The Heather Blazing (8 page)

It was difficult, particularly in the Supreme Court judgments, but also in some of the High Court rulings, not to see the personal politics coming through even in the most balanced decisions. He enjoyed the signs of this and derived particular pleasure from the more subtle and half-disguised manifestations of it.

He put the reports aside when Carmel came out with tea on a tray. She unfolded another deckchair and sat down beside him.

“I shouldn't be reading these now,” he said. “I should save them up for when it rains.”

“Was the water warm?” she asked.

“No,” he said. “It was an ordeal.” He put his hands behind his head and laughed. “But I feel good after it.”

“It's funny about the postman. I think he thinks that you can have him made permanent.”

Carmel read a novel while he lay back and did nothing. But
the lure of the reports was too great and after a while he found himself curious about some judgments which he had not followed closely at the time when they were made. He began to look through the booklets again. The morning slipped away.

He became involved in the intricacies of the law, reading as avidly as though the papers were full of easy gossip. He was interested in the workings of his colleagues' minds, their strategies, the words they chose. A few times he was disappointed by the arguments which were not followed through, by the vague assertions and the weak grasp of case law. There were several judgments which he read after lunch, written by his younger colleagues on the High Court, judgments he could not have written himself, since they were so detailed and all-embracing in their knowledge of technical matters such as patents, copyright and the intricacies of tort and property rights. He was more interested, however, in broader questions, in the cases which could raise much larger issues than the mere right and wrong of the arguments presented to the court.

During the afternoon the sun disappeared behind the house and the front garden was left in shadow. He fell asleep for a while and when he woke up he saw that Carmel must have folded away her deckchair and gone inside. He still felt the excitement of the Law Reports, and regretted that he had read so much in one sitting and not left more for the days to come. He folded his deckchair too and left it resting against the wall of the house. He found Carmel in the kitchen.

“I'm thinking of going into the town,” he said. “I'll drop in on Aunt Margaret, but I won't be too long.” He went out through the house to the car which was parked in the lane.

The land looked good in the warm light of the summer evening. The hedges were thick with growth and the trees were in full leaf. As he drove towards the Ballagh he noticed the gradual appearance of bigger fields, better land, beech and oak trees. He noticed, too, the presence of big old solid
houses surrounded by stone walls. A few miles later, however, the land deteriorated once more: there were no crops grown here, none of the wheat or barley which the better land yielded, only cattle and sheep. There were no big houses either, just small vested cottages at the side of the road.

It was the first time he had driven into the town this summer. But as he drove into Templeshannon he felt that he had always been here; the sudden clarity of his recognition made the rest of the world strange and unfamiliar. There had been changes: Bennett's Hotel was gone and Roche's Malting had several big tin lungs beside the old stone warehouses. He passed the Post Office and turned up Friary Hill, surprised for the moment at how narrow it was, how small the houses were.

He pulled up outside his grandfather's old house where his father had been born. His Aunt Margaret still lived here. She was in her eighties now—eighty-five maybe, eighty-six, he wasn't sure—but her mind was still perfect, or so Carmel told him. Carmel was in constant touch with Margaret.

He could see her sitting with her back to the bay window as he opened the garden gate. She was reading a newspaper, holding the print close up to her face. When he tried the doorbell there was no response. He did not want to tap the window in case it frightened her. He banged the knocker for a while and then he heard her coming. She opened the door, peered at him for a moment and then took off her glasses and looked again.

“Come in, come in, come in,” she said.

She led him into the bright front room and fussed for a moment over the cushions on a chair. He noticed a bandage around her leg.

“It's lovely to see you now,” she said. “Carmel has been in a few times. She said that you would be in one of these days, but I thought you might wait until the weather got bad again.”

“It's lovely, isn't it, the weather, and the house and the garden look lovely as well,” he said.

“It's nice in the summer,” she said.

She smiled at him as though he was a small boy, arriving with his father to see her, proud of some new piece of knowledge he had acquired or some new achievement. She was always gentle, eager to please and prepared to disguise her own keen intelligence and sharp memory if these were to interfere with the general harmony. She had never married, never known the control a wife and mother exercises, the unsimple compromises a man and a woman make with each other. She had worked in an office all of her life, grateful for a secure job, having lived through times when there were few secure jobs to be had.

She went down to the kitchen now and came back with a bottle of whiskey on a tray with a glass and a jug of water. He noticed that she was unsteady on her feet. She left the tray down on the coffee table in front of him.

For him there had always been something childlike and sweet about her. She had come through, unseathed, into old age. She was free of them all now. She had told Carmel that she was happy not to have anyone to look after, even though she missed them, especially her brother Tom, with whom she had shared this house after their parents' death.

“You know yourself how much whiskey you want,” she said. “There's no point in me pouring it for you.”

“Will you not have one yourself?” he asked.

“Maybe I will,” she said and laughed. “You know I normally don't.” She went down to the kitchen again and returned with an empty glass and a bottle of lemonade.

“You'll go home and tell Carmel now that I've taken to the drink,” she laughed again.

“Carmel would be delighted to hear that you're taking a drink,” he said. She poured the whiskey and added some lemonade.

“Let me see if I've any news for you now,” she said. “You couldn't come all this way without some news.”

Slowly, as he sipped his whiskey, she went through all his relatives one by one, distant cousins in North Wexford who were always asking for him, other cousins in America, old family friends in Cork. She talked about the Bridge Club, remembering if he had ever met any of the people she was telling him about, or if she had told him of them before.

“I've a lot to tell you now,” she said. “It's so long since I've seen you. I hear everything about you from Carmel.”

