Leaving Ardglass

by William King

‘The Somerset, The Devonshire … others, where well-off old gents stay.’

  Maurice Fitz is even better in the second half, and when the Kerry team comes to receive the Sam Maguire right in front of us, I stand with everyone else; M.J.’s gang cheer and punch the air. But Jody’s words puncture the cheers and the speeches. The Somerset. The Devonshire. Well-off jossers.

  25

  I’M STILL NOT SURE why I decided to search for Bonnie: guilt perhaps at the way M.J. had treated her, or some remorse of conscience for failing to keep in touch, except for a Christmas card sent at the last minute. So, while the students are on a short retreat during mid-term, I catch a plane to Heathrow, and spend hours sipping coffee in quiet corners, behind pillars and in the lee of palm branches, until an older version of the Bonnie image in my head strides out of the revolving doors of The Belgrave. In a well-fitting suit and carrying an umbrella, she has ripened into the upper limit of middle-years; her hair is cut short and she has lost weight.

  I put down the cup as she hurries by. ‘Bonnie,’ I call.

  She swings round. ‘Who are you?’ Then, after a moment’s recognition, her look of anxiety gives way to a scowl; she makes to dash off, but I go after her. ‘Bonnie, come back. Can we talk? Bonnie.’

  A commissionaire with two rows of buttons down the front of his red uniform and wearing white gloves eyes me.

  ‘I’ve nothing to say to your crowd any more,’ she says over her shoulder. ‘Sorry I ever set eyes on the lot of you.’ Her accent has become distinctly English.

  I lay my hand lightly on her forearm: ‘Bonnie, remember what you said: “No matter what, Galvin, we’ll always be friends.”’

  ‘Don’t think I ever said that.’

  ‘Have something with me.’

  She glances at the reception. ‘Not here.’ And without another word being spoken, she stamps out of the hotel; anger in every movement of her body. ‘Who told you?’ she asks over her shoulder.

  ‘Jody.’

  Silence then until we reach a restaurant off Kensington Gardens.

  ‘I know what you and your Church think of what I’m doing.’

  ‘We knew each other before I … before I joined the Church.’

  ‘In case you’re shocked, it’s no different from what the men who work for your brother are doing. They sell so that he can get richer. They sell, I sell. The only difference is – I get well-paid.’

  Under the light of the table lamp, I notice grey roots at the parting of her hair, and her overdone make-up fails to cover the wrinkles that have scored her face and neck.

  She catches me looking. ‘You’re shocked.’

  ‘No, no. I respect everyone’s decisions about their life. Enough to do to make sense of my own.’

  ‘Why did you look me up?’ She raises her head from the menu chart. ‘To go after the lost soul, is that it? Well, Tommy, save me your pity.’ She looks nervously around. ‘Yes, sure, I’ve been treated like an object. No promises. Money up front.’

  ‘I’m not going after any lost soul, but I am anxious to know how you are. That’s why I … well, I was in London just to browse around a few bookshops and call to see M.J., and decided to look you up.’

  She picks at her food, and, like a broken record, falls into the same groove: M.J. and the times she went with him to stupid cowboy films, and he fell asleep on her shoulder, and she wouldn’t move in case she’d wake him. Took his washing with her to the hotel; his shirts were ironed as good as the prime minister’s. And all the while he had another English dame who worked for Nat West. Anyway, rich blokes like him are used to getting their own way. He was only a couple of years married when he asked her to take up where they had left off. ‘How about that now, Father Galvin?’

  She dries her eyes, and is silent for a while as she emerges from her troubled world, and, for the first time that evening she looks directly at me. ‘You’re getting thin on top, and you had a fine mop; they must be pushing you too hard.’ She studies my face in a way that causes me to redden. Her tone softens. ‘You’ve suffered too, Tommy. I can tell.’

  ‘Who doesn’t?’ I try to wriggle away from her gaze. ‘Isn’t it a vale of tears?’

  ‘I’ve met all sorts, and I see their eyes at close range, and I know when the light has gone out.’

  ‘You should be a counsellor, or a spiritual director.’ I force a laugh and take refuge in describing my work with Nugent: visiting the priests, trying to encourage them to keep going; the drinkers and those who are fiddling the parish accounts; the career men who know what buttons to press for a reward.

