In the Middle of the Fields

by Mary Lavin

  Andrew gave a laugh. ‘Not at all.’ But he must have seen she wasn’t satisfied. ‘Look here,’ he said, ‘there’s something I didn’t tell you. I was only told it myself in confidence.’

  ‘Oh, why tell me? It has nothing to do with me,’ she said coldly.

  ‘But I’d like to tell you. I wish I could.’ He frowned. ‘But it’s a bit of a responsibility having someone’s confidence in a matter that’s very intimate. I probably will tell you some time. Not now, though,’ he said, dismissing the topic. ‘There’s something else I want to talk about tonight, if you don’t mind?’ They had reached the bottom of Leeson Street and were walking slowly. ‘It’s about my weekends. I’d like your advice,’ he said gravely. ‘My brother was up in town this afternoon. My sister-in-law has been in bed again, and this time they had another doctor, not the local doctor, but one down from Dublin, a woman’s doctor.’

  ‘A gynaecologist, you mean,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ he said humbly, as if he knew that she found his approach to this topic irritatingly naive. ‘She has to stay in bed for several weeks. It’s too bad, really. That’s what I wanted to ask you about. Do you think it would be all right for me to continue to go down there?’

  Her first impulse was to urge him to go, but she hesitated, thinking that his embarrassment might come from something in his experience she didn’t understand. Then, overcome by a sudden impulse, she heard herself utter the most astonishing words. ‘Why don’t you come down to us for this weekend?’

  He stared at her in amazement.

  ‘Well, why not?’ she said. ‘You’d get away from Dublin, and it would give them a bit of privacy.’

  ‘Wouldn’t your people mind?’ he asked after a pause.

  ‘Oh, there’s only my father,’ she said offhandedly, ‘and he likes having people about.’

  Clearly, he himself didn’t come from gregarious stock. ‘Does your father shoot?’ he asked after another pause. She saw that the answer to this would be of great importance to him. ‘Only rabbits I’m afraid,’ she said smiling.

  But even rabbits seemed to put things on a better basis. ‘How would I get down?’ he said cautiously.

  ‘Oh, there are several buses,’ she said, trying to give an impression of carelessness, though it was of vital importance to her now that he come, if only to prove he had not thought the invitation outrageous. She felt like holding her breath, in case one breath might scare him away. But she couldn’t hold it forever. ‘I think there are plover in the fields,’ she said timidly.

  ‘Golden plover?’ he asked eagerly.

  ‘Are there different kinds?’

  ‘You don’t mean to say you don’t know the difference?’

  ‘Are they a bit like magpies?’ she asked cautiously.

  ‘Oh no, that’s green plover, the common sort! They’re easy enough to find in most places. They make quite good shooting, though,’ he added hastily, but she saw he was disappointed.

  ‘Last Sunday, I saw a pheasant,’ she said.

  ‘On your own land?’ he asked eagerly. ‘A hen?’

  ‘I think so. Yes, it was a hen, of course, the duller of the two, isn’t it?’

  ‘I should think so,’ he said. ‘You can’t mistake the male at this time of year. They get so daring coming up to the close season. You can see every feather, not just the mottle on the body but the ring of white feathers around the neck, and even the fiery rim of feathers about the eyes.’

  But she interrupted him. ‘They’re not feathers, that red rim about the eyes. Surely that’s skin or inflamed flesh?’

  He was so taken by surprise, he stared vacantly for a moment. ‘You’re right,’ he said then. ‘You’re absolutely right. But how did you know that?’

  ‘I’ve seen them in the poulterer’s,’ she said, so apologetically that he threw back his head and gave a loud laugh.

  ‘Well, will you come?’ she cried, quick on the laugh, taking him a bit off guard. ‘The bus gets to the gate about eight, but if I’m not there to meet you, it will still be light enough for you to make your way up to the house.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, I must,’ he said after a minute, and she knew he had capitulated.

  ‘Well, I’ll see you then,’ she said, to show it was settled, although she hoped to see him again before then.

