Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “’Tis the only thing himself and I fight about,” Nuala said in a blatant lie.

  “’Tis the only thing I’ve won so far,” I added truthfully enough.

  “We’d be delighted to have lunch with the T.D.,” Nuala said. “Dermot and I have a tennis match sometime this afternoon, but there’ll be plenty of time for that.”

  “Golf,” I said.

  “Tennis,” she said, and that was that.

  “Lord and Lady Ballynahinch own most of the rest of the land along the coast,” Seamus Redmond said, returning to the question of land ownership. They are even more committed environmentalists than our own Greens. Heaven knows they don’t need the money.”

  “Lord and Lady!” I exclaimed. “I thought most of the Brits were out of here.”

  “Most of them are, thanks be to God. Lord Ballynahinch, or Matt Howard, to use his real name, is the head of a large group of insurance companies in London. Labor, friend of Tony Blair, in favor of the Northern Ireland peace agreement, technically a hereditary Lord, though the family lost its lands here over a century ago, mostly because of incompetence. Attends the Lords these days because he’s keeping an eye on things for Tony until he can shut it down completely. Matt has made a lot of money. He decided that he would put some of it into acquiring some of the old family holdings. Rebuilt the ruins of a manor house out in Maamtrasna. Not his family house, but a nice enough place. Kind of hobby of his. His wife is more interested in being Lady Ballynahinch than he is in being Lord Ballynahinch. Only reason he’d want to sell his lands around here would be if he needs money, which he doesn’t. Moreover he hired an expensive architect named Tomas O‘Regan to design the house. O’Regan is a bit of a gombeen man, if you ask me. You can count on him to lecture Matt on the importance of the house.”

  “Down in Carraroe where I come from,” Nuala Anne commented, “they think Lord Ballynahinch is a bit of a gombeen man.”

  “Well, Nuala Anne, they wouldn’t be completely wrong, but he’s a charming one and basically honest.”

  We chatted amiably for a few minutes more and then he asked to be excused because he had to make preparations for the arrival of the Russian military tomorrow.

  “Will they put ashore in a rubber boat from a nuclearpowered sub?” I asked innocently.

  “I don’t think …”

  “Pay no attention to the man, Seamus Redmond. Hasn’t he seen too many films on television!”

  “Film” is pronounced in Ireland with a u as in “filum.” The Irish not unreasonably assume that there should be a vowel between the two consonants.

  “Well,” she said, as the manager of the Renvyle House Hotel drifted away, “that was all a crock of shite, wasn’t it, Dermot Michael Coyne?”

  It had not seemed so to me. However, I agreed with her. Her detective modality did not take kindly to disagreement.

  “It was all of that.”

  “As though even the May fly fishermen would keep coming if Renvyle had a ritual of sacrificing guests every week or so, especially if they were foreigners.”

  “Right!”

  “And as though any big hotel company in the world would not sell this place or any other property if the price was high enough.”

  “Right!”

  “And as though they give a good shite about your environmentalists.”

  “Right!”

  “And as though a T.D. from out here would not trade a minister’s post for an opportunity to find a big pot of gold.”

  “Right!”

  “And as though you and I are dumb enough to be taken in by all that shite!”

  “Right!”

  “The Gardai know better too, but like us they can’t figure out what’s the point of the local terrorism.”

  “Russian money laundering!”

  “I told you before that you had the right of it. They’re involved somehow and offended someone, someone very powerful and very wicked.”

  “Like your gombeen man from down below on the road?”

  “Wasn’t I thinking the same thing meself?” she agreed. “Why would Seamus Redmond bother to lie to us?”

  “Maybe because he was told to?”

  “Och, Dermot, you’re the quick one!”

  In the early days of our romance I had resented the fact that she was Holmes to my Doctor Watson (or Poirot to my Captain Hastings, or Flambeau to my Father Brown). I broke up with her, well, tried to break up with her, because Dermot Michael Coyne was no spear-carrier, right?

  Wrong.

  Now I didn’t mind anymore. Well, not much.

