Irish Revel (1)
The Irish are said to be good at parties, noisy revels with drinking, singing, and dancing late into the night. But Mary, seventeen and living on a lonely farm, has no experience of them, and as she cycles down the mountain road to her first party in the town, she is full of hopes and dreams and expectations...
Mary hoped that the ancient front tyre on the bicycle would burst. Twice she had to stop to put more air in it, which was very annoying. For as long as she could remember, she had been putting air in tyres, carrying firewood, cleaning out the cow shed, doing a man's work. Her father and two brothers worked for the forestry company, so she and her mother had to do everything, and there were three children to take care of as well. Theirs was a mountainy farm in Ireland, and life was hard.
But this cold evening in early November she was free. She rode her bicycle along the road, thinking pleasantly about the party. Although she was seventeen, this was her first party. The invitation had come only that morning from Mrs Rodgers, owner of the Commercial Hotel. At first her mother did not wish Mary to go; there was too much to be done, soup to be made, and one of the children had earache and was likely to cry in the night. But Mary begged her mother to let her go.
'What use would it be?' her mother said. To her, all such excitements were bad for you, because they gave you a taste of something you couldn't have. But finally she agreed.
'You can go as long as you're back in time to milk the cows in the morning, and don't do anything foolish,' she said. Mary was going to stay the night in town with Mrs Rodgers. She had washed and brushed her hair, which fell in long dark waves over her shoulders. She was allowed to wear the black evening dress that an uncle had sent from America years ago. Her mother said a prayer to keep her safe, took her to the top of the farm road, warned her never to touch alcohol, and said goodbye.
Mary felt happy as she rode along slowly, avoiding the holes in the road, which were covered with thin ice. It had been very cold all day. At the bottom of the hill she got off and looked back, out of habit, at her house. It was the only one on the mountain, small and white, with a piece of land at the back which they called the vegetable garden. She looked away. She was now free to think of John Roland. He had appeared two years before, riding a motorbike daringly fast, and stopped to ask the way. He was staying at the Commercial Hotel and had come up to see the lake, which was famous for the way it changed colour at different times of day. When the sun went down, the water was often a strange reddish-purple, like wine.
'Down there,' she said to the stranger, pointing to the lake below. Rocky hills and tiny fields of bare earth dropped steeply towards the water. It was midsummer and very hot; the grass was tall and there were wild flowers, blood-red, close to their feet.
'What an unusual sight,' he said, looking at the lake.
She had no interest in views herself. She just looked up at the high sky and saw that a bird had stopped in the air above them. It was like a pause in her life, the bird above them, perfectly still. Then her mother came out to see who the stranger was. He introduced himself, very politely, as John Roland, an English painter.
She did not remember exactly how it happened, but after a while he walked into their kitchen with them and sat down to tea.
Two long years had passed since that day, but she had never stopped hoping. Perhaps this evening she would see him. The postman had said someone special in the hotel expected her. It seemed to her that her happiness somehow lit up the greyness of the cold sky, the icy fields going blue in the night, the dark windows of the small houses she passed. Suddenly her parents were rich and cheerful, her little sister had no earache, the kitchen fire did not smoke. Sometimes she smiled at the thought of how she would appear to him - taller and more womanly now, in a dress that could be worn anywhere. She forgot about the ancient tyre, jumped on the bicycle and rode on.
The five street lights were on when she entered the small town. There had been a cattle market that day, and drunken farmers with sticks were still trying to find their own cattle in dark corners of the main street.
As she reached the Commercial Hotel, Mary heard loud conversation inside, and men singing in the bar. She didn't want to go in through the front door, in case someone saw her and told her father she'd gone into the public bar. So she went to the back door. It was open, but she knocked before entering.
Two girls rushed to the door. One was Doris O'Beirne. She was famous for being the only Doris in the whole town, and for the fact that one of her eyes was blue and the other dark brown.
'God, I thought it was someone important,' she said when she saw Mary standing there, blushing, pretty, and with a bottle of cream in her hand. Another girl! There were far too many girls in the town. Girls like Mary with matching eyes and long wavy hair.
'Come in, or stay out,' said Eithne Duggan, the second girl, to Mary. It was supposed to be a joke but neither of the town girls liked Mary. They hated shy mountainy people.
Mary came in, carrying the cream, which her mother had sent to Mrs Rodgers as a present. She put it on the table and took off her coat. The girls whispered to each other and giggled when they saw her dress. The kitchen smelt of cattle and fried food.
