by Dermot Healy
“We’ll have to leave here. Tomorrow!”
Age overnight harried his features. The cheeks sagged. Then one day the girls found him waiting for them at the boathouse at Scotchport beach, something he had never done before. The old fear and the new fear combined to make him distraught, yet he remained silent. The possession was over. He accompanied them to the house in a forgiving way. Then, come the afternoon, he made a fire of his papers in the back garden. “Watch,” called Maisie, “that you don’t burn the privy.” Ash from the history he had attempted floated over the leafless escallonia. Scraps of dialect went over the roof of the house.
“Why are you destroying all that you’ve done?” she asked.
“Because,” he said, “it’s all been done before.” He looked at Maisie. “You should have told me,” he said sadly. “Someone should have told me when to stop.”
Next morning there were wild flowers on the pillows of each of the three women.
By the time they came downstairs they knew the persecution was over. He was installed in his study reading. He had passed on into the role of elder from which the word Presbyter takes its name. They heard him, as they passed his door, reading out loud what they first took to be ancient Greek. Vee shay, vee may, vee tu; vee shiv, vee ameed, vee adder. Cod taw harlaw? Cod ay sin? Kay will asti?
All day it went on. Questions. Exclamations. Entreaties.
In 1710 the first Presbyterian preachers, hounded by the High Church, began translating the Bible into Irish. True to that ecclesiastical republicanism which let the individual form his own government, Jonathan Adams had set up his own private republic.
In The Dwellings he began his first translations into Irish with the help of schoolbooks loaned by Joe Love’s children. He began at the beginning. He was, I was, you were. We were. They were. We all were. What happened? What is that? Who is within?
One summer’s morning Jonathan Adams decreed that an extra place be set for dinner. There was a visitor arriving. Then the family went through the house with a fine-tooth comb to make sure there was no evidence of his previous life on show. He and the girls drove to Belmullet town.
Mr Thomas MacDonagh, who had arrived early, was standing where the bus had left him.
“Mr MacDonagh?” asked Jonathan Adams.
“Sin ceart,” said the Kerryman. He was stout with thin fair hair, rimless glasses and sensual lips. The daughters were introduced. He gave Catherine one damp, limp hand and looked at Sara as if he was seeing two of her.
“Come, Sara,” said her father, “what have you been told about staring?”
MacDonagh shook his finger disapprovingly. “As Gaelige, maith se do thoil,” he said. In Irish, please.
Sara blushed and felt mortified.
It was not a good beginning. As Gaelige became a phrase that rang constantly, like some dread commandment from the Old Testament, throughout the house. They grew to hate that sound. Thomas MacDonagh soon learned that the use of the vernacular was at a low ebb in Adams’ of Corrloch. And though he had been hired to teach young girls, his main student was in fact the father. Old Adams had no vocabulary and a reading accent which bordered on Arabic. When MacDonagh greeted her, as was customary, with a short nasal Dia guit, Maisie Adams returned a mindless response.
“I didn’t catch that.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Mr MacDonagh,” she’d reply and skip away.
The Sergeant, out of irony, he called A mhaister. Master, he exclaimed with rueful satisfaction. His early attempts to conduct all conversation at meal times in Irish ended with his finely modulated questions turning aggressive and abrupt. He’d start again. No reply ensued. Instead, he was met with a timorous, well-mannered silence. Their restraint perplexed the Irish teacher, while dinner time taxed the Sergeant. He’d speed through an English-Irish dictionary on his lap and with a word start a train of talk which had nothing to do with what had gone before.
“It surprises me that you did not get an Irish teacher from the locality,” said MacDonagh.
“I did not want to be drawing attention to ourselves,” said the Master.
“Is that so?” The inquisitive face broke into an alarming sneer. And in reply, Jonathan Adams’ cold superiority: “I would watch my facial expressions, if I was you, Mr MacDonagh.”
“What?”
