The following series consists of a number of excerpts from the previously unpublished novels of Belfast author Gerard Keenan, long time pseudonymous contributor to The Honest Ulsterman. This material is reproduced here by generous permission of Gerard’s son John and is edited and introduced here by Dr James Gallacher who is currently preparing a book length collection of Keenan’s creative fiction for publication next year under the title Bohemian Belfast and Dublin: Two Artistic and Literary Worlds in the Work of Gerard Keenan (Edward Everett Root Publishers).

The third extract from the writing of Gerard Keenan is taken from an unpublished novel written between the late 1970s and early 1980s titled The Sick Men of Sunday. The text itself is an extended development of the novella ‘Farset and Gomorrah’ serialised by Keenan in ‘The Business Section’ of the Honest Ulsterman from 1977 to 1978. In keeping with the previous excerpts, the piece adopts the style of a fictionalised biographical account of Keenan’s life from early adulthood in 1950’s Belfast (once more given the soubriquet Farset) through to fatherhood in London of the early 70s.  The opening paragraphs of the text find Keenan casting a wilfully unsentimental eye over the machinations of class dynamics within the Catholic Northern Ireland of the mid-twentieth century, offering up a description of a staunchly respectable Catholic middle-class comprised of businessmen and police officers. Keenan (present as chief protagonist Dan Duggan), emphasises his own quasi-dislocation from the context early on, establishing for himself the narrational freedom of a ‘distant observer’ in keeping with his own more modest origins in the New Lodge area of the city.

     This narrative distance achieved, Keenan develops his account by gleefully recording a consistent, if low level, subversion of the arch-Catholic moralising that pervaded his environment; his peers are drunks, violent and insatiable, identified by their shaking and sweating at church each Sunday morning. The three characters explored most extensively in the piece are Keenan’s childhood friend, Gussie Keeney (presented as Jerry Hanna), renowned BBC Radio Ulster pianist Tom Davidson (appearing here as guitarist Phillip Klein) and internationally acclaimed Belfast painter Gerard Dillon (depicted as Dublin-born Francie Gent). Keenan’s description of Keeney and Dillon’s overt and at times aggressively manifested homosexuality provides a rare contemporary record of gay life in Northern Ireland; highlighting his willingness to present a side of Belfast seldom recounted in popular or cultural histories.

     As the narrative moves from 1950s Belfast to 1970s London, the writing becomes preoccupied with Keenan’s often fraught relationship with Dillon. Central to the dynamic tension between the two is an encapsulate microcosm of the central and arguably irreducible contradiction of Keenan’s entire career: that of reconciling his intellectual bohemianism with his sense of responsibility towards his family. Interestingly, as the context slides bleakly towards the outbreak of the Troubles, this contradiction surfaces as a position from which Keenan launches a baleful condemnation of IRA violence in the form of a heartfelt invocation of the virtues of a life more ordinary. Palpable is the sense of futile anguish evidently felt by an expatriate watching on as his native city set apart tearing itself apart, offset only occasionally by intimations of guiltily acknowledged relief at the relative safety of London. Present throughout Keenan’s exploration of the escalating conflict, including the brutal paramilitary murder of an old drinking acquaintance, is a reflection of the wider editorial policy of the Honest Ulsterman at the time; namely that of a conscious and pointedly cultivated anti-political stance whereby the magazine’s main contributors often wilfully disavowed the tribal sectarian allegiances of their respective backgrounds. In doing so, Keenan and his contemporaries provided a vital intellectual and artistic counterpoint to the rigid binary of the prevailing context. In bringing to light this component of his creative work, it is hoped that his contribution made to Northern Irish culture, both as critic and creative writer, can come to be more substantially recognised.

                                                                                                [***]

A visitor to twelve o’clock mass, ‘last mass’, in the church of St Martin de Porres on Sundays during the early 1950’s would have observed that the collection was lifted always by the same set of well-dressed men. As parishes go in Farset, a big industrial city in the north-east of Ireland, St Martin’s parish was well-to-do. Uphill from the working-class inner-city quarter of the Markets, St Martin’s, in the middle-class district of Clifden, had the fine parks, the two cinemas, the dance-hall, the restaurants and the cricket-ground, while the Markets had the lively pubs, the raunchy anecdotes and the high male unemployment rate. The shops in Clifden, owned by parishioners from St Martin’s and staffed, particularly as to messenger-boys and cleaning women, by parishioners from the Markets.

