Dan said – to be sure, there was only his word for this; but who would invent such a thing? – that, in their teens, his brother and he had ravaged their sister on the parsonage kitchen table. Their father was a parson, and when the rape took place the household was at Evensong. Dan described a fume of dust motes sliced by thin, surgical light, a gleam of pinkish copper pans and, under his nose, the pith of the deal table. Outside the door, his sister’s dog had howled. But the truth was, said Dan, that she herself did not resist much. She’d been fifteen, and the unapologetic Dan was now twenty. It had, he claimed, been a liberation for all three.
‘The Bible’s full of it,’ he’d wind up. ‘Incest!’
The story was for married women only. Dan specialized in unhappy wives. Mal mariées. He sang a song about them in French, easing open the tight, alien vowels and letting the slur of his voice widen their scope: ma-uhl mah-urrr-ee-yeh. It was a Limerick voice, and those who resisted its charm said that the further Dan Lydon got from Limerick the broader his accent grew. The resistant tended to be men; women always liked Dan. To hear him lilt, ‘My lo-hove is lo-ike a r-red, r-red r-ro-ose’ was, as respected matrons would tell you, like listening to grand opera. His vibrancy fired them. It kindled and dazzled like those beams you saw in paintings of the Holy Ghost, and his breath had a pulse to it, even when all he was ordering was the same again, please, and a packet of fags. Words, moving in his mouth like oysters, put town-dwellers in mind of rural forebears and of the damp, reticent lure of the countryside.
The parsonage of Dan’s youth lay in grasslands watered by the River Shannon, flat country shadowed by those cloud formations known as mackerel backs and mares’ tails – arrangements as chameleon as himself. He was a bright-haired, smiling boy, who first reached Dublin in 1943, a time when the Japanese minister rode with a local hunt and the German one did not always get the cold shoulder. Dan’s allegiance was to the noble Soviets, but he was alive too to sexual raciness blown in like pollen from the war-zones. Change fizzed; neutrality opened fields of choice, and values had rarely been shiftier.
‘So where is your sister now?’
Mrs Connors did and did not believe his story. ‘Tea?’ she offered. Tea was his hour. Husbands tended to be at work. Mr Connors was a civil servant.
Dan took his tea. ‘She had to be married off,’ he admitted. ‘She has a sweet little boy.’
Mrs Connors dared: ‘Yours?’
‘Or my brother’s? I’d like there to be one I knew was mine.’ His eyes held hers. Putting down the cup, he turned her wrist over, slid back the sleeve, and traced the artery with a finger. ‘The blue-veined child!’ he murmured. ‘Don’t you think children conceived in passion are special? Fruits of wilfulness! Surely they become poets? Or Napoleons?’
Phyllis Connors was sure Napoleon’s family had been legitimate. On her honeymoon, before the war, she had visited Corsica. ‘Their mother was addressed as Madame Mère.’
‘Was that the model Connors held up to you? “Madame Mère”!’ Dan teased. ‘On your honeymoon! What a clever cuss!’
The teasing could seem brotherly; but Dan’s brotherliness was alarming. Indeed, Phyllis’s offer to be a sister to him had touched off the nonsense – what else could it be? – about incest.
Nonsense or not, it unsettled her.
He was predatory. A known idler. Wolfed her sandwiches as though he had had no lunch – and maybe he hadn’t? The parson had washed his hands of him. But Dan had a new spiritual father in a poet who had stopped the university kicking him out. Dan’s enthusiasm for poetry – he was, he said, writing it full-time – so captivated the poet that he had persuaded the provost to waive mundane requirements and ensure that the boy’s scholarship (paid by a fund for sons of needy parsons) be renewed. Surely, urged Dan’s advocate, the alma mater of Burke and Sam Beckett could be flexible with men of stellar promise? Talents did not mature at the speed of seed-potatoes, and Ireland’s best known export was fractious writers. Let’s try to keep this one at home.
The poet, who ran a magazine, needed someone to do the legwork and, when need be, plug gaps with pieces entitled Where the Red Flag Flies, A Future for Cottage Industries? or Folk Memories of West Clare. Dan could knock these off at speed and the connection gave him prestige with the undergraduates at whose verse-readings he starred.
It was at one of these that Phyllis Connors had first heard him recite. The verse had not been his. That, he explained, must stay sub rosa. Did she know that Jack Yeats, the painter, kept a rose on his easel when painting his mad, marvellous pictures of horse-dealers, fiddlers and fairs? Art in progress was safest under the rose.
