‘Well –’
‘Why is God so cruel that we leave the ugly school and travel together to a greater ugliness when we could travel to something nice?’
‘Nice, Miss Fanshawe? Nice?’
‘You know what I mean, Carruthers.’
He shook his head. Again he turned it away from her, looking at the window, wretchedly now.
‘Of course you do,’ her voice said, ‘if you think about it.’
‘I really –’
‘Funny our birthdays being close together!’ Her mood was gayer suddenly. He turned to look at her and saw she was smiling. He smiled also.
‘I’ve dreamed this train went on for ever,’ she said, ‘on and on until at last you stopped engaging passengers and waiters in fantastic conversation. “I’m better now,” you said, and then you went to sleep. And when you woke I gave you liquorice allsorts. “I understand,” I said: “it doesn’t matter.” ’
‘I know I’ve been very bad to you, Miss Fanshawe. I’m sorry –’
‘I’ve dreamed of us together in my parents’ bungalow, of my parents dead and buried and your thin mother gone too, and Ashleigh Court a thing of the nightmare past. I’ve seen us walking over the beaches together, you growing up, me cooking for you and mending your clothes and knitting you pullovers. I’ve brought you fresh brown eggs and made you apple dumplings. I’ve watched you smile over crispy chops.’
‘Miss Fanshawe –’
‘I’m telling you about a dream in which ordinary things are marvellous. Tea tastes nicer and the green of the grass is a fresher green than you’ve ever noticed before, and the air is rosy, and happiness runs about. I would take you to a cinema on a Saturday afternoon and we would buy chips on the way home and no one would mind. We’d sit by the fire and say whatever we liked to one another. And you would no longer steal things or tell lies, because you’d have no need to. Nor would you mock an unpretty undermatron.’
‘Miss Fanshawe, I – I’m feeling tired. I think I’d like to read.’
‘Why should they have a child and then destroy it? Why should your mother not love you because your face is like your father’s face?’
‘My mother –’
‘Your mother’s a disgrace,’ she cried in sudden, new emotion. ‘What life is it for a child to drag around hotels and lovers, a piece of extra luggage, alone, unloved?’
‘It’s not too bad. I get quite used to it –’
‘Why can He not strike them dead?’ she whispered. ‘Why can’t He make it possible? By some small miracle, surely to God?’
He wasn’t looking at her. He heard her weeping and listened to the sound, not knowing what to do.
‘You’re a sorrowful mess, Carruthers,’ she whispered. ‘Yet you need not be.’
‘Please. Please, Miss Fanshawe –’
‘You’d be a different kind of person and so would I. You’d have my love, I’d care about the damage that’s been done to you. You wouldn’t come to a bad end: I’d see to that.’
He didn’t want to turn his head again. He didn’t want to see her, but in spite of that he found himself looking at her. She, too, was gazing at him, tears streaming on her cheeks. He spoke slowly and with as much firmness as he could gather together.
‘What you’re saying doesn’t make any sense, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘The waiter said that you were mad. Am I crazy too? Can people go mad like that, for a little while, on a train? Out of loneliness and locked-up love? Or desperation?’
‘I’m sure it has nothing to do with madness, Miss Fanshawe –’
‘The sand blows on to my face, and sometimes into my eyes. In my bedroom I shake it from my sandals. I murmur in the sitting-room. “Really, Dora,” my mother says, and my father sucks his breath in. On Sunday mornings we walk to church, all three of us. I go again, on my own, to Evensong: I find that nice. And yet I’m glad when it’s time to go back to Ashleigh Court. Are you ever glad, Carruthers?’
‘Sometimes I have been. But not always. Not always at all. I –’
‘ “Let’s go for a stroll,” the algebra teacher said. His clothes were stained with beer. “Let’s go up there,” he said. “It’s nice up there.” And in the pitch dark we climbed to the loft where the Wolf Cubs meet. He lit his cigarette-lighter and spread the tent out. I don’t mind what happens, I thought. Anything is better than nothing happening all my life. And then the man was sick.’
‘You told me that, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘ “You’re getting fat,” my mother might have said. “Look at Dora, Dad, getting fat.” And I would try to laugh. “A drunk has made me pregnant,” I might have whispered in the bungalow, suddenly finding the courage for it. And they would look at me and see that I was happy, and I would kneel by my bed and pour my thanks out to God, every night of my life, while waiting for my child.’ She paused and gave a little laugh. ‘They are waiting for us, those people, Carruthers.’
‘Yes.’
‘The clock on the mantelpiece still will not chime. “Cocoa,” my mother’ll say at half past nine. And when they die it’ll be too late.’
He could feel the train slowing, and sighed within him, a gesture of thanksgiving. In a moment he would walk away from her: he would never see her again. It didn’t matter what had taken place, because he wouldn’t ever see her again. It didn’t matter, all she had said, or all he had earlier said himself.
He felt sick in his stomach after the beer and the wine and the images she’d created of a life with her in a seaside bungalow. The food she’d raved about would be appalling; she’d never let him smoke. And yet, in the compartment now, while they were still alone, he was unable to prevent himself from feeling sorry for her. She was right when she spoke of her craziness: she wasn’t quite sane beneath the surface, she was all twisted up and unwell.
‘I’d better go and brush my teeth,’ he said. He rose and lifted his overnight case from the rack.
‘Don’t go,’ she whispered.
His hand, within the suitcase, had already grasped a blue sponge-bag. He released it and closed the case. He stood, not wishing to sit down again. She didn’t speak. She wasn’t looking at him now.
