The Pig Comes to Dinner (19 page)

“It hasn't stopped.” For this, his lordship had adopted a clipped tone common to his kind.

What could Kitty do but intensify her agreeable smile? “Then let's say it's abated.”

“One could hardly be wetter that one is now, I suppose.”

Kitty approved of his self-referral in the third person, an obvious abjection when his preference no doubt would have been the use of the royal we. To further demonstrate his inbred humility, he had lengthened his neck and thrust out his bit of a chin, locking his jaw and sending forth his words through teeth immobilized by abnegation. If Kitty's smile had extended further, her face would have broken. “If one gets wet, one gets dry,” she said, hoping his lordship remembered, as did she, that this was the exact same advice she'd dispensed at the close of his previous visit.

Now, as then, his Lordship summoned the stoical resignation adopted by his ancestors when first confronted by a wisdom to which they were unaccustomed. “Still no umbrella, I assume.”

“I keep forgetting.” Kitty gave her head a slight bow.

“It's not for myself I'm concerned. It's for Mr. Skiddings, who's subject to pneumonia.”

The architect jerked his eyes open wider in surprise at this revelation.

“You have none in the car?” Kitty asked.

“Would we not have availed ourselves of it to come here in the first place?”

“Forgive me. I'm not very bright.”

When his lordship offered no contradiction, Kitty lifted her head, the better to display the still beaming smile to which her face was now becoming accustomed. No doubt Lord Shaftoe took it for the grimace of an idiot, and Kitty, so pleased with this interpretation, now smiled with genuine happiness and deep-seated pleasure. “We'll leave this way.” Kitty gestured toward the entrance to the great hall. “But mind your step. There are cows in residence.” She stepped aside and let the two gentlemen enter first, his lordship preceding the architect.

“There's a pig standing in my way, staring at me.” Lord Shaftoe paused, then, with offended astonishment, added, “Oh, and now it's—Well, really!”

Looking past his lordship, Kitty saw the pig planted in the man's path, not only staring up at him, but sending out behind, as is the sow's way, an arc of golden piss that reached, with perfect aim, the center of a steaming cow flop a few feet away.

“Faugh a Ballagh! Faugh a Ballagh!”
Kitty clapped her hands in the manner of her niece-in-law, Lolly. The pig lowered its snout and swung its pink head to the side, retreated to a corner of the hall, and lay down next to a cow that had been watching the display with all the interest of a lump of lard.

Mr. Skiddings had come to his lordship's side. Kitty waited for them to move on, but George Noel Gordon Lord Shaftoe had begun to gesture with a waving arm. “All this must be tended to. Once it's thoroughly scoured, an admirable room with definite possibilities. The crudities I'm sure can be overcome. And I want fireplaces, at both ends of the hall, and carvings, perhaps with figures emerging from the marble.”

It was the word
marble
that roused Kitty from her smiling complacence. Marble? In a castle? Here she was surrounded above and below by stones once hurtled and sent crashing down from the mountain peaks, stubborn reminders that even to grinding glacial ice it had been possible to say, “No farther; here I stay”—a contest hard won against forces elemental in their indifference and implacable in their determination. Never would these stones be civilized. To put them into the company of decadent marble would be an abomination to which her ancestral blood could never give consent. To claim that they were insufficient in themselves was a heresy to which she could never subscribe.

Lord Shaftoe turned to his architect. “I must take you to East Anglia to show you what I have in mind. Can you believe what we see here?” He leaned closer to Mr. Skiddings and lowered his tone. “Fascinating to find out that what's been said of these people is actually true. You have only to look around. I do believe Heaven has sent me—may I say,
us
?—just in time. A moment later and all could be lost, eh, Skiddings?”

