Larry’s meaty palm was lifted. ‘You’re off-beam, James.’
‘How?’
Larry sighed. ‘Jesus, man, I took you out of academe. Even if your nutty nun’s got the truth, we don’t want it. We’re making a film. We don’t want appendices and footnotes. Above all, we don’t want material that doesn’t fit.’
‘Surely you can accommodate some ambiguity? Hell, Larry, if you wanted the goodies and baddies as distinct as in a Kojak episode, you could have let me know.’
Larry sighed again. ‘This is a Republican film, remember? To raise funds, right? In America. We do not want to show Republicans murdering an American fund-raiser. Can you see that?’
‘But you wanted to discredit the old pols and …’
‘Listen, James, drop it, OK?’ Larry poured out two tumblers of Paddy and raised his own to the light. ‘We’re constructing a myth,’ he said, squinting at the golden liquid ‘We don’t give a goddamn about truth. It does not set you free. It dissipates energies. Myths unify. They animate.’ Larry waved out of the window in the general direction of Stephen’s Green. ‘Out there,’ he said, ‘there are guys fighting. They don’t want an ambiguous fucking message, right?’
James gave in.
‘Talking of fucking,’ Larry went on, ‘you’d better cool it with the O’Malley woman. There are people of importance to my backers who want you out. Maybe you should come with me to Amsterdam. You’d be safer in its Red Light district than here. Do you know what the IRA does to guys who fuck women for whose honour they feel some concern?’
Next morning a sober Larry told James that Kinlen was refusing to make RTE facilities available to Larry.
‘Kinlen?’ James was astonished. ‘I thought we were buddies.’
‘Uhuh. See you in three days,’ said Larry. ‘We’ll talk.’
Since then, James had been unable to get hold of Corny Kinlen or anyone else he knew in RTE. ‘The place has turned into something like the Kremlin.’
Grainne poured whiskey for him. ‘Hair of the dog?’ she offered.
‘Listen, shall we go to the Devereux Estate ourselves? This weekend?’
‘Without your aunt? Why? And why now when …’
‘Why not? She was cover for me. A chaperone. It’s more of a boat-burning expedition for me if I go alone. And we can investigate the place for our own satisfaction and to hell with them all.’
‘You will burn your boats?’
‘Slowly. Judiciously. One or two at a time.’
‘Will you come away with me?’
‘Maybe. What about England for a bit? Neutral ground.’
‘Because you have doubts?’
‘Because you may. Anyway I couldn’t get a visa for the US overnight.’
‘How practical you are, after all. What changed you?’
‘You looked so miserable.’
‘I should have known how to soften you.’
‘Yes. I’d better go. I’ll have to talk to Michael.’
‘They won’t stop you coming?’
‘No. I’ll phone you in the morning. We’ll arrange some neutral place to meet.’
*
‘I’ve made up my mind!’
Kathleen was frying bread and her hair was tied up in a cloth to protect it from the smell of grease.
‘I’m telling Owen when he gets back next week. I can’t marry him and I can’t stand this house, nor country nor all the palaver. It’s all very fine for you,’ she accused. ‘We’ve all protected you. You never knew anything. When there were arms hidden in the house you never knew it. I’ve been running the place all the time you were at school and even when you were home we kept things from you. When you did guess at something it was an excitement. For you. Not for me. For me,’ said Kathleen, ‘it was hell. Sheer. Unrelieved. I know it’s unfair to tell someone that they’re young. But you’re young, Judith, in a wilful, blind way. You don’t see reality and you think you do. So don’t advise me. There’s no agreement between us. I’m only telling you so that when the rumpus breaks out, with Owen cursing me and saying I’m the worst in the world, you may just have some inkling of how things were for me. Me. I’m sorry to use the word so much but up to now I’ve used it too little.’
Kathleen was flattening the bread in the grease and had the flame too high so that bubbles leaped from the pan. Her words spattered with the same angry heat.
