‘How’s Michael?’ he asked.
‘How should he be? The same.’
‘Tell him I’ll be dropping by his office. I’ve something to discuss with him.’
The crudeness of the threat enraged her and she answered her cousin short-temperedly. The American looked surprised and she saw that each man suspected her of having some understanding with the other. Their resentment gave them a comradely look, and she guessed that each was wondering whether she had deliberately manouevred this meeting.
Why would she have? It didn’t suit her at all to be found here by Cormac who, come to think of it, should have been at school. He had a hangdog look when he first came in the door and saw her. Later, he was clearly wondering why she had not given him hell for mitching. Caught out by the different roles she should have played for the two men and Cormac, she became boisterous and started teasing Owen Roe.
‘The dead,’ she’d said, as though explaining this to James, ‘are the great allies of Republicans like my cousin here. The Republic, you see, was founded “in the name of God and the dead generations” and it’s hard for those sponsors to deny them. If the living turn against you,’ she addressed her cousin directly, ‘you say that you have the dead men’s vote. Supposing you didn’t? Supposing a voice from the past were to take issue with you?’
‘A ghost?’ Owen Roe spoke in an amused voice but there was a twitch in his lower lids. Unreliable female, said the twitch.
Her face burned where he had slapped it, but that was nothing to what he might do. The IRA had a romper room where they beat up women whose conduct was thought to reflect discredit on the cause: girls who went with soldiers or slept with married IRA men and undermined their morals, wives who got tired of waiting while their men were behind bars. That happened up North but the people involved had allies down here, including Owen Roe. There was a rumour about a kangaroo court which two years ago had condemned a man to death for treachery in this very cottage. The body had not been found.
‘Why not a ghost?’ she’d said, facing him down. She felt high with an excitement whose nature eluded her. Anger? Gambling-fever? Memory of her girlhood, when Owen Roe used to take her hacking as he took Cormac now? His mastery over large animals had impressed her then. Owen Roe tended to own big stallions and his bulky figure was usually hung about with enlargements which had a military as well as a rustic air. ‘You deal with the dead,’ she told him. ‘You’d better be ready for those backers to deal with you.’
Owen Roe’s face could have been a bulletin board. She read signals off it, guessing when she was getting nervously near target.
Guiltily, she told herself that she had exposed Aunt Judith to Owen Roe’s anger and that she had no right to do this. Her feelings for her aunt had quickened in the last hours. From seeing the poor thing as an inconvenient relative, she had come to see her as a victim deserving special concern. Hers was an unfinished story. Stored energies were explosive in her. She held on to her youth, in her own mind still was young: a girl imprisoned in an aged body. It was like a nightmare and that nightmare could spill into other people’s lives.
Grainne intended to question her aunt more closely than she had bothered to do until now.
It struck her that the best way to undo any harm she might have done the old woman, by threatening Owen Roe with her revelations, was to get those revelations on tape. Then he wouldn’t think he could suppress them by having her shoved into some institution or given more shock treatment. The tape should be kept in some neutral place, perhaps by James Duffy.
*
‘Let the false Saxon feel Erin’s avenging steel.’
Patsy Flynn kept time with himself as he basted an egg on the frying pan, digging his spoon rhythmically into boiling oil and tossing this in brown blobs on to the transparent goo of egg white. The oil was too hot and spurted out from time to time on to Patsy’s arm. ‘Bugger!’ he shouted, and licked the burned spot. He had invited Cormac to supper in his small flat at the back of the Grateful Patriots’ Youth Club. ‘How do you like it?’
‘Not runny.’
‘Righto.’
Patsy told Cormac that he should keep a weather eye on his aunt. Maybe someone should give the old hairpin a bit of a fright, eh, what? Put the fear of God into her?
