A Different Kingdom Page 4

  'Now, Michael-boy, can you float on your own or do I have to carry you everywhere?'

  He realized that she was in her depth, standing with her feet planted in the silt of the bottom and the river lapping round her shoulders.

  'Don't let go of me.'

  'Ach, you've no courage. Did I not teach you how to swim last summer?'

  But last summer was a year ago, a lifetime to a child. He shook his head.

  'Well here, then. Grab hold of this.' She pulled down a slim branch of the old oak for him to hold. 'Got it? Good. Now don't let go. Hold on there while I splash about a bit.'

  He clung there blinking water out of his eyes and feeling the current move lazily around him. His feet kicked for a moment and the liquid forced his toes apart. What were they thinking, those underwater knights and ladies, those dragons? He shifted uncomfortably as he thought of eels, pikes—who knew what?—powering through the water to nibble at him.

  Rose was scattering a shower of sun-kindled spray as she splashed and kicked in the middle of the river. Behind her the black arch of the bridge loomed like an open mouth. Michael saw her head go under and her buttocks flash as she dived, and the river quietened, ripples plashing and spreading, lap-ping the banks.

  'Rose?' he called, alarmed, but she broke surface seconds later with black hair plastered over her face.

  'I can see down there,' she called. 'I can see under the water.

  It's dear as a bell, Michael, like another world.' And then she had dived again. Her pale form was a blur under the river, sinuous as an otter.

  She could be a fairy, Michael thought. All she needs are wings. A water fairy. Were there such things?

  Rose stood up in the shallows, waist deep. Water poured off her like liquid flame. She raised her arms to wipe the hair from her eyes, grinning, and for a second the water that streamed from her shoulders, sunlit, looked like two transparent wings, and Michael gurgled with happiness.

  But something tore his stare away, drew it to where the stone of the bridge was covered by the trees. Movement, a white blur. A face disappearing quickly into the shadow there. Someone watching.

  'Rose!' he yelled, lifting one chubby arm to point. His other hand slid along his oak lifeline, leaves torn free by his slipping palm, and he was floating free— no, sinking freely, his astonished eyes filling with water, the river's cool clutch easing over his forehead as softly as a caress.

  He batted at the stuff surrounding him, kicked and wriggled, and felt himself rise. Then there was a grip in his hair and he was hauled into the air, the pain making him cry out.

  'You wee twit, Michael! What did you want to do that for? What was it anyway?' She hugged him tightly, and he would remember afterwards and replay endlessly in his mind the way she felt against him. Cold with the water, her arms hard around him, his kneecap tickled by the soft pelt at the top of her thighs.

  'There was somebody there, Rose. Somebody was looking at us, up by the bridge.' No fox face. Just an ordinary one. A real face, but gone in a moment, quick as shame.

  'Oh there was, was there?' Oddly, she smiled, a curious, inward smile. 'It doesn't matter, Michael. I don't care and you've nothing worth hiding.'

  'What's so funny?'

  'You.' She released him. 'Your face when you went under the water. I thought the pike was tugging at your toes for a minute.'

  'It's not right to spy on people.' Especially when they've no clothes on, he added to himself. There was an odd feeling in him, like a cold blush tightening under his stomach. He looked down through the clear water. 'Rose!'

  She followed his goggling gaze and her eyebrows shot up her forehead. 'Dear me. You're growing up, Michael.' She kissed his wet nose. 'It's alright. Come on. I think it's time we got dressed.'

  FOUR

  GROWING UP... TERRIBLE, frightening words. They were on a par with dentist and mortal sin. The feel of Rose holding him, and his unprecedented reaction. That dizzy, fearful excitement. These things wheeled in his head for days so he forgot about the face at the bridge, the fox faces at the river. They were placed somewhere in a back room, filed away until something should bring them to light again.

