The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘You’re quite remarkable,’ she said, dismounting. ‘And to cap it all you’re still upright.’

  ‘Never mind, what goes up must come down!’

  ‘I always need a double after wine, two in quick succession. Gregory could never manage more than one a day and even Forker isn’t a hundred per cent reliable. You’ve got the advantage, the most precious of all commodities – unjaded youth. Jack had it too, and he was thirty. Maybe it’s to do with being a Heron. I can tell you here and now that you’re no disgrace to his underpants.’

  ‘You can have a treble if you like.’ He smiled to conceal a knowledge of what happens when love becomes labour.

  ‘I know that, but I mustn’t make a beast of myself. Besides, I promised Alicia to make a pie for tea. I wonder if you’d mind staying to help me peel the apples.’

  ‘Not at all,’ he replied, beginning to savour the power of his detachment, an almost inhuman remoteness from what he normally thought of as his life.

  She kissed him playfully on the cheek.

  ‘You were good in a different way from Jack. He used to start very softly and very slowly, and then come up hammer and tongs on the rails. You’re steadier, you keep the same pace throughout. It’s all a question of strategy. What matters is to bring the horse home with a couple of lengths to spare.’

  He decided to get out of bed before the next race was announced, and when Alicia returned from her sketching she found him slicing Bramleys in the kitchen.

  ‘Domesticated already?’

  ‘Do you have a viburnum in your garden?’ he asked. ‘I thought I recognised one on the way in.’

  ‘You’re so naive, dear Cookie. What you recognised was my new perfume. No matter how often I hide it, Mother keeps finding it.’

  He left before the pie went in the oven and walked down to the slip in the gentling quiet of the evening. It was no quieter than any other Sunday evening, he supposed; it was merely so in relation to the howling inside his head, which had started as soon as he came out the gate. He sat on a bank above the slip watching gannets and seagulls, trying to make sense of their plummeting and swooping. A fishing boat with an outboard shot round the point, two men trolling and one standing in the stern with a hand on the tiller. He listened in vain for the puttering of the engine above the screaming of the gulls. The bow scraped on the end of the slip and one of the men in yellow waders jumped out to hold the boat steady for the other two. Then the three of them hauled until the stern was clear of the water, splashed the floor with brine, and let the bilge flow out though the spile-hole. The tallest and strongest took the end of the rope which was attached to the bow and began hauling hand over hand while the other two shoved, one from each side. It was heavy work pulling over the wooden skids up the whole length of the slip, but it was done with as little apparent effort as the counting and sharing of the catch which followed.

  ‘Do you feel better now?’

  Joey sat down beside him, the mockery in his tone unmistakable.

  ‘If I say no, you won’t believe me; and if I say yes, you’ll jump to conclusions.’

  ‘There is always “perhaps”.’

  ‘Now you’re putting words in my mouth.’

  ‘I’ll put it another way: did you get your end away, and if so, how many times and in which of the canonical positions?’

  ‘I’ve been watching the three Harleys hauling.’

  ‘I know what that’s code for.’

  ‘There is an extraordinary spiritual value in work rituals: tying knots, mending nets, mooring boats, unloading fish. They are activities that enrich both the doer and the observer.’

  ‘It’s easy to romanticise plain living after six hours in the flesh-pots of Fort Knox. Don’t give me humbug and hypocrisy, Cookie. I’ve had enough of both from brother Bosco over lunch.’

  ‘Is he still above?’

  ‘He’s been closeted with Gulban all afternoon. What do you make of that?’

  ‘I’ll think about it on the way home and give you my considered opinion in the morning.’ He refused to acknowledge Joey’s quizzical smile.

  ‘I’m thinking of enriching you, Cookie.’

  ‘A share of your talent?’

  ‘I’m going to buy a boat so that you can watch me tying reef-knots and carrick bends, and making fast with a slinky clove-hitch. Will you come down with me to inspect the object of my dreams?’

  ‘You’re not being serious?’

  ‘Not all of us are called to scale the Mount of Venus. For some, true pleasure can only be vicarious.’

