Venetia Kelly's Traveling Show: A Novel of Ireland

  And I—I slept in my own bed that night, and helped Lily put my parents’ room back to rights. When I opened my bag I found the note from Venetia: Dear Ben.

  Washing, ironing, polishing, cleaning—such a surge of effort; the gratification! At noon next day, I fetched the three women. It proved difficult to fit them into the Alvis because they had prepared so much food.

  And at five o’clock, with the sun still in the sky, I walked down to the cottage holding in my hand the lawyer’s piece of paper, signed and witnessed.

  The range of human emotions isn’t always wide enough. Or we can’t—or daren’t—expand on it. I watched it in my parents that evening, and I think the word daren’t applied. Neither took it in fully; they delayed its digestion. This time at least, I found the cottage door open.

  They never heard me coming, and each started in fright at the big shadow that loomed in the doorway. Both rose, and my father pushed his spectacles back on his head, saying, “Well, look who’s here.”

  Mother said, “Did you travel far? Have you eaten?”

  I said, and I couldn’t hide my smile, “You’ll need to be sitting down.”

  They were my children now. Just for that afternoon and evening. Like toddlers they sat obediently in their chairs, looking at me, not knowing what was to come.

  I pulled the piece of paper from my pocket and began to read from it: “‘I, Thomas Aquinas Kelly, do hereby—’” A little overcome, I had to stop and start again. “‘I, Thomas Aquinas Kelly, do hereby give back to Harold and Louise MacCarthy their farm at Goldenfields. I cancel any mortgage that I once had on that entire property …’” I stopped.

  “Show me that,” said Mother.

  I handed it over; he looked over her shoulder. She took his hand and they couldn’t look at me, but I was fine with that.

  Mother had a saying that I loved—because she said it with such satisfaction. She said it everywhere, around the house, in the garden—she even used it to potty-train me. Now she said it again as she looked at me.

  “Job done.”

  They walked up to the house, arm in arm. I went ahead, just by fifty yards or so, to tell everybody that they were coming. A long table had been set out in front of the house, as we sometimes did on fine summer days. White linen shone in the sun—and piles of food glistened.

  In a row behind the table stood Lily and Billy—no sign of Mary Lewis—and Mollie May Holmes, Joan Hogan, and Kitty Cleary. They didn’t applaud or anything like that. It wasn’t their way. The most they managed was “Howya?” and “Welcome back.”

  My parents shook hands with everybody. Mother looked at the food and began talking about recipes, and my father asked Billy to bring around Bobbie Boy.

  Nobody left that table until ten o’clock that night. Billy, who had been off the drink since my father’s initial departure, didn’t touch a drop. He drove the women home.

  My parents, Lily, and I tidied up. Mother inspected everything, the rooms, the floors, she ran her fingers along high edges looking for dust.

  All she said was, “Is this your doing, Ben?”

  They went to bed. Lily walked home. I sat alone in the porch. There was a moon that night, and it lit the white railing that needlessly divided the field, and down along which the Animal had galloped in the Incident.

  I left a note for my parents: I’ll be away for a while. Expect letters from me.

  The driveway in the moonlight stretched as clean—I thought—as the life ahead of me, and as I strolled I sought the honeysuckle that Venetia had admired. I stopped to savor it, and taste the moment, and then, a hero again, I strode on. The car wasn’t seven leagues away; I reached it in minutes.

  Do you remember how I described the first night that I drove in the dark? That dank and awful night, with the goat’s greenish-yellowish eyes on the roadside? This night bore no resemblance to it. I didn’t drive; I rode a magic carpet. Isn’t it wonderful what happens when you’re driving under a full moon? It appears, it’s gone, and then, like a child playing a game, there it is again, above a new hill. My friend the moon, I remember thinking, my friend the moon. And tomorrow, I thought, my other friend the kind old sun.

  With a flourish I parked the Daimler outside the house. Midnight. Minuit, the French call it. The witching time.

