The Gift of Women

by George McWhirter

  When it grew into a sheep and too big for the back garden, Daddy had it butchered and the mutton sent to the Sally Ann.

  Tina, the timer on the oven has just gone. – Now, where did I get to? Lord, I think I’m doing to you what Daddy did to me every week when he wrote. Except it’s all fitted into this one skittery letter.

  Sally brought it on herself. There was no way anybody could help her.

  She was forever arriving late for school. You saw the shape of that. Year round. No sense of time or place. You know how they called me down to the Office to ask after her whereabouts. I was as clueless as they were, but I couldn’t cane her to make her stop – could I? What else could I tell them?

  Daddy wrote to stop them pestering me about her.

  There was that terrible time when she rented a rowing boat and oared out in front of the school to watch us through binoculars. Like we were dotty little birds behind the Collegiate windows. Mrs. Clegg was declining pouvoir: je peut, tu peut ( put, put, putter, put…) “Isn’t that Sally Wellesley out on the water. I recognize her hair.”

  The wind was blowing it behind her like a flag. I loved school and everybody in our form, Tina. It was in a brilliant location for a school, wasn’t it? Top of the hill, overlooking Pickie Pool and Bangor Harbour, but Sally used its pool deck like a runway, and the horseshoe harbour, as Mrs. Clegg put it, like a proscenium stage for her shameless shenanigans. Thank God, the tennis courts were over the hill, away from the water. I know you were a member of the Bangor yacht club and liked watching from the windows of our form room to see which yachts had put out, but you didn’t have a sister like Sally.

  I’m just too tired, Tina. I’m writing this too late in the evening and I’ll have to come back to it tomorrow.

  SATURDAY 18

  Here I am another day later. Sorry. Do you remember when the boys from the Grammar climbed up the drainpipe into our school attic, then couldn’t open the attic door from the inside to get down the stairs and into the school? After they made the mistake of trying to knock it open, the police were called. The Grammar boys were trapped. When the boys tried the drainpipe back down, all the girls were out, looking up it, and the dopes had to be let out by the peelers.

  That was like Sally with her captives in the Green Room. She teased boys up to the heights and they couldn’t really get down and into the lesson in loveliness she laid on. They were given a look at nude Mummy in the photo, then Sally sitting in naked competition without her letting them lay a hand on her. After that, a tour of the house, a squint at the Cromwell tankard, and then, they were shown out. Meanwhile, Sally told the lamb fibs about the bad wee boys who had pulled off all her wool.

  You know she once told me if Mummy hadn’t done anything with men, she would still look like she was in the photograph. If she had stayed innocent as a lamb.

  Poor deranged Sally. Do you think pure admiration can keep a woman young?

  Sorry I have to break so soon, William is on the phone.

  1:30 SAME DAY, BELIEVE IT OR NOT

  You remember that Air Corps cadet who got her into the rowing boat so he could wave-hop past her. Ditched her in the water, didn’t he, because he skimmed too close. Tina, you went out with the same Queen’s Air Corps cadet, before that. He came to pick you up in his uniform, thinking the more dressed up he was the more naked he could get you. Sally showed him more skin and for that he didn’t have to wear a thing. Though he got nowhere once he was out of uniform and in the buff beside her, he just clicked into the other half of an arty impression in Sally’s head: a dotty déjeuner sur l’herbe in the Green Room. After that, when he found out my William’s family owned a Cessna, he almost proposed marriage to William and forgot about Sally altogether. I keep expecting to see the fellow here in B.C. where small planes are a way of life. I suppose I flew off and saw less of Sally too once I met William.

  You are lucky, though, that you got engaged and married in London. When William came to pick me up, Sally was always trying to lure and Lorelei him, giving him little glances, wearing things that were cut lower and lower till you could practically see her navel. Poor William, who had to stand in the hall, waiting. Remember how he told us, “That girl has a hole in her twice as deep as her cleavage,” at the Queen’s formal, when she swept by in the arms of one of the Bangor Grammar bunch of engineers.

  Not long after the cleavage comment he said she had ambitions to cap her career in the madhouse.

