Rainsongs Page 19
She tells him what she knows about the spa, which isn’t a lot.
And he wants part of my field so he can have access.
You wouldn’t, would you Martha? You wouldn’t sell it to him?
Well until now I haven’t really given it any thought. It had crossed my mind to be shot of it. But no, of course, I won’t sell it to him and let him destroy Paddy’s life and ruin this special place.
I have been thinking a good deal over the last few days. About Brendan and Bruno. About the cottage and Eugene’s scheme. I want to do what I can to stop him. It may not be much, but I feel it’s important. That I have a responsibility. I’m one of a generation that had so much. Free health care, free education. Jobs were easy to find and we could travel cheaply, live on very little. It didn’t cost an arm and a leg to buy somewhere to live. But we got greedy. House prices rose and we felt rich, so homes became investments. People began to borrow more than they could afford and the banks encouraged them. I don’t want to be a part of that. I want to leave this place as it was when I came here with Bruno and Brendan. To remember it as it was.
She gets up and takes his glass to refill it. Then as she makes her way back to the sofa stops and, without thinking, brushes a damp lock of hair behind his ear. It’s a spontaneous gesture. Not weighed, not considered. Not what she really meant to do at all. She turns to move away but as she does so he reaches for her hand and pulls her towards him so suddenly his tongue is in her mouth. Was this what she intended? She doesn’t think so. But she hadn’t realised what a hunger she still has for touch. For something to obliterate the Bruno-shaped hole in her life. She knows that she should resist. But what harm can it do? She can smell smoke and carbolic on him as he unbuttons her thick shirt and is suddenly aware of the stretch marks on her breasts. He unzips his jeans, and, as he undresses, her finger traces the outline of the Japanese carp tattooed on his left arm. Its compact muscles, the golden scales and lashing tail. In the firelight he looks very young. His white torso like a boy’s with its line of dark hair running from his navel down to his wiry tuft. She buries her face in it and feels him grow like something she’s cultivated. He gets up, fetches a blanket from the back of the armchair and covers them with it. Then, as he touches her, she gasps and the peat in the stove collapses into a glowing heap. Slowly her body begins to unfold from its knife-edged creases. For the first time in months the knot inside her starts to unravel. In its place is a new quietness. As though she’s being returned to herself. They lie on the rug in front of the stove, drifting in and out of sleep, until the sky whitens across the damp morning fields.
Thursday
1
She must have fallen into a deep sleep because when she wakes he’s gone. His jacket is missing from the back of the chair and the stove is out. Did she dream that he was here? But the damp patch between her thighs tells her otherwise. She climbs from the makeshift bed, her fingers still smelling of him, folds up the old tartan rug and places it on the back of the sofa, goes to the dresser, cuts a slice of soda bread and spreads it with a thick layer of butter and marmalade, which she shovels on with the back of the spoon. Then she sticks some bacon under the grill and makes some scrambled eggs. She hasn’t felt this hungry for a long time.
After her shower she tidies the cottage and spends the rest of the day quietly looking through Brendan’s books and papers, uncertain what to feel or how to make sense of what’s just happened. Sometimes when we meet another person there’s an instinctive sense that we already know them. Not because we explain things but because there’s an unspoken connection. Perhaps loneliness is simply the gulf between our inner world and how others appear to experience us. Despite her long marriage, she sometimes wonders whether Brendan really knew her at all. She’d loved him through habit and history and because he was the father of her child, but often, particularly during their final years after they’d lost Bruno, she felt a deep sense of loneliness sweep over her. When they were young and first in love they’d playfully tested each other by asking: will you still love me if I lose my looks, if I have an accident or go bankrupt? After all I’d still be the same person inside.
Yet love between adults was rarely that unconditional, was it? The only time she truly felt as though she’d give everything, was for her son.
So much emotional attachment, she thinks, is a resort against isolation. The woman who nags her husband, the man who smashes his wife’s face against the table edge because he suspects that she’s having an affair—all done because they ‘need’ each other. The other person provides the necessary escape from a self we can’t bear, which would be lost if they left. But with Colm there’s a rare sense that nothing needs to be explained or justified. Things just are as they are. She feels it when they talk about his poems. His openness to her criticism, the way he tacitly accepts that she understands what they’re about. He may be much younger, more or less the same age as Bruno would have been if he’d lived, yet there’s something wise about him, about the way he experiences the world.