  Pauline was watering her plants in the hall when he got back. She was peering without touching, pouring the water gently around their stems. He coughed, as if he’d surprised her in a little act of intimacy he was not meant to see.

  ‘One thing is obvious,’ he said. ‘You know that they know that you know when to water them.’

  ‘How was lunch?’

  ‘The beef was delicious but the vegetables were slightly overcooked.’

  ‘Were both of them there?’

  ‘Oh, yes. Safety in numbers, I suppose.’

  ‘What did you talk about?’

  ‘Islamic ceramics, spiders, croquet, narrow-gauge railways.’

  ‘An educational afternoon?’

  ‘The curriculum lacked diversity. The interest, I found, was largely scientific.’

  ‘And Fort Knox itself?’

  ‘It’s an academy that makes you quite oblivious of the extramural. When you leave, you’re surprised to find the world outside the walls still there.’

  ‘It sounds like a kind of paradise. Did they mention Jack?’

  ‘Mrs Bugler did, once or twice. She said that he was steadier than me.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  ‘And that he could sit a horse.’

  ‘Utter nonsense. What, I wonder, could he have seen in such a place?’

  ‘I think he went there to forget. In spite of appearances, he was not a contented man.’

  She turned her back to him. He watched her examine the leaf of a Swiss cheese plant that showed distinct symptoms of gigantism.

  ‘Have you seen Bosco?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s still with Gulban. I expect they’re both asleep.’

  He went into the lounge and ordered a whiskey and water at the bar. A few waistcoated worthies from the village and four or five tourists were sitting by the windows absorbing the deepening shadows on the hill. The wife of one of the tourists came to the bar for cigarettes. Her skin was dry as a mummy’s, her hair dyed the colour of barley straw. He knocked back his drink and went round to the public bar where he ordered a pint of stout to be in the fashion. Two youths were playing darts and three fishermen were taking their ease at one of the tables. It was still early. The empty evening lay ahead. It would be pleasant to talk to Pauline over a drink but she was talking to her plants. He sat by the window overlooking the eastward-rolling moor bounded by a blue paling of low hills in the distance. Gradually, the landscape darkened, heights and hollows melted away. Finally, all became featureless and the reflection of the blazing turf fire took shape in the panes. He thought of his father slipping between waking and sleeping and hardly knowing which was which. He wished for the company of noisy students with a gift for impromptu ribaldry; beer flowing and spilling; and quick-witted barmaids good for a jape, a joke, and nothing more serious than a squeeze.

  Four sheep farmers entered and nodded to him without speaking. The barman had gone down to the cellar to change a barrel, so he got up and served them the tot of whiskey they invariably drank as an appetiser before the soup of the day, as Joey called the draught stout. He gave them their change without attempting to interrupt their discussion of the merits and demerits of Slash Gildea’s new ram.

  He came out of the bar and found Father Bosco and Joey locked in conversation on the stairs. Father Bosco, who seemed excited, beckoned to him.

  ‘Now that the three of us are together, I have a little announcement to make,�
� he said.

  ‘You’re going to give us all unconditional absolution,’ Joey predicted.

  ‘I must be absolutely frank with you both. I’m not a dark horse, I don’t believe in surprises. I’ve entered the race, you see. I’d like you both to know.’

  ‘Which race?’ Cookie, after his recent experience of the turf, showed confusion.

  ‘I’m not making the running but I’m in the running. I’ve discussed with Gulban the possibility that I may inherit. Nothing has been settled, I hasten to say. If I’m offered it, I shall take it, that’s all.’

  ‘The hotel?’ Cookie looked incredulously at Joey.

  ‘The hotel, the farm and the shop. I’ll turn the hotel into a home for elderly priests, I’ll get lay brothers to run the other two.’

  Joey laughed and Cookie hiccuped.

  ‘God and Mammon in harness. You simply can’t lose,’ Joey said.

  ‘I’ll become a lay brother if you agree to give me a job,’ Cookie promised.

