“You are nodding,” I heard him say, and heard too the challenge in his voice.
“I agree with you.”
“But I stopped talking half a minute ago.”
“Which shows you how much I agree with you,” I said, before turning in my seat to see if the waiter was coming with our coffee, which happily he was. Millar when I turned back was staring at me fixed.
“Something is amiss with you.”
I hesitated. I knew Millar. He would not let this go until he had an answer. I had to offer him something. “A miss is right,” I said, and when that drew no response, “a girl . . . a woman.”
The waiter set the tray on our table, took from it the cups, the silver coffee pot, the cream, the sugar, and a dish of macaroons. He poured coffee for us – as black as molasses and almost as thick – then tucked the tray under his arm and made an abbreviated bow.
“A woman?” Millar said, the instant he was gone. He looked bemused. He would probably have struggled less if I had told him outright that I meant to ambush Lord Donegall. He excavated a Himalaya of sugar with his spoon and allowed it to dissolve in his coffee, then stirred, and stirred, and stirred. (Ferris, on the solitary occasion that I had been here in the past, had stirred his for a full five minutes before setting down the spoon and leaving. “How should I know whether it is good or not if I have nothing with which to compare it?” Ferris, in whatever realm you now find yourself, I am no connoisseur, but I have drunk enough coffee in the years since to tell you, you missed nothing that morning but the novelty.)
Millar stopped stirring, and with inordinate care, while he measured his words, replaced the spoon on his saucer. “You have not got her in a ‘family way’, have you?”
“John, please,” I said, and only then wondered if it was possible, despite Maria’s having at the critical moment in my grandfather’s kitchen . . . No, I own that I was still unclear about the precise mechanics, less clear if anything than I had been before being inducted into the casual bawdiness of the Ballast Office clerks, but I was as certain as I could be that I was not to have a visit from her as I had had from Hannah.
I glanced behind me. If any of our fellow coffee-drinkers had heard, they were not letting it distract them from their sitting and looking glum.
“Well, then,” said Millar. I was not sure whether the relief on his face was for me, or for him that he did not have to pursue this line of questioning further.
“She is in love with someone else,” I said. He snatched up the spoon again, held it poised over the cup. “But I am almost over it,” I added quickly.
Some friendships stay for ever in childhood, though the parties otherwise mature in mind and body. My friendship with Millar, I understood in that moment, was one such. I left it to him to choose the subject in which we might take refuge, and was not greatly surprised by it.
“I have been to see the Museum,” he said. My “and”, I trusted on this occasion, would be taken as read. “And”, he went on, “I suppose it is good enough in its way.” He took the merest sip from his cup; grimaced. “The laws of probability, of course, dictate that even a Duff and a Jackson must occasionally get it right, or at least not too far wrong.”
This was tired stuff, and I thought for a moment I detected in it a softening of his attitude towards his rivals. I could not have been more mistaken.
“You remember the day we walked to the Giant’s Ring?” I allowed that it had been much on my mind. “And mine,” he said. “To tell you the truth, I have not been able to stop thinking about that bottle you told me was buried in the foundation stone of the Museum.”
Said I, “It is a pity you are so far beyond foundation stones yourself.”
“It is,” he said, in such a way, however, as to suggest it was no great pity at all. “I went this afternoon to the foundry and asked Boyd himself if it might be possible to have something cast inside one of the remaining columns, a slate tablet, say.” That “say” was a nice touch. “He said to me, ‘The size of those columns, Mr Millar, you could cast a cow inside them and no one would be any the wiser.’ A cow!” Millar slapped the table, rattling our cups and at last causing heads to turn our way. He laughed then stopped abruptly. “So I went straight from there to my grandfather’s yard and found a cow’s-length piece of slate. I have given the stonemason a text that I want engraved on it.”
