The Soldier's Song (2 page)

‘He’s only after telling me to be sure and enjoy myself,’ he hissed. ‘He’s sick, sure. He’s been sick for a year. What good will it do to have me sitting here all night? Anyway, wasn’t I here last night? I’m here most nights while you’re over in Liberty Hall playing with your new gun.’

Joe’s mouth fell open as if he’d been slapped, but then he flushed angrily. ‘That’s none of your business.’

‘You’re right, it’s not. And what I do is none of yours, so keep your nose out of it!’

‘It’s none of my business, is it? I’ll tell you what, it’s my business if you’re going to a party thrown by Richard D’Arcy.’

‘How is it your business? What’s he to you?’

‘He’s nothing to me – only one of those greedy bastards who put honest men out of work for fear they’d have a union. And the worst of them at that. The richest man in Dublin and the first to have scabs in. And him after locking out men with twenty years’ good service.’

‘Ah, will you ever cop on to yourself!’ Stephen shouted. ‘The lockout’s over. It’s finished, and it failed. Most of the men have gone back to work and they’re glad to take money from the likes of Richard D’Arcy. If you want to carry a grudge, then go ahead, but I won’t help you. It’s his daughter’s birthday party. I know her, and I’m going.’

He turned on his heel and walked down the hall to the front door.

‘You’re as bad as a scab,’ Joe called after him.

‘I don’t care, I’m going.’

‘I hope you choke on the cake,’ he heard his brother shout, before the front door slammed behind him.

The bang of the door echoed around the empty street. The kids had all gone in for their tea, and the only thing disturbed by the noise was an old dog that sat up on the steps of the tenement house and then busily set to scratching himself.

Stephen stood for a moment and took a few deep breaths. Always the bloody same, always a flaming row. Why couldn’t Joe just keep his flaming mouth shut? But to hell with him! He decided he wasn’t going to let his brother spoil the evening. Straightening the hat on his head, he turned and went on his way, enjoying the quiet and the smell of roasting hops that the warm breeze carried down from Guinness’s brewery.

It took him a little while to realize that something wasn’t right. It was a nagging feeling that grew on him as he walked towards Trinity College. He had lived in Dublin all his life and he was familiar with the rhythms, the heartbeat of the city. He knew it was the August fortnight and many people were on holidays – but this was too quiet. Not a soul stirred as he passed along the empty streets, not a tram or a cart. Nothing, until he walked past the train station at Westland Row and saw the soldiers outside. That jarred on him. They weren’t lounging outside having a fag and a laugh, but solemnly standing guard, rifles at the slope. There were more at the railway bridge; stiff, silent, but eyeing him as he passed. Next he saw an empty news-stand still blaring the morning headline:

WE CANNOT STAND ASIDE

Finally, the penny dropped: that was it. War was looming, and the city was holding its breath.

Only when he walked through the front gate of Trinity College did Stephen feel any sense of relief. It was as if those high walls could keep anything out – even the threat of war. The Front Square was quiet and peaceful, with birds singing in the trees and the evening air as still as water. Five minutes from his house, and it was as if he’d walked into another world.

But it wasn’t his world, not really. Even now, he felt like an interloper, a thief, stealing across the square. He tried to walk with a measured, regal step, following the tap-tapping tip of his cane across the cobbles, but he couldn’t shake that feeling. Three years as a student and he still wasn’t at home, though Joe thought he was. Joe thought he’d climbed the golden ladder to a toff’s paradise and turned posh the minute he walked through the gates. But he was wrong: it wasn’t like that. Stephen wasn’t posh. He was among toffs, but not like them. And they had an innate sense for these things. They could tell he was from below the salt.

Then again, he wasn’t like Joe either – not any more. This place had marked him as far as his own class was concerned. They respected learning, but suspected it also. Education was the province of others, of owners and bosses. In coming here he’d changed sides; he’d left his own people behind and he could never go back. They had an innate sense of these things too.

But he’d known that would happen. He’d known damn well and still he’d fought his way in here. In the end it came down to talent and sheer bloody-mindedness. He’d provided the one and Mr Keogh, his maths teacher, the other. Mr Keogh was the one who’d put the idea in his head, who’d told him not only that he
could
go to university, but that he
should
go, he
must
go – it would be a terrible shame to waste the gift he’d been given.

