The Islands Read online

  He tries to get me to come down. I think he’s more frightened now than interested in my underwear. From high up over the sea I lift my skirt and show him my knickers and then I stick my tongue out and laugh at him. It is Grace’s laugh, the way she can make me feel small. He runs away. I can see him tearing through the thistles and bracken.

  I’m excited. For a long time afterwards I tried to think why he wanted me to show and why he thought I would.

  We’re at Richard’s house at Tiraneering. Grace is reading, Em is sleeping in Jane’s arms, Richard is closing the big shutters with their brass latches. Tom is there but I do not see him in memory. It’s late and we have been playing cards. Who won? It was usually my father. But I cannot remember.

  Then we go upstairs, Tom, Grace, Em, Jane, Richard, and I, turning out the lights one by one so that by the time we reach the top of the stairs there is a huge fissure of darkness at our backs with Flanagan the cat emerging from it, his eyes of malachite green. He sleeps with Jane.

  These old houses, Richard used to say, they need an empire to keep them alive. Meaning the portraits of admirals and colonels who went out to defend England in the China Sea and Omdurman. This is Captain Richard Wood, he was with Nelson at the Nile, he was wounded in the leg by a fragment of iron from the explosion of L’Orient. I loved those stories. Between the colonels and admirals, the dead aunts mostly disapproving of what had befallen them—death and reduced circumstances, retirement, half pay, the Encumbered Estates Act.

  The stupidity of memorial.

  Tom standing on the top step with his hands resting on the balustrade, declaring his objections to all of that: We should have burned you out like foxes.

  Flanagan is cat-sniffing around his feet, his greeting ritual. Does that mean that Tom has just arrived? Where has he come from? How long have we been here?

  And Richard saying, Nobody burns foxes out, Tom.

  My father means the War of Independence, that all the landlords should have been driven away. He’s against land ownership, or at least ownership on the vast scale of the Tiraneering estate. Now they’re at it hammer and tongs: the landlord class, the gombeen class, parasites, reactionaries.

  Arguments terrify a child. I’ve no concept of what a friendly quarrel might lead to, how friends make fun of each other. To me it looks and sounds like Grace’s game. I have no skin. I’m always sensitive, in so many ways, whereas Grace has a professional hauteur that protects her from the vagaries of love.

  Later I can’t sleep. I think about fire. I look at the windows to see how they can be opened. I wonder would I die if I jumped out onto the stone yard below. There’s moonlight, that night or another night, and I see an owl ghosting towards the fields. He seems inflated, enormous. I don’t know what he is—I think he might be a soul taking leave of us.

  That night or another night there are words about Jane. I don’t know what is said—they’re always talking riddles. It is Em who wakes us. She says she heard a ghost. She lies in Grace’s bed with her eyes wide open, her thumb in her mouth. It’s possible only she knew how things would turn out: children and dogs, they say, have that instinct. We listen but hear nothing. Then it comes again, a faint, animal wailing. Then there are doors. First we are happy that the sound is human, then we realize that the silence means we are alone. We close the shutters but it does no good. We hear Flanagan mewling at the door and let him in. We are all terrified but Grace is the worst. Poor Grace. Why is it that without seeing we all know the sequence? They argued, Mother cried, she walked out. It is a dark, cold night. There is no moon and the stars are like broken glass.

  We go over the sequence, folding our stories into each other: Grace says there was the wailing and then loud talk and then shouting, I remember the kitchen door banging closed, then there was silence, we are all agreed on that, we all remember the silence. Grace says she heard Jane’s voice in the yard so we all go to the window and open the shutters again to look down. We are in time to see Tom and Richard carrying flashlights, going their separate ways, Richard through the gate, Tom by the side of the old stable. They are calling and calling; for a time we can see their lights.

  Grace says that if they want to find her they have to leave us alone. If we want our mother back we must wait in the haunted room. Em begins to cry. Mammy is gone, she keeps saying, mammy is gone. Grace holds her in her arms. She’ll come back, Em, she says.

