At Swim, Two Boys

by Jamie O’Neill

  “You’re a regular pagan,” said the boy.

  “You’re not so bad yourself.”

  He took him down the backstairs to the kitchen where no one yet stirred though MacMurrough knew the girl, and most probably Cook too, and whoever else in the turnover of staff, would be ears against the walls. He opened the kitchen door and paced up the area steps, suppressing in the open an urge to sneak. The boy felt this, for he asked, “Are you never worried you’ll be catched?”

  —We will be caught, said the chaplain. We will go down for habitual degenerates and it will be that young blackguard’s blame.

  MacMurrough said, “Actually, I was caught.”

  The boy stopped on the gravel. “You was?”

  MacMurrough ambled on. “It’s all right. They never catch you twice.”

  “Why wouldn’t they?”

  “They never release you the first time.”

  Down the path to the end of the garden where opened a private gate to the sea-wall. Mist out on Howth and a chill breeze; dew on the lawns where a blackbird practiced its range. Distant doves cooed with argumentative insistence. A magpie’s rattling gun. He believed he saw a rabbit. He believed he saw a fox. Hare and hyena, he told Scrotes: supporters of our chivalry.

  “Good luck so,” said Doyler.

  “Yes, good luck.”

  The chaplain and Dick proffered their conflicting counsel as MacMurrough watched him tread his way. A sadness and tenderness descended as he saw how beautiful was the world. The clearing sky was beautiful, the leaping dew, the breeze that blew like mint upon his face. His seed was inside a darling boy who limped through this imperial morn in his raggedy-daggledy clothes. Lamb dressed up as mutton. How sad that made him feel, and tender. Tender and sad and cold.

  MacMurrough climbed back into bed. He closed his eyes and wandered up spiral stairs till he came to Scrotes’s turret room. The old fellow was beavering away at his table. MacMurrough leant at his shoulder to over-read, piecing together with difficulty the vermiculate letters. Omnis natura, he read, in quantum natura est, bonum est. Aquinas? It sounded like Aquinas.

  —Augustine, snapped Scrotes.

  MacMurrough wandered about the room, opened a book, closed it again, flicked through the Latin dictionary of Lewis and Short. Scrotes certainly was in a mood, which was inconvenient rather, for he felt a wish to speak with the fellow.

  —Why is it always so cold in this turret? he ventured after a time. Never a fire in the grate.

  Scrotes tapped his quill in its well.

  —I shall tell you why it is cold, he replied. It is cold because you fancy it so. You fancy I wear a skull-cap when I work. You fancy me in threadbare wool. The temperature descends to suit. Industry in your mind is associated with old clothes and ice. Sometimes as I write, droplets freeze on my mittens. It is all most disturbing. A memory of your schooldays no doubt, when they penny-pinched on coals.

  MacMurrough yawned. He said, rhyming schoolboy-quick: Amo, amas, I loved a lass, for she was soft and tender; amas, amat, she laid me flat, and tickled my masculine gender.

  —He has gone then, your young friend? said Scrotes sighing.

  —Yes, I led him down the garden path.

  The porcupine quill was wiped with the pen-wiper, the page was blotted, and Scrotes said, You wish to speak with me.

  —Do you always eavesdrop on my thoughts?

  —You forget: I am your thoughts.

  —A portion of them, MacMurrough advised.

  Scrotes fleered in deference. The loftier portion, one hopes.

  MacMurrough hesitated. It’s about that boy.

  —Well?

  —While Dick was at him—

  —Dick? By which you intend your membrum virile and the wayward cerebrations that command it?

  MacMurrough sighed. Very well, while I was sodomizing the kid, I felt an odd poignancy. The oddness remained while we said our goodbye. It was my desire that had occasioned our intercourse, it was by my leave that we walked through the garden. Yet he chose—I do not know by what expediency—to behave as if this were not the case.

  —And this explains your sadness? This explains the tenderness you avowed?

  —One is not so foolish as to attribute such sentiments to anything more elevated than selfish interest. I was sad for myself; I desired the world should know me for a sad and tender soul.

  —And the boy?

  —One pities him, naturally. It would be absurd to say one cared.

