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  He was about to go bed when he realised that he was at the centre of a Niagara of falling water. A clap of thunder, a cracking, splintering sound, reminded him of his tree. He went to the window and pulled back the heavy curtains. They were stiff to saturation, and the carpet under his feet was soaking. Rain was falling out of the sky, not in drops but in a splashing stream that came through the open window and poured down his face and neck. The night was shaken by one thunderbolt after another, the sky torn by fleeing light that seemed to have neither pattern nor purpose, neither beginning nor end.

  He put on his slippers and went downstairs and out into the garden. It was within half-an-hour of dawn; he could just make out the dark pyramidal outline of the stricken tree. Soon he was soaking from head to foot as if someone had emptied a keeler of water on his head. He stood under the conifer as the rain made rivulets down his face and chest, imagining the heavenly water being absorbed by the tinder-dry needles, into the sapwood, into the very heartwood. Overhead the sky was a cupola of flame. He visualised the darkness over the bog being rent by bluish light, and water flooding in streams where there never had been a stream before, expunging footprints, swelling the surface of the sod, burying his secret deeper and rendering a fathom unfathomable. It all ended as quickly as it had presumably begun. The streaming and splashing dwindled in a flurry of droplets. He became aware of the dripping of the tree like the susurration of blood in his ears.

  As the storm receded into the northwest, he went inside, towelled himself with luxurious care, and lay down in his pelt. He woke in daylight, refreshed by a sleep without dreams. After a copious breakfast of black pudding, bacon, eggs and tomatoes, he went into the garden again to savour the freshest, most intoxicating smell in the world, the smell of the earth after rain. Under the heat of the forenoon sun, the flowers, grass and leaves, after a long parching, gave off a subtle odour that cleansed his memory of the remaining shades of agitation. It was as if he had only dreamt of Eales and his obsessions. He was strong and full of purpose again. Now it seemed to him that there was nothing he could not do.

  4

  Potter would have liked a bath before dinner but a bathroom was not among the amenities of the cottage he had rented from Rory Rua. As a makeshift solution he had arranged with Roarty to use his bath once a week; and though Sunday was not his regular bath night, he got out his towel, wrapped it round a bottle of bath oil, and put it in the car to have at the ready.

  He had been in the glen since May, and after three months he was at last beginning to feel that he was no longer a stranger, thanks largely to Roarty and his pub. For the first month he had done his drinking in McGonigle’s at the top end of the village, which was much frequented by sheep-farmers from the depths of the north mountain who talked mainly about yeld ewes, liver fluke, scrapie, and grass tetany. Night after night he had listened to the sing-song of their conversation, regretting that his knowledge of sheep shearing and dipping was so scant, and wondering if they might be interested to hear of the problems of lawn-mowing in the London suburbs. Then one evening he went into Roarty’s for a change and he never went back to McGonigle’s again.

  Roarty’s was smaller and smokier with an old-fashioned flagged floor and a bar so arranged that the farmers and fishermen from the shore townlands who drank in it could all take part in the same conversation. Whoever designed it had probably done so unthinkingly but he had created a place of converse for the like of which many a sophisticated architect strove in vain. On his first evening the customers eyed him as he entered and continued their conversation as if they had not seen him. He ordered a large Scotch, and as an afterthought specified a Glenmorangie, which Roarty poured from a bottle that had been collecting dust on the top shelf. A small, hungry-looking youth whom he later came to know as Cor Mogaill looked up at him with a smile and said, ‘I’ve often wondered how many centuries it takes a people to evolve your pronunciation of the word “Scotch”.’

  ‘No longer than it took to evolve your pronunciation of the word, I imagine.’ He was reluctant to become embroiled in a discussion on social history that might explode in politics.

  ‘You must be English,’ said Cor Mogaill. ‘Do I detect the tones of the Home Counties in your accent?’

  ‘Yes, I am English. I’m pleased you can tell.’

  ‘Put English on ruamheirg, then,’ said the youth with apparent innocence.

