The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Read online

  “He’s as Belfast as you or me,” the driver surprised me by saying before I had a chance to speak. I pulled the blanket around my chest. The reins snapped, the hooves rang, the wheels rattled, and soon we had joined again the general stir.

  The boys were gone from in front of the Academical Institution, but, however they had managed it, they had succeeded before they left in crowning Cooke with their holly wreath. He looked as ridiculous as they could have wished, as impotent.

  Mrs Mawhinney must have been waiting in the hallway, so quickly did she appear at the door. She came right out to the carriage step. “Look at you, you are chilled to the bone,” she said and asked the driver, as his master’s representative there in her world, what Mr Erskine could have been thinking, calling on that telephone contraption, keeping me out till all hours in the depths of winter. (That was the order of her complaint, telephone before weather.) The driver, to his great credit, held his peace. I gave him ten shillings of a tip, which he was kind enough to say would keep him in “smokes” for some considerable time.

  “Smokes!” said Mrs Mawhinney and took hold of my arm, as much to save me from corrupting influence as assist me to the door.

  Inside, she warmed a pair of water bottles while I undressed for bed then left me here, propped against the bolster with my writing board and my journal. She paused in the doorway to wish me a happy Christmas.

  “A happy Christmas to you, too, Mrs Mawhinney,” I said.

  I listened to her footsteps receding down the landing, as I have listened to them time without number in the years that we have spent alone here together, and for a moment – just for a moment – I imagined getting out of bed (imagined myself a man for whom the act of getting out of bed was as fleet as the thought), going to the door and calling after her . . . But what, and to what end?

  On down the landing she plodded, and – a creak as the door opened, a click as it shut – into her apartments, so that now there is only the hiss of the lamp for company, the scratch of my nib, and, somewhere across this great, perplexing city, bells chiming the midnight hour.

  II

  Saturday, 25th December 1897

  Oh, G—!

  Water . . .

  Mrs Mawhinney may have been right. I awoke a quarter of an hour past, at ten after two, drenched in sweat, yet shivering. The bottles were cold against my feet; my head throbbed to bursting. I thought to ring the bell, but having untangled the bedclothes and sipped from the glass at my bedside I began to feel a little better (till that stab of pain just now). And it is – for all that it appears to be the dead of night – Christmas morning. Mrs Mawhinney’s sixty-sixth. My eighty-fifth.

  I rested the nib of my pen on the paper, looking at those last two words – eighty-fifth – breathing hard, until the full stop became a blot, spreading.

  Water.

  Where did I read of it: the young woman with an aversion amounting almost to the hydrophobic? A journal in the library at the Reform Club, maybe: an account of a book by a Viennese doctor – Bauer, or Breuer? Yes, Breuer and a colleague, whose name escapes me. The young woman was suffering from a form of hysteria, existing only on fruit, until with Dr Breuer’s encouragement she was able to “wind off backwards” the thread of memory and arrive at the day when she walked into a room and saw, to her horror, her governess’s little dog, lapping out of a glass on the table. And, like that, the symptom disappeared.

  The “talking cure”, the young woman called it. Perhaps one day the experiment will be extended, to men as well as women, old as well as young, and all will be enabled to understand the inner logic of the stimuli that caused them to act as they did at any given moment of their lives. It will come too late for me. I must in the time that is left to me be my own physician.

  *

  My mother, “a slip of a girl”, died on the evening of the day that I was born. My father remarried her sister, and his cousin, within the year, but within another year this wife too had died, trying to bring forth a child, my brother that would have been, had he not died with her. Fortunately, it might be thought, there were no more sisters, or eligible cousins, after that. In the spring of 1817 my father himself succumbed to the typhus that had followed the failure of crops in the previous “year without a summer”. I was not quite four years old. For many years after I carried a memory of watching the gravediggers lower my father’s casket into its shaft in the New Burying Ground and calling down cheerfully that I would join him, and all the others, soon, although my grandfather, which is to say my great-uncle, with whom I was sent to live, did his best to disabuse me of this notion. I never did see the open grave, for I never did attend the funeral. The rain that day was torrential. I was a croupy child, who had only just pulled through the winter. My grandfather had no desire to pay the undertakers to open the grave a fourth time in as many years.

