Colonfay

by O'Grady, Myles;

  She said, “You can’t leave it, can you? I never liked the French.”

  “The French? Well, Nana, there are those who say they’re shits and that’s certainly true, in a way. Because they’re contrary. Utterly chauvinistic. But they’re unboring shits. Although they drive me up the wall with their infernal conceit they suited me better than the amiable nincompoops I’ve worked with in some countries. You know the sort. Pleading, servile. Love me and have a good day! Those are the characteristics of people who have nothing to say. That fearful middle-class gentility of the Anglo-Saxons. They compare lawnmowers, homemade marmalade, so-called Italian restaurants. The Americans are invariably nice and friendly but they tend to compare prices. With great objectivity.”

  But what a lot of crap. His best friends were Bimmy, a German, and Sterling, an American. Giles Pollock, now an English baronet.

  All things considered though he’d rather be in France than anywhere. He was never one for the easy environment. The fact is, and Laure knew it best, he was an in-between person, happiest when travelling, at home in a city he didn’t know with a language he didn’t understand. Unfixed. So long as he had a home base, back on the ranch, in Paris.

  Still, there were days when he needed to get away from the French. When the war and the Occupation came up. When his father-in-law talked about the hardships they endured. They construct historical narratives that are of questionable objectivity and often simply untrue. ‘France liberated herself.’ Don’t bother me with the facts. Well, yes, but don’t convert cowardly behavior into heroics.

  In fact, he despised them a lot of the time. Especially when he flashed back to the war. Still, being a mite cantankerous himself, Dermot enjoyed their cuts and thrusts.

  He had a theory. The Irish and the French get along together not only because the Irish aren’t English but because they are both cantankerous races. Cantankerousness in the Irish is genetic. It developed as an allergy to the potato over centuries of having the common spud as the staple diet. Then in the seventeenth century there were thousands of Irishmen in the service of the king of France. Mercenaries forced by the Brits to flee Ireland. With the liberated Irishman’s eager propensity to copulate with the immoral mademoiselles, there was an injection of bloody-mindedness into the French blood. Irish sperm is highly potent. And mildly toxic.

  The French have a different set of priorities. They put writers and painters above the mercantile spivs and forgive them their tresspasses. Being a bit of a painter and a bit of a writer, he appreciated this positioning statement. No, he thought, they’re not ‘nice,’ the French. They’re unscrupulous. But they’re passionate. That suited him when he doffed his mental combat uniform. He was not much of a one for reasonable things. His abiding fear was to be detached from the French environment, to have the carte de séjour revoked, to be hurled back among the blinkered puritans and the do-gooders. For the second time in twenty years it seemed a likely prospect.

  The first was the death of his daughter, Penelope. She was the glue that held the elements of life together: the marriage, his job, Paris. When she went, he slipped and went off the rails and took another cure for the booze. Laure lost herself in intensive research into the lives of long-dead painters. And in an art expert who flattered and charmed her. He lost himself in his yacht, externalized the pain, converted it into an obsessive interest in an object of beauty. Lived in the Swedish yard. Travelled, couldn’t stand still, couldn’t rest. The death of Penelope was the pivotal point in his life. Constant movement was an antidote to the pain. He couldn’t go to the house in Provence. The Pavilion had been done up for Penelope. Her easel stood there, another reminder of her bubbly presence.

  After Laure’s affair with Marcel, he sought solace again in Nana the Troll. A sexual tranquillizer. But a powerful one.

  Already, long before he left for Mexico, communications between Dermot and Laure had broken down. They were strangers. The cultural gap opened up and they fell into it.

  Laure said, “Why don’t you go away for good? I don’t mind. I’m better off without you.”

  A nice thing to say to your husband when he’s off to dangerous parts. It cut like a knife.

  Now she had read the letter. Detailed. Clinical, except that it had been written in the heat of body love and his genius for verbalizing the particular. He had photographed the particulars. God is in the details and the details are often, shall we say, private. Unvulgar close-ups, expressions of adoration.

