Ghost Light (12 page)

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Authors: Joseph O'Connor

BOOK: Ghost Light
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There is a script of Lady Gregory’s she has to learn: her role is difficult, complex. He reads the other parts for her, offers insights. He is a laughably dreadful actor, hamming lines, waving his arms, stomping around the cabin soliloquising to the rafters. His attempt at a Connemara accent would cause a turnip to cringe, but he knows he is no good so it doesn’t matter. He batters the love lines by saying them too loud, eviscerates the hate lines by speaking them too quietly, misses cues, waits too long, stutters, interrupts, and lisps when he means to be menacing. His oath-swearing warriors are gibbering clowns and his warlocks are effete English headmasters. One night he insists on donning a bedspread as the mystical robe of Cuchulainn. He raves in it, eyes bulging, his trouser-legs rolled up, his finger pointing vengeance on the fireplace.
After a few days he comes to look like a countryman: sunburnt, dishevelled, his hair and beard bleaching, red earth on his clothes. His bleak, grey eyes seem filled with reflections. His stockings are holed. She darns them.
‘There is a wasp in your beard, John. Sit you easy till I get a cloth for to flurry it.’
‘It will not sting me, don’t worry.’
‘How do you know?’
‘They smell the sickness in my blood. It repels them.’
‘Don’t be daft.’
‘Or perhaps they are afraid of Protestants.’
He has heard it said there is a Wicklow mushroom that has hallucinogenic properties. One sees visions and phantoms if one eats it. (‘Old Yeats tried some once. Sent him out of his mind. Course, he didn’t have far to go.’) She loves when he mimics Yeats; it is remorselessly accurate – the gestures, the accent, the studied floridness of expression. It is as though they are naughty schoolchildren lampooning a master who might materialise through the floorboards at any moment.
‘You’re an awful cur to go making a jeer of Mr Yeats. And I thinking youse the greatest friends ever heard of.’
‘
You
, my little dunce. I shall put you across my knee. “Ewes” is the plural of mature female sheep.’
‘Oh is it, Professor? I’ll wax your moustache for you in a minute.’
‘Poor, trying old Yeats. I adore him, of course. He is so slow and fierce and sleek and subtle. Like a great silverback gorilla in a cummerbund. His valet strips him down and shaves his back of a morning, did you know?’
‘He goes down like a dinner with Her Ladyship anyhow.’
‘Darling old Augusta. You know she breast-feeds him, don’t you? Every night during the second interval.’
‘That is enough blah out of you now. Let me alone to read, you scruff-hound.’
‘Actually I tell a lie. You do realise Augusta is a man?’
‘Would you quit your playacting this minute and give me some peace!’
‘Willie Fay told me he dandered into the jakes at the Abbey one morning and here’s Augusta, saving your presence, making Adam’s ale standing. Says Augusta:
Me bould hack, that’s the soft day now
. Says Fay:
Deed and it is, Ma’am, thank God
. And the two of them a-widdle like water-clocks in a fountain. Told me she pissed like a buffalo.’
‘There’s talk out of you now. Merciful hour but you’re lovely.’
He finds a sickle in the thatch of the cottage and takes it into the forest, returning with an armful of nettles he asks her to boil, but the slick, green juice is too bitter. Vital to exercise caution in the countryside of Ireland, for certain of the flora can kill you. The berries of a yew, so lusciously scarlet, have poisoned whole legions of the ignorant.
One morning she is wandering the laneways while he is away to Annamoe for bread, when a young policeman approaches on a bicycle. He is handsome, like a boxer, and he salutes as he dismounts. He is the girl’s own age, perhaps.
Walking up the boreen with the constable at her side, she makes small talk about the weather, the birds. The constable is a Mayoman, ‘a blow-in’ as he puts it, and the phrase seems to hang in the air between them. It is clear he knows she is one of the people staying at the cottage. He is a policeman: omniscience is his trade. A boy returning from haymaking with a scythe over his shoulder glances back at the curious combination as they continue along the lane. The gorse in the fields smells richly sweet. You could hang a hat on the constable’s cheekbones.
‘I’m told himself is a writer, Miss.’
‘He is. Well, he tries.’
‘Sure, that’s all any of us can do in the end.’
‘It is.’
‘My father now, God be good to him. That was the man could tell a story if you like, Miss. When the neighbours came in of a winter’s night. They do talk of him yet in the townland down at home – though he’s gone this fourteen year. He’d have you in transports with a story so he would.’
‘Would he?’
‘Of the hard days, you know, Miss, when the Famine was in it. The people and they going to America. He’d a queer enough story of how the big house got burnt one time and himself and the brother tried to save the landlord’s family. But the flames was gone too high on him so he couldn’t do aught for it. He was harrowed by it. You know, Miss. The not being able to do nothing. For there was childer in the house, a little fellow there was. Never done a harm to no one, a little puppy, no more. The mother said he was never the same after.’
‘They were terrible times. When you think of the suffering.’
‘Indeed and they were. It’s better off out of them we are. The people set against one another and murder walking the country. God send we’ll never see the likes again.’
‘Well, we’re coming to the cabin. Would you take a cup of tea?’
‘Faith, I would if it’s no trouble, Miss. It’s gracious of you now.’
