The Red Men

by Patrick McGinley

  Cookie had begun to sense that he himself had waited too long. He knew that soon he must retackle his thesis and give some thought to finding a job. In the meantime he went for walks on the hill with Pauline or for drives down the coast in the direction of Undercliff. He tried to seek out new places, yet wherever he took her he could not help feeling that both he and she had been there before.

  Mrs Bugler had moved to Wicklow. Fort Knox, a cold and lonely station, was now his own. Most days he went down and lit a fire in the living-room. Then he would wander round the other rooms for an hour, upstairs and down, or sit on the summer seat in the garden and watch blue turf-smoke uncoiling over the blackened chimney. One evening he and Pauline sat silently before the fire, drinking tea and looking into the flames.

  ‘This place gives me the creeps,’ she said. ‘Not a breath stirring inside or out. It’s difficult to imagine a normal life here. How on earth did they keep sane? Up at the hotel at least you can see sane people in the distance.’

  Before sunset they placed the fender in front of the fire and locked up. As they went out the gate, she said, ‘You must have been crazy to buy it. I shall never come here again.’

  On the way back to the hotel she stopped to listen to a cuckoo calling from the holms. He stood beside her, waiting for her to speak because he himself had nothing he wanted to say.

  He went up to Gulban’s room and sat by the bed until he could no longer make out shapes in the twilight. His father now slept for most of the day. Sometimes he woke and enquired about business, but his thoughts soon returned to the room, the bed, the ceiling, and what he could see out of the window. His mind slipped and wobbled, unable to retain its grasp on any single thought for long. The doctor came twice a week and went away without saying anything new. Towards the end of May, as the weather grew warmer, he seemed to recover a little of his zest and acuity. That morning he had demanded bacon rashers for breakfast and he had read the newspaper before lunch. Now he opened his eyes and asked Cookie if he could lose his temper.

  ‘I don’t like shouting and I don’t like bluster,’ Cookie replied.

  ‘A good hotel manager must be able to lose his temper. Otherwise how can he control a bone-idle staff?’

  ‘He could talk quietly and carry a big cudgel.’

  ‘You must be seen to lose your temper. I’ve been seen to lose mine more often than I’ve actually lost it. The knack is to lose your temper only when all about you are keeping theirs.’

  Cookie laughed. He had heard this cynical incisiveness before.

  ‘Life is a game of hide and seek,’ Gulban continued after a pause. ‘Some men are good at hiding and some are good at seeking. Are you a hider or a seeker?’

  ‘A seeker.’

  ‘And what are you seeking?’

  ‘What the hiders have hidden.’

  ‘You won’t get elected on that ticket.’

  ‘If I don’t get this hotel, I’m going to be a professor.’

  ‘A professor! Go into politics. Live in the power-house. I always said that if Grandad had stayed in America, we’d have had a Heron in the White House by now. We’re every bit as lecherous as the Kennedys, and besides, we know when to be lecherous – and where. Are you lecherous, Cookie?’

  ‘Very.’

  ‘I like a man to be specific. How do you spend your evenings?’

  ‘Mostly reading.’

  ‘A lechery of the mind! What did you do yesterday evening?’

  ‘I took Pauline to town for a meal.’

  ‘Have you taken her out before?’

  ‘Oh, yes.’

  ‘Regularly?’

  ‘We do go out together fairly regularly.’

  ‘I didn’t know. Growing old is knowing less and being sure of less. And not just because no one tells you anything. I’m surprised that Pauline never mentioned it.’

  ‘Perhaps she didn’t realise that you were absolute for lechery.’

  ‘You have the makings of a professor, I can see that. Remember this, remember it when I’ve gone: keep your grip on common things – you’re descended from practical men who never drew the dole.’

  Cookie crossed the landing with a sense of imminent disablement. He took down his suitcase from the top of the wardrobe and stared into it. He could pack in twenty minutes. If he left in the morning, he could be in Dublin by lunchtime. He would find a flat and finish footnoting his thesis before taking the Golden Road to Samarkand. He gave a laugh of derision and closed the suitcase. He thought it wise to talk to Pauline before Gulban sent for her.

