Collected Stories (82 page)

“What barricade?” asked Martin, who found all this hard to follow.

“Any barricade,” said Ned wildly. “I don't care what 'tis for so long as 'tis a fight. I don't want to be a messenger boy. I'm not even a good one. Here I am, arguing with you in a pub instead of doing what I was sent to do. Whatever the hell that was,” he added with a hearty laugh as he realized that for the moment—only for the moment, of course—he had forgotten what it was. “Well, that beats everything,” he said with a grin. “But you see what I mean. What duty does for you. I'm after forgetting what I came for.”

“Ah, that's only because it wasn't important,” said Martin, who was anxious to talk of Paris.

“That's where you're wrong again, Jack,” said Ned, really beginning to enjoy the situation. “Maybe, 'twas of no importance to us but it was probably of great importance to Nature. It's we that aren't important. What was the damn thing? My memory has gone to hell. One moment. I have to close my eyes and empty my mind. That's the only way I have of beating it.”

He closed his eyes and lay back limply in his seat, though even through his self-induced trance he smiled lightly at the absurdity of it all.

“No good,” he said, starting out of it briskly. “It's an extraordinary thing, the way it disappears as if the ground opened and swallowed it. And there's nothing you can do. 'Twill come back of its own accord, and there won't be rhyme nor reason to that either. I was reading an article about a German doctor who says you forget because it's too unpleasant to think about.”

“It's not a haircut?” Martin asked helpfully, but Ned, a tidy man, just shook his head.

“Or clothes?” Martin went on. “Clothes are another great thing with them.”

“No,” Ned said frowning. “I'm sure 'twas nothing for myself.”

“Or for the kids? Shoes or the like?”

“Something flashed across my mind just then,” murmured Ned.

“If it's not that it must be groceries.”

“I don't see how it could,” Ned said argumentatively. “Williams delivers them every week, and they're always the same.”

“In that case,” Martin said flatly, “it's bound to be something to eat. They're always forgetting things—bread or butter or milk.”

“I suppose so,” Ned said in bewilderment, “but I'm damned if I know what. Jim!” he called to the barman. “If you were sent on a message today, what would you say 'twould be?”

“Fish, Mr. Mac,” the barman replied promptly. “Every Friday.”

“Fish!” repeated Martin exultantly. “The very thing!”

“Fish?” repeated Ned, feeling that some familiar chord had been struck. “I suppose it could be. I know I offered to bring it to Tom Hurley, and I was having a bit of an argument with Larry Cronin about it. I remember he said he rather liked it.”

“Like it?” cried Martin. “I can't stand the damn stuff, but the housekeeper has to have it for the kids.”

“Ah, 'tis fish, all right, Mr. Mac,” the barman said knowingly. “In an hour's time you wouldn't be able to forget it with the smell around the town.”

“Well, obviously,” Ned said, resigning himself to it, “it has something to do with fish. It may not be exactly fish, but it's something like it.”

“Whether it is or not, she'll take it as kindly meant,” said Martin comfortingly. “Like flowers. Women in this country seem to think they're alike.”

“It's extraordinary,” said Ned as they went out. “We have minds we have less control of than we have of our cars. Wouldn't you think with all their modern science they'd find some way of curing a memory like that?”

Two hours later the two friends, more loquacious than ever, drove up to Ned's house for lunch. “Mustn't forget the fish,” Ned said as he reached back in the car for it. At that moment he heard the wail of a newborn infant and went very white.

“What the hell is that, Ned?” Martin asked in alarm.

“That, Martin,” said Ned, “is the fish, I'm afraid.”

“I won't disturb you, now, Ned,” Martin said hastily, getting out of the car. “I'll get a snack from Tom Hurley.”

“Courage, man!” said Ned frowningly. “Here you are and here you'll stop. But why fish, Martin? That's what I can't understand. Why did I think it was fish?”

A Set of Variations on a Borrowed Theme

K
ATE
M
AHONEY
was sixty when her husband died and, like many another widow, she had to face the loss of her little home.

