. Joanie’s little sister was in the hall in her pyjamas staring at me. I strained to hear any sound of a baby. I heard nothing and realized how little I was sure of.

  At the waste ground near the traffic lights a bulldozer had eaten away the last of the famine mound Joanie had told me about. A new billboard was advertising more town houses. In the ploughed earth there were plastic markers and a row of white crosses. I knew that they only marked out foundations but I wanted to tell myself that one was for her father and the others for all the women and men whose lives had been buried alive in rooms where the sun rarely shone.

  The Whelan boy was standing on the corner, his face bloated from whatever drugs the clinic fed him on. He was staring at the broken pillars of the entrance to what had once been the asylum. I didn’t know if he thought anything but perhaps he knew that that was where he would have wound up a hundred years before. When I passed he turned to glance at me as though I were familiar. My cock hurt, I wanted a cigarette badly, I wanted to wash out my mouth. I had passed him and was looking for a taxi back to town when I stopped.

  I thought of all the evil I knew of in the world, not the great wars and famines, but the thousands of lives crippled in the name of family love, of that violence never spoken, rarely made physical, the slights and silences twisting like a knife into a loved one’s flesh. I thought of those back there; Joanie naked on her back in one room, her granny lying like a corpse in another, with a faded pattern of roses on a wall between them, her sister still standing in the hall, a doll clutched to her breast the way Joanie had cuddled one as she waited for her father to come home from work two days after her mother’s death. And though I was about to be driven away under the cold yellow lights, I knew that I had not escaped, I would never shake the feeling of having been an accessory to a crime.

  Like a small sharp pearl she came back to me, as cold as her age. And yet it wasn’t her that was holding me there. I waited at the corner and felt again that sensation I had not been able to explain. For a moment it seemed as if it were the presence I had dreamt of as a child on those damp roads, not a god now, but something lost and overlooked, whose feet inaudibly beat with my feet on the hard pavement, whose breath panted in the moonlight with mine. I turned to look back. Only the Whelan kid was there with his idiotic stare.

  So why did I feel I had finally kept that rendezvous? For one
brief second I allowed myself to imagine I was not just a fluke of biology and chance. Like Joanie’s father, consoled by the thought of other lives, I felt suddenly one of a long line that stretched behind me and before me, I as much a speck in their minds as they were in mine, that if I could only grasp them this would all make sense to me. Then I shook the feeling. I wished I could believe in ghosts, that I did have some connection with that place, but I knew it was just drink and physical signals from my body that this madness would have to stop.

  The nightclub would still be thumping out music when I got home, like a dentist’s drill trying to root out an aching pain. Couples would clutter up the quays, searching for taxis, trying to cling on to the ambience there. I knew I would never see Joanie again. Her name would appear on the attendance book till all her sick allowance ran out. Some nights I would wake in a strange sweat. Phrases would come back to me, parts of her body, the way her eyes looked. You’re the most beautiful man I’ve ever known. I’d have a child for you, a daughter. How much was real or at least meant at that moment and how much was I simply an instrument of revenge?

  A taxi came down the carriageway and I hailed it, music blaring on the car stereo, the driver grinning at my dishevelled hair. He tore up the hill towards the all-night garage, his fingers tapping on the wheel, and when I looked through the rear-view mirror the Whelan kid still stood, like Joanie had once done, shrinking into a motionless speck that never budged until I was gone.

  The early weeks after that night felt unreal, waiting for a knock at the room, the constabulary or my employer. Then the cycles of ordinary life drew me back in. The closeness of my escape startled me back to my senses. Bridget’s illness passed through the house in a whisper, a new girl started, I heard the sound of young voices laughing from downstairs. If I did not forget her, then in time I learned to live with the memory; I felt a grief when I thought of her and quiet relief that I was not implicated; I woke occasionally unable to prevent myself lingering on some detail of our night together. I managed to avoid that road, the row of cottages, the arched bridge, the asylum walls.

