‘Though I hold no brief for Mr. Neary,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘yet I am loath to think he is the dastard you describe. If, as you say, on what grounds I do not inquire, he has deserted his wife, no doubt he had excellent reasons for doing so.’
Miss Counihan could not think too harshly of a man whom her charms had brought to the brink of bigamy, if indeed they had. Nor was any good purpose to be served by her concurring in Wylie’s denigrations of a suitor more solvent, if – er – personally less interesting than himself. She would not identify herself more closely with Wylie than was convenient to her purpose (Murphy) or agreeable to her appetite. If she treated him with less rigour than she had Neary, it was simply because the latter took away her appetite. But she had made it as clear to the one as she had to the other, that so long as any hope of Murphy remained her affections were to be regarded as in a state of suspension. Wylie accepted this with a very good grace. He found her suspended affections so cordial that he did not greatly care if they were never released.
Wylie, intelligent enough to thank his stars he was not more so, saw his mistake in defending Murphy and attacking Neary. A man could no more work a woman out of position on her own ground of sentimental lech than he could outsmell a dog. Her instinct was a menstruum, resolving every move he made, immediately and without effort, into its final implications for her vanity and interest. The only points at which Miss Counihan was vulnerable were her erogenous zones and her need for Murphy. He engaged a rapid skirmish with the former and said:
‘I may be quite wrong about Neary. I trust I am. He may be the most dependable person in the world. But without Cooper he will never find Murphy. His talents are not that kind. And till Murphy is found there is nothing to be done.’
Miss Counihan had a sad feeling that after Murphy was found there might be still less to be done. She said:
‘What do you propose?’
Before Wylie proposed anything he would like to say that Murphy’s need for Miss Counihan was certainly greater than hers for him. She could judge of his distress from Cooper’s description of how he had found him, the victim apparently of some brutal attack, at the hands of a business rival in all probability, in a dwelling not only unfit for human habitation but condemned by the central authority. Now he was probably sleeping on the Embankment, or being moved all night long round and round St. James’s Park, or suffering the agonies of the damned in the crypt of St. Martin’s in the Fields. It was essential to find him without delay, not merely in order to have him satisfy Miss Counihan that his attitude towards her was as positive as it had ever been, though that of course remained the paramount consideration, but also so that he might be saved from his foolish Irish pride. So long as he was allowed to deprive himself of Miss Counihan’s society, through some mistaken idea of chivalry, his every effort was being crippled. But with Miss Counihan at his side, to stimulate, encourage, console and reward him, there was no eminence to which he might not attain.
‘I asked what you proposed,’ said Miss Counihan.
Wylie proposed that they should all go to London, she, he and Cooper. She would be the heart and soul, he the brains, Cooper the claws, of the expedition. This would enable her to let loose on Murphy, the moment he was found, her pent-up affections, which he, Wylie, in the meantime, would be happy and flattered to exercise daily, in addition to his lesser functions of dealing with Neary and keeping Cooper off the bottle. And bringing hope into the life of Ariadne née Cox, he might have added, but did not.
‘And who pays,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘for this big push?’
‘Ultimately Neary,’ said Wylie.
He adduced the letter, in which Neary bemoaned his hastiness with Cooper, implored Wylie to enter his service, and panted after the hem of Miss Counihan’s fur coat, as one of credit through and through. It might be necessary to call on Miss Counihan for some of the more immediate outgoings, which she must regard not as a mere advance, but as an investment, with Murphy among the dividends.
‘I could not leave before Saturday,’ said Miss Counihan. She was in the middle of a fitting.
‘Well,’ said Wylie, ‘the better the day … It is always pleasant to leave this country, but never more so than by the Saturday B. and I., with the ladies and gentlemen of the theatre enjoying the high-seas licence and a full night on the water.’
‘I mean there would be time,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘to advise Mr. Neary and have the whole arrangement placed on a less – er – speculative footing.’
