The Nature of Water and Air Read online

  I went upstairs and drew a bath, but hesitated before it and did not get in. In my room, I lay naked on my bed and touched the dampness between my legs. Like silt, I thought, from the floor of the sea. A sweat broke on my upper lip, under my breasts. How would I wait out the hours, remembering what he felt like inside me?

  Tears fell down over my temples and hair and onto the pillow beneath me.

  • • •

  That night at eleven o’clock the house was quiet. I crept down the stairs and quietly out through the door. I found my way through the pitch darkness, the night air rich with the odor of bracken and the residual smoke from Angus’s fire.

  He was standing, having heard me coming through the trees, his fire down to red embers. He was already beside himself for me when I rushed into his embrace, and that night on his caravan bed in the dim light of a votive candle set before the Blessed Mother with the broken hand, we lost ourselves in each other.

  Walking back to Drumcoyne House through the trees before dawn, I remembered my mother returning quietly from her trysts, hardly breathing, heat and ocean smells issuing from her as she got into bed beside me.

  • • •

  The next afternoon I met Angus at his camp and rode with him in the caravan to a fair at Ailwee Head. I helped him set up and watched him sell his tinware and crockery, make trades with other travelers.

  We were there a few hours, the fair growing progressively more and more crowded, when I took a walk among the makeshift booths, looking at displays of such disparate things as kippered fish and rotting fruit, heath brooms and old rope, and found myself lost.

  Against a fence a group of traveler girls turned on their heels, smiling and ranting at three boys from town who were dressed in clean pressed trousers and shirts. Two of the girls circled the handsomest boy, asking him if he wanted a look at their knickers. An old woman on the sidelines cried out to them that they were a pair of whores.

  The handsome boy stood against the fence with his arms crossed, giving the girls a negligent smile. There was such a lot of screeching and laughter from the girls that I found myself mesmerized by the little scene, watching it unabashedly.

  The handsome boy noticed me and said, “And who is this girl? I’ve not seen her before.” He gave me a winning smile.

  In that moment I felt a hand grip my arm. “There you are. Come on, now,” Angus said, a sternness in his voice that startled me.

  “Her bleedin’ father’s a bit too protective,” one of the boys said.

  With Angus’s turn they all fell quiet.

  But on our way from the fairground two of the local boys threw rotten fruit at the caravan. An apple hit Declan and he bridled and screeched, pulling the caravan off the road and down a slope into the field. When Angus had reined him still he jumped from the caravan, racing after the boys who ran for their lives into the field.

  “Fuckin’ tinkers!” one of them cried out.

  “Lunatics!”

  “Children of the dead!”

  Time passed and I could see none of them. I stood holding Declan’s reins, waiting anxiously. Angus came back ferocious, out of breath. The boys had gotten away unscathed. As we headed back to the woods at Dunshee he said, “That’s the stinkin’ truth between tinkers and landed people. We’re belittled and laughed at like we’re bloody idiots. We’re animals in your eyes.”

  “Not in mine!” I cried, but he didn’t bother to answer.

  • • •

  It was almost evening when we arrived back at his camp in the oak woods. He started a fire and we sat on the stones waiting for the kettle to boil. He had not recovered from the incident. The impotence of his rage ate at him.

  After tea he sighed, looking up from his cup. “You don’t belong with the likes of me,” he said.

  “What do you mean, Angus?”

  He shook his head, looking into the fire. “Settled girl, clean as rain.”

  “That doesn’t matter.”

  “It’s wrong what we’ve been doing together.”

  “No, it isn’t.”

  He hesitated then said, “You haven’t asked me my age, have you, Mare?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “You’re ageless, Angus,” I said. “You haven’t an age.” I approached him, touching the side of his face with my palm, and he stiffened.

  “I’m thirty-nine, Mare. I’ll be forty on the first of November.”

  “You’re a young man, Angus.”

  “I’m a tinker and you’re not,” he said harshly.

  “I wish I were a tinker.”

