by William King
At one side, a half-partition separates the office from a cubicle big enough for a bed where one of the navvies rests if a delivery of timber or cement needs guarding overnight. I come in one morning to find Sputnik asleep and Scunthorpe Peggy in her slip beside him.
Sitting behind an old table that acts as a desk, Jody hands me a thick roll of notes. ‘Pay the drivers out of this. They want cash on the nail, but get a receipt. Be careful with that. The lads aren’t light-fingered, but there’s no point in putting temptation their way.’
Then, as always, he checks that the coast is clear, and lowers his voice. ‘Now I hope this doesn’t trouble your conscience.’ He studies my reaction. ‘You’ll be signing invoices when they bring the gravel or cement.’
‘OK.’
‘We’ve an arrangement with the drivers. Every time a load arrives, you get the driver to write out an invoice for, say, a hundred and twenty, and you pay out a hundred. Are you with me?’
‘I am.’
‘So at the end of the year that’ll be a nice penny saved and we won’t have to be working our arses off for the Chancellor of the Exchequer.’ A grin of devilment plays around his mouth. ‘Of course, the drivers have to get their quid. Twenty out of each load of gravel, cement thirty and timber fifty; that’s our way of getting round the taxman. Are you with me?’
‘I’m with you.’
‘Seery can set it against John Bull’s tax bill.’
‘Right.’
‘We pay enough already, God knows.’
‘We do.’
‘And another thing. Make sure the drivers don’t pull a fast one.’
‘How do you mean?’
‘Pulling in one gap and out the other without emptying the load. Then back an hour later with the same gravel, and so we pay twice or maybe three times. Black Mick from Rathkeale, he’s a bastard. Watch him.’
From the roll I peel off notes and give the drivers their cut, sign the invoices, and fasten them to a wire that hangs from a stanchion. ‘Thanks, Pat.’ The English drivers hand me a receipt. I keep a close eye on Black Mick, and try to convince myself that Jody is right: that M.J. is paying enough already to John Bull. Jody had laid down the rule of thumb: ‘A jungle, Tommy. Jungles have their own laws. They need us Paddies and our sweat; we’ve built their skyline. Everything is hunky dory.’ Graft is second nature to them. And like the previous summer, what M.J. is doing leaves a sour taste, but I still carry the traces of a child’s admiration for his big brother, who carried me on his broad shoulders one glorious summer’s day when we had set off for the lower reaches of Mount Brandon and my legs would take me no farther. The fun we had together – such as the night we were walking up Ardglass from the village and I thought the full moon was following us. ‘Right, Tomásheen,’ he says, ‘we’ll be home before that moon.’ And he begins to run, allowing me to get ahead until we reach the wicket gate of our house. He was in England only a year or two when he sent money for my first bicycle: a dark green Raleigh with a gear case and a bell.
He is now going out with Grace, yet whenever I stay at the house, I notice Bonnie’s dresses lying across a chair in his bedroom. And he is getting me to back up his deceit. ‘There,’ he says one Thursday evening, handing me the keys of the Corsair. ‘Bring her for a meal – some good place. Tell her I’m delayed and there’s no use in waiting.’
But he’s not delayed. Grace has a free day from the hospital, and the weather being so fine, she wants to go on a boat trip up the Thames to Wapping where, she heard, there is a first-class fish restaurant. That, as far as I can remember, is the only day off he takes during those two summers, apart from the odd Sunday.
Bonnie is waiting outside The Victoria on Holloway Road: a lone figure all done up in expectation. ‘He has to meet the foreman of the job out in Luton,’ I lie as I hold open the door, and see her face cloud over.
‘Luton,’ she mutters, filling the car with the whiff of wounded pride. ‘Does he take me for a right eejit?’
‘One of the compressors broke down.’ I look away, so that she won’t see me redden. Armies of men covered in grey dust are jumping off wagons, and girls in overalls are spilling out of Baldwin’s, the paint factory.
‘Will you come for a meal with me?’
‘A meal. You’re the consolation prize, priesteen.’
‘Do, and we could go to a picture after. There’s a comedy on in the Odeon: It’s a Mad Mad World, with another “mad” added on.’ My attempt at humour raises only a hint of a smile.
