‘And what the hell did we tell all the lies for?’ asked Moll with her teeth on edge to be at Kendillon. ‘Thade Kendillon there swore black was white.’
‘What else would I do, woman? There was never an informer in my family.’
‘I’m surprised to hear it,’ said Moll vindictively, but the old man thumped his stick three or four times for silence.
‘We all told our story,’ he said, ‘and we told it well. And no one told it better than Moll. You’d think to hear her she believed it herself.’
‘I declare to God I very nearly did,’ she said with a wild laugh.
‘I seen great changes in my time, great changes,’ the old man said, shaking his head, ‘and now I see a greater change still.’
A silence followed his words. There was profound respect in all their eyes. The old man coughed and spat.
‘What change is that, Colm?’ asked Moll.
‘Did any of ye ever think the day would come when a woman in our parish would do the like of that?’
‘Never, never.’
‘But she might do it for land?’
‘She might.’
‘Or for money?’
‘She might so.’
‘She might indeed. When the hunger is money people kill for the money; when the hunger is land people kill for the land. But what are they killing for now? I tell ye, there’s a great change coming. In the ease of the world people are asking more. When I was a boy in the barony if you killed a beast you made six pieces of it, one for yourself and the rest for the neighbours. The same if you made a catch of fish. And that’s how it was with us from the beginning of time. But now look at the change! The people aren’t as poor or as good or as generous or as strong.’
‘Or as wild,’ added Moll with a vicious glance at Kendillon. ‘ ’Tis in the men you’d mostly notice the change.’
The door opened and Magner, Delancey, and the sergeant entered. Magner was already drunk.
‘I was lonely without you, Moll,’ he said. ‘You’re the biggest and brazenest and cleverest liar of the lot and you lost me my sergeant’s stripes, but I’ll forgive you everything if you’ll give us one bar of the “Colleen Dhas Roo”.’
4
‘I’m a lonely man,’ said the drunk. ‘And I’m going back to a lonely habitation.’
‘My best friend,’ he continued, ‘I left behind me – Michael O’Leary, the most sincere man I know. ’Tis a great pity you don’t know Michael and a great pity Michael don’t know you. But look at the misfortunate way things happen! I was looking for someone to console me, and the moment I turned my back you were gone.’
He placed his hand solemnly under the woman’s chin and raised her face to the light. With the other hand he stroked her cheeks.
‘You have a beautiful face,’ he said reverently, ‘a beautiful face. But what’s more important, you have a beautiful soul. I look into your eyes and I see the beauty of your nature. Allow me one favour. Only one favour before we part.’
He bent and kissed her. Then he picked up his bowler which had fallen once more, put it on back to front, took his dispatch case, and got out.
The woman sat on alone. Her shawl was thrown open and beneath it she wore a bright-blue blouse. The carriage was cold, the night outside black and cheerless, and within her something had begun to contract that threatened to crush the very spark of life in her. She could no longer fight it off even when for the hundredth time she went over the scenes of the previous day; the endless hours in the dock, the wearisome questions and speeches she could not understand, and the long wait in the cells till the jury returned. She felt again the shiver of mortal anguish that went through her when the chief warder beckoned angrily from the stairs and the wardress, glancing hastily in a hand-mirror, pushed her forward. She saw the jury with their expressionless faces. She was standing there alone, in nervous twitches jerking back the shawl from her face to give herself air. She was trying to say a prayer but the words were being drowned in her mind by the thunder of nerves, crashing and bursting. She could feel one which had escaped dancing madly at the side of her mouth, but was powerless to recapture it.
