The Collected Stories

  It was difficult to know what to say to May, so Barney didn’t say anything. She talked about her brothers and sisters; half listening, he imagined Ariadne at Lisscrea. He imagined being engaged to her, and introducing her to Nuala in the kitchen and Charlie Redmond in the garden. He saw himself walking along the road with her, and waiting while she attended Mass in the nearby church. He showed her Ballinadra – the rudimentary shops, the statue of Father Mathew in the square.

  He glanced at the car and caught a glimpse of brassy hair through the back window. He would introduce her to the tender-hearted Miss Bone. He imagined Miss Bone dismounting from her bicycle outside O’Kevin’s hardware. ‘Welcome to Ballinadra, Ariadne,’ she murmured in her gentle voice.

  Three men had turned into the alleyway, and a moment later shouting began. A door of the car was wrenched open; clothing was seized and flung out. One of the lean girl’s gold-coloured shoes bounced over the surface of the alleyway, coming to rest near the skip. ‘Get that hooer out of my car,’ a voice furiously commanded.

  In spite of what was happening, Barney couldn’t properly detach himself from his thoughts. He walked with Ariadne, from the town to Lisscrea House. On the way he showed her the Lackens’ farm and the hay-shed where the Black and Tans had murdered a father and a son, and the ramshackle house at the end of a long avenue, where the bread van used to call every day when he got a lift in it back from school, where mad Mrs Boyce lived. Weeds flowered on the verges; it must have been summer.

  ‘Get out of that bloody car!’

  The garments that lay on the ground were pitched into the skip, with the shoe. Medlicott called out incomprehensibly, a humorous observation by the sound of it. ‘D’you want your neck broken?’ the same man shouted back at him. ‘Get out of my property.’

  ‘I’m off,’ May said, and Barney walked with her to her bus stop, not properly listening while she told him that a girl who would enter a motor-car as easily as that would come to an unsavoury end. ‘I’ll look out for you in the Crystal,’ she promised before they parted.

  On the journey back to Sinnott Street Barney was accompanied by an impression, as from a fantasy, of May’s plump body, breasts pressed against his chest, a knee touching one of his, the moist warmth of her palm. Such physical intimacy was not the kind he had ever associated with Ariadne, but as he approached his lodgings he knew he could not let the night pass without the greater reality of seeing her face, without – even for an instant – being again in her company.

  When he arrived at Mrs Lenehan’s house he continued to ascend the stairs after he’d reached the landing off which his room lay. Any moment a light might come on, he thought; any moment he would stand exposed and have to pretend he had made a mistake. But the darkness continued, and he switched on no lights himself. Softly, he turned the handle of the door above his, and closed it, standing with his back to the panels. He could see nothing, but so close did the unspoken relationship feel that he half expected to hear his name whispered. That did not happen; he could not hear even the sound of breathing. He remained where he stood, prepared to do so for however many hours might pass before streaks of light showed on either side of the window blinds. He gazed; at where he knew the bed must be, confirmed in this conjecture by the creeping twilight. He waited, with all the passion he possessed pressed into a longing to glimpse the features he had come to love. He would go at once then. One day, in some happy future, he would tell Ariadne of this night of adoration.

  But as the room took form – the wardrobe, the bed, the wash-stand, the chest of drawers – he sensed, even before he could discern more than these outlines, that he was alone. No sleeping face rewarded his patience, no dark hair lay on the pillow. The window blinds were not drawn down. The bed was orderly, and covered. The room was tidy, as though abandoned.

  Before the arrival of Professor Makepeace-Green the following morning, the episode in the alleyway and Slovinski’s swift spiriting away of the willowy woman from the dance-hall floor were retailed. Barney was commiserated with because he had failed to take his chances. Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, and several other ex-servicemen, gave him advice as to amorous advancement in the future. His preoccupied mood went unnoticed.

  That evening, it was the old woman who told him. When he remarked upon Ariadne’s absence in the dining-room she said their future needs in this respect would be attended to by a maid called Biddy whom Mrs Lenehan was in the process of employing. When he asked her where Ariadne had gone she said that Ariadne had always been religious.

  ‘Religious?’

