An End and a Beginning

by James Hanley

  “I can hear him laugh. ‘How odd,’ he said, ‘whenever I use the word “others” your eyes widen. Perhaps it mystifies you. But it’s a real word, and they’re real too.’”

  She can see the room, the chair, the man. “Never did I feel so far away from my own home and my own life as I did that evening. And it was still too strange to understand, this new country, this other way of life. I even wrote to Mother about it. Poor Mother. She never even replied to my letter. How odd that Mother should come into my mind, I don’t think she even wanted to understand me, or why I ran away. Sometimes I was really sorry for Father. It wasn’t always his fault. She could never forget her accident, never forget what she called her affliction. In the end it became our affliction, too. We were never allowed to forget it. I was sorry for Mother, we all were, she had always been so active, so full of life. But the accident changed her altogether. She almost ceased to be upright. She whimpered, she was afraid, suspicious, unfair, begrudging, in the end it got Father down. No wonder he threw himself into Winifred’s arms, she was a most handsome girl then, not to mention the others. It was her fault, not his. I was glad to see the back of it. Too much of everything, and everything coming too easy. In Gelton it was the other way round. I wanted nothing myself except to be free, to live my own life. And I did. And here I am back again. What a long journey, what a waste—but was it, was it?

  “No, it wasn’t really, and I don’t regret it, and I’m glad I was never afraid of it. It was a great experience. I saw for the first time how other people lived. It opened my eyes. I hadn’t really run away from my parents, I never actually hated them, only the things that surrounded them, the sacred things. I saw them ever so clear in that tiny house in Price St. It was the way they just accepted them, without question, as if they were some special ordination of God Almighty. I disliked that most of all. The air was purer in the house that was small, and in the street that was narrow, and very long, the endless tunnel to the sea, and the sky always so begrudging. I hardly ever saw anybody look upwards, and afterwards I even forgot myself. All the roads were one road, I knew it, all the time they knew it. ‘This’ they seemed to say, ‘is our road. The only one.’

  “Criminal. I knew it was, from the very beginning. I knew it from the first sound of my own steps on a stone stair, and my first look out of a tiny window. That window. All those windows. I can see them now, the bars across them. To keep everybody in, Desmond said, ‘everybody’. ‘To keep everybody safe,’ he said, ‘shut in, secure, anchored down. Stay where you are. Breathe where you stand. Don’t move. That’s how it is.’ That’s how it was, and I saw with his eyes, and after a time I had almost forgotten my home across the sea.

  “‘Are you happy?’ he said. ‘Are you sorry?’ he asked. ‘You don’t regret?’ And I didn’t. I was learning to grow up, I grew up. He was good to me then.”

  If she opens her eyes this room will be no less dark, no less silent. There is only the man beside her, only his regular breathing, heavy, rhythmic as the throb of an engine. “I wonder what he’ll do? Go back to Gelton. I can’t think of anything else. Yes, he’ll go back. Poor Peter, I’m sorry about his messed-up life.”

  But she was back there before him, picking up the threads again, a pattern of days, she is lost in the noise, the tumult, the tight, tense, exacting life of Price St. She can feel the city, the man, she can remember the days, the hours, the uncertainties, the gropings. She was a wife again; she was up at five in the morning, he was; she was getting his breakfast, she was listening to the banging of doors, the strident, compelling ringing of clocks, the feet hurrying again into the new day, the feet past the window, the hurrying men, and the noise heard like the breaking of waves. She was preparing the food for his day; she was hoping for the best, expecting the worst. She sees each day as a hazard. She is cleaning down the house, and she is sitting quietly by the fire on all the evenings of her life, waiting for her husband to return home.

  “I learned to be anxious, I learned to be really afraid, and I was sharing it with others. Mother continued to write to me and she had another name for it. The pilgrimage downwards. How little she knew. How little it matters. Yes, it was real, and the words were real. Bread, time, luck, cunning, the feet, the shouts. The days were real. How I used to hate those evenings, watching the clock, dreading the knock that was not his own. Once he was almost killed, but he never told me. I only heard the story later. How I admired him then, how I loved him.”

  And the presence is still in the room, the man, and the arms out, and still leaning, and still saying into her waiting ear, “Why have you done this to me?”

  Nothing lasts. “Sometimes I would think about Ireland, my home, my parents, my brother, our friends. They seemed miles away. Once he asked me about them. I told him. I told him a day in my life. It amused him.

