When I wake the next morning it’s still dark but the dawn isn’t far off. Maggie and I used to go up to the lake every Saturday morning, almost religiously, and I’m dying to know whether she still keeps to our old routine. This is the third Saturday since I’ve been home, and I can’t help but wonder whether she has been up there for the past two Saturdays, waiting in hope that I might appear. I dress and wash and comb my hair, I pick up the only reading material I can find – the Picturegoer from Phil Shanahan’s – and head out into the direction of the rising sun. All the doors in Madden are still closed, which suits me fine as I don’t want to see anyone. I reach the top of the street, I’m passing the Harte household, I’ve almost made it … The door opens. Ida appears in the doorway in her nightdress and untied dressing gown. She’s holding a broom, as if she’s just out to sweep her front step, but her eyes, sparkling crazily like diamonds rough in the mine, give her away. She has caught me. ‘You’ve been keeping a low profile,’ she says, ‘I wasn’t sure you were still about. Or maybe you’re just avoiding me.’
‘Busy, that’s all,’ I say, not stopping.
‘Don’t worry, I didn’t tell anybody,’ she calls after me. I glance around surreptitiously, in case anyone has overheard. Ida pulls her dressing gown tight around herself and steals up to me, conspiratorially close. ‘There’s a lantern in the window of my shed. If ever you feel lonely, you light that lantern and I’ll keep you company,’ she says.
I turn away from her. God knows I don’t judge whores for the way they eke out a living, but Ida Harte is appalling. There’s really no call for that kind of wantonness. Yet I can’t help the fleeting images that flicker in my mind like a cinematograph, of those black-as-night eyes laughing at my foolishness. She should learn some small degree of reticence, she hasn’t the slightest bit and it just isn’t ladylike. As I walk, I have to put my hand into my pocket to fix myself. She really is the most distressing woman.
It’s a couple of miles to the lake, which was my favourite place once. As I walk out the road, I think of the last time I walked it, all those years ago. I remember asking everyone I met along the way whether they had seen my ma. Aye, she went that way, they said, she doesn’t look well, they said. She’s in her dressing gown, they said, still in her slippers. Just five minutes ago. Straight up the road there. Towards the lake.
I reach my old spot, where low-hanging branches form a little canopy over the water’s edge. I sit on the boulder there and listen to the waves. Someone told me one time that the sound of the water is the only thing a man can listen to forever without going insane. Testing out that theory, listening to this sound forever, is not the most unappealing idea I’ve ever heard. I used to spend endless hours here, skimming stones or vainly attempting to catch fish with a hazel wand, string and a bent nail. One day, I suppose we were about thirteen or so, Maggie showed me her father’s copy of Candide (Dr Cavanagh was the sort of Catholic who reckoned any book on the Index had to be worth a look) and she was terrified of being caught with it, so I took her here, to my special place by the water. Shaded from the rain, we huddled together and read the book, our noses almost touching over the illicit pages. Maggie read faster and was forever chastising me as she waited at the end of each page. We became avid in our reading. If it was forbidden, we wanted it. We read whenever the chance arose, but always, always, we spent our Saturday mornings together up here, lying side by side, devouring the most corrupting material we could get our hands on. Why’d it have to be here my ma came? I wish I could sit here and think only of kissing Maggie’s lips, but I can’t. The good memories are corrupted. What are you doing here, Ma, you shouldn’t be out of the house. Victor, son, life is in the letting go. Life is in the letting go.
I skim stones off the surface of the lake for perhaps an hour or more, all the while wondering whether she will come, until I see in the distance a figure approaching, growing larger. She’s tall and willowy, quick but graceful, thrillingly Maggie, my own Maggie. I knew she would come, I just knew it. She wears a heavy black dress and a white blouse and a dark red shawl. When she gets close she looks slightly vexed, perhaps to see me. I point at the newspaper she’s carrying under her arm. ‘Why are you reading a paper that’s two weeks old?’ I say. She unfolds the broad-sheet and reveals a tattered, dog-eared copy of The Count of Monte Cristo hidden inside. ‘I haven’t read that one.’