  The bridge drew him. He was fascinated by the fact that it was impossible to see daylight through it. It seemed more like a long tunnel leading into the earth. A place for goblins, subterranean workings, mines and borings. But there was water there too, the river, as deep as a sapling and as slow-moving as cold honey. The place was like a green-walled cathedral, the oaks and limes standing back from the bank where the willow and alder clustered as if eager to drink. Light fell on to the water and filtered through the canopy like the rays running through the stained glass of a church. It was both shadowed and brilliant, sparkling and dim. And dominating all was the black mouth of the bridge, as lightless as a well. To enter the arch of the bridge one would have either to swim or procure a boat. Michael could do neither, so the blackness remained one of the fixtures of his young life, as unplumbed as the deepest Pacific canyon.

  The river, the bridge, the meadows that surrounded them— these were the places where he frittered away his time, alone for the most part, for Rose developed sudden, unexplained absences over the following weeks which produced sharp words in the house, and one time Michael entered her room to find her sitting crying on the bed. This was a shock to him, a break in the natural order of things. He wanted to exit immediately and forget it, but then Rose looked up at him and he found himself hugging her clumsily, feeling like an impostor.

  He was aware that his grandparents, and his Aunt Rachel too, for that matter, disapproved of Rose for some reason, and that she was fighting an obdurate battle against them, but the whys and wherefores of it were kept from him. He heard snatches of talk about 'bringing disgrace on the family' and 'not even one of her own kind', but these merely baffled him further. It was Aunt Rachel's voice he heard saying these things. She was a big woman, like her mother, in her late twenties and thus ten years older than her sister. She was unmarried, austere, prematurely grey. Michael had seen photographs taken of her before he was born, and in them she had been a smiling dark girl with squarer shoulders and slimmer hips, one hand clasped round a prayer book and the other fighting to keep a broad-brimmed straw hat on her head in a wind from an older, black and white world. She had been 'disappointed in love', Rose had told him once in a portentous whisper.

  Michael came to know the warning signs. The family would take up what he had come to think of as their battle positions in the kitchen, with Rose bright-eyed and defiant, Rachel looking strangely vindicated, his grandmother haggard, her husband weary, and old Mullan sneaking out of the door with a shake of the head. It was grown-up business, a squall to be weathered.

  Then there was the dreadful night the parish priest walked in, grim and ashen-hatred, his black cassock sweeping the ground, and Michael had been hustled upstairs to bed. He was glad to stay clear of it.

  Set against the tension in the house were weeks of the finest weather imaginable. In the fields the barley was being slowly touched with gold and the hay was paled steadily by the sun. A wet spring had meant a much later hay crop and Michael's grandfather had fussed and worried over this one as though it were a wayward chid. Field mice by the hundred had woven their hanging nests in the stalks, unaware of the coming apocalypse. Pat walked through the forest of stems with a smile in his eye, rubbing the ears between his hard hands and winnowing the result with a swift pucker. Ten acres of fine barley, four more of hay—very soon now, the haymaking— and the pastures thick with the dung his cattle had so kindly donated. With Sean's talk, it would be the last time perhaps that they would use the old horsepowered thresher for the barley.

  He talked to Mullan of buying a horse, at one of the autumn fairs perhaps, 'just a wee, high-stepping thing for the trap', whilst his wife listened in stony silence. There was such a thing as stretching sentiment too far. Mullan told a wistful story of seeing a British transport column moving to Ypres in '15; thousands of big he
avy horses taking up the roads for miles, hardly a truck among them, towing wagons, ambulances, limbers, guns. And never a one to be seen now. Just damned tractors, keeping a man's feet from the earth, lifting him out of the furrow. You could plough a field these days without even getting its soil on your boots. And he shook his head whilst he and Pat shared a pouch of Warhorse, and even Michael's grandmother was seen to smile a little wistfully, which made Pat and Mullan share a private grin.

