A Pagan Place Read online

  You were afraid of her. You said you had better be off. She said to please yourself. She gave you some change and called after you to mind the wolves but she did not convey you to the door. Going up the passage you tripped and it was something you had foreseen but could not prevent. On the way out you bought a cake. It was the only cake in the display case.

  In the street the lights were out. The couples allocated in doorways and alleyways, the way they were each night. They gasped and groaned, their mouths chirruped and their arms so encircled each other that their persons were indeterminate. They were a blaspheme. You ran. It was more assertive running over concrete. It drew attention to you. You tried to run on your toes. Your mother was waiting at the window. She did not start speeching like you thought, she went dumb. All the invective had gone into the walking and the waiting. She was meek, like a simpleton.

  You described the proceedings, Emma’s girl-friends, what they ate, what you ate and then at the very end Emma’s reluctance to see her. You sweetened that. You said Emma had to recuperate. The note was in little shreds along with your bus ticket.

  She asked some little particulars about Emma’s appearance and Emma’s apparel but on second thoughts begged not to be told. Slowly she began to gather the belongings and drop them into the suitcase. It was time to go. She had already secured a promise of a lift on a paper lorry. She had not done it personally but the driver was the dressmaker’s nephew and she was supposed to have written and squared it. You waited outside the door of the newspaper office. At times you stood out from the wall in an attempt to half sit. It blackened your hands and blackened the seat of your coat but she did not scold you. At other times you walked up and down to get warm. The cold did not seem to affect her. She was thinking. What was she thinking?

  Directly opposite was the river, the city’s brown river whose waters were alleged to have a peculiar softness, but no salmon leaping in it. You hadn’t tasted it. It wasn’t like Lourdes or a place where waters were passed around for cures, it was not a sacred river.

  She seemed mesmerized by it, kept staring, as if something important was going to emerge from it, a monster maybe. It had a tide like a sea tide. It lapped back and forth.

  The moment the newspapers were ready a bustle started up and very young boys emerged through the revolving doors, shouting. You would not have recognized the name of the paper only that you already knew it, so garbled was their speech. It was code, it was sing-song. They scattered in different directions. From the back of the building the engines of lorries started up and she hurried round in search of the Samaritan who was to bring her home.

  You stood holding your cakebox. The loop of the twine was like a ring on your little finger. It had eaten a ridge in your flesh. A couple of drunk men going by tried to engage you in talk and called you stuck up because you wouldn’t reply to them. They were very amused by the cake, the way you held it, they pretended to be carrying cakeboxes themselves and tiptoed back and forth past you ridiculing your daintiness. You went towards one of the newsboys to be rescued. It meant buying a paper. It had a funny smell and the print was moist. Down at the end of the page there was a line that had slipped away completely, a sentence that had no end. You moved into the porch to read the headings.

  CHEAPER CLOTHES COMING

  REFUSAL TO REMOVE AXIS

  DIPLOMATS

  DISCIPLINE PROBLEMS IN PARIS

  The woman’s nephew had had no warning but he gave you a lift all the same, even though it was against regulations. There were two other passengers, a man going home for his father’s funeral and a man who had to till his fields because they were in danger of being confiscated. You all had to sit in the back so as not to be seen. You each sat on a bundle of newspapers. They served as cushions of a kind.

  You were a sombre party. The man going home for the funeral had a fawn teddybear coat which meant he was prosperous. You were tempted to stroke it. A teddybear coat was one of your favourite garments.

  In each of the towns a bundle was dropped outside a newsagent’s door. The people were sleeping. The towns were the colour of a creamery tank, pewter. You said their names, you knew them off by heart, that long litany of names that charted the journey from the city to where you were conceived and born: Leixlip, Mountmellick, Port Darlington, Toomevara, Cloughjordan, Borriseykeane, Kenigad, Nenagh, Portroe – towns and townlands, meadows and chieftains, raspberries on canes, sundials and hounds and hallways, and two-roomed houses with a tangle of roses and damp clay. To think of such things was balderdash. Your mother would say so. Miss Bugler would not. Miss Bugler was in love with a married man. You saw them. She did not duck down, made a point of moving her head ever so haughtily on the axis of her long white neck. She was in love with Guard Cody. They were in her car but he drove it. They were parked in a lane. He had a jacket on instead of his tunic. They appeared to be talking gravely but you know that in the dark they would hearken to one another and hold each other, and kiss. That was love. Love was a condition of the heart, a malady. The heart was sachet-shaped. One day you would fall in love, one day, no, never.