After tea, Dan talked of procreation and of how men in tropical lands like Ecuador thought sex incomplete without it. That was the earth’s wisdom speaking through them. RCs – look at their Madonnas – had the same instincts. Dan, the parson’s son, defended the Pope whose church had inherited the carnal wit of the ancients. ‘The sower went out to sow his seed….’
Talk like this unnerved Phyllis, who was childless and unsure what was being offered. What farmer, asked Dan, would scatter with an empty hand? ‘Your women are your fields,’ he quoted, from the Koran. ‘Go freely into your fields!’ Then he extolled the beauty of pregnant women – bloomy as June meadows – and recited a poem about changelings: ‘Come away, O human child …’
Phyllis, thinking him a child himself, might have surrendered to the giddiest request. But Dan made none. Instead he went home to his lodgings, leaving her to gorge her needs on the last of the sandwiches.
He came back, though, for her house was near the poet’s, and after drudging with galleys would drop by to cup hands, sculpt air, praise her hips, and eat healthy amounts of whatever was for tea. Refreshed, he liked to intone poems about forest gods and fairyfolk. ‘And if any gaze on our rushing band’, he chanted, ‘We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart.’
Why did he not come after what he implied was the hope of his own heart? Wondering made her think of him more than she might otherwise have done, and so did seeing him in The Singing Kettle, eating doughnuts with the poet’s wife. Peering through trickles in a steamy window, she thought she saw the word ‘love’ on his lips. Or was it ‘dove’? His motto, ‘Let the doves settle!’ meant ‘Take things as they come.’
Phyllis decided that some doves needed to be snared.
*
Soon she was pregnant, and when she went into the Hatch Street Nursing Home to give birth, Dan brought her a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, with the pale slash where the Virgin, easing her gown off her round belly, shows underlinen more intimate than skin. His finger on Phyllis’s stomach sketched an identical white curve. He teased the nurses, relished the fertility all about, and was happy as a mouse in cheese.
It turned out that the poet’s wife was here, too, and for the same reason. Her room was on another floor, so Dan yoyoed up and down. Sometimes he brought gifts which had to be divided: fruit, for instance, from the poet, who still used Dan to run errands. Or books, review copies from the magazine. When a nurse let drop that the poet’s wife had the same Piero Madonna on her side table, Phyllis wrapped hers in a nappy and put it in the trash. If there had been a fireplace, she would have burned it, as she had been trained to do with unwanted religious objects.
Her baby received her husband’s first name, and the poet’s baby the poet’s. Dan – though neither couple asked him to be godfather – presented both infants with christening mugs. One had been his and the other his brother’s, and both were made of antique Dublin silver. Early Georgian. The official godfathers, fearing odious comparisons, returned their purchases to Weirs Jewellers and bought cutlery. Phyllis wondered if Dan’s brother knew what had happened to his mug. Though the war was now over, he was still overseas with the British Army.
‘He’ll not be back,’ Dan assured her, and revealed that the parsonage had been a dour and penurious place. Its congregation had dwindled since the RC natives took over the country in ’21, and attendance some Sundays amounted to less than six. Pride had throttled Dan’s widowed father, who did menial work behind the scenes and made his children collect firewood, polish silver, and dine on boiled offal.
‘He wouldn’t want the mug,’ said Dan. ‘Too many bad memories!’ The brothers had left as soon as they could, and getting their sister pregnant had been a parting gift. ‘If we hadn’t, she’d still be Daddy’s slave.’
*
Some years went by, and Dan was a student still, of a type known to Dubliners as ‘chronic’, one of a ragged brigade who, recoiling from a jobless job market, harked back to the tribally condoned wandering scholars of long ago. This connection was often all that raised the chronics above tramps or paupers, and the lifeline was frail.
But out of the blue, opportunity came Dan’s way. The poet, who had to go into hospital, asked him to bring out an issue of the magazine bearing on its masthead the words ‘Guest Editor: Daniel Lydon’. Here was challenge! Dan toyed excitedly with the notion of publishing his secret poetry, which he yearned, yet feared, to display. These urges warred in him until, having read and reread it, he saw that it had gone dead, leaking virtue like batteries kept too long in a drawer. Stewing over this, he fell behind with the magazine and had to ghostwrite several pieces to pad the thing out. As part of this process, he decided to publish photographs of A Changing Ireland. Hydrofoils, reapers-and-binders, ballpoint pens and other such innovations were shown next to Neolithic barrows. The Knights of Columbanus in full fig appeared cheek by jowl with an electric band. Portraits of ‘the last Gaelic storyteller’ and some ‘future Irishmen’ rounded out the theme. The future Irishmen, three small boys with their heads arranged like the leaves of a shamrock, were recognizably his nephew and the recipients of his christening mugs – and what leaped to the eye was their resemblance to himself. The caption ‘Changelings’ drove the scandal home.
