A Song of Sixpence

by A. J. Cronin

  ‘Your reverence!’ Her hands and eyes went up in horror. ‘In your shirt-sleeves. And such a state. And Mr and Mrs Lafferty waiting for you in the church with the poor unbaptized innocent infant, a good half-hour.’

  He got up, with an apologetic smile to Miss O’Riordan, looking rather like a guilty schoolboy. But as he hurried off he gave me an encouraging glance.

  ‘We’re not beaten yet, Laurence. We’ll try again.’

  We did try again. We tried repeatedly, and always without success. The reluctant engine became, for us, an absorbing hobby. We discussed it daily, in unmechanical terms, determined not to be beaten.

  On Wednesday of the following week we had just had dinner; Uncle’s coffee had been brought in, he had selected and lit his thin cigar. He always smoked this in a dreamy manner with half-closed lids as though transporting himself back to his beloved Valladolid. How surprised and saddened I should have been had I known that within a few months he would in fact be transferred back to that city to become a member of the College staff. But this afternoon I did not know nor, I am sure, did he. Mellowed by the coffee and cigar, there was a quizzical look in his eye.

  ‘The Flying Scotsman?’

  ‘Yes, Uncle,’ I shouted.

  We brought the engine out from, the toolshed. While Miss O’Riordan watched disapproving from the kitchen window, making remarks under her breath to Mrs Vitello, we fed it oil, spirit and water, saw it boil furiously to bursting point. And all without effect. It simply would not ‘ go’.

  With our heads over the straining machine Uncle said, in a voice wherein, at last, I detected a note of pessimism:

  ‘It must be blocked somewhere. Try giving it a shake.’

  I gave it a despairing shake, a hard, a violent shake, and finally, in a temper, I kicked it. Immediately there was a sharp explosion. The boiler, from its internal parts, shot out a blob of viscous matter. Steam hissed from an unsuspected valve. The wheels spun violently and the Flying Scotsman shot away from us like an arrow.

  ‘Hurrah!’ I yelled. ‘It’s going. Look, Miss O’Riordan, look!’

  Straight down the concrete path it sped, gathering momentum with every thrust of its powerful pistons, wheels racing, steam flying, its firebox sparking like a comet’s tail. A glorious, stupendous sight!

  ‘Oh, heavens,’ suddenly exclaimed my uncle.

  I followed his eyes. Sarah Mooney had come out of the church and, with her head down and her bad leg dragging, was hobbling towards us on her crutch.

  ‘Look out, Sarah!’ shouted Uncle Simon.

  Sarah, absorbed by the prospect of tea, did not hear, and the engine, bearing down with an accuracy almost inspired, struck her crutch fair and square. The crutch flew into the air in a perfect arc and broke with a resounding crash. Mrs Mooney sat down on the concrete, while the engine, emitting billows of steam, spun over on its side and lay panting hoarsely on the grass. For a moment Sarah sat stupefied, enveloped in a heavenly cloud, then with a screech she scrambled to her feet and ran, ran like a hare, to the safety of the church.

  ‘Well, thank God she isn’t hurt.’ Uncle turned to Miss O’Riordan, who had now joined us.

  ‘But Uncle Simon,’ I clutched his arm, finding my voice at last, ‘didn’t you see? She ran. No crutch. Actually ran. It’s a miracle.’

  He looked at me thoughtfully, but before he could answer Miss O’Riordan, who for once was looking pleased, interposed.

  ‘If she’s not back tomorrow with two crutches that will be a miracle.’

  Uncle still said nothing, but he was smiling now. I think he had enjoyed Sarah Mooney’s twenty-yard dash.

  The flying Scotsman, after its brief moment, never was the same again, and without any attempt at repair, was retired to the attic. Indeed, from that day on, the whole complexion of my stay at the rectory changed. I was told nothing, but from Miss O’Riordan’s expression and my uncle’s manner, which became serious and more concealed, the news from Ardfillan was obviously much worse. Simon began to cross the firth more often, returning with a sad face which he tried, not always with success, to lighten when I appeared. In the kitchen, too, I would break in on muted conversations between Miss O’Riordan and Mrs Vitello, to be greeted with excessive and too obvious endearments, but not before I had heard the two ominous, often repeated words, ‘galloping consumption’, words which immediately and vividly created in my mind’s eye a vision of my father, pale as on that unforgettable night, galloping madly to destruction on a great white horse.

