More Pricks Than Kicks (21 page)

“He'd be about the Master's size” she said.

Just fancy her noticing that!

“Then why don't you tell him so” moaned the Smeraldina “and let do the best he can and not be coming up here to torment me.”

What could an inch or so possibly matter this way or that? There was no question of having to skimp aragonite or peperino. The coffin was not going to eat him.

Mary Ann returned to the torment with the sad news that Mr Malacoda was at that very moment springing up the stairs with a tape in his black claws. The Smeraldina started up, clutching the scissor, and began to plunge towards the door. But the thought of the thoral chintz brought her up short. Had again!

“You might at least bring me a cup of tea” she said.

Mary Ann left the room.

“And a lightly boiled egg” cried the Smeraldina.

A small wreath, of arum lilies needless to say, arrived in a box—anonymous. This the Smeraldina buried. She sought out the gardener, a slow shy slob of a man with a dripping moustache, and found him watering in a dazed and hopeless manner a bed of blighted sweet-william. Someone had stolen his rose, he mowed down the flowers with hard jets of water. She sent him flying up into the heart of the mountains with two sacks to gather bracken. Then he might go home. Herself she stripped a eucalyptus of its boughs.

The parson came churning up the avenue in bottom gear, confirmed his worst fears with a quick look at the windows, let fall his rustless all-steel in sorrow and anger on the gravel, and walked right in.

“I never knew anyone founder” he declared in a passionate way, “and I've seen a good many.”

“No” said the Smeraldina.

“Automatic dispensation” he cried. “Strength from on high” snapping his thumb “like that. Meet in Paradize.”

“Yes” said the Smeraldina.

“No sooner does he arrive” clasping his hands and looking up (why up?) “there where there is no time, than you burst in upon him.”

“He's all right” said the Smeraldina. “I know that.”

“Therefore be glad” cried the parson.

He pedalled away like a weaver's shuttle (but not before she had covenanted to be glad) to administer the Eucharist, of which he always carried an abundance in a satchel on the bracket of his bike, to a moneyed wether up the road whose tale was nearly told. Seven and six a time.

Capper Quin arrived on tiptire, in a car of his very own. He grappled with the widow, he simply could not help it. She was a sensible girl in some ways, she was not ashamed to let herself go in the arms of a man of her own weight at last. They broke away, carrot plucked from tin of grease, and Hairy stood humbly before her, hers to command. He was greatly improved, commerce with the things of time had greatly improved him. Now he could speak quite nicely, he did not simply have to abandon his periods in despair after a word or two.

She stood by while he freighted the car. The sacks distended with fern and bracken; the boughs of eucalyptus, piecemeal to meet the occasion, tied up in an old stable jacket; a superb shrub of verbena treated in the same way; a vat of moss; a bag of wire tholes. When all these things had been safely stowed and the car pointed in the right direction, Hairy followed her lead into the house and took up position, the crutch well split, the great feet splayed, swollen paws appaumée two dangling chunks of blood ballast, aborted mammae much in evidence, at gaze. Even Ireland has a few animals, now generally regarded as varieties, which have been ranked as species by some zoologists. He felt his face improving as grief modelled the features.

“Might I see him?” he whispered, like a priest asking for a book in the Trinity College Library.

She had herself supported up the stairs, she led the way into the death-chamber as though it belonged to her. They diverged, the body was between them on the bed like the keys between nations in Velasquez's
Lances
, like the water between Buda and Pest, and so on, hyphen of reality.

“Very beautiful” said Hairy.

“I think very” said the Smeraldina.

“They all are” said Hairy.

Shed a tear, damn you, she thought, I can't. But he went one better, he choked a whole bucketful back. His face improved rapidly.

They met again at the foot of the bed, like parallels made to for the sake of argument, and occupied this fresh viewpoint with heads together until the Smeraldina, feeling the absurdity of the position, detached herself, left the room and closed the door behind her, on the dying and the dead.

Hairy felt it was up to him now to feel something.

“You are quieter than humus” he said in his mind, “you will give the bowels of the earth a queer old lesson in quiet.”