Her two daughters, Nora and Molly, were married, and even if either of them had been in a position to offer her a home, she would have hesitated over it. As she said in her patient, long-suffering way to her old crony Hanna Dinan, they shouted too much. Hanna raised her head in mock surprise and exclaimed, “You don't say so, ma'am!” Kate looked at her reproachfully for a moment and then murmured with almost sensual bliss, “Oh, you cheeky thing.” The truth was, as Hanna implied, that Kate shouted enough for a regimental sergeant-major, and the girls, both gentle and timid, had learned early in life that the only way of making themselves heard was to shout back. Kate didn't mind that; in fact, she rather enjoyed it. Nor did she shout all the time. She had another tone, which was low-pitched and monotonous, and in which she tended to break off a sentence as though she had forgotten what she was saying. But low-pitched or loud, her talk was monumental, like headstones. Her hands and legs were knotted with rheumatics, and she had a battered, inexpressive country woman's face, like a butcher's block, in which the only good feature was the eyes, which looked astonishingly girlish and merry. Maybe it would be only later that you would remember the hands—which were rarely still—fastening or unfastening a button on her blouse.

Her cottage was in a lane outside Cork. There was high rocky ground behind it that could never be built on, and though as a result it got little or no sunlight and another row of cottages between her and the roadway shut off the view, it was quiet and free of traffic. She wanted to die there, in the bed her husband had died in, but with the rheumatics she couldn't go out and do a day's work, as other widows did. It was this that made her think of taking in a foster child. It was a terrible comedown—more particularly for her, a respectable woman who had brought up two honest transactions of her own, but at her age what else could she do? So she took her problem to Miss Hegarty, the nurse.

Miss Hegarty was a fine-looking woman of good family, but so distracted with having to deal with the endless goings on of male and female that there were times she didn't seem right in the head. “Ahadie!” she would cry gaily to a woman in labor. “Fun enough you got out of starting it. Laugh now, why don't you?”

But Kate found her a good friend. She advised Kate against taking foster children from the local authorities, because they paid so badly that it was no better than slavery. The thing to do was to take the child of a girl of good family who could afford to maintain it.

“Ah, where would I meet a girl like that?” Kate asked humbly, and Miss Hegarty gave a loud, bitter laugh and stood up to lean against the mantelpiece with her arms folded.

“'Tis easy seen you don't know much about it, Mrs. Mahoney,” she said. “What chance, indeed, and the whole country crawling with them!”

“Oh, my!” said Kate.

“But I warn you, ma'am, that you can't rely on any of them,” said Miss Hegarty. “They're so mad for men they'll go anywhere for them. And for all you know, a girl like that would be off next month to London and you might never hear of her again. The stick, ma'am, the stick is what the whole lot of them want.”

Kate, however, decided to take the risk; there was something that appealed to her in the idea of a child of good family, and Miss Hegarty knew the very girl. She was the manageress of a store in Waterford, who had got entangled with a scoundrel whose name nobody even knew, but indeed he couldn't be much good to leave her that way. When Kate told her daughters, Nora, the flighty one, didn't seem to mind, but Molly, who was more sensitive, wept and begged her mother to come and live with them instead. “Oh yes, what a thing I'd do,” said Kate, whose mind was made up. From Nora, who now had children of her own, she borrowed back the old family perambulator, and one spring morning it appeared again outside the door in the lane, with a baby boy asleep in it. “My first!” Kate shouted jocosely when any of the neighbors commented on it, and then she went on to explain, in the monotonous voice she used for solemn occasions, that this was no ordinary baby such as you'd get from the workhouse, without knowing who it was or where it came from, but the child of a beautiful educated girl from one of the best families in Waterford. She went on to tell how the poor child had been taken advantage of, and the neighbors tch-tch'd and agreed that it was a sad, sad story and didn't believe a word of it. The young married women didn't even pretend to believe in Kate's rigmarole. They muttered fiercely among themselves that you couldn't let decent children grow up alongside the likes of that, and that the priest or the landlord should put a stop to it. But they didn't say it too loud, for however embarrassed Kate might be by her situation she was a very obstinate old woman, and she had a dirty tongue when she was roused.

So Jimmy Mahoney was allowed to grow up in the lane along with the honest transactions, and turned into a fat, good-looking, moody boy, who seemed to see nothing peculiar in his mother's being a cranky old woman with a scolding tongue. On the contrary, he seemed to depend on her more than the other kids did on their mothers, and sometimes when she left him with Hanna Dinan and went off to see one of her daughters, he sat and sulked on the doorstep till she got home. One day when Hanna's back was turned, he went after Kate, right across the city to Molly's house on the Douglas Road. Kate, talking to Molly, glanced up and saw him glaring at her from the doorway and started, thinking that something must have happened to him and this was his ghost. “Oh, you pest!” she shouted when she saw that it wasn't. Then she gave him a grin. “I suppose it was the way you couldn't get on without me?”

