Portobello Notebook (10 page)

‘What’s the programme?’

‘We’re training the junior staff, local people we’re training to take over.’

He remembered that we-know-better voice from the past. He was able for it now. He nodded. ‘What will they be doing?’

‘It’s a training pack we’re having printed.’

‘You’re bringing the training pack with you?’ He sprinkled a little salt on the side of the plate.

‘Yes, they’ll take over then. It’s very simple.’

‘That’s what you were doing?’

She blundered on. Finally she was silent. He glanced at her deep-set tired eyes, the brown slack skin beneath them. She put a good face on her defeat, asked for the bill and insisting on paying. As she signed a MasterCard slip she said, ‘I’m sure you and Joe have lots to talk about. I have to go to my office.’

He hadn’t had any wish to hurt her. He had been defending himself, the little freedom he had won. Calm again, he kissed her cheek goodbye.

Now he and Joe were free to talk, but they were silent as they
strolled the sunny streets. He suggested sitting down, and Joe led the way to a bench in a small sandy, tree-shaded square. He lit a cigarette. ‘What are you doing with yourself?’

Joe did a Cockney accent, as he had long ago. ‘I do a bit o’ writing, myself.’

‘Anything published?’

Joe shook his head.

‘What do you write?’

‘Plays, mostly.’

‘Any performed?’

Joe shook his head again.

‘Why not? Have you tried?’

There was a glint of steel in Joe’s boyish smile. He backed down. Joe glanced at his cigarette. ‘What are they?’

‘They’re not bad. Turkish.’

‘I sometimes smoke the odd one … outside.’

Sally had banned smoking, and Joe was signalling for help? Having a little rebellion? Making an effort at intimacy? He handed him a cigarette. The way Joe drew on it deeply reminded him of that long-ago intensity, the desperate innocence of their
high-spirited
talk as freedom had drawn close; a night in an Austrian bar when they had silently watched workmen at the next table drive pins into their powerful arms, challenging each other’s endurance. Joe breathed smoke slowly down his nostrils, then dropped the cigarette on the sand, half-finished. ‘What would you like to do?’

He thought it was some great question, but Joe meant simply that. They wandered down the street to a vast bookshop, where he looked for a present to bring home. He felt a small shock as he saw Joe lost in a book, shutting it reluctantly as he approached. Already Joe was returning to his own world.

‘Would you like to meet my daughter?’ That was the best he could manage.

‘Sure.’

Together they walked to her flat, not far, but their silence made it seem endless. When he rang the bell, she came downstairs with her boyfriend. The owner of a music shop next door stepped out onto the pavement and they chatted gratefully with him for five minutes more. Then it came down to small talk.

‘When are you going back?’

‘Tomorrow.’

His daughter picked up the silence. ‘Would you like to come in?’

Joe looked at his watch, gave his aloof self-mocking smile, and turned away. ‘I must go back to my Sally.’

He wanted to run after him, suggest a drink, in a bar try again for that past togetherness. The blue yachting cap disappeared into the crowd. He grasped at images –
All things are Buddha things
– the paling post enfolded in the old tree’s bark. But the facts were that he was going back to Ireland, and Joe was staying in New York.

ALMOST ALL THE MEN
in the townland had the same name, but in different forms – Paddy, Páraic, P.J., Pak – so you hardly noticed they were the same. You noticed it in the graveyard on the hill when you saw the full name on each headstone. Some houses had a statuette of Saint Patrick set into their gate pier, but if it was smashed by a tractor or a delivery lorry reversing it wasn’t replaced. The few young men left were busy all day. Each small farm had its own small advantage and disadvantage: a stream or a well, and some wet land; or some good land on an awkward slope.