  Colm S. MacManus, who waited for us in the lounge for tea, would have perhaps made Ward Committeeman in the Cook County Democratic Organization, but only if there was no real talent in the ward. The media, however, would certainly not describe him as a “key Daley adviser.”

  In white sport coat and light blue trousers, Colm S. was a round man, with a round body, a round bald head, a round face, and a round mouth that was never shut.

  “Ah, Ms. McGrail … So happy to know you and yourself, I believe, a constituent … We’re so proud of you out here … . You prove that the great Irish cultural traditions of the West can speak loudly to the modern world … .

  “’Tis a grand time for Ireland with young women and young men like yourself … . And, Mr. Coyne, your family was from out here too I believe … . An important part of the Irish Diaspora … . I was delighted when my estate agent told me that you had bought one of my bungalows … .

  “We built only three you know … . Yours and Mr. Redmond’s, just up the road … And, of course, mine, which was tragically destroyed the other day … I’m sorry if the explosion caused you any inconvenience … . And terribly troubled by the dastardly attempt on your life … And the Gardai swarming all around … I hope your vacation will not be ruined … .”

  Would he ever run down, I wondered. Well, it was Ms. Holmes’s job to intervene.

  “Wasn’t it a terrible shame to have your new house blown up by them shitehawks? I hope nothing valuable was destroyed.”

  She sighed loudly, and so did the T.D. In that blessed interval of silence, I sat down and signaled to the expectant waitress to bring over the tea and scones. There was no reason to let the tea turn cold. Nuala Anne thanked the waitress, not in Irish but in Spanish, much to that young woman’s delight.

  “Ah, no, not at all … Just the usual summer cottage furniture … Everything covered by insurance, of course … Terrible inconvenience to have to rebuild, don’t you know … And then this horrid murder right here in the hotel last night … . I must say I am not happy at the prospect of having a lot of rich Russians around … . Still, everyone is welcome in Ireland, aren’t they? …”

  “Even your Romanians?”

  “Well, no, they’re not part of the EU, you know … . That young Italian woman you spoke to, on the other hand, her kind is always most welcome … .”

  “Spanish.”

  The man was patently a fool. It did not follow, however, that he was not using his folly to cover something up or that he was not a dangerous fool. Whatever he was hiding, however, was not something that could be completely unknown to the Gardai.

  “This woman from down below, Margot Quinn, seems very interested in the land around here, doesn’t she now? Wanted to buy our house for a condominium development, didn’t she?”

  “That woman is not to be trusted, Ms. McGrail,” he said, his jowls trembling with outrage. “She does not know the meaning of truth. Worse still, she is in league with thoroughly corrupt speculators. I would not want to deal with her if I were you … . And I trust you are not considering selling your bungalow.”

  “Not at the moment … A lot of money to be made out here, isn’t there now?” Nuala interrupted his free-association flow.

  “Oh, yes indeed. West Galway and South Mayo are potentially great resources for Ireland and indeed the whole European Union. Tourism, minerals, skilled workers. It has become increasingly clear that the gove
rnment should direct more funds out here to balance the enormous riches of the East.”

  That was a campaign speech. It meant everything and nothing. Come to think of it, he would never rise beyond the precinct captain role in Chicago.

  “Minerals?” my wife asked innocently.

  “Recent studies … Offshore oil … deep but still there … recoverable at costs not far above present-day prices … Zinc in the mountains … Maybe gold …”

  “Like that under Cro Patrick?”

  “Improbable … Environmentalists wouldn’t let us explore … Good people … Sometimes a bit unreasonable … Still and all … Can’t dig up a holy mountain, can you? …”

  “I suppose not. However, I would think, sir, that the greatest source of income here in Connemara would be from tourists. Expand the Galway airport so that flights from New York or Frankfort could land, a score more places like Renvyle House or Ashford Castle. Lakes, inlets, harbors, marinas, concert halls, casinos and theater, local talent which, as we all know, is quite good, better roads, vast possibilities with little damage to the authentic countryside …”

  I doubted that she believed a word of it. Yet it was a very good show. The woman was dangerous. I had known that, however, for a long, long time.

