Painting St. Feoc

CHAPTER 1

Something bad is going to happen.

Michael Urquhart knows that something bad is going to happen because he has just been counting and he finds himself stopped at the number one hundred and ninety nine which he knows is not a good number. But he has stopped there because on his reaching that number, the pages of his book of Botticelli’s paintings, which he had left open on the sill of the rear facing window, finally stopped being blown about by the draught which often blows in there, staying open on ‘The Birth of Venus’, at which he now finds himself looking. He had heard the pages begin to lap, gently, like waves, and so he had stopped painting and had begun to count. It is his habit to count. And it is his habit to interpret all numbers as auguries of the future. He believes that numbers anticipate outcomes. He believes that they pre-define events and circumstances. And he knows that this particular number feels wrong. It is an inauspicious sign. It is a presage of misfortune. It means something bad.

He tells Francesca. He tells her that something bad will happen. Other books lie scattered upon the floor around her. The books are opened on reproductions of other nudes: Valazquez’ The Toilet of Venus, Ingres’ The Turkish Bath, Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’Herbe, Goya’s Maja, Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. But Michael Urquhart stands before the rear window half behind her, away from his easel, in his blue, paint-smeared smock and grey woollen trousers which are all that Francesca has seen him wear in the seven days she has been there with him, and contemplates only the birth of Venus and a bad number.

She hears him sniff. Then she hears him sniff again. Then she hears him sniff for a third time. Each time it is a long, drawn-out, desperate sniff. And each time it is an attempt to clear his nose of whatever is blocking it. And he will go on sniffing, she thinks, because his nose is too small and pointed. Because nobody could breathe through a nose so small and pointed. It is like a little beak.

She lies upon the sofa. It is an old, worn-out, weather-beaten, pea green, sweat-stained sofa and she knows that it is not only her sweat but the sweat of others who have laid there like her. She lies along it naked, supine upon her back, with her legs apart, her arms clasped across her stomach beneath her breasts. It is a pose that makes her feel self-conscious. She thinks how she has never shown her body to anyone before. She has lived such a lonely life. For it has always felt natural to her to be alone.

It had felt natural to her to be alone in County Donegal. It had felt natural to her to sit alone in her room and watch her father take the stool and the rope across the yard into the barn. And it had felt natural to her to lock herself away in her room in her uncle’s, the priest’s house in the small village of St. Feoc where, not so long ago, she thinks, she had never heard of Michael Urquhart.

In the back of her mind is the thought of her uncle’s three stones, which he kept in his room in a small wooden box on his bureau beside the window. The stones were white and oval, like plovers’ eggs. Every now and again, Father Patrick Clancy would remove them and roll them together in the palms of his small, callused hands. She knows that he did that because she had often heard the noise of them whenever she had stood near the open door to his annexe. He had three stones because to him they represented the Holy Trinity. But to her own mind now they represent simply the number three itself. For the number three is Michael Urquhart’s most portentous number. It is the number which makes him feel that everything else is going to be alright, even if he has suffered the occurrence of a bad number. It is the number he would be counting up to now, she thinks, as he sniffs and as he swallows, until he feels right.

She cannot see him for she dares not move her head, which faces towards the smaller, front facing sash window looking out onto Observatory Gardens. She doesn’t know why it is called Observatory Gardens because she has never seen any gardens, only the one tree, at the corner of the street, tall and inanimate, like a sentinel. But all she can see now out of the window are the frontages of the apartments opposite, their third floor windows as clean as Michael Urquhart’s are dirty.

She hears him sniffing again. It is the dust, she thinks. The room is covered in dust. But he has told her that it would be worse to disturb it. It is just as bad at night. At night she can hear the noise of his breathing, of his struggling for breath, as the dust settles and congeals in his nose, his nose which is too small to cope.

She looks across the stark, Spartan room towards his bed in the corner. She wonders why he does not sleep with her and why she must sleep on the sofa, even after having been on it all day; and why he doesn’t ever do anything to her. She wants to know what it would be like for another person to touch her. She wants to know what another person would do to her. She has always lived too alone to know.

