IN THE BEGINNING the orange tree gave no fruit. The island was wet and green and soaked with rain that filled the emerald lake and the blackwater river and the red mountain bog where slept Queen Dana of the hilly paps and her sons who hunted the great elk. In clouded night all over the land the stowaway stars distilled the damp to dab the rhododendron and the fuschia to fatten the bumblebees to make Wexford honey to feed the rosepetals in the lippies to kiss the boys in the webwet copperleaf beechwood adieu along the chainy path by the lily-pond. Soft water seeped up into the alder and the ash and the birch and the furze and the holly and the juniper, the quicken and the rowan and the yew and the grieving willow, the whole alphabet of trees, and met the mist that painted the land with watercolour brushstrokes of virgin snowdrop and bluebell and yellow crocus and broad leering beds of wild strawberry. The blackberry plumped into the bucket and Mary Neville the housekeeper filled her frockenbib with bilberries and the apples were crisp and rosy-cheeked. Then the warm south wind came up from Glengarriff off the Gulf Stream and gilded the rolling barley, and the orange tree in exile blossomed in tandem with the whitethorn, and in the early morning sunshower Jeppie and his wife Veronica woke to the scent of orange blossoms, and he dreamed the dream of Africa.   

After Vonnie died, the old man still woke with aureoles popping in his head, but the dream stopped. When he went to the barber’s he saw his white hair float like the snow in a crystal paperweight where time was frozen. He had to get back.

And then one day in September, after nearly forty years, a single orange appeared. He went out and stared at it for a long time and dared not pick it or even touch it, but he could smell it as if he stood in another place and another time. Next day there were three.

He made an expedition to the Botanical Gardens to check the orange trees in the big greenhouse there, but those trees bore no fruit. So he knew he had a miracle happening in his garden. To the man in the street a miracle was a rare and strange thing. To a man in the insurance business it was an event. It happened. That was the paradox, that a man who sold intangibles and paid out only on kickable realities should be a believer in miracles.

Two oranges he picked. He put them in a bowl on the kitchen table and when he opened the atlas at the map of Africa he would take an orange and nuzzle it, as if to prompt the dream, but the dream refused. He told his grandson Rory that the tree had grown from seeds he’d brought back from Africa many years ago.

My foot, thought Rory, who knew that there were Jaffa oranges and Seville oranges, but who ever heard of Dublin oranges? and yet he was suspicious. Long before the age of reason which is seven, he knew that time always went clockwise, and only Superman could change the past and the future by flying around the world in the wrong direction. It was as if the old man had imaginings in his head, like when he read out the comic strip where the pig was called Curly Wee and the goose was called Gussy Goose and they talked to each other in rhyme (as if). The pig wore a frock coat and a top hat and the goose wore Bombay bloomers.

“You have to imagine it,” said Jeppie, “and then anything can happen. And don’t forget, there’s a fine line between an astronomical impossibility and a mathematical certainty, and we are all at the mercy of the celestial mechanic.”

Maybe that’s what he told people when he sold them insurance, being a master of the nebulous hypothesis. And the oranges sat there until they became wizened like little dunduckety footballs that had the wind kicked out of them.
 

IN THE HOUSE OF THE MUSES he was back in the bath with the woman who looked like the Queen of Sheba.

Not Nefertiti of the enamelled eyelids, not Helen of the ships, not Cleopatra of the burnished throne, not Salomé of the silver salver. Who knew her name, the woman who seduced Solomon the wise?

It was a sunny day in North Dublin. An orange tree from the Cape of Good Hope blossomed in a back garden in Henrietta Street and a curtain twitched, and an old man looked out. His name was J. P. Lienhart, known as Jeppie. The grandfather. And the boy’s name was Roderick after the last true king of Ireland, or maybe after Rodrigo El Cid, or Nimrod the Hunter who built the tower of Babel. Call him Rory.

Standing over the sink in the dark kitchen, Jeppie held back the curtain and looked out again cocking his head sideways as he always did when he was thinking or asking a question, and with his other huge mitt he turned off the cold-water tap, caressing it like a burglar waiting for a tumbler to click. His eyes were as pale as the moon.

He dried two cups and saucers with the tea-towel and exclaimed, “We must go around Africa!” And the way he emphasised the word “around” would make you think that they talked about Africa all day every day, but they did not.

Africa was a place in the movies where Clark Gable went to shoot the gorilla that stole the pineapple, and Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly loved him for it, a place of sunshine and singing warriors. So Jeppie said Africa, not for the first time, and Rory heard it and at the same time didn’t hear it. That may have been the moment when every­thing changed. In any case the boy was too preoccupied, as you would expect from a young man of seventeen, with edifying thoughts. In his own chaste way, sitting there at the kitchen table, he was contemplating in his mind’s eye the breasts of frivolous women and what the prophet called fornication in high places. When you’re seventeen. And working on his theory that the wishbone was somewhere between the stomach and the head, a sort of plectrum for the heartstrings.

Speaking of women. His mother was very beautiful and he remembered her heartbeat. And he remembered her shining in the sun on the strand at Curracloe, and the imprint of her dancing foot. There was no memory of his father, who took his mother away one day and never brought her back.

Then he came to live with his grandfather and went to a new school. First class. Where he wrote his first book.

 “THE BEGINNING. My grandad is closely related to me. My granny lives here too but she is a distant relation. Mary Neville is my other Nan who looks after me. When I shat my trousers past tense she said wisha he’s after committing himself. If you want to do that in here you better go outside. I don’t know how she knew. After that I told her nearly everything. For example, the equator is a menagerie lion running around the world. A cherub’s wing is 5 cubits which is not on my ruler. Writing came from Messpotamania, and beer. The two most important words in the Irish language are plaumaus that means bullshit and rawmaysh that means rubbish. THE END”

He thought parents were over-rated, except his mother, and likewise grandparents except his grandad, so he kept them to a minimum.

