Книга - The Dalkey Archive

The Dalkey Archive
Flann O’Brien


From the author of the classic novel ‘At-Swim-Two-Birds’ comes this ingenious tale which follows the mad and absurd ambitions of a scientist determined to destroy the world.Flann O'Brien's third novel, 'The Dalkey Archive' is a riotous depiction of the extraordinary events surrounding theologian and mad scientist De Selby's attempt to destroy the world by removing all the oxygen from the atmosphere. Only Michael Shaughnessy, 'a lowly civil servant', and James Joyce, alive and well and working as a barman in the nearby seaside resort of Skerries, can stop the inimitable De Selby in his tracks.









FLANN O’BRIEN





The Dalkey Archive










Copyright (#ulink_7541b2cd-0731-5fda-8a63-38582c68b2cf)


Fourth Estate

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 1 London Bridge Street London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk)

This Harper Perennial Modern Classics edition published 2007

Previously published in paperback by Grafton in 1986 (reprinted once), Paladin 1990 and as a Flamingo Modern Classic in 1993 (reprinted 10 times)

First published in Great Britain by MacGibbon & Kee Ltd 1964

Copyright © Brian O’Nolan 1964

PS Section copyright © Richard Shephard 2007

PS™ is a trademark of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Source ISBN: 9780007247196

Ebook Edition © MARCH 2016 ISBN 9780007405893

Version: 2016-03-31

HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.




Dedication (#ulink_32eccb76-7ec3-5383-ae86-286962e2fe6c)


I dedicate these pages to my Guardian Angel, impressing upon him that I’m only fooling and warning him to see to it that there is no misunderstanding when I go home.




Contents


Cover (#u5b6c1604-de03-5da4-8512-ef3858b71366)

Title Page (#ueb91d8d1-8c41-5916-9750-83b2d84c7492)

Copyright (#u835e89d7-4fd9-5ffc-9df1-c9b805192044)

Dedication (#ue1bc36f7-5e39-596b-be1e-da27ad5dd301)

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Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)

P.S. Ideas, Interviews & Features … (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author(s)

The Dalkey Archive: Not So Much an Encore as a Rehearsal (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Book (#litres_trial_promo)

Re: Joyce

A Dalkey Drama (#litres_trial_promo)

Joyce: Portraits of the Artist as a Fictional Character (#litres_trial_promo)

Read On (#litres_trial_promo)

If You Loved This, You Might Like …

Flann O’Brien Trivia (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)

By the Same Author (#litres_trial_promo)

About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)




1 (#ulink_c615349e-93e8-5b47-a3da-d8632a122990)


Dalkey is a little town maybe twelve miles south of Dublin, on the shore. It is an unlikely town, huddled, quiet, pretending to be asleep. Its streets are narrow, not quite self-evident as streets and with meetings which seem accidental. Small shops look closed but are open. Dalkey looks like an humble settlement which must, a traveller feels, be next door to some place of the first importance and distinction. And it is – vestibule of a heavenly conspection.

Behold it. Ascend a shaded, dull, lane-like way, per iter, as it were, tenebricosum, and see it burst upon you as if a curtain had been miraculously whisked away. Yes, the Vico Road.

Good Lord!

The road itself curves gently upward and over a low wall to the left by the footpath enchantment is spread – rocky grassland falling fast away to reach a toy-like railway far below, with beyond it the immeasurable immanent sea, quietly moving slowly in the immense expanse of Killiney Bay. High in the sky which joins it at a seam far from precise, a caravan of light cloud labours silently to the east.

And to the right? Monstrous arrogance: a mighty shoulder of granite climbing ever away, its overcoat of furze and bracken embedded with stern ranks of pine, spruce, fir and horse-chestnut, with further on fine clusters of slim, meticulous eucalyptus – the whole a dazzle of mildly moving leaves, a farrago of light, colour, haze and copious air, a wonder that is quite vert, verdant, vertical, verticillate, vertiginous, in the shade of branches even vespertine. Heavens, has something escaped from the lexicon of Sergeant Fottrell?

But why this name Vico Road? Is there to be recalled in this magnificence a certain philosopher’s pattern of man’s lot on earth – thesis, antithesis, synthesis, chaos? Hardly. And is this to be compared with the Bay of Naples? That is not to be thought of, for in Naples there must be heat and hardness belabouring desiccated Italians – no soft Irish skies, no little breezes that feel almost coloured.

At a great distance ahead and up, one could see a remote little obelisk surmounting some steps where one can sit and contemplate all this scene: the sea, the peninsula of Howth across the bay and distantly, to the right, the dim outline of the Wicklow mountains, blue or grey. Was the monument erected to honour the Creator of all this splendour? No. Perhaps in remembrance of a fine Irish person He once made – Johannes Scotus Erigena, perhaps, or possibly Parnell? No indeed: Queen Victoria.

Mary was nudging Michael Shaughnessy. She loitered enticingly about the fringes of his mind; the deep brown eyes, the light hair, the gentleness yet the poise. She was really a nuisance yet never far away. He frowned and closed his fist, but intermittent muttering immediately behind him betokened that Hackett was there.

– How is she getting on, he asked, drawing level, that pious Mary of yours?

It was by no means the first time that this handsome lout had shown his ability to divine thought, a nasty gift.

– Mind your own business, Shaughnessy said sourly. I never ask about the lady you call Asterisk Agnes.

– If you want to know, she’s very well, thank you.

They walked in, loosely clutching their damp bathing things.

In the low seaward wall there was a tiny gap which gave access to a rough downhill path towards the railway far below; there a footbridge led to a bathing place called White Rock. At this gap a man was standing, supporting himself somewhat with a hand on the wall. As Shaughnessy drew near he saw the man was spare, tall, clean-shaven, with sparse fairish hair combed sideways across an oversize head.

– This poor bugger’s hurt, Hackett remarked.

The man’s face was placid and urbane but contorted in a slight grimace. He was wearing sandals and his right foot in the region of the big toe was covered with fresh blood. They stopped.

– Are you hurt, sir? Hackett asked.

The man politely examined each of them in turn.

– I suppose I am, he replied. There are notices down there about the dangers of the sea. Usually there is far more danger on land. I bashed my right toes on a sharp little dagger of granite I didn’t see on that damned path.

– Perhaps we could help, Shaughnessy said. We’d be happy to assist you down to the Colza Hotel in Dalkey. We could get you a chemist there or maybe a doctor.

The man smiled slightly.

– That’s good of you, he replied, but I’m my own doctor. Perhaps though you could give me a hand to get home?

– Well, certainly, Shaughnessy said.

– Do you live far, sir? Hackett asked.

– Just up there, the man said, pointing to the towering trees. It’s a stiff climb with a cut foot.

Shaughnessy had no idea that there was any house in the fastness pointed to, but almost opposite there was a tiny gate discernible in the rough railing bounding the road.

– So long as you’re sure there is a house there, Hackett said brightly, we will be honoured to be of valuable succour.

– The merit of the house is that hardly anybody except the postman knows it’s there, the other replied agreeably.

They crossed the road, the two escorts lightly assisting at each elbow. Inside the gate a narrow but smooth enough pathway fastidiously picked its way upward through treetrunks and shrubs.

– Might as well introduce myself, the invalid said. My name’s De Selby.

Shaughnessy gave his, adding that everybody called him Mick. He noticed that Hackett styled himself just Mr Hackett: it seemed an attitude of polite neutrality, perhaps condescension.

– This part of the country, De Selby remarked, is surprisingly full of tinkers, gawms and gobshites. Are you gentlemen skilled in the Irish language?

The non-sequitur rather took Shaughnessy aback, but not Hackett.

– I know a great lot about it, sir. A beautiful tongue.

– Well, the word mór means big. In front of my house – we’re near it now – there is a lawn surprisingly large considering the terrain. I thought I would combine mór and lawn as a name for the house. A hybrid, of course, but what matter? I found a looderamawn in Dalkey village by the name of Teague McGettigan. He’s the loçal cabman, handyman, and observer of the weather; there is absolutely nothing he can’t do. I asked him to paint the name on the gate, and told him the words. Now wait till you see the result.

The house could now be glimpsed, a low villa of timber and brick. As they drew nearer De Selby’s lawn looked big enough but regrettably it was a sloping expanse of coarse, scruffy grass embroidered with flat weeds. And in black letters on the wooden gate was the title: LAWNMOWER. Shaughnessy and Hackett sniggered as De Selby sighed elaborately.

– Well the dear knows I always felt that Teague was our domestic Leonardo, Hackett chuckled. I’m well acquainted with the poor bastard.

They sidled gently inward. De Selby’s foot was now dirty as well as bloody.




2 (#ulink_cc7f985b-1746-54ad-bef7-02b17ece5bca)


Our mutilated friend seems a decent sort of segotia, Hackett remarked from his armchair. De Selby had excused himself while he attended to ‘the medication of my pedal pollex’, and the visitors gazed about his living room with curiosity. It was oblong in shape, spacious, with a low ceiling. Varnished panelling to the height of about eighteen inches ran right round the walls, which otherwise bore faded greenish paper. There were no pictures. Two heavy mahogany bookcases, very full, stood in embrasures to each side of the fireplace, with a large press at the blank end of the room. There were many chairs, a small table in the centre and by the far wall a biggish table bearing sundry scientific instruments and tools, including a microscope. What looked like a powerful lamp hovered over this and to the left was an upright piano by Liehr, with music on the rest. It was clearly a bachelor’s apartment but clean and orderly. Was he perhaps a musician, a medical man, a theopneust, a geodetic chemist … a savant?

