The Matchmaker of Kenmare (21 page)

All that was over now, and would never rise again, and I felt proud of them for having recovered so well, but as usual I didn’t have the words to say it. Nor did they, nor could they, would they, ever refer to those events—too painful, too intimate, too sore, and too tragic for me.

Except: When I was leaving, Mother walked with me to the gate, and my father waved from the doorstep.

“He looks well,” I said, “apart from the sprain.”

She said, “He has great spirit, you should have heard the commotion he made about the sprain, he made me laugh until I was sick. Said he’d
have the leg amputated and collect a war pension. And sell the toes as holy relics, say they were Saint Patrick’s toes.”

And then, before I mounted my bicycle, she said, “Ben, I never ask. But did you ever hear? I mean—a word?”

I shook my head, and she continued, very slowly as though prepared to interrupt herself if she was saying too much.

“They say. That, ah’m. That she’s in America. That the mother goes to see her. That, well, there’s, we have, I mean: Look. If there is, if there actually is—a grandchild—well, it would always be welcome here,” and she stopped, quavering a little, and asked, “What do you think, Ben? Do you think she’s alive? D’you think there’s a grandchild?”

If Mother knew how often I’d asked myself that question—every second of every minute of every hour of every day of every week of every month of every year. And therefore I felt able to say, “I think so. But I don’t know.”

And she said, as she did about many things, “Let Life fix it.” She patted my shoulder. “Ben, you’re so good, you’re such a good fellow.”

“How are you, yourself?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” she said. “Most of me.”

I couldn’t bear to look back at her because I knew that she’d be standing there, angular as a coat hanger, simple as prayer, watching me out of sight, and I knowing that a day would come when she wouldn’t be there to look at my back as I went away from her yet again.

Two weeks later, after uneven times and mixed results in Kilkenny and Carlow (the west coast is still the richest in our lore), I took my bike on a train, went to the post office in Limerick, and opened a letter from Miss Begley: “Come down here and celebrate.”

Had she married already?

In the house at Lamb’s Head, I found all the excitement of a fable. The place teemed with women and girls—no marriage yet, but trousseau time, with plates of food and bells of laughter. When I loomed in the doorway, big as a black shadow, Miss Begley clapped her hands, ran to me, and said, “I clinched it.”

And from a chair near the window the grandmother said, “She clinched it.”

“Clinched what?”

“We have a date, for the wedding,” said the grandmother.

“If we had a tune to that, we could sing it,” said Miss Begley, “and from now on you have to call me ‘Kate,’ because I’m going to show you my trousseau, and therefore you’ll know a lot about me that most men never will or should.”

“Is he here?” I asked.

“Oh, good God, we’d have seven years of bad luck if he saw any of this! The wedding’s in London. And you’re coming.”

Like a servant in a play, I folded my hands in front of me and nodded my head.

I said, “I have to get something from my bike,” stepped out into that wild Atlantic wind, and tried to find a place where I could vomit without being seen. I didn’t in fact throw up, but I was sick to the core. My heart was now harassing me every day because I was having difficulty in maintaining to myself that Venetia was still my world. But I had articulated none of this to myself; now I know that my body was the messenger.

You can tell, can’t you, how it must have felt? I was betwixt and between, yet the loss of people past still lay coiled inside me like a snake, ever ready to hiss and strike.

The light had turned pewter across the bay, as a small rainstorm swept in, but the squall touched Lamb’s Head not at all and the sun lit the sea between the rain and me. Taking great care, I edged down the steep path that leads to the jetty, which I had never seen. Awkward as a hobbled goat, I kept my body low to the ground, ready for a fall at any time. Until it breaks away to the left and onto a little plateau, any drop from the path will pitch a body straight down into the waves. I made it to the safe level and walked the rest.

Unseen from above, the jetty had substance. An oblong of rocks, selected for their natural fit to one another, had been cemented together.
Over the years, seaweed, kelp, barnacles, and other shore growth had added to the welding, and the gray-blackened stones looked as firm as a harbor wall. Not more than ten feet long, the pier had iron rings embedded on both sides; from one hoop waved strands of an old rope like a lock of hair.

I looked up behind me but could only see the chimney and part of the roof on the Begley house. And I imagined the men who came here, with their rough faces and rougher hands, and, perhaps roughest of all, their manners, but maybe with yearning in their hearts for a fireside companion.

Such thoughts led me straight to melancholy and could produce a mood that would last for weeks, ever sinking, ever worse. I fought with it by looking around, by dipping my fingers into the wonders of a rock pool, where a tiny crab scuttled away from the shadow of my hand. Periwinkles cropped everywhere, and I began to gather them, to boil them later and winkle out the meat with a pin.

And then I saw the plaque in the wall.

A flat stone had been inserted high on the pier, out nearest the harshest drag of the ocean. Every wave must pound that stone, every lip of a tide must suck at it. Yet the inscription, the deeply incised words, had held fast:

The sentiment should have felt crass and mushy; it didn’t. I’d known of similar little monuments on the coast of Portugal—they’re designed to beckon home the lost mariner—but I’d never seen it in Ireland, and I’ve never seen another. The sea washed in; I had to jump to keep my feet dry; the pewter light out in the bay began to spread in my direction.

I never viewed the trousseau—too many girls and women, too much squealing and ribaldry. That suited me fine, and I sat with the baleful grandmother, and I ate every bite of food that was offered to me—which is what I do under stress.

However, in my personal journal I have a sensational entry, made next day. Though I didn’t want to, I stayed at Lamb’s Head, and, late in the blue and smoky evening Miss Begley came to my room. Here’s the note I made.

