Strumpet City (22 page)

‘Did you hear the bell ringing?’ he asked.

‘I did. I’d want to be deaf not to.’

The bell of St. Brigid’s stood in the church grounds, a great bronze affair supported by bars which were imbedded in a stone pedestal.

‘That was me,’ Rashers said, modestly.

‘You rang it?’

‘The clerk said I could. Hanlon used to do it for him of a Sunday.’

‘And now it’s your privilege,’ Hennessy said. ‘Isn’t that a great honour—to be summoning near and far to the house of God.’

‘I knocked a bloody fine clatter out of it,’ Rashers boasted. ‘Got my feet against the stonework, took the rope in my hand and lay back.’

He gave Hennessy a rough demonstration.

‘It sounded very impressive,’ Hennessy confirmed. ‘Every clang caught me at the back of the throat.’

‘Here’s something else for the same place,’ Rashers said. He opened a newspaper and displayed slices of chicken and ham, which he had managed to hide away in the course of breakfast. When he had divided them with Hennessy he took a bottle from his pocket, removed the cork and passed it under Hennessy’s nose.

‘Port wine,’ Hennessy breathed.

‘Pinched it from a bottle on the dresser.’

‘They’ll miss it and you’ll be in trouble.’

‘There were three half-finished bottles in a row. They’ll never guess.’

‘Somebody must be partial to the cup that cheers.’

‘Father Giffley, I imagine. The other man is a bit prejudiced in that direction. He doesn’t like the smell of drink at all.’

‘God bless the thought, anyway,’ Hennessy said. He drank deeply.

‘What do you think of my little place here?’ Rashers asked, as they feasted.

‘If I was you I’d bunk down here at nights instead of in that bloody oul basement in Chandler’s Court.’

‘I would, only for the dog. I can’t very well leave him on his own.’

‘Bring him with you,’ Hennessy suggested generously.

‘That would be a class of a sacrilege,’ Rashers objected, ‘bringing an unbaptised animal into a church.’

‘This isn’t the church.’

‘It’s all sanctified ground.’

‘Not the boiler house,’ Hennessy argued. ‘Sanctifying the boiler house would be a bit Irish. You might as well say the toilet at the back of the vestry was sanctified.’

The point impressed Rashers.

‘You might be right,’ he conceded.

‘Of course I’m right.’

‘Maybe I’ll chance bringing him down an odd night,’ he agreed. Again he passed the bottle to Hennessy. He thought in silence for a while.

‘A bit of music mightn’t be out of place.’

‘What music?’ Hennessy asked.

‘This,’ Rashers said. He rooted in his inner pockets and drew out a tin whistle. It was a superior toned Italian Flageolet.

‘I got a present of a shilling at Christmas from Father Giffley,’ he explained, ‘and I squandered it on this.’

‘Are you not afraid they’d hear you above?’

‘Divil the bit.’ He held the whistle towards Hennessy. ‘What do you think of it?’

Its slender column took on the rosy hue of the firelight. They both regarded it, Rashers affectionately, Hennessy, his mouth full of food, with an expression of bulbous curiosity.

‘You spent a shilling on that?’ he asked when it was physically possible.

Rashers turned it about and about in the firelight and said: ‘I often spent a shilling on less.’ He took a swig from the bottle and passed it to Hennessy.

‘Isn’t this the life of Reilly?’ Hennessy exclaimed. They bent forward together to let the fireglow play on their bodies, unaware of the antics of their gigantic shadows in the flickering candlelight.

‘I knew you’d like the wine,’ Rashers said. ‘It’s made out of grapes.’

‘Play the oul whistle,’ Hennessy invited. He disposed himself comfortably to listen.

Rashers began to do so. The notes came out sweetly and slowly. Hennessy, listening politely, now and then gathered food crumbs from the paper on his knee with fingers that courteously avoided noise. Rashers thrust his chin forward and found again a simple consolation he had lost months before in race crowds and drink.

Celebrating late mass in the church above them, Father Giffley bent down to the altar and breathed the
Domine Non Sum Dignus
. The act of stooping sent a stab of pain shooting from his neck to his throbbing eyes. The server struck the altar gong three times with the felt-headed hammer and the worshippers bent low also and beat their breasts.

