A Man Over Forty (23 page)

He drove the Land-Rover back to the village, where Balintore insisted on walking round the little square which was dominated from above by two enormous churches, and consoled on its own level by four public-houses. In the centre of the square stood a time-worn memorial with an inscription long effaced by the weather – but it was generally supposed to commemorate a patriot who had died in 1798 – and east and west from it ran the main street, which was enlivened by a dozen shops with brightly painted fronts, a garage and some petrol pumps, and two more public-houses; and to the east was ennobled by the ruins of an ancient abbey.

‘If, after a few weeks,' said Balintore, ‘I become a burden to Honoria, I can, I suppose, find rooms somewhere in the village. Nowhere in the world have I seen a place that has made so immediate an appeal, that was so instantly attractive, as this. Here's the country I've been looking for, and here, if I can
find accommodation, is where I'm going to settle down. Here's where I'll live with contentment as my neighbour.'

‘There was a hospice or guesthouse in the sixteenth century,' said Palladis, ‘but it was burnt by someone trying to pacify Ireland – either for Elizabeth or James I, I can't remember – and it has never been rebuilt. No, you wouldn't find accommodation in the village, but you can stay with Honoria as long as you like. She's always glad of company.'

They went into O'Hara's Bar and found the melancholy Michael Dooley drinking a pint of porter. He was wearing a new pair of Wellington boots, and had almost recovered from his persistent cold. He gladly agreed to look after Mr Balintore, and promised to put him over rising fish with unfailing regularity. They agreed to meet the following morning, and Dooley accepted another pint of porter.

For a whole week they woke to tall skies and bright, unclouded weather, and Balintore persuaded himself that he had found, not only a delectable refuge in the outermost surviving parts of civilization, but a hitherto unmapped territory where halcyon days were guaranteed by isobars of incredible benignity. He went fishing every day with Michael Dooley, and though he caught nothing but an occasional six-ounce trout, he would come ashore in the evening and protest his perfect enjoyment. He would repeat the long conversations he had had with Dooley, he would describe inaccurately the wading-birds and ducks he had seen, and usually he produced a bunch of faded flowers, twigs, and rushes – gathered on the island where he had gone ashore for lunch – and asked Honoria to identify them.

At dinner he listened attentively to her gossip of the countryside, and one evening, when she spoke of her late husband, asked her, ‘Was it he who gave O'Halloran his lease of those two fields?'

‘Oh, no,' she said. ‘No, it began earlier than that. It was Charles's father who gave O'Halloran's father a lease, or perhaps confirmed him in a lease that his grandfather had been given: it isn't easy to sort these things out. O'Halloran's father was a sergeant in the Connaught Rangers – they were disbanded, of course: such a pity, don't you think? Those
Irish regiments were
so
good, I don't believe we'd have lost our Empire if we'd kept hold of them. But it was all mixed up with politics, of course, and when people get politically interested they lose sight of everything that matters, don't they? Well, as I was saying, O'Halloran's father was a sergeant in the regiment that Charles's father commanded, and when he was our tenant he was no trouble at all: or so I've always heard. He kept a couple of cows, and did odd jobs about the demesne, and no one could have been nicer. Well, in those old-fashioned regiments everyone was nice, weren't they? But young O'Halloran – our O'Halloran – was a very clever boy, and troublesome from the start; though Charles liked him. Charles encouraged him, and helped him when he decided not to be a priest, as his mother wanted, but to study science. I know Charles lent him money to go to college in Galway, and whether that did him any good or not, who can tell? They teach science in Irish there, and that can't be easy.'

‘How old is O'Halloran?'

‘He was about the same age as Charles, I think, and Charles was ten years older than me. But haven't you met him yet?'

‘No.'

‘Oh, you'll have to meet him! Shall we ask him to dinner, Guy?'

‘I thought you were bitter enemies,' said Balintore.

‘So we are, but that's no reason why he shouldn't come to dinner. He can be very amusing, if he's in a good mood. He's been to Canada and Australia, looking for the sort of things that geologists do look for – minerals, I suppose, though I don't think he ever found any – and in the Hitler war he was in Italy with one of those Irish regiments that we didn't disband, thank goodness. And before that he fought in Spain. For Franco, of course. He was still a Catholic then.'

