There was more about Maureen. In the pages of the colour supplement Mrs McDowd said her daughter had been a helpful child. Her father said she’d been his special child. When she was small she used to go out with him to the fields, watching how he planted the seed-potatoes. Later on, she would carry out his tea to him, and later still she would assist with whatever task he was engaged in. Father Sallins gave it as his opinion that she had been specially chosen. A nun at the convent in Mountcroe remembered her with lasting affection.
O’Kelly fell prey to this local feeling. Whether they knew what they were doing or not, the people of Drimaghleen were protecting the memory of Maureen McDowd, and the Superintendent went along with the tide. She was a local girl of unblemished virtue, who had been ‘specially chosen’. Had he publicly arrived at any other conclusion Superintendent O’Kelly might never safely have set foot in the neighbourhood of Drimaghleen again, nor the village of Kilmona, nor the town of Mountcroe. The Irish do not easily forgive the purloining of their latter-day saints.
‘I wanted to tell you this stuff had been written,’ Father Sallins said. ‘I wanted it to be myself that informed you before you’d get a shock from hearing it elsewhere.’
He’d driven over specially. As soon as the story in the paper had been brought to his own notice he’d felt it his duty to sit down with the McDowds. In his own opinion, what had been printed was nearly as bad as the tragedy itself, his whole parish maligned, a police superintendent made out to be no better than the criminals he daily pursued. He’d read the thing through twice; he’d looked at the photographs in astonishment. Hetty Fortune and Jeremiah Tyler had come to see him, but he’d advised them against poking about in what was over and done with. He’d explained that people wanted to try to forget the explosion of violence that had so suddenly occurred in their midst, that he himself still prayed for the souls of the Butlers and Maureen McDowd. The woman had nodded her head, as though persuaded by what he said. ‘I have the camera here, Father,’ the man had remarked as they were leaving. ‘Will I take a snap of you?’ Father Sallins had stood by the fuchsias, seeing no harm in having his photograph taken. ‘I’ll send it down to you when it’s developed,’ the man said, but the photograph had never arrived. The first he saw of it was in the Sunday magazine, a poor likeness of himself, eyelids drooped as though he had drink taken, dark stubble on his chin.
‘This is a terrible thing,’ he said in the McDowds’ kitchen, remembering the photograph of that also: the cream-enamelled electric cooker, the Holy Child on the green-painted dresser, beside the alarm clock and the stack of clothes-pegs, the floor carpeted for cosiness, the blue, formica-topped table, the radio, the television set. In the photograph the kitchen had acquired an extraneous quality, just as the photograph of the Butlers’ yard had. The harsh, ordinary colours, the soiled edges of the curtains, the chipped paintwork, seemed like part of a meticulous composition: the photograph was so much a picture that it invited questioning as a record.
‘We never thought she was going to say that about Maureen,’ Mrs McDowd said. ‘It’s lies, Father.’
‘Of course it is, Mrs McDowd.’
‘We all know what happened that night.’
‘Of course we do.’
McDowd said nothing. They had taken the money. It was he who had said that the people should be allowed into the house. Three thousand, one hundred and fifty pounds was the sum the woman had written the cheque for, insisting that the extra money was owed.
‘You never said she’d been specially chosen, Father?’
‘Of course I didn’t, Mrs McDowd.’
He’d heard that Superintendent O’Kelly had gone to see a solicitor to inquire if he’d been libelled, and although he was told he probably had been he was advised that recourse in the courts would be costly arid might not be successful. The simple explanation of what had happened at the Butlers’ farm had been easy for the people of Drimaghleen and for the police to accept because they had known Mrs Butler and they had known her son. There’d been no mystery, there’d been no doubt.
‘Will we say a prayer together?’ the priest suggested.
They knelt, and when they rose again Mrs McDowd began to cry. Everyone would know about it, she said, as if the priest had neither prayed nor spoken. The story would get about and people would believe it. ‘Disadvantaged people’, she quoted from the newspaper. She frowned, still sobbing, over the words. ‘It says the Butlers were disadvantaged people. It says we are disadvantaged ourselves.’
‘That’s only the way that woman has of writing it down, Mrs McDowd. It doesn’t mean much.’
‘These simple farm folk,’ Mrs McDowd read, ‘of Europe’s most western island form limited rural communities that all too often turn in on themselves.’
