The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty (8 page)

7

He is standing there crying
in his dancing-suit on the beach at Strandhill where his father has realized his grand ambition and established a little corrugated dance-hall beside the waves. And such moody waves they are famously, often so fierce and high that children are kept locked in the daytime cars as if the beach were plagued by hungry lions. Great winds have come in from the Atlantic that once he knew so well, all afternoon, and now the sea is poised in the ruins of its own ruckus. The sun throws long golden arms out each side like an Indian idol, making the richest path of gold in answer across the hurt waves that he has ever seen. He stands there crying in his dancing suit. Jonno’s prophecy has come to pass. Freedom. The lights of the dance-hall touch out on to the wet tar where the big Fords and the baby Austins are gathered, with their headlamps left on to help the arrivers on foot. The little breeze freshens under the skirts of the women in the half-dark and just rearranges the hairdos slightly, and the men have oil in their short hair and they think of themselves as being in America. They think of themselves as in America and the sun flounders a moment and blunders down, and a redness different to the first redness rises up and spreads about generally and even seems to tinge the very iron of the upper cloud and sits in black glimmers on the big curved mudguards of the Fords.

Eneas hears the laughter over at the motorcars but he sees and thinks he understands something about the sun, and though it is dark or darker now, he cannot stay in Sligo if he is to live. Not because he has done things he regrets but because he has done things that they would not forgive him for, most of those men within, dancing with their girls. If they knew, and shortly he supposes everyone will know. O’Dowd will tell everyone, for now O’Dowd has the opportunity to say what he likes, and be what he wants to be. For this is the famous day of freedom, freedom for Ireland. Eneas has not much time left as a sort of guilty innocent in Sligo. The dancers are dancing so hard the narrow dance-hall is echoing like a drum. It’s exhilarating in spite of everything! And he remembers the row his brother Young Tom put up when his mother wouldn’t let him come out to the dance in the cars because he’s still just too young. And Young Tom wild to get in among the girls and be up on the platform with his father, playing all the tunes his father has bestowed on him. But his mother is law enough to halt him where he is back in the house in John Street. Eneas wishes it was only the simple word of his mother that troubled his own ease. He wishes it was simple like that. And not the collective wish of all those young men within in his father’s dance-hall with the folds of corrugated iron to beat the elements. Those men and their girls, excited no doubt by the news from London, and the great mass of them in the night of seeming victory overwhelmed by this untouchable, untastable, unknowable almost, sense of freedom. For Collins has gone out in his fierce boots and wrested something from the arms of the British that they have held there so jealously for so long. Some are saying the phrase seven hundred years, and even if there are mutterings here and there in pockets about the shortcomings of this treaty, nevertheless on this night an elixir of freedom has invaded their hearts and they are united in a rushing, a tide, a sunset of freedom. Nothing has changed except the news, the grains of sand on the beach are the same, the moon that will establish herself after the disaster of the sun setting will be the same. Freedom is a grand drink for the young. Up in the dark town maybe, definitely, there are more vociferous mutterings, angry shouting, a sense of something far more invasive than freedom, of bitterness and hurt, betrayal — but here in the narrow realm of the young, Eneas understands well enough the jubilation and the wildness inside the hall. He knows from the manner in which the newly arrived greet each other under the lights of the portal that the excitement is general. He feels like a spy under the pall of night. Therefore he alone weeps. He can be neither happy nor bitter at the news. It is not news for him, he cannot walk across to the lights, the word freedom playing on his lips, and smile at his fellow countrymen and women. It is not to be. He knows it.

But he may weep. He is one of the fearing men. He supposes there must be others like him all over Ireland, the boys of the black-lists. Having seen the wickedness done and lived through it and seen men killed and one man murdered at his very side and lost his friend into the bargain he cannot stay in a place he can call home. He will ask Viv to come with him, if she likes. He must be wandering as a displaced man and wandering and never coming back and always maybe be telling strangers of his love for Sligo and never seeing Sligo again or taking her in his arms again, never seeing her gold and blooded suns again, never hearing the laughter of these dancers, that mean all of three bob each to his father and the girlfriend free in. He weeps tears and he supposes the salt sits in them from the blown tide.

