by David Miller
Henry said: “I want you to understand that I won’t be party to this – in any way.”
She shrugged and said: “You want them to understand” – and sent a look back to the house. Whereupon, on his entire being, the suspended charm of the afternoon worked. He protested against the return to the zone of death, and perhaps never ever seeing all this again. The cruciform lilac flowers, in all their purples, and the colourless mountains behind Mrs Vesey’s face besought him. The moment he had been dreading, returning desire, flooded him in this tunnel of avenue, with motors swishing along the road outside and Maria standing staring at him. He adored the stoicism of the group he had quitted – with their little fears and their great doubts – the grace of the thing done over again. He thought, with nothing left but our brute courage, we shall be nothing but brutes.
“What is the matter?” Maria said. Henry did not answer: they turned and walked to and fro inside the gates. Shadow played over her dress and hair: feeling the disenchantedness of his look at her she asked again, uneasily, “What’s the matter?”
“You know,” he said, “when you come away from here, no one will care any more that you are Maria. You will no longer be Maria, as a matter of fact. Those looks, those things that are said to you – they make you, you silly little girl. You are you only inside their spell. You may think action is better – but who will care for you when you only act? You will have an identity number, but no identity. Your whole existence has been in contradistinction. You may think you want an ordinary fate – but there is no ordinary fate. And that extraordinariness in the fate of each of us is only recognized by your aunt. I admit that her view of life is too much for me – that is why I was so stiff and touchy today. But where shall we be when nobody has a view of life?”
“You don’t expect me to understand you, do you?”
“Even your being a savage, even being scornful – yes, even that you have got from them. – Is that my bus?”
“At the other side of the river: it has still got to cross the bridge – Henry –” she put her face up. He touched it with kisses thoughtful and cold. “Goodbye,” he said, “Miranda.”
“– Maria –”
“Miranda. This is the end of you. Perhaps it is just as well.”
“I’ll be seeing you –”
“You’ll come round my door in London – with your little new number chained to your wrist.”
“The trouble with you is, you’re half old.”
Maria ran out through the gates to stop the bus, and Henry got on to it and was quickly carried away.
HOW TO WRITE A SHORT STORY
Sean O’Faolain
Sean O’Faolain (1900–1991), the son of a police constable, was born over a pub in Cork. After studying at University College, Cork, he served as a courier and publicity officer for the IRA. It was Joseph Conrad who wrote, in The Secret Agent, “The terrorist and the policeman both come from the same basket.” It is possible this has never been so nearly true. O’Faolain started to have his writing published in 1932. His work includes biographies, travel books, a study of the short story and a memoir. Married to the writer Eileen, he was the father of Julia O’Faolain.
One wet January night, some six months after they had met, young Morgan Myles, our country librarian, was seated in the doctor’s pet armchair, on one side of the doctor’s fire, digesting the pleasant memory of a lavish dinner, while leafing the pages of a heavy photographic album and savouring a warm brandy. From across the hearth the doctor was looking admiringly at his long, ballooning Gaelic head when, suddenly, Morgan let out a cry of delight.
“Good Lord, Frank! There’s a beautiful boy! One of Raphael’s little angels.” He held up the open book for Frank to see. “Who was he?”
The doctor looked across at it and smiled.
“Me. Aged twelve. At school in Mount Saint Bernard.”
“That’s in England. I didn’t know you went to school in England.”
“Alas!”
Morgan glanced down at twelve, and up at sixty.
“It’s not possible, Frank!”
The doctor raised one palm six inches from the arm of his chair and let it fall again.
“It so happened that I was a ridiculously beautiful child.”
“Your mother must have been gone about you. And,” with a smile, “the girls too.”
“I had no interest in girls. Nor in boys either, though by your smile you seem to say so. But there was one boy who took a considerable interest in me.”
Morgan at once lifted his nose like a pointer. At this period of his life he had rested from writing poetry and was trying to write short stories. For weeks he had read nothing but Maupassant. He was going to out-Maupassant Maupassant. He was going to write stories that would make poor old Maupassant turn as green as the grass on his grave.
