Creatures of the Earth (24 page)

‘When do you think they'll come?' he asked when the guard seemed to have arranged the sods of turf to his satisfaction.

‘They'll come some time in the morning. Do you know I feel badly about all this? It's a pity it had to happen at all,' Casey said out of a long silence.

‘It's done now anyhow.'

‘Do you know what I think? There were too many spongers around. They took advantage. It's them that should by rights be in your place.'

‘I don't know … I don't think so … It was me that allowed it … even abetted it.'

‘You don't mind me asking this? How did it start? Don't answer if you don't want.'

‘As far as I know it began in small things. “He that contemneth small things …”'

‘Shall fall little by little into grievous error,' Casey finished the quotation in a low, meditative voice as he started to arrange the fire again. ‘No. I wouldn't go as far as that. That's too hard. You'd think it was God Almighty we were offending. What's an old creamery anyhow? It'll still go on taking in milk, turning our butter. No. Only in law is it anything at all.'

‘There were a few times I thought I might get out of it,' he said slowly. ‘But the fact is that I didn't. I don't think people can change. They like to imagine they can, that is all.'

‘Maybe they can if they try hard enough – or they have to,' Casey said without much confidence.

‘Then it's nearly always too late,' he said. ‘The one thing I feel really badly about is taking the Sergeant and yourself to the
Ulster Final those few Sundays back. That was dragging the pair of you into the business. That wasn't right.'

‘The Sergeant takes that personally. In my opinion he's wrong. What was personal about it? You gave us a great day out, a day out of all of our lives,' Casey said. ‘And everything was normal then.'

That was the trouble, everything was not normal then, he was about to say, but decided not to speak. Everything was normal now. He had been afraid of his own fear and was spreading the taint everywhere. Now that what he had feared most had happened he was no longer afraid. His own life seemed to be happening as satisfactorily as if he were free again among people.

Do you think people can change, Ned? he felt like asking Casey. Do you think people can change or are they given a set star at birth that they have to follow? What part does luck play in the whole shemozzle?

Casey had taken to arranging the fire again and would plainly welcome any conversation, but he found that he did not want to continue. He felt that he knew already as much as he'd ever come to know about these matters. Discussing them further could only be a form of idleness or Clones in some other light. He liked the guard, but he did not want to draw any closer.

Soon he'd have to ask him for leave to go back to his cell.

The Protestants had so dwindled that there was no longer a living in Ardcarne: the old Georgian parsonage had been closed, its avenue of great beech trees, the walled orchard, the paddock and lawn and garden, all let run wild. The church with its Purser windows was opened once every year for harvest thanksgiving to keep certain conditional endowments. There was always a turnout on that one Sunday, from the big farms and houses, gamekeepers and stewards of the Rockingham estate, and some years Sir Cecil and Lady Stafford King-Harmon came from the Nash house above Lough Key, in which there were so many windows it was said there was one for every day of the year.

The Catholic church, hiding its stark ugliness amid the graveyard evergreens in the centre of the village, was so crowded for both Masses on Sundays that often children and old people would faint in the bad air and have to be carried outside. Each day saw continual traffic to the blue-and-white presbytery, blue doors and windows, white walls, at the end of the young avenue of limes. They came for references, for birth certificates, to arrange for calls to the sick and dying, for baptism, marriages, churchings, to report their neighbours: they brought offerings and payments of dues. No one came in the late evening except on the gravest matters, for by then Canon Glynn and Danny, who had retired early from the civil service to come and live with his brother, could be extremely irritable, and often smelled of whiskey. ‘You could get run,' was the word that was out.

A green mail car crossed the bridge to the post office each morning and evening at nine o'clock and six. Stephen Maughan crossed the same bridge on his heavy carrier bicycle every Thursday evening with fresh herrings off the Sligo train, setting up the bicycle on its legs outside the post office to shout, ‘If you don't buy you can't fry,' to the annoyance of the Miss Applebees within, Annie and Lizzie, with their spectacles and neat white hair and their glittering brass scales. There were two pubs, Charlie's and Henry's, and they both had grocery stores as well. There was a three-teacher school, a dancehall, a barracks with three guards and a sergeant.

