The Dalkey Archive

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But the sergeant had been examining a large bottle he had taken down from a low shelf by the counter.

– By the pipers, he cried happily, here is the elixir of youth innocuously in its mundane perfection!

He handed the bottle to Hackett and reached up for another which he put in Mick’s hand. The label was,

HURLEY’S TONIC WINE

A glass three times a day or as required assures lasting benefit to the kidneys, stomach and nervous system. As recommended by doctors, nurses and geriatric institutions.

– Mind you, that’s not a bad sedative for the inner man, Mr Brannigan said seriously. Many ladies in the town are very partial to it.

– Sir Thomas O’Brannigan, the sergeant intoned grandly, I will buy a bottle of it myself – put it down to me – and when you have emplaced delicate stem glasses we will all have a sup of it superbly, for the dear knows how sick we could all be in the heel of the day.

Mr Brannigan smiled and nodded. Hackett hastily examined their faces in the uncertain light.

– I suppose it would pull us together a bit, he conceded. I’ll have a bottle too.

That Sunday morning had been surely one of manicoloured travail. After acerb disputation between De Selby and Saint Augustine, here they were for at least an hour in that closed pharmacy drinking Hurley’s Tonic Wine and listening to Sergeant Fottrell’s pensées on happiness, health, the wonders of foreign travel, law and order, and bicycles. The tonic was, as one suspected it would be, a cheap red wine heavily fortified. Its social purpose was clear enough. It enabled prim ladies, who would be shocked at the idea of entering a public house, to drink liquor that was by no means feeble, in the defensible interest of promoting health.

Mick had also bought a bottle and they were in the midst of a fourth bottle which Mr Brannigan bad gallantly put up ‘on the house’ when Mick felt that sheer shame required that the little party should end. Hackett agreed that he felt much better but not so Mick; even genuine wine does not help much, and he felt a little bit queasy. The sergeant was quite unmoved, and undeterred in loquacity. When they were back in the street Mick turned to him.

– Sergeant, the day is getting older and more people are now about. Would you mind if I left this bike in your station till tomorrow? I think for me a tram home would be the business.

– Benignly certain, he replied, courteously. Tell Policeman Pluck that I ordained the custody unceremoniously.

He then departed about his public business with many blessings commending his friends to God.

– Do you know, Hackett mentioned as they moved off, all that Augustinian chat is gradually bringing half-forgotten things bubbling up in my head. Didn’t he have a ferocious go at Pelagius?

– The heretic? Yes.

– What do you mean heretic?

– That’s what he was. Some synod condemned and excommunicated him.

– I thought only the Pope could pronounce on heresy.

– No. He appealed to the Pope without result.

– I see. Other bad eggs were the Manichees and the Donatists. I know that. I don’t mind about them at all. But if my memory isn’t all bunched. I believe Pelagius was a grand man and a sound theologian.

– You don’t know much on the subject. Don’t pretend.

– He believed Adam’s lapse (and personally I wouldn’t take the slightest notice of such fooling) harmed only himself. The guilt was his alone and this yarn about everybody being born in original sin is all bloody bull.

– Oh, as you will.

– Who, believing in God, could also believe that the whole human race was prostrate in ruin before Christ came, the day before yesterday?

– Augustine, for one, I think.

– New-born infants are innocent and if they die before baptism, they have a right to heaven. Baptism is only a rite, a sort of myth.

– According to De Selby, John the Baptist was no myth. He met the man. He probably regards him as a personal friend.

– Are you baptized?

– I suppose so.

– Suppose so? Is a hazy opinion enough if your soul depends on it?

– For heaven’s sake shut up. Haven’t we had enough for today and yesterday?

– An awkward question, what?

– At this rate I’ll probably meet Martin Luther on top of the tram.

Hackett contemptuously lit a cigarette and stopped.

– I’ll leave you here, go for a walk, get a paper, sit down and read a lot of boring muck, and wait for a chance to slip into the Colza. But remember this: I’m a Pelagian.

Policeman Pluck was young, raw-boned, mottled of complexion and wore an expression of friendly stupidity. He had a bicycle upside-down on the floor of the day-room attending to a hernia at the front rim, grating white powder on to a protruding intestine. His salute for Mick was an inane smile in which his scrupulously correct uniform seemed to concur, though all visible teeth seemed to be bad and discoloured.

– Morning, Mr Pluck. I met the sergeant and he told me I could leave this other machine here for a day or two. I’ll get a tram.

– Well he did, did he? grinned Policeman Pluck. Ah, the dacent lovable man!

– Is that all right?

– You are welcome, sir, and lave it be the wall there. But the sergeant’s tune will change when he comes up with that cabman Teague.

– What has Teague done?

Policeman Pluck blanched slightly at the recollection of horror.

– Yesterday he met a missionary father, a Redempiorist, at the station and druv him up to the parochial house. Well, Teague and his jinnet wasn’t five minits in the PP’s holy grounds but before they left it they had the whole place in a pukey mess of a welter of dung.

– Ah, unfortunate, that.

– Enough to dress two drills of new spring spuds.

– Still, Teague was hardly to blame.

– Do you expect the sergeant to have the jinnet in the dock for sacrilege? Or for a sin against the Holy Ghost? I’ll tell you wan thing, boy.

– What’s that?

– You’ll have a scarifying mission, an iron mission, there will be rosaries on the bended knees for further orders, starting tomorra. There’ll be hell to pay. But thank God it’s the weemen’s week first.

– Thank God, Mr Pluck, Mick called back at the door, I’m not even a parishioner.

Why should he take account of hellfire sermons anyway? Had he not been, in a kind of a way, in heaven?

6 (#ulink_d80081ac-fc40-53b2-9b6a-4ec213280991)

Mary was not a simple girl, not an easy subject to write about nor Mick the one to write. He thought women in general were hopeless as a theme for discussion or discourse, and surely for one man the one special – la femme particulière, if that sharpens the meaning – must look dim, meaningless and empty to others if he should talk genuinely about her or think aloud. The mutual compulsion is a mystery, not just a foible or biogenesis, and this sort of mystery, even if comprehensible to the two concerned, is at least absolutely private.

Mary was no sweetie-pie nor was she pretty but (to Mick’s eyes) she was good-looking and dignified. Brown-eyed, her personality was russet and usually she was quiet and recollected. He was, he thought, very fond of her and did not by any means regard her as merely a member of her sex, or anything so commonplace and trivial. She was a true obsession with him (he suspected) and kept coming into his head on all sorts of irrelevant occasions without, so to speak, knocking. Hackett’s relations with the peculiar girl he mixed around with seemed perfunctory, like having a taste for marmalade at breakfast or meditatively paring fingernails in public-house silences.

Mick was absolutely sure in mind about few things but he thought he could sincerely say that Mary was an unusual girl. She was educated, with a year in France, and understood music. She had wit, could be lively, and it took little to induce for a while gaiety of word and mood. Her people, whom he did not know, had money. She was tasteful and fastidious in dress … and why not? She worked in what was called a fashion house, with a top job which Mick knew paid well and involved consorting only with people of standing. Her job was one thing they had never talked about. That her earnings were a secret was something he was deeply thankful for because he knew that they could scarcely be less than his own. A disclosure, even accidental, would be his humiliation though he knew all this situation was very silly. Yet work at the fol-the-lols of couture did nothing to impair Mary’s maturity of mind. She read a lot, talked politics often and once even mentioned her half-intentions of writing a book. Mick did not ask on what subject, for somehow he found the idea distasteful. Without swallowing whole all the warnings one could readily hear and read about the spiritual dangers of intellectual arrogance and literary freebooting, there was