The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘Stretch your legs and relax. I’ll give you a smooth ride now, there’s no need to give you a rough one.’

  ‘You’ve been drinking,’ Cookie accused him.

  ‘Not a drop. As you must know, a man in love has no need of liquor. I just want Alicia to be happy. And you too.’

  His sharp, bony face was set hard against the wind, which had drawn a tear from the corner of his eye. He shook his head impatiently so that the tear fell without running down his cheek. Ignoring the pitching of the boat, he stood up straight in the stern. Cookie said nothing. He knew that this was no time to show either undue interest or undue anxiety.

  They had come into the shadow of the island. They entered a small cove which seemed airless after the hurly-burly of the Sound. The keel grazed the concrete of the slip. Cookie jumped out and made fast the painter to one of the mooring rings. He felt such relief to stand on a surface that did not move. He picked up a turnip-sized stone and flung it at the tilting water.

  He felt angry with Joey and irritated with himself. They walked up the slope and paused on top for breath. The small island, a mere sixty acres, was rocky and bare with coarse, patchy grass that had been cropped by rabbits. The wind whistled with an occasional whirroo round the lighthouse lantern. The lighthouse itself was no longer the sparkling white tower he had often observed from the mainland. Its paint was peeling and the locked doors with their rusty ironmongery gave it the look of a disused belfry. The last of the lightkeepers had left over ten years ago. Now it was nuclear-powered, and no one climbed its winding stairs except the maintenance man who came once a month for a few hours.

  ‘It must be a cold stand on a winter’s day,’ Cookie said.

  ‘Let me take you to my little haven where no wind will lift your Casanovesque forelock.’

  Joey took him to a hollow between two upright slabs, from which four wailing seagulls rose into the wind.

  ‘These two rocks were one a long time ago. You can tell by the seams that it must have split down the middle. It’s a lovely spot on a warm day. The sun shines on the south-facing slab. You can feel the reflected heat, and now and again a little eddy of cool sea air mingling with it. I’ll bring you and Alicia out here in the spring and leave you alone for the day. You’ll get to know her, you’ll have the island all to yourselves.’

  Cookie placed a hand on the face of the slab and did not answer.

  ‘I’ll take Pauline out another day. We’ll picnic here. I’ve planned it all.’

  They left the hollow and walked back to the landward shore with the low sun behind them.

  ‘Something has been settled between us two,’ said Joey. ‘You’re in love with Alicia, you’ve given up your claim to Pauline. Now I see the open road before me. Nothing and no one stands in the way. Are you happy with that?’

  ‘Do I have to be happy?’

  ‘I want you to be happy. I thought we’d agreed to be partners.’

  ‘I’m happy, then,’ said Cookie.

  Joey jumped and clicked his heels together like Jack.

  ‘Have you ever noticed Pauline’s face? It looks quite perfect, yet it’s full of flaws. One cheek is more rounded than the other. Her forehead is higher on the right side because of the higher hairline, and the right eyebrow is fractionally higher to match it. The whole effect is one of fullness and roundness. Her nostrils are round and so are her eyes. When she looks you in the eye, you know in the marrow of your bones that you’re being scrutinised. It’s what I call full-frontal communication. All lost on obtuse old Jack, of course.’

  ‘You’re a specialist, Joey, and Pauline is your special subject.’

  ‘One thing I forgot to mention is her mouth. The upper lip is longer than the lower. How can that be?’

  ‘I hadn’t noticed.’

  ‘Of course you hadn’t. It may be a kind of illusion created by the wanton fullness of the lower lip in relation to the straight and narrow upper.’

  ‘One thing is certain: you haven’t been neglecting your studies.’

  ‘You have no idea what it’s like being obsessed with a woman. Your mind is in hock, it’s no longer your own. Once I’m sure of her, there will be no stopping me. I’ll devote myself a hundred per cent to business.’

  ‘I can see it all,’ said Cookie. ‘I shall marry Alicia, you’ll marry Pauline, and we’ll share the estate. It’s so simple that it must come true.’

  ‘It must, it must, it must. And if it doesn’t, there will be hell to pay.’

