A Pagan Place Read online

  The Major was studying the design of the marble fireplace and saying what blinking craft had gone into it. He said it would fetch a nice penny at an auction and your father said what a pity it was a fixture, or it could be sold. You did the daftest thing, you handed your father the sixpence. He said what was that for. You said for overheads. He laughed. The Major laughed. He pretended to keep it. He called your mother in to tell her what a generous girl you were and she too was touched and half in sadness and half in happiness she said to the Major that between you and your father there was a real bond but neither of you would ever admit it.

  The Major said love was a deuced thing. No one knew what he meant, just like when the Matron had said that the Nigger’s kiss was like a swab. Your father handed you the sixpence and, mortified now, you used the thin edge to push back the skin and give your nails some halfmoons.

  She asked the Major to wait for lunch although she had no intention of cooking any. The incident had mellowed her. He said there was nothing he would like better, but that if he wasn’t back, his cook would never let him hear the end of it. They were having jugged hare. The Major said that a man was as beholden to his cook as to his wife and your father said wasn’t it a bind to be bullied by one of your own servants and he made some reference to his nanny, how they used to have to humour her by giving her port wine. The Major said apropos of nothing how he liked to take his exercise after lunch to work off the fat and he said there was no better way of seeing the world than from a horse. Your father agreed.

  He had rapport with horses but he never rode them. He put ropes round their necks and ran with them to break them in. It was always a crucial affair and your mother used to implore him to at least do it in the walled garden so that the horse could not campaign too far or too calamitously.

  The Major and he did not get around to discussing business because the moment he had drained his glass the Major said he must be on his way. It was left pending. Your mother was ripping. The dogs chased the car as far as the gate. Your mother rinsed the glass to remove the whiskey smell and said to your father why hadn’t they got down to brass tacks. The plan was that the Major would train the filly and that they would jointly own her. Your father said that not everyone was as precipitate as she and that it took men two or three meetings to measure each other’s calibre. Your father added that Rome was not built in a day. Your mother said he was very quick with the proverbs but she was not incensed over it.

  In the sunlight the hens’ droppings were a startling sight. Forty-three hens had done their different droppings on the flag. You threw buckets of rain water on it then swept it with a coarse brush. Then you cycled up down and around, cycled maniacally, tinging the bell, taking your hands off the handlebars, squeezing the brakes, anything to pass the time.

  When Emma got off the train it was pitch. She said how quiet, how balmy the country air was. The porter looked at her astonished. She had an accent. She told your father that she had been treated to tea and scones on the train by an industrialist. Your father said a man like that was worth knowing, worth cultivating; added that he himself might be needing a bit of farm machinery later on and might be able to get it at cost price through the influence of such a man. Emma made no rejoinder.

  In the car you touched her hair, but lightly, so that you were not sure if she felt it. She asked how was mummy. Your mother was at home doing last minute things, slicing the cold meat, distributing the pickle mush, laying serviettes out. A car coming in the opposite direction didn’t dim. Emma told the driver not to dim either and was very adamant about it. The headlights of the other car enraged her. A rabbit crouched in the middle of the road and it reminded your father of the Major and the jugged hare. Your father said they ought to kill it and bring it home and jug it for your mother. It must have been diseased because it refused to budge and the car had to skirt round it. Each time when you touched her hair you thought of things that you might say to her, such as Hello, or that the bicycle was pumped up or that you had a silk hankie for her.

  She got a gala welcome. The new guard was there. Lizzie had put on rouge and even Ambie had deigned to stay in. First thing Emma did after kissing your mother was to pick up the guard’s melodeon, strap it over her shoulder, and attempt to play. The guard put his fingers over hers and taught her a tune that was all the rage at the time. It was about little holly trees and little babbling brooks and pulled at everyone’s heartstrings.

  Emma was wearing a black crêpe dress and white sandals with wedge heels. The heels were made of cork. She’d got fat. When Lizzie remarked on it Emma was livid, said on the contrary, she had lost weight. Your mother said she didn’t want to hear any talk of diets or starvation because everything was to be eaten up. Emma was told about Miss Davitt and she impressed everyone by saying that she had seen it in the paper and had already arranged to have a Mass said.

  Then your mother asked Lizzie and your father to tell jointly about the horse and the banana but they clashed over the order of events. Your Aunt Bride described the day at the seaside, the waves, the rock formation, the cries of the birds, plaintive and otherwise, but it was the same as if she was talking to herself because she kept looking down and picking up crumbs on the base of her fingers and dropping them again. Her comments drew no applause from anyone.

  Then Emma conducted the conversation. She told how two American soldiers went to an ice-cream parlour in the city and asked for two nice cups of coffee like the sweet American girls and was asked by the waitress Black or White, sir?

  Ambie applauded that, and your father asked Emma to tell it again and begged of everyone else to shut up. He was very testy and wanted Emma to talk exclusively to him.

  Then your father told about Ambie and his friend Jacksie eating a chicken that wasn’t drawn and getting sick over in the forge and Lizzie said not at table and burped, but your father went on about how they had tasted bits and enjoyed them immensely but when Jacksie stuck the spoon in to haul out the stuffing something else altogether shot in his face, some oats and the two of them had to run for it to the back of the forge and be sick. The chicken was a gift from a man who had come to have his horse shod.