  The other customers turned their heads and looked at Cor Mogaill and Potter with wide-eyed amusement. One or two laughed as they waited for his reply.

  ‘If you tell me what it is, I might conceivably be able to oblige,’ he said drily.

  ‘It’s a trick question,’ said a tall, sad-faced man at his elbow whom he later discovered to be Gimp Gillespie. ‘A question without a straight answer.’

  ‘It must have an English name,’ said Potter with a hint of chauvinism that was not lost on the company.

  ‘It’s the reddish brown water you find here in hillside streams that run over iron ore in the ground. Rusty water, you might say, but the literal meaning of ruamheirg is “red rust”.’

  I’m sure there’s an English name for it,’ Potter insisted. ‘I just don’t know it.’

  That was how he’d made the acquaintance of Gimp Gillespie, now his boon companion. Gillespie was a journalist who had no illusions about his craft; he used Roarty’s not merely to dull his over-active senses but to snap up what little news there was in the glen. Gillespie told him that the hungry-looking youth was the village intellectual and that ‘Put English on ruamheirg’ was a local phrase that meant ‘Square the circle’.

  ‘So if I’d known the English word, I’d have become a local hero?’

  ‘We don’t take it quite so seriously,’ Gillespie explained. ‘There are certain key words that occur again and again in conversation here. Ruamheirg is one and cál leannógach is another. We all laugh whenever we hear them. They keep us amused in the long winter nights. If you wish to enjoy yourself here, you’d better begin finding words like ruamheirg amusing.’

  He looked at Gillespie’s melancholy face, wondering if he had responded correctly. Was all this nonsense an example of rueful Irish humour or was he having his leg pulled, however gently? He couldn’t be sure which, and he felt that it did not matter. He was pleased to have met someone whose company he could enjoy.

  ‘Are all your key-words in Irish?’ he asked.

  ‘Most are Irish words for which there is no English equivalent. The only exception I can recall is “replevy”.’

  ‘Replevy? I’ve heard of “replevin,” a legal term, something to do with the recovery of goods and chattels.’

  ‘Here we use it to mean a loud noise. If you had the misfortune to fart violently in company, Cor Mogaill might say, “Potter discharged a replevy that would wake the dead.”’

  ‘I wonder what the Law Society would say to that.’

  ‘I just thought I’d mention it to save you possible confusion.’

  ‘It’s very kind of you, I’m sure,’ said Potter.

  He had been through a form of induction, he realised. Now they saw him as one of themselves, or so it seemed. Whenever he entered the pub, Roarty would pour him his favourite Scotch without waiting to be asked, and the regulars would involve him in their disputatious conversations as if he were a countryman like themselves. Their talk, as you might expect, was of the country, often of subjects that could well form the last item on The Times letters page. They would discuss at length whether wild duck feed with curlews because of the vigilance of the latter. One or two of them might contend that the curlews acted as sentinels for the whole flock while the rest would argue that curlews were too restless and noisy to make easy companions for other wild fowl. The essence of these arguments was that no one knew the answers, and for this reason Potter’s olympian judgements were much appreciated by the company.

  He turned to the kitchen window and gazed down at the rocks and knolls that fell away sharply to the sea. The waves were wi
nking in the descending sun and Rory Rua in a red shirt was lifting lobster creels in the bay. He thought it would be pleasant to sit by the west window in Roarty’s, nursing a Scotch while the evening drifted into night. After a drink or two he would have a bath, and after another few drinks he would come home and cook the lobster Rory Rua gave him that morning. He left the door on the latch, pleased that he could do so in the knowledge that burglary was unknown in the glen. It was a lovely evening after the rain of the previous night, and he drove slowly to the village, enjoying the view of the north mountain, a jigsaw of fields, roads and cottages with here and there a straight plume of smoke rising from a potless chimney.

