‘No, they haven’t, truly.’ And shows her the snowdrops. ‘Flowers,’ he says.
‘Snowdrops, sure give them to me.’
He hands them over like an army dispatch.
‘You’re well treated, are you?’ he says.
‘Well, you give me flowers, like a lover.’ Then, pleasantly enough, ‘I wasn’t waiting for you, you know.’ ‘I often thought of you, in Africa…’
‘Is that where you were? Well, that’s a long way, brother.’ She puts the snowdrops to her nose.
‘No scent,’ she says expertly. ‘The sick and the mad,’ she adds, more mysteriously.
‘I just thought I’d come out and see you, since I was home anyway.’
‘Well,’ she says, looking at him. ‘I wasn’t waiting for you.’
He goes back away out the road to thumb a lift back into Sligo. Swinging his arms, swinging his arms, hawthorn, hawthorn.
Bread-and-butter bushes was the name for the hawthorn, on the way to school, up the nuns’ field by the raggedy ditches, and you could eat the leaves with relish, under the rain.
Swinging his arms, hawthorn, hawthorn.
A bright suit’s not enough.
Next time he walks down to the post office to get his official letter with the army pension in it, there’s another letter waiting also, poste restante.
Beasley’s Hostel,
Isle of Dogs,
London,
3rd April, 1959
Dear Brother Eneas,
Now I’ve been wandering these last months and ever hoping to find you. I’ve been looking, brother, into every passing face, to see if you are there. I crossed to the Horn of Africa scared out of my blessed wits by recollections of Lagos, and also, the very fierce fellas of the wilderness that would gladly kill and cook a man. I was standing at the door of the freight car, crossing to Kenya, shouting out your name in case you were near. Standing like a fool and shouting out at the lost lions and the burning bushes and the straw villages. Eneas, Eneas, was my eternal shout. And no blessed answer in the wilderness of my homeland.
The Isle of Dogs was a place you mentioned as a haven for men like us and I have scoured the Isle from stem to stern, every poor dosshouse and house of lonesome girls, and find you nowhere. This is a letter to say I am alive and looking for you and hoping to see you. The world is wide but I have trust in God’s instincts and the light of His kindness. I do. I am writing to the only other place I know that may be connected with your name, unless you are still in Lagos, a district now closed to me. I am afraid to write to Lagos and leave a clue for murdering men but all the same I did write to the company there but they send word they know nothing of your whereabouts. I am even afraid to write to you in Sligo lest I might stir up a hornet’s nest to devour you. Forgive if you will the force of friendship but I am not willing to be parted so needlessly. I would explain all if I could only ascertain your location.
It behoved me to leave Nigeria in a violent and dark fashion, to wit, escaping the terrors of Lagos. I’ve a tale to tell of murder and misery pertaining to my late lamented father and your friend Harcourt bears the scars of a beating and imprisonment. But God allowed me freedom at last in the darks of the night because murdering men love to drink worse than us and my head was clear and I ran out into my Africa like a mighty rabbit and got loose from them. I burst forth and tasted freedom. And hurried down to the stockyard but you were long gone, whither I did not know, safely I hoped and prayed. It was my hope that you’d jumped the expected train to Kenya. And I leapt on the next train myself in my misery of loss and fear. For if you were gone back into the dark town I could not follow you. Fear worse than a child’s, brother Eneas, and darker than tar.
But I’ve sought you ever since, in Nairobi and secondly along the coast, with no reward. And I doubt in my heart you could be in Sligo, it being your dark Lagos after all, full of wretched killers. But Sligo’s the only name I have after the Isle of Dogs, and God send this letter to you in the upshot. You see I sorely miss you, my brother. And hope this letter finds you and finds you well.
I remain,
yr obednt servnt,
Port Harcourt.
In any court in the land he would count it a remarkable letter. Not just because it has reached him but also the birds of friendship flying about among the words. Yes, sir, it is a mighty thing to enjoy the fact of a friend in the world. A mighty thing. He is affected to his boots by it. The old tone of Harcourt carried in a perilous letter. The living force of it.
So it’s back to his old task of hail and farewell.
‘Well, take care, son, as ever,’ says the Mam, and takes a hold of him, and would kiss his face but she can’t reach it. ‘Will you bend down to me?’ she says. ‘And take your punishment like a man.’
And she kisses him quick, like he has it written on his hat at the seaside. She’s buoyant, weirdly so, excited. Everything a mystery!
