For the first time since his wound, he wanted to participate again. But the terms would have to be his. Carefully, with precise calculation, he decided to make it all right for their sakes. His war was not with them.
‘Ach, Ah’m sorry, mither.’
‘Aw, Mick. It’s a’ richt, son. It’s jist that Ah’ve been worryin’ aboot ye lately.’
‘Mick, son,’ Tam said.
‘Naw. It’s a’ richt, feyther. Ah ken whit ye meant. Ye’re richt enough tae. Don’t worry aboot it. Ah’ll soart masel’ oot.’
It was a tentative contract. Their obvious relief showed that they didn’t understand the terms of it. Not long afterwards, Mick fulfilled his part by taking the job that had been on offer to him for some time, since old McGarrity was dead. He became the watchman in Lawson’s mill. Seeing him come and go, like any other worker except that the hours were staggered, Jenny and Tam were convinced that Mick had settled for a limited version of his past. Mick let them think that because his personal life was no longer the area where he expected his sense of truth to happen. He was looking for other terms.
He became a kind of recluse among them. His thoughts were seldom shared. The part of him they were aware of, sitting at table, reading the paper by the fire, talking occasionally, concealed the most of him, that deep fifth-column which was examining their lives very critically. The only two he saw hope for were Angus and Conn. The rebelliousness of Angus answered something in Mick himself. Angus opposed the way he had to live. But his opposition was fitful and always wilful. Mick saw the need to pick his way more carefully. Conn seemed to him too young to be sure about. But Mick had hopes that he would question things at least.
Mick was asking his own questions. Almost every night now he was reading. Not much of it was fiction. Painfully, he acquired a certain skill. His compulsion to find out, to understand what was happening to them, sharpened his intelligence to the point where it operated with a force that belied his education. He sifted, he underlined, he put together.
Painstakingly, he was trying to construct his own maps of where they were. The areas towards which his father had all his life just made desperate gestures Mick was trying to penetrate, to chart. He acquired a certain authority, even with Tam. The very unpredictability of his responses they found arresting.
When the peace finally came, Mick dampened their delight by showing no elation. Somebody in the street had shouted up, ‘It’s by, it’s by!’ Mick had only said, ‘Naw. It’s only jist stertin’.’
He imparted to the house a sense of waiting. He read the papers as if they were personal letters in a code only he understood. When the terms of the Treaty of Versailles appeared there, he nodded over them as if they were the answer to a problem he had been working out and he’d got it right.
The bastards,’ was his summation.
‘The Jerry asked fur it,’ Old Conn was saying. ‘He deserves everythin’ he gets. That’ll teach him a lesson.’
‘Naw. But it should bloody well teach us wan.’
‘To the victor the spoils,’ Old Conn announced.
‘Hoo much o’ the spoils are you gettin’, gran’feyther. Can ye no’ see? They’re playin’ at medieval bloody knights. Still! A’ richt, they’ve had their fun. Noo fur the real war.’
The others waited for him to explain it. But he didn’t. He just sat there staring at his paper, and waiting, it seemed.
19
The moment might well have had solemnity, the year becoming monument. But too many people were busy claiming the last available space for personal graffiti. Two strangers drank to the fact that they had never met. A man leaning out of a tenement window shouted, ‘Goad bless ye if ye’re no’ a Catholic.’ A woman in her fifties sang ‘Sweet Sixteen’. A man fell and, feeling the inside of his jacket wet, said, ‘Ah’ve ruptured ma whusky.’ Three friends were harmonising. As the clock struck, the crowd at the Cross overwhelmed the weight of its announcement. They cheered, shook hands, juggled toasts, kissed, embraced. For some time the small area at the centre of the town churned confusedly with people and the impression was that everybody there was determined to shake hands with everybody else and everybody had lost count. People were wished Happy Hogmanays, Hogmaloos, Houghmagandies. A big man clamped his friend at arm’s length, stared at him and said, his voice tremulous with reverence, ‘Ya auld bastard.’