“Tell me about it,” he ordered. “Tell me every single detail.”
“There is nothing to it. Or at any rate, as I now know, nothing abnormal. But, at that age!” – pointing with his pipestem. “I was as innocent as … Well, as innocent as a child of twelve! Funny that you should say that about Raphael’s angels. At my preparatory school here – it was a French order – Sister Angélique used to call me her petit ange, because, she said, I had ‘une tête d’ange et une voix d’ange.’ She used to make me sing solo for them at Benediction, dressed in a red soutane, a white lacy surplice and a purple bow tie.
“After that heavenly place Mount Saint Bernard was ghastly. Mobs of howling boys. Having to play games; rain, hail or snow. I was a funk at games. When I’d see a fellow charging me at rugger I’d at once pass the ball or kick for touch. I remember the coach cursing me. ‘Breen, you’re a bloody little coward, there are boys half your weight on this field who wouldn’t do a thing like that.’ And the constant discipline. The constant priestly distrust. Watching us like jail warders.”
“Can you give me an example of that?” Morgan begged. “Mind you, you could have had that, too, in Ireland. Think of Clongowes. It turns up in Joyce. And he admired the Jesuits!”
“Yes, I can give you an example. It will show you how innocent I was. A month after I entered Mount Saint Bernard I was so miserable that I decided to write to my mother to take me away. I knew that every letter had to pass under the eyes of the Prefect of Discipline, so I wrote instead to Sister Angélique asking her to pass on the word to my mother. The next day old Father George Lee – he’s long since dead – summoned me to his study. ‘Breen!’ he said darkly, holding up my unfortunate letter, ‘you have tried to do a very underhand thing, something for which I could punish you severely. Why did you write this letter in French?’” The doctor sighed. “I was a very truthful little boy. My mother had brought me up to be truthful simply by never punishing me for anything I honestly owned up to. I said, “I wrote it in French, sir, because I hoped you wouldn’t be able to understand it.” He turned his face away from me but I could tell from his shoulders that he was laughing. He did not cane me, he just tore up the letter, told me never to try to deceive him again, and sent me packing with my tail between my legs.”
“The old bastard!” Morgan said sympathetically, thinking of the lonely little boy.
“No, no! He was a nice old man. And a good classical scholar, I later discovered. But that day as I walked down the long corridor, with all its photographs of old boys who had made good, I felt the chill of the prison walls!”
“But this other boy?” Morgan insinuated, “Didn’t his friendship help at all?”
The doctor rose and stood with his back to the fire staring fixedly in front of him.
(He rises, Morgan thought, his noble eyes shadowed. No! God damn it, no! Not noble. Shadowed? Literary word. Pensive? Blast it, that’s worse. “Pensive eve!” Romantic fudge. His eyes are dark as a rabbit’s droppings. That’s got it! In his soul … Oh, Jase!)
“Since I was so lonely I suppose he must have helped. But he was away beyond me. Miles above me. He was a senior. He was the
captain of the school.”
“His name,” Morgan suggested, “was, perhaps, Cyril?”
“We called him Bruiser. I would rather not tell you his real name.”
“Because he is still alive,” Morgan explained, “and remembers you vividly to this day.”
“He was killed at the age of twenty.”
“In the war! In the heat of battle.”
“By a truck in Oxford. Two years after he went up there from Mount Saint Bernard. I wish I knew what happened to him in those two years. I can only hope that before he died he found a girl.”
“A girl? I don’t follow. Oh yes! Of course, yes, I take your point.”
(He remembers with tenderness? No. With loving kindness! No! With benevolence? Dammit, no! With his wonted chivalry to women? But he remembered irritably that the old man sitting opposite to him was a bachelor. And a virgin?)
“What happened between the pair of ye? ‘Brothers and companions in tribulation on the isle that is called Patmos’?”
The doctor snorted.
