Collected Stories (75 page)

“I declare to God!” Mrs. O'Brien interrupted in astonishment. “And that fellow there is one age with you, and he can't spell house. How well you wouldn't be down at the library, you caubogue, you! … That's enough now, Larry,” she added hastily as I made ready to entertain them further.

“Who wants to read that blooming old stuff?” Gussie said contemptuously.

Later, he took me upstairs to show me his air rifle and model aeroplanes. Every detail of the room is still clear to me: the view into the back garden with its jungle of wild plants where Gussie had pitched his tent (a bad site for a tent as I patiently explained to him, owing to the danger from wild beasts); the three cots still unmade; the scribbles on the walls; and Mrs. O'Brien's voice from the kitchen telling Aideen to see what was wrong with the baby, who was screaming his head off from the pram outside the front door. Gussie, in particular, fascinated me. He was spoiled, clever, casual; good-looking, with his mother's small clean features; gay and calculating. I saw that when I left and his mother gave me a sixpence. Naturally I refused it politely, but she thrust it into my trouser pocket, and Gussie dragged at her skirt, noisily demanding something for himself.

“If you give him a tanner you ought to give me a tanner,” he yelled.

“I'll tan you,” she said laughingly.

“Well, give up a lop anyway,” he begged, and she did give him a penny to take his face off her, as she said herself, and after that he followed me down the street and suggested we should go to the shop and buy sweets. I was simpleminded, but I wasn't an out-and-out fool, and I knew that if I went to a sweet-shop with Gussie I should end up with no sixpence and very few sweets. So I told him I could not buy sweets without Mother's permission, at which he gave me up altogether as a sissy or worse.

It had been an exhausting afternoon but a very instructive one. In the twilight I went back slowly over the bridges, a little regretful for that fast-moving, colorful household, but with a new appreciation for my own home. When I went in the lamp was lit over the fireplace and Father was at his tea.

“What kept you, child?” Mother asked with an anxious air, and suddenly I felt slightly guilty, and I played it as I usually did whenever I was at fault—in a loud, demonstrative, grown-up way. I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my cap in my hand and pointed it first at one, then at the other.

“You wouldn't believe who I met!” I said dramatically.

“Wisha, who, child?” Mother asked.

“Miss Cadogan,” I said, placing my cap squarely on a chair, and turning on them both again. “Miss May Cadogan. Mrs. O'Brien as she is now.”

“Mrs. O'Brien?” Father exclaimed, putting down his cup. “But where did you meet Mrs. O'Brien?”

“I said you wouldn't believe it. It was near the library. I was talking to some fellows, and what do you think but one of them was Gussie O'Brien, Mrs. O'Brien's son. And he took me home with him, and his mother gave me bread and jam, and she gave me
this
.” I produced the sixpence with a real flourish.

“Well, I'm blowed!” Father gasped, and first he looked at me, and then he looked at Mother and burst into a loud guffaw.

“And she said to tell you she remembers you too, and that she sent her love.”

“Oh, by the jumping bell of Athlone!” Father crowed and clapped his hands on his knees. I could see he believed the story I had told and was delighted with it, and I could see, too, that Mother did not believe it and that she was not in the least delighted. That, of course, was the trouble with Mother. Though she would do anything to help me with an intellectual problem, she never seemed to understand the need for experiment. She never opened her mouth while Father cross-questioned me, shaking his head in wonder and storing it up to tell the men in the factory. What pleased him most was Mrs. O'Brien's remembering the shape of his head, and later, while Mother was out of the kitchen, I caught him looking in the mirror and stroking the back of his head.

But I knew too that for the first time I had managed to produce in Mother the unrest that Father could produce, and I felt wretched and guilty and didn't know why. This was an aspect of history I only studied later.

