Bishop's Delight, page 19
When he phoned the editor of The Irish Times the following morning, he was told that Lily had already been in touch with them and that an obituary had been written.
‘I wasn’t planning to write a formal obit,’ he explained. ‘What I’d like to write is a light-hearted piece of reminiscence, something of a personal nature that no one else could write.’
‘Then write it for the diary column. There’s no news like people news.’
He was delighted to be given an opportunity to take some of the wind out of Lily’s sails. He would do Anna’s quirky sense of humour full justice, while sailing as close to the wind as good taste permitted—anything to discomfit her bitch of a sister.
Lily had made the funeral into an occasion to glorify her own family. They turned out in force, as did Maguire’s former political colleagues. There was a whiff of the countryside about the service; the readings were not those Anna would have chosen, and the hymns were those sung in rural parishes rather than by cathedral choirs. Woody sat at the back of the church wondering what Anna would have made of it all. She was not a churchgoer. The pious old lady the priest spoke of bore little resemblance to the Anna he knew. When it was all over, he slipped away without waiting to make his presence known. It was a banal ending to one of the more offbeat episodes of his life.
Two months later he had a letter from Anna’s solicitor letting him know that she had bequeathed him her cottage in Conamara and ownership of the copyright of her published and unpublished works, as well as any income derived from them. She had left her investments and both her houses to Lily, and she had donated Maguire’s papers to the National Library. He felt humbled by her generosity, and overjoyed when he discovered that the annual income from her books far exceeded his own income from writing. Now he could afford to relax, lay off journalism for a while and devote himself to the serious business of Maguire’s biography, which must have been what Anna had intended.
As winter approached, he fancied a break before the months of darkness set in. He couldn’t face a sad little holiday abroad on his own, and he wondered if he should phone Jane to see if she had forgiven him. He agonised uncertainly for a week. Then, in a moment of unaccustomed self-confidence, he invited her out to dinner. On the phone she seemed her usual bubbly self. She had obviously forgiven him everything. They met in one of their old haunts. He told her about Anna’s death and his unexpected good fortune.
‘I’ve got good news for you as well,’ she smiled. ‘I’m getting married in April.’
‘Congratulations!’ he said, putting on his actor’s voice. ‘Do I know the lucky man?’
‘Probably not. He was directing traffic on O’Connell Bridge when I spotted him. He’s my next door neighbour from home.’
‘Another Aran Islander!’
‘We’re two of a kind, simple souls at sea in the city. We’re both victims of different shipwrecks, hoping to reach land together one day.’ She smiled and reached across the table for his hand.
‘You used to say that all you need is money, and to rile you, I used to say all you need is love. In a curious way we both got our wish,’ she said.
She had made him feel foolish. For a moment he suspected that she must see him as the shallowest of men.
‘You and I had some good times,’ she smiled. ‘I learned a lot from you, Woody. I was an innocent when I met you. I used to read the newspapers and marvel at how clever they were. Now I question everything I read and hear.’
‘Don’t question your husband too closely. He mightn’t like it.’
‘Don’t worry, you’ve taught me about men as well. All they need to be happy is plenty of good food and flattery.’
As they parted, he kissed her cheek. She kissed him on the lips and smiled. ‘Who knows, our paths may cross again one day.’
He went home despondent. In talking to her he discovered that he was still in love with her. He poured himself a glass of Maguire’s Balvenie and asked himself where he had gone wrong. ‘To snare a woman, you need to be a salesman,’ he said aloud. ‘It doesn’t matter what you’re selling; if you’re a good salesman, you’ll sell it.’ He held up his glass to the light before lowering it to his lips.
Open-collared honesty—that was his undoing. He’d let her peer into his mind. He’d stood naked before her; he’d let her see too much. His training had taught him to be clear and concise, to give the reader the picture at a glance, whereas in love, as in politics, dissembling and obfuscation took the prize. He was so true to himself that she’d seen right through him, while her policeman had had enough peasant cunning to cover up his game. It was a tragedy, not just for him personally but for Jane as well. She said he’d taught her scepticism. He should have taught her never to trust a man in big boots.
He’d learnt one or two things from her. Love, like religion, thrived on mystery and mystique, which when all was said and done meant keeping up the illusion that Celia never shits. He had come to the end of the Balvenie. Mercifully, he could rely on the Talisker for another day or two.
26
The commission looking into the circumstances of Maguire’s death reported the following summer, over three years after the event. As might be expected, the document it produced was longwinded and exhausting, if not as exhaustive as expected. It considered an impressive range of theories, including those invented by imaginative journalists in search of notoriety and personal advantage. Finally, it came down on the side of the plodders who had believed all along that the death of the Taoiseach was an unfortunate accident. As members of the commission saw things, Maguire had taken his boat out for a day’s fishing. He ran out of petrol and panicked at the thought of drifting out of sight of land. He tried to swim ashore and failed in the attempt. His body was carried out to sea and never seen again. The commission had no answer to the question of the missing oars, which, it said, pointed to the absence of a third party since a third party would have made certain to cover its tracks and not to do anything that might point to foul play.