The grandfather had imaginary lines in his head where the plates met, the main one being the line between right and wrong, and was always trying to teach him the facts of life which some people had to learn the hard way. “Faraway hills are blue,” the old man would say when everybody knew that faraway hills were green. And he had the patience of a steam-roller, repeating things until you gave in and agreed even if you didn’t. That was because he was in the insurance business where you had to keep talking.

According to Jeppie, Eccles Street (just up the road, where Leopold Bloom lived, he knew the family well) was named after a man in the Bible called Eccles the preacher. This was the man who had written the book of Eccles. The book that said, For everything there is a season, and a time for every purpose under heaven: a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance. So jokes and dancing were OK, even if some of the stories you heard were so old they made you weep.

If you bought a sweep ticket you could win a prize. If you bought an insurance policy you could win a prize too, but only if something terrible happened as well, like if your house burned down or you died. That was why the old man needed the gift of the gab to sell insurance. But he was very good at it. If you rang him by mistake he wouldn’t say “Wrong number,” the way a normal person might, but he’d keep you talking and then sell you a Wrong Number policy to protect you from people ringing you in the middle of the night. No topic of conversation was alien to him. “The trouble with the Yanks,” he’d say, to no one in particular, “all their geese are swans.” This would get a conversation started at any point of the compass any day of the week in Ireland. And then he had you.

Rory’s theory was that people resented the Yanks because they invented Rock’n’roll and the jukebox and sneakers. And Mad magazine, featuring Alfred E. Newman. “That little voice inside us which used to be our conscience is now a pocket radio. Our price 25c cheap. No matter how you look at it, it’s gonna be a mad year, 1961. The first upside-up year since 1881. The last upside-up year until 6009.”

He was reading the official Mad history of the twentieth century from the American point of view. “Chapter I: How the War came and how we won and how our enemies lost and how people were killed and how all this resulted in television.” So that’s how it happened. “In 1950 there was another war, this time in Korea, but since television was already here at the time, most people paid little attention to it.”

“In the Land of Youth beyond the sunset,” said Jeppie, “a man from Wexford has said, Ask not what your country can do for you. Typical. The grandfather went away without a penny to scratch himself, now they’ll be back telling their ancestors how to grow spuds. As if they were real Americans.”

A real American would have to be a practical penny-pinching person like himself, or Benjamin Franklin, the man who invented America. The man who mapped the river in the ocean that we knew as the Gulf Stream. The man responsible for the black wall in the garden that absorbed the heat from the south wind that came off the river in the sea and kept the frost off the orange tree. Much cheaper than building a greenhouse.

According to the history, Eisenhower was elected in 1952 and took over his duties in 1959 following the death of John Foster Dulles. Eisenhower had come after Truman, who had succeeded John Dewey, who was president for one night in 1948, according to The Chicago Tribune in the imaginary present. And now there was Kennedy, and Mad magazine had a special cover to congratulate Nixon. Other forms of entertainment in those days, it said, were rock’n’roll and horror movies. “These will be discussed in a later chapter entitled The End of Civilization As We Once Knew It.” Rory couldn’t wait, but the other and much larger half of his capacious and infinitely elastic brain was calling.

Jeppie put the cups and saucers on the centre of the table next to the tea-pot. The boy continued scribbling away in the dusk, upside down to him, expecting him at that point to talk about the cups, and how the rings were caused by the fine strong Indian tea he got by special order from Assam or Findlaters the grocers or wherever, and nothing to do with the washing in cold water. No. Not this evening. He went out and up the half-stairs, limping slightly, not that you would pick it unless you foxed him. Whatever it was, it made him appear deliberate in all his movements, like a man who was thinking about what he was doing. Reliable. A practical man.

“The King of Man had a daughter called Affreca,” said he. “That’s the Isle of Man that you can see if you go up to the top of the house and sit on the chimney and look out across the Irish Sea on a fine day. John de Courcy married Affreca in 1180 to bolster the alliance with the Norsemen. A sort of sheelanagig to ward off the evil eye. That is not the Africa I’m talking about.”

Rory considered himself a practical man too, but in a different way. The correct procedure for kissing a woman’s toes (apple-scented, golden, with tiny silver bells, one by one), or for placing in her navel (lintless, knotless, golden), a ruby bespoke. Beeswax candles burning left and right, and frankincense, under a canopy of star-spangled velvet. Radio Moscow playing Shostakovich, impossibly romantic music from The Gad?y. He first heard it at the Christmas Pantomime where Prince Charming was a girl in fishnet tights and buckled shoes and a tam-o’shanter. She had long legs and you could see all the way up to her bum. If she let you see that much leg in the Bank of Ireland in College Green where she worked behind the counter, you’d have to marry her.

Anna Bradley at Number 46 gave him a kissing lesson and warned him that French kissing was what made babies — useful to know. That was when you put your tongue into the girl’s mouth. (Imagine.) Her brother Conal told him that a man named Lobsang Rampa had had an operation to open up the magic third eye in the middle of his forehead so he could see things others could not see, but he didn’t need to do that. The BBC was free because it leaked out of England through the clouds and came down the chimney and in through the window on a wire and out of a pale grey eye in the middle of the parlour, a wall-eye full of shadows in which you could see anything you wanted to see, even the Queen’s coronation that Granny Veronica watched. Like watching the rain where you could make up the story yourself. Conal was the first to read a Mickey Spillane book that he bought off a sailor and sold to Séamus Deverix who wore it out. Nineteen sixty was when Lady Chatterley’s Lover was legalised in England but could not be sold in Ireland because it was all about things which Irish people did not do. And Nineteen sixty-one would be the year they got their own TV station in Ireland and immorality would come into its own. He suspected that Jeppie was already planning to move the TV set into the attic to avoid immorality, or to avoid paying a license fee.

