The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘You’re early and lunch is late,’ she called.

  ‘I was invited for twelve.’

  ‘You shouldn’t have come.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Don’t you have a sense of enchanted entrapment here?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘This is a place outside life. Over the wall the only house you can see is the hotel, which is equally remote from the things we seek to know. No fields, no farmers, no boats, no fishermen, no sheep, no cows. You can hear the sea in winter, though. And you can smell new-mown hay in summer. This is a place for reading rather than writing, for mixing colours rather than painting. I’m convinced that those who come forget what they’ve seen immediately they go out the gate. Hence the itch to come back. Again and again and again. So I’m telling you to leave before you fall into the silken toils that don’t so much chafe as tease.’

  She tossed her curling hair and laughed at him.

  ‘Would you like a game?’ Her eyes gleamed bright with mischief.

  ‘No, I’m content to watch.’

  ‘Yet another voyeur! You don’t have to be an athlete to play croquet but it helps to be intelligent.’

  Mrs Bugler bore down on them, stepping dauntingly and crushingly on close-trimmed grass with heels that were the more noticeable for not being fetlocks. She was wearing a darkly striped shirt with a stiff white collar and cuffs. Cookie had a distinct impression of chains and bracelets. He visualised the horse brasses on the chimney-brace in the lounge bar of the hotel. He glanced at her squarish forehead, half-expecting to see a blaze. She smiled in welcome. Then, to show who was mistress, she turned to Alicia with a challenging tilt of nose and chin. Beside her Alicia was a schoolgirl, dainty as a painted doll.

  ‘Owen Forker has had to cry off. A flat battery, or was it a flat wheel? I can never understand impractical men.’

  ‘It will be so flat without him,’ said Alicia. ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go home?’

  She turned from Cookie to her mother. By her very stance she seemed to emphasize that her mother had stopped being a woman, that she was now at an age when she was half-way to being a very practical man.

  ‘We’ll have to make do without him, just the three of us, I’m afraid,’ said Mrs Bugler.

  ‘Cookie will feel threatened, as the only male,’ said Alicia. ‘I suggest we flatter him by competing tooth, nail and tweezers for his favours. Or if you think competition unfair, Mother, we could go down to the crossroads and invite the first man in trousers to come along. The best luncheon parties are more than three and less than nine. More than the Graces and less than the Muses, isn’t that what you always say?’

  ‘Lunch won’t be ready for half an hour. Would you like a drink, Cookie, while you’re waiting?’

  ‘He won’t have a drink yet,’ Alicia either decided or predicted. ‘One thing at a time. He’s about to try his hand at croquet.’

  Mrs Bugler began walking towards the house, her high, wide bottom the very picture of unshakeable solidity.

  ‘I’ve changed my mind,’ he said. ‘I’ll try a shot or two.’

  ‘It isn’t as simple as it looks. The hoops are only one-eighth of an inch wider than the balls. There is little room for error.’

  She handed him the mallet and stood beside him, showing him the different grips. To demonstrate her skill, she played an oblique hoop-shot, hitting the far wire so that the forward spin of the ball carried it through.

  She was wearing a light-blue, low-cut dress with a neat bow at the back which gave her the look of a Meissen figurine released into movement. As she explained the game and coached him in the swing and carry-through, he kept looking in the direction of two straight oaks at the other end of the lawn, silent twins who’d seen much yet reflected nothing more secret than the sturdiness of each other. She gripped his wrist as she showed him once again how to hold the mallet. The rhododendron sprawled between the oaks only thirty strides away, and her flat-bottomed mother was safely out of sight, immersed in la grande cuisine.

  ‘Watch this!’ She swung the mallet between her legs centre-style and hit the red ball off the black.

  ‘I’ve made what could have been a roquet. Match it if you can.’

  He hit the ball with fierce aggression, driving it wide of the hoop, straight between the oaks, in under the shapeless rhododendron. He ran to retrieve it, and sure enough behind the bush was Jack’s wooden summer seat. He hadn’t told a lie. It was here that he’d had her at thirteen while her mother was upstairs fucking Forker. A jet of anger did violence to the lining of his stomach. Blindly, he rolled the ball in her direction.