‘They can’t keep you out, not with what you have in there!’ Keogh used to say, and he would rap his bony knuckles on Stephen’s skull as he pored over a book. But it wouldn’t be easy – his father could never afford the fees. He would need a scholarship, or a sizarship as they called it at Trinity. Two years of hard work followed, and old Keogh had brought him to the entrance exams himself, standing behind him like a cat on hot bricks while Stephen signed his name in the roll, and solemnly shaking his hand before he went into the hall. As he sat at his allotted desk and waited for the examination paper, he wondered if Mr Keogh had once sat here. He had never gone to university himself, but had he tried? Had he tried and failed? Stephen had never considered failure, but now that the moment had arrived, now that the invigilator was coming down the line of desks with a sheaf of papers, he felt his throat go dry and his palms turn clammy.

Keogh was dismayed that he came out so quickly. He should have stayed in, checked his answers, made adjustments. Even after he’d gone through the paper line by line, Keogh wasn’t satisfied. Was he sure? Had he done everything he could? It wasn’t enough just to pass – any fool could pass. He had to excel. But Stephen knew he’d excelled, and wasn’t surprised when he opened the letter from the university. Keogh had wept with joy when he showed him the result. A sizarship to study mathematics at Trinity College. It was his greatest achievement in twenty years of teaching, and his greatest victory in a lifelong battle with the Christian Brothers. But they conceded it only grudgingly. Noses were turned up and disapproving stares directed at Stephen. The boy had a gift, no doubt, but why couldn’t he go to the Catholic university? Surely the Protestants would corrupt him. As the pressure mounted, Stephen had wavered, but Keogh remained defiant: ‘Don’t you listen to them, Stephen: they’re only jealous, the small-minded bastards. You’ll show them. You’ll be better than they ever were.’

‘Stephen! Up here!’ The shout rang around the square, and Stephen looked up to see a moon face thrust under the sash and an arm waving furiously from a window on the top floor of the Rubrics. Billy was in his new lair – one of the corrupting Protestants. He smiled to himself. If they only knew, the Christian Brothers would be in like a light, dragging him out by the scruff of his neck. He waved back.

‘Come up! Come up and see!’

He went up by the narrow winding stairs. The Rubrics was the oldest building in the college and it smelled like it. The top floor was like something out of a tenement, with low ceilings, warped floorboards and patches of horsehair showing in the walls. As he came up to the landing he could hear pigeons cooing in the attic above and he wondered how long Billy would last this time? Every year he took rooms in college and every year, when the damp and the squalor became too much, he vacated them by Christmas. When this happened he went back to his aunt’s mansion in Rathgar, but he could never settle there. Billy wasn’t comfortable in the bosom of his family, and by Easter he would be dreaming of a poky little room he could call his lair.

The last door on the landing stood ajar, and when Stephen looked inside he saw Billy’s round face looking back at him from the oval mirror of a dressing table.

‘Come in, come in,’ he beamed. ‘Don’t be shy.’

Stephen stepped through the door and stumbled over a suitcase lying open on the floor.

‘Oh, dear me, Stephen. Are you all right? Do excuse the mess. Just moving in, you know. What do you think of the place?’

Straightening up, he found his head almost touched the ceiling, which was cracked and yellowed and cobwebbed in the corners. Apart from the dressing table, which seemed to double as a desk, the only furniture was a chair and a narrow bed, both of them covered with suitcases and clothes and stacks of books and papers. A white silk evening scarf hung over the reading lamp and Billy stood in a clearing at the window, doing something with his tie.

‘It’s a bit small, isn’t it?’ Stephen answered dubiously.

‘It’s cosy, Stephen. That’s the word you were looking for. Cosy – not to mention well appointed.’ He gestured out the window, where the Front Square lay before him. ‘I have the most agreeable view in the college and the bathroom is just next . . . Stephen, why are you making a face?’

‘What’s that smell?’

‘Oh, that? Mothballs, I believe. Or turf. The previous tenant was of a rustic persuasion and used to burn it in the grate. The discerning palate may also detect a hint of damp, I admit. But it’s not so bad once you get used to it.’

Stephen knew what mothballs smelled like, and he was familiar with turf smoke. This was neither. ‘It smells like a dosshouse,’ he said bluntly.

The grin faded from Billy’s face. He sighed.

