Strumpet City (68 page)

The footpath, still wet from the rain, glowed a little in the light of lamps and shopwindows. It had a tilt. He leaned sideways to balance, decided his direction, lurched forward. The wind caught him full in the face. It was the blow of a fist. He endured it. He was used to beatings; from superiors, from anonymous letter writers, from friends of the days of studenthood who had found it more prudent to forget him. The parish he ruled over beat and bruised him, with its hovels, its ignorance, its hunger, its filth. It had broken him with beatings. It had filled his mouth full of blood. He stopped at the corner, leaned against a wall, braced himself against the sudden lurch of the unstable street. The band approached.

He would go immediately to his church. That was his refuge. But first the band. The bandsmen wore peaked caps and wide bandoliers of shining black leather. The brassy notes battered against the wall he was holding, making it beat like a giant pulse beneath his hand. The din grew and the bandsmen multiplied, until they spread in fanlike waves from the centre of the street to the wall he was leaning against. With shining bandoliers and sounding instruments they passed over and through him. The wall offered no resistance to them, they brushed by him without impact, they filled the street and the sky. The banners followed and whirled above his head like shrieking birds, the torches tossed and sparked and flared in long processions down corridors of his mind, boots pounded in streets of his being, the citadel in which he had barricaded the last of himself was assailed and shaken. He hid there, awaiting dissolution. Then the band passed.

‘Help the lock-out, Father.’

Someone was rattling a box at him. He wiped the heavy sweat from his face, pushed the box aside, lurched forward in his effort to get quickly away.

‘Jaysus,’ the shocked voice said, ‘will you look at his Reverence—drunk as a lord.’

The words cut into him like a knife thrust. He recollected himself, posed cunningly as an invalid, made use of his walking stick, simulated a limp. It took him, unnoticed for the most part, through the remaining streets. They were not, at that hour, populous. He crossed the granite flag with its worn depression, passed the holy water font with its green slime and found himself in the dimness and quietness he had desired. His church.

He sat down. A woman, deep in prayer, knelt some distance from him. At shrines and side chapels candles, like gossips, bobbed numerous heads and held mischievous conversations. The sanctuary lamp, sign of the Real Presence, houseflag of the Lord God, showed a tiny point of flame above the high altar’s sacrificial slab. Christ was in residence. What was an altar, then? A monument to the world’s cowardice, where Holy men cringed to and propitiated God’s anger with the blood of others; saving their own skins with slaughtered bodies; with lambs, with doves, with the innocent blood of Christ Himself. The World—not Christ—judged, mocked, derided; the world trampled on the weak and battered in its rage at the faces of the defenceless; the world—not Christ—crucified, maimed, chastised with rods, demanded sacrifice. What priest could take the body of the world and break it between his fingers? How many desired to?

The woman in front had forgotten his presence, if she had ever been aware of it. Her prayers had stopped. He listened carefully and knew she was weeping. Her grief was soft and controlled, her sobbing barely audible. He raised himself with the help of his stick and went to her. He felt steady again. His mind was clear, untroubled, reasonable. He touched her shoulder.

‘For whom do you weep, my poor woman?’ he asked. His voice too, he was glad to discover, was entirely under his control again. He felt extremely well.

‘For my poor husband, Father.’

‘Has he died?’

‘He died on me two days ago.’

‘And have you buried him?’

‘He’ll be buried tomorrow after the ten o’clock mass.’

‘Then his body is in the mortuary chapel?’

‘It is, Father, we brought him here this evening.’

‘Then dry your tears and follow me.’

She rose obediently. They went into the mortuary chapel where the coffin rested on trestles between four tall candles. Beads of holy water still besprinkled the lid. Father Giffley turned to her and said gently:

‘I’ll raise him up for you.’

He smiled as he did so. It was a terrible smile. The woman backed away from him. He raised his voice to its pulpit pitch and shouted:

‘Lazarus—come forth.’

The woman began to scream. Her terror echoed through the whole church.

‘Jesus,’ she screamed, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .’

He lifted his voice once more, so that their shouting intermingled in a nightmare of noise.

‘Lazarus—come forth.’

