‘Strumpets.’
The rest of the meal was taken in a silence that wasn’t broken until Ariadne came to clear the table. ‘I meant to have told you,’ she remarked to Barney. ‘Your window gets stuck at the top.’
He said it didn’t matter. He had noticed her mother opening the bottom sash in preference to the top one, he added conversationally. It didn’t matter in the least, he said.
‘The top’s stuck with paint,’ Ariadne said.
Mrs Fennerty returned to her place by the fire. Mr Sheehy put on his navy-blue overcoat and his gloves and sat on the chair by the door. Skilfully, with the glass held at an angle, Mrs Fennerty poured out a bottle of stout that had been placed in the fender to warm. On her invitation, accompanied by a warning concerning hasty digestion, Barney occupied the second fireside armchair, feeling too shy to disobey. Mrs Fennerty lit a cigarette. She was a boarder the same as Mr Sheehy, she said. She paid her way, Mrs Lenehan’s mother or not. That was why she sat down in the dining-room with Mr Sheehy and whoever the third boarder happened to be.
‘Are you at Dowding’s?’ She referred to a commercial college that offered courses in accountancy and book-keeping, preparing its students for the bank and brewery examinations.
‘No. Not Dowding’s.’ He explained that he was a medical student.
‘A doctor buries his mistakes. Did you ever hear that one?’ Mrs Fennerty laughed shrilly, and in a sociable way Barney laughed himself. Mr Sheehy remained impassive by the door. Barney wondered why he had taken up a position there, with his coat and gloves on.
‘Six feet under, no questions asked,’ Mrs Fennerty remarked, again laughing noisily.
Dressed to go out, Mrs Lenehan entered the dining-room, and Mr Sheehy’s behaviour was explained. He rose to his feet, and when the pair had gone Mrs Fennerty said:
‘Those two are doing a line. Up to the McKee Barracks every evening. Sheehy wouldn’t part with the price of anything else. Turn round at the barracks, back by the Guards’ Depot. Then he’s down in the kitchen with her. That’s Ned Sheehy for you.’
Barney nodded, not much interested in Mr Sheehy’s courtship of Mrs Lenehan. Nevertheless the subject was pursued. ‘Ned Sheehy has a post with the Hibernian Insurance. That’s how he’d be selling wireless sets to people. He calls in at houses a lot.’
‘I see.’
‘He’s keen on houses all right. It’s the house we’re sitting in he has designs on, not Mrs Lenehan at all.’
‘Oh, I’m sure –’
‘If there’s a man in Dublin that knows his bricks and mortar better than Ned Sheehy give me a gander at him.’
Barney said he didn’t think he could supply the old woman with such a person, and she said that of course he couldn’t. No flies on Ned Sheehy, she said, in spite of what you might think to look at him.
‘She made a mistake the first time and she’ll make another before she’s finished. You could turn that one’s head like the wind would turn a weather-cock.’
Ariadne came in with the Evening Herald and handed it to her grandmother. Barney smiled at her, but she didn’t notice. Mrs Fennerty became engrossed in the newspaper. Barney went upstairs.
In time, he heard footsteps in the room above his, and knew they were Ariadne’s. They crossed the room to the window. The blind was drawn down. Ariadne crossed the room again, back and forth, back and forth. He knew when she took her shoes off.
Handwritten notes clamoured for attention on the green baize of the board beside the porters’ lodge: love letters, brief lines of rejection, relationships terminated, charges of treachery, a stranger’s admiration confessed. The same envelope remained on the baize-covered board for months: R.R. Woodley, it said, but R.R. Woodley either did not exist or had long since ceased to be an undergraduate. It is hard to find myself the way I am, and to be alone with not a soul to turn to: a heart was laid bare within the dust-soiled envelope, its ache revealed to the general curiosity. But other notes, on torn half-sheets of exercise-paper, remained on the green board for only a few hours, disappearing for ever while they were still fresh.
Within their fire-warmed lodge the porters were a suspicious breed of men, well used to attempted circumvention of the law that began where their own rule did. They wore black velvet jockey caps; one carried a mace on ceremonial occasions. They saw to it that bicycles were wheeled through the vast archway they guarded, and that female undergraduates passed in and out during the permitted hours only, that their book was signed when this was necessary. In the archway itself, posters advertised dances and theatrical productions. Eminent visitors were announced. Societies’ account sheets were published. There were reports of missionary work in Africa.
