There was something absurd and defenceless about him sitting there in his stockinged feet. The heels of his socks were worn thin and she could see the dull rose of skin through them. There was a hole in the big toe. It put him at a disadvantage, she thought, as she eyed him surreptitiously. His dark hair was cut jauntily and slicked down with hair oil which gleamed under the store lights. He had a fleshy face, scrubbed and babied-looking. He wore heavy-framed spectacles. Oh dear, she thought, they’ll have to go. He was smartly dressed, a tweed sports jacket (no elbow patches, thank God) and a shirt and tie. There was a noticeable crease in his dark pants – a mother’s touch, she hoped. A clerk, she guessed, taking his elevenses out of the office. The shoemaker set to on the shoes. It was a noisy machine with a belt drive that whined like a dentist’s drill. The heel bar seemed to Edel like a pocket of heavy industry in the midst of household linens, electricals and cosmetics. It had the fumy smell of a factory and the clattery serious air of male business. The regular customers were nearly all men; the women who came to the heel bar were usually limping and in distress, bearing a stricken stiletto or a single shoe with an amputated heel.
Heels and soles took less than ten minutes, Edel knew. She would have to move quickly. She was alone at the counter and shouldn’t leave. Vi (no, she corrected herself, Miss Hunter – Roches’ policy forbade staff using one another’s Christian names, too familiar) would not be back from her break for another fifteen minutes and the shoemaker was already on to the left shoe. The neon sign tantalised. The shoes were being handed over now. Money was changing hands. There was the sharp ring of the till. Edel watched as he bent over to tie his laces. Then he eased himself down from his high perch. He flexed his feet in his newly minted shoes, turned on his fresh rubber heels and walked away. And then she noticed that he had left his newspaper behind. She darted out from behind the counter across the aisle, whipped the paper and ran after him. She caught up with him at the main entrance. Cold blasts of air came in through the revolving door, meeting the dry heat of the store. She tugged gently at his sleeve. He wheeled around.
‘Your newspaper,’ she said, ‘Sir.’ (More of Roches’ policy.)
He smiled, at first surprised, then gratified.
‘Why, thank you, Ma’am,’ he said.
She saw a flicker of appraisal. Her move.
‘Why don’t you ask me out?’ Edel asked boldly.
The revolving doors gasped hot, then cold.
‘Why don’t I?’ He smiled cheekily, then stashing the paper under his arm was swept away in the cool carousel of the glassy doors.
A week later, Victor Elworthy came back and bought a two-pronged plug at the electrical counter and asked Edel Forristal to a matinée at the Savoy.
Edel felt she had come a long way. She felt it particularly when she went home to Mellick. And contrary to her expectations it was not a pleasant sensation. She had been so homesick in the city at first, staying in a damp bedsitter on the North Circular Road where the bulbs were always blowing and the public phone in the hallway was always ringing – but not for her. She spent weeks waiting for someone to shout up into the well of the landing – ‘Call for Number 4’. She felt rebuked by the gay chatter of the girls in Number 3, their stifled laughter on the landing on their way back from a late night, their sleepy early morning conversation. She lived near the cattle mart then. She remembered the loneliness of those drear November mornings, watching the cattle being shipped in, their wild eyes visible through the slats of the trucks, their caked tails waving feebly, their plaintive protests audible over the hissing of tyres, the jangle of bicycle bells, the drone of buses. It made her feel doubly desolate. The bellowing cattle reminded her not only of home, but of the loneliness of home, the suffocating sadness of a place that felt already abandoned even before she had left it.
Then she met Babs who worked in Hosiery. They moved into a cheerier flat. Granted there was still green mould growing in the shared bathroom down the hall and the electricity meter was greedy as an infant. Suddenly in the midst of cooking dinner the last coin would drop down and the bubbling of potatoes, or the chops hissing on the pan, would quietly subside like the stealthy withdrawal of affection. The hothouse glow of the two-bar fire would fade slowly to black while plumes of steam from their damp washing, straddling the backs of the kitchen chairs, gloomily exhaled. When Edel looked back on it, everything in this world seemed metered, monitored, rationed. Oranges were a luxury; war a live memory. But after six lonely months Edel felt she had arrived.
The city became, thanks to Babs, a place of possibility. Babs knew where to go – picnics in the Botanic Gardens, afternoon tea at the Metropole where you could easily snaffle a second iced fancy from the cake tray if you took the precaution of sharing a table. Edel would remember this time as a kind of courtship. A courtship with the city itself in which the crowded tram rides to the sea and the smogged rough and tumble of the municipal baths were like shyly offered gifts. She liked the city’s mix of serious grandeur – the pot-bellied former parliament, the flint-faced university, the declamatory statues of patriots – and the slatternly charm of the streets with their fruit sellers, their littered pavements, the garish fluorescence of ice-cream parlours. It was just such a mixture of gravity and contingency that she wanted in a man.