  Emma changed the subject by saying that a head of cabbage varied in price from one shop to another as much as twopence a head and how towards the end of the week she had to go far afield for hers. Your father said what a shame and to think he threw cabbage to the cattle and what a pity he could not send her some. He did not add that it was riddled with holes and it took twelve heads to make a saucepan full and how your mother had to chop it away until she got to the heart where the slugs found it harder to penetrate, the heart being tightly bunched and impenetrable.

  Emma called your mother Mummy, and your father Daddy and made frequent use of the other people’s first names. You blinked to get attention and your father told you to stop blinking. Emma sent you upstairs for her handbag. In it, there was her diary, leather-bound and with a pencil attached, a small bottle of gin, pearled nail varnish, nail varnish remover and a piece of soiled cotton wool that had traces of lipstick and suntan lotion.

  Emma’s legs were very brown. In one house that she visited there was a heated swimming pool and spare sets of togs for visitors. At midnight a butler had served hot bouillon, then rashers and eggs. Emma said he had gloves on and your father said that would be the next thing your mother would be doing, putting gloves on to pass pieces of cake. When you got back Lizzie was spanning Emma’s waist and saying how she mustn’t lose her figure. Lizzie’s fingers were long, the nails sharp and clayed and it was like seeing antennae trying but failing to enclose Emma’s waist.

  Hilda who was expected didn’t arrive and your father remarked on her handsomeness and there followed a heated argument as to what was the difference between handsome and pretty. Ambie said Dorothy Paget was his idea of beauty and described what jowls she had. He had seen her at the races masticating chicken. Ambie and his friend Jacksie cycled to the races every year and stayed in a hotel bu
t didn’t leave their shoes out for polishing in case of theft. Your father went too but he was always in a different enclosure where he could be near the horses and chat with the trainers and get tips. Ambie voted for Dorothy Paget and the guard said it was hard to surpass Greer Garson but he knew someone who did and he looked at Emma. Lizzie said everyone was nothing in the end but a heap of flesh and bones and your father said brusquely that that did not take away from Emma’s lustre.

  Your Aunt Bride said that in her estimation both girls were beautiful and your mother said to your father that it wasn’t fair to single out one above another and that anyhow beauty was in the eye of the beholder. There were tears in your eyes and hot tears going down the back of your throat which you were endeavouring to swallow. The conversation got stifled.

  The guard stood up to leave. Only then was it noticed that the dogs had been indoors all the time, under the table, and they had to be given mutton to lure them out. Bran, the dog named after the chieftain, often refused to go, had to be badgered, and often when he got as far as the door and saw the bribe that was awaiting him, the crust of bread, or the bone, or whatever, returned to his haunt under the table. Your father gave them a kick to usher them down the steps.

  The sky was a deep blue and riven with stars. There was a slight breeze and the rustle that the trees always gave. The new guard looked up, said If you could wish upon a star, and went down the steps, floundering. Emma had made another conquest.

  In the middle of the night you found her peering down the lavatory bowl with a candle held down to assist her vision. You thought it was an earring she had lost, or a hairpin, or a tooth. My aunt, my aunt, Emma said in a very jubilant voice as she flushed the lavatory. You were afraid she would waken the house. She asked if you knew what she meant, if you were acquainted with the facts of life, and you said yes, but haltingly. Blood flowed from you, came upon you unsuspectingly when you were on a roadside where you had gone to sit and see horses and caravans and animals file past as the travelling circus came into town.

  You were able to provide her with the necessary and two large safety pins. Your mother had made the napkins herself, they were big and ungainly, with herring bone stitch in other colours along the hem. They were white. Emma thanked you and closed her bedroom door to be private for a minute while she put it on, then opened it and said to sit by her for a while, to sit and chat, for old time’s sake. It was like a song the way Emma worded it. You sat outside the covers with the eiderdown around you.

  She said to give her all the latest, the scandals, the summonses and the amatory pursuits. You could only think about Jewel and how she was going to a convent where she would be taught deportment as well as academic things. Emma said in the joint where she went there were dumb-bells and barbells but they were only used to put on a display for a bishop whose calls were few and far between. Emma had been to a convent of lesser renown.

  You told her they were digging for gold in the mountains. She said if they got any to let her know, to let her know anyhow and she giggled. You touched her toes outside the covers and in one rush all the friendliness that was between you came back and took possession of you and you were her slave. You asked to be told more about the city and the sights. She said she was so popular with bus conductors that she almost never had to pay her fare. You asked if she had a boyfriend and she said hosts. She couldn’t wait to get back to the city, she had come only to please the folks.

  This Dump, This Dump! she said. The room was an insult, a paper fan in the fireplace, soot behind that, a chair with a broken back, trunks with school books in them, the press where the cling peaches lay, and a fitted wardrobe with two wire hangers for her clothes. She had thrown the bulk of her things over the chair and she promised that next day she would allow you to fit them on.