He took from the inside pocket of his coat a folded sheet of paper, which he opened and slid across the table to me, avoiding the coffee that had splashed out just now. I read it where it lay, my eyes – I could feel them and was powerless to stop them – growing wider with every word. Oh, my friend, my friend . . . I had thought he meant to outdo the Museum in rhetoric or ambition, but, never mind the “cow’s length”, what I read might have been cribbed from a schoolboy’s slate.
“You do not seriously mean to include this?” I said.
“The stonemason is at work on it as we speak, else I would not be sitting here taking coffee with you.”
“But who will ever get to see it?” I asked. “Encased in all that iron?”
“Perhaps whichever future generation, or civilisation, unearths the bottle buried beneath the Museum. At least they will have their ‘Rosetta Stone’ to help them decipher my text.” He slid the page back, around the coffee spill, and read it one more time himself, nodding at the aptness of this word or that, before folding it and returning it to his inside pocket. “Besides,” he said then, “the fact that I know it is there is enough. I will rest easier in my grave.”
“Let us hope you are a long time out of it.” The words, by rote, had escaped my mouth before I could call them back. I could almost have spoken the response for him.
“The Lord knows we will be a long time in it.”
“I think I have had all the coffee I want,” I said.
He looked down at his cup. “I know what you mean,” he said, and for once in our friendship I could say with a certainty that he was wrong.
Millar left a letter at the house for me a few days later. I did not acknowledge it, did not, in truth, even open it. His company at that precise moment was just too unsettling. I did not fear blurting something to him, I think, as much as I feared seeing myself reflected in him. It was important that I preserved the distinction I had made between the courses of action upon which we had each embarked, that I continued to convince myself that it was the casting of a slate in an iron pillar that was the act of a disordered mind. I avoided Rosemary Street, too. In so far as it was possible, I avoided anywhere that I thought would bring me into prolonged conversation with friends.
I left it until late in the afternoon of the day before Derby Day, and what I thought was the opportunity of an empty office, to remove myself from the planned outing to the Maze.
“What are you doing?”
Ferris and Bright had, at the very moment I finished putting a line through my name, stepped in off the street, their arms full of the linen-backed rolls they had volunteered to go to Billy Blow’s on Arthur Street to fetch. (I had been relying on them stopping somewhere along the way to drink a glass, or try on a hat, a pair of gloves. Why else would they have volunteered?) They stood in the doorway watching in astonishment.
“I am correcting an error,” I said and sat again.
“Are you sure you are quite well, Gilbert?” Ferris asked.
“Sane?” said Bright, and dumped his cargo on the nearest desk. One of the rolls slipped out of the ribbon that had been holding it and opened a blank half-foot: a chart in search of its fluctuations.
They were as insistent with me as they had been on Easter Monday: the Cave Hill, I had to believe them, was tame in comparison with the antics I could expect at the Maze. Was I really going to let my grandfather deter me from the pleasures to which all young men had a right?
I, though, was not the person that I had been three months before. This had nothing to do with my grandfather, I told them, I had better uses for my time, that was all, and I did not even e
ncourage the inference they drew, the same inference that they were, admittedly, capable of drawing from almost any combination of words in the English language (do not even mention French) . . . “There would not be seen, in the whole of this Mazy week, a darker horse than I,” etc. etc.
I had already that day “put a line through” one other item on my list of final preparations, ducking into Church Street at the end of my dinner hour to leave Maria’s letter at the post office.
The clerk, to whom I paid my penny, a little pudding of a man, or a little pudding topped with a littler, held the letter at arm’s length. (It did not extend far.) “The Mill for Grinding Old People Young!” he read aloud. It was precisely this habit they had there of calling out addresses, like guards calling the destination of their coaches, that had led me to contrive the rendezvous with Roddy McCluskey for the dispatch of Lord Donegall’s letter.
I was in luck, the clerk said. In the normal run of things it would be the morning before this could be delivered, but he lived out that direction himself and would gladly drop the letter off on his way home. I told him there was no great urgency and that the next morning would be soon enough, but he said I was not to worry on his account, the other clerks would do the same if an address lay in their way. “Tampering”, they would probably call it now, may even have called it then in other parts of the kingdom. The clerk to the left of him looked up and nodded, sorry that he was not able to oblige me: “Anything around Edward Street, on the other hand . . .”
