‘Hey, Eneas,’ says Harcourt. ‘You know how far it is to camp?’
‘Haven’t a God’s notion.’
‘Me neither,’ says Harcourt. The truck fumes on a halfminute. All crimes and sorrows, all mothers, histories, are hidden in the afflicted smoke. ‘That’s how I like it!’
Laughter again.
Moonlight brings Nigeria closer to Ireland. It might be Ireland because the night is still and quiet as a stone. The camp receives them with a mixture of officiousness and good humour. They have their bunks assigned to them and their hours explained and it is just the same as anywhere in the world except Eneas does notice the clash of wit and easiness between the new men and the old hands. The talk is very speedy and he doesn’t catch the gist of much of it and he knows these men would have the same difficulty if they were to find themselves of a sudden on the quays in Sligo, one single Negraman among a few dozen densespeaking Irish. But he’s glad now to be among the grubby tents with the toiling ditch of a canal reaching back up the night-encrusted plain. He eats some kind of vegetable stew with them, and they turn in like sailors on a becalmed sea, and it seems natural enough that Harcourt, the nearest thing to a fellow Irish, lays himself down on the bunk adjacent. Soon the room is a parliament of fireflies, the soft intensifying and dwindling whorl of cigarettes.
Harcourt gives Eneas a pleasant smile for himself. A few of the men gather round a candle stub and flick a pack of grubby cards about. One of the players has a bruised face, three or four dark-blue flowers of bruises, a week or two old. But the storm of violence seems far distant from him now, because his wrecked face frowns and mutters over each shining hand of cards.
‘So, what were you doing there, in Ireland,’ says Eneas, ‘that time I met you?’
‘What did I tell you I was doing?’ says Harcourt, the ash from his cigarette beginning to gather unheeded on the chest of his long johns.
‘I don’t know, since I don’t remember it…’
‘You know Rice’s public house, at the top of Grafton Street?’ says Harcourt.
‘In Dublin?’ says Eneas, a little disorientated to hear those names out of God knew where in Nigeria, from the friendly mouth of a Nigerian.
‘I think I told you I was on holiday! I think I did. Yes, I did. And I think I told you that the priest at home, at home there in Lagos, because, though born in Port Harcourt I have to call Lagos home, since me and my father lived there so many long and busy years, but I told you that already — what was I saying, oh, yes, the priest — can’t remember what I was going to say to you about him … Well, brother, Rice’s. Now that’s a fine establishment. But on the first floor there of Rice’s was this little office of Army Intelligence. You won’t have known that, anyhow. I hope not!’
‘Army — which army?’
That’s right, you got your own army there in Ireland, don’t you? And it’s not like the army here, which is really belonging to Britain and His Majesty himself. No. But, during the war, and secret, as secret as any secret between girls, you know, well, His Majesty’s army kept a little office going there in Rice’s, for the gathering of information generally, in your sweet neutral country, information of invasions, and such like. And me, I was assigned, due to my indubitable talent for eliciting information in an easy and decent manner, I was assigned to travel between Belfast and Dublin on the trains and talk to servicemen in their civvies and the like and to talk to any foreigners, you know, that might like to be talked to and have information they might or might not be aware they had.’
‘By God — and did you gather much of interest?’
‘Of interest … I heard sad tales of wives deserted, of children displaced, I heard tales of love, and history. Men told me small dark secret things that would mean nothing to anyone but were eating them away. I heard of great things done by ordinary people, kind of astonishing things, lives rescued from districts of hell. I heard of women’s breasts cut off and I heard of things so terrible I don’t recall them, I don’t retrieve them from those times I was told them. Up and down on the Belfast to Dublin train, on the Dublin to Belfast, the friendly man, the madman, listening and I tell you, sometimes crying like a child, more often laughing, think of it, what an occupation. Yards and yards of things of interest, but, nothing of use …’
‘Just as well maybe — in Ireland.. .’
‘I don’t know what you mean maybe, but I know what you mean. I was long enough there to know what you mean and not know what you mean. Yes, sir, brother.’
