Nevertheless, I sense myself quietly choking, quietly succumbing to the dreadful weight of some unseen, unheard burden. It isn’t a new feeling. I could have predicted it long before I stood here, no matter which year I might allude to. I knew it would happen just as certainly as I knew the sea would be here, writhing up and down the shoreline. It is an old adversary, an old friend, as all such familiar things tend to become.
I have worked out, even after such meagre visits, that the sense, if that’s what it is, is of time: a claustrophobia of time, time or rather time’s end, time closing in, closing in with a laughing, mocking, ridiculing, insistent weight. It is the same time that lingers in the dark sitting-rooms of former mine houses where two ageing people have decided they can tolerate one another, but certainly no more; the same weight that hangs over empty village streets behind the walls of which there is a yearning for entertainment but an absence of spirit to make it happen; the same claustrophobia that makes the hour before dusk last forever.
I can’t accept we felt it dragging us under when we were so young, so long ago, recently.
I long for the night, fish and chips and London Gin.
*
We never realised our childish games had so much latent reality, but isn’t that the case with all such games, that they end up being a prediction, a prophecy, a warning. So, when we served pretend cups of tea, with very fine biscuits, though we didn’t know what they were called, or what went into their making, signing a conversation we didn’t remotely understand, certain only that that was how grown-ups went on, we had no inkling it should be the living image of so many later tea-parties. How were we to know that hide-and-seek was actually running for our lives? How could we have guessed that poor, put upon Poppy, who suffered terrible travail – Abby pulling her about, wayward doll that she was, never sitting just so, and Grace Powers admonishing her for being the scruffiest, careless doll ever – was a maquette.
Grace threatened to cut Poppy’s hair one day, right down to the scalp, it was so knotted and filthy, forming her fingers into scissors to signify her complaint and mercilessly flashing them in front of Poppy’s unblinking eyes. Abby looked horrified, but as always when Grace asserted her rightful ownership of the doll her hold loosened and poor Poppy looked likely to fall to the sand. That only made Grace lose her temper and stamp about, kicking out and lashing at the coal pitted sand, whilst she ranted at Abby to keep hold of her, keep hold of her as she had been. Abby didn’t understood Grace’s fit of temper, she rarely did, though as she watched her, flinching from moment to moment, she surreptitiously pulled Poppy back into her clutch, so that by the time Grace calmed down, normality was intact.
We bought, sold, stole, cheated, captured slaves and freed captives, never knowing they were grown-up themes, never realising we were imitators, mimic sisters, making the only play we knew. We never completed Nora’s role, though.
Chapter Six
A woman, wet and laded, dressed in a thick, threadbare overcoat, bound with string around the waist, appeared at the fringes of the village. It was a filthy day in November, not cold, indeed very mild for the time of the year, but with frequent heavy showers, falling from a dull, uniformly grey sky. There were pools of mist trailing amongst undulating fields and spoil banks and the air was heavy with the scent of rotting vegetation. She looked as if she had been walking for a long time, her boots and coat caked with wet and dry mud. She was bent with the weight of her bags, which she had strapped together with rope that trailed across her shoulders. She gave the impression that if she stopped to rest she wouldn’t be able to start again, so plodded on slowly, relentlessly.
To begin with she was entirely alone, head bowed, careless of ruts and puddles, her boots splashing up to the ankles in iron-ore stained water and clay, but soon she was stalked by a group of children, though whether they thought they were cowboy scouts or Hun spy catchers – it was, after all, 1916 – no one can know. Christian Shaughnessy, Grace’s great uncle, claimed they trailed her long before she reached the village, growing in number as she came on, until there was a crowd of them, at least a dozen, but in most versions of events she is said to have arrived at the edge of the village unaccompanied. Not that she was molested by them in anyway. They were too scared by half. That was the point of the story. They followed her, not because she was a tramp, wet, scruffy and easy bait, but because she appeared so formidable, carrying her load like a dogged mule. My father, Robert Salt, who was never prone to florid speech or exaggeration, who was matter of fact in acknowledging he had married into the easier Sempie line, claimed that his father maintained Nora Shaughnessy was the only woman able to stand up to Martha Sempie and that day was always cited as the proof of it.