What does she want from him? Nothing really. She knows that what they have is fragile, momentary. But for now, for the first time in months, she feels alive.
2
Nora is waiting for Paddy when Colm brings him home. He’s no longer wearing the neck brace. Luckily he suffered nothing more than serious bruising and some broken ribs. But they are still taped up so he has to go carefully. She has built up the fire, ironed his washing and baked a fresh batch of scones and is bustling round the green-painted kitchen tidying away newspapers and straightening cushions on the old horsehair sofa. This is where she grew up. Although she’s been away in Cork teaching all these years she comes back to her brother for Easter and Christmas. She’s never married and this still feels like home. Everything is pretty much the same as in her mother’s day when the kitchen was full of children and the dog. The flour bin, the big yellow china bowl in which she mixes the dough for the scones, the brass coal scuttle by the fire. Paddy is a clean man and takes care of himself and the cottage. She’s retired now. Sure forty years a primary school teacher is enough for any woman. Though she made it to head for the last fifteen. What with the welfare and education of so many children and her two nights a week singing in the choir, she’s been busy. She hates to be idle. All those morning assemblies, the annual rehearsals for the Christmas nativity—when she’d insisted on real straw for the manger and one of the shepherds would invariably lose his striped tea towel as the angel Gabriel brought glad tidings from the top of her kitchen stepladder—have left her with a need to be occupied. For years her days were regimented by parents’ evenings and timetables, the school bell and lunchtime supervisions in the playground. Separating fights and patching knees, she watched over the skipping games and football that every generation of seven and eight year olds have always played. Who better, then, to look after her own brother? She’ll have him back on the mend in no time. But she’d like to know how those cows got out.
She’s ironing Paddy’s pyjamas when Colm eases him out of his van. It’s strange to see him leaning on the younger man as he comes up the path past the turf reek to his green front door. They ease him into the wing chair by the stove and she wets the tea, sets out the glass dish of jam and the warm scones on her mother’s flowered plates, and passes one to her brother.
3
Once Paddy is settled Colm takes his leave. It’s still only mid-morning. A clear, fragile day. The sea glycerine under the thin winter sun. As he drives down the mountain he pulls up at Martha’s and jumps out of the van.
Come on, he says, as she opens the door. Get your coat. The day’s too good to waste. We’re going for a drive.
She hasn’t seen him since he left her bed and laughs at his casual effrontery of turning up unannounced. She brushes her hair, smears on some lipstick and puts on her coat and scarf.
Okay then. I’m ready. Where are we off to?
She clambers up int
o the high passenger seat of his rusting van. It’s a mess. Full of rope, old turf bags, Wellington boots, electric wires and loud speakers. There’s a little makeshift platform covered with blankets and a mattress that serves as a bed when he’s away on gigs. A battered gas ring and a fridge. But she doesn’t care. She’s enjoying the sense of freedom.
How’s Paddy? She asks. You collected him from hospital, didn’t you? That was kind.
Sure I couldn’t expect your man to come back in a taxi, could I? I love that old fella. Pleased to be home, I’d say. His sister Nora’s with him. Busy feeding him up with her home baking. He’ll mend. He’s a tough old goat. But it’s good to see him back at his own fireside. You heard anything more from Eugene?
No, she says. It’s gone strangely quiet. But let’s not talk about him. So where are you taking me?
He doesn’t answer but turns on the battered radio taped to the dashboard. An Irish music station fills the van and they turn sharp right across the boggy moor, past the peat power station, towards Waterville. A low sun streams through the windows. They drive on towards the far mountains and up the winding coast road along the Kerry Ring towards Caherdaniel. The view of the barren mountains above and the breakers coming in over the wide empty beach below seem impossibly beautiful. Suddenly Colm slows down and pulls into a gateway. They clamber out of the van and trudge to the middle of a field to look at an ancient pillar incised with parallel lines and notches in some sort of primitive alphabet. It’s an ogham stone, he tells her. No one knows what they were for. Some say they mark burial sites. Others, that they were tribal boundaries.