There was much traffic on the roads, carts, bicycles, people on foot who always climbed on the walls or grass margins when the occasional motor was heard. People could be seen walking the whole seven miles to Boyle before the big matches, and after the digging of the potatoes, when the dreaded long nights had to be faced, holding wet batteries stiffly. Every summer Sunday the cattle were driven from the football field at the back of Charlie's and the fouled lines marked white again with lime. To the slow sog of the football in the distance, handball of sorts was played against the back of Jimmy Shivnan's forge, the bounce uncertain because of the unswept stones, and there, too, the coins were tossed from the backs of rulers and greasy pocket combs, each copper row arranged so that all the harps faced upwards before being thrown. Everywhere there was the craving for news. News, any news, passing like flame from mouth to eager mouth, slowly savoured in the eyes. ‘Bruen's cow rolled over into a drain, was found dead on her back, the feet in the air …' ‘Where? When? Who came on the cow? Was she long on her back? That'll put them back a step. It's no joke no matter who it happens to. Terror what life puts people through.' ‘A sewing machine was the only thing left standing four floors up in a bombed factory in Conventry.' ‘Imagine … four floors up … a sewing machine standing on a girder out there on its own … a terror … a sight.'

Suddenly the war was over. Britain had to be rebuilt. The countryside emptied towards London and Luton. The boat
trains were full and talk was of never-ending overtime. After weeks in England, once-easy gentle manners, set free from the narrow rule of church and custom, grew loud, uncertain, coarse.

At home a vaguely worried church joined a dying language to declare that learning Irish would help to keep much foreign corrupting influence out. Red Algier tractors with long steering columns and the sound of low-flying airplanes – they were said to have the original Messerschmitt engine – started to replace the horse and cart. A secondary school was opened by the Brothers in the town. The word
Salamanca
, having endured for most of a century as a mighty ball booted on the wind out of defence in Charlie's field, grew sails again on an open sea, became distant spires within a walled city in the sun. Race memories of hedge schools and the poor scholar were stirred, as boys, like uncertain flocks of birds on bicycles, came long distances from the villages and outlying farms to grapple with calculus and George Gordon and the delta of the River Plate.

Against this tide the Sinclairs came from London to the empty parsonage in Ardcarne, where Colonel Sinclair had grown up, where Mrs Sinclair, as a young army wife and mother, had spent happy summers with her gentle parents-in-law, the old canon and his second wife. After the war, the Colonel had settled uneasily into the life of a commuter between their house in Wimbledon and the ministry. Their son had been killed in the war and their daughter was married to a lecturer in sociology at Durham University, with two children of her own. They both wanted to live in the country, and when they discovered that the church commissioners would be only too glad to give the decaying parsonage for a nominal sum to a son of the manse, they sold the house in Wimbledon, and the Colonel took early retirement.

They stayed in the Royal Hotel while the parsonage was being restored, and as they employed local tradesmen, it was not resented. Once they moved in, the grounds, the garden and orchard, even the white paddock railings, they brought back
with their own hands. They loved the house. Each year just after Christmas they went to England for two months, and every summer their daughter and her children came from Durham. Each Thursday they did a big shopping in the town, and when it was done went to the Royal Hotel for a drink. It was the one time in the week they drank at the Royal, but every evening except on Sunday, at exactly nine o'clock, their black Jaguar would cross the bridge and roll to a stop outside Charlie's Bar. It was so punctual that people began to check their watches as it passed, the way they did with the mail van and the church bells and the distant rattle of the diesel trains across the Plains. Mrs Sinclair never left the Jaguar, but each night had three gin and tonics sitting in the car, the radio tuned to the BBC World Service, the engine running in the cold weather. It was the Colonel who brought out the drinks, handing them through the car window, but his own three large Black Bushmills he drank at the big oval table in Charlie's front room or parlour. ‘Wouldn't Mrs Sinclair be more comfortable in at the fire on a night the like of that?' Charlie himself had suggested one bad night of rain and a rocking wind not long after they had started to come regularly. ‘No, Charlie. She'd not like that. Women of her generation were brought up never to set foot in bars,' and the matter ended there; and though it caused a veritable hedgerow of talk for a few weeks, it provoked no laughter.

‘They're strange. They're different. They're not brought up the like of us. Those hot climates they get sent to does things to people.'

At first, the late night drinkers entering Charlie's used to hurry past the car and woman, but later some could be seen to pause a moment before pushing open the door as if in reflection on the mystery of the woman sitting alone drinking gin in the darkness, the car radio on and the engine running wastefully, the way they might pause coming on the otter's feeding place along the riverbank, its little private lawn and scattering of blue crayfish shells.

When they left for England after Christmas, the car was missed like any familiar absence, and when suddenly it reappeared in
March, ‘They're back,' would be announced with relief as well as genuine gladness.

‘How long have we been here now? How long is it since we've left Wimbledon?' the Sinclairs would sometimes ask one another as the years gathered above them. Now they found they had to count; it must be three, no four, five my God, using birthdays and the deaths of friends like tracks across the sky.

‘They're flying now.'

‘Still, it must mean we've been happy.'