Rory’s friend Steven invited him to become a Communist. It cost four shillings to join, but he felt no different, even after Steven used the money to buy two pints of Guinness in the Buttery at Trinity. He said it was like being baptized: you didn’t feel anything but it might come in useful later. He took Rory to see The Gad?y at the film club where all the pictures had subtleties at the bottom and taught him to say Shasta-koa-vitch. All practical considerations.

He could hear the old man’s feet on the timber and then heel-tips metal on tile in the hall and the brass squeak of the door to the front parlour opening, and Rory warmed his hands on the tea-pot. Jeppie didn’t like that because you had to take off the tea-cozy. Sometimes in winter when the old man was locked in the attic doing whatever he did up there, Rory would put the warm tea-cozy on his head. The phone rang and he put the cozy back on the pot and poured the milk and waited for the tea to draw and scribbled on. Now he heard the old man’s voice when he picked up the phone and said, “I have waited years for this call.” That’s what he always said.

The boy didn’t know then that the Queen of Sheba was an Ethiope, but wouldn’t life be a pain if we knew everything at once? Where would Mount Discovery be then, and Good Hope and Lake Disappointment and the rest of the great adventure? Where was he . . . ?

Inspired, he wrote down the bit about the orange tree. And mentioned Africa, since his grandfather had brought it up. The Journal, Rory called it. It was couched in the third person which made it easier to talk about things unmentionable, in order to evoke the truth. And to talk about himself behind his back. The language was the main difficulty. All ancient stories were told in a strange language called Fadó Fadó (far ago and long away), since that was what they were all about and that was how they always started in the telling. Even if the story was about something that happened last week it was farago in the west by moonlight where people talked funny and they pronounced it "farrago by lamplight when things were different." It was a lovely way to tell a story, like Thomas Aquinas’s logic that only told the truth at night when the sun was hidden, a watchpiece of impeccable workmanship that made its own time, but it would have to be simplified for the modern reader during the daylight hours. For example, where the annals said

“Far ago and long away fado fado when the age of the world in the year of the deluge was 2242, forty days before the flood, Casar came to Ireland with fifty girls and three men. From the Deluge until Parthalon took possession of Ireland 278 years; and the age of the world when he arrived in it, 2520.

“The age of the world when Parthalon came into Ireland, 2520 years. These were the chieftains who were with him: Slainge (Slaney), Laighlinne (Lachlan), and Rudhraidhe (Rory), his three sons; Dealgnat, Nerbha, Ciochbha, and Cerbnad, their four wives.

“The Age of the World, 2545. Rudhruidhe, son of Parthalon, was drowned in Loch Rudhruidhe, the lake having flowed over him; and from him the lake is called.”

It was important to know when and where everything happened for the sake of accuracy, and indeed they were very accurate with the years and the numbers and the exact place-names, but he thought they were a bit too lavish with the dates. The names were always given in the old Irish spelling, like Rudhruidhe his ancestor, to indicate the old pronunciation. He believed it sounded more Russian than Irish and to speak it properly a man had to have his gob full of spuds, and so he was happy to use the English version of his name, Rory. Still and all it was useful to know who the first Rory was, and where he died, and that for him the lake was called Lake Rory.

HE SAT across from Jeppie now, thinking about that story and all the others.

The old man told Rory that if clockwise moments were equal to anticlockwise moments, there would be equilibrium, which was a way of saying that everything was right with the world. This was called the principle of moments. The boy understood this to mean that time would stand still and everything would be perfect, like when Ossian went off with Princess Niav to the Land of Youth for three hundred years and no one grew old there. Only when he got homesick and came back and fell off his horse he suddenly aged and his hair turned white and his beard grew very long. So moments could be very short or they could last a thousand years if you didn’t fall off. Perfect moments. And the Koran said there was a tree in Heaven whose shade would protect you from the sun, a tree so big that you could walk under it for a hundred years.

It was nice to think about it even if you didn’t believe it. A palm tree, Jeppie said, with dates on it. That would be where the hundred years came in. A hundred years was a lot of dates.

On Rory’s seventh birthday Jeppie took him to see Broom Bridge on the Royal Canal. This was where William Hamilton wrote the equation for quaternions.

“Quarter onions,” said Rory, who hated onions. “Yuck.”

“Aye,” said Jeppie. “A Trinity man. Born on the same day as you. A child prodigy.”

“He must be, if he’s the same age as me,” said the boy.

“Oh he’s dead now, long gone.”

“How is that, if he was born on the same day as me?”

“A pathological mathematician. Very contrairy, like yourself. When other people were trying to square the circle, he was circling the quadrangle, and he ended up here, where he carved the equation in the stone with his pen-knife. And the Dido problem, don’t you see.”

Rory examined the commemorative stone plaque and said, “He was a very good carver too. What is the Doodoo problem?”

“The Dido problem is about whether you can be happy being happy, or whether you need to be a little bit unhappy at times in order to be really happy. And then you have to know about vectors. If you don’t know about vectors you can only go backwards and forwards in time, but a vector can go sideways like a crab. If you were a vector, you could be born in this world, enter an imaginary world, go sideways in three different directions, and come back as a new person.”

“Like going to the pictures. Or reading a comic.”

“You could say that. Very like.”

Then they went around to the Phoenix Park to look at the Wellington monument where Wellington was not buried because he was two hours late for his own funeral and so they buried him in London, and his wife always referred to him as the late Duke, and Jeppie bought two ice-cream cones and said they could have a contest to see whose would last longer and Rory let Jeppie win. Then he licked his fingers and Jeppie wiped his face and gave him the handkerchief. He gave back the hanky and reached out and held on to his grandad’s fingers as they walked home in the chilly dusk. The lights were coming on in Henrietta Street and Jeppie said he would put the kettle on. When he made the tea Rory put his hands under the tea-cosy and warmed his fingers on the pot and thought about the Dido problem. It was like eating ice-cream. The cold might get you between the eyes and your fingers might be chilled to the bone but all in all it was nearly a perfect moment, according to the principle of moments.