So great a pitch had been reached by Kitty's wrath that only complete calm could rescue her from spontaneous combustion. To impose it, she had no need. Through natural selection, a strain had developed within her species that would, when threatened with self-destruction through the rise of a righteous wrath, trigger an interior mechanism so that, for the moment at least, a preternatural serenity was substituted for the furies that were already shredding her mind and tearing at her soul. Composed now, she dismissed her smile and decided to answer his lordship's inanities with simple silence and uncaring patience. She would hurry the departures no longer. She would stand where she stood and wait, not ignoring further outrages but setting them aside for future reference, when a conniving rationality could devise a vengeance best suited to the offenses being thrust like poisoned darts at her innocent self. Calm pervaded; patience prevailed.

George Noel Gordon Lord Shaftoe turned his attention to his hostess. “You'll be happy to hear that I intend to bring a celebratory mood to the neighborhood. I am already making plans for entertainments and revels that will no doubt bring considerable joy to the castle, inspiring similar festivities in the countryside around.”

“Dances? Parties? And everyone invited?”

“Oh, no. You misunderstand. I'll entertain, bringing to the castle some of those illustrious personages absent too long from the district. It's my belief that my gatherings will inspire a general mood of rejoicing, emanating as it will from no less a prominence than the castle itself. I consider it my responsibility to set a tone, as it were. And the tone I shall set, much to the advantage of the farmers and fisherfolk, and of the cottagers as well, will inspire others to respond with revels of their own devising and consistent with their own customs. I'm sure you see the logic in that.”

Kitty's calm stood fast, her patience intact.

“Another benefit,” his lordship added, “is the employment I'll bring. One can hardly live on the scale I expect to achieve without a full staff and, at times, temporary but sufficiently rewarded help. The attendant rise in the common prosperity will be appreciable, I'm sure.”

Kitty was tempted to inform his Lordship that her country was no longer a prime incubator for a servant class. The common prosperity had arrived, with no help from Lord Shaftoe. The tide had been reversed. Girls from America were recruited for the summer tourist season as staff members in hotels and restaurants throughout the land. Young men from across the seas were welcomed as waiters and busboys. Perhaps Lord Shaftoe could scour the student bodies of American colleges for his menials, but any hope of finding them among the “locals” was destined for disappointment. Possessed as Kitty was by a serenity that had quieted her congenital contentiousness, she felt no need to discommode his Lordship with realities he would encounter soon enough.

As a matter of fact, serenity or no serenity, it was impossible for her not to enjoy her complicity in the man's delusions. Let him find out the hard way. Glee was threatening to overcome her calm, but tranquility restored and renewed itself when she heard Mr. Skiddings say, “Are we expected in two hours' time to dine with her ladyship in Cork?”

“Ah, her ladyship. Yes. And we must tell her of our own adventure. She will be highly amused, I'm sure.”

Relieved as Kitty was by this prompting toward the door, it surprised her by its reference to her ladyship. George Noel Gordon was, she knew, unattached as of the moment. He had neither wife nor family, although he must now, as keeper of a castle, require an heir. Which would require a wife. It occurred to Kitty that the ladyship referred to was a candidate for the honor. It further occurred to Kitty that the poor woman was not allowed to see her future home until the necessary desecrations had been effected.

Navigating among the cowpies, skirting both bovine and porcine piss, the two men made for the door with what alacrity their breeding allowed. “You do see possibilities, Mr. Skiddings?”

“Many, I assure you.”

“Pity you didn't see the tower. It's cluttered at the moment, as which space is not, but you'll have opportunities undreamed of by any imagining.”

“I can readily see them now.”

“And, of course, you'll have my generous assistance at every turn.”

“I am much obliged to your lordship.”

“I admit to a partiality for comfort.”

Without waiting for the architect to make the demanded response, his lordship turned to Kitty and said, his voice and his face alive with pleased expectation, “I remember now: ‘House of Splendid Isolation.' ”

“Sorry,” Kitty said. “Edna O'Brien. Again.”

“Fancy that. Oh, well.” And with that he passed through the door, saying to his accomplice, “I expect to make a suitable offer for the scullery. I wonder who actually did it.”

