An End and a Beginning (27 page)

But she did none of these things; did nothing except to sit rock-still, and watch the fire die down, and the coals turn and fall. The clock did not tick, and she did not notice, and never once looked up, and never thought of winding it. Miss Fetch was washed, and tossed, and stranded, on the wide shore of some now far distant days.

“Unaccountable,” reflected Miss Fetch. “An extraordinary thing to do. And it still seems so to me. Not a word to her parents, just clears off and marries the first man she meets. And into such a family. No wonder her poor mother nearly died of the shock of it. I mind Mary Doolan telling me how she bumped into Miss Downey and that husband of hers, I suppose I should say Mrs. Fury, but somehow I can't. I never could. Saw both of them one afternoon in that Gelton place. A terrible town, Mary said, a terrible place. But what a family to have got mixed up with. The mother seemed a complete fool of a woman, the mad things she did, loading the family with debt just to realize her own ambitions. And look at the ambition to-day. Yes, look at it. An overcoatless wretch out of the night. Just got out after doing years of gaol for plunging a knife into some miserable woman's neck. I think she was a moneylender lady that had the family tied up in every kind of knot. Poor silly creature. From what I heard she always thought the sun shone out of the backside of the failed priest. Sending him into a place that was fit only for better men. And in the end he ran away from it, and played the fool with his days, when some real hard work might have made a man of him. Man did I say. God help us. It reminds me of the old father. Now there's a man that worked. Always away on ships, sailing some old sea or other, labouring and sweating and earning his money hard. A nice home life I call that. I expect he was glad to see the back of the house. He reminds me of the old bullock that presses so hard against the gate that will never open. Poor, stupid, downtrodden man that he was. A perfect fool of a wife. Drove all her family away from her in the end. And the way that spoiled son carried on with Miss Downey after she married his brother. I expect he thinks we know nothing in these parts. The little birds that flew over from England brought news enough about the goings on. But what is a sensible woman to think of it now. The daughter back home after years, and this man sheltering here. She's like an oyster, she wouldn't give you a clue. I'm sure I'm right, though. Yes, I'm sure I'm right. She's left her husband. The moment I set eyes on her I realized it. Yes, indeed, and I said to myself, ‘Here she is then, with her childless arms'. T'would have pleased her mother, I'm sure. How she dreaded a child of that marriage.”

Before the blackening fire Miss Fetch cogitated, Miss Fetch explored. “Wants me to go back to my sister. And what on earth would I do sitting around in an old cottage? Sure I see her once a fortnight, and we're both agreed that's often enough. This is my home, and that cottage is hers. That's the way of it. ‘Go back to your home,' said she, as though she were ordering sugar from the grocer. Why I was dragged out of my home when I was a child, before I was able to learn that it was my home, that my parents died in it, that I was born there. I never learned the meaning of it. This room's my home. I'm happy here, content. And look at this place as big as a palace. Sure who'd ever notice me in an odd corner of it, a worry to nobody. No. And my sister wouldn't want me either, for she's as independent as I am myself, and lives her own life, and goes out every day to work at the Murphy's farm, and she's ten years younger than meself, and may marry Murphy's Sean before she's fifty, if he's the mind to it. The world moves slowly on its old axis in these parts. I remember my father saying to me when I was twelve that there's always a duty you owe somebody and there's always somebody you can do without. I locked the words up in my head, and I've never forgotten them, for only a little while after that I was sent up to this place because he could do without me, and I came where there was lots of bread to eat. Ah well!”

She got up and began walking around the room. She took a book from her shelf and opened it; she held the page close to the lighted candle, and for a few minutes she read aloud that Job was no comforter. She put back the book and crossed the room to where lay her sewing basket. She lifted out of it the needles and the thread, and a long, cloud-like piece of lace that seemed to float into the air, and carried this to her chair, and again sat down. She had often sewed, yesterday, and the day before, and the day before that, and it was like loving, and it was like building for the Faith, and it was like hoping. The needle and the thread moved through the hours of many a silent night, and wrote upon the air that each day was useful, and each day was grace.

