‘We’ll put her to the test then. We’ll frighten her and make her scream.’
Laboriously, they climbed the hill. When they came within sight of the other lough, there was not a trace of the water bird.
‘She’s gone,’ said Roarty. ‘You might catch something now.’
‘It was a duibhéan all right. They come inland from the sea for a change of diet.’
‘It wasn’t a duibhéan, I’m telling you. It was a big dark bird I’d never seen before.’
‘You only imagined it.’ McGing finally settled the matter. ‘Are you going to try your luck, now that you can no longer see her?’
‘No,’ said Roarty. ‘I won’t wet another fly today.’
McGing’s flat-footed attempt at humour had annoyed him. He set off across the brown bogland, his mind racing ahead. He was still apprehensive but now he had an immediate sense of purpose. This evening he would be as inscrutable as a heron while keeping a wary eye on Potter. His visit to the loughs had not been in vain.
7
Potter was waiting for Nora Hession at the priest’s gate. Earlier in the week he had run into her in the village, gazing into a shop window. When he asked if she was studying her reflection, she told him that she was looking for something that wasn’t there.
‘If you like, I’ll take you shopping to Donegal Town on Saturday. Perhaps you’ll see whatever it is you don’t see here.’
‘What makes you think I want to go shopping?’ she smiled.
‘Would you like to see a film, then?’
‘Wait for me outside, not inside the parochial house gate at five,’ she said, turning away.
In the meantime without seeming to, he’d asked Roarty a few casual questions about her sister, and then in the shape of an afterthought a few questions about Nora herself.
‘They’re an odd pair,’ said Roarty. ‘Both luckless in love, ill-served by two undeserving men. Maggie, as I told you, is still pining for her Highland gentleman, and Nora, who used to be a schoolmistress, hasn’t been the same since she ran off to England with a good-for-nothing scallywag from Glenroe. No one knows what happened between them. She came home after six months looking like a wraith, a ghost of her former self. She couldn’t face teaching again, so she ended up as housekeeper to Canon Loftus. Oh, she’s a sad girl. You can see it in her eyes even on the brightest day in summer.’
Potter switched off the engine and watched a shower from the sea envelope the shoulder of the bluff to the north. The shower passed along the mountain, a grey veil that dimmed the brightness of the landscape while a few sparkling drops fell on the windscreen of the car. The door of the parochial house opened and Nora Hession came down the avenue, stepping daintily in high heels with all the caution of a heron. He experienced a momentary thrill at the comparison, seeing lakes and moors under an evening sun and a lone heron fishing. In a moment she had filled the car with a fragrance that reminded him of crushed bluebells and a day in Derbyshire as a boy.
‘Why did you ask me to wait by the gate?’
‘Your car is bigger than the Canon’s. He has a worldly streak for a priest. He might conceivably be envious.’
‘So you wish to spare him envy?’
‘It’s one of the seven deadly sins. Though I’m paid to look after his bodily needs only, I consider it my duty not to lead him into temptation.’
‘You’re a serious housekeeper, not all domestic economy.’
Smiling to himself, he drove through the village, narrowly missing a cockerel at the crossroads, then up the hill behind the village while she told him what the Canon liked on his toast in the morning. Soon they were flying over the Abar Rua, the bogland stretching away on each side with a single yellow boat on a blue lake and the dark bulk of Slieve League on the right. The road was narrow and the bends came up so unexpectedly that his hand was hardly ever off the gear lever.
Leaving Glenroe behind, they drove through more kindly countryside with small cottages at the ends of laneways and farmers and their sons making hay in the roadside fields.
The west coast of Ireland was a landscape of harshness and exiguity, a million miles from the green and pleasant land of England. It was a landscape that had been shaped by a warped history, eaten to rock bottom by the forces of erosion, now almost irreducible in its barrenness. It was a landscape of green patches precariously struggling against the wildness of encroaching heather; drystone walls instead of hedges; stunted trees bending before wet winds; futile roads winding towards long-abandoned homes and bare hilltops; and lonely beaches among black rocks and the tormenting crash of the sea.