  He protested to himself, I took them for painting reference. Like Rodin, Maillol, Egon Schiele. People didn’t understand that. Especially wives. Even French wives. The word made flesh. Not the way it’s meant in the bible. It’s the Irishness. Upwelling verbosity. Sensuousness. Flaws in the character. His last poem:

  Yes, I am a twisted vine

  But if you cultivate me

  I may give a heady wine

  Suddenly he had a forlorn sense of drift. The ballast keel had fallen off. He was unstable. Philanderer that he was, and he hadn’t been one until after the rift and her betrayal, he didn’t want to be unshackled from the marital anchor. Total freedom leads to insanity. He had spent his life looking for an identity and the nearest he came was as a père de famille for a limited time when Penelope was alive. He didn’t want to think about that. Laure had cut him adrift. His love for her was deep and she had repelled it. It was sacred, sanctified by marriage. Meant to endure. She had shown him that it was not important. He was floating free, with no direction, and, as your man said, ‘Pleasant it is, when over a great sea the winds trouble the water, to gaze from shore.’ His shoreline was being undermined. The undertow was fearful. No solid ground under the size twelves. He talked to himself. He did go on. He was one for the words. And the images. He saw what he wanted to see, not the reality of what was there. This could lead to trouble. Sometimes the images came together like the split screen in the camera, a perfect fit, but that was rare.

  He said to Nana, “The French? Well, perhaps they’re a trifle more sophisticated than the Irish. Maybe my countrymen have changed. Buck Mulligan and the sow that eats its farrow. Be the holy man, God bless us all. Are they still be talking like that? Had they ever? Oh, yes. And why not? Language is not for computer instruction books. Living off the Words, the only Irish export apart from your American politicians. Words, as Robertson Davies said, are only farts from people who’ve swallowed too many books, but wasn’t he a Canadian?”

  “You do know a lot,” she remarked, already bored.

  “Yes, knowledge but not wisdom. Still and all. If you want to know where you’re going you have to know where you come from. I know that one all right. Another gem of purest corn serene. I’m thinking about it as I circle the birthplace, like an Indian scout around the wagon train, delaying the arrival as long as possible. Born there, I am a stranger in a strange land. Me, an alien now, a man without a country, I came from Piltown, County Kilkenny, but I’m not of it. Was I ever? Do I belong here? That’s what I want to find out.”

  “What’s so special about it?” she asked.

  “Ah, well now, alannah, Kilkenny is famed in song and dance for nothing except cats tearing each other to pieces. ‘Fighting like two Kilkenny cats’. Not altogether inappropriate when applied to the human species. That’s meself, certainly. All rage and fury at times. What others are for, I’m against; what others are against, I’m for.”

  “Just like your father,” she said.

  “‘Fraid so. And I’m thinking the other wordy fella from Asheville, North Carolina, was probably right: You can’t go home again. I’m a displaced person. A hotel man, airline man, autoroute man. Homo transiens. My best line: ‘I’m just a skidmark on a runway. That’s all.”

  He thought, ‘Not like Laure, permanently fixed in France.’

  Madness threatened so he went back to the madhouse. The place where he was born. ‘Whelped’ was The Boss’s word for it. The old elephant now returning to the cemetery? Not quite. Maybe he could go another roun
d with life, yet.

  She complained, “When will we get somewhere civilized? Where we can have a good lunch and go to bed for the afternoon? I’m dead.”

  “Not for a while, I’m afraid.”

  He stood on the clutch (heavy as a tractor and distinctly anti-feminist) and crashed down through the steel gate into second gear and the big Michelins with the twelve cylinders driving them at 6,000 revs gripped the patchy tarmac and the four exhausts played Enzo’s unmistakeable Maranello Concerto and blasted off the hills and the three-double-barrelled Weber carburetors and the valves and tappets bounced off the banks and the cow near the hedge jumped over the moon.

  Apprehensive about going direct to Fiddown and Piltown he decided to approach it from the north and went up to Inistioge and down through Thomastown.

  He thought, ‘It must have been near here that The Boss was picked up during the Troubles.’

  They sat there stopped on the road while a herd of cattle slowly swayed across from one field to another. The farm laborer, his trousers tied up with string and a potato sack wrapped around his shoulders to keep him dry, slapped the rearguard cow on the rump and waved his blackthorn stick at them as he turned to close the gate after him.

