‘Knockinagow,’ read the cop. ‘Che Guevara Speaks.’ He looked amused.
‘It’s a free country.’
‘I’m glad you agree,’ said the cop. ‘No need to free it so, is there, if it’s free already? The priests,’ he went on, ‘are fit to be tied. Father Farrel rang the station twice. He says community relations with the Protestants get set back light years by this sort of thing and that it’s not from the Church that the snot-nosed little hooligans get their sectarian hatred.’
Patsy was embarrassed. Two men had just walked into the club. He could see them behind the cop’s head through the hatch which separated his quarters from the public premises. The hatch was open and the cop’s voice had a carrying ring.
‘Urinating up and down the nave,’ said the cop with disgust.
One of the fellows in the rec. room was Cormac O’Malley. He was showing the other one round. The man picked up a billiard cue and turned to take a shot. Jesus, it was that Yank that Patsy had warned off in the Shelbourne Rooms. What was the boy thinking of to bring him round here? Sacred Heart, how was Patsy going to face him if Cormac brought him in? Would the Yank denounce him?
‘They killed an expensive dog,’ said the cop. ‘Belonging to the vicar. An Alsatian.’
Patsy edged round him towards the hatch. ‘Excuse me,’ he said.
‘Some sort of black mass,’ roared the cop, budging his fat cop’s arse no more than an inch. ‘Strangled the dog in the church and pissed all around it. Where do they get the ideas, tell me that?’
Patsy tried to reach across the jutting navy-blue backside to close the hatch but things had been hung on it – his space was cramped – and a saucepan fell with a clatter.
‘Tell me,’ said the cop meaningfully, ‘before I tell you.’
The Yank was staring right at Patsy.
‘Good inter-community relations are …’
The Yank’s stare was neither of recognition nor hostility. He seemed not to know Patsy at all. Patsy would deny, he decided, that he’d ever seen the fellow. Stoutly. The guards wouldn’t bother him. It was his word against the Yank’s. His fear was of the IRA. They didn’t like people impersonating them. Men had been kneecapped for less. Patsy’s stomach seemed to flop into his bowels and he had an impulse to run out of the house. Hold it, Flynn, he admonished himself. Brazen it out. His hands were clammy. How would the IRA hear of it? Oh, they had their ways. He watched Cormac and the Yank approach in slow motion.
The cop (whose name, it came to Patsy who was going to have to introduce him, was Guard Kirwin) remarked that the fence dividing the garden of the club from the garden of the Protestant church showed that the burglars had reached it from here. ‘This,’ Patsy would have to say, ‘is Guard Kirwin.’ And ‘this’, Cormac might say, ‘is Patsy Flynn.’ ‘Oh,’ he imagined the Yank exclaiming, ‘is that who it is!’ Then, somehow, word would reach the IRA.
‘Impersonation,’ said Guard Kirwin, ‘is one thing, but encouraging …’
Issuing threats in their name? They’d never stand for that.
‘It’s bloody negative and backward,’ said the guard. ‘Give the young fellows something to be for, can’t you, instead of always something to be against? Form a football team. Take them mountain-climbing. Bring in girls.’
Patsy wasn’t listening.
‘A bit of fun,’ said the cop. ‘A bit of a laugh. Why do you think they go off to England? It’s not only the jobs.’
He was young, Patsy noticed suddenly: a healthy lump. All pink flesh, gleaming. All appetites. Teeth like delph. How dare he come round giving jaw out of him? A chisler. What did he know? Girls? Patsy had never touched a female. Not since his mother and he had given up trusting her because of the way she made signs about him when she thought he didn’t see. Early. When he was maybe seven.
‘Well, I’ve said what I came to say,’ said Guard Kirwin. ‘I’ll be pushing off.’
Behind his head two faces thrust into the hatch then bounced shyly away. The guard turned and saw them.
‘Oh, hullo,’ he said cheerily. ‘I’ve been making some inquiries about what happened next door. You’ll have heard?’
He walked away with the other two. Checking on Patsy, thought Patsy, but couldn’t bring himself to follow. The guards had no proof that anyone from the club had done the burgling. If they had they’d be singing a different tune. Still, they were nosy, seizing the occasion to snoop. He felt feverish. A voice rang out in laughter. Then two others joined in. They were joking. They were outside in the street, laughing. Patsy was shocked.
