Murphy (21 page)

‘Here he had a big birthmark.’

Coroner and R.M.S. pounced on the find.

‘Beyond the slightest doubt,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie, ‘an
extensive
capillary angioma of most unusual situation.’

‘A proper port-winer,’ said the coroner. ‘The afterglow is unmistakable.’

Miss Counihan burst into tears.

‘I knew of no such mark,’ she cried, ‘I don’t believe he ever had a horrid mark like that, I don’t believe it’s my Murphy at all, it doesn’t look at
all
like him, I don’t believe—’

‘There there,’ said Neary. ‘There there. There there.’

‘How beautiful in a way,’ said the coroner, ‘birthmark death-mark, I mean, rounding off the life somehow, don’t you think, full circle,
you
know, eh, Angus?’

‘There there,’ said Neary. ‘No man is without blemish.’

‘Well,’ said the coroner,‘now that we know who is dead, who is?’

‘Mr. Murphy,’ said Neary, ‘native of the city of Dublin.’

‘Dear old indelible Dublin,’ said the coroner. ‘Our only female link passed peacefully away in the Coombe, a month and a half before her time, under the second George. Christian name. Next-of-kin.’ 

‘None,’ said Neary. ‘A Dutch uncle.’

‘Who the devil are you?’ said the coroner.

‘His very dear friends,’ said Miss Counihan. ‘His dearest friends.’

‘How often have you to be told?’ said Wylie.

‘Was it to Murphy he answered,’ said the coroner, ‘or only to Mr. Murphy?’

‘Mr. Clinch,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie.

They covered the tray and carried it out to the refrigerators. Neary saw Clonmachnois on the slab, the castle of the O’Melaghlins, meadow, eskers, thatch on white, something red, the wide bright water, Connaught.

‘And this young lady,’ said the coroner, ‘who knew him in such detail, such opportune detail—’

‘Miss Celia Kelly,’ said Neary.

‘Did Miss Kelly murmur Murphy,’ said the coroner, ‘or Mr. Murphy?’

‘Damn you and blast you,’ said Neary, ‘the man was
unbaptised
. What the bloody hell more do you want?’

‘And this Mrs. Murrrphy,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie, ‘who was she? The Dutch uncle?’

‘There is no Mrs. Murphy,’ said Neary.

‘An epigram,’ said the coroner, ‘has been attempted.’

‘Miss Kelly would have been Mrs. Murphy,’ said Neary, ‘if Mr. Murphy had been spared a little longer.’

‘One would have thought so,’ said the coroner.

Cooper and Wylie supported Miss Counihan.

‘No,’ said Celia.

With a bow Dr. Killiecrankie handed the letter to Celia, who handed it to Neary, who opened it, read, reread, hesitated, read again and said at last:

‘With Miss Kelly’s permission …’

‘Is there anything more?’ said Celia. ‘I should like to go.’

‘This may concern you,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie, ‘since it appears to be addressed to you.’

Neary read out: 

Neary continued to gaze on the sheet for some time after he had ceased to read. At last he put it back in the envelope and handed it to Celia, who grasped it to tear it across, remembered her solitude was not without witnesses and contented herself for the time being with crumpling it in the palm of her hand.

‘The necessary house,’ said the coroner, catching up his hat and umbrella.

‘Their happiest hours,’ groaned Miss Counihan. ‘When is it dated?’

‘Burnt,’ said Wylie.

‘Body and all,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie.

Bim and Ticklepenny had gone, already they were far away, behind a tree, in the sun.

‘Leave me among the slops,’ begged Ticklepenny, ‘do not send me back to the wards.’

‘Darling,’ said Bim, ‘that is entirely up to you.’

The coroner had gone, he unbuttoned his black and striped with one hand and drove with the other, sweater and slacks would soon enfold him.

Celia was going.

‘Just one moment,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie. ‘What arrangements do you wish to make?’

‘Arrangements?’ said Neary.

‘The essence of all cold storage,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie, ‘is a free turrnover. I need every refrigerator.’ 

