After the Wake (12 page)

‘Yes, Dionysius, it was one of my cases. He got it as a birthday present for his wife, wrote his name in Irish on the order form. That’s how they didn’t twig him.

‘They asked him how his name in Irish was spelt differently before and he said there was different kinds of Irish and he believed in giving them all a go, a fair field and no favour, “Up Down” and every man for his own county.

‘The hire purchase man cried when he saw the state of the washing machine but Mr. Genockey told him to cheer him up, so to speak, that it was only where he’d lent it to a man to mix concrete in, a neighbour was putting down a bit of a path in the garden.’

We pulled up at the premises aforesaid, beside an expensive looking black Humber. An expensive looking gentleman with a moustache got out of it and stood with us on the pavement.

‘Good afternoon, Mr. Claythorpe,’ said Dion.

‘Effanoon, ’m,’ said Mr. Claythorpe from between his cool, white teeth and, nodding to Mr. Carr, ‘Effanoon, Cur.’

‘Good afternoon, sir,’ moaned Mr. Carr respectfully.

Mr. Claythorpe looked at me. ‘You a bailiff’s man?’

‘He’s a newsboy,’ said Mr. Carr. ‘He’s only here with Dion, sir.’

‘Well, I suppose we had better go in, Cur,’ said Claythorpe.

We were met by a smiling big woman with a Munster accent.

‘Yeer the man that’s coming to see Mr. Genockey about the oul’ car? Come in and rest yourselves a minute. Is that yourself, Mr. Carr? Friends meet though the hills and the mountains doesn’t. I didn’t see you now, Mr. Carr, not since the washing machine, and God help you, it must have been an awful trouble to you carrying it down the stairs and you sit down, sir,’ she said to Mr. Claythorpe, ‘you’re another friend of Mr. Genockey’s.’

‘May neem is Claythorpe,’ said Mr. Claythorpe through clenched teeth.

‘Ah sure himself’d murder me if I let you out of the house before he comes back. It’s often he does be talking about you. He won’t be long. He’s only gone in the oul’ car to Athlone to bring back a few pigs. He brought down a load of coal in it to oblige the man he’s buying the pigs off. He said he’d be back at three o’clock to the dot though the oul’ car might have broken down, it’s only a heap of scrap now, but sure nothing lasts only for a time, ourselves included,’ – she put her hand to her ear – ‘now here he is.’

Mr. Genockey came into the room, kissed his wife, and shook hands with Mr. Carr and Dion, ‘How’s every bit of yous?’ He looked at me and smiled, ‘You the Sheriff? I’m like a big kid I am, I’d love to meet
the Sheriff. Have you your star? And your six-gun?’

Mr. Claythorpe spoke from behind him, his face pale and his knuckles showing white where he gripped the back of a chair. He struggled to get out the hoarse words, ‘Genockey! I’m Claythorpe!’

Mr. Genockey turned. ‘Well, I’m more nor pleased to meet you in the flesh,’ he smiled affectionately, ‘though we’re a kind of pen pals, we still only know each other by correspondence.
Acushla
‚* did you make Mr. Claythorpe a cup of tea?’

Mr. Claythorpe looked as if he could do with it.

‘The old car is outside and you can have it with a heart and a half as soon as I get the few pigs out of it.’

Later, I asked Dion, what was Mr. Carr’s little trouble that got him suspended from his office.

‘He discovered a law that said that all pawnbrokers that hadn’t attended Divine Service the previous Sabbath had to pay a fine of seven-and-sixpence, and he went round collecting it and charging an extra half-a-crown for lip when they were slow to pay up.’

This life is full of disappointments. The band of the Beaux Arts School is one of them. Not in noise, volume or variety of costume but, as the man said, basically.

The Ecole des Beaux Arts, or the the School of Fine Arts in Paris in the popular imagination, is a sort of
Tír na
nÓg
* of young geniuses, painting and sculpting with fresh, savage efficiency during the working day, cursing the professors, damning all academics, till the light fades, the stars rise over the
garret, and Mimi, the little
midinette
,
knocks timidly on the door and comes in with the bottle of wine, the piece of veal, the garlic, the bread and cheese purchased, mayhap, with the fruits of her long day’s stitching for the rude and haughty ladies of the rue de Faubourg Saint Honoré.

