No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘This is your grandnephew, Sister Judith,’ said Reverend Mother carefully, ‘Mr O’Malley.’

  ‘Ah!’ Sister Judith shoved the guilty feet into her shoes. ‘The new Principal Man, is it?’

  She took her leave of the nuns with worldly aplomb and chattered pleasantly to her grandnephew as he drove her across Dublin from the suburb in which the convent was to the one where he lived.

  ‘Dublin must look strange to you?’ he suggested, and thought of old newsreels he had seen of the city in the years she had known it: men with bowler hats, horse-drawn cabs, open-topped trams – had they too been horse-drawn? – and, oh yes, the tram-wires threaded above the streets like a web darning the sky. Lamp-lighters, thought the grandnephew sentimentally, chestnut-roasters. ‘It’s changed a lot since your day I’ll bet,’ he said.

  Great-aunt Judith looked about her. ‘It’s very old-fashioned,’ she remarked, craning her neck. ‘I was expecting something like the cities you see on films: Los Angeles, San Francisco. To be sure, the climate is against us, but is that any reason for not putting on a slap of paint?’

  ‘Who are you?’ she asked after a mile or so, and turned to scrutinize the chap into whose care she seemed to have fallen. He looked, she thought at first glance, like a good-looking goat.

  ‘I’m Michael,’ said Michael. ‘I’m your sister Kathleen’s grandson.’

  ‘How’s Kathleen?’

  ‘She died,’ he told her, ‘they must have told you that. Fifteen years ago.’

  ‘Kathleen did not die,’ she argued stubbornly. ‘Our brother, Eamonn, was killed in 1919 and the Yank in ’22 and Kathleen’s fellow, Owen, went queer in the head after the Troubles. Kathleen was all right.’

  ‘My grandfather was not queer in the head. He was in the Cabinet for decades. He was a great man,’ said Michael O’Malley with annoyance. ‘Though a bit hard to take from close up,’ he added. Michael had lived his life under the shadow of the patriarch. Someone’s calling the old bastard ‘queer in the head’ made this seem avoidable and therefore worse. ‘He was brilliant,’ he told his grandaunt with bullying emphasis, ‘internationally acclaimed.’

  ‘Who was?’

  ‘The old man. Owen O’Malley.’

  ‘Great?’

  ‘Great,’ said her grandnephew, who had suffered from a literal and crushing belief in this when he was a boy. Humour had eventually alleviated his discomfort and, by the age of eighteen, he was clowning in pubs about the difficulties of being the grandson of a patriot hero and the son of a maker of underpants. ‘How do you follow that act?’ he used to demand in mock mockery and was astounded to find himself with a reputation for high spirits. How did you honour a grandfather who, having helped forge change through violence, ended his days guarding the outcome from any further change? Wild songs and tame realities had been the fare of Michael’s youth: puzzling stuff for a young fellow to swallow. In the hall of his monastic boarding-school, a fresco of the guerrilla leaders of the Twenties – Granddad to the fore – had faced an effeminate image of Christ the King. The aunt, to be sure, had given her vote to the second.

  ‘Owen,’ he told her, ‘went to the League of Nations.’

  ‘Oh?’

  He wondered if she’d heard of the organization.

  ‘My wife, Grainne, is your grandneice,’ he told her. ‘We’re cousins.’

  ‘You got a dispensation?’

  He quipped: ‘We live under hers.’

  It was a joke from the days when Grainne, then a schoolgirl with a determined crush on Michael, had managed to chase him to Rome where he’d been having his voice trained. He, like the aunt, had tried to opt out of the world he knew. His singing-master had supported him and his father been relieved to acquiesce. To O’Malley senior, thrift and industry were the major virtues. He lived for his woollen mills and retail outlets and genuinely feared that prospective customers who saw the O’Malley scion in low dance halls or getting drunk in pubs might be the less eager to buy the firm’s broadcloth, darning wool, and other sundries from off the sheep’s back. ‘Stick to what comes off my back and you’ll be on his,’ ran one of the firm’s ads from those years, featuring a ram and a pig. Both animals had strong, thrusting torsos and a look of old O’Malley. Michael had often wondered whether the artist had been conscious of this.

  ‘Did you know my father at all?’ he asked the aunt. ‘Maybe my grandmother brought her children to visit you?’

  ‘No,’ said the aunt shortly, ‘never.’