When they reach Daniel O’Connell’s house it’s closed for the winter, so they make their way down the dirt track through the pines, over the grassy dunes, to the bay. Clambering over the rocks and storm-tossed seaweed they head to the furthest shore where, beneath the ruins of a small abbey, they strip off their anoraks and thick sweaters to throw themselves on the sand in the warm January sun until a chill wind forces them back to the van.
At Inny Strand they stop off near the golf course. An Irish flag snaps above the club house. The clipped hedges and lawns look incongruous among the sand dunes and rolling breakers. They make their way down to the beach, the wind biting at their scarves and anoraks. It must be a good place to surf but there’s no one about except a lone man walking his dog.
This place, Colm tells her, wrapping his arm round her shoulder against the wind, is mentioned in the Book of Invasions. Do you know about that, Martha? It’s an ancient text that’s supposed to contain the history of Ireland. Noah’s granddaughter was said to be the leader of the first Irish invasion after she was denied admission to the Ark. I’m not sure what she’d done to piss off old Noah, but anyway, somehow she ended up in Co Cork, if you’d believe that, with fifty women and three men, including Fintan mac Bochra, whom she married. The three men, so the story goes, agreed to divvy the women out amongst them. Nice for them, not so good for the women, he smiles—as well as slicing up Ireland. They hoped to populate the place or at least have fun trying. Anyway, two of the men died and all fifty women started giving out to Fintan. So he did a runner and they all perished.
The next lot were the Partholonians, I think. They were supposed to have come from Greece. And, if I remember right, after them were the Nemedians and the one-legged, one-armed Fomorians. This is the bay where the Milesians—they’re supposed to be the true Gaelic people of Ireland—are thought to have landed. Now how’s that for a bit of potted history? he asks, wrapping her scarf securely round her neck in the squall as if she were a child. Anyway, he laughs, you wouldn’t know if I was telling you wrong!
And, as you can see, by the name of the pub over there, this was quite a place for smuggling. There were a lot of shipwrecks. A Danish schooner on the way to McMahon’s timber yard at the beginning of last century fetched up here on the rocks. Some of the crew are buried in the local church. Oh yes, and while I’m being your official tour guide, the other thing is that Fascist, Charles Lindbergh, is supposed to have flown over here on his solo flight from New York to Paris. Can’t think of anything else you should know, he says running down the beach towards the sea and pulling her after him, so they have to jump back from the incoming surf to avoid getting wet. And, as he skims a flat stone across it in a triple arc across the breakers, she remembers all those years ago, Bruno trying to perfect his aim. She can see him now. Collecting smooth pebbles on the tide’s edge, struggling to get them to jump the waves. As if an ability to skim stones signified the passage from boy to man.
The sea is a translucent green, framed by the brown mountains on the other side of the bay. As they head back up the beach into the little town the row of brightly-painted, old-fashioned B&Bs remind her of a 1950s English seaside resort. There are signs for ice creams and cream teas, though the whole place seems to be shut. At the Butler Arms they stop for a drink and Colm tells her this is where Charlie Chaplin and his family stayed each summer. Now the little man stands forever holding his bowler hat and bronze stick in the blustery Atlantic wind.
Back in the van they take the winding road that runs along by the sea. A cluster of megalithic stones on the brow of the hill stands silhouetted against the winter sky. The surrounding landscape is boggy. Bulrushes grow by the side of the road and there’s a big digger in one of the fields. Martha wonders if it’s used for cutting peat. Other fields are dotted with ruined cottages with no windows and collapsed roofs. On the other side of the lane is a row of newly-erected bungalows.
It’s such a pity to see these old places left in this state.
Emigration. It was poor here, Colm says. There wasn’t the work. Just subsistence farming. Anyway the family is probably still arguing about who actually owns the land, so it can never be sold. Most likely they got a grant to build one of those swanky new bungalows. The council has a book, you know. Like Ford’s ubiquitous black car you can choose any design you like so long as it’s hideous.
