Suddenly, Maurice saw that a way was being cleared on one of the central stairways as the figure of de Valera was being helped down the steps. He felt the tears coming to his eyes at the sight. De Valera was as tall as he remembered him when he had seen him speaking in Enniscorthy, but he seemed even more dignified now, almost solemn, as he moved slowly down towards his seat. He looked straight ahead of him, not allowing his failing sight to affect the serenity with which he moved; his steely distance from things was further emphasised by the bustle around him. As deputies made space for him, they moved away slightly. No one, other than the younger man in a suit who held him at the elbow, came close to him. No one put a hand or an arm out to assist him. He was utterly in command, the set of the jaw stubborn and unafraid. Once he was seated, he lifted his head but did not look around him or move. Were he to appear in a classroom, Maurice knew, he would cause an awed silence to descend.
One of the visitors who had arrived at the gallery a while earlier tapped him on the shoulder and pointed down into the Dáil chamber where Sean Flood was gesticulating to him. Maurice had been so wrapped up in watching de Valera that he had not noticed him. Once Sean Flood saw that he had Maurice’s attention, he indicated to him that he should leave the visitors’ gallery and come out into the corridor that led to the chamber. When he checked to see where the Minister was, he saw that he was still in his seat on the front bench, busily talking to a colleague.
‘I told him I have a constituent who wants a few minutes with him,’ Sean Flood said when they met. ‘So what we do is we wait here, and we’ll either go to the bar or to his office when he appears. It’s a busy day but he knows we are here.’
Maurice was about to ask if the Minister knew why he had come but he understood from what Sean Flood had said that the Minister did not. In the way Sean Flood had said ‘constituent’ he realised that he would have to tell the Minister from scratch who he was and who his father was before telling him why he wanted to see him. He hoped that he would not have to do this with other people milling around.
As they waited, deputies from all the parties began to spill out from the chamber into the corridors. Maurice knew how much Tom and his father would be interested in them, and was surprised at how friendly they all seemed with each other, no matter what party they belonged to. They all greeted Sean Flood pleasantly. He wished that he were just here on a visit with no purpose and would have loved coming home with the account of how he saw de Valera, and which ministers he had seen, and how men his father and Tom hated seemed friendly and ordinary as they came into the corridor and stopped for a second to speak to Sean Flood. Even though deputies from all the parties stopped, Maurice was amused at the fact that he was only introduced to the deputies from Fianna Fáil. The deputies from Fine Gael and Labour were not introduced by name.
When the Minister appeared he was joined by a man whom Maurice later learned was his private secretary. It took Sean Flood a minute to move towards him, having signalled to Maurice to stay where he was. He spoke quietly to the Minister as the private secretary stood by impatiently. Maurice noticed the Minister’s shoes, which were of soft black leather, and his grey suit, white shirt and dark-red tie. As he listened to Sean, the Minister’s face remained impassive, his expression thoughtful; he was concentrating. Eventually, he nodded but did not speak as Sean turned and gestured to Maurice to approach.
The Minister shook his hand. And then, Maurice saw, he looked around him, the expression on his face suddenly severe and distant. He was, it seemed to Maurice, alert to his own dignity and wanted to see who was watching him and wanted to be sure that it was apparent that he stood apart from Sean Flood and his private secretary and Maurice. As he led them down a number of corridors, he did not speak. He walked slowly, deliberately, like a man with much on his mind. If de Valera were to retire, Maurice thought, the Minister would be among those who could easily replace him. Even though he was not as tall nor as imposing a figure, he had his own dignity and a sense that he could not easily be crossed and that he would take a calm and astute view of any problem that arose.
When they reached the bar the Minister’s private secretary found them a corner table and placed himself opposite the Minister and Maurice, with his back to the door. He had a file in his hands which he opened and studied while Sean Flood went to the bar, having been told by the Minister and Maurice that they each wanted tea.
