Each feared that they should be left alone with one of the others.
After a moment both Pascal and Rosemary spoke at the same time, both inquiring after Emily and her overdue arrival.
A little yelp of delight escaped Eban and he swirled the amber scotch in the bottom of his tumbler, a smile playing about his lips.
Pascal Loncle had the distinct impression that his guest was perversely enjoying these moments of self-conscious discomfort.
They all jumped a little when Emily knocked at the door.
As she entered and reached the table, clutching a pretty box of chocolates as a gift for Pascal and panting a little due to her lateness, the candlelight seemed to be caught and held by her skin, which appeared flawless and brilliantly translucent.
Immediately, all of her fellow diners were taken aback, as if seeing something in her for the first time.
The fatigue and worry of the last week had drained her so that she appeared delicately fragile and otherworldly in the trembling shadow and flame from the candles.
For a moment it seemed as if she might have sat for one of the Dutch Masters three centuries before.
Emily noticed that they were staring at her and self-consciously pushed back a lock of hair that had been pinned high but had fallen delicately across her face.
“Dear Emily… we were getting worried about you,” clucked Rosemary and stepped closer to her, reaching up and tucking the offending lock behind her ear like a mother hen.
Emily stepped backward, just managing to resist an urge to raise an arm in protest. “Sorry everyone, I was busy… with things…” She tailed off.
“Might I suggest a little music?” offered Pascal, and hit the play button on his iPad.
A high clarinet refrain pierced the air as Benny Goodman and his big band joined the supper troupe.
“Oh, excellent choice as always Pascal,” purred Rosemary as she sashayed a little on her toes, eyes closed, making the others feel uncomfortable. “We should pass a law that this is the only music to be played in the building!”
She looked directly at Eban when she said this, and he knew that she was referring to the evening some months back when – following a stand-up row with Rosemary over emptying bins or replacing toilet paper or some such – he had returned to his room and blasted the entire Space Ritual album by Hawkwind at full tilt.
Sure it was childish, but at the time it felt somehow like taking back control.
“I’m not sure that our Lutheran landlords would agree with that Rosemary… they were in good voice this morning.”
It was Emily, who was also aware of that incident and had spotted the potential slight intended for Eban. She was good at that sort of thing. Reading the situation and saying the right thing at the right time.
“Shall we be seated?” suggested Pascal and all three took their places as he returned from the kitchen with the first course.
There was much oooing and ahhhing and general praise from the ladies.
“Does anyone feel like they’re in an episode of Come Dine With Me?” joked Eban, and took a healthy pull on his wine glass.
“I can’t think what you mean,” shot back Rosemary dismissively.
“Oh come on Rosemary, it’s that TV show… you know… we’ve often talked about it,” said Emily.
Rosemary glared askance at the younger woman and said with a steely tone, “No Emily… you must be mistaken.”
The music paused before the next track began.
In the silence, in the moment, something passed between the diners.
For Pascal it signalled that his last-minute reticence toward having this event in the first place may not have been misplaced.
For Emily it was a reminder that there was clearly an alpha female in the room and it was most assuredly not her. Rosemary’s matriarchal dominance was not going to be challenged in front of these men.
Only Eban did not feel cowed or apprehensive.
Given all that had gone before this week and all that was still to come, he no longer felt that he had anything to lose by failing to humour this harridan.
And although he did not take the bait at this precise moment in deference to Pascal and his hospitality, part of him seethed inside as he thought to himself, bring it on, bitch!
*
The Moroccan stew was delicious and was served with bowls of steaming hot, fluffy white rice and couscous.
Eban marvelled at his host’s skill in seamlessly keeping the wine glasses charged and somehow disappearing to the kitchen to replenish the table with side dishes and breads, then reappearing effortlessly to add some quip or bon mot to the dinner conversation.
By the time the company were imbibing their dessert wine, all of the awkward silences of the earlier evening had been eradicated, washed away on a fair tide of liquid conviviality.
As the four had few mutual friends, most of the conversation revolved around people in the news, the arts and current affairs.
By coffee, Rosemary was holding forth on the former evils of the Apartheid regime, and what lessons the South African peace process might have for Northern Ireland.
Pascal chided her gently that – this being Belfast – as a rule, he did not allow politics to be brought to the dinner table.
But Rosemary, who did not have a good head for alcohol, was in full swing. She then turned her attention to the topic of cultural identity.
“Now take your crowd…” she said, slightly slurring her words and pointing somewhat aggressively at Eban with a teaspoon.
“My crowd?” asked Eban, keen to hear what was coming next.
“Yes: the Orangemen… what’s all this nonsense about turning the Twelfth of July into a carnival?” she snorted. “Orangefest or some such nonsense… really…”
She looked to Pascal and Emily, eyebrows raised. “Have you heard about this?”
“My crowd?” Eban repeated. This time with a hint of incredulity in his voice.
“All these protests… this flag-waving nonsense… the truth is, you have no culture of your own.” She made it sound like a personal attack on Eban.
