The Collected Stories (32 page)

‘If it wasn’t me it would be some other. My mother will never understand that. I might as well say I waited long enough for you.’

The visit we made to my father some weeks later quickly turned to a far worse disaster than I could have envisaged. I saw him watch us as I got out of the car to open the iron gate under the yew, but instead of coming out to greet us he withdrew into the shadows of the hallway. It was my stepmother, Rose, who came out to the car when we both got out and were opening the small garden gate. We had to follow her smiles and trills of speech all the way into the kitchen to find my father, who was seated in the car chair, and he did not rise to take our hands.

After a lunch that was silent, in spite of several shuttlecocks of speech Rose tried to keep in the air, he said as he took his hat from the sill, ‘I want to ask you about these walnuts,’ and I followed him out into the fields. The mock orange was in blossom, and it was where the mock orange stood out from the clump of egg bushes that he turned suddenly and said, ‘What age is your intended? She looks well on her way to forty.’

‘She’s the same age as I am,’ I said blankly. I could hardly think, caught between the shock and pure amazement.

‘I don’t believe it,’ he said.

‘You don’t have to, but we were in the same class at university.’ I turned away.

Walking with her in the same field close to the mock orange tree late that evening, I said, ‘Do you know what my father said to me?’

‘No,’ she said happily. ‘But from what I’ve seen I don’t think anything will surprise me.’

‘We were walking just here,’ I began, and repeated what he’d said. When I saw her go still and pale I knew I should not have spoken.

‘He said I look close to forty,’ she repeated. ‘I have to get out of this place.’

‘Stay this one night,’ I begged. ‘It’s late now. We’d have to stay in a hotel. It’d be making it into too big a production. You don’t ever
have to come back again, if you don’t want to, but stay the night. It’ll be easier.’

‘I’ll not want to come back,’ she said as she agreed to see out this one night.

‘But why do you think he said it?’ I asked her later when we were both quiet, sitting on a wall at the end of the Big Meadow, watching the shadows of the evening deepen between the beeches, putting off the time when we’d have to go into the house, not unlike two grown children.

‘Is there any doubt? Out of simple hatred. There’s no living with that kind of hatred.’

‘We’ll leave first thing in the morning,’ I promised.

‘And why did you,’ she asked, tickling my throat with a blade of ryegrass, ‘say I was, if anything, too beautiful?’

‘Because it’s true. It makes you public and it’s harder to live naturally. You live in too many eyes – in envy or confusion or even simple admiration, it’s all the same. I think it makes it harder to live luckily.’

‘But it gives you many advantages.’

‘If you make use of those advantages, you’re drawn even deeper in. And of course I’m afraid it’ll attract people who’ll try to steal you from me.’

‘That won’t happen.’ She laughed. She’d recovered all her natural good spirits. ‘And now I suppose we better go in and face the ogre. We have to do it sooner or later and it’s getting chilly.’

My father tried to be charming when we went in, but there was a false heartiness in the voice that made clear that it grew out of no well-meaning. He felt he’d lost ground, and was now trying to recover it far too quickly. Using silence and politeness like a single weapon, we refused to be drawn in; and when pressed to stay the next morning, we said unequivocally that we had to get back. Except for one summer when I went to work in England, the summer my father married Rose, I had always gone home to help at the hay; and after I entered the civil service I was able to arrange holidays so that they fell around haytime. They had come to depend on me and I liked the work. My father had never forgiven me for taking my chance to go to university. He had wanted me to stay at home to work the land. I had always fought his need to turn my refusal into betrayal, and by going home each
summer I felt I was affirming that the great betrayal was not mine but nature’s own.

I had arranged the holidays to fall at haytime that year as I had all the years before I met her, but since he’d turned to me at the mock orange tree I was no longer sure I had to go. I was no longer free, since in everything but name our life together seemed to be growing into marriage. It might even make him happy for a time if he could call it my betrayal.

‘I don’t know what to do,’ I confessed to her a week before I was due to take holidays. ‘They’ve come to depend on me for the hay. Everything else they can manage themselves. I know they’ll expect me.’

‘What do you want to do?’

