At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [167]
“I don’t know that I agree,” said MacMurrough. “Are green carnations so very much more buffoonish than these?” He fingered the spray at his breast.
“These,” she answered, “are shamrock leaves. They are the emblem of our country, of its holiness and ancientry, which we wear with pride on this day of each year. What is more, admit I have never seen it, but we are told they grow naturally, which cannot be said of a green carnation.”
“Then let us tolderol for nature and deck ourselves in trefoils.”
She was quiet after this tease, while some emollient she smoothed in her face. “Anthony, it is a year since you came to me. I did not say then, but you frightened me. Your face was quite stark and your tongue could be so cruel. I hated to see you brooding and picking over your hurts. Yes, I pressed you into activities. How else was I to help beyond feeding and lodging you? Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps it is the Forty Foot that has helped you and I have done nothing at all. If so, I thank the Forty Foot. But you have come through. Every day I see it, your old confidence returning. Your face too has cleared and is almost the face I loved so many years ago.”
“You loved?”
“I loved. It was a terrible punishment you suffered, I am not the least deceived. But it is over. You know that it is over. You have come through.”
“Yes,” said MacMurrough. “I think you may be right. I think I really may have come through.”
“You must put aside this fascination with Oscar Wilde. If you cannot forget him, at the least regard the totality of the man. He had a wife, he had children, he worked hard to support them. But for that other buffoon, Queensberry, this would be all we knew of the man, and we should all be very much the better for that.”
She rose from her seat. “Such a pretty green, St. Stephen’s,” she remarked, looking out the window. “I cannot think there is call for an umbrella.”
MacMurrough admired her from behind, with her beautiful hat that fell in lacy veils, cream and tan and umber, about her shoulders. What she needed, he decided, was some poor relative to keep company with her, and whom she might quietly terrify. With a start, he realized this was he. She turned. “Boots,” she said and MacMurrough found a cloth.
While he polished, he said, “Do you remember I mentioned I rescued a man?”
“At the Forty Foot, I do.”
“Shall I let you in who it was?”
“Do I know the gentleman?”
“I believe you may.” He looked up from his shoe-polishing. “Sir Edward Carson.”
The mildest of surprises crossed her face. “You are sure?”
“He gave me his card.” And MacMurrough had not needed his card, for he knew that face well, had studied with perverse fascination the vignettes, the caricatures, from the trial. And there he had stood before him, in the Forty Foot of all places, with his chewy lips and distended jaw, his slanting eyes and sloped-back forehead, he stood there, draggled in his drawers, insisting on MacMurrough’s use of his towel, the brilliant instrument of Oscar Wilde’s fall. The classmate who had performed his task, as Wilde had predicted, with all the added bitterness of an old friend. And who since that eminence of the forensic craft, Pelion upon Ossa, had been fomenting Orange trouble in his native sod.
His aunt said, “It is wrong in me, I know, but I have never looked kindly on the Forty Foot. It attracts all conditions, which is always unfortunate.”
“But shall I tell you what I did?”
“You are decided that I wish to hear?”
“I’ll tell you because you may pretend dismay but I know you’ll find it amusing. I kissed him.”
“Sir Edward Carson?”
“Lavishly, on the lips.”
Yes he had kissed him, clamped his mouth on that awful mug, lips on rubbery lips he pressed, propelling his tongue inside the portals, kissed for all he was worth. And Carson had staggered away, spitting and spluttering as though all the Irish Sea had vomited into his mouth. And MacMurrough had laughed like a schoolboy, and he heard now his aunt was laughing too.
“You are a wicked, wicked boy,” she said, “and the Lord knows what retribution