‘You went, didn’t you?’ Margaretta accused. ‘You went in the middle of the night?’
‘In the early morning.’
‘He loved me, y’know, before I was so stupid. It was me he wrote letters to.’
The summer crept by. They talked much less than they had talked before. Politeness began between them, and smiles that were not meant. They missed the past but did not say so, and then – on the night before Laura was to return to England – Margaretta said:
‘I’ve hated you this summer.’
‘There is no reason to hate me, Margaretta.’
‘It has to do with him. I don’t know what it is.’
‘Well, I don’t hate you, Margaretta, and I never could.’
‘That’s nice.’
‘Don’t be unhappy, Margaretta.’
Why could she not have shared the truth? Why could she not have said that in the game he’d played he’d wanted to know all about Anstey Rye also? She might have pointed out that when you scraped away the superficialities of her early-morning journey – the peaceful dawn, the rooks, the honeysuckle – it had been less honourable and less courageous than Margaretta’s. In her wise virgin way, she had taken no chances in visiting only the dead.
‘Margaretta…’
She hesitated, unable to go on. And Margaretta said:
‘I’ll never forgive you for going to his grave.’
‘I only went to say goodbye.’
‘It was me he wrote to.’
Again Laura tried to say that she, as much as Margaretta, had been shamed. Sharing their folly, would they have laughed in the end over Ralph de Courcy, she wondered, as they had laughed over so much else? Would they have talked for half the night in Margaretta’s bedroom, exorcizing that lingering pain?
‘Margaretta,’ Laura began, but still could not go on.
The De Luxe Picture House has gone. Mr Hearne is dead. So is Mrs Eldon, her lips trimmed down to size. But Coffey’s still smells pleasantly of paper, and Murphy’s of vanilla and grapes. Wiry Bohan and Katie are grandparents now.
‘But oh, it’s not much changed, y’know,’
Dr Heaslip and his wife might or might not be dead also: this is not mentioned in Margaretta’s news. Her voice is spiritless, and Laura has to think as each name is mentioned. Margaretta’s features mourn the loss: a conversation, through desuetude, has lost its savour. It was harsh, so casually and so swiftly to have considered her bland and fat, implying insensitivity. Laura should reach out and kiss her, but the gesture would be false.
Margaretta remembers the flowers that year after year she has placed on the grave, and the bitterness she felt when she thought of Laura. She cycled in that same secret way to the churchyard, not caring if the de Courcys guessed that it was she who had picked the weeds from the mound that marked his presence. When she ceased to make the journey she had at first felt faithless, but the feeling had worn away with time.
For Laura there is the memory of the guilt that had remained for so long, the letters she had tried to compose, her disappointment in herself. Dear Margaretta: so many times she had begun her message, certain that there were words to soften her treachery and then discovering that there were not. In time she ceased also, weary of the useless effort.
Regret passes without words between them; they smile a shrugging smile. If vain Ralph de Courcy had chosen their girlish passion as a memorial to himself he might have chosen as well this rendezvous for their middle age, a waspish cathedral to reflect a waspish triumph. Yet his triumph seems hollow now, robbed by time of its drama and the heady confusions of an accidental cruelty. Death’s hostage he had been, a ghost who had offered them a sleight of hand because he hadn’t the strength for love. They only smile again before they part.
Music
At thirty-three Justin Condon was a salesman of women’s undergarments, regularly traversing five counties with his samples and his order book in a Ford Fiesta. He had obediently accepted this role, agreeing when his father had suggested it to him. His father in his day had been a commercial traveller also and every Friday Justin returned to the house his father had returned to, arriving at much the same hour and occupying a room he had in childhood shared with his three brothers. His mother and his father still lived in the house, in the Dublin suburb of Terenure, and were puzzled by their youngest son because he was so unlike their other children, both physically and in other ways. His dark-haired head was neat; remote, abstracted eyes made a spherical, ordinary face seem almost mysterious. At weekends Justin took long walks on his own, all the way from Terenure to the city, to St Stephen’s Green, where he sat on a seat or strolled among the flowerbeds, to Herbert Park, where he lay in the sunshine on the grass: people had seen him and remarked upon it. He had never in his life been known to listen to the commentary on a hurling match or a Gaelic match, let alone attend such an event. When he was younger he had come back one Friday with a greyhound, an animal he had proceeded to rear as a pet, apparently not realizing that such creatures had been placed in the world for the purpose of racing one another. ‘Ah, poor Justin’s the queer old flute,’ his father had more than once privately owned in McCauley’s public house. His mother wished he’d get married.