  “Where are we now?” Nana asked.

  “Near Piltown. As I told you it means ‘a hole.’ Out of one hole into another. I think you know when you first poke your head out into the world that life there is not going to be like a strawberry tart.”

  “Did you live on a farm?”

  “No. We owned a farm but we didn’t work it. We had very little property left in Ireland. What started as a vast tract of land between Carrick and Piltown, with a big house, was lost by my great-grandfather with quadrupeds that were insufficiently motivated and women who were too eager. Slow horses and fast women, the downfall of many an Irishman. Plus a family predisposition to the sauce. His only claim to fame the fact that he had a horse in the Grand National which is still running. My grandfather was the Land Agent for the Earl of Bessborough. All gone up in smoke with the Big House in 1922. Cromwell’s colonel had had a good run for his money.”

  “I don’t know any Irish history. Is it interesting?”

  “Not really. Rather boring. Failed rebellion after failed rebellion. Famine after eviction. Cry-babies, all of us. Complaining because the English took all our land. Benevolently, of course. Because we were too ignorant to farm it properly. We ourselves lived in a form of genteel poverty from the rent of the farm which The Boss couldn’t work due to his war wounds and this modest income was supplemented by his 100% disability pension. A few rich aunts subsidized my education. Waste of money, of course. A no-man’s land between the British professional class and the poor Irish tenants. Flotsam of the gentry. The Boss had just passed his exams as a Quantity Surveyor in England and was in Wales on his way back from Piltown when the war broke out. He joined up and found himself in the 3rd Welch Regiment, a six-foot-three tone-deaf Irishman who could read and write in the midst of a bunch of five-foot nothing singing miners. Indeed to goodness, Bach, it was not a happy conjunction. He transferred out of it, was commissioned and went to Belgium with the Royal Irish. Mons, the Somme, Passchendaele. Piltown. The End.”

  “My father-in-law was in the Resistance. I have a photograph of him in his Resistance uniform.”

  “You don’t say? Looked like an SS Cavalry uniform to me. I thought he was a military govenor in the Channel Islands?”

  “I don’t know. He was a show jumper. Maybe I got it wrong.”

  “Ah, well, never mind. We’re all agin the government here. Our genetic heritage they keep telling us is schizophrenia and repressed sexuality. Different now.”

  “I noticed.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. You liberated me. But this valley bred them all. The high incidence of insanity in Ireland was certainly due to the fact that they didn’t fuck enough. No condoms and God help the girl who got in the family way. Off to England to work as a ‘maid.’ There was, of course, no such thing as homosexuality in Holy Ireland. The fact that the postmaster blew his brains out with a 12-bore the day after his marriage must have been due to a Ruskin-like fright when he saw her beard. And don’t be telling me about the priests and the altar boys of today: I don’t believe a word of it even if it is true. It’s a valley but not at all like Vaucluse in Provence where I have a house and the sun shines and the melons ripen and other succulent things represented in myth by the fig add to the sensuality which the natives of Piltown in my day thought could only be discovered through the bottom of a glass of stout.”

  “But you left when you were young.”

  “Twelve. I was confined in the place before I was despatched to school in England. That wasn’t a barrel of laughs but it was on the way to France—the dream of art and fair women—and freedom. Unfortunately, Hitler thought so too and he beat me to it. I didn’t get to live there for a long time but I stayed longer than Herr Schickelgruber. Paris, the Mecca for all souls that want to sing. In the meantime I saw the world at His Majesty’s expense and had fun bombing and firing rockets at the Huns and Japs. A good war and worth a guinea a minute, as The Boss used to say. He was an irreverent character.”

  “Tell me about him.”

  “More? He was a card. The old man at a wake. Derry was a hunchback, a farm laborer. When they laid his corpse out, they put a heavy weight on his chest to keep him in a more or less horizontal position. The weight was tied by baling twine to both sides of the bed to keep it in position. At some point in the proceedings, with all the keening and boozing, The Boss cut the twine and the weight fell off. The corpse sat up and exhaled, making a loud “Ahhh!” as the wind was expelled. This scattered them like St. Jerome’s lion in the monastery. Laugh? I thought I’d die when I heard it for the hundreth time. Oh, dear God, give me patience.”

