No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  Wondering at his disappointment, he saw that he had moved from dallying with the prospect of a sexual quickie, such as red-blooded tourists hope to fit in between sight-seeing tours. Quite what he had moved towards was unclear. He guessed he must be letting himself hope for some dream of wholeness or newness, for some change in his way of being, such as old Celtic ladies had had a way of offering men who let themselves be lured on strange trips. In Celtic tales, it was the woman who rode by on a white horse and bade the man leap up behind her.

  Better haul in your imagination, James Edmund, he warned himself. The Irish Church had been tight-assed about sex and Grainne Ο was no pagan princess.

  Living in this fishbowl town with her highly visible relatives, she would not have had much chance to learn about pleasure. It struck him that the scar-tissue faces he’d seen on the streets were the result of ways of living which would have left less visible scars. You didn’t learn to enjoy in one generation. Americans knew that, having watched fortunes rise like yoyos while habits lagged. He could teach her though. Ridiculous: turning his coming affair into a project. Yet why not?

  ‘Why are you laughing?’

  He told her he’d thought of some joke. No, not worth telling. Exhilarated, he looked at her with new passion. Yes, he said firmly, he wanted to come.

  ‘I must explain about Aunt Judith,’ she said.

  As she drove through the outer city – grey chrysalis of walls within walls, wadded like layers in a wet wasp’s nest – he let her talk about the aunt who, he must keep remembering, was not only the pretext for this jaunt but could also be a Queen Lear, a Celtic seer or one of those sly old hags whose knowledge turns out to be of use.

  He had been reading the newspapers of 1921 in the National Library and realized that it had been a time of chaos. Factions. Guerrilla war. He wondered how it had been for that American, Driscoll: an earlier, simpler sort of man than you got nowadays in the States. James was curious about him. What would he have been like? Streetsmart Irish? A devious politician? Did he come over here from ambition, intending to go back and use the experience with the Boston Irish? And did he find the people here as alien as James did? O’Toole’s hints about sinister machinations came to mind but did not hold James’s attention. The old man had stumbled late in life on the conspiracy theory of history and was as dazzled by it as people had been back in the days when underground radio stations in LA devoted six-hour programmes to the Kennedy murders. Another era: close but gone.

  Grainne O unfolded her plan for reawakening her aunt’s memory. It involved returning her to the scenes of her youth and most specifically to an Anglo-Irish mansion which had been requisitioned one night in the spring of 1921 for the peaceful purposes of holding a ball.

  ‘It seems the fighting men wanted to enjoy the fruits of revolution while the revolution was still in progress.’ She sounded fired by the notion. ‘Tricky,’ she commented, ‘but worth trying when you think how quickly revolutions can turn sour.’

  The story was a version of the Cinderella story in which not one but all dancers were interlopers from the world of cinders, and doom had dangled, exploding after midnight when the Black and Tans burst in with guns blazing. One of the men arrested that night was Michael’s grandfather. Judith’s brother-in-law. Obviously, she would remember the event.

  ‘I got her on the subject,’ said Grainne, ‘and she knew details I had never heard. I asked was Sparky Driscoll there and she said no, but that she herself had taken him to visit the place some months later. Her family knew the caretaker, you see. Now the lucky thing is that that same caretaker is still alive and living in the house. Owns it, in fact, but that’s another story. Talking to him would surely jerk her out of her forgetfulness. We could drive her down there on a visit, if you like.’

  ‘We?’

  ‘Well, you can’t go off with Aunt Judith on your own, you know. I’d have to be along. I thought,’ said Grainne, ‘we should manage the thing in easy stages and spend a night or so in the local hotel. Timmy himself might interest you. He’s the onetime caretaker who now owns the great house. He must have known Aunt Judith quite well and he has lots to say on his own account. The place is worth seeing too.’

  ‘Could we film it?’ James collected his wits. Lights green as emeralds were exploding in his head.

  ‘Shouldn’t be any problem.’ She edged the car off the road on to an overgrown grass track. The bonnet nosed through meshed bramble shoots. ‘Here’s the cottage.’

  It was rectangular like a shoebox, and looked no more connected with the landscape than debris might, which had been thrown there by long-gone picnickers and grown mossy and eroded over the wet years.

