The Last Storyteller Read Online Free

vacuum gives offense to every woman. Mal might have been a mighty landowner, with rolling acres and woodlands barbered like a bishop’s jowls, and he might have been as handsome and as rich as the man who owns the sun, but he was all alone
.
    He would dearly have liked to marry—but a chap who has been on the battlefield gets to know himself very well, and Mal knew that he had not yet seen the woman who would take possession of his heart and hold it in her soul
.
    And then one day, a day of sun and roses, a mercenary blacksmith came by with his beautiful daughter, Emer
.

7
    How should I describe the inside of my mind the next day? It rang with the music of John Jacob’s voice, it lit up with the brilliance of his word-pictures, it thrilled to the antiquity of his tale, first noted down, perhaps, in some long-ruined, limestone abbey, Mellifont, Durrow, Clonmacnoise.
    Yet there I was, sitting in a pub, a lower world, and thus robbing myself of the previous night’s elevation. On a damp and slovenly day I had subscribed to a cliché: I had allowed myself to be drawn into a classic Irish conversation, random talk, half an inch deep, about everything andnothing, where strangers exchange snatches of knowledge and gossip and faux intimacy.
    So I told Jimmy Bermingham about Venetia. Because he asked. He said, “Listen, you can’t say to a man, ‘That’s a long story’ and then not tell it.”
    How many times had I told it? In love when I was eighteen with a beautiful actress named Venetia Kelly. Whom I married on a ship in Galway Bay, when she wore flowers in her hair on a day of bliss. Stolen from me by her ruthless, murderous family. I searched high up and low down for her. Long thought her dead. Murdered. I dug woods and mountainsides looking for her grave.
    And then I found her again. Met her many years after, on a beach in Florida. She’d had twins by me, Ben and Louise, one named after me, one after my mother. I walked away. Away from Venetia. Couldn’t handle it. Away, therefore, from my children, too. And thus I’d never met them, never even seen them. That’s the story I told him. A true story.
    “Never even seen them?” he echoed. “Jesus, that’s bad. How old are they?”
    “Their mother is back in Ireland now.”
    He twisted toward me on the bench. “Where is she?”
    “They’re in their twenties. Not small children anymore. Born 1933.”
    “Ah, shag it, Captain, go look for her,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “Go on. I’ll come with you. Moral support.”
    Since that day I’ve shunned “moral support” with all my strength.
    I said to him, “There’s a show going around—
Gentleman Jack and His Friend
.”
    “Oh, yeh, I saw posters on a lamppost somewhere. Catchy name.”
    “Jack Stirling is his real name,” I said. “She’s with him now.”
    “So is she the ‘friend’?”
    I hope you never know pain such as the anguish I encountered because of Gentleman Jack. And I don’t mean mere jealousy.
    “Yes,” I sighed. “She’s the friend, all right.”
    Jimmy Bermingham said, “I’ll kill him for you if you like. And nobody’d know.”
    Next, in this newfound ersatz profundity, Jimmy Bermingham told me about his own deep and abiding love.
    “My pet name for her is ‘Dirty’ Marian,” he said.
    “Well, that’s some term of endearment,” I remarked. He ignored it.
    “Wait till you meet her, Captain—you’ll see what I mean. But, God, she keeps me at a distance. She’s as haughty as a cat.”
    “Is that because you call her ‘Dirty’ Marian?”
    He said, “What chance has a fellow but to fight back?”
    Now the asteroids began to crash.
    First, a girl walked in. We’d kept our snug door wide open, so Jimmy and I retained a full view of the pub’s general space. The girl, pretty as a rosebush, glanced all around.
    Hmm. She’s hunted-looking. Searching for somebody? But hoping not to find them?
    We all stared at her tight red sweater.
    Whatever she sought, she didn’t