Jeppie took him down to the lighthouse at Hook Head, after they had buried Granny Von in Mountgarret, and said to him, “If you look hard beyond the Saltee Islands (shearwater, gannet and puffin, guillemot, godwit and curlew) you can see the Blue Bay of Biscay where our people came from. And on a clear day you can see Africa.” But all Rory could see was the grey Atlantic ocean and the grey Atlantic sky.

“It must be your eyesight,” Jeppie said. “Your eyes are still growing, son.” He had called him son ever since. On the wet sand at Duncannon Rory sighted tiny wormholes and each one had next to it a little rope of extruded sand and Jeppie told him the little men from China came up in the night and made their doodoo but they didn’t call it doodoo. Rory fell asleep on the way home.

In his copybook he wrote: “The Chinese word for shit is nootna. Perfect moment.”

Woke him up in the middle of the night and dragged him out in the back garden to see the tiny Russian Sputnik. It was a cloudless night as if arranged. The violet sky was encrusted with fairy lights and the new star dropped softly like a teardrop over the horizon. On the radio he could hear the heartbeat of the satellite, even after it disappeared. Like his mother’s heartbeat from heaven.

“If you were up there now son you’d see Africa all right, eyesight or no eyesight.”

Rory wondered how anyone could see Africa in the dark, eyesight or no eyesight, but said nothing because he knew what the answer would be. Old people had an answer for every­thing, a way of not answering the question at all, and that was called wisdom which was dearer than rubies.

“And what colour is it, Africa?”

“Blue,” said Jeppie.

“The first I heard of that,” said the boy. “It’s all different colours on the map at school. Mostly red.”

“That’s because it’s an English map. On French maps it’s mostly blue.”

Rory sent away a shilling postal order for a Russian stamp that said which was how they spelled SPUTNIK which meant FELLOW-TRAVELLER in the CCCP, and a picture of the earth and the orbiting satellite. There was Africa, and it was a sort of faded blue, but it was hard to tell. And the stamp had no glue on it, so maybe they skimped on the blue ink too. The heavenly heartbeat went on for twenty-two days. Then it stopped.

Rory’s primary-school friend Séamus had it from the horse’s mouth that all you needed to be a band manager was a second-hand van and French letters. The horse being his older brother. If you spoke French, it seemed, you could meet fast girls from the Ursuline convent and then you’d have no trouble getting the musicians. The letters had to be carried in your wallet. Those were the facts.

They made a pilgrimage to see the girls. Ursuline girls were all of unspeakable beauty with the names of princesses, Clodagh of the Raven Hair and Affreca of the Blood-Red Cheeks and Dervorgilla the Adultress and Deirdre of the Sorrows and Maeve the Warrior Queen. Names that made a rumbling of hooves and a rattling of chariots across the plains of Meath and Kildare and a spinning of van-wheels and a blaring of jukeboxes playing Johnny B. Goode.

The princesses seen from a distance wore knee-socks and tam-o’shanters and woollen scarves and buckled shoes and walked in crocodile formation along the front beside the sea-wet sand. They saw a rider coming towards them from the Land of Youth on a broad chestnut horse prancing with ?owing mane. The rider wore a silver tunic and over his shoulder a sunburst shield with a silver strap. He slowed his horse to a walk and then stopped, and all the girls fell in love with him. The shield, they could see, was a Gibson ES-350T, and he sang this song:

Deep-down Loosy-ana close to Noo Orleans

Back-up in the woods among the evergreens

Stood a log cabin made of earth and wood

Where lived a country boy named Johnny B. Goode

Who never ever learned to read or write so well

But he could play that guitar just like a ringing a bell

And all the princesses swayed and sang

Go! Go! Go Johnny go! Johnny B. Goode!

And then they all swooned like dominoes, and the road was called Rock Road, and the rider’s name was Rory.

Rory and Séamus bought a pack of playing-cards with pictures of film-stars. They discarded the men and divided up the women. Séamus snaffled Betty Grable and Marilyn Monroe (Queen of Hearts), but Rory managed to get Jane Russell and took her home and outlined her breasts and nipples with ink and kept her hidden under the mattress with Rita Hayworth the Goddess of Love.

The thing about Jane Russell was the look in her eye, a look that said she knew what you were thinking, and that she agreed, and Rory wondered what it was he was supposed to be thinking.

Séamus got a black eye after Sergeant Moloney caught him trying to drive a van out of the yard at O’Brien’s garage and took him home to his mother and she punched him in the head and said, “Don’t you know you can’t steal cars without a driving license and how will you ever be a priest now — and me after buying all them black socks.” She spat on the corner of her apron and wiped his cheekbone where she had split the skin. “You’ll be the death of me.”

The papers reported that the Pike Theatre in Herbert Lane was being prosecuted for putting on a lewd entertainment: The Rose Tattoo. The critics discussed Tennessee Williams and American letters and English letters and French letters. Mad magazine said the play re?ected the new realistic underwear school of writing, and of course that alone would have got it banned in the Island of Saints but on top of that the word prophylactic was mentioned somewhere, and Séamus said that was another word for a French letter for doing the slip-jig.

In the dictionary Rory found that a prophylactic was a condom. Then he looked up condom and it said “a contraceptive sheath that can be worn on the penis during sexual intercourse.” Penis he knew was a medical word for Mickey. (On the other hand, going back to Credny the Artificer, who according to Haverty’s History pioneered the limb transplant c. 1500 BC, and even before him as long as records have been kept in the ogham, even among the sages — of whom there were four classes, to wit the druids, the ollavs, the brehons, and the satirists — the medical term for the little Mary had never been uttered by any Irishman within the land or without. Even your man Joyce, who knew the word for everything in the Big Book of Misprints, said, “Next she greesed the groove of her keel, warthes and wears and mole and itcher, with antifouling butterscatch and turfentide and serpenthyme and with leafmould she ushered round prunella isles and eslats dun, quincecunct, allover her little mary.”)

