The Matchmaker of Kenmare (53 page)

“If you can bear to,” he said, “listen again carefully to the words Venetia spoke. I don’t think you have.”

“James, you’re right in this respect—I can’t bear to. And that’s over. She married another. Is that legendary too?”

“Oh, Ben, you sound bitter,” said James.

“Maybe I am.”

Next morning, as I unloaded his bicycle from my roof rack, James told me that he was taking a year’s sabbatical; it would begin in two months, and he asked me to take over his duties. That was the moment to tell him—that I wouldn’t even be in the country, that I would have joined the ranks of exile and gone abroad to seek my fortune. But I didn’t—too cowardly. Instead, I thanked him for the compliment, and he thanked me for having always been so trustworthy.

The symbolism that James had aired stayed in my mind as I drove away. I began to see myself as Odysseus, Ulysses, Homer’s wanderer, at last on his way to his Ithaca and his Penelope, except that it was Lebanon, Kansas, and she was Kate.

And I had even had some tasks to complete before my odyssey ended.
In fact, that day could be counted as part of it, because from Donegal to the west of Kerry is almost the longest journey one can take in Ireland. I stayed in Killarney; Mrs. Cooper still had the suitcase we’d packed before leaving for Germany and Belgium—I’d completely forgotten it. I assumed, as I opened it, that the new and savage beating of my heart came from the memories stirred by the suitcase.

Next morning, with the sun high in the sky, I set out for Lamb’s Head. By now, the long, low house had been vacant for almost a year—perhaps more, because I didn’t know the precise date that Mrs. Holst had ceased to live there.

A squall hung on the sea out beyond Caherdaniel. The lane had weeds growing in it. A seagull perched on the chimney, something that could never previously have happened because the fire burned all the time. A tiny corner of the thatch had grass peeping through; if that weren’t soon corrected it would overgrow the roof. The red paint of the door had peeled away in part, possibly from salt pitched up here during a storm in the winter.

On a windowsill at the back of the house, beneath a geranium pot now grown wild, I found the key where Kate had told me. She was needed again, with her stick of chalk—the ants had invaded the kitchen, and a line of them walked across the floor looking like a thin, flowing trail of gunpowder.

I propped the door wide open, flung up all the windows, and opened the other doors to get as much air through the house as possible. I caught the faint odor of a fire long gone out. I went from room to room, checking for ceiling damage; everything seemed very sound. I felt no alarm. Not yet. The furniture hadn’t been covered with dust sheets, therefore no ghosts.

Mrs. Holst must have visited somewhat recently, and she’d left a single cigarette in a packet on the table, together with a box of matches. She hadn’t left any food, however, and I sat in the open air, grateful that I’d had the foresight to have Mrs. Cooper make me a sandwich. How that outdoor nook got its shelter I never could tell, but from the first moment I sat there, the day when Kate touched my arm and asked me to tell her my troubles, it had had a sense of calm. I didn’t feel it now.

Before I locked up the house again, I decided to do one last tour of inspection. Something was getting at me. I picked up the cigarette
packet.
Mrs. Holst doesn’t smoke. So whose cigarette packet is that?
I dismissed it.
Perhaps her new husband smokes
. It didn’t quite go away.

Under an old pile of newspapers in Kate’s room, and the magazine clippings we’d used for our researches before Belgium, I saw her red book. Here is the last entry she’d made.

My father had an old saying, “Listeners never hear good of themselves.” Meaning that eavesdroppers may hear people speak of them in unpleasant terms. My children, dear Ben, dear Louise—never read somebody’s intimate journal, especially if you know and love them. You won’t be portrayed as you’d wish to be.

I closed the book, shut all reaction from my mind, refastened all the doors and windows, locked the house, and drove down to Kenmare. On the edge of the town, I found my way ahead blocked—in every possible sense.

