‘I do not wish my little woman to go away.’
‘It’s only a few miles down the road.’
‘You shouldn’t have left here . . . this is our valley . . . our Montmartre.’
‘I had to ... my lease was up . ..’
‘Your house is not happy . . . it’s gloomy.’
‘Don’t say that . . . it’s costing me all I have and haven’t.’
‘For your whippersnapper, Sven . . . Prince Hamlet of the byways.’
‘The local people like him, they respect him, they call him the Scholar.’
‘You are a free soul.’
‘So is he.’
‘Not like you . . . you give off an aura . . . even the dogs in the street know that.’
‘We’ll still be friends Otto . . . always.’
‘Always. What is always ... go ... go to your shack with its no bath and no lavatory and no Otto to come across the fields to of an evening and smoke and have a drink and conjure Chagall’s floating angels circling above our valley . . .’
‘I’m happy . . . don’t you want me to be happy?’ ‘No, nein, niet.’
‘What can I do?’
‘Let me paint you.’
‘OK.’
‘Nude.’
‘OK.’
‘A triptych . . . first nude, the young Eily, vibrant, hungry, her burning hair . . . next she is older ... a little belly on her . . . mother of three in a chemise and last a pilgrim woman going up a winding road.’
‘Why are you so against him?’
‘Question . . . how come Otto has not been allowed to make love to the little Madonna?’
‘Because ... it ... wasn’t . . . the right chemistry.’
‘I see. You will tell me next that you have discovered love . . . you will tell me there is no other love like it ... never was, never will be ... the stroke of his hand and you are electrified . . . you think a thought and he finishes it ... you will tell me you have just discovered love and I will tell you you have just discovered disappointment. It is all illusion, fantasy, chimera.’ ‘Why are you so against him?’
‘Because he is young and nothing else matters in this crooked, lousy, beautiful world.’
He kicked a few things out of the way and went down the ladder stairs and she followed, a bit crestfallen.
Parting
Madge is hanging out a double sheet, mustard coloured. There is something amiss about her wave to Eily, something tentative, embarrassed. In that moment Eily thinks she should reverse up the lane, but then she thinks that would be hasty, unfriendly.
Madge and Eily have been friends since they met that warm day the previous spring when Eily had gone into the craft shop where Madge worked, to see if she might display some of the postcard drawings she had done. They were all of nudes and many were pregnant with proud voluptuous bellies.
‘How about putting some clothes on them,’ Madge said and they laughed, both knowing how the local people viewed them, with their long skirts and their wellingtons, their sloppy knitwear and their ethnic jewellery. ‘Blow ins’ they were called, a name that had originated from the flotsam of wrecked vessels that had blown in from the sea. Blow ins.
They went outside and sat on the window ledge watching the dilatory life of the street - a dog chewing a flat ball, young girls teetering in absurdly high platform shoes walking up and down, expecting a group of boys to appear.
‘I hate men,’ Madge said but without conviction. She had separated from her third partner, had two kids, no money, lived in a leaky caravan and had just set her cap at another heartthrob. They discovered that they both had a penchant for the Jesus types, men with long, straggly, unwashed hair, woodsmen appearing at dusk like shadow men. Madge had noticed her latest on the upper road delivering oil, and many a morning since, was to be seen wandering up there, drooling.
‘What hooked you?’ Eily had asked.
‘A silent bugger ... I have this dappy notion that if they’re silent they’re deep. What about you? Are you solo?’
‘I am now. I lived in England ... I worked in an arts centre, fell for someone, got pregnant . . . the old story. But I have a bonny boy.’
‘The old story,’ Madge said wistfully.
It transpired that they lived within a couple of miles of each other, Madge in her buckled caravan and Eily in a rented apartment surrounded by rolling hills and the landlord’s thoroughbred horses.
When Madge visited for the first time she marvelled at this harem, this Aladdin’s cave, bright walls, oriental rugs, shawls and throws, flung around like props on a stage.
