King of Morning, Queen of Day (16 page)

“Haa! Fnoud eno!”

Gonzaga’s filth-smeared face smiled up from between the pink vaulted backs of Farmer Mulvenna’s pigs. Between his fingers he held a Free State penny. He wiped it clean, waved it triumphantly beneath Tiresias’s nose, then thrust it into the depths of a much-worn, more soiled trooper’s knapsack.

Twenty miles of rain, and nothing to be done, and rain, and anagrams; not one single worthy soul generous enough to save a tramp’s shoe leather by offering him a lift. In the temporary respite offered by the walls of a ruinous castle that stood picturesquely by the waterside, Gonzaga began to snuffle, nose to the ground, in search of further treasures for his sack. “On any other day, in any other weather, at any other season,” intoned Tiresias, watching the rain fall from the grey sky. Nothing found, they pressed on through countless millions of raindrops along the coast-hugging road, past the pines that demurely screened the seafront summer residences and the habits of their moneyed tenants from rude gazes. Before them rose the steeples and smokes of the village that was their destination, and beyond and above, the slopes of the mountains. Tiresias bade his colleague wait a moment while he admired the view.

“Comparable to the Corniche of Monte Carlo, or that oft-gloried road that wends south out of Naples, under the breath of Vesuvius, to Sorrento, would you not agree, Gogo? However, my boots are killing me. Or, to translate directly from the Irish, more grammatically than idiomatically, “the boots they do be killing me.”

They took a rest on the steps of a small obelisk erected with startling abruptness in an otherwise unremarkable cow pasture by the road.

“Erected in memory of Major Robert John Ross, who, in the War of 1814 with the colonials, actually succeeded in capturing and burning the White House, but not before he had helped himself to the presidential repast, still hot on the table, and liberated the presidential wine cellar. Apparently, it was quail on the menu.” Tiresias read from the legend engraved upon the stone as, grumbling and gasping, he eased off his boots; left, then right. “Oh, Gogo, ah; the simple ecstasies are the most profound. Oh… ahhh…” Gonzaga picked up flakes of stone shed from Major Robert John Ross’s stab at immortality and inspected them minutely before discarding them over his shoulder.

“Time, methinks Gogo, for a quick survey, after which we shall partake of the marvellous restorative qualities of Earl Grey’s unexcelled
chai.”
From a waistcoat pocket Tiresias unfolded a pair of thick, square spectacles. Harlequin colours swirled and ran in the lenses. Wire frames were carefully hooked over scrofulous ears.

“Scofu? Snexu?”

“A modicum of time, if you please, while my weary old visual systems acclimatise… yes, there’s something manifesting. The mythline flow follows the geomorphological landscape quite closely. Evidently there was no human settlement and mythic activity before the landscape stabilised after the Ice Age. I can distinguish a tangle of minor nodes along the river valley and there seems to be an octave of decayed myth-echoes along the shoreline. The place we’re pacing with our singular posteriors is the focus of one such old, decayed echo, in all probability the site of an Old Stone Age hamlet. This whole place is quite a jumble. I’m trying to sort out the major octaves from the minor harmonics. Yes… yes, I’ve got them now. Here, Gogo, see where I am pointing?” Gonzaga hunkered and squinted along Tiresias’s quavering forefinger. The old man was indicating a low, flat-topped mountain at the edge of the mass that formed such a picture-postcard backdrop to the village in the valley.

“Draloch snexu?”

“Major chordal nexus,” Tiresias confirmed. “Right on the summit.” The square glasses were unpeeled from the prominent proboscis, adoringly folded in vellum, and returned to the next-to-heart pocket. “Good comrade, how about that long-promised cup of liquid nectar? Time aplenty tomorrow for the setting about of ordained businesses. Tonight we rest, we recreate, we take our easance and pleasure in Rostrevor Village.” Oily locks that had not seen the comb for over a generation nodded at clouds ripping and tearing under the weight of their own rain. An aqueous, ochre evening light spilled down the mountainsides and poured over the village. “See, dear Gogo, even the elements themselves have deigned to smile upon us.”

“Wentyt slime gneo, dna gnithno ot eb edno,” grumbled Gonzaga, reaching into the wet grass and pocketing a discarded cap from a bottle of Cantrel and Cochrane red lemonade. He took a small metal cylinder from the webbing bandolier he wore slung across his shoulder, opened the cap, tipped a few grains of black tea into the iron pot that swung from his belt. “Oyu ekam erif. Ym tfee thru.”

