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– I’m not afraid of a shower, Hackett remarked coldly. At least you know what it is. There are worse things.
– Peaks of rock prod up into the clouds like fingers, Teague explained, until the clouds is bursted and the wind carries the wather down here on top of us. Poor buggers on a walking tour around Shankill would get soaked, hang-sangwiches in sodden flitters and maybe not the price of a pint between them to take shelter in Byrnes.
Their dressing, by reason of their rough rig, was finished. De Selby and Hackett were smoking, and the time was half nine. Then De Selby energetically rubbed his hands.
– Gentlemen, he said with some briskness, I presume that like me you have had no breakfast before this early swim. May I therefore invite you to have breakfast with me at Lawnmower. Mr McGettigan can drive us up to the gate.
– I’m afraid I can’t go, Hackett said.
– Well, it’s not that my horse Jimmy couldn’t pull you up, Teague said, spitting.
– Come now, De Selby said, we all need inner fortification after an arduous morning. I have peerless Limerick rashers and there will be no shortage of that apéritif.
Whether or not Hackett had another engagement Mick did not know but he immediately shared his instinct to get away, if only, indeed, to think, or try not to think. De Selby had not been deficient in the least in manners or honourable conduct but his continuing company seemed to confer uneasiness – perhaps vague, unformed fear.
– Mr De Selby, Mick said warmly, it is indeed kind of you to invite Hackett and me up for a meal but it happens that I did in fact have breakfast. I think we’d better part here.
– We’ll meet soon again, Hackett remarked, to talk over this morning’s goings-on.
De Selby shrugged and beckoned McGettigan to help him with his gear.
– As you will, gentlemen, he said politely enough. I certainly could do with a bite and perhaps I will have the pleasure of Teague’s company. I thought the weather, the elements, all the forces of the heavens made a breakfast-tide lecture seemly.
– Good luck to your honour but there’s nourishment in that bottle you have, Teague said brightly, taking away his pipe to say it loudly.
They separated like that and Hackett and Mick went on their brief stroll into Dalkey, Mick wheeling the bicycle with some distaste.
– Have you somewhere to go? he asked.
– No I haven’t. What did you make of that performance?
– I don’t know what to say. You heard the conversation, and I presume both of us heard the same thing.
– Do you believe … it all happened?
– I suppose I have to.
– I need a drink.
They fell silent. Thinking about the stance (if that ill-used word will serve) was futile though disturbing and yet it was impossible to shut such thoughts out of the head. Somehow Mick saw little benefit in any discussion with Hackett. Hackett’s mind was twisted in a knot identical with his own. They were as two tramps who had met in a trackless desert, each hopelessly asking the other the way.
– Well, Hackett said moodily at last, I haven’t thrown overboard my suspicions of yesterday about drugs, and even hypnotism I wouldn’t quite discount. But we have no means of checking whether or not all that stuff this morning was hallucination.
– Couldn’t we ask somebody? Get advice?
– Who? For a start, who would believe a word of the story?
– That’s true.
– Incidentally, those underwater breathing masks were genuine. I’ve worn gadgets like that before but they weren’t as smart as De Selby’s.
– How do we know there wasn’t a mixture of some brain-curdling gas in the air-tank?
– That’s true by God.
– I quite forgot I was wearing the thing.
They had paused undecided at a corner in the lonely little town. Mick said that he thought he’d better go home and get some breakfast. Hackett thought it was too early to think of food. Well Mick had to get rid of his damned bike. Couldn’t he leave it at the comic little police station in charge of Sergeant Fottrell? But what was the point of that? Wouldn’t he have the labour of collecting it another time? Hackett said that there had been no necessity to have used it at all in the first place, as there was such a thing as an early tram to accommodate eccentric people. Mick said no, not on Sunday, not from Booterstown.
– I know Mrs L would let me in, Hackett observed pettishly, except I know the big sow is still in bed snoring.
– Yes, it’s been a funny morning, Mick replied sympathetically. Here you are, frustrated from joining the company of a widow who keeps a boozer, yet it is not half an hour since you parted company with Saint Augustine.
– Yes.
