Foggage

by Patrick McGinley

  Kevin walked away in case he should lose his temper, telling himself that Snoddy was in for a surprise, He went down to Larch Lawn after nightfall and found Elizabeth wallpapering her bedroom, or “our bedroom” as she called it.

  “But we’ll be living in Clonglass,” he said.

  “I want to live here. The house is bigger and more modern, and we’ll have it all to ourselves.”

  They had a long but amicable argument, and finally she promised to come to see Clonglass next day. She came “like visiting royalty,” as Maureen put it, and drank one cup of tea with himself and his sister while Billy Snoddy was, by no means accidentally, on an errand in town. Then she went away as suddenly as she had arrived, and the kitchen seemed empty of everything but her perfume for half an hour. Two days later she handed him a list of changes he must make if she was to join him at Clonglass. She demanded a new toilet and bathroom with a bidet, central heating in all the rooms, a music room, a flower garden for herself, and a new double bed which she had seen advertised in a glossy magazine. He told her that he could not do everything at once but that he would make a start on the bathroom and toilet with the bidet right away. He had never heard of a bidet before, which did not make his task any easier, but he knew that if it had anything to do with sex, Festus O’Flaherty would be only too pleased to enlighten him.

  He asked Festus to be his best man, and Festus promised to be on his best behaviour on the day, though he confided that he would much prefer to goose the bride than kiss her. As the nineteenth of May fell on a Saturday, they met on Friday for a little celebration, for what Festus called a “twostag party.”

  “It’s your last night free,” he said as he proposed a toast. “When a man marries, he goes to stud. The night and its dreams are no longer his own.”

  Festus was more excited than Kevin. He genuinely saw his friend as a comrade-in-arms who had finally bitten the dust, and he convinced him that he should mark the occasion by scorning pints and celebrating in neat malt whiskey. Over the first six doubles they talked seriously about cattle, and then suddenly they found themselves in serious conversation about women.

  “Consider yourself lucky,” Festus said. “You’re getting married with both eyes open. At forty you’re no longer twenty, no longer at an age when you marvel at the existence of women. You’ve seen them on bad days as well as good, in curlers as well as evening dress. You’ve lived with them and without them; you’ve glimpsed both sides of the coin. The man who gets married at twenty thinks he knows his woman, especially if she’s been confident enough in her charms to allow him to anticipate marriage, and most young women are overconfident these days. But the truth is that he knows nothing about her that matters. He may know her two breasts and seven orifices, he may be intoxicated by the shared secrets of the flesh, but he knows nothing of the chrysalis in her heart containing the monster that will emerge in her middle age. The change that overtakes a married woman is more diabolical than any change wrought by time. The running of the house, the luxury of spending without having to get, the moulding of children, the realization that at last she has a habitation and a name—all these things give her ideas above her station, sometimes above her husband’s station. What I am saying at such length, dear Kevin, is that when a man marries he domesticates a tigress.”

  “Why a tigress?”

  “A carnivore who will smile as she consumes him.”

  “I’ve seen women who sweeten everyone they talk to.”

  “Are you drunk enough to hear the truth?”

  “I am sober enough to recognize it.”

  “The truth about Elizabeth?”

  “Tell it if you can.”

  “You should watch her. She’s got a classical face, clearcut features that mirror an icy heart. She has a will that can only be conquered by snaffle and curb, the two things that the modern woman most stridently rejects.”

  Festus was more than tipsy. He had reached the stage of drunkenness when he would order two double whiskeys and drink his own while the barman was still pouring Kevin’s. He was in one of his conspiratorial moods in which he continually looked over his shoulder before speaking and gripped Kevin’s forearm as he whispered in his ear.

