Shade (3 page)
Perhaps he fell in love with it because he needed to, needed a home for his turbulent emotions, so radically different from anything he had hitherto known. That he was in love with Elizabeth was for him beyond question. And perhaps, again, he should have questioned that emotion, as to whether the long drama it was leading him towards was a symptom of the short drama he had left behind. But there is a third supposition, that this moment was fortuitous in the way few moments are, that he could bring whatever consolation was needed to the small-boned hand that he held in his. And when he leaned against the curved metal casing of the giant steam-paddle, placed his other hand around Elizabeth’s thin waist and saw the obelisk of the Lady’s Finger drift by, with the Maiden’s Tower in line with it and beyond them both the long stretch of Mornington Strand, he felt that strangest of affections, for a landscape and country he had never seen before, never imagined he would see.
~
As night comes down again the radio speaks to itself in George’s empty cottage. A weather-man predicts unseasonable sunshine. The amber lamp in the radio dial illuminates the frosted window. A pale wash of moonlight pencils each branch of the ash trees beyond. Sadness, if I could feel sadness, would be what that disembodied voice would evoke. He left it on, and the coming days of winter sunshine are broadcast to nothing human. As the night progresses and the moon moves and all the shadows of the trees move with it, it seems the calm the radio predicted has already descended. The winds that have blown for the last three days are bound for the Azores.
I should have read the signs, of course. George, like all of us, had his weather too. He had seemed restless because of those winds, obeying instructions other than mine. Instead of grass verges clipped, manure was spread around the roots of the blackcurrants and cherries in the walled garden.
“It is winter, George, the ground is frozen, why manure the frozen ground?”
“I’m doing what I’m told,” he said.
“I didn’t tell you,” I said.
“No,” he said, “what do you know about gardens?”
By the river’s bank I had found a sparrow with its head cut off.
“Who would decapitate a sparrow, George?” I asked him.
“A mink,” he said. He pointed towards Baltray, where the mink farm was. But the head had been sliced neatly, as if with a shears.
“Maybe it was you, George, clipping.”
“Why would I clip,” he had asked me, “in the middle of winter?”
Why indeed, I wondered, and forgot about it.
I had come upon him that afternoon, lying face down in the frozen grass beneath the apple tree.
“You’ll freeze, George,” I told him.
“Maybe,” he said, “but I’ll warm the earth.”
“And I’m sure the earth will appreciate your efforts, George,” I said, “but why not let the spring do it for you?”
“The spring needs help,” he said, “the summer needs help too.”
“Are you an Adonis then, George, in overalls?”
“Who is Adonis?” he asked.
“Adonis revived the earth,” I told him.
“He was a gardener then?”
“Yes,” I told him, “of a kind.”
“We used to lie here,” he said, “just like this, the four of us.”
“Yes,” I said, “but in the summer and the grass was high and we were children then.”
He raised himself at that and stood, awkwardly, as if re-entering his oversized adult limbs.
“You took my part,” he said, or I thought he said, and turned away.
“I what?” I asked.
And he repeated, over the blowing wind, “You took my part.”
I stared at the outline his body had left in the crushed winter grass. I remembered the tiny theatre of the four of us beneath that apple tree in the long September grasses of my childhood. His part had been Touchstone, not Adonis. And he would strike me more dead than a great reckoning in a little room.
T
HE HOUSE, WHEN
David Hardy came to view it—or it came to view him, for its approach was calm and silent as Dan Turnbull’s handling of the grey mare that pulled them past the limestone pillars of the gates—seemed like a folly to him, an imitation of a civilised facade set arbitrarily in a vista that could have been the Azores or the Antipodes, or the Flemish estuaries in those paintings of Jacob van Ruisdael. There was a strangeness about it that never left him, the strangeness he felt when Dan manoeuvred the horse through the half-open gates, when the wheels of the trap crunched over the long-uncrunched gravel and swung round the back, which, to his mild surprise, he realised was the front.
I know now, of course, what he had left. How do I know this? It
is
the only grace of my state. I am everywhere being nowhere, the narrative sublime, a kind of mote in his eye as he rubbed from it the dust stirred up by the mare’s hooves and saw the house he never expected to see, its lumpen limestone an affront to the lowland fields.
