1

IRELAND had been waiting, quietly, to change Maisie.

Michael had led her to a different country, a foreign place, somewhere where things were not as she had expected and, in their newness, startled and surprised her. But in all this, part of Maisie was left behind. And, in all this, the balance of power between her and Michael had shifted. It had shifted to Michael.

Even while they were crossing over, waves and wind howling and hungering round the boat, it had started then. Maisie had not realised until now to what extent she had, in fact, held that balance of power. But now, among his own people – even on the boat he met those who knew him, called out to him, calling him Mick, and a group on deck playing the spoons drew him into their circle. He was going home. She was setting out in an unknown country. She was his girlfriend, his woman.

And with the rough weather, and the early stages of pregnancy, she was feeling slightly queasy. She said nothing at first and tried to ignore it, but later had to go and lie down in the cabin, covered over with her big travelling-coat. She lay there with closed eyes and wondered who this Irishman, this Mick Curran, was to her. And how it was she had become Mick Curran’s woman. He no longer dressed with the slightly eccentric dash he had assumed in London. Now he wore his native clothes, a becomingly rough old coat, loose sweaters and soft corduroy. He was going back home.

The crossing over, they spent their first night in a large, turn-of-the-century hotel. It had once been a fine establishment, but now it was run down, its tennis courts and exotic gardens all grown over into a tangled mess of vegetation, strangled in briars. The food was good, only Maisie still felt a slight nausea which would not quite leave her. Michael ate steak and drank whisky. He said he was going to hire a car and show her a bit of the country. She could see he secretly thought Ireland was something special, his treasure.

And so they drove about his place, his country, mile after mile, and sat by streams and lakes, walked by the sea on firm hard sand, wandered over springy hills of short tufted grass. They ate in little cafes and in castle dining rooms and drank in dozens of pubs. In these pubs they listened to endless talk – talk about the Irish government, the English government, the drug-smuggling that was said to go on in the coves round the coast, talk about life and death and have you heard this one, now listen, then. Sometimes the old men played on fiddles, listening as they played, carried into some other region, lost in it, their faces concentrated, a gap-toothed grin of self-forgetful joy. Maisie would watch her lover as he sat in these dim little pubs, a jar of Guinness in front of him, his dark head against the wooden settle. At home in his native land. At night they put up all over the place, in cottages, pubs and hotels. Once or twice they stayed with people Michael knew. They never stayed more than one night anywhere.

Gradually Maisie’s sickness left her. She noticed that her breasts were getting heavier, but that was the only outward sign. She reckoned the child had been conceived the day of the visit to the catacombs.

The shift in the balance of power had made them hunger more for each other sexually, made them new to each other. But they spoke less intimately to one another, their verbal intercourse became less probing, more concerned mostly with day-to-day things.

Although they spoke less to each other, they were unusually inseparable, touching each other often, living side by side through the days and nights. Physically, sexually, they were at the height of their passion for each other. Mentally there was not so much a rift as a lull, as if they had got to know as much as they wanted of each other. There was no more questioning, they rested in what they knew, knowing there was a divide between them. Unbridgeable. This fed their sexual craving – as if sex might take them across this divide. But it never did.

One morning, they made love out of doors. It was late March now and the sun had some warmth in it, though the air was cold. The night before they had stayed with one of Michael’s musician friends and his girlfriend and had shared a bedroom with the couple’s six-year-old child – it had precluded even the most furtive love-making.

So in the morning they stopped near a copse of beech trees, growing in a scooped-out valley. Here they found a soft place to lie in the moss and last year’s leaves. Michael folded his coat under Maisie’s head, and they made love there without undressing, finding their way to the warm flesh through layers of clothes.

Afterwards Michael lay for a while, heavily on her. She did not mind. She lay still, with the man’s heavy weight on her. The hollow where she lay cradled her body, and she thought when she died how she would like to be buried in this place. Unvisited, unmourned. Birth and death clung together like two halves belonging to each other, part of each other, one thing. She felt Michael’s heartbeat which throbbed from the very centre of the earth, and the sap of the trees and every living thing ran in her veins. They made their way back to the car, leaving the copse to busy crows building their ramshackle nests in the top branches.

Wherever they went Maisie’s eyes drank in new sights. Unexpected things gave her a deep pleasure – there were more animals and birds; for the first time in her life she saw kingfishers, and otters. Used to surroundings teeming with the human species, it was healing to know a more balanced world.

The people they met seemed classless.

One day they met a young woman walking in the middle of nowhere. She was carrying a baby in a sling made of her jacket. It was such an unusual sight – to see this woman, so far from any village or town, she seemed so independent, unafraid. She spoke to them briefly, politely, saying there was a wind getting up. Maisie caught a glimpse of the baby’s curled-up fist.

They also met, from time to time, couples and bands of people who were dressed in an exotic but practical way, in flowered skirts and cotton and leather cummerbunds and feathered hats; these people were usually accompanied by wild-looking lurcher dogs. They spoke with accents from Bristol and London – they were English hippies.

