The Matchmaker of Kenmare Page 3

  From a capacious bag she pulled a flask of tea and shared it with Neddy the Drover while the cattle grazed the margins of the road. She began to chat to him—where he came from, where he was going, asked him his destination, where he called home, his age, and so forth. Within minutes she had him talking about himself as never before.

  “And you’ve no wife,” she said.

  Neddy harruped a little cough, to overcome his embarrassment.

  “And then she says to me, ‘D’you know what, Neddy? You’re a damn nice fella as it is, but if you had a few teeth, sure you’d dazzle us all.’ ”

  I’d been heading southwest anyway, and two days later, I paid my first visit to Lamb’s Head. Now, as I sit here, looking back, I have the thought: What unfriendly god, what cosmic system, sent this man into my life, this simple cattle drover who’s as honest as a horse, this dear fellow with his rented teeth?

  6

  At that time, July 1943, I viewed myself as a man alone and grieving, with those night soldiers, doubt and fear, hammering always at my door. I believed that my constant pain didn’t show in my face, yet when I’d finished my note-taking and was making ready to leave, Miss Begley said, “Tell me about yourself. You look a bit lonely. Might you be looking for somebody yourself?”

  I nodded, mute as a leaf. My internal gentleman, for once, said nothing. She pressed, an eyebrow raised like a semaphore.

  “There’s something wrong, isn’t there?” and she put her hand on my arm and said, “Tell me about it. How can I help you? You’re a fine-looking man. Nobody has to live a lonesome life.”

  I nodded again.

  After looking at the distant sea for a moment she put on her professional mode. “Here’s a question for you,” she said. “Would you marry a girl with, say, only one leg?”

  “I’m already married,” I said.

  She barked. “I don’t do that kind of thing, and you should be ashamed of yourself.” And she turned away, sniffing like an aunt.

  “No, no,” I said. “That’s wrong, that’s not right. I was married. It’s just that I don’t know if I still am.”

  I told her the story as briefly as I could, and I explained that every day I asked everybody I met if they’d ever seen “this beautiful woman, the actress, Venetia Kelly. She was—is—my wife.”

  As Miss Begley peered at the fraying photograph that I took from my pocket, I could see that she understood. In fact, she summarized my pain—to have had it all and lost it.

  “Oh, you poor man.” She took my hand. “Here,” she said. “Come on in. I’ll make a fresh pot of tea and we’ll talk like old friends.”

  As the afternoon went on, I relaxed and opened out my life story a little more. Time and again, she said, “Oh! Oh, that’s too bad. Too bad altogether. It’s a wonder you can stand upright with that weight of grief. Oh, poor you.”

  Although the police had insisted that I set down a record of all the events surrounding the disappearance of my wife, and although on many a morning, noon, and night, I’d shouted my grief from the hilltops, I had never until that moment told any human person how I felt. On that entire subject I had uttered scarcely a word—never dared to, because I didn’t think that anyone would understand, and I didn’t want to weep in front of strangers. Now this girl, a few years younger than I, took my hand and held it and warmed it in hers.

  Kate Begley then told me of her own loss. When she was four years old, her parents “failed to come home from the sea.” As they returned from a wedding in Waterville, a squall raced up along Ballinskelligs Bay. The spars from their ransacked boat washed up at Sheehan’s Point a few days later.

  “I even remember the dress my mother wore to the wedding. Soft and gray. Had a small, round collar made of lace that she crocheted herself.”

  Sitting in the sunlight, with the same deadly sea beating down there, racing like a herd of dragons along the rocky shores and snarling up at us as though we might be their next meal, we leaned on our chairs toward each other and exchanged views of eternal seeking.

  I told her of my long search: “Every village is a cave, every town a forest.”

  She told me of her own eternal quest, prowling the headlands of the ocean, the beaches, still looking: “And, Ben, I say to myself, ‘Haste the day when they’ll walk up the cliff here and stand in the doorway, cheerful as mice.’ ”

  She squeezed my hand and said, “You know—people with loss are meant to meet. So that they can help each other.”

