Scéalta Page 9

  When Mike and I went to the pictures one night in Waterford, I came out of the cinema with my head full of notions. I could not help it. As Mike tucked the rug around my knees and ankles before he cranked up the motorcar, my thoughts whirled inside my head. The film, which was called Gone with the Wind, was in Technicolor. Oh, the colour of the ladies’ dresses and Scarlett O’Hara’s in particular. I will never forget it, all the dancing and laughter, the big talk from very handsome men. It was the most beautiful film I have ever seen, all of us there trying not to cry, pretending that cigarette smoke had got in our eyes. You could hear a pin drop at two bits in particular. The first was when Melanie died, the other was when Rhett Butler forced himself over Scarlett’s body and we all waited, dying to see whether she would enjoy that or reject him because of it. Then there were the bits when he just kissed her, or the way she would look up at him. I also enjoyed the part when she flaunted herself before him and all of society, in a dress made out of old velvet curtains. Yet as Mike let the brake off the motorcar and we drove away, all he could say was ‘Well, that’s that.’ I was so full of something unspeakable that I did not dare answer in case I screamed. At times like that, Mike could fill my heart with disappointment, anger too. Even though he did not mean it, even though he was a good man, the best of men, something began to churn in me. I thought of the old butter churns still used in the country beyond the creamery, and even the big creamery churns, turning and turning until the liquid separated from the lumpy bits, and I saw the bits of my own life separating, some of them drifting and sticking in shapes beyond my control, while the thinner bits of me, or the bits that seemed thin and of no consequence, just slopped there in unwanted pools.

  Two nights later, Sean went to the pictures by himself. The day after, he came up to me as usual, with the bucket of milk from the dairy. He looked bashful, quiet in himself. Full well I knew what was on his mind though we’d said nothing to one another. He opened a packet of cigarettes, lit one slowly, sucked in hard, keeping his eyes down as he did so. Only as he breathed out did he look at me.

  ‘Which bit did you like the best?’

  His eyes stayed on my face. I felt myself blush horrid hot, so much that I wanted to run from the kitchen. Quickly, I turned and dragged a bag of spuds from beneath the sink, fired them into a basin. I took a knife and began to peel like blazes. The sound of the peeling had its own quick rhythm, because although I did not mean it to, the blade of the knife kept hitting off the blue enamel edge of the basin. They were the cleanest spuds you ever did see by the time they reached the saucepan.

  ‘Did you hear me, a stoirin? Which bit?’

  I kept my head turned from him, and I answered.

  ‘The bit where Ashley and Melanie run towards one another. When he comes back from war.’

  It’s true I enjoyed that part, but not as much as some other parts.

  ‘Have you stars in your eyes today, then?’ he enquired softly from where he stood, with his back to the range. I glanced over my shoulder at him, then turned away again. His look was amused, gentle. He was well able to tease just then, knowing that, somehow, he had the upper hand. Everything was quiet at that moment, save for the soughing wind in the apple branches, and a couple of starlings fighting over a scrap of bacon fat on the window ledge.

  ‘Put some coal on that range for me, would you Sean?’ I called back over my shoulder with a light laugh.

  He futhered with the lid for a while before he got it opened, then lifted the copper scuttle. As the coal tumbled in with a loud grating, black smoke puffed out into the kitchen, so that we were both coughing a bit. He replaced the lid quickly. But he didn’t let up.

  ‘You have stars in your eyes, haven’t you?’ he said again, more teasingly, as if he was insisting on something.

  This time I just coughed by way of avoiding an answer. I marched out of the kitchen and down to the hen house. I wasted little time picking my bird, tucked her under my arm and marched back up the garden towards the kitchen. Sean was watching from over the half door. There was uproar among the hens, as if they knew what was coming. The rooks were circling the yard as usual, cawing and screeching. Two magpies cackled on the plum trees, scattering the white blossom in little darts and spirals.

  ‘I’ll give you stars in the eyes, Sean Flynn!’ I took the chicken and wrung its neck. I was good at that. Swift and clean. The birds hardly knew they were dead. This one didn’t even squawk.

