“We’ll have a box for our table and an old newspaper for a cloth.”
“We’ll have nix to eat and nuppence to buy it with.”
“We’ll eat bread and onions.”
“Bread and onions, bread and onions, bread and onions,” said Doyler. “Because you know onions repeat.”
“And every time we sit to table, we’ll be reading that same old paper, tenth time the same column. We’ll curse it, so we will.”
“We’ll have no light to read by.”
“We’ll shake the lamp to find any oil left.”
“There’s no lamp sure.”
“And you know,” said Jim, exploring his fingers along Doyler’s arm, along the scrapes and grazes of the elbow, their mesmeric tactility, “you know, things won’t be like this then.”
“Why wouldn’t they?”
“Listen to me. When you’d touch me, I won’t be jumping, I won’t be startled, won’t hardly show if I felt it even.”
“What about it?”
“I’m just thinking that would be pleasant. To be reading, say, out of a book, and you to come up and touch me—my neck, say, or my knee—and I’d carry on reading, I might let a smile, no more, wouldn’t lose my place on the page. It would be pleasant to come to that. We’d come so close, do you see, that I wouldn’t be surprised out of myself every time you touched.”
“And wouldn’t you better like it if I touched you, say, down here, say? And if I was to go down, say, like this, say?”
“Don’t bend, you’ll bring on the cramp.”
“And, say now, I took hold your buttons and undone them, say, like this, say, and I fetched out your lad, what would you say to that?”
“Don’t, Doyler. Stop it.”
“And say I was to lick my, say my tongue, say? Only the tip of my tongue, like this, say?”
“Oh my goodness,” whispered Jim. “Oh my gracious me.”
He didn’t need to ask where Doyler had learnt this. In this same bed—oh my gosh. The love he felt was extraordinary. The sense of its power astounded him. That all this should happen, and then Ireland to rise! that he should not be separated from any he loved. He felt humbled, and a little awed. The little hairs curled through Doyler’s fingers as up and down the fingers stroked. This very bed. The eyes closed and the mouth wide and the thick lips on the pink thing. My gosh.
After, while they lay, Jim said, “Will I tell you now about the Sacred Band of Thebes?”
“Tell me anything you like.”
“They was an army,” Jim began. Yes, an army. They stood three hundred strong. And each man stood with his friend by his side. They fought that way, friend and friend, side by side. They were famed the world over, the ancient world over, for their courage and loyalty. They never once broke or ran. “For you know,” said Jim, “it would be awful hard to do anything dishonorable with your friend by your side.”
“So they was never bate?”
“Well, they was,” said Jim. At Chaeronea they fell. But not a man but he had his face to the foe and his friend beside him, dead too. Sometimes it could make Jim cry picturing this. The victor too had cried to see them on the battlefield, when all else had broke and run, the Sacred Band of Lovers, each man so brave and true to the end.
“So that’s what they was,” said Doyler, “lovers?” Jim nodded. “The sergeants too? Did they have their chaps?”
“They were all of them lovers,” Jim said firmly.
“Was they not worried they’d be thought partial? Giving out guard detail and that, a sergeant might be accused of favoring his own chap.”
“I don’t know,” said Jim, “but the sergeants had only sergeants for their friend.”
“I’m with you now,” said Doyler. “So was the general’s chap a general also? That was two generals. Two generals is a very chancy business. Could lead to any manner of confusion.”
“I know what you’re doing,” said Jim, “and you’re only wasting your breath. You know it’s the most wonderful thing.”
“Tell me this, Jim: what happened if one of them died?”
“What do you mean?”
“What happened the other fellow then? Did he fall on his sword or what? Did he hunt round quick to catch another chap? Maybe they had him excused drill till he found another fellow.”
“You’re no use at all,” said Jim, “and I don’t know why I bother with you.” Doyler was making to rib-tickle his belly, and Jim just thumped him on the shoulder. He got up and was dressing. Doyler stretched in the sheets.
“I don’t believe a bed and Doyler was ever this long acquainted. Reminds me of himself at home. When he used take to his bed till me ma found the money for his trousers to get back from the pawn. Like father, like son, eh?”
