Wild Decembers (25 page)

I
DREAMED
. A gold bird. It landed on my pillow and lay there, not like an ordinary bird at all. The beak was soft. It dropped drops into my ear. In the morning it would be gone. I’d look for it under the pillow and under the covers, but it would be gone. Then one morning it was dead on the pillow.

She looks up at the Dutch woman, relieved that after an hour of silence she has managed to tell her something, in lieu of telling her why she is there.

“What colour drops, Breege?”

“Goldish.”

“Saying what?”

“I forget.”

“And it died?”

“It did.”

“Who killed it?”

“I don’t know.”

Unable to look at the woman, she stares at the pictures arid drawings of flowers and plants, their Latin names and their healing properties written underneath them. There are yellow and blue flowers, thistles, balls of dandelion seed, flowers and plants she has seen all her life, walked over, driven animals over, not knowing that in them might be a cure. She looks from them to three marigolds in a jug, their spears on fire.

“Is it loneliness?” the woman asks. She cannot answer.

“Is it money?” Again she looks as if she has not heard.

“Is it depression, Breege . . . Are you depressed?”

She looks away at a shelf packed with tiny medicine bottles, the orange nozzles like the teats of babies’ bottles. Everywhere there are reminders.

“It’s a man,” she said then, the sentence coming out suddenly, but the true sentence all the same.

“Is he someone you know well?”

“I did know him . . . He hates me now.”

“Why would he hate you?”

“Because. . .” She is unable to go on.

“Maybe he’s afraid,” the woman says.

“Maybe he’s afraid.”

“Or maybe he’s torn.”

“Is there anything you could give me to steady me?”

“Let’s try . . . Let’s see if we can do that.”

The woman has sat her in a deep rocking chair. A pink stone is being held in front of her chest, and from its oscillations the woman seems to derive a yes or a no to the questions she is asking the body. She writes down the names of the different medicines that she will prescribe. The curtains are closed, a nest of candles that have been stuck onto a dinner plate aré all lit, flames shooting up, veering this way and that, licking one another, separating, faint music like the music she once heard when Lady Harkness put a seashell to her ear.

The medicine which the woman drops onto her lips reminds her of her first Holy Communion and rehearsing the receiving of the Host, with Joseph putting bits of blotting paper on her tongue, out in the fields. Her eyes are fixed on a white rose floating in a bulbous vase of water, each gold thread of calyx a wisp as the woman tells her to send thoughts to him, how a thought, if it is powerful enough, can carry across fields, across counties, across continents, across anywhere. She feels warm, relieved, the woman telling her that her fears need no longer be bottled up, that instead of anguish, instead of hard feelings and dead birds, she will melt and remember the candlelight and the purity of the white rose. It is all true. Except. She knows that when she has paid she will have to leave, she will have to go out and get on her bicycle and ride home, pushing the bicycle up the last bit of hill, the crows swooping down, black plastic bags of silage, a world she had come away to forget.

Then all of a sudden it is not like that. The woman has had an idea, a brainwave. In an excess of solicitude and not knowing the black heart whom it concerns, she hears the woman asking her if it is possible to get in touch with this man.

“He lives here.”

“Then you must go and see him.”

“Could I?”

“How do you know that he is not hoping for that? Women are always the stronger. It is the women who break the ice.”

“What would I say to him?”

“Say what you feel.”

Already she felt heartened; she remembered how he held her that night in the graveyard, held her against the night, against the cold, against all that threatened.

T
HERE WAS ACCUSATION
in his eyes even as he hurried down the stairs. I had not gone to trap him. I might have gone to appeal to him in some roundabout way, but seeing his vexed eyes put a stop to that. The very early hour probably told him that something was not right. Not that I knew myself. I was still ignorant of it.

“It’s six in the morning, there must be something wrong,” he said. We might never have known each other, so abrupt was he. But it was not to trap him that I had stolen out of my own house and gone up there. He closed his shirt buttons as if my seeing his chest had some impropriety in it. His eyes were narrow, narrowing, like eyes through a visor. Half his face was flushed up to the sternness of those eyes where he had slept on something hard.

You learn lessons in a flash. Along with resenting my being there, he feared me as if I carried a plague. To have said anything, a soft word or a begging word, would have been useless.

