It was then – when another silence gathered and continued for a couple of minutes – that Eddie knew the mother had guessed also: suddenly it came into her face that Timothy was as fit as a fiddle. Eddie saw her glance once across the table, but the old fellow was intent on his food. On other birthday occasions Timothy would have talked about Mr Kinnally, about his ‘circle’, which was how the friends who came to the flat were always described. Blearily, through a fog of Cork gin, Eddie knew all that, even heard the echo of Timothy’s rather high-pitched voice at this same table. But talk about Mr Kinnally had never been enough.
‘’Course it could go on the way it is for years,’ Eddie said, the silence having now become dense. ‘As long as there’s a drop coming through at all you’re in business with a toilet cistern.’
He continued about the faulty valve, stumbling over some of the words, his speech thickened by the gin. From time to time the old man nodded, but no sign came from the mother. Her features were bleak now, quite unlike they’d been a moment ago, when she’d kept the conversation going. The two had met when she walked up the avenue of Coolattin one day, looking for petrol for her car: Timothy had reported that too. The car was broken down a mile away; she came to the first house there was, which happened to be Coolattin. They walked back to the car together and they fell in love. A Morris 8, Timothy said; 1950 it was. ‘A lifetime’s celebration of love,’ he’d said that morning, in the toneless voice he sometimes adopted. ‘That’s what you’ll find down there.’
It wouldn’t have been enough, either, to have had Kinnally here in person. Kinnally they could have taken; Kinnally would have oozed about the place, remarking on the furniture and the pictures on the walls. Judicious, as he would have said himself, a favourite word. Kinnally could be judicious. Rough trade was different.
‘There’s trifle,’ Eddie heard the old woman say before she rose to get it.
The rain came in, heavier now, from the west. A signpost indicated Athlone ahead, and Eddie remembered being informed in a classroom that this town was more or less the centre of Ireland. He drove slowly. If for any reason a police car signalled him to stop he would be found to have more than the permitted quantity of alcohol in his bloodstream; if for any reason his clothing was searched he would be found to be in possession of stolen property; if he was questioned about the car he was driving he would not be believed when he said it had been earlier lent to him for a purpose.
The Rover’s windscreen wipers softly swayed, the glass of the windscreen perfectly clear in their wake. Then a lorry went by, and threw up surface water from the road. On the radio Chris de Burgh sang.
The sooner he disposed of the bit of silver the better, Athlone maybe. In Galway he would dump the car in a car park somewhere. The single effect remaining after his intake of gin was the thirst he experienced, as dry as paper his mouth was.
He turned Chris de Burgh off, not trying another channel. It was one thing to scarper off, as Timothy had from that house: he’d scarpered himself from Tallaght. To turn the knife was different. Fifteen years later to make your point with rough trade and transparent lies, to lash out venomously: how had they cocked him up, how had they hurt him, to deserve it? All the time when there had been that silence they had gone on eating, as if leaving the food on their plates would be too dramatic a gesture. The old man nodded once or twice about the valve, but she had given no sign that she even heard. Very slightly, as he drove, Eddie’s head began to ache.
‘Pot of tea,’ he ordered in Athlone, and said no, nothing else when the woman waited. The birthday presents had remained on the sideboard, not given to him to deliver, as Timothy had said they probably would be. The two figures stood, hardly moving, at the back door while he hurried across the puddles in the cobbled yard to the car. When he looked back they were no longer there.
‘Great,’ Eddie said when the woman brought the tea, in a metal pot, cup and saucer and a teaspoon. Milk and sugar were already on the pink patterned oilcloth that covered the table top. ‘Thanks,’ Eddie said, and when he had finished and had paid he walked through the rain, his headache clearing in the chilly air. In the first jeweller’s shop the man said he didn’t buy stuff. In the second Eddie was questioned so he said he came from Fardrum, a village he’d driven through. His mother had given him the thing to sell, he explained, the reason being she was sick in bed and needed a dose of medicine. But the jeweller frowned, and the trinket was handed back to him without a further exchange. In a shop that had ornaments and old books in the window Eddie was offered a pound and said he thought the entwined fish were worth more. ‘One fifty,’ came the offer then, and he accepted it.
