The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘What good do you do apart from praying? Are you of any practical value to your flock?’

  ‘I’m a healer, I suppose. A man comes to me with an overwhelming problem – a mountain he can’t see across or beyond. I make him see the mountain against the landscape of eternity. The mountain shrinks, the man regains his hope.’

  ‘You’re a pedlar of dreams.’

  ‘And you’re a man who’d ask the number of steps in Jacob’s ladder.’

  ‘I’ve got an overwhelming problem: I’m dying between these sticky sheets. The mountain is only six inches from my nose. I’ll give you the hotel if you blow the top off it.’

  ‘God isn’t on the fiddle.’

  ‘Think of the good you could do if you owned it. You could abolish after-hours drinking and Saturday and Sunday night dancing in the ballroom, which, as you must know from the confessional, is only a prelude to promiscuous groping – what you call sins of impurity in your sermons.’

  ‘Don’t mock me, Gulban. I came here to comfort you.’

  ‘They say priests are condemned to a lifetime of penance if they perform even one miracle. Would you do a lifetime’s penance to make me well?’

  ‘I would, if that were the case.’

  Gulban closed his eyes. Father Bosco opened his breviary again and waited.

  ‘What is the value of my life?’ Gulban asked, as if from sleep.

  ‘You worked hard. In worldly terms you achieved more than most.’

  ‘The value of my life is that it happened to me. There’s nothing else to it. No one else is interested. Life lacks body, shape, solidity. Life is a … fart. Prup, prup. Life stinks.’

  ‘We all have moments of despair. Think of the good you’ve done, think of one good deed and build on it.’

  ‘I failed you, Bosco. You would have been a businessman if I hadn’t put you off. Was it something I said or something I did?’

  ‘It was nothing like that, nothing to do with you.’

  ‘You’re the only man left, now that Jack is dead. You may have your head in the clouds but you’re tall enough to keep your feet on the ground as well. Cookie and Joey have no head for business. Money isn’t real to them, as a sheep is real to a shepherd. They don’t think money, they get no pleasure from turning one pound into two. That’s the test and there’s no faking it. To a businessman money is what God is to a priest, it’s in the forefront of his mind every hour of the day. Do you think of God every hour of the day?’

  ‘I’m aware of His presence on good days and of His absence on bad.’

  ‘You could think of money just as often. You were born with the right cast of mind.’

  ‘Heaven forbid!’

  ‘Surely you don’t believe all that guff you preach? “If any would sue you and take your coat, let him have your cloak as well … If any one forces you to go one mile, go with him two miles.” A businessman who did that would end up bankrupt. It’s a recipe for profligacy and financial disaster.’

  ‘It’s a recipe for inner peace and true happiness.’

  ‘So you think my life has been a waste of time?’

  ‘You can still make amends.’

  ‘If I left you the hotel, what would you do with it?’

  ‘I’d turn it into a home for old priests, a place where they could end their days in prayerful thought, looking out serenely over the sea.’

  Gulban gave a sarcastic croak of a laugh and closed his eyes. Father Bosco got up from his chair.

  ‘Stay with us, for it is towards evening and the day is now far spent.’

  ‘You don’t know what you ask,’ Father Bosco replied.

  ‘You said you didn’t want your talent, that you wouldn’t be in the running. Let me tell you that you are. So sit down again and finish your office while I sleep.’

  Father Bosco obeyed. He read as Gulban dozed and shadows inched unseen across the hill. On the level ground below, the windows of Fort Knox were sensual sheets of gold, while in the west the sky bore an intimation of austerity, of the chill purity of silver sunsets in the winter days to come.

  As the evening darkened, Gulban’s eyes seemed to sink in their sockets. He was retreating inwards, abandoning the outer extremities of his life. His body, now graceless and ungainly, was a territory which had become too extensive for his needs.

  Cookie and Joey had put it differently.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ Cookie had remarked. ‘The light has gone out in his eyes.’

  Joey smiled with half his mouth and said, ‘The only question now is: will he linger or will he scoot?’

