‘I was born poor in this life, but I wouldn’t stay poor back then. I’d have all the things I’d want and if he couldn’t give me them I’d leave him for another who could.’
‘Who?’
She snapped the book shut as I suddenly thought of her father’s town house and company car.
‘I’d find the richest man in this filthy city and I would make sure I became his best mistress.’
Two years had passed in Shallon House before that morning. For days afterwards I watched her, lifting the trays in the morning-room, walking through the walled kitchen garden towards the servants’ door, running, and then when she realized she was being observed, walking to answer the cook’s shouts from downstairs.
There was nothing special to mark Bridget out for me and yet I developed a quiet, almost morbid, fascination with her that I found hard to shake off. I had little to interest a woman, a tutor from my background is between classes. To those who can match my education I may perhaps be an amusing companion but can never hope to be more. To those hardened girls of the lower orders, who smell of the cramped tenements that cling like an invisible stain to me, I have the manners of a gentleman with none of the money and position which go with them. Although here ‘the manners of a gentleman’ is a meaningless phrase. The rich stave off boredom inside their houses circled by trees like a peasant fights hunger. Outside their drawing-rooms they have no more manners than any of their tenants’ pigs. I have seen one of them out hunting use his whip on the boy Turlough who had fallen in his bare feet down Watery Lane almost in front of their horses’ hooves. I say nothing, my job is to teach their offspring, be the occasional object of philanthropic voyeurism from their guests and otherwise keep my mouth shut.
The question still haunts me. Why, from the morning when I had leaned from my window to see Bridget vainly knocking on the front door, growing more desperate as the moments passed and nobody answered, had I known that she would be the first woman whose limbs would open beneath my own?
It was her prolonged knocking that morning which had woken me. I lay perplexed for a moment. In my time there I had never known anybody knock more than once on the front door. Often if I descended the stairs quietly I’d catch O’Rourke, the butler, in the alcove beneath the staircase with all his other work finished and his eyes trained on the bulk of the oak door, his bent frame poised like a race horse’s awaiting the starter’s flag. For all I know he may have slept that way, certainly I believe he spent hours in that posture, shuffling away only if somebody spied him. When the door was eventually pounded upon he never moved at once, he waited, visibly restraining himself for the length of time it would have taken him to walk from his small office beside the kitchens, and then set forth at an almost boyish trot down the waxed hallway. Watching from the stairs, one could gauge the caller’s stature by the angle to which O’Rourke’s whole trunk descended. But after long observation I realized that his head always began its descent before the door was fully opened and he could possibly have glimpsed the caller. I decided that years of hovering in the musty alcove had awakened a sixth sense within him, that he could not only distinguish between knocks, but knew, before a carriage had stopped or boots mounted those twelve steps, who each caller was and, for all I know, the exact nature of their business.
I lay that morning between the sheets, watching thin slats of light intensify as they squeezed through the gaps in the shutters. My first thought was that O’Rourke had died – mere illness would never have been sufficient to cure his obsession for servitude. But surely that in itself would not necessitate the superbly orchestrated machine of the house capitulating into chaos. His remains would pass out the back door with no more fuss than those of a finished meal and someone else who took size nine shoes would be appointed to open the door and break in his master’s footwear.
I crossed the room to pull open the wooden shutters and lean out. A maze of curled hair confronted me and then an upturned face with frightened eyes as Bridget looked up, distracted by the noise of my window. She looked nineteen, if that, obviously a girl from the village or the new labourers’ cottages built near the bridge below the wood. She was close to tears, like a child struggling with a foreign language or a savage baffled by the most rudimentary mechanism. With another I would have been tempted to laugh at her ignorance, yet with her something fascinated me from the first glance. Partly it was the fear in her eyes that was caused not just by the predicament she found herself in, though that was the reason for her present terror. But it was as if that terror was a manifestation of a deeper, ingrown horror which remained constantly just below the surface. That I realized later, but at the moment when I leaned down to observe the look of helplessness and the search for reassurance in her face what I felt most was a strange sense of absolute power as though I could mould this frightened figure into anything that I wished.
You should not imagine that as a tutor I am a man well versed in power. My charges were then aged thirteen and eleven respectively, their characters already formed as surely as if lava had slid across the nursery while they slept and hardened into rock around their white skin. For all my temporary power, my lists of Latin verbs and algebraic equations, they knew that this learning was really a game, an exercise to lend a veneer of sophistication to the stark, pure power of their money, just as they knew that the right word to their father would cast me out from the sanctuary of that single room I was then allowed to call home.
‘What are you doing, girl?’ I called down.
‘It’s the door, Sir, nobody will answer it to me. Surely there are people inside?’
I could imagine the deserted alcove where O’Rourke normally stood. The knock would have startled him like an apparition from the underworld, no creak of a carriage wheel, no thud of a well-heeled boot on the gravel. It would take him a moment to realize that the unmentionable had happened and then he would be gone, slipping down the dark passageway to his office, knowing nobody would have the audacity to approach the door in his absence, deeming it below himself to even reprimand the offender.
‘What’s the nature of your business, child?’
‘Work, Sir. My father arranged it.’