“Father?” said Jim.
“Something like it, I suppose. When’s your man due back?”
“Any time.”
“You positive now he don’t mind me being here?”
“No, he’s glad. He’s glad if I’m happy.” Jim sat down on the bed, tying his boots. “He’s going tomorrow. He’s to join the army in England. Only he wanted to be sure we were all right before he left.”
“What’s it have to do with him anyway?”
“He’s a complicated man. I think the way it is, he wanted to leave something behind. He’s got it into his head he’ll be killed in the war. I have to stop that. I have to stop him leaving.”
“You sound like him sometimes.” Jim looked up. “Goodness gracious,” Doyler mimicked.
“Do I say that?”
“My golly gosh.”
“I don’t say that.” The pillow flung at him. He flung it back. “The state of this bed,” he said. He tugged the sheets, tucking them under.
“How you going to stop him?”
“We’ll see.” Jim’s thoughts ran on and he said, “It makes sense too. If there’s fighting to be done, or dying even, it’s only sensible it’s an Irish war, not an English. That way, we’ll all be fighting together.”
“Mary and Joseph, but you’re the bloodthirsty animal.”
“I am not. Did you know the English had him in jail?”
“Sure the Irish would gallows him, only for the scandal of naming what he done.”
“Not in my country they won’t. Listen now, you’ll sleep some more?”
“I’ll have sores on me bum and I sleep any more.”
Jim felt his forehead. “There’s still a temperature. We’ll have a big day tomorrow. You can show me round the Green.”
“Jim?” It was funny but he knew what Doyler would ask. “Jim, did you go with him, Jim?”
He smiled, partly in reassurance, but there was more to it, he knew, and he said, “There were times all right we might have.”
“You wouldn’t let him though?”
“Sure he wouldn’t let himself.”
“Proper gent.”
It was comical seeing Doyler looking round for somewhere to spit in that elegant polished space, the only house Jim had known that didn’t smell of food, only furniture. “The pot’s under the bed,” he told him. He went over and pulled the curtains to. At the door he said, “You know there’s nothing to fear, don’t you? If only you might have come swimming today you’d know it for sure. The Muglins there and the great sky above—we’re immortal. We’re no more than filling in now.”
He waited outside the door a moment to be sure of Doyler’s resting. Satisfied, he gathered the bundle of Doyler’s clothes and skimmed down the stairs. In one of the recesses in the hall he hurried out of his jacket and trousers and into the dark-green uniform. Nothing really fitted. The chafe of the trousers, a thick coarse cloth, prickled the inside of his thighs, the sort of an irritation you’d offer up for the Holy Souls. The mirror glanced him passing, a green stranger, and he paused for a more formal inspection. The tunic was too big and the trousers too long. He saw his inquisitive face poking out from under the brim of the slouch hat. He thought of his brother. Yes, he did look a sol
dier, he truly did. Too much the soldier in fact. He took off the tunic and hat again. He’d be better carrying them till he was surer of Dublin, how things stood. He might be stopped and questioned, there might be military checks, he didn’t know what else.
He left his clothes by the hall stand, where they wouldn’t be noticed but they would be found. He couldn’t leave Doyler go to war with only MacEmm’s linens to wear. He pulled the heavy front door and he was away up the drive. A moment’s unease coming into the shop, for his father might be home and he’d be nosing about the strange trousers. But there was no sign of him yet. He went immediately to the broom-cupboard, shifted round inside till he came on Doyler’s rifle. “Is that you, Jim?” called Nancy. He looked sharply: she was out the yard. She was saying something about the weather and he answered, Yes. The rifle was still in its brown paper covering. He stared at it a while considering, then he poked the sticks of three brushes down the top. He was going in his shirtsleeves: let people think he was a working man.
