The devils diary, p.2
The Devil's Diary, page 2
‘It was the Game that was on his mind, not bell-ringing,’ Hugo smiled. ‘Nothing ever changes here.’
‘You’re wrong. We’re no longer children, we must think and live like men.’
‘Surely, if we’re mature men, we must acknowledge the past in all its diversity. Childhood isn’t something you try not to tread in. It must be accepted and allowed to work its way through the conscious and unconscious designs of our waking and dreaming lives.’
Hugo drove up the avenue and parked the Land Rover and boat outside the door. In the boat he had stowed a cargo of provisions: meat, vegetables, fruit, six bottles of malt Scotch and a bottle of brandy.
‘The brandy is for the bishop,’ he said, as Father Jerry helped him unload. ‘The Scotch is for myself, not the parish priest, you understand.’
‘It looks as if you intend holing up here for quite a while.’
‘It’s just that I’m fond of my food.’
Father Jerry made tea and Hugo prepared what he called a mixed grill — lamb cutlets, bacon rashers, sausages, tomatoes and black pudding. He must have been peckish. While Father Jerry talked, Hugo bent over the mountainous meal and ate without once raising his head.
‘I’ve been to see the auctioneer,’ he said, when he had finally cleared his plate of everything except a single rib. ‘I made a pre-emptive bid for Burke’s but he wouldn’t budge. Someone else had bid before me. I’m not the only man who’s keen.’
Father Jerry told him that his rival must be their old school chum Arty Brennan. Arty had spent ten years in America and had come back seventeen years ago a prosperous man.
‘Now he owns everything worth owning here: the fish-meal factory, the vegetable factory, the motel, the supermarket and the folk museum. He built them all. At present he’s planning to build a holiday village, and for that he needs Burke’s. If you want it, you’ll pay through the nose for it. Arty Brennan is one of those men who don’t take kindly to being blown off course.’
‘Ah, the local boy made good. That makes two of us. The plot, Father Jerry, is about to thicken.’
‘Brennan is an egomaniac. I’m convinced he came back here because they wouldn’t put his name up in neon lights in New York. Here his name is everywhere: on the supermarket, the motel, and on the vans and lorries in and out of his fishmeal and vegetable factories. He’s in love with his own idea of himself. He’s had his portrait painted and hung in the motel restaurant, a big, gilt-framed oil painting, as wide and as high as Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment”.’
‘Surely there’s no money in any of these things. The motel can be busy only in the summer, and a folk museum is just a civilised way of collecting coppers. He sounds to me like a man of straw.’
‘He’s a tireless milker of government departments. He spends his time up and down to Dublin lobbying politicians to give him grants. He lobbies God as well. He’s first to the altar for Communion on Sundays.’
‘A goody-goody. You must love him.’
‘Only in so far as I love my neighbour. I don’t love him specially or specifically. He is not a lovable man.’
The following fortnight was mild and calm. Hugo took him out in the boat once or twice. They caught pollack and cod which Hugo cooked in a thick sauce flavoured with celery. As Father Jerry didn’t eat meat, he was delighted to have fresh fish, if only because it made a change from the flavourless fish fingers he normally bought in Brennan’s supermarket.
Hugo was a rough and ready cook who spent as little time as possible in the kitchen. First, as a notional aperitif, he would announce that dinner would be ready in two hours. He would then vanish into the kitchen for twenty minutes, put something in the oven, and place two or three pots to simmer on the hot plate. Lastly, he would go for a walk or a drink in the village and saunter back to find everything ‘done to a turn’. Surprisingly, he always managed a happy confluence in his cooking. Everything was ready at the same time, yet it seemed that everything had been left to chance. His shortcomings as a cook were that dinner could be at any time between six and nine, and once he had eaten he lost all interest in washing up.
‘Every good chef needs a scullion, just as every good priest needs a deacon,’ he said.
Father Jerry, who was pleased to be spared the bother of cooking, gladly assumed the role of scullion, washing up every evening with an old shirt tied over his cassock as an apron.
