The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  If Nellie thought that would shake him she was mistaken. He merely tossed his head with a silent chuckle and went in, adjusting his pince-nez. For a fellow who was supposed to be in love with her since they were kids, he behaved in a very peculiar manner. He put his hands in his trouser pockets and stood on the hearth with his legs well apart.

  ‘Isn’t it awful, Ned?’ Mrs Lomasney asked in her deep voice.

  ‘Is it?’ Ned purred, smiling.

  ‘With a priest?’ cried Nellie.

  ‘Now, he wasn’t a priest, Nellie,’ said Mrs Lomasney reprovingly. ‘ ’Tis bad enough as it is without making it any worse.’

  ‘Suppose you tell me what happened,’ suggested Ned.

  ‘But we don’t know, Ned,’ cried Mrs Lomasney. ‘You know what that one is like in one of her sulky fits. Maybe she’ll tell you. She’s up in bed.’

  ‘I’ll try,’ said Ned.

  Still with his hands in his pockets, he rolled after Mrs Lomasney up the thickly carpeted stairs to Rita’s little bedroom on top of the house. She left him on the landing and he paused for a moment to look out over the river and the lighted city behind it. Rita, wearing a pink dressing-jacket, was lying with one arm under her head. By the bed was a table with a packet of cigarettes she had been using as an ashtray. He smiled and shook his head reprovingly at her.

  ‘Hullo, Ned,’ she cried, reaching him a bare arm. ‘Give us a kiss. I’m quite kissable now.’

  He didn’t need to be told that. He was astonished at the change in her. Her whole bony, boyish face seemed to have gone mawkish and soft and to be lit up from inside. He sat on an armchair by the bed, carefully pulling up the bottoms of his trousers, then put his hands in his trouser pockets again and sat back with crossed legs and shoulders slightly hunched.

  ‘I suppose they’re all in a floosther downstairs?’ Rita asked with amusement.

  ‘They seem a little excited,’ said Ned with bowed head cocked a little sideways, looking like a wise old bird.

  ‘Wait till they hear the details and they’ll have something to be excited about,’ said Rita grimly.

  ‘Why?’ he asked mildly. ‘Are there details?’

  ‘Masses of them,’ said Rita. ‘Honest to God, Ned, I used to laugh at the glamour girls in the convent. I never knew you could get like that about a fellow. It’s like something busting inside you. Cripes, I’m as soppy as a kid!’

  ‘And what’s the fellow like?’ Ned asked curiously.

  ‘Tony Donoghue? His mother had a shop in the Main Street. He’s decent enough, I suppose. I don’t know. He kissed me one night coming home. I was furious. I cut the blooming socks off him. Next evening he came round to apologize. I never got up or asked him to sit down or anything. I suppose I was still mad with him. He said he never slept a wink. “Didn’t you?” said I. “It didn’t trouble me much.” Bloody lies, of course. “I did it because I was fond of you,” says he. “Is that what you told the last one too?” said I. Then he got into a wax too. Said I was calling him a liar. “And aren’t you?” said I. Then I waited for him to hit me, but, begor, he didn’t, and I ended up sitting on his knee. Talk about the Babes in the Wood! First time he ever had a girl on his knee, he said, and you know how much of it I did.’

  They heard a step on the stairs and Mrs Lomasney smiled benevolently at them both round the door.

  ‘I suppose ’tis tea Ned is having?’ she asked in her deep voice.

  ‘No. I’m having the tea,’ said Rita. ‘Ned says he’d sooner a drop of the hard tack.’

  ‘Oh, isn’t that a great change, Ned?’ cried Mrs Lomasney.

  ‘ ’Tis the shock,’ Rita explained lightly, throwing him a cigarette. ‘He didn’t think I was that sort of girl.’

  ‘He mustn’t know much about girls,’ said Mrs Lomasney.

  ‘He’s learning now,’ said Rita.

  When Paschal brought up the tray, Rita poured out tea for Ned and whiskey for herself. He made no comment. Things like that were a commonplace in the Lomasney household.

