The Mill for Grinding Old People Young Page 5

  “Thank you for your efforts, young man,” he said, and his mouth rose above the constraints of his collar to produce a smile of two seconds’ duration. “Another time, I trust.”

  And with that he was off up the steps at the top of which the two gentlemen were waiting to whom he had been talking when we set out, three or more hours before, and with whom he began now, without breaking stride, to converse again.

  I started to walk back to the Ballast Office, but after only a few steps, in the course of which my feet seemed unable to agree with one another, or either of them with me, had to find a wall to cling to – a ship chandler’s, it so happened. The owner used a boat hook to reach across the coils of rope in the window and rap the glass: “Away on o’ that with you, you lazy so-and-so!”

  It was the oddest sensation, and one that, though I have been to sea many, many times in the seven decades since, I have never again experienced. I believe that what I was that March afternoon by the Town Dock was land-sick.

  I had still not fully recovered by the time I quit the office at the day’s end, although that did not prevent me from taking my preferred, less direct route home, along Rosemary Street.

  Some few months earlier my friend Millar had presented himself at the door of my grandfather’s house. We had not been entire strangers all this time: the size that Belfast was then did not allow for that, any more than did the prominence that Millar had early begun to enjoy in it.

  He had been in London for some time, studying architecture in the offices of Mr Thomas Hopper, and from there had been sent to Markethill, near to Armagh, where Mr Hopper was building for the Earl of Gosford a castle – in the eighteen hundred and twenties: a castle – that was the talk of the entire country. Rumour told of two hundred rooms, of keeps and stone passages with veritable dungeons beneath. The work had been going on then for upwards of ten years, and would go on – perhaps only Hopper himself was aware of it – for twenty more.

  Millar, meanwhile, had found the time to build a pair of villas at Holywood, on the County Down shore of Belfast Lough, which had won him so many admirers that, although still not twenty, he had been encouraged to enter the competition for the design of a church on Rosemary Street, the Third Presbyterian, it being a special feature of our denomination that no sooner had one congregation been established that a schism would occur over a point of theology – a point, sometimes, of typography – resulting in the building of a new church, often within sight of the first. (First Presbyterian, in fact, was to be found fifty yards further up Rosemary Street from Third.) It was my grandfather himself who drew my attention to the announcement of Millar’s success, which had prompted me to write a letter of congratulation, which had in turn prompted him to chance a call.

  My grandfather received him with perfect civility. (You would have thought it was my hand he was asking for, not my company.) Not a word passed between them about our childish escapade, but then for my grandfather actions had always spoken louder. It might have surprised Millar to know it, but to my grandfather’s eyes his life had acquired the arc of a grand act of atonement.

  He had left town again soon afterwards, being expected back first in Markethill then in London, and having, after much deliberation, decided to entrust the execution of his design for a “pure and massive” edifice to the architects Thomas Duff – who had lately completed the Roman Catholic cathedral at Armagh and who had also worked under Hopper at Gosford Castle – and Thomas Jackson, a former pupil of Duff’s.

  I was not altogether sure what was intended by “pure”, but the edifice I saw taking shape day by day was undoubtedly massive, if a little less trustworthily so on the afternoon of my land-sickness.

  The “other time” to which Mr Walker had looked forward when taking his leave of me did not come to pass. Despite Ferris’s lurid imaginings the sickly apprentice made a full recovery (further testimony to Dr Murray’s fluid of Magnesia), the survey of the port was completed and its findings were launched on the perilous voyage through boardrooms and debating chambers, which none before had survived, while I returned for twelve uneventful months to the daily deception of Sir Clueless that was the inauspicious start to my own career.