MacDonagh tried to lord it over the girls, but from the beginning they were not given to submission in any language, and seemed to have entered into a conspiracy against him. They had a code of gesture and laughter which used to raise his hackles. They were too old to be precocious, too young to be sophisticated. The sexual tang of their presence shocked him deeply. Often during his first few days there he felt like shaking them. But he got on with it.
The girls’ lesson took place in the kitchen between ten and twelve in the July mornings. Sometimes, to torment him, the girls would speak to each other in lewd French so that he was left as hopeless as they were when he’d break into a tirade of Irish.
“What did your father do above?” he asked casually.
“He was a traveller for chocolates,” said Sara.
“Was he now?” replied MacDonagh.
The afternoon and much of the early evening the teacher spent above in the Master’s room, from which, crestfallen and appalled, he’d make his way around nine to O’Malley’s pub. Both the Sergeant and the girls found MacDonagh a very stern customer. A Hail Mary in Irish began each lesson. A strange, untranslatable plea to the Lord ended it. It often appeared that nothing had happened in the Irish language except worship of God. Should the girls turn noisy he was out the door complaining. He held a special spite against Catherine because she would have her lessons prepared, answer him with sarcasm and throughout the class preserve a hostile female air. He tried everything to win her over, and failing that, to humiliate her by humiliating himself. His voice would break at the end of a love poem. He’d look up to find her looking away. His treatment of Sara was at first matter of fact, and then he tried by praise to turn her into a collaborator. But his attempts to separate the girls brought them closer together. He remained outside, a figment of their father’s imagination.
His inadequacy with the girls made him a stranger. But worse was to come. He made no bones of expressing his horror to Maisie Adams that a picture of Queen Victoria and other royal memorabilia took pride of place on the parlour mantelpiece. It was only mock horror, yet the woman of the house took it seriously. Now he began to realize why they had invited no local in. The Adamses had old-fashioned Royalist leanings. They were hiding a secret. Maisie remonstrated with her husband, who remonstrated with MacDonagh that the Queen was his wife’s hobby.
“Hobby!” said MacDonagh astounded and looked with amusement at the Queen.
He would not let the argument be. He treated them at tea time to an account of how the Prince Regent had sped through Ireland two generations before. “In my village, the people laid out flowers for him. The tenants were made to line the platform like idiots. There was a brass band assembled to break into a colonial air. All were trained to wave in unison. They waved and the Prince, the bastard, shot by without losing speed.”
“You are lucky,” said Maisie. “He never made it to Rathkeale, where I came from.”
“Most likely,” he said jokingly, “living in a huge house where you lorded it over the natives.”
“My father was a labourer. And his father before him, Mr MacDonagh,” said Maisie Adams. “Before I met that man there I had no life.” She turned to the girls. “Not until I met your father. He was a Northerner. I thought the Northerners had something about them. They were handsome creatures.” Then she turned to the Irish teacher. “If I keep the Queen on my chest of drawers or on my mantelpiece or wherever I so choose it’s because I was envious of a princess.”
“Not every woman is,” MacDonagh ventured.
“Every woman,” said Maisie derisorily, “unless she would be king.”
MacDonagh’s laugh was a loud howl. Then, disb
elievingly, he followed old Adams upstairs to continue with the Irish lessons.
What MacDonagh had found was a conservative household the like of which he had never encountered before. It was beyond him that such a family could have succeeded in living in such ignorance in Ireland with all that was happening not a hundred miles up the road. Yet, though he felt superior to the Adamses, their quaint domestic life and lack of bitterness would somehow entice him in. But not for long. When he found out in O’Malley’s that, besides being a Protestant, it was rumoured that Jonathan Adams had also held some important government job, the penny dropped.
“Do you tell me that?” he said. “I thought he didn’t look like a Cadbury’s man.”
“He was high up, too.”
“I might have known,” he said. “He has the head of one.”
“Oh, they’re decent, good-living people,” replied O’Malley.
But now the inclination of Master Adams towards Irish and Irishness became contemptible in MacDonagh’s eyes. What was driving the old bollacks? It derived from guilt over violence done. He had probably taken part in some vile deed in the past. His wish was not reconciliation, but to disguise himself in another culture. There was no other explanation.