  ‘I have no wish to inspire bad feeling. I thought I should tell you, so that everything is open and above board.’

  Cookie and Joey watched him hurry out through the lobby.

  ‘He’s a twit,’ said Joey.

  ‘A twit, a twat and a gom,’ said Cookie.

  ‘Can a man so lacking in stratagem go any distance in the Church?’

  ‘At this rate he’ll never be Pope and neither of us will get to be camerlingo.’

  Cookie turned and climbed the stairs. He had decided to spend the evening alone.

  ‘You’re pooped and ready for bed,’ Joey shouted after him.

  Cookie did not reply.

  ‘I’ve got the perfect exam question for you,’ Joey called again. ‘“A middle-aged woman is a ruined abbey – food for romantic thought. Discuss.”’

  ‘She’s a city much like Babylon,’ Cookie declaimed from above.

  ‘And you, Cookie, were a king in Babylon for an hour. But were you every inch a king?’

  Cookie waited outside his bedroom door until the laughter of ribaldry below had ended.

  ‘I give you a mid-year resolution,’ he shouted. ‘Acquire a self to which you can be true.’

  ‘Too late, too late,’ Joey called up the stairs. ‘L’esprit de l’escalier, it simply will not do.’

  Chapter 16

  On the way home Father Bosco stopped above Undercliff beach to breathe air that was pure and salty. Below was an old graveyard, a dark spit of land, pale grey sand, and an arm of water alive with pinpoints of the moon’s reflection. A lorry and van passed on the way to town. He waited for silence, then listened hard for the murmur of moving water. He thought he heard it, yet he could not be sure. He listened again, aware that somehow in not hearing he was failing in his priestly function.

  He got out of the car and descended the shadowy steps to the beach, clutching the thick wooden handrail all the way down. The lees of excitement still stirred his blood. He felt grateful for the cooling touch of the night breeze on his neck and cheeks. He had acted correctly in telling Cookie and Joey of his talk with Gulban. Now all was in the open, and neither could say that he had been dishonest or disingenuous.

  The more he thought about it the more convinced he became that he must and should inherit, if only to ensure the exercise of compassion and reparation. Father Tourish would have a new home in which to end his days in the company of other elderly priests. The home would be run by even-tempered men with one foot in the outside world, chosen for their amiable and open-hearted nature. There would be no bossy nuns to anger and irritate with emotional compulsions that had no place in the spiritual life which was essentially sweet in its detachment. There would be no strict regimen of spiritual exercises. The priests would lead the normal lives of the old – reading, watching television, listening to music, going for walks on the moor, sitting in the sun gazing out across the Sound. Gradually, they would shed the loneliness that had come from a lifetime’s knowledge of being special. Prayer would no longer be a ritualised, introspective and world-denying activity. It would recede into the very fabric of their waking and sleeping, and they would become spiritually the richer for it. They would shed the habits and habiliments of self-enclosure and go to their Maker for judgment as would any ordinary man. They would acquire the fullness of experience that comes with double vision, and they would realise that if they had their lives to spend again they would be less obsessed with their own salvation. They would risk all to save all, not surround themselves with the mote and bailey that denies the soul the nourishment it must possess if it is to communicate glory.

  He walked between the driftline and the edge of the water, the sand soft and damp underfoot. He climbed the slope under the graveyard wall and stood above the moonlit waves. He could hear a murmur now but still he was not satisfied. The murmur he heard was the loudest and crudest. What he craved were the thousand gentle exhalations it concealed, to be followed by the roaring of a thousand angry seas all in unison. His ear was not attuned. Life was a symphony of sounds he would never hear.