I would blame her, for many years, for a state of things engendered by him. His corduroy trousers, his tweed jacket, the military belt I loved to finger with its copper clasp, the linen shirt with its blue and red tracing pulled tight beneath it, the studded shoes that touched the gravel as he helped her out, all concealed something as banal and Victorian as a secret. And secrets, he should have known even then, will always out.
He took her elbow with an assurance that he cannot quite have felt. He concealed, because he had to, his trepidation, his fear even, of what this house might hold for him. She dismissed Dan with a nod and led him, by way of her elbow, the thin forearm pressed reassuringly on his thick, hesitant fingers, towards the door. She felt he was in need of reassurance and thought she knew why. He was in another country, the house was large and Mary Dagge, who opened the door, was all starch and unnatural whiteness.
Come into my world, she intimated, a world I promise will cloak you with delight. And he wondered, as he entered the shades of that interior, how the promise would be kept. They made love in the early afternoon on the large oak bed of the room they had decided would be theirs, and if there was a kindness in the low rays of the October sun that touched the bubbled window, the bedspread and her tangled stockings, there was an emptiness as well. He was a stranger among her familiar things. He had chosen to be this stranger, this journeyman. He wanted his journey to end here, but he wondered would it: would he always be a stranger here too, no matter how familiar this place became.
And then, maybe, or if not then, some time in that first month the child was conceived, another stranger in her body. And as it grew inside her, it slowed her movements, hampered that angular swiftness of which she was so proud, imposed a weightiness on her that she never quite forgave. He was overjoyed at the prospect of replacing that which he thought he had lost. But for her, childbirth and motherhood were an estrangement from her girlish self, a burden she never did repeat.
Two strangers, then. And the sense of strangeness released in him energies he never knew were there, energies he expended in, of all things, crustaceans. He loved to walk the banks of the rivermouth, on its Mornington and Baltray sides, hear the crunch beneath his feet of decades of scallop-shells. He loved to paint the fishermen as they pulled in their salmon-nets, listening to their talk as the oil-paint dried. He heard how they were flush for the season of the salmon run, then starved the rest of the year, noted the lobsters and prawn they flung back into the waters, began his first tentative co-operative, shipping ice-packed boxes of lobster, prawn, cockle, mussel and scallop on the steampacket to Liverpool. Liverpool’s appetite for shellfish proved insatiable and the shipments grew, spread their tentacles to Blackpool, Southampton, Brighton, London.
Soon the string of fishermen’s huts grew inadequate for the enterprise it had become, and a factory was needed which he financed, and so found himself, nearing the end of the old century, a surprised and surprisingly successful man of business. And soon he was rooted in this strange land, this strange house, as if he had been here for ever, the only hint of the life he had left being the tears that flowed occasionally from his hazel eyes, always unexpectedly, which he would explain to his young wife with the single word: Velázquez.
So Velázquez had become their word, for the eternal lost in the quotidian, for those lingering hopes one had but had to forget, those ambitions that were thwarted because of accidents, inability, or both. And, in the way of such words, for that moment when they had met the second time, and had known, within minutes of meeting, that they would be together for ever. That globe on the canvas, suspended in its dark background of dimly glittering stars.
And when she arrived, that’s all he thought of, the child-virgin with the pinched face standing on the apex, utterly alone in the chilly universe. And when the doctor informed him that this child would be their last, tears were not an issue. He could not imagine this perfection ever being repeated.
She was carried into the house by her father, her tiny cheek resting against the white crocheted shawl over the rumpled corduroy of her father’s sleeve. Her mother followed in a wickerwork nursing chair, carried by Dan Turnbull and two farm-hands, gingerly, like some exotic piece of china that might break at any moment. The house greeted her, as it greeted each newcomer, with a mysterious, unbreakable embrace.
Her eyes observed the house through a liquid prism, calm as pools of bog-water unruffled by any sentient breeze, disembodied as any ghost, carried by arms she was barely aware of through the front door into the yawning dark of the hallway, the oak staircase rising to the tall windows with their oblongs of grey Irish light. Her eyes closed at irregular intervals and the dark came in like a lake. They opened on a whim to see an entirely new vista, a nurse bending towards her in a different room, black hair brushing like wings off her face, sliding the bottle with India-rubber nipple downwards. The mother stretched in the verandaed room below her on the easy chair, wrapped in blankets, hand checking her vaginal stitches, father pacing the ground floor, now tinkering on the piano in the dining room, now sketching his sleeping wife with a soft charcoal pencil in the whey-coloured wash of light that seeped through those mildewed windows.
