No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  He looked impatient. ‘What do you suppose the party members lived on during the five years we were refusing to take our seats, Judith? There were no salaries and no jobs for us. The other crowd had the country in their pockets. We had a right to that money,’ said Owen calmly. ‘It was donated to the Republican cause and we were the only ones faithful to that cause.’

  ‘Yes,’ she remembered. ‘You explained that to me long ago.’

  ‘So why bring it up now?’ Owen’s hand moved towards his waistcoat pocket. He had never taken to wearing a wrist-watch, she remembered. The gold chain bellying across his lean front had belonged to her father, but on Owen it looked somehow official. Like a decoration.

  ‘Owen,’ she pleaded. ‘I’m afraid of going mad. Really mad. I’m afraid of seeing a doctor. What can I tell one? I said a few things to the chaplain here in confession and I could see he thought I’d imagined them. He told me to take it easy, rest, see a doctor. How can I? Unless you corroborate what I say, they’ll think I’m raving. Isn’t there some version which could help me without endangering you? I could see that priest thought I was just a silly female. Imaginative.’

  ‘He probably thinks it’s sex,’ said Owen. ‘Half the women in here are probably suffering from suppressed sex. The priest’s like a doctor in hay-fever season. He puts everything down to the one cause.’

  ‘So you mean I should stay here because it’s next door to a lunatic asylum anyway?’ Judith’s tongue swelled in her mouth like a gag. She had waited for this visit, had prepared and marshalled her facts, planning and redrafting a letter which must alarm him sufficiently to make him come, yet avoid turning him against her. Arguing with Owen was like fencing with a bag of wool. Points were absorbed, then rejected, unblunted but unbloodied.

  ‘Your vocation was in no way forced,’ he told her. ‘You took your vows after the usual trial period.’

  ‘I wasn’t myself, Owen. I felt terrible guilt.’

  ‘Why cease to feel it then?’

  ‘It was because of you, Owen. I used to admire you so much and …’

  ‘You choose to think so. It suits you to. I’ve never been sure of your motives. Whether there wasn’t some sexual thing between that American and you.’

  ‘You’re obsessed with sex. Anyway, Kathleen was the one he was after.’

  ‘That’s not true.’

  ‘Have you forgotten how jealous you were at the time? You nagged her about it. You made her cry.’

  ‘I was wrong. I was young, unsure of myself, a silly young pup.’ Owen’s mouth set in a hard, erasing line. ‘I know now there was never anything out of the way. He was coarse, indelicate, but there was no substance to my fears.’

  ‘Nor with me either,’ said Judith. ‘Half your colleagues, by your reckoning, should be shut up in convents. Think of that.’

  ‘Nobody shut you up.’

  ‘You worked on my nerves.’

  Owen became agitated. ‘You’re not thinking of presenting a case like that to Rome?’ His lips curled. Weakness annoyed him. Her femininity repelled him. Women, for Owen, belonged in a domestic sphere, like Kathleen, with whom he now talked exclusively about their children. There were three or four symbolic, almost depersonalized, widows in the Dáil. Relicts of hero-husbands, they occasionally rose, like the figureheads of ships, and spoke from the back-benches with more emotion than sense. They had their uses, since one of the functions of a parliament is to protest fidelity to principle while, when need be, taking measures which run counter to it. These widows, having been deprived of home life by the revolution, did very well as reminders of that time of turmoil, which, in retrospect, filled Owen with distaste. He had lived through it, as one lives through birth and other messy experiences from which good may come but which must be put behind one. Contagious old fevers must be isolated, germs killed, the new order protected. Owen’s party, which had taken the losing and extremist side in the Civil War, was plagued by an ambiguous and motley following, many of whom would have to be dealt with in the very near future. Interned. Something. Meanwhile, here was this feverish sister-in-law fussing and wasting his time. He stood up and began pacing the room.

  Judith watched him, recognizing his irritation. His temper had always had a short fuse. Very fond of himself Owen. His clothes had a clerical look. The long, lean, black coat reached to his calves. He had not taken it off, for the convent was unheated.

  ‘What is the worst thing which could happen to me, Owen? If I tried to come out?’

  ‘You could end up in a lunatic asylum. I’m telling you this frankly, Judith. You could be found insane.’

  ‘I mightn’t be.’