– He’s snug here anyway, Mick Shaughnessy said, and very well hidden away.

– He’s the sort of man, Hackett replied, that could be up to any game at all in this sort of secret HQ. He might be a dangerous character.

Soon De Selby re-appeared, beaming, and took his place in the centre, standing with his back to the empty fireplace.

– A superficial vascular lesion, he remarked pleasantly, now cleansed, disinfected, anointed, and with a dressing you see which is impenetrable even by water.

– You mean, you intend to continue swimming? Hackett asked.

– Certainly.

– Bravo! Good man.

– Oh not at all – it’s part of my business. By the way, would it be rude to enquire what is the business of you gentlemen?

– I’m a lowly civil servant, Mick replied. I detest the job, its low atmosphere and the scruff who are my companions in the office.

– I’m worse off, Hackett said in mock sorrow. I work for the father, who’s a jeweller but a man that’s very careful with the keys. No opportunity of giving myself an increase in pay. I suppose you could call me a jeweller too, or perhaps a sub-jeweller. Or a paste jeweller.

– Very interesting work, for I know a little about it. Do you cut stones?

– Sometimes.

– Yes. Well I’m a theologist and a physicist, sciences which embrace many others such as eschatology and astrognosy. The peace of this part of the world makes true thinking possible. I think my researches are nearly at an end. But let me entertain you for a moment.

He sat down at the piano and after some slow phrases, erupted into what Mick with inward wit, would dub a headlong chromatic dysentery which was ‘brilliant’ in the bad sense of being inchoate and, to his ear at least, incoherent. A shattering chord brought the disorder to a close.

– Well, he said, rising, what did you think of that?

Hackett looked wise.

– I think I detected Liszt in one of his less guarded moments, he said.

– No, De Selby answered. The basis of that was the canon at the start of César Franck’s well-known sonata for violin and piano. The rest was all improvisation. By me.

– You’re a splendid player, Mick ventured archly.

– It’s only for amusement but a piano can be a very useful instrument. Wait till I show you something.

He returned to the instrument, lifted half of the hinged top and took out a bottle of yellowish liquid, which he placed on the table. Then opening a door in the nether part of a bookcase, he took out three handsome stem glasses and a decanter of what looked like water.

– This is the best whiskey to be had in Ireland, faultlessly made and perfectly matured. I know you will not refuse a taiscaun.

– Nothing would make me happier, Hackett said. I notice that there’s no label on the bottle.

– Thank you, Mick said, accepting a generous glass from De Selby. He did not like whiskey much, or any intoxicant, for that matter. But manners came first. Hackett followed his example.

– The water’s there, De Selby gestured. Don’t steal another man’s wife and never water his whiskey. No label on the bottle? True. I made that whiskey myself.

Hackett had taken a tentative sip.

– I hope you know that whiskey doesn’t mature in a bottle. Though I must say that this tastes good.

Mick and De Selby took a reasonable gulp together.

– My dear fellow, De Selby replied, I know all about sherry casks, temperature, subterranean repositories and all that extravaganza. But such considerations do not arise here. This whiskey was made last week.

Hackett leaned forward in his chair, startled.

– What was that? he cried. A week old? Then it can’t be whiskey at all. Good God, are you trying to give us heart failure or dissolve our kidneys?

De Selby’s air was one of banter.

– You can see, Mr Hackett, that I am also drinking this excellent potion myself. And I did not say it was a week old. I said it was made last week.

– Well, this is Saturday. We needn’t argue about a day or two.

– Mr De Selby, Mick interposed mildly, it is clear enough that you are making some distinction in what you said, that there is some nicety of terminology in your words. I can’t quite follow you.

De Selby here took a drink which may be described as profound and then suddenly an expression of apocalyptic solemnity came over all his mild face.

– Gentlemen, he said, in an empty voice, I have mastered time. Time has been called, an event, a repository, a continuum, an ingredient of the universe. I can suspend time, negative its apparent course.

Mick thought it funny in retrospect that Hackett here glanced at his watch, perhaps involuntarily.

– Time is still passing with me, he croaked.

– The passage of time, De Selby continued, is calculated with reference to the movements of the heavenly bodies. These are fallacious as determinants of the nature of time. Time has been studied and pronounced upon by many apparently sober men – Newton, Spinoza, Bergson, even Descartes. The postulates of the Relativity nonsense of Einstein are mendacious, not to say bogus. He tried to say that time and space had no real existence separately but were to be apprehended only in unison. Such pursuits as astronomy and geodesy have simply befuddled man. You understand?

As it was at Mick he looked the latter firmly shook his head but thought well to take another stern sup of whiskey. Hackett was frowning. De Selby sat down by the table.

– Consideration of time, he said, from intellectual, philosophic or even mathematical criteria is fatuity, and the pre-occupation of slovens. In such unseemly brawls some priestly fop is bound to induce a sort of cerebral catalepsy by bringing forward terms such as infinity and eternity.

Mick thought it seemly to say something, however foolish.

– If time is illusory as you seem to suggest, Mr De Selby, how is it that when a child is born, with time he grows to be a boy, then a man, next an old man and finally a spent and helpless cripple?

De Selby’s slight smile showed a return of the benign mood.

– There you have another error in formulating thought. You confound time with organic evolution. Take your child who has grown to be a man of twenty-one. His total life-span is to be seventy years. He has a horse whose life-span is to be twenty. He goes for a ride on his horse. Do these two creatures subsist simultaneously in dissimilar conditions of time? Is the velocity of time for the horse three and a half times that for the man?

Hackett was now alert.

– Come here, he said. That greedy fellow the pike is reputed to grow to be up to two hundred years of age. How is our time-ratio if he is caught and killed by a young fellow of fifteen?

– Work it out for yourself, De Selby replied pleasantly. Divergences, incompatibilities, irreconcilables are everywhere. Poor Descartes! He tried to reduce all goings-on in the natural world to a code of mechanics, kinetic but not dynamic. All motion of objects was circular, he denied a vacuum was possible and affirmed that weight existed irrespective of gravity. Cogito ergo sum? He might as well have written inepsias scripsi ergo sum and prove the same point, as he thought.

– That man’s work, Mick interjected, may have been mistaken in some conclusions but was guided by his absolute belief in Almighty God.

– True indeed. I personally don’t discount the existence of a supreme supra mundum power but I sometimes doubted if it is benign. Where are we with this mess of Cartesian methodology and Biblical myth-making? Eve, the snake and the apple. Good Lord!

– Give us another drink if you please, Hackett said. Whiskey is not incompatible with theology, particularly magic whiskey that is ancient and also a week old.

– Most certainly, said De Selby, rising and ministering most generously to the three glasses. He sighed as he sat down again.

– You men, he said, should read all the works of Descartes, having first thoroughly learnt Latin. He is an excellent example of blind faith corrupting the intellect. He knew Galileo, of course, accepted the latter’s support of the Copernican theory that the earth moves round the sun and had in fact been busy on a treatise affirming this. But when he heard that the Inquisition had condemned Galileo as a heretic, he hastily put away his manuscript. In our modern slang he was yellow. And his death was perfectly ridiculous. To ensure a crust for himself, he agreed to call on Queen Christina of Sweden three times a week at five in the morning to teach her philosophy. Five in the morning in that climate! It killed him, of course. Know what age he was?

Hackett had just lit a cigarette without offering one to anybody.

– I feel Descartes’ head was a little bit loose, he remarked ponderously, not so much for his profusion of erroneous ideas but for the folly of a man of eighty-two thus getting up at such an unearthly hour and him near the North Pole.

– He was fifty-four, De Selby said evenly.

– Well by damn, Mick blurted, he was a remarkable man however crazy his scientific beliefs.

– There’s a French term I heard which might describe him, Hackett said. Idiot-savant.

De Selby produced a solitary cigarette of his own and lit it. How had he inferred that Mick did not smoke?

– At worst, he said in a tone one might call oracular, Descartes was a solipsist. Another weakness of his was a liking for the Jesuits. He was very properly derided for regarding space as a plenum. It is a coincidence, of course, but I have made the parallel but undoubted discovery that time is a plenum.

– What does that mean? Hackett asked.

– One might describe a plenum as a phenomenon or existence full of itself but inert. Obviously space does not satisfy such a condition. But time is a plenum, immobile, immutable, ineluctable, irrevocable, a condition of absolute stasis. Time does not pass. Change and movement may occur within time.

Mick pondered this. Comment seemed pointless. There seemed no little straw to clutch at; nothing to question.

– Mr De Selby, he ventured at last, it would seem impertinent of the like of me to offer criticism or even opinions on what I apprehend as purely abstract propositions. I’m afraid I harbour the traditional idea and experience of time. For instance, if you permit me to drink enough of this whiskey, by which I mean too much, I’m certain to undergo unmistakable temporal punishment. My stomach, liver and nervous system will be wrecked in the morning.

