The Railway Station Man

by Jennifer Johnston

  ‘No.’

  ‘I suppose he does that quite a lot? Brings down friends?’

  ‘No. I think he likes to protect his friends from me.’

  He looked away out to sea. He looked, she thought, as if he were trying to see America.

  ‘Did he say who he was bringing down?’

  ‘I asked him, but I don’t think he heard me. Why?’ She gathered together the book and her pencils, the wet sandy towel.

  ‘I just wondered. I thought maybe it was someone I knew.’

  ‘Oh hardly … I mean … well … hardly.’

  ‘Yes. Hardly. I’d better be getting back to my work.’

  ‘You’re mitching today.’

  ‘I work my own hours. He’s very reasonable like that.’

  She stood up.

  ‘I hope I didn’t bother you.’

  ‘Of course not. I hope you won’t suffer any ill effects from your swim.’

  ‘Not a bit of it. Sometimes he’s not well at all. It’s quite hard then for the both of us. He gets these moods, like. You have to understand.’

  ‘Do you think he’d like it if I asked him over for dinner one evening?’

  ‘Aye. I think he’d like it. Goodbye then.’ He took a few steps. ‘Helen.’

  ‘Goodbye, Damian. See you soon.’

  He walked away up the beach, his shoes and socks dangling from his right hand, leaving deep footmarks in the sand.

  For the next two days she lived in the shed, making short trips across the yard from time to time to make herself a cup of tea, boil an egg, feed the cat, who took quite unkindly to what he considered to be desertion. Bananas were useful, she thought. In Africa native tribes had existed for thousands of years on bananas; now, presumably, the glories of the sliced loaf and instant coffee had reached them. Monkeys too, very healthy, very energetic. A lot could be said in favour of the banana. Elephants even ate them with the peels on. She didn’t bother to sit down to eat, just moved restlessly around the kitchen, watched by the disapproving eyes of the cat. The cups had brown stains inside them, a sign of true sordidness, she thought.

  She remembered a moment with Dan. She blotted at the toast crumbs with a damp cloth as he sat watching, also, like a cat, disapproving.

  ‘The really dreadful, debilitating thing about housework, domesticity, whatever you like to call it, is that over and over again you’re doing the same bloody thing.’ He hated that word. She only used it when she really wanted to annoy him. ‘Bloody,’ she repeated. ‘You clear the table.’ She threw the cloth across the room towards the sink. The cloth landed on the floor. ‘You lay the table again. You wash the bloody saucepans and then you dirty them again. You wash them specifically to dirty them. You lay and unlay. Make beds in order to get into them and crumple them. On and on and on for ever until you die … or end up in the local bin, gaga, incontinent and unloved.’

  ‘Your problem is that you’re a slut.’

  ‘No,’ she said sharply. ‘I wish I were. If I were a slut I wouldn’t care. I’m just a boring woman with a boring sense of duty. I feel my whole life is rushing down that bloody sink with the Fairy Liquid bubbles’

  ‘I do wish you wouldn’t use that word.’

  ‘Bloody,’ she said just to show that she wasn’t intimidated by him.

  She laughed at the memory of it and went out into the yard, closing the door on the banana skins and the brown-stained cups and the crumbs on the table and the cat.

  The first painting was growing. The canvas had become a magnet drawing out of her head an implacable coherence that she had never felt before. Each stroke had its purpose, its truth. The gaunt bones of the young man became a great stalk growing up through the centre of the canvas, from its own black shadow on the sand. She painted fast, the fear always in her mind that if she faltered, looked back even for a moment over her shoulder, Orpheus-like, she would lose her vision. She spoke words to herself as she worked, meaningless jumbles of sound, and sang snatches of songs that had become embedded in her head for no reason. Over and over again the same phrase would burst out of her into the room, until sometimes she would put down her brush and give a sharp slap to the side of her face to try and dislodge the irritation.

  ‘What day is it?’ she asked aloud.

  No one answered.

  She put down her brush and stood up. She stretched her arms up above her head. Stiff. Every bone, joint, muscle, whatever they all were, seemed to be locked hopelessly together. Grey cloud pushed down on the glass roof.

