‘Utter nonsense!’ said Potter, ‘plus a dollop of codswallop for good measure.’ He looked at the other members of the executive committee but they were not listening to him; they were looking expectantly at the Canon.
‘It may seem far-fetched now, but will it seem so in ten years’ time? As a result of my enquiries, I’ve learned that the south mountain deposit may contain as much as 700,000 tons of ore. At a modest £25 a ton for the untreated rock, the total deposit might be valued at £17.5 million, most of which will line the coffers of Mr Potter’s American firm. The Americans will pay a pittance to the Church of Ireland, which is no better at business than theology. They will ship out the unmilled rock, leaving this country with the minimum economic advantage and the farmers whose rights they have usurped without a brass farthing.’
‘All this is a fictive confection of your extravagant imagination,’ Potter interjected.
‘Now, no swearing in front of the Canon!’ Rory Rua admonished.
‘I didn’t swear!’ Potter snapped.
‘I heard you say “fick”,’ Rory Rua insisted. ‘We all know what that means.’
‘Let Mr Potter finish,’ the Canon smiled. ‘I think he said “fictive”, which means something that isn’t literally true... But you were saying, Mr Potter?’
‘I have bad news for you, I’m afraid. In the samples that have so far been analysed, the percentage of barytes is too small to make for economic mining. I’ve been told by the London office that, barring miracles, my team will be recalled before the end of the year.’
The Canon held up a hand and smiled. ‘It is in Pluto’s interest to conceal the size of the deposit and stress the operational difficulties. They think they’ll get their way by saying one thing and doing another, but they haven’t reckoned with a certain canon in the Diocese of Raphoe. I propose to organise the local farmers into a vociferous and single-minded group since they all, you included, have a claim to some rights in the mountain. I’ll find out what those rights are and insist that they be acknowledged. I think you will agree that the time has come to disband the Anti-Limestone Society and raise the flag of the Anti-Exploitation Society.’
‘We’re sufficiently ambidextrous to manage both,’ said Cor Mogaill.
‘It is not an option. If you want me to lead the Anti-Exploitation Society, you will have to bury the other. I am not being immodest when I say I have friends in high places (I refer to this world, not the next), and friends among the legal fraternity on whose services we shall have to call. You know I’m not a loser. In this venture, and in the words of Christ himself, he who is not with me is against me. Are you with me, Roarty?’
Roarty studied the challenging thrust of the Canon’s chin. He was a blunt man with none of Potter’s polish, and in his crafty way he had found the answer to the Anti-Limestone Society. There was ‘gold’ in the south mountain, some of which might help pay the blackmail.
‘Well, Roarty?’ asked the Canon.
‘I’m with you,’ Roarty mumbled, not daring to look at Potter.
‘Rory Rua?’
‘You can count on me, Canon.’
‘Gillespie?’
‘I have my reservations but still I’m with you.’
‘Cor Mogaill?’
‘Go to now, ye rich men, weep and howl for your miseries that shall come upon you. Your riches are corrupted... your barytes is cankered; and the rust of it shall be a witness against you, and shall eat your flesh as it were fire.’
The Canon held up a fatherly hand again and laughed.
‘Even a Marxist can misquote Scripture for his purpose. May I give you a greater authority than James? Christ himself said: “The labourer is worthy of his hire.” Here, my dear Cor Mogaill, we’re on the side of the angels.’
‘The fallen angels?’ Cor Mogaill enquired. ‘I think, Canon, you must have been reading Machiavelli.’
‘There is nothing devious or self-seeking in my methods. I shall be perfectly frank. You all will get a share of any profits arising, and a portion of your share will find its way into the collection plate on Sunday, I hope. In short, this is one of those rare and satisfying occasions when it is possible to serve God and Mammon simultaneously.’
Cor Mogaill gave a high-pitched squeak and delved madly into his rucksack. He pulled out a bundle of tattered newspapers and held up one of them before the company. ‘I’ll only say this, he shouted, finding his place:
‘“Let us always be truly poor. If we have nothing, no one can take it from us. If we own nothing, nothing can own us. Only an absolutely poor man is absolutely free.”’
