My parents, however, didn’t seem pleased. My father got hold of a Cork Examiner and looked up the film that was on at the Pavilion and reported that it wasn’t suitable for a child. My mother gave me a bath and examined my clothes for fleas. When Father Parsloe winked at me in the dining-room my parents pretended not to notice him.
That night my mother prayed for her extra long period, after the visit to my uncle. I lay in the dimly lit room, aware that she was kneeling there, but thinking of the film and the way the people had kissed, not like my parents ever kissed. At the convent elementary school there were girls in the higher classes who were pretty, far prettier than my mother. There was one called Claire, with fair hair and a softly freckled face, and another called Peggy Meehan, who was younger and black-haired. I had picked them out because they had spoken to me, asking me my name. I thought them very nice.
I opened my eyes and saw that my mother was rising from her knees. She stood for a moment at the edge of her bed, not smiling, her lips still moving, continuing her prayer. Then she got into bed and put out the light.
I listened to her breathing and heard it become the breathing which people have when they’re asleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. I lay there, still remembering the film and remembering being in Thompson’s and seeing Father Parsloe lighting one cigarette after another. For some reason, I began to imagine that I was in Thompson’s with Father Parsloe and the two girls from the convent, and that we all went off to the Pavilion together, swinging along the street. ‘Ah, isn’t this the life for us?’ Father Parsloe said as he led us into the darkness, and I told the girls I’d been to the Pavilion before and they said they never had.
I heard eleven o’clock chiming from a nearby church. I heard a stumbling on the stairs and then the laughter of Father Smith, and Father Riordon telling him to be quiet. I heard twelve chiming and half past twelve, and a quarter to one, and one.
After that I didn’t want to sleep. I was standing in a classroom of the convent and Claire was smiling at me. It was nice being with her. I felt warm all over, and happy.
And then I was walking on the sands with Peggy Meehan. We ran, playing a game she’d made up, and then we walked again. She asked if I’d like to go on a picnic with her, next week perhaps.
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted one of the girls to be my friend. I wanted to love one of them, like the people had loved in the film. I wanted to kiss one and be with one, just the two of us. In the darkness of the bedroom they both seemed close and real, closer than my mother, even though I could hear my mother breathing. ‘Come on,’ Peggy Meehan whispered, and then Claire whispered also, saying we’d always be best friends, saying we might run away. It was all wrong that there were two of them, yet both vividly remained. ‘Tuesday,’ Peggy Meehan said. ‘We’ll have the picnic on Tuesday.’
Her father drove us in his car, away from the town, out beyond the heathery wastelands, towards a hillside that was even nicer. But a door of the car, the back door against which Peggy Meehan was leaning, suddenly gave way. On the dust of the road she was as dead as the woman in the film.
‘Poor Peggy,’ Claire said at some later time, even though she hadn’t known Peggy Meehan very well. ‘Poor little Peggy.’ And then she smiled and took my hand and we walked together through the heathery wastelands, in love with one another.
A few days later we left my Aunt Isabella’s house in Montenotte and returned on the train to our seaside town. And a week after that a new term began at the convent elementary school. Peggy Meehan was dead, the Reverend Mother told us, all of us assembled together. She added that there was diphtheria in the town.
I didn’t think about it at first; and I didn’t connect the reality of the death with a fantasy that had been caused by my first visit to a cinema. Some part of my mind may passingly have paused over the coincidence, but that was all. There was the visit to the Pavilion itself to talk about in the convent, and the description of the film, and Father Parsloe’s conversation and the way he’d smoked fourteen cigarettes in Thompson’s. Diphtheria was a terrible disease, my mother said when I told her, and naturally we must all pray for the soul of poor Peggy Meehan.
But as weeks and months went by, I found myself increasingly remembering the story I had told myself on the night of the film, and remembering particularly how Peggy Meehan had fallen from the car, and how she’d looked when she was dead. I said to myself that that had been my wickedest thought, worse than my blasphemies and yet somehow part of them. At night I lay in bed, unable to sleep, trying hopelessly to pray for forgiveness. But no forgiveness came, for there was no respite to the images that recurred, her face in life and then in death, like the face of the woman in the film.
