An End and a Beginning (22 page)

“
Take—it.
”

“
It doesn't matter.
”

She rolled over on the bed, she wrenched, thrust upwards, and by sheer strength forced me clear of the bed, and I dragged her with me. I had forgotten the snores, and I had forgotten the snorer. Perhaps he wasn't there at all, had never been there. Perhaps this woman snored, powerfully, like a man. She lay flat on the floor, I lay upon her
.

“
Take it. Get out.
”

“
It does not matter. I said that before.
”

“
There is nobody but her in this house,” I told myself, “Nobody,” and I suddenly pulled the blanket out of her mouth. She had closed her eyes. Now I only wanted her to open them again. They remained closed. Flat on her back she was still powerful to me. I felt her nails in my neck
.

“
Get out. Take it. Get out.
”

“
I don't want it,” I said
.

“
What do you want?
”

“
Nothing.
”

“
Who are you? Why have you come here?
”

“
It doesn't matter,” I said, and it didn't
.

I put my hands behind her shoulders, lifted and sat her in the armchair
.

“
I want nothing.
”

“
Oh God,” she said, and began struggling again. “Take anything.
”

She had not even seen the knife, perhaps she had smelt it. I sat on her knee, and I covered her entire face with my spread hand
.

“
Take anything
——”

“
There is nothing I want,” I said, suddenly realizing that my panic had gone. I pressed back her head and I took out the knife
.

“Anything,”
and her very roots seemed to come up with the word. I touched the top of her neck with the tip of the knife. I heard nothing, and I felt nothing, and I saw nothing as I pressed in the blade, and I slid to the floor as the blood spurted out. There was just one single sound as violently her elbow struck the arm of the chair. I picked up some notes from the cash-box, and I stuffed them into her mouth
.

“You had better come outside,” Brother Anselm said, and I got up and went with him to the door which he opened, and we went out and round the corner to the garden. He spread a hand across my forehead. “Be sick. Be sick,” he said.

I was sick.

When the rap came to the door I sat up and shouted, “All right, I'm all right now.”

Only then was I aware that I lay stretched out on the floor of this room, and that the housekeeper was knocking on the door.

“Are you ill, Mr. Fury?”

“I'm all right.”

“This is the third time I've come up, and it's almost too late for breakfast. Mr. Cullen has just called here, and he says Miss Downey is already on her way up in a taxi.”

I knew where I was, I knew how I came.

6

The morning flowed into the room, touched his closed eyelids, touched the furniture, the tossed bed.

“Yes, it's done with. I'm glad I told him. I couldn't have told anything else. And now I can keep my mouth shut.”

Below he heard the banging of a door. The holy woman had gone to her breakfast.

“God! The dreams I had last night.”

He stretched himself in the bed, he looked towards the window. After a while he got up and went and stood by it, the blanket drawn about his shoulders.

“The walks I went, the houses I was in. Yes, I was even in that other house, Desmond's place. So real, I
was
there.
She
was. That afternoon when I was alone with her for the very first time, that time she smiled and let down her hair like a black wave. He came back to the house, too suddenly, perhaps he was
bound
to come back. How I hated him even then, but I think I always hated Desmond. He struck her. I struck him. I was about sixteen then, and even at that age I was as tall as he was. ‘I could
kill
you,' he said, but I never gave it a thought, I never even looked at him. That's how it was.”

A bite in the air sent him away from the window. He began to dress.

“Here within the hour,” he thought, “Sheila. Within the hour. I can't believe it. I expect she's quite changed after all this time. I've changed. We can expect shocks.…”

“I've changed all right,” as he shaved, as he watched closely in the looking-glass.

“She was good. Never stopped writing to me, all the time I was there. One a month, just like old Kilkey, regular as the clock itself. But not a line from him. An unforgiving swine. I'm rather glad in a way. We'll never miss one another. I expect he'll be as busy as ever, he always was, very, very busy, organizing the workers. Poor bloody mugs. He just hadn't got the time. I wonder what kind of life she leads with him? It staggered me when it happened, it still does.”

