The barman glanced towards the source of the interruption and saw that the annoyed soldier was being held by the sleeve of his tunic. ‘Keep him quiet,’ he said to Morrissey, imagining that the hand on the tunic was there as a restraint against an outbreak of violence. ‘Keep him quiet or get him out of here.’
‘This man steals stuff out of Wool worth’s,’ shouted the soldier.
‘You’d need two tons of ointment on to get those boils off your face,’ Morrissey said quietly. ‘You’re a completely untrustworthy man. You haven’t the brains of an insect.’
He released his hold and the soldier marched away, his face the colour of an open beetroot. Morrissey turned to two men who were standing near by.
‘That fellow’s a Communist,’ he said.
He finished his drink and he drank what remained of the soldier’s Celebration Ale. It was always the same: everywhere there were the hard-hearted who pretended an interest, who began a conversation and then, their cadging over, walked away. Was it just and fair that he should spend his nights lying down on the floor of the hall in O’Neill’s Hotel while Agnes Quin, an immoral woman, was permitted to occupy a bed and while O’Shea, a half-wit, should occupy a bed also? Was it just and fair that as a child he had been unable to turn his back on his enemies without receiving punishment he in no way merited? Was it just and fair that the woman in Wigan had betrayed him utterly?
In Old Moore’s Almanac it had been written that men with yellow faces would be flying over Paris by the turn of the century: Morrissey trusted it would be sooner and that the yellow-faced men would fly onwards from Paris to this city in which there was only injustice, stupidity and hypocrisy. He imagined Beulah Flynn, Mrs Dargan, Mrs Kite and Agnes Quin transported for life to the bamboo fields, where they would suffer side by side with O’Shea and the stamp-collector, Mr Gregan, Eugene Sinnott, Eddie Trump, the spotted soldier, and everyone else who had ever walked away from him. He trusted that the woman in Wigan, now Mrs Crosbie, would be sought out by the men from the East and imprisoned and tortured. He trusted that she and all the others would be made to suffer every ignominy that the human mind had yet devised.
He left the bar and strode out into the sunshine of the afternoon with bitterness only in his heart.
‘Are you busy tonight?’ Mr Smedley enquired of a waitress. ‘I’m a stranger in the town. Shall we go to a dance?’
The waitress, placing a plate of buns on the table in front of him, quietly declined this offer. It was nice of him to ask her, she said.
‘I’ve plenty of cash,’ said Mr Smedley. ‘I’m a well-off man from the Liverpool area.’
‘Ah no, sir, no,’ replied the waitress.
Sighing, Mr Smedley cut a bun.
8
At one o’clock that day, while Eugene Sinnott was lighting a cigarette in Riordan’s Excelsior Bar, his son entered Bewley’s Café in Westmoreland Street, where he ordered cod and chips. He touched with his tongue his newly repaired tooth, reflecting that it seemed sorer now than it had been an hour ago.
‘It’s fine weather,’ a man sitting opposite him said. Timothy John nodded. He opened a newspaper and read, as his father had read some hours before, that the strike of the city’s semiskilled and unskilled Corporation workers had entered its fifth day. The strike of three hundred firemen, he noted, had also entered its fifth day. The Irish Post Office Engineering Union, on behalf of four thousand five hundred members, had served strike notice on the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs. The Minister for Social Welfare had declared open a new cinema in Middle Abbey Street. Drought was reported in Cork.
‘Excuse me, sir,’ said the man sitting opposite him, and Timothy John put down the newspaper and listened to the man asking him if he was a writer. ‘I was hit by a Christian Brother,’ said the man, ‘in the industrial school I was at one time. I have a story to tell, sir, which is why I am saying that to you. I need a writer to write it down.’ Timothy John said he was employed in an insurance company. ‘I seen plays on the television,’ said the man, ‘that is nothing at all compared with what I could tell you, sir. I was hit on the eye, sir.’
In the bungalow in Booterstown, Philomena made tea. In Terenure Mrs Gregan bought lozenges from a chemist. In his office Mr Gregan ate sandwiches that his wife had that morning prepared for him, and said to himself that they were dry today. He thought of her and then he thought of the field with the glass-houses in it, and of green tomatoes turning orange in the sun.
