No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  ‘I’ll have some wine from your bottle. I’m twenty months under age, though.’

  ‘They don’t care,’ his father told him. ‘You’re tall enough to be sixteen.’

  ‘Have you something important to tell me?’

  Cormac had meant this to come out funny, the way they did it in movies. But his father looked squashed. Cormac tried to scoop up the good humour which was leaking out of the situation. He waved at a trolley loaded with crab, olives and poached eggs decorated to look like children’s paintings. ‘Well, this is a bit unusual,’ he said, ‘for you and me, I mean? Oh,’ he heard his embarrassed voice mumble: ‘Forget it.’

  His father gave him a hurt look. ‘Don’t you think we should see each other this way sometimes? You and I? Your mother takes over when we’re at home – which is grand, but … then there’s the aunt … house seems in a constant …’ As though wearied by the topics looming like traffic signs along the road of this particular conversation – getting to be a man; should talk; get to know each other; the future; subjects you’ll be taking for Matric; College, etcetera, etcetera – the Dad let his breath out in a vagabond little puff: ‘Peugh!’ he said, ‘well, you know what I mean?’ He raised his glass. ‘Cheers!’

  ‘Cheers!’

  They drank. Then ordered. Then, again, it was time to talk. Cormac ate a bread roll and tried the wine. It was OK. Nothing special. He wondered if he was destined to become an alcoholic? Ran in families, didn’t they say? Of course, there was will-power. Interested, he drank some more. What he was tasting, it struck him, was not the stuff in this particular glass but possible destiny. A thrill ran through him but right away he felt ashamed of letting himself play-act when poor Daddy was a victim. The next sip tasted foul but had maybe gone to his head for he seemed to have finished the glass.

  ‘More?’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Well, I’m glad you like it. Got to go easy though. It’s treacherous.’

  Cormac could have wept. Luckily, the first course came then. It too was foul: cold poached eggs and spinach. The sort of thing his mother might dish up for Sunday lunch: refrigerator scrapings. Here, though, it had announced itself as oeufs florentines. Oeuf meant ‘egg’. Gaelic ‘uv’. There was a tongue-twister: dih dov duv uv ov ar nav. Meant ‘a black ox ate a raw egg in heaven’. Try it on the Dad. Don’t be daft. Probably he’s the one taught it to you. Probably has a stock of them. Tongue-twisters were sobriety-tests, weren’t they? Say British Constitution – Brishish Conshtipation. – Sorry, sir. Have to take away your driving licence. You’re ploothered and a menace to the community when behind a wheel. – Offisher, I inshish on my rish. I’m a Gaelic speaker. Constitutional rish … –Oh, you’re a clever Dick, are you? Say this then: Dih dov duv uv ov ar nav.

  Cormac cupped his hands, blew into them and inhaled his own winey breath. It had a pleasantly adult smell: worldly, not sour as his father’s often was. His father’s – Cormac hated admitting the fact to himself – smelled sometimes like really grotty old plumbing.

  ‘Well,’ said the said father, ‘we don’t seem to have much to say for ourselves, do we?’ He said he knew how Cormac must be feeling. ‘How’s the grub?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good!’

  There was a silence while they ate it. Then Cormac’s father said that the reason he knew how fellows felt about being brought to restaurants like this was because he’d felt that way himself when his father used to get him a few hours’ leave from the concentration-camp of a school in which the old man had stuck him for personal ends.

  ‘He’d take me for a big tuck-in to salve his conscience then lob me back.’

  Saint Finbar’s had been the worst, grimmest and most repressive school in Ireland, but Cormac’s father’s father hadn’t cared. He’d hoped to curry favour with the monks who ran it so as to sell them wool from his woollen mills.

  ‘I was offered up like Esau by Abraham, except that in my case there was no reprieve. The monks were sadists,’ said Daddy. ‘Maniacs!’ He knocked a knife off the table and said: ‘Leave it. The waiter will bring another.’

  Cormac had heard all this many times. Poor Daddy’s childhood had been like Oliver Twist’s. The sacrifice had worked, though. For decades, the schools of the Order had made their uniforms from the grandfather’s wool. From pyjamas and underpants to blazers and socks, generations of pupils had been rigged out in the thorny products of the O’Malley looms. O’Malley blankets were on all the monastery beds. The monks’ trousers were tailored from O’Malley ‘priest’s cloth’ and their overcoats from O’Malley hopsack.

