‘It is a little bit extreme, all right,’ her mother said, with a frown, but May knew she was thinking of her.
May had the feeling that Mrs Corkery would make a very good nun, if for no other reason than to put her brother and Mother Agatha in their place. And of course, there were other reasons. As a girl she had wanted to be a nun, but for family reasons it was impossible, so she had become a good wife and mother, instead. Now, after thirty years of pinching and scraping, her family had grown away from her and she could return to her early dream. There was nothing unbalanced about that, May thought bitterly. She was the one who had proved unbalanced.
For a while it plunged her back into gloomy moods, and they were made worse by the scraps of gossip that people passed on to her, not knowing how they hurt. Mrs Corkery had collected her six letters of freedom and taken them herself to the Bishop, who had immediately given in. ‘Spite!’ the Dean pronounced gloomily. ‘Nothing but spite – all because I don’t support his mad dream of turning a modern city into a mediaeval monastery.’
On the day of Mrs Corkery’s Reception, May did not leave the house at all. It rained, and she sat by the sitting-room window, looking across the city to where the hills were almost invisible. She was living Mrs Corkery’s day through – the last day in the human world of an old woman who had assumed the burden she herself had been too weak to accept. She could see it all as though she were back in that mean, bright little chapel, with the old woman lying out on the altar, covered with roses like a corpse, and an old nun shearing off her thin grey locks. It was all so intolerably vivid that May kept bursting into sudden fits of tears and whimpering like a child.
One evening a few weeks later, she came out of the office in the rain and saw Peter Corkery at the other side of the street. She obeyed her first instinct and bowed her head so as not to look at him. Her heart sank as he crossed the road to accost her.
‘Aren’t you a great stranger, May?’ he asked, with his cheerful grin.
‘We’re very busy in the office these days, Peter,’ she replied, with false brightness.
‘It was only the other night Joe was talking about you. You know Joe is up in the seminary now?’
‘No. What’s he doing?’
‘Teaching. He finds it a great relief after the mountains. And, of course, you know about the mother.’ This was it!
‘I heard about it. I suppose ye’re all delighted?’
‘I wasn’t very delighted,’ he said, and his lips twisted in pain. ‘ ’Twas the most awful day I ever spent. When they cut off her hair – ’
‘You don’t have to remind me.’
‘I disgraced myself, May. I had to run out of the chapel. And here I had two nuns after me, trying to steer me to the lavatory. Why do nuns always think a man is looking for a lavatory?’
‘I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t a very good one.’
‘There are different opinions about that,’ he said gently, but he only hurt her more.
‘And I suppose you’ll be next?’
‘How next?’
‘I was sure you had a vocation, too.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said thoughtfully. ‘I never really asked myself. I suppose, in a way, it depends on you.’
‘And what have I to say to it?’ she asked in a ladylike tone, though her heart suddenly began to pant.
‘Only whether you’re going to marry me or not. Now I have the house to myself and only Mrs Maher looking after me. You remember Mrs Maher?’
‘And you think I’d make a cheap substitute for Mrs Maher, I suppose?’ she asked, and suddenly all the pent-up anger and frustration of years seemed to explode inside her. She realized that it was entirely because of him that she had become a nun, because of him she had been locked up in a nursing home and lived the life of an emotional cripple. ‘Don’t you think that’s an extraordinary sort of proposal – if it’s intended to be a proposal.’
‘Why the hell should I be any good at proposing? How many girls do you think I’ve proposed to?’
‘Not many, since they didn’t teach you better manners. And it would never occur to yourself to say you loved me. Do you?’ she almost shouted. ‘Do you love me?’
‘Sure, of course I do,’ he said, almost in astonishment. ‘I wouldn’t be asking you to marry me otherwise. But all the same – ’
‘All the same, all the same, you have reservations!’ And suddenly language that would have appalled her to hear a few months before broke from her, before she burst into uncontrollable tears and went running homeward through the rain. ‘God damn you to Hell, Peter Corkery! I wasted my life on you, and now in the heel of the hunt all you can say to me is “All the same”. You’d better go back to your damn pansy pals, and say it to them.’
