An End and a Beginning (16 page)

She stood now, with her hand on the knob of the tall white door, and seemed so tense and concentrated in this act that she was quite unaware of the loud bang of an outer door, of the footsteps upon the blue tiled hall, and the soft thuds as Peter Fury walked down the passage in which she stood, and passed her by. Reaching its end he came to the flight of stairs that carried him to his own room, and she did not hear the closing of his door. He had spoken to her as he passed behind her, but she had not heard, had said “good afternoon,” and she had not answered. Miss Fetch saw only a cripple's wheel chair standing in the window of this long, high-ceilinged room, and remembered the woman who had once sat in it. The sheeted furniture looked like a line of icebergs, but they were old in Miss Fetch's eyes, and would never melt.

“Often enough I wheeled her about in that chair,” she thought, “often enough,” remembering a winter afternoon when the woman had gone out upright, and returned broken.

“A towering old tree and the unruly horse. A terrible thing to happen. And yet somehow her crippled days were happier. She thought the chair her cross. She liked suffering, she liked being crucified. The poor weak woman she was. And not a soul turned up here when she died, except the daughter who was too late, but the husband never cared, and I was glad he never came. Went a bit light in the head, poor woman. Many's the time she's said to me, ‘Has the paper come, Winifred?' and it hadn't of course, it was always late arriving.” She walked up to the window, the chair, stared down at a great pile of old newspapers, and a smile suddenly parted her lips. “I just picked up one of them old ones and give it to her, and she read it, though some were ten years old, but she didn't notice the difference at all. 'Twas only Father Breen and me that followed her to the Ballin yard.”

She turned and left the room, locked the door. She stood at the next door, and thought quickly, “She'll be here herself soon, and I'd better get it ready. Just imagine it, this is the one the daughter was born in,” as she opened the door and entered. And nothing had changed. Miss Fetch looked at the canopied bed, the dressing-table, the stool, the carpets, and against one wall the pile of toys, and books. “The first time I ever came into this room I remember sitting down on that chair and staring at the walls, at the pictures. No, it's just the same now, as it was then,” and she looked from one wall to another, the murals had always fascinated her, the riot of colour. “A lovely place to be born in,” she reflected, as her mind travelled back to the stone cottage of her father, and her own tiny room, with its chair and table and bed, and its plain, whitewashed walls. She stared up at golden-winged angels still trumpeting their descent out of blue sky, down through sheafs of rolling white cloud. She saw the birds that flew in and out of trees dense and burdened by their summer flesh; saw ballet dancers reaching for the moon, and in a far corner a ship of gold that waited for the traveller. She walked along the room and looked at this ship, and on its prow she still saw the spread-winged bird of ill-omen.

“Nothing changes in this room. Not a thing. It was always a nice, warm, colourful place. I remember them days, I do indeed. The eating and the drinking, and the dancing and shouting that went on, and the galloping horses all over the place.” She remembered this, heard the sound of their hooves on rough winter grasses.

“Six of them they had, and lovely creatures they were indeed, and I remember the names of them so. There was Monarch, and Johnny Boy, and Starlight, and Lucifer, Bright Morning, and Silver Shield. Lovely things they were, and all of them buried hereabouts, and lots of lovely golden dust they kicked up for the Downeys. Lots of it. How fortunate indeed that this house has escaped the petrol of the bright and murderous boyos, with their cheap raincoats and their petrol tins. The lovely places that went up in flames. Terrible days they were indeed, sometimes you could hear the air itself exploding. Ah! it's all over now, and a fine lot of shells they are that's standing about after the flames.”

From room to room, from hour to hour, from memory to memory. She shut the door and went down the passage. It was almost dark. “I wonder if he's up there, I wonder. The man must be hungry. Perhaps I should strike the gong again. He may have fallen asleep.” And once more the thundering sounds reverberated about the house. There was no answer.

“Well then he must do what he wants to do. I can't go on waiting and waiting,” and she went off to the kitchen. “I'll leave something out for him, and if he's hungry enough he'll be down for it,” she thought.

Quiet afternoon grew to quieter evening, but the night was violent.

