Sunset on the Window-Panes, page 1
Bello:
hidden talent rediscovered
Bello is a digital only imprint of Pan Macmillan, established to breathe life into previously published classic books.
At Bello we believe in the timeless power of the imagination, of good story, narrative and entertainment and we want to use digital technology to ensure that many more readers can enjoy these books into the future.
We publish in ebook and Print on Demand formats to bring these wonderful books to new audiences.
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Contents
Walter Macken
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Chapter Ten
Chapter Eleven
Chapter Twelve
Chapter Thirteen
Chapter Fourteen
Chapter Fifteen
Chapter Sixteen
Chapter Seventeen
Chapter Eighteen
Chapter Nineteen
Chapter Twenty
Chapter Twenty-One
Chapter Twenty-Two
Chapter Twenty-Three
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chapter Twenty-Five
Chapter Twenty-Six
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Chapter Twenty-Nine
Chapter Thirty
Walter Macken
Sunset on the Window Panes
Walter Macken was born in Galway in 1915. He was a writer of short stories, novels and plays. Originally an actor, principally with the Taibhdhearc in Galway, and The Abbey Theatre, he played lead roles on Broadway in M. J. Molloy’s The King of Friday’s Men and his own play Home Is the Hero. He also acted in films, notably in Arthur Dreifuss’ adaptation of Brendan Behan’s The Quare Fellow. He is perhaps best known for his trilogy of Irish historical novels Seek the Fair Land, The Silent People and The Scorching Wind. He passed away in 1967.
Chapter One
HE WAS SITTING on the stone wall. The field behind him sloped. First it was green, then it became darker green where the ferns were beginning to embrace it.
He wore grey trousers and a white open-necked shirt that seemed to be blinding white in the sunshine. The wall was a boundary of the yellow road. When he looked left he could see the road twisting and winding back into the valley between the tall hills, until it ended at the lake. The lake was untroubled by wind. It was like clear glass. If he looked to his right he could see the calm sea stretching away to the horizon.
It was very hot. There were beads of perspiration on his upper lip. He wiped them off with the back of his hand and rubbed a finger along his eyebrows and flicked it. He watched the bead of sweat falling in the dust and vanishing.
He saw the girl coming out of the valley with the donkey ahead of her. She was a long way away. He paid no attention to her or the donkey. They were a common sight on the road between the big valley and the sea. He was looking blankly at the fields stretching away in front of him. They were neatly divided by stone walls. They were cared-for and cultivated. It was undulating land rising and falling. Some fields were barren and in others the cold stones peered through the thin grass. There were black cows grazing in them, and sometimes they raised a head curiously to look towards the white-shirted figure on the wall.
His eyes didn’t see all those things. He was listless. He was bored. He barely tasted the cigarette he was smoking.
The figure of the donkey and the girl came nearer and nearer to him. The donkey’s unshod hooves landed in the dust with a gentle clop. There were two baskets on his back, and as they swung emptily, the straps tying them to the pannier creaked.
The girl saw the figure on the wall long before she reached him. She knew him. She felt colour rising in her cheeks. The sight of him made her heart beat faster. All because everyone was unknowing. She had heard that he was home. This was June, this was the time when everybody came home.
She kept her eyes looking ahead, but now and again she would peep out of the sides of them to see if he was noticing her. He wasn’t noticing her. His teeth were bared in a grin of thought. They were white and strong, and looked very white in the dark face. His hair was tightly curled and clipped close to his head. He had a good-shaped head and a thick neck rising out of a round strong chest. She knew what his eyes were like. They were steel-blue in colour and there was always a reckless sort of glint in them. There were some who said they were never without a sneer in them. She passed by the unseeing eyes.
“Hello, Mister O’Breen,” she said as she passed by. He paid no attention. She was sure he would pay no attention, but all the same she was a little disappointed. Then she heard his voice. It was a deep voice, sort of rusty.