A year later, while lying awake in the same room in my aunt’s boarding-house, I saw her. In the darkness there was a sudden patch of light and in the centre of it she was wearing a sailor-suit that I remembered. Her black plaits hung down her back. She smiled at me and went away. I knew instinctively then, as I watched her and after she’d gone, that the fantasy and the reality were part and parcel: I had caused this death to occur.
Looking back on it now, I can see, of course, that that feeling was a childish one. It was a childish fear, a superstition that occurring to an adult would cause only a shiver of horror. But, as a child, with no one to consult about the matter, I lived with the thought that my will was more potent than I knew. In stories I had learnt of witches and spells and evil spirits, and power locked up in people. In my games I had wickedly denied the religious life, and goodness, and holiness. In my games I had mocked Father Smith, I had pretended that the dying Father Magennis was a criminal. I had pretended to be a criminal myself, a man who broke jewellers’ windows. I had imitated my parents when it said you should honour your father and your mother. I had mocked the holiness of my Aunt Isabella. I had murdered Peggy Meehan because there wasn’t room for her in the story I was telling myself. I was possessed and evil: the nuns had told us about people being like that.
I thought at first I might seek advice from Father Parsloe. I thought of asking him if he remembered the day we’d gone on our outing, and then telling him how, in a story I was telling myself, I’d caused Peggy Meehan to be killed in a car accident like the woman in the film, and how she’d died in reality, of diphtheria. But Father Parsloe had an impatient kind of look about him this year, as if he had worries of his own. So I didn’t tell him and I didn’t tell anyone. I hoped that when we returned to our own house at the end of the stay in Montenotte I wouldn’t see her again, but the very first day we were back I saw her at four o’clock in the afternoon, in the kitchen.
After that she came irregularly, sometimes not for a month and once not for a year. She continued to appear in the same sudden way but in different clothes, and growing up as I was growing up. Once, after I’d left the convent and gone on to the Christian Brother’s, she appeared in the classroom, smiling near the blackboard.
She never spoke. Whether she appeared on the promenade or at school or in my aunt’s house or our house, close to me or at a distance, she communicated only with her smile and with her eyes: I was possessed of the Devil, she came herself from God. In her eyes and her smile there was that simple message, a message which said also that my thoughts were always wicked, that I had never believed properly in God or the Virgin or Jesus who died for us.
I tried to pray. Like my mother, kneeling beside my bed. Like my aunt and her houseful of priests. Like the nuns and Christian Brothers, and other boys and girls of the town. But prayer would not come to me, and I realized that it never had. I had always pretended, going down on my knees at Mass, laughing and blaspheming in my mind. I hated the very thought of prayer. I hated my parents in an unnatural manner, and my Aunt Isabella and the priests in her house. But the dead Peggy Meehan fresh from God’s heaven, was all forgiveness in her patch of light, smiling to rid me of my evil spirit.
She was there at my mother’s funeral, and later at my father’s. Claire,
whom I had destroyed her for, married a man employed in the courthouse and became a Mrs Madden, prematurely fat. I naturally didn’t marry anyone myself.
I am forty-six years old now and I live alone in the same seaside town. No one in the town knows why I am solitary. No one could guess that I have lived with a child’s passionate companionship for half a lifetime. Being no longer a child, I naturally no longer believe that I was responsible for the death. In my passing, careless fantasy I wished for it and she, already dead, picked up my living thoughts. I should not have wished for it because in middle age she is a beautiful creature now, more beautiful by far than fat Mrs Madden.
And that is all there is. At forty-six I walk alone on the brief promenade, or by the edge of the sea or on the road to Cork, where the moving house is. I work, as my father worked, in the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin. I cook my own food. I sleep alone in a bed that has an iron bedstead. On Sundays I go hypocritically to Mass in the Church of the Holy Redeemer; I go to Confession and do not properly confess; I go to Men’s Confraternity, and to Communion. And all the time she is there, appearing in her patch of light to remind me that she never leaves me. And all the time, on my knees at Mass, or receiving the Body and the Blood, or in my iron bed, I desire her. In the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin I dream of her nakedness. When we are old I shall desire her, too, with my shrunken, evil body.
