My Oedipus Complex (29 page)

Young Niall O'Donnell came in with his girl; one of the Deignans from up the hill. She was plump and pert; she had been in service in town. Niall was a well-built boy with a soft, wild-eyed, sensuous face and a deep mellow voice of great power. While they were having a cup of tea in the parlour where the three or four family photos were skyed, Ned saw the two of them again through the back window. They were standing on the high ground behind the house with the spring sky behind them and the light in their faces. Niall was asking her something but she, more interested in the sitting-room window, only shook her head.

‘Ye only just missed yeer father,' said their Uncle Maurice when they went across to the other house for dinner. Maurice was a tightlipped little man with a high bald forehead and a snappy voice. ‘He went off to Owney Pat's only this minute.'

‘The devil!' said Tom. ‘I knew he was out to dodge me. Did you give him whiskey?'

‘What the hell else could I give him?' snapped Maurice. ‘Do you think 'twas tea the old coot was looking for?'

Tom took the place of honour at the table. He was the favourite. Through the doorway into the bedroom could be seen a big canopy bed and on the whiteness of a raised pillow a skeleton face in a halo of smoke-blue hair surmounted with what looked suspiciously like a mauve tea-cosy. Sometimes the white head would begin to stir and everyone fell silent while Niall, the old man's pet, translated the scarcely audible whisper. Sometimes Niall would go in with his stiff ungainly swagger and repeat one of Tom's jokes in his drawling, powerful bass. The hens stepped daintily about their feet, poking officious heads between them, and rushing out the door with a wild flutter and shriek when one of the girls hooshed them. Something timeless, patriarchal, and restful about it made Ned notice everything. It was as though he had never seen his mother's house before.

‘Tell me,' Tom boomed with mock concern, leaning over confidentially to his uncle and looking under his brows at young Niall, ‘speaking as a clergyman and for the good of the family and so on, is that son of yours coorting Delia Deignan?'

‘Why? Was the young blackguard along with her again?' snapped Maurice in amusement.

‘Of course I might be mistaken,' Tom said doubtfully.

‘You wouldn't know a Deignan, to be sure,' Sean said dryly.

‘Isn't any of them married yet?' asked Tom.

‘No, by damn, no,' said Maurice. ‘Isn't it a wonder?'

‘Because,' Tom went on in the same solemn voice, ‘I want someone to look after this young brother of mine. Dublin is a wild sort of place and full of temptations. Ye wouldn't know a decent little girl I could ask?'

‘Cait! Cait!' they all shouted, Niall's deep voice loudest of all.

‘Now all the same, Delia looks a smart little piece,' said Tom.

‘No, Cait! Cait! Delia isn't the same since she went to town. She has notions of herself. Leave him marry Cait!'

Niall rose gleefully and shambled in to the old man. With a gamesome eye on the company Tom whispered:

‘Is she a quiet sort of girl? I wouldn't like Ned to get anyone rough.'

‘She is, she is,' they said, ‘a grand girl!'

Sean rose quietly and went to the door with his head bowed.

‘God knows, if anyone knows he should know and all the times he manhandled her.'

Tom sat bolt upright with mock indignation while the table rocked. Niall shouted the joke into his grandfather's ear. The mauve tea-cosy shook; it was the only indication of the old man's amusement.

The Deignans' house was on top of a hill high over the road and commanded a view of the countryside for miles. The two brothers with Sean and the O'Donnell girls reached it by a long winding boreen that threaded its way uncertainly through little grey rocky fields and walls of unmortared stone which rose against the sky along the edges of the hill like lacework. On their way they met another procession coming down the hill. It was headed by their father and the island woman, arm in arm, and behind came two locals with Dempsey and Red Patrick. All the party except the island woman were well advanced in liquor. That was plain when their father rushed forward to shake them all by the hand and ask them how they were. He said that divil such honourable and kindly people as the people of Carriganassa were to be found in the whole world, and of these there was no one a patch on the O'Donnells; kings and sons of kings as you could see from one look at them. He had only one more call to pay and promised to be at Caheragh's within a quarter of an hour.