  He was cold to everything she said, after she shut him into the Green Room. The one time he walked in to look at Mummy’s photo she was standing behind the door and she shut it on him. He came out as silent and white as Mummy’s face with her makeup on.

  His family had bought interests in big B.C. timber, even then. I suppose they came to the wood, instead of it coming to them. You met William’s family, many a time – import Lumber people – down on Queen’s Island. We could see their sheds from the train, just after it left the Belfast Co. Down Railway station. You’d titter and say, “I’m glad your William’s in wood, but not wooden.”

  That’s about as much as we knew at the time. Later, I learned the family used to trade through Liverpool. The plane, the famous Cessna that fascinated the air cadet, saved time when they checked up on cargoes there. It was easier to buy out of Liverpool. There wasn’t the volume in Belfast until the Troubles and the burnings, and every kind of building material grew in demand.

  It’s odd how Liverpool has died and business at home is kept alive by the bombs that should destroy it.

  I still say “home.” God, it’s an upside-down, hourglass kind of thing being an immigrant. One minute to the next you’re not sure what way you see it.

  William is busy all the time. I wish I were. You warned me about Training College, about gym teachers being like horses. Once they go lame, their career is shot. Who told you that? It’s very good.

  I have always been scared to death of being sedentary, or being watched. I’d rather be destroyed. Not Sally. She just wanted to be seen doing nothing at all, with nothing on, like Mummy in the photograph. We should have known where it would go from the rowing boat business. It became a regular thing for her to go out in one, on her own. Remember that time she stood up and took her clothes off in that thunderstorm? Rowed out into the middle of the bay and took off her school uniform.

  Naked in the sight of God, I suppose it was. But when I asked her, she told me it was because she was bored. Bored of what? She didn’t do anything to be bored of. She played tennis as if she were batting butterflies, no concentration, no focus, and no fun for me. But Sally just smiled secretively, like she had been batting back compliments from the angels. Any roads, Mummy never did that. She always concentrated on some man. She didn’t wait around letting the admiration get the better of the action.

  What am I saying? What am I writing here? Geraldine Wellesley’s objections to her sister going bonkers?

  Sorry, Tina. I have to stop now and see who that is at the door.

  4:00 P.M.

  Any road, Daddy said Sally just slathered herself in baby oil to keep within sniffing distance of the crib.

  According to Sally, it was to keep her from burning when she sunbathed. But she put it on to let her shine in the mirror. I know. I’ll tell you how she got the idea, from that boy, the weightlifter, who took her to one of those bodybuilding shows. Mr. County Down, or Mr. South Antrim, or something. He let her see how the oil gives muscles extra lines of definition. He’s the weightlifter one I wrote to you about after you had taken the chief jewellery buyer’s job at Selfridges, the one who wanted my calves because his own legs were too thin and didn’t respond to calf presses. I told him to take up tennis or play football in the mud. But what he said – “respond to calf presses” – made me see poor calves in these presses being squished. Even though I know these exercise routines very well from Jordanstown, and Mrs. Brand’s lectures on “musculature.” It made me giggle at him. He was none too happy. William called him the Greek god o
n the dog-bone legs.

  Now I remember, he met her years before at Crawfordsburn Beach. He was the same bodybuilder who used to drive her up from there to Belfast, through Holywood on his motorbike, no hands, while he used them to comb his hair. I asked Sally why she didn’t borrow the comb.

  Did you ever believe there were so many narcissi in Northern Ireland? As Miss Arthur, our history teacher, would say – “It is on the bare rocks that we find the brighter lichens growing.”

  It’s true, you forget how vain they are at home. The Ulster lot polish their flaws like they are the facets of diamonds – and they’re such a cutting, cruel lot to each other. That’s Daddy’s view on it, too. That bodybuilder called me “the racket” because I kept butting in and out when he was in the Green Room. I expected to find him copy-catting Mummy on the mat as well as Sally.

  Well, if he didn’t, Sally kept on at it as her daily routine.