‘The verdict of the jury is that Helena Maguire is not guilty.’ Which was it? Death or life? She could not say. ‘Silence! Silence!’ shouted the usher though no one had tried to say anything. ‘Any other charge?’ asked a weary voice. ‘Release the prisoner.’ ‘Silence!’ shouted the usher again. The chief warder opened the door of the dock and she began to run. When she reached the steps she stopped and looked back to see if she was being followed. A policeman held open a door and she found herself in an ill-lit, draughty stone corridor. She stood there, the old shawl about her face. The crowd began to emerge. The first was a tall girl with a rapt expression as though she were walking on air. When she saw the woman she halted, her hands went up in an instinctive gesture, as though to feel her, to caress her. It was that look of hers, that gait as of a sleepwalker that brought the woman to her senses.…
But now the memory had no warmth in her mind, and the something within her continued to contract, smothering her with loneliness, shame, and fear. She began to mutter crazily to herself. The train, now almost empty, was stopping at every little wayside station. Now and again a blast from the Atlantic pushed at it as though trying to capsize it.
She looked up as the door slammed open and Moll came in, swinging her shawl behind her.
‘They’re all up the train. Wouldn’t you come?’
‘No, no, I couldn’t.’
‘Why couldn’t you? Who are you minding? Is it Thade Kendillon?’
‘No, no, I’ll stop as I am.’
‘Here, take a sup of this.’ Moll fumbled in her shawl and produced a bottle of liquor as pale as water. ‘Wait till I tell you what Magner said! That fellow is a limb of the devil. “Have you e’er a drop, Moll?” says he. “Maybe I have,” says I. “What is it?” says he. “For God’s sake, baptize it quick and call it whiskey.” ’
The woman took the bottle and put it to her lips. She shivered as she drank.
‘ ’Tis a good drop,’ said Moll approvingly.
Next moment there were loud voices in the corridor. Moll grabbed the bottle and hid it under her shawl. But it was only Magner, the sergeant, and Delancey. After them came the two countrywomen, giggling. Magner held out his hand.
‘Helena,’ he said, ‘accept my congratulations.’
She took his hand, smiling awkwardly.
‘We’ll get you the next time though,’ he added.
‘Musha, what are you saying, mister?’
‘Not a word. You’re a clever woman, a remarkable woman, and I give you full credit for it. You threw dust in all our eyes.’
‘Poison is supposed to be an easy thing to trace but it beat me to trace it,’ said the sergeant, barely concealing his curiosity.
‘Well, well, there’s things they’re saying about me!’ she said with a nervous laugh.
‘Tell him,’ advised Magner. ‘There’s nothing he can do to you now. You’re as safe as the judge himself. Last night when the jury came in with the verdict you could have stood there in the dock and said: “Ye’re wrong. I did it. I got the stuff in such and such a place. I gave it to him because he was old and dirty and cantankerous and a miser. I did it and I’m proud of it.” You could have said every word of that and they couldn’t have laid a finger on you.’
‘Indeed, what a thing I’d say!’
‘Well, you could.’
‘The law is truly a remarkable phenomenon,’ said the sergeant, who was also rather squiffy. ‘Here you are, sitting at your ease at the expense of the state, and for one simple word of a couple of letters you could be up in Mountjoy, waiting for the rope and the morning jaunt.’
The woman shuddered. The young woman with the ravaged face looked up.
‘ ’Twas the holy will of God,’ she said.
‘ ’Twas all the bloody lies Moll Mhor told,’ replied Magner.
‘ ’Twas the
will of God.’
‘There was many hanged in the wrong,’ said the sergeant.
‘Even so, even so, ’twas God’s will.’
‘You have a new blouse, Helena,’ said the other woman in an envious tone.
‘I seen it last night in a shop on the quays.’
‘How much was it?’
‘Honour of God!’ exclaimed Magner, looking at the woman in stupefaction. ‘Is that all you had to think of? You should have been on your bended knees before the altar.’
‘And sure I was,’ she answered indignantly.
‘Women!’ exclaimed Magner with a gesture of despair. He winked at Moll and they retired to the next compartment. But the interior was reflected clearly in the corridor window, and the others could see the pale quivering image of the policeman lift the bottle to his lips and blow a long silent blast on it. The young woman who had spoken of the blouse laughed.
‘There’ll be one good day’s work done on the head of the trial,’ she said.
‘How so?’ asked the sergeant.
‘Dan Canty will make a great brew of poteen while ye have all yeer backs turned.’
‘I’ll get Dan Canty yet,’ replied the sergeant stiffly.
