No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘I’m a character from Moby Dick trying to live in Cranford. It’s not even a quiet Cranford. Old phantoms stalk the privet hedges. Cormac dreams of being a gunman.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound workable. Why don’t you come away with me? Come to California. Bring Cormac. I’ll teach him to surf. That’ll deviate his dare-devil drives. Or to hang-glide.’

  ‘Are you planning to get a divorce?’

  ‘I don’t know. We’d have to see. You might even like my wife.’

  ‘Oh. Do you have polygamy over there?’

  ‘No. But situations can be fluid.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  *

  Cormac had written:

  Dear Dom Patrick,

  I am asking you to excuse Cormac from the excursion to St Michan’s crypt. He has been there before and as he is suffering from varicose veins in his legs the doctor has suggested that he walk as little as possible. For the same reason, we hope that you will excuse him from taking part in sports for the rest of term. The scholastic part of his curriculum should benefit from this enforced rest. Yours sincerely, Michael O’Malley.

  Cormac was expert at forging his father’s signature and had been writing notes like this for years. He didn’t think the old man would blow the gaff if he were to find out. Daddy hated trouble – which, in a way, was his trouble. Cormac sometimes had the feeling that he had stolen something of his father’s self by impersonating him so regularly.

  It was as if they were both plugged into the same current and Cormac was using up too much. Certainly the old man was getting dimmer, while Cormac felt charges inside him curdling his blood and brains. Probably it was adolescence and would pass. Or he could be a touch mad? His heredity wasn’t too reliable, so he’d better hope it was just puberty. Other fellows in school didn’t seem to suffer from it though. Maybe they were sublimating?

  Dom Patrick had explained to the senior boys that the thing to do with sexual drives was to sublimate them on the sports field. He’d read out bits from some book on psychology. Cormac thought the old twit was spastic. Since listening to him he couldn’t look at a ball or stick.

  Anyway, sexual drives weren’t what troubled Cormac at all. What was boiling up in him was more a kind of total disgust. Many things revolted him, especially having to touch anything which was less than clean. That was just about everything these days, for in school the monks were filthy and at home his mother had become a sloven. It was having the aunt in the house, he supposed. She was niffy and Mary, the maid, also had a pong. Cormac wished he didn’t feel that way about them, but he did. The other day he had found a long red hair in his mouth while eating a pie. He had pulled it out with difficulty because it had got tangled up in the food he was chewing and it was all he could do to stop himself being sick. He’d managed to refrain from complaining, partly because mentioning the thing would have made him even more disgusted. Also, he was having trouble keeping his mother from kissing him and he didn’t want to be always hurting her feelings.

  The rolling about in tangles of arms and legs on a mucky playing field, which seemed so healthy to Dom Patrick, was especially nauseating to Cormac. Actually, Dom Patrick himself was icky. He had dandruff all over his black, clerical clothes. A barber had told Cormac that dandruff came from nerves and nerves from unsatisfied desire. Cormac wasn’t sure that the chap mightn’t have been pulling his leg but anyway the stuff revolted him. He couldn’t keep his eyes off the grey flakes scattered like the scales of small, moulting beetles all over Dom Patrick’s cassock. The monk’s hands were grey too, like the hands of the skeletons you were meant to shake for luck when you visited St Michan’s crypt. These had great flaps of leather over their chests. They released brown dust like old puff-balls when you moved them. They were supposed to be the miraculously preserved bodies of old crusaders but the preservation was so poor that you could hardly be impressed by the miracle and anyway, according to the guide book, the crypt wasn’t old enough for them to be crusaders at all. So where was the point of the excursion? Piety? Lies? A typical Dom Patrick move. He’d make them all walk through town in a crocodile wearing their blazers to give the school some free publicity. Dom Patrick himself would be swanning along in front with his dandruff shining in the sun like castor sugar.

  Anyway Cormac had got off the outing and rung Great-uncle Owen Roe to ask could he come riding with him up on Calary.

  ‘Haven’t you got school?’ his uncle wanted to know.

  ‘There’s an excursion. I’m not going.’

  Great-uncle Owen Roe had been unusually pernickety. ‘I’m not going to fight your battles with your mother for you,’ he’d warned. ‘I won’t try to stop your coming to visit me but I won’t square it with her either. It’s up to you.’