Of course, as with so much regarding the Shaughnessys it is never easy knowing whether something is part of the family myth or whether it is true. The picture of her entering the village, weighed down but steadfast, her face clenched with determination, is a vivid one, but who was there to draw it? The fact that a dozen children appeared with her at the Shaughnessy household is never queried, but they are never named. Nevertheless, the events of that homecoming have become part of the collective memory of the village, certainly etched deep into the minds of the Shaughnessys and Sempies. I remember it as if I was there, and Grace Powers always spoke about her grandmother with undiminishing respect and fear. Even Abby used to laugh, hacking out the first letter of the alphabet as if she wanted to shape words with it, and clap her hands as if she were viewing a comic show, at the mention of Nora Shaughnessy.
I can see her now making her determined, fearless approach to the village, towards people who must certainly have realised she hadn’t been there and had obviously ruminated why that should be, and I am guilty, despite coming from the easy Sempie line – Grandfather Dan being Martha’s full cousin, but according to my father as ordinary a man as one could meet, which he meant as a high compliment indeed – of making much of her, much of her endurance. She has become symbolic of a woman’s ability to experience suffering and foster regeneration through it. It was never doubted that she had suffered, not simply because she had returned a tramp, but because she was so aged. She must only have been in her mid-twenties at the time, gone from the age of sixteen, maybe seventeen, but already was weather-beaten, drawn. She must once have been a good-looking woman, maybe even a pretty one, but her surface was roughened up, damaged. It was later claimed, and never refuted, indeed, accepted as part of the Nora Shaughnessy myth, that she had earned a living as a prostitute, the weathering coming from street corners not open fields. Certainly Martha insisted on it as incontrovertible fact.
Nora had only just made it to the Shaughnessy household – which at the time consisted of Ed, generally considered simple, Honor and Aidan, both deaf, and Christian, who had a terrible reputation for drinking, home on leave (Dermot and Maura having died during separate influenza outbreaks before the war) – when Martha arrived. Martha shouted out her name, Nora Shaughnessy, as if wanting to identify her for the dozen attendant kids, her tone incredulous, accusatory. Nora immediately rounded on her, her cumbersome baggage forcing her to turn a full 180 degrees.
Nora didn’t have the physical presence of Martha, particularly bent under her burden as she was, but she certainly wasn’t perturbed by her. In fact, as her eyes lit on Martha – who in reality was little more than a girl, Harold just a year old – the pressure on her back seemed to ease and she physically rose with the relief. She glared for a moment, her expression consumed with hatred – hatred and maybe resentment that such a young person could exact such feeling – and then quietly, surprisingly, she smiled, and her smile seemed to erase all of what had just gone before. Indeed, her smile threatened to erupt into laughter, though what quality that laughter would have had was impossible to predict, but just at the point of manifestation it drained away, drained away as if it were formed of liquid. After that her expression was devoid of easily read meanings, though taken together her various shifts of
attention seemed to denote one overriding feeling: satisfaction, its coldness, its freedom. It blossomed around her eyes and mouth, igniting the ghost of a once good-looking woman, a ghost untested and unknowing.
Eventually, encumbered as she was, she pulled at her overlapping coat until her hand slipped inside and she produced a small slip of an envelope that she immediately offered to Martha. Martha didn’t hesitate but stepped up and snatched it, though as she did a part of her self-composure broke. She quickly looked around as if she felt exposed, but finding only a dozen bemused kids looking on she immediately shouted at them, shooing them away. She turned back to Nora, her defiance intact again, but seeing Aidan and Christian, who had appeared on the step, her composure failed her once more and she froze. Nora spoke up, her voice quiet yet charged.
