‘Anything wrong?’ he asked one evening when she was moodier than usual.
‘Oh, just fed up,’ she said, thrusting out her jaw.
‘Still fretting?’ he asked in surprise.
‘Ah, no. I can get over that. It’s Kitty and Nellie. They’re bitches, Ned; proper bitches. And all because I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. If one of them got dumped by a fellow she’d take two aspirins and go to bed with the other one. They’d have a lovely talk – can’t you imagine? “And was it then he said he loved you?” That sort of balls! I can’t do it. And it’s all because they’re not sincere, Ned. They couldn’t be sincere.’
‘Remember, they have a long start on you,’ Ned said.
Is that it?’ she asked without interest. ‘They think I’m batty. Do you, Ned?’
‘Not altogether,’ he said with a tight-lipped smile. ‘I’ve no doubt that Mrs Donoghue, if that’s her name, thought something of the sort.’
‘And wasn’t she right?’ Rita asked tensely. ‘Suppose she’d agreed to take the three hundred quid, wouldn’t I be properly shown up? I wake in a sweat whenever I think of it. I’m just a bloody chancer, Ned. Where would I get three hundred quid?’
‘Oh, I dare say someone would have lent it to you,’ he said with a shrug.
‘They would like hell. Would you?’
‘Probably,’ he said gravely after a moment’s thought. ‘I think I could raise it.’
‘Are you serious?’ she whispered earnestly.
‘Quite,’ he said in the same tone.
‘Cripes, you must be very fond of me,’ she gasped.
‘Looks like it,’ said Ned, and this time he laughed with real heartiness; a boy’s laugh of sheer delight at her astonishment. Of course, it was just like Rita to regard a lifetime’s friendship as sport, and the offer of three hundred pounds as the real thing.
‘Would you marry me?’ she asked with a frown. ‘I’m not proposing to you, mind, only asking,’ she added hastily.
‘Certainly, whenever you like,’ he said, spreading his hands.
‘Honest to God?’
‘Cut my throat,’ he replied, making the schoolboy gesture.
‘My God, why didn’t you ask me before I went down to that kip? I’d have married you like a shot. Was it the way you weren’t keen on me?’ she added, wondering if there wasn’t really something queer about him, as her sisters said.
‘No,’ he replied matter-of-factly, drawing himself together like an old clock preparing to strike. ‘I think I’ve been keen on you since the first day I met you.’
‘It’s easily seen you’re a Neddy Ned,’ she said. ‘I go after mine with a scalping knife.’
‘I stalk mine,’ he said smugly.
‘Cripes, Ned,’ she said with real regret, ‘I wish you’d told me sooner. I couldn’t marry you now.’
‘Couldn’t you? Why not?’
‘Because it wouldn’t be fair to you.’
‘You think I can’t look after myself?’
‘I have to look after you now.’ She glanced round the restaurant to make sure that no one was listening, and then went on in a dry, dispassionate voice, leaning one elbow wearily on the table. ‘I suppose you’ll think this is all cod, but it’s not. Honest to God, I think you’re the finest bloody man I ever met – even though you do think you’re an atheist or something,’ she interjected maliciously with a characteristic Lomasney flourish in the cause of Faith and Fatherland. ‘There’s no one in the world I have more respect for. I think I’d nearly cut my throat if I did something you really disapproved of – I don’t mean telling lies or going on a skite,’ she added hastily. ‘That’s only gas. I mean something that really shocked you. I think if I was tempted I’d ask myself: “How the hell would I face Lowry afterwards?” ’
For a moment she thought from his smile that he was going to cry. Then he squelched the butt of his cigarette on a plate and spoke in an extraordinarily quiet voice.
‘That’ll do me grand for a beginning,’ he said.
‘It wouldn’t, Ned,’ she said sadly. ‘That’s why I say I have to look after you now. You couldn’t understand it unless it happened to yourself and you fell in love with a doll the way I fell in love with Tony. Tony is a scut, and a cowardly scut at that, but I was cracked about him. If he came in here now and asked me to go off to Killarney on a week-end with him, I’d buy a nightdress and a toothbrush and go. And I wouldn’t give a damn what you or anybody thought. I might chuck myself in the lake afterwards, but I’d go. Christ, Ned,’ she exclaimed, flushing and looking as though she might burst into tears, ‘he couldn’t come into a room but I went all mushy inside. That’s what the real thing is like.’