‘Don’t pay attention,’ Father Sallins advised.
‘Does disadvantaged mean we’re poor?’
‘The way that woman would see it, Mrs McDowd.’
There was confusion now in Drimaghleen, in Kilmona and Mountcroe; and confusion, Father Sallins believed, was insidious. People had been separated from their instinct, and other newspaper articles would follow upon this one. More strangers would come. Father Sallins imagined a film being made about Maureen McDowd, and the mystery that had been created becoming a legend. The nature of Maureen McDowd would be argued over, books would be written because all of it was fascinating. For ever until they died her mother and her father would blame themselves for taking the money their poverty had been unable to turn away.
‘The family’ll see the pictures.’
‘Don’t upset yourself, Mrs McDowd.’
‘No one ever said she was close to being a saint. That was never said, Father.’
‘I know, I know.’
Mrs McDowd covered her face with her hands. Her thin shoulders heaved beneath the pain of her distress; sobs wrenched at her body. Too much had happened to her, the priest thought; it was too much for any mother that her murdered daughter should be accused of murder herself in order to give newspaper-readers something to think about. Her husband had turned away from the table she sat at. He stood with his back to her, looking out into the yard. In a low, exhausted voice he said:
‘What kind of people are they?’
The priest slowly shook his head, unable to answer that, and in the kitchen that looked different in Jeremiah Tyler’s photograph Mrs McDowd screamed. She sat at the blue-topped table with her lips drawn back from her teeth, one short, shrill scream following fast upon another. Father Sallins did not again attempt to comfort her. McDowd remained by the window.
Family Sins
A telegram arrived out of the blue. Come for the weekend, Hubert’s message read, and I remember the excitement I felt because I valued his friendship more than anyone else’s, I had no money for the train journey and had to raise the matter with my father. ‘It’s hard to come by these days,’ my father said, giving me only what he could easily spare. I increased it playing rummy with McCaddy the courthouse clerk, who had a passion for the game.
It was the summer of 1946. Long warm days cast an unobtrusive spell, one following another in what seemed like orderly obedience. The train I took crept through a landscape that was just beginning to lose its verdancy but was not yet parched. The railway for the last few miles of the journey ran by the sea, which twinkled brilliantly, sunlight dancing on it.
‘There’s someone called Pamela,’ Hubert said, greeting me in no other way. ‘Probably I mightn’t have mentioned her.’
We walked from Templemairt railway station, away from the sea, into a tangle of small suburban roads. Everywhere there were boarding-houses, cheaper than those by the promenade, Hubert said. Bookies’ families stayed there, he said: Sans Souci, Freshlea House, Cois na Farraige. We climbed a hill and passed through iron gates into a garden that was also on a hill, steep rockeries on either side of a path with occasional steps in it. I could see the house above us, through hollyhocks and shrubs, a glass veranda stretching the len
gth of its façade.
‘Who’s Pamela?’
‘She spends the summers here. My cousin.’
We entered the house and a voice at once called out. ‘Hubert, I should like to meet your friend.’
‘Hell,’ Hubert muttered. He led me into a small room, its burnt-brown blinds half drawn against the sun. An old woman sat at a piano, turning on the stool as we entered. She was dressed severely, in long, old-fashioned black clothes; her grey hair was swept up and neatly rolled. You could tell she had once been beautiful; and in the wrinkled tiredness of her face her eyes were still young.
‘You are very welcome,’ she said. ‘Hubert does not often invite a friend.’
‘It’s nice of you to have me, Mrs Plunkett.’
The piano stool swivelled again. The first notes of a Strauss waltz were played. I picked my suitcase up and followed Hubert from the room. In the hall he threw his eyes upwards, but did not speak. Silently we mounted the stairs, and when we reached the first-floor landing a woman’s voice called up from some lower part of the house: ‘Hubert, don’t tell me you forgot the honeycomb?’
‘Oh, God!’ Hubert muttered crossly. ‘Leave your case. We’ll have to go back for the damn thing.’
I placed my suitcase on the bed of the room we’d entered: a small cell of a place, masculine in character. Just before we left it Hubert said:
‘My grandfather had a stroke. You won’t be bothered with him. He doesn’t come downstairs.’
