The Road to McCarthy (6 page)

Vince is one of those men who can wear cravats, brocade waistcoats and Panama hats and come out of it looking like a colorful roué rather than a twat. Like many Irishmen before him he served in the Royal Navy, then embarked on the successful career in unemployment that led eventually to his celebrated win and purchase. Despite the fact that his new toy must have absorbed the million and a fair bit more besides, he has such an unconcealed glee in the project that you’re almost convinced it might be a sound idea.

“This used to be the most miserable room in town. Well, take a look at it now.”

The signing-on hall has been transformed into an upmarket restaurant, modeled on the design of the Palm Court Café on A deck of the
Titanic
. The sea views are extensive, though not as extensive as the
Titanic’s
. The restaurant appeared to be open—people were sitting at tables eating at any rate—but there was an inaugural dinner scheduled for the next night in the presence of the
Titanic
survivor. What if she hated it? If she screamed, “This is a travesty and a desecration!” and threw herself through one of the handsome sash windows into the harbor, or onto the yuppies eating satay on the jetty?

“Ah, she’ll be fine,” said Vince, “we’ve had two openings already. She knows the drill. She’s a wonderful woman.”

As far as I could make out, about seventeen openings were planned.
This made me feel marginally less special for receiving an invitation, especially as I’d phoned up and asked for one. As a general rule I find this usually works very well in Ireland, where social etiquette is less rigid than in England. If you really want to go to something, then you’re probably the sort of person they’re looking for anyway, so why not come along?

There’s a big bar downstairs, which was full of local types who looked as though they’d either finished work for the day, or never started. The room isn’t a replica of the ship’s first-class lounge, so much as an improvisation around its designs. There’s a wonderful back bar mirror with wooden surround.

“Indian rosewood, from the
Mauretania,”
said Vince. There are lots of other memorabilia, including the harbor logbook displayed in a glass case, and open at the
Titanic’s
fateful handwritten entry. The overall effect is either deeply impressive or wildly kitschy, depending on your point of view.

Vince gave me a guided tour of the Gents, followed by the Ladies, where our arrival did nothing to interrupt the vigorous application of mascara. Both facilities have been kitted out with period marblework and authentic-looking sinks with original taps, though my favorite detail was the bucketful of ice cubes that had been dumped in the urinals. Vince said they’d had some tourists in who’d been fascinated by the toilet fittings.

“Did these things really come from the
Titanic?
How did you get them up from the bottom of the ocean?”

After buying me a couple of drinks, Vince suggested we take a jaunt along the front. In the street just along from the restaurant there’s a wooden hut that operates as the taxi control center.

“It was built in 1886 as a beverage stall for departing emigrants. Once a year twenty-five or thirty men used to push it up the street, then back again, which meant they didn’t have to pay. Look, you can still see the wheels.”

And so you can.

Walking east along the harbor we came to a bench, known locally as the Bench, where conversation has been held and wisdom dispensed for many generations. The stretch of shore beyond it is known as the Holy Ground.

“Not like in the song ‘The Holy Ground?’”

“The very same.”

“I thought the song was about, you know, the whole of Ireland. The Holy Ground.”

“Ah, no, this is it here.”

It’s a traditional drinking song, sung when I was a kid in any social club you cared to go into, and made popular by the likes of the Clancy Brothers and, in Liverpool, the Spinners. Remember them? Remember their sweaters?

Sacred ground, then, where virtuous young wives waved their menfolk off to sea and remained chaste until their return?

“Ah, no.”

The guy who had been in the pub dissing the bishop had sidled up and taken his place on the Bench, where, as tradition demanded, he was engaging in conversation and dispensing wisdom.

“They were a bunch of feckin’ hoors! ’Twas all brothels along here, a bit of a party for the randy auld sailors. Of course they don’t like you saying it, but feck ’em, for it’s the truth.”

“It’s a very close-knit community round here.” Vince smiled. “The original tenements were knocked down in De Valera’s time, and new houses built. The boxer Jack Doyle grew up and lived here. Remember him?”

No. So was it true—about the brothels?

“Well….” As a pillar of the local community Vince was potentially compromised.

