Collected Stories (64 page)

Joan confided in Chris her troubles with her sisters, and Chris, after a certain amount of hesitation, admitted that he, too, had serious difficulties with his older brothers, Bob and Jim, neither of whom seemed to have any sense of responsibility. Between family confidences and a love of music, he and Joan seemed made for one another, the only obstacle being that each had so many responsibilities that there did not seem to be the slightest prospect of their ever being able to get married; but even this common element of frustration formed something of a bond, and in their conscientious way, going to concerts and walking up the Lee Fields in the evening, they were profoundly happy in one another's company.

But Joan's troubles with her sisters were very far from being ended. By the time May was seventeen, she was a handful, and a much bigger handful than Kitty. Kitty had a temper and wept on the least provocation, but May was a girl of extraordinary sweetness, with a disposition as clear as her complexion. You could hear Kitty getting into a scrape a mile off, but May merely glided into it like a duck into water. It was her natural element. She was cool, resourceful, and insinuating, and frequently turned the tables on Joan, who was none of these things. For instance, she could appeal to Joan's sense of humor, which was fatal to her dignity. Or she could get her to talk about her own troubles and then advise her as though she and not Joan were the elder. May could be involved in a police-court case and, in some way Joan couldn't understand, it would all be turned into a warning against Chris Dwyer. May had never got over her early hero-worship of Dick Gordon, and everything about Chris annoyed her: his dark suits and white shirts, his clumsy attempts to please her, and the intensity with which he bowed his head and clasped his long, thin hands while listening to a Beethoven quartet. May didn't know much about music, but she felt that it was never worth all that strain.

“Ah, listen, Joan,” she would say peremptorily, “take that fellow by the scruff of the neck and drag him up to the priest yourself. You'll never get married at all if you leave it to him.”

“But we haven't a chance of getting married anyhow, girl,” Joan would say with resignation. “Between his mother and Daddy, it looks as if we have another twenty years to wait.”

“But even if Chris buried his mother tomorrow, he'd find an old aunt that had to be looked after,” May would say with exasperation. “I'm warning you, Joan—that fellow is a born grandmother. He's not your sort at all.”

May was like quicksilver: you had her cornered, and then, before you knew what was happening, she had you cornered. She slipped in and out of the Ten Commandments as if they were ten harmless old aunts, not in the least trying to discredit them—on the contrary, she thought them delightful, in the manner of characters in a Jane Austen novel, and deeply resented anyone's speaking disrespectfully of them—but she never gave them more than the affection and respect due to ancient monuments.

May's principal achievement—no small one for a girl living at home in a small city like Cork—was to become involved with a married man. Timmy MacGovern was a fat, greasy man with a long lock of black hair that fell over his left eye, small merry eyes, a jovial air, and small, unsteady feminine feet that positively refused to support his weight. He rarely went anywhere except by car, and even when he dislodged himself from the car he usually tried out the feet first to see if they were still functioning.

He was the commercial representative of several big firms, and in line for the Dublin management of one, which must have been largely due to his charm, for he was very rarely in his office on the Grand Parade, and when he was, he either sat at his desk as though he were sitting for his portrait, or thudded to and from the window, riffling his hair and interrupting his adoring secretary, till somebody came to bring him out for a drink. Usually this was Tony Dowse, who had some undefined job in the County Council that left him free to go and come as he pleased. He was as big a man as Timmy, with a pasty face and an anxious air, and always adopted a protective attitude to Timmy. He was very fond of Timmy, but regarded him as the last word in fantasy and excitability. While Timmy riffled his hair and knit his black brows in a thunderous frown, Tony flapped his fat hands feebly. “You take things to the fair, MacGovern,” he would moan, curling his long, mournful upper lip in distaste. “If 'tisn't women, 'tis ghosts.” (Timmy was a strong believer in ghosts and had seen a number of them in his time, but Dowse blamed it all on his excitability and unreasonableness. Dowse had never seen a ghost, and except for one distressing little episode with a girl at the age of sixteen he had never had anything to do with women.) Timmy was a born boon companion, had a small army of admirers, and brought light and laughter to any pub he chose to patronize. Among his other accomplishments, he was an out-and-out Voltairean, a part that was possible for him, as Tony Dowse remarked, only because nobody believed him. “If that was me or you,” Tony would say, shaking his head over the injustice of it, “we'd be for the long drop. They think Timmy is only cod-acting.”

