At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [78]
MacMurrough pushed the tepid tea aside. He left a tip for the ladlorn waitress. I give without loss as I buy without gain.
He walked afterwards along the pier where another band was playing, a military band this time, and listened a while until the recruiting-sergeants grew too insistent. Then he passed through a gap in the wall to the seaward side, where the wind hit with the blast of guns. There were slum children on a Sunshine Trip clambering over the rocks and MacMurrough watched their ragged antics and listened to their bootless cries. At the pier’s end he waited within the spray of the waves as the mailboat came in. It recalled his own arrivals here as a child and the expectation that rose when his father changed his watch to Irish time.
—You know, I used to enjoy those holidays at Aunt Eva’s. As a boy, I mean. It was always a friendly, idle sort of house. She used to tease my father for sliding into an Englishman, and to prove her wrong he would take punch and sing songs into the night. The children were let run free. It’s odd, considering the interminable political plight, but Ireland for me has always signified freedom. A lazy freedom which you don’t really know what to do with.
—What did your mother make of the place?
—She, being English, put up and smiled. Aunt Eva terrified her. One begins to see why now.
—Does she terrify you?
—All this rot about flutes and fêtes. It’s absurd, but I mayn’t deny it’s tempting, too. To see society return. Once more to dine at a club. Unghost my father with posterity till again he shines on his son. It’s terrifying to be tempted into happiness.
—Do you not wish for happiness?
—I don’t wish always to hope knowing there can be none. Even Aunt Eva cannot scratch time.
The mailboat had entered between the piers and he saw the passengers crowding the decks. He saw the excited face of a boy with his father beside who pointed out the places. The boy gulped the air, gulping in the sights and sounds, electrified by the strangeness and the strange familiarity. Holidays, that unbelievable future, had arrived.
Yes, he had enjoyed those holidays at Aunt Eva’s. Enjoyed them and mostly forgotten them. Until out of the blue his aunt wrote him in Wandsworth Jail.
—I remember, said Scrotes. You wept when they showed the envelope.
—Did I cry? I’m not sure.
—You wept. They were induced to call the chaplain.
—Her green notepaper and the Irish postmark in my cell. It was like all of Ballygihen spilt out of it. There was the boy with his glass jar and his collecting-net and the waves washing as he played on the sea-wall. I felt he stopped suddenly and a recognition came over his face which turned to horror when he met my eyes. I think for the first time I felt—I realized the enormity of what had happened in my life.
—What did you feel?
—You know what I felt.
—Say it.
—I don’t need to.
—You do.
—Disgust. I despised myself.
He felt Scrotes’s hand in his pocket and his handkerchief unfolded before him. So brilliantly washed and ironed, the cloth seemed a thousand miles away.
—It really isn’t fair, you know. If it weren’t for this rotten war I might have gone to France or Italy where you’re supposed to go when they find you out. What on earth brought me to Ireland? What on earth am I to do here?
—There there, said Nanny Tremble, but it wasn’t Nanny Tremble, it was Scrotes, who only said, We shall see.
The washerwoman was coming down the garden when he returned to Ballygihen. Her feet were the color of boots and her shawl was black, but her skirt beneath showed a rich red which surprised, though he could not say why. The infant that snuggled inside her shawl seemed too large to be carried. Its wide unwondering eyes hinted at simplicity. She had her wicker load as usual on her head. How could a burden lend such poise, he wondered, for she appeared to glide along, as though the dirt on her feet were one with the grass. Her face was stern, probably older than her years. She was singing, but only when she passed did he catch words from her song.
MacMurrough shut his eyes. Her