by John A. Ryan
Paulie whined on, watching his own two planks, watching that cursed barrel, until, with relief, he saw it change direction and trundle onto Canon Burke’s cattle grid and stop there, an orange tom returning home after victories skipping nimbly out of its way.
But somebody was shouting. He realised the shouting was at him, and then the small Coppinger, the nephew, jumped up behind him on the forklift.
‘You dirty rat!’ he yelled, beating Paulie on the top of the head with his paintbrush. ‘You dirty yellow rat!’
He must not let this noisy fellow upset him. Wasn’t it a good thing he was wearing his cap? He turned a beautiful turn in the yard door without stirring his two planks and he thought, Was there another forklift driver in the County who could do that? Once inside the yard, he executed one of his best routines, a sudden stop which dropped the planks on the ground in front of him and an even more sudden jerk forward which threw the noisy painter into the pile of sawdust that always lay to the right of the door, while Paulie sent her full speed out the second door into the Main Street. As he cleared the door he leaned back and slammed it shut. Safer.
It did seem to Paulie that the world was a risky kind of place, full of dangers. Physical and spiritual. And financial. A young man had to be on his guard always.
But his day had begun well. If Wattie didn’t give him that extra £2.50 he’d look for a job somewhere else. There were builders and fellows going mad looking for good forklift drivers, and Paulie couldn’t deny that maybe he was the best forklift driver in the world.
Passing the archway he took a look down Chapel Street. The big heavy Coppinger was still on his back, his legs in the air, while with his white paint brush he made slow circles in the sunlight. Did you ever see one of those beetles that get turned on their backs and can’t get themselves right again? Like that.
But white instead of black. This struck Paulie as very funny, and he chuckled. A white beetle instead of a black beetle. He laughed out loud, showing his big white teeth.
Somebody would soon come along and help to put the painter right side up. First on the scene would likely be the Gorman woman. Pity he couldn’t wait for that.
The forklift had never gone better; it paid to look after a machine.
The Long Consequences
Coming to sit in the boat had not been a good idea after all; the sun was too bright for reading. The wavelets trooping up the river made a spangle of golden points. She pulled on the mooring rope and, when the cot started to move, slow and heavy because the tide was running strongly now, she leaned back on the rope until prow bumped against granite. She gathered her books together where they lay scattered on the stern-seat, noticing how warm the planking was, and then stepped carefully onto the quay. The river came rolling to her from Curra Weir and beyond that from the city and the sea. The sedge leaned towards her too in that pleasant moving air, and the grey heron stood sentry among the grey stems, patience on one leg, Old Granny.
She turned away, and with her books under her arm went past the boathouse, feeling under her feet the springy turf that was made of so many years’ wood-shavings. If you cut down through the layers you could count the years just like tree-rings, two hundred of them, each one thicker than the one before for the first hundred years, but after that thinning slowly until it would not be easy to find and number each layer, and then the final one, seventeen years before, the year she was born, the year after her father had closed the boatyard.
From the yard a stony lane ambled up the slope with many a stop and turn. Ferns grew damply in the moss on one side, and on the other the lichened stones gathered the sun’s heat. The lane climbed a bit, then it checked again at the stony remains of a house. That was where Williams had lived, coachman at the Big House. If you looked and knew where to look you found the hearth and at one side a stone set at ground-level had a hole in it an inch deep, and that was where the fire-crane had swung. Ferns grew among the scattered rocks, their roots cool under the flags where once the fire had blazed. Further on a glistening stream crossed the lane and you could track that up the hillside to the coolest and greenest well. Her father often took a mug from the dresser and walked across the field to drink from it, even though the Lady’s Well was much nearer.
At the highest point of the lane, Liz passed through the shadow of the square tower that people called Barrington’s Castle. You could still reach the battlements by a winding stair in the thickness of the walls, and from the top you could look up the river or down, or across it to the hills. You could see also the double row of limes that pointed towards the Big House and even dimly among the trees make out the remains of what had once been the greatest house in this county and, for a short time, the greatest house in Ireland when Lord Ormsby had been Viceroy. The tower was a sad place now, jackdaws and bats its only inhabitants, cattle sheltering there from winter’s wet and cold or from the flies in summertime.
