Tales and Imaginings (10 page)

All the same, is not the writer disingenuous in describing the glacier as a giant? Beware these metaphors that lead one on from rational consideration of relative size to superstitious reverence! The suggested calculation of how far the glacier advances during one’s ascent is
perhaps an attempt to hang heartbeat and geology on the thread of a single realizable time. But what are the implications of the piling-up of microscopic geometries, and the infinitesimal effect of a push against the glacier’s flow? Man is a middling-sized entity; not for us the frantic vortices of the nucleus or the stately galactic gyrations. Keep your homelife a secret from the Gods, isn’t that wisdom? But these writers, these doubting, delicate, retiring shadow-mongers! Insinuating their images into one’s brain,
covering
the world in a delicate silk web of associations as if to preserve it from all our purposeful cutting-about! Are we supposed to leave it untouched, to decay or flower or both or neither as if we weren’t even looking at it? Surely our demands, for food, knowledge,
luxury
, power, are part of this world! The warmest, best, richest, most living part! We, the builders, are like a great tree, we may drain the
soil so that nothing grows in our shadow, but we tower into heaven. We can even tolerate these piping wraiths flitting to and fro in our crown; studying them is a hobby, a relaxation snatched from our duties. But their humility angers me! This casual talk of the ‘
erasing
’ of ‘temporarily established’ human structures! We could erase that glacier, if we wanted to. We have the bombs, the machines, to crunch it into little bits. As our plane banks smoothly above the mountains we will look down upon the rumpled bed of the glacier, celebrating its removal; I imagine with relish the touch of the last of its fragments bobbing against my lip as I sip a gin and tonic.

Note that you are alone for this grand confrontation of man and nature. There were fifty of us, as I remember; they took us up in two buses, a good lunch was served at the restaurant after our walk, and we were back on board for dinner and an evening of bridge. Though, funnily enough, I was left by myself for a few minutes at the lakeside. I had felt a sort of cramp, a pain diagonally across my heart, during the climb; I realized the unwisdom at my age of this exertion, and when the others had finished photographing the
ice-boulders
and were trailing away down the muddy path I sat down to rest for a moment. It was a day like the one described here, clouding over. I had forgotten my cigarettes. There was a little brownish bird in the rough grass along the water’s edge; I couldn’t see it clearly enough to identify it. I wished I were at home, or even at my work. You know those moments. It began to rain and I got quite wet before I reached the restaurant. I missed the lunch.

I remember it very clearly now, that time by the lake.

The English couple stood in silence to watch the winter evening’s bleak glory and its dark reflection in the bay. Light that fell from pallid rifts in the clouds was swept up by each wave advancing across the sand, accumulated in a luminous arc of foam the length of the beach and left to fade slowly into the twilight, until washed over by the next black rim of water, and so renewed. Out on the bay a dark seabird rode the waves to the same rhythm. After a while the bird slipped noiselessly below the surface; the man’s eye soon lost its place in the water, and when it reappeared much further off it was almost invisible in the dusk.

‘Why can’t we stay here for ever?’ The man seemed to have
spoken
out towards the distant solitary bird rather than to his
companion
; she had climbed up among the rocks at the end of the beach
and was looking across the sound to the mainland, where a few points of light had come into existence marking the line of the coast road below the long silhouette of the Connemara mountains. She called back to him without turning round: ‘Come on, let’s walk along towards Dara’s.’ He started to pick his way up to her over the slippery boulders. ‘Old Dara will be in the pub,’ he said. ‘Old Dara will be in bed,’ she answered. ‘He was carting seaweed all day. But we can walk in that direction anyway.’

They scrambled up onto the little road that followed the islands coast. Once they had left the bay the sea was hidden from them by a great bank of rocks, but they could still hear the dull fall of each breaker and the rattle of shingle in the undertow. Inland, the little stone-walled fields sloped up to the heavy clouds. Light drifts of rain began to fill the air. The man walked on in silence for some time, his head turned towards the sea and his eyes half shut against the rain. Then he began to talk in a voice not his own, slower, more rhythmic, with a pause after every phrase: ‘It was a night like this, out in the latter end of the month of March, when I came back to the Black Shore, after many a year walking the roads of Connacht.’

The woman had stopped as soon as he adopted this voice, and by the end of his sentence he was a few paces ahead of her. He turned towards her, looking heavy and hunched with his hands deep in his pockets. ‘Yes, go on,’ she said, and ran up and took his arm. ‘A night like this?’

