Читать книгу House of Mourning and Other Stories - Desmond Hogan - Страница 8

A Marriage in the Country

She burned down half her house early that summer and killed her husband. He’d been caught upstairs. It was something she’d often threatened to do, burn the house down, and when she did it she did it quietly, in a moment of silent, reflective despair. She had not known he’d been upstairs. She’d put a broom in the stove and then tarred the walls with the fire. The flames had quickly explored the narrow stairway. A man, twenty years older than her, had been burned alive, caught when snoozing. Magella at his funeral seemed charred herself, her black hair, her pale, almost sucrose skin. She’d stooped, in numbed penitence. There was a nebulous, almost incandesced way her black curls took form from her forehead as there was about all the Scully girls. They made an odd band of women there, all the Scully girls, most of them respectably married. Magella was the one who’d married a dozy publican whose passion in life had been genealogy and whose ambition seemed incapacitated by this passion. She’d had a daughter by him. Gráinne. That girl was taken from her that summer and sent to relatives in Belfast. Magella was not interned in a mental hospital. The house was renovated. The pub reopened. People supposed that the shock of what she’d done had cured her and in a genuinely solicitous way they thought that working in the pub, chattering to the customers, would be better for her than an internment in a mental hospital. Anyway there was something very final about internment in a mental hospital at that time in Ireland. They gave her a reprieve. At the end of that summer Boris came to the village.

Stacks of hay were piled up in the fields near the newly opened garage outside the village which he came to manage, little juggling acts of hay in merrily rolling and intently bound fields. All was smallness and precision here. This was Laois. An Ascendancy demesne. The garage was on the top of a hill where the one, real, village street ended, and located at a point where the fields seemed about to deluge the road. The one loss of sobriety in the landscape and heaviness and a very minor one. Boris began his career as garage manager by, putting up flags outside the garage, and bunting, an American, an Italian, a French, a Spanish, a German and an Irish flag. He was half-Russian and he’d been raised in an orphanage in County Wexford in the south-eastern tip of Ireland.

Boris Cleary was thin, nervously thin, black-haired, a blackness smoothing the parts of his face which he’d shaved and the very first thing Magella noticed about him, on coming close, under the bunting, was that there was a smell from the back of his neck, as from wild flowers lost in the deep woods which lay in the immediate surroundings of the village. A rancid, asking smell. A smell which asked you to investigate its bearer. Magella, drawn by the rancid smell from the back of a nervous, thin neck, sought further details. She asked Boris about his Russianness which was already, after a few weeks, a rampant legend, over her counter. His father had been a Russian sailor, his mother a Wexford prostitute; he’d been dumped on the Sisters of Mercy. They had christened him and one particular nun had reared him, cackling all the time at this international irony, calling him ‘little Stalin.’ Boris had emerged, his being, his presence in the world, had emerged from an inchoate night on a ship in the port of Wexford Town.

How a September night, the last light like neon on the gold of the cornfields, led so rapidly to the woods partly surrounding the village they later lost track of; winter conversations in the pub, glasses of whiskey, eventually glasses of whiskey shared, both their mouths going to a glass, like a competition—a series of reciprocal challenges. Eventually, all the customers gone one night as they tended to be gone when Magella and Boris got involved in conversation, their lips met. An older woman, ascribed a demon by some, began having an affair with a young, slackly put-together man.

The woods in early summer were the culminative platform for their affair. These woods that were in fact a kind of garden for bygone estates. Always in the woods, oases, you’d find a garden house—a piece of concrete—a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Church of Ireland chapel. Much prayer had been done on these estates. Laois had particularly been a county in bondage. Now rhododendrons fulminated and frothed all over the place. And there were berries to admire, right from the beginning of the summer. They found a particular summer house where they made love on the cold, hard, almost penitential floor and soon this was the only place where they made love, their refuge.

In September, just over a year after Boris had come to the village, they got a taxi and visited Magella’s daughter in Belfast. She lived off the Falls Road, in a house beside a huge advertisement on a railway bridge for the Irish Independent. Gráinne dressed in an odious brown convent uniform. She had long black hair. She looked at Boris. From the look in her eyes Magella afterwards realized she’d fallen in love with Boris at that meeting.

