The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  He took his newspaper into the lounge bar and sat by the east window with the sharp November sun over the moor behind him. She wasn’t an early riser. He would wait till ten before giving her a ring.

  ‘So this is where you come to do your skiving!’ Pauline looked in the door.

  ‘I’m resting for five minutes before the fray.’

  ‘Gulban would like to see you now. When you’ve finished talking, perhaps you could bring down his breakfast tray.’

  His father was staring at his knuckles, opening and closing his fist.

  ‘You’ve been seeing Alicia Bugler, I hear?’

  ‘We meet from time to time.’

  ‘Give her up.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘She’s no good.’

  ‘She’s talented and charming, and I’m very fond of her.’

  ‘Would you marry her?’

  ‘The thought had crossed my mind.’

  ‘Mrs Bugler’s a bad egg and Alicia is her daughter. She may be rosy-cheeked now and sweet to look at, but, take it from me, she’s got a grub in her. Some fruit rot before they ripen.’

  ‘I’ve never heard such nonsense. You’re running her down because of her mother.’

  ‘Do you expect to inherit the hotel and shop?’

  ‘That’s my ambition.’

  ‘If you do, you’ll need eyes in the back of your head. It’s a round-the-clock job, I can tell you. How can you run a business if you have a flibbertigibbet for a wife?’

  ‘I think you misread her, she’s serious and sincere.’

  ‘She’ll do to you what her mother did to Gregory Bugler. You’ll be her husband on paper and the butt of her jokes with other men in bed. She’s only twenty but already she’d buy and sell you ten times over.’

  Cookie flushed with the effort of concealing anger. He decided to appeal to his father’s greed for property.

  ‘Marrying her would make good business sense. If I were to inherit the hotel and the shop and Alicia inherited Fort Knox, between us we’d own everything worth owning on the headland. She’s friendly with Old Gildea. If he sold her the island, we’d own everything in sight.’

  ‘What would you do with Fort Knox? Turn it into a knocking shop? Officially, that is.’

  ‘I have plans but it would be premature to reveal them.’

  ‘And the island? It would make a lovely holiday resort, if this were Polynesia. Even that would have its disadvantages. It might take business away from the hotel.’

  ‘All this is hypothetical, Alicia might say “no”.’

  ‘If you ask her to marry you, she’ll say “yes”, as her mother said “yes” to Gregory Bugler. And if you marry her, you may say goodbye to your chance of inheriting. Do you want to inherit or not?’

  ‘Of course I do, but I won’t be bullied.’

  ‘Say no more, you’ve said it all.’

  He left Gulban comparing his fists and carried the breakfast tray downstairs. Slash Gildea was in the lobby talking to Pauline, who gave Cookie an anxious glance.

  ‘Bad news, I’m afraid,’ he said to Cookie. ‘Alicia has had an accident.’

  ‘Is she badly hurt?’

  ‘It’s worse than that, she’s dead.’

  ‘She must have crashed the car.’ The effort of saying six words left him drained of feeling.

  ‘She went out over the Gravelly Shoulder, straight through the railings and down into the sea. The car’s a wreck. They had to wrap her in sheets before hauling her up.’

  ‘I’m sorry, Cookie.’ Pauline grasped his hand.

  ‘I’d like to see how it happened,’ he said vaguely.

  Slash accompanied him to the Land-Rover. The butcher’s van went by, and Slash told him that the body was in the back. They watched the van turn left at the crossroads and drive over the narrow lane to Fort Knox. Cookie felt that he was going to be sick. He turned his back to Slash for a moment, then climbed into the passenger seat of the Land-Rover and asked Slash to drive.

  Four or five men were gathered on the Gravelly Shoulder looking down the slope to the rocks and sea below. The road ran along the edge of the cliff, bending sharply midway. She would have driven downhill into the bend. There were no tyre marks on the road. It looked as if she had not braked. The only evidence of mischance was the broken railing and a wooden post on the slope underneath. The small car was a broken box crushed between the jaws of two serrated rocks.