That night I was really able to indulge my passion. At last I had the material to work with. I was myself as Gussie O'Brien, standing in the bedroom, looking down at my tent in the garden, and Aideen as my sister, and Mrs. O'Brien as my mother, and, like Pascal, I re-created history. I remembered Mrs. O'Brien's laughter, her scolding, and the way she stroked my head. I knew she was kind—casually kind—and hot-tempered, and recognized that in dealing with her I must somehow be a different sort of person. Being good at reading would never satisfy her. She would almost compel you to be as Gussie was: flattering, impertinent, and exacting. Though I couldn't have expressed it in those terms, she was the sort of woman who would compel you to flirt with her.

Then, when I had had enough, I deliberately soothed myself as I did whenever I had scared myself by pretending that there was a burglar in the house or a wild animal trying to get in the attic window. I just crossed my hands on my chest, looked up at the window, and said to myself: “It is not like that. I am not Gussie O'Brien. I am Larry Delaney, and my mother is Mary Delaney, and we live in Number Eight, Wellington Square. Tomorrow I'll go to school at the Cross, and first there will be prayers, and then arithmetic, and after that composition.”

For the first time the charm did not work. I had ceased to be Gussie, all right, but somehow I had not become myself again, not any self that I knew. It was as though my own identity was a sort of sack I had to live in, and I had deliberately worked my way out of it, and now I couldn't get back again because I had grown too big for it. I practiced every trick I knew to reassure myself. I tried to play a counting game; then I prayed, but even the prayer seemed different, as though it didn't belong to me at all. I was away in the middle of empty space, divorced from mother and home and everything permanent and familiar. Suddenly I found myself sobbing. The door opened and Mother came in in her nightdress, shivering, her hair over her face.

“You're not sleeping, child,” she said in a wan and complaining voice.

I snivelled, and she put her hand on my forehead.

“You're hot,” she said. “What ails you?”

I could not tell her of the nightmare in which I was lost. Instead, I took her hand, and gradually the terror retreated, and I became myself again, shrank into my little skin of identity, and left infinity and all its anguish behind.

“Mummy,” I said, “I promise I never wanted anyone but you.”

Expectation of Life

W
HEN
Shiela Hennessey married Jim Gaffney, a man twenty years older than herself, we were all pleased and rather surprised. By that time we were sure she wouldn't marry at all. Her father had been a small builder, and one of the town jokers put it down to a hereditary distaste for contracts.

Besides, she had been keeping company with Matt Sheridan off and on for ten years. Matt, who was a quiet chap, let on to be interested only in the bit of money her father had left her, but he was really very much in love with her, and, to give her her due, she had been as much in love with him as time and other young men permitted. Shiela had to a pronounced extent the feminine weakness for second strings. Suddenly she would scare off the prospect of a long life with a pleasant, quiet man like Matt, and for six months or so would run a tearing line with some young fellow from the College. At first Matt resented this, but later he either grew resigned or developed the only technique for handling it, because he turned it all into a great joke, and called her young man of the moment “the spare wheel.”

And she really did get something out of those romances. A fellow called Magennis left her with a sound appreciation of Jane Austen and Bach, while another, Jack Mortimer, who was unhappy at home, taught her to admire Henry James and persuaded her that she had a father fixation. But all of them were pretty unsuitable, and Matt in his quiet determined way knew that if only he could sit tight and give no sign of jealousy, and encourage her to analyze their characters, she would eventually be bound to analyze herself out of love altogether. Until the next time, of course, but he had the hope that one of these days she would tire of her experiments and turn to him for good. At the same time, like the rest of us he realized that she might not marry at all. She was just the type of pious, well-courted, dissatisfied girl who as often as not ends up in a convent, but he was in no hurry and prepared to take a chance.

And no doubt, unless she had done this, she would have married him eventually, only that she fell violently in love with Jim Gaffney. Jim was a man in his early fifties, small and stout and good-natured. He was a widower with a grown son in Dublin, a little business on the Grand Parade, and a queer old house on Fair Hill, and as if these weren't drawbacks enough for anyone, he was a man with no religious beliefs worth mentioning.

According to Shiela's own story, which was as likely as not to be true, it was she who had to do all the courting and she who had to propose. It seemed that Jim had the Gaffney expectation of life worked out over three generations, and according to this he had only eight years to go, so that even when she did propose, he practically refused her.