With no words, no gesture of farewell or thanks, the two men continued on, unmindful of the drizzle that was replenishing whatever wet might have dried in their clothing during their time in the castle. Kitty watched them go, her patience and her calm still surviving well beyond the reach of rudeness and other known attributes of aristocracy. His lordship continued to talk; Mr. Skiddings continued to listen, a nod of the head his only contribution to that most civilized of human attainments, conversation.

The rain had relieved itself of the greater part of its generosity, and Kitty could now return the cows and the pig to the well-washed air. When she turned around to coax the cows outside, she stopped on the threshold, then stepped backward, away, outside, into the drizzle and the rising mist. She stared into the great hall, at the milling cows, lowing and moving restlessly on the flagstones, tails swishing, their udders swaying with ponderous dignity beneath them. With determined effort, she forced herself to raise her eyes and look upward, to see again what she had already seen. There, hanging from the iron ring of the candled chandelier, were the young and beautfil bodies of Brid and Taddy, she in her simple brown dress of coarse wool, he wearing the brown tunic cinctured at the waist, the legs of his brown pants reaching to midcalf. Their muddied feet, as sweet as anything Kitty would ever see, bent downward, the toes pointing toward the darkening corners of the hall. There were the raw ropes burning into their slender necks, their eyes bulging in horror at what had been their fate, the swollen tongues strung sideways from their surprised mouths, tongues that would never speak again to tell their tale or speak their woes. Slowly they turned, surveying the hall for one last time, unmindful of the cows and the indifferent pig who went about their shitting and pissing, uncaring that so much splendor had been removed from the face of the earth.

They were, Kitty knew, but shades. Still, they could not be left dangling there, disfigured, mute, blind, their crusted feet brushing against the head of one cow, the ears of another. She wanted to plead that they would vanish, that they would retreat to shadowed corners of the castle rooms or turn to the harp and the loom in the tower above. She refused to make her plea. She would stand there, the soft rain falling, the mist rising from the earth. She would let her eyes see nothing but these two ghosts. She would keep vigil until they dissolved into nothingness and went from her sight, free of the noose and free to wander again the castle, the pastures, the hills, the stone-pocked fields. If their hanging were to last her lifetime, she would not leave the spot where she was standing now. She would not abandon them to their horror and their final fears. She would be faithful to the last.

The rain, still soft, began to cloud her eyes and the mist to seep into the great hall through the opened door. Kitty made no move. She would let happen what would happen. Softer fell the rain, blurring further her sight. Still she saw the forms, but through the growing mist. She knew whose presence had hanged them there. That they would be condemned to this horror ever again could never be allowed. Peace must come at last. They must be released and set free to join themselves. What must be done would be done. To this she swore, and it would be accomplished, or she was not who she was.

At this, the mists separated, the rain lightened. Brid and Taddy were gone; they were nowhere to be seen. Kitty looked at the iron circle, then began slapping the rumps of the cows. “Move,” she said. “Come on. Yes, you, move. Everybody out. Move.”

10

I
n their first days and weeks in the castle Kitty and Kieran were not particularly well matched when it came to Ping-Pong. Neither was practiced in restraint, and Kieran simply had the harder slam, which Kitty was unable to return, the ball's velocity exceeding that of a bullet and its apogee on her side of the net well beyond her reach. Kieran made no effort to conceal his jubilation when the ball smashed against the far wall behind his wife's head.

Kitty minded this not at all. His strength was a source of pride at all other times, and it would be ungracious to single out these moments of humiliation as a goad to resentment. Nor did she resort to the usual antidote prescribed for losers: it's only a game. To play a game (in her view), one played to win. Defeat had nothing to recommend it, and the search for solace would be even more humiliating than the loss already experienced.

Also, she was not a good sport. Her competitive sense was seldom inactive. Had she the strength of the man she loved she wouldn't have hesitated to crack the Ping-Pong ball as if it were nothing more than the shell of a newly laid egg. Still, in seeming contradiction to her nature, she accepted Kieran's accumulation of points, his triumphs at her expense, the undeniable advantage of his good right arm. And while she was sustaining her equilibrium she was also keeping her own counsel.