No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘Great.’

  Like herself, the fridge was febrile. Leaning her elbows on the deal table, she bit into a sausage and said, ‘This is the first time I’ve relaxed all day.’ She sloshed whiskey into her glass – the guest chose the hock, but she needed a quicker fix – and felt its ease flow into her fingers until they slowed, then ceased their tattoo. ‘People seem to be flinging themselves into history’s embrace,’ she said. ‘I had a row with my son. He’s fourteen and consorts with bombers.’ She was talking too much Nerves. Anger twitched in her as she saw that unjudging look in the man’s eyes and diagnosed it as medical. Of course, finding her in this madhouse, he must doubt her sanity. Silence was an easy trick. Priests and doctors cultivated it, nodding behind confessionals and desks and wrapping themselves in an air of sagacity. Grainne, an ex-Catholic, had transferred the odium she might have felt for priests on to medical men. False prophets she thought them – her mother had died of cancer – sanctimonious, raking in the money, intruding into people’s lives and bodies. Terrified of her heredity, she had to go regularly to a gynaecologist who poked lubrified fingers inside her vagina to take a smear test, exactly as her confessors, before she left the Church, had poked spiritual probes into her head. Often doctors were clumsy, catching some of her soft inner tissues in their metal specula and tearing out pubic hair. If she made a grimace, they looked at her with the mild condescension she saw on this man’s face. He was eating her food and being placidly polite and superior in his silence. She vowed to try silence herself, then heard her voice carrying on regardless.

  ‘The people who need bombs,’ said that brittle voice, ‘are not the fourteen-year-olds. They’ll escape the family trap in the next few years.’

  ‘You mean they’re free?’ he asked. ‘But that’s awful too. Each choice diminishes the freedom. Surely you remember?’

  She didn’t. At Cormac’s age she had been intent on her inner life which was unfree, fanatical, and flung itself about like some creature afflicted by unassuageable desires. Her thoughts then were perverse, her aspirations disincarnate. After an acute crisis of religiosity, she had given up the Church. There had been no logical progression to this. The movement had been like that of a tennis ball which, smashed back and forth, finally spins off course and leaves the court through a gap in the fence.

  ‘But Cormac,’ she cried, horrified by memory, ‘isn’t under the sort of pressure my generation was.’

  ‘There are always pressures.’

  ‘You think history is more like tennis than, oh, what? Golf? That things bounce back and forth?’

  She didn’t hear his answer, having just had one from her own body: a surge of lust. Absurd, familiar, forgotten, it was what she had often felt when she went to confession for the man invisible behind the dark grating who talked to her of the spirit and made her mouth parch, her breasts burn, her womb heat and melt. Why? Perversity. Tennis. Too much of one thing drove her to its opposite. She had never felt such a thing for a gynaecologist. She hadn’t felt it for years. Surprised but gratified – for now what the old, once-loathed, sensation meant was a resurgence of youth – she stuffed her mouth with bread.

  ‘Have some,’ she pushed the breadboard his way. ‘Brown bread. Home-made, I’ve been missing it in London.’

  Had she been away then? he asked and she said she had. Mechanically, her mind sent out conversational signals, like some sleepy, all-night, disc jockey, while she focused her main attention on the bread. When had he arrived himself, she asked? Oh? And for how long? Of course you don’t want to go to bed with this fellow. It’s a reflex, knee-jerk. Means nothing. Think of bread. And he’d met Michael in a pub? With Corny Kinlen. I see. She visualized her teeth sliding in and out of the boggy texture, soft crust, damp pith spiked with bits of rough husk. Brown soda-bread was her mnemonic, her madeleine; its turfy substance told her that she was home. You ate it with smoked salmon or oysters, marmalade or egg. It reminded her of childhood, picnics, smokey cottages and the Shelbourne Rooms. It was the substance of Ireland. She was taking communion under two species: brown bread and whiskey.

  The guest – what was this his name was? Duffy? – said he had come from the States to interview people with memories of the Troubles. ‘I gather that your aunt …’

  That fixed her attention. ‘Aunt Judith? Oh, indeed, she’s the ghost patrolling the battlements without hope of deliverance or revenge.’ What luck, she thought, that someone should value what the poor thing had. ‘She’s a touch gaga,’ she warned. ‘From what I can make out, she seems to have had an appalling life.’