Hugo gradually established a routine. He would spend the morning walking on the hill, the afternoon fishing, and the evening drinking in the lounge bar of Arty Brennan’s motel. He came back around midnight and went straight upstairs to bed. The only signs of heavy drinking he ever evinced were his frequent visits to the toilet during the night.
Soon Father Jerry grew accustomed to sharing the house with him. At first he was afraid that Hugo might intrude on his privacy, but before long he came to realise that Hugo himself was a private man. He spent hours alone in his room, and when Father Jerry once asked him if he had been reading, he replied, ‘Not reading but thinking. Reading is only a way of letting other men do your thinking for you.’
On the morning of the auction Hugo was up early. He had cooked and eaten a hearty breakfast of poached eggs and haddock before Father Jerry left for Mass at nine.
‘You’ll come to hear the bidding?’ Hugo enquired. ‘I shall need moral support; and, who knows, a bidding prayer at Mass may do no harm.’
They spent an hour looking over Burke’s farm before the auctioneer arrived at half-past eleven, both of them in raincoats and wellingtons, as the morning was wet. Local farmers smoked their pipes in the shelter of the haysheds and discussed the likely price, though it was obvious that most of them had come to watch rather than participate. Brennan was nowhere to be seen. Just as Hugo revealed to Father Jerry that the opposition had got cold feet, McDaid arrived on a bicycle with a spade tied to the crossbar so ostentatiously that Hugo immediately saw it as a weapon of offence.
‘Arty Brennan has bigger fish to fry. More than likely, he’s frying them in Dublin,’ Father Jerry said. ‘If you want Burke’s, you’ll have to bid against his scullion.’
The auctioneer took them round the farmhouse and outbuildings. He was a neat middle-aged man who was short of breath and gave persistent questioners the impression that he could also be short of patience. The sky darkened. As they crowded into the bare kitchen, it began to rain. The auctioneer stood on a chair and faced the grey light that seemed to leak accidentally through the dusty windows. When he had finished his preliminary remarks, a young man who had got married the previous month opened the bidding. A shopkeeper from the village bid fifteen thousand pounds. The auctioneer waited. One or two farmers looked at McDaid who looked out at the falling rain. The auctioneer told them that the reserve price had not been reached. McDaid bid seventeen thousand. The newly married man hung his head. As Hugo bid twenty thousand, everyone in the kitchen turned to look at him, except Father Jerry who was gazing steadfastly at the ferrule of his umbrella.
The rain lashed the window panes with louder insistence as Hugo and McDaid battled it out. Hugo’s face had set, or rather his beard had set. He looked alien and demonic in his single-minded concentration; he had lost all awareness of everyone except McDaid.
Each time McDaid raised the bidding by five hundred pounds, Hugo would raise it by a thousand. The murmur of conversation fell away, and the beating of the rain on the concrete of the farmyard died to a whisper. The tension of single combat showed in every face except the auctioneer’s. When McDaid raised the bidding by a thousand pounds, Hugo’s immediate response was to raise it by two thousand. Silence followed the auctioneer’s request for another bid. McDaid stalked out of the kitchen. The auctioneer announced that the property had gone as one lot to Hugo McSharry for the sum of thirty-seven thousand pounds.
On the way home Hugo was jubilant. He talked and talked, unable to contain his excitement. When Father Jerry reminded him that he would have to spend at least another ten thousand on general repairs to the house and outbuildings, he said, ‘Ten thousand! I’d give twenty thousand to see Brennan’s face when he hears the news.’
‘If you’d waited, you’d have got a better farm for less,’ Father Jerry said.
‘I fell in love with the forge. Maybe I fell in love with all those afternoons I spent watching Old Burke working the sooty bellows.’
‘It’s a lot to pay for a memory.’
‘I wasn’t out for a bargain,’ Hugo replied. ‘I was out to make a point.’
Chapter 3
A fitful morning breeze was coming in from the west. They could feel it on their faces but only now and then.
‘I’m afraid I still can’t get it,’ Hugo said.
‘You will when the weather gets warmer, believe me. The stink of rotten fish guts hangs over the shore townlands like a haze you can’t see. You’ll taste it on your tongue when you wake up in the middle of the night, and you’ll get it again first thing in the morning.’