‘A fine Marxist, you are!’ the Canon jeered.
‘I’m a Marxist with a difference. I don’t merely seek a redistribution of wealth. I seek a redistribution of suffering as well. And we all know the distributor of that!’
‘A true Marxist would say that you can’t redistribute one without redistributing the other... But my dear Potter, you are curiously silent.’ The Canon gave one of his self-satisfied smiles.
‘I’m flabbergasted at the speed with which my friends have turned Turk. Only the other evening they were quoting the penny catechism and papal bulls in support of their anti-limestone ideals.’
‘The vagaries of the human mind and heart are what make human life so fascinating. We live and sometimes learn. But now we have business to do, business that may embarrass you, Mr Potter. As a servant of Pluto, you can hardly be expected to join in a plot to deprive them of their profits. We shall, therefore, understand if you should wish to withdraw.’
‘I have no desire to stay.’ Potter glanced around at the sheepish ex-officers of the disbanded Anti-Limestone Society.
‘Neither have I,’ said Cor Mogaill, joining him.
As the Canon accompanied them both to the door, Roarty wondered what on earth he should say to Potter the following evening. The Canon returned, rubbing his hands, pleased with the outcome of his tactics.
‘Now we can put our heads together,’ he said, pouring them another drink, much to the surprise of Roarty.
16
Potter was sitting by the window of the cottage with an oil can and a wad of tow on the chair beside him. He was cleaning his shotgun, having spent the morning shooting. It was almost three o’clock, about forty-five minutes before sunset, and already the November light was fading. The sun, shyly hiding somewhere in the west, had permeated with deep evening reds the feathery clouds that hung like threadbare curtains in the high heavens. Below them, long streaks of blue-black cloud were piling in from the sea in dark contrast to the quiet, heavenly light in the upper reaches of the sky.
Were these frayed, reddish clouds really becalmed or did they just seem becalmed by comparison with the furious activity below? Thinking of a tondo by Tiepolo, he closed one eye and observed the clouds through the branches of the mountain ash. They were moving eastwards very slowly, almost imperceptibly, and he wondered what a meteorologist would make of the varying speeds of the wind at different altitudes. Would he expect a change in the weather or would he say that it was yet another instance of how easily the uninformed eye may be deluded? So much in life was a matter of illusion.
There was nothing illusory about the November weather over the past week or so. It was hard and cold, so cold that he was obliged to move from the bedroom and sleep in the alcove bed next to the kitchen hearth fire, which he never allowed to go out. Now for the first time in a fortnight the sky promised rain. He had enjoyed the first weeks of November, which again and again brought home to him the beauty of the countryside in early winter. As the sunrise was late, he saw it every morning on the way to his work on the mountain.
Frosty mornings made him shiver, not just with cold but in wonder at the scores of objects to which the frost had given a quality of graphic simplicity: fallen leaves in the laneway with their veins and serrated edges picked out in grey; twigs that looked as if they’d been furred by an unseen hand in the night; the worn gatepost with a grey fungus of hoar frost on
its top; and the bare, black trees of the garden with thrushes like birds of ill omen in their branches. Frost had transformed everything into stark and simple forms as in a painting by an artist with no eye for detail.
One morning in particular lingered in the memory. He had risen early to go bird-watching on the Ross Mór. The sun, hidden in cloud, did not shine on the grey rime that lay everywhere except on the black earth beneath the weeping willow. It lay on the tiled roofs of houses; on the zinc roofs of byres and barns; on the coping stones of walls; on hard-as-rock cabbage heads in the gardens; and on the paving flags of the laneway from the cottage
By the time he’d prepared and eaten breakfast, the sun had burnt its way through the cloud, and the hoar frost had melted. The upper side of the branches of the apple tree, previously grey, were now a shiny black, and clear droplets hung like pearls from their undersides, dripping luminously as the sun rose higher. For one precious moment it seemed to him that this melting and dripping would never end—until he realised that his time in the glen was coming to an end, that he was living out the final weeks of his stay. The sense of something ending came as a shock, as if he had discovered too late in life that he was mortal.
