Mc MANUS came to his senses and heard kitchen sounds. He was a child in his own bed, curled securely in a safe and familiar place, enclosed in safe and familiar sounds. The bedclothes were deep and warm and reassuring.“Mammy,” he said. To himself, not to be heard. That was comforting too. His mother was close. He would call. He could hear. She would hear. She always heard.
He opened his eyes and was not in a safe and familiar place. He did not know where he was and was afraid.
He had been dreaming? Terrifying dreams; or were they real and had they found him and beaten him unconscious? He was sore, everywhere. There was a woman with pink jellyfish eyes that grew and shrank.
She was standing in the bedroom doorway, drying her hands on a towel. Wearing steel-rimmed eyeglasses that glittered. Or the eyes behind them glittered. It was hard to breathe and impossible to call out.
“There, child,” the woman said, “don’t fret. You’ve been sick.” She came down the room slowly the way she would come catching a cat. Don’t run, her sly movement said, I’ll not hurt you.
She sat on the edge of the bed near the foot. “I’m Mrs. Burke,” she said.“This is my house. You fell in over my half-door—a very sick child.”
Child? Yes, he thought vaguely, I’m a child.
The woman’s voice was gentle, but she didn’t smile. That face didn’t do much smiling. “I was just going to wash you,” she said, as if she always washed him. “You’ve sweated something terrible.”
She was big. No, not really big; tall, as tall as he was himself. His mind absorbed her in fragments, not in general. A bun at the back, brown hair, a little gray, mere traces of gray; a grayish dress, square like a flour sack with holes cut for the neck and arms. Strong arms, big hands. The face was narrow, plain, full of force. And tired. There were dark circles under the eyes. They reached well below the glasses.
“I’ll get the things,” she said, and left him to wonder what things.
Strong legs. Big feet. She came back carrying the things; an enamel basin, steaming, towels over her shoulder; and pulled up a chair with a big foot and put everything on it.
“Now.” He couldn’t move when she reached with a big hand and slowly drew back the bedclothes. “You’ll feel the air,” she said.
He felt the air, all over his body. Not cold; fresh. He was naked.
She washed him from head to feet, the way his mother did when he was very young, and sick. She soaped a face cloth and went over him slowly, very gently. Then she dried him the same way, in all the same places. She turned him over, washed the other side, and dried him, and said, “Don’t want bedsores, do we?” and rubbed cold fluid on his back and buttocks and it stung a little, freshly, then glowed on his skin. Then she turned him on his front again. His fears had gone. She was gentle, kind, motherly. She wouldn’t harm him. She covered him and took the things away.
When she came back she said, “Want me to talk to you?”
“Yes.”
She pulled a chair to the edge of the bed, drew his arm from under the covers, and held his hand in both of hers. “You collapsed at the door three days ago. Do you remember anything of the past three days?”
“Only your glasses.”
“That’s interesting,” she said like a kindergarten teacher. That’s what she was like—a schoolteacher. Like old Moll McCullough who used to hide the cane when the Inspector came, and Paddy Gallagher who made his own fiddles knew where she kept it, and brought it out where the Inspector could see it. Moll whaled him with it afterwards, when the Inspector left.
“What made you smile?” the woman said.
“Moll McCullough.”
“Who’s she?”
“Schoolteacher.”
“Did I remind you of her?”
“Yes.”
“That’s good. I was a schoolteacher once. We’ve been pouring penicillin into you,” she said. “You’ve had pneumonia. You’ll be fine now.”
If she’d known Moll McCullough she wouldn’t have thought it was good, and if she thought it was good why didn’t she smile? Only her voice smiled. Or her voice sang at him, as if he were an infant.
“I’m going to give you a little clear soup. I’ll fix your pillows. The doctor said only a little clear soup. We’ll do as he says. He’s a very good doctor.” More infant tones.