They looked over the Deignans' half-door. The kitchen was empty. The girls began to titter. They knew the Deignans must have watched them coming from Maurice's door. The kitchen was a beautiful room; woodwork and furniture, homemade and shapely, were painted a bright red-brown and the painted dresser shone with pretty ware. They entered and looked about them. Nothing was to be heard but the tick of the cheap alarm clock on the dresser. One of the girls began to giggle hysterically. Sean raised his voice.

‘Are ye in or are ye out, bad cess to ye!'

For a moment there was no reply. Then a quick step sounded in the attic and a girl descended the stairs at a run, drawing a black knitted shawl tighter about her shoulders. She was perhaps twenty-eight or thirty, with a narrow face, sharp like a ferret's, and blue nervous eyes. She entered the kitchen awkwardly sideways, giving the customary greetings but without looking at anyone.

‘A hundred welcomes.… How are ye?…'Tis a fine day.'

The O'Donnell girls giggled again. Nora Deignan looked at them in astonishment, biting nervously at the tassel of her shawl. She had tiny sharp white teeth.

‘What is it, aru?' she asked.

‘Musha, will you stop your old cimeens,' boomed Tom, ‘and tell us where's Cait from you? You don't think 'twas to see your ugly puss that we came up here?'

‘Cait!' Nora called in a low voice.

‘What is it?' another voice replied from upstairs.

‘Damn well you know what it is,' bellowed Tom, ‘and you cross-eyed expecting us since morning. Will you come down out of that or will I go up and fetch you?'

There was the same hasty step and a second girl descended the stairs. It was only later that Ned was able to realize how beautiful she was. She had the same narrow pointed face as her sister, the same slight features sharpened by a sort of animal instinct, the same blue eyes with their startled brightness; but all seemed to have been differently composed, and her complexion had a transparency as though her whole nature were shining through it. ‘Child of Light, thy limbs are burning through the veil which seems to hide them,' Ned found himself murmuring. She came on them in the same hostile way, blushing furiously. Tom's eyes rested on her; soft, bleary, emotional eyes incredibly unlike her own.

‘Have you nothing to say to me, Cait?' he boomed, and Ned thought his very voice was soft and clouded.

‘Oh, a hundred welcomes.' Her blue eyes rested for a moment on him with what seemed a fierce candour and penetration and went past him to the open door. Outside a soft rain was beginning to fall; heavy clouds crushed down the grey landscape, which grew clearer as it merged into one common plane; the little grey bumpy fields with the walls of grey unmortared stone that drifted hither and over across them like blown sand, the whitewashed farmhouses lost to the sun sinking back into the brown-grey hillsides.

‘Nothing else, my child?' he growled, pursing his lips.

‘How are you?'

‘The politeness is suffocating you. Where's Delia?'

‘Here I am,' said Delia from the doorway immediately behind him. In
her furtive way she had slunk round the house. Her bland impertinence raised a laugh.

‘The reason we called,' said Tom, clearing his throat, ‘is this young brother of mine that's looking for a wife.'

Everyone laughed again. Ned knew the oftener a joke was repeated the better they liked it, but for him this particular joke was beginning to wear thin.

‘Leave him take me,' said Delia with an arch look at Ned who smiled and gazed at the floor.

‘Be quiet, you slut!' said Tom. ‘There are your two sisters before you.'

‘Even so, I want to go to Dublin.… Would you treat me to lemonade, mister?' she asked Ned with her impudent smile. ‘This is a rotten hole. I'd go to America if they left me.'

‘America won't be complete without you,' said Tom. ‘Now, don't let me hurry ye, ladies, but my old fellow will be waiting for us in Johnny Kit's.'

‘Well go along with you,' said Nora, and the three girls took down three black shawls from inside the door. Some tension seemed to have gone out of the air. They laughed and joked between themselves.

‘Ye'll get wet,' said Sean to the two brothers.

‘Cait will make room for me under her shawl,' said Tom.

‘Indeed I will not,' she cried, starting back with a laugh.

‘Very shy you're getting,' said Sean with a good-natured grin.

‘ 'Tisn't that at all but she'd sooner the young man,' said Delia.

‘What's strange is wonderful,' said Nora.

