John McGahern - The Pornographer

“Whiskey,” Maloney said.

“Whiskey,” I said.

“Three whiskeys,” Cyril ordered, but Brady nodded to the young girl that the drinks were on the house. I noticed they served Bovril and coffee and fresh sandwiches as well. Black coffee bubbled in a jug beside a tray of sandwiches from which green leaves of lettuce bulged.

“Your good health,” Maloney toasted the foreman with suitable gravity. “This is certainly the old style.”

“You have to give the people something back,” the foreman smiled. “It’s not even good business to be taking all the time.”

“Is Mr Comiskey about?” Cyril asked.

“He’s in his office. He’s expecting you. But there’s no hurry. Anytime. Enjoy your drinks whatever ye do. I’ll show ye up to him after a while.”

“Do you still make coffins or do you just order them?” I asked.

“Order them,” he answered. “No more than the poor spraying machine the days of making your own coffins is gone. There was a time you just nailed a few deal boards together and that was that. In the thirties, none of yous would remember, when I started here, people couldn’t afford to even have the coffins painted. The few bare boards was wrapped in a black sheet and carried to the church and grave covered with the sheet so no one could see the lack of paint or handles. Now it’s the opposite: oak and walnut, brass and silver. It’ll be gold handles next. People have to be kept back from spending money now. And it all goes down into the ground anyhow. And who can tell the man that wore the ragged jacket?” he quoted expansively.

“Still, I suppose they’re expressing their feelings,” I said in deference to Cyril’s increasing discomfort during the speech.

“People are anxious to do the best they can,” Cyril added. Maloney, who had his arms folded, unbuttoned himself enough to take out his spectacles, polish them, put them on, inspect Cyril as if he was some rare botanical specimen for a long minute. Then he went through the same silent show while returning the spectacles to their pocket.

“Apparently it’s a sight all together in America,” the foreman went on. “The boss was out at a conference in Los Angeles a few months back. Apparently they’ve gone wild there. The sky’s the limit. Apparently the whole talk at the conference was how to interest people again in the plainer type of burial.”

“Thanks very much,” Maloney put down his glass firmly. “Having thus regaled ourselves we may as well see — is it Mr Comiskey? — about the rest of our business,” but if he thought he could march to the office, see the marble slab, and get out, he was wrong. When we opened the bar door two coffins stood on iron trestles and beside them a pair of sleek hearses. The names were already on the nameplates. One had yesterday’s date as the date of death; but the second had the day’s date. The person, James Malone, had been alive a few hours before. I had never thought of history as so recent. On the shelves were plastic wreaths, and flat brown boxes which must have held the graveclothes.

“They’re just ready to go out,” the foreman said when he saw us linger.

“I didn’t know you could get the information on the nameplate so quickly,” I gestured to the day’s date.

“It only takes a few minutes. Getting the spelling right is the main thing. Sometimes they don’t even have their own names spelled right, but when it’s pointed out to them that it’s wrong by someone else, they’re apt to storm in and kick up one unholy fuss. By that time, of course, the coffin is in the ground. It doesn’t happen often. We either know the person or can check. But we always keep the slip they give us just in case.”

“This man must have died since midnight?”

“I can answer that in fact,” the foreman said proudly. “I took the order myself just after opening the shop. He died at six o’clock this morning; ah, a quiet inoffensive little man, you’d often see him round the town with a hat, very fond of a pint.”

“You see,” I said to Maloney. “This is as good as your Paris venture. And it’s not made up either.” I thought I heard him curse, but my ribs and jaw gave warning not to laugh.

“Ah yes,” Cyril said sententiously, standing between the pair of coffins and their waiting hearses. “Ah yes, when you think of it, life’s a shaky venture,” and they did hurt, even more so when I saw Maloney glower at him as if to eat him up, before the foreman led us up the wooden stairs, showed us into the office and withdrew.

Comiskey came out from behind the desk to shake our hands. He had on a worsted blue suit, shiny at the back and elbows, a Pioneer Pin, and an array of fountain pens and biros across the breast pocket to the lapel. His silky brown hair was combed back. It was not that he was very fat, but that the rich covering of flesh, sleek as any of his hearses, seemed to shake inside the cloth, and there was a permanent blush of raw beefsteak on both cheeks.

“We finished everything for you, Cyril, last thing yesterday evening,” he said in a tone that managed to be both authoritative and familiar. In a slow jog he led us down the stairs, rubbing his hands and talking as he went. He led us away from the hearses and out into a big yard. He paused at an enormous slab of black marble. “There we are,” Comiskey stood to one side.

Beside my aunt’s name and dates in gold on the marble was the silhouette of a fashionable young woman. On the base of the marble, in gold too, was Cyril’s family name, o’doherty. I looked at Maloney but he lifted his eyes briefly to the sky and then fixed them intently on the points of his shoes.

“It’s very nice,” I said to break the growing tension of the silence. “It must have cost a lot of money.”

“We tried to do the best we could,” Cyril said, again in his hushed voice. “She was a fine person. Her generosity to me was abundant. She left me everything she had.”

“It’s the best,” Comiskey said, “It’ll look very nice,” and if his foreman had all day to discourse he plainly hadn’t, and he led us back to the bar, “These gentlemen will have a drink on the house,” he said in a lordly way to the girl, shook our hands, and left us. We had whiskeys again.

“Her generosity to me was abundant.” I marvelled at the phrase as I looked at Cyril’s handsome, dull face and wondered if he’d bought it with the marble.

“What are you going to do with the old limestone?” I asked.

“Well,” he said ponderously, “I gave it a good deal of thought, and I didn’t like to have to remove it, but there comes a time, just the same as with old houses, when you can’t do them up any more. You’re throwing good money after bad. You’re far better to start from the ground up again. I think the marble will be no insult.”

“Quite right,” Maloney chorused with alarming fierceness.

The rain had already half eaten many of the names: Rose, Jimmy, Bridie.… Soon the limestone would not be able to give them even that worn space. They would be scattered to the mountain air they once breathed. It would be a purer silence.

“You’ll have one more drink on me,” Cyril pressed.

“No,” I said. “We have to be back.”

“We’re late,” Maloney added. We shook hands with the foreman on our way out, with Cyril outside the door.

“You’ll be very welcome any time you’re down,” he said in the first generous flush of his new estate.

“He’s your uncle-in-law,” Maloney said before Cyril was even out of earshot.

“That’s right.”

“Well your uncle-in-law is an eejit.”

“I concur.”

“And by the way that was a cheap crack about the Paris business, and like all cheap cracks full of a little truth, helping it up into a bigger lie. Nobody would pay the slightest attention to you wheeling a baby around in a coffin in this misfortunate country. They’d think you couldn’t afford a pram,” he said fiercely. “Look at today — isn’t the whole country going around in its coffin! But show them a man and a woman making love — and worst of all enjoying it — and the streets are full of ‘Fathers of eleven’, ‘Disgusted’ and the rest of them. Haven’t I been fighting it for the past several years, and giving hacks like you employment into the bargain. But what’ll work here won’t necessarily work elsewhere and vice-fucking-versa. That’s why I’m not giving up my Paris idea. Every country has their own half-baked version of it and they wave it around like their little flags. It’s coffins here. It’s class in England. It’s something stupid or fucking other everywhere.”