No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  He had stared at her in wonder. He didn’t for a moment believe she was as vulnerable as she was pretending. They had been married seven years.

  The plane stopped; a few passengers clapped. The stewardess announced that anyone who had had contact with farm animals should report this to the agricultural official now coming on board.

  James’s suspicion was that Therese while trying to work on his sympathies had frightened herself. She had been his professor. He had sown the most old-fashioned wild oats and they had come up tame. Convenience-packaged. She had been the older woman: knowledgeable about wines and how to order in a restaurant. He had left decisions to her and she had got him to bed, to the registry office and through his Ph.D. She had failed to get him tenure but not for want of trying. Like a protective playground Mom, she made him look puny. He had to get away. For a while anyway.

  ‘For both our sakes,’ he had pleaded. ‘A moratorium.’

  He had got away. Dublin, as he walked down the gangway, had a taste of guilt in its air. Imported? Native? He had always heard that it was an indigenous product. He was here on parole: free and less than free like the place itself, capital of four-fifths of an island in economic thrall to the old oppressor still. He had given himself a crash course in Irish history but it was unsorted in his mind and his vision was like that of a man wearing prismatic lenses. Images made shifty rainbows. Wet air fizzed under his nose as though emerging from an aged soda siphon. A conman could probably have sold him O’Connell Bridge.

  *

  Customs and Baggage-Claim areas were one and the same: a dinky place which reminded James Duffy of airports in country resorts. Groups holding children in their arms waved from behind the exit door and added to the holiday air. He handed over his passport and answered questions about his financial resources. He was here to work on a film. Historical. No, he wasn’t a famous director or actor.

  ‘I’m nobody you’ll have heard of,’ he told the official, and smiled.

  ‘What’s the film about?’ The man flipped through James’s US passport. ‘Anything to declare?’

  The film was a promotional one about the IRA. But James was not about to mention this.

  ‘Oh,’ he remembered, ‘someone gave me some cigars.’

  Cuban cigars had recently become available again and O’Toole, the father of James’s employer, had pressed a box on James when he’d stopped by the old guy’s office on his way to LA airport. James didn’t smoke but hadn’t liked to say so.

  The Customs official opened the lid of the box and a sheet of paper fell out. It was covered with handwriting and had a letterhead in Celtic script. The man began to read it and to look less amiable.

  ‘Is this your property, sir?’

  ‘First I’ve seen of it. I guess the friend who gave me the cigars must have put it there.’

  ‘Well,’ said the man, ‘maybe you’d as well read it. I’m going to have to confiscate it as a subversive document.’

  ‘You’re kidding?’

  ‘No.’

  James, his laugh unfinished and unreciprocated, took the letter. Old idiot, he was thinking of O’Toole, goddamned maniac. But it was his own fault. He’d been warned that the old man was bananas, and he should have been alert for this sort of senile trick. The official was now doing a thorough search of James’s suitcase.

  God bless Banned Aid for giving so unstintingly to the Irish Republican Cause …

  Shit, he knew what this must be. O’Toole had mentioned some letter he’d got from a ‘source’ in Queens, New York, which he’d wanted James to see. The Customs man was pinching the interlining in James’s overcoat with the air of a man whose mind was running on ripping things apart. Might he make James strip? Unbelievable? No, believable. Better see what else is in this letter.

  From the earliest days Republican sympathizers here in the US have given more than dollars for the Republican Cause, although the Irish in Ireland have not always appreciated this. Who now remembers Sparky Driscoll?

  The writing was crabbed, scarcely legible.

  A nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse and there is reason to believe that research …

  James groaned.

  ‘It’s garbage,’ he told the Customs man. ‘You can’t take it seriously?’

  The man looked snotty. He pulled the insole out of one of James’s shoes.

  James went back to the letter.

  … research might show that this gallant American Irishman was stabbed in the … gaff on their own sinister machinations …

  ‘It’s a joke,’ said James. ‘Deadpan humour – you know? Like Woody Allen?’

