Once more he felt a hint of excitement. It was a confused feeling now, belonging as much in his body as in his mind. In a dim kind of way he seemed again to be telling the story to Mrs Harcourt-Egan or to someone else. Telling it, his voice was quiet. It spoke of the compassion he had suddenly felt for the small, unattractive Jewish, woman and for another woman, a total stranger whom he’d never even seen. ‘A moment of truth,’ his voice explained to Mrs Harcourt-Egan and others. ‘I could not pass these women by.’
He knew it was true. The excitement he felt had to do with sympathy, and the compassion that had been engendered in it. His complicated nature worked in that way: there had to be drama, like the drama of a man dead in a bed, and the beauty of being unable to pass the women by, as real as the beauty of the Madonna of the Meadow. With her cigarette and her Brolio, his ex-wife wouldn’t have understood that in a million years. In their bedroom in Siena she had expected something ordinary to take place, an act that rats performed.
Never in his entire life had Attridge felt as he felt now. It was the most extraordinary, and for all he knew the most important, occasion in his life. As though watching a play, he saw himself assisting the dead, naked man into his clothes. It would be enough to put his clothes on, no need to move the body from one flat to another, enough to move it from the bedroom. ‘We put it in the lift and left it there,’ his voice said, still telling the story. ‘ “No need,” I said to her, “to involve my flat at all.” She agreed; she had no option. The man became a man who’d had a heart attack in a lift. A travelling salesman, God knows who he was.’
The story was beautiful. It was extravagant and flamboyant, incredible almost, like all good art. Who really believed in the Madonna of the Meadow, until jolted by the genius of Bellini? The Magic Flute was an impossible occasion, until Mozart’s music charged you like an electric current.
‘Yes, Mr Attridge?’
He moved towards her, fearing to speak lest his voice emerged from him in the shrill whisper that had possessed it before. He nodded at Mrs Matara, agreeing in this way to assist her.
Hurrying through the hall and hurrying up the stairs because one flight of stairs was quicker than the lift, he felt the excitement continuing in his body. Actually it would be many months before he could tell Mrs Harcourt-Egan or anyone else about any of it. It seemed, for the moment at least, to be entirely private.
‘What was he?’ he asked on the stairs in a whisper.
‘Was?’
‘Professionally.’ He was impatient, more urgent now than she. ‘Salesman or something, was he?’
She shook her head. Her friend had been a dealer in antiques, she said.
Another Jew, he thought. But he was pleased because the man could have been on his way to see him, since dealers in antiques did sometimes visit him. Mrs Matara might have said to the man, at another party given by the Mortons or anywhere else you liked, that Mr Attridge, a collector of pictures and Staffordshire china, lived in the flat below hers. She could have said to Attridge that she knew a man who might have stuff that would interest him and then the man might have telephoned him, and he’d have said come round one afternoon. And in the lift the man collapsed and died.
She had her latchkey in her hand, about to insert it into the lock of her flat door. Her hand was shaking. Surprising himself, he gripped her arm, preventing her from completing the action with the key.
‘Will you promise me,’ he said, ‘to move away from these flats? As soon as you conveniently can?’
‘Of course, of course! How could I stay?’
‘I’d find it awkward, meeting you about the place, Mrs Matara. Is that a bargain?’
‘Yes, yes.’
She turned the key in the lock. They entered a hall that was of the exact proportions of Attridge’s but different in other ways. It was a most unpleasant hall, he considered, with bell chimes in it, and two oil paintings that appeared to be the work of some emergent African, one being of Negro children playing on crimson sand, the other of a Negro girl with a baby at her breast.
‘Oh, God!’ Mrs Matara cried, turning suddenly, unable to proceed. She pushed herself at him, her sharp head embedding itself in his chest, her hands grasping the jacket of his grey suit.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said, dragging his eyes away from the painting of the children on the crimson sand. One of her hands had ceased to grasp his jacket and had fallen into one of his. It was cold and had a fleshless feel.
‘We have to do it,’ he said, and for a second he saw himself again as he would see himself in retrospect: standing with the Jewish woman in her hall, holding her hand to comfort her.