  It was the sons of the shop-owners who were the well-dressed young men who took around the collection plates during last mass. They were men in their late twenties or early thirties. None was married. All had been to secondary school, one of the church schools. None had been to university, because most worked for their fathers, in their fathers’ shops, which they would inherit. They were well dressed, but their suits were of an old-fashioned cut, the material, scarcely exciting, one of the sombre shades of blue or grey. Many of the suits were of the three-piece variety, completed only by the staid waistcoat, unusual for men of their years. They looked like their fathers, used their fathers’ tailors. Their fathers might be with them in the aisles, taking up the collection from pew to pew; but more often the fathers would be outside, standing on the steps holding a St Vincent de Paul box where coins were dropped for the poor of the parish. Generally, their fathers were older than one would expect, looked more like their grandfathers; they were late marriers, with grey faces and silver hair.

     The sons’ faces were not grey, they were an unhealthy pink, sometimes an unhealthier purple, their foreheads beaded with sweat regardless of the season, and the hands that held the flat, wooden green-baize-covered collection plates could at most times be seen to vibrate with a fine tremor. Most had been out the night before.

     This weekly phenomenon fascinated Dan Duggan: respectability and religion, or respectability as religion, on the outside, but within, what? Flashes of recall, vivid and intense, of orgy, obscenity, profanity, sometimes violence, sometimes disgusting regurgitation of food and drink on to soiled clothing – and all this as recently as a mere few hours earlier. Duggan liked to catch the eye of whoever held a plate before him as an offering; always he saw the pain, the physical torture of trying to appear normal when nerves must have been screaming, stomach heaving, head pounding.

     Duggan, a slight, dark-haired youth with a hooked nose, was himself not much of a drinker, he could not afford it; nevertheless, he was a night-hawk and had often met the collection-plate holders, deep into the wee small hours of Saturday night, walking around the streets of Clifden till their parents were in bed and it was safe to go home. If one of them was hopelessly drunk, staggering and vomiting, he was always accompanied by a less drunk companion who would stay with him loyally, all night if necessary. The police on the night beat knew each one, knew his family, never touched the very drunk as long as he had a watcher. It was a characteristic of St Martin’s parish that many of the families were police families or the families of retired policeman in business locally.

     The sick men of Sunday morning were frank, talkative companions when he encountered them on Saturday night, and Duggan enjoyed drawing them out. Fintan Liddy was a simple drunkard, liked to whoop at groups of girls linking arms on the other side of the street as they walked from a dance in the moonlight. Declan McCloud, as indefatigable in the pursuit of whores as Tolstoy claimed to be, spent an hour one night describing to Duggan the complicated precautions against venereal disease he would be taking as soon as he got home: bathing in chemical solutions, then packing powdered manganese under his foreskin and bandaging his penis so that the dressing stayed packed in all night. The Banim brothers, Cal and Antony, were alcoholics rather than drunkards. They had been particular friends of Duggan’s for a time until Cal’s suicide, head in the gas-cooker: the night people spent hours nervously discussing Cal’s drinking, consoling themselves by establishing that it was fundamentally different from their own habit.

     Since Cal’s death and Antony’s withdrawal from the drinking set to keep his lonely father company in their chain of grocery stores, Jerry Hanna was Duggan’s new neighbourhood friend in St Martin’s parish. Hanna was a collection-plate holder and drunkard like the rest, he was also the only homosexual among them – at least as far as Duggan could ascertain. Duggan’s own position in parish society was that of a detached observer, like a foreign correspondent reporting on alien customs from a capital in a distant country. He lived with his mother and two older sisters in a large, comfortable red-brick house with AD 1888 on the lintel. His mother had moved to this house in the suburb of Clifden only some ten years earlier, when Dan was twelve.

     His friends local remained few, and even these few friendships remained slight, because for years he had run with a set of friends in another quarter of Farset. Millbank, to the west of the city. Quarrels about girls had led to a rupture among the Millbank friends. One girl was all that remained, Duggan’s girlfriend Dolly Wall, a schoolteacher with curly brown hair, big lively eyes and a slim, shapely figure. He visited Dolly in the evenings, every evening, stayed late, and it was on his long walk home every night, from Millbank to Clifden, that most of his encounters with the shopkeepers’ sons of St Martin’s parish took place, and where he had first found Jerry Hanna wandering, sodden drunk, without a watcher to protect him from the police and without his house keys, or so he said.

     The Hanna family was a prominent member of the parish, and Jerry himself was well dressed and well spoken, a model of good mannered behaviour even when drunk. He was tall and thin with bright red hair, his complexion a bit marred by blunt-topped pimples that seemed to be permanent. Hanna’s Stores, the family business were draper’s stores, emporiums was the word still used of them by some. The Hannas were one of the three or four Farset drapers who had the concession to supply the bright blue or scarlet uniforms to the snobby convent schools, which made the Hannas a kind of sub-clergy in their own right in the eyes of the parishioners. With a background like that, Duggan knew his mother would show nothing but sympathy with Jerry and Jerry’s misadventure when he came down to breakfast with him on Sunday morning in time for last mass.