– To say nothing of the dry gawks, Hackett added. De Selby laughed civilly.

– That would be a change to which time, of its nature, is quite irrelevant.

– Possibly, Hackett replied, but that academic observation will in no way mitigate the reality of the pain.

– A tincture, De Selby said, again rising with the bottle and once more adding generously to the three glasses. You must excuse me for a moment or two.

Needless to say, Hackett and Mick looked at each other in some wonder when he had left the room.

– This malt seems to be superb, Hackett observed, but would he have dope or something in it?

– Why should there be? He’s drinking plenty of it himself.

– Maybe he’s gone away to give himself a dose of some antidote. Or an emetic.

Mick shook his head genuinely.

– He’s a strange bird, he said, but I don’t think he’s off his head, or a public danger.

– You’re certain he’s not derogatory?

– Yes. Call him eccentric.

Hackett rose and gave himself a hasty extra shot from the bottle, which in turn Mick repelled with a gesture. He lit another cigarette.

– Well, he said, I suppose we should not overstay our welcome. Perhaps we should go. What do you say?

Mick nodded. The experience had been curious and not to be regretted; and it could perhaps lead to other interesting things or even people. How commonplace, he reflected, were all the people he did know.

When De Selby returned he carried a tray with plates, knives, a dish of butter and an ornate basket full of what seemed golden bread.

– Sit in to the table, lads – pull over your chairs, he said. This is merely what the Church calls a collation. These delightful wheaten farls were made by me, like the whiskey, but you must not think I’m like an ancient Roman emperor living in daily fear of being poisoned. I’m alone here, and it’s a long painful pilgrimage to the shops.

With a murmur of thanks the visitors started this modest and pleasant meal. De Selby himself took little and seemed preoccupied.

– Call me a theologian or a physicist as you will, he said at last rather earnestly, but I am serious and truthful. My discoveries concerning the nature of time were in fact quite accidental. The objective of my research was altogether different. My aim was utterly unconnected with the essence of time.

– Indeed? Hackett said rather coarsely as he coarsely munched. And what was the main aim?

– To destroy the whole world.

They stared at him. Hackett made a slight noise but De Selby’s face was set, impassive, grim.

– Well, well, Mick stammered.

– It merits destruction. Its history and prehistory, even its present, is a foul record of pestilence, famine, war, devastation and misery so terrible and multifarious that its depth and horror are unknown to any one man. Rottenness is universally endemic, disease is paramount. The human race is finally debauched and aborted.

– Mr De Selby, Hackett said with a want of gravity, would it be rude to ask just how you will destroy the world? You did not make it.

– Even you, Mr Hackett, have destroyed things you did not make. I do not care a farthing about who made the world or what the grand intention was, laudable or horrible. The creation is loathsome and abominable, and total extinction could not be worse.

Mick could see that Hackett’s attitude was provoking brusqueness whereas what was needed was elucidation. Even marginal exposition by De Selby would throw light on the important question – was he a true scientist or just demented?

– I can’t see, sir, Mick ventured modestly, how this world could be destroyed short of arranging a celestial collision between it and some other great heavenly body. How a man could interfere with the movements of the stars – I find that an insoluble puzzle, sir.

De Selby’s taut expression relaxed somewhat.

– Since our repast is finished, have another drink, he said, pushing forward the bottle. When I mentioned destroying the whole world, I was not referring to the physical planet but to every manner and manifestation of life on it. When my task is accomplished – and I feel that will be soon – nothing living, not even a blade of grass, a flea – will exist on this globe. Nor shall I exist myself, of course.

– And what about us? Hackett asked.

– You must participate in the destiny of all mankind, which is extermination.

– Guesswork is futile, Mr De Selby, Mick murmured, but could this plan of yours involve liquefying all the ice at the Poles and elsewhere and thus drowning everything, in the manner of the Flood in the Bible?

– No. The story of that Flood is just silly. We are told it was caused by a deluge of forty days and forty nights. All this water must have existed on earth before the rain started, for more can not come down than was taken up. Commonsense tells me that this is childish nonsense.

– That is merely a feeble rational quibble, Hackett cut in. He liked to show that he was alert.

– What then, sir, Mick asked in painful humility, is the secret, the supreme crucial secret?

De Selby gave a sort of grimace.

– It would be impossible for me, he explained, to give you gentlemen, who have no scientific training, even a glimpse into my studies and achievements in pneumatic chemistry. My work has taken up the best part of a life-time and, though assistance and co-operation were generously offered by men abroad, they could not master my fundamental postulate: namely, the annihilation of the atmosphere.

– You mean, abolish air? Hackett asked blankly.

– Only its biogenic and substantive ingredient, replied De Selby, which, of course, is oxygen.

– Thus, Mick interposed, if you extract all oxygen from the atmosphere or destroy it, all life will cease?

– Crudely put, perhaps, the scientist agreed, now again genial, but you may grasp the idea. There are certain possible complications but they need not trouble us now.

Hackett had quietly helped himself to another drink and showed active interest.

– I think I see it, he intoned. Exit automatically the oxygen and we have to carry on with what remains, which happens to be poison. Isn’t it murder though?

De Selby paid no attention.

– The atmosphere of the earth, meaning what in practice we breathe as distinct from rarefied atmosphere at great heights, is composed of roughly 78 per cent nitrogen, 21 oxygen, tiny quantities of argon and carbon dioxide, and microscopic quantities of other gases such as helium and ozone. Our preoccupation is with nitrogen, atomic weight 14.008, atomic number 7.

– Is there a smell off nitrogen? Hackett enquired.

– No. After extreme study and experiment I have produced a chemical compound which totally eliminates oxygen from any given atmosphere. A minute quantity of this hard substance, small enough to be invisible to the naked eye, would thus convert the interior of the greatest hall on earth into a dead world provided, of course, the hall were properly sealed. Let me show you.

He quietly knelt at one of the lower presses and opened the door to reveal a small safe of conventional aspect. This he opened with a key, revealing a circular container of dull metal of a size that would contain perhaps four gallons of liquid. Inscribed on its face were the letters DMP.

– Good Lord, Hackett cried, the DMP! The good old DMP! The grandfather was a member of that bunch.

De Selby turned his head, smiling bleakly.

– Yes – the DMP – the Dublin Metropolitan Police. My own father was a member. They are long-since abolished, of course.

– Well what’s the idea of putting that on your jar of chemicals?

De Selby had closed the safe and press door and gone back to his seat.

– Just a whim of mine, no more, he replied. The letters are in no sense a formula or even a mnemonic. But that container has in it the most priceless substance on earth.

– Mr De Selby, Mick said, rather frightened by these flamboyant proceedings, granted that your safe is a good one, is it not foolish to leave such dangerous stuff here for some burglar to knock it off?

– Me, for instance? Hackett interposed.

– No, gentlemen, there is no danger at all. Nobody would know what the substance was, its properties or how activated.

– But don’t we know? Hackett insisted.

– You know next to nothing, De Selby replied easily, but I intend to enlighten you even more.

– I assure you, Mick thought well to say, that any information entrusted to us will be treated in strict confidence.

– Oh, don’t bother about that, De Selby said politely, it’s not information I’ll supply but experience. A discovery I have made – and quite unexpectedly – is that a deoxygenated atmosphere cancels the apparently serial nature of time and confronts us with true time and simultaneously with all the things and creatures which time has ever contained or will contain, provided we evoke them. Do you follow? Let us be serious about this. The situation is momentous and scarcely of this world as we know it.

He stared at each of his two new friends in turn very gravely.

– I feel, he announced, that you are entitled to some personal explanation concerning myself. It would be quite wrong to regard me as a christophobe.

– Me too, Hackett chirped impudently.

– The early books of the Bible I accepted as myth, but durable myth contrived genuinely for man’s guidance. I also accepted as fact the story of the awesome encounter between God and the rebel Lucifer. But I was undecided for many years as to the outcome of that encounter. I had little to corroborate the revelation that God had triumphed and banished Lucifer to hell forever. For if – I repeat if – the decision had gone the other way and God had been vanquished, who but Lucifer would be certain to put about the other and opposite story?

– But why should he? Mick asked incredulously.

– The better to snare and damn mankind, De Selby answered.

– Well now, Hackett remarked, that secret would take some keeping.

– However, De Selby continued, perplexed, I was quite mistaken in that speculation. I’ve since found that things are as set forth in the Bible, at least to the extent that heaven is intact.

Hackett gave a low whistle, perhaps in derision.

– How could you be sure? he asked. You have not been temporarily out of this world, have you, Mr De Selby?

– Not exactly. But I have had a long talk with John the Baptist. A most understanding man, do you know, you’d swear he was a Jesuit.

– Good heavens! Mick cried, while Hackett hastily put his glass on the table with a click.

– Ah yes, most understanding. Perfect manners, of course, and a courteous appreciation of my own personal limitations. A very interesting man the same Baptist.

– Where did this happen? Hackett asked.

– Here in Dalkey, De Selby explained. Under the sea.

There was a small but absolute silence.

– While time stood still? Hackett persisted.

– I’ll bring both of you people to the same spot tomorrow. That is, if you wish it and provided you can swim, and for a short distance under water.

– We are both excellent swimmers, Hackett said cheerfully, except I’m by far the better of the pair.

