No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  By now the other four had drawn abreast of Timmy.

  ‘Onward,’ he told them, ‘to behind the green-baize door Garrets. Attics. Demi Devereux,’ he went on, ‘says he’s as Irish as myself and I say that in that case I’m as good a gent as himself, for all my Mammy cleans out his Mammy’s chamber-pots. If he’s English, then he can make much of his English gentility, but if he’s trying to get into the one bed with us, he’d better shed it, because when you desert from your native army you can’t expect to be let wear the old medals. That’s logic,’ said Timmy, ‘but I’ve scant faith in it’s winning the day. They’ll manage to have it both ways. You’ll see.’

  ‘Jesus, Timmy,’ said Seamus, ‘you’d talk the hind leg off a donkey.’

  ‘I’m giving you the benefit of my savvy,’ Timmy told him. ‘Listen, Clancy, I’m the only man you know who knows the enemy close up, close enough to see the whites of his eyes and other parts unmentionable in the presence of young girls, as well as the mindless, egotistic decency, God rot him, in his heart. The enemy is not your poor bleeding Tommy who is as fed up as ourselves with the gentry that sent him off to fight in those stinking trenches and then over here to get shot at from behind hedges.’ Timmy was touring them through servants’ rooms, throwing open doors and shutters, letting cobwebby light through small windows into boxy spaces. ‘The enemy,’ he went on, ‘is Demi Devereux, as I’ve been telling him since I learned to talk. His father voted against Home Rule in the House of Lords. In Ireland’s interests, you understand. They love us, so they’d rather kill us than give us up. There’s passion for you! We can go down the back way and I’ll show you the kitchens. Mind your step, girls. They might sell this place if anyone would buy it. But I don’t know. There’s great fox-hunting here. Nothing like it, I’m told, on the other side. And then they have their notions about how the ‘real people’, which doesn’t mean you, Clancy, but people like my mother, God love her, would hate to see them go. Well, it’s true my mother would be out of a job if she had no chamber-pots to clean. It’s not Kathleen here who’s likely to give her employment. Here’s the kitchen,’ said Timmy, leading the way into a large, vaulted room full of giant furniture. ‘The woman’s imagination is limited and there’s no persuading her that life is not all chamber-pots. “Ah wisha, Timmy,” says she, “don’t be getting above yerself and offending the gentry that give ye the bread that’s in yer mouth, God bless them, where would we be without them?” She’s their product. A lost cause. And it doesn’t end with chamber-pots.’ Timmy led them out to a courtyard surrounded by stables. ‘Spiritually, they do the same thing. I, as you must know, studied with Demi until he went to Eton, which he did late because he was sickly as a chisler. Well, I remember some play we were studying one time with an old French mot that used to give us lessons. It was about Nero, the Roman Emperor, and a servant of his. Now this servant was forever suggesting the most dastardly, low villainous things to Nero and Nero would do them. But the idea always came from the servant and this, said the French mot, was because the servant was of a baser nature and so corrupting Nero who, after all, was an emperor and must have had noble instincts. Well, after that, do you know, Demi started calling me by the name of Nero’s servant and what astounded me was that I could see he genuinely felt that in our games the low instincts were mine and that he was considerably less to blame than I was if he gave in to them. He was wiping his spiritual arse on me – no offence meant,’ said Timmy to the girls who were, in fact, taking none. Talk of arses and chamber-pots was coarse but not truly shameful the way mention of sexual matters might have been.

  *

  Grainne had started having nightmares. About a funfair ride – this went back to something in her childhood which, asleep, could harrow her still.

  She’d been six and at the seaside in a house her parents rented every summer. It was in a small village where children could circulate safely and one late afternoon she had gone down with her sixpence to ask the man on the merry-go-round for a ride. Rob Redmond was the perfect funfair attendant. His nose was a strawberry and his grin like an apple slice, only brown as though the apple had been sitting about on a plate.

  He took her sixpence, although he had been ready to close down, and cranked up the merry-go-round for her alone, letting her ride her painted wooden horse round and round through afternoon air thick with fermentings of the day’s smells: hay, dung, petrol and quite a whiff of whiskey. The air too was whiskey-coloured and greasy. The sun had slipped down. There was a fine rain. The horse surged like a boat on a wave and when it came time to stop the attendant refused to end the ride. He laughed. His mouth, instead of being a neat slice, was like a hacked-up apple.