  He sneered at me. “You think it’s romantic to bloody live this way. You’re young, and protected as you are, you only see the surface of things.”

  A little storm of anger started in my chest. “You don’t know that. How can you say that?”

  “Go back to the rich house, lass,” he said harshly.

  I shook my head in disbelief.

  “You’re just angry now. You wouldn’t send me away . . .” My voice softened as I said, “Not after what we’ve done together.”

  His eyes drifted to mine. “What did you think would happen between us, Mare?”

  “I want to be with you,” I pleaded.

  “What do I have to offer you?”

  “Things, objects, don’t matter to me.”

  “They’d matter to you soon enough.”

  “No, Angus,” I said, but as I reached to touch him he stiffened and averted his face.

  “It’s better that we put a stop to this now. If I have a conscience in me that’s what I’ll do.”

  I stood, waiting for some change in him, afraid to move.

  “I’m a traveler. I’ll be gone from this place in a few days’ time.” He looked up at me plainly. “Don’t come back to me here again, lass.”

  • • •

  I stumbled back through the woods and saw a little black car parked in front of Drumcoyne House. I smoothed my hair and wiped away the residue of tears from my face.

  Aunt Lily greeted me at the door in a stiff purple dress with a gold and garnet brooch at her throat.

  “Father Galley is here,” she said. “Giving Kitty Extreme Unction.” She grasped my wrist, squeezing tight, her distress making her unusually forthcoming.

  “Oh, Aunt,” I said, shivering.

  “I think she might leave us, Clodagh.” I took both of her hands in mine. “Father Galley is alone with her now.”

  We ascended the stairs together to wait in a study near the room where the priest was with Kitty.

  Lily went abstractedly to the window, the fingers of her right hand moving over the brooch at her throat. I wanted to touch her, to reassure her somehow, as if I might find reassurance for my own pain by offering her the same.

  “I’m sorry I went into my father’s rooms without asking” was all that I could think to say.

  “You never knew your father. You have a right to your curiosity. I never knew my own father either, Clodagh. He never had a word for me or for any of us.”

  “I’m sorry to know that, Aunt,” I whispered. She looked at me with thoughtful curiosity and gave me a small, halfhearted smile.

  “Of course if Frank were alive he’d be a wonderful father to you!”

  “Would he?” I asked in earnest.

  “Oh yes.” She looked at me uneasily. “Are you cold, dear?”

  I had not stopped shaking. “Yes, a little.”

  “Sit near the fire,” she said, pointing to a little range in the corner of the room. I nodded but stayed where I was.

  “I’ve always loved this window. You can see above the forest and far inland.” But when she looked out it was at a great drift of shadow in the sky moving in from the east. “Watch and you’ll see the shadows of day change right before your eyes.”

  She looked at the door to the room where Kitty was. “There’s a terrible momentum to the days lately,” she said. “Like the course of everything is set, impatient to find its finis
h.”

  “I feel that, too,” I said, moved that we shared the same perception. I felt a powerful wish in that moment that she should love me. I renounced Angus Kilheen in my thoughts. I had an urge to confess what I had done, to get some kind of absolution from her. But I knew what a mistake that would be.

  The floor creaked near the window and she turned toward it with wide eyes, hand on her bosom.

  She seemed so startled that I asked, “Are you all right?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve lived here all my life and I’m afraid here.”

  “Of what?”

  “The strangeness of the light in a room sometimes.”

  “Would you ever leave Drumcoyne House?” I asked.

  “Oh, no!” she said as if it were unthinkable. “No.” She touched the glimmering brooch at her throat. “But I don’t want to be alone in this house. I’m glad you’re here, Clodagh.”

  My eyes filled with tears.

  “What is it, Clodagh?”

  “I . . . just want to do the right thing, Aunt. I want to please you.”

  “You do please me, dear,” she said.

  She touched my shoulder. “I want you to think of Drumcoyne House as your home, Clodagh.”

  As I searched her face I felt her retreating from my intensity, until I detected the faint gleam of mistrust in her eyes.

