‘That’s not what I mean, Larry,’ he said, drawing neat figures on the counter with the bottom of his glass. ‘What I mean is you can’t help wondering what happened yourself. We knew one another when we were young, and look at us now, forty odd and our lives are over and we have nothing to show for them. It’s as if when you married some good went out of you.’
‘Small loss as the fool said when he lost Mass,’ retorted Larry, who had found himself a comfortable berth in the pub and lost his thirst for adventure.
‘That’s the bait, of course,’ Ned said with a grim smile. ‘That’s where Nature gets us every time. A small contribution; you’ll never miss it, and before you know where you are, you’re bankrupt.’
‘Ah, how bad Nature is!’ exclaimed Larry, not relaxing his grin. ‘When your first was born you were walking mad round the town, looking for people to celebrate it with, and there you are now, looking for sympathy! God, man, isn’t it a great thing to have someone to share your troubles with and give a slap on the ass to, even if she does let the crockery fly once in a while? What the hell about an old bit of china?’
‘That’s all very well, Larry, if that’s all it costs,’ said Ned darkly.
‘And what the hell else does it cost?’ asked Larry. ‘Twenty-one meals a week and a couple of pounds of tea. Sure, ’tis for nothing!’
‘And what about your freedom?’ Ned asked. ‘What about the old days on the column?’
‘Ah, that was different, Ned,’ Larry said with a sigh, and all at once his smile went out and his eyes took on a dreamy, far-away look. ‘But sure, everything was different then. I don’t know what the hell is after coming over the country at all.’
‘The same thing that’s come over you and me,’ Ned said with finality. ‘Nature kidded us, the way it kidded us when we got married, and the way it kidded us when the first child was born. There’s nothing worse than illusions for getting you into the rut. We had our freedom and we didn’t value it. Now our lives are run for us by women the way they were when we were kids. This is Friday and what do I find? Hurley waiting for someone to bring home the fish. You waiting for the fish. I’ll go home to a nice plate of fish, and I’ll guarantee to you, Larry, not one man in that flying column is having meat for his dinner today. One few words in front of the altar and it’s fish for Friday the rest of your life. And they call this a man’s country!’
‘Still, Ned, there’s nothing nicer than a good bit of fish,’ Larry said wistfully. ‘If ’tis well done, mind you. If ’tis well done. And I grant you ’tisn’t often you get it well done. God, I had some fried plaice in Kilkenny last week that had me turned inside out. I declare to God if I stopped that car once I stopped it six times, and by the time I got home I was after caving in like a sandpit.’
‘And yet I can remember you in Tramore, letting on to be a Protestant to get bacon and eggs on Friday,’ Ned said accusingly.
‘Oh, that’s the God’s truth,’ Larry said joyously. ‘I was a divil for meat, God forgive me. I used to go mad seeing the Protestants lowering it, and me there with nothing only a boiled egg. And the waitress, Ned – do you remember the waitress that wouldn’t believe I was a Protestant till I said the “Our Father” the wrong way for her? She said I had too open a face for a Protestant. How well she’d know a thing like that about the “Our Father”, Ned!’
‘A woman would know anything she had to know to make you eat fish,’ Ned said, finishing his drink and turning away. ‘And you may be reconciled to it, Larry,’ he added with a mournful smile, ‘but I’m not. I’ll eat it because I’m damned with a sense of duty, and I don’t want to get Kitty into trouble with the neighbours, but please God, I’ll see one more revolution before I die, even if I have to swing for it.’
‘Ah, well,’ sighed Larry, ‘youth is a great thing, sure enough.… Coming, Hanna, coming!’ he boomed as a woman’s voice yelled from the room upstairs. He gave Ned a nod and a wink to suggest that he enjoyed it, but Ned knew that that scared little rabbit of a wife of his would be wanting to know about the Protestant prayers, and would then go to Confession and ask the priest was it a reserved sin and should Larry be sent to the Bishop. And then he remembered Larry during the Dunkeen ambush when they had to run for it, pleading with that broad smile of his, ‘Ah, Christ, Ned, let me have one more crack at them!’ ‘No life, no life,’ Ned said aloud to himself as he sauntered down the hill past the church. And it was a great mistake taking a drink whenever he felt badly about the country because it always made the country seem worse.
