“MacEmm says there’s more things happened already than ever you’d dream of to come. MacMurrough: I call him MacEmm.”
“I don’t like him.”
“You had a barney is all. Friends can’t fall out that way. You’ll make up, you’ll see.”
“Has he been saying things about me?”
“Only things I asked him. Don’t worry about that now. Haven’t you me with you now?”
“I think I have.”
“Hold me so,” said Jim. He lifted Doyler’s arm and snook in under it. He bundled himself small the closer to be held. He felt a great emulsive flow of love, all the truer for his needing no arm to hold him. The parts had shifted. He felt the marvel of his will that had brought Doyler to him this night. Doyler had not understood about the island. But that would come. Doyler had nothing to fear. Jim would swim him to the Muglins, he would swim him home again. There was no end to the swimming they would do.
He was coming on to yawn. His breath sucked in the draught from the window. His shoulders hunched, his legs stretched to their toes, he made claws of his fingers in his hands—a fierce pandiculation of his limbs. This is my body. See how it fits. Everything fits. I am a finely tailored flesh. He arched his groin. Feel this, my stand. Its throb alone would fetch it. His breath streamed out. The magnificence of my chest.
“You yawning?” asked Doyler.
Jim flung himself on top like a coil released. He crushed his body upon Doyler’s, each muscle straining to bear and be known. He caught Doyler’s arms and reached them wide, spreading his legs with his own between. He pressed his groin, flesh upon flesh, upon Doyler’s groin, hub of their wheel.
“Whoa,” said Doyler. “What’s brought this on now?”
“Tell me if you love me.”
“All right, I love you.”
“Tell me again. Keep telling me.”
“I love you, Jim.”
“And why wouldn’t you love me? Amn’t I all you wanted? Amn’t I all of it yours?”
He nuzzled his head in the pillow. He had released Doyler’s hands and they enfolded him now. They seemed so big of a sudden. “Doyler,” he said, and of that same sudden his voice sounded small and quavery. “Doyler . . . what and we don’t make the island?”
“But we will sure. That spit of a swim, we’ll easy make it.”
“I know we will. We can’t drown anyway. The wars are coming and we need to be fighting for Ireland.”
Doyler said nothing, only patted his shoulder, and after a time, Jim said, “I’m sleepy.”
“Sleep so,” Doyler told him. Jim turned on his side, pulling an arm with him so that Doyler spooned beside, holding the arm to him, while his eyes closed, surely and immaterially to sink him in sleep.
But Doyler did not sleep. He lay on his lump of pillow, watching the night that gaped at the window. His arm moved up and down with Jim’s breathing, wisps of Jim’s hair tickled his face. Old pal o’ me heart. Indeed it was true, the wars were coming, and already far over the seas where the world turned, the sun was creeping up the sky.
And high and bright and clear it shone, early next morning when they stepped out to Mass. Outside the chapel, all along the railings, newspaper placards had been posted. “What does it mean?” asked Jim.
“Maneuvers canceled, it says,” said Doyler.
“I know, but what does that mean?”
“I don’t know for sure.” Two young Volunteers were standing about reading an Independent. Doyler wandered up. “What’s going on?” he asked.
They looked him over in his Citizen rig. “Maneuvers canceled,” they said.
“You telling me the Volunteers has funked it?”
“We haven’t funked nothing, pal. Orders came in the night.”
“That’s right,” said the other. “We’ll be off to the races now.”
These were Volunteers out of Dalkey. They wouldn’t know much about any rising planned. “Can I have a read of it?” Doyler took the paper. “No Parades!” said the headline. “Volunteer Marches Canceled. A Sudden Order.”
“What does it mean?” said Jim, coming impatient.
“I’ll tell you what it means. It means we’re free.”
“Ireland?”
“Where would you go with Ireland? We are, you and me.” He still couldn’t believe it. They had canceled the rising. The last minute the Volunteers had lost their nerve. Didn’t he know them for shapers? He was free of it all. He clapped Jim on the shoulders. “We’re in the swim!” he was saying.
