Strumpet City (42 page)

‘Let’s see,’ Pat asked her.

‘Fortunes are private,’ she said, keeping it out of his reach. He shrugged. They walked all the way to the Park, following the river to Kingsbridge and entering at last by the main gate. The trees were rich with the colour of autumn, grassland and paths were strewn with fallen leaves. It was their habit to be together once a week. Lily would not agree to meet him more often and he had given up his earlier attempts to persuade her. A string of horses, returning from exercise, went by at a distance. Riders and animals made beautiful silhouettes against the autumn sky.

‘There goes the Quality,’ Pat commented.

‘Are you jealous?’ Lily asked.

‘Why should I be jealous?’

‘Because the gentry have horses.’

‘I have a horse of my own,’ Pat said, ‘the one I drive for Nolan & Keyes.’

Lily laughed and reached out her hand to him. He took it gently. She was wrong if she thought he coveted any of the things the Quality enjoyed. He would fight them only because people of his own class were hungry and in want and those who were taking too much must give something back. And because he would refuse any longer to cringe before their lackeys or fawn on them for his livelihood. When a banner swaying above a meeting said ‘Arise, Ye Slaves’ the words stirred him like the sound of a great band. He would not be a slave for the sake of livelihood, and he would not tolerate the company of slaves. Riders and animals passed by in silhouette, far away and beautiful in the autumn evening.

When he had been silent for some time Lily said to him: ‘Don’t you want to know my fortune?’

‘You said it was private.’

She took from her bag the card the monkey had given her and said: ‘There’s a Dark Man and a Fair Man in my life and I’m supposed to fall in love very soon with one or the other of them. Oh—and I’m to go on a journey by water too.’

‘If I’m the Dark Man,’ Pat said, ‘who’s this fair fella?’

‘I don’t care for fair fellas,’ Lily told him.

‘Neither do I,’ Pat decided.

The horsemen had gone and the Park all about them was empty.

From time to time the telpher circled above the works yard, a small cabin suspended from a rail, with a trolley which crackled now and then and threw out a cascade of blue sparks. It was almost level with the windows of the boardroom, which occupied the top storey. Watching it as it passed, Yearling wondered what it would be like to drive. What purpose it served he could not remember, although he had been watching it during Board meetings since his youth. Sometimes it broke down, and the driver would climb out on to the roof to adjust the trolley. Some years ago a man had been blown off the roof by a sudden squall of wind. Yearling, who had been watching him throughout a particularly boring meeting, saw him fall and rushed down to help. He found a knot of workmen gathered about a mangled and unrecognisable body. The telpher had remained driverless for most of the afternoon, tiny and inaccessible on its rail above the yard, marooned in mid journey until the riggers worked out a plan to lift another driver to it by means of a hoist chair. The wind tore at the ropes and tossed the chair about, until Yearling stopped watching because apprehension was making him sick. But the new man got there and after an hour or so the telpher was moving about its business once again. Yearling sent twenty pounds to the widow—anonymously. How long ago was that? Twenty years, perhaps.

‘You haven’t been listening,’ his brother-in-law said. Mr. Yearling shifted his gaze from the window. He had been conscious of the voice in the background.

‘You joined the Employers’ Federation several months ago,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing very new in what you’ve been saying.’

‘I feel it my duty to bring you up to date. There were several important meetings of the Board while you were away shooting.’

‘Fishing,’ Yearling corrected.

Bullman, controlling his irritation, said: ‘I beg your pardon—fishing.’

He was well named, Yearling thought. Deep voice, thick neck, heavy shoulders that were beginning to stoop. When he had married into Morgan & Co. he was already a man of influence in other fields, particularly shipping. The indiscipline of the working class of the city, after years of docility, confused and frightened him. The world of industry, so long stable, so entrenched in its authority, was sliding on its foundations.

‘We are going to make a stand against Larkinism,’ he said.

‘You said that several months ago.’

‘A determined stand,’ Bullman insisted. ‘You see, you haven’t been listening. The shipping crisis brought matters to a head.’

‘You were beaten by Larkin in the shipping business,’ Yearling said. ‘You gave everything he asked for. So much for your Federation.’

