The Shelter of Neighbours (7 page)

Chip was a good teacher. He repeated the same instructions over and over again, as a mother names her child, without showing the exasperation he must have felt. His patience, his ability to suspend disbelief and to have faith in the pupil, were qualities that must have stood to him later.

They stood to me then. In a few days I was good in the canoe. We were able to move far out into the lake – there was a barrier of red buoys preventing us, but Chip just lifted the rope and we slid under. I would have liked to stay close to shore, but he wanted to go right out to the opposite side. Luckily that was impossible in the stolen hour I would have at my disposal.

I didn't fall in love with him during the first few days. I fell in love with the lake itself and with the canoe, and the paddle, and my developing skill in propelling the long, elegant craft through the ice-clean water. Then, about a week after the first canoeing, I woke up in the early morning and Chip's image was in my mind, and I felt a lightening of spirit, a miraculous change of perspective, as if my mind had been lit up and was now casting a bright, rosy light on everything. I knew I would see him sometime that day. That was all I wanted, and the rest of the day – six hours – was a preparation for that meeting. Time didn't drag, it was transformed by the knowledge that Chip existed, and that at three o'clock, when Morgan and Berry and Warren were at the beach, I would be on the water, heading out into the lake with him.

Trish never came with us, although Chip always invited her.

‘I've got stuff to do,' she'd huff, giving me a look for which the best and only adjective is a simple one: dirty. ‘I'll go down later when you two are finished.'

She'd toss her head and flounce off into the woods, a book under her oxter. Some people have a special talent for making others feel bad, and Trish had this gift in abundance.

On the seventh day I put my hand on Chip's when we were out in the lake, where nobody could see, especially not Trish – unless she spied on us with binoculars from some hidey-hole in the woods. That, oddly, was the first time I noticed something funny about his hand – he had only three fingers on the left one. The long finger was missing – it had been cut off, I never found out exactly how – when he was six years old.

He put down his paddle and we kissed. As well as we could, which is not very well in a canoe. The next day we didn't go out into the middle of the lake, but paddled along the shoreline until we came to a sheltered cove, where we pulled in, lay on the beach, and embraced. Kissing and pressing – I wasn't going to go further; you didn't, then, when you were seventeen, even in America. I'd stopped going to Mass (you couldn't, anyway, at Lake Elizabeth). I was definitely losing my faith, but nevertheless I felt the spying eye of the Blessed Virgin on me at certain crucial junctures. It's hard to get rid of that person, even when you know she doesn't exist.

The thing is, time flies when you're kissing someone you're in love with. You kiss and then you look at your watch and three hours have passed, three hours that felt like three minutes. When I got back to the cabin, Morgan was already there, fuming. Berry had refused to go to bed, since I wasn't there to tell her the bedtime story. She'd become so upset they had to give her a sedative. And they – herself and Warren – had wanted to go out to dinner – they'd made friends with another couple the same age as themselves, and now they wanted to go out every night and have fun down at the café in the big house, drinking fruit punch and coke. (There was no alcohol at Lake Elizabeth, it was the big taboo, which didn't strike me as in any way unusual at the time, since I had taken the pledge when I made my Confirmation and had never drunk myself.)

I said I was sorry and tried to look it, but her annoyance had no effect on my mood. She could do nothing to dishearten me. Nobody could. I was buoyed up by love. My heart is a canoe, I said to myself, a silver canoe sailing through the silver sky.

Morgan noticed.

‘
ok
!' she said. ‘I get it. But don't be late again –
ok
? Or no more canoeing.'

‘Canoeing!' I overheard them talking about me. Warren laughed in his not very nice way. ‘Is that what she calls it?'

‘Oh well, nothing will come of it,' said Morgan. ‘How could it?'

‘Chip is dumb,' said Warren. ‘He's dumber than he looks.'

My eyes filled with tears. Of rage. It was not on account of the insult to Chip; it was on account of the insult to me.