  *

  Besides the waterways, the Ballast Board introduced me to what was, in effect, a whole other town, Belfast after dark. Night did not any more, of course, hold quite the terrors that it had for previous generations of our townsfolk. We were early converts to the virtues of coal-gas lighting. I had been taken along myself, the autumn of my tenth birthday, to witness the ignition of the first jets, on a lamp standard at the dock end of High Street, and still remembered the gasps of astonishment at the brightness of the flames, and the howl from somewhere in the vast assembly of one much younger child, who was expecting perhaps brimstone to follow. The main streets were now all well lit – second only to London was our boast, although those few I knew who had visited there doubted even that inferiority – and the gas network penetrated deep into the alleys and courts in which the town abounded.

  Not everyone was overjoyed by the improvement. Hard on the heels of the gas-lamps came the by-laws protecting them from interference and destruction, by those whose trades had depended on the rule of darkness (and whose Sunday services in the House of Correction I had often attended) and those, as unlike the first group as it was possible to be, who feared that street lighting exposed to the public gaze what nature, and God, had intended to remain private.

  As for diversion amidst all this effulgence . . .

  “The playhouse!”

  “We went the night before last.”

  “For the first half only.”

  “Which was more of our attention than it deserved.”

  “You say that every time we go.”

  “Except when we arrive at the interval.”

  “There is a ball in the Exchange.”

  “When is there not a ball in the Exchange?”

  . . . planning for it consumed the greater part of our mental energies on the ground floor of the Ballast Office. The only limits were stamina and wherewithal, although among the circle I became acquainted with through Ferris and Bright it was almost a mark of pride to have been pursued for debt: “had up before the Manor Court”, was what they said. For some it was as much a part of their economy as the Bank or the Pawn; but not for me. My first salary was forty-five pounds per annum, or a little more than seventeen shillings in the week. Half I gave straight away to my grandfather, who in turn gave half to Molly. Out of the remainder I had to provide for all other needs – a concept of which I now had a firm grasp, even if it was not one I could share with my grandfather. I was not niggardly, but neither was I profligate. Far from the Manor Court, I ended most weeks a shilling or two to the good.

  A handsome new gymnasium had recently opened on Montgomery Street (Bright swore by it for the musculature) and there were any number of dancing classes from which to choose, although Monsieur Perois’s was by common consent the pick of them. (I was always intending to go next week.) And everywhere there were taverns and public houses, of all conceivable sizes and varieties. Some were known chiefly for their singing, others for their games; for others the dining room was the draw, or the cellar, or indeed the promise of a particular kind of company. Oftener, however, the attraction escaped definition. It had an air about it, was as much as could be said. “Not the worst place to pass an evening.”

  It was the custom in those days, among the younger townsfolk in particular, to make an excursion on Easter Monday to the Cave Hill, the last and most prominent of the hills, stretching from Collin through Black Mountain and Divis, walling us in on the west. Ferris and Bright were astonished to learn that these festivities had so far passed me by. “But where did you go as a lad to trundle your egg?” Bright asked, and was even more astonished by my reply. “Not once?” he cried. “You poor little orphaned mite.”

  They were adamant that they would not go that next Easter without me, should they have to take me t
here in chains and with my egg . . .

  Well, let it be hoped that I would consent to come willingly.

  The Cave Hill was then far removed from the town limits, or they from it. What are now the northern suburbs were still distant hamlets in the hill’s considerable shadow. When viewed from the town side it was famously said to look like the Emperor Napoleon in repose, or at least like the Emperor Napoleon’s brow and nose. I confess I had always struggled to see it, just as I had struggled to see in the profile the shipwrecked giant that impressed itself on Dean Swift’s imagination when as a young man he was prebendary at Kilroot, a few miles further north along the Lough shore. Still, on the night before the day in question I had Molly boil me an egg, which I painted to resemble the Duke of Wellington, brooding and braided, off to do battle again with the Little Corporal.

  I was probably more exact than I needed to be with a hard-boiled egg: a plate commemorating the victory in the Waterloo Campaign and decorated with the Duke’s face had hung throughout my childhood on the wall of the stairwell outside my grandfather’s study, and though it had met with an accident around the time of the Catholic Relief Act (Nisbet, taking it down for Agnes to dust, had let it slip through his fingers) I had long since committed its every line to memory.

