‘You’re nicely in time for coffee, Mr Torridge,’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton said.
‘Brandy more like,’ Arrowsmith suggested. ‘Brandy, old chap?’
‘Well, that’s awfully kind of you, Arrows. Chartreuse I’d prefer, really.’
A waiter drew up a chair. Room was made for Torridge between Mrs Mace-Hamilton and the Arrowsmith boys. It was a frightful mistake, Wiltshire was thinking. It was mad of Arrowsmith.
Mace-Hamilton examined Torridge across the dinner table. The old Torridge would have said he’d rather not have anything alcoholic, that a cup of tea and a biscuit were more his line in the evenings. It was impossible to imagine this man saying his dad had a button business. There was a suavity about him that made Mace-Hamilton uneasy. Because of what had been related to his wife and the other wives and their children he felt he’d been caught out in a lie, yet in fact that wasn’t the case.
The children stole glances at Torridge, trying to see him as the boy who’d been described to them, and failing to. Mrs Arrowsmith said to herself that all this stuff they’d been told over the years had clearly been rubbish. Mrs Mace-Hamilton was bewildered. Mrs Wiltshire was pleased.
‘No one ever guessed,’ Torridge said, ‘what became of R.A.J. Fisher.’ He raised the subject suddenly, without introduction.
‘Oh God, Fisher,’ Mace-Hamilton said.
‘Who’s Fisher?’ the younger of the Arrowsmith boys inquired.
Torridge turned to flash his quick smile at the boy. ‘He left,’ he said. ‘In unfortunate circumstances.’
‘You’ve changed a lot, you know,’ Arrowsmith said. ‘Don’t you think he’s changed?’ he asked Wiltshire and Mace-Hamilton.
‘Out of recognition,’ Wiltshire said.
Torridge laughed easily. ‘I’ve become adventurous. I’m a late developer, I suppose.’
‘What kind of unfortunate circumstances?’ the younger Arrowsmith boy asked. ‘Was Fisher expelled?’
‘Oh no, not at all,’ Mace-Hamilton said hurriedly.
‘Actually,’ Torridge said, ‘Fisher’s trouble all began with the writing of a note. Don’t you remember? He put it in my pyjamas. But it wasn’t for me at all.’
He smiled again. He turned to Mrs Wiltshire in a way that seemed polite, drawing her into the conversation. ‘I was an innocent at school. But innocence slips away. I found my way about eventually.’
‘Yes, of course,’ she murmured. She didn’t like him, even though she was glad he wasn’t as he might have been. There was malevolence in him, a ruthlessness that seemed like a work of art. He seemed like a work of art himself, as though in losing the innocence he spoke of he had recreated himself.
‘I often wonder about Fisher,’ he remarked.
The Wiltshire twins giggled. ‘What’s so great about this bloody Fisher?’ the older Arrowsmith boy murmured, nudging his brother with an elbow.
‘What’re you doing these days?’ Wiltshire asked, interrupting Mace-Hamilton, who had also begun to say something.
‘I make buttons,’ Torridge replied. ‘You may recall my father made buttons.’
‘Ah, here’re the drinks,’ Arrowsmith rowdily observed.
‘I don’t much keep up with the school,’ Torridge said as the waiter placed a glass of Chartreuse in front of him. ‘I don’t so much as think about it except for wondering about poor old Fisher. Our headmaster was a cretin,’ he informed Mrs Wiltshire.
Again the Wiltshire twins giggled. The Arrowsmith girl yawned and her brothers giggled also, amused that the name of Fisher had come up again.
‘You will have coffee, Mr Torridge?’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton offered, for the waiter had brought a fresh pot to the table. She held it poised above a cup. Torridge smiled at her and nodded. She said:
‘Pearl buttons d’you make?’
‘No, not pearl.’
‘Remember those awful packet peas we used to have?’ Arrowsmith inquired. Wiltshire said:
‘Use plastics at all? In your buttons, Porridge?’
‘No, we don’t use plastics. Leathers, various leathers. And horn. We specialize.’
‘How very interesting!’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton exclaimed
‘No, no. It’s rather ordinary really.’ He paused, and then added, ‘someone once told me that Fisher went into a timber business. But of course that was far from true.’
‘A chap was expelled a year ago,’ the younger Arrowsmith boy said, contributing this in order to cover up a fresh outburst of sniggering. ‘For stealing a transistor.’
