At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [72]
“Yes, I played concert flute. I told you.”
“The man in charge is not to be trusted.”
“Trusted with what?”
She looked aggrieved at his interrogation. “The care of young minds.” Her fingers, which had stroked a stem, now pinched it till it severed. She brought the spray to her nose, sniffed. Before she would toss it aside she said, “He is not patriotic.”
MacMurrough laughed, a single ejaculated breath.
“There is no occasion for scoffing. Father O’Toiler and I intend the boys to be an inspiration to the parish. It has become too Englified and reminds one of your recreant father.”
His father, yes. Advocate, of course, not brilliant but reliable. For the prosecution, hence the knighthood. Sir John MacMurrough, Knight of St. Patrick. Dubbed at Dublin Castle, hence the recreancy. Twins, she the elder by half an hour, he the winner by the unalterable right of male succession.
“As it happens this current teacher is indisposed. An unfortunate mishap on the road. The man to replace him need not be so proficient. He need only be . . . bien disposé.”
“Aunt Eva, you’re not suggesting . . . ?” Apparently she was. “Does your priest know about this? Does he know anything of my situation?”
Sternly she said, “What is there to know? Other than that you are a MacMurrough and as such bear a name inseparable from our country’s cause.” She sought to hold his eyes. Some appeal there he thought might be gratified by his flinching. He did so and she said, eirenically, “As for your contretemps with the British courts, we must never forget your grandfather himself was imprisoned. Kilmainham Jail. They have ballads about it still.”
So that was it. They were to play the green card. Wily old bird is offering me a way out. Would anybody fall for it? Even for Ireland it seemed too extravagant to equate his plight with the humdrum consequences of nationalist agitation. And yet he was Irish—as much as he was anything much. His gaze lowered from the sycamores through which the sky still showed. He flicked his cigarette in the flowers. “Two years with hard labor, hard fare and a hard bed is hardly a contretemps.”
“I am afraid they have coarsened you. However, you will find that in this country incarceration is not quite the disgrace our conquerors would make of it. Why, I myself received a one month’s detention.”
“Darling Aunt Eva, even in Wandsworth I had news of your escapades. Eggs at Asquith, gracious me. However, three-quarters of an hour in the cells below till they cat-and-moused you out scarcely amounts to a martyrdom.”
“And what of that?” she snapped. “If our masters have grown too cunning to permit of martyrs, is the cause to be any the lessened?”
Yes, he thought, she had hoped for prison. Hunger-striking, he did not doubt. How it must have riled her, her brother’s intercession. He remembered she had crossed to London for the Coronation demonstration of 1911. His father, invited of course to the Coronation itself, refused her his house. She camped outside in a borrowed motor, festooned with garlands and bannerets. In the procession itself she reclined upon a float, fingering a giant harp, the Dark Rosaleen of Erin, at the head of a mildly discomfited contingent from the Irishwomen’s Suffrage Federation. He watched her pass from a balcony in Piccadilly, one remarkable woman in a mass of thousands, each chanting for her vote.
He did not know whence she produced them, for she did not seem to carry anything with her beyond her parasol, but some salts had appeared which now she inhaled. Such a feminine creature. Impossible to imagine her a man. When he posited this, she answered he was impertinent.
“I do not intend to be.”
“Thoughtlessness is small excuse.”
“I merely meant that in some ways you are better fitted to be head of the family, The MacMurrough. In place of my—as you call him, recreant—father.”
“One does not wish oneself changed. One wishes the