Bring Larks and Heroes (4 page)

When they were beyond doubt hidden in the forest, Ann stopped. She leaned against a tree-trunk the colour of old iron seamed with vertical corrosion. A honey-coloured ant, one inch from her shoulder, reared up polemically on its abdomen, but seeing that she was, for the moment, invulnerable, it galloped off drunkenly across the gullies of bark. Ann was transmuted by something very close to the pure animal joy of being
released from that God-abandoned hutch at the back of Blythes'. Here, in nobody's country, in thin shade and thick heat, she became visibly young again.

Halloran found himself holding on to her head so tightly with both his hands, that he could feel the skull-case, dear and mortal, beneath her hair.

‘Do you want to walk, Ann?' he asked her, implying that she probably didn't want to. ‘We can find a shady place here and rest, because you need a rest.'

‘I need a seabreeze, Halloran darling. It isn't far to the seabreezes.'

Halloran went on to say many trite things for a man who fancied himself as a poet. Just as they separated, he said, ‘My bride in Christ.'

But, by the time they had crossed over the hill and come, slipping in the leaf-mould, to a dry stream-bed, Halloran felt again, as he had earlier in the day, that they were patently man and wife. It was about a quarter of a mile behind them that a rather Calvinist deity and the House of Hanover were the names by which contracts and marriages, baptisms and hangings were solemnized. Four hundred yards from the town, on untouched earth, they seemed as much fated, each to each, as two people in a fable.

3

Halloran knew that he would not sight any game. The full-time game-killers, three men chosen from amongst the transported felons, had not brought in anything since New Year. Even so, it was fitting to carry some symbol of your superiority through this knock-kneed forest, every stick of it a sacrament of antiquity and rebuke. Halloran carried not a Bible nor a book of sonnets, but a breech-loading Ferguson, a wonder of its times, capable of downing three men a minute.

They would see no black people, Ann and he. Somewhere between the skirting-board and carpet-edge of the land, the black race, with the secrecy of moths, was dying of smallpox. Or, perhaps, dying out.

One day at the beginning of spring, the disease had struck two people in the town. One of them, the sixteen year old son of Rev. Mr Calverley, died. The boy was
an outstanding scholar, and could, as de Quincey later claimed to be able to do, translate news-sheets into Greek at the age of thirteen. Over twenty-five degrees of unredeemed latitude and thirty degrees of longitude that had not bent the knee, his father was parish priest; and lured by this grand and meaningless concept, the boy had been enjoying an empire-building holiday with his parents.

After his death, there were a few other but not-fatal cases within the town. Then, against all the rules which the disease itself had established over centuries in Europe, and in the stewing December heat, it left the settlement. The surgeons were amazed; but it had found a better mark.

All the young subalterns, writing up the occurrence in their journals, felt no gratitude for the exit of the smallpox. They held that here was a stage in the general policy of deceit in which the new land dealt with them, that here was an attempt to subvert their civilized judgements. Some weeks later, they wrote with bitter zest of an incident involving Mr Calverley, which they saw as the summit of the almost personal guile of the land they garrisoned.

It seems that the Calverley boy had died of a bad form of the sickness.

‘He must have had some special weakness,' Mr Calverley said numbly in the presence of his son's horrific corpse. For, in the son, the fleshy parts of the
body swelled until the Chaplain could see only a pudgy mockery of his formerly trim scholar. The flesh turned purple and suet in streaks, like flesh which has been flogged and flogged but will not, by breaking open, splash out its pain. In the end, panting out a verse from Xenophon, the boy jerked down into his last frozen delirium and choked to death.

It was almost exactly in this way, the Xenophon excluded, that the disease took to the natives.

On the Saturday before Christmas, the Chaplain had gone out with his felon-servant to shoot wild ducks in the reed marshes to which the road past Blythes' finally came to bury itself. The servant went off to wade along the edge of the swamp and start the birds. As Mr Calverley waited, he believed he saw his son, awkwardly at rest, far in under the interlocking branches of three or four acacia trees, embowered as well as you could expect this niggardly place to embower anybody.