Justin’s reason for remaining in his parents’ house had not been shared with them, although it was a simple one: he considered that any other dwelling would be of a temporary nature and not worth the nuisance of moving to because one day he would leave, not just the suburb of Terenure but Dublin, and Ireland, for ever. He would leave his samples in the Ford Fiesta; he would leave the Ford Fiesta in a lay-by. He was not truly a purveyor of garments in imitation silk, his destiny was not the eternal entering of drapers’ shops. He would escape as others had escaped before him; James Joyce he thought of particularly in this respect, and Gauguin. He liked the photograph of James Joyce in the broad-brimmed black hat, with the black coat reaching to his ankles; Gauguin had been a businessman. When Joyce had left Ireland he’d had to borrow a pair of boots. Later he’d tried to sell tweed to the Italians.
Dwelling on such matters, Justin watched the light of a May morning from a bed in Co. Waterford. There wasn’t much to see: streaks of brightness along the edges of the drawn curtains, the ceiling of the bedroom mistily illuminated through rosy fabric. A man called Fahy, travelling in fertilizers, had assured him that when he stayed in this house he occupied the bed of Mrs Keane, its widowed landlady. When Garda Bevan, who lodged on a more permanent basis in the house, drank his eleven o’clock Bournville and stated his intention of retiring for the night, Fahy would rise from the kitchen table also, saying he’d had a long day. He would mount the stairs a few paces behind Garda Bevan and in full view of the policeman would enter the bedroom known as the ‘overnight room’ because it was set aside by Mrs Keane for her casual trade among commercial travellers. Garda Bevan, long since retired from the force, a lifelong bachelor, was a moral presence in Mrs Keane’s house, a man who could be relied upon by Father Grennan or Father Reedy, selflessly working behind the scenes for the Pioneer cause and organizing the tug of war at the Nore Fête every Whit. Fahy said he gave him a quarter of an hour and then listened on the landing to the depth of his snoring. He smoked a final cigarette in the overnight bedroom, taking a good ten minutes over it, before listening again at the panels of Garda Bevan’s door. If the rhythm of sleep had not altered, he made his way to the bed of Mrs Keane.
Justin supposed it was true. With some precision, Fahy had described the body of the widow, a woman of fifteen stone and in her sixty-first year. The hair that was grey about her head sprouted blackly and abundantly, according to the traveller in fertilizers, on other areas of her. Buttocks and stomach were vast; Hail Marys were repeated after sinning.
In the overnight room Justin imagined without pleasure the scenes Fahy described. Fahy was a little runt of a Dublin man, married with five or six children, always sticking his elbow into you to make a point. Sometimes in his ramblings he mentioned Thomasina D
urcan, the dentist, who was the only other lodger in Mrs Keane’s house. She had a great notion of Justin, Fahy insisted, the implication being that Justin could easily arrive at the same arrangement with Thomasina Durcan as he himself had arrived at with Mrs Keane. No man was an island was a repeated observation of Fahy’s.
Justin rose in order to break his train of thought, and crossed to the window. He drew back the curtains and stood in his pyjamas looking out at the line of houses across the street. No blind had yet been released, no curtain or shutter opened. A cat crept along the grey pavement, interested in the empty bottles outside each door. The houses themselves were colourwashed in pink or cream, in yellow, grey or blue, their hall doors painted in some contrasting shade, or grained. The street was wide, with lampposts between every second house, and a single visible telegraph pole. Just visible also, where the street met another as it curved away to the left, was Hayes’s shop, which traded in newspapers, tobacco and confectionery. The sight of it, with its hanging Players Please sign, reminded Justin that he was in need of a cigarette himself. He left the window and crossed to the bedside table.