Liz waited in the garden till she saw her mother come out the back door and go to one of the outhouses, then she went in quickly and took the key from the desk in the parlour. Her great-great-grandaunt Lettice looked down darkly and disapprovingly. Liz wrinkled her nose at her. Why should she disapprove?
Out then by the front door, pulling it quietly shut, across the lane and in by the tall iron gate to the churchyard. It was full of sunshine here, a sheltered place, and there was company that she was at ease with. She could tell where every grave was, almost what was chiselled on every stone. Here lies in hope of resurrection. The day Thou gavest, Lord. Happy are the dead. 1861 Elizabeth Wardell. James Nicolson. Hewetts, Greggs. Some day her own name would be cut on the limestone: Harriet Elizabeth Barrington. Just as well the other girls didn’t know her first name. Old-fashioned, but she liked it because it was Family; there was another Harriet Gregg, alias Barrington, and a date that was either 1775 or 1795. Now this present Harriet, who departed this life in say, the year 2040 which would make her 77, and then she would lie here in the place she loved, with Hewetts and Pykes, Grahams and Greggs, Ibbotsons, Brownes and all her kinsfolk, with primroses.
Some people were afraid of churchyards. She had played here from her infancy, even though in those days the church had still been in occasional use. Then ten years ago the furniture and all of value had been taken away, to Achaveen. Graigue church, too, was no longer used, and the church in Ballykeeran had been demolished. The other graveyard, however, had lately been extended.
Or supposing she were to be buried in that other graveyard? Elizabeth O’Neill, née Barrington. RIP. Her loving husband, Thomas. Long rows of graves, all in line, no elms, no primroses. A tractor to cut the grass in summer instead of the gentle ministrations of old George Hillis. She stopped and stood quite still before the oak door, staring at but hardly seeing the black hinges and the peeling varnish. Tom was a nice fellow, and clever. What would everyone say? Her mother’s disapproval was easily foreseen. Her father would kiss her. ‘Whatever you think best, Elspeth,’ (he was the only one who called her that), ‘whatever you want, love. He’s a nice lad,’ always the generous word, and his eyes would smile, but he would be sad too, the last of the Barringtons and a tradition broken. The Canon would hardly be happy about it but he would, as usual, take no definite stand.
That would be left to Aunt Sarah. She would rage. ‘Who is he? Tell me that,’ and would her condemnation and bitter criticism be for his being Roman Catholic or for his lack of Family and Land? ‘Why don’t you find a nice Protestant boy?’
But whether Aunt Sarah knew it or not, time and history had taken away the nice Protestant boys and that was why Liz was going to the disco tonight with Tom O’Neill, and why she had decided, almost decided, to do nursing, to go away to Dublin to train, where perhaps there were such boys as Aunt Sarah imagined.
Then why had Frances Smith not found them? Trained in London, she had come back when she was quite old, well not old exactly, Liz’s mother said she must be thirty-thre
e at least, and married that dry old fellow of the Allens in Killin Grange. He must be well over forty, maybe he was fifty, he looked old and withered up. Of course he was one of the Allens and had several farms.
She fitted the huge key in its place and used both hands to turn it. The Allen stone was set in the wall near the altar, sub umbra mensae something, something, sub umbra mensae in Lucem Vitae Eternae something Ricardus Allen, M.A. Hujus Ecclesiae diu Rector. Obiit and the Roman numerals, she knew, meant 1798. There were other Allen names too in the corner near the main road.
