An invitation arrived from the Irish Embassy. Michael was to sing in an oratorio in a church. Since the occasion was cousinly, cultural and religious, the nuns stretched their rules and Grainne was let out alone.
She took her tremulous self down past the hissing youths into the streets off the Corso, where she found a shaky filobus to carry her to the Piazza Navona. She was late and Michael, already singing, as she reached the nave, struck her as a creature apart. Grainne was unmusical. The nuns had said so in a report to her family. Not only, they complained, was she musically uncultured – ‘pas cultivée du tout’ – but perhaps beyond culturing. Her relatives, associating the words with the soil which they were eager to put behind them – her mother’s people had been farmers – were unperturbed. This was the first concert Grainne had attended in months. The impact of the music was the more total. It wrung her nerves. The singer seemed disembodied and sustained by it and held her mesmerized like a snake.
At the concert’s end a girl moved through gauzy twilight towards the singer. She wore a mantilla and the dusk knitted her contours into the church’s baroque exuberance. Grainne observed singer and girl exchanging looks. Separated by a small congratulatory crowd pressed around Michael, their faces achieved a symmetry, like matched statues flanking an altar. Grainne, alert for the tense and illicit, intuited a current of passion and wanted it to touch her.
‘I think,’ she told James, ‘I was afraid of not being able to generate anything like it myself. I didn’t want to take anything from them, you understand. Just to be part of it.’
This happened. She became their confidante. The girl was English, a lovely, ivory-skinned slut in whose room Grainne was able to smell the fumes of sex at no cost to her own purity – smell them physically from Theo’s chronically unmade bed and stained turbulence of sheets. Grainne would sit for hours on a smoothed-out stretch of this while Theo -Theodora Smith – waxed hair off her legs, painted her nails, chain smoked and interrogated her about Michael.
‘Will he marry me?’ she asked. ‘You must know. You’re his cousin. I can’t make out these Catholic boys at all.’ She laughed and the misplaced, inconsequential laughter seemed to Grainne to pinpoint the bravura of blighted love. The blight rescued Theo from banality and was clear to Grainne from the start. It was Theo’s readiness to adapt which would put Michael’s family off. Theo, Grainne guessed, could have got away with any one of her personae but could hardly hope to put across the lot. She was a rag-doll made up of scraps which told a tale. Her accent, as she freely admitted, had been learned from a lover who had found her working in a Kilburn pub and planned to launch her as an actress. Her name came from another lover. Her clothes were remnants of a trousseau supplied by the man she had ditched for Michael and in these – until she opened her unbridled mouth – she looked like a duchess. Better than many duchesses. Grainne had seen several at the convent, and Theo, at her best, outshone them. At her best, she could look like a saint. The man who had wanted her to act had been on to something, for she could imitate anyone. It was the substance behind appearances which escaped her.
‘I know he’s weak,’ she told Grainne. ‘I’ve been warned. He says he’ll marry me but his friends say I shouldn’t count on it. You tell me,’ she flattered. ‘Hοw can I win round his parents? What should I do?’ It was a tall order.
‘Be yourself,’ said Grainne inadequately. The advice was useless. Which self? The Kilburn self? Even that might have been acceptable if Theo had stuck to it. Michael’s – and Grainne’s – family, though avid for gentility, could not forget their revolutionary background. They felt unease about snobbery. If Theo had managed to look like someone who had risen by force of grit and virtue, they would have been uncomfortable about rejecting her. Grainne sensed this but, unable to put it in words, fell back on the nice-girl’s rule of thumb: be sincere and with luck your sincerity will be reciprocated. For marrying one’s own kind this was sure-fire and anyway the only strategy open to the young and ignorant like herself. For Theo, she began to see, it would not do. Theo could only afford small doses of sincerity.
‘It’s all so bloody two-faced and old-hat,’ Theo complained. ‘People pretend matchmaking and dowries went out with the Flood. Don’t you believe it. Some milky little deb can slip in and marry the man you’ve been living with and maybe supporting for years. I’ve seen it happen.’ Her face hardened suddenly and Grainne saw an older, embittered Theo with no flies on her, a brassy, disillusioned shopgirl, a Kilburn char.