     Jerry Hanna was no sooner in bed than he was trying to get his hand inside the fly of Duggan’s pyjamas.

     “Cut it out, Jerry. Settle down and go to sleep,” Duggan said. Duggan liked his sleep. Hanna kept pressing him from behind, grunting and making likely noises. His chin on Duggan’s shoulder, where his stubble rasped like a rusty file.

     “OK, Jerry. So you’re homosexual. I’m not. If you don’t settle down, you’re going to spend the rest of the night on the cold oilcloth. All right?”

     Jerry didn’t behave at once, but Duggan convinced him that there was going to be no fun and games, so he turned to the cold wall and slept.

     Dan Duggan was a moralist who would have preferred not to be one. He had been reared a Roman Catholic and was aware how much sheer indoctrination had been included in his education. Throughout his schooldays, only stubborn common-sense had protected him from it all: from the ribbon of rubbish which stretched from the simple-minded silliness of a belief in ghosts to the empty ritualism of a belief in the sacraments and their magic powers. Then there was the church’s ceaseless, monotonous, mindless, irresponsible whinging about sex.

     However, as he got more and more friendly with Jerry Hanna, he found it difficult not to be disturbed by the youth of Jerry’s choice of lovers. Duggan’s relationship with his Millbank girlfriend Dolly Wall was a completely happy physical relationship, and they both felt inhibited by the pleasure they derived from their relationship from criticising Jerry’s pleasure in his. They rationalised their uneasiness: Dolly, a socialist, gave off about Jerry’s boys because they were from the very poor; Duggan gave off about them because he found them awful little bores.

     “You’ve got it all wrong Dan!” Hanna explained one day, “they come to me. I don’t go to them. They want a couple of bob for the pictures or to buy lemonade. They know I’m always here. They know I never turn anyone away. They’re only doing with me what they do by themselves, anyway.” He said.

     “It’s all right being a public service, but if you’re as well known as all that, someone’s going to talk,” Dan said anxiously.

     “And ruin the game? It isn’t likely,” Jerry said. “You’re not far wrong, either, about me being a public service. The other night there were five of them one after the other. There must have been an awful good picture on somewhere.”

     “Did you come to an accommodation with all five?”

     “Had to. If I had given them money without getting you know what, they’d have been looking for that sort of money again. It wasn’t half hard work though.”

     The urchins came from homes in the Markets. Jerry kept away from the youths of his own parish. Sometimes, standing with Duggan at the back of the church at last mass on Sunday, between sessions with the collection plate, Jerry would appraise the sexual development of his neighbours’ boys.

     “That McLeish lad’s coming up beautifully,” he would murmur into Duggan’s ear. “There. In front of us. That’s just in the last three months.”

     “How can you tell?”

     “Do you see the fatness at the back of his neck? They always get like this when they start masturbating. It’s the absolute ideal.”

     Apart from the casuals in the store, Jerry would have a regular boy – well, more often the regulars came two at a time. He visited them at their homes, was accepted by their mothers, stayed overnight. Their homes would be in the Markets or another of Farset’s very poor quarters. Their mothers would be widows with biggish families. Jerry was no mug, the well-off never are, and he wanted no trouble from daddies. If the family was a family of boys, Jerry looked on it as money in the bank. He had the oldest boy this year and could see a new boy entering the field every year for year after blissful year.

     That was the theory. In practice, Duggan gathered that when Jerry was really drunk – he was a bit drunk every evening without exception – but when he was roaring drunk, he liked his bed in the Markets to be full of bare boys regardless of age or relative sexual maturity.

     Duggan got a fright one summer evening. He and Jerry and Dolly Wall were to go to a movie, were to meet outside the cinema. Duggan never went casually to the pictures: every picture was treated by him as if it were the world premiere of a new masterpiece. It was Wednesday, early closing day in Farset, and when Duggan heard Jerry Hanna say he was going to spend his afternoon off up in Cafolla’s with Dicky Cafolla, his present regular, he changed the plan and insisted on calling at Cafolla’s for Jerry rather than risk waiting in vain for him at the cinema downtown. Jerry grumbled but he knew his record for punctuality was bad, he had to consent.

     Mrs Cafolla, a widow with umpteen children, all boys, lived in the poor quarter called Old Demesne, a district composed of scores of little parallel streets of two-storied houses. The streets were strewn with an assortment of unbelievably varied litter, from old armchairs to dead rats, and swarmed with shrieking, whooping children. The houses were kitchen houses, that is, with access direct from the street to the tiny living-room without mediation of hallway or porch. It was a mill district, so there were many cul-de-sacs terminating at mill walls. Incongruously for a city, some of the little streets even terminated in streams or rivulets, relics of some long extinct millstream complex, the banks of the stream bare clay, all trace of grass or greenery trampled out of existence by a hundred thousand children’s feet.

