The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘What distinctions?’

  ‘Between playing the fool and making love,’ he replied with a weary air as though he could barely be bothered explaining such matters to a girl as inexperienced as she. From imaginary distinctions he went on to out-and-out prevarication. ‘If I went out with Penrose, for instance, that would be one thing. Going out with you is something entirely different.’

  ‘But why?’ she asked as though this struck her as a doubtful compliment.

  ‘Well, I don’t like Penrose,’ he said mildly, hoping that he sounded more convincing than he felt. ‘I’m not even vaguely interested in Penrose. I am interested in you. See the difference?’

  ‘Not altogether,’ Janet replied in her clear, unsentimental way. ‘You don’t mean that if two people are in love with one another, they should have affairs with somebody else, do you?’

  ‘Of course I don’t,’ snorted Mick, disgusted by this horrid example of English literal-mindedness. ‘I don’t see what they want having affairs at all for.’

  ‘Oh, so that’s what it is!’ she said with a nod.

  ‘That’s what it is,’ Mick said feebly, realizing the cat was out of the bag at last. ‘Love is a serious business. It’s a matter of responsibilities. If I make a friend, I don’t begin by thinking what use I can make of him. If I meet a girl I like, I’m not going to begin calculating how cheap I can get her. I don’t want anything cheap,’ he added with passion. ‘I’m not going to rush into anything till I know the girl well enough to try and make a decent job of it. Is that plain?’

  ‘Remarkably plain,’ Janet replied icily. ‘You mean you’re not that sort of man. Let me buy you a drink.’

  ‘No, thanks.’

  ‘Then I think we’d better be getting back,’ she said, rising and looking like the wrath of God.

  Mick, crushed and humiliated, followed her at a slouch, his hands still in his trouser pockets. It wasn’t good enough. At home a girl would have gone on with the argument till one of them fell unconscious, and in argument Mick had real staying power, so he felt she was taking an unfair advantage. Of course, he saw that she had some reason. However you looked at it, she had more or less told him that she expected him to be her lover, and he had more or less told her to go to hell, and he had a suspicion that this was an entirely new experience for Janet. She might well feel mortified.

  But the worst of it was that, thinking it over, he realized that even then he had not been quite honest. He had not told her he already had a girl at home. He believed all he had said, but he did not believe it quite so strongly as all that; not so as not to make exceptions. Given time, he might quite easily have made an exception of Janet. She was the sort of girl people made an exception of. It was the shock that had made him express himself so violently; the shock of realizing that a girl he cared for had lived with other men. He had reacted that way almost in protest against them.

  But the real shock had been the discovery that he minded so much what she was.

  They never resumed the discussion openly, on the same terms, and it seemed as though Janet had forgiven him, but only just. The argument was always there beneath the surface, ready to break out again. It flared up whenever she mentioned Fanny – ‘I suppose one day she’ll meet an Irishman, and they can discuss one another’s inhibitions.’ Or when she mentioned other men she had known, like Bill, with whom she had spent a holiday in Dorset, or an American called Tom with whom she had gone to the Plough in Alton, she seemed to be contrasting the joyous past with the dreary present, and she became cold and insolent.

  Mick gave as good as he got. He had a dirty tongue, and he had considerable more ammunition than she. The canteen was always full of gossip about who was living with whom, or who had stopped living with whom, or whose wife or husband had returned and found him or her living with someone else, and he passed it on with a quizzical air. The first time she said ‘Good!’ in a ringing voice. After that, she contented herself with a shrug, and Mick suggested ingenuously that perhaps it took all those religions to deal with so much fornication. ‘One religion would be more than enough for Ireland,’ she retorted, and Mick grinned and admitted himself beaten.

  But, all the same, he could not help feeling that it wasn’t nice. He remembered what Fanny had said about nobody’s knowing the Plough better, and Janet about how nice it was in the early morning. Really, really, it wasn’t nice! It seemed to show a complete lack of sensibility in her to think of bringing him to a place where she had stayed with somebody else, and made him suspicious of every other place she brought him. He had never been able to share her enthusiasm for old villages of red-brick cottages, all coloured like geraniums, grouped about a grey church tower, but he lost even the desire to share it when he found himself wondering what connection it had with Bill or Tom.

