Annie Dunne

  ‘I think this pony is getting fat,’ I say. ‘Maybe we should put him out onto the sloping field for himself, Sarah.’

  ‘Maybe you should sell him, as I suggested,’ says a man’s voice, and of course it is Billy Kerr, who else? I do not feel entirely easy to have him standing in the light of the rough door. Billy the pony snorts and stamps on his smeared straw, which by rights needs mucking out.

  ‘What do you want now, Billy Kerr?’ I say.

  ‘I want a word with you, Annie Dunne, as quiet as I can get it.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He steps in, releasing the few rags of daylight back into the byre. Billy’s grey coat lightens a few shades. It is small enough for a pony, let alone a pony and two people, especially when one of those people, myself that is, would prefer now to disappear through the solid wall. I hate proximity, but proximity to a man whose voice is so sure and hard is deeply unpleasant.

  ‘I suppose,’ he says quietly, ‘I could take you by the scruff of the neck, you old dog, and give you a mighty shake for yourself.’

  ‘Billy Kerr!’ I say. I am so shocked the blood is seeping out of my legs, it feels like.

  ‘What are you trying to do to me?’ he says. ‘Going down to Winnie Dunne and having a go at me, like you did.’

  ‘What I am saying to Winnie is none of your affair.’

  ‘Is it none of my affair when the topic is myself? And you are making me out to be a blackguard?’

  ‘A blackguard?’

  ‘Don’t play the innocent old woman,’ he says. ‘Look it, here, Annie, I’ll, what-cha-ma-call-it, enlighten you. Just so you will know and not be thinking you can do and say what you like around Kelsha and Feddin. In respect of myself. If you go about saying more, Annie, I’ll come up here in the dark of the night,‘ and now he is very quiet, very quiet, ’and I’ll do something to you—I’ll hurt you, Annie, make no mistake.‘

  I am looking at him. Yes, a low person. Strength in his body from decades of labour. A dangerous, low aspect to him. There is a crouch in his shoulders I have noted before. He is clenching and unclenching his fingers like he wants to do this hurting to me now, without further warning. Should I say anything now? I am sorely afraid of him. His force and strength washes against me. He stands on the fork of his legs, pulsing, trying to convince me. He is convincing me.

  ‘Do you understand me, you old bitch?’

  ‘Do you think Sarah would let you talk to me in this way?’ I say, without considering the words.

  ‘How will she know how I talk to you? If you are saying anything to her, even a hint or whisper, I will twist your ugly old neck for you.’

  Well, he is trembling with rage, I can see that. The twilight deepens in the yard outside, lending a strange dying vision to this talk. Somehow I feel like all my life is dying in the yard outside, all that I am, can be. Something is failing in my blood, in my heart, a measure of hope and female strength that has been there unquestioned throughout everything. It isn’t just that I fear him, but that he feels able safely to offer me these speeches of hate and constriction. The word ‘old’ echoes and echoes among the four tottering walls of Billy’s last refuge.

  Then, oddly, something goes out of him.

  ‘That’s all I have to say to you,’ he says, with some exhaustion. Maybe he thought he could achieve more, heave all opposition to one side with a great effort, and now the effort has drained him. Men are all sudden spurts and dashes. They do not have the long continuance of strength that women have by way of recompense. His face is not evil but it is ugly in the new shadows. And yet I know he is not an entirely ugly man. He is not stunted like so many of the men about, nor does he have that big red face that is so prevalent. He has been narrowed, even like myself, by the empty hand of possibility hereabouts. Maybe the size, the emptiness of his ambitions exhausts him. Rattling in his hollow head. Now the blood pumps back into my legs.

  ‘It’s over my dead body you’ll have anything to do with Sarah,’ I say.

  ‘Would you shut up about that? What are you talking about? I have said nothing to Sarah. I have said nothing to anyone. I am only going about my business in the countryside, I am only assisting and helping her, and you too I might add. Have you forgotten the ferocity of that animal there in the corner, and how I ripped the skin from my face leaping through a hedge of brambles for you?’

  ‘My brother-in-law Matthew will be down shortly and he’ll settle your hash for you, mark my words.’

