But though he found himself walking rather exhaustingly uphill, and coming to a curious region of wide unfrequented streets and low terrace houses, shabbily genteel, dominated by a portentously spiky church, the mountains eluded him, for a mist was gathering and a muddied glow of street lighting steamed up between him and them. What he really wanted, after all, was a cup of tea, and he descended in search of it. Apparently this part of Dublin did not go in for teashops, there were no notices saying ‘Betty’s Parlour’; no vistas of pink-lit rooms and little tables; and suddenly he was out on the river again, in the teeth of the wind. He let it carry him towards the bridge he had earlier crossed with Jessop. The further side of the river had seemed considerably more prosperous, holding out more promise of pink-lit rooms and little tables and somewhere to sit down in and possibly a pretty waitress. A surge of hurrying people, sprung from nowhere, swept him across the river, and while he still thought he knew where he was going, he was borne on into a street that frightened him. A railway crossed it, and quantities of children with blackened faces darted in and out of alleyways, threatening each other with sparklers. It must have been somewhere near the docks, for twice he heard the melancholy lowing of a ship’s hooter. Here and there were groups of men who leaned against the lamp-posts and threw down playing cards on the pavement, and once he passed an old woman who sat on the kerb, rearranging the contents of a shopping basket and benignly hiccuping, for she was drunk. But there was nowhere he could sit or lean, and the stupidity of fatigue drove him on until he saw a man going into a church, and followed him. Here at least he could sit down. Sit down he did. But it made him feel conspicuous, for the other people scattered about the building—and though nothing was happening there was quite a number of them—were on their knees. Roman Catholics, of course. He had nothing against them, but they made him feel awkward and a stranger. Candles were burning, some before this image, some before that. They gave a sort of top-dressing of warmth to the building, but basically it was as cold as river mud, and under a glazing of incense it smelt of poverty. Besides, how was he to get out? All those who went out crossed themselves, genuflected, even walked with a particular pious stealthiness. He could do none of these things, yet he did not want to offend. Looking at his watch, he realized that he must get out immediately, if he were to collect his suitcase and be in time for Jessop. At the terminal he got a taxi, saw the Morgue again, quite an old friend, and was at his hotel with five minutes to spare.
His room was on the second floor. The curtains had not been drawn across, and noticing this he noticed at the same time what seemed a rather unusual expanse of moonlit sky; and heard the rustle of the wind in a tree. The tree was on the pavement opposite. Beyond it was the breadth of river and the quay beyond. He had crossed the river four times already, but this was the first time he had really looked at it. It caught and dandled and polished the lights along the further embankment and from the pattern of the ripples in the reflections he got a perturbing impression that the river was flowing the wrong way. Then he remembered the nearness of the sea. It must be the incoming tide he saw, pushing the inland waters before it, driving them under the dark arches of the bridge. He would have liked to watch it longer, but the thought of Jessop took him downstairs.
He need not have left his window so soon, for Jessop was late. He came in with a hurried, disobliging air, complained of the cold, and said, as though he were talking to a child, ‘Well, and how did you get on? How do you like Dublin?’
‘There’s one thing I couldn’t make out. Why are all those children rushing about with sparklers and black faces? I wouldn’t have expected Roman Catholics to go in for Guy Fawkes, somehow.’
‘Halloween.’
‘Halloween? But that’s Scotch. Still, no reason why they shouldn’t have it here, too. Scotch or Irish, eh? Which will you have to warm you up? I rather thought we’d have a bottle of Burgundy with our meal.’
They mixed grain and grape, they heaped roast duck on hot lobster.
‘What’s caragheen?’ he asked the waitress, when she took away the duck.
‘It’s mawss.’ She was a big tall woman, and she looked down on him maternally and spoke in a brooding, compassionate voice.
‘Moss,’ put in Jessop.
‘Oh! Well, I don’t think I’ll have that. What’ll you have, Jessop?’
‘I won’t have anything. I’ve got to be off. See you tomorrow.’
