The Death of an Irish Tradition (3 page)

WARD AWOKE
in one motion, sitting up and tossing the covers off his legs. A burst of sun through the skylight overhead was nearly blinding him, making the large central area of the loft on the Liffey quay bright and fiery, the corners bluish.

Ward didn’t care for that light. It was too harsh, clinical, and made the old warehouse floors, the ancient brick that he and some friends had recently painted, the oily oaken beams overhead, seem old and dirty and nakedly…industrial, there was no other word for it.

He preferred the place at night, when the fog on the bay pushed up the river and wrapped the masts of the ships docked on the wall in a heavy gray gauze. Then from the cocktail area near the windows he would watch the patches drift before other lamps, farther down the river toward the sea, catching at their glows and seeming to carry the light away.

But now Ward felt that he was late. Why? Ah, yes—he pushed himself off the bed—the girl. Mairead Kehlen Caughey. She’d be arriving at the Castle to make a formal statement, and with McKeon standing in for Sinclaire, he might have a chance to take it himself.

He took two eggs out of the fridge and broke them into the glass jar of the blender, added some vitamin pills, some corn flakes, and filled it up with orange juice. He switched the blender on low and let it spin while he showered, shaved, and dressed in his best summer suit.

It was Italian, bought while he was on holiday in Ravenna, like the black, glove-leather loafers that he kept polished only to a dull sheen, and the off-white shirt with the wing collar. Ward didn’t bother with a tie, only tossed the coat over his shoulders the way the Ravennati did, and paused in front of the mirror.

The recent sunny weather had only further darkened his skin, and he did look—definitely, he decided—Latin, with black, curly hair that he had only tossed dry with his fingers, dark eyes, and rather prominent spaces between his white, even teeth. He undid yet another button. Somebody—McKeon or O’Shaughnessy or even McGarr—would notice, but he didn’t care. He imagined Mairead Kehlen Caughey would be a prize well worth the abuse, if only he could find some way to separate his official duties from—.

But he needed something else to complete the image. What was it? A cigarette, like a prop, in his left hand. He would talk with it, swirling it around demonstratively. A…Gauloise. Sure. Ward didn’t smoke, but he thought he’d give it a try. If nothing else, the girl was chic, and that Murray fellow she was keeping company with, well—.

He took three large strides into the kitchen area of the loft and switched off the blender. He tossed the cover at the sink. It bounced off and hit the floor. Ward didn’t notice. He was almost thirty now and a confirmed bachelor.

But forcing the dreadful liquid down his throat, he tried to think of something else—the metallic rasp of a cog sliding over the teeth of a ship’s winch; the raucous, greedy cries of gulls; the fart and sigh of a lorry releasing the pressure in its air brakes outside the window—, and he only saw too late the thick, golden dribble that was hanging from the bottom of the glass.

It landed in a streaky tear on the lapel of his priceless, light-gray suit.

“Ah—bloody hell!” he shouted to the oily, industrial beams overhead.

McGarr had been up for several hours, making phone calls and other arrangements. Now he was sitting in a small, darkened theater, sipping tepid tea from a Styrofoam cup.

“Janie Mack,” the man next to him was saying, “what a lummox I am. Can’t even toss water in a pot. I dunno, Peter, I’m not long for the job.” He shook his head and stared dolefully down into the mud-colored liquid that some sort of film, translucent and scaly, was riding. “I can see them giving me the sack any day now.”

Flynn was director of sports programming at Radio Telefis Eireann, the Irish national broadcasting network, and McGarr knew him to be good at his job. And he’d heard the lament before, had pondered and spoken it himself. It was a plaint that most of his countrymen indulged themselves in from time to time, a recurrent, metronomal drone—as from a bagpipe or a
bodhran
—of the self-critical Celt, the lower register of an otherwise happy people.

McGarr glanced over at Flynn, a thin man with a craggy face and thick, graying hair no comb could rule. He was wearing a turtleneck jersey with a pendant and chain around his neck, some sort of icon—Celtic or Russian or Greek; it didn’t really matter—that placed him immediately in “the arts.” It was necessary equipage, McGarr supposed, at R. T. E.

