Saints and Sinners by Edna O’Brien

him what made him tick.
    "Lust," he answered.
    "For the fair sex," Tubridy said.
    "For everything ...Medb the Connaught Queen has nothing on me, with her avarice for dominions, herds, jewels, and booty."
    "And thy fellow man?" Tubridy put it to him.
    "A checkbook speaks louder than the act of perfect contrition," he answered, and laughed, and Tubridy laughed with him, but nervously.
    He was famous for his loud laugh that had little mirth in it. It confused people, it kept them dangling. As for bad feeling, there was so much bad feeling vented on him that he could bottle it and sell it like holy water. His wife, Kitty, mortified that Sunday after Mass, when a mad eejit of a woman who had done upholstery for a block of houses came up to him cursing and screaming, "You broke me, you broke me, Mr. McSorley," and he not losing the cool one bit, giving her the big smile and assuring her that it would be looked into. Soon she was timorous, almost apologetic, and he walked tall to the car, Kitty pinching him and asking, "In the name of God, Daragh, in the name of God, what did you do?" It wasn't long after that that the stone eagles were hacked off the piers of his front gates and dogs were set on Kitty when she was out for a walk.
    Another thing, never in his cups did he luxuriate in that maudlin stuff about hunger and privation. He knew it in his marrow. Lesser men than him would go on about crubeens and a turnip for Christmas dinner, or a grandmother pulled off her bicycle when she was taking the salmon that her man had poached from the river, to sell to the fishmonger in the town, taken down off her bicycle and brought to the county jail.
    "Be absolute in your aim" was what he told himself while he was still in short trousers. On the day when he hired his first lorry and trusted that guiding star that led him through mountain gorges to his El Dorado, a disused quarry. He got out, looked at a sheer wall of rock over two hundred feet high, and imagined the wealth that lay hidden within the belly of it.
    It is Friday night, the night he and Kitty—along with Ambrose, his brother and partner, and Ambrose's wife, Isolde, the ex-beauty queen—will go up the country to a simple olde worlde pub for dinner. It's his way of letting it be known that he hasn't lost touch with his roots and, moreover, they have taken on a young chef who had just got his degree in Switzerland. Walking to his car after work, the jacket over his shoulder, he can see the men, the few trusted ones breaking the stones with their jackhammers. Lights gleam in the valley down below, and from a hillside farmstead comes the sound of a cow in labor. He knows that sound. Sometimes the memory of it took him unawares, that low grieving sound of a cow in labor, but instantly he shut it out. Such things belong to his former and unhardened self. He is no longer that man. He is a man frequently described in the newspapers as ruthless and with a criminal coldness.
    Yes, it's their evening for up-the-country, and Isolde, with her range of accessories—because she's an accessory freak—in the black gloves with sequins, raving about too much dairy in her diet, too much frigging Krug in her diet, not like his little Kitty, one gin and tonic that she nurses faithfully, because she read somewhere that Winston Churchill always nursed his drink.
    Isolde falling not once, not twice, but thrice at their barbecue at the end of summer, whereas his little Kitty is up with the lark, morning Mass, a bit of baking, her prize herb garden, and a brisk walk in the afternoon to keep her figure. Chalk and cheese, Kitty and Isolde, like Daragh and Ambrose, quiet and staid, brothers yoked together, in their crooked deeds and their crooked deals. Kitty knew how to keep her man, that lady journalist sashaying up to him at the function in Dublin, to ask how she could get in touch so as to raise his profile, stressing his works for charity and his role as a family man, and Kitty answering from the far