No Country for Young Men

by Julia O'Faolain

  Both men sighed. Then the Irishman creaked into action:

  ‘Mr Duffy,’ said he, in a sorrowful voice, ‘your film was cover. There is no such film, is there, or, if there is, it’s a subsidiary activity of the people you work for? Mm?’

  A notebook was produced. James’s movements, some of them furtive – those rural hotels – were well known, it appeared, to the Special Branch. His visit to the Young Patriots’ Club, the trouble at Customs, even his meeting with the goat-faced man who had warned him to keep away from Grainne, his trips to IRA veterans’ homes, Larry’s trip to Amsterdam, calls and telegrams about tapes, equipment, camera crews – all these had been marked and noted in the judgement book. All were now decoded and all, to the minds of Berg and Horan, pointed to the one thing. They were cover; they were masks and what they were covering was not sex. That itself was a cover. His adultery with Grainne was pretence. ‘A common dodge,’ said Horan, shrugging. ‘Old as the hills. People think the police are so thick they’ll swallow anything.’

  Obsessed as a pair of witch-hunters, minds zipping along their single track, they challenged him to deny any of the particulars in the Detective-Inspector’s notebook. Had he or had he not, on the day in question, gone to a certain cottage in the mountains with his associate, Mrs O’Malley? Yes, and had he had an interview there with her uncle, Mr Owen Roe O’Malley, the TD?

  ‘I want to see a lawyer.’

  The embassy man cut in. ‘This is no case for a lawyer. The police will not press charges if you leave at once.’

  ‘And if I don’t?’

  ‘Your passport could be confiscated and a deportation order issued.’

  And could he see Mrs O’Malley? No, he could not. She would be informed of what had happened.

  ‘May I take it that you will cooperate with Detective-Inspector Horan?’

  ‘I seem to have no choice.’

  A chill smile: ‘None at all.’

  The woman’s hand was on his knee. ‘Here’s our tea.’ Smiling. Motherly. Her overtures upset him. Her sidling humility. Her Irishness. Puffs of flesh, swelling on either side of her wedding ring, made the thing look punitive: a brutal tool.

  Informed? What did they mean informed? What would they tell her? And would her resolution founder now forever?

  Had Larry set him up? Or should he have tried to tip Larry off? Was all this his own fault? How? Where had he gone wrong? Had he unconsciously – Celticly? – willed disaster on himself?

  Maybe she’d have to get out? On whose side was her cousin?

  The curse or anger poem, he had been told, was a traditional Irish genre. He felt capable of composing a stinging one extempore and phoning it to her from New York. Might it move her to come and join him? Maybe, half-way across the Atlantic, he’d stop wanting her? Disbelief in one’s loss was supposed to be a prologue to grief. He’d better get to the sorrowing stage fast and get it over with.

  Still over Ireland. Strips of land showed through breaks in the cloud. Green, uneven, like fallen apple-peelings, they sizzled then sank into memory’s perfecting gleam. He had a letter to Therese in his pocket. Even touching it made him wince. At least he hadn’t mailed it. Shit, shit, shit. He kept looking out of the window lest the woman on his other side engage him. The red sun would not sink for hours. It was buoyed up, congealed in its tracks by the plane’s movement westward. Passengers had been invited to put their watches back.

  Could he set himself back emotionally too? Forget Grainne and return to Therese? If she’d have him? Could he? Would she? Did he want her to? He tried to remember his letters to her and his hand scratched at the final one in his pocket. He was numb, stunned. Obviously, this deadness was a defence and not all that effective. Flicks of feeling razored through: memories of driving into the country with Grainne en route to some hotel, where they would pretend to rent a room for the night, keeping up a front of propriety, paying in advance, walking up the softly carpeted stairs, while manageresses pretended not to know that they’d be leaving in an hour. Then, behind the closing door, laughter, connivance, that binding euphoria of recovered childhood. It was such a proper country, so tight, so watchful – so much more so than he had supposed. How had anyone charted their progress down those empty mountain roads: hedged and ditched, hairy and brambly, empty but for the odd, pensive, munching donkey and the silly baaing sheep? He had more than once wanted to pull her into some hole under a hedge and pull the clothes off her freckle-flecked body which was like something spawned spontaneously by the landscape. There were lichen growths on the rocks of the same colour as the hair on her head and the secret, tousling hair on her body. James wanted to stand up and scream at the thought, must have started to do so, for the seat-belt was cutting at his thighs. ‘Grainne!’ A perfect name for howling in pained disbelief. Grr … He was talking out loud, upsetting the woman beside him, who had started up her chatter again, pushing goddamn tea-the-universal-pick-me-up and, no doubt, deprecating his peculiar manners.