“Here, Breeda,” he said. “ Come here.”
She turned. She had to walk back to him. It was a good way. She thought it was a very long way. She was terribly conscious of the eyes on her. Looking her over, taking her apart. She hadn’t her best dress on either. She had only the old blue cotton thing, that had been washed so often it was almost white. But she had outgrown it a bit if she only knew. Her body was shaping it better than she thought. She had good strong sunburned legs and they were bare like her feet. She needn’t be in bare feet, but she liked to be. She liked the silky feel of the dust. Her hair was brown and it was straight, but it always shone. She wore it long around her face. Her face was narrow, her eyes were deep-sunken and seemed to glitter from cover. I won’t blush she thought. I won’t blush. This is one time I won’t blush – but she couldn’t stop it from rising in her cheeks. The blush seemed to start in her toes and rise all the way to her brain. She couldn’t stop her fingers fiddling at the sides of her dress. She was furious at herself. After all she was over sixteen, practically, and he wasn’t a nun who had called you from the body of the class to stand before her blushing and shamed and fiddling with your dress. She should be more poised like the sisters told her.
She found it hard to meet his gaze, but she raised her eyes. There seemed to be two bits of steel boring into her. His face was big and broad. All strong it seemed. All strong all over.
“What’s the idea of calling me Mister?” he asked.
She was confounded.
“Well …” she said.
“Well what?” he asked.
“Well water,” she was going to say, but bit it back. It was so schoolgirlish but it was the answer to end answers when people well-ed you. So she dropped her eyes and scurried her feet.
“What age are you now?” he asked.
“I’m nearly seventeen,” she said.
“You are like hell,” he said. “ You’re probably nearly sixteen.”
“I’m over sixteen,” she said.
“All right. I’m nineteen. That’s a three-year difference. Why do I qualify for the Mister?”
“Well …” she said.
“What, again?” he asked.
She laughed and her blush went away.
“You seem to be a man,” she said. “ That’s why. And when a person is a man he should be called Mister, I suppose.”
“Where are you going?” he asked.
She flung her arm out in a gesture. “Down to the sea,” she said. “Down for some seaweed.”
He got off the wall.
“I’ll go down a piece with you. I’m bored.”
He walked beside her. He seemed to be towering over her. He wasn’t, just that he was bulky. He was looking down at her bent head. She had full red lips under a thin nose. He knew from the look of her skin that it would be soft to the touch.
“You have changed a lot since I saw you last,” he said.
“That was a year ago,” she said. “I was only a child then.” I mustn’t gush, she thought. Walking like this beside Bart O’Breen was a sort of fulfilment of a daydream. She was thinking that when she went back to school this year, she would really have something to dream about. He was quite close to her. She could smell tobacco from him. His shirt-sleeves were rolled. The bare arm near her was very brown from the sun. The skin was smooth on it. Muscles were leaping in it. “Will you be long home?” she asked him.
“For ever,” he said.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“It means that I’m not going back there,” he said. “They don’t know that at home yet, but they will, they will.” This grimly.
“Oh!” she said.
“It’s all a cod,” he said. “I wasn’t cut out to be a teacher. Can you see me teaching?”
“I can see you doing anything,” she said. Trapped, she looked up at him wildly. But he hadn’t noticed. He wasn’t even listening.
“It was the first thing that came into my head, when I was asked,” he said. “Do you know why?”
“No,” she said. He wasn’t listening to that either.
“It was your father,” he said. “He was a great teacher. He really knew how to teach and he made it look easy and a good thing to do. You remember him teaching?”
He had stopped now, looking directly at her.
She didn’t want to talk about her father. It still hurt her. Did she remember him teaching!
“Yes,” she said. “ I remember.”
“That’s why I came this way now,” he said. “ Remembering back. It was a good life those days only for the home we had. I liked school. But it was your father really. Down here.” He turned down a lane that led off the road. It was a little-used lane. There was grass growing in the tracks of the cartwheels. He stopped when she didn’t come with him. “Come on! What’s wrong with you?” he asked her roughly.
