Collected Stories (66 page)

Mrs. Rahilly was a plump, pasty-faced woman with rather syrupy manners. To give herself courage, Joan talked in a loud breezy tone, but it came back to her with a hollow echo. She was in a quandary and knew it. To treat the matter too gravely would imply such a reflection on Kitty that Mrs. Rahilly might make it an excuse for refusing to agree to it at all, while if she treated it too lightly, she might conclude that Joan was of the same kind.

“Well, I'm sure I'm very sorry, Miss Twomey,” the older woman said effusively. “But I don't see there's anything I can do about it. I had to pinch and scrape to send Con to college, and if it was to save my life, I couldn't do more.”

“But surely you'll agree that they must get married,” Joan said eagerly.

“Well, indeed, I'm sure I'd be delighted,” said Mrs. Rahilly; “that's if your family can support them.”

“We have nothing,” replied Joan, realizing that she wasn't going to get a shilling.

“Nor more have we,” said Mrs. Rahilly as if it was a great joke.

“Then I suppose they must only do what others did before them,” Joan said in chagrin. “Kitty can't support a child on her own.”

“She might find she has to support a husband and child,” said Mrs. Rahilly. “There's no use putting a tooth in it, Miss Twomey, but Con would be no head to her. His father was a weak man—I can say that to you—it was the drink with him; there's no use in denying it. But Con is weaker still. I never thought I'd rear him. It is the digestion with him. He has every delicacy in his own home, but he cannot keep it down. What chance has a boy like that of providing for a wife and child? It's foolishness, Miss Twomey—foolishness!”

Joan was beginning to think that much as she disliked Mrs. Rahilly, they were in agreement about this at least. She was very angry with Kitty and refused to tell her what had happened. “I know what happened all right,” Kitty said. “You met your match at last,” and this made Joan angrier still. But when Con turned up to Kitty's lodging next day he was resolute for the marriage. Joan had no great faith in his resolution. It was desperation rather than courage. Bad as poverty was, it now had less terrors for him than life with Mother.

When all this was fixed, Joan brought Kitty home to prepare for the wedding. She didn't speak to her all the way down on the train. Her interview with Mrs. Rahilly still rankled. She refused to let her father have anything to say to her either, and except for confidences with May, Kitty was treated as an outcast, an abandoned woman who had brought disgrace to them all. Joan was still very doubtful whether when the moment came, Con Rahilly would have the nerve to defy his mother, and she had to prepare her father and Chris for the worst. She watched every letter which Kitty received, sure that each one must contain the bad news.

This was the beginning of what Kitty called Joan's hypocrisy, though at no time did Joan ever feel in the least hypocritical. It was only that during those difficult months her attitude to Chris changed completely. She became more dependent on him. She asked his advice about everything. She clung to him with a passion that surprised herself. It surprised Chris too, but if he had any qualms about it, he put it down to the strain that she was enduring. Having suffered so much himself, he was prepared to be tolerant of her.

To everybody's astonishment, Con arrived the evening before the wedding. To Joan he seemed a different young man. He had packed his bag and walked out of the house alone. His father had shaken him silently by the hand and slipped him a five-pound note, but his mother had refused to leave her room or admit him to say farewell. The father of a college friend had made a small job for him. He had rented one furnished room in Lower Leeson Street. His friends had treated the whole thing as no better than suicide, and he took them off with great gusto while he cracked ghastly jokes about starvation, which Joan found tasteless. But to her surprise, her father took an instant liking to him. He laughed at Con's grim jokes and took him aside to offer to raise a loan for him. When Con refused, he told Joan that Kitty had picked the best of the bunch.

Joan didn't at all share her father's views, but she didn't try to disillusion him, because his satisfaction seemed to round off her task. Now that her sisters were both married, she felt she had kept the promise made after her mother's death, and proposed to devote the rest of her days to Chris. She proclaimed joyously that they were now getting married too, just as quick as they could. They would live in Dublin because he must have the chance of hearing good music. Every obstacle was brushed aside. Chris's mother would have to live with Bob; her father would either have to live with May or fend for himself. There was to be no further talk of her responsibilities or of Chris's. To her surprise, her father agreed enthusiastically.

