No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  History pupils were reminded that it was an Irishwoman’s frail morals which led to the English first coming here in 1169. Women bore inherited guilt.

  The chaplain prayed that all should be cleansed in the blood of the Lamb.

  Blood was invoked for secular purposes too, though there was debate about this. Padraig Pearse had gone too far when he wrote that ‘the old earth of the battlefields is thirsty for the wine of our blood’. The allusion could be blasphemous and nuns from Loyalist families – most were – found it out of keeping with the taste and refinement which this convent had always sought to inculcate.

  The chaplain’s view was that the mystic sacrifice of the mass was one thing and sending young fellows out to die for no practical purpose was another and one with which he, personally, didn’t hold. To seek death was next door to suicide and though nobody, to be sure, could look into Pearse’s heart, they could look into his writings and what they’d find was unhealthy. All that about the wine of the battlefields was one of two things: heresy or blather. His view, as their spiritual pastor, was that it was blather. The Irish weren’t heathens, thank God. They didn’t go in for Voodoo and the like.

  The chaplain had a loud voice. Discussion died while he was talking. Later it took up again. Politics was not a matter of faith and morals. To be sure, we weren’t Africans, but accepting English ways was slavish.

  ‘What sort of civilization is the English anyway? By their deeds shall ye know them. The Tans caught four fellows from our townland and cut the nose off of one, the tongue off another, the …’

  ‘Girls! Please! Manners!’

  Judith guessed that someone had reminded the others of her dead brother, for the subject was swiftly changed.

  Travelling homewards on the rickety train, she thanked her stars that the truce was on. Last year, the lads had jumped this train more than once to rescue prisoners or shoot English soldiers travelling on it.

  Kathleen came to the station to meet her with the pony and trap and wrapped rugs around the pair of them, for it was a cold old night. The pony trotted along fast and Judith sat on her hands to warm them. Everyone was grand, said Kathleen. There had been an anniversary mass said for their brother, Eamonn.

  ‘How did the Da take it?’

  ‘Cried,’ Kathleen told her, ‘drank. Got over it.’

  ‘Have you seen the Yank?’

  ‘He drops round. Why?’

  ‘No reason.’

  ‘Ha,’ said Kathleen, teasing as an engaged girl will, safe in her own allegiance. ‘You like him. That’s why.’

  ‘He likes you,’ Judith retorted. ‘I’ve watched him watching you.’

  Sitting quietly on the edges of gatherings, she had noticed the American, Sparky Driscoll, smile and throw quick glances towards Kathleen.

  ‘Not me,’ said Kathleen. ‘He’s starry-eyed about Holy Ireland. Caitlín Ni Houlihan, not Kathleen Clancy, has yer man’s interest. There’s two of them over here now. Observing us. They send reports back to sympathizers in America.’

  ‘What kind of reports?’

  ‘You don’t imagine he tells me?’

  ‘When are you getting married?’

  Kathleen didn’t answer. She went quiet the way a marine creature will when it hides in shallows, imagining that it can fool or tire you into leaving it alone. It wasn’t Judith who was harrying Kathleen. It was the question. Suddenly, Kathleen answered it, and threw the reins forward, shaking them urgently over the pony’s neck.

  ‘If the peace holds and Owen gets out of gaol,’ she said, ‘then right away. I’m sick of waiting.’

  ‘So why did you wait before?’

  ‘Owen doesn’t want me left with a string of kids if anything should go wrong.’

  The pony kept up its panicked trot between windy hedges and Kathleen’s profile flashed in and out of starlight as loose branches strained and swung. Judith had a feeling that Kathleen herself was panicky: eager to marry and get it over with. Terrified of being told about this, she began to sing a snatch of a mocking song about matrimony, then stopped, for the thing wasn’t funny.

