‘It’s a question I don’t like to answer.’
‘You mean it’s the baby?’
‘Well, after all she’s mine in a way she can never be yours. I’m carrying her. Soon I’ll feel her first kick, Maggie says.’
‘Or his first kick!’
‘His or hers, I’ll be the one who’ll feel it. I’d better have a look at the pot. I think I can get the smell of cooked meat.’
They didn’t talk further about their predicament. Over dinner she told him about the local gossip, who said what about whom. She was as lively as ever. He smiled at her jokes while trying to conceal the hurt of rejection and the torn state of his feelings.
‘It’s a starry night. I’ll walk back with you,’ he said, thinking that at least a walk would take longer than a drive. Perhaps on the way she might pause between sentences and listen for the fluttering movement of a roosting bird in a hedge, or say, ‘Stay for another week, Ken. It will give us time. Who knows, we may yet find a way.’
‘I feel tired after all the excitement,’ she replied. ‘Maybe you should drive me back.’
He watched her retreating figure from the parochial house gate as she walked up the avenue to the heavy door which swallowed her up, closing with a thud behind her. He stood there feeling foolish, looking up at the tall house, thinking she had vanished out of his life into the darkness of the unknown.
He felt angry and confused. If the Canon were a holy man, he would not have been so troubled. The Canon was vain, shallow and overbearing, a tireless meddler in other people’s lives. As neither an objective observer nor a disinterested adviser, he had no business interfering. Beneath the priestly façade, he was just a man with the same vanities and impulses that drive all men to distraction. How could Nora, an intelligent girl, be so naïve? If she was so desperate for confession, he would have driven her to Garron or even Donegal Town, where she could confess to a total stranger she’d never see again. Confessing to a self-admiring peacock like the Canon was granting him a position in her life that he himself did not have and would never aspire to have. The only thing that made an easy relationship between a man and a woman possible was that neither knew the true thoughts of the other.
He was surprised to find himself back at the cottage. The cheerlessness of the kitchen was so unbearable that he did not take off his coat. What the situation demanded was a strategy of desperation, the kind of strategy that overturns all predictions and expectations. With a keen sense of personal failure, he drove straight to Roarty’s, desperate for the harmless deceptions of male companionship.
20
Gillespie had invited him to supper in the declared hope that he might remember the glen for the excellence of the cooking. Aware of the local gossip about Gillespie’s heroic eating habits, Potter lunched lightly by way of preparation. Since he didn’t expect Gillespie to dust down a bottle of the best wine, he wrapped a bottle of his own modest claret in a newspaper and laid it in readiness on the passenger seat of his car. When subsequently it occurred to him that his host would hardly go to the trouble of getting in some Glenmorangie, he reasoned that it might be a good idea to stop at Roarty’s en route for his apéritif.
To his surprise he found Gillespie at the counter deep in conversation with Crubog and Cor Mogaill.
‘I hope I haven’t got the wrong evening?’ he said in reply to Gillespie’s greeting.
‘There’s no such thing as a wrong evening here,’ Gillespie explained.
‘Who’s cooking dinner then?’
‘The dinner’s in the oven. Relax and have a welcoming drink on your host.’
Crubog laughed and Cor Mogaill winked at Potter. ‘I hope you’ve brought your longest spoon,’ he said. ‘Gimp is noted for his lack of cutlery.’
It was all good-humoured joshing, and Gillespie didn’t seem to mind. After one or two rounds Potter and Gillespie made their escape and faced up the street against a biting wind. Gillespie’s kitchen was clean but untidy with a bunch of onions on the table, a crate of Guinness on the floor, a bottle of Irish whiskey and a big head of cabbage on the worktop, carrots in the sink, and pots and pans everywhere.
‘Two is really the minimum for a dinner party,’ Gillespie said.
‘The rule we follow in London is no fewer than the Graces and no more than the Muses.’
‘And how many would that be?’
‘No less than three, no more than nine.’
‘Now isn’t a classical education the grand thing!’ Gillespie exclaimed, peeling off his pullover and rolling up his sleeves.