Sometimes they drove through villages of the utmost melancholy and desolation – a huddle of ill-built houses, made of slabs of concrete. A garage, a pub. The only sign of life the graffiti.

One evening, just as it was getting dark, they picked up a little family on the road. The man was young, very correct and stable-looking, the woman slight and pretty; they were carrying what looked like all their worldly goods, slung about them. Their little girl was carrying a cat in a cage. They were moving house, they said calmly, inconsequentially. They spoke Gaelic to each other. This family was dressed in layers of clothes, perhaps wearing as many as they could to lighten their burdens. They wanted to be dropped at a crossroads. Here there were no houses in sight, or anything else, but they seemed sure about what they were doing.

They also saw the same tinker several times in different places. Always, when they saw him, he was reading a book, sitting peacefully by the roadside, his horse tied up nearby. Maisie wanted to know what he was reading.

She did not know where they were going – just let Michael lead her where he liked. She did not know, half the time, whether they were north, south, east or west.

Then one day they pulled up outside a farm, a farm like many others they had seen. Michael sat silent for a while. Then he said, ‘Well, Maisie. Let’s go in.’

He opened the car door for her, and she followed him through the cross-bar gate, which he closed behind them, across a path of planks laid on the mud, into a farmyard. Two sheepdogs rushed out barking, scattering hens, then quietening suddenly.

They passed a milking shed where a man was working. Scarcely looking their way, he answered Michael’s greeting. There were three cars in the yard, one partly dismantled.

The farmhouse door stood open, muddy sacking on the doorstep. Several cats crouched about on the window-sills. A pile of mud-caked wellingtons was heaped just inside the door.

It was dark inside and smelled of bread baking. After a while, Maisie made out a room that seemed entirely comfortless except for one easy-chair by the stove. There were piles of newspapers in the corner, a stuffed horsehair sofa which was broken, a flitch of bacon hung up among the cobwebs, a flagged stone floor, a television set. There was a glass-fronted bookcase full of books. On the walls there was a calendar from the Irish Farmer and Stockbreeder and a picture of the Pope before last.

In the darkest corner of all, a small boy was playing with a basket of kittens. He had a rabbit’s paw on a string and was teasing them with it.

‘Hallo, Mick,’ said the child.

‘Hallo, Declan,’ said Michael. ‘Where’s your grandmother?’

‘She’s not here,’ said the little boy, ‘perhaps she’s in the field. I’ve called this kitten Mouse.’

Michael went over to the boy, who let him pick him up without a struggle, but without much collaboration.

‘That’s a funny name for a cat,’ said Michael.

‘It’s a kitten.’

‘It’s a nice name for a kitten,’ said Michael.

‘Who’s that lady?’ asked the boy, not looking at Maisie.

‘This is my lady – she’s got a funny name too. She’s called Fig.’ He put the boy down.

‘I’ll call the tabby one that,’ said the little boy, picking up another kitten. He shot Maisie a small quick smile, full of humour.

Maisie smiled back and followed Michael through to the kitchen. The mother cat jumped off the table where it had been helping itself to the newly baked soda bread laid out to cool on racks.

‘Wait here,’ said Michael, ‘I’ll go over to the field and find her.’

Maisie waited. She looked around the kitchen. A pot of something was cooking on the stained AGA. More piles of newspapers in the corner. A stack of washing-up waited to be done in the sink and overflowed on to the floor. The long trestle-table was laid with a crumpled white cloth, clean apart from the cat’s muddy paw-marks, and good cutlery. A bowl of primroses was set in the middle of the table beside the bread. Then she watched Michael from the window. He had put on wellingtons and was walking across the field; she watched as he walked away from her, his shoulders moving slightly as he walked, in that way he had.

Then she noticed a woman bending, cutting cabbage. The woman stood up and Maisie saw her give Michael what she had cut and stoop for more.

After a while Michael and his mother began walking back to the house, stopping now and then to talk. As she came nearer, Maisie saw that the mother was tall, as tall as her son, and had thick, iron-grey hair. Even at this distance the tense, almost angry manner was apparent in her walk and her demeanour.

She seemed neither pleased nor displeased to see Maisie, but perhaps to regard her as another pair of hands. ‘Will you do the potatoes?’ she asked by way of a greeting. Michael she seemed to regard in something of the same light – someone come to help with the continuous work of the farm and the house.

‘You’ll be needed to finish the milking,’ she told him. ‘The tractor’s broken down since yesterday, and your brother has his work cut out what with that and everything else. There’s never anything but work,’ she told Maisie with grim, bitter, satisfied anger in her voice.

Her anger was there too in the way she clattered the plates as she washed them, handing them steaming-hot to Maisie to dry – there was nowhere to put them down. The two women worked, clearing the pile of dirty dishes, scrubbing the potatoes clean, preparing the cabbage. When the food was ready, Mrs Curran thumped the browned potato pie on the table.

‘Go and ring the bell, Missus,’ she said to Maisie. ‘It’s by the door.’

Maisie found the rusty old school bell under a bush by the door.