Inhaling, he slipped out of his pyjamas and dressed himself in shirt and trousers, preparatory to making his way to Mrs Keane’s bathroom. Still intent on keeping Fahy’s reports and innuendoes at bay, he dwelt upon his earliest memory, which was the leg of a chair. That same chair was still in the house in Terenure and he often found himself looking at it, his eye travelling down one particular leg, to the rings cut into the timber, the varnish worn partially away. With three brothers and three sisters, he had grown up the baby of the family, surrounded by people who shouted more than he did, who were for ever arguing and snatching. At school the textbooks were inkstained and dirty, the blackboards so pitted you could hardly read the chalk marks on them, the desk-tops slashed with messages and initials. ‘Come here and I’ll show you,’ Shay McNamara used to whisper; and forcibly he’d insist, no choice about it, on displaying the promise of his sexuality. Ikey Breen had been paid a threepenny piece by a woman under cover of darkness in the Stella cinema. All Riordan’s jokes had to do with excrement.
Justin shaved in Mrs Keane’s bathroom, hurrying to finish before Garda Bevan came rattling at the door. Long before he began to go to school he remembered his father driving away from the house in Terenure on a Monday morning. His father had taught him how to strike a match, and would let him hold it over the tobacco in his pipe while he sucked at the smoke, making a bubbling noise. His father used to take him on to his knee and ask him if he’d been a good boy, but Justin always had to turn his head away because of the whiff on his father’s breath. The stench of stout, his mother said it was, bottle after bottle of stout that made the whole house stink like a brewery. He associated his father particularly with Sundays, with leading the family into Mass, with saying he was starving on the walk home. Sunday dinner was different from ordinary dinner, always meat and a pudding. Afterwards his father had his bath, with the door of the bathroom open so that he could listen to whatever sporting commentary there was on the radio. Justin’s sisters were forbidden to go upstairs at this time in ease they’d catch a glimpse from the landing. His brothers roller-skated in the yard.
Justin washed the remains of the shaving foam from his face. It was on a Sunday that his Aunt Roche had first put a record on her gramophone: John Count McCormack singing ‘The Rose of Tralee’. After that he had begun to visit her sitting-room regularly, a room full of ferns in pots and framed embroideries. It was she and Father Finn who had given him faith in himself and in his musical aptitude, who hadn’t laughed when he’d hinted that Mahler was his hero.
He dried his face and left the bathroom. Somewhere in the house he could hear the heavy tread of Garda Bevan. The smell of frying rashers and the chatty voice of a radio disc-jockey drifted from the kitchen.
‘Mr Condon!’ called Thomasina Durcan. ‘Mr Condon, Mrs Keane has the breakfast ready.’
In her tiny sitting-room she dusted the ornaments on the mantelpiece: the brass gondola, the tuskless elephants, the row of trinket containers, the framed photograph of Justin as a child, specially taken by Mr Boland the insurance man, whose hobby was photography. She was not really his aunt: when he was six he had stood by the railings of her front garden, staring at her while she cut the grass. ‘What’s your name?’ she’d asked, and he’d said it was Justin Condon. ‘Ah now, isn’t that a great name?’ She’d smiled at him, knowing he was shy. Her face had been damp with perspiration due to the exertion of pushing the lawn-mower. He had watched her closely while she took her glasses off and wiped them on her apron.
She was a slight, frail woman of seventy-nine, with thin hands, and hair the colour of the ashes she now carried in a cardboard box from her sitting-room. She moved slowly, suffering a little from arthritis in one of her knees and in her arms. ‘I think I have some Mi-Wadi,’ she’d said that first day. ‘D’you like Mi-Wadi lemonade, Justin?’