They were shy. If a man saw a stranger come up his boreen, he might step back into his house and wait until there was a knock before coming to the door. They were used to hearing their accent imitated by comedians on TV. They didn’t often visit each other, but when they passed on the road they stopped and rolled down their car windows and talked until another car moved them on. To fall out with someone was terrible; someone with the same name,
whose father lay beside your father up in the graveyard, whose great-grandfather had helped your great-grandfather build his house – whom you had to pass on the road now without talking, every day, maybe forever, until you lay side by side up in the graveyard under the same full name. So they were tolerant – of moodiness and oddness, drinking, not shaving, bachelor clothes and untidy homes. In winter they often vanished from each other’s sight for months. They no longer went to work in England or America, but that memory had made them casual with long absence. When Marcus appeared they just said, ‘You’re down again.’

HE HAD BEEN GIVEN
a name in keeping with the new life his parents had made in the city, but as a boy on summer holidays this poor farm had been his second home. As a young man he had hardly visited, but it had always been at the back of his mind. What he had seen down here – an owl blundering from an ivied tree in daylight … fallen ash leaves plastered on the wet road – remained clear of daily habit, as fresh as when he had seen it first. By middle age this place had become as an image of certainty, a fixed point. But when his uncle died and left it to him, he was shocked. It had meant so much to him that he feared to see it now. He drove down from Dublin with his wife one weekend, to look at it and decide what to do.

The first glimpse, through a lank hedge as he came around the bend of the narrow road, was another shock: the 1950s’ bungalow, the field spattered with rushes at the foot of the small hill. It seemed to be in a hole. Failure, isolation, the grip of the past – all the fears he had gathered since boyhood sprang up. The boreen was overgrown, his car skidded over sheets of lodged wet grass. His shoulder caught a blackthorn branch, and cold raindrops showered on his head. He breathed in the raw silence, the rank
sweet elderflower smell. When he opened the door it caught on an ESB bill. The envelope was damp. The ashes in the hearth were sodden by rain that had come down the straight wide chimney. Wind rumbled under the slates. But when the fire was lit and he looked out the big kitchen window, down over hedges to the silver flash of the lake and the blue shapes of the sea-coast mountains far beyond, he felt peace.

All his deepest delights had been here. His city home had been shadowed by his father’s long struggle to succeed. This place had meant wild freedom – his uncle holding a mug of tea under the mare to whiten it with her milk. He remembered her sweat-wet flanks stuck with hayseed, the green-foamed mouth and bared teeth as the bridle was caught and she was backed between the shafts after dinner for more work; the hedge trembling as she drew the heavy blue and orange cart; the crunch and roll of the ironshod wheels down the sand road, the snap of the leather rein-ends on her rump, the bone-shaking trot, the crack of horse farts, the tail pluming up and the smell of falling gold dung …all day until the long sleep under blankets that smelled of turf smoke.

When he woke in the morning his wife was sitting up in bed, reading. He watched her put down the book and look out the window. A white butterfly was flitting about tall nettles that nodded above the sill. He sat up beside her and watched the butterfly rest on a leaf, its wings closed, its body curved underneath.

‘What’s he doing? Does he drink from the flowers?’

‘It’s a she. She’s laying her eggs.’

When they had dressed they went outside, and he lifted a leaf to show her the pale-green eggs fixed like tiny rivets underneath. She laughed with wonder and turned her face to the sun, opening her arms as if for an embrace. ‘Oh lovely light.’ She closed her eyes and swayed from side to side. That was why he had married her.
She was good. She had put up with his dreaming and wandering, and now they were home. He felt that boyhood peace again.

She came from another world; this place meant nothing to her. She knew nothing of the yellow nettle-roots she dug, that turned and rooted in the clay again, and in days sent up fresh stinging leaves. Like him she tossed them on the thorn hedge to wither, and pulled dock leaves to soothe the white blisters the stings raised. They worked all morning, and had their lunch of milk and sandwiches outside. The breeze blew through the sally bushes along the ditch, lifting their leaves, showing the pale grey underneath. As naturally, quietly, they lay down together in the wild grass: he stamping his mark on this childhood home, she gathering his strange adult peace into herself. They slept then until rain fell warm and heavy on their face, but they lay there for a minute more, watching a frog,
green-gold
, motionless, in the damp roots before they went into the house. The peace there was like the peace he felt inside. The disorder – a sheep clippers, a rusted tin of beans, a bag of sugar like a rock on the table – only made clear the simple pattern of his uncle’s life.

