The Private Wound

  “I’m glad. I thought you might find it a bit lonely, out at the back of beyond here.”

  “Back of beyond!” said Flurry. “Sure, it’s only a mile or so from the thriving city of Charlottestown.”

  Kevin frowned. Evidently he had suffered a lot from his brother’s clumsy teasing.

  “You’re an Irishman yourself, Mr. Eyre, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “I was born in Tuam. But I’ve lived in England nearly all my life.”

  “And you’re thinking of spending the summer here?”

  “Yes. If I can find—”

  “Not a word more,” said Flurry. “You’ve found it.”

  The others were looking at me. I felt like an article sent on approbation: I could almost feel Maire Leeson fingering it.

  “I hear you write books,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve read any of them.”

  “I expect he’s on the Index,” said Flurry.

  “You’d be wrong.” The priest’s voice was an extremely pleasant baritone. “I looked him up. I hope we shall be seeing a lot of you, Mr. Eyre.”

  “Tell me now, Mr. Eyre, what sort of books you write? Is it novels? I’m a great reader myself,” asked Maire Leeson.

  “I’ve written two novels.” From her chair by the fire, Harry suddenly grinned at me: then her red lips rounded into a silent “Boo.” I averted my eyes.

  Maire Leeson deployed the usual questions—did I write with a pen or a typewriter? did I keep regular working hours? had I come to Ireland for local colour? I answered, very briefly. I had certainly not come to Ireland for literary chit-chat. She finally gave it up, a bit huffed, and—with a somewhat barbed glance at Harry’s bare arms—asked her where she’d bought the new jumper.

  The three men were talking together on some local government matter. No attempt was made to draw the women into the conversation, I noticed: Ireland was certainly, as my father had told me once, a man’s country. I noticed too the deference paid to Father Bresnihan’s views on secular matters—very different from the attitude to the parish clergyman in England. The priest interested me a good deal. He spoke with authority, with a calm assumption that, if there was a last word, he would have it: like a benevolent but firm father with his children. But, beneath this calm, I seemed to feel a temper held on the leash, or perhaps it was a capacity for spiritual torment: the haggard, ascetic face twitched from time to time.

  Presently Flurry brought in a tray—tarnished Georgian silver, Woolworth tumblers—and put glasses of whiskey in our hands. Father Bresnihan moved over to Harry: Maire Leeson beckoned to Flurry. Kevin Leeson turned to me.

  “Slainthe. Tell me now, what does London think about the international situation?” he asked in his self-important way.

  “Well, I suppose most people were ashamed by the Hitler-Chamberlain meeting, but don’t like to admit they felt relieved.”

  “You think war’s inevitable, though?”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “And I suppose the English say we’ll be stabbing them in the back by staying neutral?”

  “Some will say that, no doubt. You don’t help things by throwing bombs at us in the meanwhile, you know.”

  Kevin Leeson blinked: his eyes took on a guarded look. The I.R.A. bomb outrages in England had started last January; and the worst were yet to come.

  “What’s the point of it?” I went on; then, seized by an irrational desire to shake Kevin’s complacence, added, “Of course, they’re only pin-pricks: but they’ve meant the death of innocent people.”

  “Ah, that’s the wild men. It’s their protest against Partition. I suppose they’re trying to create a situation where Dev. will have to implement the ideals of the men who rose in 1916. Mind you, I don’t hold with it at all, but—”

  “‘England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity’?”

  “That’s true enough. Don’t you think so?”

  “I do. But I still don’t see that killing innocent people is a good way of seizing an opportunity.”

  His face darkened. “And how many innocent Irish people—women and children even—did you kill in the Tan war? Tell me that now?”

  “I know enough about the Tans, and the Auxiliaries. But two wrongs don’t make a right.”

  The room had fallen silent. Father Bresnihan was looking at me quizzically: Harry had returned to her magazine.

  “I hold no brief for the I.R.A. extremists,” said Kevin, “but their objectives in England have been power-stations, and the like.”

  “Then they’re madly inefficient. All they seem to blow up is pillar-boxes and bystanders.”

