The Shelter of Neighbours (22 page)

At the top of the hill, they turned and walked back in the direction of their own town, the direction from which they had just come. They turned off the road and down a turf track. Within seconds, the trail of cars vanished, and they were in a wilderness. Nothing but the rough heather, the clumps of bracken, sheep bleating all around them.

They lay in the heather and kissed and pressed their bodies together. ‘With my body I thee worship,' Polly said to him, tracing the line of his profile with her finger. Where had she heard those lines? ‘They are in the wedding service,' she said, because she had read this in a novel.

‘Are they? I never heard them,' he said. He had not been to many weddings and neither had she, and it was years later that she had discovered he was right, nobody said that, not in Catholic weddings. It was the English service, the Church of England, and when Polly realised that if you married in Ireland, which she never did, you did not mention anyone's body, she felt acutely let down, and bitter, and thought it was typical. How could she have imagined her mother uttering such a line? In Irish? Or in English or Latin? In the Catholic Church, as it happened, all you had to say at a wedding was ‘I do'. The priest said everything else, speaking on your behalf.

She loved his body. The dark brown hair, thick and spiky – spiky with salt. The salty taste of his brown skin. His deep grey eyes, which reminded her of the sea as well, of the stillness, as she imagined it, the calm of the fish, although when Paddy encountered fish they were anything but calm. She liked the dark hairs sprouting on his arms, thick like a bear's, and later she found those hairs on his legs and elsewhere. She loved his wide, generous mouth. It seemed she could not tire of exploring this body, even though it was one body, a tiny thing on the mountainside. It was a world, it was a continent, as John Donne said, in some poems she had found in the library. ‘You are a continent,' she said, again tracing the line of his profile. Hill, rock, river. ‘You are a map of the world.' He liked that better than the line from the wedding service.

They talked endlessly about themselves. She told him about her family, covering up the worst aspects but letting him understand that they would find him surprising when they finally had to meet him. He understood that, he was used to being disapproved of, especially by schoolteachers and people of that kind. The priest. His father was a native, a speaker of the language, but his mother was from a suburb of Dublin, not a very posh one, and that was the trouble. Not only did she speak English, she spoke it with a working-class Dublin accent. Paddy had a touch of this himself. She went to bingo religiously, and she went to the pub on Sundays with her husband, something that shocked even Polly. Her mother would have preferred to die, she was quite sure of that, than enter a public house.

‘What does she look like? Your mother?'

He had difficulty describing her. ‘Her name is Muriel. She has black hair.'

‘Short or long?'

‘Kind of shoulder length. And she's about five five. Thin.'

‘What sort of clothes does she wear?'

Paddy laughed: ‘What is this? Is my mother wanted for some crime? Not speaking Irish?'

‘No, sorry.' Polly kissed him and caressed his hair.

He said, in her arms, ‘I don't know what sort of clothes she wears. Normal women's clothes. Jeans and jumpers mostly. She has shorts, actually, for this weather.'

Shorts. Polly imagined a short, fat woman with dyed jet-black hair, red lips, white legs bulging from red shorts. She imagined her with a cigarette dangling from her lips and with gold earrings, a sort of gypsy. She did not know where this picture came from.

The next time Polly comes, which is just the next day, she does not bother ringing the doorbell, but just walks into the kitchen, not making much noise. She wants to have a good look today before she lets her mother know she is here. She explores the parlour, goes back and has a look at the bedrooms. It is all like the kitchen, plain, 1970s style, nothing cute or old or cute and new, like the house Polly is staying in. It seems like her parents gave up on interior decorating, on their aim to be the best in the valley, a long, long time ago. A big photo of Polly is on the piano in the sitting room. Polly when she was twelve and making her Confirmation, in a pink tweed suit and a white straw-boater.

When she slips into the kitchen, her mother is in her chair in front of the television, talking. There is nobody else there, just herself, but she is engaged in a long monologue. Polly stands just inside the door and listens. It takes her a while to get accustomed to the flow of words, which seem to pour out of her mother's voice in a stream, not monotonous but unbroken, fluent as a river.

This is what she does all day.

She tells stories.

Today it is a story about a boy and a girl. The boy is called William, but the girl does not seem to have had a name, oddly enough.

