No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

Kathleen drooped.

  ‘Did Sparky,’ Judith pressed her advantage, ‘say he’d marry you?’

  ‘He’s against pinning people down,’ Kathleen stabbed a bead on to pink satin, ‘or pinning himself. He wants me to come to America without obligation on either side.’

  ‘Convenient!’

  ‘It’s from delicacy,’ Kathleen defied. ‘He’d want me to feel free.’

  ‘You’re not living in a penny romance.’ Though maybe Kathleen was? ‘Has he,’ Judith produced the word with distaste, ‘said that he loves you?’ One must get things clear if the mad girl was to be brought to her senses. Oh, the senses! Judith was stricken by the double meaning.

  ‘Not in words.’ Kathleen had that girlish simper so maddening to well-wishers.

  Hope, Judith saw – she saw everything; it was her curse – had turned Kathleen’s head. There was a feeling of urgency in the country. Like looters when the fighting paused, people were eager to snatch at pleasure. Kathleen had a pink satin dress in her wardrobe which she hadn’t worn since the Devereux dance. The bag she was sewing had been cut from a remnant of the same satin.

  ‘He’s a lovely dancer,’ said the bewitched creature who needed locking up. ‘I can make him love me,’ she confided, ‘I know I can.’

  *

  Memory was the Queen of Spades in the three-card trick. Some agency – God? – like a fair-ground trickster, shuffled, flashed, then whisked it out of sight.

  ‘Why do you want to remember?’ impatient nuns used to ask Judith when she was in the convent.

  They had smelled out the worldliness of her wanting to hold on to bits of her life which she was supposed to have given to God.

  Priests had wasted breath on her, preaching joy at being a bride of Christ.

  But was she an abducted bride?

  And what was the glisten of shame winking blackly out at her from oblivion? Something wrong? Something in need of expiation?

  Ha! Armed now, she faced her confessor. This was a scruple, see, official currency in confessionals. It was not just faddy self-concern.

  ‘I feel remorse,’ she had claimed cannily. ‘I need absolution. To get that I must confess. To confess, I must know.’

  One young confessor took her seriously for a while, but was replaced by an elderly, domineering Jesuit.

  ‘Have you seen a doctor?’ This, he implied, was not a religious matter at all.

  Now, in this place, they wanted her to remember. They’d even brought round this instrument, the cassette-recorder. That could change everything. She had always had flashes of immediate memory. But they disappeared. Went out like lights. Could not be recaptured and pieced together.

  It wasn’t as easy as she’d hoped, though, to trap memory on the recorder. Words were clumsy. She got excited. Images faltered as you tried to describe them. The pace of speech broke up the flow of vision.

  ‘Do you know the story,’ she asked the Principal Girl, ‘of the fairy mansion that rises from the bog at night ablaze with lights and rocked by music?’

  ‘Yes, it’s an old story.’

  ‘And the traveller who enters is in danger of never escaping. If he eats fairy food he’ll sink with all the company into the bog at cock-crow and be trapped in fairyland forever.’

  The girl was quick. ‘You’re afraid of memory?’ she guessed. ‘You think you’ll be trapped in it? You don’t want to talk about the past?’

  ‘I do, I do, but …’

  ‘What?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Judith was suddenly tired. ‘My poor brain is addled.’

  ‘Do you want me to take away the recorder?’

  ‘Leave it, girl, leave it. I can’t be worse than the way I am.’

  The girl went away. Later, Judith plugged the thing in and talked to it. It was company if nothing else. One thing, she told it, that was becoming clear to her was that she had never been sure of anything. Ever. In her girlhood, people kept things from her. Lied. From the best of motives. During the Troubles, the less a young person knew the better for all concerned. Facts were in short supply but principles abounded. Great hell-raking talk. Gossip. No middle ground. Flashes of close-up vision: her dog’s gay tail, waving like a blackboard duster, rubbing out – what? The flapping sole of a boot lolling like a foolish tongue; a wet coat steaming; a load of glimmering sprats, guns, milk-churns, red whorls of blood weaving together in a stream; a silver, no white, thing floating on it: a cigarette? What could you make of that? Useless. She pressed the button to erase and clear the tape.

  She didn’t want anyone coming on such babble.

  Snatches of conversation made more sense.

