by Dicey Deere
“I’ll have another pint,” Winifred said to the waitress. And to Torrey, “You’re remarkably mum about your friends.”
“Well, I don’t exactly … I’m working on this language book, it’s for kids, I’m up to here in —”
Winifred Moore gave a hoot of a laugh. “I wish Sheila were as circumspect about my personal business as you are about Rowena and that Ashenden affair.” To the waitress who set down her pint, “Bring my friend another pot of tea. This one’s gotten cold.”
A shadow, someone was looming over the table. “Ms. Moore!” It was the man with the tousled white hair, a tall old fellow, maybe in his seventies, newspaper now under his arm, face alight with recognition. “Ms. Winifred Moore, is it?”
“It is,” Winifred pushed out a chair with her booted foot. “Sit down. Buy you a drink? Can’t say I remember you.”
The man sat down. Tousled white hair. Keen eyes in a weathered face. Worn old tweeds, navy flannel shirt. “Didn’t say I knew you. Except for photographs in the paper the time you won the Irish Women’s Poetry Prize. Knew your cousin Desmond, though.”
“Did you? Desmond? Would’ve been hanged if someone hadn’t sliced him up first. This is my friend, Ms. Tunet.”
“Your tea, ma’am.” The waitress set down the pot and a fresh cup.
“And a pint for me,” the old man told the waitress. He had a tenor voice, something lyrical about it. He sat at ease. “I’m Michael McIntyre. Wicklow born, world educated. I’ve hung my hat from the Antilles to Togo but always a finger on the old pulse. Ballynagh. Now back for good.” A gnarled hand went up and ruffled his disordered hair. “Don’t miss much. Know every newborn cat and dog on Butler Street. Know how much Mrs. Mc-this and Mrs. O-that owes O’Curry’s Meats. Know what’s in folks’ closets and who’s in their beds. Seen this young lady” — he grinned at Torrey — “seen you help Rowena Keegan doctor a sick cow in Sweeney’s barn. Seen the pair of you hiking the hills with the Ashenden dogs.”
“Pity you didn’t also see what they’re now calling ‘The Bridle Path Murder,’” Winifred said. “Could’ve saved a lot of newspaper print.”
“Now there’s a fancy murder for you! Dr. Ashenden, done in with a knitting needle in a horse’s rump! That’s a lady’s touch.” McIntyre ruffled his white hair, gave a laugh and a belch, and moved his glass in a circle on the table. “Know that Ashenden family, though, from way back. Knew Gerald Ashenden’s wife. Kathleen, her name was. A waitress here in O’Malley’s back then. A young fawn. Been here in Ballynagh two weeks when I first saw her. Eighteen years old and not knowing a pint from a quart. Come from Galway to live with her spinster aunt, tragic accident. Brady family in Galway drowned on a birthday outing to the Aran Islands, their own miserable little boat, should’ve known better. Story was, Kathleen was afraid of the sea so she’d hid in the barn. Saved by fate, right?
“I’d sit down at my regular table, by the wall there, and Kathleen’d bring me my pint. Dark green barmaid’s apron, shamrocks on it. Canny old O’Malley thought that up for the tourists. Shamrocks! Kathleen Brady was her name. Tell me a name once, I’ll know it forever.”
“You’re a poem, Mr. McIntyre, a poem.” Winifred got up and pulled on her parka. “A pity I’ve got to leave. I’ll get the bill, Torrey. Sheila’s waiting for me. Put your bike in the Jeep.”
“Never mind, you go ahead.”
* * *
Gnarled hand swiping through ruffled white hair, another dark, foam-topped, then another, McIntyre’s head tipped up to drink, down the gullet, gulping, Adam’s apple going up and down, oddly lyrical voice. Torrey was like a shadow, listening. “That girl, Kathleen. I’d been away back then, was in the islands. Tahiti. You know that painter? Pictures of girls naked above the waist, flower tucked behind an ear, arms holding ripe melons.” A long, thoughtful pause, then a shake of the head. “Kathleen Brady. Lush as a tropical plant, but oh, an innocent! A combination to take your breath away. Made my hand tremble round my glass.”
Torrey said not a word. Her tea grew cold, and there was no other sound for her than the old man’s voice lingering over memories. Kathleen Brady took shape before her: black-haired, slender and small-boned, with a breathtaking curve of bosom and hip, long slender legs and narrow ankles. Eyes so intensely blue that your own eyes smarted for an instant when you looked into them. “Yes, smarted and teared! Her eyelids were always heavy, as though she were sleepy, which she was: the girl was anemic and often tired. Her idea of heaven was a midday nap. But that was out of the question. At closing time, she’d be yawning and often stumbling.”
