The Holy City (2 page)

— What a character, I said to Vesna, as we took our usual seat by the window.

— Whisky and soda, I requested, snapping my fingers, and the lady I think will have a margarita.

— Certainly, sir, yes of course, sir. Very nice to see you again, Mr McCool.

— Just call me Pops, I beamed, C.J. Pops, international playboy, ha ha.

When I knew Mike Corcoran back in St Catherine's, I have to say that really for me he was a kind of lifeline. He used to have me in stitches, with no end of cracks, crazy quips and daft sayings. Mike Martinez he calls himself now, and his stage outfit has to be seen to be believed.

— You gotta stay one step ahead of the punters, Pops, he'll tell me.

Direct from Vegas,
his poster reads, and with that ludicrous fake tan he sure looks the part. Dripping in gold, with the sweat running off him, more than anything what he suggests is the fatal offspring of Julio Iglesias and Engelbert Humperdinck. But he's not bothered. Nope, as far as old Mike Martinez is concerned, no one in showbiz even comes
close to him and his combo. So night after night, there's no stopping old Mike, shaking those maracas and doing the cha-cha like there's no tomorrow, as the bright and breezy xylophone chimes. While he shakes his hips and does the bossa nova. Schmoozing, as always, for the ladies.

— Yes, it's lounge! It's hi-fidelity! It's soft, it's lush but more than anything, it flows — we're the Chordettes, ladies and gentlemen. Welcome tonight to the world of Mood Indigo. Enjoy!

Like Mike always used to say — laughter is your friend: the crutch that enables you, against the odds, to make it through. And it's great to have that, really it is. For one thing I would hate is in any way to sound at all bitter about my upbringing. What purchase could there possibly be in that? And I don't want to end up blaming poor old Henry Thornton either.

It was just his attitude — that had always been the Protestant way. Henry Thornton prided himself more than anything on his aristocratic lineage and ascendancy heritage. And the time-honoured qualities they had instilled in him. Which he had described in his books as that ‘sovereign, autonomous, self-contained ego formation against all possible incursions or admixtures, endogenous or exogenous'. The muscular Protestant character, he insisted, must at all times be secured against both its own passions and the invasions of others. For Henry Thornton, the ethos of uncompromising, hard-headed, rational self-interest could only serve to advance this imperative. Consequently, to
him, all Catholics were to be apprehended as both unreasonable and quite hysterical — as the creatures of their own effeminate imaginations, the banshees.

How he must have reacted to the penetration of his wife by ‘one of them' can only be imagined. Not to mention the fact that issue had succeeded their vile congress in the barn that night. In the final analysis, he informed her if she ever so much as looked in my direction, or associated my despicable existence ‘in any way' with the big house, she would end up disgraced. She would die on the road like her peasant Fenian friends during the famine.

As regards my mother's furtive nocturnal visits to the little farmhouse where I grew up, I cannot say I remember a great deal. Except that they were welcome and pleasant, shrouded as they were in a kind of exotic mystery. It seemed to me, as a small boy, that she and her female companion came from a world wholly alien, albeit quite beautiful. One that was fragrant and all their own. One where elegance and ‘ladylike poise' were prized above all else.

They wore gloves and tweed skirts and strings of pure white pearls. They spoke in accents with cut-glass vowels, which had clearly originated far from Cullymore, perhaps in London or the Home Counties of England. The mild-mannered companion, whose name was Ethel Baird, seemed remote in her eccentric attire — a veiled pillbox hat and what she habitually referred to as ‘overshoes' — expressly purchased for her visits to the Nook, which was what they called the farmhouse, and which was located at the far end of the estate, across three muddied and thistled
rough fields. Where Wee Dimpie McCool, my guardian, took the place of my mother — and who often wept on their departure, I remember.

It was Ethel Baird, in fact, who had given me the book — my golden treasury, a volume of Robert Louis Stevenson rhymes. On a day long ago in the year 1950.

— This is for you, I recall her saying softly, as she carefully, patiently and methodically turned the pages, showing me the delicate illustrations of the constellations: those fantailing sprays of glittering diamonds that adorned the gleaming night-blue cover.