  Fashions change and the rich feign new interests and passions. I still remember the shock when I heard the faltering phrase of Gaelic spoken by a visitor in the drawing-room. It is quite the rage now in literary circles. Five guineas I received for my first work of translation, the tales from the west of Ireland which my mother spluttered out to us in that tenement, now set down in stiff, antiquated English. They are praised in a small way as long as I curtail them, take out the native sweat and dirt and put in noble peasants with flighty words. I was born at the tail-end of a famine nobody wants to be reminded of. Instead I give them heroic vassals as pure and forced as Bridget’s last smile.

  I have long left Shallon House, and now teach only Latin, like a rich version of Hegerty, in several of the neighbouring big houses. Although I still work mainly for Protestants, I have learned to keep close to the priests again. A Catholic with such a grasp of Gaelic and Latin is rare. We’re growing rich as a religion, anxious for coats of arms as good as any Englishman’s. The fact that I work for Protestants makes me a prize to be displayed. I tour the new houses, giving them inscriptions of their clans in Latin and Gaelic, occasionally bearing Homer to their children.

  Eighteen months after Bridget entered the asylum I married Mary, a good and simple woman, and bought this cottage off Washerwoman’s Hill, blessed by the convent gates and secured by the barracks. The tram terminates on the hill. Beyond that, although I never ventured there, the hill slopes down towards the cottages by the bridge.

  The labouring men in the fields salute me now. Barre, the grocer, tries to recruit me for his campaign against the extravagance of asphalting the paths. He tells me the gossip of the lower orders who pass up and down the hillside. One spring evening, three years after I moved there, as he brought me to the door to show his esteem for my custom, Bridget’s father passed, exhausted looking, curled up on the back of a cartload of flour.

  ‘Away down Slut’s Alley that man there goes,’ Barre laughed. ‘The drivers still give him lifts in the carts though he’s long sacked, but I don’t approve at all. I tell you, Slut’s Alley could have been named after his clan down by the bridge. He has a daughter across the road from him, locked up in the madhouse. Did you know that now?’

  I gazed after the cart, neither shaking nor nodding my head.

  ‘And a wee slip of a granddaughter tucked away at home in a room.’

  It was like the man had punched me. I tried not to stagger, reaching back to grasp the door behind me.

  ‘A granddaughter you say?’

  ‘Surely you’ve heard tell of it? Sure, it’s a disgrace on the whole neighbourhood. They’re clearing away the mud heaps and yet letting people away with the likes of that. The man’s stubborn and dumb. My God, there were nuns down to him and priests, but sure even if the Archbishop of Dublin had descended on his cottage nothing was good enough for the man but to rear the child himself. He lost his job and all, only now gets the odd bit of work as a night-watchman. He locks her up when he goes to work. The neighbours hear her crying all alone in the back room by herself.’

  ‘But you said his daughter’s in the asylum?’

  ‘She delivered in the asylum, seven and a half months after she was brought in.’

  ‘Who is the father?’

  I wanted him to answer me, I needed a name. Barre laughed and slapped me on the shoulder.

  ‘When the harlot was around, Slut’s Alley must have fairly earned its name.’

  He moved inside chuckling to serve a customer. I took my Evening Mail and began my walk up the hill towards my wife with our child growing inside her. The long months of disappointment, the uncertainty and then exhilaration at the news, the nights in our bed discussing names, planning a bright white future. But was I a father already, a daughter, born of seed I had thought spilt over her mother’s belly and breasts, growing in poverty that my own child would escape from? Or was Barre right, was I just one of many lured to that room, spun stories of shapes on walls? She had cried out, claimed to be a virgin, but could I remember whether there was blood? That night she had run through the meadow was there somebody in her room, her father perhaps, a bullying neighbour who knew she was alone? Had she been forced to commit an act against her will and turned to me with wild stories, hoping somehow I would save her?

