Looking down at the beautifully tinted map was to be brought summarily back there, so that she was not just seeing the names of towns and lesser towns and rivers with their ample estuaries, she was seeing and smelling all: the grass banks glutted with dock, the hot smell of nettle, cows at evening time, pendulous, moving en masse and as if in a ritual of discomfort, their udders mutinous. Above all, she was seeing in the wavery purple-red lines that divided two provinces the varicose veins on her mother’s shin, raised, purplish, madly gurgling. All because of looking at the map which lay on the kitchen table, the glass newly broken and Kim’s little note: “I break, sorry.”
“You break, sorry,” she said, vexed, and put it down, because the slivers of glass, which lay like a jigsaw on the towns and rivers, eased apart, giving off dust and infinitesimal splinters.
“You break, sorry,” she said again, while in her mind she began devising little punishments for Kim, for being so careless; Kim, a small Asiatic creature, open as a lotus, given to laughter at everything, believing it stalled punishment; Kim now the butt of her anger, her spleen. Yes, ever since he’d left, ever since that morning, she had felt filleted and slowly but inexorably was joining the Brigade of the Vexed.
“You break, sorry … shit.”
Yet a few weeks later, coming out of the frame shop, she heard herself say, “Oh, Kim, look what you’ve done for me … look what you’ve done.”
She saw him first as he emerged from the artist’s shop carrying a tin box of paint. It was his beret she recognised and the slant at which he wore it, a thing he copied from the Breton man who delivered onions on his bicycle, always drunk and pressing for a cognac. For a moment she hesitated, but he had already seen her and came to her, beaming, jaunty, showing his precious purchase, paints for his evening class. He had taken up painting and went two evenings a week, sat in front of his easel and painted a model or a milk jug or fruit or whatever. It was weeks since he had left home, and though they had talked on the telephone, coming on him like this had something propitious to it. Moreover, he was glad to see her. Under the streetlight he showed her the paints, lozenges of colour, lickable, edible, the reds and blues the most enticing, the white very stark, like the makeup on a circus clown. Yes, he had taken up painting and loved it, found that these forays with colour were wonderful, gave him a freedom, a purpose. He could not tell her how pleasant it was to assault a canvas or to paint a few daisies on an enamel plate.
“Like Kandinsky,” she said.
“Not quite,” he answered, and smiled. She could scarcely see his smile in the streetlight but could tell it from memory, deferential, both shy and thrilled when attention was bestowed on it.
“I came to have the glass put back on the map of home … Kim broke it.”
“How is Kim?” he asked, not feeling staunch enough to ask how she herself was.
“She misses you … She says, ‘No master’s ironing for me anymore.’”
“Master,” he said, and chuckled, and then remembered that Kim didn’t like Charlie, hid from Charlie, and put the hoover or a chair between herself and Charlie’s snarls.
“He bit her,” Nell said.
“Only a nip,” Paddy said, and promised that he would send Kim a card. As in his letters, he repeated how satisfying it was to be in the country, doing manual things, chopping wood, thinning cabbages, milking (he had learned to milk), and as she soon saw this was a preamble for him to say solemnly how unhappy he had been, how everyone had suffered from it, especially those near and dear to him, a matter for which he would have lasting regrets.
“Sweetheart,” she said, but nothing more.
Twice in a letter he had asked her to visit, mentioned the family, their new baby, a hammock under a tree where the baby slept, various other features of a house which was next to a stream so that one wakened or slept to the sound of trickling water. He had got a bit high-flown about this trickling water and had called it a threnody.
“I will come soon,” she said, and then he kissed her, a warm kiss, and as of old said scoldingly, “I hope you are getting out and about and not being too much of a hermit.” As she followed his shadow among all the others, she had to bite back tears of warm happiness.
The pavement seemed to spring under her feet, and at moments it was as if she were in a conveyance, being borne along, waving, waving, because she felt so elated. A chance meeting, better, far better than anything sought. She remembered his smile when he saw her and the rush with which he came to her, the excitement over the box of paints, and then that bit of scolding which was a mark of affection, too. Sighting all the people, she thought that she must smile at just one of them. They were young and old, lame and fit, men with briefcases which they wielded like dispatch boxes, young girls walking briskly, their heels on the cobbles like smart hammers; others chattering, men darting into pubs, people by a bus stop jostling each other as a bus came into view that was already overflowing, so that those who jostled had now somewhat shamefully to rejoin the queue and look down at their feet, disgruntled. To whom could she tell her surprise? To whom could she say that of the ten million or more, crammed in nooks and corners and boardinghouses and grand houses and even palaces, of these ten million whom should she meet but her son, her son who had been restored to her, who had even said as they parted, “I’m a good boy now … I’m clean.” Clean!