  Unfastening the belt, he stood up: ‘Excuse me.’

  ‘Oh, you’re not feeling well. I thought you mightn’t be. I’ll let you out the minute I get this yoke open. You’re not airsick, are you? There’s a little bag in front of you, if you’re short taken. Frig! I’m sorry, sorry to be holding you up.’ She wrenched at the seat-belt.

  ‘Don’t apologize!’

  It was that Irish thing: always saying ‘sorry, sorry’, somehow conveying a sense that the one who should be sorry was not them but you who had crossed some invisible, important, electrified line: ‘Sorry, but do you realize that you’re trespassing, breaking the law, charging in, committing adultery? Do you? No? Well, sorry, but you are!’

  ‘Sorry,’ said the old thing. ‘Sorry.’ Her grey, dishevelled head bobbed. She was flustered, clumsy and he had to lean across her to release the buckle. Her hands got in the way of his and he felt the loose, mobile slither of old skin.

  Forging past her breakable knees, he crossed to the other side of the plane where he found a row of vacant seats. He sat here with a mild tremor of guilt at the snub he was delivering to the woman, who would guess that he had fled from her. He held on to this sensation. It was a screen, a thin membrane dividing off other memories and questionings which must not be let through.

  Pressing the flight attendant’s button, he ordered a double whiskey. He’d learned that trick in Ireland. Here’s to – what? Numbness? Love? Resignation? Rage?

  They’d brought him a copy of the Irish Press.

  Not bothering to unfold it, he let his eye pause on the topmost item: a government notice fixing the retail price of bread.

  In the case of batch bread and pan bread which is packed (whether sliced or not sliced) by the baker thereof in a covering or wrapping …

  The punctilio soothed him. He imagined it coming down the centuries from Roman to Norman to British clerks who had then, with sly triumph, left it behind them in the ministries of Ireland.

  24p. per loaf when sold in loaves of 1lb, 12oz, 3 drams, 14 grains (800 grammes), or loaves of pan bread joined together the total weight of which is 1lb, 12oz, 3 drams, 14 grains (800 grammes) …

  He relished the dryness, the precision and the might of the pen. Grids, he thought restfully, guidelines – then shied from, his approval, startled to remember that he was at this moment the victim of these old friends and props. Law-and-Order at its most arbitrary had smashed his hopes and certainties.

  Outside the window, a cloud-formation made a stab at modelling Grainne’s opulent ass. Then a sleeve of mist slid in along the wing and eroded his view. He ordered another drink and drank to oblivion. Love, had he not read somewhere, flourished where there were obstacles, sex where there were none? So, he drank to sex and, finding the prickly letter still crackling in his pocket, pulled it out and read it with as much irony as he could summon to dilute his pain.

  Dear Therese,

  I fear I have been less than sincere for all my scruples. Maybe because of them? I have led you to believ
e that I was not in love. I am. Hopelessly – and hopefully – and yet all the things I said are true. I am crazy, guilty, concerned about you, unsure how much she feels for me, aware of all the ingredients of this love – and yet I levitate. I feel a piercing joy. I could not, even from concern for you or for a certain idea I have sometimes cherished of myself, wish to be out of love. I would not have wanted to die without knowing this. I feel, at moments, so alive that I could stand to die on the spot.

  Paradox? A sick man’s delirium? Maybe I shall think so one day. Meanwhile, I am in it: right inside. It is the only reality of which I can conceive or in which I can at this moment believe.

  A memory of what people think when they are not in the state in which I find myself makes me suspect that you may not rejoice with me and that I should apologize for writing to you like this. Maybe I should not tell you – now, when asking for a divorce – that I love you as I do. For I am in love, brimming with it and swimming with it and it colours all my feelings and relationships.

  James, cheeks blazing as though he had a fever, rang for another drink. He stared a while at iridescent damp outside his window, then lifted the letter as though it weighed like lead. He sighed and read on:

  When I say I am unsure what she feels I mean that I I am unsure whether she will really leave her husband for me. There is a strong bond there – just as you and I have had a strong bond – and both she and I are aware that this hurricane of emotion which has swept us up may not accommodate to time.

