‘There are more sounds to hear and there’s more going on, but I prefer mountain people. The village people think they’re a cut above everyone else.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘Put six houses together in a row and you change the nature of the people who live in them.’
Pressing the tip of her nipple as if it were a doorbell, he kissed her slippery lips, inhaling the smell of fried liver, bacon, onions, and gin-and-tonic from her breath. It was an intoxicating smell that reinforced his tipsy feeling of sheer recklessness.
‘It’s the first time I’ve been kissed by a man with a beard. It’s nice and soft, not at all as rough as stubble.’
He placed a kiss in the valley between her breasts and she seemed to wriggle inside her dress, perhaps because of the tickling of his beard. He unbuttoned her dress at the back and slipped her arms out of the sleeves, revealing two white breasts with brown nipples inviting the maddest of kissing.
‘You don’t wear a bra?’
‘I like to let the air cool them in summer.’ He could tell that she was every bit as proud of them as he once was of his penis. She wriggled again, this time surely with pleasure, he told himself.
He put her lying on her back on the sofa, and he lay between her legs and kissed one breast after the other, licking the erect nipples and going from one to the other like a man who cannot make up his mind where the greater pleasure lies. Meanwhile she caressed the back of his neck with strong fingers and scratched his head behind the ears as she might do to a cow to get her in a mood for milking. And he thought she was nothing if not sweet-natured, so different from his late wife with her willpower and sticklike figure and determination never to be cajoled. If Florence had been in the garden with Adam, humanity would still be in its prelapsarian state. What excited Adam was not the rosiness of the apple but the longing of Everyman for pneumatic bliss. The adrenaline was running in his stomach as it always did at the thought of Florence’s unyielding flesh. To regain his grip on sanity, he ran an exploring hand up Susan’s leg. No bra. No knickers. Susan, bless her, was a latter-day Eve, and, like Eve, a fresh air fiend. She was moistly inviting, juicy as a peach. He unzipped his trousers, sharply aware of the great quiet in his crotch. Hoping that the furnace heat below would induce an immediate awakening, he tried and tried with a penis as limp as a lugworm, good for nothing but bait. Regretting his overhasty disposal of Eales’s lust-finger, he fondled her clitoris with what he could only describe as regretful reverence. She clung to him like a waif in a storm, her mons veneris firm against his thigh while she wriggled with a low moan that betokened as much pain as pleasure.
‘That was hard work?’ she said.
‘I’m dog tired.’ He allowed his head to sink onto her arm, too embarrassed to meet her eye.
She held his head to her bosom and he began breathing heavily, pretending to be asleep, reluctant to confront her obvious puzzlement. As he emitted a long ‘snore’, she put her hand down inside his trousers and felt his sleeping penis all along its length which, he was still pleased to think, was quite considerable. She retracted the foreskin once or twice, slowly at first and then more quickly, squeezing gently, almost lovingly, each time, while he groaned like a dreaming dog and buried his head more deeply in her breasts. Susan, he told himself, was no stranger to these parts. Unlike Florence, she was a skilled resurrectionist, but sadly on this occasion the patient was proof against all known ministration. Finally acknowledging defeat, she slid out from under him but still he kept on breathing heavily. After a while she came back with a bedspread, which she laid lightly over his shoulders and kissed his cheek. His eyes still closed, he heard the click of a closing door and her heavy tread on the stairs.
On the verge of sleep, real sleep, he tried to hold a picture in his mind: fishing cod in the Sound on a windy evening in March, a leaden sea sploshing against the bows, the sky a blue-black cupola of low cloud and an opening in the west above the horizon where an invisible sun shot feathery cloud with golden light. It was such a contrast, the blue-black above like grim night descending and the window of gold over the water providing what light there was in the evening. Somehow it seemed to him then like an image of his desperate life, and he bent stoically over the gunwale to haul in a cod. When he raised his head again, the strip of light had gone. All was blue-black, the very image of premature night.
