An End and a Beginning (15 page)

“‘To-day I am sixteen and I have come here at my father's bidding to serve Rath Na. I have stopped looking through a cracked window, feeling my father's shadow behind me. I have stopped looking at the sea.' Think of it. I wrote that all those years ago, in the old days, when Rath Na was glorious.”

Idly her fingers turned its pages; phrases leapt out like light. “To-day Colonel Downey brought back with him a bright girl with laughing eyes.”

She shut the book. She saw the girl, she saw the master of Rath Na. “Now he lives in England, of
all
places, in a very respectable villa, and this place rots. I sometimes ask myself why I stayed here so long, so very long. My foolish hope chained toe to every part of this house.”

She opened the book again, and her sharp eye was darting about for dates, her mind leaping back to a day, an hour, a feeling, an observation, a look, a gesture.

“Mrs. Downey likes suffering, it's crucifixion for her, she likes being crucified.” She turned page after page, she searched for an entry. She read. “To-day the Colonel did not come—but he sent a wreath. Father Twomey and myself followed the martyr to her grave.”

She laid the book face downwards, on her knee. “How he must have loathed her. How he must have hated that clinging ivy, that wilting piece of hypocrisy. Nevertheless, God rest her soul.

“I would have married him. He never spoke. And neither did I. That's how we loved each other, in silence.

“I came here at sixteen to be a serving maid, and here I am.” Raising her head, she once more glanced round her room. She was at last its mistress, and Rath Na was silent, empty, falling to pieces.

“Ah, but I won't think about it any more. No, I won't be remembering, and I won't be bitter. I'd better forget it.”

Again the red book tempted, and again she opened it. “A letter came to-day from Master John. A good lad. Best of the lot. This day I'll write to Colonel Downey.”

She reached forward and replaced the book on the shelf. The moment she closed its pages the silence was ended, and all the sounds were back again. She went to the lower part of the house.

“Pacing his room,” she said, “and if it's not the room, then it's some other place. The miles that man has walked these past few days.” And then, suddenly, she was back in the hall. It was time to call him. Picking up the stick she struck a single blow, and the sounds went circling from floor to floor. The noise drowned the pacing feet.

Miss Fetch never called him to meals personally, she always struck the gong. Then she went off and laid the table. As she moved about she thought of the first days, and the silence. He hardly spoke of anything beyond the weather, the seagulls on the lawn, the rain-sodden land. And the walks he took. Such walks, such long walks, out for hours, wearing the day out, far beyond the house. Where on earth did the man get to? When she heard him moving in his room, and knew he was getting up, she had but to glance at her clock, and it would show the hour of eight. It was always eight. Listening to him she would count the stairs as he descended, she had memorized the number of steps he took across the hall, how the door creaked when he opened it, and the heavy dragging steps on the gravel paths. The pattern was clear. Back to his breakfast. Up to his room. Long silences. Did he sleep, or did he just lie there, thinking, or did he read? There was plenty to read in John Downey's room. The midday meal, and then off again, another walk. She thought he must already have flattened the hill. And how punctual he was, with nothing very important to be punctual about. The way he jumped when you came upon him suddenly in some part of the house. Sometimes she thought of a lost child, wandering about in the darkness.

She now heard Peter Fury crossing the hall. The fork fell from her hand, went clattering to the floor.

“But this,” she thought, “
this.
” It was the captain again, wandering through the wilderness of his ship; the demented captain was back. Like a hunted man. Hunted by whom? By what? A frightened man. Afraid of what?

He entered the kitchen and sat down.

“Good afternoon,” said Miss Fetch.

“Good afternoon, ma'm,” he replied. She looked at him, and he returned her look.

He saw the tall, thin woman enveloped in black, and this sombreness of dress was broken only by the white of the short apron she wore, and the bone brooch at her throat. She saw this tall, broad-shouldered man, with the black, though slowly greying hair, the wide eyes, and the restless hands. He saw before him the guardian of this house, its ordinance, its breath.