  ‘Why? Because she was a nun? But mustn’t that have been a free choice?’

  ‘You just said that choices are cages.’

  ‘Did I?’

  ‘Something like that. However, it wasn’t her having gone into the convent I meant but the fact that she then had to come out. Imagine: after fifty-five years! The monastic alternative was never gay but used to be reliable. Repudiation was never in the contract when you became a bride of Christ. If Jesus is a Judas,’ she shrugged, ‘then …’

  ‘Anything goes?’

  ‘Doesn’t it?’

  ‘There’s always the highway code,’ said the American. ‘Civic virtue works quite well when religion dries up. But why do you suppose your aunt had a poor life? The life of the body isn’t everything.’

  Grainne laughed, then, realizing that he hadn’t meant sex, blushed her furious redhead’s blush. He was looking tranquilly at her. Had he meant something spiritual? she wondered. People had funny religions now in America. You saw them on television. Moonies. Hare Krishnas. Even in London, by the Goodge Street Underground, disciples tried to lure you into the lair of Ron Hubbard. It made her angry to think that after all the centuries it had taken people to escape the yoke of traditional religion, these eejits were sticking their necks under freak ones.

  Under this official line of thought, she could feel rogue notions skittering. One was continuing embarrassment at her blush. Relax, she told herself. What does it matter what this fellow thinks. He’s a ship that’ll pass in the night. Sharp as a pincer came the knowledge that she didn’t want him to. She wanted him to stay where he was, beaming attentiveness at her. When had she last felt its glow?

  She laughed again. He joined with her. Laughing was something he did easily, she noticed. She felt joined in its medium with him as though they had been both immersed in some liquid. It was not a humorous – not an Irish – laugh.

  ‘Why are we laughing?’

  It struck her that she knew nothing about him. At the same time she remembered when she had last been looked at this way. It had been in Italy and she had hated it. She had been eighteen and social considerations were of vital importance. Men defined you then. Men talked. Other men listened and what was said could decide a girl’s future. Then.

  ‘An individual came asking for your address,’ a secretary at the embassy had told Grainne on some occasion that year. ‘He hoped we might have a list of our resident citizens. Naturally, I refused,’ said the man, and looked with disfavour on the girl who attracted the attention of brazen individuals. Definitions then were the name of the game. Not only was Ireland a small community but, in those days, the Irish carried their signalling network wherever they went. Grainne’s mother used to sing a song whose refrain went:

  ‘What has a poor girl but her name to defend her?

  Oh Barney go home, I will not let you in.’

  Clearly, Barney, whoever he was, lacked social credentials. He was also probably – though Grainne saw the fallacy of assuming the asocial to be always thrilling – someone the girl would have liked to let in, if only because his proper place, like a yard cat’s or a mountain lion’s, was out. He was not husband material and Grainne, at eighteen, had been in search of nothing less. She was not proud of this. The rules had changed and young women nowadays could afford to be adventurous. The yardstick for judging them was less harsh – but you reckoned with the one in use in your time. Anywa
y, now she was not seeking definition any more. What a man could do for her now would be to help her forget herself. Provisionally. Grainne had ties and duties. The tide of permissiveness which lapped the shores of Ireland, like an oil slick riding the warm Gulf Stream, was safely navigable only as long as you kept off the coastal rocks. Laws here had not changed, nor people’s attitudes underneath. Not for women. Like a group riding the last steps of an escalator, Ireland moved with the times but stayed in the rear. Women could now live openly with lovers but legal protection lagged. There was no divorce. Alimony – if you obtained one abroad – was hard to collect. Moreover, thrifty husbands had been known to fall back on an old trick of the livestock trade and sue a wife’s lover for sizable compensatory damages. Caught between canons, you could go wrong. The old said: ‘Thou shalt not be promiscuous nor basely sensual.’ The new: ‘Thou shalt have orgasms and enjoy God’s good gifts to the full.’ The old, being old, had been eroded by custom. An ill-married woman might, it conceded, have a discreet fling if nobody got hurt in the process. The new was rigid: be honest, it bullied, be frank. Speaking most recently through Jane’s mouth, it demanded that women be true to themselves and break up a bad marriage instead of trying, hypocritically, to smooth things over. Unsatisfactory mates should be replaced.

