“It’s a fine garden,” I said. She’d already begun to weed.
“I do a bit every day. That way it never gets out of hand. There’s no rush and push. And you can watch it for the bugs. Some of them would sweep you out of it in a day.”
I weeded with her, hating the dry clay on fingers. The garden held no interest for me. I’d never watch it grow.
“That’s all I ask,” she drew up her back, and as I watched her I knew she’d be back in hospital before the fruits were gathered, and that it’d be the last garden she’d watch grow. “You think it’d not be much to ask. Just to get a bit better. Not to have to leave the garden—I hate to think of it running wild again—though Cyril complains it’s nothing but trouble. To just go on. It doesn’t seem much to ask. To let things stay as they are. To go on.”
“But you will.”
“Sometimes I don’t know.”
When I felt sure she wouldn’t notice emotion in my voice I said, “There are some fine trees in the hedge.”
“Yes,” she said with spirit. “Your uncle made one great offer of help when I started the garden. He offered to cut down the trees.”
“He would.”
“I told him he’d be run if I caught him near them. But they must house a million midges. Some evenings they’d ate you alive.”
She was tough. There was nothing but to salute that proud hardness with a perfect silence. She stood at the foot of the garden, under a far outriding branch of the oak, her ravished face and few wisps of hair turned away from the searching light, and she said in a voice matter-of-fact enough to be running through a tenant’s contract, “I don’t know. It’s only after years that you get some shape on things, and then after all that you have to leave. It’s comical. You want to go on and you can’t.”
“I think you’ll be all right, that you’ll get better, but there does come a time—for everybody, for us all,” my own voice sounded so awkward and solemn that I felt bells should mock the still air.
“I know that,” she said and we started to move slowly towards the gate. “But somehow deep down you can never feel it’s going to happen to yourself. In your case somehow you feel the great exception will be made.”
“If you can say that, there can’t be too much wrong with you,” I said.
When we went back to the house we finished the bottle of brandy. Then she said she was going to bed, before anybody could come back. She washed the glasses and put away the empty bottle before she climbed the stairs. And I drove out to the saw mill.
Neither Jim nor my uncle noticed me get out of the car and walk up to the mill. They were in the middle of a quarrel. I had watched these quarrels so often that it was like standing in front of a TV shop window and watching an old familiar movie. They stood with their backs to one another, beside two saws, both idling over; and each vigorous insult was addressed to a point high in the roof of the shed, the very farthest point from the person the insult was intended for. The intervals between the insults were lengthy. Each word seemed taken up, weighed and tested, and then the contemptuous answer would be fired furiously towards the farthest rafters. Their expressions did not change when they noticed my presence on the mound of sawdust. They dropped the quarrel with as much emotion as they might show when putting down a heavy, cumbersome tool they had grown tired using, and came towards me with outstretched hands, both smiling.
We three stood there, not talking, occasional words let drop into the silence like pebbles into still water, allowed to sink and bubble with neither more nor less attention than that given to the preceding and following silence; and when it seemed that an appropriate amount of such silence had been observed Jim walked away towards the big saw without a word.
“You seem to be using a fairly strong aftershave?” my uncle asked, having caught the smell of the brandy.
“It’s brandy. I had a glass in the house with her. I don’t like it very much this time of day.”
“I know that,” he said with an understanding patronage that irritated me. “But what’ll happen to her, at the rate she’s going? What’ll be the end of it?”
“What’ll be the end of any of us?” I was ashamed of my own sharpness when I saw him wince. Then he coughed, a cautious clearing cough, like sending exploratory noises out into the field before risking any compromising words. “You didn’t run into Cyril at all?”
“No. How is he?”
“Worse. He’s a pure dose. I’d move out long ago but it’d not be right with the way she is now.”
Jim had started sawing. In the safety of the piercing scream, the sweet sudden scent of fresh resin, I asked, “What was yourself and Jim arguing about?”
“O that,” he shook with laughter. “He took in some contract timber.”
“What’s that?”
“We don’t do it any more except we know the people. A fella might have a few good trees he’d want sawed, to save him buying timber, and we used to give him a price. A lot of that stuff came from trees they used to plant round houses, beech mostly, and you’d never know what you’d run into, nails by the no time, handles of buckets, links of chains.”
“They could be dangerous,” I said.
“They’d go through you like fucking bullets except they’re mostly rotten. They’ve been hammered in years ago and the wood has grown over them. I saw them ruin more saws than you can name,” he was relaxed, holding forth.
“What’s this got to do with the argument between Jim and yourself?”
“He took in a few big oaks for this fella that he knows. And I was going to use the big saws.”
“Are the oaks all right?”
“Of course they are. But you have to make a stand sometime round here or you’d wind up taking orders. There’s no giving of orders as it is.”
“I can’t see you taking orders,” I said.
“You can never be too sure of that,” he shook with the laughter of pure pleasure as he wiped his eyes with the back of the enormous scarred hands. “To make sure of that, you have to keep sitting upon the other fella every chance you get.”
I hung about until they closed the mill, and after that it gradually grew plain that he was loathe to go into the house in case he’d meet Cyril or even possibly my aunt.
