The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  Feeley smiled his curving smile. “The Fallons do be off to Spain. Isn’t that the height of it? The Irish running off to the Continent for their holidays while the Continentals come here for theirs. Oh, the world is a funny place, all right.”

  His hand flipped toward an armchair. “Have a seat, will you? What was the name again?”

  “Mangan. James Mangan.”

  “Mangan? We have that name here in this very parish.”

  “I know. That’s why I came. I think some of them might be my relatives.”

  Feeley’s sideways eyes slid around in his head. “Be damn and you have the look of a Mangan, so you have. I’d say you might be related all right to some of them around here. My wife is related to Mangans. My wife, Una. That lady you just saw.”

  “Is that so?”

  “It is. Now, you’re looking for a B and B, is that it?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Bed and breakfast. How long would you be thinking of staying?”

  “Well, it depends. A few weeks?”

  Feeley reached up and carefully removed a folder from the seemingly inextricable mass of papers on the top of his desk. “Bad time of year,” he mused to himself, his thick fingers flipping through sheets. “Most of the B-and-B trade is in the summer, of course, but there’s still one or two. No, that one’s closed and let’s see, there’s just Mrs. . . . Mullin . . . Mrs. Mullin . . . Mrs. Mullin . . . here we are. No. Closed in December and January. Well, now.” He stared at the folder, then slapped his hand down on it. His dolphin head craned up as though someone were about to throw him a fish. “A possibility!” he said. “There is a house up beyond in Duntally, a two-story house, three bedrooms, a parlor, a kitchen and sun porch. It belongs to a Mangan, as a matter of fact. Dinny Mangan. He let it for the holidays this year. Be damn and I have the key here someplace. There is linen and blankets—the lot. There’s a Mrs. Kane that lives down the road. I’d say she’d be glad to come in and clean up for you. Can you cook a bit yourself?”

  “Yes. But it sounds big for one person.”

  “It is big. Yes, it is big. But sure that’s all the better. Now, I’m the agent in this matter and I’d say we can arrange terms that will suit you.” Feeley opened a bottom drawer in his desk and took out a circle of keys, all with tags on them. He spun it like a prayer wheel and stopped it with his index finger. “Ah! Here tis. Duntally.”

  He rose up. “This house is only ten minutes by car from Drishane. A bit over half an hour on foot. Will we go and have a look, so?”

  They went out into the street. As at a signal, the man on the tractor started his machine. “Will we go in my car or in yours?” Feeley asked. “We’ll take mine,” he decided, without waiting for Mangan’s answer. And so they set off.

  Feeley’s car was more powerful than Mangan’s and was painted a strange metallic green. The interior smelled of sheep, and the back seat, like an extension of his office, was strewn with folders, briefcases, Ordnance Survey maps, and old newspapers. They passed through the village and turned up a narrow side road. As they entered this road, a man came down it, standing upright on a tiny donkey cart, reining in his donkey. Scything into the high grass of the ditch, Feeley managed to avoid this obstacle without slackening his speed and at the same time raised his hand from the wheel to wave cordially at his near-victim. Past high fuchsia hedges they climbed at reckless speed until the car reached a crossroads and turned right onto a bare, narrow, lonely road which ran along a ridge of mountainside. Far below, like a postcard view, was Drishane and its church spire, and beyond it, distantly, the great bay curving out to a headland, and on the horizon, rising like a sword from the gray sea, the lighthouse rock. “What is that rock?” Mangan asked, pointing. Feeley looked, then cast his dolphin grin on his passenger. “Fastnet,” he cried. “Fastnet lighthouse,” then pointed ahead. “See that house?” It was the first house they had come to in minutes of driving, a newly built bungalow by the roadside, its yard still strewn with building debris. “That’s Mrs. Kane’s place. She’s the woman who’ll do for you. Ah, she’s a grand person.”