Someone clapped him suddenly on the shoulder. It was Jack Martin, the vocational-school teacher, a small, plump, nervous man with a baby complexion, a neat greying moustache and big, blue, innocent eyes. Ned’s face lit up. Of all his friends Martin was the one he warmed to most. He was a talented man and a good baritone. His wife had died a few years before and left him with the two children, but he had not married again and had been a devoted if over-anxious father. Yet two or three times a year, and always coming on to his wife’s anniversary, he went on a tearing drunk that left some legend behind. There was the time he tried to teach Verdi to the tramp who played the penny whistle and the time his housekeeper hid his trousers and he got out of the window in his pyjamas and had to be brought home by the parish priest.
‘McCarthy, you scoundrel, you were hoping to give me the slip,’ he said delightedly in his shrill nasal voice. ‘Come in here one minute till I tell you something. God, you’ll die!’
‘If you wait there ten minutes, Jack, I’ll be back to you,’ said Ned. ‘There’s only one little job I have to do, and then I’ll be able to give you my full attention.’
‘All right, all right, but have one little drink before you go,’ Martin said irritably. ‘One drink and I’ll release you on your own recognizances. You’ll never guess where I was, Ned. I woke up there, as true as God!’
Martin was like that. Ned decided good-humouredly that five minutes’ explanation in the bar was easier than ten minutes’ argument in the street. It was quite clear that Martin was ‘on it’. He was full of clock-work vitality, rushing to the counter for fresh drinks, fumbling over money, trying to carry glasses without spilling them, and talking thirteen to the dozen. Ned beamed at him. Drunk or sober, he liked the man.
‘Ned, I’ll give you three guesses where I was.’
‘Let me see,’ said Ned in mock meditation. ‘I suppose ’twould never be Paris?’ and then laughed boyishly at Martin’s hurt air.
‘You can’t do anything in this town,’ said Martin. ‘Next, I suppose you’ll be telling me what I did there.’
‘No,’ said Ned gravely. ‘It’s Father Clery who’ll be telling about that – from the pulpit.’
‘Ah, to hell with Father Clery!’ said Martin. ‘No, Ned, this is se-e-e-rious. This is vital. It only came to me in the last week. We’re only wasting our time in this misfortunate country.’
‘You’re probably right,’ Ned said urbanely. ‘The question is, what else can you do with Time?’
‘Ah, this isn’t philosophy, man,’ Martin said testily. ‘This is se-e-e-rious, I tell you.’
‘I know how serious it is all right,’ Ned said complacently. ‘Only five minutes ago I was asking Larry Cronin where our youth was gone.’
‘Youth?’ said Martin. ‘But you can’t call that youth, what we have in this country. Drinking bad porter in public-houses after closing time and listening to someone singing “The Rose of Tralee”. Sure, that’s not life, man.’
‘But isn’t that the question?’ asked Ned. ‘What is Life?’ Ned couldn’t help promoting words like ‘time’ and ‘life’ to the dignity of capital letters.
‘How the hell would I know?’ asked Martin. ‘I suppose you have to go out and look for the bloody thing. You’re not going to find it round here. You have to go south, where they have sunlight and wine and good cooking and women with a bit of go.’
‘And you don’t think it would be the same thing there?’ Ned asked qu
ietly.
‘Oh, God, dust and ashes! Dust and ashes!’ wailed Martin. ‘Don’t go on with that! Don’t we get enough of it every Sunday in the chapel?’
Now, Ned was very fond of Martin, and admired the vitality with which in his forties he still pursued a fancy, but he could not let him get away with the notion that Life was merely a matter of geography.
‘But that’s a way Life has,’ he said oracularly. ‘You think you’re seeing it, and it turns out it was somewhere else all the time. Like women; the girl you lose is the one that could have made you happy. Or revolutions; you always fought the wrong battle. I dare say there are people in the south wishing they could be in some wild place like this. I admit it’s rather difficult to imagine, but I suppose it could happen. No, Jack, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that wherever Life was, it wasn’t where we were looking for it.’
‘For God’s sake!’ cried Martin. ‘You’re talking like an old man of ninety-five.’