  He made a detour to drop you by your own gates and when he refused the offer of tea your mother insisted on taking his name and address so that she could send him some table fowl. He hooted as he drove off and the dogs, aroused from sleep, came down to meet you. They came slowly, half-heartedly, they were not nearly so buoyant as when your father arrived back from the monastery.

  She made no reference to the baby, she simply said the end of an epoch. It would never be mentioned again; it would never be referred to, by name. You would pray for it, you would include it in your morning and night prayers, its welfare, its blood and the hope that someone would take pity on it in the orphanage and pamper it. The sky had puffs of pink that were moving about aimlessly. The house looked cheerful enough.

  Your father sat up in bed. He cried when he laid eyes on you. The skin falling away in folds from his Adam’s apple was like a turkey’s, slack and reddish, made him appear an old man, be the grandfather that he both was and wasn’t. He said he hadn’t slept a wink or had hardly broken his fast and your mother said it wasn’t all malarky in the city either but she was not going to relay it.

  He was thrilled with the paper. He thought it an ultra-modern thing to have a daily paper before the day began at all. The bedroom was cold. Your mother carried up a tray. The cake was yellow and she swore that powdered eggs had gone into it. A new patch of damp sprawled across the fireplace. It was overlaid on all the old patches that had disfigured the wallpaper and it was more drastic than any of them. He said there had been a deluge. They compared rainfall and it turned out that there had been less rain in the city. He said you ought all to move there and she said no, not for love nor money.

  He was reluctant to ask about Emma, but at last he did, said Well how was she, and then could not bring himself to utter her name. Your mother said she was her wilful, capricious and wayward self. She said she would tell him later. She winked, implying there were incidents she could not disclose in front of you but you knew it was a ruse to break it to him gradually and give him less of an excuse to go on a binge. Under the unlit lamp there were bills. Paraffin oil had trickled down and stained them. She knew what they were without having to ask. There was one from the Major for the horse’s keep and there were rates and one from a corn merchant for seed corn got a long time before.

  He looked at you and said he was financially embarrassed and you thought that the most pitiful thing he had ever said to you. He would sell another field. The estate would get smaller, the boundaries close in. At last there would be your own house only, your own house would become an ark, with cats and dogs and livestock and your mother and father and you, tossed together, for eternity.

  She said there was one favour that she would ask for. It was a telephone. He said by all means. He would have given her anything. He was filled with largesse. He said he could pull it, being a Peace Commissioner, he said ordinary people had t
o wait years for a telephone, but he was no ordinary person, oh no boy. That sparked him and so did the paper and so did the cake although it was made with powdered eggs.

  You were shivering both because the room was cold and because you hadn’t slept. She told you to snuggle into bed, to skip school. It was nearly light and lying down in bed you could see the tops of the black trees and the flecks of snow on the near-by hills. You were tired, and on the verge of sleep and you thought of yourself as jogging along in the back of the van through a succession of empty sleeping towns that were the colour of pewter. She brought you a stone hot water bottle. She put it at the end of the bed and you stretched your legs to reach it.

  She did not go to bed herself because she was anxious to get things in order, to get bread baked, to get the hen-house cleaned out, to get windows cleaned, to get things presentable again. The stone bottle was too hot. You pushed it towards the rungs of the bed and every so often you stretched so that your feet had the benefit of it but when it suddenly got unbearable you took your feet away. You realized that in hell you would have no such choice and the fire would be all around you, the tongues of flame touching every part of you, every zone, internal and external and the devils would be all around you stoking and hell and the sleeping towns and the jog-jog and the encompassing flames battled in your mind as you descended into sleep.