Suddenly he forgot his fear of the young louts in today’s IRA who had no respect for men like him. He forgot that he had been afraid that the American might denounce him. How could he? A Yank. A tourist. Patsy’s anger rose at not being recognized. Anger and hurt. It was unfair. After all he’d done. To be ignored, denied, told to bring in girls. Trivialization, he thought. Sex. The threat to him was dark. He felt as though the laughter in the street were wiping him out. The three young men were indifferent, self-absorbed, together. Even the young guard.
Picking up his boot which he had over-polished, he began to wonder who had committed the odd, angry crime in the church next door. Pissing in the nave, he thought. Murdering a dog? The thought began to excite him in a queer, disgusted way.
*
Larry phoned from the States to say that he would be in Dublin the day after tomorrow and wanted James to dine with him. Eight p.m. in the Shelbourne, OK? He wanted to hear the best of the tapes. As soon as James had picked out the likeliest interviewees, a camera crew would be coming to film them. Larry himself would be en route to Amsterdam. He rang off at a speed which reminded James that time was money and sent him back to a symphony of coughs taped two days before in a home for veteran patriots. Even the voices unafflicted with catarrh were next to impossible to understand. A tape made in a Cork pub was no better. Unsteady laughs racked at it. James hoped the excitement hadn’t given any of those old guys a stroke. Re-running the interviews, he managed to make out a couple of phrases: ‘Yish, I rimimbir. Chrish, yish.’ James had made the mistake of filling the old-timers with drink to loosen their tongues. ‘Oh dim were de days!’ Dim was right. A frieze of rheumy eyes rose in his memory. Trick noses. Faces reduced to caricature by pressures now forgotten. Limbs like sticks inside the limp flap of their trousers: these, assured the local guide, were indeed the Joe O’Does whom Larry wanted to commemorate, unknown soldiers who had fought with Commandant Tom Barry and known Mick Collins.
‘You remember Mick, do you not,’ the guide had rallied an old-timer.
Heavy lids blinked. The old man might have been fished out after days spent under water.
‘Were you not working with him in England,’ the guide encouraged, ‘before the Great War? Jimsy Doyle says you were. The Great War, remember?’
Troubled by so much attention, the man reached into a muddied memory and came up with an offering. In a cracked, heart-breaking voice, he began to sing something martial but, so thin was his pipe, that it was moments before the mortified guide recognized ‘The British Grenadiers’. He had brought James a veteran of the wrong army. Titters. Claps. The tape fizzed with hilarity.
‘Remember the Munster Fusiliers?’
‘Towrowrow Alexander or even Hercules,
Ulysses or Lysander …’
‘Yiz have tin ears!’
‘Mons, Wipers …’
‘Goodbye, don’t cry …’
‘Sing “The Lily of Killarney” for us, there’s a good man.’
‘Sure where did Giniral Barry learn to fight but wid de Tommies!’
The next tape featured Miss Lefanu-Lynch.
She could have stepped out of Gone with the Wind or Great Expectations. Swathed in lace, she came on like a TV ad, explaining, lest James not know, that her lace was from Limerick and made by hand. It was the colour of boiled potatoes and so was her face: a mashed affair. She was eighty-one.
‘Limerick is noted for it
s lace,’ she said instructively, ‘for the verse-form improperly associated with the town and for the last stand made there by the Irish aristocracy. That was in 1691. James Shit-on-himself had let them down the year before. I refer to James II whom the Irish, on that account, called James Shit-on-himself, Séamus an chaca.’
If the Joe O’Does were inarticulate, Miss Lefanu-Lynch spoke like a book. She was used to interviews and started this one by handing James her album of press-cuttings. Memories,’ she told him, ‘culled in the garden of yesteryear.’ There were photographs of herself unveiling plaques, addressing rallies, attending funerals and marching in parades. From the Twenties to the Sixties she had marched, then taken to the bed from which she was conducting this interview. Though protected by Cellophane, the browned edges of her cuttings crumbled like cornflakes over James’s lap.
