The Little Red Chairs

by Edna O'Brien

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

When a wanted war criminal, masquerading as a healer, settles in a small west coast Irish village, the community are in thrall. One woman, Fidelma McBride, falls under his spell and in this searing novel, Edna O'Brien charts the consequence of that fatal attraction. This is a story about love, the artifice of evil and the terrible necessity of accountability in our shattered, damaged world.

Release date: March 29, 2016

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 320

Sample

The dirt of his travels, Gilgamesh washed from his hair, all the soiled garments he cast them off, clean new clothes he put on, about him now wrapped, clinging to him was a cloak with a fringe, his sparkling sash fastened to it.

The town takes its name from the river. The current, swift and dangerous, surges with a manic glee, chunks of wood and logs of ice borne along in its trail. In the small sidings where water is trapped, stones, blue, black and purple, shine up out of the river bed, perfectly smoothed and rounded and it is as though seeing a clutch of good-sized eggs in a bucket of water. The noise is deafening.

From the slenderest twigs of the overhanging trees in the Folk Park, the melting ice drips, with the soft, susurrus sound and the hooped metal sculpture, an eyesore to many locals, is improved by a straggling necklace of icicles, bluish in that frosted night. Had he ventured in further, the stranger would have seen the flags of several countries, an indication of how cosmopolitan the place has become and in a bow to nostalgia there is old farm machinery, a combine harvester, a mill wheel and a replica of an Irish cottage, when the peasants lived in hovels and ate nettles to survive.

He stays by the water’s edge, apparently mesmerised by it.

Bearded and in a long dark coat and white gloves, he stands on the narrow bridge, looks down at the roaring current, then looks around, seemingly a little lost, his presence the single curiosity in the monotony of a winter evening in a freezing backwater that passes for a town and is named Cloonoila.

Long afterwards there would be those who reported strange occurrences on that same winter evening; dogs barking crazily, as if there was thunder, and the sound of the nightingale, whose song and warblings were never heard so far west. The child of a gipsy family, who lived in a caravan by the sea, swore she saw the Pooka Man coming through the window at her, pointing a hatchet.

*

Dara, a young man, the hair spiked and plastered with gel, beams when he hears the tentative lift of the door latch and thinks A customer at last. With the fecking drink-driving laws, business is dire, married men and bachelors up the country, parched for a couple of pints, but too afraid to risk it, with guards watching their every sip, squeezing the simple joys out of life.

‘Evening sir,’ he says, as he opens the door, sticks his head out, remarks on the shocking weather and then both men, in some initiation of camaraderie, stand and fill their lungs manfully.

Dara felt that he should genuflect when he looked more carefully at the figure, like a Holy man with a white beard and white hair, in a long black coat. He wore white gloves, which he removed slowly, finger by finger, and looked around uneasily, as if he was being watched. He was invited to sit on the good leather armchair by the fire, and Dara threw a pile of briquettes on and a pinch of sugar, to build up a blaze. It was the least he could do for a stranger. He had come to enquire about lodgings and Dara said he would put the ‘thinking cap’ on. He proceeds to make a hot whiskey with cloves and honey and for background music the Pogues, at their wildest best. Then he lights a few aul candle stubs for ‘atmosphere’. The stranger declines the whiskey and wonders if he might have a brandy instead, which he swirls round and round in the big snifter, drinks and says not a word. A blatherer by nature, Dara unfolds his personal history, just to keep the ball rolling–‘My mother a pure saint, my father big into youth clubs but very against drugs and alcohol… my little niece my pride and joy, just started school, has a new friend called Jennifer… I work two bars, here at TJ’s and the Castle at weekends… footballers come to the Castle, absolute gentlemen… I got my photo taken with one, read Pele’s autobiography, powerful stuff… I’ll be going to England to Wembley later on for a friendly with England… we’ve booked our flights, six of us, the accommodation in a hostel, bound to be a gas. I go to the gym, do a bit of the cardio and the plank, love my job… my motto is “Fail to prepare… prepare to fail” … Never drink on the job, but I like a good pint of Guinness when I’m out with the lads, love the football, like the fillums too… saw a great fillum with Christian Bale, oh he’s the Dark Knight an’ all, but I wouldn’t be into horror, no way.’

The visitor has roused somewhat and is looking around, apparently intrigued by the bric-a-brac in nooks and crannies, stuff that Mona the owner has gathered over the years–porter and beer bottles, cigarette and cigar cartons with ornamental lettering, a ceramic baby barrel with a gold tap and the name of the sherry region in Spain it came from, and in commemoration of a sad day, a carved wooden sign that reads ‘Danger: Deep Slurry’. That memento, Dara explained, was because a farmer in Killamuck fell into his slurry pit one dark evening, his two sons went in after to save him and then their dog Che, all drowned.

