Cast a cold eye, p.3
Cast A Cold Eye, page 3
She told him her name was Grainne Clarkin, she would be twenty-three in December, her parents owned the bookstore and she was helping them run it for a few months while they took some time off and made visits to relatives, and while she decided what she wanted to do . . . or until she was able to find a real job, there not being many jobs of any sort to be had in Ireland, even for a Trinity graduate, she spoke and read Irish—Jack confessed that he only knew half a dozen words—and she promised to read all of his books right away, now that she’d met him and knew him.
Jack told her he was thirty-two years old, he’d written seven novels—serious suspense novels, he called them—had lived most of his life in New York except for periods of travel that included most of western Europe with the notable exception of Ireland; this new book had earned a sizable advance on his proposal for it and he was using part of the money to finance the research trip, partly because the subject truly interested him and gave him a chance to see the land of his ancestors and, besides, it was tax-deductible; and he’d certainly be back in Dublin again as soon as he was settled in the house and the book was actually started, and he’d very much like to see her again and he hoped she felt the same.
Midway through the third pint, his hand was resting lightly on hers on the worn leather cushion between them. By the end of the third pint, her fingers were gently gripping his.
But, in spite of his best efforts, Jack’s eyes were closing from fatigue. It suddenly struck him that three pints of beer was a quart and a half. God, talk about getting acclimated quickly. They voted against another pint, and she drove him down Clontarf Road in her rattly Toyota. When she stopped in front of the house he pointed out, the only thing awkward about parting was the box of books he clutched on his lap.
“I’m awfully glad we met,” he said.
“Irish girls are not supposed to be so forward,” Grainne said quietly.
“I suppose that’s what a university education will do.”
“It is,” she said. “I’m terribly corrupted.” With only a little encouragement, Jack thought, her smile might have turned into a grin.
“Will you be in the shop in the morning?”
“Yes.”
“I’ll stop by.”
“All right.”
At home, he would have kissed her. Here, he knew he shouldn’t.
He stood on the pavement, with the box of books held up against his chest, watching until the Toyota’s taillights blended into the traffic.
In the morning, he ate breakfast ravenously and finished all the brown bread in the basket. The car, a blue Escort, was delivered as promised, and by ten-thirty—he was comfortably falling into the slower Irish ways—he was driving away toward the Clontarf Bookshop.
She was there. When he walked in, he saw that she was reading one of his books.
He wrote down the address and telephone number of the house he was renting. She gave him one of the bookshop’s cards and added that she lived upstairs.
She walked him to the door and, when he’d opened it, spontaneously leaned forward—she was almost his height—and kissed him lightly on the mouth. She seemed quite as surprised as he was. For the moment they touched, her lips felt full and soft on his own.
“I’ll see you again,” he said, and she nodded. He thought her eyes still looked startled at her own boldness.
He saw when he glanced back that she stayed in the doorway until he’d driven out of sight.
The clerk at Radio Shack had everything ready as promised, and helped him carry it all outside and wedge the cartons securely into the trunk and back seat of the car.
The sun was shining again as he threaded his way through traffic alongside the Liffey, searching for unfamiliar road signs, and then onto the N7, heading west toward the rocky hills of County Clare and his waiting house near the village of Doolin on the coast, just at the edge of the Burren.
CHAPTER 3
In the village of Doolin, where the breezes carried the salt and scent of the ocean onto the stone-strewn hills, a man named Padraic Mullen was nearing death.
He was seventy-three years of age, hearty and in good health, still working his patch of hillside right up until spring planting time earlier that year. One morning, just as the planting was nearly done, he had urinated blood. He’d stood there for a long time, breathing deeply, his lips moving in sudden devout prayer, asking God Almighty that when he opened his eyes it would all be changed and he might be permitted a longer time on this earth with his children and his wife, God willing. But God was not willing and when old Paddy opened his eyes, the urine was still bright red. Oddly, there was no pain, no burning, and for another week everything was normal. Eleven days later, he stood before the toilet in the morning, forgetful, for the first time, of that big fright. And the urine was bright red again, accompanied this time by a horrible burning that made him cry out and double over in a vain attempt to stop the flow.