“I'll clear out of here,” Peter said to himself, and knew he wouldn't. Stretched on his bed he, too, had watched the light go, the darkness come down. In the long afternoon he had travelled much, a dream journey; from a tiny Gelton street to the sprawling American town; from behind the shelter of a priest's back to another place in the far north, where always there had been the clean snow line. From Tilsey's steam-filled restaurant to the stone quarry, and from the stone quarry to the bare tree.

“Mother and father. Both of them.
Gone!
And I can't believe it. I can't even believe myself. Oh God. If only I'd seen them, just the once, before the ship sailed, before the bloody bullets struck.” Stretching and stretching in the bed, aching and grinding between yesterday and to-morrow. Longing for the meeting with the beautiful woman; dreading it; excited by it, numbed by it.

“Smashed. Scattered. Finished. Just like that. The Cromwellian touch. God! Why do we leave our country, and why do we hate it?”

The gong again. “Tea,” he thought. “The old bitch is going to roar teatime into my ears.”

And the gong
again
. Supper.

But already he was undressing in the now darkened room. He climbed into bed and lay there, seeing nothing, feeling nothing. The bed was warm, the bed was safe. One night was just like another. “Christ! If I could sleep.”

Tossing and turning; sitting up and lying down again, stretching and curling, and rolling, this way and that, waiting for sleep, hoping for it.

“For what can one pray?” It was always the same. If only he could drown, drown in innocent, disarming sleep. If only he could.

“If mother had been alive, if it hadn't happened. Christ Jesus! I curse those bastards who pulled the trigger to save Ireland. Blast them. Blast them.”

Over and over, and over and over, the blankets like sails, the blankets twisted and tugged and tossed, in the safe bed, the imprisoning room. “What the hell is the matter with me?”

He slept and woke, slept and woke. Miss Fetch heard the sudden shout in the night, and she stiffened herself in her Polar cold bed.

Only once before had she heard it. “At first I thought it was an animal.”

The shout died away, the warm beads curled about her finger's bone, sleep pressed gently upon her eyelids.

Wind blew into the room, tugged at the curtains. The man in the bed stretched and twisted under the sheets. Three times he had awakened with a jolt, had sat up and lighted the candle, and three times blown it out.

“Fifteen years ago. All that time gone,” he told himself in the darkened room, safe under the blankets. “I can't believe it.” He thought of the holy woman in the near-by room. In a dream he had stripped her naked. “Little she knows.”

Over and over, longing for sleep. He got up and went to the window, looked out at banked-up darkness that yielded nothing. Barefooted, he resumed the clock-like pacing of the room. And after a while he flung himself down into the warm, suffocating bed. He fell asleep. He dreamed again. The years fell upon him like knives. He leapt from dream to dream, from road to road, and the signpost to cactus land was always there. And the waiting woman. “Got you.”

She was everywhere he walked, everywhere he looked. Behind a door, running down a corridor; she was stood in a mile-long street, she lay log-like on his bed, she turned this and that corner, she walked behind him, counted his every step; she cried into his rejecting ear, “Got you.”

A light shone upon her face. “Stroke my hands. Feel my feet,” said the woman in the dream, as he turned over and over, as the sweat came.

“Each time I wake I know I'm alive.” He woke in cold, aching misery, drew the blankets over his head; against the cold of the room, the touch of the woman.

“Got you.” He shouted, and it woke the housekeeper.

“Poor creature,” she thought, “'tis a nightmare he's having so.” The man is years from the house, and she would never have reached him. “How dreadful!”

But the cringing man in the bed was another's responsibility.

The dream has claws, the dream pulls. Towards the lock, under the stone. The great clock grinds out purposeless hours as he stares at a wall, at a hole, at a watching eye. The voice climbs over his shoulder, a sudden bark, an eye lurked, the iron feet went walking up and down. Into the mile-long days, the towering nights. The cell is an island of ice, peopled with regrets. The spirit clings as the light begins to fall, and the silence comes again. The rub of the stone, and the rising dust. He is bent double in mist, under the merciless, unclosing, watchful eye.