  ‘Conformist sheep clad in sheep-shearings,’ said Daddy. ‘My father was an underpants maker: a businessman. All my life I’ve hated businessmen. Your grandfather was an old fart. Between ourselves, that’s what he was: an old fart.’

  Cormac looked anxiously around at other tables to see if anyone was listening. His father confided that he did not expect Cormac to respect him just because he was his father. No: if he were to behave like an old fart then Cormac had licence to think that that was what he was.

  ‘Left his mills to your great-uncle,’ said Daddy angrily. ‘Owen Roe wormed his way into his confidence. Cared as little about the business as I did but knew how to curry favour. Oh yes. Politic. Slimey. Now he clips coupons.’

  A waiter hurried over to pour the last of the wine.

  ‘We’ll have another bottle,’ said Cormac’s father. ‘Have you ordered your second course yet?’ he asked Cormac. ‘Are we all set? Oh God,’ he exclaimed, ‘I sound like him! Like the old fart. I can’t stand that. Food was all he could give me. Food and money. He was always pushing them at me. Like the witch in Hansel and Gretel. Used to press fivers into my pockets. The school matron was always fishing them out of the wash. Well, I hope I’m not like him. Not sure how to be a father, really. You’ll have to help if I go wrong, Cormac. Blow the whistle. Tell me. I never had a model, you see. Except that I learned what not to do – not to send you to boarding school, for instance. I didn’t do that – so maybe you’ll be normal?’

  ‘Daddy!’ Cormac couldn’t take this any more. ‘Lower your voice. You’ll be heard.’

  Again his father looked squashed and Cormac wished he hadn’t spoken. When the food came, he saw his father brighten, then droop.

  ‘It’s good,’ Cormac reassured him. He had chosen pheasant because he’d never had it. The meal was educational, whatever else. Actually, he enjoyed food and was planning to have something flambé for dessert. ‘Pudding’ they’d called it in his English school. They were puddings themselves: heavy and thickish with a childish sense of humour which was both dirty-minded and embarrassed over the slightest thing.

  Making conversation, he told his father how disappointing it had been on his first evening to find that the promised ‘pudding’ was a raw apple. But you had to watch it with the Dad. He felt reproached and begged Cormac to remember that sending him to an English school had never been his idea. Never. He was all against boarding schools after his own experience. In a day school, at the worst, a parent knew what was going on.

  ‘I told that headmaster of yours here that if he laid a violent finger on you I’d have him before the courts in two shakes. Told him I’d send you to one of the interdenominational schools. Just you let me know, Cormac, if there’s trouble of any kind. Just bring it to my attention.’ The Dad looked fighting mad and suddenly Cormac noticed that he’d got a bit saggier-looking while they’d been away. This made him feel sad.

  ‘Don’t worry,’ he soothed. ‘School’s all right. I can handle it.’

  ‘Would you like to go to some other school?’

  Cormac thought about this, then said what Doris, the char, always wound up saying when she’d been considering giving his mother notice: ‘The divil you know is better than the divil you don’t.’

  ‘Divil? What divil?’

  ‘The one you know,’ Cormac explained, ‘is better. It’s what Doris says. Remember?’ />
  ‘Oh, Doris …’

  ‘Mind if I suck these bones?’

  ‘Bones?’ His father stared at him. ‘Oh suck away,’ he decided. ‘Chew and crunch them if you like. The Italians do that. How are your teeth? Does your mother send you to the dentist regularly? That’s very important, you know. Irish teeth are bad. It’s genetic.’