‘I can see men enslaved here . . . Homer with the sirens,’ she had said walking around, scrutinising the various treasures, little perfume bottles, tortoiseshell combs, donning a feather boa and green with envy, as she put it.
In the month of the bluebells Madge asked if she could do a portrait of Eily and sat her on a kitchen chair in the middle of Allendara Wood. The bluebells everywhere, along the ground and between the rocks and up the tree trunks and even wreathed around the skulls of two dead horses that lay there perfectly preserved in a greenish mould. There was a harmony to it, the rich myriad life of the wood all about, the deft strokes of the brush along the canvas, little shadows that danced skew-wise across her face, under the brim of a lilac straw hat. It was Madge’s hat and it was made of a silken straw. They jumped when a pack of lurchers ran through chasing their leader who had a hunk of raw dripping meat hanging from his mouth.
‘You’re to keep the hat,’ Madge said as they walked back in that filtered sunlight, stopping and starting, picking the odd flower, and concocting big dreams about buying land and selling it for a packet. That was the day they pledged to be always there for one another, but then Sven came and came between them somewhat. Farmers referred to him as the Scholar because he was so knowledgeable, knew so much about different types of land, diversified farming, lecturing them at length and sometimes a little boringly about environment, the pollution in their rivers and streams. The need for cosmic consciousness.
Madge had first sighted him in the hall dancing with an elderly woman, looking into her face and dancing the slow sedate steps that she knew, oblivious of the tempo around them. ‘I bet that boy loves his mum,’ Madge had said and remarked on his arms that were a little too long for his body. It was Madge that spotted him and it was Madge that eventually threw them together. How inevitable it seemed once it happened, yet before that, Eily scarcely noticed him, had given him a lift the odd time, had once seen him in the landlord’s grounds, the pair of them walking up and down the avenue debating heatedly. And then, that spell, that flounder, then an instant of capitulation and not a word uttered. It was his birthday and while everybody was celebrating Madge had sent them into the kitchen to make a pot of tea. Suddenly they were kissing and he was kicking a nearby door for them to avoid the inevitable guffaws from the other room. Accidentally they bumped into and overturned a heater and as he told her afterwards in his confiding way, he left it overturned to prolong the sweetness of the moment.
Kilcash became their haunt, the oldest of all the woods, a timelessness in its rustle, in its vastness, in twig and leaf and bole, moss a thick boucle of velvet on tree trunks, herds of wild goats fleeing at the first sight of an intruder. Their wood. Sven had fixed up a hammock inside a fort of trees and covered it with a canopy of green tarpaulin. Nearby was a well which he insisted was a magic well and where someone, other lovers perhaps, had left a little pewter egg cup for passers by to drink from. On their third or fourth visit she brought a medal and threw it into the well and they wished, jointly wished, then watched the silver sparkle down there, the medal settling itself on a bed of fawn silt . . .
‘Hi stranger,’ Madge said, fixing the last peg to the sheet with a snapping sound.
‘I haven’t been because I’m working on the place day and night.’
‘When is the housewarming?’
‘Soon ... I want to borrow that dream book from you ... I
had the oddest dream last night.’
‘What?’
‘Monkeys. They were swinging inside my skull . . . frantic to get out.’
‘Sven borrowed it.’
‘Oh he’s back,’ Eily said, trying to sound casual.
‘Yes he got back last night ... he called here ... he crashed out, but before you erupt let me explain, he was tired, we talked, we smoked a joint, I made a bit of supper and presto, it’s midnight.’
‘I see,’ Eily said, but what she saw was a sheet hung up, water dripping from it in little piddles, a sheet as she believed that they had slept on.
‘Get a grip . . . you sulked when he left for Dublin, now you’re sulking because he’s back . . . he’s a kid . . . he’ll go off you.’
‘What makes you say that?’
‘Well his family think it’s all wrong ... an older woman, solo with a child . . . they have bigger things in mind for him.’
‘He told you that?’
