Strumpet City (41 page)

He hesitated, wondering what to do.

‘Father,’ he whispered, ‘Father Giffley.’ When he had repeated the name several times his superior opened his eyes.

‘Go away,’ he said.

‘But, Father . . .’

Father Giffley turned away and closed his eyes once more. After a moment, while Father O’Sullivan waited, he said:

‘Heart of Jesus patient and full of mercy, Heart of Jesus, desire of the everlasting hills.’

Father O’Sullivan remained very quiet. In the twilight of the room the words seemed for a little while to have physical presence, to repeat of themselves, clearly at first, then fading gradually into silence. Father Giffley’s breathing became heavy. After a while he began to snore.

Father O’Sullivan, knowing there was nothing he could do, withdrew, closing the door very gently.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

Yearling, back in the city for the first time in six weeks, remarked anew its characteristic odours; the smell of soot and hot metal in Westland Row station, the dust-laden air in streets, the strong tang of horse urine where the cabbies had their stand, the waft of beer and stale sawdust when a public house door swung open. If the fishing in Connemara had been poor this season, at least the open spaces had given him back his nose.

He stood at the corner, a jaunty figure in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers, with a walking-stick which he wagged contentedly to and fro as he considered his surroundings. He liked to smell things. Smell was part of place. It was more. It seeped into forgotten storerooms of the mind and unlocked hidden memories. Smell, like music, could produce the latchkey to pain and pleasure.

He looked down Brunswick Street to read the clock above the fire brigade station. Twenty-five minutes to three. That gave him an hour before his appointment with the chairman of Morgan & Co. He was glad. The October afternoon was fine. There were plenty of pleasant, inconsequential things to do.

Wondering if there was anything of interest going on at the Antient Concert Rooms, he crossed the road and turned left down Brunswick Street. He found the place was locked and the notice board outside blank. Too early yet, he remembered, for any of the concerts of the Dublin Orchestral Society. He had played with the orchestra some years before, when they presented all the Beethoven symphonies. They had to leave out the last movement of the Ninth, though, because there was no choir. Michele Esposito had conducted, an accomplished musician, Yearling considered, unanimously respected by musical citizens. Pity they were also unanimous in mispronouncing his name.

In the graveyard of St. Mark’s Church an old man was sweeping up the leaves. The trees that had shed them were covered with grime from the nearby railway bridge, as black as the coal carters who lived in the surrounding tenements. Yet they budded in spring and decked themselves in summer, with a gnarled and grimy courage which moved Yearling to admiration. The old man swept the leaves into little heaps along the paths. From time to time he exchanged his sweeping brush for a barrow and brought them to the fire that smouldered by a stone wall. There was no flame visible, only a plume of blue smoke rising steadily towards the sky. On all sides were tombstones, upright, angled, grimy as the trees. The iron railings of the graveyard ran parallel with the street, a barrier to divide the kingdoms of the living and the dead.

The metal-shod wheels of a dray ground on the cobbles behind Yearling’s back. The noise was deafening. He turned impatiently to shake his stick at the driver and put his fingers in his ears. The driver, unabashed, winked to convey his good humour. As the dray passed Yearling saw the board on the back. It read: ‘Morgan & Co.’

The reminder of his appointment was unwelcome. His mother had been Cecilia Morgan and from his grandfather, George Morgan, he had inherited an aptitude for music and his influential place on the Board. His brother-in-law, John Bullman, was now chairman. Neither approved of the other.

As Yearling turned to resume his walk, a man passed him with a barrel-organ and a monkey on a chain. One of Signor Esposito’s fellow-countrymen, a twin soul, a musician. The man was thin and famished looking and the monkey, in its red flannel jacket, clung to the organ and scrutinised the passers-by with quick, continuous movements of its head. When a group of children waved and shouted to it, the monkey responded by leaping up and down several times. Showing-off, Yearling thought.

He crossed the road. The children had now gathered about a shop window. They were ragged and poor. The boys wore trousers that had been cut down to fit, the girls’ dresses were made of oddments run clumsily together by their mothers. All of them were barefooted. For the moment the window held their unanimous interest. It displayed drumsticks and liquorice pipes, toffee apples, jelly babies, cough-no-mores, aniseed balls, conversation lozenges.