  Chapter 15

  As Mrs Bugler refilled his glass and closed the french windows, Cookie knew that the familiar ritual of lunch was over and that an afternoon of unknown hazards had begun. It was now up to him to give form and content to the hour that must elapse before he could decently slip away. He suspected that he was sitting primly, so he stretched his legs and extended an arm along the back of the sofa in the attitude of a man who has fled disquiet and is pleased to have found relief and ease. She was telling him about Alicia, yet he could not think of Alicia. He could only give his mind to the mature and confident woman sitting opposite.

  He had never before had an opportunity of studying her face. What he’d seen whenever he’d met her was a head of rich, brown hair that gave her strong, almost masculine, countenance a touch of bizarre luxuriance. Now he saw a thick, straight nose that led the eye downwards towards two full lips, the lower of which glistened with brandy. His eye travelled further to a small pouch of flesh to the right of her chin which caused him to look upwards in search of a corresponding pouch beneath the right eye. The eye was pouchless and so was the left side of her chin. Yet despite the obvious lack of symmetry, the face gave no sense of lopsidedness, rather the impression of a terrain of little rivulets whose courses had been cunningly concealed by the arts of conservation and landscape-gardening. His eye finally rested on her blue silk scarf which failed to conceal a little triangle of loose skin at the base of her throat bearing an etching of dendritic lines to form what his old geography master would have called a classic drainage pattern.

  He felt shaken by what he’d seen or had forced himself to see, which was not what Jack had seen or what he himself might see tomorrow. She was smiling amiably at him, yet he could not enjoy his brandy. He would have felt more secure if Alicia had stayed, or if her exit had been less pointedly flamboyant.

  ‘How is your father these days?’ she asked.

  ‘Going downhill slowly.’

  ‘He was a hard-working, hard-headed man. Not an easy man to live with, I would say. I remember your mother. She was a gentle soul.’

  ‘It’s sad to see him now, gradually losing touch. Every day carries him further on the journey back into himself. One morning he’ll wake up lost. Lost in his own double bed.’

  ‘You don’t mince words, Cookie.’

  ‘We’re all truth-tellers at the hotel – especially when we speak of each other.’

  ‘In the early days Gregory and your father were friends. That’s how I got to know him. He used to come down here for a pipe and a chat whenever the nights were long. Gregory, of course, spent a lot of time at the hotel. They fell out when Gregory painted your father looking like Andy Early – or so your father claimed. It was all rather silly. Gregory stopped going to the hotel for his drinks. He stopped drinking altogether. Then he became moody and introspective. The next thing he built that wall. I think the wall was his undoing. He had no natural gift for bricklaying. He found it difficult and it preyed on his mind.’

  Cookie waited for her to continue. At length kindness constrained him to break the silence.

  ‘My father always spoke highly of him to me.’

  ‘He was an unusual man, was Gregory. He was widely travelled before I met him. He’d spent four years in India, and even twenty years later he still retained something of an oriental calm. He would steal up behind me like a big Persian cat and put his arms round me while I stood
at the kitchen sink. It’s what I miss most,’ she sighed. ‘He was very keen on Islamic art, especially ceramics. Let me show you an albarello, one of his favourite pieces.’

  She opened a tall glass cabinet and took out a black, blue and turquoise drug-jar with concave sides decorated with floral and geometric motifs. He turned it over, examining the panels and friezes, marvelling at the delicacy of the underglaze painting, questioning the blankness of incomprehension in his mind. As he handed it back, their fingers touched.

  ‘I feel heavy after the lunch,’ she breathed.

  ‘So do I.’

  He thought the time had come to leave.

  ‘Shall we go to bed for an hour?’

  ‘I’d love a rest.’ He tried to speak normally, though his tongue had gone thick and dry.

  ‘It’s the wine. One glass makes me forget my worries. Two makes me wish for a tumble.’

  His wish for a tumble without commitment had been granted, though not in the circumstances he would have chosen. He studied the hard muscle of her calves on the stairs, wondering if he would achieve the required erection. It was by no means certain. The house, the garden, the lunch and the conversation had filled his mind with a sense of remoteness from the day. He wished to sit at Gregory Bugler’s table and meditate for an hour. There was no time for meditation, however. They had already reached the bedroom door. Lines from a poem fell with a mechanical plink-plink-plink into the vacuum in his skull:

  I hid my love to my despite

  Till I could not bear to look at light:

  I dare not gaze upon her face

  But left her memory in each place;

  Where’er I saw a wild flower lie

  I kissed and bade my love goodbye.

