‘Call these breasts?’ John said, ‘You should have seen the woman I had in Brittany – Bertha the Bosomy.’
‘Big were they?’
‘Big? My dear Loon, they were pillows, waves of pearly foam breaking into headlands of coral. Compared to Bertha’s these are acorns.’
‘What are you doing that to them for, then?’
‘If there’s nothing else one has to make do with acorns.’
Or: ‘Did I tell you about Anita the Athletic, what I had on crusade?’
‘Tell me about Anita the Athletic.’
‘Madly in love with her, I was. Still am. Breasts like mosques. Together we swung from minaret to minaret, humping to the seductive call of the muezzin.’
‘Sounds tiring. What’s a muezzin?’
‘Something like a camel, and you wash your mouth out with soap. People who belittle Anita the Athletic have to pay the price.’
She paid it.
She was so grateful to him for making sex funny, she could have cried. The jokes severed any connection between the nightmare act at Kildare and this amiable, magical, liquid coupling that took her into a dimension she hadn’t even dreamed could exist, where stars intermingled with skin textures.
There had undoubtedly been a lot of other woman and, equally undoubtedly, he had told them he loved them. It didn’t bother her. It might have done if he’d put her in the same category by saying that he loved her, but he never did. Laughing her into bed was a protection for both of them. Once, after a climax, he still kept her clutched to him.
‘What’s the matter?’
‘Damn you, you bloody woman.’
He wasn’t joking; it was the nicest thing anybody had ever said to her.
* * *
Eventually they were both so hungry that fetching supplies became a necessity. Even so, they sat for an hour in the sun on the island’s tiny beach, burbling, before they could bear to break the spiral.
‘I’ll go. It’ll give me a chance to dally with Almaith the Amorous; she’s been beckoning to me every night when your back’s turned.’
‘Does Niall know that?’
‘Certainly not. It’s a secret between us. I’m the only man who can satisfy her voracious appetite.’
‘All right, you go. My lover on the other side of the lake has been waiting for the chance to swim over.’
‘More fool him. What’s that dirty little grebe doing to that lady grebe?’
‘Same as you were doing most of last night.’
‘Filthy little beast.’
It was high summer, a day to begrudge wearing clothes. The water was so still that she could see a brown trout resting in the shade of a rock as clearly as if it had been in the same element as herself. The replete sound of wood pigeons cooed from the trees on the hills and dragonflies shimmered over the rushes.
‘Let’s both go.’
As they clambered up onto the holm of the inlet leading to Almaith’s house, Finn knew it had been a mistake to come back to civilisation. There were people about and her conscience was stricken to remember that there were Partraige families still grieving for a pile of stones left at Ardee. ‘You go,’ she said, ‘and while you’re dallying remember to ask Almaith for fresh bread, and some bacon if she’ll trade it for trout – oh, and some cabbage.’
‘What am I, a bloody housewife?’
‘I can’t go, Pilgrim. I’ll get drawn in, or they’ll separate us somehow. Please.’
It was ridiculous, he thought, that he had the same feeling as when she’d been mad and he’d left her at the convent overnight and had worried until he got her back; he should be getting free of her by now. ‘God save me from loony women,’ he said, and strode off. He flustered poor Almaith into giving him the supplies quickly, and was returning to the pier within half an hour. The sense of menace dissipated as he saw that she was still there, sitting in the sun with her back to him, her bare feet dangling in the water. She had been talking to her cousin, Nessa, who was walking away from her along the holm and coming towards him. A dull man, but he supposed he could afford to give him a minute or so’s chat.
‘How’s trade, Nessa?’
They stood under the trees to talk. Nessa’s jaw muscles moved fascinatingly as he droned on about his success with the hides at Dublin, and what a bad season the eastern side of Ireland was having. ‘I have just been telling my cousin some news to her advantage which I learned there. Doubtless she will tell you of it.’ Nessa disapproved of their liaison on Swan Island, he could tell; well, he disapproved of it himself, if it came to that. Sooner rather than later, he’d have to get back and report to Fitzempress. He’d take her with him, put her in the context of the real world and see if he’d be free of her then.