  Even this is a lie. You see it is hard to communicate accurately since often we seem to be outside time and unable even to conceive of it. Some of the – bite my tongue – time, on occasion – how impossible these temporal adverbs are when what I want to describe is their absence – anyway, there are phases when we have no doubts and then, like a rip tide, they come roaring back. She has a son and social obligations here which means that she is returned regularly to a sense of the temporal and returns to me tainted with what she calls ‘realism’.

  Have I hurt you, Therese? What I wish I could do is share my joy with you. But it’s impossible, isn’t it? Love is possessive. I rebel against the impossibility and feel that if you too could climb over the barriers of everyday logic, then somehow we could all benefit from this source of warmth and happiness, as more than one or two people can share the heat of a fire. Mad? Or just unorthodox? Viable? Delirious?

  At any rate, Therese, I beg you to know and believe that my impulse in writing what may be clumsy and hurtful letters is not to boast or hurt but to bring you into the orbit of this delight which I am experiencing. I know you are too generous to be resentful. I hope you feel, as I do, that our relationship is something too strong and fruitful to sour under the strain I am imposing on it. Love is not finite. Like energy, it is self-regenerating. Though I have given some elsewhere, I feel that now I have even more for you – though of a different kind.

  So, love,

  James.

  Christ, thought James. What treacherous things words were! Feelings which floated, free as butterflies, could, pinned to the page, look so appalling! Could seem insincere, foolish, self-regarding. Yet, the feeling in the letter had been real. Was? Had been? It made him want to cry. It might make Therese want to cry too! Certain impulses should never be turned to words. They were of the flesh, fleshly.

  Before he could let himself reflect, he began to shred his letter into his new, untouched double whiskey and water and to drink down this concoction. It stuck drily in his throat, then, slowly, with the sensation of over-large capsules of medicine being eased downwards, it did succumb to his swallow.

  Across the aisle, the woman with the bad teeth looked at him in beady-eyed shock. James filled his mouth with some more of his wet letter and chewed at it furiously.

  *

  For some weeks, Patsy Flynn had been promising the Captain that he’d go over to the Michael O’Malleys’ and put an appearance on the place. It was turning into an eyesore and if it was left up to the Michael O’s themselves, the lawn would climb the house. Anyway, he’d finally got round to doing the chore this Saturday, and it was the divil’s luck that he had for, from all appearances, there was something amiss.

  The first thing to happen was that the Captain turned up with Mrs Michael. This was between nine and ten in the morning. Odd. Your woman had a small suitcase and looked as if she’d been crying. The two raced in the gate and up the front steps, leaving Patsy to wonder what that could be in aid of. He asked the skivvy when she brought him his bottle of Guinness at eleven: Mary. She said that the old aunt had been taken sick and that the Captain had gone off after the Missis and brought her back. Back from where? Mary wasn’t saying. She didn’t like Patsy, who had never had a way with women.

  He decided to do a bit of weeding outside the drawing-room window. This turned out to be a good move. The old woman was inside and the Captain was asking her questions.

  ‘Have you no recollection at all, Aunt Judith?’ says he. ‘Think now. About Owen. Think hard. What were you saying about him?’

  ‘What would I be saying?’ says the old hairpin. ‘He’s dead, isn’t he? They tell me he’s dead. Not that you can trust what people say.’

  ‘What did you say?’

  ‘Me? That he was dead. I’ll be dead soon myself, and it’s thinking of that I should be and praying for a happy death, instead of talking trash with idle-minded people.’

  It was clear to Patsy that the old battle-axe had no time for the Captain. That was a rum turn when you thought that the Captain was known for being able to charm birds off trees.

  ‘What did you say to the American?’ asks the Captain.

  ‘He’s dead too, so what does it matter?’

  ‘No, to the other one: the one with the recorder.’

  ‘Do you mean Saint Michael?’

  Patsy had to laugh, keeping his head down, stifling in the steaming flower-bed. He was getting a crick in his neck.

  ‘Leave her alone,’ says Mrs Μ in a cross voice. ‘He’s gone, isn’t he? You’d think you’d be satisfied. You got rid of him.’

  ‘He’s got the tapes,’ says the Captain.

  ‘I’m surprised your men didn’t take them.’

  ‘They weren’t on him. He may have given them to someone. Damn it,’ says the Captain then, ‘I want to know what she’s been saying. It affects me. She’s been spreading libels about my father.’

  Oho, thought Patsy, cocking an ear. Father, was it?

