The hens lived in a wire run behind the cowshed. Mag knelt in the soiled straw and reached inside the little hut where the nests were. How odd the eggs seemed with their smooth self-sufficiency and perfect form among the crooked posts and torn wire, straw, shit, Mag's big red hands. She lifted them into the brown paper-bag with care, almost with reverence, while those ludicrous birds pranced around us, outraged and quivering. As the bag filled she reached deeper into the hut, and then paused and frowned and slowly withdrew her arm. She opened her fist between us, and there on her palm a tiny yellow chick waggled its stumpy wings and emitted a feeble cheep. We stared at the little creature, astonished that life could exist in that minuscule form, and suddenly Mag thrust it back into the hut and we fled, disturbed and obscurely embarrassed.
We went into the dairy, a long stone room with white walls and a whiter ceiling. The vacant milking stalls were whitewashed, the bare floor scrubbed. The light through the little windows was limpid and delicate. In here a silence reigned such as I have never experienced anywhere else, something like that frail nothingness which persists long after a churchbell has dropped its last chime into the pale upper airs of morning. Mag took the lid from the churn and ladled milk into my can, great dollops of it, filling the white room with a white fragrance. She seemed preoccupied and feverish. She splashed milk on her black laceless boots and gave a brief frantic squeal of laughter.
It seems incredible that we did not speak during all that followed, but I can remember no words, only glances and advances, sudden retreats like complex dance steps, and, perhaps in place of words, small modulations, readjustments in the silence between us. Mag offered me the can. I tried to take it. She would not let go. I stepped back. She put the can down on the floor. I cleared my throat. She made a determined advance, and I dived aside very neatly and fussed with the bag of eggs, placing it carefully on the floor beside the can so that nothing should break, terrible if an egg should break, smashed yolk on the stone, that yellow ooze! She reached a hand toward my trousers. I was terrified.
She lay down on her back in one of the milking stalls and I knelt before her, red-faced, with pains in my knees, grinning foolishly, with that lugubrious puce stalk, my faintly pulsating blunt sword of honour, sticking out of my trousers. Mag yanked her smock up over her enormous bubs and clawed at me, trying to pull me down on top of her. I stared at her shaggy black bush and would not, could not move. The situation was wholly farcical. She moaned beseechingly and lay down on her back again, turned up her eyes until only the whites were visible, and opened wide her mottled legs, and it was as though she had split open, had come asunder under my eyes. I knelt and goggled at the frightful wound, horrified, while my banner drooped its livid head and Mag groaned and writhed. My hand shook as I reached it forward between her gaping knees and, with my eyes closed, put my finger into her. She gasped and giggled, gasped again and thrashed her arms wildly. I opened my eyes and looked at my hand. Part of me had entered another world. The notion left me breathless. How soft and silky she was in there, how immaculate. She took my hand in hers and slowly pushed my finger out and in again, out and in, smiling to herself a strange and secret smile, and all at once I was filled with compassion. This was her mortal treasure which I touched, her sad secret, and I could only pity her, and myself also, poor frail forked creatures that we were. She sat up at last, and I leaned forward to kiss her, to plant my tenderness on her cheek. She reared away from me, gave a snort of contempt at my mawkishness, and rose and fled across the yard.
I stood in the doorway and wondered if she would return. She did not. Out in the field the caravans were ranged in a circle on the rolling green, tiny at that distance, toylike, gay. The wind blew. The smell of the sea mingled oddly here with the heavy fragrance of milk. Two of the eggs were smashed. I gathered up those that remained. The cream was rising already in the can. I went out into the yard. Violets and cowshit, my life has been ever thus.
29
I HAVE GIVEN the impression perhaps that wherever we stopped we were greeted with a rousing cheer of welcome, or at the very worst indifference. It was not always like that. Sometimes indifference turned into a sullen resentment which seemed to spring paradoxically from part envy, part moral disapproval. That phenomenon necessitated a rapid departure, so rapid indeed that our goings then looked like high farce. A fast getaway was imperative too when our audiences went to the other extreme and worked themselves into such a paroxysm of excitement that we were all, performers, props, stage, everything, in danger of being trampled by stampeding boots and horny bare feet. In Wexford once a full house displayed its appreciation so strenuously that it brought the house down, the tent collapsed, and in the melee that followed two tiny tots and an octogenarian were smothered. You could not have seen our heels for the dust.
Official disapproval was worse. Some rat-faced fellow would arrive with a writ just as the last patrons had paid their pennies and the performance was about to begin, and then, feeling foolish in our makeup and our costumes, we would shuffle our feet outside the tent while Silas in the middle of the field vainly argued our case, acting out in dumb show before the queen's man our mute bafflement and resentment. I think it was better, I mean less dispiriting, when they swept aside the formalities and sent against us a squad of soldiers tramping behind a mounted officer, who placed an elegant hand on his knee and, leaning discreetly down, quietly ordered us to move. There was no arguing with those gleaming bared bayonets. I am thinking now of the last time they put the skids under us, the last time before the country became engrossed with disaster and no one bothered about us anymore.
It was a bright day in early summer, I remember it. We were campfed on a hill above a little town with a bridge and a glittering river, narrow streets, a steeple. The first performance the night before had been well received, and we rose in the morning with that calm elation which always followed a successful premiere. Magnus caught a couple of rabbits, and I was sent with them to Angel. I found her in the big caravan, standing by the table with her sleeves rolled up, slicing a lump of turnip. Silas was there too, collar and braces undone, bearded in lather, shaving himself before a bit of cracked mirror. He lifted the razor in a greeting.
‘Gabriel, my boy, good morrow.’
Angel took the still warm furry dead brutes and slit their bellies. The vivid entrails spilled across the table, magenta and purple polyps, tender pink cords, bright knots of blood, giving off a nutty brown odour. She hacked off the paws, chopping through bone, lopped off the head, peeled the skin. Into the big black pot it went, that painfully nude flesh, the turnip too, sliced carrots, parsnip, thyme and other aromatic things. Silas, beating the strop with the razor, lifted his head and sniffed, the wings of his red nose fluttering delicately.
‘Ah,’ he sighed fervently, ‘ahh, grub.’
Angel said nothing. Her hair was tied back in a greasy pigtail. An odd woman, our Angel. She rarely spoke, rarely even looked directly at anyone, but seemed always preoccupied by some abiding and malicious joke. If she did look at one it was with a brief but intense and probing stare, one eyebrow lifted, lips compressed. When she spoke, her words were scarred by elisions, run together into one sound like a bark, the tone jangling with derision and black amusement. Sometimes she would laugh without apparent cause, a rumbling hiccupping noise like that of something soft and heavy rolling about in a barrel. In spite of her seeming intangibility she presided over all the doings of the circus with a mysterious strength, her massive trunk, with that flat yellowish face set on the front of it, planted among us like an implacable and ribald totem. I found her unsettling and kept out of her way when I could, for she seemed to me to personify, more than any of the others, the capriciousness, mockery and faint menace on which the circus was founded. She wiped her bloodied hands on a rag.