After the Wake (6 page)

‘After all the money was spent on your rearing,’ said he, ‘your own second cousin in the Jockey Club de Buenos Aires – what are you? – beef to the heels, like a Mullingar heifer.’

He insisted, however, that she come to the next dinner party and they’d make arrangements about future dates. Most of the guests did not speak English, and she wouldn’t have to be there to make conversation with the Cultural Delegation and the Secretary of the CCJAFATC (3rd Int.).

‘All right,’ said María, with resignation, ‘if you say so, I’ll make converstion with them.’

‘You’ll do as you’re fuckingwell told,’ said he, in Castilian.

María began by refusing to make conversation with either the Delegation or the Secretary of the CCJAFATC (3rd Int.) on the grounds that none of
them spoke intelligible Spanish.

She offered a handkerchief to the Chairman of the Cultural Delegation, because she said she did not wish him to blow his nose on his napkin.

As Loyola said, she spared neither age nor the sanctity of God’s anointed for she called Lady Jane an old Grange bitch, and alleged that the chaplain, sitting beside her, was trying to feel her leg under the table.

‘You might at least have respect for Father Cardona’s Sacred Office,’ said Loyola, with mounting fury.

‘He might keep his Sacred Paws to himself,’ said María, ‘Catholics … Catholics how are you! This crowd is no better than the Christian Front.’

This was a reference to the crowd supporting Franco, ex-members of the British police force, the Royal Irish Constabulary, and their sons, with some ex-Free State Army officers, and failed clerical students, though the mass of them were recruited from the Dublin underworld.

They were known to the Franco Army as ‘the tourists’ and their leader, General O’Duffy, as ‘the Flying Postman‚’ because he went around in an aeroplane collecting his men’s mail, while his men spent their time reading and writing letters and sending postcards home, drinking cheap wine and smoking cigarettes.

Six hundred of them left Ireland, and all returned safely but seven, six of whom were killed accidentally. The other one was in a bad state of health for some years before he joined the force, and only went to Spain because his parish priest thought the climate might do him good.

It was a deadly insult, to compare a bourgeois Nationalist, or any respectable person, (even a respectable supporter of Franco), whose family had not been in the Black and Tans or convicted of burglary or shop-lifting or living on prostitutes with the Christian Front.

By the grace of Providence the guests did not know this, nor notice the insults at all, nor the altercation between Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar. The Iberians could not understand English and gave determined attention to the food and wine. Lady Jane was stone deaf and very drunk. So that dinner party did not pass off so very disastrously, but at the next, María dropped the Ibizenco fish-weight on the head of the President of the Scottish Widows’ Mutual Financial Trust; he was unconscious for four days, and Mr. and Mrs. Bolívar finally parted.

Loyola was a generous man to his family and María was not short of money herself. She moved out of the big house, in County Dublin, and bought one for herself in Ballsbridge. Here she lived, with Ciarán and Deirdre, and her uncle Hymie. Ciarán and Deirdre were away at school when their father and mother parted, but it was agreed that María should have the custody of them.

Loyola was kind and sent them money, but he was the kind of man that needed his children about him, although he was satisfied that they were being well looked after.

When they finished boarding-school and went to the National University, Loyola called at the house in Ballsbridge one day, held a conference with María, and presented them with a new motor-cycle to take
them to and from their classes. Ciarán was to drive it, and Deirdre was to go pillion. Sometime Ciarán had another girl called Mairéad Callan as a pillion passenger, but Deirdre did not object, because she had affairs of her own to attend to.

Ciarán was studying medicine, and Deirdre was studying Social Science, because she wanted to work with little children. Her brother remarked, grimly, that she would not be short of a supply of them, by the looks of things. This was what the party was about.

In the years they were growing up, their father continued to take an active interest in them and in plans for their futures. He had fixed it already for Ciarán to take over a doctor’s practice as soon as he had qualified. He did not think much of Deirdre’s Social Science, and when she was eighteen she was introduced to a very correct, well-dressed young man from the Mexican Embassy, whose family was rotten with money.

