by William King
13
LADEN WITH BOTTLES OF SHERRY and whiskey and a basket of groceries with the Queen’s head on pots of jam, M.J. turns up at Ardglass that Christmas, only his second since our brother Mossie’s body had been dragged out of the Thames. In a new Wolsey he drives into the yard as Gerry is watering the cows at the trough. His visit, however, is much more than a homecoming for the festive season. He has got word of a manse and a hundred acres for sale outside Killarney. By St Stephen’s Day he is restless, and asks me to go with him to view the property.
‘Gerry, you go along too,’ my mother says in a loud voice.
Reeking of drink, Gerry throws himself into the back and lies there, a ridiculous smile on his flushed face.
‘Very little to do to the house,’ says M.J. as we wave goodbye to the Protestant minister and crunch our way back along the gravel driveway. ‘And that old bloke hasn’t much to live on.’
‘They were built to last,’ I say. Already, Gerry is beginning to snore in the back.
M.J. relaxes behind the wheel. ‘Nothing like having a stake in your own country, Tommy.’
‘No, I suppose not.’
‘Anyway, we’re only getting back from that crowd what they took from us.’
We traverse common ground: Seery, Horse Muldoon, and Garryowen, the goings-on at The Highway. ‘Not a bit of trouble now since I brought in the heavy gang.’
‘Good.’
‘And Jody is over in Bristol with his other woman.’ He gives me a sidelong glance. ‘I shouldn’t be talking like this now to a fella that’s going on for the Church.’
‘I’m much the same since you saw me last.’
‘He’ll go home to the wife and kids for a few days before the New Year. The wife wouldn’t live in England, wanted to be near her mother, and Jody couldn’t find work around Galway. He sends on the money order without fail.’
Gerry suddenly comes alive as we are approaching Farranfore: ‘Tomásheen is right, M.J., they were built to last.’ He leans forward, ‘Will we have something, lads?’ Tis Christmas and the three of us don’t meet much.’
‘One then.’ M.J. glances at me.
A wrenboys’ party is in full swing in the pub: dancers tap the wooden floor with their Christmas shoes; twirling skirts rise higher, showing stocking tops and suspenders and causing shouts from the men seated on the high stools. The air is thick with the smell of drink and cigarettes.
Those home from England are easy to pick out: they wear shiny suits and gold watches and throw pound notes on the counter. And they are good at jiving. Some of them know M.J., and, swaying on their feet, try to stand us drinks.
‘Have something stronger, Tomásheen, for Christ’s sake, and don’t be like an oul lady with your bottle of lemonade,’ says Gerry, eyeing my glass.
M.J. rounds on him: ‘Don’t you think there’s enough topers in the Galvins already? And by the way, when are you going to give up being a drunkard?’
‘You see this, M.J.’ He lifts his glass: ‘After the first of January, as God is my judge, not another drop will touch my lips.’
M.J. glares at him and looks as if he might slap the glass out of his hand, but Gerry rambles off to talk to the shiny suits. As soon as he has gone, M.J. edges in with the other reason for his visit: would I go over for a few days – some of his workers didn’t get home – just to give them their Christmas box?
‘I don’t know.’
‘I’m up to my eyes getting books in order with Seery. And I’ve to see some people about the Heathrow job. You’d be doing me a big favour. Just to give them a few quid. They’re in bad shape, but they’re good lads.’
‘I suppose I could manage it.’
‘And there’s a big do at the Irish Club on New Year’s Eve. I’d like you to be there. I’ll get you an oul dress suit.’
The mother puts on a scowl when I tell her: ‘I suppose I’ve no say in this house any more. The big man with his money decides everything.’ Then, as if with the slightest touch of a button, she unleashes a torrent of abuse. ‘My son Mossie would be alive today only for him. He sends you to that college with the big nobs, and your father crying his eyes out every time you went back after the holidays, and saying “Why isn’t the Christian Brothers School good enough?” I’m to be pitied if ever a woman was.’
‘Only for three or four days. I’ll have another week’s holidays when I get back.’
In a taxi from Heathrow, I watch people hurry along the wet streets, umbrellas tilted against the driving sleet, fringes of snow by the kerbs. Pink and yellow and blue neon streams run down the taxi window as we pass the Odeon cinema on Gloucester Road.