She is cold. There is only a small electric fire. It gives off hardly any heat from its single element. It gives off so little heat that she can barely feel it. And whenever the wind blows through the gaps in the windows she can feel the even colder air from outside rippling across her flesh. But she knows that he will stop soon now; after he has sat down again behind his easel and done a little more to his painting of her, and once the descent of dusk has cast the room into darkness. Then he will begin counting again, stopping when a number feels right. And then he will turn on the dim, bare light bulb, and draw the thin, cream curtain, and begin packing up his paints whilst she dresses.

She can hear him counting again now. She wonders what it is that he is counting this time. But then he is always counting. Just as he has to do everything three times, and just as the world is always presenting him with numbers. For that is why she is there, she thinks. Because of Michael Urquhart’s belief in numbers. It is why she is not still in St. Feoc, sitting alone in her room, watching and listening to whatever is going on.

For she has watched and listened to everything, she thinks, even though she has never partaken of anything.

She has watched the breath coming out of Father Clancy’s mouth when he walked across the fields to the church, hunched over his box of stones, dragging his lame foot behind him. She has heard him repeating his prayers and his canticles in the sanctuary of his room. She has heard him asking God to forgive the infidel that was once within him. And she has heard him telling his secret. She has heard him baring that inner, most sinful part of himself to her mother, confessing to her what he had done to her. And she has heard her mother telling God about the shudder she began to feel between her legs when Patrick began telling her, and the pain like childbirth in her dry vagina when he finally confessed to her the moment of his sin which made her clutch that part of her in her hands and grip herself there with all the strength her fingers had as Patrick knelt before her whispering his terrible act.

And she has watched Cailin reading her bible every day in the back room of the priest’s house, and she has heard Ceara rehearsing her stories to be told each night to the old men of the village in the place they called the drinking house. But Francesca believes she knows more than any of them just by having watched and listened. For she knows Patrick’s secret, and she knows her mother’s pain.

But she has never told anyone about that. She has only ever thought about it every now and then, like she thinks about it again now, as she lies naked and cold on the couch waiting for Michael Urquhart to continue his painting of her, his representation of her, which will also satisfy the desire she has always had to be represented in something, somewhere, cold and alone; so that others too might see her like that, like she has always been; despite the blatancy of it; despite the exaggeration of her breasts caused by her pose, with her knees so wide apart that the whole area between her legs is open and exposed. Her vagina is not a nice thing to her. She thinks that it looks ugly; that it looks crinkled and absurd. It feels to her like some separate, incongruous thing; like a sea creature, out of its shell, its pink, raw, intricate body nestling uncertainly in a clump of coarse, red, bristly weed.

She looks down at herself lying there. She looks down towards that part of her again. She cannot see it. But it is not for her to see now, she thinks. It is for him to see. It is being shown to him. As all of her is.

Then she thinks suddenly how yellow her skin looks in the dull, late light of that room. But her skin is not yellow. It is white. She has good white skin, she thinks. It is her father’s skin.

CHAPTER 2

Mallory O’Herlihey stared proudly through the rain at Imogen Clancy in front of the small church of Kilgarren, Co. Donegal the afternoon they were married. He stared proudly at her because he felt safe suddenly. He felt safe suddenly in the three feet and nine inches of his stunted body which rose like a stump from the stone steps. He bore the rain upon the bald pate of his head and in his long red mane of hair that sprouted from the base of his bare crown and fell down the back of his head and onto his hunched shoulders. And he knew that Imogen Clancy was a good woman. He had known her father and he knew that Liam Clancy had been a solid and well-grounded man. He knew that his family had been anchored to the soil of that west coast for nine generations and that the farm had been handed down through them all. And he looked out over Imogen Clancy’s fields and at the herd that he would help her to manage now, ready to bear his new responsibilities even though he had never farmed a field or tended a herd in his life before.

He put his hand down into the deep pocket of his brown jacket and felt the tight bundle of damp stalks which he had collected earlier from the new season’s grasses he had found growing against the south wall of the church. He felt the rough surfaces against the soft flesh of his palm and fingers. They would be fine when they were dry, he thought. They felt like good stalks. Good for preserving.

Imogen Clancy had known that she would marry Mallory O’Herlihey from the moment she had first seen him across his father’s dead body. They had been neighbours, although she had never had anything to do before that with any of the other farms in the area. Mallory O’Herlihey’s face that day of Hugh O’Herlihey’s funeral had been entirely new to her.