McIntyre’s photographic eye, projected back in time, brought pictures, and Torrey saw Kathleen in the shamrock apron over moss-green cotton dresses, all the same style, products of the spinster aunt’s needle. Short sleeves for convenience in serving. Kathleen’s cardigan, a rusty red, did for autumn weather, a duffle coat and boots from a jumble sale did for winter. She lived above the needlework shop with the aunt. Two rooms, a bathroom down the hall shared with another tenant.
“She had friends?” Torrey’s first words in a half hour.
“No, no girls her age nearby. Boys? Boys hung about, but inept. Country boys. She was shy of them.”
Then one late afternoon in June, Gerald Ashenden, having just passed his final medical exams, dropped in at O’Malley’s Pub. Gerald Ashenden, tall, fair-haired, with dark eyes under thick, blond brows. Gerald Ashenden. Not a boy. A man.
* * *
Out on the street it was dusk. She had left Michael McIntyre in the pub. He’d stood up with unsteady courtesy, then accompanied her as far as the bar for a chat with friends. “I’ll buy you a brew next time, lass. And Winifred Moore, poet. Six hundred years of Irish poetry and not three women poets among them. Not till now. But washed a lot of clothes, poor lasses.”
Dusk, shops closed, no one about. A dim night light showed from Amelia’s Tea Shop. Above Grogan’s Needlework, three narrow casement windows were lighted. For a long moment, Torrey gazed at those windows, wondering if one of them might have been that of the young Kathleen who’d been afraid of the sea and come from Galway. A dog barked, and Torrey looked farther down Butler Street where bright light spilled across the road from the police station. So small a village, so narrow this deserted, cobbled street. It was like being in a ravine, the village at the bottom of a cleft in the hills, and all around were the mountains she could not see.
She got on her bike. So late, so dark. But her groceries were in her bicycle basket, safe, untouched. She thought how there was so very little theft in Ballynagh. And almost no crime.
30
By eight o’clock the next morning, the morning Torrey later thought of as “the morning of the gypsy,” she had breakfasted and was at her desk, working on the three-language book. The publisher’s contract called for forty-four pages, one third of each page for three-color illustrations.
At eleven o’clock, she stretched and got up to get a glass of water. At the window above the kitchen sink she disgustedly surveyed the last of the tomatoes on the withered, sticklike stalks. Tomatoes, for God’s sake! Why had she tried to grow tomatoes? She’d planted them way too late, and a frost would come any day now and ruin what was left. She’d planted tomatoes just to show off. As though anyone in Ballynagh would be impressed and think admiringly, “The American woman in the cottage is growing tomatoes.” All summer she could’ve bought better tomatoes in Coyle’s on Butler Street.
Purple among the tomato vines. Purple? She leaned closer to the window. Purple skirt, ragged-looking tan sweater. A woman leaning down, picking up a tomato from the ground, putting it in her skirt pocket. Fine. Good riddance, Torrey thought.
But then the woman straightened and pulled a ripe tomato from a vine. Then another. Oh, no, my dear woman, not my last good ones! You go too far.
Torrey put down her glass of water and went outside to stop the depredation. Depredation, from the Latin: “to plunder.” She loved that word: plunder. So rich, s
o … velvety soft? The woman was plundering her tomatoes.
* * *
“There’s plenty more, and it’s still hot.”
The gypsy nodded. Torrey poured more tea into her cup. They sat at the kitchen table.
Torrey cut two more slices from the soda bread on the wooden board. She’d baked the bread herself. Jasper wouldn’t eat it, but he’d complimented her on making a good start. She bravely ate it in front of him with lots of butter, saying how good it was. He was in Dunlavin today, having read in the Independent about an estate sale, entire contents of a house. Might even be a windfall of books for him.
“More bread and butter?”
The gypsy shook her head. “No, Missus.” She was about forty or so, thin, with a mass of dusty dark hair and gold earrings.
Torrey, walking toward the woman among the tomato vines, had known at once, at the woman’s “Good day, Missus,” that she was from Romania. She’d likely be one of the Romanian gypsies who’d arrived in Ireland in the last few years, traveling across France, bringing with them their few possessions and their own gypsy language mingled with Romanian.
