Collected Stories (52 page)

“Denis,” I shouted, “I'm going down a bit of the way with these chaps. You can wait for me if you like.”

Then I began to run and the others ran with me. I felt rather ashamed, but at the time I really did intend not to stay long with them. Of course, once I got to the river I forgot all my good resolutions—you know the way it is with boats—and it wasn't until I was coming back up the avenue in the dusk and noticed the gas lamps lit that I realized how late it was and my heart sank. I was really soft-hearted and I felt full of pity for poor old Denis waiting there for me all the time. When I reached the cross and found he wasn't there it only made it worse, because it must have meant he'd given me up and gone home. I was very upset about it, particularly about what I was going to say to the mother.

When I reached home I found the front door open and the kitchen in darkness. I went in quietly and to my astonishment I saw Mother and Denis sitting together over the fire. I just can't describe the extraordinary impression they made on me. They looked so snug, sitting there together in the firelight, that they made me feel like an outsider. I came in conscience stricken and intending to bluff, and instead I suddenly found myself wanting to cry, I didn't know for what reason.

“Hullo,” Denis said, giving me a grin. “Where did you go?”

“Ah, just down the river with Bastable,” I said, hanging up my cap and trying to sound casual. “Where did you get to?”

“I came back,” he said still grinning.

“And indeed, Michael, you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself, leaving Denis like that,” Mother said sharply.

“But really, Mummy, I didn't,” I said weakly. “I only just went down a bit of the way with them, that's all.”

I found it difficult enough to get even that much out without blubbing. Denis Corby had turned the tables on me with a vengeance. It was I who was jealous, and it took me weeks to see why. Then I suddenly tumbled to the fact that though he was quite ready to play with Susie and me it wasn't for that he came to the house. It was Mother, not us, he was interested in. He even arranged things so that he didn't have to come with us and could stay behind with her. Even when she didn't want him in the house he was content to sit on the wall outside just to have her to himself if she came to the door or wanted someone to run a message for her. It was only then that my suspicions turned to panic. After that I was afraid of leaving him behind me because of what he might do or say when my back was turned. And of course he knew I knew what was in his mind, and dared me.

One day I had to go on a message to the cross and I asked him to come. He wouldn't; he said he wanted to stay and play with Susie, and she, flattered at what she thought were his attentions, took his part.

“Go on now, Michael Murphy!” she said in her bossy way. “You were sent on the message and you can go by yourself. Denis is stopping here with me.”

“It's not you he wants to stop with, you little fool!” I said, losing my patience with her. “It's Mummy.”

“It is not,” he said, and I saw from the way he reddened that he knew I had him caught.

“It is,” I said truculently. “You're always doing it. You'd better let her alone. She's not your mother.”

“She's my aunt,” he said sullenly.

“That's a lie,” I shouted, beside myself with rage. “She's not your aunt.”

“She told me to call her that,” he said.

“That has nothing to do with it,” I said. “She's my mummy, not yours.”

He suddenly gave me a queer look.

“How do you know?” he asked in a low voice.

For a moment I was too stunned to speak. It had never struck me before that if his Aunt Nellie could be his mother, Mummy, whom he called Aunt Kate, could be his mother as well. In fact, anyone could be a fellow's mother if only he knew. My only chance was to brazen it out.

“She couldn't be,” I said. “Your mother lives up the Buildings.”

“She's not me mudder,” he said in the same low voice.

“Oh, there's a thing to say!” I cried, though the stupefaction was put on.

“How could she be me mudder?” he went on. “She was never in England.”

The mystery was so close I felt I could solve it in a few words if only I knew which. Of course it was possible that Mother, having worked in England, could be his real mother while his own mother couldn't, and this was what had been between them both from the start. The shock of it was almost more than I could bear. I could keep my end up at all only by pretending to be scandalized.

“Oh,” I cried, “I'll tell her what you said.”

“You can if you like,” he replied sullenly.

