Dance Lessons Page 8

  Above all else, Ned McHugh has never once let an animal suffer; never let it bellow in pain. Surely he can do the same for his mistress, the woman he’s worked for for thirty-two years?

  She unhooks her cane from the sink edge. Tap, tap, tap across the scullery tiles, until she’s standing next to him. Now Jo leans on the cane, stoops to tuck the €100 note into the top pocket of his jacket. “Please. I’ll not ask again.”

  He nods slowly. “I’ll do that, ma’am.” Then he puts the cap back on his head and turns for the door.

  13

  MOTHER SENDS A CAR to the bus stop in the village. It’s waiting for them when they arrive, the same man and driver who, a week ago, drove them down through the frozen landscape to their wedding at St. John’s Church.

  Today the thaw is setting in, Gowna’s houses and shops drip-dripping with melted frost. As they drive away from the village toward the lake, the man is asking John questions: “Tell us, had yez a brilliant time above in the big smoke?” In the front passenger seat, John is keeping small talk, describing it all, the colossal size of everything: the buildings, the houses, the train station where they waited for the train back home.

  From the back seat, Jo watches the distant lights across Lough Gowna, that town in County Galway where people are already sitting around their nighttime supper tables, eating toast or rashers or banana sandwiches. She loved the city. But she hated the burden of pretending to enjoy herself. Who thought it up anyway, the very idea? Whoever it was was a stupid person, the idea of a holiday away with a stranger, a holiday straight after your wedding. She’s been counting the days to be home, to the house and the fields where she can hide again, where she can lose herself in the crevices of her old life.

  They drive past the Gowna Dance Hall, empty and closed until Saturday night. She watches the back of her husband’s head and sees him back there, once, a whole lifetime ago, crossing the dance floor in his bicycle clips to ask her up to dance. If he hadn’t? If he’d decided to stay on the men’s side, smoking his Sweet Aftons and making small talk with the other men? She wouldn’t be here now. Things happen that easily, she thinks, watching the dark landscape float past the car’s back window. One small thing, a decision like that. But a small thing sets off something else. Like a marriage. So if the accident that makes it happen is so small, then maybe the thing itself, the result, is just as small. One man or another. Maybe it doesn’t even matter.

  The tea table is set in the kitchen, where Mother flutters around, passing a plate of scones and treating the new couple like visitors. Father tells John how many ewes have dropped already. Mother asks if they were frozen stiff above in the city.

  Kitty arrives from work, her eyes bright and her cheeks red from pedaling home in the January night. She regales them with the usual stories of the town and how the shopgirls pass the change from counter to counter, down along the shop in a shuttle contraption that flies above their heads like a bird. She mimics the women who come to select blouses and cardigans, who send their housemaids to collect a bolt of dress material, spending a guinea or a half-crown like it’s only tuppence. She starts to tell about a fat woman, a bank manager’s wife, who’s so fat that it takes two shop girls just to measure her for a girdle.

  Jo screeches laughing at her sister’s story. It’s so delightful to be home again, to chat and laugh with her sister. Sitting here, she realizes that for the entire honeymoon, as she sat with John in a Dublin café or cinema, she was prenarrating the city already, its lights and houses and shops, saving it all up to tell her sister.

  A cough from the top of the table stops them. Father. He frowns at his daughters. Mother looks at Kitty, and says, “Now, that’s enough. You know your father doesn’t like that kind of talk.”

  After tea, Mother ushers Jo and John upstairs to their new room. There’s a surprise waiting for them in the big room at the front of the house. Mother and Father have ordered them a new double bed from a hardware shop in Ballinkeady.

  On the bed are two white pillowcases that Kitty has embroidered with a rose in each bottom corner.

  “I emptied out the wardrobe,” Mother is saying, pulling the doors open to the empty insides. Standing in her new marital room, Jo wants to run across the landing, pitter-patter like a child to her and Kitty’s old room.

  Next morning, she wakes to a pale winter sunlight outside the window. Eyes still shut, she listens for him, the familiar little snores next to her. She feels that now-familiar ache, that wet between her legs. The shame! Oh, Christ, the shame! And here in her own house, with her mother and father asleep across the landing.

  When she reaches for him the bed is empty. He is already up and gone.