  Past Mrs. Kane’s the road forked. Feeley took the smaller fork, which was simply a rough track, so narrow that the car could barely move within its limits. Ahead in a hollow just off the road, fenced in by a shield of ragged hedges, was an old two-story house with faded pink walls and a high slate roof. Its glassed-in front porch faced the road and a small neglected front garden. At the rear of the house were very old outhouses, thatched, and with the irregular stone walls of Irish peasant cottages of the last century. The outhouses seemed abandoned, their roofs sagging. “Here we are, then,” Feeley said, as his car whipped through a gateless back gateway and came to a halt on a rocky promontory in the yard outside the farmhouse’s back door. There were no hens in the yard. The house had the look of being abandoned, yet when Feeley unlocked the kitchen door there was no shut-up smell inside. All was clean, as though it had been swept and dusted that morning. The kitchen was furnished with four wooden armchairs with faded green seat cushions. Its wooden table was grooved in the service of countless meals. The stove was an old-fashioned gas cooker and there was a large open hearth with a fire set in it and turf stacked nearby ready for burning. Mangan saw cutlery, glasses, and china in the glass front cupboard, and someone had built an unpainted bookcase into the far wall and filled it with Penguin paperbacks, a dictionary and encyclopedia, and other, older volumes. Over the mantelpiece there was a large photograph of Pope John and a colored oleograph of Our Lady hung at the kitchen door, intertwined with a crucifix made of palm leaves. The house was not cold or damp. There was a bathroom next to the kitchen, and Feeley pointed out the water heater beside it. “It’s a good house,” Feeley said, as he preceded Mangan into the parlor. “Last summer’s tenants were well satisfied with it.”

  The parlor faced the glassed-in sun porch, which gave on a view of the neglected front garden and, beyond it, the bay and the lighthouse on the rock. “Will we go upstairs?” Feeley asked and led Mangan up a narrow flight, past a statue of the Virgin Mary in a landing alcove, to three bedrooms on the upper floor. In the largest of these bedrooms, which they now entered, there was a picture and a scroll dedicating the house to the Sacred Heart, and under it, burning bright, a small lamp in the shape of a heart.

  “I thought the house was empty,” Mangan said, pointing to the lamp.

  “Oh, that never goes out,” Feeley informed him. “It runs on the gas. In perpetua, as you might say. And look here, sir. Plenty of blankets and sheets. You could move right in, make up your bed, and have a sleep after your long journey. Will you be wanting the house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Grand. Will we go downstairs, then? Is there something else you’d like to see?”

  “No.”

  “Then, tell you what. I’ll run you back to the village and we’ll get some stuff for your breakfast. Come back here and have a good sleep and then stop in to see me sometime tomorrow. How would that suit you?”

  “Fine. Do you want a deposit?”

  “Ah, not at all. Not at all. And the price will be reasonable. I can assure you. Tis nice and quiet, isn’t it? Very quiet. A grand place for a rest.”

  And then they drove back to the village. An hour later, having collected his car and retraced his route up the narrow, lonely roads, Mangan reentered the empty house called Duntally. As he went in, putting down two paper bags of groceries on the kitchen table, daylight was beginning to die outside, and as he entered the parlor, with its sun-porch view of bay and headlands, the evening sky was filled with an almost supernatural light. The lighthouse flashed suddenly like a signal from some secret source. As he looked down at the fields surrounding the bay, it seemed to him that he had gone back in time: there was a stillness in this scene as in a painting of medieval times. The distant vista of fields, the church spire and the slate rooftops far below, all of it was like a world long gone, still as a Poussin landscape, unchanged and unchanging. There was no sou
nd at all, not even an insect’s hum or a bird’s cry. Caught in that stillness, he stood unmoving. It was as though his life had stopped.

  Loud, sudden, the rain came down. Loud because it was the only sound. The sky darkened. The rain beat on the slates, wept against the windows, made the ragged hedge-rows in the deserted front garden writhe and twist. He felt alone: never so alone as now. Turning from the rain, he went back into the corridor and climbed up the stairs. In the largest bedroom the little heart-shaped lamp burned like a wound. Awkwardly, he put sheets and blankets on the double bed then, stripping off his clothes, lay down on an old, lumpy mattress hollowed from the bodies of other sleepers. The rain beat on the roof but he no longer heard it.