Sweetman was the first to comment on the commission’s report in his evening TV news programme. He said that he’d read every tautological word of it and had come to the conclusion that it was all an expensive whitewash. It considered a range of unlikely theories and rightly rejected them, while ignoring those that the establishment would rather forget. The morning newspapers followed suit and took the same predictable view. The long-awaited report had been a waste of time and taxpayers’ money. One journalist said that it had failed to consider the most obvious theory of all: that Maguire, during the Northern Ireland negotiations, had been in the British government’s pocket and had paid the price of his perfidy with his life. Even Sweetman didn’t go that far. He said that Maguire had presided over twelve years of unprecedented prosperity. His time was a golden age in which everyone lived for the day without a thought for tomorrow. The golden age had come to an end, and Maguire in his wisdom had seen the shadow of Nemesis on the horizon and had left the stage while the audience was still clapping and before the booing had time to start. Now he was probably enjoying the demimonde of Paris in disguise and disposing of the ample funds he had amassed in office.
Woody wrote an ironic piece, congratulating the commission on its elephantine gestation while marvelling at the triviality of the result. Predictably, the commission’s report did little to satisfy the public’s taste for skulduggery and conspiracy. Everyone who could read a newspaper firmly believed that there was more to Maguire’s disappearance than the government wanted them to know. The whole seemingly shady business was still a hot topic of debate in every pub and living room in the country.
Sweetman gloried in the hoo-ha. As he said to Woody, ‘It’s all grist to our mill. Even if there’s no truth in any of the conspiracy theories, there’s a story in refuting them. We make our living from assertion and rebuttal, to be followed inevitably by further assertion and further rebuttal. We may run out of new ideas but we’ll never run out of copy.’
Sweetman’s biography, Death of a Taoiseach, published three years after Maguire’s disappearance, was both a critical and commercial success. In his journalism he had made sure that interest in Maguire remained alive, and his book, which was serialised in the press, attracted favourable reviews from academics and fellow journalists alike. Woody had expected a hastily assembled mishmash of fact and fiction. Instead, his book was a surprisingly competent assessment of Maguire’s public and private lives. It was forthright and provocative, presenting Maguire as a prodigiously gifted man who was deeply flawed in his sexuality. He argued that Maguire’s remote and at times glacial public persona was not the real man at all, and that the effort of hiding behind his mask forced him to compensate by relaxing on occasion with women who were less fastidious than his puritanical Irish wife. Hence his love of Paris. After all, he had admitted that his favourite French paintings were Ingres’s La Grande Baigneuse and Gauguin’s Manao Tupapau, both of which showed a young woman in the nude.
Woody read the biography as a man with a vested interest in the subject. He could not help admiring the ease with which the thing was done, but as he came to the last paragraph he said to himself, ‘I must not follow in Sweetman’s footsteps. Like every other biographer I’ve ever read, he’s fully convinced that there’s a reason for everything, and consequently he has an explanation for everything. He makes no allowance for chance and contingency, twin forces capable of defeating the strongest human will.’ Sweetman was a novelist manqué who thought he could shape his great work as he pleased without sacrificing a word of the truth. Maguire put it differently in his diaries: ‘When things come right, we say we planned them. When they go wrong, we blame sod’s law.’
Sweetman didn’t seem to know that we are all walking mysteries; that the human heart is by nature perverse, deceitful and desperately wicked. Jane would have told him to read Jeremiah: ‘They were as fed horses in the morning: everyone neighing after his neighbour’s wife.’ Maguire was only running true to form; there was nothing unusual in his sexuality.
As he expected, Sweetman was vain enough to think that he had captured Maguire in the flesh as a lepidopterist might net a rare butterfly. Maguire was not so easily accounted for. His protean nature made him a cynic one moment and humanely generous the next. In the space of an afternoon he could be exuberant, reflective, modest, and insufferably big-headed. One day he would say that in politics stupidity was no handicap, and on the next argue that success in politics was the very pinnacle of human achievement.
‘The stakes are high,’ he’d claim. ‘We are contending for nothing less than a permanent place in history and our only weapons are our gifts of judgement, persuasion and leadership. The politician who walks in someone else’s tracks leaves no footprints behind him.’ On other occasions he could be engagingly irresponsible. He once told Woody over a drink that a good blowjob was more satisfying than the most resounding political victory.
So where was the true Maguire to be found? Not in Sweetman’s reductive pages, and certainly not in Maguire’s own journal and sex diary. He himself was writing a critical biography, though he knew that he could never capture the living man in all his contradictions. Biography, like autobiography, was flawed at conception. In human affairs there was no absolute and no stability. All was flux and changing perceptions, yours, mine, his and hers, one seeking to challenge and refute the others. In the coming years all he himself could do was to produce a book that showed Maguire in a light that had not been cast on him before. He would paint him as a fully rounded man, a scholar as well as political tactician, capable of friendship as well as robust rivalry, not entirely at ease in a country of rain and small-minded gossips. Had he been born in the warm south, he might have found fulfilment.