  When several evenings passed and she did not see him, she got uneasy. On Thursday evening, she felt certain he’d be in the library, but as she went up the library steps she saw, not him, but that girl Olive! Immediately she was unhappy, although she went into the library and tried to forget her. When a short time afterwards, however, Andrew came in, she knew at once that something was wrong. He looked around the room and came straight to her desk.

  ‘Must you study tonight?’ he asked abruptly. ‘I’d like to talk to you about the weekend.’

  ‘You’re not coming?’

  ‘How did you know?’ he asked in surprise.

  She got up, and they went out together.

  ‘I was coming,’ he said as they went down the stairs.

  ‘I know! Till you met that girl!’ she cried. ‘I saw her on the steps when I was coming in.’

  He looked unhappy. ‘She didn’t say anything, she was just surprised,’ he said. ‘She hadn’t realised we knew each other so well.’

  ‘And what did you say?’

  ‘I told her the truth,’ he said simply. ‘I said we didn’t know each other well at all, but that you lived in the country and knew I’d be glad of a chance to get out of Dublin.’

  ‘What did she say to that?’

  ‘She only shrugged her shoulders and walked away. She’s like that. She wanted to talk to me about something and I suppose she was disappointed. She’d begun to count on being able to confide in me.’

  Vera pondered this for a minute. ‘Are you sure she isn’t interested in you?’ she said then, very slowly and carefully.

  ‘Not in the least,’ he said stoutly. ‘Do you remember I said there was something about her I hadn’t told you? Well, I’m going to tell you now. I feel differently about it since she interfered in my affairs. She’s married. She’s married to that fellow I saw her with in London. They were married even then, but I didn’t know it!’

  ‘I don’t understand.’

  ‘They don’t live with each other, by the way. There’s some reason, his mother doesn’t know about the marriage, or something like that, but that’s not the real reason. They have some awful effect on each other, she says. The minute they’re together, they quarrel. It’s happening all the time, and yet when they’re apart they’re miserable too. She says it’s like a curse on them, whatever she means by that.’ An unhappy look came over his own face at the thought of it. ‘What do you make of it?’ he asked. ‘I wanted to tell you ever since I met you. I wanted to talk it over with you, and see what you’d say. What do you make of it?’

  ‘I told you I just don’t understand.’

  ‘Nor me!’ he said.

  ‘Well, then!’ she cried suddenly. ‘If we can’t understand them, how could she possibly understand us? I don’t think she should have said anything to you, about me, I mean.’

  ‘Neither do I!’ he said firmly, but he was still troubled about something. ‘Apart from that, though, perhaps I ought not to go home with you tomorrow anyway, for other reasons. I’ve been seeing a lot of you. For a person of my disposition, I mean,’ he added when she raised her eyebrows. ‘You see. I’ve never enjoyed talking to anyone as much as I’ve enjoyed talking to you, or not for years. Not since I used to go out with my brother all day long on the bog.’

  ‘Is that the brother who’s married now?’

  ‘No – a younger brother. He died.’

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry,’ she murmured.

  ‘It’s all right. I don’t min
d now. I’ve got over it. I was only explaining that being with you was the nearest thing I’ve ever known to being with him. But I suppose I’ve been foolish, and there is a difference. This friendship might easily turn into something else.’

  ‘And what harm if it did?’ she said boldly.

  ‘Oh, but we wouldn’t want that to happen, would we?’ he said with great concern. ‘It would spoil everything.’ He looked genuinely distressed. ‘You wouldn’t want it, would you?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she said prudently. ‘But if it did turn into something else, I don’t see how it could matter, as long as we both felt the same way about it, as we do about the way we feel now.’

  He was listening very carefully. ‘I suppose so,’ he said. ‘I’m certain we’d never feel differently about anything. I can’t imagine us ever disagreeing,’ he said confidently.

  ‘Even about Dublin?’ she said pertly.

  He laughed at that.

  ‘Well, then, why worry?’ she said.

  ‘You mean I ought to go down to your place as we arranged?’ he said.

  ‘I do,’ she said decisively.

