The Mill for Grinding Old People Young

by Glenn Patterson

  The teasing and name-calling got worse after that, but Maria went to the village regardless. Even if she had wanted to, she could not hide away for ever. Every now and then as the months passed she would come across Tomas, sitting on his own, pulling the legs off a grasshopper or something equally worthy of his talents, and she would look him in the eye – the eye she had ground her fist into, leaving him writhing on the dust and dirt – and the sneer would shrivel on his face. And she was satisfied then that, deep down, he knew it was he, not she, who had lost.

  “I am sorry,” I said into the silence she left after these words, although sorrow scarcely felt adequate.

  “For what?” she asked. “For that? It saved me early on from a belief in mermaids and angels. There are in this world only people and dumb animals.”

  The rain had not amounted to much in the end, although the clouds had succeeded for a time in blotting out the County Down side of the Lough. We remained where we were, underneath the tree, watching as pair by pair, chaperone by chaperone, those slower walkers we had earlier overtaken passed us by; watching and, on Maria’s part at least, talking more.

  I own that I did not always follow her story with ease. So complicated were the affairs of Poland – so numerous even were the names by which it had been known – that Ireland’s history was made to seem straightforward, the history of the Presbyterian Church in Ireland, a model of harmony and decorum in comparison. I gathered, however, that at some stage in the tenth year after his arrest her father had been allowed to return to his family, and almost at once had joined with a clandestine group plotting to overthrow their ever more oppressive Russian rulers. Maria had been visiting an elderly and infirm aunt in Toruń when the Uprising finally occurred the previous November. Her first thought was to return home, but her father counselled against it. She should see out the winter where she was. Hard though it must be for Maria to accept, her aunt’s call on her must take precedence for now. Besides which, the campaign against the Russians was progressing splendidly: by spring all of Poland would be liberated. Then two things happened at almost the same time. Maria’s aunt suffered a fatal haemorrhage and the Russian army entered free Polish territory in overwhelming numbers. All around her in Toruń people were packing their belongings and closing up their houses. Maria, as the daughter of a known agitator, was in particular peril. Her aunt’s friends and neighbours were anxious that she waste no time in escaping further west: her father could not be expected to write in the midst of such turmoil. But it was not her father’s word she was waiting for.

  “Ah,” I said.

  She looked at me askance. “I have never made a secret of him.”

  “No, you have not, although neither have you spoken of him directly, or even given him a name.”

  “I did not see how his name could possibly have meant anything to you, but as you wish: Colonel Ludwik Branicski.”

  “Colonel!”

  “Please do not,” she said.

  “Do not what?”

  “Do not say anything to make me regret coming here with you today.”

  She took from some fold or pocket in her dress a small cylindrical object – I had no name for it then, scarcely even a reference point – which she placed between her lips. From somewhere else she produced a “Lucifer” match (these at least I had seen, although not often) and, leaning forward, struck it against a stone at her feet. The fire positively roared from the tip, but by tilting the stem this way and that, Maria brought it under control, making of it a precise blade of flame. She touched it to the cylinder in her mouth and disappeared in a cloud of smoke.

  Colonel Branicski, she said, when she re-emerged, was one of her father’s fellow conspirators, twenty years older than Maria, a veteran of the Polish corps of the Grande Armée, and already married to a woman he no longer loved.

  (She did not have to tell me to refrain from saying anything, for – between the smoke and the married man – my tongue by that stage had failed me utterly. I wondered could anyone see, or hear us from the road.)

  He had sworn to her, had the Colonel, that once Poland was freed he would complete the separation from his wife – for what were the bonds of marriage, after all, when set against the shackles of Empire? He told her that that was the secret meaning for him of the cockade he wore on his lancer’s cap, the crimson and the white: their two lives entwined.

  So she waited in Toruń, and waited, and waited, and waited. And the letter when it came was from her father. She was to go to Paris. No one was thinking of failure, even now, but it was important to prepare for all possible outcomes. There were people in Paris, loyal friends, with whom she was to make contact; they would instruct her how best now she could serve the cause. (Those were the words that tipped the balance for Maria.) He omitted from the list he gave her the name of Mme Branicski, yet hers was the first Polish face that Maria saw when she arrived in that city. She came down the staircase, into the hallway, of the house off the Place de l’Odéon to which Maria had been directed. “My dear child,” she said, and laying her hands on Maria’s shoulders placed three kisses on her cheeks. And Maria felt in the coldness of that embrace the certainty that her rival knew everything, had somehow arranged it that Maria would be summoned here, out of the Colonel’s reach.

  She lasted there for five days and nights. Five days and nights of false smiles and brittle conversations and meals left untouched on her plate. (Five days and nights in the course of which she had discovered for herself the habit of tobacco-smoking and its – temporary – calming effects.) On the morning of the sixth day she booked a seat in a coach out of the city, travelling north. What money she had had the journey from Toruń had all but consumed, but she had a few pieces of jewellery that her aunt had left to her and her brothers and sisters, which she had been determined to use only as a last resort. The flight from Paris was achieved at the expense of a small lapis lazuli aigrette brooch.