‘We weren’t ready then.’

‘And are you ready now?’

‘More than ready. We’ve been promised help from the Castle. The police will be used—the military if necessary. We’ve approached employers in England for financial assistance. They’ll help if we call on them.’

Yearling smiled.

‘I see you are learning from Larkin. Each for all and all for each. What will be the first step?’

‘To outlaw Larkinism. The members of his union will be given the option of resigning from it or being sacked. Those who are not members of the union must give an undertaking never to join it.’

Bullman paused. He was coming to the crucial part.

‘Before putting the matter to the Board I made a count of the firms involved. Almost four hundred will take concerted action. The Board was unanimous in giving a solemn pledge.’

‘Who is to be the leader of the gallant four hundred?’ Yearling asked. He was anticipating the answer and made a quick gamble with himself. A further, prolonged week-end in Connemara if he was right—a ten-pound note to Father O’Connor’s fund if he was wrong.

‘William Martin Murphy,’ Bullman answered.

The undubbed knight. His guess had been correct. He would arrange to go the week-end after next.

‘Why are you telling me this?’

‘Because as a director you should know what went on while you were away . . . fishing. I also feel under a special obligation. After all, you are my brother-in-law.’

‘Thank you,’ Yearling said.

He smiled. As a brother-in-law he would hardly count. But as a considerable shareholder he could dissent and embarrass the Board’s determination and unanimity.

In the yard below men were working to pile coal into a huge rick. In the houses they fed furnaces with long-handled shovels. How many of them were Larkinites, Yearling wondered. They would resist, of course—that was why police and military must stand by. The telpher glided past the window again, suspended from the arced track. Yearling watched. It would be like being in a balloon—or more accurately, one of those new flying machines. He remembered something Mrs. Bradshaw had mentioned to him a long time before and began to search in his wallet. He found a piece of paper with the name
Robert Fitzpatrick
written on it. The meeting was obviously at an end, so he rose.

‘We’ve a man of that name on the staff,’ he said, handing it to Bullman. ‘If anything can be done to advance him it has the recommendation of a very dear friend of mine.’

Bullman was surprised, not at the request, but its source. He put the slip of paper under a weight and said, with a cordiality calculated to please:

‘We’ll be shuffling around the key men to get rid of Larkinites. I’ll see that he’s considered.’

They went down the stairs together and parted in the ground-floor office, where clerks on high stools, aware of their presence, wrote figures into ledgers with intense concentration. Yearling, left alone, surveyed the scene for some moments, tapping his stick lightly against his knickerbockers, enjoying the tense and artificial silence. He took a paper bag from his pocket and offered it to a bald stooped clerk whom he judged to be the senior.

‘Have a Kruger’s Soother,’ he invited pleasantly. The man gaped at him. Yearling placed the sweet on his desk, took one from the bag for himself, bowed gravely and began to eat it as he went out.

In the morning, when they called to the hospital, the Italian was dead. They stood awhile beside him in the morgue, where he lay all unknowing, his hands joined on his breast. They crossed themselves and said a prayer.

‘He won’t be playing “Over the Waves” any more,’ Hennessy whispered, when the prayer was finished.

‘Unless they give him a harp with a handle,’ Rashers whispered back.

‘We should have brought the monkey.’

‘What would we do that for?’

‘To see the last of him.’

The sentimental note in Hennessy’s voice made Rashers forget the presence of the dead.

‘And have him screeching and roaring crying,’ he shouted, ‘is that what you want? Monkeys is notoriously highly strung and emotional. If he saw your man stretched out there in a late and lamented condition he’d go berserk.’

‘Keep your voice down,’ Hennessy pleaded, ‘remember where you are.’

‘When we get back home,’ Rashers said, once again whispering, ‘don’t breathe a word about this in front of the monkey because if he gets word of it at all he’ll go off his grub and die of a broken heart.’

They put their hats back on their heads.

‘The question is,’ Hennessy said as they closed the door of the morgue behind them, ‘what are we going to do with the poor brute. And how will we dispose of the barrel-organ?’

