Blind Man's Bluff Read online

  BLIND

  MAN’S

  BLUFF

  AIDAN HIGGINS

  OTHER WORKS BY AIDAN HIGGINS

  Felo de Se

  Langrishe, Go Down

  Images of Africa

  Balcony of Europe

  Scenes from a Receding Past

  Asylum & Other Stories

  Bornholm Night-Ferry

  Helsingor Station & Other Departures

  Ronda Gorge & Other Precipices

  Lions of the Grunewald

  Flotsam & Jetsam

  As I was Riding down Duval Boulevard with Pete La Salle

  A Bestiary

  Windy Arbours

  Darkling Plain: Texts for the Air

  ABOUT AIDAN HIGGINS

  Aidan Higgins: The Fragility of Form

  ANECDOTES, CARTOONS, COLLAGES, and PICS

  For the Semi-Blind

  Compiled with the Aid of Neil Donnelly,

  Matthew Geden, and Alannah Hopkin.

  Part the diamonds and you’ll find slug’s meat.

  Djuna Barnes

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  OTHER WORKS BY AIDAN HIGGINS

  ANECDOTES, CARTOONS, COLLAGES, and PICS

  Flood and Fire

  My Mother and the Cat

  Education with the Nuns

  Road Kill

  The Suicide of old Jem Brady

  Jesuit Casuistry

  Lord Nelson’s Hat

  Handy Andy

  Compass Hill

  A Tiff with Mary Ann Quigley

  In the Psychiatric Ward

  The Enigmatic Publisher John Calder

  Contretemps in the Chinese Restaurant

  The Japanese Intruder

  Speer’s Secret Garden

  West View

  Incident on the Hill

  A Walk in the Dark

  Robinson Crusoe

  A Footprint in the Sand

  About the Author

  Copyright

  Flood and Fire

  Nothing was ever as familiar as the mile-long road from our front gate (two lodges, seventy-two acres, grazing for horses or cows) to the village a mile off. It seemed forever in existence and could never change. At the corner was Brady’s farm. Next was the Collegiate Girls’ School. The Protestant orphans seemed to spend most of their free time in the hockey field instead of the classroom. They were taken crocodile-fashion in double file for walks at regular intervals, their teachers striding behind. I was acutely embarrassed when I had to pass this file of chattering girls, and blushed to the roots of my hair.

  One day came a strange disruption of the ordinary. As usual I was being pushed in my black-hooded pram, that most funereal looking thing, into the village and found water up to the approaches of Marlay Abbey, then occupied by nuns. The village was flooded, the Liffey had overflowed its banks, the bridge with five arches was under water. No one was about. We had to turn back. What must the deluge have been like? It was a day of prodigious happenings, never to be repeated. Nothing predictable was to be expected. It was to become a time of stupendous occasions. First the flood, then the death of the postman and old Jem Brady.

  For days it was noticed that he behaved peculiarly, he wasn’t himself. Then one morning his bed was empty.

  My Mother and the Cat

  Years went by and Papa Hemingway hobnobbing with Castro in Cuba had tamed an owl for which he could find no adequate pet name. Papa was a great inventor of cruel nicknames, called Marlene Dietrich “the Kraut.” Not finding a suitable pet name for the owl, he called it OWL, wise old owl, and this suited the bird as no other name could. No other word would do.

  You might like to know how it all began, what induced me to write in the first place. Why, where everyone began, with one’s mother, herself a voracious reader, with access to banned books. The light romance, Without My Cloak, and Brinsely McNamara’s The Valley of the Squinting Windows that my wife wittily renamed The Valley of the Squinting Widows.

  My mother put a pencil in my hand and pointed at the cat that was watching us intensely, and said, “Write down CAT for me in capital letters.” She tried for days to get me to write CAT but I could feel no affinity between the observant dumb creature and the word CAT. My mother tried Hat, Fat, Mat, Bat, all to no avail, until one day the miracle occurred. Animate and inanimate merged. I could now make the connection between words and a living being.