It didn’t cease to rain. As he drove on through it, Eddie felt better because he’d sold the fish. He felt like stopping in Ballinasloe for another pot of tea but changed his mind. In Galway he dropped the car off in the first car park he came to.
Together they cleared away the dishes. Odo found that the gin in the drawing-room had been mostly drunk. Charlotte washed up at the sink. Then Odo discovered that the little ornament was gone from the hall and slowly went to break this news, the first communication between them since their visitor had left.
‘These things happen,’ Charlotte said, after another silence.
The rain was easing when Eddie emerged from a public house in Galway, having been slaking his thirst with 7-Up and watching Glenroe. As he walked into the city, it dribbled away to nothing. Watery sunshine slipped through the unsettled clouds, brightening the façades in Eyre Square. He sat on a damp seat there, wondering about picking up a girl, but none passed by so he moved away. He didn’t want to think. He wasn’t meant to understand, being only what he was. Being able to read Timothy like a book was just a way of putting it, talking big when nobody could hear.
Yet the day still nagged, its images stumbling about, persisting in Eddie’s bewilderment. Timothy smiled when he said all he was asking was that a message should be passed on. Eddie’s own hand closed over the silver fish. In the dining-room the life drained out of her eyes. Rain splashed the puddles in the cobbled yard and they stood, not moving, in the doorway.
On the quays the breeze from the Atlantic dried the pale stone of the houses and cooled the skin of Eddie’s face, freshening it also. People had come out to stroll, an old man with a smooth-haired terrier, a couple speaking a foreign language. Seagulls screeched, swooping and bickering in the air. It had been the natural thing to lift the ornament in the hall since it was there and no one was around: in fairness you could call it payment for scraping the rust off the ballcock valve, easily ten quid that would have cost them. ‘A lifetime’s celebration,’ Timothy said again.
‘It has actually cleared up,’ Odo said at the window, and Charlotte rose from the armchair by the fire and stood there with him, looking out at the drenched garden. They walked in it together when the last drops had fallen.
‘Fairly battered the delphiniums,’ Odo said.
‘Hasn’t it just.’
She smiled a little. You had to accept what there was; no point in brooding. They had been hurt, as was intended, punished because one of them continued to be disappointed and repelled. There never is fairness when vengeance is evoked: that had occurred to Charlotte when she was washing up the lunchtime dishes, and to Odo when he tidied the dining-room. ‘I’m sorry,’ he had said, returning to the kitchen with forks and spoons that had not been used. Not turning round, Charlotte had shaken her head.
They were not bewildered, as their birthday visitor was: they easily understood. Their own way of life was so much debris all around them, but since they were no longer in their prime that hardly mattered. Once it would have, Odo reflected now; Charlotte had known that years ago. Their love of each other had survived the vicissitudes and the struggle there had been; not even the bleakness of the day that had passed could affect it.
They didn’t mention their son as they made their rounds of the garden that was now too much for them and was derelict in places. The
y didn’t mention the jealousy their love of each other had bred in him, that had flourished into deviousness and cruelty. The pain the day had brought would not easily pass, both were aware of that. And yet it had to be, since it was part of what there was.
Child’s Play
Gerard and Rebecca became brother and sister after a turmoil of distress. Each had witnessed it from a different point of view, Gerard in one house, Rebecca in another. Two years of passionate quarrelling, arguing and agreeing, of beginning again, of failure and reconciliation, of final insults and rejection, constituted the peepshow they viewed.
There were no other children of the two wrecked marriages, and when the final period of acrimonious wrangling came to an end there was an unexpected accord as to the division of the families. This, it was decided, would be more satisfactorily decreed by the principals involved than by the divorce courts. Gerard’s father, innocent in what had occurred, agreed that Gerard should live with his mother since that was convenient. Rebecca’s mother, innocent also, declared herself unfit to raise the child of a marriage she had come to loathe, and declared as well that she could not bring herself to go on living in the house of the marriage. She claimed that suicidal tendencies had developed in her, aggravated by the familiar surroundings: she would suffer the loss of her child for her child’s sake. ‘She’s trying all this on,’ the other woman insisted, but in the end it appeared she wasn’t, and so the arrangement was made.
