by Phelan, Tom;
“Ah, sure, you shouldn’t have bothered with tea at all, Annie,” was Bridie’s way of thanking Annie for her hospitality. She filled her mouth with the sweet cake, slurped loudly at the edge of the cup and continued talking. “Eddie will be sitting there staring into the fire waiting for me to make the tea for him when I get home. I was just saying, if I fell off the bike and got killed going home, wouldn’t Eddie be found dead in the chair in front of the fire, dead of starvation because I never got home to feed him? All dried out like an old rabbit skin.”
With her face glowing from the heat of the fire and her mouth still full of the taste of sweet tea and curranty cake, Bridie Coughlin stood up and brushed the crumbs off her skirt onto the floor. Meanwhile, Annie Lamb retrieved the blue coat from the drying nail in the chimney. As she held it up, Bridie put her arms behind her and backed into the sleeves. When the coat swung around her, she said, “Oh, God, Annie, but the coat feels so nice and dry and warm. You’re the only one who’d ever think of having it nice and cozy for a body. That’s one of the things that’s going to bother Jarlath when he comes home, the cold. It always does. He’ll be here for six months. Do you think I’ll be able for him, Annie? Him with his servants to look after him out in India, and they with running water and the electric; fans in the ceilings to keep them cool, no less. Fans, mind you! I was just saying, it’s not fans he’ll be needing when he comes home. It’s a good fire he’ll be wanting the whole time to keep himself warm.”
Annie Lamb threw her husband’s topcoat over her head and around her shoulders. When she opened the kitchen door, a gust of watery wind blew in on her face.
Adjusting her scarf one more time, Bridie Coughlin put her head down and stepped out into the dark. “Now, you shouldn’t be bothering coming out to see me off, Annie,” was her way of thanking Annie for her consideration.
Out on the road, Bridie took hold of the bike’s handlebars as if they were the horns of an uppity bull calf she was about to wrestle to the ground with a view to castrating him. A gust of wind howled around the two women as Bridie switched on her flashlamp and turned her bike in the direction of home. “Sure, Eddie says I’m as tough as a noul galvanized bucket, Annie. I’ll be home in no time because once I get to Tuohy’s Corner the wind will be in my back.” And then, like a lone, lost crow blown across a stormy sky, Bridie was gone.
10
In the Sunroom
In which Elsie Howard and Patrick Bracken contemplate the role of luck in human affairs.
“DEAR GOD,” MISSUS HOWARD said. “What a joyless life! I remember Bridie Coughlin, and I knew others like her who spent their lives teetering on the edge of madness. Life can be such a mean, miserable and nonstop grind for some, the nonstop fretfulness; the bitterness. How unlucky some people are!”
Silence fell into the sunroom. If there had been anyone in the garden looking in, he would have seen an old couple gazing out, their eyes lost in the distance; he would have seen the back of a man’s head, his elbows on his knees and his face enclosed in his long fingers like a hazelnut in its cupped September husk.
Even when the silence dragged on, Patrick did not feel uncomfortable. He contemplated the role of luck in people’s lives, in his own life. He saw his professional life as a road that crossed other roads; where the roads crossed, a square was formed; in those small squares, chance meetings had occurred and he had taken advantage of them by making connections. Was that what luck was? Finding oneself with someone else for a few moments in a coincidental meeting? Was making your own luck just another name for the survival of the fittest? For the most calculating? For the brightest? For the slyest? For the most devious? For the more self-assured? But Patrick knew he had also made his own luck by lying in wait in the corner of the square for the certain arrival of that other person.
In the corner of his eye Patrick thought he saw Elsie’s fingers wiping at tears. He looked directly at her and, indeed, she was surreptitiously spreading the tears on her face to make them evaporate quickly. He heard her sighing softly.
“You’re sighing, Else,” Sam said, and he changed his position, brought himself back into in the sunroom.