  —Was it pity you felt last evening?—when he spoke of his friend.

  His friend, yes, the comfort for the troops who had brought stockings. They planned to swim at the Forty Foot together, every morning, rain or shine. Dick was thrilled by it all and spent much of the night romancing the two into all sorts of performances. Not sure why, now, possibly to humiliate, probably to goad, I asked did he love his friend. Well, no boy loves his chum, or no boy says he does. But he answered, I do.

  I do, he answered as in some preposterous dissenting nuptial. And MacMurrough remembered how touching it was that a young fellow in a stranger’s bed should say that he loved his friend. The strangeness of the bed assisted, of course. But still, it was . . . charming.

  —But did you pity him? Scrotes would be deferred no longer.

  —No, I did not. I thought him naif. Charming, but naif.

  —And this morning when you parted, why did you feel sad?

  —I have already explained it was an egoistical affectation.

  —Your egoism is not in doubt, MacMurrough. What is in doubt is your humanity.

  —You never used to hector so.

  —You never used to be so cold.

  It was cold, and bare with it. Winter prevailed in the dim-lit room. And chancing on the glass that Scrotes kept by his table, MacMurrough caught his face and it seemed to him a fresh and alarming thing, a hanging fruit among the withered leaves. Such a fruit as the ancients described as having a color as though fit to eat: but if plucked it crumpled in your hands into ashes. And where they grow by the Dead Sea these fruits are called the apple of Sodom.

  MacMurrough cast an eye on the spiral stairs down. He yearned for Nanny Tremble to come and cosset him. But Scrotes leant forward with eyes of December.

  —Answer the truth. Did you not look upon the world this morning and imagine it as the boy might see it? And did you not recognize the mist and the dew and the birdsong as elements not of a place or a time but of a spirit? And did you not envy the boy his spirit? For you know there can be no power over him who freely gives what another would take. Such a one has the capacity to love. Freely, naively, to say, I do.

  Coldly MacMurrough answered, You forget yourself, Dr. Scrotes: I loved you. Heartily I loved you. Two years hard I spent loving you. They had me watch you die.

  —So must you kill everything now in revenge?

  “Snapdragons,” said Eveline. “I’m never sure if they’re not too tawdry. Are they tawdry? Or are they merely vulgar?”

  “Tawdry,” chose MacMurrough. “Vulgar when called antirrhinums.”

  Her hand squeezed his containing elbow. “How very Wildean,” she said.

  A momentary lapse which sundered them. She covered with tulips. “They’re one’s favorites, of course, but he won’t grow them, old Moore won’t. Or at least he will, but only among the snapdragons and whatever these are, green things. Whereas with tulips what one prizes is their uniformity. Nothing to break a prospect so well as a parade of unvarying turbans.”

  Old Moore preceded their progress down the garden path. His hands snapped dead things off, boots slid dead things under the shrubberies. Aunt Eva looked to left and right, but graciously not ahead.

  “One argues with him, naturally, but in the end one must give way. Too odd to care too much about a garden, don’t you agree?”

  MacMurrough did agree and their arms entwined once more. She spoke of tulip-beds she had known at Versailles and in the Tuileries and he thought of Wilde’s that had flamed like thro
bbing rings of fire. He was struck still by her allusion.

  Squilde. Don’t let ’im catch yer bending, mate. We got ourself an arse-fackin-Squilde on us-fackin-wing.

  “Whereas here in poor old Ireland all is a galimafrée.” She strode ahead to quiz the gardener, who shuffled his feet, bowing his head. MacMurrough imagined the mumbling response, his seeking to stumble his words lest expertise should offend.

  Green old rambling garden. MacMurrough knew it, of course, from his holidays as a boy. Screen of twisted pines, the sycamores to the road with their clouds of flies. Dark shrubberies scattered about like mounds over warrior-kings. Exciting places for a child to grub in, somewhere to show your bottom to the gardener’s lad. Wonderful meadow lawn, quite hidden from the house, where he had liked to lie in the long grass while the ponies came up and nudged him. And always at the end, the sea.