  ‘She must have known this road like the back of her hand,’ one of the men said.

  ‘She was a demon driving,’ his friend replied.

  ‘There’s no sign that she even tried to take the turn,’ said another.

  Cookie moved away from the group. The angular edge of the land bristled with pointed rocks, ugly black monsters with white-breasted seagulls on their backs. The shore gleamed with the clarity of nightmare. The gabled rocks with their sabrelike apexes became a shower of arrows flying into his face. His eye travelled over the rising slope of the sea towards the horizon where the offshore blue faded into white light that merged with the softer hue of the sky. It was there he wished to dwell, cradled and suspended above all that pierced, encroached and diminished. His eye returned to harsh solidity. A car was a toy that bounced and dented. Flesh was made to bleed and bones were made to be broken. The fire-tested rock remained. She had spent her life in the haze between sky and sea. The rock that broke her had yet to find its way into a geologist’s handbook.

  When he got back to the hotel, he found Pauline repotting a delicate fern in the porch.

  ‘It’s a great shock,’ she said. ‘I know how you must feel.’

  ‘She had everything ahead of her, she’d barely begun to live.’

  ‘Was it an accident?’ She looked pointedly at his chin.

  ‘It was a waste of talent and of life. She knew the road from childhood. I can’t imagine what came over her. Even rash drivers go slow over the Gravelly Shoulder.’

  He left her because he could not bear her quickening curiosity. He went into the bar, he could not think. The headlines in the newspaper referred to remote, incomprehensible things. His mind was a pool of thin liquid on which nothing could be etched or written.

  After a while Joey came in and sat on the stool beside him.

  ‘You loved her, Cookie. The next six months won’t be easy.’

  ‘She was very special, not an ordinary girl.’

  ‘I remember thinking once that she would never grow old. Though she was twenty, she hardly looked sixteen.’

  ‘She lived in a different world from you and me,’ Cookie said. ‘She lived in a different world from Pauline. There was a charge of poetry in everything she said and did. Today there isn’t even prose.’

  ‘You are bound to suffer at first. You must allow yourself to suffer because suffering heals the wound.’

  ‘Don’t give me the bedside manner, Joey. All I ask is that you respect my feelings. Silence is best. We must never talk about Alicia again.’

  ‘I was only trying to help.’

  ‘I don’t want to hear her talked about. I don’t want to lose her, I want to preserve her as she was. I shan’t be going to the funeral; I couldn’t bear to listen to the address.’

  He rang Mrs Bugler. She could hardly speak, she sounded miles away.

  ‘I’ll call down in half an hour,’ he said.

  ‘Wait till the afternoon. Everything’s in a muddle now. I don’t know where I am.’

  Just before lunchtime Father Bosco arrived.

  ‘It was Pauline who told me,’ he said. ‘I didn’t know.’

  ‘What did she tell you?’ Cookie asked.

  ‘That you loved her. I mean Alicia. I am sorry. I’ll remember you in the Mass and in my prayers.’

  ‘I’d prefer you didn’t. I don’t wish for help, either visible or invisible.’

  ‘Then I’ll pray for Alicia.’

  ‘She’s dead, poor girl. She can’t stop you now, but if she were alive she’d laugh at you. She lived in her ow
n world, which was neither this world nor the next. She was determined to have no truck with either.’

  ‘Try not to lose your sweetness, Cookie. Sourness in an old man is understandable. In a young man it’s intolerable.’

  ‘You should put on your biretta before you talk to me like that.’

  ‘I’m trying to help.’

  ‘Then you must never mention Alicia to me again. There is so much else to talk about – Gulban, Gulban’s will, Gulban’s loss of memory, your Fiat, your parish priest, Pauline’s pot plants. We shall never be short of subjects, and provided the subjects are not important to either of us, we’ll never quarrel.’

  ‘You’re determined not to be comforted.’ Father Bosco turned on his heel and went.

