2

THE first night in the cottage that Maisie found for them, the fire smoked and a gale rattled at the windows. There was no electricity, and the oil lamp they took up to the draughty bedroom smoked too.

‘Put the bloody thing out,’ said Michael.

In darkness so absolute, it made the sense of sight quite useless, they lay naked against each other. The bed was old and had a dip in the middle, where they lay together.

‘Are your eyes open?’ she asked Michael.

‘No, are yours?’

‘Yes, but I can only see blackness.’

‘Don’t try to see. Forget about seeing. Feel. Feel my hand.’ His hand, roughened with work now, roamed about her soft body.

‘There’s not a glimmer of light anywhere,’ she said. ‘We’re in total darkness.’

‘Yes, it’s wonderful. Don’t mind it.’ He was stroking her gently, firmly. Her heart was beating heavily, she did not know if she minded the dark, or if she was afraid of it; if she was afraid, there was nothing to do about it.

‘I want you to like this darkness,’ he said. ‘Give yourself up to it, give yourself up to me.’

He shifted her carefully on top of him, facing upwards – there was hardly room in the dip of the bed for them to lie comfortably side by side. With one hand he held her pinioned to him, with the other he caressed her.

Deprived of sight, the other senses reared up in the dark. She heard the sound of the gale rocking the house; her lover’s breath; her own breath. And she breathed in the smell of his flesh, his hair; her own flesh, warm, sweet, moist; the slightly musty bedroom unused all winter; the rough, clean linen. The taste of each other, like apples. And touch.

She lay helplessly cradled into his body, held there by his arm; she could not have moved if she had wanted to. She cried out, in the dark little house, rocked by the wind, herself rocked in the man’s arms, she cried out that love had veered at the last moment away from its object, how it had been scattered at the last, the very last moment, to the winds. How wishing to bring her lover closer had only parted them.

After they had made love, they stayed in that position, she lying on him, and talked softly.

‘You’re glad to be away from the farm,’ he said.

‘Yes,’ said Maisie, ‘I want you to myself.’

He said nothing for a while, but lay stroking her belly.

‘I shall have to see a doctor, I suppose,’ she said, ‘before long.’

‘You’re not worried. No hurry is there?’ said Michael.

‘Well, no – but I’m getting a bit, well, in medical terms I am an “aged primate”.’

‘That sounds terrible.’

Maisie laughed quietly. ‘What shall we do tomorrow?’ she asked.

‘I must go over to the farm in the day.’

‘Oh, why?’

‘They need another hand there. The tractor’s still broken. It’ll take a while to mend it. It holds the work up, everything takes longer. I’ll use the farm car, if I can keep it going.’

Maisie was silent.

‘Will you be all right here?’

‘Yes, I suppose I will. I’ll get some work done – the Dublin paper needs a conclusion.’

‘What’s it about?’

‘The treatment of scours in cattle.’

He gave her thigh a painful little pinch. ‘What’s it about?’

‘The golden age of the medieval ikon,’ she said, rubbing the place. ‘I’ll have to rewrite it so that I can read it – and write a conclusion. I’ll do it while you are stirring the silage or whatever you do.’

‘A farm is a lot of hard work. Unremitting. Sometimes I feel guilty to have escaped.’

‘What made you leave?’

‘One of us had to go – Liam or me. We couldn’t both come into the farm, and split, it would be nothing. Anyway, I was restless and only interested in music. There was an idea afoot that I should go in for the priesthood – I was a bit of a favourite with the priests at school, I’ll never know why – and I fled from the prospect. I’ve done what I wanted and left my mother to the same old grinding work. When I do come home I have to help.’

‘You’re like the prodigal son – in reverse.’

‘Well, I didn’t notice any fatted calf.’

‘You’re the one who has prospered,’ said Maisie. ‘Your mother is – quite formidable. She affects them all, all of you, you are all marked by her. I would have been if I had stayed.’

‘I’m glad you didn’t get drawn in.’

‘Is Kate drawn in?’

‘Inextricably.’

‘She’s not one of the family?’

‘As near as dammit.’

‘I think she loves you.’

After a while Michael said, ‘Don’t worry about her.’ He slipped her off his body and tucked her in beside him and went to sleep.

How love spoils everything in life, all other pleasures, thought Maisie. A curse. A sickness. And how jealousy spoils love itself.

Next morning she woke up nearly falling out of bed. The wind had gone and sun shone on the window-sill.

