In the Middle of the Fields

by Mary Lavin

  She knew what he’d feared. But that was all she knew. The word ‘blockage’, so familiar, so domestic a word, had up to that moment reassured her. But was it a euphemism for what he feared? She grew rigid. If so he must not know. Then, at the thought that she might not have been there to protect him her breath caught. Others in her place would have cared for him and been kind. Lily had already shown amazing devotion. But who besides herself could protect him from a word? It was little things like this that Alan had never understood.

  Her face must have given her thoughts away because the glare had appeared again in her father’s eyes. ‘When is that fellow going?’ he asked suddenly.

  Was it possible he did not know? ‘He’s gone, Father,’ she said. She was so eager to reassure him she made it sound as if Alan’s going was something joyous. ‘That’s where I was last night, seeing him off at the boat.’

  If he was relieved he was too clever to show it. Instead he shifted his position. ‘I knew he was no good,’ he said.

  Sick as he was, she could not stand for that. ‘You know why he went!’ she said. And she had the satisfaction of seeing his eyes falter.

  ‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ he said humbly enough. ‘You’ve been a good daughter to me, Vera, always.’ Their eyes met then, and met with love. ‘You won’t regret it,’ he said.

  Immediately her heart filled with warmth for him until, like when she was a child, it was brimful with love. Reaching out she put her hand on his, and weakly he raised his other hand and placed it over hers again. It was like piling love on love. It reminded her of a game they used to play when she was a child. ‘Do you remember playing Hot Hands Father?’

  He nodded, and tears came into his eyes. But they were happy tears, and after a few minutes his lids closed as if he might sleep. Gently she drew her hand away.

  What miracles of love he had performed when she was a child. He had made it seem that to be motherless was to be privileged. When he called for her after school his spare male figure stood out among the floppy mothers and set her, too, apart. A plain child, his love gave her sparkle. But as the years went by, his care and caution were sometimes excessive and set too high a price upon her company. Oftener and oftener her classmates left her out of their pranks and their larking. Then, if her father found out, he’d spring up, his black eyes flashing. ‘Never mind,’ he’d cry. ‘I’ll take you.’ And as if by magic he’d always find where the others had gone.

  There was one winter when the lake behind the school-house froze over, and a party was hastily organised. As usual she was not included, but he saw the others going skating past the house and he sprang up as if to a challenge. ‘We’ll show them,’ he cried. ‘Wait.’ And he dashed upstairs to an old leather chest that stood, always locked on the landing. She’d never seen it opened. Its contents were as unknown to her as his life before she’d been born into it, yet she was hardly surprised when he drew out an ancient pair of skates. Within a minute they were at the lakeside, where they found her classmates gathered, timidly trying out the ice, venturing a little way out across it and holding up one foot, they slid along as far as their own momentum carried them. Her father pushed his way to the edge of the ice, put on the skates, and with a laugh, sped away like a bird. Out into the middle of the lake he went, and for the next few minutes he held all eyes with the capers he cut. Then, taking wing again, he came back to the shore. ‘Get down on your hunkers,’ he ordered her, and bending he tied her feet together with her own shoe-laces, and taking a piece of rope from his pocket he tied one end around her middle and the other around his own. In the blink of an eye he was flying over the ice again, only this time it was on her all eyes were centred as she swayed to and fro behind him, in a kind of splendid redundance, like a tassel on the end of a gorgeous cord, or the tuft on the tail of a lion.

  The next day the lake had cracked like glass and everyone said they could have been drowned, both of them. Her father only laughed. ‘What matter, we’d have gone together,’ he said.

  She stared in amazement. Ordinarily he was obsessed for her safety. In the evenings after he’d heard her tables and her catechism, he used to put her through a catechism of his own. ‘What would you do if you were chased by a bull?’

  ‘Take off my coat and throw it over his horns.’

  ‘If your clothes caught fire?’

  ‘Roll on the ground.’

  ‘If you were out in a thunderstorm?’

  ‘Lie flat.’

  ‘If you got lost?’

  ‘Stand still in one spot.’