  Michael had sunk into several minutes’ consideration of the matter of the boy’s teeth. Ought he to know about them? Did other fathers keep abreast of such things? Had his father? No. But then the old fart had been saving his energies for the socially useful purpose of making money for his family and his country. Shouldn’t have called him an old fart to the boy. Michael decided sadly that he was making a balls of this lunch. At your peril did you abandon the old forms, the tracks tried and true: my boy, I must pass on a few words of sure-fire wisdom. What? Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Guard your spondulicks. Oh dear, had he no sure values at all? Surely a man must? Must he? Better get the waiter to bring some water. Catching waiters’ eyes was one talent which Michael had not buried but trained. Drink no more anyway What did you say to a fourteen-year-old who happened to be your son? Easier if he wasn’t. Probably had lots to conceal and why shouldn’t he? Secrets from that half-world of when you were neither boy nor man. Probably looking for a man to model himself on and finding him in Owen Roe. Bastard had the showy virtues: rose early, kept a sharp crease in his pants. Twit! The uncle reminded Michael of his own father who’d been a workhorse and never out of harness. A sort of robot. God knew what passions he’d repressed and channelled into industry. Lashings of energy. A face like a tool. He’d been ashamed of Michael from the word go. Shoved him off to school early and told the monks to be hard on him. ‘He needs a firm hand,’ Michael remembered him telling them. ‘For his own good. For the good of his immortal soul.’

  ‘Water, sir?’ proposed the waiter.

  Had Michael ordered it? Must have. ‘They’ve got crêpes flambées,’ he told Cormac, recalling himself to his hostly duties. ‘They’re really good, made with a sauce containing three different liqueurs. A bit heady but good. It’s for two Shall I order one for us?’

  Cormac said he’d rather have ice-cream. He poured water into Michael’s glass. Thinks I’m drunk, does he?

  ‘Pêches Melba then,’ Michael told the waiter. ‘And coffee. Did I tell you,’ he asked Cormac, ‘that at St Finbar’s they’d skin the arse off any boy caught reading the News of the World?’ Now why had he said that? Cormac looked surprised. Had they been talking about something different then? Don’t falter. Confidence was worth a load of consistency. ‘We used to get it smuggled in from England,’ Michael explained, ‘wrapped inside the Catholic Herald. Very primitive people monks. Don’t forget to tell me if you have any trouble with them. They’re good for getting exam results though,’ said Michael responsibly. ‘Statistics show. Good at getting boys into college. Still, one can pay too highly for anything.’

  ‘I’m OK.’

  ‘In the interests of keeping healthy minds in healthy bodies, our crowd made us work on the monastery farm.’ Michael stopped and drank some water. The rest of this memory was unsuitable. Censor. Opportunities for discreet bestiality had been liberally available at St Finbar’s farm and liberally availed of. Primitive. Primitive! Michael drank more water with a shudder. ‘Luckily,’ he told his son, ‘I had a talent. I was the star of the choir and the choirmaster was a power in the place. Yes.’

  Again he shut up, sorrowing over the loss of his singing voice and the disappointment he’d brought to the old teacher who had obtained so many favours for him. He’d got Michael off soccer, got him passes to go into the local town and, in the end, when Michael was found to have buggered and destroyed the anus of a sheep, had managed to hush up the scandal and persuade Michael’s father – enraged, astounded, shamed – to send the boy to Rome to have his voice trained for Grand Opera. The old man had wept when Michael came to say goodbye: ‘Un bel di vedremo,’ he’d smiled through his tears. ‘You’ll pay me back. I’ll see the name of a pupil of mine on a Covent Garden programme.’ Now he was dead. Michael wished he’d written to him in the optimistic years when he was in Rome. He hadn’t, had he? He tried to remember one small note or even card being sent by a grateful Michael back to St Finbar’s. A Christmas card? Maybe. At best.

  ‘I’m afraid,’ Michael had to confess to Cormac, ‘I’m not feeling up to snuff. Could you get the man to call a taxi?’

  The boy looked mortified. Michael wondered could he get across the restaurant without help. The floor was rising and again rising in tidal ascent. It was the emotion. Always made him tiddly. ‘Can I lean on your shoulder?’ he asked, abandoning pride. It would be worse if he fell.

  ‘Of course.’

  At the door, cold air restored him. ‘I’m afraid we didn’t have much of a talk. I’m sorry about this,’ he apologized.

  ‘That’s all right.’

  ‘Boys change so fast at your age. I don’t …’

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘There’s nothing you’d …?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Because if there were, I hope you would feel you could come to me with it, Cormac. No need to go bothering your great-uncle.’

  ‘Here’s the taxi!’ shouted Cormac. ‘Listen,’ he said precipitously, ‘thanks for lunch. I enjoyed it. Really. Will you be OK now, on your own? Sure? Then I’ll say goodbye. I’ve got to go and …’

  Michael didn’t learn what he had to do. The door had slammed. Cormac, young, troubled, cheeks pink in the whipping wind, waved in what was probably relief as the taxi drove away, delivering his father and himself to the separate solace of anonymity.