A letter from Kilkey. A letter from the world. Hope leaping towards a face on the wall, behind the bars, inside the keyhole. A figure transfixed upon straw. The frenzied dreams in the murdering silence. The images of the night, the seized hands and the smiling breasts, the wave-like legs, the downpouring, scalding rain of secret passion. Feelings crawling in the slime, leaps into the abyss. Roads leading to the end of the world. Clutching at nothingness, eating oneself alive. The wall that moved, that rose higher than the lighthouse without lights, the rocks without hold, over seas without sound. A ladder built in the brain, and the pain of remembering. Another letter, out of the clouds, out of the world.

“My dear son—try to forget—try to be brave—learn to be good.”

The shape under the tree, the shape of yesterday. “Learn to be good——” and her eyes and hair and mouth shining towards him through the barebone branches of an islanded tree.

“Oh Christ! I'm afraid. I'm afraid!”

She heard yet another shout, heard a sudden hammering on the wall, a heavy thud.

“God save us, what was that?”

Miss Fetch got up at once and put on her dressing-gown. Taking up the candle she left the room and made her way down the passage and up the short flight of stairs that would take her to his room. She stood outside his door, she crossed herself, she listened, and always she was afraid. “What on earth has happened. What's going on in there?” Then she heard a sound, a sudden loud noise. Quietly she turned the doorknob, and fearing what she would, pushed it open and peeped round. The man had fallen from the bed, lay sprawled across the floor. The wind tossed up the curtains, it found a way to his hair. Miss Fetch closed her eyes, opened them again, looked down at the man. This was new to her, this man upon the floor looked like another person. She saw the drawn-up knees, the hands behind the head that seemed to be clenching the air about.

“Poor man,” she said. No one had ever looked so inert, so finally exhausted.

She bent over him, put the tip of a finger to his bared shoulder.

“Mr. Fury,” gently, “Mr. Fury. You've fallen out of bed, and you'll catch your death of cold lying there like that. Come now, get back into bed like a good man.” Only then did she realize that he was fast asleep, heavily breathing.

“I shan't wake him now,” she thought. She pulled the clothes from the bed and threw them over him. She closed the window, and drew the curtains together. Then she left the room as silently as she had entered it.

“I shan't sleep myself now,” she told herself on her way back to her room. “A nightmare. It must have been. Those terrible shouts. Ah, I hope everything will be fine and good for him so.” She drew the gown tightly about her, she sat on her chair and watched the fire die out.

“Look at the time. Three o'clock in the morning. Perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps it's best that she does come. I
am
afraid of being alone with him. Anything might happen. There's something sad and desperate about him. Why on earth did she send him here? The worst place of all, only another tomb. Oh, the Downeys are a mad lot of people. Quite mad, quite unpredictable, and such a lot of simple, sensible things that they don't understand. Ah, sure they never will!”

Miss Fetch decided to make herself a cup of tea on her spirit stove, decided to sit where she was until the first light came to the room. “I couldn't settle. I couldn't sleep.”

And she sat on in the chair, it was like another duty to be done, like an extra penance. Her head nodded on her breast from time to time, she dozed off, and a sudden rush of wind and an early passage of birds above the house set her upright again, and the clock said five, and then six. After a while the light came to the woman in the chair, and to the man upon the floor.

“I wonder if he's still sleeping?” she asked herself.

Later that morning she went up to his room. She knocked twice, but there was no answer.

But he was there, stretched out on the floor, warm under blankets, safe in the room. Miss Fetch's fingers had rapped upon the door, but in his mind he heard only the click of a latch. He closed his eyes, for another voyage. He saw the man more clearly, brown in his habit, his back bent, eyes to the soil, the hoe driving. He remembered the man, the hoe, the rhythmic movements. Not a sound anywhere save that of the hoe driving in stony soil.

“It was so quiet there, so peaceful. I envied him.” He had been on another walk, a long walk, he had come round a bend in the lane, and suddenly there was the field, and the man in it. He could see the lane again, the man, the distant hills that were purple dark against the early light that crept over the land. “I wanted to say good morning to him, but somehow I couldn't. It was so peaceful looking, it was too silent. I just stood watching him. He was so close to the soil, and perhaps he was also miles from it. It was then I moved, and then I fell. I must have slipped on something.”