The Old Jest

by Jennifer Johnston

  ‘Of course I’m all right. It’s been … I’m grand.’

  He took hold of her arm just above the elbow. His fingers were able to stretch right round it. He pulled her very close to him.

  ‘Will you be seeing him?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Well tell him … not today, don’t go today …’

  ‘Tell him?’

  ‘That Broy says he must move on. He thinks it would be best.’

  ‘Br …’

  He squeezed her arm to prevent her from saying the name.

  ‘Ow!’

  ‘Just say that to him.’

  He let go of her and took a step towards the tram. He turned back and looked at her. She was rubbing her arm.

  ‘Did I hurt you?’

  ‘Not really.’

  ‘Nancy is a pretty name. I’ll see you again Nancy. Mind yourself.’

  ‘And you.’

  ‘I will. I’ll turn up again, remember.’

  ‘Like a bad penny.’

  ‘Yeah. What’s my name?’

  ‘Joe Mulhare.’

  ‘Say it again.’

  ‘Joe Mulhare.’

  ‘I’ll see you, Nancy.’

  He stepped up on to the platform. They stood looking at each other; she wished she had something to give him. She lifted her hand to her forehead in a salute.

  ‘Au revoir.’

  ‘Nancy,’ was all he said, and ran up the winding stairs.

  Harry was on the train. Aware of the possibility, she had been on the lookout for him as the train slowly moved into the station. Wispy fingers of steam grasped at the descending passengers’ feet as the doors banged open. She saw him sitting in the corner of a first-class carriage, his head bent slightly towards a folded copy of the Irish Times. His city hat was sitting neatly on his knee. She climbed quickly into the third-class carriage next door, relieved that she hadn’t been seen. When they arrived, she waited until he had got down from his carriage, his hat now firmly planted on his head, and had walked some way down the platform, before she got out herself. She watched him begin to climb the steep steps of the metal bridge that crossed the line. His long legs climbed quickly from step to step. Mrs Bradley from the hotel puffed behind him with a wicker basket over her arm. The engine driver let loose a great ball of steam that rose and hid the centre of the bridge. Harry disappeared into the cloud. Doors slammed. The porter walked along the platform securing the handles. The guard blew his whistle. The green flag waved; with a jerk and the usual rattling the train moved forward. Nancy ran up the steps and over the bridge. It trembled under her feet. The carriages slid away, running smoothly now. The smoke drifted back into the station and up into the evening sky. Harry was waiting for her at the door out into the road.

  ‘Nancy.’

  ‘Oh, hello there.’

  She swung the bag with the library books in it with bravado.

  ‘What on earth were you up to this afternoon?’

  The sun was sideways and warm on their faces. A cool breeze blew from the sea. She watched the train gathering speed along the track curving towards the point. The sun glittered in the windows.

  ‘I wasn’t up to anything.’

  ‘That chap you were with, who was he?’

  Nancy didn’t answer.

  ‘He looked a terrible little tyke.’

  Nancy swung the bag.

  ‘Nancy?’

  ‘Oh, I just met him in the library. He was changing books for his mother. We just happened to be going in the same direction. That sort of thing happens, you know.’

  ‘He didn’t look like someone whose mother would be getting books from the library. He didn’t look as if his mother would be able to read. Where were you going on the tram?’

  ‘I like trams,’ she said truthfully.

  ‘That’s not an answer to my question.’

  She didn’t say anything. The train had almost reached the point. Mushrooms of smoke drifted back towards them.

  ‘It’s really none of your business,’ she said at last.

  ‘I think perhaps I should have a word with Mary.’

  ‘That’s your business, I suppose. Interfering with my life. Why don’t you do something with your own life instead of bothering with mine. Chuff chuff up to town in the morning, chuff chuff down in the evening, selling blooming stocks and shares or whatever it is you do in the middle. Where does all that get you?’

  ‘It’s a damn good job. One of the better jobs. You don’t realise how lucky I was to get into the firm. I mean to say, after the war there were hundreds of chaps like me looking for work. I didn’t even have the advantage of a couple of years at the university. I went slap into the army straight from school. If my father hadn’t known Peter Jordan, I might be looking for a job yet.’

