burned down half her house early that summer and killed her husband. He’d been caught upstairs. It was something she’d often threatened to do, burn the house down, and when she did it she did it quietly, in a moment of silent, reflective despair. She had not known he’d been upstairs. She’d put a broom in the stove and then tarred the walls with the fire. The flames had quickly explored the narrow stairway. A man, twenty years older than her, had been burned alive, caught when snoozing. Magella at his funeral seemed charred herself, her black hair, her pale, almost sucrose skin. She’d stooped, in numbed penitence. There was a nebulous, almost incandesced way her black curls took form from her forehead as there was about all the Scully girls. They made an odd band of women there, all the Scully girls, most of them respectably married. Magella was the one who’d married a dozy publican whose passion in life had been genealogy and whose ambition seemed incapacitated by this passion. She’d had a daughter by him. Gráinne. That girl was taken from her that summer and sent to relatives in Belfast. Magella was not interned in a mental hospital. The house was renovated. The pub reopened. People supposed that the shock of what she’d done had cured her and in a genuinely solicitous way they thought that working in the pub, chattering to the customers, would be better for her than an internment in a mental hospital. Anyway there was something very final about internment in a mental hospital at that time in Ireland. They gave her a reprieve. At the end of that summer Boris came to the village.
Stacks of hay were piled up in the fields near the newly opened garage outside the village which he came to manage, little juggling acts of hay in merrily rolling and intently bound fields. All was smallness and precision here. This was Laois. An Ascendancy demesne. The garage was on the top of a hill where the one, real, village street ended, and located at a point where the fields seemed about to deluge the road. The one loss of sobriety in the landscape and heaviness and a very minor one. Boris began his career as garage manager by, putting up flags outside the garage, and bunting, an American, an Italian, a French, a Spanish, a German and an Irish flag. He was half-Russian and he’d been raised in an orphanage in County Wexford in the south-eastern tip of Ireland.
Boris Cleary was thin, nervously thin, black-haired, a blackness smoothing the parts of his face which he’d shaved and the very first thing Magella noticed about him, on coming close, under the bunting, was that there was a smell from the back of his neck, as from wild flowers lost in the deep woods which lay in the immediate surroundings of the village. A rancid, asking smell. A smell which asked you to investigate its bearer. Magella, drawn by the rancid smell from the back of a nervous, thin neck, sought further details. She asked Boris about his Russianness which was already, after a few weeks, a rampant legend, over her counter. His father had been a Russian sailor, his mother a Wexford prostitute; he’d been dumped on the Sisters of Mercy. They had christened him and one particular nun had reared him, cackling all the time at this international irony, calling him ‘little Stalin.’ Boris had emerged, his being, his presence in the world, had emerged from an inchoate night on a ship in the port of Wexford Town.
How a September night, the last light like neon on the gold of the cornfields, led so rapidly to the woods partly surrounding the village they later lost track of; winter conversations in the pub, glasses of whiskey, eventually glasses of whiskey shared, both their mouths going to a glass, like a competition—a series of reciprocal challenges. Eventually, all the customers gone one night as they tended to be gone when Magella and Boris got involved in conversation, their lips met. An older woman, ascribed a demon by some, began having an affair with a young, slackly put-together man.
The woods in early summer were the culminative platform for their affair. These woods that were in fact a kind of garden for bygone estates. Always in the woods, oases, you’d find a garden house—a piece of concrete—a Presbyterian, a Methodist, a Church of Ireland chapel. Much prayer had been done on these estates. Laois had particularly been a county in bondage. Now rhododendrons fulminated and frothed all over the place. And there were berries to admire, right from the beginning of the summer. They found a particular summer house where they made love on the cold, hard, almost penitential floor and soon this was the only place where they made love, their refuge.
In September, just over a year after Boris had come to the village, they got a taxi and visited Magella’s daughter in Belfast. She lived off the Falls Road, in a house beside a huge advertisement on a railway bridge for the Irish Independent. Gráinne dressed in an odious brown convent uniform. She had long black hair. She looked at Boris. From the look in her eyes Magella afterwards realized she’d fallen in love with Boris at that meeting.
What were they flaunting an affair for? At first they were flaunting it so openly no one believed it was happening. Such things didn’t happen in Laois in the 1950s. People presumed that the young Russian had taken a priestly interest in the older possessed woman. And when they brought their affair to Belfast, Boris in a very natty dark suit and in a tie of shining dark blue, a gaggle of relatives thought that there was something comic going on, that Magella had got a clown to chaperone her and prevent her from acts of murderous madness. They brought glasses of orange onto the street for the pair—it was a very sunny day—and oddly enough there was a spark of bunting on the street, the ordination of a local priest recently celebrated. A bulbous-cheeked, Amazon-breasted woman spluttered out a comment: ‘Sure he reminds me of the King of England.’ She was referring to the King who’d resigned, the only member of royalty respected in nationalist Belfast.
But behind the screen of all the presumptions—and it was a kind of smokescreen—something very intense, very carnal, very complex was going on. Magella was discovering her flesh for the first time and Boris was in a way discovering a mother. She’d always been the licentious one in her family but flailing her flesh around cornfields at night when she’d been young brought her no real pleasure. In the carnality, in love-making now, she’d found lost worlds of youth and lost—yes, inchoate—worlds of Russia. She was able to travel to Boris’s origins and locate a very particular house. It was a house in a wood away from the dangers of the time. In this house she put Boris’s forebears. In this house, in her sexual fantasies, she made love to Boris, his forebears gone and only they, random lovers, left in it, away from the dangers and the onslaught of the time. There was a tumultuous excitement about being lovers in a house in a wood with many dangers outside the borders of that wood. There was a titillation, a daring, and even a brusqueness about it. But those dangers eventually slipped their moorings in the world outside the wood.
Early in the second summer of their affair someone saw them making love in the summer house. A little boy. Tremulous though he later was about the event he was matter of fact enough to wait for a good view of Magella’s heavy white thighs. He was the butcher’s son. A picture was soon contrived all over the village, Magella and Boris in an act of love that had a Bolshevik ferocity. Killing your husband was one thing but making love to a young Russian was another. Within the month Magella was in a mental hospital.
The funny thing was that she’d had a premonition that all this was going to happen some weeks before the little boy saw them. Fondling some budding elderberries in the woods she remarked to Boris, looking back at the visible passage they’d made through the woods, that they, she and he, reminded her of the legendary Irish lovers, Diarmaid and Gráinne, who’d fled a king into the woods, feeding on berries. They’d invested Irish berries with a sense of doomed carnality, the berries which had sustained them, right down to the last morsels of late autumn. Here in these woods many of the berries had been sown as parts of gardens and it was difficult to distinguish the wild berries from the descendants of a Protestant bush—the loganberry, redcurrant, raspberry. These woods had been a testing ground for horticulture and parts of the woods had been cultivated at random, leaving a bed of mesmeric flowers, an apple tree among the wildness. Diarmaid and Gráinne would have had a ball here, Magella said. But for her and Boris the climate was already late autumn when the trees were withered of berries. Their days were up. She remembered the chill she’d felt at national school when the teacher had come to that part of the story of Diarmaid and Gráinne, reading it from a book which had an orange cover luminous as warm blood.
Boris tried to call on her in the mental