  If she had any thought in her head that morning it was that she would make her way to London, where there was also a community of Poles, but the closer to that community she drew the less the prospect of it appealed to her. Who was to say that she would not find there too friends of Mme Branicski? It was while in the state of agitation – desperation – this thought brought on that she remembered the stories that her father had told her of his own exile to Paris as a young man, remembered in particular his meeting with an Irishman called . . .

  The name came out almost as a cough with the last of the smoke from her lips. I had to ask her to repeat herself to make sure I had heard it correctly – “Tone” – then straight away hushed her. If there was one name more calculated than Henry Joy McCracken’s to provoke argument, or worse, in our town, it was Wolfe Tone’s.

  I glanced towards the road, which was thankfully at that moment empty. “You must take care where you utter that name,” I said in a whisper.

  “So far I have only met one spy here,” she replied and narrowed her eyes at me.

  “It is no laughing matter.”

  “Oh, but to see your face,” she said. “It is.”

  I checked the road once more. “You know what was the end of him?” I asked.

  She nodded, solemn again. “I was brought up on it,” she said.

  Tone had talked often to her father about Belfast where, together with his wife and children, he had spent the final weeks before he was forced, on pain of imprisonment, into exile from Ireland. A town more committed to the cause of Liberty was not to be imagined. The Rights of Man was its holy book, its Qur’an. On one memorable occasion he had climbed, with a handful of the leading Qur’anites, to the summit of the Cave Hill, and there sworn a solemn oath never to rest until Ireland was free.

  Every day that he had been away he had dreamed of sailing back into Belfast Lough to signal the start of the rebellion that would unite all Irishmen, irrespective of class or creed, against English rule. He laughed as he related this‚ “My friends would hound me out of Dublin all over again for
saying so, but Belfast is the key.”

  By the time the rebellion did start, two years after their meeting, Maria’s father was back in Poland. It was to be some months, therefore, before he learned that his friend Tone had never accomplished his dreamed-of return to Belfast, but was instead captured in lonely Lough Swilly, to the north-west, in French officer’s uniform, and brought to Dublin to be tried. He asked that he be shot as a soldier. He was told that he would hang as a common criminal. He denied his enemies the satisfaction by cutting his throat as he sat in his cell on the day before that set for his execution.

  “There are people here would say he should have been hung for good measure,” I told Maria.

  “And what would you say?” she asked, but spared me the embarrassment of being found wanting for a reply by continuing with her story. She was not quite sure what she had been expecting that morning, driving through the French countryside, when she made her decision to pass by London and travel on instead to Belfast. Of course, more than three decades had passed since her father and Wolfe Tone had talked together in Paris, but she liked to think that places, like people – cities, like citizens – possessed an essential character, which they retained no matter what the circumstances.

  “A cornfield beneath the snow is still a cornfield,” she said. “A graveyard is still a graveyard. The snow melts, the corn rises again.”

  “And the corpses?” I asked.

  She regarded me with a faint puzzlement, so that I wondered whether she had forgotten the second part of her opposition.

  “They lie where they always lie,” she said with a shrug. “They are corpses.”

  What she had certainly not been expecting to find in Belfast was a town so consumed by the desire to make and spend money. Did no one ever talk of anything but yields and tariffs and returns on investment? Even the young people she overheard at the inn appeared to have room in their heads for nothing else, unless it was silk stockings and cravats.

  I almost said – pulling my coat collar closer about my own cravat – that she should meet my friend Millar, and was surprised at the jealousy the thought of their meeting provoked in me. I began to recount instead my conversation with him at the Giant’s Ring . . . She laughed at the first mention of “Giant’s”, she had heard the Causeway on the northern coast so described: everything marvellous the work of mythical creatures! (I was gladder than ever that I had not mentioned the “little people” guarding the Danish gold.) I persisted. The Giant’s Ring was very much the work of human hands, Millar’s ancestors and my own. I would take her there some day to see for herself. And to the Museum when it was open . . . the Museum, which, I was quick to add, had been raised entirely by public subscription, a boast no other town on the island could make. Before long I was telling her – as though I had actually read it – of the History of the town, published several years previously by the son of one of my grandfather’s friends, who was at the time not much above one and twenty, and who was letting it be known that he intended soon to add a second volume (an intention on which he would not deliver for a further fifty years – I said a word or two at the dinner to mark the occasion – having a business to attend to in the mean time), but anyway, to get back to Millar and me at the Giant’s Ring . . .

  I stopped. She was smiling.

  “I am sorry. I did not mean to talk on so,” I said.

  “The criticism clearly stings. That is nothing to apologise for,” she said. “I was perhaps too rash in my judgement of your generation, at least. So long as they do not concern themselves only with history and monuments.”

  The County Down shore had emerged once more from its rain-shroud, the fields, the fir trees, the few slate roofs, rinsed clean.

  We came down off our seats in the chestnut tree and started walking back slowly the way we had come. But even slowly we covered the distance much too soon. We had got to within sight of the Mill before I could bring myself to ask the question that had been pressing like a weight against my chest.