     Duggan delayed a few minutes at Cafolla’s, standing in the kitchen talking to Mrs Cafolla, mainly out of guilt at being associated with a middle-class rake who was exploiting the black Italianate beauty her sons had inherited from their dead terrazzo-worker father. When he came out of the house into the early evening sunshine he said, “Damn it, Jerry, Dolly will be waiting for us outside the ‘Imperial’.”

     “It’s your fault. Tattling on with Mrs Cafolla,” Jerry said. “But come on, let’s hurry,” and he shot ahead of Duggan, setting a brisk pace.

     “Gary Hamill. I say, you there. Gary Hamill!” Duggan heard the woman’s voice calling behind him. He walked on a moment, ignoring the call, until suddenly he realised that ‘Jerry Hanna’ was meant and that the call was addressed to him. He turned with a wooden expression on his face.

     The woman was unmistakably a street gossip. She wore the Old Demesne street gossip’s uniform: flowered cotton overall, a turban and white mutton-dummies, that is, plimsolls, white canvas shoes. She seemed to have no lips underneath her lipstick. Her eyes were hard; they had forgotten how to reflect compassion and were hot with aggressive curiosity.

     “Aren’t you Gary Hamill?” She asked.

     “No. He’s a friend of mine.” Duggan said

     “Well, if you say he’s a friend of his, maybe you can tell me what’s going on in that house. What does he want with them Cafolla boys?”

     “I suppose, ma’am, he knows them in the way one knows people,” Duggan said.

     “He’s there till all hours. Playing the wireless and singing songs. I think he gives them young fellas drink. Do you think that’s right? Would you let him do it in your house?” the woman said.

     “I’ll be quite honest with you, ma’am. He has a drink problem. His family is aware of the problem. We’re trying to cure it. Isn’t drink the curse of Ireland? It is so kind of Mrs Cafolla to put up with him. There’s no bigger nuisance than a drunk man, and yet it would break your heart, he is such a respectable fellow when he’s sober,” Duggan said.

     The woman was a bit baffled by Duggan’s flow, but she pressed on regardless.

     “It’s not drink I’m talking about, mister. There’s something else going on there that I don’t understand.”

     “Believe me, ma’am, drink is our problem. I don’t touch it myself. I abhor it. I’d like to see it banned. It’s at the root of more distress in our country. Leave it to me. I’ll have a quiet word with him. All right?”

     The woman gathered herself for the finale:

     “You tell Gary Hamill I’m not satisfied and that I’m going to get to the bottom of this. And if I can’t I’m going to put the IRA onto him. If I can’t find out what’s going on, maybe they will.”

     “I’ll certainly pass on your message, ma’am. You can rely on that,” Duggan said and hurriedly made off. He threaded his way through the little street until he came out on the main Old Demesne Road where, as he had expected, Jerry was waiting by the bus-stop.

     “What was all that in aid of?” Jerry asked.

     Duggan told him their conversation. “That is a very dangerous woman. I know her kind,” Duggan finished by saying.

     “She comes in and out of Mrs Cafolla’s,” Jerry said. “She reads stories to Mrs C from the ‘News of the World’ about curates and scoutmasters. It’s obvious what she’s hinting at. She’s nothing, Dan.”

     “All right, but what about the IRA? I thought they were a thing of the past,” Duggan said.

     Jerry laughed. “Oh, I’ve had a visit from them before,” he replied.

     “You have?” Duggan said, startled.

     “Two old codgers and a young fellow. They kept referring themselves as Brigade-Commander this and Lieutenant-Commander that. Oh dear, dear, they were so embarrassed. I was sorry for them. I suppose she sent them. They said they liked to keep a watchful eye on widow-women in their area. I gave them a glass of whiskey and they left. The young one had this incredibly sensitive face. When he blushed he looked very interesting. Strawberries and cream. He can call on me any time he likes.”

     Duggan had a neat mind that was appalled at waste. Assessing Jerry Hanna’s fine intelligence and good natural taste, it seemed to Duggan in his innocence that all that was required to get the productive best out of the raw material was improved management of sound assets; he resolved Hanna should learn to play the guitar.

     It isn’t necessary to be a psychiatrist to know that many decisions run in double-harness, one decision borrowing strength and energy from the other. Duggan wanted to renew his acquaintance with Phillip Klein as much as he wanted Jerry Hanna to learn something about playing the guitar.