  I’ve rattled on, and I still haven’t got to the horns of my dilemma about Sally. You had that problem with your mother after your father died and your mother was weathering the second-tier effects of senile dementia. If she were in either the sanatorium or at home, did she know where she was? Where should she be, and who should take care of her?

  Sally, as I’ve told you, has been the same for a long time, fit for nothing. When she left school, she started reading books for the first time in her life. She carried one with her everywhere. Replacements for the little lamb, I suppose. Books thick enough to stop a rifle bullet. The Troubles had started for her too. Daddy was pressing her to take a job. He had something for her in the Agency. She grabbed a book the minute he said Agency, and her peripatetic studies got going. Daddy said she had started up her own private hedge school. She was always away off in the fields, supposedly studying. But you would have thought advertising was Sally’s métier – in a sense, she’d been working all her life on a Wellesley Ad.

  Besides, random quotations and slogans were winging about in her head by the time William and I got married. I felt sorry leaving her, what with Mummy and Daddy being so old. I suppose she was hiding behind any old sheaf of words that didn’t say I do.

  She made that speech at our reception in the Culloden Hotel, there, in Craigavad. “Love should not be selfish,” it started. “We have a tankard in our house that Oliver Cromwell drank out of. I am not a puritan and I have shared it with a hundred boys I have known.” It was a sort of boast. But no boy shared her. And everybody was terribly embarrassed at her performance. Her “I’m the better sister” speech.

  You heard it, close up – you were a bridesmaid at the head table, but you never saw this and I never told you. There was the most mind-warping scene upstairs in the Culloden when I went to change. Sally came to help me off with the dress. We carried it to the bed between us and we left it there. We even had a laugh about it. Then, my nerves went to my bladder. I had to go to the bathroom. When I came out, Sally had hauled off her clothes and was standing by the window where the sun was shining in. She may even have tried on the dress that we said we had laid to rest.

  I don’t know. I was angry all over again, thanking God she hadn’t decided to go downstairs like that, just to get attention. I grabbed her by the shoulders. I spun her round and somehow my hands shifted to her neck.

  That made her positively radiant. She didn’t even look at me, she stared in front of her as if she was gazing out of the window still. Or over the heads of the guests, and the hacked chicken bones on their plates, at the reception downstairs.

  I even looked out the window. There were trees between the hotel and the next house, and I wasn’t sure if she had been staring into the leaves, or up the Belfast Lough.

  It lay down the hill, on the other side of Sydenham, where the airport was. The water looked like an extension of the runway. Planes flipped in and out, as unable as I to make up their mind if they should stay, or fly.

  I stood there, rigid in my travelling suit.

  I told her, “You realize I could kill you when you look like that.” This brightened her up better than a mouthful of compliments, and immediately she was putting her dress back on.

  She kept this look on her face, as if her nakedness in the window had been a secret destination tucked away from everybody. As if our wedding car with the cans and the carnations was part of a wild goose chase.

  “I was just having a little time to myself in the window with the sun,” she said, then she gave me a kiss.

  Mad or mischievous, Tina? She wanted me angry because her sister’s anger was like admiration. ‘I dare you to ignore me,’ that’s Sally’s way with other people.

  Remember when you met her at the Royal Yacht Club in Bangor, she was talking to someone about Rosicrucians. She trotted out this huge word for a philosophical sect she hadn’t a notion of. One of those times you were back visiting your parents and catching up with the yacht club bunch, buying Celtic silver and gold body ornaments for Harrods. You heard her say “Rosicrucians,” didn’t you, Tina? You reported how others of the great disconnected in Bangor were going to the Hare Krishnas and the Maharishi Gi, or the Rastafarians and doing dread-locks while they dodged in between the bullets and the bombs singing “peace and piss on Ian Paisley,” and what not.

  Sally joined the longest, least-known, most esoteric name in the pack and sat all winter posing in the Green Room. Daddy invited some of his junior managers down to take her out. Then, one night, he ran into that effete ex-B Special, Thomas Tallboy Slattery, in a camel hair coat, the one Mummy had brought home with her that time. By then, he was gun-running for the U.D.A or U.V.F. Daddy said the two of them, Sally and Slattery, the B-Special, twittered in multisyllables, like tiny birds that have the most complicated calls. They were a splendiferous, phantasmagorical pair, he said.