She sat close to him, on the edge of the bed, pulled him up to her with one strong arm and with the other raised his pillows, patted them, and then put both arms about him and cradled him. “My poor child,” she said, and held his face against her; against her breast. He could feel her nipple through the dress, against his mouth. His mother did that when he was sick, and he’d wondered years later whether she’d been wishing him back to infancy. But this woman pressed his face so hard against her breast that he coughed for want of breath. “Poor child,” she said, and lowered him down on his pillows. I hope she does that again, he thought; she gave him a safe feeling. An odd thought occurred to him. She can do that to me, he thought, she’s known me for three days. I’ve never really seen her before.
She brought the soup and fed him, wiped the spills from his chin and chest. “Take your pills,” she said. “They’ll keep you sleepy and you’ll be fine in no time.” She lowered his pillows, covered his shoulders. “I’ll leave you now. Sleep some more, child. You’ll mend quick.”
He woke and slept and woke and it was like climbing a terraced hill on a crisp day. He felt better every time he turned to look about him. From soup to scrambled eggs. A week, maybe two weeks, waking and sleeping, taking pills and being washed. Two more days, in fact. On the third day time became measurable again, but by then he was enveloped in timeless kindness.
It was today, while the washing was going on, that he lay in pleasant acceptance, his eyes on the bun on the back of her neck and remembered what Pat McGladdery said one day in school about Miss Martin, who had hair like that. “She’s got very sexy hair—that’s pillow hair, Johnny boy.” It had fixed an erotic image in his mind and women in his fastasies had long hair that flowed on pillows. Mrs. Burke was washing his upper thighs when his penis rose.
His embarrassment colored him. “Don’t fret, child,” she said, and moved her face cloth a little higher as if everything was normal. “God made you whole. Thank Him.” Her voice was flat.
He sneaked a glance at her face. It was as severe as ever and as cold as the face of a spinster vigilante beating the village bushes for sin.
But she didn’t wash him again. “You can take a bath tomorrow,” she said. “I’ll help you in and out in case you slip, but you’re coming on fine.” She put him in warm pajamas when the washing was done, and piled pillows behind him. “The doctor’s coming,” she said. “You were sleeping when he came yesterday. He just took your pulse. Sit up and we’ll talk.” She helped him, then was busy about the room, tidying the tidy.
“Tell the doctor you’re fine,” she said, lifting and laying about the room, and not looking at him. “Would you like to go to a hospital?”
“No. No.” It was too urgent. “No,” he said calmly. They could get at him easily in a hospital. “If you can stand me,” he said.
“All right, child. You’ll stay. You need a mother.”
Did that explain her? She came suddenly and sat on the bed. “Before he comes, we need to have a frank talk.”
She was in a hurry. It harshened her voice and her look. “You raved a lot,” she said. “There’s two paperback books in your pack. You’re John McManus. Your name’s in them.”
“Yes.” Her urgency frightened him.
“Was Maureen your sweetheart?”
She knew it all, one way and another. What in God’s name had he been saying? Raving. Hopelessly, he decided he’d told her too much to lie. “My sister.”
“A man by the name of Powers? He killed her?”
“I think so.”
“You said a lot of names—this man Powers, McCann, Clune, McCandless. Everybody knows who they are. They must be the only television stars the law can’t find. Were you a Provo too?”
“Yes.”
“You’re not the kind.”
“No.” Bull Baillie saw it. She saw it. Powers and Clune saw it. Everybody saw it but him. Maureen would be alive if he’d seen it.
“Did you turn informer?”
That was the life-and-death question. The way she spoke, though? About Clune and McCann and the law?
“Not till they killed my sister.”
She was about to say something and closed her mouth. “How old are you?” she said instead. He knew she’d been going to say something else, something more important.
“Twenty-two. “
“Do you know what’s going on in the North this past week?”
“No.”
“There’s been nothing else in the papers or on the air for a week. The army got a big haul of Provos, bomb factories, a Catholic doctor by the name of McDermott and a lot of guns and ammunition. The same night twelve Officials were shot, including their top man in Belfast. The Provos issued a statement. They claimed they did it. They said the Officials informed on them and they gave them twenty-four hours to get out of the North. They’ve been killing one another for a week. The civil war the Provos wanted to start has started—but it’s between Catholics. Again.” She stared at him steadily, from a cold, thin face.
