At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [70]
Coldly MacMurrough answered, You forget yourself, Dr. Scrotes: I loved you. Heartily I loved you. Two years hard I spent loving you. They had me watch you die.
—So must you kill everything now in revenge?
“Snapdragons,” said Eveline. “I’m never sure if they’re not too tawdry. Are they tawdry? Or are they merely vulgar?”
“Tawdry,” chose MacMurrough. “Vulgar when called antirrhinums.”
Her hand squeezed his containing elbow. “How very Wildean,” she said.
A momentary lapse which sundered them. She covered with tulips. “They’re one’s favorites, of course, but he won’t grow them, old Moore won’t. Or at least he will, but only among the snapdragons and whatever these are, green things. Whereas with tulips what one prizes is their uniformity. Nothing to break a prospect so well as a parade of unvarying turbans.”
Old Moore preceded their progress down the garden path. His hands snapped dead things off, boots slid dead things under the shrubberies. Aunt Eva looked to left and right, but graciously not ahead.
“One argues with him, naturally, but in the end one must give way. Too odd to care too much about a garden, don’t you agree?”
MacMurrough did agree and their arms entwined once more. She spoke of tulip-beds she had known at Versailles and in the Tuileries and he thought of Wilde’s that had flamed like throbbing rings of fire. He was struck still by her allusion.
Squilde. Don’t let ’im catch yer bending, mate. We got ourself an arse-fackin-Squilde on us-fackin-wing.
“Whereas here in poor old Ireland all is a galimafrée.” She strode ahead to quiz the gardener, who shuffled his feet, bowing his head. MacMurrough imagined the mumbling response, his seeking to stumble his words lest expertise should offend.
Green old rambling garden. MacMurrough knew it, of course, from his holidays as a boy. Screen of twisted pines, the sycamores to the road with their clouds of flies. Dark shrubberies scattered about like mounds over warrior-kings. Exciting places for a child to grub in, somewhere to show your bottom to the gardener’s lad. Wonderful meadow lawn, quite hidden from the house, where he had liked to lie in the long grass while the ponies came up and nudged him. And always at the end, the sea.
And Aunt Eva. How romantic she looked in her saffron wrap. Her hair was a glossy black after some preparation or other. A pale maquillage. White flowing unfashionable dress whose trail was stained with grass. Not quite the Irish colleen, but whatever it is colleen is the diminutive of.
His gaze took in the run of the house. She called it Georgian, but Georgian here meant anything up to the ’fifties. His grandfather had taken it as convenient for the Mail. The stone was rendered grey, but not somberly so, lightly grey, grisaille, his aunt would say, faded of salt and wind. Canted wings, one grown over with ivy, the other so bare as to be bald, lending the façade a tilted aspect. No turret, nor room for one, which was surprising really, considering the hours MacMurrough spent there with Scrotes. Balustrade bounding the balcony whereon his aunt took tea in the morning. Below the balcony the garden room, whose French windows, open to the day, drew the garden paths together.
“Defney I never seeyan dis many tings in a roowam befroor.” Thus the boy of MacMurrough’s bedroom. Shaving-stand, washstand, shuttered secretaire, his leafy Saraband rug: it had seemed bare enough to MacMurrough. The house was far less fussy than he recalled. The heavy mahoganies remained, but were islands of furniture against faded walls. Gone the sand pictures, the featherwork scenes, pictures without paint that so had charmed his childish mind: all that jumble of ornament