Dispersal was slow. People who had already gone came back, vaguely moved around as if looking for something. Gradually, the place cleared, the last promises pronounced, the last improbable assignations made. The only surviving residents of the Cross were a man, leaning over to boke prodigiously into the gutter, and his friend, who had waited behind, loyal to him in his time of need, and was singing ‘Should auld acquaintance be forgot’ with an improvisational brilliance that made the absence of lyric and tune a minor problem. Between harmonic experiments, he would say, ‘Oan ye go, son, get it up’ or ‘Ring out the old, ring in the new’.
The others had moved off along the streets that led from the Cross. They took away with them a part of what had happened, a piece of the warmth, and for another hour or two, small groups would carry their elation like a torch through the streets.
In the house, Jenny and Kathleen had been preparing, knowing that their hospitality would soon be under siege. The house had been cleaned with an almost superstitious thoroughness, as if in propitiation of the New Year. Becr and whisky were on the sideboard beside shortbread and black bun. Extra chairs and glasses had been borrowed. The fire reflected brilliantly on the black-leaded surfaces around it. In his rocking-chair sat Old Conn, his first Ne’erday dram cached like a gold nugget in his enormous, buckled hand. Through the room Alec, and Jennifer, a few months old, were sleeping. Jenny, Kathleen and Old Conn had wished one another a Happy New Year and now they waited, listening to 1920 squall itself alive in the street outside.
Jenny didn’t like Hogmanay. It was one of the two times of the year she would have wished to cut out of the calendar. The other was the Grozet Fair. Asked why, she would say simply, Things happen.’ She could have recited a whole catalogue of accidents, deaths and other private misfortunes relating to one local family or another and all filed in her memory under one or the other heading. Hogmanay was the worst. It was in the nature of men to be trouble-makers at any time, but at Hogmanay they seemed to declare a fiesta for their capacity for bother. Drink circulated carelessly in crowded rooms. Small men imagined themselves bigger. People said wild things and then tried to measure themselves against them. The songs, the laughter, the jokes, the bragging, they were harmless in themselves but they were like fireworks set off among powder-kegs. The result was that even if they escaped the almost mystical malevolence Jenny sensed in those few hours when the calendar was suspended, people were all too likely to improvise a minor disaster of their own.
She remembered years ago visiting with her parents the reunion of another family at Ne’erday. The members of the family had begun almost formally, not having seen one another for some time. But by midnight they were wallowing in communal sentimentality. At half past one they were ranged behind past grievances, hurling accusations. By two o’clock it was civil war. The father sustained a broken nose, the oldest son had his head split with a pail. As her father said on the way home, ‘A guid New Year tae yin an’ a’, an’ mony may ye see.’
Yet, much as she dreaded it, it would never have occurred to her not to celebrate it. Every year her house had what it was traditional to offer and was open to anyone. Tonight she expected Tam and Tadger Daly would be in first. They had just stepped down to the Cross to bring in the New Year, Tadger was by long usage her accepted first foot. Jack should be with them. He had said earlier he would meet them at the Cross at midnight. Jenny looked at Kathleen, who was still soft in the belly from carrying Jennifer, and hoped, as she did several times a day, that she and Jack would sort things out all right. Mick had gone to see old Mary Hawkins. Mick was settling down now that he had that caretaker’s job
in the mill. Where Angus and Conn were was anybody’s guess. Jenny had wanted Conn to stay in the house but Tam had said to let him go out. He was too young, though. Jenny reflected how Tam was becoming more lax with the family, as if to make up for what he felt was happening in himself. She hoped Tam would be happy tonight.
There was a knock at the door. The ceremony was part of the occasion. Smoothing down her clean pinny, Jenny crossed and opened it. Only Tadger stood there, a bottle bulging in his pocket, a wee raker of coal in his hand. ‘Jenny,’ he said, ‘a Happy New Year, hen.’ ‘Happy New Year.’ They embraced lightly. Over Tadger’s shoulder, she saw Tam come into view, his expression a licence for her to forget about him and get on with her own enjoyment. Wullie Manson was with him.
They eddied briefly in the middle of the floor, happy-new-yearing. Before they were finished, Jack came in, explaining that he had missed them at the Cross and almost managed to catch up with them before they reached the house. His breathlessness acted on them like an epigram on the brevity of pleasure. Greetings exchanged, drinks were given out. The men had whisky, Jenny and Kathleen had ginger wine. Tadger gave a toast to 1920.