‘I’m forty-two,’ Ned said with quiet emphasis, ‘and I have no illusions left. You still have a few. Mind, I admire you for it. You were never a fighting man like Cronin or myself. Maybe that’s what saved you. You kept your youthfulness longer. You escaped the big disillusionments. But Nature has her eye on you as well. You’re light and airy now, but what way will you be next week? We pay for our illusions, Jack. They’re only sent to drag us deeper into the mud.’
‘Ah, ’tisn’t that with me at all, Ned,’ said Martin. ‘It’s my stomach. I can’t keep it up.’
‘No, Jack, it’s not your stomach. It’s the illusion. I saw other men with the same illusion and I know the way you’ll end up. You’ll be in and out of the chapel ten times a day for fear once wasn’t enough, with your head down for fear you’d catch a friend’s eye and be led astray, beating your breast, lighting candles and counting indulgences. And that, Jack, may be the last illusion of all.’
‘I don’t know what the hell is after coming over you,’ Martin said in bewilderment. ‘You’re – you’re being positively personal. And Father Clery knows perfectly well the sort of man I am. I have all Shaw’s plays on my shelf, and I never tried to hide them from anybody.’
‘I know that, Jack, I know that,’ Ned said sadly, overcome by the force of his own oratory. ‘And I’m not being personal, because it isn’t a personal matter. It’s only Nature working through you. It works through me as well only it gets me in a different way. My illusion was a different sort, and look at me now. I turn every damn thing into a duty, and in the end I’m good for nothing. I know the way I’ll die too. I’ll disintegrate into a husband, a father, a schoolteacher, a local librarian, and fifteen different sorts of committee men, and none of them with enough energy to survive. Unless, with God’s help, I die on a barricade.’
‘What barricade?’ asked Martin, who found all this hard to follow.
‘Any barricade,’ Ned said with a wild sweep of his arms. ‘I don’t care what it’s for so long as it means a fight. I don’t want to die of disseminated conscientiousness. I don’t want to be one of Nature’s errand boys. I’m not even a good one. Here I am arguing with you in a pub instead of doing what I was sent to do.’ He paused for a moment to think and then broke into his boyish laugh, because he realized that for the moment he had forgotten what it was. ‘Whatever the hell it was,’ he added. ‘Well, that beats everything! That’s what duty does for you!’
‘Ah, that’s only because it wasn’t important,’ said Martin.
‘That’s where you’re wrong again, Jack,’ said Ned, beginning to enjoy the situation thoroughly. ‘Maybe it was of no importance to us but it was probably of great importance to Nature. What was the damn thing? My memory’s gone to hell.’
He closed his eyes and lay back limply in his chair, though even through his self-induced trance he smiled at the absurdity of it.
‘No good,’ he said briskly, starting up. ‘It’s an extraordinary thing, the way it disappears as if the ground opened and swallowed it. And there’s nothing you can do about it. It’ll come back of its own accord, and there won’t be any reason for that either. I was reading an article about a German doctor who says you forget because it’s too unpleasant to think about.’
‘It’s not a haircut?’ Martin asked helpfully, and Ned, a tidy man, shook his head.
‘Or clothes?’ Martin went on. ‘Women are great on clothes.’
‘No,’ said Ned, frowning. ‘I’m sure it wasn’t anything for myself.’
‘Or for the kids? Shoes or the like?’
‘It could be, I suppose,’ said Ned. ‘Something flashed across my mind just then.’
‘If it’s not that it must be groceries.’
‘I don’t see how it could be. Williams deliver them every week, and they’re nearly always the same.’
‘In that case it’s bound to be something to eat,’ said Martin. ‘They’re always forgetting things – bread or butter or milk.’
‘I suppose so, but I’m damned if I know what,’ said Ned. ‘Jim,’ he said to the barman, ‘I’m after forgetting the message I was sent on. What do you think of that?’
‘Ah, I suppose ’twas fish, Mr Mac,’ said the barman.
‘Fish!’ said Martin. ‘The very thing.’
‘Fish?’ repeated Ned, stroking his forehead. ‘I suppose it could be, now you mention it. I know I offered to bring it for Tom Hurley and I had a bit of an argument with Larry Cronin about it. He seems to like it.’
‘I can’t stand the damn stuff,’ said Martin, ‘only the housekeeper has to have it for the kids.’