Jim smiled uncertainly and the Volunteers looked on indulgently at this mad Citizen soldier who laughed out loud for liberty.
Saturday afternoon MacMurrough visited his aunt. She was kept under detention at the military hospital in Dublin Castle. Oddly enough he had not been questioned himself about the guns. A policeman had called to inform him of a regrettable accident involving his aunt. The next, a detective arrived inquiring about his residency in Ireland. So that was how they would play it. With that ball in the air, even if the swim had not been tomorrow, he should be leaving on the Monday. Gruesome to travel on a bank holiday, but such were the exigencies of wartime. Mailboat to Holyhead, train to somewhere in the Midlands. Nottingham, he thought. Is Nottingham in the Midlands? Fuck my way to France.
While he waited to be shown to his aunt’s ward, he became aware of the corridor’s collection of war-wounded. Avoiding their faces, he glanced the more on their injuries. The different lengths of leg that might be cut off, how neat the tucks in armless tunics, in wheelchairs feet that pointed askew. He heard their unearthly banter: the races, the rain, Nurse O’Hara. He had a notion of his being naked in their presence, an urge to cover his exposure with his hands. How very much more precious was the body than the life. A ward door opened, a nurse came out: a glimpse beyond of unsayable distress. His hands in his pockets of their own accord moved to cover his balls. This too in France. The ward door creaked home, saying whyee, whyee, why.
Unlucky bastards. Unlucky to be in their presence.
At last his ticket was accepted and he was directed to his aunt’s ward. He found her on a verandah overlooking the Castle gardens, arranged in a wicker bath-chair. The cuts to her face had all but healed, though a nasty bruising still showed at her forehead. She did not complain, but her posture told the pain of her back. A sergeant in scarlet attended her. One of his aunt’s coups de maîtresse, so characteristic, had transformed this keeper into a family retainer. Shorty, she called him, on the grounds presumably of his being tall and burly. She conducted their relations in something of a musichall turn.
MacMurrough kissed her. She said, “Shorty, you will remember my nephew.”
“Yes, mum. Nephew, mum.”
“Did I mention he was a captain in the Volunteers?”
“Indominatably, mum.”
“He has resigned his commission.”
“Ah, mum, wise.”
“It was hoped once upon a time he would lead the men of Ferns. Yes, in the rising that was to come. But there will be no rising, will there, Shorty?”
“Couldn’t say so, mum.”
“Because they have taken Casement.”
MacMurrough asked for a private word, but this was not possible, indominatably not. He found a chair and brought it close. “Aunt Eva, I am told they will put you under a ban from Ireland. You will have to remove to England.”
“Is that what you are told?” she said. “I have been telling Shorty about Casement. Shorty never knew he was Irish, sure you didn’t, Shorty?”
“Sir Roger, mum? English as roast beef.”
“There. Even our heroes must be English.”
“Aunt Eva, there are arrangements to be made.”
“They’ll hang him,” she said. “Won’t they, Shorty, hang Casement?”
“Traitor, mum. Indominatably.”
MacMurrough sighed. He had as well ask or she might never drop it. “Tell Aunt Eva, what is the news of Sir Roger?”
“Casement,??
? she corrected him. “He has never liked to be Sir Rogered.” She waved at a newspaper, which told, blandly he thought, of an arms seizure in Kerry. But apparently Shorty had assured her it was all to do with Casement. Casement had been captured with the arms, he had been spirited through the Castle and already lay in chains in London. MacMurrough eyed Shorty, who might be on parade so inscrutable his demeanor. It occurred to him there might after all be a logic behind this tiresome double-turn.
Casement had brought an arms ship through the blockade, she told him, through the teeth of the British navy even, all the way from Germany he had brought it, to the coast of Kerry. “He does this wonderful thing, this incredible thing for them. And what do the fools of Volunteers do? What do they do, Shorty?”
“Muck up, mum.”
“They muck bloody up. They couldn’t get the arms to the beach even. These are the men who refused any assistance. A woman’s use is a nurse and typewriter. Have they never looked at their wives? Have they not seen their mothers? They might try managing a household on these novel lines. We should have lunch for supper and come home without the kiddies. One wonders what they hope to do with the Poor Old Woman, after they have toasted her in exotic beverage. Throw her to the kitchens with the praties?”