Miss Lefanu-Lynch was the purest of the pure. ‘I am mindful, Mr Duffy, of the many who went before, unsung heroines like my poor sisters, Kitty and Bridge, who heeded the clarion call of destiny and laboured in obscurity till the end.’ Though all had suffered for the cause, no relative of hers would ever accept a pension from the successive Irish governments which had offered them. They would neither deal with compromisers nor hearken to the siren call of comfort.
James’s recoiling eye was held by her scorched yellow ones. She hitched her shawl on to elbows sharp as knitting needles, then asked what he wanted of her. Why was he wasting her diminished stock of time?
Nervously, he said he had hoped for something more personal.
‘Oh, human interest? Gossip? I’m afraid, Mr Duffy, you’ve come to the wrong person. People do not fight revolutions to exalt the commonplace but to make the worthwhile available to ordinary people.’
James fancied he could smell the clay of the cemeteries where she had so often dished out such sentiments. There were chrysanthemums in a bowl. Perhaps the rank odour came from them?
On impulse and because she had annoyed him, he asked, ‘I wonder if you ever ran across a woman called Judith Clancy who became a nun? I believe she knows some story connected with an American fund-raiser, Sparky Driscoll, who was killed over here in 1922. I’m interested in the details of the affair.’
‘Mary. My specs.’ Miss Lefanu-Lynch took a pair of thick-lensed glasses from the maid who had stood in attendance on her through the interview. When she put them on, James realized that, without them, she must be near blind. Magnified, two pansy-sized orbs gazed at him with a guileless air. She looked now like a sweet old thing adrift in her own benevolence. But the lemur look must be covering her first scrutiny of him.
‘What do you know of her?’ she asked.
‘Well, I’ve tried interviewing her. But it’s a little difficult. She’s …’
‘Senile?’ suggested his hostess. ‘Say it if you mean it. Words don’t frighten me, Mr Duffy. Never have. She probably is. She was never normal, you know. I thought she’d been locked up years ago?’ She threw a taunting glance at him, raising her spectacles for a moment to show inflamed, screwed-up flesh around her naked eyes. ‘Anyway, Judith Clancy was never of the least importance in the National Struggle.’
‘But she did know people, didn’t she? Owen O’Malley? Sparky Driscoll? She must have known them well, known things about them?’
‘Unofficial things you mean? You’re muck-raking, I suppose? Don’t count on me for help. God knows I had no sympathy with Owen O’Malley from the day he turned his coat and accepted the so-called “Free State” in 1927 …’
James sighed.
‘Well, this can be of little interest to you,’ said Miss Lefanu-Lynch angrily. ‘We have become used to being treated as bores, Mr Duffy. Those of us who remained faithful to the last all-Ireland parliament elected in the last all-Ireland parliamentary election of 1918 are used to being denied media coverage. President Wilson, to be sure, had a prejudice against the Irish …’
He saw that she could not stop herself. Words in her memory were strung like necklaces. Perhaps Larry might like to use her precisely for this reason? Cut back and forth from this unfaltering fury to a changing Ireland: traffic jams, bingo games, tower blocks, then this anomaly with her timeless broad effects?
‘Owen O’Malley was no ally of ours after ’27, but to say that he misused American funds is a dastardly lie. If Judy Clancy is giving credence to that old canard, she is mad. I always thought she was sexually unstable. Yes, sexually unstable. There was an imbalance there. She may have had a crush on Owen or on the American. I never listen to gossip, so I can’t tell you.’
‘Might she have been put into a convent to hush some scandal up?’
‘Piffle! Misguided Owen O’Malley may have been but he was straight as a die. Do you expect me to malign the dead?’ Miss Lefanu-Lynch removed her glasses, shrank her eyes and blotted James out. ‘Ask me about something else if you want to,’ she invited. ‘Then it will be time for my nap.’
James asked her opinion of the current IRA campaign.
Miss Lefanu-Lynch slid down in the bed and closed her eyes. ‘I may not live to see it,’ she said, ‘but the British will have left this island e’er long. History will uphold us, Mr Duffy. The present generation is one of the finest our people have produced.’
The maid moved towards the door, her hand expectant on the knob. James had a last look at the mausoleum of a room where infusions of dust were gathering. The old woman kept her eyes shut, simultaneously dismissing and treating him to the full-dress death-bed rehearsal towards which, he supposed, she must have been manoeuvring throughout the interview.