Left to himself, Repton ordered an omelet flambée, for he wanted something that would invigorate him. Jessop had warmed up with the Burgundy, but even so it had been quite an effort to keep conversation going, and their fortuitous affability grew increasingly threadbare. It would have been easier with a younger waitress perhaps.
The omelet was slow in coming. He dozed off while waiting for it. It was a large omelet; they certainly didn’t spare eggs in this country; but he got through it, looking at Jessop’s crumbs and thinking they were better than his company. The room was emptying, extending, darkening; but a steady rattle of conversation persisted from a family party some tables away—all of them, except for two silent little girls, discussing some sort of lawsuit. Silly to keep children up so late. He ordered coffee and a brandy.
‘Your coffee, sir.’
‘Eh? What’s that, what’s that?’
He heard his own voice, sounding loud and abrupt, opened his eyes, saw that the family party had somehow gone away, and fell asleep again, slumped in his chair, his head sinking forward, his hands relaxed on his thighs.
A change came over him. Sitting there in his heavy ruinous estate of age and joylessness, with all his grossness exposed and defenceless, he began to look almost noble. It was as though an artist had made him, and not he himself.
‘He’s old, God help him!’ said the big waitress. ‘And anyway, it was the other one was the blackguard.’
‘Will you be sitting up with him?’ asked the cashier, locking her desk with a flourish.
‘I’ll leave him a bit longer. He’s doing no harm.’
In the end, he was awakened, and the porter took him up to his room, and put him to bed. Just as he was going, Norman Repton said, ‘Draw back those curtains.’
‘Yes, sir.’
‘Might want to look at the river.’
It seemed that to get out of bed and look at the river would in some way re-establish him and make up for the failure of the evening—the failure to hook Jessop, to digest the omelet, to have enjoyed himself either with a view of mountains, a cup of tea when he wanted it, the stewardess’s young leg, a first day in a city that once, a long time ago, had been romantic and unattainable. In fact, he would not have needed to get out of bed. It would have been sufficient to look at the ceiling, where the river was casting its lightly dancing image. But this he did not know, sucked down into his heavy sleep. He spent an uneasy night, at the mercy of his digestion and his bladder, trying to crawl back into sleep like an animal into its lair, indifferent to the river outside, unaware of its counterpart dancing so lightly overhead. Then, when at last he was sleeping restfully, a great bell stripped him naked, as his father used to do, pulling back the blankets and threatening to empty the jug over him. Its loud, stark strokes seemed to march into the very room, at the same time unloosing bells all over the city, each of them reiterating its single note, except for a carillon which chimed out a hymn tune whose pinched intonation and jigging rhythm called up in his mind a picture of some bedizened spinster. But his indigestion was gone, and the noise of renewing traffic and of people moving about in the hotel encouraged him with the thought that yesterday’s disappointments were behind him, and that here was another day, which might be a more satisfactory one. It promised to be a fine day, too. Light was welling upwards, lifting a tenuous web of cloud and here and there beginning to break it; broken, it took on a perceptible movement, a convoy of clouds sailing eastwards. The wind of yesterday‚ but lessened. He had no objection to a slight wind; it was even rather pleasant, and made one feel brisk. Colour
grew in the plane tree outside. The wind fluttered its dwindled stock of leaves but did not detach them. Behind the plane tree, on the farther bank of the river, was an expanse of housefront painted a bright clear shade of yellow. It looked quite Continental. His eye rested on it with pleasure. He was, after all, waking up in what was almost a foreign city. He hoisted himself from his bed, walked across to the window and looked out. Over the undulating reflection of the yellow house floated two swans. Presently, from under the dark arch of the bridge came another swan, and, presently, another. While he was watching and admiring, three more swans appeared, moving into mid-stream from the near bank, where the quay’s parapet had concealed them. Seven swans … That was something, and a lovely sight. A bus came along the quay, and paused, blocking out the river. When it moved on, he counted the swans as though they were his hoard, his treasure. There were now eleven swans. As he counted them again, to make sure, another sailed out from under the bridge.