  ‘Thursday,’ she answered herself.

  She bent down and, carefully lifting the canvas, she carried it across the room and propped it against the wall. She stood for a moment or two staring at it.

  ‘Thursday it is.’

  No one disagreed.

  She looked around.

  ‘Bloody pigsty.’

  She went over and opened the window. She emptied the ashtrays into a plastic bag and then threw in some tissues that were lying on the floor. Stiff back as she bent. Some dirty rags, and then some rolled-up used tubes of paint. Marginally less like a pigsty.

  She went out into the yard and put the plastic bag in the bin, then she got her bicycle out of its shed and set off for the station. It wasn’t raining, but the west wind was damp and squally. She had to struggle quite hard to keep the bike on the left-hand side of the road.

  She didn’t hear the car until it passed her coming round a corner. Roger put his hand on the horn in greeting and then stopped. She got off the bike and crossed the road.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Good morning … perhaps it’s afternoon, I’m not sure. I was just going to call on you.’

  ‘Snap,’ he said.

  He looked tired. The scars on his face were bunched together and shiny … somewhat grotesque. She felt suddenly guilty at thinking such a thing. She put her hand through the window of the car and touched his shoulder briefly.

  ‘Go on ahead,’ she said. ‘I’ll follow you back. I’ve finished a picture and I’d like to show it to you … well … to someone. I just suddenly thought I’d like to show it to someone. You seemed to be …’

  He nodded. The car gave a slight shudder and then moved slowly down the road. She turned the bike round and pedalled after him.

  She brought him in through the little glass porch. Several of the geraniums still flowered bravely and the air was sweet. They walked across the hall and out into the yard.

  ‘I’ve just been down looking for Damian,’ he said. ‘There was no sign of him this morning so I thought I’d go down and find out what was up. I thought he might be ill. He is usually so meticulous about everything he does.’

  ‘I hope nothing’s the matter with him.’

  ‘No. His mother says he’s gone away for a few days. Just took off last night. Odd he didn’t say.’

  ‘Yes. Odd.’

  She opened the door of the shed as the first raindrops pattered around them.

  ‘Rain,’ she said.

  She crossed the room and closed the window.

  ‘I also wanted to see you,’ he said.

  The rain thickened suddenly, almost startlingly, rattling off the roof, splashing down into the yard. Everything in sight changed its colour.

  ‘Gosh, we were only in in time.’

  ‘For several days, I’ve wanted to come and see you. I don’t quite know why I didn’t come. Some kind of reticence prevented me.’

  ‘This place is a pigsty. I’m sorry. Dan always said that I was a slut. He must have been right. I argued with him at the time, but …’

  ‘Are you going to show me this picture, or have you changed your mind?’

  ‘Shut your eyes.’ Oh God, she groaned. ‘Eye. Shut … listen to that awful rain.’ She looked at him. He stood by the door, his eye obediently shut. She walked over to the painting and lifted it up carefully.

  ‘I wanted to see you,’ he repeated.

  ‘That’s nice.’

  She carried it across the room and p
ut it standing up on the only chair. ‘You can look now.’

  She heard the telephone ringing from across the yard. She considered the possibility of leaving it to ring itself out, but decided against it. She pulled open the door and dashed across the yard. Curiosity killed the cat, Dan would have said coolly. The telephone had held no magic for him at all.

  ‘Hello.’ Puffed.

  Crackle.

  ‘Mother.’

  Crackle.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello.’

  Crackle.

  Miracles of modern science how are ya.

  ‘Mother, can you hear me?’

  ‘Yes. Just,’ she yelled.

  There was a long crackling silence.

  ‘Jack. Hello. Are you still there?’

  She caught the sound of his voice again. A voice drowning in crackles. As it went down for the third time she heard the words, ‘tomorrow evening.’

  ‘Tomorrow evening?’ she shouted back. ‘Is that what you said? You’re coming tomorrow evening?’

  There was total silence.

  ‘Hey. Yoohoo. Anyone there?’

  It sounded as if someone sighed.

  ‘Bugger the Minister for Posts and Telegraphs,’ she said into the mouthpiece and hung up.