‘You’re at the wrong door, child. Nobody will answer a servant there.’
It was so quick that I could not be sure I saw it, but an amused knowing smile seemed to cross her face as she glanced at the carved iron knocker, but when she looked back up at me her eyes were filled with the same confusion.
‘Follow that gravel path around the side of the house till you reach a small door. That’s where you must go.’
She turned and began to run across the wet grass to the path, turning back flustered to thank me again and almost falling as she did so. I watched her run in short, frantic strides and found myself piecing together her body beneath the heavy layers of clothes. As I withdrew my head I realized that my penis had stiffened slightly beneath my nightshirt. I lay back on the bed, watching the light play with the tall jug of water beside my shaving bowl, and longed for a cigarette to hold between my fingers.
I was edgy all that day, filled with a restless pent-up sense of expectation. Even my charges felt it. I was tolerated in that house because of a fashion, everybody had a tutor like a grandfather clock or the latest scarf from London. It had become a matter of spite for me to fill their heads with questions in the hope that some half-sown seed would somehow disrupt the impervious grind of the house in years to come. It is important for social stability for the landlords to remain as dumb as the tenants beneath them. But that morning they could have remained as ignorant as the savages in the Colonies for all I cared. I set them a stiff passage of Caesar to translate and left them to frown and make faces at each other across the polished wood. The window looked out on to the kitchen garden and part of the stone-flagged yard where the girls were hanging great white sheets out to dry. I wanted one glimpse to reassure myself that the girl had not been dismissed on the spot upon reaching the kitchen and then I swore
to return my mind to the monotonous duties of the schoolroom. Each girl came forth in her uniform, sleeves rolled back as she carried the heavy basket and vanished back again behind the ivy-cluttered wall, leaving the sheets rippling like flags with water dripping down on to the stones. Behind me there was silence in the room as the children ceased to fidget and bicker and became genuinely alarmed at my indifference. All my moods they had grown used to, from forced humour to anger; the one thing their life had never prepared them for was to be ignored. Finally I felt my shirt being tugged, and I looked down into the worried eyes of the youngest who held her exercise book aloft to be examined. I smiled and for the first time ever received an honest smile of affection in return. As I turned from the window back to my duties a figure emerged briefly in the courtyard below, and though there was nothing in the uniform to distinguish her from the others, I knew instinctively it was Bridget and it stirred something in me that she had not been dismissed, as if a small spark of rebellion had been lit, even by accident, and had survived in the ordered conformity of that house.
The next night was pay-night, another tacky Thursday in the basement of a pub, two dozen library assistants intent on blowing a fortnight’s wages. The dance floor was the width of a phone box, the bar a hatch poked out in the wall. The whole joint had a seedy magic, the toilets a descent to a dungeon of cracked enamel and small round cakes of detergent that smelt of piss, where footsteps clattered on the jigsaw of hammered glass that served as a skylight in the ceiling.
I was smoking small, tipped cigars, drinking pints, trying to convince a new girl that Billy was the City and County Librarian.
‘The City and County Librarian’s a woman,’ she kept protesting and Billy would strut his chest out and wink.
‘She’s fierce butch all the same,’ I’d say to the girl who looked increasingly worried.
It was near closing time when I met Joanie at the bar.
‘Where’s the most beautiful girl in the libraries been keeping herself?’ I was joking but I could see her sudden pleasure. She was buying cigarettes and emptying them into the gold case she always carried around. I accepted one and fingered the battered case.
‘Very sophisticated,’ I said, ‘Victorian. It suits you down to the ground.’
She smiled like a little girl dressed up in her mother’s shoes. That’s how I thought of her at that moment, playing at being an adult. The barmen were still serving drink even as they called out time. We began to dance in the ruck of bodies under the single spotlight, Billy watching, amused as he guarded our drinks at the table, girls around him arguing about whose flat they would invade to party in. Without warning, Joanie began to give me a seemingly endless French kiss. Whenever my eyes wandered around the floor she would sense it and, easing her tongue back a fraction, whisper for me to concentrate. I felt pleasurably helpless, knowing that she was publicly claiming me, that she knew how the eyes of every library assistant were now focused on the arch of her neck bent back beneath my lips. Even when the music stopped and the other dancers cleared away she held her posture, playing for time perhaps or just waiting till she was ready.
Finally she withdrew her lips.
‘Have you a place to stay?’
‘There’ll probably be a party,’ I said.
‘Have you a place?’
I nodded.
‘Fuck their party so.’
She paused only twice. Once to get our coats and glasses while I bargained for a bottle of vodka at the bar, and again, for a second at the door with the glasses hidden by her bag, half glancing back as if listening to silent applause. Outside I tried to take her hand.
‘I never hold hands,’ she said. ‘It feels like someone owning me.’
We walked up along the quays towards my flat, finishing off our drinks. I still could not quite believe what had happened, kept waiting for her to make some excuse and leave. I was excited at the prospect of sex and yet, in those tumbledown alley-ways still glistening after a fall of rain, I felt an abundant tenderness towards her curious innocence. I would have been happy to have just sat on the edge of those damp cobbles with my arm around her. If Joanie felt that serenity she seemed threatened by it. She needed to talk incessantly, stories I could hardly believe about the men she had known, prison officers and soldiers, two-timing, three-timing them, being sneaked in the windows of Cathal Brough barracks, getting back over walls before dawn.
