Cast a cold eye, p.16
Cast A Cold Eye, page 16
“Just put a meal in front of me in the evening, and I’ll be perfectly happy,” he told her. “And I’ll be out in the middle of the day today.”
“Seven o’clock, then, for your supper,” she said firmly, and set to work on the dishes he’d left in the sink.
Jack left her up to her elbows in suds and went into the office to work.
The scene in the book that had been troubling him and that had only made sense that morning was out of sequence with what he’d been working on, but he opened up a new data document and went ahead and wrote it anyway. Later he could just fit it into the book in its proper place.
Two hours later, he’d written the equivalent of eight manuscript pages—his fastest pace at the best of times, he knew from past experience—and he was feeling just terrific. He decided to use the time he felt he’d gained by writing a few letters, one to his agent in New York to assure her that he was working every day and that the book was going well, one to his British agent in London, saying that he might be able to get over for a few days, a brief note to his accountant who was handling his bills and such in his absence, and a couple of personal letters to friends.
As he was finishing the last of the letters, he heard Mrs. Mullen in the living room, talking to someone. His first instinct was to go out and see what the problem was. Then he reminded himself that Mrs. Mullen could no doubt take care of whatever it was—probably some friend of hers who’d dropped by just to gawk at the house and at him as well—and he went back to finishing the letter. When he was done, he set the computer to print two copies of each letter, and strolled out to the living room.
Mrs. Mullen was in the bedroom, changing the sheets on the bed.
“Who was that at the door?” he said.
“The post,” Mrs. Mullen replied as she tucked the covers beneath the mattress so tightly that he wondered if he’d be able to get into the bed that night.
“The post! There was mail?”
“There was,” she said without looking up. “I gather from Mr. Hegarty, he’s the one that brought it, it’s the first you’ve had.”
“Yes, it is,” he said. “Where’d you put it?”
“Well, I didn’t want to be disturbing you at your work, so I just put it on the table in the kitchen. Was that all right? There was a couple of big parcels too.”
“Yes, fine. But you can bring it into me from now on.”
He hurried off to the kitchen. He knew from all of his friends who were writers that they all felt the same way he did: the daily arrival of the mail was often the big event of the day. Besides the mundane things like bills, the mail brought checks, books for review, manuscripts from publishers seeking praise-filled quotes for their covers, new books by friends whose work he admired, copies of the newspapers containing the reviews he wrote, magazines with his own short stories, and letters bearing news and gossip.
The pile on the kitchen table was a little battered from its transatlantic journey, but it was impressive. There were two packages that obviously contained manuscripts—some publicity departments were ingenious at tracking him down—four letters from friends to whom he’d given his Irish address, a book to review for the Washington Post, and a big envelope from his agent that he suspected contained more letters and, with a little luck, a contract on a film option that needed his signature.
He opened the package from his agent first. The contract was there, along with her usual hastily scrawled note saying that she hoped he was having a good time and working hard and not getting notions of becoming a recluse and writing nothing but (uncommercial) sensitive poetry.
He slapped the contract on his left hand and grinned.
“Are you sure I can’t fix you something?” Mrs. Mullen asked from the doorway behind him.
Jack jumped at the sound of her voice. “Oh! Yes, well, a cup of tea would be great. Thanks.”
He sat at the table and began opening the mail.
It was terrific. It was just terrific. There were letters to be answered, a couple of decisions to be made, a contract to be signed and returned at once, manuscripts to be read, a book to be read and reviewed. There was even a letter with Irish stamps on it containing an invitation to address a literary society in Galway. That was probably the doing of his British agent, but the letter had inexplicably gone to New York, and his agent had scribbled on the top of it, “That’s what you get for being famous. Have fun!”
Everything was normal. Everything was fine. The rhythm of his life had been changed, interrupted for a couple of weeks by the trip, the dislocation, even by the excitement of meeting Grainne. But now he was busy again, feeling the pressure of work he enjoyed and the comfortable squeeze of deadlines, no longer cut off from all the rest of his life.
“Mrs. Mullen,” he said happily, “you’ve brought me luck!”
Peggy Mullen was making potato salad and didn’t look up from what she was doing.
“I’ll have chicken for your supper,” she said. “And I’ll see can I get some soup out of the bones.”
As soon as he pulled the letters from the printer, he realized that he’d forgotten to buy envelopes. With the letters and the signed contract in his hand, he asked Mrs. Mullen which of the shops in Doolin would have them.
“Fanning’s,” she said at once. “They keep all that sort of thing. You can buy stamps there as well.” The implication was clear that there wasn’t much call in Doolin for “all that sort of thing.”
As he went out the door, he impulsively stopped, then went back and took the book he had to review from the kitchen table. The weather looked bright and clear, at least at the moment, and not too cold, and he was planning to take a long drive this afternoon. Maybe he’d find a pretty spot to sit and read for a while.
He got into the car and started the motor, then glanced down at the book beside him on the seat and, grinning, tapped his knuckles on the cover.