  And Aunt Eva. How romantic she looked in her saffron wrap. Her hair was a glossy black after some preparation or other. A pale maquillage. White flowing unfashionable dress whose trail was stained with grass. Not quite the Irish colleen, but whatever it is colleen is the diminutive of.

  His gaze took in the run of the house. She called it Georgian, but Georgian here meant anything up to the ’fifties. His grandfather had taken it as convenient for the Mail. The stone was rendered grey, but not somberly so, lightly grey, grisaille, his aunt would say, faded of salt and wind. Canted wings, one grown over with ivy, the other so bare as to be bald, lending the façade a tilted aspect. No turret, nor room for one, which was surprising really, considering the hours MacMurrough spent there with Scrotes. Balustrade bounding the balcony whereon his aunt took tea in the morning. Below the balcony the garden room, whose French windows, open to the day, drew the garden paths together.

  “Defney I never seeyan dis many tings in a roowam befroor.” Thus the boy of MacMurrough’s bedroom. Shaving-stand, washstand, shuttered secretaire, his leafy Saraband rug: it had seemed bare enough to MacMurrough. The house was far less fussy than he recalled. The heavy mahoganies remained, but were islands of furniture against faded walls. Gone the sand pictures, the featherwork scenes, pictures without paint that so had charmed his childish mind: all that jumble of ornament and garnish that marked the high reign of the old Queen. Wandering through the house he felt how light were these rooms and large now, when his memories crowded them with riding-booted feet, gruff voices of visiting gentry, the incommunicado of footmen. Hearths gaped without their screens, pole-screens, cheval-screens, screens against the draught, the light—where had all the screens gone? Yet, for all its airiness, there was a mood of want and disrepair, as though the modern style had fallen by accident, by unreplaced breakage, loss.

  And the garden, too, with its wilderness sides and combed lawns—a type of Jekyll and hide. Even here the modern style seemed hit upon by negligence. Or perhaps not negligence but nonchalance, a supremacy over style born of conviction. His aunt was certain of her standing, in history and in place. Anything she touched, ergo, was . . . à la mode.

  However, she owned a curious inability to keep people. The place was run on the very minimum of staff. Half the rooms she kept shut. He had noticed a certain maneuvering of the apostles, robbing Peter to pay Paul, with the tradesmen. Was Aunt Eva feeling the pinch? She still topped it the grande dame of course—to the extent of keeping a dispensary, what she was pleased to term her Wednesday levée, when from the front steps of the house she doled out blue butter and castor oil to the needy sick of the parish. But still, to remain here among the retired majors and advancing suburbandom of Sandycove: a florist’s bizarre in the borders.

  Our estate is over the mountains, she told him when he asked. But he remembered the family home, High Kinsella, which sat upon a vast heatherless roadless mire: one of those blank Irish houses, with staring windows, and the misgiving as you approached of the roof fallen in. She had taken recently to motoring there of a long weekend.

  How interesting if Aunt Eva should be poor. How well they should get on.

  Something crawled inside his collar. Impassively, he plucked the gentle seed. Lousy little renter. Nanny Tremble had been right about the Keating’s Powder. The grey thing crushed with a tactile crunch and his fingers stained with blood. Had better check for crab-lice too. His shoulders hunched with incipient formication.

  In Wandsworth they used water from boiling potatoes. Rubbing it into Scrotes’s back that time in the infirmary. Horrid warts he had. Old man’s warts. Old lag’s lice.

  —And only this morning we were treated to proclamations of undying love.

  —For your soul, great heart, for your soul.

  “He claims it is a July garden,” Aunt Eva said returning. “Have you ever heard such a thing? A July garden indeed. It was never a July garden when I was a child. Why, I don’t remember any Julys here. We always traveled to Paris in anticipation of the recess.”

  “This is Ireland. Everything comes later here.”

  She sighed. “Yes, this is poor old sold-out Ireland.”

  Even the late blooming of flowers, apparently, could be laid at the union with England. They passed under an arch that come July, politics permitting, would ramble with rose. Low hedges separated the path from the vegetable rows. Cabbage, cabbage, potato, cabbage; potato, potato, cabbage, cabbage. And just there, by the sea-steps, I took him in my mouth.

  Aunt Eva stopped. “Well, it is useless to go on. At the least no one need starve. We can feed them all colcannon.”