He dropped all work on his magnum opus for the time being and devoted his leisure hours to helping Louise with her Rousseau-inspired memoir. It seemed to him that she was barking up the wrong tree, but that was something she would have to discover for herself. When they had come to the end of their labours, she insisted on the title Love Conquers All. He tried to tell her that it wasn’t suitable, but she wouldn’t listen. They sent out the text to seven publishers. The only one who responded said that as a book it fell between two stools, while omitting to name the stools. Louise was inconsolable. When he tried to reason with her she told him she didn’t need a comforter.
‘The Beetles were wrong and Maguire was right,’ she said. ‘He used to say that all you need is sex.’
‘It’s certainly true in books,’ Woody said. ‘If you give me carte blanche to rewrite your memoir, I promise you it will be published.’
‘Fire away,’ she said, ‘but you won’t publish it under my name.’
‘Let me think about it,’ he said. ‘This is an artistic problem, and like all artistic problems it won’t be solved by mere reasoning.’
‘Then how will it be solved?’
‘By a happy conjunction of chance and intuition. Imagination, not love, conquers all.’
‘Promises, promises. You journalists are all the same.’
He could see that she was disappointed in him; he knew he had let her down. ‘Give me six months,’ he said. ‘I won’t come back till I have a finished typescript to place in your hand.’
He was annoyed with himself, so annoyed that he was determined to prove her wrong. He read her memoir again, and saw that like all real lives it lacked shape. If he imposed on it a shape of his own, it would no longer be the life she thought she’d led. He ran his eye along his bookshelves and took down John Cleland’s Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. Quite unwittingly, he had stumbled on his template: he would write a novel based on her memoir while giving no indication of his true intention. It would be a seductive novel written from the point of view of a woman who found meaning and pleasure in giving sexual delight to men. She would answer to male fantasies of the perfect woman, and would be so gifted in turning the tables on men that the reservations of women readers would be transformed to admiration of her wit and repartee. Of course, he wouldn’t say any of that to Louise. He would hand her the typescript and bask in her surprise and delight.
Every weekend he went over to Galway to enjoy the peace of the cottage Anna had left him. It wasn’t perfect peace because of the screaming seagulls that came to perch on his roof-ridge every afternoon. They reminded him of the agitated world of words-for-profit he had left behind in Dublin as opposed to the perfect world of male fantasy he was seeking to create. Whenever his imagination flagged he was tempted to go back to Louise for inspiration, but against the odds he carried on doggedly to the end. Working at weekends only, he wrote the novel in six months, and spent another month polishing what he’d written. He felt so pleased with his prose that he thought he might spring a surprise.
He didn’t phone her to let her know he was coming. He arrived expectantly at her flat one Saturday morning with the typescript in his bag. A woman whom he took for the cleaner opened the door. He was about to ask if Louise was at home when she reached out and grasped his hand.
‘Come in, Woody. I know you won’t believe it but I’m Louise.’
She led him to the sofa and told him that she’d had an operation for gallstones that went badly wrong. She was much reduced. She looked pale and worn, her youthful bloom quite gone. Though her dark eyes had lost some of their dazzle, they were all that reminded him of the girl he used to know. He was so shocked by her appearance that he realised he must drop everything else and take care of her. The typescript in his bag was no longer of any account.
He asked if he could make her a cup of tea, and she said she hadn’t had lunch and that she fancied fish and chips because she hadn’t had any fish in the hospital. By the time he returned with the fish and chips and a bottle of wine, she had done her hair and put on some make-up. She looked less ghostlike, almost human again.
‘You should have got in touch with me,’ he said.
‘We made a bargain. I knew you’d come back some time, but I didn’t know when.’
‘If I’d known you were unwell I’d have come right away.’
‘I’m an awkward girl, and you’re an awkward boy. We’re two of a kind.’
She told him about her operation, which she’d been assured was just a routine affair. Something had gone wrong; she didn’t know what, but she suspected the surgeon must have cut something he shouldn’t have cut, resulting in a damaged bile duct.
‘My father used to work in a hospital,’ she said. ‘He had no time for surgeons. His advice was, “Never trust a man with a knife.” ’
He reached for her hand, realising that in her vulnerability she had become precious to him. She had no more than half a glass of wine, what she called a taste, but it seemed to lift her spirits. The afternoon gradually faded into evening, and when he asked her what she’d like for dinner she said she felt so weak that she had better go to bed.
‘It’s funny in a way,’ she smiled wanly. ‘Going to bed has taken on a completely new meaning for me.’
‘Why don’t we go down to the cottage for a week or two? The fresh sea air will do you good.’
‘What about your work?’
‘We needn’t worry about that. It will still be there when we come back.’
For the first few days she seemed fragile and unsteady. They spent the mornings sitting in the garden. Sometimes he would read to her, mainly short stories by Katherine Mansfield, whose writing she seemed to enjoy. Gradually, her strength returned, and one afternoon she said she’d like to go for a short walk. He led her to the seat on the cliff facing west. They sat looking in silence at the hazy horizon, watching a boat going down the bay. The boat moved slowly, almost imperceptibly. Here was a life where everything happened at a snail’s pace. The sun was going down behind a straggle of inky-blue-black-crimson clouds, a mixture of conflicting colours that no conventional artist would have chosen. There was a faint suggestion of incongruity and business that was not entirely above board.
