Shade (8 page)
Nina walked over the varnished wood round the doorway on to a different carpet. George and Janie stayed by the door jamb, as if another carpet was more than they could negotiate today. Her mother wore a cream blouse, hair falling around her sculpted cheeks in an untidy but not unpleasing tangle. A glass with a lemon-slice held back the pages
of The Well-Tempered Clavier.
The pearly notes cascaded round her and she looked at her only daughter through a concentrated haze.
“Nina, you’re a disgrace,” she murmured, looking at her stained white smock and her smudged shoes, then towards the door. “And who are these two other disgraces?”
~
“Would he have placed her in the river, Ma’am?” the nearest policeman asks Janie in a low mumble, designed to be unheard by George.
“Did you put Nina in the river?” Janie asks George, her teeth clenched, her fist scratching at her watery eyelids.
“The river,” George repeats.
“Is she in the river, George?” Janie asks again.
“She’s in the river,” says George, “and the seaweed is her hair.”
“Not her, George,” says Janie. “Nina. We’re talking about Nina.”
“What was that about seaweed?” Buttsy Flanagan asks.
“We found a body once, when we were children, tangled in the seaweed—”
“Her hair,” says George.
“Isobel Shawcross,” says Janie. “Check the coroner’s records. She drowned.”
“The river took her,” says George.
“Took who?” asks Dr. Hannon.
“Took Boinn—”
“Who’s Boinn?”
“Only one place the river could take her,” says a policeman. “Out to sea.”
“You don’t understand,” says Janie, “he’s confusing one thing with another—”
“Why did the river take her?” asks the doctor.
“For her hair—”
“Jesus Christ—”
“Let him speak—”
“She’s not in the river, Georgie, is she?” asks Janie. “That would be too simple.”
“Much too simple,” says George.
“Why did you kill her, George?” Janie says slowly.
“Kill who?” says George.
“Nina,” says Janie, and her closed fist scratches again at her eyelid.
“Didn’t kill Nina,” says George. “I killed Hester.”
“Oh Jesus,” says Janie and walks away.
“Hester?” asks the doctor. “Who’s Hester?”
They are being led to a conclusion and maybe George, with some defensive, fractured intuition, is leading them to it. Dr. Hannon enquires about Hester, Buttsy Flanagan about Isobel Shawcross, George smokes one cigarette to its end and holds his hand out mutely for another. They walk back from the river as the light fades and a consensus is emerging from the interstices of their conversation, from what Janie can remember of their childhood narrative, from the dementia of her grief and her unwillingness to penetrate it.
And the conclusion when arrived at is, like all conclusions, the most convenient.. That he lowered the body into the water with all the care of deranged affection, that the tide, which would have been high then, would have carried it past the ruins of the shellfish plant, past the limestone tower at the old breakwater out to sea. And besides convenience, there is a mystery to this conclusion, there is a pleasing poetry to it, the body never found, the lapping waters of an infinite, open grave, the sense that, whatever the warp-spasm that came over George, he deposited Nina, Boinn, Hester, in the arms of the river, in the body of the ocean she loved with some warped version of the same emotion.
So there would be, conveniently, no body to be dealt with, no visit from the State Coroner, no grave to be dug; and the sentence, when it came to be passed in Drogheda District Court, would be one of guilty but insane. There would not be even the inconvenience of a change of residence for George: the ward in St Ita’s would become his prison, and out of his barred window he could look towards the same insane sea.
On the grassed-over cover of the rusting manhole of the old septic tank, they gather and drink coffee from a policeman’s flask. He spices his cup with whiskey, raises the metal hip-flask towards Janie with an enquiring eye. She nods.
“A bird,” Buttsy Flanagan informs her, “never flew on one wing.”
“Hester,” says Dr. Hannon, “was your . . .”
“Nina’s doll. Nina’s ghost. Whatever Nina wanted her to be.”
“Her familiar.”
“Yes,” says Janie, “she became familiar all right.”
“And Boinn?” says Buttsy.
“Get a guide-book of the locality,” says Janie. “You’ll come across her.”
“A legend,” says Dr. Hannon.
“Again,” says Janie, “Nina’s. And I think I’m going to cry now.”