  Ferris and Bright called for me before it was quite eight o’clock, Ferris sporting a fine new pair of white duck trousers and carrying a large haversack, the contents of which, he assured Bright and me, we would thank him for later. The freezing fog that had descended overnight had not yet cleared and there was frost still on the setts of Hercules Street, which on any other Monday at that hour would already have been thick with sawdust from the butchers’ shops that stretched from one end of the street to the other. (Some said there were forty-seven, others forty-nine, others that there was no point in counting: by the time you had finished another would already have opened somewhere back along the street.) We stopped for a “warmer” at an inn, the Lamb and Flag, near the junction of North Street and Carrick Hill.

  I had, as I have intimated, until I started to work, been as ignorant of alcohol as I was of egg-trundling, but the Ballast Office stood right next to a tavern and, never mind the nights, scarcely a daytime passed now without me finding myself in there or in one of its numerous siblings within spitting distance: the Lady of the Lake, the Rob Roy, the Red Cross, the Cumberland, Mrs Hainen’s, Mrs Henry’s, Martha Kennedy’s, Flood’s . . .

  I knew my limits, though, in more ways than one.

  As we sat that morning in the Lamb and Flag, with our glasses of rum punch, Bright drew our attention to some business being transacted at, or rather, as he said, under a table in the corner. “The big fellow with the wavy hair – don’t both turn at once – appears to be some kind of fence or fixer. You know the sort, will buy from you what never was yours to begin with and sell you what by honest means you never could have got.” I managed to get an angle on him in a mirror set behind the counter – “big” did not come close: he was as broad-shouldered as two men – then looked away when his eyes found mine out, as if he had been all along conscious of the scrutiny. Even in that instant, even with the mirror between us, I felt he had the measure of me. (Of all things, it was the red hen I thought about. The red hen and the green potato.) Ferris leaned across the table and whispered with evident relish that this was where the weavers had met who had exploded the bomb outside the house of their employer on Peter’s Hill.

  “You were barely off your mother’s t— then,” Bright interjected. Ferris shook his head. That was as may be, but this was still not a place to be found drinking alone later in the day. The thought, though, would not have occurred to me. Drinking on its own (and therefore on my own) did not interest me in the least: it was the company it brought that I craved. Besides which, I had not entirely forgotten my grandfather’s lectures those years before: other people’s worlds did not a playground make.

  By the time we emerged, warmed twice over, just to be sure, the fog had dispersed and the sun broken through, adding a further, unnecessary, festive touch to the procession we saw making its way along North Street towards us. There could not have been a person between the ages of twelve and twenty left anywhere in Belfast. It was as though the doors of every costumier and milliner in the town had sprung open and their wares simply danced out. All were dressed for the impression they would create on the journey, rather than the steep climb that awaited them at its end. A fellow linked my arm as the multitude passed in front of the Lamb and Flag; Ferris linked my other arm, and Bright Ferris’s, and in this way we were swept along into the countryside in the direction of Carrickfergus. Hucksters weaved in and out calling “willicks” and “yellow man”, jostling with the preachers (“a new nuisance”, according to Ferris, a veteran of two years) for whom the road to the Hill was rather a road to the temptations of Hell. The famous Tantra Barbus, far removed from his usual haunt at the foot of the Long Bridge, danced attendance, with his hand out and his mouth open: “Give a man a drink, there, sirs. Give a man a drink.” Cockybendy the fiddler, too, who could usually be relied on to pop up wherever two or more were gathered, walked alongside us for a couple of reels, then retired a penny the richer to start again further down the line.

  Bright leaned in across Ferris to ask me what I thought.

  “Who is thinking?” I said, and took a bite from a cinnamon bun that had been passed to me over the shoulder of the person in front.

