‘Why don’t you let it go with him?’ I heard her voice. ‘You know what he’s like.’ She had lived rooted in this one place and life, with this one man, like the black sally in the one hedge, as pliant as it is knobbed and gnarled, keeping close to the ground as it invades the darker corners of the meadows.
The coffin was taken in. The house was closed. I saw some of the mourners trample on the flowers as they waited in the front garden for her to be taken out. She was light on our shoulders.
Her people did not return to the house after the funeral. They had relinquished any hopes they had to the land.
‘We seem to have it all to ourselves,’ I said to my father in the empty house. He gave me a venomous look but did not reply for long.
‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes. We seem to have it all to ourselves. But where do we go from here?’
Not, anyhow, to Sierra Leone. For a moment I saw the tall colonial building on a hill above the sea, its white pillars, the cool of the veranda in the evening … Maybe they were facing one another across a dinner table at this very moment, a servant removing the dishes.
Where now is Rose?
I see her come on a bicycle, a cane basket on the handlebars. The brakes mustn’t be working for she has to jump off and run alongside the bicycle. Her face glows with happiness as she pulls away the newspaper that covers the basket. It is full of dark plums, and eggs wrapped in pieces of newspaper are packed here and there among the plums. Behind her there shivers an enormous breath of pure sky.
‘Yes,’ my father shouted. ‘Where do we go from here?’
‘I suppose we might as well try and stay put for a time,’ I answered, and when he looked at me sharply I added, for the sake of my own peace, ‘that is, until things settle a bit, and we can find our feet again, and think.’
The Conversion of William Kirkwood
There might well have been no other room in the big stone house but the kitchen, as the rain beat on the slates and windows, swirled about the yard outside. Dampened coats were laid against the foot of the back door, and the panelled oak door that led to the rest of the house was locked because of the faulty handle, the heavy key in the lock. A wood fire flickered in the open door of the huge old range which was freshly black-leaded, its brass fittings gleaming; and beside it Annie May Moran, servant to the Kirkwoods since she was fourteen, sat knitting a brown jersey for her daughter, occasionally bending down to feed logs to the range from a cane basket by her side. At the corner of the long deal table closest to the fire, William Kirkwood sat with her daughter Lucy, helping the child with school exercises. They were struggling more with one another than with algebra, the girl resisting every enticement to understand the use of symbols, but the man was endlessly patient. He spread coins out on the table, then an array of fresh walnuts, and finally took green cooking apples from a bucket. Each time he moved the coins, the nuts, the apples into separate piles she watched him with the utmost suspicion, but each time was forced into giving the correct answer to the simple subtraction by being made to count; but once he substituted x and y for the coins and fruit no number of demonstrations could elicit an answer, and when pressed she avoided understanding with wild guesses.
‘You are just being stubborn, Lucy. Sticking your heels in, as usual,’ he was forced at length to concede to her.
‘It’s all right for you, but I’m no good at maths,’ she responded angrily.
‘It’s not that you’re no good. It’s that you don’t want to understand. I don’t know what’s wrong with you. It seems almost a perversity.’
‘I can’t understand.’
‘Now Lucy. You can’t talk to Master William like that,’ Annie May said. She still called him Master William though he was now forty-five and last of the Kirkwoods.
‘It’s all right, Annie May. It’d be worth it all if we could get her to understand. She refuses to understand.’
‘It’s all right for you to say that, Master William.’ Lucy laughed.
‘Now, what’s next?’ he hurried her. ‘English and church history?’
‘English and catechism notes for tomorrow,’ she corrected.
English she loved, and they raced through the exercises. She was tall and strong for her thirteen years and had boyish good looks. When they came to the doctrinal notes, it was plain that he was taking more interest in the exercises than the pupil. Through helping Lucy with these exercises in the evenings, he had first become interested in the Catholic Church. In a way, it had been the first step to his impending conversion. He smiled with pure affection on the girl as she tidied all her books into her leather satchel, and after the three had tea and buttered bread together she came into his arms to kiss him goodnight with the same naturalness as on every night since she had been a small child and he had read her stories. When Annie May unlocked the panelled door, a rush of cold met them from the rest of the house, and she hurried to take the hot water jar and the lighted candle in its blue tin holder to show the child to her upstairs room.
After Eddie Mac, herdsman to the Kirkwoods, as his father had been herdsman before that, had sold the pick of the Kirkwood cattle on the Green in Boyle and disappeared into England with the money, leaving Annie May pregnant, it was old William, William Kirkwood’s father, who persuaded Annie May to stay and have the child in the house.
‘Why should you have to go to England where you’ll know nobody? You did no wrong. Stay and have the child here. We don’t have to care what people think. We’ll be glad of the child.’
Annie May never once thought of calling the girl by her own name, and she was named Lucy after a favourite aunt of the Kirkwoods. The girl grew strong and healthy, with her father’s dark hair. She loved to shout in the big empty rooms of the stone house and to laugh with hands on hips as her voice was echoed back, the laugh then echoing hollowly again, voice and laugh closer to the clipped commanding accents of the Kirkwoods than to her mother’s soft obscured speech, vowel melting into vowel. The old man and child were inseparable. Every good day they could be seen together going down to the orchard to look at the bees, she, clattering away like an alarmed bird, trying to hold his hand and hop on one foot at the same time, he, slow by her side, inscrutable behind the beekeeper’s veil. And it was Lucy he sent to find William that final day when he wasn’t able to lift the tops of the hives, imagining that they had all been stuck down by the bees. It was a sunny spring day. The bees were making cleansing flights from the hives.
‘I can’t understand it, William,’ the beekeeper explained to his son when Lucy brought him to the hives.
‘If the bees have stuck the roofs down, Father, we may need a hive tool. I’ll try to twist them and ease them up slowly,’ William said, but to his consternation found that the roof was loose in his hands and lifted easily. ‘They’re not stuck at all. They’re quite free.’ He began to laugh, only to fall into amazed silence when he saw that his father had grown too weak to lift the few boards of painted pine. Gently he led the old man and puzzled child back to the house.
‘You must have caught something, Father. A few days in bed and you’ll be fine.’
During that same windless spring night in which a light rain fell around the big house and its trees like a veil, the old beekeeper sank steadily, and near morning slipped as gently out of life as he had passed through.
Annie May wept bitterly for the old man, but Lucy was too young for grief and turned naturally to William. She started to go with him everywhere, about the sheds and out into the fields. She was as good as any boy at driving sheep and cattle. Annie May tried to put some curb on these travels, but Lucy was headstrong and hated housework. Besides, not only did William seem to like the girl’s company in the fields but he often found her extremely useful. It was as a gesture of some recompense to Annie May for stealing the child’s hours in the fields — as well as that of a naturally pedagogic nature — that led him to help Lucy from her early years with her school exercises in the winter evenings.