  She wouldn’t have. He remembered now: the aunt had been ‘odd’ and oddities were not tolerated in the Granddad’s day. Into convents with them: to God or the Devil. Dynastic families must be above reproach. Mind, that sort of treatment made the odd odder. You lived down to expectations and Michael himself, the wool-merchant’s black-sheep son, had played his rake-hell role as faithfully as if his father had mapped it for him. When Grainne reached Rome – she’d got herself sent to finishing school there – Michael had been living for two years with a girl of Edwardian unsuitability. Outrageous in a period way, Theo was English and on the make – which meant that she too would have liked to have been saved – and was strategically unfaithful to Michael who, though feverishly aroused by her, jibbed at marriage. Theo, supposing her sexual hold over him to be a trump card, played her hand the wrong way. She could not know that Michael’s thrashings about in her bed were half intended as aversion therapy. He saw her as Circe and one does not marry Circe. Looking back, he saw a comic pathos in her efforts to provoke him into marriage. She used to dangle herself before his friends, bestowing herself like a good-conduct prize on the soberest and going home with whoever that happened to be after a night’s drinking in the bars along the Via Babbuino. Poor Theo. She became as snugly familiar as his own armpit but he had never, for a moment, been jealous about her.

  Then Grainne had turned up at a concert where he was singing. He remembered that: she was pale, in a mantilla and all excited reverence for what she supposed him to be. He was to her, he saw instantly, what Theo had been to himself: freedom, a spreader of colour, something like a stained-glass window when the sun refracts through it. Seeing the family face in hers worshipping him, he had been unable to resist.

  Naturally, cracks had been made when news of their engagement got out. One was: ‘the fellow couldn’t marry his hero grandfather so he did the next best thing’.

  There might be some of the same motive in his taking the aunt home. A mistake? Too late to worry. In the pause before a traffic light, he inspected her. The family face? On the grandma’s side this time? Too true. My own past and maybe my future if I swaddle my lean chin in a triple band of fat. Front-face she was shapeless like poorly impressed sealing-wax. Half buried in half-dead flesh. How old? Eighty? No, seventy-five if the Reverend Mum wasn’t lying. Had the familiar profile still: lean lines among the slack, like drawings on sand. Well, here we have her then: the last of the great generation. Michael’s parents – not great, pigmy in fact – had died in a car-crash some years back but he’d seen little of them for the previous decade at least. The old man had never forgiven Michael his disinterest in the business and left it in the end to Michael’s uncle, Owen Roe, a go-getter, who paid Michael a not too generous stipend and had procured him an undemanding job to keep his family fed and clad. It was in the Heraldry Commission: a joke. Let the blot on our escutcheon occupy itself with escutcheons, ha ha. Or so Michael read it: blots to blots.

  ‘If you can’t keep sober,’ Owen Roe had said, ‘I will not be responsible for putting you in a position where you can bring the family name into disrepute.’ Then up he’d come with this sinecure: sine cura, worry-free. But Michael would have relished a challenge.

  They came to Mount Street Bridge. He pointed out the canal.

  ‘Looks dirty,’ said the fastidious aunt.

  ‘Polluted,’ Michael agreed. Like memory’s stream – was he stark, raving irresponsible to be bringing this old thing home?

  He’d agreed
to do so when other members of the family had refused, for – oh, a tangle of motives. Pity. Curiosity. About her. About the past. The grandfather. Himself in whose veins that exuberant generation’s blood had thinned. Funny that she should say the Granddad had been queer in the head. Must have heard someone say it of herself and shifted the smear. Or maybe the whole family were a touch highly strung? Like race horses. Grainne was certainly not the cart-horse breed. Bad at pulling burdens, she’d slipped her harness five months back and left for London with their son, Cormac, leaving Michael to dry out alone – that was the hope. Go on the water-wagon. Kick the habit.

  The move was punitive. In another era Grainne might have gone on a pilgrimage or prayed for his soul. What she’d done instead was to take a job with an old schoolmate who ran a Halfway House for Battered Wives. Michael, who could read metaphor as well as the next man, got her drift.

  Needless to say, so did their friends. Some assumed she was an inmate and Michael a wife-batterer. Others pretended to for the sake of raising a laugh. Dozens of times he’d been on the point of going after her – or perhaps not quite on the point. He tended to be tipsy when this looked viable and by the time he sobered up, it no longer did.