“Course it’s true,” chimed in the Bishop Basher.

“Well, there are those who think that the song was written in an ironic voice,” volunteered Vince.

“Wasn’t it funny now, when the pope came over. He gets off the plane and kisses the runway and the band start playing ‘The Holy Ground,’ a song about a bunch of feckin’ hoors. Ah, Jaysus, we were pissing ourselves laughing down here.”

“It was an incongruous moment,” conceded Vince.

“On that headland over there”—the Basher was pointing to the west of the harbor mouth—“they found a grave dating from 300 b.c. Imagine that now.” He had clearly decided I needed a tour guide, and to be fair he did have an impassioned, unpredictable quality not normally found in official guides, but then usually they haven’t been drinking all day, more’s the pity. The thought of lairy, unkempt dipsos shouting and slurring and weeping their way round Westminster Abbey and Stratford-upon-Avon before hugging their visitors and asking for the bus fare home is most appealing.

“Seeorther?”

He was pointing to a distant industrial building across the water.

“Viagra factory! True! Export-quality Viagra, made in Ireland! And over there?”

He was pointing to Spike Island, so I said, “Spike Island?”

He ignored me and said, “Spike Island!” Then he said, “That’s where the Brits put their political prisoners. John Mitchel. You know about him?”

I said I didn’t.

“No, me neither. But they kept him out there. Can’t blame ’em like.”

I agreed that indeed you couldn’t. You couldn’t blame ’em at all. And so, having improved my knowledge of John Mitchel, though only marginally, the tour was concluded, and the Bishop Basher meandered home to sleep it off or have a few more, whichever seemed the better idea at the time.

We wandered up through the town and while Vince nipped home to sort out a room for me I decided to have a look round the cathedral, check
out the altar rails and see what all the fuss was about. What I wasn’t expecting was to find the bishop himself, addressing a party of devout-looking coach passengers. As I backed out of the door as inconspicuously as I could, he fixed me with a withering look that made me sure he knew I’d been talking about him in the pub.

So one thing
led to another, as tends to happen, and we ended up in a cozy bar full of people talking and drinking and smoking, while a singer with big sideburns played all the old songs on several instruments at once. Then the room went quiet and everyone stood as he played the national anthem, indicating that it was now an hour and a half past closing time. Then we all carried on drinking. A man from Manchester told me he once approached a barman in a small village in the west of Ireland at one o’clock in the morning and asked when they closed. “October,” came the reply.

The singer came over to join the table and we fell into conversation. He’d been on the road playing music all his adult life, in show bands and rock bands and traditional Irish bands, solos and duos, in pubs and clubs and big concrete dance-halls on the edges of tiny villages. It turned out that he grew up in one of those villages, where a favorite old aunt of mine was a teacher. Excited at this unlikely connection—even though by now I should know that in this part of the world there are no degrees of separation, rather than the usual six—I asked did he know her?

“Sure, I did. She taught me for five years.”

He took a drink.

“So, what was she like?”

“She was a vicious auld bitch.”

The Chinese takeaway that should have been closed was open, possibly because it knew that the closed pub was open too, so we headed back to Vince’s imposing Regency terrace with a leaking carrier bag full of noodles and duck. We washed them down with neat malt whiskey, an imaginative combination that I can’t recommend highly enough, especially if you feel your life’s stuck in a rut. Then we sat up talking for hours about things I can’t remember. Perhaps I should have written them down on a piece of paper.
Perhaps I did. I know that at one point we went on a tour of the house, a gloriously unmodernized wonderland of ancient wood and plaster, bohemian clutter and horror movie landings, the sort of place you expect someone to say, “You’ll be sleeping in Igor’s room tonight.” So naturally I was thrilled when Vince refilled my glass and said, “You’ll be sleeping in Igor’s room tonight.” There really was a lodger called Igor, a young Croatian who was maître d’ at the
Titanic
and was away for the night.

Next thing I knew the sun was streaming through cracks in the shutters. I got up and opened the shutters to look at the harbor and was hit by blinding sunlight of such vicious and painful intensity that it seemed likely I had been turned into a pillar of salt. There was no sign of Vince anywhere, so I went downstairs, cleared up the duck, the noodles, the empty glasses and forty or fifty of Vince’s dog-ends, and drank six or seven pints of water.

