Goosefoot, page 2
“I’ll call for you at eight,” he said, getting into the Land Rover. “I’ll have to keep an eye on you from now on. When word gets round that you’re a landed woman or nearly, the plot is bound to thicken.”
Her uncle was alone in the house when she returned, her parents and brothers gone home.
“Let me do the washing up, Uncle Lar,” she said.
“What kind of job do you hope to get in Dublin?” he asked too directly.
“I don’t know.”
“I knew you had something up your sleeve, and that’s why I told you about the farm—to give you a sense of responsibility. You won’t do anything rash when you know you have land behind you.”
“What rash thing could I do?” she laughed.
“I’ll leave that to you.”
“In Dublin I’ll be near Bray,” she smiled. “I’ll be able to nip out to Greystones to see if it’s changed.”
He laughed lightly, then allowed his features to freeze into a mask of serious concern.
“In Dublin you won’t meet the right men. You won’t meet farmers, you’ll meet gurriers who never slipped in pigsh.”
“But I can easily arrange for them to slip in pigsh.”
“You’re an attractive young woman with an appetite for change and excitement. Don’t stay away too long.”
He put a hand on her shoulder and, though she was as tall as he was, she felt like a little girl.
“I’m not a simpleton,” he said. “The city isn’t the only place of temptation. In the country there are men who might think more of the land than the landowner.”
She spent the rest of the afternoon with her uncle and brought back his cows from the moor for milking. The drizzle had stopped and the evening air smelled of trees, grass, and wet clay. Though it was a Sunday evening with a beginning and an end, it stretched backward in time to merge with all the other Sunday evenings she had known in the country since she was a girl, Sundays of quiet, of minutes passing emptily, of longings now forgotten. The cows swished white tails, tore at the selvage of grass in the lane, or tried to mount one another in randy playfulness, while in a field of winter barley a neighbor was picking up doped crows and stuffing them into a sack. For a moment she paused to watch him but what she saw was the swirl of tide over black rocks. On the southwest coast you could stand on a cliff and, looking toward Florida or Spain, inhale the perfume of free-playing winds on the sea. But the midlands enveloped you like a womb. Here was a hidden Ireland, a darkly secretive landscape whose only hint of other worlds was in the sunset clouds on the horizon, reflections of far-off cities, Valparaiso or maybe Rome. She tapped the rump of the hindmost cow with a switch and watched them push forward suddenly with their heads up.
It was dusk when she got home. Her mother was sewing, her brothers watching television, and her father sleeping on the couch.
“Did Lar say anything after we left?” her mother asked.
“What could he say?”
“And you as flighty as a lark, turning your back on the best farm in the parish, tempting providence with your gallivanting up to Dublin.”
Her mother was a strong, heavy woman in a wide skirt with gaping pockets, and she was wearing her brown beret because it was Sunday. Her black beret, which she wore on weekdays in and out of doors, was hanging on its peg by the window next to the peg for her father’s hat. Her mother was a better farmer than her father. She could pitch bales with any man and thin a row of turnips while her slow-moving husband rummaged in his pockets for his tobacco knife. She was also the family banker. She kept the money in a biscuit tin in her bedroom, doling it out as she delivered a homily about the road to hell being paved with the coins that the thriftless spent on their way there. Her husband listened with longanimity and went straight to the pub. And when he had gone, she would say that she suffered him only for the sake of “the boys,” and Patricia would think that in a house of men her mother was the most manly of them all. But, sadly, she paid the price of her manliness in a head which was as bald as an egg on top.
Though Patricia felt uneasy with her, she admired her flair for good husbandry. Without her mother’s careful management, her father would not have kept his head above water when the children were young. But now, when her talents were no longer needed, she continued to exercise them to the detriment of her sons. Admittedly, Austin, the elder brother, who was self-reliant and remote, would probably survive her dominance; but Patsy, Patricia’s twin brother, was sensitive and self-effacing, the kind of boy who needed light and space in which to spread his wings.
