A Different Kingdom(4)

He looked around the table, feeling strangely guilty. His grandfather had pushed back his plate and was now lighting his pipe in a flare of match flame, its light throwing into relief his big, roman nose and the chiselled lines: of his face, like a sea cliff that has weathered many storms. The hair on his head, though pure white, was as thick as it had been thirty years before, and his back was still pokerstraight. The hand that held the pipe was as huge as a spade, brown and liver-spotted. The hired hands called him 'The Captain' because he habitually wore a pair of old cavalry breeches and leather leggings. His boots struck sparks off stones when he walked, a thing which never failed to fascinate Michael.

His grandmother was clearing the plates from the table, helped by her two daughters. His Aunt Rose, not much more than a girl herself, winked at him as she left for the scullery balancing a tower of dirty plates. He began to swing his legs under the table, careful to avoid Demon, his grandfather's badtempered, ageing collie, who crept under there at meals in the hope of scraps. It was the only thing he had ever seen his grandparents disagree on: the grey muzzled dog under the table at mealtimes. Michael disliked the animal. He was coal-black, lean, sharpnosed, and he worshipped his master and held the rest of humanity in contempt. But though the house was grand-mother's kingdom, the dog was grandfather's workmate of a dozen years and so he stayed.

His Uncle Sean was rolling himself a cigarette, humming under his breath. He had the face of a film star, and his sisters doted on him. He popped the finished fag in his mouth and fumbled unhurriedly for his matches, smiling at Michael's pink face. People said he looked like Clark Gable, with his thick black hair tumbled over his forehead and those sea-grey eyes which were the hallmark of the Fay family. The local girls congregated around him like wasps on a jam pot when he appeared, polished and brushed, at the dances which were held in the church hall at every month's end. But he seemed never to notice them. He was caught up with the farm, preoccupied with ways of improving it—often in conflict with the views of his father. Michael had heard some of the labourers talking about him one morning. Too much of a bloody gentleman was Sean, they had said, and one had sniggered, saying if he'd been offered as many cunts as Sean his John Thomas would have been worn away to a button by now. Somehow Michael had known that this was not the sort of thing he could bring up at the dinner table, though he had thought of asking Aunt Rose, who often fished with him in the little river and took him into her bed when the thunder was loud.

Chairs were being pushed back and there were a few belches. (His grandmother was still in the scullery or they would not have dared.) Tobacco smoke spun blue tendrils in the light of the lamps. There was an electric bulb dangling forlornly from the ceiling, but it was saved for special occasions. And besides, Michael's grandparents hated it. It had no soul, they said, and they continued to light the oil lamps at dusk despite the protests of their children. Electricity was saved for visitors.

The hired hands said their good nights and left for home, slapping their caps on their heads as they went out of the door and sniffing at the starlit air outside. One or two would eat a second dinner cooked by their wives, but most were bachelors and were going back to empty cottages or parents' houses. There were quite a crowd of them around the farm at this time of year, with haymaking and the harvest approaching. Those inside could hear the scrape and tick of bicycles pushing off from the wall of the house, and then the door had been closed again and Aunt Rachel was drawing the curtains on the night. Demon sidled out from under the table and flopped down before the range with a contented sigh. Old Mullan lit his pipe and sat opposite Michael's grandfather with a leather halter he was soaping. That was his privilege. He had been with the Fays since the Great War, when he had returned from Flanders a young man with one leg shorter than the other.

Clattering plates and women's voices came from the scullery. Michael felt sleep hovering around his eyes. He would tell someone tomorrow, perhaps— tell them that there were terrorists with fox faces down by the river waiting to blow everyone up. But it seemed less real here in the solid security of the house. Like a dream. He yawned, and his Aunt Rose pounced on him.

'You're half-asleep, yawning there in your nightshirt. Bedtime for you, Michael-boy.'

He protested sleepily as she dragged him from his seat and took his hand in hers. His grandfather nodded at him over pipe smoke and the Irish Field, his grandmother kissed his forehead and Uncle Sean waved a hand absent-mindedly whilst old Mullan merely paused in his soaping for a second. Rose tugged him up the stairs, talking all the while. He liked her to talk, especially if it was a thundery night and he had burrowed into her arms in the girlsmelling bed. She would talk then to keep him from fearing the thunder, though she loved it herself. It made her hair crackle, she said.