‘Bitch goddess!’ said James, with sudden and unexpected force.
Uncle Peter looked up at him like an elderly bishop whose sermon has just been interrupted by a junior member of the choir. ‘I beg your pardon, Young James? What did you say?’
‘Bitch goddess!’ James repeated with the same vigour as before. ‘Maud Gonne is Yeats’s bitch goddess. She wouldn’t marry him and she wouldn’t leave him alone. She’s tormented him for years, the cow!’
‘Maybe,’ said Uncle Peter, ‘but perhaps it’s just as well the poet man met his bitch goddess. Answer me this, Young James, would we have had Homer’s Iliad without Helen of Troy? She was somebody’s bitch goddess, though I’m damned if I can remember whose just at this moment. Would your man Shakespeare have written Antony and Cleopatra without Cleopatra and her snake, best thing that ever happened to her in my view? Or John Donne written his verses without all those mistresses of his? What would have happened if they had married anyway, Yeats and Maud Gonne? Maybe they’d have lived happily ever after, taking out the tarot cards under the fruit trees in the garden in the afternoon and writing obscure papers for the Theosophical Society in London in the evening. No pain, no poem. I’ve never had much to do with the women myself,’ he admitted, ‘too temperamental for me, but I’ve always understood that the one thing they’re good for is a bit for inspiration for the poetry writing classes when the normal things like drink have failed.’
‘Anyway,’ Uncle Peter went on, fuelling his cynicism with another large gulp of Cockburn’s finest Old Tawny, ‘your man Yeats, so a professor from Trinity told me once – don’t ask me his name, that’s gone too for the present – he told me Yeats thought he and his friends could create an alternative version of the Irish past to fill the political vacuum left by the death of Parnell and the squabbling of his associates. Horse manure!’ He paused for just one more mouthful. ‘Horse manure and gobshite! How many people from Carrick-on-Shannon or Ballywalter know where the bloody Abbey Theatre Yeats founded actually is? How many people have bought tickets for the performances? How many Catholic farmers and shopkeepers and solicitors are ever going to buy a book of poetry, any damned poetry, let alone stuff with titles like “The Song of the Wandering Aengus” or “The Valley of the Black Pig” or “The Host of the Air”, for God’s sake? And how many Christian Brothers are going to teach poetry written by a Protestant from Sligo, if they teach poetry at all?
‘Damn. I’m lost now. Where was I?’
‘Parnell’s just off the boat, Uncle Peter,’ said Johnny, ‘and it was still raining. This was Ireland, after all.’
Uncle Peter looked as if he was going to continue his diatribe, but he went back to his book.
‘“The body was carried quickly ashore and placed on the waiting train. There was a short delay while the mail was unloaded from the Ireland. Charles Stewart Parnell began his last journey into Ireland’s capital on track laid in 1834 by the Dublin and Kingston Railway Company, at the time the first commuter line in the world. At seven thirty on Sunday morning it reached Westland Row station. As the coffin, six feet four inches long, was finally removed from the large deal case which had protected it on its rough journey across the sea, the crowd surged forward and hacked the case to pieces, breaking the wood up into fragments to be treasured as relics, as if they had come from a dead saint. A soaking escort of nearly a thousand members of the Gaelic Athletic Association, a nationalist body devoted to Irish games, widely believed to be infiltrated by Fenians or members of the Irish Republican Brotherhood, more devoted to insurrection than to ball games, formed an honour guard round the bier as it was laid on its hearse. They were all dressed in green and carrying hurling sticks tied with black crepe and green ribbon. Here was a blatant warning to any anti-Parnellites who might have thought of trying to disrupt the proceedings. Violence would be met with violence.”’
Johnny Fitzgerald had been holding his hand up and waving it for a minute or so. ‘Those bits of the deal case enclosing the coffin, Uncle Peter,’ he said, ‘I know something that might be useful for this section of your book when you next revise it. You could buy bits of them, the relics I mean, in many of the Dublin pubs that evening when the funeral was over. They were changing hands in some places for a pound or more. Mind you, one of the publicans told me afterwards that there was enough wood on sale that night to cover fifty coffins. Maybe they increased and multiplied, like those loaves and fishes on the mountain.’
‘Thank you, Johnny,’ said Uncle Peter. ‘I am seriously thinking of banning all interruptions in the manner of a French teacher of mine who punished any disturbances when he was giving dictation with a severe thrashing.’ Uncle Peter took advantage of the diversion to open another bottle. ‘Anybody else wish to interrupt? Young James, have you further comments on the personalities involved you would like to impart to us? Powerscourt, you have been commendably quiet so far?’
All three shook their heads.
Uncle Peter’s appearance was rather wild now, wisps of hair falling down on to his lined forehead. He looked, Powerscourt thought, like an aged prophet come out of the wilderness with his book to lead his people on a last crusade, or a man who had spent too long in solitary confinement. A large drop of port had fallen on to his green dressing gown. At any moment, Powerscourt felt, a dragon’s mouth might dart forth and gulp it down. Uncle Peter’s drinking continued regularly, like the beat of a metronome. From outside the dining room came faint noises of doors being bolted and creaky sash windows closed. The household was going to bed.
‘“Parnell’s last journey across the city resembled a secular version of the Stations of the Cross, the stops at the great memorials to Ireland’s past replacing the final stages of Christ’s journey. The procession moved slowly away from Westland Row station, outriders on either side, the honour guard of the hurling stick youths surrounding the coffin, crowds marching six abreast behind them, the pavements packed with mourners, women kneeling down and crossing themselves as it passed by. Down College Street they went, stopping at the Old Parliament building on College Green. Here, until its abolition in 1800, an Irish Parliament had sat, composed entirely of Protestant members and looking after entirely Protestant interests, able to pass limited amounts of legislation. Parnell’s great grandfather had been a prominent member of this Assembly. Now the cortege rested for a minute to honour the great grandson who had nearly secured the return of an Irish Parliament to Dublin, one that would have been dominated by Catholics. Nobody in an Irish crowd would have failed to see the symbolic significance of this moment. At the rear one of the thirty-three bands on duty that day began playing the Dead March from Saul. The procession continued through the rain, crossing the river Liffey and advancing along the northern quays to St Michan’s Church, one of the oldest in the city. As the coffin entered the church one of the officiating clergy said at the porch, ‘I am the Resurrection and the Life, he that believeth in me shall not perish but have everlasting life.’ As the coffin went through the church it passed under the archway of the organ which, according to legend, Handel himself had played at the first performance of the Messiah. Down in the crypt of St Michan’s, some special atmospheric properties, unique to the church, had kept a number of corpses in a state of remarkable preservation, the wooden caskets cracked open to reveal skin and strands of hair. There is even a figure, deep from Ireland’s past, known as The Crusader. Up above, as the prayers for the dead were intoned, Parnell’s own body was beginning its long rot towards eternity. For most of the congregation this was the first, and probably the last, Protestant funeral service they would ever attend.