Table of Contents
PENGUIN BOOKS
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Teaser chapter
Praise for Annie Dunne
“As a wordsmith, Barry is at times amazing, his descriptions poetic and insightful.”
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
“Rarely has the precious interaction between the old and the young been captured in such beauty and tenderness .. a remarkable novel.”
—The Christian Science Monitor
“Barry’s prose is lyrical ... in each novel Barry pays tribute to the complex resilience of the human spirit.”—The Miami Herald
“Barry’s gift for image and metaphor ... are equaled here by his eye for descriptive detail.”
—Publishers Weekly
PENGUIN BOOKS
ANNIE DUNNE
Sebastian Barry was born in Dublin in 1955 and read Latin and English at Trinity College, Dublin, where he was later Writer Fellow in 1996. He is the author of The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty and A Long Long Way, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. He has also written several award-winning plays, among them The Steward of Christendom, Our Lady of Sligo, and most recently The Pride of Parnell Street. In 2006 he was Heimbold Visiting Professor at Villanova University, Pennsylvania. He lives in Wicklow, Ireland with his wife Ali and three children, Merlin, Coral and Tobias.
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First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited 2002 First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc 2002 Published in Penguin Books
Copyright © Sebastian Barry, 2002 All rights reserved
PUBLISHER’S NOTE
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product
of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental
eISBN : 978-1-101-17508-8
1 Aged women—Fiction 2 Farm life—Fiction
3 Ireland—Fiction 4 Aunts—Fiction I Title
PR6052 A729 A84 2002
823’914—dc21 2002020675
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To Derek Johns
Chapter One
Oh, Kelsha is a distant place, over the mountains from everywhere. You go over the mountains to get there, and eventually, through dreams.
I can picture the two children in their coats arriving. It is the start of the summer and all the customs of winter and spring are behind us. Not that those customs are tended to now, much.
My grand-nephew and grand-niece, titles that sound like the children of a Russian tsar.
My crab-apple tree seems to watch over their coming, like a poor man forever waiting for alms with cap in hand. There is a soughing in the beech trees and the ash, and the small music of the hens. Shep prances about like a child at a dance with his extra coat of bog muck and the yellow effluents that leak into yards where dogs like to lie.
The children’s coats are very nice coats, city coats. Their mother does not neglect the matter of coats, whatever else I could say about her. But they are too nice for a farmyard existence. We will wrap them in old brown paper and put them in the small blue cupboard in their room, and keep the moths from them as best we can.
I herd the children like little calves through the lower leaf of the half-door and into the beautiful glooms of the kitchen. The big sandwiches lie on the scrubbed table, poised like buckled planks on blue and white plates. Words are spoken and I sense the great respect Sarah has for their father Trevor, my fine nephew, magnificent in his Bohemian green suit, his odd, English-sounding name, his big red beard and his sleeked black hair like a Parisian intellectual, good-looking, with deep brown angry eyes. He is handing her some notes of money, to help us bring the children through the summer. I am proud of her regard for him and proud of him, because in the old days of my sister’s madness I reared him. My poor sister Maud, that in the end could do little but gabble nonsense.
The great enterprise now, with Trevor and the children’s mother, is to cross the sea to London and see what can be done. There are only stagnant pools of things to tempt him here in his own country, there is nothing. He has trained himself up by a scholarship and I can smell the smell of hope in him, the young man’s coat. But his hope is proficient and true. I have no doubt but that he will find himself and his care a place to lodge, and fetch about him, and gain employment. He has his grandfather’s wholeness of purpose, who rose from a common police recruit to be the chief superintendent of B Division in Dublin, the capital of the whole country.
His father, Matt, Maud’s husband, who as good as threw me from the house when finally she died, may drag his polished boots every morning from that rented house in Donnybrook to the savage margins of Ringsend, where he teaches painting and drawing to children who would as much like to learn them as to eat earwigs. Back and forth on that black bike with its winter lamp and ineffectual bell, thinking only of the summer when he can paint the midgy beauties of Wicklow, cursing his fate.
But Trevor has the strength and purpose of another generation, with his red beard.
He is kissing the children’s heads now and saying good-bye, be good, see you in a few months.
‘Every day I will write to you,’ says the little boy, which is comical since he is too young to know his writing. But the father is not listening to the son, he is staring away into nowhere, distracted no doubt by all the things he has to do, the arrangements, the tickets, the prayers that I think will rise up unbidden, though I know he professes to be a Godless man, one of those modern types that would make me fearful if it was not him.