  It was the calm before the storm, the storm being harvest time, that deliciously busy, back-breaking time of the year when the long, slow days suddenly contracted and seemed too short, when the men sometimes worked on into the nights and the women would bring them massive sandwiches and bottles of cool porter out to the fields. They would work by the light of storm lanterns, eyeing the sky nervously. When the hay was cut and lying one day's rain was all there was between a fine crop and a ruined one, and in spite of Mullan's protestations they would be glad of the tractor then and the angular bundles that the baler tidily excreted in its wake. The tractor was an innovation, and the year before Pat muttered about the square-built towers of bales that dotted the fields instead of the old blunt-headed ricks. Progress. Life was speeding up, he complained, like the cars on the roads. It took a wary hand on the reins to make the trip to the village, with the horse snorting at the passage of the metal monsters. He was a simple man, was Pat, his life built in black and white, as nostalgic as any Irishman when talking of his own land. To the hands he appeared to be absolute master, but even Michael knew how his wife prodded him on, like an old cob reluctant in the shafts. His son Sean was full of the ideas he had picked up at agricultural college. Farming was a science, according to him, whereas to Pat and Mullan, and to Michael's grandmother too, if truth be told, it was a way of life, as natural as the return of the swallows in the spring. It had resisted change for generations, but now it was succumbing at last, as was the land itself. It was being battened down and circumscribed, made smaller. The seasons were becoming elements in an equation.

  MICHAEL KNEW NOTHING of this. He knew that there were more metal contraptions in the sheds than there had been, and that the smell of engine oil and petrol were becoming as common as the scent of leather and horse, but he drew no conclusions. He was about as analytical as one of the horses themselves. The day ahead was far enough away to look after itself, and the summer stretched like a golden road winding to infinity. There were far more interesting things capering under his very nose.

  Grandfather and Mullan went to have a look at the 'wee, high-stepping thing' a few days later, whilst Michael's grandmother remained silent and disapproving and Uncle Sean thought it a waste of money.

  'But the harvest will be a good 'un,' Grandfather had said, surreptitiously scratching the back of a wooden chair. 'We can afford it, and when we sell off the bullocks we'll have pasture and to spare.'

  'For sheep, I'd have thought,' Sean mumbled, but Grandfather affected not to hear.

  'The bottom inch needs a rest; one pony on it for a while will hardly strain it too much.'

  'It's winter in a few months.' Sean made a lastditch effort. 'What about feed?'

  'God willing, this will be the best hay crop I've seen in ten years. We can spare enough for one more mouth.' He and Mullan exchanged a look of triumph. Sean subsided grumpily.

  They took Michael with them to see the animal, trundling along at a snail's pace with Felix, one of the two heavy horses, clodding between the shafts. Demon sat in the rear of the cart, panting, his black coat livid with dust. A few cars passed them, making Felix throw up his head in annoyance, but he was an old hand and was not going to start playing at silly buggers in the middle of the road—so Grandfather said, anyway. There were others on horses, and they stopped more than once, blocking the road entirely, to share a chat with distant neighbours, the pipe smoke rising between them, the smell of Clan and Warhorse melting away in blue ribands down the breeze.

  Twice they drove under Orange arches left over from the Twelfth, gaudy and woebegone. Michael had always been fascinated by the wooden images enshrined there, the man on the white horse, the red hand, the miniature ladders; but he understood also that there was something wrong about them. That was why Grandfather had spat without thinking into the dusty road as their shadow fell across the cart, though he glanced apologetically at Mullan the next second. Mullan was a Protestant. On the Twelfth of July he marched the roads with a chestful of medals and raised his good hat formally as he passed the farm as though they were strangers, though most of the family would be out in front waving at him. For that day he was in a different world, part of a different people that had nothing in common with them. On the thirteenth he would be Old Mullan again, cap-wearing and disreputable. That was the way life worked.

  They reached their goal after a long morning in the heat and dismounted before the usual tangle of whitewashed buildings, slapping the dust from their clothes. A dog began barking furiously, and Grandfather laid a hand on Demon's collar. They heard children's voices. A door slammed, and a stocky, shirt-tailed figure stepped out of the house pulling his braces up over his shoulders.

  'Ah, Pat, so you're here to have a look at her, then. I knew you would.' They slapped hands. The man dug in his pocket, produced a thumbed-out cigarette, jammed it in his lips, grinned at Michael with what teeth he had (not many, and most of them black), and then strolled off towards one of the buildings, jerking his head for them to follow. 'Brought her in specially today so's you wouldn't have to chase half across the field to look at her. She's a fresh wee thing.'