  An old respectable umbrella of Dan’s stood in a corner of the hall, ready for emergencies. His name was written on a thin gold band around the handle, in neat looping letters. He had always kept it immaculately rolled.

  ‘Hopeless, hopeless,’ she muttered to herself as she picked it up.

  Roger was standing looking at the painting.

  ‘Hopeless,’ she repeated to his back. ‘Do you know that the people are leaving this country in thousands because they can’t communicate with each other. Thousands. What the hell is the point of paying to have one of those odious little black gadgets in your house, if it doesn’t work?’

  ‘I think it’s a very remarkable painting,’ Roger said.

  She crossed the room and picked up several brushes that were lying on the floor.

  She poured some turpentine into a cup and began to clean them.

  ‘Why do you live alone?’

  She rubbed at the handle of one of the brushes with a cloth.

  ‘I’m not unhappy.’

  Blue paint stained two of her fingers.

  ‘That wasn’t what I asked.’

  ‘I like to be alone. It’s funny how long it takes you to learn these things about yourself?

  She put the brush into an enamel jug where several others were standing and picked up another.

  ‘I didn’t discover that truth about myself until after Dan was killed. Up until that moment I saw nothing but my own inadequacies.’

  She twirled the brush for a moment in the turpentine.

  ‘I’m not lonely you know,’ she said quite firmly, ‘just alone. I like to live on the edge of things.’ She sighed. ‘Dan … he was very sane and well balanced. I suppose that was why I married him, I saw the lack of balance in myself. He …’ she hesitated.

  ‘Go on.’

  She put the next brush in the jug with the others and turned round to look at him. He was still staring at the painting.

  ‘He would have considered me to be irresponsible. He believed in structures and hierarchies, responsible involvement.’

  She patted the pockets of her overall for a moment, feeling to see if her cigarettes were there. Having found that they were, she didn’t need one any longer.

  ‘Sanity. He believed in sanity.’

  ‘I’ll buy it,’ he said.

  ‘Buy what?’

  ‘The picture.’

  She burst out laughing.

  ‘Don’t be a damn fool.’

  ‘I’m not. I want to buy it.’

  ‘Well, I don’t want to sell it. I intend to do a series … sequence … call it what you like. I see four in my mind. Then I’ll take them up to Dublin. If I finish them I’ll feel I really have something to show people. I’ll be ready then. So …’

  ‘So?’

  ‘No more talk of buying. I don’t want …’

  He smiled slightly as he waited for her to finish the sentence.

  ‘… don’t get me wrong … kindness, charitable offerings. I don’t mean to be rude.’

  He nodded. He plucked at his eye-patch and she thought that he was going to pull it off. She didn’t want to see an empty socket, or perhaps the eye was still there, threaded with red veins like the blind man who used to tap his way down the street where she had lived as a child. She wouldn’t want to see that either.

  ‘Of course you’re right. Absolutely right. Look here, I feel like a drink. How about coming down to the village with me and we’ll have a drink?’

  ‘We could have one here.’

  ‘No, no, no. Let’s get out of here. Mr Kelly’s insalubrious bar … or the hotel? Take your pick. A celebration. Both are equally dismal. We could go further afield if you preferred.’

  ‘The hotel.’

  ‘Right. The hotel it is. Come along then.’

  ‘I’m not really fit to be seen.’ She laughed nervously. ‘I don’t think I’ve even combed my hair today.’

  ‘You’ll do.’ He turned abruptly and walked towards the door. ‘It’s not the Ritz. Not even the Shelbourne Hotel, Dublin.’

  He opened the door. It was still pouring.

  ‘Hold on,’ she said. ‘I have the umbrella.’ He was striding across the yard, impatient to be off on this jaunt.

  ‘I must wash the paint off my hands.’

  ‘Don’t fuss. You’ll do the way you are. Women always fuss so. Prink, pat, fiddle.’

  ‘I am not going to prink, pat nor fiddle. I’m going to wash the paint off my hands. If that upsets you in any way, you can go to hell.’

  She marched past him into the kitchen and turned on both taps with ferocity. He didn’t follow her. He walked on down the narrow hall and when she came out of the kitchen he was standing in the porch among the geraniums.

  ‘Did you have this built?’ he asked.