While they still stood there, just as he was about to propel her forward, there was a noise.
‘My God!’ whispered Mrs Matara.
He knew she was thinking that her husband had returned, and he thought the same himself. Her husband had come back sooner than he usually did. He had found a corpse and was about to find his wife holding hands with a neighbour in the hall.
‘Hey!’ a voice said.
‘Oh no!’ cried Mrs Matara, rushing forward into the room that Attridge knew was her sitting-room.
There was the mumble of another voice, and then the sound of Mrs Matara’s tears. It was a man’s voice, but the man was not her husband: the atmosphere which came from the scene wasn’t right for that.
‘There now,’ the other voice was saying in the sitting-room. ‘There now, there now.’
The noise of Mrs Matara’s weeping continued, and the man appeared at the door of the sitting-room. He was fully dressed, a sallow man, tall and black-haired, with a beard. He’d guessed what had happened, he said, as soon as he heard voices in the hall: he’d guessed that Mrs Matara had gone to get help. In an extremely casual way he said he was really quite all right, just a little groggy due to the silly blackout he’d had. Mrs Matara was a customer of his, he explained, he was in the antique business. ‘I just passed out,’ he said. He smiled at Attridge. He’d had a few silly blackouts recently and despite what his doctor said about there being nothing to worry about he’d have to be more careful. Really embarrassing, it was, plopping out in a client’s sitting-room.
Mrs Matara appeared in the sitting-room doorway. She leaned against it, as though requiring its support. She giggled through her tears and the man spoke sharply to her, forgetting she was meant to be his client. He warned her against becoming hysterical.
‘My God, you’d be hysterical,’ Mrs Matara cried, ‘if you’d been through all that kerfuffle.’
‘Now, now –’
‘For Christ’s sake, I thought you were a goner. Didn’t I?’ she cried, addressing Attridge without looking at him and not waiting for him to reply. ‘I rushed downstairs to this man here. I was in a frightful state. Wasn’t I?’
‘Yes.’
‘We were going to put your clothes on and dump you in his flat.’
Attridge shook his head, endeavouring to imply that that was not accurate, that he’d never have agreed to the use of his flat for this purpose. But neither of them was paying any attention to him. The man was looking embarrassed, Mrs Matara was grim.
‘You should damn well have told me if you were having blackouts.’
‘I’m sorry,’ the man said. ‘I’m sorry you were troubled,’ he said to Attridge. ‘Please forgive Mrs Matara.’
‘Forgive you, you mean!’ she cried. ‘Forgive you for being such a damn fool!’
‘Do try to pull yourself together, Miriam.’
‘I tell you, I thought you were dead.’
‘Well, I’m not. I had a little blackout –’
‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, stop about your wretched blackout!’
The way she said that reminded Attridge very much of his ex-wife. He’d had a headache once, he remembered, and she’d protested in just the same impatient tone of voice, employing almost the same words. She’d married again, of course – a man called Saunders in ICI.
‘At least be civil,’
the man said to Mrs Matara.
They were two of the most unpleasant people Attridge had ever come across. It was a pity the man hadn’t died. He’d run to fat and was oily, there was a shower of dandruff on his jacket. You could see his stomach straining his shirt, one of the shirt-buttons had actually given way.
‘Well, thank you,’ Mrs Matara said, approaching Attridge with her right hand held out. She said it gracelessly, as a duty. The same hand had struck him on the face and later had slipped for comfort into one of his. It was hard and cold when he shook it, with the same fleshless feel as before. ‘We still have a secret,’ Mrs Matara said. She smiled at him in her dutiful way, without displaying interest in him.
The man had opened the hall door of the flat. He stood by it, smiling also, anxious for Attridge to go.
‘This afternoon’s a secret,’ Mrs Matara murmured, dropping her eyes in a girlish pretence. ‘All this,’ she said, indicating her friend. ‘I’m sorry I hit you.’
‘Hit him?’
‘When we were upset. Downstairs. I hit him.’ She giggled, apparently unable to help herself.
‘Great God!’ The man giggled also.
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Attridge said.