“Yes, Sam,” Elsie said, and she shook herself out of the sadness that had sprung her tears. “God, I was so lucky! It’s all a matter of luck”—she held up her hand to Patrick—“and I know we make our own luck to a certain extent, but pure luck, pure coincidence is a real part of it all. The Bridie Coughlins of this world didn’t have any luck at all.” She stood up. “Patrick, your story about Bridie reminded me: I have a curranty cake, and I’m going to make a fresh pot of tea.” She stood up and collected the three used cups. “Did your mother make a curranty cake every Saturday for Sunday?”
“No, Else, she didn’t. But Missus Lamb did, and her son Mikey brought some to school for his lunch on Mondays. That’s how we started being friends—when he gave me some.”
“Imagine!” Missus Howard came to a stop near the kitchen door, cups and saucers in her hands, “You married the woman you married because her brother gave you a piece of cake when you were children. Life is full of coincidences.”
Mister Howard said, “Else loves coincidences, Patrick. She believes they are foreordained by fate or God or the fairies or Mao Zedong.”
“Sam has no room in his head for anything except logic, Patrick,” Elsie said. “And no more about the return of the natives till I have the tea made.” She went into the kitchen.
Sam threw his voice after her. “The word ‘coincidence’ is invariably used incorrectly in an effort to remove the randomness from our lives.”
The sound of flowing water stopped in the kitchen, and Elsie came to the door with the kettle in her hand.
“Patrick,” she said, “I had to give Sam many infusions of romance over the years. But every now and then he falls into remission and his logical self flares up.” She retreated.
“That’s true,” Sam said to Patrick, and he raised his voice again. “She has treated me, but I had to treat her too; exfuse her romanticism and infuse her with a good dose of logic every so often, especially when it comes to coincidences.”
Elsie came back with a plate of sliced curranty cake. She said, “You’re just being stubborn and annoying with that new word of yours: ‘exfuse.’ Look it up in the dictionary, and you won’t find it. And will you stop boring Patrick with your coincidence speech, Sam. You’ll drive him away before we find out what he has to tell us.” She went out again.
She failed to derail her husband. “It’s only when we seize the randomness and rename it that coincidence enters in. We invent coincidence in order to convince ourselves that there is some purpose to our lives.”
Elsie came in with three mugs on a small tray. “There’s more tea in a mug than a cup,” she said. When she held out the tray, the two men took their tea. “I forgot the plates,” she said as she put the tray down on the table. “Randomly, I forgot the plates and if I fall and break my hip when I go back to get them it will be a coincidence that I broke it while Patrick was here because if he wasn’t here I wouldn’t have broken it.” She went out and came back immediately with three plates. As she handed them around she said, “Coincidently, gentlemen, I did not break my hip; isn’t that a coincidence?”
“Jesus!” Mister Howard said. “I’m sorry I mentioned it.”
“Wasn’t it a real coincidence that you did?” Elsie said, and Patrick almost sputtered tea.
“She never knows when to stop,” Sam said, and he smiled.
Patrick complimented Missus Howard on the quality of her cake.
“Is it as good as Missus Lamb’s?” she asked.
“You’re fishing for a compliment, Else,” Sam said
“Patrick can tell the truth,” Missus Howard said.
“Nothing will ever taste as good as Missus Lamb’s curranty cake, Else, because until I tasted hers, I had never eaten curranty cake.”
“Curranty cake and sex and everything else in the world,” Sam said. “The
re’s nothing like the first time.” The two Howards, unembarrassed, floated off into their memories for a moment. When they showed signs of returning, Patrick said, “Even though most people called him . . .”
11
The Civil Servant
1951
In which it is seen why it had to be Kevin Lalor, a.k.a. the Civil Servant, who discovered the body on the hill on a summer morning in 1951.
EVEN THOUGH MOST PEOPLE CALLED HIM Kevin to his face, they always referred to Kevin Lalor as the Civil Servant. Lalor was secretive by nature and inclination, but over the years his neighbors had drawn inferences from what he didn’t say as much as from what he allowed to escape. Some facts were inescapable.
Kevin Lalor was the only child of Betty and Pascal Lalor, both now living in a council cottage in Gohen. The quoins at the corners the windows and door were painted red. The front door was red too, and the house white. A low wall with a red gate kept cattle, horses and dogs from plundering and dropping their dung in the small flower garden. Townspeople often said to each other, “Isn’t the postman’s house as neat as a pin. It could be on a Christmas card.”
