‘Would there be anything to eat in here, pet? Would they have biscuits?’
At the bar he ordered two more bottles of stout and inquired if biscuits could be supplied. The publican said he had ginger-snaps and went to the grocery to weigh out half a pound.
‘Oh, great,’ Kitty said. She crumbled one in her mouth. He poured out the stout. The day before her aunt had made her suggestion in the yard he had noticed Kitty going up to Coddy Donnegan after Mass, and Coddy Donnegan had turned away from her as if they’d had a quarrel, which was understandable in view of her friendship with Father Tolan’s cousin. After that, Coddy Donnegan’s Vauxhall never again drove up to the farm.
‘We’ll never forget our honeymoon,’ Kitty said. ‘I wish we had a camera. I’d love to take snaps of Tramore.’
He knew what she meant. For the rest of their lives they’d be at the farm, milking every morning and evening, taking the churns down to the creamery, ploughing and sowing and ditching. No matter how you fixed it there was never enough time, except for the couple of hours you took to go to Mass. He always rode to Mass on his bicycle, and on Sunday afternoons he rode over to Doolin’s at the old railway junction, where no trains came any more. A new road passed by Doolin’s now and on Sunday afternoons there would always be bicycles propped up against its window, and the same dozen or so faces inside. ‘I hear you’re marrying in,’ one of the men said to him on the Sunday after Kitty agreed. ‘More power to your elbow, Davy!’ No one was displeased at his good fortune, in Doolin’s or anywhere else. Father Tolan came up to the farm specially and walked down to the mangold field to shake his hand and to congratulate him. Even Ned Cauley, who rarely had a good word to say on any subject, wagged his head at him in an approving way.
‘I love the taste of ginger-snaps and stout,’ Kitty said. ‘Did you know ginger-snaps were my favourite?’
‘They’re all the man had.’
Suddenly she asked him if he was happy. She repeated the question, putting it differently, asking him if he was contented in himself. He said he was.
‘Will you ever forget the day we went to Cork, Davy?’
From her voice, he thought she was maybe getting drunk, that her condition made the stout go to her head. She was looking at him, giggling. She leaned closer to him and said that on the bus that day she’d thought to herself she wouldn’t mind being married to him.
‘You were good to me that day, Davy, d’you know that?’
‘I always had a notion of you, Kitty.’
‘I never noticed it till that day, pet. That was the first time I knew it.’
He went to the bar for two further bottles of stout. He had wondered if the men in Doolin’s knew the state she was in, and if they imagined he was the man involved. The same applied where her father and her uncle were concerned, and Father Tolan. He didn’t know if there’d been talk or not.
‘Didn’t it work out OK, in the end?’ she said when he returned with the stout. She asked if there were any more biscuits and he went back to buy another quarter pound. When he returned to where they sat she said:
‘Were you ever jealous of Coddy, pet?’
He nodded, pouring his stout from the bottle, and she laughed because she’d made him feel awkward. He looked away, wishing she hadn’t brought up Coddy Donnegan. Then he turned and clumsily attempted to kiss her on the lips, but found them gritty with biscuit crumbs.
‘Oh, Coddy’s the right romantic! It was maybe ten or eleven times he said would we get married.’
He frowned, feeling that something wasn’t quite right, yet for the moment uncertain as to what it was.
‘Did I tell you poor Coddy cried?’ she said. ‘The day I told him I was marrying yourself?’
After that the conversation became confused. Kitty again mentioned her surprise when Mrs Kilfedder had embraced her at the wedding. She counted up the wedding guests, and said it must have been the biggest wedding for a long time. Her father had had to sell two bullocks to pay for it. ‘Did you see the cut of old Feehy, without a collar or tie?’ She went through all the guests then, commenting or their dress and wondering why other women hadn’t embraced her. ‘Will we take back a few bottles?’ she suggested, nudging him and winking. ‘Hey!’ she called out to the publican. ‘Put a dozen stout in a bag for us, Mister.’