And of course he knew I couldn't. Whatever strange hold he had over her, you simply daren't ask her a reasonable question about him.

Susie was watching the pair of us curiously. She felt there was something wrong but didn't know what. I tried to enlighten her that night in bed: how it all fitted in, his mother who couldn't be his mother because she'd never been to England, his Aunt Nellie who could but probably wasn't because he saw so little of her, and Mummy who had not only been to England but saw him every week, made a pet of him, and wouldn't let you say a word against him. Susie agreed that this was quite probable, but she was as heartless as usual about it.

“She can be his mummy if she likes,” she said with a shrug. “I don't care.”

“That's only because you're Daddy's pet,” I said.

“It is not, Michael Murphy, but it doesn't make any difference what she is so long as he only comes every Saturday.”

“You wait,” I whispered threateningly. “You'll see if his mother dies he'll come and live here. Then you'll be sorry.”

Susie couldn't see the seriousness of it because she was never Mummy's pet as I was, and didn't see how Denis Corby was gradually replacing us both in Mother's affection, or how day after day she mentioned him only to praise him or compare him with us. I got heart-scalded hearing how good he was. I couldn't be good in that sly, insinuating way, just trying to get inside other people. I tried, but it was no use, and after a while I lost heart and never seemed to be out of mischief. I didn't know what was wrong with me, but I was always breaking, losing, pinching. Mother didn't know either and only got more impatient with me.

“I don't know under God what's come over you,” she said angrily. “Every week that passes you're becoming more and more of a savage.”

As if I could be anything else, knowing what I knew! It was Denis, Denis, Denis the whole time. Denis was sick and had to be taken to a doctor and the doctor said he was worrying about something. Nothing was said about the way I was worrying, seeing him turn me into a stranger in my own house. By this time I was really desperate.

It came to a head one day when Mother asked me to go on a message. I broke down and said I didn't want to. Mother in her fury couldn't see that it was only because I'd be leaving Denis behind me.

“All right, all right,” she snapped. “I'll send Denis. I'm fed up with you.”

But this was worse. This was the end of everything, the final proof that I had been replaced.

“No, no, Mummy, I'll go, I'll go,” I said, and I took the money and went out sobbing. Denis Corby was sitting on the wall and Susie and two other little girls were playing pickie on the garden path. Susie looked at me in surprise, her left leg still lifted.

“What ails you?” she asked.

“I have to go on a message,” I said, bawling like a kid.

“Well, that's nothing to cry about.”

“I have to go by myself,” I wailed, though I knew well it was a silly complaint, a baby's complaint, and one I'd never have made in my right mind. Susie saw that too, and she was torn between the desire to go on with her game and to come with me to find out what was wrong.

“Can't Denis go with you?” she asked, tossing the hair from her eyes.

“He wouldn't come,” I sobbed.

“You never asked me,” he said in a loud, surly voice.

“Go on!” I said, blind with misery and rage. “You never come anywhere with me. You're only waiting to go in to my mother.”

“I am not,” he shouted.

“You are, Denis Corby,” Susie said suddenly in a shrill, scolding voice, and I realized that she had at last seen the truth for herself and come down on my side. “You're always doing it. You don't come here to play with us at all.”

“I do.”

“You don't, you don't,” I hissed, losing all control of myself and going up to him with my fists clenched. “You Indian witch!”

It was the most deadly insult I could think of, and it roused him. He got off the wall and faced Susie and me, his hands hanging, his face like a lantern.

“I'm not an Indian witch,” he said with smoldering anger.

“You are an Indian witch, you are an Indian witch,” I said and gave him the coward's blow, straight in the face. He didn't try to hit back though he was twice my size, a proper little sissy.

“God help us!” one of the little girls bawled. “You ought to be ashamed of yourself, hitting the little boy like that, Michael Murphy.”