     Klein had been at Duggan’s Christian Brothers’ secondary school, Savage Street School. In the absence of a Jewish secondary school, some Jewish parents had preferred sending their children to Catholic schools rather than to the state schools, attracted, perhaps, by the reputation of the Catholic schools for authoritarian, patriarchal control (lots of flogging). Klein had moved on from the school to an English university before Duggan could do much more than admire him, but he had turned up some years later in the debating society of the Old Boys Association. Duggan belonged to a small literary clique there, Klein to a small music and painting clique. Both sets each had its bully-leader who had successfully resisted any merger, or even any significant socialising, between their respective subjects. Duggan had yearned to socialise.

     Duggan was an Irishman who had no special interest in things Irish. There were many like him and part of Klein’s appeal to Duggan was that he had the air of a fellow internationalist about him. Even as a youngster at primary school, Duggan had been chilled when the Walter Scott poem had been discussed: “breathes there a man with soul so dead, who never to himself hath said ‘this is my own, my native land’” He never to himself had said that or anything like it, but he was prudent and didn’t mention it to anyone. As far as the Duggan of the 1950s was concerned, Farset was a regrettably distant suburb of London, Paris and New York.

     Duggan’s clique had broken u and scattered, and he suspected that Klein’s had also. Nowadays when he encountered him in art galleries or at foreign films, Klein was on his own.

     Phillip Klein was an apprentice senior civil servant, recruited from university to start at the bottom of the top of the ladder. He liked to give the impression that his job gave him more time off than it required time on, though who didn’t in his social class in Farset or Dublin – it was the Irish languid-aristocrat thing. He was a fair amateur musician, favouring the guitar and lute, and in the Old Boys Association he had once offered to teach Duggan the rudiments of guitar-playing.

     Duggan phoned him. He explained that his request was being made, not for himself this time, but for a friend.

     “Is your friend the pederast you told me about one night?”

     “Pederast! Well, no, not this one. Would you prefer the pederast?” Duggan said quickly.

     “Bring him too. If he gets in the way, we can always find him a little boy to keep him occupied” Klein chuckled.

     Duggan and Hanna began going to Klein’s every Tuesday night, alone at first to test the ground, then with Dolly. Jerry practiced fingering the strings of the guitar two or three times, then gave it up. The visits became social visits. They became twice weekly visits, Sunday being added to Tuesday. The drinking was heavy, too heavy and Duggan contemplated leaving Farset because of it, before he ended up as one of the sick men of Sunday, in the sick Sunday churches. Jerry Hanna always brought a bottle of whiskey or gin to Klein’s, and Phillip would have his own bottle on the table too. The unaccustomed hard drinking was also playing havoc with Duggan’s sex impulses, he became frustrated on two levels: frustrated with the pattern of his lovemaking with Dolly and frustrated with his reading habits, in both cases because of drink.

     He was very drunk till the early hours of the morning every Sunday and Tuesday and badly hungover on Mondays and Wednesdays. He often vomited before going to bed. He was in no fit state to make love to Dolly, nor she to him. They went as a foursome to the movies on Wednesday, and often the après-movie became a drink up too. Friday and Saturday were sober and were blissfully his and Dolly’s. he looked forward to them with yearning. He saw marriage as Friday and Saturday always, no interruptions. He hated going home to his solitary bed, wanted to share Dolly’s bed, knew he could never get married in Farset. He also knew that he could not face being poor in Farset. None of his friends was poor. He worked as a low-paid clerk in a newspaper office, with little indication of better things to come. Dolly was a teacher, but under the regulations she would have to resign upon marriage. There was no way out but the way out, so Duggan and Dolly decided they must go to London.

     One Tuesday, two or three months before Dolly and Duggan’s departure for London, Phillip Klein had a visitor. He was Francie (Francis) Gent, the Dublin painter, though to Duggan’s surprise he said he lived most of the year in a flat in Hampstead in London and stayed with his family in Dublin only during the Irish Academy’s big exhibition period in the summer.

     Gent was small and neatly dressed in very worn, much pressed tweeds; neat also was his trim military moustache. He had a plump, pale face and a plum, pale bald head. His eyes were Chinese slits and twinkled as though they were wired to the mains. That he was homosexual was so obvious that a deaf man would have seen it in his dancing face and hands, a blind man heard it in his dancing accents. He looked far from prosperous but immensely self-confident.

     The night could have been described as very jolly; there was certainly much laughter, but Duggan was unhappy throughout the whole evening, although he concealed it. Francie Gent was a fund of good stories, his anecdotes were witty and well delivered and often involved fairly famous writers, artists and actors; but his humour was relentless, and Duggan felt intimidated. The conversation was not the exchange of ideas and opinions that was his model of a good interaction.