‘He fought in Spain?' said Balintore.

‘I don't know for how long, but long enough to get wounded. Charles was very jealous of him, but in spite of that helped him to go to college when he came home from Spain. And you've seen how he rewards us for Charles's kindness!'

‘If Charles had lived,' said Palladis—

‘It would have made no difference to anyone except me!
Charles couldn't have got rid of him, and I can't get rid of him – so let's make the best of a bad business, and ask him to dinner.'

Palladis did not take her suggestion very seriously. From time to time Honoria would say, ‘We must have a little dinnerparty. I ought to ask the So-and-so's, I'm sure I owe them something. And old Colonel Whatnot, such a bore, but he does enjoy a good meal. Some time next week, do you think?' But before she could decide on the appropriate day for her dinner-party her impulse would fade, or she would let a wilful forget-fulness remove from her mind an intention which could not be fulfilled without a great deal of trouble. Her proposal to invite O'Halloran had no substance, thought Palladis. It was a passing whim; and having passed, it would not recur.

After more than a week of fine weather, the clouds returned and for three or four days the whole countryside retreated from sight. Curtains of rain carried down the darkness of the surcharged sky to hide houses and hills, and dissolve the bright colours of the fields. To the drumming of rain on the windows was added the splash and gurgle of overflowing pipes and gutters, and the complacent chuckle of rivulets that ran anklehigh on either side of the drive.

With some reluctance Balintore discarded his romantic notion that an Irish summer consisted of an unbroken sequence of sunlit days, and showed the resilience of his spirit by finding compensation in the library. This was a dark and unused room in which he had found several hundred novels – many with slightly mildewed boards and a faint smell of damp – by such neglected authors as Charles Lever and Le Fanu and Charles Reade, and Whyte-Melville and Wilkie Collins, and Mrs Oliphant and George du Maurier and Ouida. The several volumes of Irish poetry that he had bought in Dublin were still wrapped in brown paper, but for several days he read Victorian novels with great avidity, and talked at the dinner-table in praise of their virtues.

‘They're so finite and accomplished,' he said. ‘They're not afraid of sentiment and not appalled by death. They take sex for granted – they realize it has been in existence for a long time – and give no more thought to its mechanism than
Shakespeare gave to Antony's metabolism. I sometimes think that our contemporary authors' preoccupation with sex is merely a symptom of their laziness. They won't bother to put on their boots and go to look for a subject out of doors.'

‘In some ways,' said Honoria, ‘Ireland is still rather like a Victorian novel. People are more interested in money than in sex – except for stud-grooms and farmers, of course, and that's because it's profitable when it's well managed.'

‘You mustn't underrate it,' said Palladis. ‘More and more the world becomes a suburban world, and how would the suburbs get on without it?'

‘They do,' said Balintore sourly.

‘They read about it.'

‘I like to read about it!' said Honoria. ‘I think reading takes your mind off it.'

‘And consider France,' said Palladis. ‘Without its kitchen, its
couture, and
its
connaissance approfondie de la vie
, how would France have survived?'

‘Charles never noticed what I wore or what he ate,' said Honoria.

Conversation relapsed into a gossiping reminiscence of clerical asceticism, the asceticism of maiden ladies, and of eccentric admirals who in retirement chose to live on a diet of ship's biscuit and dry hash. Honoria brought it to an end by saying, as she rose to leave them, ‘Charles's great-uncle Kevin lived to the age of eighty and never married. Then, at a party for his eightieth birthday, he fell in love with the grand-daughter of one of his oldest friends. But he was a man of great strength of character, so after the ladies had left them he drank half a bottle of port, went down to the beach, and without taking off his clothes – there was a full moon and everyone could see him – he swam out to sea and his body was never recovered.'

Balintore and Palladis went out to look at the weather, and Palladis said, ‘You'll have good fishing tomorrow. There'll be a broken sky, wind and sun, and rain from the south-west. Let's go to bed, and make an early start.'