“Upset though I am, I'd like to do a little sewing now, but I don't know why, and I wished I knew why, and I wished I knew why I wanted to cry my heart out. No, I don't know, I don't know. I ought to get up and make my hot milk and have the biscuits like I always did. And I ought to say my prayers and go to bed, and forget that Cullen won't come any more, and I ought to remember that I'm an old woman. Should I walk out of this place and go to a cottage and disturb my sister that has the peace of a nun, and sit with her, and talk about the things that happened long ago? No. No. This is my room, my home.”

She rolled up the lace and carried it back to the workbasket. She went and stood where the altar's shadow lay to the wall; she knelt down and said quickly, “God, what shall I do?” She undressed, climbed into bed, and covered herself up. She closed her eyes. Once she had lain like this, and a man had come into her room, and opened them. She remembered the man.

“Strange,
strange
. Yes, indeed, for after a while I fell in love with the man that first opened my eyes to the world that was too big to fit into a stone cottage. And after my father died, and my sister was away to be a nurse at Dublin, he said to me, ‘This is your home from now on, Winifred, and you will stay in it.' And I did, and here I am now. Funny it was, but I hated one half of those words, and I loved the other. It makes me think of him. He will be old, too. It makes me remember one particular time, and it was the most shining in my whole life, that night we all came up from below, and took the drinks to celebrate the victory of his horse, and I remember the sudden devilish way he caught hold of me and waltzed me round the room. I was so happy that night to be a servant girl that was picked out from the others, and I laughed all the way back to my room after he poured the champagne into my mouth and sang the song of praise to everybody about his golden beast. Oh, I was young then, too young maybe, but all the same young. Ah, surprises will come out of a known nature, and his I knew from heel to heart, and that Friday evening when he went off all of a sudden, and returned in two hours with a doll from the town, and had her to his room, and kept her there for three whole nights, and went off again with her to the town—well I was nearer to the cripple in the chair than I'd ever been, and I knew the sadness in broken things. Yes, indeed, and ever after that I was at her side, helping and helping, and doing, and doing again, for I knew there was a debt to be paid back to a silent woman. And I learned to curse my flesh; I tied my tiger down.”

Suddenly she sat up, listened. “I thought I heard something moving.” She lay down again, drew closer the bedclothes.

“Oh, when I look back, when I think of this house. The drink that flowed in it, the food that made the tables groan, the money that burned like fire and ran like water. I remember thinking about all that one morning after the early Mass, and I wondered if the master's going away was from too much of a fullness of those things. Yes, and wondered if when Miss Downey ran away that time it was from a sickened sight of too much that flowed like a tap. Yes, I saw it all lit up that morning, shining against the bones of many a fisherman that measured his loaf always with an uncertain hand. And another day it came clearer still, and I knew it myself for a lot of nonsense, a lot of waste. And later on it came like that to others also, and then there wasn't enough tanks to hold the petrol that would have blazed it all from the land.”

The days tumbled about in Miss Fetch's mind; like clouds, like tunes, like dancing men. She dozed, and she awoke with a start, then dozed again. The fire was almost out, a pinhead of light in a blackness of coal. This room was black. Dark, behind the thick curtains, and the fast shut window, beyond which a moon, riding swiftly through cloud, drowned the land in light. She opened and closed her eyes, she waited for nothing. But the ear was lively again. Was that the sound of feet? A step on the stairs? The creak of a door? Opening, closing? She did not know. Miss Fetch was deep in the bed, and yet was far from the bed; seemed moving and straining forward towards whole islands of days that she could never reach, as she fitfully dozed, as she started up out of dreams that were as soft as silk, and her opened eyes fought back against the darkness of this room.

The room that was small, that was high up, in the house that rose upon the land like a great ship. Its face was turned towards the south, its bulwarks of stone toned by sun, weathered and beaten by winds. Windows shone outwards like eyes. Miss Fetch knew this house, these rooms, these stairs, the corridors like alley-ways, the towering, endlessly ending staircase on her heaviest days. She knew the length and depth, height and feel of every one of them. She knew the life that was in, and the life that was out of them.