     Nevertheless, Gent’s paintings were so good that Duggan decided to take up his invitation and visit him in London. So much Irish painting was landscape painting so square that it looked as if it had been executed by William Wordsworth c/o the Lake District. When Francie Gent looked at landscape, he saw it filtered through a sensibility that was steeped in Pont-Avon and Gauguin.

     He was a child of the Dublin tenements, reared in Lower Dominick Street, and his homelife had the classic shape to favour the growth of homosexuality – an intelligent, fiercely embittered mother and a weak, drunken father. Gent had received scant formal education, worked for a living from an early age, hated intellectual talk, and read little. He saw Gauguin’s early work as a call to escape from the educated in art, to return to primitive roots. Gent dramatized his daily life in his paintings in the way that his master had done, though with none of Gauguin’s self-pity.

     Gent did share one other quality with Gauguin, however, an all-pervading, twenty-four-hours a day, three-hundred-and-sixty-five days a year, apparently inexhaustible sexual urge. Duggan found this a terrible nuisance, particularly when it was directed at him.

     At the theatre, Francie would sit between Duggan and Dolly and, inevitably, his hand, which appeared to be resting casually on the back of Duggan’s seat, would begin to stroke, almost absentmindedly, the back of Duggan’s hair, the fingers to stray around the ear to play gently at his temples. In pubs, Gent forced the role of naughty boy on Duggan, encouraging him to mix his drinks, to finish double whiskies in one glug, to talk too loud and to act the ass. To his irritation, Duggan found himself playing the part. Gent’s accent was attractive and infectious, and for hours after being in his company both Duggan and Dolly were using it while wagging their hands about like dolls on strings in a puppet theatre.

     One night when they were visiting Francie, he put makeup on Duggan, not outrageous makeup, but applied with the subtlety of a painter, darkening his eyes, brightening his lips and strengthening the line of cheekbone.

     “You’re beautiful,” Francie said, suddenly serious, almost sad, when they were alone for a moment. Duggan was so tickled by his appearance that he kept the makeup on and went home like that on the number thirty-one bus.

     Duggan lamented Gent’s mistake or delusion as to his sexual tastes as it quite spoiled his pleasure in Francie’s company. He and Dolly thought Gent’s little garden flat was heaven. Francie had divided his living room into foyer, sitting-room and bedroom. Furniture and furnishings, carpets and curtains, were shabby, clean and colourful. The walls were covered in paintings, some framed, many unframed. The tools of Francie’s calling were sitting around on mantelpiece and cupboard, and there they were also in the paintings on the wall.  Duggan never tired of this effect, of looking from model to model’s reflection. If it were only a pair of pliers, a screwdriver and a blow-lamp, their physical identity was glorified, dignified beyond measure, in the translation to canvas. So also with Gent’s own features: as theologians claim for the translation in death, so the translation in pain, or charcoal, in self-portraiture, stripped away from Francie all that was tiresome and affected, burned off all that was touchy and spiteful and laid to rest at long last the restlessness, and what was left was the veritable Francie Gent, a serious artist.

     One night, Gent phoned Duggan in panic: “I’ve two dealers coming from Dublin. Come down and help me make conversation for Christ’s sake. I can’t talk their talk.”

     It was inconvenient for Duggan. Dolly was pregnant and having a bout of sickness. She couldn’t come, and he suspected she resented his going on his own. He knew of no way to say no to Francie Gent. He doubted if there was a way.

     Duggan lived at one end of Hampstead, Gent at the other. As Duggan walked across he keyed himself up for a night of robust criticism and refreshed his memory with Barbizon and Impressionist, Cézanne and Post-Impressionist, Cubist, Fauve and Surrealist. He was a fool. The two art experts talked nothing but smut and cried out in mock alarm if ever Duggan inadvertently mentioned culture. An awful lot of gin was drunk. The two Dublin gentlemen, both fathers of large families, got smuttier and the odd thing to Duggan was that their smut was queer smut. Duggan had nothing to say to them and could scarcely raise a tired smile at their naïve anecdotes, accounts of sexual encounters, near-encounters really, most of them supposed to be true stories.

     Duggan had drunk a fair share of the gin, but in the absence of any weightier stimulant he was sober: the gin wasn’t enough. He went out to the lavatory.

     Gent had decorated a wall of his lavatory with a fine mural based on what Duggan could have described if he’d wished to be catty, as the worst Picasso ever painted, the blue period ‘La Vie’. Gent had borrowed only the sad, dispirited couple from the left of the painting -an almost naked, thin youth and his bride, a naked girl, clutching his shoulder and pressing her likely pregnant stomach into his. The boy pointing in an odious, limp-fingered way. There was little question that Gent liked the painting for the delicate contact of the two bellies and the way that the girl’s left thigh grazed the boy’s penis.