Ethel and my birth mother had been friends all their lives. They were fond of Wee Dimpie but would never consort with her socially — they couldn't.

Orthodox Protestant ladies — high-bred and discreet.

Obviously it would have been better to have a proper mother like anyone else but Wee Dimpie was a rock, in the circumstances, I have to say. There is not a bad word I could say about the woman. And she never tried hiding things, or telling me any lies.

— So that's who she was, I used to say when I got older, that's who she was — the ‘mystery' lady! With her airs and graces and presents and food. My my! My own mother!

No, no ‘mammy' on earth could have tended to my needs any better than Dimpie. Why, her breakfasts alone were enough to feed an army.

— Me auld pal Chrishty! she used to say to me. That took his name after the besht auld saint of all!

— She's Lady Thornton, isn't she, my mother? She's the wife of Henry Thornton of the Manor. Isn't she, Dimpie? Please tell me the truth.

— Yes, she'd say then, shuffling off with a bucket, scratching her backside as she wiped her mouth and shouted ‘Chawk chuck chuck!', a scatter of red hens charging raucously across the yard.

Dympna McCool, it has to be said, was fond of me too, if in a functional, dutiful sort of way: she didn't pass all that much heed on me, to tell the truth. Generally being too busy haring off up to the chapel. For Wee Dimpie, I'm afraid, was a bit of a religious zealot, bestowing on me, as a consequence, the names of two of her favourite saints. St Christopher, to whom she declared she had a ‘special devotion', and John of the Cross, he for no other reason that I am aware of apart from the fact that his fly-specked picture adorned the wall. But they were names, I suppose, as good as any other. So all in all, Wee Dimpie did her job well. Being big-hearted and nice in a kind of vacant, uninterested manner.

One thing for which I remain in her debt — she taught me all there was to know about rustic living. With the result that, by the time I was twelve years old — and it's amusing when you think about it, considering the cosmopolitan lifestyle I ended up embracing — there was very little about chickens and cow shit that C.J. Pops didn't know. As the two of us whacked the fat arses of Friesians, whistling as we trod the churned mud of the estate, Dimpie fingering her
beads as she implored God for yet another batch of favours, before wielding her ashplant and bawling at the livestock:

— Will youse shoo outa dat, youse eejity bastards!

The Nook was nice and warm and cosy and it could have been a worse arrangement, I suppose. And one which, surprisingly without a doubt, had been facilitated, in a quite extraordinarily uncharacteristic burst of largesse, by Henry Thornton himself. Primarily, of course, to prevent the impending nervous collapse of my mother. The conditions he outlined were as follows:

— McCool can look after him down in the Nook. Just make sure he never darkens the door of this house, never once sets his foot across our threshold. Don't ever even dare bring him inside the gates. For, if you do, if you even consider it, my dear: be assured of this, you'll lose everything, all entitlements, everything that might be due to you. I'll see you walk the roads of this county for the humiliation that bastard Carberry has visited upon me.

After the passing of Wee Dimpie, God rest her soul — she died of cancer when I was in my late teens — I was subsequently informed by a solicitor that my tenancy of the house remained valid until I had attained the age of twenty-one. After which I would be expected to vacate the premises in order that ownership might succeed to the Thornton family. But, as it happened, poor old Henry went and passed away himself, not so very long after my mother in fact, and quite suddenly, precipitating some complicated wranglings in the family over
the will. So in the event, to my surprise but immense pleasure, no one ever did expel me from the Nook. And, as they say, between hopping and trotting, I was eventually informed that my tenancy was secure, provided I paid a nominal rent. With the result that, by the time adulthood had come around, lo and behold I was still lord of my little manor. King of my cottage and three acres of scrubland, with a dozen sprightly bronze chickens standing guard.

As I say, chiefly as a result of Wee Dimpie's tutelage, I by no means disgraced myself in the world of rustic authenticity. Indeed proved every bit as competent a yokel as any of them. And became well integrated, setting myself up in a dairy business. Purchasing a nice little tractor and trailer, now to be seen jangling about with my porringers and churns, dispensing my milk to the thirsty of the province.

