The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘Yes, Jack,’ said Ned, settling himself in his seat with sudden gravity, ‘but what else can you do with Time?’

  ‘Ah, this isn’t philosophy, man,’ Martin said testily. ‘This is – is se-e-e-rious, I tell you.’

  ‘I know how serious it is, all right,’ Ned said complacently, ‘because I was only saying it to Larry Cronin ten minutes ago. Where the hell is our youth gone?’

  ‘But that’s only a waste of time, too, man,’ Martin said impatiently. ‘You couldn’t call that youth. Drinking bad porter in pubs after closing time and listening to somebody singing “The Rose of Tralee”. That’s not life, man.’

  ‘No,’ said Ned, nodding, ‘but what is life?’

  ‘How the hell would I know?’ asked Martin. ‘I suppose you have to go out and look for it the way I did. You’re not going to find the bloody thing here. You have to go south, where they have sunlight and wine and good cookery and women with a bit of go in them.’

  ‘And don’t you think it would be the same thing there?’ Ned asked relentlessly while Martin raised his eyes to the ceiling and moaned.

  ‘Oh, God, dust and ashes! Dust and ashes! Don’t we get enough of that every Sunday from Clery? And Clery knows no more about it than we do.’

  Now, Ned was very fond of Martin, and admired the vitalitywith which in his forties he still pursued a fancy, but all the same he could not let him get away with the simpleminded notion that life was merely a matter of topography.

  ‘That is a way life has,’ he pronounced oracularly. ‘You think you’re seeing it, and it turns out it was somewhere else at the time. It’s like women – the girl you lose is the one that could have made you happy. I suppose there are people in the south wishing they could be in some wild place like this – I admit it’s not likely, but I suppose it could happen. No, Jack, we might as well resign ourselves to the fact that, wherever the hell life was, it wasn’t where we were looking for it.’

  ‘For God’s sake, man!’ Martin exclaimed irritably. ‘You talk like a man of ninety-five.’

  ‘I’m forty-two,’ Ned said with quiet emphasis, ‘and I have no illusions left. You still have a few. Mind,’ he went on with genuine warmth, ‘I admire you for it. You were never a fighting man like Cronin or myself, but you put up a better fight than either of us. But Nature has her claws in you as well. You’re light and airy now, but what way will you be this time next week? And even now,’ he added threateningly, ‘even at this minute, you’re only that way because you’ve escaped from the guilt for a little while. You’ve got down the drainpipe and you’re walking the town in your night clothes, but sooner or later they’ll bring you back and make you put your trousers on.’

  ‘But it isn’t guilt, Ned,’ Martin interrupted. ‘It’s my stomach. I can’t keep it up.’

  ‘It isn’t only your stomach, Jack,’ Ned said triumphantly, having at last steered himself into the open sea of argument. ‘It’s not your stomach that makes you avoid me in the Main Street.’

  ‘Avoid you?’ Martin echoed, growing red. ‘When did I avoid you?’

  ‘You did avoid me, Jack,’ said Ned with a radiant smile of forgiveness. ‘I saw you, and, what’s more, you said it to Cronin. Mind,’ he added generously, ‘I’m not blaming you. It’s not your fault. It’s the guilt. You’re pursued by guilt the way I’m pursued by a sense of duty, and they’ll bring the pair of us to our graves. I can even tell you the way you’ll die. You’ll be up and down to the chapel ten times a day for fear once wasn’t enough, with your head bowed for fear you’d catch a friend’s eye and be led astray, beating your breast, lighting candles, and counting indulgences, and every time you see a priest your face will light up as if he was a pretty girl, and you’ll raise your hat and say “Yes, father,” and “No, father,” and “Father, whatever you please.” And it won’t be your fault. That’s the real tragedy of life, Jack – we reap what we sow.’

  ‘I don’t know what the hell is after coming over you,’ Martin said in bewilderment. ‘You – you’re being positively personal, MacCarthy. I never tried to avoid anybody. I resent that statement. And the priests know well enough the sort I am. I never tried to conceal it.’

  ‘I know, Jack, I know,’ Ned said gently, swept away by the flood of his own melancholy rhetoric, ‘and I never accused you of it. I’m not being personal, because it’s not a personal matter. It’s Nature working through you. It works through me as well, only it gets me in a different way. I turn every damn thing into a duty, and in the end I’m fit for nothing. And I know the way I’ll die too. I’ll disintegrate into a husband, a father, a schoolmaster, a local librarian, and fifteen different sort of committee officials, and none of them with justification enough to remain alive – unless I die on a barricade.’