He handed Potter a glass and the bottle of Jameson and told him to pour himself a drink. He himself uncapped a bottle of stout, and watched the myriad-eyed froth rising up the side of the tilted glass as he poured.
‘You scrub the potatoes and I’ll chop the onions. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong time of year for scallions. We’ll boil the potatoes in their jackets and in sea water to give them the desired je ne sais quoi. And don’t scrub them too clean; the clay in which they grew is part of the flavour.’
‘Do you serve them in their jackets, clay and all?’ Potter looked worried.
‘No, I’ll be making brúitín, what some people call champ or colcannon.’
‘And what is this... brooteen?’
‘Potatoes mashed with onions or scallions and butter as well as a little sprinkling of milk.’
‘I think I can get the smell of roasting meat? What is it?’
‘We’re having slow-cooked crubeens, a speciality of the house which I reserve for highly valued guests.’
‘What are crubeens?’
‘Pig’s trotters, pettitoes to the squeamish, thought by the elect a delicacy. I always get the butcher to give me the hind ones; they’re the meatiest.’
Potter was beginning to feel distinctly uneasy. He’d never been keen on pork. He’d loathed the weekly roast pork at his school, but even at school he’d never been given trotters. Next, Gillespie commissioned him to peel and chop some carrots while he himself split the head of cabbage down the middle and began cutting it up with a fearsome looking kitchen knife.
‘I hope you’re a cabbage man,’ he said. ‘If you are, I’ll put on the whole head.’
‘I’m not what you’d call a noted cabbage man but I’ve been known to eat it. My mother used to say it was good for the character.’
‘Your mother was right, Potter. I boil my cabbage first and then toss it lightly on the pan in the fat of the crubeens. Is that how your mother used to do it?’
‘No, she was not a noted crubeen person.’ He glanced at Gillespie to see if it was all a leg-pull but his host was grimly intent on his chopping.
At last, when everything was in a doing way, they rested from their labours to enjoy what Gillespie called ‘a well-earned apéritif’. Sitting at the bare pinewood table and listening to the bubbling and hissing of the potatoes in the big saucepan, they discussed Cor Mogaill’s combative debating style without resorting to it.
‘Sorry to be losing you, Potter,’ Gillespie said eventually. ‘You’ll be taking Nora with you, I suppose.’
‘I’d like to but she refuses point blank to come. She’s been to London once, apparently. Nothing will make her go back.’
‘It isn’t London, it’s the Canon,’ Gillespie said firmly.
‘The Canon has nothing to do with it. She doesn’t like cities. She says she wouldn’t even want to live in Dublin. For Nora it’s what she calls “the sharp sting of sea air” or nothing.’
‘You don’t know her history, Potter. She’s in love with the Canon. Everyone knows it. We were all surprised when you managed to deflect her thoughts for four whole months.’
‘Don’t be absurd. Nora and I love each other. For me there is no other girl. I’ve proposed to her twice, but she isn’t as sure of herself as other girls are. I’m going to keep in touch. She needs time to discover what’s in her heart.’
‘You must face the facts, Potter. If she loved you, she’d marry you.
I say that as a friend.’
‘The child she’s carrying has come between us. It has taken her over, and that’s the long and the short of it.’ He regretted having said it. Gillespie was a gossip. Not a man to keep his mouth shut.
‘She’s pregnant then?’
‘Perhaps I shouldn’t have told you. Keep it under your biretta at least for the moment.’
‘I’m sorry, Potter. You must be worried stiff.’
‘If only she’d come to London with me, all would be well. What’s to become of her here? She can’t stay on at the parochial house. And they won’t give her back her old teaching job, I’m sure. Just think of the scandal.’
‘You needn’t worry. She’ll come to no harm. Here we have a long tradition of looking after one another. It may be the best thing that’s ever happened. She can come and live with me. I’ll give her a place in my life any day.’
‘I love Nora. I’m worried because I know that if the Canon should turn against her, not one of you would be man enough to stand up to him. It would be the craven Anti-Limestone business all over again.’