He dropped the fowling-piece he carried and fell on his knees. Mumbling at the unforeseen mercy, he scurried under the spiny canopy. He took up the dead head and shoulders of a native lightened to purple by the smallpox. His hands were overcome and awkward, cherishing the head. Waves of contentment rocked him back and forth, and he sang, unaware of the look of what he held.

The wind fell. Slatternly swamp-oaks were arrested
by the parson's tragedy, and gaped. So did the servant, coming back into the glade to consult him, having started no birds. Before the servant got to him, however, disbelief set in.

Mr Calverley lifted his head and saw that the light was swarming with gilt beetles, clicking onto bark; and gross flies cropped and bubbled about him. His hands felt too cold, and the face slipped from them. A wide, flared nose was now apparent, with purple death and blowflies ringing it.

Slow panic moved him upright then, through the froth of acacia. Twigs snapped around his waist as he stood tottering in a surf of yellow blossom. The servant reached him and helped him away.

‘Come on, sir. It's a dead savage. We don't want nothing to do with him, sir.'

When the transported man spread the story, it was relayed with rare pity and in appalled tones. And so it was recorded by the diarists. But Calverley himself was far from appalled. He rejoiced that his son was feet deep in the soft mercy of the grave, where the big seas of the inverted seasons would wash him down to dust. The Chaplain had catalogues in his head of the mercies and justices of God; and he transferred the truth of man's fitting reduction to dust from its place among the justices, to enrol it high among the mercies.

He refused to be soothed homewards. He wished to stay here and let the sun bite his back through his old
broadcloth coat. He wanted to listen to the chirruping of the marshes. There was the fowling-piece, on the mouldy ground. He snatched it up and went his own way, all the while rubbing the florid metal-work of the breech. For a man who had come shooting, it was too early to turn home. In the low fork of a tree with feathery bark, which he picked at a strand at a time, he spent the afternoon.

Only he and Halloran perhaps, in that whole town, did not resent the grotesque land, did not call it evil because it was weird. But the busy compilers of journals called it evil at some length.

4

Meanwhile, without hindrance, Halloran and his secret bride came to an open space above the sea. It had not been a long walk, but through the settled heat in a lee gully. They huffed and felt greasy.

‘Ah,' said Halloran, ‘the seas of romance. As they call them.'

Off they went, searching for the edge, half-afraid to find it, wading through a matting of shrubs stripped and cuffed westward by the prevailing wind. Once the green shoals could be seen under the cliff, he sat Ann down on a hump of granite. The cliff-top was sown with partly revealed clods of the rock and was not unlike a half-buried graveyard, with the names and scraps of remembrance having wasted into the crystals of the stones. Ann looked well here; beauty amongst the tombs. Halloran sidled back a step. He watched
her take her hat off, shake out her hair, lift her chin to catch the wind beneath it.

Having caught the breeze and jiggled the scalloped top of her chemise before it, she turned her head in time to catch him in his pride of possession.

‘Come on, Phelim!' she called, without enthusiasm. ‘Come and sit here. None of this adoring from a distance. You make me feel I'm stealing from God.'

There was no mistake; she had gone stale on him again. He had walked her too far.

‘I don't know how a poor silly beggar's supposed to know!' he said gently to the ether.

‘That's an elegant thought for a lover,' she observed.

‘Lovers don't have elegant thoughts,' he said. ‘Except in poetry.'

He sat down in a lump, feeling hamstrung that, except for her temporary radiance in the woods, his mood had chased hers downhill for an hour, never catching up.

‘Oh dear!' he grinned and gave a long, baffled snort. In fact, he was one of these people who have a talent for expressive breathing. ‘Oh dear, oh dear!' he said. His right hand went around and patted her hip. It had to stay there on her glum waist, superfluous as a bird on a tower.

There was something of the settling-in air of playgoers about them as they examined the spacious sea.

‘The seas of romance,' said Halloran again.

This was by way of being an invocation. In saying it, he hoped she might recall that into old age their distinction would be that they, with a few others, had punctured the tight horizon and come into an ocean made of the same freakish blue that people see in fevers. That they were brethren of Magellan, no less. But so were all the frayed ladies and soldiery of the colony. So that Ann grunted cursorily.

‘I heard you the first time. And if you're talking about waste,' she cried out, as if he had been, ‘look at that for waste!'

