People who have not grown up in a provincial town won’t know what I mean when I say what Terry Coughlan meant to me. People who have won’t need to know.
As kids we lived a few doors from each other on the same terrace, and his sister, Tess, was a friend of my sister, Nan. There was a time when I was rather keen on Tess myself. She was a small, plump, gay little thing, with rosy cheeks like apples, and she played the piano very well. In those days I sang a bit, though I hadn’t much of a voice. When I sang Mozart, Beethoven, or even Wagner, Terry would listen with brooding approval. When I sang commonplace stuff, Terry would make a face and walk out. He was a good-looking lad with a big brow and curly black hair, a long, pale face and a pair of intent dark eyes. He was always well spoken and smart in his appearance. There was nothing sloppy about him.
When he could not learn something by night he got up at five in the morning to do it, and whatever he took up, he mastered. Even as a boy he was always looking forward to the day when he’d have money enough to travel, and he taught himself French and German in the time it took me to find out I could not learn Irish. He was cross with me for wanting to learn it; according to him it had ‘no cultural significance’, but he was crosser still with me because I couldn’t learn it. ‘The first thing you should learn to do is to work,’ he would say gloomily. ‘What’s going to become of you if you don’t?’ He had read somewhere that when Keats was depressed, he had a wash and brush up. Keats was his god. Poetry was never much in my line, except Shelley, and Terry didn’t think much of him.
We argued about it on our evening walks. Maybe you don’t remember the sort of arguments you had when you were young. Lots of people prefer not to remember, but I like thinking of them. A man is never more himself than when he talks nonsense about God, Eternity, prostitution, and the necessity for having mistresses. I argued with Terry that the day of poetry was over, and that the big boys of modern literature were the fiction writers – the ones we’d heard of in Cork at that time, I mean – the Russians and Maupassant.
‘The Russians are all right,’ he said to me once. ‘Maupassant you can forget.’
‘But why, Terry?’ I asked.
‘Because whatever you say about the Russians, they’re noble,’ he said. ‘Noble’ was a great word of his at the time: Shakespeare was ‘noble’, Turgenev was ‘noble’, Beethoven was ‘noble’. ‘They are a religious people, like the Greeks, or the English of Shakespeare’s time. But Maupassant is slick and coarse and commonplace. Are his stories literature?’
‘Ah, to hell with literature!’ I said. ‘It’s life.’
‘Life in this country?’
‘Life in his own country, then.’
‘But how do you know?’ Terry asked, stopping and staring at me. ‘Humanity is the same here as anywhere else. If he’s not true of the life we know, he’s not true of any sort of life.’
Then he got the job in the monks’ school and I got the job in Carmody’s and we began to drift apart. There was no quarrel. It was just that I liked company and Terry didn’t. I got in with a wild group – Marshall and Redmond and Donnelan, the solicitor – and we sat up until morning, drinking and settling the future of humanity. Terry came with us once, but he didn’t talk, and when Donnelan began to hold forth on Shaw and the Life Force I could see his face getting dark. You know Donnelan’s line – ‘But what I mean – what I want to say – Jasus, will somebody let me talk? I have something important to say.’ We all knew that Donnelan was a bit of a joke, but when I said good-night to Terry in the hall he turned on me with an angry look.
‘Do those friends of yours do anything but talk?’ he asked.
‘Never mind, Terry,’ I said. ‘The Revolution is coming.’
‘Not if they have anything to say to it,’ Terry said, and walked away from me. I stood there for a while, feeling sorry for myself, as you do when you know that the end of a friendship is in sight. It didn’t make me happier when I went back to the room and Donnelan looked at me as if he didn’t believe his eyes.
‘Magner,’ he asked, ‘am I dreaming or was there someone with you?’
Suddenly, for no particular reason, I lost my temper.
‘Yes, Donnelan,’ I said. ‘But somebody I wouldn’t expect you to recognize.’
That, I suppose, was the last flash of the old love, and after that it was bogged down in argument. Donnelan said that Terry lacked flexibility – flexibility!
Occasionally I met Tess with her little shopping basket and her round rosy cheeks, and she would say reproachfully, ‘Ah, Ted, aren’t you becoming a great stranger? What did we do to you at all?’ And a couple of times I dropped round to sing a song and borrow a book, and Terry told me about his work as a teacher. He was a bit disillusioned with his job, and you wouldn’t wonder. Some of the monks kept a mackintosh and muffler handy so that they could drop out to the pictures after dark with some doll. And then there was a thundering row when Terry discovered that a couple of his brightest boys were being sent up for public examinations under the names of notorious ignoramuses, so as to bolster up the record. When Brother Dunphy, the headmaster, argued with Terry that it was only a simple act of charity, Terry replied sourly that it seemed to him more like a criminal offence. After that he got the reputation of being impossible and was not consulted when Patrick Dempsey, the boy he really liked, was put up for examination as Mike MacNamara, the County Councillor’s son – Mike the Moke, as Terry called him.