  ‘You’d want to be leery,’ Owen had said, ‘with Irish Americans. Why do you think de Valera fell foul of them? Personalities? My eye. It was money. The so-called Friends of Irish Freedom used the Irish cause to raise funds which they then turned round and used in America. For their own interests. I’m telling you. We have the figures: black and white. By the end of 1920 their so-called “Victory Fund” had contributed exactly $115,000 to the movement over here and spent $750,000 in the US.’ Mutters. Whispers. Owen had always been doubtful of Sparky Driscoll. He banged the table. ‘We’re not their prime concern. Always remember that. They have their own interests and put them first. A lesson.’

  Once, a slanderous story was printed in the Gaelic American which Sparky Driscoll brought to the house. According to it, de Valera ‘clandestinely withdrew $20,000 from New York banks’. A lie. Even Dev’s opponents agreed about this. It showed you had to watch the Yanks. Their politics were dirty.

  Mistrust was the order of the day. That was the Christmas of 1921.

  Lucifer, they said, had started the first civil war and put his mark on all those that followed.

  A later memory was of a hospital: a big old eighteenth-century ward and herself lying in it tended by nuns. Owen bent over the bed and Kathleen sat on a chair. Peonies they’d brought. Red splotches. Top-heavy and scentless. She’d been ill, they said, and missed the wedding. Here were the photographs. The Civil War was over. What Civil War? Over, over, never mind.

  ‘We lost.’ Owen’s mouth twisted in bitterness. ‘The opportunists are in power. The best grow worse. It was all to be predicted.’ People who’d never done a hand’s turn for God, man, or Ireland had marched in the victory parade while Republicans were in internment camps.

  Talk of something cheerier. Kathleen was pregnant. Yes. Smiles, kisses, congratulations. Tears.

  ‘What was wrong with me?’ Judith asked.

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Our other visits?’

  ‘No.’

  Kathleen began to cry. Owen told her not to upset herself. It would be bad for the baby.

  ‘You were ill,’ he told Judith. ‘Don’t bother your head about the past. Rest,’ he advised her. He had brought magazines. Oranges and grapes. Hot-house grapes in those days were what you got. They were firm, like sea-smoothed glass, with a bloom and a bite such as you never got on the ones going now.

  Later she found herself working in the same hospital as a nun. How had that come about?

  ‘Don’t you remember?’ the chaplain asked her.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Do you regret entering?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Owen came back to see her and advised her to stay put. Her father was gaga. The drink. Seamus was in medical school and they’d got a man to manage the pub. No, she couldn’t come out and mind him. She wasn’t up to it. He threatened her. Did he? Yes. With some story. It slid round the edges of her mind, slimy with menace, what? Frightened, she stayed where she was but got nightmares, delusions and had to be given electroshock. Now, foraging in her mind, the old images were back after lying dormant for decades. There was violence. Blood. Secrecy. She would haul out and confront it. What else had she to do now? Die? She’d die anyway. Had someone tried to murder her? Owen? She had written to Seamus years ago asking, in veiled terms – n
uns’ letters were read by Reverend Mother – that he come and help her get things straight. He never answered. The family behaved as though she had done some dreadful thing. Could she have betrayed someone? Whom? How?

  This time she did not erase the tape. Let the rubbish pour out. Everything, silly and sensible. Later, she’d sift through and try to make sense of it.

  *

  Corny Kinlen received a phone call.

  The man on the other end of the line was his immediate superior and spoke with that excessive heartiness which often means that an Irishman is finding himself obliged to be more unpleasant than he would like.

  ‘Corny, me auld warrior, yer after stirring up a desperate hornets’ nest. You’ll know what I’m referring to? You don’t? Well, the divil hice ye, man, you should keep your antennae better tuned. I’ve had higher-ups leaning on me till I’m gone two-dimensional. Yes; it is your fault. Listen, does the name Judith Clancy ring a bell? That’s the lady. Are you beginning to get the picture? Well, it seems that you turned this American – right, right, Duffy, that’s the boyo. Stinks to high heaven. Sensitive isn’t the word. As much as either of our jobs are worth. No, I’m not exaggerating. Call him off. Well, do your best. No question of RTE touching anything he might produce? OK? The real danger would be a leak to the gutter press. What do you want to know for? It’s of no interest to the world today. Yes: an old skeleton with a bone in every cupboard. Corny, it’s yesterday’s news but reputations could suffer. Look, I’ll tell you some other time. Not on this phone, OK? What do you mean what do I mean? Ah, you watch too many movies. Of course I do not think your phone is tapped or mine either. Ever hear of crossed lines? Idle operators monitoring and etcetera. Discretion is the better part. Seadh go deimhin agus na habair focal. I don’t know how you keep your job on our national media with that Liverpool accent you have in Gaelic. Let me know when you’ve got that settled, OK?’