‘Every day, every day,’ says the boy emphatically.
‘I am going to press flowers for you all summer in my autograph album,’
says the little girl. ‘There won’t be anyone to write their names in it down here.’
‘Look after yourselves in London,’ I say to him. ‘And you need not for a moment worry about the children. You will have enough to do setting yourselves up.’
‘As soon as everything’s in place, we’ll send for them,’ Trevor says. ‘Thank you, Aunty Annie. It’s an enormous help.’
‘It’s no trouble, God knows. We are lucky to have them.’
‘Don’t spoil them,’ he says.
‘We will not. But we will look after them, certainly.’
‘Good,’ Trevor says, and kisses my cheek, and away with him out into the paltry sunlight. He doesn’t look back, though the children rush to the door.
‘Come in now,’ I say, in case they are going to miss their father loudly, like the knobs on a wireless suddenly turned up, ‘and we’ll show you your beds, and you can put your bits and bobs in the drawers and we’ll be shipshape.’
We hear, all of us, Sarah and me and the little ones, the car reversing out of the rough yard and out again onto the green road to Kiltegan. He will not go home by the Glen of Imail because he fears the rutted tracks and rightly. Oh, it is some other, older year still in those lonesome districts, no calendar there says 1959.
‘Sarah and me scrubbed out the old room,’ I say gently.
For a moment they are stuck, like beasts in the gap between two fields.
‘When you’re not here with us, this old room goes to cobwebs. Though it got a mighty spring clean with the rest of the premises just in April. I limed the walls, so don’t lean your nice clothes on them, or you’ll be getting streaks. And the fire is lit these two days, and the mattresses are aired as you’d like.’
The room is bleak, the room is bare. A tiny hill of brown turf with seams of garnet fire steams in the grate. The window is as small as an owl and frames the lower clutter of the ash tree outside, the big fierce hair of thin branches that grows up from the root.
The fireplace is a hole with a thin strip of painted iron for a mantelpiece. Nothing ticks in that room, the big clock is in the kitchen.
‘Are the mice still above us, Auntie Anne?’ the boy asks, and I can sense him make the leap, the little leap to us. He calls me Auntie Anne like his father, I notice, though in truth I am his great-aunt. It is like a compliment.
‘The mice?’ I say absently, inserting their small supply of clothes into the drawers smelling of mothballs and the dry, small bones of herbs in a tight net. I feel relief like a luxury, like a strip of chocolate. ‘This house was never without mice.’
‘Now,’ I say, when the clothes are nestled in properly, ‘you’re Wicklow people now. And this is your nest. And it’s nice to have nestlings again in the nest. I hope you won’t put too great a strain on old bones! Come back out to the kitchen and eat.’
They don’t know anything about old bones. They follow me into the kitchen dutifully. All of the world is new, and very little, if any of it, is ugly to them. Nothing is old. They do not know anything about the exhaustion of minding children.
Towards the end of the day these times I go slower and slower, like a bad clock. My movements lessen and I reach across gaps with parsimonious expense of energy. Even my words stretch longer. I feel a sudden fear that we are too old to guard these little ones. A hundred tasks and now, two creatures as vigorous as steam engines.
But the fear passes and my sense is only of the deepest pleasure, the deepest anticipation. Two small children in a small country kitchen, wolfing the enormous sandwiches. The flagstones underfoot polished to an impressive green darkness. The dresser against the wall beside the door to my and Sarah’s bedroom, which looms at your back when you sit by the fire. All the pride of our delf is there, simple objects enough, the chipped items retired to the topmost shelf. Long strips of notched wood hold the plates from falling. There are but two books there, both thick and wrapped in dark brown paper - my father’s family Bible and his complete works of William Shakespeare, side by side like a set of twins.
The lights in the room are always evening lights.
These are important matters.
‘I was afraid of the sandwiches,’ says the boy, eating fiercely.
‘Why?’
‘Because of your butter.’
‘Well, there is no butter on them,’ I say, tenderly. I would not take offence at a little boy. We were careful, Sarah and I, not to put butter on the bread. Our country butter has no salt and the children will need a few days to get used to it. We were fearful they would reject the sandwiches and all the work that went into them.
