Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show (54 page)

C
harleville had a police station down the street, and I walked to it; but not a light showed in its windows—or anywhere in the town. I walked back, falling apart. My brain kept veering to the worst, the dark water at Lough Gur. I walked all around the town’s two main streets like a madman; I had no idea what to do. The house repelled me; I couldn’t go back in. Not safe to drive the car either—even at this remove in time I can tell how badly I was disintegrating. In truth, I didn’t have a coherent thought in my head, yet I knew, I somehow knew, that I would have a difficult task to persuade anybody of my worst fears.

Which is exactly what happened. At first light I waited outside the police station, beside the old and half-concealed
ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY
sign. As yet, not every physical conversion had been completed, and many stations, such as Charleville, had posted a temporary sign with the symbol of the new civic guards over the old insignia.

A man inside saw me waiting and opened the door.

“Y’all right there, huh?”

What words could I choose that would make the most impact? I’d tried all night to think of some. By then my appearance spoke for me. I
threw out my hands and the man, still in his shirt and suspenders, said, “Come in, huh?”

My mind registered,
Why is it that policemen always say everything as though they’re asking a question?

“I’m from Rosewood Cottage,” I said. “Down the street.”

“The actor crowd? D’you want to sleep it off, so?”

“Something bad. Something—bad—”

I couldn’t speak—I’ve replayed this moment all my life.

“Are you an actor yourself?”

“No.”

“What are you? Are you after doing something, huh?”

“No. Somebody’s vanished.”

“Is there blood?”

“No, no, I mean—there’s a doll cut up.”

He looked at me. “Is there anybody over there now?”

“That’s it, that’s what’s wrong, there’s nobody there and there should be.”

He leaned close and I figured later that he was trying to smell my breath.

“Is there damage to the property?”

“I want you to come look.”

My agitation produced his effort—sort of. The policeman went away, shaved, ate breakfast, dressed, and came back. How do I know? He hadn’t already shaved, he hadn’t been fully dressed, he was gone for nearly an hour, and when he came back he had a flake of yellow egg near his mouth. And he was sucking crumbs from his teeth. He applied his cap to his head and we walked to the house.

I, as bidden by him, stayed in the hall as he went through every room with elephant plods. It took him many, many minutes.

When he came back downstairs he said, “There wasn’t a robbery, was there? All that money, huh? Is that yours—I s’pose it must be.”

“But something bad’s happened.” My voice wailed.

“Who’s missing?”

I said, “My wife.”

Odd, isn’t it? The first time I used the term in the outside world was the night I lost her.

“Is that all?”

“The housekeeper. Mrs. Haas.”

He looked at me and looked all around. “We’ll leave it a bit. If you don’t hear from your wife or Mrs. House, I s’pose we’ll have to do a report. People go away a lot. Did you have an oul’ row or something, the two of you, huh?”

I shook my head, miserable, destroyed. He coughed.

“I’d say, I’d say—she’ll be back. I mean, the money, huh? You know, like, you know—women. And money.”

He touched his blue cap, walked out of the house—and that was it.

N
ow I shall tell you the awful story of my searches, and what became of me after Venetia’s disappearance. I had nowhere to go, nobody to whom I could turn that day. This matter couldn’t be aired at home to my parents—and James Clare would take three days to contact. I thought about going to Dublin and Miss Fay, but I felt that the burden of it might be too heavy for her, and I felt that I should stay in Charleville in case anything happened. When a moment of calm arrived I understood that I had an empty house, a car, a suitcase full of cash—and a terrible, problematic loss.

All that day I wandered around the house, going mad fast. My wife—that proud phrase again,
my wife
—had gone missing. I feared her dead, I knew that. I feared her and our unborn child murdered.

Next raft of thought:
The policeman believes that she walked out on me after a row, and that our housekeeper went with her. Missing persons, not murder
. I disagreed in my heart.

Third level of, as it was by now, despair:
I can do nothing. She might still be alive somewhere, not yet killed, and I can do nothing; I can’t save her and I can get nobody to help me
.

Fourth, and worst, level:
This happened because I blackmailed her grandfather and cost him his prestigious job. I killed her
.

You think that was a bleak day? It was—but I would have bleaker.

Toward evening, after hours of fitful sleep and mad food consumption, I rallied. I still had some things on my side. The company was on its way down from Donegal after a vacation paid for by Venetia. If nothing else I would now have a team to help me search. And search is what I intended to do—search the world, if necessary. I rallied myself with one central thought:
Don’t think of yourself, Ben; think of Venetia’s safety
.

When I awoke next morning, the bed—our bed—looked as though it had been bombed by massive ordnance. I must have twisted and turned, rolled and tumbled. Mother had insisted since age six that I make my own bed every day—two minutes was my record; this took ten. I washed with great care, trying to impose order upon myself, and mapped out my day.

Downstairs I forced myself to eat, and I walked slowly from the kitchen to the hall, from the hall to the kitchen.
Walking slowly is thinking deeply; thank you, Miss Fay
.

Outside, no rain, some light overcast—the daylight helped. At ten o’clock, the hour that I had observed Charleville usually woke up, I went from door to door and asked the same question:

“The night before last, just before midnight—did you hear or see anything unusual?”

(You can tell, can’t you, that I was a widely read boy? Adventure stories contain good basic lessons.)

Nobody saw anything. Two people, close to the house, heard what they called “a lorry,” but they had gone to bed and didn’t get up to look. They timed it identically: “About ten before midnight.”

Everybody wanted to know why I was asking; I said, “I can’t say yet.”

They all found out within days because they told the policeman that I’d been asking questions, and he told them that my wife had run away.

