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  “Come on, Gregory.”

  And Gregory came on. He placed one foot in the clasped hands and George hoisted him up in one swift, deft movement. Nina watched him as he settled in the saddle, as stiff and elegant as a pencil, and decided horses definitely brought out the best in people.

  “Will he take two?” asked Gregory, wrapping the reins round his hands.

  “Why wouldn’t he?” asked Nina, trying to assume an authority she didn’t quite feel now. George leant back against the trembling flank, clasped his hands together and let Nina use him as a stepladder. She placed her wet shoe in his hands, her wet hands on his shoulder and lifted herself out of the sea. She sat down on this hard mound of wet leather, felt it shiver beneath her as if exploring this new burden, then felt it shift gently from foot to foot, so her legs were like butter-churns in the water, a sensation not at all unpleasant.

  “Hold on to his belt,” said George, and she did, and thought perhaps if he’d told her to hang herself and her family, she’d have done so just as readily.

  “What’s it like when he gallops?” she asked him.

  “Like falling,” he said, “but never reaching the ground.”

  She wrapped her fingers round Gregory’s belt and felt the flannel of his underpants beneath it, the hard tiny scallops at the base of his spine against her knuckles.

  “Are you ready?” she whispered.

  “Yes,” he said, “but how do I make it go?”

  “Kick him,” said George.

  Gregory tightened the reins in his hands and dug in his heels. The horse gave a kind of a whimper, but didn’t move.

  “Harder,” said George, and Gregory dug with his heels again. The horse shifted, splashed the water but stayed where it was. Then George raised his right hand and slapped it hard against its rear, and it raised itself once on its hind legs and galloped.

  She felt none of the pounding she had expected, more of a feeling of flight, a rhythmic rise and fall of the horse beneath her, and whether she rose or fell, the headlong rush kept her pressed against Gregory. So it must be falling, she thought, as George had said, her small breasts pressed against his shoulder-blades, her fingers dug into the belt of his trouserts, her chin dug into one side of his neck. The water splashed around them like spattered pearls and a yacht sailed by to their right, the red sail idling in the other direction, the sailor giving them a lazy wave. Come on boy come on boy come on she muttered like a tinker’s mantra, and then the beach was at an end, they were coursing over the scutch and seagrass between the dunes and the farmland beyond it. There was a barbed wire fence and the horse jumped it, into a meadow full of August barley, and he pounded a flattening irregular path through the barley-stalks until a sound stopped him dead, and she fell again, sailed through the air with her brother this time, over the horse’s bowed head.

  This was a different fall, a more languorous one, and she would remember thinking as she sailed through the air, her fingers still clinging to his belt, if I have to fall, I want to fall with him. The thick barley welcomed them with soft, cushioned arms, parted before them and made a generous path as they rolled to a halt. She was on top of him, sneezing with the chaff in the air, her fingers still dug in the belt of his trousers, laughing with exhilaration, coughing with the dust, until the sound stilled her into silence.

  It was the scraping of a stone off a scythe, one stroke upwards, one stroke downwards, and it continued, at its own deliberate rhythm, as if marking time for some dance about to happen. She looked up and saw sparks flaring against the yellow barley, sparks from the sharpening stone, drawn over the blade. The blade was dark against the sunlight and behind it she could see the outline of a large, bearded face beneath a cowl.

  “Are you sorry now?”

  Nina stifled her laughter and stared upwards. Whoever it was stood, framed by the dancing ears of barley, the scythe curving above the brown cowl of his head. Her eyes travelled down the brown folds that wrapped a sturdy body, tied at the waist with a smudged cord, to the fringes of a skirt, swaying gently over sandalled feet.

  “For what, sir?” she managed to ask.

  “For making a right haims of our barley.”

  “Are you the devil?” she asked, for a reason she couldn’t understand.

  He laughed. “No,” he said, “but I’m in the devil of a bad humour. How will I explain this to the Abbot?”

  “Tell him we’re sorry sir,” she said, “that the horse kept running and we couldn’t—”

  “The horse, was it?”