There and then, at the age of thirteen, he thought his education was complete. But it created a precedent: Séamus knew stuff. And by the time you caught up and found him out he knew more stuff and would always catch you on the hop. Like wisdom. Séamus told him that condoms came from a place in France called Condom, which was why they were called French letters. And these were things you had to know if you were to understand Finnegans Wake, a book where all the names were misspelt and you had to be an entomologist to understand the jokes.

Rory decided wisdom was simple hearsay and not to be trusted. Common sense told him that you could not take things for granted. But on the other hand you could not spend the whole day looking things up. So there was stuff you knew yourself, and there was stuff you had to take on trust (scientific facts). And in between there was what was known as theory or unverified speculation. The answers to all the great questions: How long is a cubit? (Newton); Do balls hang lower in summer? (Aristotle); and the one posed by the philosopher at the Irish Times: If the production of useful work was limited by the laws of thermodynamics, why was there no law, in nature or in the statute book, against the proliferation of useless work, especially in the civil service? Most of what was considered wisdom fell into this category.

His own people, he saw, had a natural bent in the direction of fairy rings and leprechauns and goblins and pookas and parallel worlds running to the tick of different clocks which had not been affected in the least by the coming of the railways, or rural electrification, or the bovine tuberculosis eradication scheme, or the wireless, all of which were as miraculous as talking pictures. Every railway station still had two clocks that told different times, local time and railway time, and long ago some people knew why but now it had simply become an Irish fact, a peculiarity of the race that exasperated German tourists because they expected to know exactly when the train would arrive, as if it made any difference on the West Clare Railway.

Mr Merriman the Latin master was from West Clare and could not tell a lie. He won a golf tournament when he had never in his life played the game but simply read a book on the subject. Interviewed after the tournament he told the reporter that the study of the classics enabled a man to master any subject from first principles. This stamped him as a wit and determined that he would never again be taken seriously.

But it was his heresies in Intermediate Latin that got him in hot water. “In Longman’s,” he said, “the three gerunds, which Dr Kennedy hunted in the African jungle, end in ‘?dum, ?di, ?do,’ sometimes given as ‘?di, ?do, ?dum.’ These are easily remembered as follows:

‘When Dido saw Aeneas needs must go,

She wept in silence and was dumb Di-do.

When Dido saw Aeneas would not come,

She mourned in silence and was Di-do dumb.’ ”

He wrote all this on the blackboard, along with the rule, “The genitive of the gerund is always adnominal in Old Latin. Read that back to me, Mr Lienhart.”

Rory, thinking about the pathological mathematician circling the quadrangle at Trinity, said, “The genitive of the gerund is always abdominal in Old Latin.”

“Mr Deverix?”

Séamus was reading Mickey Spillane, a novel called My Gun is Quick. He looked up at the blackboard and read, “The genitive of the gerund is always adenoidal in Latin.”

Walking slowly between the desks as he spoke. Picking up the book that Séamus made no attempt to hide, Mr Merriman said, “Mike Hammer.”

“Yes sir.”

“Michael Q. Hammer.”

“Sir?”

“Philip Q. Marlow. Raymond Chandler you should read. Much better.” He smiled for the first time and said, “Adenoidal. The only true instance of onomatopoeia in the English language. Never mind.

“The centre of the Aeneid,” he said, “for Virgil, and Maecenas, and Augustus, and for the Holy Examiners, is Book Six, in which the Cumaean Sybil shows Aeneas the pageant of the future glory of Rome. The Romans invented straight roads, concrete, and efficient tax collection, and they broke a lot of eggs doing it, and Virgil was an apparatchik. He was the first government propagandist, the great seducer, so seductive that he was adopted by the Church as a sort of secular prophet. But this is the book we must deal with. You will get no marks for having read the other books, and I know you have better things to do with your time.” Handing the book back to its owner and turning and returning the way he had come.

Séamus smirked and said, “Virgil’s Adenoid. Aeneas could not come,” and sniggered.

“However.” Mr Merriman hesitated at the head of the class and swivelled on his heel: “You could do worse than to read about Dido and Aeneas. Don’t forget she was a Phoenician princess, and was descended from Jezebel, who also got a bad press for wearing the trousers and sticking to her guns and not keeping her mouth shut, and other abominations such as wearing eye-shadow. Dido gets the blame for Hannibal. They always blame the woman. As Mr Stanyhurst says, Her wound fed by Venus, with firebait smouldering. His words, fitly placed, march mastering through her heart. All in her breast deeply she prints. But it was a Phoenician woman who by her wit made Jesus change his mind in Mark Seven, and that was something no one else could do even unto crucifixion. And read The Midnight Court, if you can find a copy. And if you can’t find a copy try the Catholic Library in Merrion Square. They have most of the books you’re not supposed to read.”

Rory raised his hand and asked, “What is an apparatchik, Sir?”

“It’s a Russian word,” said Mr Merriman. “It means an agent of the system.”

“And what does the Q stand for, Sir?”

“Quick-sot. The knight errant, he of the doleful countenance. From which we get the adjective Quixotic.”

Rory went home and took down the book that began in the beginning and went to Mark Seven and read about the woman who bandied words with Christ and bested him and continued down the page and there was a story about a man who was deaf like Jimmy Neville and Jesus stuck his fingers in his ears and spat on his finger and touched his tongue and said efafata. That sounded like an abracadabra word. He would have to catch Jimmy asleep in front of the fire to try that but Jimmy never slept nor ever closed his eyes. In any case it wasn’t clear if Jesus stuck his fingers in his own ears or stuck the man’s fingers in the man’s ears or what, and Jimmy always had the biting ferret on his lap.

At the university Rory began to understand for himself that some things couldn’t be explained, like the Metaphysical Poets. Once in a moment of folly he asked Jeppie if he had heard of John Donne. Jeppie said, “There was a family of Dunnes in Ross who used to say, ‘Well done said ould Dunne when young Dunne was born.’ Do you know what an analogy is? Metaphysical is to physical as pathological to logical. Muddle. We had a teacher from Belfast used to say, ‘An enthymeme is a syllogism with the muddle left out.’ How do you like that? Based on licensed premises, believe it or not.”

