Peeling Oranges by James Lawless Page A

that. Her consolation was her Baby Power whiskey, that, and of course her visits to Belfast.
    To fill the void in her life, my mother wrote daily to Patrick:
    Tell me what’s happening in Spain. When Gearóid left he said he was going to fight the fascists. Is it really not safe for me to go and see you? Can’t I go to France? Can you come over – surely at Christmas?
    Poor Tommy died. He had no resistance when the consumption hit him. He went very fast. God rest his soul. I went to the wake. They had plenty of everything. I brought a few things from the shop, but most of what they had was ‘on tick’: the loose cigarettes and the matches and the drink of course, and the saucers of snuff which attracted the women. And they talked of the bad times. And when the drink took hold, they forgot themselves for a while, and Jack Ó Súileabháin and a few others began to sing. A friend of Mrs Chaigneau’s started to give out to them for having no respect for the dead. But Mrs C told her to hush, that they meant no harm, and that they might as well sing grief as cry it, which is what Tomás used always say. And my heart sank later as I saw the horses with the white plumes pulling the hearse.
    The suffering has dried up all their tears, Patrick. All they can do is sing like the penniless soldiers on the street. But I have tears, buckets of tears for little Tommy and for all of us.
    ***
    ‘How come you loved Tommy Chaigneau?’ I shout irately at my mother as I come out of Patrick’s study. She is sitting in her armchair, sitting smugly I may say, going through a bundle of her fusty old newspapers.
    ‘Tommy?’ she says, looking up. ‘Little Tommy.’
    ‘He wasn’t even your own flesh and blood.’
    ‘Why?’ she says. ‘Is that what you’re asking?’
    ‘Yes.’
    ‘Because he died, that’s why.’
    ***
    Patrick and my mother met at Christmas in nineteen thirty six. They stayed in Rathfarnham. Attempts at sexual union were unsatisfactory:
    Her reference to the rig made me very uncomfortable. Could she be laughing at me behind my back? She tried so hard to please me. She is patient, but so conventional. All I can see before me is M, her beauty which I must not sully. The image in my mind, however, is blank.
    ***
    I read that Napoleon was a rig and yet he had a son whom he called the king of Rome, and Mark Twain was impotent, and so was Pope Pius VI (how did he know?). Impotence is not sterility. Erectile dysfunction is the correct term. An erection is caused by the penis filling with blood (six or seven times the volume of the flaccid penis). It was Leonardo da Vinci who discovered this.
    They met again in the summer of thirty seven. And once more at Christmas in thirty eight. Years without issue.
    Although Patrick disliked Spanish heat, he did like Spanish light. In Dublin he found the greyness of Irish weather weighed heavily on an already ripened melancholia:
    It’s a dead day, a day that has died, or a day that never came alive. There is no joy here. There is only the pretence of joy. The dancers are arthritic and the singers are sad and consumptive.
    ***
    ‘He’s worse than Damn the Weather when he’s home,’ my mother wrote to Gearóid.
    When Patrick returned to Spain he found an outlet for his loneliness:
    I went to see L. Always afterwards I abase myself for doing so, but she releases valves, secret valves, which no one else, not even M, can find. She reduces my anxiety, if only for a little while. She endows me at least with the delusion of normality. What harm is there in that? But I feel so wracked by it, especially after reading M’s last letter about Monto. And there is a fondness growing between L and me, more on her part admittedly. She is so young, but I don’t exploit her, not like some of the wretches who visit her. And that damned Jiménez, always hovering around, a permanent gadfly. She keeps thanking me for saving her life.
    Did I really do her a favour? Still, I am teaching her to speak