‘Good evening, friends.’
None replied, but at the back someone laughed, a glass chimed, and the piper, a cadaverous fellow with a shock of lank black hair hanging over one eye, struck up another tune, the bodhran joined in with its truculent booming, and the conversation started up again. We made our way to the bar. The publican was a tubby little man with a red nose and a long apron.
‘Grand evening.’
‘Indeed it is,’ said Silas. ‘I think, ah, a glass of porter all round, and a small one for myself, to oil the j oints. And you'll have one yourself?’
‘Ah no.’
‘Ah do.’
‘Well…’
‘Your health.’
‘Good luck to you, sir.’
That was my first taste of porter. Frightful stuff, I must admit, for I am no hard-drinking broth of a boy, but, taken there, that brew, black and bitter, harbinger of a wild mordant gaiety, seemed to me, and still seems, to carry the savour of the country itself, this odd little land. I stood with an elbow on the bar behind me and a heel hooked on the footrail, trying to make the glass look at home in my unpractised hand, and surveyed the room. The topers were dressed in their Sunday best. It must have been a holiday, or a holyday, perhaps some feast of the Queen of May. Much raucous laughter tumbled out of gap-toothed mouths, and the voices and the strange macaronic talk clashed in the smoky air like the sounds of battle. A fat woman with a red face was copiously weeping, rocking back and forth on a stool between two sheepish, speechless men. The cadaverous piper, hunched over his reeds, swung into a gay dance tune, but his long face registered only a deeper melancholy. There is in the happiest of that music a profound thread of grief, never broken, equivalent to but not springing from the sustained drone note, an implacable mournful-ness, and so, although the jig made the glasses sing, the fat woman wept and wept, rocking her sadness to sleep, and the two old men, with their hands on their knees and their jaws munching, sat and stared, with nothing to say.
Maybe I was already drunk, no telling what a sip of porter will do to you, but one minute Silas and the rest were standing beside me, the next they were scattered about the room, joining the party. Silas was engaged in what, from the angle of his chin, appeared to be a furtive conversation with a red-haired boy or small man whose face was hidden from me. Ida had borrowed the bodhran from its master, a boy with buck teeth who hovered awkwardly behind her, shuffling his feet, his face clenched in a grin of embarrassment. Mario, on the whistle, joined the piper in his song. Magnus and Sybil, with the sleeping and swaddled Sophie wedged between them, were huddled on a crowded bench in the corner where a decrepit little old man with no teeth and extraordinary knees was dancing, capering and prancing wildly, his boots banging the flagstones. Rainbird conjured cards out of the air to the delight and fright of two wide-eyed, pretty, painfully shy little girls. The golden children were, ominously, nowhere to be seen. Only Ada, in a sulk, stayed by me, slumped against the bar.
I began to play a game, idly at first and then with some excitement. I would close my eyes and then, every few seconds or so, blink rapidly. Not much of a game? Each time I blinked I carried back into the gloom an image of arrested movement, the old man frozen in mid-air, Silas with his arm uplifted, the fat woman with a finger stuck in her red eye, and it came to me with the clarity and beauty of a mathematical statement that all movement is composed of an infinity of minute stillnesses, not one of which is exactly the same as any other and yet not so different either. It was enormously pleasing, this discovery of fixity within continuity. I elbowed my way outside, and out there in the fragrant darkness and the silence, yes, it was the same, I mean the same principle of continually fluctuating stasis held good, but the shifts and stillnesses here were vast and difficult to distinguish, but I distinguished them. And I saw something else, namely that this was how I lived, glancing every now and then out of darkness and catching sly time in the act, but such glimpses were rare and brief and of hardly any consequence, for time, time would go on anyway, without my vigilance.
Soon my rhapsodising under the glimmering poplars was interrupted when the others came tumbling out of the pub. The children, I gathered, had been found doing something frightful in the jakes, and they and their keepers were ejected. Silas peered at me in the dark, swaying and belching.
‘Come along, Caligula, come along.’
Later, lying in my bunk in the caravan, with Mario near me emitting a kind of low hum as he sorted through his file of phantasmal ladies, I thought about the pub and the people, the piper, the weeping woman, the ancient dancer, and I felt stirring deep within me a strange and unexpected emotion which as yet I could not name, which soon settled back into hiding, and then in drowsiness my thoughts wandered afar over the dark fields and lakes, the rivers, the murmuring woods. On the point of sleep my mind made a last effort to stay awake, and my foot jerked, my teeth clenched themselves, and the essence of all I had seen that day, spring rain on the road, a black ship, curlews crying, the residue of all this spun on the last remaining tip of wakefulness like one of Mario's discs on its stick, and as I sank down into the dark I carried one word with me, that word which gives me so much trouble, which is, time.
28
AT THE END of the spring we stopped in a little seaside village in the south. It was a pleasant enough place, sharply divided between the whitewashed hovels of the natives at one end and, at the other, handsome holiday villas perched on promontories or retiring behind cypresses, not a few of them unshuttered and loud with children even in this early part of the year. We camped in a meadow behind the beach. The weather was glorious, days full of sun and glass, soft black nights with stars. At dawn, as the mist lifted, rabbits came out of the ground and scampered heedlessly under our wheels, into Magnus's traps. We feasted on stew and new potatoes, buttermilk and brown bread. The circus drew capacity audiences. It was a good time. We should have known, with all this, that our carefree days were numbered, that our happiness was ending. For we were happy, in our way.
There were eggs too, and jugs of thick milk, purchased from a farm nearby. There I went each morning, barefoot through the dewy drenched grass, swiping at butterflies with the milkcan. The farmhouse was a crooked affair, long and low, in need of new thatch, with tiny windows and a warped green door. Violets flourished in the filth of the yard, among the cowflop. The hall was suffused with furry yellow light, tranquil and still. I stood in the silence curling my toes on the cool tiles and waited for the daughter of the house. The doorway framed a patch of yard where brilliant sunlight shone on stylised chickens, a mongrel scratching its ear, two sparrows staring at a breadcrumb. It was odd to be inside a house again, to step across a solid floor and hear no axle creak, no horse stir. Mag came down the stairs at the end of the hall, her arms lifted, hands doing something to her hair at the back.
‘Uh,’ she said sleepily.
She went ahead of me across the yard tugging her brown sacklike smock into something close to her own shape underneath it. Mag was a squat heavy girl, all bone and muscle, a year or two older than I, with fuzzy red hair and a button nose and hands like cut steaks. It will seem extraordinary, but when I saw her the first time my heart skipped a beat, that hair, those odd blue eyes, although how I could picture her, even for a moment, in a white dress under a lilac tree I cannot say. Still, I was no great judge of female beauty, and I imagine that Mag appeared to me as pretty as any other. I was at that time an innocent lad to whom the dark damp side of life was still another country. I began my journey a virgin, and ended it still unsullied, but I am not ignorant of certain facts, and if here they create a somewhat twisted view of the basic acrobatic duet I insist that the warp is in the facts and not my recounting of them.