‘With Duffy?’
Grainne pressed her lips together.
‘All right, all right. Your pride is up. You won’t drop him on my sayso. I’m sorry for Michael’s sake but the thing doesn’t concern me enough for me to roll out my big guns.’
‘But the Aunt-Judith angle does?’ What big guns? Which?
It was true that the look which Grainne had imposed on her face felt liable to slip and that her mouth had the unconvincing feel of cardboard. It was a look of outrage and Grainne was not sure that anything could be held to be outrageous here and now. Unless perhaps everything? Starting with Owen Roe’s concern for appearances.
Objectively, the man was surely madder than Aunt Judith? Unless, to be sure, the political scene was as he said it was and mad enough to justify him? Not having paid attention to it, she had no way of knowing. She had not assumed it could affect her. She had thought of it as a stale old play, trundled out by a decreasingly talented rep. company, where attitudes were struck while the audience spent its time in the bar. That such a ham lot should suddenly draw real pistols and shoot into the audience was – what? Possible? Maybe. Maybe they’d shoot each other instead?
‘If your de Gaulle scenario were anything but a pipe-dream, surely you’d have been got rid of by now?’
‘Nobody has any interest in getting rid of me. What harm am I doing? I’m waiting in a disciplined and patriotic manner for the moment when I may be of use.’
‘What about the story that it was you, ten years ago, when you were a government minister, who funnelled funds to the hard boys in the IRA and got them to break away from the other lot and form the Provos? That, if true, leaves you with a lot of responsibility.’
‘Doing nothing also entails responsibility. You might like to recall that at that time the Catholic population up North were like mice before a predator with the Β Specials rampaging through their ghettos. Our people up there were a minority. Unarmed. When they started a Civil Rights campaign they were beaten up, shot at and intimidated. The government up there was partisan. The IRA was a joke. They’d handed in the gun years before – sold their last remaining ones to the Welsh. People forget that. They forget the despair of the Catholics, the graffiti on their walls showing IRA equalling “I ran away”. They forget the climate of the time which had just seen the US National Guard murdering students on US campuses. Then the big bullies in the popular imagination were policemen. Now, because of things which have happened around the world since, the popular bugaboo is a terrorist. But politics isn’t played for a gallery. The aim is not to be the pin-up of the season but to be effective in the long run, and, in the long run, no matter what the media are telling you right now, access to power and privilege has always been won by violence. The violence, later, has to be controlled in order to set up a new status quo. A conciliatory figure has to be found to head up a new government. Someone not too closely involved with the old powers or the new – or, alternatively, someone equally involved with both.’
‘You?’
‘Me.’
‘Up North?’
‘No, no. I’m envisaging a larger shake-up which will bring forth a federal Ireland.’
‘You’d be High King?’
‘For a while.’
‘It sounds like an opera.’
‘You mustn’t think I’m a villain. I didn’t plan all this when we were trying to help our people some years back. I just felt then – and, mind, the story you heard about what happened is not accurate and I’m not about to tell you the true one – I felt that when things get going they can be given a shove in what seems the right direction. A man has few chances in his life to give that shove. It’s the sin of indifference to play safe when you do get your chance. Jesus Christ was very critical of the do-nothing chappies. “Behold I was in prison and ye visited me not, I was hungry and ye fed me not …” Etcetera. He’s angry, mark, at what they did not do. He doesn’t say “you were drunk while I was at Long Kesh”, or “you were whoring or lining your pockets”. A lot of pocket-liners and whore-masters have been good for their people. Men of will and energy tend to sin as well as to save. Probably JC himself, before the censors got at his life story, was less of a Holy Joe.’
‘Well, nobody could say that you have a small opinion of yourself.’
He had impressed her. In spite of herself. It was true that he was better on public than on private matters, even gave the impression of not being out for himself. Grainne was reminded of being thirteen and in love with the principal boy in the Christmas panto who, of course, was not a boy but a girl. For about half a year she had agonized over her doomed and silly love. ‘He’ was a she, yet fought the wicked ogre with a convincing male flourish. Grainne’s present feelings for Owen Roe were similarly snarled.
