The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 3

  That, however, lay far in the future. (Mr Darwin farther still.) Back on that First Day of Our Acquaintance we had completed a lap of the square together. We stopped, facing one another.

  “Will I see you here at the same time tomorrow?” Millar asked.

  Something told me it would not do to be too quick to assent. I furrowed my brow; I scratched my ear. I almost, in the end, overdid it.

  “Of course, if you would rather not . . .” He started to turn away.

  “All right, three o’clock by the bedpans,” I said, and like the old fellows who walked around the grounds of the White Linen Hall we solemnly shook on it, or as solemnly, on my part, as a person can whose forefinger feels as though it has in it suddenly a whole hand’s worth of blood. As soon as I was alone again I inspected it properly. The skin was not broken, but the knuckle, where the hen had caught it, was as swollen as a worm’s saddle. I hunted on the ground as I walked, kicking over paper and straw and cabbage leaves, until I spied a wizened green potato, which I instantly scooped up. Perfect! I hurried back to the entry where John Millar had cornered me. I barely broke stride before pitching the potato side-arm at the hen, fully expecting the thing to take flight in fright. It did not. One moment there was a living creature on the butt by the half door, the next there were feathers in the air. I stared in astonishment. A cry went up within. I ran.

  It was not until I was getting undressed for bed that I remembered why I had gone to Smithfield in the first place that day. I decided once and for all to unburden myself of that particular obsession. Which is where I had rather leave the subject.

  Millar’s other passion, I discovered at our very next meeting, was handball. His grandfather’s yard was just along Berry Street from a ball-alley run by a man called Billy Pollard, with whom Millar had in the short time since his arrival from Newtownards reached an understanding. In return for Millar’s sweeping the half-moon of street before the front door, morning and night, Billy Pollard waived the sixpence a game he normally charged, providing, of course, that there were no paying customers wanting to play. I could not count the hours I spent in the months that followed sitting on a bench at the back of the court beside my new friend, shoes off, awaiting our chance, because nothing would do Millar but that I would love the sport as much as he, although to begin with, such was my bewilderment at the speed of the ball, the height and angle of the bounce, I offered as much challenge as one of his grandfather’s slabs of marble.

  I got better, though, much, much better. It was the one sport at which I think I might truly have excelled had not fate, in the shape of my grandfather’s man Nisbet, intervened.

  There were also in Berry Street, or in Charlemont Street, which opened off it, a number of fishmongers – “clan” would not be too strong a word, since they all seemed to hail from the same part of the world, that is to say below Newry, the townland of Omeath. They were, as Billy Pollard himself said, “the very divil for handball”, and for the related activity of betting on the outcome of handball matches, although Billy did his level best to keep gambling from encroaching on that half-moon my friend Millar swept so assiduously; or at least from being seen to encroach.

  One afternoon while Millar and I were sat on our bench an Omeath man approached and asked us, in that curious accent that they had (for amongst themselves they spoke only Gaelic), if we would mind his handkerchief while he played his friend. Millar, who had put out his hand to accept, nearly dropped the handkerchief in his surprise: it was tied in a knot around a pound’s weight of coins. The two were at it for more than an hour, so evenly matched were they, with four or five changes of serve between each point scored. When the game had finished the friend came and demanded the handkerchief of us. Millar and I refused, but the man who had given us the thing to mind nodded (when he could raise his head from between his knees, he nodded) that we were to hand it over, whereupon his friend gave us each a penny. “Maith na buachaillí,” he said: “Good lads.”

  Handkerchief minding thereafter became a regular occupation for Millar and me. Sometimes we would have several handkerchiefs to mind in the one game. Sometimes the person who had given us the handkerchief would take it back at the end, sometimes not. We asked no questions. A penny apiece was our usual reward, practically the first money I had ever handled: whatever I needed, in so far as I had any conception then of need beyond food and clothing, my grandfather bought for me, as he bought everything, on account, settling the bills on a grand tour of the town on the last day of every quarter.

  The coins, as a result, presented me with something of a dilemma. One or two I could spend (half a minute took us – frequently – from Billy Pollard’s to Gribben the confectioner’s on Hercules Street), but only on what could be consumed before I returned home, where I could equally not display my earnings openly. After long deliberation I chose to hide the surplus in my room, next to the schoolroom at the very top of the house, in the space between the chest of drawers and the wall, where, the evidence of my eye suggested, no human hand, or its duster extension, had ever reached.

  Millar had no such difficulties. He was saving to buy a book on Tuscan marbles, which he had seen on display in Hodgson’s the bookseller, another of our afternoon destinations. For myself, I would have bought there The World Turned Upside Down; or, No News, And Strange News, with its cover of a dog seated at a table, playing the flute: “Here you may see what’s very rare, the world turned upside down, a tree and a castle in the air, a man walk on his crown . . .” Except, as I have said, I could not buy anything for myself.

