‘Get away out of that,’ said Bowser Egan, cutting in on the youth who was dancing with Bridie. ‘Go home to your mammy, boy.’ He took her into his arms, saying again that she was looking great tonight. ‘Did you hear about the cement factory?’ he said. ‘Isn’t it great for Kilmalough?’
She agreed. She said what Mr Swanton and Mr Maloney had said: that the cement factory would bring employment to the neighbourhood.
‘Will I ride home with you a bit, Bridie?’ Bowser Egan suggested, and she pretended not to hear him. ‘Aren’t you my girl, Bridie, and always have been?’ he said, a statement that made no sense at all.
His voice went on whispering at her, saying he would marry her tomorrow only his mother wouldn’t permit another woman in the house. She knew what it was like herself, he reminded her, having a parent to look after: you couldn’t leave them to rot, you had to honour your father and your mother.
She danced to ‘The Bells Are Ringing’, moving her legs in time with Bowser Egan’s while over his shoulder she watched Dano Ryan softly striking one of his smaller drums. Mrs Griffin had got him even though she was nearly fifty, with no looks at all, a lumpish woman with lumpish legs and arms. Mrs Griffin had got him just as the girl had got Patrick Grady.
The music ceased, Bowser Egan held her hard against him, trying to touch her face with his. Around them, people whistled and clapped: the evening had come to an end. She walked away from Bowser Egan, knowing that not ever again would she dance in the Ballroom of Romance. She’d been a figure of fun, trying to promote a relationship with a middle-aged County Council labourer, as ridiculous as Madge Dowding dancing on beyond her time.
‘I’m waiting outside for you, Cat,’ Eyes Horgan called out, lighting a cigarette as he made for the swing-doors.
Already the man with the long arms – made long, so they said, from carrying rocks off his land – had left the ballroom. Others were moving briskly. Mr Dwyer was tidying the chairs.
In the cloakroom the girls put on their coats and said they’d see one another at Mass the next day. Madge Dowding hurried. ‘Are you OK, Bridie?’ Patty Byrne asked and Bridie said she was. She smiled at little Patty Byrne, wondering if a day would come for the younger girl also, if one day she’d decide that she was a figure of fun in a wayside ballroom.
‘Good-night so,’ Bridie said, leaving the cloakroom, and the girls who were still chatting there wished her good-night. Outside the cloakroom she paused for a moment. Mr Dwyer was still tidying the chairs, picking up empty lemonade bottles from the floor, setting the chairs in a neat row. His wife was sweeping the floor. ‘Good-night, Bridie,’ Mr Dwyer said. ‘Good-night, Bridie,’ his wife said.
Extra lights had been switched on so that the Dwyers could see what they were doing. In the glare the blue walls of the ballroom seemed tatty, marked with hair-oil where men had leaned against them, inscribed with names and initials and hearts with arrows through them. The crystal bowl gave out a light that was ineffective in the glare; the bowl was broken here and there, which wasn’t noticeable when the other lights weren’t on.
‘Good-night so,’ Bridie said to the Dwyers. She passed through the swing-doors and descended the three concrete steps on the gravel expanse in front of the ballroom. People were gathered on the gravel, talking in groups, standing with their bicycles. She saw Madge Dowding going off with Tim Daly. A youth rode away with a girl on the crossbar of his bicycle. The engines of motor-cars started.
‘Good-night, Bridie,’ Dano Ryan said.
‘Good-night, Dano,’ she said.
She walked across the gravel towards her bicycle, hearing Mr Maloney, somewhere behind her, repeating that no matter how you looked at it the cement factory would be a great thing for Kilmalough. She heard the bang of a car door and knew it was Mr Swanton banging the door of Mr Maloney’s car because he always gave it the same loud bang. Two other doors banged as she reached her bicycle and then the engine started up and the headlights went on. She touched the two tyres of the bicycle to make certain she hadn’t a puncture. The wheels of Mr Maloney’s car traversed the gravel and were silent when they reached the road.
‘Good-night, Bridie,’ someone called, and she replied, pushing her bicycle towards the road.
‘Will I ride a little way with you?’ Bowser Egan asked.