  They were standing above the shingle with the white boat on its side among the grey beach stones.

  ‘Why did you buy the boat?’ Cookie thought they might talk about something less emotionally demanding.

  ‘I didn’t buy a boat, I bought a coign of vantage. Now I can come out here and view the hotel, the village and Fort Knox from a long way off. I seek a god’s eye view, and I have it here. If I ever manage to buy this island off Old Gildea, I shall be adding more lustre to the history of the House of Heron than Gulban ever did.’

  ‘It doesn’t look much from where we stand: sixty acres of rocky ground with grass that’s been burnt by blown salt-water.’

  ‘I wouldn’t buy it for the grass but for its place in the imagination of everyone on this headland. Something Gulban will be the first to appreciate.’

  Cookie said nothing. It occurred to him that his brother had gone cuckoo. They picked their way down to the boat in silence. Light would be failing in forty minutes. He was keen to get back and determined not to give Joey further cause for erratic steering. He tried to give the appearance of imperturbable serenity as he watched the island recede with the setting sun behind it.

  ‘Pauline isn’t perfect,’ Joey said when they were out in the Sound. ‘She’s so introspective now. I sometimes think her whole life is Gulban, her pot plants and the hotel accounts. The shock of Jack’s death put her into reverse. It will take another shock to force her back into forward gear. Will Gulban’s death achieve it?’

  ‘You expect great things from Gulban’s death. I hope you’re not disappointed.’

  ‘I’ll be satisfied if it’s not an end but a beginning. We must be honest with each other and with Gulban too. He’s lived too long. It’s a thought you must not shirk. You can love and honour your father and still welcome his death as a necessary rebirth.’

  ‘You may be right.’

  ‘In many ways he’s already dead. Pauline lives and remains unknown. She’s a queen bee that must be overtaken and boarded in flight. What worries me is that the man she finally marries will only be a substitute for Jack.’

  The sun had already set by the time they reached the slip. They hauled in the boat and put an oilskin cover over the outboard. When they had finished, Joey offered Cookie his hand.

  ‘You were my only rival. Now I have the field to myself. You were her first love, when she was only twelve. You lost her to Jack-in-the-Orchard, and she never looked my way. I’ve thought about this. The hotel has always been her pivot. As a girl, she played with us, never with the other children from around. She won’t look outside now, she’ll turn to me. Is that how you see it, Cookie?’

  ‘You could be right.’

  ‘Don’t say “could be”. Are you rooting for me or are you not?’ He squeezed Cookie’s hand till it hurt.

  There were no guests for dinner that evening. Cookie, Joey and Pauline dined alone in the kitchen.

  ‘It’s almost winter,’ Cookie sighed. ‘Nothing will happen now till Easter.’

  ‘You forget Christmas,’ Joey said. ‘There’s always something new at Christmas.’

  ‘Winter is a weird time here,’ Pauline said.

  ‘It’s a long, sleepless night,’ Cookie agreed.

  ‘When the hotel is empty, it’s difficult not to feel that your life is empty too,’ she said. ‘We all thrive on other people’s movements and demands: guests coming and going, complaining about pot-holes in the car park, the chef’s sauce Béarnaise, or the lack of a telephone and telev
ision in the bedrooms. All these things irritate and stimulate at the same time.’

  ‘Let’s celebrate the end of the season,’ said Joey, when they’d had their coffee. ‘Let’s have a drink in the lounge. Pauline, do you fancy a brandy?’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Cookie?’

  ‘I had wine at lunchtime. I think I’ll go straight to my room and read a book.’

  They both went into the empty lounge bar and took their drinks to a table by the fire. Pauline sat on a low stool with her elbows on her knees and her face cupped in her hands. The dancing firelight shone on her legs and forehead.

  ‘The wind is rising, it’s getting colder,’ she said.

  ‘Then, you mustn’t allow the cold to get inside you, Pauline,’ Joey advised.

  She kept staring at the heart of the fire, as if he had not spoken.