She was hysterical by the time she reached Summerhill. Her father’s behaviour was completely characteristic. He was the born martyr and this was only another of the ordeals for which he had been preparing himself all his life. He got up and poured himself a drink.
‘Well, there is one thing I’d better tell you now, daughter,’ he said quietly but firmly. ‘That man will never enter this house in my lifetime.’
‘Oh, nonsense, Jack MacMahon!’ his wife said in a rage, and she went and poured herself a drink, a thing she did under her husband’s eye only when she was prepared to fling it at him. ‘You haven’t a scrap of sense. Don’t you see now that the boy’s mother only entered the convent because she knew he’d never feel free while she was in the world?’
‘Oh, Mother!’ May cried, startled out of her hysterics.
‘Well, am I right?’ her mother said, drawing herself up.
‘Oh, you’re right, you’re right,’ May said, beginning to sob again. ‘Only I was such a fool it never occurred to me. Of course, she was doing it for me.’
‘And for her son,’ said her mother. ‘And if he’s anything like his mother, I’ll be very proud to claim him for a son-in-law.’
She looked at her husband, but saw that she had made her effect and could now enjoy her drink in peace. ‘Of course, in some ways it’s going to be very embarrassing,’ she went on peaceably. ‘We can’t very well say “Mr Peter Corkery, son of Sister Rosina of the Little Flower” or whatever the dear lady’s name is. In fact, it’s very difficult to see how we’re going to get it into the Press at all. However, as I always say, if the worst comes to the worst, there’s a lot to be said for a quiet wedding.… I do hope you were nice to him, May?’ she asked.
It was only then that May remembered that she hadn’t been in the least nice and, in fact, had used language that would have horrified her mother. Not that it would make much difference. She and Peter had travelled so far together, and by such extraordinary ways.
Old-Age Pensioners
On Friday evening as I went up the sea road for my evening walk I heard the row blowing up at the other side of the big ash tree, near the jetty. I was sorry for the sergeant, a decent poor man. When a foreign government imposed a cruel law, providing for the upkeep of all old people over seventy, it never gave a thought to the policeman who would have to deal with the consequences. You see, our post office was the only one within miles. That meant that each week we had to endure a procession of old-age pensioners from Caheragh, the lonely, rocky promontory to the west of us, inhabited – so I am told – by a strange race of people, alleged to be descendants of a Portuguese crew who were driven ashore there in days gone by. That I couldn’t swear to; in fact, I never could see trace or tidings of any foreign blood in Caheragh, but I was never one for contradicting the wisdom of my ancestors. But government departments have no wisdom, ancestral or any other kind, so the Caheraghs drew their pensions with us, and the contact with what we considered civilization being an event in their lonesome lives, they usually brought their families to help in drinking them. That was what upset us. To see a foreigner drunk in our village on what we rightly considered our money was more than some of us could stand.
So Friday, as I say, was the serg
eant’s busy day. He had a young guard called Coleman to assist him, but Coleman had troubles of his own. He was a poet, poor fellow, and desperately in love with a publican’s daughter in Coole. The girl was incapable of making up her mind about him, though her father wanted her to settle down; he told her all young men had a tendency to write poetry up to a certain age, and that even himself had done it a few times until her mother knocked it out of him. But her view was that poetry, like drink, was a thing you couldn’t have knocked out of you, and that the holy all of it would be that Coleman would ruin the business on her. Every week we used to study the Coole Times, looking for another poem, either a heart-broken ‘Lines to D—’, saying that Coleman would never see her more, or a ‘Song’. ‘Song’ always meant they were after making it up. The sergeant had them all cut out and pasted in an album; he thought young Coleman was lost in the police.
When I was coming home the row was still on, and I went inside the wall to have a look. There were two Caheraghs: Mike Mountain and his son, Patch. Mike was as lean as a rake, a gaunt old man with mad blue eyes. Patch was an upstanding fellow but drunk to God and the world. The man who was standing up for the honour of the village was Flurry Riordan, another old-age pensioner. Flurry, as you’d expect from a bachelor of that great age, was quarrelsome and scurrilous. Fifteen years before, when he was sick and thought himself dying, the only thing troubling his mind was that a brother he had quarrelled with would profit by his death, and a neighbour had come to his cottage one morning to find Flurry fast asleep with his will written in burnt stick on the whitewashed wall over his bed.