‘A little whisky first,' said Balintore. ‘I like to prolong this sensation of living on the edge of the world and near forgotten
happiness. Let's have a little whisky before we say goodnight to those black clouds and the primrose light of the moon on the fringe of Atlantis. That's Atlantis down there, isn't it?'

‘Nothing but a bucket of rain,' said Palladis.

Wearing Sou' Wester, oilskin jacket, and waterproof trousers that never quite kept out the wet, Balintore fished the big lough for more than a week in broken weather, and came home day after day with a basket of six or eight or ten trout. Palladis, a better fisherman, seldom did so well; and with a smug pretence that it was only luck which made the difference between them, Balintore, in O'Hara's Bar, where they usually stopped before returning to Turk's Court, would buy drinks for an increasing audience, and relate every detail of his battle with the fish that Michael Dooley had netted for him.

Within ten or twelve days – for his luck stayed with him –he became something of a local hero; and that at the cost of no more than several gallons of porter. The children would come out to salute him in the morning, and when he came ashore in the evening he would give them sixpences to buy boiled sweets and ice-cream. He established himself as a figure in the neighbourhood, and two or three times the parish priest took a glass of whisky with him. He began to inquire of Honoria the possibility of buying a small property, and she, with a landowner's interest in dealings of that sort, would speak of little or greater holdings in the district, some of which had been abandoned and others might be in the market if the offered price were sufficient.

Twice she drove him, in the Land-Rover, over rough and narrow roads to look at lonely cottages and deserted houses, but though he still protested his wish to settle in the neighbourhood – to buy a house with an acre or two of land – he found nothing to please him; or please him enough to put money down for it.

There came a morning when he and Palladis were driven off
the lough by a rising gale and going into O'Hara's Bar they found ten or a dozen of the villagers gathered about a black-avised man who was loudly complaining, to the proprietor of the local garage, about the failure of a pump he had lately installed.

‘It's O'Halloran,' said Palladis. ‘You haven't met him, have you? Mr O'Halloran, this is a friend of mine, Edward Balintore.'

For a long moment O'Halloran looked at him in silence. ‘It's not the name he used to have,' he said; and turned to put down his glass. The dim light of an angry day illumined, though darkly, his scarred and shadowed face – shadowed by umbrageous eyebrows and a heavily drooping moustache – and Balintore, recognizing him, lost half his voice in a gasp of surprise. Thinly he exclaimed, ‘It's Dan O'Connell!'

‘No longer,' said O'Halloran. ‘I took a brave name from the past when I went out to play a brave part in a shabby world –and you, with the same impulse, I suppose, called yourself Alan Breck.'

‘A romantic whim,' said Balintore weakly.

‘How many years ago would that be?' said O'Halloran. ‘A quarter of a century, maybe more, and here's both of us still alive, by the mercy of God and to the total disqualification of anyone that thinks there's reason in the world. You've brought two old comrades together, Mr Palladis, and it's a clear case of drinking deep, and drinking again, to celebrate that. Drink up your porter, boys, and get clean glasses. It's whisky from now on, for I'm greeting a fellow soldier in the Tercio del Alcazar, in the great days in Spain. But I disremember his name, for it used to be Alan Breck when I called myself Dan O'Connell and neither of us had any more right to a noble patronymic than the soaring of our hearts, which were young in those days. What is it you call yourself now?'

‘Balintore.'

‘Then give me your hand before we drink together!'

Though Balintore was by no means insignificant in appearance – by no means of unimpressive stature – he was dwarfed by the great figure of O'Halloran, dark in rain-soaked dungarees; and the face that had dominated millions from a television-screen
looked plain and ordinary in comparison with the wild and extravagant features of the Irish geologist.

‘Hurry up with that whisky now,' said O'Halloran, and nervously the small, white-faced, ginger haired barman filled their glasses. It was his wife who owned the bar – she by birth was O'Hara, but he, who had come down from Ulster as a travelling salesman for sheep-dip, had the less ringing name of Willy Thom – and now his wife, roused by a note of excitement that had reached her in the kitchen, came in to demand, ‘What's all the noise about?'