Some of Theo’s friends had managed to marry up. Peers two had got. A third had got her hooks into a Greek movie director and another married a playboy who owned a race-course in Atlantic City. Compared to them, what was Michael?
‘I thought he was wild Irish,’ she complained. ‘Now they tell me the wild Irish are all Protestant. How’s a girl to know?’
Her ditched lover had written to Michael’s father.
‘A foul, filthy, libellous letter! I never knew he was such a shit.’
The father cut funds and the two pawned things – Michael’s violin, their skis – while waiting for something to turn up. Michael did some numbers in a cabaret and borrowed small sums from Grainne who imagined one or both of the lovers dying, like Chatterton, on that stained bed. She also had sessions with Michael.
‘I wish you’d talk sense into that girl,’ he complained, as though Grainne had been an understanding grandmother. ‘She doesn’t understand,’ he intoned, ‘that I’ve got to play ball with my bloody father. I’m an artist. I need time to develop my voice. And I wish she’d tone herself down. We were in a trattoria the other night and I said, “look, love, that booze hound with the red nose over there happens to be the chargé d’affaires representing our sanctified island. So do me a favour: sit tight.” Well, nothing would do her when the musicians came round but to jump up and start singing with them. Making up for her lack of the lingo with mime and cabaret humour. Knickers humour if you don’t mind. And the old bastard had his eyes out on sticks.’
‘He may have liked it.’
‘Oh don’t worry! He liked it. He’ll be doing the act for my old man the next time they meet.’
Grainne’s association with the lovers fired and aged her. Michael and Theo interviewed and managed to impress the nuns with their suitability as chaperones. Theo had worn gloves and a hat for the occasion and now the trio dined together almost nightly. They ran up bills in small eating-places and had a decidedly ambiguous air.
‘Isn’t he smashing?’ Theo would croon. ‘Everyone’s admiring my songbird. L’uccellone mio.’
‘They’re admiring you!’
‘Maybe it’s Grainne they like? She’s the local type. The ragazza per bene: the nice girl.’
‘Don’t be horrid, Theo. That makes me think of all those bloody girls at the school.’
‘But you are like them, darling: a virginal voyeur. What better definition of a nice girl?’
‘Grainne’s all right,’ said Michael. ‘Leave her alone.’
The look she got from Theo was Grainne’s first intimation that she might be being backed into the role of predatory little deb who swipes the heroine’s man.
Years after Grainne and Michael had married, Theo turned up in Dublin for Horse-Show Week with a rich Colombian in tow. She bore no grudges. In the end it was she who had called quits, leaving Michael and Grainne to find that their meetings to talk about her were turning into talks about themselves.
‘Which could have been foreseen with half an eye,’ said Theo the-wordly-wise, who had dyed her hair and was wearing sables. She claimed to have a soft corner for Michael still.
‘Which one?’ Grainne asked tartly and was pleased that Michael happened to be away.
Theo laughed, unruffled. ‘I called him my songbird,’ she told the Colombian. ‘Ah well, he’s Grainne’s now. How is he?’ she asked Grainne.
‘He lost his voice,’ Grainne warned. ‘Don’t mention it if you see him. He hates to be reminded.’
&n
bsp; By then Michael had tried working in the woollen mills and their retail outlets but had been fired for drunkenness by his father.
‘Had to drink,’ Michael had groaned humorously. ‘There I was, working as a bloody counter-jumper, selling lengths of ribbon and woollen combs to farmers. “This’ll keep your backside warm, sir, just the thing to wear for the spring sowing.”’
‘But darling,’ screamed Theo. ‘I didn’t call him songbird because of his voice! What a laugh! Don’t you know the slang meaning of uccello in Italian? Penis! You see, Michael, in that department, was memorable.’
Her Colombian lover laughed with zest. He was a short, reddish, Indian-looking man with quick, excited eyes. The year was one when group sex had become fashionable in England, and Grainne had a panicked fear that the two might suggest something. The notion froze her. Voyeurism no longer appealed to her in the least and sex had been of such minimal importance in her marriage that she had come to think it must have been Michael’s lack of potency which had led to the final break with Theo. This latest news was humiliating. If true. Theo might be getting a delayed revenge. Amusing herself perhaps? Grainne shot glances at her but didn’t dare pursue the matter. Questions festered however: was Michael simply not aroused by her? Had she somehow unmanned him? Had he married her simply so as to go on talking about Theo? They no longer did this, but who could have foreseen the cooling of the heart?
