After the Lockout (12 page)

When I wake the next morning it's still dark but the dawn isn't far off. Maggie and I used to go up to the lake every Saturday morning, almost religiously, and I'm dying to know whether she still keeps to our old routine. This is the third Saturday since I've been home, and I can't help but wonder whether she has been up there for the past two Saturdays, waiting in hope that I might appear. I dress and wash and comb my hair, I pick up the only reading material I can find – the
Picturegoer
from Phil Shanahan's – and head out into the direction of the rising sun. All the doors in Madden are still closed, which suits me fine as I don't want to see anyone. I reach the top of the street, I'm passing the Harte household, I've almost made it … The door opens. Ida appears in the doorway in her nightdress and untied dressing gown. She's holding a broom, as if she's just out to sweep her front step, but her eyes, sparkling crazily like diamonds rough in the mine, give her away. She has caught me. ‘You've been keeping a low profile,' she says, ‘I wasn't sure you were still about. Or maybe you're just avoiding me.'

‘Busy, that's all,' I say, not stopping.

‘Don't worry, I didn't tell anybody,' she calls after me. I glance around surreptitiously, in case anyone has overheard. Ida pulls her dressing gown tight around herself and steals up to me, conspiratorially close. ‘There's a lantern in the window of my shed. If ever you feel lonely, you light that lantern and I'll keep you company,' she says.

I turn away from her. God knows I don't judge whores for the way they eke out a living, but Ida Harte is appalling. There's really no call for that kind of wantonness. Yet I can't help the fleeting images that flicker in my mind like a cinematograph, of those black-as-night eyes laughing at my foolishness. She should
learn some small degree of reticence, she hasn't the slightest bit and it just isn't ladylike. As I walk, I have to put my hand into my pocket to fix myself. She really is the most distressing woman.

It's a couple of miles to the lake, which was my favourite place once. As I walk out the road, I think of the last time I walked it, all those years ago. I remember asking everyone I met along the way whether they had seen my ma. Aye, she went that way, they said, she doesn't look well, they said. She's in her dressing gown, they said, still in her slippers. Just five minutes ago. Straight up the road there. Towards the lake.

I reach my old spot, where low-hanging branches form a little canopy over the water's edge. I sit on the boulder there and listen to the waves. Someone told me one time that the sound of the water is the only thing a man can listen to forever without going insane. Testing out that theory, listening to this sound forever, is not the most unappealing idea I've ever heard. I used to spend endless hours here, skimming stones or vainly attempting to catch fish with a hazel wand, string and a bent nail. One day, I suppose we were about thirteen or so, Maggie showed me her father's copy of
Candide
(Dr Cavanagh was the sort of Catholic who reckoned any book on the Index had to be worth a look) and she was terrified of being caught with it, so I took her here, to my special place by the water. Shaded from the rain, we huddled together and read the book, our noses almost touching over the illicit pages. Maggie read faster and was forever chastising me as she waited at the end of each page. We became avid in our reading. If it was forbidden, we wanted it. We read whenever the chance arose, but always, always, we spent our Saturday mornings together up here, lying side by side, devouring the most corrupting material we could get our hands on. Why'd it
have to be here my ma came? I wish I could sit here and think only of kissing Maggie's lips, but I can't. The good memories are corrupted.
What are you doing here, Ma, you shouldn't be out of the house. Victor, son, life is in the letting go. Life is in the letting go.

I skim stones off the surface of the lake for perhaps an hour or more, all the while wondering whether she will come, until I see in the distance a figure approaching, growing larger. She's tall and willowy, quick but graceful, thrillingly Maggie, my own Maggie. I knew she would come, I just knew it. She wears a heavy black dress and a white blouse and a dark red shawl. When she gets close she looks slightly vexed, perhaps to see me. I point at the newspaper she's carrying under her arm. ‘Why are you reading a paper that's two weeks old?' I say. She unfolds the broad-sheet and reveals a tattered, dog-eared copy of
The Count of Monte Cristo
hidden inside. ‘I haven't read that one.'

‘You wouldn't like it,' she says, ‘far too bourgeois for the big socialist.'

‘Maybe you'll let me read along?'

‘You're too slow.' She concedes a half-smile.

‘Sure I saw the moving picture of it anyway.' I hold up the
Picturegoer
, the circular imprint of a whiskey glass haloing Kitty Gordon, and she reaches for it with zeal. She can't hide her interest, and she accidentally drops
The Count of Monte Cristo
. Fussily she picks it up again, but the pictures and stories of film stars have her attention. She flicks through the pages as I rise from the rock. ‘Kitty Gordon isn't my favourite, to be honest. She's no Mildred Harris. No Florence La Badie.'

‘Have you been to the pictures?'

‘Hundreds of times.'

‘What are they like?'

‘Like magic.'

Her hair is rich and arranged in ringlets of the most time-consuming sort. You can see the character in a woman of such elaborate appearance. Her skin is soft caramel and I want to know if it tastes as good as it looks. The nape of her graceful neck nearly has me believing in God. When I look at her I want to kill something, but at the same time the sight of her siphons the heat from my veins. That doesn't make sense, I know, it's a contradiction, but there it is. I want to tell her that I've dreamed of her every night since I can remember.

‘I haven't seen you around lately,' she says.