Pascal interrupted. “Has anyone been to see the new play at the Lyric?” He eyed the Lambrusco edgily. It was around now that he had hoped to make his grand revelation.
His efforts were in vain.
Rosemary was warming to her topic and it was clearly one she had exercised at another time, in other company.
“There does not exist – neither could there ever exist – any legitimate or worthwhile expression of a valid or meaningful cultural contribution emerging from the Ulster Unionist or Loyalist community.”
Emily could sense where this was going and why.
“Come on now Rosemary, that’s not very… nice.” She winced on hearing herself use the term.
Rosemary did not extend her the courtesy of a reply.
Instead she turned her petition toward Pascal, a student of Art History and a learned man in her estimation. She cited as her logic for this pronouncement that – unlike, say, the great Protestant poets, playwrights and novelists who embellish the literary history of the Republic of Ireland – no repressive, sectarian or reactionary state could ever produce art or cultural expression of worthwhile or lasting merit.
As if by way of empirical evidence, a quick inventory was offered.
An entire pantheon of outstandingly successful musicians, writers and actors were presented, all of them first or second generation Catholic Irish and many of them drawing their very inspiration from the muse of Celtic mysticism, Catholicism, dispossession and suffering.
To further support this, she asked the company to consider if any enduring and influential artists had emerged from Apartheid Afrikaans society, the Zionist Israeli state or indeed Nazi Germany for that matter?
“No,” she insisted, “great art in general, and edgy, subversive popular culture in particular, remain exclusively the unimpeachable birthright of the dispossessed, the revolutionary and the freedom fighte
r.”
Eban had suffered this kind of liberal fascism many times before when living in London.
But to have to listen to it here, now, from this self-righteous, stuck-up cow…
It was just too much.
He knew from experience that any spirited defence on the matter would render him a bellicose Paisleyite and monarchist lickspittle… once he had left the room, naturally.
Instead, he forced a smile through gritted teeth.
He had some years ago reached the conclusion that he was to be forever held prisoner in the netherworld of the socially mobile.
Never being able to entirely return to his ‘own’.
But never being fully accepted by people like those who now sat around the table.
When Eban eventually spoke, he surprised himself with the measured and calm tone that he managed to marshal. He held his hands aloft in mock surrender.
“Okay… you got me… I’m a member of the least fashionable community in Western Europe.”
He turned toward Pascal and Emily, addressing them directly, hoping the insult was not lost on Rosemary.
Eban closed his eyes for a moment to gather his thoughts and then began falteringly.
“It is true that certain expressions of my – of our… of Protestant cultural identity could be taken as offensive… by the other side, I mean, and yes, Stormont was built on sectarian abuses of the Catholics, but there’s another side to all of this… the collapse of heavy industry… the breakdown of working class neighbourhoods… the IRA terror campaign waged against them… not to mention their own organisations on their backs…”
The words just seemed to tumble out of him.
He could see they were impressed. They were listening to him now. A side he hadn’t shown them before. It encouraged him to continue.
“… and in direct rule; in laws dumped on them over the last thirty years by – dear ladies – the English.”
He paused for effect. “Present company excepted of course.”
“Go on,” said Pascal, pulling the cheese board toward him.
“Trying to explain this… this…”
He reached for the term, eyes closed in concentration.
“… this experience has proved a disaster. The ‘flags’ protests – just another example: legitimate concerns about a threat to political and cultural identity down the drain with the first bottle thrown at the police lines.”
Christ, it was like an out of body experience. He heard himself speak but could barely believe it. He sounded like a bloody politician!
It was then he realised what had happened.
That he had somehow managed to mash together everything he’d been reading in the papers, watching on television news and listening to on the radio for the past number of weeks.
He seemed to have effortlessly and unconsciously consumed and now regurgitated them.
But with a clarity of thought and expression previously untroubled and now a revealation to his companions and indeed to himself.
And he was doing so in this perfectly cohesive and credible manner.
This was a talent previously unrecognised in him, and he was revelling in it.
For it was both the incongruity of his entreaty, plus the plausibility that he had brought to his delivery, that had rendered his dinner companions transfixed.
It just seemed to flow out of him.
It felt like a cocaine rush.
Rosemary Payne was having none of it.
“No culture can live if it attempts to be exclusive. Mahatma Gandhi said that!”
She spat this at him like it was some kind of deal-clincher.
That it somehow invalidated everything that he had said before.
He looked at her and grinned.
Despite all he had drank, his mouth felt as dry as sand.
He noticed for the first time that his shirt was sticking to his back with cold sweat.
He saw the smug conceit of her cosy certainties and comfortable allegiances, and in that moment decided to consciously and wilfully devalue all the rational capital he had just accrued.
It would be, after all, much in the manner of the community that he was even now seeking to defend, and what he imagined his dinner companions had really expected from him all along.
His people.
His tribe.
Council house loser.
Street-corner-boy scum.