  He clanged back bolts on a half-door and they heard the stamp of a hoof from within. Mullan struck a match off his boot heel as was his wont and sucked the flame into his Peterson.

  She was a chestnut, two white socks and a blaze on her nose. 'Two white feet buy him,' Michael muttered, and his grandfather winked at him,

  They waded through the thick straw of the box whilst the mare blew down her nose at the smell of strangers and retreated into a corner. Grandfather ran his hands over her gently, produced a stub of carrot for her to nibble, felt her-legs, then lifted her hoofs and peered at the frogs.

  'How old?'

  'Just turned five, same as I told you,' her owner answered him. His stub of cigarette was lit and he was crinkling up his eyes against its smoke.

  Pat lifted the upper lip, peered at the teeth, nodded. Noted the way her ears remained forward and there was no white in her eye. Even-tempered.

  'How about a look at her moving?' he asked.

  'Surely.'

  The man threw a halter on her head and led her out of the swishing straw to the sun of the yard. Demon lay watching. The man trotted her up and down. She was unshod, but her hoofs were brought from the ground in an exaggerated prance. She was as perfect as a fully wound toy. Michael gaped.

  'A real mover,' Mullan said. He and Grandfather exchanged a look, and Michael knew the horse was as good as bought. 'Fifteen hands, I'd have said,' Pat offered.

  'Och, no.' The man was out of breath. 'Fourteen three.'

  'Fourteen, you told me,' Pat said easily. 'Just a wee pony, no more.'

  'Sure I knew if you thought she was this size you'd never even look at her. And she's worth a look, isn't she?' Pat stared at him with a look that was both annoyance and amusement, and the man grinned hideously, knowing he had been right.

  They haggled whilst the mare stood uncomprehending but attentive, the muscles quivering in her flanks.

  'Sixty pounds would seem fair.'

  'Guineas would be fairer, and a few more at that.'

  'What would you say, then?'

  'Well, what would you offer? Be realistic now.'

  'No, no. It is for you to say. What would you be wanting?'

  The man stated a price which made Grandfather and Mullan sputter with mirth and wipe their eyes. 'So you're a comedian,' Mullan laughed.

  The price came down. They argued. Grandfather made as if to walk away in disgust. Mullan pull
ed him back. They threw up their hands, drew attention to her height. This was a horse, not a pony. Ate more. Needed more careful handling. Wasn't quite what they had been looking for.

  The price fell further.

  The owner shook his head in despair. The beast was a family pet. His daughter would be heartbroken. Hard times forced such measures. Pat tried to bring the price down a last time, but it had hit bedrock. The man was obdurate. He and Grandfather looked at one another, gauging; finally Pat spat on his hand and stuck it out. They shook, each believing he had the better bargain.

  'We bought her!' Michael cried.

  Mullan patted his head. 'Two white feet, Mike, remember. We had to buy her. Now get you up on the cart.'

  They were even slower on the way home, the chestnut tied behind, Felix plodding along in front, keeping to a walk to spare the mare's feet. A subtle gold came into the air, heralding the wane of the afternoon. Blackbirds darted out from the hedges in front of them, alarmed. The roads were quiet. Pat and Mullan were discussing grazing, winter feed, hay and tack. Horse talk, wholesome as apples. Michael looked back at the white-splashed face of the mare. She was staring wide-eyed at the woods to their left.

  They were nearly home, and the trees wound about the little river. They could hear it churning in the quiet of the coming evening. The woods were thick here, perhaps half a mile above the bridge. They butted on to meadows and fields of barley.

  There was movement there, in the shadow of the trees. Shapes were coursing along low to the ground, grey as smoke.

  Demon growled deep in his throat.

  Michael peered harder. Dog-like silhouettes loping along-the edge of the meadows. Were they after sheep?

  With a clatter of cracked branches a great stag came leaping out of the woods, sprays of leaves caught in its antlers and the insides of its nostrils gleaming like blood. It was gasping and heaving, stumbling, its coat foamed with sweat and matted with briars. The other creatures gave a collective howl and changed course in pursuit. They were wolves.