At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [197]
“Muck up, mum.”
“They muck bloody up. They couldn’t get the arms to the beach even. These are the men who refused any assistance. A woman’s use is a nurse and typewriter. Have they never looked at their wives? Have they not seen their mothers? They might try managing a household on these novel lines. We should have lunch for supper and come home without the kiddies. One wonders what they hope to do with the Poor Old Woman, after they have toasted her in exotic beverage. Throw her to the kitchens with the praties?”
“So the plans”—MacMurrough glanced to the sergeant—“the plans are off?”
“He means the rising,” she told Shorty. “How can there be a rising without arms? We shall be lucky if they riot. Certainly it will never come to a peace conference. Sure it will not, Shorty?”
“Couldn’t say so, mum.”
“He can’t say,” she said, “but I know he agrees. You do, Shorty, I know you do.”
Shorty remained mum.
“Aunt Eva, this really is getting us nowhere.”
“No,” she agreed, “it has got us nowhere at all. And now poor Casement must hang for it.”
She was gazing beyond the Castle walls at the soft-turned Dublin hills. It was raining there and soon the rain would fall on Dublin. Her chin was trembling and her lips quivered with words. He saw how creased and pale they were. “He is the only man I ever thought was beautiful.”
MacMurrough was struck by her tone. “Aunt Eva, I believe . . .” He took her hand, which felt cold in his. He believed there might be a tear in her eye.
“A beautiful man, Shorty, no?”
“Pleasant face, mum. Say so myself.”
“Never a mean turn in his heart. An utterly selfless man. The first I saw him, I was struck. I knew immediately I was in the presence of something extraordinary in our land. Something we had not seen in Ireland in the centuries. The soul shone through his face. Though you are to remember,” she said, aside to Shorty, “he was not raised a Romanist.”
“Protestant, mum,” Shorty averred.
“It shone in his face, his soul, his rare and natural face. And I thought, there indeed stands an Irish gentleman.”
MacMurrough was overcome with compassion. “I’m so sorry, Aunt Eva. You must fear so dreadfully for him.” He saw her mouth puckering, her eyes veiled with tears. Her hand was so cold. He stroked it. He could not bear to see her so wretched, nor suffer her heart, that proud thing, to be bared before this English yokel. “Come, Aunt Eva, bid your man to leave us a moment. We’ll talk alone. Truly I had no conception of your sensibilities in this matter.”
“No more you had. They teach little of the heart in the gutter.”
He was stung. He loosed her hand. She took it away.
“Well, the English have him now,” she said, “and they will tear him to pieces. Hanging is the least they will do.”
“Now, mum,” said Shorty. MacMurrough watched him pat her shawl closer round her shoulders. “Nip in the air, mum. Best turn in.”
He sought in the man’s eye some collusion, a notice that they both were dealing with a woman distracted. Nothing. MacMurrough was excluded, entirely.
Still his aunt stared at the mountains. It might be her portrait she sat for. Then, in defiance, her hand flung out. “Hang us and be damned,” she cried. “It is too absurd to die of an influenza. Or of a Tuesday. Don’t you think, Shorty?”
Shorty wheeled her round. “Tricky business, ’flu, mum.”
MacMurrough said, “Aunt Eva, you sting me and provoke me. I do not protest. I am too conscious of your pain. But you are misinformed, I find, of the gutter.”
“And what will you pretend to teach me?”
“Perhaps that, gutter or mountain, the heart breaks as surely.”
“Indeed. And now we discover your heart to be broken.”
“Perhaps it is. But it is proud too. There is a boy I love and his soul too shines in his face. Though it never may be, I am proud to love him.”
The bath-chair had stopped at the glass doors to the ward. His aunt did not look his way, only nodded her head. “Well, Shorty,” she said at length, “what do you make of that?”
“Smitten, mum. Happens.”
“And so you will go to the Front?”
“I will.”
How very old she did look, without