Lark's Eggs Page 16

  The younger, Una, was small, pudgy, her head powdered with anthracite black and celestial vague hair. The older, Sheona, was, by contrast, tall, demure, red-haired, the fluff of her red hair gripping her ears and her neck like forceps. They’d been parentless for a long time, running a bed and breakfast house since their parents died when Una had just entered her teens. They kept the circus people and the theatre people: many disreputables came to the house, of salesmen only licentious-looking ones, of lorry drivers only those continually drunk. Their family origins had become a mystery for many in town; it was as if they’d had no parents and stepped out of another planet very alien to this town because their manners and their decorum were different.

  Of the two, Sheona was the most faraway. It was as if she’d spent a time in another country and was continually thinking of it as she sat by the natty peat fires that Una had prepared. She was queenly, erect, but was now nearing, without the sign of a man, the explosive age of forty.

  Much satisfaction was expressed with this year’s performances: Cathal Mahaffy, with his mad, upshooting blond hair, was particularly singled out; the redness in the whites of his eyes seemed to be the redness at the bottom of the sky in the evening after they’d gone, the sky over the fair green where the marquee had been. But Cathal hadn’t really gone with the show. He came back again and again between performances of the plays elsewhere and it took some weeks before the people of town realized that he was having an affair with Sheona Barrett.

  The realization came in a week of tender weather in November when he was seen again and again bringing Miss Barrett on the back of his motorbike on the backroads between wavering, stone-walled fields in the countryside outside town. The sky was very blue that week, the weather warm, and Miss Barrett, the near forty-year-old, often wore a summer dress under a cardigan and nothing other than the cardigan for warmth.

  How did it happen? What had been going on among the crowd at the guesthouse? More and more women peeped through the curtains and saw the giant tableau on the sitting-room wall of Kylemore Abbey, Connemara, the tableau painted on to the wall by a destitute painter from Liverpool once, this work done in lieu of payment of rent. The painter had a red scarf around his neck and women in the town muttered that you’d have to be careful of his piglet fingers, where they went. Now they knew where Cathal Mahaffy’s fingers went. They knew only too well. Sheona Barrett had shed forty-year-old skin and become a young woman.

  It was Christmas that riled the women most though, Sheona Barrett going up to Dublin to attend a dinner dance with Cathal Mahaffy, at which the lord mayor of Dublin was present. She’d walked to the station, not got a taxi, and some people had caught sight of her on that frosty morning, of the erectness of her bearing and the pink box she carried in one hand. What had been in that pink box? And she still stood straight. People now, mainly women, wanted to knock her off balance. It was fine as long as the theatre came only once a year but now that it had been detained people were disconcerted. Superintendent Scannell, who always dressed in the same withered-looking, yellow ochre civilian coat, was seen chasing his civilian hat along O’Higgins Street one morning. A soldier’s trousers suddenly fell down as the soldiers stood to alert in the square outside the church one Sunday morning. A teacher in the boys’ national school suddenly started uttering a pornographic poem in the middle of a mathematics lesson. This man was swiftly taken to the mental hospital. A celibate, he’d obviously been threatened by a nervous breakdown for years.

  But some other people were not so fortunate to get such an easy way out. The theatre had stayed in town and upset people, to the very pegs of their being, those pegs that held their being to the ground just as the players’ tent was held to the verdant ground of the fair green by pegs.

  Sheona Barrett did not seem even aware that she was upsetting people. That’s maybe what upset them the most, that austere bearing of hers. It was a scandal but because it was a scandal that came from the theatre the scandal was questioned. This was the stuff of theatre after all, that people sat comfortably looking at. Now that it had been let loose on the streets you had to ask yourself: was the theatre not an intoxicating thing, like whiskey at a dinner dance? Did it not block out realities? In a way they envied Sheona Barrett for having taken something from a night of Shakespeare in a fair green and made it part of her life. They all dabbled with the thought of ensnaring some permanence from the theatre and when they realized it was impossible they decided, en masse, to destroy Sheona Barrett’s relationship so they could have the theatre back for what it had been, a yearly festive balloon in their lives.