  • • •

  That night I woke sweating in the dark. I saw Angus Kilheen’s horse shifting from leg to leg in my doorway, the light of the hall flooding into the black of the room. I sat up in bed and the vision faded.

  In the isolation of that hour I felt dismantled by the lovemaking with Angus, and wished that I had never come to Dunshee.

  I could feel him breathing across the darkness of the oak woods.

  · 23 ·

  I DIDN’T SLEEP. THE TASTE of Angus’s skin stayed on My tongue. I told myself wanly that I did not want his poverty or his darkness. I relived the words of his rejection, yet my body remained full of erotic volition; my blood clamoring and wild and unafflicted. I wanted him unbearably.

  At first light I made myself get up and splash my face with cold water. Wanting to feel a part of Drumcoyne House, I put on a formal dress and went downstairs. Kitty was up and asked me to play the piano.

  I attempted a Debussy Prelude, the last piece I had committed to memory for Sister Seraphina, but had difficulty concentrating and asked if I might try it again later.

  I took refuge in the kitchen, trying to make myself useful to Mrs. Dowling, helping her make the toast for breakfast.

  • • •

  In the afternoon I walked to the Hibernian to see Denis, to be in his civilized presence. Mrs. Shea told me that he wasn’t back yet from Galway.

  I sat for nearly three hours waiting for him at a table near the big window that overlooked the strand, trying to hear the Debussy Prelude in my mind. But I was listless, my ears full of echoes.

  When they arrived Mrs. Shea met them in the hotel entrance and said something to Denis that made him blush. He came to me looking very fresh faced, his cousin and her friend following.

  He introduced me to Joan and Roy. Joan was fair with puckish features like Denis; Roy tall and dark haired, a sharp-featured handsomeness to him.

  They seemed pleased that I was there. “Denis mentioned you to us on the drive up here,” Joan said.

  Certain that his cheeks would be ablaze I spared him by not looking at him.

  “Are you looking forward to the Beltaine fires?” Joan asked.

  “You’re still coming with us, I hope,” Denis said.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  “Grand,” he said.

  “Well,” Joan said. “We’ll get our rooms arranged, shall we? Are you staying far, Clodagh?”

  “About a twenty-minute walk north,” I said.

  “Of course. You’re a Sheehy. Clodagh should probably get a room as well, Denis. The fires go very late, Clodagh.”

  “I don’t think I should . . .”

  “Of course you should. Ask your mother to telephone Lily Sheehy, Denis,” Joan said.

  I followed them into the hotel lobby with its dark wood-paneled walls and green upholstered furniture, and Denis introduced me to his mother who stood behind the registration desk; a small nervous woman with a pair of glasses around her neck that she put on to look in the reservation book.

  “She can take the yellow room. It’s number three, just at the top of the stairs,” she said, handing me the key.

  “Can you telephone Lily Sheehy and tell her it’s all on the up-andup?” Denis asked her and she agreed, peering at me over the frames of her glasses.

  As we readied to ascend the stairs I heard Denis’s mother going back and forth with Aunt Lily, insisting there’d be no charge for me to stay.

  • • •

  Joan detained me on the landing.

  “Denis is very impressed with you, Clodagh.”

  I smiled at her.

  “It’s grand that you’ll be in school so near each other.”

  “Yes, isn’t it?” I said, trying to match her cheerful enthusiasm.

  “I’m knackered from the drive,” she said. “I’ll have a lie down for awhile.”

  I told her I was going to rest as well and she said she’d knock when it was time to go.

  I closed the door on my little room with great relief, lay down on the yellow ruffled bed, and began to cry. I could hear the sea through the open window. When I closed my eyes my pulses thrummed. If I had not met Angus Kilheen in the woods I would have enjoyed the assumption that Denis and I were a couple. But my being here with Denis now was a deceptive act.

  Having slept little the night before I fell into a restless sleep full of dreams about playing a broken, dissonant-sounding piano.