— There he goes, Cullymore's very own Eggman! Young McCool there. How are they hanging? Will you leave me in a dozen of your turnips? And I think I'll have a porringer of crame! they'd call out good-naturedly as I came phut-phutting by, in my sturdy Massey Ferguson 35 tractor and trailer.

— There he goes! they'd cry. Cullymore's finest Eggman! For the most part, I have to say, my neighbours tended to be genial fellows. Carrying on with their lives like their fathers and mothers before them.

— Howya, Eggman! A grand day now! Sure it's great to see it and thank the Lord for it! they would call good-naturedly after my tractor as I passed.

But deep in my heart I knew that even if I wanted it to be the case I could never be like them. Knew instinctively from the furtive nocturnal visits I had received of old and from Dimpie's veiled intimations and general behaviour towards me that I was ‘different'. And that part of me would always be Protestant. Which was why I continued to be fascinated by Thornton Manor. That once breathtaking eighteenth-century edifice, clad in ivy and set in beautiful woodland, which was now on its way to becoming a ruin. So many times I made it my business to go up there just to gaze fondly at its crumbling towers, its grim Gothic dourness already becoming history, like the hegemonie ascendancy world of Dr Henry Thornton, esteemed literary critic, landowner and espouser of the traditional ‘values of empire'.

And there I'd stand, in absolute silence, mesmerised, staring through the high French windows. Thinking about ‘Protestants', their traditions and their values. And how, once upon a time, if things had been different, I might have ended up being one of them. Now, however, being just an impotent witness, to a world now fast fading, if not already gone.

So that was hardly going to happen, was it?

I thought about it nearly all the time — not just occasionally, or maybe now and then. I couldn't stop thinking about it, to tell you the truth. About the mysterious, fragrant night-time lady who came with parcels of food for Dimpie, who arrived with Ethel Baird her companion like a strange figure from a book. But what a beautiful book,
it seemed to me now: a storybook of dreams that made you feel good.

And I would see myself there then, standing outside the high French windows of Thornton Manor, with Lady Thornton kind of blurred inside — as she sang ‘All People That on Earth Do Dwell', turning the pages of the dreambook she was perusing. Before smoothing her hair and leaving down the book, moving sideways to look out at me. Before saying:

— It's you that I'll always love the most, not Tristram. Not Little Tristram, C.J.

I had imagined Little Tristram — of course there was no son in existence named Tristram Thornton, ‘little' or otherwise.

But he would always seem so real to me when I stood there thinking about him that at times I could scarcely bear to look through those windows. For I'd see him so vividly — Little Tristram sucking his thumb behind the rain-speckled glass as she whispered them softly into his ear, those beautiful words of Robert Louis Stevenson's ‘Escape at Bedtime', taken from
A Child's Garden of Verses:

Dr Thornton's works were all available in the local library. He was a commentator, historian, literary critic and essayist: there was no end to his intellectual talents. One of his works
was on the cultural antagonisms of Catholics and Protestants. And in which he attested, again baldly and confidently, that Catholics were by far the weaker species and that Protestants were innately superior. Always remaining impartial and neutral, self-controlled, dignified at all times.

I would think of them at evening gathered around the fire in the drawing room of Thornton Manor, arranged in a circle with their hymnals open, Little Tristram's voice soaring like a lark's above all the others, lovingly appreciated by all:

As the soothing shadows of the evening fire flickered.

— The Protestant mind is indifferent, I would hear the good doctor say, self-controlled and sober. Judicious and equable, it tends towards abstinence. The Catholic temperament, however, is quite the opposite. It is vitiated, debauched, and quite degraded. Essentially of inferior status, I'm afraid.

Even as a fully grown adult now, seeing myself standing once more on the porch beneath the dripping willow trees, shivering and trembling — outside those blurred high French windows, with rain coursing down my face as I tonelessly repeated, chafing my palm remorselessly with the tractor keys: