At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [71]
And the garden, too, with its wilderness sides and combed lawns—a type of Jekyll and hide. Even here the modern style seemed hit upon by negligence. Or perhaps not negligence but nonchalance, a supremacy over style born of conviction. His aunt was certain of her standing, in history and in place. Anything she touched, ergo, was . . . à la mode.
However, she owned a curious inability to keep people. The place was run on the very minimum of staff. Half the rooms she kept shut. He had noticed a certain maneuvering of the apostles, robbing Peter to pay Paul, with the tradesmen. Was Aunt Eva feeling the pinch? She still topped it the grande dame of course—to the extent of keeping a dispensary, what she was pleased to term her Wednesday levée, when from the front steps of the house she doled out blue butter and castor oil to the needy sick of the parish. But still, to remain here among the retired majors and advancing suburbandom of Sandycove: a florist’s bizarre in the borders.
Our estate is over the mountains, she told him when he asked. But he remembered the family home, High Kinsella, which sat upon a vast heatherless roadless mire: one of those blank Irish houses, with staring windows, and the misgiving as you approached of the roof fallen in. She had taken recently to motoring there of a long weekend.
How interesting if Aunt Eva should be poor. How well they should get on.
Something crawled inside his collar. Impassively, he plucked the gentle seed. Lousy little renter. Nanny Tremble had been right about the Keating’s Powder. The grey thing crushed with a tactile crunch and his fingers stained with blood. Had better check for crab-lice too. His shoulders hunched with incipient formication.
In Wandsworth they used water from boiling potatoes. Rubbing it into Scrotes’s back that time in the infirmary. Horrid warts he had. Old man’s warts. Old lag’s lice.
—And only this morning we were treated to proclamations of undying love.
—For your soul, great heart, for your soul.
“He claims it is a July garden,” Aunt Eva said returning. “Have you ever heard such a thing? A July garden indeed. It was never a July garden when I was a child. Why, I don’t remember any Julys here. We always traveled to Paris in anticipation of the recess.”
“This is Ireland. Everything comes later here.”
She sighed. “Yes, this is poor old sold-out Ireland.”
Even the late blooming of flowers, apparently, could be laid at the union with England. They passed under an arch that come July, politics permitting, would ramble with rose. Low hedges separated the path from the vegetable rows. Cabbage, cabbage, potato, cabbage; potato, potato, cabbage, cabbage. And just there, by the sea-steps, I took him in my mouth.
Aunt Eva stopped. “Well, it is useless to go on. At the least no one need starve. We can feed them all colcannon.”
They turned, old Moore remaining to potter about in his darling rows.
“If he can grow cabbages that way, why can’t he plant tulips in beds? I sometimes despair of my race and its lack of an aesthetic. Of course it comes from the famine. If a thing can’t be eaten, one must throw it away. But what am I to do? Dispose my guests among the praties?”
“Wait until July.”
“It looks as though we shall have to.”
They came to a seat and she sat down. The heavy scent of wall-flowers hung, members too, MacMurrough recalled, of the cabbage family. He stood over her, smoking.
“Did I mention we are to have a boys’ band playing?”
“What sort of boys’ band?”
“Local boys. Poor ones, I presume. I arranged for kilts