  A Texan millionaire had come to live in a mansion outside town in 1957, a mansion in which the caretaker, who’d been there since the rich owners had departed to take up residence in Kensington, London, had murdered his half-wit brother. The millionaire was a divorcee and the parish priest had blocked the entrance to the mansion with his car one morning and stopped the millionaire’s tomato-coloured American car from coming out. The priest had got out of his car and approached the millionaire whose head was cautiously inside the car under a wide cowboy hat and informed him that divorcees were not welcome here. The millionaire departed forthwith, leaving his Irish roots.

  The same trick was got up with Miss Barrett but with less success because the parish priest was ill and his stand-in, Father Lysaght, a plump, berry-faced man with his black hair perpetually oiled back, was addicted to sherry, saying mass and giving sermons when drunk on sherry, mouthing out the usual particularities of Catholicism but given new accent on sherry. He was dispatched to pull back Sheona Barrett from her affair, arriving already drunk, was given more drink and spent the night on a sofa with Cathal Mahaffy, discussing the achievements of Cathal’s father.

  Eventually the priest began talking Greek because he thought that was appropriate, quoting poetry about carnal subjects from his seminary days, digging his snout-like nose into the air as he recited, and then he wavered and snortled his way home. The final agreement had been that only the theatre mattered, nothing else did, and the church and its sacraments palled in comparison to a good theatrical performance. The priest got to the presbytery gates, jolting out a refrain from The Mikado remembered from his days at boys’ boarding school, boys in merry dress and many in ladies’ wigs lined up to daunt the 1930s with colour and the smell of grease paint.

  The relationship of Cathal Mahaffy and Sheona Barrett had been given a safe passage by the church. Sheona Barrett, by her association with theatre people, had been elevated to the status of an artistic person and as such was immune from the church’s laws. You had to titillate people through the arts with a sense of sin so as to reaffirm all the church stood for. A thread united Sheona Barrett to the artistic establishment of the country now and she knew this, becoming so faraway looking she looked almost evanescent, as if she was part of the clouds and the fields.

  Cathal Mahaffy invoked her to many parts of the country and she went swiftly. The townspeople knew now that the girls had been left money they’d never spent much of before. That was evident from the way Sheona Barrett could so readily draw on those funds to get herself around the country. There’d never been any need of that money very much before. Una Barrett groomed her sister, settling her hair. A taxi was often called to speed to some desolate town in the Midlands, past derelict mill houses and past weirs and houses that handed on an emblem for brandy on their fronts, to one another, like a torch.

  In August 1959 Sheona Barrett attended the Galway races with Cathal Mahaffy. Her photograph was in the Connaught Tribune. She looked like a new bride. In late September they spent a few days together, again in Galway. They sauntered together by the peaceful blue of the sea, holding one another’s hands. Most of the holiday-makers had gone and they had Salthill to themselves. The sea was blue, it seemed, just for them. The blue rushed at their lovers’ figures. There was a happiness for them in Galway that late September. Sheona’s hair was a deeper red and often there was red on both her cheeks, ‘l
ike two flowerpots’, one bitter woman remarked.

  Cathal Mahaffy’s body must have been lovely. He was so lithe and pale. In bed with her he must have been like a series of twigs that would seem almost about to break making love to this tall woman. He looked like a boy still. He had this intensity. And he challenged you with his pale appearance, his albino hair, his direct smile. You always ended up for some reason looking to his crotch as his shoulders sloped in his act of looking at you directly.

  It was also clear that Cathal’s parents approved of the relationship or at least didn’t object to it. They were broad-minded people. They were glad to have their son with them and he could have been making love to a male pigmy for all they cared it seemed. They had seen many sexual preferences in their time and a lifetime in theatre qualified them to look beyond the land of sex, to see things that transcended sex: comradeship, love, devotion to art. Art had guided their lives and because of this they themselves transcended the land of Ireland and saw beyond it, to the centuries it sometimes seemed from the look on Mrs Mahaffy’s face as she stood on a green in a village, the light from a gap in the tent falling on her face. But there was always some tragedy at the end of the route of tolerance in this country.

