The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (22 page)

And nightly Eneas blesses the Northern Lights Hotel like a small farmer includes his holding in his night prayers. Each week the War Office dispatches with astonishing faithfulness the sum owed to him for his wartime gallantry. And if an angel were to descend and inform him that paradise was at hand, he thinks he might linger nonetheless in this fortunate isle instead. It is the tin-tacks of days and the slumbers deep as wells of the nights that gild the dark terrain behind his eyes. Away goes care on long-famished legs and in lopes the great figure of sufficiency. The medicine of nondescript and toiling years restores him. Restores Harcourt also — not a trace of his epilepsy disturbs, in his own grateful phrase, his ‘social standing’.

In the dawns a pale wrung light slightly evil falls from the small window of Eneas’s own room, where a simple chair is set, for looking out. There’s a black sea-trunk against the wall, and some old pictorial magazines — oh, a hard nest maybe for a single man. On a single hook on the door is a ragged dressing-gown, and a yellowed pair of pyjamas leaks out from under the ancient bolster. A few jam-jars, in the grip of dust, have wandered in from the world of shops and preserves, to catch the wasps that plague his kingdom in the summer. The river moils past. At their unknown appointed times ships slide by unseen.

And yet it is a pleasant station. It is a station fashioned after the hankering of his heart. Ordinary heart of no fabulous requirement. The gaining of this place all the same to him is a high achievement. The arena of friendship with Harcourt and the general usefulness of their haven in the sea-weary hearts of sailors — both are palaces and jewels to him. He has been brought at last to the preferred spot. And as a journeying man it is fitting to him that it is an ancient port, as old as England herself. And as he watches the fleeting tide swell the river and deflate it, by turn and turn, he thinks of this district before the first wanderers, a riverbank wild as America’s West, and the rage of birds tearing worms out of the printless mud. And the queer silence of that ancient noise and the pristine absence of men and women, loving and shouting. And he wonders did God Himself stand there before mankind, stand there with his ample creation, feeling the wind of His winds against His face, the water of His waters against His feet? And did He paddle in the river He had made?

When he thinks of Sligo now it is as a place eternally the same. Certainly no news of death or even life reaches him. Perhaps it hurts him that no characteristic letter arrives to him from his mother but equally his old habit of not writing to her persists, and in his easy moments he assumes that she is as happy to think of him as write to him. He is not so great an illusioned fool as to forget that indeed in the course of his bockety life he hasn’t received more than a handful of letters. The documents of his existence are scant and few. Nor indeed, by the lights of his old concern of safety and concealment, has he actually communicated his whereabouts to her. He is content to leave the matter year and year, and the years accommodate him. So Sligo slips behind him, fixed, at anchor. And as for his notorious sentence of death covered now in the rheum of time and the lichens of the decades, it is emptied of its terrors. He cannot feel it any longer beat against his living heart.

Far away there is freedom for Nigeria and so Harcourt is ever to be an Englishman. There is freedom for Nigeria but Harcourt must abide in the Northern Lights Hotel. It is strange that though many years separate the freedoms of their homelands, Eneas and Harcourt are scraps of people both, blown off the road of life by history’s hungry breezes. Therefore their hotel must be both homeland and home, though homeland and home have but two citizens. The craziness of it doesn’t drive them crazy. Side by side they are citizenry enough and their constitution provides for their concealment and abandonment. Abandonment is the proudest principle of their order.

By these vague beliefs Eneas lives and in the ordered motions of each day he rests his faith. As the years go on the hotel neither prospers nor struggles. The saga of grease and grime has no more impediment than the occasional death of an inmate, a finished man carried down into the lobby and out into the bare hearse of Carnew and Son, Grocers and Undertakers. Carnew needs no shining brasses. These deaths are not violent but the easy epic deaths of the lonesome. The proprietors of the Northern Lights Hotel don’t fail to observe the proper obsequies of their inmates, whether Methodist, Jewish, Baptist or renegade. The rabbi is called for to gather his man to the breast of Yahweh, the never-written name, or the minister for a strayed sheep of the Presbyterians, scratched though he be by briars. Father Connolly is fetched for to honour the end of the odd stray Irishman. Therefore the Northern Lights is a kind of lean-to or hedge-school of the religions of the world and all are united at last in the long peace of decay.