They were making their way downstream, but dallied, oaring about to inspect floating bits of rubbish, diving their long necks below the surface with a burrowing motion, scavenging with unruffled classical dignity. He hurried into his clothes. Unwashed, unshaved, his shoes untied, he stumbled downstairs. In the hall, an idea occurred to him. He turned into the dining room, where a thin young man was already breakfasting, served by the big waitress. ‘Bread!’ he shouted. ‘I want some bread.’ As she came forward, his glance fell on a row of plated breadbaskets, ranged on the sideboard. He shovelled the sliced bread from half a dozen of these into one basket, and hurried on out, saying over his shoulder, ‘It’s all right. I’ll pay for it.’
The garda directing the traffic by the bridge shouted a warning to him as he scrambled across the road under the nose of a lorry. A group of women waiting for a bus stepped quickly out of his path. It seemed an age before he could look over the parapet. Some of the swans had moved downstream, but others had arrived. Fifteen, sixteen, seventeen … there were eighteen swans. What a total! What a boast! ‘In Dublin I’ve seen eighteen swans within a stone’s throw.’ Drawing a breath that cost him agony, he whistled. They paid no attention. ‘Swans!’ he hallooed. ‘Swans!’ One near by seemed to be looking at him from its sidewise face. He threw a slice of bread at it. It turned. Others turned. They came flocking towards him. Even in the wildness of his excitement and sense of personal glory he admired how skilfully they shaped their course without check or collision and how, as he scattered the bread among them, they went after it and contested for it with an air of proud negligence, feeding, he said to himself, like lords. He was about to throw in the last slice of bread when it was twitched from his hand, and in an instant the air between him and the river was shaken and noisy with gulls. Flapping, disputing, wheeling round and round, the ugly, greedy, bullying creatures were attacking his swans and stealing their bread. ‘Get out!’ he shouted. ‘Get out, you brutes! Damn you, damn you, damn you, you dirty bastards!’ Shaking with rage, he hurled the breadbasket into the midst of them. They thinned for a moment, and he saw that the swans had drawn away towards the opposite bank, and were heading downstream.
His rage came up in his throat and choked him. He lost all thought of who he was or where he was, and the hand clenching and unclenching on the rim of the parapet might have been the hand of a stranger. A bit of bread lay beside it. A gull, flying belatedly after the others, saw the bit, and swooped down. He struck at the gull with all his force, missed it, lost his balance, struggled to regain it, and fell backwards, his head striking the pavement. A terrified giggle broke from one of the women and was peremptorily hushed by another. For a while he struggled, threshing about with violent, unco-ordinated movements. The woman who had giggled moved diffidently forward, meaning to help him up. ‘Best leave him alone,’ said the woman who had silenced her. The voice was not so much harsh as harshly resigned. She had known much trouble in her life, and this had left her with no sympathy to spare for a corpulent old Englishman who had thrown a breadbasket into the Liffey and cursed the hungry seagulls—nor, indeed, for the seagulls either. She need not have spoken. Frightened by the grimace frozen on the old man’s features, and by his set, snarling lips, the other had stopped short.
The garda‚ who had left his place amid the traffic, now came up to where Norman Repton lay motionless. After a momentary hesitation, as though he were hastily summoning up something he had learned, he knelt beside him. The women drew closer together, and one of them pulled her coat about her, as though she had suddenly become conscious of the cold. Presently the garda looked up. ‘Will one of you ladies go across to the hotel,’ he said, ‘and ask them to telephone for the ambulance?’ Two women detached themselves from the group and hurried across the road, arguing in whispers.
THE VIEW OF ROME
FROM that morning when he woke to the sound of the first autumnal gale lashing like a caged tiger against the house fronts and knew with physical infallibility that after all he was going to recover, Guy Stoat burned with impatience to get out of the County Hospital and go home. He burned with an inward fire. He had never been a man to canvass attention or make a display of his feelings, even to himself—and a man can as easily be blinded by his own feelings as deafened by those of others. Guy’s impatience did not blind him; it sharpened his sight and concentrated it on his objective. As through that keyhole in the massive door on the Aventine through which one stares in fascination at the view of Rome, till the remainder of one’s gazing self seems to have been left hanging on the door like a coat, Guy saw his small magpie house, whose warping timber frame had pulled it a little off the straight, and the two yew trees shaped into cockyolly birds and the flagged path running between them to the door which he would open with his key and shut behind him. Fortunately, he had finished clipping the yews before his stomach ulcer had tripped him. If he got back by the beginning of October, and dodged the silly daylight-saving by getting up an hour earlier, he would have the garden combed and tidied before he settled down for the winter.
