The Matchmaker of Kenmare Read online

  As the sunlight flooded her eyes, she raised a shielding hand and said, “How shocked are you?”

  I said, “If you mean last night—why does the word shocked come into it?”

  “Well—what we did.”

  I wasn’t certain what value she was trying to extract—praise or blame. So I said, “I felt used.”

  She didn’t recoil. “Do you know why it happened?”

  I bit off the words. “No. I don’t know why it happened.”

  She said, “I have nobody but you to trust with the person I am. Myself.”

  “Aren’t you about to marry someone for that reason?”

  She ignored my remark and said, “You’re my security, Ben, if everything goes wrong.”

  “Goes wrong?”

  “If a girl comes back to me after her first walking out with a fellow, and she sits there and says she had a lovely time, but she’s twisting her handkerchief until her fingers are blue, what kind of a time did she really have?”

  “What on earth has that to do with you and me naked?”

  She said, “I’m going forward into the unknown. You’re what I know.”

  When she spoke like a novelette, it drove me crazy.

  “You’re not answering my question.”

  She said, “So—how shocked are you?”

  “You made me look at you,” I said. “You made me inspect you. You used me.”

  “You don’t believe me,” she said, “because you don’t want to believe me. I watched you in France, I saw the way you looked after me, you were a kind of overseer. And I trust you so much that I want you to remember me as Kate Begley, not as Mrs. Charles Miller. I can never have that chance again. And I couldn’t have done it if you’d never been married yourself.”

  “What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

  “Don’t be so cross. I need to know that there will always be one person in the world who knows me best of all.”

  “Outside of your new husband?” I said. She nodded, and I asked, “Then why didn’t you go the whole hog? Why didn’t we complete it?”

  “I wanted to,” she said. “But there was no sign that you did.”

  This was defeat; this was humiliation. I asked the feeble question. “Why me?”

  “Because you’re the safest person in the world.”

  I said, “Kate, you’re so many things—how do I know what you are at any given moment?”

  She said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I am. I’m the Fourth Fate.”

  This is very grandiose, ran my hostile mind.

  She went on. “You don’t know, do you, who the Fates were?”

  I said, trying not to sound tart or smart, “One spun the thread of life, one handed it out, and one cut it.”

  “And I draw two of those threads together,” she said. “Two lives, and I knot them to each other. I’m the destiny that those two people harness.”

  Yes, she is being grandiose. I need Billy Moloney because this is flockin’ irritatin’.

  “You’ve seen those people who come to us. You’ve seen Edward Hannitty, the drover. You’ve seen Miss Mangan from the bakery. What kind of a hand is Destiny dealing them? They’d be nowhere without my intervention.”

  My mind yelled, She’d better stop this soon. I can’t take much more of it.

  “And my Charles?” she said with a flourish. “My captain? Wait and see.”

  Too much—too much at that moment; I stood up.

  “I’ll be back in a bit, just going to check my bike.”

  And she, that brown-eyed girl, said, “He’ll be a general before the end of the war. Just you watch.”

  She should have consulted the other Fates.

  59

  And so I became a silent witness to the wedding in bombed London of Captain Charles Howard Miller and Miss Katherine Ann Begley. They married in the church run by the Jesuits on Farm Street. Tweedlehugh and Tweedlejohn must have believed that groomsmen should look like sentries, because they stood at rigid attention throughout.

  A cousin of Miss Begley’s wept as every bridesmaid must weep. Behind them, in the soft mahogany light, stood no more than twenty other people, including Claudia, gleaming in cream, beside the quiet gentleman from lunch, Mr. Howard, he of the bunched red hair. A number of polished uniforms, spangled with decorations, gleamed in the dim church.

  We all walked down a cobbled lane to a pub that, bombs or no bombs, kept geraniums in its window boxes. Miss Begley clung to Captain Miller’s arm as though fearing he might run away. He loomed over her, attentive and calm. Whatever deal they’d cut was up and running like a hare.

