The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  “Yes, isn’t it.”

  “Grand, yes, grand,” the tall old man said, proceeding past Mangan, going toward the dog who stood on the wall, tail wagging frantically. Mangan looked back toward the rock face and at that moment saw Kathleen come around it, brushing mud from her jean-covered bottom. She saw him, smiled, and waved to him. “Hello there, Jim. How are you today?”

  “Fine,” he called. He looked back at the tall old man, who had picked up his bicycle and was wheeling it out onto the road. The dog, tail wagging, frisked about him in great excitement, but was ignored. The tall old man threw his leg over the crossbar and, giving himself a push, mounted the bicycle and turned down the precipitous incline toward Drishane, his fingers gripping the hand brakes to slow his progress. The dog, running ahead, scooted in a bounding gallop across the grassy ditch, keeping pace with the bicycle’s rushing progress. Mangan watched it go down into a hollow, saw the old man pedal up a small rise, then disappear over another hump of road. He turned to Kathleen. “So, you’re back to see us,” she said, and smiled as though she were happy at this news. He stared at her young rounded breasts, half revealed in the unbuttoned baby-blue cardigan. What had she been doing around the other side of the mountain with that old man? “Who was that?” he said, pointing off down the road where the cyclist had gone.

  “Oh, that’s Pat the Post,” she said. “He had a letter for me.”

  She held up a letter with an English stamp on it. “It’s from a boy I met last summer. He was here on his holidays.”

  But why had they gone around the rock face, the two of them? “Where’s Con?” he asked.

  “Ah, he’s gone to Cork. He forgot to tell you yesterday, but he’s arranged with another man to pick up a load of scrap iron down there.”

  “I’m sorry I missed him.”

  “Is there anything I could do?” she said.

  He looked at her. “I was wondering. I mean, you said something yesterday about being able to put me up in the house.”

  “We can, surely. You’re very welcome. I’m sorry you missed Con, but he should be back tomorrow night. Did you bring your case with you?”

  “Case?”

  “Your suitcase.”

  “It’s in the car.”

  “Then we can go down to the house directly.”

  “Whatever you say.”

  “We’ll go down now and I’ll show you your room, and you can leave your case in it. After that, we can come back here and get something to eat. The kitchen in the house is no good at all. The chimney has something wrong with it.”

  As she spoke she began to walk him toward the car. “Where’s your dog?” he asked.

  “Spot?” She looked around. “I don’t know. Out after rabbits, I’d say.”

  In the car’s front seat, sitting beside him, she leaned back, locking her hands behind her head, revealing to him the lift of her young breasts. The car went gingerly down the steep narrow road, turning in at the rusted unhinged gate. Again, he saw the tall two-story house of gray stone, that house which would have seemed at home on the outskirts of a town as it was not here at the top of a mountain. Again, as he got out of the car, it was as though the house seemed aware of his penetration into its territory, and as he removed his bag from the back seat and walked toward the front door, he was seized with a feeling that the place willed him to approach, yet intended to harm him. He stood waiting at the faded green door as she found the large iron key, unlocked and pushed inward, the wooden footboard clattering on the stone step.

  Together they entered the dark hall. To his left was the large dining room cluttered with boxes and cartons and the shut door of the parlor containing photographs and paintings. She negotiated their way among the maze of tin cans on the floor, and they climbed a flight of uncarpeted stairs and crossed the first-floor landing, its aged, uneven boards groaning under their tread. The landing opened into a corridor similar to the one on the floor below it, on either side of which were three shut doors. Kathleen opened the first one. On entering, he was surprised at the size of the bedroom. There was a large three-sided bay window. The room was uncurtained, so that the morning entered in a gray cloudy light which glossed the furniture with a ghostly patina, turning chairs, bed, and tables into artifacts resembling sculpture. The bed was the thing he noticed, for it was very old and large, so high off the ground that it reminded him of beds he had seen in museums. The walls were unadorned with pictures, save for an oval lithograph of the Virgin Mary over the chimneypiece. There was also a large oak wardrobe, a dressing table with standing mirror, a white enamel washbasin on a marble stand, a white enamel chamber pot underneath it. The floorboards were bare. The only ugly note in the room was a modern propane heater, which sat in the unused fireplace. He put down his bag. Kathleen went to the bed and undid the counterpane, pulling it back to show clean white sheets and pillows. “I made it up for you last night,” she said. “Con said you’d come.” She laughed. “He ran into Dinny at Deegans after supper and heard that Dinny had given you the order of the boot. Is that right?”

