‘That’s my Souvenir de St Anne’s,’ says someone behind him and he knows it’s her before he turns.
‘I was just calling on you, you know,’ he says. ‘I’m leaving Sligo and I just thought I’d call on you like we said.’ ‘I’m just back from my shopping,’ she says, swinging a string bag at him softly, ‘not exactly pearls from Macy’s but it feeds the old maw.’
‘It smells good, your rose,’ he says, as she sticks her key in the door and starts to disappear into the interior blank to him as Africa. If a lion roared in the distance down on the beach it wouldn’t startle him, she is that strange. She certainly has a beautiful back in her slight cotton outfit, and the most tender-looking hips and backside. Oh, yes, he’s hurting now, and a little tic has begun in his left eye the way it does when desire afflicts him. He will never forgive himself if he goes on in this light and he feels confident that it was not the purpose of his visit to ogle her, or that Jack’s intimations about her stirred him at all.
‘Do you know,’ she says, ‘I actually prayed last night that you might make it back to see me. I don’t know why.’ She sort of casts her shopping adrift on a pleasant wooden table in the dim room. ‘Don’t ask me why, brother.’
‘I won’t stay long,’ he says. ‘I have the jarvey waiting up by the Protestant church, and my train’s going in a couple of hours.’ She doesn’t seem to have much interest in this. ‘From the station, you know,’ he adds desperately.
She goes with terrific grace into the back of the hut, and he hears the strong rush of tapwater and he’s surprised she has water on tap, and she comes back in and hands him a glass and says:
‘Champagne?’
The stuff is fizzing mightily, and for a moment he thinks Tom must be treating her royally what with the rationing and all that even though he’s mayor, but one sip tells him the truth. He can’t think of the name of what it is. He’s afraid to ask in case she believes it’s champagne in her madness. There might be a terrible rudeness in it too. My heavens, the things that people call eggs and cream nowadays were only shadows of those things, and maybe she has just taken things a little further and this is indeed in her perished mind champagne. He sips at it brave as an actor.
‘You’re better looking than Tom though he’s a mighty man in the doss, but I suppose your brother Jack is the Valentino in your family with his face and the red hair. I was up one night a while ago at my father-in-law’s place and I was looking in, you know, through the windows, and I saw Jack there in his uniform and I thought, well, the poor creature, he misses wearing it out on the street, the poor man.’
‘You were up at the house?’
‘Oh yes, I was going to beard the lion, but, my courage failed me. I can’t stay out here for ever and I thought I could talk to your mother or something.’
‘And did you?’
‘Not at all, amn’t I telling you?’
‘You shouldn’t be looking in the windows, you know, at the back of the house and all.’
‘Oh, is that right, and did you never do it?’
He says nothing, how can he after all?
‘Go on,’ she says, ‘what else is left me, but listening at doors and spying on my in-laws. Sure, child, they’ve made a madwoman out of me and worse. I should have your brother shot for a start. You know, I’ve been around with some pretty rough fellas and there was a time when I could have had that done, like that, snap your fingers, oh yes.’
‘Ah,’ he says, ‘do you know, for an educated man, I don’t know, he’s my own brother, and an officer, but, he doesn’t know women, anyhow.’
‘You do?’
He flushes like a fool.
‘Ah no, I mean it,’ she says, ‘Jesus. I’m not trying to be smart with you. You’ve knocked around yourself. You know the world a bit. I tell you, better than me. I never been beyond Sligo much. I was in Dublin once for a horse show week, that a fella brought me to. He was to bring me to the Isle of Man after. But you know.’
It’s true now that he’s perplexed enough not to know what to say any more. She’s too big for him, too expanded. Neat as a rose, she is.
‘Were you telling that that rose out there, now, has a name, or some such?’
‘Oh God, yes, they all have names, boy.’
‘What is the name of it?’ he says lamely.