The poet, convalescing in his hospital bed after an operation for a gentleman’s complaint, told his wife, in an insufficiently discreet hiss, that he had paid Dan to do his leg work, not to get his leg over. Reference was made to ‘cuckoo’s eggs’, and it was not long before echoes of this reached the ear of Mr Connors, the proverbial quiet man whom it is dangerous to arouse. Connors, who had done a bit of hacking in his bachelor days, had a riding crop. Taking this to the student lodgings where Dan lived, he used it to tap smartly on his door.
When Dan opened this, Connors raised the crop. Dan yelled, and his neighbour, a fellow-Communist, who was on the Varsity boxing team, came hurtling to the rescue. Assuming the row to be political and Connors a member of the Blue Shirts only reinforced his zeal. Shoving ensued; Connors fell downstairs; gawkers gathered, and the upshot was that an ambulance was called and the opinion bandied that the victim had broken his back. Some genuine Blue Shirts were meanwhile rustled up. Men whose finest hours had been spent fighting for Franco, singing hymns to Cristo Re and beating the sin out of Reds, they were spoiling for a scrap, and if it had not been for Dan’s friend spiriting him out the back they might have sent him to join Mr Connors – who, as it would turn out, had not been injured, after all, and was fit as a fiddle in a couple of weeks. Dan, however, had by then prudently boarded the ferry to Holyhead, taking with him, like a subsidiary passport, the issue of the magazine bearing his name as ‘guest editor’. It got him work with the BBC, which, in those days of live programming, needed men with a gift of the gab and was friendly to Celts. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas were role-models, liquid stimulants in high favour, and Dan was recruited straight off the boat.
*
So ran reports reaching Dublin. Pithy myths, these acquired an envious tinge as Dan’s success was magnified, along with the sums he was earning for doing what he had formerly done for free: talking, singing and gargling verse. Others too were soon dreaming of jobs in a London whose airwaves vapoured with gold. Hadn’t Dubliners a known talent for transubstantiating eloquence into currency? And couldn’t every one of us talk at least as well as Dan Lydon?
Declan Connors doubted it. Despite himself, he’d caught snatches of what nobody had the indecency to quote quite to his face: a saga featuring Dan as dispenser of sweet anointings to women. These, Connors understood, had needed preparation. Persuasion had been required, and Dan’s boldness at it had grown legendary, as an athlete’s prowess does with fans. The gossips relished Dan’s gall, the airy way he could woo without promise or commitment – arguing, say, that in a war’s wake more kids were needed and that his companion’s quickened pulse was nature urging her to increase the supply. Nature! What a let-out! Any man who could sell a line like that in Holy Ireland could sell heaters in hell.
‘He’s a one-man social service!’ A wag raised his pint. ‘Offers himself up. “Partake ye of my body.” He’d rather be consumed than consume!’
The wag drained his glass. His preferences ran the other way. So did those of the man next to him, whose tongue wrestled pinkly with ham frilling from a sandwich. All around, males guzzled: women, in this prosperous pub, were outnumbered ten to one. Connors, sipping his whiskey, thought, No wonder Lydon made out. We left him an open field!
He could no longer regret this, for after ten barren years of marriage, Phyllis had had three children in quick succession. It was as if something in her had been unlocked. He supposed there were jokes about this, too, but he didn’t care. His master passion had turned out to be paternal, and Declan Junior was the apple of his eye. The younger two were girls and, as Phyllis spoiled them, he had to make things up to the boy.
For a while after the scandal, the couple had felt shy with each other, but had no thoughts of divorce. You couldn’t in Ireland, and it wasn’t what they wanted. They were fond of each other – and, besides, there was Declan, of whom it was said behind Mr Connors’ shrugging back that he used his blood father’s charm to wind his nominal one around his little finger. A seducer ab ovo.
Small-mindedness! Envy! Anyway, time heals, and when the boy was picked, surprisingly early, for his elementary-school soccer team, and later won ribbons for show jumping, Connors – a sportsman – knew him for his spiritual son. Even if the kid was a Lydon, he was a better one than Dan – whose brother, Connors recalled, had been decorated for gallantry in the war. Skimming the entry on Mendel in the encyclopaedia, he learned that hereditary character was transmitted chancily and, remembering the poltroonish Dan draped over armchairs and cowering during their fight, decided that Declan Junior had nothing of his natural father’s but his looks.