  ‘We can’t draw the curtains,’ she said. ‘The window can be seen from the drive and Alicia could come back at any moment.’

  She allowed her dress, a collapsing sail, to fall at her feet.

  ‘I’m not worried about the light.’ He made a kind of public declaration.

  ‘There are men who are potent only in the dark.’

  She was sitting on the edge of the bed, her spreading bottom giving her back the outline of a cello, an old-fashioned churn and a Florentine beaker, all at the same time.

  ‘You’re wearing black underpants,’ she said. ‘Are these the new fashion or are they meant to impress lady fetishists?’

  ‘They’re a pair I inherited. They’re more serviceable than white ones, they need washing less often.’

  ‘Have I seen them before?’

  ‘Not since I’ve been wearing them.’

  ‘They’re Jack’s, aren’t they?’

  ‘Yes, I thought it a pity to pension them off. Jack would hardly have approved.’

  He kissed her on the lips to hide his embarrassment. He was struck by their unexpected softness and the faint odour of cardamom that leaked from the pores of her skin. It seemed to him that the upper lip tasted of port and the lower lip of brandy, so he kissed them both together, mixing one with the other, seeking the correct proportions.

  What made her more attractive with her clothes off than on was her breasts, which in shape resembled those of the hill that overlooked her bedroom. Though she was at least fifty-five, they had not yet begun to sag. They were fully rounded above and below with strong, straight nipples as long as apple stems. Their curve seemed to begin just below her collar-bone and they rose and fell as she talked, close together, not touching, forming a hanging valley whose formation had nothing to do with the Ice Age. It was a valley for the drowning of the greatest sorrows and all mere irritation.

  They lay under the turquoise sheet with the blankets rolled back for coolness. Her hair smelt of burnt leaves, reminding him of the Michaelmas term at university and fires smoking in suburban gardens.

  ‘Your hair smells of autumn,’ he said.

  ‘Burnt grass, to be precise. I mowed the lawn and burnt the cuttings. Do you like it?’

  ‘Very erotic. It could be the latest from the House of Chanel.’

  Lying against him, so big in the bed, she traced with her forefinger the outline of a map on his lumbar region, which he took to be the map of Arcady, yet his member refused to wake and dispel the anxiety in his mind. For some reason he had imagined that her flesh would be firm. He was wrong. Her buttocks were flabby, the skin cold, smooth and dry, in its way not unpleasant to touch. He ran his fingers up her back, executing a perfect portamento, noting the gradual increase in warmth, while she clung closely, kissing him hungrily on the mouth, rubbing her legs hard against his thighs while her bristly mound rasped his groin. As he kissed her breasts and the floor of the dry valley between them, the light and sounds of the outside afternoon receded. He had been borne into a secret world of soothing warmth and silence. He forgot Jack’s black underpants and the cold provocation of Alicia’s kiss. What he had been trying to will into existence had arrived all shipshape entirely of its own accord.

  ‘I’m ready,’ she whispered with the resignation of a woman who has been cursed with a long succession of absent-minded lovers. ‘Don’t stop kissing my breasts. Keep kissing them even while you’re inside me.’

  He lay on top of her in the vice-grip of her legs and arms, surrounded by her, imprisoned in her, the acute consciousness of the eternal moment drilling an escape hole through his skull. He stopped kissing her breasts and buried his face in the pillow to obliterate all knowledge of the relentless drilling.

  On the moor he had come upon a gypsy woman resting outside her tent late one evening. She was wearing a black skirt and a green blouse with a red plaid shawl round her shoulders. Her dry chestnut hair could have done with combing and her tanned face might have got its colour from hanging over fires of smoking green wood in the open.

  ‘One of the O’Rourkes, a lecherous bunch,’ his father would no doubt have said.

  ‘Have you seen a man with a string of tin cans on your travels?’ she asked.

  ‘No.’