  “I never knew there were other people, because I simply did not think about them, and I never knew there could be, I never knew there could be less than nothing because in my days there was everything. There was never too much of anything. I simply lazed away my days. Nobody ever told me the size of the world, that there might be something else. My father simply told me that I would marry, and certainly enough young men came to the house to look me over, like a prize exhibit. Everything was planned, from the beginning to the end. I woke about nine in the morning, and there was a girl standing by my bed with the tea in her hand. And I’d have my tea, and then I’d fall asleep again, or just lie there dreaming, and at ten o’clock there was another girl, and she brought me my breakfast. I’d look out through the window, begin to scan my day, the ordered one. It was like a rule, it was a law. I used to wonder what I could do with my day, what tiny part of it I could steal for myself, for I liked being alone, I always did, and there were simple things that pleased me most, the things I remember, that made me different, made me happy in my own tin-pot way. The first snowdrop, and the first summer rose, the first celandine, the long hacking back from a hunt. In the season I went out with them three days a week. I never asked myself whether or not I wanted it, liked it, I just went, it was the thing to do. I did what they did. I often went into Dublin, there were lots of parties, lots of laughing and dancing, lots of eating and drinking. We never once thought of others. They didn’t exist. Our frontier was always green, verdant green, the circle was green, the world was. Gelton was where the boats sailed, where the cattle were landed, it was nothing else to me. Nobody ever asked questions, nobody read, nobody listened. I was one with them. The only lesson I ever learned in my life was from our housekeeper, Miss Fetch, and that was when she told me the first lesson she had learned.

  “Desmond said nothing, not a word, I can see him now, sitting exhausted in that chair after the heavy day. He just smiled. But in bed that night he said, ‘And they’re the kind of people who run Ireland,’ and I had to say yes, because that was one of the things I knew, and one of the things I had been taught from the beginning.

  “‘Bugger Ireland,’ he said and he laughed when I said, ‘Bugger it,’ I can hear him laughing, it was the first time in my life that I had ever sworn. And we then forgot it, we remembered each other, and I dreamed of the child.”

  She buried her face in the pillow, she cried softly, but the man beside is too exhausted to hear, too far away, too deep down. And she felt the ache of the child, and the want, and the loss.

  “We could have been happy, if he’d only tried,” she thought. “But he was so busy shouting about the rights of others that he hadn’t the time to think about mine. Gelton wouldn’t wait, the world wouldn’t, and always I was learning, more and more, and I never once lost my admiration for him. Working all day, and then in the evenings, out, always ringing a bell, calling a meeting, always planning, always organizing. I used to stand with him on street corners, on waste grounds, on dock roads, in cold, dismal institutes, always listening, watching, always learning. ‘There weren’t many there this evening,’ I’d say.

  “‘There never are.’


  “‘Why?’ How shut in I am, how locked up, how ignorant I really was. ‘Too bloody tired to want to bother,’ he said. How tired he could look, how sad and disappointed. I was always sorry for him, such patience, such utter determination. From him I learn the lesson of a single life, a single day. I learn about this city, I can look into my own emptiness, I can think of the others, share his hatred, but I do not see them, they seem to exist on some other planet. It is always new, always strange, always menacing, days are broken by facts, lifted up by dreams. He makes certain that I will never forget the others.

  “Their faces are made of brass, and they smile only at each other. This city is divided, unequally, into two parts. There is this northern end in which we live, and there is the southern end. To reach the south you may do so only by riding on somebody else’s back. And the moment you get your bearings for that point, the race begins. They race, too, they think life is nothing else but a race, and a bloody mad one it is. If they don’t keep running fast enough they’ll lose something. If you saw one of them you’d know, you’d see him losing something, feel him losing it, and they dread losing things. It’s catastrophic to lose anything, a minute, a halfpenny, a bus, a train, a ship, a penny stamp, a crumb, a chance, an inch.

  “How extraordinary. All that time that I was going about with him, collecting his wretches, his slaves, as he called them, standing on those corners, in those holes, at the end of those platforms, and listening to him preach, and appeal, and exhort, I hardly realized where it was leading to. In the end he got what he wanted. Perhaps he was always ambitious, perhaps always tired of his strait-jacket. My God! When I think of it, when I look back and remember. Evening after evening of it, standing looking at these miserable gatherings of people, the others that were always pressing on his brain, nothing but that, and work, and meals, and cleaning up, and washing down, and listening to him talking about economics, and misery, about being flung up, about being pushed down, and all the time he had a long-term plan for his own ends, his own life. In the end I began to hate it all. The sham, the hypocrisy of it. If only he’d talked about something else, just once, anything else, a tree, a child, the sky, the sun, the moon, anything except the grinding out, monotonous tune about rights. If only he’d done something else. The things he didn’t want to do. The simplest request I ever made was linked up and pinned down with those others. The things I begged for. Even a walk in the park, and there was a park of sorts, and it did have grass, and even a few trees. But what on earth was a park for except to get from one end of Gelton to the other, and what on earth was a tree except something under which you stood when the crowd had gathered, and out it came again, the same old tune, the chewed newspapers, and the vomited-up text-books. Bending under the weight of his mission, blind under the crusader’s light, carried away by words, listening only to himself. A fanatic, the iron will hammering at the wooden heads. Watching him always made me think of his mother, the seated, silent, resentful woman, locked in with her grudge, her silly dream. I remember the very first time I talked about her. I hadn’t then seen her, didn’t know her. I thought she might be a good woman, and even a bad one. But I wanted to meet her, I resolved to meet her. He was her son, I was his wife, why shouldn’t I?