‘You couldn’t forget a thing like that,’ said the man in Bewley’s. ‘A Christian Brother lifting his fist, sir.’ He rose and went away, saying that his eye had never recovered.
Timothy John ate, keeping the food on the left side of his mouth, away from the tenderness. He went over in his mind various insurance matters that had come before him that morning; he said to himself that after he had eaten his lunch and had a few cups of tea he’d buy the tray-cloth for his grandmother and then he’d go down and look at the books in Webb’s bookshop. He felt a sudden, brief sensation in his tooth, a different kind of pain from the soreness that had remained after the dentist had drilled it. He held his mouth open for a moment to see if the dart of pain would occur again. When it didn’t he chewed cautiously, reassuring himself, pointing out to himself that there was always a bit of unease after a visit to the dentist. His eye fell again on the newspaper. Barmen in Dundalk, he read, were planning to strike on Monday week in support of a claim for an increase of four pounds a week and other benefits. In Wexford a new oratory had been released by a bishop. In Sligo the water shortage was critical. Rain was on the way.
All over Dublin that lunchtime people from offices and shops took advantage of the sunshine; children, tired of the good weather, waited for the cinemas to open. Youths in open shirts crept over the grass in St Stephen’s Green, causing the girls they crept upon to shriek. The card-sharpers whose photograph Mrs Eckdorf had taken spent part of their gains in a bread-shop in Mary Street, and the twins that had been that morning born in the Coombe Maternity Hospital passed their first midday asleep and in health. The Indian doctor who had delivered them stood in the Municipal Art Gallery regarding the face of Lady Gregory as represented by the Italian artist Mancini. ‘God give me patience,’ said the manager of the hotel where Mrs Eckdorf had been staying. He had just been told that in his absence the luggage of Mrs Eckdorf had been forwarded to an hotel in Dolphin’s Barn. ‘Are you half-witted?’ he noisily demanded of the untrained clerk who was responsible for the action, and the clerk replied that a clear message had been received from the lady, and that for his part he had done his best. ‘You said to be always civil, sir,’ he reminded the manager, who replied by depriving him of his position.
In Reuben Street the woman who had said to her priest that she was not ungrateful for the life she’d been given was measured by local undertakers. In a public house in York Street the old woman who had begged from Mrs Eckdorf poured the dregs from glasses into a can and thanked the publican for allowing her to do so. The cinema projectionist whom Mrs Eckdorf had called a naughty chap hummed to himself in the projection room of one of the cinemas which children were preparing to enter.
It was a day in Dublin as any other, except that, being a Friday, less meat was consumed than on other days. The sun glittered on the water of the river, seagulls stood quietly on walls and parapets. At half past one the banks were open for business again, later the public houses closed for their quiet hour.
With careful, unhurried gait, Eugene Sinnott walked along Thaddeus Street towards his mother’s hotel, finding the sunlight a burden on his eyes. The street was peaceful as he moved along it: Keogh’s the grocery was closed for the lunch-hour, there was no sound from the turf accountant’s, no excited voice on the radio reported the progress of a race while men stood still and listened. The tall stucco houses revealed no sign of life, although life continued within them. On corrugated iron there were tattered rags of posters, their colours glaring in the sunshine. On the yellow wash of O’Neill�
��s Hotel its title in white stared out between two rows of windows, and shone again on the paned glass of the entrance doors.
Eugene entered the hotel and mounted the stairs to his room. He opened the wardrobe, drank briefly from a bottle that lay inside, and stretched himself on his bed. With the blinds still raised and the room full of sunshine, he closed his eyes and slept.
Two flights below, in the kitchen, O’Shea filled a third hot-water jar, being newly concerned about dampness in the bed he had prepared for Mrs Eckdorf, while miles away Mrs Eckdorf walked in a cemetery. She had left the hotel in order to consider and to eat. For lunch she had taken oysters and steak, and then she had asked to be driven to a cemetery, where she could wander among the stones and devote herself to thought. She did so, strolling slowly about and turning in her mind the pages of the book she planned.
