The Night Stages

by Jane Urquhart

  Kieran could hear the faint hissing of the water but he could not see it because of the thick hedges that bordered the road. By now the village of Mastergeehy was directly beneath them and they were looking down at the slate roof of Annie’s church. The smell of turf smoke from cottage chimneys reached them, that and the noise of children out for recess in the National School’s playground.

  “That’s not the school you will be going to,” Annie said, “when you get over your stubbornness. All that noise! I’m thinking they teach shouting and screaming there.”

  Kieran said nothing. He would not respond to her humour. He would not look toward the school. He would not wear the coat. He was full of refusal.

  Before they reached the tailor’s house Annie stopped to pray at the grotto that marked the crossroads. Kieran stood to one side and looked toward the little Cummeragh River, which moved under a stone bridge then looped behind the white shape in the distance that Annie had told him was the tailor’s house. He was suspicious of grottos, which always brought into his mind the memory of the two coins he had not offered at the side of the well four years ago.

  “The Virgin says you’ll wear the coat,” said Annie, closing the grotto’s iron gate. “She says that once you know Davey, you’ll want to wear it.”

  Kieran didn’t want to talk about the Virgin. At the bridge he stopped to look more closely at the river. Long green and brown weeds moved in it. He thought he saw a fish as well and a suggestion of the dark skirt his mother had worn the last morning he had seen her. Then Annie tugged his sleeve, bringing him back.

  “Knocknagantee,” she said, naming the mountain directly ahead of them. “Coomcallee.” She pointed to a wall of rock to the south so huge it filled over half the sky five fields away. Kieran could see that it was busy with jumping waterfalls.

  “And on this one short road, four townlands,” Annie was saying. “Cushcummeragh, Namona, Cappanagroun, and Cloonaughlin.” They passed by a minor hill, part of which had been removed to have gravel for the road. “The travellers sometimes come there and stay for a time,” Annie said. “Then they go away again.”

  “Could the travellers have left the bicycles?” Kieran asked his first sentence of the morning.

  Annie laughed. “No sensible traveller would leave behind something as useful as a bicycle.”

  There were two delicate ash trees in front of the tailor’s house and between them sat a slight man on a green chair. “That’s himself,” said Annie as the man rose to his feet. “He is wondering who you are, as he’s never seen me with a boy before.”

  Kieran noticed that the man had a violin in one hand and a bow in the other. He set both down carefully on the chair as they approached and came halfway down the lane to meet them. He shook their hands, Annie’s first and then Kieran’s.

  “I said to myself,” he confided to Annie, “that it wasn’t Brendan O’Sullivan and it wasn’t Jonnie O’Sullivan and it wasn’t Sean Shea and it wasn’t Micky Shea and it wasn’t Cormac O’Connell and it wasn’t Donald O’Connell and it wasn’t Eugie O’Connell and it wasn’t Niall O’Connell and it wasn’t Tim O’Connell.” He paused, thinking. Then he continued. “It wasn’t Jimmy Curran and it wasn’t Matt Curran and it certainly wasn’t Des Curran. So, I said to myself, it has to be a stranger.”

  “It’s the son of the weather man I work for,” said Annie.

  “He’s mine now.”

  “Yours, is he?”

  “So to speak. He’s now living with me.”

  Davey seemed unsurprised by this. “And does he have a name?” he asked.

  “He, does, Davey. He has a name and he has a temper something awful.”

  Kieran looked up, taken aback. Since he had left the town neither he nor Annie had spoken about the tantrums.

  “Well, I like that in a child,” said Davey. “It shows character – a mind of his own, like.” He turned toward Kieran. “What makes you angry? Whatever it is, it’s something you care about in a powerful way.”

  Kieran realized that he had no notion of what made him angry. The tantrums, when he had them, had been like visitors who had taken up residence inside him, not like blood relations. And not like his mother was now. “I don’t know,” he said.

  “Come now,” said Davey, “not everything can be perfect. What has disappointed you then, since you came to be with Annie?”