  In a back room upstairs, the wedding party, such as it was, convened. Nobody sat down; we drank beer and ate cheese sandwiches. No speeches, and I recall thinking, His colleagues seem so somber. They’re not laughing or joking. The war, I suppose.

  When some of the guests had departed, Miss Begley (as she would always be to me) left her bridegroom’s side for just a moment.

  I asked her, “What happens now?”

  “Tonight and tomorrow night I have him to myself, and then he’s off somewhere.”

  Stress, the fear of losing his company while they should be on honeymoon, the power of marriage—something was making her frown, and she saw me register it.

  “It won’t always be like this,” she said.

  “You’ve never looked better,” I said to her.

  “After the war,” she went on, “he’ll be back, and we’ll be together all the time.” She held a small basket of violets, saw me looking at them, and said, “From Claudia. Will you wait and travel home with me?”

  We agreed to meet two days later under the clock at Paddington Station.

  It rained that night, and all the next day, and the next. I sat in my hotel room, my thoughts mixed and confused. The fact of her marriage, and the honeymoon scenes in my brain’s theater, troubled me like bereavement, especially after that strange, naked night forty-eight hours earlier at Lamb’s Head.

  There’s something else hidden that you should know about me—and it’s not as benign as the Secret Life of Ben MacCarthy, Medieval Wandering Scholar. I’ve already hinted at it and its shame; and, although by now I have it almost completely under control, it has created some dreadful times.

  Here comes the confession: I suffer from intense fantasies of violence. In my mind, I see the person who injured me, and I set upon them. I swing a chain, wield a knife, brandish a scimitar—anything that will hack bloody, rubbery chunks from their flesh. Down on their heads I rain stones, hammer blows, kicks. I rake them with daggers and spikes, I bite them. I gouge their eyes, I slash off their ears, I make them whimper. And I walk away not caring what damage I’ve done, because they’ve so harmed me.

  The accuracy of how badly or unfairly they’ve treated me has nothing to do with the fantasy—I merely have to imagine that they might sneer at or injure me. You should know this about me, and you’re already mature enough to grasp that the mind goes to black thoughts as the tongue to a broken tooth.

  What has this to do with events in London at the time of Miss Begley’s marriage? As I say, I tried and tried to put out of my head random images of their wedding night in—where else?—the Ritz. Did they have breakfast in bed? I’d become friendly with so many of the staff, especially those from Ireland, who had met me with Miss Begley. And now of course my mind’s eye could actually see, in naked reality, what Charles Miller was seeing all day and all night, for ever and ever, amen.

  The rage began to kick in. Deep, terrible anger, with scenes in which I first imagined attacking him, and then, at worst, moving unspeakably to her. The fantasy seized me, until the pair of them lay weeping, curled and bloodied at my feet, and it took a long, long time to bring the fury under control. No sleep that night, no sleep at all.

  Late on the morning of the second day of their marriage, when I had quit my hotel in anticipation of the night train to Liverpool, I walked out in the rain. Still roiling, I had a goal�
��I wanted to find them; in fact, I wanted to find them in their room.

  Without effort, without asking directions, I found myself on Piccadilly, right across from the Ritz, looking up at the windows. During rain we felt safe in London because—or so we were told—the German bombers couldn’t find their targets through the overcast. A deep archway sheltered me, an arcade; others came and went when the rain squalled harder.

  In my hectic and edgy state, my arms hanging long, my eyes fixed on the gray building across the way, I felt something take my hand. I looked down and saw scarlet fingernails; I looked up and saw Claudia, wearing a rain hat that made her look like a trawlerman. She inclined her head toward the hotel and led me across the empty street.

