Lark's Eggs Page 7

  Sheila would stand by the counter talking to all who came in, occasionally cleaning a glass, rubbing it with a cloth.

  Her husband had left her five months now and her children were gone, married, working on the bogs in the Midlands and she was alone.

  But she was glad she was alone. The house was falling down. A brown faded photograph of a distant Edwardian relative stood askew on the stairway. Nettles brandished themselves in the garden, the odd Guinness bottle thrown among them, but she was happy. She went to bed at night with Saucepan, the big brown cat, on the eiderdown and she slept peacefully, dreaming of girlhood dances when she waltzed at the crossroads, framed in a black dress with a topaz necklace on her white bosom.

  She’d been a famous beauty then and even in the big house with raging Virginia creeper beyond the canal there weren’t girls to come near her in beauty.

  She had a quality ministers’ daughters or doctors’ daughters, lawyers’ daughters or senators’ daughters couldn’t rival. She had black hair wild and as crossed as blackberries and her skin was rich and olive. She had six sisters, none to come near her in beauty, and as such she was marked out and her sins counted.

  She’d dance at the crossroads with the doctors’ sons and the lawyers’ sons and often there’d be coloured lights nearby or a caravan with the lakes of Killarney painted on it as an excuse for a carnival.

  Girls at the village molested her with stares but she didn’t care and went to Mullingar with doctors’ sons who had rich woollen jerseys and bright broad bones in a country where other men stood silently on streets, holes in their trousers and handkerchiefs trailing out of their pockets.

  They were good old days to talk to her customers about and she didn’t really care if they had not attended the dances. She didn’t really care if no one else remembered the day Dr Dehilly’s son pinched her cheeks and said they were the colour of scarlet. He had been the boy she mostly had her eye on. He had red check handkerchiefs spilling out of his pocket and he always looked at though he was about to swing a golf club, alert, agile. He took her five times to a dance in Mullingar and once to dinner in Dublin.

  When she came back he stopped seeing her and she had the ire and jealousy of local girls to deal with. But she didn’t care. Her own sisters were cruel and cutting, and to make things worse she’d been jilted by him, but she raised her head and kept it high and if they breathed bad words about her hadn’t she had his good looks and his smile for five weeks and the pleasure of his company in Dolphin’s Hotel in Dublin?

  Her clothes were cheap and often second hand which caused scandal to her family but it had to be admitted at a dance she looked better than the most refined of the young, a ‘French painter’s model’ someone said. She had good taste and if she had the looks sure she might as well make use of them.

  It was going too far, however, when she started roaming the fields in summer with farmers’ sons. The streets of the village were bare and deserted, the canal usually low on water and if there weren’t poppies in the fields there’d be no colours other than green of grass or gold of hay.

  What she did in the fields with those young men no one knew but one rather mad young man gave her a mother-of-pearl bead owned by his grandmother and another said afterwards she was as fine to be with as a whore in Dublin. She didn’t care. She raised her head higher and walked the one main carnivorous street of the village, waiting to be chastised, knowing she never would be openly, defiant if you like, brave.

  There was a priest at the time with a rhubarb neck whom people said the African sun had made somewhat crazy and he hollered each Sunday as money rattled.

  He collected money at funerals and weddings and it would almost make you cry to see the bereaved at a funeral give their silver to a little lizard of a man who with the priest was like the local mafiosi.

  This priest hollered one Sunday about Jezebels and daughters of Satan, and Sheila felt like standing, ordering her stance and making a speech in favour of sin. She’d discovered sin to be warm and vibrant and thoroughly to be recommended.

  That was in the bad old days. Now Ireland had changed and her nieces courted men on the pavement outside and priests talked about sex and the papers wrote about it. Behind her counter Sheila felt glad that somewhere she’d inaugurated it and laughed at the dreary dirty jokes of her customers.

  Five months before her husband had left her. Her husband used to run the pub with her and read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the counter but then he tired of her fits and got the mail boat from Holyhead and went away.

  Sheila’s fits were known to all her family. She’d threaten to burn the house down or kill herself, or she’d stand on the stairway at night shouting abuse at her son. No one knew why she did it.

  She was the black sheep of the family, always isolated, always blamed and as such into middle age she felt she ought to drag an element of nuisance.

  She tried to choke her husband one night, not seriously, but in a fit of anger with herself alighted on him. He stared back. Once he’d loved her. But as she’d grown older she’d made such a nuisance of herself that he tired of her.

  He backed a lot of horses. He drank a lot of Guinness.

  She’d call him names if he spilt porter on the floor; make him clean it up. As her daughter grew up she grew jealous of her and gave her a difficult time. As her son grew up she was more relaxed but often lost her temper with him and boxed him in the ears. Then she was sorry. But it was too late.

  They tried to put her in a mental hospital many times but she refused to go. She knew her rights and laid them on the table. People stared at her exasperated, but that didn’t bother her. There was something more she wanted to know about.

  She’d go into the garden and recognize the supreme quality of untidiness there and ask herself why she hadn’t tended a garden like the local lawyer’s or the Protestant minister’s with its orange undercurrent blaze of nasturtiums in autumn or its bed of baby raspberries in summer.