  I never understood or sought to explain to myself why the horse should be white, but I knew then, knew absolutely, and with a strange apathy, that my father would soon die. Had I not sensed, unconsciously, on that night of blood that he would not recover? I hung about the house, feeling neglected, hearing with impatience the whispers of ‘another haemorrhage’, resentful, of the gravity and preoccupation of the others, chilled by the loss of the warmth that had enveloped me.

  One evening, some ten days later, I had coaxed, perhaps tormented my uncle into a game of draughts. We were at the board and he had permitted me to crown a man when I heard a door bell ring, a sound I disliked since it usually was the prelude to a sick call. But when Miss O’Riordan entered, she had a telegram in her hand. My uncle read it, turned pale, and said:

  ‘I must go to the church, Laurie.’

  Miss O’Riordan went out of the room with him, leaving me alone. Not a word to me. Yet I had known instantly. I did not cry. Instead a dullness, a kind of heavy dreariness descended on me. I looked at the draughtboard, regretting the untimely ending of the game where, with my crowned man, I held a winning position. I counted the piles of pennies on the mantelshelf, twelve pennies in each pile, studied again my friend, the old man on the pillar, then went down to the kitchen.

  Miss O’Riordan was weeping and, with many fervent ejaculations, saying her beads.

  ‘I have a headache, dear,’ she explained, concealing the rosary under her apron.

  I felt like saying: ‘Why tell a lie, Miss O’Riordan?’

  But I gave no sign of grief until the following morning when Miss O’Riordan, deputed for the occasion, led me to the window of the sitting-room, put an arm about my shoulders and while we both gazed distantly to the harbour where a Clan Line ship was in process of unloading, proceeded, by a series of low-toned graduated remarks, to break the news gently. Then, because I felt I must, that it was expected of me, I burst dutifully into tears. But they were quickly dried, so quickly that Miss O’Riordan was able to remark several times in the course of the day, and with a complacent air of self-achievement: ‘ He took it well!’

  In the afternoon, having dressed herself ‘ for the town’, she took me into Port Cregan and bought me a ready-made black suit which, being chosen, as she put it, for my growth, was a shameful misfit. The jacket hung on me like a sack, the wide trousers, unlike my own neat shorts, sagged halfway down my calves, giving the impression of a man’s long trousers, amputated well below the knee. Determined to make me a walking example of grief the good Miss O’Riordan completed the outfit with a black bowler hat that extinguished me, a black tie, a crape band for my arm and black gloves.

  Next morning, in this hideous panoply of death that made me look like a miniature mute, I said goodbye to Miss O’Riordan who, in embracing me, calling me ‘her poor lamb’, bathed me with her incomprehensible tears. But perhaps she foresaw better than I what lay ahead of me. Then, accompanying my uncle. I departed in a cab for the Ardfillan boat.

  We sat on deck where the same German quartet discoursed the same lively Viennese waltz tunes. My heart lifted up at the music to which some children were skipping around. I wanted to jump up and join them, but sombrely conscious of my attire which, in fact, had drawn upon me much sympathetic attention, I dared not.

  Chapter Twelve

  The funeral took place privately in Lochbridge where, in the local cemetery, a family plot had been honourably provided by my father’s humble yet eminently worthy parents.
It was in this industrial town that Laurence and Mary Carroll, driven from their Irish croft by the great potato famine, had settled to lead out their lives in pious obscurity, here my father had lodged in bachelor rooms before his marriage, and here too was Uncle Bernard’s establishment, the Lomond Vaults, now revealed, to my surprise and chagrin, as a rambling, run-down public-house, above which my uncle and his wife resided with my two cousins, Terence and Nora.

