Saints and Sinners, page 3
We thanked him for conveying us, but he was already off on another tangent about some delinquent who passed himself off as blind and was actually a brilliant pickpocket. Inside the pub we had the greatest difficulty getting rid of him, and only after Rafferty whispered that we had an important matter to discuss did he take his leave of us, but not before he gave us his business card, printed with his name, a degree in ecology, and his availability as a tour guide of the area.
The place was completely empty. The faint straggling rays of the setting sun came through the long, low window, and fiddle music filtered from the kitchen area. Tapping one foot, Rafferty listened, listening so intently he seemed to be hearing it there and then and also hearing it from a great distance, rousing tunes that ushered him back to the neon purlieu of the Galtymore Dance Hall in Cricklewood, where they had modern and fiddle. Saturday nights. Admission two shillings and sixpence. Scores of young men, including him, togged out in the navy suit, white shirt, and savvy tie, standing at the edge of the dance floor, gauging the form. One girl was called Grania, after a pirate queen. Other girls wore bright flashy frocks or skirts with stiffened petticoats, but Grania had on a black dress with a white collar and inlaid white bib, giving the appearance of being a nurse. As he learned later, she was a seamstress in a shop on Oxford Street, making curtains and doing alterations. What first struck him, apart from her pure white skin and thick brown hair, with hues of red and gold like an autumn bogland, was how down-to-earth she was. Between dances she would sit, fling off her shoes, and mash her feet to ready herself for the next bout on the floor. Up at the mineral bar, other men would be buying her lemonade and pressing her for the next dance, and the one after that, and she was always saucy with them. He himself never got on the floor, because of an unconquerable shyness. Six months or more passed before she threw him a word, and as long again before she allowed him to walk her home. She lodged three miles beyond Cricklewood, near Holloway Fields. He recalled standing outside her digs till one or two in the morning, hearing her soft voice as she bewitched him with stories. Listening to her was like being transported. Her father was a tailor who also had a pub and grocery, where people drank, mulled over the latest bit of gossip. She herself preferred when one of the old people, from up the country, happened to come in and told stories of the long ago, cures and curses, warts removed by being rubbed with black stones taken out of the bed of the river, and the wonders of Biddy Early the witch, who, by gazing into her blue bottle, reached second sight.
He would drink in the week evenings, but kept himself fairly sober on the Saturdays, to gaze at Grania, to buy her the minerals and walk her home. One night when they were parting she handed him a gift in a sheet of folded paper and whispered a few words in Irish. This was her way of saying she was his.
Next morning he studied the gift again and again. It was a smooth flattened seashell, the ribs on the underside, bone white, curving out into a fan, and in the interstices, tiny vermilion shadings like brushstrokes, as if someone had painted them on.
They found a little flat above a hardware shop that was many miles from Camden. Friends donated things—sheets, bolsters, and a jam dish with a hanging spoon that carried a colored likeness of His Holiness the Pope. Soon he learned what a fine cook Grania was, but she was also very particular. For their Sunday walk, she would not let him out with a crease in his shirt, having already cleaned the clay under his nails with a crochet needle. The thing was (as he ruefully put it), Grania could drink any man under the table, but she knew when to stop. In the evenings when he got home, two glasses of milk would be on the table, to have with the dinner. But he was missing the pub, the noise, the gas, and before long he would be dropped off at The Aran and have a few drinks and arrive home late. Then later. Soon he pretended he was on overtime, and would not be home till midnight. A row would often follow, or else Grania would have gone to bed, his dinner, with a plate over it, on a rack above the gas cooker. One night he got back and found a note on the kitchen table—“You can have your overtime, now and forever,” was all it said. He thought she would be back the next evening, or the next, but she wasn’t.
“She took nothing, not even the jam dish with the hanging spoon and the likeness of the Pope,” he said, then broke off abruptly. One of the dogs from the playground had come in and was staring up at us, panting wildly. Rafferty put his hand on its snout and kept it there until the animal’s breathing had quieted, and in the silence, I was conscious for the first time of a ticking wall clock.
Considering the plethora of crimes we’d been warned of, I suggested taking a minicab and offered to drop Rafferty home.