– We’d be delighted, Mick interrupted with a sickly smile, on the understanding that we’ll get safely back.

– There is no danger whatever. Down at the headquarters of the Vico Swimming Club there is a peculiar chamber hidden in the rocks at the water’s edge. At low tide there is cavernous access from the water to this chamber. As the tide rises this hole is blocked and air sealed off in the chamber. The water provides a total seal.

– This could be a chamber of horrors, Hackett suggested.

– I have some masks of my own design, equipped with compressed air, normal air, and having an automatic feed-valve. The masks and tank are quite light, of aluminium.

– I think I grasp the idea, Mick said in a frown of concentration. We go under the water wearing these breathing gadgets, make our way through this rocky opening to the chamber, and there meet John the Baptist?

De Selby chuckled softly.

– Not necessarily and not quite. We get to the empty chamber as you say and I then release a minute quantity of DMP. We are then subsisting in timeless nitrogen but still able to breathe from the tanks on our backs.

– Does our physical weight change? Hackett asked.

– Yes, somewhat.

– And what happens then?

– We shall see what happens after you have met me at this swimming pool at eight o’clock tomorrow morning. Are you going back by the Colza Hotel?

– Certainly.

– Well have a message sent to Teague McGettigan to call for me with his damned cab at 7.30. Those mask affairs are bothersome to horse about with.

Thus the appointment was made. De Selby affable as he led his visitors to his door and said goodbye.




3 (#ulink_46d55dd4-f8a8-5f8d-bea5-b27b06b3c79a)


Hackett was frowning a bit and taciturn as the two strolled down the Vico Road towards Dalkey. Mick felt preoccupied, his ideas in some disarray. Some light seemed to have been drained from the sunny evening.

– We don’t often have this sort of diversion, Hackett, he remarked.

– It certainly isn’t every day we’re offered miraculous whiskey, Hackett answered gloomily, and told at the same time we’re under sentence of death. Shouldn’t other people be warned? Our personal squaws, for instance?

– That would be what used to be called spreading despondency and disaffection, Mick warned pompously. What good would it do?

– They could go to confession, couldn’t they?

– So could you. But the people would only laugh at us. So far as you are concerned, they’d say you were drunk.

– That week-old gargle was marvellous stuff, he muttered reflectively after a pause. I feel all right but I’m still not certain that there wasn’t some sort of drug in it. Slow-acting hypnotic stuff, or something worse that goes straight to the brain. We might yet go berserk by the time we reach the Colza. Maybe we’ll be arrested by Sergeant Fottrell.

– Divil a fear of it.

– I certainly wouldn’t like to swear the truth of today in court.

– We have an appointment early tomorrow morning, Mick reminded him. I suggest we say nothing to anybody about today’s business.

– Do you intend to keep tomorrow’s date?

– I certainly do. But I’ll have to use the bike to get here from Booterstown at that hour.

They walked on, silent in thought.

It is not easy to give an account of the Colza Hotel, its owner Mrs Laverty, or its peculiar air. It had been formerly, though not in any recent time, an ordinary public house labelled ‘Constantine Kerr, Licensed Vintner’ and it was said that Mrs Laverty, a widow, had remodelled the bar, erased the obnoxious public house title and called the premises the Colza Hotel.

Why this strange name?

Mrs Laverty was a most religious woman and once had a talk with a neighbour about the red lamp suspended in the church before the high altar. When told it was sustained with colza oil, she piously assumed that this was a holy oil used for miraculous purposes by Saint Colza, VM


(#ulink_857164e2-63c1-5666-95ea-a16fdbbe0229), and decided to put her house under this banner.

Here is the layout of the bar in the days when Hackett and Shaughnessy were customers:

The area known as ‘The Slum’ was spacious with soft leather seating by the wall and other seats and small tables about the floor. Nobody took the hotel designation seriously, though Mrs Laverty stoutly held that there were ‘many good beds’ upstairs. A courageous stranger who demanded a meal would be given rashers and eggs in a desultory back kitchen. About the time now dealt with Mrs Laverty had been long saving towards a pilgrimage to Lourdes. Was she deaf? Nobody was sure. The doubt had arisen some years ago when Hackett openly addressed her as Mrs Lavatory, of which she never took any notice. Hard of hearing, perhaps, she may also have thought that Hackett had never been taught to speak properly.

When Hackett and Shaughnessy walked in after the De Selby visit, the ‘Slum’ or habitat of cronies was occupied by Dr Crewett, a very old and wizened and wise medical man who had seen much service in the RAMC but disdained to flaunt a military title. A strange young man was sitting near him and Mrs Laverty was seated behind the bar, knitting.

– Hello to all and thank God to be back in civilization, Hackett called. Mrs L, give me two glass skillets of your patent Irish malt, please.

She smiled perfunctorily in her large homely face and moved to obey. She did not like Hackett much.

– Where were ye? Dr Crewett asked.

– Walking, Mick said.

– You gents have been taking the intoxicating air, he observed. Your complexions do ye great credit.

– It has been a good day, doctor, Mick added civilly.

– We have been inhaling oxygen, theology and astral physics, Hackett said, accepting two glasses from Mrs Laverty.

– Ah, physics? I see, the young stranger said politely. He was slim, black-haired, callow, wore thick glasses and looked about nineteen.

– The Greek word kinesis should not be ignored, Hackett said learnedly but with an air of jeer.

– Hackett, Mick interjected in warning, I think it’s better for us to mind our own business.

– It happens that I’m doing medicine at Trinity, the stranger added. I’m out here looking for digs.

– Why come out to this wilderness, Hackett asked, and have yourself trailing in and out of town every day?

– This is a new friend of ours, Dr Crewett explained. May I introduce Mr Nemo Crabbe?

Nods were exchanged and Hackett raised his glass in salute.

– If you mean take rooms in Trinity, Crabbe replied, no, thanks. They are vile, ramshackle quarters, and a resident student there is expected to empty his own charley.

– In my days in Egypt we hadn’t even got such a thing. But there was limitless sand and wastes of scrub.

– Besides, Crabbe added, I like the sea.

– Well, fair enough, Hackett growled, why not stay right here. This is a hotel.

Mrs Laverty raised her head, displeased.

– I have already told the gentleman, Mr Hackett, she said sharply, that we’re full up.

– Yes, but of what?

Dr Crewett, a peace-maker, intervened.

– Mrs Laverty, I think I’ll buy a glawsheen all round if you would be so kind.

She nodded, mollified a bit, and rose.

– Damned physics and chemistry are for me a scourge, Crabbe confided to all. It’s my father who insists on this medicine nonsense. I have no interest at all in it, and Dr Crewett agrees with my attitude.

– Certainly, the medico nodded.

– He believes that doctors of today are merely messenger boys for the drug firms.

– Lord, drugs, Hackett muttered.

– And very dangerous and untested drugs many of them are, Dr Crewett added.

– Nobody can take away Dr Glauber’s great triumph, Hackett remarked, grasping his new drink. I’ve often wondered that since glauben means ‘to think’, whether Glauber means thinker? Remember the pensive attitude of the seated one.

– It doesn’t, Mick said brusquely, for he had briefly studied German.

– Actually, poetry is my real interest, Crabbe said. I suppose I have something in common with Shelley and Byron. The sea, I mean, and poetry. The sea is a poem in itself.

– It has metre, too, Hackett’s voice sneered. Nothing finer than a good breeze and a 12-metre boat out there in the bay.

Mrs Laverty’s gentle voice was heard from her averted face.

– I’m very fond of poetry. That thing the Hound of Heaven is grand. As a girl I knew bits of it by heart.

– Some people think it’s doggerel.

– I suppose, Crabbe ventured, that all you good friends think my Christian name is odd. Nemo.

– It is odd, Mick agreed in what was meant to be a kindly tone. And if I may say so, your father must be an odd man.

– It was my mother, I believe.

– You could always change it, Crabbe, Dr Crewett suggested. In common law a man can call himself and be known by any name he likes.

– That reminds me of the poor man whose surname was Piss, Hackett recounted. He didn’t like it and changed it by deed-poll to Vomit.

– I implore you not to be facetious, the unsmiling Crabbe replied. The funny thing is that I like the name Nemo. Try thinking of it backwards.

– Well, you have something there, Hackett granted.

– Poetic, what?

There was a short silence which Dr Crewett broke.

– That makes you think, he said thoughtfully. Wouldn’t it be awful to have the Arab surname Esra?

– Let us have another round, Sussim L, Mick said facetiously, before I go home to beautiful Booterstown.

She smiled. She was fond of him in her own way. But had she heard his hasty transliteration? Hackett was scribbling a note.

– Mrs L, he said loudly, could you see that Teague McGettigan gets this tonight? It’s about an urgent appointment with another man for tomorrow morning.

– I will, Mr Hackett.

They left soon afterwards, going homewards by tram. Hackett got off at Monkstown, not far away, where he lived.

Mick felt well enough, and wondered about the morrow. After all, De Selby had done nothing more than talk. Much of it was astonishing talk but he had promised actual business at an hour not so long after dawn. Assuming he turned up with his gear, was there risk? Would the unreliable Hackett be there?

He sighed. Time, even if there was no such thing, would tell.