Now, Donnelan is a gas-bag, and, speaking charitably, a bit of a fool, but there were certain things he learned in his Barrack Street slum. One night he said to me, ‘Ted, does that fellow Coughlan drink?’ ‘Drink?’ I said, laughing outright at him. ‘Himself and a sparrow would have about the same consumption of liquor.’ Nothing ever embarrassed Donnelan, who had the hide of a rhinoceros.
‘Well, you might be right,’ he said reasonably, ‘but, begor, I never saw a sparrow that couldn’t hold it.’
I thought myself that Donnelan was dreaming, but next time I met Tess I sounded her. ‘How’s that brother of yours keeping?’ I asked. ‘Ah, fine, Ted, why?’ she asked, as though she was really surprised. ‘Oh, nothing,’ I said. ‘Somebody was telling me that he wasn’t looking well.’
‘Ah, he’s that way this long time, Ted,’ she replied, ‘and ’tis nothing only the want of sleep. He studies too hard at night, and then he goes wandering all over the country, trying to work off the excitement. Sure, I’m always at him!’
That satisfied me. I knew Tess couldn’t tell me a lie. But then, one moonlight night about six months later, three or four of us were standing outside the hotel – the night porter had kicked us out in the middle of an argument, and we were finishing it there. Two was striking from Shandon when I saw Terry coming up the pavement towards us. I never knew whether he recognized me or not, but all at once he crossed the street, and even I could see that the man was drunk.
‘Tell me,’ said Donnelan, peering across at him, ‘is that a sparrow I see at this hour of night?’ All at once he spun round on his heels, splitting his sides with laughing. ‘Magner’s sparrow!’ he said. ‘Magner’s sparrow!’ I hope in comparing Donnelan with a rhinoceros I haven’t done injustice to either party.
I saw then what was happening. Terry was drinking all right, but he was drinking unknown to his mother and sister. You might almost say he was drinking unknown to himself. Other people could be drunkards, but not he. So he sat at home reading, or pretending to read, until late at night, and then slunk off to some low pub on the quays where he hoped people wouldn’t recognize him, and came home only when he knew his family was in bed.
For a long time I debated with myself about whether I shouldn’t talk to him. If I made up my mind to do it once, I did it twenty times. But when I ran into him in town, striding slowly along, and saw the dark, handsome face with the slightly ironic smile, I lost courage. His mind was as keen as ever – it may even have been a shade too keen. He was becoming slightly irritable and arrogant. The manners were as careful and the voice was as pleasant as ever – a little too much so. The way he raised his hat high in the air to some woman who passed and whipped the big handkerchief from his breast pocket reminded me of an old actor going down in the world. The farther down he went the worse the acting got. He wouldn’t join me for a drink; no, he had this job that simply must be finished tonight. How could I say to him, ‘Terry, for God’s sake, give up trying to pretend you have work to do. I know you’re an impostor and you’re drinking yourself to death.’ You couldn’t talk like that to a man of his kind. People like him are all of a piece; they have to stand or fall by something inside themselves.
He was forty when his mother died, and by that time it looked as though he’d have Tess on his hands for life as well. I went back to the house with him after the funeral. He was cruelly broken up. I discovered that he had spent his first few weeks abroad that summer and he was full of it. He had stayed in Paris and visited the cathedrals round, and they had made a deep impression on him. He had never seen real architecture before. I had a vague hope that it might have jolted him out of the rut he had been getting into, but I was wrong. It was worse he was getting.
Then, a couple of years later, I was at home one evening, finishing up some work, when a knock came to the door. I opened it myself and saw old Pa Hourigan, the policeman, outside. Pa had a schoolgirl complexion and a white moustache, China-blue eyes and a sour elderly mouth, like a baby who has learned the facts of life too soon. It surprised me because we never did more than pass the time of day.
‘May I speak to you for a moment, Mr Magner?’ he asked modestly. ‘’Tis on a rather private matter.’
‘You can to be sure, Sergeant,’ I said, joking him. ‘I’m not a bit afraid. ’Tis years since I played ball on the public street. Have a drink.’
‘I never touch it, going on night duty,’ he said, coming into the front room. ‘I hope you will pardon my calling, but you know I am not a man to interfere in anyone else’s private affairs.’
By this time he had me puzzled and a bit anxious. I knew him for an exceptionally retiring man, and he was clearly upset.