  ‘You’re never getting off!’ he shouted, spluttering. ‘I’ll make you ride round for ever. Will you like that? Heh? Eh? Will you, little Grannie?’

  It was an adult joke. Grainne had had to put up with the like before: from maids who said they’d tickle her to death or throw her over the sea wall. Under the joke, you knew they had started to hate you. She had been suspended over a cliff from one wrist by a girl whom her parents had hired to take her for walks. The fall below was sheer and there was madness in the girl’s eyes. ‘I’ll drop you, I’ll drop you,’ she’d been singing and Grainne knew she mustn’t scream lest the girl panic and really let her go. Compared to that fear, the funfair ride was manageable. Like the maids, Rob Redmond was punishing her parents through her. One day a threat would go too far and a child be found smothered in a cellar. Meanwhile, Grainne hoped to escape. She held hard on to the wooden horse’s neck and hoped someone might come. The hacked-apple face laughed but she didn’t scream because if she did Rob Redmond would know that she knew that the joke was not a joke. Pretence was protection. Everyone pretended and so must she. Please, she was whispering, let someone come, and the horse was slipping and the attendant roaring that he’d never let her off. Black holes tore through the whiskey sky and the horse moved queerly sideways while Grainne clutched the pole and felt terror, a strange stab of delight and a numbing urge to let herself get dizzier still. ‘I think my mother will be worried,’ she managed to say sensibly. ‘Can you please let me off?’

  ‘Never,’ roared the mad Rob Redmond. ‘Ha, ha,’ he hiccupped, ‘round and round you’ll have to go, round and round forever. In saecula saeculorum.’

  In the end she peed, wetting the horse and her dress, and somehow it all ended without the attendant having to dispose of her mangled body, as he might have to do with some child’s if ever one of his jokes went wrong. Perhaps he would chop the child into steaks and sell them to a butcher, like the man who was caught doing this by Saint Nicholas in one of Grainne’s story books?

  As she grew older, Grainne hardened her pretences and ended up believing in them. Only occasionally a glimpse of people’s secret, murderous hatred broke through – in IRA rallies for instance; and in dreams, from time to time, she rode that coldly perilous, ravishing wooden horse and hoped that it might take off from the merry-go-round and become a Pegasus.

  She’d had the dream again recently and knew why. Sex was the merry-go-round. She did and didn’t want to get off. The attendant was now inside herself. She hated her appetite, had moments of hating James and the disproportion between what you hoped for in pleasure and what came when it was over: the return to everyday. Better not rouse yourself if you had to come back. James’s satisfaction astounded her. Little smiles she detected on his face made her want to sadden him. What made him so satisfied? Did he feel he deserved the happiness she – or so he said – had brought him? How could he be happy anyway? Things were so intractably finite. Yet he talked of taking her to California. The absurdity of it. California! More day-to-day ordinariness in a place she didn’t even know. Why? What for?

  Oh, and she did know she was wrong to think this way. Why could she not be a pleasure-lover who simply took what was offered? Or else be a true puritan and feel right about feeling wrong and regret her adultery with proper remorse. Instead, she w
as divided as she had been on the merry-go-round, when she half wanted the man to murder her as he and the maids would have liked to do from resentment at her white kid shoes and organdie dress, and the fact that her father’s photograph was always in the papers.

  ‘They’re no better than us,’ she had heard the charwoman tell the housemaid. ‘Sure, my grandfather and hers,’ raising her eyes to the ceiling above which Grainne’s mother could be heard playing the piano, ‘went barefoot to the same village school. Now look at them.’

  ‘Money’s never come by honest,’ said the maid. ‘Why them, not us?’

  ‘Little pitchers!’

  ‘Maybe one day …’

  ‘Fat chance. Their kind stick together. The rich get richer.’

  ‘She’s sweet as honey.’ Again the eyes sailed towards the ceiling.

  ‘Gets more out of you that way. Stands to reason. Don’t be taken in.’

  They hated you. The IRA was only saying what had always been whispered in kitchens and sculleries. They hadn’t minded working for the old stock but working for their own kind stuck in their gullets. Expected to wear livery! Well, they wouldn’t. No. What was the new moneyed class but gombeen men, opportunists, the scum that rises to the surface. The charwomen whispered, spat, and would one day take kitchen knives and trim off your fat – ‘fat,’ they whispered, ‘living off the fat of the land!’ – and cook nice steaks from the flesh between your ribs.