He had been lucky that morning on the Ross Mór. He spotted a male merlin flying down a meadow pipit, and later a hen harrier, which according to his bird book, was rarely seen in Donegal. He hadn’t made a note of it that day, so he opened his diary at Saturday, 27 November, and wrote:
Ross Mór 9.00 -11.00 a.m—Saw one male merlin decapitating a meadow pipit. One hen harrier flying uncharacteristically low.
Troubled by the cheerless vacuity at the centre of things, he looked out of the window, hoping perhaps for a ray of meaning or even reassurance. Which? He did not know. Rory Rua’s donkey was rolling in the road, his hind legs reaching heavenwards, his forelegs bent. As he struggled to his feet, he was joined by another donkey that began scratching his comrade’s neck in playful camaraderie, which soon took on the guise of unhurried homoeroticism. He watched them with voyeuristic contentment, two male donkeys unselfconsciously sniffing each other’s groins, while their black pintles lengthened slowly like hanging concertinas. He could not help wondering about the nature of what he had seen. Sex was not the only reality, but it was perhaps the only reality potent enough to blot out, at least temporarily, the consciousness of death and the memory of a male merlin decapitating an unsuspecting pipit.
Rory Rua’s red setter came up the lane with a bone. Carefully, he scooped out a shallow grave in his master’s field, covered the bone, and examined his footwork with a sniff before putting the donkeys off their lovemaking with a furious fit of barking. The dog was obviously a policeman, and the donkeys, errant humanity following its instinct in its customary pursuit of pleasure. For all he knew, he could have been in Soho, watching from a window the motley press below. But why go to Soho when all human life, at its most primitive and uninhibited, was to be enjoyed here free of charge? He felt like going to bed and pulling the blankets up over his head. Ever since that bruising evening with the Canon, he had been suffering from a malaise of the will; a kind of Oblomovism that rendered him incapable of even the simplest decision.
As he turned away from the window, a movement caught the tail of his eye. A grey rat with a hairless tail vanished into a hole in the garden wall. In one continuous movement, he took two cartridges from his pocket, loaded the gun, raised the bottom sash, and rested the barrels on the sill. As he waited with the safety catch cocked, he recalled a bright Saturday morning in October when Rory Rua was threshing and he had stood back from the corn stack and blasted each rat up the Khyber as it fled. It was an expensive method of extermination but it pleased Rory Rua and provided mild entertainment on a morning when he had nothing better to do.
The rat emerged with its pointed nose to the ground, looked to and fro, and made for a half-eaten potato by an upturned creel. Potter took aim and pulled the trigger as the rat, turning, looked up from its meal. Unnecessarily, he held the gun for a moment with the heel of the stock firmly against his shoulder, but the rat was already dead. Struck by a disabling sense of the ridiculous, he did his best to ignore the memory of a Victorian photographer taking a picture. It was the way the rat had looked up at him in the moment of death that brought the image to mind. Again, he was taking a photo of Margaret, and as usual she was bent on absurdity, repeating the word ‘Cheese!’ over and over again whenever he pointed the camera in her direction. He dismissed the thought as irrelevant. After all, he had managed to shoot the rat. That was something Oblomov would never have had the strength of will to do.
Satisfied, he took the tongs from its place by the fire, lifted the flabby grey body, and flung it over the garden wall for the dog to enjoy. Returning to the house, he sat down to clean his gun once more.
