Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  Thank you. Mrs Sinnott.

  Mrs Sinnott had pointed through the open door to a youth in uniform who stood in the hall, indicating that he would show Philomena to her room. She picked up the pile of plates. O’Shea led Philomena away.

  Her mother died a month later. She returned by bus to Clonakilty, where her uncle had met her and said at once that he would pay for the funeral. The coffin was taken to the big, ugly cemetery in which her father was buried also, and when she went back to O’Neill’s Hotel the other girls were kind to her and a man who used to put his arm around her tiny body didn’t do that for a week or two. She wrote every Sunday to her uncle, who had explained to her that he wouldn’t be able to reply because writing letters to people was a burden for him. Having written regularly for two years and having spent a week’s holiday on his small farm, she ceased the correspondence and did not ever see him again.

  O’Neill’s Hotel had became her home. She made the beds of the travellers who stayed there, she carried trays of food from the kitchen to the dining-room, she helped to wash sheets. She never lost her shyness, and when the other girls recommended a film that was showing, or told her to look out for some local youth at Mass, she rarely heeded them. ‘You’ll make-a great wife one day,’ a man in the meal business said to her once. ‘If I hadn’t one myself I’d bring you back to Roscommon tonight.’ She laughed, imagining being married to the big, bluff good-hearted meal merchant, but she knew that she’d like to be married to someone, to be in love, and to have children. In the hotel her birthday was celebrated on its day, as everyone else’s was. Everyone gave her presents, as Mrs Sinnott had ordained that they must.

  At night in the kitchen they would sit playing rummy, which Mrs Sinnott had taught them all. On winter evenings the fire in the range would glow and murmur, occasionally stoked by old Kathleen Devinish who had been in the hotel longer than Mrs Sinnott herself, who used to tell stories about Mr O’Neill, Mrs Sinnott’s father, a wild man, apparently, yet one with a head for business, a man who had married an Italian. Kathleen Devinish was almost eighty when Philomena first came to O’Neill’s: she still cooked and controlled the work in the kitchen; she was content, she often said, and added always that God had been good to her. Sweets were passed around when they played rummy, and cocoa was taken by everyone before going to bed at eleven o’clock. ‘Is O’Shea hungry?’ someone would say and O’Shea, his face full of happiness after the pleasant evening, would say he could eat a cream cracker. Eugene Sinnott always laughed then and his sister joined with him, but they, too, ate cream crackers and butter when they were placed on the table. Eugene always won at rummy; O’Shea was a loser.

  During the first Christmas that Philomena spent in the hotel she wondered why, since no one was staying there over the holiday, the other maids and O’Shea weren’t permitted to return to their families, as she herself would have wished to had her parents been alive. It was then that she realized that the people whom Mrs Sinnott employed were all, like herself, orphans. Kathleen Devinish told her. ‘She’s a woman that loves orphans,’ she said. ‘She likes to make things up to people.’ On Christmas Day they had dinner in the kitchen at half-past four in the afternoon and there were presents for everyone, and wine with the food. People from the neighbourhood came in at moments during the day to celebrate the occasion with a glass or two. Keogh the grocer came with a confection in the form of a yule log with a robin redbreast sitting on chocolate icing, and a calendar for the year ahead. Priests who were friends of Mrs Sinnott’s came, and Mr Riordan from the public house at the corner, and a coal merchant called Lynch, who always brought his wife and left behind him a bottle of Winter’s Tale sherry. In the evening while they talked or played cards an old man who had once held the position that O’Shea held came to the hotel by the back door and was given a drink. He was deaf and did not say much, but his advent was looked forward to as a small tradition and there was disappointment the year he did not come, although all had known he would not. On Christmas evening, before they went to bed, Mrs Sinnott would make signs to remind her two children of their father, without whose love they would not exist. She asked that neither family nor servants should fail between this Christmas and the next to remember him and to pray for his continued peace.