‘Terrible sad, terrible altogether,’ he says.

He is at his wits’ end, scraping the head with a pencil, and jotting down the names of the various B & Bs, regretting that most of them are shut for the season. He tried Diarmuid, then Grainne, but no answer, and at three other joints he gets a machine, bluntly telling callers that no message must be left. Then he remembered Fifi, who was a bit of a card from her time in Australia, but she was not home, probably, as he said, at some meditation or chanting gig, a New Age junkie into prana and karma and that sort of thing. His last chance is the Country House Hotel, even though he knew they were shut and that husband and wife were due to leave on a trekking holiday in India. He got Iseult, the wife. ‘No way. No way.’ But with a bit of soft-soaping she relents, one night, one night only. He knew her. He delivered things there, wine and fresh fish including lobster from the quayside. Their avenue was miles long, twisting and turning, shaded with massive old trees, a deer park on one side and their own bit of river, sister to the town river, a humped bridge and then more avenue, right up to the front lawn, where peacocks strutted and did their business. Once, when he stepped out of the van, he happened to catch this great sight, a peacock opening his tail out, like a concertina, the green and the blue with the richness of stained glass, an absolute pageant. Some visitors, it seems, complained about the cries of the peacocks at night, said it had the weirdness of an infant in distress, but then, as he added, people will get funny notions into the head.

A youngster came in, to gawk at the strange figure in the dark glasses and went out roaring with laughter. Then one of the Muggivan sisters came and tried to engage him in conversation but he was lost in his own world, thinking his own thoughts and muttering to himself, in another tongue. After she left he became more relaxed, let his coat slide off his shoulders and said he had been travelling for many days, but did not say where he had travelled from. Dara poured a second drink, more liberal with the measure this time and said they could put his name on the slate, as hopefully he would be coming in and out.

‘’Tis an honour to have you Sir,’ and he left the tired man to his meditations as into the little passbook he wrote the date and itemised the two brandies. The visitor said that in his part of the world, the brandy was made from plums and damsons, known as rajika, and at least forty per cent proof. It was mandatory at baptisms, weddings and the graveside of warriors.

‘Mandatory.’ Dara liked the fullness of that word in the mouth. And where would your part of the world be, he ventured to ask.

‘Montenegro.’

At the word Montenegro, he recalled another stranger from there, bit of a hermit, lived in a big house overlooking the sea and walked his cross dogs very early in the morning. His untimely death in his early sixties, that bit fishy. Only three mourners at the grave down in Limerick, three people all hunched under the one umbrella. Never knew him, but heard various stories from the sergeant to the effect that he was wanted elsewhere. Didn’t think it was an appropriate anecdote for the visitor.

He had come outside the counter, gobsmacked, as he would later put it, by the sagacity of this man, the knowledge, a walking university to himself. He heard of the beautiful scenery of Montenegro, mountains that rivalled the Alps, deep gorges, glacial lakes that were called the eyes of the mountains and valleys abundant with herbs. Hewn into the rocks were little churches and monasteries, without windows, where people came to pray in the same way that Irish people were known to pray. Celts, he was told, had lived in the gorges of the Dolomite Mountains and along the river Drina in the centuries before Christ and the link between Ireland and the Balkans was indisputable. Scholars who had studied hieroglyphics in scrolls and artefacts in the several museums had traced the resemblance in the type of weaponry and armour that was worn.

‘So your people have suffered injustices just as my people have,’ he said.

‘Oh ’deed we did… My mother who comes from Kerry, used to tell us of the Ballyseedy massacre, nine men tied together and a grenade put down between them. Only one survivor and that was my grandfather and he appeared to her every year on the anniversary, March the 24th, God’s truth… stood at the end of her bed.’

The stranger hearing it, pondered it and then bowed his head in sympathy.

‘You are familiar with Siddhartha?’ he says after a long silence.

‘Well, not exactly,’ Dara replied.

Siddhartha, he was told, lived thousands of years ago and one day, at a ploughing match, he had a vision in which the sufferings of all mankind were revealed to him and he was told that he must do all he could to alleviate that suffering. While not being Siddhartha, as the stranger was quick to say, he too changed paths midlife. He withdrew to various monasteries to meditate and to pray. The question that perplexed him was how to get back the something he had lost. That something lost to modern man, call it soul, call it harmony, call it God. By withdrawing from the world and giving himself up to the magic carpet of learning, he entered, as he said, the rose garden of knowledge, esoterica, dream divination and trance. With careful study he arrived at a simple observation, which is the analogy of opposites and from that he hit upon the idea of combining ancient medicine with modern science, a synthesis of old and new, the one enriched by the other.

