‘What are you going to do?’ he asked fearfully.
‘Do the exam, of course.’ There was determination as well as fear in the sunken eyes.
‘But you can’t do it if the doctor said you weren’t fit.’
‘Let’s put it this way,’ the sick man laughed in harsh triumph, ‘I can’t not do it.’
The night before the exam he asked the teacher to bring up the clippers. He wanted a haircut, and that night, as the teacher wrapped the towel round the instructor’s neck and took the bright clippers out of their pale green cardboard box, adjusting the combs, and started to clip, the black hair dribbling down on the towel, he felt for the first time ever a mad desire to remove his hat and stand bareheaded in the room, as if for the first time in years he felt himself in the presence of something sacred.
‘That’s a great job,’ Tom Lennon said afterwards. ‘You know, while we’re at it, I might as well go the whole hog and shave as well.’
‘Do you want me to get you some hot water?’
‘That wouldn’t be too much trouble?’
‘No trouble at all.’
Downstairs as they waited for the water to boil, the wife in her quiet voice asked him, ‘What do you think?’
‘He seems determined on it. I tried to talk him out of it but it was no use.’
‘No. It doesn’t seem any use,’ she said. A starched white shirt and blue suit and tie were draped across a chair one side of the fire.
The teacher sat on the bed’s edge and held the bowl of water steady while the instructor shaved. When he finished, he examined himself carefully in the little hand-mirror, and joked, ‘It’s as good as for a wedding.’
‘Maybe it’s too risky. Maybe you should send in a certificate. There’ll be another chance.’
‘No. That’s finished. I’m going through with it. It’s my last chance. There’ll be no other. If I manage to get made permanent there’d be a weight off my mind and it’d be better than a hundred doctors and tonics.’
‘Maybe I should give the old car a swing in readiness for the morning, so?’
‘That’d be great.’ The instructor fumbled for his car keys in his trouser pockets on the bed rail.
The engine was cold but started on the sixth or seventh swing. In the cold starlit night he stood and listened to the engine run.
‘Good luck, old Tom,’ he said quietly as he switched it off and took the car keys in.
‘Well, good luck tomorrow. I hope all goes well. I’ll be up as soon as I see the car back to find out how it went,’ he said in a singsong voice he used with the children at school in order not to betray his emotion after telling him that the Ford was running like a bird.
Tom Lennon rose the next morning as he said he would, dressed in his best clothes, had tea, told his wife not to worry and that he’d be back about six, somehow got as far as the car, and fell dead over the starting handle the teacher had left in the engine the previous night.
When word was brought to the school, all the hatted man did was bow his head and murmur, ‘Thanks.’ He knew he had been expecting the death for some days. When he went to the Bawn a last time he felt no terror of the stillness of the brown habit, the folded hands, but only a certain amazement that it was the agricultural instructor who was lying there and not he. Two days later his hat stood calmly among the scarved women and bareheaded men about the open grave, and when it was over he went back to Charlie’s. The bar was filled with mourners from the funeral-making holiday. A silence seemed to fall as the brown hat came through the partition, but only for a moment. They were arguing about a method of sowing winter wheat that the dead man used to advocate. Some thought it made sense. Others said it would turn out to be a disaster.
‘Your old friend won’t hunt again,’ Charlie said as he handed him the whiskey. The voice was hushed. The eyes stared inquiringly but respectfully into the gaunt face beneath the hat. The small red curl of the nose was still.
‘No. He’ll not hunt again.’
‘They say herself and the child is going home with her own people this evening. They’ll send a van up later for the furniture.’ His voice was low as a whisper at the corner of the bar.
‘That makes sense,’ the teacher said.
‘You have the bitch still?’ Charlie asked.
‘That’s right. I’ll be glad to keep her, but the wife may want to take her with her.’
‘That’ll be the least of her troubles. She’ll not want.’
‘Will you have something yourself?’ the teacher invited.
‘All right, then, Master.’ He paused suddenly. ‘A quick one, then. We all need a little something in the open today,’ and he smiled an apologetic, rueful smile in his small eyes; but he downed the whiskey, as quickly running a glass of water and drinking it into the coughing as if it hadn’t been in the open at all.
The fawn jumped in her excitement on her new master when he finally came home from the funeral. As he petted her down, gripping her neck, bringing his own face down to hers, thinking how he had come by her, he felt the same rush of feeling as he had felt when he watched the locks of hair fall on to the towel round the neck in the room; but instead of prayer he now felt a wild longing to throw his hat away and walk round the world bareheaded, find some girl, not necessarily Cathleen O’Neill, but any young girl, and go to the sea with her as he used to, leave the car at the harbour wall and take the boat for the island, the engine beating like a good heart under the deck boards as the waves rocked it on turning out of the harbour, hold her in one long embrace all night between the hotel sheets; or train the fawn again, feed her the best steak from town, walk her four miles every day for months, stand in the mud and rain again and see her as Coolcarra Queen race through the field in the Rockingham Stakes, see the judge gallop over to the rope on the old fat horse, and this time lift high the red kerchief to give the Silver Cup to the Queen.
And until he calmed, and went into the house, his mind raced with desire for all sorts of such impossible things.
Faith, Hope and Charity
Cunningham and Murphy had worked as a team ever since they’d met on a flyover site outside Reading. They dug trenches and were paid by the yard. The trenches were in places where machines could not easily go, and the work was dangerous, the earth walls having to be shuttered up as they went along, the shutters held apart by metal bars with adjustable flat squares on both ends. Both men worked under assumed names to avoid paying income tax.
This money that they slaved for all the year in the trenches they flashed and wasted in one royal month each summer in Ireland. As men obsessed with the idea that all knowledge lies within a woman’s body, but having entered it find themselves as ignorant as before, they are driven towards all women again and again, in childish hope that somehow the next time they will find the root of all knowledge, and the equally childish desire for revenge since it cannot be found, the knife in the unfathomable entrails. They became full of hatred. Each year, as Murphy and Cunningham dug trenches towards their next royal summer, their talk grew obsessional and more bitter. ‘It’s a kind of a sort of a country that can’t even afford a national eejit so they all have to take turns.’
What slowed them up the most was not the digging but the putting up of the shuttering behind them. As August drew close they grew careless and their greed for money grew in order to make an even bigger splash this summer than ever before. Little by little the spaces between the metal bars lengthened. They felt invulnerable: no matter how careless they were the bad accident was bound to happen elsewhere.
Murphy was standing on top of the trench watching Cunningham wield the pick below, behind him the fence of split stakes on Hessell Street. The midday sun beat mercilessly down on the trench, and they worked it turn and turn about, coming up every five minutes or so to cool in whatever air stirred from the Thames.