Rainsongs Page 4
Home.
But recently there’s been talk that there are those who want him gone. Who have plans for his land with its view of the Skelligs. He tries not to think about it, for what can he possibly do?
2
Martha had forgotten how much further north and west she is than London. How late it stays dark. It’s already a quarter to nine. She’s slept fitfully, has a crick in her neck and is freezing. She pulls on her thick jersey and huddles back under the blankets. She’ll have to look for a hot water bottle. She’s sure there’s one in the cupboard under the stairs. Outside the sky is a fragile blue, like the washed stain of newly-laid watercolour and the little islands that in the dark looked so far away, seem almost near enough to swim to. There’s not a building or tree in sight. Nothing except a vast expanse of sea, sky and the islands, so that for a moment, her heart stops at the beauty of it all.
She climbs from beneath the covers, folds up the blankets and puts them in the ottoman. She’ll have to go upstairs and air the bed, make it up for tonight so she can get a decent night’s sleep. She lights the stove, fumbling for firelighters and matches but doesn’t bother to shower. It’s too cold and anyway she forgot to switch on the immersion and there’s no one to care how she smells. She brushes her teeth and, after banking up the fire, slips on Brendan’s old wax jacket and makes her way up the track towards the headland. Below the waves hurl against the rocks, and the sheep, huddled for shelter in the lee of the stone wall, run off up the hill bleating as she passes, their shimmying backsides smeared in Day-Glo pink. The air is thick with salt and there’s a mist coming in off the sea that’s slowly erasing the view of the uninhabited islands like a coating of whitewash. In a muddy ditch a solitary black-headed crow is pecking at the carcass of a lamb. She climbs on past the scattered cottages fringing the track. The roofs have fallen in and tufts of turf sprout along the broken walls like unruly green eyebrows. Cattle graze by the collapsed hearths. Three hundred feet above the Atlantic those who once lived here have long gone, weary of huddling over a few smoky clods, wracked by hacking coughs. The crumbling walls resonate with the lost voices of those who set sail for Liverpool, Brisbane and New York.
There’s no one about and the wind is full of rain. The road is steep and the stone wall boundaries marking the patchwork fields have slipped in places like displaced vertebrae along a damaged spine. Scraps of black plastic fertiliser bags flap on the barbed wire fence. Those who once farmed here were hill people. They won their small plots from the scrub and bog, leaving behind the remains of potato ridges and small circular corn fields. Potatoes, rye and oats were staples. The rye thatched houses, the potatoes and oats lined bellies.
Pulling up the collar of Brendan’s jacket against the downpour she stops to gather her breath and wonders why they chose this remote spot without a harbour and with so little shelter from the elements. They must have been permanently damp. Their skin kippered from turf smoke, their lungs thick with phlegm. By twenty the women would have had a clutch of hungry, lousy children.
She remembers Brendan telling her how his father, Dermot, while on a visit to see his old man in the ’50s, had been driving through some desolate glen when he passed two policemen with a donkey-cart carrying a coffin. Stopping to enquire what had happened, the fat guard told him that only days before some young fellow had been reaping down in the glen and taken a glass or two more than was good for him, then thrown off his clothes and run off into the hills. That night there was a great rain and the poor young eejit lost his way. Next morning, when Mickey Murphy was driving his flock up the mountain, he came upon the fellow’s footprints in the mud, along with his half-naked body near eaten by crows.
She trudges on up the track and is beaten back by the wind. As she passes a hunched bungalow, its walls green with mould, its windows boarded up, a muddy farm dog rushes out barking and snapping at her heels. She picks up a fallen fence post to wave it off, glimpsing among the pile of tangled barbed wire, a child’s rusted tricycle.
She’s getting wet and remembers all those years ago, coming out of the Curzon into a tremendous shower and running for shelter to Brendan’s room at the top of that shabby Bloomsbury house where he lodged. They’d stripped off their wet clothes and she hung her tights and cardigan above the rust-stained bath while, wrapped in his big plaid dressing gown, he dried her hair with a towel in front of the gas fire. There was a sagging double bed and an ugly mahogany desk piled with art books. The room looked down over a private garden off Gordon Square where an ancient medlar grew in the corner of the garden. That summer she often saw an elderly woman in a straw hat reading beneath its low branches. With her equine face she reminded her of Virginia Woolf.