His face had a few moments earlier loomed into my mind, his kind, decent face with its smile backed by rented teeth. Neddy the Drover was taking twenty head of cattle to a yard on the other side of Kenmare, and for the next few minutes they blocked the entire sloping street.

I bipped the horn at him, he waved a casual hand back without looking, as much as to say, “This will only take a few minutes,” so I bipped again. Harder. Louder. He looked back—puzzled, because Neddy could never reach annoyance. When he saw me, he didn’t wave, he ran back.

“Mr. Ben. It is, isn’t it?”

“Neddy, how are you?”

“Sir, you’re the man I want to see, the very man.”

“You look good, Neddy.”

“Sir, these’ll take me about ten minutes. Ten minutes and no more. Can you meet me at MacCarthy’s?”

“The name is good anyway,” I said, but Neddy didn’t catch—or, more accurate, didn’t want—the joke. He looked agitated.

When he trotted into the pub and found me, before I could offer him a drink, he grabbed my wrist.

“Sir, were you up at the house at all?”

“That’s where I was coming from.”

“Was it all right?”

“There’s grass in the thatch,” I said.

“Jesus, sir, don’t go up there again. Not on your own anyway.”

I laughed. “Is there a ghost there?”

He looked at me wide-eyed and nodded.

“Kind of,” he said.

How did I know? Nobody rational can answer that question. I knew with that part of me that I can’t define or locate, the part of me that tortured and killed, the part of me that knows about remorse, the part of me
that had those brain-spattering fantasies of violence, the part of me that’s ashamed of all that.

It is my fervent hope that you never feel shame—by which I mean shame that you’ve deserved. It covers the soul like slime. You can’t shake it off. It lasts for a long, long time. Try the detergent of justification if you like, but it doesn’t work. I’m ashamed of what I did to Cody—ashamed of the actual violence, ashamed of the greater and terrifying threat. I’m ashamed of killing that soldier in the snows, even if it were Sebastian Volunder. Shame’s time lies deep in the night, at four o’clock in the morning, the time that the Norse legends call “the hour of the wolf”—that’s when most people die. It’s when I’ll die. And from the place I keep such knowledge—that’s how I knew.

All of those thoughts came rushing in that afternoon—as much to remind me of my capacities as of my shame.

Neddy the Drover had extensive detail. When he and his bakery love had wed, they’d gone to live in a house between Lamb’s Head and Kenmare. With the house came a small boat, and Neddy delighted to row out and fish. One morning early, edging around the point at Lamb’s Head, he saw a figure standing down by the water.

“Not doing anything, Mr. Ben, just standing and looking at the stones. On the little dock, like.”

Neddy assumed that it was some fisherman—but he saw no boat. He then assumed that it was some tourist, some camper. But when, a week later, and then two weeks later, and then three weeks later, the man could still be seen there, standing, smoking a cigarette, and staring at the rocks on the jetty, the little dock to which fishermen came seeking a wife, Neddy assumed a ghost. He hadn’t gone near the place, too frightened.

“Didn’t Miss Begley’s father die at sea, and wasn’t he a big, blondy man too, by all accounts?”

But I knew what the “ghost” was looking at: a little plaque with a tender message from a bereft child.

“And then, Mr. Ben, didn’t I hear tell, like everyone else along here, that Miss Begley’s new husband, wasn’t he killed in the war, like? And was it his ghost?”

“When did you see him last, Neddy?”

“Mr. Ben, wasn’t he there every day, like? It’s a shock that he hasn’t fallen into the ocean by now.”

“Is he there all day?”

“I can’t say, Mr. Ben. I’m not all that inclined to go there that much at the minute.”

What choice did I have? Decency had nothing to do with it. Powerful self-interest, self-protection—even curiosity—all kicked in. My life had suddenly become unsafe, as it always had been, I realized, when I’d been in Captain Miller’s company. Remember those fantasies of violence that I’d had when he and Kate married in London? I’m certain they came from not feeling safe. And back then, I hadn’t even known that they called him “Killer.”