  The afternoon was grey and drizzling as the cortège set out from the church. But I was not there to view it. To my immense relief Mother had ruled that I must not attend the burial. On the previous day, over my frantic protests, I had been induced by Uncle Bernard to take what he called ‘a last farewell’ of my father in his coffin. This was my introduction to death, and I had been frozen by the sight of Father, so young, so handsome, a perfect waxen image of himself, stretched in the sumptuous, embossed, richly cushioned shell that Uncle Bernard himself, with extravagant sentimentality and against Mother’s wishes, had ordered. Prepared immaculately for the grave, hair brushed, moustache clipped, Father was groomed, as he himself would have ironically phrased it, ‘to a hair’. Then, as Uncle Bernard, oozing tears, lifted one of those flaccid, clay-cold hands and placed it in mine, tightening my skin with horror, I noticed at the same instant on the dead chin, cleanshaven by the undertaker only the day before, a faint reddish beard beginning to sprout. With a shriek I tore myself free and dashed so wildly from the room that I cut my head on the jamb of the door. So now, with a bandage round my brow, but freed from the further terrors at the graveside, I waited with my new cousin Nora in the backyard of the Lomond Vaults.

  The yard lay between the railway line and rear premises of the red-brick Vaults, a strange, unbelievable yard, enclosed by broken wooden palings, a no-man’s-land, littered with lumber, with wooden cases, with stacks of empty and broken bottles and their rain-sodden straw casings. A heap of coke blocked the cellar door, in one corner there was a dilapidated poultry hut before which hens scraped, pecked and cackled, in another a range of dog kennels that seemed held together by a tangle of rusted wire. And all this existed in such a state of wild disorder, contrasting with the spotless order of my own home, with all that I had known or seen before, it actually became invested with a fearful and attractive charm.

  Something of this must have shown in my face as I glanced around, for Nora favoured me with a mischievous, inquiring smile.

  ‘It’s not very tidy, is it, man?’

  ‘Not very,’ I agreed tactfully.

  ‘That’s how things are here. We’re always in a mess.’ She added carelessly: ‘The whole property’s condemned.’

  ‘Condemned?’ The word had a sinister sound.

  ‘Ordered to be pulled down. By the town council. If it doesn’t fall down first.’

  At that moment a Caledonian train roared past, perhaps the very train that my poor father had taken in his youth, and in the thunder of its passage, as though bearing out Nora’s words, the entire yard rattled, boxes fell off the top of the pile, the hens scuttled for shelter, while the house itself, quivering and vibrating throughout its aged structure, loosed a small piece of mortar that fell exactly at my feet. I gazed at her apprehensively.

  ‘But what will you do then, Nora? When it’s pulled down?’

  ‘We’ll just go bankrupt, I suppose, like we nearly did before.’

  Was she joking? No, apparently she was serious, yet she did not seem to mind a bit, and with complete unconcern was smiling at me again. I liked her smile, so full of a careless ease that was beyond me. Indeed, although I had known my cousin only a few hours, I was inclined to like all of her, especially her thin, delicate, vivid face which, despite the bereavement in the family, was bright and full of fun. Her skin had a creamy colour, her eyes were almost black with long curling lashes and her hair, which she kept tossing about, was a glossy black also. Although almost three years older than me, she was small, still about my height, and very skinny, with thin elbows and legs. She had been dressed for the occasion in a smart new braided black voile dress with fetching pleats which, contradicting her protestations of financial insolvency, had a most expensive look.

  ‘That’s Terry’s dog. The Joker.’

  As though anxious to stir up our lagging conversation she had resumed her air of cicerone, pointing to a long, lean, mouse coloured hound with melancholy eyes and a thin curved rat-like tail that silently materialized in an elongated manner from the recesses of the kennel, a dog of a species I had never seen before and which bore absolutely no resemblance to the aristocratic canines that I had hitherto observed being carefully walked out in the privileged Ardfillan thoroughfares.

  ‘Is it a mongrel?’ I inquired.

  ‘God, no. Don’t you know a whippet when you see one? The Joker’s a valuable animal that cost a mint of money. And has made a mint for Terry. You’ll not beat Terry at the races, dog, horse, or man.’

  My expression of total incomprehension must have made her want to give me up. Yet although she shook her head she was not easily defeated. She chose however a simpler gambit.

  ‘Well,’ she commented, breaking the silence, ‘they’ll soon be back. But not Uncle Simon. He can’t get out of his appointment with the Bish.’

  Not to be behind her, I nodded agreement, although I had not the faintest idea what she meant or who the Bish might be. Before leaving for the cemetery Uncle Simon had talked privately with my mother, but I had no idea of the nature of their conversation.