  At the same time, he could not do without her. They met every evening after work, went off together on Saturday afternoons, and she even came to Mass with him on Sunday mornings. Nor was there any feeling that she was critical of it. She followed the service with great devotion. As a result, before he returned home on his first leave, everything seemed to have changed between them. She no longer criticized Fanny’s virginity and ceased altogether to refer to Bill and Tom. Indeed, from her conversation it would have been hard to detect that she had ever known such men, much less been intimate with them. Mick wondered whether it wasn’t possible for a woman to be immoral and yet remain innocent at heart and decided regretfully that it wasn’t likely. But no wife or sweetheart could have shown more devotion than she in the last week before his return, and when they went to the station and walked arm-in-arm to the end of the long, drafty platform to say good-bye, she was stiff with unspoken misery. She seemed to feel it was her duty to show no sign of emotion.

  ‘You will come back, Mick, won’t you?’ she asked in a clear voice.

  ‘Why?’ Mick asked banteringly. ‘Do you think you can keep off Americans for a fortnight?’

  That she spat out a word that showed only too clearly her intimacy with Americans and others. It startled Mick. The English had strong ideas about when you could joke and when you couldn’t, and she seemed to think this was no time for joking. To his surprise, he found she was trembling all over.

  At any other time he would have argued with her, but already in spirit he was half-way home. There, beyond the end of the line, was Cork, and with it home and meat and butter and nights of tranquil sleep. When he leaned out of the window to wave good-bye, she was standing like a statue, looking curiously desolate. Her image faded quickly, for the train was crowded with Irish servicemen and women, clerks and labourers, who gradually sorted themselves out into north and south, country and town, and within five minutes, Mick, in a fug of steam heat and tobacco smoke, was playing cards with a group of men from the South Side who were calling him by his Christian name. Janet was already farther away than any train could leave her.

  It was the following evening when he reached home. He had told no one of his coming and arrived in an atmosphere of sensation. He went upstairs to his own little whitewashed room with the picture of the Sacred Heart over his bed and lost himself in the study of his shelf of books. Then he shaved and, without waiting for more than a cup of tea, set off down the road to Ina’s. Ina was the youngest of a large family, and his arrival there created a sensation too. Elsie, the eldest, a fat, jolly girl, just home from work, shouted with laughter at him.

  ‘He smelt the sausages.’

  ‘You can keep your old sausages,’ Mick said scornfully. ‘I’m taking Ina out to supper.’

  ‘You’re what?’ shouted Elsie. ‘You have high notions like the goats in Kerry.’

  ‘But I have to make my little brothers’ supper, honey,’ Ina said laughingly as she smoothed his hair. She was a slight, dark, radiant girl with a fund of energy.

  ‘Tell them make it themselves,’ Mick said scornfully.

  ‘Tell them, you!’ cried Elsie. ‘Someone ought to have told them years ago, the caubog
ues! They’re thirty, and they have no more intention of marrying than flying. Have you e’er an old job for us over there? I’m damned for the want of a man.’

  Ina rushed upstairs to change. Her two brothers came in, expressed astonishment at Mick’s appearance, satisfaction at his promotion, incredulity at his view that the English weren’t beaten, and began hammering together on the table with their knives and forks.

  ‘Supper up! Supper up!’ shouted the elder, casting his eyes on the ceiling. ‘We can’t wait all night. Where the hell is Ina?’

  ‘Coming out to dinner with me,’ replied Mick with a sniff, feeling that for the first time in his life he was uttering a curtain line.

  They called for Chris, an undersized lad with a pale face like a fist and a voice like melted butter. He expressed pleasure at seeing them, but gave no other signs of it. It was part of Chris’s line never to be impressed by anything. In a drawling voice he commented on priests, women, and politicians, and there was little left of any of them when he had done. He had always regarded Mick as a bit of a softy because of his fondness for Ina. For himself, he would never keep a girl for more than a month because it gave them ideas.