She loved that room. It was there, for the first time, that she felt like an adult. She was a newly qualified teacher. She had a lover. Sundays were spent lazing in bed reading the papers and eating crumpets. On rainy afternoons they went to the manuscript room at the British Museum. And Brendan introduced her to the Sir John Soane Museum, hidden at 13 Lincoln’s Inn Fields, with its casts and curiosities. A testimony to English eccentricity.
When she gets back to the cottage the stove is out and there’s a note on the mat.
Dear Martha,
I should have written sooner. I heard you were over. I was truly sorry to learn about Brendan. He and I go back a long way. I do hope you’ll drop by for my little New Year’s Eve celebration. It’s just a few friends. 7.30 for 8.00.
Eugene Riordan.
3
She’s surprised. She hasn’t given Eugene a second thought. She’d only met him a couple of times and, despite his thick dark hair, his imposing height and large house, didn’t much care for him, had thought him arrogant and taciturn. His relationship with Brendan was a boyhood thing, based on a summer messing around on the beach. Now Eugene was one of the richest men in Ireland. A property lawyer turned developer, with a string of luxury hotels located in national beauty spots that catered for an elite clientele. He spent his days on the golf course, out shooting, or walking his Irish setters along the beach. She knows, too, that all those years ago he took an instant dislike to her. She suspects that he thought her self-consciously bookish. A stuck-up English woman in her natural linen skirts and floral scarves, with her long, girlish hair. She was too homely for his taste. Maybe she’d made him uneasy knowing that neither his person nor his wealth impressed her and that she’d never be one of his conquests. He liked trophy woman. Women with highlights in their hair, women who looked good when they walked into the golf club dinner on his arm, or sat at the other end of his long oak table when he entertained. He was one of those men who, if he ever found her on the beach engrossed in a book, would boast that he didn’t have the ‘time to read’. That newspapers and professional journals were all that he could manage to fit into his demanding schedule. As if reading was a sign of weakness. An indication that one didn’t have a life of consequence.
She wonders if he was jealous when Brendan had turned up with a wife. Why Brendan, who was both sociable and cultured, should have put up with Eugene she has no idea. But Brendan’s grandfather had been born in Ballinskelligs. Their families had old connections. Brendan could just about hit a golf ball but had no interest in shooting. He wrote books and collected art. She wasn’t sure what Eugene must have made of Peter Lanyon. The walls of his house, an imposing one-time Church of Ireland rectory down on the beach, were decorated with hunting prints and oils of stags at bay. Low occasional tables sported glossy books on antiques and small bronze statues of his dogs with grouse in their mouths. He didn’t have much time for ‘modern’ art. As to his party? Well, she’s not sure she can face it. She was planning an early night with a hot water bottle, a glass of whiskey and her Edith Wharton. She wants to forget that it’s New Year.
Why had Eugene asked her? A prurient interest in how she’s worn after all these years? Loyalty to Brendan? And how did he even know she was here? We
ll, maybe she should go. After all there’ll be plenty of time to spend on her own. Luckily she’d thrown a good black dress in her bag on top of her thermals.
She makes a coffee and sets about sorting Brendan’s things. Even though it has to be done she feels like a spy or worse, a hyena picking over her husband’s carcass. Nothing has been touched since his death. Books lie where he left them. Papers litter his desk and a graveyard of flies has gathered on the window ledge. It obviously never occurred to him to dust in here. She goes to the pine desk. Its drawers are crammed with old receipts. In the middle one she finds a series of Moleskine notebooks, the pages covered with little drawings of puffins, black-headed gulls and kittiwakes, all annotated with dates, times and locations. She’d no idea that Brendan was interested in birds, let alone that he owned a pair of binoculars until she discovered the ones on the back of the kitchen door. She wonders if he’d ever gone to the Lee Valley Marshes or up to Orford Ness with Sophie to look for some lesser-spotted-something-or-other? But huddling in a damp hide didn’t quite seem Sophie’s style. After their affair was over Martha thought that he’d decided to tell her everything. Yet surely a secret love of bird watching wasn’t such a sin. Still it was a secret. Perhaps we never truly know those we live with. She tries to remember if she ever kept anything back from him.