The next day, a Friday, his two sons, Michael and Patrick, had driven him in the truck to the hospital in Galway—Father Henning had said that would be the best place for this sort of thing—and, with many reassuring pats on the shoulder, had left him in the care of the sisters who managed to smile and yet look stern at the same time. The brothers had then driven on to Salthill, the beach resort just a few miles farther out on the coastal road along Galway Bay, taken a room at the Monte Cristo Hotel, and proceeded to the serious business of getting roaring drunk in one of the local dancehalls. When they were ejected from that place, they found another, more congenial establishment where their noisy custom was welcomed until closing time. They made a terrible racket getting up the stairs to their room at the Monte Cristo, and they were embarrassed and penitent when they faced the frowning landlady the next morning over breakfast. They were still red-eyed an hour later when they reached the hospital and enquired for the doctor whose name Michael had written down carefully on a grubby bit of paper. The doctor, a hard-eyed young man whose accent was more British than Irish, told them in a straightforward manner that their father had cancer of the pancreas and would be dead within six months. They took the old fellow home that afternoon, put him to bed, told the tale to their weeping mother, and repaired to the local pub, it being Saturday night anyway, where they repeated the previous evening’s performance on a quieter scale to ease their sorrow.
Now, in mid-September, Padraic Mullen, his flesh gnawed away by the cancer, his eyes glazed, cheekbones threatening to tear through the jaundiced skin of his face, hands reduced to claws, was coming to the end at last.
Michael Mullen came out of the bedroom, secretly glad to escape the heavy smell of sickness and death, and closed the door behind him.
“It can’t go on much longer,” he said to Patrick and his mother, who kept one hand pressed tight over her mouth. “Please God, it’ll be easy and he’ll just go quiet-like.”
Peggy Mullen’s eyes narrowed as she forced back the sobs. Her voice, schooled by countless generations of getting by in the face of the worst, hardly wavered when she said, “I’ll sit with him. You come in, the two of you, in a few minutes.” Hand still pressed firmly to the side of her face, she opened the bedroom door and went in to sit with her husband. She and Padraic had been married for almost forty-one years.
When the door was closed, Michael turned to his younger brother. “You’d best go for Father Henning,” he said. Michael was thirty-seven, four years older than Patrick, and now the head of the family. “It won’t be long, I’m thinking. It’s as good as over. Get on with you.”
Patrick pulled on a coat and, head bowed, hurried from the house and down the road toward the church.
Michael sat in the front parlor for ten minutes, smoked two cigarettes, then got up and went to join his mother in the bedroom. He avoided looking at his father’s ghastly face, which was mercifully lost in shadow. The room was lighted dimly by a single lamp. There was a cane-bottomed straight chair in the corner of the room and he sat there, thick hands between his knees, listening to his father’s body in its weary struggle for breath. His mother sighed and occasionally shook her head from side to side.
After a while, Patrick returned with a sad-faced Father Henning. They came into the bedroom quietly and the priest—who had been born in the same year as Padraic Mullen, who had married the couple four decades earlier, who had been three times offered retirement in a home for aged priests in County Limerick and who had three times refused—put a comforting hand on the shoulder of Peggy Mullen and moved his dry lips in silent prayer.
Then he sat carefully on the edge of the bed and performed for his boyhood friend the rite of Extreme Unction, murmuring the words of the prayer in a hoarse voice and tenderly anointing the dying man’s body with holy oil. The moment after he straightened up from this office and was turning to speak some comforting words to Peggy Mullen about the irresistible will of God, the old fellow in the bed sighed loudly, made a soft rattling sound in his throat, and conceded victory to a greater force.
His wife, now his widow, cried out at last. The men let her stay for a few minutes, stroking her dead husband’s face, then firmly led her from the bedroom and made her sit on the sofa in the front room, where she huddled, sobbing, in the corner, twisting a damp handkerchief in her hands. The two brothers and the priest retreated to the kitchen.