‘Souvenir de St Anne’s. Dublin, you know. St Anne’s Park? Where the Guinnesses lived one time. No? Ah, sure, you Sligo men. I have to take them in at night in their pots, like dogs, or the frost would stop them quick enough.’ There’s another silence.
‘What is it, boy?’ she says.
‘I don’t know,’ he says. ‘I’m flummoxed.’
‘Flummoxed? By what?’
‘Yourself,’ he says, helpless.
‘Listen,’ she says, putting down her own glass anyhow.
‘What?’ he says, startled, like the glass had been his shield. ‘What?’ and showing the whites of his eyes maybe.
‘OK,’ she says, ‘look. Life is brief, isn’t it? That’s what the philosophers say anyhow.’
‘That’s the story,’ he says.
‘You want to climb in the old bed, in there, with me?’
It’s his brother’s wife. It’s the woman his mother reviles. Jesus, he’s thinking, she’s like something out of the Bible, Book of Revelation, no less. Babylon. He never saw a Babylon so sweet and hard, like a sweet nut in her dress. Breasts on her as soft as twilight and you’d say she was burning there in the half-light, alive as a God. There is more to her than meets the eye too. Her talk really obliterates him. It would be sinful to touch her, not because any human religion says so but because … He doesn’t have a because. He wonders suddenly why she said ‘Snap your fingers’ instead of actually snapping them but maybe she doesn’t have the gift of doing it like some people can’t raise just one eyebrow and most people can’t jiggle their ears. Who was the Englishman says we are all from apes? Not this lady. His heart’s gone on him now because she can’t snap her fingers but said ‘Snap your fingers’ instead. That’s dangerously endearing. Now if he was standing in one of those fancy cocktail bars in London or some place swank such as the crazy officers in the asylum used to hanker after, he’d know the word for her he thinks, and that’s charming. Maybe she is also a madwoman in a cheap dress, but youth in the world is everything. Lovely — glad as a rose was the phrase. Even as he thinks these matters he understands how rusty all these sections of him are, and Viv comes back to him and truly has not far to come, just up the hill of cold sun and sharp wind from the forgotten breakers beside the hill of sand below.
‘Oh, you’re far away now,’ she says. ‘A penny for them.’
‘Not worth a penny,’ he says.
‘A halfpenny then,’ she says, and takes three strides to him and sets herself in against him. She reaches up both hands like she was going to take his head down from a shelf and takes the head and he feels her hot hands on his cheeks. And she gets her lips on to his and kisses him not unlike Viv used to years ago, with her tongue as lively as a snail.
‘Oh,’ she says, pausing for breath, ‘you’re crying.’
‘It’s been a while,’ he says. ‘The war and everything. You know.’
‘I know,’ she says. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘you can get another train, surely.
‘OK,’ he say s.
‘In the morning.’
‘OK,’ he says.
‘Go up the blessed hill and pay off Tomlinson, for God’s sake.’
‘All right.’
So he goes to the door.
‘What’s that we were drinking?’ he says.
‘Alka-Seltzer,’ she says.
‘Mighty good stuff,’ he says, and hurries off like a veritable Don Juan or a cowboy or some fool playing a cowboy or whatever but as happy as Larry, whoever Larry was. Morning conies colder and clearer, the gulls rocketing over the iron roof and racketing like maniacs, he has slept like a caterpillar in its hammock of silk. Now she doesn’t speak
but feeds him a veritable crust of bread and some tea with a taste that must mean the leaves are old and secret in the scullery. She’s neither angry or gentle but absent. She dresses him like a child, firmly, neither gentle or angry. And puts him on the road like a grown son. He feels inclined to speak himself, to thank her even, but he knows better. She picks bits of dirt off his coat, and now he feels like a husband. And she turns about and leaves him on the graceless tar and leaves him to wonder and go up the road with the high gulls and the salt of the sea blowing up from below where the ghost of Viv seems still to be in his dark memory, and this is an hour of ease to him, a cherishable hour, with its own confusion maybe, but a right confusion, yes, certainly, and he is aware then of his prick, damp and sore and small in the nest of his trousers, and gratitude does not describe what lights his head, nor yet love, but he knows he’ll carry the demon of that single night with Roseanne into the tiding reaches of the coming days, and greet that demon ever with a dark and conspiratorial greeting, and he hopes in his heart he hasn’t done for the blooms of her roses, that stood out all night in the foul drench of the frost and the darkness, and were never taken in.