Biting her lip with her tiny front teeth, Cait looked angrily at her sisters and Sean, and then began to laugh. She glanced at Ned and smilingly held out her shawl in invitation, though at the same moment angry blushes chased one another across her forehead like squalls across the surface of a lake. The rain was a mild, persistent drizzle and a strong wind was blowing. Everything had darkened and grown lonely and, with his head in the blinding folds of the shawl, which reeked of turf-smoke, Ned felt as if he had dropped out of Time's pocket.

They waited in Caheragh's kitchen. The bearded old man sat in one chimney corner and a little bare-legged boy in the other. The dim blue light poured down the wide chimney on their heads in a shower with the delicacy of light on old china, picking out surfaces one rarely saw; and
between them the fire burned a bright orange in the great whitewashed hearth with the black, swinging bars and pothook. Outside the rain fell softly, almost soundlessly, beyond the half-door. Delia, her black shawl trailing from her shoulders, leaned over it, acting the part of watcher as in a Greek play. Their father's fifteen minutes had strung themselves out to an hour and two little barefooted boys had already been sent to hunt him down.

‘Where are they now, Delia?' one of the O'Donnells would ask.

‘Crossing the fields from Patsy Kit's.'

‘He wasn't there so.'

‘He wouldn't be,' the old man said. ‘They'll likely go on to Ned Kit's now.'

‘That's where they're making for,' said Delia. ‘Up the hill at the far side of the fort.'

‘They'll find him there,' the old man said confidently.

Ned felt as though he were still blanketed by the folds of the turf-reeking shawl. Something seemed to have descended on him that filled him with passion and loneliness. He could scarcely take his eyes off Cait. She and Nora sat on the form against the back wall, a composition in black and white, the black shawl drawn tight under the chin, the cowl of it breaking the curve of her dark hair, her shadow on the gleaming wall behind. She did not speak except to answer some question of Tom's about her brother, but sometimes Ned caught her looking at him with naked eyes. Then she smiled swiftly and secretly and turned her eyes again to the door, sinking back into pensiveness. Pensiveness or vacancy? he wondered. While he gazed at her face with the animal instinctiveness of its over-delicate features it seemed like a mirror in which he saw again the falling rain, the rocks and hills and angry sea.

The first announced by Delia was Red Patrick. After him came the island woman. Each had last seen his father in a different place. Ned chuckled at a sudden vision of his father, eager and impassioned and aflame with drink, stumping with his broken bottom across endless fields through pouring rain with a growing procession behind him. Dempsey was the last to come. He doubted if Tomas would be in a condition to take the boat at all.

‘What matter, aru?' said Delia across her shoulder. ‘We can find room for the young man.'

‘And where would we put him?' gaped Nora.

‘He can have Cait's bed,' Delia said innocently.

‘Oye, and where would Cait sleep?' Nora asked and then skitted and covered her face with her shawl. Delia scoffed. The men laughed and Cait, biting her lip furiously, looked at the floor. Again Ned caught her eyes on him and again she laughed and turned away.

Tomas burst in unexpected on them all like a sea-wind that scattered them before him. He wrung Tom's hand and asked him how he was. He did the same to Ned. Ned replied gravely that he was very well.

In God's holy name,' cried his father, waving his arms like a windmill, ‘what are ye all waiting for?'

The tide had fallen. Tomas grabbed an oar and pushed the boat on to a rock. Then he raised the sail and collapsed under it and had to be extricated from its drenching folds, glauming and swearing at Cassidy's old boat. A little group stood on a naked rock against a grey background of drifting rain. For a long time Ned continued to wave back to the black shawl that was lifted to him. An extraordinary feeling of exultation and loss enveloped him. Huddled up in his overcoat he sat with Dempsey in the stern, not speaking.

‘It was a grand day,' his father declared, swinging himself to and fro, tugging at his Viking moustache, dragging the peak of his cap farther over his ear. His gestures betrayed a certain lack of rhythmical cohesion; they began and ended abruptly. ‘Dempsey, my darling, wasn't it a grand day?'

‘ 'Twas a grand day for you,' shrieked Dempsey as if his throat would burst.

‘ 'Twas, my treasure, 'twas a beautiful day. I got an honourable reception and my sons got an honourable reception.'

By this time he was flat on his belly, one leg completely over the edge of the boat. He reached back a clammy hand to his sons.