But it did matter. The secret she spoke of wasn’t worth having because it was sordid and nothing else. It was hardly the kind of thing he’d wish to mull over in private, and certainly not the kind he’d wish to tell Mrs Harcourt-Egan or anyone else. Yet the other story might even have reached his ex-wife, it was not impossible. He imagined her hearing it, and her amazement that a man whom she’d once likened to dust had in the cause of compassion falsified the circumstances of a death. He couldn’t imagine the man his ex-wife had married doing such a thing, or Mrs Matara’s husband, or the dandruffy man who now stood by the door of the flat. Such men would have been frightened out of their wits.
‘Goodbye,’ she said.
‘Goodbye,’ the man said, smiling at the door.
Attridge wanted to say something. He wanted to linger for a moment longer and to mention his ex-wife. He wanted to tell them what he had never told another soul, that his ex-wife had done terrible things to him. He disliked all Jewish people, he wanted to say, because of his ex-wife and her lack of understanding. Marriage repelled him because of her. It was she who had made him vicious-tongued. It was she who had embittered him.
He looked from one face to the other. They would not understand and they would not be capable of making an effort, as he had when faced with the woman’s predicament. He had always been a little on the cold side, he knew that well. But his ex-wife might have drawn on the other aspects of his nature and dispelled the coldness. Instead of displaying all that impatience, she might have cosseted him and accepted his complications. The love she sought would have come in its own good time, as sympathy and compassion had eventually come that afternoon. Warmth was buried deep in some people, he wanted to say to the two faces in the hall, but he knew that, like his ex-wife, the faces would not understand.
As he went he heard the click of the door behind him and imagined a hushed giggling in the hall. He would be feeling like a prince if the man had really died.
Teresa’s Wedding
The remains of the wedding-cake were on top of the piano in Swanton’s lounge-bar, beneath a framed advertisement for Power’s whiskey. Chas Flynn, the best man, had opened two packets of confetti: it lay thickly on the remains of the wedding-cake, on the surface of the bar and the piano, on the table and the two small chairs that the lounge-bar contained, and on the tattered green-and-red linoleum.
The wedding guests, themselves covered in confetti, stood in groups. Father Hogan, who had conducted the service in the Church of the Immaculate Conception, stood with Mrs Atty, the mother of the bride, and Mrs Cornish, the mother of the bridegroom, and Mrs Tracy, a sister of Mrs Atty’s.
Mrs Tracy was the stoutest of the three women, a farmer’s widow who lived eight miles from the town. In spite of the jubilant nature of the occasion, she was dressed in black, a colour she had affected since the death of her husband three years ago. Mrs Atty, bespectacled, with her grey hair in a bun, wore a flowered dress – small yellow-and-blue blooms that blended easily with the confetti. Mrs Cornish was in pink, with a pink hat. Father Hogan, a big red-complexioned man, held a tumbler containing whiskey and water in equal measures; his companions sipped Winter’s Tale sherry.
Artie Cornish, the bridegroom, drank stout with his friends Eddie Boland and Chas Flynn, who worked in the town’s bacon factory, and Screw Doyle, so called because he served behind the counter in McQuaid’s hardware shop. Artie, who worked in a shop himself – Driscoll’s Provisions and Bar – was a freckled man of twenty-eight, six years older than his bride. He was heavily built, his bulk encased now in a suit of navy-blue serge, similar to the suits that all the other men were wearing that morning in Swanton’s lounge-bar. In the opinion of Mr Driscoll, his employer, he was a conscientious shopman, with a good memory for where commodities were kept on the shelves. Customers occasionally found him slow.
The fathers of the bride and bridegroom, Mr Atty and Mr Cornish, were talking about greyhounds, keeping close to the bar. They shared a feeling of unease, caused by being in the lounge-bar of Swanton’s, with women present, on a Saturday morning. ‘Bring us two more big ones,’ Mr Cornish requested of Kevin, a youth behind the bar, hoping that this addition to his consumption of whiskey would relax matters. They wore white carnations in the buttonholes of their suits, and stiff white collars which were reddening their necks. Unknown to one another, they shared the same thought: a wish that the bride and groom would soon decide to bring the occasion to an end by going to prepare themselves for their journey to Cork on the half-one bus. Mr Atty and Mr Cornish, bald-headed men of fifty-three and fifty-five, had it in mind to spend the remainder of the day in Swanton’s lounge-bar, celebrating in their particular way the union of their children.