  Part Three

  Miss Bugler was dinning it into you. You tried to sing from high doh to low doh. You could not distinguish between one note and another. You were tone deaf. She hit the tuning fork and asked you to take the note but you could not understand what she was talking about. The sound of the fork cleaving the air was a metallic one and you could not reproduce it in your throat which was composed of muscle and tissue. It would have been easier to attempt a bird’s note.

  You were studying for a scholarship. You were cramming. You vouched that you would get it. You studied going home along the road and girls passed remarks. They sat in cliques, playing forfeits, and some went in pairs across fields to kiss and do things.

  You had kissed no girl since Jewel went away. She used to use some of her mother’s lipstick that smelt like raspberries. You could summon up that smell any time you wanted. And taste it too, its fragrance.

  The boys went home in cliques too. The boys were in a different school. Their teacher was descended from the Huguenots and had a flaming temper and got beset by more than one parent for doing grievous bodily harm.

  Your books had marks, thumb marks, daubs, various pressed flowers, and bits of nose-pick that had shrivelled and dried. You ripped the oilcloth covering off old books and covered those new ones that were in danger of dismembering because of being put to so much strenuous use. There was a shortage of brown paper. The pressed flowers went putrid, the sweeter they’d been, the more putrid they became. The books were bound with yellow gauze. You preferred those that had big print and decorative capital letters. When you brought the print right up to the bridge of your nose, you lost sight of everything. That was called not being able to see the wood for the trees.

  In the morning you tried to memorize what you had gone to sleep chanting. Often sleep cancelled it. You dreamed of a rubber dog having fits and of carrying vegetable marrows that were sprouting limbs, between the ridges of a ploughed field. Miss Bugler allowed you to take the infants class, to practise the method of teaching. You sat on the floor in a corner of the classroom. They all sat around you. You sat very ladylike. They didn’t care how they sat. Their knickers showed. The gussets showed. They played with plasticine. The plasticine was old and dry, the oils had gone out of it. The different colours were mixed in together so that it was streaked, but basically it was brown. They made figures and pots. They gave them names. One was called Giant’s House, Giant inside sleeping. It was a topnotch.

  You did not want to be a teacher. You wanted to be a specialist in a white coat with your nails varnished. Miss Bugler gave you extra tuition. She smoked in front of you. You sucked mints together. You had the wrong vocal chords for French. She said Oui, oui, oui, oui, but you could not grasp it. She was nice about it, told you to lose your inhibition. Your mother put your supper down beside you. It was boiled egg. She said to eat it or it would get cold. If there was a blood spot on the yolk it meant you would pass your exam. There wasn’t. The yolk was all runny, she put the top back on it and stood the eggcup on the pot of boiling water to harden it a bit.

  A man with a slashed face kept looming up in your thoughts, someone you must have seen in the city. Emma sent sausages for Christmas. Wrote Perishable Goods on the outside. She parboiled them to keep them from going off.

  Christmas morning there was a row. Went into a tantrum because he couldn’t find the suspenders to keep his socks up. She said he’d done without them all the year round so why the sudden impetus to keep his socks up. While he was still threatening to maim her she left for Mass. Luckily the turkey was already in the oven, sizzling away. There was a white frost. The grass was like ostrich feathers, each blade a plume of white. Her shoes and your shoes rasped. There were a few stars left in the sky, a few who had omitted to go. The trees were very stark with their characteristics showing, their knots and their tumours and their branches and their twigs. Some had tapering twigs and some there were with twigs like prongs, out to afflict. The gates looked imposing because of the whiteness, looked like gates leading to a palace. The cows had been foddered and the sops of hay in their mouths hung in loose wisps like beards.

  That had maddened him, having to get up early and exert himself. It was less slippery in the gutter than in the middle of the road. You clung to each other for support. She had no money for the collection. She said she would have to pretend that she forgot and by the following Sunday have it scraped together. She had arranged to sell two old hens that were past laying, to the proprietor of the hotel. They would be served there for supper one evening to the residents and the visiting commercial travellers. You said Happy Christmas over and over again. People said likewise to you. There were twelve days and twelve nights until little Christmas and it was doubtful that they could all be happy, that they could all be harmless.