Vera is rushing from the kitchen to the dining-room and back. ‘Have to meet Bertie, me hubby. We’re going to Bayswater, Tommy. Victor Sylvester’s playing at the Palais.’
‘Fine, Vera.’
Envelopes behind the radiogram. Back tomorrow, M.J. has scribbled on the back of a cigar box left on the hallstand; beside it, the keys of the Corsair. I take the batch of addressed envelopes to the dining-room where Vera is now placing a casserole dish on a green and red tablecloth.
‘I’ve ice-cream in the fridge for you. Your favourite.’ She pauses for a moment at the table, a neat apron over her skirt. ‘That brother of yours, he’ll run himself into the ground, he will. Doesn’t half-finish his meal, and he’s gone. See you tomorrow then. Ta ra, love.’ On her way to the kitchen, she can’t resist preening herself in the mirror.
‘Thanks, Vera.’
The sleet turns to snow overnight; small drifts lie against the garden walls and on window ledges as I drive at a snail’s pace up Magenta Drive the following morning. At a slope in the road, children are taking turns on a sledge; cries of excitement fill the pure air when a snowball smashes against a child’s woollen hat and dissolves into a shower of white powder.
The roads are almost free of traffic, so I stop now and again to check the addresses. A boy on a three-wheel delivery bike appears above the brow of the hill and then freewheels down the slope whistling Perry Como’s ‘Magic Moments’. On the basket carrier is a metal plate: Hammond’s Sausages, a cut above the rest.
In the first lodging house, a woman peers at me through a chink in the open door.
‘Yes?’
‘I’m here to see a couple of friends.’
‘Are you family, Pat?’
‘A friend.’
Reluctantly, she stands aside, and, with a look of contempt, points upstairs: ‘Tell them they’re out if they don’t stop pissing in the bed.’
‘I will.’
‘Their last chance. Do you ’ear, Pat?’
‘I hear.’
‘Second landing, the door on the right.’
As I climb the cold stairs, a man’s barking voice rises from below: ‘What was that all about?’
‘Another Paddy. Filthy lot. I should never ’ave taken them in. Only for you.’ The door bangs shut.
A murmur of voices leads me to a door with peeling paint. I knock.
‘Who’s there?’
With caution, I turn the doorknob and catch the dense smell of sweat and stale beer. A gas fire casts a reddish glow over the dark room. After a moment I make out three mounds on rumpled beds; another man in a string vest and shorts is hunched in front of the gas fire.
‘Close the fucken door,’ says one of the mounds.
‘I’m Tommy. M.J. Galvin’s brother.’
‘Even if you’re the Lord Almighty, I’m goin’ out to no fucken site on a day like this.’
On the fireguard are shorts and socks that look like dried bits of sticks or strips of cardboard, standing rather than lying on the network.
I close the door and the draught causes a string of tinsel to loosen its hold on the window and flicker as it falls.
‘I’ve a few Christmas presents.’
The men raise themselves and peer at me. Then, with low growls of contentment, they tear open the envelopes and count the notes: thirty-year-old children wit
h dark stubble seeing what Santa has brought.
‘The blessin’s ’a God on you, boybawn. You’ll have a drop?’ says the man in the string vest; already he is making towards the bottle of Powers on the windowsill.
‘Thanks, but I’ve a few journeys to make. And the snow.’ I’m searching for the doorknob behind me.
‘Good man.’
‘Right so.’
‘Thanks, boy.’
‘Dacent man, M.J.’
‘Happy New Year, boybawn.’ One man is already tucking the envelope beneath the pillow and pulling the bedclothes about his head.
Garryowen’s one-room flat in Maitland Park is my last port of call. The flat complex, a functional building of windows and pebbledash, looks old and dirty above the white carpet. Melted ice and slush trickle down a drainpipe. On the opposite side of the street, a man is shovelling snow off the footpath in front of a dull brown building. He calls out: ‘Hey mate, over ’ere.’
I cross the street.
‘The body’s in the fridge, mate. I’ll take you up.’
‘The body. What body?’
He looks closely at me. ‘Aren’t you from the undertakers?’
‘No.’