  Kieran looked at Annie timidly. “Say it, whatever it is,” she advised.

  “Having many bicycles and not being able to ride any of them.”

  Davey turned to Annie and raised his eyebrows questioningly.

  She cleared her throat. “There is the odd bicycle around the place,” she admitted. “Do you remember the raid of the bicycles, Davey?” she suddenly asked. “Gerry himself once had ten or more in his possession. And they all being from the barracks in town. It was the only time all the young men in the parish had bicycles and they’d leave them by Shehan’s gate when they went up the mountain to do their talking.” She closed her eyes. “And to do their drilling and marching as well. They were talking and training in the mountains, Davey, as were you yourself. Do you remember?”

  “Of course I remember,” said the tailor, “but that was a good long time ago now, Annie.”

  “But not so long it couldn’t happen again. It’s a way men have, I suppose.”

  “I suppose,” said Davey uncertainly. “But that was a good long time ago, and at the moment there is not much of it left in us, I’d say.” He looked thoughtfully across to the distant waterfalls of Coomcallee. “Nor in the young folk either who have no work.” He turned again to inspect Kieran. “What did you say his name was, Annie?”

  “I didn’t say, but I will now. His name is Kieran.”

  “That explains it.” Davey picked up the fiddle and bow and began to walk toward the open door of his house. Annie and Kieran trotted behind him. For a small man, an old man, this tailor was surprisingly swift.

  “St. Kieran,” said Davey, ushering the woman and the boy inside, “was the son of a wagon maker. ’Tis how the wheel got into the Irish cross and stayed there.” Kieran, he told them, had a lifelong love of the wheel, and all named after him would have the wheel and the love of it in them. St. Kieran had this love and he had the anger brought about by the unused wheel. “What in blazes,” he was wont to say, “is the good in a wheel that is unused?” Davey motioned his guests over to the settle by the fire. “I can feel that anger in this boy,” he said.

  Kieran was fascinated by this but suspected his anger, or what was left of it, had little to do with wheels. He glanced upwards. The room they sat in had a high ceiling made of tongue-and-groove boards. There was no loft, but beside the fireplace there was a door that led into another room.

  “It was the roundness of wheels that led St. Kieran to dwell on islands, which as we know from looking toward our own sea and the Skellig Islands in it, are round at their base.” The tailor began a precisely described verbal tour of various holy islands, of the circles with which the monks began the construction of their beehive huts, of the round towers he confessed to never having seen, and of the turning wheel of the mill where St. Kieran had ground magically multiplying oats. “They’d say of St. Kieran, Columcille himself was heard to say of him, that he was anxious for the useful wheel.”

  While Davey was delivering this speech, three small cows walked sedately past his back window, startling black against the bright green of the grass and moving west. There was something about them that was not unlike the dark garments hanging from hooks nailed into a piece of the wooden moulding that was fixed like a plate rail around the perimeter of the room. Kieran had never before been in a room so occupied by the presence of absent others, their arms and shoulders, and occasionally their legs, outlined against the whiteness of the wall. He felt examined, as if the people for whom these garments were destined were watching him and waiting, expecting something from him. Outside the front window the light changed and the mountain called Coomcallee app
eared to step two or three fields closer to the house, as if it wanted to examine him as well. He looked again out the more predictable back window, where a fourth cow had paused to graze.

  “Are you looking at my cows, Kieran?” the tailor asked. “Aren’t they lovely?”

  Kieran, embarrassed, studied the ashes in the grate.

  “On the subject of our cows,” the tailor continued, unaffected by Kieran’s silence. “Bo Chiarrai,” he said. “Kerry Cow.” Then he stood. “ ‘In the histories they’ll be making they’ve a right to put her name / With the horses of Troy and Oisin’s hounds and other beasts of fame/ And the painters will be painting her beneath the hawthorn bough/ Where she’s grazing on the good green grass my little Kerry cow.’ ” He sat down again, smiling.

  “Might there not still be some men in the mountains talking?” Annie asked Davey, after a respectful silence.