  I did not see Sean until the following week. Something had changed between us. Perhaps we had declared ourselves. I was truly agitated by the prospect of his return. I knew he would come back, wanted him to. Delivering our daily milk was, after all, one of his jobs.

  My eyes wandered restlessly as I worked, drawn always to whatever was happening outside the window, whether I was in the kitchen or the parlour, or in the bedrooms, or indeed in the bathroom where Mike spent so much time splashing and preening himself every morning. (Small wonder the boys still brought chamber pots to their bedrooms. He wouldn’t let anybody near the bathroom in the morning, until he was well and truly finished. He had leathers and razors galore, nose-clippers and ear-clippers, blades and cutting implements for dealing with every kind of hair under the sun, no matter where it was located. Me, I never bothered much with the solitary hair that sprang from a small mole above my lip. Sometimes I cut it, but it didn’t worry me. For some reason, the few hairs I once had on my bosoms fell away after the boys were born. Everything else is as nature intended.)

  But that spring I was full of nervous strength. Strength, that was it. I was so bursting with it I could have mown my way through a field of ripe corn, or danced all night, had I the chance, or done things which I dare not commit to paper. Instead I kept the house clean. I was busier than ever. I made myself so. Some of the rooms in the house I have never liked, the ones that are too dark, or which show the old-fashioned taste of the previous manager’s wife. A drab soul, she must have been. But our bedroom, with the shining brass bed and a creamy-white bolster with lace edging, the dressing-table on which I keep brushes, one ivory comb, some face-cream and a bottle of perfume, is a delicious place. I enjoy being a wife, in spite of all. The wifely things, the habits and touches that go with my station, bring ease and civility and peace. The view from that bedroom window always pleased me, falling down the hill from the back of the house towards the big stream, and beyond that again the field with the beech trees and the sweet beech nuts that I gorged myself on when I was expecting both children.

  One day I made myself stop the mad cleaning and polishing. The youngest child was with me, the other boy at school. I treasured the last few months of my baby boy’s true freedom. In September, he would be gone from me, to the schoolroom, to rules and regulations, so that he could learn to read and write and count and become a proper little Irishman during Mr DeValera’s Emergency. Makes my heart ache still, to think of it. But there we were, and me playing with him in the front garden. I had the box camera. I settled the child on top of one of the pillars by the gate, all ready to take a photograph. He still wore his little winter boots and the grey socks Mike’s aunt liked to knit. Terrible things to look at, but warm.

  ‘Now, mo pheata,’ I coaxed, ‘You give me that big smile of yours, the one your Mammy loves so well.’

  He knew how to charm, little man that he was. My heart filled with joy when he smiled and I looked down into the camera, transfixed by his broad grin and the small white teeth as he pulled his face wide just to please me.

  ‘Ah, there’s the good boy, the best boy ever!’ I crooned for a moment afterwards, scooping him off the pillar and into my arms. But this is the strange thing. I knew full well that my joy was not entirely for my son. I knew that my heart soared like a lark for Sean Flynn, who had just turned in the gate as I lifted the child down. I’ve heard of dentists who give laughing gas to their patients. Well, I imagine that if I had had laughing gas it might have felt as good as what ran through me just then. It wasn’t that I laughed
out loud. This was something within me, a spring in some secret mossy place that nobody before has ever discovered. I wanted to shout about it, to tell everyone, to let the spring overflow and make its way to the unknown, wild, beautiful ocean where I could dream and drown with the joy of it all. And I wonder if there’s a difference between dreaming and drowning?

  Sean was taken by surprise, seeing me there. Immediately, he put the bucket down on the gravel path, beside the polleny shrubs that tumbled around, never pruned when they should be.

  ‘May I take a picture of you? May I? I’d like to, if I may,’ he said, suddenly more polite and correct in his English than I had ever heard him before.

  I was wearing a big hat that day, and a new blue dress from Switzers of Dublin, and little cream leather shoes with fine double straps and the very latest heels.

  ‘Yes,’ was all I said.