His head was heavy. He could barely hold it up. He didn’t want to hold it up. What was it he told the policeman when he phoned home? Houses, factories? Jesus, when they understood there’d be hundreds of them after him.
“Maybe you’re wrong,” she said. “Maybe they’re not hunting you. It’s the Officials they’re after.”
“No. They decided to give me the black cap before any of that. I was quitting. They tried for me and it went wrong. They killed my sister ... they’ll keep after me. They never stop.”
“You’re for England?”
“If I ever reach it.”
“Your gun’s in the dresser. Top right-hand drawer. With your money.”
She was in a great hurry now, giving the room a last look over for anything out of place. “I’m making trouble for you,” he said.
“That’s enough,” she said sharply, and put her big hands on her big hips, bracing her shoulders as if to ease her back. “Lie down.” She had made up her mind about something. She punched his pillows. “Give the doctor no more than the time of day,” she said brusquely. “Just yes and no. No talk.” She covered his shoulders. “I’m Mrs. Burke.”
“Yes.”
“Yes, I told you that. He’s Sullivan. Dr. Seamus Sullivan. He married my sister. She’ll be here too, but you won’t see her. Nobody else in Ireland knows you’re here. The three of us listened to you raving.” She was nervous, building something inside herself. “She’ll be here because Seamus comes almost every day.” She looked at him cannily. “You see what I mean?”
“No.”
“If a brother-in-law who’s a doctor visits his sister-in-law almost every day, either she’s sick or she has somebody in the house that’s sick—or he’s going to bed with her. Anybody who saw him would take the third choice. So my sister comes too.” She rushed away from that. “You were reading one of Thomas Burke’s books.” He grasped at a change of thought like a change of step.
“Yes. I was re-reading it.”
“Good,” she said, and the corners of her mouth creased a little. She bent suddenly and kissed his head. “That’s a good child. I’m Thomas Burke’s widow.”
Then the doctor’s car came and with it, he feared, hostility. So he braced for the strain, burning up energy, and Mrs. Burke went out to meet them.
There was talk in the next room among the three of them. It made him feel like a specimen.
“How is he, Kate?” A big deep voice. Not unpleasant.
“Sleeping. A bit better, poor child.”
“Child? He’s a full-grown man.” A woman’s voice, not far from Mrs. Burke’S, but harsher. “Some child!” That had overtones, and he thought with guilt and pleasure of his erection in Mrs. Burke’s hard fingers.
“I’ll get him into the Schull Hospital,” the doctor said firmly, making decisions for Mrs. Burke
“Am I a useless old woman? Is that it, Seamus?”
“That’s the bloody point. You’re not an old woman at all. That’s what has your sister worried. That ‘child’ you’re talking about has all his parts, full size.”
“Watch your tongue,” Mrs. Burke said, but it wasn’t a rebuke.
“Where do you sleep, Kate?” the sister asked sharply.
“You’ve got the mind of a horny curate,” Mrs. Burke said, as if her sister amused her.
“Kate!”
“By God, I think you need an invalid in the house, Kate,” the doctor said. “Can’t you do without a patient?”
“Go and see the child, Seamus.”
McManus closed his eyes and waited for the doctor.
He was a hefty man with a weathered face. He probably spent as much time with a rod in his hand as he did at bedsides. “You’re the great sleeper,” he said to McManus, and took his wrist and stuffed a thermometer in his mouth. “And you have the constitution of a horse.”
McManus did as Mrs. Burke had told him to do. “You talked a lot,” the doctor said.
“Sir?”
“Why did you run to here?”
“It was far.”
“Nowhere’s far in Ireland. It’s a big saucer. Didn’t they teach you that in school?”
“Yes, sir.”
