1972 (27 page)

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Authors: Morgan Llywelyn

BOOK: 1972
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Tiger's eyes
, thought Barry.
Barbara was looking at him with equal intensity. She remembered him as a grown-up—to a ten-year-old, anyone over sixteen was a grown-up—but she had not remembered that he could stand so absolutely still, so quiet at his centre. “Barry Halloran! Don't you know me?”
“I'm sorry, I just didn't recognise you for a moment.”
Barbara laughed. “I'll take that as a compliment. People do tell me I've changed a bit.”
“A bit,” Barry conceded. While he stowed their suitcases in the boot of the car he could feel her eyes on him.
Once again Barry and Barbara rode together in the back seat. Barry tried to make conversation but could think of little to say. She was so totally different from his expectations.
In the front seat Isabella talked nonstop about her talented daughter. She gave the impression that the girl was the greatest singer anyone had ever heard, someone who would set the world of music on fire. Her boasts piled atop one another like too much sugar icing on a cake.
Barbara seemed content to stare out the window at the passing countryside.
When they turned into the lane leading to the farmhouse Barry was painfully conscious of the numerous potholes. He had never paid any attention to them before; they were simply part of the farm, like the sag in the roof of the house. Ursula put her effort into the things that mattered to her. The livestock were always in top condition.
Barbara turned toward Barry. “You told me you were wealthy and lived in a big house. That one isn't big at all.”
“You remember something I said all those years ago?”
“I remember everything you said. I had a terrific crush on you.”
Barry felt his ears redden. “You were just a little girl.”
“Oh yes,” she agreed. “But as I said before, I've changed.”
That evening Ursula set the table with the fine china that was rarely taken from the cupboard. Atop each plate was a linen napkin folded into an elaborate flower shape. Barry was struck with admiration.
None of our neighbours would know how to do that. It must be something Mam learned when she was in Europe, and never forgot
. As he unfolded his napkin he saw his mother watching him. He gave her a tiny wink. A salute.
E
XHAUSTED by their long flight, the Kavanaghs went to bed early. Afterwards Barry remarked, “Isabella hasn't changed very much, but the way she carries on about Barbara is cringemaking.”
“She considers her daughter a fashion accessory,” Ursula replied. Her eyes twinkled with merry malice. “Isabella loathes
classical music, you know. Now she'll have to endure hour after hour of it. It's enough to restore one's faith in God.”
"I
N Irish your name would be Bairbre,” Barry said the following morning. At Ursula's suggestion he had taken Barbara out to look at the horses. With their arms folded on top of the paddock railing, they were watching the current year's crop of weanlings.
“Bairbre.” She repeated the word, tasting the sound of Irish on her tongue.
“I could teach you a bit of Irish while you're here,” Barry offered.
“Why on earth would I want to learn a dead language?”
“Irish isn't dead. It's—”
“Of course it's dead, everyone knows that. Besides, I'm studying Italian already, and I'll have to learn German and French too. That's enough.”
“You won't need any of those languages unless you actually become an opera singer.”
“Well I will, smarty pants! My grandfather left a trust fund for each of his grandchildren, and I'm going to use mine to get the best training there is. So there.”
Her tone irritated Barry. Lifting one eyebrow, he drawled, “You think you have enough talent, do you?”
Instead of answering, Barbara turned around and leaned against the fence. She inhaled deeply several times. Then, surprising in its power, the voice of a mature woman rose through the strong column of her throat. Adalgisa's aria from
Norma
filled the air.
“Deh! Proteggimi, o Dio!”
The impassioned plea of a woman begging the gods to save her from a fatal love.
One of the colts in the paddock gave a violent snort and raced off across the grass.
If amber could sing
, thought Barry,
it would sound like Barbara Kavanagh.
A rich contralto, so deep and dark a man could drown in it.
Or struggle as helplessly as a fly caught in amber.
B
ARBARA Kavanagh swept over Barry like a thunderstorm. The beauty of her voice bewitched him. Her personality annoyed
him. “That girl constantly interrupts me,” he complained to his mother, “and contradicts everything I say.”
“She's just trying to take the mickey out of you.”
“Well, she's succeeding. Sometimes it's all I can do to keep my temper.”
“Ignore her,” Ursula advised.
But it was impossible to ignore Barbara Kavanagh. She took centre stage as her natural right. Torn between amusement and exasperation, Barry said to her, “I'd like you to meet a fellow called Gilbert Fitzmaurice. You two were made for each other.”
“Is he a friend of yours?”
“We were roommates at Trinity.”
“I don't need to meet another boring old man, thank you very much.”
“Old!” Barry was outraged. “He's the same age as me. Do you think I'm …” But she was walking away.
“I feel like I've been run over by a lorry,” Barry told Ursula after they took the two women back to the airport. “Is that girl really only seventeen?”
“Seventeen going on thirty-five. Frightening, isn't she? What do you suppose she'll be like ten years from now?”
“I shudder to think,” Barry replied.
When he returned to Dublin he bought a used gramophone in a pawn shop. “I'm very fond of music,” he explained to his landlord. “Do you mind?”
“Not if you keep it low and don't play any of that jump-up-and-down music. The young ones like that sort of thing, but it gives me a headache.”
Barry liked “jump-up-and-down music” too. But he spent his hard-earned money on classical music and operatic records.
I
N spite of the inroads that popular music and television were making on the consciousness of the younger generation, sex in Catholic Ireland was still a taboo subject.
For Barry sex was a nagging constant, a distraction when he was working and a preoccupation when he was not. Either way he felt guilty. His logical mind told him there should be no guilt for a basic biological urge, but he could not help it. Some conditioning ran too deep.