And the exam tomorrow.

Jeppie nuzzle the orange and said, “We are the music-makers, and we are the dreamers of dreams.” Rory closed the copybook and stood up. “I have to go out,” he said. “Down to Rathmines, or Rathgar, I never know which is which.”

“It’s going to rain,” Jeppie said.

Well you didn’t have to be a prophet to know that. In Dublin it’s always going to rain. Taking the briefcase.

He got off the bus at the wrong stop thinking about things metaphysical and wandered up the wrong street. It started to drizzle, according to Eccles full stop (If the clouds be full of rain, they empty themselves upon the earth), and he stood under a tree next to a lamppost in a large square of handsome Georgian homes, and when the rain got heavier he bolted across the road to the nearest house. He looked up at the warm fanlight over the door. He was shivering and wet, and for a moment he could have turned away and lived another life. He reached up to knock, but she opened it while his hand was still in the air. She laughed out loud. A big smile wearing lavender lipstick. Violet eyes wearing silver eye-shadow and big black eye-lashes. Jezebel.

He looked into her eyes, staring, couldn’t help it, and knew he was blushing. The Queen of Sheba.

“Elizabeth Taylor,” she said. “Isn’t it? I know. I nearly won Miss Kilkenny but I was too much like her. One of the crosses I bear.” She tilted her head and looked at his hand, still poised. “Knock-knock, is it? Who’s there? Come in,” and laughed again.

“Is Your—”

“No he’s not. He’s away all week. He’s a rep too, like yourself,” nodding at the briefcase. “What are you selling? Universal knowledge? That’s grand altogether. Come in and tell me all about the universe.”

Down the hallway after her bummy. He wanted to look in the big mirror but didn’t dare. Up the wide staircase, all white carpet and a tapestry on the wall, into the bathroom. Perfume. She took a bath towel.

“You’re all wet. No, wait.” She handed him a thick white bathrobe, like the ones in the Rock Hudson pictures. “Put on this and I’ll dry your things. Don’t be foolish. You’ll catch your death. That shirt collar needs turning. I’ll tell you what. I’ll give you one of John’s, and I’ll turn it myself, and you can come back and get it, the next time.”

The next time?

She lathered him with Johnson & Johnson’s baby shampoo and rinsed his hair and when he wiped his eyes and looked she was still there against all the odds.

“Did you never see a woman before, or what?”

“Not with the light on,” he said, and she giggled. Her breasts ?oated in the warm suds. Grown-up warm breasts. Hard married nipples.

“What did you say your name was again?”

“Rory,” he said, Miss—”

“Mrs Bailey, but you can call me Madeleine.”

Mad-leen was what she said. A name he would never forget. Madeleine Bailey, the first woman he ever sat in a bath with, and her legs between his, and his legs between hers and her husband away selling insurance to people, because you never knew what might happen to you when you least expected it, and where would your wife be then?

He stood in the lamplight and stared up at the darkened house and wondered what is was like when it wasn’t under warm suds. Almost Miss Kilkenny. Madleen.

He had another bath when he got home, in which he re-enacted everything, and mimicked Madleen when she said “Isn’t it grand how Little Richard grows up to be Moby-Dick.” And taught him what ecstasy was. “The part you can’t understand,” she said, “the part you can’t explain. When you don’t care what happens next, except you don’t want it ever to end. It’s more than physical,” she said.

And he, groping, said “meta-physical.” A perfect moment.

Next morning he sloped into the kitchen.

The old man would have a fit when he found out. A whole bath of hot water.

Jeppie put the cups and saucers on the table, and the teapot. Gave it a good stir. Now he would talk about India.

“When I was in India . . . ,” and stopped pouring.

Yes. Yes? A whole bath full of hot water. And the price of electricity.

“How would you like to go to Africa?”

“What would I do in Africa? I have an exam today.”

But Jeppie was far away. “I have to go down at the week-end to say goodbye to your grandmother Von. It’ll be five years she died on Saturday. I think it’s time. You’re not working Saturday are you?”

The husband would be back on the weekend.

“No I’m not.”

“We can take the car out and drive down, that way you can get some practice. And you’ll have to get a passport. You’re a bit big now to fit on mine.”

Say no more, as if. But Rory didn’t mind driving the old Bentley, something his grandfather had not permitted up to now. A Bentley was nearly as good as a van, if your object in life was to engage women in polite conversation, or in caresses. Madleen would like the Bentley.

On BBC Radio Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, was explaining what colour the world was from outer space. “Blue,” he said. “A beautiful blue.”

Jeppie didn’t even turn around. “There you are, son, you learn something new every day.”

“WHAT IS IT YOU’RE WRITING?” said he, coming back without warning, and he walked past just as Rory shut the copybook.

“Just some stuff for college.”

“A beginning, a middle, and an end,” said he, “that’s what you want.” He unfolded a large map on the table. For some reason he had it North to himself and South to Rory and on the bottom just west of Cape Town under the Tropic of Capricorn it said “AFRICA by J. Bartholomew F.R.G.S.”, and no blue on it at all unless you counted the faded ocean.

“I always wondered where St. Helena was,” said Rory, thinking of Napoleon. Near Damara Land, which he’d never heard of.

The business about Granny Von was what started all this, he knew.

“The book about Bloom,” said Jeppie, staring up the Nile river towards his grandson, “that yer man Joyce wrote, next door in Eccles Street. There’s a good example of a beginning, a middle, and an end. Starts in the morning, goes through the day, finishes at night. And the unities and all. The Sonata form.”