Halfway up the lane, I stopped the car and switched off—even though the wind off the sea was blowing the engine sound away behind me. I walked the rest of the journey, I tiptoed. This time—no key; the pot had been moved and the key taken. When I went around to the front, the door stood wide open.

Do officers carry guns?
was my first thought.

In the gloom of the kitchen, he sat by the cold and empty fireplace—in Kate’s chair. He looked up—a shattered man; January outside, January in his eyes. When he stood, he still had the same height, but he looked like an effigy from which the straw had been taken—hollow-chested, and his shoulders hunched, like a man expecting a blow. The straw-colored hair, the color of Kansas, was ragged with gray. If I hadn’t known better I’d have said that somebody had drawn black shadow lines down his cheeks.

“Where’s Kate?” he said, in a voice that sounded ready to cough.

And I thought,
Did ever a man so dwindle?

——

I didn’t know what to do. Was he dangerous? He didn’t look it. Did he know me? I didn’t think so at first. Was he sane? If he was, it was a reduced sanity, a lurching from one handhold to the next, barely hanging on. This was a man who needed to die; nobody could go on through life in that shape, a member of the Silent Ones. This was also a man whom I’d so admired and now he had come down so far; where once there had been gold, I now saw only lead. The loss seared me—the loss of a man whom, whatever my doubts about his role in war, I had so admired. My mind raced faster than it had in the forest snows. Who knows he’s here? Neddy the Drover. And Neddy believes that this ghost will fall into the sea. I sat.

“Do you know who I am?”

He sat too; it is a characteristic of shell shock that the victim frequently mimics the actions of a person nearby.

“Do you know who I am?” he repeated, but he said it in an ambiguous way—he could have been parroting me, or he could have been asking me the same question. With his next words, he saved me from answering. “When will Kate be here?”

Let me try to count the currents flowing in torrents through my brain as I sat there.

Why should Kate be lumbered with this husk? How weak is his mind? Who would miss him? The scar on his throat has turned blue. Does he have any menace left in him? Is he to be pitied? Could he fight me off? Those are the sorts of clothes I saw the men wearing in the German villages. This would hurt her, to see him like this. This would ruin her life. Can he ever recover? I doubt it. Who knows that he’s here? Only Neddy and me. Who knows who he is? Apart from me, probably nobody. Not even himself. And I was unreliable—I, after all, had become a brutalized man
.

While I sat looking at him and thinking, he lapsed into gloom, staring at the sullen hearth.

I stood again. “Come with me.”

He followed me from the cottage and I walked across the little plateau, and down a few steps to the part where the path grew steepest. Nothing on the sea, not even a gull, just the waves still trying to come ashore and subdue the land and retreating in failure.

I looked back. He stumbled a little, and now he stood where I had first seen him entreating Kate, persuading her into the adventures that had ultimately scarred us all. She had lost a husband, he had lost his wits, and I had lost my soul—or part of it. The gods of war had had a field day with us. And now they would close the book with a flourish.

Charles Miller held out his hands to me, a child afraid of falling. He stood exactly where Kate Begley had stood on the day she’d held out her hands to me in forgiveness for my drunken brawl. I went back up the dangerous slope and took his hands.

Good and bad, we all do things without thinking. I can’t and I won’t claim deliberate action that day; I can’t and won’t say that I took such actions as I did for the greater good or ill of anybody. All I will do is report. And I report that I took Charles Miller’s hands, and I pulled him a little toward me and got him into my arms. Then I turned him around and walked him back up the slope.

I led him into the house, I sat him down in Kate’s chair, I opened the
neck of his filthy, army-issue shirt, and I left him sitting there for a moment. From a corner of the kitchen, I took the blue pitcher that they used for milk, and I went out to the butt of rainwater that stood at the corner of the house, filled the pitcher, came back in, found a towel in Kate’s room, and began to bathe Charles Miller’s face and neck.