  ‘She has not,’ says Mrs M. ‘She said nothing. He came here for me, damn you, Owen Roe. For private reasons. Do you know the meaning of the word: private …’ The voice creaked and strained with some strong feeling. Anger? Hysteria?

  Patsy wondered where Cormac was and whether he knew what was afoot. The boy had been avoiding the club and had bolted from Patsy one time when they’d come face to face at the Captain’s. Patsy’s heart went out to him. It was shame. The harm women did! Mothers. His own Ma had been a cold creature, always looking at Patsy as though he were a cake that hadn’t risen right.

  ‘We were in love, Owen Roe,’ shouted the mad woman inside the window.

  Patsy kept well down over his weeds, pulling them out with venom. Weeds. Women. Concupiscence. Disorder. Pull. Up by the roots. Shake the earth off. Burn them in a heap. Smoke rose from the bonfire, stinging his eyes. He threw a stalk of Devil’s Bread on it and the smell grew bitter. Queer how a wild plant like that could turn up in a suburban garden. The fire spurted out extra smoke. Through the drift of it he saw the Captain walk out of the door and down the path to his car. Mrs Μ was standing on the steps.

  The Captain shouted back at her: ‘It may turn out for the best.’

  She was wearing a pink dressing-gown. She pulled it round her.

  ‘I can deal with anything she may have said,’ said the Captain, ‘if only I know what it is before anyone else.’

  Mrs Μ closed the door and Patsy – it was getting near lunch-time anyway – followed the Captain
to his car.

  ‘Is it the Yank?’ Patsy asked, counting on surprise to breach the Captain’s caginess.

  ‘Patsy, you’re nosy. A nosy Parker. What business is it of yours?’

  ‘I’m concerned for yourself,’ said Patsy. ‘I’m not deaf.’

  ‘Far from it,’ agreed the Captain in a strong brogue. He threw this out like a rope thrown to bridge an abyss. Patsy had come on a lot of stories involving ropes and abysses, usually in wild and desperate parts of Africa. The Captain’s efforts to bridge the gap between himself and Patsy made Patsy wonder if he thought there were wilds in him?

  ‘Are things all right for you now?’ he wanted to know.

  ‘Right as rain,’ assured the Captain. ‘The Yank’s gone. Between yourself and meself and the gatepost – and I would not want it to go further – he was given the push. More or less deported.’ The Captain looked at his watch. ‘He’s on a plane that’ll be landing in New York in a few hours’ time.’

  ‘Oh bedad,’ said Patsy. ‘A bad hat, was he? Trouble?’

  ‘We can be glad to see the back of him.’

  Patsy would have liked to know more but wouldn’t ask. Now that the danger was gone, he couldn’t pass off curiosity as a bodyguard’s legitimate concern, especially as the Captain had moments of treating Patsy more as dogsbody than bodyguard. So the thing had been taken out of Patsy’s hands then? Dealing with the Yank? Well, but his instincts had been proven right. The fellow was bad news. Patsy, feeling a let-down – he ached for action – made a show of silent discretion to see would this soften the Captain. But your man was preoccupied.

  ‘I’m off,’ says he, and into the car with him without slipping Patsy the price of a drink to celebrate the turn things had taken. Maybe he didn’t quite believe in Patsy’s devotion?

  Patsy went round to Neary’s pub to restore himself.

  *

  James blinked and dreamed of dolmens the colour of dolphins: streamlined, grey, suspended over Irish fields as though in flight or aswim. Blinked again and was awake and in suspense himself, wondering whether he should or could struggle with what seemed to be his fate. Reading, to take his mind off things, he got bogged down in ‘Births, Marriages and Deaths’, a bulky section of the Irish Press. Items one and two were in ample supply and there seemed to be a cortège of deeply regretted corpses en route to their resting-place in Dean’s Grange Cemetery – so called, he wondered idly, after Swift, Dublin’s mad Dean? There would be plenty of more recent lunatics choked on saeva indignatio to fertilize that ground anyway. The next column thanked donors for mass cards and seraphic certificates: religious currency on a scale unimagined by Martin Luther. Well, ashes to ashes, he was mourning to his whiskey, when he was jerked from his dirge of a mood by an announcement being garbled over the loudspeakers. He had missed the beginning. No cause for alarm, he heard now. Three engines were working perfectly but, in the interests of the passengers’ safety, Captain Inaudible preferred to take every precaution. He regretted the inconvenience that this must cause to some passengers.