“Then he ought to let our mummy alone,” Susie screeched. Now that she saw the others turn against me she was dancing with rage, a real little virago. “He's always trying to make out that she's his mummy, and she isn't.”

“I never said she was my mummy,” he said, sulky and frightened.

“You did say it,” I said, and I hit him again, in the chest this time. “You're trying to make out that I'm your brother and I'm not.”

“And I'm not your sister either,” Susie screeched defiantly, doing a war-dance about him. “I'm Michael Murphy's sister, and I'm not your sister, and if you say I am again I'll tell my daddy on you.”

“Michael, Michael Murphy! Susie! What are you doing to the little boy?” shouted a wrathful voice, and when I looked up there was an officious neighbor, clapping her hands from the gate at us. There were others out as well. We had been all shouting so loudly that we had gathered an audience. Suddenly Susie and I got two clouts that sent us flying.

“What in God's holy name is the meaning of this?” cried Mother, taking Denis by the hand. “How dare you strike that child, you dirty little corner-boy?”

Then she turned and swept in with Denis, leaving the rest of us flabbergasted.

“Now we'll all be killed,” Susie snivelled, between pain and fright. “She'll murder us. And 'twas all your fault, Michael Murphy.”

But by then I didn't care what happened. Denis Corby had won at last and even before the neighbors was treated as Mother's pet. In an excited tone Susie began telling the other girls about Denis and all his different mothers and all the troubles they had brought on us.

He was inside a long time, a very long time it seemed to me. Then he came out by himself and it was only afterwards I remembered that he did it on tiptoe. Mother looked like murder all that day. The following Saturday Denis didn't come at all and the Saturday after Mother sent Susie and me up to the Buildings for him.

By that time I didn't really mind and I bore him no grudge for what had happened. Mother had explained to us that she wasn't really his mother, and that, in fact, he hadn't any proper mother. This was what she had told him when she brought him in, and it seems it was a nasty shock to him. You could understand that, of course. If a fellow really did think someone was his mother and then found she wasn't it would be quite a shock. I was full of compassion for him really. The whole week I'd been angelic—even Mummy admitted that.

When we went in he was sitting at the fire with his mother—the one he thought at first was his mother. She made a fuss of Susie and me and said what lovely children we were. I didn't like her very much myself. I thought her too sweet to be wholesome.

“Go on back with them now, Dinny boy,” she said, pawing him on the knee. “Sure you haven't a soul to play with in this old hole.”

But he wouldn't come, and nothing we said could make him. He treated us like enemies, almost. Really I suppose he felt a bit of a fool. His mother was a wrinkled old woman; the house was only a laborer's cottage without even an upstairs room; you could see they were no class, and as I said to Susie on the way home, the fellow had a cool cheek to imagine we were his brother and sister.

Freedom

W
HEN
I was interned during the war with the British I dreamed endlessly of escape. As internment camps go, ours was pretty good. We had a theatre, games, and classes, and some of the classes were first-rate.

It was divided into two areas, North Camp and South, and the layout of the huts was sufficiently varied to give you a feeling of change when you went for a stroll around the wires. The tall wooden watch-towers, protected from the weather by canvas sheets, which commanded the barbed wire at intervals had a sort of ragged functional beauty of their own. You could do a five-mile walk there before breakfast and not feel bored.

But I ached to get away. It is almost impossible to describe how I ached. In the evenings I walked round the camp and always stopped at least once on a little hillock in the North Camp which had the best view of the flat green landscape of Kildare that stretched all round us for miles. It was brilliantly green, and the wide crowded skies had all the incredible atmospheric effects of flat country, with veil after veil of mist or rain even on the finest days, and I thought of the tinker families drifting or resting in the shadow of the hedges while summer lasted. God, I used to think, if only I could escape I'd never stop, summer or winter, but just go on and on, making my fire under a hedge and sleeping in a barn or under an upturned cart. Night and day I'd go on, maybe for years, maybe till I died. If only I could escape!