  Society was like that and so was your own body with its urges that didn’t fit with everyday life. James thought that you could break up one order and found another on the basis of the body’s anarchy. That she could leave Michael and marry him.

  ‘Don’t worry about your son,’ he told her. ‘Kids suffer less than parents think. In California it’s been found that divorce is less harmful than a sick, unhappy home.’

  ‘How do you know that our home – yours and mine – wouldn’t be unhappy?’

  ‘We’re compatible,’ he told her.

  Well, if that was all he knew.

  ‘In Italian,’ she told him, ‘IRA means anger. I’ve seen it there on walls. Just anger.’

  ‘About what?’

  ‘Everything maybe.’

  ‘California …’ said James.

  ‘I know all about California,’ she told him. ‘It’s in all the Β movies.’

  It was the sort of chat you used to fill in spaces between going to bed. He had come round to see her and talk about Aunt Judith to whose cassette he had been listening. It was eleven a.m. Michael was at work, Cormac had gone on a school excursion and Mary was upstairs cleaning Aunt Judith’s room.

  ‘Tell me,’ she said, ‘about our life in California.’

  This was a game they had in which James strove, like an adman confronted by a resistant customer, to give his picture with a compelling realism.

  ‘I wish you’d take this seriously.’

  ‘What about your wife?’

  ‘She has her career. She won’t miss me.’

  ‘A poor reference for an ex-husband.’

  ‘You’re not serious!’

  ‘You’d be less so if I were.’ She believed this but couldn’t have been straightforward if she’d wanted. Her teasing mode, like bandiness in a jockey’s child, was an adjustment to past rather than present strains. Irony and the hype which invalidates promises were her automatic responses to the male. Except with Michael – perhaps because between them sex had never mattered. What did was not it but an emanation of it: something like the shadow thrown by a knotted handkerchief which can be so much more evocative than cloth. The first times they’d gone to bed together he could do nothing because, he explained, of being still sexually in thrall to Theo.

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she’d said.

  ‘You’re so good to me,’ he had whispered. Sometimes he had wept.

  Grainne, who had been reared on images of Christs hung on her nursery walls in the limp agony of Gethsemane, or having their feet wiped in Mary Magdalene’s gorgeous whore’s hair, found her response to Michael’s weakness shot through by currents of an earlier arousal. Play-acting with this husband who had been put in her bed by their family, as sick children are put for comfort in an adult’s bed, procured her an excitement which required little activity to fuel it. He came to her trailing the lascivious fragrances of Theo, his own misfortune, a longing on the scale of Grainne’s own for things more resonant than life, and a disinclination for coping with life itself. It was a lot to have in common.

  Raised to believe the world ‘a vale of tears’, Grainne had a sneaking sense that only the crass took satisfaction in it. Desire had been so disturbing that it had seemed sufficient in itself.

  Now, with James, pleasure was delivered but finite. She enjoyed but was suspicious of her enjoyment. Reality was a wasting asset and James too urgent. She could not cope with the creature in herself whom he brought to life. Like a relative who eats offensively, she would have liked this other self kept out of sight. The wistfulness to which she had grown addicted with Michael hung, like dim light in an invalid’s room, shadowing her sensibility. James was constantly shooting up the blind with the bossy cheer of a ward sister.

  ‘Leaving Michael,’ she tried to explain, ‘would be a sort of amputation.’

  Amputations, he retorted, were sometimes the healthy choice.

  ‘Don’t worry about Cormac,’ he repeated. ‘Kids have to snap the umbilical cord sometime.’

  When, he began asking, were they taking their trip to the Devereux Estate? Two nights off Michael’s ground would, she saw him think, be just the thing to shake her out of her pusillanimity. She braced herself for jollying and rallying.

  ‘Listen,’ James was saying in a confident voice. ‘There’s some great stuff on that cassette. Your aunt’s mind is really working now. We should strike while the iron is hot. Expose her to …’

  ‘Shh!’ Grainne interrupted him. ‘What’s that?’

  ‘I didn’t …’

  ‘Quiet,’ she whispered, ‘there’s someone in the scullery.’