“So the plans”—MacMurrough glanced to the sergeant—“the plans are off?”
“He means the rising,” she told Shorty. “How can there be a rising without arms? We shall be lucky if they riot. Certainly it will never come to a peace conference. Sure it will not, Shorty?”
“Couldn’t say so, mum.”
“He can’t say,” she said, “but I know he agrees. You do, Shorty, I know you do.”
Shorty remained mum.
“Aunt Eva, this really is getting us nowhere.”
“No,” she agreed, “it has got us nowhere at all. And now poor Casement must hang for it.”
She was gazing beyond the Castle walls at the soft-turned Dublin hills. It was raining there and soon the rain would fall on Dublin. Her chin was trembling and her lips quivered with words. He saw how creased and pale they were. “He is the only man I ever thought was beautiful.”
MacMurrough was struck by her tone. “Aunt Eva, I believe . . .” He took her hand, which felt cold in his. He believed there might be a tear in her eye.
“A beautiful man, Shorty, no?”
“Pleasant face, mum. Say so myself.”
“Never a mean turn in his heart. An utterly selfless man. The first I saw him, I was struck. I knew immediately I was in the presence of something extraordinary in our land. Something we had not seen in Ireland in the centuries. The soul shone through his face. Though you are to remember,” she said, aside to Shorty, “he was not raised a Romanist.”
“Protestant, mum,” Shorty averred.
“It shone in his face, his soul, his rare and natural face. And I thought, there indeed stands an Irish gentleman.”
MacMurrough was overcome with compassion. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Eva. You must fear so dreadfully for him.” He saw her mouth puckering, her eyes veiled with tears. Her hand was so cold. He stroked it. He could not bear to see her so wretched, nor suffer her heart, that proud thing, to be bared before this English yokel. “Come, Aunt Eva, bid your man to leave us a moment. We’ll talk alone. Truly I had no conception of your sensibilities in this matter.”
“No more you had. They teach little of the heart in the gutter.”
He was stung. He loosed her hand. She took it away.
“Well, the English have him now,” she said, “and they will tear him to pieces. Hanging is the least they will do.”
“Now, mum,” said Shorty. MacMurrough watched him pat her shawl closer round her shoulders. “Nip in the air, mum. Best turn in.”
He sought in the man’s eye some collusion, a notice that they both were dealing with a woman distracted. Nothing. MacMurrough was excluded, entirely.
Still his aunt stared at the mountains. It might be her portrait she sat for. Then, in defiance, her hand flung out. “Hang us and be damned,” she cried. “It is too absurd to die of an influenza. Or of a Tuesday. Don’t you think, Shorty?”
Shorty wheeled her round. “Tricky business, ’flu, mum.”
MacMurrough said, “Aunt Eva, you sting me and provoke me. I do not protest. I am too conscious of your pain. But you are misinformed, I find, of the gutter.”
“And what will you pretend to teach me?”
“Perhaps that, gutter or mountain, the heart breaks as surely.”
“Indeed. And now we discover your heart to be broken.”
“Perhaps it is. But it is proud too. There is a boy I love and his soul too shines in his face. Though it never may be, I am proud to love him.”
The bath-chair had stopped at the glass doors to the ward. His aunt did not look his way, only nodded her head. “Well, Shorty,” she said at length, “what do you make of that?”
“Smitten, mum. Happens.”
“And so you will go to the Front?”
“I will.”
How very old she did look, without powder or preparation. “I think indeed you may begin to love. The heart must be proud to love. You shall have High Kinsella,” she added. “I have arranged that with your father. You may yet be The MacMurrough, and a poor MacMurrough you’d be without High Kinsella behind you.”
“It seems unlikely,” he answered, “the world the way it is.”
“No,” she agreed. She said, with the merest interrogation, “You shall be brave.”
“I hope to. I wasn’t very brave with you in the car.”
She nodded. “You will be brave. Sure he will, Shorty?”
“Indominatably, mum. A MacMurrough.”
