‘You,’ James accused, ‘have a Manichaean view: pleasure is a trick of the sense. Doomed. Let me offer another pair of glasses. You can get to work on your sexual techniques. Therapy teaches us to live with ourselves. Gym improves the God-given body. Love helps us live with others. Now sex, combining all three, must be the healthiest activity.’
‘Is that the word from California?’
‘Yes.’
‘And what about your wife?’
James looked sombre. ‘I find myself turning against her, which is obviously unfair. I’ve started resenting her claims and seeing her worst sides. You can do that to anyone.’
‘Yes.’
‘She’s older than me.’
Silence.
‘A bit possessive. Domineering even.’
Grainne said nothing.
‘If I don’t say it, it festers. I’m beginning to hate her.
‘Not “hanging loose” then?’
‘The formulae can let you down.’
‘Have more Sancerre?’
‘That’s the Irish route, right? Get drunk?’
She looked annoyed.
‘Sorry.’ He held out his glass. ‘Listen, what if I were to ask you to choose between your husband and me?’
‘You’d be horrified if I took you seriously.’
‘Oh, I don’t know. Old instincts rise in me. They’re probably connected with reproducing the species. They tell me to build a nest around you.’
Grainne twisted a sheet. ‘Here’s the nest. How long do your signals want me to stay in it? Nine months? Or till laundry time? What’s wrong with my sexual techniques?’
They kidded, but the rationed meetings – an hour or two a day – were driving James into a fume and fret such as he had never known. It was his role to be the cool and heartening one when he was with Grainne, but he began to see that she was more mistress of herself than of him. He was off his ground, unsure where he stood. She did not seem to mind her own unsureness. The seesaw of sexual play suited the indolent, non-linear way she lived her life. Her trouble had been with the first step. Having taken it, she was ready to dance it again and again, like the participants in the set figures of an Irish dance who cover the same ground over and over, weaving back and forth, getting nowhere.
‘But where should we get?’ she asked in surprise. ‘Eternity is here. Now. Don’t you feel it?’
He did. He also wanted to freeze it. Fix and pin it down.
‘We’re great together, you know.’
‘I know.’
‘So shouldn’t we?’
‘No.’
‘What?’
‘Anything.’
‘You’ve got what you want,’ he said. ‘I’m your demon lover. To whom you owe nothing. Invisible. Asocial. You come to my room as men used to go to brothels. All I am is a fuck.’ He struck away her hand.
‘Now who’s the puritan!’
‘You are! You divide yourself into the decent and the improper. Sex – me – kept out of sight. The bourgeois ideal!’
‘You’re married too! It suits you.’
‘It doesn’t!’
‘It did.’
‘I didn’t see the hypocrisy. I’m being treated like a goddamn nineteenth-century whore. You won’t be seen in the street with me. I’m a penis. That’s what I am for you: a promenading penis!’
‘A lovely penis! Shall I recite Rabelais’ litany to the penis? I know quite a bit of it.’
‘You would!’
‘Why would I?’
‘Because you’re a product of this butcher-shop morality.’
‘Look, do you think sex is obscene? Because if you do …’
‘It’s you who do.’
‘You told me you had lots of little quickies with girls in California and never told your wife. What was so different about that? The word is awful anyway: quickies. Like a throwaway product. Like do-it yourself sex kits. Then you say I’m insensitive. Words give you away …’
‘Words! The Irish are great with words!’ he exclaimed. ‘But they don’t mean anything,’ he roared. ‘They obfuscate. They play about with. They lie and deny. They skirmish and ambush. All your whole goddamn literature is about evasion. The exile who had to go away. The lover who lost his lass. I bought a book of popular love songs to fill my empty hours – I told you I’m like a kept woman. I have to fill the time. And I see now what you meant by negatives. Renunciation. Dig my grave both deep and wide. Laments. Goodbyes. No commitment to anything but giving up. The system is the way it is and ochone and mavrone and leave me alone and I’ll sing a song about it.’
She laughed.
‘Don’t laugh.’
‘You were funny! You’re learning a way with the words.’
‘I don’t want words. I want you.’
‘The word made flesh.’
‘To take away with me.’
‘The sunlight in the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
You cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold …’
‘I suppose an Irishman wrote that.’
‘Does that make it less true?’
‘There are different truths. They’re tied to time and place.’
‘Well, so am I tied to time and place.’
‘Are you?’
‘I think so. So are you. That’s why you’re getting angry at your wife. Poor woman. You’ve turned her into a bogy: the embodiment of everything that stops this going on forever. This: the Sancerre, and the furtiveness, and the electricity our bodies make, impalpables, newness, hope, even our anger, even our guilt. It’s part of the fireworks. You can’t prolong that.’
‘That’s not what I want to prolong. I want you and me together, able to walk down the street and have a drink in the lounge.’
‘We can have a drink in the lounge now. I could say …’
‘I want to have a drink in the lounge whenever I like without your having to say anything.’
‘You don’t. You want the glow of guilt and at the same time you want public absolution. They don’t go together.’
‘Your language is obsolete, my love. It’s what you learned in catechism class. People start new lives nowadays every day of the week. Don’t you read the papers?’