But his wife wasn’t sleeping; she had closed her eyes against the need to meet his. Some exhaustion had entered her very being, some rage against the flesh, the skin, the tissue and bone of the animal in her that enabled this birth. She spoke when she must of course—yes my love, tired, maybe, I suppose I must be, tea, yes please—but her soul, her heart, whatever flower she gave to him was a bloody mess and was in hibernation.
The child’s eyes opened in the room above and no effort of the suckling showed in them and she stared above the nurse’s crowblack hair at what was not there. No cognition, no recognition. Just a stare.
An isolate child. Her name could have been just that: isolate, Isolda, with its connotations of tranquillity in aloneness. Dark pools of eyes, darker than her father’s hazel, staring from his hand as he held her, in her mother’s christening robe, above the stone baptismal font in the Siena Convent. Legend had it that they never blinked when the cold water trickled down her creased forehead. The shrunken head of Oliver Plunkett, sliced free of its body in Tyburn more than two hundred years ago, in its glass casket across the nave, could not have been more still. The eyes seemed designed for that too-large house, with its dark brown timbers, its damp limestone, its draughts and its shadows. When speech came, legend had it too, it came early, and always seemed addressed to someone else. They thought she had a lazy eye at first, the mamas and the papas always addressed to a point beyond their shoulders. But when they called Dr. Quirk and he moved his finger in front of those brown orbs from left to right and saw them follow, they found nothing ocular at fault. And as they were blessed with ignorance of Dr. Freud, who had, in point of fact, not yet begun to formulate his theories, they put it down to fancy and imagination.
They called her Nina.
~
The sky has clouded over and the pencil shadows on the branches have softened into a gloomy wash. The light on the window-pane is warmer now, the only light around. The onset of dawn can be felt before it is seen. The cough of a pigeon can be heard as it wakes, the wind seems to quicken and the dead leaves shift and somewhere beyond the copse of trees, the whirring of wings. After a patriotic tune on a thin organ, after a considered series of electronic beeps, the radio comes to life in the empty room with news of high and low fronts, of millibars rising slowly. And then the weak daylight comes. The night will retreat into shadow once more, into the dark spaces that define the bright.
George must have woken that last morning, turned the radio on and left it that way, found no milk in the fridge and walked through the crusted white fields towards the house. For I had come down, half-dressed, to the sound of banging in the kitchen and found the door open, a bottle of milk rocking on the pine table, spilling to the floor. A set of milk footprints traced the passage of his boots from the table to the door. I cursed them silently while I cleaned them and thought once more of ending his tenure as gardener, handyman and general factotum. Where are you, my Adonis, with your spilt milk and your bleeding sparrows?
And his words echoed in my brain, You took my part, as I went about my day, that day that ended prematurely when I came upon him two hours later in the glasshouse. The broken glass clinked around his boots as he emerged from the curtain of dead tomato plants. And he repeated the phrase I had first heard beneath the apple tree. But it wasn’t his part I had taken. Heart, he said.
“You took my heart.”
H
ER MOTHER, IN
the third year of the new century, decided Nina needed company other than imaginary. So she took the train to Dublin and visited, on Eustace Street, the Institute For Governesses, a grand-sounding title for the cramped fourth-floor room in which she interviewed lady after lady of the teaching classes. She settled on one, a Miss Isobel Shawcross, from the Kildare Shawcrosses, with a prim mouth and a carriage as straight as a pencil. The house was large, Mrs. Hardy explained, Nina was quiet and given to daydreams and prone to fill the empty spaces with her imagination. What she needed was the kind of diversion an early education could bring. Miss Shawcross nodded, and in her nodding an understanding seemed implicit, an understanding of young girls in empty houses with large imaginations. There were references to be examined, fees to be discussed, but from the moment of that nod Mrs. Hardy made her decision and Miss Shawcross found herself hired.