  13

  ‘Sparky’s after asking me to go to America,’ Kathleen repeated. ‘Ask him, if you don’t believe me. He said there was nothing here for a girl like me, but that he’d sponsor me because I’d never be happy married to a man like Owen O’Malley.’

  ‘What does he know about that?’

  ‘He had a couple of talks with Owen.’ Kathleen was like a freshly lit lamp, expanding and bright with triumph. ‘And he knows me.’

  ‘You’re cracked!’ Judith shouted. Memory of the treacherous way her own body had responded to Sparky’s kiss undermined argument. No wonder they spent so much time instilling morality into girls, my goodness! And etiquette and common sense.

  Luckily, Owen was once more away. He’d come back from prison and they’d all spent Christmas together. Now he was in Dublin politicking. He was to have a seat in the new parliament. The British grip was off the reins, a new era dawning and Owen all set to be an important man. What was wrong with Kathleen that she couldn’t see this? The kiss, thought Judith, and felt a sickening in her stomach.

  Kathleen tossed her foot. She was sewing something, stabbing at it with her needle as though it were alive and disagreeable. ‘Oh, Owen!’ She shrugged. ‘He’s awful. Well, you saw, didn’t you?’

  It was true that gaol had made Owen bad-tempered. He had taken a scunner against Sparky Driscoll and had even drawn Judith aside to ask her why the American came round so often. ‘People will say it’s for Kathleen,’ he said, and she’d guessed that someone had been talking already. ‘They’ve no delicacy where women are concerned They’re coarse,’ he warned. ‘Or is it spying he is? Coming here for the pennyworth of lookabout?’

  ‘He comes here for my father,’ she’d told him. ‘They talk about America.’ She was trying to pour oil on troubled waters.

  The truth was that Driscoll had started avoiding the old man. The Da was drinking too much and his store of anecdote had been used up. He was down now to repeating street names, like a child who gets stuck in the middle of a lesson. ‘Calumet Avenue,’ he would sigh. ‘Calumet. Were you ever there, did you say? No? What about Dorchester Heights?’ He could have been reciting a litany. There was no connecting thread and you waited for the miserere. ‘The lights,’ mused the Da vaguely, ‘Oh, bedad, the lights! We used
to have Thursday-morning specials in the grocery,’ he’d recall and nod his head in a mixture of happiness and regret. Half the time his family had no idea what he was talking about.

  Judith got the cities mixed up. Either from need or adventure, her father had been in several. When he talked of hobos who jumped trains, it had to cross your mind that he might have tried the game himself, though he wouldn’t demean himself by saying so. It was clear that he had travelled poorer routes than Sparky Driscoll, who seemed to find the Da’s enthusiasms puzzling. It didn’t take second sight to see that the American found much of the grandeur the Da remembered poor stuff.

  ‘Yes,’ he’d say a breath late for spontaneity, ‘it’s lively there, I suppose. Folksy.’ The condescension was the more wounding for Sparky’s efforts to conceal it.

  Judith decided he was a snob. How could such a man call himself a revolutionary? Or be trusted by revolutionaries?

  ‘Did you and Owen have a tiff?’ She had chosen the trivial word with care. ‘He’s had a bad time,’ she reminded her sister. ‘He’s been in gaol.’

  Kathleen stabbed and tossed. Her needle flew. Her foot twitched as though to some frivolous tune. What she was sewing, Judith saw, was a bead-bag suitable for a dance. ‘I could wring Owen’s neck sometimes,’ said Kathleen. ‘Sparky,’ she added dreamily, ‘thinks we put things off too much. He says hope is a disease and that we should live now for tomorrow might never come. I was telling him about the dance at the Devereux’s and he said it would be a great way to go, to die dancing.’ She laughed at the enormity of this. Judith saw her sister in the grip of folly. ‘Under a chandelier,’ Kathleen said, quivering perhaps at the reflections and memories of shots. ‘Tomorrow didn’t of course,’ she remembered soberly, ‘come for some.’

  ‘And Owen,’ her sister reminded her, ‘was arrested.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And had a right,’ said Judith relentlessly, ‘to suppose that you’d keep faith with him while he was locked away.’