On a table in the hall there was a dark-framed photograph of the man he spoke of, taken earlier in his lifetime: a stern, blade-like face with a tidy grey moustache, hair brushed into smooth wings on either side of a conventional parting, pince-nez, a watch-chain looping across a black waistcoat. At school Hubert had spoken a lot about his grandfather.
‘That was Lily who was on about the honeycomb,’ Hubert said as we descended the path between the rockeries. ‘A kind of general maid I think you call her. They work the poor old thing to the bone.’
We passed out of the garden and walked back the way we’d come. Hubert talked about boys we’d been at school with, in particular Ossie Richpatrick and Gale and Furney. He’d had news of all three of them: Ossie Richpatrick had become a medical student, Gale had joined the British army, Furney was in a handkerchief business.
‘The Dublin Handkerchief Company,’ Hubert said. ‘He wrote me a letter on their writing-paper.’
‘Does he make the handkerchiefs? I can’t see Furney making handkerchiefs.’
‘He sells them actually.’
Ossie Richpatrick and Gale and Furney had left school the previous summer; Hubert and I more recently, only a matter of weeks ago. It was now August; in October I was, like Ossie Richpatrick, to become a student, though not of medicine. Hubert was uncertain about his future.
‘This is the place,’ he said. We passed through high wooden doors into what appeared to be a builder’s yard. Bricks were stacked, lengths of plumber’s piping were tied together with cord. In a shed there was a circular saw. ‘This woman sells honey,’ Hubert said.
He knocked on a half-open door and a moment later a woman arrived with a honeycomb already in her hand. ‘I saw you turning in,’ she said. ‘How are you, Hubert?’
‘I’m all right. Are you well yourself, Mrs Hanrahan?’
‘I am of course, Hubert.’
She examined me with curiosity, but Hubert made no attempt to introduce me. He gave the woman some money and received the honeycomb in return. ‘I picked that comb out for them. It’s good rich honey.’
‘You can tell by the look of it.’
‘Is your grandmother well? Mr Plunkett no worse, is he?’
‘Well, he’s still ga-ga, Mrs Hanrahan. No worse than that.’
The woman had placed her shoulder against the door jamb so that she could lean on it. You could see she wanted to go on talking, and I sensed that had I not been there Hubert would have remained a little longer. As we made our way through the yard he said: ‘She lives in ignorance of Hanrahan’s evil ways. He died a while back.’
Hubert didn’t elaborate on Mr Hanrahan’s evil ways, but suggested instead that we go down to the sea. He led the way to a sandy lane that twisted and turned behind small back gardens and came out eventually among sand dunes. He held the honeycomb by one side of its wooden frame. Wind would have blown sand into it, but the day was still, late-afternoon sunshine lightening an empty sky. We walked by the edge of the sea; there was hardly anyone about.
‘What’s your cousin like?’
‘You’ll see soon enough.’
Hubert had a face to which a faintly melancholy expression seemed naturally to belong. But when he laughed, or smiled, its bony landscape changed dramatically, delight illuminating every crevice, eyes sparkling like excited sapphires. Hair the colour of wheat was smoothly brushed, never untidy. ‘Fancies himself a dandy, does he?’ a disagreeable teacher of Greek and Latin had once remarked.
‘I’m thinking of going to Africa,’ he revealed when we’d turned and begun to make our way back to the house.
Hubert’s mother and father had been killed in a car accident in England. ‘The last thing that happened before the war,’ Hubert used to say, regaling us at school with the story of the tragedy. On Saturday September 2nd, 1939, late at night, they had driven away from a roadhouse near Virginia Water and unfortunately had had a head-on collision with a lorry belonging to a travelling zoo. There’d been a cage full of apes on the back of the lorry, Hubert subsequently reported, which the impact had caused to become unfastened. He himself had been ten at the time, at a preparatory school in the suburbs of Oxford, and he told how the headmaster had broken the news to him, introducing it with references to courage and manliness. These had failed to prepare him for the death of his parents, because he’d imagined that what was coming next was the news that he would have to be sent home on the grounds that, yet again, the fees hadn’t been paid. Already there had been the wireless announcement about the declaration of war, the whole school assembled to hear it. ‘You will know no blacker day, Hubert,’ the headmaster had asserted before releasing the more personal tidings. ‘Take strength at least from that.’
We delivered the honeycomb to the kitchen. ‘Lily,’ Hubert said, by way of introducing the wiry little woman who was kneading bread on a baking board at the table. ‘Mrs Hanrahan says it’s good rich honey.’