“What’ll she say if we don’t go in?” I asked.
“We’ll ring her. We’ll have our tea in the town. And we can ring her from there, from the restaurant. I’ll say we have to go out to your place.”
“You don’t need to change or anything?”
“Not at all. Nobody cares round here. I’ll just throw off these overalls.”
He rung her from the restaurant. “She gave out,” he reported afterwards. “But they’re both there. Leave them that way. That way they’re only an annoyance to themselves.”
We had the usual restaurant meal, lamb chops, liver, bacon, fried tomatoes, and an egg, with a big pot of tea and plenty of brown or white bread. Afterwards we drove out to my place.
In all sorts of circuitous ways he detailed the several advantages I’d get from leaving the city and starting up the farm. “After all, the city is more a young man’s place,” he must have repeated several times. That, and teasing out the evening until he was certain that my aunt and Cyril were in bed, took care of the whole charming and childish evening.
I was happy there for five such days, islanded and cut off from the brass letter-box. Three letters waiting on the half-circular glass table with a London postmark were the first things I saw on entering the hallway. My island holiday was over.
Jonathan had met her at the airport. They had taken a taxi to his Kensington house. The flat was a little beauty, two rooms, a kitchen, bathroom, with all mod cons, including an automatic washing machine and drier, which would come in so useful later on. They had drinks upstairs in the lovely long reception room she had known from before. The windows were open. It was much warmer in London than in Dublin. In another few weeks, Jonathan said, they’d be able to sit out and have drin
ks on the lawn.
Then they took a taxi to Jonathan’s favourite restaurant. The table was piled with flowers. And yet she felt depressed. She missed me dreadfully. Didn’t I know how greatly I was loved, though I seemed to do my very best to avoid seeing it? But she was grateful to Jonathan. She did not know that such a genuinely selfless and good person existed in the world. If only Jonathan was me, and I was Jonathan.… but she still believed that everything that happened was basically good, because both of us were good people. She still believed that, no matter how it seemed to other people.
She was already working on a magazine. The magazine’s office was close to Covent Garden. She took a bus into the Strand and walked from there. The people all helped her and were very nice, but it was child’s play compared to all the scrivening she’d done for practically nothing for poor Walter and Waterways, She ate such rich meals at the different restaurants with Jonathan in the evening that at lunch time she just walked around and had fruit she bought in Museum Street and a cup of coffee in a little Italian place next door to the fruit shop. The morning sickness had stopped but she was hungry all the time. I could guess what that meant. She was sure it was going to be a boy and exactly like me.
Next, she was cooking dinner for Jonathan and herself. That must remind me of something. They had avocado pear, sirloin, an endive salad, and a special dusty bottle of Burgundy Jonathan had brought up from the cellar for the occasion, several cheeses and an Armagnac to finish. Compared with what she’d been used to, her own basement kitchen was luxurious but Jonathan’s kitchen made her feel more like an airline pilot than a plain cook. There were so many knobs and panels! Jonathan said she was a fine cook and Jonathan’s wife had a fantastic library of cook books. Now she cooked for Jonathan and herself every evening he hadn’t a meeting and they’d only go out to restaurants weekends. Jonathan had also got fantastic reports about her as a writer. Everybody on the magazine was pleased with her. Disaster was turning into a dream.
They were wise, the people on the magazine, I thought; she might become the owner’s wife. There must be many who have cursed themselves for not seeing that some young secretary would one day be the wife. Ο most common apotheosis, the sexual: and the most common ruin: poison of the sweet mouth.
I replied gravely to these letters. There was an early heat wave in Dublin, a stream of people passed out towards the sea in the evenings, many of them on old bicycles. My life was boring. I wasn’t writing but soon I’d have to earn money. I’d been down the country. My aunt was growing worse, but fighting hard to live. If pure desire could make a person live, she would live, I wrote.
It was hot in London too, the place beginning to crowd with tourists. Jonathan hated the tourists. Even a simple stroll in Kensington Gardens on a Sunday morning turned into a tirade against the tourists. Jonathan was so funny when he got angry, with his shiny head and handlebar moustaches, so small when he shook. At times she couldn’t resist pulling the moustaches. That morning they had a lovely quiet drink in a local but she didn’t have alcohol any more. It didn’t agree with her and anyhow it was bad for the baby. They didn’t want to have a fully fledged one-week-old alcoholic on their hands.
What she couldn’t get over was the number of men who’d asked her out, and one or two had even made passes. It was so sad. She wondered what they’d feel if they knew the truth. Jonathan said she looked amazing, and she did feel good, but in Dublin that sort of attention hadn’t been paid to her for years. Was I not jealous at all?
She couldn’t describe how grateful she was to Jonathan. She wouldn’t have believed before this all happened that such a purely good person existed in the world. He’d suffered for years with his crazy wife and he’d never had what’s called a normal happy life. The only snake in their Eden now was that Jonathan’s wife might discharge herself from the institution and find her in the house. Since she’d come to the house she’d started to read the wife’s leters. He’d asked her to. One of the forms the madness took was crazy, irrational jealousy. They could only hope and pray she’d not discharge herself.
