The Ballroom (17 page)

One long afternoon Brandt appeared, darker since last they met. Face burnt from the sun. ‘So this is where they keep you then. Cunt.’

The attendant’s eyes were yellow slits against the light. Violence hummed about him like bees in the still air.

‘A gyppo and a cunt.’ Brandt stepped up and poked their haycock with his stick, shaking hay over the ground, but the pile was steady and did not fall.

John wiped the sweat from his brow.

‘Oi, gyppo,’ Brandt called to Dan. ‘I hear you’ve been saying you’re going to win this tug of war.’

Dan grinned. ‘I think that’s right. That’s what I reckon. Pull you ladies over just like that.’ He snapped his fingers.

‘That’s not what I heard. I heard they’re only doing it so they’ll be something to laugh at.’

‘
Mio Capitane?
’ Dan turned to John. ‘Why don’t we show this
cartso
what we can do with a rope?’

So John tossed the heavy hay rope in a clean arc over to Dan, who caught it with one hand and pulled it taut, securing it with a stone.

Brandt turned, spat on the ground. ‘I told you you’d pay.’ He lifted his stick towards John. ‘And you will. You too, gyppo.’

Dan whistled through his teeth as he watched him go.

‘We’ll get the bastard,
chavo
,’ he said, coming to stand beside John. ‘Just wait. What does he think? He thinks gyppos and trampers and Irish don’t know how to work ropes? He’ll see.’ He shouted after Brandt now: ‘He’ll see what we can do with a rope all right.’

Friday came.

In the ballroom, he took his place and watched for her, restless in his skin.

Every so often he could not help but cast his glance towards her, and when he did he saw that there was a high colour to her cheek. That she moved, perhaps, with a touch more grace than she had before. And as he watched her dance with other men, there was a hunger on him that was painful and new.

When the heat of the evening and the heat of the dancing was at its height, he made his way towards her. Her face was flushed with sweat and in the candlelight seemed to shine. He felt a shifting inside him at the sight of her, something falling, finding a new place.

When they danced, he could see only the white strip of her parting and the paleness of her forehead beneath. He caught the sharp-sweet scent of her as they moved. He wanted to ask if the letter had pleased her. If it had been the sort of thing she wished to hear. But he felt raw, his body become an unwieldy thing. Now it was he who was clumsy, he who forgot the steps.

She said nothing to him, and he did not speak, only felt a growing disappointment, and as the music faded he released his grip.

‘Here,’ she said, lifting her face to his. With a fugitive smile, she tugged a folded piece of paper from her sleeve, and in a quick, darting movement, pressed it in his palm.

He opened it in the ward, when there was only the small lamp burning over where the attendant slept.

To John,

Thank you for your letter. I liked to hear it.

When I look out at the green, I wish I were outside too. But I do not wish to be outside and come back in here at night. I wish for freedom, only.

It is true that people act strangely in this heat. But I wish they acted stranger still. When you are a woman, and you work in the laundry, no one lets you take off your boots. You keep everything on and you keep your boots on till you go to sleep, when your feet are swollen and they hurt.

I think there are rules for the men and rules for the women in here.

Yours,

Ella

He folded it back and placed it in his pocket, from where he took it and read it several times that day. One thing was a relief – it did not sound like the letter of a woman who had been courted, and for this he was glad.

Still.

He would have liked to have known what she thought of the flower.

One late afternoon, when the sun was slanting sideways over the field, John uncovered a feather in amongst the hay, deep blue and white.

He knew which bird it came from, a
fáinleog
, a swallow. And he knew what it meant all right; it meant his father, and a broken promise, and everything that came after.

He thought of his father now, of the closeness he had felt to him as a boy, when he would sit with him at the front of the cart, on trips to the coast to collect seaweed and sand for their fields. Crossing the blue rush of rivers on to the sea. Scouring the shore by his side, pulling at the knotty wrack and moss and slimy weed. His father singing while they worked, Irish songs, full of words that were forbidden at school, where speaking in Irish got you beaten. Sleeping on the shore beside the mules and the sound of the waves.