‘I suppose I’d prefer to go home – that’s if you don’t mind.’

‘Why do you prefer?’

‘I like working at the hay. You come back to the city feeling fit and well.’

‘Is that the real reason?’

‘No. It’s something that might even be called sinister. I’ve gone home for so long that I’d like to see it through. I don’t want to be blamed for finishing it, though it’ll finish soon, with or without me. But this way I don’t have to think about it.’

‘Maybe it would be kinder, then, to do just that, and take the blame.’

‘It probably would be kinder, but kindness died between us so long ago that it doesn’t enter into it.’

‘So there was some kindness?’

‘When I was younger.’ I had to smile. ‘He looked on it as weakness. I suspect he couldn’t deal with it. Anyhow it always redoubled his fury. He was kind, too, in fits, when he was feeling good about things. That was even more unacceptable. And that phrase from the Bible is true that after enough suffering a kind of iron enters the soul. It’s very far from commendable, but now I do want to see it through.’

‘Well, then go,’ she said. ‘I don’t understand it but I can see you want to go. Being new, the earliest I can get holidays will be September.’

We had pasta and two bottles of red wine in the flat the evening before I was to leave for the hay, and with all the talking we were
almost late for our walk in the Green. We liked to walk there every good evening before turning home for the night.

The bells were fairly clamouring from all corners, rooting vagrants and lovers from the shrubbery, as we passed through the half-closed gates. Two women at the pond’s edge were hurriedly feeding the ducks bread from a plastic bag. We crossed the bridge where the Japanese cherry leaned, down among the empty benches round the paths and flowerbeds within their low railings. The deck-chairs had been gathered in, the sprinklers turned off. There was about the Green always at this hour some of the melancholy of the beach at the close of holiday. The gate we had entered was already locked. The attendant was rattling an enormous bunch of keys at the one through which we had to leave.

‘You know,’ she said, ‘I’d like to be married before long. I hadn’t thought it would make much difference to me, but, oddly, now I want to be married.’

‘I hope it’s to me,’ I said.

‘You haven’t asked me.’

I could feel her laughter as she held my arm close.

‘I’m asking now.’

I made a flourish of removing a non-existent hat. ‘Will you marry me?’

‘I will.’

‘When?’

‘Before the year is out.’

‘Would you like to go for a drink to celebrate, then?’

‘I always like any excuse to celebrate.’ She was biting her lip. ‘Where will you take me?’

‘The Shelbourne. Our local. It’ll be quiet.’

I thought of the aggressive boot thrown after the bridal car, the marbles suddenly rattling in the hubs of the honeymoon car, the metal smeared with oil so that the thrown boxes of confetti would stick, the legs of the comic pyjamas hilariously sewn up. We would avoid all that. We had promised one another the simplest wedding.

‘We live in a lucky time,’ she said and raised her glass, her calm, grey, intelligent eyes shining. ‘We wouldn’t have been allowed to do it this way even a decade ago. Will you tell your father that we’re to be married?’

‘I don’t know. Probably not unless it comes up. And you?’

‘I’d better. As it is, Mother will probably be furious that it is not going to be a big splash.’

‘I’m so grateful for these months together, that we were able to drift into marriage without the drowning plunge. What will you do while I’m away?’

‘I’ll pine,’ she teased. ‘I might even try to decorate the flat out of simple desperation. There’s a play at the Abbey that I want to see. There are some good restaurants in the city if I get too depressed. And in the meantime, have a wonderful time with your father and poor Rose in the nineteenth century at the bloody hay.’

‘Oh, for the Lord’s sake,’ I said, and rose to leave. Outside she was still laughing so provocatively that I drew her towards me.

The next morning on the train home I heard a transistor far down the carriage promise a prolonged spell of good weather. Meadows were being mowed all along the line, and I saw men testing handfuls of hay in the breeze as they waited for the sun to burn the dew off the fallen swards. It was weather people prayed for at this time.