“I meant to let you know . . . Rosemary is arriving in the next forty-eight hours,” he said very pat, and immediately and with no alteration in his tone, “I shouldn’t have gone to the island. Being engaged is the same as being married and I swore . . . I swore.” To confirm it he held up a ring. It looked cheap and brassy in the dawn light, like a ring out of a plum cake which he had put on as a precaution. There was no mention of my being asked inside, and from the corner of my eye I saw that he had furnished the dining room with six mahogany chairs and a very long, lonely table, funereal-looking. There was a glass bell on it. An ugly black wrought-iron fender with stout knobs as thick as cannon balls stood before an empty fireplace. Then I saw a child’s cot, painted white, and it was like there was a child already in it. He saw me gasp.

“The woman threw that in along with the furniture,” he said.

One’s feet get one away from a place of their very own accord. I was out of there. Yet out on the muck road they lurched as if on ploughed land, and my mind was racing, racing, at all that I felt and saw.

I could hear him following and he was breathless when he caught up with me.

“We will be friends,” he said, his eyes looking into me through my raincoat as if he suspected something.

“No, we won’t . . . We’ll be enemies,” I said calmly.

“That will never happen.”

“Oh, it will . . . They’ll all make sure it will,” I said, glad that I too could be cutting.

“Emotions always get in the way,” he said with vehemence, and the strangest thing was that I knew then that he loved me, I knew it by that rebuff.

Half an hour later we were still there on the road, morning things starting up, sounds, dogs, the mountain a cupola of gold, gold threads of light streaming down from the heavens and him trying to tell me what it was to be a shepherd, to be on a sheep station, to have felt a homesickness for something and then a woman coming along, Rosemary coming along, and now a homesickness for something else.

“It’ll be all right when you see her,” I said, because I knew that was what he wanted me to say, to let him go.

I
T WAS HARRY DUGGAN
who told of Rosemary’s arrival. Boasted of it in Nelly’s Bar. Described this fine lady singling him out at the airport where he had dropped off passengers and was on his way home. She was unmet because she wanted to surprise her fiancé by coming a day earlier. Her luggage, as he said, was something else—suitcases, bags, boxes, hatboxes, sheepskin rugs, and a gilded birdcage. A glamour girl in a long black leather coat and suede boots that went up to her fanny. He described the car journey, Rosemary laughing and smoking, asking him to pronounce the quaint place-names, then her good humour as three pieces of her luggage came tumbling off the bonnet. She sat, as he put it, on the ditch while he tied the pieces down with a rope that he had borrowed from a house nearby.

At dusk they headed up the mountain road, and arriving at the mud track that led to Bugler’s house, she looked at it and said “Blimey,” then put out her arms for him to carry her.

He spoke then of the lovers’ reunion. Never seen anything like it, Rosemary so vivacious and Bugler walking into the yard flabbergasted, asking why she hadn’t let him know. He described their eyes drinking each other in, something not easily discernible in the dusk, then Bugler taking her inside and himself having to bring the tractor down the dirt road to unload the luggage into it, ferry it up again, and lay it in the front hall. The most touching moment, as he put it, was when her ladyship took off Bugler’s old hat and donned a new one, identical, and said, “Until the hat dies . . . Or until we die.”

That, as he said, put the smile on Bugler’s face.

He was questioned again and again about her height, her colouring, her age, what sort of accent she had, and his answer varied with the moment, but one thing he could assure them of was her magnetism, as they would soon see for themselves.

“They’ll be tears in the crowded congregation,” the Crock said.

“What does that mean?” Nelly said.

“Ivory Mary.”

“I thought all that died down.”

“It did, but it started up again.”

“How do you know?”

“I have reason to know.”

“Well . . . There’s no woman in this neighbourhood that would hold a candle to Rosemary,” Duggan said.

W
HEN HE SAW
the figure beyond the kitchen window Bugler thought for a moment that he was imagining it. A case of bad conscience. The old guilt thing. “Don’t expect miracles” were his last words to her when she phoned the week before. Now she’s in the kitchen, putting a hat on him, saying, “Mick, Mick.”

“Surprised to see me?” Her voice so raucous, so full of vitality.

“Of course.”

He takes her hand almost formally; her nails are painted bright red and long as beaks. He remembers that she used to bite her nails and put brown stain on them to break the habit.