“The Civil War was over fifty years ago. The last revenge killing that came out of it was only done a few years ago.”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m sure you’ll get the point I’m about to make. The Irish have a lot of unlovely things in their heads and hearts. So as soon as you’re ready to move, I’m going to move you. Out of here. I’m not referring to Mrs. Burke’s house, boy. I’m referring to the whole of West Cork. Right out. I’ll smuggle you to the Cork Airport, and I’ll leave you there. After that it’s sink or swim. Do you follow me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Fair enough?”
“Yes, sir.”
“We don’t want them around here. They are here. But their guns aren’t going and we don’t want them going. We don’t want executions, black caps—none of that stuff here. Keep it in the North. Have you got me?”
“Yes.”
“I won’t labor the point.” But he labored it. “The minute you can move, I move you. Clear?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Seamus,” Mrs. Burke said from the bedroom door, “there’s plenty of sick people in Schull.”
“Do you want that fuzz off your jaw?” the doctor asked him.
“No, sir.”
“Holy God, d’you think that’ll hide you?”
“Schull, Seamus!” said Mrs. Burke.
“What the hell got into you, boyo? You’re not a back-street gunman....”
“Seamus!”
McManus watched her at the door with them. She waved them away with thanks and closed the half-door and shut the snib on the incongruous Yale lock. There was the first and odd little smile on her face. It was like the little smile he used to see on his father’s face when evening came and he locked up the house and came to them and said with a great sweetness and contentment in his voice, “Well, the world’s shut out.” The family’s private world was waiting and secure.
A rich sense of safety and of home flowed in him.
She came again into the room, her narrow face softened and private and warm, as if from some small victory. “We—ll,” she said, and brought him a woolen dressing gown. “Come and rock by a nice turf fire and we’ll talk a bit, child.”
And he thought, I like the way she calls me child.
She was excited in a quiet fashion. The sign wasn’t on her face; faintly in her voice, maybe; mostly in her talk. She chattered as she whipped eggs in a bowl; the chatter was idle in a way, but it all turned on one subject, purposefully he thought: Thomas Burke. She didn’t call him Tom, or my late husband. It was always Thomas Burke.
Thomas Burke was a Name when McManus was fifteen and wandering the summer hills with more books than clothes in his pack. Burke was a Bad Name. His books were banned in Dublin, acclaimed everywhere else, and fought over in the Dublin press, “like mongrels at a meat bone,” she said.
The banning started with Thomas Burke’s first book, Judas. It was a book about political and social obscurantism, Catholic Nationalism masquerading as patriotic Republicanism, about devious Irish treachery, about politicians “whose only talent through the years of independence has been for talking out of both sides of their mouths,” about malignant parochialism, malice and hungry sex. The book was a rejected lover’s iconoclasm.
“Thomas Burke took me to America,” she said, as if he had been a lover and not a husband. “He got to be a professor of English at New York University and I taught school. He wrote all his books in America. But he always wanted home to change Ireland and when the books made money, we bought this place and altered it, put in the electric, built on the bathroom and a pump and plumbing from the well. The little end room is his study.” Is, she said.
The cottage had three rooms, the room with the bed, the electric kitchen, and the little end room full of books, a desk, a chair, and a cupboard. There was only one bed.
Where did she sleep? His sleeping bag was rolled up in a corner of the kitchen. His heart warmed to the lonely, generous woman. He slept in the good bed they brought back from America—Colonial, they called it?—and she slept on the floor in his bedroll. And didn’t explain where she slept to the vigilant sister.
“He never wrote a good word in the end room,” she said, and served scrambled eggs. “They killed him. It took him five years to die.” She poured weak tea for McManus. “I nursed him,” she said with peculiar tenderness.
That explained Dr. Sullivan’s accusation that she needed an invalid of her own. It was almost funny in a sad sort of way: McManus and Mrs. Burke were being useful to one another. He heard himself say, “You loved Thomas Burke very much.” She ate, her head down. He wondered whether Thomas Burke loved this narrow-faced, cold-faced, severe-faced woman. Was it with her that he learned the explicit things about sex they used to mark in his books and pass around? With her? No. She looked sexless. She was sexless.