There was a great deal he wanted to know, of which he only possessed snatches now, things which would disappear with her death. At times he felt that he had been there, close by, when his grandfather was evicted, and that he had known his father's Uncle Michael, the old Fenian, who was too sick to be interned after 1916. Or that he had been in the bedroom, the room above where they were now, when his grandfather had come back to the house on Easter Monday 1916 and sat watching him as he pulled up the floorboards under which he had hidden a number of rifles. Or that he had witnessed his grandfather being taken from the house at the end of the Easter Rising. These were things which lived with him, but he could only imagine them.

Some of these events were so close, they had been recounted and gone over so much. He realized that he would never fully know what went on, there were too many details left out. Margaret would volunteer memories or incidents, but if she was asked too much her eyes would soften and the look on her face become vague.

“I'm not looking forward to the winter,” she said, and she started to explain how her house had been under a sort of siege the previous winter. When she turned on the light in the kitchen at the back of the house, she said, somebody would throw a stone through the window from the sloping field behind. Young lads from the town, she said, waited
there for hours. One of the stones had hit her on the leg and terrified her. So she couldn't use the kitchen after dark, she kept an electric kettle in the living room and made tea there.

“Did you not ring the Guards?” he asked.

“I rang the Guards, I rang Corrigan who owns the field, I even rang the Manse, and they were all full of sympathy. Father Doyle came down to see me, but no one did anything. I meant to tell Carmel about it, but I couldn't bring myself to say anything. It's very hard. No one would believe me when I said that they must have waited for two or three hours every night with stones. Waiting for me. I could feel them out there. I hope they find something else to do this winter. It's the last thing you expect that your own would turn on you.”

She stopped and looked into the distance. The silence lasted between them for a few moments as he wondered what he could do to help her. He even found himself wondering if what she said was true.

“I'll go and see the Guards about that,” he said.

“We used to do it ourselves, you know,” she continued. “But we thought it was harmless. Knocking on doors and running away, that's what it was then, that's how we used to torment the neighbours. You'd give the door a big bang and then go and hide. There was a man up the Irish Street, a Mr. Metcalfe, a Protestant man, he used to go mad at us, he'd chase us up to the Market Square. I suppose that sort of thing is old-fashioned now. Your father used to love it, and Tom.”

She offered him a second glass of whiskey, but he told her that he was driving.

“You'd better not then,” she said, “although they'd never stop you.”

“Do you ever think of them,” he asked, looking up at her, “my father and Tom?”

“Think of them?” she asked. “I do all right, I do.” Her tone was factual and melancholy. He let the silence continue between them, sorry now that he had asked the question, that
he had not let her talk of her own accord. She was thinking, a troubled look appeared on her face. He wished that he could ask her another question.

“Are you playing any golf at all?” she asked him.

“I grew tired of it,” he said, “and tired of the club.”

“They're terrible snobs, all those golf people,” she said.

“I was no good anyway. I don't even play bridge any more,” he said.

“Carmel told me that,” she said. “I love the bridge myself. It keeps you very alert.”

“You must come down some day now before we go back, I could come in and collect you in the morning,” he said.

“It would be nice now, but don't worry about it, because I know you're on your holidays.”

“You could have your lunch with us.” He heard himself saying the word “lunch” and felt uncertain about it. She would always call it “dinner.”

“Lunch is the word in Dublin now,” he said. “Do they still call it dinner here?”

“Luncheon,” she said in an English accent, “that's what Mrs. Allen in the Bridge Club calls it. But it's all the same really, isn't it, it's all food.” She laughed. “Luncheon,” she said again. “Funny, all the words they have.”

He took the whiskey bottle and offered her some.

“I don't know why I'm offering you the whiskey,” he said.

“Oh, I won't have any more. I won't be able to sleep if I have any more.”

“Does whiskey not help you to sleep?” he asked.

“When you're my age you don't need the sleep.”

“How many hours do you sleep?”

“I doze a lot and wake up and doze off again.”

There was silence again in which he felt close to her and happy sitting there talking to her.

“Madge Kehoe invited us over and we had a great evening,” he said.

“She's very nice. I haven't seen her for years. I got a Mass card from her when your Uncle Tom died, and a letter. It was your father who knew the Kehoes and the Keatings, they've always been very nice. Her mother was nice as well, old Mrs. Keating.”

“It's changed a lot down there, the erosion,” he said. “The old house is nearly at the cliff.”

“That's been going on for years, for years since that terrible storm. It was before you were born.”

“And was there no erosion before that?”

“So they used to say. I remember your father saying that. He loved it down there, your father.”

They talked until darkness fell. She sent him out to the kitchen to get an electric fire. The summer was over now, she said, even though the days were good. It was beginning to be cold at night. As he turned on the light in the kitchen, he realized that this was the target for the stones, but they came only in the winter, she had told him.

“I'll go and talk to the Guards,” he said when he came back, “about those fellows up in the field. They should be able to stop that. Or I'll talk to John Browne. Did you ever contact him?”

“He has a clinic all right in Murphy Floods on a Saturday. They say that he's very obliging.”

“He could sort it out for you.”

“There's another of them as well who has a clinic,” she said absentmindedly.

“I'll talk to the Guards anyway,” he said.

“They'd listen to you,” she said, and smiled at him warmly.

He carried the tray with the empty glasses and the bottle of whiskey down to the kitchen before he left.

“It was lovely to see you now,” she said. “It was a great surprise.”

“Whisht, whisht.” His grandmother put her hand up to stop them talking and then inclined her head towards the door, waiting for a sound. And when they listened and discovered that there was no sound, the men around the fire went on talking until it was time for news on the wireless, when she would order silence again.