Connors still took an interest, though, in the news trickling back from London, where Dan’s free-lance was said to be cutting a swath: he had apparently acquired a new patron, a literary pundit who, though married, was partial to a handsome young man. And now Connors noted an odd thing: admiration was ousting envy and Dan’s stature in the saga growing. Needless to say, his news was slow to reach Connors, since nobody who remembered their connection would wish to re-open old wounds. It came in scraps and, by the time he got them, these were as spare and smooth as broken glass licked by recurring tides.
As Connors heard it, then: Dan’s new benefactor’s marriage, though possibly unconsummated, was harmonious, for his wife had money. The couple were fashionable hosts, and Dan was soon glowing in their orbit – singing ballads, referring to his secret oeuvre, and enlivening their soirées with tales of Irish mores. The pundit’s wife, the story went, was a handsome, angry woman who had hated her father, but having agreed to inherit his money, would make no further concession to men, and slept only with those she could pity or control. As her husband didn’t fit the bill, she had lovers. Dan was soon servicing both her and the husband who, being both jealous and smitten, was in the dark about this.
Here the story fractures. In one version, she ‘gets preggers’, which so shatters the husband that his violence leads to a miscarriage and Dan’s subsequent flight to Paris. But there was an implausible symmetry to this, as though running dye from the Dublin episode had coloured it; a likelier account has no pregnancy and the jealousy provoked by someone’s indiscretion. Deliberate? Careless? Either way, Connors learned, Dan left England, the marriage collapsed and the husband, previously a rather nerveless knight of the pen – who had, in his own words, ‘failed to grapple with his subjectivity’ – finally did so in a book which raised him several rungs on the literary ladder. This was before the Wolfenden Report; homosexuality was still a painful subject, and the grappling was judged brave. Dan, as midwife to his lover’s best writing, could be said to have done him a good turn.
Meanwhile, Declan Junior was in his teens, and his mother – noting that if you cut the heart from his name you’d be left with ‘Dan’ – feared leaving him alone with his sisters. An idle fear: girls bored him, and so did poetry, to her relief. Not that Dan himself had yet published a line, but the appelation ‘Poète Irlandais’ clung to him, who had now – wonder of wonders! – married and settled in Paris. The word was that an old Spanish Civil War hero, whose memoirs Dan had been ghost-writing while sleeping with his daughter, had, on catching the pair in flagrante, sat on Dan’s chest and said, ‘Marry her.’ A bad day’s work for the girl, tittered those Dubliners who still remembered Dan. One or two had looked him up on trips abroad and reported that he was doing something nowadays for films. Script-doctoring, was it? And his wife had published poems before their marriage, but none since. Maybe she didn’t want to shame him? Closer friends said the marriage was a good one, and that no forcing had been needed.
Why should it have been? Marisol was bright, young, had a river of dark hair, and gave Dan the tribal connection he had always coveted. His ravenous charm came from his childhood in that bleak parsonage. Marginal. Clanless. Left behind by the tide. Catholics – whose clan had dispersed his – did not appeal, but the Left did. The Spanish Civil War had been Dan’s boyhood war, and the more romantic for having been lost. Dan loved a negative. What, he would argue, was there to say about success? The surprise was that the Anglo-Saxon ruling classes could still talk and didn’t just beat their smug chests like chimps. If it weren’t for their homosexuals, he claimed, they’d have no art. Art was for those whose reality needed suborning. It burrowed and queried; it … et cetera! Dan could still chatter like a covey of starlings, and the Limerick accent went down a treat in French, being, as people would soon start to say, médiatique.
Along came the Sixties. The Youth Cult blossomed just as Dan – in his Forties – began losing his hair. Juvenescence glowed in him, though, as in a golden autumn tree. His freshness was a triumph of essence over accident, and he became an acknowledged Youth Expert when he made a film about the graffiti of May ’68. Graffiti, being, like pub-talk, insolent, jubilant, and an end in itself, was right up his street, and he was soon in Hollywood working on a second film. It came to nothing, which confirmed the purity of his response to the ephemeral, and he continued to fly between Paris and California, dressed in light, summery suits, and engaged in optimistic projects, some of which did throw his name onto a screen for a fleeting shimmer.