He had followed her into the house and in the kitchen she had poured an inch or two of Mi-Wadi into two glasses and filled them with water from the cold tap. She’d found some biscuits, raspberry wafers she’d bought for the weekend. He had three brothers and three sisters, he said; his father was in business and was never at home during the week. When he was older he told her about the Christian Brothers’ school, the white-painted windows and the rowdy, concrete playground. He said that Brother Walsh had picked him out as someone who was useless.
The Sunday when she’d wound up the gramophone and put on the record of John Count McCormack was a special memory for her because she always thought of the occasion as marking the beginning of his interest in music. Later she had played him her selected arias from La Traviata and Carmen and Il Trovatore – on the same Sunday in September when he had posed for Mr Boland in the garden. He’d had to stand in front of the laurel bushes but Mr Boland hadn’t been happy with that so he’d had to sit on a chair on the front-door step. In the end the photograph had been taken against the rose trellis.
‘Well, that’s disgraceful!’ Father Finn had said on another Sunday, when he heard how a Christian Brother had described the child as useless.
‘That’s a right bit of bacon,’ Garda Bevan complimented Mrs Keane. ‘Isn’t bacon in this country a greatly improved commodity?’
Neat as a napkin across the table from him, Thomasina Durcan smiled shyly at Justin, as if they shared some private opinion. Justin pretended not to notice. He bent his head over the bacon on his plate, over the slices of black pudding and the fried bread and the egg. Garda Bevan would think Stravinsky was the name of a racehorse, and so would Mrs Keane. ‘Ah, sure, I knew all right,’ Thomasina Durcan would protest, lying because she couldn’t help herself. Her two prominent front teeth were like an advertisement for her trade; her eyes were prominent also, her nose and chin slight. She wore clothes in pastel shades, pale blues and pinks and greens. Like himself, she returned every weekend to Dublin, to stay with her parents.
‘It’s a sign of the advance the country has made,’ continued Garda Bevan, ‘the way the bacon is better these days.’
‘The price of it would murder you,’ Mrs Keane reminded him.
He nodded and continued to nod, dwelling on that. ‘Well, isn’t it another sign in that case,’ he suggested eventually, ‘the way the people would have the means for it?’
‘Nearly a pound a pound. Sure, it’s a holy disgrace.’
Mrs Keane’s dining-room was heavy with furniture: rexine-covered chairs, a large ornate sideboard, a great mahogany dining-table, wax fruit on occasional tables, armchairs with antimacassars, pictures of forest scenes. Bottles of sauce stood on the sideboard, and empty decanters, and a pile of tablemats. Shells decorated the mantelpiece, and small cups and saucers, gifts from Tramore and Youghal.
‘Well, it’s the same way that’s, in it with everything.’ The policeman’s delivery of this statement was ponderous, the words punctuated by the munching of his jaws. He was a match for Mrs K
eane in size, his rounded hill of a stomach tightly engaging the buttons of his waistcoat. A bulbous nose was set carelessly in a crimson countenance, short hair was as spiky as a hedgehog’s.
‘Wouldn’t you say the prices is shocking?’ Mrs Keane inquired of Thomasina Durcan, in a voice that insisted women knew best.
‘Ah, they are of course.’
Garda Bevan turned to Justin, a piece of egg, already dipped in mustard, on the end of his fork. ‘Have they inflation beat? Fahy was here last week and said inflation was beat.’
Justin shook his head. He didn’t know, he said. He’d heard somewhere that, far from being defeated, inflation was gaining ground.
‘Has your father a word to say on it? I remember a thing about your father when he used to stay with us here. He had a keen sense of politics.’
‘I don’t think I heard him mention inflation.’
‘Give him a message from me, will you? Tell him Garda Bevan was asking for him.’
‘I will of course.’
‘Oh, Mr Condon, I meant to tell you: I saw you in Stephen’s Green on Sunday.’ Thomasina Durcan’s two large teeth announced interest in him; the eyes blinked rapidly. Her pastel-green suit was trim on her trim form; he imagined her fingers, trim also, in a patient’s mouth.
‘I’m often in Stephen’s Green.’
‘I thought you lived in Terenure, Mr Condon.’
The Collected Stories Page 145