“I’d feel happier if Uncle Lar had said nothing about the farm. It hems me in, places me under an obligation.”
“You’re already under an obligation,” said her mother. “You owe him your education and the style and airs that go with it.”
“I was given what I never asked for.”
“Well, if you can’t think of yourself, think of Patsy there. Where will I get the money to buy him a farm when the time comes? If you had any thought for your family, you’d humor Lar while he’s alive and do what you like with the land when he’s dead. If you don’t want it yourself, give it to Patsy, who’s most in need of it. It’s too good a farm to let out of the family.”
“Why must you drag in my name?” Patsy demanded. “I don’t want Patricia’s land. Always plotting and planning, Mother—it’s your greatest failing.”
“But why have I got to plot and plan? Isn’t it because your sister knows more science than sense. Running away to Dublin without a thought for—”
“I’m going just for a year. I told Uncle Lar I’d come back.”
“You’ll come back a different girl.”
“Easier to go to town than leave it,” her father said from the couch without opening his eyes. He rarely spoke in the house, but rumor had it that he was a witty and ingenious conversationalist in the pub.
“Go back to sleep, you,” her mother told him.
“Easier to go to town than leave it,” he repeated as he placed a newspaper over his eyes.
With a gesture of impatience, Patricia went out into the night. It was cool in the lane and shadowy under the trees. A lively wind was blowing from the west, crossing Connacht and the Shannon from the sea. She inhaled deeply, seeking the tang of seaweed and saltwater, but what she breathed was the scent of rank grass or maybe new silage. When she reached the gate, she stood on it and allowed it to swing closed with a clang. Desmond had gone to the airport to meet his sister, Desmond who saw life as though it were a May morning. Above her was a flying moon with a worn face and wild, unkempt, light-suffused clouds for hair. The fugitive face buried itself in the hair only to re-emerge in sorrow, hurrying, hurrying—hurrying without seeming to make overt progress.
2
Uncle Lar was a brick. When he heard that she had landed a job as a science teacher in a secondary school in Dublin, he bought her a secondhand car, a red Mini in good condition, which gave her the feeling that all kinds of impossible things were now in store for her. She left for Dublin on August 24 so that she might have a chance to find a flat before the start of term. It was a day of pure blue sky and high clouds sailing, and she drove smoothly up the flat Naas road, leaving the secrets of the midlands and the gold of winter barley in the fields behind her. Aflutter with excitement, she felt that all moving things, including the heavy lorries with mysterious loads under green canvas, were converging on the place of life and renewal which was her destination. It was as if she’d been living in a cage and had suddenly and unexpectedly been given the freedom of earth and air and power over brute creation.
It was a feeling that remained with her during the following week, as she looked for accommodation and explored the center of the city for sights, sounds, and smells that did not remind her of Cork. However, with the first day of term came the realization of anxiety. The day arrived with mild sunshine and uncertain bird song in the back garden of the guest house which seemed as unreal as the uneaten rasher and hard-fried egg on her breakfast plate, heralding a surrealistic world from which all benchmarks had been obliterated.
The school consisted of a large red-brick house with two tall chimneys and a series of low prefabricated buildings set round a lawn which she soon came to know as the Quad. The red-brick house stood behind a concrete wall and high hedge, and the cheap prefabricated buildings behind that again, a world within a world, a world in which the only objects she recognized with a sense of comfort were two apple trees and four pear trees. As she passed through the heavy gate, she felt that she was saying goodbye to the sane world of mature men and women, and then the memory of the hated smell of gas in the chemistry lab in Cork caused her to forget everything but the queasiness in the pit of her stomach. A shout from one of the classrooms turned the geometrical Quad into a jungle clearing.
“Cannibals before a feast following a long hunger,” someone laughed at her elbow, and suddenly she was surrounded by the other teachers full of ritual jests and ebullience soon to be quenched by the approach of the headmaster, who had signed himself in her letter of appointment K.I.D. Elsynge.