Then, one evening in spring, when the fields of the farm had been harrowed and raked and spread with the green weed, his father calling him over, telling him he was leaving.

‘To England. And you’ll be glad that I do. And if the weather is too good there and the hay does not thrive, I’ll be back. But you won’t want that, because there’ll be nothing for the shop and nothing for your mother or your sisters, and nothing for the pigs, and you’ll end up on the roads, or I will. So pray for showers and rain, and then there will be work and plenty of it.’

His father took him outside and pointed to the sky, which was full of birds, small ones with forked tails. ‘D’ye see them? The
fáinleog
? They fly a long way. And they come back. Every year they come back. And that’s what I’ll do. But you must look after the farm while I’m gone.’

John stared round at the low, thatched farmhouse, the uneven yard, the outhouses, the land stretching away to the bog where the turf was cut.

‘Say it.’ His father gripped him. ‘Say you promise. I want to hear you say it.’

‘I promise.’

‘In Irish. Say it in Irish, lad.’

‘
Gellaim duit
.’

He watched his father leave, along with a large group of men, all with their sharpened scythe blades glinting in the pale spring sun. All of them walking out to take the boat to Liverpool. And it seemed to John his father was part of a great army of men, and he was proud of him, and his father lifted his hat and waved as he walked away.

When the summer ended, John watched for his father’s return. On his knees, cutting turf from the patch at the back of the cottage. Cleaning out the pigs. Sitting with his back against the gnarled and knotted tree at the front when the work was done, he stared and stared at the bend in the road.

The other men returned, but his father was not with them.

Some of those men came and stood in the cottage with his mother and put their hands on her arms and murmured things John could not quite hear.

His mother wept and hunched and dressed in black. The priest came and they knelt, he and his mother and sisters, saying rosaries for his father’s soul. There was no body to wake, but the neighbours all came and took their snuff, and the men stood about and touched him on the shoulder.

‘You’re the man now, you’re the man all right, you’ll be looking after the place. You’ll be looking after your mother now.’

But he did not believe his father was dead.

He watched for him still. He sat amongst the roots of the gnarled oak and stared at the road, until the
fáinleog
were long gone and the air was pinched and frost crusted the blackened grass.

As he grew, he kept his promise, but came to hate the weight of it. Often, he imagined slipping into Confession, the darkened grille, the priest’s sour breath: ‘
Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. I want to torch it all.
’

He walked out his hate, and he could walk far, twenty miles a day in the summertime: passing barefoot women, turf on their backs, children running after them. Past fields of black earth bounded by loose stone walls, where great drifts of sheep blocked the roads.

Sometimes, in the middle of nowhere much at all, when all that was around him was heather and bog and mountains, he turned the corner and there was a group of people, backs bent, breaking stones.

Plenty of young men were amongst them, some of whom he vaguely recognized from the dances in Claremorris, or faces in the crowd at the horse fairs. A ganger moving up and down them, shouting, making them hurry. And his father’s voice echoed in his head: ‘
You’ll end up on the roads, or I will
.’

But he saw beauty too, as he walked: saw the gorse, singing yellow after the rains. Felt a tugging that was happiness and sadness mixed together and made from the light and dark and the morning and moving and all of it rising inside him. Sometimes there were women, or girls, standing in their doorways, staring out. He saw them and felt he understood their loneliness and their wanting.

Once he approached one, walked right up to her and asked for a glass of milk.

‘I’ve such a drought on me.’

She was beautiful, standing just in her petticoat and shawl. She fetched a cup for him and waited while he drank, her pulse keeping time at her neck, her feet bare on the earth floor. He imagined her taking him inside the cottage, lying on the bed. Giving her pleasure in the darkness. Spilling the things he had seen into her ear. How the beauty of life and the world struck him like a fever sometimes, but how it was all mixed up and mangled with the hate. But he said and did none of those things, only, when he had drunk down the milk, handed the cup back, thanked her and walked on.