‘Well,’ said Ned, apparently not in the least put out – in fact, looking rather pleased with himself, Rita thought – ‘I’m in no hurry. In case you get tired of scalping them, the offer will still be open.’
‘Thanks, Ned,’ she said absent-mindedly, as though she weren’t listening.
While he paid the bill, she stood in the porch, doing her face in the big mirror that flanked it, and paying no attention to the crowds who were hurrying homeward through lighted streets. As he emerged from the shop she turned on him suddenly.
‘About that matter, Ned,’ she said. ‘Will you ask me again, or do I have to ask you?’
He just managed to refrain from laughing outright.
‘As you like,’ he said with quiet amusement. ‘Suppose I repeat the proposal every six months.’
‘That would be a hell of a time to wait if I changed my mind,’ she said with a scowl. ‘All right,’ she added, taking his arm. ‘I know you well enough to ask you. If you don’t want me by that time, you can always say so. I won’t mind. I’m used to it now.’
4
Ned’s proposal came as a considerable support to Rita. It buttressed her self-esteem, which was always in danger of collapsing. She might be ugly and uneducated and a bit of a chancer, but the best man in Cork – the best in Ireland, she sometimes thought – wanted to marry her, even when she had been let down by another man. That was a queer one for her enemies! So while Kitty and Nellie made fun of her, she bided her time, waiting till she could really rock them. Since her childhood she had never given anything away without squeezing the last ounce of theatrical effect from it. She would tell her sisters, but not till she could make them feel properly sick.
It was a pity she didn’t because Ned was not the only one. There was also Justin Sullivan, the lawyer, who had once been by way of being engaged to Nellie. He had not become engaged to her because Nellie was as slippery as an eel, and had her cap set all the time at a solicitor called Fahy whom Justin despised with his whole heart and soul as a light-headed, butterfly sort of man. But Justin continued to come to the house. There happened to be no other that suited him half as well, and besides, he knew that sooner or later Nellie would make a mess of her life with Fahy, and his services would be required.
Justin, in fact, was a sticker. He was a good deal older than Rita; a tall, burly man with a broad face, a brow that was rising from baldness as well as brains, and a slow, watchful, ironic air. Like many lawyers he tended to conduct a conversation as though the person he was speaking to were a hostile witness who had to be coaxed into an admission of perjury or bullied into one of mental deficiency.
When Justin began to talk Fahy simply clutched his head and retired to sit on the stairs. ‘Can no one shut that fellow up?’ he would moan with a martyred air. No one could. The girls shot their little darts at him, but he only brushed them aside. Ned was the only one who could even stand up to him, and when the two of them argued about religion, the room became a desert. Justin, of course, was all for the Church. ‘Imagine for a moment that I am Pope,’ he would declaim in a throaty, rounded voice that turned easily to pompousness. ‘Easiest thing in the world, Justin,’ Kitty assured him once. He drank whiskey like water, and the more he drank, the more massive and logical and piously Catholic he became.
‘Tell me, Nellie,’ he asked one night in his lazy, amiable way, ‘do you talk like that to Rita because you like it, or out of a sense of duty?’
‘How soft you have it!’ cried Nellie. ‘We have to live with her. You haven’t.’
‘That may be my misfortune, Nellie,’ said Justin.
‘Is that a proposal, Justin?’ Kitty asked shrewdly.
‘Scarcely, Kitty,’ said Justin. ‘You’re not what I might call a good jury.’
‘Better be careful or you’ll have her calling on your mother, Justin,’ Kitty said maliciously.
‘I hope my mother has sufficient sense to realize it would be an honour, Kitty,’ Justin said severely.
When he rose to go, Rita accompanied him to the hall.
‘Thanks for the moral support, Justin,’ she said in a low voice and threw an overcoat over her shoulders to accompany him to the gate. When he opened the door they both stood and gazed round them. It was a moonlit night: the garden, patterned in black and silver sloped to the quiet suburban roadway where the gas-lamps burned with a dim green light. Beyond this gateways shaded by black trees led to flights of steps or steep-sloping avenues behind the moonlit houses on the river’s edge.