Molly, a beautiful, haggard woman, gave him a smile of Christian charity and said quietly, “Come in, Jimmy.” It was a thing she would not have wished for a pound, for it would have to be explained to her neighbors, and she felt it degraded them all. But after that, whatever she or Nora might think, Kate had to bring Jimmy with her by the hand. It didn't look right—their old mother in her black hat and coat hobbling up to the door with a child younger than their own by the hand.

Even then Jimmy wasn't satisfied. He wanted a brother or sister as well—preferably a brother. He had a great weakness for babies and was mad jealous of other boys who had babies to look after. “Every bloomin' fella in the road have a brudder or sister except me,” he said to Kate. But she told him roughly that they couldn't afford it.

All the same, he got his wish. One evening Miss Hegarty came to her and asked if she would take in the child of a well-to-do girl in Bantry. The mother was engaged to marry a rich Englishman, but at the last moment she had thrown herself into a wild affair with a married man who had courted her when she was only seventeen. “Oh, my, my, the things that go on,” sighed Kate.

“Mrs. Mahoney,” Miss Hegarty cried, “don't talk to me about it! If you knew the half of it, it would make you lose your faith in religion.”

Then and there Kate accepted. Later she felt she had been hasty. She needed the money, but not as badly as all that. When Nora came to see her and Kate told her what she had done, there was a terrible scene.

“Ah, Mammy, you're making a holy show of us!” Nora cried.

“I'm
making a show of ye?” Kate pointed at her bosom with the mock-innocent air that had so often maddened her daughters. “I do my business, and I don't cost ye a penny. Is that what ye call making a show of ye?”

“Ah, you'd think we were something out of a circus instead of an old respectable family,” Nora said. “That I can hardly face the neighbors when I come up the lane! Ahadie, 'tis well my poor daddy can't see what you're making of his house! He's the one that would deal with you. A woman of sixty-five! I suppose you think you're going to live forever.”

“God is good,” Kate muttered stiffly. “I might have a couple of years in me yet.”

“You might,” Nora said ironically. “And I suppose you imagine that if anything happens you, Molly and I will carry on the good work.”

“Ye mightn't be asked,” said Kate. “Their people have plenty—more than you'll ever be able to say.” This was a dirty thrust at Nora, whose poor husband was not bright. “And how sure you are of yourself! My goodness, that we'd never do anything if we were to be always thinking of what might happen us. And what about my rent? Are you going to pay it?”

“Ah, 'tisn't the rent with you at all,” Nora said. “Nor it never was. You only do it because you like it.”

“I like it? An old woman like me that's crippled with the rheumatics? Oh, my, that 'tis in a home I ought to be if I had my rights. In a home!”

“Ah, I'd like to see the home that would keep you,” Nora replied contemptuously. “Don't be making any more excuses. You love it, woman. And you care more about that little bastard than you ever did about Molly or me.”

“How dare you?” Kate cried, rising with as much dignity as the rheumatics permitted. “What way is that to speak to your own mother? And to talk about a poor innocent child in my house like that, you dirty, jealous thing! Yes, jealous,” she added in a wondering whisper as though the truth had only dawned on her in that moment. “Oh, my! Ye that had everything!”

T
HE SCENE
upset her, but not because of the row with Nora; the Ma-honeys always quarrelled like that, at the top of their lungs, as though they all suffered from congenital deafness, and they got the same pleasure out of it that a baby gets out of hammering a tin can. What really mortified her was that she had given herself away in front of Nora, whose intelligence she had no respect for. It was true that she had taken Jimmy in for perfectly good mercenary reasons; and it was very wrong of Nora to impute sentimental considerations to her—a determined, managing woman, who had lived that long with no thanks to anybody. But all the same, Nora wasn't altogether wrong. Motherhood was the only trade Kate knew, and though her rheumatics were bad and her sight wasn't what it used to be and she had to get Jimmy to thread her needles for her, she felt the older she got the better she practiced it. It was even true to say that she enjoyed Jimmy more than she had enjoyed her own children, but this was natural enough, because she hadn't the same anxieties about him. If you had pressed her hard enough, she would have said that if there was a better boy on the road she didn't know him. And was there anything wrong with that? You could say what you liked, but there was something in good blood.