‘There are many strange things about that war, and that’s another strange thing you’ve just told me.’
‘Haven’t you noticed how out-and-out strange as a rule the world is, Eneas, man?’
‘I have.’
‘And how so little of it illumines anything at all. How so little of it shines the least light on the smallest penny of fact or truth?’
‘That thought, that could be something in the Bible, Harcourt.’
‘Most likely is, brother.’
‘So how come you’re out here for the digging yourself, Harcourt?’
‘Eh?’
‘You know, Army Intelligence like you were, how come you’re digging out here? You know, you asked me the same question in the truck.’
‘Did I? See, force of habit. Put me in a moving vehicle and I ask questions I should maybe leave alone.’
‘Oh — I wouldn’t pry. God knows, a man must keep his own counsel. Goes without saying.’
‘Anyhow, Eneas, why I’m here is another story. It’s no mystery. Fact is, I was invalided out — even before the war ended, blast me. I always had — well, this medical problem. But I was able to keep it hidden for a long while. Then one day I failed to keep it hidden, hidden anyhow from the eyes of my officers. They were kind. But I was out, and then home after a while, and you know what the situation is now for work, and I couldn’t find any work using my head such as it is, so I’m out here using my body such as it is, and God help me …’
‘A person’s got to feed himself.’
‘Well, a person does.’
‘And this ailment of yours …’
‘I tell you,’ says Harcourt, ‘there’s worse things than buggering ailments and being fecked out of the army. It’s not easy to be at home. I didn’t want to hang about Lagos. Things have changed there, brother, it’s not my town any more. My father’s like an old cracked cup now that won’t hold water. Some days, my father, he thinks he’s the king of England. Confused old man he is now. He’s got the notes all jumbled in his head and he’s no use for the piano tuning. A sad sight. And that always troubles a son. Maybe I should be looking after him. But Lagos is full of wild men these days, wild-talking men. With the war over some men want great things, big things, and especially that big thing you have in your sweet country, and I’m talking about independence. And those sort of men don’t like my father’s sort and they don’t like me, who was in the army, you know, and leads a quiet life, and takes things as they come … Death-threats are all the fashion now in Lagos, let me tell you.’
‘This is a familiar story,’ says Eneas.
‘Yes?’
‘Familiar.’
‘Well, so maybe you know what’s going on for me so, I don’t know. You say it’s familiar to you. Good. That’s good.’
‘I wish I didn’t.’
‘Ah, yes. We all wish that. Goodnight, brother.’
‘Goodnight.’
The house of the chief engineer looks like the drawing of a house that a child makes with a door in the middle and a window each side of the door, except the roof is flat and the fact is the whole house can be dismantled and trucked on to the next site across the packed dry earth. The chief engineer has a houseboy in a fine suit a little dusty that has belonged in the past to the engineer possibly and is a cast-off of sorts, but finer than any clobber of Eneas’s. And the great man drives a big motorbike at the greatest speed he can muster, revving the throttle across the thorny spaces and creating in his
reckless wake a wonderful flower, a bush of red dust. And indeed, the engineer’s greatest pride is a pot of roses that stands at the door of his movable house, and is watered and kept shaded from the worst ovens of the heat by the houseboy. At night when he looks in Eneas can vaguely see the waves of mosquito curtains billowing and the chief engineer is at that time of day decked out in his mosquito boots and fair play to him. The canal already exists on careful charts in the house which are brought down to the site hut in the mornings, rolled underarm like large batons. And such expertise is wielded you might say against the strange blankness of that district.
It happens that this person is an Irishman called Benson from Roscommon, so in the first week Eneas is sought out for news of home. Benson has style to him like a polished stone, an ordinary stone off the roads of Ireland, but polished. And he has great politeness, Eneas immediately notes, and is agreeable and not satirical as the jumped-up species of Irish or any people can be. Eneas is stopped in his digging and brought up to the hut and given a mug of best tea and it is as refreshing now as a bathe in asses’ milk, if that is refreshing, not just beautifying, as in the tales about Cleopatra.