“Are you aware there is a war going on in this country?” he asked over dinner.
“Yes,” said Jonathan Adams quietly. “Thank you.” Then he looked at MacDonagh with bitter, implacable scorn.
The teacher smiled uneasily.
“Yes,” Jonathan Adams repeated, “we are aware, thank you, Mister MacDonagh.”
There was such an air of finality about these words, of restrained tribal rage, of suppressed wrath, that MacDonagh wanted to let the matter be.
But the Sergeant, growing angrier, stood and said: “I would remind you that you are a paid guest in this house. You would delude yourself, Mr MacDonagh, if you think you understand my people.”
MacDonagh lifted a piece of buttered potato to his mouth.
“I would not claim to understand you,” he said quietly, and began to chew.
After this confrontation he turned his attention towards the girls. He grew to despise the slight tan on their skins, their infantile conversations, their sly fey world, their use of words like swoon, sensual, dire, awry, dour, provocative, sensible, assured, emphatic, lonesomeness. It was a language MacDonagh treated with polite condescension. His Irish grew evangelical. He alluded to historical knowledge they did not have.
He’d let go with reams of Gaelic names. Resurrected all the sexual words he could think of in Irish to shame them into subservience. Read entire pages of prose without stopping. He started making empty-headed talk about boys with a whingeing slur in his voice – that lad Noone, young Love, the gasur from Lavells – then laughed evilly. His gaze, his tone, imputing to the girls some moral discrepancies.
His intrusion into their lives became a sexual one.
And then, when he heard veiled stories of the Adams girls, even he was ashamed of the salacious thrill it gave him as he slept in Sara’s bed, to think how close to him the girls were. Beyond the wall that divided his room from theirs he imagined them sleeping in their skin. They’d hear him moving round his room at all hours. The soft pop of a bottle. The roll of the mattress. Sara’s sheets hauled aside. And such was his fantasy about the Protestant girls that his member would collapse into his hand without even standing. They’d see it in him the next morning with that sense of indignant sadness girls feel for unfortunate men. The sleepless round eyes, the pale twitching cheeks, the scarf round his neck fallen like an extra skin down from his pale head. Then, the quick unsatisfactory breath, and the constant slur. He said things, gave hints that told them he knew of their doings, yet he stopped from telling them all. That was left to their imaginings. Their rejection drove him to insurmountable peaks of self-abuse in Sara’s bed. Sometimes he’d expend himself and stare listless and open-mouthed at the ceiling like a doll. For a moment he’d know peace, he’d hear his breath coming and going, then, first one woman would come into the Irish teacher’s head, then the other, but hard as he tried he could not stop their personalities – their real selves – from intruding. His fantasy could not keep them under lock and key. Only as he approached his coming orgasm would they lie down obediently for him. From next door they’d hear his sigh. But his mind could not hold them in submission. He’d find one of their faces in his mind, then the other, looking away from him. His cock would collapse wet in his hand. It would be over.
In the morning Mr MacDonagh would descend the stairs very ashamed of himself and fearful that these orgies he conducted nightly with his person might have been heard throughout the house. He was afraid that they might see it in his eyes. He would start the lesson with the girls in a distracted manner.
“As Gaelige,” he’d whisper.
His guilt made him likeable. To see the girls he had dreamed of so licentiously now attend to his lessons made his voice break on such words as pog, sneachta, taithneamh. Kiss, snow, shining. He wondered where his antagonism used to come from. Now it seemed that Catherine had lost her loathing of him. That Sara had lost her distrust. Yet his cheerfulness did not last long. Embryos, swathed in green light, bathed in his hangover. He could not stand the protection the girls’ manners gave them. Only through pitting himself against the enemy could he normalize himself. Beyond that hovered a space his spirit could not fill. He was a man who makes a language stand still, and so he stuck resolutely to the constraints of Irish grammar, for to venture beyond that was to invite period blood, the smell of the silk worm, the mushroom smell. As the day progressed his old prejudices would reassert themselves, his sexual guilt would give way to a puritanism that drove even Jonathan Adams, himself inclined to an excess of religious zeal, to remonstrate.