That was the best he could manage at the time. But bowels surely was hardly the right word. That was where Queen Anne had the gout.

The hands pious on the sternum were unseemly, defunct crusader, absolved from polite campaign. Hairy reached out with his endless arms and tugged at the marble members. Two nouns and two adjectives. Not a stir out of them. How stupid of him.

“This is final” he thought.

Belacqua had often looked forward to meeting the girls, Lucy especially, hallowed and transfigured beyond the veil. What a hope! Death had already cured him of that naïveté.

Hairy, anxious though he was to rejoin the Smeraldina while his face was at its best, before it relapsed into the workaday dumpling, steak and kidney pudding, had his work cut out to tear himself away. For he could not throw off the impression that he was letting slip a rare occasion to feel something really stupendous, something that nobody had ever felt before. But time pressed. The Smeraldina was pawing the ground, his own personal features were waning (or, perhaps better, waxing). In the end he took his leave without kneeling, without a prayer, but his brain quite prostrate and suppliant before this first fact of its experience. That was at least something. He would have welcomed a long Largo, on the black notes for preference.

In the cemetery the light was failing, the sea moonstone washing the countless toes turned up, the mountains swarthy Uccello behind the headstones. The loveliest little lap of earth you ever saw. Hairy shifted the roof of planks from off the brand-new pit and went down, down, down the narrow steps carefully not removed by the groundsman. His head came to rest below the surface of the earth. What a nerve the man had to be sure. The significance of this was lost on the Smeraldina, she merely crouched on the brink.

Well, to make a long story short, the pair of them between them, she feeding him from above, upholstered the grave: the floor with moss and fern, the walls with the verdure outstanding. Low down the clay was so hard that Hairy had to take his shoe to the tholes. However they made a great job of it, not a spot of clay showed when they had done, all was lush, green and most sweet smelling.

But soon it would be black and dark night, a chill wind arose, the pangs of light began on the foothills, the moonstone turned to ashes. The Smeraldina shivered, as well she might. Hairy, taking a last look round at his handiwork, was as snug as a bug in a rug. Belacqua lay dead on the bed with the timeless mock on the face. Hairy came up out of the hole, drew up the steps behind him, put back the planks and rubbed his hands with a sigh, labour ended, labour of love, painful duty.

All of a sudden the groundsman was there, a fine man in ruins, as drunk as he knew how, giving point to the consecrated ground. He was most moved by their attentions, without parallel in his experience of the forsaken. For his own part he could be relied on to work himself to the bone for the defunct, whom he had known well, not only as a man, but as a boy also. The Smeraldina had a quick vision of Belacqua as a boy, shinning up the larch trees, his breast expanding to the world.

Hairy feeling father, brother, husband, confessor, friend of the family (what family?) and the inevitable something more, did the heavy with the reeling groundsman. The Smeraldina played up. Belacqua, idealised something horrid, made the widow and her huge escort, who now stalked off, four lovely deaf ears, faces tilted slightly to the starry sky, one in this sordid matter.

“Home Hairy” she said.

Hairy quickened his step, enveloped her, helped her along.

“I don't see the moon” she said.

Like a jack-in-the-box the satellite obliged, let down her shining ladder to the shore. She had a long lonely climb before her.

The groundsman, cut to the quick, mindful of his lumbago, sat down on the planks and lowered his bottle of stout. Guinness for Thinness, stultifying stout. He had lost interest in all the shabby mysteries, he was beyond caring. He strained his ear for the future, and what did he hear? All the ancient punctured themes recurring, creeping up the treble out of sound. Very well. Let the essence of his being stay where it was, in liquor and liquor's harmonics, accepted gladly as the ultimate expression of his non-chalance. He rose and made his water agin a cypress.

That night Hairy lay in his bed, tossed and turned for various reasons, fell off at last into a troubled sleep, woke not at all refreshed to a day of wind and rain, the weather having broken in the small hours.

At midday to the Smeraldina, in bed indulging her most secret thoughts, salivating slightly for a lightly boiled egg, Mary Ann appeared. Mr Malacoda. Keen to coffin. The Smeraldina observed in a bitter voice that if the man must coffin why coffin he must, surely there was no clear call on Mary Ann to make a point of pestering her with what could not be cured.