  ‘You should be good at that.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Seems just like the building sites.’

  ‘Ah, not that bad.’

  She softens and we rake over the ashes. The last she’d heard of Sputnik, he had gone off to Sale with Scunthorpe Peggy, whose teenage son had then stabbed him eight or nine times one night and had brought him to death’s door. Horse Muldoon had bought a pub, and a hundred acres of land outside Castlerea and had married a local barmaid twenty years younger than him: six children, one of them going on to be an engineer. Not bad for an ignoramus who could just about write his name.

  ‘You wouldn’t know the place now. Well, the Crown and The Highway are much the same, but the men have cards – nearly all of them. Have to, government regulations. Hats and gloves and proper rainwear.’

  ‘Do you remember the steam rising from their wet clothes when they sat in The Highway. Drenched after a two-hour journey?’

  ‘Yeah, wrecks now around Kilburn and Holloway – those that are still alive. That’s all they ever got out of building the skyline and sending home their postal orders.’

  Though rarely making eye contact, she relaxes and begins to talk about her customers: most of them are at the stage of life where they just want someone to listen to their stories. She gives a half-smile: ‘I probably hear more confessions than you do, Tommy.’

  ‘That would be easy. Not many go any more in Ireland.’

  ‘One chap – an elderly gent from the West Country – brings a framed photo of his mother he takes out of a briefcase and talks about her all the time. Then goes back to his wife in Bournemouth.’

  ‘You would imagine the sea air should be enough for him.’

  She laughs for the first time.

  When I spot her stealing a look at her watch, I call for the bill. ‘If you’re ever across the pond,’ I say as I write down my address and telephone number and hand it to her, ‘I’d love to see you.’

  At the door, I am using the rain as an excuse to linger and fill the leave-taking with idle talk and questions: which Tube should I take back to my hotel, the bookshops I have left to visit. London is changing. She begins to tap her umbrella against the concrete. ‘Nice of you to take the trouble to find me, but don’t worry, I can look after myself.’

  ‘OK. And phone me if ever … you know … you need … well, anything.’

  ‘I will, I’ll phone.’

  I know Bonnie; she won’t phone.

  Suddenly, she puts her arms around me, kisses me on the lips, and says: ‘I met the wrong Galvin. Goodbye, Tommy.’ And she is gone, merging with the indifferent crowd jostling for the Underground. Instead of taking the train, I trudge back to my hotel, vaguely aware of young couples meeting and going into restaurants, or taxi drivers smoking cigarettes and laughing together at a rank.

  I have a late flight back to Dublin the following evening, so, after a quick visit to a bookshop or two, I take the Jubilee line to Kilburn Station and walk as far as Quex Road Church, where I stop and let the past flood my thoughts. The spot by the low wall where they sold the newspapers is now a bus shelter: dead leaves lie on the top of a wheelie bin. The place seems smaller, the road narrower. Even the church has shrunk. On the red seat two old men are cross with each other. One is resting his hands on a walking stick, and is giving out in an Irish accent about this new fellow, Blair, to the other man, whose shirtsleeves hang loose o
utside his shabby overcoat. Another old man sitting apart from them throws a bloodshot look in my direction, and then begins to poke aimlessly with his crutch at a sweet wrapper on the footpath.

  Buckram-flared summer frocks, the smell of Brylcreem and wild promises well up in my imagination: a forest of hands is reaching for the Irish provincial papers. Wearing a cravat and sports jacket, Deano is smiling again and is slipping an arm around Kim Novak. Over the tannoy, the priest is announcing a Pioneer outing.

  I’ll sing a hymn to Mary,

  The mother of my God …

  The world is young; we shall never die.

  Passing by Halal shops, and the smell of fruit, I make my way up Kilburn High Road. Scattered among the coffee-coloured skins of Eastern Europe, and women in swathes of orange and brown saris, are old men from home who still carry in the set of their walk the memory of struggling against bleak November hills.

  My compass becomes the State Cinema, now a bingo hall, where I’d taken a Galtymore girl to see Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. We had fish and chips afterwards at the Green Rooster; over its doorway is a sign in red plastic: Popa-dom Indian Restaurant. A swarthy man in a turban looks up and down the street, throws me a look and disappears inside.