The occasion began to generate its own chronology. Talk gathered momentum, remarks thrown in from all sides like simples being mixed to induce a vision. Tam and Jack compared the things they had seen at the Cross. Tadger told an anecdote about his children. Jenny told the story she had thought of earlier about the family battle she had once attended at Ne’erday. Eating black bun and shortbread, they scattered crumbs as they laughed, like an allusion of plenty. Tam took resonance from the company of his friends, as if his nature, so often tautened to discord, was tuned by their presence to evoke its deeper reaches. Their talk struck rich responses in him of laughter, comment, pure enjoyment. Their pleasure in one another transmuted the meanness of the room, the way music can put the sleaziest public hall where it’s played into breathtaking orbit. Things happened, words took place with tropical suddenness and seemed natural. Old Conn sang:
Oh father dear, I oftimes hear
You speak of Skibbereen,
Of lofty scene and valleys green
And mountains rude and wild.
His voice was a reed, year-fretted, saliva-stopped, played fitfully by his age, mocked with ironies of unintended silence. Seen through the song, a place more real than Skibbereen, a private landscape of sound, hard fields, unpeopled houses, bleak acres whauped by dead injustices, bright-flowering moments, a long way come along. He didn’t sing. More than seventy years sang themselves in. Before he was finished, Conn was home, standing motionless at the doorway, acknowledging the nods and winks without a word, because he had been taught that you might as well interrupt a prayer as a song.
Ah father dear, the day will dawn
When in vengeance we will call
And Irishmen from near and far
Will rally to that call.
I’ll be that man to lead the van
Beneath the flag of green.
And loud and high we’ll raise the cry
Revenge for Skibbereen.
‘Guid, auld yin.’
‘An’ where’ve you been, young-fella-me-lad?’ Tadger had unconsciously anticipated Jenny, burlesquing what would have been her question. This is some cairry-oan. Ye go oot the hoose wan year an’ don’t come back tae the next.’
‘That’s right.’ Wullie Manson took it up. This is the first Ah’ve seen o’ ‘im since last year. He’s grown since then.’
‘No’ as much as he seems tae think,’ Jenny said. ‘Ye’re gey late, Conn.’
‘Aye.’ Tadger was grave. ‘Ye’ll need tae take that boay o’ yours in hand, Tam.’
The young folk nooadays,’ Wullie offered. ‘Ah didny get oot tae play efter eicht o’clock till Ah wis twinty-wan.’
‘Stane?’ asked Tadger.
‘Well, Conn?’ Jenny asked.
The men were a mock jury, the flippancy of their affection relentlessly neutralising the seriousness of Jenny’s concern. Caught in the blatancy of all their loves, Conn’s annoyance at being treated like a wee boy shrivelled. The excuses he had been trying on like a man’s clothes seemed suddenly not to fit, their glib casualness embarrassing, their throw-away authority ridiculous, and he stood exposed in a sheepish smile.
‘A wis jist wi’ some o’ the boays,’ he managed.
‘Boays o’ yer ain age, Ah hope.’
‘Hiv ye goat their birth certificates oan ye, son? Yer mither wid like tae see them,’ Tam said.
Among the laughter, Tam put up his arms, defending himself against Jenny’s wrath. Her look flashed on him for a second before her own laughter extinguished it.
‘He’s jist new turned sixteen,’ Jenny reminded them.
‘Since first I saw the lovelight in your eyes.’ Tadger’s inspiration became a duet with Wullie Manson. They all went on about Conn, roughing him verbally in a clumsy, animal affection. Woven in with their remarks, each heightening the other, Conn was still vividly conscious of where he had just been. His memory of saying cheerio to his mates an hour ago was involved with the gentle heavings of Wullie Manson’s enormous frame. His father’s laughter sheered like a light across the place where he had met Jessie Langley in the darkness.
‘Where exactly’ve ye been, Conn?’
How old was Jessie? In her thirties, he had heard people say. For him, a fabled distance away. Legendary as Jezebel. Murky with the past, veiled in whisperings. She walked among bitter mouths, ‘tail’, ‘hoor’, ‘the merry widow’.
