The Matchmaker of Kenmare (22 page)
Read The Matchmaker of Kenmare Online
Authors: Frank Delaney
Here comes the confession: I suffer from intense fantasies of violence. In my mind, I see the person who injured me, and I set upon them. I swing a chain, wield a knife, brandish a scimitar—anything that will hack bloody, rubbery chunks from their flesh. Down on their heads I rain stones, hammer blows, kicks. I rake them with daggers and spikes, I bite them. I gouge their eyes, I slash off their ears, I make them whimper. And I walk away not caring what damage I’ve done, because they’ve so harmed me.
The accuracy of how badly or unfairly they’ve treated me has nothing to do with the fantasy—I merely have to imagine that they might sneer at or injure me. You should know this about me, and you’re already mature enough to grasp that the mind goes to black thoughts as the tongue to a broken tooth.
What has this to do with events in London at the time of Miss Begley’s marriage? As I say, I tried and tried to put out of my head random images of their wedding night in—where else?—the Ritz.
Did they have breakfast in bed?
I’d become friendly with so many of the staff, especially those from Ireland, who had met me with Miss Begley. And now of course my mind’s eye could actually see, in naked reality, what Charles Miller was seeing all day and all night, for ever and ever, amen.
The rage began to kick in. Deep, terrible anger, with scenes in which I first imagined attacking him, and then, at worst, moving unspeakably to her. The fantasy seized me, until the pair of them lay weeping, curled and bloodied at my feet, and it took a long, long time to bring the fury under control. No sleep that night, no sleep at all.
Late on the morning of the second day of their marriage, when I had quit my hotel in anticipation of the night train to Liverpool, I walked out in the rain. Still roiling, I had a goal—I wanted to find them; in fact, I wanted to find them in their room.
Without effort, without asking directions, I found myself on Piccadilly, right across from the Ritz, looking up at the windows. During rain we felt safe in London because—or so we were told—the German bombers couldn’t find their targets through the overcast. A deep archway
sheltered me, an arcade; others came and went when the rain squalled harder.
In my hectic and edgy state, my arms hanging long, my eyes fixed on the gray building across the way, I felt something take my hand. I looked down and saw scarlet fingernails; I looked up and saw Claudia, wearing a rain hat that made her look like a trawlerman. She inclined her head toward the hotel and led me across the empty street.
As we walked to the door she dropped my hand and took off her amazing, transparent helmet. I followed her, striding to keep up. Nodding to the hotel staff as she passed, she marched me to a door that I’d never observed, and opened it for me to step into a corridor. Again she drove onward, to the foot of a staircase, and I followed those strong hips for three upward flights. Soon, we stood in a room. She closed the door behind us and shook herself like a dog coming out of a pond.
Ignoring me, and not saying a word, Claudia kicked off her shoes, shed her rain clothes and the jacket she wore underneath, arranged them around the room on hangers, then did likewise with my sodden coat and jacket. She dropped to her knees, undid the laces on my boots, and set them to dry by an elaborate gas fire that she’d turned on. Raindrops fell down my neck from my thick hair.
Claudia took my arms and wrapped them around her. Her arms around my neck, she rested her head on my shoulder, and we stood for long moments, never saying a word. The embrace told me that she had more flesh than she seemed to, with a soft body and a softer nature. I still couldn’t tell her age—later I learned that she was in her late forties.
When she stepped back, she said, “I hope you don’t mind.”
I said, “Why would I?”
“We’ve both lost somebody,” she said. “You’ve lost dear Kate, I saw the way you looked at her. And I’ve lost him. As I knew I would one day.”
Bewilderment had been with me so long that I sometimes saw it approaching and could compose myself to meet it.
“Is that how all this came together?” I asked. I could feel my rage flying away from me like a shamed, embarrassed thing.
“He and I—Ben, you have no idea how close we’ve been. My husband died at Dunkirk.”
“His girl back home—?” I began to ask, and she interrupted with a smile of forgiveness and said, “Sailors, soldiers—what’s the difference?”
I asked, “Were you very close?”
Claudia answered, “He loved rain because I did, and he hated the north wind because I did.”
She sent for food; we sat and talked; her kindness at that moment generated our lifelong friendship.
“And now they’re married,” I said. “And they’re here somewhere, along these corridors, in one of these rooms, behind one of these doors.”
“Not for the first time,” said Claudia.
I know that I looked puzzled and said, “What are you saying? That they—?”
“Don’t, Ben,” she interrupted. “Just tell me you’ll be my friend.”
We sat in the chairs, saying nothing.
“This war,” she said after a while. “How are we to have normal lives again?”
The angry conversation on the train with Miss Begley had distressed me. I wished that I’d behaved better. With Claudia I found a chance to make amends.
