The Afterlife (24 page)

It was true. Paler than boulders but no less opaque, scattered sheep populated the wide fields that unrolled on both sides of the road. With their rectangular purple pupils the animals stared in profile at the couple. Sometimes an especially buoyant ram, his chest powdered a startling turquoise or magenta color, dashed back among the ewes at the approach of these human intruders. Single strands of barbed wire reinforced the stone walls and rotting fences of an older pastoralism. Only these wires, and the pine poles bearing wires overhead, testified that twentieth-century people had been here before them. The land dipped and crested; each new rise revealed more sheep, more stones, more road. A cloud with an especially large leaden center darkened this lunar landscape and rained a few drops; by the time Vivian had put up their umbrella, the sprinkle had passed. Allenson looked around for a rainbow, but it eluded his vision, like the leprechauns promised yesterday at Moll’s Gap, in the droll roadside sign
LEPRECHAUN CROSSING
.

“Where
is
that second right turn?” Vivian asked. “Give me back the map.”

“The map tells us nothing,” he said. “The way it’s drawn it looks like we’re walking around a city block.”

“I
knew
this was the wrong road, I don’t know
why
I let you talk me into it. We’ve gone miles. My back is killing me, damn you. I
hate
these bossy, clunky running shoes.”

“You picked them out,” he reminded her. “And they were far from cheap.” Trying to recover a little kindness, Allenson went on, “The total walk is four and a half miles. Americans have lost all sense of how long a mile is. They think it’s a minute of sitting in a car.” Or less, if Jeaneanne were driving, her skirt tucked up to air her crotch.

“Don’t be so pedantic,” Vivian told him. “I hate men. They grab the map out of your hands and never ask directions and then refuse to admit they’re lost.”

“Whom, my dear, would we have asked directions of? We haven’t seen a soul. The last soul we saw was your cow-eyed pal at the hotel. I can hear him now, talking to the police. ‘Ah, the American couple,’ he’ll be saying. ‘She a mere raven-haired colleen, and he a grizzly old fella. They were headin’ for the McGillycuddy Reeks, wi’ scarcely a cup of poteen or a pig’s plump knuckle in their knapsacks.’ ”

“Not funny,” she said, in a new, on-the-edge voice. Without his noticing it, she had become frantic. There was a silvery light in her dark eyes, tears. “I can’t walk another step,” she announced. “I can’t and I won’t.”

“Here,” he said, pointing out a convenient large stone in the wall at the side of the road. “Rest a bit.”

She sat and repeated, as if proudly, “I will not go another step. I can’t, George. I’m in agony.” She flipped back her bandanna with a decisive gesture, but the effect was not the same as Jeaneanne’s gold-streaked hair whipping back in the convertible. Vivian looked old, worn. Lamed.

“What do you want me to do? Walk back and bring the car?” He meant the offer to be absurd, but she didn’t reject it, merely thinned her lips and stared at him angrily, defiantly.

“You’ve got us lost and won’t admit it. I’m not walking another step.”

He pictured it, her never moving. Her body would weaken
and die within a week; her skin and bones would be washed by the weather and blend into the earth like the corpse of a stillborn lamb. Only the sheep would witness it. Only the sheep were watching them now, with the sides of their heads. Allenson turned his own head away, gazing up the road, so Vivian wouldn’t see the calm mercilessness in his face.

“Darling, look,” he said, after a moment. “Way up the road, see the way the line of telephone poles turns? I bet that’s the second right turn. We’re on the map!”

“I don’t see anything turning,” Vivian said, but in a voice that wanted to be persuaded.