It was nearly midday before Michael could start the car, he had practically to take it apart and put it together again. Maisie hoped he would not be able to start it, but at last she heard the engine running smoothly and Michael, his face smeared in oil, was off to the Currans’ farm.

When he had gone Maisie felt emptied. The pain of being separated from him made time on her own, instead of being rich and significant as in her past life, a time of barren waiting for his return.

She got out her papers and shuffled them about, staring without comprehension at footnotes she had made. She made herself a cup of coffee and ate a biscuit, then, thinking she should eat more sensibly, took a piece of cheese and an apple. She sat on the doorstep in the sun. She ate her apple, noticing how the overgrown garden was sprinkled with celandines. After a while she looked round for sticks to light the fire; perhaps it would burn better today. She found a stiff brush and swept the bits of carpet. She made the bed and opened the bedroom window. Then she started making a thick broth with vegetables and barley. Peasant food. Tomorrow she would have to go to the village for supplies. She put the iron pot of broth in the oven beside the fire and hoped it would cook there.

Then she got on with her writing.

Michael came in just before dark, she heard his car coming down the lane. She saw as he passed by the window that he looked tired, in need of a wash, like any man at the end of the day, and she loved him more for the ordinariness. He came through the door. He kissed her.

‘What have you been doing?’

‘Making broth for my beloved,’ she said. ‘And you?’

‘Tinkering with the tractor, washing out cowsheds. Oh, good. The fire’s not smoking.’

They sat down and ate their meal, and afterwards Maisie washed up and tidied the little kitchen.

‘Could you live like this always?’ Michael asked her.

‘I might like it.’

‘You’d soon miss the libraries, theatres.’

‘Well, Dublin’s not far away. How is your mother?’

‘As ever.’

‘Annie and Declan?’

‘Oh, Declan sent you this.’ He searched in his pocket and found a scrap of paper with a drawing of something that could be anything. ‘What is it supposed to be?’ asked Maisie, smiling.

‘It’s you,’ said Michael, putting on his glasses. ‘He’s fallen in love with you. Look, those are your eyes, I hadn’t noticed before that one is bigger than the other, let me look.’

He turned Maisie’s face to him and stared at her critically. ‘Yes, I believe he’s right.’

Maisie laughed and put the picture in with her Dublin notes. ‘And Kate?’ she asked, watching his face.

‘She wasn’t there today.’

‘Where is she?’

‘I don’t know. Probably her grandmother is ill – she lives with her grandmother, who is ninety years old and losing her marbles.’

‘It’s a wonder Kate isn’t married, such a pretty girl, and strong-looking, just right for a farmer’s wife, I should have thought.’

‘She won’t marry until her grandmother dies,’ said Michael.

‘Oh,’ said Maisie, ‘would you like some pudding? I forgot – I made a bread-and-butter pudding.’ She took it out of the oven, it smelled of oranges and nutmeg.

‘It looks delicious,’ said Michael. ‘I love puddings.’

‘We’re getting short of food,’ she said. ‘I’ll have to go to the shop tomorrow.’

The next day Michael dropped her off at the village on his way to the farm. She intended walking back, a matter of three miles or so, it would help to pass the day.

Mrs Maloney in the general shop was friendly and inquisitive. ‘You’re in Murphy’s old cottage,’ she said, ‘that’s nice. The cauliflower are the best buy and there’s some lovely apples.’

Maisie bought more than she meant to. ‘You’ll not be carrying it all back yourself,’ said the woman. ‘Oh, no, not at all. I’ll not hear of it, Maloney’ll bring it for you in time for lunch.’

So Maisie enjoyed her walk back unencumbered, stopping to pick a few early primroses on the way. However, the groceries did not turn up until just before Michael came home, and he had to wait for his cauliflower cheese.

And so the days passed. Maisie borrowed a bicycle from Mrs Maloney and began cycling to and from the village. She felt very well physically; her mind began to slow down.

One afternoon Michael drove out unexpectedly from the farm. He had brought Declan with him and they had tea and made smoky toast over the fire.

‘Come back to the farm with us now,’ said Michael, ‘I have to take Declan home.’

‘I’ll stay and keep the fire going,’ said Maisie. When he came back, they sat by the fire and talked.

‘Will you come to Dublin with me?’ she asked, sure that he would.

‘Oh, I want to, I want to show you Dublin, all my haunts.’

‘The Book of Kells.’

‘But I must stay – there’s so much work – I can’t leave yet.’

‘I hadn’t thought of going without you.’

‘You’ll soon be back. Only one night away. I’ll finish off in the top field. I will soon have served my sentence and be free again.’