‘I know. It's just, Pius and everything, I mean, things are bad. But I just wanted to say to you, I'm sorry. I'm sorry for everything.'

She doesn't look up from the magazine but I can tell she's not reading it. She flicks the page, flicks again.

‘I hear there's a picture palace just opened up in Armagh. Maybe we could go together some night?' I say.

Something seems to snap. She stands up and throws the magazine at me. She slaps me in the chest again and again. ‘Who the hell do you think you are?' she demands. She makes to walk away but I seize her arms by the elbows and hold her tightly. She's defiant, she wants to go, but I'm never letting her go. Our eyes wrestle and her lips purse, the colour of blood and consistency of granite, but in the end, her ice-hard stare is thawed by a hot, salty tear.

She yields.

I envelop her safely in my arms, protecting her from the salt wind that whips off the water. She buries her face in my chest
and her shoulders jolt until eventually, sniffling, she breaks away, steps back and straightens her skirt. She lifts her hand to my eyebrow and touches the weak skin softly. She looks at me with great tenderness.

‘You need to get this sorted out once and for all,' she says.

I nod.

‘I'm sure you won't thank me, but I pray for you, you know. All the time, I pray for you.'

‘I do thank you.'

A priest's hold over his people was always tenuous, however it might seem from the outside. Stanislaus opened the parish ledger and copied in longhand the names of the two hundred and sixteen people of more than fourteen years of age in his pastoral care. Beside each he placed a tick for those he could definitely trust, an X for those he could not, and a question mark for those he wasn't sure about. It was a devil of a split. He banked eighty-seven as solid Christians; honest, hard-working people of faith who appreciated all the Church had done and whose loyalty and deference could be relied upon. He put fifty-four names on the rogue list. They weren't atheists – there were no atheists in Madden, everyone attended mass – but they were insubstantial people whose wont was to latch onto any fashion of radicalism that laid blame for their own failures and shortcomings elsewhere. People like the Moriartys. He put seventy-two names on the undecided list. They were the small-holders who filled the pews but contributed little else to the parish. People for whom newspapers were bulletin boards containing commodity prices
and train timetables rather than public conversation. They would bend with the prevailing wind, seeing little distinction in which direction that wind might come from. It struck Stanislaus as unfitting that such disinterested, uninterested people should be the deciding constituency in any struggle. All politics, Johnny Mangan had said of the bishopric. Maybe it was better after all to spend the winter of his life in the calm certitude of theology than the world of men and their grasping.

Three names Stanislaus set aside. First was Pius Lennon. It seemed Pius and Victor were working hard to restore the Lennon land, and Stanislaus supposed this was a good thing, but any improvement in the father's wretchedness was overshadowed by the son, hiding out and biding his time like some rapparee. Ordinarily Pius could be assumed to be the most reliable of men, his loyalty to the Church verging on the desperate, but Victor was his son and that placed him outside any calculation Stanislaus could make.

Second was Charlie Quinn. He was Victor's friend, but the Quinns had always been solid businesspeople who donated generously to the Church. Unusually, Charlie was an only child – his young mother having died giving birth to him – and since his father's passing he had sought in the Church what others found automatically in family. He chewed his pencil before he decided to add Charlie's name to the trustworthy list. It was important to recognise friends, and Charlie would be a good ally to cultivate. Support from the substantial people was sure to beget further support.

Third was Margaret Cavanagh.

Stanislaus watched the schoolyard from his window. Girls with ribbons or ringlets in their hair, uniformed in smocks and
dark dresses billowing in the wind, watched aloof and unimpressed as red-faced, knee-grazed boys in knickerbockers and jerseys ran frantically after a lump of coal doubling as a football. It was pleasing how few children were barefoot nowadays – how painful it had been, he recalled, to kick coal in bare feet! Miss Cavanagh in white blouse and long black skirt opened the school door and clanged the hand-bell. Upon hearing the bell the children lined up with impressive discipline and Miss Cavanagh shepherded them inside. Children from the better-off families handed her coins but most threw coal or turf into the pile by the door. A couple of children brought water from the well at the side of the school, while the last handful of children picked fuel from the pile and carried it inside. Stanislaus watched the empty yard till wisps of smoke slithered from the chimney, and with the lesson presumably begun, he strolled towards the schoolhouse.

It really had been too long since Stanislaus had sat in on a lesson. He was one of the commissioners appointed by the county council to govern the school. Strictly speaking, six commissioners took charge of the three National Schools in the area – three clergy and three laymen – but in practice, C of I children went to Milford, the Presbyterians had Aghavilly and Madden was for Catholics. Stanislaus, Reverend Bell and Reverend Armstrong, the three clerical commissioners, were the very best of colleagues, and never interfered in each other's business. Stanislaus's lay counterpart had been Dr Cavanagh, but even several years after his death his replacement had yet to be named. Stanislaus had appointed his daughter as schoolteacher out of pity for her then-invalid father, and she had proven an excellent teacher, but now that very excellence weighed against
her. The other schoolmaster, Leonard Mallon, was an old-fashioned, rote-heavy plodder; a nineties relic who would never have got his start nowadays, when teachers were expected to understand what they were drilling into children. Mallon was no agent of radicalism. He was no agent of anything. It would be safer if all teachers were like him.