he whistled a civil cavatina . . .
The second opening : There was nothing unusual in the appearance of Mr. John Furriskey but actually he had one distinction that is rarely encountered – he was born at the age of twenty-five and entered the world with a memory but without a personal experience to account for it . . . His knowledge of physics was moderate and extended to Boyle’s Law and the Parallelogram of Forces . . .
The third? Buy the book. You either have a taste for such toying with reality, or, lacking Irish ancestors, you don’t. In any case, mothers should warn their sons against reading At Swim-Two-Birds , or any other works by Ireland’s most famous hallucinator. Alas, mine didn’t know better.
Ireland in the early 1970s was still a Flann O’Brien world, a place where bicyclists inscribed slow circles on misty back roads, and the night’s last buses erupted with raucous song, often with the driver joining in. Of course, just when things seemed idyllic, the IRA would detonate a horrendous bomb in London or Dublin, while in Northern Ireland, only eighty miles from my Howth refuge, masked avengers from both sides of the sectarian divide would shoot out each other’s knees. The grim reaper meanwhile was kept infinitely busier on the killing fields of Vietnam.
I knew all this, but could gaze endlessly at Dublin’s ever-changing bay and the Wicklow Mountains listing through purple clouds to the south, and think of Ireland as a romantic haven, perfect for an apprentice at ignoring responsibilities.
Farm fields clambered up the hill behind my cottage to a dense rhododendron forest beside Howth Castle, where a massive dolmen spoke back through the ages. Beyond lay what was then still a fishing village, while doubling as a yachting playground for young Irish movers and shakers like Charles Haughey, later to become the most notoriously underhanded and high-living prime minister (called a Taoiseach , or “chief of the leader”) in the country’s history: Tricky Dick with a wink.
Bun, three decades older than myself, was looking after the semi-abandoned estate that included my gate lodge beside the cliffs. A widower, he had recently nurtured the owner through her cancerous final demise. Like me, Bun was at a crossroads, though he well hid whatever anxiety he felt.
He offered me tea the first time we met. Three hours later I stood up, in wonder at the richness of his conversation and the refrains of laughter that he tossed around like bouquets. I would have rented that gate lodge if it had three walls, because he filled the place with grace. I can still picture him walking up the dirt driveway to greet me in weather bleak or kind, bounding with the exuberance that was his gift, and whistling, always whistling – he was whistling me forward.
I would shuffle around the cottage in the morning, perhaps frying fresh herrings bought at Howth’s pier, with the door thrown open to the light and, by mid-February, a sea of daffodils waving outside. Under an archway of woven vines, the same small robin, infinitely tamer than the heftier, redder-breasted North American version, waited patiently. I’d sit down to breakfast and the robin would skitter in. Merely pushing my chair back a foot was a signal for the robin to hop onto the table. Then this preternatural little bird sidled onto my plate, claiming the crumbs of brown bread and fish. It happened nearly every day. Sometimes an auburn-haired German girlfriend would read me poetry as we lay back in the grass. Trinity? Trinity was my secret joke. The place had no idea what I was doing.
Not once did I ever hear my father whistling; not once did I ever see him walk with Bun’s buoyant gait; and it lifted my spirits to have a man so much older than myself finally fill my life withencouragement and the idea that the world could remain full of vibrant color as one grew older. Those mornings still seem close, when there would be that cheerful whistling sounding through