  Cookie remained in his room till lunchtime. He ate with Pauline, Joey and the Comforter in the dining-room and listened while they talked about Gulban’s confusions – how he would expect breakfast at supper time and complain of the ‘noisy’ guest in the empty room next to his own. No one mentioned Alicia. He knew that she was uppermost in their minds and he wondered why he was not moved to tears.

  He went down to Fort Knox in the afternoon. A distracted Mrs Bugler embraced him and led him into the study, where one of Alicia’s unfinished paintings stood against a bookcase. They both sat at the table. She offered him a drink which he declined without speaking.

  ‘She was with you yesterday evening,’ she said.

  ‘She came to dinner. Afterwards we talked, and she gave me the painting she’d done of me. She left just before one and drove off in the direction of the Gravelly Shoulder. I was surprised when she didn’t make straight for home at that hour.’

  ‘Did she have much to drink?’

  ‘Two whiskies and half a bottle of wine.’

  ‘What did she talk about?’

  ‘You, her father, her paintings. She was in a strange mood, edgy and rather splenetic.’

  ‘Was it an accident, do you think?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  Mrs Bugler dabbed her eyes and neither of them spoke for a while.

  ‘She was always difficult to know. She never showed her true feelings. No one got close to her, not even the students she went round with in Dublin. She lived within herself. She didn’t expect anything from anyone and she seemed to feel that no one had a right to expect anything from her. She never sent Christmas cards or birthday cards and she rarely wrote to me when she was away. Though she made jokes, you could tell that they came more from unhappiness than a sense of fun. She was like that even as a child. She never played with other children, she was always unresponsive and remote. When she grew up, she blamed her lack of feeling on her father’s early death. She was fond of him, I know, but losing him didn’t bring her closer to me. Things got worse between us when she decided to give up medicine. I tried to make her see sense. She became more aggressive, she did her best to irritate me in every way. When she began taking an interest in you, I thought she might soften. She liked you, I know. She was jollier when you were around.’

  ‘Can I see her?’ he asked.

  ‘I’d rather you didn’t. She’s unrecognisable. Better to remember her as she was.’

  He gazed through the window at the bare hill, not wishing to give way to nausea and grief.

  ‘Wait here for a moment, I’ve got something to give you.’

  She left the room and returned with a piece of paper. He stared at a crumpled cheque for £5,000.

  ‘It was in her handbag.’

  ‘I gave it to her last night. She didn’t want to take it until I insisted. I felt that she should have a chance to make something of her talent. It was meant to enable her to go to art school for a year.’

  ‘Oh, Cookie, it was very generous of you. I know how you must have cared for her.’

  He was unable to speak, so he got up and went to the door.

  ‘There may be an inquest. Better to say as little as possible. No one knows about the cheque except the two of us. I think it should stay that way.’

  ‘If I don’t go to the funeral, I hope you’ll understand,’ he said. ‘It’s just that such a public act seems a kind of desecration.’

  She went with him to the door and grasped his hand.

  ‘It might be easier for me if I could see her.’

  ‘I think you’d only regret it. She was almost too good-looking. She took after her father and she knew it. He was small and light-boned and very handsome as a young man. If you saw her now, you’d never forgive me for allowing it.’

  He hurried home in the coldly stinging air. Autumn was over. The fields, like the hill, were bare. Beside each house was a turfstack and a haystack to see the winter through. Cattle were being stall-fed, and the sheep had come down from the hill seeking what little shelter there was on the lower ground. A stiff-legged old man was driving two black cows to the river for their evening drink. On the coping of a ditch a single bachelor’s button shook its withered head in the breeze. It seemed to him that all existence had contracted into a hard dry hazelnut which no spring rain would bring to life. He ran up the steps, glad to escape into the relative warmth of the hotel. His father had asked to see him. Slowly, he climbed the stairs to the sick-room.

  ‘I just heard about Alicia,’ Gulban said. ‘You must be grief-stricken.’

  ‘It’s a blow I didn’t expect.’