‘Stand ye now for Erin’s glory,’
he told the teapot which had lost one of its three legs. Cormac guessed that Patsy had got into the way of keeping up a racket when he was alone so as not to notice his solitude. He watched Patsy stick a matchbox under the pot where the third leg should have been. He’d got that pot out of a rubbish bin, he told Cormac with pride. Waste not, want not. The grandparents of the Irishmen alive today could have lived and thrived on what was thrown daily on to the municipal dump.
‘Where’d you learn all that poetry, Patsy?’
‘The stuff I spout, is it? Learned in gaol for the most part. Had to do something to keep sane, if you think I am sane, ha ha.
I did not wring my hands as do
Those witless men, who dare
To try to rear the changeling Hope
In the cave of black despair.
Dja know who wrote that? Oscar wrote that.’
‘Wilde?’
‘Yes. I regard him as an Irishman,’ said Patsy, ‘because of how the Brits treated him. I don’t learn British verse.’
‘No Shakespeare?’
‘No,’ said Patsy firmly. He set a plate of mixed fry on the table. Black pudding, white pudding, sausages, kidneys, eggs and rashers swam in a winking pond of yellow grease. ‘Help yerself. Dig in. Come here to me now,’ he said conspiratorially, and rubbed a fat dollop of fried bread into the yolk of his egg. The skin of the yolk swelled, erupted, and the projectile of bread slid into the yellow well. Cormac stared in fascination. There was something thrilling about the sheer awfulness of Patsy’s eating habits. ‘I want to hear all and everything,’ said Patsy, ‘about that aunt of yours. What more have you been able to find out?’ Patsy stuffed his mouth with the wad of eggy bread. ‘Shpeak on, MacDuff,’ he spluttered, pushing the food sideways and making a traffic lane for speech with one side of his pursed lips. ‘What’sh this for shartersh about her going on ΤV? The Captain’sh not pleashed. That’sh putting it mildly. I heard him shay shomething about her having shenshitive information. Speaking on the phone he wash. To yer Mammy.’ Patsy dealt with the wad of bread and swallowed tea on top of it. ‘Well, you know,’ he told Cormac grimly, ‘if all the men shot for shooting off their mouths and divulging sensitive information were to rise from the dead it would fill the pro-Cathedral. Then to hear of yer Mammy wanting to put a dippy old hairpin like that on TV! It ud make yer hair stand on end.’
‘Oh I don’t think they want to put her on TV,’ Cormac told him. ‘They just said TV to her to get her interested. They took her over to RTE to show her the studios. But they weren’t filming. My mother said they just got her to talk for a bit into a tape-recorder. Reminiscing. It was a trial run.’
‘Jasus!’ said Patsy. ‘Mother o’ God! A tape-recorder, is it? Calm down now, Flynn!’ he told himself with concern. ‘No use spreading alarm and panic. Easy does it!’ But food seemed to have caught in his throat and he began to cough. His face went red as a peony and Cormac began to feel worried. ‘Sssallright!’ spluttered Patsy. ‘Be hunkydory in a sssecond. Here – get me a cup of water like a good lad.’
Cormac hurried to the sink and filled a glass. ‘Here.’
Patsy took it, drank and wiped the back of his hand across his lips. ‘The ole gullet’s never been right since they force-fed me one time we were on hunger strike. What was I saying? About your aunt. Now listen, Cormac, you have a responsibility to restrain yer Mammy if you can, and, if you can’t, you should keep a close eye on her. What was that you said before about yourself and the Captain coming on her and the Yank? Huh? At the Captain’s cottage? Very thick they must be. What were they doing there? That cottage has been used on occasion by the lads. For very private t
hings. Top security. People shouldn’t be prowling through it. Women like your Mammy, Cormac, though I don’t like saying it to yourself, are a menace. They’re security leaks. Looking for attention. They’ve no sense.’
‘Well, Uncle Owen Roe didn’t seem to mind. It’s his cottage, after all,’ Cormac said huffily. ‘He lets our family use it whenever we like. I never knew he let other people up there?’
‘The Captain’s too good for his own good,’ said Patsy. ‘They tell me he’s a genius. But geniuses can be babes-in-arms when it comes to everyday life. So yer Mammy and the Yank were there when yez came in. What were they up to?’