What were they flaunting an affair for? At first they were flaunting it so openly no one believed it was happening. Such things didn’t happen in Laois in the 1950s. People presumed that the young Russian had taken a priestly interest in the older possessed woman. And when they brought their affair to Belfast, Boris in a very natty dark suit and in a tie of shining dark blue, a gaggle of relatives thought that there was something comic going on, that Magella had got a clown to chaperone her and prevent her from acts of murderous madness. They brought glasses of orange onto the street for the pair—it was a very sunny day—and oddly enough there was a spark of bunting on the street, the ordination of a local priest recently celebrated. A bulbous-cheeked, Amazon-breasted woman spluttered out a comment: ‘Sure he reminds me of the King of England.’ She was referring to the King who’d resigned, the only member of royalty respected in nationalist Belfast.

But behind the screen of all the presumptions—and it was a kind of smokescreen—something very intense, very carnal, very complex was going on. Magella was discovering her flesh for the first time and Boris was in a way discovering a mother. She’d always been the licentious one in her family but flailing her flesh around cornfields at night when she’d been young brought her no real pleasure. In the carnality, in love-making now, she’d found lost worlds of youth and lost—yes, inchoate—worlds of Russia. She was able to travel to Boris’s origins and locate a very particular house. It was a house in a wood away from the dangers of the time. In this house she put Boris’s forebears. In this house, in her sexual fantasies, she made love to Boris, his forebears gone and only they, random lovers, left in it, away from the dangers and the onslaught of the time. There was a tumultuous excitement about being lovers in a house in a wood with many dangers outside the borders of that wood. There was a titillation, a daring, and even a brusqueness about it. But those dangers eventually slipped their moorings in the world outside the wood.

Early in the second summer of their affair someone saw them making love in the summer house. A little boy. Tremulous though he later was about the event he was matter of fact enough to wait for a good view of Magella’s heavy white thighs. He was the butcher’s son. A picture was soon contrived all over the village, Magella and Boris in an act of love that had a Bolshevik ferocity. Killing your husband was one thing but making love to a young Russian was another. Within the month Magella was in a mental hospital.

The funny thing was that she’d had a premonition that all this was going to happen some weeks before the little boy saw them. Fondling some budding elderberries in the woods she remarked to Boris, looking back at the visible passage they’d made through the woods, that they, she and he, reminded her of the legendary Irish lovers, Diarmaid and Gráinne, who’d fled a king into the woods, feeding on berries. They’d invested Irish berries with a sense of doomed carnality, the berries which had sustained them, right down to the last morsels of late autumn. Here in these woods many of the berries had been sown as parts of gardens and it was difficult to distinguish the wild berries from the descendants of a Protestant bush—the loganberry, redcurrant, raspberry. These woods had been a testing ground for horticulture and parts of the woods had been cultivated at random, leaving a bed of mesmeric flowers, an apple tree among the wildness. Diarmaid and Gráinne would have had a ball here, Magella said. But for her and Boris the climate was already late autumn when the trees were withered of berries. Their days were up. She remembered the chill she’d felt at national school when the teacher had come to that part of the story of Diarmaid and Gráinne, reading it from a book which had an orange cover luminous as warm blood.

Boris tried to call on her in the mental hospital. He was wearing a suit. But there was a kind of consternation among nuns and nurses when they saw him—they weren’t sure what to do—he stood, shouldering criminality, for a few minutes in the waiting room and then he turned on his heels and left. But there was a despatch from his childhood here. A statue of a frigid white Virgin as there’d been in the lounge of the orphanage. Magella had entered the house, all grey and fragmented with statues of Mary like falling crusts of snowflakes, of his childhood.

The years went by and the garage prospered. Gráinne came down from Belfast, having graduated from the convent. Her keen eye on Boris at their first meeting in Belfast led now, after all these years, to a romance. There’d been an unmitigated passion in between. Gráinne started walking out the roads with Boris, her hair cut short and the dresses of a middle-aged woman on her, dour, brown, her figure too becoming somewhat lumpy and, in a middle-aged way, becoming acquiescent. She was very soon linking Boris’s arm. She and Boris went to see her mother who sat in a room in the mental hospital, a very quiet Rapunzel but without the long, golden hair of course. Boris, armed with Magella’s daughter, was allowed in now. He approached Magella, who was seated, as if there’d been no carnality between them, as if he couldn’t remember it, as though this woman was his mother and had been in a mother relationship with him. The affair with her, memory of it, had, in this Catholic village, evacuated his mind. Beside Gráinne he looked like a businessman, as someone who’d been operated on and had his aura of passion removed. He drooped, a lazily held puppet. There was a complete change in him, a complete reorganization of the state of his being, a change commensurate with collectivization in Stalinist Russia. Only very tiny shards of his former being remained, littered on the railway tracks of it, the thoroughfare of it. He didn’t so much deny Magella as hurt her with an impotent perception of her. At the core of her love-making with him there’d been a child searching for his mother and now, the memory of passion gone, there was only the truth of his findings. A mother. The mother of a weedy son at that. The rancid smell at the back of his neck had turned to a sickly-sweet one. But Magella still ached for the person who would be revived as soon as she got her hands on Boris again. That person tremored somewhere inside Boris, at the terribleness of her abillty.

