The Little Red Chairs (9 page)

He wakens, ready to deny, to refute, to attack, but they have all gone, instead there is a big black dog rolling its tongue along his forehead, big larruping licks, and as he goes to strike at it, it too disappears, vanishes into the shadows.

Then he opens his eyes to a night of such infinite calm, stars numerous and bathed in gold.

The White Mist

His name is on everybody’s lips, Dr Vlad this and Dr Vlad that. He has done wonders for people, women claiming to be rejuvenated, just after two treatments. It is tantamount to a miracle, what he has done for Hamish’s wife. She suffered from seizures and they had tried several doctors, including a specialist in Dublin but with no luck. They were told that her illness was psychosomatic and in part, caused by their winding each other up.

There, in his clinic, having been stone silent for the first twenty minutes, the wife was taken with one of the very seizures they had come to discuss with him. She fell to the floor and her husband rushed to hold her. Dr Vlad took control. He said,
Don’t hold her … it ties her down.
What they had to do was allow her to lie on that floor, watch over her to contain her and just be present. In that way, the fit would subside of its own accord, which it did. She was then given a thorough examination, with Hamish waiting outside and the conclusion was that her condition was neurological because of her being allergic to many things. It was quite an unusual case. He proposed various remedies – lymphatic drainage twice monthly, sulphur and magnesium baths regularly and a very specific diet. She was to avoid foods with preservatives, cleaning fluids and soap powders with any chemical and public places where rooms or curtains had been sprayed. She began a hermetic regime, no longer going to her weekly hairdresser’s or to any cafe, but according to Hamish, she had begun to smile
again and they believe she will be one hundred per cent cured in a time. Like Jesus, Dr Vlad will soon be walking on water.

Since the evening in the Castle I had only glimpsed him, passing up or down the street or in the river, in the very early morning, gathering stones for his healing massages. It happened without my knowing. A fixation. I began to dream of him.

In the very first dream he walked brazenly into our kitchen and took Jack’s favourite coffee mug off the dresser where it always hung. A white china mug, a shaving mug, with side handles and a fading gold crest at the rim. We searched everywhere, indoor and outdoor, in the shed and even in the holes in the hedges, where it might have slipped down. In the dream, Jack said that this was serious and the culprit would have to be found. I had a sense of him knowing that I was party to the theft.

In another dream, he was delivering me of a child, in my own bedroom. It was slippery and he eased it carefully out, every little twist so slight, until it was freed, and then he slapped it smartly for the circulation and I heard its cry. A piercing cry and one that I could not forget. Our bairn, our traitor-treasure. He held it up for me to see, Jack in the bed beside me.

*

It was the mist that did it. A white mist, like a winding muslin, enfolds our part of the world from time to time. Sometimes it occurs in the night, other times in the very early morning. It breaks boundaries, so that adjoining counties are as one. I was invisible in it and so was my little pale green Citroën, buoyed along unseen. The side door of our shop was on the latch and I went up that stairs, transported. I tapped, knowing, or rather guessing, he
would be in there meditating. In the tittle-tattle of our universe, all is known, including the verbena aftershave that he uses.

‘You are very welcome,’ he said, masking any surprise at my impromptu visit at such an early hour.

‘I have come for the cure,’ I blurted it out.

The cure. He repeated the words.

‘The cure for what?’

‘
Nerves
.’

He sat me down, without pressing me to elaborate on my condition. He said there were things that could and would be prescribed, but that of course Nature herself was the primary healer. He said I ought to go to the mountains, now that the snow had begun to melt and spring flowers were showing their little modest faces. He made our mountains seem like the Alps.

He had a small bottle with drops and repeated the various plants and other ingredients that were in it. I was to let the drops dissolve under my tongue and wait. The silence was so immense, you could almost touch it, almost reach into it.

Later on, he enquired if the nerves dated back to a particular cause, a bereavement perhaps, or a childhood trauma. I told him I lost a child, that it happened twice and that curiously, I believed both children were one and the same and that afterwards we took a holiday abroad. He asked my age and also my husband’s age and said that nothing was impossible nowadays, as science, drawing on nature, had advanced with the advent of in vitro fertilisation. I could see his hands, as in my dream, delivering the child:
Mary took all these things into her heart and pondered over them.
He recognised the words and smiled, a friendly smile.

I watched while he made up a batch of powders and put each amount into a sheaf of paper, which he then folded, his hands so
adroit. Then he dated them, one for each day, twenty-one days in all, when he would like me to come back. He said he was grateful that I had come, that I felt I could come. I said were it not for the mist I would not have ventured, but the mist had made me daring.

Before I left he proposed an idea that had just occurred to him. Once winter had passed, why should he not organise some walking tours. Myself and many other ladies could walk with him in the very early morning in the mountains and it would be a wonderful stimulus to the libido.

‘That is a promise I will keep,’ he said.

I could not believe my eyes. Jack was outside, half standing, half sloping on the bonnet of the car and with a chastising look. He was also quite perplexed, said he had wakened, found me not to be there and had come in search.

‘I thought you had gone to the river,’ he said.

‘Why would I go to the river?’ I said, not wishing to be robbed of my wanton happiness.

On the way home, the mist was lifting, bits of it flying around in shreds, and the rest vanishing, as if one of those big forks, that they lift earth with, was gobbling it up. Not a word was spoken.

Dido

The Book Club was in its second year and Fidelma had recently been appointed chairperson. It was in a downstairs room, halfway up the street, that had once been a coffee shop, but that had folded. Flossie had loaned it as she had moved closer out to the sea. The furniture was rickety, two old sofas, kitchen chairs with no backs, and a long stool near the entrance, for latecomers.