There was no more canoeing, anyway.

The day after our landing on the beach Trish became seriously ill.

Poison ivy.

She'd stumbled into a patch of it while walking in the woods and was covered in a horrible rash.

They were always going on about poison ivy at Lake Elizabeth, but so far nobody had ever been stung. I'd begun to wonder if it really existed.

‘It's not just a rash. That's bad enough, but Trish is allergic to it,' Chip's mother explained, when I went over at three o'clock as usual. His mother was like Chip, not Trish. ‘Her throat has swollen. She can hardly breathe, poor old thing!' Chip and their father had driven to the hospital with Trish. ‘I'm just hoping they'll let her back.'

They didn't. She had to be kept in. Two days later, the Johnsons cut short their holiday and left the resort.

We exchanged addresses and I wrote a few letters to Chip. But he didn't reply, to my surprise – and sorrow – and, after nearly two months of anguish, as debilitating as any physical fever, during which I read Yeats's poems about unrequited love and waited every morning and afternoon for the postman, willing him to bring the longed-for letter, I fell out of love more abruptly than I had glided into it.

This transition occurred the day I started college. The journey to college was not the adventure it is for some – it just involved catching the number 10 bus at the corner of the road where I'd always lived, and getting off it twenty minutes later at the university stop. But it was a momentous event. As I got off that bus and walked up the long, windswept avenue past the football grounds to the brand new college, I knew – I believed – that neither I nor anyone else in my family would ever be a hired girl again. The building had been designed in the most modern brutalist style by a young architect who had just defected from Poland and whose grey concrete theatres and white classrooms held for me the promise of freedom, knowledge and unimaginable wisdom.

The conference on ‘The Concept of Taboo in Primitive and Contemporary Society' in San Francisco was one of those enormous ones, with up to four concurrent sessions running for most of the time, and one plenary at the end of every day. There were a thousand people in attendance, anthropologists from all over the world. I gave my paper (‘The Persistence of Endogamy in a Suburban Community') on the first day. Since I had never visited San Francisco before and could only stay for one extra day when the proceedings were over, I escaped more than once to have a look around the city – I wandered along Mission, and took my chances on Haight, the old centre of the hippy culture which had been such a magical influence on my growing up, part of the promise my college days had contained.

Chip was giving a plenary. I didn't recognise his name, because, of course, it was not ‘Chip', but something quite different: Hamilton. He had never told me that Chip was just a nickname, and I was so bewildered by America in the days of my au-pairdom that I had not known that ‘Chip' often was just that. His surname seemed different to me, too – Mills. Surely it had been Thompson? Or Johnson? I'd written him three or four letters – I'd written his name on envelopes – but perhaps I was mistaken. That had all happened thirty years ago or more. Professor Hamilton Mills, he was now, anyway. He spoke with the suave assurance, elegance and humour that marked all the most successful academics; words rolled mellifluously from his mouth in long, perfectly shaped sentences, not a hum or haw anywhere, and his vocabulary was enviably rich. He was never at a loss, for one second, for the
mot propre
, as I often was, although I had been lecturing now for years. And yet he was undoubtedly Chip. The same stocky figure, the intense blue eyes, the shock of hair – which was grey now, but the shape of which had not changed.

The lecture was illuminating and entertaining and the round of applause exceptionally hearty. Afterwards, people milled around the eminent scholar, congratulating him, touching the hem of his garment (the regulation linen jacket, the male anthropologist's summer garb). There were no questions – he was far too important to answer questions.

I did not get close to him in the lecture hall.

But later, at the reception, in a great open space in the hotel, which looked out on the bay towards Alcatraz and the Golden Gate Bridge, I approached him, as he stood, wineglass in hand, freed for a moment from the swarm of sycophants which clustered around him, abuzz with praise and opinions.

I had prepared my speech in advance.