He will go in to dance tonight all right, lost in the dark melee, but then he will pack his case and be a wanderer. His mother must make of it what she will, he cannot help it. Maybe his father will be knocked sideways for a bit, but a tuneful man like him cannot be lonesome long. Of course, he knows in the next breath this is not true, his father will be grieving, grieving. And these, the men and women of his own time, they will let him be for tonight because they are surprised by freedom and don’t know what he is. He has lost the love of his fellow people and maybe he should term himself an outcast instead of a wanderer. A wanderer is a romantic thing like someone in a western picture at the Gaiety or the Savoy. A wanderer is someone you might like to be after watching a western and walking back down Wine Street with mysterious gunsmoke in your head or traipsing past the Priory depending on where the picture was showing. Jesus, but going up between the clipped hedges to the doors of the Gaiety was a thrilling pastime right enough on a Friday. It would be world enough for anybody, and some ordinary work between.

He knows there is a scattering of other souls like his own, shocked and fearful in their shoes, and he expects they are hiding in their homes and he would not have come out himself in his dancing clothes but that it is his own father’s hall and Jack’s car brought them, his own brother’s car, and this has allowed him to stand here on the beach at the very threshold of heaven. A Ford motorcar is a magical thing in the night with the spraying lamps against the pitch road and the smell of metal and perfume under the clothy roof.

His sister Teasy spent the whole fortnight of the negotiations on her knees in her bedroom, praying for Collins, praying like that at the age of — twelve, was she, was she as much as that? — and it had infuriated him but at the same time fascinated him, such peculiar piety all mixed up with a big man she had never met nor seen. It was not Jesus Christ that Collins was by any means, a man with thousands of murders to his account. Eneas knew the figures, he had scanned them day by day and week by week in the station in the old days of his employment. He had gone out as was his duty to carry back bodies and try to work out the manner of their deaths. He had carried a number of his own companions, mostly country lads or small town lads like himself, dead to the station house. Somehow for Teasy it was all mixed up with the rotten pictures in the cathedral and the gold on the altar and the sewing that had gone into the priests’ vestments at the back. He still believes he had the right to work, to take a wage, to put himself against the task, even policing. In his heart he believes he has shown courage in his chosen trade. Part of him still hopes he was a good policeman. And he knows he’s a fool to think anything of the sort. Oh, what use was it all in the upshot now that this thing was achieved? No earthly use to him anyhow. Certainly no use to the dead. Perhaps it could not be helped. Perhaps his tears were for a reason he couldn’t name. Perhaps somewhere in his tears there was a pride, a defiance, a love. But he has said these things to himself a thousand times, over and over like the very moil and tumbrel of the waves, pulled and shaken by the moon.

Viv is coming towards him in her blue dress, the one she showed him in the Cafe Cairo that very afternoon. A Chinesy pattern she called it, slipping it out of its flimsy paper and showing him the delicate colour of it, the wings of bluebirds he thought hinted at, softly, and indeed he had been glad to tell her, to declare to her, it was lovely, and it was. Finan’s gave it to her for twenty-three shillings if he remembers rightly, no bargain there. His mother is always severe about Finan’s because they are a Jewish family and in her open opinion, call her a Christian if you liked, the Jews had crucified Christ Himself in the old days of the Romans, they were all in on it. Eneas had sailed with men that were English and Jewish, Portuguese and Jewish too, or met such men in the ports, that he perhaps romanticized because they were different, like Americans were different somehow. A Jewish man should never let himself be at ease among the blasted Christians, that was clear, or he would regret it, if the knife in his back gave him time. Finan’s is the best shop in town and his mother finds the prices beyond her, and indeed the atmosphere in the shop itself, that is the impetus behind her old fiddle-playing. You do not get a bargain there but you get quality instead. The Midletons and all the other Protestants from the houses with names shop there avidly. Thornhill, Rathedmond, Merville, Ardmore, Forthill … His mother detests them all, and all their ways. She thinks the Protestants have cloven feet. But if they have, they put lovely shoes over them, as a rule. Of course there are always the lost Protestants, the fallen ones with no money or land or vocabulary, to put a balance on it. No stranger sight.

Some of the excitement among the matrons of the town at Collins’s achievement was due to the fact that it made them all now as good as the Protestants after a fashion. And you didn’t even have to talk like them now. As a man that has sailed about a bit and seen other worlds and dearly felt the pull of America for instance he cannot share in such a view, leaving aside even the strictures of his recent occupation. No doubt he is a small man, but nevertheless there are vistas of foreign ports and sea-roads unknown to the stay-at-home, that stand to him, and at least give him more wrong ideas than others might have, blowing about in the noggin. But weren’t they certain times, those sailing days, certain, romantic and far off.