And in a moment he seemed to see his brother standing in this room, very tall, powerfully built, black-haired, the hard, greenish-grey eyes under the bushy brows. “As bright as stones,” he thought. “He was even handsome in a roughish sort of way.”

Through the looking-glass he seemed to see his brother addressing the mugs.

He finished shaving, washed and changed.

“What a rootless, lonely bloody lot we are,” and he spoke it into the room with a sudden intense disgust.

“God knows where Maureen has ended up. A lamb marrying the goat, a nice little bit of Irish stew. No. No. I shouldn't, I shouldn't. I'm sorry I said it. Poor old man,” and he thought of the room, and the man in it.

“Perhaps I should have stayed. Perhaps it was a duty.” Instead of which he had landed himself in this fantastic mausoleum. “Yes, what the devil am I doing here, anyhow?”

For the hundredth time the “murdering feet” were breaking over Miss Fetch's head. She heard him go to the bathroom and return, she heard the feet up and down the bedroom.

“I'm longing to see her,
longing
to, and yet I'm scared stiff.”

He was at the window again, looking out, looking down. “What a country. What silence, how shut off from the world. I suppose one could be happy here. I wonder why they were not, I wonder why they ever left it. Falling to pieces, it seems to have nothing more to give out, to yield up. I wonder what started it all? I'd love to know. And imagine Miss Fetch living here alone all this time. I'll bet that old woman is as tough as a lion. Why does she stay? Perhaps she's happy here, perhaps there's
something
she gets out of this life. I'll bet she's good, I'll bet she's very good. I wonder what time Sheila will arrive. God, I'm so keen to see her, just seeing her—but I wonder. Yes, what's the damned use, we've all changed.”

He thought of the man, the hoe, the long, long fields. “He seemed happy enough to me. Yes, they are good people, good people.”

He returned to the dressing-table, studied his reflection in the glass.

“She'll be grey too,” he thought, looking at his hair, “stout, too, perhaps,” noticing his fullness of shoulder, “Lined—she had such lovely eyes, they
couldn't
change. I used to love watching her smile.” And he smiled at his reflection as though she were suddenly standing behind him.

“But I'll never understand why she chose him. Never. I suppose if I'd been old enough then I would have run off with her, like he did. He was certainly the most furiously jealous man I know. I wonder if he's as jealous now, too busy to notice, too excited to, too damned determined to keep pushing on, up, forward,
what
—a hypocrite, even the little that man Delaney told me was convincing enough.”

He stood there, quietly laughing at his reflection.

“Yes,” he thought, “I was young then. And now, in some strange way I'm glad it's over. One bleeds so easily, one's always dreaming.”

He turned his back upon the grown man, and returned to the window.

“The things one does when one's young, the things one doesn't. The things one
can't,
” he thought, remembering the first days at the seminary, the erstwhile pupil, the longed-for priest, searching and doubting. Pushed in, shut up, against one's whole will. “Never asked for it, never wanted it, just mother's big dream. And it didn't happen. Her wish. My bone. No, and that's over, too. Another dismantled Roman wreck, one more crashing priest.”

He could hear the housekeeper at her most active, heard the noise of pans and crockery, heard a window thrown up, a door banged.

“If there had been just
one
to come back to.”

It made him feel outside, cold, isolated, strandless, rootless again. He shut the window and went back to the bed, throwing himself down, giving way to the question again. “What the hell am I doing here?” He could not answer it. Would not. Somewhere inside him he yet felt certain remembered moments, warm, snug, deep down, delicate, sensitive as flowers. He had lived them, he had never forgotten them.

“Mother never once forgot where I was. And Sheila remembered too.”

At thirty-three he wondered what he would do with his life.

“Must do something soon, must get somewhere,” he told himself.

Ireland was out, he knew it from the beginning. Cactus land sign-posted with old men. The land of winter where the child was hated. Love under the ice, the bent bones crawling to the hearth, embracing only their own. A hungry old bitch, but many had lived on the scruff of her back.

