The Secret Journey (26 page)

He must come to a decision.

To Mr. Kilkey, the very idea of coming to a decision about anything was hateful. In all his life he could not recall a time when the rhythm of it had been so rudely disturbed as it was now. The world had dragged him out, hauled him from those placid waters of content and rudely flung him down into a quite different world. It had neither the shape nor the order of that other world in which he had lived in such blissful content.

He swung his legs against the granite wall, and from time to time slapped his knees with the flat of his hands.

‘What am I to do? If I agree with her mother, she'll go. That's certain. No Dermod will keep her at home, for she has the same restless itch as the rest of the family.'

Yes. The more Joseph Kilkey pondered on this matter, the clearer became the picture on which he had focussed his attention.

‘I love Maureen! She knows it. She can be absolutely certain of me, but I can't be of her. Aye! I had better face the music and be done with it.' Was she just doing this to bring about a rift? No. Hardly that. For hadn't she herself begged him to go round to Hatfields and see her mother? ‘Oh, hang it!' said Kilkey. ‘It's so hard. How can I let this woman down? It would be horrible, mean. And yet if I don't, she'll go. Blast! Blast!'

He raised his head and looked imploringly at the sky.

‘I suppose I'll have to do it. Yes. There's Dermod. It's either her mother, or my home smashed up. But it's awful, just having to think about it—having to do it is even worse.'

He sighed. Why wasn't the world a happy place? Why weren't people decent?

‘But even now I don't understand. No. I confess I'm beat there. I don't understand how this poor woman can have got tied up like she has. And you can't get a word out of her, or her son. Perhaps Maureen is right, we ought to get out of the neighbourhood altogether.'

This thought released a spring of hope in Joseph Kilkey. ‘Yes. We could do that. Perhaps she'll grow to understand me. Love me better as time goes on. Ah, well.'

He stood up and looked across the waters.

‘Maybe I'd better see her mother this very evening. Yes. I'll give her a surprise. I'll settle everything this evening with Mrs. Fury.'

He turned away and walked slowly along the quay. He looked at his watch. ‘Phew!' he said to himself. ‘She'll think something has happened to me all right. I'd better push off,' and he increased his pace up the shed.

‘I never thought this would ever happen. It just shows. You have to be careful. And these moneylenders and their queer ways—well, they beat me entirely. God! if my mother, home in Clare, thought I was involved with one of these people, she'd do a double somersault.'

His thoughts rather than his feet carried him up the shed.

‘Aye! after all, all our happiness depends on this. I've simply got to see Maureen's side of the case. I wish sometimes she would see mine,' and his heart yearned for that deep and lasting content. He was happy enough. But he wasn't so sure of Maureen. If only she would learn to love him deeply, if only they could be welded together, an unbreakable chain forged by understanding. Why was Maureen becoming so unsettled? Joseph Kilkey could only put his finger upon one reason. That aunt from Cork.

‘Aye! She hates me. I can't understand her at all.'

In fact, he couldn't understand anybody who wasn't as tolerable, as contented, as happy as himself.

As he entered yet another shed he thought to himself, ‘I'll have to do it. There's nothing else for it. I'll have to tell her mother, and I must do it to-night.'

Having resolved himself to this, he felt easier in his mind. At least it would save his home.

‘Everything'll come right in the end.'

Suddenly a voice hailed him. In raucous tones it called, ‘Hey! Hey there!'

Joseph Kilkey stood still and looked about him.

‘Hey!' came the voice once more, and it seemed to come from the direction of the river. Joseph Kilkey went further down the shed, which led on to another quay. At last he saw arms waving.

‘Hey! Give us a hand, mate.'

Joseph Kilkey ran towards the figure that beckoned at the end of the quay. He forgot everything now, hearing only the hailing shouts, and seeing those frantically waving arms. It was getting dusk, and even as he came up he saw another man lighting a lamp.

‘What's up?' he asked breathlessly.

The man, who turned out to be a dock-gateman, said dramatically, and with another wave of his arm, ‘Can you give us a hand to get this woman out of the water?'

He flung the end of a rope into Joseph Kilkey's hands, as though assured of his help, and went on:

‘There's a woman down there. She's got to be got out. Ready, Mike?' He turned to the man holding the lamp.