Sarah seems to loom a little, up the top of the kitchen in the shadows, and there are many shadows. She is like a person not used to houses, strangely, but a creature from out of doors, a hare, a bittern. But her face is smiling, beaming, she keeps turning her head like a lighthouse engine, and shines her yellow smile down on the children.
Her head is a mass of powdery white hair, whereas mine is a mute grey, and she smells of something, not unpleasant but difficult to identify, not sweet or perfumed. It may be the starch in her blouses under the forgiving blue and white overdress, it may be the very starched nature of her own skin, kept scrubbed and soaped by means of a daily wash-down at her jug and basin in the bedroom.
There is nothing in the house that we have not scrubbed.
She is not beautiful in any accepted book of beauty, but she is appealing, covetable. She is also thin and so seems tall, like many of her family, and to the children she must seem almost endless, she goes up and up and only ends in the clouds of her hair. Her mother and my mother were sisters, but I do not think a stranger would see a resemblance.
For seven generations my family were the stewards on the Humewood estate, and hers were the coppicers, when coppicing was still a trade. If wooden staves from foreign parts had not become the fashion, the hazel woods so combed and cut by Sarah’s grandsires might still be scenes of dexterity and expertise. And but that my father was not inclined to the land, he might have followed a similar course, and never left these districts - and saved himself a lot of trouble later. Such things bind us, Sarah and me, though more truly it was necessities, economies, that carried me back here to her. I was happy with my lot in Dublin, with Maud and Matt, rearing the three boys, but that’s all history now. Time runs on and has no width. Those small boys are men, and Maud is dead.
Oh, we are blessed in the company of these children. It is our chance. It isn’t that we don’t know it. A glee suffuses us, like beaten egg whites folded into sugar.
When the children are fed I bring them over to the wall, the blind wall of the alcove one side of the fire, where the hag’s bed should be, except there is no hag now to sleep there.
Properly speaking the hag was the old mother of the house, who would give up her room and her marriage bed when her son wed, and brought a fresh bride into the house. I suppose Sarah and me are the hags now. Neither of us ever had the luck to be mothers, though. When we were young women we wanted to be.
It is there in the alcove, as small as any hermit’s cell, where once a bed of branches and straw abided, that we have measured the children over the few years of their lives, when we have had our chance at them.
The little boy is four, and when I press him against the damp plaster I see there has been no great leap of height in the intervening year.
The girl, now six and a bit, has sprung up by three inches and more.
The boy’s hair is black as a blackbird and it rests against the plaster like a smudge of soot. He is placid and willing, and stands there like a little sentry, smiling. I am afraid in my heart I believe a boy is worth two girls but I cannot help that prejudice.
It is like checking calves, measuring them. As if while they have been away from our care, we have feared for their progress, their feeding and their watering. My hands are trembling as they rest lightly on the slight shoulders of the boy. There is a shivering in my stomach, I am almost sick for a moment. Perhaps i
t is the stooping over, he is so small and neat. His face is as clear of blemishes as the surface of a well. Such a smile, an excellent smile like a person might draw, and indeed I am sure his grandfather Matt, as a respite from teaching those ungrateful children in Ringsend, has often drawn him, he is so suited to sitting still. As good as a landscape.
It is true that I don’t really understand what a girl is, though I was one myself in the long ago. To look at me I am sure there is no trace of that, no lingering section of me which would tell you that once I ran about the lanes of Kelsha, Kiltegan and Feddin as slight as a twist of straw.
‘Am I very much bigger?’ says the boy almost sadly, as if catching my thoughts.
‘You are not,’ I say, laughing my laugh. ‘You are most certainly not. But you have sprung up a little.’
‘How I will ever get to the top of my father’s head I do not know,’ he says.
‘Is that your ambition?’
‘Daddy says one day I will be as tall as him. But he doesn’ t want me taller. He says I will have to leave home if I grow taller.’
‘Perhaps you will not grow taller.’
‘Oh, I am sure I will,’ he says sadly, all three foot of him.
‘I think your sister might get there before you,’ I say, and the girl smiles in sudden triumph.
‘He would not like that,’ she says.
‘Who?’
‘Him,’ she says, meaning, I suppose, her brother.
The boy gazes at the might of his sister. There is a look in his eyes of simple fear. I do not understand the fear at all.
‘You will need to eat your cabbage,’ I suggest to him.
‘Now?’ he says doubtfully.
‘No, now you will go to bed. The owl is awake in the wood. Time for mortals to be a-bed.’