That’s sad.
Sure, there’s a lot that’s sad here.
The light is already going when they stop and clamber over a dry stone wall to make their way over a rough field towards a small bay.
Where are we going?
Close your eyes, Martha, and don’t open them until I tell you.
She takes his hand and shambles blindly down the path behind him. Then, as they round the bend, he says: Now.
Ahead, the sky is on fire. Blood-red and golden-white, glowing behind the great jagged needle of rock.
My God Colm, that’s beautiful. It almost makes you believe in God.
Well, he says, some say the sun dances on the Skelligs at Easter. That it’s a sign of the Resurrection.
I can understand that. she whispers, as they stand in the wind and the sky darkens, turning to purple, then black, before the great fiery ball drops into the sea.
4
She doesn’t ask him to stay the night but after they finish the bottle of wine and the embers are dying he follows her up the steep staircase to her sleeping loft. As she’s been out all afternoon it’s freezing and they huddle beneath the duvet in their clothes. There moon is full and the little room awash with light. As they warm up they undress bit by bit.
Brr, your feet are cold Martha.
She runs a finger over his face, tracing the contours of his nose, his unshaven cheeks and eyes, trying to imprint them on her memory. She knows she will never sleep with him again.
I’ve made a decision, Colm, she says, snuggling up to him. I’ve been thinking long and hard about this. I’m sure it’s the only thing I can do. I’m going home. Back to London. If I stay here Eugene will only hassle me about the land. I’m not really strong enough to deal with him and would rather do it at a distance. If I just disappear, just go back to London without telling him, he’ll have to do everything through my solicitor, and, of course, I won’t agree to any of it. But he can’t pressurise m
e with endless visits and a wad of cash for a quick sale. It’s not that I’d agree but I just don’t want to have the anxiety, don’t want to get caught up in the local shenanigans. It’s too painful, she says burrowing further into his warm armpit. And I need to move on, need to decide what I’m going to do with my life. I’ve a few ideas. Nothing very grand. I’d like to tutor refugees. Those from war-torn countries who need to learn English to make a new life. No, Colm don’t pull that face. Oh God! Do I sound really worthy and north London?
Just a little, he laughs, kissing her nose.
But seriously, Colm, I’m a teacher. I could do that. It would be good to work with young people and keep me occupied, give me something to get up for in the morning. We all need that. Goodness knows if I’d be doing much for them, but it would certainly help me. I haven’t completely decided yet, though I don’t really want to go back to teaching full-time.
But I do have a suggestion and I hope you’ll hear me out, she says brushing his hair out of his eyes. I’ve decided that I don’t want to sell the cottage. Certainly not to Eugene. Nor to anyone else. If I do there’s no guarantee that the buyer won’t then do a deal with Eugene if he offers them enough cash and that the spa won’t still go ahead. Apparently he’s squared things with the council. Though, of course, I don’t know what that actually means. There’s only me and Paddy stopping him. I want this place to stay as it is, Colm. For Paddy, for you, for me. For the next generation. There are so few truly wild places left, places where the night sky is so dark you can see the constellations, places that look the same as they must have looked a thousand years ago. Everything’s changing. So much that’s authentic is being lost. I want to remember this place as it was when I came here with Bruno and Brendan, and I’ll do what little I can to protect it. I know that Paddy and the other bachelors on the mountain are probably the last of their kind but I’d like to give their way of life a bit longer, if it doesn’t sound too sentimental. I’m not rich but I can manage in London with my lodgers and Brendan’s pension. The head has offered me early retirement on compassionate grounds. I don’t really need the money from this place. So what I’d like to suggest, she says, taking his face in her hands, if you’ll agree—and you’d be doing me a favour, honestly you would because I have been worrying about this—is, that if you’d like to, you become my caretaker. That you have the cottage to write in for as long as you need it. I don’t want any rent but if you could look after it, mend anything that needs mending, roof tiles that come off in the storms, that sort of thing, it would be the perfect solution. I’d love you to finish your collection and get it published. You can dedicate it to me, she says half-joking. And to Bruno.