No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  Over the years, as he cut down his work-outs to an hour a day, he began to feel his character change. He became curious about less healthy things and about the millions of people who did not live as he did but might have some knack for living which eluded him. At this time, he was working in the Department of Theater Arts, a hybrid position since he had no artistic skills but thrilled to the theatre’s sensual surprise. What he would have liked was to catch some of this in his own life. If his athletic training hadn’t left its mark on him, he might have been ready to fool around with the occult or join some freak sect. Drugs, however, were unhealthy and, besides, he had been raised by a lapsed Catholic mother – née Maccantaggart – who sent him to parochial school for a while when he was four and occasionally thereafter took him to midnight mass on Christmas Eve. It was not a big exposure to Catholicism but sufficient to make him feel that this was the club to join if ever he were to feel it was time to stop going it alone.

  With this in mind, he had at one stage taken courses in Anglo-Irish literature and been struck by the difficulties people in his ancestral island seemed to experience in living, dating, and just plain getting along together. He was nagged by a suspicion that they might perhaps feel things more? Certainly the poet, Yeats, had managed to get a remarkable high out of his failures with women and passed it on to James who, never having got the like from his own successes, went so far as to learn off the lines asking:

  Does the imagination dwell the most

  Upon a woman gained or woman lost?

  If on the lost, admit you turned aside

  From a great labyrinth out of pride …

  or – or some such. The words which hooked him were ‘great labyrinth’. He had never previously thought of a woman in such terms and, when he tried applying them, found that they slid off the smooth-skinned, willing and limited girl, whoever she was, with whom he happened to be sleeping. Now, in Ireland, the words came back to him. He turned them over in his mouth like bits of fruit and began to wonder whether not making it with a woman might not be a necessary preliminary to seeing her like this?

  James had no disdain for men who could not or would not let themselves score sexually. He remembered from his football days that, in the clutch, an emotional high could count as much as skill. He knew about the energy which comes in the pit of exhaustion and that negatives can breed positives. He was ready to believe that a repeatedly defeated island, throttled by ancient and fermented rage, might be the place to breed passions of a transporting magnitude. He was eager to grapple with such a passion and for the apparatus of negation which must, like a trampoline, catapult him into ecstatic orbit.

  He did not, at the same time, want to distress his wife.

  *

  The day after her visit to the RTE studios, Grainne’s cousin came to call. Owen Roe was a redhead like herself, large, assured, youthful for his fifty or so years, a bit bloated about the gills, with jutting genitals which made a fold in his cavalry twill trousers – he dressed to the right – and a righteous blue eye which could, when useful, be made to glow like a gas glimmer. He wore a fancy-dress blend often sported in Dublin, especially in Horse-Show Week: half squire, half gigolo with a dash of the bookie. She knew that if she were to get close he would smell of Ho Hang and, if closer, of more personal odours. She knew this because, the year before, she had gone to bed with him on three occasions. The affair had been brief and, on his part, brutal, for he had started it with a flourish which had led her to expect something slow-moving and prolonged. She had hoped for roses and respect and been ready to understand if he should be creaky, corsetted or unable always to perform. Needing indulgence herself, she had been ready to be indulgent in return.

  Instead, quite abruptly, after three surprisingly vigorous and – to her mind – satisfactory beddings, he had, on running into her one noon in Nassau Street, remarked by way of hail and farewell: ‘It’s over!’

  They were hemmed in at the time by a crowd waiting for a traffic light and, since this was not what she had been expecting to hear, she did not take it in. Her eyes had widened, she remembered, and she had looked at him – it was mortifying to recall – with a surrendering sigh.

  ‘Over!’

  Behind and above his head, the leaves of the Trinity College trees hung, lustreless, like drying tea-dregs, against a porcelain sky.

  ‘Sorry?’ she questioned. ‘I don’t quite …?’

  ‘So am I.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Us. Over.’

  The light changed then and he left her faltering on the kerb.