A thin wall, a good but thin wall, separated her from Mr Malacoda and assistant ungulata, in a fever to have done. Cerements did not suit the defunct, with their riot of frills and lace they made him look like a pantomime baby.

When Hairy arrived it was the magic hour, Homer dusk, when the subliminal rats came abroad on their rounds. The little something extra that he felt he had come in for made great strides at the expense of its co-heirs. He agreed absolutely that cerements did not suit the defunct, somehow they made him look so put-upon and helpless, almost as though he had not done dying. He stayed to supper.

A point to bear in mind is that the Smeraldina was so naturally happy-go-lucky that she did not find it at all easy to feel deeply, or rather, perhaps better, be deeply sentimental. Her life had been springing leaks for as long as she cared to remember. A husband—and how!—was oakum in the end the same as everything else, prophylactic, a wire bandage of Jalade-Lafont. Belacqua had come unstuck like his own favour of veronica in
What a Misfortune
. Losers seekers. The position was not quite so simple as all that, there was some sentimental factor in play (or at work) complicating the position, but that was more or less it.

That night the weather so mended as to be more than merely clement for the ceremony. Malacoda and Co. turned up bright and early with their six cylinder hearse, black as Ulysses's cruiser. The demon, quite unable to control his impatience to cover, could only manage a quick flirt with Mary Ann. The Smeraldina was through with the death-chamber, not that she was callous, quite the reverse, but the livery of death, leaving aside its pale flag altogether, was too much for her. Hairy, more and more self-assured servitor, was of the same opinion. So let the good man cover by all means. That was what he was there for, that was what he was paid for. Let the whole nightmare brood walk up by all manner of means.

Now he was grinning up at the lid at last.

“No flowers” said Hairy.

God forbid!

“And no friends.”

Need he ask!

The parson arrived in the nick of time. He had been casting out devils all morning, he was in a muck sweat.

Hairy scampered out into the sunlight and the balmy breeze, free of the house that was suddenly jerry-built mausoleum, with a message from his sweet ward to the driver whose name was Scarmiglione, a strongly worded message exhorting him to temper full speed with due caution. “Let her out” said Hairy in his pretentious jargon “to the irreducible coefficient of safety.” Scarmiglione met this request with a look of petrified courtesy. On these trips he deferred to the speed-controlling washer of his own mind and conscience, and to none other. He was adamant in this matter. Hairy shrank away from the affable rictus.

All aboard. All souls at half-mast. Aye-aye.

Mary Ann found the gardener shut up in the toolshed, all of a heap on an upturned box, nervously tying knots in a piece of raffia. He was not neglecting his work, he was grieving.

“The only one” said Mary Ann, alluding to their late employer, “as ever I dreamed on,” as though that could possibly interest the gardener. But what higher tribute could she pay? The gardener had secured his retreat, she could not come at him, she could only hold her livid farthing of a face at the broken window and commit copious nuisance with her opinions and impressions. She did not expect an answer, she did not pause for one, she received none. He heard the voice at a great distance, but could make no sense of it. For he was, temporarily at all events, just a clod of gloom, in which concern for his own state of health counted for more than he would have cared to admit. Was he overdoing things about the place? It was hard to say. He heard Mary Ann in the run, her voice raised in furious hallali, butchering a fowl for the table. He began to look about for his line. It was gone from its place. Someone had stolen his line. Some unauthorised person had taken his line, with the result that now he was helpless to put down his broccoli. He rose and let himself out, he slobbered out of darkness into light, he chose a place in the sun and settled, he was like a colossal fly trimming its load of typhus. Gradually he cheered up. Ten to one God was in his heaven.

Though the grave was deep the committal was neat, not a hitch; its words perhaps a trifle mis-directed on the vile, the sure and certain hope rather gobbled up in the fact of departure. The tone conveyed to “earth to earth” was a triumph of passionate and contemptuous reproach to all the living. How dared they continue full of misery! Pah!

“Now in Gaelic” said Hairy on the way home “they could not say that.”