  James stood up. ‘Are you …?’

  She waved him away. ‘Stay back.’ She tiptoed to the door and threw it open. At the same moment the outer door banged. Someone was racing down the back path – someone who had been listening or anyway heard. What had they been saying? Who was it? She wrenched the old door open and rushed to the gate in time to see Cormac disappear around the street corner.

  14

  ‘Timmy’s a card,’ said Seamus turning round, as they made their way back through the woods. ‘It’s true he was brought up with the son of the house and now there he is between worlds.’

  ‘He’s divided in other ways too,’ said Sparky, who was walking behind with Judith. It was as well to get back to a normal footing. At least it meant he wasn’t with Kathleen and turning her silly head.

  ‘What do you mean?’ she asked idly.

  ‘I imagine that’s why the IRA wouldn’t have him.’

  ‘What’s why?’

  ‘He’s a homosexual.’

  ‘A what?’ said Judith. ‘Don’t tell me.’

  ‘Why are you frightened of sex, Judith? You’re a country girl, after all,’ said Sparky. ‘You must have seen animals.’

  ‘Stop. I won’t listen.’ But he was blocking the path. A blackberry branch, pushed aside by the other two, had leaped back with a whiplash effect and barred the route. Sparky was trying to take hold of it without pricking his hand.

  ‘Why are you so prudish?’ he asked. ‘A revolutionary should be able to look at things the way they are, instead of pushing your sister into the arms of a man who doesn’t really like women at all. Owen may be wanting to marry Kathleen from fear.’

  ‘What do you mean?’ It was sure to be lies. He was evil. He had the look of a ferret; a streak of sun lit up his yellow hair which was just the colour of that vicious animal’s pelt. His eyes looked red to her.

  ‘Owen may be afraid of not being like other men. He may be afraid
that he is really like Timmy. In the three years of their engagement, he has never …’

  The ferret face turned and loomed. Sparky had a hold of the bramble. The touch of his flesh would appall her. His words appalled her. They had polluted her mind. She saw – from where? – two farm dogs coupling on a road. Males? A carter aimed a lash of his whip at the pair. But they seemed stuck and wheeled, like a single creature, into a ditch. The image vacated her mind. She felt a twinge of panic at what would come next. Oh, he had a way of summoning the worst, most buried filth.

  ‘First Owen went into a seminary to escape his nature …’

  ‘That’s enough!’ She pushed past him, elbowing him towards the bramble bush, not looking to see whether he had lost his balance and tipped into it. She hoped he had. It would tear his fine outfit. Good. The other two were in a clearing when she caught up with them but she didn’t stop. Running, blood pounded in her head and she couldn’t think. Thorns pulled at her and once she fell to her knees and got up again with a feeling of satisfaction. She would have liked to tear herself apart, to dissolve and scour out the thoughts in her fouled head. It would never be the same. Implications lurked. Owen and Timmy like those dogs children threw stones at. Naming things gave them power. Call the devil and he might appear. That, she sank exhausted on a bank, that was the meaning, her throat pained her, scraped by deep raucous panting, the meaning of the apple of knowledge. The priest had explained it to the senior girls in retreat last May. Mary’s month. She couldn’t, couldn’t get her breath. Imagined her throat as lacerated. Could she have done the same to the inside of her head she would have. He had been a visiting priest, a sad, shell-shocked army chaplain who’d been through some of the worst stretches of the war, and Sister Benedict had warned the girls that they must behave sensibly if he broke down and wept. With decorum. Like ladies. He’d done great things, the nun explained, for the poor Catholic lads who’d joined up, God help them. Everyone knew the Irish were as brave as lions when they had the comforts of their religion and so the British army, wanting to get the best out of them, had arranged for a general absolution to be given before they went over the top. The chaplain had been with a regiment that had been wiped out twice in four years. He’d seen things, Sister Β told the girls, that made him feel like Dante coming back from hell. No giggling, mind, if he wept. It was physical. He couldn’t control it. A holy man. Brave. A living martyr. Then she’d left them alone with him in the chapel. Judith thought about the chapel with intensity, wishing herself back there She was cold but wouldn’t go home now until she was sure Sparky had left. She’d delivered Kathleen up to him – for Seamus wouldn’t notice what was going on.