The loyal few were there, and some new faces, along with the rowdy family who, for some reason, had been christened ‘the Naublers’. There was the father, who was blind, with his Alsatian, his stroppy wife, several young daughters and hobo sons. They hated books. They detested books and came only to make a disturbance. They always brought refreshments, chips, miniatures of gin or vodka, with cans of tonic water and a generous bag of ice. The Alsatian was thrown cubes of ice, which he gnawed at, until it melted into Flossie’s carpet.

Fidelma was surprised to see Dr Vlad come in, and stand by the back wall, and suddenly the room was full of him.

As was usual, the evening opened with a short reading, in order to refresh people’s minds. Fidelma wondered if Bridget might like to read and from her wheelchair, in her old torn clothes and her green suede boots, she read the chapter called Dido from the
Aeneid
, Book IV, with all the poise and ceremony that it deserved:

Every
field, all the farm animals and the colourful birds were silent, all that lived across miles of glassy mere and in the wild country’s ragged brakes, lying still under the quiet night in a sleep that smoothed each care from hearts which had forgotten life’s toil. But not so the Phoenician queen, her accursed spirit, her torment redoubled, her love came back again and again to haunt her.

‘Feck’ was the first word, followed by a slew of fecks and it set the tone for the invective that was to follow.

‘Pissed me off it did.’

‘Nothing to do with our lives …’

‘Exactly, Moira … there’s homeless people … there’s single mothers …’

‘Yeah yeah.’

‘… People signing on … bastards up in government screwing us and we’re asked to feel sorry for Dido …’

‘She should take an ad in the
Leitrim Echo
– “Lost in Leitrim” – and the lads will put a bun in her.’

Then the most brazen of the Naubler sisters, in her short skirt and fishnets, stood on the stool to mimic Dido, rising from her saffron bed, sprinkling herself with river water, pouring wine between the horns of a white heifer and speaking into the open vitals of slaughtered sheep, to find an answer for her tormented love.

‘She’s pathetic’ was her verdict.

‘Are you sure?’ Mona asked, seething.

‘Bloody right I’m sure,’ and her sentiments were echoed by some of the younger in the audience, who found the story too antiquated, and not relevant to the modern world. Dido was no role model and anyhow, love was past its sell-by date.

‘Not for me mate,’ Fifi shouted.

‘I’m the oldest person in the room,’ Bridget said, then, rising
from her chair, like a tattered empress, looked around and said resolutely, ‘Love is everything … love is sacred … love is your last chance.’

‘Oh, Granny’s on a trip … she’s a wanker’ was heard amidst the numerous jibes, but undaunted, Bridget looked at her assailants and said, ‘Because you have never felt it … you have no right to mock it.’

Phoebe, who had been knitting, as she always did at the meetings, threw her needles down for her moment – ‘I’m a small child, I’m walking home from school in the rain, I’m soaking wet … my father is driving cattle in the field and he sees me and comes in and says
Take them clothes off and get your mother’s coat
and he starts a fire and makes me a sandwich of bread and sugar, before going back out to the cattle. If that’s not love, what is?’

It was too much for the Naublers, who rose en masse and trooped out, the dog straining as if there was something in the room he still needed to sniff. The bickering girl was yelling into her phone – ‘We’re out of this 1900 BC shithole … See ya.’

As things became vituperative, Fidelma, feeling she should bring some order to the evening, asked what they felt about the character of Aeneas.

‘Aeneas the True’ was shouted in scorn.

‘Aeneas the Rat’ and so the ridicule heaped on him far exceeded that which had befallen poor Dido. Here was a man, a semi-god, who had skulked off in the night, and so sneaky was it, that the rough oars of the sailors still had the leaves of the trees on them.

Amidst a tide of restlessness and invective, foolish and irrelevant things got said, in the name of love. Desiree had a friend who had seen Placido Domingo on an aeroplane and they had
locked eyes, Mona was not ashamed to tell them that she and her dead husband communicated morning and night, and a blusterish girl announced that she was going bisexual, as she had never found true happiness with a fella.

A young student, who had been taking notes, turned to Fidelma and though very shy, he asked if she could give him a definition of love. She hesitated, yet knew it was incumbent on her to give an answer of some sort – ‘It is a feeling … it is beyond words … it is for another person and also for something larger … in love, you know that you are living … every nerve in you comes alive …’

Schoolmaster Diarmuid rose, his lean face suffused with scorn, eyes glinting, saying that without putting too fine a point on it, their book club was no longer the acme of culture. But what could they expect from someone of the Emma Bovary mentality, who had graduated from the milking stool to the literary salon.

It was too much. There were audible gasps, the student, now with a pronounced stutter, asked for the remark to be withdrawn and Bridget wagging her finger repeatedly, told him he was a pup and an ill-bred pup at that. He chuckled, said, for Fidelma’s benefit, that he was only
codding
.

Mary Kay, a retired nurse, said she would not stoop to his level, since she wished to point out the connection between love and loneliness.

‘I was in my thirties at the time and my job took me to all sorts of outaway places. The things I saw were weird, sometimes sad, other times hilarious, husbands and wives hiding wills from one another, but a particular incident has stayed with me. There were two brothers, Michael and Finbar, twins, and Michael suffered from epilepsy. I’d go every so often to make sure he was on his
medication and try to encourage them to clean up the kitchen a bit. It was a mess. One evening, just before dark, brother Michael saw me to the car. When I sat in, he put his hand through the open window and felt my breasts inside my blouse. I did nothing. I said nothing. It was the wisest thing to do. Brother Finbar watched from about twenty yards away, but you couldn’t tell what either of them was thinking. When Michael had finished the fondling he took his hand out and I drove down that mountain helter skelter.’