‘OΚ, let’s go,’ he said when a gong sounded, and we swiftly descended the stairs, Hubert setting the pace. I caught a brief glimpse of a door opening and of a girl. In the hall Hubert struck the gong again as he passed.
‘No need for that,’ his grandmother gently reprimanded in the dining-room. ‘We are all present and correct.’
The girl smiled at me, so shyly that I was made to feel shy myself. In the absence of her husband Mrs Plunkett said grace while we stood with our hands resting on the backs of our chairs. ‘We are quite a houseful now,’ she chattily remarked as she sat down. ‘Pamela, please pass that salad along to our visitor.’
‘Yes, of course.’
Pamela blushed as she spoke, her eyes flittering for a moment in my direction. Hubert, silent beside me, was relishing her discomfiture: I knew that, I could feel it. He and I and his cousin were aware that we had not met; the old woman imagined we had.
‘I hope you are a salad-eater.’ Mrs Plunkett smiled at me. ‘Hubert does not much go in for salad. I’m not sure why.’
‘Because Hubert doesn’t like the taste,’ Hubert replied. ‘Lettuce does not seem to him to taste at all. The skin of tomatoes catches in his throat. Chives hang about on his breath. Radishes are nasty little things. And so on.’
His cousin laughed. She was a pretty girl, with dark bobbed hair and blue eyes: I didn’t, that evening, notice much else about her except that she was wearing a pale pink dress with white buttons down the front. She became even prettier when she smiled, a dimple appearing in one of her cheeks, her nose wrinkling in a way that became her.
‘Well, that’s most interesting,’ Mrs Plunkett said, a little stiffly, when Hubert ceased to talk about his dislikes.
There was corned beef with the salad. Hubert buttered two slices of brown bread to make a sandwich of his, and all the time he was preparing this his grandmother watched him. She did so uncomfortably, in an odd, dutiful kind of way, and I received the impression that she would have preferred not to. It was what her husband would have done, I suddenly realized: as if guided by his silent presence in an upstairs room she was honourably obeying him, keeping faith with his wishes. Mustard was spread on the corned beef, pepper was sprinkled. Mrs Plunkett made no comment. The slow movements of Hubert’s knife, a faint whispering under his breath of one of the songs Frank Sinatra had sung, contributed to the considerable unease of both Hubert’s cousin and myself. Pamela reddened when she accidentally knocked the little silver spoon out of the salt cellar.
‘You’re not in a public house, Hubert,’ Mrs Plunkett said when he lifted the sandwich to his mouth. ‘Pamela, please pour the tea.’
Hubert ignored the reference to a public house. ‘Don’t dawdle,’ he reminded me. ‘If we miss the seven-thirty we’ll have to cadge a lift and that takes ages.’
Pamela poured the tea. Mrs Plunkett cut her lettuce into fine shreds. She added salad cream, meticulously mixing everything up. She said eventually:
‘Are you going in to Dublin?’
‘We’re going dancing,’ Hubert said. ‘The Four Provinces Ballroom in Harcourt Street. Music tonight by Ken Mackintosh.’
‘I don’t think I’ve heard of Mr Mackintosh.’
‘Celebrity spot, the Inkspots.’
‘Inkspots?’
‘They sing songs.’
On a large round breadboard beside Mrs Plunkett there were several kinds of bread, which she cut very slowly with a battered breadsaw. On the table there was plum jam and raspberry jam, and the honeycomb we had bought from Mrs Hanrahan. There was a fruitcake and a coffee cake, biscuits and shortbread, and when we’d finished our corned beef Lily came in and added to this array a plate of éclairs. She lifted away the plates and dishes we’d finished with. Mrs Plunkett thanked her.
‘Mrs Hanrahan said she picked that honeycomb out for you,’ Hubert said.
‘Well, that was most kind of her.’
‘She’s lonely since Hanrahan died. She’d talk the legs off you.’