‘He never married?’

‘No. I’d say Paddy died a virgin.’

Her face filled with wonder, as it had at the butterfly’s eggs.

‘That was the way then.’

The gutters trickled into silence, the sun appeared between dark slate clouds, tinting the ash-tree branches silver, and they sat outside against the warm bonnet of the car.

‘What will you do with it?’

‘I don’t know.’

He rooted his toe under a rotting green hose pipe, she stooped and drew it up, and together, tearing it free of matted grass, they followed its snaking to a cattle trough full of dead leaves. A tractor roared down the narrow road, and they set to work again. In a few
days her face was bronzed, and his was red. She had a mix of blood, he was the freckled Celt.

SHE CAME IN SUMMER
, as he had once come, but in winter he came alone. One snowing day when fire could not spread, he dragged his uncle’s rotten furniture out into the field, threw on a can of petrol, lit a match and ran. He kept the long kitchen table of planks worn into ridges, the clumsy deal chair, the stool smudged with faded blue cart paint, and his uncle’s old canvas armchair. He painted the walls pale and the ceilings white. Each time he came, he sharpened his uncle’s worn scythe with the broken whetstone and mowed the grass and rushes about the house. As he walked the clean field in the evening and breathed its sweet scent, he had that childhood peace again.

Sometimes it lasted for days. The damp green moss six inches deep on the ditch banks, the red spongy moss in the cutaway bog, the huge bleached stones in the small walls about the small fields – they hadn’t changed. The crest of wild grass still grew in the centre of the road. A mare, maybe a granddaughter of his uncle’s wild mare, sank on her haunches to stale, and the wind blew the piss to spray. He walked the thin tar road around the townland, chatting with his uncle’s old neighbours, but his life and theirs were different. He was just a city visitor, restless after a few days. But before he left he always stood for a minute as he shut the gate, looked up the trim boreen at the smoke of the last embers rising from the chimney, the pheasant already advancing from the thorn hedge to peck in the mown field. It was a shrine to peace.

NATURE PRESSED IN
. A boundary bank was knocked by accident, then another one. Furze crawled over the hill. To keep the land, he planted it with trees: ash, alder, beech, larch, pine, sweet chestnut,
oak. Their children joined them for a week each summer, beating down the briars and nettles until the saplings had risen into the light. But still there was the house. When he arrived in winter the walls and windows were glistening with cold damp. Wind carried slates away and the roof leaked. The rushes grew in spring, green briars snaked out from the hedge. His drive west became more duty than pleasure. His wife came less often in the summer: her nature was giving, growing attached to people; not holding on to a place far away. But still he couldn’t bring himself to sell. In the end, ambivalent, he let the house. It was a year before he returned to see how the tenant was getting on.

THE BOREEN
was worn to mud, the overhanging blackthorns had been hacked away, sacks of coal were heaped against the gable he had painted white. It was like any poor country bungalow. He heard TV noise, a child crying inside. She had the child in her arm when she opened the door. The porch was full of turf, sticks, a bush saw, a Calorgas cylinder – everything was to do with keeping warm. She shut each door behind them and shoved a mat against the door. A clothes line hung from the kitchen ceiling, the cement floor was carpeted and littered with toys. A small boy sat on the clumsy deal chair looking at a TV on a shelf her husband had fixed to the wall. It was just what he had wanted it to be, a living house. She sat in his uncle’s old canvas armchair, took a joint from the hob and lit it, as naturally as his uncle had lit his pipe. The hot rich scent of herb mixed with turf smoke and made a strange new scent.