‘I am against any liaison with Neary,’ said Wylie, ‘until Murphy is found. Applied to now, with everything still so very much up in the air, he might be foolish enough to put obstacles in the way of his own advancement. But confront him with his friend and beloved, at a moment when his spirits are low, with Murphy in the background an accomplished fact, and a shower of benefits is I think certain.’
If the worst comes to the worst, thought Wylie, if Murphy cannot be found, if Neary turns nasty, there is always the Cox.
If the worst comes to the worst, thought Miss Counihan, if my love cannot be found, if Wylie turns nasty, there is always Neary.
‘Very well,’ she said.
Wylie assured her she would never regret it. None of them would ever regret it. It was the beginning of new life for them all, her, Murphy, Neary, his unworthy self. It was the end of darkness for all concerned. He moved towards the door.
‘Regret or not,’ said Miss Counihan, ‘new life or not, I shall never forget your kindness.’
He stood with his back to the door, one hand behind him holding the handle, the other describing the gesture that he always used when words were inadequate to conceal what he felt. Miss Counihan in turn compelled just so much understanding to sit for a moment on her face as it could readily retrieve. It was a risk she did not often care to take.
‘It is you who are good,’ said Wylie, ‘not I.’
Left alone, she stirred the fire in vain. The turf was truly Irish in its eleutheromania, it would not burn behind bars. She turned off the light, opened the window and leaned out. Is it its back that the moon can never turn to the earth, or its face? Which was worse, never to serve him whom she loved or perpetually those, one after the other, whom she scarcely disliked. These were knotty points. Wylie and Cooper appeared on the pavement, two tiny heads in the pillories of their shoulders (Murphy’s figure). Then Cooper was suddenly in motion, jerking along in his frustrated run, expanding into full length as he receded. She did not heed the click of the street door slammed, warning her to take up a position worthy of being surprised by Wylie, but craned still further out and down till not more than half her person, and that half clear of the floor, remained in the room. Bounding the grey pavement, stretching away on either hand beneath the grey spans of steps, the areas made a fosse of darkness. The spikes of the railings were a fine saw edge, spurting light. Miss Counihan closed her eyes, which was unwise, and seemed likely to leave the room altogether when Wylie’s hands, making two skilful handfuls of her breasts, drew her back to a more social vertigo.
8
IT must have been while the chandlers were mocking Murphy that the shocking thing happened.
That day, Friday, October the 11th, after many days, Miss Carridge found her bread, it came bobbing back to her in the form of free samples of various sorts, shaving soap, scent, toilet soap, foot salts, bath cubes, dentifrice, deodorants and even depilatories. It is so easy to lose personal freshness. Miss Carridge had one incalculable advantage over most of her kind – insmell into her infirmity. She would not stink without a struggle, provided the struggle were not too expensive.
Highly elated, thoroughly scoured and anointed in every nook and corner, rashly glowing with the sense of being what she called ‘pristine’, Miss Carridge appeared to Celia with the cup of tea. Celia was standing at the window, looking out, in an attitude quite foreign to her.
‘Come in,’ said Celia.
‘Drink it before it curdles,’ said Miss Carridge.
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Celia whirled round, exclaiming:
‘Oh, Miss Carridge, is that you, I am so worried about the old boy, there has not been a move or a stir out of him all day.’ Her agitation carried her away, she came and took Miss Carridge by the arm.
‘What nonsense,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘he took in his tray and put it out as usual.’
‘That was hours ago,’ said Celia. ‘There hasn’t been a stir out of him since.’
‘Pardon me,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘I heard him moving about as usual quite distinctly.’
‘But how could you have and not me?’ said Celia.
‘For the excellent reason,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘that you are not I.’ She paused for this striking nominative to be admired. ‘Have you forgotten the day I had to draw your attention to the plaster he was stamping down on your head?’
‘But now I have got to expect it,’ said Celia, ‘and listen for it, and this is the first time I haven’t heard it.’
‘What nonsense,’ said Miss Carridge. ‘What you want—’
‘No, no,’ said Celia, ‘not till I know.’