  ‘Matt? Matt hates you with wholehearted hatred.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Matthew? Maud’s man? Are you crazy, woman? He is my friend. Of all you mad Dunnes and Cullens, he is my friend.’

  ‘He is neither Dunne nor Cullen, and I tell you, if he thought you were about some unusual mischief here, he’d see to you, yes, he would.’

  Now he is laughing, actually laughing.

  ‘Are you a stupid woman, on top of everything else? With your nasty old tongue and that pitiful’—he forbears to say hump, but I know he wants to—’pitiful long face of yours, Jesus Christ, years and years people have been putting up with you - do you think Winnie likes you, Annie Dunne? She does not.‘

  ‘But and she does.’ But I wish I could be silent. Silence might stop him in his litany of truths.

  ‘No, no. She thinks you are a rude piece of baggage, she told me so, just this morning, even as she was dressing me down, and threatening me with apocalypse if I ...’

  ‘If you what?’

  ‘There’s no one here in Kelsha likes you, no one. Why, Annie, Annie, do you think Sarah Cullen likes you?’

  It is now very dark in the byre. Billy the pony is very quiet, he may be falling asleep on his legs, as is his wont. My soul is weary. I must be almost invisible. I hope I am. There are tears now, my own private tears that no one must see. When I was a little girl and my mother was dead, and my father, with all the responsibility of B Division and three little girls to raise, would in an extremity of rage shout at me, I would hold good for the onslaught, but when he was gone, when he had stamped away in his police-issue boots, I would go into whatever cubby-hole I could find, and weep my private tears there. I am praying now for the new dark of the night to hide me, cloak me, preserve me. Maybe my father thought me hard and careless, I do not know. He never saw me cry. I owed my mother that, I owed him that.

  ‘Hah?’ he says. ‘Hah?’ He is like a hammerer of nails. ‘Don’t get in my way, Annie,’ he says. ‘I will skin you, I will take out your guts, I will take something you love and destroy it, that I will.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘How does anyone mean anything with you? You look down your ugly nose at me, but what are you? Little people that were once big people are all the more little now for that. And, if it was your father was the big noise, wasn’t he a big, traitorous arse-licker to a foreign king? And what are you like here, only a serving woman? No, no—you do not even get a wage from Sarah. You are a slave, a slave to work.’

  I have nothing now, only the hurried beating of my heart, I can feel it.

  ‘And it isn’t just that exactly, it is that no one in the world likes you. I never heard anyone say they did. You have nothing to recommend you. You go about here like you were something big, something grand.’ He is laughing again, real laughter. ‘And we’re all thinking, that you’re only a great gallumping pain in the backside, a stupid, bitter-tongued, wrong-headed, foul old woman!’

  The little boy likes me, the little boy likes me. But it would be crazy to say that.

  ‘You see, you see?’ he says. ‘You’ve to put all this in your pipe and smoke it. Because you are bringing trouble on my head. And I will not have it. I will not have an unloved, hunchbacked, mouldy old hag causing me grief! I tell you, I tell you!’

  And in the smoke of his fury he is gone, gone away out, and I am standing there, his words that have leapt from the cauldron of his head now boiling in my own head, boiling, boiling.

  It is difficult, difficult, it
is difficult to stop my bones from breaking in their slings of muscles, to stop my head bursting. How dark and dirty the byre is. I think of the cleanliness of my father’s world, polish and starch, everything in order, including hopes and dreams, including words themselves.

  It comes upon me like a tidal wave that I am a woman entirely alone, as if all these years in the aftermath of my father’s life I have lived as if he too were living, somewhere, solidly, eternally.

  All sorts of horrors strike me. In the moment of his death he was certainly alone, without even the attendance of those creatures that in their time ran the county home. Maud was so alarmed by his madness, in that to her it seemed a messenger of her own distress, that she would not accept the news that he was dead, and to Dolly it was only a piece of sad and distant news, where she nested safely in Ohio. And something gripped me too, some dread, some shame, some terrible stupidity, and I responded to the letter of the county home only weeks after, by which time they had buried him on the parish somewhere in Baltinglass, it being the very height of summer, and they were used, they said, to their inmates being, well, they said, left to fend for themselves.

