A Pagan Place Read online

  So it was urine. You elbowed your mother. She shook her fist at you to shut up. The hall door was shut but they could be heard clearly both because they were shouting and because two of the panes of stained glass were missing and the pieces of cardboard put in their place were missing too. She shielded the candle flame with her cupped hand. When they started to walk round the side of the house she hurried to be in the kitchen ahead of them and though she could have slain the doctor she bade him good evening in her customary diffident way.

  But she was quaking. He put the lantern on the kitchen table with a thud. He was more gaunt than ever. There were two lights at the very time when a candle would have been excessive. The doctor kept blinking behind his glasses, was dazzled by the double assault on his eyes.

  He tackled her. She was servile. She said she had been his wife, his obedient servant for upward of eighteen years. He said a nice thing, an obedient thing to hoodwink a man in his own house and did she think she’d go unharmed, because to disabuse herself of that. He said first and foremost to bring Emma out from under the bed so that he could gruel her and kick the guts out of her and give her the real Ally Daly of a beating.

  She said for God’s sake not to be like that, to let them club together and marshal their strength in their hour of need. He said he knew what he would marshal and took off his hat and began to go for her.

  She said to have his will with her because she was already expiring and that it would be a mercy to finish her. The doctor intervened, said the situation was rife with anomalies. That made him gape.

  The rhubarb pies had burnt to a cinder and there was an atrocious smell. He said what a fine mess they were in, what a stew. The tea things were not cleared away. She begged him to sit, to restrain himself, to decide a plan of campaign.

  She put three chairs close together for them to confer. He kicked one chair out of the way. Ambie let out two pronounced coughs to make known he was there in the event of combat. She had inveigled him to stay in and had installed him with three bottles of stout and a few hastily done ham sandwiches.

  Your father opened the door intending to start the fracas but the moment he got the smell of the stout he proposed a drink. She gesticulated to say they had none. She was as versatile as the dummies. He said enough codswallop had gone on. He knew that the wines made from berries were in bottles disguised under bits of cloth and stuck up the clefts of unused chimneys, fermenting, changing from fruit drink to wine drink, for the day when some visitor might call for hospitality. He said Shag it, she had her own jollop.

  The doctor raised his hand and said firmly that if he had anything it would have to be spirits, some dry satin gin, because wine disagreed with his digestion. He meant of course her wine. For a minute the big dilemma was should they go to the pub or send the youngster for a bottle. She pleaded with the doctor not to go, not to leave.

  You were torn in your wishes. It meant another expedition for you down the fields but at night now, with all the dangers that lurked. You insisted on walking. On a bicycle you could be surrounded, capsized, cornered, gripped, but not on foot because you were fleet of foot. Even your father admitted that. She stayed out of doors and every so often you said Yoo-hoo to make certain that she had not reneged. Her replies were faintness itself. You did not look to left or right into spheres of darkness and you did not look down either for cowpats or for stones though your feet had to contend with both. The small stones that your feet encountered made a steady racket as they rose and fell to a definite cacophony. You were hailed in the village. You were saluted by old men who had to ask other men aloud what your first name was.

  The publican wrote the debt into the ledger and said it was a pleasure, his pleasure, and asked how your mother and father were and all their worldly goods and chattels. He asked if you wanted any trimmings with it, any mineral water or any It. It was what ladies added to their drinks to make them into cocktails, but knowing that neither your mother, Emma or you would be imbibing, you said no and thanked him, but feebly.

  There was no topic to compete with Emma’s that night. The wireless was on but nobody was listening to it. The bottle was bulbous shaped. You held it to your breast, clasped it like a baby. He had put newspaper round it.

  Your mother put a trickle in a glass, then drowned it with sugar and water. That was for him. She gave the doctor a huge measure. As soon as he tasted his he put the tumbler down and said to cut out the namby-pamby and walked to the pantry where she had put the remainder under a colander, alongside some cold cabbage. To spite her he put the bottle to his lips and said to the doctor to forgive the contamination but that a man in his position needed the patience of Job. He brought out the cold cabbage for the doctor to help himself to. It was green cabbage and some strips were darker than others and the stalk was soft and white.