The morning dragged like a Ruskinian sentence punctuated by inexplicable bell ringing. The sun shone on the artificial-looking grass of the Quad; blackbirds came and perched on the backs of wooden seats; her pupils bent over their exercises too full of seaside holidays to take the pedantries of science seriously; and Mr. Elsynge crossed and recrossed the Quad like a man who knows that every teacher hides a shortcoming or two which a good headmaster will soon uncover.
At three in the afternoon he called the staff to his study, a small, overfurnished room with dark leather chairs that seemed to absorb what thin light came through the north-facing window. She took a seat at the end of the table while the other teachers sat on each side and the headmaster at the top. Her colleagues were all older than she, and already they had lost some of the ebullience with which they began the day. She had studied them in the staff room at lunchtime and decided that they were all teachers because of their reluctance to leave school. The Irish master, with his unruly hair and freshly freckled face, actually looked like an overgrown schoolboy, while the maths master, the oldest of them, had pale, otherworldly eyes that spoke of seclusion in a country far from the bustle of men. He ate his cucumber sandwich with obsessive care, patting his nether lip with his forefinger and licking crumbs from the palm of his hand, while explaining that he did not go to the seaside this year because he was growing six species of tropical grass in his greenhouse—six because it was his favorite rational number. They were all uncommonly polite and courteous. They told her what to do and what not to do, and she made suitable replies in the knowledge that her mind was a silk cloth at which they were tugging simultaneously from every corner.
She cast a glance at Elsynge, who looked, if anything, more schoolboyish than the others, the kind of schoolboy who might let off a stink bomb and get away with it. He was a lightly built sparrow of a man, red-faced and red-haired with a well-watered moustache that took the constant drip from his chapped nose. He now shuffled his notes as if searching for the joker in a pack of cards, and he told the staff that they could smoke if they wished, that he himself proposed to do so as soon as the extra strong mint he was sucking had melted. As it was the first day of term, he said, they were meeting for a brief discussion, but the “discussion” soon became a monologue which contained a word of headmasterly advice for each of them. To the English master he spoke of clause analysis and unattached participles; to the classics master of the inexplicable dread in which even the brightest pupils held the gerund and gerundive; to the maths master of the place of mental arithmetic in the age of the pocket calculator; to the Irish master of the trick of teaching city children a language of peasant vocabulary and agrarian imagery; and to Patricia of the importance of what he called “isotropes” in the housewife’s daily round. The English master laughed self-indulgently at the word “tropes,” and the headmaster, ignoring him, told her that at the end of term he would expect every schoolboy in her charge to know that in 22.4 liters of any gas at standard conditions—0°C and 760 millimeters pressure—there are 206,000 million million million molecules. She was about to tell him that he was grossly misinformed when the classics master put a furtive finger to his lips and winked at her from behind his other hand.
As soon as Mr. Elsynge had done, she was quick to escape from the musty smell of old leather. The pupils had gone home. Four sparrows were picking on the Quad and an open copy of Cicero’s first oration against Catiline lay on a seat near a pear tree. She walked along the footpath by the Dodder, pausing under the railway bridge as a southbound train to Bray, Greystones, and Wicklow beyond hammered briefly overhead. It was a balmy afternoon, quiet and bright, and she felt a surge of happiness at the thought that the entire evening was her own.
“What do you think of God?” The exuberantly friendly voice came from behind. It was the English master, small and dapper with a head that looked too wide for his narrow shoulders. His pale cheeks bore little cicatrices of dry skin, and about his mouth she thought she discerned the vestiges of a childhood eczema.
“God?” she asked.
“Yes. K.I.D. Elsynge. It’s rather a mouthful, so we call him God for short.” His voice clicked drily as if his tongue were a metal rasp.
“From his conception of atomic numbers I would say that he is less than omniscient.”