‘You forget I’m in love with her, too, and I haven’t given up hope. I earn enough to keep both of us in comfort, and I have two empty bedrooms. We could live in this very house like the king and queen of Sheba.’
‘Those vegetables must be cooked now.’ Potter sought a polite way to end a disconcerting exchange of views.
Gillespie drained the potatoes and invited Potter to peel them. They were lovely potatoes, even-sized and smooth-skinned, and so floury that Potter thought it a pity to mash them. That precisely was what Gillespie did with a big wooden pestle, which he called a beetle, claiming it had been given him by a gypsy woman who’d said it dated from prehistoric times. As he mashed, he added some hot milk, butter, and finely chopped onions and kept pounding until the mixture was as smooth as paste. Next, he drained the fat off the roast crubeens and fried a mountain of boiled cabbage in it to achieve what he called ‘concurrence of flavour’.
Gillespie might not be a great chef, Potter told himself, but he was supremely efficient in the kitchen. Predictably, he looked at the carrots and pronounced them done to a tee. He was the kind of man who never failed to cook a meal to his own satisfaction. It was a gift not given to every bachelor. Potter could grill a chop or a steak; boil, fry and poach eggs; but he could never scramble an egg like his mother. It was one of the many things he should have learnt from her but didn’t. For that reason alone, he considered the presence of a good woman in a man’s life not a matter of choice but of necessity. Nora was such a woman. Her manifold talents would be lost on a do-it-yourself fanatic like Gillespie. Gillespie was nothing if not self-sufficient and therefore nothing if not self-satisfied. What Nora needed was a man like himself who would not feel complete without her.
At last everything was on the table. Potter poured the claret and Gillespie removed the lid from an impressively large bronze tureen, revealing eight trotters lying heads and thraws at the bottom. Potter’s appetite vanished on the spot. He had never seen, never imagined, so many severed feet together in one place, each with its four sharp toes, two large and two small, but what finally administered the coup de grâce to his appetite was the thought of the farmyards in which they’d trodden up to the ankles—or was it fetlocks?—in slurry.
Gillespie put two of the largest crubeens on Potter’s plate, picked up another for himself and began eaten it out of his hand. Gingerly examining one of the crubeens before him, Potter noted the rough pads under the big toes and the loose, anaemic skin covered in fine bristle. He rubbed the pad of his forefinger against the bristles, which were almost invisible but very much there. Not even at school had he been subjected to such a disconcerting culinary experience.
‘They’re lovely,’ said Gillespie. ‘Lovely to suck. I suggest we disregard the Talmudic injunction: fill a third of the stomach with food, a third with drink, and leave the rest empty.’
‘I should be happier following the practice of the ancient Greeks if only I could remember it. Can you?’
‘I’m afraid I can’t help you there. The ancient classics were never my stomping ground.’
Potter put on a show of eating but his heart wasn’t in the exercise. The fried cabbage was passable, more acceptable than boiled cabbage, but the thought that it had been tossed in the fat of the trotters ran counter to the judgement of his taste buds. He was glad of the brooteen, however. It was tastier than any mashed potato he’d ever eaten, but mashed potato on its own hardly made a meal. As Dr Johnson once said, ‘this was a good dinner enough, to be sure; but it was not a dinner to ask a man to.’ Observing Gillespie working his way steadily through the heap of trotters and vegetables on his plate, he sought to recall the moral of Aesop’s fable about the stork that had been invited to dinner by a fox. Now he could sympathise with the stork in her predicament. Fittingly, her response was to invite the fox to an equally impossible dinner. From his schooldays and occasional travels abroad, he himself knew of several such dinners. If his time in the glen weren’t coming to an end, he would pay his host back in his own coin.
When Gillespie had dispatched the last of the crubeens, he cleared the table and laid out a spread of cream crackers, cheese and grapes. As he approached the table with the drinks, he staggered and almost lost his balance. Recovering, he set the bottle of Jameson and a fresh glass before Potter, who realised that his host was quite drunk. He had been sober leaving the pub. The claret, which he’d pronounced very drinkable, had done for him. Gillespie returned to the table with four bottles of Guinness for himself, which he placed within easy reach of his hand.