‘O Jeez, mate, I thought you were, you know, here for the stiff. The black tie and the white shirt.’ He breaks into laughter.
‘Sorry, mate, and he’s one of your countrymen too. Poor bloke, brought to the morgue only yesterday.’ With a nod, he indicates the front door. ‘No one to claim the poor blighter. Life can be shitty, Pat.’
‘It can.’
He talks while shovelling. The body had been found on a disused ground behind a Catholic church. ‘Only a skeleton, mate, d’you get me? In rags. Been staying at the same spot for the past seventeen years, mate, the locals told the rozzers. Awful smell, Pat. Rats, d’you get me? A few children playing hide-and-seek found him. Mayo – the only name he ever had. Always singing the same song: something about Mayo. Pity no one claimed him, Pat, because the cops found over two thousand quid in a tin box. And some Irish prayer.’ He checks his watch. ‘The padre and the undertakers should be ’ere any minute. I got to be back to me missus by three. Ta-ra, Pat.’
I climb the stairs to Garryowen’s flat. ‘You didn’t make the journey home,’ I say while he is clearing a crumpled heap off a chair and throwing it on the bed: a necktie, the knot still on, falls onto the worn linoleum.
‘Have a drop, boy.’ Tis freezin’.’
Before I can stop him, he pours whiskey into tea-stained mugs and puts a glass of water on the table: the blue Formica top is pockmarked with cigarette burns.
‘Happy New Year, boy. I hope ’62 is better than the one gone out. And the Lord have mercy on the dead.’
‘Amen. You didn’t get back for Christmas.’
‘No.’ He shakes his head and smiles: ‘Ah, a crowd of us went to Holyhead, but sure, while we were in the pub, doesn’t the fucken boat go out without us. Yerra boy, when you’re not doin’ much for yourself over here, you don’t want to go home. Wouldn’t give them the satisfaction.’
Springs creak when he sits on the bed. ‘I believe you’re goin’ to Maynooth College now.’
‘All Saints.’
‘Never heard of that place. Foolish man. You could be a millionaire.’
He takes a swig from the mug and breaks into a fit of coughing from deep in his chest. ‘I may as well tell you: I never had much time for priests, or all this talk about heaven and hell. When they throw you down, that’s the end, Tommy. And hell? Sure, Jaysus, aren’t we livin’ that every day.’
He reaches across with the whiskey bottle, but I cover the mug.
‘The priest, when I was a gorsoon, only wanted the company of the dispensary doctor or farmers with big creamery cheques. Oul snobs.’ On the mantelpiece are two Christmas cards and a bottle of Aspro. ‘Although I’ve met a few good ones over here. Father Harty – he’s a dacent man. Likes his comforts. An eye for the women too – small blame to him.’ He tilts the bottle of Powers over his mug. ‘Maybe we can do nothin’right in our own fucken country, includin’ religion.’
In a recess in the wall are a few books: among them An Introduction to the Basics of Engineering, Zane Grey novels, a hardcover copy of The Art of Self-Defence by Jack Dempsey and Songs of a Sourdough.
‘You’re back to work on Monday,’ I say, to get away from talk of snobbish priests.
‘And thanks be to God for that, because if we don’t have a shovel in our paws, we’d go mad. The site and the pub, boy – that’s all we have.’ He spits in his hands and rubs them together; his face creases when he grins. ‘A twelve-storey block in Slough, bright and early on Monday mornin’, rain, hail or snow. Thirty pounds a week isn’t bad. Teachers at home aren’t makin’ that for all their oul go on.’
And few of them will leave it in the Crown or in Richmond Street comes to my lips, but instead I gesture towards the books: ‘Have you read them?’
‘Ah, I had plans when I came over. Oul night school. Make my money and go home to buy a bit of land.’ He offers me a Sweet Afton; more coughing when he lights up and inhales. ‘Yerra, you’d be a laughin’ stock on the site if you were caught with books. We brought the oul begrudgery over with us, boy.’
‘Pity.’ The night in The Highway when he staggered towards Bonnie and myself and threw a baleful eye on my novel comes winging back.