  On the altar there were white flowers. You had heard about them. They had been sent from the city by a benefactor. The sacristan had told it in confidence. They were sent in cellophane with pillows of white paper between the blooms to keep them from bruising one another. They were chrysanthemums. They were at either side of the tabernacle in units of six.

  Everyone went to Holy Communion except your father and the tailor. They were the only two people to stay kneeling while the entire congregation went back and forth to the rails, bumping into each other because of the half-light and their solemnity. Your father must have broke out, must have drank tea to assuage his temper. The tailor must have touched girls’ diddies. The tailor’s wife had a hat with a feather. It was very life-like and comical. When she moved her head the feather moved and it was like seeing a bird sauntering on a hillside. She was two ahead of you in the queue for the rails.

  After communion you had this funny feeling in the pit of your stomach, trickly, the same as when you used to tickle yourself, only you did nothing to bring it about. You no longer tickled yourself. You thought it might be due to hunger because of having to fast before going to Holy Communion, then again you thought it might be a touch of religious ecstasy. You knew that saints experienced such things and levitated. You were fearful about the commotion your levitation would cause. It did not occur. When you were back to normal you dwelt on a treat that you were going to have. There was trifle in the vestibule, setting, and you conspired to go in there with a tablespoon and scoop up big mouthfuls, with bits of peach and jam and angelica in each dollop.

  The priest said prayers for peace. All the men used the same hair oil, a creamy one. Some were lavish with it. It lay in lathers on their crowns, on their hair, or in the absence of hair, on their bald pates. The bald heads stood out. There were quite a number of them.
r />   After lunch everyone felt drowsy because of having over-indulged. The Nigger ate seventeen roast potatoes and your Aunt Hilda was the runner-up by eating six. The Nigger had to stretch himself before going out to do manoeuvres. Your mother disinfected the chair when he had gone, sprinkled Jeyes fluid on it and with the floor cloth wiped the rungs. Men assembled in uniform. Some had shotguns. They split into two groups, the attacked and the attackers. Your mother wiped the steam off the window and looking out said she could foresee consequences, an arm or a limb getting shot off. But she was laughing. Your aunt said wasn’t it amazing how not one uniform fitted properly, how couldn’t they have swopped them around and been less hickish about it. Your father said God help the country. Some of the men ducked down and were bombarded by other men. There were sporadic shots and a variety of reverberations. Those who did not take coverage in time had to act dead. They were prostrate on the frozen ground. The dogs found it invigorating and began barking and gambolling around.

  You went outside. The sky was grey and woolly. The sky was flocculent. The dogs unearthed some hares and rabbits and what should have been a military occasion turned into a hunt. Your mother said with a bit of luck they might kill a fox. There was a five-shilling reward if a fox’s tongue or tail were presented at the barracks. The sergeant used one as a mascot in his car.

  The following Sunday the priest referred to the manoeuvres and said co-ordination was called for. A cousin of yours came and made them do marching, do left-right, left-right. Then a battle took place. One unit had to advance and be ambushed by a smaller unit. The ambushers threw grenades, which were clods of earth, at the marching troops. The men that got clouted were livid and lost their tempers and it all became very personal as those that had long-standing grudges against each other took the opportunity to take revenge. There were fist-fights with other echelons on the sideline cheering and spurring things on. Your cousin said it was a real fiasco. He took a clothes brush to his uniform. Your mother admired it, the cut and the cloth. He said American taste was best in everything. He was a G.I. He had a twang. He had come from Germany to look for graves and ancestors but your father was the only thing he located. Your father asked him was he afraid in the trenches and he said not exactly. They said unfathomable things. She called the white frost black and the Nigger said it was too cold to snow even though snow was the coldest thing there was. Your cousin exposed his chest to you. It was sinister. It was densely matted with black hair and he had nipples and they were mauve. They protruded.