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Once upon a time, I lived amid a mass of feminine impedimentia. Cast stockings and petticoats in every corner, pearl powders and vanishing creams, dressing case open, scent bottle lacking its stopper, jars and powder puffs adrift, mules kicked off, curtains of triple ninon and, at the bedside, a cream-and-gilt bakelite telephone. Men found it comforting, a mystery asking no solution. Being naturally tidy, I didn’t enjoy it particularly. But, like much else in my trade, my trades, it couldn’t be faked up. You had to live it.
I no longer had to. My room in Sinnott’s Hotel must, when the place was a private house, have belonged to an upper servant. You couldn’t say that its proportions were good. It was too narrow and the yellowed ceiling too low for its length. The fittings were solid in direct relation to their insuperable ugliness. The iron-framed bed occupied the width of the room at one end, covered by a mauve candlewick counterpane. A Wilton carpet, its yowling oranges, reds and mustards undimmed by twenty years of service, lay framed by brown-painted boards. Imaginary flora surged pink and green across the walls and the single armchair beside the gas fire was upholstered in tapestry-effect stuff that somebody, astonishingly, must have fancied matched the paper. The drapes at the window (view: ashbins, rusty outhouse roof) were brown velvet, very faded. A ledge above the wash-hand basin held all my cosmetics. The treacle-coloured wardrobe with its lean strip of looking-glass, perched on preposterous frail legs, was fortunately big enough to contain both my clothes and the pictures and ornaments with which Mrs Kinsella had populated every surface. When one lives in a commercial hotel room, one wants it to look like a commercial hotel room, not the love-nest of a Corporation official and a typist. On the second-floor landing outside, pine banisters replaced the heavy, hideously-carved teak of the lower floors. Unless a guest took the overflow room next door, which none had done in a year, I had a small, chilly bathroom to myself.
There was one other permanent resident, Mr Dardis. He had a slab-sided, waxy face. Outdoors he wore a fedora of priestly aspect, which, he bragged in a grumbling tone, caused passengers on buses to give up their seats to him. He compensated for being a Protestant with highly conventional patriotism.
That Friday morning we were joined for breakfast by an English family wearing loud trousers unfit for their various shapes and a whiskery, nicotinous woman from Flensburg. She offered this information with the braced grimace of someone whose home town is known for one thing. I spoke of the idiosyncrasies of the harbour, but as a schoolmistress her knowledge of it came second-hand.
‘She never let them in,’ exclaimed the English patriarch with rich, mucous satisfaction, ‘that’s why!’ I looked at him.
Laying down his knife and fork, Mr Dardis retreated behind the Irish Press. MEET THE IRA, PRIESTS URGE. FIRST WOMAN DIRECTOR SINCE LADY GREGORY. Finding an item of interest, he folded the paper vertically. MINISTER FOR HEALTH ‘MISLEADING’ ON DRUG LEGISLATION. I thought of that Minister, whom I had met fifty years ago, a week after his father was killed. Then sixteen years of age, he’d had his father’s hard, fanatical wedge-shaped face, but his mother’s phlegmatic expression on it. The effect was of a clever and friendly Gibraltar ape, abused by tourists. He said, ‘Father said I must seek out and shake the hand of every man who signed his―’
‘Orange tips.’ said Mr Dardis.
‘Tea?’
‘Butterflies.’ He nodded as if he had expected no better of me and opened out the paper again.
I enquired about Frk. Cordsen’s sightseeing plans.
‘I am interested in your squalor,’ she said. ‘I saw a movie. Old women selling fish out of baby carriages. Empty lots where children play on the rocks behind fences of steel―’ She made a piscine motion with her teaspoon.
‘Corrugated iron.’
‘Yes. And the men talk, talk, talk, and the women smoke and look as if they have secrets.’
I smiled. ‘They do.’
‘Yes. One woman spoke. But her face wasn’t shown. She had a th th th―’
‘A lisp.’
‘Lisp, indeed. And she kept speaking of practising birth control, coitus interruptus, she said. That is not birth control. It is very impractical.’
The Press quivered. Behind it, a painful conflict of loyalties to religion, nation and sex issued in a chesty, ineffectual rumble.
‘That is another thing,’ Frk. Cordsen said, directing her remarks at the image of the Abbey actress recently appointed to the theatre’s board, as if she might be persuaded to stage a Sunday matinee of educational character, ‘the respiratory health of this country is overall very poor.’
‘It’s the climate,’ I said, rising before this unexpectedly amusing breakfast could take a turn toward jaeger combinations and physical jerks, or whatever it is the cranks wear and do now.