“That's just the way I see it too, Joan,” he said emotionally. “There's nothing I'd hate so much as to see you turning into an old maid. You're a great girl, a great girl. I'm glad you're getting a good, steady fellow like Chris. Young Gordon was a nice chap too, but he wasn't your sort, and you're better off with someone like yourself.”

Mick might almost be said to have overdone it, but I am afraid the truth is he was almost lightheaded with relief. I suppose you have to have as good a daughter as Joan to realize what a blessing it is when she marries and takes herself off. A man with marriageable daughters never has a house he can call his own. If it was only an old barn, you would prefer to have it to yourself.

So she and Chris bought a little bungalow in the hills behind Dublin; a new house without even a cottage near, and with a wonderful view across the city to the Mourne Mountains and over the bay to Howth, and indulged themselves in the solitude they both longed for. They rarely visited or had visitors, and Joan's letters described their solitary evenings, watching the lights come on in the city beneath and listening to the Beethoven quartets right through on the gramophone.

It sounded idyllic, but Kitty and Con got a different impression one evening when they were cycling through Rathfarnham and dropped in unexpectedly. Con was something of a surprise to everybody except Mick Twomey. Though so modest that he scarcely dared express an opinion of his own, he had developed into an extraordinarily acute businessman. Joan was sure he was doing it out of spite, though whether against her or his mother she wasn't sure. At any rate, he and Kitty now had a small house of their own and were talking of buying a car. He stood at the window and generously admired the view while Joan, in her vivacious way, enthused about the calm of the bungalow and the voices of the birds in the early morning. Kitty said nothing. She thought Joan's bungalow was the last word in inconvenience: an emotional girl with no side, she was very fond of the noise of buses, and thought there was an awful lot of nonsense talked about birds. Suddenly she heard a sound that made her start.

“What's that?” she said incredulously. “A baby?”

Joan smiled, looking rather uncomfortable, and Chris rose with an anguished air.

“I'll see to him, Joan,” he volunteered.

He went out and the crying ceased. For several minutes the others stared at one another. Then, in turn, they all grew red. At last Joan grinned insinuatingly.

“We have to keep it dark on Chris's account,” she explained apologetically, as though it were all Chris's doing and he had given birth to the baby himself. “Of course, it could be used against him in the civil service.”

“That's right,” Con said with complete gravity. “You can't be too careful. There's an awful lot of hypocrisy in this country.”

“Are you telling us there's hypocrisy?” Kitty asked bitterly as she rose.

“You might as well stay and have something to eat as you're at it,” Joan said with more warmth than she had previously shown. “It's a relief that you know about it, because now you can come whenever you like.”

“Quartets are not enough,” said Con.

“Ah, you'd be dead for want of someone to talk to,” said Joan.

“We'd better be going back to our own brat,” Kitty said, just managing to keep her temper. “He's probably bawling the house down by now.”

All the way downhill she pedalled madly, keeping well ahead of her husband. “God Almighty!” she said bitterly when he caught up on her, “the rest of us can have babies but she can only have quartets. Did you hear her—herself and her birds? That one was crooked from the cradle.”

Con only thought it a great joke. May was the same when Kitty wrote and told her. “What name did she call him?” she replied. “Is it Gordon or Dick?” Kitty, who knew that the child could be no one but Chris's, found it a puzzling question.

A Sense of Responsibility

M
ICK
and Jack Cantillon lived up our road when I was a young fellow. They were very much alike in general appearance, small, stout, and good-natured, but there the resemblance stopped. Mick was a thundering blackguard, while Jack was a slow, quiet, conscientious chap. Naturally, Mrs. Cantillon—a tall, mournful, pious woman with the remains of considerable good looks—adored Mick and despised Jack. She liked men to be manly; she liked the way Mick, after drinking the housekeeping money or being arrested for being drunk and disorderly, approached her with his arms out and said mockingly, “Mother, forgive your erring son.” Even when Jack had a drop taken, he didn't regard himself as being in error, and was out to work the next morning, head or no head; he seemed to have no religious feelings at all, wouldn't be bothered going to a mission or retreat, and expected the poor woman to keep accounts. Accounts were things Mrs. Cantillon couldn't keep.