‘You wouldn’t like it,’ she says, ‘far too bourgeois for the big socialist.’
‘Maybe you’ll let me read along?’
‘You’re too slow.’ She concedes a half-smile.
‘Sure I saw the moving picture of it anyway.’ I hold up the Picturegoer, the circular imprint of a whiskey glass haloing Kitty Gordon, and she reaches for it with zeal. She can’t hide her interest, and she accidentally drops The Count of Monte Cristo. Fussily she picks it up again, but the pictures and stories of film stars have her attention. She flicks through the pages as I rise from the rock. ‘Kitty Gordon isn’t my favourite, to be honest. She’s no Mildred Harris. No Florence La Badie.’
‘Have you been to the pictures?’
‘Hundreds of times.’
‘What are they like?’
‘Like magic.’
Her hair is rich and arranged in ringlets of the most time-consuming sort. You can see the character in a woman of such elaborate appearance. Her skin is soft caramel and I want to know if it tastes as good as it looks. The nape of her graceful neck nearly has me believing in God. When I look at her I want to kill something, but at the same time the sight of her siphons the heat from my veins. That doesn’t make sense, I know, it’s a contradiction, but there it is. I want to tell her that I’ve dreamed of her every night since I can remember.
‘I haven’t seen you around lately,’ she says.
‘I know. It’s just, Pius and everything, I mean, things are bad. But I just wanted to say to you, I’m sorry. I’m sorry for everything.’
She doesn’t look up from the magazine but I can tell she’s not reading it. She flicks the page, flicks again.
‘I hear there’s a picture palace just opened up in Armagh. Maybe we could go together some night?’ I say.
Something seems to snap. She stands up and throws the magazine at me. She slaps me in the chest again and again. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?’ she demands. She makes to walk away but I seize her arms by the elbows and hold her tightly. She’s defiant, she wants to go, but I’m never letting her go. Our eyes wrestle and her lips purse, the colour of blood and consistency of granite, but in the end, her ice-hard stare is thawed by a hot, salty tear.
She yields.
I envelop her safely in my arms, protecting her from the salt wind that whips off the water. She buries her face in my chest and her shoulders jolt until eventually, sniffling, she breaks away, steps back and straightens her skirt. She lifts her hand to my eyebrow and touches the weak skin softly. She looks at me with great tenderness.
‘You need to get this sorted out once and for all,’ she says.
I nod.
‘I’m sure you won’t thank me, but I pray for you, you know. All the time, I pray for you.’
‘I do thank you.’
A priest’s hold over his people was always tenuous, however it might seem from the outside. Stanislaus opened the parish ledger and copied in longhand the names of the two hundred and sixteen people of more than fourteen years of age in his pastoral care. Beside each he placed a tick for those he could definitely trust, an X for those he could not, and a question mark for those he wasn’t sure about. It was a devil of a split. He banked eighty-seven as solid Christians; honest, hard-working people of faith who appreciated all the Church had done and whose loyalty and deference could be relied upon. He put fifty-four names on the rogue list. They weren’t atheists – there were no atheists in Madden, everyone attended mass – but they were insubstantial people whose wont was to latch onto any fashion of radicalism that laid blame for their own failures and shortcomings elsewhere. P
eople like the Moriartys. He put seventy-two names on the undecided list. They were the small-holders who filled the pews but contributed little else to the parish. People for whom newspapers were bulletin boards containing commodity prices and train timetables rather than public conversation. They would bend with the prevailing wind, seeing little distinction in which direction that wind might come from. It struck Stanislaus as unfitting that such disinterested, uninterested people should be the deciding constituency in any struggle. All politics, Johnny Mangan had said of the bishopric. Maybe it was better after all to spend the winter of his life in the calm certitude of theology than the world of men and their grasping.