“Most kind,” he said, which I knew to be his way of declining, followed by his raising the large hand, with the black, wide wristband.
We were out of doors, sitting, as it happened, on a bench, in a graveyard that was anything but morose. A wide bordered path ran from a gateway to another at the opposite entrance, allowing a shortcut for pedestrians and cyclists, so that it was as much a haunt of the living as of the dead. The graves were neatly tended, the grass bank on the far side newly mowed, and there was the added gaiety of springtime in London. Borders of simmering yellow tulips, front gardens and back gardens surpassing each other in bounteous displays, the wisteria a feast in itself, masses of it falling in fat folds, the blue so intense it lent a blueness to the eyes themselves. Adrian had said that Rafferty would love a few moments with me if it was possible and hinted that he had super-duper news.
He could not contain his joy. He was going home. For good. No more bills. No more hassle. Then he took the letter from his torn leather wallet, but hesitated before handing it to me, since he needed to explain the circumstances. A benefactor, who had begun life digging, but who had bettered himself and accrued great riches, had contacted the Centre, asking for someone of good character to come home to Ireland and take care of an elderly relative. Roisin, being the stalwart she was, had suggested Rafferty, and after a ream of letters, his credentials, et cetera, passed on, he was accepted. Moreover, she had given him a new tweed suit and pullover, since a fresh consignment had come from the Samaritan.
The house, the dream house or bungalow to where he was going, would be shared with the elderly man, but a woman was coming in every day to do the dinner and keep an eye on the elderly man’s needs, since he suffered from diabetes, something which he contracted later in life. Rafferty must have read the benefactor’s letter dozens of times, as it had been folded again and again. Forty years previously, when he left Ireland, his mother, his lovely mother, had packed his things in a brown suitcase, and he had taken his belongings out, except for three sacred things; a missal, a crucifix, which she had had blessed, and striped pajamas, which he never wore, but had kept in case he had to go to hospital. He was lucky to have escaped that, because many of his mates were struck down with chronic illnesses, asthma, lung diseases, skin diseases, and injuries of every kind. He said he would humor the elderly relative, whom he guessed would sleep half of the day, or at least doze. He would play cards with him, or maybe do crosswords. With a vigor, he contemplated picking up a shovel again and getting a bit of garden going—cabbage, sprouts, shallots, lettuce—and see what potatoes were native to that particular soil. “I’ll go to the pub,” he said, “stands to reason, but I’ll pace myself, no going back to skid row for Rafferty.” The bungalow was not in his own part of the country, but still it was home, and he asked out loud if it was likely that he would once again hear the cry of the corncrake, that distinctive call which had never faded from his memory.
Birds in their truant giddiness swooped and scudded about, but a few pugnacious ones had converged on a plastic lunch box that had the remains of a salad, and were conducting bitter warfare by brandishing torn shreds of limp lettuce. Their beaks were a bright, hard orange.
When I am sitting on a rocking chair over there, on the borders of Leitrim and Roscommon (he continued), and they ask me how it was in the building work, I’ll tell them it was great, great altogether, and I’ll tell them about Paddy Pancake. Shrove Tuesday we were all on-site, itching to get off early, because we’d sworn to give up drink for Lent. Paddy Pancake sprung a surprise on us. Never touched a drink himself, and wore his total abstinence badge for all to see. He was a night chef, somewhere in Ealing. From a black oilskin bag he took out flour, eggs, milk, castor sugar, salt, and a small bottle of dangerous-looking blue liqueur. He’d even brought a basin to make the batter. Then, looking around, he picked up a big shovel, washed it down a couple of times with a hose, and presto, he had his frying pan. Two lads were told to get a fire going, as plenty of wood from timbers and old doors was scattered on a nearby site. Paddy tossed the pancakes on the shovel like a master. He had an assistant to sprinkle on the castor sugar and a few drops of the liqueur, and lads grabbed and gobbled like wolves. To crown it all, a shy Galway boy stood up on a skip and belted out a rebel song, “Roddy McCorley Goes to Die on the Bridge of Toome Today.” The words and his voice so beautiful, so heartfelt.
