The Private Wound

by Nicholas Blake

  “Strong words, Father.”

  “She mocked at me—told me I was no man, only a eunuch, a eunuch. I should have left her then.” Father Bresnihan gave Flurry a wild look. He shuddered. “But she was terrible strong. She dragged me down to her. I can see now she was set on taking revenge: she wanted to destroy my soul. The flesh. The sweating of flesh. Horrible. The woman was like a mad animal, swarming over me, her hand seeking to expose me. I could not break away from her. She had the strength of the Devil.”

  The priest broke off, wiping the spittle from his mouth. “I’ll not deny you, Flurry, I was tempted,” he went on in a different voice. “Sore tempted. I prayed to be delivered from sin. She was laughing. What a triumph for her, to ruin a priest! Now it was my own body, my sinful flesh I had to fight against as well as hers. The place stank with lust. I managed to pull out my penknife and open it. I was frantic. It seemed like driving a knife into my own corrupted flesh. She fell away from me. I had saved myself.”

  There was a long silence. Father Bresnihan was shivering like a terrified horse.

  “I see. And what did you do next?” asked Flurry.

  “I had a fearful revulsion. I threw away the knife—the blade flashed in a bit of moonlight—I saw it fall into the deep pool yonder.”

  “And then?”

  “I ran away. I staggered home. There was not a soul in the street to see me. I thought, one place on the track, I heard a bicycle behind me; but it never passed me. It must have been a delusion.” Father Bresnihan’s sunken eyes regarded Flurry desperately. “I said once, in this house, that murder cannot be condoned—it can only be forgiven. I was wrong. I do not expect you to forgive me. All I want is you should understand why I did it. I have written to the Bishop: now I shall go and give myself up.”

  “Understand you, Father? Sure I don’t even believe you —not one word of it. You’ve had a nervous breakdown. You’re not yourself at all.”

  “But I—”

  “You were always terrible down on the sins of the flesh. Now they’ve had their revenge on you. You’ve imagined the whole thing.”

  “I wish that was true, Flurry. But it’s not.”

  “Where’s the blood then?”

  “The blood—?”

  “I burnt them in the incinerator when I got back to the presbytery. Kathleen doesn’t sleep in. I had the whole night. I soaked them in petrol first. The police would never come looking for a murderer in a priest’s house, anyway.”

  Flurry gazed at him silently.

  “And you cannot believe a priest would do such a thing, Flurry. We’re men, like you, and sometimes our discipline goes.”

  “You killed Harry because you were frightened of her—of what she was trying to do to you? Degrading you? Is that it?”

  “She’d have destroyed my vocation and been the ruin of my soul. Can’t you see that?”

  “So you killed her in self-defence? Her and my unborn child?”

  “Yes,” said the Father, almost eagerly, “you could put it that way.”

  “And then you went into retreat?”

  “I was not running away, Flurry. I had to make my peace with God, before I gave myself up.”

  “And did you succeed?”

  Father Bresnihan stared out at the foaming river. “No,” he said at last. “God turned his face from me.”

  Flurry lifted the rod from the grass beside him. “Well, Father, this is a queer tale. You’ll not get anyone to believe it.”

  “But you believe it?” the priest implored.

  “I do not. You’re overwrought. You need a good long rest.”

  “But it is true! I tell you, it’s true!”

  “Prove it then.”

  “Prove it? But how—?”

  “You say you threw your knife into the river. Was that the one with your initials on it?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fetch out that knife, and I’ll believe you.”

  Father Bresnihan stared at him. Did he have any notion, in his disordered brain, of what was happening to him? or why he had been so determined to convince Flurry that his fantastic tale was true? We shall never know.

