This Is Happiness, Page 6

  The congregation rose as one, or the Fahean version. The simple act of standing, like that which precedes the paternoster, made grave the evening. Though breathy and thin, the music performed the magic of all anthems whereby people feel united and find the spirit of Nation rising in their gorge.

  Doady and Ganga were both there. From them I had the story.

  Before the last note had faded, the Master dismissed Kelly with his master’s look and called the meeting to order. The Deputy sent his apologies, he said, with a curtness that cut the legs from the notion that he might actually have appeared. The Master proposed Father Coffey as Chairman and, when he was elected by a show of hands, Father Coffey proposed Father Tom as Honorary President, and when he was elected by a show of hands, he proposed Master Quinn as Secretary. The Master was a bachelor on whom Father Tom leaned not only for local intelligence but everything else, including anything that actually needed to be done in the parish. Master Quinn proposed Mrs Reidy as minute-keeper and, though already doing so, she observed the niceties by feigning surprise and honour and agreeing with a single nod of the immovable curls while dipping the nib in the ink to note her own appointment. The election completed as rehearsed the night before in the Parochial House, Master Quinn launched the meeting by announcing the unlikeliest point first: Faha had been chosen over Boola to be the Rural District Headquarters.

  For many, nothing more needed to be said, and for the remainder of the meeting the details of what this entailed floated like the vapoury formulae when they had all been prisoners of the Master’s classroom.

  Now, because this decision was to affect my life so profoundly, I dwell a little on it, and sometimes wonder what’s the nature of chance. I wonder what my life becomes if that decision is not made and Christy doesn’t appear in Ganga’s garden on the afternoon of Spy Wednesday just as the rain stopped.

  The Master drove on, detailing what Faha could expect in the weeks ahead. Firstly, a suitable premises for the Area Office had to be found – Tom Clohessy had one. Then, a stores were needed, an outdoor storage compound for every kind of— Tom got in just ahead of Bourke, volunteering the late Mrs McGrath’s, who, for reasons unclear, was the third pensioner to leave Tom her house in a will.

  Warming to his role, the Master read aloud the list of necessities for which the electrical people would require storage: ironwork, struts, ties for headgear, insulator pins, suspension clamps, shackles, earth rods, stay rods, nuts and bolts all sizes, connectors, dead-end thimbles, fuses, air-break switches, and insulators for HT and LT fuses, he concluded, having no iota what they were but understanding the potency of language, employing every ounce of his stagecraft and thirty years’ familiarity with those floorboards. Aluminium conductors, from the Aluminium Union of Canada, he said, were on the sea and would arrive in due course. The work was expected to take a few months. Digs would be required for the travelling members of the crews, which included the Rural Area Engineer, assisted by the Rural Area Clerk, the Rural Area Organiser, and the Rural Area Supervisor, along with a number of linesmen. In addition, the Master announced, between forty and fifty general workmen had to be hired locally. That stirred the crowd. ‘One million poles have had to be erected across the country,’ he said. Because inconceivable, the number was breathtaking, and the visionary audacity of the whole enterprise landed in the mind of Faha and swept along many of the unconverted. One million poles.

  9

  The electricity poles, it turned out, would not be Irish. Irish forests, we had learned in school, were felled to make Lord Nelson’s fleet and were now fathoms deep with the rest of the Admiralty. Instead, after extensive research, which in those days meant sending a man, the Board learned that the best place to purchase the poles was the country of Finland. To Finland they dispatched a forester, Dermot Mangan. Mangan had never been north of Dundalk. He tramped through the snow directly to the Helsinki offices of Mr Onni Salovarra, stood melting alarmingly beside the ferocious stove and said he was there to negotiate for poles on behalf of the Irish State.

  Mr Salovarra thought him a novelty. He considered the comedy of the clothes the Irish thought adequate to the Finnish winter. The shoes, the shoes were little more than cardboard, a detail that inexplicably moved him, conjuring a country poor and valiantly endeavouring to overcome its circumstances. Still, business was business. Like all who had to outwit savage climate, Mr Salovarra eschewed sentiment and offered an inflated price of £4 a pole.