She was rich and beautiful, however, a landlord's daughter. Lots of rich young men came courting her but she wouldn't have any of them. And one day a poor farmer's son came and wasn't he the one she fancied? She'd have nobody but him. Well now, her father was none too pleased about this turn of events, as you can well imagine, and what did he do but send his daughter away, away to her uncle's house, so that she would have no more to do with the poor young man.

She went, and was far from happy with her fate. And while she was there, the poor young man, William, pined away and died. But she heard nothing, nobody bothered to let her know. And she stayed on at her uncle's for months. A year went by. And a marriage was arranged for her with another young man, more suitable than William. And she was going to bed one night a few days before the wedding was to take place when a knock came at her window. And it was him, it was William. He was outside the window on horseback and he asked her to come with him. ‘Let's go away somewhere where they won't bother us,' he said. She didn't need asking twice. Out she came through the window and onto the back of the horse and off they went, galloping across the fields. It was a bright night, the moon was shining, and she was as happy as could be.

Then her mother turns and catches sight of Polly.

‘That's not the end, is it?' Polly asks.

‘I forget how it ends,' says her mother. ‘It's just old rubbis
h
…' She is embarrassed at being caught out. ‘I do it to pass the time. I used to hear those old things when I was a child and I thought I'd forgotten them.'

‘I'd like to know how it ends,' says Polly.

‘They were buried in my head somewhere, and when I told one, the others came back, one after the other. Funny, isn't it?' She stops talking and stares out the window. Then she adds, ‘Usually I just watch the television. Most things are subtitled.'

Polly's picture of Paddy's mother was completely inaccurate, as she discovered just days later when she saw her. This was at Paddy's funeral. He was drowned at the beginning of August, while out fishing. The weather had not broken, there was no storm or sudden calamitous change to explain what had happened. But his boat had got into difficulties, for no apparent reason. The rest of the crew were saved, but Paddy was not. ‘He was knocked overboard by a freak wave', was the explanation circulating in the community. ‘He was swept against the Red Cliff.' Drownings occurred every few years in this area, and the Red Cliff was notoriously dangerous. ‘His number was up,' a fisherman said, shrugging casually, in Polly's hearing. More people said, ‘The good die young.' They had a proverb or cliché for every occasion, and dozens of them for the occasion of death.

The entire school population of the peninsula turned out at the funeral, which was attended by hundreds and hundreds of people. Polly's friends hugged her and squeezed her, trying to sympathise, horrified at the idea of what had happened to Paddy and to Polly but unable to grasp the enormity of it. Polly's parents were not at the funeral.

They knew about Paddy now. When he had died and become a celebrity, someone had revealed the secret. But they did not take it seriously.

‘I believe you were friendly with the young man who drowned, Lord have mercy on him,' said her mother.

‘Yes,' said Polly. She was paralysed. She could not believe that Paddy would not be there, at the spot where they met, if she took the bus and walked along the hill road. He was linked with the place, he could not move from it, in her imagination. She had seen his coffin, carried by six boys from the football team through a guard of honour, to the graveyard across the road. She had seen his coffin descend into the earth, and heard the clay fall on it. But she could not believe he was gone for good. How could he be, so quickly? This was four days after they had sat on the hillside discussing his mother's clothes. In that time he had changed from being a goalkeeper, a lover, a fisherman, to this: a corpse in the ground.

‘It's a great tragedy for his family,' her mother then said, pursing her lips and tut-tutting. She turned her attention to the tablecloth she was embroidering with pink roses. Polly said nothing, but left the room.

She purses her lips again, in just that way, when Polly tries to tell her about her living arrangements; shows her photos of the house, of Karl. Her mother asks if she is married and Polly shakes her head. In Denmark there is no major legal disadvantage to this, and she and Karl have been together for twenty years. They do not think of themselves as unconnected or likely to part, and getting married is not something Karl believes in. ‘I am an old fox,' he says. That's what they say in Denmark, ‘fox' not ‘dog'. You can't teach an old fox new tricks. He looks like a fox, though. Polly is reminded when he says this. He has reddish hair, still, and a sharp face. He's a schoolteacher, like her father, but the principal of a large secondary school in one of Copenhagen's best suburbs. They live in a house in the grounds, a privilege for the headmaster. Polly is telling her mother this – she can lip-read, a bit. She is trying to tell her something about Copenhagen, mentioning Tivoli, which is, as a rule, the one thing people have heard of. She talks about the fishing boats at Dragør, how she goes there sometimes to buy flatfish from the fishermen on the quay, how you can get huge flounders for a few crowns. ‘They are still alive when you buy them,' Polly says. ‘Huge flounders, fat halibut, dancing around in the basket.'