‘No!’ She held up a steaming spoon. ‘Don’t interrupt. Let me have my say. You don’t know,’ she insisted. ‘Not really. What it was like. First we had Eamonn on the run. Then Seamus and Owen. Strange gunmen spending nights in the bedrooms above stairs and there on the settle. Sometimes half a dozen at one time. How was I to pass them off if the Tans came? As relatives? You should have seen some of them. Jesus! I didn’t get a night’s sleep for eighteen months before the truce. Not one. I still wake up rigid with terror of a raid. I’m not the only one. I know. I’m not complaining. Not about that. It was worse for the men and, anyway, I know it was the only way. Eamonn explained that to me. And Seamus and then Owen until the explanations are coming out my ears. I know this was the only sort of war that a small, unarmed people could fight against a colossus. All right. I accepted that. But now, I’m tired, Judith, and you’ve no right at all to judge me because you didn’t live through it the way I did.
‘Do you know one reason why we kept so much from you? Eamonn and Seamus and I? Because you’re childish, Judith. You’re quick at your books and, as Seamus says, people that are good at the books are often oddly stupid when it comes to practical things. They stay childish longer. They like school and they don’t want to grow up. There’s some of that in Owen. No, it’s true. I mean it. It’s one reason why you’re not more frightened. Bravery is a form of stupidity. I don’t want to insult you, but I want you to try and understand someone quite different from yourself: me. The war was never exciting to me, Judith. I saw too much of it.
‘And another thing, you don’t get braver. It’s the opposite. Your nerves get ragged. I’ve lain there trying to get to sleep to escape my fright and when I did sleep, there it would be again waiting for me in a nightmare. You get so you’re afraid to close your eyes. I know it sounds weak to you, and maybe some people are braver. Some are. But a lot of the fellows have shot nerves and one or two went mad. Raving. Had to be locked up. Ask anyone. Even Owen gets dreams. You heard him yourself. But now that we have a chance of peace, nothing will do him but to try to start things up again. Well, it’s turned me against him. He’s cold as ice. A machine run on will-power. He wasn’t like that when I knew him first. So don’t tell me that I haven’t kept faith. It’s him has changed. I can’t stand him now. He makes my flesh creep. I’m glad he doesn’t seem to care for me any more.’
‘He does, Kathleen. It’s just that he’s thinking about politics, the war. He’s a special man, Kathleen. You’ve got to …’
‘I’ve got to think of myself. And I don’t give two hoots if you or anyone else thinks I’m throwing myself at Sparky Driscoll. I am. I’m in love with him. Why wouldn’t I be? He’s gentle. He’s gay. He makes me feel I exist, and the only reason he’s holding back is because everyone’s been telling him that I’m to be a hero’s bride. Well, I don’t want a hero. I want a man.’
‘Kathleen … Listen. You mustn’t … Please, Kathleen …’
‘I’d forgotten what men could be like. Maybe I never knew.’ Kathleen threw grease furiously on the bread, then turned round to harangue her sister. ‘How could I have children with a madman like Owen O’Malley? He’s arrogant, abstract, he never changes his underwear.’
‘Kathleen! You’re so vulgar. It’s that Yank.’
‘Yes. It is. He’s considerate. He doesn’t smell. He cares about people, not causes. God, how I hate the word “cause”.’
‘And if he won’t have you?’
‘He’ll help me get to America and I’ll get someone like him. An ordinary man. Even if he’s not like Sparky, he won’t be all mad for his own notions
of himself like the lads here. I want to be ordinary, Judith. I want to settle down, marry and live my life without people pointing their fingers at me for a man-eater. I’m not a man-eater. God knows. I laugh and make jokes and dance because I can’t stand to remember the last eighteen months. I think that if I got to America and had the ocean between me and this place, I’d get so easy-going and slow that I’d be as fat as an elephant in three months.’
‘Well, you’d better hook your man before that happens.’
