Jig by Campbell Armstrong Page B

something? You’re disgusting.’ She laughed again. She had one of those rich sincere laughs that change the temperature of rooms, like fine resonant music.
    â€˜Seriously now,’ she said. ‘Is archaeology a field for a young man?’
    â€˜We study the past to understand the future,’ Cairney intoned solemnly.
    â€˜You,’ and she nudged him with an elbow. ‘Are you never serious?’
    â€˜I have my moments.’
    Rhiannon crushed out her cigarette and lay back. ‘Does it really matter how much a loaf of bread cost in ancient Egypt?’
    â€˜I like to think it helps us understand inflation.’
    Cairney peered at the cinder of light that lay against the window, thrown on the glass by a faraway streetlamp. He felt both comfortable and secure with this lovely girl at his side. She offset something of the lonely edge he frequently experienced – a stranger in a strange country. And yet it wasn’t alien at all because there was a sense in which he’d been familiar with it all his life, courtesy of his father, who had instilled in him the wonders of Irish culture and history. Harry Cairney, who for most of the year had been an absentee father in Washington, returned each summer to Roscommon to indoctrinate his son in the melancholic songs and stories that were part of the Irish tradition, tales of defeats and victories, old loves, poems about the Old Lammas Fair in Ballycastle and the headlands of Kerry and the braes of Strasala. When other kids were out in hot sandlots tossing baseballs at their fathers, Patrick Cairney would sit with a fishing pole on the bank of a river and listen to his father recite the last words of the patriot Robert Emmet on the eve of his execution. Even now the young man could remember Emmet’s speech. When my country takes her place among the nations of the earth, then and not till then, let my epitaph be written. I have done . Harry Cairney had been less a father than a kind of history instructor whose view of the past was coloured by the romanticism of the Irish exile. All through his childhood the boy had wished for a father like the one other kids had, those young vigorous men who’d throw a baseball at you or take you one-on-one on a basketball court or get down with you in a scrimmage. But Harry, who was fifty years older than his son, had seemed remote even then, removed from Patrick both by years and memories of a faraway island. As if he felt guilty about his absences, Harry forced himself on his son during the summer, but never quite in the way Patrick Cairney wanted. He was too old and too dignified, too detached , to get down in a sandlot and dirty his hands. He was too sophisticated to go inside a sporting-goods store and discuss the merits of this or that baseball bat. Consequently, when Patrick thought of his father now he felt a curious combination of admiration and pity, the former because Harry had occupied an exalted position in politics and was highly regarded by everyone – and the latter because the world Cairney had tried to foist on his son was an old man’s dead reality and therefore pathetic.
    Patrick Cairney got out of bed and went into the small kitchen, where he filled a glass with water. He carried it back to the bedroom and slipped under the sheets beside the girl. Once more through the night came the quick whine of a Garda car.
    â€˜You’ve gone very quiet all of a sudden,’ Rhiannon said.
    â€˜ I am Ireland: I am older than the Old Woman of Beare ,’ he recited. ‘ Great my glory: I that bore Cuchulain the valiant .’
    â€˜ Great my shame ,’ the girl replied. ‘ My own children that sold their mother .’ She paused a second. ‘Patrick Pearse. Sure, I’ve known that since I was no higher than a blade of grass. Where did you learn it?’
    â€˜From my father,’ Cairney answered. ‘Didn’t I mention he was born right here in Dublin?