Mike was a policeman, and judging by the expression upon his face he had become quite inured to these scenes. Indeed he seemed rather taken aback by the horrified look upon Kilkey's face. He swung the lamp in the air.

‘Hang on to that rope,' he said; and going to the edge called down, ‘Ready now. Have you got a good hold?'

‘Aye! And for Christ's sake hurry up about it. The stench down here is enough to …'

Kilkey realized at once. The policeman put the lamp down, and took a hold on the rope. ‘Heave,' called the dock-gateman.

‘Easy she goes,' came the voice from below.

And at length there appeared over the edge of the quay the body of a woman dressed entirely in black.

‘God!' said the policeman. ‘What a smell!'

Joseph Kilkey, still holding taut the rope, looked down at the bundle dangling at the quay's edge. Unlike the others, he seemed quite indifferent to the smell. He was attracted rather by the body itself, by the way it lay huddled in such a pathetic heap, and he realized that he had only to give a single jerk on the slack of the rope for the body to hurtle down to the water again.

‘Pull it in,' said the dock-gateman. ‘We can't hang round here all the bloody night.'

Joseph Kilkey pulled on the rope. The body was clear. The policeman raised the lamp aloft, so that its sickly yellowish light fell upon the dead woman's face.

‘Ah! There's an arm missing,' said the policeman, but Kilkey was too occupied looking at her face.

The three men looked down at the still figure. Behind them the great sheet of steel that formed the sliding gate of the shed, beneath their feet the hard cold granite of the quay, beyond this the luminous sheen upon the green oily waters of the river. And the stench that rose from this bedraggled body on the quay commingled with the various odours that rose like many breaths upon the evening air. The smell of bacon and cheese, of fruit, of grain and tobacco, of rope and stout wood, all these became mixed with the odours of corruption. The three men stared down at the woman.

‘Looks like a suicide,' remarked the dock-gateman.

They held their fingers to their noses.

‘Aye,' drawled the policeman. ‘But it's funny about that there arm. A bit suspicious-like to my way of thinking,' to which remark the dock-gateman replied with a grin:

‘The bloody thing fell off in the water, no doubt. Jesus! It smells as though it were in the water for some time.'

‘Aye! And we'd better get the bloody thing to hell out of here,' said the policeman.

Joseph Kilkey said nothing. As he looked into the wretched and almost unrecognizable features of the woman he felt a sort of sick feeling rise in him. He wanted to retch.

‘Poor woman!' he thought. ‘Just look at her face. And here am I grumbling like a damned fool about my miseries. Dear me! Dear me!'

‘Come on, for Christ's sake,' said the dock-gateman. ‘I've got to get my supper.'

‘And you reckon you can eat your supper after that?' said Kilkey. It was the first comment he had made.

‘Ah! Here's the wagon,' said the policeman, ‘and not before its bloody time. If there's anything I hate on this job, it's fishing these things out of the river. Silly cows! They always seem to turn up in my direction.'

Joseph Kilkey looked at the policeman. He was six foot high, with a reddish-purple face, the eyes in which were almost hidden from view by the cupped eyebrows.

Now Mr. Kilkey really felt sick. He went to the quay side and retched into the river. ‘What a callous swine!' he thought, for somehow, and in some strange way that only Mr. Kilkey himself could have explained, there rose, there emanated from this derelict and putrid corpse something of its humanness, as though that wretched being, finding voice, had cried out that now at last she was free. No longer tied to things. This wretchedness was a face in itself, illuminated now by the all-devouring lights of the lamp, and shrouded from above by the now damp air, pregnant with the odours of life and death.

‘Ah! There's a note in the pocket,' said Joseph Kilkey, and he bent down and put his fingers on a piece of white paper, the end of which he had espied sticking from the opening of her dress-body. And he could not help but look at her face, which reminded him of some hunted beast. Why had that woman thrown away her life? Why did she lie there so foul, so piteous, and yet, though beyond aid and all mental purpose, still breathing as though from some hidden fastness of her being the essence of her humanity?

‘And here I am grumbling like the swine I am. Grumbling at Maureen, and at that woman. Worrying myself into a state, and yet I'm alive—alive—and all the world's alive. But this poor woman is dead.'