He would not go to Roarty’s tonight. He would stay at home, read a book, and have a swig or two from the bottle of Glenmorangie he kept in the dresser for emergencies. Ever since Roarty and Gillespie had shown the white feather in their discussion with the Canon, he had not been going to the pub as regularly as before. He should have known that the Irish, in spite of a handful of anti-clerical writers, were by nature priest-servers. They might poke fun at the arrogance of their ignorant clergy when their back was turned, but confronted by a cassock and surplice they tugged the forelock and said, ‘Yes, Father,’ with an alacrity that had as much to do with superstition as religion. If it were merely a survival of attitudes from penal times when the priest was thought to bear the future of the race with the housel in his pyx, he would have understood; but as far as he could discover, there were no satirical portraits of randy friars or venal pardoners in classical Irish literature. There was no fourteenth-century Irish Chaucer, no Irish Wycliffe, only the earlier excesses of ascetic monasticism. However, the undertow of racial inclination did not excuse Roarty, Gimp Gillespie, and Rory Rua in their treachery. All three were men of intelligence. They knew what they were doing, and they did it not merely to please the Canon but in the vain hope of lining their own pockets.
The experience, however disagreeable, had opened his eyes. He had been too sympathetic, overeager to enjoy what he had seen as the genius of the country. He had become more detached, less ready to applaud because of a picturesque phrase in a pub; and he was prepared to believe that his newfound ambivalence was an emotional and perhaps an intellectual enrichment. Thankfully, he still could rely on Nora Hession. She had a way of making light of obstacles that at first glance seemed insurmountable, and she had the knack of making him laugh at his own excesses. Whereas Margaret had become an agent of aggro and a creator of absurd situations, Nora could bring order out of muddle and laugh him out of his ill-humour. She was so sensible, so committed to looking at everything with a practical eye, that he sometimes wondered if she saw right through him—a thought that troubled him more than he cared to admit.
He put away the cleaning rod, oil and tow, and placed the gun on its rest above the kitchen door. He switched on the light, pulled down the window blinds against the descending night, and poured himself a long drink to provide company for an hour. As he leaned back in his fireside armchair, the intimate comforts of the cottage leaped to his eye. It was a genuine peasant cottage with a low thatch roof, flagged floor, whitewashed walls, hearth fire, a curtained kitchen bed in an outshot, a garret for storage above the kitchen, and a loft above the lower bedroom. Both outside and inside it looked the very antithesis of the modern bungalows now being slapped up for tourists by profit-hungry contractors who put asbestos sheeting under the thatch and introduced such anachronisms as tiled floors, wooden ceilings, central heating, and piped water. This cottage had brown scraws and smoke-blackened rafters beneath the thatch, an open fireplace with a sooty crane, and barnacle-eaten beams which spanned the width of the house and had obviously been cast ashore as flotsam in the days of sail.
What he liked most about the cottage was the open turf fire. Admittedly, there was a cooker run on Ca
lor gas by the dresser but he never used it except to make a quick cup of tea in the morning. He did most of his cooking over the peat fire because of the subtle flavour it gave the food, a tang he liked best in lamb stew made from mountain ‘mutton’.
He took Gimp Gillespie’s book from the only shelf, an account of Ireland during the Famine by a visiting English philanthropist: Narrative of a Recent Journey of Six Weeks in Ireland in Connexion with the Subject of Supplying Small Seeds to Some of the Remoter Districts with Current Observations on the Depressed Circumstances of the People, and the Means Presented for the Improvement of their Social Condition. He stretched his legs across the hearth and, as he began the first chapter, wondered vaguely if he could interest a London publisher in a similar composition concerning the depressive influence of the Catholic Church today on the circumstances of the Irish people with suggestions for the improvement of their intellectual condition.
As he began the third chapter, he looked up, wondering if a mouse had stirred in the wall. Again he heard the noise, a soft tap like that of a forefinger on a hand drum, followed a second later by a metallic ping. Looking at his watch, he worked out that the pings were occurring at four-second intervals. Rain, he thought, though he could not hear anything between the taps and the pings. He opened the door to find that the night was full of the sound of falling water. It was dripping from the eaves, whispering in the trees, and gurgling in the runnel by the gable; but try as he might, he could not identify the source of the tapping. The ping, however, was coming from the edge of the outshot roof onto the side of an overturned bucket. Curiosity satisfied, he returned to the fire and his book. The warmth inside and the rain outside filled him with an unexpected sense of well-being; the sense of security of a man of forty who is in good health and has long since solved life’s economic problems.
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