‘As though you might be dead.’
‘If he had his way.’
In the snug of Kehoe’s they spoke of Heffernan’s bête noire, the aged Professor Flacks, a man from the North of Ireland.
‘ “I see you are still with us,” ‘ Heffernan repeated. ‘Did you ever hear the beat of that?’
‘Sure, Flacks is senile.’
‘The mots in the lecture giggle when he says it.’
‘Oh, an ignorant bloody crowd.’
Heffernan became meditative. Slowly he lit a Sweet Afton. He was supported in his continuing studentship by the legacy left to him for that purpose by an uncle in Kilkenny, funds which would cease when he was a student no longer. He kept that tragedy at bay by regularly failing the Littlego examination, a test of proficiency in general studies to which all students were obliged to submit themselves.
‘A fellow came up to me this morning,’ he said now, ‘a right eejit from Monasterevin. Was I looking for grinds in Little-go Logic? Five shillings an hour.’
FitzPatrick laughed. He lifted his glass of stout and drank from it, imposing on his upper lip a moustache of foam which was permitted to remain there.
‘A minion of Flacks’,’ Heffernan continued. ‘A Flacks boy and no mistake, I said to myself.’
‘You can tell them a mile off.’
‘ “I know your father,” I said to him. “Doesn’t he deliver milk?” Well, he went the colour of a sunset. “Avoid conversation with Flacks,” I told him. “He drove a wife and two sisters insane.” ’
‘Did your man say anything?’
‘Nothing, only “Gripes”,’
‘Oh, Flacks is definitely peculiar,’ FitzPatrick agreed.
In point of fact, at that time FitzPatrick had never met Professor Flacks. It was his laziness that caused him to converse in a manner which suggested he had, and it was his laziness also which prevented him from noticing the intensity of Heffernan’s grievance. Heffernan hated Professor Flacks with a fervour, but in his vague and unquestioning way FitzPatrick assumed that the old professor was no more than a passing thorn in his friend’s flesh, a nuisance that could be exorcised by means of complaint and abuse. Heffernan’s pride did not at that time appear to play a part; and FitzPatrick, who knew his friend as well as anyone did, would not have designated him as a possessor of that quality to an unusual degree. The opposite was rather implied by the nature of his upkeep and his efforts not to succeed in the Littlego examination. But pride, since its presence might indeed be questioned by these facts, came to its own support: when the story is told in Dublin today it is never forgotten that it has roots in Professor Flacks’s causing girls to giggle because he repeatedly made a joke at Heffernan’s expense.
Employed by the University to instruct in certain aspects of literature, Professor Flacks concentrated his attention on the writings of James Joyce. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge, Wilde, Swift, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and many another familiar name were all bundled away in favour of a Joycean scholarship that thirty or so years ago was second to none in Irish university life. Professor Flacks could tell you whom Joyce had described as a terrified YMCA man, and the date of the day on which he had written that his soul was full of decayed ambitions. He spoke knowledgeably of the stale smell of incense, like foul flowerwater; and of flushed eaves and stubble geese.
‘Inane bloody show-off,’ Heffernan said nastily in Kehoe’s.
‘You’ll see him out, Heff.’
‘A bogs like that would last for ever.’
Twelve months later, after he and Heffernan had parted company, FitzPatrick repeated all that to me. I didn’t know either of them well, but was curious because a notable friendship had so abruptly come to an end. FitzPatrick, on his own, was inclined to talk to anyone.
We sat in College Park, watching the cricket while he endeavoured to remember the order of subsequent events. It was Heffernan who’d had the idea, as naturally it would be, since FitzPatrick still knew Professor Flacks only by repute and had not suffered the sarcasm which Heffernan found so offensive. But FitzPatrick played a vital part in the events which followed, because the elderly woman who played the main part of all was a general maid in FitzPatrick’s digs.
‘Has that one her slates on?’ Heffernan inquired one night as they passed her by in the hall.
‘Ah, she’s only a bit quiet.’
‘She has a docile expression all right.’
‘She wouldn’t damage a fly.’
Soon after that Heffernan took to calling in at FitzPatrick’s digs in Donnybrook more often than he had in the past. Sometimes he was there when FitzPatrick arrived back in the evening, sitting in the kitchen while the elderly maid pricked sausages or cut up bread for the meal that would shortly be served. Mrs Maginn, the landlady, liked to lie down for a while at that time of day, so Heffernan and the maid had the kitchen to themselves. But finding him present on several occasions when she came downstairs, Mrs Maginn in passing mentioned the fact to her lodger. FitzPatrick, who didn’t himself understand what Heffernan’s interest in the general maid was, replied that his friend liked to await his return in the kitchen because it was warm. Being an easy-going woman, Mrs Maginn was appeased.
‘There’s no doubt in my mind at all,’ Heffernan stated in Kehoe’s after a few weeks of this behaviour. ‘If old Flacks could hear it he’d have a tortoise’s pup.’
FitzPatrick wagged his head, knowing that an explanation was in the air. Heffernan said: ‘She’s an interesting old lassie.’
He then told FitzPatrick a story which FitzPatrick had never heard before. It concerned a man called Corley who had persuaded a maid in a house in Baggot Street to do a small service for him. It concerned, as well, Corley’s friend, Lenehan, who was something of a wit. At first FitzPatrick was confused by the story, imagining it to be about a couple of fellow-students whom he couldn’t place.
‘The pen of Jimmy Joyce,’ Heffernan explained. ‘That yarn is Flacks’s favourite of the lot.’
‘Well, I’d say there wasn’t much to it. Sure, a skivvy never would.’
‘She was gone on Corley.’
‘But would she steal for him?’
‘You’re no romantic, Fitz.’
FitzPatrick laughed, agreeable to accepting this opinion. Then, to his astonishment, Heffernan said: ‘It’s the same skivvy Mrs Maginn has above in your digs.’
FitzPatrick shook his head. He told Heffernan to go on with himself, but Heffernan insisted.
‘She told me the full story herself one night I was waiting for you –maybe the first night I ever addressed a word to her. “Come into the kitchen outa the cold, Mr Heffernan,” she says. D’you remember the occasion it was? Late after tea, and you didn’t turn up at all. She fried me an egg.’
‘But, holy Christ, man –’
‘It was the same night you did well with the nurse from Dundrum.’
FitzPatrick guffawed. A great girl, he said. He repeated a few details, but Heffernan didn’t seem interested.
‘I was told the whole works in the kitchen, like Jimmy Joyce had it out of her when she was still in her teens. A little gold sovereign was what she fecked for your man.’
‘But the poor old creature is as honest as the day’s long.’
‘Oh, she took it all right and she still thinks Corley was top of the bill.’
‘But Corley never existed –’
‘Of course he did. Wasn’t he for ever entertaining that fine little tart with the witticisms of Master Lenehan?’
The next thing that happened, according to FitzPatrick, was that a bizarre meeting took place. Heffernan approached Professor Flacks with the information that the model for the ill-used girl in Joyce’s story ‘Two Gallants’ had come to light in a house in Donnybrook. The Professor displayed considerable excitement, and on a night when Mrs Maginn was safely at the pictures he was met by Heffernan at the bus stop and led to the kitchen.