That conditioning drove many young Irish men into the priesthood.
Barry never considered becoming a priest—Ursula's opinion of institutionalised religion had its own effect—but he no longer thought of marrying. A wife and the inevitable children would tie him down too much.
A freelancer needs to be free.
Having a family would also place an intolerable strain on his finances. Although he was beginning to build a reputation, the assignments he received from the Dublin print media were not enough to support him. Most of his sales were self-generated, which meant he had to go out and find stories for his camera to tell. Sometimes he did not return to Harold's Cross for days.
But, as he said to Séamus McCoy,
“Bíonn gach tosach lag.
Every beginning is weak.”
“And the endings too,” McCoy replied.
“It's not like you to be so pessimistic.”
“Look what's happened to the Army, Seventeen. The gun's on the shelf, full stop. I should be training a new company of recruits, and you should be blowing the hell out of roads and bridges in the north. Yet here I am in my room, reading the writings of James Connolly, and you're … What did you say brings you to Ballina?”
“I'm on my way to Foynes to see what's left of the facilities for amphibian aircraft. The flying boats were a vital link between Europe and America during World War Two, but I understand there's hardly anything left now. It might provide some dramatic photographs. You know the sort of thing: death of a dream, et cetera.”
“Ireland's full of places where dreams died,” said McCoy. “Everything from castles to linen mills. You think anyone would be interested in an old airport?”
“I hope so. I'm doing it on spec.”
McCoy picked a shred of tobacco from his tongue and ground out his cigarette as if it were an enemy he lusted to break. “I'm living my life on spec,” he said. “The hope that the Army'll be back in business one of these days. I envy you, Seventeen—having something else.”
Barry spent a day in the small town of Foynes on the bank of the Shannon. There was an ineffable sadness about the place. The Monteagle Arms Hotel, which had been adapted as a control
centre, still contained communications equipment. A rail link still ran toward the flying-boat basin. But rotting piers, deteriorating storage hangers, and rusting fuel tanks told the story of an era that had come and gone.
Barry stood at the edge of the river and gazed out across the reed-fringed water, toward the open sea.
The next parish is Boston
. He was swept by sudden yearning for America, where the air was electric with energy and dreams were still coming true.
America. Barbara Kavanagh.
Barry smiled to himself. “I hope your dream comes true, little girl.” The smile expanded to a laugh. “God help anyone who gets in your way!”
The photos from Foynes generated a modicum of interest but no sales. Barry refused to be discouraged. He wrote an evocative article to accompany the pictures, recalling the exploits of the heroic pilots who had braved the Atlantic during the darkest days of the war. Going one step further, he suggested a museum devoted to that brief but important period in aviation history. He sent copies to the few aviation magazines in Britain, then began haunting the newsstands, looking for suitable publications farther afield.
Camera in hand, he scoured the Dublin area for subjects. He was developing an eye for what the market wanted. Human interest pictures. An impromptu football match on a grassy field, the young lads grimacing with effort while old men watched from the sidelines, their faces seamed with nostalgia. A lean-to in which a woman sat hunched on a three-legged stool, showing her small daughter how to milk the family cow. Every picture presented an image of Ireland in the 1960s. None depicted the underlying politics. There was no market for visual political commentary. Whatever was happening in the north, the south did not want to know.
Barry went out with a number of young women that autumn. He liked all of them, slept with one or two, committed himself to none. Sometimes he met friends from Trinity and they spent an evening together, but they were going their way and Barry was going his. His old lone-wolf habit had returned. On the day he sold the Foynes series to an American magazine Barry found himself sitting alone in a pub in Middle Abbey Street, staring
into a pint of bitter that he really did not want. Leaving the drink untouched, he went home to listen to his newest acquisition, a recording of
Cavalleria Rusticana.
The role of Lucia was sung by a contralto whose name meant nothing to him, but he could lose himself in her voice.
I
N Northern Ireland the staple industries continued to decline. Marine engineering and linen manufacture were particularly hard-hit. In spite of the efforts of Terence O'Neill's government, unemployment remained stubbornly high.
The IRA, north and south, seemed to be fading into oblivion. The only time republicanism came to public attention was when one of the splinter groups staged a bank robbery to gain funds. Quite a few were undertaken by these dissidents; only a small number were successful; several were farcical. On one occasion, the only weapon the gang possessed was an ancient revolver that literally fell apart as the ringleader was waving it at a bank clerk. The men fled the building amidst hoots of derision from bystanders.
Barry cut the article from the newspaper and posted it to Séamus McCoy, with, “This is embarrassing,” written in the margin.
Under Cathal Goulding's leadership the Army, or what remained of it, had taken a decided turn to the left. Social issues were the order of the day. Instead of military drill, Volunteers marched shoulder to shoulder with trade unionists protesting unsafe labour practices.
“Joe Cahill's thoroughly disgusted,” McCoy wrote to Barry, referring to one of the Army's stalwarts who had been a close friend of Goulding's since the early fifties, “and so am I. To add insult to injury, Éamonn Thomas has been voted off the Army Council. I don't know why. We're on the ash heap and Ireland's not a damned bit better off than it was in 1921. In fact it's worse. Now we haven't a hope in hell of getting our republic back.”

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