‘It’s hard for the poor woman. A builder’s widow.’ Mrs Plunkett explained to me what I already knew. ‘He fell off a roof six weeks ago.’
‘As a matter of fact,’ Hubert said, ‘she’s better off without him.’
‘What on earth d’you mean, Hubert?’
‘Hanrahan went after shop girls. Famous for it.’
‘Don’t speak so coarsely, Hubert.’
‘Is Pam shocked? Are you shocked, Pam?’
‘No, no, not at all.’ Pamela swiftly replied before her grandmother could answer for her. She had reddened again in her confusion, but being flustered made her more vivacious and was not unattractive.
‘Mr Hanrahan was a perfectly decent man,’ Mrs Plunkett insisted. ‘You’re repeating tittle-tattle, Hubert.’
‘There’s a girl serves in Binchy’s, another in Edwards’ the cake shop. Hanrahan took both of them to the dunes. D’you remember Hanrahan, Pam?’
She shook her head.
‘He painted the drain-pipes one time.’
‘You’ll need to hurry if you wish to catch the train,’ Mrs Plunkett said. As she spoke she drew back the cuff of her sleeve to consult a wristwatch that had not been visible before. She nodded in agreement with the statement she’d just made. Addressing her granddaughter, she said:
‘It doesn’t matter if you don’t finish.’
Doubtfully, Pamela half smiled at Mrs Plunkett. She began to say something, then changed her mind. Vaguely, she shook her head.
‘Is Pamela going in to Dublin too?’ Hubert said. ‘Going to the flicks, Pamela?’
‘Isn’t she accompanying you? Don’t you want to go dancing with the boys, Pamela?’
‘No, no.’ She shook her head, more vehemently than before. She was going to wash her hair, she said.
‘But surely you’d like to go dancing, Pamela?’
Hubert stood up, half a piece of shortbread in one hand. He jerked his head at me, indicating that I should hurry. Pamela said again that she wanted to wash her hair.
‘Jesus Christ!’ Hubert murmured in the hall. He stifled laughter. ‘I’m bloody certain,’ he said as we hurried through the garden, ‘she remembers Hanrahan. The man made a pass at her.’
In the train he told me when I asked that she was the child of his father’s sister. ‘She comes over every summer from some back-of-beyond rectory in Roscommon.’ He was vague when I asked further questions, or else impatiently brushed them aside. ‘Pam’s dreary,’ was all he said.
‘She doesn’t seem dreary to me.’
‘The old man worships her. Like he did her mother by all accounts.’
In the Four Provinces Ballroom we met girls who were quite different from Hubert’s cousin. Hubert said they came from the slums, though this could not have been true since they were fashionably dressed and had money for soft drinks and cigarettes. Their legs were painted – the liquid stockings of that time – and their features were emphasized with lipstick and mascara. But each one I danced with was either stunted or lumpy, and I kept thinking of Pamela’s slim figure and her pretty face. Her lips, in particular, I remembered.
We danced to ‘As Time Goes By’ and ‘Autumn Leaves’ and ‘Falling in Love with Love’. The Inkspots sang. One of the partners I danced with said: ‘Your friend’s very handsome, isn’t he?’
In the end Hubert picked up two girls who were agreeable to being seen home when the evening came to an end.
Ken Mackintosh and his band began to pack away their instruments. We walked a little way along Harcourt Street and caught a number 11 bus. The girls were nurses. The one allocated to me, being bouncy and talkative, wanted to know what it was like living in a provincial town, as I did, and what my plans were for getting out of it. When I told her she said: ‘Maybe I’ll run into you when you’re a student,’ but her voice wasn’t exactly loaded with pleasurable anticipation. She was wearing a thick, green woollen coat even though it was August. Her face was flat and pale, her lips garish beneath a fresh coa
ting of lipstick. She had to get up at five o’clock every morning, she said, in order to get to the ward on time. The Sister was a tartar.
