At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [230]
“Aye aye, and what’s doyling?”
“Doyling, if you didn’t know, is that brazen discourteous vainglorious smirk which commonly distorts your face: the giving of it.” And he clipped once again the boy’s rubious conk.
“I’ll get you back,” said Doyler, but not vindictively, and once or twice indeed he did, making a comedy of adjusting MacMurrough’s head just so, for the neatest crack at his nose. It was child’s play, parlor-game stuff, and it held just that sufficience of malice to excuse their enjoyment, encourage it even. The gas was up, they fell about, a rorty time was had by all. MacMurrough broke off to fetch barley water and a pale ale, a plate of biscuits.
“My poor aunt,” he said returning. “If she could see the state of her playing-cards.”
Doyler pounced on the biscuits. He sat on the floor cross-legged, in his shirt only, no drawers. MacMurrough had thought to throw him an old trousers, but there was that delicacy between them of clothes. Every now and then, slipping out from his shirt tail, came the hint of a hair of his sex. A proposition which once propounded MacMurrough found hard to ignore, and yet whose advancement, let alone its achievement, would surely be indescribably banal.
“Funny thing about your aunt,” Doyler said, munching. “Did you know she was well thought of down Liberty Hall?”
“Liberty Hall, my aunt?”
Doyler shrugged. “Back in the Lock-out she helped out in the soup-kitchen there.”
“You’re pulling my leg.”
“God’s truth. There’s a painting even. She has an apron on and her sleeves rolled up. Enormous big cauldron on the boil beside her.”
“But this is extraordinary.” He pictured his aunt in the steaming frame with the hungry masses huddled behind: in Parisian pinny she plies the ladle.
“Beats me,” said Doyler, “with half Dublin out of work, why they has to get rich folks to cook the soup. But there you are.”
“Yes,” said MacMurrough, “there you are.” Truly she was a remarkable woman. He remembered how she had chastened him once for his unguarded assertion of female practicalism. He regarded women as practical, she told him, because he never saw the sex but it was tending to his needs: bringing his tea, making his fire, paying his cigarist’s bills. Yes, he would miss his aunt. All very large and fine having boys in and out of the house, but his aunt had been a good sport. And now she must retire, hors de combat. How it must pain her. Really, the English had grown too high: to presume to exile Irish men and women from their own country. Their own country—the thought repeated, and he looked at Doyler, whom Jim had once spoken of as his country. “What happened us at all, Doyler,” he asked, “that we should have fallen so out of sympathy?”
“Matter of a knee in the balls.”
“Oh yes, that.” MacMurrough conceded a moral homer, a hit not by virtue of the boy’s being right but of his being wronged that morning in St. Stephen’s Green.
“You was after that young chap Paddy’s day.”
“Yes, him.”
“Piece of smut, you called him.”
“Yes, we shan’t require the exhaustive history.”
“You made out as I was after him too.”
“Yes.” Thank you Doyler, nicely pilloried. He took a Player’s, lit it. “And were you?”
“Was I what?” For a moment the glowers returned. “Did you put a peeler on me in the park?”
“Grief no.”
“I didn’t know if you did. No, I wasn’t after that chap. Not that time anyway. Not that way. Another time, maybe I was.”
“You were?”
“Does it matter?”
“No.” A sense of symmetry had MacMurrough inquire was it Doyler who informed the Castle of his aunt’s rifles. But of course Doyler hadn’t. “You did put the wind up me though, that rifle, finding it bang in my face.” Doyler grinned. MacMurrough inspired the rough virginia of his Player’s, reluctantly admitting an accustomation. “I never thought to ask—have you started smoking?”
“I don’t, but thanks now for offering.”
“Not at all.”
They smiled daftly at each other. Reluctantly MacMurrough admitted a contentment with the evening. In its own unparticular way, it brought a close to this Irish episode, back where it