‘I don’t side with the Republicans …’
‘The IRA then. You and your friends, safe in your own country, sent money over here to encourage young fools like my Eamonn to die.’ Clancy landed a gobbet of spittle in the fire. He was trembling.
Sparky opened his mouth to argue.
‘Ah, can’t the pair of yez get off the subject!’ Judith could have knocked their heads together. ‘Tell him about America,’ she whispered to Sparky.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing?’ he hissed back.
‘Not like that!’ She tried to explain: ‘His America. What he remembers. Baseball …’ she pleaded. ‘Remind him.’
‘That’s a tall order,’ said Sparky.
It was, too. Clancy’s dreams were perhaps dead – but whose fault was that? Judith groped for a joke which might get them going on baseball or the Boston politics of thirty years ago. But the words stuck in her mouth. His American jokes had never made much sense to her and she had begun to guess that Sparky Driscoll didn’t see the point of them either. Maybe her father had got them wrong? Suddenly, she had an image of him standing on a sidewalk – she wasn’t too sure what that was and so he stood suspended, levitating in her mind’s eye – staring in a baffled way at some dazzling scene. Maybe he’d been a greenhorn always? On his own telling, most of the money to buy this house and the pub had come from her mother’s uncle who had left it to her when he died in Philadelphia. Her father’s contribution could have been very small. It could have been imaginary?
‘That picture,’ she said, ‘where was it taken? The one of you and my mother wearing hats? She has a lace collar and …’
‘Oh, that hat!’ Her father grasped so gratefully at her question that she felt a spasm of pain for him. ‘The women,’ he chuckled, ‘wore such hats! Like basins!’
‘They wear them small now and close to the head.’ Driscoll had finally sensed what was wanted of him.
The Da ignored him. ‘Huge!’ His hands sketched an imaginary hat-brim and quivered from present feeling or for old ostrich plumes. ‘They could hardly get in doorways.’
His wife had been lovely. This part was true. Judith had seen the photographs. His luck at getting her overwhelmed him still. Why had she married him? She with her dowry? Because she was ill with TB? Because he agreed to come home with her? He had regretted that ever since. But his thoughts turned like homing birds to his courtship days.
‘It was on Boston Common,’ he said of the picture. He’d been wearing his summer straw and his wife that absurd, optimistic, fashionable hat. ‘Have another drink?’ he coaxed Sparky.
Driscoll said he had to go.
Judith was half glad to see the back of him, half angry at his running out on her father. When she came back from seeing the guest out of the door, the Da had his head back, staring at the black glass of an uncurtained window. ‘She had a fur muff and collar,’ he reminisced. ‘In winter. Raccoon fur, soft as a cat’s belly and warm – your mother was always warm even on a perishing day. Hot even. It was the fever. The TB. She’d let me warm my hands in the muff. Mine were always cold. They have terrible winters over there. Snow up to here. Icicles like pikes. And you’d get chilblains so bad the skin swelled and raged. “Give me your muff a minute,” I’d say and get as many fingers as I could into it. You know the pain when you warm cold hands too suddenly? The skin burns. That muff had her fever in it. It was so warm it felt wet … Ah hell!’ His eyes were wet. He wiped them. ‘I’m an eejit,’ he groaned. ‘Going on this way.’ He drank down the drink he’d just poured for himself: his second wind. ‘We’ll be dead long enough, what?’ Suddenly, his mood changed. Words poured like beads off a broken string. America wasn’t all it was cracked up to be either. There was prejudice there, bigotry, and corruption among our own people. Though you could see why. They’d had a hard furrow to plough. Aye. ‘“No Irish need apply” they’d say when they were advertising jobs. I’ve seen that myself. Treated us like dirt. Snobs. Boston Brahmins. In the land of the brave and the home of the free!’ He laughed, suddenly bitter. Yanks no longer justified him. The talk with Sparky Driscoll had revealed him to himself as doubly homeless, exiled also from the elected country of his dream. ‘Republic,’ he said, ‘they say “Republic” here now and they think it’s magic. They think it’ll change something but the only way you get respect is by making money I saw that in the Republic of the US. Yes. A poor man there is as poor as a poor man here Worse, because people despite him. You wouldn’t see them feeding him the way we feed Dirty Fleming. No. I wouldn’t give a thraneen for a word like Republic,’ said the Da. ‘Seamus is right about that.’
