Collected Stories (92 page)

“Why can't you be nicer to Jerry?” he asked as they were going home one night. “He hasn't so many friends.”

“He has no friends at all, if you ask me,” Brigid said coldly. “He's too bloody selfish to afford them.”

“Selfish?” Joe exclaimed, stopping dead. “A man who put a check for two hundred quid on my mantelpiece while I was out of the room!”

“We know all that,” Brigid said contemptuously. “Damn well he knew you wouldn't take it.”

“He knew more than I did,” Joe said, resuming his walk. “Anyway, it wasn't the money that mattered at the time. It was his confidence in me. It gave me confidence in myself. I tell you, Brigid, there are things between men that you'll never understand, not till the day you die.”

But argument had no effect on Brigid except perhaps to give her fresh grounds for spite. One evening at Joe's house, Cross was boasting innocently of some shady deal he had refused to be connected with, and Brigid, with mock admiration, drew him skillfully out. It was one of Cross's little weaknesses that he liked to think himself a really shrewd businessman—“a bloody dreamer” was how an uncle had described him to Joe.

“You always play it safe, Jerry, don't you?” she asked at last.

“What's that, Brigid?” Cross asked eagerly, too pleased with himself to be aware of her malice.

“Brigid!” Joe said warningly.

“Anyone who had anything to do with you would want to watch out,” she said.

Cross got up and clutched the lapels of his coat as though he were about to make a speech. It suddenly struck Joe that he was a little man who lived in expectation of having to make speeches—unpleasant ones, in his own defense.

“I assure you, Brigid, that nobody who had anything to do with me ever had to watch out, as you put it,” he said overloudly, speaking as it were to a faraway audience. “I do play it safe, though. You're right there, I do. And I'll play it safer for the future by not calling here, as I have been doing.”

Then he made for the door, and Joe, holding his coat for him, realized that he was shivering violently. Joe opened the door, put his arm round Cross's shoulder, and walked slowly to the gate with him. Cross walked close to him, so as not to break the embrace, and yet Joe knew he did not feel it in a homosexual way. The estate road went uphill to the bus stop on the tree-shaded suburban road, and the two men walked together like sweethearts till they reached it. Then Joe took Cross's hand in his own two.

“Try not to think of it, Jerry,” he said in a low voice. “She doesn't even know what she's saying. The girl is sick in her mind.”

“She is, Joe, she is, she is,” Cross said with pathetic eagerness. “I thought it from the first, but now I'm sure. I'm sorry I was so sharp with her.”

“You weren't, Jerry; not so sharp as I'd have been.”

It was only when he had waved good-bye to Cross from the pavement that Joe gave way to tears. He walked slowly up and down the road till the fit had passed. As he entered the house, Brigid was waiting for him in the sitting room, sitting exactly as when he had left.

“Come in, Joe,” she said quietly. “We have to talk.”

“I'm sorry, Brigid, but I don't want to talk,” he said, feeling sure that if he did he would break down again.

“I want to talk,” she said in a flat tone. “It may be the last chance we'll get. I'll have to clear out.”

“What's that?” he asked incredulously.

“I have to clear out,” she said again, and he knew that she meant it.

It was at moments like these that all the wise passivity in Joe came on top. In his time he had been humiliated, hurt so that the pain had never left him, but he knew you had to give in to it, let the pain wash over you, if you didn't want it to destroy you.

“Why do you think you have to clear out, dear?” he asked mildly, taking a chair inside the door and joining his hands before him.

“Because I don't want to destroy your life the way I destroyed my own,” she said.

“Well, I should have something to say to that,” he said. “So should the baby, of course. Unless you're proposing to take her with you.”

“I'm not,” she said with artificial casualness. “I dare say your mother can look after her.”

“I dare say she could,” he said calmly. “But it's not my idea of what a child needs.”

“At least your mother won't insult your friends,” Brigid said bitterly. He knew then that she had no illusions about her behavior to Cross, and his heart softened.

