The devils diary, p.4
The Devil's Diary, page 4
He inhaled and coughed against the back of his hand.
‘Those are foreign cigarettes.’
‘They’re French,’ she said.
‘You’re not, are you?’
‘I was born in Munich and came to Dublin before I was twenty. I’m self-supporting. I’m my own meal-ticket. Is that how you say it?’
‘It’s a phrase we don’t use here.’
He got up and offered her a glass of milk and a biscuit.
‘Ah, you were expecting someone.’
‘Most evenings someone does call — a parishioner with a problem, a fisherman with a lobster for my dinner, a hungry tramp.’
‘You’re lucky to be living here. You’ll never have a visit from an overdressed businessman with a briefcase and umbrella.’
‘Believe it or not, we have at least one businessman here.’
She sipped the milk and stared at the digestive biscuit. In profile her face did not look in the least Germanic. It had some of the subtle refinement of a face by Botticelli, expressing an elusive spirituality that seemed to shine from the dark right eye, the eye that had not moved since they met. As she raised her head to exhale a puff of cigarette smoke, her face took on a hint of heaviness that belied the fine, straight hair and slender neck.
‘You know Mr Brennan?’ she enquired.
‘He’s our businessman.’
‘I got to know him a little on the way from Dublin. He’s full of good ideas.’
‘You mean profitable ones. The best ideas have no monetary value.’
‘If he’s a businessman, what does he do in a place like this?’
‘He owns things: a motel, a supermarket, factories, cottages. He adds a new string to his bow every time he goes to Dublin.’
‘String to his bow. I understand.’
‘He’s a businessman who never ceases to do business. When he asks you the time of day, rest assured that it isn’t an idle question.’
‘He’s an unusual businessman. He’s a conceptual thinker and he can see with other men’s eyes. For most men only what they have experienced themselves is real. Mr Brennan isn’t afraid of what he doesn’t know. He had never thought about wood carving before I met him but he saw immediately how I could relate it to the life here. That’s exciting.’
‘As you say, he’s a conceptual thinker.’
‘I can tell from how you say it — you find your meaning in things.’
‘I don’t see concepts as foxhounds to be set on the heels of things. I like to leave things as they are.’
‘When I get the cottage in order, I’ll show you my carvings. They are things that have swallowed up concepts. The best of them are just things.’
He followed her to the door. Though her hair fell forward on each side of her face, there was still a profusion of blonde tresses left to fall down her back almost to the waist.
‘I’m pleased to have found such a good neighbour,’ she said.
‘The glen is full of good neighbours. Here you can have as many good neighbours as you like.’
He closed the door softly behind her, holding back the catch to keep it from clicking.
‘Brennan has found himself an admirer,’ he said aloud. ‘Or has he added just one more string to his bow?’
He sat by the fire till after midnight reading a book on patristic theology that the bishop had lent his parish priest Canon Hackler. The parish priest, who was not a scholar, had asked Father Jerry to summarise the argument in two short paragraphs so that he could show some acquaintance with the text in his next letter to the bishop. He wrote three long paragraphs, about nine hundred words in all, and put them in an envelope which he stood behind the clock on the mantelpiece. He felt tired and at the same time excited. The luxury of reading and making notes in a large, empty house late at night was not the kind of pleasure that the Fathers of the Church considered dangerous. Yet it had left his mind so restless that it was well after two when he finally got to sleep.
Chapter 5
Hugo returned from Dublin the following afternoon, bulky and overbearing with a tang of stale Scotch on his breath.
‘What a cock-up,’ he snorted. ‘Only one of my trunks has arrived. The other is the one I’ve been waiting for.’
‘Don’t worry, it’s bound to turn up.’
‘You’d better say a prayer to St Antony or whoever looks after lost property these days. It contained all my diaries, nine fat volumes, every one of them as big as a ledger. It’s twenty years of my life, a record of every day and every night.’
‘I hadn’t realised you kept a diary.’
‘It’s more than a diary, it’s a historical document. I wrote over five hundred words a day, nearly four million words in all, every one of them meant for publication.’