  She lies there listening to the sounds from downstairs: Mother rattling the poker in the fireplace. Then Mother’s footsteps across the kitchen. The clanking sound as she sets the pot of animal swill on its hook. Jo listens for men’s voices. Nothing. So John and Father, their bellies full of boiled eggs and hot toast and scalding tea, have already left for the yard and the fields.

  14

  MOTHER’S EYES STRAY to her older daughter’s waist. Jo catches her mother’s knowing smirk. There is a woman’s justice here. On a farm all things spawn themselves into the new season, into the next generation. It has happened in the very room where Mother, as a new bride to this house, conceived Jo.

  Down in the village, Dr. Fitzgerald examines Jo in his surgery. She hates lying there, hates that this grey-haired man who smells of aftershave and always wears a good waistcoat and pin-striped trousers has the power to do this. Has the power to tell her “yes” or “no.”

  “Great my dear,” he says, in that false, staged way of his. “You’re expecting.”

  Kitty, she thinks. I must tell Kitty.

  Father is sick again, always sickly in the spring with his bad chest, the coughing, coughing from his bed, the old newspapers crafted into birds’ nest shapes, makeshift spittoons. Every morning when Jo brings him his breakfast, she collects the night’s paper spittoons, carries them to the kitchen fireplace, where the phlegm sizzles in the flame.

  John and Mother and Jo hold the fort, keep everything going. It’s the end of lambing season, so they’re out half the night, the flashlight shining under bushes looking for birthing ewes.

  Now that she’s fully trained as a drapery assistant, Kitty has got herself a job in a much bigger drapery shop in Galway City, where she lives with other girls in a rooming house. Half of the county is jobless or gone to England, but for Kitty Burke it’s been no bother to get a new and better job. On her days off, she and her new friends walk on the promenade at Salthill. At night they go dancing at a grand, beachside dance hall.

  Mother let her younger daughter move away on one condition: Kitty is supposed to come home on Sundays, for Sunday dinner. But for the past few weeks, Kitty has sent a letter saying that she’s not feeling well; she has a little chill. Mother reads these letters and clicks her teeth about the dirt and filth and germs of the city’s back streets.

  Jo knows the letter is just another of Kitty’s fibs. After each of Kitty’s excuse letters, the week stretches ahead as a disappointment.

  Without her sister, without Kitty’s stories and chatter and rushing through the house in her high heels, the days at Knockduff are identical. With Kitty gone, the four of them have settled into their own, deep silence, a silence that seems to have a life of its own.

  The first Sunday in March, Kitty is finally coming for Sunday dinner. This will be the day to tell her Jo’s news. While Mother peels the potatoes for roasting, Jo practices before her dressing table mirror. Kitty, I’m expecting. Kitty, I’m expect—Kitty, you’re going to be an auntie. Auntie Kitty.

  An hour before Sunday dinner, a shiny black car appears at the end of the avenue. A man gets out to unlatch the first gate, he shuts it behind him, then the car comes bumping up the last stretch of avenue to the yard.

  From the bedroom window, Jo watches as the man parks just beyond the yard
gate. But nobody gets out. Then Jo watches the heads together, the arms, the bodies clasped. At last, Kitty steps out, blows a last kiss back at him.

  The man reverses and turns while Kitty stands there straightening her skirt. Then, in her high heels, Kitty picks her way across the muddy farmyard.

  At the dinner table, Kitty asks for a linen dishcloth to spread over her new blouse. Jo watches how her sister eats in this new, compact way—the delicate little forks of potato, little slices of roast beef. Her plate is still half full when Kitty announces that she couldn’t possibly eat another bite, while Jo, whose waist is already thickening, gobbles down the slathers of meat and spud and carrot. She’s already craving the trifle and custard and tea that will follow. These days, she could eat the house.

  Jo catches her sister studying John, a perplexed look, as if Kitty can’t quite recall how John Dowd got here, in this house, at their family table. Jo sees herself through her sister’s eyes. Nowadays, she smells of the yard and the stables, her legs have the permanent mark of her black Wellingtons. She keeps her thick hair clipped back with hair clips because it’s easier that way.

  Across the table, Jo watches her sister’s animated face, the red-lacquered nails fluttering like bright butterflies. She shuts her eyes and wills it to last, wills the man in the black car to run his motor into a ditch, to break an axle or burst a tire.