  He stamped on a newly lit cigarette. The doctor said Now, now, said that equilibrium was called for, and to bow to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. He winked at you when saying that. Your father began rolling up his sleeves. The doctor said they all had the same failing, hasty tempers and how it got them into scrapes all over the place and your father laughed recalling fist-fights about such issues as the best goalie in the county or the maiden name of John McCormack’s mother. Your father said that one thing he always made a point of was to stand a round of drinks after the furore had died down. The doctor said that was a good ruse, not to burn one’s boats completely. Your mother ran her thumbnail against the grain of her lisle stocking and you pressed your hands to both ears to blot out the sound and there was buzzing in your head, but then you removed your hands so as to be alert for the arrival of Emma. You reckoned that she was outside the dispensary, skulking in the doorway like a hen. The lantern gave a few puffs and then went out. Nobody bothered to wind down the screw. He said she was to make tea and toast.

  Making toast involved opening the bottom door of the cooker, taking out a metal rack and holding the bread in close to the fire. She used the worst fork. She could have chosen a longer one, but she was bent on sacrifice. She buttered each slice as it was made and crushed the crusts with a knife to soften them. She gave it to them slice by slice in turn. She coughed a lot, dry conspicuous coughs with no phlegm in them.

  There was something wrong with your swallow. It was like the day you ate the oyster, only you were choking from within yourself and the saliva kept threatening to engulf you. The doctor said the youth of the country had gone to hell, he cited his own son, called him a young lad instead of his name, which was Terence. She said Emma was always given too much latitude and too much longitude, by some. The doctor said that children were almost inevitably a disappointment, except for the infant muling and puking who provided some sort of puppy pleasure. She supplied a proverb: Sharper than a serpent’s tooth is thankless child. Then she looked at you and said Not you darling.

  The darling was like an embrace in the big sorrowful kitchen. Your father said that he would have to marry her. She just nodded her head, she made no mention of the diary, no mention of the fact that there was a cavalcade of men, of suitors. The doctor said it was their blackest hour, their Via Dolorosa. She relished that.

  Ambie appeared. He made sure not to look at her because of having bungled the night’s arrangements. He had assured her that the doctor would be waiting to receive Emma in the dispensary. The doctor got it wrong being inebriated. Ambie kept eyeing the gin but was offered none. The level was sinking rapidly. Your father was insisting that when Emma showed up the doc must take her upstairs for a last thoroughgoing examination. Your mother was against that. The doc said they would decide anon. You were asked to leave.

  You tiptoed out of the kitchen and through the hall. You crept into a downstairs room and nearly fainted, because there she was, there someone was, on a sofa, sobbing. You yelled. She cautioned you to shut up. They called in to know what ailed you and you said you had tripped on a biscuit tin, that was all.

  She had climbed in the window. You closed
the door. She was crying. It was more pitiful than any you had heard before. It was more like retching than crying.

  You asked what was the matter. She said she could not bear to tell you. You asked three times, in the same tone of voice. Your voice was pinched, and your heart too, your heart was like a fist, clenched.

  She said the doctor had just told her the sad news that she was barren and how it would jeopardize her chances of marriage. You did not know which to say first, whether to say he was in the kitchen, or to tell her that she was not barren, she was not like Sarah the wife of Abraham, or to ask if her husband-to-be was called Tony, short for Anthony. In the dark you were only shapes to each other and it was a mercy that you did not have to look her in the eye. You wanted to put your arms around her but something stopped you, something in her repelled you. Her sins.

  Her talk was scattered. She said she would shake them, she would give your mother something to atone for. She said like Caesar she could declaim Veni, vidi, vici. She said your mother had warped and coddled you but then she took that back and said that you were a mite and that she loved you almost. She said that in the spa town she and another had jitterbugged and had brought the crowd to a halt. She said she was taking up fencing. She said the diary was nothing but a pastime and that anyone who couldn’t see that was very narrow-minded indeed. She expressed a desire for Bovril. She said the dispensary was a dungeon. She said the doctor was good at diagnosing but very abrupt and had told her about being barren without as much as offering a handshake.

