The Red And The Green (12 page)

Of course, Kathleen never reproached him, never indeed mentioned his remarkable failure. But of course, too, after a while she began to withdraw. It seemed to him that she had withdrawn slowly, step by step, her eyes fixed upon him, waiting for a sign or gesture which he simply could not make. If he could only, as in the old days, have sought her forgiveness. But he could not. He needed now to defend himself against her, to make fortifications. He began to feel a little afraid of her. He kept formulating and then of course rejecting the theory that she had married him to spite Millie. He formulated more confidently the theory that what she had loved in him was not the whole muddled human person but simply his fallen state. As he put it much later in his Memoir, ‘Millie loved me because I was a blasphemer, Kathleen loved me because I was a penitent'.

He regretted what he had lost, he wished that he had waited. With a curious pain, which was like remorse in reverse, he judged that he had been far too hard on himself at the time of the original fault with Millie. He had exaggerated his guilt. He had been guilty of nothing but inopportunely falling in love. It now began to seem to him that he had done something far worse in marrying Kathleen. He became moody, gave up his job in the excise department, and tried to concentrate on his work on the Irish Church. He spent a great deal of time away from home, ostensibly at the Library, but in fact more and more frequently sitting in bars by himself or with chance acquaintances. Then one day by accident he met Millie in Sackville Street.

She immediately began to laugh. She laughed and laughed while Barney scowled at her sickly. Then she took his arm and said he must come to her house forthwith for a glass of sherry. He came there and immediately fell at her feet. Extreme love is like certain kinds of conditioning in animals. It exists at a level where there is no such thing as time. Barney was simply back where he was. A few kind words, a touch, from Millie re-established and confirmed his servitude. He did not accuse her of the past but told her in a trembling voice that
now, now
she must never send him away again. Moved herself, she promised that she would never send him away, that he could always come to her. Carried away, she even expressed a sort of love for him. Perhaps, being older, she was now more appreciative of an absolute devotion. And when Barney began, slightly sobered, to explain that of course he didn't exactly mean that he was going to leave Kathleen, she began to laugh again, and laughed and shook him until he laughed too. Barney was very happy on that day.

Later times were less happy. He took to frequenting the house at Upper Mount Street. He said nothing to Kathleen about having met Millie and nothing about these visits. He noticed too that Millie, following the instincts of a much-courted woman, quite automatically made a secret of his status with her. When others were present he was merely ‘a relation'; and indeed most of Millie's grander friends were in any case incapable of focusing their attention upon so drab a figure. Barney, for his part, watched Millie closely, more closely than she realized, coming with relief to the conclusion that she had no lover. He began to feel a little security in his new life. Christopher Bellman, who knew vaguely of his existence as Millie's friend, was a man of the world and no gossip. Barney had been shaken, surprised, and rather especially pained at twice meeting Pat Dumay at the house. But he knew of Pat's morbid reticence. Nothing would reach Kathleen from that quarter.

Kathleen did not know; but Barney's secret life with Millie took nourishment, took blood, from his existence at home, and Kathleen certainly felt this extra deprivation, this increased rate of emaciation of their common world. And Kathleen, as it seemed to Barney, took perhaps unconsciously her own steps to punish him. Since his re-instatement with Millie, Barney had been less than constant in his attendance at mass. He had taken no stand with himself, formulated no policy; he just found that, giving this or that explanation to his wife, he just went to church less often. He shunned confession or else went through it in a kind of dream. During this time Kathleen became noticeably more devout. She began to go to mass daily and, almost ostentatiously, to collect ‘lame ducks' of all kinds. She spent a lot of time in the poorer parts of Dublin doing strenuous kinds of social work, and became an organizer of a league for helping ex-prisoners. She had never been particularly house-proud, but her attention to the house was now minimal. She was too busy helping people in distress. Her appearance also she neglected, and began to look noticeably shabby, untidy, old. She was often up half the night with her charges and invariably seemed tired. It was as if she had taken over the pastoral function which had once seemed reserved for her husband. She was the priest now.