He rose to his feet and handed the sopping piece of paper to the policeman. The officer laid it flat upon the quay, and bringing the hurricane lamp down to it was able, after great difficulty, to decipher the following scrawled in blue pencil in a large childish hand:

‘My name is Madeline O'Hara, and I have eight children.'

‘Well, that cuts out all suspicion, anyhow,' said the policeman.

Two men came up. ‘Is this the body?' they asked, as though with one voice.

‘Aye! This is it,' said the dock-gateman, and he touched it with his foot.

‘Right-oh!' They moved it on to the stretcher. The dock-gateman, thinking of his waiting supper, did his best with the toe of one foot. The men lifted the stretcher away, and slid it into the van. The van rolled off, the noise of its steel-plated wheels echoing in the cavernous shed.

‘Ah well! And that's that,' said the policeman. ‘I must make out my notes.'

‘Aye! Well—good-night, Mike,' said the dock-gateman, and he turned to Joseph Kilkey. ‘Thanks, mate. Now I must run off and get my supper. Good-night, and thanks again.' He ran off towards his little hut.

Mr. Kilkey was so upset that he stood looking at the spot where the body had lain for a few seconds before finally going into the shed.

As he hurried home to Price Street, more than three hours late, there was not a single thought in his head. All thought had been obliterated by the picture of the woman's face that remained fastened upon his mind. He could not blot it out. When he reached the Dock Road, it was already dark.

‘Maureen will have something to say about this,' he said to himself, and increased his pace until he reached the King's Road, when he fell back again into his usual leisurely pace.

Maureen Kilkey had much more to say than he had really expected. That he was so late didn't seem to matter so much.

‘Good Lord!' she said, scowling at him. ‘The time you roll up from work. It's nearly half-ten now.'

‘Is it?' said Mr. Kilkey. ‘Well! What if it is?'

‘And what if it isn't?' she snapped back at him. ‘Did you call to see Mother?'

‘No, I didn't,' replied Mr. Kilkey, whose eyes were searching about the kitchen. ‘Where's the baby?'

‘In the cradle, of course. So you didn't go, after all?'

‘I told you I'd see your mother this evening, Maureen. Why are you always nagging at me lately?' he asked. ‘What is the matter with you, really? I'll go round directly I've had a bite to eat. Won't that do?'

He took off his coat and hung it behind the door. The cap followed. Then he went outside to wash.

Maureen Kilkey sat down. Everything was ready. The table had been laid since half-past five. The fire burned red in the grate. The kettle boiled away on the hob. Outside, Joseph Kilkey was swilling the day's dirt from his face, from the upper part of his body. Having dried himself, he began to unlace his boots.

‘Oh, you can't start washing your feet now,' called Maureen through the open door. ‘The food's been cooked hours.'

‘All right, then, I won't bother,' he said.

He realized at once that Maureen was angry with him. He sat down, repeating with great emphasis his promise to go round to Hatfields and settle things once and for all with her mother.

‘Oh, you needn't bother now,' she almost flung the words at him. ‘I've settled it myself.' She pushed a plate of hot-pot before him, steaming from the oven.

‘How?' asked Joseph Kilkey, too surprised to add another single word.

‘Never mind how,' shouted Maureen. ‘I've settled it, and that's all.'

If Mr. Kilkey had been endowed by nature with eyes at the back of his head, and therefore in the fortunate position of being able to see what went on behind as well as in front of him, he would have been surprised at the early hour at which his wife got up—not that Mrs. Kilkey was possessed of any great desire to start her day early, but merely that the knock at the door at half-past seven in the morning was one that had a sort of surprising and welcome sound behind it. The postman had dropped a letter in the box. Mrs. Kilkey, throwing a coat round her shoulders, went down into the lobby and took the letter. The last letter she had received was one from her Aunt Brigid. That was some ten months previous. Naturally she was curious. Who could have written to her? The stamp bore the Gelton postmark. She ran upstairs and jumped back into the warm bed. She had a sudden intuition. This letter could only be from Mrs. Ragner. In this she was wrong. Her surprise knew no bounds when she discovered that the letter was from her brother Desmond, and it read as follows: