Ghost Light (13 page)

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Authors: Joseph O'Connor

BOOK: Ghost Light
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‘Throw a leaf in it for luck, Molly.’
‘More likely I’ll do something else in it.’
‘Holy Moses, but you have the mouth of a harlot.’
‘You like my mouth sometimes. Or so you do be telling me.’
‘Mary O’Neill. I despair of you.’
He comes to her one evening while they are walking in the pinewood, asking with his hands and his eyes. Unfasten your dress, love. Think it no sin. A stag bounds from a copse, its hairtrigger hearing startled by her whispers as she comes.
She washes her hair in the sandy waters of Considine’s Lake.
The dirt of the city seems to sweat itself out. It is as though a layer of her skin has been removed.
He reads Racine, Pierre Loti, translates Shakespeare’s 130th sonnet into Irish – or tries to, abandoning the attempt after a day. ‘No good writer can ever be translated,’ he says, and she teases him for making excuses. He quaffs the sweet country milk a quart at a time, sometimes with a capful of whiskey ‘for luck’, as the fishermen on Aranmore taught him. The taste of Wicklow buttermilk has him moaning with pleasure. ‘Oh, you simply must try it, Molly. They drank it on Olympus.’ It trickles through his beard and he laps at himself like a dog, laughing all the while, or sighing. He eats hungrily, with great relish, often without speaking, mopping at his plate with his bread.
There comes a day of golden sumptuousness, the shifting breezes scented with wild rosemary. Every blade of snipegrass can be heard as it grows or is mown into sweet-smelling death. Larks and blue linnets arise from the furrows as she walks to the streamlet in the morning. Within, she feels the pulse and run of her blood, the calendar of the body, its flow.
There is a fish among the osiers, a small silver trout, and she knows she could grasp it if that was her desire and kiss its lipless mouth before releasing it. If you do such a thing, the fish will speak a blessing, telling the name of your true-love and the name of your husband. If it utters only one name you will be the happy girl indeed.
He glances up, dazed with reading; gives a drowsy, abashed smile.
‘Would there be e’er a drain o’ tay itself for a Christian tongue?’
‘Wusha, Misther, but there would, and I wettin it now in a minute.’
‘May the shadow of you never grow shorter.’
It has become part of their love talk, this mockery of his lines. They speak to one another like characters in one of his plays. His smile is like the sparkling of sun on dark water. Something in being mocked by her delights him.
She rises earlier, in the quarter-light, at the first reddening of the mountain, so as to make the days last longer. To walk the wet fields through the wakening birdsong is to feel the marriage of joy and sadness, the black miracles of the trees. A tinker comes daily with buttermilk and apples. Breakfast often lasts an hour.
To stir in sleep beside him. To know he is there. The warm male aroma and the rhythm of his breathing, and the moon making shadows of the oak boughs. But close to dawn one morning he flails awake from a nightmare.
‘I dreamed I had lost you. My father was there.’
‘Your father?’
‘I think so. Sweet Christ.’
One day, having lain together, they laze on in the heatherbeds looking up at the corncrakes they have frightened off with their cries. The scent of bog myrtle and lavender and willowherb. There is sweet sleepiness in him at such moments; he is like a tender boy. He tells her his imaginings of New York.
‘We shall go there when I recover. They would adore you in America. You would conquer whole cities. They live very freely. They are like every people who have rid themselves of aristocracies: obsessed by the differences between the classes. They love beauty and bravery. I do not understand them. They are the most magnificent people in the world.’
He cuts his hand while shortening firewood; she bathes it, dresses it. He covers her pillowslip with wild asphodels from the heath. He carves her name in an alder.
There comes a rainy afternoon when he kisses her breasts for what feels a whole hour, until she begs him, with profane murmurs, to go further. Then her hands gripping hard to the rungs of the bedstead; she had never imagined a man’s mouth could be so gentle. Afterwards she does not want to look at him, feels opened, revealed. There is a quietness after the storm.
He reaches and takes from her hair a length of broken wheatgrass.
‘A penny for your thoughts, my brown-eyes.’
‘Have you been with many girls, John?’
‘Not many. A few in France.’
‘Did you love them?’
‘I thought so. There was one I thought I loved.’
She pushes him and he laughs again, running the blade of wheat across her wet nipples, then kissing her hair and face.
‘You smell of strawberry leaves,’ he whispers. ‘I adore you. My little succulence.’
‘I’ll strawberry
you
in a minute. Tell me about her, so. My rival.’
‘Oh it was all very long ago. There were differences of religion.’
‘She was Catholic?’
‘No. She was a Plymouth Brethren. She was a neighbour of ours in Kingstown.’
‘Did she break your poor heart?’
He pauses a long time before replying. ‘I was younger. I suppose I thought so. I was a very different person then. But none of it matters any more. My little elf.’
Atkinson’s Gazetteer to Great Britain
including Ireland
For Amblers, Ramblers & Cavers
