Limestone

by Fiona Farrell

  ‘Now, sweetie,’ he said, ‘we can’t have you moping. We must try and find someone for you. We must put some real effort into it. What about Geoff? What do you think, Mark? Wouldn’t he be just perfect for our Clare? We should ask you both over for dinner.’

  ‘No! No!’ Clare said, overplaying the horror. ‘Please no! Don’t even think about it. I’m fine on my own, truly.’ And she was, though each repeated ‘we’, each ‘our’ or ‘us’ flew from her friend’s mouth like a tiny dart and pierced her clichéd heart.

  She had adapted. It always takes some practice to be solitary once more, but she had learned how to do it. It requires concentration on small pleasures if you are to build a strong skin about your bare bones.

  But that early-morning talk, that soft intimate burr overheard through a bedroom wall, could subvert her in a second. That is the one moment when Clare can feel lonely, even at times like this when she is lying right in the middle of a big soft bed. Alone in a big bed, where she does not have to observe the courtesies. She does not have to worry about rolling over too abruptly on a bouncy mattress or hogging the duvet. She can sleep all night tightly cocooned, without that slight chilly gap that opens, sooner or later, between all twin bodies. She can switch on the bedside lamp and read if she wants, or fart, or listen to music without earphones, or get up and make toast and honey and bring it back to bed, or add or subtract blankets. She can be free of all that delicate negotiation.

  But that talk …

  It always sounds like the aftermath of early-morning sex, the soft talk as one lies stroking another’s skin, all unkindnesses forgotten. Clare lies in her pink room at Tir na nÓg and knows that she is, without a doubt, a human being detached from all other human beings. An island, contrary to what the philosopher said. A single, insubstantial tangle of faulty DNA, a genetic dead end, a nothing, a nobody. She lives in a universe so complex it might as well be random. There is no shape, no design, intelligent or otherwise; no pattern to which she belongs. No pragmatic link to reality. No family, or at least none to speak of: a dead brother. A sister who may or may not be alive, vanished among hordes of pixilated phantoms. No mother. No father. A pointless life spent in the analysis of that ephemeral nothing, beauty. She feels the beginnings of the panic she used to feel as a child, kneeling in her winceyette nightie to pray to Gentle Jesus whom she knew, because she had tested him, was just pretend, like the guardian angel who supposedly lay down each night beside her and kept her safe. She forces herself to resist the panic. Begin the routine: wriggle the toes, swivel the ankles from left to right, flex the spine, clench, unclench, testing her bones for co-operation. The panic flickers about the small bones at the nape of the neck. It quivers above femur and tibia. She gets up, dresses quickly and lets herself out into the day.

  Once in the open air, the panic recedes and she is able to breathe. The air smells sweet, like fresh butter. She walks the length of the village, though it’s not really a village. At least, not the village she had imagined, which had been a cosy cluster of shop, post office, pub and school gathered about a church with streets of quaint cottages radiating from a central square. Killinaboy stutters unevenly along either side of a main road, a few houses of assorted styles, pre-war and post-war, two-storey and bungalow. She pauses by each gateway to peer in, seeking the unlikely: a farmhouse set back within a yard, a well-head at its centre, a girl in a raggy dress leading a donkey. But where the well might have stood there is instead a Volvo Estate, and of the girl in the raggy dress there is no sign: she’d be long gone, off to be a PR consultant in New York or maybe taking a couple of weeks’ break in Ibiza. She’s teetering in high heels down Grafton Street or planning her wedding in Venice, with gondolas on the Grand Canal and a restaurant booking for fifty guests.

  There is a ruined church, some flowers in a teapot on an overgrown grave. Up a side road stands its replacement, a modern church that is all plain certainty, and next door is a school, its windows pasted over with children’s paintings of gangly daffodils. Beyond that, Killinaboy trails away inconclusively into fields and cows who stand about in the lush grass with their tongues poked nonchalantly up their nostrils and their breath forming little individual haloes about their calm, kind heads.

  Hopeless.