‘My father,’ Maurice said to the Minister, ‘isn’t well at the moment, and he asked me to come. He is Patrick Webster, and he sends you all his best regards. He says that you might remember him from Frongoch.’
‘Frongoch,’ the Minister repeated, smiling faintly as though it was a place of which he had fond memories.
‘And I am the secretary of the local cumann, Sean might have told you. I introduced you when you came to Enniscorthy, the time you spoke in the Market Square.’
‘That’s right,’ the Minister said vaguely.
‘Sean might have mentioned that my brother is sick,’ Maurice said.
‘He did,’ the Minister replied and, looking away, moved close to Maurice so that Maurice would not have to raise his voice.
‘At home they saw a report in the paper that there was a new drug for TB …’ he began.
‘Is your brother in the sanatorium?’ the Minister interrupted.
‘No, he’s at home.’
‘He might be better in the sanatorium.’
He looked at Maurice sharply.
‘There are coffins coming out of there every day,’ Maurice said. ‘And they are not letting visitors into the wards themselves. You have to shout things out from the door for everyone to hear.’
The Minister knitted his brow and did not reply. Maurice was worried in case his seemed like a criticism of the health service.
‘Well, it’s infectious, you know,’ the Minister said. Sean Flood came back with a tray and put it down on the table and sat opposite them.
‘We read about the new drug,’ Maurice said, addressing the Minister only, ‘and we were wondering when it might be available.’
The Minister nodded his head and moved forward and began to pour tea for himself and Maurice, putting milk and sugar into his own cup and then taking the cup and saucer in his hand.
‘It’ll be a while,’ he said.
‘Do you mean a few months?’
‘It might be longer. It’s still being tested.’
‘We read that some people are getting it as part of a trial.’
The Minister sipped his tea.
‘They are all being done in England and on the Continent. I wish the Irish Times hadn’t reported it. It’s irresponsible of them.’
‘So there’s nothing here?’
‘He would be better in the sanatorium. If anything comes in, it will be through the sanatorium.’
‘And will they have the drug?’
‘In the course of time, I hope.’
Maurice put milk into his tea and lifted the cup and took a sip.
‘We thought that because of my father … I mean that you might have some way of helping us.’
‘It’s a bad business, TB,’ the Minister said.
‘They asked me at home to come up and see you anyway.’
‘We’re doing the best we can,’ the Minister said.
‘Oh, I know that.’
‘Sean says that you are a teacher?’
‘That’s right.’
‘Secondary or primary?’
‘Secondary. I’m with the Christian Brothers.’
They were silent for a while. The Minister looked around him as Sean Flood sat quietly opposite them and the private secretary continued reading the file.
‘There’s not much we can do at the moment,’ the Minister said eventually. ‘But they have to worry about infection. If you need any help to get him into the sanatorium, let me know.’
‘Ah no, it’s all right.’
The Minister turned and looked at him.
‘I hope I
see you the next time I’m in Enniscorthy.’
He stood up.
‘Did you say your father isn’t well?’
‘He has a bad heart.’
‘Will you give him my best wishes? From one Frongoch veteran to another.’
‘I’ll do that,’ Maurice said.
As Sean Flood saw him out to the front gate of the Dáil Maurice made no effort to break the silence. Even as they parted, he said nothing, merely walked away curtly. He would see Sean Flood in Enniscorthy, but he hoped it would not be for a while.
He had missed the train that left Westland Row in the early afternoon and would have to wait, he realised, until six o’clock for the last train. It was hard to think what to do. For a second, he began to imagine that he was a student again and he could walk from Kildare Street to Earlsfort Terrace, and he quickly realised that he would have given anything to be back in Dublin then with only exams to face, with long days to himself, with the welcoming smiles of his landlady Mrs Ruth and her sister when he came home every evening in Terenure, how they had soda bread or currant bread and butter and jam waiting for him, the table set as though for someone important. At the beginning, when he went home to teach in Enniscorthy, he had sent them Christmas cards each year and then one year had forgotten and had lost touch with them. Mrs Ruth must have been seventy when he last saw her, he thought, and her sister older, and he calculated then that that was fourteen years ago, so maybe they were dead now, or too old to have lodgers.