  ‘What barricade?’ asked Martin, who found all this hard to follow.

  ‘Any barricade,’ said Ned wildly. ‘I don’t care what ’tis for so long as ’tis a fight. I don’t want to be a messenger boy. I’m not even a good one. Here I am, arguing with you in a pub instead of doing what I was sent to do. Whatever the hell that was,’ he added with a hearty laugh as he realized that for the moment – only for the moment, of course – he had forgotten what it was. ‘Well, that beats everything,’ he said with a grin. ‘But you see what I mean. What duty does for you. I’m after forgetting what I came for.’

  ‘Ah, that’s only because it wasn’t important,’ said Martin, who was anxious to talk of Paris.

  ‘That’s where you’re wrong again, Jack,’ said Ned, really beginning to enjoy the situation. ‘Maybe, ’twas of no importance to us but it was probably of great importance to Nature. It’s we that aren’t important. What was the damn thing? My memory has gone to hell. One moment. I have to close my eyes and empty my mind. That’s the only way I have of beating it.’

  He closed his eyes and lay back limply in his seat, though even through his self-induced trance he smiled lightly at the absurdity of it all.

  ‘No good,’ he said, starting out of it briskly. ‘It’s an extraordinary thing, the way it disappears as if the ground opened and swallowed it. And there’s nothing you can do. ’Twill come back of its own accord, and there won’t be rhyme nor reason to that either. I was reading an article about a German doctor who says you forget because it’s too unpleasant to think about.’

  ‘It’s not a haircut?’ Martin asked helpfully, but Ned, a tidy man, just shook his head.

  ‘Or clothes?’ Martin went on. ‘Clothes are another great thing with them.’

  ‘No,’ Ned said frowning. ‘I’m sure ’twas nothing for myself.’

  ‘Or for the kids? Shoes or the like?’

  ‘Something flashed across my mind just then,’ murmured Ned.

  ‘If it’s not that it must be groceries.’

  ‘I don’t see how it could,’ Ned said argumentatively. ‘Williams delivers them every week, and they’re always the same.’

  ‘In that case,’ Martin said flatly, ‘it’s bound to be something to eat. They’re always forgetting things – bread or butter or milk.’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Ned said in bewilderment, ‘but I’m damned if I know what. Jim!’ he called to the barman. ‘If you were sent on a message today, what would you say ’twould be?’

  ‘Fish, Mr Mac,’ the barman replied promptly. ‘Every Friday.’

  ‘Fish!’ repeated Martin exultantly. ‘The very thing!’

  ‘Fish?’ repeated Ned, feeling that some familiar chord had been struck. ‘I suppose it could be. I know I offered to bring it to Tom Hurley, and I was having a bit of an argument with Larry Cronin about it. I remember he said he rather liked it.’

  ‘Like it?’ cried Martin. ‘I can’t stand the damn stuff, but the housekeeper has to have it for the kids.’

  ‘Ah, ’tis fish, all right, Mr Mac,’ the barman said knowingly. ‘In an hour’s time you wouldn’t be able to forget it with the smell around the town.’

  ‘Well, obviously,’ Ned said, resigning himself to it, �
�it has something to do with fish. It may not be exactly fish, but it’s something like it.’

  ‘Whether it is or not, she’ll take it as kindly meant,’ said Martin comfortingly. ‘Like flowers. Women in this country seem to think they’re alike.’

  ‘It’s extraordinary,’ said Ned as they went out. ‘We have minds we have less control of than we have of our cars. Wouldn’t you think with all their modern science they’d find some way of curing a memory like that?’

  Two hours later the two friends, more loquacious than ever, drove up to Ned’s house for lunch. ‘Mustn’t forget the fish,’ Ned said as he reached back in the car for it. At that moment he heard the wail of a newborn infant and went very white.

  ‘What the hell is that, Ned?’ Martin asked in alarm.

  ‘That, Martin,’ said Ned, ‘is the fish, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I won’t disturb you, now, Ned,’ Martin said hastily, getting out of the car. ‘I’ll get a snack from Tom Hurley.’

  ‘Courage, man!’ said Ned frowningly. ‘Here you are and here you’ll stop. But why fish, Martin? That’s what I can’t understand. Why did I think it was fish?’