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘he told his old one he wanted to chuck the Church and marry me. There was ructions, of course. The people in the shop at the other side of the street had a son a priest. She wanted to be as good as them. So away with her up to Reverend Mother, and Reverend Mother sends for me. Did I want to destroy the young man’s life and he on the threshold of a great calling? I told her ’twas they wanted to destroy him. I asked her what sort of priest Tony would make. Oh, ’twas a marvellous sacrifice, and after it he’d be twice the man. Honest to God, Ned, the way that woman went on, you’d think she was talking about doctoring an old tomcat. I told her that was all she knew about Tony, and she said they knew him since he was an altar boy in the convent. “Did he ever tell you how he used to slough the convent orchard and sell the apples in town?” says I. So then she dropped the Holy Willie stuff and told me his ma was after getting into debt to put him in for the priesthood, and if he chucked it, he’d never be able to get a job at home to pay it back. Three hundred quid! Wouldn’t they kill you with style?’

  ‘And what did you do then?’ asked Ned with amusement.

  ‘I went to see his mother.’

  ‘You didn’t!’

  ‘I did. I thought I might work it with the personal touch.’

  ‘You don’t seem to have been very successful.’

  ‘I’d as soon try the personal touch on a traction engine, Ned. That woman was too tough for me altogether. I told her I wanted to marry Tony. “I’m sorry,” she said; “you can’t.” “What’s to stop me?” said I. “He’s gone too far,” says she. “If he was gone farther it wouldn’t worry me,” says I. I told her then what Reverend Mother said about her being three hundred pounds in debt and offered to pay it back to her if she let him marry me.’

  ‘And had you the three hundred?’ Ned asked in surprise.

  ‘Ah, where would I get three hundred?’ she replied ruefully. ‘And she knew it too, the old jade! She didn’t believe a word I said. After that I saw Tony. He was crying; said he didn’t want to break his mother’s heart. As true as God, Ned, that woman had as much heart as a traction engine.’

  ‘Well, you seem to have done it in style,’ Ned said approvingly as he put away his teacup.

  ‘That wasn’t the half of it. When I heard the difficulties his mother was making, I offered to live with him instead.’

  ‘Live with him?’ asked Ned. Even he was startled.

  ‘Well, go away on holidays with him. Lots of girls do it. I know they do. And, God Almighty, isn’t it only natural?’

  ‘And what did he say to that?’ asked Ned curiously.

  ‘He was scared stiff.’

  ‘He would be,’ said Ned, wrinkling up his nose and giving his superior little sniff as he took out a packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Oh, it’s all very well for you,’ Rita cried, bridling up. ‘You may think you’re a great fellow, all because you read Tolstoy and don’t go to Mass, but you’d be just as scared if a girl offered to go to bed with you.’

  ‘Try me,’ Ned said sedately as he lit her cigarette for her, but somehow the notion of suggesting such a thing to Ned only made her laugh.

  He stayed till quite late, and when he went downstairs the girls and Mrs Lomasney fell on him and dragged him into the sitting room.

  ‘Well, doctor,’ said Mrs Lomasney, ‘how’s the patient?’

  ‘Oh, I think the patient is coming round nicely,’ said Ned.

  ‘But would you ever believe it, Ned?’ she cried. ‘A girl that wouldn’t look at the side of the road a fellow was at, unless ’twas to go robbing orchards with him. You’ll have another drop of whiskey?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘And is that all you’re going to tell us?’ asked Mrs Lomasney.

  ‘Oh, you’ll hear it all from herself.’

  ‘We won’t.’

  ‘I dare say not,’ he said with a hearty chuckle, and went for his coat.

  ‘Wisha, Ned,’ said Mrs Lo
masney, ‘what’ll your mother say when she hears it?’

  ‘ “All quite mad,” ’ said Ned, sticking his nose in the air and giving an exaggerated version of what Mrs Lomasney called ‘his Hayfield sniff’.

  ‘The dear knows, I think she’s right,’ she said with resignation, helping him with his coat. ‘I hope your mother doesn’t notice the smell of whiskey from your breath,’ she added dryly, just to show him that she couldn’t be taken in, and then stood at the door, looking up and down, as she waited for him to wave from the gate.

  ‘Ah,’ she sighed as she closed the door behind her, ‘with the help of God it might be all for the best.’

  ‘If you think he’s going to marry her, I can tell you now he’s not,’ said Kitty. ‘I’d like to see myself trying it on Bill O’Donnell. He’d have my sacred life. That fellow only enjoys it.’

  ‘Ah, God is good,’ her mother said cheerfully, kicking a mat into place. ‘Some men might like that.’