  “Well, Mr. Eyre, at least that proves there’s been no collusion with the Germans. They’d have seen it was done more efficiently,” put in the Father.

  “I dare say. But—”

  “You’re a humanist, Mr. Eyre?”

  “I don’t think so, Father. Not in the theologian’s sense, anyway.”

  “But you think we hold human lives too cheap over here? Maybe we do. But it’s a question of values. When you believe the end of his human life is not the end of a man’s life, your position is altered.”

  “You have him there, Father,” exclaimed Maire Leeson.

  “But that does not condone murder,” I replied, annoyed by her sycophancy. “The Communists liquidate hundreds of thousands—sacrifice them to the future good of humanity. It’s still murder.”

  “I agree, Mr. Eyre. Murder can never be condoned,” said Father Bresnihan soberly. “It can only be forgiven.”

  Kevin Leeson was studying me in a puzzled way. His brother rose abruptly. “I’m going to see if they’re rising. It’s overcast again. If you’ve done with the fisher of men, Dominic, come and see a fisher of fish at work.”

  I followed him into the room on the opposite side of the hall. It was indescribably untidy. A pair of fish-scales on a table by the window, metal boxes containing casts and flies piled up beside them: tall narrow cupboards with rods and gaffs: a bureau littered with bills: five saws hanging from nails in the wall: photographs of dead fish and live horses: fishing nets stacked in a corner: a barometer and temperature chart: lengths of rope tumbling out of a drawer: an ancient radio set.

  I picked up a medal lying half-hidden by detritus on the mantelshelf. It was the medal of the War of Independence.

  “You were in the Trouble?” I asked, rather surprised.

  Flurry winked. “I just picked the thing up at an auction. Would you care to take a rod?”

  “I think I’ll watch this evening, thanks.”

  Flurry lumbered out, with a quickened gait like that of an alcoholic who has a bottle in sight. We went to the grassy spit, a hundred yards away. The others were following us.

  Flurry certainly knew his business. His casts had the feathery touch of a supreme pianist. The others had hardly arrived when he gave a leftwards flick of the wrists. There was a disturbance in the water; the reel whirred.

  “He has him!” said Maire excitedly.

  Flurry’s whole face tautened, like the line. He looked ten years younger, a light of battle in his eye. The fish dived deep, then almost surfaced, darting, twisting, threshing. There was something sexual, physically provocative, in its movements as Flurry coaxed it gradually nearer the shallows and its silver belly could be glimpsed.

  “Play him, Flurry, play him!” yelled Kevin, his sober mien vanished. “Bring him over here a bit! I have a gaff.”

  He struck at the fish. A last convulsion. Flurry turned to Father Bresnihan, saying,

  “He put up a great fight, didn’t he now?”

  I was standing a few yards away. “Great fight!” I muttered. “What bloody chance did it have?”

  Fingers gripped my hand for a moment. Harriet Leeson whispered in my ear, “Good for you! I hate it too. Turns me up. The hypocrisy.”

  “You must come and take a rod one evening, Father.” Flurry was still breathing heavily. “It’s an age since you fished this water. You can’t be chasing sinners
every hour of the day.”

  After a few minutes, we straggled back to the house. Kevin Leeson, an excited small boy no longer, fell into step beside me.

  “You fancy the cottage then, Mr. Eyre?”

  “It has points. How much rent are you asking?”

  “Would five pound suit you?”

  My face fell. “I don’t think I could manage that.”

  “Five pound a month, of course,” he said smoothly. Flurry, who was walking just in front, turned his head convulsively, as if he’d been stung, and stared at Kevin.

  “For a long let,” Kevin added. “It’s about six months, isn’t it, you’ve a mind to stay in Ireland?”

  “Yes.” I plunged. “All right. Five pounds a month.” I’d thought he meant a week. He didn’t seem the desperate man at a bargain his brother had made him out to be.

  Back at the house, Flurry poured drinks for us. “No, I must be off,” said the priest. “I’m glad we’re to have you as a neighbour, Mr. Eyre. You must dine with me one night. We need young blood in Charlottestown, the way the younger people are all leaving us. No, thank you, Maire, I’ll walk. I have to call in at the Cassidy’s on the way.”