  Honesty and mate-jettisoning horrified Grainne. Yet she felt prepared to believe the part of the message which said that good sex made you a healthier and better-balanced person. Her balance was bad. She didn’t need anyone to tell her that. But you had to decide how you were going to play things. As this fellow had said, choice caged you and the best choice, she felt, was a charitable hypocrisy. It was easier on families, more exciting for the hypocrite. She had seen the new, frank mode in operation among foreign friends. Married or not, according to this formula, you brought your bed companion to dinner and acknowledged him. This revived the matter of social definitions and table manners and the discredit he might reflect on you if he didn’t have them. But where then was the romance of finding a creature uniquely appropriate to night, intimacy and bed? Someone as anonymous as a merman or satyr with furry, frondy thighs. Asocial and outside time. She had seen paintings of these lewd creatures of old fantasy when she was in Italy and they had taken her breath away. Right in the museums, framed in ornate gilt: a publicly acknowledged ancient dream of pastoral bliss and folly. Naked girls in forests, minotaurs and goatmen licking at them. Frondy wetnesses, clear streams, pink nipples, mouths open down to their tonsils. She forgot the names of the painters, remembering only Raphael who painted virgins, God help us, with prim little mouths. She hadn’t profited from that year at all. It had been the wrong time for her and the men were terrifying. She remembered their eyes X-raying her clothes. She had been innocent but had understood. You couldn’t fail to. Their thighs pressed against the cloth of their trousers and so did their genitals. Was it all an act, you wondered, or were they really that mad for it? That great at it? You’d like to know. To have tried just once. Instead, she’d married Michael and after a while she’d given up wanting it. Maybe an emotional duct dried up on you. Like religion: use it or lose it. Of course there had been – no, don’t think of him! That had been a case, if ever there was one, of falling between the old and the new. ‘Make yourself cheap,’ warned the old ethic, ‘and men will take you lightly.’ She had and he had. Very. But with a stranger, an anonymous man of the night, you didn’t care about being taken lightly. You wanted to be wanton like witches who, in nocturnal orgies, did the opposite of everything they did by day. It would purge and renew you. Surely it would.

  She had been reminded of her ancient female dream by this man’s electric look. Was she counting her chickens before they were hatched? Was she even sure that she had a hold of an egg? Maybe this fellow didn’t even know he was looking? Had a cast in his eye? Dare she ask: ‘Sir, is yours an anthropologist’s or a tourist’s scrutiny? Are your intentions reliably dishonourable? Do you realize that you’ve shaken a decent wife and mother out of her ethical corsettings? Do you know the responsibilities that that entails? She needs a new shape: needs the surround of a new presence, like a cuckoo’s egg, in the nesty warmth of some unknown bird.’

  Mad, she thought. Fool. He’s not thinking of you at all. They’re just not taught manners and not to stare. Cultural divide. Mixed signals. Forget it. You’d better take up jogging or something. Get rid of your appetites. Assault your husband. That was the thing, really: she had been primed for bloody Michael and the pulsings of her body had nothing to do with this man at all. The bastard was good-looking though. Too good-looking? A queer? Oh, what did it matter? She wished he’d leave.

  Frightening her – for if he could read her thoughts how appalling that would be – he said, ‘I should go. It’s late. Could I use your phone to call a taxi?’

  *

  Possessions were vital to Cormac’s well-being. In his English boarding-school there had been pain – no, there had been panic in the way his sense of himself failed when he was obliged to undress in an open dormitory, with only one drawer to call his own at the foot of his bed and a few hooks in the cloakroom for shirts, jackets, mac and coats. There had been other small areas reserved for him in the school: shoe-holes, a shelf in a games cupboard for his sports kit, and another in study hall for books. At night, sleepless, feeling like a martyr whose bones lay scattered on Alpine mountains cold, he would inventory the places where his belongings were, going over them, as a dog might be imagined to console itself by remembering sites where it had buried bones. The martyr image was closer. Cormac had felt dismembered. Mid-terms spent with his mother at the Halfway House had been unspeakably worse. He never ever wanted to think of them again.

