For Norman Britt, as the decade of the 1960s passed, it trailed behind it the marvels of his love affair with Marie. Hilda’s scorn when he had confessed had not devalued them, nor had the two dirty rooms in Kilburn, nor the equally unpleasant experience in Reading. Their walk to the Great Western Royal, the drinks they could not afford in the hotel bar, their studied nonchalance as they made their way separately upstairs, seemed to Norman to be a fantasy that had miraculously become real. The second-floor bathroom belonged in it perfectly, the bathroom full of whispers and caressing, where the faraway places of his daily work acquired a hint of magic when he spoke of them to a girl as voluptuous as any of James Bond’s. Sometimes on the Tube he would close his eyes and with the greatest pleasure that remained to him he would recall the delicately veined marble and the great brass taps, and the bath that was big enough for two. And now and again he heard what appeared to be the strum of distant music, and the voices of the Beatles celebrating a bathroom love, as they had celebrated Eleanor Rigby and other people of that time.
The Raising of Elvira Tremlett
My mother preferred English goods to Irish, claiming that the quality was better. In particular she had a preference for English socks and vests, and would not be denied in her point of view. Irish motor-car assemblers made a rough-and-ready job of it, my father used to say, the Austins and Morrises and Vauxhalls that came direct from British factories were twice the cars. And my father was an expert in his way, being the town’s single garage-owner. Devlin Bros. it said on a length of painted wood, black letters on peeling white. The sign was crooked on the red corrugated iron of the garage, falling down a bit on the left-hand side.
In all other ways my parents were intensely of the country that had borne them, of the province of Munster and of the town they had always known. When she left the convent my mother had immediately been found employment in the meat factory, working a machine that stuck labels on to tins. My father and his brother Jack, finishing at the Christian Brothers’, had automatically passed into the family business. In those days the only sign on the corrugated façade had said Raleigh Cycles, for the business, founded by my grandfather, had once been a bicycle one, ‘I think we’ll make a change in that,’ my father announced one day in 1933, when I was five, and six months or so later the rusty tin sheet that advertised bicycles was removed, leaving behind an island of grey in the corrugated red. ‘Ah, that’s grand,’ my mother approved from the middle of the street, wiping her chapped hands on her apron. The new sign must have had a freshness and a gleam to it, but I don’t recall that. In my memory there is only the peeling white behind the letters and the drooping down at the left-hand side where a rivet had fallen out. ‘We’ll paint that in and we’ll be dandy,’ my Uncle Jack said, referring to the island that remained, the contours of Sir Walter Raleigh’s head and shoulders. But the job was never done.
We lived in a house next door to the garage, two storeys of cement that had a damp look, with green window-sashes and a green hall door. Inside, a wealth of polished brown linoleum, its pattern faded to nothing, was cheered here and there by the rugs my mother bought in Roche’s Stores in Cork. The votive light of a crimson Sacred Heart gleamed day and night in the hall. Christ blessed us half-way up the stairs; on the landing the Virgin Mary was coy in garish robes. On either side of a narrow trodden carpet the staircase had been grained to make it seem like oak. In the dining-room, never used, there was a square table with six rexine-seated chairs around it, and over the mantelpiece a mirror with chromium decoration. The sitting-room smelt of must and had a picture of the Pope.
The kitchen was where everything happened. My father and Uncle Jack read the newspaper there. The old battery wireless, the only one in the house, stood on one of the window-sills. Our two nameless cats used to crouch by the door into the scullery because one of them had once caught a mouse there. Our terrier, Tom, mooched about under my mother’s feet when she was cooking at the range. There was a big scrubbed table in the middle of the kitchen, and wooden chairs, and a huge clock, like the top bit of a grandfather clock, hanging between the two windows. The dresser had keys and bits of wire and labels hanging all over it. The china it contained was never used, being hidden behind bric-à-brac: broken ornaments left there in order to be repaired with Seccotine, worn-out parts from the engines of cars which my father and uncle had brought into the kitchen to examine at their leisure, bills on spikes, letters and Christmas cards. The kitchen was always rather dusky, even in the middle of the day: it was partially a basement, light penetrating from outside only through the upper panes of its two long windows. Its concrete floor had been reddened with Cardinal polish, which was renewed once a year, in spring. Its walls and ceiling were a sooty white.
