The Whereabouts of Eneas McNulty by Sebastian Barry Page B

the Ford and gets out to open the other door for Eneas.
    ‘I’ll go in and fetch the nurse for you,’ says Mr Murphy, ‘and we’ll help you in together. You’d be too much for me on my own.’
    But it was nothing to that girl against the rock, to that Vivienne Roche herself whose father cut the stone for the new bridge this side of Enniscrone. He knows that about her but little else. Roche the stonemason is a well-known figure about the town, a man with sideburns on him like a shire’s blinkers. He keeps greyhounds and would be racing them all over the place, Dublin even, Harold’s Cross even, the premier track. And he put in that bridge good, and a good solid bridge it is, from the day of finishing to the end of doom no doubt it will stand, a monument to Roche and his mighty sideburns. That’s what he knows, because any fool knows Roche the stonemason. But nothing else. Except, she has a body warm as a stove. And eyes with little glints in them, little scraps of jewels like the stones out of engagement rings that people might have lost swimming on the strand when the cold water shrinks their fingers.
    ‘All right,’ says Eneas. ‘Thank you.’
    ‘All right,’ says Mr Murphy.
    ‘Tell us,’ says Eneas, ‘before you go. Where would I buy a decent blouse?’
    ‘Well, I don’t know like,’ says Mr Murphy for all the world as if it was spuds he just said.
    ‘Man to man,’ says Eneas. ‘Any ould blouse, if you don’t know a good shop.’
    ‘Would a fella try Greaney’s, in Mill Lane?’
    ‘I don’t know. Would he?’
    ‘He might.’
    ‘I’ll drop in there so.’
    ‘Greaney’s might do the trick.’
    ‘Rightyo,’ says Eneas.
    ‘Ah sure, yes,’ says Mr Murphy, pausing to make sure Eneas has no more to say, then turning softly from him.
     
    He doesn’t know if he is courting or wooing or what, he knows well he has not the freedom to court and woo. Certainly he knows it. Nevertheless he prospers in his purchasing of a blouse, presents it to her, brings her the next week up the steps between the dark green hedges of the Gaiety cinema, only half praying that he is not seen, the adventure of it bridging the great gap that fear has made in him, as if bridge-building was her talent too. And near the whispers of the little stream, by the old bridge, at the pillar of her father’s gate, she gives him a mighty kiss. She takes his face in her hands like a farmer’s wife lifting a swede in pride from the earth and plants her mouth on to his and in the same moment sucks the life out of him and forces the life into him. Or so he tries to settle the matter later, going home himself like a mechanical man, upright, young, but deeply shaken.
    He is left alone in this fearful happiness all through the midwinter. There is great fighting in the country now worse than ever but the new song is the hints of peace in every report, just as Jonno said. He wonders how Jonno has been such a prophet, but then Jonno resides in that world. He wonders also does Jonno ever wake sudden in the morning and feel for a second a doubt or a guilt for what he does? Or is he so certain and firm in his truths? Maybe so. O’Dowd is clearly the leader of the town and is sometimes seen going out in a car into the countryside like a general, with his captains about him. There is a military air over Sligo and the barracks is teeming with the real soldiers. Astonishing stories of the ongoing reprisals hurt or enthral the citizens, depending on their allegiances. O’Dowd is not so afraid of being known for what he is, maybe now he wants people to know, in preparation for the tremendous days of freedom just ahead. So Eneas thinks. Eneas is in a position to know because he receives a letter from O’Dowd, signed right enough only with one initial, but who else could it be? And clearly the writer had no fear of any agency in the current state of things to accuse him of the writing of it, or a fear indeed that Eneas had anyone to show it to, or