When Davy had paid for them they left the public house, Kitty talking about a girl called Rose she’d been at the national school with, wondering where she was now. She hung on to his arm; he listened vaguely. Turning into the cul-de-sac, they met Mr Hurley exercising a greyhound, a dejected animal which in the course of conversation Mr Hurley said was worth a fortune. ‘Is it the one that gets into the cement mixer?’ Kitty asked, and Mr Hurley explained that the greyhound only got into the cement mixer the odd time.
Kitty laughed shrilly. The trouble with a habit like that, she pointed out, was that the creature might get turned into concrete. ‘Will you take a stout, Mr Hurley? We brought home a few bottles.’
Mr Hurley instantly fell into step with them and when they arrived at the house he led them round to the back, incarcerating the greyhound in a shed on the way. ‘Sit down on a chair,’ he said in the kitchen and his wife produced glasses, saying it was unusual to have guests bringing drink back to St Agnes’s, but where was the harm in it? ‘Good luck!’ said Mr Hurley.
Details of the Wall of Death were given, and details of the wedding. The unexpected embrace of Mrs Kilfedder was retailed, and reference made to Kitty’s father singing ‘Lily of Laguna’ and to old Feehy without his collar or tie. ‘Poor Coddy Donnegan hadn’t the heart to attend,’ Kitty said. ‘He’s a fellow from the slaughterhouse, Mrs Hurley. I went out with poor Coddy for three years.’
‘They take it hard,’ agreed Mrs Hurley.
‘He cried, poor Coddy.’
‘I had a similar case myself. A fellow by the name of O’Gorman.’
‘A chancer,’ said Mr Hurley beneath his breath. ‘A real oiler.’
‘O’Gorman could have charmed the leaves off the trees. I heard him called the handsomest man in Tramore.’
‘The story is told,’ Mr Hurley said in the same low voice, ‘that he fecked a crucifix off a nun.’
‘ “Well, I’ll never marry now,” was what poor Coddy came out with when I told him. “I’ll keep myself by for you, Kitty.” ’
‘Where’d the point be in that, though?’ Mrs Hurley interposed. ‘Is poor Coddy a bit slow?’
‘It’s only his way of putting the thing, Mrs Hurley.’
The dozen bottles took an hour to drink, during which time Mr Hurley gave Davy a number of racing tips. He talked about famous greyhounds he had known or had even had a hand in the breeding of, but Davy was more interested in what the two women were discussing and was unable to prevent himself from listening. He heard Kitty saying the husband she’d married would do anything for you. He watched her leaning closer to Mrs Hurley and heard her referring to the cousin of Father Tolan. ‘Errah, go on, are you serious?’ Mrs Hurley exclaimed, glancing across at him, and he guessed at once what she’d been told – that the lapse of the priest’s cousin had determined him in his vocation, that God had gained in the end.
‘Held back all summer,’ Mr Hurley continued. ‘Put every penny in your pocket on him.’
Davy promised he would, although he had never in his life backed a horse and hadn’t heard what the one Mr Hurley recommended was called. Kitty stood up and was swaying back and forth, her eyes blearily staring. ‘I don’t know should I have eaten the ginger-snaps,’ she muttered uneasily, but Mrs Hurley said a ginger-snap never did anyone any harm. Mr Hurley was talking about another horse, and Davy kept nodding.
‘You’re a good man,’ the landlady whispered as he went by her. He had one arm around Kitty, holding her up. He shook his head, silently disclaiming the goodness Mrs Hurley imbued him with.
‘Are you all right?’ he asked Kitty on the stairs, and she didn’t reply until they were in the bedroom, when she said
she wasn’t. He lifted the china jug out of the basin on the wash-stand and after she had finished being sick he carried the basin across the landing to the lavatory.
‘God, I’m sorry, pet,’ she managed to say before she fell asleep, lying across the bed.
