“This is where all the big nobs hang out.” Snoddy laughed at the hackneyed joke as if he had minted it on the spot.
“The interesting thing about nobs is that they all, or nearly all, piss equally well,” Kevin said to appear light-hearted.
“You’re saying that the difference between a good one and a bad one lies elsewhere?”
“It’s a difference that is not apparent to the naked eye.”
“Yet it’s very real to women. And if you asked them why, they would slap your face. I’ve often wondered what women really think of them.”
“Maybe they don’t think of them,” Kevin ventured.
“There are women who think of them and women who don’t. I would say myself that Elizabeth Hurley née Quane does not.”
“I was pleased the rain held off,” said Kevin.
“A happy marriage is one where the man and the woman are equally proud of the member that is their common property.”
“I must tell Maureen to go home and make sure the oul’ fellah is all right.”
“Kevin Hurley, your member is no longer your own. A licensed bull is a tethered bull.”
“Don’t forget your jobs this evening, will you?”
“If you like, I’ll drive Maureen home now. It might keep me from drinking more than is good for either of us.”
Kevin weighed the possibilities and, as the least of several evils, put his hand in his pocket for the car keys.
Determined to have one more drink before news of death put a stopper on the nuptials, he joined Festus in the bar while Snoddy went off with Maureen. After a while Elizabeth came in and said that she wanted a word with him. She was in a turquoise going-away suit with a turquoise ribbon in her hair and rarely worn stiletto heels that brought the tip of her nose to the level of his shoulder. Noticing for the first time the brown flecks in the grey of her eyes, he could not believe that she was his wife; she was no more his wife today than yesterday or last week. He had married her only to find that she was still as elusive as a moor hen in a boghole, but he smiled at her, telling himself that he must have been naive to imagine that the familiar formula recited over them by McGladdery could confer on him a sense of possession and companionship which would only come, if at all, from years, maybe a life, of shared living. Or could it come from one hallucinatory night of shared sexuality?
“We should be making plans to leave,” she said in the hallway.
“But the fun has only started. People are just beginning to get the flavour.”
“The flavour of whiskey. You’ve been to weddings before. You know that they all end with too many men having too much to drink. We must leave before the merry din becomes a drunken rout. And remember, you’ve got to drive to Galway.”
“That won’t take long.”
“Have you booked a hotel?”
“There’s no need, it’s not races week.”
“If we haven’t got a hotel, we’d better get there early.”
“We don’t need a hotel. I know a big Tipperary woman who runs a guesthouse in Salthill and puts me up whenever I go to the races. We’ll go there.”
“No, we won’t, we’ll go to a hotel. I want privacy on my wedding night. I know what Nosy Parkers landladies are. I’ve had enough of them in Dublin. What’s the best hotel in Galway?”
“The Great Southern.”
“We’ll go there for our hibernation hymeneal.”
“What’s that?”
“A code word for honeymoon. We don’t want every Harry, Dick and Tom to know our business.”
“Well, certainly not Harry and Tom.”
“It’s settled then.”
“The Great Southern is expensive, full of Americans willing to pay through the nose for lobster served under its French name but supposedly caught by an Irish-speaking Aran islander.”
“All right, we’ll have lobster tonight in the Great Southern. If it pleases you, you can have gliomach ar an sean nós while I have homard à la Newburg.”
He could not help smiling at her spirited self-assertion, especially when he remembered that they would be spending the night at a wake surrounded by sympathetic neighbours, not tip-obsessed flunkeys.
“I want you to name a time for leaving now and I want you to stick to it. It’s the only way I’ll get you out of here in fit condition for the road.”
“All right, we’ll leave at four,” he said in the knowledge that it did not matter.
Billy Snoddy came through the swing doors and straight towards them. “I’ve got bad news for you, Kevin. Your father’s dead.”
“When did he die?”
“He was cold when we got home, but he must have woken up after we left. The stopper wasn’t in the flask and the tea inside had gone down.”
“I’m sorry,” Elizabeth said, taking his hand.
“We’ll go home right away—as soon as I’ve told Festus and the rest,” he said.
“It had to happen to us,” she said when they were alone in the car.
“He had to die sometime. He just chose the wrong day.”
“What will we do now?”
“We’ll go home and shake hands with all who come to the wake.”
“Like any long-married man and wife?”
“When the wake is over, we’ll go to the funeral, and the day after the funeral we’ll go to Galway for whatever it was you said.”
“Won’t people think it too soon?” she suggested.
“No, he was an old man. It isn’t as if his death was unexpected.”
Maureen washed the body and pared the toenails and fingernails, and when she had finished, Kevin shaved the hollow cheeks, pointed chin and stringy gills with his old bonehandled cutthroat. They tidied the room, put fresh linen on the bed, lit a blessed candle on each side of a crucifix, and twined a pair of black rosary beads round his big-jointed fingers.
“It was a lovely death in the heel of the hunt,” Maureen said when they had finished. “He went quietly, like a swan going downriver. His legs were stretched straight, his eyes and mouth closed, and his hands joined in front of him. It was as if he didn’t want to cause trouble, as if he decided to lay himself out without a helping hand from anyone.”
