An End and a Beginning

by James Hanley

  “Strange, strange. Yes, indeed, for after a while I fell in love with the man that first opened my eyes to the world that was too big to fit into a stone cottage. And after my father died, and my sister was away to be a nurse at Dublin, he said to me, ‘This is your home from now on, Winifred, and you will stay in it.’ And I did, and here I am now. Funny it was, but I hated one half of those words, and I loved the other. It makes me think of him. He will be old, too. It makes me remember one particular time, and it was the most shining in my whole life, that night we all came up from below, and took the drinks to celebrate the victory of his horse, and I remember the sudden devilish way he caught hold of me and waltzed me round the room. I was so happy that night to be a servant girl that was picked out from the others, and I laughed all the way back to my room after he poured the champagne into my mouth and sang the song of praise to everybody about his golden beast. Oh, I was young then, too young maybe, but all the same young. Ah, surprises will come out of a known nature, and his I knew from heel to heart, and that Friday evening when he went off all of a sudden, and returned in two hours with a doll from the town, and had her to his room, and kept her there for three whole nights, and went off again with her to the town—well I was nearer to the cripple in the chair than I’d ever been, and I knew the sadness in broken things. Yes, indeed, and ever after that I was at her side, helping and helping, and doing, and doing again, for I knew there was a debt to be paid back to a silent woman. And I learned to curse my flesh; I tied my tiger down.”

  Suddenly she sat up, listened. “I thought I heard something moving.” She lay down again, drew closer the bedclothes.

  “Oh, when I look back, when I think of this house. The drink that flowed in it, the food that made the tables groan, the money that burned like fire and ran like water. I remember thinking about all that one morning after the early Mass, and I wondered if the master’s going away was from too much of a fullness of those things. Yes, and wondered if when Miss Downey ran away that time it was from a sickened sight of too much that flowed like a tap. Yes, I saw it all lit up that morning, shining against the bones of many a fisherman that measured his loaf always with an uncertain hand. And another day it came clearer still, and I knew it myself for a lot of nonsense, a lot of waste. And later on it came like that to others also, and then there wasn’t enough tanks to hold the petrol that would have blazed it all from the land.”

  The days tumbled about in Miss Fetch’s mind; like clouds, like tunes, like dancing men. She dozed, and she awoke with a start, then dozed again. The fire was almost out, a pinhead of light in a blackness of coal. This room was black. Dark, behind the thick curtains, and the fast shut window, beyond which a moon, riding swiftly through cloud, drowned the land in light. She opened and closed her eyes, she waited for nothing. But the ear was lively again. Was that the sound of feet? A step on the stairs? The creak of a door? Opening, closing? She did not know. Miss Fetch was deep in the bed, and yet was far from the bed; seemed moving and straining forward towards whole islands of days that she could never reach, as she fitfully dozed, as she started up out of dreams that were as soft as silk, and her opened eyes fought back against the darkness of this room.

  The room that was small, that was high up, in the house that rose upon the land like a great ship. Its face was turned towards the south, its bulwarks of stone toned by sun, weathered and beaten by winds. Windows shone outwards like eyes. Miss Fetch knew this house, these rooms, these stairs, the corridors like alley-ways, the towering, endlessly ending staircase on her heaviest days. She knew the length and depth, height and feel of every one of them. She knew the life that was in, and the life that was out of them.

  How quiet the house after the noise, the tempestuous, the wasted days. Miss Fetch remembered them all. The daily journeys that were like pilgrimages, the keys rattling at her waist, and the swinging chain. The voyage of hours through what might be a deserted town, so big, so overpowering the house, a passenger-less ship. Round and round, and up and down, through whole companies of shadows. How damp its autumn and winter airs, how cold the hall, how warm the kitchens. She saw these also, she heard herself walking them, and thought of the armies of people they had fed. Climbing to rooms like palaces, and rooms like cells. And there were three that were special to her, that were as real as persons. In one she heard the child sing, and in another the woman moaned and bared her breast to the arrows that were flung upon her.