Even though she couldn’t hear him, he said it didn’t matter. It had never occurred to him before that a cousin of Father Tolan’s who came to the parish for his holidays must have attended Mass on Sundays, yet he had never seen him there. Nor had he ever heard anyone else but Kitty mention him. She had painted a picture of a saintly young man who had since become a priest, and in her befuddled state she’d wanted Mrs Hurley to know about him too. She had wanted Mrs Hurley to know that it wasn’t anything crude that had occurred, like going with Coddy Donnegan in the back of a bloodstained Vauxhall.
‘It’s all right, Kitty.’ He spoke aloud, sitting beside her on the bed, looking down into her face. In the bedroom there was the rancid smell of her vomit; her breath as he pulled the dress over her head was cloyed with it. Again he looked down into her face, understanding why she had told the lies. When she’d approached Coddy Donnegan after Mass that day he’d probably retorted that she’d let herself get into that condition in order to catch him.
Davy stood up and slowly took his clothes off. He was lucky that she had gone with Coddy Donnegan because if she hadn’t she wouldn’t now be sleeping on their honeymoon bed. Once more he looked down into her face: for eighteen years she had seemed like a queen to him and now, miraculously, he had the right to kiss her. He straightened her slackened body, moving her arms and legs until she was lying comfortably. Slowly he pulled the bed-clothes up and turned the light out; then he lay beside her and caressed her in the darkness. He had come to the farm with a label round his neck; he had come out of nowhere, from rooms and corridors that were as bleakly anonymous as the orphan home’s foundling inmates. He had been known as her father’s hired man, but now he would be known as her husband. That was how people would refer to him, and in the end it wouldn’t matter when she talked about Coddy Donnegan, or lowered her voice to mention the priest’s cousin. It was natural that she should do so since she had gained less than he had from their marriage.
The Printmaker
In the large room Charlotte hangs her prints to dry, like clothes on clothes lines. Three crows, framed by the legs and belly of a cow, have rested for an instant beneath its udder: all over the room this stark image is multiplied, in black and white and tones of green.
The reality was years ago, in France: Charlotte senses that confidently, without being able to recall the moment of observation. Familiar to her is the feeling that a glance from the window, or from a motor-car, has been retained for half a lifetime. ‘This is still the Langevins’ land,’ Monsieur Langevin said in English, the first time he drove her in his white Citroën the fifteen kilometres from Massuery to St Cérase. Obediently she inspected the fields to her right, treeless and uninteresting, cattle grazing. Perhaps there were three crows also.
In the room the suspended sheets are scrutinized, and one in every seven or eight rejected. Fragile, tapering fingers loosen the tiny, variously coloured pegs that hold the prints in place; each inferior reproduction floats softly to the bare-wood floor. Intent upon her task, Charlotte moves silently in the room, seeming almost a ghost among the ubiquitous repetition of what she has created. At thirty-nine she is as slender as ever, her bones as apparent as her flesh. Bright azure eyes illuminate a face that is still a girl’s. Shattered only twice in Charlotte’s appearance is the illusion that time has been defeated; grey strands creep through hair that once was as pale as corn, and on the backs of her hands are the reminders that sun and weather do not pass gently by.
One by one, she picks up the rejected prints where they have dropped. She tears each in half and bundles it into the wooden box that is the room’s repository for wastepaper. Then she examines one of the. suspended sheets, holding it obliquely against the light to see if it has wholly dried. Satisfied that this is so, she releases the pegs and trims the paper in her guillotine. She signs it and writes in pencil 1/50, then places it in a pale green portfolio. She repeats all this with each remaining print, then loosely ties the folder’s tattered ribbons.
‘To look at, there is l’église St Cérase,’ Monsieur Langevin said, that first Wednesday afternoon. He stopped the car in the Place de la Paix and pointed out the way. There was nothing much else in the town, he warned. A park beside the Maison de la Presse, tea-rooms and cafés, the Hostellerie de la Poste. But the church was quite impressive. ‘Well, anyway, the façade,’ Monsieur Langevin added.
