The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  ‘He’s a role player, is our Cookie. All he wants is to make himself interesting – not just to you and me and Father Bosco but to his own dear shimmering self above all. He longs for the obsessive personality. He longs to be obsessed by Alicia. He’ll never forgive her for having taken her life while he still only fancied her.’

  Now there were two moths circling the lampshade. She closed her eyes, not wishing to see, feel or think. The evening in retrospect filled her with despondency. The mare that pursued her in her dream and the man who came to her room were more real to her than anything she’d ever experienced. They seemed to be one and the same. They had grown out of her mind and body, and the thought of them filled her with self-loathing.

  Luckily, there were things to be done. She would go to Gulban’s room and the nurse would speak unambiguously about Gulban’s condition. She could not say whether he would live or die, yet she would give no indication of doubt. She would confine her observations to things that could confidently be observed and known.

  The following morning Cookie had a telephone call from Mrs Bugler, inviting him to Fort Knox for coffee. He was taken aback. He stammered in hesitation before accepting. He did not want to go and at the same time the thought of going filled him with curiosity.

  ‘She must be lonely,’ Joey said. ‘Did she say she felt lonely?’

  ‘No, she just invited me for coffee.’

  ‘Cookie, you’re a romantic or an innocent, which is the same thing. Her coffee-house is the most popular in the country. It’s a club from which no member has ever been blackballed.’

  Joey’s hysterical laughter propelled him out the door. He walked slowly downhill with one eye on the road and the other on the red-brick wall and the white-walled house behind it. The gate was open. The daffodils and the narcissi were out, and the rhododendron was coming into bud. Someone had been digging the flower-beds. A garden fork leant against the summer seat. He felt weak and slightly queasy. He wished he had not come.

  She came to the door and offered him her cheek. She had put on weight. Her face was formless and her body looked broader because of the heavy, loose skirt that hung in tucks round her hips. Over coffee she told him about her work in the garden. He listened sympathetically in the knowledge that she had weightier matters on her mind.

  ‘I still haven’t found a buyer,’ she said at length. ‘Two or three people have expressed an interest but it’s obvious that they don’t have the money.’

  ‘It will be difficult to find someone here who has.’

  ‘I thought you might like to make me an offer.’

  ‘I would if I could afford it.’

  ‘I no longer expect to get the asking price. Your Joey has offered me ten thousand. Would you be willing to offer as much?’

  ‘It’s worth five times that.’

  ‘I’d let you have it for ten on condition that I could have it back for a month every summer and that you left my bedroom as it is. The house and garden are very dear to me. Sadly, I just can’t live here any more, it’s so depressing when it rains. I’d like to sell it to someone who’d know its sentimental value. I can’t think of a more suitable buyer than yourself.’

  ‘I may not be staying on here, I’m thinking of going away.’

  ‘Shall I sell it to Joey, then? I know he’s keen.’

  ‘No, I think I have a better claim. I would like to own it. It’s just that I feel embarrassed, you’re practically giving it away.’

  ‘We’ve got a deal, then.’

  They drank a glass of dry sherry and discussed the conveyancing. She had bought a small cottage in the Wicklow mountains not far from the town in which she was born and close to a few remaining childhood friends. She did not speak of Alicia or Jack or Forker. He could see that in every sense that mattered she had already gone away.

  He left her at noon in a mood of exhilaration. The garden would be his, the summer seat and the swing; also the house with its book-lined study and the single bedroom upstairs. He was going down to the village to break the news to Joey. At the crossroads he hesitated and walked up the incline to the hotel. He had stolen a march on his brother. He had brought off a coup. Though it was really a coup de chance, it might still impress Gulban, if he should ever get his strength back.

  A week later Gulban showed the first sign of recovery. He called for rum punch and, as he sipped it, he complained that he could not taste the Angostura bitters. He was still weak. His mind wandered more frequently, his words came slowly and from far away. Cookie, Joey and Father Bosco went up to see him. He talked for five minutes, then closed his eyes and emitted a loud, drawn-out snore. He had said nothing about the talents, and Cookie wondered if he’d finally forgotten them.