Mrs Rodgers came in from the bar to speak to her.
'Mary, I'm glad you came, these two girls are no use at all, always giggling. Now the first thing to do is to move the heavy furniture out of the sitting room upstairs, but not the piano. We're going to have dancing and everything.'
Quickly Mary realized she was being given work to do, and she blushed with shock and disappointment. She thought of her good black dress and how her mother wouldn't even let her wear it to church on Sundays. She might tear it or dirty it.
'And then we have to start cooking the goose,' Mrs Rodgers said, and went on to explain that the party was for Mr Brogan, the local Customs Officer, who was leaving his job.
'There's someone here expecting me,' Mary said, trembling with the pleasure of being about to hear his name spoken by someone else. She wondered which room was his, and if he was likely to be in at that moment. Already in her imagination she was knocking on his door, and could hear him inside.
'Expecting you!' Mrs Rodgers said, looking puzzled for a moment. 'Oh, that young man from the factory was asking about you - he said he saw you at a dance once. A strange one, he is.'
'What man?' Mary said, as she felt the happiness leaking out of her heart.
But Mrs Rodgers heard the men in the bar shouting for her to refill their empty glasses, and she hurried out without replying.
Upstairs Doris and Eithne helped Mary move the heavy furniture out of the sitting room. The two town girls shared jokes with each other, giggled at Mary behind her back, and ordered her around like a servant. She dusted the piano and cleaned the floor. She'd come for a party! She wished she were at home - at least with cattle and chickens it was clean dirt.
Then Eithne and Doris told Mary to get the glasses ready, and they went away to drink a secret bottle of beer in the bathroom.
'She's crying like a baby in there,' Eithne told Doris, giggling.
'God, she looks an eejit in that dress,' Doris said.
'It's her mother's,' Eithne said.
'What's she crying about?' wondered Doris.
'She thought some boy would be here. Do you remember that boy who stayed here the summer before last, with a motorbike?'
'The boy with the big nose?' said Doris. 'God, she'd frighten him in that dress. Her hair isn't natural, either.'
'I hate that kind of long black hair,' Eithne said, drinking the last of the beer. They hid the bottle under the bath.
In the room with the piano Mary got the glasses ready. Tears ran down her face, so she did not put on the light. She saw what the party would be like. They would eat the goose, the men would get drunk and the girls would giggle. They would dance and sing and tell ghost stories, and in the morning she would have to get up early and be home in time for milking. She looked out of the small window at the dirty street, remembering how once she had danced with John on the farm road to no music at all, just their hearts beating, and the sound of happiness.
On that first day at tea, her father had suggested that John should stay with them, and he stayed for four days, helping with the farm work and the farm machinery. Mary made his bed in the morning and carried up a bowl of rainwater every evening, so that he could wash. She washed his shirt, and that day his bare back burnt in the sun. She put milk on it. It was his last day with them. After supper he gave each of the older children a ride on the motorbike. She would never forget that ride. She felt warm from head to foot in wonder and delight. The sun went down, and wild flowers shone yellow in the grass. They did not talk as they rode; she had her arms round his stomach, with the delicate and desperate hold of a girl in love. However far they went, they always seemed to be riding into a golden mist. The lake was at its most beautiful. They stopped at the bridge and sat on a low stone wall. She took an insect off his neck and touched the skin where there was a tiny drop of blood. It was then that they danced, to the sound of singing birds and running water. The air was sweet with the smell of the grass in the fields, lying green and ungathered. They danced.
'Sweet Mary,' he said, looking seriously into her brown eyes. 'I cannot love you because I already have a wife and children to love. Anyway, you are too young and too innocent.'
Next day, as he was leaving, he asked if he could send her something in the post. It came eleven days later - a black-and-white drawing of her, very like her, except that the girl in the drawing was uglier.
'That's no good for anything!' said her mother, who had been expecting a gold bracelet or necklace. They hung it on the kitchen wall for a while and then one day it fell down. Someone (probably her mother) used it, with a brush, for collecting dirt from the floor. Mary had wanted to keep it, to put it safely away in a drawer, but she was ashamed to. Her family were hard people, and it was only when someone died that they ever cried or showed much feeling.
'Sweet Mary,' he had said. He never wrote. Two summers passed. She had a feeling that he would come back, and at the same time a terrible fear that he might not.
