The Furys (55 page)

Half-way through the scrubbing of Peter's room she stopped for a rest. She rested standing, leaning against the wall, one hand holding on to the bookshelf. It began to shake, and she loosed her hold of it. She looked at the books on the shelf. A French Primer! Bio-chemistry. History of the World.
Les Misérables –
in French.
Handy Andy,
by Lever. She was reading the titles of the books. ‘H'm,' she muttered. ‘H'm. A lot of rot! Waste!'

Having finished the floor, she remade his bed, dusted the table and dressing-table, and went downstairs. She paused on the bottom stair, as though a sudden thought had arrested her progress, but she only stopped to get breath. She placed the bucket and cloth away. She made some tea, which she drank in the back kitchen, sitting down before the mangle, using the cloth-board as table. Yes. The house must get a real clean-down. It was simply filthy. ‘I wonder?' she exclaimed. ‘I wonder?' and rising to her feet began to search the shelves. She lifted the pans and looked underneath. She ran her hand behind them. ‘No. Of course not. That hungry boy must have found it.'

She sat down again. Mrs Fury's one luxury was a quarter pound of best butter, which she bought each Friday out of her father's pension from Mr Potts, the grocer. This butter she generally placed under one of the iron pans. It was better than roast beef, better than chicken, it was everything to the woman. To Mrs Fury a cup of tea with a slice of bread and best butter was a feast. Now it had gone. Sometimes she went a whole day without anything but this butter on her mind, her thought continually turning to the quiet meal when the others had gone to bed. At one time Brigid Mangan used to send her weekly supplies. That had stopped long ago. Miss Mangan was so busy seeing that the priests' bread was buttered that she had no time to think of sending anything. ‘I wonder where Denny's got to?' she said aloud. ‘I wonder?'

Time to feed Mr Mangan. She heated his milk, put a small drop of brandy into it from the bottle in the cupboard, and went to her father. She was certain that it could only be the brandy that was keeping the old man alive.

Having seen to ‘him', Mrs Fury once more refilled the bucket and went upstairs, this time to her own room. The front room of the house in Hatfields was larger than any of the other rooms, and its window looked out on the front street. It was oblong in shape. In the corner where the big iron bed stood there was a high shelf, a fixture in the room. All the houses in Hatfields had a high shelf let into the wall of the front room. Here Mrs Fury had erected an altar. It was covered with a white strip of cloth. Upon it there stood a small statue of the Sacred Heart, and two vases containing artificial flowers. When fresh flowers were obtainable, the artificial ones were placed to one side. In front of the statue itself there stood a small red glass lamp, in which a night-light burned. Owing to the semi-darkness of this corner of the room, the light from the lamp threw a rich red glow upon a part of the wall, as well as sending this glow upwards like a sort of halo that hung above the altar itself. The lamp had been burning in Hatfields for seventeen years and had never gone out. Not for one single moment had this light been extinguished. When the night-light had burned through, another was already lighted, waiting to take its place. This everlasting illumination seemed almost symbolic. It was like the woman's own faith, to which she had clung passionately, and which had never wavered. Against the amorphous mass of everyday urgencies, against these the light threw itself forward like a bright burning shield. She never entered the room without going to this altar. And whenever she stood in front of it, she felt calm and peaceful, as though the tragic face of the figure in front of her had moved, had put out its holed hand and touched her gently upon the shoulder. Her whole soul seemed to rise, her spirit cling to this face and to the light that glowed so redly and softly upon it. Dirt was nothing, filth was nothing, lies, insult, cheating, all these things were only sores that one reflection from that glow could obliterate. Mrs Fury, having scrubbed white the wooden flooring beneath this altar, now rose on her knees, closed her eyes and prayed. And with this closing of the eyes Hatfields had disappeared, its walls crumbled to dust; its dirt, its sameness, its monotony, its people too, had gone as if with a single flash some heavenly fire from the lamp, like a monstrous sun, had burnt and dried it up. And before it had knelt her children, and now she named them: Desmond, John, Anthony, Peter, her daughter Maureen. Naming them, she raised her right hand, making a sort of half-circle, held it for a moment in the air, then made the sign of the Cross. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.'

