Chapter 10 #25
“What is your business here?” he demands, and Liam can see that every muscle in his body is tensed, ready to defend his home, his family.
“Good day to you,” Liam says, and he uses his soothing priest-voice. “I’m sorry to be taking you from your work.”
The man shifts on his feet. “Are you coming from the big house?” he says. “I’ve paid my rent, I’ve—”
“It’s nothing like that,” Liam says. “My family used to live up the way,” he sweeps an arm towards the crag, the rath, “and I’ve lost sight of them.
I’m here to see if any know of their whereabouts.
We knew the widow who lived here before you.
I wonder did she leave anything behind? Any letters or—”
“They went away, I heard.”
“Who?”
The man nods towards the hillside. “The young ones from up the hill. A brother and sister. Across the sea.”
Liam hears the clicking of a sudden pulse in his ear. He is too late, they have gone. He is a fool, an ingrate: why ever did he not come before? “There…there were two sisters. Do you know what happened to the other one?”
The man shakes his head. “I’m sorry for your troubles.”
He goes inside the house to see if his wife knows any more; as the door swings open then shut, Liam catches a glimpse of the interior, the ladder up to the loft, the long table laid with spoons and cups.
The woman is friendlier than her husband: she invites Liam to come inside, to take a bite or a drink of tea, but he refuses.
She tells him that nobody lives up the hill now: the new viscount, a distant cousin of the old man who passed not long after he lost his son, God rest him, doesn’t bother too much with his tenants—he spends most of his time away, abroad—but his land steward is the very devil of a man, always after them, always wanting to raise their rents or call in his thugs.
Will you step inside? she asks again, and Liam, again, refuses.
He turns from the house, his eyes sweeping over the door and the byre, the strand behind it, knowing it is the last time he will ever see it.
Darkness will fall in approximately four hours, Liam thinks, so he doesn’t have long.
He stands there, hesitating. He could leave, walk back along the track to the main road.
He has, in a way, got what he came for: they have all gone, his brother and his sisters, and nobody knows where.
Across the sea. There is nothing for him up the hill.
Hard to picture Eugene and Rose—for it must have been them who went together, no doubt Enda split away and is off somewhere marching to her own beat, her and her fiddle—in the New World.
Impossible to envisage them anywhere but here.
He feels himself to be small of heart, deluded, a person so short-sighted that he could not recognise that what he needed—his brother, his sisters—was here all along.
He’d assumed, like a fool, that they would always be here, waiting for his grand return, and now he is the one left alone.
Liam eyes the mountain, the twin drumlins; he turns his head to look back the way he came.
His feet, his body make the decision for him.
He is contemplating the distance to the nearest inn when he sees that he is, in fact, moving up the hillside, climbing the slope, and how potent, how arresting is this overwhelming familiarity.
Each stone, each swag of moss, each patch of mud seems precisely the same, the fecund damp smell: he is at once a grown man with two children and a wife, and he is also a young lad, desperate to go into the priesthood, making his way home after a long day of instruction at school.
And he is the small boy who came up here with his father, carrying a surveying pole, on a wet and breezy day, long ago.
At a bend in the path, he is startled to see a group of children bending over a stream, and for a moment he thinks that time has twisted back on itself and it is Rose and Eugene and Enda and himself, building a dam, sending leaf boats downstream, but no, of course it isn’t, because isn’t he standing here, a surveyor and cartographer, in a suit?
The children are scooping mud from the bottom and piling it up in thick, oozing slabs on the bank. One of them sees Liam and exclaims in surprise and they all scramble to their feet.
“Who’re you?” says the oldest girl, a bold one with two fair plaits and the hazel-green eyes of the woman from down below.
“I’m Liam,” he says.
“Where’re you headed?”
“Up this way. I used to live there, when I was your age.”
“In the old cabin on the hill?”
“That’s the one.”
The children eye and nudge each other; there is some conferring between them. The youngest pushes her hand into that of the eldest.