‘Now that the formalities are over, let the real business of the evening begin,’ he said. ‘Drink and conversation.’
The little kitchen had become quite warm. Potter loosened his tie and undid the top button of his shirt. Gillespie poured himself a Guinness and attacked the grapes and cheese.
‘Do you ever suffer from doubts, Potter?’ he asked through a mouthful of grapes.
‘Religious doubts?’
‘No, just doubts. There are two types of men: men who suffer from doubts and men who suffer from certainties.’
‘Personally, I’d plump for the pleasures of certainty rather than live in the torture chamber of doubt.’
‘The men who suffer from certainty are boring. Could anyone be more certain and more boring than Rory Rua?’
‘I find Rory Rua quite engaging,’ Potter said, beginning to wonder where Gillespie’s conversation was leading them.
‘I think you’re a doubter yourself, Potter. That’s why you’re such good company. You have the type of mind that is always peering behind the back of the obvious. I know because I have that sort of mind myself. It never gives you a minute’s peace. But it means you’re always ahead of the game. You’ve foreseen it all, if only as a remote possibility. I see doubt as a gift from heaven. We should be grateful for all the insights it gives us.’
Potter could not begin to imagine what Gillespie was driving at. He looked passionately serious, as if about to lapse into one of his melancholy moods. Celts were like that, brooding on the darkness of winter nights one minute and the glory of a summer’s day the next. Gillespie obviously felt that everyone thought and felt as he himself did.
‘Are you certain about Nora, for example?’ he asked. It was an odd question, and it had come at Potter out of the blue. He scrutinised Gillespie’s shut-down face, and Gillespie returned the scrutiny.
‘I’m not at all sure I get your drift, Gillespie.’
‘Are you sure you’re the father of the child?’
‘You’re not suggesting you are?’ Potter laughed, though somewhat uneasily.
‘Alas, I’m not. But don’t get me wrong. I’m only trying to alert you to possibilities. As I see it, life is a river and we’re all rowing against the flow. On one bank are the probabilities; on the other, the possibilities. It’s up to us rowers to choose which bank to hug. The adventurous g
o after the possibilities; those who play safe go for the probabilities.’
‘Gillespie, you’re into deep water now, too deep for me.’
‘What Englishman said, “Never patronise, never explain.”’
‘I think the saying is, “Never apologise, never explain.” But to end all this futile speculation and to set your suspicious mind to rest, let me assure you that I know Nora in a way no other man has ever known her. She was a virgin when we first made love. Some things can’t be faked, my dear Gillespie.’
‘You and I are fellow victims, Potter. We’ve both suffered injury at the hands of the Canon. Like the devil himself, he never rests. Repulse him on one front, and before you have time to look round, he’s advancing on you from another.’
Potter felt angry but it was not his way to show it. He had taken Gillespie’s measure. As a failed lover, he must know the torments of jealousy; and there was no surer way to avenge an ancient hurt than to inspire jealousy in the man he saw as his rival. Gillespie was not the boon companion he’d taken him for.
‘Look, Gillespie, the Canon is twice her age, old enough to be her father.’
‘Or her father figure!’
‘I’m her father figure. I’m ten years older than Nora. I love her and she loves me. And there’s an end on’t.’
‘Spoken like John Bull himself. What I like about the English is their unshakable objectivity. We Irish are far too hot-headed.’
Potter felt uneasy. Any discussion about the English and the Irish was fraught with explosive possibilities, especially in conditions of high inebriation. He reached for the only subject guaranteed in Ireland to calm the stormiest of alcoholic seas. Poetry was something everyone could agree on because no one could be certain of what it was about.
‘I admire the Irish above all for their poetry,’ he said. ‘It seems to me that the most profound question in all literature was asked by Captain Boyle in Juno and the Paycock.’
‘And what question is that?’ Gillespie asked.
‘What is the stars?’
In quoting, Potter took care not to imitate a Dublin accent, in case he might give offence by getting it wrong. Gillespie’s eyes lit up. Potter could have sworn he’d heard the click of points changing in the other man’s mind.
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