Three names Stanislaus set aside. First was Pius Lennon. It seemed Pius and Victor were working hard to restore the Lennon land, and Stanislaus supposed this was a good thing, but any improvement in the father’s wretchedness was overshadowed by the son, hiding out and biding his time like some rapparee. Ordinarily Pius could be assumed to be the most reliable of men, his loyalty to the Church verging on the desperate, but Victor was his son and that placed him outside any calculation Stanislaus could make.
Second was Charlie Quinn. He was Victor’s friend, but the Quinns had always been solid businesspeople who donated generously to the Church. Unusually, Charlie was an only child – his young mother having died giving birth to him – and since his father’s passing he had sought in the Church what others found automatically in family. He chewed his pencil before he decided to add Charlie’s name to the trustworthy list. It was important to recognise friends, and Charlie would be a good ally to cultivate. Support from the substantial people was sure to beget further support.
Third was Margaret Cavanagh.
Stanislaus watched the schoolyard from his window. Girls with ribbons or ringlets in their hair, uniformed in smocks and dark dresses billowing in the wind, watched aloof and unimpressed as red-faced, knee-grazed boys in knickerbockers and jerseys ran frantically after a lump of coal doubling as a football. It was pleasing how few children were barefoot nowadays – how painful it had been, he recalled, to kick coal in bare feet! Miss Cavanagh in white blouse and long black skirt opened the school door and clanged the hand-bell. Upon hearing the bell the children lined up with impressive discipline and Miss Cavanagh shepherded them inside. Children from the better-off families handed her coins but most threw coal or turf into the pile by the door. A couple of children brought water from the well at the side of the school, while the last handful of children picked fuel from the pile and carried it inside. Stanislaus watched the empty yard till wisps of smoke slithered from the chimney, and with the lesson presumably begun, he strolled towards the schoolhouse.
It really had been too long since Stanislaus had sat in on a lesson. He was one of the commissioners appointed by the county council to govern the school. Strictly speaking, six commissioners took charge of the three National Schools in the area – three clergy and three laymen – but in practice, C of I children went to Milford, the Presbyterians had Aghavilly and Madden was for Catholics. Stanislaus, Reverend Bell and Reverend Armstrong, the three clerical commissioners, were the very best of colleagues, and never interfered in each other’s business. Stanislaus’s lay counterpart had been Dr Cavanagh, but even several years after his death his replacement had yet to be named. Stanislaus had appointed his daughter as schoolteacher out of pity for her then-invalid father, and she had proven an excellent teacher, but now that very excellence weighed against her. The other schoolmaster, Leonard Mallon, was an old-fashioned, rote-heavy plodder; a nineties relic who would never have got his start nowadays, when teachers were expected to understand what they were drilling into children. Mallon was no agent of radicalism. He was no agent of anything. It would be safer if all teachers were like him.
Stanislaus straightened his cassock, overcoat and hat, and lightly lifted the latch. Miss Cavanagh was near the back of the classroom with a textbook in her hand, far from her desk by the fireplace. What on earth she was doing all the way back there?
‘Good morning, Your Grace. Children, say Good Morning to Bishop Benedict,’ she commanded.
‘Good morning, Bishop Benedict,’ they incanted.
‘Miss Cavanagh. I thought I might sit in on the class and see how you’re all getting on.’
‘Always a pleasure to have you, Your Grace,’ she said sunnily, and with a swish of her skirt she turned to a boy at the back of the class and instructed him to move, so as to make room. The boy took his copybook and writing materials to the other side of the room, leaving a tiny space between a young girl with her wool and needles out for her knitting work, and an older boy with copybook and pen in hand, who seemed to be trying to look irreproachably busy. Stanislaus’s knees rubbed against the underside of the desk. The overcrowding was worse than he had realised. People were always complaining that there were too many pupils for such a small school. Some people had even suggested sending some of the children to the other schools – the Protestant schools – where they had spare capacity. He looked up at the blackboard, decorated with Latin verbs on one side and times tables on the other. Usually the problem of overcrowding was alleviated by the fact that on a given day you could expect a third of pupils wouldn’t turn up, but, problematically, Miss Cavanagh seemed to have a very high attendance rate. Still, it was better for them to be here than outside, meeting adulthood too early in the fields or, like those cursed to live in cities, up chimneys.