The sunlight slanted in through the tall windows but she put her chair and desk in the shade, sat down and spread her books on the tiled floor. She took her history book and found 1798 and read a page or two but then shut it with a slap, because it seemed so unrelated to what she knew as history. No mention that in 1780 a Robert Barrington, with a younger brother, had set up a boat-building business near Curragh, that by 1800 he had twelve men full time in the yard, others cutting and drawing timber, that he owned or leased forests and mills, that half the cargo on the river was carried by Barringtons in barges they had built themselves. Salmon and eel-cots too. The family prospered in this new trade. But they turned their backs on the land. And new things came. In the twenties coaches, in the forties railways, and river transport failed to meet this competition. In 1889 when the Navigation closed down, boat-building was a declining trade. Fishing kept them afloat for a time, but their land in Dufferin and Cloonagloor had to be sold.
What was left? The too-big house, shadowed by the square tower, twenty acres or so along the river set to Paddy Byrne, an abandoned boatyard. That was all. And the river, the river that had made the Barringtons and had destroyed them. The beautiful siren river.
Reading school history always brought her to this discontent, this feeling that history was here, in this churchyard, in the stones of the tower, in the springy turf of the boatyard, and to the feeling, instinctive, that the writer had somehow missed the point. She turned to an earlier chapter. ‘… Unpaid and potentially mutinous, the victorious troops were now, ironically, seen as a threat to the stability of the Commonwealth. A campaign in Ireland would keep them occupied, at a safe distance, and they could afterwards be paid with grants of land there.’ How incomplete this version of it! The things that were not mentioned, the idealism, the passion for right and truth that had driven those plain people and that simple farmer to rise against and destroy the entrenched power of a tyrannous king and a corrupt system, and all those people ever since who had had the same quiet austere virtues, her grimly opulent great-great-grandaunt in her dark frame, and Grandfather, whom she vaguely remembered, and Robert her father, upright good people, and all the others around her sleeping now in the sunny silence.
Her father came in so quietly she did not hear him. He put his hands on her shoulders and kissed the top of her head. ‘Stay a while?’ She nodded. He put two cans of orange in the wall-niche. ‘Would you like one now?’
‘No, not now. Thanks for thinking of it.’
He sat on the altar step, took out his pipe, raising an eyebrow in question. ‘Sure,’ she said. He looked rested and well, as he always did on Saturdays; often when he came from work he looked haggard, and although he seldom spoke about the factory, she knew he was not happy there, a highly skilled man whose skill was no longer needed, working where skill was somehow distrusted. A gentleman ranker, the Canon called him. The Canon was an old snob but his comment was true in a way.
‘How is the work going?’ he asked presently.
She considered that. ‘All right, I think.’
‘What about maths?’
‘If I get maths it will be thanks to Tom. He’s able to make everything so clear. Trouble is I can’t remember it afterwards.’
‘Tom is a nice lad.’ He lighted a match and applied it to his pipe, puffed, burnt his fingers and threw down the spent match among the others on the floor.
‘Still quite determined to do nursing?’ She nodded. They smiled at each other, understanding.
She must do something about that Geography Mr Bennet had given them. She took quick notes as she read. Her father smoked his pipe and the pleasant tobacco smell drifted past her. When he stood up and whispered, ‘Bye,’ she waved a hand and looked up briefly and smiled, and he slipped out as quietly as he had come.
Absorbed in her books, she was yet in a vague way aware of the stillness, aware of the shaft of dusty sunlight that now shone on her feet. I must bring a brush and a watering can and sweep the place, knowing she probably wouldn’t now with the exam so close, but it would be nice to have it clean, and some flowers, the first roses were almost in bloom. She eventually pushed her books away and stretched herself. Mr Bennet had never been known to give a higher mark than C+, but he was a wizard tipster, always guessing shrewdly at what was likely to come up, so you felt pretty happy about Geography.