  After dessert and tea, the men go back to the fields while Mother sits by the range and dozes. Jo shoots her sister their old, secret look and darts her eyes toward the kitchen and the yard. The sisters tiptoe out across the scullery, close the back door softly behind them.

  Out in this blustery March day, the apple trees creak above their heads.

  “Kit, I’m expecting. A baby.”

  Kitty shrieks. “How long? What day? It’s going to be a girl. I just know it’s a girl!”

  Then Kitty takes her sister’s hands and twirls her around. In the yard, the sisters skip and dance, ring-around-the-roses. “Brilliant!” Kitty shrieks. “Such fantastic news!”

  So Jo supposes that it is.

  Jo and Ellen

  15

  THE SMELL OF TURF SMOKE is stronger here, just inside the farmyard gate, so close to the Dowds’ house. Ellen watches a small man walking across the yard. It’s a smaller, second farmyard that sits just beyond the house. His shoulders are hunched into the rain. He wears an old tweed cap and a thick moustache.

  The man uncurls a green water hose from over his shoulder, bends to set the end over the edge of a water trough. He hasn’t seen Ellen yet. Hasn’t seen the American girl who has walked up here in the rain.

  The name comes to her. Fintan’s voice: We had a man who used to work for us in the busy season, a farmhand. Ned. Then, after my father’s death, he came every day.

  Ellen wonders if she should cough, announce herself. No. Too late. He’s straightened up and now he’s standing there staring at her.

  “Hi. Um . . . Hello. Hi there.” She takes a few steps closer, as if approaching a cross dog. “I’m here to see Mrs. Dowd.”

  She watches him flinch at her voice, her American accent. Then realization dawns across his face. He stubs out the cigarette with his boot. He looks down the yard past her, obviously wondering how she has suddenly materialized like this. He fumbles in his pants pocket. He takes out another cigarette but doesn’t light it.

  “Is she in?” Her voice is gentle, tentative. He knows, she thinks. He somehow knows who I am.

  “Yeah, she’s in but she’s . . . ah . . .” She follows his gaze toward the grey stone house. From here, it looks huge—a big, stolid farmhouse with a slate roof and double chimneys. The curtains on the gable window are drawn. It’s Jo’s room. She can tell.

  “She’s still sleeping?”

  Ned has the same guarded look as the village priest. “Well, when the day is wet like this, she’s not that . . .”

  “Right.”

  “She was asleep this morning anyways, when I went in. It’s th’oul damp. Plays hell with us all.”

  “Look, could I just go in? See for myself?”

  He meets her eyes at last. Something about her drenched state softens him. “If you don’t knock or make noise, she probably won’t even waken. So no differ.”

  Inside the back door is a line of hanging rain coats, winter coats, woolen hats, rubber gum boots standing toes to the wall. An electric clock ticks loudly from the patch of wall above the window. There’s an electric kettle next to the sink. The house smells of boiled cabbage.

  In a second, inner kitchen, someone has set a fire in the ceramic range. On each side of the range sits a high-backed wooden armchair, the arms worn shiny with age. The chair opposite the television has a stack of white bed pillows.

  On the table is an upturned teacup on its saucer, a Yoplait strawberry yogurt, an unopened packet of wheat bread. Someone has set a bunch of fat green grapes in a white bowl.

  Jo starts awake. There’s a noise, a noise that woke her. She was dreaming again, some daft dream about John and Kitty and Mother. The noise now. It’s in the kitchen. Clank-clank. Is it the range door? And there are footsteps back and forth. No, not Ned. The footsteps too light for Ned. And it’s not a dream. Not now. Someone’s in the house. Was someone supposed to come? She forces her mind to remember, forces it awake and all the way out of the murk, the clouded murk of sleep and tablets. No. Ned has already been here. Earlier, she heard him tiptoe in, half-opened her eyes to see him standing at the parlor door again. This morning? Yes, this morning. Not yesterday.

  Tick-tick-tick. She listens to the rain in the yard, drip-dripping onto the window-sill.

  Another noise. Down in the kitchen, there’s someone pacing. Jesus. She lies still as a corpse. It’s someone who has come to rob her, to kill her in her own bed. Ned. Jesus, Ned where are you?