When we arrived at the girls’ flat Hubert suggested that we might be offered a cup of tea, but the girls would permit us no further than the doorstep of the house. ‘I thought we were away,’ he murmured disconsolately. His father would have got in, he said. They’d have cooked a meal for his father, anything he wanted. We walked to where we hoped to get a lift to Templemairt. Two hours later a lorry driver picked us up.
The next day being a Saturday, Hubert and I went to Phoenix Park races. We missed breakfast and due to pressure of time we missed lunch also – and, in fact, the first race. ‘The old man’ll have been livid,’ Hubert said. ‘You understand he takes in what’s going on?’ Mrs Plunkett and Pamela would have sat waiting for us in the dining-room, he said, then Pamela would have been sent up to see if we were still asleep, and after that Mrs Plunkett would have gone up herself. ‘They’ll have asked Lily and she’ll have told them we’ve hooked it to the races.’ He neither laughed nor smiled, even though he seemed amused. Another two pounds had been borrowed from Lily before we left.
‘He’ll be livid because he’ll think we should have taken Pam with us.’
‘Why don’t you like Pamela?’
Hubert didn’t reply. He said instead: ‘I’d love to have heard Hanrahan putting a proposition to her.’
At school all of it would have sounded different. We’d have laughed – I more than anyone – at the report of the lively builder attempting to seduce Hubert’s cousin. And somehow it would have been funnier because this had occurred in his grandfather’s house, his grandfather being the sort he was. We would have imagined the embarrassment of Hubert’s cousin, and Hanrahan saying what harm was a little kiss. We would have imagined the old man oblivious of it all, and would have laughed because Hubert’s cousin couldn’t bring herself to say anything about it afterwards. Hubert told his stories well.
‘He may not,’ I said, ‘have had a go at her.’
‘He couldn’t leave them alone, that man. I’m going for this Summer Rain thing.’
We stood in the crowd, examining the list of runners. Announcements were made over loudspeakers; all around us people were talking furiously. Men were in shirt-sleeves, women and girls in summer dresses. It was another sunny day.
‘Paddy’s Pride no good?’ I said.
‘Could be.’ But we both put our bets on Summer Rain and to my surprise the horse won at nine to one. ‘Let’s have a drink,’ Hubert said. Without asking me what I wanted he ordered stout at the bar.
We won again with Sarah’s Cottage, lost with Mohaghan Lad and King of Them All. We drank further bottles of stout. ‘Take Gay Girl for a place,’ a man who had dropped into conversation with us in the bar advised. We did so and were again successful. Between us we were now almost seventeen pounds richer than when we started. We watched the last race in high spirits, grasping glasses of stout and urging on a horse called Marino. We hadn’t backed it; we hadn’t backed anything because Hubert said he could tell our luck had come to an end. Marino didn’t win.
‘We’ll have something to eat and then go to the pictures,’ Hubert said.
The grass beneath our feet was littered with discarded race tickets and programmes. The bookmakers were dismantling their stands. Pale evening sunlight slanted over the drifting crowds; voices were more subdued than they had been. I kept thinking of Pamela in the house in Templemairt, of Mrs Plunkett saying grace again in the dining-room, the old man sensing that we weren’t present for yet another meal.
‘What about The Moon and Sixpence?’ Hubert suggested, having bought an Evening Herald as we left the racecourse. ‘George Sanders?’
We ordered two mixed grills at the cinema restaurant, and tea and cakes. We both bought packets of cigarettes. When The Moon and Sixpence came to an end we went to an ice-cream parlour and then we caught a Saturday-night bus that brought us almost as far as Templemairt. We walked the last bit, Hubert talking about Africa. Before we reached the town he said:
‘He disowned my father, you know. When my father got involved with my mother that was the end of that. My mother was a barmaid, you understand.’
I nodded, having been informed of that before. Hubert said:
‘I didn’t know that old man existed until I was told after the funeral. He didn’t even come to it.’