  ‘Not a bit of it,’ said Joey. ‘He’s still trying to call the shots, he’ll keep us guessing while there’s a puff left in him.’

  Gradually, the weather turned warm. Farmers with spades emerged from their barns and blackened the fields as they dug. Ewes and their lambs climbed higher on the hill. In the evenings Cookie began going for walks with Pauline. Once or twice they drove up into the mountains in the east and she sat with him on the edge of a cliff watching sea birds through her binoculars, while he feigned an interest in shags, gannets and guillemots. His thoughts began turning to the university: the smell of ancient calf leather in the library on damp mornings, the stiff-legged walk of an English professor in a crumpled raincoat, his own sense of suffocation, of being buried under a scrap-heap of useless learning and dead culture. That sense of aridity had returned to him on his walks with Pauline. He would observe trees coming into bud and fresh green leaves unfurling in ditches, yet in his mind and heart he had a sense of winter. He was still in hibernation, with a low body temperature, low respiratory rate and slow metabolism, living off the stored fat of a warmer season. All vigour and enthusiasm seemed to have ebbed away.

  He could not account for it. He liked Pauline. She was intelligent, witty and good-looking. Perhaps, he told himself, he was jealous without knowing it – jealous of her unremitting obsession with Joey and Father Bosco. She talked about them endlessly. Her imagination did not seem to range beyond the grinding routines of the hotel.

  ‘Joey has more than a streak of cruelty in him,’ she said one evening. ‘When he sits beside me now, he always turns the bad side of his face to me. He keeps staring through me, torturing me with the knowledge that my own face is without a scar. Does he ever say anything about his face to you?’

  ‘No, and even if he did, it would not be a straightforward statement. He is interested mainly in propositions that are neither true nor false. I’m sure he means no harm. I think he only wants you to be aware of him.’

  ‘I am aware of him. How could I be otherwise?’

  ‘He thinks the world of you.’

  ‘I’d feel more comfortable if he didn’t.’

  That evening he kissed her on the lips for the first time. They were alone in the Land-Rover on the grey mountain road. He kept kissing her for twenty minutes with a deliberation that appalled him, and all the time he kept thinking that Alicia had killed all sexual impulse in him for ever. At last Pauline broke his embrace and asked, ‘Is Father Bosco happy?’

  ‘He’s the sort of man who doesn’t expect to be happy till he’s dead. Even when he was growing up, he never communicated happiness. He was always secretive and withdrawn. When he decided to enter the seminary, no one was surprised. We all said, “Now at last we know his secret.”’

  ‘He still has secrets. Sometimes, as he talks, you feel that the words bear no relation to what’s really on his mind.’

  ‘The about-to-be-demised estate? He’s become very attentive to Gulban lately. For a priest who should know better, he has no fear of Mammon, or of the hotel and shop which are the haunts of Mammon. I know he wants to turn the hotel into a home for superannuated clergymen. What he doesn’t realise is that some poor servant of Mammon will have to make a whacking great profit below in the shop to keep the servan
ts of God in luxury on the hill. It’s the sort of parasitic economy that a scrupulous priest would shun. Or has he so much faith in God that he has lost all fear of the Devil?’

  ‘He never mentioned that to me.’

  ‘Perhaps he sees you as the manageress who will make his heavenly dream come true.’

  ‘That’s something else he’s never raised.’

  ‘You must wait and see which way the cat jumps – once she’s out of the bag.’

  ‘You’re a strange family, you never speak well of one another. Jack was hard on Bosco, and so are you and Joey. Isn’t it possible that he means well?’

  ‘So does Gulban, so do most of us.’

  ‘You always call him Gulban. Are you afraid to call him Father?’

  ‘He likes being called Gulban. It’s the kind of name that doesn’t need a double-barrelled surname to lend it singularity.’

  They drove home in silence. At the hotel gate she said, ‘You’ve been pulling my leg. You’re quite sensitive, really. You just want to make me think that you’re cold like Joey.’