‘He trusts me, he confides in me, he runs to me, then you run to me . . . tea and sympathy . .. you’re like children the pair of you . . . sometimes I wish I’d never flung you together.’
Eily had been sitting sideways, half in and half out of the car, bantams like little ballerinas pecking at the canvas of her shoe, when suddenly she swings her feet back in, trembling, but adamant.
‘Why are you doing this. Why are you so suspicious?’ ‘I love him, Madge.’
‘Oh Jesus. Love! All I meant was don’t be such a Princess,’ and with that she reached in and tried to snatch the keys and they bickered, Madge insisting, ‘I only want to be his friend, I want to do a painting of him, I don’t want to make babies with him.’
Eily reversed the car, startled some hens in the dust baths and trampled over a new flower-bed to get on to the rutted avenue, Madge hitting at the bonnet and pleading with her not to go - ‘I’m a blatherer ... I know
I’m a blatherer but I love you.’ The car shot away, Madge, waving a tea cloth and then shaking the garments on the line, imploring her to turn round.
When Eily saw Sven outside Jacko’s, sitting on the pavement, she almost melted. He seemed so young, so vulnerable, eating a choc ice, a punishing hair cut, his tongue licking the drips of cream, beside him a bundle that was his few belongings.
She did not want to, yet she crossed towards him and handed him the tape that contained the storybook words they whispered when they were alone.
‘What’s this,’ he asked as he stood up. He had just read her eyes, the seething within them.
‘I’ve decided that it’s best you go away now . . . not in a month or two as we said.’
‘I can’t. I’ve told my parents . . . I’ve written to my professor . .. I’ve told them I’m staying on here.’
‘We always knew that you were going to go home . . . we knew it from that very first day in the Kilcash Wood . . . but we blocked it, because we’re . . . simpletons.’ He broke into his own tongue then, believing that the depth and truth of what he said would be evident and she, for her part, kept lolling her head idly as if she was about to yield to him. A little girl who was skipping stationed herself in front of him, wildly inquisitive. ‘Trying to find the right words,’ he said.
‘For what?’ the little girl asked and he described seeing a beautiful princess on a dance floor, wearing a sailor suit and then suddenly she was gone and he had to bribe one of the locals to drive him over fields and bogs and eventually arriving underneath her window and serenading her with bits of grass and loose pebbles. ‘Don’t, Sven,’ she said.
‘Is it our age difference, then?’
‘That . . . and . . . everything. There will always be people who will try to split us up.’
‘Let’s go to a new place . . . let’s drive further and further west until we find, maybe an island with a few cows ... me and my gypsy girl.’
‘Your gypsy girl’s mind is made up,’ she said.
They are facing each other now, both shaking, each with a hand raised either to mediate or remonstrate. The black hairs on his knuckles are like jet.
‘This is some kind of false proudness,’ he says.
‘It isn’t . . . I’ve put down roots here and I’ve put them down alone,’ she says.
‘To be honest I don’t know you now ... I am looking at a woman I thought I knew . . . who has turned into a stranger.’
‘I don’t trust you Sven.’
‘I didn’t fuck anybody in Dublin ... if that’s what you’re thinking.’
‘You got back last evening.’
‘I hitched ... it was raining. I walked the last bloody umpteen miles and I called to Madge . .. you’re just jealous.’
‘Yes, just jealous.’
‘Explain to me please, why you are making me go.’
‘I’ll write it to you.’
‘So you really mean that you want me to pull out.’
‘Yes, I really mean that I want you to pull out.’
‘What do I do with all my feelings?’ he asks boyishly.
‘When we’re sixty or seventy, we’ll understand all about our feelings,’ she answers.
‘I guess you’re right . . . everybody moves on,’ he shrugged then said, ‘Hey . . . let’s make it bittersweet . . . let’s kiss here on the street in front of all the busybodies’ and his full lips, the wine red of loganberries, sought hers.
She did something other. She took off the chain and blue amulet that she was wearing and put it round his neck and tied it with infinite care.