“You lucky fellow,” he said, addressing the author of the book, “your chances of a good review have already gone up a couple of notches.”
He was humming the Irish national anthem as he drove up the hill toward the village.
Fanning’s did indeed sell “all that sort of thing.” He bought what he needed, then wrote out and stamped envelopes for the letters and the contract.
McGlynn’s, he thought, when he’d tossed the other things into the car. Lunch at McGlynn’s today, then at the Seafoam tomorrow, and then I’ll alternate after that. Spread my custom around a little, get to know the people. It didn’t occur to him to include Nolan’s in his plans.
He had sausages and mashed potatoes for lunch, with a pint of lager, and he thought he’d never eaten so well. While he ate, he pulled out a pocket notebook he’d bought at Fanning’s—he always carried one at home—and jotted down a couple of things he needed to remember to do. At home, his desk was always littered with lists and reminders. Oh, and call the people in Galway about addressing the literary society.
Everything was fine.
He went sightseeing, feeling as excited as he ordinarily would on the first day of a normal vacation, with no research to do and no distractions of setting up housekeeping and an office in a foreign country. He felt suddenly liberated, almost high, and the car fairly flew over the roads.
His eyes drank in all the sights, all the rich profusion of details that mark a place, a land, as being different from what we know: the color of the sky, the shape of the clouds, the contours of the earth. And more than that: the narrow twisting road, lined on either side with unmortared walls of stone, the muddy sheep that speckled the hillsides, the occasional abandoned hut, its stone walls crumbling, a tangle of ancient thatch still clinging to the gable at one end. Even the perspective of driving on the left side of the road, which he’d gotten used to after only a couple of hours on the road from Dublin to Clare, seemed to give him a fresh, new angle of vision on everything.
On a distant hillside he spotted a ruined church or abbey with daylight showing through its glassless windows and hollow interior. He made a mental note to put it on his list of things to explore. He slowed his speed as the car neared a blind curve and then had to halt as twenty or thirty sheep, unimpressed by the vehicle, came ambling toward him. They were quite on their own, no farmer in sight, and Jack sat there grinning at them until they had strolled past the car and left the road clear again.
The road began climbing into the hills south of Doolin and, at one point, he was presented with a stunning view of the majestic Cliffs of Moher, their sheer rock faces staring impassively at the gray-blue Atlantic, while the ocean heaved and boiled against the rocks at their base.
He pulled the car off at the edge of the road and took in the view for a few minutes, breathing the clear air and feeling the wind toss his hair. That did it. The Cliffs of Moher would be the feature attraction for today. At the next junction in the road, a weathered little sign pointed the way and he turned the car in that direction.
He spent an hour and a half there, climbed the path to the top of the hill, stared at the tower on the crest that Yeats and Lady Gregory had loved, admired the view of the cliffs, and resisted the temptation to buy souvenirs at the tourist shop adjoining the now empty bus parking area. A good place to stay away from in tourist season, he thought, but wonderful now with only a few people besides himself and the hills and the cliffs and the wind.
The fact that he was not here as a tourist but as a resident—three months was a long time, after all—made him feel even better, and he was humming again as he drove out of the parking lot and turned left toward Doolin.
“Well, how do you like it?” said Father Malcolm Henning when the two of them were comfortably settled in his sitting room. Deirdre Corcoran had gone off to fix the tea.
“I like it just fine, Father,” Jack said.
“You’re all settled in, then, I take it?”
“Oh, yes. And the book is going fine. I got off to a slow start, but it’s going just fine now.”
“You certainly sound happy about it. Is Doolin everything you wanted for your research?”
For an instant, it occurred to Jack that the otherwise innocent question carried a double weight of meaning. And although there was nothing specific to remind him, Jack suddenly found himself thinking of the strange story the priest had told in the pub on Saturday night.
“Oh, it is,” he said. “In fact, in some ways, it’s almost more so.” He kept the pleasant look on his face but waited to see how the priest would respond. He didn’t want the conversation to become the same mild-mannered sort of contest the first one had been—he was feeling too good, too friendly, for that—but he did want to ask about the tale.
“How’s that?” asked the priest.
Jack almost shook his head in wonder at the old fellow’s conversational expertise. Ask everything, say nothing, that was his technique. Well, okay then, Jack had a few gambits of his own, not as subtle perhaps, but just as effective.
“Well, for one thing,” he said casually, “I was very interested in that story you told the other night in the pub. It didn’t strike me as a very Christian sort of tale, especially for a priest to be telling.”
“In what way did it seem unchristian?”
Jack had to grin openly at that.
“Talking heads?” he said.
That simple response must have done the trick, because the priest’s face crumpled into a thousand wrinkles as he returned Jack’s grin.
“It is quite a tale, isn’t it?” he said. “But, sure, that’s the way I heard it told to me, and I was only passing it along. You know, don’t you, that the tales must be passed on just exactly the way they come to you.”
Now Jack had an opening of his own, one the priest had unwittingly given him—that, combined with Grainne’s prompting the other day.
“Are you the seanachie here?”
