‘Oh yes, it must be nice.’
‘It’s terribly cold actually, but at least I’m not right under the parents’ wing all the time.’
‘But in summer it must be nice.’
‘Yes. Yes, it is.’
End of conversation.
Another prolonged silence. The bus stopping and starting, sending the big flat puddles swooshing out, crawling onwards.
‘Um, do you know Austin Boycott?’ Roger asked.
‘Well, I do,’ she said.
Sudden caution.
‘He works at the School,’ Etain added. ‘Why wouldn’t I know him?’
‘No reason, no reason at all. I just heard somebody mention him the other day. I’ve seen him around the School. I know him by sight, but I’m not sure I realized he was working full time at the School.’
Roger leant forward.
‘Well, he is.’
Etain turned and looked at the steam on the window. She rubbed at it with the inner part of her mackintosh sleeve.
Suddenly she turned round.
‘I wish to God he wasn’t at the School,’ she said. ‘Honest to God, he frightens me.’
‘Frightens you?’
‘Yes, you must know the way he goes on.’
‘No. No, I don’t. I haven’t met him. I just know vaguely what he looks like.’
‘I thought everyone knew about him. No one else seems to take any notice. They all say it’s only codding. But, I tell you, I don’t like it.’
‘Don’t like what?’
‘All this class of talk about liquidating the opposition, sweeping away the bourgeoisie, forced labour camps in the Curragh and everything.’
‘I haven’t heard any of this.’
‘Well, you can’t have met him then, because he’s always doing it. And he sounds so nasty the way he boasts of the need to be ready to betray anyone who deviates from the party line, and says he’d have his friends shot without the least hesitance. I can’t think why they don’t arrest him or something.’
‘But didn’t you say everybody thinks he doesn’t mean it all?’
‘That’s what they keep telling me, Mammy and Daddy and everybody. But I still get the creeps whenever he comes near me.’
Again she turned to the window. Long trickles were running down from the patch she had cleaned with her mackintosh sleeve. The bus lurched to a stop again.
‘Does he ever ask you questions about the School?’ Roger said.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t let him.’
She spoke without turning away from the window. Roger peered over her shoulder at the clear patch on the misted window. All that could be seen outside was the gleams of passing lights elongated on the shiny wet surface of the road.
‘Is it far to where you live?’ he asked.
‘Quite a way still,’ she answered.
They lapsed into silence. A promising line suddenly gone to earth.
Roger felt a wave of irritation and began to wonder how frequent the return service of buses was.
Etain turned towards him. The damp hair that had been clinging to the sides of her cheeks was beginning to dry out and fluff up.
‘It is you who’s got that terrific dog, isn’t it?’ she said. ‘I mean he must be very nice, but he is enormous.’
‘He’s a wolfhound,’ Roger said. ‘A damn silly sort of dog to keep in the middle of a city actually, but I looked after him for someone when I first came over here, and then I sort of took him on.’
‘What’s his name?’
The random question.
‘Cuchulain.’
Etain at first found nothing to say to this. Roger turned and looked down at the steam rising from his sodden shoes. Etain looked as if she too was going to try another spell of contemplating the rainy night, but suddenly she spoke.
‘Cuchulain,’ she burst out. ‘It’s awful, you know, but I don’t really know which of them he was. Daddy and Mammy are awfully keen on Irish legends and all that – that’s why I’m called Etain, actually – but I can never sort out one from the other. Was Cuchulain the old king who took Deirdre off?’
‘No, that was Conchubar, I’m afraid. Cuchulain was actually his nephew. He defended Ulster single-handed against Queen Maeve. He’s the one the statue in the Post Office is of.’
‘Oh, of course. You must think I’m awful not to know. Did you call your Cuchulain that yourself or was he already named when you got him?’
‘Oh, he was named indeed. But not Cuchulain. He was called Snibbo. I thought it was a bit much.’
‘I should say so. It would be terrible for a lovely creature like that to descend down to being called Snibbo. Did you choose Cuchulain because he symbolizes Ireland? If I mean symbolizes.’
‘You do, and I didn’t really. It was a line from Yeats that was in my mind. The one that says Cuchulain “fought with the invulnerable tide”. I rather liked it, so I saddled the poor beast with the name.’
‘Well,’ Etain said, ‘I shall always be able to remember which Cuchulain is now. That’s some progression anyway.’
She sat savouring her achievement. Roger was at a loss for an appropriate comment.
The rain beat steadily on the metal roof of the bus above them. After a while Roger spoke again.
‘Tell me,’ he said, ‘will Miss Hogan be in the office tomorrow?’
‘She will. On the dot of nine.’
‘You sound bitter. Does she beat you to it then?’
‘Ah well, for God’s sake, why get in at the exact minute when no one else so much as shows their face till half past and there’s nothing to do that can’t be done in ten minutes or five?’
‘You do sound bitter.’
‘Oh, I suppose she’s all right really. But she’s been at the School since Adam and Eve and she thinks she knows everything.’
‘Adam and Eve isn’t really so long, you know. The School’s only been in existence since Ireland caught on to all the university refugees who only asked to get on with their work in quiet.’