  And yet I had fended for him, going down Sunday after Sunday, though slowly gaps opened in those Sundays, of weeks, then months. He caused in me a terror too great to withstand, the long, wide body seeming to shrink down into that pale, old man with his broken thoughts and disturbing speeches. He could not remember my name half the time, but called me Dolly, and used to try and grip me in his weakened arms.

  He died alone, and was buried as if in secret, like a hanged man, like one of those criminals he had dealt with in his forty years as a policeman.

  And to this day I do not know where he is buried, my own father, because by the time I asked, their book was found not to record it, and the rough man who had attended him was gone, emigrated to Canada—so they said. So he lies now displaced and unknown in Baltinglass, in some weedy corner of some graveyard, without headstone or marker, an important man with responsibility for hundreds of souls reduced at last to less than a shadow, melting away for ever beneath the poor, municipal earth.

  Because I did not bury him, somehow he did not die for me. He became again in my mind that healthy giant of my girlhood. I must have known well that he was dead, but my old brain, my dreams, my inmost thoughts, decided otherwise. And I have gone about for—it must be over twenty years - as if I still had his protection and the light, as one might say, of his position and his style.

  But the words of Billy Kerr have knocked that weak notion clear away. Now I know I am alone.

  It is like an emergency, like news of war, except the news comes from within the lost landscape of my own thoughts. And the war is somewhere there, across hill and down dale.

  It is the next day and we are baking. I allow the little boy and girl to put the flour on the wooden table so we can bang and fold the dough there, and plump it into loaves. They delight in this, and return the delight into ourselves. Sarah carries a piece of the fire on the shovel out into the yard, where we have set up the pot oven for the loaves. Six we will make for the week, six loaves to measure the hours. It is as if all is right with the world.

  The little boy is fascinated by the flour, the dryness of it, the cloudiness when he bangs his palms together.

  ‘You’re getting that all over,’ I say.

  He beats his hands down onto his legs and is astonished to see two hand prints there. He loads up his palms again and kind of leaps at me with a whoop, and slaps his hands onto my upper legs. It is reasonably painful, but he only wants to see the prints again on my blue and white apron. He turns then to Sarah.

  ‘No, no, no,’ she says, just settling the shovel again in its niche. ‘Keep back with those paws!’

  ‘Oh, Sarah,’ he says. ‘You must not escape.’

  And he runs for her, and she skithers around the other side of the table with a mad screech.

  The little girl cries out, ‘Don’t hurt her, don’t you hurt that old lady!’

  ‘Old lady, is it?’ said Sarah. ‘But I still have the gallop in me. He can’t catch me.’

  Round and round the table they go, the little boy eagerly holding out his hands, the flour flying softly from them. Against Sarah’s prophecy, he does begin to catch up with her, and when soon she begins to run out of steam, he lands his right hand on her bottom with a smack. Sarah thankfully is laughing, the little girl is laughing, and now Sarah tries to stare back at her bottom to view the hand print, which further encourages the hysteria of the children. Then suddenly I feel myself being tickled on my sides, with the firm fingers of a grown-up, and I wheel about, and there is Matt, just in the door with his easel slung over his shoulder, laughing now loudly too. But I must admit the shock of this quite takes the laughter out of me. It is one thing to have him creep in unknown, another thing to see him at all after all our misadventures, and thoroughly another thing again to have him put his hands on me like that. I am put to silence and don’t know what to say. The children alter their attentions in an instant, and fly to him.

  ‘Papa, Papa, Papa!’ cries the boy. He is altogether smitten, altogether made nearly daft with happiness to see his grandfather—who in his own fashion he calls Papa not Grandpapa.

  Of course, he is a great favourite with the children. That is the way of things. Nevertheless I notice there is a part of me that is vexed by this vision of joy.

  The little boy fires himself into Matt, and Matt laughs gratefully and holds the child to him, stroking the back of his head. Then he gleefully kisses the little girl, who is infinitely more quiet than her brother, but just as infinitely pleased.