  Old houses, big houses, make noise, they talk at night in their own fabric language. A million beetles eat. Mice live in the attics and behind the wainscot. Rafters and runners and boards shift in their beds of stone. Lath and plaster wear each other away. Water courses in copper and lead. Every time the house settles itself we hear a pistol shot, a groan. We hear ghosts in the other rooms. Conversations. Noises on the landing.

  We fall asleep together—children need sleep more than love and Flanagan is our comforter—Em between Grace and me, none of us knowing what we fear, but fearing that when we wake up everything will have fallen apart, everything will be different. At such times a continuation of even the unhappiest life is preferable to the unknown. We dream, of course, whatever those dreams were, certainly uneasy versions of ourselves. At some point Flanagan gives up and moves out. None of us are awake to hear them bring her back but in the morning she’s there to wake us. It’s no comfort. She’s pale and her eyes are red. For all we know she might be a changeling, a fairy woman. For all we know our mother might have gone into the bog and this is her ghost.

  Our island home. What is the house like?

  Go through the front door and you’re immediately in the kitchen. Flanagan checks your shoes for hostile tomcat smells; he knows there is no other cat on the island. He knows me. You may pass, Jeannie, his insouciance says, you’re nothing new. This is the biggest room, with the chimney breast at one end and the stairs to “the loft” at the other. Before we came someone put a black Stanley no. 8 range in the chimney and when it is hot it heats the entire house. Tom told me that when they bought the house there were mice nesting in the open oven. They scampered out when Jane opened the door. She just laughed.

  The timbers that hold up the floor above us are solid oak, they look like ship’s timbers, and the floorboards above are oak planks too. There is a long tradition of harvesting shipwrecks along this coast. In Living an Island, Loving the World Tom told about seafaring families who buried timber or brass or furniture or brandy and the complicated folk laws that governed found things. It was his most popular book.

  Up the narrow stairs, Flanagan at our heels, and there are two bedrooms, each with a “light,” a window set into the roof that mainly looked upwards at the sky. Their room has an iron-framed double bed that they kept because Jane said it would be bad luck to throw out. It’s heavy cast iron with brass knobs and where it stands there are four hollows in the oak. Flanagan sleeps in the bed, and on bad nights he sleeps underneath among the shoes and cardboard boxes of winter clothes.

  Our room has three iron-framed beds, hospital issue, which they picked up when a local hospital was downgraded to an old folks’ home. Although the windows are set into the slope of the roof, still by standing close to them I can see down to the shore and across the sound at the sandbar where oystercatchers and turnstones, curlews and sandpipers live their intertidal days. Wading birds feature strongly around us. Their cries are our nightsongs. Em imitates them. She can do a curlew perfectly. She could call them here from the half-tide flats but what would we do with them?

  To furnish the house Jane and Tom and Richard scour the auction rooms. The Irish are throwing out their old mahogany to buy expensive stuff veneered with Formica and there’s a ready supply of what people eventually begin to talk of as “antiques.” To Tom and Jane they’re just the cheapest, strongest, most functional things they can get. One day they buy a deal table for the price of a shirt (Tom’s words) and beech chairs, a pine dresser, an oak log box, and a coal scuttle with a cracked tin lining. Another evening they come home in an overladen s
almon yawl and disembark with a mahogany armchair, a rosewood lady chair, and a beveled mirror in an art deco frame. In a priest’s house, being sold as part of the reforms of the Second Vatican Council, they find a brass-bound barometer and a perfect mahogany sideboard to be shipped out to us in a trawler a week later so that its legs smell of sour fish for weeks. We’re picking up the pope’s castoffs, Tom says.

  They speak of it as furniture but later I recognize it as a political position: they’re rejecting capitalism, or at least Jane is, the conventions of rising consumerism, the faith in the new, in favor of the products of unalienated labor. Others might have fetishized the old, the antique. Not Tom and Jane.

  It’s more of an anachronism now than it was then. In those days there were people like that.