Then he stretched out both hands and pushed the coffin from its trestles. It fell thunderously on the stone floor. The lid burst open. The corpse tumbled out and lay in a grotesque bundle on the ground. The woman’s screams became wilder.

‘Jesus, oh Jesus,’ she kept calling, ‘Jesus, Jesus, Jesus . . .’

Father O’Connor and Father O’Sullivan arrived together. It took them a long time to quieten her and then to persuade her to go into the house with the clerk to rest and recover. When she left they looked for Father Giffley. They found him eventually at the foot of the high altar. He was lying prostrate, his face downwards and his arms spread wide in formal veneration. He was either heavily asleep—or unconscious.

On Tuesday morning at eleven o’clock Rashers knocked on the basement door and asked the housekeeper if he might speak with Father Giffley.

‘Father Giffley is not here,’ she said.

‘That’s all right,’ Rashers told her, ‘he said I was to wait for him.’

She looked at him peculiarly.

‘But Father Giffley isn’t here at all, at all. He’s gone away.’

‘Gone away?’ Rashers repeated. The housekeeper nodded. He hardly dared to ask the next question. He waited for some time, but the housekeeper volunteered nothing further. He said, fearful of the answer:

‘And when do you expect him back?’

‘He’s very sick, the poor man,’ the housekeeper said. ‘God alone knows when we might hope to have him back with us.’

Rashers absorbed the information slowly. The pain in his heart made it difficult to speak. She closed the door.

He went back again towards Chandlers Court. The streets were warm with unseasonable sunshine. It did not comfort him. A parade passed him but he paid no attention whatever to it. There was the usual band and the usual whirl of banners.

‘Larkin gaoled by Lloyd George’

‘British Comrades

No Larkin

No Lloyd George’

The court had sentenced Larkin to seven months’ imprisonment. The news meant nothing to Rashers. He had no further interest in anything. Nothing mattered.

C
HAPTER
T
WELVE

In December defeat became a certainty. It afflicted the streets and peered through the windows of tenements with a cold, grey eye. The grates were often without fire, the rooms without furniture. Hope flickered for a moment when the Archbishop of Dublin, moved by their hunger and distress and the nearness of Christmas, succeeded in assembling a Peace Conference. It failed almost as soon as it began. In London the British Trade Union Council met to consider a plea for sympathetic strike action. It was refused. They promised instead to increase the subsidies so that Dublin’s strike pay could be improved. The opposite happened. The subscription lists in the Labour papers grew shorter, the central strike fund dwindled almost to nothing.

Mr. Doggett, fixing his new calendar for 1914 to the wall of the office overlooking the idle marshalling yard, looked beyond it and noted that the ships at the quayside were working normally. Free labourers now glutted the port. The police were there to guard them, of course, but he took heart. It could not possibly be long now. In January also Fitz attended a closed meeting in Liberty Hall at which the members were advised to go back to work if they could do so without signing the document that had started the whole thing. Joe, who was standing beside Fitz, looked around at him. They were beaten. For the present anyway. No one had said so, but everybody knew it. They would have to get back to work now as best they could.

‘That’s that,’ Fitz said. They stood at the river wall to talk awhile. The food kitchens in the basement were already closed. There were no longer queues with jamjars and cans.

‘What are the chances?’ Joe wondered.

‘None for me,’ Fitz said.

‘Still—no harm trying.’

‘No harm in the world,’ Fitz said.

Mary said the same thing. She had never criticised or complained, but she had grown thin and looked unwell. The police had wrecked what little remained in the room which once had been her source of comfort and pride. It had only the broken table now and, incongruously, the clock that had been Pat’s wedding present to them. The police had overlooked it. Or perhaps Father Giffley’s unexpected entry had saved it. She said he should try his luck. Maybe they would remember that he had always been a good workman.

He went down to the foundry with the rest. They were presented with a form which was not quite the same as the original. It demanded an undertaking that they would not take part in sympathetic strikes but it made no mention of relinquishing membership of their Union. They discussed it and decided to sign.

‘There’ll be another day,’ Fitz told them when they consulted him. He himself was called aside by Carrington. They walked in silence down the yard to an empty storeroom. At the door Carrington took a whistle from his pocket and stopped to blow two blasts. A boy appeared from one of the houses.