  Inside a week Kitty and Nellie were sick to death of the sight of Rita round the house. She was bad enough at the best of times, but now she just brooded and mooned and snapped the head off you. In the afternoons she strolled down the dike and into Ned’s little shop, where she sat on the counter, swinging her legs and smoking, while Ned leaned against the side of the window, tinkering at the insides of a watch with some delicate instrument. Nothing seemed to rattle him. When he had finished work, he changed his coat and they went out to tea. He sat at the back of the teashop in a corner, pulled up the legs of his trousers, and took out a packet of cigarettes and a box of matches, which he placed on the table before them with a look that almost commanded them to stay there and not get lost. His face was pale and clear and bright, like an evening sky when the last light has drained from it.

  ‘Anything wrong?’ he asked one evening when she was moodier than usual.

  ‘Just fed up,’ she said, thrusting out her jaw.

  ‘What is it?’ he asked gently. ‘Still fretting?’

  ‘Ah, no. I can get over that. It’s Kitty and Nellie. They’re bitches, Ned; proper bitches. And all because I don’t wear my heart on my sleeve. If one of them got a knock from a fellow she’d take two aspirins and go to bed with the other one. They’d have a lovely talk – can’t you imagine? “And was it then he said he loved you?” I can’t do that sort of stuff. And it’s all because they’re not sincere, Ned. They couldn’t be sincere.’

  ‘Remember, they have a long start on you,’ Ned said smiling.

  ‘Is that it?’ she asked without interest. ‘They think I’m batty. Do you?’

  ‘I’ve no doubt that Mrs Donoghue, if that’s her name, thought something of the sort,’ replied Ned with a tight-lipped smile.

  ‘And wasn’t she right?’ asked Rita with sudden candour. ‘Suppose she’d agreed to take the three hundred quid, wouldn’t I be in a nice pickle? I wake in a sweat whenever I think of it. I’m just a blooming chancer, Ned. Where would I get three hundred quid?’

  ‘Oh, I dare say someone would have lent it to you,’ he said with a shrug.

  ‘They would like fun. Would you?’

  ‘Probably,’ he said gravely after a moment’s thought.

  ‘Are you serious?’ she whispered earnestly.

  ‘Quite.’

  ‘Cripes,’ she gasped, ‘you must be very fond of me.’

  ‘It looks like it,’ said Ned, and this time he laughed with real heartiness, a boy’s laugh of sheer delight at the mystification he was causing her. It was characteristic of Rita that she should count their friendship of years as nothing, but his offer of three hundred pounds in cash as significant.

  ‘Would you marry me?’ she asked frowningly. ‘I’m not proposing to you, only asking,’ she added hastily.

  ‘Certainly,’ he said, spreading out his hands. ‘Whenever you like.’

  ‘Honest to God?’

  ‘Cut my throat.’

  ‘And why didn’t you ask me before I went down to that kip? I’d have married you then like a shot. Was it the way you weren’t keen on me then?’

  ‘No,’ he replied matter-of-factly, drawing himself together like an old clock preparing to strike. ‘I think I’ve been keen on you as long as I’ve know you.’

  ‘It’s easily seen you’re a Neddy Ned,’ she said with amusement. ‘I go after mine with a scalping knife.’

  ‘I stalk mine,’ said Ned.

  ‘Cripes, Ned,’ she said with real regret, ‘I wish you’d told me sooner. I couldn’t marry you now.’

  ‘No?’

  ‘No. It wouldn’t be fair to you.’

  ‘Isn’t that my look-out?’

  ‘It’s my look-out now.’ She glanced around the restaurant to make sure no one was listening and then went on in a dry voice, leaning one elbow on the table. ‘I suppose you’ll think this is all cod, but it’s not. Honest to God, I think you’re the finest bloody man I ever met – even though you do think you’re an atheist or something,’ she added maliciously with a characteristic Lomasney flourish in the cause of Faith and Fatherland. ‘There’s no one in the world I have more respect for. I think I’d nearly cut my throat if I did something you really disapproved of – I don’t mean telling lies or going on a skite,’ she added hastily, to prevent misunderstandings. ‘They’re only gas. Something that really shocked you is what I mean. I think if I was tempted to do anything like that I’d ask myself: “What would that fellow Lowry think of me now?” ’

  ‘Well,’ Ned said in an extraordinary quiet voice, squelching the butt of his cigarette on his plate, ‘that sounds to me like a very good beginning.’

