The Yellow Meads of Asphodel Page 5

  ‘Oh, really. I didn’t know.’

  ‘Well, first let me have your name.’

  ‘Maitland.’

  ‘Miss? And Christian name?’

  ‘Gladys.’

  ‘Age?’

  ‘Thirty-five.’

  At the doctor’s request, after a few more questions, she slipped off her dress and lay down on a couch. Suddenly unaccountably nervous, she felt the first touch of the stethoscope on her chest like a knife stab. She started to breathe heavily and went on to answer more questions as in a dream.

  ‘Do you sleep well?’

  No, she had to confess she didn’t. On the whole she slept very badly.

  ‘Do you take anything for it? Pills or anything?’

  No, she didn’t. She always had a glass of hot milk last thing, though it didn’t seem to help very much.

  ‘What about recreation? Do you swim? Tennis or anything like that?’

  No, she didn’t do anything. She read quite a lot. She liked walking too.

  Then the questions became more intimate. ‘What about boy friends?’

  The question caused a startling convulsion deep in her chest. The stethoscope ceased its travelling over her rather inconspicuous breasts and at the doctor’s request she turned over and lay face downwards. From that position the voice of the doctor seemed to come to her from a great distance, with a kind of mesmeric quietness.

  ‘I’ll give you some sleeping tablets. They’re not habit-forming, but never take more than two at a time.’

  She thanked him. But what of the pain?

  ‘When did you last have a holiday?’

  Last September, she said. She always took it in September.

  ‘Is there any reason why you shouldn’t take a couple of weeks off now, a month or two earlier?’ She didn’t suppose there was. She’d try.

  ‘Yes, do that.’ The doctor gave a short, light laugh. For some reason the upward lilt in his voice struck her as being like the bright leap of a fish out of dark water. ‘Have you never been to my country? To Ireland?’

  Never, she said. As a matter of fact, she usually went to London. She liked the museums and the theatres.

  The doctor laughed again, his voice now captivatingly rich as well as bright. ‘I tell you what. There’s this little place down in Kerry, not far from the Kenmare river. I’ll write it down for you, and the little hotel there. It’s kept by a Mrs Cassidy. If you tell her you know me, it’ll be like the gates of heaven opening for you.’

  She was moved by this to make a reply so near to being jocular that it surprised her into laughing, too. ‘I don’t think I want them opening quite so soon as all that, Doctor.’

  ‘Ah yes, bad metaphor. But I tell you, you’ll eat fresh brown trout there with lashings of butter that’ll melt like manna in your mouth, and raspberries with cream so thick you could stand a flagpole upright in it. And the sunsets over the bay … ah, they’re like apricots – pure gold apricots with just a touch of red on their cheeks.’

  While saying all this, he was writing out the prescription for her sleeping tablets and she was putting on her dress. Now he got up from his desk and saw that she was struggling with the zip. Casually he helped her with it, his fingers brushing her bare back with a brief lightness that prompted all her inner trembling again.

  ‘Well, there’s the address of Mrs Cassidy’s hotel and there’s your prescription. But I’m telling you that the best prescription I can give you is the light on that little bay. You’ll sleep the sleep of the just there and eat like an Irish hunter.’

  When would she know the worst? He could be honest with her.

  ‘There’s no worst to know. There’s nothing organically wrong with you. You’re a perfectly healthy woman and all you need is a change – that’s all, Miss Maitland. So wallow in your raspberries and cream and catch a brace of brown trout for me.’

  ‘But I’ve never fished in my life.’

  ‘Well, now’s the time to begin. Liam Cassidy’s the man to teach you.’

  A week later she was in Ireland. After just over another week she was writing the first of her many letters to herself.

  The little Cassidy Hotel had four front bow windows that stuck out from the whitewashed walls like pleasant rounded paunches. The small tributary of the Kenmare that came down from the hills behind seemed always to have a tender breath of mist on it in the early mornings and a rarefied scintillation of pure silver by noon.

  From the very first day Dr O’Brien emerged and grew in stature as a prophet. The raspberries and cream were truly sumptuous, the trout noble in their butter, the sunsets brilliant as ripe apricots. Mrs Cassidy was a wide, comfortable cushion of a woman who talked in the dreamy brown accents of a summer bumble bee.

