Creatures of the Earth (31 page)

‘I doubt they did right. I was no great catch.'

‘We were about to give up for that Sunday when we called on Baby. She said before we finished, “I'll take him. I know the bar and the farm,” and we brought you in out of the car.'

‘Maybe that's when she made her big mistake,' Charlie tried to joke.

‘She made no mistake,' the teacher put in gently, afraid that Charlie was being hurt by the Sergeant's egotism, oblivious of everything but his own part in that Sunday. ‘She made the best move of her life. Look where you both are today – children, money. Who could want more?'

‘Maybe it's as good as the other thing anyhow.' Charlie laughed with unchanged defensiveness.

‘It's far better. This love business we hear so much about nowadays is a pure washout,' the teacher said definitively.

‘One thing is sure,' the Sergeant said after Charlie had brought them the pints. ‘We can't bundle William Kirkwood into the back of a car and drive
him
around for a whole Sunday until we find him a wife,' and at the very absurdity of the picture both men began to laugh until tears ran from their eyes, and they had to pound their glasses on the table. When they were quiet, the Sergeant said, ‘There are more ways of choking a dog than with butter,' which renewed the laughter.

What they didn't know was that Charlie had been standing in the hallway all the time, rigid with anger as he listened. ‘The pair of bitches,' he said quietly, his anger calming as he moved to face the men who were growing rowdy behind the wooden partition.

‘What will we do about the Captain? He didn't seem averse to the idea,' the Sergeant was saying in the parlour.

‘We can't, as you put it, bring in any old bird. We'll have to look hard and carefully. It'd be a very nice thing to see the Captain married.' The teacher was serious.

The first to be approached was Eileen Casey, the junior mistress in the school in Keadue. She was twenty-eight, small, with very blonde straight hair, fond of reading, pretty in a withdrawn way. Her headmaster, a friend of McLoughlin's, brought it up over the tea and sandwiches of the school lunch hour. When it was clear that she was not interested and was going out with a boy from her own place near Killala and was looking for a school closer to home so that they could marry, he pretended it had been nothing but a joke on his part. ‘We like to see how these rich converts look in our girls' eyes.'

After this, the Sergeant and McLoughlin sat for a whole evening and compiled a list of girls. They were true to their word that they couldn't bring in just any old bird. All the girls they picked were local flowers, and they knew they faced the probability of many rebuffs, but they studied how to go about it as circuitously and discreetly as possible.

Before this got under way, William Kirkwood came to McLoughlin's bungalow to dinner for the first time. He felt ill at ease in the low rooms, the general cosiness, the sweet wine in cut glasses, and Mrs McLoughlin's attempts at polite conversation. Not in all the years of his Protestantism had he ever felt his difference so keenly. What struck him most was the absence of books in a schoolmaster's house. He disliked spirits after dinner, but this evening he was glad of the glass of whiskey in his hand as he faced McLoughlin in his front room while Mrs McLoughlin did the washing up. Around him, among the religious pictures and small statues, were all the heirlooms and photos of a married life that seemed to advance with resolute cheerfulness towards some sought-after stereotype. He was on edge, and when McLoughlin said, ‘We've started looking,' he practically barked, ‘For what?'

‘For a good woman for you.' McLoughlin didn't notice the edge and smiled sweetly.

‘Dear Peter … I had no idea … This is too ridiculous.' William Kirkwood was on his feet at once. ‘It is positively antediluvian.' He had started to laugh dangerously. ‘Fortunately, no
one will have me. Imagine the embarrassment of some poor woman who was fool enough to have me when she found I couldn't abide her! I'd have to marry her. You couldn't do otherwise to any unfortunate two-legged.'

McLoughlin sat the outburst through in open-mouthed dismay. ‘We thought you'd like to be married.'

‘That's true. I would.'

He was even further taken aback by the positiveness of the ready response. ‘Is there any person you had in mind yourself?' McLoughlin was glad to find any words on his lips.

‘Yes. There is,' came even more readily still. ‘But what's the use? She'd never have me.'