‘‘We’re through now,’’ she said, and then hesitated, evidently considering whether to say more. Eventually she shook her head and said, ‘‘You’re just a kid,’’ her voice lowering and failing, as if that fact cancelled out all other considerations. She realised she was through so turned away and went indoors, ushering Aidan and Christian before her with a single nod of her head, leaving Martha to bluster in wordless rage, which far from appearing frightening looked decidedly absurd.
For Nora her liberation from Martha drained her, so that on entering the house that she hadn’t seen for so many years she seemed gripped by a terrible grief. Perhaps it was an awareness of the absence of Dermot and Maura, or a recognition of herself, of what she had become that so affected her? Whatever the cause, she couldn’t abide herself for a while and flatly refused any attention from her brothers, despite their coaxing and their evident disappointment.
*
There was never any doubt that Nora was paying off something and the most logical assumption was she was purchasing the deeds to the Shaughnessy plot that had come to Martha after the deaths of her brothers Tom and Will in the Battle of Loos – her mother having died of a haemorrhage after giving birth to Will and her father dying in the same influenza outbreak that killed Dermot. Even as a teenager she was already the matriarch, a fact that hadn’t escaped Nora. It was assumed she threatened the Shaughnessys with eviction at that time for no other reason than that she could. After all, it was well understood she despised them, though later, a chance comment from Mr Drake suggested something quite different.
There is no doubt that this place is capable of fermenting hatred, severe, intransigent hatred such as that Martha seemed to possess, though what provokes it is difficult to perceive. Maybe it’s the isolation, people compelled to live with the same others, year after year, building up resentments and dislikes that finally erupt in outright detestation: and maybe some is spontaneous, the same hatred that has driven human beings from the very beginnings of socialisation. Maybe Martha’s hatred was as unaccountable as that, but when she stood blustering outside the Shaughnessys crowded hovel, her feelings palpable and physical, there could be no doubting its reality, its fixation.
As to why Nora should have taken on the family poverty so fully can best be explained by a story she regularly told, in which she recalled her father, Dermot, describing one of three evictions he experienced when his own father, Owen, was laid off from the iron-ore mines, and in particular a detail that stood out above all others.
He remembered the speed with which the family possessions were loaded onto the back of a cart and being surprised, even frightened by it. It was as if they expected to be attacked at any moment and had to get the job done without delay. He couldn’t really understand it, they were simply moving into a barn just a mile or so away, but nevertheless found himself caught up in the panic. In and out of the tiny cottage he went, bringing out any small bits and pieces he could manage. At one point he had to wait, his arms wrapped around a dolly tub he was only scarcely managing to hold, as Owen and Eistir struggled with a large wardrobe. As they slid it along the back of the cart a door swung open and a full length mirror pinned to the inside fractured into seven distinct cracks all emanating from a single fracture at the top. When Honor – whose first and only eviction this was – saw the mirror she began screaming, but Owen and Eistir were too busy to help her. She was left standing alone, crying and moaning, complaining incoherently. Dermot never did find out what it was about the mirror, other than the tragedy of its breaking that had so affected her, but it never left him. To the end of his life he regretted the fact he hadn’t even attempted to console her.
He remembered as they settled down to sleep in the hayloft Honor still crying, saying to Owen she wanted to go home, and Owen answering that he was sorry but he had no home now. Of course Honor never heard his reply, but Dermot did and it was the worst sentence he had ever heard in his life, and even though it was only a story to her, it was also the worst sentence Nora had ever heard, enough to send her off and do whatever it took to ensure that her simple Uncle Ed, deaf Aunt Honor and kid brothers Christian and Aidan never had to hear it.
Of course all that might be Shaughnessy myth.
