“I must admit,” I said tentatively, “I am interested. I’d like to know what led you from there to here.”
“Of course you would,” she said. “There’d be something wrong with you if you didn’t.” She took a long pause and another sip from her pint. “I suppose,” she said finally. “I suppose I should start with my Uncle Kenneth.”
“All right.”
“And now this is going back a long way, so you’ll have to bear with me. I was brought up in a small village in West Cork called Goleen. Born in 1929, so I was only sixteen when these events took place. And I had a family, of course. I had a mammy and daddy like everyone has. And a gaggle of brothers, each one more feather-brained than the last except for the youngest one, Eddie, who was a nice fella but probably a bit too timid for his own good.”
“I’ve never even heard of Goleen,” I said.
“No one has,” she told me. “Except those of us who come from there or lived there. Like me. And my family. And my Uncle Kenneth.”
“Were you close with him?” I asked.
“I was,” she said. “He was barely ten years older than me and always took a special interest in me because we had similar senses of humor and I was just crazy about him. Oh, he was so handsome, Cyril! He was the only man I ever truly fell in love with. Now, you must understand, he wasn’t actually my blood uncle. He was married to my Auntie Jean, who was my mammy’s sister. Kenneth himself was from Tipperary, if I remember right, but of course we didn’t mind. Everyone loved him, you see. He was tall and funny; he looked a bit like Errol Flynn. And he could tell jokes and do wonderful impressions. He was a demon on the piano accordion and when he sang one of the old songs there was never a dry eye in the place. And I was only a child at the time, really. Sixteen years old, just a silly girl with notions in my head. I was mad for him and I saw to it that he was mad for me too.”
“How?” I asked.
“Well, I led him on, I suppose,” she told me. “I flirted with him constantly and sought any opportunity to get him on his own. I didn’t even really know what I was doing but it felt good, I knew that much. I would cycle my bike up to his farm and talk to him over the fence, my skirt hiked up shamelessly. And I was pretty, do you see, Cyril? I was a very pretty girl at that age. Half the lads in the village were always trying to get me to go to dances with them. But I only had eyes for Kenneth. There was a lake on the outskirts of the village and I saw him there one time with my Auntie Jean. It was late at night and they’d gone for a dip. And the pair of them without a stitch on them. It was an awakening for me. I saw the way he held her and the things he did to her. And I wanted him to hold me like that, to do those things to me too.”
“And did you tell him?”
“Not for a while. You see, Kenneth and my Auntie Jean were a great match, everyone said so. They walked around the village hand in hand, which in those days was considered a bit brazen, even for a married couple. I think Father Monroe had a word with them about it. He said it promoted immorality in the young, that if they weren’t careful, young boys and girls would be following their example and getting up to all sorts. I remember Kenneth saying this to me and laughing his head off. Can you imagine, Catherine, he said. Jean and I holding each other’s hands and suddenly Goleen turns into Sodom and Gomorrah!
“And what did I do, only slip my hand inside his own and say that maybe he should hold my hand instead for a while, and I can see the look on his face even to this day. The shock and the desire. Oh, I loved the power I had over him! The power I could sense in myself! You won’t understand this but it’s something that every girl realizes at some point in her life, usually when she’s around fifteen or sixteen. Maybe it’s even younger now. That she has more power than every man in the room combined, because men are weak and governed by their desires and their desperate need for women but women are strong. I’ve always believed that if women could only collectively harness the power that they have then they’d rule the world. But they don’t. I don’t know why. And for all their weakness and stupidity, men are smart enough to know that being in charge counts for a lot. They have that over us at least.”
“It’s hard for me to relate to,” I said. “I never had any power at all. I was always the wanter, not the wanted. I was always the one filled with desire, but in my whole life I think Bastiaan was the only man who ever desired me in return. All those boys when I was young, it wasn’t me they wanted. It was just a body, it was just someone to touch and to hold. I might have been anyone to them, but Bastiaan was different.”
“Because he loved you.”
“Because he loved me.”
“Well, you might have been better off. Girls can cause a lot of trouble and other men will forgive them for it if they have a chance themselves. I certainly didn’t understand the trouble that I was causing. But, as I said, I liked how it made me feel and so I kept at it, making that man want me more than he’d ever wanted anyone before, and when I’d just about driven him to distraction and he could take no more he came up to me one day when I was on his farm and grabbed me to him, pressing his lips against mine, and of course I kissed him back. I kissed him like I’d never kissed anyone before or since. And then one thing led to another and before I knew it we were in the middle of what I suppose people would call an affair. I would call over to the farm after school and he would take me to the hayshed and off we’d go, rolling around, a pair of mad things.”
“So he was the one?” I asked. “My father?”
“Yes. And the poor man was tortured about the whole thing,” she said. “Because the truth is, he loved my Auntie Jean and felt terrible about the things he’d done. Every time we finished, he started to cry, and sometimes I felt bad for him and sometimes I just thought he was trying to have his cake and eat it. The only time I got frightened was when he said he’d leave Jean and we could run off together.”
“You didn’t want that?”
“No, that was too much for me. I wanted what we had and I knew full well that even if we did, he’d be bored with me within a month. It was the start of me feeling guilty about what I’d done.”
“Yes, but you were still a child,” I said. “He was a grown man. How old was he, twenty-five? Twenty-six?”
“Twenty-six.”