  The witching time? Why did that sinister phrase from Hamlet cross my mind at that moment? “’tis now the very witching time of night, / When churchyards yawn and hell itself breathes out.”

  I stepped from the car and kicked something. A head. A head lay in the street. Blarney’s head. It had been hacked from the neck. Inside the front door, which stood slightly ajar, I found his torso, his arms, his legs.

  They took Venetia away. And they took Mrs. Haas too. Nobody saw it happen. They left two significant traces to tell me a story. One was the death of Blarney, the brutal slaying. I gathered the pieces, I saw how he’d been hacked—so savagely that I was surprised not to see blood. His head had been attached to a long “neck,” a thick tube that went down into his body, where Venetia could reach in through his back and turn his head with a lever. They had sawn the head from the neck just below the chin. His feet had been cut off halfway up the calf, the hands at the wrists. That was the first message to me.

  The other trace told me who had done it—Cody. Cody knew that we had a suitcase of money in the house. He’d brought it down from Donegal, and we were deciding how much of it to bank, and how much to use in cash bargaining for rent or property. And Cody knew where we were hiding that money, in a closet upstairs, covered over by boxes. He had taken out the suitcase but he’d taken only some money, not much, and left the rest there, out on the bed, in the suitcase.

  It must have happened minutes before I got there. Everything had a fresh feeling—the teapot in the kitchen was still warm.

  Do you know that moment, that suspended, almost happy moment when you know that something awful has happened but you’re still thinking that it hasn’t? That night, in that house, I had that feeling, and it seemed to last for a time. When it ceased, I screamed. I ran all over the house calling out Venetia’s name, yelling for Mrs. Haas.

  And I knew that nothing would come of my shouting, I knew that something so bad had happened that I had no mechanism to address it.

  I also, without much effort, knew the truth. Cody had been planted in the traveling show by King Kelly—which explained their familiarity with each other. And Venetia’s disappearance was my punishment. Cody, probably with some henchmen, and almost certainly at gunpoint, had taken her away in the middle of the night.

  Charleville had a police station down the street, and I walked to it; but not a light showed in its windows—or anywhere in the town. I walked back, falling apart. My brain kept veering to the worst, the dark water at Lough Gur. I walked all around the town’s two main streets like a madman; I had no idea what to do. The house repelled me; I couldn’t go back in. Not safe to drive the car either—even at this remove in time I can tell how badly I was disintegrating. In truth, I didn’t have a coherent thought in my head, yet I knew, I somehow knew, that I would have a difficult task to persuade anybody of my worst fears.

  Which is exactly what happened. At first light I waited outside the police station, beside the old and half-concealed ROYAL IRISH CONSTABULARY sign. As yet, not every physical conversion had been completed, and many stations, such as Charleville, had posted a temporary sign with the symbol of the new civic guards over the old insignia.

  A man inside saw me waiting and opened the door.

  “Y’all right there, huh?”

  What words could I choose that would make the most impact? I’d tried all night to think of some. By then my appearance spoke for me. I threw out my hands and the man, still in his shirt and suspenders, said, “Come in, huh?”

  My mind registered, Why is it that policemen always say everything as though they’re asking a question?

  “I’m from Rosewood Cottage,” I said. “Down the street.”

&
nbsp; “The actor crowd? D’you want to sleep it off, so?”

  “Something bad. Something—bad—”

  I couldn’t speak—I’ve replayed this moment all my life.

  “Are you an actor yourself?”

  “No.”

  “What are you? Are you after doing something, huh?”

  “No. Somebody’s vanished.”

  “Is there blood?”

  “No, no, I mean—there’s a doll cut up.”

  He looked at me. “Is there anybody over there now?”

  “That’s it, that’s what’s wrong, there’s nobody there and there should be.”

  He leaned close and I figured later that he was trying to smell my breath.

  “Is there damage to the property?”

  “I want you to come look.”