‘Get my sandwiches from the locker,’ Carrington told him, ‘and bring a can of tea.’

‘Yes, Mr. Carrington,’ the boy said.

They went inside. There was a stove lighting in one corner and from the window they had a view of the wintry yard. It looked desolate enough. Exposed machinery had gathered rust, grass had rooted in the spaces between the cobbles, the paint on doors and woodwork had faded and peeled.

‘We’ll have a cup of tea when the nipper comes,’ Carrington said.

‘I’m not here to drink their tea,’ Fitz told him.

‘The tea is mine. Don’t be so bloody shirty.’ His tone was friendly. But he was embarrassed.

‘I’d like to know what the news is,’ Fitz said. Carrington opened the shutter of the stove and stirred the coals until they flamed.

‘We might as well be warm,’ he said.

He offered Fitz a stool to sit on and gave him a cigarette. It was so long since Fitz had smoked that the first pull of it made him dizzy. For a while Carrington’s face became a blurred disc.

‘The news isn’t good,’ Carrington said at last.

‘I thought it wouldn’t be,’ Fitz told him.

‘I told you they wouldn’t re-employ a foreman who went out with the rank and file, and that’s the instruction they’ve sent down. You’re not to be taken on.’

‘Am I the only one?’

‘There are two others.’

‘Shop stewards?’

‘One is a shop steward. The other is just an incurable troublemaker.’

The boy came in with the sandwiches and the tea. Fitz rose to go but Carrington gripped his arm.

‘We’re not enemies, Fitz.’

‘No.’

‘Then stay where you are. I want to talk to you.’

‘Is there any sense in talking?’

‘Sit down.’

Fitz hesitated. But he took the mug of tea which Carrington pressed on him and accepted a sandwich. The feel of the sandwich in his hand roused reserves of hunger that had been building up for weeks. It had meat in it. He forced himself to delay before eating it. It took an enormous amount of will. After a decent interval he began to eat it. Once he began it was impossible to stop. He worked away steadily at it until it had gone. Carrington immediately offered him another, but Fitz waved it aside.

‘No shame in being hungry,’ Carrington said, ‘take it.’ He was smiling. Fitz gave in and took it.

‘Thanks,’ he said.

‘There’s one way you might get back,’ Carrington said, ‘but you’re probably going to be stubborn about it.’

‘Tell me what it is.’

‘If I could tell them you’d leave the union and give an undertaking never to join it again, it might make them change their minds.’

‘Is this your idea or theirs?’

‘Mine. I don’t even know if it would work. But I’m willing to put it to them.’

‘I’ll do anything within reason,’ Fitz said, ‘but not that.’

‘Fitz,’ Carrington said earnestly, ‘I have respect for you as a person and as one of my best foremen. If you do what I ask it’ll all be forgotten about in a few months anyway. What’s the sense in being stubborn?’

‘No,’ Fitz said.

‘Do you realise the position you’re in?’

‘I’ve a shrewd notion.’

‘I don’t think you have,’ Carrington said. ‘You’re the only foreman I know of who walked out with the men. It’s not just a matter of the foundry refusing to employ you. You’ll be blacklisted in every job in the city.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I’ve been given the general list drawn up by the Federation with instructions to follow it, when I’m taking men on. Your name is on it. You don’t believe me?’

The information was hard to accept. As he reflected on it he felt panic beginning to stir in the back of his mind.

‘I believe you,’ Fitz said.

‘Then let me try what I suggested.’

Fitz hesitated. He shut his mind to speculation about the future.

‘No,’ he said.

‘You’re a stubborn bloody man,’ Carrington said. He offered another cigarette and they smoked in silence. Then Carrington said:

‘There’s something else I wanted to speak to you about. I’m thinking of that friend of yours who lost his legs here a couple of years ago. Mulhall—wasn’t it?’

‘Bernard Mulhall,’ Fitz said. ‘He died.’

‘I know that. Had he a family?’

‘A wife and an only son.’

‘That’s what I was told. How old is the son?’

‘About eighteen. He might be more.’

‘I think I can help him.’

‘I seem to remember Bernie Mulhall being on your blacklist too.’