Hello, Professor Mills, I would smile gently. I am sure you don't remember me, but I met you a very long time ago when you were on holiday at Lake Elizabeth. You taught me to canoe.

That would be sufficient, I felt, to bring back all the memories. No need to mention love, or the day on the beach, or poison ivy.

I glided through the room and by some miracle the crowds thinned as I moved, so that I bumped into no one, but sailed a straight course from the door to the verandah, where he stood with the bay and the bridge and the islands, all that magical panorama, in the background.

As I drew near, a woman joined him.

A stocky woman, with a mop of thick white hair, and a sensible outfit that made no concession to pleasure or fashion, or even the formality of the occasion: she was wearing a loosely cut navy blue pants suit, flat shoes. Her face had a scrubbed look. She was not at all the kind of woman one would expect Chip – Professor Mills – to have as a wife or a partner.

And of course she was not his wife. As I came up to them and began my spiel, her expression changed from one of indifference to one that was familiar to me: exasperation. Her pale blue eyes swept me up and down, taking in my red shoes and my black cocktail dress, my round, painted face, and dismissing them with the contempt I recognised only too well.

She said something to him, in her dry raspy voice, which had not changed one iota.

I finished my speech, to which he had listened with attention.

‘I'm delighted to meet you,' he said. ‘But no, I think you must be mistaken. I was never on holiday at Lake Elizabeth.' He shook his head in mock sadness. ‘I can't even canoe.'

His companion – Trish, for sure – pursed her pale lips and regarded me smugly. She was drinking iced water with a slice of lemon in it.

He turned to her. ‘Allow me to introduce my wife, Patti,' he said.

She smiled her cold triumphant smile and extended her hand.

‘I'm so sorry,' I said. ‘My memory plays such tricks on me these days. Thanks for a really inspiring lecture.' I turned to his wife and smiled. ‘“Taboos of the New Age”. It's a subject I'm very interested in. It's an area where anthropology can teach us a lot about contemporary people.'

‘Yes,' she said, in a voice like cold, rusty iron, which could cut you dead with one syllable.

The cocktail party was sparkling and went on for a few hours. I lingered, chatting to many people, keeping an eye on Professor Mills, keeping track of his movements. But in the end I gave up. I gave up whatever I was hoping for. I allowed some sliver of desire to slide away from me into the gathering mist of the Pacific night.

As I was collecting my jacket and bag from the cloakroom, he came out. He didn't say anything but he took my hand in his and pressed it.

Bliss ran through me then, sharply, as if I had received an injection of some euphoric drug.

He smiled, pressed my hand again. I felt his fingers and looked. The long finger on the left hand. Missing.

Odd that he hadn't replaced it. Can it be that fingers are irreplaceable, even today, unlike, say, kidneys, or livers, or even hearts? There are still some parts of the human anatomy which, once gone, are gone for good. Eyes, probably. Fingers.

I was wondering about this as Chip retreated.

Since then I have never seen him.

I check the Internet occasionally, just to see if he is still alive.

Which, so far, he is.

Olivia had had her eye on the stoves for some time. There were four of them on display in the new hardware shop on the edge of the town – a vast place, with a big bathroom department full of Victorian tubs and Roman tiles, and a garden centre overflowing with ornamental plants and terracotta pots of every shape and size. The shop was owned by Murphy's, which had served the town for a century from a cramped premises on Main Street. The new branch had been designed to cater to the needs of the affluent community, which wanted hot tubs, landscaped gardens and big gas barbecues.

But almost as soon as the new shop opened all the things it was designed to cater to – wealth, optimism, sunny days – stopped. Suddenly the country, which had been so rich, descended into poverty, like a hiker who had been striding blithely along, his rucksack of goodies on his back, singing,
tra-la tra-la
, stumbling without warning into an ancient well. Aeons deep, dark as outer space. The glass doors of Murphy's wonderful shop slid open for the first time just as the world began its rapid slide into recession.

Nobody wanted barbecues, or Greek goddesses, or even roses, any more.