  “It is.”

  “If you want hot water to shave,” she said, “you’ll have to put that little tin yoke on top of the heater. Will I leave you here now, or do you want to come back to the caravan with me?”

  He turned to her. She was smiling; she stood in a mocking, provocative pose, her rich, reddish hair falling below her waist. What if he were to kiss her, as he did yesterday?

  But yesterday when he had kissed her he had acted unthinkingly. Now, as he started toward her, he saw her mocking posture. Would she laugh at him? Confused, he came to a standstill.

  “Well,” she said, “are you coming or staying?”

  “What?” He did not understand her.

  “Are you coming up to the caravan with me or do you want to have a lie-down here and come up later?”

  “I want a kiss,” he said thickly, and reached for her, taking her into his arms, his mouth blundering toward her face. Her soft lips found his, opening to his kiss, and at once her left hand slid down to his crotch, fondling his genitals. Lust clouded his mind and in an urgent clumsy lurch he pushed her back onto the high old bed. She laughed and rolled away from him, and as she did, he saw her unzip her jeans, dragging off a pair of pink bikini briefs in the process. He stared at white thighs, rounded buttocks. Her cardigan was now open all the way, so that her young breasts were exposed to him. He knelt clumsily on the bed beside her, and as he did she expertly unzipped his fly, pulled down his trousers, and, taking his member in her childish fingers, brought it to stiffness with the grasp of an expert.

  He held her shoulders, beginning to slide his hands down over her breasts. Naked, she seemed even younger than in her jeans and cardigan, and now as his hands explored her, cupping her breasts, sliding down to fondle her belly and bottom, it came to him that she might be even younger than twenty. Maybe she was underage? But this prospect, while it produced in him a qualm of alarm, also elicited a shiver of illicit pleasure. As his mouth went hungrily down on her small round breast, guilt was transformed into the impure delight of the forbidden. In his fantasy he became her master, her body his to do with as he wished. But in reality he was quickly made aware that this near-child was infinitely more skilled in venery than Beatrice or any other woman he had known. It was she who—abandoned, naked, trembling yet cajoling—brought him again and again to the point of ejaculation, yet managed to prolong his pleasure. Roiling around in the bed, rearing up over her buttocks, which somehow seemed to tremble beneath him, he became aware that, without a word being said, she had divined his dream and was acting it out, playing the part of the young girl as victim, assigning to him the role of lustful tutor, older lover, occasion of her sin.

  And so he spent in her and lay, breathing heavily, and she put her hand on his belly, her reddish locks spread over his thigh. She smiled up at him, her eyes so childish and innocent that he was inflamed once again to fondle her, to caress those long, slender thighs, to glut hims
elf with kisses on her youthful breasts. And all the time, like a child doing what she had been told to do, her delicate fingers slowly kneaded his penis to full size. His face flushed, he asked her to kiss his cock, and submissively lowering her head until all he could see below him were masses of red hair, she brought him deliciously to a second climax, an event rare enough in recent years for him to experience a sense of triumph. He laughed. He felt insatiable. He held her head against his chest and, staring out of the large window at the morning light on the cold mountain face, felt a rush of joy, and almost without thinking, as though he had composed it for the occasion, cried out one of Mangan’s stanzas.

  “Over dews, over sands

  Will I fly, for your weal:

  Your holy delicate white hands

  Shall girdle me with steel.

  At home, in your emerald bowers,

  From morning’s dawn till e’en,

  You’ll pray for me, my flower of flowers,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My fond Rosaleen!