“Brothers? I have told you I was twelve. Bruiser was eighteen. The captain of the school. Captain of the rugby team. Captain of the tennis team. First in every exam. Tops. Almost a man. I looked up to him as a shining hero. I never understood what he saw in me. I have often thought since that he may have been amused by my innocence. Like the day he said to me, ‘I suppose, Rosy,’ that was my nickname, I had such rosy cheeks, ‘suppose you think you are the best-looking fellow in the school?’ I said, ‘No, I don’t, Bruiser. I think there’s one fellow better-looking than me, Jimmy Simcox.’”
“Which he, of course, loyally refused to believe!”
The old doctor laughed heartily.
“He laughed heartily.”
“A queer sense of humour!”
“I must confess I did not at the time see the joke. Another day he said, ‘Would you like, Rosy, to sleep with me?’”
Morgan’s eyes opened wide. Now they were getting down to it.
“I said, ‘Oh, Bruiser, I don’t think you would like that at all. I’m an awful chatterbox in bed. Whenever I sleep with my Uncle Tom he’s always saying to me, “Will you for God’s sake, stop your bloody gabble and let me sleep.”’ He laughed for five minutes at that.”
“I don’t see much to laugh at. He should have sighed. I will make him sigh. Your way makes him sound a queer hawk. And nothing else happened between ye but this sort of innocent gabble? Or are you keeping something back? Hang it, Frank, there’s no story at all in this!”
“Oh, he used sometimes to take me on his lap. Stroke my bare knee. Ruffle my hair. Kiss me.”
“How did you like that?”
“I made nothing of it. I was used to being kissed by my elders – my mother, my bachelor uncles, Sister Angélique, heaps of people.” The doctor laughed. “I laugh at it now. But his first kiss! A few days before, a fellow named Calvert said to me, ‘Hello, pretty boy, would you give me a smuck?’ I didn’t know what a smuck was. I said, ‘I’m sorry, Calvert, but I haven’t got one.’ The story must have gone around the whole school. The next time I was alone with Bruiser he taunted me. I can hear his angry, toploftical English voice. ‘You are an innocent mug, Rosy! A smuck is a kiss. Would you let me kiss you?’ I said, ‘Why not?’ He put his arm around my neck in a vice and squashed his mouth to my mouth, hard, sticky. I thought I’d choke. ‘O Lord,’ I thought, ‘this is what he gets from playing rugger. This is a rugger kiss.’ And, I was thinking, ‘His poor mother! Having to put up with this from him every morning and every night.’ When he let me go, he said, ‘Did you like that?’ Not wanting to hurt his feelings I said, imitating his English voice, ‘It was all right, Bruiser! A bit like ruggah, isn’t it?’ He laughed again and said, ‘All right? Well, never mind. I shan’t rush you.’”
Morgan waved impatiently.
“Look here, Frank! I want to get the background to all this. The telling detail, you know. ‘The little actual facts’ as Stendhal called them. You said the priests watched you all like hawks. The constant discipline, you said. The constant priestly distrust. How did ye ever manage to meet alone?”
“It was very simple. He was the captain of the school. The apple of their eye. He could fool them. He knew the ropes. After all, he had been there for five years. I remember old Father Lee saying to me once, ‘You are a very lucky boy, Breen, it’s not every junior that the captain of the school would take an interest in. You ought to feel very proud of his friendship.’ We used to have a secret sign about our meetings. Every Wednesday morning when he would be walking out of chapel, leading the procession, if that day was all right for us he used to put his right hand in his pocket. If for any reason it was not all right he would put his left hand in his pocket. I was always on the aisle of the very last row. Less than the dust. Watching for the sign like a hawk. We had a double check. I’d then find a note in my overcoat in the cloakroom. All it ever said was, ‘The same place.’ He was very careful. He only took calculated risks. If he had lived he would have made a marvellous politician, soldier or diplomat.”
“And where would ye meet? I know! By the river. Or in the woods? ‘Enter these enchanted woods ye who dare!’”
