by James Hanley
“Out,” I said.
“We seem never to be together any more,” she said. “Never.” There was such sadness in her voice. She went and stood in front of the fire, her hands clasped in front of her. I spoke at last. I had to.
“I am taking ship on Wednesday next,” I said, “I got a berth yesterday.”
She made no reply, and it did not seem necessary.
“If I had known how much was involved I would never have gone to study for the priesthood.”
I was seated at the table behind her. In her very height, in the way she stood there, I had the measure of her curious strength.
“Father knows about the money taken from the chimney shelf,” I said.
Silence.
“And Maureen knows about the document signed by her husband.”
“And Father knows that his wages were collected monthly by Mr. Corkran who is employed by the Ragner woman.”
And I know what was involved the morning the Bursar came to me and informed me that a quarter’s fees were unpaid and that I might have to leave.”
“And the distance from Hatfields to Banfield House is one and a half miles. I measured it.”
“And Maureen herself told me that you forced her to marry Kilkey whom she has never loved.”
“And Father always said that you were the devil for getting your way.”
“And Desmond said that you would crush and walk over anybody in order to get an inch closer to what you were determined to get.”
“And John said he sang a song of delight the moment he turned his back on the greenest country in the world.”
“And Kilkey himself said that you were so innocent that you could never realize your stupid moments.”
“And Maureen said that if you have driven everybody away from you it’s your own fault, and that nobody in this family ever asked for special favours. And that it wasn’t fair to me to send me away when I was at an age when I couldn’t make up my own mind.”
“And Father was never a lazy man, and often told me how happy he’d been sitting with his own family, but that it was far more peaceful stuck away in the belly of his ship.”
“And first I was hated by them because I did something to please you, and now I’m hated by you because I didn’t.”
“And there’s no warmth and there’s no love in this bloody house, and there never was.”
“And every single feeling or hope, every stick and stone in this place seems to be equally divided between God Almighty and that old bitch in Banfield Rd.”
“We want our own lives.”
When I looked up I saw that she had changed her position, and she was different; she seemed to wilt where she stood. I felt as if I’d struck with whips, and I felt I had been used.
“Oh God! The things we do.”
“Do you want to go outside for a moment, Mr. Fury?” Brother Anselm said.
I said no, I couldn’t move, I didn’t want to. I felt him grip my shoulders, hold me tight, and I heard him say, “It’s all right. You’ll feel better after this. It’s good to speak.”
How moved I was by his words. I loved the man. “They were terrible things to say to your mother, my son. How old were you?”
“Seventeen. I know it was. I’ve never forgotten, I’ve never forgiven myself. I hate nobody but myself. Nobody.”
“What happened?”
“I left the house, left her standing in front of the fire, I couldn’t stay there a moment longer. If only she had spoken about it, but she would never do that. No. Everything was silence, everything was secret, and she was always afraid——”
“Afraid of what?”
“That I would fail her in the end, and that she would be laughed at.”
“I’m unable to understand how she managed at all, I mean after your brothers left home, and your sister got married. If only she had spoken to your father——”
I remember my father saying to me one night as I stood with him on the quay, “How changed your mother is, Peter, how changed. Something has happened to her. Why can’t she be like other people, there’s thousands of us here because in this time any country is better than the one you were born in. What’s happened to her? Tell me.” I couldn’t tell him, I didn’t know. And like him I wasn’t always there. “Your mother will never forgive me for taking you all away from home, and ever since I’ve felt in some strange way that somebody would be made to pay for her bitter disappointment. But we can’t all live by grace and fresh air. We have to work. I’ve always done my best, what I thought my best. It’s not much of a life for me, really, I don’t want to be roaming the seas for the remainder of my life, but what can I do?”
And I knew he could do nothing. I can see him there, a wiry sort of man, a little bent, bareheaded, and over us both the enormous height and weight of the ship.
“In the times we live in I’m very lucky to be on a ship at all,” he said, but I made no reply, just looked beyond him to the ship, and I remember how the light suddenly began to go and the deep colour of a flag seemed to melt all at once, and then it was dark, and to my right I heard the first steps on the gangway, and knew I must go. I was always sorry for my father. He got little thanks for his pains.
“When did you next see your mother?” he said. And I said I couldn’t remember that, I could only remember the one thing, going off to the house in Banfield Rd.
“I went to see the woman at Banfield Road,” I said.
“It is not necessary to tell me that,” he said.
“No, Brother, perhaps it isn’t.”
“Do you feel any better now?” he asked, and again he offered me the coffee or the wine.
“I’ll be all right in a moment, Brother. Then I must go.”
I made a movement as if to go, but he pressed me back in the chair. “Would you like to rest for a while,” he said. “There is a room here that we keep for visitors. You seem very shaken up by this.”
“I’m all right,” I said.
“I think you had better tell me,” he said, and I told him.