The rusting cover of the manhole reads Twyfords Adamant and Janie’s heel scrapes over it as she turns away and weeps.
H
ESTERTHE PESTER
. Her inanimate eyes seemed to know it all that afternoon, seemed able to decipher Dan’s whispers, when he entered and conferred with her mother, seemed able to interpret her mother’s gasp when she held her mouth and turned away. “My God,” her mother said out loud, then, “Nina,” and she took her and wrapped her arms around her as Dan led her two new friends towards the front door. She would remember that holding, those arms stroking her hair, the comfort of being comforted, in years to come, when no comfort was forthcoming. She would remember the sound of her father’s feet, the sight of him as the door burst open and the two of them held her, together. She would wonder what it would take to recreate that, the three of them wrapped around each other-—the death of another governess, perhaps. She felt privileged by death that evening, as her mother and her father let her play with Hester till the sun went down, watched her with moist, attentive eyes, before accompanying her up to her room, to sleep.
Sleep, of course, was late in coming, for Nina if not for Hester. She lay there, thinking of cause and effect. She had wished her governess gone and now her governess was gone. She looked at the moon through the half-drawn curtains at the window, and wished it gone. But her wish had no effect: the indistinct half-globe stared down at her as if teasing her with its continued presence. She wished the curtains would close of their own accord, blocking out the moon, but of course the curtains stayed, limp and inanimate. She thought of Miss Shawcross’s definition of her doll, inanimate, lifeless, ceramic and horsehair. For a moment she wished Hester gone, then instantly regretted it; but Hester remained, sleeping on the crook of her arm, in her Puritan bib and smock.
And then the light darkened imperceptibly on Hester’s ceramic cheeks and Nina looked back at the window and the moon was gone, behind a thin strip of cloud shaped like an orange-peel. For an unending moment she was filled with a bottomless terror and wished the moon back again. And the moon indeed came back, as the cloud changed its shape from an orange-peel to a wisp of hair, exposing the half-finished globe once more. And although she knew the moon exposed itself independent of her wishes, she was still not certain that her wishes had no effect. If her wish cohered with what inevitably would happen, did her wish not in some way conspire with what would happen? If she had not wished, would what had happened have slipped into the realm of that which would not happen? And if, having glimpsed a vision of Miss Shawcross’s hair under water, mingling with the seaweed, she had warned Miss Shawcross of the imminent dangers of water, would Miss Shawcross have still ended thus, under the limp seaweed in the waters of the Boyne? Or would she have dismissed Nina’s inner world as adroitly as she dismissed that of her doll, now named Hester?
If she had wished, then, that George had not taken the course he did, would she rather than I be standing now by the upper window, observing, since observation is all I am, the lone policeman’s breath on the cold air, his stamping feet on the hoar-frosted grass by the gates? Had she been at the left-hand window in the dining room on the first storey, could she have transferred her gaze to the pale light spilling in through the right-hand window, from a moon very like the one she wished away, spilling its light over the frozen fields? And since we are supposing here, as she loved to suppose, could she have seen the mauve
fleur-de-lys
of the wallpaper print of forty-five years ago, could she have followed that pattern to the door? Could she have walked to the accompaniment of distant piano music from downstairs, towards that door?
Time would be malleable for her in her world of supposition, so the formidable oak stairway would still be intact, the steps would even creak as she mounted them. The door to her bedroom would still be open, so she could enter, silent as the grave, and observe her young self sleeping at last, under the oatmeal-coloured blanket, the doll with its Puritan bib and smock on the pillow beside her. She could watch her own chest rise and fall, her bowed mouth half open, she could bend close and feel the warmth of her breath. She could wonder at her loneliness, her utter isolation, the kind of isolation that animates the inanimate Hester, that brings others, perhaps even me, into being. She could cease these suppositions then and look once more out of the window, see below her, instead of a policeman stamping his feet, blowing his cold fingers, wondering about the fact of murder, hares dancing in the moonlit fields between the haystacks.