15
THE ATOMIC BOMB brings the men home from every quarter of the earth because the war is not so much over as stunned back into history, and Eneas must be nimble and quick with the employment columns in the newspapers and smell out something to put food in his belly. He’s getting older no doubt and his illness is on his army record so there isn’t a kaleidoscope of happy jobs open to him. At length he finds a job digging in Africa.
Africa in his Sligo head before he goes to Africa is a strange little tinful of fourpenny thoughts. Darkness, but when he gets there, a sun brighter than the creation of the earth. Primitive, but after a few days in Lagos it’s a sort of a Sligo, but bigger, and alive as a Yankee port. So his fourpenny ideas aren’t worth fourpence.
He belongs now the while to the East African Engineering Enterprise Company, with his contract signed and sealed in London, and his next three years indentured more or less to their efforts to bring water into regions catastrophically dry. For if there are to be farms, proper farms with proper European crops, fantastically long canals must be constructed by the EAEE and its indentured men, weird straight canals and bizarre twisting ones joining Muslim districts to Christian and Christian to pagan, good water crossing borders as swift and covert as flightless birds. Men of strength are needed, who can dig like blessed dogs, and have eyes in the backs of their heads like Grecian mythological for whatever tremendous dangers might bear down on them. So Eneas is told at each official juncture, at each signing and briefing and, he might say, preaching session. For Africa makes Bible spouters out of everyone, even the passionate engineers of the EAEE.
He wakes one morning at normal cockcrow in his wooden quarters in Lagos. Already he feels after a mere few weeks of tin cups and strong wine like a Lagos man, and it is just as well. Because this day is the day of his ascent upcountry to the canal works. Into his sun-stiff shirt and simple trousers and on with his stout shoes and then shaved and then a bit of already familiar food and onto the rough trucks and away. In the fashion of a human man.
At his heart, not diminished by the space of time banging about London, or the long sea-miles of the sea voyage, leaning on rails, playing poor cards in the steerage spaces, engaging in endless spieling talk about nothing with a variety of unlikely passengers bound for a hapless Nigeria, at his heart, a soft bird in a nest of dry moss, Roseanne, the flash of her linen dress, her dark easy breasts, every door in the mansion of her good self flung open, and a veritable bevy of owls and wild birds bulleting in and out, rattling the sashes with such screeches and yells of love, by God …
The elderly truck leaves the dwindling city. He’s in mostly with a bunch of Lagos men, so there’s seven pairs of shoes tipping against another seven, each side of the vehicle. The road throws them about familiarly, but it’s not minded, there’s laughter. On top of the truck ride the bound spades as new as gifts, jostling slightly. And the tin container of water bangs about and surges where it hangs from the tailgate. Eneas is missing Roseanne surely, but against that is the wide freshness of this southern clay and the sky so soft and clear it’s a sort of happiness to look at it from the darker shelter of the awning. He suddenly thinks of himself running into the Garravogue and passing drenched through Sligo and he laughs out like a madman. It isn’t taken as madness but more likely spirits as high as the other men’s spirits.
For a good long while after, Eneas is examined by the quiet face of the man opposite him. It’s not offensive.
‘Well, I’ve seen you before, brother,’ says the man finally, almost striking one of his own knees like in a music-hall skit. ‘Do you remember where that was?’
‘I should,’ says Eneas, ‘But…’
‘It’s not so long ago, brother,’ says the man. ‘A year maybe, maybe more.’
‘Is that so?’ says Eneas, but he can’t recall it. As a matter of fact his head is addled in the matter of recent days, and those days further off are in a general state of rebellion.
