The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 18

  The moon decided to go back up to the sky, and she placed a moonbeam in Sour Louis’s hand as a flashlight. She gave him a big smile, and he felt that she was telling him to follow the little silver, dancing people.

  Such a welcome they gave him down there—it was wonderful. They fed him and feasted him, they drank toasts to him, they thanked him for the brilliant embellishment to their song, and said they would use it forever more. Then, in gratitude, sixteen men and sixteen women climbed on Sour Louis’s shoulders and by magic tricks they removed his hump. They lifted it off, took it over to a great stone shelf, sat it there like a monument, and lit candles around it. In the meantime, ten of the most beautiful of the Little Women began to dress Sour Louis, and then one of the most handsome men wheeled out a tall looking-glass so that Louis could see himself.

  Now he knew that he must be dreaming—because the dapper and handsome fellow in the mirror had Louis’s face all right, but this didn’t look anything like the Sour Louis whose angry jowls he shaved every bitter morning of his life. He thanked them profusely, they began again to dance and sing and sway in front of him, and suddenly they evaporated. Louis found himself out in the open air once more, sitting on the greensward of the Moat of Knockgraffon on a summer night.

  He pinched himself, to make sure he was real. Sure enough, the pinch hurt, and yes, there was the moon up in the sky, and she seemed to be sailing along minding her own business. He stood up—and that’s when he saw the difference. The clothes he was wearing were beautiful, not at all the shabby old sleaze that had covered him when he’d set out on his walk. And something more remarkable—he was upright, he had a broad chest, he was strong and fit. The hump was gone.

  Naturally enough, when he got home, people asked questions, and Louis—no longer did they call him Sour Louis because he now smiled all the time—felt obliged to tell them the tale of the Moat of Knockgraffon. He knew that the Little People wouldn’t mind.

  Louis’s story ran throughout the land like the fire on the stubble of an autumn wheat field. They marveled here, they wondered there—people up and down the country talked of little else for weeks and weeks because, you see, they’d always wanted to believe that the Little People could do good.

  One day, to Louis’s door came a lady on a pony, not a very salubrious mount either—the hooves wanted for some care. She said to Louis, “Are you the man who had the hump?” and he said he was.

  After he had told her the full story, to which she listened like a child to a talking dog, she turned the pony around without a word and rode back the way she’d come.

  Now, this woman was a widow, her name was Mrs. Madden, and she had a son, Jack, who had a hump, and he was sourer than Sour Louis had ever been. Jack Madden slouched around the house all day, moaning and cribbing, refusing to work—he wouldn’t wash his own cup and saucer, he’d say his hump was hurting him. So Jack Madden’s mother told him to get up on the pony, ride over to the Moat of Knockgraffon, and join in any song he heard.

  With as many complaints as a wet hen, Jack Madden rode to Knockgraffon. He climbed down off the old pony and went to sit, as his mother had bidden him, on the grassy slope of the moat. Within moments, he heard the little silver song coming up out of the ground like a million tinkling bells. “Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday, Monday, Tuesday—Wednesday.”

  Now, Jack Madden had no singing voice whatsoever—he sounded like a crow with croup. But he knew, or thought he did, what the song now needed, and also he was impatient with the whole scheme—he just wanted his hump taken away. So instead of being sensitive to the needs of the little singers, he stood there and burst out in his raucous voice, “Ah, to hell with it—Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday.”

  Next thing, he too heard a great whoosh! of sound, and he too was surrounded by a white light, but it shone in his eyes and half-blinded him, and it was cold when it silhouetted him, and it didn’t look like a halo. The moon was angry, and when the moon is angry she lets you feel her ice.

  Hundreds of invisible hands then dragged him to the ground, pinned him facedown, and he felt something heavy and strange being loaded onto his back. Far from easing his burden, they gave him Sour Louis’s old hump, and as they left him lying there, they sang at him, “Jack Madden, Jack Madden, you ugly big lump; If you ruin your music, then you’ll have a hump. But Jack Madden, Jack Madden, you ugly big lump; Spoil the music that we have, we’ll double your hump.”