  She turned away and saw the horse behind her, over Gregory’s prone body. It was chewing lazily at the barley, a tremble, like the last breath of wind on water, running over its hide. There was a long black fist between the horse’s legs, growing all the time.

  “Is he dead?” she asked. The thought was as huge to her as the word was tiny.

  “I hope not.” He dropped the scythe in the barley and the horse whinnied at the sound. He moved towards it and it reared, its hooves flailing over Gregory’s head. She screamed, he grabbed the swinging reins, twisted the angry mouth towards him and whacked it in the rump with his free hand, letting the reins go with the other. It kicked free then, galloped through the barley, flattening another path. It jumped the fence, kicking sand up in clouds behind it, back the way it came.

  He bent down towards Gregory, lifted him gently, turned his face towards the sunlight and pulled one eyelid open.

  “What’s his name?”

  “Gregory.”

  “Are you dead yet, Gregory?”

  “Who’s he, Nina?” Gregory asked slowly, eyes moving from one to the other.

  “He’s not the devil, anyway,” she said.

  “No,” he said, smiling, “I’m Brother Barnabas.”

  He carried him then, through the waist-high barley, and Nina followed. Suddenly the terror struck her, after the event. The thought of death in this sunlit field seemed preposterous to her, unreal, but the very possibility made her shake. She heard the sound of sobbing, and realised it was hers.

  “Are you crying, Nina?”

  “No,” she said, “I’m just . . .”

  “Just what?” he asked, holding Gregory’s form free of the nodding eaves of barley, just in front.

  “You’re afraid of what I’ll tell the Abbot.”

  “Yes,” she lied.

  “Well,” he said. “There’s time enough for that.”

  The field rose towards a wizened tree and the barley diminished around it. There was a small round pool below with a lip of crumbling stone. He knelt at the pool, brought Gregory’s head towards the water and dipped it in.

  “Is the water cold?” he asked Gregory, who nodded. “Can you see my face?” And Gregory nodded again. “Can you stand?”

  Gregory took a breath and he tilted him sideways, placed his feet on the ground. “What do you remember?” he asked.

  “I fell,” said Gregory, slowly.

  “No,” he said. “You died. The waters brought you back to life. Isn’t that true, little Nina?”

  “Is it?” she asked, and the thought frightened her more than any thought yet.

  “Did you see angels?” he asked. Gregory shook his head.

  “What a pity,” he said sadly, “because they could have told you what to tell the Abbot.”

  He reached out, took both of their hands and drew them towards him. He squatted, so the brown skirt rose halfway towards his knees.

  “We could tell him the truth, that Nina and Gregory rode a horse through the barley.”

  “Do we have to?” asked Nina.

  “We have to tell him the truth. But then, I suppose the truth is that the horse ran through the barley of its own accord.”

  “It did,” said Gregory.

  “And what will I tell him about Nina and Gregory?”

  “Nothing,” said Gregory.

  “We’ll leave your field,” said Nina, “we’ll walk back along our tracks as if we never existed.”

 
“And maybe you don’t,” said Brother Barnabas.

  “Don’t what?”

  “Exist.”

  “How could we not exist?”

  “Maybe you’re a dream the Abbot is having right now in the monastery garden. He likes his post-prandial nap. So why don’t you run out of here before he wakes up?”

  They ran, past the edge of the field of barley, and could see him penetrating deep inside it to where his scythe lay on the trampled ground, and the last sight they had of him was of the scythe flashing in the sunlight and his cowled head bending, up and down.

  “So do we exist, Gregory?” she asked him, when they reached the shore again.

  “No,” he said, his bare feet splashing in the water. “Someone else is dreaming of us.”

  “Is it a good dream then?”

  He took her hand as he walked. “It’s an excellent dream of larks,” he said.

  “Larks,” she said. “What larks.”