  For myself, I still have the greatest admiration for him. He was a strong character, intelligent, brave and honourable, and I have no doubt a most conscientious priest. Although his silence had put me into a week of misery, wondering if I myself had killed Harriet, knowing myself suspected of it, I could never hold this against him. And I have long forgiven him the killing of Harriet. The extreme loathing, the insidious upsurge of lust which made that loathing even more lurid, because now it was turned upon himself—how could any man have dealt with them? Father Bresnihan remains a tragic figure for me; and tragedy comes, as the Greeks believed, from a fatal flaw.

  Bresnihan, in his ignorance and contempt of sex, had all his life defied the most merciless of the gods, Aphrodite. It was she who in a few minutes turned on him and destroyed him.

  Perhaps, too, he could be convicted of the sin of pride—an overweening confidence that he would always be armoured against the Aphrodite in woman. I don’t know. Harriet never disgusted me; but I can imagine her driving me to a crisis when I would have to draw a knife on her—to hack myself free from those liana-like arms.

  At what point Flurry became certain that the Father was telling him the truth, we cannot know. It may have been some while before he challenged him to find the knife. Flurry, after Harriet’s death, had turned into a man with but one purpose in his head. I suppose you could say he too, like all monomaniacs, was insane. He was a simple-minded man—half a peasant in his values, a guerrilla by training; amazingly generous when generosity could least be expected—to me; but beneath all this a crafty and ruthless man, to whom an enemy, a man who had destroyed what was nearest to him, was quite simply a life he must take in retribution, and no argument about it

  So, when I saw the last act of the tragedy playing itself before my eyes, I stood as helpless as a Greek chorus, first in a bewildered lack of comprehension, then frozen into immobility.

  “Fetch out that knife and I’ll believe you,” Flurry had said.

  And at once Father Bresnihan plunged into the river. The force of the current, the uneven river-bed, caused him to stumble several times. But he forged his way towards the pool, and began clumsily diving into it. Flurry told Concannon that the priest dived in time and again, only to surface empty-handed. It must have been a pitiable sight—the desperate face, the fingers clawing at the rock to prevent him being swept downstream.

  It was then that Maire and I arrived. The man in the water held up something, with a cry of triumph as if it had been a pearl. I focused the glasses on him, and saw what it was.

  “Wedged in a rock,” I could just hear Father Bresnihan shouting.

  But why on earth had Flurry sent him out to retrieve it? Then the Father lost his footing again and disappeared, to emerge a little farther downstream, swimming clumsily.

  Maire was giving little sobs beside me. I turned the glasses on Flurry, who stood like a boulder at the water’s edge. As I did so, he made a cast. I followed the fly, which alighted with the most perfect accuracy a foot or two upstream from Bresnihan’s head and a little beyond it.

  I could hear Flurry reeling in. I saw the flick of the wrists as he struck. Bresnihan clapped a hand to his ear, as if he had been stung by a hornet, and in doing so went under the water again. When he emerged, there was blood flowing from his ear: he had been hooked in the cartilage of it.

  “What in the name of goodness is Flurry doing?” muttered Maire. “That’s no way to rescue a man.”

  What Flurry was doing was slowly to reel in the line, playing his fish, dragging the Father always nearer the bank. He was in the shallows now and could easily have stood up and scrambled the rest of the way, but for Flurry, who kept the line tense, so Bresnihan must either have half his ear torn off or crawl along the river-bed obedient to the line’s tug.

  It was not till hours after that I realised he
could have cut it with the knife he still held in his hand.

  Flurry’s face was utterly expressionless—only a little pouting of the lips as he judged the strain his line would bear. He looked so ordinary, it made the whole scene still more enigmatic and bizarre. I was so dazed that I could not begin to find a reason for the spectacle Flurry and Father Bresnihan were enacting.

  And then the moment of truth was here. The Father, who had indeed been led like a lamb to the slaughter, knelt up on the strip of shingle between the grass and the Lissawn. He could have cut the line, but he did not. I saw Flurry’s hand reach down to the grass beside him. I saw the Father hold out the knife to him. I saw him gaze fearlessly at Flurry, and his lips moving. Flurry told Concannon afterwards that Father Bresnihan’s last words were, “No, Flurry. Don’t take murder on your soul, my son.”