20

Lonesome days
are nothing to Eneas McNulty. Here he is in his seventieth year, as hale as a nut, as fast-bottomed as a new bucket. His every gesture as easy-natural as a dancing man’s. His mind goes back betimes to the dance-hall of his father and his brother. Where all the souls of the district were dancing — dancing souls as fierce as foxes. Where the queer starlight infected the very hairdos of the beauties of Sligo. And every girl of twenty was a beauty, for youth alone he sees now was loveliness, glamour and charm. Out of the great trees were charmed the black-coated birds, every man a willing dupe to the starlight in the tresses tortured into perms in the Friday Mecca of the hairdresser’s.

But the time that has begun to stand in front of the time of Viv — that old vision which for so long took first place, took centre-stage like his father’s band and dancing orchestra of yore, planting its eight sets of polished boots and hitting out the Yankee tunes — the thing he sees now betimes when his mind wanders back to those haunted lanes and strands, those still-glimmering lamps, the November rain eating into the car-lights, is Sam Dickins dancing with his girlfriend of twenty-three years, Mary Deegan. And Sam Dickins has a club foot covered in that mighty shoe made for him by the cobbler — Blennerhasset, the planter’s whelp — but he knows the weight of that shoe and swings it through the steps. Where other men are doing three steps, he’s swivelling on his normal boot, and swinging that club foot. You can see him count the beats, you can see Mary Deegan laughing for the joy of it, the prettiness of it. Oh, Jesus, and all night he’s dancing with Mary Deegan, too busy dancing for marrying he says, and there’s many, many a girl would take her place. He’s a dixie dancer! Lord God, Protector of the Meek, he swings that foot. You can say to him, as he goes out sweaty and radiant into the frosted night, Mary on his arm, ‘Good dancing,’ and by that same Lord he’ll say, ‘Not so bad!’ Eneas is ever thinking of that. Because in his heart he believes he understands the weight of the thing that was given amiss to him, whatever limb it is, soul or otherwise. But with Harcourt in the high times of the Northern Lights, he has discovered the weight of it, unearthed the number and is dancing now, swivelling one foot where other men would take three steps, swivelling his good foot, and throwing the other.

One night, coming in from the blackness of the wharf, the Isle of Dogs smeared over with a crust of filthy rain, his coat heavy with it, and three fat loaves of bread under an arm for the breakfast, he finds Harcourt jumpy and flushed behind the counter of the lobby. On a usual night Harcourt is trawling his way through Iceland, Berlin and such with the well-worn knob of the radio. But all is silence in the old house, as if the inmates themselves were aware of Harcourt’s queer excitement. Harcourt gives him a fierce stare as he comes in as if expecting — God knows what apparition. The lobby is ill served by a bulb of poor wattage and the foul weather further blackens the lair of cobwebs and darkly marked linoleum. Harcourt tears out from behind the counter and drags his friend in over the threshold and bangs the door and even puts the old iron bar down across it, a thing he never bothers to do.

‘Hey, hey, what is it, Harcourt? Don’t pull an old man about so.’

‘See anyone out there?’

‘Not a soul…’

‘Got to get a lock on the place …’

‘Why so, Harcourt? Be plenty of old fellas trying to get in later.’

‘They’ll have to tell their names through the keyhole. Where you been wandering, brother? Expected you hours ago.’

‘No, you didn’t, Harcourt. I always go out for an hour and bring back the old bread at this time. Baker wouldn’t know what to do with himself if I didn’t fetch the unbought loaves … Seven years I’ve done that

‘Brother, man, never mind the feckin loaves now. We’ve had visitors, untrustworthy-looking visitors, not pleasant, not as kosher as you’d like, men in dark coats. What do you call them, bowsies!’

‘Eh, what bowsies you mean, Harcourt?’

‘Your kind of bowsies — Sligo bowsies.’

‘Looking for rooms, like?’

‘Looking for you, you mad bollocks.’

And he pushes Eneas further back from the door and beckons him into the safer realm of the three brown plastic armchairs and the spider-thin table with a grimy magazine on it dating from nineteen sixty-two.
Illustrated London Weekly.

‘Why looking for me? Done nothing, Harcourt.’

‘You done something, something — they know you. Oh, they’re polite, polite bowsies, but I can tell, there’s a sort of angle on everything, questions ordinary, but too many of them, too friendly, and they’re all excited, like me now, like they were creeping up on something, a deer or a fish in the river — creeping, creeping. Oh!’