  Grainne, having fallen in love with a prince, had woken up married to an amphibian: a soak who croaked where his former self had sung. Michael, having lost his singing voice through an accident of his own devising, had, ever since, been seeking the pithy glories of grand opera through the bottom of his next glass of whiskey: her version. Home she would not come – she’d sworn – before getting a good report of him. From whom? Spies. Busybodies. Possibly the maid? He’d sacked her forthwith. But drank the more. How go off the liquor in a lonely house?

  ‘Come home,’ he’d bargained, ‘and then I will.’

  She wouldn’t.

  A bitch – but you could end up loving the faults you’d bred in someone. They were signs of their adjustment to you: tokens of loyalty, like a seeing-eye dog’s gait. He needed her and need had bred cunning, hoho and alleluia! He was about to get her back. Now. Pronto and with no more ado. The aunt was bait. Heel, Grainne! I have you foxed.

  Yesterday he’d written again:

  Dear G,

  You’ll appreciate that I can’t hold the fort here alone while our joint great-aunt is in residence. Between us, she and I could burn the place down.

  No sentiment. No emotion. He’d laid his trap coolly and if he knew her it would bring her belting back.

  Christ, though, why did it have to be like this?

  Why was because he’d got stuck in a pattern which might not be ideal or fulfilling or – never mind what it wasn’t, the important thing was that it was his. His habitat. His rhythm. He needed it if he was going to get on with a secretly nourished project: writing the life of his grandfather, source of weal and woe. This had to be kept dark. People would split their sides if word got out. Ancestor-worship, they might quip. God help us, think of that lush, that unvoiced eejit thinking up such a plan at his time of life. Him that never did a day’s honest work. Come here to me – the chorus clacked conspiratorially in his head – didjez ever hear the story of how Michael lost his voice? What? The bottle? What else? And what’s open to him now but to drown his dreams in further bottles of Powers’ Gold Label, Paddy, Jameson and Tullamore Dew. He’s a prop to the National Industry. You have to give him his dew, ha ha.

  Oh the cynicism would stymie him before he got going at all, if they knew. So know they wouldn’t. Let their first intimation be a title on a publisher’s list. Then they could laugh out of the other sides of their mouths. They were success-worshippers, as materialistic as the inhabitants of any other city. More so, claimed Uncle Owen Roe who said the Church had no power in the country any more. He should know for he was forever sniffing the changing wind. New materialists, he stated, were, like the new rich, always crasser than the old.

  ‘How come so,’ Michael had asked, ‘that there’s no divorce here and we’re one of only four countries in Western Europe that has no legal abortion? Want to bet we’ll be the last to bring it in?’

  ‘That’s not the Church,’ said Owen Roe. ‘The Catholic laymen who run the country don’t want it.’

  ‘Do you?’ Owen Roe was a TD.

  ‘I have objectives closer to my heart,’ said the uncle. ‘I can’t afford to alienate voters by backing controversial issues.’

  Helping the IRA tear the country apart was the objective close to Owen Roe’s heart. In the hope that he, personally, might profit from the ensuing breakdown. One reason Michael wanted to write his grandfather’s biography was because that generation had left such a mucked-up heritage. When had the pure become impure? Or was purity a theatrical simplification? Was Michael, an ex-would-be singer, seeing life in operatic terms? A would-be historian now, he wanted to understand the Grandda, Prime Mover in his own and the country’s life.

  Until Grainne came back, though, he couldn’t put pen to paper.

  ‘Here we are,’ he told the aunt. ‘This is the house.’

  ‘You live on a canal,’ she said with delight. ‘How pretty.’

  ‘Yes,’ he saw with surprise, ‘isn’t it?’

  Sun was gilding the water. The grass had a deceptively clean look and bicycling children wheeled like swallows through luminous, lemon-coloured air.

  3

  James was remembering his last session with O’Toole Senior.

  ‘Larry’s warned you against me, hasn’t he?’

  James had tried to look amazed.

  ‘I know,’ the old man said quickly, ‘it’s not fair to ask. You’re in a delicate situation.’ Childish eyes held James’s at embarrassing length. Old fox, thought James, this is how he made his fortune, smiling at people, being patient and open like a trap. They were in the office from which O’Toole and Father Casey conducted the business of Banned Aid. The glass in the windows was tinted brown to screen out the California sun and beyond it lay a land like old coffee grounds, sepia snaps, a world visited by blight. The blight wasn’t here though, O’Toole explained, but in Northern Ireland where … He listed its woes. Other men his age were living in Sun City, James reflected, or they raised funds for boys’ towns, research on spina bifida, their church. Larry, like a rich kid’s father, had got his child-father into something too tricky for unsupervised play.

