‘The gypsies gave me the room to grow into a woman. In the years coming up to that I learned from them about the herbs and then the cards. The woman who showed these to me let me sleep curled up beside her. I stayed close to her in the days, too, and she treated me like a daughter. None would harm me with her about, Sive. She was a fierce woman and I do not remember a day of that time when I went hungry.
‘Then the girl left me and the woman-time came. The fierce woman turned the cards for me and the card of the Long Road fell. She said it was mine and that it meant I would find no place until the very end of life. This caused her to cry because she had imagined that I would marry one of her own. But even the gypsy caravan was too much settling down for me, Sive. I had thirsty feet and eyes.
‘The next day I left because the woman said the shape that was on me meant she could no longer protect me from men’s eyes. She gave me the cards and they have been my constant companions, my longest friends. She gave me the eyes for ghosts and taught me not to fear seeing them. “Fear the place where there are no ghosts,” she told me. “For there are no people living there either.”
‘I got on the road and I went as far as my feet would take me without sleeping. I walked on after sleeping and I slept out for many nights until I came to a town. At the edge of it was a house of women. One found me asleep in their garden and had me carried, still sleeping, into the house. When you sleep after days and weeks of walking, Sive, and little food, you sleep like the dead.
‘When you wake, you have a hunger that will not let you speak until it is satisfied. I woke on a soft bed with the eyes of three curious women on me. All I could say was food and all they could do was get some, for I would say no more until I was fed.
‘They brought it to the bed, and with it came an older woman who watched me from a chair in the far corner of the room.
‘I ate like there was no food left in the world. The women watched and when I finished they waited for me to speak and still I did not.
‘The gypsies had taught me to be wary of people who slept in beds under the one roof in the same place. They get, the gypsies said, so as they would do anything just to keep that one spot.
‘So the women took to asking me questions. Why were my eyes black? Where did I come from? Why was I alone? Where was my family? What money had I? How had I travelled here?
‘I did not know, Sive, and so I could not tell them. I could only say I had been on the long road for a long time. They pulled at the bedclothes and they pricked the blisters on my feet and they brought hot water and put my feet in it.
‘The older woman told them all to leave and they left as quickly as she asked. They seemed to hold fear for her. I did not. She was as fierce as the gypsy woman but no fiercer, so I knew how to be with her. The woman lifted off the nightgown the women had put on me and she looked at me long and hard and I did not feel ashamed, but I was shy and tried to cover myself.
‘She got fierce with me and pulled my hands away to look more and as she looked she asked, “Have you anywhere to go?” I did not and so that was how I came to stay there. “This will be your room,” the woman said and she told me her name but I do not remember it now.
‘I liked the room, Sive. It had dark green walls and pictures of places I had never been to. It had a soft bed, as I said, and the woman opened the wardrobe and there were four dresses. I never had more than one before that time. There were creams and powders and a dressing mirror. The woman said, “With the black eyes and pale skin you’ll go well. But we’ll get you ready first.”
‘She taught me, Sive. She taught me first by getting me to look through spy holes while the other women worked with the men who came each evening. Sometimes two women worked together but she did not let me look because she said, “You are one who works best alone.”
‘That has always been the way, Sive. She put her hands on my body to show me what I would do with the man and how. She showed me many ways and she gave me only kind men to begin with. But when I had been there for some time I learned this was a place where the women grew old while young.
‘I was shown many ways and I will tell you what I was shown, Sive, shown to satisfy the men who felt as if they loved me. There are other ways in the work, Sive, and I do not wish you to know them. You can have a life and a place, Sive, and love. I would have liked all three but I did not have the feet and the eyes for it. In my day the only way to have freedom was to do this work or the work of God. But God did not seem to want me.
‘The woman and I parted ways when I had been with her for five winters. I left with the spring as I had arrived. I did not want to stay and she said it was as well I went for, to tell you the truth, I was too good at the work for that small place, Sive. The other women grew to narrow their eyes at me. I was best, as she said, working alone. I always did from that day on.
‘Now, what you have wanted to know, I will tell you.’
Myrna said this before she said anything else, sensing my impatience to know only what was relevant to me, my wanting to have the old woman part of the story out of the way. It was only in later years that Myrna’s story rang back to me and I was haunted with questions I wish I had asked. Instead I heard only this:
‘Sive. Feel like your fingertips have eyes. Use the eyes to see all parts of a body and then the body will fall away and you will have only eyes and spirit under the fingertips. Massage will tell you all you need to know, as will time. Never rush, Sive, even for the one who wants it all quickly. The time will rise the blood in them and it will tell you all you need to know.
‘When he asks for something, do not give it to him twice. Vary each movement and make him ask again and again. Still do not give him what he asks for. That is the way of women who work with men. For a woman who loves a man I would say do the same, until the point where you wish him to know you as you know him. Open to him only when he has been to all your openings and explored. Tell him your deepest heart in the moment when he has given you all he has. Match his giving and you will invite more. Never give too much. The man will lie back and expect and in my work that is what they pay for, but in love there are two working together.