  ‘Ariadne’s working in the kitchen of the convent.’

  Mr Sheehy came into the dining-room and removed his navy-blue overcoat and his tan gloves. A few minutes later Mrs Lenehan placed the plates of fried food in front of her lodgers, and then returned with the metal teapot. Mr Sheehy spoke of the houses he had visited during the day, in his capacity as agent for the Hibernian Insurance Company. Mrs Lenehan put her mother’s bottle of stout to warm in the fender.

  ‘Is Ariadne not going to live here any more?’ Barney asked Mrs Fennerty when Mr Sheehy and Mrs Lenehan had gone out for their walk to the McKee Barracks.

  ‘I’d say she’ll stop in the convent now. Ariadne always liked that convent.’

  ‘I know.’

  Mrs Fennerty lit her evening cigarette. It was to be expected, she said. It was not a surprise.

  ‘That she should go there?’

  ‘After you took Ariadne out, Barney. You follow what I mean?’

  He said he didn’t. She nodded, fresh thoughts agreeing with what she had already stated. She poured her stout. She had never called him Barney before.

  ‘It’s called going out, Barney. Even if it’s nothing very much.’

  ‘Yes, but what’s that to do with her working in the convent?’

  ‘She didn’t tell you about Lenehan? She didn’t mention her father, Barney?’

  ‘Yes, she did.’

  ‘She didn’t tell you he took his life?’ The old woman crossed herself, her gesture as swift as it always was when she made it. She continued to pour her stout, expertly draining it down the side of the glass.

  ‘No, she didn’t tell me that.’

  ‘When Ariadne was ten years old her father took his life in an upstairs room.’

  ‘Why did he do that, Mrs Fennerty?’

  ‘He was not a man I ever liked.’ Again she paused, as though to dwell privately upon her aversion to her late son-in-law. ‘Shame is the state Ariadne lives in.’

  ‘Shame?’

  ‘Can you remember when you were ten, Barney?’

  He nodded. It was something they had in common, he’d said to Ariadne, that for both of them a parent had died. Any child had affection for a father, Mrs Fennerty was saying.

  ‘Why did Mr Lenehan take his life?’

  Mrs Fennerty did not reply. She sipped her stout. She stared into the glow of the fire, then threw her cigarette end into it. She said Mr Lenehan had feared arrest.

  ‘Arrest?’ he repeated, stupidly.

  ‘There was an incident on a tram.’ Again the old woman blessed herself. Her jauntiness had left her. She repeated what she’d told him the first evening he sat with her: that her daughter was a fool where men were concerned. ‘At that time people looked at Ariadne on the street. When the girls at the convent shunned her the nuns were nice to her. She’s never forgotten that.’

  ‘What kind of an incident, Mrs Fennerty?’

  ‘A child on a tram. They have expressions for that kind of thing. I don’t even like to know them.’

  He felt cold, even though he was close to the fire. It was as though he had been told, not of the death of Ariadne’s father but of her own. He wished he had taken her arm when they went for their walk. He wished she’d said yes when he’d suggested they should have tea in a cinema café. Not so long ago he hadn’t even known she existed, yet now he couldn’t imagine not loving her.

  ‘It would have been no good, Barney.’


  He asked her what she meant, but she didn’t answer. He knew anyway. It would have been no good because what seemed like a marvel of strangeness in Ariadne was damage wrought by shame. She had sensed his love, and fear had come, possibly revulsion. She would have hated it if he’d taken her arm, even if he’d danced with her, as he had with May.

  ‘Ariadne’ll stay there always now,’ the old woman said, sipping more of her stout. Delicately, she wiped a smear of foam from her lips. It was a silver lining that there’d been the convent kitchen to go to, that the same nuns were there to be good to her.

  ‘She’d still be here if I hadn’t taken the room.’

  ‘You were the first young man, Barney. You couldn’t be held to blame.’

  When Barney returned to Dublin from Lisscrea at the beginning of his second term he found, unexpectedly, that he had been allocated College rooms. He explained that in Sinnott Street, and Mrs Lenehan said it couldn’t be helped. ‘Mr Sheehy and myself are getting married,’ she added in the hall.