  “What a man needs in a wife is moral not physical beauty,” he continued. “You need a warm heart more than a pretty nose. Now, Elizabeth has physical beauty, but has she the sweetness of nature to match it? I think she’s a filly, and there you have my sympathy.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Womankind can be divided into two classes: fillies and heifers. Fillies are slender, small-breasted, quick-footed, intelligent, and excitable. That’s your Lizzie. Heifers are heavy and slow, with udders for breasts and a tendency to sleep. Most men would prefer to be seen out with a filly in the evening, but they’d prefer to spend the night with a heifer. Heifers make the truest and trustiest bedfellows. They eat a lot, think little, and are content with only scant attention.”

  “If that’s your view of women, why do you pursue them?” Kevin asked.

  “I pursue them for the same reason a cat will pursue a mouse. You’ve often seen cats that will kill mice and never eat them. Well, I’m the same with women. My pleasure is in the chase, in bringing the quarry to bay, not in the consumption. Once a woman drops her knickers I lose all interest, though I must admit that now and again curiosity overcomes me, the desire to see if she’s musical, if she has a sense of rhythm on the short strokes. But once I’ve found out, I look round for the next. I’ve had a lot of women in the last five years, not one of them twice.”

  “Come on now, Festus, tell the truth. What about the widow from Clonaslew?”

  “She’s the exception that proves the rule. I keep going back because she’s an eminently penetrable lady, but even she has her faults. If I didn’t keep her on such a tight rein, she’d be telling me within a week that until I met her I didn’t know the cure for white scour in calves.”

  At closing time Festus invited Kevin back for what he called “a last drink single.” He did not want another drink, and neither did he want to disturb Mrs. O’Flaherty, but when Festus said that they would have only one drink and that they would have it in the garage he agreed. O’Flaherty opened the garage doors, drove in, and closed them again. Kevin got into the front beside him while he opened a half-bottle of Scotch which he had secreted in the glove compartment.

  “We’ve had our last night out together,” he said after a while.

  “Nonsense. I’ll still come to Phelan’s on Saturday’s.”

  “Brave words, Kevin, but we’ll see.”

  “You’re drunk, Festus. You drink too much, enough to ruin the health of a stronger man.”

  “I drink no more than I need. My choice is not between a ripe old age and cirrhosis of the liver at fifty, but between the madhouse at forty and cirrhosis at fifty. Dear God, give me cirrhosis before madness.”

  “Why madness?”

  “It’s a constant battle with the tigress. I stay with her only because of the children. Surely, you must know that only a very unhappy man would waste his life on women, monsters in fancy dress. There’s nothing I’d like better than to spend an evening with a book at my own fireside, but I can’t. One day you may see what I mean, but for your own sake I hope you never do.”

  As he talked, O’Flaherty started the car and left the engine running. He was muttering into his chest, his head bent over the padded steering wheel, and in the effort to understand him Kevin failed to notice the rising smell of the exhaust fumes.

  “Christ!” he said when they finally made him cough. He jumped out of the car and opened the garage doors.

  “You bloody madman, you could have poisoned us both.”

  “‘Bridegroom and Best Man Found Dead in Car. Suicide Pact Suspected.’” O’Flaherty laughed, but there was more bitterness than mirth in his voice.

  “See you at the chapel at eleven. And don’t be late,” Kevin said, walking away.

  He drove home with exag
gerated care, his eyes fixed on the centre of the road, only half aware of the hedge on each side rushing to meet him and the delicate smell of hawthorn blossom coming through the window. At each crossroads without a give-way sign he stopped, switched off the lights and waited to see if another car was coming. Then he nosed slowly forward, telling himself that Festus knew nothing about women.

  When he reached home, he tiptoed up the stairs and lay over the bedclothes without undressing. The room was spinning like a top, and he felt that the foot of the bed was higher than the head one minute and lower the next. He disliked whiskey. As long as he lived he would never taste another drop of it. But the daemons at the bedside laughed in his ear and told him that tomorrow was the day of wrath and tonight a night of infernal temptation.