‘Or we could go to the Adelphi; there’s a re-run of Diary of a Chambermaid.’
‘How about Trickery of a Priesteen, who covers for his big brother and thinks I’m an eejit.’ She does a playful take-back with her arm to swipe at me.
‘I’ve to run around to the Crown to pay a few men, then we’ll be right,’ I say as we drive into Cricklewood Broadway.
‘M.J. Galvin – always a bastard.’ With a hangdog look, she stares at the teeming footpath.
While I’m checking wages in front of the Crown, Bonnie gets out for a packet of cigarettes. Striding angrily, she makes for the door where a group of fellows are leaning against the red sandstone wall, their pints golden in the evening sun.
One of them, a small chap like a jockey with hair plastered to his head, steps out in front of her. ‘Could I take you to the Galty on Sunday night, Miss?’ he asks, a cheeky grin on his face. The rest laugh. One of them shouts, ‘Go on home, Jimeen boy, and have a sup of milk for yourself. A woman like her would blow you out in bubbles.’
But Jimeen stands his ground and keeps looking up at Bonnie. ‘Go on, give him the start,’ they guffaw again. ‘Jimeen boy, your mother won’t know and I won’t tell her.’
Bonnie’s pout melts. Suddenly, she reaches down and grabs the front of his trousers, and half-turns to the gallery: ‘Nothing. There’s nothing there! I’d be wasting my time.’ And she pushes him out of the way.
‘Sound woman,’ says a tall man, wearing his hat at a rakish angle. ‘Try me, Miss, why don’t you try me.’
Bonnie ignores him and disappears inside.
A few of them have made a football out of paper bags tied with twine and are kicking and jostling around the lane at one side of the pub, their hobnailed boots rasping off the concrete. Others are slouching at a window and casting baleful looks in my direction.
I set out the wages according to the list, and make my way around the football game to the door.
In a Swiss Cottage restaurant, when we have finished a bottle of wine with the meal, and Bonnie is working her way through a second, her anger returns: ‘He’s meeting that Grace bitch, isn’t that it?’
‘No. Sure, she has Roger, the chap with the moustache.’
‘He dropped her. A nurse from St Andrew’s told me. She won’t give him his cocoa.’
She dries her eyes when she notices the owner bringing over two glasses of ouzo: ‘Special treat for the Irishman and his pretty girlfriend.’ She laughs, but then grows silent again. ‘They fuck you, then they marry someone else. I’m great for a weekend in Chiswick.’
The letdown kindles another hurt that had blighted the flowering of her youth. As a sixteen-year-old, she had worked for the village shopkeeper a few miles outside Athenry, filling brown paper bags from the tea chest, stocking the shelves and helping his wife in the kitchen. One day his eldest son asked her to give him a hand in the store. ‘He had me up against bags of animal feed before I knew it. Told me he loved me.’ That was the first of many afternoons in the back of the store while the son was on his holidays from the university. Then the nightmare: sick in the morning, and wearing loose clothes to hide her shame. Finally, the discovery and the arrival of the parish priest, who took her aside in the same kitchen where he played cards on a Sunday night with the shopkeeper and a couple of well-off farmers. He whispers. ‘Nuns in Dublin will take care of your baby and provide it with a good home, and then, would you think of going to England?’ Yellow trace of snuff on his n
ostrils. ‘Best way for everyone, rather than be bringing trouble to your poor father and mother.’
Her hand trembles when she raises the wine glass to her lips.
‘How come you didn’t – well – see the risk?’
‘He was going on to be a doctor. Said he knew about these things and I was dead safe. He’s a specialist now. Anyhow, I was asking for it. I had led him on. That summer, I took part in the step-dancing competition at the sports. The usual – a tractor-trailer for a stage.’
‘I know.’
‘Anyhow, I’d noticed him hanging around. I can tell you: when it came to my turn to dance on my own, I edged out to the front to make sure he got an eyeful.’
‘I’m sorry, Bonnie – I mean, about what happened to you.’
‘Men. Ah, they take what they can get, and then leave you in the lurch.’
