The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Read online

  *

  My return to work coincided with a great excitement in the town, brought on by another dreadful murder, closer to home and the present moment, confirmation of which had only just reached us: five policemen slain in County Clare on Easter Monday.

  The miles that the story had travelled, the hands, and mouths, it had passed through might have added to the grisliness – the talk was of mutilations and other abuses of the corpses – but the bald facts were unsettling enough. A sergeant and four constables from the station house at Doolin had come upon a large body of peasantry, near the chapel at Toohavara, clearly intent on some mischief, for all were armed and all wore straw hats by way of uniform. When the policemen tried to take one of this company into custody the countrymen overpowered them, separated them from one another, and either shot them in the fields round about or beat them to death with clubs. The murderers were supposed to be “Terry Alts”, provoked to their ghastly deed, and a succession of lesser outrages in recent times, by last year’s poor harvest in that part of the world. The fear that day in Belfast, however – a fear expressed only among pockets of friends, and then not without a glance over the shoulder – was that land and crops were mere excuses. One of the policemen in his final throes had cried out to his assailants, “Clare boys, I am a Catholic!” He had articulated what many of the people I spoke to held to be true, and many of those presumably whom I saw crowding at the doors of the town’s gun shops: that the real targets of the Terry Alts were Protestants at large.

  Belfast then, thirty years after the Act of Union, did not have much of religious strife, still less of violence. St Patrick’s Day and the Orangemen’s march on the Twelfth of July could, it is true, be occasions for mayhem, even murder, and were as a consequence regularly suppressed, but the confrontations seemed of a piece with the parades’ air of Carnival, an interruption to everyday relations (a hazardous interruption, but no more than was, say, the running of the bulls at Pamplona), relations which if not wholly cordial were neither consistently hostile. It was not unheard of for Catholics to reside in Brown Square or Sandy Row, or Protestants in the Pound. By far the most alarming incident in my lifetime, to that point, was the bomb to which Ferris had alluded in the Lamb and Flag – and which had spread the name of our town far and wide for several days – and that had arisen out of a dispute over combinations, not religion.

  In more recent times, however, the “monster meetings” that had accompanied Mr O’Connell’s campaign for Emancipation had reawakened in some Protestant townsfolk ancient fears of encirclement and extirpation by “Papes”. (Remember Portadown! Remember 1641!) “Clare boys, I am a Catholic!” ensured those fears did not fall back into a slumber.

  Only much later did I connect these events, and fears, to the “baser currency”, the thought of which had, in a roundabout way, spoiled my grandfather’s dinner.

  *

  For those first few days back at the Ballast Office I relied on the use of a bow crutch (when I could wrest it back from Ferris and Bright), which Mick had delivered on Dr McDonnell’s behalf to my grandfather’s house, with the injunction that even after I had left it aside I should not, for a few days more, overexert myself. It was not until the beginning of the following week, therefore, that I felt able to return to the Mill for Grinding Old People Young to thank Maria for the care that she had shown me, and to ask her forgiveness for the ingratitude that I had shown her in return. I told no one that I was going, not my grandfather, who nevertheless called to me from the top of the staircase as I opened the street door that I was to remember what Dr McDonnell had said about exertion, not Dr McDonnell himself, and very particularly not Ferris and Bright.

  I walked again, at a fraction of the pace, the route of the Easter procession out the road to Carrickfergus, as congested a district as any in the town, where North Street, Mustard Street, Little Donegall Street flowed into it, but in short order less densely populated. Already by Great George’s Street there were wide open spaces on either side of the road, although there were numerous scaffoldings to be seen too, terraces of weavers’ cottages taking shape behind them to serve Mulholland’s Mill, which having burned down some years before had recently been rebuilt at twice the size and converted – foolishly, some still said – from cotton to linen. North Thomas Street was little more than a name, the last before the Milewater Bridge and the town’s northern limits. It was from here on Easter Monday that we had struck out, westward, for the Cave Hill. A little further on lay Lilliput Farm – how puny those who built the house here must have felt in the shadow of a giant; how puny and yet how elevated to be able to appropriate such a name – with the Lough now running to shore directly behind. A little further on again was Ringan’s Point, which I passed with all the haste I could muster, that bleak spot being where the town’s suicides and unbaptised foundlings were disposed of; then, within sight of my destination, I made the last of my frequent halts since leaving home. A few years before a man named Livingstone had flown in a hot-air balloon from the town to Fortwilliam, not far from here, in less than five minutes. On foot, or on two good feet at least, it was a journey of at most three-quarters of an hour. That night it had taken me more than half as long again. It was not discomfort or tiredness that forced me to stop this final time, however, but a shortness of breath brought on by the anticipation – or as it had suddenly become, the dread – of seeing Maria again. What if she were still angry with me? And how exactly would I explain my petulance that day?

  I would have turned about then and there and started for home, but for the certainty that I could not endure another week like the two weeks just past, constructing conversations in my head, taking them apart word by word, starting all over again. For good or ill, I must go on.