  Will you be able to serve two women? they jeered. Easier to serve God and Mammon. Will you be able to please Elizabeth because your trousers never bulged in her parlour? She is just the kind of girl you might fail with, and if you do, will the marriage be null and void? “Annulment of Farmer’s Marriage on Grounds of Impotence.” Headlines in The Leinster Express. Sniggers at Macra meetings. Double-edged jokes about foggage.

  Another daemon opened his bedroom door and touched his face with her forefinger, tracing on his cheek the secret sign she normally traced on his buttocks. She shook him by the shoulder, but he pretended to be fast asleep.

  “Kevin, it’s Maureen,” she said, but he groaned wearily and buried his head deeper in the pillow.

  She gripped him between the legs and shook him again, but all his feeling had dissolved, and she went away as silently as she had come. The last thing he heard before sleep was the hoot of an owl and the splash of her water against the side of the bowl.

  It was six when he woke. He had a scalp-rending headache which he half attributed to the dream that tormented him in the night. As he dreamt, he felt certain that he had experienced it all many times before, but now he knew that it was a new dream, a dream for a new and different life.

  Twelve of his heifers calved together in the cow house and he lay over the bedclothes watching them on closed-circuit television, watching them lick their calves while their afterbirths hung in wads that reached to their hocks. He went out and shook salt and pepper on their cleanings and then untied them one after the other. They followed him out into the yard and walked round him in a circle, each cow eating the dangling afterbirth of the one that went before. Outside the circle trying to get in was Elizabeth dressed in an A.I. man’s smock, but all he could do was wave to her and wait till the cows had finished their extraordinary meal.

  The dream was now a cloud in his mind; he could not say if the cows were Herefords or Friesians or if they had a good show of milk. And he could not say what it meant, though as he dreamt it he had marvelled at its simple inevitability. Then he recalled that he was to be married in Killage parish church at eleven, and the sobering thought banished all oneirocriticism from his mind.

  He got up before Snoddy and went out to the cow house while he waited for the kettle to boil. One of his heifers, the one he called Rotten Socks, had unexpectedly come round. Henry had served her with his customary gusto last time, but the slight show of blood behind told him that she had not proved. He would release His Rampancy after breakfast and watch his last service as a single man. In his early bachelor days he often wondered about the care he took of his heifers, how he rarely missed the signs of heat, and how he would give Henry a helping hand if in his eagerness he sought the upper chamber. Now he would be married like any other man, and if he took pleasure in Henry’s service, he would not feel guilty because he himself lacked a licence.

  He ate a plate of beef and cold baked beans for breakfast with a wedge of soda bread and three cups of tea.

  “I suppose we should eat lightly,” Billy Snoddy said. “We’ll be having a good breakfast in Phelan’s after you’re spliced.”

  “Dinner,” Kevin said.

  “I’ll bet Elizabeth Hurley née Quane will call it breakfast.”

  “You can call it supper if you like. It will still be my dinner, because I’m having my breakfast now.”

  “It must be a great feeling getting the licence,” Snoddy said.

  “The only difference is that you take a greater interest than usual in the weather.”

  “I would expect you to feel a little flutter, not in your stomach but in your trousers, maybe.”

  “That reminds me,” Kevin said. “Rotten Socks is bulling. We’ll have to see that she gets her due after breakfast.”

  When Henry had done his duty, Kevin had a bath, but he still did not put on his wedding garment, a three-piece suit he had bought four years ago and had never worn. He was going to wear the waistcoat today so that he could sport his grandfather’s gold watch, which had not ticked in living memory. He went out to the yard and leant over the gate, wondering if his cows would seem different tomorrow and thinking about the Connemara bridegroom who, according to Festus, said, “Stand back, boys, till I make my last piss single.”

