Bad Things Happen

by Tim Buckley

  Ella came back with our drinks and set the tray down on the table. She passed me my pint, and handed the Master his whiskey.

  “There you go, Mr. O’D. I presume you don’t want anything in that, do you?”

  “I want nothing in my whiskey, young Ella, except for an ‘e’!” he quipped – he would only ever drink Irish whiskey, and never Scotch – and handed her a crisp €10 note.

  When she had walked back to the bar, he turned to face me and raised his glass.

  “Well, it’s very good to see you again, Aengus. Sláinte.”

  “Sláinte, Master. It’s good to see you, too.” And I meant it.

  “You sounded… I don’t know, hesitant maybe, about London. Are you having second thoughts?”

  I shrugged.

  “I don’t know, Master. For the first few months after …” I paused. I think it might have been the first time I’d spoken to another person about it, and I wasn’t sure I knew how. Wasn’t sure I knew the words or how to speak them. I didn’t know, I suppose, how they were going to come out. They had been trapped for so long in my head, echoing in that dark place, that they might burst forth unconstrained or trickle out weakly, blinded by the light.

  “For those first few months, I just assumed it was going to be a question of time. I knew nothing would ever be the same again, and that I’d have to learn to live all over again in a world I wouldn’t know. But I just assumed it would be in London, surrounded by my friends, surrounded by familiar, comfortable things. I knew it would be hard seeing the places and the people we knew together, but I couldn’t imagine starting afresh somewhere new on my own. Without her.”

  The pub was steadily filling up now, commuters coming in for a quick one to ease the pain of the day gone by before going home to husbands and wives and children. The Master raised his hand to acknowledge the many patrons who nodded or called his way. But his attention never strayed from my story.

  “And now you’re not so sure.” It was a statement, not a question.

  “No, I suppose I’m not.”

  “Why not?”

  I exhaled, blowing the breath through pursed lips.

  “God, I’ve been asking myself that question for months. I suppose it’s a few things really. I just think I need a place to take root. Our life has been – even before Caitríona went away – it’s been so transient. It feels like either we’ve been moving around or other people have moved, gone away or gone home, moved on or moved back. It’s felt like we’ve only known our friends – even our best friends – for a few years at the most. I don’t have a history with them, and if I’m honest, I don’t really have a future with them. It’s hard work.” I smiled ironically. “And it’s not supposed to be that hard, is it?”

  He sipped his whiskey and shook his head.

  “In my day, it wasn’t like that at all. I moved here in 1962 to do my teacher training, left behind all of my friends in Kerry, thought I’d moved a thousand miles from home. Might as well have in those days. I was so homesick, I wanted to give it all up and go back home. But my father wouldn’t hear of it, couldn’t afford to have me back home I suppose. ‘You’ve made your choice’, he’d say. ‘Now it’s up to you to make the best of it.’ But the friends I made in the early sixties are the self-same friends I have today. I don’t hear much from my old friends in Kerry, but the friends I made when I came to Dublin have been with me since. Oh, we fall out from time to time, we might tire of each other or drift away for a period. But when push comes to shove, we’re still friends at the end of the day.”

  I nodded, recognising what he described. “I think maybe that’s what I’m missing. When I had Caitríona, it didn’t matter because I had… her. But now, it feels like I need some stability, something I can hold on to, something that’s always going to be there.”

  Ella was engaged in some banter with a suited foursome at the table beside us. As she turned to the bar to fetch their order, she gave the Master a knowing, sardonic smile. One of the four said something about her to the others and they laughed loudly.

  “And after nearly twenty years of travelling about, I just don’t know where home is. It’s not London. Then I come back here and I realise I’m a stranger in my own town. It’s not any of the other cities I’ve lived in. Where is it?”

  I looked over at the four commuters at the table beside us, with their umbrellas and briefcases. I leaned closer to the Master.

  “Take those lads. My age. Jobs in town, mates to have a pint with on the way home, wife and kids waiting in the house. Routine, solid routine. Twenty years ago it would have chilled my blood. Now I envy them.”

  CHAPTER 5

  The Master looked at his watch.

  “Sorry, Master,” I said, and took a long draft from my glass to finish my pint. “I’m keeping you from something…”

  He waved away my protestations.

  “Far from it, Aengus, far from it. I put a roast in the oven for my dinner before I came down for a warmer. I need to get back and take it out, that’s all.”

  He hesitated.

  “Sure look’t, if you’re at a loose end this evening, you’d be very welcome to come back and join me. There’s more than enough.”

  “No, Master, I don’t want to impose.”

  My protest was weak.

  “Nonsense. I’m enjoying our chat and it’d be a shame to end it prematurely. Come on.” He finished his whiskey, picked up his coat and we made for the door.

  “Goodnight to you, Ella, slán leat.” He waved to her as we passed the bar, and put his two hands on a shoulder each of the two pals he’d been drinking with earlier in the evening. They talked briefly in low voices, then he said something, clapped them both on the back and they all laughed. He turned back to me and we left the pub.

