by John A. Ryan
Their fox took them straight across the muddy place at the bottom of Jefferies’ fields. The pack managed it with difficulty, but of course it wouldn’t hold a horse.
‘Keep up,’ he yelled at Lady Catherine. ‘The gap is in a wicked state. You’d go to the elder in it,’ and they kept along the higher level and jumped the stream farther on. Glancing back he saw that at least three of the others were stuck at the muddy place and he laughed loud. ‘The old dog,’ he shouted. But Lady Catherine was now losing ground and he was on his own. Not quite. Two others were off to the right – one of them was surely that English fellow, the other looked like Tom Loughlin – but they seemed to have come across by Barnakillen lane and hadn’t come over the hill at all.
He and Tim Kelly had it all to themselves and at the end of that great run, one of the best he thought that they’d ever had, he was still there when they killed, right under Bawncreea wall.
Very small their brave fox looked now, that had been so full of running and of guile so short a time before. He had been beaten by less than two hundred yards for the break in the wall and the safety of Bawncreea wood.
Tim and Batty shook hands solemnly. Respect for hard riders and contempt for lesser men was in that handshake. Then Tim took his tired hounds away towards Bawncreea cross. The light was beginning to fail. Batty headed for Coolgard, hacking first along the level, but then walking where he met the long rise to the main road.
Now on the long trudge back, he felt elation draining out of him. Why he should think of Maggie again he didn’t know. She should be here. Instead she was likely out with the Kildares or whoever hunted up in that part of the country. Who would have thought she was all that interested in getting married? And that bit of a fellow, a lightweight, hardly any taller than Maggie herself, he’d never be able for her. ‘Capable of producing hunters,’ the phrase jumped, oddly, to his mind. If any woman was calculated to produce high-quality stock, surely it was Maggie. But whoever was getting hunters on Maggie now, it wasn’t Batty.
He shook his head as if to shake away the idea. Well, there were others. There was that viperish young filly with the pouty mouth, Pauline Kerr’s daughter. Too young! Too young for you! Now what put that thought in his head? He was only forty-three, going on – what? Next week? – well, not forty-four yet. But she’s only eighteen or nineteen. Oh hell, if they’re big enough, they’re old enough.
There was a light already in Flanagan’s, one of the famous oil lamps; with windows a foot square their lighting-up time was bound to be early. Anything except temptation, he thought, and going round to the back he left Skoury in the stable. ‘Five minutes, Skoury,’ he said.
He took his drink over to the fire and sat down in the welcome warmth. At the other side sat a small man drinking a large stout. That was Tom Callaghan, spoiled poteen-maker, grave-digger and handy man.
‘Good morrow, Tom.’
Tom looked up slowly and surveyed him from heel to head.
‘Jaysus,’ he said. ‘Comfort me in me last agony,’ and went back to his stout.
Not an easy man to talk to, reflected Batty.
After long silence, Tom asked, with heavy sarcasm, ‘Well, did yiz ketch anything?’
‘What have you against the hunt crowd, Tom?’
‘Idlers. Idlers and their fancy women. Tell the truth of you, though, Batty, you were never an idler.’
‘And no fancy women either,’ said Batty, and then was sorry he’d said it. ‘Did you ever hunt, Tom?’
‘Oh ay. Isn’t that what killed all belongin’ to me?’
‘It’s a thing that grows on you. If you once follow hounds on a good horse, you’ll never again ask for any other sport.’
‘I must saddle the jennet,’ said Tom sourly.
Uncheered by his stop at Flanagan’s, he set off on the last half mile. Near Fitzgerald’s he saw a hound that looked very like a straggler from the pack. It wasn’t like Tim to lose one of them. Batty whistled him, but the animal loped away.
As Coolgard House came in view he was reminded of the last time they’d had the Hunt Ball there. A night and a half! A night till morning! He remembered sitting on the broad carpeted stairway with Wigeon beside him, glasses of malt in their hands, studying the legs of the women who went up and down the stairs, and exchanging pleasantries with them all. Wigeon wasn’t long back home after a trip to England with some beef group and he spoke as though he had managed to escape from something he never wanted to see again.