  Eventually my mother’s patience was rewarded, and I could read Christopher Robin and the likes. In a few years I had advanced to Robinson Crusoe and would never look back.

  My mother took me to a garden sale of books in Marlay Abbey and I came away with Hemingway’s Green Hills of Africa, while she confined herself to Beverley Nichols’s Down the Garden Path. Voracious readers will read anything, from trash to profundity.

  Later, I contracted measles, which was duly passed on to my younger brother, dead before me like my two elder brothers. The curative for measles in those far-off times was to put the boy to bed for six weeks in a darkened bedroom and let him amuse himself as best he could.

  My mother, the great reader, went to a Dublin book-shop and bought Hans Christian Andersen. I was away.

  Education With the Nuns

  One day, long dreaded, we were committed to the tender care of the nuns to begin our formal education. We walked the mile from our grand mansion, mother and two bewildered lads, and were formally received at the convent by the Reverend Mother in person. Education is so important, my mother opened proceedings, and offered the Reverend Mother a Zube which was formally accepted in a gesture of good will.

  Time passed and we became acclimatized to our fellow-sufferers. One day passing the girls’ cloakroom I saw a couple of white enamel bowls brimming with girlish blood, only recently extracted, and guessed that the visiting dentist had been at his rough and ready trade. About the playground they passed, pale and wan, handkerchiefs bloodied.

  Road Kill

  Tim Timmons it was who carried the post for Colonel Clements, and lost his life while on the job. He was a familiar sight cycling between the Clements’ long avenue and the village below. One day he got on his bike to catch the Birr bus coming from Dublin. The avenue terminated at the end of the hill, as did the life of the popular postman under the wheels of the six o’clock bus carrying passengers home to their tea. The lads in our front lodge who liked to tell a tall tale gave us a gruesome account of the collision, the blood and guts of the unfortunate postman, the clearing up of the mess of the dead Timmy Timmons. Buckets of water flung down the hill, and yard brushes applied vigorously. Nurse kept the pram clear of the accident. It came to us as hearsay, the death of the soft-spoken postman. Not long after, while I was being conveyed down the Clements’ long woody avenue, a black-bird fell dead alongside the pram, gazed at with wonder by my brother, aged two, who commented “Finished,” the first word he ever uttered, acknowledging with wonder the world he found himself in. Nurse said it was the ghost of the dead postman. Such superstition was rife down our way. Death was always near in Celbridge.

  The Suicide of Old Jem Brady

  My lackadaisical father, as lazy as they come, ran a stable for racehorses. Cabin Fire and One Down come to mind, the latter well named because he was never placed. My father was in the front yard when who should show up but our near neighbour old Jem Brady. Always garrulous, my father remarked, “Yesterday I saw a rat in one of the stables.” The taciturn farmer didn’t reply for a while. Then he said, “Of all the birds in the air, I do hate a rat.” This became a stock phrase in our family.

  Old Jem’s behaviour became odder and odder; then one morning his bed was found empty. The early riser had not risen. A vigilant guard noticed footsteps
in the morning dew, leading to the quarry with its reputation of being depthless. But nothing came up in the net. One last trawl of the net before lunch and up came the drowned farmer. My young brother and I cycling to school flew past the death quarry, a bluish gas hovered over the last resting place of the good farmer, much mourned and long remembered. Thus ended childhood.

  Jesuit Casuistry

  Sunday was visiting day at Clongowes Wood College and my father encountered Fr. Gerald O’Byrne, familiarly known as Gerry Razz, a scholar of classical Greek who had been in the Spanish Civil War and was spat on by a fascist, one of those who stabled their horses in Spanish churches and desecrated the holy statues. How the fascist beast reacted is not known, the pugilist must have beaten the anti-Christ to a pulp. Gerry Razz and my father had been companions in Longford at the start of their careers. In prep school we were read Hiawatha by the Captain of the school, placed in a chair where two classes could hear him. Da asked what do the J’s make of James Joyce? He did not appear in the Collegium of past alumni. “We’re not proud of him,” told all. I left Clongowes Wood College ignorant of the difference between Lord Haw-Haw and James Joyce. Jesuit education was all about religion, Mass followed by Holy Communion followed by Confirmation.

