The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘I’ll do my best.’

  ‘And don’t forget supper.’

  ‘I’ll bring you a plate of cold beef salad. The sirloin is excellent. Do you like it rare or well done?’

  ‘I don’t like roast beef at all, and as for salad, I’m not a rabbit. If you bring me the Scotch, I’ll have a look at the menu over the first couple of bumpers.’

  Cookie met Joey on the way to the kitchen.

  ‘The saucy bugger won’t eat cold beef, he wants to look at the menu. I hope he orders something simple because the chef always leaves early on Sunday evenings.’

  ‘Leave it to me,’ Joey said. ‘Just find out what he wants, I’ll know precisely what to put in it.’

  Cookie brought Big Andy half a bottle of Scotch and a bowl of roasted peanuts on a tray. He had taken off his shoes and trousers and was reclining on the bed with his open shirt revealing a hairy belly and hairier nether parts. Cookie left him to study the menu and went off to find a pair of pyjamas as a matter of urgency.

  After prolonged comparative study, Early put down the menu and ordered lobster cardinal.

  ‘The lobster cardinal is off,’ Cookie said.

  ‘I’ll have the lobster Newburg, then.’

  ‘There’s no more lobster, I’m afraid. It’s been very popular this evening and we never buy in more than we think we’ll need.’

  ‘Before I get excited over something else, you’d better tell me what’s off and what’s on.’

  ‘Everything is on except the lobster.’

  ‘I’ll make things easy for the chef de cuisine. Can you do me a large T-bone steak, charcoal-grilled with mushrooms, tomatoes, broccoli and potatoes lyonnaise. I like my steak medium to well done and the broccoli underdone, rather than boiled out of its wits as it usually is.’

  ‘You’d like an hors-d’oeuvre, of course?’

  ‘I’m hungry, there’s no need for an appetiser. Nothing but Scotch and the main course.’

  ‘He’s impossible,’ Cookie told Joey, after giving the chef the order. ‘What are we to do?’

  ‘Throw him out, that’s what.’

  ‘You know what Gulban said.’

  ‘If we can’t use force, we’ll have to use inducement.’

  ‘Another fiver?’

  ‘A fiver wouldn’t wet his whistle. No, we’ll have to make leaving worth his while.’

  The following morning Cookie took him to Gulban’s room after breakfast and waited outside on the landing in case he should escape. He emerged after an hour and Cookie lured him down the back stairs.

  ‘Your father isn’t near as chirpy as he used to be. Jack’s death hit him hard, poor man.’

  ‘He needs rest and quiet,’ said Cookie.

  ‘I won’t disturb him, I’ll only stay a fortnight.’

  Joey was waiting for them both in the hallway.

  ‘I know my father likes seeing you,’ he said to Early, ‘but the slightest excitement is bad for him these days. We can’t put you up here in the height of the tourist season, so I’m going to give you a hundred pounds to keep you going till the winter. You can come back when things are quiet and we have the house to ourselves.’

  He handed Early a long envelope which Early shook but refrained from opening. Cookie produced another long envelope addressed to Andrew Early, Esq., care of the post office in a certain seaside town fifty miles away.

  ‘I’m posting this today. It contains another hundred pounds to be held for you poste restante and collected at your leisure.’

  Early flung back his sun-tanned head and laughed.

  ‘Last night you made me feel like a spy. Now you’re making me feel like a remittance-man. What on earth do you yourself feel like, I wonder?’

  ‘Call it a little inducement to travel,’ Cookie smiled.

  ‘Think of it this way,’ Joey counselled. ‘It will be one of those rare occasions when it is even better to arrive.’

  ‘You’re two clumsy gift-horses and I’m too old and too poor to look you in the mouth. I can be generous, too, though. I won’t mention any of this to Gulban next time I see him. Even if I did, he’s too much of a gentleman to understand.’

  They watched him shuffle down the driveway, craggy and stiff-legged with a barely perceptible tremble of the hand that communicated itself to his hazel stick as he walked.

  ‘He’s an engaging old rogue,’ said Cookie. ‘Pity we had to show him the door.’