  “John Downey I liked best of all,” she thought. The bright youth who so often sat alone in his room, and held the secret that lay so close to his secret heart. As she paused at their open doors, their names would spring to her lips, as they sprang to them now, in these moments of memory, of uncertain repose. John Downey. A shy, withdrawn youth, and now a naval officer thousands of miles away, still hiding his secret, sharing it with none, as his boat plied the shores of a land that treasured a thousand and one of its own. “Teresa Downey,” and her lips moved. “Died in my arms, looking out of a window on to her lands that had been going to the devil for twenty years.

  “Sheila Downey. Back home now after her pilgrimage to the gutter.

  “Patrick Aloyious Downey, master of a great house, and crawling servant of his own flesh.

  “A pity,” thought Miss Fetch. “A great shame.”

  She imagined she heard the step again, the door, and she sat up, one hand to her ear. But there was no sound in the house.

  “My sister still works for Murphy, and that cottage I was born in may still stink of the fish that my father got in the hard way out of hungry waters. It doesn’t matter. It never did.”

  For a moment she saw the cottage, and her sister sitting in it.

  “This is my home. This is my home.”

  She lay back on the pillows, her hands crossed over the beads. She seemed to hear the woman talking, caught the words as they fell. “You’re getting on Winifred, you’re getting on,” Sheila said. “And I think you ought to go back to your sister.”

  “Getting on,” she thought, “getting old. I shan’t mind. Age is peace.”

  And suddenly, easily, like a child, she was fast asleep. Perhaps it is also a crown.

  8

  “When the light goes the candles will be lit. He’ll watch them burn, and watch me. Darkness will come and the candle will burn out. And after that a silence will be inexcusable. He is just waiting. I’ll go up to my room, and something in him will drag after me. Later he’ll tell me that he loves me. They all do. As though it were a plan, the last thing it can ever be. No plan is necessary to lie flat on your back.”

  She sat on one side of the fire, and he on the other. A clock ticked over their silence, an elected one; they did not wish to talk. They were tired after the long walk. Miss Fetch had served them dinner, had attended upon them in the sulkiest fashion, and had then gone off again, perhaps to do penance for the sin that would shortly be committed. The man is inert, his body slumped, and his arms lie stretched along the hard, uncomfortable arms of the chair. Only his eyes are not tired, looking, staring, at the impossible, the unbelievable. A woman in a chair; a woman in a long blue, sheath-like dress, which by the very act of sitting pronounces upon what in this silent hour can only be stared at, the razor sharp line of a thigh, the upthrusting, taunting, and giving breast, the partly open mouth and the tiny teeth, the hair that seems to dart with light from the candle. The woman with her face turned towards the fire, who might be watching the flames yet does not see them, who might be on the point of speech but will not talk. The neck, and the eye, and the ear that he can watch. “In that place, every night, every single night, a woman came into my cell. She had red hair and black hair, golden hair, and brown hair, she was tall and she was small, she was fat and she was thin. And I could never reach them, never touch,” and he watched, and went on watching, and he hated the clock, the tick of it, the length of the candle, the slow drag of the clock’s hands, as he looked, and went on looking at the woman in the chair. Man and woman. Brother Ansel
m is worlds away, and a mound and a bare tree have sunk from sight.

  Her body moves, her nature speaks. One foot crosses the other, and he watches, not the feet, but the dress’s movement, the upward movement, the beginning of the leg’s journey. She turns, stretches, it is only the heat of the fire, but in a moment he knows how far the leg reaches. The curtains are drawn, and a moon is up. He does not see it, cannot look that way. There is only one way of looking in this silence-wrapped room. The candle is so close, burning in his eye, how long will it last? It will go, the darkness will come. Another will not be lit. He watches her entwined hands, he waits for any movement, a movement is the only necessary word. So near, so very, very close, and before so very far away. At the tops of mountains and in the depths of abysses, in clefts of rock and in the middle of oceans. “My arm feels so long, I could touch her now.”

  The sheer presence of each other in chairs is yet the barrier of iron. The candles will not burn for ever, and the clock’s hands will reach a figure after which it will be impossible to follow it. The flames will die down, the grate blacken. The room will force them out. When a coal dropped with a clatter to the open hearth they both jumped, as though from the sound of a gunshot. He knows that every movement is towards the door, the darkness, the long broad staircase, the long dark passage to other rooms. He sees her close and open her eyes.