The priest’s eyes were fixed on him and he was still smiling, but he said nothing for so long that Jack was beginning to feel the need of filling the silence with words. But he held out and, at last, Father Henning spoke. When he did so, the tone of his voice was changed, more serious, and again carried what appeared to be a double burden of meaning.
“I am,” he said, and the hard, clipped way he said it made it almost into a challenge. He stared at Jack. He hadn’t moved, hadn’t changed the expression in his face or his eyes, but everything about the sound of his voice speaking those two monosyllables made it clear that he’d offer nothing more.
Jack watched him for a minute, but finally, against his will, he had to drop his gaze.
“Listen, Father . . .” he began, trying to recapture the easiness of the first few minutes of their talk.
Father Henning said nothing.
“All I—”
But just then Deirdre Corcoran came in with the tea.
People are always coming in with tea in this damned country, Jack thought, no wonder they’re so slow with everything, tea always comes first, but he instantly pushed back his irritation. When in Ireland, do as the Irish do, he told himself. I am not going to let this old man, priest though he may be, spoil my day. He can help me out with the book by telling me stories and providing local color and local history, or he can tell me nothing, in which case I’ll simply make it all up if I have to. If Doolin, in the person of Father Malcolm Henning, wants to close itself off from me, then so be it. But he’s not going to play his little games with me. I won’t have every conversation turned into a contest. But why in the goddamn hell won’t the old codger talk to me?
“You’ll be putting on weight with Peggy’s cooking, I can tell you that,” Deirdre Corcoran said to him as she straightened up from the tray.
“Yes,” Jack said a little too quickly. “Yes, I suppose I will. I’m looking forward to it. I’m not much of a cook myself.”
“Didn’t your ladyfriend put a meal on the table for you?” she asked, still pretending to be fussing with the tea things.
Father Henning shot her a glance. Jack caught it and thought he saw that hint of amusement return to the priest’s face.
“Yes, she did, but she’ll only be here on weekends, whenever she can manage.”
“You’re engaged to be married, are you?” said Deirdre.
Frontal attack, Jack thought. And a solid wedge driven into his line. Time to fight back with a frontal attack of his own.
“No,” he said casually, leaning forward to take a cream biscuit from the plate on the tray. “No, we’re not. Just good friends, that’s all.”
“Oh, I see,” Deirdre said from the doorway.
“Deirdre, I do believe I smell something burning in the kitchen,” the priest said mildly.
Deirdre retreated, and Jack imagined her quizzing Peggy Mullen closely later that evening. The whole world, at least the world of Doolin, would know what color his underwear was by the time the sun went down.
“You have a very direct sort of way of speaking, Jack,” the priest said when they were alone, and Jack knew instantly that, in some odd way, maybe because of his boldness, the priest had moved a little closer. And he’d called him by his name, for the first time, Jack thought. Given the way this not-so-budding acquaintance was going so far, that could mark a new plateau.
“So does everybody around here, it seems.”
“Not everybody,” the priest replied. “As you’ll learn when you’ve been here a bit. Are you still planning to stay three months?”
“I am.” Don’t sound too Irish, Jack told himself at once. That mimetic tendency could make them think you’re making fun of them. And that thought raised another: these people deliberately seemed to cut him off, forcing him to regard them as if they were some sort of primitive savages, guarding their secret rites and customs from the intruding, prying eyes of a stranger.
“You’ll be seeing a great deal, then, as the time goes by,” said Father Henning. And then, as it had before, his manner suddenly changed. “I was so happy to see you at the church yesterday. I hope you’ll be coming regularly from now on. Now I won’t be lecturing you and trying to tell a grown man what’s what, but it would be a good thing for you and I think you’d feel better for it.” As he spoke, the words rolling so easily off his tongue, he was indistinguishable, Jack thought, from all the hearty Irish priests he’d known in his childhood and youth.
But, still, there was something different here, something distant.
“I expect I’ll be there, Father,” he said.
They sipped at their tea.
“So you’re the seanachie,” Jack said, and watched for a reaction.
The priest set his cup down carefully. From seeing them in action, Jack was beginning to realize that the Irish used the teacup or the pint glass of Guinness the way George Burns used his cigar, for punctuation and pacing and making the most of a point.
“I am, in a way,” Father Henning said, but now he was staring at his teacup and not watching Jack’s face at all, not measuring anything, as he’d done before. “In the old days, you know, the seanachie was treated almost like one of the lower gods, so important was his function of preserving history. But you must remember too that among an illiterate people he preserved more than the tales of kings and battles. In remote areas, it was he who preserved the history, say, of a village. He was the records office, as you might say, and often he was the only one who recalled the exact boundary of a bit of land, or whose cousin, twice or thrice removed, had married so and so.”
The priest paused, but he was looking for no response, Jack knew, just thinking ahead to the next part of what he was going to say. “In the old days,” he had begun. To an Irishman, that phrase didn’t mean what it meant to an American. When an Irishman says “the old days,” he might mean his own youth, or a time a hundred years gone by, or a thousand.