* (#ulink_193a1e42-9605-5a2f-8a0b-d31840992cd0) Virgin Martyr.




4 (#ulink_6a89a18a-90a2-5083-883e-0a6312b513d2)


Mild air with the sea in a stage whisper behind it was in Mick’s face as his bicycle turned into the lane-like approach to the Vico Road and its rocky swimming hole. It was a fine morning, calm, full of late summer.

Teague McGettigan’s cab was at the entrance, the horse’s head submerged in a breakfast nose-bag. Mick went down the steps and saluted the company with a hail of his arm. De Selby was gazing in disfavour at a pullover he had just taken off. Hackett was slumped seated, fully dressed and smoking a cigarette, while McGettigan in his dirty raincoat was fastidiously attending to his pipe. De Selby nodded. Hackett muttered ‘More luck’ and McGettigan spat.

– Boys-a-dear, McGettigan said in a low voice from his old thin unshaven face, ye’ll get the right drenching today. Ye’ll be soaked to the pelt.

– Considering that we’re soon to dive into that water, Hackett replied, I won’t dispute your prophecy, Teague.

– I don’t mean that. Look at that bloody sky.

– Cloudless, Mick remarked.

– For Christ’s sake look down there by Wickla.

In that quarter there was what looked like sea-haze, with the merest hint of the great mountain behind. With his hands Mick made a gesture of nonchalance.

– We might be down under the water for half an hour, I believe, Hackett said, or at least that’s Mr De Selby’s story. We have an appointment with mermaids or something.

– Get into your togs, Hackett, De Selby said impatiently. And you, too, Mick.

– Ye’ll pay more attention to me, Teague muttered, when ye come up to find ye’r superfine clothes demolished be the lashin rain.

– Can’t you keep them in your cursed droshky? De Selby barked. His temper was clearly a bit uncertain.

All got ready. Teague sat philosophically on a ledge, smoking and having the air of an indulgent elder watching children at play. Maybe his attitude was justified. When the three were ready for the water De Selby beckoned them to private consultation. The gear was spread out on a flattish rock.

– Now listen carefully, he said. This apparatus I am going to fit on both of you allows you to breathe, under water or out of it. The valve is automatic and needs no adjustment, nor is that possible. The air is compressed and will last half an hour by conventional effluxion of time.

– Thank God, sir, that your theories about time are not involved in the air supply, Hackett remarked.

– The apparatus also allows you to hear. My own is somewhat different. It enables me to do all that but speak and be heard as well. Follow?

– That seems clear enough, Mick agreed.

– When I clip the masks in place your air supply is on, he said emphatically. Under water or on land you can breathe.

– Fair enough, Hackett said politely.

– And listen to this, De Selby continued, I will go first, leading the way, over there to the left, to this cave opening, now submerged. It is only a matter of yards and not deep down. The tide is now nearly full. Follow close behind me. When we get to the rock apartment, take a seat as best you can, do nothing, and wait. At first it will be dark but you won’t be cold. I will then annihilate the terrestrial atmosphere and the time illusion by activating a particle of DMP. Now is all that clear? I don’t want any attempt at technical guff or questions at this time.

Hackett and Mick mutely agreed that things were clear.

– Down there you are likely to meet a personality who is from heaven, who is all-wise, speaks all languages and dialects and knows, or can know, everything. I have never had a companion on such a trip before, and I do hope events will not be complicated.

Mick had suddenly become very excited.

– Excuse the question, he blurted, but will this be John the Baptist again?

– No. At least I hope not. I can request but cannot command.

– Could it be … anybody? Hackett asked.

– Only the dead.

– Good heavens!

– Yet that is not wholly correct. Those who were never on earth could appear.

This little talk was eerie. It was as if a hangman were courteously conversing with his victim, on the scaffold high.

– Do you mean angels, Mr De Selby? Mick enquired.

– Deistic beings, he said gruffly. Here, stand still till I fix this.

He had picked up a breathing mask, with its straps and tank affair at the back.

– I’ll go after you, Mick muttered, with Hackett at the rear.

In a surprisingly short time they were all fully dressed for a visit under the sea to the next world, or perhaps the former world. Through his goggles Mick could see Teague McGettigan studying an early Sunday paper, apparently at a rear racing page. He was at peace, with no interest whatever in supernatural doings. He was perhaps to be envied. Hackett was standing impassive, an Apollo space-man. De Selby was making final adjustments to his straps and with a gesture had led the way to the lower board.

Going head-down into cold water in the early morning is a shock to the most practised. But in Mick’s case the fog of doubt and near-delusion in the head, added to by the very low hiss of his air supply, made it a brief but baffling experience. There was ample light as he followed De Selby’s kicking heels and a marked watery disturbance behind told him that Hackett was not far away. If he was cursing, nobody heard.

Entry to the ‘apartment’ was efficient enough for beginners. If not adroit. De Selby readily found the opening and then, one by one, the others made their way upwards, half-clambering, half-swimming. They left the water quite palpably and Mick found himself crouching in an empty space on a rough floor strewn with rocks and some shells. Everything was dark and a distant sussurus must have been from the sea which had just been left. The company was under the water and presumably in an atmosphere that could be breathed, though only for a short time. Time? Yes, the word might be repeated.

De Selby beckoned Mick on with a tug at the arm, and he did the same for Hackett behind. Then they stopped. Mick crouched and finally squatted on a roundish rock; De Selby was to his left and the three had come to some sort of resting posture. Hackett gave Mick a nudge, though the latter did not know if it meant commiseration, encouragement or derision.

From his movements it was evident even in the gloom that De Selby was busy at some technical operation. Mick could not see what he was doing but no doubt he was detonating (or whatever is the word) a minuscule charge of DMP.

Though wet, he did not feel cold, but he was apprehensive puzzled, curious. Hackett was near but quite still.

A faint light seemed to come, a remote glow. It gradually grew to define the dimension of the dim apartment, making it appear unexpectedly large and, strangely dry.

Then Mick saw a figure, a spectre, far away from him. It looked seated and slightly luminescent. Gradually it got rather clearer in definition but remained unutterably distant, and what he had taken for a very long chin in profile was almost certainly a beard. A gown of some dark material clothed the apparition. It is strange to say that the manifestation did not frighten him but he was flabbergasted when he heard De Selby’s familiar tones almost booming out beside him.

– I must thank you for coming. I have two students with me.

The voice that came back was low, from far away but perfectly clear. The Dublin accent was unmistakable. The extraordinary utterance can here be distinguished only typographically.

– Ah not at all, man.

– You’re feeling well, as usual, I suppose?

– Nothing to complain of, thank God. How are you feeling yourself, or how do you think you’re feeling?

– Tolerably, but age is creeping in.

– Ha-ha. That makes me laugh.

– Why?

– Your sort of time is merely a confusing index of decomposition. Do you remember what you didn’t know was your youth?

– I do. But it’s your youth I wanted to talk about. The nature of your life in youth compared with that of your hagiarchic senility must have been a thunderous contrast, the ascent to piety sudden and even distressing. Was it?

– You are hinting at anoxic anoxœmia? Perhaps.

– You admit you were a debauched and abandoned young man?

– For a pagan I wasn’t the worst. Besides, maybe it was the Irish in me.

– The Irish in you?

– Yes. My father’s name was Patrick. And he was a proper gobshite.

– Do you admit that the age or colour of women didn’t matter to you where the transaction in question was coition?

– I’m not admitting anything. Please remember my eyesight was very poor.

– Were all your rutting ceremonials heterosexual?

– Heterononsense! There is no evidence against me beyond what I wrote myself. Too vague. Be on your guard against that class of fooling. Nothing in black and white.

– My vocation is enquiry and action, not literature.

– You’re sadly inexperienced. You cannot conceive the age I lived in, its customs, or judge of that African sun.

– The heat, hah? I’ve read a lot about the Eskimoes. The poor bastards are perished throughout their lives, covered with chilblains and icicles but when they catch a seal – ah, good luck to them! They make warm clothes out of the hide, perform gluttonly feats with the meat and then bring the oil home to the igloo where they light lamps and stoves. Then the fun begins. Nanook of the North is certainly partial to his nookie.

– I reprobate concupiscence, whether fortuitous or contrived.

– You do now, you post-gnostic! You must have a red face to recall your earlier nasty gymnastiness, considering you’re now a Father of the Church.

– Rubbish. I invented obscene feats out of bravado, lest I be thought innocent or cowardly. I walked the streets of Babylon with low companions, sweating from the fires of lust. When I was in Carthage I carried about with me a cauldron of unrealized debauchery. God in his majesty was tempting me. But Book Two of my Confessions is all shocking exaggeration. I lived within my rough time. And I kept the faith, unlike a lot more of my people in Algeria who are now Arab nincompoops and slaves of Islam.

– Look at all the time you squandered in the maw of your sexual fantasies which otherwise could have been devoted to Scriptural studies. Lolling loathsome libertine!

– I was weak at the time but I find your condescension offensive. You talk of the Fathers. How about that ante-Nicene thoolera-mawn, Origen of Alexandria? What did he do when he found that lusting after women distracted him from his sacred scrive-nery? I’ll tell you. He stood up, hurried out to the kitchen, grabbed a carving knife and – pwitch! – in one swipe deprived himself of his personality! Ah?