  Even as a child I’m fascinated by Richard’s body. All the things he did were perfectly elaborated, every action was exact and sufficient. Even the process of swallowing something—a piece of fruit, a sip of whiskey—is beautifully faithful to itself. I long to be as self-contained in everything, to be Miss Jean Wood and not Jeannie Newman, child of the Big House, and not a ragamuffin on an island. When I see him naked for the first time—at seven or eight—I experience none of the shock that children are supposed to feel. Instead I see his leanness, his hair, his sex, his long fingers and loose limbs for what they are, in their proportions, expressions of his personality, the physical poetry of his mind. He’s swimming with Jane in the moonlight on a completely calm sea. They’re making no sound. It’s such a night that even if there were ripples I would hear them. It is, I think, the beach near Tiraneering because there are pebbles underfoot. I don’t see them go into the water but I see their heads, the slow gleam of their path, the occasional white arm in the air. When they come back I see he is a god; in the pale moonlight he might be stone. That he should quarrel with Tom over everything was perfectly reasonable then. When they come out, it’s Jane who wraps him in a towel. She folds her arms around him as if she were sheltering him. She whispers into his ear. Everyone knows that something whispered directly into your ear is more exciting, more devastating. It is absorbed like oxygen across the blood-brain barrier. There’s no defense.

  Her hair is long and it hangs wet down her back to her shoulder blades. They turn and I know that they will discover me if I stay where I am. But if I stay I will see more. I can hear Grace’s voice in my head. What will they do next? What happens now? Stay and learn the secret and be caught. I run home. By the time they get back I’m in bed practicing the lies I will tell if they notice anything. But they think I’m asleep. Jeannie sleeps like the dead, Jane used to say.

  I may be mistaken—it’s too late now to know whether the two incidents were really one, the night swim and the first seeing of his body, and I’ve never dared to ask him. They both belong to the primordial mass of childhood. They are available to me only in this singular form, like erratics carried by glacial time and deposited on this highland. But their meaning for me is crystal clear, reason enough to remember them out of all the blizzard of experience. They mean fear and lust.

  Fear and lust.

  So I suppose Richard was my first love. His image set in me, stony and recalcitrant as the perfect man, the perfect lover. Some girls fall in love over and over again with variations on their father. Grace would make much of that, it’s the psychologist’s perfect love affair. But I skipped whatever necessary anguish was required and fell in love with my father’s best friend. A misdirected oedipal urge? A transfer of affection from the taboo subject? I find psychology tiresome, a kind of literary criticism of dreams and chance utterances masquerading as science. The chemical formula for calcium carbonate is CaCO3. Show me a single observation in psychology that’s as clear as that. There are none. Science has thousands.

  Here is something that I remember in exact detail: it’s the morning after the night swim—or possibly a different morning. I go into Richard’s room and slip into his bed and put my arms around him. I can hear Jane downstairs putting crockery on the table for breakfast. He’s asleep on his side. He loosens a little under my grasp. He rolls back into me. The moment of surrender. I’d seen Jane wrapped into Tom like this, Tom opening to her. I’d seen her wheedling him on the strand, tickling his nose with a sea pink, curled into his back with one hand plucking at the hairs of his chest.

  I know exactly what I’m doing.

  His body warm and musty and full of nightsmells.

  Then he senses my smallness and wakes up. How, in his sleep, did an impression of my body form? Did he dream of a child? He wakes and is cross. What are you doing, get out, out of here, go on, what are you doing . . .

  I was too young to be able to read the look on his face. Now I wonder what it was. Was he shocked? Frightened? Ashamed? Angry? Hurt? Excited?

  He may have thought it was some childish and inappropriate game.

  I go back to my own bed.

  As I lie shivering in the morning sheets I feel nothing but triumph. I’ve done something. Something has happened. Children rarely have the feeling that they can cause things. They experience the world as happening to them. I feel as though I’ve appropriated something of Jane’s power. Now I’m a witch too.