  The tailor bent to place a piece of turf on the fire. He poked at it for a moment with an iron rod, then sat on the wooden chair he had turned toward the settle. “If two men meet in the mountains, they will of course be talking, Annie.” He gazed at the clothing hanging on the wall opposite him. “But there are fewer and fewer men in our mountains nowadays. Donal is up there of course, and Tim the Sky, and Brendan Shea on occasion. But not many young ones that I know about.” Motioning toward four sets of trousers hanging in a corner, he announced, “Many have not come back to collect these.”

  Kieran could hear his mother in the room behind the fireplace. Have not come back, she whispered like an echo.

  “Oh, but they will, of course.” Annie twisted on the settle to regard the pants. “They will wear out their trousers and then they’ll be back.”

  “Someday. Perhaps. Which is why I keep them. When they come back, they will need one good set of trousers.”

  “Where have they gone?” Kieran asked. The sound of his own voice startled him.

  The tailor looked surprised. “To London, of course, for work; London or America. There is none here. And no money either.” He stood, opened a drawer beneath the table top, and pulled out a long brown tape. Then he turned back to his visitors. “This time we are living in, this time of scarcity, has broken the farming people of Kerry,” he said with sudden vehemence. “It has pauperized them, and scattered them.” A silence slipped in through the door and inhabited the indoor space. Then it slipped out again. “Let’s measure you up then, lad,” Davey said.

  “How do they get there, to London?” Kieran stood, willing now to entertain at least the abstract notion of the coat.

  Davey wrapped the tape around the boy’s chest and pencilled a number on a scrap of paper. The cows drifted again by the window, moving now toward the east. Kieran felt the tailor’s fingers at his shoulder and then on the side of his leg. He heard the squeak of the pencil writing another number on the scrap.

  Applied arithmetic, his mother whispered in the adjoining room.

  “It would be brown for you,” Davey said, reaching up to a shelf to remove a bolt of worsted wool. “They’d take the train in Cahersiveen, for Dublin, then the boat, I’d say. Some come a fair distance in from the mountains to catch that train. I’ve seen them on their bicycles heading into town. It’s the one pack on their back that lets me know that will be the last of them, going over the hill.”

  Kieran looked quickly across the room at Annie, a thought taking him. “But what do they do with the bicycles? Do they take them with them to London?”

  “Well now,” said Davey, “I’d not thought of that. They’d not be able to take the bicycles to London. What would you say they’d do with those bicycles, Annie?”

  She said nothing for a moment. Then she shifted her weight on the settle and replied, “They’d lean them against a wall, I’d say, somewhere in the countryside outside of the town. It would be too heartbreaking, like, to leave them at the station.”

  “And do you think you have some of those bicycles, Annie?”

  Annie’s face was stern with thinking. “I have, Davey,” she eventually said.

  “Well, there’s a mystery solved,” the tailor said. He rolled up the measuring tape and, after shaking open a reluctant drawer under the table, placed it among a jumble of mysterious objects inside, then kicked the drawer closed with his boot.

  A small bird swung through the air of the open door and flew in the direction of the tailor, settled down near his chair, and bounced along the floor, turning its head quizzically from side to side. Soon it was joined by another. “Greedy little beggars,” Davey said to the birds, “it’s your second visit and not yet noon.”

  Kieran was amazed, but Annie barely gave the birds a second glance.

  As he opened a biscuit tin, the tailor said to Annie, “This boy is longing for a bicycle. Surely he could ride just one of them.” He tossed some crumbs to the floor. “Think how wonderful the new coat will look gliding down the hill to the church in Mastergeehy.”

  “Will you wear the coat then?” Annie asked the boy.

  “I will,” he said. “But I’m not going to the church.”

  “And the bicycle, it won’t be stealing?” she asked the tailor.

  The tailor handed a biscuit to Kieran so that he could eat some of it and share the rest with the birds. “It will be like giving life to the machine,” he said. He looked at the boy’s face. “You’ve chosen one of those bicycles already, I’d say.”

