Brian Friel Plays 2 (14 page)

Chris
There are eight of us, Maggie.

Maggie
How are there –? Of course – the soldier up the sycamore! Not a great larder but a nice challenge to someone like myself. Right. My suggestion is … Eggs Ballybeg; in other words scrambled and served on lightly toasted caraway-seed bread. Followed – for those so inclined – by one magnificent Wild Woodbine. Everybody happy?

Chris
Excellent, Margaret!

Maggie
Settled.

Rose
has
taken
off
her
shoe
and
is
examining
it
carefully.

Agnes
We’ll go and pick some more bilberries next Sunday, Rosie.

Rose
All right.

Agnes
Remember the cans you had? You had your own two cans – remember? Did you take them with you?

Rose
Where to, Aggie?

Agnes
Into the town … wherever you went …

Rose
I hid them at the quarry behind a stone wall. They’re safe there. I’ll go back and pick them up later this evening. Does anybody know where my overall is?

Maggie
It’s lying across your bed. And you’d need to bring some turf in, Rosie.

Rose
I’ll change first, Maggie.

Maggie
Be quick about it.

Chris
How many pieces of toast do you want?

Maggie
All that loaf. And go easy on the butter – that’s all we have. Now. Parsley. And just a whiff of basil. I don’t want you to be too optimistic, girls, but you should know I feel very creative this evening.

Rose
moves
towards
the
bedroom
door.
Just
as
she
is
about
to
exit:

Kate
I want to know where you have been, Rose.

Rose
stops.
Pause.

You have been gone for the entire afternoon. I want you to tell me where you’ve been.

Agnes
Later, Kate; after –

Kate
Where have you been for the past three hours?

Rose
(
inaudible
) Lough Anna.

Kate
I didn’t hear what you said, Rose.

Rose
Lough Anna.

Chris
Kate, just leave –

Kate
You walked from the quarry to Lough Anna?

Rose
Yes.

Kate
Did you meet somebody there?

Rose
Yes.

Kate
Had you arranged to meet somebody there?

Rose
I had arranged to meet Danny Bradley there, Kate. He brought me out in his father’s blue boat, (
to
Maggie
) I don’t want anything to eat, Maggie. I brought a bottle of milk and a packet of chocolate biscuits with me and we had a picnic on the lake. (
to Agnes
) Then the two of us went up through the back hills. He showed me what was left of the Lughnasa fires. A few of them are still burning away up there. (
to Kate
) We passed young Sweeney’s house – you know, the boy who got burned, the boy you said was dying. Well, he’s on the mend, Danny says. His legs will be scarred but he’ll be all right. (
to all
) It’s a very peaceful place up there. There was nobody there but Danny and me. (
to Agnes
) He calls me his Rosebud, Aggie. I told you that before, didn’t I? (
to all
) Then he walked me down as far as the workhouse gate and I came on home by myself. (
to Kate
) And that’s all I’m going to tell you. (
to all
) That’s all any of you are going to hear.

She
exits,
her
shoes
in
one
hand,
the
poppy
in
the
other.
Michael
enters.

Kate
What has happened to this house? Mother of God, will we ever be able to lift our heads ever again …?

Pause.

Michael
The following night Vera McLaughlin arrived and explained to Agnes and Rose why she couldn’t buy their hand-knitted gloves any more. Most of her home
knitters were already working in the new factory and she advised Agnes and Rose to apply immediately. The Industrial Revolution had finally caught up with Ballybeg.

They didn’t apply, even though they had no other means of making a living, and they never discussed their situation with their sisters. Perhaps Agnes made the decision for both of them because she knew Rose wouldn’t have got work there anyway. Or perhaps, as Kate believed, because Agnes was too notionate to work in a factory. Or perhaps the two of them just wanted … away.

Anyhow, on my first day back at school, when we came into the kitchen for breakfast, there was a note propped up against the milk jug: ‘We are gone for good. This is best for all. Do not try to find us.’ It was written in Agnes’s resolute hand.

Of course they did try to find them. So did the police. So did our neighbours who had a huge network of relatives all over England and America. But they had vanished without trace. And by the time I tracked them down – twenty-five years later, in London – Agnes was dead and Rose was dying in a hospice for the destitute in Southwark.

The scraps of information I gathered about their lives during those missing years were too sparse to be coherent. They had moved about a lot. They had worked as cleaning women in public toilets, in factories, in the Underground. Then, when Rose could no longer get work, Agnes tried to support them both – but couldn’t. From then on, I gathered, they gave up. They took to drink; slept in parks, in doorways, on the Thames Embankment. Then Agnes died of exposure. And two days after I found Rose in that grim hospice – she didn’t recognize me, of course – she died in her sleep.

Father Jack’s health improved quickly and he soon recovered his full vocabulary and all his old bounce and
vigour. But he didn’t say Mass that following Monday. In fact he never said Mass again. And the neighbours stopped enquiring about him. And his name never again appeared in the
Donegal
Enquirer.
And of course there was never a civic reception with bands and flags and speeches.