It was an alien land that spoke to something fundamental in his makeup. From it he drew an image that brought him not only to the very quick of the country but to the very centre of his own experience as a man: a solitary fisherman in a boat on a mountain lough and night falling, darkness in the hollows of the hills, and streaks of broken light on the dull water. The man and the boat were a mere silhouette, darkly outlined against the play of the water, the surrounding landscape vague in the thickening light. On first seeing this silent figure, an angler no longer fishing, he was moved as he had not been by anything else in the country. And he carried this image with him until he chanced on a more potent one: a grey heron fishing knee-deep in a stony moorland tarn, solitary, statuesque, timeless, signalling that a country has a life of its own, deeper, more mysterious even than the life of its people. Sensing that he had peeled off a further layer of the onion, he told himself that he had discovered not so much a paradigm of Ireland as a paradigm of life, of the dread and desperate loneliness at the heart of it. With a pang of recognition, he noted the faint lines that branched from the corners of Nora’s mouth, and he wondered if she dreaded the night.
They were driving between two rows of sad-looking, two-storey houses which he tried not to notice.
‘Run-down villages are the ugliest feature of Ireland, warts on the face of the landscape.’
‘I’ve lived most of my life in one,’ she said.
‘In England villages improve the countryside; they embody for most Englishmen an ideal of life. In fact their most implacable enemies are the townspeople who drive miles every Sunday to have tea and scones in them. I can’t imagine anyone driving even half a mile to have tea in one of these hungry straggles. They all look the same, a street with a row of faceless house on each side: a church, two shops, a petrol station, six pubs, and what you call a barracks. Now in England we ring the changes; we have ‘square’ villages as well as ‘street’ villages; villages built around a green where people once gathered to play cricket. It’s a simple layout, yet no one seems to have thought of it here.’
‘If you don’t like Irish villages, you’ll like those who live in them even less.’
‘Have you ever seen an English village?’
‘No. My six months in England were spent in London.’
‘That was a mistake. You didn’t see England.’
‘I saw the Serpentine, and I cried when I thought of the Lough of Silver. It was so artificial, so crowded with people heavy from Sunday lunch. It seemed to me that all the ugliness of humanity was there.’
Glancing at her serious profile, he realised that their conversation had taken a wrong turning. He did not wish to talk to her about the Serpentine but to walk with her along the shore of the Lough of Silver and show her perhaps the stillness of a heron. Better still, he would say nothing; he would allow her to reveal her Lough of Silver and perhaps discover something no guidebook could tell him.
‘To know the Lough of Silver it helps to have seen the Serpentine,’ he said apologetically. ‘It’s in opposites that we find ourselves.’
‘And it’s my fate to be taken to the pictures by men with a taste for sophistry.’
‘And who is the other sophist in your life, may I ask?’
‘Canon Loftus. Like you, he has the knack of making me feel positively simple-minded.’
Donegal Town had the air of a place that contrived to be at once
a town and a village. He parked in the Diamond and they had a drink in the permanent twilight of the lounge bar of the Central Hotel.
‘What film are we going to see?’ she asked, sipping her sherry too daintily, sipping it like a girl who would have preferred to drink it. She had twisted one foot round the leg of the table, which led him to believe that he had made her feel ill at ease. He wondered if his well-meant disquisition on Irish villages had been ill-judged.
‘Which film? I had meant to look it up but I forgot.’
‘You’ve gone native already. It’s what I would expect from an Irishman rather than an Englishman.’
‘You mustn’t expect me to be typical of anything. I came here merely to be myself.’
‘It’s difficult being yourself in a strange country. I know that for a fact,’ she said seriously.
‘Then perhaps you’ll feel able to instruct me.’
‘The first lesson is to say as little as possible, and let everyone else do the talking.’ She turned to him with a mysterious smile.