The romance between Boris and Gráinne lapsed and Gráinne went off to work in a beauty parlour in Bradford where relatives of her father lived. A few months after her departure, Boris—there’d been tiffs between them—repented of his irascibility in the weeks before her decision to leave and he went looking for her. He ended up beside a slime heap in Bradford, a house beside a slime heap, exiled Irish people. The beauty parlour was a few streets away. People in Bradford called Boris Paddy which further confused his sense of identity and he went home without resolving things with Gráinne to find Magella out of the mental hospital and having reopened the pub which Gráinne had tentatively opened for a while. Everything was ripe for a confrontation between them but Magella kept a quietness, even a dormancy in that pub for months until one night she raged out to the arage, wielding a broom, a like instrument to that of her husband’s death. He met her at the door of his little house alongside the garage that was closed for the night. ‘You scut,’ she said, ‘You took two dogs from me once and never gave them back.’ True, Boris had taken two ginger-coloured, chalk cocker spaniels for his mantelpiece on the condition he’d return them when he found something suitable for the mantelpiece himself. ‘I want them back,’ she said. He let her in. The dogs were there. She stood in front of him, not looking at the dogs. Where there had been black hair there was now mainly a smoke of grey. She stood in front of him, silently, broom inoffensively by her side, as if to show him the wreck of her being, a wreck caused by involvement with him. ‘Come down for a drink some night,’ she said and quietly went off.

He did go down for a drink in her pub. He fiddled with drinks on the counter. Then Gráinne came back and Magella burned the whole house down, everything, leaving only a charred wreck of a house. She was put back into the mental hospital. There’d been no money left in the bank. Everything was squandered now and everything had been amiss anyway before Magella had burned the house down. Maybe that’s why she’d burned the house down. But this wreck, this cavity in the street was her statement. It was her statement before Boris and Gráinne announced plans for marriage.

What Gráinne did not know when she was earnestly proposed marriage to was that Boris and Magella had slipped away together for a honeymoon of their own in Bray, County Wicklow, the previous June. They stayed in a cascade of a hotel by the sea. The mountains, Bray Head, were frills on the sea. The days were very blue. Women walked dogs, desultory Russian émigrés in pinks, purples, with hats pushed down over their ears. You never saw their faces. Boris and Magella slept in the same room but in separate beds. There were rhododendrons on hills just over Bray and among the walks on those hills. Boris explained to Magella that she was the real woman in his life, at first a carnal one, then a purified, sublimated one. She’d been the one he’d been looking for. It was difficult for Magella to take this, that physical love was over in her life, but there was affirmation with the pain when she eventually burned down the house, on hearing of Boris’s imminent marriage to Gráinne. She’d achieved something.

In Bray before they used to go to sleep Boris would light a candle in the room and sit up in bed thinking. ‘What are you thinking of?’ she asked. But he’d never answered. Nuns in Wexford, gulls streaming over an orphanage, poised to drop for crusts of bread on a grey playing area, sailors on the sea, migrations on foot by railroads in Russia, heavy sun on people in rags, a grandmother pulling a child by the hand, the only remaining member of her family.

‘You’ve got to go through one thing to get to the other,’ Boris said sagely as he sat up in bed one night, the lights still on, impeccable pyjamas of navy and white stripes on him which revealed a bush of the acrid black hair on his chest, he staring ahead, zombie-like.

In this statement he’d meant he’d gone through physical love with Magella to fish up a dolorous, muted ikon of a Virgin, of the untouchable but all-protecting woman. To get this holy protection from a woman you had to make her untouchable, sacred. For the rest of his life Magella would provide the source of sanity, of resolve, of belief in his life. She was the woman who’d rescued him from the inchoate Wexford night.

Magella was, of course, pleased to hear this but still restive. She did not sleep well that night. She longed, despite that statement, to have Boris, his nimble legs and arms, his pale well of a crotch, in her bed.