  You’ll think of me through daylight hours,

  My virgin flower, my flower of flowers,

  My Dark Rosaleen!”

  She raised her head from his chest, tossing back her red mane of hair, smiling that smile which entranced him. “Are you at the poetry again?” she said. “Oh, you are a fillim actor, you must be.”

  “No, I’m not.

  “Oh, my red Rosaleen.

  And one beamy smile from you

  Would float like light between

  My toils and me, my own, my true,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My fond Rosaleen!

  Would give me life and soul anew,

  A second life, a soul anew,

  My Dark Rosaleen!”

  “You’re a gas man,” she said, twisting about in sudden girlish merriment.

  “No, it’s true. That’s what you’ve given me.”

  ”What did I give you?” she asked.

  He struck a pose.

  “A second life, a soul anew,

  My Dark Rosaleen!”

  “Go on with you. Or, tell us, then, what will you give me? Will you give me twenty pounds? Con would kill me for telling you, but we’re flat broke, the pair of us. His fault. He’s spent the dole and the assistance, the lot. Is it true you’re rich?”

  “It’s true!” he shouted, his voice mad loud in the quiet room. “I’ll give you twenty pounds. I’ll give you a hundred, a thousand. Come here, my red Kathleen.”

  “That will be the drink talking. A thousand quid? I’ve never seen a thousand quid, let alone held it in my hand. It must be the vodka you’re on, for I smell nothing.”

  “I’m not drunk on drink, I’m drunk on you.” He pulled her up onto his chest, his hands sliding down along her smooth thighs. To his astonishment, his penis was again rising to the occasion. To go on fooling around with her in this high old bed seemed to him the summa of everything he wished for, and now as if she perfectly perceived each nuance of his fantasy, she turned away from him and knelt, touching her forehead to the mattress as though making obeisance to some god at the foot of the bed. In this posture her luxuriant red tresses fell away to reveal a defenseless white nape of neck as she presented her long, straight back and upraised trembling young bottom. He knelt, reaching out to caress and fondle the soft white buttocks. If happiness was this, then he wanted it never to end, unholy though it be, this joy. For she must be almost young enough to be his daughter.

  “How old are you, Kathleen?” he whispered, as he handled her soft thighs.

  “Nineteen,” she whispered back, submissively. “At least I’ll be nineteen at the beginning of next month. Will you still be here for my birthday?”

  Eighteen. Half his age. With a moan of pleasure he penetrated her. “I will. Of course, I will.”

  A pebble struck the wall outside the bedroom and fell back into the yard. Boots crunched on gravel. A second pebble lobbed up and struck the windowpane as Kathleen raised herself on her arm, her red hair obscuring her face. She brushed aside her tresses and put her finger to her lips, cautioning silence. The footsteps walked about in the graveled yard. “Kat’leen?” a man’s voice shouted up.

  Mangan, aroused from post-coital slumber, looked at her face, which in the misty early-afternoon light was the color of rose-tinted marble. Again, she warned him to silence.

  “Kat’leen, are you there at all? Have you somebody wit’ you?” Coarse laughter followed this. The footsteps crunched around on the gravel. “Are you there?”

  She smiled at Mangan, that smile which undid him. They heard the footsteps retreat. She rose up naked, slight, graceful as a naïad, and ran to the bedroom window. Curious, he followed her. Below the window, going off down the steep mountain track bent low over the handles of a racing bicycle, was a dark-haired youth wearing a raincoat over a footballer’s striped jersey and white shorts. He wore bright stockings and football boots, and from the way he wiggled the handlebars and ran the bicycle up on the ditch, he seemed to be drunk. Kathleen giggled as the bicycle skidded on the bank. Its rider fell off, got up, grabbed the handlebars, and vaulted on again to careen precipitously toward the turn of the road. “That’s Denis Dolan,” she said. “They must have won the match.”