Let’s join the rush to the bottom.
Let’s give them what they want.
“And what the fuck would you know about it… you fat, dried-up, Fenian-loving cunt?”
Boom!
Self-detonation.
With extreme prejudice.
Everyone’s jaws hit the ground.
“And I’ll tell you something else: all your pious, pointless research never saved one nigger!”
“My God, EB… how could you?!” cried Emily, horrified at this deliberate transgression of manners.
“Eban… Rosemary… no…” was all that Pascal could manage as he looked back and forth between the two, open-mouthed.
Rosemary was dumbstruck.
Eban noticed that his lungs felt like they were made of lead, and they protested angrily for lack of air by producing a lacerating pain across his shoulder blades.
But adrenaline was flooding his body.
He had allowed himself to be pulled back into the vortex.
Back down into the ancient enmities he had sought for years to rise above.
His left upper arm throbbed like a bad toothache.
Undeterred, he turned his fire on Emily.
“You don’t belong here either… you haven’t got a fucking clue.”
Emily looked a little frightened, and very betrayed. “I know you’ve been having a difficult time Eban, but—”
Eban turned to Pascal, clammy, his shirt darkened with perspiration. White flecks of spit around the corners of his mouth.
“Did you know when Emily first arrived in Belfast, her very first day here – ecologically sound as ever, in that English-Guardian-liberal-guilt kinda way – she telephoned the Solid Fuel Advisory Board to complain about the air quality? First fuckin’ day… and she was told yes, there was indeed a policy to promote smokeless zones in the greater Belfast area, and no, they had no immediate plans to take the culprits to task.”
Emily pleaded. “Eban, don’t…”
He had wanted to laugh in her face.
How could she know that this was just another one of those infuriating inconsistencies of civil society in Northern Ireland?
“She was livid, weren’t you pet? ‘He couldn’t give me one good reason why no-one had been prosecuted’… that’s what she told me – Christ, three thousand dead and this is what she comes up with on her first day here!”
Sweat was running into his eyes now and the salt burned and stung them.
He rubbed at them with his shirt cuffs.
He saw that Pascal was looking at him strangely.
Rosemary was gathering her things together in outraged mortification.
Eban stood unsteadily.
“Fuck, did she have a wakeup call coming… she still stiffens at the sight of an armed policeman, for Christ’s sake. Where I came from no-one was prosecuted for filling the air with coal smoke and sulphur dioxide or for failing to pay a television licence, or car tax, or their fucking rates. Or for axing the neighbour’s dog to death if it barked through the fucking night!”
“I’ll show myself out,” announced Rosemary, stung that her host had neither moved to her assistance nor defended her honour more robustly.
Eban ignored her, still speaking to the others. “Coal fires mucking up the environment? What would a couple of blazing cars and a bus do to it, then? What about the eleventh night bonfires – have you see the size of those fuckers?!”
“My God… I am so sorry for you… you are such a prisoner of the past,” whispered Pascal.
Eban ignored him.
“I can see
why you lot might think Belfast was just like any other big British city. Boots the chemist, Marks and Spencer’s, HMV… but it’s not, my friends… oh no… it’s not!”
He reached for an open bottle of wine, sloshed the contents into his glass and onto the table, then gulped it back.
“I have an announcement to make,” murmured Emily.
Pascal looked at her in puzzlement. “Actually, so do I…”
“I am leaving for home tomorrow morning for a job interview, and I intend to stay there until I get one – a job I mean. My rent is paid up to the end of the month.”
Eban had been feeling nauseous.
Now the room was spinning.
Why hadn’t she said something?
He wanted to talk with her alone.
He reached out a hand toward her and almost lurched into the drinks cabinet.
Bottles clinked and rattled and he swayed backward.
“Pascal… thank you for everything.” Emily moved toward the door.
Again Eban tried to move toward her, tried to speak to her, but this time it felt like some unseen force was pushing him hard in the chest, backward, downward.
His back pressed against the far wall and he slid down it slowly, leaving a broad ribbon of wet sweat-mark the length of it.
Until he sat, wretched and rasping on the ground, gulping in air, his face the colour of gravel.
The others gaped at him.
“Can someone call me an ambulance please?”
“You’re an ambulance,” said Rosemary Payne, summoning up all the disdain and indifference she could muster, before turning and leaving the room.
*
As they strapped him onto the stretcher, the chirpy paramedic assured Eban that it was his lucky day.
“Had this been an ordinary ambulance call-out, mate, you’d be a goner. Lucky there was a rapid response cardio-crash team in the area. You can thank your French mate over there for that.”
Pascal and Emily stood in the doorway of the house, washed by the flashing blue lights.
She, her arms folded tightly across her chest and shivering.
He still nursing a glass of cognac in his hands.
Despite the commotion of carrying Eban downstairs, the oxygen mask, the drip, the staccato barking of the men’s walkie-talkies, Rosemary had resolutely remained in her room with the door closed.
White Church, Black Mountain Page 28