She lowered her head, her arms had fallen limp to her sides, and she remained thus. It was as though the life in her had suddenly gone out, and thought itself had been drawn up by the red glow towards that face. After a while she got to her feet and continued her work.

She pulled the huge bed from the wall, and two dead flies fell into the film of dust that had collected behind the bed. She picked up a mouldy halfpenny, some rusty nails, an old holed glove. These she placed on the mantelshelf. Then she knelt down and began to scrub. Suddenly she stopped. The hand with the brush stretched out towards the window, the other rested on the iron bucket. She was staring at the wooden floor. For some reason or other the room had seemed to expand, to extend, so that she imagined she knelt on the brink of a veritable wooden desert, that she must scrub to the very end of it, pausing here and there for a rest. It was as though she had seen mirrored there her own life, as though those occasional pauses were merely magic moments stolen from time, from the long day itself. She looked up at the altar again. There was the early rising, the cleaning, the cooking, washing, mending, Mr Mangan, his comfort, the comfort of others. She saw them all now crystal-clear. These things seemed to rise from the wood and confront her. And when they were seen to, there was that quietness and peace, in the corner, where the ceiling glowed red. Everything was worth it. She began to scrub again. Below, somebody had come in. It was Mr Fury. She heard him climbing the stairs, pause outside the room door.

‘Are you there, Fanny?'

‘Yes. What is it?' she asked, her mind wholly upon other things. ‘What is it?'

‘Are you busy?' asked Dennis Fury. He was leaning on the landing, smoking his pipe.

‘Yes. I am.' And the tone in which it was conveyed seemed to leave no doubt but that she was. ‘Did you see Peter? I sent him after you.' Hearing a step, she added loudly, ‘Don't come in! I'm busy. I left your dinners in the oven. Peter's plate is on the top shelf, yours on the bottom.'

‘Oh! Righto! Righto!' Mr Fury replied. He went downstairs thinking, ‘What's she doing?'

Then he heard the sound of the brush upon the floor. Mrs Fury had begun again. Having scrubbed beneath the bed, she began to push it back against the wall. But for some reason it would not budge. One of its castorless legs had become stuck in the wooden floor. She looked into the bed. She went to the top of the bed and, placing her hands underneath, began to lift. But the bed was stubborn and refused to move, as though it were angry at being disturbed, as though it had resented those festoons of fluff being brushed away from its rusty legs. Mrs Fury went to the door and called, ‘Denny! Denny!' She sat down on the bed. The effort had been too much for her. Mr Fury came running upstairs.

‘What's up?' He burst into the room. He looked at Fanny. She was hot, her face was livid, smudged here and there by dust marks, and a stray feather or two from the pillow had planted themselves on her hair. Her long arms were bare, almost to the shoulder.

‘What?' he asked again.

‘Will you lift this bed?' she said. ‘It's got stuck in the floor. It's really a nuisance. I do wish I could get another castor for it. I have this trouble every time.'

‘Why don't you leave it against the wall?' Mr Fury suggested. He lifted the bed up. ‘There!'

Well, that was done, and there wasn't a word more to be said. When Fanny's spring cleaning began – he called it spring cleaning though it was the woman's weekly job – it was best to get out.

‘You look hot,' he said, and went out of the room.

He tramped heavily down the stairs. ‘Ah!' thought Mrs Fury. ‘Those stairs! I knew there was something.'

Although the man had lifted the bed clear from the patch where the wood was brown-stained and rotted, it had not occurred to him to push it back against the wall. ‘His dinner would get cold,' Mrs Fury thought. ‘Wonderful creatures, men.' She pushed the bed back to the wall. It made a harsh scraping sound. The twenty-five-year-old iron bed was feeling the passage of time. It hated being moved at all. As she scrubbed the last patch near the door she heard Peter coming in. After a while he called up, ‘Dad says what about your dinner, Mother?'

‘Yes! What about it? Have you had yours?' she called downstairs. One hand lay immersed in the dirty black water, the other held the loose knob of the front room door. The boy shouted up:

‘Yes. I'm going to get mine now.'

‘Well, that's good,' the mother called out.

Silence again. She heard the kitchen door close. ‘As long as they have theirs, everything is all right,' she thought.