‘I bring it to you,’ he said, and offered his hand as an assurance.

‘Cripes’ was the only word Dara could find.

‘A woman brought me here,’ he said then with a touch of mischief, describing how one night in a monastery, there appeared to him, pale-faced and with tears streaming down her cheeks, a woman, saying I am of Ireland, entreating him to come there. Dara, with his smattering of history, said that crying woman was well known and in every child’s copybook and she was called Aisling, which meant dream. Then he was handed the visitor’s card, with the name Dr Vladimir Dragan, in black lettering, plus a host of degrees after it. Further down he read Healer and Sex Therapist.

‘But I am known as Vuk,’ the man said with a tentative smile. Vuk was a popular name for sons in his homeland, because of the legend attached to it concerning a woman who had lost several infants in succession, deciding to name her newborn Vuk, meaning wolf, because the witches who ate the babies would be too terrified to confront the wolf-child. They were getting on great, when to Dara’s utter annoyance the bloody telephone rang. It was Iseult from the country house, wanting to know when the guest was arriving and if crab claws would do for his supper.

He stood in the doorway and under a sliver of moon, watched the man go down the slip road, the ice cracking under his feet, footsteps getting fainter and fainter as he crossed the bridge, away from the roar of the river, to a sister river that was not nearly so rapid. He took gulps of the air, priming himself, knowing that presently the bar would fill up and he would have to provide a blow-by-blow summary of the encounter.

Desiree was first, a strapping girl in her pink mini-dress, her stout arms bare and a coat over her head, bursting for news.

‘God I could do with a fella, haven’t had a fella for half a year,’ she said, curious to know if the guy was presentable and married or single. Did he wear a ring? The Muggivan sisters were next, slinking in, in their grey coats and their knitted caps and ordering peppermint cordial. Fifi came with a few of her friends and Mona, alerted by the hilarity, came down from her living quarters, and like any customer sat on one of the high stools and ordered her usual tipple, which was a large port wine with a slice of orange. A widow for over twenty years she always dressed nicely in dark crepe dresses with a corsage of cloth violets on her ample bosom and she spoke in a soft, breathy voice. Mona had two staples in life: one was Padre Pio, in whom she had unswerving faith and the other was the romance novels of which she could not get enough. She devoured them, the way she devoured fudge in bed at night and looking around she welcomed the fact that the bar was filling up as things had been woeful since Christmas. There was also Plodder policeman, Diarmuid the ex-Schoolmaster and Dante the town punk, with his dreadlocks and his black gear, flanked by his cohorts: Ned, who’d done time for growing marijuana in window boxes and Ambrose, for stealing lead piping from the contractor he worked for. Business had bucked up. Seized with enthusiasm, Dara was proud to announce that the stranger was a gentleman, an out-and-out gentleman down to his pointy shoes. Soon he had them in the palm of his hand, as he pieced events together, adding a few flourishes, such as the man’s transfixing eyes, his long fingers, expressive as a pianist’s, and the signet ring with the crest of an eagle, the colour of red sealing wax. Although a toff, as he had to remind them, there was also this aura of one of those holy men, pilgrims that used to travel around, barefoot, doing good. He mentioned the plum brandy, rajika, that was mandatory at baptisms, weddings and the graves of warriors and how the Balkans and Ireland had shared ancestors in times gone by.

Was the newcomer one of those sharks, speculating for gas or oil, to bleed their green and verdant land?

‘No way… he’s a doctor, a philosopher, a poet and a healer.’

‘Jaysus, that’s a mouthful,’ Plodder policeman said, coming to his own conclusions. Close to retiring and a bit of a joke in the barracks, he was only sent out on small jobs, missing tail-lights or straying sheep, but he felt in his waters that this visitor was dodgy, a con artist of some kind, or maybe a bigamist.

‘Where is he from?’ Mona asked.

‘Montenegro,’ Dara said and then relayed the story about Irish and Balkan Celts being blood brothers and how the artefacts found in fields et cetera were similar to ones dug up around the Boyne.

‘Bollocks,’ Desiree said.

‘He’s staying…’ Dara said, pleased at his timing and then dropped the bombshell about the man intending to set up a clinic as an alternative healer and sex therapist.

‘Sweet Jesus,’ the Misses Muggivans said blessing themselves.