  Her husband Liam looked like a bony, beery, mischievous jockey who had seen better days but still persisted in a fanciful belief that horses were more princely than men and that one day he would pick out a colt with solid gold hoofs and mother of pearl in its eyes. The twittering slyness in his own small brown eyes at first dismayed Miss Maitland. She was all too sure, when constantly he called her beautiful, that her leg was being pulled.

  But soon it came to her that everything and everybody, in the Irish way, was beautiful. The word bestowed itself as naturally on things and people as the mist of early morning clothed the face of the stream, and the magenta and purple bells of fuchsia clothed every hedgerow. Even Dr O’Brien was beautiful.

  ‘A beautiful man. A beautiful man. He was no more than sixteen when he first came here, all the way from Dublin, on his bone-shaker, with hardly the price of a fly in his pocket. Ah, a beautiful man.’

  ‘Has he been back here lately?’

  ‘Ah, he’s in England now. He’s in England now.’ And the words might have been the beginning and the end of a funeral dirge.

  The air was always so damply soft that Miss Maitland took on the feeling, and even the appearance, of a well-fed, sleepy cat. She slept with undiminished peace at night and woke to eat prodigious breakfasts of Irish bacon and eggs and honey and brown loaves baked in a wood-fired oven.

  Once or twice a day she went through the apprenticeship of learning to cast a fly under the twittering and half-affectionate gaze of Liam Cassidy; until the day came, after a week, when she took her first brace of trout in trembling triumph back to the hotel.

  It was also a triumph for the prophetic powers of Dr O’Brien. Vividly she remembered his words, ‘Wallow in your raspberries and cream and catch a brace of trout for me,’ and it was almost as if he had actually willed her to do such things.

  So strong were her feelings of both gratitude and triumph about all this that that evening she felt impelled to sit down and write to him: first to say how splendidly right he had been about everything, the raspberries and cream, the trout, the sunsets, the Cassidys, the soft sea air; then of how restored and relaxed she was; then of the triumph of the trout.

  ‘I must confess I felt like a child opening a Christmas stocking or something. I could have screamed when I hooked the first one. Well, anyway, I’m going to have them for supper tonight and just as a celebration I’m going to have half a bottle of white wine with them. And of course I shall drink your health, because if it hadn’t been for you I wouldn’t be here and in a way they’re really your trout more than mine.

  ‘Liam and Mrs Cassidy, by the way, send their best regards to you and only wish that you were here. Liam still makes that nectar of a drink with honey and whiskey which he says you invented. It looks so innocuous and tastes so heavenly and then all of a sudden it hits you and you go all whoozy. I don’t know if it’s this that makes me sleep so well, but sleep I do – like a top.

  ‘By the way, I’ve decided to let the office go hang and stay here for three weeks instead of two. I know you’re awfully busy – I expect it’s measles year or something and you’re run off your feet – but it would be nice if you could drop me a line and include a word for the Cassidys. They sort of dote on you, you know. An
yway, I’m terribly grateful to you for the best prescription a patient ever had.

  ‘Yours most sincerely, Meg Maitland.

  ‘P.S. No doubt the “Meg” surprises you, but this is Liam’s little joke. He wouldn’t, in the name o’ God, as he said, have a girl with a Welsh name learning to fish on an Irish river; so suddenly he christens me Meg. I must say I rather like it. It sort of fits the new me.’

  After that, hopefully and then more and more eagerly, she waited for a reply; until it became, after a week, an obsession. Soon, she was sleeping badly again. Lying for long periods awake, she found herself composing the things she wanted Dr O’Brien to say to her. Mostly these first imaginary letters were merely formal and brief.

  Then gradually they grew more vividly, intimately and optimistically longer. Finally she actually sat down and, for the first time, with a curiously combined feeling of guilt and excitement, wrote a letter to herself.

  ‘You’ll understand how busy I am – yes, it’s measles year – but I’ve just got time to snatch a moment to say it gives me a great deal of satisfaction to know that my prescription worked. I only wish I could come and share the trout and the sunsets with you, but until we get the measles thing beaten there isn’t a hope. My love to the Cassidys, especially to Liam, the old rascal. So he still makes that devil’s brew, does he? I might have known.’