They rode together and when they arrived at the hill for which it was necessary to dismount she looked back and saw in the distance the four coloured bulbs that decorated the façade of the Ballroom of Romance. As she watched, the lights went out, and she imagined Mr Dwyer pulling the metal grid across the front of his property and locking the two padlocks that secured it. His wife would be waiting with the evening’s takings, sitting in the front of their car.
‘D’you know what it is, Bridie,’ said Bowser Egan, ‘you were never looking better than tonight.’ He took from a pocket of his suit the small bottle of whiskey he had. He uncorked it and drank some and then handed it to her. She took it and drank. ‘Sure, why wouldn’t you?’ he said, surprised to see her drinking because she never had in his company before. It was an unpleasant taste, she considered, a taste she’d experienced only twice before, when she’d taken whiskey as a remedy for toothache. ‘What harm would it do you?’ Bowser Egan said as she raised the bottle again to her lips. He reached out a hand for it, though, suddenly concerned lest she should consume a greater share than he wished her to.
She watched him drinking more expertly than she had. He would always be drinking, she thought. He’d be lazy and useless, sitting in the kitchen with the Irish Press. He’d waste money buying a secondhand motor-car in order to drive into the town to go to the public houses on fair-days.
‘She’s shook these days,’ he said, referring to his mother. ‘She’ll hardly last two years, I’m thinking.’ He threw the empty whiskey bottle into the ditch and lit a cigarette. They pushed their bicycles. He said:
‘When she goes, Bridie, I’ll sell the bloody place up. I’ll sell the pigs and the whole damn one and twopence worth.’ He paused in order to raise the cigarette to his lips. He drew in smoke and exhaled it. ‘With the cash that I’ll get I could improve some place else, Bridie.’
They reached a gate on the left-hand side of the road and automatically they pushed their bicycles towards it and leaned them against it. He climbed over the gate into the field and she climbed after him. ‘Will we sit down here, Bridie?’ he said, offering the suggestion as one that had just occurred to him, as though they’d entered the field for some other purpose.
‘We could improve a place like your own one,’ he said, putting his right arm around her shoulders. ‘Have you a kiss in you, Bridie?’ He kissed her, exerting pressure with his teeth. When his mother died he would sell his farm and spend the money in the town. After that he would think of getting married because he’d have nowhere to go, because he’d want a fire to sit at and a woman to cook food for him. He kissed her again, his lips hot, the sweat on his cheeks sticking to her. ‘God, you’re great at kissing,’ he said.
She rose, saying it was time to go, and they climbed over the gate again. ‘There’s nothing like a Saturday,’ he said. ‘Good-night to you so, Bridie.’
He mounted his bicycle and rode down the hill, and she pushed hers to the top and then mounted it also. She rode through the night as on Saturday nights for years she had ridden and never would ride again because she’d reached a certain age. She would wait now and in time Bowser Egan would seek her out because his mother would have died. Her father would probably have died also by then. She would marry Bowser Egan because it would be lonesome being by herself in the farmhouse.
A Happy Family
On the evening of Thursday, May 24th 1962, I returned home in the usual way. I remember sitting in the number 73 bus, thinking of the day as I had spent it and thinking of the house I was about to enter. It was a fine evening, warm and mellow, the air heavy with the smell of London. The bus crossed Hammersmith Bridge, moving quite quickly towards the leafy avenues
beyond. The houses of the suburbs were gayer in that evening’s sunshine, pleasanter abodes than often they seemed.
‘Hullo,’ I said in the hall of ours, speaking to my daughter Lisa, a child of one, who happened to be loitering there. She was wearing her nightdress, and she didn’t look sleepy. ‘Aren’t you going to bed?’ I said, and Lisa looked at me as if she had forgotten that I was closely related to her. I could hear Anna and Christopher in the bathroom, talking loudly and rapidly, and I could hear Elizabeth’s voice urging them to wash themselves properly and be quick about it. ‘She’s fourteen stone, Miss MacAdam is,’ Christopher was saying. ‘Isn’t she, Anna?’ Miss MacAdam was a woman who taught at their school, a woman about whom we had come to know a lot. ‘She can’t swim,’ said Anna.