  ‘It’s a bit Spartan.’ Grainne got out of the car and fumbled under stones for a key. ‘It belonged to Michael’s grandfather whose publicized love of frugality was quite genuine.’

  James followed her into a room smelling of mould.

  ‘Pff! Needs airing. I’ll light a fire and we can have tea. He,’ she said of the grandfather, ‘was the bane of our diplomats when he travelled. Would eat nothing but eggs, salt bacon and boiled potatoes. You may imagine the embarrassment at dinner-parties, since, if it was good enough for him, why not for them and their guests? Also, for a long while he refused to wear a dinner-jacket, not to mention morning-trousers. That generation was more egalitarian than the Soviets.’

  James noted armchairs angular as choir stalls and thorny with tweed. A fireplace had a cheap tile surround which had started to peel from the wall.

  ‘I’d do it over if it was mine,’ she said. ‘It belongs to a cousin. Well, at least the fire’s been laid.’

  James looked round. ‘I like the austerity,’ he decided. ‘It surprises me for a governing class, but I like it.’

  ‘All changed now. In the Thirties times were tough. There was an economic war with England and later they probably had to be very foxy if they were to walk the tightrope between excitable elements in the country and the British threat to invade and grab back the ports. Churchill threatened to do that in, I think, 1940. Chaos was constantly threatening. “Chassis” O’Casey called it. People still quote his line: “The whole world is in a state of chassis”. Wryly. “Chassis” is back, you see.’

  ‘Not just here.’

  ‘No, but here it’s familiar.’

  ‘Are you afraid of feeling?’

  She gave him a sharp look. ‘It needs channelling, don’t you think? Like gas.’

  ‘Romantic scenery,’ James peered out of a window.

  Pricking through beards of foliage, he made out the gleam of a lake. Coot flew across it and reeds, topped by thick pods, moved in rhythm to the suck of the waters. A mountain surged upwards like a mace. His ancestors might well have fled from some barren place like this. By that move they had given him his chance and destroyed their memory – a double bonus.

  This country was populated with pillars of salt. The fancy made him think of running his tongue across Grainne O’Malley’s salt-white teeth.

  ‘It’s easy for you,’ she was panting behind him. ‘Americans,’ pant, ‘are the new aristocrats.’

  Turning, he found her on her knees, blowing into a wet fire. Green smoke spurted and her cheeks were like drawings of the wind in the margins of old maps.

  ‘Let me do that.’

  ‘It’s done,’ she said, scrambling up. ‘But the blood’s gone from my head. I’m seeing black.’ Groping for his steadying hand, she fell into his arms.

  It was then that he made his move and was repulsed. He called her a tease, accusing her of giving off signals like a wigwag.

  ‘You misread them!’ She bolted for the protection of brogue and laughter: ‘We’ll have none of that now, Misther Duffy,’ she clowned. ‘What about a nice cuppa to settle yer fancy?’

  Defeated, he let her lead him into the kitchen where, while waiting for water to boil, she showed photographs of the heroes of the Twenties looking plebeian in cloth caps. They depressed him. Upward striving,
ambition, politics depressed him. He would have liked to lie on this frugal floor with her and fuck. Strain was alien to him except in sport, where the prize was immediate. Even that seemed senseless suddenly. Was he getting old? He wanted pleasure now and for her to have it. Her pieties saddened him and so did the laughing faces in the photos, several of which lacked teeth.

  A photoportrait of Owen O’Malley poised before a trompe-l’œil Grecian pillar reminded James of poor immigrants’ mementoes, whose formality evokes what it was intended to blot out: the decades of thrift and hope. Sexual parsimony would have been the pivot of such lives and here was this opulent granddaughter still stuck with the habit.

  ‘Now, now, now, now!’ he found himself grinding the words like nuts between his teeth, horrified for her and generations like her. If he’d been the Holy Ghost gifted with ubiquity, he’d have descended in the form of fire on every sad spinster, neglected wife and virgin in the land.

  ‘How,’ he asked, as they sat over tea and stale biscuits by the smoking fire and she worried about possible jackdaws in the chimney, ‘how does one woo a decent married Irish-woman?’