“Father, will you have something against the chill?” Michael asked after a moment.
“I will,” Father Henning said, “but just a drop, and I’ll take it in honor of him inside.”
Michael crouched and pulled a bottle from a cupboard beneath the sink. The dusty bottle bore no label and had come from no shop that paid taxes to the government. Michael pulled the cork from it, rubbed his hand on the mouth of the bottle, and handed it to the priest. Father Henning raised it to his lips, sipped quickly at the colorless poteen, ancient and illicit product of the hills and the only proper libation at a time like this, and passed the bottle to Patrick. He drank and passed it to Michael, who took a mouthful, then stoppered the bottle again, and replaced it in the cupboard.
“Well, then,” Father Henning said, “I’ll be off now, but I’ll come by tomorrow to say a prayer with you. It’s best this way, lads, you know that. He’s out of his pain now, God rest him.”
The brothers lowered their eyes and nodded.
“I’ll send the woman to help with the body,” the priest added quietly. “And I’ll telephone for you to Will McKeon.” Will McKeon was the undertaker who served the needs of all the remote villages in this part of County Clare; he’d made a fortune, so it was said, on the grief and loss of others, and was simultaneously resented and admired for it. “You’ll be waking him here, of course.”
“Yes,” Michael told him.
“That’s best,” the priest agreed. “There’s no point in putting yourselves to needless expense. Will McKeon already has more put by than all the rest of us together.” He looked at the brothers. They each managed a thin smile in reply, and the touch of normalcy marked an end to the little ceremony in the kitchen.
Father Henning stopped for a minute to speak a few soft words to the widow. Patrick sat down beside his mother and put a clumsy arm around her shoulders. Michael saw the priest to the door. It was dark out now.
“Mind your step in the road, Father.”
“I will.”
Back in the front room, Michael said, “I’ll bring you a cup of tea, mother.” She nodded but said nothing. Michael gestured his brother to follow him into the kitchen.
Looking directly into his brother’s eyes, Michael placed a hand on Patrick’s arm and said, “Pat, I want you to go for John MacMahon. It’s best to do it and be done, before the women are here.”
Patrick drew back a little but Michael held his arm. “Must we?” the younger brother said. “Is it necessary?”
“It is,” Michael said.
“But—”
“Don’t be arguing with me, Pat. It must be done and that’s all there is to it. It’s been done and done, you know that, and I’ll not be the one to let it go. That’s all there is to it. Now be off while there’s still time. Go on. Go on, I said.”
Patrick took his coat from the back of the chair where he’d left it and went out through the kitchen door into the night.
Michael fixed the tea for his mother, sat with her a few minutes holding her hand, fixed her a second cup, went to the bedroom and bade a brief farewell to his father, then returned to the kitchen door and waited there until Patrick came back with John MacMahon.
Without a word spoken, he led the old man into the bedroom and closed the door on him; he had no desire to watch or be present while the blood, even a small amount, was drawn from his father’s body. He waited in the kitchen and Pat sat in the front room to make certain their mother didn’t stir. If she heard strange movement in the house, she gave no sign. Besides, she no doubt knew just what they were doing. Hadn’t her own husband been fetched from the house many a night to do the same for others that was now being done for him?
Then John MacMahon was back in the kitchen. Still without speaking—Pat was still in the front room with the mother—Michael drew out the bottle of poteen once again. Silently, he and John MacMahon drank from it. Then the old man nodded, silent and solemn still, and went out, as the priest had, into the darkness of the night. Michael followed him with his eyes until he was out of sight and tried not to look at the heavy bulge in the pocket of the old man’s coat.
The house, Jack Quinlan thought when he finally reached it that evening, was everything he’d hoped for and infinitely more than he’d expected.