  ‘What do you want going to town for supper for?’ he drawled incredulously, as though this were only another indication that Mick was a bit soft in the head. ‘Can’t ye have it at home?’

  ‘You didn’t change much anyway,’ said Mick with a snort of delight. ‘Hurry up!’

  He insisted on their walking so as not to miss the view of the city he had been dreaming of for months; the shadowy perspective of winding road between flowering trees, and the spires, river, and bridges far below in evening light. His heart was overflowing. Several times they were stopped by neighbours who wanted to know how things were in the outside world. Because of the censorship, their ideas were very vague.

  ‘Oh, all right,’ Mick replied modestly.

  ‘Ye’re having it bad.’

  ‘A bit noisy at times, but you get used to it,’ he said lightly.

  ‘I dare say, I dare say.’

  There was pity rather than belief in their voices, but Mick didn’t mind. It was good to be back where people cared whether you were having it bad or not. But in his heart Mick felt you didn’t get used to it, that you never could, and that all of it, even Janet, was slightly unreal. He had a suspicion that he would not return. He had had enough of it.

  Next morning, while he was lying in bed in his little attic, he received a letter from Janet. It must have been written while he was still on the train. She said that trying to face things without him was like trying to get used to an amputated limb; she kept on making movements before realizing that it wasn’t there. He dropped the letter at that point without trying to finish it. He couldn’t help feeling that it sounded unreal too.

  Mick revisited all his old haunts. ‘You should see Fair Hill,’ his father said with enthusiasm. ‘ ’Tis unknown the size that place is growing.’ He went to Fair Hill, to the Lough, to Glanmire, seeing them with new eyes and wishing he had someone like Janet to show them off to. But he began to realize that without a job, without money, it would not be very easy to stay on. His parents encouraged him to stay, but he felt he must spend another six months abroad and earn a little more money. Instead, he started to coax Chris into coming back with him. He knew now that his position in the factory would ensure a welcome for anyone he brought in. Besides, he grew tired of Ina’s brothers telling him how the Germans would win the war, and one evening was surprised to hear himself reply in Chris’s cynical drawl: ‘They will and what else?’ Ina’s brothers were surprised as well. They hadn’t expected Mick to turn his coat in that way.

  ‘You get the feeling that people here never talk of anything only religion and politics,’ he said one evening to Chris as they went for their walk up the Western Road.

  ‘Ah, how bad it is!’ Chris said mockingly. ‘Damn glad you were to get back to it. You can get a night’s sleep here anyway.’

  ‘You can,’ Mick said in the same tone. ‘There’s no one to stop you.’

  Chris looked at him in surprise, uncertain whether or not Mick meant what he seemed to mean. Mick was developing out of his knowledge entirely.

  ‘Go on!’ he said with a cautious grin. ‘Are they as good-natured as that?’

  ‘Better come and see,’ Mick said sedately. ‘I have the very girl for you.’

  ‘You don’t say so!’ Chris exclaimed with the smile of a child who has ceased to believe in Santa Claus but likes to hear about it just the same.

  ‘Fine-looking girl with a good job and a flat of her own,’ Mick went on with a smile. ‘What more do you want?’

  Chris suddenly beamed.

  ‘I wouldn’t let Ina hear me talking like that if I was you,’ he said. ‘Some of them quiet-looking girls are a terrible hand with a hatchet.’

  At that moment it struck Mick with cruel force how little Ina had to reproach him with. They were passing the college, and pairs of clerks and servant girls were strolling by, whistling and calling to one another. There was hardly another man in Ireland who would have behaved as he had done. He remembered Janet at the station with her desolate air, and her letter, which he had not answered. Perhaps, after all, she meant it. Suddenly everything seemed to turn upside down in him. He was back in the bar in Alton, listening to the little crowd discussing the dead customer, and carrying out the drinks to Janet on the rustic seat. It was no longer this that seemed unreal, but the Western Road and the clerks and the servant girls. They were like a dream from which he had wakened so suddenly that he had not even realized that he was awake. And he had waked up beside a girl like Janet and had not even realized that she was real.