Besides, the littler pudding gave me a wink, it would be no hardship to have to stop off at an inn – and not just any inn, but that inn, where he had not stopped off in years, must be – and tell Her at Home that it was for work. And what was I to say to this, but “all right, then”, and “thank you most kindly”? And, really, what difference could it possibly make now?
I did not go straight home myself when I left the Ballast Office that evening, but made my way instead up Donegall Street to cross off the last item on my list. Far ahead, three separate fires burned on the side of Black Mountain. It was the season for them, for gorse gone dry, and idle boys with glasses. The smoke plumes were angled in the breeze, a uniform forty-five degrees. It might have been a race from Cave Hill on the right to Collin on the left, the progress as stately as boats across a pond.
Past the Poorhouse, I walked, and the new lying-in hospital, until, beyond where Donegall Street became the Antrim Road, I came at last to the cemetery.
I had not visited my parents’ grave for the better part of three years, had never visited it at all on my own. Without my grandfather to keep me right I wandered lost for some minutes before I succeeded even in locating the New Burying Ground. A guard hut stood just inside the gate, erected since last I was there, I can only think to dissuade the bereaved from mounting their own vigils and being tempted in the night, and in their fright at suspected grave-robbers, to discharge their blunderbusses, creating more graves, more vigils, more mishaps with firearms and so on in a never-ending cycle.
I found my family at length, wedged between Jane Brigs, remembered with respect and affection by all those who had the opportunity of observing her amiable disposition, and Michael Atkins, Esq., for forty years the manager of the Northern Theatre, who having strutted his hour upon this earth finished the last scene in the great drama of life on the 13th of April 1812, aged sixty-six years.
My parents’ headstone was considerably less forthcoming than either of their neighbours’ on character and achievements. Names, dates, and the coordinates of their three-way relationship were all that were inscribed (“wife of the below-named and also sister of the above”), along with the assertion that they were all gone to a better place.
A chanting had started up behind me. “A sailor went to sea, sea, sea, to see what he could see, see, see . . .” Across a field and over another wall the Poorhouse children had been let out to play. Looking back towards the town, I could make out the tip of a pole, garlanded with coloured ropes or ribbons. Hands clapped out the rhythm: “but all that he could see, see, see was the bottom of the deep blue sea, sea, sea.” I turned again and bowed my head, trying to conjure the smallest memory of the people in the deep, dark grave before me – a hand tousling my hair, a face looming as I drifted into sleep. Not a single one came. It was an effort even to hold in my mind that the sister-wives could not be entwined in death as I had only ever seen them in life, or at least likeness.
It was an effort to think that if all went wrong tomorrow I might be returning here sooner rather than later.
What would the gravestone say about me? Hero? Hothead?
Hanged?
I had not shied away from the possibility that I would share John Bellingham’s fate, or imagined that I had not, the average Irishman’s sense of fair play, to my knowledge, being no more reliable than the average Englishman’s. (As for Belfast men, you might chance to fall among friends, or you might fall among “friends of true friends”.) Always, though, it had been the drama of the moment I had dwelt on. I would find out Maria in the crowd, be it as large as the one that had gathered for the reading of Lord Belfast’s letter – the ignition of the first gas lights. I would hold her gaze while the hangman behind me adjusted the noose and the minister beside me mumbled his prayers. A hush would descend, broken only by the wail of a child. I would not blink, or flinch. And Maria would nod in recognition.
“Let it be done!”
My soul would fly out to her . . .
Now that it was so close, however, the noose was no longer a prospect I cared to contemplate, even for Maria’s acknowledging nod. Should I have to turn the pistol on myself, I would not be taken.
I knelt and offered it as a silent promise to the deaf stone (though if it had had ears to hear, a mouth to speak, the stone would have screamed its horror at what I was about), then seeing an elderly man and woman come in at the gate and feeling a little foolish to be found like that on my knees, I uprooted several of the larger dandelions from around the base. Two more words were thus revealed, “Also David”: the measure of my brother’s brief passage from womb to grave.