“Just under the silhouette of the second little hill. Follow the road with your eyes, darling.” Allenson was feeling abnormally tall, as if his vision of Vivian stuck in the Irish landscape forever had a centrifugal force, spilling him outward, into a fresh future, toward yet another wife. What would she be like, this fourth Mrs. Allenson? Jewish, with a rapid, humorous tongue and heavy hips and clattering bracelets on her sweetly hairy forearms? Black, a stately fashion model whom he would rescue from her cocaine habit? A little Japanese, silken and fiery within her kimono? Or perhaps one of his old mistresses, whom he couldn’t marry at the time, but whose love had never lessened and who was miraculously unaged? Still, in a kind of social inertia, he kept pleading with Vivian. “If there’s no right turn up there, then you can sit down on a rock and I’ll walk back for the car.”

“How can you walk back?” she despairingly asked. “It’ll take forever.”

“I won’t walk, I’ll run,” he promised. “I’ll trot.”

“You’ll have a heart attack.”

“What do you care? One male killer less in the world. One less splash of testosterone.” Death, the thought of either of
their deaths, felt exalting, in this green-gray landscape emptied by famine and English savagery. British soldiers, he had read, would break the roofbeams of the starving natives’ cottages and ignite the thatch.

“I care,” Vivian said. She sounded subdued. Seated on her stone, she looked prim and hopeful, a wallflower waiting to be asked to dance.

He asked, “How’s your back?”

“I’ll stand and see,” she said.

Her figure, he noticed when she stood, had broadened since he first knew her—thicker in the waist and ankles, chunky like her aggravating shoes. And developing a bad back besides. As if she were hurrying to catch up to him in the aging process. She took a few experimental steps, on the narrow macadam road built, it seemed, solely for the Allensons’ pilgrimage.

“Let’s go,” she said combatively. She added, “I’m doing this just to prove you’re wrong.”

But he was right. The road branched; the thinner piece of it continued straight, over the little hill, and the thicker turned right, with the wooden power poles. Parallel to the rocky crests on the left, with a view of valley on the right, the road went up and down in an animated, diverting way, and took them past houses now and then, and small plowed areas to vary the stony pastures. “You think those are potato patches?” he asked. He felt sheepish, wondered how many of his murderous thoughts she had read. His vision of her sitting there, as good as a corpse, kept widening its rings in his mind, like a stone dropped in black water. The momentary ecstasy of a stone smartly applied to her skull, or a piece of flint sharp as a knife whipped across her throat—had these visions been his, back in that Biblical wilderness?

Now, on the higher, winding road, a car passed them, and then another. It was Sunday morning, and unsmiling country families were driving to mass. Their faces were less friendly than those of the shopkeepers in Kenmare; no waves were offered, or invitations to ride. Once, on a blind curve, the couple had to jump to the grassy shoulder to avoid being hit. Vivian seemed quite agile, in the pinch.

“How’s your poor back holding up?” he asked. “Your sneakers still pushing your hips around?”

“I’m better,” she said, “when I don’t think about it.”

“Oh. Sorry.”

He should have let her have a baby. Now it was too late. Still, he wasn’t sorry. Life was complicated enough.

The road turned the third right on their map gradually, unmistakably, while several gravelled driveways led off into the hills. Though Kenmare Bay gleamed ahead of them, a tongue of silver in the smoky distance, they were still being carried upward, dipping and turning, ever closer to the rocky crests, which were becoming dramatic. The sheep, now, seemed to be unfenced; a ram with a crimson chest skittered down a rock face and across the road, spilling scree with its hooves. In what could have been another nation, so far away it now appeared, a line of minuscule telephone poles marked the straight road where Vivian had announced she would not move another step. Overhead, faint whistling signalled a hawk—a pair of hawks, drifting motionless near the highest face of rock, hanging in a wind the Allensons could not feel. Their thin hesitant cry felt forgiving to Allenson, as did Vivian’s voice announcing, “Now I have this killing need to pee.”

“Go ahead.”

“Suppose a car comes?”

“It won’t. They’re all in church now.”

“There’s no place to go behind anything,” she complained.

“Just squat down beside the road. My goodness, what a little fussbudget.”

“I’ll lose my balance.” He had noticed on other occasions, on ice or on heights, how precarious her sense of balance was.

“No you won’t. Here. Give me your hand and prop yourself against my leg. Just don’t pee on my shoe.”