  I recall James’s face as he finished his tale. He liked to be in the open air when he talked to me about what he called “the fitness of things.” He’d say, “We can’t be overheard under the sky,” and that day we sat on a bench in the lovely little town of Edenderry. (His handwriting, by the way, that black, elegant script, when you come across it in the archives, looks medieval in its control; he was what they called a “true scribe.”)

  “James, why did you tell me that story?”

  “So that you’d think about it.”

  It had been almost two years since he told me, and now, on that train, the meaning began to filter through. How I must have been oppressing everybody with my grief; how I must have sought attention like a spoiled child. I had indeed traveled around the country weighted down with two humps. My grief made people recoil, and my mourning, though deeply valid, dignified nothing and nobody.

  61

  June 1944

  We parted by the train that would take her back to the south. Miss Begley had to get to Lamb’s Head, I to the road and my work. At no time on our journey back did we have a long conversation, and thus I said not a word about Claudia.

  As we clasped hands, I ventured the question, “When do you expect to hear from him?”

  “He has a week of leave to come soon, and then he has to go back to Derry.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “God Himself doesn’t know that.”

  “I’ll think of you,” I said.

  “We’ll be all right, Ben. Only the Brave deserve the Fair.”

  She turned away and I thought, She’s going to need more than hearts and flowers.

  And as we stood there, on a bright May morning, Charles Miller was at that exact moment stepping back into Europe, into an uncivil world, where no laws prevailed beyond the laws of life and death, where no ordinary decencies had a chance, where terror came from both earth and sky—a world that he, poor fellow, believed he could contain.

  I’ve just recently discovered an entry that Miss Begley wrote at length in her diary on the day after she returned to Lamb’s Head. Here it is:

  This is my first letter to myself as “Mrs. Miller.” I am “Mrs. Charles Miller.” In the morning and at night I look at myself in the mirror and I say, “This is Mrs. Charles Miller.” But have I made the greatest error of my life? Have I ruined the very thing I had hoped for—a chance at contentment that would keep me safe long after Nana has gone from me? And children, maybe? And a life with a steady daily round to it? Inside, I am shivering as though I have a fever. But I do have a fever—of the heart, of the soul. And I can share it with nobody, not Nana, nor faithful Ben.

  I must keep up appearances, even though I am falling apart, because I, who have made so many happy marriages for others, have steered myself into a desperate channel of life. Here I am, having married a great man, of strong and wonderful character, and he feels the same passion for me. But now I have discovered what he does—he kills people.

  Can I live with such a man? Doesn’t he know his Gospels? “Then Jesus said unto him, Put up again thy sword into its place: for all they that take the sword shall perish by the sword.” And, worse, here I am letting go of him, waving him off as he steps into circumstances that may take his own life.

  In our two days together, we never ceased touching each other. I discovered that we breathe at the same pace. He didn’t need to speak a word—I always knew what he was about to say. And even as we had intimacy over and over, I cried all the time. I cried in bed, I cri
ed on the floor. His kindness alone held me up. And such kindness: I told him my past—I told him before we wed, lest my history offended him beyond the possibility of holy matrimony, and he laughed, and said that he hoped I didn’t want to know about his past.

  How can it be that this man who kills people makes me feel that I am better than I am, and makes me want to grow even better than that? And now I have let him go, I have let the war take him—as it will. I have married a ghost, I know it.

  The entry for the next night contains more of the same confusion. Her pain sears the page, and her desperation comes across so strongly that one can forgive Miss Begley her Victorian sentimentality.

  She talks about Seeing his back, the square box of his shoulders, as he walked away; and, Did the last touch of his skin have to be no more than a handshake? and, I wish he hadn’t smiled at me as he left. It wasn’t what I was feeling.

  I suppose there is no irony in cheap music. Later that week, she describes her own actions, the steps she took to dampen down the anguish.