  From time to time the Charlemont clan paid us in honeycomb, another of the specialities of that unusual street. (To this day I am unable to make a connection, beyond the phonic, between bee and sea.) It was on one of these occasions, an afternoon in early spring, when Millar and I were sitting against the outer wall of the alley, barefoot, honey dripping from our chins, that Nisbet chanced by on some errand. I scrambled to my feet, which was a mistake, because the sudden movement not only alerted him to my presence, but also advertised my guilty conscience. Nisbet’s face registered first alarm (had someone drugged me and carried me here against my will?) then, as an Omeath man came out from Billy Pollard’s and asked us for his friend’s handkerchief, “minus the tax”, a sorrowful determination.

  He continued on his way towards Hercules Street, pausing just once to look over his shoulder as if to confirm that his eyes had not deceived him. I finished my honeycomb and licked each finger in turn before pulling on my boots. Already I had the feeling that it would be a long time before I had another.

  The house when I returned was silent, as it often was, although now the silence seemed to have a greater intensity, not the mere absence of noise, but the deliberate withholding of it. I went to my room, three flights up, and sat down at the table before the window to wait. Far below, the town went about its affairs without me, a pantomime of productivity and politeness, hats doffed, hands offered, horses urged on, on, on. Inside, the bell for dinner did not ring. The lamps were not lit. I had begun to wonder if there was anyone at home after all when my grandfather called my name from the foot of the next stairs down but one.

  Nisbet was leaving the study as I descended. He glanced up at me without expression then carried on down towards the hallway.

  My grandfather closed the door behind us.

  I was rarely admitted to this room and the novelty of it at any other time would have been enough to hold my fear in check. On one wall hung a view of a windmill on a hill, a cart passing beneath it, trying to reach the shelter of a village before the thunderclouds massing on the right closed in; on another, in a plain oak frame, the only painting anywhere in the house of my mother and stepmother, or so, by virtue of their proximity to his desk, I assumed them to be: two near-waifs with their arms clasped around one another’s necks, as though for protection from the calamity that, their wide eyes had just foreseen, the future held in store for them. The globe on the desk itself called to mind the ope
ra my grandfather’s old teacher had composed, so that I would not have been surprised if it had by some mechanical means cleft open and a miniature player emerged, as I had once heard people sometimes appeared from cakes and all manner of unlikely things in the entertainments at royal courts.

  My grandfather did not invite me to sit. He did not at first look at me directly.

  Whatever of resolve that I had when I left my bedroom shrivelled to nothing the moment he shook his head, a single, sorrow-laden sweep. I had fallen short of his expectations, that shake informed me, far, far short.

  “My first concern,” he said at length, “from the day and hour I took you under this roof, was for your health and well-being. You were, as I have often told you, a sickly infant. That you survived those first years at all was a constant source of wonder to me, except that the Almighty had clearly ordained it.”

  A clock was ticking on the mantelpiece, disproportionately loud. Judgement Day, I thought, would be like this, the torment all within.

  My grandfather told me that he had had an earlier report of my being seen running from an entry near the Market, which he had chosen to believe at the time was a case of mistaken identity. This new sighting, however, at the ball alley, could not be gainsaid.

  He looked me square in the eye. “Without shoes?”

  The idea clearly baffled him. I opened my mouth, but my tongue failed me. He shook his head again.

  How I elected to use the precious gifts Providence had bestowed on me was, finally, between me and my Maker, although I should not be in any doubt that I would have to account for it. (The clock ticked. The accounting had already begun.) What was of more concern to my grandfather – for he had to accept now that the boy seen previously hurtling about Smithfield was indeed me – was that I appeared to have been treating that part of the town as an exotic playground. I had chosen to be there, unlike the unfortunates who inhabited the meanest of its hovels.

  “It is not your disrespect for me that distresses me so much as your disrespect for them,” he said, at which point I could restrain myself no longer, but began to cry, out of self-pity, no doubt, although there was something else in there too. It was, I thought long afterwards, perhaps the first time that I had truly grieved for my father and my brother, for the two girls clinging to one another on the study wall.

  My grandfather watched me, unmoved. Tears in themselves were no atonement; they merely washed away the debris of the original fault.

  I asked, when I had recovered myself a little, if I might be excused. I went then to my room where even without the aid of a lamp I was able to locate the columns of pennies behind my chest of drawers. It required two trips to carry them, their accumulated fluff and mouse droppings, down to the study. There were two hundred and nine of them in total: seventeen shillings and five pence. They might as well have been gold sovereigns, from the astonishment on my grandfather’s face.

  I spared him no detail in the story of their provenance and asked him if he thought, tainted though they were by gambling, God might nevertheless see fit to use them.

  My grandfather laid his hand on mine. It felt like the hand of God Himself. “You will make a good boy yet,” he said, and I cried twice as hard as before.

  Some days later, Agnes, the maid, brought a letter to me in the schoolroom, the first I had received in all my eleven years. I do not know why it did not occur to me until I had unfolded it that it would be from Millar. He was back with his parents at the quarry in Newtownards. Our grandfathers, it seemed, had spoken together. He was sorry that he had not seen me before he left. He was sorry that he would not have the opportunity to show me the sandstone slab that had been cut there earlier in the week with the trail of a scorpion clearly visible, although how that might be no one was able to say, unless, as one of the quarrymen suggested, the scorpions had clung to the backs of the snakes when St Patrick drove those creatures from the island. He added a P.S.: “I got the book from Hodgson’s!”