Company they seemed not to need. Occasionally, they ran into their own class, on Thursday in the Royal, after their shopping was done, the town full of the excitement of the market, bundles of cabbage plants knotted with straw on offer all along the Shambles; but as they never had more than the one drink, and evaded exploratory invitations to tea or bridge, they became in time just a matter of hostile curiosity. ‘How did you get through the winter?' ‘Dreadful. Up to our hocks in mud, my dear.' ‘But the Bishop is coming for Easter.' Mostly, the Colonel was as alone in Charlie's parlour as Mrs Sinclair was outside in the closed car, though sometimes Charlie joined him with a glass of whiskey if the bar wasn't busy and Mrs Charlie wasn't on the prowl. They'd sit at the table and talk of fruit trees and vegetables and whiskey until the bell rang or Mrs Charlie was heard surfacing. Sometimes the Colonel had the doubtful benefit of a local priest or doctor or vet or solicitor out on the razzle, but if they were very drunken he just finished his drink and left politely. ‘I never discuss religion because its base is faith – not reason.' What brought them most into contact with people was the giving away of fruit and vegetables. They grew more than they could use. To some they gave in return for small favours, more usually by proximity and chance.

It was because of help the Sergeant had given with the renewal of a gun licence that they came with the large basket of apples to the barracks. The day had been eventful at the barracks, but only in the sense that anything at all had happened. An old donkey found abandoned on the roads had been brought in that
morning. Every rib showed, the hooves hadn't been pared in years, the knees were broken and twisted and cut, clusters of blue-black flies about the sores. He was too weak even to pluck at the clover on the lawn, and just lay between the two circles of flowerbeds while they waited for the Burnhouse lorry, an old shaky green lorry with a heavy metal box like the lorries that draw stones, too wide to get through the barrack gates.

‘It'd be better if we could get him alive on the lorry. That way it'd save having to winch him up,' the driver said.

They had to lift the donkey from the lawn and push, shove, and carry the unresisting animal over the gravel and up a makeshift ramp on to the lorry.

‘Whatever you do keep a good hault of his tail.'

‘I have his head. He can't fall.'

‘Christ rode into Jerusalem on an ass.'

‘He'd not ride far on this one.'

They expected the donkey to fall once they let go of him on the lorry, but he stayed on his feet without stirring while the driver got the humane killer out of the cab. When the back of the metal horn was tapped with the small hammer close to the skull, he crumpled more silently after the shot rang than a page thrust into flame. The tailboard was lifted up, the bar dropped in place. A docket had to be signed.

The Sergeant and two of the policemen signed themselves out on delayed patrol after the lorry had rattled across the bridge with its load. Guard Casey remained behind as barrack orderly and with him the Sergeant's sixteen-year-old son, Johnny. As soon as the policemen had split out in different directions on their bicycles at the bridge, Casey turned to the boy. ‘What about a game?'

They were friends, and often played together on the gravel, dribbling the ball around one another, using the open gates as goal. The old policeman was the more skilled of the two. Before he'd joined the Force he'd been given a trial by Glasgow Celtic, but he would leave off the game at once if any stranger came to
the barracks. What annoyed the boy most during the games was that he'd always try to detain people past the call of their business. He had an insatiable hunger for news.

‘I don't feel like playing this evening,' the boy said.

‘What's biting you?'

‘What'd you do if you caught the owner of that donkey?'

‘Not to give you a short answer, we'd do nothing.'

‘Why?'

‘We've trouble enough without going looking for it. If we applied the law strictly in every case, we'd have half the people of the country in court, and you know how popular that would make us.'

‘It's lousy. An old donkey who's spent his whole life pulling and drawing for someone, and then when he's no use any more is turned out on the road to starve. How can that be justified?'

‘That's life,' Casey replied cheerfully. He went in and took one of the yellow dayroom chairs and the
Independent
out on the gravel and started the crossword. Sometimes he lifted his head to ask about the words, and though the boy answered quickly and readily the answers did not lead to further conversation.

It was getting cold enough for both of them to think about going in when they heard the noise of a car approaching from the other side of the river. As soon as Casey looked at his watch he said, ‘I bet you it's the Colonel and the wife on their way to Charlie's. I told you,' he said as soon as the black Jaguar appeared, but suddenly stiffened. Instead of continuing straight on for Charlie's, the Jaguar turned down the hill and up the short avenue of sycamores to stop at the barrack gate. Casey left the newspaper on the chair to go forward to the gate. Mrs Sinclair was in the car, but it was the Colonel who got out, taking a large basket of apples from the back seat.

‘Good evening, Colonel.' Casey saluted.

‘Good evening, Guard.' The effortless sharp return of the salute made Casey's effort seem more florid than it probably was. ‘Is the Sergeant about?'

‘He's out on patrol, but his son is here.'

‘That will do just as well. Will you give these few apples to your father with our compliments and tell him the licence arrived?'