  ‘And I will,’ he said, equally strongly, and so loudly that a lady in the street stared in disapproval. ‘After all, tomorrow may never come.’

  ‘That’s true,’ she said, but a small guilty feeling stole into her heart, as if somehow she had taken advantage of him. Because she had felt that not only would tomorrow come but other tomorrows, and that one day they’d get married. And the responsibility would be hers. It rested with her at that very moment.

  He, however, was concerned only with the weekend. ‘Well, is it settled?’ he asked. And when she nodded, he smiled. ‘Aren’t we lucky? That we can talk over things, even an awkward matter like that, and not—’

  ‘I know,’ she nodded, without letting him finish.

  ‘How is it Olive and Convery are so different from us,’ he said.

  ‘It’s the kind of people they are, I suppose,’ she said cautiously ‘We’ve kept ourselves free of each other, and that will give us a right of choice in the future.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ he said, and he looked very sagacious. ‘They let themselves be caught up blindly in some sort of …’

  ‘Almost its prey,’ she suggested.

  ‘Yes, yes!’ he said. ‘They put themselves at the mercy of some force outside themselves, I’d say.’ They walked on silently for a little way. ‘That’s it!’ he said with satisfaction, and then he looked at his watch. ‘Look here, it’s early yet, couldn’t we have a cup of coffee before I see you home?’

  ‘That would be nice,’ she said. They turned back towards the city. But she was still thinking of the others. ‘It must be awful for them,’ she said.

  ‘Simply awful,’ he said, measuring his step carefully to hers. ‘I often think about them, about him in particular. It must be terrible to have made a mess of things like that at the beginning of your life. How can he hope to make a success of his profession with all that strain and tension in his private life.’

  ‘It must be anguish for them,’ she said, out loud. But as she said the word, its meaning, which she would have thought immutable, began to change and take on strange inflections that were not all of pain. There seemed even to be implications in it of something like exultation. And again she felt a strange sense of guilt towards him. She glanced at him. I’ll never make him suffer, she vowed to herself.

  But it was absurd. Had he not said himself that they were a lucky pair?

  Heart of Gold

  ‘That,’ said Lucy, ‘that is something I cannot remember.’ She knew they would not believe her, but she didn’t care.

  ‘Was it the first night he came back to see you?’

  Lucy only smiled enigmatically. What they all wanted to know, specially her nieces and nephews, was when exactly Sam had proposed to her. That it was scandalously soon after Sam’s first wife died – poor Mona – they already knew. The whole town knew for that matter. Tongues had begun to wag within minutes of his stepping out of the Dublin train and everyone had guessed he had come back to her after all the years. A lot of people maintained he would, but nobody dreamt he’d come so soon, and Lucy sensed disapproval in some quarters.

  Dear Sam. Lucy couldn’t understand why people didn’t give him credit for so faithful a heart. Only the young had seen his love in its true light and responded to the romance of it. And that was why she would not have minded them knowing, the young people, knowing that Sam had indeed declared his intentions on that first night of all, that he had hardly stepped inside the door when he had broached marriage. But she couldn’t tell them, dearly as she would like to have done because of course she had Sam’s character to consider. And, as well as that a certain respect had to be shown towards the dead. Although, mind you, Lucy told herself, her own sisters had not shown much respect. The very day Mona died, Louise and Bay, the only two of the family who lived in the town, had come running down the street screeching like oracles.

  She was in the yard at the back of the house, which Louise and Bay still called the garden, although the real garden had long gone to glory. A large portion of it at the end, most of it indeed, had been compulsorily acquired by the town council when they were widening the main street which was behind their house. All Lucy had for a garden were some plants in tubs, but they in no time at all flourished and spread like wildfire until in no time at all they had covered up every unsightly thing in the place, the tin roof of the fuel shed, the walls to either side and above all the cast-off rubbish of two generations.

  ‘I’m out here in the back-yard,’ she said when she heard them calling her name. They ran out to her, yes, ran. She hadn’t seen either of them run in years.