  ‘Banned Aid is a very real organization, Mr Duffy. There’s nothing humorous about them that people here can see.’

  The next bit of the letter was in caps:

  THE DE FACTO AUTHORITIES IN IRELAND TODAY MIGHT BE DISTURBED BY THE THREAT OF SEEING SUCH DIRTY LINEN DRAGGED FROM THE CLOSET OF HISTORY AND THEREBY DISSUADED FROM HAMPERING BANNED AID’S CURRENT EFFORTS TO HELP THE ONGOING STRUGGLE AGAINST AN IMPERIALISM …

  The official plucked the letter from James’s hand.

  ‘At best,’ he warned, ‘it’s Republican propaganda. It may be evidence of conspiracy.’

  ‘Look, it was put in that box by a man of seventy-seven. He’s gaga,’ said James. ‘Nobody takes him seriously. I have introductions to prominent citizens of this country …’

  But the official claimed that this was no matter for him to decide. Would James care to step into a nearby room? James followed him to where another, apparently more senior, official was shown the letter. James thought of offering him the cigars, then thought better of it. Outside the window a rabbit – or perhaps a hare? – skipped along the grassy edge of the runway. How ridiculous if he were to be shipped right back on the plane. Seeing a hare was either good luck or bad. Idly, he wondered which. Definitely don’t offer the cigars.

  To his surprise he heard the second official apologize for inconveniencing him. He was older and fatter than his colleague and his uniform had the slight mutinous untidiness of fat men’s uniforms.

  ‘It’s probably innocent enough,’ he told James and handed him back the letter. ‘Seventy-seven, you say? There’s great fight in some of those old geezers, isn’t there? The wife’s father is the very same: a fire-eater. All cod, mind. God help us, we’ve a population here that’s totally unbalanced as to age: all old men and teenagers. The working population emigrates, though they say that’ll be falling off now with the Common Market. Yes, well, old men and young men dream, eh, Mr Duffy? Fellows like yourself and myself have to bring home the bacon. I don’t think you’d have carried a dangerous document as openly as that. Sorry you were troubled. You’ll appreciate that we have to take precautions.’ The date on the letter, the fat official then pointed out, was several years old. ‘If there’s a time bomb there, ha ha, it’s a bit slow. Can I get you a porter?’

  *

  By the age of seventeen Judith had been head girl of Mucklea school for over a year. The prospect of leaving depressed her.

  ‘But child,’ said the Mistress of Studies, ‘if you feel that way, then our whole effort with you has been a failure. Education is a preparation for the World. You must use your gifts in the secular sphere.’

  ‘Why, Mother, why must I?’

  ‘It would be selfish not to. You have a father and a brother. When your sister gets married they will need you to look after them. Then there is the fighting going on …’ The nun crossed herself. The frame of her coif gave her a look of one cut off from time. A blue shadow fell through it and lay on her skin like bloom on a plum. ‘Each station in life,’ she said, ‘imposes duties. Women’s role in our troubled times …’ With a practised crackle, the nun flicked back the goffered coif and applied a papery cheek to Judith’s. ‘Safe home,’ she said.

  The train home rocked along a monorail above a sequence of cliffs. Lights were not supplied and by the time the bog vegetation had given way to the milky surface of the sea
it was too dark to read and Judith delivered to her thoughts. Like cards fanned in a hand, these were from different suits: school and home. Home was male territory. Judith’s sister, Kathleen, struggled without hope. Maids, she complained, were breakers and wreckers. Moujiks. Mohawks. They destroyed and did not belong. Country girls, gross, good-natured and alive with parasites, they had the clumsy vigour of outdoor creatures and went back to their distant farms when they got the chance. Not understanding comfort, they provided none. The house was full of men’s boots, smells of unemptied chamber-pots, a clutter of unassigned hats and macintoshes. Closets held clothes which nobody had thought to throw out: Judith’s mother’s dresses, jackets belonging to an uncle who had fought with Kitchener and died. Drawers were stuffed with British army medals, broken rosary beads, spats, curling tongs and a device for curling moustaches. There was clutter and there were lacks: nowhere to tidy things. Fishing rods and walking-sticks stood in a deep jar. On the chimney-piece there had once been china figures but the maids had done for them. Their mother’s collection of Waterford glass had gone the same way.