This was an injustice to Timmy, who had genuine aspirations after a fuller life; aspirations you wouldn't understand until you met his wife, one of the Geraghty girls from Glenareena. “The Grip of the Geraghtys” was a proverbial saying in that part of the country. Eily MacGovern was a small, thrifty, pious, unimaginative woman whom Timmy was supposed to have married for her money—another example of the way people are misjudged, because he really married her for her voice. But the voice was all the romance there was in Eily. The soul of order, she had given Timmy a small house in the suburbs, with small rooms that were a clutter of small useless tables which Timmy was always falling over, and a son and daughter as neatly matched as the two china dogs on her parlor mantelpiece. Timmy was a conscientious husband and father, but he would often look at his family in their surroundings and shake his head as if he wondered who had been putting spells on him. Eily had nursed him through a dozen different ailments, all mortal. Timmy, an imaginative man, never got any disease that wasn't mortal, and when he had a gastric attack, he took to his bed in a state of icy terror, while Eily, who never ceased to marvel at the ways of imaginative men, said with a stunned air to Tony Dowse: “And they call
us
the weaker sex!”

May, who loved imaginative men, was delighted with Timmy's big frame and robust humor, his songs and stories and bawdy jokes. Then—just like the second figure on the weather-clock that pops out on the approach of rain—out came the second Timmy, a bewildered man with aspirations after a fuller life, and complained of Eily and denounced the pettiness of Cork, and begged May to leave everything and come away with him; even if they had nothing, and no home but the lonesome roads of Ireland.

It was just like Timmy, who couldn't walk half a mile with his poor feet, to talk about the roads, but May thought the way he described them was something beautiful, with castles and fairs and tinkers and asses, just as though he had served his time to them, and at once she saw herself swinging a shawl and dragging a barefoot child behind her while they tramped the boglands in the warm days of June. There was no humbug about May's ambitions. She had a genuine streak of the vagrant in her, and a real liking for the extremes that give a sharp edge to sensation—hunger and thirst and cold and weariness. It had always seemed to her that people attached too much importance to security, and that the happiest souls in the world were the tinkers who built their campfires by the road and stretched old bags across the shafts of their carts by way of tents.

But when Joan heard that Timmy and May had been practicing the simple life in the mountain country outside Macroom, sitting in pubs and talking to tinkers, she thought May must have taken leave of her senses. She searched May's room till she found Timmy's letters, and read them in a state of utter incredulity. She knew from of old that all love-letters were silly, but these were mad. They would go on for a paragraph in a jerky style like a broken-down Ford, and then suddenly soar into passages of inspired rhetoric in which Timmy declared that when he was with May the real world didn't exist any longer for him, and there was nobody and nothing only the two of themselves. They were so queer that she hardly knew what to say to May about them.

“Tell me, May,” she asked that evening, “what's going on between Timmy MacGovern and you?”

“How do you mean, going on?” May asked with mock ingenuousness.

“Ah, stop playing the innocent with me,” Joan said impatiently. “You know quite well what I mean.”

“Nothing's been going on to get in a bake like that about,” May said reproachfully.

“I read his letters to you.”

“Well, you know all about it, so.”

“You should be proud of them,” Joan said bitterly.

“They suit me all right.”

“They'd probably suit Mrs. MacGovern too. Listen, May, what are you going to do about this thing?”

“We didn't decide that yet,” May said with a slight touch of guilt as though she didn't quite know how she had come to let such opportunities slip. “I dare say eventually I'll go and live with him.”

“You'll what, May?” Joan asked in a dangerous tone.