Torridge nodded, appearing to be interested. He asked the Arrowsmith boys where they were at school. The older one said Charterhouse and his brother gave the name of his preparatory school. Torridge nodded again and asked their sister and she said she was waiting to go to university. He had quite a chat with the Wiltshire twins about their school. They considered it pleasant the way he bothered, seeming genuinely to want to know. The giggling died away.
‘I imagined Fisher wanted me for his bijou,’ he said when all that was over, still addressing the children. ‘Our place was riddled with fancy larks like that. Remember?’ he added, turning to Mace-Hamilton.
‘Bijou?’ one of the twins asked before Mace-Hamilton could reply.
‘A male tart,’ Torridge explained.
The Arrowsmith boys gaped at him, the older one with his mouth actually open. The Wiltshire twins began to giggle again. The Arrowsmith girl frowned, unable to hide her interest.
‘The Honourable Anthony Swain,’ Torridge said, ‘was no better than a whore.’
Mrs Arrowsmith, who for some minutes had been engaged with her own thoughts, was suddenly aware that the man who was in the button business was talking about sex. She gazed diagonally across the table at him, astonished that he should be talking in this way.
‘Look here, Torridge,’ Wiltshire said, frowning at him and shaking his head. With an almost imperceptible motion he gestured towards the wives and children.
‘Andrews and Butler. Dillon and Pratt. Tothill and Goldfish Stewart. Your dad,’ Torridge said to the Arrowsmith girl, ‘was always very keen. Sainsbury Major in particular.’
‘Now look here,’ Arrowsmith shouted, beginning to get to his feet and then changing his mind.
‘My gosh, how they broke chaps’ hearts, those three!’
‘Please don’t talk like this.’ It was Mrs Wiltshire who protested, to everyone’s surprise, most of all her own. ‘The children are quite young, Mr Torridge.’
Her voice had become a whisper. She could feel herself reddening with embarrassment, and a little twirl of sickness occurred in her stomach. Deferentially, as though appreciating the effort she had made, Torridge apologized.
‘I think you’d better go,’ Arrowsmith said.
‘You were right about God Harvey, Arrows. Gay as a grig he was, beneath that cassock. So was Old Frosty, as a matter of fact.’
‘Really!’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton cried, her bewilderment turning into outrage. She glared at her husband, demanding with her eyes that instantly something should be done. But her husband and his two friends were briefly stunned by what Torridge had claimed for God Harvey. Their schooldays leapt back at them, possessing them for a vivid moment: the dormitory, the dining-hall, the glances and the invitations, the meetings behind Chapel. It was somehow in keeping with the school’s hypocrisy that God Harvey had had inclinations himself, that a rumour begun as an outrageous joke should have contained the truth.
‘As a matter of fact,’ Torridge went on, ‘I wouldn’t be what I am if it hadn’t been for God Harvey. I’m what they call queer,’ he explained to the children. ‘I perform sexual acts with men.’
‘For God’s sake, Torridge,’ Arrowsmith shouted, on his feet, his face the colour of ripe strawberry, his watery eyes quivering with rage.
‘It was nice of you to invite me tonight, Arrows. Our alma mater can’t be too proud of chaps like me.’
People spoke at once, Mrs Mace-Hamilton and Mrs Wiltshire, all three men. Mrs Arrow
smith sat still. What she was thinking was that she had become quietly drunk while her husband had more boisterously reached the same condition. She was thinking, as well, that by the sound of things he’d possessed as a boy a sexual urge that was a lot livelier than the one he’d once exposed her to and now hardly ever did. With boys who had grown to be men he had had a whale of a time. Old Frosty had been a kind of Mr Chips, she’d been told. She’d never ever heard of Sainsbury Major or God Harvey.
‘It’s quite disgusting,’ Mrs Mace-Hamilton’s voice cried out above the other voices. She said the police should be called. It was scandalous to have to listen to unpleasant conversation like this. She began to say the children should leave the dining-room, but changed her mind because it appeared that Torridge himself was about to go. ‘You’re a most horrible man,’ she cried.
Confusion gathered, like a fog around the table. Mrs Wiltshire, who knew that her husband had committed adultery with Mrs Arrowsmith, felt another bout of nerves in her stomach. ‘Because she was starved, that’s why,’ her husband had almost violently confessed when she’d discovered. ‘I was putting her out of her misery.’ She had wept then and he had comforted her as best he could. She had not told him that he had never succeeded in arousing in her the desire to make love: she had always assumed that to be a failing in herself, but now for some reason she was not so sure. Nothing had been directly said that might have caused this doubt, but an instinct informed Mrs Wiltshire that the doubt should be there. The man beside her smiled his brittle, malevolent smile at her, as if in sympathy.