  Half-past five in the morning. There’s not a sound. I can’t even hear the sea. I shall get up and walk.

  When she returns, she writes the next entry:

  Seven o’clock: the world is completely still. This beautiful weather taunts me. He should be here with me, we should be lying on the grass down there, amid the yellow loosestrife and the opening fuchsia. Where is he? The wind comes always from the west, but I want the wind to turn east and blow word of him from Europe. I had hoped that the seabirds and the breezes and the white clouds would ease the time away from him. But it gets worse.

  On and on her diary goes, in the same anguished chant. The strength of her feelings isn’t surprising, but her incapacity to get them under control shocks me. I also find it somewhat annoying because she had so often upbraided me for my “moping,” as she called it. But even as I set down these words, I know that I’m being unfair—because she did keep her feelings under control, confiding only in her nightly journal.

  I suppose I wished that she’d been mourning the loss of me, that she’d been reflecting a horrified angst that she’d made a wrong choice. That’s how far down her road I had traveled, and I recall thinking that I wished I’d had the power to anguish her as profoundly as Miller did.

  62

  Odd that she mentioned the word ghost. That same month, May 1944, when I came back from London, I received a letter from James Clare asking me about the matchmaking inquiries. As ever, he told me what he himself was collecting—stories of “Famine Roads,” those well-meaning but often pointless enterprises, roads to nowhere, undertaken during the years of the great potato famine in the mid-nineteenth century to give local employment. He’d recently, he said, been in the Caha Mountains (not too far from Miss Begley), where he’d found such a road, and he was attempting to establish why it had never been finished, why it went nowhere.

  In his last paragraph, he wrote and asked me to “hang out a good ear for any ghost stories. I’m finding a preference in many houses for such tales. Sometimes they’re invented, I suspect, rather than traditional.”

  That very month, I took down this brief tale told by a woman in County Longford:

  A man coming home from a dance here in Edgeworthstown was given a lift in an old-fashioned carriage by two ladies, mother and daughter. He went with them to their house out near Clonbroney, had a drink, had another drink, ate some sandwiches they made for him, and then it was so late that he took up their invitation to stay the night. Woke up next morning, took breakfast with them—all very old-fashioned, thanked them, and continued his journey home. That’s when he missed his wallet; he had taken it out of his pocket as he lay down to sleep.

  He went back to the house. Found the gate locked with a rusty iron chain; found a way in, went up the overgrown avenue. Same house, no question—but it looked very different, it looked old, unkempt, with all the windows shuttered, the gravel overgrown with weeds, and no sign of life. He had to force the front door and he called and called the names of the ladies, but there wasn’t a soul in or near the house. Yet, in the hallway he found two sets of footprints, one going upstairs, the other down—his own boot marks. Dust sheets covered the furniture; he went upstairs, found his wallet on the mantelpiece of the bedroom.

  On his way home, he inquired locally. The house had been closed for decades, ever since a widow and daughter who had lived there were killed when their horse bolted in a lightning storm and overturned their carriage. The accident happened on the same day that the woman’s husband, i.e., the girl’s father, was killed in the Crimean War.

  Call it weird or disturbed or any term you like, but when I heard that story, I had this flash of thought: Will I one day go to Lamb’s Head and have a meal with Miss Begley and her grandmother—only to go back the following day and find the house boarded and shuttered, the inside covered in dust cloths?

  As I tell you this now, a shiver thrills me—although back in those days I didn’t believe in premonition.

  63

  In the house where they told me of the ghosts of Clonbroney, I asked, without quite meaning to, my new habitual question: Do you know a man by name of Raymond or Ray Cody? This represented a failure, a slippage on my part, typical of my gift for inconsistency. Since London, I’d been trying to change, trying to stop myself asking about Venetia or that period of my life; I’d been trying to take James’s advice and let Life take care of it. But some flicker of seizure, I suppose, took me over, and I fell back into old habits.