– Yes. Let us call it heroic impetuosity.

– How could Origen be the Father of Anything and he with no knackers on him? Answer me that one.

– We must assume that his spiritual testicles remained intact. Do you know him?

– I can’t say I ever met him in our place.

– But, dammit is he there? Don’t you know everything?

– I do not. I can, but the first wisdom is sometimes not to know. I suppose I could ask the Polyarch.

– Who on earth is the Polyarch?

– He’s not on earth, and again I don’t know. I think he’s Christ’s Vicar in Heaven.

– Are there any other strange denizens?

– Far too many if you ask me. Look at that gobhawk they call Francis Xavier. Hobnobbing and womanizing in the slums of Paris with Calvin and Ignatius Loyola in warrens full of rats, vermin, sycophants, and syphilis. Xavier was a great travelling man, messing about in Ethiopia and Japan, consorting with Buddhist monkeys and planning to convert China single-handed. And Loyola? You talk about me but a lot of that chap’s early saintliness was next to bedliness. He made himself the field-marshal of a holy army of mendicants but maybe merchandizers would be more like it. Didn’t Pope Clement XIV suppress the Order for its addiction to commerce, and for political wire-pulling? Jesuits are the wiliest, cutest and most mendacious ruffians who ever lay in wait for simple Christians. The Inquisition was on the track of Ignatius. Did you know that? Pity they didn’t get him. But one party who wouldn’t hear of the Pope’s Brief of Suppression was the Empress of Rooshia. Look at that now!

– Interesting that your father’s name was Patrick. Is he a saint?

– That reminds me. You have a Professor Binchy in your university outfit in Dublin and that poor man has been writing and preaching since he was a boy that the story about Saint Patrick is all wrong and that there were really two Saint Patricks. Binchy has his hash and parsley.

– Why?

– Two Saint Patricks? We have four of the buggers in our place and they’d make you sick with their shamrocks and shenanigans and bullshit.

Who else? What about Saint Peter?

– Oh he’s safe and sound all right. A bit of a slob to tell you the truth. He often encorpifies himself.

– What was that?

– Encorpifies himself. Takes on a body, as I’ve done now for your convenience. How could the like of you make anything out of an infinity of gases? Peter’s just out to show off the keys, bluster about and make himself a bloody nuisance. Oh there have been a few complaints to the Polyarch about him.

– Answer me this question. The Redeemer said ‘Thou art Peter and upon this rock I shall found my Church’. Is there any justification for the jeer that He founded his Church upon a pun, since Petros means ‘rock’?

– Not easy to say. The name Petros does not occur in classical, mythological or biblical Greek apart from your man the apostle and his successor and later namesakes – except for a freedman of Berenice (mother of Herod Agrippa) mentioned in Josephus, Jewish Antiquities 18, 6, 3, in a passage relating to the later years of Tiberius’s reign, that is, the thirties A.D. Petro occurs as a Roman surname in Suetonius’s Vespasiae 1, and Petra as a woman’s name in Tacitus, Annals 11, 4.

– And you don’t care a lot about him?

– The lads in our place, when he barges around encorpified and flashing the keys, can’t resist taking a rise out of him and pursue him with the cackles of a rooster, cock-adoodle-doo.

– I see. Who else? Is Judas with you?

– That’s another conundrum for the Polyarch. Peter stopped me one time and tried to feed me a cock-and-bull story about Judas coming to the Gate. You get my joke? Cock-and-bull story?

– Very funny. Is your mother Monica there?

– Wait now! Don’t try and get a dig at me that way. Don’t blame me. She was here before me.

– To lower the temperature of your steaming stewpot of lust and depravity, you married or took as concubine a decent poor young African girl, and the little boy you had by her you named Adeodatus. But even yet nobody knows your wife’s name.

– That secret is safe with me still.

– Why should you give such a name to your son while you were yourself still a debauched pagan, not even baptized?

– Put that day’s work down to the mammy – Monica.

– Later, you put your little wife away and she shambled off to the wilderness, probably back into slavery, but swearing to remain faithful to you forever. Does the shame of that come back to you?

– Never mind what comes back to me, I done what the mammy said, and everybody – you too – has to do what the mammy says.

– And straightaway, as you relate in Book Six of your Confessions, you took another wife, simultaneously committing bigamy and adultery. And you kicked her out after your Tolle Lege conjuring tricks in the garden when you ate a handful of stolen pears. Eve herself wasn’t accused in respect of more than one apple. In all this disgraceful behaviour do we see Monica at work again?

– Certainly. God also.

– Does Monica know that you’re being so unprecedentedly candid with me?

– Know? She’s probably here unencorpified.

– You betrayed and destroyed two decent women, implicated God in giving a jeering name to a bastard, and you blame all this outrage on your mother. Would it be seemly to call you callous humbug?

– It would not. Call me a holy humbug.

– Who else is in your kingdom? Is Judas?

– Paul is in our place, often encorpified and always attended by his physician Luke, putting poultices on his patient’s sore neck. When Paul shows too much consate in himself, the great blatherskite with his epistles in bad Greek, the chronic two-timer, I sometimes roar after him ‘You’re not on the road to Damascus now!’ Puts him in his place. All the same that Tolle Lege incident was no conjuring trick. It was a miracle. The first book I picked up was by Paul and the lines that struck my eyes were these: ‘Not in rioting or drunkenness, nor in chambering or wantonness, nor in strife or envying: but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ and make not provision for the flesh in the lust thereof.’ But do you know, I think the greatest dog’s breakfast of the lot is St Vianney.

– I never heard of him.

– ’Course you have. Jean-Baptiste. You’d know him better as the curé of Ars.

– Oh yes. A French holy man.

– A holy fright, you mean. Takes a notion when he’s young to be a priest, as ignorant as the back of a cab, couldn’t make head nor tail of Latin or sums, dodges the column when Napoleon is looking for French lads to be slaughtered in Rooshia, and at the heel of the hunt spends sixteen to eighteen hours a day in the confessional – hearing, not telling – and takes to performing miracles, getting money from nowhere and taking on hand to tell the future. Don’t be talking. A diabolical wizard of a man.

– Your household abounds in oddities.

– He performs his miracles still in our place. Gives life to bogus corpses and thinks nothing of raising from the dead a dummy mummy.

– I repeat a question I’ve already asked: is Judas a member of your household?

– I don’t think the Polyarch would like me to say much about Judas.

– He particularly interests me. The Gospel extols love and justice. Peter denied his Master out of pride, vanity and perhaps fear. Judas did something similar but from a comprehensible motive. But Peter’s home and dried. Is Judas?

– Judas, being dead, is eternal.

– But where is he?

– The dead do not have whereness. They have condition.

– Did Judas earn paradise?

– Pulchritudo tam antiqua et tam nova sero amavit.

– You are shifty and you prevaricate. Say yes or no to this question: did you suffer from hœmorrhoids?

– Yes. That is one reason that I encorpify myself with reluctance.

– Did Judas have any physical affliction?

– You have not read my works. I did not build the City of God. At most I have been an humble urban district councillor, never the Town Clerk. Whether Judas is dead in the Lord is a question notice of which would require to be given to the Polyarch.

– De Quincey held that Judas enacted his betrayal to provoke his Master into proclaiming his divinity by deed. What do you think of that?

– De Quincey also consumed narcotics.

– Nearly everything you have taught or written lacks the precision of Descartes.

– Descartes was a recitalist, or formulist, of what he took, often mistakenly, to be true knowledge. He himself established nothing new, nor even a system of pursuing knowledge that was novel. You are fond of quoting his Cogito Ergo Sum. Read my works. He stole that. See my dialogue with Evodius in De Libero Arbitrio, or the Question of Free Choice. Descartes spent far too much time in bed subject to the persistent hallucination that he was thinking. You are not free from a similar disorder.

– I have read all the philosophy of the Fathers, before and after Nicaea: Chrysostom, Ambrose, Athanasius.

– If you have read Athanasius you have not understood him. The result of your studies might be termed a corpus of patristic paddeology.

– Thank you.

– You are welcome.

– The prime things – existence, time, the godhead, death, paradise and the satanic pit, these are abstractions. Your pronouncements on them are meaningless, and within itself the meaninglessness does not cohere.

– Discourse must be in words, and it is possible to give a name to that which is not understood nor cognoscible by human reason. It is our duty to strive towards God by thought and word. But it is our final duty to believe, to have and to nourish faith.

– I perceive some of your pronouncements to be heretical and evil. Of sin, you said it was necessary for the perfection of the universe and to make good shine all the more brightly in contrast. You said God is not the cause of our doing evil but that free will is the cause. From God’s omniscience and foreknowledge He knows that men will sin. How then could free will exist?

– God has not foreknowledge. He is, and has knowledge.

– Man’s acts are all subject to predestination and he cannot therefore have free will. God created Judas. Saw to it that he was reared, educated, and should prosper in trade. He also ordained that Judas should betray His Divine Son. How then could Judas have guilt?

– God, in knowing the outcome of free will, did not thereby attenuate or extirpate free will.