  The T.D. bubbled ever more rhapsodically as he perceived in my innocent wife a kindred visionary spirit.

  “Obviously someone is trying to frighten the rest of you off,” she said softly as she interrupted a particularly big bubble, “why else the bombing and the murder?”

  It was like she had pricked a child’s balloon.

  “I really cannot understand it,” he said, suddenly dejected. “Clearly we’ve had offers from respectable companies. We are determined not to sell this land to anyone. It is part of Ireland’s natural treasure. The sheep herders up in the mountains are unlike anyone else in Europe. The songs they sing … the stories they tell …”

  “Like the Maamtrasna story?”

  The conversation came to a dead halt.

  “I think that’s more legend than story,” he said fretfully. “It was so long ago.”

  “I have often wondered,” Nuala mused, “whether the ghosts of Johnny Joyce and his wife and mother and children don’t haunt that old cemetery up above beyond.”

  If you did it right you had to combine three such prepositional adverbs in an Irish sentence.

  She had stopped the T.D. dead in his tracks.

  “Oh, that cemetery is gone. Matt Howard built his house on top of it.”

  “He moved the graves?” my wife asked in horror, whether mock or real I didn’t know.

  “No, that would have been impossible. His wife loved the spot. They simply built over it.”

  “And tore down the little church?”

  “There wasn’t much left of it. Actually, the cemetery was an untidy place. Eyesore. Scattered gravestones and such like. No one to keep it up. Local people didn’t protest.”

  The T.D. seemed so surprised by the question that it never occurred to him to wonder how Nuala knew about the cemetery if it had been covered over. Perhaps he thought she had seen it as a child.

  “Well, there was certainly a miscarriage of justice up there … .” Nuala said soothingly. “I would be inclined to guess that your three Russians represented a group that was attempting to outbid another group, perhaps also laundered Russian money lifted from the International Monetary Fund.”

  “Oh, I certainly hope not. It’s all too complicated and evil for our lovely bit of ground here on the far end of Europe.”

  “Or,” I said, “the near end of Long Island.”

  “While we’re thinking of development projects,” my wife continued, “isn’t it time we thought of doing something for them poor folk out on the Aran Island?”

  “Aran!” The T.D. almost choked on his scone.

  “Wouldn’t it be brilliant altogether to have three luxury hotels, one on each island. Each one would have its own heated swimming pool, its own eighteen-hole championship golf course, its own convention center, and its own condominium development for Yanks or Germans or even Russians who wanted to own a piece of Irish history. Wouldn’t such a scheme mean hundreds of jobs for the poor natives, maybe thousands of jobs? Isn’t it time to end the poverty out there once and for all?”

  Colm S. MacManus hesitated.

  “Clearly the idea is brilliant, Nuala Anne … . I don’t think the time is quite right for it now. I quite agree, however, that we need ingenuity and imagination to create parity between the West and Dublin.”

  “Couldn’t we have artists’ colonies and theater companies which would create permanently an enclave of Irish-language culture for the whole world, kind of a Gaelic culture museum?”

  The T.D. remembered an appointment he had with a constituent and pleaded to be excused. He rolled out of the lounge as if he were a pastel, multicolored balloon pursued by a Russian clown with a knife.

  “You scared the shite out of him, Nuala Anne,” I said.

  “I thought I was very persuasive … . Give the poor man a couple of days and he’ll be whispering me scheme into the ear of any gombeen man who wants to listen.”

  Absently she buttered a scone, drenched it in strawberry preserves, and plunked it into my mouth—with the same reverence a priest might have put the host on the mouth of an elderly person who did not want to receive the Eucharist in the hand. It was an old ritual between us with a deeply erotic overtone.

  “I don’t know why I mentioned Maamtrasna, Dermot Michael. I really don’t. It scares me now.”

  “The dead can’t hurt us, Nuala Anne.”

  “I know that, Dermot. They can only help us if they want. ’Tis the living that scare me.”