Yearling, aware suddenly of a conglomeration of appetites, tapped the nearest shoulder and asked: ‘Who’d like sweets?’

The faces turned in unison to look up at him. They examined in unison the knickerbockers, the Norfolk jacket, the cane.

‘Come,’ Yearling encouraged, ‘first in gets the most.’

He went into the shop. There were bundles of firewood in one corner and a large drum with tin measures beside it. The tap, dripping occasionally, filled the air with the smell of paraffin. The shelves behind the counter supported trays of money balls, potato balls, peggy’s legs, jaw stickers, bulls-eyes and lemon drops. There was a closed box which contained something called Kruger’s Soothers. Slices of snow cake and plum pudding were stacked on the counter itself and a tumbler stood for a measure beside a basin of cooked peas.

Yearling, aware now that the small space about him was crammed, wondered where to begin. A middle-aged woman faced him. She was smiling.

‘Give them what they want,’ he said, smiling back at her.

For some minutes there was chaos, until the woman said no one would get anything until they were all quiet and waited their turns. Then she began to select from the boxes, counting sweets and measuring out peas. The snow cake and plum pudding disappeared altogether. When all had been served he paid her. It was a modest amount. Never, Yearling thought, had a mob been so economically mollified. He dismissed them and they went whooping out the door.

‘Thank you,’ he said to the woman who had served him.

‘You’re welcome, sir.’

He was about to remark on their appetites, their excitement, the bewildering combination of poverty and high spirits. He changed his mind. What seemed remarkable to him was everyday to her. Raising his hat ceremoniously, he left.

The traffic in Townsend Street, preponderantly horse-drawn, displayed the familiar names—the Gas Company, the Glass Bottle Company, Boland’s Bakery, Tedcastle McCormack, Palgraves, W. & R. Jacob, the Foundry of Morgan, the Dublin United Tramway Company. Most of the drivers had sacks pinned about their shoulders. Many of them wore moustaches that made them look curiously alike. All of them seemed lost in some slow-minded afternoon reverie. Yet these were the revolutionaries and the Larkinites, Yearling reflected, patiently revolving God knows what plans for further mischief behind short clay pipes.

The thought gave him zest for his appointment, which, his watch informed him, was now imminent. He began to swing his cane again, in time with a jingle which had begun to repeat itself in his head.

‘Edward Carson had a cat

It sat upon the fender

And every time it caught a rat

It shouted: No Surrender.’

Carson, arming his Ulster volunteers in the Northern counties of Ireland, wanted a Protestant parliament for a Protestant people. Home Rule is Rome Rule.

‘Ulster will Fight

And Ulster will be Right.’

‘The men of Ulster, loyal subjects of King George V, will use all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule parliament in Ireland, and in the event of such a parliament being forced upon them, will refuse to recognise its authority.’

Edward Carson signed the Solemn Covenant, and immediately after him came the pillars of Northern society: Lord Londonderry, the Bishop of Down, the Moderator of the General Assembly. It would be a fight between John Redmond and Edward Carson, Dear-Harp-of-my-Country-In-Darkness-I-found-Thee against the Protestant Boys and the Ould Orange Flute.

There would be excitement, whatever way the cat jumped. Was it this that had his brother-in-law worried? Or was it the labour unrest? He turned in by the works gate and stood for a while to wonder at the endless belt of buckets which groaned and rattled as they climbed the mechanical hoist. He would soon know.

Rashers, summoned urgently into the street, examined the monkey and the barrel-organ at Hennessy’s request.

‘Where the hell did you get it?’

‘This little Italian collapsed in front of my eyes. I know him well and went over to him. When they were taking him away in the ambulance he asked me to mind the monkey for him.’

‘How can you mind a monkey?’

‘Take him into the room with the rest of the brood, I suppose. I’m wondering what he’ll eat.’

‘One of your misfortunate kids, the minute you turn your back.’

Hennessy looked worried for a moment. Then he said: ‘Monkeys is vegetarians.’

‘I wouldn’t be sure. That fellow there has the look of a bloody cannibal.’

