‘Get your things together. Josie will fix you up. Train is at eight in the morning. And Gabriel. O, nothing-’
At that word he bit his lip, and suddenly grinned, gaily, guiltily, and hastily retreated, closing the door in my face. I turned, and another hand descended on my shoulder.
19
IT WAS AUNT MARTHA, very distraught, her hair standing on end, her lips quivering.
‘Well?’ she snarled, glaring at me accusingly out of her cat's eyes. ‘What was all that about? Speak! And where's Michael? You little beast, sneaking around, sticking your nose in. You're a sly little boy, do you know that, do you? I saw you with the blotting paper.’ This was a reference to my effort to read the smudges on Papa's green blotter by holding it before a mirror one day after I had overheard talk of his famous will. I thought I had not been observed. It hardly mattered, since all the mirror gave me back were blots turned the right way about but still illegible. Aunt Martha's talons sank deeper into my shoulder. ‘Little lord of the manor, you are, smirking there. Young Lord Snot. Well we'll see about that too, let me tell you. I asked you where he is, didn't I, now where is he?’
I smiled at her sweetly and said nothing, not a word. I had to admit that this new concern for her son and his whereabouts interested me, but it would have needed more than interest for me to speak of her then. She released me, and with a little gasp of fury turned and strode away down the hall. Later I saw her wandering distracted up and down the lawn, calling Michael's name and wringing her hands. By nightfall he had still not returned and she dragged Papa into the hall to telephone the police.
‘But, but,’ he spluttered, wriggling in her grasp. He was quite drunk. She propped him against the wall and thrust the phone into his hands, and he mumbled into it, looking at her with pained, injured eyes.
‘I can't get through, the lines must be down.’ He glowered at the smug black machine. ‘The bastards,’ he said cryptically.
Aunt Martha began to cry.
‘O god O god O god!’ she wailed.
Papa bared his teeth.
‘Ah for the love of Jesus, Martha, the boy is probably off in a ditch somewhere with some tart. Have a bit of sense, woman. Now listen-’
‘Listen! Listen to what? Jesus Christ, you listen. You don't know him, Joe, you don't know him. If he brings that crowd here-’
‘Ah, shite!’ He caught sight of me, and giggled suddenly and said to her, ‘There's the one you should be worrying about. He's the one.’
Aunt Martha's swollen face collapsed completely, as though a fine lace of supports behind it had crumbled.
‘Fifteen years!’ she wailed. ‘Fifteen years you kept me stuck in that place, no money, no friends, and you only coming when you felt like it. I gave you my life and you ruined it! You broke your word, you cheated us. O god I was a fool. Damn you damn you damn you!’
He pushed her out of his way and staggered toward the library, waving his arms as though a cloud of flies were pursuing him. Martha sat down slowly on the chair beside the hatstand and wept into her hands as I had never seen her weep before, for these tears were real. After a while she lifted her head and looked at me with anguish and hatred.
‘You,’ she said softly. ‘O you won, didn't you, you little bastard. I wish to Christ you had never been born.’
I climbed to my room. A low whistle rose from the garden, and when I opened the window and leaned out I saw a dark figure standing below on the lawn. It was Michael. He cupped his hands around his mouth and hissed,
‘They have your sister, Gabriel.’
I heard him laugh, and he walked backward slowly and disappeared into the trees. I closed the window and sat on the bed for a long time without moving, and then took from the wardrobe a rucksack. Dazed moths staggered out of the folds. I was on my way.
20
IN THE EARLY HOURS of the morning I was awakened by distant cries and, most incongruous of sounds, the clanging of a bell. A red light danced on the wall above my bed. I lay for a while without stirring, fuddled with sleep. A voice which seemed to be in the room with me said, very calmly, here it comes, and the bell banged louder, and there was the rattle of hoofs and the grate of steel-rimmed wheels on gravel. I struggled up and wrapped a blanket around my shoulders. The glasshouses glowed with ruby light. The hayshed was on fire. Rosie-the bitch!
I do not see the stairs, but I recall the shock of cold tiles under my bare feet when I reached the hall. The front door was open back to the wall, and there Mama and Aunt Martha stood confronting each other, very strange, very still, like stone figures guarding the doorway. They were both fully dressed, and I realised immediately that I had found them at the end of a long and bitter quarrel. Mama was smiling. That smile.
‘Dear Martha,’ she said, ‘I've told you, he's in the shed down there.’
Aunt Martha bared her teeth.
‘Mad bitch,’ she said softly. The words slipped from her lips like a silken red ribbon of hatred. She swept out to the porch, where she halted and stared back at us over her shoulder with an impossibly melodramatic look, eyes smouldering and nostrils flared. She disappeared. Mama touched my cheek. Behind her there was wind, a frozen moon, black trees. Suddenly I had an irrational desire to strike her. Instead I pushed her aside and ran down the steps, across the garden. The blanket clutched at my legs, and I must have fallen more than once, for in the morning my knees were crusted with dried blood and bits of grit. The fire wagon was parked at the corner of the garden, its two black horses stamping the grass uneasily and rolling their eyes. Dim figures were busy in the glasshouses, and a white canvas hose, swelling and writhing like a stranded eel, crawled through a smashed frame and down the path toward the rear of the house, where I followed it.
The shed was a glorious sight. Enormous scarlet flames poured through the door and the windows, lighting with an evil glow the underside of the tumbling pall of black smoke above the roof. In the open yard squat firemen in outsize uniforms were running up and down and shouting. There seemed to be a horde of them. Two stalwarts grappled valiantly with the gasping hose and sprayed a stream of water on the cobbles, the empty sties, even on the burning shed, and once on the figure of Aunt Martha, a tragic queen, standing below the flames with her arms flung wide, her face livid in the glare. The fire roared like a wounded animal, but it could not drown out her piercing crv.
‘Michael P
She dropped her arms and set off toward the shed with an odd broken stride, her hands flapping. Josie and a fireman made a lunge at her and missed, and the fireman darted after her, tapped her on the shoulder, and then, beaten by the heat, turned and scampered back to his mates. I thought that he giggled, like a child playing tig. It was an extraordinary moment, in which it seemed that the whole yard was about to erupt into guffaws.
Aunt Martha halted outside the burning doorway, and remained there, apparently at a loss, for a very long time, and Papa, looming up behind me like a huge pale spider in his long woolly underwear, gave a grunt of astonishment as she lifted her arm to brush the sweat from her forehead with a languid, lazy, stylised gesture of weariness. Acting still! Her dress burst into flames then, and she trotted on through the door. Her wild, ululating cry was the perfect counterpart of her rippling figure as it drifted, so it seemed, slowly, dreamily, wrapped in an aureole of light, into the furnace. Papa opened his mouth and bawled, angrily, terribly, and covered his face with his hands, and in that theatrical pose I left him, as a fireman, no doubt acting out some cherished notion of heroism, grabbed me up out of the path of a non-existent danger and went pounding off around the house to the front door, where Mama still stood, still smiling placidly.