  Irony kicked in too; the first time I felt hesitant in asking was the first time that I received help.

  “Cody?” they said. “There’s a Ray Cody around here, all right. Is he a skinny, pale-faced lug of a fellow?” and they laughed. They knew him and didn’t like him. “That lad was born four miles away from here, over in Templebeg,” they said, “and he never did anybody any good.”

  They told me how to find the place, that his brother now lived in the family home.

  “You can’t miss it—’tis the only house in Templebeg that has a blue door.”

  Easy to find—though nothing can be obscure in Templebeg: six houses, a church, and a garage. The Cody place, shabby and unmemorable, except for the blue door, had no light or sign of life. In the field across the road, a steep hill gave me a clear view, and I waited there, under a tree, for several chilly hours.

  Once again, I fantasized that I would inveigle Cody to some quiet, undiscoverable place, an old quarry, a deep, abandoned pond, and torture him, drive nails through his hands and feet. I’d also daydreamed that I would then probably kill him—but I’d have to do that with even greater care and secrecy because I didn’t want my life any further diminished by that greasy slug.

  Consumed again by violence? Images of savagery, of assault? Ben, come on! In the cold morning, I shook myself. So much for the good intentions. Am I going to be like an alcoholic who keeps having another drink?

  At just after ten o’clock I saw life. A woman answered the door, a woman with a foolish, moonish face.

  “Dan, there’s somebody here wanting Ray,” she called—and then she shrank back from me, as though saying, I don’t like the look of you. “Dan, come’ere, willya?” And to me she said again, “Whatch you want, anyway?”

  I said, “Ray Cody.”

  “Dan!” she called again, and he shuffled into the frame of the doorway behind her.

  “Whoizzit?” he said, and then, “Who’re you?”

  Dan, who much needed cleansing, tried to close the door.

  I blocked it with my foot and asked, “What’s wrong?”

  “What’re you lookin’ for?”

  “I’m looking for Ray.”

  “Ah, Ray don’t live here no more.”

  “Where can I find him?”

  “Ah, Ray’s away, he’s, ah’m—he’s over in England.”

  “Where? Where in England? I’ve just been there.”

  “Ah, he never writes.”

  I ste
pped forward into the house, and the man said, “Stop, stop,” and the woman behind him began to wail.

  Miss Begley said to me, after the dance-hall fight in Killarney, that she’d slapped my face because she thought I was going to kill the man I had grabbed.

  “You should have seen yourself, I was so frightened of you. And Charles says you should be a soldier, that’s where to put all that anger, into a war.”

  “I’m not going to do anything wrong here,” I said to Dan Cody. “Just tell me where your brother is.”

  “I’ll find out, I’ll find out for you.”

  “When?”

  He said, “Ah, I don’t know, I don’t know, but I’ll find out.”

  “Good. I’ll be back soon.”

  In the following weeks, I played that morning like a film in my mind, asking over and over, What made them so afraid? I felt no malice toward that couple. For me they offered no more than a means to an end, and yet they had behaved as though I might bludgeon them both. No good conclusion suggested itself, and when one day I asked Ray Cody why his brother and his brother’s wife had been so frightened of me, he shook his head and said not a word—even though at that moment it would have served him greatly to speak.

  64

  On the morning of Wednesday, 7 June 1944, I opened the Irish Independent newspaper and I read the following editorial:

  “The long-expected ‘Second Front’ has finally materialized and the crisis of the war is upon us. The first point chosen was the obvious one, the short sea and air passage across the English Channel to the Seine Valley and the north of France. Parachutists and glider-borne troops, estimated by the Germans to number four divisions, opened the invasion about midnight on Monday night.”

  I stopped reading—to let the picture form in my mind, to let the negative develop. Looking for focus, I glanced across the page. A film called By Hook or by Crook starred Red Skelton, Eleanor Powell, and the Jimmy Dorsey Orchestra. It was the feast of Saint Colman. Uncle Vanya was playing at the Gate Theatre in Dublin.