  With Deano’s ghost, I catch the bus for Cricklewood, past stalls selling soap, umbrellas and shoes, once drapers’ shops with striped awnings where men bought shiny suits the day before Christmas Eve to wear on the boat for the North Wall.

  At a café opposite the Galtymore, I have coffee while staring across at what was the gateway to unmixed joy, but now, in the clear light of day, is just a shabby building with brown paint peeling from the walls. Near me a man is growling his way through a soggy mass of baked beans, runny eggs and rashers. He calls roughly to a waitress, and bygone mornings of gulping down food when whistles are blowing outside come tumbling back to me. ‘Don’t shout, Jimmy,’ says the dark-skinned waitress with the firmness of a well-intentioned nurse. He splutters that he wants more cuts of bread, and throws a cautious glance in my direction.

  I nod towards the dance hall. ‘Not like it used be.’

  For a moment, he raises his mane of bedraggled hair and looks out with rheumy eyes. ‘They’re goin’ to knock it down. Apartments.’ Then back to his runny eggs.

  ‘Pity.’

  ‘Ah, that day is gone.’ The tone – pure Connemara – has softened.

  ‘No one around here now. Caribbeans.’ The knife he holds in his knobbly fist jerks in the direction of the girl who has cast the cuts of bread on his plate. ‘No manners.’ Hunched over the table, his broad shoulders suggest what must have been a powerful frame; his comments come out in throwaways. ‘Them Latvians. They’re done too by the subbies, same as our crowd were. Nothin’ changes.’

  ‘Paid into their hands, I suppose.’

  For the first time he looks straight at me, and is about to speak, when his eye falls on my briefcase and he stops, as if remembering the old law of guarded speech with outsiders. ‘Did you work here?’

  ‘I did. A long time ago.’

  ‘One of them engineers, I suppose.’

  I hedge. ‘While I was a student.’

  ‘What are you doin’ now?’

  Fearing that my profession might cause a strain in our conversation, I say, ‘Personnel management.’

  ‘What’s that?’

  ‘Seeing that the workers are looked after.’

  He shows rotten teeth when he grins. ‘You did all right.’ Every now and then, while he slurps his tea out of a saucer, he makes barking sounds with his throat, then struggles to his feet and reaches for his stick. ‘The pauper’s grave for the rest of us. Good luck.’ He shuffles off to pay the waitress.

  Before I get the bus back to Kilburn Station, I look around for one last landmark. The dark alley where Maureen from Claremorris had led me that first night at the Galty is no longer an alley; instead, a cyber café fills the space that once was Eddington’s Lane. On a blue-painted metal hoarding, a sign over the door says: Internet City: Mobile City. I get on the next bus and hop off at Kilburn Station, where a man with several days’ stubble and plastic bags tied around his shoes holds out a box in front of me: ‘Give us a little help, sir, to buy a cup o’ tay.’

  He stares at the pound coin I fish out of my pocket, and as it settles in the box, he looks at me. ‘May you never be short, sir. You’re a dacent man and all belongin’ to you.’

  26

  FOR THE TUESDAY LUNCH with M.J., I hurry up Grafton Street. A city girl in a suit, resolutely neutral to the world, is speaking into her mobile; she does a neat sidestep when a sallow-faced woman wrapped in folds of clothing holds up a child and copies of the Big Issue before her. In the open doorway of a newsagent, a display board shows a headline: ‘Government Minister and Planning Official for the Heaslip’.

  M.J. is waiting outside Brownes. He has one foot resting on the granite base of a railing and his head is raised as if in the act of listening. ‘Look.’ He points to the skyline over St Stephen’s Green. ‘I can count six cranes from here, and one of them is on a Galvin site. Not bad for an oul bogtrotter from Ardglass.’

  In a grey suit and a wine-coloured tie, he looks fit and well; his high colour could be mistaken for a healthy glow, but after his two heart attacks, a cardiologist in Harley Street had issued an ultimatum: slow down or you’ll be in a box within six months. Since then, he takes the odd week at the stud farm in Westmeath. Even there, he can’t rest and spends the time in wellingtons, pounding paling posts with a sledgehammer and tightening fence wire.