N
INA’S MOTHER, IN
the third year of the new century, came to acknowledge her imaginative world for what it was—loneliness. Perhaps because she herself was growing familiar with that condition. The days stretched out ahead of her like infinite extensions of the crossword puzzles she filled-in, drab, endless and somehow more real than she had ever expected them to be. Her husband returned home at six, then often left again at seven, to oversee the night shippings. Everything that was new to him, it seemed, was old to her, in this vast house where she had grown up, with this child whose imaginative world filled all the empty spaces. She slept late often, rose to find Nina already fed by Mary Dagge and realised her more ardent self was slumbering too. “Nine across,” she said to her husband once at dinner, “Spanish Court painter.”
“Velázquez,” he replied, but without the recognition she had hoped for. She decided then, to let that self slumber on.
And in the absence of Isobel Shawcross, she decided to leave her daughter’s schooling to nature, Dan Turnbull and the “two disgraces” from the cottage across the river. Nina would eventually learn to spell, with the same George and Janie, in the national school across the river, and would misspell one word consistently, leaving out the “e”: lonly. And when the mistake was pointed out to her, she would misspell it deliberately, claiming it looked more beautiful that way.
But for the moment she was left free, to substitute real friends for imaginary ones, to share their world, to adopt the townland dialect, so fivepence became fippence, a long walk became a dreadful foreigner. She would talk of silage and rides on the back of the harvester with Dan, of colly dogs that are whores for barking, and her bemused parents would see this lithe tinker grow between them. Her father would walk her through that long cathedral of steaming ice and hear her talk with the shellfish packers in a tongue that was, to him, near impenetrable.
Her summer became one long swathe of sensuality, a bathing suit beneath a tattered dress, whole weeks spent on the dunes that spread from the Baltray golf-course to the interminable stretch of empty beach to the north of the river-mouth. The cottages across the Boyne river from her father’s shellfish plant became her second home: George and Janie Tuite in one, fifteen children spread between the other two. The blue and white horizon of the foaming sea was always perched, it seemed, over the three smoking chimneys, threatening to douse them entirely. Between those cottages and her parents’ large, ungovernable house was the estuary swamp, a terrain of dried mud, of slowly creeping tides, of barely formed canals Dan Turnbull had chosen to call Mozambique.
Why Mozambique, they were never sure. But there were flies in Mozambique, Dan told them, flies, mosquitoes, and the fetid humours you
get
in flatlands below sea-level, so Mozambique it did become. And in Mozambique there were all of the estuary delights, crabs and kingfishers, channels and runnels, stagnant ponds, mudflats and seeping tides that rose at will, turning cracked black earth into mud that squelched and oozed between George’s ever-naked toes. There were men digging for earthworms in the early morning, mists like white hair clinging to the low ground, obliterating the dunes beyond, making Mozambique seem endless, men turning sand with spades, severing a lugworm here, a ragworm there. And when the men and the mists departed, there were monsters to be found in Mozambique: a huge flatfish left in a runnel by the departing tide, flapping, gasping vainly for air with its whitened mouth; an eel slinking in a stilled pool; multitudinous crabs; and one day a horned creature, up to its midriff in the soft mud, mud caked on its hair, its tail, mud from the incessant flailing of its four trapped legs, mud which dried around it as the sun rose.
They surveyed this thing for hours, a footless mound of hair with two curved horns rising from it, wondering was it reindeer, unicorn or seahorse, until Dan arrived and told them it was none of those, it was Mabel Hatch’s goat. He undid the muddied rope from round its neck, slid it beneath its belly, avoided its jagging horns and pulled. And they heard grotesque sucking sounds as first the front legs, then the back ones emerged from their prison in the sludge and the whole goat was up, unsteady on its feet but standing free and readying itself to take a run at Dan. Which it tried, but slipped and rolled again in the mud-caked earth, and Dan said “Enough so,” grabbed it by the horns and hind legs, hoisted it over his shoulders and walked into the sunlight towards Mabel Hatch’s field.
And what she would remember for ever was not the goat stuck in the mud but the horns, which seemed to sprout from Dan Turnbull’s bent head as he disappeared, silhouetted against the light.
George walked in the goat’s footsteps, his bare feet obliterating the cloven indentations in the mud. “So,
it
was a goat, then,” he said.