That was the Saturday, a most dismal parting. MacMurrough made his way to Trinity, waited there for his tram. It came; he sat on the open upper tier, with the pipe-smokers and the spit. The fender grated on the setts, the trolley hissed above. Snatches of his interview with his aunt repeated, inducing involuntary musculations. Conception of your sensibilities in this matter—could he truly have said that? Words of a stiff. His hand went to his pocket, it came away empty: naturally he had forgotten the tobacconist’s. The garish shine on his good brogues caught his eye: and he sighed. It was one of the trials of Dublin, that one mightn’t stand still a second for the accostment of her shoeshines. At Ballsbridge a boy ran skipping with his hoop. For a moment MacMurrough thought of cliffs, of gulls that soared on island airs. His buttocks clenched on the seat. I am proud to love him—tell me I didn’t say that, please tell me I didn’t say that to my aunt.
And if it is love, it is a curiously inefficient force, urge and halt, the both at the same time. I want, but nothing I can propose would satisfy this wanting. I can’t say what it is I want, not anything much, not even to fuck him particularly, if at all. Simply I want. Earnestly, most hurriedly, wretchedly want. God, let it be true they make a man of you in the army.
The conductor called out the stops: Sandymount, Blackrock, Monkstown. Kingstown, he called, and MacMurrough on an impulse whipped down the stair. He no sooner dismounted than the rain fell, that particularly Irish rain which soaked without apparently wetting. He sloped down to the sea. He realized he was looking at places for the last time, the Crock’s Garden, the swimming-baths, over there at Doyle’s Rock. And he had hoped to avoid all this; or rather to hoard this seeing for one final gulp from the mailboat rail. Now he had blundered into it. He heard the rain’s whisper on the tide: through pearly clouds the sun still shone. He looked beyond at Sandycove harbor, the Martello above on its modest cliff; at the walls that seemed to rock and tumble in the light. It was a strange land, of rainshine and sunpour; and it was true there was a spirit in this land that called to freedom, a singularly Irish freedom with which really there was nothing in the world to do.
He pushed through the gate to Ballygihen House. The staff had been paid off, save for old Moore who would act for caretaker. He stared a while at the grey façade, watching through a
gauze of rain that softly from the mountains came. Somebody was waiting.
“My gosh, what are you doing out here in the wet?”
“I was hoping I’d find you.”
“I thought you’d be busy today.”
“Oh sure Doyler won’t be here till the evening.”
“You sound very sure. Come in, come in. Are you wet?”
“I was sheltering.”
“Come in, please.” He led him through the garden room. The boy was looking at the furnishings, white-sheeted now. “I forgot, you haven’t seen inside before.”
“Will I take off my boots?”
“Not at all.”
“I think Doyler was inside before though.”
MacMurrough stopped. He turned. “Yes, he was, actually. Do you mind waiting? I must find something dry.”
“Can’t I come up with you?”
“Do, by all means.”
The boy followed MacMurrough into his bedroom. MacMurrough took off his coat. He noted an exaggeration in his movements. This is my towel—see? I dry myself. He must have changed a hundred times before the boy. Difference a bed in a room could make. “Why did you want to see me?”
He was worried. MacMurrough had left him worried after Thursday—Thursday being the last they had swum together. He had got to thinking that night that MacMurrough was leaving. He didn’t know what it was, something the way MacMurrough was talking. Then he looked for him all Good Friday and no sign of him and the house shut up.
“I had business in Ferns,” MacMurrough said.
“Oh, you did.”
MacMurrough had undressed to his combination shorts, his Jaegars. He was toweling his legs. The boy had his head bowed. From out of the veil of his hair, he said, “My, you’re a handsome man.”
MacMurrough wasn’t sure he had heard him. “Good grief,” he said.
“Oughtn’t I say that?”
“No—”
“I’m sorry, I didn’t know. Only I thought—”
“No, I mean, of course you should say it. I don’t mean that. I mean it’s a surprise. A very pleasant one. Truly.”
“MacEmm, you wouldn’t leave that way without saying anything, sure you wouldn’t?”