Beyond this entrance, dark façades loomed around a cobbled square. Loops of chain protected tidily shorn lawns. The Chapel stared stolidly at the pillars of the Examination Hall. Gold numerals lightened the blue face of the Dining Hall clock. A campanile rose fussily.
Barney attended the lectures of Bore McGusty and Professor Makepeace-Green and the elderly Dr Posse, who had been in the medical school in his father’s time. Bore McGusty was a long-winded young man, Professor Makepeace-Green a tetchily severe woman, who particularly objected to Slovinski reading the Daily Sketch during her lectures. The students of Barney’s age keenly took notes and paid attention, but the recent shedding of years of discipline by the ex-servicemen left them careless of their academic obligations. ‘Listen,’ Slovinski regularly invited, interrupting Bore McGusty’s dissertation on the functioning of the bile-ducts by playing Beethoven on his teeth.
The medical students favoured certain public houses: the International Bar, Ryan’s in Duke Street, McFadden’s. After an evening’s drinking they danced in the Crystal Ballroom, or sat around pots of tea in the café attached to the Green cinema, where the private lives of their mentors were breezily speculated upon, and for the most part scorned. On such occasions Slovinski spoke of his wartime liaisons, and Medlicott retailed the appetites of a baker’s widow, a Mrs Claudia Rigg of Bournemouth. For Barney –years later – this time in his life was as minutely preserved as his childhood at Lisscrea. And always, at the heart of the memory, was Mrs Lenehan’s household in Sinnott Street.
‘You’ve maybe not come across the name Ariadne before,’ Mrs Lenehan said one morning in the hall, adding that she’d found it in a story hi Model Housekeeping. Had a son been born instead of a daughter he’d have been christened Paul, that being a family name on her own side. As soon as she’d seen Ariadne written down she’d settled for it.
Barney liked the name also. He thought it suited Mrs Lenehan’s daughter, whom increasingly he found himself thinking about, particularly during the lectures of Bore McGusty and Professor Makepeace-Green. Ariadne, he soon discovered, didn’t go out to work; her work was in her mother’s house and it was there, during the lectures, that he imagined her. She assisted with the cleaning and the preparation of meals, and the washing-up afterwards. She was often on the stairs with a dust-pan and brush; she polished the brass on the front door. Every morning she set the dining-room fire, and lit it every evening. Once in a while she and her mother cleaned the windows.
Mrs Lenehan occasionally sang while she performed her household tasks. Ariadne didn’t. There was no trace of reluctance in her expression, only a kind of vagueness: she had the look of a saint, Barney found himself thinking once, and the thought remained with him. In the dining-room he was usually the last to finish breakfast, deliberately dawdling. Ariadne came in with a tray and, seeing him still at the table, absorbed the time by damping the fire down with wet slack and picking up the mantelpiece ornaments and dusting them. Her elegant hands were as delicate as the porcelain she attended to, and her clothes never varied: the same shade of mauve combined repeatedly with mourner’s black. ‘Good evening, Mr Prenderville,’ she sometimes whispered in the dusk of the hall, a fleeting figure passing from one closed door to another.
After he’d been in the lodgings a month Barney
was familiar with every movement in the room above his. When Ariadne left it and did not return within a few minutes he said to himself that she was washing her hair, which he imagined wrapped in a towel, the way Nuala wrapped hers before she sat down to dry it at the range. He imagined the glow of an electric fire on Ariadne’s long, damp tresses. Staring at a discoloured ceiling, he invaded her privacy, investing every sound she made with his speculations. Would she be sewing or embroidering, as Nuala did in the evening? Nuala pressed flowers between the pages of the medical encyclopaedia in the dining-room at Lisscrea, pansies and primulas she asked Charlie Redmond to bring from the garden. Barney wondered if Ariadne did that also. He guessed the moment when she lay down to sleep, and lay in the darkness himself, accompanying her to oblivion.