*
My palate is sophisticated these days. I was brought up on brisket, pork, bacon, black-pudding and root vegetables, carrots, turnips and potatoes. We didn’t have lavish helpings, after all things were still rationed, but I grew tall, if awkward, on what I was given. But now, I favour Mediterranean flavours, anything with olive oil. I love bone-dry Sauvignon wine. I am old enough not be surprised or embarrassed by new things, and when I want I can dismiss so much as fad. Which corner of the world will provide the next culinary delight, I mockingly muse? Personally, I am always rather surprised that East European dumplings have been so shamelessly neglected, or Norwegian boiled cod with liver sauce. I have come a long way.
I can’t escape the fact, though, that my life stretches back over a hundred years, to a time when diets were probably very basic indeed. A whole period before I was born lays claim to my attention, to my time, to me. So, as much as the afterlife will only make sense by what happened in this life, so this life must only make sense by the life preceding it, and yet it eludes me. There are voices there demanding restitution, ease, forgiveness, but even at maximum amplification I just can’t hear them. So many hidden lives, then, so much unfinished business, so many intrigues, so many bewildered people, surprised by more than anchovies and clams, abandoned, lost in time.
As is Judith Salt, lost at Red Steps, Hawk Cliff, Ghost Valley, Lost Plateau, Frozen Fields, Waste Land, No Man’s Land, Lost Girl. Each time I hear something, a note, a murmur, a whisper, I reach out, certain that this time I’ll be able to hold it, keep it still, fathom it, but each time I just miss it, and the moment is gone, replaced by another, another whimper, another giggle, so the present never exists because it will never be still, never be contained, never held, and like everyone, I look, and look again, and can’t quite account for the fact that the present has vanished away.
We sleep-walk to extinction, playing catch up.
I have felt relatively free in London, able to make up names and games, make up me, with my delicacies and friendly hairdresser, with my insistence the past was another country. London doesn’t care about its tribes, it survives them all, is bigger than any of them. In London everything is significant and insignificant at one and the same time. I can’t help but stay.
I still have the occasional London Gin, sometimes far too much, but not like the early days, then I didn’t know anything else. And as for fish and chips, I really wish I enjoyed them as once I am certain I did.
Chapter Seven
There was always a great deal of killing in Harold’s yard, some of it seasonal, the slaughter of pigs and poultry, but most of it sporadic, the elimination of things intruding onto his tenure, moles, mice, rats and crows, the carcasses hung out on wire fences as deterrents and trophies. Abby had seen him stamp on frogs and toads, crushing them underfoot, with neither a smile nor a grimace of satisfaction on his face, just an understanding, that’s what was done. There was so much killing Abby was accustomed to it
. I don’t know why she found it any different the day they brought in dogs to kill a rat, but something clearly bothered her.
Earlier that day Harold had shown her a cleft pig head. He held it on his palm, showing her the face. He smiled at her, and obliquely drew her attention to the animal’s features, the human look of curiosity and naïve trust. Maybe he smiled because he saw a similar look on her face, her features responding to his invitation. She moved quite close. She thought it looked like a fat woman with a wart and whiskers. She signed pleasure, amused by the pig’s unblinking eye. He slowly moved it towards her, his hand hidden, as if the face were floating. He gestured that she touch it, feel what dead skin was like, cold yet pliant. She didn’t understand but knew it wasn’t worth refusing, wasn’t worth making him mad, after all, it was only a funny fat woman with a wart and whiskers, long single whiskers. So she reached out to touch it, opting to stroke the cheek because she didn’t want to feel the eye, but just as she was about to make contact he quickly changed hands, passing the cloven head from palm to palm, replacing skin with brain. He made a noise to scare her, but she never heard. She didn’t know what to do, because still it wasn’t worth making him sore at her, and besides, she had already seen too much to be squeamish. She held her hand poised, uncertain where to place it. However, before she had made any decision Harold began to trace structures with his index-finger, outlining brain, cortex and stem, jawbone, teeth, tongue and spine, talking his way through an anatomy lesson. Of course, she missed all of it. Still, it hadn’t been his intention to educate her, but having failed to scare her, it was a means of saving face.
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