‘I’m in a rocket,’ he said, her hands so stealthy, so caressing.
‘I’m gone,’ she whispered.
‘Stay just one more minute,’ but she was lifting the latch of the pub door, tall and tawny, disappearing with the abruptness of a sunset.
The Tavern
She sat silently and drank slowly but deliberately. She thought I am seeing this place through different eyes. She had been in Jacko’s dozens of times, yet never before took it all in so acutely. She thought I've drunk with him here, I’ve danced with him here, I’ve flirted with him here and now I am staring into the almost empty bar wondering why I sent him away.
What she stared at were the high stools with their red plastic covers held down with regimented rows of brass studding, the one wall with a strip of embossed velveteen from Jacko’s mother’s time, the other walls white, the globes of light with segments of imitation fruits and a dented St Anthony’s box. Two men are further over by the fire, arguing, grasping each other’s coat collars, in an altercation. She knows them, Denny, a bachelor, small with a grizzled goatee beard and Huw, the swank, in a green corduroy jacket, with leather elbow patching.
‘I’m not telling you and that’s that,’ Denny says. ‘All I’m asking is, have you a site to sell?’
‘I wouldn’t let you within miles of my place . . . with your women and your greyhounds.’
‘At least hear me out.’
‘I know what you want . . . you want it cheap and then sell it off to another fecking foreigner.’
‘How many acres have you, a hundred, two hundred?’ Huw says, baiting him now.
‘More.’
‘Water frontage?’
‘Water frontage, water views, water works . . . you’re wasting your throttle boy.’
‘I’ll pay the asking price.’
‘I’m not selling ... I told you last week and the week before and the week before that.’
‘What do you want with all that land and you an old bachelor.’
‘How many illegitimate kids have you now ... is it five or six? . . . the state paying for them . . . our poor little country bled from the likes of ye . . .’
‘You haven’t done too badly with your water frontage.’
‘It was my father’s before me.’
‘Look, half an acre is all I ask . . . I’m living with a Norse woman and she’s mad to be by water . . . she misses the sea.’
‘Asleep on the job, are you?’ Denny says and winks to
where Eily is sitting.
‘And how is the Princess,’ Huw calls across to her. She had thought him attractive for a few minutes one night in another pub and she always regretted that she had let him see it, because he took sneering advantage of it.
‘Fine fine,’ she says distantly.
‘Didn’t poor Mrs Burke go quick,’ Denny calls across to her in a friendly voice.
‘And how are you, Denny?’ she calls back.
‘I’m getting old and foolish,’ he says laughing.
‘He’s sitting on a fortune,’ Huw says and suddenly Denny goes towards the door cursing, ‘Feck off, you and your foreign woman and them naked children, running wild.’
‘Oh ... a major alcoholic,’ Huw shouts to him as he goes through the door.
Standing above Eily he begins to read aloud what she has just written - ‘Go up to the village and turn left at the village hall. Go on not too far and take the first left turning and you come to a little road that goes over a tract of bog, you pass a derelict house on the left and further on down there's ponies, piebald ponies in a field, after that there’s an old red caravan with a curtain in the window and you go on down until you come to a view of the lake way beneath you and you will come to a forked track where there is a rusted cattle feeder and you’ll take the centre fork and see the house in among the trees. By the way, you’ll have to walk the last bit of your journey ’ He looked at her, looked to the copy book again and whistled and said, ‘Jesus you’re a number one gypsy, plonking yourself like that in the middle of wilds. No one will go to a party down there.’
‘Look Huw, cut it out’ and she snatches the notebook back and nettled by the rejection he takes off his green scarf, dosses it with a spurious and condescending sarcasm and says, ‘You’re all candidates for Valium here.’
She is unnerved when he has gone and orders another pint. Jacko says nothing. That is his way. He stands in the yellow artificial light, like a figure in a frieze, stands as he has done for years, drawing pints, never once remarking on his customers or entering into any conversation with them. The wall clock seems both loud and slurpish.
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