  Mangan furrowed his brows and melted some more. He was not a businessman, his prime negotiation was with saws, but he had been told to drive for £3 and 10 shillings per pole, and if things did not progress, the Department Secretary had told him, drop in a mention of Norway, they won’t like that.

  Mangan sat down. He said he was sorry he had travelled so far in vain. He said he had been hoping to see the glory of the Finnish forests, which he believed the finest in the world, but now would have to travel on to Norway.

  Mr Salovarra said £3 and 10 shillings per pole.

  Mangan said he would send word back to the Government and asked for the nearest telegram office.

  Right here is the only one, said Mr Salovarra and smiled. He had the kind of teeth that suggested the tearing of fish-flesh.

  Mangan wrote out the words of the telegram. Please send this, he said, and passed the wording across the desk to Mr Salovarra. The message was written in Irish.

  Mangan crossed the frozen street and into the tropic of a wooden hotel where three stoves were kept going and the floor of the lobby wore a permanent stain of male thaw. His room was spartan but it was overhead Reception and the heat fairly cooked him. The floorboards up there had been shrinking and creaked like the bones of old men, but they dried his shoes in jig-time. In the same jig-time the stitching of them gave up the ghost and he could hear the tiny snaps of the cobbler’s thread as the soles came loose. The fish he ate for dinner was larger than the plate. He had no idea what kind it was, but with enough salt you could eat timber was Mangan’s thought.

  He went back to Mr Salovarra the next day and received the telegram of the Government’s response, which was also written in Irish. Translated, it read: Delighted with offer. Accept on behalf of State.

  Mangan looked across at Mr Salovarra, whose teeth were smiling. ‘Offer refused,’ he said.

  Mr Salovarra could not believe it.

  ‘Look, here,’ said Mangan, and read aloud the impenetrably harsh sounds of the Irish. He finished with a flourish the sign-off, An tUasal O Dála.

  Mr Salovarra asked him what An tUasal meant and Mangan explained that in Irish we remembered we were noblemen and greeted ourselves as such.

  Mr Salovarra said £3 a pole.

  In all, ten telegrams went back and forth from Helsinki to Dublin, all of them in Irish, and, because in Irish and incapable of being translated in Finland, they were able to take on whatever degree of intransigence Mangan thought apt. Ultimately, because of the unnegotiable severity of the Gaelic, Mr Salovarra was bargained down to £2 a pole, and on that the two men shook. A fact.

  But that was not the end of it. Now fearful that their inexperience might be taken advantage of, the Electricity Board insisted that each individual pole be inspected, calipered and approved by Mangan himself before being shipped to Ireland.

  Mangan told Mr Salovarra he would have to stay in Finland for some months. He was to visit the northern forests in person.

  Mr Salovarra lifted on to his desk the gift of a pair of fleece-lined lace-up boots and made a small respectful bow. ‘An tUasal,’ he said.

  Dermot Mangan travelled by sleigh into the snowbound forests of Finland. He didn’t take the suggestion of using preventative fatty oil on his lips and they cracked off like flakes of pink paint, making of his mouth a glossy sore until he learned respect of where he was and daubed his whole face. It was too late to save his eyelashes. In the deep woods was a preternatural silence and a sense of the beginnings of time, and Mangan was not surprised to learn of th
e Finnish epic poetry of the Kalewala in which the earth is created from pieces of duck egg, and the first man, whose name is not Adam but Väinämöinen, starts by bringing trees to barren ground.

  Mangan took to the woods. They were his dream habitat. He wore furs, Mr Salovarra’s boots, and went from pole to pole and made his mark, selecting the ones that in time would criss-cross the green spaces of Ireland. He became a story, and that story was well-known by the electric crews that came into Faha and told and retold it with greater or lesser detail depending. But the fact is that for the next thirty years, May to December, there was always a ship bringing poles from Finland to port depots in Dublin, Cork or Limerick. In the interests of story, sometime you could do worse than go out into the country, find one of those quiet roads where time is dissolved by rain, look out across ghost fields that were once farmed and you’ll still see some of those poles An tUasal Mangan first laid a frozen hand on in the forests of Finland.