  ‘Life, it’s hard. Jack’s death was a blow, and Gulban’s illness is another. You must live and continue to love, in spite of the cold. I know I’m not as sensitive as you, but even I often wonder what keeps me going. It’s easy to get into the habit of doing the same things, and then, before you know where you are, you’ve built a railway with a runaway train you can’t get off. I try to keep fresh by changing my leisure interests. You haven’t seen my new boat? You’ll fall in love with her when you do. I’ve just had a thought. Why don’t you come out to the island one day for a run?’

  ‘In this weather?’

  ‘Cookie and I went out this afternoon.’

  ‘I’d like to see the island. I’ll come when it gets warm again.’

  ‘You’ll be surprised by what you see. The hotel, Fort Knox, the Hill. All else shrinks into the landscape. Nothing else exists, except sky and water.’

  ‘That’s how I’ve always seen it, even from here. It’s wrong, you know. There are other lives and other ways of life.’

  ‘We’re cocooned, they don’t impinge on us.’

  ‘Isn’t that our weakness, being inside looking out? We see a landscape with men and animals moving. Men digging and mowing, cattle and sheep grazing. We see figures, not faces. We see a life and know it only through reported speech.’

  Joey laughed excitedly.

  ‘You were born half-way between Fort Knox and the hotel. You could have turned to either. I’m glad you turned to the hotel.’

  ‘There was no choice for me. The hotel, I thought, represented the life of effort – the serious, strenuous life – while Fort Knox was only appetite and desire.’

  ‘Poor Cookie, he had lunch there today. I hope he knows what he’s doing, I hope he doesn’t get eaten.’

  Pauline laughed unexpectedly.

  ‘Does he go for Alicia or Mrs Bugler?’ she asked.

  ‘Oh, Alicia.’

  ‘Perhaps he’d like to be eaten, then.’

  ‘Don’t mention it to Gulban, he mightn’t approve. Better not mention it to Bosco either.’

  ‘Is it a great secret?’

  ‘I’m thinking of Cookie. He’ll mention it himself when he feels he must.’

  ‘I don’t like secrets, they make for edgy relationships.’

  ‘How is Bosco? He seems to visit Gulban every day.’ Joey decided to seek a foothold on firmer ground.

  ‘Every other day.’

  ‘I’m usually at the shop when he comes. Is he keeping well?’

  ‘I’ll tell him you were asking after him,’ she smiled. ‘If you like, I shall ask him to call in at the shop tomorrow.’

  ‘He can’t be overburdened with parish work.’

  ‘The corporal works of mercy, like charity, begin at home.’

  He wanted to ask her about Gulban, if he found Bosco’s visits tedious and if he realised what Bosco was up to. The fire blazed. She turned an inscrutable face to him.

  ‘I must wash my hair before turning in,’ she said.

  She got up and placed the stool under the table.

  ‘I’ll have one more drink in the public bar,’ he told her. ‘Who knows, I may learn something from the reported speech there.’

  She smiled at the fire and left him nursing his empty brandy glass.

  He did not seek out the company of the locals in the public bar. He hung over the dying fire alone, until a smock of yellow ash had covered the shrinking coals. He felt puzzled – confused by a sense of guilty exposure. He had been talking to her through a closed window. He could discern passing moods reflected in her features. He could observe the movement of her lips forming words. Yet her voice remained muffled and impersonal.

  She was a woman of many windows, as the hotel was a building of many windows, and what you saw of her depended on the window she chose to present to you. The Pauline that Jack had seen was not the Pauline that he himself saw, nor was she the Pauline that Cookie, Bosco and Gulban saw. She remained unknown and unknowable, perhaps because she lacked the sense of fellowship that must precede the desire to be known. Everything had appeared so simple from the island with the bare, unyielding rock underfoot. Here was the quivering quagmire of life itself, full of perilous holes and gullies, emitting phosphorescent gases that beguiled the eye with a treacherous semblance of light.

  He climbed the stairs and paused outside Cookie’s room. The light was on inside. He listened for a sound and heard the rising wind charging the gables and whistling over the roof. With an urgent desire for secrecy, solitude and unhurried recollection, he turned down the corridor to his room.

  Cookie was in the bath, immersed to the neck. He had come back from the island with his skin atingle from the wind and sharp salt-water, and after dinner he had felt uncomfortably alert, too critical to make amiable conversation over brandy.