“You’ll have a very good life,” I said. I must have been sudden in my words, because she started.
“Oh, do you think so?”
From somewhere inside me, deep in there, past all the forests of moping self-absorption, I found a clearing, a glimmer of tenderness.
“You’re a remarkable woman.”
She flinched; I thought it was alarm, but it was surprise.
“Nobody has ever said that to me,” she said.
“You’re warm. You’re kind. And you’re very clever.”
These words of praise—whence did they spring?
“Thank you, Ben,” she said. “But you have to stop now or I’ll weep.”
“Maybe you should,” I said. “Maybe you need to.”
“I’ve now lost twice,” she said. “My husband. And—this. But I knew I was losing him while you and she were staying here.”
“Was it that early?” I asked.
“Hotels are like villages,” Claudia said. “Gossip, gossip, gossip. Those last few weeks that you both were staying here, they were very difficult for me.”
She clasped her hands in front of her and gazed into the limited
mauve flame of the fire. And I recollected how Miss Begley had moved to a room that wasn’t next door to mine.
I don’t know how long we sat there in silence. An hour, maybe. Claudia nodded off in the chair, and in her sleep I could see the exhaustion in her face. I was the one to rise and gather my drying clothes. She heard me and apologized.
“Oh, dear, I’m not a very good hostess.”
“What are friends for?” I said—and I sounded like Mrs. Charles Miller, though I never would and never could think of her under that name.
On the journey back to Ireland, Kate and I scarcely conversed. In the train compartment, as we left London, she set out to sleep. I draped my omnipresent black coat over her knees and made her as comfortable as I could.
As she nodded off, I said to her, “I want to apologize to you for my hard words when we were coming to London.”
She looked at me in a drowsy and odd way, as though I sounded different. Which I did; I put a finger to my lips and said, “Shhh. You must rest.” And she slept until we reached Liverpool, and I watched over her all the way as though she were my wife or child.
You can see, can’t you, that this rising simplicity toward her was quite sudden in me? I can track when it happened. During the time with Claudia, I moved from anger to serenity, and then, during the train journey with Miss Begley, I understood something. I realized that I had been reflecting for days on what I consider the most important conversation I ever had with James Clare.
Let me tell you about it now, and you’ll see how central this is to me and my spirit, and to the man I would try to become.
You know, I think, how old I am, and you know that I’m trying to tell this story while I maintain the strength and energy. I won’t preempt anything
by saying, from hindsight, that I was at that moment embarking on a crusade to change myself, to change my inner life; I would rather that you perceive it from my account of my own actions, my own life as I lived it. Did I succeed in becoming a good man? It’s not for me to judge.
Given how many such talks I had with James, and how deep and wise they were, to call any one of them “the most important” is saying something. This teaching took the form of a story that he had collected. In a lovely irony, the story had always existed near me—it originated a few miles downriver from my home, and here’s James’s version, reproduced from the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission.
There was a man in Knockgraffon who had a hump. His name was Louis, and he was known locally as “Sour” Louis, because he was very bad-tempered—maybe on account of the hump. Now if you know Knockgraffon, you’ll know that there’s a moat there, a big, domed hill made of earth. That was built centuries and centuries ago by the Little People, the fairy folk, the followers of the goddess Dana, who were consigned to live underground when they lost the surface of Ireland to the Spanish invaders, in the clear, crystal years ten million days before Christ was born
.
Sour Louis couldn’t make a dog wag his tail, that’s how grim he was, and the look on his face made people think he drank vinegar for his breakfast. But the world turns, and we turn with it, and late one summer night, when nobody could see him, Sour Louis dawdled along the road, out for a stroll under the eye of a warm and friendly moon
.
As he passed by the Moat of Knockgraffon, he heard music. Not loud music, nor with many instruments—if indeed there were any. As it happens, what he heard was what we call mouth music, or puss music, the lilting and chanting of tunes that people do when they have no instruments, yet wish to dance
.
Sour Louis sat down on the grassy mound, listened hard, and made out the words. Deep inside the moat and underneath it, many, many little voices were singing in a very sweet way, “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday.”
People didn’t know it, but Sour Louis had a very fine singing voice,
and he had an instinct for melody, and to his ear the tune seemed unfinished. So, when the singers next came to the end of a line, he sang in his fine baritone voice, “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday—Wednesday.” His musical instinct made the word and the note fit perfectly
.
Silence fell. Then Sour Louis heard a big
whoosh!
of air, and a brilliant light fell from the sky. It was the moon herself, perched on the Moat of Knockgraffon, and as Sour Louis sat there, silhouetted against her milk-and-silver light, you could see the shape of his poor hump on his back like a young elephant
.