Jack was a great friend of another young man called Farren, and the two of them went everywhere together, though they were as much unlike as lads could be. Farren was tall and handsome, with a clear, delicate, tubercular complexion. He was quick-witted and light-hearted. Having been brought up in a household of women, sent to work in an office full of women, he seemed at times to be half a woman himself. He certainly seemed happier with women than with most men. Meeting some well-to-do educated young lady from Sunday's Well who swallowed all her words in the best Sunday's Well manner, he called her “sweetheart,” and when she'd got over the shock of that, coaxed her into telling him how changed her boy friend seemed to be since he'd come back from Paris. Farren was just like another girl with her; so understanding, sympathetic, and light in touch that it didn't strike her till later that this was the only thing feminine about him, and by that time it was usually too late. As a result women were always trying to get him over the phone, and the things he said about them were shocking. Not that he meant them to be, but there was something almost treasonable about the way he talked so intimately of them, and some men didn't like it because it so resembled eavesdropping.

Apart from Farren, Jack's great friends were the Dwyers, a large, loud-voiced family. The father was a small building contractor, known to his wife as “poor Dwyer,” whose huffy shyness had never permitted him to get anywhere in life. His wife had ten times his brains and he lectured her as if she were an idiot, and she put up with it as if she were. She was a big, buxom, bonny woman, very devout and very caustic. They had three boys and three girls, and Jack went drinking and bowl-playing with the boys and dancing with the girls until the latter held a council about him and decided, as he was completely incapable of making up his own mind, that they had better do it for him. It was decided that he should marry Susie, the middle girl. Annie, the youngest, whom he was supposed to favor, was compensated with a blue frock.

If Jack noticed anything peculiar about the way Susie was thrust on him, he didn't say much. He never said much anyway. Soon after, the Dwyers had plenty of opportunity for observing how close Jack could be when it suited him.

Mick, you see, had married a girl called Madge Hunt, a good-natured, stupid, sentimental woman who adored him. She was shocked at the harshness of his employers, who actually expected him to be at work six days out of every week, and at the intolerable behavior of people he owed money to, who expected him to pay it back, whether he had it or not. A couple of years of marriage to Mick improved her sense of reality enormously. She became hard as nails, cold and knowing. Then Mick was killed, not too gloriously, in a motoring accident, and Madge had to go out and work as a charwoman.

Jack was very upset by Mick's death. He took to calling regularly on Madge and her little boy. The Dwyers at first saw nothing wrong with this; a decent grief is a very respectable thing, and the Dwyers were nothing if not respectable. But Jack's concern bordered on insincerity. And it didn't stop there. The eldest of the Dwyer girls, Babs, who heard everything, heard from the Mrs. MacDunphy who employed Madge that Jack had made her give up the daily work and was supplying the equivalent of her wages out of his own pocket. According to Mrs. MacDunphy, this was to go on till her son left school. What Mrs. MacDunphy had said was “There's a good brother-in-law for you!” What Babs said was “How well I wouldn't find some old fool to keep me!” But what her mother said was “That's very queer behavior in a man who's walking out with Susie.” It was the first glimpse she'd caught of that side of Jack's character, and she didn't like it.

She wanted Susie to have it out with him, but Susie flew in a panic and said she'd be afraid. Mrs. Dwyer wasn't afraid. Anyone who employed one of the Dwyer family could rely on her to see that the goods came up to scratch, and she wasn't the sort to tolerate a slight on her daughter.

“I hear you're looking after Madge Hunt while the little fellow is at school, Jack,” she said pleasantly one evening when she managed to get Jack alone.

Jack looked embarrassed. He didn't like his charities to be known.