He didn’t tell Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, or anyone else, about Ariadne. In his letters to his father he mentioned Mrs Lenehan and Mrs Fennerty and Mr Sheehy: Ariadne mightn’t have existed. Yet in the noisy cafés and the lecture-halls he continued to feel haunted by her, and wished she was there also. He left the house in Sinnott Street reluctantly each morning, and hurried back to it in the evenings.
‘Ariadne.’
He addressed her on the first-floor landing one Sunday afternoon. His voice was little more than a whisper; they were shadows in the dim afternoon light. ‘Ariadne,’ he said again, delighting, while they were alone, in this repetition of her name.
‘Yes, Mr Prenderville?’
Mrs Lenehan and Mr Sheehy spent Sunday afternoons with Mrs Fennerty in the dining-room, listening to a radio commentary on a hurling or Gaelic football match, the only time the dining-room wireless was ever turned on. When it was over Mr Sheehy and Mrs Lenehan went to the kitchen.
‘Would you like to come for a walk, Ariadne?’
She did not reply at once. He gazed through the gloom, hoping for the gleam of her smile. From the dining-room came the faint sound of the commentator’s rapid, excited voice. Ariadne didn’t smile. She said:
‘This minute, Mr Prenderville?’
‘If you are doing nothing better.’
‘I will put on my coat.’
He thought of her mother and Mr Sheehy as he waited. He didn’t know which direction the McKee Barracks and the Civic Guards’ Depot lay in, but wherever these places were he didn’t want even to see them in the distance. ‘I’m ready,’ Ariadne said, having delayed for no longer than a minute. Barney opened the front door softly, and softly closed it behind them. Damp autumn leaves lay thickly on the pavements, blown into mounds and heaps. When the wind gusted, more slipped from the branches above them and gently descended. Ariadne’s coat was another shade of mauve, matching her headscarf. There’d been no need to leave the house in that secret way, but they had done so nonetheless, without exchanging a look.
‘I love Sunday,’ Ariadne said.
He said he liked the day also. He told her about Sundays at Lisscrea because he didn’t know how else to interest her. His father and he would sit reading in the drawing-room on a winter’s afternoon, or in the garden in the summer. Nuala would bring them tea, and a cake made the day before. His father read books that were sent to him by post from a lending library in Dublin, novels by A.E.W. Mason and E. Phillips Oppenheim and Sapper. Once, laying one down when he had finished it, he changed his mind and handed it to Barney. ‘Try this,’ he said, and after that they shared the books that came by post. Barney was fourteen or fifteen then.
‘Your mother is not there, Mr Prenderville?’
‘My mother died.’
He described Lisscrea to her: the long, narrow rooms of the house, the garden where Charlie Redmond had worked for as long as Barney could remember, the patients in the hall. He mentioned the cottages next to Lisscrea House, and Walsh’s public house, and the ruined tower he could see from his bedroom window. He repeated a piece of Charlie Redmond’s doggerel, and described his prematurely wizened features and Nuala’s countrywoman’s looks. He told Ariadne about school at Ballinadra, the journey on the milk cart when he was small, the return by the bread van in the afternoon, and then the inheriting of his father’s old B.S.A. bicycle. She’d never known a town like Ballinadra, Ariadne said; she only knew Dublin.
‘It isn’t much,’ he said, but she wanted to know, and he tried to make a picture of the place for her: the single street and the square, O’Kevin’s hardware, the grocers’ shops that were bars as well, the statue of Father Mathew.
‘A quiet place,’ Ariadne said.
‘Oh, a grave.’
She nodded solemnly. She could see the house, she said. She knew what he meant by Virginia creeper. She could see his father clearly.
‘What would you have done if I hadn’t suggested a walk?’
‘Stayed in my room.’
‘Doing nothing, Ariadne?’ He spoke lightly, almost teasing her. But she was still solemn and did not smile. Maybe tidying her drawers, she said. She called him Mr Prenderville again, and he asked her not to. ‘My name’s Barney.’
‘Just Barney?’
‘Barney Gregory.’
Again she nodded. They walked in silence. He said:
‘Will you always help your mother in the house?’
‘What else would I do?’
He didn’t know. He wanted to suggest some work that was worthy of her, something better than carrying trays of food to the dining-room and sweeping the stair-carpet. Even work in a shop was more dignified than what she did, but he did not mention a shop. ‘Perhaps a nurse.’
