Ghost Light (14 page)

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Authors: Joseph O'Connor

BOOK: Ghost Light
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‘If by
these people
you mean the poor –’
‘That is not what I meant.’
‘Are their families to starve?’
‘Is mine?’
‘You are ridiculous. Do you know that? Why play the village idiot?’
‘Is my mother to go hungry? That income is all she has. Will you help me fetch some water, Molly? I will wash that filth away.’
‘John –’
‘I did not make the world, Molly. Neither did you. I am going to the lake. For water.’
An old peasant woman appears in the lane with a ram on a string and a creel of black turf on her shoulder. She looks like the Comanche chieftain on the cover of his almanac. She begs a smoke of his pipe. She has a son in Illinois.
He tries to speak to her in Gaelic, of local legend, folkways, the place names of rural north Wicklow. Has she memories of the Famine? Has she people in England? She does not understand what he is saying. When he explains that he is speaking Irish, she regards him amiably enough, as one might smile on an arch child who has asked an inconvenient question. There was a professor from Germany here in the Glen last summer, and scarves of the blessed Gaelic flowing out of his mouth (God be good to Your Honour but you never heard the likes) with a notebook the size of the Protestant Bible and a huntsman’s feather cawpeen on his head. And he traipsing up the bogs with the book in his oxter and he asking th’aul bogmen for legends. And they scratching themselves in their waterboots beyond in the river and your man shouting down to them about Vikings. Tormented he’d have you. Had you stories of saints? Had you ever shtuck a pig? Were you Christian at all, like? Faith, but he would fairly ask you what you do be having for breakfast in the morning, things a
peeler
wouldn’t ask you this ploughboy would ask, and the hunger and th’emigration and all th’auld sorrows and he wishing to be writing them in his book. And saving your presence, only who would be reading that? If a body
could
read. Which
wasn’t likely here in the Glen. And devil the hunger nor a soul ever knew that a book of this world could sate, sir. In’t there misery enough now, don’t you think, in the world, without adding to it by writing it down, sir? We must laugh at the devil, sir, in’t that the only way? Laugh, and the devil does be frit. But this German professor or whatever else he was, God keep him alive, sir, and no disrespect to His Honour, but he’d nearly be disappointed no one belonging to you never got drownded nor got the belly kicked off him be a redcoat. Away with him to Germany and little to show. Nobody around here could remember nothing.
‘Silly-headed old wagon.’
‘Droleen, please.’
‘It’s in the Bedlam asylum should be the likes of herself. I don’t know why you go talking to them at all.’
‘They interest me. The people. They are like the ancient Greeks.’
‘They are like my sanctified arse.’
‘I wish you would not speak in that uncouth manner.’
‘Did you see the maggoty beard on her? She was worse than the ram. Like a sow staring into a swill barrel.’
‘I said I wish you would not speak in that uncouth manner, Molly.’
‘Oh do you, My Lord? Well I’m awfully worried.’
‘Nevertheless. Why do you conduct yourself like that when you know it hurts me? The poor woman has done you no harm. Your attitude unnerved her.’
He is whittling a lump of oak he found in the bog.
‘There is something troubling you, I think.’
‘No, John. I am tired.’
‘What is it?’
‘Well, since you ask – Could we not be married?’
He thumbs at a nodule of candle grease on the tabletop, takes a long, slow breath, like a tenor about to commence an aria. ‘I am impatient too. But there are various impediments, as you know. We shall have to show forbearance a while more.’
‘How much of a while more? Till we are old and grey, is it? Is it swither and dither till we’ve not a tooth left between us?’
‘My health is fragile since the surgery. You know this very well.’
‘That fragile it couldn’t stand a blessing and a sprinkle of confetti?’
‘I have not the means to support a wife. Surely you can see this.’
‘I am worn out telling you it need not matter.’
‘It would obviously matter to me, though. As a man, it would matter. And what would people say if it were seen that I could not maintain my wife? The gossips would have a carnival. As you know.’
She rises quickly from the bench and busies herself at the old dresser where the plates and tableware are kept.
‘In any case, what is marriage but the final admission that one’s parents were right? It is the dreariest way imaginable for society to regulate the natural impulse.’
‘The natural impulse?’
‘Well, what would you call it?’
‘I have heard it called many things. One of them is love, John.’
‘Ah yes – love. The dressmaker’s friend.’
She looks at him and drops a heavy stack of delft on the flagstones, where some pieces smash and others roll about, and a platter cracks cleanly into three. The jags are blue and white, like broken bits of the sky. Something in the chimney gives a scuttle.
‘What in the name of Holy Moses are you doing?’
‘You huer’s melt and cur. You may leave me well alone from this out. You may sleep in your blasted
hammock
, my buck.’
‘Is the hysteria to continue, do you know, at all?’ His words are measured carefully but she can see that he is frightened. It interests her to glimpse his helplessness before a woman’s anger and she wonders about the source of that fear. He blurs in her eyes as she commences to weep. He takes the broom from its hook, his boots scrunching quietly on the debris.