Victor worked nights. He was a Linotype operator on the Press. Later in their courtship he had taken her on a tour of the works one Sunday morning when the case room was idle. He proudly showed her his keyboard, which to Edel looked for all the world like her mother’s treadle sewing machine. Bigger certainly, more masculine, the heavy ingots of lead hanging on pulleys hinting at a more weighty purpose. But what was he, really, only an industrial typist, Edel thought, refusing to be visibly impressed. Another evening he took her to see the presses run. They stood in the loading bay, a smell of ink in the air as the press thundered and rattled. Only then could Edel begin to understand Victor’s urgent pride in his work − the hugeness of the press, the pulse and noise like the roar of war. Oil-begrimed men clambered on the platforms of the vast machine beneath the feathery wave of the newspapers as they reared and dipped overhead with the crazy motion of a rollercoaster. Other men sorted and bundled the copies as deftly as if they were large decks of cards. Then, packed and smacked, the papers juddered down rollered chutes into the black gape of the delivery vans. All in the dead of night, as if secretly. Saturday was the only evening they could meet, and even then Victor was wide awake and buoyant at midnight when Edel was ready for bed. She tried not to dwell on this mismatching too much; it brought her back to the manner of their meeting. By rights, she should have waited. Waited for the right man to come along. Trusted to chance.
Edel had no real desire to learn to drive. She had been quite happy to sit back and be a passenger. But Victor was insistent.
‘Come on,’ he said, ‘there’s nothing to it.’
But when she sat behind the wheel she felt it was intrinsically wrong. She should not be in charge of something so large and powerful. And she wasn’t in charge of it. Even turning the key in the ignition made her fear the car would suddenly leap into life.
‘Not until you put her into gear,’ Victor said, snorting with laughter.
They inched around the back haggard in Mellick, Edel nosing the car tentatively around the perimeter, past the black doorways of the outhouses, circling the water pump on its altar of concrete, the rusting mangle in its bed of nettles. These things seemed grounded and necessary, while she sat in a candyfloss car, playing. She did not feel so bleakly inauthentic in the city with Victor. In fact, he was considered quite a catch, a man with a job and a car, good-looking in a neat, presentable way, smart, keen. Keen at first, Edel thought. Lately she had noticed a certain creeping reserve and she wasn’t sure if it was her own nervousness about losing him, or a cooling on his part. Some reserve of her own prevented her from asking. The nerve she had used to attract him deserted her at close quarters. She had begun to brood about what a young m
an with a car and a salesman’s good looks could get up to on sunny afternoons when he was free to wander the city alone. She felt acutely the need for something definitive to happen. Perhaps that was why she had asked him to come home with her for the summer holidays.
‘Well,’ Victor said finally, laughing. ‘We can’t just sit here. Let’s try again. And remember … the clutch.’
Damn him, she thought. Teaching her to drive had been all his idea, anyway. Edel suspected that it was boredom; they were into their second week at Mellick and in this setting Victor had seemed ill at ease, his jocular manner a handicap in the face of the busy disapproval of the Forristal household. It was the haymaking season so the house was empty for the long hot afternoons and Victor was at a loose end. He had offered to help but Ned, Edel’s brother, had considered this preposterous. As he did Victor’s presence. He was a city boy; what would he know about such things? He might as well have been a woman, as far as Ned was concerned.
The Zodiac was Victor’s only trump card. It conferred on him a status he would not have otherwise enjoyed. He ran Edel’s mother into town to do the shopping; he drove Ned to the creamery. Ridiculous and all as they thought the large sugared lozenge of a car was, the Forristal family found it – and Victor – useful.
After a few days Victor took her out on the open road. Strangely, it was easier away from familiar sights and Ned’s reproachful looks when he returned to the house in the evening to find Edel stranded in the yard with Victor, helpless with laughter, as the car juddered and stalled. Her mother considered the whole driving business unseemly. She just about tolerated being driven about by her daughter’s young man. She suffered Victor’s eager offers of transport with a mute embarrassment. But seeing Edel behind the wheel was another thing altogether. It just wasn’t proper. That’s what she thought, Edel knew. Away from the sceptical eyes of home, and out on the empty tarred road, Edel could build up some speed. She wanted to succeed at driving, not for her own sake, but for Victor’s. Particularly if he was having doubts about her.
Edel had never been as conscious of her background before. But seeing the way her mother and Ned lived through Victor’s eyes made her feel anxious. Ned’s spattered wellingtons standing splay-footed on the brush mat inside the back door, the crude washboards and tin bath they used for the laundry, the chipped crockery, even the scummy top on the milk carried in an enamel jug straight from the dairy, spoke of a dour futility. The constant feeding of the range, the endless hauling and carrying, the grinding impoverished repetition of their routine began to oppress her. Ned had made his peace with Victor in the way that men did. They had found their common ground and traded information about cars and tractor parts, engines and horsepower. But her mother had been more resistant. Victor was the first man Edel had ever talked about, let alone brought home.
‘You’re getting to be a bit of a speed merchant,’ Victor said, interrupting her thoughts: ‘50 mph, no less!’
She braked immediately.
‘No, no,’ he said, ‘don’t do that. You’re really getting the hang of it now.’