‘My mother was picking up some sheets.’
‘Sheets of paper?’
‘Bed sheets,’ said Cormac.
Patsy blushed. ‘Did the Captain say anything at all?’ he asked.
‘Nothing special.’
‘Oh well,’ said Patsy, blushing even more furiously.
‘Ours not to reason why,
Ours but to do and die.’
‘Keep your eye on the aunt, though. Try and find out what it was she said into that recording machine. Do you think you could frighten her a bit, Cormac? Would you be up to that? Just to try to get her to keep her gob shut?’
‘No,’ said Cormac. ‘I’d rather not try that, Patsy. She’s a bit cracked as it is. It might send her right round the bend. By the way, that’s an English poem.’
‘What is?’
Patsy’s blush was still high and he seemed glad of any subject of conversation to distract Cormac’s attention from it. Cormac politely looked at his own teacup. He understood what was in Patsy’s mind. He didn’t blame him. How could he? Actually, it was decent of Patsy to be so embarrassed for Cormac’s sake. He felt like telling him not to worry, that he’d had to put up with worse. But he couldn’t without disgracing his bloody mother who should be put in a bin instead of his aunt. Or along with her. Cormac didn’t want to start blushing himself. ‘“The Charge of the Light Brigade”,’ he said. ‘You were just saying a bit of it. It’s by Alfred Lord Tennyson. “Into the jaws of death,” you know?
‘Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.’
‘Do you tell me that?’ said Patsy indignantly. ‘And I thinking it was a Christmas-cracker motto. Yer right though. “Into the jaws of death,” I remember now. Sure they colonized our thoughts and minds. Took over our heads! It’s hard to get free.’
Patsy’s blush was receding. ‘The buggers!’ he said.
‘You could learn Irish,’ Cormac told him, laughing. ‘Then you’d be safe.’
‘It’s easy seen you don’t know what suffering does to the brain,’ said Patsy. ‘Sure I tried Irish. Wore meself out struggling with it. I even took a class. But I couldn’t make any headway at all. Declensions. The Future. Is and tá. Bean, mna, mnaoi. I was destroyed with it. And the bitch who was teaching was one of those Rathmines-and-Rathgar types with a sports car and a fancy accent in English. She looked down her nose at me till I was dreaming at night of getting my hands on her windpipe. What I wouldn’t have given to tan that lady’s arse for her. Holding me up as a show to the class one time because I asked some question that musta been very stupid altogether because they began to laugh. Civil servants they were. There was even an Englishman. Oh I was mortified. I got my books and walked out and never went back. What I wouldn’t have given to have had some crushing answer to give that one. But I was afraid to say a word in case I’d get my cough. It comes on in emotional moments, don’t you know.’
‘I could give you lessons,’ Cormac offered.
‘You’re a good lad, Cormac.’ Patsy looked to be on the point of tears. ‘But I’ve given up. It’s too late for me now. Just you keep your eye on your womenfolk and we’ll count that as your good deed for the cause. OK?’
‘Right you are,’ said Cormac.
*
Sister Judith could not get to sleep. The room they’d given her was too big and its windows wouldn’t close. Damp had mildewed the ceiling stucco, furring its vines and fruits with grey canker. Draughts played through the room, moving curtains and valances in a continuous rustle which, mixed with the sound of rain, gave her a sense of lying on some wild heath. The cold did not bother her, for she was wrapped in bed-socks and mummying clothes which she had brought from the convent. What did was the space. She had lived for years in a cubicle, and now here was this expanse of room. It made her nervous and this was odd for, once, decades ago, she had been equally uncomfortable in the cubicle. She had suffered then from the feeling that her space was being eroded, and had thought of herself in terms of the sailor one sees in cartoons shipwrecked on an island which is being eaten away by the sea. There is a palm tree and in the final picture the island disappears and all that is left is the palm sticking up from the water with the sailor clinging to it like a monkey-on-a-stick.