  She was in the back office typing a business letter which began: ‘I am sorry to have to tell you that there is no substitute for … ’ Yet we are all hell-bent on the quest for substitutes, he thought. Gulban seeks a new Jack. If Joey is right, Alicia was just a paler Pauline. And now Pauline herself? Perhaps only childhood is central: perhaps all else is a search for surrogates.

  ‘I’ve been up to see Gulban. He asked me more questions than a policeman.’

  ‘He must be on the mend.’

  ‘When I told him we had dinner in town last night, he wanted to know if we go out together often. I got the impression that he was surprised you hadn’t told him.’

  She looked up from the typewriter with a patient smile.

  ‘Then he’s really on the mend,’ she said.

  She sat staring at the letter in the typewriter. It ended in mid-sentence with the word ‘because’. She felt weary and stale, and it occurred to her that the weariness and staleness were an infection she had caught from Cookie. It was not like her to sit paralysed before an unfinished letter, as if the burden of work, indeed of all existence, had become too heavy for her shoulders.

  Yesterday he had said to her, ‘The foremost thing to be avoided in life is doing the same thing for too long. We are restless souls. We must have change, even change for the worse. On his sick-bed Gulban continues to maim us all. As we wait for him to die, we ourselves die instead, and by our dying we give him strength for yet another day. We should cut free, you and I. As long as we stay here, we’re only symbols in a dying man’s cosmology. What do you think?’

  ‘We have different responsibilities,’ she had replied. ‘You have to finish your thesis and think of your career.’

  ‘I wasn’t thinking of either. I was thinking of young life, and spring all round us in the fields.’

  ‘I’ve thought about that already, I shall stay.’

  She wondered if her paralysis had come from her sense of wrongness in the order and shape of things. She kept remembering the mare in her dream and the visitor who came and went and now did not bear thinking about. She lived in a dark, damp basement in which the air was thick with the spores of puffed fungi. She plucked the unfinished letter from the typewriter and said loudly and clearly, ‘I shall never, can never, fall in love with anyone again.’

  At ten she climbed the stairs with Gulban’s rum punch on a tray. He was lying on his back, his hands locked and his tufted nose venting above the covers. His eyes were closed, his features set in a grainy mask of suffering. She placed the tray on the night table, closed the window, and quietly drew the curtains. Now the fresh-scented night had been locked out. The room had become an enclosed retreat where time was viscous treacle through which thoughts and words swam slowly and in no predictable order.

  ‘What do you think of Cookie?’ His eyes remained closed as he spoke.

  ‘We get on reasonably well as a rule.’

  ‘At our extraordinary meeting he was the only one who didn’t try to influence me. Is that a good thing or a bad thing?’

  ‘It shows detachment.’

  ‘Or apathy. You like Cookie, I can tell.’

  He opened his watery eyes and peered through a twilight haze without seeming to focus. She sat down beside the bed, her face now close to his.

  ‘Will you drink your rum punch?’

  ‘You must stop going out with him.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because you�
��re brother and sister. You share the same flesh and blood.’

  His hands unlocked. One of them twitched on the bed, which caused him to place the other on top of it. His wiry hair had become a cap of matted bristles. She knew that he could not see her. Though his eyes stared, what they really saw was the frantic succession of images inside his head.

  ‘You mustn’t say such things. You’ve been sleeping and dreaming, now you’re awake again.’

  ‘You’re his half-sister and I’m your father. Your mother never told you, she didn’t wish you to know.’

  He closed his eyes and seemed to drop off. Though she wanted to shake him, she sat frozen on her chair.

  ‘If I’m Cookie’s half-sister, then I’m Bosco’s as well.’ The words were alien but horrifyingly real.

  ‘Your mother and I fell in love. After you were born, we had a row and even after her husband died she never relented.’

  ‘Can’t you see it’s all a dream?’ she whispered. ‘You never had a daughter and you want one. Well, I’m willing to be your daughter.’