  At last I had found somebody who would understand my whimpering anguish. Or so I felt. For a decade and more, I had been immersed in a daily search for a dearly beloved person who might be dead—but equally might be alive. In any given phase of my travels, I might be passing through the town, village, or parish where Venetia lived. No wonder I had known days when, out of sheer pain, my toes felt the curve of the earth.

  Yet, I have to be careful in this memoir; I must retain a balance. Much though I took comfort from Miss Begley’s soothing empathy, had that conversation not happened, what else might have not?

  Many things. I doubt that I’d ever have run from a bursting shell in a French village. Or stumbled through that dreadful snow in Belgium. Nor would I ever have stood among the fearful, tearful wives standing aghast on the docksides of New York. Or killed a man. Or groomed a giraffe. Or sat wide-eyed in that dank room in Dachau, listening to the frightful court proceedings dominated by the word danke—as though saying, “For such atrocities I thank you,” and my heart simmering with rage on behalf of my two dear friends.

  In time, when her own loss made Miss Begley into a searcher too (the world is more full of them than you know), she and I met many people who understood. We met them in army camps, on mountainsides, in village cafés, on battlefields, on boats, on trains. We who search are identified by our quietude—and, I believe, our dignity, because while helping one another, we also try to keep our yearning to ourselves.

  Nevertheless, we are perceived as clearly by our anxiety as though a black cross has been daubed on our foreheads.

  7

  My record of Kate Begley is comprehensive and it’s augmented by her own journal, to which she gave me uncensored access. I’m its custodian, and for some time now, while I’ve been pulling this story together, that diary—a large red ledger—has been as big as an animal on my desk. From her entry for that August day, here’s her account of meeting me:

  A lovely young man collecting folklore for the government came to see myself and Nana today. Luckily, I was wearing my gray dress and my fuchsia scarf, and the bracelet I borrowed from Mama’s top drawer. He is tall, he has hair the color of a brick, and he has suffered a big loss; he keeps plucking at his clothes. Yet when he sits down to talk and listen, there’s something calm in him, like the Sea of Tranquillity that I’ve heard about on the moon.

  He has such a sad face. His dear wife was kidnapped from him over ten years ago, and may have been murdered in an act of revenge. Or she may still be alive and is being kept somewhere so that he’ll never again find her. She was expecting their first baby.

  I’m going to include him in my prayers tonight. But he’s in poor condition. I wanted to tell him to shape up, to stop pitying himself. He’s very handsome and I’ll help him get new clothes. I’ve told him that he’s to shave every day, and he’s to cut down his drinking. Nana says he may be dangerous, she thinks he has a fierceness. But I think there might be gold in him too. I’ll have to repair him.

  He had a hole in the upper of his shoe, and I could see that one foot had no sock on it. But no matter what his sadness may have done to his behavior and general appearance, he knows about a good, clean life, because his official journal looked as black and pure as a prayer book, and his pen was perfect.

  8

  I stayed the night in the long little house at Lamb’s Head. Next morning, I asked if I might sit in one day on a matchmaking session.

  “If I say yes, will it bring you back here soon?” she asked.

&
nbsp; And I replied, “I’ll come back anyway.”

  “I have to be in Killarney Saturday week,” she said. “If you’re there, we might go and buy you some clothes.”

  Down beside the winding Lamb’s Head road, I retrieved my tools. When approaching a dwelling, I always hid them, to avoid being asked, “Why do you carry a shovel and a garden fork on your bicycle?” I didn’t care to tell people that, as I went from place to place, I also dug in every wood I found.

  At that time, the notion seemed to contain a wild logic. Venetia and I had first embraced beneath trees. Leaning against the cool cylinders of their trunks, we’d first kissed under the velvet shelter of their branches.

  Then one afternoon, during the blackest of those far-off days after the Disappearance, I met a traveler on the road who told me that he believed she’d been buried beneath a tree. He was a one-legged man, cruel-faced, with a slash of a mouth. At the time I put his meanness down to how much he must have suffered in the loss of that leg. He cackled at me like a wizard as he looked at her photograph. “A tall, blondy one, wasn’t she? Venetia Kelly. I went to her show once. And the dummy she had, Blarney, he was a scream altogether.” He cupped his filthy hands to his chest. “And she had big diddies on her.”