‘God, isn’t it lovely?’ said Rita.
‘Oh, by the way, Rita, that was a proposal,’ he said, slipping his arm through hers.
‘Janey Mack, they’re falling,’ she said, and gave his arm a squeeze.
‘What are?’
‘Proposals. I never knew I was so popular.’
‘Why? Have you had others?’
‘I had one anyway.’
‘And did you accept it?’
‘No,’ Rita said doubtfully. ‘Not quite. At least, I don’t think I did.’
‘You might consider this one,’ Justin said with unusual humility. ‘You know, of course, that I was very fond of Nellie. At one time I was very fond of her, indeed. You don’t mind that, I hope. It’s all over and done with now, and no regrets on either side.’
‘No, Justin, of course I don’t mind. If I felt like marrying you I wouldn’t give it a second thought. But I was very much in love with Tony too, and that’s not all over and done with yet.’
‘I know that, Rita,’ he said gently. ‘I know exactly what you feel. We’ve all been through it.’ He might as well have left it there, but, being a lawyer, Justin liked to see his case properly set out. ‘That won’t last for ever. In a month or two you’ll be over it, and then you’ll wonder what you saw in that fellow.’
‘I don’t think so, Justin,’ she said with a crooked smile, not altogether displeased to be able to enlighten him about the utter hopelessness of her position. ‘I think it will take a great deal longer than that.’
‘Well, say six months even,’ Justin went on, prepared to yield a point to the defence. ‘All I ask is that in one month or six, when you’ve got over your regrets for this – this amiable young man’ (momentarily his voice took on its familiar ironic tone) ‘you’ll give me a thought. I’m old enough not to make any more mistakes. I know I’m fond of you, and I feel sure I could make a success of my end of it.’
‘What you really mean is that I wasn’t in love with Tony at all,’ Rita said, keeping her temper with the greatest difficulty. ‘Isn’t that it?’
‘Not quite,’ Justin replied judiciously. Even if he had had a serenade as well as moonlight and a girl, Justin could not have resisted correcting what he considered a false deduction. ‘I’ve no doubt you were very much attracted by this – this clerical Adonis; this Mr Whatever-his-name-is, or that at any rate you thought you were, which in practice comes to the same thing, but I also know that that sort of thing, though it’s painful enough while it lasts, doesn’t last very long.’
‘You mean yours didn’t, Justin,’ Rita said tartly. By this time she was flaming.
‘I mean mine or anyone else’s,’ said Justin. ‘Because love – the only sort of thing you can really call love – is something that comes with experience. You’re probably too young yet to know what the real thing is.’
As Rita had only recently told Ned that he didn’t yet know what the real thing was, she found this very hard to stomach.
‘How old would you say you’d have to be,’ she asked viciously. ‘Thirty-five?’
‘You’ll know soon enough – when it hits you,’ said Justin.
‘Honest to God, Justin,’ she said withdrawing her arm and looking at him furiously, ‘I think you’re the thickest man I ever met.’
‘Good-night, my dear,’ said Justin with perfect good humour, and he took the few steps to the gate at a run.
Rita stood gazing after him with folded arms. At the age of twenty to be told that there is anything you don’t know about love is like a knife in your heart.
5
Kitty and Nellie persuaded Mrs Lomasney that the best way of distracting Rita’s mind was to find her a new job. As a new environment was also supposed to be good for her complaint, Mrs Lomasney wrote to her sister, who was a nun in England, and the sister found her work in a convent there. Rita let on to be indifferent though she complained bitterly enough to Ned.
‘But why England?’ he asked in surprise.
‘Why not?’
‘Wouldn’t any place nearer do you?’
‘I suppose I wouldn’t be far enough away.’
‘But why not make up your own mind?’
‘I’ll probably do that too,’ she said with a short laugh. ‘I’d like to see what’s in theirs first though. I might have a surprise for them.’