‘… the breakers falling on the rocks with a lonely kind of a sound, and the rain blowing across from Connemara, and me with my head down thinking of the past, when …’

‘Yes?’
She clutched his arm and glanced around at the glistening rock bank and the desolate hillside.

‘… all of a sudden …’

‘Go on then!’

‘Now don’t be rushing me! When, all of a sudden, didn’t I hear a little voice saying, “Welcome home, Master, to your lost fields!’”

‘Amazing! What sort of a voice was it?’

‘A little mocking voice
like two flat stones rubbed together.’ He mimicked it: ‘Welcome back to your lost lands, Master!’

‘And what happened then?’

‘I looked around me, and the road being empty I looked over the wall into the fields, and there was nobody in it at all. Now, I thought, that’s a very strange thing, for it’s many a mile since the last public house, and didn’t I have but four!’

‘God bless you, you were never much of a man for the drink, Seamus.’ She tentatively adopted the role of a wheedling old woman, and dropped it immediately to say, ‘Button your collar, love, you’ll get soaked.’

The man let her button his collar, and then marched on with a hopeless, heavy-footed gait. ‘That’s a very strange thing, says I to myself; that’s the voice of memory itself! For it’s not lying the voice was, and in years gone by this land was mine’ – waving his hand towards the wet gleaming rock surfaces beside the road – ‘though it’s little the pleasure and few the potatoes I ever got out of it! And then the little voice came again: “Let you be walking on now,
Master
, for you’re nothing but a man of the road and another fellow has the enjoyment of your fine potato-plot!’”

‘Garden,’ said the woman. ‘They call these little fields gardens.’

“‘Your garden is
another man’s now,” said the little mocking voice, and I couldn’t figure it out how it was, for there wasn’t a bramble by the roadside big enough to hide a bold child, and
nothing
on the road only one stone and that no bigger than a loaf of bread.’

‘A cake of bread, they’d say.’

‘Cake, then, for God’s sake. Isn’t it a narrow enough path I have to tread, between flatness and Irishry, and the rain running down
the back of my neck, without you putting in on me!’

‘All right, get on then. Nothing on the road but a stone

‘Now, what with the mocking sound that was in the voice and the drop I had taken, and me being a quick-tempered sort of a
fellow
, I upped with the stone and whirled myself about and I let a great shout out of me: “Whatever about my lost land,” I shouted, “don’t be making a fool of me wherever you’re hid!” But as soon as I had that stone in my two hands, with the feel of it like, the whole sad story all came back to me, and I dropped the stone and I stood there looking at it.’

‘Sure, isn’t it the Proust of the Western World you are, entirely!’

‘For it was on account of that very stone I lost my land and became a man of the road. And that’s the story I’ll be telling you now – unless you’re getting too wet; shall we run back to the
cottage
?’

‘No, I love this soft sort of rain. And look at that colour in the clouds! Go on, it’s ages since you told me a story.’

‘Right then, we’ll walk on a bit.’ He raised his hand like the
conductor
of an orchestra and waved himself on. ‘Ah, it’s well I
remember
the day I first set potatoes in that garden. I was young then and healthy, and I don’t want to be boasting but there was no man could match me with a spade but my father before me, may God rest his soul in peace.’

The woman rounded her back and peered up at him sideways. ‘Lord love you, Seamus, aren’t you still a fine figure of a man?’

‘Oh, I’m still supple,’ he said, and took a few lurching jig-steps across the road, lifting his knees high, stamping in the puddles, and bending his back about; ‘and I still have my faculties!’ – snapping his fingers by his temples – ‘I’m telling you, if I had no drink taken for but three days, I could drive a spade through that road!’ –
pointing
emphatically at a spot between his feet. And then, throwing up his hands with a great sigh: ‘Ah, it’s swiftly the years go by! I
enjoyed setting a lea-garden then, working with the spade, cutting the scraw and turning it in

‘What’s the scraw?’

‘The top layer, the grassy stuff. You cut round a bit and fold it over onto the seed-potato

‘Oh yes, don’t go on. You should have done your thesis on the way they plant potatoes here. You talked of nothing else when we were back in London last summer.’

‘Well, I might write a book about it; why not? It’s the principal art-form here. Everyone’s very critical of other people’s crooked potato ridges. It’s an ancient skill; you have to fold the scraw over carefully without breaking it or the weeds will grow up through the broken place. When I write my great earth-novel I think I’ll call it “The Integrity of the Scraw”. I’ll give you another technical term: the “clash”, that’s the channel between the ridges; it’s sure to come into the story. You cut the scraw out of the clash and fold it over onto the ridge.’