  You said that if you could borrow a bicycle the two of you might go down to the lake and sit by the water’s edge and paint your nails. Emma said the boatmen going by would take the dangling of your fingers to be hellos, and would come and abduct you away. She took the gin bottle from her bag and said she had proved that for menstrual pains there was nothing to beat it. She let you taste it.

  You told her about the Major coming and how your father hadn’t touched the whiskey but Emma did not want confidences like that. She asked how the hot water situation was, because she liked lolling in her bath, in fact she said it was one of her primary pleasures to loll in the bath and with her big toe to keep turning the hot tap on and off. She said the name of the bath oil she used. She described how it made a veneer on the surface of the water and how it had the perfume of the woods. The woods Emma conjured up were not like the ones beyond the window where the old trees reigned and the badgers roamed and the dogs convened at night, Emma’s woods were bright and blossomy as in an operetta.

  When she fell asleep you folded the sheet back so that the blankets would not tickle her chin and you token-kissed her, you brought your face near enough to be able to feel her breath and then you let your breaths mingle but you did not touch her cheeks or her lips.

  You slept it out. You had to miss school. There was sleep in the four corners of your eyes, yellow crystals that you wormed out. They were like grains of sugar between your fingers. Emma called you a little minx, said you had slept it out on purpose. She and you had boiled eggs for breakfast. She ate hers so thoroughly that the inside was as bald as the outside shell. She had eaten the thin skin around the albumen. You didn’t do that, you didn’t follow suit. Afterwards she forced her spoon through the shell for fun, and you did the same. They were egg spoons, smaller than the teaspoons and they were yellow from years and years of contamination with sulphur.

  It was teeming rain. The rain fell perpendicularly and made a sound as of bullets. Your father trod on the spaces between the sheets of newspaper that she had put down to protect the tiles. There was different-coloured muck, brown and ochre muck on the soles and up the sides of his heavy boots. He had taken a short cut through a ploughed field, did it so as not to be too long absent from Emma and the entertainment of the kitchen.

  The water ran down the brim of his hat and down the length of his oilskin coat and created a pool on the floor. A reminder of when the dogs were pups but there was no smell from it, there was no smell attached to rain itself. It brought out the smell of whatever it touched, the fibre of cloth, the dankness of mushrooms, the inner unction of trees. When he removed his hat and coat everything within reach got a ducking. Emma put her hand over her correspondence. He touched her wrist and begged her forgiveness. It was coy. His hat was a very dark brown from the rain, and he explained to her that its true colour was buff. His hand lingered over hers. She spurned it.

  The hens’ trough was full of water. It had rained at least two inches. The hens’ trough was two inches deep and V-shaped. She tipped it upside down. You helped her scoop out the food, she used a broken garden shovel, you used a lath of wood. The hens were reluctant to come out of their house. One came, then the cock came, then they all came. They were not discerning, they all convened at one end of the trough leaving masses of untouched food at the other end. The door latch was wet, and overlaid on the wet was grey mash from her hands. The dogs got in. He shouted at you to get them out.

  Emma put the letters she had written in her cardboard writing case and tied the two ends of thin ribbon together. You longed to know who she had written to. She used her saucer as an ashtray. She chain-smoked, drank tea with hardly any milk, only a sensation of milk, as she put it. She wound her watch and asked at what time the doctor finished in the dispensary. She said she did not want to go to his house because that would make it into a social occasion. Your mother asked what was it then if not a social occasion. Emma said she had a little ailment and that she would like a consultation about it. Your father said that if it was her stomach she could use some of his jollops. Sometimes it was thought his ulcer was peptic and sometimes duodenal. The symptoms varied and so did the degree of pain. He even credited himself with ha
ving both. Emma said it wasn’t digestive trouble and left it at that. She made it clear that she did not want it enlarged upon.

  The pools of water on the road were deep and mud-coloured and the two times when a car went by the back of her legs got spattered and she consulted them to see if her suntan lotion had got smudged. She decided to let the spatters dry for fear of harming the beautiful even film of brown. She asked you to say a little prayer for her. She said she might as well tell you what it was being as you were her confidante, it was something to do with the bladder.

  You could only think of pigs’ bladders and how when he blew air into them and trapped it and bound it with a piece of cotton thread Ambie used them to play football with, until such time as they burst. Bladders were a pus colour, had a glaze.

  You said a dog bit the postman and he was suing the Hairy Fellows, the owners. Anything to get off the subject of bladders. It was a Tibetan dog. You had never seen it. You had heard of it. It was shaggy. In Tibet there were lamas, holy men, but their souls were eternally lost because of the god they worshipped. They had devil dances and barley grew there.

  Emma had timed it perfectly. The other patients were gone, and so was the dispensary nurse, a meddlesome woman, who always insisted on staying behind on the excuse that she had to boil water to sterilize instruments. The doctor was gamey with Emma, said why hadn’t anyone told him she was home. Emma said she was home no more than twenty-four hours and there she was at his disposal. He took her arm and conducted her in. You were crouched down behind the wall, directly opposite. Emma had suggested that you hide, said your presence might banjax her position. The moment they went in you brought yourself up, first by kneeling and then by standing. Your knees were pocked from the uneven ground.