  She looked away from him, smoothing her skirt. Her eyelids trembled and he noted the scatter of freckles under each eye. Blue-veined lids. Hair the colour of a golden cocker’s. Her mouth shut pursily over those sensual teeth. Thinking. He could imagine the flavour of her armpits. They’d be reddish too, grainy, the colour of young carrots crisp with earth. Immured in her fears, whatever they were. The husband, remember, was a lush. Loyalties there would be fierce. Weaklings knew how to manipulate their mates.

  ‘I could have gone to bed with you before,’ she said seriously. ‘While you were a stranger. Like a demon lover – you know, anonymous, faceless. Now it’s not so easy.’

  ‘Another double bind!’ He jeered. ‘You’re mistress of the game if mistress only of that.’ A cheap taunt if her concern was with emotional accuracy. ‘I could put a bag over my head,’ he suggested.

  But she had gone to collect whatever it was she’d come to get in the back room of the cottage and, left alone, he began to feel annoyed with himself for not trying to make things easier for her. She was like a trotter suddenly required to convert to a gallop. It hit him that anyway, he was not really eager to jerk her out of her puritanism. He liked the tartness which had been missing from so many of his sexual encounters. He’d had a lot since marriage. Instant intimacy was a necessity in a town like Los Angeles, if there was to be intimacy at all and, besides, there was a whole range of people who could not communicate verbally. If you wanted to know them you had to find other ways. James did. They were his antidote to the university, his safety valve – what Grainne meant, it struck him, by a demon lover. He had not bothered Therese with mention of them and she, on her own part, had been equally discreet. Her anxieties about what he might get up to here stemmed from a suspicion that women on this side of the Atlantic might play for keeps. They might too. James felt like a sportsman who, on the occasion of some commemorative jubilee, gets a chance to play a known game by primal rules.

  Bam!

  From the back of the house came sounds of clashing furniture. She was taking out her frustration.

  Maybe he’d been a boor? You’d think he was sixteen and hard up for sex – going off half cocked because she wouldn’t hit the sack with him right away. It wasn’t even fair to say she’d led him on. She’d – count them – given a negative signal for every positive one. Something like this had happened to Caesar’s men when, besieging a Celtic town, they saw towns-women crowd the ramparts to point bare boobs at them. Simple souls, the Romans took this for a sexual come-on, whereas the women had been beaming bad magic their way. Therese had come on the story and told it to James as a warning.

  More noises in the back room.

  James knocked on the dividing door.

  ‘Can I come in?’

  ‘Come on.’

  She was standing by a large wall-cupboard whose double doors were open, showing shelves of folded white linen. Stacks more of this lay on a bed. Several sheets had been shaken from their folds and thrown about in an angular tumult.

  ‘Sorry if you’re getting fed up,’ she said. ‘This is taking longer than I foresaw. I’m looking for some sheets of mine which have got mixed up with other people’s.’

  ‘Can I help?’

  ‘Would you? There’s a laundry mark on mine but it’s hard to find. I’ve found three pairs already but there should be another two with matching pillowcases.’

  James began looking. ‘I’m sorry for just now,’ he apologized.

  ‘Don’t be,’ she said. ‘I led you on. The truth is I haven’t tasted this sort of thing for years: being chatted up. I didn’t mean to lead you on but I did. I see that.’

  Gallantly, he denied this. She thanked him for his denial and flung a stiff, linen sheet out of its folds, waved it like a sail then ran it through her fingers, scrutinizing the hems. Yes, she said, shrugging. That was how it was here. It could drive you to drink. He expressed surprise that armies of men weren’t around her. She, in her brogue, said to get along outa that and did he have her sheets picked out. He had found one and, showing its laundry mark, leaned over the edge of it and kissed her on the neck.

  ‘Arguing is what frightens you, isn’t it?’ he challenged. ‘Nothing binds people like a good fight. It jumps the stages, rushes them forward.’

  He kissed her this time on the mouth and was kissed back. He could feel her body wanting his, responding, but she pushed him away.

  ‘I’m an idiot,’ she said. ‘But I am afraid.’

  ‘Fear’s great,’ James assured her. ‘It’s the great enhancer. Like that ball you were describing where they danced and trembled. You can imagine how that enhanced the experience of a mere dance. You don’t know your luck at being a puritan.’

  She laughed.