  She nodded.

  ‘I’ve always had a vision of myself as an old lady sitting wrapped in shawls watching the sun set, in a porch filled with geraniums. The building of the porch was phase one.’

  ‘Knitting?’ he asked.

  ‘Heavens no. Not doing anything useful at all. I don’t see that my personality will change with old age. Staring into space.’

  ‘A rocking chair?’ he suggested.

  ‘Perhaps.’

  They scuttled out to the car through the rain.

  ‘You don’t like women much, do you?’ she asked as she settled herself into her seat.

  ‘I have observed their manipulations from a healthy distance. They tell lies.’

  ‘Everyone tells lies when it suits them. Dan, who was the soul of honesty, did. Mind you, he pretended he didn’t, but he did. And you do too.’

  ‘I don’t tell lies.’

  He slammed the car door and began to fiddle around with the keys.

  ‘Of course you do. What’s all this railway nonsense then? Trains? There hasn’t been a train here since 1947 or some time like that. Over thirty years. There are no lines. No hope of trains. No more trains. Never.’ He didn’t say a word. He turned the car very carefully round and they drove in silence down the hill. She took her cigarettes from her pocket and put one in her mouth. He leaned slightly forward as he drove, peering with care through the triangle cleared by the windscreen wiper. She lit the cigarette and took a deep pull.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ she said, as they reached the first house in the long street. ‘I shouldn’t have said any of that. I feel dishevelled, mentally as well as physically. I hope you’ll forgive me.’

  ‘There isn’t anything to forgive. You have your right like everyone else to your point of view. I see my station working. Trains running through it. Goods. Not many passengers I admit. Most people have cars these days. Moving extensions of their homes; the same sweet papers on t
he floor, the same music, your old coat on the back seat, your own smell. Trains are different. Trains will run through my station again … That’s not a lie, Helen.’

  He stopped the car outside the hotel. Macnamara’s Hotel was written in black letters over the pillared door. Licensed Bar in smaller letters. Prop. Geo. Hasson, very small indeed. She got out of the car and followed him into the dark hall. The bar was empty. The eight plastic stools waited hopefully, the fire smouldered.

  Beer and smoke and a smell of fried fish.

  ‘Stool or table?’ he asked her.

  ‘Over by the fire, I think.’

  He rang the bell on the counter and a voice called something from another room.

  ‘I met your son here one evening … Jack?’

  ‘Yes. He mentioned that.’

  ‘He seemed a nice boy.’

  ‘I don’t think I know him very well.’

  Mr Hasson came in, in his shirt sleeves. ‘Well, well,’ he said. ‘Sir and madam. How’s Mrs Cuffe? Well I hope.’

  ‘Fine thank you Mr Hasson.’

  ‘Weather changeable, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘That’s autumn for you. Unreliable.’

  And you, sir. All well? I hear the station’s coming along nicely. What can I get you?’

  ‘Helen? What would you like?’

  ‘The young fella away back to college, is he? We don’t get to see very much of him these days. Of course you can’t expect young people to stick themselves away in a place like this. Back of beyond.’

  ‘I think a glass of wine would be nice. If it’s possible.’

  ‘Now I wouldn’t hold that view myself mind you. No better place to my way of thinking. Born and reared here … Mr-ah-sir and my mother and father before me. Out of the soil you might say and back into it again one day. The young people don’t feel like that at all.’

  ‘Have you any wine, Mr Hasson? I think we’d like a bottle if you have one.’

  ‘Away to Dublin they go the minute their ears are dry. I have a son in Saudia Araby. Making a pile. A pile. He’ll be able to buy me and sell me when he comes back. Mrs Hasson doesn’t take it well at all. Isn’t she terrified he’ll marry a black girl and come back and make a show of us all? Red or white?’

  Roger looked at Helen.

  ‘Red.’

  ‘God made us all, I said to her, but she’s a hard woman to convince. I had a word with that new young Father Mulcahy about it. Her nerves were getting real bad over the whole thing. Shocking. Wine. I have a few bottles. I always like to keep a few bottles in the place. You never know the moment when someone won’t pop in for a meal and ask for a bottle of wine. I have red all right …’