  At ten o’clock Maureen called him and told him to get ready. She had polished his Sunday shoes and laid out his suit on the bed. It was a tight fit. The trousers needed no belt and the jacket barely buttoned, but as he studied his handsome face in the mirror, he told himself that there would be more ill-fitting suits at his wedding. When they were about to leave, Maureen gave him a thermos flask of whiskey-laced tea to take up to his father. The old man was lying on his back, his eyes closed and mouth open, and suddenly Kevin knew without touching him that he was dead. All that seemed left in the bed was the narrow bird’s head with its fringe of white hair, the rest of him so wasted that his form was barely discernible under the clothes. His forehead was cold. He must have died soon after breakfast. Now De Valera could sleep in peace, because there was no one left who remembered with such passion the rigour of his oratory and the satanic sweep of his black overcoat. He straightened his father’s legs, closed his mouth, and tucked the bedclothes under his chin so that the jaw would not drop again.

  He opened the window and breathed the first fresh air that had entered the room in years. Beyond was the Red Gate, a hawthorn hedge with white blossom, and black-and-white Friesian calves grazing with angular rumps. It was a minutely private world, a world in which the world could forget you, and his father had left it more or less as he found it. He had planted a hedge here and dug a drain there. He had contributed a story or two to local folklore which would survive him by a decade, and he had lost four fields and a patch of woodland which would be more than recovered by his son. For fifty years he had ploughed and harrowed, sown and harvested, but still the land had retained its secret. The land was greater than the landowner. Though it might yield to the thrust of his coulter and respond to his husbandry, it lived a life of its own which gave it the last word and the last laugh.

  The calves took off down the field with stiff tails. He remembered his boyhood and the boorish tyranny of his father. He remembered the Grove and how his father had to sell it after a bad year, while Elizabeth’s father had had a good enough year to buy it. His father had been an encumbrance, a withered thistle that could still prick long after the sap had dried in it. He had been contrary in his old age. He had refused to make over the farm to his son, but now Kevin would have the property administered and the brown official envelopes that came a few times a year would be in his own name.

  “What’s keeping you?” Maureen called up the stairs.

  “Coming.”

  He opened the flask and drank two mouthfuls before leaving it unstoppered on the bedside table.

  “How is he?” she asked when he came down.

  “Fast asleep. I left the flask at his elbow in case he wakes up thirsty.”

  “I’ll come back right away after the breakfast to see if he wants anything.”

  “Don’t worry, he’ll be all right on his own for a couple of hours,” he said, getting into the car.

  The wedding service went smoothly. El
izabeth was only five minutes late and, contrary to Kevin’s expectations, O’Flaherty arrived on time. Kevin heard little of the service. His thoughts were on the ashen face on the pillow at home, and what prayers he said were not for Elizabeth and himself but for the old reprobate who had been a thorn in his flesh for so long.

  After breakfast the drinking began in earnest. The men clung together with oily-looking whiskey glasses in their scarred hands, and the women surrounded Elizabeth and the bridesmaids like wasps about a jam jar. Later, when the men had consumed their share of drink, the more self-satisfied would turn uxorious and the more self-confident adulterous, but the women would be sufficiently womanly to encourage them both to act out their dreams in dancing. Meanwhile, those who enjoyed the rough edge of manly conversation would make a last stand against the efforts of the women to get them onto the dance floor, while a few rare fellows who thought that conversation was not everything would sing a song. Kevin stayed with the men, trying to attend to their jokes with one half of his mind and wondering with the other half when Maureen would go home and discover that their father was dead. O’Flaherty was at his most conversable, going from group to group, regaling them with his favourite stories about “his friend the A.I. man” and returning to Kevin every now and then with a word of comradely concern.

  “As best man I consider it my final duty today to make sure that you are fit to perform tonight. The knack is to drink the right amount. Drink too little and you’ll be too nervous. Drink too much and you won’t be able to find it. It’s a matter of fine tolerance, and I’m determined to make sure that you get it right. Here, have another drink!”

  To escape the torrent of advice, Kevin went into the toilet only to find Billy Snoddy enjoying a solitary pee, waving his uncircumcised cock around as if he were watering a flowerbed with a hose pipe. Though he had been drinking for only an hour, he had had enough. Kevin felt uneasy in his company. He did not wish to antagonize him today, but neither did he wish to appear placatory.