  Mangan stared at the boy’s dark head of hair, watched it disappear around the bend. “Who is he?” he asked. Jealousy seeped into him. “What did he want?”

  “Ah, he’s a butty of Con’s. He was looking for a drink, if you ask me. Listen, Jim. Talking about drink, do you have any money on you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, could we go and get a feed of stuff, rashers and bread and eggs? And whiskey and stout? I haven’t a thing left up above in the caravan.”

  “Of course,” he said, and watched her run to the middle of the room, pulling on her clothes as though she were in a race. “We’ll drive to Skull,” she said. “That way we won’t have them gawking at us in Drishane. In Skull you can get Fuller’s cakes, and grand sausages—the lot. Will you buy me a chocolate cake? Will you, Jim?”

  “Anything you want.”

  “Do you like me, then?”

  “I think you’re fantastic.”

  “Go on with you. You that’s worked in the fillims, you must have had your fill of girls. Did you ever go out with a fillim star?”

  “Yes.”

  “Who? Go on, tell us.”

  “You might not know her,” he said, wishing he hadn’t got into this.

  “I’ll bet I do. Is it in fillims or the telly, she is? Tell us her name?”

  “Beatrice Abbot.”

  As soon as he had said Beatrice’s name, he felt he had betrayed her. But Kathleen’s face merely registered puzzlement. “Beatrice Abbot? Wait a minute. What was she in?”

  “You probably wouldn’t know her,” he said. “Doesn’t matter.”

  “Is she gorgeous?”

  “Not like you.”

  “Ah, go on with you.” She laughed, obviously pleased. She put on her cardigan. “Will we go?” she said. “I love shopping. I think we’ll get a walnut cake as well as a chocolate one. I like walnut cake with white icing.”

  “Fine.”

  Dressing hurriedly, he followed her downstairs, the loose floorboards protesting under his tread as he went along the front hall. It was, he realized, the house itself and not its ghosts which disturbed him. It had about it the ominous air of frailty of a bomb-damaged building, and so it was with a sense of coming out of danger that he stepped into the misty light of the yard. Letting him pass in front of her, Kathleen reached back and pulled the heavy front door shut with a slam like gunshot.

  “Were you born in this house?”

  She seemed disconcerted by the question. Pulling her cardigan about her throat, she moved off without answering, going quickly toward the car. A stiff wind whipped across the yard, and at that moment he heard a dog nearby utter a small, piteous yelp. He turned toward the abandoned coach house at the end of the yar
d and saw, inside, anxiously tail-wagging, Kathleen’s dog, Spot, tied to the axle of a broken-down jaunting car. The dog seemed afraid of him and eased away as though he might strike it. He looked back and saw Kathleen sitting in the front seat of his car waiting for him. He went to her. “Spot is back there,” he said. “Tied up.”

  “Spot?” she said. “He’s all right. Are you coming?”

  He got in the car and they drove out of the yard. “But who tied Spot up?” he asked.

  “I did.”

  “I thought you said you didn’t know where he was.”

  “I forgot. I tied him up earlier because Pat the Post was coming.”

  “The postman? But they must be used to dogs.”

  “Pat has his own dog that runs along with him when he’s on the bike. He fights with Spot.”

  But how did she know the postman would come up here today? Or did he come up every morning? He looked at her: her face was serene. Her profile now seemed to him the most beautiful he had ever seen. Why had she lied earlier about the dog? But it was better to forget it: let sleeping dogs lie. It did not bear to think of ugly old postmen, drunken footballers, the bicycle brigade which pedaled up these roads to see her.

  “Did you go with her long?” Kathleen asked.

  “Who?”

  “The fillim star. The one you were telling me about.”

  “I was married to her.”

  She stared at him, incredulous, then delighted. “You’re joking me?”

  “No, I’m not.”

  “You were married to a fillim star? Wait now. Tell us again, what pictures she was in?”

  “Did you ever see Springtime? That was a big one. She played the sister.”

  “Oh, God, I know her. She was Deborah, the one he didn’t marry. The nice one.”