She runs her fingers along the dusty book shelves, the eclectic assortment of battered spines: The Art of Collecting Antiques, John le Carré and Sebastian Faulks. Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno. There are faded volumes on the geology and archaeology of the Béarra peninsula, countless Thames & Hudson art books and rows of orange Penguin paperbacks. As she leafs through the box files she comes across a well-thumbed address book and turns, instinctively, to B to find Sophie Bawden, Flat 3, Nightingale Lane, SW13 in Brendan’s spidery script.
Why should it still distress her? Because it brings the past into the present? Because it means that what she’s trying to forget is chronicled in black and white as history and fact. She flips through the yellowing pages. There are old friends from the Courtauld, some crossed through with heavy black lines after they’ve moved, or worse, died. Other names belong to clients, publicists, editors and press contacts. Some she’s vaguely heard of, while others have long since relocated to new jobs. Their neighbours, Judy and Sam, are there. Sam and Brendan played tennis on Highbury Fields on Sunday mornings and, occasionally, they all went to the Almeida theatre together or to that Lebanese place in Upper Street.
She fills bin bags with scraps of paper and old files, as if tidiness might somehow ensure her sanity. This little address book has depressed her. As if one short existence amounted to no more than a cluster of names in a Letts notebook. How many listed here knew, or even cared, that Brendan was dead? Death changes things. This is the beginning of a new chapter but she’s no idea, yet, of the plot. She’s an orphan and a widow. She has no ties. She can do whatever she wants. But what does she want? The only thing she’s ever wanted was impossible and she’d nearly driven herself and Brendan half-crazy with her magical thinking in attempting to bring it about. She’s not religious. For her death is the end. A soundless dark beyond time and sleep. Now all she has are memories—a few letters and photos. How many stories does one person have? How many shapes can they inhabit? She shuts the drawer and opens another and finds an early draft of his St Ives book.
Perhaps that’s what Brendan loved about this part of the Irish coast. Its similarity to Cornwall. The grey-greens, the yellow gorse and dry stone walls, the surf gnawing away at the rugged cliffs. She pulls the drawer out on its runners and puts it on the desk to better sort its contents. There’s a collection of cuttings from The Kerryman. Something about a legal battle Eugene has been waging against local environmentalists. She gives them a cursory glance before tossing them in the bin bag with the taxi receipts and stray paper clips, the envelopes that’ve lost their glue and dried-up biros. Then as she goes to replace the drawer she notices, half-hidden beneath an old Bus Eireann timetable, a photograph, and her heart skips a beat. A small boy standing in the surf silhouetted against a dying sun, his arms raised above his white-blond head as if waving.
4
If she’s going to Eugene’s party then she needs to get ready. She doesn’t want to stay here on her own. She feels knocked off balance, as if the cottage is closing in on her. She undresses quickly and climbs into the shower. She’s not washed properly since she arrived and the hot water is like a blessing, turning her skin pink and creating a fog in the freezing bathroom. She towels herself standing under the Dimplex heater and dries her hair, hardly recognising the pale face that stares back from the medicine cabinet’s clouded glass. Yet if she makes an effort she’ll scrub up ok. She’s taken care of herself, eating sensibly, walking rather than taking the bus. On a good day she can till pass muster. Not that she cares what Eugene thinks. But she’s decided to go to his party so wants to look her best and not be pitied as the grieving widow. Anyway, most of her grieving has been done and what remains is a private affair. She dries her hair, does her makeup, puts on her black dress and a cashmere pashmina, shoves her good shoes in a plastic bag and drapes her anorak over her shoulders. Then she locks the door and hurries out to the car, letting the engine run to de-mist the windscreen. The night is cold and the sky clear as an astronomer’s map. As she drives down over the hill a beam from the lighthouse flashes across the inky bay. After a couple of dark miles she turns right at the Celtic cross.