‘I am a monkey-on-a-stick,’ Judith had said to Owen when he visited her once in 1933. ‘Look,’ and she had drawn a toy monkey-on-a-stick from the pocket of her habit. She pulled the string which made the monkey dance. She was teaching the kindergarten class at the time and her pockets were full of toys, for it was by such stratagems that she managed to trick the children into finding hers an enlivening presence.
‘In fact,’ she told Owen, ‘I think I may be heading for a breakdown. I want to come out.’
‘Your vow …’ said Owen.
‘Your oath!’ said Sister Judith with acerbity. Owen’s party, after swearing for five years that they could never take the oath of allegiance to England’s King which the Free-State constitution of 1922 required of all members taking their seats in the Dáil, had suddenly decided that they could and would take it. Various excuses had been put forward: it was no oath; they had not noticed themselves taking it – a clerk had helpfully brushed the text past their distant-viewing eyes – hadn’t pronounced but only signed it, without, to be sure, reading it. Besides, to abolish it they must first get into the Dáil to repeal it. This the party, on finally taking office, had now proceeded to do.
‘You’ll say that’s a different kettle of fish, I suppose?’ Sister Judith challenged her brother-in-law, who flapped a vague and irritable hand at her. ‘But if you plead constraint, so can I. I never wanted to come here, Owen,’ she reminded him.
There was a silence.
‘Owen, are you paying attention? I regard mine as a forced vocation. Forced,’ she said, ‘by you.’
Owen was at this time a cabinet minister. To be fair to him, he and his party had suffered oblivion and poverty after losing the Civil War. Owen, during the years when he was refusing to take the oath, had had a child a year.
‘How’s Kathleen?’
‘Grand. Grand,’ said Owen automatically, then, as if remembering only now that Judith, a relative, could be told the truth, ‘actually, she’s pregnant again and feeling a bit low. I suppose we’ll be able to afford nursemaids now. The last years were hard on her. Harder than on me.’
‘I’m sure.’
‘You look well,’ he said.
‘I’m going mad,’ she told him.
Owen sighed. ‘That might prove handy,’ he told her, ‘if you were unwise enough to throw off the veil. Old stories can come out. Be leaked. Especially now I’m in the government. Don’t imagine I’m better able to protect you now,’ he warned. ‘Quite the opposite. You never know who’s picked up rumours. Someone could use you to get at me, embarrass the party …’ Again he made his impatient, dismissing gesture, as though flicking away a small, physical annoyance. ‘I’m talking for your own sake, Judith, and for Kathleen’s of course and our children’s. Not to mention the country.’
‘The country has a broad back.’
‘I never,’ said Owen, ‘took a single action in my adult life which did not seem to me at the time to be in the country’s best interests.’
Judith sighed. ‘What happened to the money?’ she asked. ‘The money the Americans had that should have gone to the party
? I heard that there was litigation in the American courts. I heard that you were over there. The least you could have done was let me know the outcome. After all.’
Owen shrugged. ‘Water under the bridge. Nobody got the money. Not us and not the other crowd. The Judge ruled that it be given back to the American subscribers.’
Judith laughed and felt her laugh escape her like an animal. She imagined it jumping from her mouth like some creature in a folk tale. It was an eel, a winged snake. It was her own guts transformed and venomous. She clamped a hand to her teeth.
‘So many things seem to come to nothing, don’t they?’ She stared out of the convent window at some freshly marked playing fields: white lines on cropped, green grass. Without looking at him, she said: ‘Not all the money could have been repaid. There was a bag full of cash brought over, do you remember? Money that never existed officially on our side of the ocean. That couldn’t have been repaid, could it?’ She kept her eyes off him, waiting for a reply. In a paddock beyond the playing fields a donkey was grazing. A crow swooped, pulled some hairs from the animal’s back and flew off. ‘Could it?’ she repeated, and turned to look at her brother-in-law.
No Country for Young Men Page 20