  Sally and Slattery went out drinking, and they came back drunk. Then, this TiT Slattery appeared in the living room where Daddy was sleeping with his thumbs tucked into his braces. Daddy loved to sit like that – his self-made man, pencil-in-the-shirt-pocket look. Tommy Slattery shook Daddy. “Incredible,” Slattery told him. He was still in his camel hair coat, raising his hands to the ceiling. “INCREDIBLE!”

  When Daddy was properly awake and went into the Green Room, Sally was shining with baby oil and dripping it over the mat, like a lamp to overflowing. The smell of the oil and the grimace on her face made Daddy want to cry because she was like a small child again, a small baby hiccupping with colic.

  Incredible.

  She talked normally enough in the morning.

  I’ve read these particular letters of Daddy’s over and over. Daddy blamed himself for bringing Tommy Slattery home for his own amusement. Enough to laugh any parent into the grave. Poor Daddy. He couldn’t say Mummy was one rotten tree falling and knocking down a good one. After all, I had turned out all right. I had stood up to it. It was two hollow trunks, not three, cracking each other open when they hit. That’s what Daddy said. Sally got her problems from the Wellesleys, not her mother. Our mother was someone Daddy had recognized long ago as having the Wellesley style.

  The empty Wellesleys. We were everything Slattery admired, Daddy believed, because Slattery’s ambition was to go mad with eccentric ecstasy too.

  When I wrote Daddy back, or when I wrote back to Daddy, funny how we switch the language round without noticing, when we live here. I said I wasn’t so sure that he didn’t want to be murdered. A bloody strange bird full of artificiality, like those painted targets at a fairground that go round and round, repeating the same silly music, setting themselves up for a pot shot.

  Dinner, Tina. William is just in. He knows I’m writing to you. He says it’s very friendly and therapeutic. He says to tell you he remembers your frowns when you’re thinking and not to let them sink in too deep over this.

  10:00 P.M. STILL THE 18TH.

  I did see Sally when Mummy died.

  She put up a show of grief, but I believe she was pleased because it gave her exclusive rights to the photograph.
She wouldn’t let Daddy put it away. Why should he? He never came into the Green Room anyway, and she never left it.

  He hadn’t the heart to fight her out of it, or to tell me until later. I offered to come back with the children to stay for a while, and while I was writing, asking this, he started to scold me for going into Gym. Didn’t I have a brain in my body, and a knack for words? He made me angry, writing about that and not answering me. I suppose he was defraying his bitterness about Mummy and Sally.

  What should I do if I took up the pen, I asked him. What would he do this time around? Write ad-copy, or be a reporter and write about the Troubles in Ulster and everywhere else? Or would he be like me – run, jump and smash tennis balls and show others how to do the same? In any case, I was married, settled down, wasn’t I? With two boys, in a family beyond the complication of any more Wellesley women.

  Then, he wrote to tell me he was proud of me. I was so sane it turned the old family ghosts in their graves. The Roundhead Wellesleys, the ones mad enough to come to Ireland in the first place with their good General, Cromwell. They put out propaganda, even then. Proclamations and pamphlets, with decrees and appeals to people, who couldn’t read a word of it.

  Pen and paper. William is moving exclusively into paper. Did I tell you all about that in my last letter? In case I didn’t, the new computers and their printers eat a tree a minute. The future lies in paper, William says. From the length of this you probably agree. How many pages have I disposed of, and have I got any nearer to the nub of the matter, Tina?

  I offered to stay again after we came over for Mummy’s funeral. I told you that.

  But you can’t stay here with your children, not in this house, not in this country, not with this problem of ours. That was Daddy’s new line now. How glad he was, or so he said, that I had escaped the crazy vanity that the Irish cherish. I should count myself lucky and stay on the other side of the Rockies. So little colour all about, in Ulster. Only drab grey and green – the people on occasion touched up with a bit of blood.