  The bar would be empty at this hour; the regulars never came in before nine. Roarty would be alone as Eales always went dancing on Sunday evenings; and if Roarty was alone, he’d be game for an off-beat conversation. Thanks to his encyclopedia, he was a treasury of useless information. He could talk about everything from phlogiston to fish-plates but his favourite topic was drink and all its concomitants, ancient and modern—pins and firkins and hogsheads, faucets, spiles and spigots not to mention the kilderkin, tierce and puncheon. Potter could listen to him for hours theorising about the effect of Irish whiskey on the dark side of the Celtic soul; and as for his knowledge of fishing and shooting, it was unsurpassed.

  He parked his car opposite the pub where the road was widest, and bent his head under the low lintel as he entered. Roarty was immersed in the Sunday newspapers while Gimp Gillespie was seated by the west window contemplating a creamy pint on the table before him.

  ‘I wasn’t expecting to see you at this hour,’ he said.

  ‘I felt like a snifter before dinner, and I didn’t have any Scotch in the house.’

  He listened pleasurably to Gillespie praising the forbearance of the Irish bachelor in the face of the rapacity of village windows. ‘They acquired the taste from their dead husbands, and now they’re insatiable addicts,’ he said. Gillespie was a good conversationalist; there was a hint of rumination in everything he said, which gave his lightest remark a substance reflecting the melancholy of his long face, which was never far from spontaneous laughter.

  Roarty was seated on his high stool behind the bar, holding the newspaper at arm’s length as he read. Even in his present hunched position he looked impressive. He was tall, broad-backed, bald and bearded with an air of stillness that put Potter in mind of early mornings on the mountain. Was it the stillness of self-possession or self-absorption, he wondered idly. When you met him in the street, the first thing you noticed was his bow-legged walk; but seated behind the bar, you could only see his top half, and then it was the bulky head that impressed. It was a noble head with a grizzled beard from the depth of which emerged a sand-blasted, straight-stemmed pipe. Beardless, he would have been red-faced. As it was, the brewer’s flush of his cheeks showed above the greyness of the beard, contrasting oddly with the pale skin of his bald head. The bushiness of the beard concealed closely placed ears. As you looked him full in the face, you could not see them, and you felt that there was something missing—which gave his head a rare quality that remained in the memory.

  Pulling a pint of stout, he would eye the rising froth, his head tilted sideways, the cast of his half-hidden lips betraying serious concern. But when the pint was nicely topped, his eyes would light up momentarily as he placed it before the expectant customer. At such moments one felt that because of some pessimistic streak in his nature, he did not expect the pint to be perfect and that he was continually surprised by the successful combination of brewer’s technology and his own handiwork. The pint served, he would reach out a big hand with well-kept nails and take your money with an absentmindedness that robbed the transaction of anything reminiscent of the cold-blooded self-interest of commerce.

  In speech and bearing, he was quite different from the farmers and fishermen on the other side of the counter, hardy, bony men who went out unthinkingly in all weathers. They were men who put Potter in mind of bare uplands, grey rocks, and forlorn roads in the mountains. Even in the twilight of the pub they wore their peaked caps down over their eyes, and though they could be seen squinting occasionally from beneath them, there was an unflinchingness in their gaze, as if they believed that looking could change the object looked at. Their lean faces bore spiders’ webs of deeply etched lines that branched from eye corners or crisscrossed stubbled chins, expressing a noble stoicism in the face of life’s unremitting adversity. Roarty, on the other hand bore the marks of easy living. He was fleshy rather than wiry, a man who had never experienced sun or wind except from personal choice.

  ‘Where is Eales this evening?’ Gillespie asked. ‘Dancing in Glenties, I suppose?’

  ‘I wish I knew.’ Roarty put down his paper with an air of impatience. ‘I got up this morning to find his room empty, the bed not slept in. Wherever he went, he took his hold-all with him.’

  ‘You don’t mean to say he’s done a bunk?’

  ‘I don’t know what else to think.’

  ‘And the bugger owes me a fiver!’ said Gillespie.

  ‘That’s the younger generation! No sense of responsibility.’ Roarty said with feeling.

  ‘I should have known better. Never trust a Kerryman, not even if he’s been caught young.’ Gillespie looked mournfully through his wallet.

  ‘He must have left after I went to bed,’ Roarty grumbled.