In the town I am a solitary, peculiar man. I have been rendered so, people probably say, by my cloistered upbringing, and probably add that such an upbringing would naturally cultivate a morbid imagination. That may be so, and it doesn’t really matter how things have come about. All I know is that she is more real for me than anything else is in this seaside town or beyond it. I live for her, living hopelessly, for I know I can never possess her as I wish to. I have a carnal desire for a shadow, which in turn is His mockery of me: His fitting punishment for my wickedest thought of all.
Mrs Silly
Michael couldn’t remember a time when his father had been there. There’d always been the flat where he and his mother lived, poky and cluttered even though his mother tried so. Every Saturday his father came to collect him. He remembered a blue car and then a greenish one. The latest one was white, an Alfa-Romeo.
Saturday with his father was the highlight of the week. Unlike his mother’s flat, his father’s house was spacious and nicely carpeted. There was Gillian, his father’s wife, who never seemed in a hurry, who smiled and didn’t waste time. Her smile was cool, which matched the way she dressed. Her voice was quiet and reliable: Michael couldn’t imagine it ever becoming shrill or weepy or furious, or in any other way getting out of control. It was a nice voice, as nice as Gillian herself.
His father and Gillian had two little girls, twins of six, two years younger than Michael. They lived near Cranleigh, in a half-timbered house in pretty wooded countryside. On Saturday mornings the drive from London took over an hour, but Michael never minded and on the way back he usually fell asleep. There was a room in the house that his father and Gillian had made his own, which the twins weren’t allowed to enter in his absence. He had his Triang train circuit there, on a table that had been specially built into the wall for it.
It was in this house, one Saturday afternoon, that Michael’s father brought up the subject of Elton Grange. ‘You’re nearly nine, you know,’ his father said. ‘It’s high time, really, old chap.’
Elton Grange was a preparatory school in Wiltshire, which Michael’s father had gone to himself. He’d mentioned it many times before and so had Michael’s mother, but in Michael’s mind it was a place that belonged to the distant future – with Radley, where his father had gone, also. He certainly knew that he wasn’t going to stay at the primary school in Hammersmith for ever, and had always taken it for granted that he would move away from it when the rest of his class moved, at eleven. He felt, without actually being able to recall the relevant conversation, that his mother had quite definitely implied this. But it didn’t work out like that. ‘You should go in September,’ his father said, and that was that.
‘Oh, darling,’ his mother murmured when the arrangements had all been made. ‘Oh, Michael, I’ll miss you.’
His father would pay the fees and his father would in future give him pocket-money, over and above what his mother gave him. He’d like it at Elton Grange, his father promised. ‘Oh yes, you’ll like it,’ his mother said too.
She was a woman of medium height, five foot four, with a round, plump face and plump arms and legs. There was a soft prettiness about her, about her light-blue eyes and her wide, simple mouth and her fair, rather fluffy hair. Her hands were always warm, as if expressing the warmth of her nature. She wept easily and often said she was silly to weep so. She talked a lot, getting carried away when she didn’t watch herself: for this failing, too, she regularly said she was silly. ‘Mrs Silly’, she used to say when Michael was younger, condemning herself playfully for the two small follies she found it hard to control.