It had been exactly a year after the death of her own father and it had brought the circumstances of her own father’s death back to her. She remembered the way she had found him asleep in his bed that dawn but how she had been unable to wake him. The way she had left him there without doing anything for a whole day. How she had waited for him to awake. How it had been Michael O’Donnell who had had to tell her that he was dead. Michael O’Don-nell had come around with his bill for groceries. But Imogen Clancy had been loath to tell him that her father was asleep and Michael O’Donnell had had to find out for himself when he had gone up to ask Liam Clancy for money.

Previous to that Michael O’Donnell had had to tell Imogen Clancy that her mother had run away with his own best friend and so Michael O’Donnell had felt even more anxious about having to tell Imogen Clancy that her father also had been taken from her. He had promised there and then to find her a companion. It had taken him a year but then Michael O’Donnell had nudged her arm at old Hugh O’Herlihey’s funeral to point out the little figure of Mallory O’Herlihey standing small and stunted but strong as a fence post on the opposite side of Hugh O’Herlihey’s grave.

Mallory O’Herlihey would always remember the way that Imogen Clancy looked on the day of their wedding. He would remember the way that her long, green dress hung so straight against her boyish body. How it showed off her white ankles. And how, because of her broad shoulders, it emphasised her little waist when its fine cloth touched her at hip and thigh when she moved precariously down the steps underneath Mary Carey’s black umbrella. But what he would remember most, he thought, would be her eyes. Her eyes that were so often sad, dark and heavy, sunken beneath her pale brow. It was because of her long face. Her long, drawn face imposed its weariness on her weak, vulnerable eyes. But when he gazed at her eyes on the day of their wedding, he saw that they were now wide, bright and hazel, redolent of an inner lightness and earnestness. And he looked back at her as she came slowly towards him on Michael O’Donnell’s extended arm, down the draughty, empty church, her long, white face framed by her black hair which hung heavy like a bell about her slim, ivory neck, as her eyes looked out, intense and motionless, like an expression of her soul, fixed upon the way ahead.

Mallory O’Herlihey knew what he wanted from marrying Imogen Clancy. He wanted her to teach him. He wanted her to teach him about the land. He wanted to know how to work it. He wanted to know what could be done with it; now that he had so much of it preserved; so many of its parts collected and catalogued in his books. He wanted to understand now all that Imogen Clancy did and all that his father had done with it, against that which he himself had done with it. He looked upon Imogen Clancy, who had been running her dead father’s farm for a year on her own, as his guide. And he believed that that was how she saw her own role with him. He knew that she was aware that he knew nothing himself about farming. But now he could sell his father’s farm and she could teach him about the running of her own. Their honeymoon could be spent together in the fields.

Mallory O’Herlihey knew that he was different. He had watched his father’s fine, rugged body working on the land but he had never been allowed to work on it himself. His father had seen another life for him. Hugh O’Herlihey had seen that his stunted son was not going to grow any taller. He had seen the soft flesh of his hands. He had watched his unearthly eyes grow more distant as he had grown older, drawn to tears from the cold wind. He had bought him books. He had bought him books about the land. For although he would not expose his son to the actuality of the land, he had wanted Mallory to be steeped in the traditions of it. So he had bought books about its myths and its legends and about its folk and fairy lores. He had begun purchasing them from an old peasant woman who lived along the coast and who had told him she was dying. She told him she wanted to get rid of all her books to a good home. She gave Hugh O’Herlihey all the books she had, together with a single, black, leather-bound, fine-leafed bible. Most of them were chapbooks, she told him. They had been handed around at fairs and meeting places by chapmen and ballad-men. Some of them were brown with turf smoke, from where they had sat on her cottage shelves all the years. But whenever he went to Donegal to sell his milk, Hugh O’Herlihey returned with another pile of them on the back of his cart.