The kitchen was where we did our homework, my two sisters and two brothers and myself. I was the youngest, my brother Brian the oldest. Brian and Liam were destined for the garage when they finished at the Christian Brothers’, as my father and Uncle Jack had been. My sister Effie was good at arithmetic and the nuns had once or twice mentioned accountancy. There was a commercial college in Cork she could go to, the nuns said, the same place that Miss Callan, who did the books for Bolger’s Medical Hall, had attended. Everyone said my sister Kitty was pretty: my father used to take her on his knee and tell her she’d break some fellow’s heart, or a dozen hearts or maybe more. She didn’t know what he was talking about at first, but later she understood and used to go red in the face. My father was like that with Kitty. He embarrassed her without meaning to, hauling her on to his knee when she was much too old for it, fondling her because he liked her best. On the other hand, he was quite harsh with my brothers, constantly suspicious that they were up to no good. Every evening he asked them if they’d been to school that day, suspecting that they might have tricked the Christian Brothers and would the next day present them with a note they had written themselves, saying they’d had stomach trouble after eating bad sausages. He and my Uncle Jack had often engaged in such ploys themselves, spending a whole day in the field behind the meat factory.
My father’s attitude to my sister Effie was coloured by Effie’s plainness. ‘Ah, poor old Effie,’ he used to say, and my mother would reprimand him. He took comfort from the fact that if the garage continued to thrive it would be necessary to have someone doing the increased book-work instead of himself and Uncle Jack trying to do it. For this reason he was in favour of Effie taking a commercial course: he saw a future in which she and my two brothers would live in the house and run the business between them. One or other of my brothers would marry and maybe move out of the house, leaving Effie and whichever one would still be a bachelor: it was my father’s way of coming to terms with Effie’s plainness. ‘I wonder if Kitty’ll end up with young Lacy?’ I once heard him inquiring of my mother, the Lacy he referred to being the only child of another business in the town – Geo. Lacy and Sons, High-Class Drapers – who was about eight at the time. Kitty would do well, she’d marry whom she wanted to, and somehow or other she’d marry money: he really believed that.
For my part I fitted nowhere into my father’s vision of the family’s future. My performance at school was poor and there would be no place for me in the garage. I used to sit with the others at the kitchen table trying to understand algebra and Irish grammar, trying without any hope to learn verses from ‘Ode to the West Wind’ and to improve my handwriting by copying from a headline book. ‘Slow,’ Brother Cahey had reported. ‘Slow as a dying snail, that boy is.’
That was the family we were. My father was bulky in his grey overalls, always with marks of grease or dirt on him, his fingernails rimmed with black, like fingers in mourning, I used to think. Uncle Jack wore similar overalls but he was thin and much smaller than my father, a ferrety little man who had a way of looking at the ground when he spoke to you. He, too, was marked with grime and had the same rimmed fingernails, even at weekends. They both brought the smell of the garage into the kitchen, an oily smell that mingled with
the fumes of my uncle’s pipe and my father’s cigarettes.
My mother was red-cheeked and stout, with waxy dark hair and big arms and legs. She ruled the house, and was often cross: with my brothers when they behaved obstreperously, with my sisters and myself when her patience failed her. Sometimes my father would spend a long time on a Saturday night in Macklin’s, which was the public house he favoured, and she would be cross with him also, noisily shouting in their bedroom, telling him to take off his clothes before he got into bed, telling him he was a fool. Uncle Jack was a teetotaller, a member of the Pioneer movement. He was a great help to Father Kiberd in the rectory and in the Church of the Holy Assumption, performing chores and repairing the electric light. Twice a year he spent a Saturday night in Cork in order to go to greyhound racing, but there was more than met the eye to these visits, for on his return there was always a great silence in the house, a fog of disapproval emanating from my father.