  My agitation produced his effort—sort of. The policeman went away, shaved, ate breakfast, dressed, and came back. How do I know? He hadn’t already shaved, he hadn’t been fully dressed, he was gone for nearly an hour, and when he came back he had a flake of yellow egg near his mouth. And he was sucking crumbs from his teeth. He applied his cap to his head and we walked to the house.

  I, as bidden by him, stayed in the hall as he went through every room with elephant plods. It took him many, many minutes.

  When he came back downstairs he said, “There wasn’t a robbery, was there? All that money, huh? Is that yours—I s’pose it must be.”

  “But something bad’s happened.” My voice wailed.

  “Who’s missing?”

  I said, “My wife.”

  Odd, isn’t it? The first time I used the term in the outside world was the night I lost her.

  “Is that all?”

  “The housekeeper. Mrs. Haas.”

  He looked at me and looked all around. “We’ll leave it a bit. If you don’t hear from your wife or Mrs. House, I s’pose we’ll have to do a report. People go away a lot. Did you have an oul’ row or something, the two of you, huh?”

  I shook my head, miserable, destroyed. He coughed.

  “I’d say, I’d say—she’ll be back. I mean, the money, huh? You know, like, you know—women. And money.”

  He touched his blue cap, walked out of the house—and that was it.

  Now I shall tell you the awful story of my searches, and what became of me after Venetia’s disappearance. I had nowhere to go, nobody to whom I could turn that day. This matter couldn’t be aired at home to my parents—and James Clare would take three days to contact. I thought about going to Dublin and Miss Fay, but I felt that the burden of it might be too heavy for her, and I felt that I should stay in Charleville in case anything happened. When a moment of calm arrived I understood that I had an empty house, a car, a suitcase full of cash—and a terrible, problematic loss.

  All that day I wandered around the house, going mad fast. My wife—that proud phrase again, my wife—had gone missing. I feared her dead, I knew that. I feared her and our unborn child murdered.

  Next raft of thought: The policeman believes that she walked out on me after a row, and that our housekeeper went with her. Missing persons, not murder. I disagreed in my heart.

  Third level of, as it was by now, despair: I can do nothing. She might still be alive somewhere, not yet killed, and I can do nothing; I can’t save her and I can get nobody to help me.

  Fourth, and worst, level: This happened because I blackmailed her grandfather and cost him his prestigious job. I killed her.

  You think that was a bleak day? It was—but I would have bleaker.

  Toward evening, after hours of fitful sleep and mad food consumption, I rallied. I still had some things on my side. The company was on its way down from Donegal after a vacation paid for by Venetia. If nothing else I would now have a team to help me search. And search is what I intended to do—search the world, if necessary. I rallied myself with one central thought: Don’t think of yourself, Ben; think of Venetia’s safety.

  When I awoke next morning, the bed—our bed—looked as though it had been bombed by massive ordnance. I must have twisted and turned, rolled and tumbled. Mother had insisted since age six that I make my own bed every day—two minutes was my record; this took ten. I washed with great care, trying to impose order upon myself, and mapped out my day.

  Downstairs I forced myself to eat, and I walked slowly from the kitchen to the hall, from the hall to the kitchen. Walking slowly is thinking deeply; thank you, Miss Fay.

  Outside, no rain, some light overcast—the daylight helped. At ten o’clock, the hour that I had observed Charleville usually woke up, I went from door to door and asked the same question:

  “The night before last, just before midnight—did you hear or see anything unusual?”

  (You can tell, can’t you, that I was a widely read boy? Adventure stories contain good basic lessons.)

  Nobody saw anything. Two people, close to the house, heard what they called “a lorry,” but they had gone to bed and didn’t get up to look. They timed it identically: “About ten before midnight.”

  Everybody wanted to know why I was asking; I said, “I can’t say yet.”

  They all found out within days because they told the policeman that I’d been asking questions, and he told them that my wife had run away.

  “Actors,” I’m sure they said. “Them bad morals.”