‘So,’ says Benson, ‘another Irishman, McNulty, you say, well.,
‘That’s it,’ says Eneas and he notes in himself less of an ability to talk to this man than to Harcourt, still below sweltering with a ready shovel.
‘Yes, yes,’ says Benson, ‘you know, I worked with a man called McNulty some years back, from Sligo, when we were both employed up there on the Gold Coast. A very nice man he was. Jack McNulty, an engineer like myself. I don’t suppose he’s any relation of yours?’
Eneas is on the cusp naturally of saying my brother, but he doesn’t say it. No, he doesn’t.
‘I don’t think so, sir,’ he says, a little army fashion, a soldier speaking to an officer, a hint that Benson catches.
‘You were in the war?’ he asks.
‘I was.’
‘So was I,’ says Benson. ‘Bomb disposal. The engineer’s lot.’
Eneas is about to say, ‘Like Jack,’ but catches himself in time. He doesn’t know why he has denied his brother, as the saying goes, but he had better stick to the denial. Sure enough Jack did do some bomb-disposal work as far as he knows. You needed a quiet hand and a stout heart for that.
‘What did you do yourself, McNulty?’ says Benson.
‘Not much is the answer. I was — taken off the beach at Dunkirk. Well, in a kind of way. But sometimes, I don’t remember it.’
‘Where did you come from this time when you came out here?’
‘London.’
‘Poor old London. I hope they can rebuild her. And I say that not only from a professional point of view. Thank God the war is over. Thank God.’
‘Aye.’
‘You see that rose? Isn’t it a beautiful thing? “Peace”, is the name of it. It was bred in France and launched on the world on Armistice Day. Every rose has a name, you know.’ ‘I expect.’
Eneas has that sense of his answers getting shorter and shorter but he can’t help it. He feels he said too much when he mentioned Dunkirk. It gave him a fright to say the name. Maybe he hadn’t been at Dunkirk and certainly oftentimes he knows he wasn’t. Just as surely at others he knows he was. Looks like he has a choice of memories for the same times here and there. Not so good. Anyway, discretion, discretion. Of course he thought of Roseanne when the topic of the roses came up, but what would be the use of mentioning Roseanne to Benson? He would like to answer Benson like a civilized man but he can’t afford to. Roscommon after all isn’t so far from Sligo in fact neighbours it and if he has travelled so far for safety he must play it safe with Benson now. Maybe he doesn’t altogether like the mother-of-pearl buttons on the man’s shirt and the well-cut jacket and the general air of power and happiness — well, whatever the general air of the man is. Poor old Jack, with his mountainous problems, there was a time when he would have been proud to acknowledge Jack, educated, officer, and to talk about Sligo to any man who could share an understanding of its beauties and dangers, but somehow something has changed. He still sees instantly the grievous bulk of Knocknarea rising massive and elderly in a filthy rain, or the rain-browned pavements of the town, when the word Sligo sounds like a holy bell, but, something nevertheless has changed. It isn’t just the famous threats of Jonno and O’Dowd and those hurtling shadows along the riverbank, but some inner urge now to privacy, to peace even it could be said. He doesn’t believe any more in one man fishing fact and remembrance from another man. He’s happy to drink the tea. He’s happy to say nothing. He couldn’t care less whether anyone followed him out here to shoot him. What an achievement that would be, to trail him across half the world, traipse upcountry here and execute the notorious enemy of the Irish people. Well, his blood would freeze and he would shit his pants if he saw them coming, because fear is an animal that lives in a man separately, and pokes its head out at will. No, it is that fear so long endured and the nature of his life with that fear as his companion animal that seem to have changed him, altered the man himself. Eneas McNulty. Maybe he should change his name he thinks, except it’s very hard to trust a forged passport and anyway he believes that this fear long suffered has changed his face, changed the lines on his hands, his fingerprints, the imprint of his very soul pressed temporarily on the earth. The fear has become something else, could he dare call it a strength, a privacy anyhow. A sort of privacy private to himself, a house with a private garden.