‘They don't have the euro in Denmark,' her mother breaks in. She hasn't heard a thing. ‘They have more sense, I suppose.'

When Polly found out that she was pregnant, just before the Leaving results came out, she felt not as dismayed as she should have, although she knew it was in any practical sense a hopeless, insuperable tragedy. She had Paddy's baby. It was as if fate had awarded her some compensation for losing him. But it was not great compensation, in the circumstances.

‘Tell your mother,' Eileen said. ‘You'll have to. I mean, what are you going to do?'

‘How can I tell her? She'll die,' said Polly.

Eileen shrugged. ‘Sometimes things like that are easier than you think. When you do them.' This advice sounded good. Eileen saw the lift in Polly's expression and pressed her advantage. ‘Things are usually easier than you think they'll be,' she reiterated. ‘They're always easier, when they happen.'

She convinced Polly. Anyway, she had to tell her parents, as Eileen said. The best thing that could happen would be that they would understand, and help, although at that moment Polly's mind could not wrap itself around the reality of what that help should consist of. A ménage of herself, her child and her parents was not imaginable, even as a dream.

She confronted her mother the next day, in the kitchen. They had been to the beach together. Polly had swum in the breakers, finding the cold shock of water comforting; it demanded so much immediate attention that it diminished her problems. Her mother did not swim but sat, in her full cotton sundress, on a folding chair on the beach, reading the newspaper,
Inniu
. Afterwards, they had lunch together, salad and tea, and now Polly was smoking a cigarette, something her mother did not disapprove of, although she did not smoke herself. It seemed like a good moment to break the news.

Her reaction could not have been more surprising, but it was not surprising in the way Eileen had anticipated. Instead, it surprised, shocked, terrified Polly that her mother was capable of such anger. She screamed abuse and insults. She hit Polly with her fists and seemed to want to flog her in some ritualistic punishment of humiliation, degradation. But her father would have to administer this treatment, and fortunately for himself and Polly he was not available, having gone to the city for the day to buy new textbooks for school. Polly was to be locked in her room until he returned. She was to be starved. When all this was over, it was not clear what her mother's plans for her were, but they did not involve bringing up her grandchild in a normal family environment.
Homes
,
adoption
,
hiding
, were words that occurred, in a medley of Irish and English, a macaronic stream of abusive language that had never emanated from Polly's mother before. It seemed that one language did not contain enough invective to express the full depth and range of her anger. Clearly, this was the nadir of her existence. Nothing as tragic, as evil, as shameful, as her only child's pregnancy had ever befallen her.

Afterwards, Polly had simply left the house; as it happened, there were no locks on any of the room doors. She ran away without even a toothbrush, catching the afternoon bus to town and going on to Dublin on the train. She had some money; it was not so difficult. Her Leaving result she got from Eileen a month or so later. Eileen came to Dublin to visit her, to Polly's gratification and surprise, and tried to persuade Polly to go to college, as she had planned: she would have some money from her scholarships; if she padded it out, she would get by. Polly tried it, and her parents were unable, or did not bother, to prevent her. But she had Conor in April, just before the first-year examinations. She missed them and no quarter was given, no special provision could be made. She lost her scholarship and left college. She got a job in a bank, lived in a bedsitter, and kept the baby, although Eileen tried to persuade her to be sensible and give him over for adoption. She could not part with him, although she soon found out that keeping him was quite astonishingly difficult, in every possible way. There was no money, there was no time, nobody even wanted to rent her a place to live; single mothers with babies were blacklisted by most landlords in Dublin. Everyone colluded in making her life as hard as it could be – her parents, the state, the system. Eileen, who was in Dublin herself, studying to be a nurse, continued to help, finding flats in her own name and installing Polly and Conor when the lease was signed.