– That light-and-shade gentleman you once admired so much, Mani, held that Cain and Abel were not the sons of Adam and Eve but the sons of Eve and Satan. However that may be, the sin in the garden of Eden was committed in an unimaginably remote age, eons of centuries ago, according to the mundane system of computing time. According to the same system the doctrine of the Incarnation and the Redemption is now not even two thousand years old. Are all the millions and millions of uncountable people born between the Creation and the Redemption to be accounted lost, dying in original sin though themselves personally guiltless, and to be considered condemned to hell?

– If you would know God, you must know time. God is time. God is the substance of eternity. God is not distinct from what we regard as years. God has no past, no future, no presence in the sense of man’s fugitive tenure. The interval you mention between the Creation and the Redemption was ineffably unexistent.

– That is the sort of disputation that I dub ‘flannel’ but granted that the soul of man is immortal, the geometry of a soul must be circular and, like God, it cannot have had a beginning. Do you agree with that?

– In piety it could thus be argued.

– Then our souls existed before joining our bodies?

– That could be said.

– Well, where were they.

– None but the Polyarch would say that.

– Are we to assume there is in existence somewhere a boundless reservoir of souls not yet encorpified?

– Time does not enter into an act of divine creation. God can create something which has the quality of having always existed.

– Is there any point in my questioning you on your one-time devotion to the works of Plotinus and Porphyry?

– No. But far preferable to the Manichœan dualism of light and darkness, good and evil, was Plotinus’s dualism of mind and matter. In his doctrine of emanation Plotinus was only slightly misled. Plotinus was a good man.

– About 372, when you were eighteen, you adopted Manichæanism and did not discard the strange creed until ten years later. What do you think now that jumble of Babylonian cosmology, Buddhism and ghostly theories about light and darkness, the Elect and the Hearers, the commands to abstain from fleshmeat, manual labour and intercourse with women? Or Mani’s own claim that he was himself the Paraclete?

– Why ask me now when you can read the treatise against this heresy which I wrote in 394? So far as Mani himself is concerned, my attitude maybe be likened to that of the King of Persia in 376. He had Mani skinned alive and then crucified.

– We must be going very soon.

– Yes. Your air is nearly gone.

– There is one more question on a matter that has always baffled me and on which nothing written about you by yourself or others gives any illumination. Are you a Nigger?

– I am a Roman.

– I suspect your Roman name is an affectation or a disguise. You are of Berber stock, born in Numidia. Those people were non-white. You are far more aligned with Carthage than Rome, and there are Punic corruptions even in your Latin.

– Civis Romanus sum.

– The people of your homeland today are called Arabs. Arabs are not white.

– Berbers were blond white people, with lovely blue eyes.

– All true Africans, notwithstanding the racial stew in that continent, are to some extent niggers. They are descendants of Noah’s son Ham.

– You must not overlook the African sun. I was a man that was very easily sunburnt.

– What does it feel like to be in heaven for all eternity?

– For all eternity? Do you then think there are fractional or temporary eternities?

– If I ask it, will you appear to me here tomorrow?

– I have no tomorrow. I am. I have only nowness.

– Then we shall wait. Thanks and goodbye.

– Goodbye. Mind the rocks. Go with God.

With clambering, Hackett in the lead, they soon found the water and made their way back to this world.




5 (#ulink_fb8ecff5-3499-5659-a293-915bd7a5b8a1)


The morning was still there, bland as they had left it. Teague McGettigan was slumped in charge of his pipe and newspaper and gave them only a glance when, having discarded their masks, they proceeded without thought to brisk towelling.

– Well, De Selby called to Mick, what did you think of that? Mentally, Mick felt numb, confused; and almost surprised by ordinary day.

– That was … an astonishing apparition, he stammered. And I heard every word. A very shrewd and argumentative man whoever he was.

De Selby froze in his half-naked stance, his mouth falling a bit open in dismay.

– Great crucified Lord, he cried, don’t tell me you didn’t recognize Augustine?

Mick stared back, still benumbed.

– I thought it was Santa Claus, Hackett remarked. Yet his voice lacked the usual intonation of jeer.

– I suppose, De Selby mused, beginning to dress, that I do you two some injustice. I should have warned you. A first encounter with a man from heaven can be unnerving.

– Several of the references were familiar enough, Mick said, but I couldn’t quite pinpoint the personality. My goodness, the Bishop of Hippo!

– Yes. When you think of it, he did not part with much information.

– If I may say so, Hackett interposed, he didn’t seem too happy in heaven. Where was the glorious resurrection we’ve all been promised? That character underground wouldn’t get a job handing out toys in a store at Christmas. He seemed depressed.

– I must say that the antics of his companions seemed strange, Mick agreed. I mean, according to his account of them

De Selby stopped reflectively combing his sparse hair.

– One must reserve judgement on all such manifestations, he said. I am proceeding all the time on a theory. We should remember that that might not have been the genuine Augustine at all.

– But who, then?

The wise master stared out to sea.

– It could be even Beelzebub himself, he murmured softly. Hackett sat down abruptly, working at his tie.

– Have any of you gentlemen got a match? Teague McGettigan asked, painfully standing up. Hackett handed him a box.

– The way I see it, Teague continued, there will come an almighty clump of rain and wind out of Wickla about twelve o’clock. Them mountains down there has us all destroyed.

– I’m not afraid of a shower, Hackett remarked coldly. At least you know what it is. There are worse things.

– Peaks of rock prod up into the clouds like fingers, Teague explained, until the clouds is bursted and the wind carries the wather down here on top of us. Poor buggers on a walking tour around Shankill would get soaked, hang-sangwiches in sodden flitters and maybe not the price of a pint between them to take shelter in Byrnes.

Their dressing, by reason of their rough rig, was finished. De Selby and Hackett were smoking, and the time was half nine. Then De Selby energetically rubbed his hands.

– Gentlemen, he said with some briskness, I presume that like me you have had no breakfast before this early swim. May I therefore invite you to have breakfast with me at Lawnmower. Mr McGettigan can drive us up to the gate.

– I’m afraid I can’t go, Hackett said.

– Well, it’s not that my horse Jimmy couldn’t pull you up, Teague said, spitting.

– Come now, De Selby said, we all need inner fortification after an arduous morning. I have peerless Limerick rashers and there will be no shortage of that apéritif.

Whether or not Hackett had another engagement Mick did not know but he immediately shared his instinct to get away, if only, indeed, to think, or try not to think. De Selby had not been deficient in the least in manners or honourable conduct but his continuing company seemed to confer uneasiness – perhaps vague, unformed fear.

– Mr De Selby, Mick said warmly, it is indeed kind of you to invite Hackett and me up for a meal but it happens that I did in fact have breakfast. I think we’d better part here.

– We’ll meet soon again, Hackett remarked, to talk over this morning’s goings-on.

De Selby shrugged and beckoned McGettigan to help him with his gear.

– As you will, gentlemen, he said politely enough. I certainly could do with a bite and perhaps I will have the pleasure of Teague’s company. I thought the weather, the elements, all the forces of the heavens made a breakfast-tide lecture seemly.

– Good luck to your honour but there’s nourishment in that bottle you have, Teague said brightly, taking away his pipe to say it loudly.

They separated like that and Hackett and Mick went on their brief stroll into Dalkey, Mick wheeling the bicycle with some distaste.

– Have you somewhere to go? he asked.

– No I haven’t. What did you make of that performance?

– I don’t know what to say. You heard the conversation, and I presume both of us heard the same thing.

– Do you believe … it all happened?

– I suppose I have to.

– I need a drink.

They fell silent. Thinking about the stance (if that ill-used word will serve) was futile though disturbing and yet it was impossible to shut such thoughts out of the head. Somehow Mick saw little benefit in any discussion with Hackett. Hackett’s mind was twisted in a knot identical with his own. They were as two tramps who had met in a trackless desert, each hopelessly asking the other the way.

– Well, Hackett said moodily at last, I haven’t thrown overboard my suspicions of yesterday about drugs, and even hypnotism I wouldn’t quite discount. But we have no means of checking whether or not all that stuff this morning was hallucination.

– Couldn’t we ask somebody? Get advice?

– Who? For a start, who would believe a word of the story?

– That’s true.

– Incidentally, those underwater breathing masks were genuine. I’ve worn gadgets like that before but they weren’t as smart as De Selby’s.

– How do we know there wasn’t a mixture of some brain-curdling gas in the air-tank?

– That’s true by God.

– I quite forgot I was wearing the thing.

They had paused undecided at a corner in the lonely little town. Mick said that he thought he’d better go home and get some breakfast. Hackett thought it was too early to think of food. Well Mick had to get rid of his damned bike. Couldn’t he leave it at the comic little police station in charge of Sergeant Fottrell? But what was the point of that? Wouldn’t he have the labour of collecting it another time? Hackett said that there had been no necessity to have used it at all in the first place, as there was such a thing as an early tram to accommodate eccentric people. Mick said no, not on Sunday, not from Booterstown.

– I know Mrs L would let me in, Hackett observed pettishly, except I know the big sow is still in bed snoring.

– Yes, it’s been a funny morning, Mick replied sympathetically. Here you are, frustrated from joining the company of a widow who keeps a boozer, yet it is not half an hour since you parted company with Saint Augustine.

– Yes.