  ‘Larry doesn’t come clean, you know,’ Larry’s father complained. ‘Never has. I doubt if he has with you, so why would I interrogate you? That’s not why I asked you here.’ The pale globules of his eyes were too transparent for truth. Still as frogspawn, they were hatching something.

  The old man started talking about the ‘real’ Sparky Driscoll, some information which had come his way from an old guy he’d met at a Banned Aid rally. ‘We could use it,’ he told James. ‘Apply pressure to the authorities over there if they give you any trouble, see what I mean? If what this man told me was true they wouldn’t want it coming out. A lot of facts never come to light. Refugees living right here in America could rewrite the histories of the Russian, Irish, Chilean and God knows what revolutions for you. Losers have their own truth,’ said O’Toole who, in his heyday, must have had as much time for losers as a Jansenist for souls impervious to God’s grace.

  Then he gave James the cigars. ‘Take them. Don’t lose the box. Someone will appreciate it if you don’t.’

  ‘Listen,’ he said, before letting James go. He had another small favour to ask, an errand. Would James mind? It was to commission a rendering of the O’Toole armorial bearings to be painted and gilded by a professional scribe and heraldic artist. O’Toole showed some shyness about revealing such a taste. ‘A present for Larry,’ he winked, turning the hick request into a joke. ‘The O’Toole armorial bearings are very militaristic – pikes, battle-axes – and Larry used to be a peacenik. We had some run-ins.’ Well, that was behind them now. Larry might have changed. O’Toole had not. He was an unrepentant hawk. America had a mission laid on her by history … The soporific ph
rases made James’s mind wander. He was on his way to the airport, and he glanced at his watch. Unfortunately, he had plenty of time and the old man knew he had. Even on the Irish question, he heard O’Toole claim, his concern was as an American. ‘Listen, you might think we had no vital interests to protect there?’ The slow smile exuded the triumph of a man about to confound all polemic. ‘It’s in our zone, though.’ Seductive, not to be gainsaid, he asked James, ‘What about our image? Do you know that Ireland is crawling with pressmen from Marxist countries? The West,’ cried O’Toole the umpire, ‘has to clean up its act.’ All means were fair, he assured James, when a task was so Herculean and money was a sacred trust. What politicians couldn’t do, the lone, well-heeled man of goodwill could perhaps achieve.

  ‘But Larry, I don’t know. Larry’s pussyfooting. Maybe he doesn’t trust me? I hope you do, James, I hope you’d come to me if you needed help over there? Mm? I’m not asking you to break confidence. Maybe he’s up to nothing? Maybe he’s just making a film? Propaganda?’ O’Toole looked shrewdly at James. ‘Maybe he hasn’t told you yet?’ Pause. The old man seemed to drowse, staring out of his tinted windows whose darkness invaded the room. Indoor gleams, domesticated like dim haloes in the murk of old religious paintings, played on chrome and Perspex and converged about his capped teeth, white hair, enfevered eyes whose shine, James now saw, was due to the old man’s wearing contact lenses.

  ‘Listen, listen,’ he said, ‘you’ve heard of young men in a hurry. That makes sense. But an old man in a hurry makes more. Time’s nipping at his – my – heels. I’d like to leave my mark. Making money isn’t enough. You want to use it. Put it to use. I’ve got a friend, my age, rings me up asking me to help on his favourite project: campaign to promote the humane slaughter of cows. Cows, I ask you, when the world’s in the state it is. The world’s given me a lot.’ The old eyes swam in what might be sincerity, though they had lost the gift of projecting this effectively. In the past O’Toole had probably persuaded when insincere and now the after-image of his deceit imprisoned him. ‘I want to give something back,’ he pleaded. ‘Through Larry – but he doesn’t confide in me – or you. Don’t dismiss the rumours about Driscoll’s death. They were suppressed. What can that mean but that pillars of the state you’re going to are afraid? Maybe, like Samson, you’ll want to knock them down? More things are possible than you might think if you think big. Anyway, follow up the lead. It might take you places and what can you lose?’ More pleading grins. O’Toole lit up one of his own cigars. Sweet smoke eddied in tinted sunlight. No glow: a sun-smothered smouldering.