  “What makes you so sure your Colonel will write to you even now?”

  She turned to face me. “What age are you?”

  “I do not see what that can have to do with anything,” I said, but this time she did not talk over my embarrassment. She waited. “All right, then, I am eighteen,” I said, and walked on. “Or will be soon.”

  “Then I would expect you to know,” she said quickly, but not unkindly. “‘My Colonel’, as you call him, will send for me because of how he looked into my eyes when he swore it. I cannot believe he will not.”

  The crimson to her white, or the white to her crimson . . . I was not sure which way round they were supposed to be; not sure either I wanted to think about it too much.

  But the days passed, turned into weeks, and still he did not send.

  In the countries united under the crosses of St Andrew, St George and St Patrick, meanwhile, those weeks coincided with a General Election, the second since the death of the old King the year before. The new King – the old Duke of Clarence – had yet to be crowned, although that had not stopped him going in person to the House of Lords at the end of April to dissolve Parliament, for the purpose, as he said, of ascertaining the sense of his People on the question of Reform. The round dozen of his People resident in Belfast and entitled to vote returned, as before, and before, and before, a Chichester, unopposed, whatever His Majesty was able to ascertain from that. For the fifty thousand others, resident but unentitled, the day was remarkable only for the hail shower that appeared out of nowhere about eleven o’clock in the morning and in two minutes filled the gutters and gullies with ice, which by half past the hour had melted away again as though it had never been.

  *

  I walked with Maria whenever she would let me, which, as time went on, became whenever she had a couple of hours to herself. The chestnut tree, our habitual destination, was a shade now from the sun more often than a shelter from the rain. Between one week and the next in the middle of May it flowered, looking, as we approached it, as though someone had spent the previous seven days and nights decking it out in beeswax candles: a tribute, a gift. I bowed and held the branches for her to pass under. She responded with an imperious tilt of her head, her fingers wafting before my lips, just out of reach.

  I took to going to the Commercial Rooms in my spare time, searching in the newsroom for any item of comfort to bring her. We had then, besides the town’s five newspapers, dozens more across the whole island, which were regularly delivered, in addition to those brought by boat every week from London, Manchester and Glasgow. Keeping abreast of them all would have been full-time employment for three men. (There were, curiously, always exactly three men in the newsroom any time I went in, although never exactly the same three; they clearly operated shifts.) I was interested, though, in one story only, and soon knew where in each paper was the most likely place to find it. The lines, in truth, were few and far between. As May was drawing to a close, a report appeared of a battle for the town of Ostrołęka. The report told of a redoubtable Polish defence, hand-to-hand fighting, of disarray in the Russian ranks. It merited a visit that very evening to Maria, who would, I think, have hugged me when I gave her the news, if she had not at that moment been drawing the third of four pints of ale being loudly demanded by a party of men all wearing lawyers’ jabots. When she had returned from serving, she drew a map for me on the counter with her finger: “Here is Ostrołęka. See? To the west of the scorch mark – Białystok – and north of Warsaw. It was vital that we held on to it.” But when I turned the pages of the next issue of the paper, two days later, the victory had turned to a defeat, with only the heroic rearguard action of the cavalry standing between the Poles and complete annihilation.

  I did not rush this time to bring her the news. And the Colonel still did not write.

  Often Maria and I would pass our time together in complete silence, reading the books we had brought along with us, or simply watching the traffic on the Lough, the passage of th
e clouds across the sun, although there were times too when we would carry on like children, playing “chasies” around the tree trunk, tumbling to the ground at the limit of our breath and laughing. We were at ease in one another’s company, but never so much so that, secluded though we were, we forgot ourselves. Our consciences were our chaperones, even if at times conscience on my part was indistinguishable from awkwardness and lack of experience.

  She shared with me her cigarettes (she was my introduction to the word as well as the habit), of which she had brought a small supply from Paris, where they had been imported from Spain, restricting herself to one every week or ten days. For this reason as much as any other I refused at first when she suggested I join her in smoking. But she kept on at me, asked me if I was perhaps afraid to try, and in the end I said all right, then, I would.

  Although I had by then seen her do it several times I could not when put to it myself work out how to hold the thing, and could never afterwards correct the hold I improvised. She struck the Lucifer herself and touched it to the cigarette while I sucked.

  And, oh . . . I had never experienced such euphoria. I seemed to step out of time entirely, was scarcely conscious of Maria’s voice as she asked me how I liked it. Tendrils of smoke drifted from my lips like the ghosts of every care I had ever had, exorcised. When at last I was able to raise my hand to my mouth again the cigarette was all but extinguished.

  “You must carry on drawing in the smoke.” She took the cigarette from me and blew on the tip. Her supply of Lucifers was nearly as precious as the cigarettes.

  “I do not think I should have any more just now,” I said, and sat on the ground. I was a long time getting up again.

  On other occasions Maria wanted to talk about nothing but home, simple things like food – she never would have thought she would miss the cabbage rolls – and the subtly different quality of an early summer’s evening.