  I drifted a bit.

  It’s licensed by time on the planet.

  The bones of it are fact.

  When Master Quinn mentioned the jobs, like a human concertina, every woman in the hall in Faha elbowed her man. Although she knew the intention was to hire young farmers, and Ganga was not young, Doady did the same. The prospect of his getting a job would float through the following weeks. Sometimes, with rehearsed casualness, she would land it Kerry-cute in conversation – ‘Young Carty, they say, has a job got with the poles’ – and always Ganga showed genuine interest, ‘Is that right?’

  ‘So I hear.’

  ‘Good man, Carty.’

  ‘You could ask.’

  ‘Jeez, I will.’

  ‘They might need experience.’

  ‘That’s true.’

  He’d carry on diligently buttering his bread and somehow, by the magic of intention, it would be as though he now had the job, so there was no need to apply.

  A wife knows with some exactitude the limits of her husband, and so in her heart Doady already knew that Ganga would not sign up for the work, but it’s human nature to dream, and in the vexed nature of marriage to hope time will harmonise the irreconcilable. When she finally conceded to reality, Doady took a different road and decided to take in one of the electric lodgers.

  And now that he’s slept enough, here he is, coming backwards down the Captain’s Ladder in his socks, his large figure in untucked shirt, forked hair, and sleep-eyes, stepping on to the flag floor and to the audience of the three of us says: ‘That bed’s heaven.’

  Perhaps from unfamiliarity, Doady met compliment with brusqueness. ‘There’s food,’ she said, and turned away.

  We sat to the table for a Lenten meal. Eggs were plentiful but being saved for Easter Sunday, so what was served was a black seaweed of imperishable salt and fried cakes of onion-seasoned mashed potato that since the nineteenth century Ganga had been calling Pandy. Doady brought a pot of tea from the hearth, tea that brewed beyond time and became so strong it defeated sugar. Christy acted as though the tea’s bitterness was imperceptible and the meal a feast. Although I couldn’t have put it in words yet I think I was already struck by what I’ll call the generosity of his spirit.

  Ganga and I pretended not to be watching him. I noticed he was a citog, and there were few enough of them then, left-handedness having been almost entirely purged by Sisters, Brothers and Masters who were all of one conviction: the world spun right-handed off the fingers of God. He ate with appetite and relish, a thing approved by all mothers then, but caused me to wonder when he had last sat to a meal.

  ‘It’s a difficult job, the electricity,’ Ganga announced, with blithe knowingness.

  ‘Ah no, it’s not really,’ said Christy.

  To uphold the masculine charade of appearing informed, or in combat with the Faha feeling of inadequacy, my grandfather surprised all by disagreeing. ‘It is, though.’

  Over by the basin Doady turned and looked at the perplexity she had married.

  ‘The insulator pins, the suspension clamps sure,’ Ganga said.

  There was an astonished pause when my grandmother and I were not sure if we were hallucinating.

  ‘All the earth rods, stay rods, and the connectors,’ Ganga added, as though he knew these last were particularly troublesome. The performance of Master Quinn had made the list indelible, and by magic of theatre and a man’s need for fantasy it was as if Ganga believed he had signed up for the job when Doady urged him, was in fact an electricity worker, and had been for some time.

  Sparked with the novelty of speaking technology, Ganga drove on: ‘The dead-end thimbles. The dead-end ones. And the air-break switches.’ He gave a slow shake of his big head to acknowledge vexatious encounters with air-break switches, then stopped short. It was all he could remember. He had come to the end of his lines. He knew there was more, but no prompt was offered from the wings. He looked blankly at his audience, air leaking out of his performance, then some switch inside his memory was thrown, he blinked twice, tapped his forefinger on the table, and added: ‘Of course, there can be trouble with the insulators for the HT and the LT fuses too.’