‘…somethingsomethingsomething Bristol,’ intoned Nessa.
‘Ah, Bristol,’ said Sir John, ‘Earnest little town, definite lack of dancing girls. You like it, do you? Well, better be getting on.’
But Nessa refused to let him go and expounded at length on Bristol and its trade.
Finn had listened reluctantly to what Nessa had to tell her; it would reconnect her to the real world’s time and give her decisions that she didn’t want to make, apart from the fact that thinking about it made her sick. But he was inevitable and she was forced to hear him. As he left, she kept on staring down into the water where weed flowed backward in the almost imperceptible movement of the lake and then pointed forward in branches like parallel roads which never met.
She heard with relief the familiar voice challenge Nessa and sat there listening without turning round, enjoying her lover’s awareness of her as he was forced to make small-talk. Their conversation came to her, slightly echoing on the heavy summer air. ‘Bristol…’ she heard him say, and grinned because he was getting impatient, ‘…definite lack of dancing girls.’
Somewhere else, somebody else had said that. In the same voice and he was saying it on another warm, scented morning. In a garden. Eleanor of Aquitaine’s garden. ‘Definite lack of dancing girls,’ the voice she knew was saying, and there had been two of them.
Desperately, she turned round and looked at him afresh with Boniface’s eyes. He was the shorter one, with mousey-coloured hair, the one who wasn’t quite as good-looking as the other. They’d both bowed to the nun who sat anonymously on the garden bench. Now he winked at her. Quickly she went back to staring at the water.
She couldn’t remember exactly what else they’d said but Boniface had been left in no doubt that they were going to Ireland as spies for Fitzempress. She could fool herself by pretending that she didn’t remember, but she couldn’t fool the clear-minded, unloving, unloved Boniface. He was a spy. It made sense of his being here at all, a fact that she’d accepted because it had suited her and the Partraige hadn’t questioned because they were too hospitable.
Boniface’s ideals had been affronted by Fitzempress’ underhandedness, but Boniface hadn’t really cared, being the citizen of a concept, not a country. It was Finn who cared now that she belonged to Ireland; not Dermot’s Ireland or the Ireland where women were raped, as they were raped everywhere else, but the Ireland of a lake and an easy-going freedom so sure of itself and so deep-rooted that it could allow some of it to spill over to its women. Fitzempress came into her mind clearly with his genius and his energy and his administration, able to pick up this lazy country of hers any time he wanted and attach it to his modern empire, imposing his own law on it so that it became indistinguishable from anywhere else.
Fitzempress’ Common Law treated women like chattels while providing justice for everyone else. Women married who they were told to marry under Fitzempress’ Law. It would not allow Blat to divorce Niall because he was unkind to her. It might suit other countries, but not her Ireland. It would wipe out all the eccentricities and kindnesses. Scathagh would have no place in Fitzempress’ Ireland, nor would Blat and nor, for that matter, would there be any feudal position for Niall of the Poems. Everybody in their place was how it would b
e, every blade of grass owned by somebody, no liberal sharing of the salmon and the wild garlic, no quick sweeping of every stream.
She saw quite clearly the potential for her country if it could only think of itself as a country and not a collection of inimical states. If there was one king of Ireland (as long as it wasn’t Dermot), if it could cohere, it could leap ahead of the modernity of Fitzempress to an even newer and better civilisation where women were recognised as partners…
In that moment she took on the king of the most powerful empire in the world as her enemy. Dermot became a side issue; she would rid Ireland of Dermot because he wasn’t fit to live in it, but if Fitzempress put his clever, interfering fingers on her country, she would fight him.
She looked at her bare toes in the water. ‘I’ll give him spies,’ she said.