  “‘What is wrong with your mother, Desmond?’ ‘Wrong?’ and at once he was on his toes. ‘Nothing so far as I know. But I told you we didn’t get on, that we never see eye to eye, none of us do, except her darling, and he’s too young to know anything yet. You don’t suppose she wants to see me after marrying you.’

  “‘Why not?’ ‘Because you’re not a Catholic,’ he said.

  “‘How very silly,’ I said. It was, and I still think it was.

  “But I did bother. Yes, I went round to see her that very next afternoon. The street had a different name, but the houses were still on the Lilliputian scale. I remember I was stood there for nearly five minutes before my knock was answered. But the door did open, and there was a tall, lean, rather handsome-looking woman standing in the doorway. I was impressed at once, even in the way she stood there, and the way she looked at me. It was a look of implicit trust in an absolute stranger, and that’s what I really was, until I gave her my name. Her whole expression altered at once. I was terribly embarrassed. I didn’t know whether to say good afternoon and depart, or whether to continue standing there, awaiting her move, her indulgence. But she did ask me in, and she closed the door behind me and gave me a chair. I was struck by the cleanliness of the place, by a certain brightness in it, by the arrangements of objects, the pattern of curtains. She was quite alone. She even showed me round the house. Perhaps I was lucky, perhaps I caught her in her lonely hour. She made us tea. I sat and talked with her. An intelligent woman, I had her life story in a few hundred words. No anger here, no complaints, and seemingly not a single regret, that she should be in Gelton, that she should even be in England.

  “The little bit of Irish history came out, it didn’t surprise me. She talked about her home, her first, her only home. It seemed strange for such a person to be sitting so quiet and alone in a tiny house that shamed only its builder. One thought of a poor view of humanity, from the very beginning, and people no bigger than hedgehogs. She talked to me about her family, about a married daughter, any number of sons. And how forthright, how honest, honesty with the knife in it. She never once took her eyes off me, as bright as any of her children’s eyes, as deep as Peter’s, as hard as Desmond’s. No, she said. She didn’t blame me for anything at all. After all, it wasn’t my fault. Besides, she didn’t expect me to know much, a young girl fresh over from Ireland. A sad look came to her then, as though she was suddenly young in the moment, herself lost in the green land and the soft airs.

  “But Desmond ought to have known very well how I would be up against things, new things, mysterious things. The disgrace of the whole affair. Fancy him marrying me, and his own youngest brother actually studying for the priesthood. A stop gap, a knot, a twist in the vision. Catholic and Protestant could never meet in the same room. Talking of my husband she became livid. She saw no good in him at all. Did I think there was no bad in him? And she answered her own question by the silence that followed it. I can see her eyes, I can hear her talk.

  “‘It’s not right, my dear. But I’m glad you came. I’ve always disliked my eldest son, so disloyal to his family, to his faith. Even to his country. His grandfather’s whole family died on the road in the famine. It’s a strange thing to me, but he’s totally unlike the rest of the children. A hard man, you’ll find that out, my dear. But a fine broth of a boy he calls himself no doubt, a little trade-union official that very soon will have to have bigger boots, my dear. But he’s not genuine. I know. People are talking about him at this very moment. I hear things occasionally. I even know how it all began, where the bug came from, you might say. He’s a head full of conceit. He has a sister and he has brothers, but I’ve yet to hear him say a good word for them, I don’t count in myself. But he has a great regard for his father, a great regard.’

  “She leaned close to me then, and gave me the most curious smile, and said, ‘Desmond rations out his humanity, my girl, as you’ll find out soon enough. I hope he does better by you, I may even hope that he loves you.’ ‘Tell me about yourself, Mother,’ I said, and she seemed pleased to be asked.

  “After a while I had the real feeling of the dream she lived, the dream that never left her. She sat on in this house, and on and on, waiting for the blow of a ship, waiting for her husband to come home from sea. She talked about him with pride, but sometimes the grudge came out. I felt I ought to go, and yet something held me back, held me down. I just went on listening. Perhaps she was pleased to have a listener. It was all very simple. She had married at sixteen, she had come to a new country. ‘My husband’s a harum-scarum sort of man, and he still is, age doesn’t knock sense into everybody, but he has a heart to him, and that counts, it always does, my dear. My own parents never forgave me for marrying him, never. We’ve been married we
ll over thirty years, and in that time I’ve seen him perhaps a score of times, but no more than that. God! How I hate the sea, how I always hated it. It never did a sailor any good. I’ve been here a while now, and I’m still waiting to get out of it. I don’t want to end my days in this hole. My parents were right, one can be too young, yes, too young. No matter. I just sit on here, and I think of the fine day coming. It keeps me alive just thinking about it. One always knows where one belongs. I don’t like Gelton, never did, never shall. I hope things will be better for you.’

  “When she gripped my hand I was glad, to respond, to break something down, to feel a way in, to get a touch of the warmth of belonging. ‘Desmond’s a hard man, and a selfish one, and he’ll do anything to get his own ends. I’m finished with him. He’s no part of us, and he never was. I shall always feel disgraced that he turned his back on his faith.’

  “‘I’m only sorry you feel so bitterly about it,’ I said.