His Pappy’s more subdued, more puzzled. They go out into Father Moran’s Park along the river. The old man is as lithe as a boy, right enough, stooping to pick up sticks and stones to fling into the salmon-coloured river, silver and black. On the other hand he himself, Eneas himself, is tired and his joints feel creaky. His father gambols about the riverbank.
‘Here, Pappy,’ he says, taking out a roll of notes in an elastic band. ‘Something to keep the wolf from the door.’
‘What is it?’ says the old musician.
‘Cash,’ says his son.
‘Good on you,’ says Old Tom. The old man pockets the fold of notes and laughs. ‘You’re a bit of a wonder to me, Eneas. Always were. Quaint little lad, sitting up waiting for me.’
‘Ah, well, yes.’
He contents himself with the night boat to England.
‘Farewell,’ his Mam said to him, and ‘Bye-bye,’ and isn’t that right and on the button? Parcels speckled by rain…
The thought of Harcourt, the victory of Harcourt’s letter, offers a balm.
Oh, he was going to be the great man in Sligo, but, all in all, when the few sums are totted up, you’ve to start off great to be a great man. He is a little smidgen of a fella, a shadow, a half-thought at the back of his brothers’ minds maybe, a sort of warning to them, a kind of bogeyman to fright the children and put manners on to them.
It’s one of the rare fine nights at sea on the Irish Sea with the dark blue heavens hammered by the hammers of God and the stars set in the cold enamel aching somehow there in their distances. He cannot help thinking of the sky as a realm of jewels but he supposes it is all fire and ruin just the same. All fire and ruin. He sits on a wooden bench like you’d find in a municipal park, up on the deck of the dark mail-packet, alone it seems of the passengers. The mysterious vents and round brasses shine in the friendly moonlight. Below him the fleeing emigrants are stilled in their flight by pints and smashed-up songs, preferring the stale air, disregarding the clean, clear night of honest stars. Somewhere in the first-class he imagines dark strangers sitting, noble, immaculate, aglow. And he leans his head back against the iron ship and opens his face to the quiet sky, and wonders how deep the sounding-lead would go here, let down by the eternal ‘boy’, and scratches at himself in his privacy, and if there is stardust then he is getting it now, it will be lying on his cheeks as cool as cups.
He would rather, yes he would, Roseanne by his side, and indeed he knows Harcourt would not grudge him Roseanne, no, sir. But she had not been waiting for him.
And it rushes at him now like a leopard, one of those mighty fellas in Dublin Zoo that walk about in their cage and look the men to do you mischief, should they ever escape and wander out into the city on a dark night. Like one of those leopards, something flows up the side of the mailboat and crosses the rust-speckled deck, and fastens its long white teeth into his throat. And the mouth tears at his throat, the heavy molars dragging on his voicebox, and a flood of blood comes up through his neck from his drowned chest, and pours out through the magnificent gashes. And his very v
oice is wedded to that leopard darkness, the one drowning and the other in a delight of rage and strength. Tears fall uselessly down to wash the murder from his throat. And he hugs himself with his long arms in the suit suddenly peculiar to him also, and the leopard departs and this notion, this cockamamie notion of blessed love he has about her, about Roseanne, is not manageable suddenly after all but stabs at him, on the lonesome deck of the mail-packet, and who’s to see him, and what odds a man alone, and bugger the thing, and thank the good God there is no one to see him, shrunken into his tears, stabbed and stabbed by the sudden grief — eternally, entirely, and no, not uniquely, never so, in this wide creation of solo persons, alone. In the matter of a wife, alone. He thinks and thinks, like his brain was a metal plate and hammer, striking, striking, of the harbour of her sharp breasts, and is murdered, murdered.
Deep in his callused hands now, his starry face.
He goes from his mother’s kiss to Harcourt’s, because unexpectedly he is kissed by Harcourt, a rough kiss planted in at a wrong angle, but a kiss for all that. In fact Harcourt clasps him wordlessly and thrusts his face towards him but is so overwhelmed that he only manages to kiss Eneas’s lapel. He misses the face entirely. And then he stands holding on to Eneas as if the storm of the world might carry him off again, the tornado of accidental things, and by God it’s true that Harcourt’s own face is screwed up queerly and lemonlike tears are chasing each other down his cheeks.
‘Good old fella,’ says Eneas, like you might to a frighted horse, and he almost pats the old bastard’s shoulder. ‘Jesus.’
‘Jesus is right, brother, Jesus is right.’
‘You had a buggering hard time of it there in Lagos.’