‘I don’t think they can be anything serious. Look it, they’ll be friends from the boozer, looking for a loan of a ten-bob note …’

‘That’s right, Eneas, be stupid. All right. Now, first thing, after you go out, for your hour as you call it, your evening in the public house

‘Three pints of ale, Harcourt, nothing to keel a man over…’

‘Feck that,’ says Harcourt. ‘First man in is this cleaned-up fella, you know, mighty-looking fella as a matter of fact, big tremendous head of white hair, straight-backed, maybe not a Sligo man I would of said, but says he’s from Sligo, says he’s Jack McNulty, Eneas …’

‘Ah, sure, look, that’s just my brother, Harcourt. Well, Jesus, can’t say I’m too pleased he’s found me, but, well, no, I am, I am chuffed, I’d like to see him, is he coming back? You’ll have told him to come back?’

‘Of course I told him.’

‘Could of stayed here the night, eh? Didn’t think of that?’ ‘Oh, yes, bugger turns up, never seen him in my life, certain resemblance to yourself maybe, well-to-do sort of a character, not so bad, but do I ask him to stay the feckin night — no, sir, not with your history.’

‘Ah, well. No matter. So when will we see him?’

‘Well, I told him to come back in the morning. You know, and if you didn’t think he was who he said he was, you could thump him with a hammer, you could get a look at him coming up the street or something

‘It’s only Jack…’

‘All right.’ And Harcourt crosses his arms with a measure of meaning and grandeur.

‘So?’

‘So, half an hour later, I’m in here, doodling with the radio, got Moscow for a few seconds as a matter of fact, in comes these two lads, big black coats on them, you know, you’d be kind of laughing in your head at them, you know, feckin old tribesmen I would of said, to borrow a phrase of yours

‘Gobshites…’

‘Yes, gobshites. Came slithering up to me, smiling, I don’t care for strangers smiling at me, and I didn’t think they were men looking for lodgings, though I hoped they were. But they had no kit, they had no weary look to them, they had no — they weren’t sorted in themselves, they weren’t shipshape, they weren’t the kind of men we like here.’

‘Who were they then?’

‘Well now, my brother, they were asking for you too.’

‘For me?’

‘Oh, yeh. That black lingo, you know, couldn’t barely catch it, the young one had, but he didn’t talk much, it was the other one, the old one, that talked — smarmy as a knicker salesman. Feck, Eneas, smarmy.’

‘Any name?’

Now Eneas’s voice is more clipped. This is business of a kind. The business of other days. Expected business maybe, maybe not this long while since. Dark coats.

‘Maybe this is nothing to worry about,’ says Harcourt. ‘They had no weapons or nothing like that. I mean, I get all excited when I hear rats in the wainscoting, I do. Oh, Jesus, I’ll have to sit down. I’m not up to this, my brother.’

‘Any names?’ says Eneas. But he knows the names already. Well, he thinks he knows one of the names.

‘Then, these two are here talking to me, and another man comes in, Christ Jesus, it could be Euston station on the Easter holiday, and he says, something like, “What’s the story, Lynch, what’s the story?” — an ancient sort of bowsie this time, older than the old man, I mean, quite tender in his shoes, shaky, not right for going about and visiting flop houses on the Isle of Dogs.’

‘Right.’

‘Should of been at home in bed in Sligo or wherever he comes from.’

‘Sligo.’

‘You think?’

‘They say Sligo?’

‘This other fella, Lynch, he says, “Just after asking, Mr O’Dowd.” “And what he say?” says, I suppose, the same Mr O’Dowd. “Said nothing yet of worth,” says Lynch. “Well, is he here or not, Lynch?” says the tottery man. So Lynch he turns to me, and he looks into my green eyes, and he says, “You heard the question, now, what we want to know, is Eneas McNulty here?” “No, no,” I say, “haven’t I just told the other man was here, no, Eneas McNulty is not here.” “So, do you know his present whereabouts?” says this man Lynch. “I do not,” I say, and I’m trying to look him in the eye too, you know, like an innocent man would, but I’m not so innocent. “What do you want him for?” I say, pleasant as a barmaid. “What for, indeed,” says Lynch. “Murder, and other things…” “Murder?” I say. Then Mr O’Dowd seems to think better of his friend’s remark, and tells them to come away, and doesn’t even look at me again, and only the young man looks back before they go out, looks back with a dark filthy look worse than winter…’ ‘Jonno never could hold his tongue,’ says Eneas. ‘They should of only sent the young fella in, and made a decent enquiry, something normal, nothing to get the wind up you. But of course in they all troop like the brave soldiers of Ireland they are, each one surer than the last they know how to deal with it. Jesus, feck, I can tell you, Harcourt, I feel like a hundred and ninety years old at this minute. A hundred and ninety.’