  Then, after reading the letter through several times, she suddenly felt sharply vexed with herself and tore it up. It was really an extraordinarily silly thing to do, writing to oneself. You couldn’t cheat like that.

  Immediately, with the letter torn up, she was aware of feeling strangely cheated herself. It was rather like having a cup dashed from your lips at the moment of drinking. The anticipatory thrill of the moment was shattered, leaving a void.

  She started to fill the void with new thoughts of Dr O’Brien. Soon it was remarkably easy to imagine that he was actually there at the little hotel. Soon she could see herself, mornings and evenings, fishing with him, walking the lanes between the dripping lush bells of fuchsia hedges, sipping Liam’s devil’s brew in the bar, even sharing a table and a bottle of wine with him over the evening trout. It was easiest of all, perhaps, to hear his voice talking to her in the deep immeasurable quietness of the remote sea soft air.

  * * *

  The result of all this was to throw her into a new state of sleepless conflict. By three o’clock one morning she had worked herself up into a torment of restless exhaustion, almost a fever, when some physical action and exercise seemed the only possible remedies to desperation. She dressed, went downstairs, let herself out of the hotel and started to walk.

  A soft light drizzle was already falling. As it gradually increased she heard it plopping with big warm drops on to the water of the trout stream, on the surrounding mass of heavy summer leaves and on her own uplifted face.

  ‘Oh, I wish to God you were here. I know you can’t be but perhaps you could write, just once. Couldn’t you? Just once. Please.’

  When she at last went home, vowing in farewell her fervent intention of coming back next year, it was to take with her not only pots of honey and a bottle of Irish whiskey so that she could sometimes make Liam’s devil’s brew, but something of much more importance: several dozen sheets of the Cassidy Hotel notepaper.

  Back at the office an astonished Mrs Braithwaite confessed herself slightly bowled over by a transformed, rejuvenated Miss Maitland.

  ‘Well, if that’s what Ireland can do for you I’m not sure I won’t give it a go myself. Is it the whiskey, the blarney or something in the air?’

  ‘The air is wonderful.’

  ‘By the look of you I’d say it was miraculous. Make any friends?’

  ‘Liam and Mrs Cassidy – they keep the hotel. Otherwise—’

  ‘Come clean.’

  Miss Maitland smiled in a secretive sort of way. ‘Well, you could sort of say I made a friend …’

  ‘I see, I see, I see. Tell me.’

  ‘There isn’t much to tell. It’s strictly friendship. Well, so far—’

  ‘Some wild Irish boyo sweeping you off your feet?’

  ‘Oh, nothing like that. He’s Irish, yes, but very quiet. He’s a doctor.’

  Mrs Braithwaite was moved through mere astonishment to a display of great relish and satisfaction. It was marvellous to see the change in Miss Maitland, the transformation. She looked another woman. It was quite wonderful what love could do.

  ‘I didn’t say anything about love.’

  It was now Mrs Braithwaite’s turn to laugh. ‘My foot. Naturally. Just as if I was born yesterday.’

  ‘Friendship can do a lot too.’

  Friendship was all right, Mrs Braithwaite said, but she didn’t think a lot of it from a distance. You couldn’t warm it up very much with Ireland all that far away. When did she hope to see him again?

  ‘Oh soon. I’ll probably fly over for a long weekend in September. In the meantime he’ll be writing. Oh, by the way, I learned to fish.’

  ‘So,’ Mrs Braithwaite said, ‘it would seem.’

  From then until September – when she was to fly back for the promised long weekend at the Cassidy Hotel – Miss Maitland typed one letter a week to herself as from Dr O’Brien, on the Cassidy Hotel notepaper. As appetite grows on what it feeds on, in the same way the hallucination that the letters were in fact from Dr O’Brien profoundly increased with every letter. Their warmth, intimacy and sheer affection increased profoundly too.

  Consistently, from the first, she wrote them every Saturday. This was in order that they should arrive on Monday morning; so that she could be sure that each week would begin with excitement, as it were with a fresh blossoming.