It was a problem which occupied them during their journey home. At first Rashers was in favour of keeping both. Providence, with an unusual show of favour, had placed at their disposal an easily mastered instrument and a well-trained animal. It would be a means of livelihood, a self-contained business. He proposed a partnership, in which Hennessy’s only responsibility would be to push the barrel-organ—the rest he would attend to personally.

‘It’s very tempting,’ Hennessy admitted.

‘We’ll be set up for life,’ Rashers urged.

‘Yes—until the police catch up with us.’

That was the difficulty. The Italian may have said something to the hospital staff. If there was an inquest something might come out. Or the relatives might have the police searching high and low already for the barrel-organ and the monkey.

‘It’s too much of a risk,’ Hennessy decided.

Rashers was forced to agree. There was hardly any way at all of earning an honest penny. The door opened and when you stepped forward with hope—bang—it slammed to again. Now and then, as when he was boilerman, it stayed open for a little while. But never for long. And the older you got, the less often it opened. Soon he would become too old to cope with poverty. What would he do then?

‘We’ll give it up to the police,’ he said. ‘Maybe there’ll be a reward.’

They brought the monkey and the organ to College Street Station. Rashers recognised the sergeant who had once given him a shilling, Sergeant Muldoon. Often since then he had met him on patrol, and they would stop for a joke and a friendly exchange. Usually he came away a few pence the richer.

‘Can you play it?’ the sergeant asked, indicating the barrel-organ.

‘I never tried,’ Rashers evaded. It might not be legal to have borrowed it for a whole day.

‘I’d imagine now,’ the sergeant said, with a great air of ingenuousness, ‘a man of your musical gifts would have little difficulty in mastering the likes of that. I’d nearly be able to knock a tune out of it myself. Hasn’t it a handle—like the gramophone?’

Rashers pretended to examine the instrument for the first time.

‘It has wheels on it too,’ he said finally, like the motor car. But that doesn’t mean you could drive it to mass of a Sunday.’

Hennessy withdrew a little. The movement caught the sergeant’s attention.

‘Who’s your friend?’ he asked suddenly.

Hennessy froze and said: ‘Hennessy, Sergeant—Aloysius Hennessy.’

‘Better known to his friends and well-wishers as the Toucher,’ Rashers provided. He was at ease with the sergeant in any matter that was on the right side of the law.

‘I see,’ the sergeant acknowledged. His face, Rashers observed, had a grey colour and his body, suspended from once burly shoulders, was thinning. That was unusual in a sergeant. Usually they grew fat and had big, well-nourished bellies. The sergeant was showing age. Policemen, when they could work no longer, were given pensions. That was the great difference.

The sergeant, having thought about it, decided to put the monkey in one of the cells. They accompanied him.

‘Would there be a reward, do you think?’ Rashers asked.

‘There might,’ the sergeant said, ‘and then again there might not. It depends on the relatives.’

He turned the key in the lock.

‘I’m wondering now will I have trouble with
habeus corpus
.’

‘Is that one of his Italian relatives?’ Hennessy asked.

‘It’s a conundrum of the law,’ the sergeant told him, ‘which I never, in all my years, understood properly myself.’

They walked back down the corridor with him and stopped once again beside the barrel-organ. It looked incomplete without the monkey. The sergeant leaned against it.

‘It’s a funny thing,’ he said to Rashers, ‘but a young policeman the name of Gallagher, that you may or may not know, reported yesterday evening that he saw yourself playing a yoke like this at the corner of Bachelor’s Walk. You were in company, he said, with a man unknown to him.’

‘That’s very strange,’ Rashers said, for want of something better.

‘It was probably someone like you,’ the sergeant agreed, ‘but not you at all.’ He brought them to the door.

‘Now—off you go—and good luck,’ he said.

He stood to watch their passage down the street. The gait of Rashers reminded him—as always—of the little boy dying of meningitis. After a while he went in, turning away not from the street only but from young eyes fixed on him and his own helplessness, from love unable to intervene. Everything in life was alone; his child dying whom he could not help, the brute dog lying with bloodied nose and lolling tongue on the pavement that he had been called on in the course of his duty the day before to shoot. He went inside again and hung the keys on their familiar hook.