The House of Slamming Doors
Mark Macauley
To John Boorman for all his encouragement
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Prologue
Summer
One
Two
Three
Four
Five
Six
Seven
Eight
Nine
Ten
Eleven
Twelve
Thirteen
Autumn
Fourteen
Winter
Fifteen
Sixteen
Seventeen
Eighteen
Nineteen
Twenty
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Based on an idea by Mark Macauley and Peter Hort.
Thank you to Antony Farrell, Djinn von Noorden, Kitty Lyddon, Fiona Dunne and the wonderful team at The Lilliput Press for all their hard work.
With special thanks to my agent Ger Nichol, and also Jana Pflimpflova, Jeremy Vintcent, Ed Frazer, Danny Moynihan, Alex Masterton and Billie Skrine.
I would also like to thank Vera Cummins, Bunny Hyland, Paddy Conway, Cissie and Odie Flanagan, Bridget and Tony McLoughlin, Roisin and Tommy Conway and Mick Healy. And last but not least, Eamonn Reynolds.
Prologue
If it was raining soup, the Irish would go out with forks.
Brendan Behan
County Kildare
The Republic of Ireland
1963
My name is Justin Alexander Torquhil Edward Peregrine Montague but my father calls me ‘you little bollocks’ or ‘you bloody twit’ or when he is in a really good mood, ‘old cock’.
‘How are you, old cock?’ Like I’m married to a hen.
My best friend is Annie, Annie Cassidy. Annie is thirteen, just like me. Annie is afraid of nothing and has brown hair and big blue eyes and beautiful round lips, which I’d love to kiss, but can’t. I want to but I could never. Anyway, she’d probably tell me to ‘feck off, ya dirty little bastard!’ Although she wouldn’t mean it as she’s actually really polite.
Annie is Irish, of course, and my father says all the Irish are ‘dirty and unwashed and thieves’, and I can’t help thinking this any time I want to kiss her. So I never do.
Annie’s dad is Liam Cassidy and he’s great and listens to me like he’s interested. Liam is the best worker on my family’s estate. Everyone says. Even Dad. Liam can do anything: plough fields, fix tractors, even electrics. Once I had this new motorized toy airplane, a Spitfire, but Liam broke it as he was trying to get it working. It flew straight into the turf shed, smashed to bits. Liam was mortified but I couldn’t get cross as he’s too nice.
Maureen Cassidy, Annie’s mum, used to work in our house, The Hall, when my sisters were little. Maureen was a parlour maid and told me once about how she was always having to change uniform. There would be one uniform for breakfast, another for lunch and even a different one for tea. Maureen said she didn’t mind all the changing, not one bit. Maureen absolutely loved my mother’s dresses and all the parties and lords and ladies who came to visit. She says she misses all that now she doesn’t work in the house any more.
Often I go up to the Cassidys’ at teatime and just chat. They have great food, much better than ours: sausages and rashers and eggs and bread with lashings of butter. Sometimes when I’m in the pantry at The Hall and Cook can’t see me, I stick my hand right into the middle of the pan of bread and pull out the warm, sweet dough. I roll it up into a soft melty ball and eat it. Absolutely gorgeous.
Once when I was small, I took my pony into the kitchen to get a mineral or milk or something. I twisted the pony round to open the fridge. The old man, my dad, that is, caught me just as the pony and I got stuck in a difficult position, the pony with his hairy arse jammed against the fridge door.
‘What the fucking hell do you think you’re doing, ya little bollocks?’ The poor pony, Darkie, got such a fright he shat in the fridge door right down the inside.
My mother’s a lady. What I mean is she’s called Lady Helen because her father, my grandpa, was an English earl. Mother is not really a mother, not like Maureen, Annie’s mum. My mum is a bit more like the Queen. We don’t see her much, our mother. We never did even as children. But we’d always go and kiss her good morning at exactly 7.45, and then we’d see her again at luncheon if she hadn’t gone to town or the races. I wish I could say what my mum’s like but I don’t really know. All I know is she loves French wine and swanky Russian fags called Sobranie and she definitely doesn’t know where the kitchen is. To be fair Mum is really beautiful, so everyone says. Although her face is getting a little puffy now, from the bottle.