‘Maybe you should get back to your work,’ says Benson kindly when that odd minute of wordlessness passes, kindly, at ease even, but with that strange definite air that an employer can always muster, even smiling a little. Let him laugh at him if he wishes, if he thinks Eneas McNulty is funny. Well, he is funny, a forty-six-year-old creature with a bleary face that can’t answer a pleasant question about Ireland and denies his excellent brother.
‘Yes, sir,’ says Eneas, grateful for the tea and grateful to be gone. An oddity. A singular man. An anecdote for Benson.
Curious old earth they dig from the first wild talk of the birds in the thorns to the deeps of silence when the rackets and whistling and cheering of the insects stops and sheets of darkness plunder down over the plain and claim the numbed countryside. Day by day the new spades gather hoards of scratches and scores and grow old in their hands. Nevertheless there is pride in Eneas for the strength of his back, and he digs as if carelessly or careless of the task but he’s fit and good for it. Harcourt not so much as he because Harcourt is really a head man. It’s Harcourt’s brains that are his pride. Eneas must conclude that Harcourt is truly a wise man in that he speaks elegant as a judge and opines on many a matter and has driven already the shadows from some dark questions bothering Eneas these dozen years. Harcourt believes that as a person is but briefly on the earth it behoves him to look about and understand the nature of the great puzzle of life. That a person could never know for why he is upon the earth and yet he might for a moment feel the light of heaven pierce down upon his head, for a moment, a moment, and have a little suggestion, a little touch of the sugar of heaven. Harcourt evidently scorns religion and priests after all despite his early comments though he has a broad knowing of them. Because religions and priests offend his idea of heaven, in the main. And he is fond of displaying to Eneas in the privacy of their near bunks the various amazing and ancient practices of some of the more lonesome people of Nigeria. His own mother, it appears, came from a group of excellent people that until the arrival of the British into the then private districts of her native realm — sometimes chopping off hands and heads for the sake of discipline and terror — were wont to give the credit of greater life to the dead ones, and called themselves in fact by the names of the dead and believed themselves to be mere shadows and the haunters of the huts of the Great Living — to wit, the eternal dead. Stances removed by the ascendancy of Harcourt’s family into the colder and notionless regions of the piano-owning classes of Lagos. And al
so that human life was a sort of first death before the great death, to wit, Life itself.
Eneas lies in the sunken dark of the tent and listens because Harcourt pleases him and he is greatly affected by the friendship that Harcourt bestows on him, him, an unwanted or extra Irishman as it were. Though Eneas has his own weeds of pride quite proudly growing about his soul, yet his simpler heart needs the balm of another person’s bountiful friendship, which he thinks is the nature of Harcourt’s admirable and continuous talking. Some slight academy of interesting and twisting thoughts takes place under the starry tent, and if Eneas is beyond healing truly, yet he settles further into peace, and things in his head find their places, hammer to its niche, sextant to its shelf and box, and he is fiercely content to dig the canal for Benson of Roscommon, and hear wisdom from Harcourt of Lagos.
16
THE DAYS OF LETTERS are well gone now, and the only touch he has against his mother must be in dreams, and truth to tell his dreams are poor things really and he has a contempt for them. But now and then some nights she flits through in strange guises, whether as the avenging crone of old dreams, or the bright flame of an aisling that he has no need of, and rises unbidden from the paltry bog of his sleeping brain. He knows that she and all her world will die, and her secrets too, and he knows that all traces of even his own days will be pulled from the streets of Sligo, and the names of the shops will change again, and someone’s premises here and another’s there will suffer the great iron ball, and he knows that in that sense he is already dead, that time has already taken care of him. There is the living breathing world of Ireland with De Valeras and the sons of powerful men taking power as they come to age. It’s all the old story over again except this time the rich man is themselves in a motorcar and a house on a respectable road. Well, he must not worry about politics, he’s beyond them now. He has never been for politics, only the flotsam of its minor storms.