  When it occurred to him that I might slug him for the disrespect, he smiled, as one-sided as a shark, affected a sad air, and through his thin lips told me what he thought he knew.

  “Well, what it was is this. I was coming through Dromcollogher one day about not long ago, and I was taking a shortcut off the road near Broken Bridge heading for Kilmeedy, and I was up in a wood, up the side of a hill, and there was people there, and they was burying something, I thought it might be a dead calf or something, it was that big, I can tell you the place.”

  When he lifted his eyebrow, that side of his face went up with it.

  “I waited,” he said, “hiding myself, and when they were gone, I went over and looked, and they’d covered the ground with old sticks and stuff, rotten leaves and that, but when I poked around, ’twas clear, like, there was a burial, now why would you need to cover the tracks of a burial if ’twas only a calf? I never told anyone, not a soul, until yourself now this minute, a gentleman like you, you’d know what to do.”

  Kilmeedy. Dromcollogher. Broken Bridge. Not more than a few miles from Charleville, the town from which they took her at midnight. I purchased a gardener’s trowel that day, a shovel, and a fork, and strapped them to the bar of my bicycle; and I went and lived in that wood for weeks until I had dug it up.

  Soft, pliable earth beneath me, and intense fungi that looked like magic or gangrene or both; cold cushions of moss; ancient roots; the long disused sett of a badger; a soft hollow with some traces of red fur where a family of foxes had played and rested—I found many things: an old pot, part of a wheel, the broken-off tine of a fork, green bottles caked with dirt. But I never found a burial. Perhaps I had dug in the wrong forest.

  Often thereafter, in part to get away from the question “Have you seen this woman?” I would ask in jovial conversation, “If you were burying a body, where would you do it?”

  Many people answered, “Oh, inside a wood,” and I would hear this desperate thought tolling like a leper’s bell: How many forests must I excavate?

  As I rode the narrow winding road back to Kenmare, my mind raced so fast that I scarcely looked at the open sea on my right hand. I’d not spent time alone with any young woman since Venetia’s death. Now the force of Kate Begley’s impression upon me challenged my memories of Venetia and brought back images.

  I’d first seen her on the stage of a dank old hall in Cashel, a few miles from home. She played Portia in an excerpt from The Merchant of Venice and the audience fell into a hush when she sauntered on. In a long, black velveteen gown, her silver blond hair falling to her neck, she looked to her right, then her left, and in three or four paces reached center stage. Like truly great performers she had all the time in the world and from the moment she delivered her first lines she owned us.

  When I next saw her, she wore a towel around her head and a mask of white cream on her face, as she prepared for bed in the opulent house where she lived with her mother. Two meetings after that, she was standing with me in our woods at Goldenfields, under trees that I loved. I touched her satin hair and she kissed me.

  But these are memories, and they don’t convey Venetia, they don’t tell you the power of her calm, the consistency of her warm nature, the stability given to her by her talent. To sit with her was to be rendered serene; to wake alongside her was to know that a lovely world awaited. If I have to give you one image of your mother as she was when she and I first married, it will be the moment she stepped back onto the quayside in Galway. The law allowed a ship’s captain to marry us offshore, and I will ever remember Venetia in a dress of pearl silk, a flower behind one ear, and her hand taking mine as she put her head on my shoulder. She was almost as tall as me, and the western light made her shine like a diamond.

  9

  August 1943

  To this day, the streets of Killarney feel like a minefield under me. I’ve always been troubled there, and I used to avoid the town if I could. The remarkable beauty of the surrounding countryside made me ill, because I associated the place with flickering images of old silent films, their curly words flustering the screen. Venetia had been a child actress with one of the companies that made miles of film in and around Killarney in the 1910s.