‘Well, at least they haven’t been pinched by Brennan.’
‘You don’t know what this means. My diaries are irreplaceable. I’m not the same man without them.’
He drove off to Burke’s with six bags of cement that he had bought in town. Father Jerry decided to spend the rest of the afternoon clearing up the mess in the vegetable garden. Towards evening Brennan came through the gate looking as burly and overbearing as Hugo. He was wearing green tweeds and a green beret whose leather rim shone with oil from what remained of his sandy-red hair. He stood among the broken tops, tall, broad and planklike, without a hint of either humour or flexibility.
‘This place looks like a battlefield,’ he said with an air of accusation.
‘I had an invasion of bullocks the other night. They trod everything back into the ground.’
‘You must look on the bright side. They left you their manure. You’ll get the benefit of that next year.’
‘I’m a simple country priest. I prefer blessings that are not quite so heavily disguised.’
‘Let me offer you a blessing you will recognise, then. I’ve come to invite you and Hugo to supper at the motel next Saturday.’
‘There are two kinds of suppers: those you sing for and those you don’t. Which is this?’
‘You won’t have to sing, I do assure you. I have a pop group from Dublin on Saturday nights to provide the music. We’ll talk of course. All three of us have travelled, we won’t be short of anecdotes. And for your added enjoyment, I shall have a little proposition for you and Hugo to think about.’
‘I must warn you I don’t eat meat.’
‘Do you eat fish?’
‘I’m fond of fish, except in fishmeal, fishcakes and fish fingers.’
‘You needn’t worry, there’s lobster, crab, salmon and wild trout on the menu. For special guests I sometimes buy in crayfish.’
‘I’ll tell Hugo. I’m sure he’ll be delighted.’
Hugo was suspicious. He said that he would go only on condition that Father Jerry agreed to act as his taster. Father Jerry said no more, and Hugo spent the next three days at Burke’s bemoaning the loss of his diaries and clearing out the house in readiness for reroofing. On and off Father Jerry thought about Brennan. It was difficult to know what to make of him. He probably meant well, yet he never created anything without leaving a swathe of destruction behind him. The things he built were monstrosities that leapt aggressively to the eye; the things he destroyed were invisible because they had resided in the hearts and minds of men. People praised him for his monstrosities, and he believed them. He saw himself as a builder rather than a demolition man. The German girl had said that he could see with other men’s eyes; the truth was that he was blind to all ideas except his own.
As a boy Brennan had known poverty. His mother, a poor widow, was barely able to clothe his fast-growing frame, let alone provide the hearty meals his physique demanded. At the age of sixteen he was still running about barefoot and in short trousers, which made him a butt for cruel humour among the other village boys. Yet he had been spared the extremity of destitution because he had in McDaid a disciple who worshipped the ground his bare feet trod. That must have been a rare solace to Brennan in those straitened days, and when he returned from America, a man of conspicuous means, he appointed McDaid his factor, land-steward and major-domo extraordinary. McDaid was grateful. He repaid his patron with an unquestioning loyalty that took time off only for sleep.
Brennan’s first move was to buy the local hotel which at the time attracted starchy middle-aged couples on tight budgets, who spent as little as possible and complained volubly and frequently about rising prices and poor service. Round the old hotel Brennan built what he called ‘a leisure complex’ which included a ballroom, three lounge bars, an indoor swimming pool, a snooker room and a fast-food restaurant. He put up a large sign in red lettering which said ARTY BRENNAN’S MOTEL. He introduced rock music, which drove the careful middle-aged couples several hundred miles down the coast and attracted the spendthrift young from all over the county. The fame of the ‘motel’ spread. In next to no time the glen people had declared it a rip-roaring success and its proprietor a man of genius who instinctively knew what people wanted before they themselves did.
