The Private Wound (6 page)

“Why are they bringing it this way?”

“There's no road from the cottage, I suppose.”

Harry and I were both whispering.

“But the river. Are they going to swim across it?”

No. There must have been a ford at that point; for the cortège splashed across and set off over the strand, plodding through the sand at a purposeful, short-stepped pace. Not a word had been spoken. I could not even hear the men's footsteps. The whole thing was incredibly bizarre: they might have been a troop of ghosts.

“The Irish love funerals,” whispered Harry, still clinging to my arm.

The cortège made a detour round a shallow, saucer-shaped depression in the sand, a hundred yards away from us. It receded into the distance, still at that plodding quick-step, splashed over the river where we had crossed it
on stepping-stones, and stood around the hearse with heads bowed while the coffin was slid into it. Behind us the waves sounded louder, stealthily encroaching upon the strand.

“D'you think Father Bresnihan saw us?” I asked, thinking of our linked arms and her reputation.

“Don't be so wet.”

The hearse bumped on to the stony track. The mourners formed up behind it, and the cortège moved off up the hill. My eyes followed the black-clothed figures till they disappeared round a last bend. The afternoon sun was declining: the rugged stone walls up the hillside were touched with gold.

“Are you scared of the Father?”

“No. But—”

“He's only a man. Like the rest of you.”

“Aren't you a Catholic, Harry?”

“No. Our children would have to be, if—”

“We'd better be going, hadn't we?”

“If you want to drive for miles behind them. They'll spread out, right across the road. They don't like you to overtake a funeral cortège in Ireland. Disrespectful to the dead.”

We were sauntering across the strand. The satchel swung from her hand, and a rising wind blew Harry's dark hair over her face: the sunlight fetched glints of red from it. Her right hand as in mine.

We skirted the shallow depression, and found ourselves on a dune of firmer sand, with sparse clumps of wiry grass dotted about on it, and a little cache of bones where a sheep had lain down and died. Out at the sea's edge a flock of terns flashed and gyrated, like a mobile gone mad. There was a screaming of gulls.

Harry put her arms round my neck, sank to the ground with a fluent movement, as if she was a wave-nymph drawing me down. How well I would get to know that liquid,
yielding, compelling movement of hers! It was so utterly different from her rather gauche, graceless walk. I had no sensation of falling to the ground: it was like being lowered on a cloud.

Her saffron-coloured skirt had ridden up high. She was wearing nothing beneath it.

“I love you,” she said, her eyes closed.

“Not here.”

“Why not?”

I had a momentary revulsion, knowing now she had come out here to seduce me.

“The bay's a fine and private place, but none I think should there embrace,” I muttered in her ear.

“Oh lord! Poetry!” Her body stirred under mine. “Don't you want me?”

“Of course I want you.”

“Well then … oh, you are a cold fish.”

“I want you naked.”

“Take off my clothes then.”

“People could see us.”

“What people? You just said it's a fine and private place.”

There were diamonds again on her closed lashes. I kissed them away, but new ones started.

“You don't love me.”

“I do.”

“Say it.”

“Darling Harriet, I love you.” My voice was so shaky I could barely control it. I felt like crying myself.

She opened her eyes, smiling into mine, a quirk at one corner of her red mouth. I rolled off her and put my head on her breast. It felt burning hot, like a fever patient's. There was a smell of sweat, delicious to me. Everything about her was delicious. A hand ruffled my hair, then tugged at it viciously.

“I believe you're a tease, Boo.”

“I'm not. It's just that—”

“I ought to be angry with you, rejecting my advances. You're the first man—” she broke off.

“—who's rejected them? How many have you—?”

“Now he's jealous!” she crowed. “Dozens and dozens.”

“In
Ireland
?”

“Aren't you an old sober-sides! Now
I'm
teasing you.”

Oh that ludicrous lovers' badinage! It seemed to me then like a dialogue of angels. Harriet sat up, her hair cascading over my face.

“Tell me some more poetry. Go on with the one about the bay.”