I do remember when we were really small and Mum used to play with us, although not every day. At about 3.30 in the afternoon the nannies would be shouting out our names and we’d have to go into the house and get washed and changed into these sailor suits. They were navy blue and even had a whistle. I had shorts and the two girls had skirts. (One nanny got in such a fluster because the old man was shouting that she put me in a skirt and one of the girls in my shorts.) Then the nannies would bring us into Mum in the drawing room at exactly four. Mum would have some game to play with us, usually a card game like Old Maid or Pelmanism, and it was great but it wouldn’t last long, more’s the pity.
At about 4.30 she’d ring her bell and the nannies would come and get us again and we’d get changed back into our dirty clothes and run back into the garden or the farm. I wanted to stay longer but Mum always said she had something important to do and couldn’t really spare the time. So I stopped asking.
I have two older sisters, Lucy and Emma. Lucy is fifteen, going on twenty. Lucy thinks she’s American and really cool. She keeps saying ‘man’ the whole time. Lucy tells absolutely brilliant jokes and knows how to work the old man. If Lucy wants something, like money for clothes, she tells him a joke. He roars with laughter, always, and she gets the cash.
Emma is seventeen and really pretty although she says it’s not important and hates it when anyone says anything about it, being pretty that is. Mum says that ‘Emma’s not that pretty, just young.’ The old man says Emma’s frigid. Emma goes to confession every single Saturday. Lucy says Emma goes so often she’s hardly got time to commit a sin.
Lucy won’t go to confession herself because she says the priest, Flash O’Ryan, always knows exactly who she is by her posh voice and his ears immediately perk up as he wants all the gossip from the big house.
Father Flash is called Flash because he can be finished Mass and in his golf clothes in under forty-five minutes. He baptized me. I bet it was quick.
Emma is always fiddling with her crucifix. The old man calls her the Virgin Mary. Emma hates blaspheming, especially like when someone says, ‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph!’ But she’s nice all the same; Emma, and the staff all like her because she says kind things after the old man shouts at them.
But mostly he shouts at me.
Summer
One
If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.
Oscar Wilde
Wednesday, 26 June 1963
It’s early in the evening and I’m stalking pigeons, just like Daniel Boone after all them Indians.
I love it here in the forest. It’s magical and smells mossy and it’s shady and full of deer lepping around the place.
Annie Cassidy, sneaking in behind with my game bag, makes too much noise, crunching twigs, the eejit. Sometimes she’s so clumsy that
she scares the pigeons. Honest. I don’t really care as I like having her with me. Anyway I don’t really like killing any more. Only sometimes, when I’m angry with the old man.
‘Shite!’ says Annie, far too loud for the animals.
‘Shhh,’ says I, annoyed she’s so bloody loud and worried she’ll scare them.
‘But we’re late, we’ll miss him.’
‘Whom?’
‘JF bloody K, that’s whoooom.’ Annie loves copying my ‘posh voice’, as she calls it.
I’d forgotten about President Kennedy coming. ‘Oh Christ! The old man’ll kill me. Quick!’ I break open my 20-bore shotgun, take out the cartridges and get ready to sprint home.
‘Hold your horses!’ says Annie. She pulls out a bottle wrapped in Christmas paper and presents it to me with a big grin. I’m a bit embarrassed. I’m not sure I like it when someone remembers my birthday, but I sort of do. It’s Lucozade! I could drink Lucozade all day and I love the crinkly yellow paper on the bottle and the rubber cork and the way it pops and everything fizzes inside.
‘You remembered,’ says I.
‘Of course. I’m your best friend aren’t I … old chap?’
‘You sure are. Come on!’ Annie and I are running now. We’re late and that’s one thing the old man won’t have: lateness. The lads who work on our farm say all you have do is turn up exactly at eight in the morning and leave exactly at five. What you do in between doesn’t really matter.