He got there at about seven-thirty, squinting in the fading light at the baroquely complicated driving directions the house agents had provided. It was amazing how misleading the directions could be in a country with so few roads. Fortunately, he’d driven on the left-hand side of the road several times in England before this, so that part of the journey, at least, was no problem. By the time he was out of Dublin traffic, he felt comfortable in the car. He’d been warned that Irish roads were like no others in the world: narrow, twisting, treacherous, confusingly marked, when they were marked at all, and haunted by fire-eyed demon drivers with not a whit of safety-consciousness and seemingly even less sense of self-preservation. All of it, everything Jack had ever heard, turned out to be the truth. What passed for a national highway route in Ireland wouldn’t have passed muster as the lowliest county road at home. After an hour of driving, including twenty minutes rolling slowly along a single-lane road behind a lumbering wagon filled with shuddering bales of dusty hay, he was making daredevil passes with the wildest of the native drivers. In the end, the trip that he’d estimated would take three hours took, in fact, closer to seven. When he was still only halfway there, as best he could reckon the distance on his Geographia map, he settled back and resigned himself to living on “Irish time.”
But his first view of the house made it all worthwhile.
It was at the top of a boulder-strewn hill that sloped so regularly toward the ocean’s edge that he was sure the hillside simply continued, uninterrupted, beneath the water’s white-capped surface. A blazing red-gold sun was just flashing its final light beyond the Atlantic horizon, staining a rippled streak of water with its own brilliant color, and outlining in shadow the dark, sea-girt, rocky hummocks of the Aran Islands. Jack had stopped his car near the ocean, at the bottom of the hill. When he turned his head away from the sun and looked up to his right, toward the house, the broad expanse of windows flashed back the sunset in dazzling flames of orange, gold, and red. The sky beyond was indigo velvet. The air was fresh, cool, salty with evening seaspray.
“I may never see Times Square again,” Jack breathed. “Or miss it.” He put the car in gear and continued up the hill.
Whether the house had ever actually been the home of an architect—every attractive house offered for long-term leases back in the States was advertised as being the former home of an architect—it was certainly everything the agents had promised: traditionally styled but with that very modern row of windows facing the ocean, comfortably furnished, with all amenities, including two bedrooms, a study (that would be his office, where he’d write), a dining room, and a modern kitchen big enough to eat in. It made no difference to Jack that it wasn’t exactly “within walking distance” of a church, as the listing had promised—although maybe it was, by Irish standards—but he had no doubt there was a church in the town itself. Beyond his own hillside, to the north—he was just in time to see it as the light of sunset died away into darkness—was the clearly defined edge of the limestone plains of the Burren.
For the next hour, in an excess of enthusiasm that he regretted only when he was finished and sat down to catch his breath, he unloaded from the car his three suitcases, the computer and printer, the carton of supplies and two heavy cartons of paper, the box of books, and—he blessed himself for his own foresight, even if he’d only thought of it late in the afternoon—the sack containing tea, bread, cheese, and jam that he’d bought in some nameless little town along the road.
He sat on the couch, looking about wearily but with great and warm satisfaction, at his new domain.
After a few minutes, he became aware of the strain his back and shoulders had suffered from sitting in the car all day, negotiating unfamiliar and difficult roads, followed by a spell of hauling heavy cartons around. And he was famished. Before he could fall asleep on the couch, he got up quickly and went out to the kitchen, found a kettle, and put water on to boil. While he waited for it, he made a cheese sandwich and had finished it before the kettle began to whistle. He ate another while the tea was steeping. When it was ready, he carried the steaming mug out to the living room and stood at the windows, looking out to the west, down the long slope toward the ocean. He could just make out the sound of waves rolling in and breaking on the shore.
“Home, indeed,” he said out loud.
When he turned to go back to the couch, he spotted the fireplace for the first time. Somehow, in the excitement of arriving and unpacking and settling in, he’d completely missed it. He walked over to it now, admiring the fine stonework and broad white mantel, which was at the level of his shoulder. He’d have to find things to put up there, things that would personalize the living room, make the house his own. He looked around for firewood but there was none. Then he stopped suddenly, grinning at himself. Of course there was no firewood. This is Ireland, not Vermont. The English destroyed the Irish forests centuries ago. Here we burn peat. Snapping his fingers, he headed for the door.