And he slumps back in a plastic armchair. It’s as greedy as a mouth, sucks his back into itself, like he might vanish into the weary brown plastic. The two friends say nothing for a little, Harcourt glancing, glancing at the gloomy figure in the chair. And indeed, you might think a hundred and twenty years had been heaped on Eneas’s head, he’s melded with the shadows from head to toe.

‘Sweet buggering Jesus,’ Eneas says.

‘What’ll we do, brother? Is this the kibosh? Are you action stations?’

‘And I didn’t even want to see my brother Jack. Not so much. They must have followed him. How did he find me? War Office I expect. Him being a major and all. “I’m looking for the whereabouts of my brother, Sergeant McNulty. My name is Major John McNulty, Retired.” The whole feckin drill of it. Doing for me.’

Then there’s a terrific banging on the barred door, and Harcourt leaps up like a shot rabbit, and flings himself, seventy years and all, across the grubby lobby, and grips the iron bar like he’d hold it in place against the hordes of Attila himself, and would be glad to take any Sligo bullet that might tear through the old wood — but no, it’s only Moses Seligman, the Yankee Jew, that sailed around the Horn seven times and never saw a storm.

‘Moses, Christ, get yourself in,’ says Harcourt, ‘come on, brother.’

‘Where’s your hurry, Mr H., and why the locked door?’ ‘Don’t talk to me now, Mo,’ says Harcourt. ‘I can’t stand it. I can’t hear another word.’

‘This is not like you, Mr H. You have an ache? My uncle travelled in powders, Mr H. I can help you.’

‘You’re kind, Mo, kind. Be going up to your bed now.

I’m just going to close up now.’

‘You never closed up in your life.’.

‘I’m closing up tonight.’

‘There’s Mr Masterson still in the Crown, and I saw some of the men across the way in Jackson’s little place, the whiskey place …’

‘I’m shutting the feckin door!’ says Harcourt, and wildly. ‘I’m shutting the feckin door.’

‘Men will have to come in,’ says Eneas from the shadows, his shadows and the general shadows.

‘Oh, hello, Mr M., I didn’t see you…’ says Moses Seligman.

Now Harcourt is standing powerless at the door, wanting to let the bar down, but powerless, stymied.

‘How come I can’t shut our own door! How come I got to stand here, brothers, and keep the door open against the enemies of Eneas McNulty? Why in Jesus’ name do I have to do that!’

Moses Seligman in his discretion nods at Eneas and goes away up the stairs — he can be heard making every creak creak the four flights to his valueless eyrie. Four bob a month. No extras. No glass in the window!

‘It doesn’t matter, Harcourt,’ says Eneas. ‘If they come, they come. I’ll tell you, most of my born days I waited for them to come. They said a few times they’d come and they never did. But lately, these last years, I haven’t cared about that. I don’t care about it now. We can talk to them. See what they want. They can shoot me if they wish. What odds?’

‘I…’ But Harcourt has no words readymade for that.

‘Did anything ever happen in your life you could avoid? I don’t think so. They ran you out of Lagos but you were meant to get out of there. God’s will. You were a young man still, sort of. We were meant to run this bloody old place together. It’s no matter, just death, death in one of his less appealing faces.’

‘Well, you sit there, old man, and spout philosophy. But I’m saying no one’s going to be shooting you. They wouldn’t dare shoot you. This is England, brother.’

‘Isle of Dogs.’

‘No one’s shooting you. I’ll see to it.’

‘How, Harcourt?’

‘I’ll feckin — we’ll leave here now, like we always did, we’ll leave this kip to rot, it’s not worth a fart anyway.’

‘Ah, thank you, thank you. But it wouldn’t do. They’ll be flying after us if the mood’s on them now. Even if they go home, I’ll
think
they’re flying after me. Ah, no, Harcourt, better have it out with them now, I’m too old for that old life of fear at the back of the head and nowhere to call home.’

Harcourt walks back across the lobby and sits himself in front of Eneas.

‘OK, brother, we’ll wait so.’

‘You think?’ And Eneas laughs, a big braying laughter.

‘We’re too old for wives and too old for politics.’

‘We are!’

They sit in the chairs all night, half dreaming and dozing, but no one comes through the portal of the Northern Lights Hotel except the stragglers from the pubs and drinking dens. And when those men bump their way through the dark lobby even Harcourt isn’t alarmed at the possibility it might be the avengers of Sligo. Yes, yes, they’re too old for jumping at shadows.