  ‘Lucy! Did you hear!’ they cried. ‘Sam’s wife is dead.’

  ‘Oh, no!’ she said, and she sank back against a bushy mass of jasmine. Like a living creature, it gave way at the shock of her weight, then braced to take it. ‘Not Mona Hendron?’ A minute too late, she realised she had used Mona’s maiden name.

  Louise didn’t miss the significance of that. ‘Take care!’ she said. ‘You may find him at the door one of these days to see if you’ll have him back.’

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Louise,’ Lucy said, taking this for a compliment and feeling it should be disclaimed.

  But Louise had not meant it for a compliment. ‘He’d be just the kind of old fool to do something like that,’ she said. ‘Why didn’t you marry him, anyway when he was young? You never really told us.’

  Lucy bridled. ‘Why didn’t I marry any of them if it goes to that?’ she said coldly. ‘He wasn’t the only pebble on the beach.’ It was a well enough established fact, and Louise and Bay had no business to forget it, that her beaux had been legion. Even those who had not known her in the old days had only to look at her now to believe in her legend. Louise and Bay seemed to forget how sought after she had been. Even now they were implying that Sam had been the only real string to her bow, she who went everywhere with a crowd of admirers circling around her.

  Not that she ever took joy in her nimbus. She was forever shooing men away like wasps. But it only made them pester her all the more. At dances she was continually being waylaid behind some potted palm or Chinese screen. It got very tiresome, a fact that Louise and Bay never believed. They rarely gave her any sympathy, even after they were married themselves and when she – now she could face it – when she had been left behind by the tide. The fact was that Sam was the only one she might have married, because only with him did she feel friendly and at ease. Indeed, they were very modern in the way they took things for granted about each other. The trouble was that they sometimes took the wrong things for granted. Or Sam did. He assumed that she’d never marry him. He never asked her reason.

  It was Sam she told about her first and premature proposal at six
teen. They were coming home from school with their satchels on their backs when she told him. He nearly doubled up with laughing. They had to put down their satchels till they got their breath back, they laughed so much. In the years that followed, Sam was a party to many a laugh of the same sort. He was almost as quick as herself to spot when some poor fellow was about to fall for her, some newcomer to the town, a bank clerk, or a solicitor’s apprentice, or maybe just a visitor in the hotel. ‘Poor fellow!’ he’d say. ‘Poor fellow. Another case of Lucyitis!’ He was never mistaken about these prospective suitors, only about the outcome of their suit. ‘Take care, Lucy,’ he’d say each time. ‘This one will sweep you off your feet.’ He never learned to take her treatment of one as an indication of how she’d treat the next. And when at last it became clear that she gave them all short shrift, Sam being timid and humble, took it as a guarantee, that he had no chance at all.

  Then when he was the last man on the scene and she had reached her thirtieth year, he surprised her one evening. ‘What are you waiting for anyway, Lucy?’ he asked out of the blue.

  ‘For you, Sam,’ she said promptly.

  ‘Don’t joke with me,’ he said soberly. ‘I know I have no hope.’

  ‘You have as good a chance as anyone,’ she said. And then, cautiously, she decided to give him a hint of certain misgivings. ‘Matrimony doesn’t appeal to me,’ she said, ‘much less maternity.’ For a minute she thought she had uncovered her fears of childbirth, but she hadn’t really disclosed anything, and so he didn’t believe her.

  He’d bent his head. ‘I envy fellows that are married,’ he said.

  It was the first time she’d realised that, living alone in a room in the Central Hotel, he might well long for a home of his own, but she was impatient with him for not seeing what it was that held her back.

  ‘Why are you single so?’ she’d cried.

  ‘Because of you, Lucy,’ he said. ‘I’d stay single forever if I could be sure you would. But you might walk off one day and leave me in the lurch.’

  ‘I’d never do that,’ she’d said. ‘We might be an old Darby and Joan yet. I wouldn’t mind that at all.’ Then, thinking she’d been very meaningful, she ran off, laughing and happy. Next time, she thought, she’d give him a broader hint.