But, of course, at this juncture the hospital took it into its head to thwart him. Hitherto, he had been assured that he was making quite remarkable progress, that he would soon be feeling more like himself every day, that it was only a question of time. Now he was told that recovery was bound to be slow, especially in a man of his age, that he must not expect to run before he could walk, that it was all a question of patience and due course. When they were assuring him of his remarkable progress, he had felt too weak to contradict. He did not contradict now; he had better things to save his strength for. He lay still, and husbanded his impatience, and Sister Lockwood said at intervals, ‘You’re really quite a model patient, Mr. Stoat.’ The night nurse in charge of the private ward was called Considine. Night relaxes discipline, and by 3 a.m. Sister Considine became almost human. She would drink a cup of tea at his bedside, and once they had a quite rational conversation about owls. One comes to feel a certain degree of security with a woman whose aunt had slept in a fourposter with a tame owl perched on the rail, and though Guy knew better than to mention his impatience to leave the hospital, one night he went so far as to admit that he had a home and was attached to it.
‘I ought to be making apple jelly at this moment,’ he remarked wistfully.
‘Not quite at this moment, Mr. Stoat, surely.’
Poor wretch, who would never get away, she must be allowed her titter. The summoning light glowed, the titter was cut short, and Sister Considine went on to another patient.
Living from night to night as other people live from day to day, when next she saw him she took up where they had left off. ‘Do you like making apple jelly, Mr. Stoat? It’s rather an unusual passion for a gentleman.’
‘I prefer making damson cheese. Did your aunt make damson cheese?’
(A dark, slow process, compatible with owls on a four-poster.)
‘I don’t seem to remember her having anything to do with damsons. She went in more for embroidery.’
(Palla
s Athene, of course, mistress of her needle.)
Finding that he was about to fall impolitely asleep, neither in the aunt’s fourposter nor in the metal contraption that raised him aloft as though on a sacrificial altar but in his own dear bed at home, Guy roused himself and said, ‘I can’t compete in embroidery. But I can do a good darn when I give my mind to it.’
‘Can you really? Well, of course, it’s useful for a bachelor to know how to darn. Though I hope you don’t often have to darn, Mr. Stoat.’
‘I do all my own darning.’
‘Socks,’ said she, understandingly.
‘Not only socks. Sheets, towels. I can wash, too, and iron.’
(The washing line under the apple trees. The smell of linen when frost has stiffened it, taken down from the line on a still, green-skied evening. The ironing board’s place under the stairs, and the mat just inside the kitchen door where his gardening shoes were faithfully awaiting him.)
‘But do you live all alone, Mr. Stoat? Will there be no one to look after you when we send you back?’
(Her back arching under his hand, the soft treading paws.)
‘There’ll be——’ Sleepwalking on the edge of the pit, he opened his eyes just in time and saw the gaping danger. These hospital know-it-alls would never accept a cat as an adequate companion for a convalescent—‘Hattie,’ he continued unswervingly. ‘My step-niece. She’s coming to spend the winter with me.’
‘That’s good news. It would never have done for you to be all alone.’
‘No, no. I agree. Fortunately, there’ll be Hattie.’
When they were making him ready for the operating theatre, drawing on white woollen stockings that clustered round his legs like a swarm of bees, someone had appeared with a form for which he had to supply answers. ‘Occupation: wood engraver. Next of kin….’ Who had he named? He remembered deciding against Bartle, and against Joanna. He certainly hadn’t named Hattie, though his cat was more to him than ten thousand Joannas. However, he had named her now.
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