  But Flurry’s right arm rose up, with the gaff in his hand. Maire and I, released from our trance, yelled out and leaped forward. But the gaff struck with murderous violence against the neck of the kneeling man.

  Epilogue

  As the late Dominic Eyre’s literary executor, it behoves me to add a few words to this very strange, and for him untypical, story. He himself wrote at the beginning of it, “I do not know if I shall ever bring myself to publish it.” After his sudden death a couple of months ago, going through his effects, I came upon the MS, and the decision devolved upon me.

  It was a difficult one for two reasons. First, the novel is out of key with his other published works. They are, to the layman’s eye, often satirical, somewhat dry in places, but witty and beautifully written, with an air of complete self-possession. The Private Wound, on the contrary, is a kind of romantic melodrama (on the title page Take her up tenderly has been crossed out and the present title substituted). What Dominic’s faithful public will make of it, I cannot imagine: but his publisher, though sharing my doubts, felt it should be given to the world. My second reason for hesitation I shall come to later.

  I have often wondered whether this novel (“I dislike confessional writing,” he says) was prompted by some intuition of his approaching death. It is true that in one sense he did not need this sort of confession: he had been received into the Catholic Church not long after the last war. But, if the events in the book are at all autobiographical, Dominic might well have come to think that they needed fuller treatment than could be given under the seal of the confessional.

  The title he finally chose suggests a course of events which was highly personal and for some reason or other had long been preying upon his mind.

  But first I should say something about Dominic himself. We first met in 1940 at an O.C.T.U., and as fellow Anglo-Irishmen struck up a friendship. We were posted to the same unit, and fought side by side in the Western Desert, where he got the M.C.

  Like every front-line soldier, he was frequently scared stiff: like every good soldier, he controlled his fear and used it to sharpen his edge in action. He struck me as essentially a cold, or at least a cautious and circumspect man; but he could break out occasionally into a wild, irresponsible mood which made the rest of us, his juniors in age, seem positively stodgy. This combination of traits turned him, as a soldier, into a real professional: he planned with extreme care, then carried out his plans with an almost manic recklessness. At that time, few of us knew that he wrote books: he never spoke of them: the only sign he gave was that writer’s abstractedness, the feeling you got from him that now and then he had moved miles away from you into some desert of his own. But he was always polite, unobtrusive, almost self-deprecating.

  It was this detachment, together with the outbursts of gaiety and the hard core they felt in him, which won the respect of his men.

  Presently he and I transferred to the Long Range Desert Group. Here he was in his element, swanning around in armoured cars, no longer under any obligation to the regimental frame of mind. However, after an extremely successful attack on an airfield eighty miles behind the enemy’s lines, we were finally caught out by Rommel’s boys and—the few of us who survived—put in the bag.

  For a short while we were in the same German hospital, then in the same prisoner-of-war camp. Dominic was not one of those always planning an escape. “Now I can get on with my work,” he said to me; and one saw him scribbling away on any piece of paper he could get hold of. He adapted well to the tedious stalag life: but he used to have nightmares, in one of which I heard him muttering over and over a name that sounded like “Harry.” When I taxed him with it next morning he went so cold on me that I wondered if I had not unveiled some homosexual secret.

  I was transferred to another stalag, and I did not meet Dominic again till after the war. By this time, I had joined my father’s firm of solicitors. I met Dominic by chance in my club, where he was a fellow member’s guest—he was never a one to go to those Eighth-Army reunion jamborees. He looked well. That curious impression of stillness, of inward-looking, of being separated from other human beings by some invisible barrier, which I am told exprisoners of war give, with him was indistinguishable from the writer’s mien of abstraction.

  Learning that I was in a law firm, he asked if I would act for him in a small piece of litigation he was threatened with. We won the case for him, and some months later he appointed me his executor. By this time, his mother was dead: he had no close relatives: apart from a few minor bequests, the will I drew up for him divided his property between certain Roman Catholic charities in Ireland and a fund for the relief of indigent authors.