With his head bent over the table and his hands half hiding his face, the younger Arrowsmith boy examined his father by glancing through his fingers. There were men whom his parents warned him against, men who would sit beside you in buses or try to give you a lift in a car. This man who had come tonight, who had been such a joke up till now, was apparently one of these, not a joke at all. And the confusion was greater: at one time, it seemed, his father had been like that too.
The Arrowsmith girl considered her father also. Once she had walked into a room in Lagos to find her mother in the arms of an African clerk. Ever since she had felt sorry for her father. There’d been an unpleasant scene at the time, she’d screamed at her mother and later in a fury had told her father what she’d seen. He’d nodded, wearily seeming not to be surprised, while her mother had miserably wept. She’d put her arms around her father, comforting him; she’d felt no mercy for her mother, no sympathy or understanding. The scene formed vividly in her mind as she sat at the dinner table: it appeared to be relevant in the confusion and yet not clearly so. Her parents’ marriage was messy, messier than it had looked. Across the table her mother grimly smoked, focusing her eyes with difficulty. She smiled at her daughter, a soft, inebriated smile.
The older Arrowsmith boy was also aware of the confusion. Being at a school where the practice which had been spoken of was common enough, he could easily believe the facts that had been thrown about. Against his will, he was forced to imagine what he had never imagined before: his father and his friends as schoolboys, engaged in passion with other boys. He might have been cynical about this image but he could not. Instead it made him want to gasp. It knocked away the smile that had been on his face all evening.
The Wiltshire twins unhappily stared at the white tablecloth, here and there stained with wine or gravy. They, too, found they’d lost the urge to smile and instead shakily blinked back tears.
‘Yes, perhaps I’d better go,’ Torridge said.
With impatience Mrs Mace-Hamilton looked at her husband, as if expecting him to hurry Torridge off or at least to say something. But Mace-Hamilton remained silent. Mrs Mace-Hamilton licked her lips, preparing to speak herself. She changed her mind.
‘Fisher didn’t go into a timber business,’ Torridge said, ‘because poor old Fisher was dead as a doornail. Which is why our cretin of a headmaster, Mrs Mace-Hamilton, had that Assembly.’
‘Assembly?’ she said. Her voice was weak, although she’d meant it to sound matter-of-fact and angry.
‘There was an Assembly that no one understood. Poor old Fisher had strung himself up in a barn on his father’s farm. I discovered that,’ Torridge said, turning to Arrowsmith, ‘years later: from God Harvey actually. The poor chap left a note but the parents didn’t care to pass it on. I mean it was for you, Arrows.’
Arrowsmith was still standing, hanging over the table. ‘Note?’ he said. ‘For me?’
‘Another note. Why d’you think he did himself in, Arrows?’
Torridge smiled, at Arrowsmith and then around the table.
‘None of that’s true,’ Wiltshire said.
‘As a matter of fact it is.’
He went, and nobody spoke at the dinner table. A body of a schoolboy hung from a beam in a barn, a note on the straw below his dangling feet. It hung in the confusion that had been caused, increasing the confusion. Two waiters hovered by a sideboard, one passing the time by arranging sauce bottles, the other folding napkins into cone shapes. Slowly Arrowsmith sat down again. The silence continued as the conversation of Torridge continued to haunt the dinner table. He haunted it himself, with his brittle smile and his tap-dancer’s elegance, still faithful to the past in which he had so signally failed, triumphant in his middle age.
Then Mrs Arrowsmith quite suddenly wept and the Wiltshire twins wept and Mrs Wiltshire comforted them. The Arrowsmith girl got up and walked away, and Mrs Mace-Hamilton turned to the three men and said they should be ashamed of themselves, allowing all this to happen.
Death in Jerusalem
‘Till then,’ Father Paul said, leaning out of the train window. ‘Till Jerusalem, Francis.’
‘Please God, Paul.’ As he spoke the Dublin train began to move and his brother waved from the window and he waved back, a modest figure on the platform. Everyone said Francis might have been a priest as well, meaning that Francis’s quietness and meditative disposition had an air of the cloister about them. But Francis contented himself with the running of Conary’s hardware business, which his mother had run until she was too old for it. ‘Are we game for the Holy Land next year?’ Father Paul had asked that July. ‘Will we go together, Francis?’ He had brushed aside all Francis’s protestations, all attempts to explain that the shop could not be left, that their mother would be confused by the absence of Francis from the house. Rumbustiously he’d pointed out that there was their sister Kitty, who was in charge of the household of which Francis and their mother were part and whose husband, Myles, could surely be trusted to look after the shop for a single fortnight. For thirty years, ever since he was seven, Francis had wanted to go to the Holy Land. He had savings which he’d never spent a penny of: you couldn’t take them with you, Father Paul had more than once stated that July.