  OLD-AGE PENSIONERS

  ON FRIDAY evening as I went up the sea road for my evening walk I heard the row blowing up at the other side of the big ash-tree, near the jetty. I was sorry for the sergeant, a decent poor man. When a foreign government imposed a cruel law, providing for the upkeep of all old people over seventy, it never gave a thought to the policeman who would have to deal with the consequences. You see, our post office was the only one within miles. That meant that each week we had to endure a procession of old-age pensioners from Caheragh, the lonely, rocky promontory to the west of us, inhabited – so I am told – by a strange race of people, alleged to be descendants of a Portuguese crew who were driven ashore there in days gone by. That I couldn’t swear to; in fact, I never could see trace or tidings of any foreign blood in Caheragh, but I was never one for contradicting the wisdom of my ancestors. But government departments have no wisdom, ancestral or any other kind, so the Caheraghs drew their pensions with us, and the contact with what we considered civilization being an event in their lonesome lives, they usually brought their families to help in drinking them. That was what upset us. To see a foreigner drunk in our village on what we rightly considered our money was more than some of us could stand.

  So Friday, as I say, was the sergeant’s busy day. He had a young guard called Coleman to assist him, but Coleman had troubles of his own. He was a poet, poor fellow, and desperately in love with a publican’s daughter in Coole. The girl was incapable of making up her mind about him, though her father wanted her to settle down; he told her all young men had a tendency to write poetry up to a certain age, and that even himself had done it a few times until her mother knocked it out of him. But her view was that poetry, like drink, was a thing you couldn’t have knocked out of you, and that the holy all of it would be that Coleman would ruin the business on her. Every week we used to study the Coole Times, looking for another poem, either a heart-broken ‘Lines to D—’, saying that Coleman would never see her more, or a ‘Song’. ‘Song’ always meant they were after making it up. The sergeant had them all cut out and pasted in an album; he thought young Coleman was lost in the police.

  When I was coming home the row was still on, and I went inside the wall to have a look. There were two Caheraghs: Mike Mountain and his son, Patch. Mike was as lean as a rake, a gaunt old man with mad blue eyes. Patch was an upstanding fellow but drunk to God and the world. The man who was standing up for the honour of the village was Flurry Riordan, another old-age pensioner. Flurry, as you’d expect from a bachelor of that great age, was quarrelsome and scurrilous. Fifteen years before, when he was sick and thought himself dying, the only thing troubling his mind was that a brother he had quarrelled with would profit by his death, and a neighbour had come to his cottage one morning to find Flurry fast asleep with his will written in burnt stick on the whitewashed wall over his bed.

  The sergeant, a big, powerful man with a pasty face and deep pouches under his eyes, gave me a nod as I came in.

  ‘Where’s Guard Coleman from you?’ I asked.

  ‘Over in Coole with the damsel,’ he replied.

  Apparently the row was about a Caheragh boat that had beaten one of our boats in the previous year’s regatta. You’d think a thing like that would have been forgotten, but a bachelor of seventy-six has a long memory for grievances. Sitting on the wall overlooking the jetty, shadowed by the boughs of the ash, Flurry asked with a sneer, with such wonderful sailors in Caheragh wasn’t it a marvel that they couldn’t sail past the Head – an unmistakable reference to the supposed Portuguese origin of the clan. Patch replied that whatever the Caheragh people sailed it wasn’t bum-boats, meaning, I suppose, the pleasure boat in which Flurry took summer visitors about the bay.

  ‘What sailors were there ever in Caheragh?’ snarled Flurry. ‘If they had men against them instead of who they had they wouldn’t get off so easy.’

  ‘Begor, ’tis a pity you weren’t rowing yourself, Flurry,’ said the sergeant gravely. ‘I’d say you could still show them a few things.’

  ‘Ten years ago I might,’ said Flurry bitterly, because the sergeant had touched on another very sore subject; his being dropped from the regatta crews, a thing he put down entirely to the brother’s intrigues.

  ‘Why then, indeed,’ said the sergeant, ‘I’d back you still against a man half your age. Why don’t you and Patch have a race now and settle it?’

  ‘I’ll race him,’ shouted Patch with the greatest enthusiasm, rushing for his own boat. ‘I’ll show him.’

  ‘My boat is being mended,’ said Flurry shortly.

  ‘You could borrow Sullivan’s,’ said the sergeant.