‘You’re right. It does pong a bit, doesn’t it? I suppose I shall have to leave the window open for a while to air it out. And those flaming pigeons had better go to sleep at a reasonable hour!’ He stopped fiddling with his tie and turned away from the mirror, ‘Can you do something with this, Stephen? I have the fingers of a navvy.’

Stephen dropped his top hat and cane on the bed and set to work on the knot while Billy obediently stood still and looked past his shoulder. Billy was a good deal shorter than he and much broader around the waist. He had sparse blond hair and bright little eyes that shone out from behind his round spectacles.

‘So how are things chez Ryan?’ he asked, ‘Everything all right?’

‘Billy, this would be much easier if you didn’t talk.’ The collar stud had come undone and he deftly closed it without letting go of the tie.

‘Sorry.’

The stud popped open again.

‘Billy!’

A mute apologetic smile as Stephen closed the stud again and swiftly whipped the tie into a neat knot.

‘Since you ask, things are not good chez Ryan,’ he said grimly, adjusting the tie so it sat straight under Billy’s chin, ‘As a matter of fact, everything is far from all right. I’ve just had another row with my flaming brother.’

‘Hmm?’

‘You can talk now.’ Stephen put a hand on each shoulder and turned him back towards the mirror.

Billy admired himself for a few seconds before he asked, ‘When was this?’

‘Just now, before I came out.’

‘Oh dear! He’s not still moaning about you going to college when you could be earning an honest wage, is he?’

‘A variation on that theme. He told me I should be ashamed of myself, going to a party with my father lying sick in his bed.’

‘But your father’s been sick for ages. I don’t see how donning the sackcloth and ashes is going to make him any better.’

‘That’s more or less what I said. But I don’t think it’s the party he objects to as much as who’s throwing it.’

‘Ah, of course!’ Billy took his jacket from a hanger and shrugged it on, ‘Old man D’Arcy was no friend to the workers during last year’s unpleasantness, was he? To a trade union man like your brother I’m sure it looks very much like you’re supping with the Devil. But I’m sure he’ll get over it eventually. And how is your father? Bearing up?’

‘Hanging on is more like it,’ Stephen said bleakly, and he sat down on the edge of the bed and told Billy about Phillips’s visit and what he’d said about his father’s leg.

Billy listened attentively, watching him as he talked. Strange how he chose to confide in him of all people – after all, they’d only known one another for three years. But what a change Billy had seen in that time. He remembered the boy he’d seen on his first day in college: an ungainly-looking creature in a threadbare suit and heavy boots. But the suit, though ill fitting, was clean and freshly pressed, and the boots were polished to a high shine. He didn’t have much, but he made the best of what he had. There was a dogged pride in his bearing – he knew he couldn’t match all the blazers and bowlers and silk ties, but if he didn’t come up to scratch it wasn’t his fault. Still, there was no mistaking another misfit, and one painfully aware of it too. It was that which had drawn Billy to him in the first place; a mixture of pity and curiosity propelling him across the square to where Stephen stood eating thick sandwiches from a parcel of newspaper. To look at him now, with his silk topper and silver-topped cane, was to see the butterfly emerged from the chrysalis.

Still, he often wondered how they had become such close friends. They had little enough in common – different backgrounds, different classes and one enormous difference that Billy still quailed to think of. That misjudged kiss. God! What was he thinking? It had happened in a dingy little room just like this one, after they’d whiled away half the evening talking and joking together. A few glasses of sherry and he’d seen the shy, reticent scholarship boy melting away and the real Stephen opening like a flower. He thought he’d seen something else too, but in the giddy heat of the moment he had misjudged it. Oh, he was sure he was being so bloody cosmopolitan, chattering on about Oscar Wilde. A former student here, did he know? Of course he knew. He was anything but stupid. Of course he’d read the plays – and the poems, and the prose – but not out of any devotion to Wilde. He’d read them because he read everything he could get his hands on, but Billy never thought of that. The sudden urge that came on him had blotted everything else out. Their friendship was barely two weeks old and he’d nearly wrecked it with that foolhardy, hasty kiss. He knew it the moment he felt Stephen pushing him away and standing up. The look of shock on his face nearly stilled his heart. He was still sitting on the bed, his legs still crossed, one sweaty hand on the coverlet, but he almost fainted at the thought of what might happen next. An appalling vista opened before him; shame, rejection. He would be sent down at the very least, his life ruined. But Stephen had stopped with his hand on the door. He was disconcerted, but not disgusted.