“What’s that?” he said. Something about his dinner. “I’m to eat at MacMurrough’s,” he called. He was looking about to see was there anything else. His rosary beads. He reached up quickly to the shelf, and touching them, he glanced on the wall beside where his father’s best coat hung on its hook. It looked so exactly like the back view of his father, it stopped him in his reach. He smiled. It really was like his father, shaped to the exact slope of his shoulders. He looked about the room. There were correspondences everywhere. He knew these things so very well, the fittings and furnishings of his boyhood, yet each particular object appeared clearer and fresher than ever he had known it before, as though they all had been very recently painted, but with a strange and vivid paint that applied no colors but memories. This is my home, he thought. Or rather, as after an absence, This was the home where I grew up. He saw, and necessarily touched, the table and his bench, where he had sat these countless meals. He saw the ghost of him on the match-boarding behind where the varnish had rubbed away. Another ghost showed beside, bigger a bit, where his brother had sat. On the press were his schoolbooks and prizes—The Sieges of Gibraltar, he read—all covered in brown paper and his father’s neat stencil on the spines. He saw the dark disc round the gas-lamp that would widen and deepen till again his father whitewashed the ceiling, for the disc to form and grow and deepen again. Out in the scullery was the sink where his father had scrubbed him, scrubbed him pink with a hard brush, while he sat and shivered on that perilous height. It was all here. He sniffed, catching the smell of his home, cabbagy same like any kitchen in the world, save with something sweeter in it, apples maybe, mouldering in a box. He went to the mantel shelf and lifted the lid off the Huntley and Palmer’s biscuit tin. He looked happily at its contents, pleased they had never changed, all manner of scrip-scrap his father had saved: pins, button, bands, three foreign coins passed for sixpences, a Danish safety-pin. Nothing had changed. And he thought of his father who too had never changed. With his significant looks and his consequential airs, desperate lest any should think him soft. He had left the regiment that was his life to bring his sons home when their mother was dying. Such unselfish love, and oh such bravery. How he loved his father. It was the same huge love he felt for all, for Doyler and MacEmm, for Aunt Sawney and Nancy and Gordie’s baby: how very much he loved them all. How very much indeed.
In the summer of long ago he had heard of Wolfe Tone who gallantly and gay had gone about his deed. He too had loved so well. He too had been so loved.
He went out in the shop. He passed between the narrow shelves and the dusted finicky wares. On the wall he saw the advertisement card for Robin Starch, the new starch, the robin still told—sparrow-dull now so long it had hung. He picked up the rifle and bundled the tunic and hat under his arm. He pulled the door and the bell clinked, and he had the strangest notion standing there that the door had pulled itself.
The door had pulled itself and the bell of its own discretion had clinked. And now it clinked again as the door swung home behind him, and he turned towards Sallynoggin and the unfrequented road to town.
With the last bundle of washing, Nancy heaved backwards in from the yard: through the scullery and into the kitchen where she hefted the washing on the table. “Now,” she said. She took a moment to wipe her forehead, listening to the peevish cries above, then up the box-stairs door, aware of the climb of each stair in her calves. “Well Aunt Sawney,” she said, coming in the room. Aunt Sawney sat in her chair by the window, the babba on her lap. Nancy took the mite in her arms. “What’s this now?” she asked, poking a finger at the screwed-up face, “what’s this has you complaining to your Aunt Sawney about?”
Aunt Sawney thought the way the child was hungering.
“Sure that’s only good complaints.”
She humped the babba, easing the strain afterwards with a hand to her back. She took a corner of the bed to sit on. “Now,” she said, while she loosened her blouse. A lovely evening light was in the room, all glimmery after the glare outside. “It’s buttered eggs for tea,” she told Aunt Sawney, “and I’ve a mind to try a custard after.” The babba nuzzled her mouth to her breast.
Aunt Sawney said nothing, only rocked to and fro. She had her beads already in her hands, but there was something in her face, worrisome a touch, the way the mysteries she told this evening would be unusually doleful. “Are you right there, Aunt Sawney?”
She didn’t answer, only stared out the window.
“There you are now,” said Nancy, as the little mouth dribbled its surfeit. In a glance of the swing-glass on the bedroom table, she caught a peek of her reflection. I have a face, she told herself, the color and texture of a turnip. She rebuttoned her blouse. The mite was looking for hiccupping then, and she said to Aunt Sawney, “Will you take her again for a quarter of a mo while I see to them sheets below?”
