At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [96]
To which witticism she deferred with a smile. “Did you know,” she inquired after an interval, “that a Fenian has died?”
“I did not know there were any Fenians left.”
“No. Well, there you are. Dead ones, leastways. This was in America, which continent, I am persuaded, will ever produce novelties. He was of your grandfather’s time, this particular Fenian. Something of the dynamitard, if I recall. The remains are to be returned to Ireland. There will be a public demonstration of grief, which naturally I shall attend. If I am not deceived, my nephew will offer to accompany me.”
“Should you like me to accompany you, Aunt Eva?”
“That would be most acceptable. It is just what the country needs. To electrify the soul, galvanize the sinews, march the patriotic heart: a glorious grand monumental funeral!”
“Cometh the hour,” MacMurrough murmured, “cometh the corpse.”
“In the meantime we have the garden party to consider. Really, Anthony, you might show more interest. Caterers,” she offered by way of example. “Where to rope off, where for the canaille. We are to have a play performed. Won’t that fascinate? An enterprising young man of Father O’Toiler’s acquaintance keeps a school for Gaelic youths. He has composed a drama which his boys will enact.”
“I had not thought the drama a subject to move our priest.”
“I have read the résumé. All quite wholesome, what I could make of it. Father O’Toiler assures me it is a mystical chef d’oeuvre. Whatever, it has diverted his mind from this hockey bout. Really, hockey on one’s lawns. I had suggested croquet at a shilling a mallet, but this apparently was not the thing. So difficult when one entertains outside one’s circle.”
“How many are expected?” he asked.
She glanced up, then glanced down again, having perceived in his eyes the root of his query. “Absurd boy. That a garden party should dismay a MacMurrough. I have never heard such a thing.”
“One can’t help wondering if one isn’t to be paraded as a fairground attraction.”
“How little you know of the world.”
“If one were to be blunt, one might posit a similar nescience in one’s aunt.”
“Really Anthony, you would have me believe that a term of imprisonment and a bent for slumming are to be reckoned an education. The naivety of the young never fails to amaze. Nor their impertinence to offend, no matter how iffed.” She rang the little bell at the table’s center. “The world does not hang upon your misdemeanors. The world is no longer interested.”
“Oh, but it is, Aunt Eva. To the tune of Church, Parliament, press, the mob, the courts, police, the prisons. It is that I should take an interest that is objected to.”
She stared at the door a moment in expectation of the maid. No maid forthcoming, she said, “I can form no idea of the occasion, but suppose I had thieved at one time. Do I hold myself a thief for ever? Do I attempt a philosophy of my thieving? I do not. I have blasphemed. A saint would blaspheme with such a nephew. Am I nothing ever more than a blasphemer?”
“There is no equivalence.”
“The laws are unjust, that I will grant. But not as you would have it. It is girls and young women they prejudice. Men who rake hell in the customary manner, in them the courts discover no wrong, the law propounds no remedy against them. Yet how many young women have they ruined? And you think to right this wrong by having chauffeur-mechanics for ever at your disposal? My nephew will not persist in this. I think better of him than to suppose it.”
She had shifted into French, but still this was pretty strong stuff, and MacMurrough couldn’t but feel impressed. At home, he hadn’t dared say Stomach for fear of his mother reaching for the smelling-salts.
“No more of this Job and Jeremiah now. It is over, it is done with.” But not quite done with, for she added, with a haughty lift of her chin, “As though to say twelve men in London, whom the law humorously describes as your peers, should decide the fate of a MacMurrough. Why, were I to heed the opinion