  As we walked to the door she dropped my hand and took off her amazing, transparent helmet. I followed her, striding to keep up. Nodding to the hotel staff as she passed, she marched me to a door that I’d never observed, and opened it for me to step into a corridor. Again she drove onward, to the foot of a staircase, and I followed those strong hips for three upward flights. Soon, we stood in a room. She closed the door behind us and shook herself like a dog coming out of a pond.

  Ignoring me, and not saying a word, Claudia kicked off her shoes, shed her rain clothes and the jacket she wore underneath, arranged them around the room on hangers, then did likewise with my sodden coat and jacket. She dropped to her knees, undid the laces on my boots, and set them to dry by an elaborate gas fire that she’d turned on. Raindrops fell down my neck from my thick hair.

  Claudia took my arms and wrapped them around her. Her arms around my neck, she rested her head on my shoulder, and we stood for long moments, never saying a word. The embrace told me that she had more flesh than she seemed to, with a soft body and a softer nature. I still couldn’t tell her age—later I learned that she was in her late forties.

  When she stepped back, she said, “I hope you don’t mind.”

  I said, “Why would I?”

  “We’ve both lost somebody,” she said. “You’ve lost dear Kate, I saw the way you looked at her. And I’ve lost him. As I knew I would one day.”

  Bewilderment had been with me so long that I sometimes saw it approaching and could compose myself to meet it.

  “Is that how all this came together?” I asked. I could feel my rage flying away from me like a shamed, embarrassed thing.

  “He and I—Ben, you have no idea how close we’ve been. My husband died at Dunkirk.”

  “His girl back home—?” I began to ask, and she interrupted with a smile of forgiveness and said, “Sailors, soldiers—what’s the difference?”

  I asked, “Were you very close?”

  Claudia answered, “He loved rain because I did, and he hated the north wind because I did.”

  She sent for food; we sat and talked; her kindness at that moment generated our lifelong friendship.

  “And now they’re married,” I said. “And they’re here somewhere, along these corridors, in one of these rooms, behind one of these doors.”

  “Not for the first time,” said Claudia.

  I know that I looked puzzled and said, “What are you saying? That they—?”

  “Don’t, Ben,” she interrupted. “Just tell me you’ll be my friend.”

  We sat in the chairs, saying nothing.

  “This war,” she said after a while. “How are we to have normal lives again?”

  The angry conversation on the train with Miss Begley had distressed me. I wished that I’d behaved better. With Claudia I found a chance to make amends.

  “You’ll have a very good life,” I said. I must have been sudden in my words, because she started.

  “Oh, do you think so?”

  From somewhere inside me, deep in there, past all the forests of moping self-absorption, I found a clearing, a glimmer of tenderness.

  “You’re a remarkable woman.”

  She flinched; I thought it was alarm, but it was surprise.

  “Nobody has ever said that to me,” she said.

  “You’re warm. You’re kind. And you’re very clever.”

  These words of praise—whence did they spring?

  “Thank you, Ben,” she said. “But you have to stop now or I’ll weep.”

  “Maybe you should,” I said. “Maybe you need to.”

  “I’ve now lost twice,” she said. “My husband. And—this. But I knew I was losing him while you and she were staying here.”

  “Was it that early?” I asked.

  “Hotels are like villages,” Claudia said. “Gossip, gossip, gossip. Those last few weeks that you both were staying here, they were very difficult for me.”

  She clasped her hands in front of her and gazed into the limited mauve flame of the fire. And I recollected how Miss Begley had moved to a room that wasn’t next door to mine.

  I don’t know how long we sat there in silence. An hour, maybe. Claudia nodded off in the chair, and in her sleep I could see the exhaustion in her face. I was the one to rise and gather my drying clothes. She heard me and apologized.

  “Oh, dear, I’m not a very good hostess.”

  “What are friends for?” I said—and I sounded like Mrs. Charles Miller, though I never would and never could think of her under that name.

  60

  On the journey back to Ireland, Kate and I scarcely conversed. In the train compartment, as we left London, she set out to sleep. I draped my omnipresent black coat over her knees and made her as comfortable as I could.