Hackett laughed bitterly. Mick had in fact business of his own later in the day, he remembered, as on nearly every Sunday. At three-thirty he would meet Mary at Ballsbridge and very likely they would go off to loaf amorously and chatter in Herbert Park. The arrangement was threatening to take on the tedium of routine things. When eventually they were married, if they were at all, wouldn’t the sameness of life be worse?

– I’m going to rest my mind, he announced, and rest it in Herbert Park later today, avec ma femme, ma bonne amie.

– My own Asterisk lady abstains on Sundays, Hackett said listlessly, lighting a cigarette.

But suddenly he came to life.

– Consternation was caused this morning, he cried, by the setting off of a small charge of DMP. Here comes the DMP in person!

True enough. Wheeling a bicycle, Sergeant Fottrell was coming towards them from a side road. His approach was slow and grave. Here one beheld the majesty of the law – inevitable, procedural, sure.

It is not easy to outline his personal portrait. He was tall, lean, melancholy, clean-shaven, red in the face and of indeterminate age. Nobody, it was said, had ever seen him in uniform, yet he was far from being a plain-clothes man; his constabularity was unmistakable. Summer and winter he wore a light tweed overcoat of a brown colour; a trace of collar and tie could be discerned about the neck but in his nether person the trousers were clearly of police blue, and the large boots also surely of police issue. Dr Crewett claimed to have seen the sergeant once with his overcoat off when assisting with a broken-down car and no inner jacket of any kind was disclosed, only shirt. The sergeant was friendly, so to speak, to his friends. He drank whiskey freely when the opportunity offered but it did not seem to affect him at all. Hackett held that this was because the sergeant’s normal sober manner was identical with the intoxicated manner of other people. But what the sergeant believed, what he said and how he said it was known throughout all south County Dublin.

Now he had stopped and saluted at his cloth cap.

– That’s the great morning, lads, he said, gratuitously.

There was agreement that it was. The sergeant seemed to be maturing the air and the early street.

– I see you have been to the water, he remarked genially, for far-from-simple cavortings in the brine?

– Sergeant, Hackett said, you have no idea how far from simple.

– I recede portentously from the sea, the sergeant beamed, except for a fastidious little wade for the good of my spawgs. For the truth is that I’m destroyed with the corns. Our work is walking work if you understand my portent.

– True enough, Sergeant, Mick agreed, I have often seen you with that bicycle but never up on it.

– It is emergency machinery for feats of captaincy. But there are dangers of a mental nature inherent in the bicycle and that story I will relate to you coherently upon another day.

– Yes.

Hackett was meditating on something.

– Funny thing, he said, I left a little bottle behind me in the Colza last night by accident. Perigastric thiosulphate, you know. My damned stomach is full of ructions and eructations.

– Well by damn, the sergeant sighed sympathetically, that is an infertile bitching. I cry for any creature, man or woman, who is troublous in the stomach enpitments. Mrs Laverty would be in her bed now or mayhap awash in her private bath internally.

– Brandy is good for a sick stomach, Mick ventured with studied tactlessness.

– Brandy? Baugh! Hackett grimaced.

– Not brandy but Brannigan, the sergeant cried, striking his crossbar. Brannigan the chemist, and he’s an early-Mass man. He would now be shovelling gleefully at his stirabout, and supinely dietetic. Come down along here now.

Glumly Mick followed Hackett’s downcast back as the sergeant led the way down the street to a corner shop and smartly knocked on the residential door. The small meek Mr Brannigan had scarcely opened it when they were all crowded in the hallway. Mick felt annoyed at this improvised and silly tactic. What would passers-by think of two bicycles outside at such an hour, with the sergeant’s the most recognizable in the whole country? Hackett might be forced to swallow a dose of salts rather than disavow his lie about digestion trouble, and good enough for him.

– I have a man here, Mr Brannigan, avic, the sergeant announced cheerfully, that has a raging confusion in his craw, a stainless citizen and a martyr. Let us make our way sedulously to the shop.

Mr Brannigan with vague noises had produced keys and opened a door in the narrow hall; then they were all in the shop, with its gaudy goods and showcases. Under the high ceiling Mr Brannigan looked tiny (or perhaps his nearness to the sergeant was the real reason), the face quite round, round glasses in it and an air of being pleased.

– Which of the gentlemen, Sergeant, he asked quietly, is out of humour with himself?

The sergeant clapped a hand officially on Hackett’s shoulder.

– Mr Hackett is the patient inexorably, he said.

– Ah. Where is the seat of the trouble, Mr Hackett?

The patient made a clutching motion at his stomach.

– Here, he muttered, where nearly everybody’s damn trouble lies.

– Ah-ha. Have you been taking anything in particular for it?

– I have. But I can’t tell you what. Something from a prescription I haven’t got on me.

– Well well now. I would recommend a mix of acetic anhydride with carbonic acid. In solution. Excellent stuff in the right proportions. I won’t be a minute getting it.

– No, no, Hackett said in genuine remonstrance. I daren’t take drugs I’m not used to. Very nice of you and the Sergeant, Mr Brannigan, but I can wait.

– But we’ve any amount of proprietary things here, Mr Hackett. Even temporary relief, you know …

But the sergeant had been examining a large bottle he had taken down from a low shelf by the counter.

– By the pipers, he cried happily, here is the elixir of youth innocuously in its mundane perfection!

He handed the bottle to Hackett and reached up for another which he put in Mick’s hand. The label was,



HURLEY’S TONIC WINE

A glass three times a day or as required assures lasting benefit to the kidneys, stomach and nervous system. As recommended by doctors, nurses and geriatric institutions.



– Mind you, that’s not a bad sedative for the inner man, Mr Brannigan said seriously. Many ladies in the town are very partial to it.

– Sir Thomas O’Brannigan, the sergeant intoned grandly, I will buy a bottle of it myself – put it down to me – and when you have emplaced delicate stem glasses we will all have a sup of it superbly, for the dear knows how sick we could all be in the heel of the day.

Mr Brannigan smiled and nodded. Hackett hastily examined their faces in the uncertain light.

– I suppose it would pull us together a bit, he conceded. I’ll have a bottle too.

That Sunday morning had been surely one of manicoloured travail. After acerb disputation between De Selby and Saint Augustine, here they were for at least an hour in that closed pharmacy drinking Hurley’s Tonic Wine and listening to Sergeant Fottrell’s pensées on happiness, health, the wonders of foreign travel, law and order, and bicycles. The tonic was, as one suspected it would be, a cheap red wine heavily fortified. Its social purpose was clear enough. It enabled prim ladies, who would be shocked at the idea of entering a public house, to drink liquor that was by no means feeble, in the defensible interest of promoting health.

Mick had also bought a bottle and they were in the midst of a fourth bottle which Mr Brannigan bad gallantly put up ‘on the house’ when Mick felt that sheer shame required that the little party should end. Hackett agreed that he felt much better but not so Mick; even genuine wine does not help much, and he felt a little bit queasy. The sergeant was quite unmoved, and undeterred in loquacity. When they were back in the street Mick turned to him.

– Sergeant, the day is getting older and more people are now about. Would you mind if I left this bike in your station till tomorrow? I think for me a tram home would be the business.

– Benignly certain, he replied, courteously. Tell Policeman Pluck that I ordained the custody unceremoniously.

He then departed about his public business with many blessings commending his friends to God.

– Do you know, Hackett mentioned as they moved off, all that Augustinian chat is gradually bringing half-forgotten things bubbling up in my head. Didn’t he have a ferocious go at Pelagius?

– The heretic? Yes.

– What do you mean heretic?

– That’s what he was. Some synod condemned and excommunicated him.

– I thought only the Pope could pronounce on heresy.

– No. He appealed to the Pope without result.

– I see. Other bad eggs were the Manichees and the Donatists. I know that. I don’t mind about them at all. But if my memory isn’t all bunched. I believe Pelagius was a grand man and a sound theologian.

– You don’t know much on the subject. Don’t pretend.

– He believed Adam’s lapse (and personally I wouldn’t take the slightest notice of such fooling) harmed only himself. The guilt was his alone and this yarn about everybody being born in original sin is all bloody bull.

– Oh, as you will.

– Who, believing in God, could also believe that the whole human race was prostrate in ruin before Christ came, the day before yesterday?

– Augustine, for one, I think.

– New-born infants are innocent and if they die before baptism, they have a right to heaven. Baptism is only a rite, a sort of myth.

– According to De Selby, John the Baptist was no myth. He met the man. He probably regards him as a personal friend.

– Are you baptized?

– I suppose so.

– Suppose so? Is a hazy opinion enough if your soul depends on it?

– For heaven’s sake shut up. Haven’t we had enough for today and yesterday?

– An awkward question, what?

– At this rate I’ll probably meet Martin Luther on top of the tram.

Hackett contemptuously lit a cigarette and stopped.

– I’ll leave you here, go for a walk, get a paper, sit down and read a lot of boring muck, and wait for a chance to slip into the Colza. But remember this: I’m a Pelagian.

Policeman Pluck was young, raw-boned, mottled of complexion and wore an expression of friendly stupidity. He had a bicycle upside-down on the floor of the day-room attending to a hernia at the front rim, grating white powder on to a protruding intestine. His salute for Mick was an inane smile in which his scrupulously 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 (#ulink_d80081ac-fc40-53b2-9b6a-4ec213280991)


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





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