There was no difficulty in the way, for María agreed with Loyola that it was an excellent match. Deirdre, dear, amiable and healthy girl, smiled when he asked her to marry him, and said she’d love to.

He was very formal, but most attentive. He called and took her out in his car every Sunday. The wedding was fixed for Saint Stephen’s Day, the twenty-sixth of December, a favourite day for Irish weddings, and an engagement of one year.

But between hopping and trotting, Deirdre had been seeing this student from National, and his foot slipped.

By this month of September she was discovered to
be somewhat pregnant.

This was where I came in.

I had been a comrade of Ciarán’s in the Fianna Boys – the Irish Republican youth organisation – since we were twelve years old, and later in the I.R.A.

We were both twenty-one; he was a third year medical student, and I was following the family trade of house-painting. Ciarán and I drank together, and sometimes I drank with Deirdre – not that she drank much.

I did not drink with her and Ciarán together, except in their house, for he was a bit of a snob and did not want his only sister to get involved with a house-painter, if she could get some fellow with the readies.

I visited the house and went to all their parties. Deirdre liked me a lot, Mairéad said I did Deirdre a lot of good, and was worth listening to, except when I was drunk, and Ciarán liked me a lot, because we were old comrades and as long as I did not attempt to involve myself with his sister.

I liked them all but I am a proud man, and the last I resented.

They all certainly liked me, except the old one’s and Loyola’s love for their children and, it may be mentioned, friendship for each other was only equalled by their disapproval of me as a friend for them.

María’s disapproval changed to dislike when I went to her house in my professional capacity to wallpaper a room.

She came down and asked me what I would like for my dinner, it being Friday. She was ever-generous
with food and drink. She was never sure, she said, what religion I was. The old cow, and all belonging to me Catholics since 432 A.D. But I knew fish was scarce and not good that week, so I said I was a Protestant, and she gave me a steak.

Later she discovered that I was not a Protestant, whatever I was, but a Catholic, and she denounced me to the children, and said I had sold Jesus Christ for threequarters of a pound of beef, and must never darken her door again. I don’t think she ever liked me darkening it, at that. But when this matter of Deirdre’s came up, Ciarán came looking for me to do something about it, and I did.

María, through some way of her own, known only to religious people, pretended to think that Deirdre was only going on a holiday, though none of that household had ever used England for holidays, other than as a stepping-stone to Paris, Rome or Barcelona. She financed the trip to Bristol, and even said to Deirdre at the Airport, ‘Now, enjoy yourself,
a
stór.*
’

I was welcomed back to the house shortly after that, and once more was a welcome guest there any time I was too drunk to make my way home from a party.

And this, the evening of Deirdre’s return, I was welcomed with open arms by her brother, who threw them round me, and María gave me qualified approval and a glass of whiskey.

In a corner and blind-drunk as he had been for sixty years, was uncle Hymie.

He was the second most blasphemous man I’d ever met, except during his hangover in the morning.

Before he’d got a few glasses of whiskey into him he’d moan and groan about his past and sinful life, and quite sincerely pour himself a couple to give him the strength to get down to Mass. But by the time he had recovered sufficiently to get as far as the church door, he was strong in his unbelief again, and very coarse apart from blasphemous.

When I walked in, he said to me, ‘How is the hammer hanging?’ adding in the same breath, ‘Deirdre is on the telephone talking to her intended. She looks well after her trip to the other side.’

‘Why wouldn’t she look well?’ said I, ‘and she a fine girl not twenty years of age? Aren’t you looking well, and you four times that age?’

‘I am by Jasus,’ said Uncle Hymie, ‘and six more years with it.’

I knew he was eighty-five years old or more. He left the County Kildare the time of the Land War, in Parnell’s day. Hymie shot a landlord who was evicting a widow and six small children, and had to leave the country like many a decent man before and since.

He went to Dublin on the run there, till the money would arrive from Mexico to take him to his people there.