She got to her feet, surveying the newly cleaned front room. That was done. What was next? Of course. The landing and the stairs. The landing was dark and smelt musty, probably from the damp film of mould that clung to the bare red-distempered walls. Here and there the plaster had given way. Every time a person ascended the stairs, a shower of dust fell from some new part of the wall that had surrendered to the damp. This dust was now an inch thick upon that part of the floor behind the banisters. The floor was bare. Here and there rusty nails protruded, showing where oilcloth had once been.

The woman went downstairs to refill her bucket. She never glanced at Mr Fury or her son as she passed through the kitchen, though the usual cautionary look was extended to her father. Mr Mangan, however, was quite safe, the great belt lashed round his chair. She emptied the bucket and refilled it with clean hot water from the boiler in the back kitchen. The mice that nightly ran along the shelves of the back kitchens of the houses in Hatfields had a habit of falling into the boilers, and as Mrs Fury ladled the water into the bucket she saw two dead mice. She called to Peter, ‘Come here a minute, Peter!'

‘Take these things out and throw them in the bin. It's a disgrace. One can't keep a single bit of food in the house with these mice!'

Peter carried them away. The woman went upstairs, placed her bucket on the floor, and sat down on the huge tin band-box that lay in the corner of the landing. It had just occurred to her that she had to see her daughter at half-past six. She thought of this, endeavouring to draw a picture in her mind of the whole proceedings. She could see Mrs Anna Ragner quite clearly now.

No! She had better not think about it. Just forget it. Her mind had a habit of conjuring up the most weird trains of thought. They seemed to take wing, to encircle and carry her away. She knelt down and began to scrub. During a momentary pause she heard her husband say, ‘Well – I suppose we'd better go out. Best to keep clear when your mother's working.' He was talking to Peter. She heard them moving about the kitchen. She seemed to divine their thoughts from their movements. She could mirror her husband's irritation, his restlessness. He was like a ship anchorless in a storm.

The other! Peter! Well, he was an unknown quantity, a mystery. The boy seemed not to know what to do with himself. Such were Mrs Fury's thoughts, when the back kitchen catch was lifted and they went out again. Where were they going? What did they do with themselves when they went out? Her thoughts seemed to synchronize with the circular movements of her scrubbing-brush. ‘What a job!' she exclaimed. She didn't mind anything excepting the landing. Now she came to think of it, Maureen had been a help. She pushed back the tin box that contained nothing but a set of broken Venetian blinds. Then she renewed her scrubbing. She had reached the end of the landing, and was on the point of taking out the stair-rods, when she heard a noise in the kitchen. Only one thing could make that noise, her father's high-backed chair. She must attend to him at once. This was Mr Mangan's signal that he was hungry. She wrung out the cloths, flung them to the floor, and for the fifth time went into the back kitchen with her bucket. She left it in the sink and went in to her father. She tied an apron round his shoulders, tucked it beneath his chin, and then got his milk pudding from the oven. Milk puddings and pobs were Mr Mangan's only food.

She began to feed him. Those small bright eyes seemed to say, ‘I can see you, Fanny. I can see you looking hot and tired. I'm sorry for you. I can see you raising that spoon up and down.' The woman wiped her father's mouth after each spoonful. Once she was sure he smiled, and she said in a sort of confiding whisper, ‘Dad! You look almost bonny today!'

There, that was done. A quarter past two. How time flew when one worked! She made some tea, made toast at the fire, and sat herself down. There was something significant in the way the woman approached the square table set in the centre of the kitchen. She seemed not to walk to it, but to be drawn towards it by some magnetic power. And the act of sitting at it seemed a kind of blind obeisance to the slavery of this dead wood. The table was a throne, a cage, a cell, a refuge, a lighthouse. Everything, thought, word and deed, seemed centred about this four-legged table. Her family had sat at it, as children, as men. Plans had been made there – even John's dead body had been laid upon it. The wood seemed to have drawn into it something of their very spirit.

The woman ate hurriedly, as though there were not a minute to be wasted. Now to the stairs. Would she get the stairs and lobby finished by half-past three? Would she have time to do the two kitchens? Having filled her bucket, she ascended the stairs once more.