The first memories I have are of the garage, of watching my father and Uncle Jack at work, sparks flying from the welding apparatus, the dismantling of oil-caked engines. A car would be driven over the pit and my father or uncle would work underneath it, lit by an electric bulb in a wire casing on the end of a flex. Often, when he wasn’t in the pit, my father would drift into conversation with a customer. He’d lean on the bonnet of a car, smoking continuously, talking about a hurling match that had taken place or about the dishonesties of the Government. He would also talk about his children, saying that Brian and Liam would fit easily into the business and referring to Effie’s plans to study commerce, and Kitty’s prettiness. ‘And your man here?’ the customer might remark, inclining his head in my direction. To this question my father always replied in the same way. The Lord, he said, would look after me.
As I grew up I became aware that I made both my father and my mother uneasy. I assumed that this was due to my slowness at school, an opinion that was justified by a conversation I once overheard coming from their bedroom: they appeared to regard me as mentally deficient. My father repeated twice that the Lord would look after me. It was something she prayed for, my mother replied, and I imagined her praying after she’d said it, kneeling down by their bed, as she’d taught all of us to kneel by ours. I stood with my bare feet on the linoleum of the landing, believing that a plea from my mother was rising from the house at that very moment, up into the sky, where God was. I had been on my way to the kitchen for a drink of water, but I returned to the bedroom I shared with Brian and Liam and lay awake thinking of the big brown-brick mansion on the Mallow road. Once it had been owned and lived in by a local family. Now it was the town’s asylum.
The town itself was small and ordinary. Part of it was on a hill, the part where the slum cottages were, where three or four shops had nothing in their windows except pasteboard advertisements for tea and Bisto. The rest of the town was flat, a single street with one or two narrow streets running off it. Where they met there was a square of a kind, with a statue of Daniel O’Connell. The Munster and Leinster Bank was here, and the Bank of Ireland, and Lacy and Sons, and Bolger’s Medical Hall, and the Home and Colonial. Our garage was at one end of the main street, opposite Corrigan’s Hotel. The Vista cinema was at the other, a stark white façade not far from the Church of the Holy Assumption. The Protestant church was at the top of the hill, beyond the slums.
When I think of the town now I can see it very clearly: cattle and pigs on a fair-day, always a Monday; Mrs Driscoll’s vegetable shop, Vickery’s hardware, McPadden’s the barber’s, Kilmartin’s the turf accountant’s, the convent and the Christian Brothers’, twenty-nine public houses. The streets are empty on a sunny afternoon, there’s a smell of bread. Brass plates gleam on the way home from school: Dr Thos. Garvey M.D., R.C.S.; Regan and Broe, Commissioners for Oaths; W. Drennan, Dental Surgeon.
But in my memory our house and our garage close in on everything else, shadowing and diminishing the town. The bedroom I shared with Brian and Liam had the same nondescript linoleum as the hall and the landing had. There was a dressing-table with a wash-stand in white-painted wood, and a wardrobe that matched. There was a flowery wallpaper on the walls, but the flowers had all faded to a uniform brown, except behind the bedroom’s single picture, of an ox pulling a cart. Our three iron bedsteads were lined against one wall. Above the mantelpiece Christ on his cross had already given up the ghost.
I didn’t in any way object to this bedroom and, familiar with no alternative, I didn’t mind sharing it with my brothers. The house itself was somewhere I was used to also, accepted and taken for granted. But the garage was different. The garage was a kind of hell, its awful earth floor made black with sump oil, its huge indelicate vices, the chill of cast iron, the grunting of my father and my uncle as they heaved an engine out of a tractor, the astringent smell of petrol. It was there that my silence, my dumbness almost, must have begun. I sense that now, without being able accurately to remember. Looking back, I see myself silent in a classroom, taught first by nuns and later by Christian Brothers. In the kitchen, while the others chattered at mealtimes, I was silent too. I could take no interest in what my father and uncle reported about the difficulties they were having in getting spare parts or about some fault in a farmer’s carburettor. My brothers listened to all that, and clearly found it easy to. Or they would talk about sport, or tease Uncle Jack about the money he lost on greyhounds and horses. My mother would repeat what she had heard in the shops, and Uncle Jack would listen intently because although he never himself indulged in gossip he loved to hear it. My sisters would retail news from the convent, the decline in the health of an elderly nun, or the inability of some family to buy Lacy’s more expensive First Communion dresses. I often felt, listening at mealtimes, that I was scarcely there. I didn’t belong and I sensed it was my fault; I felt I was a burden, being unpromising at school, unable to hold out hopes for the future. I felt I was a disgrace to them and might even become a person who was only fit to lift cans of paraffin about in the garage. I thought I could see that in my father’s eyes, and in my uncle’s sometimes, and in my mother’s. A kind of shame it was, peering back at me.
