The Light of Evening (16 page)

His downstairs rooms had an unlived feeling, slightly dark because of the shutters half drawn, leather sofas, leather chairs, a black lacquered cabinet with two pink china slates on little easels, the word
menu
engraved on both. There were paintings stacked, waiting to be hung, one wall white, another terracotta, an unfinished quality as if someone, maybe him, had given up in the middle. There was a portrait of him, which, when she stood before it, made her come to the conclusion that the painter disliked him. His skin had a greenish tint and his deep-set dark eyes smote with a consuming anger. When her mother and family in pursuit of her saw that portrait, her mother claimed to have be-

come so frightened, so stricken, that it was as if she had seen a portrait of Lucifer himself. But that was not for some time yet.

First there was courtship, a tour of the house that he was so touchingly proud of. He took her hand and led her into his study, the stacks of books, some leather-bound like ecclesiastical books, a barometer on which the weather forecast was inking itself on a graphed sheet of paper. To amuse her he wrote out the expected week’s rainfall and propped it on the mantelpiece. The bedrooms, although furnished, had a gauntness, waiting as it were for footsteps, some beds made, others stripped and in one room a pink crib without either mattress or blanket, telling of another time. He said yes, he had had a son and was now without a wife and without a son, which made him disconsolate but in the eyes of the local people branded him as a rake and a reprobate.

They walked in the woods, the breeze so soft, so gentle, branches in a sway, to and fro, last year’s birds nests fraying in the upper reaches of the trees and swarms of flies in dazed drifts as if they had just wakened from their winter slumbers. In the far field the gorse bushes in thick sullen clumps, a few already in flower and some newborn lambs crying with an infant’s plaint. They stood on a wall to look down at the lake, his telling her that he would take her out on his boat for a picnic, that being his way of saying he intended to see her again. He pointed to the small white cottage on the far side of the lake and said that a woman lived there all alone and had become such a recluse that she did not even greet the postman, who rowed up once a month to deliver a letter or a circular; instead she hid in the room off the kitchen telling him to be off, as he was not wanted. She shivered at the thought of such isolation, as if that would be her destiny one day.

“You’ve never been lonely,” he said, quizzical.

“I was … I talked to trees when I was young,” she said.

“You talked to trees,” he said, deeming it daft and lovable.

In the evening they ate off a card table, close to the fire, they drank red wine and told each other engaging stories, that repertoire of stories that people tell each other when they have first met and are on the brink of falling in love. When a hairpin fell out of her hair, he picked it up, studied it, said, “My house is not used to finding a woman’s hairpin,” and with tenderness put it in his shirt pocket as a keepsake. It was a plaid shirt with bold patches of red and yellow, one that she would appropriate in due course, coming as she did, penniless and in the clothes she stood up in.

Later that week he drove to the city and took her to the cinema, where they saw
Ballad of a Soldier,
a Russian film about a soldier being given leave to go home to see his mother, bearing a gift of a bar of soap, but because of many hazards and the soldier’s kindness at helping others, he arrived at his mother’s house only minutes before the twenty-four-hour leave had expired and he had to return immediately. Her husband-to-be could not understand why she cried so much, cried in the cinema, then cried out in the street, cried in the restaurant where he had taken her, tears that neither he nor she could assuage.

Scene Two

their elopement had in it some of the perilousness and subterfuge of Natasha Rostov’s fling, but with no rustling dresses, no gems on bare flesh, no troika or sable cloak, no whistles at midnight by a wicker gate, instead a flurried trip to a rocky island off the coast of England, where they went to hide until, as he said, the hysterics had died down. Her secret had been disclosed. In an anonymous letter her mother had been apprised of her abominable life and hence the family’s pursuit of her to the rocky island, asking for her to be handed back to them. Hermann had gone out to confront them. She waited in the hotel room, cowering, never guessing that in the altercation two of the men, her father’s adjutants, would strike him, knock him to the ground, and in the scuffle injure him. Police were called, evidence taken, the assailants sent packing, but a disgrace hung over room seventeen.