  His litany, however, could not make provision for everything. Once she nearly broke her neck, when she was climbing on the roof of a shed and her foot slipped. Except that he was in the yard, and quick enough to reach out and catch her, she would have been killed. It was the first time she saw him in a rage. Marching her ahead of him into the house and up the stairs to the landing, he unlocked the leather chest. This time he took out a small revolver wrapped in a length of black calico. ‘Do you see this?’ he asked. ‘Well, if anything happened to you, do you know what I’d do?’ He put the barrel to his head and pulled the trigger. The sound of the empty clack was the most terrifying sound she had ever heard. But he’d gone too far. He had shown her more than her value: he had shown her where it lay – in his own eyes. From that hour her confidence diminished. Shy and distant always, she became more so. And when she was of an age to go to dances she got very few invitations. However, her father was eager to escort her himself.

  ‘It’s a good thing your old father can still pick up his heels,’ he’d say. Often he had the lightest foot on the floor! But one day she found him appraising her. ‘You’d have been better-looking if you‘d taken after your mother,’ he said. ‘But never mind. You may be better off in the long run. I’d never have got anywhere if I didn’t learn to stand alone.’ It was the first time he’d ever spoken of her mother and she was so surprised she didn’t at once take in the fact that he was speaking of her own single state as if it were final. She was only twenty-three or twenty-four at the time. But over the next few years he made similar remarks and those habits of speech began to harden into an attitude. ‘What will you do the day I’m taken from you?’ he asked once, shortly after her thirtieth birthday, but they laughed at the thought of a thing so remote. He threw back his head. ‘Nature takes care of everything,’ he cried. ‘Let’s hope you’ll have me as long as you need me.’

  Ironically it was that year she met Alan. They met in a public library in Dublin. She’d already seen him a few times when one day they arrived together at the library door a few minutes before it was opened. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ he said. ‘I always notice people who are alone. I find myself wondering if, like me, they dislike their fellow men.’ She laughed but he reproved her. ‘I’m serious,’ he said. ‘I hate the common herd.’

  After that, whenever they met, they exchanged a few words, and if they were leaving at the same time he saw her to her car. Once or twice when she hadn’t the car he walked to the bus with her. He was a solicitor attached to an office in Dublin. He was interested to learn that she lived in the country. ‘I should have known,’ he said. ‘It accounts for a certain difference about you.’ From him that was a great compliment. Another day he said something still more preposterously flattering. ‘If I were not so set against marriage,’ he said, ‘you’re the kind of girl I’d marry.’

  It was like a declaration. Her happiness was so great she hardly cared that when she told her father his responses were, to say the least of it, tepid.

  ‘Wait till you meet him, Father,’ she said.

  The meeting was a failure. To begin with her father made bones about giving her the car to fetch him from the bus at Ross Cross. He turned on her savagely, when she asked for the keys. ‘I’ll drive you over,’ he said. ‘But why hasn’t he got a car of his own? He must be a poor kind of solicitor.’<
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  ‘There’s no need of a car in a city practice, Father,’ she said, trying to bolster things up.

  Her father looked up at the sky.

  ‘Can’t he walk then?’ he asked. ‘It’s a nice fine day. Is there something the matter with him?’ But he threw the car-keys at her.

  ‘Be nice to him, Father, for my sake,’ she pleaded before she drove away.

  And when they arrived back he was civil enough. The trouble was that Alan didn’t take to him. And her father saw that. ‘I can see why you need the car,’ he muttered. ‘He’s a delicate-looking article.’

  ‘Oh, what a cruel thing to say!’ she cried. ‘About a stranger too.’

  His eyes bored into her. ‘Is that all he is?’ he said. ‘If you take my advice you’ll keep him that way. I pity the woman that’ll marry him. He’ll die young and leave her with a houseful of brats.’

  ‘Don’t worry, Father,’ she said. ‘After today I don’t expect I’ll see him again.’

  But she did, and more often than ever. Alan came down again and again, doggedly ignoring her father’s rudeness. ‘Don’t think I’m thick-skinned, Vera,’ he said one afternoon, ‘but I will not let him, or anyone, interfere in my life.’ It was another of those oblique remarks that she took to presage happiness.