  On the telly, on the news, all those stories about old people tied to their own kitchen chairs and left there for days, their life savings robbed, their bodies beaten black and blue.

  No. No. By hell, it’s not going to happen to her. She levers herself up on her elbows. Yes. Good. Her walking stick is there, crooked on the bottom bed rail. If she’s careful, she can walk out there quiet as a ghost. She’ll surprise them, whoever they are, not the other way around. She’ll beat their bloody brains out.

  Ellen is turning to leave, to tiptoe back up through the scullery when she hears the sound. Turning, she sees the old woman standing there, a walking cane held high, a murderous face under wild, grey hair.

  They stand there. Jo has Fintan’s deep-set eyes. Jo’s mouth falls open, a puppet unhinged. She’s fully dressed in crumpled pants and a stained, beige cardigan. The old woman has obviously been asleep. At last Jo lowers the cane. “I heard someone. I heard someone in the house.”

  “Hi. Mrs. Dowd? I’m . . . I’m Ellen. I’m sorry to just come like this, but Ned said it might be okay.” Ellen hears how stupid, how whiny-childlike her voice sounds. She pushes on. “We talked on the phone. Last week.” Jo is older, so much older than the first communion photo in the church. And across the sweltering kitchen, Ellen gets a body smell, a sour, sulfuric whiff.

  Jo Dowd sniffs at her. “You . . . you better sit down a minute.”

  Ellen listens to the scullery cupboards being opened and slapped shut, then a kettle on the boil. Then at last, Jo crosses the kitchen with a metal teapot. She walks slowly, painfully. She sets the tea on the table, then produces an empty mug from the big cardigan pocket. She sets the mug in front of Ellen. “I’ve no milk. I don’t take milk myself.”

  From her chair, Jo reaches into the windowsill, which is crowded with old magazines and letters. Jo produces a tin ashtray that is already overflowing with ash and cigarette butts. She sets it next to the upturned cup, then pushes away all the other breakfast things—the yogurt, the bowl of grapes. She produces a gold packet of cigarettes and a disposable lighter from her cardigan pocket, then offers the packet across the table. “Take a fag?”

 
Ellen shakes her head. “No thanks.”

  Jo pours the tea. Then she lights up and takes a long, deep draw. Ellen watches the cigarette trapped between the brown-stained fingers.

  Jo reaches back into the windowsill again. This time she produces a white envelope, which she tosses onto the table between them. Ellen stares at the three postal stamps with the American stars and stripes, the faded post-office mark, “Essex County, Massachusetts.” It’s Ellen’s own handwriting: “To the family of Fintan Dowd, Gowna, County Mayo.”

  To the family. This family, here. Now. This old woman in her dirty cardigan and her fierce, sunken eyes. This old woman who keeps puffing on her cigarette and won’t meet Ellen’s eyes.

  Ned saw this letter. That’s how he recognized her just now, outside in the yard.

  Loudly, Jo sets her teacup down. “Last week . . . or whenever it was . . . on the phone. You must’ve thought I was coddin’ or something. I told you on the phone that there’s nothing here for you. And I’m telling you the same thing now.” For the first time at the kitchen table, Jo fully meets Ellen’s eyes. “You shouldn’t have come.”

  What? Ellen asks Fintan inside her head. What was it about this decrepit old woman that you wanted to keep from your own wife, to lie about her very existence?

  Jo looks a little demented. She jabs a cigarette hand at the letter. “That’s a quare way to inform a mother of her son’s death.”

  These are Fintan’s eyes—the day when their kitchen sink had leaked and he was spitting, raging mad. Or once, when he ran out of gas on a rush-hour highway. There he is standing on the shoulder of the highway seething, screaming, blaming.

  Jo says, “August. Last August. Nine months—nine months and you could’ve written to me, lifted the bloody phone. To his own mother. When a person passes like that, you let the family know straight away.”

  Jo takes another slug of her tea, another drag of the cigarette. “Look, I believe in calling a spade a spade. I’m not one for any of this soft talk or plamás. We weren’t on speaking terms, myself and my son. Well you’d know that, wouldn’t you? But of course you know that.” The voice trails. “Years ago, before he left for . . .” Jo looks back to the crowded window, the swatch of dripping sky.