  He was so filled with consternation that he almost told Chris about her. But he knew that Chris would no more understand him than he had understood himself. Chris would talk sagaciously about ‘damaged goods’ as if there were only one way in which a woman could be damaged. He knew that no one would understand, for already he was thinking in a different language. Suddenly he remembered the story of Oisin that the monks had told him, and it began to have meaning for him. He wondered wildly if he would ever get back or if, like Oisin in the story, he would suddenly collapse and spend the rest of his days walking up and down the Western Road with people as old and feeble as himself, and never see Niamh or the Land of Youth. You never knew what powerful morals the old legends had till they came home to you. On the other hand, their heroes hadn’t the advantages of the telephone.

  ‘I have to go back to town, Chris,’ he said, turning in his tracks. ‘I’ve just remembered I have a telephone call to put through.’

  ‘Good enough,’ Chris said knowingly. ‘I suppose you might as well tell her I’m coming too.’

  When Chris and himself got in, the alert was still on and the station was in pitch-darkness. Outside, against the clear summer sky, shadowy figures moved with pools of light at their feet, and searchlights flickered like lightning over the battlements of the castle. For Chris, it had all the novelty it had once had for Mick, and he groaned. Mick gripped his arm and steered him confidently.

  ‘This is nothing,’ he said cheerfully. ‘Probably only a scouting plane. Wait till they start dropping a few wagons of high explosive and you’ll be able to talk.’

  It was sheer delight to Mick to hear himself speak in that light-hearted way of high explosives. He seemed to have become forceful and cool all at once. It had something to do with Chris’s being there, as though it gave occupation to all his protective instincts. But there was something else as well. It was almost as though he were arriving home.

  There was no raid, so he brought Chris round to meet the girls, and Chris groaned again at the channel of star-shaped traffic signals that twinkled between the black cliffs of houses whose bases opened mysteriously to reveal pale stencilled signs or caverns of smoky light.

  Janet opened the door, gave one hasty, incredulous glance at Chris, and then hurled herself at Mick’s n
eck. Chris opened his eyes with a start – he later admitted to Mick that he had never before seen a doll so quick off the mark. But Mick was beyond caring for appearances. While Chris and Fanny were in the throes of starting a conversation, he followed Janet into the kitchen, where she was recklessly tossing a week’s rations into the pan. She was hot and excited and used two dirty words in quick succession, but he didn’t mind these either. He leaned against the kitchen wall with his hands in his trouser pockets and smiled at her.

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll find I’ve left my principles behind me this time,’ he said with amusement.

  ‘Oh, good!’ she said – not as enthusiastically as he might have expected, but he put that down to the confusion caused by his unexpected arrival.

  ‘What do you think of Chris?’

  ‘A bit quiet, isn’t he?’ she asked doubtfully.

  ‘Scared,’ replied Mick with a sniff of amusement. ‘He’ll soon get over that. Should we go off somewhere for the weekend?’

  ‘Next weekend?’ she asked aghast.

  ‘Or the one after. I don’t mind.’

  ‘You’re in a hurry, aren’t you?’

  ‘So would you be if you’d spent a fortnight in Cork.’

  ‘All of us?’

  ‘The more the merrier. Let’s go somewhere really good,’ he went on enthusiastically. ‘Take the bikes and make a proper tour of it. I’d like Chris to see a bit of the country.’

  It certainly made a difference, having Chris there. And a fortnight later the four of them set off on bicycles out of town. It was a perfect day of early summer. Landscape and houses gradually changed; old brick and flint giving place to houses of small yellow tile, tinted with golden moss, and walls of narrow tile-like stone with deep bands of mortar that made them seem as though woven. Out of the woven pullovers rose gables with coifs of tile, like nuns’ heads. It all came over Mick in a rush; the presence of his friend and of his girl and a country that he had learned to understand. While they sat on a bench outside a country public-house, he brought out the beer and smiled with quiet pride.