‘You really think you’re a sort of Christ figure, don’t you!’
They laughed. It was odd. An intimacy had been established. But then, enemies are intimate too. A current bound them.
Impatient to break it, she threw out a random dig:
‘So, I’m in a position, thanks to Aunt Judith, to put paid to your heroics?’
‘Our interests are not divergent.’
‘But I’m sorry for Aunt Judith. I’d like to see her recover her wits.’
It was some physical thing about her cousin, she was thinking. Something he gave off. You let yourself feel that he was appealing to your good sense, when what he’d done was to bludgeon your senses. She had already forgotten what he’d said just now but the feeling he had aroused in her – a sort of submission – was still there.
He was talking again. About Aunt Judith and how fishing in old murk risked bringing up nasty matter which would do nothing for her wits.
‘Even harmless secrets,’ said Owen Roe, ‘because of being hidden, breed maggots.’
She had a sensation that his words themselves were maggots.
‘I’ve got to throw you out now, Owen Roe. It’s late.’
‘In history as in matter, nothing,’ he said, ‘is lost. It comes back in another form. You and Michael thought that the dead time in which you grew up would go on forever. You thought the Troubles were over and the curtain down. It was an intermission. Yours is a peculiarly apathetic generation.’
‘Bath!’ She mimed soaping gestures, washing away his words. ‘I’m off to have one. You can let yourself out. Sorry.’
He picked up his roses. ‘Shall I put these in water?’
They were florists’ flowers: long-stemmed, tight-budded, rusty-red like old scabs or clotted wounds oozing emissions between the bandaging folds of white paper.
‘I don’t care,’ she said ungraciously. ‘I’ll be dead late. Do what you like. Bye.’
She ran upstairs. She had forgotten to bring up the matter of Cormac which she should have done if a bargain was to be struck. Never mind. There would be other opportunities. Too many, she thought, and was grateful for her luncheon date with Duffy, a mild, civil man in whom she hoped to find a knight who could deliver her from the dragon of her lower nature, which was uncreditably responsive to Owen Roe.
It was only when she was in the bath and it was too late to call him back – she’d heard his car grind down the gravel drive – that what he’d said about rolling out guns began to frighten her. What had he meant? Why hadn’t she asked? She must be out of her mind! Dealing with Owen Roe was like walking across a bog. You never knew when the ground might give way under your feet.
*
‘Then why did you bring me here?’
‘To force myself to decide.’
‘Why do you need forcing?’
‘Please,’ she begged, ‘don’t press me. I don’t think I can explain.’
‘Well, then, let’s try.’
‘But if I freeze you’ll hate me.’
‘How could I?’
‘You’ll be angry. It’s humiliating for everyone. Oh, I am a fool!’
‘Don’t you want to make love?’
‘I did but I don�
��t now. I know I’m maddening. Sorry.’
‘Don’t apologize! I think you want me to rape you,’ James told her. ‘But I won’t. Remember there are two of us involved. I do have feelings.’
‘It would be so deliberate now – after all this talk. By daylight.’
‘We can close the blinds.’
‘There aren’t any.’
James felt impatient. ‘You are a tease!’
‘I didn’t want to be. It’s just that it’s important to me that it should work and now it won’t. We’ll both be selfconscious.’
‘It could be worse if we don’t do it,’ James told her. ‘Listen, do you want me to tell you how much I’ve been thinking about you? I have. Every day. This wasn’t an impulse.’
‘Please no. I’m not playing hard to get. I mean …’
‘Well?’
‘It’s – I’ve said it: I’m afraid it would be no good. I’ve waited so long, you see, for long before you came. You can’t imagine. And now it might disappoint me. I might disappoint you. That’s one fear. The other is that it might be marvellous and I wouldn’t be able to do without it.’
‘You’re being funny, aren’t you? Having me on?’
‘No.’
‘So you propose a double bind. Like your namesake did to that poor guy she forced to run off with her. In the Celtic saga. What’s his name?’
Grainne shrugged.