She now stood behind his shoulder, serving him, still unable to believe that the machinery of the pacing feet had suddenly shut down, like an engine, a dynamo. Looking at the top of his head she glimpsed skull through thinning hair, saw the strength of the face in profile, watched his hands. “Did you enjoy your walk?”

“Yes, thank you. I like the smell of the sea over the hill,” he said, as she moved away and stood by the fire. She heard him eating.

“Aren't you eating, Miss Fetch?” he asked.

“Of course.” She put some food on a plate and sat down opposite him. He lowered his head, and went on eating, and he knew that she was watching him.

By some process of divination, each seemed to know just what the other was going to say. The conversations were fugitive, circumscribed; eating was the self-imposed ordeal. The feet trod into Miss Fetch's mind. They seemed to press out her sudden question.

She seemed hardly to have realized that she had spoken to him, until she heard him say, “I don't know—not long.”

“Are you comfortable?” she asked, wondering exactly what length of stay could be indicated by the words, “not long.”

She had pushed away her plate, and now, her arms folded, she leaned across the table. “You never go to the village,” she said.

He shook his head.

“Nor to the Mass on Sundays,” added Miss Fetch.

And when he did not reply, she said, “It is understood.”

The expression upon the man's face had suddenly softened, and when he smiled at her, she saw him confused and shy, but she knew that the ice was breaking. “Thank you, Miss Fetch,” he said, and leaning towards her, he said, “You understand?”

“I will try to. I am alone here. Rath Na is far from Gelton, and a wide sea divides them. But little birds have wings. I am sorry indeed that you do not go to the Mass.”

The tenderness that had stolen into her own voice surprised her.

“Don't you
ever
feel lonely here?” he asked her.

The ice was still breaking. “So much of my life is here. Why should I be lonely?”

After a slight pause she went on, “I have seen unhappiness before to-day, in this very house. How people will torture each other.”

The slight movement of his head indicated nothing to the housekeeper. “You know what I'm waiting for?” he said.

“Only what you may be expecting,” was her reply, and at once she got up and left the kitchen.

“There are limits to everything,” she thought.

5

A letter addressed to Mr. Fury arrived by the faithful, though trembling, hand of Mr. Cullen, the postman. As the arrival of mail always meant something out of a bottle, Mr. Cullen and the housekeeper had repaired to a tiny, unused smoke-room, that had later become Mr. Patrick Downey's study. It contained nothing but piled and sheeted furniture. There was no fire in this room, and there never would be. Mr. Cullen liked anything out of a bottle that carried the right label, and what Miss Fetch provided from the Downey store would be warming enough. It was not the first occasion that the postman had sampled it.

“Your health, Winifred,” he said.

“And the same to you, Michael,” she said, raising her glass. “And how are things with you?”

Cullen tossed back his tot, then cleared his throat. They weren't very well, but then they never were, not since those mad Downeys had gone away and left a whole village bereft of their splendid and generous company.

“You've a visitor.”

“I have.”

“Most unusual, ma'm, most unusual. And who'd it be this time?”

“I scarcely know myself,” Miss Fetch said, but it only brought a howl of laughter from Cullen.

“Ah! Sure I love that, I do indeed. Not knowing indeed. Why ma'm, you know everybody in these parts, and some from across the seas indeed. Anything I can bring you up from below now I'm here?”

“Nothing at all. And now you've had your medicine you can go, Cullen.”

“Of course.”

“Though I'm hereabouts on the usual evenings as you know,” she said.

“As I know so,” said Cullen, showing the housekeeper a glimpse of his horse-like teeth. “We read the papers, ma'm, just like you do. Been in gaol the hell of a long day, and now out, and 'twas that brother of his that was here a long while back. Feller be the name of Desmond, I believe. An' how's he looking after his long voyage, eh, Miss Winifred?”

“Good-day, Mr. Cullen,” she said.

“Sure I'll be up to see you Thursday be the stroke of the clock, so I'll away now, ma'm, and God look to you. Bye-bye.”