Like many self-made men, Brennan had a blind faith in material progress. Looking round the glen, he saw the remnants of an ancient society that had changed little in two hundred years. He saw men who wore homespun tweeds and lived almost entirely off the produce of their meagre farms. These men, who made neither profit nor loss but still found time to lean on their scythes and converse over a ditch in idioms of infinite subtlety, affronted him in their culture which was a culture of noncompetition and an implicit negation of the strenuous years he had spent in America. He saw a place that had been forgotten by the twentieth century. At last he had found his mission in life: ‘to put Glenkeel on the map, where it belongs’.
The poverty of his upbringing had given him a genuine desire to better the lot of his fellow-man. As he walked the lonely beaches of the glen, he had visions of laughing tourists bringing new life to ‘a dying community’. As he imagined the riot of colour against the gold of the sand — the red beach balls, the striped towels, the gaudy bikinis — he heard the cash registers in the village shops ringing in an era of bustle and prosperity. Tourists would bring money, and not just to the motel. They would come to savour an ancient way of life; they would be moved to buy the work of local craftsmen and mementos of their sojourn among a simple but noble people. Apart from filling the motel bedrooms, they would provide employment for men and women who had no connection with the motel. The realisation that his aim was nothing less than the public good must have given him a frisson of pleasure that could never have been derived from considerations of personal gain.
The intoxication of his idealism doubled his energy and drive. He advertised widely in Europe and America, and so many tourists came that the motel had to be extended twice within five years. Next he inveigled the Tourist Board into building a scenic road along the mountain overlooking the sea, and when it was built he lined it on both sides with three-room chalets which he let to visitors for the summer months at rents that enabled him to close them without undue concern during the winter. After the chalets came the fishmeal factory, and after the fishmeal factory came the vegetable factory which brought enough spending money to the glen to support the supermarket he had built simultaneously.
The glen folk, seeing that whatever he touched turned to extra cash in their pockets, accorded him the respect which in the past had been reserved for the parish priest. His fame spread. Businessmen on the make and rising politicians came to seek his advice. Journalists from Dublin came to marvel in purple prose at his transformation of the life of a remote rural community from a simple to a cash economy. Unfortunately, not even Brennan could transform the economy of an area without transforming its culture too. At first the changes seemed insignificant, but to the concerned observer they were telling. People spoke less Gaelic and increasingly adopted English, the language of commerce and lucre; they spurned the garrulous story-teller on the hearth for the whip-crack jokes of the television comedian and the slick entertainments at Arty Brennan’s motel; and they stopped helping one another in the fields because in their new-found affluence they no longer needed to. Few people saw this. Few people cared. Typically, Brennan saw it, and before a cynic could have said Jack Robinson he had built a folk museum to enshrine and preserve the symbols of a way of life that his works had destroyed.
The folk museum was an immediate success. It was popular with day-trippers who enjoyed the illusion of experiencing the remnants of an ancient and complex culture between lunch and afternoon tea. It was so much more convenient to walk round a centrally heated museum and study scythes, traw-hooks, kibbing sticks and slanes than to go to the trouble of seeking out a farmer who was actually using one of those primordial implements in a wet field or bog. The museum was also popular among the locals, who would visit it with their children on Sunday afternoons to reminisce about a way of life they had once known and whose passing gave them no cause for regret.
Brennan’s most grandiose scheme took root in his imagination when he heard an American tourist remark that he would be willing to pay double if only he could live in a peasant cottage without having to endure the inconveniences that make such a dwelling authentic. Brennan immediately envisaged a Holiday Village (he naturally thought in capitals) by the sea, a clachan of ‘peasant cottages’ with electricity, piped water, gas cooker and fridge, not to mention a turf fire on the open hearth with a wide chimney brace and a big crane from which would hang smoke-blackened pots and pans. The cottages would appear thatched from the outside, but an asbestos roof underneath would keep out the rain, as expert thatchers were now hard to find.
In this way the tourist could nurse the illusion of living the simple life while enjoying all the conveniences to which he was accustomed at home. There would be one or two picturesque trappings to give him a sense of authenticity — a piece of old fishing net hanging over the dresser and perhaps an old cartwheel or broken wheelbarrow by the door. He would receive an attractive colour brochure explaining the mystique of the peasant life, reminding him, for example, that the kitchen hearth was the centre of his cottage; that here the grandfather nodded and told his stories while the woman of the house knitted and rocked the cradle and her weary husband slowly sucked his pipe; that the turf fire must be kept alight at all times; and that for his convenience Brennan could sell him the best of turf which, because of rising labour costs, was regrettably more expensive this year than last.