They strolled across to the Four Masters’ Cinema, pausing on the way to look at shop windows.
‘My God, it’s My Fair Lady,’ he said. ‘It follows me everywhere.’
‘I’ve always wanted to see it,’ she said enthusiastically.
‘I’ve seen it four times already because of girls like you and I’ve seen Pygmalion twice. Let’s have another drink in the Central instead.’
‘I want to see the film.’
‘Surely you don’t wish to spend a lovely evening like this in a stuffy flea pit. Come back to the Central and I’ll sing you “The Rain in Spain”, and I’ll do the Cockney better than they do it in the film.’
‘No thank you.’
‘Is there another cinema?’
‘No, there isn’t.’
They arrived in time for the main feature. He sat next to her in the darkened cinema wondering if he would pass through middle age as gracefully as Rex Harrison. He asked himself why it was that he was fated to meet girls whose tastes in theatre and cinema weren’t his. Margaret’s taste in books, theatre and cinema had defeated him utterly, yet he persisted for five whole years, hoping that finally they might ‘grow’ together, that their lives might somehow entwine like the branches of two contiguous trees. She was first to see the light; she was more decisive, more willing to wound, than he. The way she had left him still hurt, even in the darkness of a cinema and in spite of Nora Hession’s company and the pellucid beauty of Audrey Hepburn. It was his disquieting sense of failure, of personal defeat, that had driven him here.
‘We’ll have supper in the Central,’ he said when the film finally ended.
‘I don’t think I should. I’d be back too late. The stairs in the parochial house are old, and when they creak, they wake the Canon.’
‘I don’t see why we should allow the Canon to spoil our evening.’
‘He hasn’t spoilt our evening. At least he hasn’t spoilt mine. I’ll tell you what we’ll do: we’ll have fish and chips in Garron on the way back.’
‘Aren’t fish and chips a trifle sordid after the dream world of My Fair Lady?’
‘Not as they’re cooked in Garron. The fish will have come off the boats this evening still tasting of the sea.’
He did as he was told. They stopped in Garron and joined the queue in the fish and chip shop, which extended to the door.
‘I’m not so sure I’m going to enjoy this,’ he said, casting a fastidious eye on the noisy teenagers on each side.
‘We don’t have to eat here. We can eat in the car if you like.’
They drove round to the far side of the harbour and parked on the water’s edge. For a while they sat in silence, eating their fish and chips from a newspaper. Feeling somewhat put upon, he told himself that moonlight on water was the same everywhere.
‘To me there’s nothing more unlovely than a moon four days past the full,’ he said.
‘Why is that?’
‘It’s asymmetrical. It looks as if someone has clipped the top off it with a shears.’
‘Look at the water instead. It’s beautiful. The Canon always takes me here after the pictures. He was born in a fishing village. There’s nothing he likes better than boats.’
The lights of the town surrounded the small harbour. Looking at the water, you’d think there was another town beneath the waves. It seemed to him that he was living in a drowned city giving a refracted view of the mysterious life above. For a split second he glimpsed himself through Nora’s darkly discerning eyes.
‘Do you ever have fish and chips with the Canon?’ Waiting for her to reply, he watched the forest of masts on the other side of the harbour and a faint light in the wheelhouse of the nearest vessel.
‘We always have fish and chips here on the way back from Donegal. We sit in the car and look at the lights on the water.’
‘So our evening has been a replica of all the evenings you’ve been out with the Canon.’
‘Not exactly. Tonight the conversation is different, the feeling that time is passing more pronounced.’
‘What sort of man is the Canon? Is he as combative as he sounds in his sermons?’
‘He’s different when you get to know him. In his sermons he says women are the root of all evil, but he never goes on like that to women in real life. You might say he treats us all with wary cordiality.’
‘It’s a wise man who respects his enemy.’
‘I am convinced he sees me now and again as an enemy, or at least in league with the Enemy.’