He woke with a shiver though the night was warm. It was almost three by his watch. He realised that he must have slept, that the weariness he had been at pains to feign was real. He picked up the bottle of whiskey and his empty glass, and quietly climbed the stairs so as not to disturb Susan. Without switching on the light in his bedroom, he went to the window to pull the curtains. As he raised his hand, a movement on the other side of the street caught his eye. Someone was lurking in the shadow of the gable opposite, looking across directly at the house. Wondering who it might be, he moved to the corner of the window without taking his eyes off the figure in the shadow. He did not have long to wait. As the church clock struck three, McGing emerged into the light of the street lamp and headed for the barracks.
Roarty was shaken. He already knew that McGing had vowed to catch the murderer but he had not realised that he himself was to be the quarry. He wasn’t imagining things; there was no other reason why McGing should keep his house under surveillance. Regrettably, there was only one thing to be done: take McGing’s mind off the murder by giving him something more urgent to think about. He would allow him half an hour to get back home to his bed. Then he would strike.
He put the Rhenish symphony on the gramophone and poured himself a drink, half-aware of an unresolved crux in the music and in his life. His hands shook as he poured but they usually shook first thing in the morning, and it was now only two hours from sunrise. He sat on the bed with a pillow between his head and the wall, consciously striving to expunge McGing from his thoughts. He visualised Potter peeing on Carraig a’ Dúlamáin, a trusted friend compared with the wayward McGing. And he thought of Cecily playing Papillons with a lightness of touch that promised invincible innocence, now a grown woman writing in desperation to a debauched bugger from Kerry, her purity of heart overcome by the primacy of the clitoris. And finally he thought of the woman who had brought her into the world, and asked himself why he should marvel at the transformation that had overtaken her daughter. If he had knowingly chosen Florence for wife, if he himself had been the guilty author of his misfortune, he might conceivably forgive her. Instead he had been put upon, sat upon, and shat upon by that Innominate Agent unthinking men call Fate.
Superficially, he owed his wife to the dextrous student of Dante and Rimbaud, Dusty Miller. If Miller had not disappeared with the contents of the till, a nondescript girl called Florence Kissane would not have entered his life. Admittedly, it had been a difficult time for him. He had left the seminary only a year before, and he was still trying to convince himself that in leaving he had done what was right for him. He could have taken a job in an office, of course, but he was driven towards the pub life because he saw it as a crossroads where good and bad meet and in the encounter get to know something of themselves and each other. After six enclosed years in a seminary subjecting himself daily to a masochistic scrutiny of his conscience, he felt he needed to rub shoulders with both the rough and the smooth in order to rid himself of the suspicion that he was a calf with two heads, a prize exhibit in a seaside circus. He needed to lose himself in a field full of folk, and he reckoned that a London pub was the twentieth-century equivalent.
For his first year outside the walls he lived without women, having rejected the possibility of seeking out a prostitute to rid himself once and for all of the virginity that had come to symbolise six fruitless years of incarceration. He went even further, taking a decision not to surrender to the urge of the flesh except for beauty, because it seemed to him at the time that to give up the priestly life for anything less would have been unworthy. He waited and waited but no beautiful woman came his way. At first he wondered
about the effect of the kiss of a truly beautiful woman (healing or searing?). After a while he began wondering if there were any beautiful women in London. If there were, they did not seem to live in Fitzrovia. His mind was so fixed on his idea of beauty, that he barely noticed Florence who had replaced his friend Dusty in the pub.