“Billy Snoddy said that he had a swig of tea before leaving.”
“He had an’ all. What surprised me was that he didn’t have more—after all the whiskey I put in it this morning.”
No sooner had they finished than the first neighbours came in. Kevin and Elizabeth drove to Killage to order a coffin and buy drink and food for the visitors—sweet sherry for the women, whiskey, beer, and stout for the men, two large hams, seven pounds of tomatoes, eight loaves, four barm bracks, butter and jam.
On the way back Elizabeth asked, “Will you be staying up all night?”
“No. I’ll go to bed after the rosary. I feel tired after the day.”
“Where will you sleep?”
“I think we should both sleep at Larch Lawn. It will be quieter.”
“It won’t look callous?”
“Even in the shadow of death, life, such as it is, must go on,” he replied.
After they had said the rosary at midnight, he and Elizabeth drove to Larch Lawn. She made him coffee and sandwiches, and he sat at the kitchen table looking at pictures of weddings in the local newspaper, while she opened and closed doors upstairs.
“I’ve put you in Murt’s old room,” she said when she came down again.
“And where will you sleep?”
“In my own room.”
“On your own?”
“If you don’t mind.”
“It’s a strange start to a marriage.” He tried to laugh.
“I’m… not feeling well.”
“Is it what my mother used to call the plague?”
“Yes.”
“Well, it was you who named the day.” He smiled.
“Normally, I’m reasonably regular, but this time, when it mattered, I was six days late.”
He wen
t across to the settee and put his arm round her shoulders. He did not love her, but he wanted to possess her, to make her his own and rid himself at once of the enfeebling feeling that he was her chauffeur. He wanted to feel that she was his wife, because he knew that he would not get a wink of innocent sleep until her warmly encompassing folds had bled him of his seed.
“It’s nearly over,” she continued. “We could go to bed together, I suppose, but you might be shocked.”
“We’ll sleep together if only to get used to each other.”
“On second thoughts, I don’t think so. I’d like my wedding night to be perfect. We’ll wait till after the funeral, and then we’ll go to bed properly, between starched sheets in the Great Southern.”
He kissed her on the lips, but he could tell from the stiffness of them that she was eager to escape from him, so he said good night and trudged upstairs alone. Before he fell asleep, he found himself wondering how any man manages to invade a woman outside matrimony, because even with a licence the going seemed tough enough to daunt anyone except Festus O’Flaherty. Then he thought of Maureen, of her natural openness, her earthy intuition, her unerring way with a man, and he told himself, There are heifers and there are fillies, and you’ve married a filly.
On Tuesday morning, after his father had been kibbed for twenty-four hours, he and Elizabeth set off for Galway, first crossing the Delour River and driving over Slieve Bloom in the direction of Kinnitty. It was a lovely morning of soft breezes, with a regatta of white clouds sailing before them against a sea-blue sky, and the flat countryside, a jigsaw of different greens, falling away behind them as they climbed the mountain road. Around them rose a forest of deeper green with a hint of intersecting triangles as the conifers stood to attention one above the other like an army of immovable sentinels. Then the road began to dip, and they found themselves on the other side of Slieve Bloom with another landscape laid like a table before them.
“We’ll have a drink in Birr to shorten the journey,” he said when they had passed Kinnitty.
“But surely that will only lengthen it.”
“We’re on holiday. We can forget about the clock for a day or two. Apart from going to the races and the All-Ireland and once to a wedding in London, I’ve never been on holiday before.”
He drank two pints of stout in Birr while she sipped a dry sherry and told him that she considered stout a cow’s drink, that she failed to understand how anyone except a cow could drink a pint let alone two. He explained to her with more good humour than he felt justified that it all had to do with the circumference of the gullet, that while a thimbleful of sherry might wet a woman’s, nothing less than half a gallon would lubricate a man’s.
“But there are men who drink sherry!” she said triumphantly.
“And there are women who drink stout. Of the two, I prefer the women.”
“Why is that?”
“Because I have more in common with them.”
“I thought you were going to say that it is more natural to err on the side of coarseness than refinement.”
“No, let it be remembered that it was you who said that,” he replied, sucking the froth from the bottom of his glass.
As they crossed the spreading Shannon, he said, “Now, we’re really on holiday, we’re in Connacht.”
“It’s after two. We’d better eat in Portumna,” she replied.
They went into the first hotel they saw, a brooding building with dark corridors and an empty dining room with a picture of President Kennedy on one wall and Pope John XXIII on another. They sat at a table by the only window and counted the bonhams in the lorry that was parked outside. Three policemen with beefy necks came in and sat at the table nearest the kitchen. A red-haired waitress came backwards through the swing doors and placed a plate of soup before each policeman while the youngest and beefiest of them patted her flat bottom.
“Lunch is finished,” she told Kevin as she picked up the menu from his table.
“What about the policemen?” he asked.
“They’re regulars. They eat here every day.”
“We’ve been travelling and we’re absolutely famished. Have you anything at all that we could eat?” Elizabeth inquired.
“I’ll ask cook,” she said, and off she went.