  When Father Bresnihan had left, Flurry turned a melancholic eye on us. “All the younger people leaving, indeed! And who’s to blame for that but himself?”

  Maire Leeson was up in arms. “Flurry! That’s a dreadful thing to say. Your own parish priest. I’m ashamed of you.”

  “Ask young Eamonn why he went to London, then. And where’s Clare, for the matter of that?”

  “It’s a wicked lie! Isn’t it, Kevin?”

  “A bit of exaggeration, I agree.”

  “What is?” asked Harry.

  “You should tell your husband not to spread malicious gossip.”

  “My dear Maire, I’d never dare order my husband about,” replied Harry, with an innocent stare. Maire’s handsome face flushed.

  “If you’re suggesting—”

  “Ah, will you stop pecking at each other, you two,” said Flurry. He turned to me. “The Father found Eamonn and Clare having a roll in the hay. He drove the girl back home with strokes of his ash-plant on her bum. And young Eamonn lost his job and had to leave the town. He’s a holy terror, the Father. The purity of Irish womenfolk has him frothing with zeal.”

  “And why wouldn’t it?” exclaimed Maire angrily. “Isn’t he your parish priest? A priest has a duty, under God, to keep his flock from straying.”

  “He has a duty to keep his temper too, not go lashing out at young girls. Isn’t that so, Kevin?”

  “Well now, I don’t—”

  “The Father has a right to rebuke sin. Wherever he finds it.” There was something in Maire’s emphasis which stopped the talk in its tracks. Kevin at last broke the embarrassed silence by turning to me and asking what stores I’d need for the cottage: he would have them sent from his shop if I’d let him have a list. I arranged to move in the day after to-morrow.

  Presently I took my leave. Outside the front door I turned left on an impulse instead of going straight to my car. I wanted to look at the river and the garden that bordered it at the back of the house. As I approached the bow window, which was half open, I heard voices from within.

  “Five pounds a month! What came over you, Kevin?”

  “I want him under my eye, that’s all, Flurry. For a bit.”

  The two men moved away from the window. I could hear no more, so I returned to the car, baffled and disquieted by Kevin’s extraordinary remark. I might have pulled up my stakes and left Charlottestown for ever the next morning: but, just as I was starting the car, Harry ran out.

  “You left your cigarette case behind.”

  “I didn’t,” said I, feeling in my coat pocket.

  “That was just my excuse.” She put her head in at the window. “You are going to take the cottage?”

  “Do you want me to?”

  “Yes, Dominic.”

  “Why?”

  “You will, then?”

  Her cheap perfume blew into the car.

  “I expect so.”

  “Goody. Don’t believe everything they tell you.” On which enigmatic statement, Harry waved and went back to the house.

  Chapter 3

  A week later I was sitting at my desk in the cottage. The fuchsia hedge blocked out the far mountains. My work had been going well, and I enjoyed the simple task of cooking for myself. Kevin had arranged for a neighbour to look after me, but one of Brigid’s efforts had been quite enough, so I kept her now to bed-making and cleaning. It was nice to be off the telephone, to take long solitary walks over the countryside and an occasional drink in the Colooney bar.

  Contrary to anticipation, Flurry and Harry had not encroached on my privacy. I’d had dinner with them once—a meal Harry ate with curiously self-conscious, gingerly movements of the mouth, as if she had a set of ill-fitting dentures. There was no complicity in her looks at me, and only a sort of boyish forthrightness in her remarks: Flurry kept up his usual flow of badinage. It was a dull evening. I can only remember two things out of it. I discovered that Harry was the daughter of a shopkeeper in a town on the Gloucestershire-Warwickshire border, which accounted for her countrified English accent.

  “Harry’s dad went broke. I picked her up out of the gutter,” said Flurry, with an affectionate glance at his wife.

  “You make it sound as if I was on the streets,” she protested.

  “Off a dung-heap then. Harry was working in a riding-stables when I met her.”

  And, just before I left, my tongue loosened with whiskey, I said to him, “Why on earth does Kevin want to keep me under his eye?”

  Flurry regarded me quizzically. “Keep you under his eye? Sure that’s a queer notion. What put that in your head?”

