The Devil's Diary, page 10
‘I want something fresh or something that sounds fresh. Since Arty Brennan died, I’ve had nothing but old hat.’
He strolled back slowly to the parochial house and realised from the smell in the hallway that Hugo had been boiling morkin. He found him seated at the head of the kitchen table with a sheep’s skull at the other end. He was staring into the empty eye sockets, an old cotton rag in one hand and a bottle of linseed oil in the other.
‘What on earth are you up to?’
‘I found another dead sheep on the hill. The carcass was practically intact apart from the eyes which had been pecked out by gulls. I cut off the head and brought it back for Olga. I know she’d prefer a skull that’s been whitened by wind and sun but it’s surprising what spit and polish can do in a fraction of the time.’
‘She’ll think you’re cuckoo.’
‘On the contrary, she may see it as a little love offering. I’ve been telling her that it was once the custom here to place a row of glass buoys on the top of one’s dresser to go with the willow-pattern chargers and the bowls. Buoys are made of plastic now and the willow-pattern chargers have found their way to the antique shop. A row of sheep’s skulls is surely an imaginative substitute.’
‘It’s possible that she may not appreciate your macabre sense of humour. I don’t like to see you making fun of her.’
‘Olga can look after herself. I’ve seen her in the village pubs. The face of childish innocence she turns to you is not the one she reveals in the company of drinking men. I’m telling you for your own good, I wouldn’t like to see you get hurt.’
With a cryptic laugh Hugo draped the dirty rag over the sheep’s skull to make a crinkled headscarf.
‘What are you trying to tell me?’
‘You’re an innocent when it comes to dealing with women like Olga. If you have any plans to convert her, forget them. Some of us don’t pray for her conversion. We like her as she is.’
Father Jerry fought back rising anger because he knew that anger was precisely what Hugo wished to arouse.
‘Nothing is to be gained from idle talk,’ he said slowly. ‘I should like you to realise that I can’t have you boiling sheep’s heads in the parochial house.’
‘What’s up? Surely you’re not expecting another visitation from the bish?’
‘If you must boil morkin, as you call it, do it at Burke’s. There are no other houses near and there are fewer people calling.’
As Father Jerry went to the door, Hugo leant forward and said, ‘Bub-bub-oh!’ to the sheep’s skull on the table. ‘You’ll find a sack of old clothes under the stairs,’ he called. ‘McDaid said you might like to have them for your next jumble sale.’
‘He knows perfectly well that I never hold jumble sales, raffles or bingo evenings.’
‘Perhaps he thinks it’s time you did.’
Father Jerry emptied the contents of the sack on the floor: a tweed jacket, twill trousers and a checked shirt.
‘Have you looked in the bag?’ he called to Hugo.
‘I’m afraid not. I already have two good suits I never wear.’
‘You’d better come and see for yourself.’
Hugo picked up the jacket and pulled it on over his sweater.
‘A snug fit but not my style.’ He tugged contemptuously at the sleeve.
‘They’re Brennan’s clothes, don’t you see?’
‘Well spotted,’ said Hugo. ‘They could be the clothes he left behind on the island — assuming that my dream is true.’
‘How did McDaid come by them, and why didn’t he give them to the police?’
‘Perhaps he wanted you to have them for old times’ sake. You could offload them on a wandering tramp — if you don’t want to see them worn in the glen, that is.’
‘I was talking to McDaid just now and he never once mentioned Arty Brennan’s clothes.’
‘Neither did he mention him to me. “Give these old duds to Father Jerry, they’ll do for jumble,” was all he said. Then he walked off, leaving me holding the bag. He’s not himself these days. He thinks of nothing but Olga. He’s even taken to shaving every morning instead of once a week.’
‘I find him unfathomable.’
‘He’s full of dark imaginings. He’s a man who thinks Satanic thoughts.’
Hugo bundled the clothes into the bag as Father Jerry climbed the stairs.
‘I’ll keep them as a souvenir,’ he called after him. ‘I may even donate them to the folk museum.’