The heavy oak door is opened by a young man in black. He takes her coat and, in a cloakroom full of Penhaligon soaps and soft white towels, she changes her shoes and adjusts her makeup before being led down a hallway past an enormous Christmas tree—all tasteful pine cone decorations, clear-glass ornaments and old-gold chiffon bows—into a room with a blazing log fire. Everything is a shimmer of candles and lights. There are about thirty other guests, their faces like masks in the soft glow. The younger women are all dressed in designer wear, while the older ones, despite or perhaps because of, their hair dye and best clothes, still seem have a look of the land about them. Eugene is over the other side of the room talking to some guests and, although he’s seen her, doesn’t come to greet her so that she’s left to introduce herself to those nearby and explain who she is. Eventually he makes his way over. Though tall, his once thick hair is thinning. He has a glass of whiskey in one hand, is wearing a grey shot silk shirt and has more of a paunch than must be good for him.
Welcome Martha, he says bending to peck her cheek, so she can smell his tobacco breath. I’m glad you could make it. It must be a while now? Have you a drink? he asks, beckoning over the young man who opened the door, who Martha presumes must be one of the many Eastern Europeans benefiting from Ireland’s new prosperity.
Champagne?
Thank you Eugene, that’ll do nicely. Yes, it’s been some time hasn’t it? It’s kind of you to invite me. How did you know I was here?
News gets round, he says, without smiling. I suppose you pulled into the garage.
To buy some firelighters. Is that all it takes?
As they’re chatting a young woman comes over and slips her arm proprietorially through his. Eugene doesn’t introduce them. She has a brittle, horsey face, wispy blonde hair and a skirt that’s a little too short and is, at least, twenty years younger than he is, though there’s already a fine web of lines at the corners of her mouth and eyes. Martha has some vague recollection that he’s been married twice, so isn’t sure if this is a wife, a girlfriend or simply his companion for the night.
They’re invited to take their seats in the dining room. A huge log fire in the grate lights up the heavy brocade drapes and table decorations, the crisp damask cloth. She wonders where the wood comes from as there are so few trees round here, then realises that Eugene probably owns the commercially-planted pine forest that runs up the side of the mountain behind the house. Branches of spruce adorn the mantelpiece and candles flicker in the silve
r candelabra, bleeding rings of light through the high windows into the wet herbaceous border in the dark garden. Two enormous leather sofas sit on either side of the fireplace. The place has the air of an expensive country club. Martha knows that Eugene has another house somewhere near Kinsale where he keeps a boat and goes sailing, as well as a penthouse apartment in Dublin. She’s uncertain how he made all his money. Brendan once mentioned something about a multinational law firm in Chicago where he’d negotiated complex real estate deals during the ’80s. But there’ve always been rumours about businesses in South Africa, Zaire and China which the locals, not knowing the truth, enjoy embellishing. As the evening wears on Martha recognises one or two of the guests from her previous visits. There’s Sean Kennedy, the local builder, last seen halfway up a ladder replacing some guttering, who’s made a fortune building holiday homes on Valentia Island. And a small man in a pink cashmere sweater, with an Ulster accent, who’s a financial advisor. On the other side of the table is the director of a string of supermarkets and his heavily Botoxed wife. Next to him is the local auctioneer, his generous gut encased in a tight lilac shirt. Everyone seems to be involved with finance or property. And, at the far end of the long table, is another face she recognises. Seamus O’Sullivan, the local doctor.
But the place has changed beyond all recognition. That summer, more than twenty-five years ago, it felt as if she’d come to the ends of the earth. As far west in Europe as it was possible to go without falling into the sea. Now, with the help of EU grants the place reeks of new money. Buildings have sprung up blighting the rugged coastline. Ugly bungalows on the edge of muddy fields, complete with concrete porticos and rampant lions, like something out of the ’80s TV soap, Dallas. Bland suburban homes, without any architectural merit, have been erected next to the carcasses of ruined cottages with their collapsed corrugated roofs. The banks are doling out money to those who’ve never owned anything more than a second-hand car or a rusty tractor. Developers are feeding funds into local government coffers in order to build row upon row of executive homes on the outskirts of remote villages that nobody’s ever thought of commuting to or from. Who are all these ticky-tacky houses for? With a population of four million surely there aren’t enough people in Ireland to fill them?