  ‘No. But you might. And you would harm your family, Kathleen …’

  ‘The country?’ Ironically.

  ‘I believe that.’

  ‘Do you distinguish what is good for Owen from what is good for Ireland?’

  ‘I risked my life for the country many times.’

  ‘Oh,’ she shrugged, ‘that was in another era. Owen, tell me the truth. Do you really think it right that I should be buried alive here? All my life?’

  Owen looked around him. They were in the convent parlour. It had been the library of the Anglo-Irish mansion which the nuns had bought some years before. They had cut trees, cleared the shrubbery and thinned out furniture, turning the place into a sparse, graceful skeleton of itself. Statues from Lourdes and Lisieux stood on console tables whose curved, callipygian limbs jarred with the Virgin’s machine-modelled robes. Traces of rococo frivolity lingered in the panelling.

  ‘What’s wrong with being here?’ Owen wanted to know. ‘You should see poor Kathleen struggling with the kids. She looks ten years older than you do.’

  ‘She is older and she’s living her life. She deserves to look older.’

  Distaste was back on Owen’s face. He was the one who should have stayed in a monastery. In the days of great, intriguing abbots, he could have reconciled his passions. Now he was stuck with matrimony which he clearly suffered in a Pauline spirit.

  ‘If it’s children you want,’ he said, ‘you’re teaching the kindergarten here, aren’t you? I should have thought you’d have everything here you’d want.’

  Owen’s face had grown more ascetic with the years. His hair had receded. His eyes, behind thickened glasses, looked larger. His mouth had thinned. Sensuality had been eroded from his face, nibbled away, as the sea nibbles traces of meat from a shell.

  ‘It’s funny,’ she said. ‘When the fighting was on, even during the Civil War, we felt the future was ours. If the past was as bad as ours was, then we had to own the future. It was our due, inevitable, do you remember, Owen? Ours!’ She let her eyes shine out at him with irony. Judith was twenty-eight that year. She had recovered from years of almost catatonic silence. ‘You got your future!’ She faced him down, emphasizing her point.

  ‘I never wanted anything for myself.’

  ‘Power?’

  He made his impatient gesture.

  ‘You’re naive,’ he said. ‘We have no power. The economy is in an appalling state. We entered the Dáil in a spirit of sacrifice, to see what help we could provide. We’ve been called every name: “pitiless idealists”, “turn-coats” …’

  ‘Well, you did turn your coats!’

  ‘We couldn’t leave the country to rot. We had to be practical, get our hands on the helm and steer it out of the doldrums.’

  ‘Hοw I hate politics!’

  ‘You can afford to. That’s your luxury.’

  The convent, he implied, was a self-indulgent place in which he, if he had been free to follow his inclination, would have lived happily.

  ‘What was done,’ he told her, ‘had to be done. We said that we would have to wade through Irish blood. But this does not mean that we should not try to atone.’

  She saw that in his mind the atonement was being done by him. Cute as a pet fox, Owen saw himself instead as the noble stag at bay. He was a menagerie of men and in the old clandest
ine days this had reinforced his appeal, since each one saw in him what he wanted to see.

  ‘There are young fellows still out in the wilderness,’ she reminded him, ‘because they believed what you told them a few years back and are so unsupple that they still do – the “new” IRA. Your crowd gaol them now.’

  He didn’t even pretend to be listening. He had never listened. Stubbornness – she’d seen it described in the newspapers as ‘a lofty sense of purpose’ – made him immune to logic. He made you feel it was cavilling. His virtue spoke for him more than the virtue of his arguments. He was Jesus and you, if you disagreed with him, were a Pharisee.

  ‘I know what’s best for the country,’ he told her in a mournful tone. ‘I trust my own deep instincts as an Irishman. I find the answers in my heart.’

  Oh, she thought, spare me the soft soap. You’re not campaigning now.

  ‘Is Kathleen still pretty? She hasn’t been to see me this long time.’

  It was Owen, she was sure of it, who kept her sister away.

  ‘Kathleen,’ he told her, ‘is the mother of six children with another on the way.’

  She laughed. ‘Look at her when you go home, Owen. Look at her for me and notice her. Is her hair still red?’