  ‘I’ll show you a rush stroke now,’ she said.

  ‘I’m going in for a drink. I know when I’m outclassed. As you say, it helps to be intelligent.’

  ‘Perhaps you’d like to try the swing.’ She pointed to the garden swing on the far side of the rhododendron.

  ‘Not just now.’

  ‘Would you like to see me swing? I can go higher than Mother and I’m more interesting to watch.’

  ‘After lunch perhaps all three of us can have a go.’

  ‘You mustn’t feel bad, Cookie. Croquet is a truly modern game. It’s one of the few outdoor games I know in which a woman is not potentially at a disadvantage.’

  He walked towards the cube that was the house – a plain, unpretentious building of white pebble-dash that bore the marks of eccentric, if not amateur, design.

  ‘What do you think of the house and garden?’ Mrs Bugler handed him a schooner of dry sherry.

  ‘They make their own world. They have little to do with the world of harsh utility outside the walls.’

  ‘The same could be said of your hotel.’

  ‘The difference is that we are open to the public.’

  She ignored his comment. He waited for her to speak again.

  ‘Nothing binds a man and a woman together as closely as the building of a house,’ she said. ‘Most couples buy their houses already built; only the lucky few make a nest of their own. That’s one of the reasons I’ve stayed on here: the house and garden are still warm with enlivening memories. I often recall the nights we sat up together arguing about the design. Gregory used to say that architecture was the queen of the arts, but, as you can see, he was no architect. The house he designed is as plain as it is solid; it has an uncompromising geometry that gives it a sullen presence. Then there was the garden. The site was a builder’s yard once. We spent months digging up broken bricks, rusty paint-pots and ends of decaying timber. Then we spent as long again planning the layout, arguing about the flower-beds and which flowers to put in them. When it was all done, Gregory got the idea of enclosing it from the world. He built that six-foot wall with his own hands. He began down by the gate, you can see how the brickwork improved with experience as he approached the house.’

  She laughed genially, her large breasts heaving within the tight bodice of her dress. Looking at her, he became aware of more than he could actually see. The handsome strength of her face seemed to spring from the structure of bone beneath. It came to him that she was one of those women who are plain at eighteen and grow more handsome every year until they reach their meridian on the far side of fifty. He began to understand something of what Jack must have seen in her, yet his eye dwelt obsessively on her lined neck, weathered as a portal dolmen.

  He was about to ask her why her husband had built the wall when Alicia pranced in, having left a trail of mallets and balls behind her on the lawn.

  ‘I’ll bet Cookie is dying to know what’s for lunch.’ She flopped down carelessly on the sofa, and her feet lifted off the floor.

  ‘Beef à la mode,’ said her mother.

  ‘It’s all the rage up at the hotel, I’ll bet.’ She gave a kittenish grin and tucked her legs under her dress, causing Cookie to wonder if she were trying to tell him something about himself that he did not wish to know.

  They ate inside with the french windows open, because it was a shade too co
ol to eat on the patio. The food and the wine were good, and Alicia’s conversation bristled with cleverly prepared darts aimed by turns at Cookie and her unresponsive mother. Cookie tried to give an impression of worldly well-being, though a sense of unease in his stomach forecast for him an afternoon of querulous indigestion.

  After the coffee and the brandy, Mrs Bugler asked Alicia to show Cookie her father’s study. She led him into a small room at the back of the house that looked out on the two-breasted hill. There was a bare table, two chairs, and a book-lined recess on each side of the chimney-brace. The other walls were covered with line drawings, posters and lithographic prints.

  ‘You’ve passed the test,’ Alicia smiled. ‘What’s more, you’ve passed magna cum laude.’

  ‘What test?’

  ‘No one sees my father’s study who hasn’t passed the test. I remember the evening Jack qualified. To have passed at your age is an achievement. You are, in fact, what my mother calls a sweetie.’

  ‘You speak in riddles, Alicia.’

  ‘Life is a riddle, particularly as lived chez Bugler.’