One evening in Paris, he came face to face with Connors and Phyllis in a brasserie. They were at different tables, and could have ignored each other. As their last encounter had led to Connors’ departure from the scene in an ambulance and Dan’s from Ireland, this might have seemed wise. Sportingly, however, Dan came over. Shiny and aglow, his forehead – higher than it used to be – damp with sweat. It was a hot night. Hand outstretched. A little self-deprecating. He had heard their news, as they had his, and congratulated Connors on a recent promotion. Family all well? Grand! Great! He was with his. Nodding at a tableful of Spaniards. Laughing at their noise. Then, ruefully, as two of his wrestling children knocked over a sauceboat, he said he’d better go and cope.
Soon the waiter brought the Connors two glasses of very old cognac with his compliments. They accepted, toasted him and, watching his gipsy table, remembered hearing that ‘the poor bastard’ had saddled himself with a family of idlers whom he had to work overtime to support. Dan’s father-in-law, it seemed, had emphysema. Marisol’s brother yearned to be a pop star, and she herself kept producing children. How many had they? Phyllis counted three, who were dark like their mother and did not look at all like Declan Junior. As she and Connors left, they thanked Dan for the cognac.
Afterwards, they discussed the encounter half sharply, half shyly. Looking out for each other’s dignity. Not mentioning Declan Junior whom Phyllis, her husband guessed, thought of as having two fathers. Blame could thus be moved about or dissolved in the whirligig of her brain. And she could play peekaboo, too, with romance. He suspected this because – the evening had brought it home to him – he, too, had an imaginative connection with Dan and had not liked what he saw in the brasserie. It had depressed him. Spilled gravy and domesticity cut Dan down to size, and a life-sized Dan was a reproach, as the saga figure hadn’t been at all. The connection to that Dan had, somehow, aureoled Connor’s life and added a dimension to his fantasies. For a while, it had even made Phyllis more attractive to him. An adulterous wife was exciting – and he had often wondered whether it could have been that extra zest which had led to his begetting the two girls.
Water under the bridge, to be sure! The Dan Saga had not stimulated his sex-life for years. What it did do was make him feel more benign than might have been expected of the sober civil servant he was. Broader, and even passionate. It was as if he himself had had a part in Dan’s adventurings. That, of course, made no sense, or rather the sense it made was private and – why not? – poetic. Dan, the unproductive poet, had, like Oscar Wilde, put his genius into his life: a fevering contagion. Or so Connors must have been feeling, unknown to himself. How else explain the gloom provoked by the sighting in the brasserie? Phyllis didn’t seem to feel it. But then women saw what they wanted to see. Connors guessed that for her Dan Lydon was still a figure of romance.
*
It was around this time that Declan Junior began to disappoint his parents. A gifted athlete who handled his academic work with ease, he had come through university with flying colours and Connors, convinced that the boy could star in any firmament, had looked forward to seeing him join the diplomatic corps or go in for politics or journalism. Something with scope. Instead, what should their affable, graceful boy do on graduating but take a humdrum job in a bank and announce that he was getting married! Yes. Now. There was no talking him out of it, and it was not a shotgun wedding, either. Indeed, Declan Junior was rather stuffy when asked about this. And when you met the girl you saw that it was unlikely. She was limp-haired, steady and – well, dull. Here was their cuckoo, thought Connors, turning out too tame rather than too wild. If there was a Lydon gene at work, the resemblance was more to the family man he and Phyllis had glimpsed in Paris than to the satyr whose heredity they had feared. Had they worked too hard at stamping out the demon spark?
That, they learned, was still riskily smouldering in the vicinity of Lydon himself. Connors heard the latest bulletin by a fluke, for he had grown reclusive since Declan’s wedding and more so after the christening, which came an impeccable ten months later. He was, to tell the truth, a touch down in the mouth. Brooding. Had Phyllis, he wondered, been cold with the boy when he was small? Could guilt have made her be? And might there be something, after all, to Freudian guff? Till now Connors had dismissed it, but there was Declan married to a surrogate Mum. Born to be a Mum: she was pregnant again, and had tied her limp hair in a bun. Cartoonish, in orthopedic shoes, she wore a frilly apron and loved to make pastry. Declan was putting on weight! Ah well.
The latest about Lydon was that, hungry for money, he had agreed to be a beard.
A what?
‘You may well ask,’ said Connors’ source, a man called Breen, who swore him to secrecy. Breen was on leave from the Irish Embassy in Rome, which, said he, was in a turmoil over the thing.
‘But what is a …?’
Breen looked over his shoulder; they’d met in the St Stephen’s Green Club. ‘I can’t tell you here.’