The marriage took place in July the following year. There was a crossroads dance the night before a mile or two outside the village. Rare enough in Ireland at that time, even in West Kerry and in Connemara, they still happened in this backwater of County Laois.

People stepped out beside a few items of a funfair, a few coloured lights strung up. An epic, a tumultous smell of corn came from the fields. A melodion played the tune ‘Slievenamon.’ ‘My love, o my love, will I ne’er see you again, in the valley of Slievenamon?’ Lovers sauntered through the corn. Magella was packing her things in the mental hospital to attend the wedding the following day.

On their second last day in Bray, by the sea, he’d suddenly hugged her and she saw all the mirth again in his face and all the dark in his hair. An old man nearby, his eye on them, quickly wound up a machine to play some music. There was a picture of Sorrento on a funfair caravan, pale blue lines on the yellow ochre caravan, cartoon Italian mountains, cartoon-packed Italian houses, cartoon operatic waves. Magella had looked to the sea, beyond the straggled funfair, and seen the blue in the sea which was tangible, which was ecstatic.

Magella danced with Boris at the wedding reception. She was wearing a brown suit and a brown hat lent to her by her sister in Tihelly, County Offaly. She looked like an alcoholic beverage, an Irish cream liqueur. Or so a little boy who’d come to the wedding thought. She danced with him in a room where ten-pound notes, twenty-pound notes and, of course, many five-pound notes were pinned on the walls as was the custom at weddings in Ireland. The little boy had come a long way that morning. His granny, on the other side of his family, whom he called on on the way, in her little house, had given him a box of chocolates that looked like a navy limousine. He still had it now as he watched Boris and Magella dance, the couple, a serenity between them, an understanding. They’d been looking for different things from one another, their paths had crossed, they’d gone different ways but in this moment they created a total communion, a total marriage, an understanding that only a child could intuit and carry away with him, enlightened, the notes on the walls becoming Russian notes with pictures of Tsars and dictators and people who’d changed epochs on them, the walls burning in a terrible fire in the child’s mind until only a note or two was left, a face or two, sole reminders of an enraptured moment in history.

At such moments the imagination begins and someone else, someone who did not live through the events, remembers and, later, counts the pain.

A little boy walked away from the wedding, box of chocolates still under his arm, not wanting to look back at the point where a woman was dragged away, screaming, at a certain hour, to a solitary room in a mental hospital.

Years later he returned, long after Magella’s death in the mental hospital, to the woods, at the time of year when rhododendrons spread there. He bent and picked up a decapitated tiara of rhododendron. There was a poster for Paris in the village, a Chinese restaurant run by a South Korean, a late night fish-and-chip takeaway. The garage was still open at the top of the village. The only change was that Boris had put up a Russian flag among the others. It was his showpiece. He’d gotten it from the Legion of Mary in Kilkenny who’d put on a show about imprisoned cardinals behind the Iron Curtain. But it was his pride. It demonstrated, apart from his roots, the true internationalism of the garage. There were no boundaries here. A bald man, lots of children scampering around him for years, would come out to fill your car and his face would tell you these things, a brown, anaemic work coat on him, a prosperous but also somewhat cowed grin on his face.

At her funeral in 1959 Boris had carried lilies, and there, in the graveyard, thought of his visit to Bradford, the exiled Irish there, a cowed, depressed people, the legacy of history, and of the woman who’d tried to overthrow that legacy, for a while. He’d put the lilies on the grave, Magella’s lover, no one denying that day the exact place of the grief in his heart.

Everybody walked away except the boy and Boris and then Boris walked away, but first looking at the boy, almost in annoyance, as if to say, you have no right to intrude on these things, flashing back his black hair and throwing a boyish, almost a rival’s look from his black eyes that were scarred and vinegary and blazingly alive from tears. In those eyes was the wound, the secret, and the boy looked at it, unreproached by it.

Years later he returned to find that there was no museum to that wound, only a few brightly painted houses, a ramshackle cramming of modernity. He took his car and drove out by the garage and the bunting and the flags to the fields where you could smell the first, premature coming of the epic, all-consuming, wound-oblivionizing harvest.

Our mad aunts, the young man thought, our mad selves.

Lady of Laois, ikon from this incumbent, serf-less, but none the less, I expect, totally Russian storybook blinding harvest, pray for the night-sea, neon spin-drift, jukebox-beacon café wanderer.