Darkness is falling as I return to the house with the scattered fragments of human wreckage floating around in my head: Garryowen missing the boat, ‘Moonlight In Mayo’, ‘the site and the pub, boy’. The snow has now turned to slush, except for little white hills on pillars and at sheltered corners. Figures in tightly belted overcoats and carrying umbrellas pick their steps and smile if they brush or collide with one another.
Outside a cinema, a queue is forming to see Charlton Heston and Sophia Loren in El Cid. A man in a trilby and a mackintosh is stamping his feet; the woman beside him checks the seams of her nylons and then glances at the drivers waiting for the green light.
M.J. rings to say he’ll be late and to apologize to Vera, and would she put his dinner in the oven? ‘He’ll give himself a heart attack, he will,’ she says as she places a plate of steak and chips in front of me. She is off again with Bertie, to a party in Kensington. She touches up her perm: ‘I believe,’ she says without taking her eyes off the mirror, ‘that you are studying to be a priest. The Reverend Mr Galvin.’ She laughs.
‘Trying it out anyway, Vera.’
‘So you’ll never get married then?’
‘Yes, that’s the way it is.’
‘Bit of a waste if you ask me, but then as my Bertie says, “Each man to his own.”’
Before leaving, she returns, wearing a red coat that matches her lipstick, and carrying a floral umbrella.
‘The big dance tomorrow night, Tommy.’ She fills the room with the scent of her perfume. ‘I’ll get Mr Galvin’s dress suit from the dry-cleaners in the morning, and I’ve rented one for you. Hope it fits. Okey-dokey, I’m off. Ta-ra, love.’
The New Year’s Eve dinner and social is held at the Irish Club in Eaton Square. Guests of honour are the two McMorrow brothers from Sligo, one of the biggest firms of road builders in Britain: they have done long stretches of the M1, as well as bypasses and major intersections. From time to time they have featured in The Irish Press and the Irish Independent. Another success story. With only two rented lorries, they had begun clearing up rubble in post-war London. Now they have winners at Doncaster and Ascot, their sons have gone to Stonyhurst and acquired clipped English accents. ‘Slave drivers,’ Garryowen had called the brothers: ‘They’d hang their mother for the last penny.’ Some of their workers had joined M.J., hearing that the boss ‘has an oul way about him’.
The function is held in a long banqueting hall with a bar lit up in a golden arch at one side: white linen cones, tall glasses and the sparkle of silver cutlery on the long rows of tables.
As the guests are crowding into the
hall, M.J. calls me aside; he is flushed and restless: a boy at his first dance.
‘Guess who I met earlier.’
‘Man or woman?’
‘Woman.’
‘Her Royal Highness, the Queen.’
‘Close. Grace Healy.’
He draws on a cigar: ‘She’s doing one of them swanky nursing courses. Queen Alexandra, I think she said.’
‘I told you that last summer.’
But he is not listening: ‘Look. There she is. Over there.’
A group of men and women are chatting in one corner of the hall where a man is pulling back a chair for Grace to sit on. Unlike the pint drinkers who stand at the bar, they give the impression of being at home in dress suits and cufflinks, with women wearing taffeta – the men hold tumblers, the women sip sherry, or gin and tonic with a slice of lemon.
‘Her doctor friends from the hospital.’
While he speaks, I watch her: wearing a royal blue dress, and a string of pearls around her neck, she has the same ice-cold look and starchy gestures I’d remembered from seeing her at Ardglass chapel.
‘Turned out to be a fine-looking woman,’ he says. ‘Anyway, I’ll see you later.’
Galvin men who work in the trenches and keep the mixer going look out of place and clumsy; they have never been in the Irish Club before and most likely will not be again. So they keep to themselves and throw brooding looks at the cigar-smoking quantity surveyors and engineers.
‘I tried to get them to join us,’ M.J. says when we are called to take our places at the long tables. He leans over. ‘You might stroll round to them later. This is all beyond them.’ He throws his eyes towards the cornices: ‘’Tis far away from chandeliers any of us were reared.’
We stand to attention when His Eminence, John Cardinal O’Hara sails into the room as if on castors, his crimson cloak of washed silk trailing behind him. A young priest sweeps ahead, clearing a passage, like a fussy waiter; then, with a stylized gesture of his hand, guides His Eminence to the top table beside the McMorrows. The Cardinal recites a prayer in Latin and blesses the room.