  “He says that he will not stay long.”

  “He says that my husband will follow me over here.”

  “He says that years ago he would have loved to run away from me,” and out of the hidden words comes the sudden smile that he lights on, and holds with his own eyes, and remembers that the candle must soon splutter out.

  “She said yes in the wood, when I held her, and when I kissed her.” The very words seem to put out the candle, blacken the fire, send the clock’s hands whirling. “God! I just can’t believe it’s happened. I can’t. I can’t.” And the room is full with a bed, heavy with a bed; he closes his eyes, dreams.

  “What were you thinking about?” she asked. He did not answer. He hadn’t actually heard, as though the words themselves had slipped out, velvet soft, crawled to the chair on which he sat.

  “What were you thinking about, Peter?”

  “Nothing,” he said, “nothing,” like the word had lain on the tip of his tongue all this silent hour, only waiting to drop. And as if to make sure that it had landed, he repeated, “Nothing.”

  “What were you thinking about?”

  “Only of myself, dear. Only of myself.”

  “The candle won’t last long,” he said, dumb in a moment, he could not think of anything else to say and now there was no need to, only to look again as she rose to her feet and came towards him. She knelt down and took his hands.

  “Forget Desmond,” she said.

  She did not look at him as she said it, and did not wait for an answer. She crossed the floor and went out. He heard the door close behind him.

  “I could cry out, I feel so happy,” the very words spoken aloud in the room seemed to propel him from the chair. The next moment he was leaning on the mantelpiece, watching the now guttering candle. After a while he blew it out and left the room. He stood at the bottom of the stairs.

  “I can go to hers, or she can come to mine,” he thought, and slowly climbed the stairs and made his way to the room.

  Owing to the coldness of the night the housekeeper had lighted a fire in his room, and this burned brightly as he entered. He did not bother with the light. Slowly he undressed, got into the bed, and waited.

  “I wonder if she really loves me. I wonder if she always did?”

  The words carried him forward, upwards like chariots. He lit a cigarette; he counted the ticks of his own clock.

  “Last night was a horror.”

  “Yesterday I was so ashamed.”

  “The day before I felt so bloody lonely, so out of it. I’ve hated nothing but myself since ever I came out.”

  He lit another cigarette, he drew up his knees, looked towards the window, the door. He listened. No sound.

  “Christ, suppose even now, just suppose it was still only a dream,” and in a moment he was lying on an ice-shelf. “No. She wouldn’t do it, she wouldn’t do it, she——” the cigarette falling from his fingers, reaching down for it, as the door opened, and she came in.

  “Sheila!”

  She came slowly across the room and stood in front of the fire. Even before she raised her arm he was standing beside her. “Let me,” his mouth at her neck, pressing, pressing, and his hands moved. Every movement will last a lifetime, as he feels first at the shoulder, as he dreads to unfasten, and as he unfastens, as the cloth moves, as he drowns in each moment and as he rises up, as the cloth shuts out grave and tree, monk and field, mouth and knife, ship and sea, cell and hole, as the cloth so slowly falls on a long journey, as she stands there in the willed innocence of an act, for him the only woman on the living earth. As the breasts leap from a prison, and as he bends and kisses them, and as he sees them pink-flowered at their peaks through almost grass-dry eyes, as he holds and lifts and feels a firmness and a softness, and a curious blind thrust of the woman at his side, as he kneels and draws downwards, the cloth inching and inching, until he is on his knees before her, and a thousand dreams in his hands. The lighthouse is full of lights, and the oceans are full of sounds.

  “Oh Sheila! Sheila!” His fingers live only when she shuts her eyes.

  “It is his need,” she thought, “but it is nothing else.”

  She feels a pressure of a head on her belly, a sudden movement of his hands at her thighs that makes her think of something curling, a snake, a piece of rope, a wire. She feels a menace in his fingers, and in a sudden silence. She feels his muscles taut, strung like a bow. She opened her eyes and slightly turned her head to look into the fire.