And so it was that Sparky Driscoll, unknowingly, converted the Da to the pro-Treaty side which was the logical side for him to be on, being the one which all the conservatives in the country were taking, along with the old loyalists who, seeing that England had let them down and ditched them, were falling over themselves, trying to get friendly with the faction likely, at a pinch, to provide stability, moderation and respect for property.
Owen came home to find the house full of Free Staters with only Judith – who wasn’t revealing her opinions – a secret diehard.
It wasn’t long before the fur began to fly. Seamus and Owen sat up late, battering out the argument, like a smith and his journeyman shaping some object on an anvil.
‘Keep personalities out of it,’ said Owen, when Seamus brought up Michael Collins.
Seamus slapped his thigh, bunched his fists, winked and threw in jokes, but Owen was unflickering, a sea-green incorruptible. Judith thought of the years he had spent learning ancient abstract things in the seminary surrounded by bog. She fancied that his eye, by a double mirror trick, had caught the immobility of flatland water flooded by the pallor of clouds. His beard was bluish in the hollow of his cheek and his hair had the black-green sheen you saw on the feathers of a rooster. She couldn’t see him sitting by the stove in his braces and a collar stud, the way her father did, nor shovelling dirt from a chicken run. No, he probably would do those things. Deliberately. As a discipline. She admired the way he answered Seamus, whose arguments, until now, had seemed to her unanswerable.
Seamus talked of economics and of how the place was destroyed and the lads at the end of their tether.
‘Economics,’ said the Da, cocking an ear like a gun dog jerked from sleep by some familiar shout. ‘That’s the head and tail of it. Money moves mountains.’
‘So,’ said Owen implacably, ‘can faith, The Irish people,’ he told Seamus, ‘will follow. They won’t initiate. And don’t tell me that they’re tired. They’re always tired. They have to be goaded for their own good.’
‘Jesus, the arrogance!’ Seamus was shocked. ‘You should never have left the seminary, Owen. You’re worse than a priest now. As a priest you’d have known your authority was borrowed from heaven. This way there’s no limit to it.’
‘You,’ said Owen, ‘say “wait, settle for less”. What did waiting do for us in the past? You have the souls of shopkeepers. Don’t you see?’ he spoke with cold passion, ‘that you’ve been warped by oppression?’
‘Oh, I’d rather see shopkeepers run the country than lay priests, and I’ll tell you another thing,’ said Seamus, ‘I’d rather priests than lay priests: bloody, self-appointed heroes like yourself. The anointed priest has all eternity to reach paradise and its perfections, but you want it here and now. You learned the desire for it from the Church but you lost the Church’s patience. You’re dangerous. Mad. Like rabid dogs …’
‘Madness can sometimes be the only sanity.’
‘Faith then, we’ve had our dose. Tell me, do you not think the people have a right to a bit of peace and normality?’
‘The “people” is an abstraction. We didn’t fight for one generation. When Pearse proclaimed the Republic, he wasn’t thinking of the comfort of one set of people inhabiting the island at any one time. He was thinking of what each generation owes the race. A mystic continuity …’
Seamus held his head in mock pain. He groaned and patted his ears with remedial delicacy.
‘Oh my poor ears! The codology they’ve got to listen to The bad faith. Listen, it’s our own government. What we’ve always wanted. Remember? We should support it if you don’t want the English to think we’re a crowd of trigger-happy Paddies incapable of running the country they turned over to us.’
‘Still looking over your shoulder at the old governess?’
Sparky made an effort to pour oil on troubled waters.
‘Surely what counts,’ said he, ‘is the Irish people’s right to self-determination? Isn’t it as simple as that? The form of government is surely secondary?’
Owen gave Sparky a cold look from his saline blue eyes. ‘The “people” are clay. You can do what you like in their name but, as Aristotle said of men and women, the formative idea comes from the male and the clay is female; passive, mere potentiality. The clay here is the people who have no self and no aspiration towards determining anything at all until we infuse it into them. We are their virile soul,’ said Owen. ‘We are they.’
‘Hey, Kathleen!’ Sparky caught her boisterously by the elbow, ‘are you letting this fellow get away with this? Is this the way the Irish court their girls? Hm? My mother always told me an Irish woman could give as good as she got. Are you going to answer him or do you want us to belt him one for you? In the name of Irish womanhood?’