  I dreamed of that Abbot intermittently myself, sleeping in the walled garden of the monastery I never saw, beyond the barley field I did see, a rotund figure on a deckchair beneath a late-flowering cherry, the petals dropping occasionally and landing on his bald napping pate, since his cowl had slipped and was dangling behind him, in the hot, summer, bee-thickened air. He was the repository dreamer in the final circle of dreams, but was asleep himself so couldn’t know it, and if the disturbance crept inside me, the unease I would come to know too well, the vacuity, I would console myself with the possibility that I was after all the dream of that unseen Abbot, and that my vacuity was his.

  20

  JANIE SLEEPS THE sleep of nine whiskies or was it ten, and dreams of the September morning she walked up the drive in the pearl-grey uniform of the Siena Convent. George had watched her roll her socks neatly round the edges of her bootees, and upon enquiring had been told that’s the way the Siena girls wear them and what would he know about it anyway. George had agreed he would know little about it, and parted company with her near the gates and made his way towards the potato drills of Keiling’s market-garden. Nina, Janie found when the front door finally opened, had her own socks stretched up above the knee. A debate had ensued as to which style the Siena girls favoured, to which Gregory, dressed in the grey flannels of St. Lawrence’s Grammar School, contributed nothing whatsoever. It was resolved by Mr. Hardy, who proposed an elegant compromise, of the socks being drawn to just below the dimple of the kneecap, the knee, as Ruskin had once observed, being the signature of a young lady’s beauty.

  So, George, as he moved among the potato drills with the line of day-labourers on a field above the Baltray Road, watched the trap make its way towards Drogheda, Gregory and Mr. Hardy in the front, Nina and his sister Janie in the back, their knees decorously exposed to the September air. He noted the socks pulled up to just below the kneecap and concluded that was the way the Siena girls must wear them, after all.

  And now Janie dreams, of Gregory walking towards the knot of youths beneath the brown castellated facade of his grammar school, with the careful gait of a heron picking its way through mudflats; of the mock-Gothic arch of the Siena Convent entrance, of the sheen of polished maple in the shady corridors, the smell of bleach and lavender, of Sister Annunciata in her white wimple and bonnet, the young novice from Mayo, Sister Camille, who walked them through the gardens holding both of their hands and who seemed as new to these hushed environs as they were themselves. She would squeeze Janie’s hand tighter on some days, Nina’s on others, and spend the next five years in an exquisite dilemma between the affections of both. She would share with Janie her memories of the road from Leenane to Louisburg, the bay with the frothing Atlantic below it, the curling booreen above it that led to her family’s ever-smoking thatched cottage, of the bed that she so sorely missed, crowded at night with her five sisters. She slept now in an iron cot, curtained in blue and white check, with only the visitations of the unseen St. Catherine to console her. She would share with Nina her devotion to the same St. Catherine, the silent ecstasies that came to keep her company, advise her against fast dances, theatrical attendances and romantic novels while curling her fingers round the soft skin beneath her thumb. She would weep real tears before they left, come behind them in the dark corridor on the way to Mass as they passed the warm kitchen, kiss one and then the other, oh rapture, oh delight. And as Janie sleeps she wonders was anything in mature passion quite as good?

  And George daydreamed, of Gregory, ofJanie, but most of all of Nina, as he moved with the unwashed day-labourers in an irregular line along the ridged turnip fields. The daydreams almost made bearable the company he kept. Mostly outpatients from the asylum he would one day sleep in himself, they shifted with the unthinking regularity of cattle over the turnip drills, their fingers blackened from the wet earth, their boots gathering mud as they proceeded. The rains came down hard, but not hard enough to stop the work.

  It would take the thunder to do that. A great wail rose up from the line of the deranged and Keiling still kept them in check until the lightning flashed, and neither he nor his son could stop the rout. Towards the only shelter there was, the circular mound at the end of the fields, surrounded by a ring of blackthorn trees, where they huddled beneath the bare branches, and George alone ventured towards the grass-covered stone entrance and stepped inside.

  A lintel of ancient limestone, the circular gougings etched in lichen, the dark interior illuminated by the intermittent lightning, the thunder-claps gaining on it until they met in concert, three or four minutes of soundful flashes. He saw a figure carved on the stone inside, a woman’s head raised in an unearthly grin, her stone knees apart, her stone hands between them.