Hackett laughed bitterly. Mick had in fact business of his own later in the day, he remembered, as on nearly every Sunday. At three-thirty he would meet Mary at Ballsbridge and very likely they would go off to loaf amorously and chatter in Herbert Park. The arrangement was threatening to take on the tedium of routine things. When eventually they were married, if they were at all, wouldn’t the sameness of life be worse?
– I’m going to rest my mind, he announced, and rest it in Herbert Park later today, avec ma femme, ma bonne amie.
– My own Asterisk lady abstains on Sundays, Hackett said listlessly, lighting a cigarette.
But suddenly he came to life.
– Consternation was caused this morning, he cried, by the setting off of a small charge of DMP. Here comes the DMP in person!
True enough. Wheeling a bicycle, Sergeant Fottrell was coming towards them from a side road. His approach was slow and grave. Here one beheld the majesty of the law – inevitable, procedural, sure.
It is not easy to outline his personal portrait. He was tall, lean, melancholy, clean-shaven, red in the face and of indeterminate age. Nobody, it was said, had ever seen him in uniform, yet he was far from being a plain-clothes man; his constabularity was unmistakable. Summer and winter he wore a light tweed overcoat of a brown colour; a trace of collar and tie could be discerned about the neck but in his nether person the trousers were clearly of police blue, and the large boots also surely of police issue. Dr Crewett claimed to have seen the sergeant once with his overcoat off when assisting with a broken-down car and no inner jacket of any kind was disclosed, only shirt. The sergeant was friendly, so to speak, to his friends. He drank whiskey freely when the opportunity offered but it did not seem to affect him at all. Hackett held that this was because the sergeant’s normal sober manner was identical with the intoxicated manner of other people. But what the sergeant believed, what he said and how he said it was known throughout all south County Dublin.
Now he had stopped and saluted at his cloth cap.
– That’s the great morning, lads, he said, gratuitously.
There was agreement that it was. The sergeant seemed to be maturing the air and the early street.
– I see you have been to the water, he remarked genially, for far-from-simple cavortings in the brine?
– Sergeant, Hackett said, you have no idea how far from simple.
– I recede portentously from the sea, the sergeant beamed, except for a fastidious little wade for the good of my spawgs. For the truth is that I’m destroyed with the corns. Our work is walking work if you understand my portent.
– True enough, Sergeant, Mick agreed, I have often seen you with that bicycle but never up on it.
– It is emergency machinery for feats of captaincy. But there are dangers of a mental nature inherent in the bicycle and that story I will relate to you coherently upon another day.
– Yes.
Hackett was meditating on something.
– Funny thing, he said, I left a little bottle behind me in the Colza last night by accident. Perigastric thiosulphate, you know. My damned stomach is full of ructions and eructations.
– Well by damn, the sergeant sighed sympathetically, that is an infertile bitching. I cry for any creature, man or woman, who is troublous in the stomach enpitments. Mrs Laverty would be in her bed now or mayhap awash in her private bath internally.
– Brandy is good for a sick stomach, Mick ventured with studied tactlessness.
– Brandy? Baugh! Hackett grimaced.
– Not brandy but Brannigan, the sergeant cried, striking his crossbar. Brannigan the chemist, and he’s an early-Mass man. He would now be shovelling gleefully at his stirabout, and supinely dietetic. Come down along here now.
Glumly Mick followed Hackett’s downcast back as the sergeant led the way down the street to a corner shop and smartly knocked on the residential door. The small meek Mr Brannigan had scarcely opened it when they were all crowded in the hallway. Mick felt annoyed at this improvised and silly tactic. What would passers-by think of two bicycles outside at such an hour, with the sergeant’s the most recognizable in the whole country? Hackett might be forced to swallow a dose of salts rather than disavow his lie about digestion trouble, and good enough for him.
– I have a man here, Mr Brannigan, avic, the sergeant announced cheerfully, that has a raging confusion in his craw, a stainless citizen and a martyr. Let us make our way sedulously to the shop.
Mr Brannigan with vague noises had produced keys and opened a door in the narrow hall; then they were all in the shop, with its gaudy goods and showcases. Under the high ceiling Mr Brannigan looked tiny (or perhaps his nearness to the sergeant was the real reason), the face quite round, round glasses in it and an air of being pleased.
– Which of the gentlemen, Sergeant, he asked quietly, is out of humour with himself?