  *

  ‘Mind your mouth,’ said Judith to her brother. He had a smile which alerted her to the presence of a dirty meaning. Like the crack in a shutter, this could lead to illuminations which she preferred to avoid. In the same spirit, she had borrowed her father’s old hat and put on bits of masculine gear. If people thought her a tomboy, well and good. It meant she could go out with Sparky and Seamus without embarrassment.

  Seamus had been talking about Timmy Moynihan, the caretaker at the Devereux Estate who had invited the Clancys to bring Sparky to see the place. The owners were away and Timmy would show them round.

  ‘He’s a funny fellow,’ Seamus had been telling Sparky. ‘Was mad to come in with the IRA and at the same time is as proud of the house as if he owned it.’

  Sparky was surprised that the caretaker hadn’t been fired when the owners found out he’d connived with the IRA to let them use the ballroom.

  ‘Ah well now,’ Seamus looked crafty, ‘they may have thought a caretaker well in with the lads was a sort of insurance, don’t ye know. A lot of big houses were burned down last year in reprisal for police destruction of our people’s property. Better dancing than burning, the Devereux may have thought. Anyway, Timmy is very close to the family. Queer feudal relationships you get in those big houses. The children play together when they’re small and sometimes go on playing when they’re big.’ It was at this point that Judith told her brother to mind his mouth.

  She was alert for trouble and determined not to step one hand’s breadth from her sister’s side. She had persuaded Seamus to join the expedition for fear that she mightn’t manage the chaperoning on her own. Nature was against her. Birds sang. The ironwork of the estate gates had been gilded and the scrolled tips painted blue so that the gates seemed to have netted a stretch of sky.

  Seamus led them to the house by a short cut through dense beech woods.

  ‘We used to trespass here when we were small,’ Kathleen told Sparky. ‘We thought there might be man-traps.’

  ‘It became one later,’ said Judith. ‘And poor Owen fell into it.’ She was walking between Sparky and her sister whether they liked this or not.

  ‘There’s the house!’ Seamus cupped his hands and yodelled for Timmy and also, perhaps, to defy the clothy, somehow menacing dusk. Sounds were muffled by leafmould. There was an illicit feel to their presence which set Judith’s nerves on edge. They had left the beech trees and reached a walk of ornamental evergreens: magnolias, rhododendrons and great regimented hedges of Irish yew. Tufts, brown as tobacco and shaped like shuttlecocks, lay mouldering underfoot. Ahead, a river of windows mirrored milky cloud. Leading up to the house was a flight of limestone steps and, in the doorway, stood Timmy Moynihan dressed in riding breeches and a trenchcoat. He was a small man with a quick, clever, rodent’s face.

  ‘Half gunman, half gent!’ yelled Seamus by way of greeting, adding that the costume suited Timmy down to the ground. ‘Scratch the Republican,’ roared the boisterous Seamus, ‘and you’ll find the old retainer.’

  Timmy and he pretended to jab and box at each other for a bit. Then they started on the tour.

  ‘Here’s a Russian ikon,’ said Timmy, crushing his listeners with the word they would not give him the satisfaction of admitting they didn’t know. ‘And this here’s an Arab chest from Zanzibar.’ The word buzzed like a flight of bees. Lions and sultans pranced for it so that the real chest was a bit of a disappointment. The ikon too turned out to be nothing but a holy picture.

  Timmy led them to the ballroom, pointing out stucco ornamentation which was all crests and coronets, swords and sceptres, the pomp of empire manifest in every curlicue.

  ‘The lads burned down places like this.’ Judith was taking out her mood on the architecture.

  ‘It would be a sin!’ Kathleen’s mood was all approbation. ‘It’s too lovely!’