  She reached up to take down a book or possibly to show off her lace-edged slip.

  ‘Father was interested in Arachnida. I came across this monograph on spiders the other day. Fascinating. I thought you might be amused.’

  Cookie, looking nonplussed, waited for further enlightenment.

  ‘Listen to this: “The male inseminates the female at arms’ length … she’s larger than he is, so he has to scale her while taking care to keep clear of her fangs. Sometimes his courtship includes tying her down with silk, just in case …”’

  Her curls lifted and floated as she laughed. She had thin, spreading lips and her open mouth revealed two rows of tiny white teeth and clean, pink gums below.

  ‘Kiss me, Cookie.’

  She advanced and stood with her hands by her sides, her small round breasts touching him below the chest. He bent down and kissed her on the forehead.

  ‘That was a chaste kind of kiss. Kisses are never chaste chez Bugler.’

  He put his arms round her this time, while the monograph on spiders pressed against his groin. With a sense of being teased rather than desired, he kissed her slowly on the mouth and waited for her to draw away. She put her tongue between his teeth and drove the book edgeways between his thighs.

  ‘Now you’ve seen the study,’ she said. ‘Like all good studies, it’s full of dusty tomes.’

  He followed her into the living-room, moving awkwardly and breathing quickly.

  ‘I’m going for a walk now, Mother. I’ll be back in about two hours.’

  ‘If you’re going up the hill, I’d like to come,’ Cookie said.

  ‘No, I’m going down to the slip to make some sketches for a painting.’

  ‘Then I’ll come along and sharpen the pencils.’

  ‘Another time maybe. I’m working out an idea. It’s something I need to do alone.’

  ‘Surely Cookie can only help,’ said Mrs Bugler.

  ‘Ideas must come from me. Don’t fret, Mother, I’ll be back to show you the fruits of my genius. Like all artists, I’m just a teensy bit vain.’

  ‘You see what I mean?’ her mother said after she’d gone. ‘There’s no getting through to her. She lives in a world all her own.’

  ‘I’m afraid I haven’t had a chance to talk to her.’

  ‘You did your best. Come, let me get you another brandy.’

  With a smile that concealed reluctance, he handed her his empty glass.

  Chapter 14

  Father Bosco, Joey and Pauline had lunch in the hotel restaurant. It was coming up to the end of the season, and there were only nine or ten guests staying. They chose a table by the window, looking out over the rising slope of the sea with darkly wrinkled patches in the green running before a fresh south-easterly breeze. The white lighthouse, white clouds and white seagulls gave Father Bosco a sense of self-indulgent self-discovery. He was dipping into the history of his childhood, which was a history of far-off things so remote and final that now it could never be blotted.

  He liked returning to the hotel if only to enjoy a leisurely lunch served by young waitresses with genial country humour in their faces. They made a change from Canon Sproule’s stiff-legged housekeeper, a dragon who knew no moderation in the kitchen. When she cooked, she overcooked; and when Father Bosco gently reminded her that overcooking took longer than cooking and used up more electricity, she told him straight that the Canon liked his food well done. Dinner at the parochial house was as predictable as dinner in a boarding school, always either roast beef or roast lamb, except on Fridays when she served fried fish fingers or grilled mackerel and mustard.

  ‘Much though I like coming back, it’s sad to see the old order change,’ he said. ‘For a long time it seemed that nothing would ever alter. Gulban at seventy-five was the same as Gulban at fifty-five. Now suddenly we’re full of uncertainty.’

  ‘It’s the uncertainty that must precede new certainty,’ said Joey.

  Father Bosco waited for Pauline to speak. When she didn’t, he continued, ‘The three of us have one thing in common. We come from families who never had a shanachie – a traditional story-teller in the chimney corner.’

  ‘We didn’t even have a chimney corner,’ Joey pretended to lament.

  ‘Though we were born and brought up here, our sustenance never came from the soil,’ Father Bosco reminded them. ‘Digging, scything, turf-cutting and lobster-fishing were always things that were done by other people. We had meat and gravy in this high-ceilinged room while our neighbours ate dry salted fish in their poky kitchens. We were tourists without ever leaving home.’