‘Hide parts of yourself as if you do not have them and they will be forgotten. When you love you must reveal or you will lose yourself in love to all that he reveals. He must know who you are to love who you are. Pray for quiet days with rain and for days of sunlight, pray for cold days and days of warmth. In all these days you will know him in different ways.
‘Do not hide the woman in you. A woman is all you are. Show him possibilities and he will take them. Encourage his tears and you will hear his laughter. Take the whole of him and do not look for anything else. To do otherwise is the one sure way of killing love.
‘Last of all, Sive; do not lead the way. Do not let him lead the way. Let love do that. It has all the experience and you do not. Let the one you love know the shadow in you and he will know the whole. You cannot speak for him. Speak of yourself in love and walk away from any man that tries to do it for you. Walk and don’t look back. But there are moments, in union, when you can have one voice.
‘This is a new world, Sive. I watched it grow. This is a world when a woman can love a man equally and you are in it.’
‘I feel all of that as you speak it,’ I told Myrna and the night growing round us. I could hear her smile. ‘Even with all I feel, I feel the call from him stronger. I hear him at night even. He is not young, there is hardly any life left in him.’
‘It is the same love,’ Myrna said. ‘He does not feel it any less or more than you do. But he has lived longer than you without love. He feels desperation. The last years are on him and he is given this to contend with. Poor man.’ She clucked her tongue against her teeth. ‘Lucky man. You are wrong to say he has no life, Sive. He has plenty of it. Plenty there waiting. It is the life in him that loves the life in you.’
I felt afraid that she might say what we did was wrong, to love in such a way.
‘He
is old, Myrna. Is it wrong?’
Myrna reached for my hand and held it to her, ‘The old can be young and the young can be old. He is who he is. You are who you are. You will have the time together that you are meant to have. Then it will be over.’
‘Do you watch us with your cards and eyes for ghosts?’
I was fearful, suddenly, at the thought that our moments together might not be our own.
‘No, Sive!’ Myrna laughed. ‘You are living for one thing and you have your own way to go for another. I know you as I would know my own daughter. I have the eyes and ears and heart you have, though they are not what they were.’
She shifted her hips off the now wet grass and I heard the dry creak of them and put my moist hands on them and they softened under my touch.
‘No,’ Myrna said, giving my hands back to me. ‘Don’t waste this on me.’
On the way home I was silent, as was she, but there was no easiness in the lack of words and we did not see the magnificence and violence in the death of the day, in the blood-red sunset. We did not look up, only down at our feet and the next place they would land on the walk home.
We did not hear the high and free sound of my mother’s laughter in the wood.
At the door of the house Myrna placed her bony hands on my shoulders before meeting my gaze with hers and planting her thin, dry lips on my forehead.
‘We should call this place by a different name,’ she whispered. ‘For all new things are happening here. Solas.’
Though it was the hottest of summers, in this house with its thick walls full of secrets, it could still be cold. We had tea and sat by Myrna’s fire. The flames licked me to sleep.
It was not until Carmel burst in with high colour on her cheeks and Eddie behind her, that I woke and felt the pinch of the creeping cold. For the fire had long since gone out and we were in the middle of the night.
Myrna woke too and more tea was made and a conversation begun, though I could not help but think of my early start.
Eddie stayed as he stayed each night, on blankets by the fire. Though he could have gone in beside Carmel. He had asked Carmel to marry him and she had grown down and silent at that. It had not been mentioned again.
We knew my mother’s fear and the reasons for it. We knew she had only seen one marriage.
22 ∼ As It Was in the Beginning
‘AS IT WAS IN the beginning so shall it be in the end.’
Jonah whispered into the ear of his stranger-father and wished, with all of his strangled heart, there was a way of knowing if what he said was heard.
For every time Patricia Cave lashed out at her son she told him why it was happening.
‘This is because your father left us.’
Often.
When he went hungry, he was reminded it was his father’s absence which left them without a provider.
When he missed school so much they forgot who he was and filled his seat with a more financed child, his mother wept and said it was his father who had sent orders for him to go to this school and she could not afford it.
He was sent instead to one that did not demand fees, closer to home, and he was sent home for having no uniform and for his lack of hygiene, homework and schoolbooks.
Jonah Cave, sad, strange, tall, ghostly, unwell Jonah Cave, was the one everyone could hurt. It stopped when they realized to touch him was to land a week’s coal tar scrubbing and soaping from the hard hands of irritated mothers, who had to rid them of nits and the like.
It was best to leave him be, and leave him be they did – only their shouts covered the distance between them and the thin bag of bones and eyes that Jonah Cave grew into by an early age. He never lost the look.
When he came home from school his mother Patricia Cave was either passed out on the floor or well on the way to it, or wrapped up in a blanket and staring at the television and talking to it.