We tear up the drive past the beautiful sleek racehorses on one side and the horrible smelly black-and-white milking cows on the other, onto the crunchy gravel up the big steps and into The Hall.
The entrance hall, which is the biggest room in the house, has a stone floor and wood-panelling and is full of fox-hunting paintings by a fellow called Sartorius. There are also a few photos such as one of the Queen of England. It’s in a huge silver frame and it has her signature scrawled on it: Elizabeth R. My mother knows her somehow, the Queen. I think my Aunt Daphne is a lady-in-waiting or something like that. There’s another photo of my grandparents standing with Winston Churchill and his wife at my parents’ wedding at the Dorchester Hotel in London. Churchill was my mum’s godfather. I bet he wasn’t too pleased when she married a Catholic. I know Grandpa Charlton, Mum’s dad, wasn’t too happy.
The staff and all the estate families, about fifty of them, are standing at the back of the entrance hall, waiting, excited. They’re dressed in their Sunday best. The lads hold their caps in front of their privates and whisper dirty jokes to each other, like at Mass. The women stand together, gossiping away quietly.
The parentals, as Emma calls Mum and Dad, sit up front on two hall chairs facing the two televisions with Emma and Lucy sitting beside them. The four of them are sitting in a row like in the front row of the Savoy Cinema in Dublin. Now they’re all staring at me and Annie, and the old man is fuming with guess who for being last to arrive.
‘You’ll be late for your own bloody funeral, you will. Ten to seven means ten to seven! Say hello to your mother then sit down. Christ!’
‘Do not use the Lord’s name in vain,’ says Emma snottily. Oh yeah, that’s really going to worry him.
‘Oh button it, Miss Goody-Two-Shoes,’ he says right back.
The old man has a really weird accent. He was born in Canada, went to big school and university in England and now lives in Ireland. He has a different accent for every moment or mood. If he’s on the phone trying to be business-like or sucking his pipe thinking he’s wise, he’ll have a Canadian twang. If he’s trying to be funny and friendly with the locals he suddenly gets a terrible Irish accent, like he’s trying to be their best friend, saying stupid things like, ‘bejesus’ or ‘begorragh’ or ‘fair play to ye’. If he’s in England he has an English accent just like ‘By the way, I went to Oxford, old chap.’ Lucy says he’s a chameleon. I’d say he was hairy. Seriously. Really hairy.
I heard a story about the old man from Lucy about when he was in the Canadian Air Force during the war and they had a party and got rotten drunk. As a laugh the other fliers tied him down and shaved his back because it was so hairy. Because of that, his back’s now twice as hairy. That story’s probably true. It makes sense.
I take the last chair between Emma and Lucy, and Annie sits on the edge. While we’re waiting for President Kennedy, I grab the game bag and pull out two dead pigeons. ‘Look, Dad, a left and right! Just two shots.’ I know he’ll be pleased. He loves shooting.
‘You’re only supposed to fire when they’re in the air.’
‘They were in the air. Very high too.’
‘I was only joking, you twit! Have you no sense of humour? Jesus!’
He always makes me look a total prick, does the old man. I feel bad now but Annie strokes my hair, just once. I love it but I feel uncomfortable too as I can feel him watching me. I can easily tell when he’s not happy but I don’t always know why. Sometimes in the morning when he’s in a bad humour he says: ‘I’ll see you in my study at ten o’clock.’
‘What have I done now?’
‘You’ll find out soon enough.’
So all I do is worry for a couple of hours and think really, really hard, until I can come up with a reason for being in trouble. Sometimes I can’t think of anything and that’s the worst feeling of all.
So there we are, still watching the two televisions, still waiting for JF bloody K. There are two tellies in our house. One has great sound but a terrible fuzzy picture. The other has a great picture and a terrible crackly sound. On their own, the tellies are useless. Together, they work great.