The bride, who had been Teresa Atty and was now Teresa Cornish, had a round, pretty face and black, pretty hair, and was a month and a half pregnant. She stood in the corner of the lounge with her friends, Philomena Morrissey and Kitty Roche, both of whom had been bridesmaids. All three of them were attired in their wedding finery, dresses they had feverishly worked on to get finished in time for the wedding. They planned to alter the dresses and have them dyed so that later on they could go to parties in them, even though parties were rare in the town.
‘I hope you’ll be happy, Teresa,’ Kitty Roche whispered: ‘I hope you’ll be all right.’ She couldn’t help giggling, even though she didn’t want to. She giggled because she’d drunk a glass of gin and Kia-Ora orange, which Screw Doyle had said would steady her. She’d been nervous in the church. She’d tripped twice on the walk down the aisle.
‘You’ll be marrying yourself one of these days,’ Teresa whispered, her cheeks still glowing after the excitement of the ceremony. ‘I hope you’ll be happy too, Kit.’
But Kitty Roche, who was asthmatic, did not believe she’d ever marry. She’d be like Miss Levis, the Protestant woman on the Cork road, who’d never got married because of tuberculosis. Or old Hannah Flood, who had a bad hip. And it wasn’t just that no one would want to be saddled with a diseased wife: there was also the fact that the asthma caused a recurrent skin complaint on her face and neck and hands.
Teresa and Philomena drank glasses of Babycham, and Kitty drank Kia-Ora with water instead of gin in it. They’d known each other all their lives. They’d been to the Presentation Nuns together, they’d taken First Communion together. Even when they’d left the Nuns, when Teresa had gone to work in the Medical Hall and Kitty Roche and Philomena in Keane’s drapery, they’d continued to see each other almost every day.
‘We’ll think of you, Teresa,’ Philomena said. ‘We’ll pray for you.’ Philomena, plump and pale-haired, had every hope of marrying and had even planned her dress, in light lemony lace, with a Limerick veil. Twice in the last month she’d gone out with Des Foley the vet,
and even if he was a few years older than he might be and had a car that smelt of cattle disinfectant, there was more to be said for Des Foley than for many another.
Teresa’s two sisters, much older than Teresa, stood by the piano and the framed Power’s advertisement, between the two windows of the lounge-bar. Agnes, in smart powder-blue, was tall and thin, the older of the two; Loretta, in brown, was small. Their own two marriages, eleven and nine years ago, had been consecrated by Father Hogan in the Church of the Immaculate Conception and celebrated afterwards in this same lounge-bar. Loretta had married a man who was no longer mentioned because he’d gone to England and had never come back. Agnes had married George Tobin, who was at present sitting outside the lounge-bar in a Ford Prefect, in charge of his and Agnes’s three small children. The Tobins lived in Cork now, George being the manager of a shoe-shop there. Loretta lived with her parents, like an unmarried daughter again.
‘Sickens you,’ Agnes said ‘She’s only a kid, marrying a goop like that. She’ll be stuck in this dump of a town for ever.’
Loretta didn’t say anything. It was well known that Agnes’s own marriage had turned out well: George Tobin was a teetotaller and had no interest in either horses or greyhounds. From where she stood Loretta could see him through the window, sitting patiently in the Ford Prefect, reading a comic to his children. Loretta’s marriage had not been consummated.
‘Well, though I’ve said it before I’ll say it again,’ said Father Hogan. ‘It’s a great day for a mother.’
Mrs Atty and Mrs Cornish politely agreed, without speaking. Mrs Tracy smiled.
‘And for an aunt too, Mrs Tracy. Naturally enough.’
Mrs Tracy smiled again. ‘A great day,’ she said.
‘Ah, I’m happy for Teresa,’ Father Hogan said. ‘And for Artie, too, Mrs Cornish; naturally enough. Aren’t they as fine a couple as ever stepped out of this town?’
The Collected Stories Page 58