They sat round the table, Michael, his younger brother Liam, a heavy, full-lipped, ruddy-faced man who looked nothing at all like Michael (Maisie had not even known of the brother’s existence until now), Liam’s wife Annie (a thin wispish, beautiful woman, flat-chested in a flowered pinafore) and their son, Declan – and Mrs Curran.

Maisie realised that not only was she now Michael’s woman, she was part of a tribe; through Michael, she was being drawn into this matriarchal tribe as a camp-follower. With each mouthful she became more and more uneasy, even slightly panicky. She wanted to get out of this place.

The seat of power was Mrs Curran. Everything emanated from her, she worked ceaselessly. Even when she sat after the meal, in her chair for a while, she knew what was going on in every part of the farm and would not give the reins over to anyone else for a moment. And she knew exactly what she was doing, she thought everything out, through to the bitter end.

Maisie thought that as soon as possible she and Michael would leave the farm.

But that night, tired out, they slept well on the makeshift bed he had made them on the parlour floor surrounded by silver-framed photographs of a proud, handsome woman carrying a drooping bouquet of lilies, and a man so very like Michael in looks. The mattress was rammed between a roll-top desk spilling bills for cattle-feed, and a piano.

When Maisie woke next day, Michael was already up working outside. There was a knock on the door. It was a young woman with bright tawny hair tied back from a freckled face, and a full figure, voluptuous, supple and strong.

‘I’ve brought you a cup of tea,’ she said.

‘Oh – thanks. I’m Maisie.’

‘Oh, yes, I know,’ said the girl. ‘I’m Kate. Is there anything else you’ll want now? I could make you a bit of toast. Breakfast’s gone.’

Nobody had said anything to her, but Maisie’s intuition was so sharp where Michael was concerned that she knew without being told that the girl and Michael had a sexual link. She thought, ‘I must be imagining this – it can’t be so – and yet it is.’

‘Thank you. I’m not hungry,’ she said. ‘I’ll get up now.’

‘Oh, don’t hurry yourself,’ said Kate, ‘you rest there.’

‘Are you Michael’s sister?’ she asked desperately, clinging to straws, knowing the answer. She was pale with fear, and the cup and saucer trembled in her hand.

The girl smiled and shook her head. ‘There’s no sister,’ she said as she went.

Maisie got up and dressed with quick, shaky hands, at the mercy of her instincts and passions. All her old life might as well have belonged to someone else. Here was Michael’s woman, pregnant, jealous, trapped like some poor bloody animal.

‘Will you hang the washing, Missus?’ said Mrs Curran, in the kitchen. Christ, thought Maisie, if she goes on calling me Missus I’ll kill her.

She would ask Michael about Kate that night, when they were in bed – the only time they were alone together. But for several nights she could not bring herself to ask, afraid of the answer, though she hedged round the subject.

‘I’ve known her all my life,’ said Michael. ‘She’s part of things here.’

‘Part of you?’

‘I suppose you could say that.’

Further than that Maisie would not press him, she knew she might not be able to bear the truth. And she even fancied his love-making was more casual. And yet surely if Michael was anything to this woman, she would not have treated Maisie herself with such equanimity. She wondered too how the family regarded her relationship. They seemed remarkably cool about it.

‘Does it matter that we share a bed?’ she asked.

‘No. It doesn’t matter a damn.’

She must pull herself together. It all came from giving over her power to Michael; giving up her autonomy. She was in his power.

‘Why doesn’t it matter? Is it because sons may do as they like – bring home any loose woman they please?’

She had no way of knowing what anyone here thought of her, and her relationship with Michael. No one said anything. Somehow it made things more dangerous. Michael’s mother, Maisie realised, frightened her. There was an unnerving silence behind her brief words, behind her actions. Michael had said his mother had a sense of humour, and Maisie had looked for it in the deeply lined face in vain. Perhaps it had left her one day – perhaps after days of rain had turned the fields to mud and the tractor had broken down again. And she had then changed into a witch.

Maisie turned away on to her side and raised herself up on one elbow. Michael reached out and pulled her roughly, gently, towards him, pushing her under him.

‘That’s it,’ he said. ‘Anyone can see you’re a loose woman.’

Covering her body with his, he entered her without preamble. They came together then, easily, quickly, their bodies mated, knowing what to do; part of the earth’s weal. Afterwards he fell asleep on top of her and she had to heave him off.

Anyway, there was a sort of joy in it, this brief, blunt kind of mating. But if the mated feeling enriched and satisfied some part of her, she knew she was in danger of losing something else, perhaps had already lost it – a kind of integrity, a singleness and uniqueness. She felt it seeping away from her, seeping out on to the floor of the hovel where she lay next to this man already deep in a heavy sleep.

Although partly this was to do with living under the tribal roof. On this bloody farm, she thought. Sleepless, she decided she would begin once more to reclaim some of what she had lost. She would take things into her own hands. She would find them somewhere to live where they could be alone. She would look for a cottage to rent.

For she wanted to stay in Ireland. The country itself refreshed and strengthened her like sweet, pure water. She imagined her child born here, brought up in the soft air and open vistas, and the rough, true, classless way of things here, the fields ploughed and open into furrows under the sky.