‘Hasn’t anyone complained?’
‘The fishmeal factory provides employment. Employment brings money. If money stinks, it’s just too bad.’
‘I think I got it that time,’ Hugo sniffed.
‘It ensures that you’re always aware of Brennan here. His works simply cannot be ignored.’
‘Not all his works are bad. Think of the tourists he’s attracted. The village pubs are crowded with comely French and German lasses every night.’
‘He’s brought the riff-raff of Europe and America here: artists, writers and hippies who have never turned an honest penny. They’re corrupting the morals of the young.’
‘I wish they’d corrupt mine.’
‘It’s no joke. They spend the days swilling plonk, the evenings smoking pot, and the nights in sexual orgies. You can get the smell of pot on the wind whenever the fishmeal factory isn’t working.’
Hugo plucked his beard and laughed irreverently.
‘I’m going to spend the day at Burke’s,’ he said. ‘I’ll take in the Glebe on the way. If I manage to get a prurient peep into the tents of ungodliness, I’ll describe for you whatever perversions I see over dinner this evening.’
After Hugo had gone, Father Jerry lingered by the parochial house gate, looking west to the fishmeal factory, a long shedlike structure with a low, grey roof. Six or seven gulls came in over the sea and perched on the roof-ridge, squawking and screaming with irritable aggression. Gradually, they settled down in a broken row. They had become a somnolent parliament of evil old women, sitting on privies, pressing and pressing with small heads sunk below their shoulders.
He sauntered up the avenue and climbed the stairs to his brother’s bedroom. The bed had been made, and from beneath it peeped two shoes with a sock stuffed into each of them. The local paper stood furled in the waste-paper basket and the book on cannibalism lay next to Totem and Taboo on the night table. Last night his brother had stayed out late, and instead of going straight to bed he looked into the study where Father Jerry was reading by the fire. Without waiting to be asked he sat down in his donkey jacket and lit one of his short, sharp whiffs.
‘I realised this evening how lovely it is to be home,’ he said. ‘Here we are protected by hills. We live in a womb, a big, soft, warm womb with nearly all mod cons provided. As I walked back from the motel, I could swear I heard the word “womb” on the wind.’
‘What you heard was the hippies on the Glebe chanting mantras.’
‘Forget the hippies, they’re harmless. They seem alien to you because you’ve always lived a sheltered life.’
‘I’ve lived in cities and ministered to the down and out.’
‘You’ve always lived among Christians or at least among people who could relate to your cassock. You’ve never been outside the realm of your Christian god; you’ve never slept in the jungle surrounded by the shrieks of hell on earth, and you’ve never been invited to a feast at which human flesh was to be consumed. If you had accepted such an invitation in all innocence, would you have had the courage to make your excuses and leave before the soup?’
Hugo showed his well-preserved teeth in silent laughter. His broad shoulders shook, his eyes gleamed with self-approving merriment.
‘You’ve had an exciting day. You’ve been celebrating. Now it’s time you went to bed.’
Hugo closed his eyes and continued smoking. His bushy beard was curly, almost unkempt, and the fine hair on his forehead shone with perspiration.
‘On my first evening here you asked me why I’d come back. Would you like to hear the real reason?’
‘It’s as good as any you’re likely to give me, I suppose.’
‘In New Guinea I got to know a woman who kept pestering me to run her plantation. She invited me to dinner and sent her chauffeur to collect me. In the glove compartment of her car was a copy of The Donegal Democrat which the chauffeur said belonged to his wife. I picked it up, and there on the front page was your picture and a caption saying that you’d been transferred from London to Glenkeel. You’d lost your boyish looks. You were thinner and more serious. I realised that you were the only kin I had left. I knew immediately that I had to see you and talk about certain things that were on my mind.’
‘It’s late now. We’ll talk about them another time.’
Hugo flung his half-smoked whiff into the fire.
‘We may not talk about them at all,’ he said.
Over dinner Hugo made no reference to the tents of ungodliness. Instead he said that Brennan had been to see him at Burke’s.