  Obliquity was in the air though, and her father too seemed to become obscure. One day he spoke of her mother again. ‘If she hadn’t married me, she’d be alive today.’ he said morosely.

  He’d never told her the cause of her mother’s death, but she knew it had happened shortly after her own birth, and was probably connected with it. Aware therefore of a strong undertow in the conversation, she picked her own words with care. ‘She made her choice, didn’t she?’

  ‘Don’t talk like a fool,’ he said.

  At that she lost her temper. ‘Oh, what’s the matter with you?’ she cried. ‘Do you want to stop me marrying?’

  He evaded her eyes. ‘I don’t see any signs of that happening,’ he said. ‘The fellow is no more bent on marriage than I am.’

  ‘Is it Alan?’ His words had stupefied her.

  ‘Has he asked you to marry him?’ he demanded.

  She stared.

  If never explicit of promise, all Alan’s words had seemed to hold promise. They could not have been uttered by any man who did not feel himself deeply committed. Yet on them in that instant a huge doubt was cast.

  ‘Well?’ her father insisted. ‘Has he?’

  ‘I don’t see why I should tell you. It’s my own business,’ she said childishly, and she trembled at the thought of the anger her words would provoke. When he said nothing at all and she was compelled at last to look at him however she saw with a shock that the rage in his eyes was a rage of pity. Suddenly she realised his dilemma. For the first time he’d come up against something he could not get for her, something that if it was to be got at all, could be got only by her. ‘Don’t worry, Father,’ she said. ‘It’ll work out all right in the end. You’ll see.’

  From that day there was a change in her father’s attitude. ‘Is that fellow worried about money, do you think?’ he asked one day. ‘I never see his name in the papers. He mustn’t do much court work. Of course,’ he said meditatively, ‘small court cases don’t pay well. It’s sales and conveyances that pay. It’s on them the big solicitors make their money.’ It was almost comical to see the interest he began to take in the legal columns of the newspapers. ‘How much commission do you think he’d get on the conveyancing of a good farm, say a farm about this size?’

  Unnerved by his question, she looked at him coldly. ‘Why?’ she asked. ‘Are you going to sell?’

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘but I might buy. And if I did I could give him the carriage of sale.’

  Her heart softened. ‘Oh, Father, you don’t want any more responsibility at your age.’

  ‘Land is a safe investment at any time,’ he said soberly.

  And the next time Alan came down her father was very affable. ‘Tell me,’ he said to him, ‘there’s an out-farm at Ross Cross I was thinking of buying. Are you any judge of land?’

  ‘But haven’t you enough land, sir?’ Alan said, and it seemed to Vera that he looked oddly at them both.

  But her father noticed nothing. ‘Oh, you can never have too much of a good thing,’ he said recklessly. ‘It’s not a big farm, mind you. It’s only forty acres. It mightn’t be worth your while having anything to do with it.’

  ‘Oh well, one must creep before one walks,’ Alan said quietly. ‘I’d be glad to act for you, sir.’ He’d got the point.

  ‘Well said!’ her father cried, slapping his thigh in delight. His good humour was doubled. ‘Come down one day next week and we’ll walk the land.’ Behind Alan’s back he winked at Vera.

  When the day came for them to look at the land though, her father was moody and irritable. ‘This fellow can’t have much to do if he can waste a whole day coming down here,’ he said as they drove to the bus to meet him.

  ‘He’s coming down on business, isn’t he?’ Vera said hotly.

  ‘He’d want to be hard-up to call this business,’ her father snapped ‘It’s not surprising he has no car.’

  She let the taunt pass because she had just been thinking that if Alan did have a car they could live down here and be near her father. Would that be at the back of her father’s mind too? Then she saw the bus coming down the hill.

  ‘Here it is!’ she cried, scrambling out of the car, expecting him to follow. She could see Alan standing on the step of the bus, and she ran to meet him.

  But Alan was not looking at her. ‘Where’s your father?’ he asked.