  Back home tonight, the relief was so acute he could hardly get used to it. His glee was near-lunatic each time he awoke to awareness of being surrounded by a wardrobe, chest-of-drawers, cupboard, trunk and tuck-box, all stuffed with his own things and all fitted with keys which he kept on a ring under his pillow and touched from time to time with utter satisfaction.

  Outside, in the garden, was the patch which he had marked off as his when he was five. He had planted several old Christmas trees there after they had served their time indoors and had buried a defunct pet rabbit called Mopsy and a dog killed by a car. Most of the plants he had put there during a brief craze for market-gardening – he had sold baby marrows to his mother that season – were long dead, but the trees throve, grew and pursued their vegetable lives steadily, unhampered and on his behalf. They were his trees. The comfort he drew from this astonished him. Experimentally, he tried to feel sympathy with the sap rising through the branches of his trees and found that he actually did experience a coursing tingle in his limbs. He hoped he wasn’t mad or too materialistic and wondered what it would be like to have a family – live humans, sons perhaps, products of your own body, breathing and sleeping in surrounding rooms? He thought he’d love it, although his imagination couldn’t quite make the leap. Did his parents feel that way about him? No, they’d have had more children if they had and wouldn’t have sent him to bloody boarding-school. It didn’t surprise him, really, that they weren’t patriotic. How could you feel for a whole country if you couldn’t even keep a family going properly?

  He hoped they hadn’t let anything happen to his trees while he was away. Cut them down even? His father was capable of it. He didn’t respect mine and thine and had been complaining last year that one tree was blocking a window. Shit, Cormac should have checked before rushing out to the club. He would have done but for the row with his mother. Where were his slippers? Bother. And his electric torch? No good trying to sleep now until he’d at least counted his trees. Then in the morning he’d make a proper inspection.

  *

  James had been caught up in something to which he couldn’t put a name. Was he merely drunk? Outside time? He was certainly between times, for here it was the small hours, and at home – he saw from his digital watch which would have to be taken to a store for adjus
tment – it was late enough to be at work. Whatever the source of his headiness, he liked it. In part it must be this odd old house, canting as though undermined by some subsidence of the soil – or perhaps by some defect in his own eye? It was like a house painted by Soutine, with verticals out of true, bruised shadows, surfaces fuzzy with the bloom of use. Even the silver cutlery, laid out for the scratch meal, had a soft-edged look. Its pattern was half-eroded and its elegance spoiled by the careless mixing in of some stained, pewter spoons. Quite possibly poisonous, these disturbed like black teeth in a mouth. James, whose native city was the capital of cosmetic dentistry, had seen teeth like this in the pubs tonight for the first time ever and experienced unease. The sight of other deformities stepped this up. Mangled features, worthy of a gallery of grotesques, blazing red skin, rheumy eyes – in one case the unmasked absence of an eye – tics and an innocence of orthodontia registered like so many reminders of mortality. James had been shaken. At the same time, his own healthy flesh had begun rampantly and defiantly to make his appetites felt. He was out of true himself, exhilarated, keyed up and, oddly enough, his hostess seemed to be at a similar pitch.

  Their hunger went some way to explaining this. His had been compounded by jet-lag. Hers, apparently, was acute. She explained that she had to eat frequently and got migraines and tremors if she didn’t. Normally, she made sure this didn’t happen but tonight, he gathered, had been trying. Family situations … He apologized but was delighted to have intruded. One relished other people’s dramas and how regret stumbling into one so promising with historical echoings? He got little from her about the aunt but determined to do some research. Owen O’Malley’s sister-in-law? A mad nun? Splendid stuff. He’d hit the jackpot there.

  Mrs Ο struck him as a familiar type. Thanks to Therese. She was not like his wife but there were traits he recognized. He was like a dog-breeder encountering a specimen of his breed. A raiser, say, of Salukis. Both Mrs O’Malley and Therese had that abundant, flouncing hair and willowy backbone. Like a yashmak, the hair provided cover and probably affected their characters. Therese fought her tendency to vagueness, goading herself as the Irishwoman almost certainly did not. There was about them both a hesitant, unfinished area: bruise and bite, doubt and coquetry.