So Connors brought him home and settled him down with a whiskey, to tell his story before Phyllis came in. She was babysitting Declan III, known as Dickybird, who was at the crawling stage and tiring. His mother needed a rest.
Breen’s hot spurts of shock revived Connors’ spirits. The Dan Saga thrilled him in an odd, outraged way, much as the whiskey was warming and biting at his mouth. Recklessness, he thought welcomingly, a touch of folly tempered the norms and rules.
Lydon, said Breen, had been acting as cover for one of the candidates in the upcoming United States election, a married man who was having it off with an actress. Needing to seem above reproach – ‘You know American voters!’ – the candidate had engaged Dan to pretend to be the woman’s lover.
‘He was what’s called a beard – travelled with her, took her to parties, et cetera, then left the scene when the candidate had a free moment.’ The beard’s function was to draw suspicion. For the real lover to seem innocent, the beard must suggest the rut. And Dan did. Though he was now fifty, an aura of youth and potency clung to him.
‘It’s all in the mind!’ said Breen shrugging.
Outside the window, someone had turned on a revolving lawn-sprinkler and the family Labrador, a puppy called Muff, was leaping at its spray. That meant that Phyllis and the child were back from their walk.
Breen said that what Lydon’s wife thought of his job nobody knew. The money must have been good. Or maybe she hadn’t known – until she was kidnapped. Kidnapped? Yes. Hadn’t he said? By mistake. At the Venice Film Festival. By Sardinian kidnappers who got wind of the story but took the wrong woman. ‘The candidate’s rich, and they’d hoped for a big ransom.’ This had happened just three weeks ago.
Connors was stunned. A changeling, he thought, and felt a breath of shame. Play had turned dangerous, and he felt angry with himself for having relished Lydon’s tomfoolery.
‘The Yanks came to us,’ Breen told him, ‘asking us to handle the thing with discretion – after they’d got the actress back to the US. You could say we’re their beard!’ He grew grave, for there was a danger that the kidnappers could panic. ‘Sardinians feed their victims to their pigs, you know. Destroys the evidence. They’re primaeval and inbred! Islanders! No, not like us. More basic! Crude! Their life-way was easy to commercialize just because it was so crude. With them vengeance required blood as real as you’d put in blood sausage. Quantifiable! Material! We, by contrast, are casuists and symbol-jugglers. Closers of eyes …’
A flick of embarrassment in Breen’s own eye signalled a sudden recognition that this could seem to refer to the story – had he only now remembered it? – of Connors and Dan: a case of eyes closed to lost honour. With professional blandness, he tried to cover his gaffe with an account of the Embassy’s dilemma: on the one hand the papers must not learn of the thing. On the other, the kidnappers must be made to see that there was no money to be had. Breen castigated Lydon, whose sins were catching up with him. His poor wife though …
Connors tried to remember her face in the Paris brasserie, but could not.
‘That louser Lydon!’ Breen, intending perhaps to express solidarity with Connors, threw out words like ‘parasite’ and ‘sociopath!’ When you thought about it, a man like that was worse than the kidnappers. ‘He breaks down the barriers between us and them. He lets in anarchy. He sells the pass.’
Connors tried to demur, but Breen, warming to his theme, blamed society’s tolerance, for which it – ‘we’ – must now pay. ‘Bastards like that trade on it.’ Someone, he implied, should have dealt with Lydon long ago.
Connors ignored the reproach. Off on a different tack, his mind was cutting through a tangle of shy, willed confusions. He recognized that what he felt for Dan was love or something closer. Far from being his enemy, Dan was a part of himself. Luminous alter ego? Partner in father- and grandfatherhood? Closing his ears to his companion’s sermon, he looked out to where Phyllis and Dickybird had caught up with the golden Lab, on whose back the child kept trying to climb. Shaken off, he tried again: a rubbery putto, bouncing back like foam. The wild Lydon heritage had skipped a generation and here it was again.
Excited by the whirling spray, the puppy scampered through its prism while the infant held onto its tail. The child’s hair was as blond as the dog’s, and in the rainbow embrace the two gleamed like fountain statuary. They were Arcadian, anarchic, playful – and propelled by pooled energy.
‘It’s a terrible thing to happen,’ Connors conceded. ‘But I wouldn’t blame Lydon. Blame the American candidate or the Italian state. Hypocrisy. Puritanism. Pretence. Lydon’s innocent of all that. Blaming him is like, I don’t know, blaming that dog out there.’ And he waved his glass of whiskey at the golden scene outside.