‘All right, the clash. So what happened?’

‘Well as you know, the gardens here are stony, hilly places, and many’s the donkey-load of sand and seaweed has gone to the
making
of the biteen soil that’s in them. And every now and then a stone would come up with the scraw, and I’d just put my spade under it and give it a twist and send it flying to the edge of the garden by the wall, intending to gather them stones later on and put them along the top of the wall.’

She watched his vigorous miming of all this with an admiring smile. ‘Sure isn’t it a shame for you now, a fine physical man like yourself, idling your life away from pub to pub, and me with a nice little garden behind my cottage and no man to set it for me?’

‘Woman, aren’t I after telling you I’ll be a travelling man till I’m buried. Now listen and I’ll tell you the very unusual thing that occurred. I was ridging there and throwing the stones down by the
wall, and maybe one or two of them stones flew over the wall – though I wouldn’t be saying that to anyone but yourself, mind!’

‘And where would them stones be flying, Seamus?’

‘Where would they be flying but into the King’s High Road, or the Queen’s High Road, whichever of them was in it at that time? So when I heard the sound of a horse coming along the road at a terrible lick, I thought, I thought, I thought, ‘That will be the bailiff now’ – for he was the only man with a horse in this parish at any rate – ‘and he’ll be giving out at me and putting the law on me, all on account of a few little stones no bigger than the nail of that thumb!’ – showing her his thumb-nail and tapping it three times with the forefinger of the other hand. ‘And I began to think black thoughts for as you know that was the Time of the Crowbars when they were evicting the poor people and throwing down their
cottages
, and the bailiff was a man I wouldn’t be giving the time of day to. So I went on with my ridging and I kept my back to the road, and just when the horse came thundering by, didn’t that stone I’m after telling you about turn up in the clash!’ He dug his elbow into her ribs and said in his usual voice, ‘The clash – did you remember the clash?’ But she replied as the old Irish woman: ‘Well now,
Seamus
, aren’t you thirsty and you after telling me that fine long story and the kettle singing on the turf in my little cottage back there?’

‘Don’t be going on at me, woman, dragging me into your little cottage and my story just begun! So that stone, as I say, hopped onto my spade and without giving it a thought didn’t I give the spade a great heave and send the stone flying over my shoulder. Then I heard a kind of a thump, and the horse let a terrible screech out of it and so did the rider, and then everything was very
peaceful
all of a sudden. I straightened myself up, and I stuck my spade into the ridge, and I turned myself around, taking my time, as if I was just considering considering considering the sky and
wondering
might there be rain on it, and then I took a look over the wall
into the road. And that road, without a word of a lie, that road was as empty then as it is at this minute!’ And he pulled her round to look back along the road, which gleamed dully in the gathering darkness. ‘Gosh,’ she said, and held onto his arm, ‘Look at that band of mist across the hill there. This place is
quite weird
sometimes
. The road looks as if nobody’s come along it since the
beginning
of time. Come on, let’s keep moving. So there was no one there? I thought it was going to be the bailiff stretched out dead, and that’s how the Land War came to this island.’

‘Well, I’d thought of something like that, but now the
supernatural
has got into it.’

‘Is this a story Dara told you, when you were supposed to be helping him dig potatoes?’

‘No, I can’t make head or tail of Dara’s stories. I’m using his phrases though, I suppose.’

‘And his gestures.’

‘Oh, my gestures are tinny imitations; his are wrought iron.’

‘All right so, Seamus; let you be finishing your story now and we’ll go back to the cottage and change our clothes.’

‘Wait till you hear my history, woman, and you’ll not be so ready with your shameless invitations. Now, as I was telling you, there was nobody in the road at all; there wasn’t rider nor horse nor so much as the nail of the shoe of a horse. – Did you like that bit? I’ll say it again for you; there was neither rider nor horse nor even

‘Yes, you must write that down when we get back.’

‘So I hopped over the wall and I picked up the stone – and it’s then I wished I was out of it, for that stone was red-hot, and the mark of a horseshoe on it as if it were a fresh-baked cake and a horse after treading on it! I did no more work that day, I’m telling you. I dropped the stone and I went home, I said my prayers and I went to bed. In the morning I thought it was all a bad dream, so I fed the hens and I changed the sheep …’

‘What do you mean, changed the sheep?’