Gliding through the dappled countryside in the glinting sunlight with Victor, she convinced herself he was right. She was getting the hang of it. She rounded a bend and almost collided with a herd of cows.
‘Whoa,’ Victor said as if it were he who was driving the animals.
Edel geared down and applied the brakes gently. All she could see ahead were the black-and-white rumps of a dozen beasts lazily swaying while a young lad with a stick hollered at them.
‘Great,’ Victor muttered under his breath, ‘we could be behind this lot for hours.’
‘They won’t have far to go,’ Edel said, ‘probably to the next gate.’
She was happy to chug along behind the chequered cows, watching their flaky flanks and skeetering hooves on the tar and keeping a safe distance. They were in no hurry, after all.
‘Come on, come on,’ Victor urged.
The slow patience of the countryside irritated him.
After about half a mile, the young boy swung open a gate on their right and urged the cattle in off the road, threatening and cajoling by turns. He stopped as Edel eased the car by, and stood almost in salute as they passed. He had heavy straw-coloured hair, a knotted little face, small contemptuous eyes. He stood for several minutes looking after them. Edel watched him in the rear-view mirror, a small, defiant figure standing at a gate.
The sun was very low now and they were driving due west. A mile further on, they veered around another bend in the road into the full glare of the setting sun. Victor leaned over to pull down the visor to shield Edel’s eyes. As he did, something solid and heavy blundered across her vision. Everything seemed to go dark as if a large rain cloud had plunged the sky into stormy relief. But this thing, a corpulent shadow, kept moving. Edel braked, the car slewed dangerously and she came face to face with the petrified eye of a Friesian just as the bonnet of the car ploughed into its mud-caked flank. There was a soft, cushioned thud as the car glanced off the animal and spun wildly, skidding headlong towards the ditch.
‘Jesus!’ Victor yelled as they came to a jolting halt on the rough camber, and the engine cut out.
He peered out the passenger window at the felled cow lying on its side and thrashing ineffectually. Blood wept from a jagged gash in its belly that showed its livid innards and streamed on to the tar road in a sticky pool. Edel, lifting her head from between her hands which were still gripping the steering wheel, saw only the cow’s eye watching her with mute, terrified appeal. Then the animal moaned.
‘Let’s get out of here,’ Victor said.
‘What?’
‘I said, let’s get out of here.’
Edel hesitated. She knew exactly what should be done. She should get out of the car, run back to the youngster who had been driving the cattle, and get him to summon his father. He would come with a knife and cut the animal’s throat to put it out of its misery. Edel had seen it done several times. But going back would mean owning up.
‘Shouldn’t we … ?’ she began.
‘Ignition,’ Victor commanded and for the first time behind the wheel she was swift and decisive, as if all the hours of instruction had been for this moment. She did as she was bid, turning the key, feeling the power surge up through the accelerator as the car righted itself and moved confidently forward. But by the time the power had reached her fingertips it had been reduced to a faint but pervasive trembling.
A couple of miles further on, she pulled in at a shady crossroads. The sun had gone down. Victor got out slowly and went to examine the front of the car. There was a large dent in the radiator and a blood-flecked hollow in the left wing where metal had met flesh.
‘Thirty quid’s worth at least,’ he said, coming round to her side and opening the driver’s door.
She dragged herself over to the passenger side. Her limbs felt like lead.
On Edel’s instructions, they hid the car in the outhouse of the abandoned house with the oak tree. The large shed was out of sight of the boreen and no one would have any business going in there, she told Victor. They told the Forristals they’d run out of petrol.
‘Typical,’ Ned said, ‘that’s women for you!’
And so the ill-advised expedition became all Edel’s doing.
Victor left first thing in the morning to take the car back to the city and get it fixed. Edel invented excuses for his departure. Egypt taking control of the Suez Canal, she said, they’ll be needing him at the paper.
‘Took fright, didn’t he?’ her mother said.
She and Victor would never talk of it again; not then, nor after they were married. It was only a dead cow, Edel would tell herself. Or a dying cow, dead now one way or another. But in her nightmares it would resurface, Victor shouting, ‘Clutch, clutch!’ and she wailing, ‘No, no, I can’t. I can’t do this!’ She would awake aghast in the dawn hours (Victor beside her, still on nights, newly asleep) with a windscreen image of the scene vivid i
n her head. The beast’s bewildered eye, its baffled pain, the bloodied haunch of the sugarplum car and Victor hissing at her to put her foot down.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Some of these stories have previously appeared in the following publications:
Arrows in Flight (Scribner/Townhouse), Bridges: A Global Anthology of Short Stories (Temenos), The Chattahoochee Review, The Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories, Glimmer Train, The Honest Ulsterman, If Only (Poolbeg), Irish Short Stories (Phoenix), New Irish Short Stories (Faber), and The Threepenny Review
I have a loyal band of first readers who saw this work at various stages and offered insight and advice – Rosemary Boran, Joanne Carroll, Orla Murphy and Terri Scullen. To them, a heartfelt thanks. Thanks are also due to the Arts Council of Ireland for a literature bursary awarded in the course of writing the collection.
Mary Morrissy, October 2015
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