I tore at some strands of ground elder, but the roots, when I worked my finger under them and tugged, ran back across Jane Brigs and into the plot beyond. You could be all night about it once you had started. I decided just to let it lie.
The breeze had dropped. The gorse fires were becalmed halfway across Black Mountain, but the children were still chanting as I passed back down the Antrim Road and on to Donegall Street.
“A sailor went to sigh, sigh, sigh, to see what he could sigh, sigh, sigh, but all that he could sigh, sigh, sigh . . .”
There was a boiled fowl for dinner. A grey-looking thing hemmed in by greyer-looking potatoes. I ate it readily enough, when at last I was able to get at it. Nisbet sat with us, as had for some time now been his custom. As was also becoming customary, it was he who, on a nod from my grandfather, had led us this evening in the saying of Grace, in several instalments, without regard for the temperature of the food (rarely the warmest when it arrived with us anyway) or the actual nourishment of our bodies, as opposed to souls. Beyond that he spoke only when my grandfather directed a question to him – there were several pertaining to the function of the Hebrew alphabet in the Lamentations of Jeremiah – or very occasionally in an undertone to Hannah, who served as she might continue to serve for a few months yet without her secret being discovered: there was barely a pick on her. Afterwards my grandfather rose – Nisbet starting a fraction of a second after him nevertheless got out of his chair fast enough to help my grandfather from his – to carry on his enquiries into the Lamentations in his study. He turned in the doorway. “I will say ‘good night’ now, Gilbert, in case I do not see you again before the morrow.” I did not know for certain that I would ever see him again. I rose myself and bowed.
“Good night, Grandfather,” I said, “and thank you.”
He shook his head. “Thank Molly. Thank Hannah. Thank him whose b
ounty fails us never.” (“Praised be his name,” Nisbet murmured.) “But do not, please, thank me.”
So he left and I sat and ate two dates out of the basket that had constituted our communal dessert. I added the stones to the two already on my plate. I made of them a cross, a four-leaf clover, a rudimentary G and left them finally in a line, like a long trailing off into silence . . . .
I did not sleep. I did not try to. I did not even remove my shirt and trousers, but stretched out on the bed covers in all but my coat and boots, listening as the town wound down to its own slumber, a day-long symphony fragmenting into random notes and percussions: a whistle through fingers, a sash window falling, the last weary thuds of the Hope Hotel drummer, fewer and further between, and fewer and further, and further, and further . . .
At the stroke of two I slipped down off the bed and crouched to coax the bag out from behind the chest of drawers. I pushed back the neck to reveal the butt – I do not know what I had been expecting to find else – and checked for the eightieth or ninetieth time the powder and the wadding, the flints, the shot. All present and correct.
I tightened the neck again and finished dressing (I would say “as though for work”, but that would signify nothing: all my adult life I have dressed as though for work) then closed the bedroom door behind me. The stairwells, the landings, the hallway, all the familiar coordinates of my life here, looked to have been draped in layer upon layer of black crêpe. My very feet were lost to me in the gloom, so that I seemed to float rather than walk, already half ghost.
I floated right through the door and on to the street. A lantern, even a closed lantern, would have been an invitation to scrutiny by whatever other ghosts were abroad. Besides, I had the connivance of a quarter moon, which once the White Linen Hall was behind me, and the houses were grown scanter, picked out a path for me, marked here and there by what, despite the season, looked very much like frost. I had quickly been reunited with my feet, my hands, my entire corporeal self. (Why had I not after all kept the coachman’s coat as well as the contents of its pockets?) I began to stride, clapping my arms to get the circulation going, murmuring, “healthful body, healthful mind”; soon I was trotting, the murmur become a chant, through the rustling, swaying plenitude of the land about Malone, “healthful body, healthful mind, healthful body, healthful mind . . .”
The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 18