Chapter 10 #2
Grosse ?le, she repeats under her breath, Grozzle, which is, the sailors told her, the name of the island but also the entry point into the country, through which all immigrants must pass.
It is the place where everyone who has survived the journey must produce their documents and submit themselves to be approved and recorded.
Grozzle—Grosse ?le. As she reaches into her pack for her papers, she seems to see her father, bending over one of his meticulous field books, with columns for names in different languages and dialects.
An urge to share this misunderstanding arrows through her, and she is already arranging it into a story for him, arriving here, her land-sickness, the two kindly strangers from the shores of the Baltic Sea, their tale of slippery nationalities, their pronunciation of “Grosse ?le,” or Big Island, but then she remembers that she will never be able to tell him, that he will never hear these words.
This is where her impulsive decision has taken her, that rummaging she did among Liam’s papers, the ones he left under his mattress, in search of something to read, and how fed up she’d felt that day, she forgets why now.
And then she came upon the emigration documents, the money for the passage, and how hastily she’d snatched them up and stowed them in her tobacco tin, with her savings, thinking how might she pull it off, would she dare, what a lark it would be.
She never really thought she’d get away with it, certain that she’d be turned back at the harbour, sent home, but instead she’d been waved onboard and before she knew it, there she was, shut in the hold, sailing across the Atlantic.
Never to see them again.
The woman with the plaits has to take Enda’s documents from her trembling hand and place them on the immigration desk; the man’s arm is still tucked through Enda’s.
His forearm is pressed to her side, to her ribcage, and too late, she realises, to the side-swell of her breast beneath its bindings, and as Enda leans forward to answer the official’s questions, she is aware of a flicker of surprise passing through him.
When she leans back again, he is withdrawing his arm from hers, looking at her shrewdly, as if he’d known from the start that there was something not quite right about her.
As the three of them wait in front of the admissions desk, Enda looks back at him mutely, imploring him to say nothing, to do nothing, and after a moment, the accordion player lowers his eyes, and she understands that he won’t speak out, won’t reveal her secret.
Enda glances back at the official and sees that he is writing in a large ledger on creamy paper, consulting the documents in front of him, lowering an ink-stamp and slamming it down, sealing a document that says a man called Liam emigrated to this country in this year of Our Lord, and is free to reside within it as a citizen.
She takes a sharp breath in, surveying the piece of paper, held in a hand that quivers in time with the hasty and unsteady rhythm of her heart.
She is here. She has done it. There is no going back.
She pictures her journey as a tiny sewn line that has picked its way from the beleaguered dog-shaped country of her birth, to this one—an eastern shore of an unimaginably vast continent, a place where land is plentiful and fortunes are there for the taking.
Or perhaps not quite. Beyond the immigration desks, before they are ushered to the next checkpoints, Enda disentangles herself from the couple, thanking them profusely: she will go on alone, she tries to tell them.
The man is shaking his head, gesturing with urgent movements, checking around himself for officials, pointing towards the next set of desks.
“Medical,” he is muttering in her ear, “medical. There will be a medical check. Do you understand? Your papers don’t match your…person.”
Aghast, Enda sees, with a collapsing sensation in her chest, another long queue, at the end of which doctors and nurses are ushering people behind curtains and asking them to remove their clothes.
She had had no idea this would happen. She is speechless.
She is appalled. She clutches her piece of stamped paper that permits a man by the name of Liam to enter the country: no one will take it from her, no one can.
Her new friends are shrugging, discussing the issue in their language.
The wife is laughing incredulously, bending over, removing one of her numerous skirts and indicating that Enda should step into it; she is tying it around her waist and pulling her towards the queue for women.
Enda has to lift the hem to walk. She enters the country in trousers and a skirt, one on top of the other; she enters as both herself and her brother, a spliced Enda-and-Liam.
She doesn’t, however, enter it yet. Because behind the medical curtain, stripped down to her underclothes, she is examined by people who don’t glance at her papers for long enough to register the ticked box on the form that states “male” because it is quickly discovered that she has a rash on her abdomen and a burning temperature.
Fièvre des navires, the doctor declares to the nurse behind him.
Both doctor and nurse step back quickly and don masks.
Enda is ordered to stand away from them, away from the queue of other immigrants.
Before she has cottoned on to what is happening, she is being hustled down a different corridor towards the quarantine hospital.
She tries to say to the staff that she has to go back, to return the skirt to the kind woman, but it is not allowed.
She is to be taken to the quarantine hospital and there she will stay until further notice.
A bird, perhaps a skylark, is in flight above the peninsula, wings unfurled, gliding south on a volatile thermal current, looking down to what lies below.
She has been nesting on a particular estuarial incline here for three summers now, building a place to lay her eggs in a rushy declivity not far from the inlet.
What might she see as she flies towards her nest?
The long and crooked length of the place, rolled out into the water, with the yellow stretch of sand at its lower tip.
The smaller bays on its northerly and south-westerly shores, one where periwinkles collect during storms, in perilous banks up near the dunes, the other filled with whitened coral nubs, held there by the protective arm of the headland.
Boats bob here, tethered to stones in the natural harbour, or pulled up onto the coral, high above the waves’ reach.
The low-lying machair where, on this breezy spring morning, a host of flowers trembles, clinging by their shallow roots to the sandy, shell-peppered soil.
The bird, heading to the brackish, estuarial shallows where the river spreads itself into the sea, might also see an intricate network of roads, paths, boreens, lanes, all linked together, cutting passages through the terrain; she would see the dry bog, like a brown-green pincushion pierced with white blooms, and the wet bog, a darker spread.
The larger lough, the surface of which is today pleated and ruffled by a gusting wind, and the five smaller ones, pooled in the landscape’s hollows.
The skylark dips and soars over fields enclosed by their stone walls, the clusters of trees, the cottages and houses—those with roofs and chimneys, and those without.
The grassed-over ruined cabins, if the bird happens to look down at them as she flies, would appear as pale ghost-shapes on the land, like watermarks on a document.
The sea would be evident to her, as it always is to any creature—mammalian or avian—that lives on the peninsula: its colossal expanse and strength, its cold, turquoise depths, its saline scent, its restless presence at the fringes of the land, its power for ever eroding some parts of it and building up others.
Hard to miss, too, the manor house, built on an elevated plane, with its peaked roofs, chimney stacks, stable-block and yard, the walled kitchen garden, the tract of cultivated lawn and espaliered orchard and ornamental lake.
The long, snaking gravel driveway, its stone gates topped with carved birds of prey.
The ice-house. The glass-house and pineapple pit.
The Regency conservatory. The curving verges of grassland.
And there, on the terrace, taking his morning tea, is the viscount.
He doesn’t sit at the table, which has been carried out here for the purpose of his breakfast, laid with cloth and cutlery, where his wife is currently seated, along with three or four daughters.
No, the viscount stands at the balustrade, brooding, looking out over his parkland, one hand holding his teacup, the other balled into a fist in his pocket.
The skylark passes unseen, directly over his head, and to her, his thoughts are a tangible line rising from his cranium, like steam: she flies right through them, she pierces the nimbus of his ruminations as a needle passes through cloth.
Scraps of it cling to her brown and cream feathers: stray filaments of his mind.
This Darjeeling is too steeped. Too long in the pot.
Must call in on the solicitor today. These bills, however am I to pay them?
Son in with a bad lot. Better keep him here to learn the ropes.
Need to tell him I’m unable to clear his debts for him any more.
Don’t let on to his mother. This country is changing, not what it used to be.
Difficult times ahead, perhaps. Now, where has the groom put that stallion?
See if the beast will be ready for the races.
Call into the stables, then whistle up the dogs. Soon as I’ve finished this tea.