  We spent the short walk back to the Master’s house reminiscing about the school and the children and teachers we had known. It was a balmy evening, the sun still high in a clear sky. The East Pier was busy with people out taking an evening stroll, and with fishermen trying their luck from the pier wall. We followed the road away from the pier, and its winking light-house, along the water’s edge until we came to a terrace of small white-washed two-storey cottages, fronted by neat gardens separated by low hedges.

  “Here we are now,” he said, pulling his keys from his pocket with a bundle of Euros, notes, receipts and coins, most of which fell to the manicured grass under the front window. I helped him scoop up the debris of life in the city, and he opened the door and we stepped inside. In all of the years we had known each other, I had never been to the Master’s house. One could almost map the evolution of our relationship by my relationship with his home. As a child, it was out of bounds. The Master dedicated long hours in the classroom, staying late after lessons to mark homework or help a child struggling with spelling or arithmetic or Irish. Once he left the school, his time was his own and he countenanced no intrusion. Not that we would have wanted to go there, but stories of the scowling face and sharp words that greeted those who had been sent by parents to hand in forgotten homework, to pay for a school trip or to report a sick sibling was all the embellished proof we needed that this was indeed our Hades protected by an unseen Cerberus.

  As a teenager, it simply wasn’t cool. You would only visit the Master’s house because either you were a bit thick and needed help with Irish or Maths, or – worse – because you wanted to. And as a young adult, first Caitríona then Aoife then London kept me away. It was different for me, of course. All through my secondary school and University years the master’s regular visits to our house for an evening whiskey on the back terrace with my father made sure he never became a stranger.

  I stepped into the hallway, and drew an involuntary breath. The neat and tidy but humble exterior belied the cave of Aladdin within. The front door opened into a sprawling open-plan ground floor. The dark flagstoned hall floor led
through an open archway to a kitchen bedecked with hanging brass pots and bordered by dark wooden cupboards. To my right, through another open arch, was the living room with its dark wood floor and wide, open fire-place. Dark wooden panelling covered the lower half of the walls in the hallway and living room and up the staircase, their upper halves painted a brilliant white. Above, I could see up the stairway to a vaulted roof with a wide skylight, through which the evening light bathed everything in a golden glow.

  But it was the artwork with which he had filled every available space that truly bedazzled. He had carefully positioned paintings on every wall to create a den of perfect proportion into which you were subtly or violently drawn. One was filled with ships and lighthouses against a backdrop of malevolent seas. One with views of Howth and the rest of the Dublin coastline under cotton-puff clouds and watery sun. One with portraits, one with rustic scenes, one with exotic Eastern cities. I could see immediately two from my father’s hand, one of a woman peeking out coyly from behind her husband as they embraced, one of the Liffey flowing down through the city to Dublin Bay. I was lost in what felt like another world.

  “It would appear that we are just in time,” the Master said, raising his nostrils to the wafting smells from the kitchen.

  He marched into the kitchen and I followed slowly, still captivated by what hung on his walls.

  “Master,” I said, “your house is stunning. The artwork is… breath-taking.”

  He was at first a little taken aback, then he broke into a wide, proud smile.

  “You’re very kind, Aengus – sure it’s just a few things I picked up over the years. Many of them thanks to your father’s eye, I should say.”

  “And the house, you’ve done a great job.”

  “With thanks, in this case, to a bit of luck on the horses! ‘Twas a few good days at Fairyhouse that did most of the work on this place. And a few bad ones that put paid to any plans I might have had to move!”

  He opened a bottle of wine and handed me a glass.

  “Take this and have a look ‘round,” he said, “while I dish up.”

  I felt like a child in a sweet-shop after closing time. The Master put an old vinyl LP on a record-player as I wandered from the kitchen into the living room, and stood in front of the painting that hung above the hearth. It was a beach-scape, a long strand that stretched way off into the distance beside a rough sea topped with white-caps. Along the beach’s edge, the marram grass was bent over in the wind, and there was sand in the air. Despite the wildness of the day, the sky was blue save for a few high clouds chased by the wind.

  “The strand at Inch.” The Master stood behind me, a glass of wine in his hand. “Beautiful, isn’t it? I used to spend every spare minute there as a child, swimming and fishing and playing football on the beach. And ‘twas often wild, a gale blowing off the Atlantic and the waves crashing on the shore. This picture puts me in mind of those days, days when just to be there was enough.”

  “Is that where you grew up, Master?” I asked, reminded that so much about this man was still unknown to me.

  “It is indeed, I was born and raised in Annascaul, only a few miles from Dingle and beside Inch Strand. We lived only a skip from The South Pole Inn, Tom Crean’s pub. But he died a few years before I was born. I remember his two girls though, still living there I think.”

  We stood in front of the painting for a few moments without saying a word. I think it is a trait of men like the Master, perhaps of his generation, that does not require every silence to be filled. At last, he took me by the elbow and led me to the dining room table, which sat between the kitchen and living room. We sat down, he replenished our wine, and closed his eyes in a brief, silent grace. Then he carved thick slices from the leg of lamb, and piled my plate with meat, roast potatoes, carrots and broccoli. It had been a long time since I had had a home-cooked meal that consisted of more than microwaved chicken.