Oh dear. The Joyce expert. The sonata form. He got that from Granny Von. Or read it off the back of the forty-five record he bought her that time for Mozart’s birthday that she never listened to. Instead she went on playing Dido’s Lament on the old gramophone in her room till the day she died that year. Rory knew it off by heart, When I Lie in Earth, because she made him listen to it, but Himself, as she used to call Jeppie, never went in there to this day, and always slept in his own room as long as the boy could remember, and she never went in there. The song Rory liked was Zadok the Priest, where the clock was wound up until he thought it was going to break and then the whole choir screamed. Not just beautiful but terrifying as well. All the colours made white noise which was the voice of God.

“Ulysses, is it?” said he. “Starts off with a very slow movement of the bowels, grinds to a halt in the pub, and staggers into the night, goes to a bawdy house, gets home and sits in the kitchen here and can’t stop talking. What sort of sonata would that be? It should be spelt Uselyss.” He had to exorcise the incubus sooner or later. “We all make his praise” was the secret incantation, not a pentagram but an anagram of William Shakespeare, like saying abracadabra, the only way to drive out the ghost. Rory knew about beginnings, that you just started with IN THE BEGINNING, the opening nobody could improve on, and when you finished you put THE END or FINE if you were Italian. It was the part in the middle that he was interested in.

Jeppie looked at him to say something, only to be pre-empted with, “Arty-phoney indeed, he of the sturdy trousers. Obsessed with puns, was Mister Joyce. There’s no blue on this map, and very little pink. It must be very ancient.” Older than Himself, the boy couldn’t say, for the sake of politeness. “And there’s countries on there, no one ever heard of.”

“I don’t know what they teach you down at that college,” The old man said in his mildest manner. “You’ll be able to put B.A. GLIB on your notepaper. Only the names of the countries change, don’t you see. Like the colours. Of course it should have been called Ulixes, since he lifted the story out of the Book of Leinster.”

A likely story. He thought precocious was a better word. B.A. PREC.

He said “And what about the other book he wrote, the Wake? With all due respect, sir, where does that begin, if not at the end, and versa vice-a? What would that be, in musical terms? A Wagnerian canon? Or a drunken glee? The big book of misprints?” Thinking he had him cornered.

“I was only the other day talking to the Archbishop,” said Jeppie, blithe as ever, “there in Grafton Street, getting out of his Citroën, and he saying to me about how hard it is to get young people like yourself to do the right thing.”

That was the trouble with oracles. A canon could only mean one thing. And the Archbishop that didn’t take sugar in his tea to save the world but drove a car that looked like Dan Dare’s rocketship was a fine one to be talking. God between us and people doing the right thing. But out of respect for the senility of all those over thirty he held his tongue, not wanting to sound glib, and made a resolution to have a good look at the wrong thing in future, with a view to doing it whenever the opportunity arose.

Just to humour him, Rory said “If you’re going to Africa you’ll need a pith helmet.”

“Sola topi,” he corrected. “Sola, meaning pith, and topi meaning hat. It’s Hindi.”

Priceless. There was no talking to a man who got all his information off the back of a tea caddy. Indian tea, indeed. Rory, however, knew about India, the home of the Taj Mahal, a white marble monument to love, and then there was the one-eyed yellow idol to the north of Katmandu, and a little marble cross below the town, where a broken-hearted woman tends the grave of Mad Carew . . .

He was still thinking about the Queen of Sheba and Elizabeth Taylor and Miss Kilkenny and Madly Madly Madleen when he went to bed, so his sleep was trouble-free if not exactly tranquil. And Mrs Neville the housekeeper examined everything. “That cat next door,” he would say. No doubt she’d take it all with a pinch of snuff as she had done when her husband Jimmy tied his bootlaces together and jumped in the Liffey shell-shocked from listening to her prate for forty years. But again the boy was fortified by the prophet who said (Eccles. XI:?6): “In the morning sow thy seed, and in the evening withhold not thy hand.” And on Radio Luxembourg 208, Station of the Stars, Sam Cooke sang

Don’t know much about history,

don’t know much about biology.

Don’t know much about a science book,

don’t know much about the French I took.

But I do know that I love you,

and I know that if you love me, too,

what a wonderful world this would be.

GOING INTO Casey’s shop for five Woodbines, Rory saw a black man waiting at the bus stop, the first time he’d seen an African, or what he took to be an African, in all his life. Except on Mrs Casey’s counter where there was a box for the black babies — on a chain if you don’t mind, as if it was full of gold sovereigns — and on it a picture of a fine healthy-looking African baby because the pennies were not for food or medicine but to send them the good news according to the Archbishop and teach them to do the right thing.

The African was on the bus already seated when Rory got on and deliberately sat next to him and asked him for a light just to see what he sounded like and offered him a cigarette which he declined. The man said he was at the College of Surgeons. He was wearing a starched collar that needed no turning, and a tie, and a coat of Donegal tweed, and cavalry twill trousers and shiny boots. Things you would not notice on anyone else. No frayed cuffs, no patches. Rory’s shirt (handed down two generations) was clean, even if Jeppie’s old collar-studs were a bit loose on him, but next to the well-dressed Nubian (Zulu? Masai?) he felt diminished by the jacket he had been growing out of since school, six inches of wrist to the biting wind. Now he noticed the man was not black at all, but a sort of chocolate, like a bronze statue out of a big book, and he couldn’t help staring at him. And his operating hands pinker than the boy’s own but with no nicotine stains, and he sounded no more foreign than a man from Galway but easier to understand.

“It’s the Guinness,” he said, and laughed out loud at Rory’s perplexed brow. Fine big ivories. “We have Guinness in Nigeria. And buses, — and independence, in that order, as it should be.” He laughed again at his own wit.

“And why wouldn’t you,” said Rory. “It sounds like a very go-ahead place. We’re not long independent, nor indeed all that independent, ourselves.”

It was all very strange but you couldn’t gainsay a man who was a surgeon in the making. Sounded like a very civilized place if they were all so droll, and red double-decker buses running on time between the huts, and the encounter put a whole new complexion on the African question. If Jeppie was to find out he’d be over to the Surgeons in Stephen’s Green with his sola topi like a shot off a shovel.