‘Now don’t you start. I’m always getting the history of the School from her.’
‘I’m sorry. It’s just that I’m rather in favour.’
‘Well, why wouldn’t you be? I suppose you must be some sort of a refugee yourself? Although not everybody at the School is.’
‘Why should you think that I’m a refugee?’
The sharp question.
‘Oh now, don’t take off so. I only supposed that you were because no one would come and work over here if they could work in England.’
‘Oh, wouldn’t they just. England’s no paradise, you know.’
‘Maybe not. But all the same I’d be off there tomorrow if I could persuade my parents to let me go.’
Roger smiled.
‘You’re over twenty-one, aren’t you?’
‘I’m twenty-seven. And I suppose I could go if I wanted to. But they’d be on tenterhooks worrying was I sleeping with a man or something, so I don’t go.’
‘But what exactly is it about life over there that attracts you?’
‘It’s what there is to do. You haven’t lived in Dublin all your life: you don’t know what a little fishpot it can get to seem.’
‘Oh, I can’t agree. It just seems to me that you’ve got to take a different attitude in Dublin. You have to learn to stop feeling you’ve some sort of right to the best of everything – to the best actors in the best plays, to a completely representative sample of the world’s art, to the greatest orchestras in the world playing steadily through –’
‘Oh, but that would be marvellous,’ Etain interrupted. ‘Just think of what music we get here in Dublin, and then think of all you can hear in London.’
‘So you like music, do you? I didn’t know that.’
She smiled at him.
‘And how would you,’ she said, ‘when you haven’t said more than two words to me before this evening?’
Roger smiled back.
‘I’m afraid I’ve got rat
her into the habit of regarding Cuchulain as quite enough company,’ he said. ‘But I do shut him up sometimes and go to a concert, you know.’
‘A Dublin concert.’
‘All right, perhaps it’s not completely brilliant. Perhaps one doesn’t hear exactly what one would choose to hear, perhaps one might prefer a Handel opera to the usual –’
‘Handel, do you like Handel?’
‘Of course I do. But don’t tell me that you do. You’re too young.’
‘I like that. And is the absolutely greatest music in the world to be reserved solely for – for –’
She stumbled for the word.
‘Ears of discretion,’ Roger suggested.
‘Anyhow, it’s a monstrous idea. I bet I know more about Handel’s music than you do, however old you are.’
‘I’m not a hundred, you know. But have you really made a study of Handel then?’
‘Well, not what you’d call a study, I expect. I expect you have terrific standards of scholarship and all that. But I’ve read all the books I could find on him, and I’m gradually collecting all the records there are. Only I’ve always had such a rotten gramophone.’
‘But, tell me, why Handel? Why should you have developed this passion for Handel?’
‘Oh, I don’t know. For one thing I’m the only one in the family who’s at all musical and when I was a kid I came across a whole heap of music that used to belong to my old Great aunt Molly, who had been a bit of a singer in her day, And there was a lot of Handel in that. And then when I discovered that the Messiah had first been performed in Dublin, I just went a burton on him.’
‘Well, at least you can still hear the Messiah performed over here.’
‘That’s exactly what I mean. The Messiah, the Water Music and precious little else. Think of all – Oh, save us, this is my stop.’
She got hastily to her feet, grabbing at the big handbag.
Roger stood up to let her go past.
He could find nothing to say.
‘Well, good night,’ she said. ‘It was queer meeting you.’
‘Yes. Yes, it was. I – I’ll –’
He followed her along the swaying bus. The brakes shrieked with the wet as it pulled up at the stop. Etain hurried down the stairs.
‘Look,’ Roger called down after her, ‘I’d love to hear your records some time.’
She turned round as she peered into the darkness before stepping off on to the roadway.
‘You would?’ she said.
‘I certainly would.’
‘All right then. That’s a date.’
The desiccated conductor banged hard at the bell. The bus eased forward into the night. The pale shape of Etain’s mackintosh was swallowed up by the wet darkness.
Roger decided next morning that he would take his time and walk to the School. He had had enough of buses the evening before and it was pleasant to be able to go about the city on foot after all the rain.
Besides there were things he still had to make up his mind about.
After he had crossed O’Connell Bridge he felt strongly reluctant to complete his journey. Perhaps somewhere near the School the Bosun and his men were lurking.
How long would they keep it up?
He turned right and walked slowly along the quays. Across the cold and sluggish green of the Liffey the dome of the Four Courts rose against a pale blue washed out sky.
A similarity of lassitude. The Pathetic Fallacy.
He stopped abruptly.
Outside one of the booksellers’ shops standing peering down at a tray of battered anonymous second-hand volumes was a figure he recognized.
A shock of white hair unprotected by any hat and underneath it a bright red face almost in the shape of a T, with the broad shallow brow tapering quickly down to a narrow nutcracker jaw. Beneath this light thin head a thin wiry body wrapped in a dull green overcoat faded to a varying olive.
Austin Boycott.
Roger stood for a while watching him.
The wispy figure industriously turning over the worn-out volumes in the box. A book beetle searching for tasty morsels.
Roger crossed the road.