“Or on my own,” she said, letting herself be lowered into a squatting position.

“It might soften them up,” he said.

“Don’t make me laugh. I’ll get urinary impotence.” It was a concept of Nabokov’s, out of
Pale Fire
, that they both had admired, in the days when their courtship had tentatively proceeded through the socially acceptable sharing of books. She managed. In Ireland’s great silence of abandonment the tender splashing sound seemed loud.
Pssshshshblipip
. Allenson looked up to see if the hawks were watching. Hawks could read a newspaper, he had once read, from the height of a mile. But what would they make of it? The headlines, the halftones? Who could know what a hawk saw? Or a sheep? They saw only what they needed to see. A tuft of edible grass, or the twitch of a vole scurrying for cover.

Vivian stood, pulling up over the quick-glimpsed thicket of her pubic hair her underpants and pantyhose. A powerful ammoniac scent followed her up, rising invisible from the roadside turf.
Oh, let’s have a baby
, he thought, but left the inner cry unexpressed. Too late, too old. The couple moved on, numbed by the miles that had passed beneath their feet. They reached the road’s highest point, and saw far below, as small as an orange star, their Eurodollar Toyota compact, parked at a tilt on the shoulder of their first crossroads. As they descended to it, Vivian asked, “Would Jeaneanne have enjoyed Ireland?”

What an effort it now seemed, to cast his mind so far back! “Jeaneanne,” he answered, “enjoyed everything, for the first seven minutes. Then she got bored. What made you think of Jeaneanne?”

“You. Your face when we started out had its Jeaneanne look. Which is different from its Claire look. Your Claire look is sort of woebegone. Your Jeaneanne look is fierce.”

“Darling,” he told her. “You’re fantasizing.”

“Jeaneanne and you were so young,” she pursued. “At the age I was just entering graduate school, you and she were married, with a child.”

“We had that Fifties greed. We thought we could have it all,” he said, rather absently, trying to agree. His own feet in their much-used cordovans were beginning to protest; walking downhill, surprisingly, was the most difficult.

“You still do. You haven’t asked me if
I
like Ireland. The Becketty nothingness of it.”

“Do you?” he asked.

“I do,” she said.

They were back where they had started.

When Farrell signed up, with seven other aging members of his local Long Island club, for a week of golf at the Royal Caledonian Links in Scotland, he didn’t foresee the relationship with the caddies. Hunched little men in billed tweed caps and rubberized rain suits, they huddled in the misty gloom as the morning foursomes got organized, and reclustered after lunch, muttering as unintelligibly as sparrows, for the day’s second eighteen.

Farrell would never have walked thirty-six holes a day in America, but here in Scotland golf was not an accessory to life, drawing upon one’s marginal energy; it
was
life, played out of the center of one’s being. At first, stepping forth on legs one of which had been broken in a college football game forty years before, and which damp weather or a night of twisted sleep still provoked to a reminiscent twinge, he missed the silky glide and swerve of the accustomed electric cart, its magic-carpet suspension above the whispering fairway; he missed the rattle of spare balls in the retaining shelf, and the round plastic holes to hold drinks, alcoholic or carbonated, and the friendly presence on the seat beside him of another gray-haired sportsman, another warty pickle blanching in the
brine of time, exuding forbearance and the expectation of forbearance, and resigned, like Farrell, to a golfing mediocrity that would make its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death.

Here, however, on the heather-rimmed fairways, cut as close as putting surfaces back home, yet with no trace of mower tracks, and cheerfully marred by the scratchings and burrows of the nocturnal rabbits that lived and bred beneath the impenetrably thorny, waist-high gorse, energy came up through the turf, as if Farrell’s cleats were making contact with primal spirits beneath the soil, and he felt he could walk forever. The rolling treeless terrain, the proximity of the wind-whipped sea, the rain that came and went with the suddenness of thought—they composed the ancient matrix of the game, and the darkly muttering caddies were also part of this matrix.