She talks on until her anger has spent itself, then a faint smile plays around her lips.
‘“Don’t you know, child,” says the parish priest, “that a man has strong desires and it’s a woman’s place to stop him.”’
‘The fool.’
‘He wasn’t the worst. Gave me a twenty-pound note when I was leaving. Told me to make sure and join the Legion of Mary when I arrived to London.’
‘Which, of course, you did.’
‘Of course.’
15
M.J. IS NOW DIVIDING HIS TIME between the various contracts: sometimes he stays a few days with one crew, doing everything from lifting bags of cement onto his shoulder and throwing them down beside the mixer, to grabbing a trowel and laying rows of bricks as if every day is a deadline. At other times he is deep in conversation with one of the foremen, the edges of a map fluttering in the breeze as they hold it down on the bonnet of the jeep.
Apart from the odd night when I stay at the house, we are commuters at a train station, meeting only for a few minutes while he is clearing out the safe in The Highway, or when he drops in to the site at Luton.
One evening he is home early and is unusually restive – tapping on the table, clearing his throat, humming out of tune. In a navy suit, he polishes his shoes in the kitchen after Vera has left. Over the ham and tomato salad, his conversation is fitful: asking me the same question a couple of times without waiting for an answer. At last he pushes away his plate: the easygoing mask has slipped; instead, he has the earnest look of a boy in the village shop, rummaging about in his pocket for enough to buy sweets.
‘What do you know about this lad …?’ – the boy in the village shop searches my face and takes two tickets from his wallet – ‘Beethoven,’ he says, stumbling over the composer’s name.
I tell him a bit about the sonatas, the concertos and the symphonies, and how, during his deafness, he composed his best work. He loses interest. ‘Double Dutch, Tommy.’ He puts the tickets away safely in his wallet and smiles. ‘We’re off to the Albert Hall. I don’t even know where it is,’ he says while at the mirror, attaching a starched collar and a red tie to the new shirt he had bought that day.
‘See you tomorrow.’ He gives me a poke on the shoulder, and goes out humming.
‘Good luck.’
The evening before I leave, he takes me to the Black Angus restaurant in Chiswick. ‘I’ve hardly had time to talk to you and you’ve been killing yourself working.’ We have a drink first in the bar. His head is almost touching the beams that support the low ceiling. Wearing a white shirt open at the neck which sets off a healthy glow to his skin, he conveys with lively gestures a store of energy inside his burly frame. As always, he is wrapped up in his work: this evening it’s the twelve houses he has bought in Finsbury. He rattles off his plan: some are in bad shape, but he’ll convert them into apartments. When Finsbury has spent itself, the compass of his interest turns to Ardglass and Gerry.
I tell him the good bits – ‘the heifers you bought for him are the envy of the neighbours’ – and omit their begrudgery: ‘That fella must be robbin’ banks over there in London.’
When he’s into his third whiskey, he begins to pick at an old sore. ‘My own mother selling me down the river.’ He had been taking the harness off the workhorse one fine summer’s evening when he’d overheard her in the cowshed; above the steady beat of the milk hitting the galvanized buckets, her voice had rung out with a dreadful clarity. ‘England or the depot. One or the other. He has a good head on him, so he’d get the guards’ exam, no bother, but, he has to go. Too many mouths to feed.’
‘But I’d be lost without him,’ our father is pleading. ‘Aren’t we doin’ all right?’
She won’t budge.
‘She had the whip-hand, of course.’ M.J. says, knocking back his drink.
‘I know. D’you remember when he used to come home drunk from Scanlon’s: “I’m only a lodger here. Only a lodger. I’d be better off dead.”’
‘Your table is ready now, sir,’ says the waiter.
‘She was trapped, you see,’ he says when we are seated.
‘Trapped. How?’
‘I was on the way, and, in those days, they had to get married. She’d have sold the few acres in Ardglass when her father and mother passed away and returned to Chicago. Used to throw it in my face: “Only for you, I’d be in America for myself.”’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you remember the way she used to go on: “Wasn’t I the fool to let that drunkard into the house? I should’ve gone back to where I was happy.” Now you know: she couldn’t go back! I could’ve followed Eddie to the depot and spent the rest of my life tramping the streets of Dublin. Maybe become a sergeant.’