  Owen got nightmares. Judith had heard him one night last year when he’d hidden in their house. A bed had been made up for him in the kitchen and she had been asleep upstairs in her room when something woke her. The war had been at its worst at the time and she had lain rigid, wondering was it a raid, waiting for the noise of lorries pulling up and the shots and shouts. She imagined these so clearly that it took her some moments to realize that she had not heard them. Normal sounds came to her: a creaking pine-branch, wind, the distant sea, a fog-horn. None of these would have woken her though. She reached for the matches, struck one, lit a candle and padded to the door of her room. The noise was below. Putting her candle on the floor so that her own shadow leaped, she opened the door and stood on the landing outside it looking down into the kitchen. Owen was out of bed. She could make out his shape in the glow from the range. He was wearing a shirt and waving his arms, whingeing like a small child. ‘Don’t,’ he pleaded in the child’s voice. ‘Don’t do it. I don’t know a thing, Mister. I swear to Jesus. Don’t … Oh, how can I prove it? Please, please, Mister, don’t, for the love of God, Mister.’ And all the time that child’s whinge as though he were fending something off while the voice broke and wavered.

  ‘Owen!’ she called down the stairs. ‘Wake up!’

  ‘Wha-at?’ His grunt was strangely deep after the little voice of his dream. Nervous still but in a different way, he jumped aggressively. ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘You were talking in your sleep.’

  ‘I? Ugh? What did I say?’

  ‘Nothing. Just noise. I thought I’d better wake you.’

  ‘Oh, well, thanks, Judith. I suppose I was dreaming.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Sorry I woke you then.’

  The next day he asked again if he had said anything intelligible and she told him no. But another time when he was staying she had again heard the sound rising thinly and unevenly through her door. This time she let him go on dreaming, horrified at the memory of his crushed, reedy voice and at the picture which came to mind of what his face must be like. She hadn’t seen it at all, for he had been turned away from her facing into the red glimmer in the range. This time she had a notion that he was not crying but bellowing. After a while she covered her head with a pillow and managed to get to sleep.

  She mentioned the nightmares to Kathleen who did not sound worried.

  ‘Sure we all have nightmares,’ she said, ‘all the fellows do. They say if you didn’t have them you’d go mad.’

  But Kathleen had not heard that shrill, pleading voice.

  Judith wondered what the nightmare meant. It could be a memory of childhood: an old, childish fear which had got mixed up with Owen’s present one of what the Tans might do to him if he was caught. Or – and this was the solution she liked least but thought likeliest – it might be a memory of some child Owen himself had tortured to get information. She didn’t want to know and could see that Kathleen wouldn’t.

  Now there was the new anxiety: the money in the backyard. Dollars. Could Owen have hidden it there before he was gaoled? But if he had, why leave it so long? Wouldn’t the lads need it? Surely he could have got a message out? It was true the truce was on but from all you heard one of the reasons our side had signed it was because of the lack of funds. Maybe the money was Sparky’s? Did Kathleen know? Judith couldn’t ask. But neither could she forget the thing or accept that there wasn’t something unsavoury and wrong about the matter. It was on the edge of her mind like a speck at the corner of your eye or fluff in your nostril. Silly, she told herself, pull yourself together. But she was feeling sick. It was the motion of the trap. Kathleen was nervous and had been urging Rosie on.

  ‘Gwan,’ she shouted now to the already speeding pony. ‘Getoutathat!’ She shook the reins and Rosie tried responsively to gallop so that the trap shook and bumped into her rump. Kathleen checked her a little the
n gave her her head to trot at top trotting speed down the dark, narrow lanes.

  *

  The bus had left the rural land around the airport and was in a built-up district. From its top storey, James could see over tall garden walls to where Edwardian facades crumbled and monkey-puzzles died from below. A tuft clung to the tip of each moulting branch so that the effect was of lions’ tails massed for a ringmaster’s display. Lawns were mangy and windows inflamed in the sunset. Behind them, he imagined frugal lives of the sort portrayed in Dubliners. Repressed, genteel. Though maybe not? Things must have changed, after all, grown better since Independence and Ireland’s entry into the Common Market?

  ‘Worse,’ Therese had prophesied.

  On hearing of Larry’s offer, her patience had melted like snow before a blow-torch. She got the notion that the thing had been fixed up behind her back.

  ‘Hey James,’ Larry had telephoned the day after his offer of a job. ‘I was serious last night. Were you? Well, we’d better get our asses in gear and line the thing up. When can you leave? What do you mean you didn’t know? Sure, you’ll have to travel. To Ireland. Where else? Listen, I’ve got to know whether you meant what you said or not?’

  Therese, who had herself been expecting a call, had picked up the extension.

