The Collected Stories (7 page)

Cars ran miles to the gallon, still on the bench: twenty-five, thirty-two, thirty-nine with careful timing and more use of clutch than brake. Another guest, Mr Haydon, marked the racing columns of the newspaper on the edge of the same bench; hairnet of purple threads on the face, commercial traveller. ‘Never made the grade,’ McVittie had pronounced. ‘Soon for the jump.’ On the next bench a pattern for a Fair Isle pullover lay open between Mrs O’Connor and Mrs Ryan, and around them children in all postures. Ingolsby was the one guest who sat alone, retired lecturer of English, while the tennis ball hopped or paused.

‘What part of the world is Lagos in?’ Haydon stirred out of the newspaper to interrupt the wear and tear on clutches. ‘You should know that, Mr Ryan. You’re a teacher.’

‘I think Africa,’ the uncertain reply came, and his sudden flush and blanching brought Ingolsby in.

‘Because somebody happens to be a teacher is no reason why they should know where Lagos is.’

‘If teachers don’t know that sort of thing who can know?’ Haydon was angered. ‘Don’t they have to teach the stuff to kids?’

‘If a teacher has to teach a geography lesson he simply looks up his information in a textbook beforehand. A doctor doesn’t go round with all his patients’ ailments in his head. He has files,’ Ingolsby explained with solid satisfaction.

‘But it’s not getting us any nearer to where the hell Lagos is?’

‘It’s in Nigeria,’ Ingolsby said.

‘It’s in Nigeria, in Africa.’ Ryan tried to smooth over the antagonism.

‘That was what I wanted to know. Thank you, Mr Ryan,’ Haydon said pointedly and buried his head in the newspaper again.

‘Amazing the actual number of places there is in this world, when you come to think,’ O’Connor added.

‘A man could spend his whole life learning the names of places and they’d still be as many as the sands of the seashore left,’ McVittie said.

The ball was idle in my hand. The tide was full, a coal boat moving out from Sligo in the channel. There were no blue spaces against Knocknarea.

Small annual calvary of the poor, mile downhill and uphill between Parkes’ and the cannon. The Calm Sea closer, inlet that ran to Ballisodare past the lobster pool, no envy there, deserted except the one day they put flags down and held the races at low tide, but still in the dead quiet the pain of voices coming across the golf links, and Jane Simpson with others there.

The first rain was loud on Haydon’s newspaper, and it was followed by a general rising and gradual procession indoors between the still sparse drops.

‘Imagine the name they called this.’ Ingolsby paused to hold a blood-orange rose towards Ryan as they went along the flowerbed.

‘I’m not so well up on flowers,’ Ryan apologized.

‘Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy. Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy,’
Ingolsby enunciated.

‘Names are a funny thing,’ Ryan said without thought.

‘Names are a funny thing, as you put it,’ Ingolsby repeated sarcastically. ‘
Peace
or
Ena Harkness
or even the
Moulin Rouge
but
Climbing Mrs Sam McGredy
! That’s an atom bomb,’ then he lowered his voice. ‘Never feel you have to know anything because you happen to teach. Never let them bully you with their assumptions of what you should be. Say you don’t know, that it can be discovered in books, if they’re interested. It’s only pretending to know something that’s embarrassing.’

The counsel roused impotent deeps of hatred in Ryan’s eyes as they went the last steps to the door.

A Miss Evans was the one addition to the company over lunch, and when the litter was cleared away with the sheets that served as cloth, and the old varnish of the big elliptical table shone dully about the bowl of roses put back on its centre, Mrs Parkes set a small coal
fire to burn in the grate as an apology for the gloom of rain. All the bars of the evening had fallen into place. ‘The rain anywhere is bad, but at the sea, at the sea, it’s the end,’ rose as a constant sighing in the conversations. The need to escape to some other world grew fiercer, but there was no money.

‘Steal, steal, steal,’ was the one way out.

Raincoat and southwester and outside – without them noticing. Mist halfway down the slopes of Knocknarea, rain and mist blurring the sea. Past Huggards, past the peeling white swan sailing on the signboard of the Swan Hotel, steady drip from the eaves louder than the distant fall of the sea and gull cries, glow of the electric light burning inside through the mist on Peebles’ window, stationer and confectioner: shock of the warning bell ringing as you opened the door.

A girl in blue overalls behind the counter was helping a man choose postcards and they were laughing.

‘Can I help you?’ She turned.

‘I want to look round.’ It was the only possible thing, and it was lucky she was busy with the man.

Rows of comics were on the counter, hours of insensibility to the life in Parkes’,
Wizard
and
Hotspur
and
Rover
and
Champion
, whole worlds.

Put a
Hotspur
on top of the
Wizard
, both on top of the yellow pile of
Rovers
, and draw breath. The man was paying for the postcards. Lift the three free, put them inside the open raincoat, the elbow holding them tight against the side. Walk.

‘Any chance of seeing you in the Silver Slipper tonight?’ the man asked.

‘Stranger things happened in the world,’ she answered, and they both laughed again.

It was impossible to walk loose and casual to the door, it was one forced step after the other, having to think to walk, waiting all the time for the blow from behind. ‘Excuse me,’ it’d probably begin, and then the shame, the police. To get caught the one reason not to steal. In the next world it was only a venial sin, purgatory, and the saints alone got the through express to heaven.

Step after step and rigid step and no blow, a cash register ringing and then the warning bell above the door and the breathing relief of the wet out-of-doors to the sea blurred beyond the golf links, rain coming down same as ever before. Past Huggards and over the
sodden sand of the street, raindrops brilliant in the red ruffles of the roses by the wall.

‘Where did you get the money from for that trash?’ came once I was in the room.

‘Sixpence I found down at the front yesterday.’

‘Why have you to be always stuck in that trash? Why can’t you read something good like Shakespeare that’ll be of some use to you later?’

The old tune: some use to you later.

‘I don’t imagine the comics’ll do much harm. Good taste isn’t cultivated in a day. We rise on stepping stones to greater things,’ Ingolsby intervened.

‘I suppose there’s some consolation in that.’ Ryan was anxious to escape, knowing the hostility the themes of Ingolsby’s ponderous conversations roused. They were felt as a slur or rebuke. This time he’d not escape easily. Ingolsby needed to live through his own voice too this wet evening.

‘What’s your opinion of Shakespeare’s validity for the modern world?’

‘It’s not so easy to say,’ he deferred again, his eyes anxious about the room, his wife on the sofa with Mrs O’Connor, measuring a sleeve of a pullover on their daughter; soon she’d be knitting silently and patiently again while the night came the same as every other coming into her patient life, while McVittie said to O’Connor, ‘The shops out in the country were hard hit by emigration. But we managed to survive. We branched into new lines. We got Esso to put down a petrol pump for instance. We changed with the times.’

‘It’s a cardinal law of nature that every man should have his head firmly screwed on to know how to change with the times and survive,’ O’Connor agreed.

The people in the room had broken up into their separate groups, and when Miss Evans raised her arms in a yawn out of the chair Haydon leaned forward to say, ‘There must have been right old sport last night.’

‘I beg your pardon, Mr Haydon,’ she laughed, pleased.

‘The way all women are, all on their dignity till the business gets down to brass tacks and then an almighty turn of events. And who’d object to an old roll between the sandhills after the dancing anyhow?’ he raised his voice, as if to irritate Ingolsby, who was pressing a reluctant Ryan on Wordsworth.

She laughed softly, a hint of defiance against the unconcealed hostility of the married women with their children in the laugh, smiling a little as she looked towards the windows streaming with rain.

‘The sandhills won’t be much of a temptation tonight, Mr Haydon.’

‘No,’ he said, laughing gently with her, ‘but where there’s an old will there’s always an old way.’ In a voice gentle with what sounded like regret he inquired, ‘It was at the Silver Slipper you were last night, wasn’t it, a bird told me?’

‘The bird was right,’ she said. ‘The Blue Aces were playing there.’

‘The rain, the rain at the sea, is deadly.’ He turned absently in tiredness or memory and reached and took a white shell from the mantelpiece and held it to his ear to listen to it roar.

‘It makes everything miserable,’ McVittie said, tired of his complete possession of O’Connor, but all Haydon did was nod heavily as he replaced the shell and turned again to the girl.

The wash of rain on the windows, the light through their mist going dull on the blue sea of the wallpaper, the red and yellow hollyhocks like tall flowering masts of sailing ships; and when a child wiped a clearing on the glass, cabbages showed between the apple trees in the garden, and the green cooking apples were bright and shining in the leaves with rain.

‘Education comes from the Latin
educo
, to lead forth. People seem to have forgotten that in the modern interpretation of education,’ Ingolsby laboured.

It was some consolation to Ryan that he’d abandoned the poets, but his eyes still apologized to the room. He’d make his position even clearer yet, in his own time.

The turning of the pages without reading, pleasure of delaying pleasure to come. Heroes filled those pages week after week. Rockfist Rogan and Alf Tupper and Wilson the Iron Man. The room, the conversations, the cries of the seagulls, the sea faded: it was the world of imagination, among the performing gods, what I ashamedly desired to become.

Alf Tupper put aside welder and goggles, changed into his country’s singlet to leave the whole field standing in that fantastic last lap, and Wilson,
Wilson, the Iron Man, simply came alone into Tibet and climbed to the top of Everest.

They cut the tongues out of the dead foxes brought to the barracks and threw them out to the grey cat or across the netting wire into the garden. They cut the tongues out of the foxes so that they couldn’t be brought back again for the half-crown the government gave for each dead fox in its campaign for the extermination of foxes. Dry mornings they put out the ‘Recruitment’ and ‘Thistle Ragwort Dock’ posters on their boards and took them in again at nightfall and when it rained.

The Sergeant and his policeman, Bannon, had other such duties, for the last crime had been four years before when Mike Moran stole the spare wheel of Guinea McLoughlin’s tractor, but as he threw it in the river they’d not enough evidence to obtain a conviction. As an army in peacetime their main occupation was boredom, and they had similar useless exercises. The Sergeant inspected the solitary Bannon on parade at nine each morning. They’d spent a certain number of hours patrolling local roads on their bikes. One or other of them had always to be on BO duty in the dayroom beside the phone that seldom rang. These regulations the Superintendent in the town tried to enforce by surprise inspections. These inspections usually found the Sergeant at work in his garden. As he’d almost certainly have been signed out in the books on some fictitious patrol, he’d have to run for cover of the trees along the river and stay hidden until the car left. Then he’d saunter in nervously chewing a grass stalk to inquire what had taken place.

All this changed the day he bought one of the lucky dips at Moroney’s auction. The lucky dips was a way to get rid of the junk at the end of the auction. They came in large sugar bags. His bag concealed two canisters of nuts and bolts and a yellowed medical dictionary.

Bannon was now sent out on the bike to patrol the local roads. The Sergeant sat all day in the dayroom poring over the yellowed pages detailing diseases and their remedies. The weeds in the garden
started to choke the young lettuce, the edges of the unsprayed potato leaves to fritter black, and when the summer thunder with its violent showers made the growth more rapid he called me down to the dayroom.

‘Sit down.’ He offered a chair by turning it towards the empty fireplace. The dictionary was open among the foolscap ledgers on the table,
Patrick Moroney MD 1893
in faded purple copperplate on its flyleaf.

‘You’re old enough to know that nobody can be expected to live for ever?’ he began.

‘Yes.’

‘If you expect something it’s only common intelligence to prepare for it, isn’t that right?’

‘Yes.’

‘Our ages being what they are, it’s no more than natural to expect me to be the first to go?’

‘That’ll be years yet.’

‘We thought that once before and we were wrong. One never knows the day or the hour. The foolish virgins are our lesson.’

I sat stiffly on the wooden chair.

‘If I go you’re the oldest and you’ll have to look after the others. I think now is the time to begin to learn to fend for yourselves. This summer I expect you to look after the garden and timber as if I no longer existed. That way there’ll be no danger you’ll be caught napping when the day comes.’

‘But you do exist.’

‘Have I to spell it out?’ he suddenly shouted. ‘As far as the garden and timber goes I won’t exist. And I’ll see to the best of my ability that you’ll learn not to depend on me for ever. It’s no more than my Christian duty. Is that clear now?’

‘Yes.’

‘Begin by informing the others of the state of affairs. There has to be some beginning somewhere. Is that clear now?’

‘Yes.’

I left to go up the long hallway to the living quarters, the noise of the children at play on its stone floor growing louder. ‘I exist, I don’t exist,’ repeated itself over and over as I tried to find words to tell them the state of affairs, bewildered as to what they were.