  I had for obvious reasons not been particularly sensible of my surroundings on my previous visit. A closer inspection revealed the Mill for Grinding Old People Young to be a building of some dozen windows fronting on to the road, with a double gateway on one side through to the stables and outhouses and, on the other, a small garden almost totally taken up by a clump of blue-flowered hydrangeas. Curtains drawn on some of the upstairs windows suggested paying guests, or more extensive private quarters than a widow living on her own might be thought to have need of.

  From somewhere in the rear came the sound of fowl disputing with one another their order in the roost, a pig arguing with itself.

  Having entered again beneath that curious sign, I passed the snug in which the Kelly brothers had deposited me, this evening occupied by four men, advanced in years, arms folded, and engaged in what appeared to be a pipe-smoking contest. (They were neck and neck, and neck and scrawny neck.) I looked, in vain, for Maria in the tap-room that served the snug and then tried a dining room further along the corridor, again without success. Immediately I pushed open the door of the next room, however, I saw her, standing as though deep in thought by the counter. There was a brief moment in which I had to merge the face before me with the one I had carried in my memory since Easter Monday: an adjustment to the advantage of the living face, which was perhaps a little thinner than I had remembered, careworn, even, but more beautiful than any I had ever beheld. If I had not known it before I knew then that I had become properly infatuated. She looked at me equably as I came into the room, even answered my smile with one of her own, but it was clear from the speed with which the smile faded and her eyes slid away from my face, that she did not know me from Adam. I shrank into a corner between a window and a high stone hearth.

  I might not have known what I would say to her – what, that is, of the one hundred and fifty versions I had rehearsed and abandoned during my convalescence – but it had not once occurred to me that I might be deprived of the opportunity to say anything at all.

  The room was oddly proportioned, as though the original had at some stage, and at whim, been divided. The hearth dominated, as it would have dominated a room two or three times the size, although the turf fire that smoked and very occas
ionally flared in its grate was barely adequate to the task of warming even that reduced space. There were perhaps eight other customers, including the first women I had seen about the place who were not in its employ: a mother and daughter, was my instant surmise, the elder stroking the hand of the younger, who held a balled handkerchief to her nose throughout the time that I remained there, like a plug to a dam of tears.

  I had been sitting, trying to appear at my ease, for several minutes, before another, auburn-haired girl came to take my order of a glass of rum and water, which she brought after the passage of several minutes more, having served two other customers in the interim. Maria, meanwhile, did as close to nothing as any living, breathing human being can do. She might just that moment have dropped from the sky, so detached was she from the activity around her. Perhaps she was still new to the trade. If so, she risked having her career terminated before it had properly begun. To judge by the looks she cast, the auburn-haired girl would have dismissed her on the spot had she but the authority. She it was who, when my drink was finished and I held my glass aloft, coaxed Maria – actually, shoved her – into bringing me another.

  “I am sorry,” she said when she arrived with the bottle and the jug for my water.

  “I do not think you can remember me,” I said. She finished pouring, looked at me a second or two; shook her head. I raised my leg a little by way of prompt. “At Easter time? You bandaged my ankle for me. I came to say thank you.”

  This drew a more genuine smile. “The young gentleman who chases eggs,” she said, or as it sounded, “who chases ex.” She had said so little at our last meeting, and that so quietly, that I had failed to notice that her accent was not native. I took the jibe in better part this time. “My egg-chasing days are over once and for all,” I said.

  “You were embarrassed, I think,” she said then. “Such a silly thing to have happened.”

  The stress on “silly”, I chose to believe, was another peculiarity of her speech.

  She apologised that she had not recognised me sooner. She had been so intent that day on treating my injury, and my features, as she recalled it, were contorted with pain for much of the time. And then there were the other people present. It had begun to feel a little – what was the word? Like “crowded”, only worse.

  Still I could not place that accent. I asked her, if it was not too impertinent a question, where she was from. “Poland,” she said emphatically, as though expecting me to contradict her. “Near the town of Łuków.” The name meant nothing to me, although had I first seen it written down rather than heard it said – “Wukuf” – I might have had a dim recollection of encountering it not long since in the newspapers: a battle; the kind of thing then that was inclined to catch my eye.

  “I must return to my duties now,” Maria said, apparently oblivious to the fact that to the observer her duties seemed to consist of standing very still and counting the brasses above the fireplace. “Thank you for coming back. It was not necessary.”

  “Oh, but it was,” I said. “Believe me.”

  It was brief, but a look passed between us, a meeting of more than eyes alone. She nodded. “I am very glad”, she said, “that you have recovered.”

  “Maria!” She had got halfway to the counter when I called her back. “You forgot something.”

  She returned, puzzled, to the corner, then saw the coins in my palm. Her expression as she took them said she was never going to learn this trade.

  I had no further opportunity to talk to her that evening. Shortly after Maria had brought me the second glass of rum, the mistress appeared in her widow’s cap – it seemed as much a part of her head as her hair – and summoned her to another part of the inn. The auburn-haired girl looked daggers at Maria’s retreating back. After half an hour she still had not returned. I wondered about going to look for her again, but, no, I had done what I had set out to do, and more; there had been a moment of clear understanding. In any case, whether because of the rum itself or of the fresh air that had preceded it after so long confined to the town, I was suddenly very weary and still had the walk home ahead of me.