‘You think so, my brother?’
‘Yes, sir. I saw the house. I saw what they did to … I saw what was his sad and regretful end
‘You saw all that. I’m sorry you saw that. Because only demons could do that to a man, a poor old man with his days behind him.’
‘I know, Harcourt, man, I know.’
‘Made me watch them, boy, made his poor son watch. Part of my sentence. Then they dragged me out into the dark of that district we knew so well, and thanks be to the Great Bugger himself, but they had plenty of cola-nut wine in them, and when I saw a gap I filled it with my flying heels, running I was thinking from my good father’s death. Nor did I go back to bury him and have lost the reputation of a dutiful son, sacred to any man, and fecked myself on to that fire-breathing train …’
They are facing each other in the lobby of Beasley’s, one of a hundred lopsided dosshouses on the Isle of Dogs, refuge of sailors. There’s an old man heeled up like a cart on a plastic seat that’s redder than lipstick, like a big lump of storm debris. And Eneas knows that all over the salted streets of the Isle lie these beached sailors. And he laughs his half-forgotten laughter. Judas, ages since he laughed that saving laughter. A lifetime. And he feels for the first time in a stretch a peculiar peacefulness. Peace, like Benson’s rose. And he thinks of Bull Mottram and the shortness of a person’s days and he smiles. He thinks of a lot of things standing there without quite knowing exactly what they are, vague, rushing things, scenes from his goings about and general things. He couldn’t say for ten bob how his heart is fixed in the matter of Harcourt. But never, never in all his living days has he taken delight, such delight, in the mere sighting of another human being. The mere sight of Harcourt there, with his lemony tears and his gabbing, the little bobbing iceberg of his deep sorrow, well, to tell the truth it’s a tonic. He feels like a fella of twenty. A hero at his ease. A lucky creature. A man blessed and enraptured. Oh, a king.
*
Nothing for it now but the inspired purchase of an old house at the southern edge of the Isle. He liberates his money to the vendor and in addition gives a couple of hundred to a builder to feck in a toilet and such and put locks on the rooms. To every inmate a lock. It is like a marriage house, though there is no bride, unless Harcourt is the bride. And the builder paints for Eneas a mighty sign, at cost price, for glory’s sake, which shows to the choppy waves of the channel and the Thames, Northern Lights Hotel. And into this hotel they receive the battered wanderers, the weary sailors, the refugees from ferocious lives, the distressed alcoholics, the repentant murderers if Harcourt’s suspicions are ever accurate — and the general flotsam of the great port river of life.
And nightly Eneas blesses the Northern Lights Hotel like a small farmer includes his holding in his night prayers. Each week the War Office dispatches with astonishing faithfulness the sum owed to him for his wartime gallantry. And if an angel were to descend and inform him that paradise was at hand, he thinks he might linger nonetheless in this fortunate isle instead. It is the tin-tacks of days and the slumbers deep as wells of the nights that gild the dark terrain behind his eyes. Away goes care on long-famished legs and in lopes the great figure of sufficiency. The medicine of nondescript and toiling years restores him. Restores Harcourt also — not a trace of his epilepsy disturbs, in his own grateful phrase, his ‘social standing’.
In the dawns a pale wrung light slightly evil falls from the small window of Eneas’s own room, where a simple chair is set, for looking out. There’s a black sea-trunk against the wall, and some old pictorial magazines — oh, a hard nest maybe for a single man. On a single hook on the door is a ragged dressing-gown, and a yellowed pair of pyjamas leaks out from under the ancient bolster. A few jam-jars, in the grip of dust, have wandered in from the world of shops and preserves, to catch the wasps that plague his kingdom in the summer. The river moils past. At their unknown appointed times ships slide by unseen.
And yet it is a pleasant station. It is a station fashioned after the hankering of his heart. Ordinary heart of no fabulous requirement. The gaining of this place all the same to him is a high achievement. The arena of friendship with Harcourt and the general usefulness of their haven in the sea-weary hearts of sailors — both are palaces and jewels to him. He has been brought at last to the preferred spot. And as a journeying man it is fitting to him that it is an ancient port, as old as England herself. And as he watches the fleeting tide swell the river and deflate it, by turn and turn, he thinks of this district before the first wanderers, a riverbank wild as America’s West, and the rage of birds tearing worms out of the printless mud. And the queer silence of that ancient noise and the pristine absence of men and women, loving and shouting. And he wonders did God Himself stand there before mankind, stand there with his ample creation, feeling the wind of His winds against His face, the water of His waters against His feet? And did He paddle in the river He had made?