Its form had not crystallized, and yet it seemed apparent to her how in essence it should be. Through her own two eyes she saw this city while searching in it for a house she’d heard of. She walked along the quaysides: what she saw was there on paper, for others also to see, one page following the next. She walked towards a mystery that fascinated her imagination, even though she had not known and did not know its nature. I was told an ordinary story, she might well write, and sensed a human tragedy that was shot with beauty, I knew not how. The fruit of the Mamiya and her talent would set the background for the disorder in O’Neill’s Hotel: the faces of card-sharpers and alms-gatherers, children and animals, seagulls on an oily river, spindly aerials rising high from façades of a lost splendour, old milk bottles on a window ledge. And in the hotel itself, as she herself moved closer to the heart of things, so too would those who turned her pages.
In the room where the old woman sat she had seen the man called Morrissey, crouched by the window, copying words from a magazine. The old woman stared through the window, looking down, at the few who passed below. On either side of her were the exercise-books, and hanging on the walls a mass of cheap-looking religious mementoes that the porter, so he proudly claimed, had bought for her himself. As they entered, Morrissey had ceased to write and had looked at them instead. In a moment Mrs Sinnott turned her head too, sensing another presence, and Mrs Eckdorf saw the black eyes like currants and a face that was thin and frail and yet had a wiriness about it. Her hair was neatly kept in place, a cameo brooch gleamed whitely at her neck, on the black material of an old-fashioned dress.
The camera had not ceased to work in this room that was so different from the other rooms in O’Neill’s Hotel. Tourists took photographs, Mrs Eckdorf’s smile suggested, and Mrs Sinnott showed no surprise, even if Morrissey did. O’Shea was used to her camera by now.
I have come to stay in your hotel, she had written on the open page that Morrissey had been writing on. I love your city.
Mrs Sinnott made no sign. She turned her head again and surveyed the street below, and Mrs Eckdorf felt that to this ancient woman it was a natural thing that a person such as she should come on a hot day to stay in a house that had known more gracious times. Tragedy haunts the steps of your stairs, she had wished to write but knew she could not. There is tragedy in your hall and in your kitchen. What happened once?
The pages of her book ceased there, with the woman’s face, itself most photogenic, and the question mark. The pages would continue with the birthday party itself, when all the family came to’ the kitchen: Eugene and Philomena and their son, Mrs Sinnott’s daughter, who once had run away, the daughter’s husband, and O’Shea. Morrissey and Agnes Quin fed on the tragedy that had happened: there would have been no place in the hotel for either of them had the hotel not lost its virtue. Eugene Sinnott, had he not been seedy, would never have permitted the presence of such flotsam in his mother’s room; and no ordinary establishment could tolerate the one stretched out in the hall by night, and the other using beds for profit. What happened? she would ask, and write the question down. What happened once to make them all what they are today?
She would write it down that she in Munich, a thousand miles away, had felt her intuitions working; that she in Munich, on slight evidence, had visualized these people and sensed their hidden tragedy. While the birthday in the kitchen continued she would show from their faces how they carried with them the past. She would tell the documentary truth that only the probing of a camera, enriched by compassion and perception, could supply. She would supply it because she knew that the truth about the lives of people must continue day by day to be told, in one way or another, on the screens of cinemas and television sets, in newspapers and magazines, or in books like hers that incorporated beauty too: truth was the parent of understanding and love.
She remembered old Father Tomaso, who had lost his faith. For weeks she had lived among his congregation in her search for the facts she had in the end established: that the man could accept no God at the end of his life, that he remained on nevertheless as his people’s pastor, and that they in their love for him allowed him his position, believing that before he died all would again be well. She had suspected it all but no one would admit it, until one night she cracked the old priest and the story was quickly told. She remembered the faces of the small community, the fear on the faces in case there should be repercussions from the Church authorities if the matter was made public. ‘We’ll go to hell, we’ll burn,’ a woman had shouted in the Sicilian dialect. There was a photograph, towards the middle of the book, that caught the woman’s simple agony and beneath it the passionate words she’d uttered. Eyes all over the world gazed now upon the woman’s face and upon the atheistic priest conducting the Mass and offering the sacrament, continuing his life as always it had been, working in the fields with his flock, eating his plain food. He and his parishioners had asked her often to go away, but she had always smiled and said she would not. ‘For the truth will set you free,’ she had reminded them, quoting St Matthew. And in the end she had been proved right, for it was right, she knew, that the fears and faithfulness of poverty-dogged peasants should be seen and understood on the coffee-tables of the rich.