  She is embarked on a hopeless quest. The picture above the dining table has faded to a blank page. The two Laceys listed in County Clare are no connection. She has already checked. One, a quavery female voice that seemed to come from an ancient cave, had said, ‘Michael? No … John, do we have any Michaels in the family, do you know?’ There was some slow discussion, at the conclusion of which it was decided that no, there were no Michaels and was she sure she wasn’t looking for a Peter or a Gerald? The second number drew a real-estate salesman who, once he understood that she was not after all interested in purchasing a superbly presented four-bedroom residence with a slate terrace and a view all the way to New York, hung up and went off to make a lot of money. She has so little to go on. A pencil sketch. A story about a cow.

  By the time she returns to the house, there are two people seated at the table by the circular feature window overlooking the garden: the couple, she presumes, whose voices she had heard murmuring through the bedroom wall. Encountered in the flesh — the pasty, bifocalled flesh — they take care of any latent envy. They sit stolidly forking up the full Irish in a cram of adzed wooden furniture and red gingham. The owner has gone for American Colonial with awe-inspiring tenacity. She is also something of an expert on the subject of salt-and-pepper shakers. On every flat surface they cluster, arm in arm: salt-and-pepper shakers coupled as semi-detached rose-covered china cottages; salt-and-pepper shakers shaped like vintage cars; donkey salt-and-pepper shakers, windmill salt-and-pepper shakers, stiletto-shoe salt-and-pepper shakers; wooden shakers and silver shakers and Delft shakers and pottery shakers. Above the shakers, the walls are thickly encrusted with family. Wedding parties line up by the rhododendrons, white frock and dark suit at the centre, pastel bridesmaids and sleek best men securing the flanks. Babies grin with that enviable toothless indifference to the future, little girls in their communion dresses stand with their hands folded piously, graduates lean earnestly toward the camera in mortarboard and gown, clutching their diplomas.

  The couple in the window, plump little salt shaker on one chair, matching little pepper shaker on the other, glance up as Clare enters the room and nod a curt Good Morning that makes a snub of the courtesy.

  A relief really. She seats herself as far away as she can by the kitchen door. She does not want to talk either. She does not feel like answering questions: the ‘So, where are you from?’ and the ‘And what are you doing here in Ireland?’

  She’d already covered some of those details with the landlady on her arrival the night before. Mrs Bunn was as small and pink as her namesake in the pack of Happy Families they’d had as children. She had not heard of any Laceys round here. Michael Lacey? No, she didn’t recall anyone of that name. But then, she was new herself: married into the area back in 1981.

  Clare had the feeling the woman had been asked such questions many times. Here they come, seeking the past that lies like a layer of peat beneath the subdivisions and the rural development zones. Here are the stones that mark the remains of a tumbled house where a family’s myths have taken their shape: the rapacious landlord’s agent demanding his rent, the bold resistance of desperate men armed only with sticks and courage and a repertoire of great songs, the cramped hold on the emigrant ship, the arrival in a city fetid with opportunity, the sweat shop, the sordid tenement, the struggle up and out into the tree-lined avenue in a good area.

  Yet here they come, the successful lawyer from Sydney with her downtown practice, the government official from Boston with his solid popular base, seeking the old sadness, looking for roots they can drag up to say, ‘Look how well we have done!’ Looking too for something more elusive: something sweeter and better than the country they’ve lived in all their lives, with its shiny g
adgets and wide streets. Somehow the kitchen with all its labour-saving appliances feels empty. Somehow the wide avenues don’t seem to lead anywhere meaningful. So they come looking here, in the corners and down the narrow lanes. Because there must be a fabled land where people danced and sang and were united in their faith and were more decent than people today. They come here looking for something that you might as well call a soul: something nebulous that they seem to have mislaid. They think they might find it lying round here, like an old coat, slung over a hedge or the back of a hoop-backed chair. They come asking questions.

  Like Clare. Mrs Bunn fielded another inquiry, her round face wrinkled with the effort to recall. No. She didn’t think she had ever heard of a Michael Lacey round here.

  Clare can hear her now in the kitchen, the tap of her shoes on the lino as she moves about preparing breakfast. There’s the clatter of plates and the sizzle of bacon and drisheen, and the chatter of morning radio. Solitary amidst the salt-and-pepper shakers, Clare sits on gingham upholstery and wonders with one part of her mind when exactly it was determined that two excitable blokes popping jokes would constitute the perfect start to the day on radio stations across the planet. Then the door whisks open and Mrs Bunn arrives with a pot of tea for the matching set in the bay window. ‘You’ll have the Full Irish?’ she says to Clare. ‘The Full Cholesterol Catastrophe?’, and Clare who only a minute before had thought just cereal, finds herself nodding.