The table shakes with his jerky movements. He begins to study the hard-cover menu in front of him, but I know he is back in that stable with the workhorse. ‘One thing I’ll have to say for her: she was better than any man to do a day’s work.’ He puts the menu aside: ‘I was going out to school one June morning, and I saw her lift a tank of milk onto the donkey’s cart. There could be twelve, thirteen gallons in that tank. On her own. Of course, himself was still three sheets to the wind after the night before.’ His face tightens in a surprising likeness to hers. ‘Darning socks and sewing patches until twelve or one at night with the oul tilley lamp brought low, so that she could see.’
The evening is still bright when we leave the restaurant, so he makes a detour to show off the houses in Finsbury. We drive through the redbrick street: bay windows, and wooden verandas on the ground floor. ‘Seery put me in the know.’ He stops the Wolsey and we get out. ‘I’ve a chance to own the whole street. The oul landlord, a retired banker, left the wife and family and is off to live in the South of France with a slip of a girl.’
‘“The older the goat, the giddier.” What the Da used say.’
We drive around the corner to see the pub – a mock Tudor building at the top of Beech Hill Road. ‘A lick of paint and a few things to the inside and it should be fine,’ he says. ‘I thought for a long time about a new name, and now I have it. Only one name.’ He spreads his two arms to describe an imaginary signboard: ‘The Crab Apple Tree.’
‘He’d be proud to think he named a pub in London.’
He does a take-off, playing out a scene that stirs up the embers of a shared past: ‘Did ye ever see a pub like that, lads? Sure, there isn’t a pub in the whole of London as good.’
‘You wouldn’t think you’re taking on too much,’ I venture on the way back.
‘Can’t stop. You see your houses going up, you get an oul thrill out of that, man, or an MP phones you to talk about a cable-laying job.’ Creak of leather when he settles himself behind the wheel; streets of redbrick sweep by. ‘And at times you wonder how it all happened. Is this a dream? Will I wake up and find myself drawing turf out of Hogan’s bog? Enough is never enough, you see,’ he continues, when we are in the house. ‘You don’t want to stop as long as there’s another peak ahead.’
I look out at the silent darkness, broken only by his pacing on the stone tiles of the kitchen and a car changing g
ears on the Chiswick Road.
‘There’s the oul fear I might lose it all.’ He settles himself into an armchair opposite me.
‘No fear of that.’
‘And then the Da holding on to the counter at Scanlon’s. “Come home,” I says to him, one cattle fair evening. The few calves he failed to sell were out in the yard hunched up with the hunger. “Sit down there for yourself, M.J. boy; the man who made time made piles of it.” “Mammy says that you’re to come home.” Bastards were asking him to tell them about the Ballymac ambush. And like a fool, he holds up the ashplant like you would a rifle. “I was in charge of twenty IRA volunteers, Kerry Number One Brigade, lads. Here’s how I gave orders to my men.” “Come on, Jack,” they shout, “tell us.” He tries standing to attention with his rifle: “Taraidh airm”, he says and they break their arses laughing.’ M.J. shakes his head. ‘The same man would run a mile from a Black and Tan. I was only a gorsoon, sitting behind them with my bottle of lemonade and a couple of Geary’s biscuits, but I swore I’d never end up like that.’
16
SUMMER IS SLIPPING from our grasp when I return to the seminary. The chestnuts and plane trees along by the grotto are turning brown; a smell of rotting foliage rises from the river. The class is getting smaller, but I’m glad to see Meehan is back, even though he swore before we broke up for the holidays that he has had enough of ‘the pricks’ who were running ‘this kip’. He is still going out with Siobhán, now a teacher.
During the previous year, free spirits who could no longer endure the heavy hand of authority had sidled off down the corridor, to be met by their families at one of the front parlours. And when we trooped down to supper in double file, we stole glances through the open door of the vacant room. The same sight after every departure – the striped mattress rolled up on the bedsprings, the deserted white washing basin and the empty bookshelves.
