At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [99]
Back in the summerhouse, he saw Doyle pull off the comfort’s cap and search inside. He made play of finding a morsel therein, a louse indeed. Plucks it, plops it in his mouth. Delicious, grins his face. Giggling, reddening, the comfort turns aside.
—Not in any Greek sense, MacMurrough answered.
—Lovers none the less?
—It is not impossible. They have youth.
—Would age forbid them?
—Rather youth permits. The not knowing and the slowness of days. Lack of imagination may move mountains.
—Quaere: did you love at their age?
—Oh well, said MacMurrough, thinking back. There was a boy at school, I suppose. We became quite regular. One time, we’d been at it, and I turned round and held him. Is this love? I asked. I suppose it is, he answered. And we both sat back, not touching, thinking the same I suppose, the vacuity of it. We stopped soon after. He smelt, I remember, of oranges.
The priest clapped his hands again, the detail of sashes apparently decided, and the boys trooped out to the garden. In the evening light MacMurrough watched their parade. The antics of their instructor had amused at first, until he had discovered in the man’s eagerness an innocence childlike as the boys’. In profile he saw the faces of his aunt and her priest. A dusk of midges danced above but their features were set like grim tutelaries. It struck him how little pleasure they gained of the boys and of their callow willingness to please. How little shame they felt of their exactions. The glances of the boys cut him and he foresaw in an inkling the thousand uses their willingness would be put to, until their faces changed, until they too were set.
He ambled towards the sea. He asked Scrotes what he had made of his aunt’s disquisition over lunch. Scrotes replied saying, O thou stranger woman, thou sayest well! Which brought knowing smiles to their bookish faces.
The sun on a stone wall—yellow, gold, bronze, red-metal—shaded through and was gone in moments. He smoked with his ear to the waves and he thought of a ten-year-old boy whose rollicking kingdom this shore had been. Truly, he was a happy child.
—What did your aunt intend, Scrotes asked, when she spoke of the good people taking you away?
—The fairies, MacMurrough answered. They take the beautiful boy and leave a changeling brute in his place.
He looked back up the lawns to where the boys still paraded. In their golden kilts they looked like tulips, tulips which glowed and marched in the dusk.
—We’re gods, he said. And these our playthings.
—There are many gods, returned Scrotes. Many to whom even you are but a whim.
—Ah yes, scaly-eyed Themis, guardian of law.
—One was thinking of Eros, whose arrows pierce and bring life.
Grey morning dulled the bay. Banks of clouds, Howth just one more bank, rolled to sea, where other Howths grumbled to greet them. Swollen spumeless tide. Heads that bobbed like floating gulls and gulls that floating bobbed like heads. Two heads. At swim, two boys.
And yet not boys but youth itself. Distance detached them, water unformed them, particularities washed away. Nasal whine, feet that smelt, these were accidents of their mundane selves. The sea proposed an ideal, unindividuate, sublime. Above on my perch I sit and watch. Alone one man.
—Not entirely alone, said Scrotes.
—No, MacMurrough conceded. One is never alone with the ghost of a friend.
He took up his towel as though to make room, patted it on his lap. In return Scrotes heaved a sigh, his weary limbs to ease, as if. Side by side they sat, chatting of this and that. With the boys swimming below, it was only natural their conversation should turn to friendship; and Scrotes remarked that the ancients had considered friendship a stimulus to virtue. The Philosopher, he further observed, went so far as to raise friendship to a virtue of itself. MacMurrough wondered was that still so, and Scrotes thought no, that its role had been subsumed in the family.
—Why should that be?
Scrotes