‘I shall be outside,’ said Celia.

Neary and Wylie listened for the sound of the outer door opened and closed. It did not come and Neary stopped listening. Then it came, neither loudly nor softly, and Wylie stopped listening.

‘Surely his last wish is sacred,’ said Miss Counihan. ‘Surely we are bound to honour it.’

‘Hardly his last, I fancy,’ said Wylie, ‘all things considered.’

‘Do you incinerate here?’ said Neary.

Dr. Killiecrankie confessed to a small close furnace of the reverberatory type, in which the toughest body, mind and soul could be relied on to revert, in under an hour, for the negligible sum of thirty shillings, to ash of an eminently portable quantity.

Neary slapped down his cheque-book on the slab, wrote four cheques and handed them round. To Miss Counihan and Wylie he said good-bye, to Cooper ‘Wait’, to Dr. Killiecrankie, ‘I trust you will accept my cheque.’

‘Accompanied by your card,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie. ‘Thank you.’

‘When it is ready,’ said Neary, ‘give it to this man, and to no one else.’

‘This is all rather irregular,’ said Dr. Killiecrankie.

‘Life is all rather irregular,’ said Neary.

Miss Counihan and Wylie had gone. The scarlet leaves drooped over them, they consulted together. Neary had not distinguished between their services, or their sexes, but had been not ungenerous with an even hand. She, in obedience to an impulse of long standing, seized him passionately by the Fifty Shilling lapels and cried:

‘Do not leave me, oh do not walk out on me at this
unspeakable
juncture.’

She impeded his view, he caught her by the wrists, she tightened her hold and continued.

‘Oh hand in hand let us return to the dear land of our birth, the bays, the bogs, the moors, the glens, the lakes, the rivers, the streams, the brooks, the mists, the – er – fens, the – er – glens, by to-night’s mail-train.’ 

Not only was there no sign of Celia, but in an hour the banks would close. Wylie squeezed open the hands and hastened away. He had indeed to leave her, but not for long, for his tastes were expensive and Cooper had whispered that the Cox was dead. Miss Counihan followed slowly.

The Cox had swallowed 110 aspirins following the breaking off of a friendship with a Mr. Sacha Few, an anti-vivisection worker.

Neary and Cooper came out, closely followed by Dr. Killiecrankie, who locked the mortuary, fixed Cooper with his eye, pointed to the ground at his feet, said, ‘Be here in an hour’, and was gone.

Neary seeing Wylie afar off, Miss Counihan following slowly and no sign of Celia, said, ‘Dump it anywhere’, and hastened away.

Cooper called after him:

‘She is dead.’

Neary stopped but did not turn. He thought for a second that Celia was meant. Then he corrected himself and exulted.

‘Some time,’ said Cooper.

Neary went on, Cooper stood looking after him. Wylie having travelled twice as fast as Miss Counihan, disappeared round the corner of the main block. Miss Counihan turned, saw Neary coming up behind her at a great pace, stopped, then advanced slowly to meet him. Neary tacked sharply, straightened up when she made no move to cut him off and passed her rapidly at a comfortable remove, his hat raised in salute and his head averted. Miss Counihan followed slowly.

Cooper did not know what had happened to set him free of those feelings that for so many years had forbidden him to take a seat or uncover his head, nor did he pause to inquire. He placed his ancient bowler crown upward on the step, squatted high above it, took careful aim through his crutch, closed his eye, set his teeth, flung his feet forward into space and came down on his buttocks with the force of a pile ram. No second blow was necessary.

The furnace would not draw, it was past five o’clock before Cooper got away from the Mercyseat with the parcel of ash under his arm. It must have weighed well on four pounds. 
Various ways of getting rid of it suggested themselves to him on the way to the station. Finally he decided that the most
convenient
and inconspicuous was to drop it in the first considerable receptacle for refuse that he came to. In Dublin he need only have sat down on the nearest bench and waited. Soon one of the gloomy dustmen would have come, wheeling his cart marked, ‘Post your litter here’. But London was less conscious of her garbage, she had not given her scavenging to aliens.