“Mammy says we’re not to go up past the boreen’s end,” blurts out one of the boys.
“Is that right?”
“A gruagach lives there.”
Liam raises his eyebrows and smiles. He hasn’t heard this word for a good long while—his city children don’t concern themselves with such things—and he is happy to be reminded of it. Gruagach: a goblin-creature, hard-working and secretive.
“Does it now?”
“It does,” says the small boy, face flushed with glee, “and it comes out at night and might steal you away. Mammy says you can hear it on windless nights.”
Liam shrugs. “I don’t believe in gruagacha.”
“Well, you’d better watch yourself, then, mister,” says the girl, turning back to their game, and Liam feels himself dismissed.
He steps around them, careful to avoid their mud-towers, and as he walks away he hears them talking about the gruagach, the older girl claiming to have seen it, and how it looks like a man but is covered in hair and has yellow teeth.
The drumlins get closer and closer, the mountain looms over him, and he can make out the rings of the rath against the cirrus-streaked sky.
He finds that the boreen is thick with branches and growth—it is clear that nobody has come this way for a very long time—but he battles on, twigs snapping and breaking as he pushes through them, the long spined limbs of brambles snatching at his clothes.
When he emerges at the top of the boreen, he realises that the woman down below is mistaken.
People are living here. There are rows of beans growing in well-turned soil; the haggard is swept and neat; turf has been stacked against the house; onions have been picked and left on a stool; there is grain and chaff on the quern stone by the back door; the air carries the scent of a fire.
Liam moves forward cautiously, calling out a greeting.
The idea that a gruagach might burst out of the half-door, brandishing perhaps a cudgel, furious at this human trespass flits through his mind, and he scolds himself for such childish fears.
Whoever it is inhabiting this place are people of habit and organisation—that much is clear.
Liam straightens his tie, brushes the leaves and twigs from his jacket.
He lifts his hand and knocks gently on the door because it seems like the right thing to do.
He knocks twice more, but there is no answer.
He could, he supposes, lift the latch and step inside—he knows precisely how to work that door handle, how much pressure to apply, how you must turn it slightly to the left before giving it a sharp twist to the right—but it doesn’t feel right to disturb these orderly people, who arrange their seedlings in such precise and straight rows.
Let his memory of the cottage’s interior be preserved; let it not be overwritten by whatever these new people have done to it.
Liam turns 360 degrees, taking it all in.
The haggard wall, the white flowers coming out on the bean plants, the axe that he’s certain was once wielded by the hand of his father, lying on top of a chopping block, the stacked ends of the thatch above his head.
He wishes he could feel that time has collapsed, that at any moment the door might open and his mother step out, that if he tilted his head, he’d see Enda sitting high on the roof, staring moodily out to sea.
He wishes he could close his eyes and believe he’d find Rose or Eugene, perhaps even Tomás, when he opened them.
But there can be no going back. They were here for a while, the six of them, and before them, others lived here, and before them, someone else, and now they are all gone, and whoever cut that turf is here now.
After these people will come someone else, and then someone else, and on and on it will go until the end of the world.
Because Liam feels this insight coursing through him, he heads, almost without thinking about it, towards the copse.
Why not? is what he is thinking. Isn’t it where his father told him to return, if he ever became lost?
And isn’t it where all this began, his father’s garrulousness, the sudden move out here to the peninsula?
Wouldn’t his going there be the closing of a circle?
Always, Liam carries within him the idea of what life might have been had his family stayed in the Lanes, who he might have been if he had never come west, never seen his father strapped to a table, never fallen under the spell of a resentful, score-settling priest. It is a lost self, a ghost twin, that Liam.
He would like to ask his sisters if they feel it too: who might they have been if they had stayed?
Now, he thinks, with a fearful wrench, he will never be able to put this question to them and it is all his own fault.
He is the one who left them, he is the one who didn’t write, even, to Liam’s eternal shame, when he received news that their father had died.
It was him who severed the ties that bound them, and look where it has got him: alone, on a hillside, his former home taken over by strangers.