  ‘You look a picture anyway, did you know that?’ he said then.

  ‘Thank you,’ I managed to reply.

  ‘Good enough to ate, a stoirin.’

  I could smell him. A clean sweat smell, I saw it moist on his neck as he craned sideways to see where he would take the photograph. Little did he know what torments his neck and throat were to me.

  ‘Now.’

  ‘Now what? I haven’t got all day,’ I began, then stopped myself. I can always sound more severe than I mean to.

  ‘Ah don’t be like that,’ he said.

  ‘Like what?’

  ‘Bossy. Mike’s wife.’

  ‘But that’s what I am.’

  ‘And my friend,’ he answered, his gaze firm.

  It took ages for him to decide where to put me. First he set me beside the sundial at the centre of the lawn, positioning me this way and that, with my head slightly raised. Then he changed his mind and set me standing beneath the lilac tree, looking away into the distance, as if I was thinking of something and not in the least aware that my picture was being taken.

  ‘You’re very fussy,’ I ventured to comment, watching him now as he took stock of the situation in a way I had never before seen.

  ‘A very important piece of technology, this,’ he said seriously, ‘and the photographin’ of a lady like yourself should be done proper.’

  In the end he made me go back to the sundial, leaning one elbow on the dial itself. Just as I settled myself, Pat the Wheels Lynch went by with his donkey and cart and two churns. He took a good gander in, his two eyes glued to the little scene in the garden. Even if the other business with the Germans had not happened, I was done for and I knew it. Next thing Pat would be down at the crossroads shop filling Mrs Sullivan and her nosey daughter Mary in on the sight he had beheld. But I did not care.

  ‘Now, turn towards me, no, no, look – wouldja folly me hand! Look where me hand is pointin’,’ he ordered. I did what I was told too, calm in those few moments when he held the shape of me in a little square bit of the box. It wasn’t that he was looking at me, so much as into that place called the soul, which the priesteens around the county so like to talk about, but with little understanding.

  Later, when the pictures came back from the chemist’s in New Ross, Mike hardly looked at the ones of me, though he took great care examining the child’s. It wasn’t that he was indifferent, so much as remiss. That happens, even with the best of husbands. Because they trust their wives, they forget that trust is not always to be guaranteed. Not long after that day, Sean kissed me. It was an awkward, short kiss, as if he was terrified, which he was, but I held on to him when the kiss had ended, because with that kiss, he entered a part of me that no one had ever before entered. I put my arms around him and hugged him very carefully, so that he would know I welcomed him. ‘There now,’ I whispered, ‘it’s all right, hush now …’

  There was a new sadness in his face that day as he left, as if he had been disturbed. Perhaps his feelings were in uproar like my own, raided with desire as if something from outside our lives had dropped on the pair of us.

  I still cannot believe what happened next. No, that is not true. But it confounds me. That summer was like any other until August, the days long, the fields and hedges and trees ripe. Meadowsweet, purple vetch, nettles, yarrow, the barley waving like a pale yellow sea. Sean and I whiled away many an hour together.

  According to his records, which I slip from the drawer every so often, Sean bagged three rabbits in August, four duck and three teal. The previous August, he had bagged thirty rabbits, three pigeon, two duck and three teal. He shot no duck the December before, but six snipe, three woodcocks and twelve rabbits.

  I will never know what notion took him that he stayed so long at the creamery restaurant that day. Probably to chat to the girls. What I remember is the whine, unlike anything I have ever heard before, getting louder and louder, so that we all knew it was not a fire siren, but something else, something deadly. The ferocious sound fell to its awful conclusion, thunder to cap all thunders, an earthquake sound because it seemed as if the whole world had been split asunder, a devilish, evil, roaring thing that shook us in our bones and souls. I was in the hen house just then. The children screamed with fright from further up the garden, then raced down to me and clung to my legs. I could feel their bodies atremble, even though my own legs went weak as water. People everywhere stopped what they were doing. I crossed my chest without thinking.