And there was the house, and the woman, and the sheath knife in my pocket. I walked quickly at first, then slowed down, taking this and that street, up this road and down that, and all the time I was making that journey longer and longer, so that I felt I might never come to the house, and all the way there I could think of nothing but my mother walking, in the evening, and later, when it was dark, and I saw her leave the house silent, and return in the same manner. I even began wondering which road she went, how many thousand steps she had taken to get to that extraordinary house with its curious atmosphere, and I thought of the distance each person would walk to reach that desk and the woman behind it. I saw her rings flashing under the light. It was quite windy. I stood on a corner, I thought about it. I thought about it for a long time. Twice I walked up to the door, and twice I walked away again. I began thinking about the man, that strange creature who held up the ledger to the light, and read from it like a mechanical doll, as he looked steadily and penetratingly at the client. I thought of the Ragner woman who never once raised her head, but only stared and continued to stare at her ringed fingers, smoothing and rubbing and circling the gold and the stones, as though for a life-time these had been her only horizon. I even thought of that curtain, thick red, abundant, with countless folds, and I wondered what lay beyond it. And for a third time I asked myself the question as I made my way to the door. The light above it was out. When I gave it a gentle push I realized that it was locked. I came away and walked to the rear of the house.
I saw then that it was islanded in waste, its hills of rubbish rubbed against edges of pools of stagnant water. In this wilderness every kind of debris appeared to have piled up. The moonlight made strange patterns over mounds and over these patches of dead water. Nothing here, I thought, could ever have been laid down. Everything gave the impression of having been flung, tossed, so used, so utterly done with. I walked about for a while among these curious heaps, among the beginnings
and the ends of effort. A whole history fastened to a smashed bedstead, an unbelievable mystery in the very shape, and position, and look of a gigantic ship’s boiler, the arms of a print-shirt ballooned with wind, and blowing hard against the very stump of the tree upon which it had landed. A fantastic collection of used and broken crockery, smashed cups and jars. Thousands of bottles. I walked round and round these desolate and silent piles. It was like nothing I had ever seen. I thought of people arriving here in the middle of the night, dumping their efforts and their ends, their miseries and their decisions. So fascinating was this mounting, far-stretching dump, that for a moment or two I saw it peopled with the oddest of beings, a kind of life grown out of the very roots of these silent, soaring and light-filled heaps. I had almost forgotten the woman, until suddenly I turned and looked back at the house. It, too, lay under the light, seemed boastful in its ugliness, in its intensely wrapped silence, behind its barred windows, behind its locked front door.
As I drew nearer I became aware of a back entrance. When I reached it I had the impression that it had never been opened. It might have been nailed down, it felt like a block of steel. To the right of it was a low window. When I pushed, it opened. After the barred windows and the locked doors it astonished me. I climbed in. It was quite dark. I imagined it was a kitchen, for the floor was slated. Immediately I took off my shoes. There was nothing I wanted here, just the woman. Where was the woman? I groped about in black darkness. A soundless house, perhaps somewhere she was sleeping. I began to wonder about the man in the sailor’s jersey. I felt about me, touched a chair, and sat down. Who was the man? Her husband? Then they would share the same room, same bed, same blanket. Was he employed by her? Then perhaps he had gone home. All the time I kept listening. I got off the chair and slowly groped around, until at last I found another door. I opened this and found myself in a long, draughty passage. When I reached the end of it I knew where I was. Through a fanlight at the end of this passage I glimpsed the bottom of the stairs. I stood for some minutes on the bottom one, always listening, and I heard nothing save the sound of my mother’s feet as week after week or month after month she made her night journey to this isolated house. I thought of other feet wending their way, perhaps out of Gelton cracks and holes that I had never seen. I went slowly up the stairs. Half way I stopped suddenly, noticing a light under a door. Which room? Whose? I thought of the man again, and he was now twice his own size, and twice his own breadth, his arms seemed to be longer and he held high a ledger that almost touched a ceiling. Who the hell was this man? Where was he, now? I held my breath, listened outside this door. A sudden cough that sent my heart into my mouth. Not his, but a woman’s cough. Awake? Asleep? If I could see through the wood, if I could turn silently at the handle, peep in. I looked about, and there seemed to be no other doors. Where was this bloody man? I only wanted to see the woman. She was in here, here. Was she alone? What was she doing, reading, writing, sitting down, lying on her back, warm against another’s? I saw nothing then save my own trembling hand, and the moment I saw it I thrust it deeply into my pocket. I was afraid of the door-handle, of the cough, I was scared stiff about the man. Suddenly I heard another sound, not from this room, but from another, the sound of a man snoring. I forgot where I was standing, for a moment I even forgot the woman behind the door, and frantically I tried to find out the position, the exact position of this other room. In the middle of this dark corridor? At the end? Above? A little below? The snores got louder. I leaned back against the wall, I feared even to breathe, and I wondered about the floor boards. I thought of noise, I suddenly moved one foot then withdrew it again, I felt afraid even to put it down to the floor. The snoring went on, but there was silence behind this other door. I thought she must have fallen asleep. Then I remembered the unlocked window. How odd to leave it open. Perhaps they had forgotten it, and then I was hoping they had, hoping desperately as I thought of some trap, as though they’d known there might be a caller. Beyond the house I heard scuffling of cats, a dog barked. Where is this room? Where in hell is it? I crept slowly down the passage. There was no door, no other room. I looked upward. Ceiling, its whiting flecking, its corners cobwebbed. And then I realized it was a dead end. There was no way out here. A cul-de-sac. Only the wall, a yellowed wall with its damp patches. I turned and crept slowly back again. The snores must be from that room. They are there together. Man and wife. They are both asleep.