  Flurry only looked at the ground and spat. Either he wasn’t feeling energetic or the responsibility was too much for him. It would darken his last days to be beaten by a Caheragh. Patch sat in his shirt-sleeves in the boat, resting his reeling head on his oars. For a few minutes it looked as if he was out for the evening. Then he suddenly raised his face to the sky and let out the wild Caheragh war-whoop, which sounded like all the seagulls in Ireland practising unison-shrieking. The effect on Flurry was magical. At that insulting sound he leaped from the wall with an oath, pulled off his coat, and rushed to the slip to another boat. The sergeant, clumsy and heavy-footed, followed, and the pair of them sculled away to where Sullivan’s boat was moored. Patch followed them with his eyes.

  ‘What’s wrong with you, you old coward?’ he yelled. ‘Row your own boat, you old sod, you!’

  ‘Never mind,’ said Mike Mountain from the top of the slip. ‘You’ll beat him, boat or no boat.… He’ll beat him, ladies and gentlemen,’ he said confidently to the little crowd that had gathered. ‘Ah, Jase, he’s a great man in a boat.’

  ‘I’m a good man on a long course,’ Patch shouted modestly, his eyes searching each of us in turn. ‘I’m slow getting into my stroke.’

  ‘At his age I was the same,’ confided his father. ‘A great bleddy man in a boat. Of course, I can’t do it now – eighty-one; drawing on for it. I haven’t the same energy.’

  ‘Are you ready, you old coward?’ shrieked Patch to Flurry who was fumbling savagely in the bottom of Sullivan’s boat for the rowlocks.

  ‘Shut up, you foreign importation!’ snarled Flurry.

  He found the rowlocks and pulled the boat round in a couple of neat strokes; then hung on his oars till the sergeant got out. For seventy-six he was still a lively man.

  ‘Ye know the race now?’ said the sergeant. ‘To the island and back.’

  ‘Round the island, sergeant,’ said Mike Mountain plaintively. ‘Patch is like me; he’s slow to start.’

  ‘Very good, very good,’ said the sergeant. ‘Round the island it is, Flurry. Are ye ready now, both of ye?’

  ‘Ready,’ grunted Flurry.

  ‘Yahee!’ shrieked Patch again, brandishing an oa
r over his head like a drumstick.

  ‘Mind yourself now, Patch!’ said the sergeant who seemed to be torn between his duty as an officer of the peace and his duty as umpire. ‘Go! – ye whoors,’ he added under his breath so that only a few of us heard him.

  They did their best. It is hard enough for a man with a drop in to go straight even when he’s facing his object, but it is too much altogether to expect him to do it backwards. Flurry made for the Red Devil, the doctor’s sailing boat, and Patch, who seemed to be fascinated by the very appearance of Flurry, made for him, and the two of them got there almost simultaneously. At one moment it looked as if it would be a case of drowning, at the next of manslaughter. There was a splash, a thud, and a shout, and I saw Flurry raise his oar as if to lay out Patch. But the presence of the sergeant probably made him self-conscious, for instead he used it to push off Patch’s boat.

  ‘God Almighty!’ cried Mike Mountain with an air of desperation, ‘did ye ever see such a pair of misfortunate bosthoons? Round the island, God blast ye!’

  But Patch, who seemed to have an absolute fixation on Flurry, interpreted this as a command to go round him, and, seeing that Flurry wasn’t at all sure what direction he was going in, this wasn’t as easy as it looked. He put up one really grand spurt, and had just established himself successfully across Flurry’s bow when it hit him and sent him spinning like a top, knocking one oar clean out of his hand. Sullivan’s old boat was no good for racing, but it was grand for anything in the nature of tank warfare, and as Flurry had by this time got into his stroke, it would have taken an Atlantic liner to stop him. Patch screamed with rage, and then managed to retrieve his oar and follow. The shock seemed to have given him new energy.

  Only gradually was the sergeant’s strategy beginning to reveal itself to me. The problem was to get the Caheraghs out of the village without a fight, and Flurry and Patch were spoiling for one. Anything that would exhaust the pair of them would make his job easier. It is not a method recommended in Police Regulations, but it has the distinct advantage of leaving no unseemly aftermath of summonses and cross-summonses which, if neglected, may in time turn into a regular vendetta. As a spectacle it really wasn’t much. Darkness had breathed on the mirror of the water. A bonfire on the island set a pendulum reflection swinging lazily to and fro, darkening the bay at either side of it. There was a milky light over the hill of Croghan; the moon was rising.