‘May I ask who she is?'

‘Of course you can. I was thinking of Miss Kennedy. Mary Kennedy.'

‘Well then. I don't see why you had to get in such a state.' It was McLoughlin's turn to attack. ‘She was the first girl we were thinking of approaching.'

McLoughlin was not so much surprised by the preference as by the fact that the solitary isolated ‘odd' Kirkwood should have a preference at all.

The Kennedys were a large local family, had good rock land and part of the woods, owned a sawmill and a small adjoining factory making crates and huge wooden drums on which electric cable was rolled. They had been rich enough to send Mary and her sisters to the Ursulines in Sligo. There she was nicknamed ‘big hips', more for her laughing vitality than measurements. From the Ursulines she went to train as a nurse in the Mater Hospital in Dublin. She was black-haired and tall, too sharp featured to be beautiful, but there was about her an excitement and vitality that was more than beauty. Even the way she had of scratching her head as she laughed, her wide stance, intrigued men. At the Mater, she fell in love with a pale young doctor, conscientious and dull, who was flattered at first, but gradually he backed away from her high spirits. When he broke with her, she came home and hung listlessly
about the house for six months, sometimes going for long solitary walks.

It was on one of those walks that William Kirkwood met her in his own fields. She had been surprised by a play of the late October light all the way across the top of the hill, and there being no purpose to her walk she had crossed the stone wall to follow the streak of evening along the hill. To William's polite inquiry, ‘May I help you in any way, Miss Kennedy?' she had responded with a certain mischievousness – ‘No, thank you, Mr Kirkwood. I'm just out for a walk' – because it was unheard of for a local person to be just out for a walk. Mary Kennedy was surprised to find the ‘young Mr Kirkwood' that they used to laugh about when she was a child – the same Mr Kirkwood who spent all fine nights out in the fields studying the stars through a telescope and his days reading or in bed – a middle-aged man, tall and beautifully mannered certainly, but middle-aged. They chatted for a while before separating. She didn't think much about the meeting but, apart from the good manners, what she remembered most was his openness and lack of furtiveness. Furtiveness was what she found in most Irish men when faced with a young woman.

She returned to the Mater, but her confidence was broken and she had to school herself to meet the young doctor on the wards or along corridors, to smile and be polite when she felt like hiding or running. She saw with dull clarity that most women's social position in Ireland was decided for the rest of their lives by one single unfair throw of the dice, and she had too much of the Kennedys' sense of themselves to be interested in the young civil servants, policemen, and prison officers that were available to the other nurses. William Kirkwood felt that he should approach Mary Kennedy himself, but he knew too well that if left to his own devices he would think a great deal about it and do nothing.

‘How did you propose to approach Miss Kennedy?' he asked McLoughlin.

‘We didn't intend to put you into the back of a car and drive you round some fine Sunday anyhow.' McLoughlin was now in
the ascendant. ‘I know one of her brothers. If she has someone else or wasn't interested, that would be the end of it. The Kennedys do not talk. If on the other hand …' McLoughlin spread his hands in a gesture that meant that all things were possible.

Mary Kennedy listened carefully to the proposal her brother brought. She had suffered and was close to the age of reconcilement. The tide was not lingering.

She recalled the meeting in the fields. The few times they had met since then he had smiled and saluted in passing. There was the big stone house in its trees, the walled orchard, the avenue, the lawn, the spreading fields … no mean setting.

A boast she had made carelessly once among girls came back to her. Love was not important, she had declared. She would love whichever man she married, whether she loved him or not before they married. This could be tested at last. She told her brother that she would meet William Kirkwood but could promise nothing.

They met in the Wicklow Hotel and had dinner there. She wore a suit of black corduroy with a plain silver necklace and was more at ease than he with the formalities of dinner.

‘I was surprised you knew my name the time we met in the fields,' she said.

‘That's quite simple. I admired you and asked your name. But you knew my name?'

‘There was only one Mr Kirkwood. There are many Kennedys.' She smiled back.