‘It’s Mr Boycott, isn’t it?’ he said.
The elderly man turned round sharply.
Roger looked into a pair of blue eyes as washed out as the pale sky over the Four Courts dome. An apple-sweet smile.
‘Yes, but I don’t think I’ve had the pleasure …’
The voice was deep and melodious. Cadenced.
‘My name’s Farrar, Roger Farrar. I’m actually a colleague of yours at the School of Further Studies, though I don’t think we’ve ever been formally introduced. I was playing truant myself and taking a stroll along the quays when I happened to see you and thought I ought to make myself known to a fellow fugitive from duty. We could invent an alibi.’
Austin Boycott chuckled.
‘I’m glad to find someone in that pernicious institution with enough guts to absent himself even for half a morning,’ he said. ‘Such a crowd of timid, lacklustre, crawling sycophants it has never before been my painful task to associate with.’
‘Oh, there isn’t all that much to rebel against,’ Roger said. ‘I believe there were some terrible scenes though some time ago when it was proposed to increase the number of statutory public lectures by two a year.’
‘Nothing to rebel against?’
Austin Boycott’s sonorous boom rolled out across the sluggish pea-green waters of the Liffey. A miserable looking swan shot forward abruptly on the mirrored surface.
‘A sink of conformism, a pillar of establishment hypocrisy, and you talk about having nothing to rebel against. The whole place should be burnt to the ground, to the ground. The staff should be publicly hanged and the secretaries raped.’
‘No wonder one of them was saying to me only last night that she was mortally afraid of you,’ Roger said.
‘Afraid?’
The pale blue eyes beneath the wide forehead blinked in incomprehension.
‘But who is this? Why should she be afraid of me? What have people been telling her about me?’
The red eyelids blinking, blotting out the faintly blue wide eyes.
Roger grinned.
‘As far as I can gather,’ he said, ‘they’ve been telling her that all your political opinions were what they call a cod.’
Austin Boycott clenched his gnarled fist.
‘A cod, is it?’ he said. ‘That’s the way the establishment always has tried to deal with opinions that were personally unpalatable to it. I’ll give them cod. Wait till the day comes. A bullet in their belly will show them whether I’m codding or not.’
‘Oh come,’ Roger said, ‘surely the establishment’s not quite as bad as that.’
‘It is, it is,’ the elderly little nut of a man boomed. ‘I’ll tell you a very remarkable thing, sir.’
‘Yes?’
‘I hate the establishment. I’ve worked all my life to secure its overthrow. And yet all my life I’ve been unable, totally and utterly unable, to shake myself free of its coils. I happened to be very vividly reminded of that fact only some twenty minutes ago.’
The pale blue eyes burnt to one half shade darker as they gazed with passionate fury up at Roger.
‘What is the very cradle and nursery of the establishment in these islands, Mr Farrar?’ he asked.
Roger pondered a moment.
‘Mother of Parliaments, system of justice,’ he hazarded.
‘No, no, no.’
Booming scorn.
‘I’ll tell you what is the very fountainhead of the establishment, the very root of the whole putrid structure.’
A dramatic pause. The last reverberations dying away in the still air over the faintly smelly river.
‘The prep school,’ said Austin Boycott. ‘The British preparatory school. And do you know …’
The boom rising to new depths.
‘… do you know for seven years I taught in one such in
stitution. Seven years. I was reminded of it after thinking I had thrust it into total oblivion by seeing only this morning one of my pupils. I recognized him, even after an interval of over forty years. The physical traits were unmistakable – immense corpulence, a port-wine complexion, and pale gold hair.’
Chapter Ten
Austin Boycott jerked up his little T-shaped head under the spikes of white hair and looked at Roger.
Some reaction required. Roger was very slow.
‘A pupil of yours?’
The most he could manage.
Boycott accepted it.
‘I remember him well,’ he boomed on happily. ‘A vicious child. Even in that nursery for infant power complexes he stood out as an incipient megalomaniac. He was the admired gang leader, the boy the others delighted to obey. Yet he was physically incompetent to a degree and he possessed not one of the attributes which are generally supposed to appeal to the juvenile mind. And didn’t he just delight in the others’ obedience. Of course, you can imagine what became of him, the great windy balloon.’
Roger refused to admit the possibility of coincidence.
‘He sounds the sort of boy who would end up in prison,’ he said.
A shout against the wind.
‘Prison?’
Boycott’s laugh rolling like miniature thunder along the quays and toppling at last into the chill Liffey water.
‘My good man, that sort of person doesn’t end up in prison: he ends up at the top. And that’s just where my pet pupil has ended. I might have guessed it.’
‘A financier then?’
Roger persisting.
‘Oh, no. Nearer the kernel of power than that class of jackal.’
‘I’ve a feeling I know who you mean.’
Roger trying a new way of turning the luck.
‘Have you? Do you know the fellow? William Bosenwite? Head of an English Government scientific place up to heaven knows what pernicious twaddle?’
‘Yes, I know him.’
It could have been no one else.
‘You do, do you?’
‘Well, that’s to say I know who he is – vaguely. I’ve seen him about.’
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