  His years as a clerical student and priest had begun as a retreat from life, at least ordinary life, and now at thirty-three he was aware every day that he was still retreating. The first such act had been involuntary, a shudder of horror he could still neither comprehend nor forget. It had begun with Pauline, when she was fifteen. She had come home from the convent for the summer holidays, a grown woman with the innocence of a child. He stopped to speak to her outside her mother’s cottage, where she was plucking roses from the trellis by the door. It seemed to him then that he had never looked at her before. He had just taken his degree exams at university. He had studied hard, he was full of academic self-confidence, and he was planning a summer of outdoor relaxation. It was the 23rd of June, St John’s Eve, and it was the local custom to light bonfires on the hill after sunset. Young men and women gathered to make light-hearted fun, and he and Pauline were among them. After midnight, when the last of the fires had died down, he walked back with her across the river to the road. Her mother had gone to Dublin for a few days. She offered him coffee, and he said that it would be a pity to go indoors on such a lovely night.

  They walked down the lane and sat on the edge of the cliff. For a long time they talked. He told her about the university and she told him about the convent and the nuns. Beneath them the sea spilled and murmured. The water was luminous, and the air sweet with the smell of cut grass and heavy with salt at the same time. The sky bristled with starlight. To the left of them the lighthouse cast lonely beams down the bay. He put his arm round her waist and kissed her. It was his first kiss, and the thought that it might have been her second or third was torment. If he kissed her a hundred times, she would still be two kisses ahead. Yet what were two kisses compared with a hundred? Though the breeze turned cool, they never moved from the cliff edge. At dawn they came back through fields full of mushrooms under a reddening sky.

  That morning as he bent down to kiss the altar at Mass, he felt the short grass of the sea cliff under his hands. He paused before the Consecration to expunge the insistent memory of the bonfire and the smoke in her clothes and hair. As he prayed for a prelapsarian purity of heart and mind, his knowledge of carnal desire was a cold, wet alb that clung to his chest and legs.

  He could not understand the force of his feelings, or the terror they inspired in him. Nothing shameful or unnatural had happened, yet he could think only of the osculum infame, the kiss of perverted worship that witches at their sabbaths bestowed on the Devil in one of his animal forms. It was a gangrened foot that suffocated him daily with its odour of sweet putrefaction. It was a grey wolf that skulked in the shadows of the foreconscious, growing leaner and more ravenous with every year that passed. He read St Augustine, grateful for his ‘cauldron of unholy loves’. Was he a man who had to struggle nightly with the demon or was he an old fraud, exaggerating his sins to humiliate himself in the eyes of God while surrounding himself with a personal mythology that wou
ld illuminate his name for ever in the errant hearts of men? Sometimes he’d wake up from a dream and wonder if, like Father Tourish, he would end his days among nuns, making ribald jokes and mocking God for creating women.

  He never kissed her again. He left university and entered the seminary, turning his back on the secular life because in three short hours his experience had grown into a monster that had to be slain. He knew that he was taking on a lifelong struggle that would require fortitude, humility and God’s daily grace and mercy. He combed the writings of the ascetics for every weapon and word of comfort he could find, yet it was a sentence from Leonardo da Vinci that in those early years awakened the sharpest echo of recognition in his soul:

  The act of coitus and the parts employed therein are so repulsive that were it not for the beauty of the faces and the adornments of the actors and the frenetic state of mind, nature would lose the human species.

  It was a sentence and a sentiment that he kept to himself, and the secret knowledge of it surrounded him with a wall that gave him an appearance of high purpose in the eyes of the other young seminarians. They respected his intelligence and diligence, his objectivity in discussion and his courtesy in personal relationships, and perhaps half-jokingly they began to forecast a distinguished future for him. Their respect and overtures of friendship restored his self-confidence and muted the self-scrutiny and self-criticism that had begun to weary his mind and body. In his fourth year he relaxed a little. He developed a sense of humour and became friendly with Benedict McBride, a fellow-seminarian with a reputation for intellectual high jinks and high spirits. McBride had a habit of quoting Ecclesiastes and laughing as he did so. ‘All the rivers run into the sea, but the sea is not full,’ he would say. And Bosco, who read Ecclesiastes too, would reply, ‘In the place where the tree falls, there it will lie.’ It was a harmless game which neither of them took seriously, and it served as the foundation of a congenial friendship. During the summer holidays he visited McBride, whose parents lived in a seaside town on the south coast.