Hugh O’Herlihey told Mallory why he was getting those books for him. He must know the tales of their people, he said, who had steeped everything in their hearts, through the unchanged rut of birth, pain and death, and to whom everything was a symbol, like the spades over which they leant. He must know the tales of hauntings and bewitchings, of ghostly happenings, of the old tribes, of the unearthly troops that rushed out of their homes in the limestone rock of Ben Bulben, sweeping to and fro across the land at night, looking for new-borns and new-wed brides, to peer at them with something other than common care, for they did not always return home empty handed. And there was hardly a valley, he said, or a mountain side where folk couldn’t tell of someone pillaged from amongst them, the good faery people having carried off their souls, once the glamour had fallen to them. But they would be happy enough, those folk, being captured, he said, though their very happiness would be their curse, for they would be doomed to melt out at the last judgement like soft vapour, for the soul could not live without sorrow. He had heard many a tale, he said, from Sligo to Donegal, of them that had seen them. And they might never know them for faeries, he said, but as poor peasants like themselves, until they melted back into the mist. So should the wise peasant, he said, looking out at the green hills, the woods and the mountains, remember the goodness of God, and hope that God was all the nearer, for the pagan powers were never far away.

Hugh O’Herlihey stacked the books in the back parlour of the house. That room had always remained empty. The room was beside the kitchen and, apart from the kitchen itself, it was warmer there than anywhere else inside the cold, white stone of that farmhouse. He piled the books around the walls. He put his best chair in the room so that his son could sit comfortably whilst reading them. Very gradually the room became filled with books. By the time Mallory was thirteen years old the room comprised three hundred and thirty three volumes. And Mallory would sit in the room amongst the stale odours of their dusty bindings and of their yellow, musty leaves, imagining in those smells the books’ pasts, and imagining the people who had read them, people whose names often appeared on the inside covers, wondering what they did and where they were now. But Mallory O’Herlihey never concerned himself with the words in those books. He concerned himself only with the weight of their pages.

It was while he was helping his father to stack one of the last books against the wall of the room that Mallory O’Herlihey had seen that there was something between its pages; something in the very centre of its thickness. Later, he took the book back down from the pile. He opened it at that page and saw then the extra burden that it carried, the ochre cowslip stalks, the pale green nettle leaf, the hawthorn petal, pressed perfectly flat and dry against the words. They would crumble to the touch, he thought, but whilst they lay there like that they were preserved, where else they would have died, or been blown away, or been trampled to mulch in mud and mire.

He stared at what he had found. He inhaled the smells from them, their surfaces still redolent, their scent released by their being opened up again to the air. He lay the book upon the floor, the page still open before him. But the air would ruin that burden, he thought. The longer it was open, the more it was unprotected. He closed the pages gently over it again. He found string from the kitchen and bound the book’s covers together. Then he filed the book away on its own in the corner of the room.

He began to search the other books to see what other burdens might lie in them also. He rifled through all their pages, removing and returning them to their stacks. But he found nothing else. And yet how much more, he thought, might have been preserved in all those other books. And he knew what he must do. He must go and collect other flowers and grasses from the land like those he had found in that book. He must go into the fields and collect what he could that could be preserved in the pages of all the other books also. He must fill them all with pressings until he had created for himself something separate from the extremes of the world.

Hugh O’Herlihey knew nothing about the real subject of his son’s occupation within the walls of that room, as Mallory O’Herlihey gathered more and more from the land and stored what he collected in four tea-chests in which Hugh O’Herlihey had sometimes brought the books back, and hid the chests in the corner of the room behind a pile of the larger books.

Outside in the fields, Hugh O’Herlihey coped alone with the Donegal seasons. He left his son in trust to understand the books. He knew that if his son could grow to love and hate with as good a heart as the good people of the books, his life would be long-lived like theirs. For their lives of dancing joy would last until God burned up the world with a kiss. He liked to remember that himself, he said, whenever he bent over his spade or sat full of the heaviness of the fields, or listened to stories told about it, that it may not be forgotten.

And when Hugh O’Herlihey came in from the fields at the end of each day in the gathering dusk and saw the light under the back room door, he would nod contentedly to himself, casting his heavy brow downward, in affirmation of the course on which he had set his son, just as he would nod to himself whenever he had run a good field’s length with his rusty plough. He had provided his son with the benefit of fine resources, to which the time his son spent in that room was testimony itself. He knew his son’s life was being profitably spent.