Hennessy scrutinised the monkey closely. It frowned at him and gave an unexpected leap. He jerked away.

‘What did I tell you?’ Rashers said.

‘Ah no,’ Hennessy said, ‘I frightened him. They don’t like to be stared at.’ They sat down on the steps.

‘What am I to do?’ Hennessy asked again.

The barrel-organ and the monkey, overshadowing both of them, cut off the rest of the street and for a long time seemed quite insoluble.

Rashers, applying his mind to the matter, began at the beginning. Anything that lived; men, women, children; dogs, pigeons, monkeys; even lesser things like cockroaches, flies and fleas, had to eat. He had been of their company for long enough to sympathise with them all—the child rooting in the ashbin, the cat slinking along the gutter, the cockroach delicately questing along the wooden joins of the floor, its grey blue body corrugated with anxiety. These were sometimes his competitors, but more often his brothers. He could never watch a dog nosing in a bin without a feeling of sympathy and fellowship. The monkey, too, was a questor, who could pick out fortunes for the curious and collect their pennies in his little black bag. They could work together, the monkey and himself.

Rising from the steps, he began to investigate the handle of the organ. He moved it slightly.

‘Don’t touch it,’ Hennessy warned him.

‘What do you mean—don’t touch it?’

‘You might break it.’

Rashers became angry.

‘Break, me arse,’ he said.

He took a firm grip of the handle and turned it rapidly. The organ, galvanised into action, began at a breathtaking tempo to emit a waltz.

‘For the love of God, will you stop?’ Hennessy appealed. ‘You’ll banjax it.’

But Rashers continued. The burst of music at the turning of the handle astonished him. He cocked his head to it and tried it at different speeds.

‘“Over the Waves”’ he announced finally.

‘Over what waves?’ Hennessy asked. ‘What the hell are you talking about?’

‘It’s a waltz called “Over the Waves”.’

Rashers found the right speed at last. The tune rattled out beneath roofs and windows and flowed down the length of the street, past broken fanlights and open hall doors. Rashers, his head to one side, listened with delight.

‘Elegant,’ he said.

As he turned to invite approval, the behaviour of the monkey caught his attention.

‘Look,’ he said to Hennessy.

The monkey had taken the little black bag in his paw. It’s body trembled a little, its eyes were alive and full of intelligence. The head, moving constantly from one side to the other, left no doubt about its thoughts. It was watching for the approach of a client to beg from.

‘Come on,’ Rashers decided, ‘if we don’t make a few bob, we’ll have a damn good try.’

Hennessy agreed to push the barrel-organ from place to place, a task Rashers found impossible because of his bad leg. He was persuaded to try the handle too, but after the terrifying burst of music which answered his first attempt he refused to have anything further to do with it. It was decided that Rashers, who had a more professional understanding of music anyway, should be solely responsible for performance. He became expert at it in the course of the afternoon and learned to vary the tempo to suit his mood. Turn the handle rapidly and the air was lively. Turn it more slowly and the effect was pensive—even melancholy.

‘It’s more impressive than the tin whistle,’ Hennessy remarked.

‘More orchestral,’ Rashers agreed.

By evening they had arrived at their last stand, a vantage point at the corner of Bachelor’s Walk and Sackville Street. It was here that Pat and Lily, on their way to one of their rare walks in Phoenix Park, saw them.

‘There’s some friends of mine,’ Pat said. She looked around her. People were passing continuously. She searched.

‘Where?’

‘Over there.’

‘The barrel-organ?’

‘The thin fella is Hennessy. The one with the beard is Rashers.’

‘And the monkey . . . ?’

‘I don’t know. I haven’t yet had the pleasure,’ Pat said.

He took her over to introduce her. Hennessy was polite and raised his hat. Rashers stared for some moments until he recognised Pat as the friend of Fitz and Mulhall.

‘Have you gone into partnership?’ Pat asked him.

Hennessy explained about the Italian who had collapsed. Then, because he was by nature gallant, he insisted that the monkey should draw Lily’s fortune. He refused to hear of any payment. The monkey selected a card from the fortune box. Lily took it.