The sergeant, a big, powerful man with a pasty face and deep pouches under his eyes, gave me a nod as I came in.
‘Where’s Guard Coleman from you?’ I asked.
‘Over in Coole with the damsel,’ he replied.
Apparently the row was about a Caheragh boat that had beaten one of our boats in the previous year’s regatta. You’d think a thing like that would have been forgotten, but a bachelor of seventy-six has a long memory for grievances. Sitting on the wall overlooking the jetty, shadowed by the boughs of the ash, Flurry asked with a sneer, with such wonderful sailors in Caheragh wasn’t it a marvel that they couldn’t sail past the Head – an unmistakable reference to the supposed Portuguese origin of the clan. Patch replied that whatever the Caheragh people sailed it wasn’t bum-boats, meaning, I suppose, the pleasure boat in which Flurry took summer visitors about the bay.
‘What sailors were there ever in Caheragh?’ snarled Flurry. ‘If they had men against them instead of who they had they wouldn’t get off so easy.’
‘Begor, ’tis a pity you weren’t rowing yourself, Flurry,’ said the sergeant gravely. ‘I’d say you could still show them a few things.’
‘Ten years ago I might,’ said Flurry bitterly, because the sergeant had touched on another very sore subject; his being dropped from the regatta crews, a thing he put down entirely to the brother’s intrigues.
‘Why then, indeed,’ said the sergeant, ‘I’d back you still against a man half your age. Why don’t you and Patch have a race now and settle it?’
‘I’ll race him,’ shouted Patch with the greatest enthusiasm, rushing for his own boat. ‘I’ll show him.’
‘My boat is being mended,’ said Flurry shortly.
‘You could borrow Sullivan’s,’ said the sergeant.
Flurry only looked at the ground and spat. Either he wasn’t feeling energetic or the responsibility was too much for him. It would darken his last days to be beaten by a Caheragh. Patch sat in his shirt-sleeves in the boat, resting his reeling head on his oars. For a few minutes it looked as if he was out for the evening. Then he suddenly raised his face to the sky and let out the wild Caheragh war-whoop, which sounded like all the seagulls in Ireland practising unison-shrieking. The effect on Flurry was magical. At that insulting sound he leaped from the wall with an oath, pulled off his coat, and rushed to the slip to another boat. The sergeant, clumsy and heavy-footed, followed, and the pair of them sculled away to where Sullivan’s boat was moored. Patch followed them with his eyes.
‘What’s wrong with you, you old coward?’ he yelled. ‘Row your own boat, you old sod, you!’
‘Never mind,’ said Mike Mountain from the top of the slip. ‘You’ll beat him, boat or no boat.… He’ll beat him, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said confidently to the little crowd that had gathered. ‘Ah, Jase, he’s a great man in a boat.’
‘I’m a good man on a long course,’ Patch shouted modestly, his eyes searching each of us in turn. ‘I’m slow getting into my stroke.’
‘At his age I was the same,’ confided his father. ‘A great bleddy man in a boat. Of course, I can’t do it now – eighty-one; drawing on for it. I haven’t the same energy.’
‘Are you ready, you old coward?’ shrieked Patch to Flurry who was fumbling savagely in the bottom of Sullivan’s boat for the rowlocks.
‘Shut up, you foreign importation!’ snarled Flurry.
He found the rowlocks and pulled the boat round in a couple of neat strokes; then hung on his oars till the sergeant got out. For seventy-six he was still a lively man.
‘Ye know the race now?’ said the sergeant. ‘To the island and back.’
‘Round the island, sergeant,’ said Mike Mountain plaintively. ‘Patch is like me; he’s slow to start.’
‘Very good, very good,’ said the sergeant. ‘Round the island it is, Flurry. Are ye ready now, both of ye?’
‘Ready,’ grunted Flurry.
‘Yahee!’ shrieked Patch again, brandishing an oar over his head like a drumstick.
