ā FOUR ā
In spite of which the picnic on the Moat went on, for, as the doctor said, the priest on his own, or at any rate with the help of his stout stick, should be able to look after the matter. It was in the province of the clergy and the police whose concern was with morals, public and private, and the keeping of the peace, and morals would go down the drain and the peace be forever unkept if other couples began to follow the example of Gabriel Rock and daft Nora.
ā Please, doctor, said Miss Grace.
The doctorās wife, squatting like a tailor, ripely filling her bermudas, looked at the picnic cloth and nibbled the picnic fare and said nothing. The miller laughed coarsely. He was not, Miss Grace decided, as saintly a man as his white locks might make him seem. The young nurse had a fit of sneezing that she said she feared was hay fever but that could have commenced as a fit of the giggles.
Nor was it a suitable time, Miss Grace felt, for Cousin Charles, as madly eloquent as usual, to tell how Lucian of Samosata had described a rite celebrated in his day at Hierapolis in honour of the goddess Atargatis, in which a naked celebrant had to climb a stone phallus one hundred and seventy feet high and stay for a whole week on top of it so that all men would be nearer to the gods and all the land below be more fertile; or of a pagan rite practised in memory of Deucalion and the time when men climbed mountains and trees to escape the deluge; or of Heliodorus, spiritual guide to the young Simeon, afterwards to be known as the Stylite, who during his sixty-five years of life spent sixty-two in his Syrian monastery to which of course he had been admitted at the age of three and who had had no knowledge of the world and didnāt even know how a cockerel or a boar was made; or of Serapion, an elder in asceticism, who went one day to Rome where he met a holy virgin and the two of them, to prove that they were dead to the respects of the world and the desires of the flesh, walked naked together through the city.
ā Please, Charles, Miss Grace said.
She meant that there was a clerical student present; and a young nurse, not that the pert hussy had as much as blushed or turned away her eyes from that degrading sight, but had even begun to giggle; and a young wife who was showing the first tender and holy signs of pregnancy; and a lady, even if the lady was advanced and intellectual and a cousin of Charles Roe and used to his ways and his talk.
ā Charles, please, she said. Talk to us about the history of this hill. Isnāt that your favourite topic?
He needed no more encouragement, no second invitation to bring back to life again, from the scaffold where heād danced his last dance, Dark Domhnall the horse-robber or to talk of that darker shadow, ten times the size of Domhnall and behind him in space and before him in time, who had snatched the maiden to the horseās back and ridden for ever with her into the bowels of the earth; or to tell of the double echo, as if of a male and female voice joined, that answered back to anyone who called into the piles of rocks and rubble that now blocked the mouths of the caves. Donāt the stolen horses also neigh, asked Peter Lane, and wondered if he and his beloved could ride like that into the belly of the mountain and find there a new land where the name of Cardinal Newman had never been heard of and the idea that to touch was to sin had never occurred to anyone. Across the picnic spread he watched the Mouse and was unaware how closely Miss Grace was watching him. By the twitching of her lips he knew that the Mouse was bursting with suppressed laughter but he remembered her, with veil unpinned and hair loosened, panting over him in the bed. Her tender tickling hand plucked blades of grass and he quoted to himself a translation of a warm Gallegan love lyric: Do you remember, my lass, that night in summer? You counted the stars and I the blades of grass.
Could she calmly count the stars if he lay on top of her on this hillside on a warm night?
ā Please, Charles, Miss Grace was saying.
For Charles had drifted away from Dark Domhnall to talk of an ancient custom of the girls of the countryside who would go on a Halloween to the meeting place of the two rivers and there drag their shifts thrice upstream and thrice downstream and bring the wet shifts home and set them to dry before the hearth fires, and keep vigil beside them all night to see if the ghosts or fetches of the lovers or husbands to come would reveal the future by walking into the room.
ā Please, Charles, she said again.
Peter Lane wondered what, if she knew his thoughts, would that poor dry stick of a woman say to him, and the doctor was tickled pink to think that a spinster who dyed her underwear all colours, well not all colours but only a sort of crimson, should object to legends of country girls dragging their shifts in the river and drying them by the hearths and hoping, perhaps as she still was, for something terrifying but yet delightful to happen.
ā It must have been cold for them, said the Mouse and laughed outright to ease the tension of all that bottled-up merriment.