  Barney said he was glad, which was not untrue. Mr Sheehy had been drawn towards a woman’s property; for her part, Mrs Lenehan needed more than a man could offer her on walks to the McKee Barracks. Mrs Lenehan had survived the past; she had not been damaged; second time round, she had settled for Mr Sheehy.

  In the dining-room he said goodbye to Mrs Fennerty. There was a new young clerk in Ned Sheehy’s office who was looking for digs, she said. He would take the vacant room, it wouldn’t be empty for long. A student called Browder had moved into Ariadne’s a week or so after her going. It hadn’t been empty for long either.

  It was snowing that evening. Huge flakes clung to Barney’s overcoat as he walked to the convent, alone in the silence of the streets. Since Ariadne’s going he had endlessly loitered by the convent, but its windows were always blank, as they were on that Sunday afternoon. Tonight, a dim light burned above the green side-door, but no curtain twitched as he scanned the grey façade, no footsteps disturbed the white expanse beyond the railings. In the depths of the ugly building were the strangeness and the beauty as he had known them, and for a moment he experienced what was left of his passion: a useless longing to change the circumstances there had been.

  While he was still in Mrs Lenehan’s house he had thought that somehow he might rescue Ariadne. It was a romantic urge, potent before love began to turn into regret. He had imagined himself ringing the convent bell, and again seeing Ariadne’s face. He had imagined himself smiling at her with all the gentleness he possessed, and walking again with her; and persuading her, when time had passed, that love was possible. ‘You’ll get over her,’ his father had said in the holidays, guessing only that there had been some girl.

  A bus creeps through the snow: years later, for Barney, there is that image, a fragment in the cluster that makes the whole. It belongs with the upturned butter-box in the grass and the pinks in the brindle hair of the dog, with Rouge Medlicott and Slovinski, and the jockey-capped porters, and the blue-faced Dining Hall clock. A lone figure stares out into the blurred night, hating the good sense that draws him away from loitering gloomily outside a convent.

  A Husband’s Return

  As dawn lightened Maura Brigid’s bedroom the eyes of the Virgin Mary surveyed her waking face dispassionately. Two fingers of the Holy Child blessed her from a tiny pedestal above the room’s single window. Sleepily recollected, the routine of the day before passed unobtrusively through her thoughts, prefacing the daytime shadow of her desertion by the man she’d loved. This pall of distress reclaimed its potency in the first moments of every day, establishing itself afresh, as the sacred statues did. Then, this morning, Maura Brigid remembered that her sister Bernadette had died.

  In his bedroom across the landing Maura Brigid’s brother, Hiney, awoke with the occasion already alive in his consciousness. In the town the family had travelled to a banner had been suspended high up across a street, offering a welcome on behalf of a carnival in the future. Halfway between white iron railings and the church, on a hill, there was a shrine, a pietà, in white also. The yellow grain of the coffin was bright in the sunshine, the face of the priest wan and strained. Hiney pushed back the bedclothes, the àction assisting him to dispel these recollections of a time spent unhappily in an unfamiliar place. Bernadette had run away from the farmhouse with her sister’s husband: that sin had still been ugly at the funeral.

  Affected also by the recent death, Mrs Colleary, the mother of Maura Brigid and Hiney, rose an hour later. She released the two blinds in her bedroom and dressed herself in the nondescript wear of a farmer’s widow. He would have gone after Bernadette, she reflected, thinking of her husband; he would have brought her back, and the danger was that he might even have killed Lawless, for his anger had always been difficult to control. It was as well he’d been spared all of it, because nothing he might have done could have lessened the disgrace into which the family had been dragged. Mrs Colleary told her rosary, and prayed for the soul of her husband, and for her daughter’s soul. It was the morning of a Tuesday in May, a month after the funeral.

  In another bedroom an old man, distantly related to the family, remained in his bed. Of everyone in the farmhouse, only he no longer dwelt on the scandal that had occurred. He had been upset by it at the time, but with the passing years it had settled in his mind, as had so much else in a long life. He was a small, wizened man who had spent most of that life on this farm. His relationship to the remaining Collearys was vague.