The complicating factor was her love for one of them. It was a complication that made her so vulnerable that if even now he said: ‘Look, I’m a spy for my country, but what do countries matter to such as you and me?’ she was terrified that she might reply: ‘Nothing,’ and chuck Ireland overboard like a cherrystone. She resented being that much in love. But he hadn’t said it and wasn’t saying it now. As he took the oars of the curragh to row back to the island, he was just concentrating on being funny at Nessa’s expense.
She watched his face as he rowed, which he did with self-conscious care because he knew she could do it better. It wasn’t the best-looking face in the world, and she hadn’t improved it when she’d caused the scar along its cheek – a fact he pointed out every time he shaved. But it was nice; people took to it because it was confident and amusing and open. And behind its openness was a closed compartment of calculation.
How could he look out on Ireland, and on her, for God’s sake, from those honest Norman eyes, all the while weighing up strength and weaknesses as if they were pieces on a chess board? She felt sick. She had been tricked. The understanding she had thought to exist between their bodies and minds had been an illusion.
If he was going to put his country first, then she must do the same. But first she’d give him a chance, because she loved him so much.
As they carried the provisions out of the boat, he said: ‘Should we eat first, or should we…?’
‘Eat,’ she said, ‘I want to tell you something.’
She raked off the turves they had left covering the fire to expose the red-hot core and put the pan on them to heat up for the bacon. She always began what little cooking they did because, he said, that was what a woman was for; but he always finished it because she was so sloppy – her sense of order had died with Boniface.
The afternoon was too hot to sit by a fire, so they took the cooked bacon to eat between hunks of new bread, and sat under the alders at the edge of the island, their feet in the reed bed, and she began telling him the story of Boniface. Her hands shook and, hungry as she was, most of the bread and bacon went to the ducks. It was very much worse telling him than an assembled gathering of the Partraige; partly because she had to go into more detail and partly because they had achieved such intimacy as they were that to introduce a new element would inevitably change things.
He was flabbergasted by the beginning. ‘A nun?’ he said, and jerked his head back to the hut. ‘You and me. A nun?’
‘Oh do shut up,’ she said wearily, ‘We’ve got a long way to go.’
She told him how and why Boniface was selected as Comarba of Kildare and of the interview with Eleanor of Aquitaine and Fitzempress. The only thing she suppressed was that the interviews had taken place in Eleanor’s garden at Chinon on the day two young agents for Fitzempress had been walking along its paths.
As she talked, she could feel him adjusting his image of her, turning it this way and that to fit the unfamiliar roles she had once played. Her estimation of him went down because his estimation of her went up. ‘I’d no idea you were so important,’ he said with surprised respect at one point, and she nearly hit him. Boniface, seen from this distance, was a diminished, deluded figure for whom she felt contempt and genuine pity.
Dermot, on the other hand, had grown to awe-inspiring proportions in his savagery. She thought very little more of the English mercenary he had set on her that night at Kildare than she would have thought of some instrument used in a sexual assault. Dermot’s face watching the rape was what she most remembered; it was Dermot who had raped her by proxy. As her story approached that night when so many people had died at Kildare along with Boniface, she became reluctant to go on. The contrast between that obscene travesty and what she now knew should exist between a man and a woman was too great. Her voice petered out.
She heard the Pilgrim say: ‘If you’re going to tell me you were raped, you needn’t bother. I didn’t think you’d gone mad because you’d lost your handkerchief.’
She grabbed hold of him and kissed him.
* * *
By sundown the mosquitos and midges which were always a factor at Lough Mask in the summer became a menace, especially to a man without trousers, so the Pilgrim put his back on – he dressed like an Irishman, but kept his Norman/English identity by refusing to grow a beard – and they sat near the fire’s peat smoke to afford them protection from insects.