  ‘I’m sure Mr Casey would find you something good in the property development line.’

  ‘You are a little bitch, Nancy.’

  ‘Oooooh!’

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Of course you did, and you’re probably right.’

  She bent down and took off her good shoes and dropped them in the bag with the books.

  ‘I can’t bear them another second. They’re agony.’

  She pulled up her skirt and unfastened her stockings and peeled them off. His face was very angry. His eyes watched her movements to begin with and then shifted to the high green hedge on their right. She rolled the stockings together and put them in her pocket.

  ‘That’s better.’

  ‘I want a decent life. That’s all. A decent normal life. You haven’t the faintest idea what life is about.’

  ‘Aspirations and things like that.’

  ‘All you seem to want is trouble. And if there isn’t any trouble you’ll make it. When you grow up, you’ll see what I mean. You’ll realise. You’ll settle down.’

  She sighed.

  ‘Anyway we’ve got off the point. Who was the little tyke?’

  ‘I’ve told you, he isn’t a tyke …’

  She turned and walked slowly away from him down the road. The ground was warm still, and gritty under her feet.

  ‘Why don’t you take off that silly hat?’

  He followed her, banging the Irish Times crossly against his right leg as he walked.

  ‘His mother is bedridden … temporarily … you understand. He had to fetch her …’ She turned round to face him, her ingenuous blue eyes gazing straight into his face. She continued to walk, unfalteringly, backwards, ‘… books. You can’t after all languish in bed with nothing to read. They live in Monkstown, just by the tower, overlooking the sea. He left her lying looking out of the window. Don’t be too long, dear, she said, as he left the room. Come straight home. We went on the tram together. I went on to Dalkey and got the train from there. He paid my fare. Wasn’t that nice of him? Yes, he got her Hamlet…’

  ‘Hamlet?’

  ‘Oh, other things too. Emmm … Great Expectations…’

  ‘All right. All right. You’ll fall down if you go on walking backwards like that.’

  They had reached the gates. Nancy stopped.

  ‘She’d just had her appendix out.’

  ‘He didn’t look the right sort. I hope …’

  ‘Oh no, we didn’t arrange to meet again or anything like that. We just said goodbye.’ She giggled. ‘I said thanks for paying my fare. Here we are.’

  ‘Yes.’

  She moved towards him.

  ‘Is that all right, what I told you?’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  She smiled at him. She longed to touch his face with the tips of her fingers and feel his warm smooth flesh, but she didn’t dare. She smiled even harder at him. At last he smiled back.

  ‘You’ll come up and have a drink? Aunt Mary’ll be raging if you don’t.’

  ‘You are so exasperating.’

  She took his arm and they walked up the avenue in silence.

  Aunt Mary was leaning on the terrace wall
waiting for them.

  ‘You’ve been ages. I thought you must have missed the train.’

  ‘We’ve been having a lovely row,’ said Nancy.

  ‘Poor Harry! He’ll need a drink. Do take off that silly hat, Harry dear.’

  Harry pulled his arm away from Nancy and took off his hat. He looked most put out.

  ‘Apart from anything else,’ said Aunt Mary, ‘you’ll be bald by the time you’re forty. It’s such a ridiculous habit men have.’

  They climbed up the steps towards her.

  ‘After all, God gave you a very good thatch. I hope, dear child, you didn’t stroll around Dublin city in your bare feet.’

  ‘I couldn’t bear them another minute. I took them off down the road. I’ll just go and change. I’ll be down in a minute.’

  She went into the house and ran upstairs.

  ‘Mary,’ the old man’s voice was calling. ‘Mary, Mary, Mary.’

  She closed her bedroom door carefully. Drifting up from the terrace, she could hear Aunt Mary’s voice rushing along as if too much had to be said in too short a time. Harry laughed. That was good anyway. She took her notebook from the drawer and opened it at a clean page. Joe Mulhare, she wrote. Full stop. Joe Mulhare. joe mulhare. JOE MULHARE. Joe. joe, joe. Joe Mulhare.