Viv comes across to him in her Chinesy dress. She has a good inkling of what a good dress can do for her, and though all humans look the better for finery, she looks now like a blessed film-star, like your woman Lillian Gish all flame with white light crossing the dark screen. Viv crosses the bright screen created by his father’s lights and the huge penumbras of the night grown black about them. Her shoes clack a little on the bleak surfacing of the promenade, with that same slight breeze in the blue dress.

He turns his head sadly and watches her approach with all the love of a condemned man. Because he must be a wanderer now he knows. He will ask her but he does not think that she will go. She’s no dark person. She would not be suited to travelling poorly, living under a poor light. He has not questioned her liking for him, for fear of destroying the miracle with stupid questions. At any rate it’s not explicable because he is a fool to himself of some sort, and she is really an admired individual in Sligo. He knows this because he has seen her walking in the streets at her ease, at her great and deserved ease.

It is overwhelming to him all the same to look at her as if for the last time. She has hard angles to her, softened by her shapeliness. Her shoulders especially are hard against him sometimes like something made of metal. Then all her breast is soft naturally enough, and her backside is delightfully soft. He admires her character, her breasts and her backside, immeasurably. He worships them. When she dances, the peculiar hardness and the peculiar softness are united, as she turns for the vivid dance.

‘Eneas, darling,’ she says, quiet enough, confident he is listening and watching. The high mound of drifted sand, that the spot has got its name from he supposes, rises behind them like a child’s sketch of a mountain. The dark is blistered by the few holiday shacks dotted here and there, the lamps lit, the holidaying kids of the world abed.

‘Eneas, darling, are you cold there?’

‘No,’ he says, ‘Viv, dear, no, I am warm enough. Is your own stole enough to keep yourself warm down here by the waves?’

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘I watched the sun going down,’ he says, ‘that’s all. It was grand to see it. It’s good, Strandhill, you know. Maybe not for rich people so much. I like to get out here, dance in the old fella’s place …’

‘I know,’ she says, and takes an arm, crinkling the material, and stands by him, holding his thick arm with both her small hands. ‘Ah, we’ve all played here as children and known each other and thrown sand at each other and feared the waves and I thought I’d miss all that terrible but truly, Eneas, it’s lovely too to be grown and all and able to go to the dances.’

‘Isn’t it?’ he says.

‘Oh, if I ever left Sligo I would surely dream of Strandhill and the dance-hall, that old corrugated iron thing I suppose but on certain nights as glamorous as — what’s the name of the place in America where they make the pictures?’

‘California,’ he says, like a song, Cal-i-forn-i-ay.

‘Yes,’ she says.

‘Oh yes,’ he says. ‘Yes, sometimes — it is that.’

‘And,’ she says, ‘Eneas, though I do love to hear you talk, kiss me, will you, Eneas, of your kindness?’

‘Of my kindness?’ he says, laughing, and he stoops his mouth to hers.

‘It’s a big night for Ireland,’ she whispers, quickly. ‘Apparently,’ he says, quicker, and they kiss. They know each other’s ways thoroughly and they kiss well. She’s a cruel hand at forcing her tongue into his mouth slowly, cruel. He gets dizzy now answering her chatty kiss. They stop the kiss then and stand there forehead to forehead and by Christ, the Christ of Sligo, he would love to lie her in the nook of the sand decently but the dress, the dress. He doesn’t want to destroy the dress. It is their emblem tonight, this night of freedom after seven hundred years of British — what’s the word they like to use? — occupation, domination, something along those lines. Perhaps there is truth in it, a truth he has never considered. He can tell nothing from anything any more, there are no signs, no means to nose your way along the roads. Suddenly he tastes the fear in his gob like a leak of repeated food. Her dress of blue and freedom for Ireland. For himself, his prick is as stiff as a sea-stone. He wants her. It is all madness. And they have lain down together often, but he doesn’t want to destroy her dress and indeed there is plenty of time, plenty of time, after the dance. Now he feels light-headed, inclined to laugh. And he would not like to place the bile of his fear into her swimming mouth. Fear they say has a smell, a stench. Her hair smells like roses and dogs, her father breeds greyhounds for the track at the edge of town, up the lake road, by the old bridge. Jesus Christ, they’re young enough to have ten children if they wished, there’d be acres of years ahead if they were to marry. Acres, acres, time, plenty of it. My God, my God.