She was right. Telling him her story had altered their relationship. The rape had made no difference, except to make him speculate with some energy on which, among a variety of painful deaths, he would inflict on Dermot of Leinster if he ever caught up with him. What worried her was his pleasure that she had held high office and had once been sought after by Popes, cardinals, queens and kings. It had enhanced her value to him.
‘I’ve done well for myself, haven’t I?’ he said, ‘An abbess, by God. Not bad for an innkeeper’s son.’
‘If you’re estimating my worth,’ she told him icily, ‘you’ve forgotten that I am also a princess of the Partraige.’
‘Ah well, yes, but it isn’t the same.’ It was only his world that counted, and the strangest thing of all was that he believed it must count most with her, as if she were just sojourning in this fey, foreign land temporarily, like he was. He seemed to think that she was his ally, and that by outraging her Dermot had turned her against all Ireland; that she was only here, at Lough Mask, because she had nowhere else to go. ‘So you’re an Angevin really,’ he said, patting her on her head, ‘Not quite as good as Norman, and not nearly as good as an English Norman like me, but one of Us.’
She was Us and the Irish were Them. ‘And Fitzempress sent you over as an informant for him, did he?’
She went still, waiting for him to say ‘Like me,’ but he didn’t. ‘We could use your new breed of horses,’ he went on, ‘they’re ideal for Fitzempress’ cavalry.’
‘Do you know him?’ Please, please, blast you; I’ve given you practically everything I can. Give me the truth about you.
‘Of course. I was his marshal. I told you. I suppose when I get back that I will be again.’ He yawned. ‘Tomorrow we ought to make plans about getting home.’
And that was the other development in their relationship. Since she was Us, his home was now her home; he didn’t even ask her if it suited her to go.
‘Pilgrim,’ she said, ‘what are we going to do?’
‘Well, I thought we’d go into the hut in a minute and take off these clothes and…’
‘What are we going to do in the future. What will I be?’ She sounded him out. ‘Are you going to marry me?’
He was shocked. ‘Marry you? Of course I can’t. All land belongs to somebody in Europe, so the only way a king can reward a landless man is to give him an heiress. Good Lord, Loon, you’ve lived there. You know.’ Suddenly she was sorry for him; his ambition to better himself was impelling him on an inflexible, foredestined road which allowed no diversions, however happy they might make him.
She said: ‘So what do you intend to do with me?’
‘Keep you in sin,’ he said, heartily, ‘Build you a bower where we can rumpty-tumpty to our hearts’ content
; a secret, flower-scented bower, like the Fair Rosamund’s.’
‘Won’t your future wife mind?’
‘She hadn’t better. Besides, she won’t know. Eleanor doesn’t know about Rosamund.’
‘Who is this Rosamund?’
‘She’s Fitzempress’ bit on the side. One of the many, but apparently she’s something special. He’s got a place for her down at Woodstock, near his hunting lodge, and he goes chasing down there whenever he can. He’s besotted with her.’
For a moment she remembered Eleanor of Aquitaine in her garden and the couple who had seemed so suited. Every man in the world, then; highest, lowest, best, was treacherous; it was built into the male system. ‘And what do I do all day in this bower when you’re not there?’
‘I don’t know. Needlework, rock the odd cradle, sling a few spears at passing wolves. Whatever women do.’
But I’m not that sort of woman, she thought. You love me, but you’ve no idea of the sort of person I am. How Rosamund bears the waiting I don’t know, but I’d go mad. I don’t even know how to do needlework.
‘It sounds delightful,’ she said. She had begun her own betrayal.
His love-making changed that night. He was more commanding, as if he were more sure of her, less fun. She felt that he was squeezing her not only physically but mentally, making her into a more conventional shape. If you fitted me into that bower of yours, she thought, you’d be tired of me within the year. He’d fallen in love with her because she was unlike any woman he’d met, but now that he’d got her he was prepared to take away the individuality that had attracted him in the first place.
Daughter of Lir Page 22