“I don’t want to,” she said.
“Don’t be neurotic,” he said, going back and taking her hand and practically pulling her down the small lane after him. She resisted a little and then followed him. She thought he was very cruel. She was sorry he had been on the side of the road when she passed by. They came out of the lane. The house was before them. It had been a two-storey house. The roof was half gone. There was no door. It was used as a stable. She felt she was suffocating as she looked at it. There had been a winding gravelled drive. You could barely see it. There was a grand stretch of green lawn. It was still there. The cattle had clipped it and manured it. The windows were blind. There was no glass in them. The rhododendron bushes grew wild, flinging their blossoms in all directions. All the other shrubs had been eaten or destroyed.
“You see, that’s all that’s left, nothing,” he said. “ He was a grand man, your father. It’s a pity he had to die. All the good people die. Come on,” he said abruptly and turned out of the lane again. She followed after him. She wanted to scream. Or kick him or something. That he should have been so unfeeling. But then he was a Mister no matter what he said.
Out on the road again, he looked left. It was as if he was expecting something.
“I thought so,” he said.
“What?” she asked.
“Look at him.” He pointed back down the road to the valley. “There’s brother Joseph, like he has the hot foot coming after me. I was thinking she would send him for me.”
She was bewildered.
“We will sit and await his coming,” he said, “and see what message he brings from Garcia.” His jaws were tight.
“I have to get the seaweed,” she said.
“Sit down beside me, Breeda,” he said, indicating a stone. She obeyed him. Her thigh was nearly touching his. She could feel heat and vitality pulsating from him.
“The donkey will be happy cropping the grass,” he said. “The donkey is far happier than you or I.”
“I’m happy enough,” she said.
“Well, the donkey is happier than you will be some time in the future,” he said.
The thin figure of the boy was tolling on the hill. His hair was dark and fell over his eyes in streaks, and he would raise a lean hand to push it back over his high narrow forehead. Even though it was a very hot day he wore a black suit and a dark cardigan and a white collar with a black tie. His face was pale. He had a pleasant mouth and his eyes were dark and shy. The two waiting for him to approach knew all this about him.
Bart was impatient for him. He moved restlessly on the wall. Breeda thought he would get up and hasten Joseph’s coming.
Joseph was pleased to see them. He had forgotten his message.
“Hello, Breeda,” he said. “ You are home. I am pleased to see you.
He was breathless.
“Well, well, well,” said Bart. “Trot it out. Don’t keep me waiting all day.”
The smile went from Joseph’s face. His eyes became troubled.
“Mother wants you, Bart,” he said.
“I was expecting that,” Bart said. “Did she get a letter?”
“She did,” said Joseph. “ He just brought it. She told me to go and find you.”
“Well, you have found me,” Bart said. “Can’t you go home and tell her that you have found me?”
“She wants you,” said Joseph. “She said to tell you to come home straight away.”
“Well, I’m not going home straight away,” said Bart, jumping off the wall. “I’m going picking seaweed, with Breeda. Amn’t I, Breeda?” He caught her arm in his hand and pulled her towards the donkey. She had to run to keep up with him.
“Yes,” she cried, “you are.”
“Can I come too?” Joseph called after them.
Bart turned round to look at him. Joseph’s head was on one side. He was looking at Bart appealingly. If he had a tail it would be wagging, Bart thought. “Don’t you want to go home and tell your mother about the disobedience of your half-brother?” Bart asked.
Joseph just looked hurt.
“All right, all right,” Bart shouted. “ Come on. We’ll all go and collect bloody seaweed.”
Joseph caught up with them and walked the other side of the donkey. Breeda was glad. She liked Joseph. She wondered how two boys who were bred from the same mother could look and be so totally different.