  ‘Giants,’ he says. ‘Giants.’

  But he has the doing of these children every Sunday of the week, or used to before their father decided to make a go of it in London. Now here he is, gathering the nectar again. I am vexed, and I am sure he sees that I am.

  How often in the past he saw it, in all the thousand rows we had, about the bringing up of his sons, about what to do with Maud and her moods, and about his hero De Valera, a strange hero indeed for a Corkman, who might have had the good grace at least to follow Michael Collins, but that was Matt all over. At least when Collins was killed, even a person like me could feel that sorrow, violent and devious though he was. Now De Valera was king of us all, and my heavens it seemed to be Matt’s duty in the world not to let me forget it. But he had married the chief superintendent’s daughter, head of the old Dublin Metropolitan Police, under the old dispensation, so whatever he said to me it was eternally true that his sons were the grandsons of that man, and carried him within themselves. This I never let him forget. All this flashes in my head in the seconds it takes for the tickles, the children, the greetings.

  Now he dispenses the boiled sweets, drawing the two brown paper bags with gestures of glory from the pockets of his worn tweed jacket, with their characteristic leather patches on the elbows. And I am viewing his old shoes, leather again, beautifully kept, thick with polish, snug in a set of overshoes. And the canvas gaiters, and the trim crease in his thick trousers, and the thickly starched shirt, and the perfect knot of the tie, and the sculpted perfection of the trilby hat. It is all miraculous in a man, and I know no man like him. His hair, which is still thick and ruddy, is combed back in a kind of ploughland, with slightly sticky-looking ridges, and he is as shaved as a newly killed pig. What the men about Wicklow with their easy ways make of him I do not know, except Billy Kerr accounts him a friend, and I have seen him talking easily to people along the green road, especially to the wives, and he has never passed a woman of whatever degree without raising the same hat, although I notice on this occasion he has had no chance at all to doff it to us, if he was intending to doff it. to us. And country wives, astonished by his manners, and by the apparent simplicity of the man, because he is no toff, but the son of a poor lithographer in Cork City, who when he died some years back bequeathed his son a pair of working boots that he had under the bed, ‘hardly use
d’ as he said to Matt. And Matt carried this trophy home, and put them by the fire in his studio, but never has worn them to my knowledge, but I did sometimes see him gazing at them, between strokes of the brush on whatever picture he was working at.

  The children take the sweets like dogs to the edge of the group, and start to examine and eat them.

  ‘There will be mighty long eating in them,’ says Sarah.

  ‘How are you, Sarah?’ says Matt, now free to take off his hat.

  ‘Oh,’ says Sarah, and moves her head to indicate she’s well enough.

  ‘And Annie, how is Annie?’ he says, turning to me.

  ‘Annie is all right,’ I say.

  ‘How is the new missus?’ says Sarah brightly. ‘And when, when will we see her?’

  ‘She is down with friends at the Strawberry Beds, at the minute,’ he says, pronouncing ‘minute’ in his strange Cork way, minyoot.

  ‘Friends from her days at Guinness’s?’ I ask blithely. Let no trace of bitterness intrude, at any rate.

  ‘No, Annie. Her nephew lives by the Strawberry Beds. In fact, he is the curate to the parish priest in that part of the world. He is a very admirable young man. Fluent in the Irish.’

  ‘Isn’t that great?’ says Sarah, a stranger herself to that language, unless Kelsha itself can be termed Irish, which I must suppose it is. Certainly the good nuns of the Loreto College in North Great George’s Street didn’t trouble themselves much with that old language of gobdaws and cottagers. Sarah’s schooling as I remember, conducted in Kiltegan, was over by the age of twelve. But for Matt, who it seems fired a few shots in 1916 down in Cork City, and so must be termed a patriot, Irish is a holy thing, despite the fact that his half-brother was a chaplain in France in the Royal Irish Rifles during the Great War.

  ‘It is wonderful to think that those two children will have the Irish when they are grown,’ he says, accepting a cup and saucer from Sarah.

  ‘I don’t see how it will help them,’ I say. ‘What is wonderful about it? No one speaks it.’