And if, at festival time, he dashes madly through the streets most daring of his band, well, youth must have its fling, and the staid conventions of looking where you are going are not for such ardent spirits as these.

The present Beaux Arts School has a band. Its instruments are not the usual instruments of brass and reed; they are composed mostly of household instruments.

During the summer nights they have a march-out at least every Saturday night, up and round the narrow streets of the Latin Quarter, playing in close harmony on buckets, tin cans, biscuit tins, old motor horns, auctioneers’ hand bells, basins, bowls, with a male and female voice choir in sections variously represented; the howl, the screech, the moan, the groan, the roar, the bawl, the yell, the scream, the snarl, the bay, the bark, in time to the steady and rhythmic thud of the big bass dust-bin, and the more sombre tones of the tin-bath.

Along the street the foreigners smiled and nodded indulgently at each other. Dear old Paris. Dear old Latin Quarter has never changed since Mimi’s hand was frozen; since Gene Kelly’s feet were hot; since the last time we were over.

We wondered at the sour looks on the faces of the French and the disgruntled voice of the big vegetable porter who cursed the noise and said people had to
be up at five in the morning to go to work.

Don’t bother with work we thought; those lads outside aren’t worried about work. Free spirits. Another cognac there,
garçon
;
the noise did not upset us. This is what we came to Paris for. Outside they were advancing on Saint Germain. Someone beat the bath on the boulevard.

I turned to Donal and, amidst the satisfied sighs of the foreigners and the curses of the French, shook my head indulgently, and remarked apropos the vegetable porter and other native grumblers: ‘Woe to the begrudgers. Aren’t they gas men, the art students?
Is
maith
an
rud
an
óige
.’

‘They manage an imitation of it,’ a voice beside me said.

I turned and saw that a girl had come in and was standing beside us.

‘What does who manage an imitation of?’ I asked.

‘You said in Irish that youth is a great thing. You were obviously referring to those dreary architects making a nuisance of themselves up the street.’

‘What architects? Anyway how did you know what I said in Irish?’

‘I suppose I went to school as much as you did.’

‘That’d be small trouble to you. But what architects are you talking about?’

‘Those fellows going around the place doing the hard chaw, keeping everybody awake. You, like all the tourists –’

I choked with indignation and my fellow-travellers, an American textile foreman, a Scots honeymoon couple and two London schoolmasters, gazed at her with disgust. The foul word that had just left her lips stamped her in all our eyes as a cad or a
caddess. It’s not a word used in polite society along the boulevards unless you are speaking of somebody else, of course.

She went on relentlessly.

‘You people think it’s all very romantic but those little architectural students, as soon as they qualify, buy a nice suit, grow a moustache, and refer to this period as the time they were sowing their wild oats.

‘I wouldn’t mind but I’ve got to get up and go over to Neuilly and be at the church of Saint Pierre in the morning.’

‘Tomorrow is not Sunday,’ said Donal. ‘Is it a holy day over here?’

‘Maybe it’s a wedding you’re going to,’ said I. ‘Have another citronade on the head of it.’

‘No, thanks. I’m for bed. It’s not a wedding I’m going to. I’m going to work. Some people do, you know. I leave my tools here on my way from the school and Madame is just gone to collect them. Ah, here she is.’

She beamed back at the fat old
patronne
whose face for the first time since I’d seen her was split in a smile as she handed over the counter what looked like a kit of tools belonging to a bricklayer.

‘
Merci
,
madame
.’

The old one smiled again. That’s twice in the one twenty-four hours.

‘
Service
,
Mademoiselle
Murfee
.’

Mile. Murphy said good night to us too and went off up the rue Dauphine, a trim slip of a girl, as they say at home, but swinging her hammers and chisels with an air.

The church of Saint Pierre is the parish church of Neuilly in south-west Paris. It is about the size of the
Dublin Pro-Cathedral and is nearly a hundred years old, no older than the University Church on Dublin’s Green, and as beautiful in a different style.