  ‘It isn’t wishful thinking, it’s the truth.’

  ‘Then it’s worse than wishful thinking. You’ve made it up to drive a wedge between me and Cookie.’

  ‘I’ve lived my life without speaking. Your mother died without speaking. If I died and took the secret with me, I might suffer for the evil I’d left behind.’

  ‘It can’t be true. I was engaged to Jack and you said nothing. I know you wanted Jack and me to marry.’

  ‘Jack and you weren’t related, Jack was not my son.’

  ‘He was your favourite son. You were going to leave him everything, you told me so yourself.’

  ‘He was Andy Early’s son. Ellen confessed to me on her death-bed, she wouldn’t have told a lie. After that I watched him growing up from a distance. By the time he was sixteen, I’d realised that he’d become my son. From the start he modelled himself on me, he was the only one among them that grew into a man. When he took up with you, I was delighted. You’re a Heron. The hotel would be run by a Heron and your family and his would have the blood of the Red Men in their veins.’

  ‘Is Bosco your son?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And Joey?’

  ‘Yes, and if I say he’s God’s vengeance on me for sinning with your mother, will you believe me?’

  His voice was barely audible. He spoke with such effort that he seemed to be making up the story as he went along. She thought for a moment and pounced on the glaring fault.

  ‘Andy Early was a tramp, and you’ve said yourself that your wife was a holy woman. She’d never have been unfaithful to you with Andy Early.’

  ‘She was a religious woman, at least from the neck up. She never read a book without a nihil obstat and an imprimatur signed by a bishop. When Bosco was born, I told her I wanted a daughter next. Two years passed and nothing happened. One night she dreamt that she would never conceive again. Andy Early was a good-looking young man then. He was a spoilt priest, he’d been expelled from the seminary, and whenever he passed this way he would talk to her about the lives of the saints. She saw him as Elisha; and herself as the wealthy woman of Shunem in the Bible. She asked me to give him free bed and board, and I saw no reason to refuse, because he and I got on well and he used to do odd jobs for me from time to time. She told him that she was praying for a daughter, and, having read the Bible himself, he took the hint and gave her a son.’

  Gulban gave a long, hacking laugh that ended in a wheezing cough. When he got his breath back, there were tears in his eyes and on his cheeks.

  ‘He opened the floodgates with his prophetic you-know-what. After Jack, she had Cookie and Joey. She’d have had more if she hadn’t died.’

  ‘It’s all lies,’ she told him fiercely. ‘With each new twist you give the story, you make it more impossible to believe.’

  ‘If you’re not my daughter, why did I pay for your convent education?’

  ‘My mother told me why. You wanted to bribe her into going to bed with you but she refused.’

  ‘I told you that after you were born she turned against me. She thought I was going to bed with Mrs Bugler because it suited Mrs Bugler to give that impression.’

  ‘You’re wicked, wicked, wicked. You couldn’t be my father. I have a father already, and you’re jealous. You know you haven’t long to live and you refuse to leave without wreaking as much havoc as you can.’

  ‘Ask yourself why you got the job of manageress here.’

  ‘I’ve got business brains, that’s why.’

  ‘You weren’t qualified. I took you on because you were my daughter. Your business brains come from me.’

  ‘Lies, lies, lies.’ The words became stones that did not thud as she hurled.

  Incensed by her own impotence, she took him by the shoulders and plunged him up and down on the springing mattress. His body became a wet sheet, and the headboard a corrugated washboard on washday.

  ‘I had a father and he’s dead,’ she insisted. ‘He was a kindly man, a doctor and a gentleman who wouldn’t hurt a fly. If he’d lived, he’d have sent me to a good school and he wouldn’t have taken me away before I’d done my exams. I’d have gone to university and got a good degree. I’d have read medicine and … ’

  He struggled to raise his arms. He seemed to cough. A rattle of phlegm and a loud, rasping KR-A-A-H came up out of his open gullet. She stopped plunging and his bristly head fell sideways on the pillow with its slack mouth open.