  He had left Fort Knox in a state of excitement, which had bestowed on him a sense of rightness and strength. By the time they’d reached the island he was numb. Joey had lost all awareness of life and modes of life that were not his to command. Years of unshared suffering, of living passionately within himself, had brought him to the threshold of compulsive action. Now nothing mattered but a personal vision that had been nurtured in secrecy and in pain. He had cut life to the measure of his needs. He had lost sight of the cutting edge of the external world; his actions were no longer those of a man who takes account of the ebb and flow of human relationships and the indifference of other lives to his own.

  Before the water had time to go cold, he got out of the bath and dried himself with a warm towel, then lay on the bed in his pyjamas and drank two whiskies as he waited for the flutterings in his chest to subside. His thesis lay open on the writing table. It was good enough to earn him a doctorate, yet the sight of it filled him with self-loathing. The argument was scrupulous and intelligent, the structure conventionally sound. To the examiners it would appear solid and well researched. Only he himself was aware of the alternative thesis, the one in his mind’s eye as he began. What he now saw was shapeless by comparison, and he had lost the will to reshape.

  He fell asleep and woke in the small hours. He had dreamt of a spinnaker run across the Sound, before a lively wind with Alicia at the helm. The taut sail did not flap. Not a drop came over the gunwales. He sat in his pyjamas on the centre thwart, facing her in the stern as she rose and fell on an invisible swing, advancing and retreating with legs extended. Joey came down the island slip to greet them, and drew Alicia’s attention to Cookie’s erect penis which had pushed its head through the front of his pyjamas.

  ‘Look at those two ugly blue veins, Alicia. They’re the living replica of a well-known river system.’

  ‘It can’t be the Amazon because the pyjamas are unstained,’ she said.

  ‘I beg your pardon.’ The words sounded pompous, not his own.

  ‘The Amazon stains the sea yellow for two hundred miles. Mud, not semen, no offence.’

  ‘Try again, Alicia,’ Joey smiled.

  ‘There’s the Vistula, the Irrawaddy, the Guadalquivir and the Murrumbidgee.’

  ‘It’s the Tigris and Euphrates, don’t you see. Birthplace of gr
eat civilisations.’ Joey stooped and blew fiercely into the eye of his organ.

  ‘The Tigris is of greater volume than the Euphrates,’ Alicia declared. ‘On its banks stood some of the great cities of ancient Mesopotamia, including Nineveh.’

  Joey side-stepped and the sun shone warmly again on his penis. He got back into the boat and headed straight out to sea against the evening light, while Joey and Alicia sang ‘Yo, heave ho!’, unaware of his departure. Reluctantly, he kept going, waiting for them to call him back. When at last he looked round, both the island and the headland had vanished. He was at the centre of a glum and featureless sea, and a yellowy stain was spreading from beneath the keel of the boat.

  He did not regret his rapture of generosity. He would go to the bank tomorrow and pay £5,000 into his current account before writing a cheque for her. Yet he could not conceal from himself a sense of loss that had nothing to do with bank balances.

  Chapter 20

  When Cookie returned from the bank the following afternoon, Pauline, who was taking down the lounge bar curtains for washing, told him that Alicia had telephoned while he was out.

  ‘She seemed disappointed that you weren’t here. She sounded as if she had expected you to be waiting by the phone with one hand hovering.’

  He went straight to the back office for privacy. Listening to the burp-burp of the Fort Knox telephone, he felt flurried and anxious, as if he’d let himself down. Alicia gave a trilling little laugh when she heard his voice.

  ‘Are you doing anything this evening?’ She spoke with a hint of breathlessness.

  ‘Nothing that I’m looking forward to.’

  ‘Mother has just come back – I feel like an evening out.’

  ‘We could have dinner at the Atlantic Grill.’ His voice had caught a nuance of her excitement.

  ‘It’s too far to drive in cold weather. Why don’t we eat at the hotel?’

  ‘The chef is having his winter break, there’s no one here to cook except Pauline.’ It had occurred to him that Pauline might have no wish to cook for his guest.

  ‘You’re making excuses. Let me be chef just for this evening.’