‘That’s what you want from me?’
‘Yes.’
‘Does she really know some secret?’
‘Delusions. What could she know? I refused to have her, you know. She’s the nuns’ responsibility. Michael wouldn’t have had her either if he hadn’t intended using her to get you to come back.’ Assessing look. ‘So,’ smiling, ‘in a way it’s your fault she’s here and ready to disgrace us all. Cormac minds.’
‘Will you stop seeing Cormac if I agree?’
‘No.’
‘Why?’
‘You and he are fighting, aren’t you?’
‘It’s none of your bloody business.’
‘Yes it is.’
‘Oh,’ she cried, ‘he’s a male of the blood. You want to recruit him. Do you believe even in the things you tell him? You’ve snared a nestling – he’s fourteen – and you won’t be able to keep tabs on him. That awful moron, Patsy Flynn, spends hours with him. Did you know that? My kind of romanticism – or soft-headedness, whatever, is not lethal. Yours is.’
She felt his immovability. The sheer mass of him in the seat beside her maddened her. There he was: set in his opinions, unwilling to revise them. Her own, in contrast, were like swirls of suds. She felt febrile. He seemed to be made of some collapsed and condensed matter. His unyielding face turned to her and arranged a smile across itself.
‘Silly Grainne!’ Boney teeth gnashed charm. A hand stripped itself of its orthopaedic black glove and reached for her breast, cupping it with authority. She caught the hand, lifted and bit it until she felt her teeth pierce the skin. Blood flowed into her mouth but she kept biting. ‘Bitch! Mad harridan!’ His other hand slapped at her, back and forth, again and again, even after she had released her bite. She felt the blows, felt her face burn and her skin tighten across her skull. Lights flared in front of her eyes but she was tasting his blood with a horrified glee.
Neither spoke as he drove her back. Outside the house, he said, ‘What will you say about your face?’
‘That we went horse-back riding and I fell. And anyway, fuck you.’
She got out and he drove off without further talk. He had a handkerchief knotted around one hand. His bulk at the wheel was adamant in its rock-like heaviness.
*
‘Weep not for me, women of Jerusalem,’ Michael intoned. ‘Weep rather for yourselves and for your children. In your case that still means me, doesn’t it? Michael, the eternal child. Your face is a disaster area. Tears won’t help. I can’t make out how you bruised so much of it.’
‘A branch hit me,’ she said, ‘on the face. Then I fell.’
‘Better stay home for a day or so,’ said Michael. ‘My reputation as a wife-batterer makes me nervous. Some Lib ladies might give me what for. Especially with all the crying. What was that in aid of?’
Grainne had started sniffling in front of the television which they now watched in Aunt Judith’s room. A film had come on before the news, showing a Traditional Crafts Exhibit at the Royal Dublin Society. A man threw pots, a horse was shod, a roof thatched, wool spun and bread baked in a bastable. Grainne’s tears had started at the pots and she had had to leave the room just as the soda-bread was emerging, baked, risen and looking like a blown-up diagram of the human brain.
‘So why were you crying?’
‘One never knows.’
‘Rubbish,’ said Michael. ‘Better vent your spleen. What have I done now?’
‘Why should it be you?’
‘Oho! Is it the uncle again then? Or is the aunt getting you down? We could shunt her off somewhere.’
‘Owen Roe says that you only took her here so as to get me back.’
‘True.’
‘Well she’s not an inanimate object.’
‘Soon will be.’
‘I can’t bear your fake toughness.’
‘What?’ said Michael. ‘Prefer lies to truth? Spinning-wheels and bastable ovens? Images of yourself as Mum with apple cheeks and a big apron baking bread which her six kids will remember all their lives? I’ll have to write a letter to RTE telling them to stop undermining the morale of our housewives with this sort of pap. No more spinning-wheels. Ban the bastable. I could organize a husbands’ picket.’
