There are worse things.
– Peaks of rock prod up into the clouds like fingers, Teague explained, until the clouds is bursted and the wind carries the wather down here on top of us. Poor buggers on a walking tour around Shankill would get soaked, hang-sangwiches in sodden flitters and maybe not the price of a pint between them to take shelter in Byrnes.
Their dressing, by reason of their rough rig, was finished. De Selby and Hackett were smoking, and the time was half nine. Then De Selby energetically rubbed his hands.
– Gentlemen, he said with some briskness, I presume that like me you have had no breakfast before this early swim. May I therefore invite you to have breakfast with me at Lawnmower. Mr McGettigan can drive us up to the gate.
– I’m afraid I can’t go, Hackett said.
– Well, it’s not that my horse Jimmy couldn’t pull you up, Teague said, spitting.
– Come now, De Selby said, we all need inner fortification after an arduous morning. I have peerless Limerick rashers and there will be no shortage of that apéritif.
Whether or not Hackett had another engagement Mick did not know but he immediately shared his instinct to get away, if only, indeed, to think, or try not to think. De Selby had not been deficient in the least in manners or honourable conduct but his continuing company seemed to confer uneasiness – perhaps vague, unformed fear.
– Mr De Selby, Mick said warmly, it is indeed kind of you to invite Hackett and me up for a meal but it happens that I did in fact have breakfast. I think we’d better part here.
– We’ll meet soon again, Hackett remarked, to talk over this morning’s goings-on.
De Selby shrugged and beckoned McGettigan to help him with his gear.
– As you will, gentlemen, he said politely enough. I certainly could do with a bite and perhaps I will have the pleasure of Teague’s company. I thought the weather, the elements, all the forces of the heavens made a breakfast-tide lecture seemly.
– Good luck to your honour but there’s nourishment in that bottle you have, Teague said brightly, taking away his pipe to say it loudly.
They separated like that and Hackett and Mick went on their brief stroll into Dalkey, Mick wheeling the bicycle with some distaste.
– Have you somewhere to go? he asked.
– No I haven’t. What did you make of that performance?
– I don’t know what to say. You heard the conversation, and I presume both of us heard the same thing.
– Do you believe … it all happened?
– I suppose I have to.
– I need a drink.
They fell silent. Thinking about the stance (if that ill-used word will serve) was futile though disturbing and yet it was impossible to shut such thoughts out of the head. Somehow Mick saw little benefit in any discussion with Hackett. Hackett’s mind was twisted in a knot identical with his own. They were as two tramps who had met in a trackless desert, each hopelessly asking the other the way.
– Well, Hackett said moodily at last, I haven’t thrown overboard my suspicions of yesterday about drugs, and even hypnotism I wouldn’t quite discount. But we have no means of checking whether or not all that stuff this morning was hallucination.
– Couldn’t we ask somebody? Get advice?
– Who? For a start, who would believe a word of the story?
– That’s true.
– Incidentally, those underwater breathing masks were genuine. I’ve worn gadgets like that before but they weren’t as smart as De Selby’s.
– How do we know there wasn’t a mixture of some brain-curdling gas in the air-tank?
– That’s true by God.
– I quite forgot I was wearing the thing.
They had paused undecided at a corner in the lonely little town. Mick said that he thought he’d better go home and get some breakfast. Hackett thought it was too early to think of food. Well Mick had to get rid of his damned bike. Couldn’t he leave it at the comic little police station in charge of Sergeant Fottrell? But what was the point of that? Wouldn’t he have the labour of collecting it another time? Hackett said that there had been no necessity to have used it at all in the first place, as there was such a thing as an early tram to accommodate eccentric people. Mick said no, not on Sunday, not from Booterstown.
– I know Mrs L would let me in, Hackett observed pettishly, except I know the big sow is still in bed snoring.
– Yes, it’s been a funny morning, Mick replied sympathetically. Here you are, frustrated from joining the company of a widow who keeps a boozer, yet it is not half an hour since you parted company with Saint Augustine.
– Yes.
Hackett laughed bitterly. Mick had in fact business of his own later in the day, he remembered, as on nearly every Sunday. At three-thirty he would meet Mary at Ballsbridge and very likely they would go off to loaf amorously and chatter in Herbert Park. The arrangement was threatening to take on the tedium of routine things. When eventually they were married, if they were at all, wouldn’t the sameness of life be worse?
– I’m going to rest my mind, he announced, and rest it in Herbert Park later today, avec ma femme, ma bonne amie.
– My own Asterisk lady abstains on Sundays, Hackett said listlessly, lighting a cigarette.
But suddenly he came to life.
– Consternation was caused this morning, he cried, by the setting off of a small charge of DMP. Here comes the DMP in person!
True enough. Wheeling a bicycle, Sergeant Fottrell was coming towards them from a side road. His approach was slow and grave. Here one beheld the majesty of the law – inevitable, procedural, sure.
It is not easy to outline his personal portrait. He was tall, lean, melancholy, clean-shaven, red in the face and of indeterminate age. Nobody, it was said, had ever seen him in uniform, yet he was far from being a plain-clothes man; his constabularity was unmistakable. Summer and winter he wore a light tweed overcoat of a brown colour; a trace of collar and tie could be discerned about the neck but in his nether person the trousers were clearly of police blue, and the large boots also surely of police issue. Dr Crewett claimed to have seen the sergeant once with his overcoat off when assisting with a broken-down car and no inner jacket of any kind was disclosed, only shirt. The sergeant was friendly, so to speak, to his friends. He drank whiskey freely when the opportunity offered but it did not seem to affect him at all. Hackett held that this was because the sergeant’s normal sober manner was identical with the intoxicated manner of other people. But what the sergeant believed, what he said and how he said it was known throughout all south County Dublin.
Now he had stopped and saluted at his cloth cap.
– That’s the great morning, lads, he said, gratuitously.
There was agreement that it was. The sergeant seemed to be maturing the air and the early street.
– I see you have been to the water, he remarked genially, for far-from-simple cavortings in the brine?
– Sergeant, Hackett said, you have no idea how far from simple.
– I recede portentously from the sea, the sergeant beamed, except for a fastidious little wade for the good of my spawgs. For the truth is that I’m destroyed with the corns. Our work is walking work if you understand my portent.
– True enough, Sergeant, Mick agreed, I have often seen you with that bicycle but never up on it.
– It is emergency machinery for feats of captaincy. But there are dangers of a mental nature inherent in the bicycle and that story I will relate to you coherently upon another day.
– Yes.
Hackett