  Peter ran his hands up and down her body’s length, and when he looked again the world had dwindled to a waiting harbour. He carried her to the bed. Their heads vanished beneath sheets.

  “Say nothing,” he said, and there was nothing to say.

  “Give me your hand.” She gave it.

  “Hold me tight,” he said.

  “Tight.” And she held him tight, and pressed his head to her childless breasts.

  She ached for a response, for a feeling, a single word.

  “Hold me, tight,” he said.

  “I am holding you, dear, I am.”

  “Tighter.”

  He felt her smile upon his face. “I could drown,” he said, his mouth at her ear.

  “Drown,” she said, and laughed at his happiness.

  “Did you dream about me every night in all those fifteen years?” she asked, pressing his fingers where the pain was sharpest, sweetest, warmer than blood.

  “Or did you just dream of all those others you talked about?” And knew the answer before he gave it, was seized by a sudden passion to push the nipple into his mouth. Later she felt something go, fall away, and he was heavy upon her, and he was sated, and he was happy. No longer lonely, no longer afraid. It pleased her, it filled some nameless emptiness of her own nature. And then he was sleeping. She drew away, turned on her side, but not to sleep. She watched the darkened window, and out of it seemed to draw thoughts of her own life, the trodden yesterdays.

  “We could have been happy, but he didn’t want the child. I stayed too long. It would have held us together, I’m sure it would have made us both happy. I still love him, in spite of everything.”

  And all she could think of were the countless mornings when she had knelt down and polished her husband’s boots. “I would have done anything for happiness, anything.”

  She wept softly into the hands that pressed so hard against her face. “I would have been happy there. I always hated this house, always.”

  “Are you awake?”

  “I’m awake,” she said, “I’ve never been asleep. Have you?”

  “Yes, I dropped off. I wish it would last forever.
”

  “I’m glad,” and she felt his hand again, his heat, but remained motionless, not turning, not wanting to, holding her breath for a moment, hurriedly drying her eyes, knowing what must come, what he wanted, what she would give.

  “Take my hand,” he said, and again she took it.

  “Sheila.”

  “What?”

  The steel fingers banded about her arms, the intense shock of another strength, another pressure. “Nothing. Nothing.”

  “Aren’t you happy?” he asked.

  “Yes,” she said, “I’m content.”

  “Happy?”

  She smiled and said nothing. “He’s like a child,” she thought, “just a big, cold child.”

  “Why don’t you want to say anything about Desmond, Sheila?” he asked.

  “Now?” and burst out laughing, and pressed hard upon the hand that lay between her thighs. “Now?” And laughed, and went on laughing.

  “They never understand. Never,” she thought. “Try to be happy, dear, try to be happy,” she said.

  The light came even as they slept. Nothing is visible of the man save one bare arm, and a sight of the tautened neck, the head clear of the pillow and hanging downwards, as though pressed and held by the peace of exhaustion. The neck is strong, browned, shadowed by beard, the bare arm seems to cover both woman and bed, the fingers of one hand reach the end of her pillow. The woman’s eyes are partly open, as though peeping, a drawn-up arm might be protecting the breast it covers, the limbs of both seemed piled, twisted under their twisted sheets, unnatural, ugly in their gesture. The bed sags. A candle has fallen into the open hearth, the fire is out. The light creeps in. The peeping eyes open wider, look upwards, startlingly, as though this room and house were strange, never-before seen, never-before lived in, as though some hand had entered it during the hours of blindness, had altered it, for as the eyes widened the head moved, and slowly came up and clear of the pillow. The woman looked about the room. She heard the snores of the man. She heard a gaggle of geese, a rustling in trees, the distant neigh of some dreaming horse. She turned her head and looked at the man below her. What blindness of trust in the back thrown, hanging head, the long hairy neck exposed to the light, the glimpse of strong chin and wide trembling nostrils, the eyes so tightly shut they might be sealed, the hair that seemed reaching for the carpet. And like a log across her body the weighted arm. She leaned over and looked at him, she eased the weight of the arm, twined the fingers of his hand within her own, reached out and down and looked at the lost, peaceful, and happy man, and the child and the youth that lay hidden within him.