Michael poured two stiff doses of Paddy. ‘Here,’ he offered. ‘My own panacea. It was an awful life, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘Mum had no teeth. She’d had them removed by tying one end of a stout thread to the door knob and the other to the tooth, then getting someone to bang the door. Dad was a dasher. He kept his canines. You weren’t weeping for the aunt, I hope? Listen, we can have her re-institutionalized and then why don’t you get yourself some sort of job?’
‘You know damn well that anything I’d earn would go on taxes. I don’t want the sort of job Marie-Antoinette had at the dairy.’
‘I don’t see why not. She might have done better if she’d stuck to it. The alternative, which I do not recommend,’ said Michael with what sounded like a stab of anxiety, ‘is leaving me and Cormac to our own unreliable devices and going off to join the ranks of poor cows sitting in bed-sitting rooms looking for their “identity” and tapping out letters to Spare Rib.’
‘How do you know about them?’
‘I see them in the pubs,’ he told her. ‘They come in with their little string bags full of convenience food and pick up their male equivalents then, from reports reaching your roving correspondent, sex sometimes ensues in the dusty bed-sits of Dun Laoghaire and Rathgar, followed usually by revulsion, self-hatred and a renewal of vows to the goddess, Diana.’
‘Your own patroness.’
‘Is that what you think?’
‘No.’
These parody-rows could turn real at any point. They were a testing of thin ice and at some point you always fell through.
‘Of course not,’ she lied, putting off the moment. Michael’s derision of people who reached out for a little sex and warmth, maybe even passion, enraged her. Precisely because it was so predictable, it hit a nerve. Predictable. Familiar. Men in this country had been educated by clerics and, though they might react for a while against these mentors, sooner or later they could be relied on to start talking about love-making the way he just had. Whether they were passionate men like Owen Roe, or frigid ones like Michael, either way, they needed the tongs of humour to pick up the subject at all. Monastic tradition described woman as a bag of shit and it followed that sexual release into such a receptacle was a topic about as fit for sober discussion as a bowel movement.
Or was the snideness guilt? Could Michael himself have been visiting the bed-sits of Rathgar? While she was away? Getting it up for some girl he might think of as ‘light’ and therefore sexy? Or who was just younger or prettier or simply different? Desolated, Grainne had to brace herself to ask:
‘Did you sleep with anyone while I was in London?’
‘No.’
‘Why not?’
‘Too drunk mostly. Too depressed.’
Shit! This – surely the worst of all possible answers? – failed to flatter either of them. Unfairly, she wished he had slept with someone. It would have been a sign of life. ‘Do you think,’ she asked provocatively, ‘that if we were mature we would opt for the brave solution?’
‘What’s that?’
‘Break up a bad marriage?’
‘What’s so bad about our marriage?’ he wanted to know. Did she imagine a flicker of panic under the hearty tone? ‘I should show you “bad”.’ He laughed. ‘Make you count your blessings. I should put on a homecrafts exhibition: beat the daylights outa you, bring a concubine under the conjugal roof, sully the nuptial bed, and bash Cormac’s brains in so that he ends up more moronic than he started out.’
These examples came from the pubs, she knew: Michael’s university and club. He’d heard them from lawyers. They were true.
‘They call that sado-masochism,’ she said, with an effort at flippancy. ‘People pay for it.’ Cards in Lo
ndon tobacconist’s windows, she was thinking: discipline and bondage; severe Swedish lessons; leather; rubber; police-women’s uniforms. Lonely, lonely bed-sit-land where people have nothing in common but their yearnings. He’s right. I couldn’t stand it. Besides, there’s Cormac.
But were yearnings maybe a deep thing to have in common, after all? Discipline-and-bondage might correspond to a need of the soul.
In the Home for Battered Wives, she had heard of women who provoked their men to hit them. ‘It’s a form of suicide,’ a social worker had told her. But maybe it was the opposite? An effort to enliven a dead situation?