I walked the three miles from the station. Meadows were down all along the road, some already saved, in stacked bales. The scent of cut grass was everywhere. As I drew close to the stone house in its trees I could hardly wait to see if the Big Meadow was down beyond the row of beech trees. When I lived here I’d felt this same excitement as the train rattled across the bridges into the city or when I approached the first sight of the ocean. Now that I lived in a city on the sea the excitement had been gradually transferred home.

Before I reached the gate I could tell by the emptiness beyond the beeches that the Big Meadow had been cut. Rose and my father were in the house. They were waiting in high excitement.

‘Everything’s ready for you,’ Rose said as she shook my hand, and through the window I saw my old clothes outside in the sun draped across the back of a chair.

‘As soon as you get a bite you can jump into your old duds,’ my father said. ‘I knocked the Big Meadow yesterday. All’s ready for go.’

Rose had washed my old clothes before hanging them outside to air. When I changed into them they were still warm from the sun, and they had that lovely clean feel that worn clothes have after washing. Within an hour we were working the machines.

The machines had taken much of the uncertainty and slavery from haymaking, but there was still the anxiety of rain. Each cloud that
drifted into the blue above us we watched as apprehensively across the sky as if it were an enemy ship, and we seemed as tired at the end of every day as we were before we had the machines, eating late in silence, waking from listless watching of the television only when the weather forecast showed; and afterwards it was an effort to drag feet to our rooms where the bed lit with moonlight showed like heaven, and sleep was as instant as it was dreamless.

And it was into the stupor of such an evening that the gold watch fell. We were slumped in front of the television set. Rose had been working outside in the front garden, came in and put the tea kettle on the ring, and started to take folded sheets from the linen closet. Without warning, the gold watch spilled out on to the floor. She’d pulled it from the closet with one of the sheets. The pale face was upwards in the poor light. I bent to pick it up. The glass had not broken. ‘It’s lucky it no longer goes,’ Rose breathed.

‘Well, if it did you’d soon take good care of that.’ My father rose angrily from the rocking chair.

‘It just pulled out with the sheets,’ Rose said. ‘I was running into it everywhere round the house. I put it in with the sheets so that it’d be out of the way.’

‘I’m sure you had it well planned. Give us this day our daily crash. Tell me this: would you sleep at night if you didn’t manage to smash or break something during the day?’ He’d been frightened out of light sleep in the chair. He was intent on avenging his fright.

‘Why did the watch stop?’ I asked.

I turned the cold gold in my hand.
Elgin
was the one word on the white face. The delicate hands were of blue steel. All through my childhood it had shone.

‘Can there be two reasons why it stopped?’ His anger veered towards me now. ‘It stopped because it got broke.’

‘Why can’t it be fixed?’ I ignored the anger.

‘Poor Taylor in the town doesn’t take in watches any more,’ Rose answered. ‘And the last time it stopped we sent it to Sligo. Sligo even sent it to Dublin but it was sent back. A part that holds the balance wheel is broke. What they told us is that they’ve stopped making parts for those watches. They have to be specially
handmade. They said that the quality of the gold wasn’t high enough to justify that expense. That it was only gold plated. I don’t suppose it’ll ever go again. I put it in with the sheets to have it out of the way. I was running into it everywhere.’

‘Well, if it wasn’t fixed before, you must certainly have fixed it for good and for ever this time.’ My father would not let go.

His hand trembled on the arm of the rocking chair, the same hand that drew out the gold watch long ago as the first strokes of the Angelus came to us over the heather and pale wheaten sedge of Gloria Bog: ‘Twenty minutes late, no more than usual … One of these years Jimmy Lynch will startle himself and the whole countryside by ringing the Angelus at exactly twelve … Only in Ireland is there right time and wrong time. In other countries there is just time.’ We’d stand and stretch our backs, aching from scattering the turf, and wait for him to lift his straw hat.

Waiting with him under the yew, suitcases round our feet, for the bus that took us each year to the sea at Strandhill after the hay was in and the turf home; and to quiet us he’d take the watch out and let it lie in his open palm, where we’d follow the small second hand low down on the face endlessly circling until the bus came into sight at the top of Doherty’s Hill. How clearly everything sang now set free by the distance of the years, with what heaviness the actual scenes and days had weighed.