The sergeant clapped a hand officially on Hackett’s shoulder.
– Mr Hackett is the patient inexorably, he said.
– Ah. Where is the seat of the trouble, Mr Hackett?
The patient made a clutching motion at his stomach.
– Here, he muttered, where nearly everybody’s damn trouble lies.
– Ah-ha. Have you been taking anything in particular for it?
– I have. But I can’t tell you what. Something from a prescription I haven’t got on me.
– Well well now. I would recommend a mix of acetic anhydride with carbonic acid. In solution. Excellent stuff in the right proportions. I won’t be a minute getting it.
– No, no, Hackett said in genuine remonstrance. I daren’t take drugs I’m not used to. Very nice of you and the Sergeant, Mr Brannigan, but I can wait.
– But we’ve any amount of proprietary things here, Mr Hackett. Even temporary relief, you know …
But the sergeant had been examining a large bottle he had taken down from a low shelf by the counter.
– By the pipers, he cried happily, here is the elixir of youth innocuously in its mundane perfection!
He handed the bottle to Hackett and reached up for another which he put in Mick’s hand. The label was,
HURLEY’S TONIC WINE
A glass three times a day or as required assures lasting benefit to the kidneys, stomach and nervous system. As recommended by doctors, nurses and geriatric institutions.
– Mind you, that’s not a bad sedative for the inner man, Mr Brannigan said seriously. Many ladies in the town are very partial to it.
– Sir Thomas O’Brannigan, the sergeant intoned grandly, I will buy a bottle of it myself – put it down to me – and when you have emplaced delicate stem glasses we will all have a sup of it superbly, for the dear knows how sick we could all be in the heel of the day.
Mr Brannigan smiled and nodded. Hackett hastily examined their faces in the uncertain light.
– I suppose it would pull us together a bit, he conceded. I’ll have a bottle too.
That Sunday morning had been surely one of manicoloured travail. After acerb disputation between De Selby and Saint Augustine, here they were for at least an hour in that closed pharmacy drinking Hurley’s Tonic Wine and listening to Sergeant Fottrell’s pensées on happiness, health, the wonders of foreign travel, law and order, and bicycles. The tonic was, as one suspected it would be, a cheap red wine heavily fortified. Its social purpose was clear enough. It enabled prim ladies, who would be shocked at the idea of entering a public house, to drink liquor that was by no means feeble, in the defensible interest of promoting health.
Mick had also bought a bottle and they were in the midst of a fourth bottle which Mr Brannigan bad gallantly put up ‘on the house’ when Mick felt that sheer shame required that the little party should end. Hackett agreed that he felt much better but not so Mick; even genuine wine does not help much, and he felt a little bit queasy. The sergeant was quite unmoved, and undeterred in loquacity. When they were back in the street Mick turned to him.
– Sergeant, the day is getting older and more people are now about. Would you mind if I left this bike in your station till tomorrow? I think for me a tram home would be the business.
– Benignly certain, he replied, courteously. Tell Policeman Pluck that I ordained the custody unceremoniously.
He then departed about his public business with many blessings commending his friends to God.
– Do you know, Hackett mentioned as they moved off, all that Augustinian chat is gradually bringing half-forgotten things bubbling up in my head. Didn’t he have a ferocious go at Pelagius?
– The heretic? Yes.
– What do you mean heretic?
– That’s what he was. Some synod condemned and excommunicated him.
– I thought only the Pope could pronounce on heresy.
– No. He appealed to the Pope without result.
– I see. Other bad eggs were the Manichees and the Donatists. I know that. I don’t mind about them at all. But if my memory isn’t all bunched. I believe Pelagius was a grand man and a sound theologian.
– You don’t know much on the subject. Don’t pretend.
– He believed Adam’s lapse (and personally I wouldn’t take the slightest notice of such fooling) harmed only himself. The guilt was his alone and this yarn about everybody being born in original sin is all bloody bull.
– Oh, as you will.
– Who, believing in God, could also believe that the whole human race was prostrate in ruin before Christ came, the day before yesterday?
– Augustine, for one, I think.
– New-born infants are innocent and if they die before baptism, they have a right to heaven. Baptism is only a rite, a sort of myth.
