The Little Red Chairs (11 page)

‘We must’, he begins sitting back, ‘if we are to make a baby,
know something of one another, our roots, our race and the loins from which we have sprung.’

‘You know a bit of mine,’ she says suddenly tongue-tied.

‘So I start,’ he says proudly. ‘The women in my life have been the stronger force, totemic figures who never raised their voices, yet I knew that I must not disobey them. My grandmother was Cath-ollic and every day she made her prayers and listened on her radio to the Vatican Mass at six in the evening. No matter what happened, she never must be interrupted while listening to the Mass. One day, visitors, cousins, have driven a long way from Ukraine and arrive at our house. I knock on her door and say Grandma and she say, “Go away Vuk, I am listening to my Mass.” The house revolved around her. She make a cheese, a soft cheese not unlike mozzarella. One room was where it was made. I see her there in her big striped apron, heating the milk on the little stove to the exact temperature, then pouring it into enamel pots that were blue with white lids. After some time she take the settled milk and put it into squares of muslin to mature. No one allowed in that room. The door was never locked because our word was our oath. One night, I do mischief, I steal down and through the muslin I feel the crust growing around the squares of cheese and I take one and eat it. I am caught. I am punished. At breakfast I must stay in the upstairs room, while downstairs they are eating the soft cheese and the warm bread that my grandmother has baked, along with the bacon from our own pigs. I smell the hot coffee and I know what is happening, mugs of coffee for the grown-ups and a little coffee in the milk for the other children, except that I am banished. My mother exactly similar to my grandmother, all daughters the same. My mother make the same cheese that her mother made, though
she didn’t listen to the Orthodox Mass. My father he steer me from boy to man. A wolf come around our neighbourhood. We have not seen it, but we have been warned. We know it is from the opposite side of the mountain, where our enemy lives. Two nights it circles our house. We hear its cry, a cry like nothing else, that baying so fierce. One night our dogs are howling in the barn and my father he lift the gun off the wall and he beckon me to follow him. I am ten years of age. The snow is higher than I am. We walk along a path where snow is shovelled away and we see the wolf on a height above us, very still, watching with its yellow eyes. My father he look down the muzzle and even now I think I hear the skid of the bullet that goes into the shoulder next to the wolf ’s heart. My father he an expert shot. Then another and another and the wolf begin to stagger and fall down the slope, the blood richer than the red of red wine. My father make me walk to where the wolf lies dead. Look in the eyes. Look at the flank. Now touch it. Then he made me lick the blood from my finger and he do the same. He make warrior sign on my forehead and initiate me into the mystery of the kill. You see, there is deep inside man the instinct to kill, just as there is deep inside woman the instinct to nurture.

‘And now you,’ he says and she hesitates, because the story she wants to tell is of the evening when chance first brought them together on the path, after she had plunged her face in the river and that somehow, surreptitiously, was where it all began. But that was too dangerous a story to tell and too binding altogether.

‘In the town,’ she begins light-heartedly, ‘women argue about the colour of your eyes.’

‘My eyes?’ he asks, unable to conceal the sudden flare of vanity.

‘I said they were a dark green, what we call bottle green.’

‘And now that we are alone?’

‘I say the same thing – bottle green.’

‘And what does that signify Fidelma?’

‘It means that they change colour …’

‘You think I am a Don Juan.’

‘No.’

‘Then why are you shivering?’

‘I am a little afraid just now.’

‘Do you want to call the whole thing off?’

‘No, I want it too much, to not want it.’

‘Then we have crossed the Rubicon,’ he says holding his hand out and she shook it and not long after they went down to dinner.

*

As they were late, the dining room had half emptied and so they were offered a choice of tables. Curtains of glass crystals hung on poles, luminous screens dividing different areas of the room and as they walked, hailstones of pink and violet light danced on whatever they could find. A world of shimmer, tall flowers and grasses in huge metal urns, paintings, drawings, a room into which such taste had been poured. He spoke to the maître d’, who led them to a corner table next to a wine rack that was filled with the empty bottles of vintage wines that had been drunk on festive occasions. Vlad reeled off the various names, the chateaux – Meursault 1962, Chassagne-Montrachet 1972, Lynch-Bages, Margaux, while the eager young waiter, who stood in awe, complimented him on his excellent French. The door to the garden was ajar and she felt, or believed she felt, trees and grass and earth drinking in the moisture.