‘Then why does he pay you to remain with him?’
‘He likes my cooking. He says I’m the first cook who’s ever been a temptation to him. Before he met me, he says, he ate only to live.’
He scrutinised her profile, trying to make out if she were being serious–always a problem in Ireland. Though her comments were never less than acute, there was a gleam of innocence in the way she expressed herself that gave her conversation the quality of originality.
‘What does he talk about when you’re with him?’
‘Like you, he asks me questions all the time. He’s a very holy man, though you’d never think it to look at him driving a tractor in his dungarees. He closes his eyes when they’re kissing on the screen. We have an unspoken understanding about that. I give him a nudge when it’s safe for him to look again.’
‘I wonder why he doesn’t want to watch kissing.’
‘I think I know,’ she said slowly. ‘He was a man of strong passions in his youth.’
Putting an arm round her, he drew her dark head onto his shoulder. Her hair was soft against his cheek, and the warm fragrance of her body mingled with the smell of fish and chips in the car. She raised her head to look at him. As he kissed her on the lips, something trickled on his cheek. He touched her face with his fingertips and realised that it was wet.
‘Do you always shed a tear when you’re kissed?’ he asked, giving her his handkerchief in puzzlement.
‘I cried the first time but that was ten years ago.’
‘Why did you cry just now?’
‘I think it was because of the Canon. It was so strange being kissed like that after fish and chips in Garron.’
They drove home without saying much, while Potter wondered why a mature woman should weep on being kissed. It had never happened to him before, and certainly not with Margaret. Was it because of her reluctance to venture out of her shell after six empty years of denial? Or was it because of the tenderness she sensed he felt for her in spite of his earlier frostiness? Perhaps she had seen the parochial house as a refuge from men who made her feel vulnerable. The Canon was a man and yet not a man. She could share his house, cooking and washing and ministering to his whims in safety, and he would never make a demand she could not meet. Now she was faced with a different beast, a stranger who would hold up a mirror to her face and perhaps surprise her into self-discovery.
As he talked to her, he was conscious of choosing his wor
ds with care; treading as cautiously as the bearer of a brimming cup that threatens to spill at the slightest stumble. He had become aware of a life of inviolable boundaries, more terrifying in its privacy that any he had previously encountered. Unwittingly, he had wandered into unchartered territory for which his relationship with Margaret had not prepared him. Now he realised how lacking in shadow had been his relationships with the other women he had known. It seemed to him that without shadow there could only be the blindness that comes from excess of light.
He stopped at the parochial house gate and pressed her hand.
‘I’ll make you flower, wait and see,’ he said. ‘From now on you will feel only the warmth of the sun.’
She laughed lightly at the foolishness of his self-confidence.
‘The sun is never warm here,’ she said. ‘Even on the finest day there’s a breeze from the sea.’
8
Roarty slept little in the fortnight after receiving the letter, and whenever he did sleep, it was only to be troubled by the same dream. He would find himself wandering in a dark landscape, his hands tied behind his back, his head of flowing hair thick at the roots with wriggling maggots that scurried over his scalp, burrowing under the skin, tapping on the hard bone of his skull. Unable to scratch his head, he would tell himself that what he had experienced was nothing compared with what was to come. What if the maggots were to tunnel through the bone and eat the very marrow of his skull, the brain pith that gave meaning to life and motion? His hands still tied, he would run wildly with the wind and put his head under a tumbling stream until the icy water flowed healingly round his ears. He would look out between his legs at an upside-down landscape and an upside-down cow at a pool below drinking floating maggots from his infested hair.
Looking out on Rannyweal from the west window, he wondered how long these terrifying nightmares would pursue him. Having ignored the bogmailer’s demand for payment, he now found that forgetting was not so easy. Forever there at the back of his mind was an opaque black cloud pressing down, forcing on him the knowledge that among the men who laughed at his jokes in the bar was one who...
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