Hans-Otto had grasped none of that because Hans-Otto had no sense of humanity or of art. Hans-Otto used to go on and on about a man in Copenhagen whom she had photographed with his wife’s spittle foaming on his chin. These two Danes had quarrelled in a rifle range in the Tivoli as she and Hans-Otto, newly married then, had walked by. ‘It does not concern you,’ Hans-Otto had muttered in dreary irritation, hardly listening when she tried to explain that everyone was the concern of everyone else. He had lost patience completely when she’d said that by catching the spittle on the man’s face, seconds after its ejection from the wife’s mouth, she had created a rare photograph. To Hans-Otto the idea of art was an electric typewriter.
Looking at her pictures of Eugene Sinnott in O’Neill’s Hotel, Hans-Otto would not be able to use his imagination because he did not possess that attribute. Hans-Otto would not sensitively see what was there on paper even: he would be unable to visualize Eugene Sinnott as he might have been, a fortunate and happy man, the prosperous inheritor of O’Neill’s Hotel, a man who wore tailored suits and gave without protest to charity.
‘Who wants to know all that?’ Hans-Otto had demanded, looking through the book she’d done on Jasper Grider, and she had been obliged to remind him that already the book was an extravagant success. But he had continued to make a fuss and in the end she had wept beneath his scorn, vividly recalling every painful step she had taken along the path that Jasper Grider had earlier moved with the murder weapon in Yikesville, Colorado – blow by blow, past the hens that the erring wife had five minutes ago fed, past the eucalyptus tree, through the back porch where fuchsias grew in pots, into the kitchen and up the stairs: the book of that journey included some of the most beautiful and some of the most evocative photographs she had ever taken, even though it didn’t contain a single human being. It did however have the Grider mongrel dog, for the Grider mongrel dog had at the time, apparently, bounded ahead of its mas
ter, and it was this that had made the book what it was and had given it its truth and its pathos.
On thick photogravure grey-tinted paper she told this story that Hans-Otto had jealously claimed no one wanted to hear. Hoerschelmann at least had been able to accept the facts of her artistry, understanding, or at least claiming to understand, that it was necessary for her to go to extreme lengths in order to achieve success. Both Hans-Otto and Hoerschelmann had married again: they’d married German puddings, she’d heard, whose idea of life was to prepare applestrudels and to breed indifferent children.
‘Why didn’t you say?’ O’Shea had cried on the landing outside the old woman’s door. ‘Why didn’t you write it down in the book?’
‘Write what?’ she’d said.
He looked at her, amazed. ‘That you have come to buy the hotel.’ His words came strangely to her, for she had for the moment forgotten. She smiled at him, appreciating again the simplicity of the notion that she had come to the city to, purchase an hotel. It was a prosperous tourist city, people had said to her: was it not plausible to wish to share in that prosperity?
‘I must talk to the family first,’ she’d said. ‘It is a family thing to sell an hotel that has always been in a family. I feel it’s a courtesy to talk to the family before worrying Mrs Sinnott: there may be objections.’
O’Shea had nodded. That was kind of her, he’d said; everyone would appreciate that.
She would talk to Philomena, the wife of Eugene, and to the daughter who had run away, and to Mrs Sinnott’s grandson, the child of Philomena. In casual conversation the truth would slip through, the past would reveal itself in a natural way. When they came to the kitchen for the ninety-second birthday she would have all the facts in her mind and she would know then what her camera must seek, so that others might benefit.
She walked in the cemetery among old cyprus trees and the grey graves of people who had died too long ago to be remembered. Sacred Heart of Jesus have mercy on the soul of Thomas Rinkle, she read. No wreaths cheered these old, old resting places, no flowers in jam-pots; no women knelt. The dead live on for a time, she thought, and then they die. Her mother’s body was ashes now. Her father’s continued to breathe, she knew not where and did not care. Miss Tample, the mathematics mistress whose lips had quivered too close to hers, was dead – or so she hoped – and blazing for ever in the pyre she had in her lifetime established. Mrs Eckdorf shivered in the sunshine. She returned to the car that awaited her and read from a scrap of paper the address of the daughter who had run away, written for her by O’Shea in his ungainly hand.
Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 13