‘It must be an Irish knack. Listen, I’d like to know. Have I bad breath or something? Men are vulnerable too. We’re not made of steel.’
She stood knotting her hands, staring at him, saying nothing. Her eyes glittered with tears. James was at a loss. Maybe she’d had a mastectomy? Or some other thing? What? Was it something he’d done?
‘Does sex frighten you so much?’
‘No. Yes. Not the sex.’
‘Have you been burned badly some time? By some guy who left you, or …’
She put a hand across his mouth. ‘I don’t want to talk about that.’
‘So there was …’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t plan this.’
‘I’ll recover. You haven’t blighted my life.’
‘I …’
‘Why don’t you collect whatever it was you had to pick up here? I’ll wait,’ he told her coldly.
She moved towards an inner door of the cottage. Annoyed? Disappointed? Good.
‘I’ll be as quick as I can,’ she shouted back at him. ‘Have a whiskey meanwhile. It’s in the cupboard. I’m afraid there’s no ice.’
He could think of quips about that. Plenty. But forebore. She’d disappeared into a back room anyway, leaving James to ponder negatives and consider the mountain view. They were miles out in the country in this uncomfortable, rustic cottage to which he had been lured on, he had every right to think, a wild goose chase in which the goose herself had taken the initiative. Well, most of it. He poured himself a whiskey and went back to the window to stare out at the empty lake and lead-coloured mountain which rose on the other side of it. What did people do in a place like this? Beat their meat probably. Goddamn place was probably soggy with onanistic sperm. He felt like running out to add his share to it. Pour it into the grass to be eaten by cows whose milk and butter could feed it back to the already demented population. The stuff was said to be high in protein. Might calm them down. Balance their diet. A paper on a nutritional solution to the problems of old Ireland, to be delivered by J. Duffy, funds supplied courtesy of the Honourable Heirs and data by the dishonourable daughters. She had done a complete about-face. Why? Where had he gone wrong?
Casting his mind back to lunch, he couldn’t see any hitch. They’d had it in his hotel: roast grouse, bread sauce, good feeling – or so he’d thought. He liked her and thought she did him. What had they talked about? Trifles. This and that. Lunch had been all jokes and for what could he take such sustained hilarity but the slow-burning fuse of sex? Savouring his awareness of this, he had played things cool. She was the one whose teeth had flashed and whose cheeks were semaphores. She was a vivid creature and the skin on her forehead was as translucent as a shell.
She ate, he noted, with finicky precision, keeping her elbows pasted to her body like the trussed wings of a fowl and wiping her lips on her napkin. It struck him again that the constraints of this tight little city must be propulsive.
It was their third meeting. Between times he had boiled down impressions of her. Now they dilated like Japanese flowers in water. Her face shifted to homeliness and back so that she seemed to be several women in one. She talked of her aunt, winking, weaving webs of conspiracy designed, he could see, to while away wet hours.
‘If I’m right in my guess, her secret,’ she said, ‘concerns Michael’s grandfather. This means that those who ride his ghostly coat-tails would not like it to emerge. The ruling party,’ she clarified. Others too.’
‘The IRA?’
James would have liked to know for whom to be cheering, if only because cheering linked you to the local scene. The long passion of Irish history mystified him, though he had opened himself to the local geography, responding to the city’s moist appeal. Dublin struck him as cryptic. It was all smear and glare. Rain filtered light. Mist masked it. Water threw it slantwise with the sly trajectories of knives. He learned that cellars flooded with the tide. This made the place seem animate, as though, circulating like a blood-stream, damp must quicken stone. He saw dry rot in a Georgian building, and the frills of flesh-pink mushrooms, bizarrely breaking through walls and woodwork, reinforced his tourist’s notion that the old houses contained embryos of ongoing life. The growths resembled rows of ears – swinish? human? – as though the place were keeping tabs on him. James found, despite the haphazard nature of his arrival here, that he was seeing Dublin as an ancestral womb. How not? His people had come from here. On the streets he kept running into deformed versions of his relatives back home: cartoon caricatures of Irish from the States, where calm apparently descended on driven immigrants or anyway on their offspring.