On the day the first telly arrived they put it up on a specially prepared shelf in the study. There was great excitement and all the indoor staff were peering round the corner to get a look. After all, most of them had never seen a telly before. The engineer switched it on and the picture was grand, really clear, but the sound was awful. The old man, furious as usual when things don’t work immediately, tells the engineer: ‘Get me another set down here from Dublin, double-bloody-quick!’
So he does what he’s told, the engineer, and the new television arrives double-bloody-quick and they put it up and the sound is great, but now the picture is awful. ‘Right,’ says the old man. ‘Get the other one back up here. We’ll have them together. I’m buying both!’ From that day on we watched two televisions. Only one would be covered with a blanket.
The two tellies are sitting on the long hall table. Everyone is watching poor old Paddy Kelly, wishing he would hurry up. Paddy is up front standing at the table fiddling with the aerial of the main telly, the one without the blanket, trying to get a clear picture so that we can all see JFK when he finally appears.
Paddy Kelly works with the cows. Paddy is ‘simple’. Well, that’s what Annie calls him anyhow. The lads say the only reason Paddy has a job at all is so that the old man can shout at him in the morning and ‘get rid of all the anger that he gathered in the night’. Paddy has gravy stains ironed into his suits and lives up a lane on Golden Hill with an old widow who looks after him. No one knows Paddy’s age as he doesn’t have a birth certificate and he collects old newspapers as a hobby and reads them all night. Paddy spends all his wages betting on the horses. Although sometimes he buys lemon sweets and gives them to Annie and me. Annie says they have cow muck stuck to them but we have to eat them as we don’t like to upset him.
We’re still waiting for JFK. Everyone is quiet and in suspense and Annie has to make a joke, as per usual. Annie shouts out real loud at poor Paddy: ‘Paddy? Paddy Kelly? Come in, Paddy Kelly!’ Everyone laughs.
Suddenly Paddy notices that Annie’s calling him. ‘Oh yeah, oh yeah,’ he mutters, as usual. Paddy’s the only person I know who can mutter out loud.
Annie teases him again: ‘Hurry up Paddy! Jaisus, we wanted to see Kennedy arrive … not leave.’ More laughs. But Paddy doesn’t really mind. He probably loves the attention. I can see him almost smiling.
‘There he is!’ squeaks Emma. Sudde
nly President John Fitzgerald Kennedy himself appears on the telly at Dublin airport in front of an Irish army guard of honour and a microphone, standing beside Eamonn de Valera, the president of Ireland, who is actually Spanish according to the old man.
Everyone is totally silent, in awe, gobsmacked. You’d think the moon had collapsed. Honestly. All the women have practically fainted at the sight of him. Even Annie. Pathetic. God himself wouldn’t get such a reception if he suddenly appeared in Ireland. ‘Would you mind coming back in a half-hour, Holy Father, when JFK is finished? That’s grand. Thanks a million.’ That’s what they’d say to God if they could.
JF bloody K starts away in his silky voice, smooth as anything: ‘There are many reasons why I was anxious to accept your generous invitation and to come to this country. As you said, eight of my grandparents left these shores in the space almost of months and came to the United States …’ Blah, blah, bloody blah.
Two
I am an idealist without illusions.
John F. Kennedy
Wednesday, 26 June 1963
I’m standing in the doorway saying goodnight to the Cassidys. ‘Night Justin. See ya tomorrow,’ says Liam.
‘Night Liam!’
The old man slams the door shut as the last of the locals heads home, all thrilled with the excitement of having Kennedy in Ireland. ‘Thank God that’s over,’ he says with relief.
‘Very unchristian,’ says Emma.
‘Oh bollocks! Last thing we need is a house full of trogs.’
Now Lucy joins the protest. ‘Hey, this is the Sixties, man.’
The old man just laughs. ‘Come on, man, supper.’
Lucy then says how JFK is a ‘real looker’. I hate Kennedy, because Annie thinks he’s handsome too.
‘But Lucy, he’s old,’ says I, all jealous.
The House of Slamming Doors Page 1