I didn’t say it must have been awful, having both your parents killed at once. We’d often thought so at school and had said it when Hubert wasn’t there. We’d often considered it must have affected him, perhaps made him the way he was – careless, it seemed, of what people thought of him.
‘You should have heard him when he could talk, laying into me because he thinks I’m like my father. A chip off the old block is what he thinks. My father lived on his wits. A con man, you understand.’
Hubert had often told us this also. His father had briefly been a racing correspondent, had managed a night-club, had apparently worked in a bank. But none of these forays into the realm of employment had lasted long; each had been swiftly terminated, either on the grounds of erratic service or for liberties taken with funds. Hubert, at school, had made no bones about his father’s reprehensible tendencies, nor about his mother’s background. On the contrary, he had taken a certain pride in the fact that his father, in later life, had lived up to the reputation he had established when a schoolboy himself. The apes that had escaped from the circus cage at the time of the tragedy had chattered with delight, scampering over the wreckage. His father would have appreciated that, he said.
A weak crescent moon lightened the darkness as we walked towards Templemairt. The stars were out in force. No car passed us, but even if we’d been aware of headlights behind us I doubt that we’d have bothered to try for a lift. We smoked one cigarette after another, still exhilarated by our triumphant afternoon, and in the circumstances it seemed natural that Hubert should talk about his parents, who had spent a lot of time on racecourses.
‘They were drunk, of course, when they crashed that car.’
It was not difficult to believe they were, but none the less I did not feel that hearty agreement was in order. I nodded briefly. I said:
‘Were you born in England?’
‘I believe in the back row of a cinema.’
I had never heard that before, but there was something about Hubert’s honesty in other matters that prevented me from suspecting invention. The photograph of his grandfather in the hall was precisely as Mr Plunkett had so often been described, down to his eyebrows being almost a single horizontal line, and the celluloid collar of his shirt.
‘When the lights went up she couldn’t move. They had to send for a doctor, but before the ambulance arrived she popped me.’
We entered the house quietly and went to our rooms without further conversation. I had hoped that Pamela might still be up since it wasn’t as late as last night. I had even prepared a scene that I felt could easily take place: Pamela in the hall as we closed the front door behind us, Pamela offering us tea in the kitchen and Hubert declining while I politely accepted.
*
‘Pam, do you want to play tennis?’
She was as astonished as I was to hear this. A startled look came into her face. She stammered slightly when she replied.
‘Three of us?’ she said.
‘We’ll show you how three can play.’
Sunday lunch had already taken place, a somewhat silent occasion because Hubert and I were more than ever out of favour. Mrs Plunkett said quietly, but in the firm tones of one conveying a message as a matter of trust, that her husband had been disappointed because we hadn’t accompanied Pamela and herself to church. I did my best to apologize; Hubert ignored the revelation. ‘We won a fortune at the races,’ he said, which helped matters as little as it would have had the old man been present.
‘Tennis would be lovely,’ Pamela said.
She added that sh
e’d change. Hubert said he’d lend me a pair of tennis shoes.
A remarkable transformation appeared to have overtaken him, and for a moment I thought that the frosty lunchtime and his grandfather’s reported distress had actually stirred his conscience. It then occurred to me that since there was nothing else to do on a Sunday afternoon, tennis with Pamela was better than being bored. I knew what he meant when he said we’d show her how three could play: on the tennis court Hubert belonged in a class far more exalted than my own, and often at school Ossie Richpatrick and I had together played against him and still not managed to win. It delighted me that Pamela and I were to be partners.
Hubert’s tennis shoes didn’t fit me perfectly, but I succeeded in getting them on to my feet. There was no suggestion that he and I should change our clothes, as Pamela had said she intended to. Hubert offered me a choice of several racquets and when I’d selected one we made our way to the tennis court at the back of the house. We raised the net, measured its height, and knocked up while we waited.
The Collected Stories Page 150