  I continued to hold his gaze. “You never know what’s in Kevin’s mind,” Flurry said equably. “He’s in Maire’s pocket, and she’s in Father Bresnihan’s. I daresay they want to make sure you don’t go round chasing the local virgins.”

  Harry giggled. “Boo couldn’t chase a hedgehog,” she said idiotically.

  “Don’t you be so sure,” her husband said.

  It was useless to press the point. Flurry did not intend to come clean. Or perhaps I had misheard Kevin’s remark in the bow window. I left them, thinking what a slob Flurry was, and how infuriating was his wife.

  This evening, as I tidied up my papers and debated whether I should dine at the Colooney Hotel or knock up bacon and eggs for myself at home, I saw Seamus O’Donovan walk through the gate. He’d been a great help getting me moved in and seemed well-disposed towards me: but he was still a mystery man—self-sufficient, shy, unsmiling.

  “A soft evening,” he said.

  “Come on in and have a drink.”

  He followed me into the sitting-room, and at once sat on a stool by the window.

  “Mrs. Leeson says will you drive her to a strand tomorrow. It’ll be a fine day. She thought you might like a picnic. If you’re not too busy with the book-writing.” Seamus looked at my desk inquisitively.

  “That would be very nice.”

  “She’ll expect you at half twelve so. Your health, Mr. Eyre. You’ve not been to the sea yet.” It was more a statement than a question. “There’s a lovely strand beyond Tullyvarna, they say.”

  “You haven’t been there yourself?”

  “I have not. The sand’s too tacky for galloping. It’s an effect of the tides in it.”

  “Oh yes?”

  “It’s like walking in a nightmare—trying to run away, and you’re hard set to drag one foot after the other out of the stuff.”

  Something in his tone made me look up, but I could not see his expression: his face was between me and the window. I gazed out over Seamus’s head at the fuchsia hedge and the sky glimmering above it.

  “It’s a beautiful country,” I said idly.

  “It is. And a bitter one, Mr. Eyre.”

  “Bitter?”

>   “We’ve never got over the Civil War. It burnt out our charity, and left us nothing but bitterness. Half the people are still fighting it—with their tongues.” Seamus’s voice was beyond sadness. I poured us some more whiskey.

  “Were you a Stater or an Irregular?”

  “I was a neutral: Flurry and I’d had enough of it after the Tan war.”

  “You were in that, were you?”

  “I was. From my sixteenth birthday, I was on the run. With Flurry Leeson.”

  “Flurry? I saw a medal on his mantelpiece. He said he’d picked it up at an auction.”

  Seamus laughed harshly. “He would.”

  “I’d never have thought of Flurry as a soldier. He’s so—” I groped for an inoffensive word—“so easygoing.”

  Seamus rose to his feet and kicked at the turf fire. Sparks and an eddy of scented smoke came out. The blue eyes blazed at me.

  “Flurry commanded a flying column in Galway. I was one of the Fianna Eireann—the Countess started them—what you call Boy Scouts over there. We ran messages. One time Flurry ambushed a party of Tans outside a village. What was left came back two hours later with reinforcements. They drove through the village in their Crossleys, shooting it up. Then they set fire to it. Two of our fellas was badly wounded in the ambush. They couldn’t be moved. They were burnt alive in one of the houses. Flurry’d stayed behind with them. The woman of the house they’d sheltered in was driven out by the heat. Some Tans threw her back into the flames.”

  “You were there yourself?”

  “I was. I’d run a message to Flurry, and the Tans came back before I could escape. I got a bullet in my leg. Flurry hoisted me on his back, when the flames reached out for us in the house, and came out of the back door shooting. That’s when he lost his two fingers. I don’t know how he got away with me—I’d fainted by then—but he did. He was a powerful great man those days, with a price on his head.”

  Seamus’s unemotional voice fell silent.

  “The story has a sequel?” I prompted.

  “Flurry never forgot those men, and the woman, screeching in the flames. He found out the ones who did it. Three of them. He was gunning after them a month and more. He followed them. One day he and the column attacked their barracks. They brought out the three Tans.”