P
IG PAWS, PIG FACES,
big pig men, bog men, up for the day from Mullingar and Kildare, plonked around the tables like sides of fatty ham, wedged apoplectically into straining tweeds and moleskins, They always sat as far from their women as the geometry of the tables would permit. Faced with lard dumplings swaddled in floral print, with cheeks like two tins of condemned veal, they could hardly be blamed for wanting to put as much distance as possible between themselves and their darling wives. What is it about Irish womanhood that aspires to the condition of massive mono-bosoms and mono-bottoms? What is the secret source of that peculiar bouquet of Eau de Farmer’s Wife that envelops them, a heady amalgam of middle-aged secretions and fat heated by its own compression to the point of spontaneous combustion?

Jessica hated Tuesdays with a cordial loathing: Tuesdays, when the shopping specials disgorged their wobbling hordes of red-cheeked rurals onto the platforms of Connolly and Pearse stations and herded them like prize Landrace pigs toward the glittering sties of Clery’s, Brown-Thomas, Switzers. Watching their jowls shudder as their teeth chomped down another forkful of meat and two veg, she imagined a little ditty running around and around behind their piggy eyes:
Yum yum, pig’s bum, cabbage and potato; yum yum, pig’s bum, cabbage and potato…

The better class of client—the solicitor, the bank clerk, the accountant, the broker, the department store floorwalker—took his custom far beyond the reach of farmers and their wives on Tuesdays, and for the deprivation of their tips and their ritual, depersonalised flirtations, she despised the pig people. Tuesdays she would forever associate with the smell of boiling cabbage in big vats and the rhythmic chomp of rural mastication.

Bang through the swinging doors into the steam heat and stench of the kitchen. Clatter of plates into the sink; a glance at the clock, which seemed to be running slow, seemed not to have moved one iota, seemed to be running backwards; a sigh, a stretch against the cool of the refrigerator, a long “Oh God,” an unrequited lust for a Woodbine cigarette and then a swift reverse out through the banging swinging doors with four more platefuls of Shopper’s Special Luncheon. Swinging in as she went swinging out was her best enemy, Fat Lettie, with the inevitable taunt: “I think the bog man on table number six fancies you. He was asking after you—when you get off, and all…”

Swinging back in as Fat Lettie went swinging out, she made her riposte: “Kindly inform the gent on table number six that he has a face like a shite that’s been stuck down the jax three days.”

In, and out again. Fat Lettie: “You’re a foul-mouthed hoor, Jessica Caldwell.”

Swing, bang. “You should open your legs and let your arse do the talking, Lettie dearest—it makes a lot more sense.”

And, on the return pass: “Well, at least my Eammon will be coming to pick me up in a motor car and take me out to Phoenix Park for a concert, Jessica Caldwell.”

Two tables served, three cleared, and one bill later. “In the Defence Forces, isn’t he, your Eammon? What’s it like, doing everything by numbers? Skirt up, two three; knickers down, two three…”

“You bitch, Jessica Caldwell. At least I’ve got a boyfriend.”

“And so’ve I, Lettie dear, and not some pissy toy soldier either—a real fightin’ man, he is, a rebel boy of the Irish Republican Army.”

“You are such a liar, Jessica Caldwell.”

Jessica Caldwell was not a liar. She was a creator of imaginative fictions. If persons had not enough wit to recognise an imaginative fiction—come, let us not quibble, a
lie
—when they were told one, the more fool they. She could not be responsible for people believing her sorry. imaginative fictions. Lying was as natural to her as song to a bird.

“Ladies, ladies, this is a public restaurant. The customers have come here to enjoy their luncheons, not to listen to you two going at it like two Montgomery Street harridans.” Brendan the head cook, as the only man in the kitchens, held an authority out of all proportion to his position. Doors banged, doors swung, and a tight and smoking silence endured until at last the clock woke from its meanderings and declared six o’clock. The peace and cool of Mangan’s back alley was almost sacramental. Jessica shook the day from her hair and stretched in a warm, vagrant sunlight the exact colour of Etruscan terra-cotta. A bird threw a snatch of song over the chimney pots and chipped roof slates. Jessica smoked a long and luxurious Woodbine while in stations named after dead patriots pig men and blowsy women slumped softly, sleepily, against each other, full to the watch pockets with Shopper’s Special Luncheon in trains taking them back to Mullingar and Kildare and every hole in the hedge in between.