  ‘Grand,’ says Mrs Bunn as if Clare had answered that question correctly, and will it be mushrooms and potato cake with the bacon and egg?

  Clare orders the lot. ‘I’ll walk it off later,’ she says, and Mrs Bunn says the walking is lovely here, she’ll bring her a map. She isn’t much of a walker herself but Mr and Mrs Talbot here know all about walking, don’t they now? Gathering them all up into a conversation because there is something unnatural about three people seated in a room together in silence. ‘They know every inch. They’re experts on the flowers, aren’t you now, Mr Talbot?’ And Mr Talbot — the pepper shaker — is forced to look up from his bacon to say yes.

  ‘They’re botanists come over from England. Every year, so. How long would it be now, Mrs Talbot, would you say? Ten years? Twelve?’ And Mrs Talbot shrugs and says, yes, twelve maybe, though Mr Talbot says, ‘It’s eleven actually. Eleven years since we first visited the Burren.’

  ‘And always to this house,’ says Mrs Bunn. ‘Isn’t that right, now, Mr Talbot? So if you want to know about walking, you couldn’t ask for greater experts than Mr and Mrs Talbot. Now, I’ll go and fetch your breakfast and you can tell Miss Lacey here all the good places for her walking.’ And she whisks back to sizzle and breakfast hilarity, having cut off the retreat back into silence.

  Mrs Talbot is attacking her bacon as if it might fight back. Her knife and fork click about the china. Mr Talbot feels compelled to make an effort.

  ‘Are you planning to walk far?’ he says.

  ‘I don’t think so,’ says Clare. ‘I don’t know really. I’m just going to drive about and … I don’t know. See things, I suppose. I don’t have a fixed plan.’

  Mr Talbot looks a little disapproving. They are clearly not the kind of people who set off on holiday without a fixed plan. They are purposeful people who consult guide books and maps and establish an itinerary. People like Clare, or at least the Clare who existed up until a day ago. The Clare who liked being organised, and not the one who headed off on a whim to a place called Killinaboy with absolutely no idea of how to begin searching for someone who might or might not any longer exist.

  ‘Well,’ says Mr Talbot, ‘there are indeed a great many things to see. It’s an extraordinarily interesting area.’ He lifts a forkful of fried egg to his mouth. It vanishes into the foliage of his beard like a rabbit into a thicket of blackberries. Phrases emerge from the mush. ‘Karst landscape … over six hundred listed species … Arctic and alpine species in the grikes … Mediterranean species on the warmer surfaces … mountain avens … several varieties of saxifrage …’ He wipes his mouth with a gingham napkin. ‘And gentians of course. The area is famous for its gentians.’

  ‘So that’s what you come here to study every year?’ says Clare. ‘Gentians?’

  Mrs Talbot is spreading butter onto a hapless triangle of toast. ‘Good heavens no,’ she says, as if Clare had suggested a taste for Nazi memorabilia.

  ‘We don’t find them particularly compelling,’ says Mr Talbot. ‘Our area of interest is the liverworts.’

  An extraordinary place, filled with interesting liverworts.

  ‘At least you’ve chosen a tolerable time to visit,’ says Mrs Talbot, chewing her toast. Her lips make small smacking sounds while she arranges the next mouthful of bacon in squares on her fork. ‘It’s an absolute madhouse in summer. Tourists everywhere, Americans mostly. They clog up the roads dreadfully. It’s complete mayhem.’

  Mrs Bunn whisks in with a laden plate.