At nights, while he is working, she reads in his guidebook, the spine of which is cracked and the mouldering pages loose. He has underscored many lines – whole passages sometimes. She ponders them for what they might reveal of him.
The bosom of Wicklow affords the inner man a plethora of delights, her natives being amenably charming to the visitor, possessing the pleasing, happy countenances of those of Her Majesty’s contented subjects encountered in the Empire’s sunnier climes.
He begins writing a novel set in a hospital, sorting notes, shaping scenes. She hears him mumbling to his characters the way he sometimes speaks to her: nagging, cajoling, begging them to come to him.
‘Whore’s bastard, come out!’
he bawls so hard that the rooks go clattering from the thatch. As though the words are midges around him and his task is to grasp a particular one of them. She pictures him in a swarm of language.
He reads her a drafted chapter as she soaks in the old beatencopper bathtub, the water reeking deliciously of turf. She tells him it isn’t good. He knows, he says. That night they watch a gorse fire spreading across Lugnaquilla, red and golden flames, jags of purple sparks, tiny black figures hurrying through the glow with pitchforks, billhooks and scythes.
‘Oh, I shall be gone for the afternoon. You shall have a little peace. I said I would lunch with Yeats. He is visiting at Powerscourt. It will be tedious but it has to be faced.’
‘You didn’t tell me before.’
‘It slipped my mind, I am sorry.’
‘Should I come with you? Would you mind? It would be nice to have an outing.’
‘Yeats …’ he pauses, ‘does not know quite the extent of our friendship. As I think you are aware. I had been meaning to apprise him. He is rather old-fashioned sometimes. Curiously so.’
‘Couldn’t we say it was a coincidence? You met me in Annamoe. I was visiting a friend who was sick.’
‘Oh, the conversation would bore you. You know how Yeats drones on. Rather too much for the white man to bear. I shall escape by five at the latest.’
‘But it’s only gone nine in the morning. What am I to do the whole day?’
‘I shall be back before dark. Unless you wish me not to go.’
‘Of course you must go if you gave your word to Mr Yeats.’
‘Your tone of voice surprises me. I have upset you, I think.’
By midnight he has not returned. The night is full of sounds. The last candle in the cabin burns low. A wind buffets up, and
the haw near the window begins a bleak insistent tap on the glass. The bedding reeks of his soap, of the unguent for his chest. The candle gutters out with a last jig of shadows. The smell of molten wax haunts the room.
In the small hours she arises, suddenly maddened by thirst, and goes dazedly to the ewer by the window. The tiny yellow globe of a storm lantern in the distance.
‘John?’ she calls out. The light stops moving. And somehow she knows it isn’t his.
She slams and bars the door. Realises she is shaking. Watches as the lantern-light approaches through the blue gloom, hears the trudge of heavy footsteps, the low male voices. Three – maybe four-it is hard to be certain. Boots on the gravel. Coughs.
‘I was frightened half to death. Why wouldn’t I and the heart put across me! And you sitting up at Powerscourt on your sweet Fanny Brown.’
‘They were probably only poachers. Or gamekeepers, perhaps.’ He gives his soft, eluding laugh and peers away towards the lake. ‘They are often the same thing, of course. Especially in Wicklow. I am sorry you were alarmed. My little sparrow.’
It is only later, at the back of the cabin, that they see the freshly whitewashed words.
EVICTORS GET OUT OR BE GOT
‘So they have come,’ he says quietly. ‘We were too happy.’
‘But – what do they mean, John? What call had they to go writing that?’
He regards the distant Sugarloaf, the bitterns wheeling and hooting. For what seems a long time he offers no response, and when finally he speaks it is as though something new has happened to him or a discomfiting light has been shone into his eyes by someone he can’t quite see. ‘There were incidents in the
past. On my family’s estate. I wish to say no more about the matter.’
‘But not evictions, surely?’
He seems to be ageing as you watch him.
‘John? Not evictions? Why can’t you look at me?’
‘They refused to pay their arrears. What could we do for it? There were agitators among them of the very worst sort. Revolutionaries, seditionists, call them what you will. My brother – he is the land agent – attempted to find common ground. He is a good man, my brother. He sought the common ground. But they acted like stubborn children, refusing all compromise. It was a wretched bloody business and I am very thoroughly sick of it.’
‘How many?’
‘Can that matter?’
She looks at him closely.
‘I think seven.’
‘Seven people?’
‘Seven families. Or eight.’
‘But John – that could be forty people. You put them out on the road?’
‘
I
put them nowhere.
I
put them nowhere! I was living in Paris, I knew nothing of the matter and neither was I asked an opinion.’
‘And had you been?’
‘They refused to assist themselves, to take the slightest
responsibility
–’
She continues, riding over him.
‘Had you been?’
‘Some of them had paid no rent in fifteen years. Why do you look at me like that? I was living in Paris. What is it in these people that must always crave trouble? One despairs of whatever it is that must always
inflame
in this godforsaken sewer of a country.’

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