Father Jerry pondered the problem his brother had set him. If he should take Brennan’s clothes to the police, then McDaid and Hugo might be forced to speak. If they said too much, he would face exposure of his previous silence and the scandal to the faithful that was bound to ensue. It was a matter of the lesser evil, not the greater good. There was no easy way out of the predicament. The wicked flee when no man pursues. They carry their Gehenna on their backs.
He stood by the north window of his bedroom, looking down on a windy sea with waves rising against the cliff faces across the bay and falling back in white rivulets that sent a mist of bright spume up into the clear air. Below the road a dark reef ran down beneath the water which in the sunlight gave momentary glimpses of brilliant green among the patches of breaking white above it. He watched the spot where he knew the rock lay hidden. A little swirl became a stronger swirl, then the water went dead again. He stood for two or three minutes without taking his eyes off the spot. Suddenly the water rose in an upward spout, as if four waves had converged from different directions with four strong winds behind them. They rose in a single column, spread into a mist-white mushroom at the top, and spilt back until the water lay flat above the hidden rock again.
He gazed for half an hour with his watch in his hand, seeking vainly for a trace of a pattern. Perhaps there was no pattern. What he was seeing was the working of the innocent universe: water swirling and rising, water falling and spray scattering, being swallowed up again in a greater, all-absorbing body. What he sought was life unseen, life before the human eye and mind had a chance to distort it.
‘Bye for now.’
He heard her voice again as she took off down the road, leaving him standing in the gateway looking after her. He had seen what he had no wish to see. Wisdom after the event. She had come here, she said, to practise her art. She was still a child. In some mysterious way she reminded him of his twin-sister Carmel.
The thought disturbed him for a reason he could not fathom. Carmel had died without having lived. She had never roamed the hills with him and Hugo because their mother had insisted that she stay at home to read and recite and practise on the tune-defying piano. Mother was determined to make a lady of her only daughter, while Father suppressed his concern that she might turn her into ‘a right little madam’. Carmel had provided Mother with a young life to shape and guide, and he and Hugo had been free to explore the countryside, provided they did not tell their mother what they’d been exploring.
After Carmel’s death life in the house became a litany of fateful prognostications. Mother kept reminding him of his weak chest and asthma, of the need to avoid chills and wettings, of the perils inherent in all the games a boy might wish to play. Meanwhile, Father hummed philosophically, or drummed on the table with his fingers. Hugo, being Hugo, escaped the smothering of a love made over-possessive by disappointment.
Had Carmel lived, his own life might have been different. Had she lived, she would probably have grown away from him. He would have neither sought nor seen her in a stranger.
Chapter 10
Olga came to see him the following afternoon as he was making notes for Sunday’s sermon. Between her hands she bore a squat object wrapped in a bath towel which she placed in front of him on the table.
‘It’s for you,’ she said.
She rearranged the towel so that the object became a statue draped in purple for Holy Week.
‘Don’t you want to find out what it is?’
He pulled the corner of the towel until it slid off the object and revealed a wood carving of a kneeling woman, her long hair falling forward over her knees. He placed the carving in the centre of the table and walked round it with his hands behind his back. The woman’s face was hidden by her hair. Her knees became buttocks and her heels became knees as he moved.
‘What am I supposed to see?’ he asked.
‘I invite you to see what you must.’
‘To me it says one word: “weeping”.’
‘Surely it says more.’
‘Not to me.’
‘Then live with it for a week. It may speak again.’
‘I see a weeping woman who is weeping from every angle. This woman was born to weep, she could be Mary Magdalene.’
She picked up a book from the table where he had been working and sat in the armchair with her long legs close together, the hard, white knees protruding from the dark, tight skirt. Now she looked serious and remote, no longer present. As she flicked through the pages, her face lengthened and the corners of her mouth turned down. Inside her shirt collar a triangle of flesh had taken on an unhealthy tinge. She stared at the title page. She looked quite dead, as if the blood had been sucked from her veins. He noticed that the skin at the base of her neck had stolen some of the colour from her light-green shirt. He ran his hand caressingly over the head of the weeping woman.