“No river. No woods. There was a sort of dirty old trunk room upstairs, under the roof, never used. A rather dark place with only one dormer window. It had double doors. He used to lock the outside one. There was a big cupboard there – for cricket bats or something. ‘If anyone comes,’ he told me, ‘you will have time to pop in there.’ He had it all worked out. Cautious man! I had to be even more cautious, stealing up there alone. One thing that made it easier for us was that I was so much of a junior and he was so very much of a senior, because, you see, those innocent guardians of ours had the idea that the real danger lay between the seniors and the middles, or the middles and the juniors, but never between the seniors and the juniors. They kept the seniors and the middles separated by iron bars and stone walls. Any doctor could have told them that in cold climates like ours the really dangerous years are not from fifteen up but from eighteen to anything, up or down. It simply never occurred to them that any senior could possibly be interested in any way in a junior. I, of course, had no idea of what he was up to. I had not even reached the age of puberty. In fact I honestly don’t believe he quite knew himself what he was up to.”
“But, dammit, you must have had some idea! The secrecy, the kissing, alone, up there in that dim, dusty box room, not a sound but the wind in the slates.”
“Straight from the nuns? Un petit ange? I thought it was all just pally fun.”
Morgan clapped his hands.
“I’ve got it! An idyll! Looking out dreamily over the fields from that dusty dormer window? That’s it, that’s the ticket. Did you ever read that wonderful story by Maupassant – it’s called An Idyll – about two young peasants meeting in a train, a poor, hungry young fellow who has just left home, and a girl with her first baby. He looked so famished that she took pity on him like a mother, opened her blouse and gave him her breast. When he finished he said, ‘That was my first meal in three days.’ Frank! You are telling me the most beautiful story I ever heard in my whole life.”
“You think so?” the doctor said morosely. “I think he was going through hell all that year. At eighteen? On the threshold of manhood? In love with a child of twelve? That is, if you will allow that a youth of eighteen may suffer as much from love as a man twenty years older. To me the astonishing thing is that he did so well all that year at his studies and at sports. Killing the pain of it, I suppose? Or trying to? But the in between? What went on in the poor devil in between?”
Morgan sank back dejectedly.
“I’m afraid this view of the course doesn’t appeal to me at all. All I can see is the idyll idea. After all, I mean, nothing happened!”
Chafing, he watched his friend return to his armchair, take another pipe from the rack, fill it slowly and ceremoniously from a black tobacco jar and light it with care. Peerin
g through the nascent smoke, Morgan leaned slowly forward.
“Or did something happen?”
“Yes,” the doctor resumed quietly. “Every year, at the end of the last term, the departing captain was given a farewell dinner. I felt sad that morning because we had not met for a whole week. And now, in a couple of days we would be scattered and I would never see him again.”
“Ha, ha! You see, you too were in love!”
“Of course I was, I was hooked,” the doctor said with more than a flicker of impatience. “However … That Wednesday as he passed me in the chapel aisle he put his right hand in his pocket. I belted off at once to my coat hanging in the cloakroom and found his note. It said, ‘At five behind the senior tennis court.’ I used always chew up his billet doux immediately I read it. He had ordered me to. When I read this one my mouth went so dry with fear that I could hardly swallow it. He had put me in an awful fix. To meet alone in the box room was risky enough, but for anybody to climb over the wall into the seniors’ grounds was unheard of. If I was caught I would certainly be flogged. I might very well be expelled. And what would my mother and father think of me then? On top of all I was in duty bound to be with all the other juniors at prep at five o’clock, and to be absent from studies without permission was another crime of the first order. After lunch I went to the Prefect of Studies and asked him to excuse me from prep because I had an awful headache. He wasn’t taken in one bit. He just ordered me to be at my place in prep as usual. The law! Orders! Tyranny! There was only one thing for it, to dodge prep, knowing well that whatever else happened later I would pay dearly for it.”
“And what about him? He knew all this. And he knew that if he was caught they couldn’t do anything to him. The captain of the school? Leaving in a few days? It was very unmanly of him to put you to such a risk. His character begins to emerge, and not very pleasantly. Go on!”