  He woke in darkness and slid into panic, not knowing who or where he was until he saw the bright-lit little red lamp above his bed. Much later, at dawn, a cock crowed, wakening him again, and he lay for an hour, warm in the bed, looking at the windowpane lashed with rain, at the little red lamp and, above it, at Christ exposing his Sacred Heart. He slept again for an hour and at eight in the morning rose up in the damp cold room, dressed, and went down to the kitchen, where he put a match to the stacked turf fire in the grate and lit the gas stove to boil water for coffee. The rain had stopped. He went through the parlor to stand in the glass-walled porch, where again he could see that landscape, still as a medieval painting, unchanged and unchanging, the fields, the sea, the great headlands circling the bay like outstretched arms. Far off on the horizon the Fastnet lighthouse flashed its secret message. It came to him that he was looking toward America from a point of land which was the most westerly part of Europe.

  He heard the water boil. He went back into the kitchen, where he made coffee and began to fry the bacon slices which Feeley had cut for him yesterday in his shop. As he stood by the kitchen window turning the frying bacon with a fork, he became aware that he was being watched. For a moment he did not trust this instinct. Then, as he carried the frying pan to the sink to pour off the bacon fat, on the periphery of his vision he saw a woman in the yard outside. She was deliberately not looking at him but instead looked up as though searching for something on the worn green flanks of mountain which rose behind the house. The woman was old and stout and wore a man’s gray tweed jacket, under it a raveled cardigan. Her black skirt hung askew, its placket unhooked; her brown lisle stockings were twisted, and she wore a pair of man’s boots. As she stood there he thought of her as a female derelict. Yet, a moment later, turning away from the mountainside which she had pretended to study, she lifted her head and it seemed to him that her gray hair stood out in aureole against the sky’s light like some crown of grace.

  He watched her cross the yard and climb a hillock, disappearing from view behind one of the decaying stone outhouses. He knew that she knew he had seen her. He put down his frying pan, unbolted the kitchen door, and stepped out into the morning chill. There was no car or bicycle in sight. Could she have walked up here? Could she be the cleaning woman Feeley had talked about? He remembered the neat new bungalow which had been pointed out as the cleaning woman’s house. Surely that new bungalow didn’t belong to this old tramp.

  He crossed the yard. The long grass wet his shoes as he climbed the hillock to see where she had gone. But when he reached the top, she was nowhere in sight. Ahead, in the landscape in which she had disappeared, he saw an unused potato patch and a wild hedge, behind which he heard a noisy brook. He went forward to the hedge and peered through it, but could see no place where she might have hidden herself. Mystified, he went back down the hillock and into the house. As he picked up his frying pan again, suddenly she came into sight in the kitchen window going down through the yard into a little rough lane at the end of it, a lane he had not noticed before. Where had she disappeared to up there when he looked for her? Not wanting to seem to pursue her out of doors, he ran upstairs and peered out of a bedroom window. Now he saw her again. She was still in the lane, that lane which he had not noticed before but which connected his house with a small old cottage farther down the hillside. White smoke came from its chimney. He saw the old woman enter her yard, scattering a few chickens and ducks, which flocked to her as she went toward her door, which was open. She went in.

  So he was not alone up here. He went downstairs, cut bread, and ate his breakfast. Afterward he unpacked his bags and laid out all the Mangan books he had brought from Montreal, together with the notes he had made on them in the past several days in New York. By that time it was after nine. Dressed in his raincoat and a hat, he went out into the rain. He looked down the lane in the direction of the cottage, but from the yard the cottage was invisible. Yet when he got into his car he felt sure that someone was watching him. Uneasy, he drove away.

  In Drishane the village street was deserted and all the shops seemed shut. He parked outside Feeley’s store and walked across the broad pavement to look in the shop window. At that moment the tobacconist’s shop across the street, which doubled as the post office, opened its doors. A young girl came out, placed two newspaper placards advertising The Irish Times and The Irish Press on the pavement in front of the shop, then went in again. Mangan turned back to look through Feeley’s window, but there was no sign of life among the clutter of merchandise. He heard a grating sound above his head and, looking up, saw Feeley’s rubbery white face grinning down at him.

  “Mr. Mangan. You’re bright and early. Did you sleep all right?”

  “Yes. Sorry, I thought you’d be open. I’ll come back later.”