‘Ah, ’tis fish all right, Mr Mac,’ the barman said. ‘In an hour’s time you wouldn’t forget it, not with the stink of it all round the town. I never could stand it myself since the last war and all the poor unfortunates getting drowned. You’d feel you were making a cannibal out of yourself.’
‘Well, obviously, it has something to do with fish,’ said Ned with a laugh. ‘It may not exactly be fish, but it’s something very like it. Anyway, if that’s the case, there’s no particular hurry. We’ll have another of these, Jim.’
‘Whether it is or not, she’ll take it as kindly meant,’ said Martin. ‘The same as flowers. Women in this country don’t seem to be able to distinguish between them.’
Two hours later, the two friends, more talkative than ever, drove up to Ned’s house for lunch.
‘Mustn’t forget the fish,’ Ned said with a knowing smile as he reached back for it. ‘The spirit of the revolution, Jack – that’s what it’s come to.’
At that moment they both heard the wail of a new-born infant from the front bedroom. Ned grew very white.
‘What’s that, Ned?’ asked Martin, and Ned gave a deep sigh.
‘That’s the fish, Jack, I’m afraid,’ said Ned.
‘Oh, God, I’m not going in so,’ Martin said hastily, getting out of the car. ‘Tom Hurley will give me a bit of bread and cheese.’
‘Nonsense, man!’ Ned said boldly, knowing perfectly well what his welcome would be if he went in alone. ‘I’ll get you something. That’s not what’s worrying me at all. What’s worrying me is why I thought it could be fish. That’s what I can’t understand.’
A Story by Maupassant
People who have not grown up in a provincial town won’t know what I mean when I say what Terry Coughlan meant to me. People who have won’t need to know.
As kids we lived a few doors from each other on the same terrace, and his sister, Tess, was a friend of my sister, Nan. There was a time when I was rather keen on Tess myself. She was a small, plump, gay little thing, with rosy cheeks like apples, and she played the piano very well. In those days I sang a bit, though I hadn’t much of a voice. When I sang Mozart, Beethoven, or even Wagner, Terry would listen with brooding approval. When I sang commonplace stuff, Terry would make a face and walk out. He was a good-looking lad with a big brow and curly black hair, a long, pale face and a pair of intent dark eyes. He was always well spoken and smart in his app
earance. There was nothing sloppy about him.
When he could not learn something by night he got up at five in the morning to do it, and whatever he took up, he mastered. Even as a boy he was always looking forward to the day when he’d have money enough to travel, and he taught himself French and German in the time it took me to find out I could not learn Irish. He was cross with me for wanting to learn it; according to him it had ‘no cultural significance’, but he was crosser still with me because I couldn’t learn it. ‘The first thing you should learn to do is to work,’ he would say gloomily. ‘What’s going to become of you if you don’t?’ He had read somewhere that when Keats was depressed, he had a wash and brush up. Keats was his god. Poetry was never much in my line, except Shelley, and Terry didn’t think much of him.
We argued about it on our evening walks. Maybe you don’t remember the sort of arguments you had when you were young. Lots of people prefer not to remember, but I like thinking of them. A man is never more himself than when he talks nonsense about God, Eternity, prostitution, and the necessity for having mistresses. I argued with Terry that the day of poetry was over, and that the big boys of modern literature were the fiction writers – the ones we’d heard of in Cork at that time, I mean – the Russians and Maupassant.
‘The Russians are all right,’ he said to me once. ‘Maupassant you can forget.’
‘But why, Terry?’ I asked.
‘Because whatever you say about the Russians, they’re noble,’ he said. ‘Noble’ was a great word of his at the time: Shakespeare was ‘noble’, Turgenev was ‘noble’, Beethoven was ‘noble’. ‘They are a religious people, like the Greeks, or the English of Shakespeare’s time. But Maupassant is slick and coarse and commonplace. Are his stories literature?’
‘Ah, to hell with literature!’ I said. ‘It’s life.’
‘Life in this country?’
‘Life in his own country, then.’
‘But how do you know?’ Terry asked, stopping and staring at me. ‘Humanity is the same here as anywhere else. If he’s not true of the life we know, he’s not true of any sort of life.’
My Oedipus Complex Page 35