In Dawson Street he walked into Hodges Figgis, smiling to himself when he saw the same sales assistant at the cash register, the one he had always remembered. She had not changed. Once she would have known him by sight, but she must have forgotten him now. Years ago, she was on the lookout for students like him who would spend hours in the shop reading a book and taking notes as though the place was a library. She would come over and stand silently behind him, he remembered, blocking his light, glowering at him when he looked up and then accompanying him to the door with a look of grim satisfaction on her face.
He perused the section on history and saw a few books that he might have bought had this been a different day. He would buy nothing now, nor even look at any volume for too long. He had to keep his mind busy, let himself think of things, anything to keep himself from wondering how he was going to face them at home, what he might say. They would, he knew, expect him to walk over from the train station to their house before he went to his own house, if there were any sort of news. He could imagine Stephen sitting by the fire, with a book maybe in his hand, or playing chess with his father, his cheeks red from the heat of the flames. He could imagine his mother moving in and out of the room. They would expect him to knock the door and then walk back along the path to the gate before it was answered. His mother, he knew, might blame Nora for his not coming into the house, but Tom would understand. And it would probably be Tom who would answer the door and come to the gate to hear the news.
He had nothing to tell them. He knew that they would, once the train whistle had been heard, wait in silence for his arrival at the door. He wondered now, as he went and looked at the shelves of books in Irish, if it would be worse to come with the news, which was no news, or if it would be better to leave it, go home to Nora. And let them realise as time passed that he had not come to them because he had no reason to come. The clock over the mantelpiece would tick and then chime gently on the hour. By nine, they would know he was late; by ten, they would be certain that he was not coming.
Out on Dawson Street again he could not think what to do. Even though he was now no longer hungry, he thought that he might go to Bewley’s on Grafton Street and have soup and brown bread, or maybe a sandwich. He bought an evening newspaper in Duke Street. He liked the crowds in the streets as he walked along and began to wonder if he should have looked for a job in Dublin once he got married, if Nora and he would be happier in a house, say, in Terenure or Stillorgan, where they would know only some of their neighbours, where they could go to the shops, or into the city centre, without meeting anyone they knew at all and not have to stop and talk to anyone. He realised as he reached Grafton Street that he had just fooled himself into thinking that if he lived in Dublin none of this would be happening. He sighed at the thought that everyone would, in fact, be just the same, the scene in the house where he was brought up, the house where his younger brother was now in slow decline, would be just as tense and watchful and would later be just as forlorn as each of them went to bed knowing that there was no news from Dublin and that there was nothing that could be done.
It was when he came to Bewley’s that he noticed the lane which led to Clarendon Street Church. He decided to walk down towards the church. He would not pray, he thought; he would not ask for anything which would not be granted. There had been enough prayers said, and they had made no difference. He was not sure, despite what others believed, that God interfered in small matters. But this was not a small matter for Stephen, he thought; it was only a small matter for those who did not know him. No one on this street knew anything about him. They were all themselves, living in their own minds, just as Stephen now was living in his and dreading its own extinction, the great change which was beyond imagining, which nobody knew about for sure, no matter how strong their faith was, no matter how hard they prayed.
He sat at the back of the church and let the minutes go by. There was a time, even when he was a student, that he would come into this church for mass, or on Saturday evening for confession. He had no knowledge then what a desolate place this church would be at a time in the future that was now. He could not think of anywhere more desolate. He stood up and genuflected and quietly left, realising that he was tracing steps in the city which he would never be able to retrace without remembering this, the day when he had been to the Dáil and seen the Minister.