  “Yes, I have.”

  “And have you a name for it?”

  “The Purple Hornet.”

  “It’s as I thought, Kieran,” said the tailor. “I knew you would have a name. And I knew it would be a good one.”

  CONCRETE

  The afternoon has darkened now, as has the fog beyond the glass. This murkiness appears to be made of vapour, or even liquid, and the absence of light. It is as if there is no air outside the passenger lounge, as if she would suffocate or drown were she to step outside. She thinks about the man Niall so much admired; about McWilliams, and how he had at one point given a talk, Niall told her, about references to night vapours in Victorian literature and the science that was once used to support the theory that one should close one’s windows against such evils. She can’t remember the theory, or the science, but recalls the word miasma. This fog looks the way miasma sounds: clotted, sticky, as if it might cling to the skin. If she as a girl had flown into this miasma, she would have trusted nothing and might have wandered right into the path of the war. She had heard of pilots so disoriented by fog they believed their instrument panels were intentionally lying to them. They had flown far out to sea, some of them never returning. When she told Niall this, he said that fog was the most stealthy and silent of weather phenomena. Often difficult to predict, it crept up on meteorologists while they were paying attention to an oncoming low pressure system or an approaching gale. Looking the other way, he had said.

  Tam had never thought that meteorologists might be distracted, might look the other way. It was difficult to believe that they, alert to the most fractional change of wind or pressure, dogged in their attempts to be accurate, would ever step away from full engagement with their subject. They had always been the strict guardians of flight. Even during the war, one dared not even glance at an airplane without clearance from the weather office. How absurd, really, that she, a retired pilot, had found herself in love with a meteorologist more than a decade and a half after the war. And what had she wanted from him? Full engagement? Clearance? Some kind of permission?

  She sees her younger self now in the mural before her, a girl with outstretched arms and a rapt expression launching out of dense foliage a black-and-white streamlined bird-form with red-and-blue markings, as if she were helping to guide it through a troubled atmosphere and into the clear air. And the girl herself is caught in this gesture of ascension. She will follow that bird. Everything about her is connected to flight. Looking at her, Tam thinks of the enormous, roaring sense of freedom on takeoff, then a sky full of stars and wind, or sun and cushione
d vapour. And she recalls her own helplessness in the face of such ridiculous joy.

  Each morning at the Cosford Airbase she and her roommate, Elspeth, would place a bet on the weather that would be waiting for them on the far side of the blackout blinds. Sun, rain, snow, and, yes, fog. Most often it would have been grey in Shropshire, damp, with light rain threatening. In winter, however, a moist, penetrating chill would settle in, exacerbating the proliferation of cold germs that seemed to be ever-present in the dormitories. The girls took these colds with them into the cockpits. Nobody wanted to be grounded. Tam often won the dawn weather wager, opting for grey conditions. Elspeth was more optimistic. More innocent actually, Tam thinks now, remembering.

  After collecting the half-dozen or so chits that would tell them which planes they would fly on any particular day, and which factories or airfields they would fly them to, the girls would consult with the mechanics, many of whom were women, and they would be told about the flaws and wounds of the planes they were about to climb into. Then they visited Wendy Weather in Meteorology. Wendy would have been up for hours sorting through forecasts, attempting to draw together predictions for at least a dozen itineraries criss-crossing the large island of Britain. An island surrounded by the North Atlantic Ocean. An island not known for its elemental stability.

  Wendy had a maternal side – she would, in fact, go on to have five children – called the girls “love” or “dearie,” in spite of being only a few years older than most of them. And she worried – about whether they had their flannels on under their uniforms, whether they had had enough sleep, about their colds, their romantic adventures. She dispensed cough lozenges with her reports, but she never suggested caution. She either gave permission or she didn’t. If permission was granted, the pilots themselves made the final call about takeoff. After that, you either got through the weather or you didn’t. “Take it or leave it,” Elspeth would often say about the weather. You took it or you left it. “Here it is,” Wendy said each flying day, “my latest attempt at defeating surprise.”