Bogmail

by Patrick McGinley

  Miller had told him that he was reading French at Bedford College but it seemed to Roarty that he read nothing but Rimbaud. He quoted him or claimed to be quoting him a hundred times an evening, and one night when he’d had too much to drink, he confided that he had made a discovery that would ensure his literary reputation and possibly make his fortune as well. Rimbaud, he said, had disappeared into the heart of Africa at the age of twenty-one, never to return to France again.

  ‘He died there in 1891, the year Conrad returned from the Congo. Does that mean anything to you?’

  ‘No,’ said Roarty.

  ‘It’s simply this. Rimbaud met Conrad in the Congo and became Mistah Kurtz in “Heart of Darkness”. No one suspects it but me. As soon as I’ve published my thesis and made my name, I’ll vanish one day like Rimbaud, cock a snook at the world, and never be seen again.’

  Not long afterwards that was more or less what he did. He disappeared one weekend with the contents of the pub till, and Roarty never laid eyes on him again. Though not lacking in boon companions, for months afterwards he felt truly alone in London. He could hardly believe that one man could pine so keenly for the company and conversation of another. He stayed in the same bedsit, hoping that Miller would turn up one night with a drunken laugh and a bottle of cheap Spanish wine.

  Years later he came on a life of Rimbaud in a public library and could not resist the temptation to read it. To his amazement he discovered that Rimbaud had spent his time abroad in Ethiopia, and that he returned to France before he died. He could not believe that such an elementary fact had escaped a student of his poetry. Was Miller a student at all?

  Or was he a literary fantasist who found in a naïve Irishman the eager audience of his dreams? And what of his claim about Dante? Was that imagination too?

  The student had marked his life, though. He never again had such a close friend. In many ways Potter reminded him of Miller. He had Miller’s frosty objectivity and a reductive capacity that enabled him to scotch the imponderable with the chop of logic. He longed to know what it must feel like to be Potter. He did not wish for his form, the slope of his shoulders, the thrust of his chin, or the look he had of being pampered by history, remote from the brute centre of himself. No, what he wished for was his detachment, which he would never have, not until he’d plucked out the thing within that nagged and nagged, wasting his every thought on the commonest trifles when he should be reclining like a god, contemplating the capricious tides of life with a Jameson in one hand and his Peterson in the other.

  ‘If only I could be friends with Potter,’ he muttered on the way down to dinner.

  9

  Potter was leaning over the parapet of the Minister’s Bridge, gazing at the breakwater splitting the flow between two brown boulders. The river came down the glen out of the mountains, those melancholy uplands that sat brooding one above the other, regardless of summer or winter. He crossed to the opposite parapet and faced downriver towards the estuary, noting the movements of a solitary angler working the left bank.

  It was evening. The angelus bell had just sounded in the meagre village of Tork behind him. The air he breathed was heavy with the smell of peat fires and the fragrance of gorse blossom from the hillock to his right. It had been a warm and satisfying day. He had spent it on the sea cliffs with his binoculars, watching guillemots, shags, cormorants, gannets, and any other bird that flew his way. A scarf of summer mist had blown in from the sea, wrapping the face of the north mountain, obscuring the middle but not the crest. An eerie and suggestive scene which the half-forgotten William Allingham had observed before him:

  With a bridge of white mist

  Columbkill he crosses,

  On his stately journeys

  From Slieve League to Rosses

  A sandpiper came up the river, gliding low without touching the surface. Ignoring his presence, it disappeared with a swoop under the arch of the bridge. Hearing a whistle while expecting a ‘twee-wee-wee’, he turned as Cor Mogaill and his dog Sgeolan came round the bend.

  ‘What were you looking at?’ Cor Mogaill asked.

  ‘The stones in the river. The peaty water has washed them all a uniform brown.’

  ‘I’ve been carrying hay to the road since eight o’clock this morning, and I’m buggered for want of a drink. Would you be coming for a jar?’

