‘Can you imagine it,’ he said, ‘that South America and Africa were once joined together? And now they are thousands of miles apart? The evidence is in the rocks. Think of the power.’
He set down his cup and slid one hand heavily over the other.
‘Yes,’ she said.
As they talked the boy smoked a lot of cigarettes, each time offering her one, which she refused. She asked him if he was married and he told her that he was engaged to a girl from Cookstown. After he graduated they would get married. To her surprise the old woman did not know her name or any of her connection when he said it. It was a changed place, Cookstown.
After he had gone she brought in the dish-towel and flapped it in front of the open window to clear the house of smoke. Bernadette had a sharp nose, which she wrinkled at any smell. She also detested the way her daughter-in-law held her shoulders high as she worked about the house – the clipped way she spoke, as if to say, ‘I’ll talk to you but I have my work to get on with.’ Old before her years, that one. The house was perfect anyway, without chick nor child to untidy it. One of the things that had annoyed her most was the speed with which Bernadette had redecorated the cottage when they had moved out to the new bungalow. She couldn’t have lived with the walls as they were, she said, giving that little shrug of her spiky shoulders.
The old woman moved to the table at the window and began a game of solitaire. The lough had become the colour of lead. She looked at the sky, now overcast. The snap-up roller blind was stuck all over with long-legged midges. They came in clouds in the summer and, like a smell, couldn’t be kept out by shutting doors or windows. She dealt quickly, the cards making a flacking noise as they came off the deck. Solitaire annoyed Bernadette. She thought it a waste of time. The old woman knew it was. All her life she had wanted to halt the time passing but she never felt like that until afterwards. She was either too busy or too tired to capture and hold the moment. Brian was now married and loosened his trousers after a meal. How long ago was it that she had taken his two ankles between the trident of her fingers to position him on his nappy? Or used egg-white to stiffen and hold in place the flap of hair that fell over his eyes before he had his first communion photograph taken? Or nudged him in his stained suit to the bedroom and let him lean his head on her shoulder while she fumbled at the laces of his shoes and became white with anger and fear that he had driven the van home in such a condition? Like everyone else, she had applauded at his wedding.
Jack on queen and she was stuck. There was nothing else to move and she pulled the cards towards her with a sigh of exasperation. She rose to go to the bathroom. As she climbed the stairs she put a hand on each thigh and pushed. There was a time when she could have bounded up them two at a time. In the bathroom the toilet-roll was olive green and went almost black in the bowl. She wandered the bedrooms, not recognising them as her own. The neatness, the colours. The view from the window had not changed. This was the room where she had given birth to Brian. The only detail she remembered from that night was the crackling of newspaper beneath her. To this day she couldn’t bear to sit on a newspaper, even if it was beneath the cushion.
Downstairs she made another cup of tea and ate a dry biscuit, massaging it past her thrapple the way she had seen the vet help pills down the cat’s throat. She found that it went down easier if she put her head back in the chair . . .
She woke in panic. It was dark and the rain was rattling against the window. For a moment she did not know where she was, thought the cottage was her own again. She switched on the table lamp and looked at the clock – a quarter past five. She began to gather her stuff. She washed the cup and returned it to its hook. She hadn’t realised that it had been so late. As quickly as she was able she damped down the fire with slack and closed it up. Some spilled from the shovel on to the lino with a rattle and she cursed herself for her carelessness. She swept it in beneath the range.
Outside it was moonless dark and still raining but the cold of the morning had disappeared. The cottage was silent after the echoing slam of the door except for the gurgling of water in the gratings.
Behind the hill she saw the white fan of a car’s headlights, then the electric glare as it broke the horizon. She watched it come towards the cottage. It slowed down and indicated before the lane end. Quickly she slipped through the gap in the hedge into the field. The car splashed and bounced through the pot-holes up the track. Unable to crouch much, the old woman put her neck forward and lowered her head. They must have left early. The cottage flooded with light. She heard Bernadette’s voice, complaining as usual, say,
‘You don’t expect me to carry this weight, do you?’
The front door banged shut. The old woman stood in the field trembling.
‘And what makes you so different?’ she said. They were the first words she had spoken since Tuesday and they made the bones of her head vibrate. The moon was in its last phase and she felt the rain on the backs of her hands. Her tremble turned to nausea and panic and she shuddered. On such a night the eels would be moving through the grass. Her hair became live. She had seen Hugh’s finger once when bitten by an eel, the bone like mother-of-pearl through the wound. Tensing the arches of her feet, she stepped awkwardly through the gap in the hedge. In the lane she kept to the side, avoiding the pot-holes. Somewhere a procession of eels would be writhing towards the lough. Out of the depths, into the depths. She turned her head and looked to see the water. She saw nothing but blackness, an infinity rising unbroken in an arch above her head.
Now as she looked at the cottage backed by darkness with its yellow windows reflected in the puddles, and in the knowledge that somewhere not too far away the earth was alive with eels – at that moment she knew her life was over. It hadn’t come out. Not the way she wanted. She was aware of the lump in her throat and knew that her eyes were full of water. Beneath her feet continents were moving. She put her head down into the slanting rain and began the slow walk to the bungalow, her coat unbuttoned.
