“THE FOCKING bitch is right”. Herself waved the Irish Times at me. “I’m a focking hypocrite.”“THE FOCKING bitch is right”. Herself waved the Irish Times at me. “I’m a focking hypocrite.”
“She didn’t say that,” I replied mildly,
knowing that my comment would do no good at all.
“And meself up there in front of the whole of Ireland acting like I was Rosin Dubh herself.”
She hurled the paper across the room.
“I thought you were just being Nuala Anne.”
“Fock Nuala focking Anne!” she shouted.
My woman, as is probably obvious, was in a vile mood, as vile a mood as I had observed since I had first met her in O’Neill’s pub.
She was curled up in a chair in our room, almost in a fetal position, huddling in a terry cloth robe. She wanted no part of the world and no part of me.
The Irish mists had returned, this time as dense fog. The swimming pool below was invisible. So were the lower floors of the hotel. The fog fit her dark mood.
No, she did not want to swim.
No, she did not want to run in the park with Fiona (who was waiting for us in the kennel in the bowels of the hotel, which was reserved for dogs prominent enough to stay at Jury’s).
No, she didn’t want to talk to me.
No, she didn’t want me to go down to the lobby and work on my report.
No, she didn’t want me to stay in the room with her.
No, she didn’t want any breakfast.
No, she didn’t want to take a shower.
No, she didn’t want anything.
Moreover, she wasn’t hungover. She had consumed only one pint of Guinness at the party. However, she had not even bothered to get into bed but had spent the whole night sulking in the chair like a little girl who had been grounded for a bad attitude. I had the good sense not to argue with her.
The reviews in the morning papers had been wonderful. There was no mention of either Father Placid or Sean MacCarthy but pictures of Nuala and Fiona kissing each other. Somehow I didn’t make it into the pictures. Good enough for me. A columnist in the Times had been a bit grudging:
Ms. McGrail has a pretty young voice which may eventually mature into something much better, though it obviously will never be quite as good as that of Ireland’s most beloved woman singer, Maeve Doyle. However, she is gorgeous and has more stage presence than all of the Riverdance troupe put together. She is, above all else, an actress, a skilled and instinctive performer who wins over even the most critical instantly. In a startling display of courage, she chose to re-create in an hour and a half the whole history of Celtic spirituality. Astonishingly, she almost carried it off. For those who admire the absolute purity of Ms. Doyle’s highly artistic performances, Ms. McGrail’s west of Ireland exuberance may well seem offensive, even a bit too American. However, within the obvious limitations of her talents, she is a compelling presence. We will hear more of her and from her in the future.
I thought that wasn’t half-bad, not for an Irish Times columnist who was clearly a friend of Maeve Doyle. Nuala Anne chose to interpret it as a charge of hypocrisy, doubtless because it confirmed her feeling that she was a focking fraud and a focking phony.
We were to have a late lunch at the Commons with her parents, who were determined to return to Galway on the six o’clock train. I thought it inappropriate to remind her.
“Well,” I said with a sigh that was a fair imitation of hers, “if you want to know what I think …”
“I don’t,” she snapped, “not at all, at all.”
“Nonetheless, you’re going to hear it … You’re astonished at how well you did and at how much the people liked you. You’re afraid of success, because you’re convinced that you’re a worthless little gobshite from the Gaeltacht who has no business singing about God and Mary and the Baby Jesus and talking about the Celtic soul. You think it was all an act to cover up that your voice has room to improve.”
No response.
“I think that’s a ton of horseshite. I think you know it is. I think you’d better face up to who and what you really are. And, since I’ve bought his book, now I can quote your man from the Gaeltacht, too:
“ ‘We are so privileged to still have time. We have but one life, and it is a shame to limit it by fear and false barriers. Irenaeus, a wonderful philosopher and theologian in the second century, said,‘The glory of God is the human person fully alive.” It is lovely to imagine that real divinity is the presence in which all beauty, unity, creativity, darkness, and negativity are harmonized. The divine has such passionate creativity and instinct for the fully inhabited life. If you allow yourself to be the person that you are, then everything will come into rhythm. If you live the life you love, you will receive shelter and blessings. Sometimes the great famine of blessing in and around us derives from the fact that we are not living the life we love, rather we are living the life that is expected of us. We have fallen out of rhythm with the secret signature and light of our own nature.’ ”
I put the book down on the armrest of her chair, very gently. She wouldn’t look at me.
“Now I’m going down to the lounge and work on my report. Someone in this family has to get things organized.”
I picked up my Omnibook 800CS and walked to the door. I turned as I was about to leave. She was glaring at me, her eyes pools of sapphire fire.
“Oh yeah, I know what your next CD will be: Nuala Anne Celebrates Christmas. Maybe we’ll call it Friggin’ Nuala Anne Friggin’ Celebrates Friggin’ Christmas.”
I think she giggled as I shut the door. I didn’t stop to find out.
Och, your man Dermot Michael is a tough one, isn’t he?
I asked the starry-eyed young woman in charge of the Towers whether she would ever be able to get a big breakfast delivered to me in the lounge.
“Wasn’t herself brilliant last night?” she demanded. “Didn’t she show up that terrible Maeve Doyle woman?”
“Sure,” I replied, using the interrogative of emphasis, “wasn’t she dazzling altogether?”
“And isn’t that poor little doggy a darlin’ girl altogether?”
“Hasn’t she taken over me whole family?”
Then the young woman deigned to order me, er, my breakfast.
I settled down at a table, plugged in my Omnibook, pulled together my notes, and began to work. While I earn my living these days by writing stories, such as they are, I found the story of Kevin O’Higgins a difficult one to tell. I was also astonished that there had been only one biography of a man who played a critical role in turning Ireland into a peaceful and democratic country almost immediately after two bitter wars, one with the English and one among the Irish themselves. He was a little too forbidding a man to like, yet clearly those who knew him did like him. There was also the mystery of his romance with Lady Lavery, so contrary to his adamant Catholic principles. I almost wrote “poor Lady Lavery” because she, too, was a tragic figure.
When my breakfast came, I ate it as I wrote. Real writers can eat and work on a computer at the same time. Right?
As I was finishing up around noon, I heard a loud slobbering noise. I looked up and there was Fiona, vast paws on the table, delicately finishing off the remains of my scrambled egg.
A woman began to sing:
“We three kings of Orient are,
Bearing gifts we traverse afar
Field and fountain, moor and mountain,
Following yonder star.
“O star of wonder, star of night,
Star with royal beauty bright,
Westward leading, still proceeding,
Guide us to thy perfect light”
“Not bad,” I observed, “for a still-immature voice.”
I looked up. Her hair was tied in a prim knot, and she was wearing white shorts and her beloved Marquette sweatshirt, thus hedging against the Irish weather. The “soft” mist had soaked her clothes and pasted them against her body. Her face was covered with a mix of rain and sweat. I smelled all kinds of wonderful womanly aromas.
“Sure, isn’t that fine, because I’m still an immature person.”
I looked her up and down approvingly. “Not in every respect.”
She blushed. “Aren’t you the one with the dirty mind, Dermot Michael Coyne?”
Fiona, having cleaned my plates, turned to licking my face. Her fur was wet from the rain. I hugged her.
“Good dog,” I told her.
“That’s enough, girl,” my wife informed the new member in our family. “I have kissing rights on that face. … I’ll put her back in the basement. Then will I be after seeing you up in our room?”
“There’s just a chance of that, woman.”
A few minutes later, she charged through the door, pulling off her sweatshirt as she did.
I almost, almost, became a wildly abandoned lover.
But I didn’t.
ASSHOLE.
This time I didn’t argue with him.