‘You will, the way you got Helena.’
‘I’ll get him yet,’ he said as he consulted his watch. ‘We’ll be in in another quarter of an hour. ’Tis time we were all getting back to our respective compartments.’
Magner entered and the other policemen rose. The sergeant fastened his collar and buckled his belt. Magner swayed, holding the doorframe, a mawkish smile on his thin, handsome, dissipated face.
‘Well, good-night to you now, ma’am,’ said the sergeant primly. ‘I’m as glad for all our sakes things ended as they did.’
‘Good night, Helena,’ said Magner, bowing low and promptly tottering. ‘There’ll be one happy man in Farranchreesht tonight.’
‘Come on, Joe,’ protested the sergeant.
‘One happy man,’ Magner repeated obstinately. ‘ ’Tis his turn now.’
‘You’re drunk, man,’ said Delancey.
‘You wanted him,’ Magner said heavily. ‘Your people wouldn’t let you have him but you have him now in spite of them all.’
‘Do you mean Cady Driscoll?’ hissed the woman with sudden anger, leaning towards Magner, the shawl tight about her head.
‘Never mind who I mean. You have him.’
‘He’s no more to me now than the salt sea.’
The policemen went out first, the women followed, Moll Mhor laughing boisterously. The woman was left alone. Through the window she could see little cottages stepping down over wet and naked rocks to the water’s edge. The flame of life had narrowed in her to a pinpoint, and she could only wonder at the force that had caught her up, mastered her and then thrown her aside.
‘No more to me,’ she repeated dully to her own image in the glass, ‘no more to me than the salt sea.’
The Corkerys
May MacMahon was a good-looking girl, the only child of Jack MacMahon, the accountant, and his wife, Margaret. They lived in Cork, on Summerhill, the steep street that led from the flat of the city to the heights of Montenotte. She had always lived the life of a girl of good family, with piano lessons, dancing class, and crushes on her schoolfriends’ brothers. Only occasionally did she wonder what it was all about, and then she invariably forgot to ask her father, who would certainly know. Her father knew everything, or almost everything. He was a tall, shy, good-looking man, who seemed to have been expecting martyrdom from his earliest years and drinking Irish whiskey to endure it. May’s mother was small and pretty and very opinionated, though her opinions varied, and anyway did not last long. Her father’s opinions never varied, and lasted for ever.
When May became friendly with the Corkery family, it turned out that he had always had strong opinions about them as well. Mr Corkery, a mild, inarticulate solicitor, whom May remembered going for lonely walks for the good of his health, had died and left his family with very limited means, but his widow had good connections and managed to provide an education (mostly free) for all six children. Of the boys, the eldest, Tom, was now a Dominican, and Joe, who came next in line, was also going in for the priesthood. The Church was in the family’s blood, because Mrs Corkery’s brother was the Dean and her sister was Mother Superior of the convent of an enclosed order outside the city. Mrs Corkery’s nickname among the children was ‘Reverend Mother’, and they accused her of imitating her sister, but Mrs Corkery only sniffed and said if everybody became priests and nuns there would soon be no Church left. Mrs Corkery seemed to believe quite seriously that the needs of the Church were the only possible excuse for sex.
From knowing the Corkerys May began to realize at last what life was about. It was no longer necessary to ask her father. Anyway he wouldn’t know. He and her mother were nice but commonplace. Everything they said and did was dull and predictable, and even when they went to Mass on Sunday they did so only because everyone else did it. The Corkerys were rarely dull and never predictable. Though their whole life seemed to centre on the Church, they were not in the least pietistic. The Dean fought with Mrs Corkery; Father Tim fought with Joe; the sisters fought with their brothers, who, they said, were getting all the attention, and fought one another when their brothers were not available. Tessie, the eldest girl, known as ‘The Limb of the Devil’, or just ‘The Limb’, was keeping company with a young stockbroker who told her a lot of dirty stories, which she repeated with great gusto to her brothers, particularly to Father Tim. This, however, was for family reasons, because they all agreed that Tim was inclined to put on airs.