  She looked around. Her father was still sitting in the car, black and silent, looking twice his bulk.

  ‘There’s something wrong,’ she cried, and she ran back. Meeting the bus was a pastime with her father. Always ahead of time, usually far too early, he’d prance up and down the road, denouncing the bus for being late. At no time else did one get such a sense of his leashed energy. ‘What could be the matter? Oh hurry, Alan!’ she cried. But before they’d reached him he’d got stiffly out. Out on the road he looked normal enough except that there was something unpleasant about the way he dispensed with greeting Alan. And with a surly look he went ahead of them till they came to a lane, into which he turned without a word. Looking doubtfully at each other, Vera and Alan followed.

  The lane was long. As they walked up it Alan chatted casually about the weather and the countryside. Her father’s black mood appeared to be lifting. Then, as they were about to climb over the locked gate that led into the farm, his face darkened again and he pointed to Alan’s feet. ‘What kind of shoes are those for going through fields?’ he demanded. Alan said nothing. He just got over the gate and plunged into the long grass in his light shoes. After a short pause, her father too got over the gate. But on the other side he immediately turned up the collar of his coat, and shoved his hands into his pockets as if to imply that he had little interest in what was going on. And when they were scarcely half-way across the first field he came to a stand. ‘Well? What do you think of it?’ he asked, turning to Alan.

  ‘I haven’t seen enough of it to form any opinion,’ said Alan coldly and began to walk on.

  Her father didn’t stir. ‘I’ve seen enough,’ he said. ‘It doesn’t take me long to make up my mind.’

  ‘What are we to understand by that?’ asked Alan. ‘That it’s good, or that it’s bad?’

  ‘There’s no such thing as bad land hereabouts,’ her father said, ‘but there are other things to be considered.’

  Miserably Vera looked at him. She could not bear the strain of waiting for Alan to speak. ‘There’s no house on it for one thing,’ she said, not caring if she blundered.

  Both men stared at her, her father with a glance that app
lauded, Alan with one she could not read. ‘Does that matter?’ Alan asked. It was to her father he spoke, not her. ‘What is the need for a house on an out-farm?’ His voice was so disengaged that Vera shivered. As for her father, he turned on his heel and walked back towards the gate.

  An appalling feeling of humiliation came over Vera. She would have stumbled after her father if Alan had not laid his hand on her arm. ‘Let me handle this, Vera,’ he said curtly. ‘I must do things in my own way, not in his.’ Yet the expression on his face as he looked after her father was one of compassion. ‘I’m sorry for him,’ he said. ‘I know how he feels.’ He turned back to her. ‘But there are times when a person must put himself first. Will I be able to make you see that though?’

  She was too worried to extract any sweetness from what his question implied. ‘We must be kind to him, Alan,’ she said.

  He nodded. ‘I suppose there’s no use in us all being unhappy,’ he said.

  By then her father had reached the gate, climbed over it and got into the car. ‘Is he going to drive off without us?’ Vera cried.

  ‘Let him if he likes,’ said Alan. ‘We can walk. Sooner or later we’ll have to have things out with him.’

  ‘Oh later then, later!’ she said, and she ran after her father, but the coarse grass entangled her feet and impeded her at every step. All the same the car was still on the road when they reached it. Her father, however, was sitting in the back seat.

  ‘Don’t you want to drive, Father?’ she asked, surprised. He turned his head away and did not reply.

  The drive home was accomplished in heavy silence. And at the house things were no better. Her father seemed unable to stay in the same room with them. He kept going in and out. And when Lily put a meal on the table he stood up from it three or four times without explanation or apology. And his absence was as oppressive as his presence. ‘Is my stove lit?’ he demanded at last, meaning the stove in the small room off the kitchen which he called his office. And although it was not lit, stubbornly he went down there. It was a dark little hole of a place, ell-shaped, its one window high-sashed and barred, and all afternoon Vera kept thinking of him sitting there in the cold with one leg crossed over the other, swinging his foot angrily back and forth like an angry cat swinging its tail. She could not keep her mind on anything that Alan said.