Owen tightened his lean lips. He was unamused. Mockery would not touch him. Jokes slid from his steaming purposefulness.
Judith felt exalted.
‘What was it all for?’ Owen asked, ‘if we stop now?’
Outside the window, stiff, icy shirts strained at a line, swelling and flapping in tethered flight.
‘The English would live up to their threats if we didn’t,’ Seamus reminded him. ‘All-out war …’
‘War then.’
‘What for?’
‘What was it ever for?’
‘A better life,’ said Seamus. Sparky nodded but Owen did not agree.
Judith saw that the rest of them longed to settle to the everyday and that tempestuous hopes struck them as irresponsible. She was viscerally on Owen’s side. The clash of wills excited her. His vision lit up the shapelessness of life, like those blades of reflected moonlight which sometimes turn a nocturnal sea into gnashings of bright steel.
*
Michael looked frightened. His eyelids blinked and he passed a hand across them, palm forwards, like a child wiping away a speck or a tear. She was furious at the unskinned pain he used against her. He exposed it, like a beggar used to making a show of his sores. It was effective too: their bond. But she felt an urge to do some extreme thing, something from which there would be no backing down. How dare he expect more from her? He was responsible for the mean lines about her mouth. I could, she thought, have been normal married to someone else. He infected me. At the same time she saw that her rage had drained off into self-pity. She would not, now, say the final wounding thing – if such existed between her and Michael.
There was a cunning movement to his head: something infinitesimally slight; he had sensed her weakening.
He walked to the window, and leaned his forehead against the glass. ‘If you want to go, you will. I can’t stop you, can I?’
‘No.’
If he had argued she might have produced reasons. She had strings all pat and ready. But Michael was giving her no chance to use them. He just stood there: a hulk of pain in his unpressed tweeds which were round-legged like pyjamas and smelled of tobacco and self-neglect.
‘What do you mean “go”?’ she asked angrily.
His need screamed at her, silently. No other answer came and this left her standing stupidly in the middle of the kitchen, deprived of her quarrel. They had been drinking tea and were on their third cup. Green light fell through the window where she had a row of plants. It shrank the space, making Michael and probably herself look amphibious. The place actually was damp. Condensation had rusted the hooks from which her saucepans hung; salt in its glass container had hardened into rocks and a Victorian egg-timer had jammed so that half the sand remained in the upper globe.
‘What do you want?’
‘What do you?’
Oh this was ridiculous!
‘I’m going away for the weekend with him,’ she said. ‘I have to.’
‘Sexual fever?’
She nodded, feeling she was betraying both men. Michael’s hurt registered on her nerve ends. Well, hurt was his weapon, she thought sourly, but when he turned a tormented face to her, open, exhausted and with no fight in it, her hand reached for his cheek, felt him grip it and then his head was on her shoulder. He was crying.
‘Michael, please, darling, don’t.’
*
‘Owen O’Malley, you’re our soul and our heart! You’re the best part of us, our very selves!’
The drunk lurched, dancing, guying his own declaration, his coat-tails flying as he twirled coquettishly in Owen’s path, holding up the flow of people who were trying to get in or out of the pub door.
It was Dirty Fleming in celebrative mood. ‘I mean it,’ he fawned, his hand held out in hesitant hope of the price of a drink. ‘Your health,’ he suggested.
But the new order did not dispense tips. Owen slid past him, followed by Seamus and Sparky, who were to act out the incident later, amid laughter, in the Clancys’ front room.
Owen spent a fair amount of time after he got home sounding out the American and trying to bring him round to his own way of thinking.
‘The fellow’s a danger,’ he concluded.
‘More than Seamus?’ Judith asked. Arguments between Owen and her brother were deadlocked.
‘Seamus hasn’t the power this lad has,’ Owen told her. ‘Our money comes from America. When he leaves he’ll be playing the expert over there. The day could come when the bold Sparky will be dictating policy to us.’
‘How come you didn’t manage to persuade him?’ Kathleen needled Owen. ‘Where are your powers gone?’ Owen had been out ballyragging the country, talking at fairs and meetings up and down the land.
‘It does no good to persuade a weathercock,’ said Owen. ‘When I talk to Sparky I win him over. But for how long? He has a notion that the Irish people are boiling with patriotism. I imagine he was brought up on ballads. He has no notion of the difficulties of remobilizing an apathetic, divided population. He doesn’t foresee the methods we may have to use. They’ll shock him. He’ll oppose us and leave us in the lurch when it comes down to it and send American funds to the other side.’ Owen frowned. His breath was bad and he was sickening for an ulcer.