When she saw him waiting for her later in the hotel foyer, the worn but well-cut blue pinstripe, the thick, lank grey hair, the jutting Anglo-Irish jaw, the military appearance of alertness, she knew that he was superior to most men she was likely to come on in the city, and she noticed how soft and long his hands were from years of gentle living. The hands of her own brothers were already large and coarse by comparison. They had two other meetings in the city before she agreed to come down and look over the big stone house and its grounds, but
she had already made up her mind that she would marry William Kirkwood.

The first sight Annie May had of her the Sunday she came to the house was standing beneath the copper beech on the front avenue. A handbag hung from her shoulder. William Kirkwood was smiling on her. The flurry of the past weeks, the visits to Dublin, the need for ironed shirts and polished shoes fell into place. The pain that filled her chest climbed into a tight band about her forehead. That there was no one to blame, that it was in the natural order of things only made it more painful. She couldn't even be angry.

They came to the big kitchen by way of the front door, looking in on the library and drawing-room, and Annie May heard her admiring the stairs.

‘What is this room with all the marble?' she heard her ask as they drew closer.

‘It's just a pantry now. In the old days it was the flower-cutting room … where the roses were cut.'

When they came through the door, there was nothing but smiles and handshakes, but it was extremely tense. If William Kirkwood knew more of human nature, he would have seen that the two women were enemies.

‘Where's Lucy?' he asked.

‘I don't know. She was here up to a minute ago,' Annie May said and offered to make tea.

‘I'd love a cup of tea,' Mary Kennedy said. ‘But first I'd like to see the upstairs rooms.'

While they were taking tea, after having spent a long time walking through the upstairs rooms, darkness fell but still there was no sight of Lucy.

‘She must have gone outside,' Annie May said worriedly, her own anxiety already transferred to the child.

William Kirkwood walked Mary Kennedy over the fields to the road that led to her house. When they got to the house, it was full of the Kennedys and their families, most of whom William was meeting for the first time. It was a pleasant
evening, and by its end it was clear to Mary that both William Kirkwood and the match were approved of. For his part, he liked the big old ramshackle farmhouse, the crowd of people, the lashings of food and whiskey, the natural cheerfulness of people enjoying themselves, the absence of formality and selfconsciousness, reminding him more of political celebration than a family evening. When he left, Mary walked with him to the avenue. On the walk she kissed him for the first time. She was planning the wedding for June. The house would have to be painted, new curtains bought, some new furniture chosen. ‘The whole house will have to be opened up again. As it stands, the kitchen is the only room that looks lived in.'

As he walked with her, he felt that the night was bathed in a dream of happiness, and would start in disbelief that this tall elegant high-spirited woman was about to become his wife. For her part, she felt that her girlish boast was coming true. She knew that she was going to love this strange man who spoke terms of endearment as if they were commands. ‘Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter to the east over there.' He was barking out the names in the clear sky, and she had to bite back laughter. She knew of men less knowledgeable about the stars who would be able to turn them to better advantage, but she would take care of that in her own time.

‘There's one thing more,' she said before they parted. ‘Annie May will have to be given notice.'

‘That I could never do,' he said with such vehemence that it took her back. ‘She came as a very young girl to work for my mother. Lucy was born here, grew up here. I could never tell them to leave.'

When she saw how disturbed he was, she put her hand on his arm. ‘Don't worry, love. You'll not have to do anything. I doubt very much if Annie May will want to stay once she hears I am moving into the house in June.'

They were both standing still at the gate, and she turned and raised her lips to his, and he, feeling her body stir against his, took her into his arms.

His own house was in darkness when he got home. He knew the back door was unlocked, but rather than go through the empty kitchen he let himself in by the front door with his key. There he sat for a long time in the cold of the library. He had many things to think about, and not least among them was this: whether there was any way his marriage could take place without bringing suffering on two people who had been a great part of his life, who had done nothing themselves to deserve being driven out into a world they were hardly prepared for.