  And when the thunder and the lightning ceased the others edged away from him, as if he was shadowed by contact with a world they wanted no part of. Which was fine with George, he adopted the mound as his refuge, ate his sandwiches in the interior gloom, watching them boiling tea-caddies beneath the blackthorn trees, silhouetted against the light.

  In the spring his labour eased. He was given a shotgun to prowl the new-sown fields and keep them free of crows. He marked his day with the diurnal clopping of Garibaldi’s hooves, bearing Nina to and from the Siena Convent, Drogheda. He waved from the wheat and barley fields, fired ofif a blast at the errant crows in a kind of greeting. He would walk home and as the sun lengthened the days, took to dallying in Mabel Hatch’s barn above her father’s fields, meeting one, two or all three of them there, as if the barn provided common ground between their childhood together and their days now, apart. His muscles were hardened now, his body had all the bulk of the agricultural labourer he was becoming, his blue eyes had retreated behind his wind-scalded, sunburnt skin. But all three of them were equal strangers in the new worlds they had entered, and the strangeness, if anything, increased their mutual bond.

  They had a new companion here, a brown owl that flew in occasionally from the golden light outside. And as two summers came and went, the brown owl stayed like a guardian angel, like their childhood ghost, their familiar, and George took to calling her, what else, Hester. “Forget about Hester,” Nina said, “she’s long, long gone.” But no, George insisted, she was the brown owl and the brown owl was her.

  The name seemed odd to Nina, like a shard from a world more properly gone, and she realised they needed new words, changed words, for the changed worlds that had grown around them. A whole new language. And late that September, under the tutelage of Sister Annunciata, she suddenly found it.

  III

  21

  I PRAY THEE, Rosalind, sweet my coz, be merry.

  The rehearsals began in the draughty, unused gymnasium, between the hanging ropes and the vaulting horse, dramatic exercise being deemed more suitable than gymnastic for the further education of young Catholic ladies.

  Dear Celia, I show more mirth than I am mistress of; and would you yet I were merrier?

  Celia was Janie’s, a cipher of kinds, but Rosalind she claimed immedi
ately as her own, more real than Nina was herself, than the ghost that intermittently haunted her. She would stay with her for ever and beyond, the mistress of her moods, consolation of her chosen profession, woman wise, woman heartfelt, woman witty, woman loving, perhaps loved. Through pretence, she realised immediately, Rosalind becomes herself since her own self is too multitudinous for any one expression of it. The girls of the Siena Convent played the boys’ parts and the boys of St Lawrence’s played the girls’, both in their separate universes until a dress rehearsal before Christmas, awaited with as much trepidation as the meeting of the waters, where gender reasserted itself, male became male and female female with nothing in between.

  “You are Jacques, all Jacques, make sure it’s yours,” Nina told Gregory. But with his height and his measured diction, they put Orlando in his path. So he rehearsed them both, at home over the kitchen table, on weekends in the dripping glasshouse.

  “They say you are a melancholy fellow.”

  “I am so; I do love it better than laughing.”

  “Rosalind,” she told him, “in an ideal world would love them both. Don’t you think, George?” she asked George who, on his weekends off, they drafted in to play Touchstone and his galaxy of fools.

  “A worthy fool, motley’s the only wear.” Dan Turnbull’s old jacket, too big for him and frayed at the elbows, a pair of oil-dosed trousers held up by his old school belt. “Aye, now I am in Arden, more fool I.” His accent was now far thicker than theirs, his hands almost wholly scarred with agricultural blades. He sat behind the dead tomato plants and watched Gregory woo her.

  “For now I am in a holiday humour and like enough to consent. What would you say to me now, an I were your very very Rosalind?”

  “I would kiss before I spoke.” And she waited to reply until their lips touched.

  “Nay, you were better speak first; and when you were gravell’d for lack of matter, you might take occasion to kiss.