  Shortly before the players arrived in Sheona’s town in 1959 Sheona was set upon in a routine walk by the railway station, near a bridge over a weir, and raped. No one could say who raped her but it was known that it had been a gang. She had been physically brutalized apart from being raped and mentally damaged. When she was brought to hospital it was clear that some damage was irrevocable in her. There was a trail of stains like those of tea leaves all across her face when she sat up in bed and her eyes stared ahead, not seeing what she’d seen before. Una Barrett was there, holding a brown scapular she’d taken from its covert place around her neck.

  The performances were cancelled that year. There was a mysterious silence around the players. The probable reason was that Cathal Mahaffy had opted out of the main parts in two Jacobean plays that weren’t Shakespeare’s. He’d made off on that motorbike of his after seeing Sheona in hospital, to mourn.

  A rape, a job of teaching someone a lesson, had gone wrong. There had been an excess of brutality. The youths who’d run away from Sheona through the thickets by the river had probably been put up to it by nameless and sinister elders in town. That was the hazy verdict handed down. There’d been many accomplices and people, in a Ku Klux Klan way, kept silent about the event, kept their lips sealed as if it had been a figment of someone’s imagination and there were often irritated howls years later when the event was referred to.

  Sheona Barrett ended up in a home in Galway and she is still there; someone who saw her says her hair is still as red as it was then.

  Cathal left the players permanently after the tragedy of October 1959, which months later still spread disbelief. He continued in the theatre in a ragged kind of way for a few years, his most celebrated role being as a black, scintillating cat in one of Dublin’s main theatres at Christmas 1960 but after that his appearances became fewer and fewer, until eventually he was down to secondary roles in discontented American plays in the backstreet and basement theatres of the city of Dublin.

  But his good looks flourished, that appearance of his became seraphim-like, and he was taken up by a rich American woman who’d moved into a top-floor flat in Baggot Street, Dublin, and he lived with her as her lover for a few years in this bohemian spell of hers, seen a lot with her in Gajs’ Restaurant over its tables regulated by small bunches of red carnations or in narrow pubs packed with Americans and Swedes craning to hear uilleann pipes played by hairy North-side Dubliners in desultory red check shirts. He nearly always had a black leather jacket on as if he was ready to depart and move on and it was true that no relationship could really last in his life so haunted and fragmented was he by what had happened to Sheona Barrett; he felt irrefutably part of what had happened.

  One day he did leave the American woman but she was already thinking of leaving Dublin so there was some confusion about his leaving her; no observer was sure which of the pair it was who sundered the relationship.

  He spent a few months on people’s floors, often on quite expensive antique carpets, around the Baggot Street, Fitzwilliam Square, Pembroke Road area of Dublin. The antique carpets were no coincidence in his life because he was actually working for an antique dealer now who had a shop on Upper Baggot Street and in Dun Laoghaire. The job was kind of a gift, kind of decoration for an aimless person and one Saturday when he wasn’t working he did what he’d wanted to do for a long time, drove west on his motorbike to Sheona Barrett’s town to try to find the answer to a question that had beleaguered his mind for so long: Why, why the evil, why the attack, what had been the motivation for this freak outrage, what had been the forces gathered behind it?

  But in the town he discovered that there were other explanations for Sheona’s state as if she’d been ill all the time. Una Barrett was a housewife, a guesthouse keeper, a mother, the wife of a man who had Guinness spilt all over his already brown jacket and waistcoat. The day was very blue: in the square there was an abundance of geraniums being sold; the sky seemed specially blue for his visit. All was happiness and change here. The past didn’t exist. He was an exile, by way of lack of explanations, from the present.