During the First Battle of the Somme a piece of exploding shell hit Pascal Lalor above the knee and left the two parts of his leg connected by a sliver of flesh. As the battle raged and soldiers ran past him into a storm of bullets fired from German machine guns, Lalor drew on reserves he never knew he had. He sat up in no-man’s land with his back to Ypres and his front to Tyne Cot, used the belt of his water can as a tourniquet, finished the shrapnel’s job with his bayonet, took the boot and sock off the dead leg, looked at its sole, and threw it away. With boot and sock clutched to his chest, he fainted from shock and loss of blood. Nineteen hours later, a searching stretcher-bearer stepped on Lalor’s stump in the dark, and Pascal came moaning back to consciousness and salvation. While a nurse in a field hospital gave him an injection of morphine in preparation for the cleaning, trimming and sewing of the stump, the boot and the sock were pulled from his clutching arms. As he floated back from morphine heaven, Lalor lingered in a layer of dense anxiety in which an English officer berated him for losing some of His Majesty’s ordinance. “Damn your lost leg, Pat. The boot and sock were army issue! Your pay will be docked.”
In 1917, from the bus stop in Gohen, Pascal Lalor rode home from the war on a black, army issued, fixed-wheel bike, the right leg doing all the pedaling, the left wooden leg hanging straight down and resting in a stirrup a few inches above the ground. In his pocket was a pension from the King and a piece of paper entitling him to a civil service job. In 1917 he married the woman he had left behind, and nine months later he was a father. When the ownership of the country finally came back into Irish hands in 1922, Pascal Lalor managed to hold on to his postman’s job, even though he had been exiled to the edge of society for having joined the British army. The old soldier would not have minded being called “Limpin Lalor” had the tone been sympathetic. But not only was the nickname used without neutrality, there was a jeer in it that rankled every time Pascal heard it.
On the strength of his father’s British army pension, his postman’s wages and a small scholarship, the son, Kevin Lalor attended the Christian Brother School in Marbra and received a secondary education. For five years Kevin traveled the seven miles of the Bog Road on his bike twice a day. He never missed a day in five years, and he won a dictionary for perfect attendance. But his most public academic achievement was the publication of his winning essay in The Leinster Express. The secondary level was as far as he traveled in the meadows of academia. He was eighteen when he got the job in the courthouse and quickly became known as the Civil Servant to everyone in Clunnyboe and Drumsally and Gohen. Seventeen years later he was the person who issued licenses for bulls, stallions, boars, dogs, guns and wirelesses throughout the county. When his parents moved into Gohen, Kevin decided to stay on in the rented house he had been born and bred in.
It was not only on account of his collar-and-tie job that Kevin Lalor was regarded by all his neighbors, except the returned exile Lawrence Gorman, as being a cut above everyone else. He occupied a lofty niche in society because he had once seen Hitler. The Civil Servant had expressed his relief on several occasions that he had not seen the apparitions at Fatima or Lourdes: “Otherwise, I’d be canonized altogether,” he was heard to say once while eating his lunch sandwich of butter and jam in the courthouse.
It was unusual in those days for the people of Clunnyboe, Drumsally and Gohen to have visitors in their houses unless they were sufficiently well off to have nice furniture instead of the scarce, vernacular creations and wooden boxes that most people had. The only way his neighbors knew about the inside of Kevin Lalor’s house was through the child Mikey Lamb. When questioned, Mikey Lamb spoke of cleanliness and warmth. There was an armchair with a cushion. There were thick books and a crystal set, thousands of postage stamps stuck into albums, a gramophone that played strange-smelling records. And on the records women sang in high voices like they were cross, and men sang like they were giving orders to everyone else in the world. And there were always two white shirts hanging upside down on the kitchen clothesline. Pictures of ducks and hens and geese hung on the kitchen walls as well as a framed copy of the essay that won the prize in The Leinster Express.