Then he looked down, because he felt something tugging at his boot, and there on the ground, all around him, dancing and swaying, he saw thousands and thousands of the Little People, and they were now singing, “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday—Wednesday.” Sour Louis smiled—it was a smile broader than he had ever smiled before, and as he did, the Little People ended their singing and began to applaud him
.
“Thank you,” they cried, “thank you for making our song lovelier.”
Next, they formed up in orderly lines and began to march into the Moat of Knockgraffon, whose grassy mound opened wide in a pair of huge doors to meet them. They kept looking back over their shoulders and beckoning to Sour Louis to follow them. He was a little hesitant—what man wants to go under the ground with a lot of people he’s never met before, and who, in part anyway, don’t have that good a reputation?
The moon decided to go back up to the sky, and she placed a moonbeam in Sour Louis’s hand as a flashlight. She gave him a big smile, and he felt that she was telling him to follow the little silver, dancing people
.
Such a welcome they gave him down there—it was wonderful. They fed him and feasted him, they drank toasts to him, they thanked him for the brilliant embellishment to their song, and said they would use it forever more. Then, in gratitude, sixteen men and sixteen women climbed on Sour Louis’s shoulders and by magic tricks they removed his hump. They lifted it off, took it over to a great stone shelf, sat it there like a monument, and lit candles around it. In the meantime
,
ten of the most beautiful of the Little Women began to dress Sour Louis, and then one of the most handsome men wheeled out a tall looking-glass so that Louis could see himself
.
Now he knew that he must be dreaming—because the dapper and handsome fellow in the mirror had Louis’s face all right, but this didn’t look anything like the Sour Louis whose angry jowls he shaved every bitter morning of his life. He thanked them profusely, they began again to dance and sing and sway in front of him, and suddenly they evaporated. Louis found himself out in the open air once more, sitting on the greensward of the Moat of Knockgraffon on a summer night
.
He pinched himself, to make sure he was real. Sure enough, the pinch hurt, and yes, there was the moon up in the sky, and she seemed to be sailing along minding her own business. He stood up—and that’s when he saw the difference. The clothes he was wearing were beautiful, not at all the shabby old sleaze that had covered him when he’d set out on his walk. And something more remarkable—he was upright, he had a broad chest, he was strong and fit. The hump was gone
.
Naturally enough, when he got home, people asked questions, and Louis—no longer did they call him Sour Louis because he now smiled all the time—felt obliged to tell them the tale of the Moat of Knockgraffon. He knew that the Little People wouldn’t mind
.
Louis’s story ran throughout the land like the fire on the stubble of an autumn wheat field. They marveled here, they wondered there—people up and down the country talked of little else for weeks and weeks because, you see, they’d always wanted to believe that the Little People could do good
.
One day, to Louis’s door came a lady on a pony, not a very salubrious mount either—the hooves wanted for some care. She said to Louis, “Are you the man who had the hump?” and he said he was
.
After he had told her the full story, to which she listened like a child to a talking dog, she turned the pony around without a word and rode back the way she’d come
.
Now, this woman was a widow, her name was Mrs. Madden, and she had a son, Jack, who had a hump, and he was sourer than Sour Louis had ever been. Jack Madden slouched around the house all day, moaning and cribbing, refusing to work—he wouldn’t wash his own
cup and saucer, he’d say his hump was hurting him. So Jack Madden’s mother told him to get up on the pony, ride over to the Moat of Knockgraffon, and join in any song he heard
.
With as many complaints as a wet hen, Jack Madden rode to Knockgraffon. He climbed down off the old pony and went to sit, as his mother had bidden him, on the grassy slope of the moat. Within moments, he heard the little silver song coming up out of the ground like a million tinkling bells. “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday—Wednesday.”
Now, Jack Madden had no singing voice whatsoever—he sounded like a crow with croup. But he knew, or thought he did, what the song now needed, and also he was impatient with the whole scheme—he just wanted his hump taken away. So instead of being sensitive to the needs of the little singers, he stood there and burst out in his raucous voice, “Ah, to hell with it—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.”
Next thing, he too heard a great
whoosh!
of sound, and he too was surrounded by a white light, but it shone in his eyes and half-blinded him, and it was cold when it silhouetted him, and it didn’t look like a halo. The moon was angry, and when the moon is angry she lets you feel her ice
.
Hundreds of invisible hands then dragged him to the ground, pinned him facedown, and he felt something heavy and strange being loaded onto his back. Far from easing his burden, they gave him Sour Louis’s old hump, and as they left him lying there, they sang at him, “Jack Madden, Jack Madden, you ugly big lump; If you ruin your music, then you’ll have a hump. But Jack Madden, Jack Madden, you ugly big lump; Spoil the music that we have, we’ll double your hump.”