  “What’s on the other side of the river?”

  “Curraghmore. Seat of the Lords Waterford. Beresfords. Admiral Lord Charles Beresford and all that.”

  They were on the hill overlooking the valley. The Comeragh Mountains were a blue-green wash obscured from time to time by the rain that lashed across the windscreen. It was not an Irish Autoroute du Soleil. The weather had lightened up a bit and shafts of white light spread from breaks in the clouds. The river was a silver snake down below. Distances are nothing, five miles from Piltown but a world apart for a loner. It was his secret place. A lonely place but not so lonely as being in the middle of a bunch of yahoos with tide marks on their necks and talking about Michael Collins and DeValera and the grand days when their fathers fought for Irish freedom. He envied them. He was a mongrel, half Irish, half English. Isolated.

  “Here’s another tale. They evicted an old woman from her cottage. She put a curse on them. Three generations would die a violent death, she said. And they did. That’s a true fact, as we say in Ireland. Her cottage was overgrown with brambles and we gave it a wide berth. It was said no dog would go near it. No hound would follow a fox into the undergrowth. And that’s another true fact.”

  They went down to Waterford and on to Portlaw and continued to Carrick-on-Suir, across the bridge, missing Mount Saint Nicholas, the Christian Brothers school.

  He said, “That’s where I was given six of the best on each hand to warm me up of a winter’s morning. Sadistic bastards. Pedophiles. I regret not having a bomb to plant there. Being of forgiving nature I wish only that most of the Brothers would be roasting in hell and turning on a spit with red-hot pokers rammed up their arses. I must be mellowing in my old age. The milk of human kindness was not flowing in that place when I was there. The bowels of compassion seldom opened but I would still like to shit on them from a great height.”

  “Doesn’t sound much like Aiglon College in Switzerland.”

  “No, I suppose not. Nor were holidays at Tramore or Clonmel like Capri and Cap Ferrat, where you spent your summers.”

  Up past Kilkieran, Ahenny, Tullaghought, Kilmagganny, Newmarket to Knocktopher. Empty villages, f
orlorn, the bold peasantry no doubt at their roast lamb and mint sauce. Or checking up on the price of beef on the hoof or the stock market results more likely.

  He said, “I wouldn’t mind a ‘welch’ in the Café de Flore meself. What am I doing in this God-forsaken place, at all? Well, you’re not interested in a geography lesson but the names are vaguely familiar to me even if the road isn’t.”

  “How did you get around?” she asked.

  “Usually in a pony and trap. But we were plutocrats by local standards. We had an old Fiat. We called it the Bluebird. We used to take it on its weekly outing to Tramore Strand every Sunday and I would ask The Boss to stop at the quay in Waterford so I could look at the small freighters tied up alongside. Dreaming of being on the bridge with Captain MacWhirr in the South China Sea. Escape!”

  “Who was Captain MacWhirr?”

  “Nobody important. A Conrad type.”

  “Thanks for the information.”

  “We used the Bluebird if by some miracle we could get it to start. It went so slow that any slower and it would have gone in reverse. Too often I was obliged to go on the backs of horses that have a usefulness confined to supplying manure for the strawberry beds. No power steering. Horses. For hunting the fox. The unspeakable chasing the uneatable.”

  “We have our own riding horses for the family apart from the stud.”

  “Naturally you would. Why wouldn’t you?”

  “Stop it!”

  “The Fiat (it must have been one of the few in Ireland at the time) was a soft-top old jalopy with side windows and brass legs that you stuck in slots in the doors, the thick mica yellowed and cracked and almost opaque. There were flaps at the front so the driver could stick his arm out to signal his steering intentions. This innovation could have been dispensed with as no Irish driver ever had intentions or considered it necessary to exert such wasteful energy which in those days was conserved for lifting glasses of porter or John Jameson whiskey. Even now French drivers whose traffic indicators demand just a flick of the finger save them for Christmas or use them after they have made some exciting manoeuver.”