The House of Pure Being by Michael Murphy

Author:Michael Murphy [Michael Murphy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781907593987
Publisher: Liberties Press
Published: 2013-06-30T16:00:00+00:00

Part Eight

That Dingle Day

‘Dingle no longer exists by law.’ Those words of a former Minister for the Gaeltacht, the Irish speaking area, expressed the sense of dislocation we felt three hundred kilometres south-west of Dublin city in County Kerry, as we wandered in the wind through the streets of, what was officially known after a local plebiscite five years ago, as An Daingean. Dressed in dark suits and ties, swishing overcoats and shiny urban shoes, the solitary winter visitors drew bemused glances from the locals, layered in woollens. We bought two ice creams at Murphy’s ice cream parlour, passing time, waiting for the funeral of my publisher, Steve MacDonogh, to start. The incongruity between the business of living and the waking of the dead sparked a memory. When Terry’s cousin had died in Laois, he and his mother were late into the house, and the recitation of the rosary was in full swing when they’d arrived. As the prayers swirled around them, Sarah made her way through the throng over to the coffin, knocked on it to make sure it was made of oak, and then stood transfixed: ‘Is that an apple tart I see on the table there?’

‘Shhh Mammy,’ whispered Terry, indicating the body, ‘remember Kathleen!’

‘Oh, she won’t mind: she’s dead, and I’m famished!’ said Sarah, valuing the living over the dead, and heading directly for the table.

The death notice in the newspaper had said that Steve’s body would lie in the funeral home for two hours, between three and five o’ clock, before its cremation elsewhere. We’d driven past the utilitarian building standing proud on the outskirts of the pretty fishing village, on our way in from the county-town of Tralee, where we’d lit a candle for the happy repose of Steve’s soul in the Dominican church a few hours earlier. Less than two years ago, at our first meeting in the Merrion Hotel in Dublin, during one of the only extended conversations we’d had with him, Steve had mentioned that he was the son of a Protestant clergyman. He also alluded to the fact that when he’d published the memoir of Gerry Adams, the republican leader, it had caused trouble for him with members of his family. ‘Somebody had to do it,’ he’d said. ‘Freedom of expression must be upheld!’ The manuscript of At Five in the Afternoon had contained a chapter about my great-grandfather’s fight for Irish freedom in the 1880s, at the time of the Land League. So maybe that was one of the reasons Steve had warmed to my book.

While we were standing in the way of the wind and whipping white foam of Derrymore Strand, scattering Terry’s sister’s ashes over Tralee Bay some two years previously, Steve had phoned us, offering to publish the book. ‘You’re a wonderful writer,’ he’d said to me in the only time that he’d betrayed his feelings, ‘but your book is all over the place. Would you be prepared to work with an editor?’ I’d been a Senior

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