Barney felt these excesses to be directed against himself. What charm, what beauty, she had had she was now deliberately destroying; and when he saw her trudging along Blessington Street, her shoulders hunched with tiredness and preoccupation, her old unfashionable serge dress bobbing on the pavement, her bulging shopping-bag knocking on the railings, he felt both exasperation and pity, but the pity was the more fleeting of the two. This was her way of being merciless to him. His reaction was a further withdrawal, more drink and more Millie. More of the Mountjoy bar and considerably less of St Joseph's Church. At the same time he still felt capable of judging himself; things had not yet gone too far. He still had a fairly clear head and could measure where he was. But effectively his repentances took the form of isolated orgies of regret: if only he had not married he could still have conceived of finding a way back into the priesthood.
Then
he could really have tried to be good,
then
it would have made sense for him to ask perfection of himself. Well, did it not make sense now? In an ephemeral moment of humility he went to a retreat house. On his return he started to write his Memoir. And he made jokes about the retreat to Millie.

At the same time, with a self-tormenting casuistry, he kept alive the pain of his other total loss. If only he had not been married he could have been so content to be Millie's fool. Perhaps after all he was not so unlike his father. How much he enjoyed making her laugh! He would be her ass and she should drive him in harness. It was only the nagging thought of Kathleen that spoilt this happiness for him. He started to spend a great deal more time reflecting about himself. The book on the Irish Church began to seem to him a piece of mushy devotional nonsense; or rather, the factual parts now seemed dried up and devoid of interest and the speculative parts seemed pure sentimentality. The whole thing collapsed, went soft; and Barney soon abandoned it and concentrated on the Memoir.

His failures to practise his religion, for which his wife reproached him only by her own increased piety, did not indicate any slackening of the bond which united him to his Church. On the contrary, it seemed to Barney that this bond grew ever closer and more painful. He had so much thought himself into the priesthood and he could not now undo this. He was ordained in his mind and his heart and he had no other profession. He was by vocation a failed priest. Yet it was an almost unlivable vocation. Barney would ask himself: could not even now some miracle of regeneration occur? It seemed as if, all along the way, he had exaggerated his faults, he had despaired too soon: suppose he had turned back then, or then; for what happened later was worse, whereas then it would have been possible to hope. Well, he found himself saying, yet again, was it not still possible to hope? His life was like the Sybil's leaves; there was always, for the same price, less to salvage. And he followed, as it were at a distance, the yearly cycle of the Church, the pilgrimage of Christ from birth to death. Even now He was drawing near to Calvary. He was riding upon an ass into Jerusalem to die.

‘And a very great multitude spread their garments in the way: others cut down branches from the trees and strewed them in the way. And the multitudes that went before and that followed cried saying, Hosannah to the Son of David: Blessed is he that cometh in the name of the Lord; Hosannah in the highest. And when He was come into Jerusalem, all the city was moved, saying Who is this?' Who indeed? Barney felt that if he could really believe, even for a moment, in redemption by love he would be instantly, automatically redeemed. He dreamed of being punished and then restored to the flock: when even punishment would fade within that love and be transformed, becoming the spectacle itself of the suffering induced in a pure being by the existence of evil. But for all his cries of
Kyrie eleison
the faith eluded him that would have made him whole. His self-abasement provided a not wholly disagreeable emotional occupation; and not only was there no large change, there was not even the smallest, most momentary change in the pattern of life which he deplored. He was inside, indeed he was, the machine.

Tears started into Barney's eyes. He had been drinking that afternoon with some friendly
bona fides
in the Big Tree in Dorset Street. Just lately he had noticed that he was never entirely sober. Tracts of time were blotted out and he was not always sure where the line came between what he had imagined and what was real, what he had intended and what he had done. He recalled with pain the scene of that morning when Millie had abused him in front of his stepson. Unfortunately, that was no dream. He had been cuffed and sent about his business. He felt a physical pain to think that Pat had witnessed this. Barney loved his stepchildren, though feeling rather in awe of both of them. He knew they could not respect him; but it seemed so very sad that therefore his love for them must be wasted and nullified. He had made one effort to draw closer to Pat by joining up with the Volunteers in the early days, and this had gained him one moment of pure pleasure, when Pat had made the discovery that Barney was a good shot. Barney had been moved too by a vague notion that he was going to strike a blow against social injustice. He had long had fantasies of himself as a slum priest defending the poor against the rich. He now proposed to divert his attention from his own sufferings to the sufferings of humanity. But humanity proved too elusive an object and the Volunteers like everything else turned out not to be the answer.