‘You have so much guilt about the farm. It’s your mother – she’s a guilt-inducer.’

‘She’s had a hard life, my father was a weak man.’

‘What happened to him?’

‘He went to England and we lost touch with him. He started to come home less and less, until he didn’t come at all. We sort of forgot about him. He’s probably living in London somewhere – if he’s still alive.’

‘You look like him – in the photograph.’

He started raking out the hot embers of the fire, making it safe for the night. ‘Let’s go to bed,’ he said, ‘I’m going to miss you tomorrow night. I hope the car gets you there all right, I’ve done my best with it.’

‘At least you’ll have a comfortable night without me,’ said Maisie as they both rolled into the dip in the bed.

‘Oh, I’ll probably stay on the farm and work late, it’s easier and means I haven’t commandeered all the farm cars. You can ring me at the farm. Now let’s stop talking.’

Next day Maisie drove the rackety car to the farm and dropped Michael off there. ‘Be careful,’ he said, ‘the clutch is still slipping a bit.’ She kissed him and did not watch as he went through the gate. She reversed into an opening in the hedge and set off down the lane towards the main road to Dublin.

Once she had said goodbye to her lover, she started in a determined way to recall her lost self. She would have enjoyed the drive if she had been in a better car – she several times heard alarming noises from it and expected it to fall to bits – but it got her there.

She parked it in the college car park, which she found by means of a little map the university had sent her. Among the other cars it looked muddy, disreputable, an interloper. Still, she gave it a little pat.

The first person she saw when she walked into the college was Philomena O’Grady, who came towards her as if expecting her, as if she had been waiting for her. ‘I came especially,’ she said, ‘when I saw your name on the programme.’

They had lunch together in the students’ canteen. ‘Now I’ve caught up with you, you’ll not escape,’ said Philomena. They had spent the afternoon wandering about Dublin, with Maisie wishing it were Michael who was with her. It was a Michael sort of place – elegant and casual, human and fallible. Music spilled from every pub door, there were buskers and beggars in every doorway. They walked down Grafton Street looking at the clothes, window-shopping.

After Maisie had given her paper, Philomena said, ‘You must stay with me.’

‘I have a room in the college,’ said Maisie. But Philomena had a ruthlessness that Maisie felt too tired to stand against.

‘Tomorrow we shall see more of Dublin,’ she said. ‘It would be stupid to go back without seeing the sights of this fine city.’

Really, she was right.

Maisie telephoned the farm, but, unable to get hold of Michael, left a message that she would be home at the weekend. Later that night, Philomena began to reveal her past and probe Maisie about hers. The Irishwoman was taking combs out of her hair, loosening it from its chignon. ‘When I saw you at the conference,’ she said, ‘I wondered what you were doing with the likes of a Michael Curran. Brandy?’

‘No. No, thanks. I thought you got on rather well together there, at the luncheon.’

‘Well, we understand each other – fellow-countrymen. We recognise the cut of each other’s jib, you might say. We came out of the same nesting box. Do you like my metaphors?’

Maisie said nothing, absent-mindedly accepting a brandy. She was trying to distance herself from Philomena’s words, trying not to listen too closely, as the Irishwoman went on, ‘I can understand what he sees in you. Not what you see in him, though. He is not what you think. He is a bird of a different feather. He is storm-tossed – his boat has a ragged sail.’

Maisie was beginning to feel angry at Philomena’s persistent probing. She left the brandy undrunk and said she was very tired and would like to go to bed.

‘Don’t you know by now,’ said Philomena, ‘that men do not want love? Do not know what to do with it. They prefer their toys, their subterfuges, their mothers, their tarts, anything, anything.’

‘I don’t know that,’ said Maisie quietly. ‘Where am I sleeping?’ She gathered up her things and Philomena showed her to a plain little attic room.

‘Sleep well, Maisie,’ she said, and closed the door behind her.

Tired out as she was, Maisie lay awake, heavy-limbed in the narrow bed. The little attic room seemed to be like a ship’s cabin, adrift, the black sky above her and the sound of a gale getting up.

She placed her hands over her belly. Her baby, growing there in its own dark world. She stroked her belly gently, as if soothing the baby to sleep, and fell asleep herself.

She woke next morning to Philomena standing by the bed with a cup of tea. ‘It’s raining,’ she was saying, ‘but it will be clear by lunchtime. Breakfast is nearly ready.’

She had made a wonderful breakfast of bacon and eggs, toast and honey. They sat opposite each other; between them was a bowl of fruit, dull, smoky-red apples and a bunch of dark grapes. Philomena poured coffee.