  The house where the family lived was large and square and white, facing a grassy hill, its back to the distant sea. The hall door had been nailed in place a long time ago, to keep out draughts; a slated roof, obtusely pitched, was scarcely visible. The gravel sweep that lay between the house and the hill was weedless; the windows that looked out on it were curtained heavily with net and velveteen. The front of the house was where appearances were kept up. At the back a cobbled yard, with a hay-barn and outhouses, and a feed-shed where potatoes and swill were boiled, was less tidy. A porch in need of repair led to sculleries and kitchen.

  Weeding a field of mangolds that ran to the edge of the cliffs, Hiney heard in the distance the engine of the post van, and knew by the direction it came from that the van was on its way to the farmhouse. Would an abrupt, buff-enveloped notice announce the withdrawal of the tillage grant? Or was there at last a communication from the Appeal Commissioners? Sunshine warmed Hiney’s shoulders and his head as he bent over the mangolds, the impassive solemnity of his countenance unaffected by speculation. His waistcoat hung loosely; his collarless shirt was held at the neck by a stud. More likely it was the bill for the diesel that brought the post van down the avenue, he guessed.

  The old man was visited in his bedroom by Mrs Colleary. She spoke to him about the weather, reporting that it was a brightly sunny morning. But it was always uncertain whether or not he comprehended what was said to him, and this morning he gave no sign that he did. The old man’s age was as mysterious as his relationship to the family; he was perhaps ninety-four or -five. Mrs Colleary visited him first thing every morning to make sure he was all right.

  Maura Brigid fried bacon in the kitchen. She had set the table the night before, the last to leave the kitchen, as she always was. She pushed the bacon to one side of the pan and dropped slices of griddle bread into the fat. She heard her brother’s footsteps in the yard, and for an instant imagined his slow walk and his wide, well-shaved face, his dark hair brushed flat on either side of its parting, his lips set dourly, his blue eyes expressionless. Work was what Hiney thought about, work that had been completed, work that had yet to be done. His life was the fields, and his tractor, and the weather.

  The letter that had arrived lay on the stone floor of the scullery passage, just inside the door from the yard. When there was a letter the postman opened the back door and placed it on the passage floor, propped against the wall, since there was no letter-box and nowhere else to put it. Entering the house, Hiney picked u
p the communication that had just been delivered. It was not the bill for the diesel, nor was it about the tillage grant or the appeal that had been lodged with the tax commissioners. It was a white envelope, addressed in a sloping hand to Maura Brigid. Hiney was curious about it. He turned the envelope over, but nothing was written on the back.

  In the kitchen Mrs Colleary said she thought the old man would get up today. She always knew if he intended to get up when she visited him first thing. The anticipation of his intentions might have shown as a glimpse in his eyes or in some variation of the sound he emitted when she spoke to him: she had no idea how the impression was conveyed, only that she received it.

  ‘I have an egg ready to fry for him,’ Maura Brigid said, that being what the old man had for breakfast. Bacon he couldn’t manage.

  Hiney placed the letter on the table beside his sister’s knife and fork. He sat where he always sat, on the chair that had been his father’s in his lifetime. ‘Move into his place, Hiney,’ Mrs Colleary had said a few weeks after her husband’s death in 1969, when Hiney was still a boy.

  ‘Did Paídín bring a letter?’ Mrs Colleary did not question the delivery of a letter since the letter was clearly there and could have arrived by no other means than with the postman: her query was her way of expressing surprise. She could see that the letter was a personal one, and from where she stood she could see it was addressed to her daughter.

  Maura Brigid, having placed three plates of food on the table, sat down herself. Mrs Colleary poured the tea. Maura Brigid examined the envelope much as her brother had done. She did not recognize the handwriting.

  Dear Mrs Lawless, I am writing to you from my conscience. There is repentance in Michael, that’s all I’m writing to say to you. There is sorrow in him also, left behind after the death. Poor Michael is tormented in his heart over the way he was tempted and the sin there was. He told me more times than once that he would endeavour to make recompense to you for the pain he inflicted on you. I am writing to advise you to pray to Our Lady for guidance at this time in your life. I am asking you to recollect the forgiveness She displayed in Her Own Life.