  But the more he stuck about, wandering among the market produce, the farmers made uncomfortable by the fact he wasn’t purchasing anything, the more he knew. People did not like happiness. They distrusted happiness of the flesh more than anything. The coming together of bodies in happiness was an outrage against the sensibilities. It not only should not be allowed to exist but it had to be murdered if it wasn’t going to unhinge them further. A swift killing could be covered up, it could be covered up forever; only the haunted imagination would keep it alive and that imagination would, by its nature, be driven out of society, so all could feel safe. There was no home for people like Cathal Mahaffy who knew and remembered.

  With money he got from an unannounced source he purchased a house in a remote part of County Donegal in the late 1960s; the house up on a hill overlooking the swing of a narrow bay. There was much work to be done on it, a skeleton of a grey house peculiar and abandoned among the boulders that all the time seemed about to tumble into the sea.

  On the back of his motorbike he ferried building materials from Donegal Town. These were the hippie days of the late 1960s and blue skies over the bay seemed arranged to greet visitors from Dublin. Often people got a bus to Donegal Town and then there was a liberated jaunt on the back of a motorbike around twists by the sea. There were benevolent fields to one side, the green early Irish monks would talk about, and stone walls dancing around the fields, finicky patterned stone walls.

  These fields stretching to one side of him like a director’s hand Cathal was killed on his motorbike one June day, a Lawrence of Arabia in County Donegal, all his motorbike gear on at the time, helmet, black leather jacket and old-fashioned goggles—a caprice? You felt he was being relieved of some agony he could no longer bear, that the day in June was the last he could have lived anyway, what with the pain in him people had noticed, a pain that scratched out phrases by the half-door of his house, into the Donegal air outside when he was under the influence of fashionable drugs transported from Dublin.

  One of these last phrases, these last annotations had been—a woman about to play in a 1930s comedy revival in Dublin had sworn it, her lips already red for the part—‘I don’t know why they did it. Why? Why? Why? The innocent. The innocent.’This was mistaken as a premature eulogy for himself and because of it all the young rich degenerates in Dublin who saw themselves as being innocent and maliciously tortured by society gathered by his grave in County Wicklow for the funeral, making it a fashionable Dublin event, a young man later said to have epitomized the event, a young man who wasn’t wearing a shirt and was advertising his pale, Pre-Raphaelite chest in the hot weather, a safe distance up from the grave, his chest gleam
ing, under a swipe of a motorcyclist’s red scarf, with sweat and with a hedonist’s poise.

  Among the crowd from Dublin there were some strange rural mourners but no one identified them and anyway they were jostled and passed over in the crowd so awkward was their appearance, so nondescript was their floral contribution. But someone did, out of some quirky interest, get the name of the town they were going back to out of them. It was Sheona’s town and the name was said almost indistinguishably so heavy and untutored was the accent.

  Ultan Mahaffy did go back to the town a few times after 1959. The company was smaller but the spirit was still high despite losses of one kind or another. The players were greeted in the town with solicitude rather than with reverence. They were tatty compared to what they had been and the marquee in the fair green came to look almost leprous, unapproachable.

  In October 1963 Ultan Mahaffy had a strange experience in the town, one which made him shudder, as if death had sat beside him. A man approached him in Miss Waldren’s hotel, a tall man under a yellow ochre hat, in a weedy, voluminous, almost gold coat—the colour of the coat evoked stretches in the middle of bogs, slits of beach in faraway County Mayo; it was a kaleidoscopic bunch of national associations the coat brought but its smell was very definitely of decay, of moroseness.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Mr Mahaffy,’ a voice said. ‘We respect you. You brought art to the town. You’ll go down in history. You can’t say anything to history. You can’t say anything to history.’With that he turned his back and went off. What had he been saying? That Mr Mahaffy could not be impugned because he was part of history. Part of the history books like Patrick Pearse and Cúchulainn. But there had been others who were not quite so fortunate. Mr Mahaffy looked after the man and knew that he would not be coming back to this town again.