Looking back now, such exchanges come easily to my mind. Bits of conversations float to the surface without much of a continuing pattern and without any significance that I can see. I suppose we were a happy family: someone examining us might possibly have written that down on a report sheet, the way these things are done. Yet what I recall most vividly now when I think of us as a family are images and occasions that for Elizabeth and me were neither happy nor unhappy. I remember animals at the Zoo coming forward for the offerings of our children, smelling of confinement rather than the jungle, seeming fierce and hard done by. I remember birthday parties on warm afternoons, the figures of children moving swiftly from the garden to the house, creatures who might have been bored, with paper hats on their heads or in their hands, seeking adventure in forbidden rooms. I remember dawdling walks, arguments that came to involve all of us, and other days when everything went well.
I used to leave the house at half past eight every morning, and often during the day I imagined what my wife’s day must be like. She told me, of course. She told me about how ill-tempered our children had been, or how tractable; about how the time had passed in other ways, whom she had met and spoken to, who had come to tea or whom she had visited. I imagined her in summer having lunch in the garden when it was warm, dozing afterwards and being woken up by Lisa. In turn, she would ask me how the hours had gone for me and I would say a thing or two about their passing, about the people who had filled them. ‘Miss Madden is leaving us,’ I can hear myself saying. ‘Off to Buenos Aires for some reason.’ In my memory of this, I seem to be repeating the information. ‘Off to Buenos Aires,’ I appear to be saying. ‘Off to Buenos Aires. Miss Madden.’ And a little later I am saying it again, adding that Miss Madden would be missed. Elizabeth’s head is nodding, agreeing that that will indeed be so. ‘I fell asleep in the garden,’ Elizabeth is murmuring in this small vision. ‘Lisa woke me up.’
My wife was pretty when I married her, and as the years passed it seemed to me that she took on a greater beauty. I believed that this was some reflection of her contentment, and she may even have believed it herself. Had she suddenly said otherwise, I’d have been puzzled; as puzzled as I was, and as she was, on the evening of May 24th, when she told me about Mr Higgs. She sat before me then, sipping at a glass of sherry that I’d poured her and remembering all the details: all that Mr Higgs had said and all that she had said in reply.
She had been listening to a story on the radio and making coffee. Christopher and Anna were at school; in the garden Lisa was asleep in her pram. When the telephone rang Elizabeth walked towards it slowly, still listening to the wireless. When she said ‘Hullo’ she heard the coins drop at the other end and a man’s voice said: ‘Mrs Farrel?’
Elizabeth said yes, she was Mrs Farrel, and the man said: ‘My name is Higgs.’
His voice was ordinary, a little uneducated, the kind of voice that is always drifting over the telephone.
‘A very good friend,’ said Mr Higgs.
‘Good-morning,’ said Elizabeth in her matter-of-fact way. ‘Are you selling something, Mr Higgs?’
‘In a sense, Mrs Farrel, in a sense. You might call it selling. Do I peddle salvation?’
‘Oh, I am not religious in the least –’
‘It may be your trouble, Mrs Farrel.’
‘Yes, well –’
‘You are Elizabeth Farrel. You have three children.’
‘Mr Higgs –’
‘Your father was a Captain Maugham. Born 1892, died 1959. He lost an arm in action and never forgave himself for it. You attended his funeral, but were glad that he was dead, since he had a way of upsetting your children. Your mother, seventy-four a week ago, lives near St Albans and is unhappy. You have two sisters and a brother.’
‘Mr Higgs, what do you want?’
‘Nothing. I don’t want anything. What do you want, Mrs Farrel?’
‘Look here, Mr Higgs –’
‘D’you remember your tenth birthday? D’you remember what it felt like being a little girl of ten, in a white dress spotted with forget-me-not, and a blue ribbon tying back your hair? You were taken on a picnic. “You’re ten years old,” your father said. “Now tell us what you’re going to do with yourself.” “She must cut the chocolate cake first,” your mother cried, and so you cut the cake and then stood up and announced the trend of your ambitions. Your brother Ralph laughed and was scolded by your father. D’you remember at all?’
Elizabeth did remember. She remembered playing hide-and-seek with her sisters after tea; she remembered Ralph climbing a tree and finding himself unable to get down again; she remembered her parents quarrelling, as they invariably did, all the way home.
