FitzPatrick, solicitors and commissioners for oaths. It is on his doctor’s advice that he employs this mode of transport. It is against the advice of
Thirty or so years ago, when I first knew Heffernan and FitzPatrick, the relationship was different. The pair were closely attached, Heffernan the mentor, FitzPatrick ready with a laugh. All three of us were students, but Heffernan, a Kilkenny man, was different in the sense that he had been a student for as long as anyone could remember. The College porters said they recalled his presence over fifteen years and, though given to exaggeration, they may well have been accurate in that: certainly Heffernan was well over thirty, a small ferrety man, swift to take offence.
FitzPatrick was bigger and more amiable. An easy smile perpetually creased the bland ham of his face, causing people to believe, quite incorrectly, that he was stupid. His mouse-coloured hair was kept short enough not to require a parting, his eyes reflected so profound a degree of laziness that people occasionally professed surprise to find them open. Heffernan favoured pin-striped suits, FitzPatrick a commodious blue blazer. They drank in Kehoe’s in Anne Street.
‘He is one of those chancers,’ Heffernan said, ‘we could do without.’
‘Oh, a right old bollocks,’ agreed FitzPatrick.
‘ “Well, Mr Heffernan,” ’ he says, ‘ “I see you are still with us.” ’
‘As though you might be dead.’
‘If he had his way.’
In the snug of Kehoe’s they spoke of Heffernan’s
‘ “I see you are still with us,” ‘ Heffernan repeated. ‘Did you ever hear the beat of that?’
‘Sure, Flacks is senile.’
‘The mots in the lecture giggle when he says it.’
‘Oh, an ignorant bloody crowd.’
Heffernan became meditative. Slowly he lit a Sweet Afton. He was supported in his continuing studentship by the legacy left to him for that purpose by an uncle in Kilkenny, funds which would cease when he was a student no longer. He kept that tragedy at bay by regularly failing the Littlego examination, a test of proficiency in general studies to which all students were obliged to submit themselves.
‘A fellow came up to me this morning,’ he said now, ‘a right eejit from Monasterevin. Was I looking for grinds in Little-go Logic? Five shillings an hour.’
FitzPatrick laughed. He lifted his glass of stout and drank from it, imposing on his upper lip a moustache of foam which was permitted to remain there.
‘A minion of Flacks’,’ Heffernan continued. ‘A Flacks boy and no mistake, I said to myself.’
‘You can tell them a mile off.’
‘ “I know your father,” I said to him. “Doesn’t he deliver milk?” Well, he went the colour of a sunset. “Avoid conversation with Flacks,” I told him. “He drove a wife and two sisters insane.” ’
‘Did your man say anything?’
‘Nothing, only “Gripes”,’
‘Oh, Flacks is definitely peculiar,’ FitzPatrick agreed.
In point of fact, at that time FitzPatrick had never met Professor Flacks. It was his laziness that caused him to converse in a manner which suggested he had, and it was his laziness also which prevented him from noticing the intensity of Heffernan’s grievance. Heffernan hated Professor Flacks with a fervour, but in his vague and unquestioning way FitzPatrick assumed that the old professor was no more than a passing thorn in his friend’s flesh, a nuisance that could be exorcised by means of complaint and abuse. Heffernan’s pride did not at that time appear to play a part; and FitzPatrick, who knew his friend as well as anyone did, would not have designated him as a possessor of that quality to an unusual degree. The opposite was rather implied by the nature of his upkeep and his efforts not to succeed in the Littlego examination. But pride, since its presence might indeed be questioned by these facts, came to its own support: when the story is told in Dublin today it is never forgotten that it has roots in Professor Flacks’s causing girls to giggle because he repeatedly made a joke at Heffernan’s expense.
Employed by the University to instruct in certain aspects of literature, Professor Flacks concentrated his attention on the writings of James Joyce. Shakespeare, Tennyson, Shelley, Coleridge, Wilde, Swift, Dickens, Eliot, Trollope, and many another familiar name were all bundled away in favour of a Joycean scholarship that thirty or so years ago was second to none in Irish university life. Professor Flacks could tell you whom Joyce had described as a terrified YMCA man, and the date of the day on which he had written that his soul was full of decayed ambitions. He spoke knowledgeably of the stale smell of incense, like foul flowerwater; and of flushed eaves and stubble geese.
‘Inane bloody show-off,’ Heffernan said nastily in Kehoe’s.
‘You’ll see him out, Heff.’
‘A bogs like that would last for ever.’
Twelve months later, after he and Heffernan had parted company, FitzPatrick repeated all that to me. I didn’t know either of them well, but was curious because a notable friendship had so abruptly come to an end. FitzPatrick, on his own, was inclined to talk to anyone.
We sat in College Park, watching the cricket while he endeavoured to remember the order of subsequent events. It was Heffernan who’d had the idea, as naturally it would be, since FitzPatrick still knew Professor Flacks only by repute and had not suffered the sarcasm which Heffernan found so offensive. But FitzPatrick played a vital part in the events which followed, because the elderly woman who played the main part of all was a general maid in FitzPatrick’s digs.
‘Has that one her slates on?’ Heffernan inquired one night as they passed her by in the hall.