‘If you open the door, I shall help you clear up, Molly. These little accidents happen.’
She begins to pack her clothes into the ancient carpetbag she always brings on tour.
‘So you will leave when I need you? How do you intend returning to Dublin?’
‘On my feet if I must. I am damn well able to walk. It’s the only useful thing knowing yourself ever taught me.’
‘You are ridiculous, of course. You will jeopardise everything.’
‘Do I take it that you will refuse me a shilling for a train fare?’
‘For the love of Christ, woman, need you act in this manner?’
‘Call it payment if you like.
Call it payment!
Do you mind me? I want never to see your liar’s face again.’
A tour in northern England. Then Wales. Then Scotland. His telegrams and letters you ignored. But speaking his lines every night brought him to you anyway. A ferociousness to his words, full of deliberate discords in their arrangement, that would make you draw in your breath and mutter and turn to your neighbour and feel strange things were being named in the room.
What had happened between you became a thing that would have to be let go. You sensed the messages from him were either a duty he felt he had to keep faith with or a sort of weaning-off he needed too. You were unmooring one another. Perhaps nobody would be hurt. One evening after a performance in Manchester, you went walking with your sister and told her a little of your feelings, of the promises not kept. She pointed out that you were speaking of him in the past tense now, advised you to allow him a last chance. What was holding you back? You owed it to yourself to try. The worst that could happen was a final rejection, but could you continue in the lie that you did not care for him any more, a fiction you must surely be able to recognise?
You dreamed of Wicklow: hidden lakes, the ruins of old mines, bog meadows, Ravens’ Glen, the waterfall at Powerscourt. You
had been a reason to visit again the places of his childhood summers – that was all you had been: a diversion. A reason to speak the place names he found soothing to say, the words sounding beautiful in his Kingstown accent: Djouce Mountain, Tonduff, Carrickgollogan. Knocksink. Aughavanna, Glenmalure, Annamoe, Lough Nahanagan. The graves in the Protestant churchyard at Enniskerry, not far from Lover’s Leap rock. You had asked him to show you his favourite view of all; he’d brought you hiking up a switchback path above the forest at Kilmolin. On the eastern horizon you could make out the peaks of Snowdonia, the bald drumlin of Holy Island at the entrance to Holyhead. You dreamed of that vista and awoke in a boarding house in Liverpool. There was a letter from him waiting. You burned it.
Manchester, Oxford. The Medway towns. York. Carlisle. Great Yarmouth. You dreamed of being with him at Brittas Bay, grim sandwiches in the dunes, and of the ruins of a fairy ring near a maltings at Arklow, still transmitting its menace a thousand years after it was made, according to the children hunting wrens nearby. A farmer had tried to fell it; his hammer had burst into flames the moment he entered the rath – he was dead before it hit the ground. ‘That’s as true as Jesus, Mister, I seen it myself.’
‘Way to God, you gowl,’ scoffed another lad, whispering lowly to his girl. But the first boy insisted on the veracity of the story. ‘I’d no more cross that circle than pish on a grave. They’d come after you, so they would. They’re evil, so they are. An oul tinker used to live up the way told me ma the fairies took his wife. An’ if you seen him yourself you’d believe it.’
You played London for a week in August. He was rumoured to be coming. A note arrived from him to the effect that he was grateful for your first-night performance but unfortunately had had to leave early, due to illness. The costume girl read it to you. You made no response. Someone brought champagne. You drank it.
He had written that he missed you, had wanted to meet you off the train at King’s Cross, had set out from his club before realising it was too insistent a gesture, something you might not want. He had walked the streets around the station in the rain and the wind, sat in a café trying to sort his thoughts. He watched the trains coming in. You would be on one of them, he knew. To approach you across the platform, to embrace you, take your bag? Would you be happy to see him there or find his presence unnerving? In the end he had sat so long that you must have arrived by then, were probably in the cab to the hotel, or the theatre. Doubtless, you did not wish to see him anyway.
You dreamed of him that night, you were walking Russell Square in London, and there was such freedom and lightness in whatever he was saying that to wake in the dark of morning was hard. You began what soon became a love letter; it was honest, too lengthy. You wrote that you had come to think of him as the source of whatever happiness and courage you knew; that the thought of a future without him was unbearable. You considered a long time before writing the word ‘unbearable’, sensing declarations of such heatedness would frighten or anger him; they would certainly have this effect on you. And then you simply let go, writing anything you felt, for you knew you would never send it, lacked the mettle to be revealed. Foolish phrases came crowding. It didn’t matter now. Quotations from love poems, from songs that had come to mean something. As you watched the letter burn, you felt the strange, bright hope that its destruction would somehow anatomise the realities it had tried to describe. You wondered why you had spent so long writing it.

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