He was turning into the station, without having met any
considerable
receptacle for refuse, when a burst of music made him halt and turn. It was the pub across the way, opening for the evening session. The lights sprang up in the saloon, the doors burst open, the radio struck up. He crossed the street and stood on the threshold. The floor was palest ochre, the pin-tables shone like silver, the quoits board had a net, the stools the high rungs that he loved, the whiskey was in glass tanks, a slow
cascando
of pellucid yellows. A man brushed past him into the saloon, one of the millions that had been wanting a drink for the past two hours. Cooper followed slowly and sat down at the bar, for the first time in more than twenty years.

‘What are you taking, friend?’ said the man.

‘The first is mine,’ said Cooper, his voice trembling.

Some hours later Cooper took the packet of ash from his pocket, where earlier in the evening he had put it for greater security, and threw it angrily at a man who had given him great offence. It bounced, burst, off the wall on to the floor, where at once it became the object of much dribbling, passing, trapping, shooting, punching, heading and even some recognition from the gentleman’s code. By closing time the body, mind and soul of Murphy were freely distributed over the floor of the saloon; and before another dayspring greyened the earth had been swept away with the sand, the beer, the butts, the glass, the matches, the spits, the vomit.

L
ATE
afternoon, Saturday, October the 26th. A mild, clear,
sunless
day, sudden gentle eddies of rotting leaves, branches still against the still sky, from a chimney a pine of smoke.

Celia wheeled Mr. Willoughby Kelly south along the Broad Walk. He wore his kiting costume, a glistening slicker many sizes too large for him and a yachting-cap many sizes too small, though the smallest and largest of their kind obtainable. He sat bolt upright, with one gloved hand clutching the winch, with the other the kite furled and in its sheath, and his blue eyes blazed in the depths of their sockets. To either side of him the levers flailed the air with heavy strokes, causing a light draught that he found not unpleasant, for he burned with excitement.

At the top of the incline he laid the winch and kite in his lap and seized the pulls. It was the signal for Celia to let go. His arms flashed back and forth, faster and faster as the chair gathered speed, until he was rocking crazily along at a good 12 m.p.h., a danger to himself and to others. Then resisting with one hand the pull, with the other the thrust of the levers, he brought himself smoothly to rest level with the statue of Queen Victoria, whom he greatly admired, as a woman and as a queen.

It was only in the legs and face that Mr. Kelly was badly gone, he still had plenty of vigour in his arms and torso.

He was as fond of his chair in his own way as Murphy had been of his.

Celia was a long time coming. He unwrapped the old silk kite, stained and faded hexagon of crimson, stretched it on its asterisk of sticks, made fast the tail and line, tested the tassels one by one. One just such milky Saturday afternoon many years
previously
a regular had said: ‘Silk ain’t worth a b—. Give me
nainsook
.’ To which Mr. Kelly recalled with satisfaction the exact 
terms of his rejoinder, which had been loudly applauded: ‘Nainsook my rump.’

Celia touched the back of his chair and he said:

‘You were a long time.’

‘Business,’ said Celia.

The leaves began to lift and scatter, the higher branches to complain, the sky broke and curdled over flecks of skim blue, the pine of smoke toppled into the east and vanished, the pond was suddenly a little panic of grey and white, of water and gulls and sails.

It was as though Time suddenly lost patience, or had an anxiety attack.

Beyond the Long Water Rosie Dew and Nelly, the worst of her heat behind her, turned their faces to the rising wind and home. A pair of socks was waiting from Lord Gall. He had written: ‘If this pair of socks does not prove more productive, I shall have to try a new control.’