I headed out for some early-morning fresh air to clear my head. It was half past one in the afternoon.

A big night
was planned at the
Titanic
and Igor would be back in town, so I was booked into a guest house up the road, the only place I’ve ever stayed whose former owner once had a job as Napoleon’s doctor on St. Helena. My room had a perfect view of the harbor, the cathedral and the bishop’s bedroom. After checking my pockets for illegible notes that might give some clue to what we were talking about last night, I waved to the bishop, who didn’t wave back, then stepped out towards the waterfront.

The inaugural dinner
was to be held in the Dean Room—named after the guest of honor, disaster survivor Mulvena Dean—but the warm-up was in the bar downstairs. Sleek and poised in black jacket, black polo neck and black bags under the eyes, Vince was working the room with energy and poise, giving an almost convincing impersonation of a man who’d had a quiet night in, a cup of Horlicks and nine hours’ sleep last night. “In a town of talkers, Vince is a doer,” said Eamon, a definite talker in a lost-at-sea beard and stained nautical sweater, who looked so completely at home on
the bar stool next to me it seemed possible he was part of the memorabilia. Perhaps he’d been cloned from DNA on a fragment of
Titanic
timber and next year, when refurbishments are complete, he’ll end up on display in a glass case under the telly.

The Dean Room has huge wood-framed windows, salvaged from a local house when they were discarded in favor of that maintenance-free UPVC that turns gray and falls out after fifteen years. We were able to look out on the tugboats passing on the water outside, and beyond them the harbor mouth through which so many—convicts and famine victims, unmarried women and unemployed men, and maybe even Louie’s Jack himself—once passed on their way to uncertain and mostly unrecorded futures. I had a seat next to Mulvena, a trim and sparky woman who was an eight-month-old baby when the ship went down. I felt awkward and didn’t know what to talk about. Should I ask her if she enjoyed the movie? Would she be amused by the ice cubes in the urinals? She turned out to be good company, and well used to being trotted out for
Titanic-related
events.

“I think they think I am the
Titanic
in America. Some of them are obsessed. One man wrote asking for a lock of my hair.”

So what did she think of that?

“I thought he was a nutcase.”

Her father was a Hampshire publican who decided in 1912 to make a new life as a tobacconist in Kansas. A house and business were arranged, but her father went down with the ship. Her mother survived, and together they went back with nothing to her grandparents’ farm in Hampshire.

“When I was eight a vet came to see one of my grandmother’s cows. He saw my mother as well and married her.”

The food and wine were good, Igor floated effortlessly around the room, and a man at the far end of the table asked me was I aware my family were ancient kings in Munster, and did I know about this fella in Morocco, the one they say is the McCarthy king? I said that I did, but it was hard to hear what he said next, because people kept coming through to peer at Mulvena, which didn’t seem to bother her, and Vince told her she’d be better off in Ireland, where pensioners travel free on buses and trains and have their mortgages and fuel and phone paid. Yeah, but other than that, said the
guy down the table, it’s everyone for themselves. “There was much more social acceptance of struggling and being poor twenty years ago than there is now. Communities looked after their own. That’s all but disappeared now thanks to the Celtic feckin’ Tiger.”

We were draining the bottles for a final toast when two big, heavily perspiring men who looked as if they’d made illicit fortunes from crooked dairy farming came through to pay their respects, as if we were in some downmarket
Gangs of New York
. The one in charge had a thick mustache, large glasses, stripy shirt, red face and a flamboyant toupee. Suddenly he closed his eyes, threw back his head and launched into an impassioned rendering of “The Fields of Athenry,” the tale of deportation and loss that has already achieved traditional classic status, despite having been written in the 1980s. It’s one of those stirring melodies that make people feel proud and sad and nostalgic and indignant and free, even if they’ve not the faintest idea what it’s about. Tonight’s version was delivered like a masterclass in pub singing technique, with peculiar vibratos and strange warbles in unexpected places.