My profession, my professions, gave me little financial security in retirement. But they trained me in its chief enterprise, that of spooling out activity to fill the day. I learned to suffer boredom, and bores. Mrs Kinsella was a talker, inclined to detain her guests in the hall. The parlour door was open and the gramophone, barbarously piped through the wireless speakers, played within. A sleek voice, redolent of macassar oil and palm-trees in pots, sang Dublin can be heaven, with coffee at eleven. That morning she confined herself to some observations on the current state of her sciatic injury (disimproved) and my post (a handwritten envelope, stamp and postmark unidentifiable without my spectacles). Murmuring noncommittally of chiropractic, and thinking of some curious country bone-setting methods once demonstrated to me by the skipper of a Frisian galiot, I put the letter in my handbag.
It was a close, dull day in mid-June, conditions under which Dublin falls short of paradisal. But coffee is rarely unwelcome, and as Mrs Kinsella was wont to indicate her disapproval of the beverage by serving it at a temperature and strength reminiscent of the contents of a used finger bowl, I set out for Grafton Street and Bewley’s Oriental Café.
I looked along the road towards the bulk of Belvedere College. A few boys were creeping like snails up the steps to the front door. At this time in the morning, in another place, another life, I should have been going to the office from eight o’clock Mass. But it was as rare now to hear a real Mass in this city as to meet a priest with whom one might converse intelligently: privately, at certain houses, once or twice a year. It gave me great pain. At times I cursed my own obduracy, but I could not see in that subfusc Protestant service even the lineaments of a Mass.
Halfway down the steep defile of North Great George's Street was Mahaffy’s old house. He stayed with us once, when I was about fifteen. He was a snob, and thrifty, never threw away his best lines. But he wasn’t dull. Thinking myself very daring, I asked him about Wilde. He said his undergraduate compositions were hollow and belle-lettristic. A man and a woman stood in the doorway smoking and arguing defeatedly in glasspaper accents. Beyond them was a tenement hall painted bilious, begrimed chartreuse, pitted as if by gunshot and carpeted in remnants.
This was never my town. Even now, when I think of Ireland, it’s not of here I think. Parnell Street was sinking ever deeper into dereliction, empty, shuttered shops and chipped, rough pubs with plastic signs defacing their crenellated Victorian frontages. The eponymous hero stood on his monument at the crossroads making his curiously equivocal salute, as if to say, Janey Mac, you wouldn’t want to be starting from here, anyhow.
We have never attempted to fix the ne plus ultra― But he and his land reforms put the tin hat on it. It was all over before I was born. Born to a corpse. Literally as well as metaphorically, if that matters.
Thirty years ago in Paris, a young officer wearing only his open shirt and riding boots, sprawling across a low, gilded Foliot armchair, had recited to me:
Schließlich, in einer Laube unter dem Zwerchfell
fand man ein Nest von jungen Ratten.
Ein kleines Schwesterchen lag tot.
He added defiantly that the poet was proscribed, but ought not to be. I think, sweet boy, he had a mind to shock. I could not help but think of my own kleines Schwesterchen as, sedulously, he executed what was to him presumably a novel manoeuvre, and six weeks later he was killed in North Africa.
Schöne Jugend. Well, so it was, in a way. We scampered about our burrow, my brothers and I, scions of the Big House in the vacation and wild Irish in our English term-times. No petty people. We knew, in a dim way, we were inhabiting something rank, diseased and crumbling, even as we convinced ourselves we were the country's bulwark against the greasy till, against the vulgar mercantilism of an Empire from which we thought to hold ourselves aloof. An imperium of English shopkeepers and Irish missionaries. I passed O’Connell, high and solitary on his allegorical granite wedding-cake, who combined the virtues of those two classes rather neatly. Two of my brothers died for that Empire, nonetheless. The third, just too young to serve, came home from Fernhurst under a pale-grey pall of asked to leave and did nothing but yawn and say over and over I should like to be here when this house burns. He had his wish.
The men came to the scullery door. The cook, a formidable woman, refused them entrance despite their guns, but they barged their way up through the house into the dining room. They told my father they were burning the house in reprisal for the destruction of six of their sympathisers’ homes.
‘Are you going to shoot me too?’ he asked the man covering him with a rifle.
‘No, sir,’ he said. ‘I amn’t going to shoot anyone. But we have our orders to burn the building.’