‘Yes.’ Kathleen began to laugh, then burst out crying. ‘I’d be a good wife,’ she sobbed. ‘I would. But I’m twenty-four. I’m losing my looks. It’s the nerves. My hair is falling out. It’ll be too late for me soon.’ Sobs shook her. ‘I’m trapped,’ she wailed and wiped her face in a dish-cloth. She kept it over her face while deep shudders ran through her. ‘Trapped!’
‘Kathleen,’ Judith was both upset and frightened, ‘can I help? Why are you crying?’
A kind of groan came from behind the dish-cloth.
‘You’re not …? Kathleen, you haven’t …?’ No. Impossible. Still … Girls sometimes forgot themselves. Judith couldn’t even put words on the fright which had begun to nibble coldly at her, like some uncertain, clawing thing in sand-clouded water. ‘Kathleen?’ she interrogated.
‘Of course not.’ The dish-cloth came off. Kathleen’s face was like more cloth: shapeless, crumpled, wet. ‘Better if I had maybe,’ she moaned. ‘Yes, better.’
‘Rubbish!’ said Judith. ‘You’re hysterical!’ She waited a moment, coldly watching her sister. ‘You’re sure?’ she insisted with distaste.
‘Of course I’m sure.’
‘So what are you crying for?’
‘Oh Judith, you’re such a prig. You understand nothing. Nothing. You’re like Owen.’
Kathleen opened the shutter of the range and threw the bread she had been frying into it. ‘I’m sick of being the woman of the house!’ she shouted. ‘Alone! Everyone’s mother and nobody’s wife. Everyone depends on me and who can I depend on? The Da?’ The grease left on the pan had caught fire. Flames blazed up in a sheet of greedy, brazen heat. Kathleen threw the pan on the floor. ‘The house can burn down,’ she yelled. ‘Then none of us need worry about anything any more, need we?’ She ran from the room, leaving Judith to douse the flames and clean up the mess.
*
Grainne had begun to clean the house. She had not looked at it with a critical eye for years and when she did she was appalled. Paint had flaked off. Skirting-boards were pitted with fissures large enough to permit the passage of a mouse. There was a furry trim of dust on every surface. Doris, the so-called cleaner, must have spent her time having pots of tea, many of them with Grainne. Mary made more dirt than she cleared. Her one virtue was that she was good with the aunt. She was with her now, gossiping or saying the rosary or perhaps both. The sounds drifting down from the top floor alternated a prayerful drone with squeals of laughter.
Grainne, leaving them to it, equipped herself with rubber gloves and cleansers and attacked the hall. It was a kind of therapy. She scrubbed as though she were cleaning her soul, amused that the image should occur to her – an echo of old catechism classes – yet accepting it too. She scattered Vim on the woodwork, scrubbed and found the edges crumbling into her sponge. She pressed Polyfilla into the holes but the stuff could get no purchase and disappeared, leaving them undiminished. When she did succeed in improving a stretch of wood, it made the rest look so much worse that she was tempted to dirty it all again. After an hour or so, she dumped her equipment in the box-room and decided to have a bath, then got dressed and went to Michael’s office to catch him before he had time to disappear into the city’s maw.
‘Why don’t we spend an evening drinking together?’ she suggested.