It was typical of Brennan that the setback over Burke’s only convinced him more firmly that he had been born to build the Holiday Village. Hugo was just an obstacle in the path of progress, by no means the first such obstacle he had encountered and overcome.
‘We’ve been invited by the lion to his den,’ Hugo said as they both set off in the Land Rover for the motel. ‘Should we beard him, I wonder, or should we lionise him?’
‘We’ll do neither. We’ll allow him the lion’s share of the food, and when he’s sated we’ll give a little twist to his tail.’
The motel was a low and rambling concrete structure tacked on to an old stone-built hotel that had been erected in the nineteenth century by an English landlord as a lodge in the wilderness where members of the shootin’ and fishin’ fraternity could pass a week or two away from the rigours of business and domesticity. It was a quadrangular, two-storey affair built round a small cobbled courtyard on a rise overlooking the sea. As the region was one of Atlantic winds and storms, it had been designed so that the doors opened on to the courtyard while the windows afforded the most splendid views of sea, moor and mountain.
Hugo pulled up outside the front entrance, having ignored the signs pointing to the car park at the rear. From the new ballroom came a shrill wail of rock music, and from one of the lounge bars a chorus of ‘Ja, ja, ja’ which made the rock music sound soft by comparison. They entered the courtyard of the old hotel with its teak tables and chairs among pot-plants, an enclave of history that for the moment seemed proof against the cacophony of the surrounding motel.
Arty Brennan greeted them in the lobby with a smile that was relaxed and confident. A thin strand of hair had been drawn carefully across his bald crown. His cheeks glowed pink with robust good health, the skin smooth without a trace of stubble. He was wearing an open collared shirt and newly pressed slacks. As he shook hands, he bestowed on them a potent waft of musky deodorant.
‘We’ll eat in the old hotel restaurant. The new restaurant gets crowded on Saturdays, as you can imagine. But first we’ll have a quiet drink, or perhaps two.’
He led them into a lounge bar which he had renamed ‘The Hills of Donegal’. From the walls blown-up colour photographs of Errigal, Muckish and Slieve League looked down on a scattering of French and German tourists and two or three intrepid locals who were giving a passable imitation of fishermen in close conversation over pints of stout. They found a table by a window facing a sharp-peaked hill that was not among those commemorated on the walls, and a barmaid came with a tray of drinks — a large whiskey for Hugo, tomato juice and Worcester sauce for Father Jerry, and Bacardi and Coke for Brennan who told them that Bacardi was all the rage among the young.
While they studied the menu, Brennan made light-hearted small talk about the scarcity of lobsters because of overfishing by the French, and the demands of the business life which kept him awake in bed at night. Father Jerry was polite and Hugo grimly laconic. Brennan put down the menu and spread himself with the air of a man whose sole purpose in life is the creation of good-natured bonhomie. The evening light was fading on the hill and the turf fire at the far end of the bar had begun to blaze brightly. An enlivening buzz of friendly conversation rose and fell behind them. The ear-splitting rock music they had heard as they came in seemed now to belong in a world that was no part of Brennan’s creation.
After they had ordered, Brennan conducted them into a small restaurant where a local family was celebrating the father’s eightieth birthday at a table dominated by a cake with eight red candles. They sat at the other end of the room, the sea beneath them dark and grandly mysterious in the waning red of the afterglow. Father Jerry, looking about him, experienced a seductive sense of solidity that had nothing to do with the material success of a man he remembered as an awkward boy running round barefoot in tattered trousers. The thick vegetable soup had a hot, peppery tang that he found superior to the packet soup he and Hugo ate. If the hotel was a lion’s den, it was a den of many apartments, and the lion himself was at pains to appear accommodating and congenial.