Energy-saving devices were what they wanted now. Anything that would save money (and – by the way – the planet).

Murphy's got the stoves during the winter. There was a big cream one, a replica of the Aga Olivia remembered from her childhood home, into which her mother would pour cindery coke from a brass scuttle several times a day. She wouldn't want one of those. And there were smaller black ones, simpler and more decorative devices, which you would use instead of an open fire. They were eighty per cent efficient, according to the sexy architect on the
tv
programme about doing up your house, whereas an open fire was twenty per cent efficient.

The stoves looked nice and cottagey. They were named after Irish writers: the Beckett was the smallest, the Yeats was the middle one, and the Joyce was the biggest (it could heat twelve radiators).

‘Most people go for the Yeats,' Joe McCarthy told her. ‘That's probably the one you'll be needing.'

Joe had been in the shop in town for as long as Olivia could remember. A wiry man, with sallow, leathery skin, bright brown eyes, he looked as if he should have been a jockey or a lion tamer, rather than a shop assistant. On Main Street, he used to be on the counter where they had the nails and screws, where the men went. But sometimes he'd be on the cash register, too, and Olivia had often bought a few cups and saucers or a potted geranium from him. They never spoke about anything other than hardware, but there was a spark there all the same and she was always pleased to see him prancing around the shop on his bow legs. Out here in the new place he was in charge of everything. At least, he was the one you had to ask for advice. They had young people on the cash registers, who didn't know anything. ‘Joe McCarthy is the one you need to talk to,' they would say, if you asked about the stoves, or electric cables, or paint. ‘He's on his lunch now but he'll be back at two. Unless he went on the late lunch. Did he, do you know, Emma?'

Alex was against the stove. He liked the open fire and he didn't like change. But it was chilly in the house this summer. The sun never shone. The fire looked lovely, flickering away, but it gave no heat to speak of. It seemed sinful to have the central heating on all the time, oil being the price it was, and the global supply of fossil fuels running out.

On St Swithin's Day, Olivia took the plunge.

For weeks fog had enveloped the valley. When you went for a walk, up the hill, you could hardly see your hand in front of you. An occasional sheep loomed out of the mist, eerie-looking in its long, shaggy coat, like a prehistoric animal. The sheep were lethargic in the fog, hardly bothering to move away, instead standing with lowered heads, looking as if they'd once had a dream of attacking you with their weird twisted horns, but hadn't got the energy. After a few days of this fog, Olivia, too, felt half-dead, gliding around like a ghost in the clouds.

But then the sun came out and the whole countryside – the bay and the ocean and the island and the mountains and the fields and the sky – were revealed like a great painted set on a stage, as the mist rolled back like a curtain. Her heart leaped. For forty days, she hoped – she knew it was a silly superstition – they would have days like this. Half-foggy and half-sunny. Fifty per cent better than it had been.

The day the fog lifted, she decided to buy the stove.

The chimneypiece in the house was its principal feature. It was a nice enough house in many other ways – wooden beams on the ceilings lent it a cosy air, and wide, long windows opening directly onto the field meant that the barrier between indoors and outdoors was minimal. You could sit in the kitchen and believe you were sitting in the field, like a cow in the long, waving grass.

All very nice indeed. But the chimneypiece was the most special thing.

‘It was the builder's pride and joy,' Alex had told her several times over the years, when he was telling the story of the house, the only new rectory built in Ireland in about two hundred years. Its construction, which had become a family myth, was often recounted. The adventure, the misadventures. It had been one of the first new houses in the coastal parish, which was now full of them. For everyone, the experience had been novel and exciting: for the architect, from Finland; for the builder, from the next village. Most of all for Alex's first wife, Lyndsey, from the other side of the ocean, who was a person with an exquisite flair for choosing just the right thing. The beauty of the house was thanks to her.