  The mother of the tearful girl smiled up at me as I squeezed past her table. I think that were I to have offered, as the first halfway presentable young man to happen by, she would gladly have had me take her daughter off her hands. I did not offer and she called instead to the auburn-haired girl for another quartern of gin.

  Twenty feet from the door of the inn the way became (how had I not thought to take this into account?) almost completely black. The April evening had given way to a February night, a chill northerly wind pressing against my back. I stuck to the land side of the road, twice narrowly avoiding a ditch, until I judged I was well clear of Ringan’s Point, then crossed to the shoreline, where the darkness seemed a little less dense, and where the lapping of the water acted as a warning and a guide both: “not this way, that . . . not this way, that . . .” Before long I began to discern an occasional light in the distance, like a coal fallen from the banked-up fire of the town, I thought, and was pleased enough with the notion to try to work it up into a line or two of verse. Bright could do that sort of thing very tidily, was forever passing pieces of paper between our desks with couplets written on them, often utterly scurrilous. I on the other hand soon found myself thinking more about the impulse to compose than the words themselves.

  Poetry! What on earth – or who – had possessed me?

  I had come alongside Lilliput Farm again, and was seized by the vision of Dean Swift riding this very road on his way from Kilroot to Belfast and his beloved “Varina”: four long years, waiting and hoping. I thought of him, in his dejection at her refusal, finally abandoning this part of the world altogether. That was what I would do in the same circumstance. In the early hours, before anyone else was stirring. A last look back over my shoulder at the town of my birth, before spurring my horse on to whatever now fortune held in store for me.

  So caught up was I with fleeing and passionate letters sent post-haste that I scarcely noticed the wind any longer, or indeed registered the remaining half a mile to the outskirts of town. Even at this hour, the sensation as the buildings closed in around me was much as I imagined it would be being taken up from the ocean into a great ship, its passengers all unconcerned by the vastness that surrounded them and that only a few minutes before had threatened to swallow you.

  Coming in by Carrick Hill and North Street, I saw once more on the opposite side from me the Lamb and Flag, where Ferris, Bright and I had had our warmers en route to the Cave Hill. It looked tonight to have burst at the seams, men crowding the footpath before its doors, slouching against its walls, the lamp standards, whatever solid surface they could find. The man Bright had pointed out on our last visit, the wavy-haired “fixer”, was instantly recognisable among them, in conversation with a man in an oilskin coat, although not so deep as to prevent him from keeping an eye too on everything that was going on around him – on me as, for the first time since Lilliput, I broke my stride.

  I had walked off my earlier weariness, and having regained the deck, as it were, a part of me had no wish to retire yet to my cabin. I remembered Ferris’s caution against drinking here alone at night, but at that moment I did not care, any more than I cared that I would be obliged to rise for work at first light, five or six hours hence. Tonight nothing bad could befall me. Not here. Not in my town. I crossed over and with a little effort made my way inside.

  And nothing bad did befall me, or nothing worse than that when day did break – a minute, as it seemed, after my head touched the bolster – my eyes could not be persuaded to open. My grandfather paused on the landing outside my room half an hour later.

  “Are you not about yet?” he called.

  “I was at my prayers,” I replied, my mouth only just above the bedclothes.

  “I see.” He stood a moment or two more and then walked back down the landing to the stairs. I prayed then, all right, silently, that I might be excused that
one small lie, which I fully intended would be my last.

  Two nights later I walked out along the shore road again, feeling stronger in body, more resolute in spirit, and pleased with myself that I had remembered to bring a tin lantern for the journey home. So of course – because God, it appears, punishes self-satisfaction before all other sins – when I arrived at the Mill, and though I looked in every tap-room, dining room, snug and hidey-hole, Maria was nowhere to be seen.

  I returned from my search to the room with the outsized hearth, around which tonight were crowded men with clay packed, vividly orange, about the soles of their boots. (They had walked in them, perhaps, from the building sites around Mulholland’s Mill.) The auburn-haired girl was serving here with a second girl, plumper, and prettier, if a little wall-eyed on the left side. It was of this girl that I enquired about Maria, but the auburn-haired one, whose name, it soon came out, was Dorothy, and whose ears, such was the force of her antipathy, were attuned to pick out Maria’s name above all other competing sounds, straight away intervened.

  “You are looking in the wrong place for that one. This is a place of work,” she said. The wall-eyed girl covered a smile with her hand. “And work and her do not exactly agree.”

  I had seen the evidence of it myself and could offer no defence.

  “And now it seems she is ‘indisposed’.” Dorothy appeared to be offering the word up for my inspection. I nodded, which satisfied her and left me none the wiser. “As if the rest of us did not have indispositions of our own.”

  Here the other girl nodded firmly, perplexing me further. “Murder, she is let get away with,” the girl said.