But what she was really thinking as she looked at that rubicund face ā as much of it as was to be seen ā and the brown whiskers and bullet-proof tweeds of the doctor was that he was teetotally different from the doctors in the stories in the nauseating religious magazines that had been forced on herself and her sister sufferers in their days of incarceration in convent boarding school. Those doctors had always been distinguished surgeons, tall, grey at the temples, well gone into middle age, and their scientific obsessions and prosperity in Harley Street had caused them to drift from the faith. Then in the operating theatre one crucial morning they were, each and every one of them, impressed by the calm courage of young Nurse Mulligatawny, fresh from the Irish bogs; and wondering, as they leave their various hospitals, about the sources of that courage, they see the Nurses Mulligatawny, each and every one of them, slipping undemonstratively into the hospitalsā chapels. So the surgeons are driven in their Rolls-Royces by their liveried chauffeurs back to their Harley Street consulting rooms and all the time they are thinking of their aged mothers, for each and every one of them has an aged mother who sits, rosary beads entwined in gnarled fingers and praying for her wandering boy, in a cottage by the sea in County Kerry. The end of the story was always in conversions and wedding bells and visits to aged mothers, so that it would seem to be part of the whole duty of the good nurse to bring greyheaded atheistic surgeons back to the Catholic Church, but she herself didnāt feel up to the part and couldnāt care less and was at that moment in the process of dragging a budding priest away from the altar and, once again, she couldnāt care less. Although the next time, she thought, it might be better not to allow him to put his hand inside her pants. That poor priest galloping down the hill to call a halt to the antics of Gabriel Rock and daft Nora was a clumsy bigbooted snuffling shellshocked thing, yet she had heard about him from the night matron the oddest, most wildly romantic story: how when he was a young priest a woman had fallen in love with him and pestered him night and day ā she was an ex-nun who had seen him for the first time when she had been a nun and he a convent chaplain ā and when he resisted according to law, as her own father would say about coursing greyhounds taking a turn after a hare, didnāt the woman kneel at the altar rails when he was giving communion and gash her throat but not, cute enough, so as to kill herself but just so as to make a mess and cause a scene, and what a scene that must have been. They put her in a home and, God help him, it was no wonder that now and again he preached to nuns and nurses in the hospital chapel the weirdest sermons about the sixth and ninth commandments. It could be that, from his experience, he thought the nuns needed the sermons more than the nurses.
But there was the Eloquent Dempsey, Charles Roe, off again and what could it be this time?
What was it but a historical note, to this effect: that when the lord of the land had drained dry the shallow lake around the Island of the Living the peasants of the place had used fragments of the mud from the lakebed to mix with cattlefood so as to induce fertility in their stock.
ā Under a glasscase in my hallway, Martin, you have seen a few pieces of that clay preserved by my family for a good two hundred years.
ā Wonderful, said old Mortell. Wonderful.
But Miss Grace wondered would a few grains of that mud mixed into his morning coffee make him behave like a normal man and not like a mixture of a mad professor and a spoiled priest.
Watching the three women, three corners of a triangle, facing one another across the picnic cloth, the miller was thinking that in ancient times when women worked the quern they sat facing one another and passing the handle of the quern from hand to hand, that oats was always ground in the husk and afterwards sifted, that, prior to grinding, the grain was often dried in an iron pot and stirred to prevent it from scorching; that millers in the old times had had a great name for being fond of women because their mills were at the townās end, with soft bags like mattresses and quiet dark corners convenient, where women would pass homewards half-tipsy at the tail of a market day; that he had once loved a Welsh girl with hair as dark as the hair of the doctorās wife, and that the doctorās wife must have, as that Welsh girl, the morning star, must have had, a bush as crisp as furze but not, pray God, as prickly; and that his foolish and wandering son, begotten on a weakly woman who drank and had made his life a misery, was dying of diseases that grew like animals in poisonous jungles far far from the wind blowing over this green and pleasant hillside.
ā I should be making for home, he said.
Dipping away away back into the monastic world of the ninth century, Charles Roe was reciting: Bell of pleasant sound ringing on a windy night. I should prefer to tryst with it than to tryst with a wanton woman.
ā And what, he said, would the monks of the Island of the Living, where no female was allowed to walk, have said had they lived to see this day?
ā Charles, please, she said.
ā Did Simeon, named the Stylite, climb up and stay to be quite literally closer to heaven? Or was his pillar and place of residence just another huge stone phallus?
ā I should be heading homewards, the miller said.
But Charles Roe, who seldom heard anyone, asked why had the saints really climbed the mountains, and suggested that the picnic party should ascend to the caves. The doctor, who had as much for one day as he could take of Charles Roe, said that Peter Lane, who was his patient, wouldnāt be able, and Peter Lane, greatly daring and hoping, said he could wait where he was while the party ascended, that he had a mouse to look after him.
ā A mouse, said Miss Grace.
ā He means a nurse, said the Mouse.
ā At any rate, said the doctor, someone has beaten us to it.
ā This hill, said his wife, is exclusive no longer.
A hundred yards away, emerging from the cover of a hedgerow that was shelter for cattle on a stormy day, was a single file of young people, three male, three female. The leader, a male, carried a melodeon and as they ascended towards the caves he began to play, quite well, the tune that had the words to it that went: There once was a troop of Irish dragoons.
To the complete disapproval of Miss Grace, the doctor and the miller began to sing to the music: I never will marry a soldier, oh!
ā Those frightful Cawleys, she said. They shouldnāt be tolerated.
ā Sister Thermometer, said the Mouse, is looking blind and wild for Teresa Fallon and Dympna Cawley. Theyāre missing.
The figures diminished as they ascended, the music was more faint. Emerging from the cover of the hedgerow a single figure stood and looked up after the single file of six.
ā Do my eyes deceive me, ...