He would search the house for money and find coins with which to buy his own food. One day a block of Calcia cheese caught his eye, the bright, healthy girl on the bright healthy blue box. He imagined if he ate it, he ate her happiness and her eternal summer sky. This is what he ate – the girl’s happy cheese – and imagined her inside him, bringing bright blue to him.
Happy melted on white bread, happy chunks with bread and milk, there was not always enough money for happy unless he got to it before Patricia’s foray to the same corner shop. The shop’s supply of vodka spirit and Calcia cheese were reserved almost solely for the bony inhabitants of 45 Peter’s Road, a house the newly formed residents’ association complained of as their first act of togetherness. Its lack of order and maintenance let the whole road down.
So the council sent letters and the letters were ignored until one day the residents marched en masse to the house, armed with paint, trimmers and strimmers and lawnmowers and the like. They got busy in their rightness and righting – they worked, painted, chipped, primmed and preened at the front until it appeared to be like all others. All the while not a sound from the inhabitants, though it was a Saturday afternoon and the television was on and they had to be home.
For an entire decade they neighboured and laboured while Patricia Cave spat blame on the long absence of Thomas.
When the neighbours found her lifeless body they tidied it up quickly.
* * *
It was a solitary funeral without flowers, and the lost body of lost soul Patricia Cave was put into a grave marked with a white cross that only Jonah visited.
All this Jonah told Thomas and Thomas heard, but chose not to speak. To reply that he had faithfully sent money in the place of love for almost forty years was no reply at all.
‘Why did you marry her?’ Jonah asked. ‘Why did you take her on? Why did you have me? Why did you leave me with her? Why did you never come back?’
Thomas did not answer that Patricia had been pretty and she had been an actress. He had met her at parties and she had always been gay at them in a brittle way, her eyes always bright, too bright now when he looked back. His eyes had always been piercing and that made some afraid of him and others distant. His own mother and father were cold to him and warm to each other.
His father was a bank manager who painted and visited galleries at weekends. Thomas had gone into photography because it offered a training wage straight away and because he could not paint but wished to please his father into noticing him. His father noticed only that photography was a poor imitation of painting.
His father noticed that Thomas had not got a job as a bank manager and would never be able to live respectably. Thomas’s mother shook her head sadly because she agreed with her husband that their only child should be respectable.
So Thomas had grown tall and mournful.
He reached thirty and had not loved and was not aware of being sad, only of being missing in some way from the world. Patricia’s lips were glossed to a wet inviting. He took her picture; she kissed him softly in thanks. She took off her clothes and walked naked into the bedroom. He did not follow. She came back out and found him, sitting, staring at his own hands. She called his name and he looked up and came to her.
At the beginning it went well.
This woman poured over him like cream on tart and he loved the easiness about her. He did not realize that her easiness hid a similar aloneness to his own. He was an innocent and he did not know her golden honey smile was for many a man and came from golden whiskey that she drank neat.
Shared melancholy brought them together in a frenzied way at the beginning. The new reality came only when she had given him her all softness and he landed on the hard edges of her despair. She would go missing and come back and weep and he would look at her and not know what to do. She could never say why she was crying and he could never ask. They did not live together. It was not respectable.
Thomas knew that Patricia was not respectable, but he did not think less of her for that. He was glad to have a woman who had come to meet him, since he could never manage to go to
a woman.
Even with her tears and disappearances it was still good to have comfort.
Then she fell pregnant, though he had been fastidious in his use of French letters.
He married her because he believed he had taken something from her. And he expected he would not meet any woman he would love so what was the harm in having a wife and child? They would be company at least.
After they married, with no parents present, hers dead, his disapproving, they lived on as they had before. He visited her in their home for his dinners and for a bed when he was not working and he had no say in the home or its running. She cooked and someone else cleaned and they got along until she grew big. With that she grew demanding and he was at a loss.
So he tried, and she grew more demanding still and one day she was lying belly up, swollen stomach pointing skywards, blind with drink and tears.
‘I married a stone,’ she said. ‘I have a rock for a husband all right. A stone he is.’
He had asked her to come, please, out of the cold and she had not come until he pulled her in, screeching her lack of love for him and how it was not his baby she carried at all, but a bigger, braver man’s.
The next day she woke and did not remember. There was no talk between them in the days that followed.
Her pains began and she bore a child, trembling cold, sickly with the need for milk mixed with whiskey. The doctor had words with him and the nurses tut tutted and he looked at them all with his piercing eyes and they avoided his and could not tell him what to do.
He asked her to stop drinking so much and she drank vodka so he could no longer smell it.
He got a commission to photograph a war and he went and when he came back she did not even bother to hide the bottles. But the paid help minded the child like her own and Thomas paid her for the kindness.
She left when Thomas Cave left Patricia.
In two years, Thomas could see well that Jonah was not his but had the look of another man he had often seen in the party days. So he decided it was more honourable to leave than to stay and hate a child. He could provide for him at a distance.
The Lost Souls' Reunion Page 14