“He cried himself to death,” she said, and the phrase sat on his mind like a crow. “They screamed him to his grave. He couldn’t think their thoughts or tell their lies. If you love Ireland your own way, it’s treason, and if you’re the wrong sort of Catholic, you’re not an Irishman.”
She cleared away. Her face was bleak.
“I want to thank you, Mrs. Burke,” he said from the rocker and wondered at once why he had chosen this moment to say it.
“None of that,” she said sharply. “Time for another pill.” She gave it to him, with warm milk, and her hand brushed his hair. “You’ll be fine, child,” she said, and washed the dishes. She had her invalid.
He felt better by the hour, hungrier, stronger. Dressed, he sat in a canvas chair in the fuchsia-walled garden and re-read the works of Thomas Burke. She fussed him, coddled him, shielded him from the doctor’s fears and the sister’s moral anxieties; gave him jobs to do, stretching his strength.
She pressed aside the fuchsia bushes to show him the land. Behind the hedge, a field of cut hay, and beyond it a mass of rock that rose four hundred feet, colored orange and mauve and violet and blue and yellow from the lichen and heather and rock flowers and gorse that grew from every crack and pocket of earth on its surface. At its foot were banks of fuchsia, honeysuckle, Michaelmas daisy, hawthorne, and buckey rose. There was a tiny copse of stunted oak. He could smell the honeysuckle across the width of the field, mingled with the scent of sweet new hay. The rock ridges rose beyond into rust and violet mountains and surrounded the house and its little afghan fields. And in front, through the green and crimson hedge, the glittering cove and a wider bay beyond it, and then the sea and a lighthouse, far out on a massive rock.
“That’s Fastnet Light,” he said.
“You know it?”
“Your cottage is in Toormore Bay,” he said.
“You know it?”
“We used to take a house for the summer at Goleen, four miles west.”
“You’re at home,” she said, and the gentleness in her voice made him look at her. The face was sharp and cold.
The road to Goleen to the west and Schull to the east, and Skibereen, and Cork must be behind the house and beyond the little fields, and beyond the first big ridge. He knew where he was. He was aware of the land again, of the mistress who was stream and hill and meadow and the spread limbs of the derry oak. They would never find him in this moon landscape of rock and gullies and green hollows and fern and thorn forests.
The warm air flowed through the flowering bushes. When she closed the hedge and shut off the moving air, the lawn was an enveloping warm cocoon. He was strong, he was safe. Time was in suspense. The world was very far and irrelevant. He drowsed in the little garden in hypnotic contentment and indolence lay on him like a layer of a dream, and in the evening she gave him his pills and they made him sleep deeply.
How old was she? Forty? Forty-five? Fifty? It varied by the day. He was a mother’s boy and the mother cradled his head and put her braless nipple to his hungry mouth. Child, she called him.
Did he dream it in the sleep before sleep? The days slept also. Reality was a welcome distance away. The dream was real.
It was the first time he had wakened in the night. The pills were losing their power.
It was raining. Pouring. The wind was high, coming off the sea, beating the rain against the little, closed, front window. The big back window was open and the cool night air backed in and across the bed like a cool hand.
He was deeply rested, refreshed, life running in him, all his thought on his abundant good feeling. He stretched his legs, reached, and dragged on the head of the bed. It was a glorious feeling to extend a stronger body and feel the life in it.
It was the first rain for several days. The rains he had walked in in his sickness were vague or forgotten. He turned on his side and curled, contented as a cat, and reached his right arm across the wide bed, to sprawl, to sleep again.
Flesh. Warm human flesh. Round human flesh. He was disabled in body and mind and could not withdraw the hand. It was on a hip. She was lying half on her face, her legs stretched at length, the fullness of her hip under his palm. A large, firm, high hip. Slowly, the hand obeyed the head and came back to him.