  “Don’t stir. I’ll be down directly,” said Feeley, withdrawing his head. Mangan heard the upper window shut and footsteps on the stairs, yet when the shop door was unlocked and opened, the person behind it was not Feeley but his wife, the fat, fair woman he had seen yesterday. “Good morning, Mr. Mangan,” said she, smiling her anxious smile. “Come in, please. Seamus will be down directly. You’re early, so.”

  “Is my watch wrong? I thought it was ten o’clock.”

  “It is, it is. Ah, we don’t get up at the crack of dawn in Drishane. Come this way, sir. Did you sleep well?”

  And so, talking, she led him into the kitchen behind the store and sat him down at a table covered with a formica top. The kitchen was very modern, with a large refrigerator and a bacon-slicing machine, a freezer and aluminum sink fittings. “I was just wetting some tea,” Mrs. Feeley said. “You’ll join us in a cup?”

  “Oh, no, that’s all right.”

  “No, no, you will. Milk and sugar?”

  As she spoke, her husband entered the kitchen, wearing his turtleneck sweater and corduroy trousers, smiling, his thick curved lips curiously immobile, so that his smile became a mask, hiding rather than revealing his mood. “Rashers, I will have,” said he loudly. “And how were those rashers I cut for you yesterday, Mr. Mangan, sir?”

  “Rashers?”

  “Rashers of bacon. This bacon,” Feeley said, lifting a side of bacon, placing it on the machine, and cutting off three thick slices, which he immediately handed over to his wife, who put them in an electric frying pan. “It comes from West Cork pigs. And that is the best of bacon, I say. But maybe you’re not a man who’s interested in material things, Mr. Mangan. May I ask what line of work are you in?”

  “I’m a writer.”

  “Ah! A newspaper writer?”

  “No.”

  “No? I thought, being interested in the Mangans . . .” Feeley broke off. His wife at the frying pan had given him a warning look.

  “Why is that?” Mangan asked.

  “Why is what, sir?”

  “Why would a newspaperman be specially interested in the Mangans?”

  “Oh, no reason. I just meant that you coming here in the dead of winter, looking for your family tree, so to speak, that’s a bit of a detective story, isn’t it?”

  “Is it?” Mangan said. He watched Mrs. Feeley ladle a fried egg on her husband’s plate. “Well, I am a newspaper writer, as it happens. And I sometimes write for documentary films. But thi
s is strictly a vacation. A personal thing.”

  “So you are a film man.”

  “No, not really. I sometimes write film commentaries. On the United Nations and so on. For television.”

  Feeley bent to his plate and, carefully picking up the whole fried egg on his fork, swallowed it in one bite. “And you were wanting to know about the Mangans,” he said. “Well, there are two families of Mangans in this district. There is Daniel Mangan, they call him Dinny. He lives with his mother up your way at Duntally. They are connections of my wife, through marriage, you might say.”

  “They are not,” said Mrs. Feeley. “Seamus, will you give over with that. He’s always saying I’m related to Mrs. Mangan. I am not.”

  “Well, anyway,” Feeley said, “there’s Dinny Mangan and then there’s his first cousins, Con and Kathleen. They live up your way, too. Farther up the road on the top of the mountain, a house called Gorteen.”

  “Are they still up there?” Mrs. Feeley asked. “I heard he’d moved over by Skull now that the house is sold.”

  “No, he’s still up there. The furniture is still in the house and I let him stay on till the man comes. Oh, they’re still around. I saw the girl coming out of King’s the other morning with half a dozen of stout.”

  Mrs. Feeley turned off the electric frying pan and stood over the kitchen table, staring at her husband. “You never told me about meeting the sister.”

  “Oh, hold your whist, woman. I didn’t meet her. I just saw her in the street.”

  “Did she speak to you?”

  “She did not. Now, Mr. Mangan, about your inquiries. The best thing for you would be to start with Father Burke, our parish priest. He does often be asked about parish records and so on. If you have relations here, he’s the man will track them down. You’ll find him at the presbytery just up the street.”

  “Did you speak to her?” Mrs. Feeley asked in a thunderous voice, ignoring this talk about the priest.

  “I did not.”

  “Did she see you? If she saw you she spoke to you.”