“Soggy? That’s an age thing. Poor man, Ma said you had to work late again.”
“It’s murder, so it is.”
“And at your age, too. What age are you now?”
“Go ’way with you. I wish you could see me now because I’m turning the other cheek after that slur about me age. I want you to know that parents do in fact survive their children’s lack of consideration, you know.”
“Your age? Ah, go on. Look at Yves Montand. Clint Eastwood…”
“Peter Ustinov?”
“Liz Taylor. They’re all getting on… No, I phoned you on a whim. I was thinking of going to Clare for the weekend.”
“God be praised. A daughter awakening to her inheritance. Are you sure you won’t be frightened by the accents down there? It gets very dark at night, you know. There are mighty strange people in Clare.”
“Understatement of the century. Ballyvaughan, I was thinking.”
“And you want pointers from me, is it?”
“No, I don’t. I was just mentioning it. There’s a crowd going to rent one of the Irish Cottages there.”
Minogue was swayed alternately by what the ‘crowd’ suggested, and his scorn for Irish Cottages. Drawn by a synthetic version of a rural past, Dubliners along with Germans and Dutch and Yanks were booking thatched cottages in Ballyvaughan to savour a quaint past conveniently new. Too full of peasant blood to listen to urbanite guff about peasant virtues, Minogue had no answers to the men he had met in the pubs of Clare over the years defending these Irish Disneylands as ‘creating employment’ and ‘bringing the tourists’. He had realized, with little remorse, that he was, in certain respects, a snob.
“A crowd”: said unconcernedly, but heavy with something. Drunken students, up late, farting about and making iijits of themselves in this ersatz Arcadia-his daughter in the middle of this? Her boyfriend, Pat the Brain, a man of revolutionary theories and humour which carried his ideas easily beyond cant: a dangerous, clever, likeable boy who was mad about Iesult.
“How quaint. Folksy even,” said Minogue at last. He upbraided himself instantly when he heard the sneer in his voice. If Iesult wanted to be involved with Pat the Brain any way she liked, she could do it and nothing would prevent her. When Minogue tried to think of his daughter and sex a numbness and a fog took hold of his brain. Traces of different memories: himself and Kathleen, urgent and whispering to one another, heat and damp bodies, the unnameable arching over the small sadness later. A feeling that couldn’t be accommodated at all. Lying there in the summers with the breeze stirring the curtains wondering how many other couples were making love now. Was there something to the petite mort? And why was it all right for Kathleen and Matt, and not all right for Iesult, a woman herself?
So great was their alarming and vigilant love for Iesult as an infant, a child who had been born unexpectedly, that Minogue and Kathleen always worried that they had spoiled her. An Iesult who had dug in her heels as an infant; a daughter who had miraculously ended desert years after the Minogues’ first child, Eamonn, had died in his sleep.
Minogue had had more dreams about Eamonn these last few years, especially since his own greeting from death when the bomb had gone off under the British Ambassador’s car a hundred yards ahead of Minogue. Recovering in hospital, Minogue had discovered that he could safely relinquish much of what had been his former life. Without effort, and with the sense of an untroubled and even humorous presence which could only be his own self, he realized, waking up from a long sleep, Minogue had started a new life. His new religion was made up of things divorced before: a cup of coffee in Bewley’s where he could be surrounded by people of every ilk; Kathleen’s mannerisms when she was pleased about something; a walk on the endless stone pier of Dun Laoghaire-when you were out so far along the walk that you believed it was no longer a pier but that you were surrounded by the sea-with night sneaking in over sea-water that lapped and kissed the stones in the gloom.
Dug in her heels: the same unwieldy gift as her father. Kathleen’s part of Iesult was the more civilizing, Minogue was sure.
“It’s not quaint, Da. It’s the only place we could get. Everywhere else is booked out, even at this time of year.”
“Fair enough. I understand it’s terrible popular with all classes of persons.”
He heard her drumming something on the hall table. She had something else in mind. He would have to draw her out.
“Is your mother home?”
“No, she’s not. She’s over at Costigan’s. They have a video-machine there and they rented Gone With The Wind.”
Minogue laughed this time. “Declare to God, your mother must have seen that a dozen times. She’s gone dotty.”
“I’ll tell her you said that, so.”
Minogue pounced. “When you’re telling her about going away for the weekend, like?”
“I haven’t told her yet. You know how she is.”
Minogue firmed up. “You mean you haven’t asked her yet. Yes, I do know how she is: that’s why I married her. I may be a bit gone in the head but your mother is very much in touch,” he said.
“Too much sometimes,” said Iesult.
“You want me to intercede for you because your mother suspects a dirty weekend but I’m more ‘progressive’. Am I getting warm?”
“Well, you’re always standing up for Daithi when he does something iijity,” Iesult said petulantly.
“Oh, that man should be getting himself tangled up as a go-between, and him slaving away at the office…”
“Stop it, Da. Be serious for a minute. You know Ma. I wouldn’t want her worrying or looking at Pat like he was a roaring divil. Pat’s very responsible. He’s actually quite conservative behind all the Marxist stuff, but don’t tell him I said that, do you hear?”
“I’m getting leery about this ‘don’t tell so-and-so this’. Your mother and yourself should talk man-to-man about this.”
“You mean I should sit Ma down and say: ‘Ma, Pat and I will not have sex in Ballyvaughan, I promise’?”
“Keep your voice down, would you,” Minogue hissed. “Bad enough to be giving me palpitations, but to be scandalizing my colleagues here… whatever effect you want to have, you just had it. But this is between you and your mother. I’ll certainly reassure her if she has doubts later on, but not before you let her know you’re going.”
“Very tricky exit there, Da.”
“Lookit, the both of us are well past the age where you should be Daddy’s little girl. Get to know your mother, would you?”
“But she’s so full of what the Church says about this and that, Da,” said Iesult, her voice rising with exasperation.
“And I’m easier to get around because I’m supposed to be a pagan or something? Listen for a minute. Did you ever hear me advising you what to do this last while?”
“No. That’s what I like-”
“You’re missing the point. Did it ever strike you that I may not have any sensible advice to give you? Ye have your own lives and no amount of talk is going to… ah, I don’t know. Being able to see clearly is what I mean. No gurus. Your mother is not afraid of standing up and saying what she believes is best for you, so you should be glad of knowing her. But face up to her and you’ll see something that might be entirely new to you, I’m telling you. She’d leave me in the ha’penny place.”
“She has changed a bit, I suppose,” Iesult murmured.
“Let me tell you, if Kathleen Minogue, or Kathleen O’Hare to give her her other title, if she ever turns turk on the Church and holy Ireland one morning, it would not surprise me. The Pope and the rest of them had better look out if and when she wants answers. Don’t you be worrying about dirty weekends, now.”
Minogue was suddenly aware of eyes upon him. Hoey was observing him through threads of cigarette smoke, his curiosity evident, and a small curl of amusement worked at the sides of his mouth. Minogue’s glance flickered recognition that that last remark had been overheard and he felt the blush begin immediately at his collar. It would make things worse if he were to plead that he had only been discussing things with his daughter. Only? Daughter?