“You know the story about the Joseph in the Bible?” Bart was asking. He bent down and took up a heavy rock and heaved it into the field. It seemed to relieve him. He wiped his hands on his trousers. “He was his family favourite, just like you, Joseph. The very same as you. The old man left him an inheritance and favoured him above the others. Not his father, but his mother. She was the one. You hear that, Joseph? Well, you know what happened to Joseph. He ended up down in a well. Maybe I ought to put you into a well. What do you think of that, Joseph? Will I fire you into a well?”
“You can if you like, Bart,” said Joseph.
“A meek Christian,” said Bart. “A goddam turn-the-other-cheeker. I’m sorry I like you, Joseph. Do you know that? I’m sorry. I like you. Sometimes I’d like to do violent things to you and I would, only I like you.”
“You didn’t finish the story,” said Breeda. “ Joseph in the Bible ended up all right, but the brothers that put him in the well had bad ends.”
“You’re for him too,” said Bart. “Tell me, what has Joseph got that makes everyone for him? Tell me that, Breeda.”
“Can’t you leave him alone?” she said. “If you want to hurt someone for something that’s disturbing you, why do you take it out on Joseph?”
He caught her and twisted her violently towards him. He looked down into her face. Her eyes were angry. A strange thing happened to him then. He felt her breast heaving against him, and he was suddenly conscious of the feel of her bare arm in his palm. Why, this girl is a little woman, he was thinking. The violence went out of him. His body seemed to go rigid. He saw the anger fading out of her eyes and a strange, disturbed, shy look taking its place. The colour rose in her cheeks from her neck and she dropped her eyes. Her eyelashes were very long. He saw them resting on her cheek. She moved and he released her and walked ahead. He heard the two following him. He knew, if he turned, the picture he would see. Tall thin Joseph with his hand on the donkey’s back, and then the donkey with his head bent and the baskets waving, and the girl on the other side with her eyes cast down, red in her cheeks and her breast heaving. He had suffered heaving breasts before. He knew about them.
He had to alter his picture of her.
She was a little girl who came to school with her father. He kept her up near the top of the classroom. She had a hard life in school. She was the master’s daughter. But she was cheerful under it. A small scattery little girl with pigtails tied with purple ribbon. Then she was a girl sent away to school and coming home in gym frocks and black stockings. Then she was the tragic little girl in black at the double funeral of her father and mother who had died when fishing for pollack. Now she was this.
He turned and waited until they caught up with him. He looked at her closely and with interest. She met his eyes.
“You have changed a lot, Breeda,” he said.
“Have I?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said. “ You have. I didn’t know you until now.” He felt excited. The other thing was nothing. That could come later. Have it out with his mother. All that. But this was something new. He recognised the look in her eyes too now that he came to think back on it.
The road came on to a tarred road that ran straight as men could make it in this rough land. There were no houses bordering the road, just the stony fields, with potatoes growing between the stones, and bare fields with grey ponies or cattle. They walked this road for a bit and then they turned off it on to another yellow road that went towards the sea.
Joseph was watching the sky. It was a pale misty blue with white clouds on the horizon. The sea was shimmering. There was no wind at all. There seemed to be no life in the day except for an occasional planing seagull. He fell back and walked behind because the laneway was narrow. He liked the look of his brother’s back. He called Bart his brother. He always thought of him as his brother. Bart always said “half-brother.” This hurt Joseph a little. He admired Bart. The straight back now, with the heavily muscled shoulders moving under the cloth of his shirt. The powerful graceful neck with the curls growing low on it. He was pleased to be with Bart. He liked always to be with him, but it happened rarely. The things Bart did were vigorous things in which Joseph could rarely join, because his chest was weak. That was what had his body thin, his face pale. But he was strong enough except for that. He wished he had always been strong. It would have been a great thing long ago, to climb trees with Bart or row currachs with Bart, or ride bareback on ponies across the dangerous ground.