She certainly had that. She was to leave for England on Friday, and on Wednesday the girls gave a farewell party. Wednesday was the weekly half-holiday, and it rained steadily all day. The girls’ friends all turned up. Most of these were men: Bill O’Donnell of the bank, who was engaged to Kitty; Fahy, the solicitor, who was Justin’s successful rival for Nellie; Justin himself, who simply could not be kept out of the house by anything short of an injunction, Ned Lowry and a few others. Hasty soon retired with his wife to the dining-room to read the evening paper. He said all his daughters’ young men looked exactly alike and he never knew which of them he was talking to.
Bill O’Donnell was acting as barman. He was a big man, bigger even than Justin, with a battered boxer’s face and a negro smile that seemed to well up from depths of good humour with life rather than from anything that happened in it. He carried out loud conversations with everyone he poured out a drink for, and his voice overrode every intervening tête-à-tête, and even challenged the piano, on which Nellie was vamping music-hall songs.
‘Who’s this one for, Rita?’ he asked. ‘A bottle of Bass for Paddy. Ah, the stout man! Remember the New Year’s Night in Bandon, Paddy? Remember how you had to carry me up to the bank in evening dress and jack me up between the two wings of the desk? Kitty, did I ever tell you about that night in Bandon?’
‘Once a week for the past five years, Bill,’ Kitty sang out cheerfully.
‘Nellie,’ said Rita. ‘I think it’s time for Bill to sing his song. “Let Me Like a Soldier Fall”, Bill!’
‘My one little song!’ Bill said with a roar of laughter. ‘The only song I know, but I sing it grand. Don’t I, Nellie? Don’t I sing it fine?’
‘Fine!’ agreed Nellie, looking up at his big moon-face beaming at her over the piano. ‘As the man said to my mother, “Finest bloody soprano I ever heard.” ’
‘He did not, Nellie,’ Bill said sadly. ‘You’re making that up.… Silence, please!’ he shouted, clapping his hands. ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I must apologize. I ought to sing something like Tosti’s “Good-bye” but the fact is, ladies and gentlemen, that I don’t know Tosti’s “Good-bye”.’
‘Recite it, Bill,’ suggested Justin amiably.
‘I don’t know the words of it either, Justin,’ said Bill. ‘In fact, I’m not su
re if there is any such song, but if there is, I ought to sing it.’
‘Why, Bill?’ asked Rita innocently. She was wearing a long black dress that threw up the unusual brightness of her dark, bony face. She looked more cheerful than she had looked for months. All the evening it was as though she were laughing to herself at something.
‘Because ’twould be only right, Rita,’ Bill said with great melancholy, putting his arm round her and drawing her closer. ‘You know I’m very fond of you, don’t you, Rita?’
‘And I’m mad about you, Bill,’ Rita said candidly.
‘I know that, Rita,’ he said mournfully, pulling at his collar as though to give himself air. ‘I only wish you weren’t going, Rita. This place isn’t the same without you. Kitty won’t mind my saying that,’ he added with a nervous glance at Kitty, who was flirting with Justin on the sofa.
‘Are you going to sing your blooming old song or not?’ Nellie asked impatiently, running her fingers over the keys.
‘I’m going to sing now in one minute, Nellie,’ Bill replied ecstatically, stroking Rita fondly under the chin. ‘I only want Rita to know we’ll miss her.’
‘Damn it, Bill,’ Rita said, snuggling up to him, ‘if you go on like that I won’t go at all. Would you sooner I didn’t go?’
‘I would sooner it, Rita,’ he said, stroking her cheeks and eyes. ‘You’re too good for the fellows there.’
‘Oh, go on doing that, Bill,’ she said. ‘It’s gorgeous, and you’re making Kitty mad jealous.’
‘Kitty isn’t jealous,’ Bill said mawkishly. ‘Kitty is a lovely girl and you’re a lovely girl. I hate to see you go, Rita.’
‘That settles it, Bill,’ she said, pulling herself free of him with a mock-determined air. ‘As you feel that way about it, I won’t go at all.’
‘Won’t you though!’ said Kitty sweetly.
‘Don’t worry your head about it, Bill,’ said Rita briskly. ‘It’s all off.’
Justin, who had been quietly getting through large whiskies, looked up lazily.
My Oedipus Complex Page 20