‘If I were a man,’ she said, ‘you’d admire me for it. You’d think I was a bit of a lad, so tell me why shouldn’t a girl have fun as well?’
We were passing the lane where the mobile vans were parked. An old woman in a crooked hat was feeding the wild cats who lived among the rotten beams of abandoned buildings on the quay.
‘What about your parents?’ I asked. ‘Do you not have to be in?’
‘They don’t care what I do. They let me live my own life. Really, I can do anything I want.’
Was she frightened of affection or did she just want a one-night stand? I thought of my flat, wished I had made the bed before I went out.
‘Even cook breakfast?’
‘Are you looking for a mistress,’ she said, ‘or a maid?’
The old woman had moved back into the shadows. I placed Joanie’s empty glass in mine and flung them high over the gates of the yard. They shattered near the steps of the office startling the cats who scattered underneath the vans. She had set the agenda.
‘Race you home,’ I said and began to run.
There were items of her clothing she wanted me to remove and others she refused to allow me to touch. She was slightly dumpy when she was naked, her words spoken with quiet dramatic pausing.
‘I tell every man I sleep with the same. You can do anything you want. I mean it. Anything.’
‘Do you want me to wear something, a condom?’
‘What kind of girl would ask a man to do that?’ she replied, genuinely shocked.
To reach my flat we had had to climb over stacks of the cheap furniture which the landlord, who owned the bargain shop underneath with the permanent Closing Down Sale sign, stored in the hallway. The late-night disco in the hotel next door thumped away like a distant rhythmic poltergeist. She was not the prettiest of the few girls I had known, and for all her talk seemed to have little idea of what to do with her body, yet I have never remained as hard for so long with any other woman. She came quickly with a short intake of breath, then focused her attention on me.
‘I never come more than once before my man,’ she said. ‘Now relax, I’ll help you, relax.’
And yet I couldn’t come. I could hear couples emerging from the nightclub and hailing taxis on the quay. A fight started between the bouncers and a Chinese youth. Cars slowed down or moved off shifting panes of light across the ceiling.
‘It’s not fair, for me to give everything I have and you to hold back.’ Joanie sounded genuinely upset. ‘I want to share with you, give you back pleasure in return.’
But still I tensed up inside as Joanie broke her rule about coming again and again. I had never known a woman like that before, never felt the strange sense of power she seemed to want to make me feel I had. When I finally came it was with a quiet ache of relief, the pleasure of it muted by what had already passed. Joanie lay under me as if shot, her hair drenched on the pillow, and whispered that no man had ever done that to her before.
It is curious how when you close your eyes during the final moments of sex you often visualize other things, a train careering down a tunnel, familiar faces flashing past into the dark. Like the final moments of your life perhaps. I lay beside her, not remembering people but the distance between them.
I have never felt myself better than those I grew up among, just different. Perhaps it was being the youngest of a family with a ten-year gap. The working class who made good in the early seventies, who left the tech at sixteen and wound up senior civil servants and marketing directors. How many Saturday evening parties in their houses, older people, older music,
myself at twelve or thirteen awkward in a corner, my parents at sixty, proud but bewildered in another? Somehow I had never connected, with them or much else that came later.
I had lived with my parents in the Ballymun flats then. At six each morning I would run out through the country lanes to St Margaret’s. If I was lonely I fought it by imagining myself somehow marked out, that among those fields where white mist hung a revelation waited. I ran hard towards it, pure in my strength and youth. And somehow I have always remained that boy, still chasing purity, still on the threshold of some great event. I was spoiled at that early age; every morning I rendezvoused with my own god on those damp roads, his feet beat with my footsteps on the hard tarmacadam, his breath panted with mine in the half-light. Maybe that’s why nothing ever seemed important afterwards, work, money, women. All were traps to be avoided. I needed to be free to keep my destiny. I grew older but never changed. I was careful, avoided interviews for promotion, group savings schemes, the eyes of girls in work with suburban minds primed to pay off a mortgage for half their lifetime.
The only thing I had not bargained for was ageing. Part of me hates to admit that I can be lonely. But at that moment with Joanie I realized how stale my life had become. It felt so good to be close to her, so drained and so secure. The tenderness I had known in the laneway came back and this time Joanie seemed to share it. I knew I would never hold out so long again, knew that I had surrendered my trust to her.
We slept and woke with the city snarling below us, traffic inching like an angry glacier along the quay. We breakfasted quietly in a small Italian coffee shop near Christchurch and separated at the entrance to the lane leading up to the yard.
Joanie went ahead and I followed a few seconds behind. As I turned in the gate I saw the squad car parked outside the office window. I felt a flush of guilt, glancing at the smashed glasses on the ground. A Garda was talking to Joanie. Billy grinned from the door of his cab.
‘You’re lucky the US marines didn’t come crashing in the window of your flat.’
The Woman's Daughter Page 10