The moment the door shut behind him Miss Fetch climbed the stairs to her room.

“A letter for the gaol bird,” she said with a smile, and she closed and locked her door. Within a few minutes she had steamed open the letter and read it.

Gelton, Friday.

Dear Mr. Fury,

I've been trying to contact you for the best part of a week, and only hope this note reaches you, since it contains news of importance for you. It is that after nearly a year of effort we have at last been able to track down your sister, Maureen Kilkey. Our society found it very difficult indeed, considering that we have branches in almost every town in the country. I know how anxious you are to see her after all this time, and I enclose the address. Unfortunately she is still living with that queer gentleman known as Slye Esquire, though the elderly man who used to accompany them on their strange travels has just recently died in the Halifax workhouse. With best wishes, yours sincerely,

Cornelius Delaney.

“Just fancy that,” reflected Miss Fetch. “I never knew he had a sister.”

She folded up the note, slipped it back into the envelope, sealed it, then placed it between the pages of a book, and promptly sat on it. When the opportunity arose she would slip up to his room and put it on the table by his bed.

“It still seems very odd to me that he should be here at all, and odder still that his brother's wife should be coming over here. It's her home, of course it is, but a great barn of a place to come to indeed. The flights of fancy of these Downeys is enough to split the skull of any intelligent person so. Empty this ten years or more, the whole family of them away, and not giving a damn about the house. Perhaps she's coming to see this visitor of mine.”

She smiled. “Maybe she'll call it her duty. Maybe she's coming to rescue the old house before it falls down altogether. Well, well! A lovely young creature she was the time she ran away from here, and nobody cried about it, and nobody will now. The father never gave a damn, and as for the mother—oh well, let's forget the mother, God rest her. All them years away, and only the son wrote me, actually wrote me a letter from time to time from that far away China where he's stationed, just to find out whether I was dead or alive. A nice boy, and the only decent one of the lot of them. Now I wonder if that man is in or out. I've not seen a sign of him since lunch time.”

As close as her own skin was the thought of the nearness of this man, the very height and weight and pressure of a stranger in the house.

“I've been afraid of him ever since he came, though I've given never a hint. And in some strange way he's afraid of me.” The thought depressed, worried her. She expected the worst. But she had only to press harder upon her rosary beads and the fear vanished.

“Perhaps he's asleep,” she thought, “or maybe reading. There's lots of reading in that room. But never a sound. I wonder if he went out, after all. Walked the country flat since he arrived here, the poor man. Something preying on his mind, no doubt. We'll see.” She went down to the hall, and a moment later gong strokes battered the air.

“If he doesn't hear that he'll hear nothing at all.” She stood in the hall, waiting, listening. But there was no movement, no other sound. “Gone off again, I expect.”

She went back to her room. Stood in the window, she watched the light begin to go. She looked at her clock. “I'll give him till five, and not a minute longer.”

In a few minutes she would carry out her usual task, the ritual, the duty to do. She would visit every room.

By a long, hallucinatory thread Miss Fetch unwinds life, and each room in this silent house has its day and hour. In the morning the doors are unlocked, the curtains drawn, the windows thrown open. And at night they are closed again, and Miss Fetch locks darkness out. Everything is remembered, nothing forgotten. This is the world. She moves, and the thread moves, from room to room, from door to door. Her very approach to them is concerned, cautious, as though behind any one of them life may still be found, as if the very knob she turns still retained the warmth of the departed hand, the very lintels the shadow of the rubbed shoulder. She throws open a door and stares inwards, as though its occupant had only just left, and will at any moment return. Looking in, remembering. For Miss Fetch moment and touch carry a mark of the eternal. And standing motionless, and so silent that in a faraway room she may hear the tick of her own clock, hear the very draughts that sweep down the passages, lifting the carpets under her. In a distant kitchen she would hear the drip of a tap. By a heaviness of carpeting, by the very weight and shine of its oak, any passage seems the final one, the secret way out for the life that has fled from it.