Gypsy or not, a Romanian. Aside from her own father, Vlad Tunet, Torrey hadn’t known half a dozen Romanians. So now, four shiny aluminum pots, at two pounds ten pence each, rested on the side table under the window, and the gypsy sat drinking her third cup of tea. Admittedly, not an appealing lady. Something grasping about her, the greedy way her glance slid about the cottage as she commented, “Pretty things.” The copper bowls on the sideboard, the hand-knitted afghan on the back of the rocking chair, the enamel three-legged clock on the mantel. Drying on the wooden clothes rack was Torrey’s nightgown, the white with yellow daisies, her favorite. “In Dublin I’ll get me a pretty nightgown like that, all daisies on it,” staring at the nightgown.
“Yes, well, I’d better get back to work.” Torrey looked toward her computer on the card table in the corner; the computer screen had gone reproachfully blank.
In the doorway, as the gypsy left, Torrey said, “Take as many tomatoes as you want. There’s a frost coming, they’ll only get mushy. Come any time.”
* * *
The gypsy gone, Torrey went slowly to the card table that held her work. If she missed the deadline, she’d have killed the golden goose. She had to stop torturing herself about Rowena being suspected of murdering her grandfather and about an illegal abortionist’s possibly unsanitary operating room. Pay attention to her own affairs. Sit down. Get back to work.
She stood looking down at the computer for a long minute. Then at the kitchen table she picked up the soda bread, threw it into the garbage, and went out and got on her bike.
* * *
Tousle-haired old McIntyre grinned when he looked up and saw Torrey standing there. He was at his usual table in O’Malley’s. “You’re in pursuit of me, I wouldn’t doubt.” He put down his newspaper. “Could be that I’m your true love.”
“Close, very close.” When he had reminisced in his lyrical tenor voice, she’d felt there were things almost within her grasp. She saw Columbus sailing toward a shore that might, after all, be a mirage, but then again, what was that, glimpsed low at the horizon? Shadow of a cloud? Or substance?
She sat down. “So then? They fell in love?”
* * *
McIntyre had ordered O’Malley’s special noontime lunch with his pint. Two sausages, fried potatoes, cabbage, pot of tea. Torrey did the same. Not a word about it would McIntyre say until he’d cut into the first sausage and chewed it about. “More than adequate.” Then, sometimes resting fork and knife against the edge of his plate, he talked. “Love? Do you know the word spoor?” At her nod, McIntyre too nodded. “Spoor! Some would call it that. Some would say desire. When young Ashenden came into the pub and saw Kathleen, it was like a terrible desire, take my word. Something he had to get out of his system, like some evanescent childhood illness — chicken pox, measles, whooping cough — something to go through on the way to become an adult. I imagine it so.
“But the young man found himself trapped in the illness. He had been careful, but grievously he’d not been careful enough. And she? At his touch, she had flowered. She was bewildered, but happy, and in love.” McIntyre speared a sausage. “They used to call it ‘with child.’ When I was a boy I’d imagine the woman’s breasts becoming tender, mysterious things happening so that her skin became more flushed, her eye brighter, her mouth fuller. With one like Kathleen Brady, I saw it happen, that flowering.”
McIntyre’s own eyes were brighter. “Ah, what a flowering!”
“And him? Ashenden?”
A gulp of Guinness. “What would you say? A Catholic girl, uneducated, and him recovering from that disease, desire. Spoor evaporated. That blinding crystal fell from his eyes. He saw again. Saw that in a year, he’d have his medical license, an office in Dublin, a wealthy practice, a social life, beautiful, educated, marriageable young women.”
“But he married her, Mr. McIntyre. He did the only decent thing, he married Kathleen Brady.”
“Decent? My dear Ms. Tunet, I would not necessarily say decent. I would possibly say cornered.”
“How, cornered?”
“I ruminated back then, Ms. Tunet, over why. I do not know. I can guess. His parents? You’d have thought the Ashendens would have found a way to obstruct such a marriage, when they discovered — and by chance they discovered it, they were not told — that Kathleen Brady was pregnant by their son.”
“Yes. I would have thought — not being cynical, only realistic about how people, influenced by society —”
“Hogwash. There are people and there are extraordinary people. Gerald Ashenden’s parents were extraordinary. Not religious people. I think they bundled it all together: Catholic or Protestant, Old Testament or New, Buddism, Judaism, Confucianism, the like. Polite, didn’t talk about it.
“Ethical, that was it. Old Miles Ashenden had a maxim, ‘Don’t do that which, if everybody did, it would destroy society.’ Can you top that one, Ms. Tunet?”