  She had tried to bury the memory. But, though she managed this to an extent – her path and her cousin’s crossed more rarely than she might have feared – she continued to feel undermined.

  It was her first affair and had taken place largely in silence since, between stealthy physical bouts, there had scarcely been time to do more than recite some verses of early Yeats.

  I would that we were, my beloved,

  White birrrds on the foam of the sea …

  His defection left her at a loss. Doubts about her mind, body, and amorous technique had prevented her looking another man in the eye since. Until now. And now, a year later, here was Owen Roe on her doorstep.

  ‘Gracious!’ she said with feeble venom. ‘To what do I owe the honour? Michael’s out and so, I’m glad to say, is Cormac. I wish you’d stop seeing him, by the way.’

  Owen Roe raised a gloved hand. ‘We’ll talk about Cormac later if you don’t mind. You’re the one I came to see.’

  Her supply of ironic looks was running out.

  He followed her in the door. ‘This house is ramshackle!’ He reached with the tip of his expensive umbrella towards a fur of dust lying below the fanlight. ‘Our social model was a decaying class. The Anglo-Irish were dirty. They’d gone soft at the core. Morally soft.’

  Grainne wondered about her morals and her core and why he had treated her as he had. The memory, having been kept suppressed, jumped up at her, fresh with implications.

  ‘Will you come for a walk with me?’ he asked.

  ‘Walk?’

  ‘I need to talk to you.’

  ‘Oh?’

  Owen Roe burst into an Edwardian song:

  ‘Madame will you walk? Madame will you talk?

  Madame, will you walk and talk with me?’

  He put a finger along the side of his nose. ‘Outside.’

  She shrugged, opened the hall-cupboard door, unhooked her macintosh, put it on and followed him out. He took her elbow.

  ‘Still angry with me?’

  There seemed no adequate answer to this.

  ‘Our social model,’ she supposed, ‘left you unguided? You took French leave.’

  He squeezed the elbow. ‘You’re a grand girl, Grainne. Great spirit!’

  ‘You took your time deciding about that! A bit Scotch, aren’t you? Slow?’ But she had no heart for badinage. He had hurt her and the hurt had gone through her like the split in a carcass. For months last year she had felt herself morally flayed, no: it was physical. She used to wake up with the itching shame of it. Like meat. Reduced. Devalued. She shook off the policeman’s hold he had on her elbow. ‘What is it you want, anyhow?’

  ‘Listen, Grainne, perhaps I should have told you at the time. Someone sent me an anonymous letter. I couldn’t afford scandal. Neither could you.’

  ‘I don’t believe you.’

  Cars were few in this residential district whose men were at work. It was the adultery hour she supposed, and wondered was any going on behind the blind windows pearly with reflections of sky. Her feet, held by the suction of the mud, came away with a sound like the kiss men on building-sites always threw at her. Did her need stick out a mile then? The place felt unleavened. Gardens were deep in leafmould and shrubs fastened to the ground by proliferations of saplings.

  I hate this place, she thought.

  She couldn’t bring herself to reproach him for the way he had broken with her.
If he can’t see it himself, she thought, and shook her head to empty it of memories. To hell with him anyway.

  ‘Social model!’ She laughed.

  She had hoped that Owen Roe, a relative and an older male, would have sympathy for her. She had been looking for more than sex, or more through sex. Perhaps she had seen him as a patriarchal figure, the head of the family, a fountainhead of strength? Perhaps he had encouraged this? The shit, she thought. He still roused strong sensual reactions in her. Yes, he had encouraged that line of thought. She remembered looking up the word ‘endogamy’ in a dictionary after one conversation they’d had. He had been talking about how women could always rely on men of their own tribe to respect and look out for them.

  ‘My position,’ he was saying, ‘was delicate, Grainne. Explosive. At that particular time. I can’t tell you more than that there was something in the wind which then didn’t pan out. Came to nothing. But my phone was being tapped. I had to stop our thing fast before it got going. I was thinking of you too.’