Everything was being done with ceremony.

Vlad looked at the basket of bread, naming the different varieties and then took a slice of rye bread, telling her that a nice combination was to rub warm rye bread with garlic and lemon rind. He had made bread himself, having grown up in that house of women, when various ancestors had died on the battlefield and later his father, who was a partisan, imprisoned as a traitor. All of it so exotic to her. She did not question it. She did not question the fact that he had been born in Alexandria, but that the family had to leave there in the exodus of 1956. She did not question the fact that he had been in a seminary for four years, wishing to be a priest, to walk the
terra sacrata
. All she wanted was his arms around her.

‘So we start with the bread and the wine Fidelma,’ and he looked into her eyes as if he was seeing her longings and seeing her soul.

To start with they ordered scallops on a bed of chive foam, which the waiter assured them was delicious, ‘’twas like eating gossamer’.

‘Of course, cooking is all science now because of the gadgets we have,’ he added proudly.

‘But the libido is in the taste buds,’ Vlad said and the young boy rushed off, scarlet.

He ate heartily, said he was a behemoth, whereas his companion ate like a bird. The elderly porter was determined not to leave them alone, coming with this and that, first it was a leaflet which he had printed out, with a picture of the stairs that they had been admiring, pointing to the mahogany newel posts, the ash treading and the side panels with forkfuls of dipping hay. The next time it was to tell them about a series of sculptures called ‘Love
Letters’ in a pasture nearby and how he would run them over there in the morning for a quick decko, if they felt inclined. The strange thing was, as he said, that despite the title, there was no lettering at all, just hoops of variously twisted bronze. Fidelma guessed that he sensed they were not man and wife and this gave a piquance to his evening.

‘You have not told your story,’ Vlad said and she looked at him and then all of a sudden began to blurt it out.

‘I always wanted a father … a father I could talk to and go cycling with, like other girls who cycled with their fathers on Sundays and weren’t afraid. It’s what drew me to my husband Jack … such a kind man … he always brought an umbrella when we went for a walk, because he knew I was fussy about my hair. I was about fifteen when we met in a kitchen garden in West Meath. The raspberries were ripe on their canes and Moira, the daughter of the house, had invited me over to pick some. He came in with another man and spoke to us and he asked me what I wanted to be. I said a poet maybe, because I had written little verses. He said he would set me up as a lady of letters later on. He waited three years before he asked my family if he could take me out. They were very surprised. He worked in a bank, whereas we were very poor, we scraped all our lives. He and I would go for walks by the river and in time he proposed. The way he did it was that he asked me to meet him, along with a friend of his that also worked in the bank, at lunchtime and it was there, on the steps, that he said to his companion, “This is my intended Donal,” then looked at me for an answer. The engagement was announced in the Social and Personal column of the papers. My parents were too shy to come to the wedding in Dublin that was in a beautiful church, I had a
white dress and a tiara of orange blossom. You see, I was heartless then, I had gone up in the world, I didn’t think too much about my poor parents, nor visit enough when they were sick and when they were dying. I had cut myself off. I remember the skeleton of a rotting horse that died on us, its bones bleaching in the field and somehow my parents are mixed in with it and shut out. But I changed with time. At first I did not want a child, but as time went on the longing grew in me. One day I was on an aeroplane going to London and beside me was a mother with an infant on her lap. She was from the north of Ireland, but her husband was from Fiji, he was one of the small platoon of foreigners serving in the British army there. The child had this gaze that I shall never forget. It looked so beautiful and so knowing, it was a half-caste, the skin brown and creamy and the mother said to me, “You’ve hypnotised it,” and I said, “No, it’s hypnotised me.” I wanted to stroke it, I almost wanted to eat it and then I put my index finger out and its fingers gripped mine and began to suck, all the time gazing with this beautiful understanding smile and for the rest of the journey it was like that, staring at me and I staring back and I thought if I could have this child, my life would be different, my life would be full. It would break my husband’s heart if he knew I was here telling you this.’