  What bound the family together was their Republicanism. In the yard, behind the family pub, a coal pile and stacked porter barrels provided a ladder for quickly scaling the back wall in time of need. Unknown young men came and went unquestioned, sleeping on the kitchen settle or in the guest bedroom. Kathleen’s fiancé, Owen, was active. Eamonn, their elder brother, had been killed when Judith was fifteen. Seamus too was with the lads. Only their father held back. A disappointed, mildly alcoholic man, he twitted the fighting men on the uselessness of their activity. What difference was it going to make if and when they got their Republic? he asked. Where was the money to come from to make good the promises they’d made the people who sheltered them and who had been pressured into buying bonds for the national loan? Would they ever see the colour of their money again, heh? A widower who had returned from America with less than the fortune he had hoped to make, the Da’s dreams had withered and left him unsympathetic to other people’s. But he was over-ruled in his own house.

  Judith’s memory of the train journey was like a fossil containing within itself the essential shape of twelve years of such train journeys. For two of these years there had been fighting and ambushes were a thing to be counted with. On journeys homeward she thought of the two forces which set up strains in her family. These were the war and – though she would not have called it this – sex. Sitting on the wooden seat, she remembered once – she must have been just seventeen – putting her hand to her hair. It was bright when she washed it and foamed around her head like a dandelion cloud making rainbows in the corner of her eye when the sunlight broke on its fuzz. Three or four days after washing, it began to tighten and grow dull, shrivelling into knots the colour of dried glue. It was reddish hair and in school she was obliged to wear it dragged tightly back. Judith never reached the stage of being vain since she never discovered whether she was plain or pretty. She had a suspicion that she might be about to blossom, but put off the moment by slouching and wearing unbecoming clothes. She could dance, though, and did, for the nuns had brought in a dancing teacher and, girls dancing with girls, wet Sunday afternoons were waltzed away, feet tracing spirals on the gymnasium floor. Sister Murphy played. When everyone was breathless, they leaned against the piano and talked about dances. The nun had been to two before she entered and the girls to none, but, last May, Kathleen had attended one which Judith could describe at length: a secret, sanguinary dance.

  It had been organized in the ballroom of a great house whose owners were away in England. The caretaker was an IRA supporter and some wild fellows had decided that, damn it, here they were righting and on the run, while the old cods of owners, Protestants and loyalists, were off toasting their toes in their Pall Mall clubs, and why shouldn’t the lads commandeer the place for one night and have a decent dance for once, after curfew, in a proper ballroom with all the comforts, instead of behind lowered blinds by day in small parish halls? Was theirs a social revolution or was it not?

  The nuns shook their heads at such talk but listened anyway. Those brave lads! Wild, wild but forgivable because at any moment they might die. The prospect purified them. They might drink and swear. They’d surely never sin against the sixth commandment. The fifth, God help us, was negotiable in time of war.

  ‘Go on, Judith. So then what happened?’

  ‘Well the girls, the Cumann na mBan, took charge of refreshments and decorations. Miles of bunting they made. All in green. Kathleen says it was very tasteful. They took the bags off the chandeliers and brought ferns and wove the letters IRA in fern with white carnations, and wound ivy up the bannisters, so the place looked like an indoor garden.’

  Sister Murphy was reminded of the Lady chapel on Holy Thursday. Lights. Foreboding. Flowers.

  ‘They made themselves ball dresses. Romantic, silky things. Kathleen says it was lovely.’

  Images pulsed in her head. How much had she invented? Maybe her imaginings fell short? They put French chalk on the floor and spent an afternoon sliding on it to make it slick. Then they had the dance. They thought they were safe because the place is in the heart of a big estate full of thick trees and, besides, there was curfew. Nobody should have come.’