  She made a derisive noise.

  ‘I mean it.’

  ‘You mean what?’

  ‘It threatened to get out of hand.’

  ‘Would you, Owen Roe, be paying me a left-handed compliment? Implying that you took me seriously or nearly did?’

  Leather-clad hands closed on hers. They looked, she thought, orthopaedic. ‘What else have I been saying for the last ten minutes?’

  Dark ilexes dripped. They had come close to the Botanic Gardens. Railing spikes were ranged like spears. He smelled of expensive macintosh: rubber, leather, metal, perhaps guns? He smelled like the insides of a car. She didn’t listen to his talk: a retrospective wooing of her, a shameless attempt to turn a year’s neglect into a plea for her gratitude. Plámás, she thought. Manipulation. You had to admire his gall. He’d come round soon to what he wanted. Meanwhile, she noted with distaste that he excited her physically. He aroused her so excruciatingly that she wanted to lie down right now for him in the middle of the muddy road and let him plough through her like a car. Like a car with radial tires which would sweep over and crush and kill her dead. At the same time she didn’t want this at all. Did? Didn’t? She hated them both: herself and him. What one had to do was to walk in a contained fashion along this slippery road, under the dripping evergreens, and answer with sharp, needling remarks to conceal the havoc he was wreaking in one’s lower self. Then one must go home, get tea, run the house and attempt to be socially adequate. How many of the mild faces you met concealed this sort of inner madness? Five per cent? Ten? All? A projected very live part of herself was kneeling in the mud unbuttoning Owen Roe and rubbing its face in his huge, horrible genitals. If the American were to make love to her would she be cured? Immunized?

  Owen Roe’s attraction was in direct ratio to his vitality. In politics too he charmed people and was hated. His constituency gave him an enormous vote but opponents said this was because of bribery.

  ‘Who would tap your phone?’ she asked. ‘You used to be in the Cabinet. You’re still a TD. Surely you do the tapping?’

  ‘I’m a loner. The rest are against me. Here’s my car. Come for a spin?’

  They had circled and were back at her house. A spin! She remembered Michael’s father saying that – he had been courting her for Michael. A steady girl, he’d thought, who’d get his son back on the rails. ‘Spin’ was a bicycling generation’s word. Cars didn’t spin. Especially Owen Roe’s. It was a Mercedes. Dark. Pompous. Expensive and geometric; it was like a portrait of Owen Roe himself. Like a desk or the horse part of a centaur, it clapped on to the man in charge and enlarged him.

  She got in, slammed the door and smelled leather. ‘In cars like this,’ she remarked, ‘the driver becomes a sort of appendage.’

  ‘The driver drives,’ her cousin told her and slipped into gear. ‘You’re an idle woman, Grainne. Don’t try to absolve yourself by pretending that we’re driven by currents we can’t control.’

  When he stopped talking, the motor seemed to be a prolongation of his voice. They were on the sea road heading through Booterstown. Beach stretched to the horizon. The tide ebbed back for what looked like a mile, leaving pools and rivulets: wet wounds in the sand and a smell of what might be fish or sewage.

  ‘You hurt me badly,’ she told him instructively. It was the sort of thing he’d have to be told. ‘Women are vulnerable, after all. I have a little pride.’

  ‘Women are as tough as old boots,’ said Owen Roe with assurance. ‘They outlive men, don’t they? I remember my had a hard furrow to plough in the background, which, let me tell you, is worse than the foreground. You get none of the excitement. You just worry and eat out your liver and wait for the hero to come home from fighting, in the fighting times, and from banquets, when he’s in government, and put up with his ulcers and bad breath.’

  Had it been like that then, she wondered? Owen Roe was usually secretive about his father.

  ‘We recited the rosary together every night when he was at home. She died in the end of cancer of the throat.’