He lay fearful of the sound of his rasping breath. She was naked in his bed. The sleeping bag on the hard floor must have done for her. Or had she used it? The pills that gave him deep sleep might have given her the chance for some sort of rest? She had to be a sexless middle-aged woman to lie in a man’s bed—if she had been doing that? It was hard to believe. “Where do you sleep?” the sister kept asking, and he’d never heard her get an answer. Could a woman sleep beside a man and not ... ? What did he knew about women? “God made you whole, child. Thank Him,” she said to his erection and went on with her washing as if a hard penis was about the same as a piece of garden hose.
If he got up and sat in the rocking chair she’d know he knew. Then he’d have to go and he didn’t want to. Was she naked? He reached cautiously for her back. Cloth. Her nightgown was gathered up about her waist. Frigid. A sexless widow in bed with a drugged child.
She always called him child.
Gently, as if the bed was rocking from his careful exertions, he perched his rigid body on the edge of the mattress, his back to her. He was erect again. Her hip was still warm in his hand as if he hadn’t withdrawn it. The thought of it murdered him. Forty or fifty, she was a woman and he had never before had his hand on a woman’s hip. If he turned in his sleep, hard and burning, he might press it against her and ... by God, he couldn’t allow himself even to think about that. He daren’t go to sleep again in case....
But he went to sleep again, and woke, still rigid in every limb, and aching in every muscle.
She was not there. There was no bruise on the pillow where her head must have been.
And the day was normal. She looked as severe as she had done all the days before. He began to doubt his senses and his recovery. She mothered him, gave him harder work to do, sent him to bed much later than usual, with his glass of warm milk and his pill.
It was still raining off the sea. He drank his milk by the big open window and shot his pill out into the rain. It would dissolve there just as readily as in his stomach. He wanted to wake in the night. He had been dreaming last night; some sort of relapse? Another sort of shroud?
It rained for three days. He had not been dreaming. There was no relapse. But maybe a new sort of shroud? She was there every night and gone early every morning. Sexless. He learned to sleep on the edge of the bed, his erections, sleeping or waking, pointed away from any cause of offense. And each day she was as she had been before. Kind. Severe.
The day the wind dried the ground she said, “It’s time for you to walk beyond the garden. When it’s dark....”
They walked in the moonlight out over the little fields and up the narrow road to the first rock ridge. The moon flew in the sky and sailed on the sea. Far dogs bayed like women in childbirth.
“There, child, you’re strong,” she said, and he filled his lungs with the turf-scented air and loved the life in his limbs and the shadowed landscape of the mistress with hills like breasts and little fields like a soft, flat belly. How long was it, he asked himself, since he had seen her, really seen her? All his old emotions for her were alive.
“You’re smiling,” Mrs. Burke said. “Are you thinking about somebody?”
“Herself,” he said, and swept his arm across the landscape. The clouds were banked like dark mountain ranges and between them light came from the molten pewter brilliance of the shining sky. “Look at her sky,” he said, “it’s like a furnace or an ice field.”
“You’re like Thomas Burke,” she said, and laughed and started down the hill, holding his hand like a mother leading home her child. It was an odd, exultant little laugh, as if something had been accomplished. He had never heard her laugh. “Sleep well,” she said in the house.
He went to bed at once.
He was half-wakened, no, less than half-wakened by the flaming delight flooding his body, swimming behind his heavy eyes, and was far down the adamantine road before the caressing fingers that made him moan softly were joined by the whispering voice that said, “God made you whole, child. Thank Him,” and he was turning and still half-asleep and half-demented when the lips touched his and a tongue tip flickered in his mouth like a sugar-coated shock.
By then he was reaching for the woman and she was naked and talking softly and the hard fingers were magically gentle on his raging penis. “There child, there child,” the voice coaxed, “do what you want....” He was blind, the darkness was black, like a wall that shut in life and fire and sent the universe elsewhere about its alien and meaningless business. “It’s all right’” the voice that touched his face whispered, “it’s all right ... do what you want to do, child,” and there were no words in his mouth, none in his head; only whimpers of tearing passion and delight.