  She lightly buttered a piece of scone for herself.

  “What are they all so worried about, Dermot?” she said, resting her chin—a determined chin, I might remark—on the pyramid of her fingers. “Both he and Seamus Redmond are worried about something. Maybe there’s a deal about to go down, as you Yanks would say, that would make them all a lot of money. Now someone else, more powerful perhaps and certainly more dangerous, is trying to edge into it. And those poor Russian fellas got in the way.”

  “We must talk to Lord and Lady Ballynahinch.”

  “Won’t I ring them up and tell them we’re coming up because of our interest in the Maamtrasna affair? That will scare the living shite out of them, won’t it?”

  “It will that.”

  “Well, Dermot Michael Coyne, let’s go home and change into our golf togs. This time I’m going to beat you.”

  14

  “WELL,” SHE said as we walked back to our bungalow, “neither one of them fellas is a master criminal are they now? Sure, wouldn’t they have a hard time organizing a crooked football pool?”

  The sun was still shining brightly, but the wind was picking up and the breakers were growing louder. There might be a “blow” coming in from Long Island or some such place. Then the rain would be “hard” instead of “soft.” We would consider an Irish “soft” rain, by the way, a torrential downpour in Yank Land.

  “You have the right of it,” I agreed.

  “Och, they’re a dead end, I’m afraid. The Gardaí will be sniffing around the financial world. They’ll be finding out that, while there’s a lot of talk about developing the harbors and inlets and lakes out here, there’s no real money for it yet, and not likely to be … . The weather is daunting, if you take me meaning, and picturesque will take you just so far.”

  “Actually, I thought you missed an obvious benefit of your Aran scheme … . You would have to build a marina on each island … .”

  “And a friggin’ tunnel into Galway … and, faith, why not a factory to mass-produce Aran Island sweaters.”

  “You ought to write it up and send it to the Irish Times.”

  “You’re the author in the family, Dermot Michael Coyne … . And wouldn’t there be amadons who would take it seriously like that poor round gobshite
of a man!

  Then she turned thoughtful. I thought it best not to disturb her. She was on an emotional roller coaster, steeper and wilder than her usual mercurial romp through life.

  On the way back to Renvyle House, I asked, “How come we switched from tennis to golf?”

  “I’m sick of being the domineering bitch who always gets her way. You really shouldn’t put up with me, Dermot Michael Coyne. I’m a friggin’ spoiled brat.”

  OK, WISE GUY, YOU DON’T RESPOND TO WHAT SHE SAYS BUT TO WHAT SHE MEANS. LET’S SEE YOU FIELD THAT HOT GROUND BALL.

  I tried, “Annie McGrail didn’t raise any spoiled brats.”

  “Hmm,” she snorted. “Doesn’t yourself say all the time that I’m bossy?”

  “Wasn’t Ma bossy and didn’t I love her?”

  My grandmother, also from Carraoe, was both bossy and conniving and I adored her. Nuala, who had translated her diary for me, identified with her. She even sometimes seems to be claiming that she heard from her, even though Ma, as we called her, had been dead for seven years. I chose to believe that she was merely asserting, sometimes with remarkable accuracy, what Ma would have said under the circumstances.

  “You never win any of the arguments. You wanted to play golf, I wanted to play tennis, so you were willing to play tennis just to keep me happy.”

  “No,” I said. “I knew if I agreed too easily, you’d switch to golf!”

  “Go ’long with you, Dermot Michael Coyne. I’m serious. You never win any of the arguments.”

  “Only the serious ones.”

  “For instance?”

  “Coming over for these two months, buying a bungalow, taking your medicine.”

  She pondered that.

  “’Tis true,” she said reluctantly. “I guess I’m confused. Maybe I should take two of them pills every day!”

  “Don’t you dare!”

  “Och, I’m just funning you, Dermot! … Would you look at that … the Gardaf are checking golfers! … Me name is Nuala Coyne and I’m not a guest at the hotel and this is me husband, Dermot Coyne, and we have playing privileges here.”