  I wrote back that I was sorry too that events had taken the course that they had. I added a P.S. of my own: “I will remember you in my prayers,” and many times I did. The way that my life went on over the next few years I had a lot of prayers to fill.

  There was a saying in our town – bruited to the world at large by the Rev. Henry Cooke, in his address to a Parliamentary Committee on the state of Ireland – that when a man first arrived in Belfast he walked to an “Old Light” House; a few years later when he could afford a gig he rode in it to one of the “New Light” Houses, which were more fashionable; and when at last he had a carriage he permitted himself to be driven to Church.

  The Rev. Cooke attributed all the ills of this world – or at least of this town, where he was just then beginning to make a name, loudly – to the spiritual softening to which gigs and carriages and fashionable ideas gave rise.

  My grandfather, as I have said, was a stranger to all things horse-drawn. In the years that followed I walked with him to Sunday-morning worship in a House whose light, strained through windows set high in the walls, failed even in summer to banish the gloom below. I walked with him there in the evening; I walked with him in between to the House of Correction on Howard Street, where the small number of women prisoners could be heard singing behind a screen, above the distracted mumbles of the men. Every visit to there, to the House of Industry, the Fever Hospital, and later – dreadfully – to the Lunatic Asylum, every second of every sermon through which I struggled to remain alert, brought me, I felt, a second closer to the boy my grandfather had it in mind for me to be.

  And then in the blink of an eye, as it seems to me now, I was a boy no longer.

  Shortly after I turned sixteen my grandfather secured for me an introduction to the Ballast Board, or, as it was known in the statute books, the Corporation for Preserving and Improving the Port and Harbour of Belfast. The Board itself, of which my grandfather had for several of his less senior years been a member, met once a fortnight to formulate the policies that were executed from a modest building (the “Ballast Office”) on the spit of land separating the Town Dock and the Lime Kiln Dock, at the eastern end of High Street and close to the town’s very origins, the ford between the County Antrim and County Down sides of the River Lagan. One of the Board’s first tasks, indeed, in the latter years of the previous century, had been to remove the remains of this ford, in the shadow of the Long Bridge, as an obstruction to river traffic. Commerce did not then – any more than it does now, when the Long Bridge itself is a fading memory – admit of sentimentality in Belfast.

  A wooden observatory, accessed by means of a ladder in the attic of the building, afforded the Ballast Master – “Sir Clueless”, as I was soon taught to call him – an uninterrupted view downriver and out into Belfast Lough; and, I was assured by two of the younger fellows, Ferris and Bright, effectively blinded him to whatever was occurring on the three storeys beneath his feet. “Which is not always very much,” Bright informed me, and proceeded to cross his legs on a table strewn with tide charts, greatly pleased with himself.

  Ferris for his part, besides furnishing me with the Ballast Master’s sobriquet, ran through the names of the various other higher-ups – the Dock Master and Harbour Masters, north-side and south-side, the Pilot Master, the Constable, the Superintendent of Quarantine and their respective deputies – dismissing this one as a drunkard, that one as a glutton, the whole lot as nincompoops, and emphasising how rarely any of them were in the office to disturb his leisure and Bright’s. Ferris’s father had lost a small fortune in the Panic of 1825, but since he had only got his wealth in the speculations that preceded the Panic it had barely had time to distort the family’s expectations. It had been like an uncommonly rich meal, Ferris would tell me: in one end and all too quickly out the other.

  He crossed his legs on the opposite side of the table to Bright, fingers laced behind his head.

  “So, young Rice, any questions?”

  I understood that it was all a show, but it was
a very entertaining one.

  “Is there room on that table, do you think, for another pair of boots?” I asked, entering into the spirit, and Bright, in his delight (my grandfather’s reputation, I rather suspect, had preceded me), almost fell backwards off his seat.

  At some point in the forty years between the Board’s constitution and my arrival there, one ingenious person had proposed that the improvement of the port and the provision of ballast to merchant ships putting back out to sea could be simultaneously effected. In those days the water before the town retreated to a depth of two or three feet at the lowest spring tides, at which point the docks on either side of our office were revealed for what they were, which was nothing more nor less than open sewers. The ballast sand and stone, sold at two shillings the ton, was therefore dredged from the riverbed, and month by month, year on year, the docks and the Board’s coffers deepened, the atmosphere in the town grew a little less offensive.

  Even then, however, the course from the Lough up the Lagan was too circuitous, the mudflats bordering it too extensive, for any but the lightest vessels to berth the greater part of the time. Larger ships were more often than not obliged to anchor at the Pool of Garmoyle, a full three miles from the town, there to await a favourable tide, or to offload their cargo into lighters (we called them “gabbards”), whose pilots, and the rowboat “cab-drivers”, were possibly the only people to profit from the whole rigmarole. “A sixpence to take you up the river. Last one: a sixpence to take you up the river . . . All right, room for three more standing at thruppence . . .”