She had come from Tipperary, from the Golden Vale as she called it, still smelling of milk and buttercups, a rare enough achievement in the fug of a public house. As the weeks went by, he spoke to her now and again, noting the efficiency and determination the landlord must have already spotted when he took her on. She was quick on her feet, quick to pull pints, quick to give change, and more quick-witted than necessary with any bohemian litterateur who thought he could make fun of her. Unlike Florence, the landlord was a slow thinker. His response to a jibe or a dig was to laugh and move out of earshot. One evening when an uncharacteristically sober journalist said in his hearing that his pub was the worst-run in London, he laughed even louder than usual. Hearing him, Florence looked over her shoulder from the till, and in her glance Roarty saw a girl for whom life held no terrors. She looked so confirmed in her self-confidence that he wondered if she must lack some feminine quality—some insight or intuition, some spiritual dimension—that other women take for granted. As his old professor of moral theology used to say, ‘No one has all the gifts, and the presence of one gift necessitates the absence of another’. It occurred to him that here was something he must investigate, if only to satisfy his curiosity about women. She was far from beautiful but somehow without his knowing it beauty had lost its pre-eminence. Within a few weeks they had become friends, going places together on their day off and comparing their dreams and ideas of what the future might have in store for them. He was delighted to have found her because she came with a woman’s mysterious aura as well as the kind of conversation he had thought only men could make.
They were both bent on going back to Ireland. They began at once to save for a place of their own. When a small pub in Roarty’s home village came on the market, they bought it with all the confidence of a couple with ‘London experience’ setting up shop in Donegal. It was only a rundown shebeen but soon they had made it into a well-stocked, comfortable inn, a natural meeting-place for village wiseacres as well as a retreat for any intrepid traveller who found himself on holiday in Glenkeel. His sense of wonder at having discovered Florence so fortuitously remained with him throughout the early years of their marriage, until it occurred to him one morning that, quite possibly, it was she who had discovered him.
Still, he did not allow the thought to come between them. They were both thrifty without being niggardly, both capable of enjoying what pleasures country living afforded. Those early years of their life together were only a little less than heavenly. He looked after the bar and Florence looked after the financial side of the business. She kept the books and paid the bills, while he entertained his regulars with lively repartee and enjoyed an occasional glass of Jameson along the way. Meanwhile they were doing their level best to start a family. Neither of them wished for a large family. They were agreed that a son and daughter would do, but after four years of unremitting endeavour they still had nothing to show for their diligence. Roarty, unlike Florence, wasn’t unduly worried; it seemed to him that this vie en rose could well continue into old age or even death itself. Then one night, as they were trying yet again for a baby, misfortune struck. He had been worried for months about the slow ebbing of his sexual urge like a tide retreating from an estuary, conscious that he no longer looked at Maggie Hession’s breasts during Mass with a feeling of unutterable tenderness in his chest. Now things had taken a serious turn. For the first time in five years of married life he had failed.
Paralysed by the frightening quiet below, he lay facing his wife, the penis on his thigh as limp as Adam’s in Michelangelo’s depiction of the Creation. Florence, always a girl to take the initiative, tried to give him a helping hand out of his difficulty, but His Lordship was proof against any tricks of resuscitation in her repertory.
‘Not my night,’ she said, turning her back to him with a final shrug of the shoulders.
They tried in vain again the following night and the night after that as well. By now he was worried and so was Florence. Her diagnosis, however, was simple and unanswerable. ‘You’ve got brewer’s droop,’ she said, ‘and the cure is total abstinence.’ Disingenuously, he told her that he was drinking only half a bottle a day, chicken feed for a man of his physique. Nevertheless, he went on the wagon because he did not wish to give her more leverage than she already enjoyed. He was old enough to know that moral blackmail is a woman’s most common weapon in the war of attrition that is marriage, and also the deadliest. The cure, however, failed to match the simplicity of the diagnosis. After a week without drink he began getting the occasional tremor of desire, followed by a beguiling show of the flag at half mast. He would begin making love to Florence, knowing how badly she needed a rub of the relic, and when she was all shipshape and ready for action, his erection would collapse with a feeble trickle on his thigh.
