The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  “Am I?” I asked.

  “You could almost be her, love.” She put her arm around me and pressed my face into the humid warmth of her neck. Her heart beat hard with the shock.

  “I’m like her,” I thought. “In the moonlight I’m like her.”

  I had a terrific urge to hunt for the sealskin dress. How many days would it be before tinkers arrived in the north field? What if I found the dress, put it on and walked into William Connelly’s camp one night? Would he think in the moonlight that I was her?

  When Mrs. O’Dare fell asleep I crept from her bed and stood outside on the dark porch. The sea rushing inland and retreating seemed to repeat: “Aga-thaaa. Aga-thaaa.”

  • • •

  I asked Mrs. O’Dare if she’d found a dress of fur anywhere and she made a face. “Heavens, no. I’d certainly remember such a thing.”

  I took a flashlight with me into the space behind the kitchen wall, determined to find it.

  I broke the tape on a box of my mother’s things and went carefully through it. I found the little snuffbox with the painting of the man’s face on it. Inside there were a few coins of foreign currency. It no longer smelled of oak but of metal and dust. Under it was a man’s beaten, pigskin billfold with cigarette papers and a pound note in it. William Connelly’s things.

  In the same box I found a little cream pitcher with an etching in green of a woman drinking out of an urn. On the bottom were written the words: “Artemesia drinking her husband’s ashes.”

  I took the cream pitcher, the snuffbox and the billfold with me and put everything else away.

  • • •

  I began piano lessons with Miss Flint, who lived two doors down from Mrs. Rafferty’s shop. She was a gray mouse of a woman who admitted me each time with reservation. The walls and curtains of her sitting room, which faced the main street, reeked of decades of cooked mutton.

  I knew by the way she grabbed the three pound notes from me after each lesson why she had agreed to teach me at all. But her criticisms, while given in a spirit of condescension, were helpful, and I took in everything she said, determined that she’d not be able to repeat a criticism. I channeled my dislike of her into my playing and loved to hear her reluctant approvals.

  • • •

  One June morning after a lesson I visited Mrs. Rafferty’s store, remembering that Mrs. O’Dare had sold some of my mother’s things back to the antique store.

  I asked Mrs. Rafferty about the dress. “It was strange,” I told her. “Made out of a kind of fur. Sealskin, I think.”

  “No. I saw nothing like that,” she said.

  “So she didn’t buy that from you to begin with?”

  “I sell antique dresses. I’ve sold coats made of fur, but never a dress. That I’m certain about, dear,” she said.

  She invited me to look at the beautiful things, addressing me as “Miss Sheehy.” She showed me a delicate mahogany trinket box, watching me expectantly as if I might be interested in purchasing it. I pulled open one of the tiny drawers and the thing exhaled a dusty rose-smelling air. I closed it and put it down on a table. “It’s nice,” I said, nodding to her and touching things appreciatively as I moved toward the door. She watched wistfully as I left, clearly disappointed that I did not have my mother’s passion for inanimate things.

  • • •

  A piano tuner came to adjust the instrument at Mercymount Strand. After he left I had to get used to the new sound of it, feeling nostalgic for the old dissonance. I practiced fiercely most of the daylight hours, a bright, vigorous Mozart sonata and the gentle Andante from Elvira Madigan. But in the evenings my thoughts shifted. I stood on the old Dublin Road praying for tinker caravans to appear on the horizon. I was starved for communion with someone. Some engagement. I had thought I’d find relief in being away from the silences of St. Brendan’s, but the same isolation filled me here.

  Mrs. O’Dare was my only real companion, and her permanent state of penitence and pity for me incited my impatience.

  One day, three weeks after I’d arrived back for the summer, I cooked a pan of eggs and left them sitting awhile on the stove. When I came back into the kitchen to eat them, Mrs. O’Dare had dumped them out and was frying slices of black pudding in the same pan.

  “Where are my eggs?” I cried.

  “They were dry, love,” she said with surprise. “I thought you cooked them last night and forgot them.”