  Lord Nelson’s Hat

  On a winter afternoon in London, one of those grey lifeless days you get there, I was making my way through Trafalgar Square and looking up at the grey sky noticed a small flag flying on top of Nelson’s column. Other pedestrians seemed to have noticed it too, for they were looking up and discussing it as they passed along, and I thought “How amazing—people are becoming observant and taking note of their surroundings at last.” But hold on, this was back in the bad old days when the other Nelson, Mandela, was still breaking rocks on his penal island, and two intrepid South African climbers had scaled the tall column and stuck a South African flag on Horatio’s high hat as an anti-Apartheid gesture. There was a photograph on the front page of the Evening Standard to prove it, and this is why the people were staring up, confirming what the paper had shown: there was an anti-Apartheid flag stuck on top of Nelson’s foppish yet natty naval hat. Now what was one to make of that? Who would take it down? (Do not come down the ladder; I have taken it away.) It took the British Army to get it down, the engineers to remove it.

  My three sons were raised in north London, in Muswell Hill Broadway, where they attended schools within sight of Alexandra Palace which had been set on fire thrice, the last time during a Parents’ Meeting held in a house overlooking the park. The kids rushed to the window and shouted “Hey look, Mum, Alexandra Palace is on fire!” They wanted to run home to see it on the six o’clock news.

  The planting of the flag on Nelson’s hat, a symbolic gesture, a metaphor, wasn’t real until confirmed by a photo on the front page of the Evening Standard—and a palace going up in flames and smoke wasn’t real until the kids had seen it on television news, to authenticate it. One summer the pavements of Muswell Hill Broadway were crawling with ladybirds and nobody noticed them.

  Handy Andy

  We encountered him on the train to Barcelona—the Talgo—on our way out of France—Port Vendres in the Pyrenees in our case, and somewhere deeper in the mountains for him whose name I forget. He had an eye injury from an accident with a van going on the wrong side of the road, or so he said. He regaled us with many a strange tale. He had trouble recalling our names and called us Jacob (pronounced Yacob) and Marlene. Andy Hand, familiarly known as Handy Andy, as a lad had lost his right hand from the wrist down, and his left thumb, letting off fireworks, the missing hand replaced with a colossal crook. He ran a fish and chip shop in Kinsale, to where he was bound. He was barred from most of the hostelries in Kinsale where the villainous-looking crook was an object of common fear. One day he did a runner and was never seen again.

  Compass Hill

  We live in a two-storey house at No. 2 Higher Street, Kinsale, which has two other No. 2’s, which makes three in all. No shop blemishes Compass Hill, above our street, and it’s a mile or more into town. Walking around Compass Hill, you pass through all four points of the compass. You can see north, east, south, and west. Two suicides occurred there.

  Three new identical mansions have been erected in our time here. From the middle one a suicide drove his car over the cliff at the Old Head to his death on the boulders below. He was deluded into believing that his business was ruined, but it wasn’t, and he had gone away into whatever lies below.

  Fiddler’s Well, the next house on Compass Hill, is named for a fiddler who fiddled in the wet field, perhaps in the time of war or earlier. It is named after another suicide, a desperate man who threw himself to his death there. How deep was the well, though, or how shallow? Did he drown or break his neck in shallow water? It is not as easy as it seems. Doing away with oneself is a serious business. Twice I have attempted suicide, plunged in deep despair, once in Berlin, overlooking Schlachtensee lake, where an RAF bomber was shot down and not recovered to this day, despite the best efforts of French divers: half bottle of vodka to anaesthetize me, and intended to slash my ankles, but drank the vodka and went home; and once in our home garden, under the apple tree armed with a kitchen knife, watched by a black cat, omen that the end is nigh—Naseby, whose life I had saved as a kitten.