  I assumed he would marry before long, and the will be altered. He was a personable man, a little below medium height, with the air of mystery which, I am told, women find attractive. He had, to my knowledge, a number of affairs with women; but he never married. His mistresses—I only met one of them—were by all accounts beautiful, dashing and mondaine women, who nevertheless failed to draw him the long step from the bed to the altar.

  I was never thoroughly intimate with Dominic. One of our mutual friends described him to me as “a haunted man.” I confess I could never see it myself—except in so far as every novelist is haunted by the characters of the book he is momently writing. I asked him once what had led him into the Catholic Church; he said something about a priest he had met before the war and greatly respected. How he reconciled his love-affairs with his church was a matter between him and his confessor. Certainly, during our many conversations, he never mentioned a visit to Ireland in 1939.

  And this brings me to my second problem. When I first read the MS., I naturally had inquiries made in the West of Ireland. I did not expect to find a small place called Charlottestown—like most professional writers, Dominic kept a wary eye open to the dangers of libel. Nor, in the district where he set the novel—it would seem to be the northwestern end of Co. Clare, but Dominic had given fictional names to all the natural features he mentioned—was there any evidence for the existence of the characters who appear in it. He would not, of course, have used the names of real people; and it could be imagined that, in any case, such an appalling scandal, involving a parish priest, would be hushed up. But in the newspapers of that time we found no mention of a sensational crime of violence or a political trial involving persons in Co. Clare.

  So Dominic made the whole thing up? I found this difficult to swallow, for the reasons I have already given. Why, at his time of life, should Dominic have written a novel of romantic melodrama, so out of character with all his previous books, unless some non-literary motive was at work in him? And how to account for the raw experience the book seems to embody—the sense I got when first I read the MS., that something like this must really have happened to him?

  I do not pretend to understand the mysteries of the craft. I remember Dominic once saying to me that there is no such thing as a purely fictional character: every character in a novel has grown from the seed of some real person—a person the author has met, if only for a few moments, in “real life,” or one whom he has built up from some personality in himself. “
We are all teeming with unborn children,” he said—“possible selves we have never brought to life.”

  So it may well be, I reason, that although the events of the book are fictional, they represent some conflict, some authentic experience, which Dominic underwent in his thirties. The central relationship, between him and the woman he calls Harriet Leeson, may have developed in another part of Ireland, in England, or somewhere abroad for that matter. He would want to “distance” himself from the experience, in place as well as time. Whatever the experience had been, he never gave me or any of our mutual friends the least inkling of it.

  I would have been content to leave it at that—a fiction lightly based on a long-buried fact—but for two things.

  A week ago, I happened to read a book by Timothy Coogan entitled Ireland since the Rising. On pp. 270-1 of this admirable study in recent Irish history, I read that “a German-American journalist called Oscar Pfaus was sent to Ireland on February 3rd, 1939, to make contact with the I.R.A.—through General O’Duffy!” The book was published after Dominic’s death.

  Well, I suppose Dominic might have heard about this Pfaus from some other source: he visited Ireland occasionally, though he seemed to me quite uninterested in the country’s politics.

  But then, going through his effects, I had found something the significance of which I had no means of grasping till later I read the MS. of The Private Wound. Tucked away on the shelf above Dominic’s suits in his wardrobe, I found a cap, faded cherry-red in colour. A kind of jockey cap.

  Harman Tooley, 1967

  A Note on the Author

  Nicholas Blake is the pseudonym of poet and author, Cecil Day-Lewis, used primarily for his mystery series.

  Cecil Day-Lewis CBE (1904 – 22) was a British poet from Ireland and the Poet Laureate from 1968 until his death in 1972. He is the father of actor Daniel Day-Lewis and documentary filmmaker and television chef Tamasin Day-Lewis.