  ‘You said,’ she heard Larry say, ‘that you’d had it with academic life: guys sitting on their butts hatching out irrelevant monographs to earn tenure, right? And your wife breathing down your neck …’

  James had no memory of having said such a thing, but she hung up in the midst of his denial.

  ‘Go to hell,’ she had yelled during their subsequent row. ‘Go to Ireland. Have your Junior Year Abroad.’

  And here he was. Riding through the city like a man in a tank. A silver drizzle had started up. Umbrellas, down below, jostled on the principle of dodgem cars, nuzzling out space for faceless walkers underneath. A grey, eighteenth-century building pleased by its visual echo of Yeats. Small shops merged into domestic architecture: B. Grady, Boot repair; Newsagents and fancy goods; Clothiers of distinction. He noted the muted mode of harangue. Even the occasional neon sign was discreet in its claims: Seafresh fish; Tony’s wedding bouquets; riskily, Fryer Tuck’s. He liked the decorum. But where was the myth and swagger envisaged by Larry? Did Romantic Ireland die cyclically?

  ‘The Celts,’ Larry had mused on their second meeting, ‘are on an eight-hundred-year losing streak and touchy, so play it cool over there and don’t let my old man foul anything up.’

  Making this film in Ireland, he explained, was a delicate operation. ‘It’s geared to helping raise funds here, right? So it’s got to appeal to an American audience and it’s got to be hard-hitting. Our subject is American intervention in the fight for Irish freedom. Historically, it was big and we aim to show how big. Financial mainly. There’s a parallel with Israel today. The difference is that in the Irish case the help always had to be clandestine. Was in the past and is now. In the Sixties this might have appealed to donors here. You know: conspire to help a beleaguered minority in Northern Ireland that’s had WASP oligarchs sitting on their necks since the seventeenth century, denying them civil rights, etcetera. Somehow all that’s less appealing now. The climate has changed. We’re less hot for justice. But that’s only half the story. The real trouble is that the fat cats in Southern Ireland are ass-hole buddies with London. The Dublin government is scared shitless that a successful revolution up North would topple their own regime. They do counter-propaganda which really dries up the sources of donations to Banned Aid.’

  The Irish Minister for External Affairs – ‘Lovely title,’ said Larry. ‘Don’t tell me those guys are verbally sensitive?’ – had been over here bad-mouthing Banned Aid and had stepped heavily on the Heirs’ corns. Apparently the dude went to some banquet and at the end of it stood up to denounce the IRA as zealots and murderers.

  ‘This really hurt the Heirs in their idealism: a sensitive part of their make-up.’ Larry gave his little laugh. The word ‘Mafia’ had been used, he explained, and they’d been made to look bad in their own backyard. ‘My father would have lynched him on the spot. But there’s a strategic way to play every game, eh, James? If you can’t out-physical the opposition, for the moment you use finesse.’

  Larry was counting on James to moderate his father’s zeal.

  ‘Tell him you’re doing whatever he wants. Then don’t do it. You see, we’ve got to film in Ireland and need the locals to cooperate. Ergo, don’t let them see we’re not on their side.’ This was not as difficult as James might think. The Dublin government paid lip-service to the ideal of an All-Ireland Republic which would include the North. However, as England was their major client, lip-service was as far as they dared go. ‘Now we,’ said Larry, ‘must let them think it’s also as far as we want to go and that we’re just making a nice nostalgic movie about the Great Old Fight. That way there’ll be no problem. OK? And don’t breathe the word “Banned Aid”. Just mention my film company. No need for the tie-up to be known.’

  The film, said Larry, was in fact going to focus on old sellouts and by implication rub today’s pols’ noses in the analogy. The hero was an American fund-raiser with whom the sponsors could identify. He’d gone to Ireland in ’22 and got himself killed by Orangemen in the North. This linked up neatly with today’s troubles.

  ‘His name was Sparky Driscoll,’ said Larry. ‘He’s the human interest on which we hang our history.’

  James’s first job would be to interview survivors of the Twenties, and to get them on tape before they died off. ‘Let them reminisce. We don’t want leaders. Just ordinary Joe O’Does.’