  ‘He’s not our real problem. Gulban’s as daft as a brush. It was obvious yesterday that he was giving us some kind of test.’

  ‘I wonder what it could have been,’ said Cookie.

  Chapter 11

  ‘The solicitor is coming at eleven,’ Pauline said.

  ‘What can he want?’ Cookie wondered.

  ‘It’s what Gulban wants. He sent for him over a week ago, the day after he talked to Big Andy.’

  ‘I’m sure he knows what he’s doing.’ Cookie went off to ring up Joey at the shop.

  ‘There’s something fishy about this,’ Joey swore. ‘Looby, Laxton and Phibbs were never bearers of good news.’

  ‘You may be wrong. He may have decided to make his will at last.’

  ‘Why now? We haven’t accounted for our talents.’

  ‘Perhaps he feels that time is getting short.’

  ‘Don’t let Looby go without pumping him. Find out as much as you can.’

  Mr Looby came at eleven and stayed till one. On the way out he found Cookie in the lobby, immersed in a newspaper.

  ‘Ah, we meet again.’ Mr Looby extended a butter-fingered hand.

  ‘How did you find him?’

  ‘Find him?’ Mr Looby tilted his head sideways, alert as a listening sparrow. He was light-boned and dainty, his mahogany-coloured briefcase disproportionately large and, to judge by his stance, disproportionately heavy.

  ‘Is he looking better, do you think?’

  ‘No, he’s looking worse. Of course, I hadn’t seen him since before the stroke.’

  ‘He’s rather forgetful, I’m afraid. He tends to ramble.’

  ‘He addressed our agenda with exemplary acuity, I must say.’

  ‘Agenda?’

  ‘Our business.’

  ‘Ah, business,’ Cookie nodded.

  ‘Always the perfectionist, your father. He wants to have Mr Laxton and Mr Phibbs present at our next meeting. They are the other partners.’

  ‘And will they be coming?’

  ‘Mr Laxton will, I’m sure. Mr Phibbs rarely leaves the office.’

  ‘You pronounce his name “Pibbs”?’

  ‘He himself prefers “Pibbs”. When he became a partner, there was some talk that he might change his name by deed poll. Instead he elected to change the pronunciation. A man of the utmost integrity is Mr Phibbs.’

  He smiled again and raised his car keys. For a moment he seemed to incense the air with a miniature thurible.

  ‘When shall we be seeing you again?’

  ‘That depends on Mr Laxton.’

  ‘Goodbye.’ Cookie held open the door.

  His head was buzzing uncomfortably. He had spent most of the morning in the small back office with Pauline, going through the September accounts. She sat beside him, exhaling the fragrance of young chrysanthemums, undermining his concentration and self-confidence with the swiftness of her arithmetical calculations. She had a photographic memory for figures. She not only recalled the amounts but the numbers and dates of invoices she had passed the previous week. He kept looking at her thin Swiss watch and imagining the heavy black skids in the concrete of the slip. She knew the business inside out. In vain he tried to grasp the numerical imbrications she had set before him. He nodded his head though he failed to comprehend, and he winced at the precision of her mind which jabbed with the speed of a sewing-machine.

  In the afternoon he decided to get away from Pauline, the hotel and everything that threatened dislodgement and annihilation. He crossed the river where they both used to catch eels and hide from Joe
y who was too young and too noisy to catch anything. She and he had shared the life of streams, heights and gullies. She would wade up and down the river in canvas shoes without socks, her dress tucked up above her knobbly knees. They were both the same age, but already she was wiser and more thoughtful.

  ‘We catch the eels and you give them to Jack,’ she’d said. ‘Jack cuts them up for bait to catch pollack. Why don’t we pinch a boat and go out and catch the pollack ourselves?’

  ‘We’re too young to go on the sea,’ he’d replied.

  ‘Will we ever grow up?’

  ‘I think so. Maybe next year.’

  ‘It’s a long time to wait.’ Wearily, she lifted another stone in the river bed.