  I went over every possibility, yet that cold dread never left my stomach. Everything I had worked for, the secure walls and careful future, seemed taken from me and yet I could not even be sure of what I was guilty. And now another thought plagued me like a wasp brushing about in my skull. Was she committed because she was deranged or because they had discovered the child growing inside her?

  I have tried to shake off these thoughts, but now at night I am haunted by what haunted her, by unseen figures, by thoughts that make sense to no one. And I realize it is not the ghosts locked in the past that should frighten us, but those of the unborn, the undreamt of, the future ones beyond our control or comprehension who will remember or forget, forgive or condemn us.

  Each morning my wife fusses over the simple daily things, my new pupils wait, growing older and more sullen. And all my Latin verbs cannot save me from these thoughts. They flood in when I pause between tenses. I stand on the waxed floor among wooden desks, the air bright, shafts of sunlight sliding across the wall. And I can hear my voice as though it belonged to someone else, someone I was once, reciting Latin. But I can feel a darkness enveloping me, can feel her limbs sweating, the tightness of her cunt as though it were drawing my world in and casting me out into a space without walls or sense.

  I want to run from it and yet I want that abandonment back just once before my youth flickers out into monotony. I want to cast this world to hell but am frightened to lose my lowly perch above the footmen in the houses I teach in. When my pupils are gone I sit on in those rooms, trace the carved initials on the wood with my finger. A.J.C. 2/6/95, S.H.C. 21/12/96
. How self-important their initials look, carved with contempt, the certain knowledge of their worth. It should console me that they will be swept into the furnace that I sense is coming, and yet they are what define me and when they are gone all trace of me will be erased as well.

  I want to be remembered and yet I don’t know by whom. Which daughter, if I have two, will find me the least unfathomable? If they too have children will they in turn honestly believe that I existed? I don’t mean times of birth and death, but the thousands of insignificant acts that made up my life. If these words survive they may grasp certain set pieces, a figure by the window where young faces bend reluctantly over their books, an ostracized man in a corner of a tavern, even the morning I leaned forth to call down to the bewildered girl. But will they really conceive of the seconds that can never be described, the constant heartbeat, the blood pumping, my breath even as I write this turning to vapour in the chill of my room? I am trying to see you, grandson or great grandson or great granddaughter, am trying to speak to you, to imagine your world. Yesterday I realized I did not know my mother’s father’s name, had never asked her, had never even thought of that man. But when you become a father death ceases to be just a word.

  I have tried to break the habit, but most evenings at a certain time I can no longer bear to sit in this cottage. I look at my daughter in her wooden cot, her hands thrown back behind her head, lips pursed as she sleeps. I pause at the loft door a moment, hoping her serenity can quench my unease, then I turn and whistle for the dog.

  It has been the longest autumn I’ve ever known, the leaves massed knee-high at the base of the trunks. Night has descended with a mist which hints of rain to come. The dog whines for home but still I wait beneath the half-bare branches. Before me is the asylum where Bridget sleeps or lies awake beneath the high arched window of a cell. Behind me the waters froth over the rocks beneath the bridge. Footsteps pass, solitary and youthful from the sound of them. I step back and do not turn until the figure of the young man is indecipherable, a farm labourer heading home or a vagabond perhaps, passing the cottage where a child is locked up whose eyes may perhaps mirror my own. The young man stops. There is something familiar about him. If it were not so dark I would swear he was watching. He turns to vanish over the brow of the hill. Are mother and daughter awake at this moment, I wonder, both facing each other, staring up through windows they cannot open, neither aware that I am under this tree, caught for ever between them, powerless to know or to change anything? I whistle for the dog and, as we walk home, I am filled with an unease that we are somehow both ghosts, that we will never arrive back to the warmth of that kitchen where Mary waits even after we think we have reached there, that we are trapped for eternity on this corner, indistinct and lost beneath the first squalls of evening rain.