‘What lesson have I interrupted, Miss Cavanagh?’ Stanislaus asked.
‘The younger girls are knitting, the younger boys are doing free-hand drawing,’ she said, pointing to a huge green map of Ireland with the place names in Irish. Stanislaus could have sworn there had been a map of the Empire there previously. ‘I’m leading the older pupils in dictation,’ Miss Cavanagh went on, showing him the book she was reading from. Thucydides. Many learned and respected men sang the praises of the ancients, of course, but Stanislaus still didn’t know why one would read works of paganism when one could reach for the Gospels, for St Paul, for Thomas Aquinas. Miss Cavanagh walked up and down the aisle between the desks reading aloud from the textbook.
‘The greatest achievement of the former times was the Persian War; yet even this was speedily decided in two battles by sea and two by land. But the Peloponnesian War was a protracted struggle, and attended by calamities such as Hellas had never known within a like period of time. Never were so many cities captured and depopulated – some by Barbarians, others by Hellenes themselves fighting against one another; and several of them after their capture were re-peopled by strangers. Never were exile and slaughter more frequent, whether in the war or brought about by civil strife. And traditions which had often been current before, but rarely verified by fact, were now no longer doubted. For there were earthquakes unparalleled in their extent and fury, and eclipses of the sun more numerous than are recorded to have happened in any former age; there were also in some places great droughts causing famines; and lastly the plague, which did immense harm and destroyed numbers of the people. All these calamities fell on Hellas simultaneously with the war, which began when the Athenians and Peloponnesians violated the Thirty Years’ Peace concluded by them after the capture of Euboea. Why they broke it and what were the grounds of the quarrel I will first set forth, that in time to come, no man may be at a loss to know what was the cause of this great war. The real though unavowed cause I believe to have been the growth of the Athenian power, which terrified the Lacedaemonians and forced them into war.’
Something unnameable in the passage disturbed Stanislaus. Two millennia and more had passed since the Athenians and the Spartans had thrown their respective alliances into total war against each other, and Grecian civilisation had passed into history soon afterwards. Why should this be troubling now?
‘Well, what do we think, class? Is Thucydides right? Is that really why the Peloponnesian War happened? What do you think, Master McCoy?’ she asked, pointing to a young fellow near the front. Stanisl
aus shifted in his seat. This was dictation?
‘Yes, Miss,’ said the boy. The teacher’s expression told him more was required. ‘The Spartans were the main ones out of all the Greeks who beat the Persians so they thought they’d be the main men, but the Athenians were getting stronger and building up a big alliance, so eventually something was bound to happen.’
‘It was bound to, you say? Why was it bound to? Geraldine Smith,’ said Miss Cavanagh, pointing across the room to a girl with ringlets in her hair. The girl hesitated. ‘Come on, Geraldine, think,’ said Miss Cavanagh, ‘what are the rules?’
The girl’s face brightened. ‘Everything is made up of opposing forces or opposing sides. Gradual changes lead to turning points,’ she said proudly.
‘Turning points. What happens at a turning point? Sarah Foy?’
‘One of the opposing forces overcomes the other,’ said Sarah.
‘That’s right,’ said Miss Cavanagh. ‘The Spartans had been the strongest but after thirty years of peace the Athenians gradually caught up. Sparta was militarised, Athens was civilised. The Spartans were invincible on land, the Athenians at sea. The Spartans had muscles, the Athenians had brains. Eventually the Athenians were too strong to be simply dismissed by the Spartans. You see how everything in existence is a unity of opposites?’ She locked her fingers together in a double fist to demonstrate the two forces pulling against each other. ‘One of the opposing forces had to overcome the other. The turning point had to come.’
After the Lockout Page 9