  A Tiff with Mary Ann Quigley

  Her moods were as unpredictable as the Irish climate itself, kind to strangers, not so amiable to locals. She was a small stout person, claimed that she never barred a customer, but gave them the cold shoulder instead. Her son James was a quiet lad who sometimes helped in the bar. Her husband, Kipper, was a fisherman, whom she treated like a dog. Because of earlier misdemeanours, Kipper was forbidden the lounge bar. Enduring the cold shoulder of relegation to a fish shed, his life cannot have been an easy one. The Quigleys never walked out together or showed each other any sign of affection.

  For no particular reason she had it in for me, in the rude vernacular; I was stuck up and was getting the cold shoulder. I made no friends in her bar, nor brought in new friends. I was a liability more than anything else. We had disliked and distrusted each other from the start.

  And now it was her turn to get even, when I entered the Fishy Fishy Bar with bloodshot eye and vacillating tread, for that morning I had received no less than three injections in the left eyeball, and must have resembled Wild Bill Hickok after a good morning’s buffalo-slaughtering.

  “I need a drink,” I said. She regarded me with deep suspicion. “I’m not going to serve you,” she said (pause for affecting leery look). “If a Guard came in and saw you . . .” She left the rest unsaid. But she didn’t serve me. She was assiduously pulling pints and making sure not to catch my bloodshot eye.

  I felt someone behind me, her son James, warned that mischief was afoot. “The bitch won’t serve me,” I told him to his face.

  “Now you’ve gone too far, calling my mother a bitch. You’re barred here.”

  “You say those you dislike won’t be served? A blackamoor, a dwarf?”

  “This is the law,” he said.

  “You can’t call a woman a bitch,” called out a tall American visitor at the counter’s end.

  “Stay out of this; it’s none of your business. Americans in foreign lands should keep their mouths shut. Bush should keep his trap shut too, otherwise he will lead us into another war.”

  In the Psychiatric Ward

  The staff had a masterly command of psychological jargon. Passing the front office one morning I hear one of them reprimand a patient:

  “Two showers in one morning. That’s paranoid!”

  The notice read CLINICAL WASTE.

  “What’s this your name is again?”

  In a set of white plastic mugs lined up on the window-sill overlooking the drenched car park I am identified as A. HIGGS. At least I think it must refer to me, not B. MUGGS.

  David Lordan asked me, twice, whether I was a fisherman. No, I told him. “You look like an artist,” he said. I h
eard him tell one of the Filipino cleaning women that he was a stonemason; to Dr. Margaret Madden he was a sculptor.

  I asked him did he know the work of Scanlon who had erected a stone group of pyramids with stained glass windows let into them, in Sneem. No, he didn’t.

  “He’s a sort of religious freak,” I said. “A believer in an age of unbelief.”

  “I too am a religious freak,” said Lordan.

  “What form does your freakishness take?”

  “I am the Holy Ghost.”

  “That’s freakish alright.”

  Once the Holy Ghost gave me a curious handshake, a dry Masonic touch, the thumb used as the tongue in a French kiss.

  Features of the place were:

  (a) No mirrors

  (b) Night and day staff were male to a man

  (c) Head guru (Dr. Hannah Hannigan) was certainly the female in charge.

  Volunteers, acting as a sort of street criers, walked into the wards at the appropriate times calling out: “Communion!”

  “Confession!”

  “Medication!”

  “Mass!”

  And most mellifluous of all,

  “TEA-TIME!”

  Small dumpy nuns in mufti distributed Holy Communion to the faithful. The sisters might have been offering Häagen-Dazs. Sometimes a priest came on his rounds, again in mufti, no sign of a Roman collar.