‘Oh, oh, oh… Sex therapist.’ Things got heated. There were those who smelt vice and corruption, while a few lone voices were insisting that he might be an artery for good. They were shouting each other down. It was too much for ex-Schoolmaster Diarmuid, who had listened to this twaddle and was now asking them to please give him a chance to voice a sensible, mediating opinion:

‘There was a man called Rasputin,’ he began and walked around, scolding and pugnacious, still the Schoolmaster except no one was in awe of him anymore, ‘who hailed from the wilds of Siberia and infiltrated himself into the very nucleus of the Russian court, presenting himself as a visionary and a healer. He was going to lift Russia from its lethargy and darkness, he was going to cure the sick child of the Czarina, the future heir, of his haemophilia and he was going to perform miracles ad infinitum. Did he cure the heir? No. Did he save the Russian family from the firing squad? No. He was a fornicator and an imposter who got drunk every night and had carnal knowledge of most of the women in the court.’

He could hear titters and shuffling, but determined to have his say, as he made for the door, he warned them that Rasputin’s last supper was a plate of biscuits laced with cyanide.

‘That’s a grand story Diarmuid,’ Mona called, entreating him to stay, because she never liked a customer to leave in a huff.

Dante had been listening and presently, with a nod from Mona, he began to play on the bohrain, his soft brown hair falling over his face, his team waiting for their cue. Demands for Irish coffee were legion. Dara was being complimented on the fact that he could keep talking and still have a nifty way of getting the cream down the back of the spoon, before it trembled into the coffee. The music got wilder, thumpier, the cohorts doing their scherzos and trills with the spoons, while Desiree improvised her mock striptease. Dante was on his feet, tiptoeing around, hovering above each one, the Shaman, whispering the prophecy:

Santa didn’t come

His brother took his place

Santa’s dead

Santa’s dead

That’s what he said

Annihilated on his sled

That’s what he said.

So this is it, Son

This is it

Dark dark shit.

Mona, a little tiddly on her perch and nostalgic now, pressed the violets on her bosom and said, ‘Maybe he’ll bring a bit of Romance into our lives.’

Outside, the thermometer on the Folk Park gate read minus three, and inside they basked in the warmth of a fire that had been going since morning. Spirals of smoke drifted through the room, the faces curious, jovial, dreamy, wreathed in smoke, like beings captured in some strange nocturnal bacchanalia.

Fifi wakened hearing voices. It could only be John, John dead almost three years and still paying his regular visits, ‘channelling’ as he would call it. He might as well be alive, she could picture him so clearly, with his tousled black hair, wild black eyes and the old green jersey with strings hanging off the sleeves, spouting the mysteries of the Divine, of which he was an initiate.

She never feared his ghost, it could only be an influence for good. They were soulmates, both having travelled the wide world, returning from their wanderings, to the sea mists and the ground mists, the Fomorian darkness as he termed it. There was nothing romantic of course, as she ruefully admitted to being ‘a dried-up old bird’ from all that sunshine in Australia, whereas John with his shock of hair and his wild eyes was still Orpheus, singing to some lonely Eurydice, whoever she may be.

Ah, the high-flow glorious nonsense of those times.

For two years he lived under her roof, in the back bedroom, which he named Manaan Mac Lir, Son of the Sea and God of the Sea. He did rough work, digging and hoeing, quite content to do it since it kept him close to nature, and pursued his mystical studies at night. The original agreement was for bed and breakfast, but with time things changed and moreover, he would bring back a hare or some trout and she would cook for him and they would sit and talk at the kitchen table, John expounding on God, paganism, Gaia, and St John of the Cross. Often he would contradict himself, saying that the way to religion was to have no religion at all and they would almost come to blows at the kitchen table, shouting one another down, regarding the authenticity of the Virgin Birth and the Resurrection of Christ. She was a believer but for John, poetry was the true faith.

He disapproved of her summer visitors, camped out in the bog or by the seashore and gave the odd seminar at summer schools, which she was too busy to attend. Her guests came back year after year, some for the fishing, some for the shooting or festivals that went on all year round, along with nature walks and God knows what else.

Her breakfasts were legendary, with all the troupe, minus John, at the long oak table, her best bone china, cotton napkins warm because she would have just ironed them, then folded them to look like a large envelope with the letter flap turned over, exactly fitting into the space between the arrangements of silver cutlery. They came down to the smell of warm potato bread and scones, honey from her own hives and marmalades and jams of different flavours. She dragooned them to eat those breakfasts whether they wanted it or not and then sent them out on their various pursuits.

Leaving her little ‘ashram’ as John called it was the great mistake of his life, because he died not long after and she always maintained that he had died of homesickness. It so happened that a nearby pub, shut down for many years, was auctioned, done up and reopened, so that the noise of cars and revellers late at night drove him insane. She could hear him in his own bedroom cursing, shouting at being hauled out of his paradisal dreams. He went south to where he thought he would find peace only to learn that a disused quarry was reopened and after that it was the noise of men and machinery all day long.

‘So what have you to say to me John?’ she asked sitting up in bed and pulling on a cardigan as the room was freezing. With her big toe she pressed on the button of the floor lamp and then go. . .