  But someone had. A neighbour, an Anglo-Irish landowner himself, had, for some reason, dropped by, seen lights, heard music and, knowing the owners were away, gone down to the local barracks and reported. Or it could have been a poacher or an informer among the lads themselves. These things happened.

  ‘God help us, yes.’ The nuns fingered their fat beads for comfort. These were wooden, half as big as conkers and worn round their waists. They sighed for secular unreliability.

  In the small hours, said Judith, two lorry-loads of Tans had roared up the drive. The scouts were taken unawares and the place surrounded. The Tans came in shooting.

  It was like a Last Judgement.

  A man had been killed on the spot and two girls wounded. A few managed to skip out the back and into the undergrowth but the bulk of the boys were rounded up and taken away. At the barracks, ‘spotters’ with bags over their heads and slits for their eyes identified known activists. A bloody night. As a result of it, several were gaoled and two lads shot – a favourite trick of the Tans – ‘while trying to escape’. The story ended in depression and anyway it was time for prayers. In chapel, Judith leaned her mouth on the polished pew and tasted its bitter, resinous flavour.

  ‘Let us pray for the souls of the faithful departed and of all those killed in the present conflicts.’ The priest gave out the litany in a lilting drone and was answered the same way.

  ‘Eternal light shine upon them and may they rest in peace.’ Some priests refused absolution to the fighting men. Bishops too.

  People were living on their nerves.

  Kathleen’s fiancé, Owen, had been in gaol since the night of the dance and one small, unpromising outcome of this was Kathleen’s discovery that she didn’t miss him at all. After a three-year engagement, though, there was no backing out.

  It had been a long-distance engagement from the first, for Owen had spent three months in America in 1920, making speeches to sympathizers there and helping raise money for the cause. Then, when he came back, it wasn’t long before he was on the run. Now, he was gaoled. At least he was safe inside, thought Judith, though she knew Owen himself would despise the consideration. Some windy fellows, from what you heard, couldn’t wait to get behind bars.

  *

  One dream she gets – message? memory? – starts with the creaking of cart-wheels. The noise is convincingly real and guarantees that she is awake and not dreaming. There is some urgent job to be done, something she has neglected and must now see to swiftly or consequences will be dire. The exact matter at stake eludes her but there is no time to puzzle about this. The wagon is pulled by a donkey with an angular rump. Bones jut so sharply under his hide that the creak seems to be coming from them, but no, it’s from
the wheels. Or could it be her window? Often she gets out of bed and goes to it, flinging open the casement and even climbing on the sill, so that now the nuns have decreed that she must sleep on the ground-floor. She has put the heart across them once too often.

  The wagon load is covered by a tarpaulin. Blood oozes from under it and trickles down the wheels. What’s under there? Illicit salmon? A dead deer, perhaps, poached on some estate? Or butchered meat?

  ‘Where’s it going?’ she asks the driver.

  ‘North,’ he tells her. ‘Up to the bloody Orangemen. We’ll get it on the night train. Yer man can travel in the guard’s van. A butty of ours is making the arrangements.’

  *

  So Sister Judith had decided to attend the meeting after all! Well, she’d have to learn the worst sometime, decided Sister Gilchrist, and sat next to the poor thing so as to give her moral support. They were in a pew reserved for elderly nuns, many of whom were bravely smiling and trying to put the best face on things. On the podium stood a nun aged thirty who had had her hair dressed professionally and was wearing a tailored suit. Sister Mary Quinn’s ‘dynamic commitment’ to change had the archbishop’s blessing and the nihil obstat of the Mother House. Today, she was giving her victory speech.

  ‘The Church,’ she said, ‘is a living organism. An organism which fails to adjust to change risks being fossilized and ultimately exterminated.’

  A tremor was perceptible in the ‘oldies’ pew’. Sister Mary Quinn called it that. Sister Gilchrist had heard her do so. The oldies did not look well. They wore black. Their clothes were odd, wistful and, in most cases, graceless approximations of the habit which they had worn all their lives, until six months ago, when it had been abandoned.

  ‘Some,’ said Quinn, ‘may be disconcerted.’