In the meantime, there was this fine summer’s day, and he went taking the fresh air for himself up in the Phoenix Park, and stood for a while watching a cricket match. One of the gentlemen players hit the ball, and it travelled about two hundred yards and looked like travelling another two hundred. Hymie walked casually along the side of the field almost as soon as the ball left the bat and reached up and caught it.

The gentry were in amazement and came over to
ask him whether he would care to join in a game, when one of their number stepped up beside him, slipped him a gold sovereign and said, in a low tone, ‘Get out of here, you bloody ruffian, while you’re safe. The Vice-Regal Lodge is only a few yards from here.’

‘How do you know me?’ asked Uncle Hymie.

‘Bloody well, I know you,’ says the gentleman. ‘Isn’t it many’s the time I saw you playing on the estate team. Only Hymie Bolívar could field a ball like that.’

Hymie nodded to him, and went off out of the Park as quickly as he could with his sovereign.

I never heard Hymie tell the story himself, though I heard him tell plenty of lies, but I knew that story was true because I heard it from other people.

When the Irish Free State was established in 1922, Hymie came home from Mexico. He applied for a pension for his part in the Land War, and discovered that the official he gave an account of his deed to was a nephew of the landlord he’d shot.

He lived for some time with his sister, back in the County Kildare, but had to leave her place and come to María’s place in Dublin, on account of a terrible thing he did on the poor woman and she lying ill in bed. The sister used to get people to read to her; books of devotion mostly, and prayers of a consolatory nature, to prepare her for the next world and ease her passage from this.

Hymie went to the library and out of a pile of old books picked an antique volume with a leather cover. He told the sister it was
The
Imitation
of
Christ
by Thomas à Kempis. He told her that when they
opened his coffin to see whether his remains were incorrupt it was discovered that he had been buried alive, by the fact that he had gnawed away the top of his right shoulder, presumably in a frenzy when he woke up and found himself to have been buried.

Hymie told the terrified sister that the same thing happened Juarez, the great Jesuit theologian.

Then he read her a piece from his venerable leather-covered book: “It is well remembered here that, about seven years ago, one Frolick, a tall boy with lank hair, remarkable for stealing eggs and fucking them, was taken from the school in this parish …”

‘Be Christ, and that’s a remarkable thing,’ he says to the pour ould one in the bed, ‘“eggs, eggs”. I’ve heard of many things in my day between here and Casa Catalina’s but “eggs”, that’s a new one on me. I wonder how he managed it?’

I was thinking that myself, when he asked me. ‘I hear you do a bit of writing?’

‘A bit,’ said I.

‘I seen a thing in one of them magazines they prints on straw or something, in this miserable country, about you being in prison in England for the cause.’

‘Like John Devoy, the Fenian –
Recollections
of
an
Irish
Rebel
, and all goddam lies. Every whoring thing in it.

‘I met him in ’Frisco in ’eighty-nine, when he came down from New York, with a lot of other gringo tinkers looking for subscriptions for Parnell. Myself and another young fellow, Argentine-Irish, were after coming from Mexico City to meet them, to hand over a big collection of money from Irish in America del Scot …’

‘From where?’

‘America, Latin America, the respectable bit. Anyway this boy with me was of a very old family, and could speak nothing but Spanish. There was a Bowery Boy with Devoy, and when he heard Patricio speak to me in Spanish he says, ‘Who is the greaser? I thought this was a
Clann
na
nGael*
meeting.’

“This boy’s name is O’Brien,” said I, “I don’t know what yours is, you Yankee scum.”

“Now, now,” says Devoy, “no fighting for God’s sake,” and turning to the other fellow, “I’ll explain in a minute. But they’ll only say here, it’s the Irish again, fighting amongst themselves.”

‘He was a cute little bastard all right, and settled the row and collected the
diñero
off of us.’

‘But,’ said Hymie, with a hard look at me, ‘you’re writing your
Recollections
of
an
Irish
Rebel
before you’ve had any goddam recollections – at twenty years of age!’

‘I’m twenty-one,’ said I.

‘Well, twenty-one. The way Ciarán talks about you, anyone would think you were Robert Emmet on a white mare. How the hell did you do three years in English jails, if you are only twenty-one?’