He kept on the road until he reached the sea, staring at the place where the horizon blurred and the west carried on to America.

Beyond.

He could get there on a boat, from Ballina, from Sligo, but you needed money. The best way to get there would be Liverpool first – he had heard there was plenty of work in the docks there – and save the money for the passage.

And so that was what he wished for, standing at the place where the land gave way to the sea. But when he had wished it, he always turned back. He had promised his father he would.

Until his mother died and the men clustered around him, their voices a low, insistent swarm. ‘It’s your farm now, John Mulligan; you’ll be after marrying now.’ Their daughters staring at him over the coffin. The sour-milk smother of them, and all the time his feet itching to take him back on the road. He had to hold himself in his chair to keep from jumping out of it. Kept taking pinches of the snuff laid out beside his mother’s coffin, his foot rattling on the floor.

He dug her grave himself. Made sure the sides were pared and smooth. He threw his sod on the top of the box, and when it was done they went back for the eating and the drinking. He could see his sisters inside the house. Knew they would be sweeping the floors, setting the clock going again, moving the hands from where they had been halted when his mother died. He wanted no part of that slow, silted time.

So he walked.

He walked away from home. Away from his father’s land. Away from his promise. Walked to Kiltimagh and to Claremorris, and from there he walked the road to Dublin. He could get to Liverpool, and America from there.

There was a great lifting in him. There was only the road ahead.

He wrote of this to Ella. Or parts of it. Not the women and the imaginings, or the broken promise. He wrote the things he believed she would like to hear. She was like those women, he thought – standing at the doors of their cottages, in their toughness and their loneliness. Staring out.

He felt lighter when he had written it. He slipped the feather in the folded letter when he was done. For not all feathers were tainted with blood, were they? It was such a light thing, to have to carry so much. Could a feather not be just a feather after all?

C
HARLES HEADED NORTH
up Bishopsgate, weaving to avoid a throng of labourers outside a pub. From their manner and bearing they had just been released from their Saturday morning’s work and were drinking lustily in the afternoon heat.

It was a fine day, radiant in the way only early June can approach, and he would have far preferred to have been walking up on the moor than in Leeds, but it was his mother’s birthday, and he had to make the obligatory visit to Roundhay for lunch.

Many of the drinkers had discarded their shirts, and their torsos were exposed and beginning to broil, their laughter ringing out raucous on the city air.

The sun did strange things to people. It made them regress. It was obvious from just these last weeks of heat that it was harder for everyone to concentrate on work. He was dressed in light flannel trousers, jacket and boater, and the cotton of his shirt felt deliciously cool against his skin. Such a relief! The asylum staff were forbidden to take off a layer of their stiff black uniforms, however hot it was. These last days Charles had taken to noting the temperature on the thermometer that was nailed to the wall of the kitchen garden. As the column in his notebook grew, the figures remained remarkably steady; the mercury had hardly dipped below seventy-nine for the last two weeks.

If he approached it scientifically, it helped to quell his own irritability with the heat: once the temperature veered towards eighty, ordinarily quiet people became fractious, less biddable. Troublemakers were more extreme. The stench on the wards was noisome. Surely the weather must break soon?

How few great empires had sprung from the places where the sun shone? The African, the Indian, the Aboriginal in Australia … what did these races have in common? They were less guided by reason. Surely it must follow that the closer you were to the sun, the more your animal nature was uppermost? It certainly seemed so in Leeds today, where these men, drinking, with their rough voices and their skin so flagrantly displayed, seemed little more than cattle, brawny and red.

Work on his paper continued, although a little less urgently, he had to admit, in the heat. He had sent away for a copy of Dr Sharp’s publication
On the Sterilization of Degenerates
, thinking to acquaint himself with the arguments for sterilization that he might the more fully refute them in his own work. Dr Sharp was the chief medical officer of the Indiana Reformatory, a man who had already sterilized many hundreds of patients. It was said that Home Secretary Churchill held him in extremely high regard. But the pamphlet – slim as it was – had lain on his desk unopened for a week.