Like Chartres, Bruges, towering and mighty, since the age of Faith, this modest and middle-age suburban church was decorated by a group of sculptors, unpaid, and giving themselves, mind and muscle, for God’s sake.

The parish priest of Saint Pierre had about enough money to keep the church in repair, to pay a couple of charwomen and a verger. He had nothing over for ornamentation, for the lovely stone that practically shouted for a chisel.

God’s help, they say in Irish, is never further than the door; in this case, the door of the Ecole des Beaux Arts.

Someone in the school heard of all this lovely stone going unadorned and the next thing a squad of students are out, fighting to divide the church up amongst them.

Kathleen Murphy, of Ballymore Eustace, comes away with three pillars and with hammer upraised, poises her slim self to strike a blow
do
chum
glóire
Dé
agus
onóra
na
hÉireann.
*

These pillars represent in their tortuous Celtic way the struggle of Christian France against the Huns, the Creation and the Deluge. Standing there, in the quiet of the Avenue de Roule, in the Church of Saint Pierre, the noise of the traffic round the Etoile and on the Champs Elysées dim in the distance, I noted lovingly the twisted features of each cantankerous countenance, thought of Raphoe, Cashel, Clonmacnoise, and heard the waves of the Atlantic break on the Aran shore and the praising voice of the
holy Irish, long since dead, soft in the gathering dusk.

One Christmas Eve, though not this one nor the one before, there was a man coming in from Cloghran, County Dublin, on a horse and cart to do his Christmas business, selling and buying.

When he got as far as Santry, County Dublin, he remembered that there was an old neighbour dead in a house, so he went in to pay his respects and, after saying that he was sorry for their trouble and all to that effect, he enquired whether he could offer any assistance of a practical nature.

‘Well, if it’s a thing you wouldn’t mind, collecting the coffin; it’s ready-measured and made and all; it would be a great help to us.’

‘I do not indeed mind carrying the coffin back for you, though I won’t be home till a bit late, having to do her shopping. I’ve a list as long as your arm, of sweets for children, snuff for her old one, rich cake, a jar of malt, two bottles of port wine, snuff for my old one, a collar for the dog, a big red candle to put in the window, a jockey of tobacco for myself, a firkin of porter, two dolls that’ll say
Ma-Ma
, one railway train, a jack-in-the-box and a monkey-on-a-stick, two holy pictures, rashers, and black and white pudding and various other combustibles too numerous to mention.

‘But I’ll stick the coffin up amongst the rest of them and take the height of good care of it and it’ll be me Christmas box and hansel for me poor old neighbour and a good turn for myself because I’ll
have luck with it.’

So off he went at a jog-trot into the city down from Santry, County Dublin, past Ellenfield and Larkhill, through the big high trees, and the sun just beginning on a feeble attempt to come out, and then having a look at the weather it was in, losing heart, and going back in again, till your man came to Whitehall tram terminus, where they were just getting ready to take the seven o’clock into town.

‘Morra, Mick,’ shouts a tram fellow, with his mouth full of steam, ‘and how’s the form?’

‘If it was any better,’ shouts Mick off the cart, ‘I couldn’t stick it.’

‘More of that to you,’ shouts the tram fellow, ‘and a happy Christmas, what’s more.’

‘You, too, and many more along with that,’ shouts Mick, and along with him down the Drumcondra Road.

So away he goes into the city, over Binn’s Bridge, and into the markets. Before dinner-time he had his selling done and was on to the buying.

He had a good few places to visit, meeting this one and that, but with an odd adjournment he had everything bought and the coffin collected and on the back of the cart with the rest of the stuff by evening-time. It was dark and cold and the snow starting to come down the back of his neck, but he tightened the collar well round him, and having plenty of the right stuff inside him began a bar of a song for himself, to the tune of
Haste to the Wedding
:

So, with a bit of a song and a mutter of encouragement to the old horse, Mick shortened the way for himself, through snow and dark, till he came to Santry, County Dublin, once again.