The irony was that now as a teetotaller he was showing the classic symptoms of brewer’s droop as enunciated by the Porter in Macbeth: ‘Much drink may be said to be an equivocator with lechery; it makes and mars him; it sets him on, and it takes him off; it persuades him, and disheartens him; makes him stand to and not stand to...’ And far from being amused by this most common of male jokes, he was so worried that a normal, self-confident approach to his wife was now impossible. At the best of times sex caught him, as it does all self-aware men, at his most vulnerable and ridiculous. Now the complications of failure were so disconcerting that it was simpler and more sensible not to begin. Florence agreed almost too readily, saying that it was cruel to set her on only to leave her high and dry with a sleepless night to follow. And she would not countenance any known alternative to full penile penetration. When he tried to explain to her that there was more than one way to skin a cat, she told him succinctly that there was only one way to make babies.
Soon her earlier mood of sympathetic resignation curdled into the sour whey of longsuffering. They took to sleeping in separate bedrooms and to eating breakfast in sullen silence. At times he was at a loss to understand how the shortest and least significant limb in his anatomy could loom so large in his thoughts and in effect determine his internal weather, not to mention his behaviour towards his customers.
Previously, all business decisions were taken by him alone. Now he found that she had begun to order extra barrels of stout without consulting him. Just because he had failed to trigger the ritual spasm in her vagina, he had dwindled within a month from a landlord to a cipher. As he had expected, there was method in her audacity. She was taking the opportunity to chat up draymen, excise men, weights and measures men, commercial travellers, and every stranger in trousers who came to the pub on business. She was no oil painting, not the type of woman who imbued men with the conviction that to make a pass was a matter of male honour. Florence was a sensible plain Jane who could not afford the luxury of coyness but must advertise immediate availability.
She must have done precisely that because one day, about six months after his first failure, she said over dinner:
‘I can stand this no longer. I need a poke, and a good one at that, to keep what’s left of my sanity. I won’t shame you with one of the locals. Instead I’ll have a sly one with MacSwilley’s drayman on Thursday. I’m telling you in advance because I don’t want you to think I’m being unfaithful.’
He was taken aback by her brutal logic. He couldn’t help wondering why there were no great women philosophers. ‘I appreciate being told,’ he smiled with unobtrusive irony.
‘Don’t think of it as love-making, Tim. My biological clock is coming up to the fateful hour. I want to make a baby before the bells begin to chime.’
‘I won’t stand in your way. I’ll go shooting on the appointed day.’
‘And who will look
after the bar?’
‘I didn’t think the bar was on your mind.’
‘You’ll stay here. It must be business as usual, so that customers don’t suspect a rift.’
‘You have a nice sense of decorum,’ he said, almost choking over some gristle in the scrag-end of neck she had just overcooked him.
As was her wont, she got her way. He stayed in the bar making uneasy conversation with Old Crubog while a drayman in wide shoes drank tea in the kitchen and plunged on her bed upstairs. The incident had given him an insight into women which was almost blinding in its simplicity. Man’s relationship with them, when all the talk of Michelangelo was done, could be reduced to a simple formula:
H = E + P + S
where H = Happiness; E = Erection; P = Penetration; and S = Spasm
If only he had tumbled to this truth before! What fun it would have been in the days when he used to give her two spasms on a single stalk. It was typical of the School of Life that it taught everything too late, when the knowledge was no longer of any use to the pupil.
‘There’s a run about the rocks today,’ he had said to Crubog in an effort to regain his grip on commonplace perceptions.
‘The sea can only do one of two things, rise or fall,’ said Crubog sagely.
‘Yet it’s full of surprises.’ Roarty looked out on Rannyweal.
‘The sea is a woman,’ Crubog said. ‘A wise man never takes her for granted.’
The drayman came and went and a commercial traveller in cigarettes took his place. Florence became more civil as she became more unfaithful. She would make small talk about the regulars and jokingly promise to give him oysters to cure his droop. Sadly, he could not respond in like spirit. The joy of self-forgetfulness had vanished from his life. How could she turn her back on five rare years of marital happiness and treat the man who helped make them like a discarded dildo? If he had been morally culpable, he would have understood. He was no more to blame for the failure of his erection than for the fact that the axis of the earth is inclined about 66°33´ to the orbital plane. Wasn’t it just typical that such an elementary truth should remain beyond the grasp of a woman, even an intelligent woman like Florence!
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