  Whatever the truth of it – and I have, as I say, no Dr Breuer to assist me – the dead, at that early age, held no terrors for me. Not so the living. My grandfather was a severe man (did it occur to me to reflect that he had lost two children of his own before unexpectedly acquiring me? It did not) whose idea of society was the Society for Discountenancing Vice and Promoting the Knowledge of the Christian Religion, of which he was a founding member, or, for a little light relief, the Religious Tract and Book Society for Ulster. Of that other Society for which the town had once been so renowned, however, he almost never spoke. It was but a short walk from his house at the northern end of Donegall Place, or the “Flags”, as all who lived there then called it, to the corner of High Street and the Corn Market, where Henry Joy McCracken, leader of the Society of United Irishmen in the town, was hanged fewer than fifteen years before I was born (although as with everything before one’s birth it might as well have been a thousand), and where the first Union flag was hoisted on the opening day proper of this fast-fading century of ours.

  McCracken’s sister, Miss Mary, who had received his body down from the scaffold, was still much abroad in my childhood days: a small woman in her middle years – old, I would have said then, not knowing how much older she would become, or that I would one day look back over a distance of some four and a half decades to my own middle age. It was said of her that she could not stand still for more than two minutes in the one place without a committee forming around her. My grandfather was a governor of the Belfast Charitable Society – the “Poorhouse” – when Miss Mary stood still there for two minutes, allowing a Ladies’ Committee to form and urge the Gentlemen to introduce a less punitive regime for the younger inmates: candles “sufficient for the hours of darkness”, warm water for the washing of clothes; toys; blackboards; counting frames; a pole in the yard to play around . . . He remembered her as a child herself, walking through the town from the Manson School on Donegall Street (for that was the sort of the family: even in those far-off days, before legislation, they submitted their daughters to be educated), and later at entertainments in the Exchange. “As marriageable a girl as was to be found in the town,” he pronounced, with unusual warmth and candour, on the one occasion when I pressed him on the subject; then almost at once he cooled, closed up. “But too devoted to the brother, finally.”

  My own education was, for the most part, conducted within the doors of my grandfather’s house. Once in a while he would take a notion to send me out – to Mrs Davis’s Classical School on Castle Street, to Messrs Acheson and Lyons in Castle Lane – but always within a matter of weeks, on occasion days, something would occur to prejudice him against the establishment in question, or its proprietor (my grandfather’s schoolmaster, a Mr Eccles, had once composed an opera of such ambition he called it simply The World; anyone else was always likely to be a disappointment to him), and I would find myself once more in the schoolroom under our own eaves, working my way through whichever book my grandfather had seen fit to leave out for me that morning: Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, The Pilgrim’s Progress, or, not infrequently, the Bible itself.

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p; As for the Academical Institution, which had opened its doors not long after I was born, it was less a school than a theological battleground and my grandfather did not then or afterwards want for battlegrounds.