“Ah, not here, of course,” May added impatiently. “I mean when he gets his transfer to Dublin. He might even have to get a job in London. People in this country are so blooming narrow-minded. They get in a rut by the time they're eighteen, any of them that weren't in one to begin with.”

At any moment now Joan felt May would tell her that Ireland didn't exist any longer either, nothing only Timmy and herself.

“Are you in your right mind, May Twomey?” she asked.

“Now, Joan, it's no use your talking that schoolgirl stuff to me,” snapped May. “It's not because Chris Dwyer was born in a rut.”

“What has Chris Dwyer to do with it?”

“Chris Dwyer has you driven out of your mind,” said May hotly. “You're becoming as big an old maid as he is. You ought to be old enough to talk sensibly about things like this. Timmy made a mistake in his marriage, that's all. Lots of men do. He has either to put up with Eily Geraghty for the rest of his life or make a fresh start.”

“Well, he's making a still bigger mistake if he thinks he's going to make a fresh start on you,” said Joan.

“We'll see about that,” said May with a shrug. She was apparently beginning to think that Joan didn't exist either.

First Joan complained to her father. As usual he behaved as though the person who made the complaint was at least equally guilty with the offender. It was the attitude of a man born weak, who hates to have his peace of mind disturbed. “Oh, for Christ's sake!” he said, and shambled in to May. He told May it was a happy day for her poor mother the day she died, and then went on to threaten her as though her mother were still alive and May was breaking her heart. May, who loved him even more than the Ten Commandments, listened to him with respect, but within ten minutes she had him admitting that there were damn few women in the world like her poor mother, God rest her, and that only for what people might say, you wouldn't blame their husbands, whatever they did. He then went off to bed, apparently under the impression that he had restored order in the household.

But Joan had no intention of being satisfied with that sort of moral cowardice. Next afternoon she bearded Timmy in his office. Timmy had his usual look of having dropped in for a chat with his secretary. He was obviously very pleased to see Joan, and smiled with the whole array of his discolored teeth as he led her into the back office. It was a small room with a window opening on a vent. He closed the window carefully and sat down, riffling his hair. On the desk before him was a photograph of May, looking romantic against a mountain. It was most improbable that he left it there permanently; more likely he had taken it out to remind himself that offices weren't real either, but it gave Joan a fresh grievance.

“I think I'd better take charge of this, Timmy,” she said, opening her handbag.

“What do you mean, Joan?” Timmy asked, rising with a look of alarm. It was a divided look, for the eyes frowned but the teeth still grinned wistfully beneath them.

“If you can't protect my sister's reputation, I must, Timmy,” Joan said briskly. “Now, if you'd give me her letters—”

“Her letters?”

“Yes.”

“But I haven't them, Joan.”

“Nonsense, Timmy. You know you wouldn't have the nerve to keep them at home.”

“I'm sorry you feel like this about it, Joan,” he said gravely, twiddling nervously with the spring of his pince-nez.

“I don't see what other way I can feel,” she replied frankly.

“I don't think you'd be so severe if you knew the sort of life I have to lead, Joan,” he said, his eyes clouding with tears. “I don't want you to think I'm complaining of Eily. I'm not. She was always a good wife, according to her lights, and I'm grateful; but there was never any understanding between us. When I met May, I knew she was the only girl in the world for me. I love that girl, Joan,” he added with manly simplicity. “I'd die for her this minute.”

“I'm sorry, Timmy,” Joan said coldly, “but I can't help your disagreements with Mrs. MacGovern. I didn't come here to discuss them. I came to get my sister's letters, and to warn you that the next time you see her or write to her, I'll go straight to your wife and then to the parish priest.”

Joan was bluffing, and she knew it. She was playing it as if she were haggling over a pound of vegetables in the market. Timmy, like the rest of us, was vulnerable, but there were few in a stronger position to resist threats of that sort. If he had stuck to his guns, there was very little Joan could have done which wouldn't have brought more trouble on herself than on him, but, scared by the hysteria in her tone, he didn't realize it. That is the worst of poetic sentiments; they so rarely stand up to a well-played bluff.