Mallory O’Herlihey never felt that his life was not being profitably spent. He went out each morning and walked across the fields towards the cliffs. He gathered from the ground whatever new grasses or stalks or flowers or leaves he found on the way. He went out in all weathers. The seasons meant nothing to him. He went out to find whatever he could that could be preserved in the pages of his books.

His pockets reeked of bitter stems, of sweet leaves, of stalks and petals, of seeds and pods pulled from the soaked clod of the boggy ground. Roots and thorns clung to his pockets’ damp, soggy linings and poked back into his short, awkward thighs as he walked and stooped across the edge of the fields collecting his horde.

In his room he kept his store of findings in the four tea-chests until he was ready to press another burden. He saw each burden as a chosen few plucked from the mysteries of the world, to be entombed between the preserving pages of his books. He washed each thing that he collected under the cold water tap in the kitchen. As the water ran gently over each delicate surface, he pushed off the mud and mire with his soft, fat, stumpy thumbs. He carefully wiped each piece dry on an old grey towel chosen for the purpose. He began cataloguing everything. He classified leaves by their shape: oval hornbeam, arrow bindweed, jagged hawthorn, pointed buckthorn, recalling their names from days long ago when his father had told him them. He classified flowers by their petals and heads. As the seasons passed he began collecting other items of more diversity. He collected bark, dampening it and flattening it out with his shoe. He collected cowslip roots and red berries, corn sheaves and mushrooms, and sheep’s wool and cow dung, and small parts of dead animals; anything that could be pressed flat enough.

He pressed everything first into the larger books. He marked the page with a slip of paper. Then he made another pressing several pages away. And then another, several pages away again, until he deemed the book full, at which point he placed the book away at the bottom of a separate pile of books containing other pressings. After a month, when the matter within had been pressed flat, without ever looking back into it, he would bind the book with string and place it in a separate pile with the other volumes he had bound.

Each week he pressed more. And when he lay down at night, himself then pressed between the cold, stiff sheets of his bed, he felt himself preserved too, as if a part of what he had collected, kept apart with them from the ways of the outside world.

Imogen Clancy had always known that there was some secret side to Mal-lory O’Herlihey. She had known it before she married him. She had told him when she had first met him to speak to that she knew that there was something different about him, apart from his stunted body. Some secret mystery. She had told him that she had seen it in his round, fleshy, fair-skinned face, in the lack of weather in it, in the red linings to the black sunken sockets of his eyes, in his bald pate and in his long, curly red hair. She had seen it when she had looked at him on the day of his father’s funeral, she had said. His face was not the face of a man who had ever worked a farm, she had said. A face like his had never had to look at such labour. And she knew that even his short, stumpy frame and the awkwardness of his walk could never have been the result of a life spent working the fields, but simply of his birth, she had said. But she had resolved there and then that she would marry him. She knew that she would feel strong beside someone she saw to be so different.

She had begun to learn in what way he was different when she had first noticed the four tea chests full of freshly gathered matter, and had begun to wonder what they might be for. She had seen them in the corner of the kitchen, four days after his father’s funeral when she had walked for the first time across the grassy fields to ask him if he needed help then to run the farm.

She learnt also then how solemn a man Mallory O’Herlihey was. How his face displayed no animation. How there seemed to be no feeling in it, except what she read there herself, certain that there were different sorts of thoughts behind it, deep in different purposes. But she gradually found more to attract her to him in the silence of his meek, pale face with its wide, beardless jaw, and in his broad forehead, and in the depths of his sunken eyes whenever they cast themselves upwards into her own, than she ever could have from his words.

She liked his flared nose. She liked the way his coarse red hair curled down the back of his head and hung down upon the hunch of his back. When Imogen had first met him at his father’s funeral he had had his hair smoothed down with oil gathered from the fat of cooked meats so that it had lain flat against his scalp. But as that day had worn on, the curls had expressed themselves again, despite his constantly smoothing them down with his large, soft palms. And when Mallory had got home afterwards from that cold, damp churchyard he had had to leave his head bent down in a bucket of soapy water for fifteen minutes to rinse out all of the fat. And whilst doing so he had tried to conjure up again all of the feelings he had had about his father. But the only one he could remember was simply the warm sense of his father having always been there, despite their separateness from each other. And he had cried then at the thought of his father not being there any more. And he