She stretched her arms above her head, then stood up and took one of the tins of orange and opened the door and stood looking out while she drank. She turned then and looked around her study, timber floor, one step up, tiles, four bright oblongs of sunlight bent across the floor and a little way up the far wall, her desk and chair, books scattered. It was a place not so big as to make you feel cold and alone, but big enough to walk around it if you wanted to think something out. Like who you were and where you were going and what you were going to spend your life at, and why you were determined to go away to Dublin when it might easily break your heart to leave this place, Harriet Elizabeth Barrington, almost seventeen. She pushed the door shut and went and looked in her mirror on the wall: fairly tall and a good figure like all the women in her family, dark heavy hair, nose a bit too narrow, but the eyes made you forget that, the eyes were the best part, grave, wide, steady. She took her hair and coiled it on top of her head. Then she opened her shirt and pulled it down, put her hands under her breasts, and looked very sternly at herself in the mirror. But no, she didn’t look at all like her great-great-grandaunt Lettice, that mysterious lady. What on earth did they do to themselves to make them bulge up and out like that? Some kind of wire contraption? – she commenced to giggle. There came a knocking at the door and someone was calling ‘Liz, it’s me, Tom.’ Hastily she fastened herself up again and went to let him in. He was standing at the bottom of the steps, smiling up at her. ‘I met your dad and he told me where you were.’ He looked around the little church. ‘Say, this place is tops, isn’t it Liz? Do you come here often?’
‘Yes if the day is warm. But in cold weather, it would be too cold here. It is years since it was in use as a church.’
‘Isn’t it very small?’
‘The congregation was probably never very big.’
‘Who’s that old fellow?’ and he went to look at the Ormsby effigy and read Frederick Alnwick Ormsby, 4th Baronet, 1823. He read some of the other plaques. ‘Are they related to you?’
‘Some of them. Greggs mostly, Barringtons and Hewitts.’
‘I suppose they all came over with Cromwell?’
‘They did not,’ she said defensively, and then was amused at herself. ‘What does it matter who they came with or when? I’m here.’
‘I’m glad you’re here,’ he said. It was not gallantry; he was too straightforward for that. They kissed, and she remembered how awkward he had been at first. He was six months older than she was. Only then did he notice and ask, ‘What did you do to your hair?’ but without answering his question she sat down at her desk and said, ‘We’ll go over that chapter Sister Pauline did on Thursday.’ He sat on the floor and leaned his head against her knee.
When she stopped reading he said, ‘History is bunk.’
‘Not very original, Tom.’
‘No,’ he agreed, ‘Henry Ford or somebody. Still, I could never get interested in history. Liz, is there anything to drink here? I’m parched.’
‘There’s a can of orange.’
While he drank he read the plaques near the altar. ‘This one’s in Latin … Speravit vocati Ricardus Allen, is he the same family as Dick Allen above? Rector? You wouldn’t think Dick was related to a clergyman if you heard him the day he got caught in the cattle-crush between the two cows. MDCCXCVIII, when was that? You know, Liz, they say my family came from the north to fight Cromwell in – whenever it was – 1641.’
‘Forty-nine,’ she said. ‘Do you believe they did?’
‘Maybe. Why not?’
‘Why don’t you find out if it’s true?’
‘Yes, I suppose I ought to,’ but she knew he wouldn’t. He would spend his time fishing or swimming or hurling. Typical. Yet these were the people unconquerable who had applied that terrible patient persistent pressure, who had touched their caps and grovelled and had never forgotten.
‘Anyway the two of us are on the same side now, aren’t we?’ he asked. He was such a simple fellow really, despite that quick brain, that you had to like him. He had the quality, too, of always thinking the generous thought, that reminded her of her father.
‘Come on, we’re here to do maths.’ Maths they did for the next hour or so, but at the end of that time she was finding it difficult to concentrate. He realized this, looked at his watch and jumped to his feet. ‘I must go home to my tea. I’ll call for you about half past eight.’ He went to the door. ‘It’s the last disco we’ll be going to.’ She looked up in sudden dismay and he hurried to explain. ‘Until after the exam, I mean.’ She stood up too and laid her hand on his arm and something was said though neither spoke. He put his arm around her, but she pushed him gently away and pushed him out of her little church. He pretended to stumble on the threshold, righted himself quickly, turned and kissed her again and then raced away to the gate, where he waved and said, ‘Half eight. See you. Bye,’ and left her smiling as she went in to gather her books. All the names looked down at her; the sun slanted in; if there were ghosts here they were happy ones.