How quiet the house after the noise, the tempestuous, the wasted days. Miss Fetch remembered them all. The daily journeys that were like pilgrimages, the keys rattling at her waist, and the swinging chain. The voyage of hours through what might be a deserted town, so big, so overpowering the house, a passenger-less ship. Round and round, and up and down, through whole companies of shadows. How damp its autumn and winter airs, how cold the hall, how warm the kitchens. She saw these also, she heard herself walking them, and thought of the armies of people they had fed. Climbing to rooms like palaces, and rooms like cells. And there were three that were special to her, that were as real as persons. In one she heard the child sing, and in another the woman moaned and bared her breast to the arrows that were flung upon her.

“John Downey I liked best of all,” she thought. The bright youth who so often sat alone in his room, and held the secret that lay so close to his secret heart. As she paused at their open doors, their names would spring to her lips, as they sprang to them now, in these moments of memory, of uncertain repose. John Downey. A shy, withdrawn youth, and now a naval officer thousands of miles away, still hiding his secret, sharing it with none, as his boat plied the shores of a land that treasured a thousand and one of its own. “Teresa Downey,” and her lips moved. “Died in my arms, looking out of a window on to her lands that had been going to the devil for twenty years.

“Sheila Downey. Back home now after her pilgrimage to the gutter.

“Patrick Aloyious Downey, master of a great house, and crawling servant of his own flesh.

“A pity,” thought Miss Fetch. “A great shame.”

She imagined she heard the step again, the door, and she sat up, one hand to her ear. But there was no sound in the house.

“My sister still works for Murphy, and that cottage I was born in may still stink of the fish that my father got in the hard way out of hungry waters. It doesn't matter. It never did.”

For a moment she saw the cottage, and her sister sitting in it.

“
This
is my home. This is my home.”

She lay back on the pillows, her hands crossed over the beads. She seemed to hear the woman talking, caught the words as they fell. “You're getting on Winifred, you're getting on,” Sheila said. “And I think you ought to go back to your sister.”

“Getting on,” she thought, “getting old. I shan't mind. Age is peace.”

And suddenly, easily, like a child, she was fast asleep. Perhaps it is also a crown.

8

“When the light goes the candles will be lit. He'll watch them burn, and watch me. Darkness will come and the candle will burn out. And after that a silence will be inexcusable. He is just waiting. I'll go up to my room, and something in him will drag after me. Later he'll tell me that he loves me. They all do. As though it were a plan, the last thing it can ever be. No plan is necessary to lie flat on your back.”

She sat on one side of the fire, and he on the other. A clock ticked over their silence, an elected one; they did not wish to talk. They were tired after the long walk. Miss Fetch had served them dinner, had attended upon them in the sulkiest fashion, and had then gone off again, perhaps to do penance for the sin that would shortly be committed. The man is inert, his body slumped, and his arms lie stretched along the hard, uncomfortable arms of the chair. Only his eyes are not tired, looking, staring, at the impossible, the unbelievable. A woman in a chair; a woman in a long blue, sheath-like dress, which by the very act of sitting pronounces upon what in this silent hour can only be stared at, the razor sharp line of a thigh, the upthrusting, taunting, and giving breast, the partly open mouth and the tiny teeth, the hair that seems to dart with light from the candle. The woman with her face turned towards the fire, who might be watching the flames yet does not see them, who might be on the point of speech but will not talk. The neck, and the eye, and the ear that he can watch. “In that place, every night, every single night, a woman came into my cell. She had red hair and black hair, golden hair, and brown hair, she was tall and she was small, she was fat and she was thin. And I could never reach them, never touch,” and he watched, and went on watching, and he hated the clock, the tick of it, the length of the candle, the slow drag of the clock's hands, as he looked, and went on looking at the woman in the chair. Man and woman. Brother Anselm is worlds away, and a mound and a bare tree have sunk from sight.