She worked as a secretary for an Indian, a Mr Ashaf, who had an office-stationery business. There was the shop – more of a warehouse, really – with stacks of swivel chairs and filing-cabinets on top of one another and green metal desks, and cartons containing continuation paper and top-copy foolscap and flimsy, and printed invoices. There were other cartons full of envelopes, and packets of paper-clips, drawing-pins and staples. The carbon-paper supplies were kept in the office behind the shop, where Michael’s mother sat in front of a typewriter, typing invoices mainly. Mr Ashaf, a small wiry man, was always on his feet, moving between the shop and the office, keeping an eye on Michael’s mother and on Dolores Welsh who looked after the retail side. Before she’d married, Michael’s mother had been a secretary in the Wedgwood Centre, but returning to work at the time of her divorce she’d found it more convenient to work for Mr Ashaf since his premises were only five minutes away from where she and Michael lived. Mr Ashaf was happy to employ her on the kind of part-time basis that meant she could be at home every afternoon by the time Michael got in from school. During the holidays Mr Ashaf permitted her to take the typewriter to her flat, to come in every morning to collect what work there was and hand over what she’d done the day before. When this arrangement wasn’t convenient, due to the nature of the work, Michael accompanied her to Mr Ashaf’s premises and sat in the office with her or with Dolores Welsh in the shop. Mr Ashaf used occasionally to give him a sweet.
‘Perhaps I’ll change my job,’ Michael’s mother said brightly, a week before he was due to become a boarder at Elton Grange. ‘I could maybe go back to the West End. Nice to have a few more pennies.’ She was cheering herself up – he could tell by the way she looked at him. She packed his belongings carefully, giving him many instructions about looking after himself, about keeping himself warm and changing any clothes that got wet. ‘Oh, darling,’ she said at Paddington on the afternoon of his departure. ‘Oh, darling, I’ll miss you so!’
He would miss her, too. Although his father and Gillian were in every way more fun than his mother, it was his mother he loved. Although she fussed and was a nuisance sometimes, there was always the warmth, the cosiness of climbing into her bed on Sunday mornings or watching Magic Roundabout together. He was too big for Magic Roundabout now, or so he considered, and he rather thought he was too big to go on climbing into her bed. But the memories of all this cosiness had become part of his relationship with her.
She wept as they stood together on the platform. She held him close to her, pressing his head against her breast. ‘Oh, darling!’ she said. ‘Oh, my darling.’
Her tears damped his face. She sniffed and sobbed, whispering that she didn’t know what she’d do. ‘Poor thing!’ someone passing said. She blew her nose. She apologized to Michael, trying to smile. ‘Remember where your envelopes are,’ she said. She’d addressed and stamped a dozen envelopes for him so that he could write to her. She wanted him to write at once, just to say he’d arrived safely.
‘
And don’t be homesick now,’ she said, her own voice trembling again. ‘Big boy, Michael.’
The train left her behind. He waved from the corridor window, and she gestured at him, indicating that he shouldn’t lean out. But because of the distances between them he couldn’t understand what the gesture meant. When the train stopped at Reading he found his writing-paper and envelopes in his overnight bag and began to write to her.
At Elton Grange he was in the lowest form, Miss Brooks’s form. Miss Brooks, grey-haired at sixty, was the only woman on the teaching staff. She did not share the men’s common-room but sat instead in the matrons’ room, where she smoked Senior Service cigarettes between lessons. There was pale tobacco-tinged hair on her face, and on Tuesday and Friday afternoons she wore jodhpurs, being in charge of the school’s riding. Brookie she was known as.
The other women at Elton Grange were Sister and the undermatron Miss Trenchard, the headmaster’s wife Mrs Lyng, the lady cook Miss Arland, and the maids. Mrs Lyng was a stout woman, known among the boys as Outsize Dorothy, and Sister was thin and brisk. Miss Trenchard and Miss Arland were both under twenty-three; Miss Arland was pretty and Miss Trenchard wasn’t. Miss Arland went about a lot with the history and geography master, Cocky Marshall, and Miss Trenchard was occasionally seen with the P.T. instructor, a Welshman, who was also in charge of the carpentry shop. Among the older boys Miss Trenchard was sometimes known as Tampax.
Twice a week Michael wrote to his mother, and on Sundays he wrote to his father as well. He told them that the headmaster was known to everyone as A.J.L. and he told them about the rules, how no boy in the three lower forms was permitted to be seen with his hands in his pockets and how no boy was permitted to run through A.J.L.’s garden. He said the food was awful because that was what everyone else said, although he quite liked it really.
The Collected Stories Page 54