  That evening, when the worst was known, I could hardly stand for the weeping, so that Mike had to put the two boys to bed. I did not care. The Irish Independent carried a full account the following morning, although I did not read it for a week or more.

  Three girls – two of them sisters – and one man were killed and others were injured when the creamery in which they were working at Campile, Co. Wexford, was wrecked yesterday afternoon when a German aircraft dropped bombs in Campile, Ballynitty, Bannow and Duncormick. The dead girls are: Mary Kate Hoare, aged 35, and her sister, Catherine Hoare (25) of Bannow, and Kathleen Kenny (25) of Tacumshin. Mr Sean Flynn (44) of Campile, also died in the incident. They were at work in the restaurant of the Shelburne Co-operative Agricultural Society Ltd, when it was struck by a bomb and reduced to ruins. The bodies were buried beneath the debris and were dead when extricated …

  Rumours spread, of course. People said that Shelburne Creamery butter-wrappers had been found in Dunkirk and that the Germans must have thought it was a big source of butter to Britain. Others said the German pilot had lost his way, or that he was getting rid of his load before returning to base.

  It is no secret that I loved Sean Flynn. Mike knows it too, and has not been hard on me on account of it. Half the neighbourhood had been gabbing about us for a long time anyway. I imagine however, that none of them today lie awake at night thinking about me and my little problems. They have enough of their own.

  When I think back to before that time, I see my life running along smoothly, even though things often perplexed me. But I was happier than I knew. Everything was normal and ordinary, just as it is again. The ordinariness is not so good now. Nowadays, I live true to everything and everyone. I am what some might call genuine. I do not give a hoot for being genuine, not since Sean died. Through him I understood that surface sincerity was not everything; that sincerity has an underbelly that it is not always possible to be true to. Most people avoid that tender spot. It is the difference between a lake and the ocean. Both are water, but I would choose the ocean any day, for its greatness, its solid will. Nothing contains the ocean, only gravity.

  We never did more than kiss.

  CHERRY SMYTH

  Walkmans, Watches and Chains

  There was very little furniture in the room as if someone had forgotten to finish putting things in it or was thinking about moving away. There were no cushions on the green vinyl settee, no ornaments on the shelves. I knew then that he wasn’t married. There was a picture of the sea arch at the White Rocks above the mantelpiece. And some photographs.

  ‘Who’s that?’ I said.

  ‘That’s a photo of
my wee niece,’ he said. ‘A school photo.’

  I remember thinking he was OK if he had a niece, his own people. I remember feeling that I was the thing that finished the room.

  ‘You have lovely hair,’ he said.

  I’d heard that before. But not the way he said it. He said it as though he wanted it for himself, the way another girl would. ‘I’m growing it till I can sit on it.’

  ‘It must keep you warm at night,’ he said.

  I’d never thought of it. The word ‘warm’ rubbed up against ‘at night’ and made a buzz in the room I’d been listening out for. His bungalow was in a crescent that used to be a field and I could hear other children playing on the green circle of new grass in front of the houses, as if they were in another part of his house. Most of the crescent still had ‘For Sale’ signs. There was little traffic up there, which is why we used to race around it on our bikes and roller skates. It had nice smooth tarmac that turned off into each driveway like petals on a black flower.

  ‘So, the bike?’ I said.

  He’d been putting up a bird table on his lawn and had offered to fix my puncture. The bike was in the hallway. I talked to it like it was a live person, half-bike, half-boy. It wasn’t like going in there on my own, having my bike.

  ‘Let me give your hair a brush first,’ he said. ‘A hundred strokes.’

  ‘That’s alright,’ I said. I tidied my hair-band and flicked my hair off my shoulders. The blush fell around my neck.

  ‘I can make it more lovely,’ he said. ‘Silky-shiny.’

  He got up and took a hairbrush from the shelf. It was an old-fashioned one with yellow bristles and flowers pressed under the glass. It made me sad for him because it was some lady’s, and she was probably dead. He signalled with it and I took a step towards him and placed my feet together. He stood behind me and began to brush my hair. I looked at the fireplace rug and concentrated on where sparks had burnt little black holes in the pattern.