“There there,” I said, like a fool, helplessly, “there there.” I felt like one who has carelessly let something drop, who realises too late, with the pieces smashed all around him, how precious a thing it was, after all. A flash of lightning lit the window, and the rain started up again with a soft whoosh. She wiped her nose on the back of her hand. The tears still flowed, as if there would be no end, but she was no longer aware of them. “I suppose you’re sick and tired of me,” she said, and lay down, and turned on her side, and was suddenly asleep, leaving me alone to nurse my shock and my cold heart.
WE MUST assume that Edward did go that night into town, and not to the village, as was later to be suggested. The evidence against the latter possibility is twofold. First, there was the direction in which I had heard him drive away. Had he been headed for the village, the sound of the car would have faded quickly as it dropped below the brow of the hill; instead of which, it was audible for a considerable time, a fact consistent with the motor travelling westward, along the main road, the slope of which is much less pronounced than that of the hill road, leading to the village. Second, there is the quite considerable amount of drink which, it would later be obvious, he had consumed. At that stage the publicans of the village, both in the hotel, and in the public houses with which the place is generously endowed, knew better than to serve him the endless double whiskeys which he would demand.
However, his going to town — to coin a phrase — will not account for the considerable lapse of time between closing time (11:30 p.m., summer hours) and his return to Ferns at approximately 2:30 a.m. As to what occurred in those “lost” hours, we can only speculate. Did he meet a friend (did he have any friends?) to whose house they might have repaired? The town does not boast a bawdy-house,[1] therefore that possibility can be eliminated. The quayfront then, the parked car, its lights aglow, the radio humming forlornly to itself, and from within the darkened windscreen the stark suicidal stare? Could he have sat there, alone, for some three hours? Perhaps he slept. One would wish him that blessing.
I can’t go on. I’m not a historian anymore.
The first thing I noticed when I woke was that Ottilie was gone. The bed was warm, the pillow still damp from her tears. Then I heard the car, labouring up the drive in first gear. I must have dropped back to sleep for a moment, the voices raised in the distance seemed part of a dream. Then I opened my eyes and lay listening in the darkness, my heart pounding. The silence had the quality of disaster: it was less a silence than an aftermath. I went to the window. Lights were coming on in the house, one after another, as if someone were running dementedly from switch to switch. I pulled on trousers and a sweater. The night was pitch-black and still, smelling of laurel and sodden earth. The grass tickled my bare ankles. The car was slewed across the drive, like a damaged animal, its engine running. The front door of the house stood open. There was no one to be seen.
I found Edward in the drawing-room. He was sitting unconscious on the floor with his back against the couch, his head lolling on a cushion, his hands resting palm upward at his sides. A mandala of blood-streaked vomit was splashed on the carpet between his splayed legs. The crotch of his trousers was stained where he had soiled himself. I stood and gaped at him, disgust and triumph jostling in me for position. Triumph, oh yes. Suddenly, through opposing doors, Charlotte and Ottilie swept in, like mechanical figures in a clock tower. They saw me and stopped. “I heard voices,” I said. Charlotte blinked. She wore an old plaid dressing-gown. Her feet were bare. Less Cranach now than El Greco. We were quite still, all three, and then everyone began to speak at once.
“I couldn’t get through,” Ottilie said.
Charlotte put a hand to her forehead. “What?”
“There was no reply.”
“Oh.”
“We’ll have to—”
“Did you ring the right—”
“What?”
In the hall a hand appeared on the stairs, a small bare foot, an eye.
“I’ll have to go into town,” Ottilie said. “Christ.” She looked at me. Her face was still raw from weeping. I turned away. I turned away. “Get back to bed, you!” she cried, and the figure on the stairs vanished. She went out, slamming the door, and in a moment we heard the car depart. Gravel from the spinning tyres sprayed the window. That wall, see, down there. Charlotte sighed. “She’s gone for. .” She thought a moment, frowning; “. . for the doctor.” She walked about the room as in a dream, picking up things, holding them for a moment, as if to verify something, and then putting them down again. Edward belched, or perhaps it was a groan. She paused, and stood motionless, listening; she did not look at him. Then she went to the switch by the door and carefully, as if it were an immensely complicated and necessary operation, turned off the main lights. A lamp on a low table by the couch was still burning. She crossed the room and sat down on a high-backed chair, facing the window. It all had the look of a ritual she had performed many times before. Something, the lamplight perhaps, the curious toylike look of things, the helpless gestures meticulously performed, stirred an ancient memory in me of another room, where, a small boy, I had played with two girl cousins while above our heads adult footsteps came and went, pacing out the ceremony of someone’s dying.
“Is it raining, I wonder,” Charlotte murmured. I think she had forgotten I was there. I went forward softly and stood behind her. In the black window her face was reflected. I looked down at the pale defenceless parting of her hair; in the opening of her dressing-gown I could see the gentle slope of a breast. How can I describe to you that moment, in lamplight, at dead of night, the smell of vomit mingled with the milky perfume of her hair, and that gross thing sitting there, grotesque and comic, like a murdered pavement artist, and no world around us anymore, only the vast darkness, stretching away. Everything was possible, everything was allowed, as in a mad dream. I could feel her warmth against my thighs. I looked at her reflection in the glass; my face must be there too, for her.
“Mrs Lawless,” I said, “this can’t go on, you can’t be expected to put up with this.” My voice was thick, a kind of fat whine. Tell her something, tell her a fact, a fragment from the big world, a coloured stone, a bit of clouded green glass. Young men of the Ipo tribe in the Amazon basin pledge themselves with the nail parings of their ancestors. Oh god. The first little flames of panic were nibbling at me. “Listen,” I said, “listen I’ll give you my address, my phone number, so that if ever you want. . if ever you need. .” I put my hands on her shoulders, and a hot shock zipped along my nerves, as if it were not cloth, flesh and bone I were holding, but the terminals of her very being, and “Charlotte,” I whispered, “Oh Charlotte!” and there was a lump thick as a heart in my throat, and tears in my eyes, and the Ipo drums began to beat, and all over the rain forest lurid birds with yellow beaks and little bright black eyes were screeching.
She stirred, and turned up her face to me, blinking. “I’m sorry,” she said, “I wasn’t listening. What did you say?”
We heard the car returning. So much for the wall of death. The doctor was an ill-tempered old man, still in his pyjamas, with a raincoat thrown over his shoulders. He glared at me, as if the whole affair were my fault. “Where is he? What? Why in the name of Christ didn’t you put him to bed?” Gruff, good with children, old women would dote on him. He knelt down, grunting, and felt Edward’s pulse. “Where was he drinking?”
1
I have since learned that this contention is mistaken; cf Polkolski, F. X., Interface Tribal Situations in Southeast Ireland: a structuralist study (M. I. T. 1980).