But he never lost his determination to return to Uganda and he still talked passionately about his life with the lepers there. And each new anecdote contained more revelations. And each new revelation startled – shocked – stunned poor Aunt Kate. Until finally she hit on a phrase that appeased her: ‘his own distinctive spiritual search’. ‘Leaping around a fire and offering a little hen to Uka or Ito or whoever is not religion as I was taught it and indeed know it,’ she would say with a defiant toss of her head. ‘But then Jack must make his own distinctive search.’ And when he died suddenly of a heart attack – within a year of his homecoming, on the very eve of the following Lá Lughnasa – my mother and Maggie mourned him sorely. But for months Kate was inconsolable.

My father sailed for Spain that Saturday. The last I saw of him was dancing down the lane in imitation of Fred Astaire, swinging his walking stick, Uncle Jack’s ceremonial tricorn at a jaunty angle over his left eye. When he got to the main road he stopped and turned and with both hands blew a dozen theatrical kisses back to Mother and me.

He was wounded in Barcelona – he fell off his motor bike – so that for the rest of his life he walked with a limp. The limp wasn’t disabling but it put an end to his dancing days; and that really distressed him. Even the role of maimed veteran, which he loved, could never compensate for that.

He still visited us occasionally, perhaps once a year. Each time he was on the brink of a new career. And each time he proposed to Mother and promised me a new bike.
Then the war came in 1939; his visits became more infrequent; and finally he stopped coming altogether.

Sometime in the mid-fifties I got a letter from a tiny village in the south of Wales; a curt note from a young man of my own age and also called Michael Evans. He had found my name and address among the belongings of his father, Gerry Evans. He introduced himself as my half-brother and he wanted me to know that Gerry Evans, the father we shared, had died peacefully in the family home the previous week. Throughout his final illness he was nursed by his wife and his three grown children who all lived and worked in the village.

My mother never knew of that letter. I decided to tell her – decided not to – vacillated for years as my father would have done; and eventually, rightly or wrongly, kept the information to myself.

Maggie,
Chris,
Kate
and
Agnes
now
resume
their
tasks.

Chris
Well, at least that’s good news.

Maggie
What’s that?

Chris
That the young Sweeney boy from the back hills is going to live.

Maggie
Good news indeed.

Chris
goes
to
the
door
and
calls:

Chris
Michael! Where are you? We need some turf brought in!

She
now
goes
outside
and
calls
up
to
Gerry.
Michael
exits.

Are you still up there?

Gerry
(
off
) Don’t stand there. I might fall on top of you.

Chris
Have you any idea what you’re doing?

Gerry
(
off
) Come on up here to me.

Chris
I’m sure I will.

Gerry
(
off
) We never made love on top of a sycamore tree.

She
looks
quickly
around:
did
her
sisters
hear
that?

Chris
If you fall and break your neck it’ll be too good for you. (
She goes inside
.) Nobody can vanish quicker than that Michael fellow when you need him.

Maggie
(
to Agnes
) I had a brilliant idea when I woke up this morning, Aggie. I thought to myself: what is it that Ballybeg badly needs and that Ballybeg hasn’t got?

Agnes
A riddle. Give up.

Maggie
A dressmaker! So why doesn’t Agnes Mundy who has such clever hands, why doesn’t she dressmake?

Agnes
Clever hands!

Maggie
looks
around
for
her
cigarettes.

Maggie
She’d get a pile of work. They’d come to her from far and wide. She’d make a fortune.

Agnes
Some fortune in Ballybeg.

Maggie
And not only would the work be interesting but she wouldn’t be ruining her eyes staring at grey wool eight hours a day. Did you notice how Rosie squints at things now? It’s the job for you, Aggie; I’m telling you. Ah, holy God, girls, don’t tell me I’m out of fags! How could that have happened?

Chris
goes
to
the
mantelpiece
and
produces
a
single
cigarette.

Chrissie, you are one genius. Look, Kate. (
scowls
) Misery. (
Lights cigarette
.) Happiness! Want a drag?

Kate
What’s keeping those wonderful Eggs Ballybeg?

Maggie
If I had to choose between one Wild Woodbine and a man of – say – fifty-two – widower – plump, what would I do, Kate? I’d take fatso, wouldn’t I? God, I really am getting desperate.

Jack
enters
through
the
garden.

Maybe I should go to Ryanga with you, Jack.

Jack
I know you won’t but I know you’d love it.

Maggie
Could you guarantee a man for each of us?

Jack
I couldn’t promise four men but I should be able to get one husband for all of you.

Maggie
Would we settle for that?

Chris
One between the four of us?

Jack
That’s our system and it works very well. One of you would be his principal wife and live with him in his largest hut –

Maggie
That’d be you, Kate.

Kate
Stop that, Maggie!

Jack
And the other three of you he’d keep in his
enclosure
. It would be like living on the same small farm.

Maggie
Snug enough, girls, isn’t it? (
to Jack
) And what would be – what sort of duties would we have?

Jack
Cooking, sewing, helping with the crops, washing – the usual housekeeping tasks.

Maggie
Sure that’s what we do anyway.

Jack
And looking after his children.