  ‘The new state could take it over,’ said Sparky. Rich men in America, he said, left their houses for the public to enjoy.

  ‘It wouldn’t be kept up the same, though, would it?’ said Timmy. ‘When the family is home the gardeners supply fresh flowers for every room. They grow orchids in the conservatory here that have won prizes up in Dublin.’

  ‘Conservatory!’ Kathleen breathed.

  Judith gave her a scorching look. ‘I’d burn it.’

  ‘Jesus,’ said Seamus. ‘The women in this country are fire-eaters. You’d be afraid to be alone with one on a dark night.’

  By now the Treaty had been adopted in Dáil Éireann. De Valera had resigned as President. The IRA, as Seamus had foretold, was splitting and the anti-Treaty forces had repudiated the leadership of the Dáil.

  ‘My family,’ said Timmy of his employers, ‘aren’t ready yet to come back from England.’ He made it sound as though they were waiting for his signal or, alternatively, as though the country should take its weather readings from the movements of the Devereux. Either way, Timmy reflected borrowed glory. He was a moon between suns.

  ‘Yerrah why,’ Kathleen’s voice had an intonation of irony, ‘wouldn’t they?’

  He grinned. ‘They’ll try to get the girl married over there This is no country for her sort of woman. Besides, if mutineers go on the rampage, things could get hot again.’ There was no denying his competence. He knew the old order and the new. He fetched a mouth-organ from his pocket and struck up a waltz. ‘Nice and slow,’ he said, winking at Seamus, ‘I like to keep it coming nice and slow, as the bishop said to the chorus girl’ He put the instrument back to his mouth.

  ‘Timmy, why don’t you show us the rest of the house?’ said Judith, and pulled at his elbow. She didn’t want Sparky and Kathleen starting to dance.

  He put his mouth-organ in his pocket and led the way past a door which was propped open by the stuffed leg of an elephant. Inside was the gun room, beneath whose ceiling a pressed python skin had been stuck as a frieze.

  ‘This place,’ said Timmy, ‘is a right zoological cemetery. Demi Devereux’s Da spent his youth shooting men and beasts. He shot Rooshians and Prooshians and took pot shots at local poachers
. These cases never get to court. You may imagine what sympathy a winged poacher would have got from the magistrates while their crowd were still top dogs.’

  Rooms led to further rooms. Mirrors, opposite mirrors, reflected flights of diminishing objects. Judith kept her eye on Kathleen to whom Sparky seemed to be paying little attention. Were they conniving to throw her off the scent? The abundance of stuffed game – salmon, deer, pheasants and the brushes of foxes – made her think of herself as a sniffing hound. In one mirror, it seemed to her that her nose had begun to twitch.

  Timmy, meanwhile, was comparing himself to a mouse.

  ‘Your big-house mouse,’ said he, ‘may love the place whose foundations he devours. I nibble because I love, as the cannibal said to his girl friend. Mind you, it’s a two-way act. I too,’ said Timmy, and postured, ‘am devoured.’ He brought them back to the front hall, then up a flight of stairs. ‘Do yez want to see the common quarters where our own sort lives?’ he interrogated. ‘Behind the backdrop? Propping it up while preparing to gobble it up?’ His accent was now all brogue. ‘Kathleen and myself had a foretaste of the gobble on the night of yon dance, am I right, Kathleen mavourneen? All the sadder that it should have ended the way it did. But no surprise. Lady Luck has been with the landlords a fair while and she’s a lethargic doxy when it comes to changing her friends.’ Timmy, now two flights ahead of the others, leaned over the bannister and struck an orator’s pose. ‘James Connolly had the right ideas,’ he shouted down at them. ‘God rest him and let’s hope God isn’t such a crusty old patriarch as to send him below with the fallen angels. “Hold on to your rifles,” said he to the Citizen Army in 1916, “as those with whom we are fighting may stop before our goal is reached. We are out for economic as well as political liberty.” Do you think the jokers now getting ready to cut each others’ tripes out over oaths to the Crown and other flourishes remember them? I wouldn’t bet on it. I’ll be round one of these evenings to have a chat with Owen O’Malley who, I’m told, will be representing us in the Dáil. I want to be sure he’s representing me as I want to be represented.’