At the college gate stood Nick Gill, dressed up as a beatnik in a pipe and beard. Smiling benevolently with his double first in mathematics and economics and doing his M.A. at government expense. One of those short people who still managed to look down on everyone else.

“And how is your lovely sister?” said he.

“What sister?”

“I must be thinking of someone else.”

His favourite trick, confusing you with someone else. He lived only down the street next to Mrs Casey. Looking appropriately vague, he said he might only get a second in his master’s because his mind was on other things. He was thinking of writing a book.

“What sort of book then?”

A novel.

“A novel? What’s that when it’s a tome?”

“You’re being facetious, Lennert, but it’s a very good question.” Another of his tricks, mispronouncing your name.

“Well then,” said Rory, “maybe it’s a question you can write about.”

“Now you’re being ?ippant.” A new word, like glib.

“Here’s another one,” Rory said. “Have you ever wondered how Darwin made the connection? From looking in the mirror, do you think?”

“But distinguo,” says he, omnia supercilio movens. “Apes don’t have beards.”

Rory thought it was smart then to walk away, across the damp cobbles, only muttering “nor pipes” as he went.

Apart from the light it threw on age-old questions that had vexed the minds of the large primates from the time they stood on their own two feet (What is a novel? Should I look in the mirror?), and the literary niceties (an obscure reference to medieval disputation and an apt quotation from Horace), the above exchange had nothing to do with the story. But Rory just did not like him, only saying.

He opened the pink exam paper in the great hall and read the first question:

“I wonder by my troth, what thou, and I

Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then?

But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?

Or snorted we in the seven sleepers’ den?

T’was so; But this, all pleasures fancies be.

If ever any beauty I did see,

Which I desired, and got, t’was but a dream of thee.

Discuss.”

Having meditated on the subject of love for what seemed like the greater part of his seventeen long years, he felt well qualified. The vital placement of the word “did” was the thing they would be looking for in the technical department, and the extra foot in the last line and other stuff. And Katmir was the watchdog for the seven sleepers, the only dog in paradise. Put that in if you didn’t know the other names. Nearly as good as Sam Cooke if he was slowed down to a walk, for which you need feet that touch the ground, but you couldn’t say that because they had never heard of him.

In the buttery, Séamus was waiting with a smile on his face that said, WE ARE OPEN FOR BUSINESS, PULL. He bought Rory two pints before the hand could be disengaged from the empty pocket. Very suspicious. Two pints. Then he told some romantic fables of the kind he specialised in.

The first one was about two cats. An old tomcat said to a young tomcat, Would you like to go out courting tonight? and off they went up on to the roof of the house and over the leads till they got to the cathedral where the old tom started yowling his head off and the young tom joined in. Then it started to rain. It pissed down, and the old tom kept on yowling and the young tom finally says to him, I think I’ll go home now, I’ve had enough courting for one night.

Then he told another one about a woman who had two cats and they got run over by a bus, squashed flat like two black soles and she took them in a hatbox to the vivisector McDaid in Leeson Street to be stuffed so she could put them on the chimneypiece beside the Sacred Heart lamp that blinked to the divine heartbeat. And the taxidermist asked her did she want them mounted, and she said, Thank you, but holding hands will be fine.

And then the one about the man from Cavan who used the prize bull to plough a field, whipping him along and shouting, Giddyup there now, I’ll teach you there’s more to life than romance.

 By this time they were into the third pint, still on him. Rory told him I was going down the country on the weekend and without drawing a breath Séamus said, There was a man in England, eighty years old, himself and his missus went to get a divorce, she was seventy-five, and the judge said, Is there no chance of a reconciliation? Oh no, says the old man, we have been unhappy since the day we got married, and the wife nodded. And how is it, says the judge, that you have not got divorced before now? And the wife says, We thought it would be best to wait until the children died.

Rory could see Séamus was laying it on, but then his friend swerved.

“You know,” he said, “Florida would be the place. Plenty of sun and rich widows. I could work as a lifeguard, for example, and wear sunglasses. Nothing too strenuous. Of course the swimming could be a drawback. I might have to learn to swim. And what’s down the country, that’s so important?”

 “The old man,” Rory said, “wants to say goodbye to Granny. He’s acting very strange these days. Talking about Africa, and having chats with the Archbishop, giving out about doing the right thing and the youth of today.”

“Wet rot,” said Séamus. “Africa sounds all right, though, if you’re to believe National Geographic.”

“But he doesn’t drink at all, more’s the pity. Very careful with a quid, and me with the drouth on me. I have a good mind to do the wrong thing, the first chance I get.”

“Dry rot, then. And what was he doing going to see the Archdruid?”

“I have no idea. Said he ran into him outside Switzers, as if.”

“Having himself measured for a red hat in millinery. I suppose he’s not happy with the old yarmulka they gave him, seeing as how the Lord Mayor has one as well. Next thing you know he’ll be in the pantomime up there at the Gaiety with Jimmy O’Dea in the long frock. I have the van, did I tell you?”

“Oh have you now? And the shadow-holsters?”

He tapped his hip pocket and said, “I’ll have to get a lend of your house-key on the week-end,” as if it was a regular arrangement.

“For what?” Rory didn’t need to ask. “Does she speak French?”

“She’s in the GPO telephone exchange. I think she heard me talking about the van on the telephone, you know, and she butts in. ‘Red hair,’ she says. ‘And do you speak French?’ says I, and she says ‘cami-knickers’ which is step-ins to you, and likes a pint. Ask and you shall receive.”

“What a chancer you are,” said Rory. On the hop. Base ungentle passion, trying to focus, and staring at him with awe and envy.

Then Séamus told him a shaggy-dog story about an Englishman in Paris who did not know the difference between a black chapeau and a black capote, a tale too long and indelicate to relate here, and it would only be an unnecessary digression at this stage.