  You tried to get a word in, you kept saying Please Emma, and she said she wanted no sympathy, no commiseration, she would brave it alone the way she had braved everything and you said Please Emma and the door flew open and they appeared with Ambie a few paces behind, holding the lamp. He held it high and a little to one side to give himself a full view.

  Suddenly it was like a tribunal with them on one side and Emma backing away in the direction of the fire-place. Her feet were very far apart and the bow of her legs more pronounced than ever. She had had rickets when young, another thing which she held against her mother. She was like the curlew, the grallatorial bird, in the lurch.

  Your father went towards her to hit her but the doctor pulled him back and said to keep in mind her condition, perfidious though it was. Your mother said she was a fully-fledged street-walker. Your father asked what pack of lies she would like to unleash before he polished her off. She turned to the doctor and said could she have a word with him in private. Your father said all the private shit was over and that it was now in the public domain. A tick, she said, to straighten something out. He said no more shit, no more tautology.

  He kept telling her to dry up, and at the same time plying her with questions, demanding a complete dossier on all her activities. Every time he approached her she took a few steps to the side to try and thwart him. He said ducking him was no good. He said it was her last moment under his roof.

  She appealed to the doctor to side with her. He nearly succumbed but your father intervened and said what a traitor he was, what a turncoat. He called for an examination there and then, pointed to the couch. Your mother said to have some decency, some vestige of it. Emma went to your mother then but your mother said it was no use currying favour with her, no use at all.

  From the way she shivered it was evident that she thought they were going to kill her. Her movements were beyond her governing, legs, knees, teeth, everything, chattered. The doctor said Steady now, and tried to improve his focus by taking off his glasses, and rubbing both of his eyeballs roughly and putting his glasses back on again. Your father asked if it could be prevented. The doctor said that was a moot point. Your father said wasn’t there ergot. Your mother uttered an ejaculation, a grandiloquent one, recalled the incident of the doctor’s maid and the nine layers of blood-soaked newspaper. Ambie got shifty, went to the window and looked out at the dark night and started to whistle. Your father said he wanted something done and pronto at that. The doctor said indeed. Your father said it was a little matter of circumventing nature. The doctor said there was such a thing as professional ethics. Your father said to ethic his arse and play ball and do something. The doctor said to cut out the follols and put it in plain speaking, and was it to terminate a life he was being asked, was that the gist. Your mother said In the name of God. Your father said everyone was putting the wrong construction on his idea. Your mother said But. Your father said to but him no buts. The doctor said to remember the Fifth Commandment, Thou Shalt Not Kill. Your father went back on it then, said his head was addled, said everyone was against him, conspiring.

  Emma clutched her stomach. It was hard to think that something else breathed in her. You couldn’t accept it. It needed a squeal or a pram to convince you of a baby. Her death would have simplified everything then. It was the only solution. It was what you all wanted, her death and her burial. Ambie sighed and put the lamp on the table with faulty castors and as your mother ran to rescue it Emma fell in a heap on the floor. The gruelling was too much for her.

  The two emergencies took everyone by surprise. The doctor went to her, picked her arm up, felt her pulse, winked, said she would be better before she was twice married. Your mother made no secret of the fact that she found his remark in extreme bad taste. Emma refused to say anything.

  She looked scandalous. The hooks and eyes of her skirt were wide open. You invented penances for her, for her face to be covered in sweat, her hair streaming, her walking on a bed of nails, going towards an altar with an agnus dei, a lamb of God, prostrating herself, getting cleansed, getting forgiven, eventually getting canonized. The doctor said a bit of sedation was called for and your father said strychnine would be better and he stressed the dosage in case anyone thought he was feigning it.