He walks around the ruined garden, looking silently at the ground, before approaching a little shed and examining its lock. He tries the bolt once or twice. She makes him his tea. He removes his beautiful cap and places it carefully on a boulder.
‘We can’t change the past, Miss. In’t that the way it is?’
‘That’s what my mother does be saying.’
‘And himself is away to Annamoe. Is it long he’s going to be?’
‘Two or three hours. Sometimes more.’
‘More, I’d be thinking. Annamoe’s the road will sort them.’
Wind moves the branches and a filigree of sunlight surrounds him. He toes speculatively at the earth as though the action might uncover something. Bending, he picks up a fist-sized, mossy stone, which he throws into a distant field.
‘The auld aim is gone on me,’ he says with a laugh. ‘One time I’d have hit a crow from forty yards.’
‘You’ve a strong throw,’ she says. ‘I’ve a brother plays handball.’
‘Used to play it the odd time myself. Down in Mayo, I mean. There wouldn’t be the call for it in Wicklow.’
She watches as he throws, the
huff
as he releases, pictures him naked in a river, his tough body sunburnt as he bends to wash his shining black hair. Or inside in the cabin. Slowly barring the door. Watching as you unbutton your dress. God forgive you but it would be wonderful to be bedded a lazy hour by someone so hard and young. No love, no words, no past, no future, just his sweat dripping on your face and your back and your breasts. Christ, a bull he’d be like; you’d be destroyed with the pleasure. It would be worth a thousand years of Purgatory. Do men have such thoughts? Do other women, too? Does your Tramp? Does the young policeman?
‘You’ll be busy today, so? Or just going the roads?’
‘I’ve to take myself up to Enniskerry with the sergeant later on. There was a house robbed the other night. A bad business.’
‘Aren’t you brave? I wouldn’t envy you. Will you catch them that did it?’
‘I don’t know about that now. I’d say they’re flown, the same heroes. I was up with the squire yester-morning. He’s a decent auld sort. Says I: “You’d want to keep a weather eye on any girleen in the house, sir. A housemaid or that. You’re a man of the world, sir. Only some of the girls that’s going now do keep queer enough company. They say more than their prayers, the same young-ones.”’
‘Aren’t you an awful man now, to go blaming everything on the girls.’
‘God keep your innocence, Miss. That it might always be your blessing. But a young-one today, her head can be turned. These flyboys do be clever as Satan in brogues. They do hang about the dance halls and they sly as you want, with an eye for the decent girl in service. Or above on the esplanade in Bray when
the girls do be walking. It’s allanah macree and the old sweet song and they talking the rain out of wetting them. The same fox will inveigle his cunning way. I needn’t tell you how, Miss. Some girls has no sense. Next thing we know it’s when does your mistress be out? Would there be e’er a bob of money left about in the house? Is there silver you do be polishing? Aren’t you the great lassie now. We’ve seen many such cases in recent times. And the girleen ruined, to boot.’
‘It’s well they’ve yourself to protect their honour all the same.’
‘The sergeant does say there’s more harm done in Ireland by dance halls and courting than all the dynamite ever come from America.’
‘What a terrible auld misery. And have you no sweetheart yourself?’
‘There was one I was great with. But she went to Massachusetts on me in the end. Two year we were courting – near enough to two year. I thought we’d be married. But didn’t she change her mind for Boston. Last Martinmas a year ago she went.’
‘And you’ve not been with another? Not in all that time?’
Everything in the garden is silent for a moment. A blackbird arises from a cluster of rhododendrons. It settles on the roof of the pigsty near the kitchen beds and seems to cock its wise face at the sky. The constable’s eyes are steady as he meets the girl’s gaze.
‘If they all looked like yourself, Miss, the world would be sweet.’
She feels herself flare. The stillness of the heather. No one would ever know. Only the blackbird and the midges.
‘I’d better let you go on,’ she says, very quietly.
‘If you’re certain, so, Miss … God keep you.’
Sometimes in the evenings he sings melancholy songs in Gaelic, the knowledge of which he is trying to improve in her. He sings
with his eyes closed like a whiskied balladeer, rocking himself gently, his arms folded tight, or his hands reaching out to some spectral invisibility summoned or driven away by language. His voice is not strong; his breathing is so pained, and at night it becomes frailer, a wheeze that often makes him tremble, but he knows about timing and drama in a song. He allows the mournful couplets to fall on you like leaves – the pleadings, the entreaties, the dark imprecations.
You have taken the east from me.
You have taken the west from me.
And my fear is great
You have taken great God from me.
‘Come sit on my lap, Molly.’
‘We know where that leads.’
‘Don’t you like where it leads, my little innocent wildcat?’
‘Very sharp now, Mister, and mind you don’t cut yourself.’
He grows stronger, gains weight, hiking ten miles every day, over stony rough country, fording rivers, climbing cliffs. He finds a long-forgotten track that leads through Crone Wood to Powerscourt waterfall. (‘I name it Molly’s Path! Hallelujah.’) He becomes convinced of the existence of a holy well in the valley, goes scouting for it with the aid of his ancient map. But it is his changeling who finds it, pulling back the thorn bush. The water is oily black.

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