“Not even if hard-pressed, Mr. McIntyre.”
“Indeed! Indeed! I can see it, the elderly old father, white-mustached, he was, in the library with young Ashenden, ‘Who do you think you are, Gerald? That immoral Tolstoy who’d go strolling on his estate and push any passing peasant girl into the bushes and use her? Then dry himself on her clothing and stroll on? You’ll marry this pregnant Catholic girl, Gerald. Or you’re no longer my son.’”
McIntyre’s color was high, his keen eyes sparkled. “What a scene it must’ve been in that library! For Gerald Ashenden, it would be good-bye to the money to open his office on Merrion Street in Dublin, good-bye to the Ashen-den estate and its five hundred acres. Even good-bye to his mother. The doors of Ashenden Manor closed against him. Disowned. Cast out! Cast out like … like somebody in the Bible. Can’t remember. Some fellow. Who was it, Ms. Tunet?”
“Isaac? Jacob? I don’t remember either, Mr. McIntyre.”
* * *
By half past twelve, it had gotten noisy in O’Malley’s, and several people, beer glasses in hand, had come up to their table to say hello to McIntyre and things like, “Back from Australia, McIntyre? Seen any kangaroos? Waltzing Matildas?” But by one o’clock it was quiet again, customers gone back to work. An occasional clash of dishes from the kitchen; Sean O’Malley at the bar, washing glasses and watching a rugby game on the television, keeping the sound low. He had put more logs on the fire: the warmth enveloped McIntyre’s table. Replete, McIntyre mused, “It wasn’t any wonder that Kathleen Brady Ashenden came often to O’Malley’s. ’Twas the only warm place in her life. Coldness at home can turn a person to drink. Coldness and misery.” The once-beautiful Kathleen became not so radiant. “More on the thick side. Gray in her hair, hair that had been black satin. The blue eyes not so blue, the electricity diminished. They were wavering eyes, pleading eyes. Bewildered. It wasn’t Gerald Ashenden got trapped, but Kathleen Brady. Poor little hen!”
Torrey gazed at the fire, which flared up suddenly. “She died so young. A brushfire, wasn’t it? Rowena once told me about it. She was only about…?”
“She was thirty-one. Had that little girl, Caroline, eleven or so, at the time.”
A silence. Something about the silence made Torrey turn from the fire and look at McIntyre. He was watching her, an assessing look. Somewhere in the past she’d seen that look, doubtful, not quite sure, saying silently: Does she qualify, can I tell her? Torrey looked steadily back into the keen old eyes. “Tell me.”
McIntyre tipped up his pint and drank, a long drink. He put it down and wiped his mouth. He gave Torrey a nod. “She was here in the pub that night, before the brushfire started. The last night of her life. She sat where you’re sitting. She started to talk, low and halting. ‘When I was little, I would worry so. I would say to my mother, “When I grow up, who will marry me?” I thought no one would ever want to marry me. And my mother would laugh and say. “Don’t worry. Someday a knight will come along on a white horse and marry you.”’” McIntyre shook his head. “Blue eyes awash with drunken tears, yet tears to break the heart. ‘I thought Gerald was the knight.’ She raised her glass of beer to drink, and her hand shook so that half the beer spilled over the table and onto her skirt. I said, ‘Here, now,’ and tried to hand her a paper napkin to blot it, but she pushed my hand away and looked down at her skirt, ‘It’s done for, same as me. Done for.’ She left then. I didn’t think twice about anything deeper. But when I went to light my pipe, my folder of matches was gone.”
* * *
On the cobbled street outside O’Malley’s, Torrey stood in the bright sunlight beside her bike that she’d left leaning against the brick wall. Brilliant blue sky, white clouds, a fresh breeze. But she felt heavy with McIntyre’s story about Kathleen Brady. It seemed somehow to cast a shadow over the sunlit village street.
Pensively, she ran a finger down the side of her nose. Next door to O’Malley’s, a woman with two small children was shopping for vegetables at Coyle’s stand. A farm truck went past. The driver, a girl, honked a greeting to Coyle’s boy, who waved back. Farther down the street, a few people went in and out of shops. A bell jangled as someone entered Grogan’s Needlework Shop across the street. Beside the needlework shop entrance was another door, a wide, handsome door with a curved top and a fresh, lace curtain across the glass. Nolan’s Bed-and-Breakfast. She came from Galway to live with her spinster aunt above the needlework shop.