‘He’s hopping mad with McDaid for letting the property slip through his fingers. He made me an offer of forty-five thousand. “You’ll make a profit of eight thousand,” he kept repeating, as if repeating it could change my mind.’
‘What did you say?’
‘No dice.’
‘That must have pleased him.’
‘He left in a huff. “You’re standing in the way of progress,” he shouted. “You got Burke’s just because I happened to be in Dublin on the day and McDaid misinterpreted my instructions. You got it by accident, and accidents have no place in my planning.” He was so incensed that he threatened me.’
‘How?’
‘By the way he stood. He was standing in my farmyard, and he deliberately made me shift my ground.
‘Don’t exaggerate, Hugo.’
‘You weren’t there. When two civilised men stop to talk, there’s a holy ground between them, a no man’s land that must not be trodden. Brennan, I tell you, invaded the holy ground.’
‘He always liked to have his way.’
‘I’m going to his motel tonight. If he’s there, he may find himself taking a backward step or two.’
‘Don’t court dissension. Best to ignore him. You made the auction into a contest which you won. Now it’s time to be generous. Just let him see that all enmity comes from him.’
That night he dreamt of a glen where lean and weathered faces had grown flabby and soft, and hippies with backpacks defecated shamelessly on the roadsides. The rangy walk of mountain men had gone the way of their native language; it had no place on the factory floor or on the dance-floor of the motel ballroom. He woke with the feeling that he had not slept, and as he went to the bathroom saw that Hugo’s bedroom door was ajar. His bed had not been slept in. From the window he looked down into the garden where a shapeless bundle dangled from one of the sycamores, an ungainly wasps’ nest that moved before his eyes. Slowly it dawned on him that he was looking at an old fishing net with Hugo curled up inside it. He ran down the stairs and into the back garden. Hugo was making a moaning sound as he struggled, his big bushy head trapped between his knees.
‘Don’t move in case the branch snaps,’ he shouted.
Father Jerry got a rope and ladder from the garage and within ten minutes had lowered Hugo to the ground. He opened the net and cut the gag that covered his mouth and chin. Hugo staggered as he scrambled to his feet. He tried to say something, then suddenly bent forward and retched over his boots.
‘Wait till I get my hands on Brennan,’ he spat between gasps.
‘Surely Brennan wouldn’t do such a thing.’
‘Not Brennan himself, he just gives the orders. While he’s got McDaid he needn’t lift a finger.’
‘Did you see either of them?’
‘It was too dark to see. I was walking home from the motel when someone jumped me from behind. The first thing I knew I was bound and gagged and hanging upside-down from a tree. I managed to free my hands but the knot on the gag was too tight to undo. I thought I was about to pass out. It was lucky you got up so early.’
He sought the support of the wall and hobbled stiffly towards the house. Father Jerry put him sitting at the kitchen table and gave him black tea laced with Scotch.
‘Will you go the police?’
‘Would you spread the news that you’d been left hanging upside-down from a tree?’
‘I think the police should know.’
‘They wouldn’t believe me. Brennan is a pillar of what passes for society here. Besides, where’s the evidence? This is something that requires a more subtle riposte than a summons. Or do you suggest that I turn the other cheek?’
‘Don’t do anything rash is all I say.’
‘The objectivity of your advice is commendable, Father, but then you don’t have a splitting headache and you don’t have cramp in your left leg. All I can say is that I appreciate your concern.’
He drank three mugs of tea but declined to eat. He looked pale and shaken, and when Father Jerry suggested that he should go to bed, Hugo took his advice with uncharacteristic docility.
‘One thing I’d like to know,’ he said as he climbed the stairs. ‘Was the net the first thing that came to hand, or is he trying to tell me something special?’
Though he felt sorry for his brother, Father Jerry could not help feeling that he had brought about his own humiliation. Throughout breakfast the thought of the bearded stranger upstairs steeped him in disquiet. With a gesture of impatience he took his father’s old shotgun from the cupboard under the stairs and climbed the hill, as his father used to do whenever his mother launched into one of her homilies on etiquette, public morality, or the weather.