It wasn’t a dream. Next day, she raised the event with me. We were sitting on the long train from Killarney to Dublin. I had put my bicycle in the luggage van; on the racks above us sat her suitcases and her trunk; Miss Kate Begley was about to become a bride, and she had packed for it like a duchess.

As the sunlight flooded her eyes, she raised a shielding hand and said, “How shocked are you?”

I said, “If you mean last night—why does the word
shocked
come into it?”

“Well—what we did.”

I wasn’t certain what value she was trying to extract—praise or blame. So I said, “I felt used.”

She didn’t recoil. “Do you know why it happened?”

I bit off the words. “No. I don’t know why it happened.”

She said, “I have nobody but you to trust with the person I am. Myself.”

“Aren’t you about to marry someone for that reason?”

She ignored my remark and said, “You’re my security, Ben, if everything goes wrong.”

“Goes wrong?”

“If a girl comes back to me after her first walking out with a fellow, and she sits there and says she had a lovely time, but she’s twisting her handkerchief until her fingers are blue, what kind of a time did she really have?”

“What on earth has that to do with you and me naked?”

She said, “I’m going forward into the unknown. You’re what I know.”

When she spoke like a novelette, it drove me crazy.

“You’re not answering my question.”

She said, “So—how shocked are you?”

“You made me look at you,” I said. “You made me inspect you. You used me.”

“You don’t believe me,” she said, “because you don’t want to believe me. I watched you in France, I saw the way you looked after me, you were a kind of overseer. And I trust you so much that I want you to remember me as Kate Begley, not as Mrs. Charles Miller. I can never have that chance again. And I couldn’t have done it if you’d never been married yourself.”

“What the hell are you talking about?” I said.

“Don’t be so cross. I need to know that there will always be one person in the world who knows me best of all.”

“Outside of your new husband?” I said. She nodded, and I asked, “Then why didn’t you go the whole hog? Why didn’t we complete it?”

“I wanted to,” she said. “But there was no sign that you did.”

This was defeat; this was humiliation. I asked the feeble question. “Why me?”

“Because you’re the safest person in the world.”

I said, “Kate, you’re so many things—how do I know what you are at any given moment?”

She said, “Well, I’ll tell you what I am. I’m the Fourth Fate.”

This is very grandiose
, ran my hostile mind.

She went on. “You don’t know, do you, who the Fates were?”

I said, trying not to sound tart or smart, “One spun the thread of life, one handed it out, and one cut it.”

“And I draw two of those threads together,” she said. “Two lives, and I knot them to each other. I’m the destiny that those two people harness.”

Yes, she is being grandiose. I need Billy Moloney because this is flockin’ irritatin’
.

“You’ve seen those people who come to us. You’ve seen Edward Hannitty, the drover. You’ve seen Miss Mangan from the bakery. What kind of a hand is Destiny dealing them? They’d be nowhere without my intervention.”

My mind yelled,
She’d better stop this soon. I can’t take much more of it
.

“And my Charles?” she said with a flourish. “My captain? Wait and see.”

Too much—too much at that moment; I stood up.

“I’ll be back in a bit, just going to check my bike.”

And she, that brown-eyed girl, said, “He’ll be a general before the end of the war. Just you watch.”

She should have consulted the other Fates.

And so I became a silent witness to the wedding in bombed London of Captain Charles Howard Miller and Miss Katherine Ann Begley. They married in the church run by the Jesuits on Farm Street. Tweedlehugh and Tweedlejohn must have believed that groomsmen should look like sentries, because they stood at rigid attention throughout.

A cousin of Miss Begley’s wept as every bridesmaid must weep. Behind
them, in the soft mahogany light, stood no more than twenty other people, including Claudia, gleaming in cream, beside the quiet gentleman from lunch, Mr. Howard, he of the bunched red hair. A number of polished uniforms, spangled with decorations, gleamed in the dim church.

We all walked down a cobbled lane to a pub that, bombs or no bombs, kept geraniums in its window boxes. Miss Begley clung to Captain Miller’s arm as though fearing he might run away. He loomed over her, attentive and calm. Whatever deal they’d cut was up and running like a hare.

In a back room upstairs, the wedding party, such as it was, convened. Nobody sat down; we drank beer and ate cheese sandwiches. No speeches, and I recall thinking,
His colleagues seem so somber. They’re not laughing or joking. The war, I suppose
.

When some of the guests had departed, Miss Begley (as she would always be to me) left her bridegroom’s side for just a moment.

I asked her, “What happens now?”

“Tonight and tomorrow night I have him to myself, and then he’s off somewhere.”

Stress, the fear of losing his company while they should be on honeymoon, the power of marriage—something was making her frown, and she saw me register it.

“It won’t always be like this,” she said.

“You’ve never looked better,” I said to her.

“After the war,” she went on, “he’ll be back, and we’ll be together all the time.” She held a small basket of violets, saw me looking at them, and said, “From Claudia. Will you wait and travel home with me?”

We agreed to meet two days later under the clock at Paddington Station.

It rained that night, and all the next day, and the next. I sat in my hotel room, my thoughts mixed and confused. The fact of her marriage, and the honeymoon scenes in my brain’s theater, troubled me like bereavement, especially after that strange, naked night forty-eight hours earlier at Lamb’s Head.

There’s something else hidden that you should know about me—and it’s not as benign as the Secret Life of Ben MacCarthy, Medieval Wandering
Scholar. I’ve already hinted at it and its shame; and, although by now I have it almost completely under control, it has created some dreadful times.