  Cormac guessed that his great-uncle didn’t want to seem to be horning in on Cormac’s father’s place.

  ‘Been seeing the uncle, have you?’ Daddy sometimes asked. He always called Great-uncle Owen Roe ‘the uncle’, as if he were a character in a comic. ‘How’s the uncle?’ he’d ask. ‘Still plotting to take over the country? Getting too big for his boots, eh?’ Cormac had the feeling that what Daddy meant was ‘plotting to take over my family’. There was always the notion around that Great-uncle Owen Roe was ‘up to something’.

  ‘So you want to come for a bit of a canter on Calary Bog?’ his uncle asked.

  ‘Yes.’ Riding was the one sport Cormac loved. It was just risky enough to take all his attention. By the time he’d galloped over a few miles of bogland and jumped a few fences, he felt his mind combed clean of the messy half-thoughts which usually cluttered it and his body felt purged. It was as though he had shucked off inessential parts of himself. The friction of the air, the bath in milky sky, the razoring wind cleansed him. He came back smelling of sedge and horse. It did for him what confession and communion were supposed to do but didn’t.

  ‘You haven’t been coming to confession, Cormac?’ Dom Patrick had remarked. If he thought Cormac was going to insert himself into a smelly confessional, breathing the same bad air as Dom Patrick, to tell him his sins, then he had another think coming.

  ‘I go with my mother to the parish church,’ Cormac lied. He stared at the scaling skin on the monk’s eyelids. It was a trick he’d learned which made the person you were talking to think you were looking them in the eye. Dom Patrick was very keen on being looked in the eye. Man to man. Straight. He couldn’t distinguish a look at his eyelid, though, from a look into his pale, jellyfish eyeball, and looking at the lid left Cormac feeling coldly superior and in control. He knew that Dom Patrick was aiming a hard look at him, but it missed him. The monk didn’t believe that either mother or son went to confession but he couldn’t say that. Having the sort of parents Cormac had did have advantages. At the same time he felt furious with the old twit for daring to think badly of his mother.

  ‘They have minds like sewers,’ Patsy Flynn had told Cormac. ‘Monks. They learn about sexual positions,’ Patsy added surprisingly, ‘by using pennies.’ He went on to say how Republicans in the past had been the only ones who wouldn’t bow the knee to them, and Cormac didn’t get a chance to ask how pennies could teach you about sex. Pennies? Penis? Penis angelicus? That was a joke from Focalín. Cormac wished he hadn’t brought the paper home. His mother had seen it. She’d come to kiss him good night and, trying to avoid that, he’d pretended to be asleep and she’d looked at it. Embarrassing. His mother was sexy-looking. Fellows had remarked on it. Cormac would have liked to cover her up in some old sack, though he knew that this was probably immature of him. You had to take the world as it was, the natural world anyway. Cormac’s trouble was he didn’t know the meaning of life or why he was alive. If you rejected what people like Dom Patrick taught you, you found yourself at a loss. You had to start from scratch and be suspicious of every single tiny thing you’d ever been told. It was daunting. Of course, if you decided to go in for politics, which Cormac thought he might, then you
didn’t have to start so far back. Action would take your mind off the vaguer questions. A bit like horse-riding really.

  ‘So can I come?’ Cormac had asked Uncle Owen Roe. ‘Riding? On Calary?’

  ‘Only if your mother rings me to say it’s OK.’

  That put paid to it. He couldn’t even ask his mother since she’d know he was meant to be at school.

  ‘I’m sorry, Cormac,’ said his uncle. ‘Your mother is getting touchy about our outings.’

  It was late in the day for her to be coming all over the responsible mother but, all right, Cormac had to admit that he’d wished she’d pull her socks up about this in the past and so now he had no right to complain. It was his old trouble: not knowing whether he wanted revolution, independence, and to break the idols, or an ordered, properly run, stable world. He must really make his mind up before he could complain about anything at all. Meanwhile, when Excursion Day came, he’d have to skulk around the house if he didn’t want to be caught mitching from school. He’d have to sneak food from the kitchen for his lunch and maybe spend good money in the afternoon to see some wretched movie he didn’t even want to see. Anyway, he’d have to keep out of sight. It was a bore.