They gave us twenty minutes. My aunt, stepmother and I went to the nursery to wake the children. It was nearly Christmas, and the elder of my half-sisters wept, ‘Don’t let them burn our presents!’ My stepmother flinched as if the child had betrayed someone's hiding place.
My aunt rounded on the two who had followed us. ‘Go to the cupboard and fetch all the parcels you can find. Look out for the dolls’ house, the biggest one. It’s fragile. And leave your ridiculous guns on the table, we won’t touch them.’
By the time the first petrol flame surged from the window she had five of them fetching and carrying for her. They set down their last burdens and turned instinctively back to the house, where the blaze had already taken its grip. A black stick figure, coat flapping and fringed in ochre, strolled casually left to right across the hall, staggered back again, pirouetted, and fell. One of the men yelped, sprang forward and was restrained by two comrades. The remaining man took a revolver from his trenchcoat, aimed it at my brother’s head, and fired.
A brother for a brother. Fair play. Mine would have been idiot enough to spill petrol on his clothes too. His killer died, not well, at the hands of a patrol the next day. Sent to lie among the other cheated dead. In the spring my father had a stroke and lingered until autumn. I could hate, but I could not blame. Torrents of blood, shed for and by an Empire. I cupped my hands and drank it cold. I fed on Britannia’s liver and her kidneys. A lovely youth, so it was, yes.
I stepped into the newsagent opposite Trinity College and bought the Irish Times. WHITELAW TO BEGIN TALKS BALLOT BACK PROVISIONALS CO-OPTED TO BOARD TRUTH FROM LIBYAN DESERT did he discover the moneymaking secret VANDALS SMASH COFFINS UNEMPLOYMENT BENEFIT no charge for failures.
I had my seat in the back room of Bewley's, that inner sanctum of idlers and eavesdroppers, and my coffee ordered before I remembered the letter. I put on my spectacles and inspected it: flimsy blue stationery, threepenny stamp, postmark unreadably blurred. It contained some small irregular object, which slid up and down. I did not know the hand, but it was one of two educated masculine sorts with which my work had made me familiar: the boyish, decisive one, bespeaking lists of House colours, not the fluent spikes and curves that meant Symons and the Phaedrus on the shelves. I’d like to think graphology is bunk, but at least in its broadest applications, it isn’t.
I opened it and tipped out the contents. The waitress came with my coffee. They were these: a cheap costume earring of the screw-on type, wrapped in a twist of printed paper, and a note which read:
Darling,
thought I’d better return this, though was tempted to a souvenir of a crowded weekend. If you can make it at all, Friday, coffee? Could be heaven &c. Quite understand if you can’t, but by the bandstand if you can. There should be plenty of ducks about.
Love,
A.H.D.
P.S. be a dear and stop by Peterson’s for an ounce of Raven Mixture. I don’t go that way.
The clue in which the red herring had come wrapped was hardly necessary. It was a scrap from a chandler’s catalogue. 1 3/8 inch, galvanised. A bit much, really, but Davies liked to make sure of one. Except it couldn’t be Davies. The penmanship was decent and the spelling correct. Besides, Davies was dead. He was born to hang, we used to say, but he died in his armchair at the age of eighty-seven. Just someone who knew his deceptively abstracted style, so, and a little of what he’d meant to me. I looked at my wristwatch. The meeting was for 11. Funny, that the song should have been playing on Mrs Kinsella’s wireless-gramophone. I had an hour and nine minutes to decide. On this island, in that year of blood, begun with thirteen dead men, half of them boys, I could hardly doubt that I was being asked to take action against my countrymen and co-religionists. I balanced all, brought all to mind. I found I had an hour and eight minutes to kill.
The centre of St Stephen’s Green, with its straggly beds and choked fountains, haunted on a dull day like this by layabouts, had never pleased me. I walked down the western perimeter, the lavatories and Lord Ardilaun on my right, and cut across past the glasshouses to the bandstand. It was peeling and precarious. A long-haired lout sat smoking on the steps, but no recognition showed on his face. My contact would come from the south or north-east, not passing the tobacconist on College Green. At a minute past eleven, he appeared: a revenant. It was Davies as I had first seen him at Howth harbour: fortyish, weathered, artless face and clear blue eyes, unintellectual brow. A spearhead of deep tan showed in the open neck of his shirt and the knees of his ancient cavalry twill trousers sagged. He communicated an indefinable feeling of quixotic pathos. I fear something of my alarm must have showed, because the eidolon extended his palm for the packet of tobacco and said, ‘I’m his grandson. But my name’s not Davies.’
‘Neither,’ I replied, ‘was his.’