  The house on Donegall Place had gardens at the rear running down to Fountain Street, a gate there that as a matter of principle my grandfather refused to have barred. (“Blessed is the man that endureth temptation,” the Scriptures said, not “blessed is the man that hath temptation withheld from him.”) The house, too, had anyone but thought to try the door, was almost always unlocked. It was tall, elegant, and as sparsely populated as the High Alps. My grandfather kept few servants – a housekeeper, who would have nothing but “Molly”, a maid of all work, or rather a succession of maids (they could have little of Molly), and a man, Nisbet, who was closer to a secretary than a butler and closer to a companion than either – and with my grandfather either confined to his study, or out on what he called simply his “visits”, it was possible for me to go from the day’s beginning to its end without seeing a living soul indoors. Fortunately, my grandfather also encouraged exercise – the only carriage I ever saw him in was the one that bore his coffin – and had more fear of my health shut up in the house all day than my safety out walking alone. (Dr Trotter’s View of the Nervous Temperament had attained with him the status of fifth Gospel: a healthful body houses a healthful mind etc.) In all but the foulest of weather, therefore, I would strike out each day the moment my reading was done, often along the Mall Ditch, which ran for the best part of a mile from the White Linen Hall to the Saltwater Bridge, and which had the advantage of being raised (“ditch” was a frank misnomer) above the quagmire that the land round about became after even a little rain; and we had, even then, more than a little rain. Along here passed the bulk of the traffic from the south, and I grew to anticipate the farmers and traders whom I would encounter according to the market being held that day, the pig men and the butter men, although most often by the time I was finished with Newton or Bunyan or the Minor Prophets, they would be making their way home again, their goods sold, their profits, or a large portion of them, evidently drunk.

  The Falls Road was another favourite walk, as was, in a more northerly direction, the Shankhill Road as far as the old cemetery, the foothills practically of Black Mountain, where the names had already faded from the more ancient headstones centuries before anyone dreamed of a town called Belfast with a Mall Ditch, a Saltwater Bridge and an Academical Institution. In warmer weather I might cut across the meadows at the rear of the White Linen Hall to the Mill Dam at Cromac, and on the very hottest days might even strip to my undergarments and join with the other children kicking up water in the shallows, with never a thought for which of us came from a townhouse and which from a cottage on Sandy Row.

  Often I went no further than the market at Smithfield Square, some two hundred yards from my grandfather’s door, but so well screened by Castle Street and Hercules Street (for there was no Royal Avenue yet) as to seem five times more distant. I would wander among the stalls, persuading myself I was in as open a space as the town had to offer, and, now and then, if I was feeling especially emboldened, or derelict in self-persuasion, would venture into the narrower streets opening off the market square.

  Smithfield then, three score years before the Corporation was provoked, or shamed, into improvements, had the air of a gold-rush camp, with this obvious exception: there was no gold, nor much likelihood of it, only prospecting without cease for a claim on tomorrow. Whatever could be traded legitimately was traded; whatever could not be was traded anyway in the entries and laneways. My shoes were enough to attract the attention of the boys of that district, so that I was at every moment prepared to run, and was occasionally obliged to, although the chase itself, the calling of names, seemed, thankfully, to content them. A point was being made: I was there under sufferance.

  On one such occasion – I was by then eleven – blown off course by a particularly persistent pursuit, I came upon a girl, three or four years older, to look at her, squatting in a court at the rear of a public house in the full flow of passing water. So astonished was I that I was unable to turn my head, or even avert my eyes. The girl’s own eyes never left my face. There was a challenge in them, a challenge that, at eleven, I did not fully comprehend, although that it was sterner than any the boys had offered I was in no doubt. And still her water flowed. When at last it stopped the girl stood straight and wiped herself with some stuff, which she afterwards tossed on the ground at her feet. She remained longer than she need have with her skirts raised, or perhaps it was only my fascination that prolonged the moment of their fall. The courtyard was so dark that I could see nothing beyond the white of her thighs, but even that was almost too much for me. I staggered back, recoiling from the reaction of my own body, and in that instant the girl was gone, whether into the public house or into another doorway I could not have said, any more than I could have said where, in my agitated state, I myself went next, or how long I walked before I was sufficiently composed to return home, although I do remember that my grandfather had got in a little before me. I see him turning on the stairs as I walk along the hallway. I hear him asking what way I went and whom I met on my travels. (I do not hear my lie in reply.) I feel his finger beneath my chin as he turns my face towards the fanlight, peering.

  “It has put a bit of colour in your cheeks,” he says.