  *

  So their cauldron bubbled behind closed curtains in his hotel bedroom. Toil and trouble might be the sediment but they tried not to stir it up.

  ‘I want to eat pineapple chunks out of your cunt,’ he said.

  It was the season for play, but she began armouring herself against reality which sooner or later must erupt. She was worried about Michael, who was hardly ever home.

  Fearful at first of hurting him, she began after a while to dread that he already was hurt but would never let her know. She imagined the knowledge of her betrayal, secret as a cancer, corrupting his health, and longed, selfishly, to have things out. He must guess something? Why didn’t he ask her? But no. He moved through the house like a new butler unsure of his duties, pausing in doorways, coughing at the turns of corridors, whistling as he came in the gate. What did he imagine he’d find if he just walked in on her?

  ‘Are you all right, Michael?’

  ‘Me? Yes. Why?’

  ‘You look peaky.’

  It was an opening but he didn’t take it.

  ‘Odd?’ she suggested.

  ‘Odd compared to whom?’ he could have quipped, or: ‘Where were you all afternoon?’

  She could have explained then about how this was just a sensual release which at her age he could hardly deny her. He had never wanted to eat pineapple from between her legs, had he? So, if she wanted to play such games while he played his in the pub, what harm was anyone doing anyone? He wouldn’t deny her the sex he didn’t enjoy himself, would he? Would he? Or the explanation she needed in order to feel absolved – it wasn’t for her sake that she wanted the showdown. She wanted to be able to tell him that the best part of her loved him. The mind and heart, Michael. Please. Really. Didn’t all that count? Didn’t he want to know he had it still? He didn’t. He slid in and out the front door like a barely tolerated cat. His clothes looked shabbier. She couldn’t think where he got them. Maybe from the Salvation Army? He was promenading around in rags so as to punish her, so as to show her up to all Dublin as a neglectful wife. In the evenings, she cooked remorseful meals for him and got herself up seductively, brimming with excess sex. But he didn’t come home or, if he did, gobbled a few mouthfuls then rushed back out to meet some man in a pub. What? No, he couldn’t take her. A men-only occasion. Sorry. It would bore her anyway. He had his key. Don’t wait up.

  He eluded her. He always had.

  ‘He’s a casualty,’ she told her lover, ‘of our family.’

  ‘People,’ she said, ‘thought I’d made a great catch when I married him. I remember a man at our wedding telling me that any lassie who could put salt on the tail of a young fellow like that knew on which side her bread was buttered.’

  ‘What an oaf!’ James was shocked.

  ‘Oh, he was drunk. But he said what they all thought. Michael was fetching and he was expected to inherit his father’s mills. Later he was disinherited after he took to the drink.’

  She was remembering Michael’s wide-spaced eyes floating like sea-slivers above his cheek bones. Nowadays they were bloodshot and surrounded by swollen flesh. He was losing his eyelashes.

  ‘Unless I destroyed him myself?’ she wondered.

  ‘Alcoholics,’ James told her, ‘are the destroyers.’

  That, like a lot of things people said, was only half true. James, Grainne noticed, chose the workable halves of truths. It was perhaps unfair to fault him for this but she did. It implied, didn’t it, that she should choose the workable half of her life: James’s and cut Michael’s out? This made a sort of harsh, pragmatic sense and was maybe honester than the solution she had chosen which was to rush, like a tight-rope performer, from one man to the other, changing her face en route. The rope was not strung between the two males but between their emotional territories. One night recently, she had found herself lunging sleepily for the cock beside her and even for the mouth which, while silent, was only flesh. When Michael said something, he at once became his quirky, easily hurt self and woke Grainne up to awareness that she was committing two-way treachery in her marriage bed. Seeing things partly with James’s and partly with Michael’s eyes, she felt herself turn into a hybrid, double-visioned creature who had to keep sorting herself out.

  ‘I’ve never done anything useful with my life,’ she tried to explain to herself and James. ‘I feel that being a private person – unlike, say, Owen Roe – it’s up to me to do good in my private life and that means to Michael. You’re trouble-free, so I don’t feel I deserve you.’