He reached inside his jacket, which was tan and made of the lightest cord, and extracted his flask. “Have a touch, Dermot. You’re a right man and you know it. I shouldn’t have ripped you away from your missus so early is all. In a half hour you’ll be on top of the world.”

Flynn eyed the flask as though it contained hemlock, but he let McGarr top up the cup.

The lights went down, and a pattern flickered on the screen in front of them.

“Listen, Peter—why’re you at this again? Is it important? What’s in it for me?”

“Tea and toddy.”

“Ah, don’t give me that. What’ve you got? I need to make a splash.”

“Take up swimming. At least it’s in sports.”

The picture came on of a brilliant summer day and an expanse of the greenest turf that was filled with tall, powerful horses and men and women dressed in riding gear.

“Voice?” Flynn asked McGarr.

McGarr shook his head. He had heard it before and he wanted to concentrate on the video, what was happening on the screen.

“Kill that voice!” Flynn roared into the darkness.

On falling asleep the night before McGarr had realized that during the judging of heavyweight hunters at the Horse Show last year, a horse ridden by a certain Sir Roger Bechel-Gore had suddenly reared and thrown the man. He had fallen heavily through a sturdy fence and onto his shoulders and neck, which had been broken. The ensuing paralysis of his legs was said to be permanent, and he had complained to the police. He had once been one of the country’s premier horsemen; as a young man he had been selected to the national team for almost a decade; since then he had bred and raised some of the most heralded hunters and jumpers in the world. He claimed to have heard a series of short, sharp whistles at the moment that the horse had shied.

“Then you think there was a conspiracy, a plot against you?” McGarr had asked.

“Is,
is
a conspiracy, man. The bastards’ll get me yet.”

McGarr had only pitied the poor man, lying virtually helpless in a hospital bed, contained by a body cast and perhaps further confined by his own fears, until the chief inspector had looked into the matter.

Bechel-Gore, it had turned out, had had many rivals and even some downright enemies. He had refused to offer his jumpers to the Irish National Team at set prices and instead had offered them up at public sales. German, French, Italian, and English money had dominated those auctions, and Bechel-Gore’s Irish horses had become the top performers of other national teams that consistently beat the Irish.

But Bechel-Gore’s other business dealings had been similarly ruthless. In particular, he had gulled one M. E. Murray, T. D., who after great commercial success—doubtless aided by his political involvement—had plunged into the prestigious bloodstock business several years earlier. Murray had, however, overcome his initial blunders and had been, at the time of the accident, the most serious rival of Bechel-Gore, whom some considered the last avatar of the old, horsey, Anglo-Irish Ascendency. But that was not why McGarr had arranged the early morning showing of the sports film.

In it, Bechel-Gore was standing near a chestnut mare no different in color from his mustache. He had on a derby and a gray tweed coat and was rather heavy, all chest and shoulders. When McGarr had interviewed him he’d already been doing upper-body exercises and his grip had been like iron.

It was a stunning scene and sounded something deep in McGarr, as it did, he well knew, in his countrymen. Horses were a passion, and wherever two or more ran together on a track or over a fence interest was aroused. For some, like Bechel-Gore and Murray, horses were business, but for others they were a pastime, a hobby, or a chance to make a killing with a tenner on the nose. Still, apart from gambling, Irishmen liked to look at horses, to contemplate and caress them, to imagine what they might do if and when. Horses were things of the spirit. McGarr thought of the Houyhnhnms and how Swift’s satirical proof that horses were nobler than men had had some basis in fact.

Or maybe it was a darker and more recent facet of the racial memory, the indelible and hated print of the British boot on their necks, when in the eighteenth and for some of the nineteenth century—recent history, that—an Irishman had no legal right to own a horse valued at more than five pounds. Perhaps it was that which made the Irish yearn for horses. Good horses. Big, powerful, intimidating horses that could dominate an island that was one of the finest natural pasturages in the world.

And McGarr well knew that the horse had been the symbol of the landed gentry, the vehicle by which they had conquered Ireland and had kept her in thrall, and fox-hunting—the seigneurial right of charging a small army of mounted men through anybody’s planted fields or gardens or backyards, driving everything at bay before them in pursuit of an animal almost as cunning as a native Hibernian—had been more than a simple sport.

