CHAPTER SIX
With no plan in his head, Minogue went to Trinity College. Driving into the centre of the city, the buildings passed him in a grimy, purgatorial progression. The rain greyed everything. Women's stockings had splash marks on them. Motorists were drowning people at the streetcorners. The buses seemed to go even faster than usual. Tramps stood sodden in the streets downtown, their hair matted on their foreheads. The parking practices of Dubliners were bad enough on days you could philosophise about them, but today they were three deep in Leeson Street. Grafton Street was blocked.
Walking from his car finally, Minogue felt the gloom approach closer. No doubt it would meet him and swallow him whole in the room. Burying Walsh today. What a send-off in this downpour. Minogue shivered.
Closer to the door of the room he had been assigned, Minogue had a little change of heart. He headed off toward Agnes' rooms.
Breathless after three flights of stairs, he tapped at her door. He heard footsteps inside. She opened the door and smiled faintly.
'Well, Sergeant. Come in.'
She was dressed in black and grey. The outfit was a size or two too big for her, probably borrowed. The dark colours made her face even paler.
Minogue stepped in. Sitting at the table was Allen, uncharacteristically dressed in a jacket and tie.
'I was just about to leave,' Allen said, rising. He turned to Agnes.
'I'll be back at a quarter to. The car is parked up near Pearse Street Gate.'
'Sit down, will you, Sergeant. Will it be tea?' she asked. Minogue was taken with the accent again: sot dine.
'I had hoped to carry on our conversation from yesterday, Agnes. But if I'm intruding…' he trailed off.
'Not a bit of it.'
'Well,' Minogue began, 'Yes, tea would be grand.'
He felt his heart pushing still after the climb. Agnes lit the gas, walked back into the room and sat across the table from Minogue. A picture of two people dressed up as clowns on their way out to a party hung on the wall behind her. It was at dusk and the two figures were dwarfed by the black branches of a winter coppice. Between the branches was a sky of light blue which fell imperceptibly to cream behind the trees. Miraculously, a moon held the stillness and peace without a trace of a message for the astonished Minogue. A Rousseau?
The place was very neat without being fussy. Minogue noticed that all the books were shelved alphabetically. Rain beaded the window. Drops broke away with the help of gusts and they gullied down the glass. A faint smell of gas came from the kitchenette. It was mixed with a light staleness of age, maybe a trace of bedwarmth. Nobody smoked here.
'You'll be off soon then, Agnes?'
'Dr Allen's giving me a lift out to the funeral. So…'
'I'm still trying to figure out details, so I am. Every little thing can have a bearing. I don't know if this is the day to be pursuing it though.'
'I can try in the next twenty minutes or so. I'm in one piece now. I can't say about this afternoon though,' Agnes said. Her voice had the questioning quality which Minogue was familiar with from listening to Northerners. Hers had none of the suspicion or dare-me he associated with the talk he heard in that accent. He was quite mesmerised by her voice. The silence finally jolted him back from staring at the poster.
'Em. Agnes, did Jarlath ever discuss things to do with drugs with you?'
'Drugs?' she asked. Drugs. She shook her head, not taking her eyes from Minogue's.
'He wasn't that type of person. I would have known,' she added. 'Jarlath talked about a lot of things. I'm not sure I was listening to him all the time. It wasn't what he said or anything, it was more that he liked ideas, liked a listener.'
'He had notebooks that were stolen. Would you know anything about what he used the notebooks for?' Minogue asked.
'Well, he wrote down ideas. He was full of them. Anything really, I suppose. Quotations, references maybe… He said it made him look organised, like Woodward and Bernstein, documenting everything,' Agnes said.
'Who?'
'The men who blew the whistle on Nixon. The Watergate thing. Jarlath was very interested in that stuff. He wanted to get a scoop, he said. He used to joke about it. He'd keep me in suspense, you know, pretending he had found out something big and I'd be dying to know. It'd turn out to be a yarn, having me on. He had a sense of humour. People didn't see it very often though. They didn't give him much of a chance. He'd have me on the edge of the chair with it, and it'd turn out to be something like the Provost's cat peed on his shoes. Silly, but he did it for laughs. He wasn't the way others here thought of him, you know.'
'Yes, your president beyond in the Students' Union mentioned Jarlath's interest in the journalism,' Minogue said.
'Mick Roche? Not too complimentary, I'd suspect,' Agnes said wryly.
'Not really. Said Jarlath had potential,' Minogue said.
In between talking, he could hear the kettle gathering strength. Soon it would whistle. It dawned on Minogue that he liked this room. He would like to try this other life out for a while. Going to lectures, chatting, making friends, reading. To be this age, to be going to libraries, to be in touch. Minogue wanted to do silly things, to make mistakes.
Agnes went to the kitchenette to make the tea. Minogue listened to the numerous domestic sounds. His mind reeled effortlessly back to his own youth. Had he had a youth? Maybe that's what it is, he speculated: he didn't have a youth and he spent his adult life trying to make up for it. He didn't mind being thought of as a bit eccentric. It served as well as any other dressing. Over the years he had watched some grey creep in, even into his beard. Kathleen had bought him an electric razor. With some fascination he observed the dust of hairs which he blew out the bathroom window. His hands had lost their strength. His shoulders weren't back. Stairs reminded him of his age. His few friends looked old sometimes, straitened, very usual.
Minogue had gone all the way through school to the Leaving Certificate. He and his brother, Mick, had run the farm. Their father could do little enough after the bouts of TB. The boys were a new generation in the Irish Free State. The war on the continent had brushed them in their early teens. Big things happening abroad, the names of battles and towns and generals coming across the wireless. The Local Defence Force hanging around in ditches trying to look fierce at the occasional roadblocks. Cars were scarce on the roads.
The Christian Brothers had done their anointed task and Minogue had endured. He could almost carry on a conversation in Latin. At least he could entertain a few Romans with recitations from Livy. He remembered the stupidest things even yet: which forms took the subjunctive, expressions like iter fecerunt, Hannibal with the vinegar, breaking boulders in the Alps.
The odd teacher along the way indulged him. He read out parts of the Aeneid by gaslight at home in the kitchen. His parents listened with a reverence for the holiness that Latin brought to the house. His father would cough and say that Virgil borrowed his stuff from the Irish stories.
They heard about camps for Jews on the continent. A lay teacher risked George Orwell, God forbid, and even loaned Minogue books by Steinbeck and Sinclair Lewis. The wet fields waited for them in the spring. One of the fields might flood. A pig might get stuck in a dike. They bought a tractor, the talk of the townland.
In school, the civics classes taught you codes of conduct. May brought the altar to the Blessed Virgin into the classroom, lilacs inevitably. The Catechism showed him how to answer hypothetical questions which a Protestant might ask you if you were in a bus, say. No opportunity for converting was to be lost. Minogue's mother thought that one of her sons might have a vocation for the priesthood. She fastened her hopes on Mick and he turned toward her hope. Minogue watched his sisters grow up, do civil service exams, go to dances, get a job in the bank and more. Minogue stayed on the farm while Mick deliberated.
More cars appeared on the roads. There was a change in the music at the dances. Minogue began to favour pints of stout and he found that he was well able to drink them all evening in the pub. Coming home on the lane, the drink tidal in his belly, he'd stop for a piss in the ditch. He'd hear the rustlings in the hedges when the stream