‘We don’t know how well off we are in this country. Do you know what? The first time I asked for a drink over there they had to search the house to find a bottle of whiskey. They had Scotch of course, but I’m talking about real whiskey. And when they found it the girl in the bar poured out a little drop and ’clare to God it hardly wet the bottom of the glass.’ He looked mournfully at Batty. ‘Do you remember when we were goin’ to school they told us an atom was the smallest thing that could hould be itself? Well, that’s not true. The smallest thing in the world is the English measure of whiskey.’
‘I’d believe you,’ said Batty, but he wasn’t giving all his attention to the conversation because he could see Maggie almost directly below him and with that low-cut dress she was wearing he could look down between Galteemore and Slievenamon. She looked up and saw him and made a puss at him, and at once he stood up and went down to her, ignoring Wigeon’s ‘What ails you?’ and leaving his whiskey on the stairs, because whiskey can be replaced but opportunity can’t.
He shook his head again. That was all water under the bridge now.
At Coolgard House he said, ‘I’ll put you in your box, Skoury.’ He gave him a quick rub-down, fastened a blanket on him and left him munching in his box. He would just have a quick look to see if Wigeon had come, then he must get on home.
Going up the steps, he felt the tiredness and a twinge of pain in his hurt leg. He stopped for a moment and looked across the trees at the lowering sky, and a snowflake drifted down and landed on his sleeve. Must get home, he thought. He went into the hall, which was pleasantly warm after the raw air outside. A pert and plump girl wearing a little white cap and a little white apron was crossing the hall with a tray.
‘Kitty, is Willie Stewart here?’ he asked her.
‘No, sir.’
He hadn’t really expected him, yet he felt keenly disappointed. It wasn’t his way to show it, however.
‘Begod, Kitty, you’re puttin’ on weight. It looks well on you, though,’ and he made a rawm at her.
‘Stop, Batty. I mean sir. You’ll make me drop all the glasses.’
He was standing near the garden window and he could see the sullen clouds darkening outside. He found himself wishing that he hadn’t to go home; here there were lights and warmth and people. For a while he stood watching the flakes of snow that fell against the glass and melted, and his thoughts were bleak.
Well, there was work waiting to be done, animals to be fed and seen to, and these things wouldn’t wait. He turned heavily towards the door. But now Sam had seen him and came over.
‘Batty, I didn’t see you come in. What will you have? I know you can’t stay, but have some little thing before you go.’
Batty hesitated. Then he said, ‘I’ll have a drop of Rémy Martin,’ but it wasn’t because he wanted it. Nor was it camaraderie that made him say it. It was, rather, a kind of terror. It was something very like defeat.
Chapel Street
Paulie swept into Chapel Street at four miles an hour almost. Then he slowed down. His forklift whined eagerly; it was going well; it paid to look after a machine.
He slowed down because he liked Chapel Street and it is a good idea to do something slowly when you like doing it. There were always things to be seen here that were worth thinking about. And you might catch a glimpse of Kate. Also he was carrying two long planks crossways and you couldn’t rush that kind of job.
Chapel Street is maybe a hundred yards long, or more, and it would take him, oh – say, one long minute, maybe two, to reach the far end. But he wasn’t going that far. At the far end, the street went under an archway and then out in front of St James’s, but before he reached that he would turn right and go into Wattie Moore’s timber-yard and there he would delicately lower the two heavy planks he was carrying, so delicately that they didn’t tilt, so both ends hit the ground at the same time and the planks were undamaged, and no one could do that like Paulie could.
He watched the planks to judge if they were correctly centred and balanced. Then he looked along the street. It was almost empty. The curve of the street meant that he couldn’t see the timber-yard, or the arch, but he could see St James’s high above the other roofs. The sun had disengaged itself from the tower and was peering into Chapel Street over one of the sloping side-parts of the church. The houses on one side were warming up in the sunshine. The houses on the dark side crouched and made themselves small; the sunlit houses bloomed and swelled and stuck out their chests.