But watching the contained energy of the large hunters cantering past, McGarr felt profoundly and irrationally a lack. He did not own a horse, did not know how to ride one properly and probably never would.

And it was at the Dublin Horse Show—he managed to find Bechel-Gore, standing with his hands on his hips in what appeared to be a swirl of horses and riders, watching them canter by: bays, roans, sorrels, skewbalds, and a pure white horse such as McGarr had never seen—that the old Ireland of the forty-thousand-acre estates with long avenues of beeches winding down to the “great house”; of tenant farmers and enclosures and conscriptions; of “Yes, your honor. No, your honor. You’re right, your honor”; of hunt balls, house parties, and little or no
noblesse oblige
lingered on, a vestige of a despicable and opprobrious caste system.

But it was a credit to the tolerance of the broad mass of the Irish people, or yet another instance of their sheer love of horses, that they had allowed the Show to continue. But in most ways it was only a pantomime of the past, and, scanning the crowd and the riders, McGarr could find few with the long faces and old tweeds and the haughty, disdainful expressions that had marked the Ascendency under siege, although there were those who were trying to effect the image. Once more McGarr’s mind turned to M. E. Murray, T. D.

And McGarr concluded, as he watched the riders line up their some twenty-seven horses, waiting for the several judges to inspect the awesome beasts at close quarters, that if, say, he could believe in the proposition that certain peoples did certain things very well—the Germans’ technology, the Italians’ design, the Americans’ know-how, the French things cultural—then the Irish did horses in that way. Very well, extremely well, perhaps as well as the English.

But the tape had progressed, and now Bechel-Gore moved toward a liver-colored mare, a magnificent specimen indeed and larger than the other horses near her. He examined her closely—neck, shoulders, forearms, knees, pasterns, and coronets. And then he proceeded to the rear—haunches, croup, thigh, buttock, stifle, gaskin, hock, and cannon. Suddenly the horse turned her head and seemed to give him a familiar nudge before the rider pulled her around. It could be that Bechel-Gore smiled, although it was hard to tell because of his mustache.

McGarr had gone through it all before with the man, when the allegations had been made. The mare, Kestral, had been bred and trained on Bechel-Gore’s farm in Galway and later sold to a neighbor, Miss Josephine Cooke, who had been unable to attend the Show. She had been certain the horse, which had hunted with the Partry Mountain Hounds and was usually extremely well-mannered, though lively, would come away from the Show with some sort of prize. Thus she had sent her nephew to Dublin with Kestral and several other horses. When interviewed, Miss Cooke had been confused and dejected—that Kestral, her favorite, could have gone so wrong, so suddenly and without warning. She had put the mare up for sale.

McGarr now watched Bechel-Gore mount the horse and move down along the white fence, behind which the crowd was contained, taking easy, graceful strides, man and beast as one and both seeming to be involved in the gallop, both knowing and wanting it.

The posts clipped by regularly, evenly, and only less so the bushy lindens.

“Could we have it in slow motion from here, Dermot?”

“Slow!” he bawled, and the steady, rhythmical jouncing of horse and rider became soft and fluid, like a dance or a martial, muscular ballet.

The crowd on the fence was motley, a patchwork blur of colors and shapes, even parasols, like plumes, overhead.

Then Kestral’s head turned suddenly to the left and she seemed to stop, or she threw out her forelegs, and Bechel-Gore was caught by surprise. His hands weren’t collected or he lost his hold, and he went forward roughly, his face coming down on her mane.

The derby flew off and the horse vaulted up, twisting like a bronco, in a way that disengaged the right boot from the stirrup, and it was plain that Bechel-Gore would lose his seat.

But again and again she vaulted, each time staggering back, closer and closer to the fence where many in the crowd stood transfixed, horror-struck, until a small, thin man in a cloth cap began pushing and shoving them back. But he also turned his head every so often to watch. McGarr couldn’t tell. The resolution wasn’t so good.

“There,” McGarr said to Flynn, think of what McAnulty at the Technical Bureau might do with the tape. Perhaps he could get a blowup, see if the small man’s lips were pursed, or his mouth—. Or maybe he could isolate the whistle on the sound track. But would that help? He didn’t know. “Right there.”