  What was wrong with her inheritance?

  She took a broom one night and set it alight; after that her husband left her. He got a job in Shepherd’s Bush in London and lived with two young labourers.

  ‘Driven from house and home,’ people said. He returned two months later for his daughter’s wedding when there were pound notes stuck about the house and when people danced at the crossroads again. The pub wasn’t doing too well so she borrowed clothes from her sister in Ballinasloe and she danced at the wedding, regardless.

  I know what they’re saying, she thought. They’re saying I’m odd and queer. I have a hat the wrong way round and my shoes are too big for me. That doesn’t stop me from dancing, does it?

  Her son went to work in Bord na Móna, the Irish peat company, and one evening in the pub she read that they’d found an ancient Irish crozier in the bog where he worked. ‘Wonders never cease,’ she told an old man dormant on her counter. He didn’t reply. She poured herself a bottle of Guinness and toasted her children, her daughter married to a rich garage owner, her son living in a flat in a town in the Western Midlands with a jukebox in the restaurant below him.

  ‘He’ll be listening to Elvis tonight,’ she thought, recalling Elvis’s latest song ‘In the Ghetto’.

  Things went from bad to worse. People stopped going to her pub altogether and she hardly had sixpence.

  No wonder she tried to burn the house down one day. That was it. She was carted off to the hospital in Mullingar. She wondered what she’d done wrong or why it was she was always doing things people didn’t favour, like driving her husband away or boxing her daughter’s ears or burning her house down. There must be something wrong with me, she thought, yet she resented being the troublesome one of the family. That made her worse. It made her more war-like.

  Yet how could she have told anyone how happy she’d been in that house that was falling apart. She’d seen a total of nine mice in it, thought she heard a rat, but alone, left in her ways, she cut an edge on hap
piness.

  Then one night she had a nightmare in which her dead mother chased her downstairs and Sheila rose and systematically tried to burn the house to the ground.

  ‘Why did you do it?’ her sister from Ballinasloe asked and she could only answer, ‘I got bored.’

  Sheila had a retinue of faithful relatives, she provided a focus for their misgivings on life and also a centre point about which they could talk of their endless problems.

  Sheila was the biggest problem of all. Yet no one had noticed she’d been happy in her second-hand clothes at her daughter’s wedding.

  The mental hospital didn’t suit her. ‘All of them queer people,’ she told her sister. ‘Can’t I get out of here?’

  By a stroke of luck a job was secured for her in an embassy in Dublin. They packed her off with good clean clothes and she took up the post of charlady in a big mansion off Ailesbury Road. She had a little room to herself and was fascinated to see a row of red-brick houses when she woke in the morning instead of trees and grass wasted by bad earth.

  She rose at early hours and did her chores, bringing tea to the ambassador and his workers.

  She cleaned carpets scrupulously and sometimes stopped to look at portraits of Scandinavian dignitaries or oil paintings of Irish scenes by leading Irish artists.

  In her village there’d been an artist among their flock of maidens, but the girl had been so cantankerous that it might have put you off art for life. Looking at these pictures now Sheila felt a blue day dawning in her. Gone were her memories of her children’s adolescence and her husband’s exasperation with her. She felt a lightness in her womb, like a birth.

  Here they had honey on their toast in the mornings and they served wine with lunch.

  She loved it. If she’d had a close female friend she’d have written to her all about it but as she’d had none she kept silent. Her husband now seemed like a stranger and her children, always angry with her, would never understand.

  But there was a unique growth which she herself understood and wanted to describe but there was no one to tell about it so she became devout, praying, because at least God could hear and know that one was grateful.

  Croissants were brown and crispy in the mornings and serving them she hummed the only song she knew of, ‘Non, je ne regrette rien’. The ambassador liked her cheerful face and seeing herself in the mirror she wondered why she hadn’t smiled more often.

  It was proper to have a happy face and then she remembered her lineage, her birth into a dour family and wondered at what chance she could have had. But replacing that understanding was a clean new emotion, there was a beginning which was eroding the past and its lack of peace. She was beginning again.

  As her wages were high she found herself buying new clothes and picking up lace and delicate things. She bought herself a ring with Connemara marble at the centre of it and often admired it on her finger as she dusted a carpet. It symbolized all growth in her. She went to a window and looked out and instead of one magpie as she’d seen on her wedding day there were two. ‘One for sorrow, two for joy.’ She remembered chanting that on her way from the church with her husband. He was in England now. He’d been working as a foreman in his peat factory. She’d driven him away, yet why worry, she told herself. She remembered his skinny body in his pyjamas in bed and she rejoiced she was here in Dublin, away from home and family. She arrested an insect in his march across the wainscot and shook him into the air.

  A delegation of dignitaries passed her. She rose. They smiled at her. She continued work.

  A man who worked as secretary in the embassy smiled at her more than anybody else and one morning when she was having coffee he approached her and offered her a cigarette. He had thick blond hair, though he was about fifty, and he had a large handsome smile. He enquired her name of her and she told him. He seemed pleased. He introduced himself as Dag. They smoked cigarettes and gently he eased information from her about her environment. He’d worked in the United Nations. He liked Dublin, he said, liked the Irish. He was interested in this country.