     Duggan was averting his face from ‘La Vie’ and zipping himself up, head buzzing slightly from the gin, when the lavatory door, which he had neglected to bolt, was whipped open, and Francie Gent burst in, his twinkling eyes, at this moment, transformed, glittering.

     “Oh, Francie, I’m finished. I’m just going,” Dan said. Francie bolted the door.

     “I don’t want you to go. I want you to show me your prick,” he said.

     “I’m really too drunk to show anyone my prick, Francie. I really must go,” Dan said, suddenly sober and alert. Gent grabbed him by the shoulder and pulled at his flies.

     “Show us your prick. I only want to see it, that’s all,” he said.

     “Under no circumstances. I never show anyone my prick when I’m drunk. Wait till I’m sober,” with a slightly too hearty chuckle. At the same time he unbolted the jakes door and wrestled Francie into the corridor. Francie wrestled fiercely back, spluttering “show us your prick. Show us your prick. Show us your prick!” Dan got a lot of mileage out of laughing and wrestling towards the door of the living-room. The old-fashioned button fly would have been ripped open, but the modern zip held.

     Dan got back into the room with the Dublin art experts. He found that his mouth was bleeding. He held his handkerchief to it to stem the flow. After a while Francie re-joined them. Vengeful and vindictive, as he sat down beside Dan he suddenly grabbed his thigh with his entire hand in an excruciatingly painful grip that caused Dan to leap almost to the ceiling with a hoarse scream of agony. This seemed to satisfy Gent. Not long afterwards Dan made his escape.

     For fifteen years, Dan Duggan lived less than a mile from his friend the painter, Francie Gent, in Swiss Cottage, Hampstead, in London, yet when he came to read the Calendar of Events in Gent’s life which was featured in the catalogue for the big Dublin retrospective after Francie’s early death in 1971, he found it hard to belief that he had ever known the man.

     This exhibition-crammed chronicle accorded not at all with the personal poverty and critical neglect that Duggan associated with Gent’s career as an artist. All those decisions to go here or there or do that, depicted as having been taken by the artist in 1955, or in 1961, or in 1968, accorded not at all with the anxieties, heartbreaks and disappointments, the drifting in a muddle and cross-purposes that Duggan remembered as the pattern of Francie’s day-to-day existence. It was only a chronological table, so there was nothing about the spitefulness, the manipulation of friends and the jealousy, and, of course, there was nothing about sex.

     Duggan was seized by panic every time he accidentally encountered Francie, and even an arranged get-together came in time to prove stressful. In fifteen years this state of affairs never improved. Duggan had only to see Francie’s jaunty little form walking towards him in the street with his sailor’s walk, the shoulders dipping port and starboard, for his heart to sink into his boots.

     Duggan was sure that he could detect a similar response in Gent. Francie would switch on the twinkle in his eyes. He would smile and his voice would purr with soft concern: “Hello, Dan, How’s Dolly?” But Duggan was sure that he would have taken some steps to have avoided the encounter if he had spotted him in time.

     The fact was that the social context in which they lived were partitioned off by two glaring differences of life-style, either one of which would have been sufficient to segregate them as by an iron curtain: Duggan was married and was raising a child, Francie was single and childless: Duggan worked for an employer from nine to five, Francie lived by his painting. When he was out with Francie, Duggan became aware of the disadvantageous of his life and it always outraged him that it was Gent who was always appealing for sympathy. Duggan was a poorly paid clerk in a newspaper office. He had a wife and child to support and a high London rent to pay. Normally he was not aware of these as burdens or responsibilities, but he grew angry when, coming from the shops in Harben Parade, he encountered Gent, who spoke enviously of the Duggans’ way of life: “Oh, look at that. A chicken, no less. It’s all right for some. I’ve been living on two barmbracks and a half-pound of margarine all week.”

     “I know, Francie. Independence isn’t easy. It’s the price you pay for integrity,” Duggan replied blandly. Later he frothed at the mouth when back at home: “We have a chicken once or twice a year. Even then it has to last three of us at least three days. What Francie omits to say is that he has a chain of rich pals, odious, well-off, bloodsucking bitches strung all over Hampstead, that he goes to once or twice a week, I’m sure he gets fat meals there. He spends more time cultivating the company of rich philistines, so-called patrons, than he would have to spend if he worked at a steady little job. It doesn’t make him more independent, it makes him dependent.” This last statement Duggan never tired of making to Dolly because he felt guilty about his job and his salary and wanted to deny Francie the title of martyr for art. “Like architects, accountants and businessmen he has to tout for custom. He has to stay near the rich. Also, he has to know a doctor and suck up to him. Also, he has to commit suicide at 65, for he won’t have an old-age pension.”