  ‘I had intended going out to the loughs for an hour before sunset. Roarty tells me there’s a strange water bird on the Lough of Silver.’

  ‘I remember five years ago I went out to the loughs and came back again. And it was a very cold day.’

  ‘What did you see?’ Potter looked at Cor Mogaill’s sad grey eyes and the black curls on his forehead matted with the sweat of the day. They both stepped aside as a stooped old man with an ass-cart of turf and a bag of flour on top passed with a crunching and a clacking of iron-shod wheels.

  ‘I’m buggered with the drouth,’ said Cor Mogaill. ‘I’ll be lucky if I make it to Roarty’s.’ And off he went up the hill, whistling after his yellow sheepdog.

  ‘I remember five years ago I went out to the loughs and came back again. And it was a very cold day.’ What could he have meant by it? Did the incident have some significance in his life that words failed to convey? Or had he in the extremity of his thirst omitted unwittingly the kernel and pith of his story? So much that happened between these two ranges of hills was a mystery, he thought, watching the angler playing a trout and listening for the whirr of the reel. There was mystery and melancholy but also spiritual peace. Never before had he been so close to the true centre of himself; so aware of half-thoughts and blurred intimations, the vague nudgings of the unconscious in the blood. Was that perhaps something he owed to Nora Hession?

  Canon Loftus’s car came round the corner, powdered with the white dust of mountain roads. The car stopped on the hump of the bridge and the Canon looked him up and down through the open window.

  ‘Are you the Englishman who’s in charge of the prospecting?’ He had a rough voice like that of a farmer who is hoarse from hay dust.

  ‘Yes, I’m Kenneth Potter.’

  ‘I’m Canon Loftus, your parish priest while you are here.’

  ‘So I see.’ Potter could not but be aware of the force of the other man’s scrutiny, which he found somewhat overbearing, if not ill-mannered.

  ‘You’re going out with Nora Hession, I believe.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘Do you realise that she is my maid?’

  ‘I have no objection to maids.’ Potter laughed in spite of himself.

  ‘That is not what I meant.’

  ‘She has already told me that she is your housekeeper.’

  ‘That’s a complication, a factor to be considered. Have you considered it?’ The Canon, having spoken, thrust out a darkly stubbled chin. One of those men, Potter thought, who should shave at least three times a day.

  ‘Are you concerned that you may have to find a new maid?’

  ‘No,’ said the Canon with annoyance. ‘I mean that I’m responsible for the girl and therefore an interested party. Are your intentions serious?’

  ‘How should I know? I’ve only known Nora for a fortnight.’

  ‘She’s a sensitive girl and I won’t have her hurt. Are you a Catholic?’

  ‘You know I attend your church, so why do you ask?’

  ‘But you’re an English Catholic, a different species from us Irish. You’ve got different standards. Are you married?’

  ‘What is this? The Inquisition?’ Potter’s laugh was not good humoured.

  ‘Most Englishmen are married by twenty-five, and you will never again see thirty-five. I must be satisfied for the girl’s sake that you are bona fide.’

  ‘Your question is an unpardonable impertinence.’

  ‘A typically English stance. No Irish Catholic would dream of addressing his parish priest in that tone of voice.’

  ‘In England there would be no need. English rectors mind their own business which,
if they’re good rectors, is God’s.’

  Conon Loftus flushed a deep crimson while a knot of blue veins swelled in his trunk-like neck. Potter felt pleased that finally he had roused him.

  ‘Don’t try to teach me my business,’ the Canon spluttered. ‘As an English Catholic, you’re in no position to. You belong to a rump, less than a minority, a sect with neither temporal nor spiritual power, remote from the ideals that give life to the English nation. Yet you, one of these rag-tag Irregulars, come over here and tell me, a Regular, how to behave in my own parish. I call it cheek, damn cheek.’

  ‘You talk a lot of nonsense, Canon. In a word, bullshit.’

  ‘I’ll ask you a question to which the answer is bullshit: what have English Catholics contributed to English culture?’