  ‘Maybe the cancer came from swallowed rage at all those Hail Marys? The French say your blood goes bad when you rage. Ne te fais pas de mauvais sang, they say.’

  ‘Ah, French!’ His voice was spiteful. She’d annoyed him. ‘You went to a finishing school, didn’t you? You’re one of the small successes of our social revolution.’

  ‘I suppose I’m being insulted?’

  ‘No, I sympathize, really. My old man, to give him his due, didn’t want our daughters turned into imitation English-women. He wanted a Gaelic Ireland. But economics bested him. We needed jobs for our people and to have jobs you have to have entrepreneurs, and entrepreneurs, like your Daddy, send their daughters to finishing school. So much of their lives goes in boot-licking, they have to have an outlet for their idealism: daughters. Not wives. Wives have to muck in. Where there’s muck there’s brass, as the North-of-Englanders say. But daughters are what it’s all seen as being for. They’re kept above the dirt. Unfitted for living.’

  Tit for tat. You touch my mother and see what I’ll say about your Daddy the businessman. Grainne’s father had been in the building trade.

  ‘Unfitted because they become wives who then do have to muck in? Supposing they become mistresses?’

  ‘It’s not a career,’ he told her. ‘Not a way of life. Not here.’

  ‘Well, you like bed enough!’

  ‘I like it. I don’t spend my time thinking about it.’

  ‘So I was the wrong partner? Too demanding?’ You were meant to learn from your mistakes, weren’t you? Was she unfit, she worried? In what way?

  ‘Your trouble was scruples. Making mountains out of molehills.’ He waved a hand. ‘The wrong woman for a politician. Do you know that the Sicilians say “politics is sweeter than sex”? Yes. Well, no reason not to combine them – until one starts to threaten the other. That happens when the woman – it’s always the woman – makes a big production out of going to bed. Bed’s simple really.’

  He talked with assurance, driving, mashing up things – love, politics – the way a garbage-disposer mashes them to unrecognizable, recyclable, grey flitters. Simple, he repeated. Whambam. Over in seconds. The idea of Almighty God watching your activities between the sheets was ludicrous. Calling it a sin! He laughed. ‘The nuns ruined you, you know, Grainne. They renounce the flesh and are haunted ever more by a wondrous notion of it which they pass on to lassies like you who end up thinking you have the Holy Grail between your legs and that some knight is going to come and find it.’ Owen Roe turned to look at her. He had parked the car on the Vico Road, a lovers’ lane. Three blue mountains across the bay corresponded to the hill from which they watched them. ‘I hear you’ve got a new lover,’ he said, ‘the little American?’

  She was too surprised to be angry. Then she thought of something: ‘Cormac told you?’ Who else could? Now she was furious. ‘What have you done to him? Listen, Michael and I want you to keep away from
him.’

  ‘I’ve always regarded myself as in loco parentis to Cormac.’

  She screamed: ‘He’s not an orphan.’

  ‘Grainne, I make myself available. That’s all. He drops round. We chat. Sometimes I take him for a run up to the cottage or a ride on Calary Bog. A boy his age needs an outlet.’

  In her mind’s eye Owen Roe galloped, broad backside raised over the horse’s broader one, as he negotiated a fence. Whack fol de diddle o! He was the embodiment of a coarse exuberance in their joint heritage.

  ‘He talks to me,’ said Owen Roe.

  ‘Talk! There was that target practice!’

  ‘That was last year. Anyway it was harmless. He needs to get things off his chest. It was from him I learned how loopy old Judith is. I think you’d be doing the family a disservice if you let this young man interview her.’ This was said with emphasis.

  ‘He’s making a pro-IRA film. You are said to be the IRA’s man in the Dáil. Why don’t you talk to him yourself?’

  Owen Roe shrugged. ‘I don’t want to pull rank, rouse hackles. He might turn round and sell the interview elsewhere. Journalist Johnnies are like that. I’d prefer that you told him Judith isn’t up to it. That she’s ill or something.’