He was too close to this country to stand out. When he talked with the neighbours his voice slipped into their tone. He had been careful not to be caught at sunset mooning over a blackbird’s song. She was different, herself. When the neighbours found her sitting on a ditch, cross-legged, and asked was she all right, she answered
simply, ‘I’m doing my yoga.’ They were polite, and only said that she was odd. She walked the road in her long tweed overcoat, talked in her plain middle-class voice about children’s allowances or the Offenbach she had heard on Lyric fm. She invited the neighbours’ children in for drawing lessons, talked to them about the left and right sides of the brain, told them to draw whatever came to mind. She had hung green scapulars in one of the hawthorn trees; tiny Buddhist bells in another tinkled with the wind. When he saw the parlour mirror ruined by rain behind the cart house, she explained that she didn’t want to see herself. To make herself plain, she had cut her long hair short as a boy’s. But she was beautiful still. She boiled a kettle, poured green tea leaves like pine needles into the teapot. She had a Brennan’s sliced pan, but also anchovies. She sat down, opened a blue plaid shirt, bared a white breast and nursed the baby as they talked. He looked away, up at his uncle’s mildewed picture of Our Lady of Good Counsel that she had left on the kitchen wall.

SHE HAD BEEN
the only one to answer his advertisement. Unerring fate had found the right tenant for this shrine to peace. Her husband was out at work all day; she was at home living a childhood dream. Each time he called he saw it drift closer to a nightmare. The shed was too far from the house, she had the turf tipped at the gable, and soon it was too wet to burn. The wild grass went on growing, the rushes drew closer, nettles were nodding their heads again above the windowsill. Ivy he had trained against the wall began to creep over the windowpanes. Her husband began to spend more time in the pub, and soon he was drifting away. When the ivy closed over the back door, she left suddenly and moved into a nearby cottage with central heating. He had to drive down again to an empty house.

WITH A CLAW HAMMER
he tore the ivy from the back door. The field behind was a wilderness. The scythe wasn’t able for three years of grass and rushes; he asked a neighbour to sweep the field with a mowing machine. He said that he was preparing it for sale. But when he walked the field that evening and saw a rabbit chopped in half among the sweet swathes, he changed his mind again. He couldn’t do it. He couldn’t sell.

He was sitting by the fire when he heard a knuckle knock on the front door. It echoed through the empty house, and then she stepped inside with the child in her arms. She had allowed her hair to grow again; it lay about her shoulders, thick auburn gold. She sat in his uncle’s canvas armchair, as naturally as if she still lived there, and they talked. Her husband had gone; their marriage was over, now she was living alone.

The child fell asleep in her arms, and they talked more quietly. She missed this place already, she said, its air of peace. He agreed. He said he had often called on his uncle, as unexpectedly as she had called now, and found him in that canvas armchair, his feet on the stool, looking up at the ceiling or at the fire. He had once asked him what he thought of as he sat there, and his uncle said, ‘Musha nothing, dreaming.’ He had once asked if he was happy, and his uncle had said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’ as if he had been asked was he alive. He had even asked once if he was afraid of dying, and his uncle had said, ‘Why would I? Isn’t very near everyone I know dead.’

They talked about him as they sat by the fire. He had lived in this place for ninety-two years, except for one season in England working on a farm. He had never set foot in Dublin, never married, never been ill, never known a holiday. She said that that was beautiful. He agreed again. The evening light, reflected from the grass growing up to the window, threw a green glow into the room. She sank lower in the armchair, her body slackened by tiredness,
intimacy, warmth. Then it was dusk, but they went on talking, their stretched feet a foot apart. In the firelight he saw her face dissolve until it was like the sleeping child’s. She answered his look with a smile of dreamy desire. It would take a moment, said a butterfly thought, to take the child from her arms, lie it to sleep in the canvas armchair, and lead her into his uncle’s bedroom. But he couldn’t do that. That mass of memories was too strong, that dream of peace blocked the door.