“Well, it's really ‘The grave's a fine and private place'.”

“What a morbid idea! Did you make it up?”

“No. A man called Marvell.”

“I don't like your Mr. Marvell then. Is that why you wouldn't make love to me? The funeral we saw?”

“I don't think so. But it did give me a turn.”

“You only live once. A short life and a merry one—that's what I say.”

“‘Short'?”

“I don't want to be a smelly old woman on two sticks.”

“Darling Harriet! You are sweet.”

She gazed at me boldly. “What's your Phyllis going to say about all this?”

“I daren't think. Sufficient unto the day.”

Harriet jumped to her feet. “Come on. Time to be off.”

But, three miles short of Charlottestown, we caught up with the funeral procession, still swinging along at that jaunty, indefatigable pace, three other cars now following it respectfully.

When finally we reached the Lissawn gates, Harry leant across to me, gave me a last kiss, and scrubbed at my face
with a handkerchief. Then she made up her mouth, and got out.

“Shall I see you soon?” I asked.

“If you're good.”

She walked up the drive, not looking back. I turned the car and went back to the cottage, leaving it on a little grassed patch at the side of the road, which served me as a lay-by. I entered the cottage, my head so full of Harriet that I did not notice for several minutes the disorder of my belongings. Someone had gone systematically through my papers, my books, the drawers upstairs and down, but had not taken the least trouble to conceal his search. It could hardly be Brigid, then. Some passing tinker? But nothing had been stolen. It was really very odd indeed; the local curiosity carried beyond all reasonable bounds. I automatically reached for the telephone to call the police, before I remembered that I didn't have one. What did it matter anyway? I sat down and gazed into the turf fire, day-dreaming about Harriet.

I had started keeping a diary a few days before this episode. Fortunately, the unknown person who had ransacked the cottage could have found nothing in the diary to betray the situation between Harry and myself, and he certainly would not in the future. Because I had to omit any intimate references to her, I have nothing to tell me when or where it was that we first made love.

How strange it is, that I cannot recall this—the occasion when my physical enthralment began. Well, I suppose it began on the day of our picnic. But which of all the nights or days in a summer so distantly, so piercingly remembered now, was the first to find us naked together? It was all a blur, shot through with sudden gleams, mystery and danger and recklessness pressing upon its edges.

The next morning I walked across to Lissawn House. Flurry was leaning over the half-door of the stable, talking to Seamus within. I told him how my cottage had been searched.

“Did ye hear that, Seamus?”

“I did.”

“Could it have been tinkers?”

“There was no tinker within twenty miles of here yesterday,” came Seamus's voice.

“Besides, nothing was stolen,” I said.

“What ails you, then? People have a powerful curiosity hereabouts.”

“So I've noticed. I'm not worried. Just interested.”

Seamus came to the door, brush and currycomb in hand. “It could never be Brigid,” he said, looking hard at me.

“I didn't suppose for a moment it was. I asked her this morning if she came back to the cottage after cleaning up yesterday. She didn't. I believe her.”

“You should so. She's an honest girl,” said Flurry.

Seamus chewed on the straw in his mouth. “Did anyone else know you'd be out on a picnic with Mrs. Leeson?”

“No. Well, I suppose anyone who saw us driving through Charlottestown might have guessed I'd be away for a bit.”

“D'you want me to ring the Garda?”

“No, Flurry, of course not.”

“They might have been after searching the cottage themselves,” suggested Seamus.

“Why on earth should they? Anyway, they wouldn't do it in such an amateurish way.”

“Wouldn't they indeed! Clancy's a stuffed cod.” Flurry went into a rambling story about how Garda Clancy had conducted a search for one of the hidden I.R.A. arms dumps.

“Well,” I said sourly, “there's no arms dump in my cottage.”

“Sure I know there isn't, Dominic. But someone might have tipped off the Garda. Some informer with a bee in his bonnet. There's a desperate lot of jokers in these parts.”