‘Well, thank you,’ he told the blue-veined or blue-painted eyelids. ‘Most grateful,’ he blurted, unnerved by the convincing deadness of the face, ‘for … your help.’
The corpse-face opened its mouth and snored. The maid showed James out and left him at the top of a flight of granite steps equipped with a shoe-scraper but no porch. Rain dripped from the house’s eaves and gathered in pools in the drive. Evergreens, as big as tents, offered oases of shelter along the length of this but in the spaces between them he saw that he would ruin his shoes and coat. He should have rung for a taxi, but the door had closed and he lacked the nerve to ring and ask to be readmitted. Instead, he darted and squelched down the drive, pausing under trees but deliberately not looking back to the house, through one window of which, he suspected, his plight might be being watched with satisfaction.
However, Miss Lefanu-Lynch was not wasting her time at the window. As soon as she heard the front door slam, she hauled herself up in the bed, wriggling backwards into a position in which she was propped and haloed by a nimbus of lace-edged pillows.
‘Mary?’ She waited until the maid appeared at her door. ‘Gone?’
‘He is.’ The maid wore a livery, as few did nowadays: black dress and stockings, lacey white cuffs and apron and a scrap of lace, like a diadem, in her hair. She was young, in her twenties, but of a Republican family and her mother and grandmother had both worked for Miss Lefanu-Lynch.
‘Telephone,’ requested her mistress.
Mary took an ivory-coloured one from a drawer and laid it on the bed. Miss Lefanu-Lynch dialled a number.
‘Hullo,’ she spoke into the instrument. ‘Liadán here. You hadn’t forgotten that you’d let me have this number, had you? It is urgent, or I wouldn’t have presumed to use it. More delicate perhaps than urgent, though that will be for you to determine. I won’t take much of your time. No, no need to flatter me. I know my place. I’m an old has-been but eager to serve and, as you thought, our interests do sometimes coincide, even if … Yes, yes, all right, all right, I’m glad to hear you say so. No, indeed, real-politik has not been my sphere, any more than consistency has been yours. You might say we complement each other. Yes. Well, I’m ringing about a muck-raker, an American working, I’m not clear for whom, on a film about 1921. He’s particularly interested in Owen O’Malley. You don’t? You do? Well, of course I supposed he was or I wouldn’t have seen him, would I? But he may h
ave got out of hand, got a swelled head. You know how irresponsible such people can be. Well indeed! From all our points of view. When he rang me first, he told me the film was designed to promote our cause in the US, raise money, counter the Peace-Ladies’ efforts, etc. Now, instead, it seems he’s thrilled with himself at having scented the bone of a buried skeleton which … I’m coming to that. You have to be patient with the old. We’re slow-witted, you know, and a touch suspicious. I never know where you people put your loyalties. No, not bitter. Just unsure. Owen O’Malley. Does his reputation still count with the party? It does? I’m reassured. To be sure, he was a weathercock himself and this is the point … Yes, you’ve guessed it … yes … exactly. No. No good at all if it should come to light. I’m glad you agree. Who? Judy Clancy, his sister-in-law. Well, so did I, but it seems that not at all. Alive and kicking and running at the mouth like a leaky tap. What’s more she is, for some reason, out of the convent. Don’t ask me. Probably non compos mentis and liable to say anything. Very sensitive, I should have thought … As you say, above party interests, but then I am in no position to do anything. The graveyard guardian I think one of your people called me not long ago in your party organ. Did you think I wouldn’t? Oh, my poor man, if I was sensitive to such snubs I’d be dead long ago. God knows I have one foot in the grave already. What keeps me back is the hope that what we’ve waited for so long may be at hand. Well, we won’t argue. I’m glad to have helped. Do let me know what transpires. Any time. Yes. You’d be welcome. I’m always here and will be until I go to the other place, which can’t be long now. One of these days then. Goodbye till then. God bless.’
*
Cormac’s father had invited him to lunch.
‘Like a drink?’
They were in a goodish place, Cormac thought. The menu was in French and there was a waiter just for drinks. Cormac considered his father’s question with care.
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