  It would all, Philomena had thought then, go on for ever. As Mrs Sinnott aged, her son and daughter would take on increasingly the running of the hotel, but nothing much would change since there was no need for it. Eugene and his sister did not quarrel, although he went out more than she did and came less and less to the kitchen in the evenings to play cards. His mother regarded him with a kindly eye and had not been known to upbraid him for the late hours he was beginning to keep, or the occasional tipsiness that a few had noticed in him. ‘He reminds me of O’Neill,’ Kathleen Devinish said. ‘He’ll settle himself down.’ His sister was the younger of the two; but she, it was said, would be a steadying influence when they held the reins between them.

  He had smiled at her across the table on his mother’s birthday, the day of their troubles, when he’d come in and said that Southern Dandy had won at a hundred to eight. She had seen his eyes looking at her face, and then his lips had parted slightly and she had wondered why he had done an amazing thing like walking out of the hotel and going to the races on his mother’s birthday. She had seen his sister glancing at him, as though deciding that the next day she would speak to him about his lapse.

  ‘Help me, dear Jesus,’ Philomena prayed in the Church of the Assumption. ‘Forgive me this weakness.’

  She would buy her a crocheted shawl to give to her with the gooseberry jam: doing that would make her feel better. She rose from her knees, genuflected in the aisle, took holy water, blessed herself, and stepped from the empty church into the heat of the morning.

  When he was a sleeping infant, a tomcat had attacked Timothy John in his pram; when he was a child he had once been tied to a tree by a gang of girls and unfortunately forgotten. His nature seeming to attract such attentions, he had learned from an early time to tread nervously, not confident of much. This morning, even though the dentist had been less than gentle over the drilling of his tooth, he had feared to protest in case the dentist would take against him for being a nuisance. His hands had gripped one another as he sat there, the heel of his right shoe pressed painfully into the other ankle. ‘She may have to come out,’ the dentist had said. ‘We’ll do the best we can.’ Small instruments scraped, the drill tunnelled deeper. The dentist talked of a race-meeting he proposed attending the following day, while fear of greater pain became the essence of his patient. ‘Come back if there’s trouble,’ the dentist said.

  In the bus Timothy John thought about other matters. He thought of his mother and of the tray-cloth he intended to buy during the lunchtime for his grandmother’s birthday. ‘Have you fallen in love with me?’ a voice said to him in his mind, and his repaired tooth gave a slight jump, as though a part of him did not care to hear that voice. Hastily, he turned his thoughts in another direction: he reflected upon the work he did. It was, so his uncle had said ten years ago when welcoming Timothy John to the Home and Personal Effects Department, interesting work. It was varied work, Mr Gregan had also pointed out. Before ever a decision had been reached as to whether or not Timothy John should join the business, Mr Gregan had spoken in detail about the work that he himself had performed over many years. He had spoken of the varying size of the claims that an employee would be dealing with and if necessary investigating. Some old woman in Irishtown, Mr Gregan pointed out, would be putting in a claim for the loss of two tea-towels, while a different class of person would be speaking on the telephone about a bracelet that had had, apparently, a faulty clasp. ‘Now it is a question,’ Mr Gregan had repeated, ‘of being capable of knowing the line to adopt with each and every type of person. A trained employee, Timothy John, can tell a lot from handwriting, the loops and the sloping, that kind of thing. And of course your same trained employee can tell a lot from a voice
on the telephone. In this day and age,’ Mr Gregan had with sincerity added, ‘a surprising number of people are criminals under the skin.’

  Timothy John travelled all over the city, examining furniture that had been damaged by fire and trying to discover if the claimant was a criminal under the skin. ‘You want to watch their eyes, the whole time,’ Mr Gregan had advised him. ‘They’d put a match to anything. “There’s a smell of paraffin” is the first thing you say when you enter a house. Examine the burnt object and say the smell of paraffin would knock you down. Take a little compass or a whistle or something from your pocket and pass it over the damaged area. I used always carry a compass with me in order to explain to them it’s a meter for seeing if there’s traces of paraffin. Keep playing around with the compass and keep watching their two eyes. If you don’t make a boob of it they’ll tell you the gospel truth within thirty seconds.’ There were people, said Mr Gregan, who’d kindle a fire in an upholstered chair and scorch the flesh off their arms so that they could show you that they’d been trying to put it out. ‘Lift up the arm,’ said Mr Gregan. ‘Put the arm to your nose and tell them it smells of paraffin.’