The manageress, who liked him, said it was true that her boss would much prefer that they departed, but since he had paid for the week, a compromise was reached. They could stay but be served meals in their room, and contrary to hotel rules she supplied them with a kettle and an ironing board. It was that copper kettle now that Eleanora boiled and re-boiled to steam his wounds and when the water ran out and she saw the coils at the bottom, greenish and twisted, they seemed not dissimilar to

the knot in her gut, quaking as she was at his cold but seething temper.

Everything she did was wrong.

In the downfalling light of the reading lamp, his trouser rolled up to his knee, she saw the wounds, a purplish black, his shins and insteps grazed, yet refusing to bleed and consequently paining him all the more. Denouncing her kindred
—
savages, smalltown hicks with their caps and their drunken red faces.

Now in the aftermath she was holding the spout of the steaming kettle to these wounds and being held responsible for their barbarities. A gash above his elbow made him wince each time that he attempted to raise his arm but yet he persisted with his irate letter. He rasped when she brought the steam too close, asked if she was so stupid that she could not even tell the difference between near and far, their stupidity having infected her also, something that was not evident in her first girlish gushings. Midges blew in from the garden in random gusts and with the muslin swatter that he had borrowed, he struck, so that soft brown smears muddied the pink china globe.

When he had finished the letter he handed it to her and told her to copy it out in her own hand and then sign it. It was an ugly letter, full of contempt, outlining their ignorance, their quasi-medieval habits, of which she was the consequence.

“I can’t,” she said and threw it back at him. Infuriated at being disobeyed he thrust a leaking fountain pen into her hand, then swore as the droplets of ink fell onto his incendiary words.

“I’ll do anything, but not that,” she said, begging him to tear it up, to vent all his anger and spleen on her. Instead he took three sheets of clean paper, told her to sign all three, a precaution lest the first or even the second letter did not have the full fruits of his outrage.

In a strange room full of fear and remorse, sleep does not come. By signing the blank pages, she had become a Judas, sold herself for that mess of pottage, and hearing the clatter of the

typewriter, sometimes in a welter, sometimes in almost a pause, she guessed that he was adding more deadly ammunition to his words and she thought, “I don’t know him at all … don’t know how stern, tormented, and unforgiving he is.”

All those giddy and high-flown notions of love, learned from books, swept away.

Scene Three

back in his house she learned to cook, studied recipes from the two grandiose cookbooks left by his wife where there were also tips for hostessing: breakfast ideas, brunch ideas, seating and serving, and how the flowers on the table should not have too delectable a scent, must not for instance compete with the aromas of the sauces. She sometimes produced floating confections with egg white and raspberries, but more often than not the exotic dishes failed, both because of her inexperience and the unpredictability of the wood stove, which either smoked or sallied like a bonfire.

One particular bird, a soft dusk-brown in color, a she-blackbird she reckoned, hovered in the folds of the cedar tree, roosted there, scarcely showing herself, yet always present, always on the watch, and she thought it had flown up the hundred or so miles from home. She had dreamed of her mother more than once. In one dream she was with a man, a stranger to her, and was wearing a blue gauze nightgown that he lifted and lowered in play, when quite stealthily her mother slipped into the bed beside them and all three lay rigid like effigies. To make matters more unsettling, a few mornings later there came a brown paper parcel that contained a nightdress identical to the one she had worn in her dream. The stamps were smeared over so that she could not tell the postmark but guessed it was from her mother because it smelled indisputably of home. She would tell herself that if she

and her husband, together, saw the pack of red deer come closer to the house at evening time, the marriage or intended marriage would be happy and the rift with her family mended; yet when they walked together, the deer would already have gone in the instant before they were glimpsed, in flowing and almost invisible formation, bouncing off into woodier and more shrouded places.

Sometimes, too, she longed to be back in a street in Dublin, hearing ballroom music, while also having to admit that when she was there, those branched fairy lights and swooning love songs did not satisfy her at all. Once she had been walked home from just such a dance by a man who worked for a bakery company, delivered breads to towns down the country, and he had told her that if ever she wanted a lift home, he was her man. He wrote his number on a torn-off end of a cigarette packet. That was the extent of her gallivanting.