BOOK TWO

1910–1912

C
HAPTER
O
NE

At fifteen minutes to midnight on the sixth day of May 1910, in the presence of Her Majesty Queen Alexandra, the Prince and Princess of Wales, the Princess Royal and the Duke of Fife, Princess Victoria, Princess Louise and the Duchess of Argyll, Edward VII breathed his last.

The Archbishop of Dublin had called for prayers for his recovery. When these were seen to have gone unanswered, the city did the next best thing. It went into deep mourning. Prescott’s, the cleaners, who claimed to have enormous facilities for such work, offered to dye all articles of clothing black at the shortest notice. Mrs. Bradshaw availed of their services and during his lying-instate she began to read the newspapers closely, keeping her husband well informed on the day-to-day events. The report of a storm, particularly, caught her interest. It occurred on the Wednesday and involved the historic scene at Westminster in a wild splendour. It broke about the heads of his loyal subjects who waited hour after hour to pay their last tribute. Vivid flashes of lightning streaked the sky and thunder crashed above the hall in which the King lay, guarded by his silent and motionless watchers. He was the least troubled of them all. The Liberals had threatened to abolish his house of peers; they could do so now without causing him the least pain. John Redmond had urged his Irish followers to hasten Home Rule by supporting the Liberal policy; he could now lean over to bawl it in the King’s ear and no flicker of the royal eyelids would reprove or admonish him. For months his subjects had wondered if in such a crisis the King could remain above politics. Death, with an unexpected gesture, had assured them that he would.

‘What a terrible storm last night,’ Mrs. Bradshaw said to her husband, when he had returned from his morning walk along the front.

‘A fog,’ he corrected. ‘I’d hardly call it a storm.’

‘I mean in London.’

‘Oh—that.’

‘It’s all here in the paper.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ he said, ‘the Kish was going all night.’

She had heard it too. All night the boom of the fog signal had disturbed her rest, a regular, disembodied moan that made the night restless.

‘There’s a thick mist at sea,’ he reported.

‘I felt there would be. How I pity the poor sailors.’

‘Didn’t stop the Navy. Part of the Home Fleet have anchored down below—I could make out the
Lord Nelson
.’ Bradshaw was very good at ships. He knew their names and could tell the difference between battleships and cruisers, gunboats and destroyers. The gentlemen of Kingstown, of course, took a very special pride in such things. Naturally so.

‘It’s a beautiful name—the Peacemaker.’

Bradshaw looked puzzled. Then he understood.

‘You mean the King?’

‘Of course. That is what they are calling him.’

‘Ah. For a moment I thought you meant one of the battleships,’ he explained.

The next day public departments, banks and business establishments closed. The Most Reverend Dr. Walsh, Archbishop of Dublin, presided at Votive Mass in the Pro-Cathedral.

Yearling, who was staying at a remote hotel in Connemara for the mayfly fishing, forgot the significance of the day until very late that night. He was drinking whiskey, not in the hotel, but unobtrusively in a little public house. One of the local people was playing a fiddle and Yearling had the seat beside the turf fire. There was a smoky oil lamp hanging from the ceiling which gave the room a small, shadowed look, and the men near him, to his delight, were speaking quietly together in Gaelic. Their voices, unaccountably, reminded him that this had been the day of the royal funeral. He thought of William Martin Murphy and, with the merest ghost of a smile, he remembered his refusal to be tapped on the shoulder by the dead king’s sword.

The high grey walls of the workhouse shut out almost everything; they were a fortification against the life of the city, a barrier against time, which passed yet did not seem to pass. The visitors who came weekly were few; the inmates were many. Carts passed in and out on stated days with a jingling of harness and a creaking of shafts and a stumbling of hooves on the uneven cobbles, but these meant little to the old women who hobbled about the grounds in shapeless grey dresses, and nothing at all to those lying in the close-packed wards, their eyes fixed on the high ceilings for hours of silence. Here, too, Death came most frequently and with no noise at all. From where, Miss Gilchrist sometimes wondered: through the great arched gateway whether closed or open, up from the deep earth or down from the insubstantial sky? Three times it had come for her in the space of almost three years: once in daylight, when from beyond the screens about her bed the voices of the others and the clatter of crockery told her it was tea-time; once in the small hours when the candle in the hand of the sister lit the priest’s bending face; once when a giantlike thumb stretched down to anoint her from a limitless absence of either light or darkness. Yet she struggled back to the world again and at breakfast time the old woman whose turn it was to be on ward duty said:

‘We thought you were gone on us for certain yesterday, Gilchrist.’