  ‘We’ve had Alexander Pope and Gerard Manley Hopkins to name but two.’

  ‘They wouldn’t be missed if they’d never written a line. The trouble with you English Catholics is that you are sunk in respectability, a namby-pamby respectability which is merely an expression of your awareness that you are aliens in your own country. A word of fatherly advice in your eye: go back to England and take up Protestantism. You’ll find it more sympathetic to your way of life.’

  ‘You are holding up the traffic, padre.’

  ‘Don’t call me padre. I don’t like it.’

  ‘It’s a term of manly camaraderie but that may not be the response you as an Irish parish priest wish to invite.’

  ‘It’s barrack-room insolence, but if you had fought with the Chindits, I might have taken it from you.’

  ‘There are three tractors behind us waiting for you to move.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘And not one of these drivers has the courage to blow his horn.’

  ‘Faith overcomes even courage.’

  ‘How typical of Irish Catholicism! What these wretches lack is the defiance of English Lollardism, a stage you have yet to reach in this priest-infested country.’

  ‘Let’s keep them waiting another three minutes to test their faith. Have you ever considered what might have happened if you English Catholics had had a Cambridge rather than an Oxford Movement?’

  ‘As a Cambridge man myself, it’s never been too far from my thoughts.’ Potter smiled with covert irony.

  ‘It’s a measure of the aridity of English Catholicism that such a question can be taken seriously.’ And with a puff of black smoke and a crunch of pebbles, the Canon, having had the last word, was gone.

  He’s burning oil, thought Potter, climbing over the sod dyke by the bridge. He set off along the river bank towards the sea, his peace of mind and pleasure in the evening perceptibly diminished. He told himself that the Canon was a figure of fun and therefore not to be taken seriously. The glen people saw the comic side of his excesses. As Cor Mogaill was in the habit of saying, ‘the Canon is larger than life in no eye except his own’.

  Cor Mogaill wasn’t being entirely fair. The Canon was a local ‘character’, the kind of man who inspired so many apocryphal anecdotes that it became nigh impossible to distinguish between the reality and the legend. Even the scrawny Cor Mogaill would admit that the Canon was a horse of a man, tall, craggy, and powerful in every limb. More farmer than priest on weekdays, he was a pastor only on Sundays. He would spend the week among his cows and bullocks, driving the tractor that was his latest toy while leaving the parish work to his pious young curate. A local farmer in a moment of diagnostic acuity said that the Canon had picked up foot and mouth disease from his herd, which would account for his reluctance to visit the sick and preach for more than five minutes on Sunday.

  In fairness to the Canon, he always marked the Lord’s Day in his own way. At ten o’clock he would drive to the village and toll the bell for five minutes as a warning to those who lived in outlying townlands that it was time to get up for eleven o’clock Mass. His great strength was evident even in his bell-ringing, which did not go ding dong, ding dong, but dong-bling, dong-bling, dong-bling. Like the interpretation of English history, the art of campanology was quite beyond him. Try as he might, he could never manage a single stroke, only a double of such power that the sexton feared that one day he would pull the bell from its housing and wreck himself as well as the belfry. After the first bell on Sundays the Canon would hurry home to fodder his cows. At ten minutes to eleven he would return to ring the second bell, which, as he put it, was purely for the benefit of those who lived nearest the church and therefore furthest from God.

  In the pulpit his appearances were brief but telling. With enormous fists tucked like breasts underneath his chasuble, he would preach a five-minute sermon with all the confidence of a seventeenth-century parson. He not only told his flock what to do but where they would go if they did not do it. He had two heroes among the popes; Julius II, whom he revered as a builder, and Leo XIII whom he admired as a writer of encyclicals. One Sunday he went so far as to say that the prose style of Rerum Novarum was superior to that of De Senectute, and he said it with the confidence of a man who did not fear even a murmur of contradiction from his congregation.