  It was an instance of triumph and display worthy of Conway’s cock. Now for you, was his look back at Doady, as though the whole speech had been an articulation of love, all the more eloquent for being in the argot of electricity. Speech over, he tugged once on his braces and returned to carving his tomato.

  But the triumph was instantly confounded when Christy, whether impressed by the listing or partial to the comedy, turned to Ganga and asked, ‘Would you like a job?’

  I didn’t have the feather to knock Ganga off his chair.

  Knowing he was under the round-glassed scrutiny of Doady, he showed no sign of it. With the composure of a lifelong draughts-player, Ganga took the breath you take before a leap. He put down his knife. He swallowed a crescent of the thick-skinned tomato along with the indigestible truth that the fate he had managed to evade for so long had come in the door and was sat beside him.

  ‘I would, of course,’ he said. There was always on his person a great-sized handkerchief, it was common enough at the time, and he drew it out now and covered his expression by trumpeting into it like the nineteenth century.

  Prayers were never answered in Faha, so it was Doady’s turn with the feather. She stayed standing by the basin twisting the teacloth.

  My grandfather pocketed the white flag of the hanky, sipped and swallowed sour tea.

  ‘But, do you know,’ he said, ‘I know a man who would be ahead of me in the queue.’ His round face assumed a look of resigned acceptance, and then, masterfully slipping impossible binds, he slowly extended his hand, like a living signpost, and pointed at me.

  10

  Although she had the rigour and meticulousness of all realists, my grandmother had not considered what she would do with her lodger in the evenings. The entertainments on offer were few and the natural decline of evening was towards the rosary, at the approach of which now, Ganga recalled that Bat Considine had asked him to take a look at an ailing calf and reached for his cap. As most of the world then, he was amateur in all things but offered a veterinary counsel firmly founded on both the full and near failures of his own farming. He headed to the back door, but before he lifted the latch, said, ‘Noe, take our visitor into the village.’

  Now, as I’ve said, I was on unsure footing then, and as both failed priest and Dubliner the last person to take Christy into Faha, but Ganga had the shrewdness of seven foxes.

  Christy was considerably shorter than me, but in deference to his bulk or age took Ganga’s taller bicycle and I the smaller one of Doady. There were bicycle clips somewhere, if only they could be found. Your right sock did emergency duty and was the better for being black and taking the streaks of oil without comment. See us then, a mismatched little and large, pedalling uncertainly out the yard.

  The lamps on the bicycles had long since conked out. The small ambit in which my grandparents lived made them redunda
nt, but less so for us, and we met each bump and pothole and progressed into the falling night by jolt and glide.

  ‘My God,’ said Christy, ‘the stars.’

  The rain having departed, the evening sky was million-flecked. It felt opened, as though previous ones you just now realised had been closed. Because there was no electric light, because we were at one of the edges of the universe, and because they were usually shielded with an impenetrable cloud, the stars hung with naked wonder. You could hardly credit it was the same world you were in yesterday.

  Christy cycled in slow meander, head tilted upward. The weight of him on the bicycle, sporadic pedalling, and general absence of effort made reaching any destination indefinite. The village may have been ten, twenty miles away, he had no urgency and seemed content to be in minimal motion along the small rises and falls of a road in west Clare. If I looked over at him I’d say he was near enough to smiling, and I was maybe thinking he had something of poor Matthew Poole, who thought life too funny for words and could be seen sometimes giving a little quiet chuckle to himself. There was no harm in it.

  Occasional silent figures came up out of the dark like bats, walkers, cyclists, or some standing for unknowable reasons by the ditch looking out into a blind field. In Faha you passed no one without a nod or a wave, and I did, knowing that, even as we passed, Christy and I were being stitched into the fabric of the townland: Do you know who I saw this evening?

  ‘The last time I was on a bicycle I was getting away from a man wanted to shoot me,’ Christy said, whether to himself or me I couldn’t say.