It was a thing they used to do when they were first married. Michael put on his tweed coat which was long and lean: a coat of the 1930s. In his youth he had dressed eccentrically from vanity. Now, perhaps he was not even aware of being out of fashion. Arms linked, they walked with their heads down to protect their faces from the wind. Rotting leaves flicked at their ankles and they paused to watch a swan pass on the canal. She wondered whether, like her, he was deliberately putting off the moment of reaching a pub. Once inside, he would begin to clown. She had started seeing Michael as James did and knew that the American imagined her husband to be, as he would have put it, ‘insecure’. Michael was not insecure at all. Instead, he was lit internally by a cold, secret flame of arrogance. Arrogance and accidie. If Μichael did not grapple with life it was because life seemed unworthy. His good opinion of himself was based on contempt for the objectives other people pursued. In the pubs, idle men like Michael and failures and would-be poets – the city was full of these; their ambitious colleagues having all emigrated – sometimes made common cause with admirers of terrorism. Theirs was a negative alliance against businessmen and professionals who would sometimes stand their detractors drinks and listen in amusement to their jibes. It was as though they paid to be scourged. Grainne could not decide whether they did this out of respect for people like Michael – ‘characters’ – or egged them on with the same indifference as they might have stirred up dogs or fighting cocks. Perhaps the old eighteenth-century liking for visiting lunatic asylums had lingered on in Dublin in this licence granted to the city’s eccentrics?
‘Let’s go to some small pleb pub.’ She hoped to avoid meeting anyone they knew.
‘As you like.’
The wind ruffled Michael’s furzy hair and froze Grainne to the bone. She felt connected to him by this punitive element. Damn, she thought, and tightened her grip on his arm.
‘Put your hand in my pocket,’ he offered. ‘Keep you warm.’
They passed a boarded-up Georgian terrace due for destruction. The façade alone was to be kept: a sop to preservationists.
Michael peered between two planks. ‘There used to be a sweet-shop here,’ he remembered. ‘I used to come here for a bar of Fry’s cream chocolate whenever anyone gave me tuppence. I think it was tuppence. Two pennies. Or a Peggy’s leg. It was a year or so after the war and sugar was still scarce. The old man who ran the shop kept his sweets for children who could ask for them in Irish. I was six.’
‘And could you ask in Irish?’
‘Yes. But I resented his high-handedness. When sweets got plentiful I boycotted his shop.’
‘Maybe you destroyed his business?’
‘If he was so pig-headed in all his business, he destroyed it himself.’
‘I remember,’ said Grainne, who had been born too late to remember scarcity, ‘asking adults the time when I was out late and unsure whether to turn for home. Priests would always insist I ask in Irish.’
‘Which half of them knew very badly.’
‘I don’t think anyone bothered Cormac that way.’
‘A pity they didn’t. He might be less of a patriot.’
‘Or if we had been, he mightn’t be.’
‘Do you remember the joke about a chameleon on a tartan?’ Michael asked. ‘Our grandparents were chameleons on tartans. They were idealistic and thuggish, cunning and mad, politicians and fighting men according to need: variegated. Then came our parents who made money. Solid-coloured individuals. Green for them meant pound notes and government contracts. You and I, the chameleon grandchildren, didn’t know how to react and keep our individuality. Cormac’s gone back to the tartan.’
‘Mmmm,’ she said, shrugging at this, unwilling to go any further with it. She felt him try to web her in. Fate, he was implying, fatigue, habit, heritage, were stakes planted around her, holding her here, limiting her choices. Poor Michael, she thought, how wrong he was. She could go any time she liked. Any time at all, she told herself with exhilaration and pressed his hand in pity.
They turned into a small, wood-panelled pub where she had not been before but where Michael seemed to be known, for the bar curate greeted him and poured a small Powers unasked.
&n
bsp; ‘Same for the lady?’
‘Yes. The lady,’ said Michael, ‘is my wife.’
Is? Was?
‘Good evening, Mrs O’Malley.’
It was twilight outside and the faintly mauve mist to which her eyes had adjusted made the lights here look orange. Worn plush, brass, the dimmed refractions of light from glasses and coloured alcohols evoked a hundred other evenings spent in pubs like this. The place was haunted, festive, theatrical. You looked hard at the decor and saw the flaws – old vomit marks, a whiff of staleness, cigarette burns – but with the glow of the whiskey defects merged in an overall opulence.
Michael raised his glass. ‘Whistler,’ he quoted ritually – she had heard him say this how many times? – ‘said “I drink to make my friends seem witty”.’
She raised her glass. ‘And relatives.’
No Country for Young Men Page 35