Kevin Lalor left his house at ten minutes to seven, six mornings a week, no matter what the weather was doing. On his clean, black, stout Raleigh bike, with its dynamo, bell and pump, he rode to his job in Gohen. A broad rubber band, cut from an old inner tube, danced in the center of each wheel and kept the axles shining. In bad weather Lalor wore his khaki gabardine coat, his sandwich in the left pocket, and his peaked cap. When the weather was good, he traveled in his suit and cap, with the folded overcoat tied up in its own belt on the spring-loaded carrier above the back wheel, the sandwich in the left pocket of his jacket. And, even though the chain had a gear-case cover, Lalor always wore bicycle clips at his ankles to keep the cuffs of his trousers clean. Locally, this had given rise to the adage aimed at the over fastidious: “You’re as bad as the Civil Servant with his gear-case and bike clips.” In his seventeen years of employment, Kevin Lalor had not missed a day’s work. And it was because he was always the first person to travel the Lower Road every morning that he was the one who found the body in that summer of 1951.
12
The Bike
1951
In which Mikey Lamb, age eleven, confides more in Kevin Lalor, a.k.a. the Civil Servant, than he does in his own father, Simon Peter.
ON A FRIDAY EVENING IN MAY, a few minutes after eight, Kevin Lalor was slouched in his armchair in front of the dying kitchen fire. At the end of his stretched-out legs, his feet rested on a low, three-legged stool. The two shirts hanging on the high clothesline above him were like the headless carcasses of eviscerated two-legged goats.
The whitewash on the walls of the small kitchen would have been whiter had there been more light. Through the small window only enough twilight seeped for Lalor to see the holes in the toes of his ancient, colorless slippers. Brown linoleum, its geometrical pattern faded into the gloom, covered the concrete floor. The dresser, with its display of glistening willow pattern dishes, plates, saucers, cups, eggcups, sugar bowl, teapot and milk jug, were bequests from his parents when they moved into Gohen. Lalor was not neurotically fastidious, but he did like order and cleanliness.
The three pictures hanging on the walls had been there in his childhood, and the farmyard scenes they depicted were still a comfort to him, like an old blanket. It wasn’t what was represented in the pictures as much as their colors which evoked feelings of security and contentment; the flaming reds and flat blacks of cockerel, russets of hens, whites of kittens’ paws, roans of cows, yellows of goosey beaks, evanescent blues and greens of drakes, dull browns of ducks, golds of straw, purples of elderberries. Lalor often allowed the colors to gather him up and swing him back through the years into his childhood.
Kevin Lalor w
as a thin man. He was considered by most people to be delicate, by which they meant he would never enjoy old age. Lawrence Gorman used “rake handle” to describe the neighbor who passed his house twice every day on his bicycle.
The Civil Servant wore thick glasses that magnified his eyes and made them look wet. At thirty-five he was unmarried, and, as far as anyone knew, he had no interest in finding himself a wife. He was simply one more bachelor in a country of tens of thousands of bachelors. However, Lalor considered himself a firmly grounded rock in the sea of mild insanity in which the isolated unmarried existed.
As he sat in front of his dying fire, Lalor moved the tuning coil of the crystal set attached to the piece of polished board on his lap. In the earphones, a man’s voice was giving the weekly roundup of the prices from the Dublin Cattle Market. Weathers and hoggets were mentioned, and as the announcer’s voice began to break up in the ether, Lalor felt something hard pressing into the back of his neck. As the hairs on his body stood to attention, a screechy voice cut through the earphones: “Stick ’em up!”
In the same motion, Lalor tore the earphones from his head, grabbed the crystal set off his lap and jumped up, shouting, “In the name of the sweet Christ almighty, Mikey, you frightened the hell out of me.” And there, passing gas behind the cushioned chair, in his soiled work clothes, his undefeated hair like a battered wire brush, his eyes as big as pennies, stood Mikey Lamb with a silver six-shooter in his right hand and an empty leather holster on his right hip. In his frightened face his top lip was drawn up off his front teeth, and the galaxy of freckles across his cheeks and nose was dark against his white face. Water welled into his eyes and quickly ebbed away.
With his hands full of wire, earphones and the pieces of his crystal set, Kevin Lalor continued to give sound to his fright. “What were you thinking about to sneak in on me like that, for Christ’s sake?”