At first, when Olivia married Alex, she had felt this as a burden. The mark of his former wife on the house was indelible. Olivia wanted to sell it and buy an old farmhouse and do it up with the money (that was the fashion now; the new places were looked down upon).

Alex wouldn't dream of it. ‘Why? This house suits me perfectly.'

And gradually Olivia had accepted his way of thinking. Now she often felt grateful to the first wife. It was as if she had made Olivia a gift of the house, along with her husband.

The design for the chimneypiece called for plain grey cut stone. But the builder ignored that. He and Lyndsey went to all the beaches and collected all the different kinds of stone you get around here. It couldn't happen now. You weren't allowed to take stone from the beaches these days, and their chimneypiece was nothing less than a rare monument to local geology. Red lava, green aeolian sandstone, grey siltstone. All the rocks that you found in the hills and the cliffs and scattered along the battered shoreline had been looted and were represented right here in the living room.

And in the centre, a big fireplace, where turf had burned for the past forty years, flickering and dancing and casting shadows on the walls.

‘And most of the heat going up the chimney,' said Olivia.

‘I've never felt cold,' said Alex. He spoke with some bewilderment. He was the sort of man who lived inside his head and who seemed to pay no attention to his surroundings. Then occasionally, he would make some surprising remark, indicating that he did, in fact, notice ordinary things just like anyone else.

‘That's because of the central heating. But we can't go on burning oil,' said Olivia. ‘It's running out. And it's three times the price it was two years ago.'

‘But we're away a lot of the time in the winter,' Alex said.

(Olivia's brother lent them his apartment in Alicante for January every year. The minister from the next parish – eighty miles away – drove over on Sundays to do the service.)

Olivia stared at him, hard. ‘I just want to try this.
ok
?'

Alex shrugged. ‘
ok
,' he said. But he looked sad.

‘You never want anything to change,' she said accusingly.

‘I know,' said Alex, with a tiny laugh. ‘It's true. I don't.'

They ring from Murphy's first thing in the morning before she has woken up. Her mobile trills loudly, vibrating on the bedside locker.

‘Where exactly are ye living?'

She gives them the complicated country directions. ‘Turn left at Alice's B & B. Drive up the hill. You pass the old Church of Ireland where the road bends. There's a white farm gate. A red station wagon parked outside.'

She didn't expect them to deliver it so soon. Down she runs, all excited, in her dressing gown, to clean out the hearth.

Last night they'd lit the fire. She'd built it up with the new Eco logs, which burned bright but very fast as they watched a new art-house film on
dvd
. Alex's son, Andrew, who is literary, had lent it to them because he knows Olivia shares his taste in movies. (She and Alex have no children; he already had two sons, now grown up, when his wife was murdered, stabbed to death by an insane neighbour on the small, almost private, beach below the house, where she liked to skinny dip in the hot summers they used to have then.) Alex hadn't liked the movie. It was too modern for his taste, confusingly plotless. She'd poured them both a glass of wine, towards the end, to reward him for having stuck it out. And although it was almost midnight, she'd thrown a few sods of turf on the fire. Real turf, bockety, with bits of straw stuck to the sods. The faint peaty smell had floated into the room.

‘This is the last fire,' he said.

She reached over and patted him on the knee. ‘The stove will really look quite nice,' she said. ‘And it will be so much more efficient.'

Now she tries to envisage what it will look like, sitting there, a squat, black, cast-iron stove, blocking the cave where the fire used to be. She can't actually imagine it in place. And how efficient will it really be?

She runs upstairs, takes off her dressing gown and pyjamas and puts on her jeans and jumper. Through the window she can see the truck making its way along the road by the coast. Red, with an ad for lawnmowers on one side and the name of the shop, Murphy Ltd, on the other. She is just tightening her belt when the knock comes to the door.

A man in a blue overall stands on the step, one of the big, thickset men who don't talk much, whom you get in these parts, alongside the quick, fiery type, like Joe in the shop.

‘Murphy's, sor,' he says.