She nodded in acknowledgement, and nodded a greeting at me. She asked me what kind of a journey I’d had and when I said it had been unremarkable she vouchsafed the information that she didn’t like trains. ‘I always said it to Hubert,’ she recalled, ‘when he was going back to school. I suffer on a train.’
‘Have you a fag, Lily?’ Hubert asked, and she indicated with a gesture of her head a packet of Player’s on the dresser. ‘I’ll pay you back,’ he promised. ‘I’m taking two.’
‘That’s seven you owe the kitchen, mind, and I don’t want money. You go and buy a packet after supper.’
‘I was going to say, Lily, could you lend me a pound?’ As he spoke he opened a green purse beside the Player’s packet. ‘Till Tuesday that would be.’
‘It’s always till Tuesday with you. You’d think the kitchen was made of Her Ladyships.’
‘If Lily was a few years younger,’ Hubert said, addressing me, ‘I’d marry her tomorrow.’
He removed a pound note from the purse and smoothed it out on the surface of the dresser, examined the romantic countenance of Lady Lavery, raised it to his lips, and then carefully secreted the note in an inside pocket. ‘We’re going dancing tonight,’ he said. ‘Did you ever dance in the Four Provinces Ballroom, Lily?’
‘Oh, don’t be annoying me.’
We smoked in Hubert’s room, a tidily kept place with Leonardo da Vinci’s Annunciation on the wall between the windows. Hubert wound up a gramophone and then lay on his bed. I sat on the only chair. Frank Sinatra sang.
‘They’re trying to grow groundnuts in Africa,’
Hubert said. ‘I think I’d be interested in that.’
‘What are groundnuts?’
‘The groundnut is a nut they have an idea about. I think they’ll pay my fare.’
He was vague about which African country he referred to, replying when I asked him that it didn’t matter. There was another scheme he’d heard about, to do with supplying telephone-boxes, and a third one that involved teaching selected Africans the rudiments of hydraulic engineering. ‘You have to go on a course yourself, naturally enough,’ Hubert explained. ‘Personally I favour the nuts.’
He turned the record over. Sinatra sang ‘Begin the Beguine’. Hubert said:
‘We can go in on the half-seven train. We’ll have to try for a lift back. Don’t dawdle in the dining-room.’
At school Hubert had been thought of as ‘wild’, a reputation he had to some extent inherited from his father’s renown at the same school twenty-five years before. For his own part, it was not that he was constantly in breach of the rules, but rather that he tended to go his own way. Short of funds, which regularly he was, he had been known to sell his clothes. The suit of ‘sober colouring’ which we were permitted to wear on weekend exeats, and for Chapel on Sunday evenings, with either a school, House or Colours tie, he sold in a Dublin secondhand-clothes shop and, never known to go out on exeats himself, managed for Sunday Chapel with the black serge jacket and trousers that was our normal everyday wear. He sold his bicycle to Ossie Richpatrick for eleven shillings, and a suitcase for eightpence. ‘I don’t understand why that should be,’ Hubert had a way of saying in class, voicing what the rest of us felt but didn’t always have the courage to say. He didn’t mind not understanding; he didn’t mind arguing with the Chaplain about the existence of the Deity; he didn’t mind leaving an entire meal untouched and afterwards being harangued by the duty prefect for what was considered to be a form of insolence. But, most of all, what marked Hubert with the characteristics of a personality that was unusual were the stories he repeated about his relationship with his grandfather, which was not a happy one. Mr Plunkett’s strictures and appearance were endlessly laid before us, a figure emerging of a tetchy elder statesman, wing-collared and humourless, steeped in the Christian morality of the previous century. Mr Plunkett said grace at mealtimes, much as it was said at school, only continuing for longer; he talked importantly of the managerial position he had reached, after a lifetime of devotion and toil, in Guinness’s brewery. ‘Never himself touches a drop of the stuff, you understand. Having been an abstainer since the age of seven or something. A clerky figure even as a child.’ Since Hubert’s reports allowed Mrs Plunkett so slight a place in the household, and Lily none at all, his home life sounded spiky and rather cold. At the beginning of each term he was always the first to arrive back at school, and had once returned a week early, claiming to have misread the commencing date on the previous term’s report.
The Collected Stories Page 149