  A few days later Joey pounced on him in the back office while Pauline was upstairs with Gulban.

  ‘You’ve got something to tell me,’ he said.

  ‘Nothing, I suspect, you don’t already know.’

  ‘Perhaps you thought it best for me not to know.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘I’ll give you a clue. She plays a musical instrument. Surely you can’t have forgotten how well she played yours?’

  ‘Mrs Bugler’s told you I’m buying Fort Knox? I had meant to tell you myself.’

  ‘But it slipped your mind?’

  ‘It wasn’t on my mind.’

  ‘Now it’s on mine. I rang Mrs Bugler yesterday to raise my offer to twelve thousand. You can imagine my chagrin when she told me that you’d bought it for ten, the price I offered before you took a hand. What’s wrong with my money? Answer me that! Or should I have said, “What’s wrong with my dong?”’

  ‘I have no idea.’

  ‘Oh, you’re a sly one. I had thought of you as greater than a brother. I had seen you as a friend.’

  ‘For sentimental reasons Mrs Bugler wanted me to have it. She invited me to make her an offer.’

  ‘Just as she invited you to fuck her. How very cosy! And how enjoyable for you, too. You were born lucky. You’re even luckier than Jack. And to beat the band you’re still alive and fucking.’

  ‘This is ridiculous. I refuse to quarrel.’

  ‘You made a pact with me, remember, and the pact said, “Hands off Pauline”. Unfortunately, you made it while you had a comely mare between your knees. Your mare jumped out over the Gravelly Shoulder, so you jumped on mine instead.’

  ‘That’s surely a matter for Pauline. As for Fort Knox – ’

  ‘Forget about Fort Knox. We’ll deal first with the means of transport – the mare, the mare, the mare.’

  ‘You’re quite mad.’

  ‘No, no, no. First she was yours, then she was Jack’s. For a time she was nobody’s, and you surrendered right of turbary to me. Now you’ve got out your spade and you’re digging turf on my mountain.’

  ‘I can hardly keep up with the metaphors.’

  ‘I’m mixing them because it’s the only language you understand. There are humbuggers, silly buggers, and literary buggers, and the greatest of these is the literary.’

  ‘I’m not talking to you in this mood.’

  ‘Then we must part as enemies. Our pact is annulled. If I get the estate, I’ll give you neither quarter nor lenity. You’ll be out of here on your ear before Gulban is cold in his coffin.’

  ‘Goodbye.’

  Cookie hurried out of the back office and up the stairs to his bedroom. Though he felt that he should do something, he had no idea what it might be.

  Chapter 26

  Joey remained in the back office playing with Pauline’s calculator while trying to recall from his schooldays a mnemonic for trigonometrical ratios. He was full of heady excitement, which led him to think that life would be more enjoyable if it provided more occasions for self-assertion. It was a pity that Cookie had made no attempt to explain away his double-dealing. He had been aware, no doubt, that if you present your opponent with an open goal, he will soon get tired of scoring.

  Pauline came in with the post and told him that bookings for Easter were up on last year.

  ‘I’m impressed with your calculator. Mine can only add, subtract, multiply and divide. Yours has got all sorts of funny buttons: sines, cosines, cosecants and cotangents. It must be a godsend for calculating small profit margins.’

  ‘I didn’t choose it.’ She sliced open a banker’s envelope with her keen little guillotine. ‘It was given me last year by a commercial traveller who said, “Punch that and think of me.” Sadly, he changed jobs and I haven’t seen him since.’

  ‘Life is full of little tragedies, and the sad thing is that no amount of them will ever add up to a great one. My little tragedy is that I must leave you to your guillotine now. I’m going over the way to cheer up Old Gildea.’

  She opened another envelope and never looked up as he said goodbye. Crossing the river, he gave a sustained whistle in response to an invisible lark somewhere in the vacant sky above. The torrent of song pursued him to the bottom of the hill where Gildea’s lane led off the paved road, lasting all of six minutes without a break. It lent impetus to his sense of mission, of knowing what he was about, of being totally and indubitably in control. He laughed as he remembered the mnemonic: ‘Snails of high class are horrible to one another.’ He would tell it to Pauline when he got back, if only to complicate her hitherto innocent relationship with her calculator.