  ‘More or less,’ he told her and then, astounding her, looked ashamed. ‘You know, Judith,’ he shuffled, ‘with a big family, we don’t have much time for each other – and I do keep busy, you know!’ Impish suddenly: the great man fishing for flattery. He laughed, guying himself, and she remembered reading in the newspapers that Owen O’Malley was a favourite with electors, had great personal charm. The sudden change threw her and she thought: yes, in here, maybe we do get a bit stuck in our rut. People put on a special face when they talk to us. Our social instinct dwindles. I suppose I’m like a child to him.

  ‘Oh, I’m sure you have a lot on your mind,’ she agreed.

  A lay-sister brought in a tea-tray and Judith watched her brother-in-law eat two fairy cakes and a slice of barm brack. Nuns did not eat publicly in those days, so she sat, with her hands folded, watching and marvelling at how this man’s appetites could make him seem more rather than less self-denying. He had sired six children and just now eaten three cakes, but neither greed nor pleasure was revealed by his face. He drained his teacup and wiped his thin mouth with a napkin.

  ‘Owen,’ she asked, ‘are you happy?’

  She was remembering the nightmares he used to have.

  His eyes, swimming in the blurr behind his glasses, gave her a hard, magnified glance.

  ‘The word means nothing to me,’ he said. ‘I have purposes, duties, people who depend on me, I …’

  ‘Is Kathleen,’ she asked, ‘happy?’

  ‘She has her children. She knows she is useful.’

  ‘Do you still get nightmares?’

  The glassed-in eyes looked at her blankly. Shortly after that, he left in a chauffeur-driven car which had waited for him during the visit. Judith gave up thinking of leaving the convent and settled to her life there. She had indeed got the kindergarten to keep her busy and felt that she was probably, in her way, as useful as Kathleen. Besides, in those days, she used to pray. Later, after the electric-shock treatment, she found she no longer could. Compartments within her mind seemed to have collapsed, so that she could only with difficulty keep things separate. She sometimes confused everyday reality with what was only to be considered real in a spiritual sense. Prayer became a temptation and a risk, something from which return might prove difficult. So she gave it up except in a limited, leashed way, keeping to set, rote-learned prayers which were useful as exercises for the memory and could never be taken to be actual experiences in the way that spontaneous effusions or meditations might. She didn’t know whether Owen had arranged for her to have the shock treatment. People told her lies now, she had noticed.

  *

  This afternoon, she had had a strange telephone call from someone who refused to give his name but had very distinctly threatened her.

  ‘No need for you to know who I am,’ said the strange, uneducated voice.

  ‘Are you sure you wanted to speak to me?’ Sister Judith had not been telephoned in years. But the girl, Bridie, had assured her she was wanted on the phone. She had even brought the instrument up and plugged it in on Sister Judith’s floor so that she need not face the stairs.

  ‘Are you Sister Judith Clancy, sister-in-law to Owen O’Malley?’

  ‘That’s right.’ She waited and heard breathing. Was this going to be one of those dirty calls you heard about? Some corner boys maybe had got hold of her address and dared each other to phone the nunny sister-in-law of the famous statesman? The sort who burgled churches and stole the altar wine. She’d heard about that. The cleaning woman in the convent had had a store of such information that would keep you going for weeks if you let her get started. ‘Who is it?’ she asked again, intending to hang up if she didn’t get an answer quickly.

  ‘Sister Judith?’

  ‘I’m still here.’

  ‘This is a warning,’ said the voice, speaking very slowly now. ‘I don’t want you to think it’s a joke. It’s a serious warning and you’d better heed it. You don’t know me but I know you and I’ve information that you intend talking on the TV about sensitive matters. Sensitive, do you understand that, Sister Judith? Do you know what I’m referring to?’

  ‘I do not,’ said Sister Judith angrily, ‘and I’d like you to know that you could be prosecuted for making calls like this. Nuisance calls.’ She’d seen cases on television. The person being called was supposed to hang on as long as they could so that the police could put a trace on the caller. But there were no police to do that here and she was on the point of hanging up when it struck her that she might be hearing things. ‘Are you there?’ she asked, wishing she had the Yank’s tape-recorder. That was a wonderful instrument. It would prove once and for all what was a delusion and what was not.