‘Why were you reading about grace?’ she asked.
‘For my sermon on Sunday.’
‘Grace and God’s salvific will. What’s that? Don’t tell me now. I’ll come to listen to what you preach, though not necessarily to practise it.’
‘You can sell this carving for money.’
‘And give it to the poor? I want you to have it.’
‘Thank you, Olga. It’s very kind of you. Is the crack between the woman’s knees deliberate?’
‘Yes and no. The wood was cracked before I started carving and already looked like knees.’
‘So it was an accident.’
‘Wood is alive and moving. It swells and contracts, it even breathes. It isn’t stable and dead like a lump of plastic. If it cracks, so be it. It cracks because cracking is in its character.’
As she bent over the book again, her hair fell forward until he could see nothing of her face except a thin, straight nose. The day he had come upon Hugo in Glenshask sitting above the Devil’s Pintle, he had stood by a river for an hour watching the flow of water over a brown boulder. Observed from upstream, the boulder seemed to rise like the neck of a horse from the river bed. The water ran up the neck in an overflowing mane, then curled before falling sideways into the frothing pool below. He moved downstream expecting to observe the face of a horse from the front. The face became a woman’s with a cascade of rippling hair obscuring one side of it. Something like steam was rising from below. Blown foam gleamed in sunlight. He moved up and down, observing the horse’s neck behind and the woman’s face in front. As he walked away, he knew that what he had seen contained a germ of undisclosed truth that would continue to vex and haunt him.
‘You’re quiet today,’ he said to Olga.
‘It’s one of my Dom Days. The sun is shining outside but in my mind it’s drizzling. Dom was my husband. Still is, I suppose.’
‘Tell me about him.’
She put down the book and lit one of her strong, sharp cigarettes.
‘I met him in Munich one summer while he was still a student in Dublin. I was barely sixteen. My father and mother had died the previous year. I thought him handsome and amusing, and when he began writing to me, I wrote back. The following summer he invited me to Dublin. He had taken a degree in civil engineering, and at the end of the holiday he returned with me to Germany. He got a job but not a good one. We got married and rented a small flat. Though we both worked, we were always short of money. He’d never get anywhere in Germany, he said. The language was against him; he’d always be someone’s assistant, he’d never call the shots. I came back to Dublin with him and he got a job which, from the first day, he felt was beneath him. Then he applied for a posh job in the civil service and got turned down because he didn’t know Gaelic, or so he said. Another language problem, this time in his own country. He started coming home late from the pub and sleeping on the sofa after dinner. He had always looked a bit boyish and soft. He put on weight and his cheeks began to sag, though he was barely thirty. The accident happened on a train coming back from Howth. There were three of us: Dom and myself and Dom’s best friend. The two of them had been drinking. Dom got obstreperous. He began jabbing at his friend with his umbrella. The train swayed, his friend ducked, and the tip of the umbrella went into my eye. He came every day and sat by my bed in the hospital with his big drooping cheeks, saying, “I’ll never touch another drop. I’ll never put a glass to my lips again, I swear.” I lost the eye. It was like losing my parents all over again. Our marriage went from bad to worse. I began to lose my self-confidence. I gave up wood carving. Then I saw an advertisement in one of the papers: “Cottage in secluded glen overlooking Atlantic”. I went to the library and found a paragraph about Glenkeel in an old gazetteer. It didn’t tell me much but the last sentence flared in my mind: “There’s a remarkable echo in the mountains.” I kept repeating it all the way home. Dom was at work, so I wrote him a note saying that I’d gone back to Munich, and warning him not to follow. Now I call myself Olga Petersen. Olga Madagan is dead. The thought of her makes me shrink. I still haven’t found my freedom, though. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and know immediately that it’s going to be a Dom Day; that I’ll be imprisoned inside myself; that I’ll lack the inspiration to start anything new. I spend Dom Days sharpening my chisels and polishing — mechanical work that doesn’t require me to be fully present. Dom Days are heavy and acid, completely lacking in balance and finish.’