“If you’d done without your stout in Birr, we’d have been in time for lunch,” she observed. He did not reply, because, though a husband of only four days’ standing, he already knew that enigmatic abstraction is the best answer to fifty per cent of a wife’s observations.
“You can have tomato soup, roast mutton, carrots and mashed potatoes, with stewed pears to follow,” the waitress said when she returned.
“It will do,” said Elizabeth.
The tomato soup, carrots, and pears came out of a tin; the mutton was fatty, tough and cold; and the potatoes, which were the colour of old parsnips, contained hard little nodules which, according to Elizabeth, must have been added deliberately by the cook after mashing. No sooner had the policemen finished their meal than the waitress came out of the kitchen with a vacuum cleaner and began cleaning the carpet around their table.
“This is too much,” said Elizabeth. “First they try to poison us with braxy and then they deafen us. Don’t they realize that we’re on honeymoon?”
“Perhaps they do.”
“Would you please stop Hoovering till we’ve eaten,” she said to the waitress.
“Sorry, ma’am, I can’t. Cook said that I must get the room ready for tonight. The Macra are having their annual dinner.”
“And I hope they have their annual lecture on foggage to go with it,” she said, turning to Kevin.
The lunch had been an eye-opener for him. Though he disapproved of the lack of beef and mustard and thought the potatoes abominable, he was willing to eat and be thankful. He was not going to allow Irish hotel cuisine to impair his exhilarating sense of freedom, which, he felt, must surely come from the awareness that he had just been spancelled. Elizabeth, on the other hand, had lost her sense of proportion. She was evincing all the signs of middle-class horror, as if she might summon the hotel manager at any moment. Was this because she was a woman? Or was it because she lacked his philosophic calm, which would never be ruffled by braxy mutton or the hard nodules that Irish chefs secrete in mashed potatoes? It was a vision of her he would remember. As Festus said, in the battle of the sexes every potsherd of experience, every tittle of intelligence about the enemy must be turned to immediate and devastating account.
They arrived in Galway to find the streets glistening after rain. The Great Southern was comfortable and thickly carpeted, and their commodious bedroom looked down on the open square. After tea and biscuit, Elizabeth had a bath and, when she had finished, she suggested that Kevin should follow suit. It seemed a reasonable thought, and as he lay in the warm water making waves with his hand so that his penis floated to and fro like an exotic sea plant in a tangle of seaweed, he considered the end and purpose of the day, the night of sexuality to come. Even now, a mere five hours away, it seemed impossible. But after the first hesitant tacking, the wind would stand fair forevermore. Who knew, perhaps tomorrow she would be forward enough to invite him for a romp in the bath.
After a good dinner at the hotel, a walk down Shop Street, and a drink in the lounge, they went to bed. He got in between the sheets before her and waited in fresh pyjamas with his face to the window, wondering if virgins were as tricky as some old farmers made out. At last she switched off the light and crawled in beside him like a stray dog looking for shelter. He put his arms round her and stroked her hair and breasts, then kissed her on the lips and drew her towards him till her groin met his own. She was a mature, sophisticated woman, he told himself, a woman who had turned her back on her own kind and had come to him, a spreading oak that would shelter her in weaving branches. If it was an oak she wanted, he would not be a weeping willow. He would be strong. He would deny himself, give her plenty of time, perhaps an hour and a half, to o
vercome her virgin modesty. He would keep Fagin under covers, hold him in leash until the last minute; and then, when she had felt the naked heat of him, she would open wide the city gates, desiring nothing more than his lion-spring within her.
He reached down and pulled up her silk nightdress, then caressed her belly and little bum with his left hand. It was her bum that undid him. The two cheeks were so small that he could span them with the fingers of one hand, and the feeling it gave him of being lord of a whole galaxy made Fagin so impatient that he could not be denied. With the flick of a magician drawing a rabbit from a hat, he brought him out of his pyjamas and laid him uncompromisingly between her thighs. The stiffening of her body and the heaving of her shoulders began at the same time. He kissed her quickly to find tears running down her cheeks.
“What’s wrong, Elizabeth?” he whispered.
“I’m not a virgin,” she said between sobs.
“Why must you be so honest?” he asked in despair.
“I wanted you to know the truth.”
“That you’re foggage?”
“Foggage?”
“You know! Grass after the first cutting. Autumn foggage isn’t as rich in nutrients as spring grass, but I’m not complaining. You’ll have to do.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “It was not my fault. I was raped by an English journalist called Alexander Utley, and when it was all over he told me that it was only symbolic, that he was re-enacting the Tudor conquest of Ireland. Do you believe me, Kevin?”
“I do,” he said for the second time in a week, “but there are those who wouldn’t.”
“I want to sleep now,” she said.
“Sleep away,” he replied and turned his back on her.
He woke in the night to find her bottom in his crotch, his arms round her waist, and his face buried in her perfumed hair. He held a breast in each hand, weighing them like pokes of gold dust, and she turned and kissed his closed eyes.
“You’ll have to be gentle with me,” she whispered. “I’ve had one bad experience and I don’t want another, but if we lie together and fondle each other, I’ll get used to you bit by bit. It’s just that when I feel it between my legs, I shiver.”
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