  He licked his way around her ear and buried his nose in her hair which, with the window behind her, was the colour of the flames they had left burning smokily on the hearth. She smelled of what? Cake? Peat?

  ‘It’s not safe,’ she whispered.

  ‘Everything’s OK.’

  ‘You don’t understand.’

  ‘I won’t do anything. Just let me hold you.’ Fondling her: ‘You’ve got a great body,’ he whispered, ‘different from Californian ones. More – exuberant.’ He ran his hands over her hips. ‘I’ve been wanting to do this. Jesus, it’s lovely. Generous.’

  ‘Are you calling me fat?’

  ‘Feminine,’ he said. ‘Ancient. There’s probably a word for it in Greek only I don’t know Greek. Maybe in Gaelic?’

  The sheets he had been holding slipped to the floor. ‘Sorry,’ he said, then realized he’d stepped on them. ‘Hell!’ He tried to extricate his foot but found he was winding it in the cloth. ‘Shit!’ He crouched to try and release himself. Grainne crouched too but only made things worse, pulling the opposite way from him. The linen was now inextricable. Hauling at it, their hands came in contact and immediately they were in a tighter, more total embrace. He felt a pulsing and was unable to tell whether it was his blood or hers. She seemed distraught.

  ‘It’s not safe,’ she kept repeating, but the moves towards the bed were coming from her. Without actively fighting her off, he could hardly prevent himself plunging with her into the farrago of sheets and coverlets of tweed which pricked like brambles and smelled overpoweringly of sheep grease.

  ‘Why not safe?’ He had caught the hysteria in her. ‘Might someone come? The owner – your cousin was it?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Her hands were running over James’s skin under his shirt and edging south towards his waistband. He felt himself responding for maybe the third time this afternoon, his foiled and optimistic penis rising and throbbing like a greedy fish to her bait. Angry with her suddenly, a rush of desire swept through him and he began pulling off her clothes and loosening his own belt. Abruptly he felt her go rigid. Then she caught his hands.

  ‘
Stop! Listen.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘A car.’

  ‘Maybe it’s not coming here?’

  ‘It has to be. This is a dead end. Hurry. He has the key. He’ll just walk in. He’s Michael’s uncle.’

  ‘I thought he was your cousin.’

  ‘My cousin too. Both. Get up. We’ll be sorting the linen. God, what a mess. Get up! James. Please!’

  He had an impulse to lie where he was and mortify her.

  Please!’ She seemed on the point of tears. ‘God, you look a sight! You’ve got lipstick on your collar – you’ve got to wash your face. Look, there’s the bathroom. There. Yes. Fix yourself up. Quickly. Please. I’m sorry. Really. We’ll manage some other time if you still want to. Tomorrow.’

  She was arranging her own hair in front of a small mirror, then gathering the tumbled sheets, cursing.

  ‘Bloody hell!’

  The car drew up in front of the house. A door banged. Then another.

  ‘Cormac,’ she whispered. ‘Cormac must be there.’

  James went into the bathroom.

  9

  When she got home from the cottage, Grainne went to the kitchen to heat some beef tea. She arranged this on a tray and carried it up three flights, switching on lights as she climbed and routing the dusk which crouched like some malevolent, clawing thing in the folds of curtains. There was a sucking depression about the street lights gleaming through the bay tree in the garden and about the house’s small, rodent-like sounds. Inside herself, though, exhilaration glowed and she imagined it showing through her flesh, like coals through the air-holes in a night-watchman’s brazier. She was ashamed of having left her aunt so long alone. The beef tea was a peace-offering. Besides, she wanted to chat.

  She was curious to know what precisely it was about Aunt Judith which had put the wind up Owen Roe. Curious, and eager to pin down the old lady’s threat to him before he did. Unsurprisingly, he and James had fallen foul of each other at once. Owen Roe had been patronizing, and thrown his weight about, saying, ‘What you, as an American, will find hard to grasp …’ and other things of the sort. ‘Please, both of you, feel free to use this place whenever you like,’ he had told Grainne with such emphasis that she began to feel as though she was acting in a bedroom farce. His final unpleasantness was to refuse to let James interview him, although he claimed to know James’s employer well, a man called Larry who was a grand chap, great value, said Owen Roe in a plummy voice. As they were saying goodbye, he told Grainne that he hoped she remembered their little conversation.