“Why the hell should I go down there? I don't want anything and I'm not hungry. Yes, why should I? Not once since I came here have I felt comfortable in the company of that woman, Miss Fetch.”

No. He was simply an intruder. At that moment he heard her passing his door, and he knew the day's adventure of the rooms was now beginning. It made him think of Miss Fetch as an entire life passed in nun-like silence. All her days spent going in and out of lifeless rooms, and the hours of greater silence in her own little cell.

“Perhaps it's a kind of happiness for her,” he thought. “Sitting there alone, perfectly content, resigned. Sitting there, and thinking. Of what? Of her frustrated Colonel? Perhaps. Remembering her granite-like father? Perhaps. Or merely dreaming? I wonder what she dreams? I wonder what she thinks of me? How much she knows? I wonder.”

Suddenly his eye fell upon the letter on the table. He reached forward and picked it up. It was still unopened. He turned it over and over, he studied the handwriting. Whose hand?

“I quite forgot it was lying there, never even noticed it.”

He wanted to open it, he didn't want to open it. It had become a kind of challenge to him. He puzzled about the writing, he did not recognise it. Who in Gelton wrote such a fine bold hand? He hadn't a clue, and over and over turned the letter, and finally he let it drop back on the table, and turned his back on it.

“It's strange really, one time I would have gone crazy to get a letter, especially one like this, from some unknown person. And now I've hardly any curiosity about it. Not a bit.”

Curiosity lay in another channel. He thought of what was coming.

“She was quite beautiful when I last saw her. I'll never understand why she married Desmond, what she saw in him. Never. I hated his luck. But she was kind, and I'll remember that as long as I live.”

At any hour now he would see her, coming up the drive, in through the door. He tingled with anticipation. He did not hear the now familiar voice, but the sudden knock made him jump.

“Your breakfast is out long ago, and is probably cold.”

He didn't want it, he knew he didn't. He refused to stir. He would listen, he would wait.

“I'll know her voice for certain. The smile will be the same, warm as her whole nature.”

Later, Miss Fetch heard the feet, up and down, and up and down, and she knew he would not come. Then let him stay.

The book he picked up he could not read, the words danced on the page; the cigarette he tried to light shook in his fingers. The woman in the dream moved when he moved, looked where he looked. He heard the hall clock strike eleven.

“I wonder when?” he thought, and again it was the window, the sentry waiting.

“I wonder why she's come. It's all so sudden, unexpected, and it's——” The sound of wheels on the gravel reached his ears. “It's her,” he said. “I'll go down now.” Instead of which he stood quietly there, watching, waiting, wondering. And then the car was there in a moment, a battered brown taxi. And at the same time he heard the front door opened. He pressed his forehead against the glass, listening. Miss Fetch came out. He saw her go to the car door and open it, the woman step out. Was it really her?

It was certainly her. He stared down at the two women. They were motionless, facing each other on winter ground. Across a desert of years they exchanged smiles. For a moment they seemed not quite real to the man at the window, but like figures in a dream. In this moment of shock Peter gave a quick tug on the curtains, and shut them from sight.

“Good God!”

He knew they were moving by the crunching sound upon gravel. Then he heard the closing of the door, the feet in the hall. The sound of the taxi faded away into the distance. He heard Miss Fetch talking. “No, ma'am. Not down yet, but will be directly. I think he had a rather disturbed night. I'll go and give him a shout,” Miss Fetch said. “I'll go up,” he heard Sheila say.

And only then did he realize that he must go down. He walked to the door, fiddled at the knob, turned it, opened the door, shut it again, went back to his bed and sat down.

“Her voice has changed, I wouldn't have recognised it.”

“Leave everything where it is,” he heard her say. “It can be shifted later.”

“I'll away and make some breakfast,” Miss Fetch said.

“Thank you.”

He heard her on the stairs, heard her call back, “Which room?” And Miss Fetch shouting, “Your brother's room. The one you said, of course.”