  At that time I hadn’t yet seen the film The Courage of Esmerelda, all seven minutes of it, but I knew about it, she had told me. And now I had to brave again the town where its young star, my passionate love, had lived between the ages of ten and fourteen. No wonder the appointment to buy clothes went so wrong.

  Miss Begley had suggested meeting at four o’clock in the afternoon, and we would go shopping. I came in from the village of Rathmore, a strenuous push up through the purple mountains, and then the dizzy reward of a freewheeling, reckless swooping down through lands of gorse and heather, past dark pools of silent water. She’d be punctual, I felt, and she was to stay in the town that night. The Farmers’ Dance, an annual early harvest affair, was a big date in her calendar.

  “A fertile ground,” she called it, “for Seekers of Love and Romance.” It didn’t begin until ten o’clock, and she said, “I want a leisurely meal before meeting new clients.”

  Too leisurely—that’s how a bad evening began. I got to the Great Southern Hotel at about noon and fell into conversation in the bar with people who had already been drinking. Lively company makes me drink quickly, never a good thing. When Miss Begley arrived four hours later, she showed displeasure, excessive in my view. Taking me away from the bar by the arm, she walked me out into the hotel gardens and insisted that I pace. Up and down, up and down; every time I laughed she cut into the chortle; every time I sat on the ground she made me stand and pace again. Naturally, she lectured me.

  “I’ve seen too many men who drink too much.”

  Inside I said, Some days, there’s no such thing as too much.

  “Drink too what?” And as the words left my mouth I began to sing: “How can you buy. All the stars in the sky.”

  She said, “God almighty, a child or a dog knows when it’s had too much of anything.”

  I followed through with, “How can you buy Killaaaaaarney.”

  She stamped her foot. That stopped me a little.

  “How old are you?” she demanded.

  Older than the hills and twice as bleak. But to her I said, “Twenty-nine. And lookin’ good.” Another song welled up inside me. “When Oirish eyes are smilin’.”

  “Stop this!” She stood back, looking shocked. “Twenty-nine? You look forty. And if you go on like this when you’re forty, you’ll look sixty.”

  I am sixty. And I’m eighty. And a hundred. And you, little-Miss-Rita-Hayworth-look-alike, you are a child.

  I stumbled a little, recovered, and decided to sit on the ground. At least now I couldn
’t fall. She stood in front of me, wagged a finger, and began to lecture me. I tuned in and out and in again, but my head was wavy and my eyes were tired. She didn’t care. This haranguing from her lasted an hour and included a walk to the cathedral and back again. I refused to go in, and soon she came out saying, “I lit a candle for you. Not that it will do much good unless you try to help yourself.”

  Any moment now she’ll say, “Send forth a candle into a naughty world.” And I’ll say, “Stick a lighted candle up your backside to give yourself that inner glow.”

  My guards were indeed on duty that day. And I had stopped singing.

  We went to eat. “There’s no point in going to buy clothes with you sweating and shaking and stinking like this,” she said.

  Horses sweat, and men perspire, but ladies merely glow. And sweating and shaking and stinking—can we have less of the alliteration, please, Miss B.?

  She asked the restaurant for a pot of very strong tea, and she watched over me as I drank one, two, three, four cups of tea so strong a mouse could trot on it. Then she ordered my food—stew with a double helping of mashed potatoes. She sought, she said, “to soak up the poison” in my stomach. Next she made me drink pint after pint of water: “Wash everything out.”

  Ah, yes, Miss Begley-of-the-bouncy-bosom, but have you ever washed your face in the morning dew? I have, and it’s one of the world’s healing miracles.

  We ate a long, slow meal, and by then I had recovered most of my faculties, with no lingering symptom worse than a strong headache.

  She asked me as dinner ended, “Do you think you’ll ever get over your loss?” And when I shook my head, she said, “But isn’t it better to be cheerful?”

  I said, “Either my wife is dead or my wife is alive. And which is worse? If I knew she was dead, I could mourn her. If I knew that she was alive, and living somewhere, and not coming to find me, that would hurt. But it wouldn’t hurt as much as not knowing what to believe.”