On a warm Wednesday afternoon, the day Quest for Fame won the Derby, Gerard’s mother married Rebecca’s father. Afterwards all four of them stood, eyes tightened against strong sunlight, while someone took a photograph. The two children were of an age, Gerard ten, Rebecca nine. Gerard was dark-haired, quite noticeably thin, with glasses. Rebecca’s reddish hair curved roundly about her rounded cheeks. Her eyes were bright, a deep shade of blue. Gerard’s, brown, were solemn.
They were neutrally disposed to one another, with neither fondness nor distaste on either side: they did not know one another well. Gerard was an intruder in the house that had been Rebecca’s, but this was far less to bear than the departure from it of her mother.
‘They’ll settle,’ Rebecca’s father murmured in a teashop after the wedding.
Watching the two children, silent beside one another, his new wife said she hoped so.
They did settle. Thrown together as helpless parties in the stipulations of the peace, they became companions. They missed the past; resentment and deprivation drew them close. They talked about the two people whom they visited on Sundays, and how those two, once at the centre of things, were now defeated and displaced.
At the top of the house, attic space had been reclaimed to form a single, low-roofed room with windows to the ground and a new parquet floor that seemed to stretch for ever. The walls were a shade of washed-out primrose, and shafts of sunlight made the pale ash of the parquet seem almost white. There was no furniture. Two bare electric light-bulbs hung from the long, slanted ceiling. This no-man’s-land was where Gerard and Rebecca played their game of marriage and divorce. It became a secret game, words fading on their lips if someone entered, politeness disguising their deceit.
Rebecca recalled her mother weeping at lunch, a sudden collapse into ugly distress while she was spooning peas on to Rebecca’s plate. ‘Whatever’s up?’ Rebecca asked, watching as her mother hurried from the table. Her father did not answer, but instead left the dining-room himself, and a few moments later there were the sounds of a quarrel. ‘You’ve made me hate you,’ Rebecca’s mother kept screaming so shrilly that Rebecca thought the people in the house next door would hear. ‘How could you have made me hate you?’
Gerard entered a room and found his mother nursing the side of her face. His father stood at the window, looking out. Behind his back one hand gripped the other as if in restraint. Gerard was frightened and went away, his brief presence unnoticed.
‘Think of that child,’ Rebecca’s mother pleaded in another mood. ‘Stay with us if only for that child.’
‘You vicious bitch!’ This furious accusation stuttered out of Gerard’s father, his voice peculiar, his lips trembling in a grimace he could not control.
Such scenes, seeming like the end of everything that mattered, were later surveyed from the unemotional safety of the new companionship. Regret was exorcized, sore places healed; harshness was the saviour. From information supplied by television a world of sin and romance was put together in the empty attic room. ‘Think of that child!’ Rebecca mimicked, and Gerard adopted his father’s grimace the time he called his mother a vicious bitch. It was fun because the erring couple were so virtuous now.
‘I can’t think how it happened.’ Gerard’s version of the guilty husband’s voice was not convincing, but it passed whatever muster was required. ‘I can’t think how I could have been such a fool as to marry her in the first place.’
‘Poor thing, it’s not her fault.’
‘It’s that that makes it such an awful guilt.’ This came from an old black-and-white film and was used a lot because they liked the sound of it.
When romance was to the fore they spoke in whispers, making a murmuring sound when they didn’t know what to say. They tried out dance steps in the attic, pretending they were in a dance-hall they called the Ruby Ballroom or a night-club they called the Nitelite, a title they’d seen in neon somewhere. They called a bar the Bee’s Knees, which Rebecca said was a name suitable for a bar, although the original was a stocking shop. They called a hotel the Grand Splendide.