  Even then she was in a hurry. Already she wanted to be with Jack, just because he was four years older. At fourteen Cookie was packed off to boarding school and her mother sent Pauline to a convent to be educated by nuns. They both came home for the summer holidays. The river, the heights, the gullies hadn’t changed, though they were now the haunts of other children. She wore a yellow dress and a white sun-hat. She seemed shot through with light, a summer’s flower which was to the summer sweet. He met her in the road, and with a pang glimpsed the curve of her newly formed breasts. On the other side of the ditch was a field of yellow ragwort. He couldn’t bear to look at her. She was a grown woman, she had sprinted out of reach. Instinctively, he knew that he would never catch her again.

  It didn’t matter now. Living had diminished her. She had become a prosaic, practical-minded woman whose days were filled with one narrow routine after another. Her fair hair had grown dark. Instead of airy yellows and white, she wore strongly contrasting colours – red blouses with black skirts or green blouses with red skirts – and she often wore a shirt and tie like a man. She probably despised men like himself who followed no direction and no routine. Her own life at least had a focus now: Jack’s empty chair in his still empty upstairs room.

  He took the rising road past Gildea’s stone cottage, winding through patches of close-cropped grass, between heather and reddening bracken. When he reached the top, he sat between the two breasts, looking down on the glassy surface of Gulban’s reservoir below. To the north stood the hotel on a small rise above the sea, exposed to every wind that blew, solitary and gaunt, with white walls, blue slates and tall windows that seemed to be contemplating the pampered life within rather than the plain, hardworking life of the farms around. On the level below lay Fort Knox, squat and flat-roofed, a white cube in a square field, a doll’s house in the middle of a miniature stockade. Beyond slept the hazy island, encircled by the sea which reached round behind him and stretched away to the south as far as his eye could see. His gaze returned to the hotel and Fort Knox, alien extrusions in the native landscape. In a sense their families were aliens too. Pauline and Alicia. Each would be seen more clearly if it weren’t for the other. They hardly knew each other, yet their outlines merged.

  He walked eastwards along the crest, up one side of the left breast and down the other, skirting the mound called the Nipple, which close up did not resemble a nipple at all. The October air was tangy and strong. The buzzing in his head had subsided. He trudged across a rolling plateau, with no houses, no roads, no farms, nothing but heather and sedge and small flocks of hardy sheep grazing. He had lost sight of the sea. His thin shadow flowed before him, while the evening light turned the brown sedge to red. He slackened his pace as the soft ground sucked at his heels.

  After two hours he reached the road to town. He sat on a ditch and waited for a lift back home. He felt jaded and footweary, and immobilised by a paralysis of the will that caused him to let two cars pass without raising a hand. The cheque for £10,000 still lay accusingly in a desk drawer in his bedroom. Now and again he would look at it, as if it were a letter he could not bring himself to post. Gulban would expect him to consult his bank manager, a firm of stockbrokers, an investment analyst – all of them things he could not do without enduring the discomfort of self-ridicule. He had made a pact with Joey. That was enough. Neither of them would be seen to strive, and Gulban would sweat the more in choosing. Yet he must at least pay the cheque into his bank. He realised that he should have finished footnoting the doctoral thesis that lay open on his desk.

  From time to time he would turn the pages and wonder how he had found the energy to write it. Increasingly, the true pleasure of life had become what he liked to call lucubration. It was a pleasure that started after midnight, when the hotel had finally gone to sleep. Then he would take down a book and read till three. Sometimes he would slip out for a walk along the cliffs to digest what he’d read and to drink the salty night wind off the sea. Once he embarrassed himself by declaiming to the mysteriously moving water:

  O well for the fisherman’s boy,

  That he shouts with his sister at play!

  O well for the sailor lad,

  That he sings in his boat on the bay!

  Afterwards he walked home wondering how much of his emotion came from lived experience and how much from off the bookshelf.

  A red car rose over the crest of the hill on his right. He got up from the ditch and waited.

  ‘We’re all suffering from a deficiency disease, an essential element is missing from our spiritual diet,’ he shouted at the approaching driver. ‘We’re all citizens of no city. Our heritage is in another country, never here, always there.’