And then The Limb astonished everybody by entering the convent where her aunt was Mother Superior. May attended the Reception in the little convent chapel, which struck her to the heart by its combination of poverty and gentility. She felt that the ceremony might have been tolerable in a great cathedral with a choir and thundering organ, but not in that converted drawing-room, where the nuns knelt along the side walls and squeaked like mourners. The Limb was laid out on the altar and first covered with roses as though she were dead; then an old nun clipped her long black hair with a shears. It fell and lay at her head as though it too had died. May drew a quick breath and glanced at Joe, who was kneeling beside her. Though he had his hands over his face, she knew from the way his shoulders moved that he was crying. Then she cried, too.
For a full week the ceremony gave her the horrors every time she remembered it, and she felt she should have nothing more to do with such an extraordinary family. All the same, a week with her parents was enough to make her realize the attraction of the Corkerys even more than before.
‘Did it scare you, May?’ Rosie, the second girl, asked with a wicked grin. ‘Cripes, it put the fear of God into me. I’m not having any of that de profundis stuff; I’m joining a decent missionary order.’ This was the first May had heard of Rosie’s vocation. Inside a year, she, too, was in a convent, but in Rome, and ‘having a gas time’, as she casually reported home.
They really were an extraordinary family, and the Dean was as queer as any of them. The Sunday following the ceremony May was at dinner there, and he put his hand firmly on her shoulder as though he were about to yank off her dress, and gave her a crooked smile that would have convinced any reasonable observer that he was a sex maniac, and yet May knew that almost every waking moment his thoughts were concentrated on outwitting the Bishop, who seemed to be the greatest enemy of the Church since Nero. The Bishop was a Dominican, and the Dean felt that a monk’s place was in the cloister.
‘The man is a bully!’ he said, with an astonishment and grief that would have moved any audience but his own family.
‘Oh, now, Mick!’ said Mrs Corkery placidly. She was accustomed to hearing the Bishop denounced.
‘I’m sorry, Josephine,’ the Dean said with a formal regret that rang equally untrue. ‘The man is a bully. An infernal bully, what’s more. I’m not criticizing you or the
Order, Tim,’ he said, looking at his nephew over his spectacles, ‘but monks simply have no place in ecclesiastical affairs. Let them stick to their prayers is what I say.’
‘And a queer way the world would be only for them,’ Joe said. Joe was going for the secular priesthood himself, but he didn’t like to see his overwhelming uncle get away with too much.
‘Their influence on Church history has been disastrous!’ the Dean bellowed, reaching for his cigarette case. ‘Always, or almost always, disastrous. That man thinks he knows everything.’
‘Maybe he does,’ said Joe.
‘Maybe,’ said the Dean, like an old bull who cannot ignore a dart from any quarter. ‘But as well as that, he interferes in everything, and always publicly, always with the greatest possible amount of scandal. “I don’t like the model of that church”; “Take away that statue”; “That painting is irreverent”. Begob, Joe, I don’t think even you know as much as that. I declare to God, Josephine, I believe if anyone suggested it to him that man would start inspecting the cut of the schoolgirls’ panties.’ And when everyone roared with laughter, the Dean raised his head sternly and said, ‘I mean it.’
Peter, the youngest boy, never got involved in these family arguments about the Bishop, the Orders, or the future of the Church. He was the odd man out. He was apprenticed in his father’s old firm and would grow up to be owner or partner. In every Irish family there is a boy like Peter whose task it is to take on the family responsibilities. It was merely an accident that he was the youngest. What counted was that he was his mother’s favourite. Even before he had a mind to make up, he knew it was not for him to become too involved, because someone would have to look after his mother in her old age. He might marry, but it would have to be a wife who suited her. He was the ugliest of the children, though with a monkey ugliness that was almost as attractive as Father Tim’s film-star looks and Joe’s ascetic masculine fire. He was slow, watchful, and good-humoured, with high cheekbones that grew tiny bushes of hair, and he had a lazy malice that could often be as effective as the uproarious indignation of his brothers and sisters.
My Oedipus Complex Page 38