‘Some sleazy hotel?’ Gerard’s father had scornfully put it. ‘Some sleazy pay-at-the-door hotel for his sleazy one-night stands?’
‘No, actually,’ the reply had been. ‘It was rather grand.’
Downstairs they watched a television serial in which the wronged ones made the kind of fuss that both Gerard and Rebecca had witnessed. The erring ones met in car parks, or on waste land in the early morning.
‘Gosh!’ Rebecca exclaimed, softly astonished at what was occurring on the screen. ‘He took his tongue out of her mouth. Definitely.’
‘She’s chewing his lips actually.’
‘But his tongue -’
‘I know.’
‘Horrid great thing, it looked.’
‘Look, you be Mrs Edwina, Rebecca.’
They turned the television off and climbed to the top of the house, not saying anything on the way. They closed the door behind them.
‘OK,’ Rebecca said. ‘I’m Mrs Edwina.’
Gerard made his bell-ringing sound.
‘Oh, go away!’ Staring intently into space, Rebecca went on doing so until the sound occurred again. She sighed, and rose from where she’d been sitting on the floor. Grumbling wordlessly, she ran on the spot, descending stairs.
‘Yes, what is it, please?’
‘Mrs Edwina?’
‘Sure I’m Mrs Edwina.’
‘I saw your card in the window of that newsagent’s. What’s it called? The Good News, is it?’
‘What d’you want, please?’
‘It says you have a room to let.’
‘What of it? I was watching Dallas.’
‘I’m sorry, Mrs Edwina.’
‘D’you want to rent a room?’
‘I have a use for a room, yes.’
‘You’d best come in.’
‘Cold evening, Mrs Edwina.’
‘I hope you’re not planning a love nest. I don’t want no filth in my house.’
‘Oh, what a lovely little room!’
‘If it’s for a love nest it’ll be ten pounds more per week. Another ten on top of that if you’re into call-girls.’
‘I can assure you, Mrs Edwina -’
‘You read some terrible tales in the papers these days. Beauty Queen a Call-girl! it said the other day. Are you fixing to bring in beauty queens?’
‘No, no, nothing like that. A friend and myself have been going to the Grand Splendide but it’s not the same.’
??
?You’d be a married man?’
‘Yes.’
‘I get the picture.’
Rebecca’s mother had demanded to know where the sinning had taken place. Gerard’s mother, questioned similarly, had revealed that the forbidden meetings had taken place in different locations – once or twice in her lover’s office, after hours; over lunch or five-thirty drinks. A hotel was mentioned, and finally a hired room. ‘How sordid!’ Rebecca’s mother cried, then weeping overcame her and Rebecca crept away. But, elsewhere, Gerard remained. He reported that extraordinary exchanges had followed, that great importance was attached to the room that had been specially acquired, great offence taken.
‘I’m tired of this ghastly hole.’ Rebecca was good at introducing a whine into her tone, a bad-tempered, spoilt-child sound that years ago she’d once or twice tried on in reality before being sharply told to cease immediately.
‘Oh, it’s not too bad, darling!’
‘It’s most unpleasant. It’s dirty for a start. Look at the sheets, I’ve never seen sheets as soiled as that. Then Mrs Edwina is dirty. You can see it on her neck. Filthy dirty that woman is.’
‘Oh, she’s not too bad.’
‘There’s a smell of meat in the hall. She never opens a window.’
‘Darling -’
‘I want to live in a house. I want us to be divorced and married again.’
‘I know. I know. But there’re the children. And there’s the awful guilt I feel.’
‘What I feel is sick in my bowels. Every time I walk in that door I feel it. Every time I look at that filthy wallpaper I get vomit in my throat.’
‘We could paint the place out.’
‘Let’s go to the Bee’s Knees for a cocktail. Let’s never come back here.’
‘But, angel -’
‘Our love’s not like it used to be. It’s not like it was when we went dancing in the Ruby Ballroom. We haven’t been to the Nitelite for a year. Nor the Grand Splendide -’