Annie Dunne (19 page)

‘Matt’s over in Lathaleer. Did you see him yet, dear?’ she says.

‘No,’ I say. Matt in Lathaleer.

‘He’ll be over to you shortly, have no fear. He is mad after those two children. He is daft about them. He has boiled sweets bought for them, the ones they like, he says.’

‘He hasn’t been over yet,’ I say.

‘Isn’t he only just down? Last night! Drove in that nice big car of his. Morris Major. And didn’t it break down in Aughrim? Poor man. Got a jarvey all the way from there. Think of the expense of that!’

‘Good for him.’

‘Oh, unstoppable. He loves all that painting. Oh, he’ll , have been up since dawn now, with that easel of his, walking, walking, pausing here and there, like a fisherman.’

‘Like a butterfly collector, my father used to say.’

‘Did he, God rest him?’

I am glad that Matt’s about again. Of course we don’t get on. By rights he should keep away. Of course it won’t be for me he comes visiting to Kelshabeg. It won’t be for me. But this is not the question of the moment, no.

‘Winnie, dear, there is a topic I wish to touch on, if I may?’

‘I am so glad you brought them down, Annie. I don’t know what I was expecting. City children. But they are lovely children.’

‘Can I ask you something, Winnie - your advice on a matter?’

She changes her manner immediately, sets down the kettle, rests a hand on the table, looks at me seriously, gently.

‘What is it, Annie? You look solemn.’

‘It’s - oh, God forgive me for not understanding the world sufficiently not to bother you with this, but. And I should likely say nothing. Let things take their course. Oh, and I don’t want to make her unhappy, to wreck her chance of happiness, if that’s what it is.’

‘Who, who, who, Annie?’ she says, like an owl in the sycamores.

‘Sarah, Sarah Cullen!’

‘What about Sarah? Her eyes, is it her eyes?’

‘It is probably her eyes has her going the way she is going. And her age, and the pony and the tinkers ...’

‘Annie, Annie, hold your horses, what’s the matter?’

I am trembling, sweating now in my summer dress. Winnie comes closer and puts her sisterly hand on my back. I can take no offence from that, though I am as always aware of the hideous hump in my spine. How close she puts her fingers to it. Touch not, touch not!

‘What’s the matter with Sarah, is she ill? Not that dreadful cancer that afflicts so many?’

‘No! Thank God!’

I am astonished she has uttered the word, cancer. But it is the mark of Winnie. Even a shameful illness like that would not confound her.

‘It is all Billy Kerr,’ I say. ‘Billy Kerr coming up to us, and talking to her, and I don’t know what he has said to her, but it is all very strange. She says, she says they have an understanding ...’

‘Billy Kerr?’

She is very quiet for a minute. She is thinking.

‘Well,’ she says at last. ‘Well, that is surprising, Annie, but I suppose people in general are surprising.’

‘But, Winnie, is it not ... is it not awful?’

‘Awful? I don’t know.’

‘The ages, Winnie, are not right.’

‘Oh? How old is Sarah Cullen now? I am sure she is sixty.’

‘She is sixty-one, just a shade older than myself, two years between us.’

‘Well,’ she says, disastrously, ‘Mrs Tomkin in the village was sixty-three when she married.’

‘But Mr Tomkin was older than her, and it was his second marriage, after the first Mrs Tomkin died.’

‘Well, I don’t know, Annie. Billy Kerr is no spring chicken either. If he doesn’t want children, it hardly matters what age his wife would be.’

‘Spring chicken? Is he not forty-five then? I thought so!’

‘Sure, no, no, Billy is in his fifties too. It’s that we feed him so well, he looks like a gasur.’

‘But, Winnie, Winnie, it’s just the farm he wants, isn’t it?’

‘Oh, now, Annie, a woman with a farm is an attractive notion, but Billy Kerr, you know, he is very sincere.’

‘Sincere?’

‘Yes.’

She looks at me. I feel she can see into my worried heart. I feel she can read there after all the source of my fear. She looks at me I think with pity, biting her lip as she does.

‘We are not against marriages, and we are not for marriages, ourselves. We never wished to marry here, you know,’ says Winnie, leaning in to me, as if I have asked her that, but I haven’t. ‘Our father left the three of us the place. , We would not divide it. We are happy to have each other. The first to die will be buried by two sisters, and the sec- , ond to die will be buried by one, and the last will have to bury herself, and that is our story!’

And she offers her enormous, kindly laugh to the bare, scratched boards of the naked kitchen, and turns her back without insult and starts to heave the fresh-boiled water into the kettle.

Oh, I am surprised and disheartened by her generous humanity. I thought I was so safe in my prejudices, and forgot the breadth of Winnie’s sympathies. It is a disaster.

As it is the boy’s fifth birthday in July, it behoves me to carry myself whatever way I can now without the pony and trap to Baltinglass, and see if there is anything there in the haberdashery and general store that would interest a little boy. As it may be imagined, I proceed on my way with some grimness, after what Winnie has told me.

It is Pat Byrne the stone-man that gives me a lift in his Ford Anglia and I suppose he considers me a very glum package indeed in the bright red plastic seat beside him. But I cannot help it. I cannot hardly speak to myself let alone to him. I feel the world is against me and at the same time I feel miserably at odds with everything. I have the awkward sense that if I open my mouth people will know me for the villain I am. At the same time, or in the next breath, tears keep surging up into my eyes, tears of some righteousness, because my mind keeps rising to righteousness. All in all I am like a ragged wind in a tangled hedge.