Aunt Sawney nodded and reached the bundle to her arms. But still she said nothing, only stared her face out the window, that same window on that same strip of lane where these years she had watched her good boy go, come and go, come and go, till he never came no more. And now she had watched the little man too with the black fellow’s gun to his shoulder.
“Are you sure you’re all right in yourself?” she heard Nancy say. The glitter formed in the opaque of her eyes while still she stared, rocking in her chair, with the bundle of babe held close to her shoulder, and her hand tapped on the babe’s back, the whole of her hand, in determined solacing pats.
* * *
“You want to play?”
“Play what?”
“Nap,” said Doyler. He was sprawled on the saraband rug by MacMurrough’s hearth, dealing a kind of demon patience with Aunt Eva’s reserved écarté cards. The evening long their conversation had not risen from the inquisitorial. Feel better?—Aye. Hungry?—No. MacMurrough had roamed the scattered appointments of his bedroom, packing his case, while Doyler hung grimly to hearth and bedlands, a ghettoing of their space. Silly really. “Oh very well,” said MacMurrough.
“I’ve no money,” said Doyler, “so we’ll play for noses instead.”
“Whatever you say. What are noses?”
“Things, you find them usually on your face.”
He gathered the cards and snappily shuffled them. MacMurrough creaked to the floor to sit. He felt a general disgruntlement, a sense of a damper. It was too bad of Jim, he had expected better. This evening, his last in Ireland—a coda to the action, when properly ordered it should have provided the climax, well perhaps not climax, but a generous envoi. The Titian-glow of fire and candles, their voices quieting, his soothing wine: the evening previous repeated in fact, save with the added piquancy of tickets in his pocket, of the imminent and ineluctable tide. Instead he had this fellow parked on his rug the night. The state of the room too displeased him that evinced Jim’s absence more than any maid’s: yesterday’s grate, the cigarette-blue air, the slop and jumble of the sick-bedside.
Fellow wasn’t even sick, mer
ely trouserless.
But MacMurrough took his cards and played the game. And noses, so he found, answered his mood to a turn. Whenever he made his nap, which he made invariably and far too unluckily for his heart, he got to rap Doyler with his winning cards: rap on the nose per point staked. How brave the boy bode, how meek he suffered: it did the soul good to see. They changed to brag, but brag the boy might, MacMurrough had aces. Aces went low, and MacMurrough had kings. The boy’s pugnacious nose reddened to a geranium. “My dear,” said MacMurrough, gathering the pack, “you cannot conceive how it becomes you, a little trouncing.”
“You play a lot at cards, do you?”
“No,” said MacMurrough. “But then I’ve always been,” he began, and finished, “unlucky in love.” Here was a rival’s compliment and Doyler received it grinning, touchingly with his lips closed to contain his laugh. “You’re doyling,” said MacMurrough. “Yes, you’re doyling. I used so to like it when you doyled.”
“Aye aye, and what’s doyling?”
“Doyling, if you didn’t know, is that brazen discourteous vainglorious smirk which commonly distorts your face: the giving of it.” And he clipped once again the boy’s rubious conk.
“I’ll get you back,” said Doyler, but not vindictively, and once or twice indeed he did, making a comedy of adjusting MacMurrough’s head just so, for the neatest crack at his nose. It was child’s play, parlor-game stuff, and it held just that sufficience of malice to excuse their enjoyment, encourage it even. The gas was up, they fell about, a rorty time was had by all. MacMurrough broke off to fetch barley water and a pale ale, a plate of biscuits.
“My poor aunt,” he said returning. “If she could see the state of her playing-cards.”
Doyler pounced on the biscuits. He sat on the floor cross-legged, in his shirt only, no drawers. MacMurrough had thought to throw him an old trousers, but there was that delicacy between them of clothes. Every now and then, slipping out from his shirt tail, came the hint of a hair of his sex. A proposition which once propounded MacMurrough found hard to ignore, and yet whose advancement, let alone its achievement, would surely be indescribably banal.