Studying his face in his morning mirror, James, seeing it with an Irish eye, perceived a blandness in it and a size and pallor suggesting that he had been raised on massive doses of Valium and milk. The stock he came from was around him in its unimproved strain: redder, sharper, more malicious, sometimes more baffled-looking or angrier or merrier – always more something, contorted by pressures, emphatic, a trifle mad. James thought of gardening and the distinctive varieties of a plant which horticulturists will blend to produce a tougher, more marketable product: like the square tomato developed at UC Davis, which can be picked by machine and easily packed for shipping. The analogy didn’t quite work since the tomato-complexion was not his but blazed like scar-tissue on the primitive, distant cousins whom he scrutinized daily in the Dublin streets. There, but for the despair and the get-with-it-ness of two forgotten great-grandfathers, went James Edmund Duffy. Would he have liked to be going there, and thus? Of course not. He preferred to be himself. At the same time, the poetry of lost possibilities played its light on an imaginary James whom in his mind he christened Seamus: the Irish form of his name. Fewer choices would have been open to Seamus and the narrowness of his society might have made him ambitious. Feisty? Probably. Political? Perhaps. James didn’t know enough about Irish politics to decide. Tiring of the game, he dropped it, but, like a man carrying dice in his pocket, returned to it from time to time for a few pensive throws.
Therese had sent a letter in which she imagined him on the plane over being seduced by a Polish countess in an immense fur cloak.
As the two manoeuvred on the seats, James saw the fur darken and turn pale like wind-tossed wheat on the Polish plains.
He was more annoyed than diverted. A diversion was what the letter was meant to be. He knew Therese. She offered a fictional release to ridicule real ones which must, her mockery implied, be as banal as episodes in a blue movie. That she should have gone to the trouble showed anxiety, and this, since she knew him, was of interest. Wa
tching with her clever wardress’s scrutiny, she had noted his chafings at the persona which boxed him in. The letter was a reminder of how tolerant and mature a relationship theirs was. The trouble was that tolerance and maturity were part of the box. To break out of it he, like a Jack-in-the-box of childhood, would need a powerful spring.
Fidgety with self-concern, he had spent the last few days walking through half-gutted eighteenth-century squares whose brick tints ranged from smoked sausage to old port.
The passionate tourist is all idle receptivity and it was in this risky state that he had let himself think about Mrs O’Malley. James’s senses were troubled; murky underneath, their surface was a dazzle of impressions, scattered spokes in need of a hub. He knew what he wanted the hub to be, but moved cautiously.
His emotional confusions were not all of his own making. Alternating come-on looks with chilly ones, his guest reminded him of a rooky cop he had once seen getting his signals mixed and snarling up traffic at an LA intersection. She said he must call her by her first name – pronounced Grawnya. A green light surely?
‘Do you hate it?’ she asked. ‘It’s the name of one of the love heroines of pre-Christian Irish saga. She was betrothed to the ageing warrior-leader, Finn Macool, but forced one of his righting men to run off with her. Apparently, it was an offer the chap couldn’t refuse without loss of honour, but he was done for anyway because Finn’s army chased the pair of them through the length and breadth of Ireland, tracking them so close that they could never pause long enough to sleep two nights in the same place.’
‘Poor guy!’ James’s sympathies were for the lover.
‘“Graw” is the Gaelic for “love”.’ Her smile was like the cop’s white, beckoning glove. ‘I never lived up to it,’ she told him sadly.
The stop-sign came when she’d drunk her coffee and said that she must go but there was no need, after all, for him to come with her to the cottage. It was a domestic chore and she didn’t want to impose it on him. While saying this, she began easing on a pair of suede gloves, coaxing wrinkled skin over the bulge of each knuckle then down to the finger’s roots. Slowly, conscientiously, she eased, smoothed and remarked that, on the other hand, the scenery was striking and he might like the jaunt? On the drive, besides, she could unfold the plan she had conceived for getting her aunt to talk. Stop. Go. Yield. Get ready.
No Country for Young Men Page 18