The Master one afternoon made the claim, when once again his language class had dissolved into political argument, that it was the Presbyterian had sided with the Catholic against the Protestant.
“For their own reasons,” said MacDonagh, smiling.
“I see you know no difference between the history of the Presbyterian and the Church of Ireland.”
“If there is one it escapes me.”
But the old policeman was not to be stopped. He argued that the first Presbyterians of Ireland – to the North they came, he said – brought the concept of the Republic with them. Ha, ha, ha, went MacDonagh. They came not as colonists, but settlers. What’s the difference? asked the teacher. The Presbyterians wanted to put England behind them. “The Presbyterian wished to begin again,” concluded Adams, “in new, in more congenial surroundings.”
“Am I to take it that you believe Catholicism to be corrupt?”
“No,” said Mr Adams, correcting himself, yet not knowing where such an implication was issuing from.
“Well, go on.”
But the old man carefully held his silence as if the matter was finished. Then MacDonagh rose and said: “I’m afraid, Master Adams, that you have the wrong end of the stick. You take great leeway.” The Master warily waved him on. “I think you hold some spirited views, which I respect,” MacDonagh opened the palm of his hand, “but I know which side I would be on.”
“You are free to hold that view, Mr MacDonagh.”
“I gather that your weakness for authority is based upon how quickly you can forfeit that authority for another.”
“Could I have that again?” asked Mr Adams smiling. “The subordinate clause, please?”
Mr MacDonagh laid down his cigarette.
“You jest, a mhaistir.”
“I am a bit too old,” said Adams, “to be starting Dostoevsky. I have always taken my orders from above.”
“And I suppose you believe in the law and order of the British Army and the RUC.”
“I do, Mr MacDonagh.”
“Hah!” said the teacher triumphantly.
They stared at each other a while.
“Perhaps we could take a break?”
“Suit yourse
lf,” said MacDonagh, then he strode to the door. “You are all at sea.” Behind his glasses anger opened the white of his eyes as he descended the stairs. He was chuckling to himself in the manner of a man remembering violence done to him. He stepped into the kitchen, put his coat on the back of a chair, and stood there working his hands.
“Are ye at it again?” asked Mrs Adams.
“Your good man,” he pouted, “has no sense of history.”
“He is,” said Maisie, “a demanding man.”
“He drives me to say things I don’t mean.” The teacher sat and looked at the upper air. And just as he had the cup in his hand they heard the door open above.
“Tarraing anseo, Mac an Du,” came the Sergeant’s voice.
“Agh!” said the befuddled teacher. “The pain of it.” He shook his head as if to clear his ears, made a gargling sound that had Maisie reaching a cloth to her lips to cover up her merriment, then he returned to his penance above. But at tea time MacDonagh would have his revenge. He returned to his favourite topic – a hatred of prostitutes. This was certain to make the Sergeant wince. Then, instead of ancient Ireland, more recent events were discussed. MacDonagh would have the Sergeant know that the Irish language begins in the soul, like all passions for beautiful things. And this the old scholar could not deny.
It soon became obvious to Jonathan Adams that his pleasurable search among the early Irish myths and antiquities had led him back inexorably, even contemptuously, to events in contemporary Ireland, a place where he did not want to be at all, having had his fair share of it in previous lives. He must listen to his daughter Sara ask after syphilis; his daughter Catherine after Republican jails. If they had not decided to speak Irish over tea none of this would have happened, all could, perhaps, have passed pleasantly in an English well used to censoring such prejudiced memories. For at table, even among themselves, the North was never discussed.
Papers were not bought. No radio played. Television was barred from the house. The North was silenced. Only at night in their bed did Maisie and Jonathan remember. Then they put it by till their return to Fermanagh in autumn. That would be soon enough. And when they’d return, with great swiftness it all came back.