LANGUAGE, TRUTH AND LOCKJAW
NORMAN SAT IN the dentist’s waiting room. Outside, the rain needled down from a grey sky. The wet shining roofs descended like steps to the sea. Because he was an emergency he had to wait for over an hour while people with appointments filed past him.
Then the dentist’s bespectacled head appeared round the door and said,
‘Mr Noyes?’
There were two dentists on the island and it was immediately obvious to Norman that he had picked the wrong one. As he called out his secret codes to his assistant he breathed halitosis. He dug into the molar that was causing the trouble and Norman yelled, his voice breaking embarrassingly.
‘That seems to be the one,’ said the dentist. ‘I don’t think we can save it. It’s a whited sepulchre.’
He went to the window and filled a large syringe. Before he approached the chair he considerately hid it behind his back.
‘Open up,’ he said. ‘That should go dead in a minute. On holiday?’
‘Yes.’
‘The weather has been poor.’
‘You can say that again.’
He had known from the minute the trip had been proposed that everything would go wrong. Patricia said that he had helped in no small measure to make it go wrong by his bloody-minded attitude. When she was a child on holiday her father, when it rained, had dressed them up in bathing suits and wellies and Pakamacs and taken them for riotous walks along the beach. He had litten – her own word – blue smoke fires with damp driftwood. But now when it rained he, Norman, retreated to the bedroom with his books. His defence was that he had work to do and that he had agreed to the trip only on condition that he could finish his paper on Ryle.
‘What do you do?’ asked the dentist.
‘I teach. Lecturing at the University.’
‘Oh. What in?’
‘Philosophy.’
‘That’s nice.’
Things were beginning to happen in his jaw like pins and needles.
&
nbsp; ‘Where are you staying?’
‘We have a bungalow up at Ard-na-something.’
‘Oh yes. Beside the old Mansion House. Interesting neighbours this week.’
Norman supposed he was referring to the men he had seen staring at him over the wall. They stood for hours in the rain, immobile as sentries, watching the house. At night he heard hooting laughter and yelps and howls which previously he had only associated with a zoo.
‘Open wide.’ He hung a suction device like a walking stick in Norman’s mouth. ‘Relax now. Sometimes I think it would be better to hook that thing down the front of your trousers. Some patients sweat more than they salivate.’
The assistant smiled. From where he lay Norman could see that the middle button of her white coat was undone and he could just see the underslope of her breast in a lacy bra.
The dentist leaned on Norman’s bottom jaw and began working inside his mouth. There was a cracking sound and the dentist tut-tutted and went to a cupboard behind the chair. He’s broken it, thought Norman.
‘How long are you here for?’ asked the dentist.
‘A ort igh.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘I cank cose i jaw.’
‘What?’
Norman pointed to his lower jaw making foolish noises.
‘Oh,’ said the dentist. He manipulated the jaw and clicked it back into place. ‘The muscle must be weak.’
‘Is it broken – the tooth?’
‘No, it’s out.’
Norman was astonished. He had felt nothing.
Patricia shouted out from the kitchen.
‘Well, love, how did it go?’
Norman had to step over the children, who were playing with a brightly coloured beach-ball on the carpet of the hallway. Although it was five o’clock on a summer’s afternoon the light had to be switched on.
‘O.K. He pulled it.’ Norman produced a Kleenex with its soggy red spot and offered it to his wife. She refused to look at it, telling him to throw it in the bin. She asked,
‘Did you expect something from the fairies for it?’
‘I just thought you might be interested, that’s all.’
‘Aww you poor thing,’ she said, kissing him lightly on the cheek. ‘Did you feel that? Perhaps I should kiss you on the side that’s not numb.’ She had a levity and a patronising approach to him in sickness which he did not like.
‘I think I’ll lie down for a while. One ought to after an extraction.’
‘Whatever you say. Will you want something to eat?’
‘What are you making?’
‘Spaghetti.’
‘We’ll see.’
In the bedroom he kicked off his shoes and stood at the rain-spotted window. They were there again, standing amongst the trees at the wall. Their heads were just visible, hair plastered wet and flat. After enquiring at the shop they had found out that the Mansion House was a holiday home for the region and that a party of institutionalised men was staying there. When they saw Norman appear at the window they faded back into the trees.
He lay down on the bed and got beneath the coverlet. The room smelled damp. It had probably been empty over the summer months as well as the winter. Who in their right mind would want to stay beside such a place? He closed his eyes and his left ear began to whine like a high-pitched siren in the distance. He wondered if this was normal. With relief he heard the noise fade as his ear tingled back to ordinary sensation. He knew he was a hypochondriac. At night when he couldn’t sleep, usually after working on a lecture or a paper, he would become aware of his heart-thud and lie awake waiting for it to miss. A discomfort in his arm, in time, would become a definite pain and a symptom of an impending heart attack. A discomfort anywhere else in his body would lead to thoughts of cancer. Laziness could be mistaken for debility, which would become a sure sign of leukaemia. This laziness could last for days and gave him much to worry about.