  The car showed no sign of slowing down. He placed one foot firmly on the road as he recognised Alicia Bugler Braking hard, she slid past him to a stop.

  ‘What were you saying?’ she asked.

  ‘I was saying that I’m too tired to walk another step, that I want a lift. A lift to anywhere will do.’

  ‘You should write it on a placard in large letters. You’ll never be heard above the hum of any engine except one made by Rolls-Royce.’

  He got in beside her. She drove off without turning to look at him. He waited for her to speak. When she didn’t, he decided to break the silence.

  ‘I walked up past Gildea’s to the top of the hill and cut across the moor till I came to the road. It’s a fair step. I was glad when I saw you coming.’

  ‘If I hadn’t come, someone else was bound to.’

  He glanced at her dainty blue shoe on the accelerator. They were gathering speed on the hill. He felt an access of excitement, as if he were driving briskly in a post-chaise with a pretty woman. A sports car was not quite what the good doctor had in mind but it was the next best thing.

  ‘You’re a capable driver,’ he said.

  ‘I try to be capable while appearing to be reckless.’

  ‘That’s what I meant. You must never allow your passenger to get bored.’

  Again he waited for her to say something, or to give something of her remote and mysterious self away.

  ‘Do you remember my father?’ she asked.

  ‘Only vaguely. I remember him carrying his easel to the cliffs on good days.’

  ‘Why good days? Surely he must have painted in all weathers.’

  ‘I was a child then, I only remember the summers. I also remember himself and your mother driving to Mass in a trap with a tartan rug over his knees. He was well liked. I’ve often heard my father say that he never drank with the tourists in the lounge, always with the fishermen in the public bar. My father’s got one of his paintings in his bedroom. Four fishermen in sea boots at the counter, two of them asleep and the other two with their heads in their enormous hands.’

  ‘Do they look like local fishermen?’

  ‘To me they look like Eskimos.’

  ‘I’d like to see it some time. He sold all his paintings, we’ve got only a few unfinished sketches at home. They went all over the world. He used to sell them to the tourists at the hotel. My mother has no interest in them now that they’ve been sold. He died when I was four, and I can’t remember his face … I hope I’m not boring you.’

  ‘You’re driving too fast for that.’

&n
bsp; If Joey were listening now, Cookie thought, he would subject her every word to the dispassionate scrutiny of a scientist who both loved and hated the object of his investigations.

  ‘I spied her going down to the slip this morning,’ he had told Cookie the previous week. ‘There wasn’t a soul about but she was walking like a woman on parade before a regiment. Tossing her head though her hair was tied in a bun, adjusting the strap of her shoulder-bag, touching her neck and necklace with her fingertips. She couldn’t have known I was watching, she was doing it entirely for her so, so conscious self. In that she’s the opposite of Pauline. Now Pauline walks as if she were alone in a lonely world.’

  ‘Pauline has been walking for longer. Compared with her, Alicia’s only a child,’ Cookie said.

  ‘You can tell the difference in their ages by their skins.’

  ‘It’s only a difference of six years.’

  ‘It’s still there. Alicia’s is soft and supple, and so pale that it’s almost transparent. Pauline’s is already going dry. Good skin is wasted on the young.’

  They both laughed, and for both the laughter relieved pain.

  ‘We can’t allow Pauline to spend the rest of her life in mourning for a man who led her up the garden path,’ Joey continued. ‘You sit beside her in the back office flank to flank – or is it cheek to cheek? Why don’t you pull her up short, tell her that Jack deflowered Alicia when she was only thirteen?’

  ‘He didn’t,’ Cookie said.

  ‘He boasted to me more than once. “I had her on the summer seat,” he crowed. “Behind the rhododendrons in the garden while her mother was upstairs fucking Forker. I had to do it before someone else did. Sweet as young parsnips, she was. If you ever get a chance, don’t pass it up. She’s an even jouncier ride than her mother.” Those were our brother’s words. I think we owe Pauline a revelation.’

  It was typical of Jack to try to drive Joey insane with sexual envy.

  ‘Will you tell her?’ Joey persisted.