She pointed to a place just beyond the riot of the shoals. Set in the jelly-blue, a fleet of jew-fish tended slowly north. It
did
make one angry, to see such placid manna a foot or two below the seatop, passing by the hungry town without a flick of their tails.

Ann wagged her beautiful, house-keeping chin after them.

‘You'd think Blythe or somebody else would have a man up here all day,' she said, ‘with a trumpet and orders to blow an alarm whenever fish like that go past. Then off we'd go, seine and cutter, and all be less hungry at the end of the day.'

‘They're a negligent lot,' he nodded, meaning Blythe or somebody else.

Above all, he was pleased that she was live enough to cherish an opinion. Yet they went on sitting
woodenly together. Their ears, drenched by the south wind, tocked like clocks, thumped like sails. At last he took her shoulders, not compellingly enough, and tried to fall with her full-length along the cool rock. She tilted like a buoy but came upright again. Arms up and empty, Halloran ended on his back.

She smiled, in fact. There was a worldly-wise smile on her face before she turned away.

Instantly he was on his feet. Pity for her might occupy him on six days out of seven. Still, he was angry now.

‘As if I was after my own comfort,' he mumbled. ‘As if I was after your priceless favours . . .'

A giggling sound came from her, but he couldn't see her face. Her head, at the full stretch of her neck, was turned to, absorbed in the south. Palm in lap, her left arm stood rigid and propped up her concave shoulders. The shoulders quivered.

‘They
are
priceless,' he murmured. ‘You're not crying, are you? Surely Ann?'

He tried uselessly to turn her face to himself. The barbarous part of him that was saying,
Good, now we can begin to talk
,
wished indecently to see the tears on either side of her long nose. After some time, he stood up and walked to the other side of her. Her lids closed. Her nostrils and broad lips cringed.

‘Come on, come on,' he said. ‘My secret bride.'

He thought that it would be easy to be deft, to reap her head in against his hip.

‘Don't call me that silly name,' she said, stiffening herself.

‘That true name.'

‘That silly, stupid name. Don't call me by it.'

‘As you say, Ann.'

He sounded hurt.

‘How dare you be hurt!' she called out, standing up. ‘You said we would not be alone any more. You said that it would double our chances of coming home. So we gave our vows to each other. In the pagan forest, I might say. In the smell of dust, starlings all round us, scabby trees. We gave our vows, didn't we?'

‘Yes.'

‘And it wasn't like St Peter's church in Rome, whatever your old Dean might say. And now I'm still alone. Deadly alone. And look at you.'

Which she did, and lost all her anger since he stood so tall, ragged and blank.

‘You don't look any less alone yourself,' she said. ‘I think the sun will fall on us. Are we truly married Phelim?'

Asking this, she sat down limp. He knew that now he was meant to come up to her, and he did. She put her face against his canvas thigh.

‘It's impossible to believe,' she mumbled.

‘No, it's not impossible, exactly. I believe it myself most of the day. It's
hard
to believe sometimes. I'll agree to that.'

‘I don't seem to myself to be a bride, Phelim.'

The hazed wilderness Halloran now faced made him fearful and even pedantic.

‘It isn't a matter of what you seem to yourself to be!'

He explained their case to her again, blinking at the charred enamel sun and the woolly forests and black valley seams emitting fogs of heat. The hazards of giving oneself away, to Ann for example, preoccupied him. He felt by instinct that if he and Ann were caught in the fixity of love, they were not, under the gods, halving their danger, but doubling their chances of being buried by this deadly, passive landscape. Two weeks before, and again by instinct, he had felt the opposite. He was a baffled animal indeed.

All the time, though, that he stood there in fear, he gave off a mess of axioms, questionable and otherwise. Her head still lay against him, but in such a way that he saw without warning her comfortless ear, the hair hooked behind it, naked before his palaver. She sat so clearly bereaved and ashamed that she didn't seem to be Ann at all. Helped by all that granite, she seemed a statue to woman in her loss and shame, trapped without any solace but the vapourings of lord-lieutenants and pulpit orators. And, of course, half-literate Corporals of Marines.

‘Oh God,' he muttered. He touched her statuesque grief by the shoulder.