Gently she drew him and lay on her back, guiding his hand to her breasts, and his senses birled in his head. “I’m a country,” she said, “feel my hills,” and he grasped her breasts frantically and felt the hard erect nipples in his palm and took them in his fingertips and pulled his mouth from hers and suckled the nipples like a feeding infant. “Tease them with your teeth,” she said, and what she said he did. She drew his hand to her belly and guided him over it, slowly, down, and “Do what you feel like, child,” she said, left his hand where she wanted it, and “Come onto me,” she coaxed. “Come on and I’ll guide you, child,” and her arm drew him onto her, plunging. “That’s it, child,” she said. “That’s it, do what you want,” and they cried their lust together.
When it was over, he lay on her and she held him hard with her thighs and caressed his hips with the soles of her feet, talking, crooning, whispering, her back still arched, her loins rising and falling gently, arms holding him on her breasts. “There child, there child, wonderful, child ... wonderful, wonderful, wonderful ...” filling him with immense pride, and peace and appetite. He found her mouth. It was like drinking cold spring water, he thought, and couldn’t imagine her face, but her body was like a known country.
“Do everything you want, when you want, how you want,” she coaxed.
“I’ve never done it before,” he said.
“I know, I know, I know ... my wonderful child....”
There was no strangeness in him with her. There was no morning, and no light. She was there under him, teasing him, talking to him as if she had always been there. There was no age; a warm body, a warm voice, fingers like feathers, thighs that embraced him, a woman who whispered “my child” like a mother and made him feel safe beyond fear, and a woman who erupted under him and made his loins roar invincibly.
And insatiably. “I want more,” he said. “I want everything.”
“Everything is here,” she said.
But in the morning everything was not there. Her mark on the pillow was not there. He saw her crossing the garden in the rain, with her egg basket, coming from the hen house in a gray raincoat, Wellington boots on her big feet, one of Thomas Burke’s old tweed hats on her head, her face as narrowly severe as a village vigilante’s.
And the day was like every other day between them; like the day of a son in his young manhood and a mother in her middle life and not much need for talk between them.
He did his small services, brought turf from the barn, weeded and turned the few flower beds, looked out at the closing circles of rock hills, and tiny fields and the sea that encircled them, and there was nowhere he wanted to be but this place where he was.
Yet in spite of its ordinariness, there was about the day something not believed. “I’m a country. Feel my hills.” Did that plain severe face really say something like that to him in the dark? Could those buttocks under that square flour bag and those breasts that were lost under its flat front really be as he thought he remembered them? In the bedroom he stared at the bed. His northern Jansenist mind knew they had been there and was not quite persuaded; or was not quite willing to believe. In this room? Wallowing between her thighs? Her voice? Her words? Her? That one out there? Did a murderer who went back to the scene of the crime really find the event real, solidly reconstructable? Were the battlefields revisited real after the battles? Was there more than one world to live in, and did they do more than cause their separate atmospheres to mingle as they passed? More and more as the day lengthened he thought of the night and his head warmed for the plain woman in the square dress.
Mrs. Burke did all day the things she had to do—washing, cooking, mending, dusting, dropping an odd word, sitting with a cup of strong tea for “a little crack,” and “come to the table, child,” and rocking before the fire when he went to bed. “Good night, child,” she said when he passed her on his way to bed and touched his arm in a motherly gesture. “Sleep well, now,” as if the light of day would be time enough to speak to him again. Did she really remember?
“Good night, Mrs. Burke,” he said, and did not take his pajamas from under his pillow and lay on his own side of the bed with his eyes closed, waiting in the dark, insanely ready.
Then wildfire and lust under the velutinous night. “More, I want more, my darling darling child,” she said with her lips cropping his and her tongue darting. “The morning’s coming.”
As if the clear light of day and clear sight were robbers of the things most precious and most real.