“What the hell am I doing here?” I asked myself, even as my two fingers touched the white knob of the door. I turned it, and pushed slightly. It did not even creak. The light was still on. I looked in. A big room, a table, a chest of drawers, a hanging mirror, a thick, brown carpet, a smell of perfume, of a highly scented soap. A small table alongside a gigantic bed. Spread papers on the table, a map of figures. Mrs. Ragner’s homework. I saw her huge at a desk, huger in this bed, her face to the wall, a book in her hand, the light falling downwards from a pink-shaded bulb. I heard her breathe, heavily, almost painfully, her whole body rose and fell under the blankets, of which her backside had made a hill. I saw one hand holding the book, I saw the rings and the light. There was a small safe in the wall, it was shut. On the floor just below lay a black tin cash-box, it was full of notes. I hardly realized that I had opened the door a little wider, that I was actually in the room, the door closed but not fully shut behind me. I had a horrible feeling of a sudden shout, could even hear it loud in my ears, but it was only when suddenly the hand and the book fell that I myself made the first jump, of sheer fright. She had fallen asleep and my involuntary movement had wakened her. I gave her no chance to shout. I was sitting on her bed in a moment and my hand was flat and hard upon her mouth. She struggled, she lay flat on her back. She gurgled through my fingers, “What do you want?”
“Don’t shout.”
The perfume was overpowering. She did not panic, and it quite un-nerved me.
“What do you want?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Who are you?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Do you want money?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
I removed my fingers before she bit on them, I stuffed the edge of a blanket into her mouth. She began to struggle. I lay on her. Her eyes never left me for a moment. I put my head down to hers to hear what she was trying to say through the blanket.
“Take—it.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
She rolled over on the bed, she wrenched, thrust upwards, and by sheer strength forced me clear of the bed, and I dragged her with me. I had forgotten the snores, and I had forgotten the snorer. Perhaps he wasn’t there at all, had never been there. Perhaps this woman snored, powerfully, like a man. She lay flat on the floor, I lay upon her.
“Take it. Get out.”
“It does not matter. I said that before.”
“There is nobody but her in this house,” I told myself, “Nobody,” and I suddenly pulled the blanket out of her mouth. She had closed her eyes. Now I only wanted her to open them again. They remained closed. Flat on her back she was still powerful to me. I felt her nails in my neck.
“Get out. Take it. Get out.”
“I don’t want it,” I said.
“What do you want?”
“Nothing.”
“Who are you? Why have you come here?”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and it didn’t.
I put my hands behind her shoulders, lifted and sat her in the armchair.
“I want nothing.”
“Oh God,” she said, and began struggling again. “Take anything.”
She had not even seen the knife, perhaps she had smelt it. I sat on her knee, and I covered her entire face with my spread hand.
“Take anything——”
“There is nothing I want,” I said, suddenly realizing that my panic had gone. I pressed back her head and I took out the knife.
“Anything,” and her very roots seemed to come up with the w
ord. I touched the top of her neck with the tip of the knife. I heard nothing, and I felt nothing, and I saw nothing as I pressed in the blade, and I slid to the floor as the blood spurted out. There was just one single sound as violently her elbow struck the arm of the chair. I picked up some notes from the cash-box, and I stuffed them into her mouth.
“You had better come outside,” Brother Anselm said, and I got up and went with him to the door which he opened, and we went out and round the corner to the garden. He spread a hand across my forehead. “Be sick. Be sick,” he said.
I was sick.
When the rap came to the door I sat up and shouted, “All right, I’m all right now.”
Only then was I aware that I lay stretched out on the floor of this room, and that the housekeeper was knocking on the door.
“Are you ill, Mr. Fury?”
“I’m all right.”
“This is the third time I’ve come up, and it’s almost too late for breakfast. Mr. Cullen has just called here, and he says Miss Downey is already on her way up in a taxi.”
I knew where I was, I knew how I came.
6
The morning flowed into the room, touched his closed eyelids, touched the furniture, the tossed bed.
“Yes, it’s done with. I’m glad I told him. I couldn’t have told anything else. And now I can keep my mouth shut.”
Below he heard the banging of a door. The holy woman had gone to her breakfast.
“God! The dreams I had last night.”
He stretched himself in the bed, he looked towards the window. After a while he got up and went and stood by it, the blanket drawn about his shoulders.
“The walks I went, the houses I was in. Yes, I was even in that other house, Desmond’s place. So real, I was there. She was. That afternoon when I was alone with her for the very first time, that time she smiled and let down her hair like a black wave. He came back to the house, too suddenly, perhaps he was bound to come back. How I hated him even then, but I think I always hated Desmond. He struck her. I struck him. I was about sixteen then, and even at that age I was as tall as he was. ‘I could kill you,’ he said, but I never gave it a thought, I never even looked at him. That’s how it was.”