“And what are you going to do with yourself when the eight years are up?” asked Matt when she broke the news to him.

“I haven't even thought about it, Matt,” she said. “All I know is that eight years with Jim would be more to me than a lifetime with anyone else.”

“Oh, well,” he said with a bitter little smile, “I suppose you and I had better say good-bye.”

“But you will stay friends with me, Matt?” she asked anxiously.

“I will not, Shiela,” he replied with sudden violence. “The less I see of you from this onwards, the better pleased I'll be.”

“You're not really as bitter as that with me?” she said, in distress.

“I don't know whether I am or not,” he said flatly. “I just don't want to be mixed up with you after this. To tell you the truth, I don't believe you give a damn for this fellow.”

“But I do, Matt. Why do you think I'm marrying him?”

“I think you're marrying him because you're hopelessly spoiled and neurotic, and ready for any silly adventure. What does your mother say to it?”

“Mummy will get used to Jim in time.”

“Excuse my saying so, Shiela, but your mother will do nothing of the sort. If your father was alive he'd beat the hell out of you before he let you do it. Is it marry someone of his own age? Talk sense! By the time you're forty he'll be a doddering old man. How can it end in anything but trouble?”

“Matt, I don't care what it ends in. That's my look-out. All I want is for you and Jim to be friends.”

It wasn't so much that Shiela wanted them to be friends as that she wanted to preserve her claim on Matt. Women are like that. They hate to let one man go even when they have sworn life-long fidelity to another.

“I have no desire to be friends,” said Matt angrily. “I've wasted enough of my life on you as it is.”

“I wish you wouldn't say things like that, Matt,” she said, beginning to sniff. “I know I'm queer. I suppose I'm not normal. Jack Mortimer always said I had a father fixation, but what can I do about that? I know you think I just strung you along all these years, but you're wrong about that. I cared more for you than I did for all the others, and you know it. And if it wasn't for Jim I'd marry you now sooner than anybody.”

“Oh, if it wasn't for Jim,” he said mockingly. “If it wasn't Jim it would be somebody else, and I'm tired of it. It's all very well being patient, Shiela, but a man reaches the point where he has to protect himself, even if it hurts him or someone else. I've reached it.”

And she knew he had, and that she had no hope of holding on to him. A man who had stuck to her for all those years, and through all her vagaries, was not the sort to be summoned back by a whim. Parting with him was more of a wrench than she had anticipated.

S
HE WAS
radiantly happy through the brief honeymoon in France. She had always been fascinated and repelled by sex, and on their first night on the boat, Jim, instead of making violent love to her as a younger man might have done, sat on his bunk and made her listen to a long lecture on the subject, which she found more interesting than any love-making; and before they had been married a week, she was making the difficult adjustment for herself, and without shock.

As a companion Jim was excellent, because he was ready to be pleased with everything from urinals to cathedrals; he got as much pleasure out of small things as big ones, and it put her in good humor just to see the way he enjoyed himself. He would sit in the sunlight outside a cafe, a bulky man with a red face and white hair, enthusing over his pastries and coffee and the spectacle of good-looking well-dressed people going by. When his face clouded, it was only because he had remembered the folly of those who would not be happy when they could.

“And the whoors at home won't even learn how to make a cup of coffee!” he would declare bitterly.

The only times he got mad were when Shiela, tall and tangential, moved too fast for him and he had to shuffle after her on his tender feet, swinging his arms close to his chest like a runner, or when she suddenly changed her mind at a crossing and left him in the middle of the traffic to run forward and back, alarmed and swearing. In his rage he shouted and shook his fist at the taxi-drivers, and they shouted back at him without his even knowing what they said. At times like these he even shouted at Shiela, and she promised in the future to wait for him, but she didn't. She was a born fidget, and when he left her somewhere to go to one of his beloved urinals, she drifted on to the nearest shop-window, and he lost her. Because all the French he knew came from the North Monastery, and French policemen only looked astonished when they heard it, and because he could never remember the name of his hotel, he was plunged in despair once a day.