  After some weeks Mrs Braithwaite was moved to remark one Monday morning at the office: ‘I’ve spoken to you twice and you haven’t answered. Have you spotted a flying saucer in our damp August clouds or what?’

  ‘Sorry. I was a long way away.’

  ‘Unless my eyes deceive me we’ve come a long way from just friendship.’

  ‘I had a wonderful letter today.’

  Mrs Braithwaite said nothing. After a few moments Miss Maitland took the letter from her handbag. ‘I’d let you read it if you’d care to. Well, part of it anyway—’

  ‘Oh no. I don’t want to pry into—’

  ‘It’s perfectly all right. I’d like you to. Or anyway just the first and the last paragraphs.’

  Miss Maitland unfolded the letter and gave it to Mrs Braithwaite, who glanced at it before starting to read. ‘Oh, I see he writes from the hotel.’

  ‘Yes. He’s staying there until he can find a house.’ ‘“My dear Meg,”’ Mrs Braithwaite read. ‘Who on earth is Meg?’

  ‘That’s me. That’s his sort of pet name for me. He said he rather hated the name Gladys and he couldn’t have a girl with a name like that fishing on an Irish river, so he started to call me Meg. I think it rather suits me. It sort of makes me feel a new person.’

  Without answering, Mrs Braithwaite read on: ‘“I went down to the estuary today and took a boat. It was quite warm, no wind at all, and a lot of people were bathing on one of the little beaches. I kept thinking all the time of you and how we ought to go down there and bathe too when you come over next time. So don’t forget – bring your swimsuit. It’s a perfectly heavenly spot and I just longed for you to be there today.”’

  Finally, Mrs Braithwaite read the last paragraph. ‘“I’ve actually added up the number of days until you come over in September. I don’t know if you know how I feel – I’m not sure if it’s agonizing or a thrill, waiting that long. Perhaps you feel the same? Sometimes it seems the time will never pass. Do you feel that way? Anyway I’ll be patient – or try anyway. You’ll be here one day, and in the meantime I’ll think about you every working minute. With all my love – Sean.”’

  ‘What an awfully nice letter,’ Mrs Braithwaite said. ‘It’s somehow so simple and so genuine.’

  ‘That’s him, you see
.’

  After this, Miss Maitland no longer felt inferior to Mrs Braithwaite. She too, she told herself over and over again, had her own source of radiance.

  This radiance remained with her throughout the next two months. A long September weekend at the Cassidy Hotel merely served to increase it. During the five days she was there a soft warm Atlantic rain fell most of the time. Low slate-blue clouds clothed the mountains like turgid smoke. The little trout stream boiled over its banks, so that there was no fishing. Instead she walked for hours, mackintosh-clad, happy in the illusion that Dr O’Brien walked with her.

  Out of all that weekend one incident alone stood out from the uneventful, damp, placid daily routine. Late one afternoon the rain at last ceased, a great apricot gap opened up in the Atlantic curtain of cloud in the west; and she went out into the back garden of the hotel to find Liam Cassidy about to saw logs.

  She started to chat. Then after a few moments she became aware of a small tree just behind him. Its every head of white blossom dripped with rain. What tree was this? she said.

  ‘That’s the strawberry tree, Meg. The arbutus. Have you never heard of the song – My love is like an arbutus?’

  She had never heard of the tree or the song, but from that moment on she was unable to forget either. Soon, she began to sign the letters from Dr O’Brien: your beloved arbutus.

  She went through another eighteen months and three visits to the Cassidy Hotel in perfect happiness: untroubled, painless, sleeping well. All the time the letters from Dr O’Brien, the beloved arbutus, piled up, more real than reality.

  This might have gone on happily and indefinitely if it hadn’t been for a remark of Mrs Braithwaite’s. ‘I wanted to ask you … What do they charge at your Irish hotel?’

  ‘Charge? What makes you ask?’

  ‘We thought we’d spend Easter over there. Take the car and tour round a bit. It sounds so marvellous.’

  Miss Maitland, gripped in cold confusion, found her tongue frozen.

  ‘Jack adores fishing and perhaps we could meet this boy friend of yours.’