  He never told anyone.

  But later that day—I’m certain of this—he asks me to walk with him. He is going out to meet the farm manager and to see about cattle. It’s a September day of showers and sun and we climb gates and cross fields as happy as birds. I remember that I talked a lot. We meet the farm manager and while they walk among the cattle I pick mushrooms. Richard lends me his cap to bring them home. On the way back we disturb a cock pheasant. He rises out of a lane with a clattering like some wild machinery. He flies over our heads, that strange, impossibly heavy and ungainly flight of the pheasant and his amazing barred gold and russet plumage, and disappears into the woods. Richard tells me that the place is called Derrybeg and that in Irish it means “the small wood.” He says there is a little sheltered beach nearby called Derrynatra, which means “the wood of the beach,” and that the sound between the islands that we can see from where we stand is called Derrynatra Sound. Even then I saw the system of it, and that in one language the place made complete sense and in another it was just noise. I never forgot the relationship between language and landscape. Years later I remember being asked by a colleague how to find a particular geological feature in a place called Mullock. Look for a hill, I said. Mullach means a hill.

  Richard and I hold hands walking home in the evening sun and I have never been happier before or since. We talk about what we see. It’s Eden and there will never be a fall from grace. The world will always be warm in autumn and I will always be a child and he will be kind. That was how I felt that evening. It was Keats’s ode—but the Grecian Urn—Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu.

  But also it’s the knowledge that going into his bed has provoked this excess of kindness.

  The storm comes with heavy rain. None of us goes outdoors all day. Usually when that happened there were games but Jane and Tom aren’t speaking. Jane is reading in bed. Tom sits at the table under the window, alternately writing and staring at the rain. Em plays with her toys in her concentrated way.

  At some point in the morning Jane comes downstairs. She sits beside Em and puts her arm around her.

  Did you get your breakfast, Em?

  No.

  Did you get your breakfast, Grace?

  No, Mam, not yet.

  She rounds on Tom. His back is to her. She stands looking at him for a while. The gloomy, shabby room full of secondhand things—the clock, the crooked table, the worn shawl that covered the obscene stuffing of the lady chair, the uneven earthen floor, the leaking stove. I realize I’m ashamed of the way we live.

  Tom doesn’t turn.

  You’re useless, she says. This is my island, my house. For you it’s only an experiment.

  Grace looks at me. What does she know? Being a child m
eans never knowing what other people know. I notice that Tom keeps his head down. An ocean is raining down outside, an inversion of the natural order. I would not be surprised to see fish nosing at the glass, or a seal curious about what happens in houses.

  Are you going to grace me with a reply, she says. She waits a while.

  That’s your answer, then?

  Tom is silent. What question is it an answer to? What did they say to each other last night after we fell asleep? In the world of adults everything is bigger. There are things that can never be said although children say them all the time: I hate you; I’m going to kill you; I’m going to spit on you.

  Fine, she says, I know where I stand.

  She walks out into the rain. She doesn’t close the door. She never did when she walked out. I see that she’s wearing a shirt and a short pants. I call out to her, Mam, your coat! But she doesn’t respond. She doesn’t care. It’s her island, her home. She’ll walk where she likes. For the first time I understand that she doesn’t need Tom. The wind drives the rain across the floor. The earth will be mud but the house will still stand, the island holding it together. Grace closes it out.

  I saw Jane kill a hen by wringing its neck.

  There is a terrible moment of stillness when she pins the bird’s wings. I see that the bird is paralyzed by fear, unable to comprehend this new turn of the world. The eyes brown and black, black at the center. I’m frightened to be so close. This frantic mechanism, this heart and talon and feather construction. It smells musty and domestic. She clasps the bird to her breast and with her right hand she finds the neck and, holding the skull in the cup of her palm, twisting her hand in advance so that the movement would be completely natural, she stretches it out and she kills it. There is some fluttering afterwards but nothing much else. The ghost of life remains but the thing is gone. My mother did that without a thought.