An immense evening was unfolding, itself over the Georgian avenues of South Dublin like a backdrop for some extravagant production of
Aida.
The tram paused to deposit Jessica at the end of Belgrave Road before lumbering on toward the Victorian pomposities of Palmerstown. Piano music; Jocasta practising Mozart. Did she never tire of arpeggios and glissandos and diminuendos and all those other tedious Italians? At the age of five, Jessica had whispered to her father that she thought the front door looked like a smiling face, which delighted him so much it had become a piece of family legend; the brass welcome to number twenty. She waved to Jocasta,—sorry, Jo-Jo, it sounded more arty—the sister she did like, who returned a nod and a smile. Clattering down the stairs came Jasmine, a.k.a. The Shite, the sister she did not like, sullen, spotty, and bulgy in her Girls’ Brigade uniform.

“I’m supposed to bring a new song for the singsong tonight,” she said. It was almost an accusation of something.

“I know a great song you can teach them. It goes like this:

I stuck my finger up a woodpecker’s hole,

And the woodpecker said, ‘God bless my soul!

Take it down, take it down, take it down,

Take it down!’”

Exit The Shite, scandalised. Jessica mistrusted people who had too much religion, especially when those people were five years her junior.

“Jessica Caldwell!” The roar came from the paternal sanctorum at the top of the stairs. Jessica loved her father’s study only slightly less than she loved him; the triple latticed windows with their generous views of the garden and the trees of Palmerstown beyond, the cupola that cast its lotus of light over the writing desk and draughtsman’s table—for as long as she could remember, her impression of the study had been one of light and warmth. Charlie Caldwell was a designer of fine linen and tableware for Doheny and Nesbitt’s exclusive interior furnishings range. President Childers ate his dinner off a Charlie Caldwell plate, and had it served to him on a Charlie Caldwell tablecloth. His father before him had been a designer of tableware. His proudest boast was that his finest designs had gone down with the
Titanic.
Also like his father before, C. Caldwell cast himself forthrightly in the tradition of the Protestant Radical, two philosophies he considered severely undervalued in the new Ireland. The waxed-oak shelves of his study were stocked with books he felt reflected his dual heritage and which never failed to raise tuts of disapproval from Mr. Perrot, the clergyman, on his rare visits to the house. Mr. Perrot had always been disapproving of the Caldwell family. Anyone who called their children Jessica, Jocasta, and Jasmine was obviously suspect of heterodoxy. A valiant, and to date victorious battler against encroaching baldness, Charlie Caldwell attributed both his success in holding his hair and his intellectual vigour to Dwyer’s Electrical Scalp Massage (Why go Bald?).

“Jessica Caldwell, you are the most foul-mouthed little hellion it has been my misfortune to hand rear. Do you have to offend Jasmine’s tender sensibilities?”

“Ah, the way she goes on you’d think she had a lemon stuck up her backside.”

The guffaw of laughter almost sent the draughtsman over backwards in his Chippendale chair. “So, how was your day in the service of Mr. Mangan?”

“Fuc… bloody awful. Dad, why…”

“Why can’t you go to college to study to be an illustrator? A fine waste of money that’d be when you end up getting married to the first man you see and having babies. All that time and money down the drain.”

“Jocasta’s going to be a concert pianist, Is she a waste of time and money?”

“Jocasta has a great talent.”

“And I don’t? I can draw as well as you. Better.”

It was an old, entrenched argument. Jessica argued it now purely for the sake of arguing. As soon as she had enough money from Mangan’s Family Restaurant, she would apply herself to college to study illustration, and pay for it of her own sweat, see if she didn’t. She was Destined for Greatness. It was written by a greater hand than C. Caldwell, Esquire’s.

“Are you going to be in for dinner?”

She still did love her father, dearly.

“Well, I’d arranged with Rozzie and Em…”

“Abandon me to the wrath of your mother, would you, ungrateful child?”

She leaned over the desk and kissed him on the not-quite bald patch.

“Aw, Dad, for a mean ould bugger, you’re a honey.”

Down in the hall, heading for the front door (“’Bye, Jocasta; sorry, Jo-Jo,”), she encountered The Shite locked in incomprehensible intercourse with a pennant on a pole.

“Don’t forget verse two:

And the woodpecker said, ‘God bless my soul!

Turn it round, turn it round, turn it round,