“Actors,” I’m sure they said. “Them bad morals.”

If they only knew.

I had intended visiting Luke Nagle anyway, to tell him the whole story. His diligence all those years ago had brought off an excellent result: In at least one mighty infringement King Kelly had been nailed, a wrong corrected; I knew he’d be pleased. Now I sat in front of him and told him
in sequence what had happened—the lawyer’s office, my parents, the farm, all of that.

“But,” said he with a raging blurt, “that animal! He did the same here; that’s how he got his first farm—he hoodwinked an old couple. He should have been strung up.”

The interruption over, I told him about Venetia, and who she was and what had now happened. Here’s why I liked him so much; he didn’t gild life—he took it on straight, headlong.

“The lake isn’t very deep,” he said. “You could drag it easy enough.”

“Dada,” said his daughter. “Slow down.”

“False hope is no hope,” he said. “Always best to know what’s happened as soon as you can.”

Though I admired him for his words, they crushed me. When I recovered as much as I could, I told him the missing-persons dilemma.

“Kelly should be behind bars for the rest of his life. They won’t hang him now.”

I asked, “What are you saying?”

“Go after him.”

“I’d get nowhere.”

“Good Christ, let me into court. I’ll witness that fellow through the gates of Hell.”

So began the first phases of my search. I would climb two more levels, including one national and very public plateau, and in between I would sink lower than I ever want you to think about, much less feel. The final stages—they occasioned this account that you’re now reading.

In that first phase, I waited for the company from the show. My calculations told me that they’d arrive at the end of the week. I could scarcely wait; I’d grown to like them so much, and to trust them.

I assessed who among them might give me the best, the coolest assistance. Would it be Graham? He had a certain distance to him, and he read more than the others. Peter would weep and get blind drunk. Cwawfod might get hysterical. Michael would rage over the “death” of Blarney, and kick things (and maybe turn somersaults). Martha might be useful; she had an energy the others didn’t, and she worshipped Venetia.

As I sat there, at the kitchen table, helpless as an infant, I tried to make sense of it all. I couldn’t. My wife was dead, my bones told me. And
I was sitting here. Doing nothing. And life wasn’t allowing me to do anything. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

I know now why people in solitary confinement become unhinged. But at least they can see and come to grips with the forces containing them. I had to do something.

Again I went to the guards. The same man. Sitting, this time, reading the newspaper. He looked at me and went back to his reading.

“Hallo.”

“Yah.”

“I was—the day before yesterday. I was, ah’m, here.”

“Is she back?”

“I want to make out a missing-person thing.”

“Three months.”

“But—”

“You’ve got to wait three months. If we made out a missing-person report for everybody who ran way from their husband, we’d catch no criminals.”

I wanted to ask, “How many do you catch, you yourself?” Instead, I asked, “Why three months?”

“As for men who run off from the missus, ’twould be like the Red Sea deluge.”

As I walked out, he called after me, “Hang on to that money and she’ll be back. Women don’t run away from money.”

The company never arrived. I never saw them assembled again. For days I waited. I knew where they were meant to stay for their holiday; I knew because Venetia had discussed it with Cody, who had made the payment.

And then of course I knew that there probably had been no holiday; that Cody had paid them off and disbanded them, had told them some story about Venetia being pregnant and giving up the traveling show—that is what I speculated when the truth came to me, when they didn’t arrive. Time proved me right on that one, but I didn’t know it for many, many years.

Now, despair picked me up by the hair and dragged me across open countryside, across deserts and scree, and tore me up. I went nowhere, I saw nobody, I went down to the dregs.

Grief, I discovered, operates in different ways. It can begin protectively,
by not letting you feel too much. And then it can scorch you and chill you all at once, like the winds of the Arctic do. Those days brought me into the first bad stages of such grief. I didn’t wash, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat what could be called food—an egg, stale bread, nothing of any taste or use.

Here’s what surprised me most: I had no coherent thought—about anything. All I could say, think, or feel was
Venetia, the baby, the baby, Venetia
.

My mind’s eyes were filled with blood; I knew they had killed her horribly. Would they now torment me further with some evidence of this? And when I moved on to thoughts of Mrs. Haas and how they must have killed her, I went further berserk.

Enough of that now; I’ve made it clear how bad it was. It did get worse but not as dramatically; it turned into a long bleakness “dropping slow,” as Yeats said of peace. I’ll come to that bleak time later; let me finish the Charleville phase.

One afternoon, as I hit my worst patch (Oh, how can I say what my worst patch was? It was all dreadful, and the shock of loss made me shudder every few minutes), I heard footsteps in the hall. The knocker had been banging, and I had ignored it.

Into the kitchen, calling exploratory cries, came Rose Nagle, daughter of Luke, followed by a man as wide as a shed.

She looked at me and said, “Go and wash your face. This is Petey.”

I went upstairs, washed my face without looking in the mirror (that’s another thing: Grief doesn’t allow you to look at yourself), and came back down.

“Petey is a detective in Cork,” said Rose. “I’m going out to get milk.”

Some men break chairs when they sit down; Petey could have done. He had the biggest shoes I had ever seen—he must have paid ground rent.

“Howya doin’?” said Petey.

“Don’t talk to me if you’re not going to believe me,” I said. Or—I thought I said it but I must have screamed it.

“Hey, whoa, boy, hould on here, like.”

Which I did. He pointed to a chair; he was in command.

“Come on now. From the start.” He said “shtart;” they all do around there—“shtart” and “shting” and “shtagger” and “shtruggle,” my word of
the moment, because I struggled. I struggled to tell the story in a linear way; I kept jumping ahead, being pulled back, going sideways.