It was not so long after Fr Gaunt's 'visit' that I was wandering over the further dunes of Strandhill beach on a crisp, moonlit night. Since he had come to see me I had felt very confined in the iron hut, as if his presence were somehow still in the room. I waited with no trace of patience every night for darkness, which at least gave me the liberty of the dunes and the marshland.
I had no desire to be seen by anyone, or talk to anyone. Sometimes out walking I would be in such a peculiar state of mind that I would rush home at the merest hint of another person. Indeed, there were times I used to fancy I actually saw people that possibly weren't there, little tricks of the marram grass or whatnot, the rise of a marsh bird – in particular I seemed to be 'haunted' by a figure that sometimes appeared, seemed to appear, at the far edges of where I was, in what might have been a black suit, and what might have been a brown hat, but even when I gathered my courage and walked towards him, the few times I thought I saw him, he instantly disappeared. But such matters were the nature of those days.
I remember this night in particular because it is probably the single most peculiar thing I ever witnessed, having seen a few peculiar things in my time.
I have to be very careful with these 'memories' because I realise there are a few vivid remembrances from this troubled time that I know in my heart cannot have happened. But I don't think this night is one of them, improbable though it was.
It is a measure of my shame that instead of climbing to the top of the hill of sand itself, which I had previously loved to do, though it was at the risk of bumping into, even stumbling over, the courting couples, I had walked out right to the edge of everything, where a deep narrow river poured into the sea, and in the daytime was a sort of luncheonette for seabirds.
I stood on the sand. The tide was out a way, and it was all perfectly quiet. Far off to the right of Knocknarea, some twisting little road entertained the lights of an unseen motorcar, appearing and disappearing. But it was too far away to hear it.
There was no wind and the sky was enormous and that enamel blue the moonlight makes. It was very easy to suppose that one human creature was the least important element there. The sea stood off in acre after acre of private, dreamy water.
Then in the distance, that tiny growling. I actually looked behind me, thinking there might be a rabid dog or some such on the beach. But no, the sound was coming from far off to the right of me. I looked towards it, all along the empty beach, to the small lights of the few buildings on the strand about an eighth of a mile away. There I saw a sort of line of piercing yellow light begin to grow on the horizon, a horizon half land and half sea.
I thought God was coming to cancel me out just as surely as Fr Gaunt had. I don't know why I thought that, except, I felt that guilty.
The thin glimmering line grew and grew. The noise also increased, and under my bare feet I thought I felt the sand tremble, tremble deep under me, as if something were rising up through the ground. The lights widened and grew taller, and then it was roaring, gathering and gathering, and then it was what looked like the edge of a flying carpet of monsters, and then that noise had grown into the noise of an enormous waterfall, and I was looking up, indeed like a mad woman, certainly feeling as mad as a hatter, and fuller and fuller, bigger and bigger, came the noise and the lights, till I could see the round bellies of individual parts of it, and metal noses, and gigantic whirrings, and it was airplanes, dozens of them, maybe hundreds, all animal-like in the moonlight, but bizarrely, with the little thin windows visible at the front, and perhaps it was really madness, but I thought I could see little heads and faces, and it was all in formation as they say, grim, catastrophic, like something at the end of the world. And because the airplanes were all together, their noise was increased truly to biblical proportions, something out of Revelation, and the sky was filled with it over my head, metal, light and ruckus, and they poured over me, flying so close to the water that the power of the engines sucked up the water, tore the water up in torn sheets, that fell back to the surface with a swishing of snakes, and I could feel the airplanes pull at me, pull at the beach, trying to tear us from our places, trying to pull the brains out of my skull, the eyes out of my sockets, and then they were pouring over me, line after line, were there fifty, a hundred, a hundred and fifty? – for full minutes pouring over, and then beginning to draw away further, leaving a huge vacuum it seemed in the sky, leaving a silence almost more painful than the noise, as if those mysterious airplanes had taken the oxygen out of the Sligo air. And off they went, rattling and ravelling the Irish coast.
Some days later I was out on my porch, fussing over my roses. It was an activity that even in my distress brought a tincture of comfort. But then it is clear to me that any effort at gardening, even a haphazard, stop-go one such as mine was, is an effort to drag to earth the colours and the importances of heaven. It was cold that day and there were goosebumps raised along my bare arms. The very existences of the roses, not yet seen, furled so tightly and mysteriously in their green buds, was making me almost dizzy.
I looked back over my right shoulder because I heard someone moving along the road. Someone or something, it might have been an old donkey scuffling along, to judge by the noises. I didn't really want to be seen by man nor beast, even though there was such comfort in my roses. Maybe this year there would be a new look to them, not quite 'St Anne's' or Malmaison', but becoming slowly Sligo, 'Souvenir de Sligo', a memory of Sligo. But it wasn't a donkey, it was a man, a very strange man, I thought, because his hair was cut tight to his head in a sort of frizz, like a Negro jazzman, and his suit of clothes was a strange dark ashen colour. No, it wasn't a suit of clothes, more of a uniform of some kind. Even his face looked queerly blue. And to my astonishment I saw that it was Jack. Of course, that would explain the uniform, and him off in India wasn't it, fighting in the king's name – but if he was off in India what in the world was he doing in Strandhill, No-Man's-Land that it was?
And then it seemed suddenly colder than the mere cold of the treacherous Irish seaside day, and there seemed to be goosebumps added to my goosebumps. Wasn't this odd apparition my enemy now?
'Jack?' I called out anyhow, throwing caution to the wind. I had the mad thought that he might have come to help me. But what had happened to him? Now he was closer and even odder, if I didn't know better I would say he was singed, he was veritably singed.
The man stopped on the path, maybe astonished I had spoken to him. In fact he looked frightened.
'Jack McNulty?' I said, as if that might be helpful. Surely he knew his own name. Now I'm sure I looked as uncertain as he did.
He spoke like a man who has not spoken for a few days, the words stumbling out of his lip.
'What?' he said. 'What, what?'
He looked so solemnly scared I went down the path to the gate and stood nearer to him. I thought he might bolt away down the road, like a donkey after all. But I was just a small woman in a cotton dress.
'You're not Jack McNulty, are you?' I said. 'You certainly look like him.'
'Who are you?' he said, and gazed back towards the sea like he feared an ambush.
'I'm no one,' I said, meaning no one for him to fear. 'I'm Roseanne, Tom's wife – as was maybe.'
'Oh, I heard about you,' he said, but without the expected censure. He suddenly seemed very glad to be talking to me, to be meeting me. He raised his right hand a moment as if he meant to shake one of mine, but he let it drop. 'Yes.'