  She waited for a movement, an exhalation, the merest sign of life. She stood over him, paralysed by panic and a kind of physical revulsion that made it impossible for her to feel his pulse. At length she dragged herself to her room and sat by the empty bed staring at a threadbare rug between her feet. A moth came in the window and started circling distractedly about the cylindrical lampshade. It rose and dropped, it grazed the ceiling with its wings, while through the transparent base of the lampshade loomed the blurred forms of other moths that had been attracted by brightness on other summer nights.

  She sat for a long time, aware of nothing but emptiness and exhaustion that turned her thoughts into random involutions, unfocused and unfelt. She could not move, she could not instigate. She could only sit impassively and wait for the frantic moth to join the other dead moths inside the lampshade. After a while she struggled to find a hard, dry oat of truth among the fluffy chaff of falsehood that threatened to smother her, but all she could see was an ugly gash, a malodorous wound from which no poultice could draw the paralysing poison.

  She would say nothing to Bosco, Cookie and Joey. What Gulban had told her was meant to hurt them too. She would do her best with the funeral arrangements and endure the funeral itself. She would escape from the disgusting nightmare to a place without a history that warped and thwarted. Would she escape from the memory of the pursuing mare and the midnight visitor whom she thought had come to cleanse and had left her smeared and filthy?

  The moth had entered the lampshade. It was circling mesmerically in the heat, seeking urgent escape from the burning bulb. She struggled to her feet and switched off the light. For a time she stood by the west window staring out through the darkness at the beam of the lighthouse sweeping the Sound and the wider bay.

  At midnight she went back to Gulban’s room. He hadn’t moved. She made as if to touch his cheek, then quickly withdrew her hand. She roused Cookie and Joey, who came in their pyjamas and after a brief consultation pronounced him dead. She telephoned Father Bosco, who murmured In paradisum deducant te angeli and promised to come immediately. Other people were hurrying, talking, planning. Things were happening round her, conveying an impression that perhaps somewhere, though not here, was a world of sanity, order and light.

  Chapter 28

  At Father Bosco’s suggestion the brothers met in Gulban’s office immediately after breakfast. They looked pinched for lack of sleep. Father Bosco had nicked himself shaving. On the rim of his shiny white collar was a tiny speck
of blood. They sat round the desk, facing a vacant high-backed chair.

  ‘It’s the end of an era.’ Father Bosco gave an impression of stubborn deliberation.

  ‘We must try not to blame God for that,’ Joey said.

  ‘As the eldest, Father Bosco, you should take the chair,’ Cookie suggested.

  ‘If you are both agreeable, we’ll do him the courtesy of leaving it vacant till after the funeral.’

  ‘Till after the will is read,’ Joey said firmly.

  ‘I thought we should meet to consider the funeral arrangements,’ Father Bosco began. ‘He has expressed his wishes. Quite simply, we must decide whether to carry them out.’

  ‘You will be officiating,’ said Cookie. ‘You know what is proper. I’m content to leave the decision to you.’

  ‘Ditto here,’ said Joey.

  ‘In that event I suggest a quiet funeral on land rather than water. I’ll say a Requiem Mass with two other priests concelebrating. We’ll have a choir, the local choir, but no undertaker and no hearse.’

  ‘Will there be funeral offerings?’ Joey asked.

  ‘Of course. Are there any other questions?’

  ‘No,’ said Cookie.

  ‘In that event I’ll get on with the arrangements.’

  Father Bosco rose ceremoniously.

  ‘It must be one of the shortest meetings ever held in this room,’ Joey said. ‘Try to be a bit less laconic in your funeral tribute, Father. People might get the wrong impression.’

  Soon the hotel, upstairs and down, flowed with visitors – neighbours and customers who hadn’t seen Gulban for nearly a year and who wished to take the opportunity of satisfying themselves that the news of his death was not just another rumour. Father Bosco had appointed himself master of ceremonies; he had taken charge of all arrangements except the catering, which he left to Pauline. Already she had become a mere observer on the forgotten periphery of things.