  Although the work was as varied as Mr Gregan had said it would be, with much colourful uncovering of attempts to hoodwink an honest insurance company, Timothy John had for many years felt that he was not cut out for the Home and Personal Effects Department, since he had a shy manner with claimants and found it difficult to establish the truth. He bought a pocket compass, but when he passed it over the burnt area of a hearthrug or an armchair and reported that traces of paraffin were present, he was invariably asked to explain how a compass could register this information since compasses were designed for another purpose. At length, he enquired of Mr Gregan if the experience gained in the Motor Department was in any way worth obtaining, but Mr Gregan replied that the Motor Department did not go in for insurance in any real sense at all, although he did not elucidate this statement. ‘I will be retiring myself,’ he pointed out, ‘one day in the not too distant future.’ He had looked at Timothy John as he spoke those words, implying a hint of what might be: everyone in the Home and Personal Effects Department would move up a step if everyone’s work continued to be satisfactory, and Timothy John might find himself at least within reach of the position that his uncle now held. ‘The Motor Department,’ Mr Gregan added, is for the fly-by-night class, just as the Life Office is for our friend the morbid mind. I welcome loyalty,’ he added, looking closely at Timothy John’s face and into his eyes, as if seeking to establish, once and for all, criminality under the skin. Beneath this scrutiny, Timothy John agreed to remain in the Home and Personal Effects Department, and a few weeks later when Mr Gregan asked him if he was happy he endeavoured not to hesitate before replying that he was. ‘That’s a very good thing, boy,’ Mr Gregan had said, regarding his nephew through his spectacles and the smoke from his pipe. ‘It would give me pleasure to live to see you where you should be, in full charge of the Home and Personal side. There’s no reason why you shouldn’t be, if you watch the claims and don’t make any more boobs.’

  Mr Gregan himself was well known in the Department for his boobs. He had stepped from boob to boob in a miraculous way and to his own great surprise had found himself one day in charge of everyone else. Timothy John, though fearing him greatly, felt sorry whenever he heard the clerks in the outer office disparaging him. It seemed to Timothy John to be pure justice that a man who had suffered because his soul had never been absorbed by the work should be rewarded in this way, but when he thought about it he was obliged to agree with the opinion of others: that the position his uncle held was due to some kind of error. He felt his uncle believed that too, or at least believed that it was his talk rather than his performance that had achieved the position for him. His uncle could be convincing when he told his stories about taking a compass from his pocket, but Timothy John suspected that the true climax of such stories was similar to his own experience. In his uncle’s eyes when he said he’d like to see Timothy John in full charge of the Home and Personal Effects Department there was a glazed reflection of his own failure, and the wish that a nephew of his should in some way make up for it.

  At one period of his childhood, regularly every week on Saturday afternoons, Timothy John used to visit his aunt and uncle in order to help Mr Gregan in the garden. By chance on one of these occasions, it came out that Timothy John was being mildly but persistently bullied at school. ‘We’ll fix that,’ said Mr Gregan in a businesslike way. He bought two pairs of boxing-gloves and tried to teach his nephew to defend himself, but the sight of Mr Gregan’s large hands encased in his gloves caused Timothy John to feel sick in the stomach. In the end, after a smartish attack of Mr Gregan’s had opened a cut on his mouth, it was suggested by the doctor who came to stitch the wound that the weekly contest was doing more harm than good. His uncle had looked at him with reproach and although Timothy John felt sorry that he had let him down, especially after he’d bought the two pairs of gloves, it was fear of the man and of what he might next suggest that possessed him more acutely. There was the same reproach when his uncle held out some claim in the office and said that as far as he could see Timothy John had made a boob. It was unlikely, he knew, that his uncle would ever give him another crack on the mouth, but the memory of the stitches going into his lip naggingly remained. And it was difficult to explain that a boob was hard to avoid when some man was swearing that his claim was genuine in all respects and was threatening violence, or when a husband and wife were allied in their story, one supporting the other in a network of small details. The husband and wife might speak quite gently, putting their case with reason and clarity, but in no time at all Timothey John would grow afraid of them, and not be able to remember afterwards what it was they had said.