Well, and I do find a highly suitable toy, a wooden fire engine painted a fierce green.

This I carry back, entering the farm like a Russian spy, and hiding the present in its folds of newspaper under the hulk of the abandoned trap. I feel in my heart that it will make the little boy’s head hot with pleasure when he sees it on the great day.

I am out of sorts now but not entirely so. The fire engine at least, I am thinking, is a victory of a kind.

Next day at evening time I am sitting on my three-legged stool, in the cow shed, milking Daisy and Myrtle. I can feel the hard little saddle of the stool against my hard backside. It is a marriage. Daisy has given up all she has, and now I lean in against Myrtle’s warm bulk, to encourage her. I begin the little hauling on her teats, stretching them, squeezing them, and after a little, the warm milk starts to spurt, striking the zinc bucket with a satisfying ripping noise. This is work that would calm an evil God. Lucifer himself would find a balm in it.

The children come out to me, maybe scattered from the kitchen by Sarah. They stand in the wide doorway of the shed, darkening the interior a little. Myrtle pays them no heed. She thinks nothing of them, maybe, mere calves of human beings. Not that I really know how a cow may think. But she must be thinking something, to judge by the murky but intelligent eyes, the blue of mackerel. She is relaxed now, surrendered, or she could not give the milk.

They are holding hands, the boy and the girl. They are complete, content, sunburned. Their own eyes are bright as pebbles in the river, and they are giggling like friends. I have watched the little girl carefully but not seen hide nor hair of anything like the thing I witnessed. My worry about them is lessening. I am hopeful that it must have been a little experiment, a moment, one of those undesirable things that happen the once.

I have debated with myself whether I should ask the little girl about it, but I cannot find the words. I do not think she would know how to answer me. It would embarrass her terribly. Much as it offends me to think it, it must be a part of being brother and sister, a mimicking of love, I do not know. Despite what Sarah says, the little girl seems bright and whole to me now. She is full of laughter.

I bend Myrtle’s supple teat towards them and send a long stream of milk across the shed. The smell of milk bursts through the shed like a veritable seltzer, that odour of inside skin that babies too must have when they are born. It breaks up into a thousand droplets, glistening like mother-of-pearl. It cascades down and strikes the gansey of the boy, the dress of the girl. They scream with surprise and delight.

In the twilight of a few days following, I am carrying in a forkful of hay to Billy in his murky byre, when what light there is is erased by someone suddenly standing in the gap. I have been speaking to Sarah those days as if no catastrophe was imminent, because there is no other way we could continue to run the farm, and she falls I think gladly under the same foolish spell.

‘I think this pony is getting fat,’ I say. ‘Maybe we should put him out onto the sloping field for himself, Sarah.’

‘Maybe you should sell him, as I suggested,’ says a man’s voice, and of course it is Billy Kerr, who else? I do not feel entirely easy to have him standing in the light of the rough door. Billy the pony snorts and stamps on his smeared straw, which by rights needs mucking out.

‘What do you want now, Billy Kerr?’ I say.

‘I want a word with you, Annie Dunne, as quiet as I can get it.’

‘Oh?’

He steps in, releasing the few rags of daylight back into the byre. Billy’s grey coat lightens a few shades. It is small enough for a pony, let alone a pony and two people, especially when one of those people, myself that is, would prefer now to disappear through the solid wall. I hate proximity, but proximity to a man whose voice is so sure and hard is deeply unpleasant.

‘I suppose,’ he says quietly, ‘I could take you by the scruff of the neck, you old dog, and give you a mighty shake for yourself.’

‘Billy Kerr!’ I say. I am so shocked the blood is seeping out of my legs, it feels like.

‘What are you trying to do to me?’ he says. ‘Going down to Winnie Dunne and having a go at me, like you did.’

‘What I am saying to Winnie is none of your affair.’

‘Is it none of my affair when the topic is myself? And you are making me out to be a blackguard?’

‘A blackguard?’

‘Don’t play the innocent old woman,’ he says. ‘Look it, here, Annie, I’ll, what-cha-ma-call-it, enlighten you. Just so you will know and not be thinking you can do and say what you like around Kelsha and Feddin. In respect of myself. If you go about saying more, Annie, I’ll come up here in the dark of the night,‘ and now he is very quiet, very quiet, ’and I’ll do something to you—I’ll hurt you, Annie, make no mistake.‘

I am looking at him. Yes, a low person. Strength in his body from decades of labour. A dangerous, low aspect to him. There is a crouch in his shoulders I have noted before. He is clenching and unclenching his fingers like he wants to do this hurting to me now, without further warning. Should I say anything now? I am sorely afraid of him. His force and strength washes against me. He stands on the fork of his legs, pulsing, trying to convince me. He is convincing me.

‘Do you understand me, you old bitch?’

‘Do you think Sarah would let you talk to me in this way?’ I say, without considering the words.

‘How will she know how I talk to you? If you are saying anything to her, even a hint or whisper, I will twist your ugly old neck for you.’

Well, he is trembling with rage, I can see that. The twilight deepens in the yard outside, lending a strange dying vision to this talk. Somehow I feel like all my life is dying in the yard outside, all that I am, can be. Something is failing in my blood, in my heart, a measure of hope and female strength that has been there unquestioned throughout everything. It isn’t just that I fear him, but that he feels able safely to offer me these speeches of hate and constriction. The word ‘old’ echoes and echoes among the four tottering walls of Billy’s last refuge.