  James gave her the answers she wanted: reassuring, sensible. American answers which – she saw as soon as he gave them – she had been shamelessly soliciting. Overtaxing your powers, he said, made things worse all round, worse for him, for Cormac even for Michael. Yes, she was being a bore. She saw that. It was these brief meetings that did it. All they had time for was to eat and fuck and talk in an excited, unnatural way. There were no pauses. No dead times. That made you take yourself a lot too seriously. She must arrange to spend a day with James, well, anyway, a long afternoon. Cook up some excuse.

  She did this and found that after the food and the fucking, she was talking lengthily about Michael. Well, why not? He was in her mind. Better bring him out front, as James would say. She was constantly having to remember not to use American turns of speech when talking to Michael.

  The connection was a deep one, she explained. Deep and old. Being cousins, she and Michael had always known each other, although she hadn’t got to know him well until she was in her late teens in Rome, where she had persuaded her parents to send her to finishing school. Michael was already in the city, studying to be a singer, sowing wild oats and sparking off rumours which filtered home through priestly connections at the Vatican.

  ‘I’d had a crush on him,’ she confessed, ‘since I was six.’

  That was why she’d wanted to go to the convent on the top of the Spanish Steps. She used to walk down these with other girls to have tea at Babbingtons’ English teashop. Local boys sat on the steps, spied up their skirts and hissed at them in various languages. The girls ignored the boys, but later, when they met marriageable young men, remembered the lewd suggestions and guessed that the polite ones must be thinking similar thoughts.

  ‘I’d like to lick you all over,’ was one of the urchins’ remarks.

  Ice-creams were bought in chrome-bright bars in the piazza and tongues, licking the coloured cones, were reflected in all the surfaces. The girls were as demure as statues, but the hiss of espresso machines set off sensations along the surface of their skin. Grainne had loathed and been fired by the overt sensuality of Italy. Michael, much later, was to admit he’d felt the same thing. They were both embarked on a pilgrimage away from the dull puritanism of their parents but had too much of it in them to accept the
easy delights on offer all around. They needed some custom-made ecstasy tailored to their own hot, fastidious needs. Now, thought Grainne sadly, she had run out on her old partner and found what she wanted with someone else. It made her feel mean. Perhaps if she stated this in Western-film terms, James might understand? Though, what was the use of his understanding? She didn’t want him empathizing so perfectly that he felt obliged to bow out of her life. Perhaps she was only sharing her past with him so that, if she did decide to go away with him, she would not have to leave it all behind? Love me, love my past. Anyway, at the time she’d been telling him about, she’d seen very little of Michael, she explained. He was sometimes in the tearooms but always got up to go when he saw her come in, looking as if he’d have hidden if he could, but looming head and shoulders above the squat Roman men. The girls from Grainne’s group called him ‘il cervo’ because, as she told James, he was forever stumbling into chairs as he rushed off, like a stag enmeshing its antlers in forest boughs. Grainne had heard that he was living with some woman and fearful lest anyone from home should know. There had been a row in the family when he chose to become a singer; further indiscretion could lead to his allowance being cut off. The romance of this appealed to her finishing-school mates, whose unique concern was matchmaking.

  These girls spent hours at a stretch discussing the money a suitor must have before he could be taken seriously, and mapping on each others’ bodies areas which such a man might explore on first and subsequent dates. No dates at all were permitted by the convent but, even so, to Grainne, coming from a country intoxicated by centuries of hope and disorder, the girls’ expectations were repellent. She must have let them see this for they stopped inviting her to their houses. This, since there was no going out unchaperoned, meant that she remained coralled within the convent for months. Having no opportunity of losing anything else, she spent the time losing her religion. She teased God in the same spirit as the girls planned to tease suitors. ‘Take me,’ she defied impatiently. ‘I’m giving you every chance. Let me feel ecstasy.’ Nothing came of this and, in an access of boredom, she made a sacrilegious communion. ‘Strike me then,’ she challenged. ‘Give me eczema, polio, something.’ God took no more notice of Grainne than she had taken of the boys on the Spanish Steps, and her emotions remained ravening and unemployed. Finally it was spring. The city, after months of muddy inertia, began to bloom. Bird cages were put out on windowsills and clothes-lines heavy with underwear strung, like gonfalons, across courtyards. Wisteria blossomed and grew pale, shedding its flowers in a preliminary typifying of grapes and autumn wine.