When he thinks of Sligo now it is as a place eternally the same. Certainly no news of death or even life reaches him. Perhaps it hurts him that no characteristic letter arrives to him from his mother but equally his old habit of not writing to her persists, and in his easy moments he assumes that she is as happy to think of him as write to him. He is not so great an illusioned fool as to forget that indeed in the course of his bockety life he hasn’t received more than a handful of letters. The documents of his existence are scant and few. Nor indeed, by the lights of his old concern of safety and concealment, has he actually communicated his whereabouts to her. He is content to leave the matter year and year, and the years accommodate him. So Sligo slips behind him, fixed, at anchor. And as for his notorious sentence of death covered now in the rheum of time and the lichens of the decades, it is emptied of its terrors. He cannot feel it any longer beat against his living heart.
Far away there is freedom for Nigeria and so Harcourt is ever to be an Englishman. There is freedom for Nigeria but Harcourt must abide in the Northern Lights Hotel. It is strange that though many years separate the freedoms of their homelands, Eneas and Harcourt are scraps of people both, blown off the road of life by history’s hungry breezes. Therefore their hotel must be both homeland and home, though homeland and home have but two citizens. The craziness of it doesn’t drive them crazy. Side by side they a
re citizenry enough and their constitution provides for their concealment and abandonment. Abandonment is the proudest principle of their order.
By these vague beliefs Eneas lives and in the ordered motions of each day he rests his faith. As the years go on the hotel neither prospers nor struggles. The saga of grease and grime has no more impediment than the occasional death of an inmate, a finished man carried down into the lobby and out into the bare hearse of Carnew and Son, Grocers and Undertakers. Carnew needs no shining brasses. These deaths are not violent but the easy epic deaths of the lonesome. The proprietors of the Northern Lights Hotel don’t fail to observe the proper obsequies of their inmates, whether Methodist, Jewish, Baptist or renegade. The rabbi is called for to gather his man to the breast of Yahweh, the never-written name, or the minister for a strayed sheep of the Presbyterians, scratched though he be by briars. Father Connolly is fetched for to honour the end of the odd stray Irishman. Therefore the Northern Lights is a kind of lean-to or hedge-school of the religions of the world and all are united at last in the long peace of decay.
20
LONESOME DAYS are nothing to Eneas McNulty. Here he is in his seventieth year, as hale as a nut, as fast-bottomed as a new bucket. His every gesture as easy-natural as a dancing man’s. His mind goes back betimes to the dance-hall of his father and his brother. Where all the souls of the district were dancing — dancing souls as fierce as foxes. Where the queer starlight infected the very hairdos of the beauties of Sligo. And every girl of twenty was a beauty, for youth alone he sees now was loveliness, glamour and charm. Out of the great trees were charmed the black-coated birds, every man a willing dupe to the starlight in the tresses tortured into perms in the Friday Mecca of the hairdresser’s.
But the time that has begun to stand in front of the time of Viv — that old vision which for so long took first place, took centre-stage like his father’s band and dancing orchestra of yore, planting its eight sets of polished boots and hitting out the Yankee tunes — the thing he sees now betimes when his mind wanders back to those haunted lanes and strands, those still-glimmering lamps, the November rain eating into the car-lights, is Sam Dickins dancing with his girlfriend of twenty-three years, Mary Deegan. And Sam Dickins has a club foot covered in that mighty shoe made for him by the cobbler — Blennerhasset, the planter’s whelp — but he knows the weight of that shoe and swings it through the steps. Where other men are doing three steps, he’s swivelling on his normal boot, and swinging that club foot. You can see him count the beats, you can see Mary Deegan laughing for the joy of it, the prettiness of it. Oh, Jesus, and all night he’s dancing with Mary Deegan, too busy dancing for marrying he says, and there’s many, many a girl would take her place. He’s a dixie dancer! Lord God, Protector of the Meek, he swings that foot. You can say to him, as he goes out sweaty and radiant into the frosted night, Mary on his arm, ‘Good dancing,’ and by that same Lord he’ll say, ‘Not so bad!’ Eneas is ever thinking of that. Because in his heart he believes he understands the weight of the thing that was given amiss to him, whatever limb it is, soul or otherwise. But with Harcourt in the high times of the Northern Lights, he has discovered the weight of it, unearthed the number and is dancing now, swivelling one foot where other men would take three steps, swivelling his good foot, and throwing the other.