'I cannot describe to you, I cannot,' she said, 'the feeling of utter wretchedness when I could not see her. My head was screaming like with a thousand of these gulls. My chest was as full of pain as if you had poured hot oil into me. The whole strand was screaming back at me in its emptiness. My dear girl, my dear girl, my dear girl.'
This last was actually to me, though she held the other 'dear girl' in her grip, and gripped my own arm now.
'I thank you, I thank you, dear, dear girl.'
And that was Mrs Prunty, the wife of the owner of the Cafe Cairo. It did not take long for her to know my story, carefully told by me in a guise I hoped was suitable, on the drive back to Sligo in her big black car. And it was her joy to suggest I might come to the Cafe Cairo to work, as my schooling was finished, my father deceased, and my mother 'unwell' as I put it, at home.
I don't remember the especial moment when Tom first came into the cafe, but I have a vivid memory of him as if contained in a sort of photograph, gold trim around the edges, like one of those still pictures outside the cinema in Sligo, of his aura and sense of infinite wellbeing, a short, thickset, almost fat man in a sturdy and neat suit, so unlike his brother Jack, whose suits were tailoring of a higher order, and whose coat was so infinitely fine it had a soft leather collar like a film star's. They both wore extravagantly expensive hats, though they were the sons of the tailor of Sligo Lunatic Asylum, and maybe that accounted for the more brutal cut of Tom's suit – certainly not his brother's. But the fact was the father was also the bandleader of Sligo's principal danceband, Tom McNulty's Orchestra, and that meant they had more shekels than most in those predominantly shekel-less times. His father, another small man seen about the place in a straw boater in that blistering summer, and a striped jacket the like of which you would see only at the races on a Wednesday the back of the town, was called Old Tom, and Tom himself was Young Tom, a thing especially useful since he also played in that famous band, if only famous among the dunes of Strandhill and in the dreams of the Sligo people.
I must have been two years and more already in the Cafe Cairo when I first became aware of these McNulty brothers. Those first years there as a simple waitress were simple happy years, myself and lonesome Chrissie being fast friends and a bulwark to each other against the world. She was a petite, neat, nice person, Chrissie, for such souls do exist. It is not all knives and axes. Moreover Mrs Prunty though rarely seen was always felt by me as a secret presence behind the steaming boilers, and the beautiful many-ledged cake holders, and the river of silver knives and spoons, and those lovely forks used only for delicate cakes. Somewhere behind all that, and the elaborate carved doors, and the touches of an Egypt no one had ever seen, I was sure Mrs Prunty moved, like a Quaker angel, speaking well of me. So I imagined anyhow. I earned the few shillings, and fed and washed my mother, haunted the picture house many many evenings, saw a thousand films, newsreels, and all the rest, wonders beyond the wonders of the finest, most extravagant dreams. And somehow in those times I was content with that, rebuffed all offers to go 'steady' with anyone, dance with anyone in particular more than once or twice. We blew out, a crowd of young girls from the town, to Tom McNulty's dancehall by the sea, like a torrent of roses along the bleak roads, sometimes spilling in tremendous gaiety and simplicity out onto the strand itself, where the road came down from the village of upper Strandhill, and the bollards one after the other on the very sand itself showed the lowtide way to Coney. Maybe you would rather call us gulls, elegant white birds dipping and calling, we were always inland as it were – as if there was always a storm at sea. Oh, it is girls of seventeen and eighteen know how to live life, and love the living of it, if we are let.
No one had seen Egypt I say, but of course Jack had been a sailor in the British Merchant Navy as a lad, and had already travelled to every port of the earth – but of course I didn't know all that. The epic story of Jack – a little epic, an ordinary epic, a local epic, but epic for all that – was unknown to me. All I saw, or began to see, was two spick-and-span brothers coming in for their cups of tea, any Chinese leaf for Tom, and Earl Grey by preference for Jack.
The dark story of their brother Eneas I never knew till long after, if I ever really knew it. Just a scrap of it, a few pages torn from his raggedy book. Can you love a man you only knew – in the Biblical sense – for a night? I do not know. But there was love there, gentle, fierce, proper love. God forgive me.
Dr Grene's Commonplace Book
Mirabile dictu (my having to read Virgil at school did me some good at least, in that it has left me with that phrase), some further documentation has arrived from Sligo Mental Hospital. It is the top copy of the old deposition and their storage arrangements must be better than ours by some measure, because the sheets are quite intact. I must say her story as itemised in the document interested me greatly, offering a sort of landscape to put behind the figure I know in the bed. A sort of human vista of troubles and events, like in a painting by da Vinci or the like, the Mona Lisa itself, with its castle and hills (as I remember it – perhaps there is no castle). As she herself continues unforth-coming, I had also a great frisson of entry to read it, as if I were getting the answers I sought from her, but of this I must be very wary. The written word assumes authority but it may not have it. I must not necessarily let her silence be filled with this, although it is a great temptation, because it is a shortcut, or a way around. The sheets amount to some seventeen closely typed pages and would seem to be offering an account of the events that led up to her, I was going to say incarceration, but I mean of course her sectioning. It is in two parts, the first detailing her earlier life up to her marriage, then the reasons for the annulment of that marriage, if that is the right term of the day. It seems this was followed by a period of tremendous disarray in her life, tremendous, really rather terrible and pitiable. This is all long long ago, in the savage fairytale of life in Ireland in the twenties and thirties, mostly, though the period of her greatest difficulty seems to have occurred actually during the years of the emergency, as de Valera referred to the Second World War.
I do not in all truth and sincerity know how much of it I can present to her. Somehow I doubt, by her reaction the other day, if she will be open to its revelations, which may or may not be revelations to her. If it represents the truth, it is a dreadful and burdening truth. In a place like this we must not concern ourselves too much with moral judgement or even legal judgement. We are like prison chaplains in here, dealing with the remnant human person after the civic powers have had their say. We are trying to ready, to steady the person for what? The axe, the guillotine of sanity? For the long watches of the sentence of living death that being here really is?
The document I was interested if not a little horrified to see was signed by a Fr Aloysius Mary Gaunt, which was a name that rang a bell. I puzzled it over until I suddenly realised who that was, the man who became auxiliary bishop of Dublin in the fifties and sixties, taking from the hemming and hawing of the Irish constitution a clear statement of his powers of moral domination over the city, as did most of his brother clerics. A man who in his every utterance seemed to long for the banishment of women behind the front doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess. There is something humorous about it now, there was nothing humorous about it then.