  He found Gildea on his knees in the garden, weaving a creel from sally rods, his wrinkled neck noticeably pale after the sunless winter. As Joey approached, he straightened and lit a stump of a pipe in which nothing but the dottle remained. He did not turn to Joey. He stood staring at the green wigwam of rods in front of him.

  ‘So you’ve come to offer me a hand?’

  ‘How did you guess?’

  ‘Get weaving then and let us see how handy you are.’

  ‘I’ve come to make a bargain, not a creel. I’m here to offer you four thousand pounds for the island.’

  ‘Again?’

  ‘I’m a fair-minded man, I wouldn’t offer you three.’

  ‘What would an old man like me do with four thousand pounds?’

  ‘You’re not too old yet, you’ll soon find someone young enough to help you spend it.’

  ‘I need so little these days. Slash bought me an ounce of expensive pipe tobacco yesterday. I told him I’d prefer cheap plug, not because it’s cheap but because it’s stronger. I have two new pipes that poor Alicia gave me. I never smoke them now, I just look at them.’

  ‘You could travel. You’ve never seen the city. It’s a marvellous and sinful place.’

  ‘What’s the good in watching other people sinning?’

  ‘I’ll make it four and a half thousand. That’s my final offer.’

  ‘Would you take me to the city for a week and show me the good by day and the bad at night?’

  ‘I’ll do better: I’ll show you the bad and the good both day and night.’

  Old Gildea fished the heel of a plug from his pocket and slowly charged his pipe. Joey looked out at the distant island and waited. Smoke rose from Gildea’s pipe, and still no word broke the tension.

  ‘I’ll take four and a half thousand clear. The money we spend in the city must come out of your own pocket.’

  ‘It’s a bargain,’ said Joey. ‘We’ll get our solicitors working on it right away.’

  ‘I said four and a half clear. You’ll have to pay my solicitor as well as your own.’

  ‘You’re a hard man.’

  ‘So is your father, though he has a likeable side to him as well. When he married your mother, he went out and bought himself a swanky hat. The first Su
nday he wore it, a gust of wind blew it off his head into the sea. His head was the wrong shape for a hat. I’ve worn a hat all my life and never lost one yet. The Herons always had money but they never had luck. If I knew you’d bring bad luck to my island, I wouldn’t let you have it.’

  ‘Do you have to clear the deal with Slash?’

  ‘No, the island is mine to sell or not sell. Now it will be yours and the money will be mine, but the sight of the island will still be mine.’

  Joey couldn’t wait to get home. He went straight to Gulban’s room and shook him by the shoulder. Gulban woke, then seemed to drop off immediately. Joey sat by the bed and waited.

  ‘Are you awake?’ he asked.

  ‘There’s something on your mind. That’s why you’re here.’

  ‘I’ve got news for you. I’ve bought the island off Old Gildea.’

  ‘You could breed rabbits on it, big white ones that will look like lambs from the mainland.’

  ‘This is a red-letter day for us Herons. At last we’ll own the island. We’ll be on the headland and off it.’

  ‘You’ll have to pay rates on it.’

  ‘Of course.’

  ‘I’ll make a bargain with you. If the income from your island in the first year is enough to pay the rates, I’ll give you a fiver.’

  ‘It will be greater than the income from Fort Knox. Now that’s a white elephant if ever there was one.’

  ‘I see two white elephants, two big, lumbering behemoths so white that I can’t tell which is which.’

  ‘You’ll see the island differently when you’ve had time to think about it.’

  ‘Time … I haven’t got much of that left. Now I’m trying to get up my strength for one last meeting. I want the three of you here in this room a week today. I have things to say that can’t be left unsaid any longer. It will be a formal meeting. Pauline will take the minutes. There must be a record of the proceedings in case you need to refer to them when I’m gone. And we’ll have a proper typewritten agenda so that you can all doodle on it and pretend to be thinking. Is that clear?’