The Dark

Abstract

The Dark Robley Wilson (bio) The first time Brian Varney, tourist, drove past the orange gate in the rented Opel, a number of automobiles were parked at the edges of the drive leading to the gate, and others were pulled off on both sides of the dirt road beyond. Brian counted seven cars in all. "Whoever lives there is throwing a party," he told the woman beside him. "So it seems," Delia said. It was a Saturday evening, half past eight, the Irish sky still vividly alight as it would be until after ten, so the party hypothesis made sense. It was only in the following days that the two Americans realized the cars belonged to hikers, who parked them near a trail entrance in the morning and reclaimed them at the tired end of each day—long days, fifteen or sixteen hours in July. They began to speculate about who lived behind the orange gate. Wealth was involved, Brian said, for you could see the several dormers of a rambling house that must hold a dozen rooms at least. Perhaps an Irish dot-com millionaire who cashed in before the market collapsed. Wealth, yes, Delia agreed, but inherited, a retired British couple choosing to settle in this evergreen countryside, safe from all social distractions save the occasional black-faced sheep trespassing innocently. One noon they walked up the graveled drive for a closer inspection of the brightly painted gate. The gabled house seemed deserted; the only sound was of the wind in a grove of tall pines beyond. Beside the gate was a wooden kiosk, a kind of sentry box with an intercom system, the kiosk as orange as the gate itself. At either side of the gate, [End Page 309] invisible from the road, barbed wire extended to left and right through the brush and goldenrod. Above that wire was another, thinner, attached to white porcelain insulators on fence posts in both directions. "Let's not disturb these folks today," Brian said. Delia punched him playfully on the arm. "Idiot," she said. "Were you seriously thinking of calling on them?" "I thought it was a possibility," he said. "'Hello, we're renting the cottage just down the road. We thought we'd make a neighborly visit.'" "Idiot," she said, and she punched his arm again. "Don't," he said. She took his hand as they strolled away from the gate. Halfway to the road Brian pointed out a thin black cable laid across the drive. "Early warning," he said. "This owner is super security-conscious. Maybe he's a retired godfather." In the days that followed they did the usual: overnight trips to Galway, to Tipperary, to Killarney and the Ring of Kerry; a dreadful visit to Cork and its mad insular traffic; a tour of Waterford Crystal and a detour to Kinsale, where Brian had roots. Each night, in their rooms at one or another hotel or "modernized" castle, they went to bed early and read the Irish Times, trying to make heads and tails of events in the North—murders, petrol bombings, Protestant marches past Catholic ghettos; Unionists, R.U.C., Sinn Fein, I.R.A., splinters and spokesmen whose motives were baffling to them. "I give up," Brian would say. "Screw both sides." Then they switched off the lights and dreamed the dreams of tourists, which frequently involved the appearance of persons who had long been dead, and who spoke to them as if there were no boundary between death and life. "Ancestors," he said one morning after they had shared their dreams. [End Page 310] "But no river of forgetfulness and no ferryman." That was Delia: literate to a fault. So their holiday passed evenly and swiftly. When they woke in the morning, sometimes there was sun to make the dew glisten on the leaves of the buttercups behind the cottage. If there was rain instead—as often there was—the yellow blossoms bowed dully, the grasses around them laid flat with wet. On the dry mornings they went walking along the one-lane road that took them to a layby overlooking the lakes of Killarney, or through the fields in the shadow of...