‘We’ll do the galleries and museums,’ she said, ‘and we’ll have a pub lunch.’

All morning, she never stopped talking wittily, quite brilliantly. But Maisie was quiet as she followed Philomena up and down museum steps, in and out of great doors, stood with her in front of ornately framed pictures; sat with her and tried to decipher the handwritten menu in a pub, where a beautiful greyhound sat delicately shivering by the empty stone fireplace.

Someone Philomena knew joined them briefly in the pub and was introduced: ‘Annie Dillon, Celtic Studies’ – a white-faced young woman dressed like an Edwardian widow in black weeds. Maisie took the girl’s thin white hand which was smudged with black – perhaps newsprint – and the fingers heavy with many rings. Everyone was talking and swearing and calling out the names of friends. There was a smell of fish and malt and wood – and Philomena’s soft, velvety perfume.

‘I’ll have just bread and cheese,’ said Maisie. ‘I’m not really hungry.’

‘I can’t eat all that,’ she protested when it came, a half loaf of home-made bread and a huge wedge of cheese. She offered some to Annie, who put a piece of the cheese into her black beaded bag for her supper.

‘She only pretends to eat,’ said Philomena, when she had gone. ‘She’s anorexic, poor girl.’

When they left the pub at last, it had stopped raining and the sun had come out. There was more to see. A room full of Irish gold treasures. The Book of Kells. It was while they were looking at the opened Book of Kells, that suddenly Maisie could bear it no longer. ‘I’m going back,’ she said.

Then again she said fiercely, ‘I’m going back.’

Philomena knew there was no point this time trying to keep her. She shrugged and walked off, as if she had been jilted.

With a sense of release, Maisie made her way from the university to the car, abandoning things she had left at Philomena’s house, including her notes and a book that she was attached to. In a very short time now she would be back with him. She would see him again, touch his arm, hear his voice.

As she was driving out of Dublin the sky was glorified by a sunset such as she had never seen. The heart of the sunset was molten-gold, a bright, streaming, living gold that brought to Maisie’s mind the gold room in the museum with its treasures of gold cups, reliquaries, croziers, vases and necklaces, but it was the gold of a thousand million such treasures melted down and flung against the sky, and even then its glorious brightness could only have been spilled from the sun, the most powerful source of brilliant light in the universe. The clouds were tinged with all shades of yellow, ochre to citrus, and then to green and to a deep purple, and the outer clouds were dark purple and even darker, nearly black – night’s harbingers.

Maisie parked the car and wound down the window, making the colours leap more brightly in the air. It was such a sight as should have made the people come out of their houses to see. If it had been a display put on by the city council, perhaps they would have done so.

She wondered if Michael was watching it. She wanted to keep it to show to Michael. Look, Michael, at this beautiful sunset I have found for you. But you couldn’t do that, take these things to give to your loved person, they weren’t even yours, they could not be had. They spoke not of having, but of not having. Rather, they spoke of relinquishing. And as she watched, imperceptibly the dark shades of night, the purple and grey increased as the gold gradually lessened, giving itself up to oncoming night in a slow renunciation. Maisie wound up the window and sped on her journey. She was so glad to leave Dublin which did not hold her lover, and travel out into the hills which did.

On the way back the fan belt went and she was held up trying to find a garage to fix it. At last she drove up the lane to the little white, low-lying house nestling in the rain. There was thin smoke coming from the chimney and the other farm car was parked outside. He was at home. Maisie felt a quick rush of joy at the thought of seeing him, without having to wait.

She went in.

He looked awful. He was crying and kept saying, ‘Oh, Maisie. Oh, Fig.’

At first Maisie thought he was ill. And then it dawned on her, with a great sickening flood of feeling, that there was someone upstairs and at once she knew it was Kate.

She took this information in without being told. She knew it, but fed it to herself as little by little as she could to protect herself from shock, but still she felt as if she had been hit by something heavy, as if a car had knocked her over. She did not know what to say, words had become redundant.

Then Kate came downstairs, her blouse unbuttoned and done up hastily with a brooch, her skirt twisted, her feet bare. She looked calm, though, as if nothing was amiss. She’ll offer me a cup of tea in a minute, thought Maisie. And that is what she did.

Maisie stared at her and then at Michael, and then she gathered up her books and one or two things – anything that was upstairs she left, she would not go up there. Michael stood like a man just woken from a dream.

She threw the things in the back of the car and without looking back she drove away.