Tears welled in his eyes as he recalled that revel, a winter evening, the glow of the fire, the leaping flames of red and blue, dancing in that London wasteland, as if in some Roman amphitheater.
As he tucked the letters back in his wallet, a photo of himself fell out. It was a snap really, taken on some riverbank, where he and his friends had obviously been swimming. The sheer life in his expression was breathtaking. His hair was tousled. His eyes as youthful and moist as any young man’s eyes could be. Not a single feature in that photograph resembled the man sitting beside me.
“Well, that’s youth for you,” he said, suddenly, and, as I had guessed, it was a fleeting farewell.
Less than two weeks later, when I called into the pub, for a moment I thought that I must be hallucinating. Sitting in his usual place, with a pint on the table in front of him, was a man the spitting image of Rafferty. Same wide-brimmed black hat, wrinkled jacket, and the pint. I looked away, but then Adrian gave me the nod, and I looked again. It was Rafferty. It was him. He was quiet and took his time before he acknowledged me, showing none of the warmth that he had on that day in the graveyard. “It happens,” he said, then taking his leave, the unfinished pint on the table, he added that the rolling stone gathers no moss.
Adrian relayed to me what had happened. The bungalow was new and clean, too new and too clean. The old man, Denny, sat in his chair all day looking out at the low-lying fields, invariably shrouded in mist, checking his blood sugar every few hours, having an insulin injection, and taking four different sets of tablets. A Miss Moroney came to do the dinner, and drove them mad. The landing was like a shrine, with statues, Miss Moroney spouting homilies about the evils of drink and touching them for alms for unfortunate children in the third world. Even when he went to the pub, Rafferty didn’t feel at home. It was noisy and brash, young people coming and going, no quiet corner to brood in, and no one had any interest in his stories. As for the garden that he had intended to plant, the grounds around the house had been landscaped with bushes and yellow flowering shrubs. Nothing was wrong, as he told Adrian, but nothing was right, either. The benefactor took the news of his sudden departure well, said he could come for a week in the summer if he wished, and that he had no hard feelings. The same young minicab driver who had collected him from the airport was the one to bring him back again, drove like a lunatic while also conducting a business transaction on a cell phone, telling the would-be purchaser to get stuffed, that no way would he take two hundred. Seconds later he rang someone else to report on matters, saying that they would be mad to let it go for less and they would hold out for the jackpot. According to Adrian, Rafferty surmised that it was either a motorcycle or an old banger that was for sale. At the airport, the minicab driver mashed his hand in effusive farewell and said what a pity the holiday had been so short.
Roisin had persuaded the council to give him his little room back, and, as Adrian said, the brown suitcase with the missal, the crucifix, and the striped pajamas was shoved back under the single bed.
“He doesn’t belong in England and ditto Ireland,” Adrian said, and, tapping his temple to emphasize his meaning, added that exile is in the mind and there’s no cure for that.
I was flabbergasted the day my analyst broke the news to me that he was leaving London and going to work in a hospital in Bristol. With solicitude he had procured a railway timetable and showed me how frequently the trains ran, saying I could come twice a month and have a double session.
I went back to the pub, to say good-byes of a sort. Adrian treated me to an Irish coffee, and Rafferty came across and stood by us, as Adrian recounted his big night at the greyhound track in Wimbledon, picking four winners because of tips that he got from the barmaid, a Connemara girl, whom he hoped to be seeing again.
“Mind yourself.” Those were the last words Rafferty said to me. He did not shake hands, and, as on the first morning, he raised his calloused right hand in a valediction that bespoke courtesy and finality. He had cut me out, the way he had cut his mother out, and those few who were dear to him, not from a hardness of heart, but from a heart that was immeasurably broken.
Under the pavement were the lines of cable that linked the lights of the great streets and the lesser streets of London, as far distant as Kent. I thought of the Shovel Kings, and their names suddenly materialized before me, as in a litany—Haulie, Murph, Moleskin Muggavin, Turnip O’Mara, Whisky Tipp, Oranmore Joe, Teaboy Teddy, Paddy Pancake, Accordion Bill, Rafferty, and countless others, gone to dust.