  ‘It is not, Ned,’ she said sadly, shaking her head. ‘That’s why I say it’s my look-out. You couldn’t understand it unless it happened to yourself; unless you fell in love with a girl the way I fell in love with Tony. Tony is a scut, and a cowardly scut, but I was cracked about him. If he came in here now and said: “Come on, girl, we’re going to Killarney for the weekend,” I’d go out and buy a nightdress and toothbrush and be off with him. And I wouldn’t give a damn what you or anybody thought. I might chuck myself in the lake afterwards, but I’d go. Christ, Ned,’ she exclaimed, flushing and looking as though she might burst into tears, ‘he couldn’t come into a room but I went all mushy inside. That’s what the real thing is like.’

  ‘Well,’ Ned said sedately, apparently not in the least put out – in fact, looking rather pleased with himself, Rita thought – ‘I’m in no hurry. In case you get tired of scalping them, the offer will still be open.’

  ‘Thanks, Ned,’ she said absent-mindedly, as though she weren’t listening.

  While he paid the bill, she stood in the porch, doing her face in the big mirror that flanked it, and paying no attention to the crowds, coming homeward through streets where the shop windows were already lit. As he emerged from the shop she turned on him suddenly.

  ‘About that matter, Ned,’ she said, ‘will you ask me again, or do I have to ask you?’

  Ned just refrained from laughing outright. ‘As you like,’ he replied with quiet amusement. ‘Suppose I repeat the proposal every six months.’

  ‘That would be the hell of a long time to wait if I changed my mind,’ she said with a thoughtful scowl. ‘All right,’ she said, taking his arm. ‘I know you well enough to ask you. If you don’t want me by that time, you can always say so. I won’t mind.’

  Ned’s proposal came as a considerable comfort to Rita. It bolstered up her self-esteem, which was always in danger of collapse. She might be ugly and uneducated and a bit of a chancer, but the best man in Cork – the best in Ireland, she sometimes thought – wanted to marry her, even after she had been let down by another man. That was a queer one for her enemies! So while her sisters made fun of her, Rita considered the situation, waiting for the best possible moment to let them know she had been proposed to and could marry before either of them if it suited her. Since her childhood Rita had never given anything away without extracting the last ounce of theatrical e
ffect from it. She would tell her sisters, but not before she could make them sick with the news.

  That was a pity, for it left Rita unaware that Ned, whom she respected, was far from being the only one who liked her. For instance, there was Justin Sullivan, the lawyer, who had once been by way of being engaged to Nellie. He hadn’t become engaged to her, because she was as slippery as an eel, and her fancy finally lit on a solicitor called Fahy whom Justin despised with his whole heart and soul as a light-headed, butterfly sort of man. But Justin continued to visit the house as a friend of the girls. There happened to be no other house that suited him half as well, and besides he knew that sooner or later Nellie would make a mess of her life with Fahy, and his services would be required.

  Justin, in other words, was a sticker. He was a good deal older than Rita, a tall, burly man with a broad face, a brow that was rising from baldness as well as brains, and a slow, watchful ironic air. Like many lawyers, he tended to conduct conversation as though the person he was speaking to were a hostile witness who had either to be coaxed into an admission of perjury or bullied into one of mental deficiency. When Justin began, Fahy simply clutched his head and retired to sit on the stairs. ‘Can’t anyone shut that fellow up?’ he would moan with a martyred air. Nobody could. The girls shot their little darts at him, but he only brushed them aside. Ned Lowry was the only one who could even stand up to him, and when the pair of them argued about religion, the room became a desert. Justin, of course, was a pillar of orthodoxy. ‘Imagine for a moment,’ he would declaim in a throaty rounded voice that turned easily to pomposity, ‘that I am Pope.’ ‘Easiest thing in the world, Justin,’ Kitty assured him. He drank whiskey like water, and the more he drank, the more massive and logical and orthodoxly Catholic he became.

  At the same time, under his truculent air he was exceedingly gentle, patient and understanding, and disliked the ragging of Rita by her sisters.

  ‘Tell me, Nellie,’ he asked one night in his lazy, amiable way, ‘do you talk like that to Rita because you like it, or because you think it’s good for her?’

  ‘How soft you have it!’ Nellie cried. ‘We have to live with her. You haven’t.’