Halfway along, the two Coppingers had put up a small scaffolding, three long planks white with mortar and lime and paint, laid across two barrels. The small Coppinger was fussing around with pots of paint while the big heavy Coppinger, the uncle, was climbing slowly and heavily but steadily up a little ladder propped against one of the barrels. White coats, white paint, whitey lime-covered planks.
The Schooner’s wife – which one? – was kneeling on the footpath outside her front door, with bucket and scrubbing brush, and Paulie saw her plumpy white knees as she bent forward. He was a well-brought-up young man and he looked away. Then he risked another quick look just to see what she was wearing, but no luck this time, she was squatting back on her hunkers, squinting up at each of the neighbour’s windows in turn. It was a risk, too, he could go to hell for doing that. And if the Schooner caught him at it Paulie wouldn’t live to go to hell.
Next was Miss Lark’s house, Lavender Cottage, neat, shuttered, prim, shut up tight at door and window as though on guard against anything that might threaten her spinsterhood. A bottle of milk stood red-capped on the step with its back firmly against the door-jamb. Not a welcoming house. He tried to look in the upstairs window but he wasn’t quite high enough and besides the Venetians were slanted against him. She was not a generous lady. Not like the Schooner’s wife, who really lived more in the street than in her house and was always doing something worth looking at.
The longer plank was dipping slightly at the left end. A subtle feint towards the right and then a little swooping lift the other way put everything in order again. Oh, it was intoxicating to have such power and such judgement in using it. He adjusted the jaunt of his cap; he hawed on his finger-nails and polished them on his lapel.
The house beside Miss Lark’s was unoccupied. Over the door and the big window you could still make out Pringle, High Class Grocer. It still belonged to Pringle probably, if he hadn’t drunk it, too, along with the tea and the sugar and the flour and the butter, till the collar came over his head from drinking and he had to be led away to St Leonard’s for the Brothers to do a job on him.
Sun was warm now, although it was autumn time. Up in the blue sky above the church tower the rooks were tumbling and playing and cawing, and on Canon Burke’s red-brick wall the pears plumped indolently and soaked in the heat through their russet skins and turned it to sweetness. It was a ripe, contented time of year.
Opposite Pringle’s, in the shadow, lurked Peejay’s bicycle repair shop. The door was closed – was it? When it was open it looked closed, when it was closed it looked no different. It opened only two inches anyway at any time, though you could squeeze another inch against the tangle of old crocks and older crocks tied it seemed in an inextricable knot with cobwebs and chains. The window beside the door had never been big, but over the years its area had been encroached on by wheels and mudguards and hubs and other nameable or unnameable bits of machinery; walls, too, once white-washed, had acquired a time-coating of dust, and from every nail hung wheels that looked like large spiders’ webs and webs that looked like wheels. The high ceiling could not be seen, it was in utter darkness and from this a long furry flex came down and held a yellow glowing bulb. Under this light Peejay worked, the hub of this slightly buckled wheel of industry, the arch-spider from whom radiated every web and spoke and cable, every loop and parabola. Here he worked in dust and silence and concentration and great content. All around him sprawled his stock in trade, his spare parts, his tools; before him knelt in reverence his patient, for he was a bicycle-doctor, almost a bicycle-psychiatrist. He had once been a champion cyclist (hard to believe now) and he had taught himself his trade, and probably no one knew more about the innermost workings maybe even the innermost thoughts of bicycles. If you brought him a bicycle to mend you had to prop it against the outside wall, no room to squeeze it in the door, no room inside, and Peejay said, ‘Lave it there, boy’, and when you returned, it was propped against the outside wall but now perfected in smooth and shining unction, no creak or squeak no grit or jerk marred its cyclical excellence of motion.
How did he bring a bicycle in? or out? You must not worry about things like this. Where there is an artist there will be mysteries.
Paulie could see no bulb glowing and this was how he knew the door was closed.
When you met Peejay in Flanagan’s at night he was a different man, talkative, his concentration unscrewed, telling big improbable lies and liable to break into song in a floriated rococo style. Ah sweet mysthery of life.