  You had a heartburn. The yolk of an egg burnt in your gullet. Your mother told her to get up and compose herself. Lying with her legs apart it was as if she was waiting to be sacrificed there and then. The doctor began to be practical. He told her they would have to find the gent in question and have banns read and arrange for wedding bells. Poor Emma he said, in the lexicon of youth, poor Emma. Your father told her to speak up, to give the man’s name, occupation, earnings and character. Your mother said not to use the word character in that context. Your father told your mother to keep out of it, that it was business between men and he and the doctor hefted Emma on to the leather pouffe. She swayed. They got from her a name and a working address for the man she held responsible. She didn’t know his home address. Idiotically she told them that he was one of a family of seven.

  Your mother, who knew the disclosures in the diary took no interest in the plot that was being hatched to find this man and get him to the altar. She started tidying, she straightened the antimacassars and thumped the cushions. She said Emma might as well go to bed.

  Emma rose and headed for the door. Your father said did she want grub. She said no. He said to do as she was told. Your mother said to let her off. He said he wanted none of her invective and to go and polish his good shoes because he and the doc had a call to make, to thrash things out, to decide on protocol, to get the bugger to the altar without any snags. She went behind his back and beckoned to the doctor not to encourage him in that escapade. In the shoe closet mice had congregated. There was a smell of leather and the perspiration from the insides of shoes.

  He hurrahed when he saw the mice, asked for the salt cellar, said

  There’s going to be a race,

  Five asses and a ginnet

  And I bet you two to one

  That the Father’s ass will win it.

  He said mice could be stopped in their tracks, mystified, by putting salt on their tails and he tried it and when it didn’t paralyse them he flung shoes, a last, every conceivable object. The doctor and he took bets as to who would make the first slaughter. They were exhilarated by it. The mice went clambering up the walls in desperate attempts to escape the various peltings. The salt cellar got emptied. A dying mou
se let out a last and unbecoming screech and he asked your mother to loan him a tanner so that he could honour his debt. He was livid at having lost.

  In the morning she put on her good corset which meant she was making a journey. He shaved on the kitchen table and she put saucers as protection over the milk, the butter and the sugar. He held his face sideways and drew the razor quickly over his jaw. In disposing of the lather he managed to strew blobs everywhere except in the small china bowl that she had given him for the purpose. She was fearless, taxed him with his crudeness of the night before, said he had shown his true colours. He looked at her with the razor poised in her direction, and though all of her was immobile, her Adam’s apple kept jumping up and down. When she did not cower he laughed and asked if she’d got out the wrong side of the bed. He said there was no fooling him and that to admit it that she was thrilled at the excuse of having a day out, a day in the metropolis.

  When Emma appeared he was the one to suggest that she eat something and she was the one who quickly and pointedly removed the jam in order to deprive Emma of a delicacy. Alone at the far end of the table Emma chewed bread distractedly. You had this silly thought that if you met him you might fall in love with Emma’s intended and she and you would be contending for him. Your mother mixed various foodstuffs for you to give to the hens throughout the day. You wished that you could go.

  He was civil to Emma. He asked was it so that the manager of a big hotel had lost his only son in a bus accident. Emma said yes. He said he heard that it was like a battlefield, all the dead bodies, all the carnage and Emma said being a bus-load it probably was.

  You kept passing bread to her and when they were leaving you kissed her good-bye, anxious to give her that sign, that little token of loyalty. You tidied. You read a poem called The Hound of Heaven, how the hound of Heaven pursued a soul. You could picture the hound running round and round, tracking this soul, this Emma, fleeing it down the days and down the nights and down the arches of the years. The doctor had termed it copulation, you would look up that word in the dictionary, in the school dictionary, one day, in time to come. The doctor’s maid had told someone that once a woman got a taste for it she could never give it up, it got to be a craving, like a craving for sweet things or cigarettes. You could picture them calling at the office of Emma’s intended, his being told to go out in the corridor to receive a deputation. You felt for him even though you didn’t know him, hadn’t even seen a photo of him. You tried standing on one foot, without wobbling, so that everything would be all right. If you could do it for sixty seconds it meant he would marry her. Standing on your right foot was easier than standing on your left, the opposite would have been the case if you had been left-handed. You were not left-handed but you were double-jointed. There would be a wedding, but not a white wedding. You might be bridesmaid. His parents and your parents would meet.