Celia wheeled Mr. Kelly into position, at the north-east corner of the plot between the Round Pond and the Broad Walk, the prow of his chair wedged against the railing. She took the assembled kite gently from his hands, backed along the path until she stood on the margin of the water, held up the kite as high as her arms would reach and waited for the glove to fall. The wind blew her skirt against her legs, her jacket back from her breasts. A week-end lecher well advanced in years, sprawling on his sacrum (which was a mass of eczema) in a chair directly before her, discomposed his features in what he had good reason to suppose was the smile obscene, and jingled his change, his very small change. Celia smiled back, strained upward with her arms, settled herself more firmly on the ground.

Mr. Kelly’s hand felt the wind he wanted, the glove fell, Celia threw up the kite. And so great was his skill that in five minutes he was lying back, breathing hard and short, his eyes closed of necessity but in ecstasy as it happened, half his line paid out, sailing by feel.

Celia paused for a second to clinch the client, then rejoined 
Mr. Kelly. The cord wormed slowly off the winch—out, back a little, stop; out, back a little, stop. The historical process of the hardened optimists. With still a quarter of the line to go the kite rode without a flicker high above the Dell, a speck in the glades that this wind always opened in the east. The chair drove against the railing, Mr. Kelly wished his bottom were more prehensile. Without opening his eyes he said:

‘You did that very nicely.’

Celia did not choose to misunderstand him.

‘And yesterday?’ said Mr. Kelly.

‘A kid and a drunk,’ said Celia.

Mr. Kelly let out a wild rush of line, say the industrial
revolution
, then without recoil or stop, gingerly, the last few feet. The kite being now absolutely at the end of its tether, he sat up and opened his eyes, hypermetropic in the extreme, to admire the effect.

Except for the sagging soar of line, undoubtedly superb so far as it went, there was nothing to be seen, for the kite had
disappeared
from view. Mr. Kelly was enraptured. Now he could measure the distance from the unseen to the seen, now he was in a position to determine the point at which seen and unseen met. It would be an unscientific observation, so many and so fitful were the imponderables involved. But the pleasure
accruing
to Mr. Kelly would be in no way inferior to that conferred (presumably) on Mr. Adams by his beautiful deduction of Neptune from Uranus. He fixed with his eagle eyes a point in the empty sky where he fancied the kite to swim into view, and wound carefully in.

Moving away a little Celia also looked at the sky, not with the same purpose as Mr. Kelly, for she knew that he would see it long before she could, but simply to have that unction of soft sunless light on her eyes that was all she remembered of Ireland. Gradually she saw other kites, but above all the tandem of the child that had not answered her good night, because he had been singing. She recognised the unusual coupling, not in file but abreast. 

The ludicrous fever of toys struggling skyward, the sky itself more and more remote, the wind tearing the awning of cloud to tatters, pale limitless blue and green recessions laced with strands of scud, the light failing—once she would have noticed these things. She watched the tandem coming shakily down from the turmoil, the child running forward to break its fall, his trouble when he failed, his absorbed kneeling over the damage. He did not sing as he departed, nor did she hail him.

The wail of the rangers came faintly out of the east against the wind.
All out. All out. All out
. Celia turned and looked at Mr. Kelly. He lay back sideways in the chair, his cheek on his shoulder, a fold of the slicker lifting his lip in a mild snarl, not dying but dozing. As she watched the winch sprang from his fingers, struck violently against the railing, the string snapped, the winch fell to the ground, Mr. Kelly awoke.

All out. All out
.

Mr. Kelly tottered to his feet, tossed up his arms high and wide and quavered away down the path that led to the water, a ghastly, lamentable figure. The slicker trailed along the ground, the skull gushed from under the cap like a dome from under its lantern, the ravaged face was a cramp of bones, throttled sounds jostled in his throat.

Celia caught him on the margin of the pond. The end of the line skimmed the water, jerked upward in a wild whirl, vanished joyfully in the dusk. Mr. Kelly went limp in her arms. Someone fetched the chair and helped to get him aboard. Celia toiled along the narrow path into the teeth of the wind, then faced north up the wide hill. There was no shorter way home. The yellow hair fell across her face. The yachting-cap clung like a clam to the skull. The levers were the tired heart. She closed her eyes.

All out
.