  ‘I’m here all right,’ said the voice, ‘and I want you to know that you should keep your gob shut if you know what’s good for you and divulge no information whatsoever to yon Yank. Or to anyone else. If you know what’s good for you. I’ll know,’ said the voice. ‘I know every move you make. You are under surveillance, Sister Judith.’

  ‘Bridie,’ screamed Sister Judith.

  ‘Bridie! Tell me,’ she asked her, calming down and forcing herself to speak quietly, ‘who was that on the phone just now?’

  ‘I dunno, Sister Judith.’

  ‘Now Bridie, think. You called me to the phone, didn’t you? You took the call. There was a man on the phone, wasn’t there?’

  ‘Of course there was someone on the phone,’ said the girl. ‘I don’t know who he was.’

  ‘But there was someone?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Well, thank God for that,’ said Sister Judith.

  *

  Dear Therese,

  This is not going to be an easy letter to read.

  The prospect of writing it has been tormenting me, but I feel it would be unfair not to tell you the truth – if I can get hold of it. Here, then, is an interim report on the emotional cyclone which has hit me: I think I may have fallen in love with someone here.

  Please believe that it is from concern for you that I am forcing myself to tell you before I am really sure of my feelings – so as to go on deserving your trust. I am desperately anxious about you – about us, Therese. I wonder will you believe this? It’s true. I care. I worry. I lie awake and wonder how you will take this and whether it – this, what I’m telling you – is an insane delusion, some sort of erotic fever which affects people when they travel. Is it unfair to bother you with something which may blow over? I don’t know. I’ve found myself weeping with indecision. Maybe I shouldn’t mail this? Yet, I feel I must. I don’t want you deceived even for a few days about what may be serious. I can’t tell. I don’t know. You won’t want details.

  I’ll write again in my next moment of sanity.


  I send many – maybe all? – kinds of love.

  James

  James, naked and busy with his tape-recorder, talked of a telephone conversation he’d had with a Miss Lefanu-Lynch, aged eighty, who had agreed to speak to him only after he had assured her that Larry’s film was committed to raising money for guns. She belonged to a political splinter group which refused to acknowledge the maimed but actual Irish Republic. Eyes fixed on the ideal, thirty-two-county one declared by the heroes of 1916, she lived in a world without flesh or geography, said James, displaying the geography of his own flesh in tigered light which fell slantwise through a Venetian blind.

  ‘When I said that,’ he let the tape rewind, ‘about guns, it hit me that that might be only half the truth.’ He paused, waiting for Grainne’s question, then went on without it. ‘The guy I work for,’ he explained, ‘wouldn’t have scruples about playing with real people, real bombs.’

  ‘Mm?’

  ‘They’ve done studies,’ he shuffled through his tapes, ‘of TV-watching generations. They’re so inured to violence on the screen that when they see it in the streets it hardly affects them. Seeing is no longer believing when you watch too many movies.’

  ‘Lefanu-Lynch wouldn’t need movies,’ Grainne told him. ‘Her crowd would eat you before breakfast.’ She spoke lazily, her mind on the muscled body poised in sliced light. She too was unable to quite believe and eager to pinch like Thomas Didimus. James had astounded her by pulling off his clumsy, mass-produced American clothes to show flesh as fluidly perfect as Bernini’s Apollo’s. As a banquet can defeat and even sicken the starving, she had felt her lust retreat before this surprise. It annoyed her that he should be unaware of her awe. To him, he was obviously still the same person; to her he was the frog turned prince.

  A while ago, he had compounded her discomfort, asking her, ‘Did you come?’

  She hadn’t. She felt mocked and grubby-fingered. Her fingers were rough. At the Halfway House, she had let them go, doing odd jobs and not bothering to use cream. Just now, she had run them like sandpaper down his limbs. It was an unsettling experience. The men she knew wore well-cut clothes over age-damaged bodies. Their pride was in what showed: cashmere, poplin, fine tweed. These stripped off, their imperfections gave intimacy an extra tingle. They had to trust her not to mind or mock or tell, and she was the desirable one to whom they were beholden. The reversal of positions upset her and she kept wanting to clutch an eiderdown around herself – was, in fact, doing this on the pretence of feeling cold. In bed with Michael and Owen Roe, as on beach trips with men she liked, Grainne had taken pride in overlooking the inadequacy of the bodily envelope in which these spirits were forced to reside. Now, she was suffering the tortures of those damned for vanity.