  ‘Maybe what I said about her this morning was harsh. I could not think of her without thinking of her bitch of a mother. Before she came between us, Gregory Bugler and I were friends. He used to spend a lot of time up here and I used to go down to Fort Knox when the nights were long. She began flirting with me, pretending that I had my eye on her, and poor old Gregory believed her. I had a certain reputation but there was nothing in it. She was trying to cover up for another man. Gregory stopped coming to the hotel. He grew odd in his ways and built his six-foot wall. He gave up painting; brickbuilding took over his life. It’s a sad, sad story. Alicia was the apple of his eye.’

  ‘She was fond of him too.’

  ‘You mustn’t take it badly. Don’t let it prey on your mind.’

  ‘Do you want anything? I’ll bring you up a drink if you like.’

  ‘Can you mix me an elixir? I’d give anything to feel the pains of youth again. In old age pain deserts the flesh for the brittle bones beneath.’

  Cookie went to the door. He wished to escape from the dryness and the prying of a mind that had built round itself a stouter wall than Gregory Bugler’s.

  ‘You’re back in the race, me bucko,’ Gulban called after him. ‘I’d struck you off the list. Now you’re reinstated.’

  He sat by the window in his bedroom staring vacantly at the moor and the road running east to the Gravelly Shoulder. He could go to the funeral and pay £5,000 in funeral offerings. She would break all records. The parish priest wouldn’t believe his luck and Gulban would strike him off his list once more. For a moment it seemed the only thing to do. Random images slid back and forth through his mind. He felt exhausted, on the verge of sleep. Light had faded from the sky. Night was falling over the moor, levelling heights and hollows, beating the dark tussocks of melic grass into the darker ground.

  He drew the curtains and lay on the bed. Now there was nothing but winter. Frost and blown salt-water would burn the grass, the moor would turn a reddish-brown. The sea would rear up on the land. Wind would tear the seaweed from the rocks and paste wet strips of it on the window panes. Pauline would wander through the empty bedrooms, because the hotel accounts would be quickly done. She would devote more time to her pot plants, and he would sit in the public bar listening to conversations that had first been made a thousand years ago. Alicia … Alicia … she had escaped from one eternity to another, and it seemed to him that in some unfathomable sense he had joined her.

  Chapter 22

  Spring came unexpectedly. One morning he woke up to find sunshine steaming warmly on the rain-bleached moor. He opened the window and the breeze that came through
was gentle and pure. The moor ran down to a black enceinte of pointed rocks and an upward-sloping sea. He washed and shaved, and descended the creaking stairs to the lobby where he stood by the south-facing window, a stranger among Pauline’s pot plants.

  A newly married man was digging a vegetable patch near a cottage, bending and straightening, levering up spadefuls of black earth, slicing them expertly with the side of the blade. At the far end of the lawn Pauline’s young daffodils peeped darkly green against the lighter green of the grass. They were just in bud, weird water fowl with long necks and bent heads, gazing down sternly at their cold feet.

  The winter had been long, grey and miserable, or so he believed. He had listened more frequently than he had spoken; he accepted the word of those who cared about such things. Most mornings he got up at eight and went for a walk before breakfast to clear his head. He had given up drinking and smoking; even chilli eggs, his favourite dish, had lost their flavour. In his chest was a vacuum that neither human companionship nor intellectual endeavour could fill. He lived behind a sheet of ripple glass through which he glimpsed vague forms or heard far-off noises, and nothing he saw or heard seemed to relieve the measured monotony of his thoughts.

  Once or twice he went down to Fort Knox to visit Mrs Bugler. He strolled between the trees and sat in an overcoat on the summer seat behind the old rhododendron. Mrs Bugler looked dispirited and distrait. She and Alicia had lived together as strangers. Without her she was friendless. She gave him tea and queen-cakes in the sitting-room and made polite conversation to which neither of them attended. She told him that she was planning to move to Dublin, and in February she put Fort Knox up for sale. Everyone said that it would fetch well over £50,000, provided a well-heeled buyer could be found. Cookie felt sad at the thought of Fort Knox in the hands of a stranger. He tried to persuade Gulban to buy it for renting during the summer.