I turned to Elvira Tremlett because everything about her was quiet. ‘You great damn clown,’ my mother would shout angrily at my father. He’d smile in the kitchen, smelling like a brewery, as she used to say. ‘Mind that bloody tongue of yours,’ he’d retort, and then he’d eye my uncle in a belligerent manner. ‘Jeez, will you look at the cut of him?’ he’d roar, laughing and throwing his head about. My uncle would usually be sitting in front of the range, a little to one side so as not to be in the way of my mother while she cooked. He’d been reading the Independent or Ireland’s Own, or trying to mend something. ‘You’re the right eejit,’ my father would say to him. ‘And the right bloody hypocrite.’
It was always like that when he’d been in Macklin’s on a Saturday evening and returned in time for his meal. My mother would slap the plates on to the table, my father would sing in order to annoy her. I used to feel that my uncle and my mother were allied on these occasions, just as she and my father were allied when my uncle spent a Saturday night in Cork after the greyhound racing. I much preferred it when my father didn’t come back until some time in the middle of the night. ‘Will you look at His Nibs?’ he’d say in the kitchen, drawing attention to me. ‘Haven’t you a word in you, boy? Bedad, that fellow’ll never make a lawyer.’ He’d explode with laughter and then he’d tell Kitty that she was looking great and could marry the crowned King of England if she wanted to. He’d say to Effie she was getting fat with the toffees she ate; he’d tell my brothers they were lazy.
They didn’t mind his talk the way I did; even Kitty’s embarrassment used to evaporate quite quickly because for some reason she was fond of him. Effie was fond of my uncle, and my brothers of my mother. Yet in spite of all this family feeling, whenever there was quarrelling between our parents, or an atmosphere after my uncle had spent a night away, my brothers used to say the thre
e of them would drive you mad. ‘Wouldn’t it make you sick, listening to it?’ Brian would say in our bedroom, saying it to Liam. Then they’d laugh because they couldn’t be bothered to concern themselves too much with other people’s quarrels, or with atmospheres.
The fact was, my brothers and sisters were all part of it, whatever it was – the house, the garage, the family we were – and they could take everything in their stride. They were the same as our parents and our uncle, and Elvira Tremlett was different. She was a bit like Myrna Loy, whom I had seen in the Vista, in Test Pilot and Too Hot to Handle and The Thin Man. Only she was more beautiful than Myrna Loy, and her voice was nicer. Her voice, I still consider, was the nicest thing about Elvira Tremlett, next to her quietness.
‘What do you want?’ the sexton of the Protestant church said to me one Saturday afternoon. ‘What’re you doing here?’
He was an old, hunched man in black clothes. He had rheumy eyes, very red and bloody at the rims. It was said in the town that he gave his wife an awful time.
‘It isn’t your church,’ he said.
I nodded, not wanting to speak to him. He said:
‘It’s a sin for you to be coming into a Protestant church. Are you wanting to be a Protestant, is that it?’ He was laughing at me, even though his lips weren’t smiling. He looked as if he’d never smiled in his life.
I shook my head at him, hoping he might think I was dumb.
‘Stay if you want to,’ he said, surprising me, even though I’d seen him coming to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to commit some act of vandalism. I think he might even have decided to be pleased because a Catholic boy had chosen to wander among the pews and brasses of his church. He hobbled away to the vestry, breathing noisily because of his bent condition.
The Collected Stories Page 88