She was unable to speak. After a while she managed to assemble her surroundings once more; the rusted iron beds side by side, the high window, the bare uneven boards of the ward.

‘You’ll be off your feet for good this time, Gilchrist,’ the old woman said, coming back, ‘and you’re a lucky oul bitch in that. You won’t have to empty any more bedpans.’

Miss Gilchrist smiled again. She had a sharp tongue, once well stocked for use. But now she kept to herself the answers that occurred so readily. They were no longer worth making. In a day or in a week; or in another three years, it would be all the same, whatever had been said or unsaid.

She was content now to lie quietly and know nothing of what passed outside. She would not, she knew, ever again take her turn at emptying the slops or the bedpans, or scrub the walls down, or sweep the floors or attend at the morgue where Death laid out his conquests before they were carted off to the grave. Miss Gilchrist had taken her turn at washing them for their journey. One day in winter she had entered to do her work and screamed because there were seven dead babies on one of the slabs. She was to be reprimanded severely for her conduct, but nothing further was said to her because near dawn the next morning she had her second attack. After considerable thought she decided to speak to Father O’Connor about it. It was his habit now to make occasional visits. He had come first because Mrs. Bradshaw, her conscience still troubled about the servant she had been fond of, asked him. Then, seizing the opportunity for the exercise of Christian virtue, he decided to continue because he suffered each time he had to enter among the miserable and the destitute and it seemed good to him to offer it to God for salvation’s sake, for his own soul and that of his superior. It might be the means of saving Father Giffley from alcoholism; if not it was still part of his duty to practise the corporal works of mercy—to clothe the naked, to feed the hungry, to visit the sick and imprisoned and to bury the dead.

The thought of seven naked babies, side by side on the slab of the dead, was a terrible one. But then, everything about the workhouse was terrible; poverty and illness and loneliness and senility were its four guardian angels.

‘You must think of them as seven innocent souls,’ he told Miss Gilchrist, ‘seven new angels praising God in heaven.’

Without changing her expression she said: ‘I want you to speak to Mrs. Bradshaw for me.’

‘Certainly.’

‘I want her to know what will happen to me when I die here.’

‘You’re distressing yourself . . .’ Father O’Connor said.

‘They’ll take me with the rest and bury me in a pauper’s grave. I want her to claim my body and save me from that.’

He tried to say something, but it was difficult. Her face was grey and very small, her lips were colourless and ringed with dried spittle which cracked when she spoke. Her mind was fixed firmly now on what she wanted to say.

‘I’ve seen too many of them, Father, laid out there to be whipped off without a tear from a friend or a solitary soul to say goodbye. Do you know what I seen once?’

She turned her face away and for a moment he thought she was wandering back to the incident of the babies again. But it wasn’t that.

‘Sometimes they forget to lock the back door of the morgue—the one that leads into the laneway. Once when I went in there was a scattering of little boys. Do you know what they were up to, Father? They were stealing the pennies from the eyes of the dead.’

He had learned enough these past few years to feel only regret. The children of need were capable of deeds far worse.

‘I would like to think that when I go someone will claim my poor body.’

‘I’ll speak to Mrs. Bradshaw,’ he promised. As always, his temptation to run away almost mastered his will to help. He fought it; for over two years it had been the same battle, trying not to surrender to disgust.

‘You mustn’t give way to morbid fancies,’ he insisted. ‘You can be sure you’ll see many and many a long day yet.’ He looked over at the high window. He saw, at a great distance it seemed, the Dublin mountains. They were, as always, fresh and beautiful. In surroundings such as that, among fields and hills, the old lady near him had been born. He looked back at the bed. She was shaking her head from side to side, denying something he had said.

It was through Miss Gilchrist that he paid his first visit to Mary. He did so to ask Mary to visit the old woman. The meeting was embarrassing at first. Mary had been two years in his parish yet he had made no attempt to contact her, partly because of what had happened on the night she had called to the vestry with Fitz to arrange their marriage, partly because it was difficult to avoid reference to the world they had met in first. Mary offered him tea but he refused.