  ‘Speak for yourself, Father,’ said Joey. ‘You have chosen the priesthood, you have made yourself a man apart. Whether you had meat or soused mackerel for dinner as a boy has little to do with your condition as a man. I can tell you that I feel fully part of all that goes on here, perhaps because I don’t have your highly developed sense of guilt. I can watch a man trudging under the weight of a burden without wishing to share it.’

  ‘It is surely a matter of personality,’ Pauline said to Father Bosco. ‘Jack had the same upbringing as you, yet I never once heard him express a word of doubt.’

  ‘Jack was full of certainty because he saw no life but his own.’

  ‘He saw the life of Fort Knox,’ said Joey.

  ‘If he did, he saw only his own reflection. Fort Knox is like the hotel, another enclave of unreality.’

  ‘We’ll ask Cookie when he gets back,’ said Pauline. ‘He’s a man of feeling. He’s bound to have something incisive to say.’

  ‘He’s feeling Alicia now – if he has any sense,’ Joey said. ‘And if he hasn’t, he’s feeling Mrs Bugler. He was invited to an alfresco lunch. Is it possible that he’s engaged in a spot of al fresco troilism?’

  Father Bosco glanced at Pauline. Neither joined in Joey’s laughter.

  ‘Why do you attach such importance to the shanachie?’ Pauline turned two earnest eyes on Father Bosco.

  ‘The shanachie was a folk historian,’ he replied. ‘By interpreting the communal past he gave resonance to an exiguous present. He peopled the landscape with larger-than-life characters. He created a world in which the landscape itself was a character. The three of us missed all that. While other children learnt why the hill has two breasts and why only one of them has a nipple, we were being taught to say “Bonjour, Monsieur” to Frenchmen and “Guten Morgen” to Germans coming down to breakfast. I can only say that I feel the poorer for it.’

  ‘We had our own private folklore,’ Joey reminded him. ‘We had Gulban’s stories about the Red Men. I remember you well, Bosco, jumping up and down in short trousers, singing:

  We are the Red Men,

  We are fly.

  No one makes fun

  Of us!

  The Red Men were our Red Branch Knights and Robin Hood rolled into one.’

  ‘The Red Men didn’t bind
us to the landscape, they set us apart. Other children ribbed us. They called us Shawnees and kept saying “Honest Injun” to annoy us. Some people still call us the Shawnees behind our backs. Fort Knox was another house without a shanachie. It’s no coincidence that Cookie has gone there to lunch. Why, I ask myself, isn’t he lunching with Old Gildea?’

  ‘I wonder what he’s doing now,’ Joey cut in. ‘Sits he, stands he, or is he holding forth?’

  ‘Cookie is a scholar. He’s probably fossicking in Mr Bugler’s library,’ Pauline laughed.

  ‘Or in Mrs Bugler’s bra. There’s gold in them thar hills. Surely it must be the six-foot wall that attracts him. Little did Gregory Bugler realise that lust laughs at bailey builders.’

  Father Bosco regretted the turn the conversation had taken. Joey had been maimed by negative experience. He saw the history of mankind as a practical demonstration of the Seven Deadly Sins, with the sin of lust forming the first and final chapters. In spite of him, Father Bosco had enjoyed his lunch. It was reassuring to sit opposite Pauline again without a sense of peril, to see her so calm in her bereavement, so cool in her judgments, so remote from the compulsions of envy and lust. Today she seemed to embody the virtues of prudence and fortitude, yet even she had drunk from the poisoned well of concupiscence. The ugliness of the thought brought a piercing sense of humiliation. It screamed at the white lighthouse and the white clouds; it darkened the surface of the cleansing sea. He smiled as he rose from the table.

  ‘I’m going up to see Gulban now,’ he said. ‘Perhaps he’ll be easier to talk to after he’s eaten.’

  Gulban was sleeping with his mouth open and one hairy arm across his chest. Father Bosco sat by the bedside reading his office while he waited for him to wake up.

  ‘Is it praying for me you are?’

  ‘No, not just now, though I pray for you every morning in the Mass.’