Sinners
THEY WERE IN. Mother, father, and daughter. Delia had stayed awake to hear them come in, but she would be awake anyhow, since sleep eluded her more and more as the years went on. Occasionally, she would fall asleep unbeknownst to herself and waken in that grim hour before dawn and, going to the window, she would see her dog come from under the hedge, tuned to the first, almost imperceptible sound inside the house, and look up at her with knowing eyes, asking that she come down, open the back door, and serve it its usual saucer of tea with milk.
Sometimes she took a tablet, but she dreaded being at the mercy of any drug and had a secondary dread of one day not being able to afford them. In her wide-awake vigils, she prayed or tried to pray, but prayer, like sleep, was on the wane now, at the very time when she should be drawing closer to her blessed Maker. The prayers came only from her lips and not from deep within anymore. She had lost that most heartfelt rapport that she once had with God.
So at night, awake, she would go around the house in her mind and think of improvements that she would make to it in time—new wallpaper in the good room, where the existing pink was stained around the window frames, brown smears from repeated damp. Then in the vacant room where apples were stored, the wallpaper had been hung upside down and had survived the years without any visitors noticing that the acorns and hummingbirds were the wrong way around. She might have it replaced also, just to get the better of those bostoons who had hung it incorrectly. Delia was a woman who liked to be always in the right. Funny, that on the day the paper was being hung she had consulted a fortune-teller in the city about a certain matter and had been told that she would go home and find that those birds and acorns were upside down and to her dismay, she did. In other quarters of the house she was more spartan with her envisaged improvements—she thought maybe a new strip of linoleum inside the hall door, to save the tiles from trampling boots and Wellingtons. Scrubbing was hard for her now, especially hard on her lower back. Then there were little requirements, such as new towels, tea towels, and dishcloths. The dishcloths smelt of milk, no matter how thoroughly she soaked or boiled them. They had that sour, gone-off smell.
Smell was Delia’s strongest sense, and when these paying guests arrived that morning, she smelt the woman’s perfume and the daughter’s, identical, and yet nothing else about them seemed similar. The daughter, Samantha, was cocksure, with toffee-colored hair, narrowing her eyes as if she were thinking something mathematical, when all she was thinking was, “Look at me, spoil me.” Her long hair was her chief weapon, which she swept along the table as she scrutinized the wallpaper, or a picture over the whatnot of pussycats who were trying to move the hands of a clock close to feeding time. She kept insisting that her parents have a bite of the iced cake, because it was yummy. Although the price quoted only included bed and breakfast, Delia liked to give her guests a cup of tea when they arrived and whatever cake happened to be in the tin. Samantha’s short skirt drew attention to her thighs, which were like pillars of solid nougat inside her cream lace stockings. She wore two-tone shoes that buttoned across the instep. The mother was dark and plump and made a habit of touching the daughter whenever she jumped up in one of her fits of exuberance. The father smoked a pipe. He was a handsome man, tall and distant, who seemed like a professor of something.
After the tea and cake, they wondered if they might have a picnic basket with some sandwiches and hard-boiled eggs, as they were taking a boating expedition. She explained then that they must make their own arrangements for dinner, as she was really just bed and breakfast.
When they returned, after midnight, she heard them say, “Shhh shhh shhh,” repeatedly as they climbed the stairs. They used the bathroom in turn. She could tell by their footsteps and had to concede that they were doing their best to be quiet, that is, until something went crash, crash. She reckoned it was the china tooth mug. She loved that tooth mug, cream with green fluting and little garlands of shamrock, and she wanted to get up and tackle them, but something stopped her. Also, she did not have a dressing gown. Would they be in their dressing gowns? The woman possibly yes, and the man in his shirtsleeves. She would miss that tooth mug, she would mourn it. Her things had become her faithfuls, what with all else gone or scattered. She knew, yes, she knew, that the love from children became fainter and more intermittent with time, not unlike a garment washed and rewashed, until it is only a suggestion of its original color. Their daughter, their Samantha, would be like that soon, would skedaddle once she had other interests, boyfriends and so forth.