As Barney mused painfully upon his humiliation of that morning he was walking down the hill from the tram in Kingstown, down past the People's Park, over the mysterious cleft of the railway, towards the sea. Praise be to God it wasn't raining, for it was his day for Frances. Every Tuesday Barney met Frances in the afternoon and they walked down the pier and then had tea at O'Halloran's Bun Shop. Barney looked forward to this time: it was a time of innocence. Barney had a happy relationship with Frances, his only relationship which was not now in some way soured and twisted. Frances was the only person who had always
simply
loved him. He had known her since she was a child and had got to know her well since her move to Sandycove. He was aware that, for Frances too, he had the fascinating role of a sinner. His religion also fascinated her; and for her he could somehow wear all the complicated tragic finery of his story, although of course she knew none of the details. She sensed the wreckage within and felt compassion, although there was also something of the self-conscious stooping of the pure young girl toward the fallen man. Frances knew nothing of his relations with Millie, though she had heard the rumour that ‘some woman' had got him slung out of Maynooth. She was very curious about his past and often tried to draw him on to talk about it. Barney had amused himself by hinting at a liaison with a notable prostitute. Keeping it up, he gave Frances to understand that he had once been a great frequenter of Dublin's brothels. This idea, which seemed to Barney to have a sort of symbolic truth, gave a certain thrill both to him and to the girl.

Barney had known from long ago, as everybody had, that Frances was destined to marry his nephew Andrew. He used to feel pleased about this as it represented an inclusion of Frances more closely in the family. But now that the time for the marriage had drawn so very near he had other feelings. He guessed that Andrew intended to take Frances to England. There Barney could not go. He too much needed, not only to see Millie, but also almost superstitiously in the intervals of seeing her, to watch her. Now the withdrawal of Frances seemed suddenly to abandon him to the devices of nightmare. Frances had been a source of light. There was also, Barney was surprised to find, an element of pure jealousy in his attitude to this marriage. He was fond of his nephew, but he simply did not want him to have Frances. This was an absurd thought, from which Barney rapidly switched to edifying pictures of dear old Uncle Barnabas, grown curiously ancient and sagelike, dandling little children upon his knee. This sometimes worked. But he was now very unhappy about Frances.

It was a windy day. The wind pursued spherical golden and black cloudlets through a yellowish sky over Kingstown and out towards the soft hazy bands of more slowly shifting sea-cloud which always lay upon the horizon like a distant range of hills. The sea would be rough. Barney could see it ahead of him now, a cold and scaly green with flecks of white. He reached the bottom of the hill and entered the gloomy patch of vegetation known as the Crocks' Garden. This consisted of paths of blackish earth which trailed about between the thick clumps of veronica bushes which clothed the slope down to the sea: a sad place which had seemed a labyrinth of mystery to him when he had been young. Below it the waves roared on to a little muddy beach of green untidy stones and foamed along a broken breakwater which had seemed to the youthful Barney like some piece of Roman antiquity. Beyond, like a strange yellow coastline, stretched the great rocky arm of the pier, on this side of which, hollow and majestic as Egyptian temples to the eyes of the child, rose two stone shelters wherein he had spent many happy hours of his holidays watching the rain falling interminably into the sea.

Barney now took the way past the shelters before climbing up on to the top of the pier where he was to meet Frances. The shelters, whose speckled stony concrete looked like living rock, had been decorated, as usual, by small posters which the Royal Irish Constabulary had not yet had time to remove.
England's Last Ditch. Pretence of the Realm Act. Fight for Catholic Ireland not for Catholic Belgium.
Barney passed by and climbed up to the top where he could pass through the thick wall to the harbour side of the pier. He looked back for a moment as a touch of sun illumined the multicoloured stucco fronts of the marine terraces, and behind them the two tall rival spires of Kingstown, Catholic and Protestant, shifting constantly in their relation to each other except when from the Martello tower at Sandycove they could be seen superimposed.