“You mean more to me than any of my friends, dear,” he said. “Even Jerry—and Heaven knows, he means quite a lot. But why do you have to do things like that? They hurt you as much as they hurt other people. What is it, Brigid? Why don't you trust me? Is it another man?”

For a moment Joe thought she really was going to strike him. Then the humor of it seemed to dawn on her, and she gave a weak grin.

“You have a very poor opinion of yourself, haven't you?” she asked pertly. “Even that jenny-ass Cross wouldn't think of a silly thing like that. I never looked at the side of the road a man walked at since I married you.”

There was no mistaking the absolute truthfulness of that, and again he felt the sense of relief, and with it the old tenderness and admiration.

“Naturally, that's what I hoped, dear,” he said. “And damn it all, nothing else matters.”

“Not even the ones I met before I met you?” she asked mockingly, and her tone struck him cold again.

“I see,” he said. “You mean there was someone else?”

“Naturally,” she said angrily. And then, as though reading his thoughts, she reverted to her tone of exasperated amusement. “Now, I suppose you think I'm breaking my heart over him? I am, like hell! I hope to God I never lay eyes on him again. I wish I could say the same thing about his child.”

“His child?” Joe repeated stupidly. Now he felt that the world really was collapsing about him. “You mean you had a child already?”

“What do you think brought me over to London in the first place?” she asked reasonably.

“I don't know,” Joe said with simple dignity. “I just thought you might have been telling me the truth when you said you came over for a job. I suppose you're right to think I'm a bit simpleminded.”

“I never thought you were simpleminded,” she retorted with the fury of a hellcat. “I thought you were too good to be true, if you want to know what I thought.”

“And you have this child where? With your people?”

“No, outside Cork,” she said shortly. “I suppose I wanted her as far away as possible. And, as I'm about it, there's another thing. I pinched some of the housekeeping money to support her. After I left the job I had nothing of my own.”

“You could scarcely have left the child to starve,” he said lightly. “That doesn't count beside the other things.”

“What other things?”

“All the lies you've told me,” he said bitterly. “I didn't deserve that from you. Look, Brigid, it's no use pretending I'm not hurt—not by what you've just told me. That was your business. But you might have told me before you married me.”

“So that you needn't have married me?” she asked bitterly.

“I mean nothing of the sort,” said Joe. “I don't know what I should have done, but I don't think it would have come between you and me. You were unfair to me and unfair to the child. You might have trusted me as I trusted you.”

“As if the two things were alike!” she retorted. “I told you I thought you were too good to be true. You weren't, but to get to know you that way I had to marry you first, and to marry you I had to tell you lies. At least, that's how it seemed to me. And a hell of a lot of good it did me!”

Joe sighed.

“Anyway, we have to think what we're to do about this child, and that's something we can't decide tonight.”

“There's only one thing to do, Joe,” she said. “I'll have to go back to London and get a job.” She said it manfully enough, but he knew she didn't mean it. She was begging him to find some way out for her.

“We don't have to break up this house,” he said with determination. “Damn it, it's our own. We can still bring her to live with us.”

“But I don't want her to live with us,” she said angrily. “Can't you understand? It was all a miserable bloody mistake, and I don't want to have to live with it for the rest of my life. And I don't want you to have to live with it either. It's just that I feel such a bitch, having everything in the world I want while she has nothing.”

“I see that,” Joe said gently. “I see it's not an easy question. We'll have to think of something, that's all.”

He thought a lot about it that night, though less of what they were to do with Brigid's child than of the disaster that had overtaken his beautiful world. Again he could see himself acting, doing whatever he felt he had to do, but beyond that he could see it all as though it were happening to someone in a book or a movie. He could almost hear his own voice as if it were in the third person. “‘We'll have to think of something, that's all,' he said.” And he supposed that this must be what people meant when they talked of grief.

Yet when Brigid waked him, bringing him a cup of tea in bed, it seemed to have taken nothing out of her. Unburdening herself of her secret seemed to have restored all her native liveliness, in fact.

When he got home that evening, he was astonished to see Cross waiting for him in the front room, and he knew from Cross's manner that Brigid had made her peace with him. At any other time this would have made him happy, but now it merely seemed an irrelevance. As he saw Cross off, Cross said urgently, “You won't think me interfering, Joe, but Brigid came to the office and told me about your little trouble. I guessed there was something upsetting her. I only wanted to say how sorry I am.” Joe was amused at Cross's delicacy, and touched that Brigid, for all her fierce pride, had humiliated herself so abjectly before him, but this didn't seem to matter either.

“I know, Jerry, I know,” he said squeezing Cross's arm, but Cross was full of the subject.

“It's going to be terrible, however you arrange things,” he said, “and I only want you to know that I'll be delighted to do anything. Delighted! Because I have a great admiration for Brigid, Joe. You know that.” Joe realized that by ways that could have been no great pleasure to her, Brigid had at last managed to pierce Cross's defenses. Being Cross, he was doing more than interceding for her. He was hiding the check on the mantelpiece.

After supper Joe said to Brigid:

“I've been thinking this thing over, dear, and I see only one way out. We have to bring the child here.”

“I've been thinking it over too, and I don't see the necessity for that at all,” she said hastily. “Cross thinks the same. To tell you the truth, I think 'twould be impossible for everybody.”

Joe could see exactly what she was thinking about. Now that the burden of secrecy had been lifted, she had fled to the opposite extreme of self-confidence. Only a wild outburst of self-confidence could have given her the courage to go to Cross at all. But with self-confidence she had regained all her old devious personality, and was plotting like mad to retrieve as much as possible from the wreck and avoid humiliating herself before the neighbors and before Joe's decent, common, working-class family.

“Not impossible,” he said. “Difficult, I grant you. We've made a good many friends on the estate, and it's not going to make our position here any better. But others have had to do the same and worse.”

“It's easier for a man than for a woman,” Brigid said ruefully.

“It's harder for a woman because she does more to make the position she finds herself in,” said Joe sternly. “It's not easy for anybody. All the same, it doesn't count compared with a child's life.”

“And there's your mother to be considered,” she said.

“Exactly. There's Mother, and there's Barbara and Coralie, and we know what they'll think and say. They'll make you pay, Brigid, and I'll suffer for it. But that's not the worst. The worst is that we may get the kid too late for her to be able to fit in. Still, bad as that is, it will be easier now than it would be in ten or fifteen years' time.”

“I don't know, Joe,” Brigid said earnestly. “I cracked up on you before because I was trying to handle it on my own. I won't crack up on you again, and I think there are a lot of things I can do without making ourselves miserable into the bargain.”

“Such as?”

“Well, it was really Jerry who suggested it—getting her over here to a decent home where we can keep an eye on her, taking her on holidays with Nance, and seeing that she goes to a good school when she's old enough.”

“And I suppose Jerry offered to help?”

“He did,” she admitted. “He's damn decent.”

“He is decent,” said Joe. “All the same, he's wrong. Dead wrong.” Like many gentle souls, Joe had a streak of iron in him, and when he made up his mind about something he could be very obstinate. “Jerry is a bachelor. He doesn't even know what he's talking about. You can cut off a man or woman as a loss, and feel that maybe they'll keep afloat, but you can't do that to a child. A child is too helpless. And this time, it isn't only you who have to live with the consequences. I have to live with them as well, and if anything happened to that child, I'd be a murderer as well. I've got my faults, Brigid, but I'm not a murderer.”

A
FORTNIGHT
later they were flying in from the sea over Dublin, and Joe knew that Brigid was losing her nerve. Every moment seemed to leave her more panic-stricken. When they travelled into the city on the tall, bumpy, swaying bus, she kept silent, but in the hotel room she broke down.