  If they only knew.

  I had intended visiting Luke Nagle anyway, to tell him the whole story. His diligence all those years ago had brought off an excellent result: In at least one mighty infringement King Kelly had been nailed, a wrong corrected; I knew he’d be pleased. Now I sat in front of him and told him in sequence what had happened—the lawyer’s office, my parents, the farm, all of that.

  “But,” said he with a raging blurt, “that animal! He did the same here; that’s how he got his first farm—he hoodwinked an old couple. He should have been strung up.”

  The interruption over, I told him about Venetia, and who she was and what had now happened. Here’s why I liked him so much; he didn’t gild life—he took it on straight, headlong.

  “The lake isn’t very deep,” he said. “You could drag it easy enough.”

  “Dada,” said his daughter. “Slow down.”

  “False hope is no hope,” he said. “Always best to know what’s happened as soon as you can.”

  Though I admired him for his words, they crushed me. When I recovered as much as I could, I told him the missing-persons dilemma.

  “Kelly should be behind bars for the rest of his life. They won’t hang him now.”

  I asked, “What are you saying?”

  “Go after him.”

  “I’d get nowhere.”

  “Good Christ, let me into court. I’ll witness that fellow through the gates of Hell.”

  So began the first phases of my search. I would climb two more levels, including one national and very public plateau, and in between I would sink lower than I ever want you to think about, much less feel. The final stages—they occasioned this account that you’re now reading.

  In that first phase, I waited for the company from the show. My calculations told me that they’d arrive at the end of the week. I could scarcely wait; I’d grown to like them so much, and to trust them.

  I assessed who among them might give me the best, the coolest assistance. Would it be Graham? He had a certain distance to him, and he read more than the others. Peter would weep and get blind drunk. Cwawfod might get hysterical. Michael would rage over the “death” of Blarney, and kick things (and maybe turn somersaults). Martha might be useful; she had an energy the others didn’t, and she worshipped Venetia.

  As I sat there, at the kitchen table, helpless as an infant, I tried to make sense of it all. I couldn’t. My wife was dead, my bones told me. And I was sitting here. Doing nothing. And life wasn’t allowing me to do anything. There was nothing I could do. Nothing.

  I know now why people in solitary confinement become unhinged. But at least they can see and come t
o grips with the forces containing them. I had to do something.

  Again I went to the guards. The same man. Sitting, this time, reading the newspaper. He looked at me and went back to his reading.

  “Hallo.”

  “Yah.”

  “I was—the day before yesterday. I was, ah’m, here.”

  “Is she back?”

  “I want to make out a missing-person thing.”

  “Three months.”

  “But—”

  “You’ve got to wait three months. If we made out a missing-person report for everybody who ran way from their husband, we’d catch no criminals.”

  I wanted to ask, “How many do you catch, you yourself?” Instead, I asked, “Why three months?”

  “As for men who run off from the missus, ’twould be like the Red Sea deluge.”

  As I walked out, he called after me, “Hang on to that money and she’ll be back. Women don’t run away from money.”

  The company never arrived. I never saw them assembled again. For days I waited. I knew where they were meant to stay for their holiday; I knew because Venetia had discussed it with Cody, who had made the payment.

  And then of course I knew that there probably had been no holiday; that Cody had paid them off and disbanded them, had told them some story about Venetia being pregnant and giving up the traveling show—that is what I speculated when the truth came to me, when they didn’t arrive. Time proved me right on that one, but I didn’t know it for many, many years.

  Now, despair picked me up by the hair and dragged me across open countryside, across deserts and scree, and tore me up. I went nowhere, I saw nobody, I went down to the dregs.

  Grief, I discovered, operates in different ways. It can begin protectively, by not letting you feel too much. And then it can scorch you and chill you all at once, like the winds of the Arctic do. Those days brought me into the first bad stages of such grief. I didn’t wash, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t eat what could be called food—an egg, stale bread, nothing of any taste or use.