  Near the Deer Park my companions and I broke away to stand for a time before the spectacle of a man in a red coatee, missing an epaulette and all but one of its buttons, balancing a young girl above his head, her left foot resting on the open palm of his raised right hand. No one we asked could tell us how long the pair had been there already. They looked straight ahead, neither of them moving, save for the faintest of trembles in his upper arm and, now and then, a twitch in her calf. That, it seemed, was the whole of their act, if act it was: he might just have been holding her up as lost in the hope that her kin could see her, and unlike the other performers we had encountered since the Lamb and Flag they had no tin cup before them in which to collect coins. Of course, it would not have been possible for a crowd of any size to gather before such a spectacle, on that raucous day of all days, without comment being passed (“Your wee woman’s not real, he stole her out of the waxworks”) and without someone in it feeling compelled to throw something our acrobats’ way – a ball of paper as it happened – not with any great intent, but rather speculatively, to determine the likely effect. Which was, a deeper tremble, an accelerated twitch, then afterwards as impassive as before. An apple core followed the paper, arcing over my head and the girl’s and landing, innocuously, in the long grass behind. A second later a stick cut the air, end over end, missing the man’s left ear by inches, and who knows what other missiles might have been thrown had not a piper perched on a stile a little way up the lane put his elbow to the bellows in that instant, drawing the major part of the crowd to him, Ferris, Bright and me included.

  I told my friends I had feared for a moment that something dreadful had been about to occur, at which Ferris confessed, laughing, that it was he who had thrown the paper ball, and Bright and I chased after him calling him all the scoundrels of the day.

  The lower slopes of the hill, when we arrived there, breathless, a quarter of an hour later, were dotted with the less energetic revellers at their rest: parents perhaps, prevailed upon to wait by sons and daughters who were even now halfway to the summit and, if what I had heard was true, all the promise of licence that that held out. Higher up, the path got rougher, the undergrowth thicker, and the overhanging branches became more of a hindrance. In some of the dimmer recesses campfires burned. There was laughter, here and there a flash of vivid colour among the black tree trunks. We three pressed on, without a word, emerging eventually a little below the first and largest of the caves (already colonised), some few hundred winding feet from the plateau. Even from this vantage point it was possible to
descry the contours of Mann to the south-east and further north, and more solidly, Scotland’s western coastline.

  “I think here would be as good a place as any for our picnic lunch,” Ferris announced, and when I remonstrated that we still had not reached our goal – that it was not yet, in any case, eleven o’clock – gave me an extravagant wink. I saw then that behind us three young women had already spread their rug. In fact, so unusually flat and green was the ground round about it, they might have brought their own square of lawn. Bright, affecting not to have noticed, cast his eye over the terrain and declared it ideal for trundling eggs, by which he might have meant only that it did not encompass any rival group of unaccompanied young men.

  The haversack being opened, Bright and I duly gave thanks to Ferris and to Mrs Divin, his landlady, who had wrapped beef, sausage, cheese, and cut bread, in separate linen napkins. Her bounty had run to apples too, the last of the winter store, hazelnuts and walnuts already shelled. And there was beer, of course, three pint bottles from which we wasted no time in drawing the corks.

  I was conscious all at once of a rise in the volume of our voices. The young women behind us, in contrast, managed to conduct their conversations without a single word carrying to our ears, a combination of their bonnets’ natural shielding and their own intentionally raised hands. That they were talking about us, however, we were in no doubt.

  When we had eaten our fill (less than half of what “Ma” Divin had prepared) and drunk our bottles dry, Ferris, Bright and I stood and with great ceremony marched a dozen steps to the right where we formed a line facing down into the valley: the Duke of Wellington, an unspecified bald man (Ferris’s minimal effort) and (Bright’s idea: “more conundrum than decoration”) a chicken.

  “Eggs at the ready!” Ferris commanded. “On a count of three. One . . . two . . . three!”