‘Do you find me sexy?’ she asked James.
‘Very.’
‘Truly?’
‘Can’t you tell?’
‘No. You might have a kink for frigid women.’
‘You frigid! You must be crazy!’
Possibly, as in Theo’s joke, sex and singing had been psychically connected for Michael. It was just before Theo took off and he got drunk in a Roman café, quarrelling first with her, then with some bystanders, that he got himself knocked down and kicked, among other places, in the throat. Theo had been demanding that he marry her and face his parents with a fait accompli. She wasn’t getting younger, she assured him, and could not afford to wait. A girl had to give some thought to number one.
‘They’d come round,’ she told him. ‘Parents always do.’
‘Theo, I need peace. There would be a God-Almighty row. If I haven’t got peace I can’t develop my art. It’s precisely because I hate that old shit of a tinker, my father, that businessman – crass, snobbish – because I hate his values that I need my art. You can’t ask me to give it up.’
Michael had drunk a half-bottle of grappa. He was red in the face and his diction was thick.
‘All I’m asking is that you marry me.’
‘He’d cut me off. We’ve got to move warily. Be gentle as doves and wishe, wise ash …’
‘You’ve been cut off. Michael, I gave up Maurice for you and I was on to a good thing there. You never mentioned wariness then, did you? It was all for love and share my crust under the moon. Damn it, Michael, I’m not complaining, but …’
‘But what? What are you doing?’
‘I’m asking you to marry me. I can’t waste any more time and you can stop pretending to be so drunk. You’re sober enough to understand. I know you by now. Your father would have to come round. Wouldn’t he, Grainne? You’re an objective outsider, I suppose? What do you say?’
Grainne tried to be fair. ‘Well, the old man could disinherit Michael,’ she said cautiously. ‘You see, there’s his younger brother, Michael’s uncle, who’s been working in the business and …’
‘Another crass businessman. I spit on their business. My grandfather was a bloody hero,’ Michael shouted. ‘Hero. I’m going to drink to his ashes. Cameriere, more grappa. A gunman! He fought your bloody tribe,’ he told Theo. ‘He never cared for money.’
‘Well you certainly care enough for it.’
‘They should be proud to pay it. I’m the pride of their bloody escutcheon. I sing. I’m the only honour they’ve got since the Granddad died. They sold their own for a mess of underwear. Combs. Jockey shorts. They can put my golden throat on their Coat of Arms. Mine. All they can contribute to it is a pair of woollen underpants.’
‘Golden uccello!’ launched Theo in a loud voice and added a number of comments which must, given the punning possibilities, have been filthy. Grainne saw this in retrospect. The whole café became intent on the quarrel. Passera, the Italian word for a female sparrow, had a second meaning – vagina. That too was bandied. So were fica, cazzo, bischero, mona, stronzo. Theo had learned her scraps of Italian from graffiti on the Roman walls. Her virtuoso performance as a dubbed-in wife of Bath swept over Grainne’s innocent head. One of the bystanders, a man who had brought his daughters to the café for ice-cream, complained to the management. A foreign whore was corrupting his children’s innocence. She should be put out.
‘Are you a businessman?’ Michael, high on guilt and grappa, interrogated the father of daughters, ‘a man of affaires?’
The Italian decided that the blonde barbarian was insulting him and that anyway the woman was a whore. ‘La donna …’ he shouted at the waiter, ‘è una sgualdrina.’
‘La donn’è mobile,’ sang Michael with drunken zest.
The two squared up to each other. Theo yelled. Michael sang Rigoletto’s aria, interrupting himself to explain, then interrupting his explanations to sing.
‘Com’ pium al vento… I’m an artist,’ he roared, ‘a bloody singer. Not a tinker or a crass businessman like my old man. Padre!’ he roared and made a face of savage derision. He had learned no Italian, although he had been in Rome for three years. Just enough to order drinks and pronounce the words in his singing repertoire. He struck his chest in a parody of Italianate pride and went back to the aria.