Although he did not say these things out loud somehow Patricia knew his nature and treated him in an off-hand way like a child. Before he married her she had been a primary school teacher and there was always a hint of it in the way she talked to him when he was ill or said he was feeling unwell. She had spotted the medical dictionary he had slipped in among his other books to be taken on holiday but he had made an excuse, saying that in remote places, like an island off the Scottish coast, anything could happen to her or the kids. She had pointed out to him that there was an air-ambulance service straight to the nearest fully equipped hospital on the mainland at any time of the day or night. At his insistence she had checked with the tourist board by phone that this was so.
Without articulating it they both knew that they had reached a stale point in their nine-year-old marriage. They no longer talked or argued as they once did and sarcasm coloured most of the things they said to one another.
Each year they went to the same place for a month’s holiday along with other families they knew. In March Norman had been sitting reading the paper when Patricia said,
‘I think we should go away for a holiday just by ourselves.’
‘What about the children?’
‘Oh, we would take them.’
‘How can we be by ourselves if the children are there?’
‘It would get us away from the same old faces. The same old interminable conversations. Get away somewhere isolated. We would be by ourselves at night.’
‘But I have this paper to finish . . .’
‘You’re at the sports page already,’ she squawked and fell about laughing. It was something which had endeared her to him when they first met, but now after ten years of knowing her it was something he couldn’t understand – how something she considered funny seemed to take over her whole body and flop it about. One night at a party someone had told her a joke and she had slid down the wall, convulsing and spilling her drink in jerking slops on the floor. In the morning when he asked her she couldn’t remember what the joke was about.
His tendency was to smile, a humour of the mind, something witty rather than funny affected him. There were times when the company about him were in fits of laughter and he couldn’t see the joke.
The children in the hallway began to fight, then one of them broke into a howl of tears. Norman turned his good ear to the pillow. Children, especially of their age, were totally irrational. The younger was Becky, a gap-toothed six-year-old who refused to eat anything which was good for her and insisted on everything which was sweet and bad. John was two years older and had his mother’s loud sense of humour. At least he ate cauliflower. He must have fallen asleep because the children wakened him with whispers, creeping round the bed.
‘Mum says tea,’ they shouted, seeing him awake.
Norman got up. His mouth tasted awful and he washed what remained of his teeth ruefully with peppermint toothpaste, thinking about old age. He sucked some spaghetti into the unaffected side of his mouth and crushed it carefully with his tongue against the roof of his mouth.
‘How do you feel now, dear?’ asked Patricia.
‘So-so,’ he said, ‘I think the dentist must have served his time in an abattoir. My jaw is sore.’
‘Look, Mum, there they are again,’ said Becky.
‘Who, dear?’
‘The loonies.’
‘So they are, God love them,’ said Patricia.
Norman looked over his shoulder out of the dining room window. They were standing at the wall again, six of them. They had moved from outside the bedroom to outside the dining room. When they saw Norman turn his head they ducked down, then slowly came up again. The one who stood with his mouth hanging open shouted something unintelligible and the others laughed.
‘You shouldn’t call them loonies,’ said Norman.
‘Spacers, then,’ said John.
‘You shouldn’t call them that either.’
‘That’s what they are, isn’t it?’
Norman looked at his wife.
‘I suppose it didn’t mention t
his fact in the brochure for the house?’
‘No, dear, it didn’t. Four minutes from the beach was enough for me. Shall I pull the blind for you?’
‘No, but it’s something animal in me. I don’t like to be watched while I’m eating.’
‘It’s good to know there’s some animal in you.’
Norman gave her a look then switched his gaze to his son.
‘John, is that the way to hold your fork?’
The rest of the evening the children spent watching the black and white television set which they had scorned when they first arrived. Norman went to the bedroom to do some work. He was writing a paper sparked off by Ryle’s distinction between pleasure and pain – that they were not elements on the same spectrum, that positive quantities of one did not lead to minus quantities of the other. He had become involved in tortuous arguments about sadism and masochism. He had shown his draughts to the Prof who had said, after some consideration, that the paper was tending more to the physiological than the philosophic. He had added, looking over his glasses, that he much preferred a wank. ‘Marriage is all right,’ he had said, ‘but there’s nothing like the real thing.’
Norman never knew how to take him, never knew when he was serious. The man could be guilty of the most infantile jokes. He repeatedly accused Norman of talking a lot of hot Ayer and of being easily Ryled. What could you say to a man like that? He was always goosing and patting his young secretary – and she didn’t seem to mind. He was a woolly existentialist who spoke about metaphysical concepts that could not be defined. He said that, with its pernickety approach to language, British philosophy was disappearing up its own arse while the world around it was in chaos. Also that British philosophy – including Norman – was like a butcher sharpening his knives. Eventually the knives would wear away but the meat would still be there to be cut. Norman thought, what more could you expect from the son of a County Derry farmer?
Norman had just written the first sentence of the severe rewriting the Prof had suggested when Patricia came into the room.
Collected Stories Page 24