The Dalkey Archive. Flann O’Brien

correct uniform seemed to concur, though all visible teeth seemed to be bad and discoloured.

      – Morning, Mr Pluck. I met the sergeant and he told me I could leave this other machine here for a day or two. I’ll get a tram.

      – Well he did, did he? grinned Policeman Pluck. Ah, the dacent lovable man!

      – Is that all right?

      – You are welcome, sir, and lave it be the wall there. But the sergeant’s tune will change when he comes up with that cabman Teague.

      – What has Teague done?

      Policeman Pluck blanched slightly at the recollection of horror.

      – Yesterday he met a missionary father, a Redempiorist, at the station and druv him up to the parochial house. Well, Teague and his jinnet wasn’t five minits in the PP’s holy grounds but before they left it they had the whole place in a pukey mess of a welter of dung.

      – Ah, unfortunate, that.

      – Enough to dress two drills of new spring spuds.

      – Still, Teague was hardly to blame.

      – Do you expect the sergeant to have the jinnet in the dock for sacrilege? Or for a sin against the Holy Ghost? I’ll tell you wan thing, boy.

      – What’s that?

      – You’ll have a scarifying mission, an iron mission, there will be rosaries on the bended knees for further orders, starting tomorra. There’ll be hell to pay. But thank God it’s the weemen’s week first.

      – Thank God, Mr Pluck, Mick called back at the door, I’m not even a parishioner.

      Why should he take account of hellfire sermons anyway? Had he not been, in a kind of a way, in heaven?

       6

      Mary was not a simple girl, not an easy subject to write about nor Mick the one to write. He thought women in general were hopeless as a theme for discussion or discourse, and surely for one man the one special – la femme particulière, if that sharpens the meaning – must look dim, meaningless and empty to others if he should talk genuinely about her or think aloud. The mutual compulsion is a mystery, not just a foible or biogenesis, and this sort of mystery, even if comprehensible to the two concerned, is at least absolutely private.

      Mary was no sweetie-pie nor was she pretty but (to Mick’s eyes) she was good-looking and dignified. Brown-eyed, her personality was russet and usually she was quiet and recollected. He was, he thought, very fond of her and did not by any means regard her as merely a member of her sex, or anything so commonplace and trivial. She was a true obsession with him (he suspected) and kept coming into his head on all sorts of irrelevant occasions without, so to speak, knocking. Hackett’s relations with the peculiar girl he mixed around with seemed perfunctory, like having a taste for marmalade at breakfast or meditatively paring fingernails in public-house silences.

      Mick was absolutely sure in mind about few things but he thought he could sincerely say that Mary was an unusual girl. She was educated, with a year in France, and understood music. She had wit, could be lively, and it took little to induce for a while gaiety of word and mood. Her people, whom he did not know, had money. She was tasteful and fastidious in dress … and why not? She worked in what was called a fashion house, with a top job which Mick knew paid well and involved consorting only with people of standing. Her job was one thing they had never talked about. That her earnings were a secret was something he was deeply thankful for because he knew that they could scarcely be less than his own. A disclosure, even accidental, would be his humiliation though he knew all this situation was very silly. Yet work at the fol-the-lols of couture did nothing to impair Mary’s maturity of mind. She read a lot, talked politics often and once even mentioned her half-intentions of writing a book. Mick did not ask on what subject, for somehow he found the idea distasteful. Without swallowing whole all the warnings one could readily hear and read about the spiritual dangers of intellectual arrogance and literary freebooting, there was