Farther along she saw a seated figure on a bench and thought, I will talk to this poor stray. It was one of those streets that sidled off into nowhere, just a crumbling brick archway and a dark passage that led to some warehouses. Behind the bench was a half-ruined brick church, its windows smashed in, the gates locked, and the grounds full of hawthorn trees just coming into bloom. She would go there and tell this figure. She pitied all those who hurried and jostled and didn’t smile and didn’t see the hawthorn, the pale, soft constellations of blossom that were soon to shed. The figure, a woman in ragged clothes, had a headscarf pulled forward over her face, the face well concealed. She was muttering to herself. Her shoes were stout country shoes and her stockings fell down around the calves of her legs. Her hands, which had the splay of a spade, were opening and closing as if mashing clods of earth. A countrywoman.
Nell resolved that after the first few awkward words she would ask the woman about herself, would listen to her and give her some money. It did not turn out like that. The muttering, which was low and incomprehensible, heightened to something other, something distinctly unwelcome, venom in it. A stream of curses came out, followed by the slinging of a satchel which the woman had at her feet. It was a school satchel made of canvas, and when she aimed, she struck out with the open buckle and swished at her opponent, shouting, “Off … off … with youse … all of youse … living Jesus … Holy Paul … Off by the blood of the Blessed Sacrament … Leave me in peace … I’m a lady … more than you are … you’re shkin through your clothes.” Then, in a parody of grace, she bowed and bent towards her assailant, or what she thought was her assailant, to recite something she remembered from her schoolbook, a torn page that perhaps was in her satchel.
“O Dun Dealgan, thou city of my sires, thou shalt receive a Red Eric for the many battles thou hast fought and won.”
Then drawing back the headscarf, to emphasise her prowess she said formally, “Yes, madam … I bless the people who bring me down.”
Nell shook in disbelief, in freezing terror. It was Rita, Rita almost beyond all recognition, old, a reject with frizzy hair, smiling, because somewhere she realised that this was a woman she had once taken up cudgels against.
“Rita,” Nell said. Hearing her name called out gave cause for another bit of jousting with the satchel, which, sickle-wise, beat the air, as if she were beating briars aside to make way for a herd of cattle. At the same time she wished shite and scutter on every passing soul, on their citified shoes and their citified hose.
“Rita,” Nell said again.
“Breach of promise … breach of promise,” she said then in a hoarse but gloating whisper, a thousand treacheries real or imagined contained within it, and she stuck out her tongue gleefully at a woman she had once cursed and still cursed perhaps, in the flounder of her being.
Then she was gone. Her shouts rose, subsided, then rerose, the cracked shouts of an intemperate woman; it could just as easily have been a man, lacerating himself, fighting a crazed, useless battle in the vast equivocal maw of a city. A common occurrence, but in Nell it struck terror. From this baulk, this unwonted scream, this boiling rage, she had fled. But how long can we hide from that which forms us, which is the very mucus of our being? The memories die away or are put down, the road rushes on, rushes with an increasingly frenzied speed, as in our variety of clothing and disguises we are in turn husbands, wives, lovers, enemies, friends; but always sooner or later we are brought back to the dark stew of ourselves and the ancestry before us, back to the midnight of the race whose sins and whose songs we carry.
She ached for one of those songs, for a figure, any figure, to stand before her and sing one or hum one; for Paddy to appear and sing the way he used to at Christmas, his eyes shut, the theme of the songs almost too much for him, as now and then his voice quavered and the words, words such as “List for a while to a blind Irish harper,” or “Only five nights in Ballygrand,” had unleashed sentiments that threatened to engulf him.
She thought it to be a vision, but no, there he was on the steps, leaning backwards and looking up at the stars as if he was counting them. He had not gone indoors, as he was afraid it might give her a fright.
“Paddy,” she said, startled.
“I decided to spend the night, if that’s all right,” he said. And again she marvelled at how all his old ways and his willingness had been restored to him.
Over dinner he sang, because she had asked him to. She did not say why and did not recount the meeting with Rita, as it might unnerve him, since Rita had not liked him and had always put him in the wrong. The warp and hurts of that time would come flooding back, to no avail. He sang two songs, the two that she liked best, and it seemed to her in her red panelled room, with deep blue glasses that were like chalices, and his new haircut, which gave him a clean, countrified look, like a peeled willow, that these were the most plaintive and yet most affirmative songs she had ever heard and that of all their moments together, even the giddy gosling moments of his infancy, none was so sweet or so lasting.
“If ever you needed me … you’d say so,” she said, but without touching, without reaching.
“And vice versa,” he said.
She would repeat those words later, take them out of her mind to look at them, like a young girl with a little hoard of wedding cake, taken out and consulted after dreaming, mindless of the fact that such trifling is in vain. The words, so very simple in themselves, were stitched into her.