‘I think they’re deceived. They might as well never have bothered to try putting their name tag on each new love or bottling the genie. It can’t be done.’
‘Well, it suits you to say that. British hypocrisy – which they’ve shed, by the way – got dumped here as part of their colonial cast-offs and you preen in their old cast-offs and think you’ve liberated yourselves.’
‘Darling, you’re being boring and, besides, it’s time I left. I have to do the shopping and …’
‘Can I come shopping with you?’
‘You know you can’t. Jesus, if we were seen pushing the same supermarket trolley, it would be like being seen pushing a pram. It would be like putting a notice in the papers. Now, don’t scold. This is my town. Not yours. I’m the one who runs the risks and …’
‘And I’m the secret sex object. What will I do all afternoon?’
‘Go and interview your old-timers.’
‘Do you realize I’ll soon be finished? Then what? I’m stringing it out.’
‘I’ve got to fly. Help me with this zip. Lovers haven’t time to argue. You should get adjusted to that.’
‘That’s why I want to marry you.’
‘To argue?’
‘To win.’
‘You’ve won already. I’m woozey with pleasure with all the goals you scored. Or was until you started in carping. Bye.’
11
Sparky Driscoll brought round a copy of the New York Times in which American Irish leaders called the Treaty ‘an insult to the dead who died fighting for an independent Irish Republic’.
‘Hell’s cure to the Yanks!’ Seamus was disgusted. ‘Let them think of the living and forget the dead.’ The country was in a shambles. What was needed
now was peace and a chance to get the new state on its feet.
‘And what about the Republic?’ someone asked. ‘The IRA took an oath of allegiance to it and …’
Oaths, said Seamus, gave him a pain in the craw. They belonged to the days of secret societies. ‘Forget all that,’ he instructed. ‘We’ll have our own state now and manage our affairs in broad daylight …’
‘Starting off with a betrayal!’
‘Ah, for Christ’s sake!’ He struck his forehead in mimicry of a man worn down by the folly surrounding him. The Republic had been a symbol, he explained, a rallying cry. Were they all so literal-minded that they couldn’t see that? Anyway the Free State would be a stepping-stone. They’d get the Republic itself in time.
As for the North, he said, didn’t the world know that those buggers up there were descended from small, land-hungry planters brought over in the seventeenth century. He’d been up there and seen them himself, an embattled crowd: thrifty, with eyes like bullets and snarling voices which they used sparely. When they talked at all, said Seamus, it was through teeth clamped as though in fright that somebody might steal their tongues. There was no forcing the likes of them into an Irish Free State, much less into an Irish Republic. They’d been Protestant bigots since the days of King Billy – pronounced ‘King Bully’ – and to their mind such a state could only be a sink of Papist iniquity dedicated to ending their privileges. Seamus tightened his lips into a piggy-bank slot and imitated the Ulster accent: ‘Aye,’ said he, ‘Ulster would fate and Ulster would be rate!’
Sparky Driscoll showed glistening teeth in a laugh. He was living up to his name, thought Judith: vivid in spanking new togs he’d had tailored for himself in Dublin. A masher. Kathleen seemed to be always finding reasons to fill his cup or catch his eye. Owen was expected home from gaol any day.
‘Owen will agree with me,’ said Seamus. ‘You’ll see. He’s a man who understands politics. Not a gunman.’
Judith was certain that Owen would disagree completely. He would see through the paltry and expedient reasoning of her brother, Seamus. The Treaty was a horrible thing if it was making young men who had been ready to die for Ireland three weeks ago talk in this mealy-mouthed way about a betrayal no better than those of the men who had been found shot with notices pinned around their necks saying ‘All traitors beware’.
The lad who’d recited ‘Dark Rosaleen’ the week before asked Seamus, ‘What about the Catholic minority up North?’ He had a sad, brooding, Celtic face, elongated and unfleshed. ‘Our suffering people,’ he mused.
Seamus said that the Boundary Commission would narrow down the Northern territory until it would be economically unviable. ‘Lloyd George himself told Collins.’
‘Lloyd George …’
‘He who sups with the devil needs a long spoon.’
‘Later,’ said Seamus, ‘when the Free State is working and on its feet will be the time to think of the North.’
He and Sparky began punching each other, wrestling playfully over something Judith hadn’t caught. Some double meaning. Fellows were forever making remarks not meant to be picked up by girls. As in the secret societies derided by Seamus, half the relish came from someone not being in the know. Judith didn’t want to be. Not in the least. She carefully kept herself from knowing about soppy things like love and courting. Sparky and her brother yelped like puppies and held each other in a clinch. They were big-wristed lads with too much energy. You could just picture one of them leaving a girl in the lurch to sing:
‘My bonny lies over the ocean,
My bonny lies over the say.
My bonny lies over the ocean,
And he’s left me in the family way.’
She blushed for the impropriety of the song and wondered how she had come to think of it? Secrets and treachery had reminded her. That was what.