‘Ah, of course you’re not,’ I said. ‘No one would accuse you of it. Sit down and tell me what the trouble is.’
‘Aren’t you a friend of Mr Coughlan, the teacher?’ he asked.
‘I am,’ I said.
‘Mr Magner,’ he said, exploding on me, ‘can you do nothing with the man?’
I looked at him for a moment and had a premonition of disaster.
‘Is it as bad as that?’ I asked.
‘It cannot go on, Mr Magner,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘It cannot go on. I saved him before. Not because he was anything to me, because I hardly knew the man. Not even because of his poor decent sister, though I pity her with my whole heart and soul. It was for the respect I have for education. And you know that, Mr Magner,’ he added earnestly, meaning (which was true enough) that I owed it to him that I had never paid a fine for drinking during prohibited hours.
‘We all know it, Sergeant,’ I said. ‘And I assure you, we appreciate it.’
‘No one knows, Mr Magner,’ he went on, ‘what sacrifices Mrs Hourigan and myself made to put that boy of ours through college, and I would not give it to say to him that an educated man could sink so low. But there are others at the barracks who don’t think the way I do. I name no names, Mr Magner, but there are those who would be glad to see an educated man humiliated.’
‘What is it, Sergeant?’ I asked. ‘Drink?’
‘Mr Magner,’ he said indignantly, ‘when did I ever interfere with an educated man for drinking? I know when a man has a lot on his mind he cannot always do without stimulants.’
‘You don’t mean drugs?’ I asked. The idea had crossed my mind once or twice.
‘No, Mr Magner, I do not,’ he said, quivering with indignation. ‘I mean those low, loose, abandoned women that I would have whipped and transported.’
If he had told me that Terry had turned into a common thief, I couldn’t have been more astonished and horrified. Horrified is the word.
‘You don’t mind my saying that I find that very hard to believe, Sergeant?’ I asked.
‘Mr Magner,’ he said with great dignity, ‘in my calling a man does not use words lightly.’
‘I know Terry Coughlan since we were boys together, and I never as much as heard an unseemly word from him,’ I said.
‘Then all I can say, Mr Magner, is that I’m glad, very glad that you’ve never seen him as I have, in a condition I would not compare to the beasts.’ There were real tears in the old man’s eyes. ‘I spoke to him myself about it. At four o’clock this morning I separated him from two of those vile creatures that I knew well were robbing him. I pleaded with him as if he was my own brother. “Mr Coughlan,” I said, “what will your soul do at the Judgement?” And Mr Magner, in decent society I would not repeat the disgusting reply he made me.’
‘Corruptio optimi pessima,’ I said to myself.
‘That is Latin, Mr Magner,’ the old policeman said with real pleasure.
‘And it means “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds,” Sergeant,’ I said. ‘I don’t know if I can do anything. I suppose I’ll have to try. If he goes on like this he’ll destroy himself, body and soul.’
‘Do what you can for his soul, Mr Magner,’ whispered the old man, making for the door. ‘As for his body, I wouldn’t like to answer.’ At the door he turned with a mad stare in his blue eyes. ‘I would not like to answer,’ he repeated, shaking his grey pate again.
It gave me a nasty turn. Pa Hourigan was happy. He had done his duty but mine still remained to be done. I sat for an hour, thinking about it, and the more I thought, the more hopeless it seemed. Then I put on my hat and went out.
Terry lived at that time in a nice little house on College Road; a little red-brick villa with a bow window. He answered the door himself, a slow, brooding, black-haired man with a long pale face. He didn’t let on to be either surprised or pleased.
‘Come in,’ he said with a crooked smile. ‘You’re a great stranger, aren’t you?’
‘You’re a bit of a stranger yourself, Terry,’ I said jokingly. Then Tess came out, drying her hands in her apron. Her little cheeks were as rosy as ever, but the gloss was gone. I had the feeling that now there was nothing much she didn’t know about her brother. Even the nervous smile suggested that she knew what I had come for – of course, old Hourigan must have brought him home.
‘Ah, Ted, ’tis a cure for sore eyes to see you,’ she said. ‘You’ll have a cup? You will, to be sure.’
‘You’ll have a drink,’ Terry said.
‘Do you know, I think I will, Terry,’ I said, seeing a nice natural opening for the sort of talk I had in mind.