‘Yes,’ he says, ‘don’t you remember? On the boat to Ireland that time.’
‘On the boat to Ireland?’ Eneas says, incredulous.
And any of the other men listening laugh at his surprise.
‘I wasn’t expecting you to say that,’ he say s.
‘I suppose not. Don’t you recall it?’
‘I don’t … I should … These are hard days. The old head…’
‘Of course,’ says the man. ‘How come you’re riding here with us, going digging?’
‘Have myself indentured now to the company for three years, whatever’s in store for me, I don’t know.’
‘Pretty tough work but you look like you can handle it.’
‘I hope so!’ he says, and the other men laughing again. ‘Snakes for breakfast, fevers for lunch, and savages for tea. That’s what we say.’
‘Savages?’
‘Well, we’re all savages, truth to tell. What’s your name?’ ‘Eneas.’
‘Not so common.’
‘It’s a Sligo name.’
‘Sligo would be your home place?’
Eneas finds himself considering this.
‘Not your home place?’ says the man helpfully.
‘Well,’ says Eneas.
‘My name around here is Harcourt, because I was born down there in Port Harcourt, if you know that place.’
‘Yes,’ he says. ‘Big shipping port.’
‘That’s it,’ says Harcourt. ‘My father, he is a piano tuner and soon after I was born moved to Lagos to be near the pianos of the rich’ — now the other men are listening with their faces turned plainly on Harcourt — ‘and raised me up pretty good, sent me to school even, drove those Christian values into me. All with the shillings he earned, going from house to house, piano to piano, bigwig to bigwig. Not bad for a blind man.’
‘Not bad,’ says Eneas. ‘My father was in the music business too as matter of fact.’
‘Yes?’
‘Yes — dance-bands, you know.’
‘Sure, brother,’ says Harcourt, and the truck takes a dip and bangs the men about for a few seconds. ‘Don’t know how we got talking about fathers,’ he says, laughing.
‘Well,’ says Eneas.
‘You play yourself?’
‘What’s that?’
‘You know,’ says Harcourt, ‘you play anything, tootling, or the like?’ And he fingers an imaginary trumpet for further illumination.
‘No, Jesus, no,’ says Eneas.
‘Ah, well,’ says the man. ‘I don’t tune pianos.’
The truck weaves on across its chosen course. The men are content to sit with their hands on their cotton knees and their bodies as loose as they can make them to accommodate the rolling and the toppling. Short deep-red bushes flash by in the torment of heat outside. Burning, burning, but the high yellow sky amiable, kinglike. Must be a fair strain on the a
xle, Eneas thinks. The truck is British-made, simple and robust, all perfect childish angles thrown against the chaotic terrain, the tyres uniting both, yielding, leaping, simplifying the elegant empires of rocks and burning bushes. Now he looks at the men one by one, wondering at their stories. Every face a life of words. Mothers’ sons. Maybe in trouble some of them like himself, because truly to go out into Nigeria to dig is pretty nigh kin to prison work. Only a desperate man, or a crazy, would go out. A three-year sentence of solitude, and hacking at the earth — thank God. In the Foreign Legion you’d be shooting at local men, here you could dig with them, ear to ear. He saw that film one time on a cold afternoon in Chester, Laurel and Hardy, and poor old Hardy rubbing his foot for ease and finding it was bloody Laurel’s foot! Almost a recruitment film for the Legion that was, the fun they had.
‘That’s — astounding now,’ says Harcourt. ‘Me meeting up with you again like this. Who’d put odds on that? But that’s how the world’s made, you’d have to conclude now and then.’
‘Certainly is,’ says Eneas. ‘Maybe I do remember you … The war years — only hash in the head now.’
Eneas wonders for a moment what the man Harcourt might have been doing in that far part of the world in those years but it isn’t a thought that bothers him. Every last thing was topsy-turvy those times, nothing in its place, people finding themselves in all sorts of queer localities suddenly, homesick maybe, knocked about, half daft in the head…