‘As de Valera has been saying,’ said Owen, ‘we may have to wade through Irish blood. Wading through a dose of Yank blood,’ he said savagely, ‘shouldn’t frighten us either.’ It maddened him that the country should be dependent still on outsiders. He was leery of Sparky and had had a row with Kathleen for flaunting herself in the fellow’s presence and making herself cheap. Maidenly modesty was one of the ancestral virtues which he hoped would flourish in the new, free and Gaelic Ireland to which all should be committed.
15
‘Do you love me, Grainne?’
‘Yes.’
‘Well then?’
‘Don’t nag.’
‘Christ, I …’
‘I know. I know.’
‘What?’
‘You want me to make up my mind.’
‘If that’s nagging …’
‘It is.’
‘OΚ. I’ll say nothing.’
Silence.
‘Oh, say it.’
‘What?’
‘Nag. You might as well, James. I know what you’re thinking.’
‘Then I don’t need to, do I?’
‘I’ve poisoned the wells here. I should move on. That’s your argument, isn’t it? Cormac will be better off without a mother who embarrasses him and in a year or so we can meet on a new footing.
Michael – I forgot what I’m supposed to think about Michael.’
‘Don’t think of him.’
‘Ah!’
‘You can’t have a perfect conscience all the time. You’ve got to put up with being partly wrong. So have I.’
‘We can’t make our omelette without breaking hearts. Joke.’
‘I’ve registered it.’
‘I’m sorry, James.’
‘So am I.’
‘No, I mean I’m sorry for being sarky. Trying to suggest that I’m the sensitive one and that your advice is facile.’
‘Well, it’s limited. You can’t expect …’
‘I know. I know. Don’t say it.’
‘Look, tell me about the Devereux Estate and why we can’t bring your aunt.’
‘She fell. Mary let her slip in the bath and she put her hip out. Anyway, Owen Roe is on the warpath and if you use one word she tells you, he’ll sue and he’ll win. That’s how the law is here. What about your boss? What did he say?’
James put his head in his hands. It ached. ‘We had a row,’ he admitted. Larry had flown into Dublin the night before and James and he, between them, had drunk a bottle of Paddy. ‘His film is shameless myth-making. Lies.’
‘Well, you said it was propaganda.’
‘Yes, but mainly I think he likes lies. On principle. The bigger the better. Scale impresses him. He calls it “art”. “Surreality”, if you please. He told me I’m naive.’
Larry and he had sat up half the night arguing. Then Larry, after perhaps two hours of sleep, had taken the plane for Amsterdam, looking, James noted sourly, none the worse for wear. His own temples were hammering and he saw scoops of light when he moved his head fast.
‘Did he listen to Aunt Judith’s cassette?’
‘Yes.’ James shrugged. His own enthusiasm seemed embarrassing now. It had blinded him for the better part of the evening to Larry’s lack of it. ‘I know you told me not to follow up your old man’s schemes,’ he had started in defensively, ‘and I haven’t. No trying to frighten or threaten the local authorities, no making waves. I’ve been discretion itself. My interest in the Sparky Driscoll story is purely as a story for our film. The first the Irish establishment need know of our version is what they’ll see on their cinema screens when it’s released. By then you’re home free. Right? And it’s a great story, Larry. You can see,’ James had rattled on, fired by the cassette, the Paddy and his own cleverness, ‘that Driscoll must have fallen foul of some elements within the Sinn Féin movement, which was drifting towards Civil War in the early months of ’22. It broke out, you’ll remember, in June. Each side would have hoped to get the Irish-American bread and whichever thought Driscoll hostile would have an interest in getting rid of him before he got in his report. What fascinates me is that I get the feeling that the guys who did him in came round later to his way of thinking. That’s the only explanation for everyone’s wanting the truth covered up and it’s an example of that Irish destiny whereby reality is so shifty that the guy who doesn’t move fast enough gets left looking like a traitor. Driscoll may have moved too fast. He may have been right too soon. It’ll make a lovely movie, Larry. The death records will have been faked but we have a chance to use oral sources before they die off. That’s what you wanted … isn’t it?’
No Country for Young Men Page 34