*
Therese,
I have been unfair; for all my efforts not to be – I have been unfair to her. I have not kept copies of my letters to you but I know I have given the impression that my relationship with her was purely physical. This makes her seem like some piece of animal bait with which Ireland trapped me. Maybe it excited me to think so. It’s not true. She’s a fine person and one has no right to turn people into playthings, even in one’s fantasy.
Maybe you’d rather not know. It’s just that, having misled you, I now feel I’ve got to put the record straight. I don’t want to tell more lies than I have to. Obviously, around here, we’re having to tell a few. She has to be discreet because of her family and I don’t want word of what’s happening getting back either to Larry or to Los Angeles. The Irish gossip. God, do they.
Yes, the furtiveness did excite me at first. I admit it. I may have told you so. The need to keep up a front, touch as if by chance, grope beneath tables and behind doors – all that cooks up excitement. It’s part of the drill that never made it West of the Rockies. Playing with what might be fire. Might. Might not. This country is between worlds. ‘Strong’ farmers in the provinces get sued for having alienated the affections of the wives of lesser ones. We’ve been following a case in the Irish Times with a mixture of hilarity and fear. Cynics say the lesser farmer sets his wife up to entice the strong (i.e. rich) one, who then has to pay the ‘outraged’ husband restitution. Cases like these are rare in England now but, like I say, this is Ireland battling with imported and dumped legislation. It hots up the atmosphere. I admit.
What I want to say – in my defence – is that this was an adjunct, the parsley round the roast – shit, forgive the imagery. I’m whacked, writing this at two in the morning after a tough day. I don’t want to tear it up and start again because I haven’t the stamina. And however dumbly or raggedly I write, I do want to keep those envelopes coming. I want us in touch.
What I set out to say is that she’s a decent person, worth while, someone you would like – in other circumstances. And I’ve intruded in her life. I’m responsible for setting it back now on to an even keel. Somehow.
Therese, forgive me if I’m a selfish and insensitive bastard. I’m at a loss. I’ll write more consecutively next time. Please be of good cheer. I love you – in my fashion.
James
*
James said Aunt Judith could borrow his cassette-recorder – he had two – to record the phone-calls she claimed to be receiving. That way she’d be sure that they weren’t coming from inside her own head.
Grainne hoped that would calm her down. ‘She’s excitable,’ she said. ‘She told Cormac that nothing was worth living for which wasn’t worth dying for. He was impressed.’
‘I’m impressed.’
‘He takes it literally.’
‘Great.’
‘What’s great about it?’ She was indignant. ‘The culture is full of pious adages it would be demented to take seriously. Fourteen-year-olds do though. Cormac could do something cretinous.’
‘I take them seriously. I love you. I take that seriously.’
This annoyed her. He was putting himself forward. Cormac and Aunt Judith were capable of dangerous insanity. Was he? Exhibitionism was in poor taste.
‘What might Cormac do?’
‘How do I know? Children are used. Everything innocent is: shopping bags, coffins. It was in the evening papers that a car stopped at the border two days ago had explosives under the back seat. The driver’s three toddlers were sitting on it.’
‘That’s how you fight a guerilla war.’
She guessed him to be thinking of films by Boris Ivens and Gino Pontecorvo. She had seen them too. Also of pub chat. But she was thinking of Cormac, a real person, a bundle of intractable adolescent impulse and generosity. Her Cormac, the loose skin of whose testicles she had caught one day in a zip when she was undressing him on the beach. He had been four years old and had screamed his head off while Michael began trembling, unnerving her and yelling that females brought up in convents were unfit to be let near male children and did she know how much she had hurt the
boy? She didn’t. The two had kept up their clamour while she extricated the tiny sliver of skin from the zip. Later, she bought Cormac an ice-cream and worried that she might have maimed him for life. Later again, when he was five or maybe six, she had told him stories of patriot heroes and sung him ballads which had seemed sage, being defused by the decades-old peace which had looked like lasting forever. Nobody in those days gave a thought to the North except to pop up there to buy contraceptives. Well, maybe those very tales were bearing their fruit now. How could you tell?
‘It’s not our war,’ she told James.
‘Pontius Pilate.’
‘I have every sympathy with the man. You wouldn’t be so indulgent about the fighting men if you knew them. They shoot bullets through the kneecaps of their own men for sexual offences.’
‘Wartime has its own morality.’
‘Maybe. But bystanders have no right to approve of it. How come you didn’t go to Vietnam if you’re so war-minded?’
‘I managed …’
‘You managed. You chose the peaceful values. They come easily to you. Not to me. I’m struggling out of a dour tradition. No, don’t start kissing me. I’m angry now.’
‘The fighting spirit finds its own outlets.’
‘That’s the thing. We need time to breed it out and there’s Cormac cultivating it in himself. I could cry. I’d try beating peace into him.’ She laughed. ‘Did I tell you about the Battered Wives’ Home in London and how most of them had been battered by Irish husbands? What does that tell you about our fighting spirit?’
‘That your government should introduce bull-fighting to channel off spleen. Why not get your politician-cousin to propose it?’
She didn’t want to talk about Owen Roe. ‘That bastard is lepping with nostalgia for the days of all-out gun-fighting.’
No Country for Young Men Page 25