‘Everyone has what you call Dom Days, days that are a long contemplation of life’s trammels.’
‘Dom never had Dom Days, and neither does Hugo. I see him as another Dom, a blind man who wants us all to play blindman’s buff. I tell him that I’ve come here to be quiet. It’s something that he’s incapable of taking in.’
‘You mean he keeps pestering you?’
‘He keeps giving me skulls, sheep’s skulls. He thinks it’s funny but it’s creepy and unsettling.’
From the catch in her voice he sensed that she was on the verge of tears. He wanted to go to her and offer comfort and understanding. He remained rigid in his chair on the far side of the table.
‘Many people are like Hugo. They stumble on what they take to be a joke and then keep repeating it because it’s the only joke they know. Hugo does these things because he doesn’t know better. When he comes in this evening, I’ll tell him to leave you alone.’
‘Please don’t. I wouldn’t want him to know that it’s important.’
She raised her face to him, her nose thin and sensitive, so finely chiselled compared with Hugo’s hacked old parsnip.
‘In the village they say he’s eaten human flesh,’ she went on.
‘Like all travellers, Hugo is a raconteur. His stories are meant to shock. If you don’t want to hear them, pretend that you’ve heard them before.’
‘I heard one of the neighbours say, “Hugo is not the full shilling.” Did he mean that he’s bananas?’ she asked seriously.
‘Perhaps he meant to say that he’s only eighteen shillings in the pound. In other words, not good value for money.’
He was trying to make her smile but all he got from her was a look of pained incomprehension.
‘I sometimes think he’s evil.’ She spoke the words slowly so that each word bore the same stress as the others. He concentrated his gaze on the dark eye that did not dance, and drummed on the table with his fingertips.
‘You don’t know him as well as I do. He’s a repertory actor and a fairground showman. The freedom you seek from Dom Days he finds behind one of his gaudy funfair masks.’
She went to the window and stood with her back to him, the flow of her hair arrested by the stately evening sunlight. He could have touched a tress without her knowing, it was so abundant. She suddenly turned and smiled at him.
‘Did you have a golden age, Father Jerry? Or a period you look back on as a golden age?’
‘In the seminary perhaps. It was an enclosed community and therefore gave the appearance of being comprehensible.’
‘I had no golden age, thanks to Dom. I went straight from the shackles of childhood to the shackles of adulthood. Everyone should have at least three years of untrammelled immaturity.’
‘Surely you’re not too late. Look at Hugo and McDaid. Their golden age has lasted all of forty years.’ He tried to tease her.
‘You’re different from other priests I’ve known. You, too, have your masks, different ones from Hugo.’
When she’d gone, he walked round the table surveying the figure of the weeping woman. He caressed the polished head with his fingertips, and the hair down to her knees, then placed the nail of his forefinger in the cleft between the knees. Once more the hair became a woman’s back and the knees a pair of dainty buttocks.
‘Olga is a maker of little mysteries,’ he said aloud. ‘No number of little mysteries will ever make a great one.’
He carried the carving upstairs to his room and placed it in the bottom of the wardrobe, as it was not a work fit for Hugo’s inflammable eye. He crossed the landing and entered his brother’s bedroom. As usual the casebound diary lay open on the night table. He read two or three entries about the problems of reroofing an old house single-handed, then found a longer entry concerning a girl called Helga:
July 30th
Hega goes to pubs for the company of drinking men. They put their arms round her waist and tickle her bottom. She laughs in their faces, winds them with bear hugs, then downs her stout and goes home alone. She never goes drinking except in full battle-dress — white baggy trousers and brown-and-green jacket with two pockets in front where she keeps her purse and cigarettes, and stuffs her fists. For the pub she sweeps up her hair and wears a flat cap like a man, and when her jacket pockets are bulging, she’s got four breasts.