  Nancy spent the next morning picking fruit and vegetables for Bridie. The last of the loganberries, which grew against the high grey wall of the garden and had to be stretched for. Tiny prickles scraped at her arms and juice from the berries stained her fingers purple. Then she sat on a stool in the yard outside the kitchen and podded peas into a white china bowl. Swallows preened above her on the wires and swooped and darted from time to time through the broken windows of the yard buildings. The cat was stretched in the middle of the yard, his expectant eyes watchful. She hoped he wouldn’t mind the move. Cats were funny creatures; perhaps he would keep coming back and back here, finding his way across the hills from Laragh, or perhaps he might pine away and die, lonely for his own haunts, his swallows, his mice, his enemies, with whom he fought at night. Bridie would be very upset if anything were to happen to him. She would miss his company in the kitchen, the long conversations of miaows and words that they each seemed to enjoy. Would it be possible that Aunt Mary too might pine away, her roots like the cat’s too old for transplanting? My most beautiful and tender memories will always be of this place, even this simple moment – the drone of bees, the smell through the kitchen door of baking bread, the shadows on the cobblestones, Bridie rattling her sweeping brush out of an upstairs window. I have inside me that gentleness, that calm, from which to begin to explore the real life that waits. I can never be undermined because of that. Maybe that is just hopefulness. Though nothing will ever be the same, I can draw on the strength that this way of living has given me, like Joe Mulhare can draw his strength from his image of his father.

  ‘Have you got them peas done yet?’

  Bridie bustled and creaked out through the door. The cat whisked his tail in some sort of salutation.

  ‘Nearly.’

  ‘Well get a move on with them. She wants her lunch on time. It’s her golf afternoon.’

  She bent down and picked up a handful of pods from the basket and ran her thumbnail along the spine of one of them, tumbling the peas into the bowl. ‘They’re good the peas this year. Last year they were bullets. I never understand.’

  Nancy put a pea in her mouth and bit the sweet juice out of it.

  ‘Will you mind leaving here, Bridie?’

  Plink, plink, plink, plink. The peas dropped swiftly from her short flat fingers. ‘It’s all the one to me where I am. Why should I mind?’

  ‘You might miss your friends and things like that.’

  ‘I might if it was America I was skiting off to, or over the water even. But it’s only down the road. I’m fully occupied wherever I am. It’s young ones like you that sits around with their heads in the clouds taking half an hour to shell a few peas that has to fret about things like that.’

  ‘I’m not fretting.’

  Plink, plink, plink.

  ‘I’m glad of that. You’ve all your life in front of you and God is good.’

  Plink.

  ‘Did you know my father, Bridie?’

  There was a short pause.

  ‘I did.’

  Plink, plink, plink.

  ‘And then again I didn’t.’

  The cat sat up and began to scratch its ear.

  ‘Full of charm. Airy fairy. If that’s what you were going to ask me?’

  ‘Something like that.’

  Plink, plink.

  ‘There you have it.’

  ‘It’s not much to go on really.’

  ‘Here one minute, gone the next. That was the make of him. Unreliable, I’d have said, if anyone had asked me.’

  ‘Miaou!’

  ‘He wants his dinner. He came from abroad …’

  ‘He was foreign?’ Nancy was startled.

  ‘Not at all. He was from the West somewhere, Clare, I think, but he came here from abroad. He had a lot of funny ideas and he went off abroad again. After the wedding. He never came back after that at all. I think She said he was killed somewhere. I don’t know …’ She frowned as she thought back. ‘India. Would that be right? India, I think it was.’

  Plink, plink, plink.

  ‘India.’

  ‘How amazing!’ She thought of him stretched in the moonlight beside the Taj Mahal.

  ‘He was a travelling sort of man. Not one for marrying at all.’

  ‘Why did he then, I wonder?’

  Bridie sighed. ‘He had to see her right. He was a gentleman, if nothing else. Maybe if she hadn’t died he’d have come back sometime, if God had spared him. Maybe he would and maybe he wouldn’t.’

  Nancy digested this. The cat stood up on its toes and danced around a little.