‘Remember how brides used to be at home, Phelim? Blue coats and long mantles and just a bit of worsted stocking showing. None of them ever looked to me as if they were raging under their decent clothes. Is there something wrong with me?'

‘Not to my eye,' he said.

‘Do you think under it all they're as shameless as me?'

‘They wouldn't be as lucky as all that.'

But she was not to be jollied out of a close look at her shame.

‘I was too full of desire. There's something wrong with me. And the whole business, the swapping of vows, I was too full of desire. I don't seem to myself to be a bride, Phelim.'

Then I'm not a bridegroom
,
Halloran was telling himself. It was an easy thing for the canon lawyers to have a rule for exiles. But even if you were exiles, you still both needed the priest to be the ultimate ratifier of your union. As he was and had been from your babyhood, of all the doorposts, windows, bridal beds and cradles in the gothic town of life.

It seemed to him that Mrs Blythe had prevailed in some way. He felt smothered by events and strongly compelled to bodily violence. At his feet waited a small dome of rock splashed with red oxide. He uprooted it and hurled it out over the sea from above his right shoulder. It hovered like a chicken-hawk, held up by the
wind and the hysteria of water. Then, in a split-second that offered him scarcely any relish, it dived under the brow of the land.

‘Damn you!' he raved down the chasm at the more practised raving of the sea. His finishing gambit was to kick a footful of rubble into the air, and to pay for it in view of his light canvas shoes.

He limped back, snorting, to the girl and risked holding his hand up to the ear that had been fretting him; the green and blue-rimmed hopeless ear, at large from its place under her hair, naked in the fierce climate. He came very close to toppling when she latched both arms around his hips and hauled at him furiously, burrowing her face into his belly. At last she looked up, spattered eyelids and a long, even smile.

‘It doesn't matter, Halloran darling. I think the priests make too much cry altogether about this virginity. I mean that it doesn't last too long, does it, once you settle down to getting rid of it.'

They laughed.

‘And except for Mrs Blythe taking me out of the hold, I would have lost it willy-nilly on the
Castile.
'

‘I would have liked,' said Halloran, ‘to run up against the beggar who tried it. Willy, I would have let him live, but nilly, I'd have dug his tripes out.'

Once more, they both laughed. Life was hearty again and all Dean Hannon's claims beyond dispute.

‘Perhaps you think I ranted as I did on behalf of
my old mate Moriarty, all prepared to have a luxurious time for himself.'

‘I know you better. Of course I don't think it.'

‘I was angry,' he said, talking straight at the low sun, ‘because I had nothing to tell you except a few bits of moral proverbs I got from the Dean in Wexford. I was angry at the people who say
It is better to marry than to burn
,
as if they were saying,
It's better to dig a corner drain than let your field be flooded.
'

In a flash he was angry again.

‘They're our vows to make. The marriage vows are ours to make. All the scholars say that. Are they all wrong? Is that likely, Ann? Is it at all likely?'

‘It's all right,' said Ann, cancelling the debate. ‘It's all gone now. I'm very happy to be your bride. Your
secret
bride.'

She giggled at the stealthy word.

‘Have you got your red string, eh?' he said.

He sat down and patted her waist for the red cord she wore under her clothes. It would, she guaranteed, stop her from conceiving before their marriage could be made public.

‘You might happen to need it this afternoon,' he said.

They laughed for seconds on end. She laughed partly, though without malice, because of his naïvety. He had no sisters, or rather, they had both died in childhood. To him a woman functioned by laws of
pythagorean grandeur and white rules of sortilege. He was willing to be serene on medical grounds about the red cord, that it would protect Ann. But she sensed in him his mannish scepticism towards unaided faith and magic. She did not tell him that the red cord was a sacramental much favoured by women on the east coast. It was called a St Megan's cord. You got an indulgence of four hundred days for wearing it, and all the women of her family had always put their trust in it in matters of female chemistry. So she laughed gently at him, thinking,
And he
'
s a scholar!

They did not, in fact, need the cord today. Halloran was cubbish; their rare freedom had its chance of going to their heads. But they both knew that they would be freer and more assured for the next seven days if they merely sat together. Perilously, they sat together, placating their destinies.