‘I would be frightened to be a nurse. I’d be no good at it.’
‘I’m sure you would, Ariadne.’
She would care tenderly. Her gentleness would be a blessing. Her beauty would cheer the low spirits of the ill.
‘Nuns are better at all that,’ she said.
‘Did you go to a convent, Ariadne?’
She nodded, and for a moment seemed lost in the memory the question inspired. When she spoke again her voice, for the first time, was eager. ‘Will we walk to the convent, Barney? It isn’t far away.’
‘If you would like to.’
‘We have to turn right when we come to Prussia Street,’
No one was about. The front doors of the houses they walked by were tightly closed against the world. Their footsteps were deadened by the sodden leaves.
‘I like that colour you wear,’ he said.
‘An aunt left me her clothes.’
‘An aunt?’
‘A great-aunt, Aunt Loretta. Half of them she never wore. She loved that colour.’
‘It suits you.’
‘She used to say that.’
That was why her dresses, and the coat she wore now, were rather long for her. It was her clothes that gave her her old-fashioned air. Had she no clothes of her own? he wondered, but did not ask.
The convent was a cement building with silver-coloured railings in front of it. The blinds were drawn down in several of its windows; lace curtains ensured privacy in the others. A brass letter-box and knocker gleamed on a green side-door.
‘Did you walk here every morning?’ he asked.
‘When I was small my father used to take me. It wasn’t out of his way.’
She went on talking about that, and he formed a picture of her childhood, just as, a few moments ago, she had of his. He saw her, hand in hand with her father, hurrying through the early-morning streets. Her father had worked in Maguire’s coal office in Easter Street. Sometimes they’d call in at a shop for his tobacco, half an ounce of Digger.
When they crossed the street he wanted to take her arm, but he didn’t have the courage. They could walk to a bus stop, he suggested, and wait for a bus to O’Connell Street. They could have tea somewhere, one of the cinema cafes that were open on a Sunday. But she shook her head. She’d have to be getting back, she said.
They turned and walked the way they’d come, past the silent houses. A drizzle began. They didn’t say much else.
*
‘God, there’s ta
lent for you!’ Medlicott exclaimed in the Crystal Ballroom, surveying the girls who stood against the walls. Slovinski conveyed a willowy woman of uncertain age on to the dance-floor, from which, a few minutes later, they disappeared and did not return. Some of the girls who were standing about glanced back at Medlicott, clearly considering him handsome. He approached a lean-featured one with hair the colour of newly polished brass, not at all pretty, Barney considered.
Because he had no knowledge of dance-steps, the partners Barney chose usually excused themselves after a minute or two. ‘What line are you in?’ a plump one, more tolerant than the others, inquired. He said he worked in a dry-cleaner’s, Slovinski having warned him not to mention being a student in case the girls took fright. ‘You can’t dance,’ the plump girl observed, and commenced to teach him.
When the end of the evening came she was still doing so. Medlicott had remained attached to the lean-featured girl, whom he confidently reported he had ‘got going’. Outside the dance-hall Barney heard him complimenting her on her eyes, and felt embarrassed because he didn’t want to have to tell the plump girl that she, too, had lovely eyes, which wouldn’t have been true. Instead, he asked heir her name. ‘May,’ she said.
Medlicott suggested that they should go out to Goatstown in a taxi, since the city bars were closed by now. There were fields in Goatstown, he reminded his companions: after they’d had a couple of nightcaps they could go for a walk through the fields in the moonlight. But May said her father would skin her if she got in late. She took Barney’s arm. Her father was fierce-tempered, she confided.
The lean-faced girl didn’t want to make the journey to Goatstown either, so Medlicott led her into an alleyway. They kissed one another in a doorway while May and Barney stood some distance away. When her father went wild, May said, nothing could hold him. ‘All right,’ Barney heard the lean-faced girl say.
A battered Ford car was parked at the far end of the alleyway next to a skip full of builder’s rubble. Medlicott and his companion approached it, she teetering on gold-coloured high heels. Medlicott opened one of the back doors. ‘Come on in here, darling,’ he invited.
The Collected Stories Page 160