“I wish they'd keep their melodrama to themselves then. I'll tell you the
kind
of person I think did it—if it wasn't just idle curiosity.”

Flurry and Seamus looked at me steadily.

“Someone who wouldn't give a damn whether I discovered a search had been made or not. Otherwise, he'd have taken more trouble to tidy up after him. Someone very sure of himself. And he wanted to find out more about me: he wouldn't look through my
papers
for machine-guns. Any candidates?”

I caught an uneasy glance between Flurry and Seamus.

“Aren't you the great detective now?” said the former, quite amiably.

“I must be getting on with my work,” said Seamus.

And that was that.

Flurry took my arm and walked me into the house. Harry was in the kitchen, sipping tea and reading one of her deplorable magazines. She waggled her hand at me, not even looking up. Did yesterday happen, or had I dreamt it? Flurry told her, at tedious length and with considerable embroidery, about how “Dominic had his cottage broken into by a horde of ruffians while you and he were canoodling on the strand.”

For a moment my blood ran cold: then I realised it was just Flurry's typical badinage. I think that was the first moment when a covert excitement blended with my depreciating attitude towards him—the excitement of the intriguer.

Harry manifested no great interest. “You'd better keep your door locked,” was all she said.

“Oh, I've nothing worth taking.”

At that, she gave me a long look, her lip curling up at one corner. A shameless look. Surely even Flurry would notice it? But he was pottering about the kitchen, gazing in a lacklustre way at the tins on a shelf.

“Haven't you anything to do, you old fool?” asked his wife.

“Will you listen, the way she talks to me?” Flurry's tone was affectionate. “Sitting on her fanny there like the Queen of Sheba!”

I was acutely embarrassed. The telephone rang and Flurry shambled out to it. Harriet was out of her chair, lacing her arms round my neck. I could not shake her off.

“Not here. For God's sake!” I muttered.

She pouted. “Hell's bells and buckets of blood! Don't you ever say anything but ‘not here'?”

She released me and pinched my bottom with a violence that made me yelp. I seized her hand and bent it back till
she was kneeling in front of me. Bucolic horse-play. If my intellectual friends in London had seen it!

Flurry's steps were returning along the passage. Harry and I were sitting decorously when he entered.

“That was Father Bresnihan. He asked will you have supper with him to-morrow. I said you would. You're not doing anything else, are you?”

The Father's housekeeper showed me into the study. “Make yourself at home, Mr. Eyre. Father Bresnihan'll be with you in a minute.”

A prie-dieu, a crucifix. Two walls lined with books, a third with filing cabinets. A shabby sofa and two armchairs facing the turf fire. A table in the middle, stacks of papers neatly arranged upon it. The room was more like an office than a study. In spite of the fire, I felt cold in it. I had only a minute to glance at the books—pastoral theology, philosophy, several histories of Ireland, 19th century novels—when the Father came in, with a tray holding a sherry decanter and two glasses. He poured out for me, gave the fire a kick, lit a cigarette (he smoked incessantly all the evening), inquired how I was getting on in the cottage.

“I hope Kathleen'll have something nice for us. I'd thought of taking you out to the Colooney. They say in Dublin you can always tell a good hotel by the number of priests you'll find eating there.” His worried, ascetic face broke into a smile. “I seldom eat at the Colooney.”

“You have delicious sherry.”

“Kevin Leeson gets it for me. A professor at Maynooth introduced me to it, years ago.”

“Kevin seems a universal provider. He's been very kind to me about the cottage.”

“I'm glad to hear that. And you find you can work well there?”

“Yes, indeed.”

“I envy you, being able to concentrate upon the one thing.” He waved an arm at the filing cabinet. “A parish priest has to be an educator, a business man, a charity organiser and the dear knows what else, besides a spiritual director. Just now I'm trying to raise funds for a new school. It's a shocking poor part of the country, out here.”

“But surely the Government—”

“The Minister of Education is a good Catholic. But we do not look upon schools and teaching as a purely secular matter. You think that a very reactionary point of view, don't you now?”