The father of daughters construed this as an insult. One knew, after all, what had been the fate of Rigoletto’s daughter and the civic status of Rigoletto. A pimp. He was being called a pimp. Un ruffiano! Him! A respected citizen. Bystanders took the insult to be aimed at the whole of Italian culture: oltraggio alla patria, a punishable offence. Someone went for the police but before they arrived Michael had been knocked down or had fallen over, and been kicked in his private parts and throat. Theo leaped at the men aiming the kicks. There were several but her Kilburn heritage came in useful. She fought with such vim and expertise, that by the time the police came two had claw marks etched deep in their faces. A man was hiding his eye. Another, bending over, moaned about his balls. Three men and Michael were transported with all speed to the Pronto Soccorso and Theo to the police station.
‘The old fighting spirit!’ James, amused by the tale, ruffled the soft hair at the back of Grainne’s neck. ‘Does this tickle? Or please? It’s where your nerves converge. Supposed to be very sensitive.’
Grainne moved her head away. ‘Not in Michael,’ she said. ‘He put up no fight at all. Never knew what hit him. Too sozzled. It was Theo who fought with her bare hands.’
‘O piccola manina!’
‘Yes. I just sat frozen. Couldn’t stir. She was ejected from the country while Michael was in hospital. Or left. We never quite knew. I was shut up in the convent at the time. All outings forbidden. Then Michael’s father turned up and started matchmaking. He thought Michael and I would be good for each other. My side of the family were furious.’
James put his tongue in Grainne’s ear. She wriggled.
‘I was in love with him,’ she said defensively. ‘I always had been and I thought he needed me. He’d lost his voice after the fight. If you could call it a fight. He kept talking about his father having the last laugh, but the old man wasn’t laughing at all. He kept saying that Michael needed a strong woman.
‘You?’
‘Yes. He wanted Michael to settle down and there I was to hand and in love with him. Everyone knew I’d always been in love with him. It was a family joke. When I was a child the maids used to sing:
‘The rain, rain falls;
The wind blows high;
The leaves come clattering fr
om the sky.
Grainne O’Malley said she’d die
If she didn’t get Michael of the roving eye.’
‘Oh Jesus!,’ said Grainne and began to cry. ‘It’s still true. I’m in bed with you and I’m in love with Michael.’
‘You’re a Proustian.’ James stroked her thigh. ‘Proust could only enjoy things in anticipation or in retrospect. Or at least that was true of his main character. You’ve got a magnificent thigh. Does Michael appreciate it?’
‘I don’t think he’s seen it in years. Maybe he never saw it.’
‘Do you like it when I do this?’
‘Yes.’
‘And this way?’
‘Yes. Yes. Oh God, yes.’
‘But you love Michael?’
‘Yes, but I’m a sgualdrina. Yes, yes, yes.’
‘Yes what?’
‘Go on doing that.’
‘This?’
‘Yes.’
‘Do you know what you’re really in love with? Your fidelity since you were four. Or whenever. Do you want me to go on?’
‘Another bit … Yes. Oh James. Oh Jesus.’ She groaned.
‘You love fucking, don’t you?’
‘Yes. I love it.’
‘You think of it all day, don’t you?’
‘How did you know?’
‘Because I do too. It’s a sort of virus. We’ve both got it. I can taste your cunt in my mouth. Suddenly. I’m walking down Grafton Street or sitting in the RTE studios, listening to Corny Kinlen sounding off or interviewing some old relic of the Twenties, and my mouth fills with the taste of it. Everything disappears. The old face in front of me turns into a visual mash with veins like crushed raspberries and a blue streak of eye and my body is deliquescent, juicing, magnetized, mad to get back into bed with you and be nothing but an assembly of prehensile, oozing surfaces. I have to clench myself, like a fist, to try and function until I can get back to you. I know you feel the same thing and I know you hate it. You fight it, and the way you do is by telling me about your son and husband and grandfather, who define you to yourself as a responsible figure: mother, wife, civic entity, and not,’ said James, sticking his palm over the dripping hair of her pudenda, ‘this, or,’ he ran his tongue in under her armpit, ‘this sweating crevice. Here,’ he swished his tongue around inside her mouth, ‘taste your own juices. I’m greedy for them. Don’t you deny them’
No Country for Young Men Page 27
