‘She’s Irish, then.’
‘No. There’s no ancestral pull. People talk about things like that but… no, nothing.’
‘Well, you are. With a name like Scully.’
‘Well, bog-Irish maybe a long way back. Desert Irish by now.’
‘Ha, desert Irish!’ The postie stomped his feet.
The fire hissed and spat. The walls steamed and the house smelled like a locker room hosed down with fish blood. Scully looked at the black work cracks in the Irishman’s fingers.
‘D’you know where I could hire a cement mixer? I thought there might be a place in town.’
‘Ce-ment mixer? Conor’s your man.’
‘Conor.’
‘My brother from Birr. He’s the electrician, but he does a bit of this and that, you know.’
‘Terrific. Maybe I could get a phone number, or something?’
‘Be damn, I’ll bring it meself tomorrow,’ said Pete-the-Post slamming his cup down on the battered mantelpiece. ‘In that little green machine out there, piled in on the mail of the Republic, no less.’
‘Look, don’t go to any trouble.’
‘No trouble at all.’
Scully watched the postie lick his lips, as though tasting the last of the whiskey on them, with eyes shut to the wan light bending in through the window, and he wondered if he’d ever get his telegram.
‘Rightso, time to go.’ The postman whanged himself on the cheek with the heel of his palm. ‘Ah, nearly forgot — something from the Dublin Telegraphs.’
He handed over the envelope and Scully did his best not to snatch at it in his excitement.
‘Good news, I hope. Never liked telegrams, meself.’
‘Thanks,’ said Scully, stuffing it in his pocket and following Pete-the-Post to the door.
‘See you in the mornin!’
As the van pulled away, motor racing horribly, Scully tore the envelope open and the telegram in half so he had to stoop to the mud and fit the pieces together.
HOUSE ON THE MARKET. AGENT ASSURES QUICK SALE. PACKING NOW. BILLIE AT YOUR MUM’S. WILL BE BACK BEFORE CHRISTMAS. USE TELEGRAMS TILL PHONE ON THERE. JENNIFER.
A light drizzle began to drift in. Rooks and jackdaws came and went from the castle keep down in the misting hollow. Scully shifted from foot to foot, inexplicably deflated.
It was good news. It was contact, confirmation. But so damn businesslike. What was the result of the ultrasound? How was everybody? What did the wide brown land look like? Was it summer, real acetylene summer? And did she miss him half as much as he missed her? Though it was a telegram. You couldn’t exactly get hot and sweaty in a telegram.
He stuffed the paper into his pocket. It was actually happening. They could stop moving at last and make a home somewhere, the three of them. Maybe she’s right about magic in the spur of the moment. Could be she’s been cautious and sensible too long. It was her new thing, cutting loose.
It was her prevailing outlook ever since they came abroad, but he had to admit he liked her just as well the old way. She was like a sheet anchor sometimes, a steadying influence on him, on everyone around her. Made people laugh, that sensible streak in her, but it also made her someone of substance. Jennifer wasn’t just a good-looking woman, he once told her wincing parents, she was someone to be reckoned with. God, he missed her, missed them both. Their brown, swimming bodies and birdcall voices — even the sound of their sober, womanly peeing from behind a closed door. He missed dumb jokes with Billie and the warped games of Monopoly that she strung out endlessly with her insistence on ‘the true and right and proper rules’. Seven and a half. She was a bright kid, and all fatherly pride aside, he knew she was different from other kids. She felt things strongly. She was fierce, precocious and loyal. She took shit from no one and saw things so clearly at times that it took your breath away. Now that he thought of it, he’d spent more time with her than he had with Jennifer. He missed their companionable silences. They understood each other, him and Billie. He wondered sometimes if Jennifer saw it, the way the two of them moved together in a crowd, in a boat, at the breakfast table. It was almost as though they each recognized themselves in the other. It was weird, like a gift. Jennifer was always busy, but she must have seen it.
Late in the afternoon, heaving and gasping, with the walls finally clear of soil and stones, he sat down for air on a stump behind the barn and saw Binchy’s things piled out there, reeking of turps. He rattled the matches in his pocket but left them where they were. Why spoil the moment of triumph? He tilted his head back and let the sweat run through his matted hair. Tonight he’d boil up some water and take a real scrubdown. He’d rig up a bed from an old door and some bricks. The flags were too cold to sleep on another night. ‘Live like an animal,’ his father used to say, ‘and you’ll start thinkin like one!’ Scully laughed at himself. This was like the tree houses of his boyhood, the Robinson Crusoe factor, the steady search for creature comforts. A cup of tea would render him human — he knew it.
After dark, scrubbed and fed and hugely satisfied, Scully went walking, a mere shadow moving through the ash wood with the wind tearing at the bare crowns of the trees above him. He was sore and happy, his hands still stung with nettles and his boots were full of stones. He saw the lights of farmhouses down in the valley, and wondered what they did at night, these farming families. He hadn’t introduced himself yet. This was the furthest he’d been from the house since he arrived. But there’d be time. The night hardened with cold. The black mass of the castle loomed below. Scully sucked in the metallic air and watched the trees in turmoil, listened to their mob violence raging above him against the sky. When he turned and looked back uphill he saw the three candles burning in the curtainless window. The wind bullied at him, ripping through the cold wet of his hair, but he stood there a long time in the wood below his field, just watching those three candles twinkling in the empty house.
• • •
IN HIS DREAMS THAT NIGHT Scully ran through long grass between walls and hedges uphill with lights gathering behind him and only the cover of grass and night before him. On he ran, never stopping to see what it was behind him, blindly going on into darkness.
Four
SCULLY JERKED AWAKE. A motor idled outside. It was light already. He wriggled from his stained sleeping bag and went to the window but could see only his ragged reflection in the frost. He opened the top half of his front door, felt the fierce cold, and saw a filthy grey truck slipping and yawing down the icy hill with its tailgate flapping. Diesel smoke hung in the air. He went out barefoot across the frozen ground and saw two tons of builders’ sand heaped against the barn wall.
From around the bend on the hill came the little green van.
‘Boots are the go, Mr Scully,’ said Pete-the-Post getting out to unlock the back doors. ‘On a mornin such as this, it’s definitely boots, don’t you think?’
Scully grinned, curling his toes on the unyielding mud. He helped the postman unload the cement mixer and several bags of cement.
‘Cheaper than airmail, it is.’
‘I really appreciate this,’ said Scully.
‘There’ll be a load of blocks here within the hour, and meself 11 be by at one o’clock to start into it.’
Scully blinked.
‘Well, you’ll be needin a hod-carrier, I expect.’
‘Well. I. Haven’t you got the post to do?’
‘Diversify, Mr Scully, that’s my motto. We’re in the EC now, you know.’
‘The EC.’
‘This is the new Ireland you’re lookin at.’