  Though he never spelt it out in words, he believed that the miseries of men were to be laid at the door of womankind, and one of his favourite axioms was that ‘whenever a man falls, you may be sure a woman has fallen first’. Needless to say, the men of the parish held him in high esteem. They called him a man’s man, and most certainly a man’s confessor. Where he’d give a woman five Rosaries for fornication in a haystack, he would let the man off with six Our Fathers and a warning. Understandably, women seldom entered his confessional; instead they told their tales of erotic adventure to the effeminate young curate who was said to have a more sensitive understanding of their spiritual needs.

  The Canon’s ambition was to go down in the history of the parish as a great builder. On coming to Glenkeel six years ago, his first thought was to replace the old chapel with a new one. As his parishioners were far from wealthy, collecting money for the undertaking was an uphill task. The Canon was not to be deterred, however. ‘God did not make you rich,’ he told the men folk in his sermon one Sunday, ‘but he made you sound of heart and strong of limb. If you can’t give money towards the building of the new chapel, give your time and labour instead.’ And that was how the new chapel was being built—by ‘voluntary’ labour.

  The Canon employed a Dublin architect to design what he called a post-Vatican II church to meet the requirements of the new liturgy. It was a square building of forbidding blue-black brickwork with a flat roof surmounted by a tiled cone in the centre, which horrified everyone except the Canon and the schoolmaster. The farmers and fishermen building it shook their heads in disbelief as it took shape under their hands. The Canon assured them that it conveyed the austerity of true spirituality, something of the spirit of early Irish coenobitism; and that the cone was an ingenious attempt to translate into modern idiom the corbel-vaulted stonework of renowned Skellig Michael.

  Potter had come within sight of the sea. The tide was at low ebb, the shore bare. He took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers, and walked out over the furrowed sand to the little lagoon of slack water on the landward side of the sandbank. He paddled in the lukewarm water, listening to the crash of the Atlantic on the far side of the Oitir. He had the lonely sea and shore to himself, and he stood with his back to the sun gazing at a farmer in the triangular cornfield on the slope above. The farmer was bent over his shearing sickle, touched by the gold of evening light, and it occurred to Potter that another eye might also be looking and marvelling at how a lone figure on a bare beach could be so transformed by the same magical light. The thought of a series of eyes appealed to him.

  ‘He must be taught a lesson,’ he said aloud. ‘A priest who has the nerve to speak like that to a compatriot of John Wycliffe is deficient in a sense of history let alone temporal reality.’

  He walked back up the beach and wiped the sand from his feet with his socks.

  ‘I must ta
lk to Roarty,’ he said firmly, as he laced up his shoes.

  10

  Roarty was late. He had promised to be at the slip at six, and it was now half-past. Wondering about the likely effect of Irish whiskey on memory in middle-aged men, Potter leaned against an upturned boat and cast an impatient eye over twisted rocks, grey-blue beach stones, lengths of rope and bleached timber, heaped nets, rusty anchors, and the debris of crab shells broken for lobster bait. It was a lively evening with a wind from the south and a slight swell on the sea, enough to give the impression of rise and fall even though it was now slack water. Ignoring an occasional whiff of rotting crabmeat, he studied the ragged goat that was straining its neck to reach a kindly tuft of grass on a ledge of the bank opposite. He wondered how the goat had managed to climb down to the ledge as there was no visible path. Again, that disconcerting smell of decomposing fish. To distract his mind he tried to work out how the goat would climb up again.

  Roarty came down the path in waders, carrying the outboard engine, a blue reek rising from his pipe.

  ‘Sorry I’m late. A commercial traveller called just as I was about to leave.’

  ‘I’ve been trying out my new fishing rod. It casts well.’

  ‘Solid fibre glass and a multiplier reel—just the thing.’

  Roarty clamped the outboard on the transom and went back to the car which he’d parked at the top of the path. When he appeared again, he was carrying his fishing rod, rifle and woollen pullover.

  ‘What are you going to shoot?’ Potter asked.