*

She came out of the bathroom, her hair unpinned, wearing her own lilac-coloured dressing gown and not one of the towelling robes that were in a pile on a stool. The bedroom was almost dark. Small candles flickered on a tall bureau and in the grate
under logs pencils of light pulsed and gave to the brass fire dogs a brazen reddish tint.

‘First Science, then Eros,’ he said as he stood above her and with an instrument, began to trace what he called her neuron path, the chakras from the crown of her head to her frontal cortex, her earlobes, her throat, her chest and her belly. Afterwards, he poured freezing drops of oil over each point, allowing the heat of her body to melt it. Then turning her over onto her face, he ran a hot mocha stick over her vertebrae, hot to the point of burning. It was not how she had imagined it and it was not how she wanted it. She was his patient, his puppet. Once again, he turned her over and as she lay on her back, he blindfolded her with a black scarf that smelt of verbena. With a pendulum, he searched for the different energies she emanated. Not once did he touch her. She put her hand out to be held and when it wasn’t, she pulled the scarf off and asked what was he so afraid of.

‘Afraid of?’ It nettled him.

‘It isn’t right,’ she said.

‘What do you mean it isn’t right, Mrs McBride?’

‘It’s an experiment … you feel nothing … all you have is your power and your pendulum.’

‘It’s a procedure,’ he said coldly.

‘It’s a very bizarre procedure … are you afraid of love, is that it?’

‘Why should I be afraid of love?’ he said and drew back as if she was one of the untouchables. Soon he began to put everything back into his doctor’s bag.

She sat up, clutching the scarf, unable to look at him, unable even to remonstrate. They were enemies now and would be back
in Cloonoila. Just as when she was a young girl, she broke into song, it was a kind of appeasement, when things got ugly –

I am a king’s daughter from the town of Cappaquin

In search of Lord Gregory, oh Gregory let me in.

He was gone by the time she had finished the verse:

The rain beats on my head, the dew it wets my skin,

The babe is cold in my arms love, oh Gregory let me in.

She sang it to the garden, to the night, to anything that might listen.

In her nightgown, she went down the spiral stairs into the garden, too ashamed to stay in that room. The garden was empty, no echoes of the giddy Holy Communicants or the group who sat out after dinner, guffawing. The grass was damp and cool under her bare feet and there were several smells, from the grass itself, from the clay of the flowerbeds and above all, from the night-scented stock that flourished everywhere. Bats flew in random erratic swoops and the air was filled with tiny insects and gnats.

His white shirt seemed like a banner under the half moon, unless it was another man in an identical white shirt coming towards her. How long had he been there? He had heard her sing in the bedroom and came down to say how beautiful her voice was, how haunting. Uninvited, he sat on the bench and like the plastered kilted lady, they remained in silence.

‘I thought I could be the scientist and not the man,’ he said eventually. She didn’t answer. He said other things too, but throughout she didn’t answer. Had she imagined him to be a
man without desire, particularly with an enchanting woman like her? He told her the moment when he was first attracted to her and how, many nights when he swam alone in Killooney Cove, he thought she might just be there and they would meet under water, sea creatures. He put his arms around her then and said, ‘You are mine now, I can drown my eyes in your hair,’ and he carried her across the garden, up the spiral steps and onto the tossed bed. The candles still burnt and she asked him to light the taller ones that were in a sconce on the bureau. Then they sat side by side and she helped him to undress. She had broken through to the real him, the poet, the man of feeling, that she always knew to be there. She held his beard and wagged it, as she had so often done in her imagination, fingering it like it was flake tobacco. He asked what poem or piece of literature in her country best expressed the wooing of a lady. She said it was a Playboy, who said he had killed his da and wandered into County Mayo to boast of his feats, where the women of Connaught fell for him. He chose one girl, envisaging for her moments out on the side of Neffin, where he would kiss her, ‘unto her necklace’.