‘Just leave it on the bar there, Victor.’
Alfie looks up and fidgets.
‘Ask him, Phil. Ask Alfie where was he when he heard they’d shot Connolly.’
‘Take it easy now, Victor,’ says Phil.
‘He was in the House of Commons cheering and singing God Save the fucking King when he heard, weren’t you, Alfie?’
‘I was on me holyers at the time,’ Alfie protests.
Phil stands up. ‘Right, Victor, that’s enough. Alfie and Mr Healy are here to try and help me get my licence back, so sit down and calm yourself. You’re drinking too fast.’
The third man sticks his fat head out from behind the door, his face all whiskey and sirloin and silver service and gout. Timothy Michael Healy, Member of Parliament, King’s Counsel. As Murder Murphy’s thug in the Four Courts, he was one of the bosses’ bluntest instruments during the lockout. Healy looks like dead king Edward, with his full white beard and his big, fat, balding head. ‘Healy. I’m sure you cheered the loudest when you heard.’
‘I wasn’t even in the House that day. Victor, whatever our differences, Connolly’s execution offended every drop of Catholic blood in me.’
‘Every one of your boss’s newspapers was baying for blood. Well, by God your boss got what he wanted.’
‘Mr Murphy isn’t my boss. I’m just a lawyer.’
‘Mr Healy’s trying to help me get back my licence,’ says Phil. ‘He’s representing Tom Ashe’s family at the inquest too. Leave him alone.’
Charlie is beside me now, trying to coax me away. ‘Where did that happen?’ Healy asks him.
‘Messines.’
Healy gets up and shakes Charlie’s hand. ‘My boy was in the Dardanelles. People say Irishmen shouldn’t be fighting for England, and maybe they’re right, but there are many good and patriotic Irishmen in the trenches.’
Charlie directs me halfway back across the room but I’m still looking at Healy, standing at the door of the snug with smugness splayed across his big, blotchy face.
‘You were his right-hand during the lockout. I haven’t forgot what you did, you and the rest of them. I haven’t forgot the lockout,’ I cry.
‘Oh, for goodness sake, nobody gives a damn about the lockout any more,’ he says.
I shrug Charlie off and fling a whiskey tumbler as forcefully as I can towards Healy, but I stumble and my aim is off. The tumbler crashes into the window above the bar. Shards of smoked glass fly everywhere. I move towards Healy with every intention of ramming his head into the wall but before my third step Phil is standing before me with hurl in hand. He pulls hard and I feel the warm smack of the ash against my shoulder. I topple sideways and collapse in a corner, but in a flash Phil wrenches me powerfully to my feet and pushes me towards the exit. He’s still the right side of forty and built like the athlete he is. He holds me with one arm and opens the door with the other before propelling me onto the pavement outside with a mighty push. There’s a good reason why Phil’s pub is the cleanest and safest in Monto. I crawl to the gutter and empty my guts of all the spuds and bacon and whiskey in me. Behind me, far away, a voice barks bitterly and a door slams. Lying on my back, I look up and see Charlie hovering.
‘All right, I’m ready to go home now,’ I say.
It’s been so long since she last even left the house you doubt your own sight. She’s standing at the edge of the lake like a will o’ the wisp, looking like she might blow away. You reach the spot, your spot, where you and Maggie meet, and look up at her in her billowing white robes. She doesn’t seem to see you. The sun is melting like it does in autumn, and the wind gusts. You shout out and she turns to face you, an old woman at forty-five. She smiles beatifically, and you glimpse your mother, not the banshee she has become.
‘Victor, son: life is in the letting go,’ she says.
She turns away and steps off the high edge of the lake. You watch her fall, serene as a snowflake.
Stanislaus felt not a day over sixty-five as he reached the crossroads, a mile and a half’s walk from Madden, mostly uphill. Not bad for a man passed over on health grounds ten years before. He turned back and kept a good, even pace, his footsteps ticking like a metronome. Walking was always good for clearing the head. He thought about full bishops promoted since his retirement, all of whom Cardinal Logue, in his vast wisdom, had recommended. He knew of four who were not well and three more who frankly were incapacitated. Soon Madden was in sight, nestling in the gentle hollow. The street lamps flickered against the failing light. From up ahead, just outside the village, came bad singing and laughter, and Stanislaus saw two lads of perhaps eighteen horsing around. Stanislaus’s knuckles whitened on his stick. ‘John McGrath and Aidan Cavanagh,’ he cried. They stopped dead and straightened up in exaggerated protestations of sobriety. Eyes red like diseased rabbits. The stench of cheap spirit damned them. ‘It’s not even six o’clock and you boys are drunk as lords. Have you no work to be at today?’
‘Everybody quit early the day, Father,’ said McGrath, the post-master’s son.
‘Where did you get the drink?’ Stanislaus demanded.
‘I don’t know, Fa’er,’ said young Cavanagh, the schoolteacher’s brother. Stanislaus slapped the blackthorn stick against the boy’s thigh. ‘Pius, we got it off Pius!’
‘Is this. How you. Behave. When your families. At home. Haven’t even. A spare penny. To waste?’ Stanislaus uttered bitterly, punctuating his speech with slaps to their legs. They yelped like puppies. ‘You should be ashamed of yourselves.’
This business of Pius Lennon and the poteen was getting out of hand. He was making the stuff in such prodigious quantities and selling it so cheaply that he was bringing many others to ruin with him. Nevertheless Stanislaus was troubled by the thought of the Victor fellow as the correcting influence, to Pius and to the wider problems connected to Pius’s dissolution. That such a person would be anyone’s idea of salvation! Obedience and discipline were the answers to vice, indolence and dissolution. People needed leadership from the cloth, not from radical politicals. Stanislaus had read many of the socialistic texts. Mostly screeds written by palpably troubled souls. He found most striking the universal rage and the rejection of authority – the former a consequence of the latter, he believed. Marxians said the meaning of life was struggle, but Stanislaus knew that grace required acceptance. True freedom came through surrender. Only rage was possible where grace was not. In lands where grace was banished, no depravity was unthinkable. The Russian experiment, for example, was sure to end in horror. He hung up his overcoat in the kitchen and opened the range door. As he poked at the fire and watched the flames rise higher, he wondered if he might work up his ruminations into a paper.
‘It’s after a quarter past six. I wish you would tell me where you’re going out and didn’t keep me late, Father,’ said Mrs Geraghty, standing behind him with her cloth coat pulled tight around her.
‘Your Grace,’ Stanislaus muttered, but knew it was pointless to keep correcting her. She’d never learn to address him correctly. At her age and station, she was disinclined to take in anything new. ‘Dinner smells wonderful,’ he said.
‘It’s been in the oven