  ‘He couldn’t have walked out over the hill in that rain. He must have got a lift.’

  ‘I wonder what lift he could have got at that hour.’ Roarty shook his noble head.

  ‘There’s a woman behind all this,’ Gillespie said knowingly. ‘I’ve never known a man so given over to women. He couldn’t meet a girl on the road without putting the comether on her. Sixty-six equals forty-six equals sixteen: that was his philosophy. They say he even tossed one or two schoolgirls.’

  ‘He’s left me in the lurch,’ said Roarty. ‘If you hear of anyone looking for a job as barman, let me know.’

  After another drink Potter went out to get his towel and bath oil from the car, only to find Cor Mogaill with a knapsack on his back looking up the exhaust pipe of his Volvo. Ignoring him, Potter opened the car door but Cor Mogaill still kept his eye to the exhaust pipe. There were certain things about the Irish he’d never understand. He lay in the bath for half an hour looking out through the open window at the evening sky changing from screened to solid pink in the west. Between the sky and the window was a mountain ash, and on its topmost branch a blackbird was whistling his heart out, the sparrows and thrushes mute with admiration. There was magic in the Donegal evenings, in the luminous twilights that were long enough to seem like days in miniature. He soaped his arms and thought of the long evening ahead, knowing that his dinner would wait till after closing time.

  ‘Ireland is full of wonders,’ he told Gillespie on his return. ‘Just now I found Cor Mogaill with one eye to the exhaust pipe of my car.’

  ‘Cor Mogaill looks up the exhaust of other people’s cars as a journalist might look up a word in a dictionary.’

  ‘Or a woman’s skirt?’ suggested Potter.

  ‘A sexual fixation, would you say?’

  ‘Undoubtedly. How interesting that the love of cars should manifest itself so extremely—and in rural Ireland, too.’

  ‘And in a man who rides a woman’s bicycle as well!’

  ‘Now, in England that would never happen. I know several suburban men whose lives are their cars. They talk about them, dream about them, copulate in them, and when they drive into the country on Sundays they sit in them eating sandwiches. Yet not one of them would be seen dead looking up the exhaust of another man’s car.’

  ‘You English are so sophisticated!’

  ‘Or sexually self-aware perhaps. Have you ever thought of writing something about our learned friend? A brief study of car love with special reference to exhaust—or should I say, anal?—eroticism.’

  ‘Surely, that would be risking ostracism
and excommunication!’

  ‘Cor Mogaill sees himself as the village intellectual but he’s closer in my opinion to being the village idiot.’

  ‘He’s no idiot,’ Gillespie said pensively. ‘But he’s certainly the village atheist.’

  Outside, the sky had darkened except for a lingering streak of pink in the west. The warm breeze coming through the window enclosed them both in a cocoon of comfort. The pub was full without being crowded, and Roarty had half-a-dozen pints of stout lined up for topping.

  ‘Here, have a chew of dillisk,’ said Crubog, who had just joined them.

  ‘What is it?’ asked Potter half-suspiciously.

  ‘It’s dulse. Seaweed that grows on the rocks here.’

  ‘Is it good for the virility?’ Potter enquired.

  ‘And what is virility?’ asked the old man.

  ‘Does it make you more attractive to women?’ Potter shouted in his ear.

  ‘No, but it’s great for the worms. You’ll never again pass a worm if you eat a fistful of dillisk first thing in the morning and last thing at night.’

  ‘It’s got a salty taste,’ Potter said. ‘It makes me long for another Scotch.’

  ‘That isn’t what I wanted to talk to you about,’ Crubog confided. ‘Keep your wits about you when you’re dealing with Rory Rua. He’s greedy for land. He wants to buy my large mountain acreage, and he wants it for a song. He may give you a lobster now and again to get round you, but there’s wickedness in that red head of his, believe me.’

  ‘Thanks for the tip,’ Potter said with a smile.

  ‘Another thing, if he offers you sloke—that’s another seaweed–take it but be careful. It makes you fart like thunder.’