‘Do I know you, Mr Higgs? How do you manage to have these details of my childhood?’
Mr Higgs laughed. It wasn’t a nasty laugh. It sounded even reassuring, as if Mr Higgs meant no harm.
On the evening of May 24th we sat for a long time wondering who the odd individual could be and what he was after. Elizabeth seemed nervously elated and naturally more than a little intrigued. I, on the other hand, was rather upset by this Mr Higgs and his deep mine of information. ‘If he rings again,’ I said, ‘threaten him with the police.’
‘Good-morning, Mrs Farrel.’
‘Mr Higgs?’
‘My dear.’
‘Well then, Mr Higgs, explain.’
‘Ho, ho, Mrs Farrel, there’s a sharpness for you. Explain? Why, if I explained I’d be out of business in no time at all. “So that’s it,” you’d say, and ring off, just like I was a salesman or a Jehovah’s Witness.’
‘Mr Higgs –’
‘You was a little girl of ten, Mrs Farrel. You was out on a picnic. Remember?’
‘How did you know all that?’
‘Why shouldn’t I know, for heaven’s sake? Listen now, Mrs Farrel. Did you think then what you would be today? Did you see yourself married to a man and mothering his children? Have you come to a sticky end, or otherwise?’
‘A sticky end?’
‘You clean his house, you prepare his meals, you take his opinions. You hear on the radio some news of passing importance, some bomb exploded, some army recalled. Who does the thinking, Mrs Farrel? You react as he does. You’ve lost your identity. Did you think of that that day when you were ten? Your children will be ten one day. They’ll stand before you at ten years of age, first the girl, then the boy. What of their futures, Mrs Farrel? Shall they make something of themselves? Shall they fail and be miserable? Shall they be unnatural and unhappy, or sick in some way, or perhaps too stupid? Or shall they all three of them be richly successful? Are you successful, Mrs Farrel? You are your husband’s instrument. You were different at ten, Mrs Farrel. How about your children? Soon it’ll be your turn to take on the talking. I’ll listen like I was paid for it.’
I was aware of considerable pique when Elizabeth reported all this to me. I protested that I was not given to forcing my opinions on others, and Elizabeth said I wasn’t either. ‘Clearly, he’s queer in the head,’ I said. I paused, thinking about that, then said: ‘Could he be someone like a window-cleaner to whom you once perhaps talked of your childhood? Although I can’t see you doing it.’
Elizabeth sh
ook her head; she said she didn’t remember talking to a window-cleaner about her childhood, or about anything very much. We’d had the same window-cleaners for almost seven years, she reminded me: two honest, respectable men who arrived at the house every six weeks in a Ford motor-car. ‘Well, he must be someone,’ I said. ‘Someone you’ve talked to. I mean, it’s not guesswork.’
‘Maybe he’s wicked,’ said Elizabeth. ‘Maybe he’s a small wicked man with very white skin, driven by some force he doesn’t understand. Perhaps he’s one of those painters who came last year to paint the hall. There was a little man –’
‘That little man’s name was Mr Gipe. I remember that well. “Gipe,” he said, walking into the hall and saying it would be a long job. “Gipe, sir; an unusual name.’ ”
‘He could be calling himself Higgs. He could have read through my letters. And my old diaries. Perhaps Mr Gipe expected a tip.’
‘The hall cost ninety pounds.’
‘I know, but it didn’t all go to Mr Gipe. Perhaps nobody tips poor Mr Gipe and perhaps now he’s telephoning all the wives, having read through their letters and their private diaries. He telephones to taunt them and to cause trouble, being an evil man. Perhaps Mr Gipe is possessed of a devil.’
I frowned and shook my head. ‘Not at all,’ I said. ‘It’s a voice from the past. It’s someone who really did know you when you were ten, and knows all that’s happened since.’
‘More likely Mr Gipe,’ said Elizabeth, ‘guided from Hell.’
‘Daddy, am I asleep?’
I looked at her wide eyes, big and blue and clear, perfect replicas of her mother’s. I loved Anna best of all of them; I suppose because she reminded me so much of Elizabeth.
‘No, darling, you’re not asleep. If you were asleep you couldn’t be talking to me, now could you?’
The Collected Stories Page 28