  ‘If you meet him, tell him to hurry up. I’m famished with waiting. I’ve had nothing but a cold potato and a cup of spring water since morning.’

  Her face was bony and hard. Bony faces are often long. Hers was bony and round or, more accurately, bony and wide with shadows in the hollows beneath the cheekbones. Her hair was parted on the crown and a crumpled ribbon tied it close against the skull behind. Hard arms and hard legs. A thin top lip and a pouting lower lip. Austerity. Sensuality. Cruelty. Tenderness. Bone and flesh. The flap of the tent behind her lay open. The sun had gone down. Night had begun its crawl across the moor from the east.

  ‘Where do you live?’ she asked.

  ‘At the hotel.’

  ‘You have a comfortable bed with a mattress, so. Have you ever lain on a blanket spread over rushes?’

  ‘No.’

  There was a red blotch on the side of her neck. Was it a birthmark or had her husband branded her with his soldering-iron in a drunken rage?

  ‘And you’ve never had a bag of hay for a pillow? Have you got a fag on you at all?’

  He gave her a cigarette. She inhaled from the match flare, a hungry smoker.

  The figure of a man appeared on the edge of the moor, dark against the afterglow.

  ‘Goodbye,’ he said. ‘If I meet him, I’ll tell him.’

  ‘I’ll bet you won’t.’ Her scornful laugh stuck pins and needles in his buttocks as he retreated.

  Her husband was a violent man who got drunk at every fair, and again between fairs, in every village and between villages. Her name, he discovered afterwards, was Maeve, which was absurdly analogous to the naevus on her neck. For months he could not get her out of his mind. In bed at night he would see the moor all dark and mysterious with a straight grey road and rows of black turf stacks. Some evenings he would walk back to the circle in the heather where she’d lit a fire. In place of the tent there was a heap of musty straw and scraps of curled tin. She had small, brown feet. She was hard and lean, young and full of experience.
He never saw her again. She had bequeathed him the word ‘naevus’ which was now for him a living word like ‘mouth’, ‘flesh’, ‘nose’, and ‘breast’.

  ‘My God, I needed that.’

  It was Mrs Bugler calling him back, her breathing high from reckless exertion.

  ‘It was a change to have it off in silence. Forker always talks, sometimes about the train coming through the Gap. And as you might expect, he likes to end with a whistle. He knows I collect books on narrow-gauge railways. He says that what he and I have in common is a happy confluence of complimentary fantasies. You’re not in the least like him. You’re younger and stronger, stronger in every way. You remind me of Gregory, you have the same strong hands. He had only one kink. He liked me to put my bottom in his groin, and then he’d put his arms round me and palpate my breasts and tummy. He used to do it for hours. Very soothing, it was. Sometimes he’d fall asleep doing it.’

  ‘What does “palpate” mean?’ Cookie strove to give the conversation a semantic turn. He could not imagine into what dark night her reminiscences might otherwise lead them.

  ‘It means exploring by touch. Gregory liked to feel with his fingers and describe to me the movements of my inner organs.’

  ‘Is that all? I thought it might be something more exotic – or erotic.’

  As they talked, she gently moved his foreskin backwards and forwards with her thumb and finger till he was erect again.

  ‘Lie on your back this time, Cookie, and leave the donkey-work to me.’

  Obedient, though bewildered, he did her bidding, watching how she sat on him, her big knees on either side of him, her breasts with their reddish brown areolas flopping, and her swinging earrings glinting. She seemed to be pitching backwards and forwards, charging and tamping, plunging up and down. He closed his eyes against the sanity of light, surrounded by the scent of viburnum blossom. It seemed to rise out of their conjoining, or had it wafted through the open window? But there was no viburnum in the garden; and if there was, it could hardly have bloomed since lunchtime, right in the middle of October. He had strayed over the march into alien territory. He was a spare wheel lying flat with Mrs Bugler vigorously pumping. He opened his eyes to see if his belly was rising. Five pounds, ten, fifteen, twenty, twenty-five, thirty. The pressure was tremendous. If she didn’t stop soon … Then the fury of the pumping relaxed. She had found renewed alleviation, her ache had been assuaged for at least another ten minutes.