  While we ate, we discussed football and horses and golf. We delved into Irish politics, a subject about which I knew embarrassingly little, and debated the state of the world in general. I found his optimism a welcome departure from the wearying and formulaic dinner conversations among my circle in London, which almost inevitably centred on the escalating price of property and child-care, and the trials of life working in the city: commuting, an ever-lengthening working day and a fading sense of purpose. The awe in which the Master had beheld the world of my childhood had not diminished. If anything, the freedom afforded to him by his retirement had allowed him to visit some of the places we had studied as children, broadening his horizons and deepening his fascination.

  His years as a bachelor had clearly honed the Master’s culinary skills, and I complimented him on what had been a splendid meal. We retired to the living room and the Master produced another bottle of wine, a Rioja from his prized collection. We talked a little about wine and food and about his travels through Europe. It seemed that his itineraries had been determined largely by gastronomic landmarks and by the great wine-producing regions of France, Spain and Italy. He had taken cookery courses from some of the best and most innovative chefs in Europe.

  By this time we had enough beer and whiskey and wine inside us to get to the day’s important topics, and the Master decided it was time to open the box.

  “So now, gosso’n,” he began, swirling his wine around the big glass and staring intently into it as though it was a source of fascination to him. “I take it your father doesn’t know you’re home?”

  “No, Master, he doesn’t. Would you mind not mentioning it to him until I have a chance to go up to the house tomorrow?” In truth, I hadn’t planned to go see my father at all, but it was always likely that a chance encounter with a mutual acquaintance would force my hand. This wasn’t the encounter I had had in mind.

  “Of course I won’t, Aengus, of course not. But don’t leave it too long, eh? It’s a small wee village and he’ll find out sooner rather than later, you know that.”

  “I know. And I’ll go see him tomorrow.”

  “It’s been a while since you’ve seen him, I’d say?”

  “He came over to the… when we said goodbye to her. But we hardly had a chance to talk, and he flew back straight after. Apart from that, it’s been nearly five years. I can’t believe it’s been so long, but it has. I’ve spoken to him of course…”

  “But not that often?”

  “No, I suppose not.” I paused, and looked over at him. “Does he talk about it, ever?”

  “Your father’s a proud man, as you know too well. He wouldn’t ever talk about it. But I know he feels it. Any father would.”

  I couldn’t picture him in that way, in misty-eyed reminiscence craving the prodigal’s return. All through my childhood, I had sought his pride, respect, his approval even. Whether through academic success, or sporting success, or through art, my achievements seemed always to leave him cold, uninspired. I inherited some of his skill and much of his passion for art, but from an early age he despaired of the manner in which my talents manifested themselves, in gauche colours and harsh angles and lines. To be fair, he always studied my school reports with keen interest – reprimanded poor marks, acknowledged good grades. But that was just it – acknowledgement. Never enthusiasm, never affectionate pride. I got more encouragement from the Master than he had ever been able to muster.

  “I’d say he’s got over it,” I said ruefully. The stout and the wine had loosened my tongue and I was more forthright than I had any right to be. “You know very well that I don’t, have never, really featured in his plans.”

  The Master went to interject, but I stopped him with raised palms.

  “He has always looked after me, no question. He has provided for me, spoiled me I’m sure some would say. I had the best clothes, toys, education – but you of all people must know that we’ve never been close.”

  He reached over and refilled
first my glass, then his own. The bottle was almost empty, so he went to the rack and pulled out another. As he pulled the cork, he said, “It’s often the spectator that has the best view of the game. I know how proud you are of him, how grateful too. And I know how proud he is of you. It’s only the pair of you can’t see it.”

  “But look what I’ve contributed to his life.” I counted them out on the fingers of my left hand. “First, I took away the one person he really loved, his one true friend. Second, I went into a career that, for him, is a desecration of my art. And third…” I unfurled a third finger, but stopped with my right hand in mid-air. “And third…”

  He looked at me expectantly, but now I realise he knew exactly what my third crime had been.

  “And third… Aoife,” he said quietly, staring into my eyes.

  Hearing someone else say her name hit me like a punch to the stomach. That he knew about Aoife left me stunned. It had never occurred to me that he might know, although now I realise I should probably have guessed. I stood up and walked over to the window that looked out on the front garden, over the low wall, across the road and out to sea. The light had all but faded, and a boat sounded its horn out in Dublin Bay as fog rolled in off the Irish Sea. I could see the light blinking at the end of the East pier. I stood there for a few moments, trying to decide what to do. Thank him for the meal and leave? But the Master had done no wrong, he had simply let me know that he knew. Change the subject? But we were way past talking football or politics. Stay and talk about it? In truth, whether because of the wine or the Master’s company, that’s what I wanted to do. I drank deeply from my glass, to find strength for the road down which we were clearly headed.