  ‘Do you mean I’m …’ She paused, wondering how to put it so that she wouldn’t upset Bridie.

  ‘I always told her you’d ask one day, and there’s no point in telling lies, and what of it anyway?’

  The bowl was full. Bridie stooped and gathered up the pods from the ground into her large white apron.

  ‘I suppose,’ said Nancy at last, ‘they loved each other.’

  ‘I suppose they did. What would they want to do that for if they didn’t? Bring the bowl into the kitchen while I get on with the lunch. You seem to think I’ve nothing to do but gab.’

  One of her hands held the apron bunched in front of her; with the other one she touched Nancy on the shoulder.

  ‘What of it anyway?’ she repeated. ‘You’re young and you’ve been well rared. We all love you.’

  Nancy nodded. Bridie’s hand was heavy on her shoulder. A whole weight of years of love and people giving and taking.

  ‘God is good.’ The words sighed out of Bridie’s mouth as if for once she might have had doubts. She moved into the darkness of the house.

  ‘Don’t go bothering Her,’ she called back, her voice confident once more, ‘about that sort of thing. She’s enough bothers on her as it is and bring in them peas.’

  He was lying on the beach when she arrived at the hut. Quite motionless, like the. cat. His eyes stared up at the floating clouds. He had taken off his shirt and neatly tucked it under the back of his neck, and she could see that a long puckered scar disfigured his thin body. It ran from just below his collar bone down the left-hand side of his chest and disappeared inside his trousers.

  ‘Hail fellow well met, All dirty and wet; Find out if you can, who’s master, who’s man.’

  He didn’t move, just spoke the words up towards the clouds.

  ‘How did you know it was me?’

  ‘I,’ he corrected gently. ‘Disrespect for the language does no service to the world.’

  ‘Who said that anyway?’

  She sat down beside him.

  ‘Said what?’

  ‘That … hail fellow … I’ve always heard it.’


  ‘The mad Dean. The chap who invented your name. I knew it was you, dear child, because no matter how hard you try to creep up on me, you haven’t yet got control of your arms and legs … in fact I may as well say here and now that I hope you never have to make your living by creeping up on people.’

  He stared at the clouds and she stared at the sea, which changed in colour from green to blue to grey with each movement of the waves.

  ‘How did you get that scar?’

  ‘These wounds I had on Crispin’s day.’

  Silence.

  She turned and looked at him. He had a faint smile on his face.

  ‘Ypres. Wipers. The young man, boy I should say, he was about your age, I was with was hit by a shell. I’ve never worked out which of us was the lucky one.’

  ‘It’s horrible!’

  He put out his hand and took hers. He ran her fingers all the way down the scar, pressing them into the soft puckered flesh. Her fingers cringed away from the feel of it, but he held them tight and wouldn’t let them go. Down under the top of his trousers to the hard jutting bone of his hip and then back again up to his shoulder. Then down again. His ribs moved gently like a calm, rippling sea. The scar itself was quite unlike the grainy flesh around it to touch; it was like a long, macabre mouth, with the pale marks of stitching criss-crossing the lips, pulling it awkwardly together. He let go of her hand.

  ‘Horrible!’ she said again.

  She looked down at her fingers, which had never touched anything like that before.

  ‘Now,’ he ordered, ‘you do it. You touch it yourself.’

  Gently she ran her fingers up to his shoulder.

  ‘You see.’

  She buried her fingers in the sand. The top layer was warm and dry, but below the surface it was cold and damp and abrasive.

  ‘I take it your journey yesterday went according to plan.’

  She nodded.

  ‘Joe…’

  ‘I make a point of never knowing people’s names.’

  ‘I liked him. We went on a tram.’

  ‘A tram is a very fine invention.’

  ‘He said to tell you that … Broy says that he thinks you ought to move on. It would be best.’

  ‘Ah!’

  He sat up and dusted the sand from his shoulders. She wondered if he were going to move on then and there.

  ‘If you go into the hut,’ he said, ‘and feel in the pocket of my coat, you’ll find the whisky. I think we should have a drink.’