He knew that Tom would be waiting for him after school the next day, and as he walked up Grafton Street towards the Green, he pictured Tom’s face when Tom realised for certain that Maurice’s not coming the previous evening had been deliberate, that he had nothing to tell them except that his journey to Dublin had been in vain. They would walk over the railway bridge together, past the bottom of Slaney Street, and they would walk past the Cotton Tree and into Slaney Place past Kelly’s Pharmacy and then up Castle Hill. They would stop and face each other at the door of Mylie Kehoe’s, and Maurice would shake his head, and then Tom would nod to him blankly, and they would turn away from one another in silence. They would not go into the pub. Tom would go home. And Maurice would walk on his own along Friary Place and then up Friary Hill to Court Street and John Street, feeling with each step he took that he was leaving a ghost trailing behind him, hovering in the darkening air, a solitary figure asking him if there was any news, if there was any hope. He would, he knew, make his way home then without looking back for a single moment.
The Crippled Man
William Trevor
‘WELL, THERE’S THAT IF YOU’D WANT IT,’ the crippled man said. ‘It’s a long time waiting for attention. You’d need tend the mortar.’
The two men who had come to the farmhouse consulted one another, not saying anything, only nodding and gesturing. Then they gave a price for painting the outside walls of the house and the crippled man said it was too much. He quoted a lesser figure, saying that had been the cost the last time. The men who had come looking for work said nothing. The tall one hitched up his trousers.
‘We’ll split the difference if that’s the way of it,’ the crippled man said.
Still not speaking, the two men shook their heads.
‘Be off with you in that case,’ the crippled man said.
They didn’t go, as if they hadn’t understood. It was a ploy of theirs to pretend not to understand, to frown and simulate confusion because, in any conversation, it was convenient sometimes to appear to be at a loss.
‘Two coats we’re talking about?’ the crippled man enquired.
The tall man said th
ey were. He was older than his companion, grey coming into his hair, but that was premature: both were still young, in their twenties.
‘Will we split the difference?’ the crippled man suggested again. ‘Two coats and we’ll split it?’
The younger of the men, who had a round, moon face and wire-rimmed glasses, offered another figure. He stared down at the grey, badly cracked flags of the kitchen floor, waiting for a response. The tall man, whose arms hung loosely and were lanky, like his body, sucked at his teeth, which was a way he had. If it was nineteen years since the house had been painted, he said, the price would have been less than would be worthwhile for them now. Nineteen years was what they had been told.
‘Are ye Polish?’ the crippled man asked.
They said they were. Sometimes they said that, sometimes they didn’t, depending on what they had previously ascertained about the presence of other Polish people in a locality. They were brothers, although they didn’t look like brothers. They were not Polish.
A black cat crept about the kitchen, looking for insects or mice. Occasionally it would pounce on a piece of bark that had fallen off the firewood, or a shadow. Fourteen days the painting would take, the young man said, and they’d work on a Sunday; then the cost of the work surfaced again. A price was agreed.
‘Notes,’ the tall man said, rubbing a thumb and forefinger together. ‘Cash.’
And that was agreed also.
*
Martina drove slowly, as she always did driving back from Carragh. More than once on this journey the old Dodge had stopped and she had had to walk to Kirkpatrick’s Garage to get assistance. Each time the same mechanic told her the car belonged to the antique brigade and should have been off the road for the past thirty years at the very least. But the ancient Dodge was part of Martina’s circumstances, to be tolerated because it was necessary. And, driven slowly, more often than not it got you there.
Costigan had slipped in a couple of streaky instead of back rashers, making up the half pound, he’d said, although he’d charged for back. She hadn’t said anything; she never did with Costigan. ‘Come out to the shed till we’ll see,’ he used to say, and she’d go with him to pick out a frozen pork steak or drumsticks she liked the look of in the shed where the deep freeze was, his hands all over her. He no longer invited her to accompany him to the deep freeze, but the days when he used to were always there between them, and she never ate pork steak or chicken legs without being reminded of how afterwards he used to push the money back to her when she paid and how in the farmhouse she hid it in the Gold Flake tin.
New Irish Short Stories Page 28