– According to De Selby, John the Baptist was no myth. He met the man. He probably regards him as a personal friend.
– Are you baptized?
– I suppose so.
– Suppose so? Is a hazy opinion enough if your soul depends on it?
– For heaven’s sake shut up. Haven’t we had enough for today and yesterday?
– An awkward question, what?
– At this rate I’ll probably meet Martin Luther on top of the tram.
Hackett contemptuously lit a cigarette and stopped.
– I’ll leave you here, go for a walk, get a paper, sit down and read a lot of boring muck, and wait for a chance to slip into the Colza. But remember this: I’m a Pelagian.
Policeman Pluck was young, raw-boned, mottled of complexion and wore an expression of friendly stupidity. He had a bicycle upside-down on the floor of the day-room attending to a hernia at the front rim, grating white powder on to a protruding intestine. His salute for Mick was an inane smile in which his scrupulously correct uniform seemed to concur, though all visible teeth seemed to be bad and discoloured.
– Morning, Mr Pluck. I met the sergeant and he told me I could leave this other machine here for a day or two. I’ll get a tram.
– Well he did, did he? grinned Policeman Pluck. Ah, the dacent lovable man!
– Is that all right?
– You are welcome, sir, and lave it be the wall there. But the sergeant’s tune will change when he comes up with that cabman Teague.
– What has Teague done?
Policeman Pluck blanched slightly at the recollection of horror.
– Yesterday he met a missionary father, a Redempiorist, at the station and druv him up to the parochial house. Well, Teague and his jinnet wasn’t five minits in the PP’s holy grounds but before they left it they had the whole place in a pukey mess of a welter of dung.
– Ah, unfortunate, that.
– Enough to dress two drills of new spring spuds.
– Still, Teague was hardly to blame.
– Do you expect the sergeant to have the jinnet in the dock for sacrilege? Or for a sin against the Holy Ghost? I’ll tell you wan thing, boy.
– What’s that?
– You’ll have a scarifying mission, an iron mission, there will be rosaries on the bended knees for further orders, starting tomorra. There’ll be hell to pay. But thank God it’s the weemen’s week first.
– Thank God, Mr Pluck, Mick called back at the door, I’m not even a parishioner.
Why should he take account of hellfire sermons anyway? Had he not been, in a kind of a way, in heaven?
6
Mary was not a simple girl, not an easy subject to write about nor Mick the one to write. He thought women in general were hopeless as a theme for discussion or discourse, and surely for one man the one special – la femme particulière, if that sharpens the meaning – must look dim, meaningless and empty to others if he should talk genuinely about her or think aloud. The mutual compulsion is a mystery, not just a foible or biogenesis, and this sort of mystery, even if comprehensible to the two concerned, is at least absolutely private.
Mary was no sweetie-pie nor was she pretty but (to Mick’s eyes) she was good-looking and dignified. Brown-eyed, her personality was russet and usually she was quiet and recollected. He was, he thought, very fond of her and did not by any means regard her as merely a member of her sex, or anything so commonplace and trivial. She was a true obsession with him (he suspected) and kept coming into his head on all sorts of irrelevant occasions without, so to speak, knocking. Hackett’s relations with the peculiar girl he mixed around with seemed perfunctory, like having a taste for marmalade at breakfast or meditatively paring fingernails in public-house silences.
Mick was absolutely sure in mind about few things but he thought he could sincerely say that Mary was an unusual girl. She was educated, with a year in France, and understood music. She had wit, could be lively, and it took little to induce for a while gaiety of word and mood. Her people, whom he did not know, had money. She was tasteful and fastidious in dress … and why not? She worked in what was called a fashion house, with a top job which Mick knew paid well and involved consorting only with people of standing. Her job was one thing they had never talked about. That her earnings were a secret was something he was deeply thankful for because he knew that they could scarcely be less than his own. A disclosure, even accidental, would be his humiliation though he knew all this situation was very silly. Yet work at the fol-the-lols of couture did nothing to impair Mary’s maturity of mind. She read a lot, talked politics often and once even mentioned her half-intentions of writing a book. Mick did not ask on what subject, for somehow he found the idea distasteful. Without swallowing whole all the warnings one could readily hear and read about the spiritual dangers of intellectual arrogance and literary freebooting, there was
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