‘Mind yourself now, Patch!’ said the sergeant who seemed to be torn between his duty as an officer of the peace and his duty as umpire. ‘Go! – ye whoors,’ he added under his breath so that only a few of us heard him.
They did their best. It is hard enough for a man with a drop in to go straight even when he’s facing his object, but it is too much altogether to expect him to do it backwards. Flurry made for the Red Devil, the doctor’s sailing boat, and Patch, who seemed to be fascinated by the very appearance of Flurry, made for him, and the two of them got there almost simultaneously. At one moment it looked as if it would be a case of drowning, at the next of manslaughter. There was a splash, a thud, and a shout, and I saw Flurry raise his oar as if to lay out Patch. But the presence of the sergeant probably made him selfconscious, for instead he used it to push off Patch’s boat.
‘God Almighty!’ cried Mike Mountain with an air of desperation, ‘did ye ever see such a pair of misfortunate bosthoons? Round the island, God blast ye!’
But Patch, who seemed to have an absolute fixation on Flurry, interpreted this as a command to go round him, and, seeing that Flurry wasn’t at all sure what direction he was going in, this wasn’t as easy as it looked. He put up one really grand spurt, and had just established himself successfully across Flurry’s bow when it hit him and sent him spinning like a top, knocking one oar clean out of his hand. Sullivan’s old boat was no good for racing, but it was grand for anything in the nature of tank warfare, and as Flurry had by this time got into his stroke, it would have taken an Atlantic liner to stop him. Patch screamed with rage, and then managed to retrieve his oar and follow. The shock seemed to have given him new energy.
Only gradually was the sergeant’s strategy beginning to reveal itself to me. The problem was to get the Caheraghs out of the village without a fight, and Flurry and Patch were spoiling for one. Anything that would exhaust the pair of them would make his job easier. It is not a method recommended in Police Regulations, but it has the distinct advantage of leaving no unseemly aftermath of summonses and cross-summonses which, if neglected, may in time turn into a regular vendetta. As a spectacle it really wasn’t much. Darkness had breathed on the mirror of the water. A bonfire on the island set a pendulum reflection swinging lazily to and fro, darkening the bay at either side of it. There was a milky light over the hill of Croghan; the moon was rising.
/> The sergeant came up to me with his hand over his mouth and his big head a little on one side, a way he had of indicating to the world that he was speaking aside.
‘I see by the paper how they’re after making it up again,’ he whispered anxiously. ‘Isn’t she a changeable little divil?’
It took me a moment or two to realize that he was referring to Coleman and the publican’s daughter; I always forget that he looks on me as a fellow-artist of Coleman’s.
‘Poets prefer them like that,’ I said.
‘Is that so?’ he exclaimed in surprise. ‘Well, everyone to his own taste.’ Then he scanned the bay thoughtfully and started suddenly. ‘Who the hell is that?’ he asked.
Into the pillar of smoky light from the bonfire a boat had come, and it took us a little while to identify it. It was Patch’s, and there was Patch himself pulling leisurely to shore. He had given up the impossible task of going round Flurry. Some of the crowd began to shout derisively at him but he ignored them. Then Mike Mountain took off his bowler hat and addressed us in heart-broken tones.
‘Stone him!’ he besought us. ‘For Christ’s sake, ladies and gentlemen, stone him! He’s no son of mine, only a walking mockery of man.’
He began to dance on the edge of the slip and shout insults at Patch who had slowed up and showed no inclination to meet him.
‘What the hell do you mean by it?’ shouted Mike. ‘You said you’d race the man and you didn’t. You shamed me before everyone. What sort of misfortunate old furniture are you?’
‘But he fouled me,’ Patch yelled indignantly. ‘He fouled me twice.’
‘He couldn’t foul what was foul before,’ said his father. ‘I’m eighty-one, but I’m a better man than you. By God, I am.’
A few moments later Flurry’s boat hove into view.
‘Mike Mountain,’ he shouted over his shoulder in a sobbing voice, ‘have you any grandsons you’d send out against me now? Where are the great Caheragh sailors now, I’d like to know?’
My Oedipus Complex Page 40