Miss Carridge shrugged without pity and turned to go, Celia clung to her arm. Miss Carridge sweated blessings on the unguents that made such cordiality possible, beads of gratification burst out all over her. Truly it is a tragic quality, that which the Romans called caper, particularly when associated with insmell.
‘My poor child,’ said the virgin Miss Carridge, ‘how can I set your mind at rest?’
‘By going up and looking,’ said Celia.
‘I have strict orders never to disturb him,’ said Miss Carridge, ‘but I cannot bear to see you in such a state.’
Celia was in a state indeed, trembling and ashen. The footsteps overhead had become part and parcel of her afternoon, with the rocking-chair and the vermigrade wane of light. An Ægean nightfall suddenly in Brewery Road could not have upset her more than this failure of the steps.
She stood at the foot of the stairs while Miss Carridge climbed them softly, listened at the door, knocked, knocked louder, pounded, rattled the handle, opened with her duplicate key, took a few steps in the room, then stood still. The old boy lay curled up in meanders of blood on her expensive lino, a cut-throat razor clutched in his hand and his throat cut in effect. With a calm that surprised her Miss Carridge surveyed the scene. It was so exactly what she would have expected, and must therefore at some time or other have imagined, that she felt no shock, or very little. She heard Celia call ‘What?’ She said to herself, if I call a doctor I must pay his fee, but if I call the police … The razor was closed, a finger was almost severed, a sudden black flurry filled the mouth. These details, which she could never have imagined, caused her gorge to rise, these and others too painful to record. She came speeding down the stairs one step at a time, her feet going so fast that she seemed on little caterpillar wheels, her forefinger sawing horribly at her craw for Celia’s benefit. She slithered to a stop on the steps of the house and screeched for the police. She capered about in the street like a consternated ostrich, with strangled distracted rushes towards the York and Caledonian Roads in turn, embarrassingly equidistant from the tragedy, tossing up her arms, undoing the good work of the samples, screeching for police aid. Her mind was so collected that she saw clearly the impropriety of letting it appear so. When neighbours and passers-by had assembled in sufficient numbers, she scuttled back to hold her door against them.
The police arrived and sent for a doctor. The doctor arrived and sent for an ambulance. The ambulance arrived and the old boy was carried down the stairs, past Celia stuck on the landing, and put into it. This proved that he still lived, for it is a misdemeanour to put a corpse, no matter how fresh, into an ambulance. But to take one out contravenes no law, by-law, section or sub-section, and it was perfectly in order for the old boy to consummate, as he did, his felony on the way to the hospital.
Miss Carridge was not a penny out of pocket, not one penny. The police, not she, had called the doctor, therefore his fee was on them. The bloody dilapidation of her lovely lino was amply covered by the month’s advance rent paid by the old boy the day before. She had carried off the whole affair in splendid style.
Murphy spent most of that night and the next day and the next night expounding by way of comfort to Celia, on and off, angrily, the unutterable benefits that would accrue, were already accruing, to the old boy from his demise. This was quite beside the point, for Celia was mourning, like all honest survivors, quite frankly for herself. Yet it was not until the small hours of the Sunday morning that he realised the irrelevance of what he was doing, and furthermore its spuriousness. So far from being adapted to Celia, it was not addressed to her.
It is hard to say why she was, and remained, so profoundly distressed. The damage done to her afternoons, which she had grown to treasure almost as much as Murphy his before she picked him up, seems inadequate to account for it. She kept on wanting but not daring to go up and look at the room where it happened. She would go as far as the foot of the stairs and then come back. Her whole behaviour annoyed Murphy, of whose presence she seemed conscious only in fits and starts, and then with a kind of impersonal rapture that he did not relish in the least.
Finally his intimation, proudly casual, that a job was his or as good as his at last, excited her to the extent of an ‘Oh’. Nothing more. Not even an ‘Oh indeed’. He took her angrily by the shoulders and forced her to look at him. The clear green of her eyes, rolling now and everted like an aborting goat’s, was silted with yellow.
‘Look at me,’ he said.
She looked through him. Or back off him.