‘Say nothin’ till ye see yer lawyer, son.’
The suddenness of her appearance in front of him. Wearing shadow, making an accessory of darkness. The innocence of her deception. ‘Could ye tell me the way tae Fleming Street, son?’ The strangeness of talk. Her words leading him, manoeuvring him with threads until he came incredibly to be standing on the wasteground with her.
‘Jist roon’ aboot.’
‘Where’s roon’ an’ whit were ye aboot?’
He welled where she touched him. And his own hands, led along her, discovered continents among her clothes. Breasts and thighs distended on his palms, undulated from him, became journeys he must make.
‘He’s no’ drunk, is he?’
Her softness was the past, the residue of other men. How she underpinned the welter of his feelings with ceremony, made the savagery gentle. She forbade the final meeting. Smiling, shaking her head. Why? Stories of disease stirred, caved within his head. Taking, she was giving. She left him himself as a gift.
‘All Ah’ve drunk is waiter.’
‘No’ guid fur ye.’
‘All right in moderation.’
He laughed among their faces, and hers was one of them. He felt defined by all of them. All the furtive stories, the jokes told in the park, the impossible facts relayed by boys who wanted to know from his reaction if they could be true, the haemorrhaging shames, they were a code translated into benignity on her body. The secret examinations of himself, the desperate masturbation in empty places, they hadn’t been dirty, but ordinary and innocent. Prayers about to be answered. He sensed that, if nobody else knew, what had happened between him and her was good. It was just their own.
‘Ye still hivny told us, Conn,’ his mother said.
He looked at her, laughing.
‘Well, mammy. Whit it is, me an’ ma’ gang broke intae a’ the shoaps oan the richt haun side o’ the main street. Next week we’re daein’ the left side. There’ll be somethin’ in it fur yerself, mammy.’
The reaction of the others demolished Jenny’s last chance of seriousness. All she could manage was, ‘There’ll be something in it fur you tae. A guid hidin’.’
His father said, ‘If ye come in as late as this again, Ah’ll skelp yer bum wi’ a tea-leaf tae yer nose bluids.’
Chaos was restored. Given something to eat (‘He’s loast his appetite. An’ fun’ a hoarse’s,’ ‘Aye, hunger’s guid kitchen.’), Conn was allowed a glass of ginger wine
and the privilege of staying up. Jack sang. Tam coaxed Kathleen to sing ‘The Donegal Wedding’. Mick appeared with old Mary Hawkins, she had no one to spend Ne’erday with.
The situation’s intensity became like an abstract of the way they lived, a celebration of themselves, a persistent buoyancy flexible enough to pass through retrospective calms, shallows of tiredness, bleak and sudden memories of the future, and stay intact. Their present transmuted past and future without seeking to deny either. They became philosophical with the same naturalness as they laughed, sadnesses being controlled by the fact that they could give them shape.
For a time they talked about people they had known who were now dead. And even that was pleasant, not remotely morbid. They moved through that area with conspiratorial nods and nudges and muted laughter, like a procession of dignified drunks revisiting in secret catacombs that weren’t officially known about. Their shifting words illumined a face here, a posture there, and all around them the dead seemed defiantly themselves, presenting gestures that mocked the accepted heraldry of death, winking in their shrouds.
Only once did their deft conversation, knowing its way by instinct in the dark, uncover not a reassuring facsimile of death, made homely by familiarity, but a real dying, the echo of the scream still on its face, still close enough to living to be its obscene parody. In spite of Jenny’s careful charting of their direction, somebody inevitably mentioned the peace, and the peace meant the war. Mary Hawkins broke down, instantly and noisily. Her self-control, like something she had carried around till it became too heavy, fell from her, shattered, and the room seemed immediately awash with her grief.
The shock of it froze Conn. The only feeling he could get hold of was embarrassment. It was the first time he had seen an adult cry so openly and the physical impact of it obscured everything else. It was an ugly performance. The dignity of her face unseamed, the eyes crumpling, the prim mouth retching up astonished sobs of pain. His surprise was enlarged by the calmness of the others.
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