She loved her husband, or believed she loved him, but she was afraid of his dark moods, of the way he retreated into himself, estranged from her. He had had a nomadic childhood, his father a foreigner, at loggerheads with his mother, many homes and no homes, then later on a wife, the exotic, much-traveled woman who had absconded and of whom Eleanora was jealous. In her prowls, in which she felt more interloper than wife, Eleanora would find traces of her predecessor, a silver-backed mirror, a powder bowl, and copied in an ornate hand the words of a song:
I dreamed I saw Joe Hill last night, alive as you and me.
In his photo album, a dazzling photograph of her in the plaid shirt that he now sometimes wore. How they must have loved each other to wear each other’s clothes.

He had made her a gift of a subscription to a special library and once a week when they went to the city for the special “outing” she returned one stack and collected another, opening them there and then in the street, for a foretaste of them.

It was a little room off the kitchen where she sat, a box room that she had fitted out with a lamp, a table with a red chenille cloth, an easy chair, and again and again she would ask herself which story was the more beautiful, by which she also had to concede the more wrenching, poor Hans Castorp, with his tuberculosis, in the mountains for the cure, sitting out-of-doors with his cousin, camelhair rugs on their knees, poor Hans, with his unrequited love for the little Russian, Claudia Chauchat, persecuting himself with thoughts of her knee, her back, her neck bone, knowing her body to be as diseased as his own, yet waiting for that one moment in the dining room when she would sweep past him and either give or withhold a look. Which was worse, that or Emma Bovary, with a husband, two clandestine lovers, and eventually nothing but that fistful of white powder that she stole from the apothecary to poison herself. Which was worse. Both were worse. War did for Hans what a broken heart did for Emma. Hans, a soldier in his hobnailed boots, marching over cold, plowed, treacherous mire, flinging himself down as the enemy shells exploded and discharged fountains of mud, fire, iron, molten metal, the pitiful fragments of his fallen comrades all around. Emma in her last throes, ice cold creeping from her feet to her heart, Emma raising herself up like a galvanized corpse to hear the drone of the blind man and then letting out an atrocious frantic despairing laugh.

To some of the authors, to those that were living, she wrote letters. They were not letters that she ever intended to send. She also wrote to Scott Fitzgerald about his summer nights, his blue gardens, women like moths, the pale magic of Daisy’s face in a window as Gatsby kept his vigil. She wrote out of loneliness. Her gardens were not blue, her woods were green and greener still from downpours, and moths ate into the sumptuous folds of the bedroom curtains, something that Hermann remarked on, dismayed at her making such a poor fist at housekeeping.

She missed things, clothes, dance music pouring from a dance

hall as she and other girls approached the entrance, that excitement, quiffing their hair up, although oftener than not they were not asked up to dance because girls were in the majority. And a Goray skirt that she loved, tartan, with warm yellows and warm terracottas, lost or left somewhere. Sometimes she wrote to her mother, letters that she knew she would not, must not, send.

Dear Mother,

Your clothes were exquisite, though faded, though flittered, though lamentably out of fashion. There was too that time when we both believed we had run away forever, run from the shades of Rusheen. To your mother’s for your long-awaited dowry. Oh what fools. She flew at you, your poor startled mother. If only I could talk to you. If only I could confide in you. This husband-to-be is an enigma in many ways. His father’s people, he says, hailed from Armenia, way, way back. Sometimes I see such a dark look on him, not aimed at me or not always aimed at me, a scowl that seems a summoning of treacheries he cannot remember because they run deep in his blood. Love was something you put your foot down over. You have won in your way. So many promises of love that I envisaged, here, there, and everywhere, along with the heady stuff that the traveling players provided, consumptive heroines drawn to cads, wretched farewells, prefiguring the cold star of doomed love. In my life here I often go up into the woods to think. My thoughts go round and round in circles. If I think ahead, to say, twenty or thirty or forty years I cannot see this liaison continuing and I so recently betrothed! I make jam when the medlar trees and the damson trees bear fruit. He likes when I make jam. We have it in a sago pudding. There are things he does not approve of. High heels for instance. He says they are bad for the feet, later on. Many things about him are solicitous but yet when I think of those twenty or thirty or forty years I shudder. Just as I used to when you questioned me about sin, sinning. That time when