‘Ah, you may as well have both,’ said Tess, and a few minutes later she brought in the tea and cake. It was like old times until she left us, and then it wasn’t. Terry poured out the whiskey for me and the tea for himself, though his hand was shaking so badly that he could scarcely lift his cup. It was not all pretence; he didn’t want to give me an opening, that was all. There was a fine print over his head – I think it was a Constable of Salisbury Cathedral. He talked about the monastery school, the usual clever, bitter, contemptuous stuff about monks, inspectors, and pupils. The whole thing was too carefully staged, the lifting of the cup and the wiping of the moustache, but it hypnotized me. There was something there you couldn’t do violence to. I finished my drink and got up to go.
‘What hurry is on you?’ he asked irritably.
I mumbled something about it’s getting late.
‘Nonsense!’ he said. ‘You’re not a boy any longer.’
Was he just showing off his strength of will or hoping to put off the evil hour when he would go slinking down the quays again?
‘Ah, they’ll be expecting me,’ I said, and then, as I used to do when we were younger, I turned to the bookcase. ‘I see you have a lot of Maupassant at last,’ I said.
‘I bought them last time I was in Paris,’ he said, standing beside me and looking at the books as though he were seeing them for the first time.
‘A death-bed repentance?’ I asked lightly, but he ignored me.
‘I met another great admirer of his there,’ he said sourly. ‘A lady you should meet some time.’
‘I’d love to if I ever get there,’ I said.
‘Her address is the Rue de Grenelle,’ he said, and then with a wild burst of mockery, ‘the left-hand pavement.’
At last his guard was down, and it was Maupassant’s name that had done it. And still I couldn’t say anything. An angry flush mounted his pale dark face and made it sinister in its violence.
‘I suppose you didn’t know I indulged in that hideous vice?’ he snarled.
‘I heard something,’ I said. ‘I’m sorry, Terry.’
The angry flush died out of his face and the old brooding look came back.
‘A funny thing about those books,’ he said. ‘This woman I was speaking about, I thought she was bringing me to a hotel. I suppose I was a bit muddled with drink, but after dark one of these places is much like another. “This isn’t a hotel,” I said when we got upstairs. “No,” she said, “It’s my room.”’
As he told it, I could see that he was living it all over again, something he could tell nobody but myself.
‘There was a screen in the corner. I suppose it’s the result of reading too much romantic fiction, but I thought there might be somebody hidden behind it. There was. You’d never guess what?’
‘No.’
‘A baby,’ he said, his eyes boring through me. ‘A child of maybe eighteen months. I wouldn’t know. While I was looking, she changed him. He didn’t wake.’
‘What was it?’ I asked, searching for the message that he obviously thought the incident contained. ‘A dodge?’
‘No,’ he said almost grudgingly. ‘A country girl in trouble, trying to support her child, that’s all. We went to bed and she fell asleep. I couldn’t. It’s many years now since I’ve been able to sleep like that. So I put on the light and began to read one of the books that I carried round in my pocket. The light woke her and she wanted to see what I had. “Oh, Maupassant,” she said. “He’s a great writer.” “Is he?” I said. I thought she might be repeating something she’d picked up from one of her customers. She wasn’t. She began to talk about Boule de Suif. It reminded me of the arguments we used to have in our young days.’ Suddenly he gave me a curious boyish smile. ‘You remember, when we used to walk up the river together.’
‘Oh, I remember,’ I said with a sigh.
‘We were terrible young idiots, the pair of us,’ he said sadly. ‘Then she began to talk about The Tellier Household. I said it had poetry. “Oh, if it’s poetry you want, you don’t go to Maupassant. You go to Vigny, you go to Musset, but Maupassant is life, and life isn’t poetry. It’s only when you see what life can do to you that you realize what a great writer Maupassant is.” … Wasn’t that an extraordinary thing to happen?’ he asked fiercely, and again the angry colour mounted his cheeks.
‘Extraordinary,’ I said, wondering if Terry himself knew how extraordinary it was. But it was exactly as if he were reading the thoughts as they crossed my mind.
‘A prostitute from some French village, a drunken old waster from an Irish provincial town, lying awake in the dawn in Paris, discussing Maupassant. And the baby, of course. Maupassant would have made a lot of the baby.’
‘I declare to God, I think if I’d been in your shoes, I’d have brought them back with me,’ I said. I knew when I said it that I was talking nonsense, but it was a sort of release for all the bitterness inside me.
‘What?’ he asked, mocking me. ‘A prostitute and her baby? My dear Mr Magner, you’re becoming positively romantic in your old age.’
‘A man like you should have a wife and children,’ I said.
‘Ah, but that’s a different story,’ he said malevolently. ‘Maupassant would never have ended a story like that.’
And he looked at me almost triumphantly with those mad, dark eyes. I knew how Maupassant would have ended that story all right. Maupassant, as the girl said, was life, and life was pretty nearly through with Terry Coughlan.