My aunt was taken back to the hospital, this time by ambulance.
“Bad luck to it,” she said when I went in to see her. “I’m here to cause you trouble once again. They talked me into giving this X-ray treatment a last try. Somehow I feel I’d be as well off in Lourdes.”
“You can’t talk that way. What’ll happen to the garden?”
“Cyril said he’d look after it and he meant it but I also know he’ll forget,” she laughed. “What I did was give Peter McCabe, a brother of poor Sticks’, some money. He’ll look after it on the quiet.”
“How is the saw mill?”
“Bad luck to the saw mill. You’d swear it was the centre of the universe. Nothing will happen to the same saw mill, and more’s the pity. He couldn’t even hide how pleased he was when he didn’t have to drive me up.”
“He’s all right. I’m fond of him.”
“Oh yes, he’ll never be stuck for someone to stand up for him, the big haveril, as long as he has you, and if you don’t watch out you’ll wind up just like him, a selfish old bachelor.”
I half expected her to go through motions of protest when I put down the bottle of brandy but instead she seized it like a lifeline, “God bless you. I knew you’d not forget it.”
In London, all prayers were being more than answered. More and more belief in heaven grew. Even though she’d been foolish and had been left vulnerable there was someone who was looking after them up there, for she was no longer alone. Just when they were afraid Jonathan’s wife would discharge herself, find her installed in the basement, and let all hell loose, what happened, but in a crazy fit, didn’t she jump from the hospital window and kill herself. After all these years Jonathan was now free.
Jonathan was now pressing his proposal of marriage more fiercely and wanted to adopt the child as his own so that she and the child would inherit all that he owned. For this he demanded, and rightly demanded, that I should give up all rights, which would make us more strangers than if we’d never met. If I changed my mind afterwards and attempted to approach either her or the child, I’d be arrested at once.
I could hardly believe my luck. Not only did my deep hope seem likely to be answered but to be given the force of the law to boot. At one stroke all the connection would be wiped out. It would be as if nothing had ever happened. We had held the body brute in our instinct, let the seed beat in the warm darkness, and were still free. I’d be glad to sign whatever was demanded. My own resolution stood and I felt that she’d be very foolish not to marry Jonathan. I was sorry for the poor part I had played in the sad business and wished her happiness.
I didn’t hear anything for days and began to write “The Colonel and Mavis Take a Trip on the Shannon”. I went in and out of the hospital with the bottle of brandy each evening like a man attending daily Mass. I started to see Maloney again.
“This woman, apparently, is to be married in London,” I told him.
“This isn’t right,” he said. “You shouldn’t get off like this. The averages should have come down instead of going up. And who is the ass who’s about to bear your burden into Jerusalem?”
“He’s the rich man I told you about who came from London to see her here. She’s been living in the basement of his house in Kensington. He also owns newspapers.”
“Nobody owns newspapers any more.”
“Well, he’s on boards, has shares. It may be magazines and newspapers. Already she has a job on a women’s paper off the Strand.”
“What’s his name?”
“Jonathan.”
“What’s his proper name?”
“I don’t know. That’s all I’ve ever known him as.”
“I could find out,” he threatened.
“Why?”
“That sort of person is always useful to know. There may be a take-over. We may need to expand. You should start to cultivate him, old man, now that, if I may be so crude, you have
a foot, a heartbeat, in the door.”
“I don’t know his name, you’ll have to take my word for it. She’s known him for years, probably through Amalgamated Waterways, but she’s never volunteered much about him to me other than that his name is Jonathan, and I’ve never wanted to know more.”
“Could it be Jonathan Martin?” he whistled. “He has a few small business things here. He looks like something between a walrus and a very small elephant but he certainly has the do-re-mi. If that’s who’s in question, she’s doing more than well for herself. But why this rush of marrying? Because she’s pregnant?”
“His wife has just jumped out of a window. That leaves him free after years.”
“So that’s it? I couldn’t imagine a guy with that much power being let run round for long. He’d attract loads of broads, all mad about his moral and spiritual welfare of course. Anything that’d help them into an ocelot coat and a Rolls Royce.”
“It’s all due to God. God arranged for the woman to jump out the window at the right moment,” I made the mistake of laughing.
“And God has arranged that you’re going to write ‘Mavis and the Colonel Take a Tip on the Shannon,” he glowered when I started to laugh. “I hate cheap laughs at the Divine.”
“I’ve started it. You’ll have it in a few days.”
“Good. Very good. All this, you realize, has far more interesting possibilities. But I’m a philosopher. I’m content with small morsels. A small morsel is my nugget of gold,” he bared his teeth at me.
When I had no word for a long time I began to think they might be married. The last I’d heard was that she’d gone with Jonathan to his wife’s cremation in Golders Green. She’d hated it, the dreadful music, the coffin moving on silent gliss till it disappeared behind the flap, a poor man behind the flap, directing the coffin to the ovens. There was a floral wreath in the figure of eight on top of the coffin and they’d to hold it so that the flap didn’t sweep it off.