  She acted like a child under surveillance. He left her but later in the afternoon, when she was cleaning the waiting room, he came behind her and indicated a painting. ‘Carl Larsson,’ he said. ‘A Swedish painter.’

  The painting showed children feasting in a summer scene with a bottle thrown amid the grass. ‘That is how it was,’ he said, ‘when I was a child.’

  Sheila looked at him. He seemed odd and beautiful. Maybe he was lonesome for home.

  He talked to her often after that. She didn’t know why. He talked of the city whence he came, rivers running through it, water reeds growing, church towers dark and threatening and rain, rain always falling. A biscuit snapped in Sheila’s teeth.

  ‘You like it here better?’ she asked.

  ‘It’s fun,’ he said simply.

  She wondered why he approached her so much. Would she become coquettish, she wondered.

  She stared at a box of marigolds outside a window one day. What was it that led her here, she wondered, was it the force of salvation itself? Her thoughts came easier. A stranger was making conversation with her and she was glad, glad of words, talk, coffee to accompany them.

  He told her about trees in his city that they tried to cut down but which the people did not allow. He told her about a poet who stayed in the trees in a hammock. He described how they still stood, green and bold in summer and how the young ate strawberries under them. Sheila thought of her own young and a wisp of guilt flew through her.

  He was a kindly person. He liked books. He talked of the Town Hall in his city where great men had been honoured by the Nobel Prize. Sheila looked at him and said, ‘Isn’t it a funny thing how men reach their goals?’ He smiled at that remark and said it was beautiful.

  ‘Would you like to join me for dinner tomorrow?’ he asked.

  Sheila was delighted. ‘Where?’ she asked. He suggested the Shelbourne.

  She met him there and he fondled her warm hands as though they were gloves and they ate veal. She didn’t want wine. It was too much of a luxury. He talked again of his home country, mentioning the far lands up north where snow fell and the sun never set in summer, where the Laps wandered, a people clothed in deerskin with caps, and eyes staring from caps—like moles.

  It was the country of his youth, he said, everyone has a country of their youth.

  Sheila considered her own hometown and regretted so much those moments that there had been no such place in her youth but was comforted when he talked of children dying in Asia. Other people had their problems too.

  She said goodbye to him at the top of Grafton Street and felt ridiculous and left, going back to work. Staring at the Larsson picture she noticed odd things about the figures and would have asked the artist to correct them if he’d been about.

  She met him again the following morning as he smiled but he didn’t stop to talk to her.

  He was busy. She saw him having coffee with some diplomats and was glad he didn’t talk to her because she understood his work to be more important than her. She dusted oak and pinewood and was glad of its sweet smell, near her nose as she bent to dust it.

  There was one room in the embassy where there was a chink of stained glass and Sheila went there, in awe of it. She loved its particularity and one day she was standing there when he put his arm on her shoulder. She laughed.

  He laughed. He sat and asked her what it was about Irish women and she said she didn’t know and he spoke about his dead wife, Elizabeth, and he cried.

  She gave him her new clean handkerchief and he said more than anything he wanted children but his wife had had no children.

  ‘There were alderberries around our summer home,’ he said. ‘I always wanted to share their taste with children.’

  She put her arm about him and he held her, quite platonically, and then he let go of her and apologized. His wife was beautiful, he said. They didn’t get on.

  And he intimated darker things a
bout her death.

  Sheila was living in a world miles from the one she used to inhabit. She rose in the mornings, serene, calm and dressed herself neatly. She understood herself to be miles beyond pain and thought they would never reach her here, they being relatives and the mangy dogs of her village.

  She went about her chores and each day took time off to talk to her new friend, not about the problems of the Third World which he knew so much about but the areas of pain, loss that the human being encounters.

  He whispered things about his home country, about wheaten-coloured grass and boats on the Archipelgo and she in turn thought of golf-playing doctors in the hungry fields about her home.

  He took her one day in the pantry and kissed her. She walked about for two days, understanding this kiss, knowing it was not from passion it was given but from appreciation.

  Her sister wrote to her and asked her how she was getting on. She didn’t reply.

  Her friend asked her to dinner and she turned up in a new turtle-brown suit. They had white wine and now she laughed more freely and her eyes were becoming wider.

  They were in Wynn’s Hotel, which caters for priests and nuns. Suddenly over a table she saw her sister. Her sister looked at her, half from embarrassment. Sheila jumped up and introduced her friend. Her sister smiled a sad knowledgeable smile and left.

  They left her alone for three weeks and then began writing suddenly, asking her how she was.

  They hadn’t written before, her husband, son, daughter, sister but suddenly a barrage of letters came.

  She didn’t reply to any of them. She had a picture by Carl Larsson in her room and the plant on the window she watered carefully.

  In August her friend told her he had to go back to his country on urgent business. She said goodbye to him as if he was only going for a few days and walked about the town where French students were thronging. It was there she met her sister again. Her sister recognized her happiness and her ability to cope and smiled.