  The following day I returned to walking the Mall Ditch, and the day after that, and the day after that. I walked along the Falls, I walked to the cemetery at Shankhill. (It still had its “h” when I was a boy, and even now that I know the name to be a derivation from the Irish sean cill, “old church”, I still feel that absent spirant in my calves.) I pushed myself further and faster each day, but by the end of a fortnight I had given up the pretence and was back among the market stalls, trying to lose myself sufficiently that I might find my girl again. Because at night that was how I thought of her, on all those walks to places that were definitely not Smithfield that was how I thought of her. My girl. Would that all my obsessions had been so innocuous.

  I had been poking about for some time, making essays into this entry and then that, retreating again, trying to reorient myself, or disorient myself anew, when I became aware of a boy on my tail. Beyond the fact that he was wearing a sort of military cap, I could get no accurate impression of him without stopping and turning about – an unwise course of action on past experience – but I had a sense of a height and build similar to my own. I gave him a minute or two more in which to overtake me, then I made a sharp turn to the left and another almost at once to the right that brought me face to face with a red hen perched on a butt before the half door of a cottage, from within which came the sound of a pestle being pounded against a stone mortar. The hen raised itself to its full height, showed me its tongue, the underside of its wings. I held up a finger – somewhere between “shush” and “stay” – and the hen jabbed out its head and bit me. I jumped, wheeling about, and there was the boy. I wedged the injured hand under my arm.

  “Who are you?” he asked me outright.

  He was, I judged, now that we were almost toe to toe, a good half a head taller than me. More importantly, unless his companions were a deal less agile in wit or limb, he was also on his own. I had nothing to lose.

  “Who wants to know?” I said and stuck my chin out. He brought a fist up to rest against the point of it. Behind me the red hen settled itself discontentedly. The fist rose by degrees from my chin to the tip of my nose then, all unexpectedly, blossomed into an open hand with which its owner mussed the front of my hair.

  “John Millar,” he said.

  “In which case” – I tugged the cap down over his eyes – “Gilbert Rice.”

  I ran past him, jinked left then right, slowing only when I had regained the market square. He caught up with me fifty yards further along, in the direction of the Flags, by a stall selling patched-up kettles and pans. He had taken the hat off and w
as making a great show of inspecting the peak, scowling the while.

  “You needn’t have been so rough with it, I was only having a bit of sport,” he said. To which I might have retorted, “It is sport when you dole it out, but not when you receive it back,” had not the black look already begun to lift from his face. Impetuousness ranked – ranks still – below surliness in my hierarchy of character flaws.

  He had without further invitation or acknowledgement fallen into step beside me, hands clasped behind his back. We might have been two old acquaintances meeting of a Sunday evening for a promenade around the grounds of the White Linen Hall, with a military band for accompaniment and not the cries of the Smithfield hawkers.

  “So, Gilbert Rice . . .”

  “So, John Millar . . .”

  “Where have you been hiding all this time?”

  He told me he had lately come to stay with his grandfather (my ears, needless to say, pricked up at this), who kept the marble yard on nearby Berry Street. The yard’s existence was news to me, although I knew the street well enough, for my own grandfather would take me there twice in the year to be measured by Mr Dalton, his tailor, for a suit of clothes, and twice in the year would ask the same question as he pored over the bill: “How much more growth can there be left in the boy?”

  I adopted my gravest expression. “Are your parents then . . . ?”

  “In Newtownards,” Millar said.

  “Ah.”

  “My father has the quarry there.”

  Despite his use of the definite article, the quarry at Newtownards had hitherto as much substance for me as the marble yard on Berry Street. We all make the mistake when children, of course, of fancying that we are at the very centre of the universe, that other people’s lives take their coordinates from our own, but even as a full-grown man John Millar never quite understood how the rest of the world could fail to share his family’s passion for stone. If anything his bafflement grew more pronounced with age. Every building we erected, he once said to me, contained the whole of history, because every piece of rock we cut was as old as the First Day of Creation. We could not bake a brick but we gave form to the very earth our earliest ancestors had trod. “Only imagine.”