     “You sound jealous,” Dolly replied, drily.

     In the year 1969, it was not the sinners who brought fire and brimstone on Farset and Gomorrah, it was the righteous. The poor of the famous two religious communities, Catholic and Protestant, sedulously coached by their priests and ministers in separate development, separate churches, separate schools, separate courtship and friendship and separate marriage, shot each other dead and burned each other’s little houses to the ground, and their priests and ministers wondered why they could not find common cause.

     The irreligious, the pleasure lovers, the Duggans’ kind, were bombed out of their pubs, their dance-halls, their happy neighbourhood cinemas and their restaurants. Their moonlit streets and dark, romantic corners were taken away from lovers. A million and a half grown up people were obliged to live for years by the standards and to the dictates of emotionally stunted eighteen-year-old boys who had never struggled to pay rates or taxes, rents or mortgages, or kept up insurance premiums; had never carried the weekend shopping, had never taken a child for a walk or pushed a pram in the sun; had never saved for a seaside holiday or patiently seen their children through their schooldays; had never bought furniture; had never encouraged their growing sons and daughters to marry their sweethearts and helped them to put the deposit on their first home; had never kissed a lover or stroked soft hair or entered paradise between velvet thighs on white sheets. The priests and ministers who had stunted their emotional growth cried woe – and set about smothering another generation.

     The puritan ethic had penetrated each of the communities till one side was as sour-faced as the other. The Catholic was taught to see his Protestant neighbour as a sex-delinquent because he had no children and used birth-control, and the Protestant was taught to see his Catholic neighbour as a sex-delinquent because he had too many children and didn’t use birth-control. And, saddest of all, there was wholesale betrayal by the intellectuals. The paramilitary organisations who said they were of the left were accepted by the intellectual class as being of the left, when a moment’s thought would have shown them to be as far left as the National Socialists of the German 1930s. The young, bitter-mouthed gunmen, who were funded by the old bitter-mouthed Irish Americans who had funded Senator McCarthy in his persecution of the left; who were not prevented by the most fanatically anti-left clergy in Europe from collecting at church doors after Sunday mass; who were defended and supported by rich landowners in the Dáil, were allowed by journalists, broadcasters, students and men of letters to claim, against all reason, that thy were left-wing freedom fighters – when even a half-hearted projection into the future they fought to achieve would have shown a society dedicated to sullen, stubborn repression of fun and gaiety and innocence, not to mention any liberal virtue.

     Francie Gent wrote from Dublin to the Duggans about marching with the art students to protest against brutality in Farset by the British Labour Government. “Francie’s grasp of politics doesn’t extend beyond calling for self-determination for Lower Dominick Street,”

     When, later, they heard of Francie’s stroke and death in his early fifties, Dolly said: “he’s as much a victim of the troubles as a bomb victim. Poor Francie, the excitement of it all was too much for him. I’d be the same if we still lived in that bloody country.”

     As the killings and random assassinations accumulated in Farset, it often came to concentrate Duggan’s mind that one morning he was going to read about Jerry Hanna’s assassination. The paramilitaries were more puritanical than any puritan and had deluded themselves into thinking themselves as law enforcement within their respective patches: they made up the laws that were to be enforced as they went along. There were no counsels for the defence, and the sentences covered the hardly wide spectrum stretching from capital punishment to mutilation. They were especially vindictive where sexual offences were concerned. Jerry Hanna stood a good chance of having his balls cut off. When Dolly had voiced the same fear, Duggan tried to calm her by saying, “the poor generally kill the poor in Ireland.”

     One of the St Martin altar-boys, a former sick man of Sunday, Fintan Liddy, did die, and died horribly. He had slid down the social scale and had taken to drinking in dangerous bars. He had been taken somewhere quiet, where he had been suspended naked and stabbed continuously to make him talk. There were one hundred and fifty shallow stabs and gougings from one end of the body to the other. A woman gave evidence at the inquest that she had heard him cry out in agony, “Kill me. Kill me.” The final cause of death was strangulation.

     One summer night in the early 70s, the Duggans were sitting at home in Swiss Cottage when Phillip Klein rang from Farset to tell them that Jerry Hanna had been found dead. His body had lain for five days undiscovered in the empty house in Clifden. Later, another report said it had lain there for five weeks, but the comings and goings of drunkards in life or in death are never easy to pinpoint. He had died from a lethal cocktail of drink and drunks. Whether Jerry had taken it deliberately could never be known.