That is a peculiarity. Some people here call everyone, man and woman, ‘sor'. When she first came across this, just after she and Alex married and she came to live in the rectory, she wondered if they were mistaking her for a man. Alarmed, she let her hair grow and did away with the country-look clothes. After a few years, she noticed that ‘sor' wasn't gender specific, necessarily, and she started wearing her wax coat and big boots again. Alex never seemed to notice what she wore, one way or the other.

‘Where do you want it put?'

She points to the pride and joy of the house, and then follows him outside. The enormous truck is parked out on the road. Perched on its back, all alone, is a small brown cardboard box.

‘I won't be able to get the truck through that!' He looks accusingly at their gate.

Olivia wonders why they use such a big truck to deliver a small object, but she knows better than to ask.

‘I'll have to swing it over. It's very heavy.'

She nods. The man is kind, sorry that everything has to be so awkward and that circumstances conspire against efficiency. It is an attitude she's accustomed to. After much foostering around, he hooks the cardboard box to a crane, swings it over the gate, and begins to lower it onto a trolley he's wheeled into the garden.

The name of the stove is printed on the box in red block letters:
yeats
. Olivia watches it swinging in the bright air. She has to dodge out of its way as it swings close to her – she doesn't want to be killed by a cast iron Yeats. A seagull sitting on the roof of the house cocks his head and observes what is going on with great interest.

‘Sixty per cent efficient,' the man says, as he pushes the Yeats into the house. ‘The fire is only forty per cent. Most of the heat goes up the chimney.'

Different from what the architect on the television said. Twenty per cent of a difference. And what does it mean, anyway, twenty per cent heat, forty per cent? Olivia feels a pang of doubt.

But soon the Yeats is in place and the cave where the fire used to burn can be seen no more. Although, as Olivia explained to Alex, the grate will still be there, behind the stove. They can go back to the fire if they don't like the new arrangement, is what she was implying. But watching the man installing the flue, with much fiddling and the application of bags of cement, she knows going back will not be easy. It never is.

‘There are two things that are good for man,' Alex says, when he emerges from his study some hours later. He has stayed in there, working on an article for the archaeological and historical journal, for as long as he could before facing the Yeats.

Olivia has read the instructions and lit a small fire in the stove. Already she is getting used to it. Already, she tells herself, it looks as if it has always been there. She pecks him on the cheek before he can complete the sentence – she knows he's suffering, but what can she do? – and leads him outside. The sky has clouded somewhat and the fields are now a muted, quiet green. Just a few weeks ago, at midsummer, everything was saturated with colour. Sapphire. Emerald. Purple. Gold. Now you see a gentle fading, the inexorable move towards autumn. The foxgloves, which people here call lady fingers, are almost gone, and the early purple orchids. The montbretia, which will come out soon, like sharp orange flames, and stay in the ditches until the blackberries ripen, have not yet blossomed, although they are gathering, relentlessly, in the damp air, like ears of corn.

Alex is older. Older than Olivia. Older than most people in the parish now. He looks young for his age, people sometimes take him for sixty-seven, not the age he is. Seventy-seven. He has been in this parish for forty-five years, and would retire if there was anyone to take his place. When he first came to the valley, to the old house that his wife replaced with this one, there was no running water, no electricity, only oil lamps. The women in the valley baked bread in pot ovens, which hung from black iron cranes over the fire on the open hearth, roasted potatoes and lobsters and crab claws in the embers. The men told long stories about ghosts and the fairies, gathered around the same firesides, until the early hours of the morning. And Alex collected a lot of those stories on his tape recorder, and transcribed them, slowly, painstakingly, for hours and days and years, in the study where he spends most of his time. (He stopped collecting stories after Lyndsey's death. Although they never found the murderer, everyone knew who did it. The son of the best storyteller. He moved to England two days after the funeral, which everyone in the valley, all the Catholics as well as the C of I's, attended.)