  They turned, old Moore remaining to potter about in his darling rows.

  “If he can grow cabbages that way, why can’t he plant tulips in beds? I sometimes despair of my race and its lack of an aesthetic. Of course it comes from the famine. If a thing can’t be eaten, one must throw it away. But what am I to do? Dispose my guests among the praties?”

  “Wait until July.”

  “It looks as though we shall have to.”

  They came to a seat and she sat down. The heavy scent of wall-flowers hung, members too, MacMurrough recalled, of the cabbage family. He stood over her, smoking.

  “Did I mention we are to have a boys’ band playing?”

  “What sort of boys’ band?”

  “Local boys. Poor ones, I presume. I arranged for kilts for them to wear.” She looked up suddenly, as if she had caught Dick’s murmur of hands wandering up skirted thighs. “I’m sure I remember you playing an instrument. Didn’t you, Anthony?”

  “Yes, I played concert flute. I told you.”

  “The man in charge is not to be trusted.”

  “Trusted with what?”

  She looked aggrieved at his interrogation. “The care of young minds.” Her fingers, which had stroked a stem, now pinched it till it severed. She brought the spray to her nose, sniffed. Before she would toss it aside she said, “He is not patriotic.”

  MacMurrough laughed, a single ejaculated breath.

  “There is no occasion for scoffing. Father O’Toiler and I intend the boys to be an inspiration to the parish. It has become too Englified and reminds one of your recreant father.”

  His father, yes. Advocate, of course, not brilliant but reliable. For the prosecution, hence the knighthood. Sir John MacMurrough, Knight of St. Patrick. Dubbed at Dublin Castle, hence the recreancy. Twins, she the elder by half an hour, he the winner by the unalterable right of male succession.

  “As it happens this current teacher is indisposed. An unfortunate mishap on the road. The man to replace him need not be so proficient. He need only be . . . bien disposé.”

  “Aunt Eva, you’re not suggesting . . . ?” Apparently she was. “Does your priest know about this? Does he know anything of my situation?”

  Sternly she said, “What is there to know? Other than that you are a MacMurrough and as such bear a name inseparable from our country’s cause.” She sought to hold his eyes. Some appeal there he thought might be gratified by his flinching. He did so and she said, eirenically, “As for your contretemps with the British courts
, we must never forget your grandfather himself was imprisoned. Kilmainham Jail. They have ballads about it still.”

  So that was it. They were to play the green card. Wily old bird is offering me a way out. Would anybody fall for it? Even for Ireland it seemed too extravagant to equate his plight with the humdrum consequences of nationalist agitation. And yet he was Irish—as much as he was anything much. His gaze lowered from the sycamores through which the sky still showed. He flicked his cigarette in the flowers. “Two years with hard labor, hard fare and a hard bed is hardly a contretemps.”

  “I am afraid they have coarsened you. However, you will find that in this country incarceration is not quite the disgrace our conquerors would make of it. Why, I myself received a one month’s detention.”

  “Darling Aunt Eva, even in Wandsworth I had news of your escapades. Eggs at Asquith, gracious me. However, three-quarters of an hour in the cells below till they cat-and-moused you out scarcely amounts to a martyrdom.”

  “And what of that?” she snapped. “If our masters have grown too cunning to permit of martyrs, is the cause to be any the lessened?”

  Yes, he thought, she had hoped for prison. Hunger-striking, he did not doubt. How it must have riled her, her brother’s intercession. He remembered she had crossed to London for the Coronation demonstration of 1911. His father, invited of course to the Coronation itself, refused her his house. She camped outside in a borrowed motor, festooned with garlands and bannerets. In the procession itself she reclined upon a float, fingering a giant harp, the Dark Rosaleen of Erin, at the head of a mildly discomfited contingent from the Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation. He watched her pass from a balcony in Piccadilly, one remarkable woman in a mass of thousands, each chanting for her vote.

  He did not know whence she produced them, for she did not seem to carry anything with her beyond her parasol, but some salts had appeared which now she inhaled. Such a feminine creature. Impossible to imagine her a man. When he posited this, she answered he was impertinent.

  “I do not intend to be.”