On the platform Francis watched until the train could no longer, be seen, his thoughts still with his brother. The priest’s ruddy countenance smiled again behind cigarette smoke; his bulk remained impressive in his clerical clothes, the collar pinching the flesh of his neck, his black shoes scrupulously polished. There were freckles on the backs of his large, Strong hands; he had a fine head of hair, grey and crinkly. In an hour and a half’s time the train would creep into Dublin, and he’d take a taxi. He’d spend a night in the Gresham Hotel, probably falling in with another priest, having a drink or two, maybe playing a game of bridge after his meal. That was his brother’s way and always had been – an extravagant, easy kind of way, full of smiles and good humour. It was what had taken him to America and made him successful there. In order to raise money for the church that he and Father Steigmuller intended to build before 1980 he took parties of the well-to-do from San Francisco to Rome and Florence, to Chartres and Seville and the Holy Land. He was good at raising money, not just for the church but for the boys’ home of which he was president, and for the Hospital of Our Saviour, and for St. Mary’s Old People’s Home on the west side of the city. But every July he flew back to Ireland, to the to
wn in Co. Tipperary where his mother and brother and sister still lived. He stayed in the house above the shop which he might have inherited himself on the death of his father, which he’d rejected in favour of the religious life. Mrs Conary was eighty now. In the shop she sat silently behind the counter, in a corner by the chicken-wire, wearing only clothes that were black. In the evenings she sat with Francis in the lace-curtained sitting-room, while the rest of the family occupied the kitchen. It was for her sake most of all that Father Paul made the journey every summer, considering it his duty.
Walking back to the town from the station, Francis was aware that he was missing his brother. Father Paul was fourteen years older and in childhood had often taken the place of their father, who had died when Francis was five. His brother had possessed an envied strength and knowledge; he’d been a hero, quite often worshipped, an example of success. In later life he had become an example of generosity as well: ten years ago he’d taken their mother to Rome, and their sister Kitty and her husband two years later; he’d paid the expenses when their sister Edna had gone to Canada; he’d assisted two nephews to make a start in America. In childhood Francis hadn’t possessed his brother’s healthy freckled face, just as in middle age he didn’t have his ruddy complexion and his stoutness and his easiness with people. Francis was slight, his sandy hair receding, his face rather pale. His breathing was sometimes laboured because of wheeziness in the chest. In the ironmonger’s shop he wore a brown cotton coat.
‘Hullo, Mr Conary,’ a woman said to him in the main street of the town. ‘Father Paul’s gone off, has he?’
‘Yes, he’s gone again.’
‘I’ll pray for his journey so,’ the woman promised, and Francis thanked her.
A year went by. In San Francisco another wing of the boys’ home was completed, another target was reached in Father Paul and Father Steigmuller’s fund for the church they planned to have built by 1980. In the town in Co. Tipperary there were baptisms and burial services and First Communions. Old Loughlin, a farmer from Bansha, died in McSharry’s grocery and bar, having gone there to celebrate a good price he’d got for a heifer. Clancy, from behind the counter in Doran’s drapery, married Maureen Talbot; Mr Nolan’s plasterer married Miss Carron; Johneen Meagher married Seamus in the chip-shop, under pressure from her family to do so. A local horse, from the stables on the Limerick road, was said to be an entry for the Fairy house Grand National, but it turned out not to be true. Every evening of that year Francis sat with his mother in the lace-curtained sitting-room above the shop. Every weekday she sat in her corner by the chicken-wire, watching while he counted out screws and weighed staples, or advised about yard brushes or tap-washers. Occasionally, on a Saturday, he visited the three Christian Brothers who lodged with Mrs Shea and afterwards he’d tell his mother about how the authority was slipping these days from the nuns and the Christian Brothers, and how Mrs Shea’s elderly maid, Ita, couldn’t see to cook the food any more. His mother would nod and hardly ever speak. When he told a joke – what young Hogan had said when he’d found a nail in his egg or how Ita had put mint sauce into a jug with milk in it – she never laughed, and looked at him in surprise when he laughed himself. But Dr Foran said it was best to keep her cheered up.
The Collected Stories Page 83