  ‘Naturally the old Bish is against it,’ she went on, ‘but he’ll have to give in. You understand it’s a great honour for Simon.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I lied. This little wretch seemed to have the inside track on everything. Only a fearful curiosity made me ask: ‘ Who is the Bish, Nora?’ She stared at me.

  ‘The Bishop, man, old Mick Macauley in Winton. Don’t you know that they want Simon back to teach at the College in Spain?’

  I gazed at her in shocked dismay. So Uncle Simon would be leaving us, just when I had become so fond of him. And Mother had been counting on him too.

  ‘Uncle Leo will be coming back though,’ I said, after a pause, anxious not to lose the stabilizing presence of this other uncle whom I had never seen until today.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ she said indifferently. ‘Leo’ll be back, he has to wait for his train. He’s a queer one.’

  ‘Queer?’

  ‘And deep … You’ll see for yourself. Terry calls him a cold-blooded bastard.’

  This unmentionable word uttered with such casual aplomb she might still have been referring to the Bishop, shook me to my heels. But I persisted.

  ‘What does he do, Nora?’

  ‘He has a warehouse in Winton. Sells cloth wholesale. But Uncle Conor used to laugh and say that no one ever knew what Leo was up to.’

  Since the day before I had been in a highly agitated state and this unexpected reference to my father, alive and laughing, brought a sudden rush of tears to my eyes. She frowned at me protestingly.

  ‘God, don’t start that again, just when I was beginning to take to you. Here, come on and I’ll show you the hens.’

  Grasping my arm she dragged me forcibly into the hen house, bent on distracting me at all costs.

  ‘See, there they are. Chookey, chookey, chookey. We had a dozen but two died. That one’s broody, I have to chase it off the nest. Get off, there, you old devil. And here’s an egg, a brown one too, we’ll take it up and I’ll boil it for your tea.’

  She held up the smooth, brown, slightly speckled egg enticingly. But it was no use. The startling change from daylight to the dim mysterious interior of the hen house, redolent of straw and other more acrid odours, had increased my woe.

  ‘Will you stop it, man, for the love of God?’

  Holding the egg, she pushed me against the wall of the hen house, and with one arm firmly round my neck and the other braced above me against the wall, she began to butt me hard with her head. The brush of her hair against my ch
eek, the warmth of her nearness, the determined encirclement of her arms, all this was strangely soothing. When, at last, rather short of breath, she paused, I felt a sharp regret that her restorative treatment had not continued longer. I had begun to smile wanly when suddenly I became conscious of a sticky coagulation on the top of my skull that was now running down the back of my neck.

  ‘Oh, God, the egg’s broke,’ she exclaimed. ‘Quick, give us your hanky. There now, never mind, never mind, it’s a grand shampoo, nothing better for the hair.’

  What could I do but submit to her ministrations as she mopped me up?

  ‘Anyway, that’s knocked the water out of you,’ she declared, examining me critically. ‘ But you could still do with a sup of something on the way up.’

  Dociley, I permitted her to lead me across the yard to the back door, then along a narrow passage into the saloon bar. While I gazed with a neophyte’s wonder at the ivory beer pulls, the rows of bottles on the shelves, the sawdust thickly strewn on the floor, making round islands of the brass spittoons, she remarked:

  ‘Out of respect we’re closed till the evening.’

  She advanced calmly to a small china barrel on the counter emblazoned with the words RUBY PORT. Turning the little nickel tap she expertly drew off two full glasses of the wine.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘Put this down. But don’t tell. It’ll stiffen you up.’

  I was now clay in her hands. While she sipped her portion, I ‘put mine down’. Then I followed her up the back stairs to the parlour, a big room full of good but knocked-about furniture and, in its own way, almost as untidy as the yard. Above the fireplace, before which some towels hung drying, was a large coloured photograph of Pope Leo XIII, with some strips of yellowish palm stuck in at the top, and at the bottom a pink notice for the June Ayr Races. A treadle harmonium with broken keys stood at the far end of the room, and in an adjoining corner were some odd shoes, a split bag of dog biscuits, some battered prayer books, and a pair of old striped braces. It seemed inconceivable that Uncle Bernard should be so different from my father, who hated slovenliness and in his own person, and in all that applied to hygiene, was almost excessively fastidious.