  There followed some directives about camera and other equipment which Larry would be sending to Ireland and which James was to pilot through Customs and store in a place already hired for the purpose. Larry had contacts who would help in case of a hitch. James was to keep their phone numbers handy at all times. OK? And the less Larry’s father knew about any aspect of things the better. The same went for Father Casey.

  ‘Hey, do you know what that pair remind me of? Ever hear of the prehistoric rulers of Ireland and how they fought their wars? The Tuatha De Danaan? They wrapped themselves in a cloud and withdrew into the hills. Not a bad move: proto-guerrilla tactics. Unfortunately, they never came out. They lost the key to reality and turned into fairies.’ Larry laughed. ‘The Reverend Casey may be one, for all I know. Not my old man. He had an eye for girls in his day. But they’re both great, misty plotters. Seriously, though, James,’ Larry’s voice grew urgent, ‘I’m trying to rescue you from a world of faded things: campus life. That’s another instance of people wrapping themselves in a cloud. A film like this is something else. It acts on people. It’s live stuff. Ireland may not be the hub of the universe but you can sure get involved there and …’

  Larry had talked lengthily about this and other matters. James listened happily. Only a businessman could have ideas so unfreighted by footnotes, suspicion or fact – off his own financial terrain, of course. He was grateful to Larry for giving him a chance to travel. In the end, he had reason to be grateful too to Therese, who gave in gracefully when she saw that she had no choice. She was a person who felt the force of moral arguments and, since she did not believe that people should be possessive of other people or ask them to sacrifice their careers, she had been obliged by her own principles to accept James’s decision to go.

  *

  Reverend Mother was speaking into the telephone. ‘I feel,’ she said, ‘that it would be misleading to describe her as disturbed. With us she fitted in, had her little habits, friends …’ She tried to remember what friends Sister Judith had had. In the old days – which had been Sister Judith’s days – particular friendships between nuns had been frowned on. Sad. Yes. Well. ‘It might be better for you to decide, yourself, as next-of-kin, what sort of institution would suit her,’ she told the grandnephew. ‘We will provide fees up to a reasonable rate.’

  When the grand
nephew arrived, Sister Judith was watching television. Reverend Mother gave him tea in the parlour and talked reassuringly about his grandaunt. ‘Surprisingly hale and hearty,’ she told him. ‘She has great stamina. But, to be sure, you come from a noteworthy family. Your grandfather was one of the great men of his day. I believe he used to visit her here, but that was before my time. She too, they tell me, was active before she entered. But you’ll know more about that than I. Women’s role was more of a back-up one, wasn’t it, in the old Republican movement? With a few shining exceptions, to be sure. Sister Judith,’ said Reverend Mother in a little rush, keeping her eyes away from the grandnephew’s which had a disconcertingly frantic glare, ‘seems sometimes to think we’re living back then. In the Twenties. It’s not clear whether this might be her little joke. Solitary people develop an eccentric sort of humour, don’t they?’

  ‘Solitary?’ queried the grandnephew. ‘Didn’t you say she had friends? I was going to ask you for their addresses in case she might want to keep in touch.’

  ‘Oh, she’ll know about that herself,’ said Reverend Mother. Oddity must run in the family she thought with a twinge of disappointment for, after all, the O’Malleys were distinguished. The grandnephew’s hand shook and that glare was not the best balanced. To think that his grandfather … Well, it showed the truth of the old saw: Great wits are sure to madness near allied. Pope, Essay on Man, was it? She’d have known that in her teaching years but her memory wasn’t what it had been. Oh, she’d end up on the scrap-heap soon enough herself. The hungry generations tread us down. Let’s hope and pray that this fellow will treat poor old Sister Judith with a bit of humanity. An elder nephew had refused to have anything to do with her. ‘Shall we go and meet her?’ she asked, and led the way to the television room.

  It was dark and Sister Judith was sitting alone, leaning, witch-like, over flickering shadows. It had been explained to her that her grandnephew would be coming but she might not have taken this in. If she was presently convinced that the year was 1921 – as she had been when Reverend Mother had tried reasoning with her – then the grandnephew’s existence was, of course, inexplicable. She had taken her shoes off. Reverend Mother saw with vexation, and her feet flopped like a pair of pale, flat fish against the rail of her chair.