Flanagan’s was quiet. It ought to be open. Paulie couldn’t see the church clock because the sun was in his eyes. But it wasn’t open. Doll was no early riser. He noticed there were bottles and glasses and puddles of porter still on the counter.
But the house that dominated Chapel Street was Wattie’s. It was taller than the others and its creamy painted walls swelled and boasted in the sunlight, and its two arched doorways (because it was two houses once upon a time) were like two eyebrows raised.
Wattie matched his house. He was the big man here. He owned half the street, and two yards, and land outside the town, and that is good progress for a man who, when he started to climb, had neither a ladder nor as much land as he could rest it on.
You ought to see him when he has a few drinks taken, and the more he drinks the further he pushes the hat back on his head and the louder he talks. Paulie recalled last night: ‘The first place I ever worked was for Phil Hannigan of Currahaglash. He was a kind of a distant uncle of mine. He had several men workin’ on the farm then and he was known far and wide for dietin’ the men on herrin’s. “Very good for the brain,” he used to say.’
‘That’s where you should have stayed, Wattie,’ said Peejay. ‘’Twould have been the makin’ of you.’
‘I couldn’t stay there. The herrin’ bones had started to come out through me waistcoat.’
In fact he had run away from Hannigan’s and joined the navy. And he swore that he had sailed the seven seas and that there wasn’t as much herrin’s in the whole lot of them as there was in Hannigan’s dairy.
‘We were cruisin’ wan day in the Caraybian Sea, and here wasn’t there a shoal of herrin’s passin’ by, all blue and shiny with the sun and the spray on ’em, and wan herrin’ puts up his head and he says, “Excuse me, sir. Oh, ’tis Wattie Moore. Wattie, am I on the right road for Hannigans of Currahaglash?”’
And Wattie had pushed back the hat and looked around, daring them.
It was talk like that, and people like that, that made Flanagan’s still the best house in the town.
As for that story, Paulie would have been the last man to contradict him, but it was hard to believe, wasn’t it? How could that herrin’ possibly know Wattie? Not denyin’ that he was a well-known man. All the same…
Sometimes people who didn’t know him felt sorry for him when
they saw the drooping shoulders and the long sad face. This was very foolish of them and it didn’t harm Wattie’s business.
Old Carraway’s car was parked outside. Didn’t leave much room, did it? Plenty of room for it inside the wall, but he was too lazy to get out and open the gate. Too high and mighty, just because he was a solicitor. He was probably at his breakfast now. Himself and Kate. Where did he find Kate? She must be twenty years younger than him, at least, and as plump and juicy as he was withered and dry. Maybe he did get her in a raffle, like Peejay said. She made Paulie think of a ripe plum. She was dark and luscious like a Victoria that is half of a long Autumn day too ripe, dark and smooth and bursting with life and lusciousness and sugar. Supposing, Paulie wondered, supposing someone shook the tree?
Well, if he got his motor car scratched it served him right for parking it in a narrow place. Still, he squeezed the forklift past it cautiously. Old Carraway was a bad man to fall foul of. Damages.
Dan Tierney was delivering milk to Gorman’s, walking carefully on his big flat feet, nodding and smiling and whispering to himself. He put two bottles on Gorman’s step and chuckled as he straightened up. Big joke! It looked to Paulie as though he had a power of funny stories that he hadn’t told himself before.
He looked again at the pears that showed amber and russet above the Canon’s wall. He could reach them all right, but still … You wouldn’t know about the Canon. Excommunication. Paulie had no idea what that involved but it sounded pretty alarming.
The big heavy Coppinger was skilfully placing his foot on the third step when Paulie’s forklift struck one of the barrels and the whole lot went flying. The three white planks went three different ways. One went through Gorman’s open window and knocked a geranium that was inside and there would be murder about that because she didn’t like having things spilled on her carpets. One barrel stayed upright, the other rolled slowly along in front of Paulie. The big heavy Coppinger was left lying on his back on the footpath with his arms and legs in the air.