  ‘There you are now, Miss Lacey,’ she says as several thousand calories swimming in fats, saturated and unsaturated, land on the table. Two eggs look up at Clare like liverish unblinking eyes from a collision of potato, bacon and glorious greasy fry-up. ‘So have you decided where you might go for your walk? Poulnabrone’s just up the road. You must go there. You might have seen it. It was on the stamps …’

  The day begins to take shape. A map is produced, creased and stuck together with brittle brown Sellotape and marked with routes to ring forts, portal tombs, good places to stop for tea, and directions to the more exclusive delights of mountain avens, rare ferns and gentians. Mrs Bunn brings Clare a tartan raincoat and a large red and yellow striped golfing umbrella for it will surely rain. The Talbots of course possess sensible parkas and heavy walking boots. They roar off after breakfast in a tiny blue Renault farting clouds of smoke. Clare tosses the umbrella into the back seat of the Starlet and, burping slightly on the Full Irish, follows them out into the tangle of the Burren.

  Once safely distant from the welter of advice, she pulls over and spreads the map across her knees. It has been lovingly drawn in black and white. Dots mark tracks across fields to the crosses that are chapels and the black stars that are hilltop cairns. Tiny tufts mark swampy areas. Curving lines sweep about the contours. The alien ranks of straight bars are forestry plantations. Broken lines mark holy wells and sites with Irish names she doesn’t understand: Croidhe na Boirne. Caislean na Ceapal. There are rings for forts, double-and-triple walled. Megalithic quarries, Bronze Age barrel tombs, an old racecourse, famine relief roads that lead in straight lines from nowhere to nowhere, and sites with tantalising titles printed in tiny letters: ‘Glas Gaibhneach: Cow Legend’ or ‘Bothar na Mias: Legend of King Guaire’s Feast’ or ‘Chair in rock: back ache cure’. Black squares mark cottages, some selected for special mention: ‘Old Martyn Residence (unfinished)’ or ‘Birthplace of Michael Cusack’. This area that had seemed so small on the road map to all Ireland now seems dauntingly dense with detail. And where in all this welter of fact might be what she is seeking? ‘The Birthplace of Michael Lacey’? ‘The Legend of the Vanished Father’?

  She chooses a route at random and sets off. She drives up every tiny road around Killinaboy, pausing at every likely gateway to look for the house in its yard, its well-head and donkey. She drives in ever-expanding circles out from the village. Lush fields browsed by cows give way to stretches of bare stone, the land scraped by ancient glaciers to bare white bones. Spindly scrub just breaking into new leaf digs roots into cracks in the limestone paving, and little brown birds whose names she doesn’t know dart about singing emphatically of territory and sex to unfamiliar tunes. The road winds up among smooth contoured hills which at first she thought were still capped with the last of the winter’s snow, but as she draws closer she can see that the traces of white are not snow but shattered limestone scattered thickly over the ground.

  Then the cloud comes down and she is driving in a velvety grey curtained place between stone walls plaited
with the knobbly roots of hazel and blackthorn: stone walls constructed from slabs of limestone by expert hands, some double-course, some that fragile, elegant single-course that lets the light through yet will stand for a hundred years.

  She turns onto a narrow road, no more than a ribbon of damp tarmac. There is no traffic, other than a massive tractor that materialises out of the stillness like some medieval siege machine, its driver riding high above her, the divinity in the warm fug of his cab. The Starlet cowers in the brambles at the side of the road as it passes, stinking grandly of cowshit and trailing clouds of fertility.

  The road descends from the fog to a crossroads by a pub, closed for the season. At the junction she glimpses the Talbots’ Renault parked by a gate, but of the Talbots themselves there is no sign. They will be striding upward in their sturdy boots, impervious to the threat of rain, every sense alert in the hunt for the elusive liverwort.

  The road continues north, rising to a miniature pass, all tumbled rock and mountainy streams. But in five minutes she is through and zigzagging down into broader country where the fields are more expansive, and the cloud has lifted so that for an instant there is a glimpse of the sea away to the north, a silver thread hemming the horizon. She passes a shop that in summer would have had tables outside, and coffee, but has not yet woken and is still surrounded by scaffolding and paint pots for out-of-season repairs. She passes a sudden suburban selection of identical white holiday cottages that appear to have dropped fully formed and furnished into a bare field, all stone veneer, Italian kitchens and underfloor heating. In summer they will bring a whiff of the Mediterranean to this corner of the north Atlantic: azure waters and the villas of Mykonos. But the rain has made up its mind after all and is dispatching gritty handfuls of sloppy sleet at the windscreen, and a chill wind is blowing. Today the cottages seem bleak and lost. Abandoned things. The toys of dead children.