“He sees himself as a polymath and we all try to sustain him in his illusion. We have agreed among ourselves never to contradict him on a matter of fact. I was pleased to see that you took his reference to “isotropes” on the chin. It showed esprit de corps as well as rare forbearance.”
“It was merely that for a moment I felt he may have been right.”
As she walked beside him, she felt uncomfortably tall. She looked down on his flat head, the tawny hair plastered as if to cover a bald patch, and yet he wasn’t bald. In silence they reached Ballsbridge and paused amid the flow of southbound traffic.
“I always have a drink in McGuffin’s after school,” he said. “Would you care for one yourself?”
He was wearing a green tweed jacket with sharp shoulders, and, as he turned to look after a Dalkey bus, she could not help noticing his chest, narrow and shallow without the customary cushion of pectorals to support the shirt. He was a townee, she thought, and she had been raised among big-boned farmers. One thing was certain: there would be no pneumatic bliss with Mr. Foxley.
“What a good idea,” she said aloud, imagining a cool pint of stout, well poured.
While she waited for her pint to be topped, he took a sip from his glass of lager and with serious deliberation enunciated his Theory of Clean and Dirty Drinks. Lager was clean and so was vodka, but stout, like whiskey, was dirty. There were excellent reasons why that was so, reasons he would explain at a more opportune time. Sufficient for the moment to say that he himself always drank lager or vodka. He was not a fanatic, however. He was not out to convert her. In short he was willing to drink and let drink. She listened to the dry rasp of his tongue with suppressed amusement and wondered how he could sound so funny and keep a straight face.
“You haven’t taught before.” He turned to her as the barman brought her pint.
“It was my first day.”
“As the Irish master would say, it isn’t every day that Magnus kills a bullock.”
“Meaning?”
“Heaven knows. The man is Gaelic-mad. He even goes to Donegal for his holidays, and he never comes back without a notebook full of asinine proverbs. Last year it was ‘good is the juice of a cow, alive or dead.’ I wonder what gem of peasant culture he has unearthed for us this time.”
“I expect we’ll learn soon enough.”
“Have you got the Dip. Ed.?” he asked.
“No, but I’m going to take evening lectures. I wouldn’t have got the job otherwise.”
“Where do you live?” He slipped in another question before the glass reached his puckered lips.
“I’m staying at a guest house in Northumberland Road while I look for a flat.”
“Will you be sharing?”
“I can see I’ll have to. I’ve been all over the place in the past week without once seeing anything I could both afford and bear to live in.”
“We’ll have to get you organized.” He pulled an evening paper from his briefcase.
They pored over the advertisements for ten minutes, but they could find only one likely flat, one in Lazar’s Park, a short walk from the school.
“Let me get you a clean drink for all your help,” she said.
“You can get me a clean drink when you get your first cheque.”
He bought her another pint and immediately reverted to his favorite topic, K.I.D. Elsynge.
“Keep out of his moustache for the first month and you won’t go far wrong. It’s the first month that tells. We’ve had three science teachers in as many years and they all fell at the first fence—they all tried to prove that they were scientists at the first staff meeting. Now, you came through today with flying colors, but tomorrow may not be as easy. He’s an unhealthy specimen, and he’s at his worst when he’s got a cold. Normally he survives the Michaelmas term without a sniffle, but throughout the Hilary term his moustache is never dry. This is going to be a bad year. His moustache was dripping today and we’re still three weeks from the autumn equinox.”
“Who called him God?” she asked.
“It all arose from a misunderstanding. The last English master came into the staff room one day to find the other teachers talking about Elsynge, and he thought they were discussing the existence of God. They began calling him God after that until a crawthumping science master said that to avoid blasphemy they should call him Godling. The new name never took, though, and when the science master left, Godling became God. It all happened before my time, but the story is part of the folklore of the staff room. Every new teacher hears it and in due course imparts it to the next.”