  As she nodded off, I said to her, “I want to apologize to you for my hard words when we were coming to London.”

  She looked at me in a drowsy and odd way, as though I sounded different. Which I did; I put a finger to my lips and said, “Shhh. You must rest.” And she slept until we reached Liverpool, and I watched over her all the way as though she were my wife or child.

  You can see, can’t you, that this rising simplicity toward her was quite sudden in me? I can track when it happened. During the time with Claudia, I moved from anger to serenity, and then, during the train journey with Miss Begley, I understood something. I realized that I had been reflecting for days on what I consider the most important conversation I ever had with James Clare.

  Let me tell you about it now, and you’ll see how central this is to me and my spirit, and to the man I would try to become.

  You know, I think, how old I am, and you know that I’m trying to tell this story while I maintain the strength and energy. I won’t preempt anything by saying, from hindsight, that I was at that moment embarking on a crusade to change myself, to change my inner life; I would rather that you perceive it from my account of my own actions, my own life as I lived it. Did I succeed in becoming a good man? It’s not for me to judge.

  Given how many such talks I had with James, and how deep and wise they were, to call any one of them “the most important” is saying something. This teaching took the form of a story that he had collected. In a lovely irony, the story had always existed near me—it originated a few miles downriver from my home, and here’s James’s version, reproduced from the archives of the Irish Folklore Commission.

  There was a man in Knockgraffon who had a hump. His name was Louis, and he was known locally as “Sour” Louis, because he was very bad-tempered—maybe on account of the hump. Now if you know Knockgraffon, you’ll know that there’s a moat there, a big, domed hill made of earth. That was built centuries and centuries ago by the Little People, the fairy folk, the followers of the goddess Dana, who were consigned to live underground when they lost the surface of Ireland to the Spanish invaders, in the clear, crystal years ten million days before Christ was born.

  Sour Louis couldn’t make a dog wag his tail, that’s how grim he was, and the look on his face made people think he drank vinegar for his breakfast. But the world turns, and we turn with it, and late one summer night, when nobody could see him, Sour Louis dawdled along the road, out for a stroll under the eye of a warm and friendly moon.

  As he
passed by the Moat of Knockgraffon, he heard music. Not loud music, nor with many instruments—if indeed there were any. As it happens, what he heard was what we call mouth music, or puss music, the lilting and chanting of tunes that people do when they have no instruments, yet wish to dance.

  Sour Louis sat down on the grassy mound, listened hard, and made out the words. Deep inside the moat and underneath it, many, many little voices were singing in a very sweet way, “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday.”

  People didn’t know it, but Sour Louis had a very fine singing voice, and he had an instinct for melody, and to his ear the tune seemed unfinished. So, when the singers next came to the end of a line, he sang in his fine baritone voice, “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday—Wednesday.” His musical instinct made the word and the note fit perfectly.

  Silence fell. Then Sour Louis heard a big whoosh! of air, and a brilliant light fell from the sky. It was the moon herself, perched on the Moat of Knockgraffon, and as Sour Louis sat there, silhouetted against her milk-and-silver light, you could see the shape of his poor hump on his back like a young elephant.

  Then he looked down, because he felt something tugging at his boot, and there on the ground, all around him, dancing and swaying, he saw thousands and thousands of the Little People, and they were now singing, “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday—Wednesday.” Sour Louis smiled—it was a smile broader than he had ever smiled before, and as he did, the Little People ended their singing and began to applaud him.

  “Thank you,” they cried, “thank you for making our song lovelier.”

  Next, they formed up in orderly lines and began to march into the Moat of Knockgraffon, whose grassy mound opened wide in a pair of huge doors to meet them. They kept looking back over their shoulders and beckoning to Sour Louis to follow them. He was a little hesitant—what man wants to go under the ground with a lot of people he’s never met before, and who, in part anyway, don’t have that good a reputation?