  As he stepped from the bus, he guessed that his uncle would approach him in the outer office and remark on the time of day, even though the evening before he had told him he would be late on account of having to pay a visit to the dentist. His uncle had a way of forgetting what had been carefully told to him, and he was constantly on guard lest it should seem that he was guilty of favouritism towards a member of the family. He would ask him, Timothy John knew, to make up the hour that had been spent, and Timothy John would naturally agree.

  On the bus and on the street this brief consideration of his work and his uncle had successfully kept other matters out of his mind, but as he ascended the rubber clad stairs of the insurance company his tooth seemed quiet and he was unable to control the leaping of his thoughts. ‘Why are you always looking in at me?’ she had said to him. ‘Have you fallen in love with me?’

  She had been there, at the door of Lipton’s one morning, waiting for him to pass, and he had felt a warm flush creeping all over his neck and face as she spoke. ‘What’s your name?’ she asked, and when he told her she said that hers was Daisy ‘Daisy Tulip they call me,’ she said. She had laughed in a casual way, as though every day of her life men looked through the shop window at her, as though every day she lay in wait for another of them in order to ask questions. ‘I’ll be seeing you,’ she said. He had walked on, his face flushed and grave above his blue suit and unwrinkled shirt. She was beautiful, he had thought, and ever since he had been thinking the same. The work he did, the people he saw, his uncle’s reproaches and his mother’s little face made little sense now when he thought about her. There was a passion in him that made even his fear of speaking to her again seem strangely slight. Her name is Daisy Tulip, he had written. He laughed to think of it, a name like that, a made-up name that suited her.

  4

  In St Stephen’s Green that morning the woman called Ivy Eckdorf took a photograph of a floating duck. She wore the same cream-coloured hat that she had worn in the aeroplane, and was dressed otherwise in a suit of pale linen over a cream-coloured blouse with buttons of pearl. Her finger-nails were lengthy, meticulously painted to match the shade of her mouth; her stockings were fine, the colour o
f honey; her flat-heeled shoes had soft wicker-work uppers and soles of a flexible leather. She carried a commodious cream-coloured handbag and about her neck, suspended by a thin length of plastic, hung the camera with which she had photographed the duck. It was an instrument of Japanese manufacture, a Mamiya.

  ‘How charming!’ murmured Mrs Eckdorf, referring to the duck and to other ducks that floated on the water in the park. ‘What a truly attractive city!’

  A man going by, a projectionist in a cinema, had an obscene thought about Mrs Eckdorf when he saw her standing there, for she was a beautiful woman in her tall, angular way. She saw the man glancing at her and she guessed that in his mind he had already placed her on a bed and was unfastening her clothes. She smiled at him, quite pleased that he had paid her the compliment. ‘You naughty chap!’ she cried, and noted scarlet embarrassment spreading all over the man’s face. He hurried on, and Mrs Eckdorf lifted her camera and photographed his retreating back.

  An old woman spoke to her, asking for alms, her hand held slightly out. She said she would pray for Mrs Eckdorf, who told her to stand back a bit, which the woman did, imagining that money would follow. ‘There are social services to see to you,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, smiling more. She photographed the woman, explaining to her that her face would now travel all over the world. She spoke harshly when the beggar woman again asked for alms. ‘Get off to hell,’ she ordered angrily.

  The woman went, and Mrs Eckdorf consulted her map. She saw the way to Thaddeus Street lay along York Street, over Aungier Street, past St Patrick’s Cathedral, along the Coombe and then on and on. She did not much care for the look of this route. An instinct told her that a more roundabout one would provide greater interest. She turned her back on York Street and set off in another direction, towards the river.