‘Ever since June,’ he said, ‘it has been job, job, job, nothing but job. Nothing happens in the world but is specially designed to exalt me into a job. I say a job is the end of us both, or at least of me. You say no, but the beginning. I am to be a new man, you are to be a new woman, the entire sublunary excrement will turn to civet, there will be more joy in heaven over Murphy finding a job than over the billions of leather-bums that never had anything else. I need you, you only want me, you have the whip, you win.’
He stopped, left in the lurch by his emotion. The anger that gave him the energy to begin was gone before he had half ended. A few words used it up. So it had always been, not only with anger, not only with words.
Celia did not look a winner, sagging under his hands, breathing painfully through her mouth, her eyes soiled and wild.
‘Avoid exhaustion,’ she murmured, in weary ellipsis of Suk.
‘I drag round this warren,’ said Murphy, with the last dregs of resentment, ‘day after day, hail, rain, sleet, snow, sog, I mean fog, soot, and I suppose fine, my breeches falling off with a fourpenny vomitory, looking for your job. At last I find it, it finds me, I am half dead with abuse and exposure, I am in a marasmus, I do not delay a moment but come crawling back to receive your congratulations. You say “Oh”. It is better than “Yah”.’
‘You don’t understand,’ said Celia, who was not trying to follow.
‘No,’ said Murphy. ‘A decayed valet severs the connexion and you set up a niobaloo as though he were your fourteen children. No. I am at a loss.’
‘Not valet,’ said Celia. ‘Butler. Exbutler.’
‘XX butler,’ said Murphy. ‘Porter.’
The little scene was over, if scene it could be called. There was a long silence, Celia forgiving Murphy for having spoken roughly to her, Miss Counihan, Wylie and Cooper breaking their fast on the Liverpool–London express. Murphy got up and began to dress with care.
‘Why did the barmaid champagne?’ he said. ‘Do you give it up?’
‘Yes,’ said Celia.
‘Because the stout porter bitter,’ said Murphy.
This was a joke that did not amuse Celia, at the best of times and places it could not have amused her. That did not matter. So far from being adapted to her, it was not addressed to her. It amused Murphy, that was all that mattered. He always found it most funny, m
ore than most funny, clonic, it and one other concerning a bottle of stout and a card party. These were the Gilmigrim jokes, so called from the Lilliputian wine. He staggered about on the floor in his bare feet, one time amateur theological student’s shirt, dicky and lemon bow, overcome by the toxins of this simple little joke. He sank down on the dream of Descartes linoleum, choking and writhing like a chicken with the gapes, seeing the scene. On the one hand the barmaid, fresh from the country, a horse’s head on a cow’s body, her crape bodice more a W than a V, her legs more an X than an O, her eyes closed for the sweet pain, leaning out through the hatch of the bar parlour. On the other the stout porter, mounting the footrail, his canines gleaming behind a pad of frothy whisker. Then the nip, and Tintoretto’s Origin of the Milky Way.
The fit was so much more like one of epilepsy than of laughter that Celia felt alarm. Watching him roll on the floor in his only decent shirt and dicky, she made the needful changes, recalled the scene in the mew and went to his assistance, as she had then. It was unnecessary, the fit was over, gloom took its place, as after a heavy night.
He suffered her to dress him. When she had done he sat down in his chair and said:
‘God knows now when I’ll be back.’
Immediately she wanted to know all about it. It was in order to torment at his ease this tardy concern that he had sat down. He still loved her enough to enjoy cutting the tripes out of her occasionally. When he felt appeased, as he soon did, he stopped rocking, held up his hand and said:
‘The job is your fault. If it doesn’t come off I’ll be back this evening. If it does come off I don’t know when I’ll be back. That was what I meant when I said God knew. If they let me start straight away so much the worse.’
‘They?’ said Celia. ‘Who? Start what?’
‘You’ll know this evening,’ said Murphy. ‘Or if not this evening, to-morrow evening. Or if not to-morrow evening, the day after to-morrow evening. And so on.’ He stood up. ‘Give the coat a bit of a dinge behind in the waist,’ he said. ‘The draught is terrible.’