  “You’re lying, damn it!” I screamed. “They were my eggs and you dumped them on purpose!”

  “Clodagh!” she gasped.

  I picked up a glass from the table and smashed it, hard and deliberate, on the floor between us.

  She peered into my eyes with confusion. “Lass . . . ,” she said, as I stormed out.

  I ran to my room and cried. I beat the mattress with my fists, screamed into the pillow. Lying on my side, I saw myself in the standing mirror a few feet away. My face looked different, I thought. Different muscles had come into play about the mouth and eyes. I got up and went to the mirror. The closer I looked the more I shuddered. My eyes caught the light deeply and under their surface glimmer they were cold, without memory, the eyes of a dead girl. I longed for Mare’s company, remembering the way we’d drifted together over the shore and the Wicklow hills after she’d died.

  I went to the piano and, shaking, attempted the “Pavane for a Dead Princess.” The melody came fumblingly at first, but after a few hours of concentrated work I played it almost seamlessly, music resonant with pain and enchantment.

  Mare inhabited me, her grief to know the world swelling up in my muscles. I felt her wishing that the flesh might find again the impulse that had once divided us into two selves; that we would not have to go to a mirror to find the other, but that we could hold each other’s hand or sleep in each other’s arms or, at last, cleave away and move off in different directions.

  After the fifth or sixth time through, I felt Mare growing weaker, dimming like a bulb. The music receded on its own, fading into silence. Slowly I removed my hands from the keys and sat a long time without moving.

  The gray day had darkened outside.

  • • •

  Walking on Mercymount Strand the next morning, I saw Finian coming toward me out of the distance. “Clodagh!” he called, waving.

  I waved back, my heart galloping with calm fury and exhilaration.

  He was taller, wider in the shoulders. His skin fair and scrubbed.

  “Do you like St. Brendan’s?” he asked, his mouth tensing around a smile.

  “No,” I said, my cheeks going warm. “It’s hell on earth.”

  “You’ll come to a dance this summer at Findlay Hall, Clodagh. They’re brilliant.”

  We walked a little and it started to rain. I said that he could come to my house for tea and we ran across the field with the rain coming down on us. When we got inside he followed me into the kitchen where I put on the kettle. My damp blouse clung to my skin causing me to shiver, and the rain ran from my hem in cold rivulets over my calves.

  I gave Finian his tea and sat across the table from him watching his eyes. He seemed curious, uncertain of himself. His hand shook slightly as he reached for his cup, as if he sensed a certain determination in me. When we finished our tea I took him for a tour of the house. He was attentive, but mostly quiet. As he followed me through the lower house, I could hear him breathing behind me the way Letty Grogan had when she’d followed me through the house that first day.

  The rain on the windows of the empty second-floor rooms cast moving shadows over Finian’s white face as he gazed at the parade of nymphs.

  Two steps above him on the next flight I turned and told him that the third floor was more decrepit.

  “I don’t mind,” he said, his eyes wide.

  The rain came down hard now, battering the roof and the windows. The dim bulbs I switched on did little to cut through the shadows so I lit an oil lamp and carried it to the room with the satyr and nymphs. Lightning mad
e the walls shimmer and dim. I stood in the doorway holding the lamp as he went in, his footsteps creaking as he crossed the bare floor.

  “Jesus Christ,” I heard him mutter. “Bring the light over here,” he said, standing before the satyr. I hesitated, then walked over, my heart thumping against the wall of my chest.

  “Holy Christ,” he said softly. The lamplight cast dark shadows around and between the figures, accentuating their contours. He seemed uneasy as he had when we’d watched the seals mating.

  While his back was to me I unbuttoned my blouse before the massive mirror. In the reflection I saw him turn. I reached around and undid my bra, then faced him, leaning my back against the cold mirror, the shadows of the rain moving over my skin.

  He stood almost gravely still, one half of him visible in the afternoon light, the other half of him in shadow. I took off the rest of my clothes and lay down on the bare floor. The fear went out of his face and when it did I felt a thrill lift my stomach.

  He unzipped his pants and was on top of me, struggling to enter me. I pushed against the pain until he was in me, rocking me under his weight, holding me to the floor.

  “Kiss me, Finian,” I said, holding his head in my hands.

  But he kept his face turned from mine as he thrust into me. His energy terrible and frenetic.

  Any feeling of certainty left to me was gone.

  I disconnected from what was happening, wincing against the force of him, waiting for it to end. I thought of the snuffbox, the little pitcher, the image of Artemesia drinking her husband’s ashes, as he squeezed my hips, holding me tightly in place, sweat gathering where his skin slammed against mine. His forehead grew fraught as if he were in pain, his teeth showing, the corners of his mouth tensing.

  All at once he pulled out of me and was up on his knees with his sex pulsing in his hands, an arc of milky spray hitting the mirror, the rest caught in his palm, some spilling from between his fingers.

  As he recovered himself I closed my eyes again and thought about the misshapen nun hidden in the far corridor. Hot tears mixed with the sweat on my face. I did not watch him as he dressed himself quietly and left in near darkness, the way Letty Grogan had almost a year before.

  • • •

  The first month of summer was gone.

  A week passed and I had not seen Finian.

  It was the time of the evening when the red light of dusk was streaking the western sky and thin clouds streamed after the sun, dark, but ignited along the edges.

  I lay on my bed looking up at the stucco herons when I smelled the first summer fires through the open window and knew that tinkers had arrived in the northwest fields.

  I prayed that the copper-haired man was among them. And if he wasn’t, maybe William Connelly would be. I would go to him and tell him who I was. Perhaps he’d think of me as a daughter.

  I ran outside into the chill of the air, the cold grass grazing my bare ankles and calves, walking to the edge of the field where I saw a fire. One figure, a man’s, stood facing the flames, all his weight on one leg, his arms folded, the red glow of a cigarette deepening and dimming at his mouth.

  A gust of wind caused the fire to swell and in the sudden yellow light I recognized the copper-haired man. He turned and saw me, watching without moving as if I were a shy animal that might scare.

  I don’t know how long we stood that way. The flames went down a bit and something crashed and fell away from the fire and he had to knock it back in. That’s when I left, running across the pitch-black fields, stumbling in the uneven grass, the small dips and ascents, back to the silence of the house and the blue room.

  • • •

  In the morning I went farther, crossing the fields and walking into the camp. A girl was squatting in some grass at the side of a caravan, doing her water. When she saw me she jumped to her feet, hastily adjusting her clothing. “My mother has tinware, Miss, if you’re looking for it.” I nodded and followed her into the circle of caravans.

  A woman bent into a washtub, the shadows of her breasts visible through the scooping neckline of her blouse. She stood up as she saw me, squeezing out the dress she was washing, holding the damp thing by the shoulders on the air before her, the sun shining through the bright yellow seams.

  “Is it tinware you’re after?” she asked.

  “Yes.”

  She led me to the back entrance of her caravan where she opened a curtain. A kettle and three tin cooking pots sat on a square of muslin. In the shadows within, the supine figure of a black-haired man stirred vaguely in the light.

  “A pot,” I said.

  “Fifty pence,” she said, and I handed her the coins.

  The caravans were spread out over a shallow slope and I scanned them, but could not see any of the inhabitants.

  Near an isolated caravan at the bottom of the hill I saw a wolfhound lying on the ground. It wagged its tail easily without rising as I approached, and the horse, grazing nearby, raised its head from the grass and looked at me.

  The copper-haired man sat smoking under the shade of a makeshift awning, facing away from the camp toward the Wicklow Mountains, his tinware and a few pieces of crockery set out on boards. I could hardly breathe, my heart crowding my throat.

  “This is a lovely thing,” I said, touching a gilt-edged saucer with a painting of a cluster of grapes at its center. A film of dust remained on my fingertips.

  “You’ve a good eye.” His voice resonated from under the awning. “It’s an Irish piece from one of the old estate houses in Antrim.”

  “It’s lovely,” I said, my own voice quavering.

  “Such an object gives great pleasure.” While the crockery and the table and everything else glinted in the sun, the man remained dim. “If I were not a traveler, Miss, I’d keep the thing as my own, but such a creature needs a settled place to stand, not a household rocking back and forth in the wind.”

  The horse had come up behind me, pressing the length of its face between my shoulder blades and pushing me forward into the boards that held the crockery, upsetting things but not breaking any.

  “Declan!” the man cried to the horse, leaning his head out into the sunlight, his hair glinting brightly. “Move off! He’ll not hurt you, Miss. He’s looking for a kiss,” he said, and stood up. He pushed on the horse’s side and it lifted its head crankily at him, curling its lips.

  “Ah, ye big bastard,” he said, laughing. The wind blew his worn cotton shirt against him, revealing the power of his upper body. “I want to show you a piece, Miss.” As he came near me he brought with him a smell of dead fires and cold air, and something else; something like sheep.

  “Look at this one.” He picked up a sugar bowl and I recognized it as the sister piece to my small broken pitcher, etched with the same image of Artemnesia drinking her husband’s ashes.

  “I’ve seen this image before,” I said.

  “Have you? Well, there are some pieces circulating.”

  The piece was missing its handles, and there was a crack in the side that must have, I thought, made the thing difficult to sell.

  “The crack and the broken handles don’t make such a thing worthless,” he said, as if reading my mind. “The thing is precious as Greek sculpture. Missing her forearms, Venus becomes something more.” The comparison struck me as sweet, and a little sad.

  “The imperfections are how you see the soul of a thing,” I said without looking up at him.

  I felt his focus on me deepen and he paused before he said in a soft, composed voice that implied an intimacy between us: “Such pieces mean something more to me with their little histories of trouble.” He waited again and then said, “I’ve seen you before.”

  “In the field, the night before,” I said. “You were building a fire.”

  ‘Was that yourself standing there?”

  “Yes.”

  He shook his head. “Before that.”

  “I saw you once on a bus,” I said, “and once at a fair in Kildare.”
r />   “Yes,” he said, nodding, looking thoughtfully at me.

  “Do you live near here?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ah, well, I’ve been back and forth to these parts all my life. Surely I’ve seen you many times in town or on the roads.”

  He smiled and my blood rushed. His face was handsome, at once rough and finely chiseled, weathered and ageless. The prominent bones of his cheeks cast shadows through a few days’ growth of whiskers.

  I looked away, unable to keep meeting his look. “How much do you ask for this?”

  “Two pounds,” he said.

  “If I had the money for this bowl I’d buy it from you. But I’m given an allowance and I’ve spent the lot of it already this week. Will you be here in another week?” I held the bowl up in the sunlight.

  Without answering, he took it from me gently and wrapped it in heavy white paper, the kind my mother had used, tied it in coarse string and gave it to me.

  “I’d hate to deprive you of the pleasure of this,” I said.

  “I keep it in here,” he said, pointing to his temple, “and in here.” He pointed with one finger to his heart, his fingernail outlined black with grime. I smiled up at him, holding one hand as a visor to the sun. I felt him watching me as I moved away. When I was out of the range of his vision I turned and saw a placard leaning against the back of his caravan. It said: ANGUS KILHEEN: CROCKERY, TINWARE.

  As I was crossing the field I saw Finian standing in front of the house.

  “Clodagh,” he called out, spotting me, squinting and smiling in the sun.

  The tide rushed inland and the petrels screeched in the sky.

  “What have you there?” he asked, gesturing with his head at my parcel.

  I ignored his question, my face burning.

  “I’ve come to see you before I go off to the Isle of Wight for July. I’ve family there and . . .”

  “Good-bye,” I said, pushing past him.

  “Clodagh, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have left that day the way I did. Come walk on the beach,” he said.

  “I’ll not go with you,” I said, holding my white package carefully in both hands, realizing that I’d left my tinware pot among Angus Kilheen’s crockery. Finian followed as I moved resolutely toward the house.