‘What right have you to be unhappy?’ Michael was sliding towards seriousness and acrimony. ‘You have leisure,’ he accused. ‘No kids pulling at your tits or skirts. I don’t even insist on your being a good housewife. You have all the time in the world to fulfil yourself in ways of your own. Take up water-colouring. Preserve Georgian Dublin. Find your own outlets, for Christ’s sake. Don’t come expecting me to live your life for you. I provide a home. More or less provide it. Anyway it’s there. What more am I expected to do?’
Cleave to her. Be one flesh with her. Why had she ever thought he might? Where had she even got the notion?
From the prayerbook, that was where. She’d only recently realized this. Tidying out some drawers, she had come on prayers she had said all her girlhood. They astounded her and yet, for all that time, she had taken them for granted, let them slip into her subliminal consciousness and programme her forever: requests, no, directions to the Divine Lover taken at the age of seven, whom no other after had managed to emulate:
Soul of Christ sanctify me.
Body of Christ save me.
Blood of Christ inebriate me.
Water from the side of Christ wash me.
Oh Good Jesus, hear me.
Within thy wounds hide me.
Never let me be separated from thee …
She had separated herself. Gone dry in the heart. Her lovers now were blighted. Michael was forever bathing his dried-out throat in pubs. Her fault? How dare she complain? Tell him? No.
Did she believe any of this?
The submerged part of her did. The part afraid to talk or tell, or mostly even think, except now, lubrified by the Paddy, the bottled barley-juice which was anyway finished, the bottle up-ended and the conversation, too, run dry. It had been parody anyway: all in quotation marks, bracketed between their little ears, joke gossip-column, joke pub-talk, joke God-knew-what. That didn’t mean that you didn’t mean what you said, but it let the other person pretend they didn’t realize. Talk between her and Michael always went that way. They always let each other off the hook in the end. For this was marriage, a modus vivendi, and who believed in final solutions anyway?
‘I’m going to bed.’
‘OΚ. I’ll lock up.’
‘Don’t forget to put out the cat.’
‘No.’
Later, they’d lie together, like a four-armed creature fearful of amputation. At some point, one or other might whisper through the darkness the old school-yard word: ‘Pax?’
‘Pax.’
8
The next day the doorbell rang and there was Owen Roe holding roses.
‘If those are for me you can put them where the Kerryman put the sixpence.’
‘I’ve got to talk to you.’
‘Will I need police protection?’
‘I’m sorry about your face.’ He stretched out a bandaged hand. ‘I told the doctor it was a bulldog.’
‘Doctor? You went to a doctor? Did you think I had a poisoned tooth?’
‘Human mouths,’ he said seriously, ‘are less hygienic than dogs’.’
‘Come in.’
‘Is Michael home?’
‘No, but I have a luncheon date.’
‘Going to keep it with that face?’
‘Why not? It’ll be a talking point. Besides, I’ll wear make-up.’
By now they were in the drawing room. Owen Roe set his roses on a chair.
‘Okay if I sit? I didn’t get across the essential thing I wanted to say last time. Please, hear me out. You’re sure Michael’s not here?’
‘What if he were?’
‘It was because of him that I broke our thing off.’
Grainne began to laugh.
‘It’s true. I didn’t want him hurt.’
‘You’ve often hurt Michael.’
‘What I mean is I didn’t want him collapsing into a million whimpering fragments.’
‘Christ, Owen Roe, whatever about your public rhetoric, your private efforts stink.’
‘What I’d like you to get into your brain is that he could not take a scandal about you. Think about this, will you? Why can’t you do your philandering across the water, anyway? It’s traditional. I thought you knew that. I thought you were having a lezzy affair in that Battered Wives hole? With the woman who runs it? The thing you don’t seem to realize is that people here have always managed to have their fun and heaven too by playing their cards close to their chests. You don’t seem to know how to do that. That’s your trouble. You’ve lost the inherited canniness of the peasant and haven’t acquired new savvy. You’re dangerous – like a mad bulldog.’ Owen Roe waved his injured hand at her. ‘Ask any small-town solicitor about the revelations that turn up in wills: bastards concealed, incest, life-long lovers who saw each other regularly without anyone suspecting. There’s nothing new about adultery. What’s new is the carelessness. A man in my position is a natural target for blackmail. I have to watch it. The point is that this American is rushing in in football boots where angels fear to tread.’
