Wearing the mask of manliness conceals the General's great sorrow

When the General was 16 his father asked him whether he was gay. Of course he didn't say gay back in those days, he had another word for it, writes MICHAEL HARDING

MONDAY WAS dry and still, and the leaves in Shandonagh fell one by one. I decide to walk up to the General’s house on the hill, because he hasn’t been out for a while. We stand at the hall door, admiring the autumn trees and commenting on the fine weather.

But Winter has already folded itself around the General. His robust bounce has faltered, and he no longer strides about with the haughty flamboyance of a turkeycock on the dungheap. The recession deepens its fingerprint in his bankbooks, and the gloom of a threadbare future gathers in his face, as he sits in a large, empty drawing room.

“Why don’t you light a fire?” I ask. But he can’t be persuaded, so instead I take him to Kinnegad for lunch. We have minestrone soup, in silence.

“Are you okay?” I ask.

“A bit shook,” he says, “financially,” and he slumps on the seat without even an echo of his former jizz.

“Actually, it’s the cousin,” he intimates. “His predicament is even worse than mine.” Apparently the cousin’s wife left, taking half the money, so that the cousin was strapped for cash and then the business went under.

“She has a qualification in massage,” the General says, “and now she is earning a fortune. I can’t understand why the cousin doesn’t do something similar; but of course men don’t do massage. So I offered him a loan, until he gets back on his feet, and the question is, when will that be? I drive past his wife’s palace every time I go to Athlone and I think about her, gloating in there; the drawers stuffed with the cousin’s cheques.”

Then he turns to me and says with great sorrow; “Love, my good man, is the ultimate delusion.”

The girl who is serving behind the bar happens to come over to us just at that moment, and leans across the table to wipe it, and remove the empty soup bowls, and to my astonishment my companion brightens up.

The General was reared in a world of money and vulnerability; he had the money and the servants were vulnerable. Waitresses have always had a peculiar effect on him; I’ve seen him snorting like a bull, and the hairs in his nostrils bristling with excitement, as some young woman carried bowls of soup or steak tartar to his table, but not anymore. He tries to engage the waitress in conversation about the weather in Lithuania, but as a flirtatious moment it is about as intense as a cigarette sizzling on a wet footpath.

I suggest he comes round later that evening and watches a movie. It’s been a while since we sat at the fire with a bottle of whiskey.

He says, “It’s been a while since I sat at any fire; I’m trying to avoid using fuel until November.”

So round he comes at 7pm and we watch a Japanese film from the 1950s; a slow-moving black and white meditation on the ordinariness of family life, by Yasujiro Ozu, though it only makes the General even more miserable.

In the film a daughter asks her father if he was in love when he married. “At first we were not in love,” the father replies, tenderly, “but in time love grew; it takes 10 years to create love.” The general sighs in his armchair.

“Bloody rubbish,” he grunts. “Fathers were not like that in the 1950s; at least not in Ireland.”

I wave the whisky bottle at him. “Do you want more poison?” I ask.

The General and I share the view that the sun is poison to the skin, salt is poison to the bones, and alcohol is poison to the vital organs. But it doesn’t stop us drinking.

He pours another glass and then he stares into the fire for a long time and when he speaks again it is in a whisper.

“When I was 16 my father asked me was I gay. Of course he didn’t say gay back in those days, he had another word for it. Basically I wasn’t manly enough. And I think it was from that point onwards that I began to act more manly. And I joined the army. And I wear a mask all the time. Especially with the ladies, like with that Lithuanian girl at lunch today. But as I get older I realise that the only thing left inside me is the ghost of a boy who never lived.”

He was reared in a world of money and vulnerability – he had the money and the servants were vulnerable