Charlotte walked to it, admired the façade and went inside. There was a smell of candle grease and perhaps of incense: it was difficult precisely to identify the latter. Charlotte was seventeen then, her presence in the Langevin household arranged by her father, who set great store by what he referred to as ‘perfect French’. Some acquaintance of his had a connection with a cousin of Madame Langevin; an arrangement had been made. ‘I’ve been good about your drawing,’ her father had earlier claimed, in the parental manner of that time. ‘I’m only asking in return that you acquire the usefulness of perfect French.’ Her father did not believe in her talent for drawing; a businessman himself, he anticipated for his only child a niche in some international commercial firm, where the French she had perfected would float her to desirable heights. Charlotte’s father had her interests – as he divined them – at heart. A prosperous marriage would come latter. He was a conventional man.
In the church of St Cérase she walked by confessionals and the Stations of the Cross, taking no interest at seventeen, only wishing her father hadn’t been insistent on sending her to Massuery. She had every Wednesday afternoon to herself, when Madame Langevin took her children riding. She had Sunday afternoons as well, and every evening when the children had gone to bed. But what on earth could she do on Sunday afternoons except go for a walk in the woods? And in the evenings the family seemed surprised if she did not sit with them. There were in all five children, the youngest still an infant. The twins were naughty and, though only six, knew how to tease. Colette sulked. Guy, a dark-haired boy of ten, was Charlotte’s favourite.
This family’s details were recorded in an unfinished letter in Charlotte’s handbag: the sulking, the teasing, Guy’s charm, the baby’s podginess. Her mother would read between the lines, winkling out an unhappiness that had not been stated; her father would skip a lot. Madame Langevin’s sister is here on a visit. She is tall and languid, an incessant smoker, very painted up, beautifully dressed. Madame Langevin’s quite different, smartly dressed too, and just as good-looking in her way, only nicer in the sense that she wants people to he all right. She smiles a lot and worries. Monsieur Langevin does not say much.
Outside a café in the square she completed the letter, pausing often to make the task last. It was July and necessary to sit in the shade. There hasn’t been a cloud in the sky since I arrived. She drank tea with lemon and when she’d sealed the envelope and written the address she watched the people going by. But there were few of them because of the heat of the afternoon – a woman in a blue dress, with sunglasses and a poodle, a child on a bicycle, a man delivering shoe-boxes from a van. Charlotte bought a stamp in a tabac and found the park by the Maison de la Presse. The seats were dusty, and whitened with bird droppings; sunlight didn’t penetrate the foliage of the trees, but at least the place was cool and empty. She read the book she’d brought, The Beautiful and Damned.
Twenty-two years later Charlotte sees herself sitting there, and can even recall the illustration on the cover of the novel – a girl with a cigarette, a man in evening dress. Madame Langevin’s conscientious about speaking French to me, a line in her letter reported. Monsieur practises his English. Charlotte was timid then, and innocent of almost all emotion. In her childhood she’d been aware of jealousy, and there’d always been the affection she felt for her father and her mother; but she had no greate
r experience of the vagaries of her heart, or even of its nature, and only loneliness concerned her at first at Massuery.
In the room set aside for her work Charlotte slips a green Loden overcoat from a coat-hanger and searches for her gloves, the park at St Cérase still vividly recurring. She might have wept that afternoon, protected by the human absence around her; she rather thought she had. After an hour she had gone to the museum, only to find it shut. Beneath a flamboyant female figure representing Eternal Peace she had waited in the Place de la Paix for the bus that would take her back to the gates of Massuery.
‘Describe to me England,’ Madame Langevin’s sister requested that evening, practising her English also. ‘Describe to me the house of your father. The food of England is not agreeable, n’est-ce pas?’
Replying, Charlotte spoke in French, but the tall, beautifully dressed woman stopped her. She wanted to hear the sound of English, it made a change. She yawned. The country was tedious, but so was Paris in July.
So Charlotte described the house where she lived, and her mother and her father. She explained how toast was made because Madame Langevin’s sister particularly wanted to know that, and also how English butchers hung their beef. She wasn’t sure herself about the beef and she didn’t know the names of the various joints, but she did her best. Madame Langevin’s sister lay listening on a sofa, her cigarette in a black holder, her green silk dress clinging to her legs.
The Collected Stories Page 157