‘So I’m a bad picker of men?’
‘If it came to that, I could fix you up with a selection of safe friends.’ Owen Roe had a trick of taking ironic statements straight: pulling the rug of humour out from under you.
Grainne looked at herself in the mirror. ‘I seem to lack instinct. Do I throw the poker at you now? Ask for a list of candidates? My breath’s gone the wrong way. That’s a gasp, I suppose?’ Her voice bobbed spurtily. ‘I’m gasping in moral shock,’ said the voice. ‘Isn’t that interesting? It means I have morals.’
‘You’re stiff with them,’ he told her impatiently. ‘You’re a naive woman, Grainne. Rigid. To function effectively in society, one’s got to be able to double think. That’s what divides independent from old-fashioned women. It separates statesmen from heroes, which is why it is not impossible that my respected Da may have done things which it would be as well didn’t come to light.’
‘Aunt Judith’s secret?’ She pounced. ‘That’s what you’re interested in then? Why? How could it matter? Do you know what it is? Yesterday, you denied it existed.’
It was like him to change things round. Badgering her. Yesterday it had suited him to say there was no secret. Today the opposite filled the bill.
Owen Roe spread his legs and looked judicious. Cartoonish stances increased his presence. He said he didn’t know what the secret might be.
‘But there are secrets, stories, dirt which could discredit half the party. Things get done in a Civil War that might look criminal in peace-time. No time for due process. You may imagine. But, today, because of the new terrorists, nobody wants to be seen being too imaginative …’
‘Surely, time …’
Owen Roe shrugged. ‘Politics here is very tribal, remember. Families could be discredited. Then there are the sons of victims …’
She had never decided whether or not this man was intelligent. He boasted suspiciously much about his own canniness and how he had put important people right about things they should have known. Owen Roe was the sort of man who tells people how to mend a puncture. ‘Yes,’ he would say in a satisfied voice. ‘People are always surprised at my knowing things like that.’ As if he were Moses. He talked about football as if it was commendably human of him to take an interest. This could be put down to his having never been married. A wife would have warned him about bo
ring people – and maybe she’d have been doing him a disservice? The bore’s self-love propelled Owen Roe like a motor and his animal exuberance made you forgive him. There was something disarming about such assurance. Something antique and almost gone from the world. He laid down the law as old men must have done from thrones and pulpits and earth mounds down all the centuries when the law had been seen as unchanging and reliable.
‘People have long memories,’ said Owen Roe. To this day, you can hear fellows in bars speculating about the identity of Kevin O’Higgins’ murderers.’
‘That was in 1927, surely? Judith had been in the convent five years.’
‘I didn’t mean she’d come up with that. Do you know what an analogy is, Grainne?’
‘What I know is that you don’t give a tinker’s damn for the party. You don’t give a damn for anyone except yourself.’
‘And the country. The country for its own sake and myself because it may need me.’
‘You would say that.’
‘General de Gaulle too was blamed for his egotism and intransigence …’
‘How did you earn the comparison with de Gaulle?’
‘A pantomime horse, my dear, takes two men to animate it. I aspire only to be the front legs. The rear, the past, the equivalent of de Gaulle’s resistance record, is provided by my illustrious Da.’
‘And it’s the back legs of your Pegasus that Aunt Judith might maim?’
‘Congratulations. You got there.’
Owen Roe produced his cigarettes. ‘Mind if I smoke?’
She shrugged.
‘Funny,’ he said, ‘the way this brings us close. You and me.’
‘You think so, do you?’
‘I know so. You feel it too. Thence all the effort at irony. Your facial muscles must be stiff. It’s a pity the way things fall out. We could have got along.’
‘My luncheon date is early,’ she told him. ‘If you’re through …’
No Country for Young Men Page 17