  • • •

  We drove to a pub in a nearby village. In the surrounding fields we saw people making piles of wood and paper and broken furniture for bonfires.

  The pub was rough, a damp smell of stale lager on the close air; the floor covered with sawdust. Some local young men sitting on kegs nodded at Denis as we entered. He guided us to a table near the bar and bought pints of Guinness for himself and Roy, and half pints for Joan and me. The young men on the kegs were smoking and laughing loudly.

  “They’re uneasy tonight,” Joan said under her breath.

  “Why?” I asked.

  “No women with them,” said Roy.

  When I looked confused Joan explained that Beltaine was a time of coupling. That in some isolated places in the west people still took the pagan holidays very seriously.

  “Do they celebrate Beltaine in Wicklow, Clodagh?” Joan asked me.

  “Travelers light fires. I don’t remember any of the people from the village or the town celebrating it,” I said.

  “Dunshee’s one of the places where the old celebrations are always marked,” she said. She was a few years older than Denis. I had learned in the car ride over that she and Roy were both Galway University students who studied Irish history and the Irish language.

  “It’s interesting,” Joan said. “There are a few bands of travelers who do keep certain traditions alive that have been lost in many places in Ireland.”

  “Here’s to those travelers!” Denis said, raising his glass.

  “To the travelers!” the others laughed.

  Through the open door we could see someone lighting a bonfire in the distance.

  “Where do the travelers originally come from?” I asked.

  “The travelers were created by the famine. Displaced people moving in circles,” Denis said.

  “Not at all,” Joan said. “The travelers were here before the famine. Maybe some are people displaced by the famine. But not most.”

  “Well, who are they, then?” he asked with a note of irritation in his voice.

  “It’s uncertain,” Roy said. “Some say they’re of gypsy stock.”

  “They’re a true relic of ancient Ireland,” said Joan. “Som
e say that they came from the sea.”

  “Oh,” I said with a smile. “Would that make the travelers related to the selkies? Denis and I were talking of selkies the other day.”

  “Ah, the selkies,” Roy said. “Now you’ve come to bring up the selkies in the right company,” he said, pointing to Joan.

  “Do you believe in selkies, too?” I asked.

  “Yes,” she said and smiled. “Don’t you, Clodagh? With a story of one in your own family?”

  I shook my head.

  Joan made a disappointed face and took a sip from her glass before reciting: “ ‘It was the cries of a fisherman that lured me ashore, lowing like a bull seal, floating in a boat over my bedroom in the night sea.’ ”

  “I remember that part,” I said. “We must have heard the same version of the story.”

  “Selkies are drawn to the erotic desire of the human male, which they can feel across great distances of water and air,” Roy said, smiling. “Bull seals just don’t do it for them.”

  He and Denis laughed.

  “A selkie is a refined, subtle creature in the ways of pleasure. She can teach a human male to please her better than any oafish bull seal. But only just barely,” she added, “for the human male isn’t much above oafish.”

  Denis and Roy moaned.

  Two of the young men who’d been on the kegs were standing near our table at the bar, listening and smiling over our conversation. “So they come to shore for sex!” one of them, a dark-haired one, cried out.

  “It’s the perpetual physical hunger of the human male that draws her,” the other one said, winking at Joan.

  “The human female being so protective of her charms and so ungenerous,” the dark-haired one said.

  We laughed with them but left off our conversation for other things until the young men went back to their friends.

  “I can’t tell if you’re serious,” I said to Joan as Denis and Roy were talking about something else.

  “I know we’re laughing, Clodagh, but I believe in everything I’m telling you.” She leaned into me and said, “You see, Clodagh, the selkie does not intend to stay. She intends after her trysts to go back to the sea and many of them do, when the man lies exhausted on the rocks beside her. The soul of the man is destroyed because he knows he’ll never go on such a wild, arching swim with a mortal woman. Those men are damned. But a virile man’ll hold her to him till he exhausts and weakens her. Then he gets her sealskin and hides it and marries her. . . .”