  The headwaiter at Brownes greets us: ‘Lovely day, Mr Galvin. And Monsignor, good to see you again.’

  We are about to sit at our table when a Minister of State stops on his way out and, in a low voice, sympathizes with M.J.: ‘After all you’ve done for this city. No gratitude.’ Between his teeth, he makes a speech about ‘these bloody tribunals’. ‘Waste of money, if you ask me. Making millionaires out of the lawyers.’ Then a handshake, a tap on the shoulder, and he rejoins the two men near the door.

  Settling the linen napkin on his knees, M.J. nods towards the departing politician: ‘A great support when I started here. Himself and Donaghy never let me down, especially when them Trinity boyos were writing to the papers about how I was destroying Georgian Dublin. Pampered bastards. Never did an honest day’s work in their lives. Many’s the time, Tommy, when I was going back to London, I saw nothing except boarded-up houses as soon as I left Ardglass until the train reached Limerick. And crying at every railway station. Tradesmen couldn’t get a day’s work for love or money.’ He pokes with his thumb: ‘His party – say what you like about them – they always got the building trade moving.’

  Anger at being called a tax cheat surfaces during the meal. He lowers his voice: Seery is a jumped-up little fucker for landing him in the shit. And all because the lousy bastard wouldn’t pay one of his staff a promised bonus.

  While he speaks, I remember the news report from earlier in the week. After securing immunity from prosecution, Seery’s junior partner had blown the whistle. The firm of C. F. Seery and Co. was organizing offshore accounts for fat cats in the construction industry. A thread had been pulled and the whole garment was now coming apart.

  ‘Put money into the pockets of them that would spend it in the boozer, is it? Or run around to the nearest Ladbrokes. I didn’t take the boat with only a pair of wellingtons in a case for that sort of caper. A bob or two back from every hard-earned pound when that fellow with the eyebrows – Healy – was chancellor. And nearly as bad here.’ His colour is rising.

  I nod in agreement to what seems like a rehearsal for the judge. ‘You did well,’ I try to reassure him.

  ‘Did I? A mother who blamed me for Mossie’s death. A wife who can’t bear to be in the same house as me. And then Margot.’

  ‘Stop torturing yourself.’

  ‘A son who tells me he became a priest to hide the fact that he’s a homo.’ He leans forward and sp
eaks in a hushed tone. ‘I sold cabbage, turnips, hay – anything to make a few bob. My two buckos rubbing shoulders with earls and viscounts at Downside Abbey. Now they’re two layabouts.’ He sinks into a gloomy silence and begins tapping the tablecloth.

  After a while, he raises his head: ‘Where in God’s name do dreams come from? I’d love to know.’ A few nights before, he dreamt about being back in Ardglass chapel, and the parish priest is thumping on the altar, and knocking over candles. ‘What shall it profit a man’, he roars, ‘if he shall gain the whole world and lose his own soul?’ The people in the seats laugh out loud; M.J. joins them. And now he can hardly hear the priest, even though he is still shouting. Flames are rising and spreading to the altar rails and the front pews. The old priest keeps on shouting: ‘It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the Kingdom of Heaven.’ M.J. is laughing because no one there, apart from the Healys, or Scanlon the publican, has more than maybe fifty pounds in the post office.

  ‘You haven’t lost your soul.’

  He looks at me in a distracted way. ‘It all happened so quickly. I’ve office blocks in this city and in London; I’ve pubs, farms and horses. What’s the use? I wanted it all and I got it. And it hasn’t turned out like … I wanted to prove to them at home – to her – that I could make it. And that no one would make a fool of me like they had laughed at our father.’ He stops tapping. ‘You remember that night in the Irish Club. The night Grace …?’

  ‘When she played the piano. And you couldn’t take your eyes off her.’

  ‘I’d made the millions – now I wanted to be connected to the Great House crowd. To be married to Grace, well, sure that would be the icing on the cake.’

  ‘Anyone’s marriage could go on the rocks. It happens every day.’

  He is deaf to palliatives.

  ‘Two sons – strangers to me.’

  ‘Is Matthew going back to the monastery?’

  ‘No. Downside was a phase, he said. I declare to God, I always thought when a fellow took on something like that, he stayed with it.’