‘Will you be all right, Miss Fanshawe?’ he said at last, and repeated the question when she didn’t reply. ‘Miss Fanshawe?’
‘I’m sorry you’re not coming back to Ashleigh, Carruthers. I hope you have a pleasant holiday abroad.’
‘Miss Fanshawe, will you –’
‘I’ll stay in England, as I always do.’
‘We’ll be there in a moment,’ he said.
‘I hope you won’t go to the bad, Carruthers.’
They passed by houses now; the backs of houses, suburban gardens. Posters advertised beer and cigarettes and furniture. Geo. Small. Seeds, one said.
‘I hope not, too,’ he said.
‘Your mother’s on the platform. Where she always stands.’
‘Goodbye, Miss Fanshawe.’
‘Goodbye, Carruthers. Goodbye.’
Porters stood waiting. Mail-bags were on a trolley. A voice called out, speaking of the train they were on.
She didn’t look at him. She wouldn’t lift her head: he knew the tears were pouring on her cheeks now, more than before, and he wanted to say, again, that he was sorry. He shivered standing in the doorway, looking at her, and then he closed the door and went away.
She saw his mother greet him, smiling, in red as always she was. They went together to collect his luggage from the van, out of her sight, and when the train pulled away from the station she saw them once again, the mother speaking and Carruthers just as he always was, laughing his harsh laugh.
A Choice of Butchers
The upper landing of our house had brown linoleum on it and outside each of the bedroom doors there was a small black mat. From this square landing with its three mats and its window overlooking the backyard there rose a flight of uncarpeted steps that led to the attic room where Bridget, who was our maid, slept. The stairs that
descended to the lower landing, where the bathroom and lavatory were and where my mother and father slept, were carpeted with a pattern of red flowers which continued down wards to a hall that also had brown linoleum on its floor. There was a hall-stand in the hall and beside it a high green plant in a brass pot, and a figure of the Holy Mother on a table, all by itself. The walls of the landings, and of the hall and the staircase, were papered gloomily in an oatmeal shade that had no pattern, only a pebbly roughness that was fashionable in my childhood in our West Cork town. On this hung two brown pictures, one of oxen dragging a plough over rough ground at sunrise, the other of a farmer leading a working horse towards a farmyard at the end of the day. It was against a background of the oatmeal shade and the oxen in the dawn that I, through the rails of the banisters on the upper landing, saw my father kissing Bridget at the end of one summer holiday.
I had come from my room on that warm September evening to watch for Henry Dukelow, who came up every night to say good-night to me. I had knelt down by the banisters, with my face against them, pressing hard so that I might be marked, so that Mr Dukelow would laugh when he saw me. ‘God, you’re tip-top,’ my father said in a whisper that travelled easily up to me, and then he put his arms round her shoulders and roughly hugged her, with his lips pressed on to her lips.
I was seven years of age, the afterthought of the family, as my father called me. My brothers and sisters were all grown up, but I didn’t feel then, not yet, that my parents had given so much to them that there wasn’t a lot left to give me. Once upon a time they had all been a family like any other family: the children in turn had left home, and then, when my mother should have been resting and my father finding life less demanding, I had arrived. I did not ever doubt my parents’ concern for me, but for the six months that he was in our house I felt that Mr Dukelow loved me as much as they did. ‘Say good-night to him for me,’ I often heard my mother calling out to him as he mounted the stairs to tell me my night-time story, and I grew up thinking of my mother as a tired person because that was what she was. Her hair was going grey and her face bore a fatigued look: Mr Dukelow said she probably didn’t sleep well. There were a lot of people who didn’t sleep well, he told me, sitting on my bed one night when I was seven, and I remember he went on talking about that until I must have fallen asleep myself.
Mr Dukelow, who occupied the room next to mine, taught me to play marbles on the rough surface of our backyard. He made me an aeroplane out of heavy pieces of wood he found lying about, and he explained to me that although a star could fall through the sky it would never land on the earth. He told me stories about Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and about the great emperors of Europe and the Battle of the Yellow Ford. He had a good memory for what had interested him at school, but he had forgotten as easily the rest: he had been a poor scholar, he said. He told me the plots of films he’d seen and of a play called Paddy the Next Best Thing. He spoke very quietly and he always answered my questions: a small man, as thin as a willow, bony and pale-faced and supposed to be delicate, different from my father. He was fifty-seven; my father was fifty-nine.
In the middle of the night that my father kissed Bridget Mr Dukelow came to my room again. He switched the light on and stood there in grey-striped pyjamas that were badly torn.
‘I could hear you crying,’ he said. ‘What’s the trouble with you?’
He wore spectacles with fine wire rims, and all his face seemed to have gone into his nose, which was thin and tapering. His greased hair was black, his hands were like a skeleton’s. The first night Mr Dukelow arrived in our house my father brought him into the kitchen, where my mother was reading the Irish Press at the table and Bridget was darning one of her black stockings. ‘I’ve employed this man,’ my father said, and as he stepped to one side of the doorway the bent figure of Mr Dukelow appeared suddenly and silently, and my father gestured in the manner of a ringmaster introducing a circus act. Mr Dukelow was carrying a cardboard suitcase that had too many clothes in it. I remember seeing the flannel material of a shirt protruding, for the case was not fastened as it was meant to be.
‘What are you crying for?’ he asked me on that later occasion. ‘What’s up with you?’
‘Go away, Mr Dukelow.’
A frown appeared on his white forehead. He went away, leaving the light on, and he returned within a minute carrying a packet of cigarettes and a cigarette-lighter. He always smoked Craven A, claiming that they were manufactured from a superior kind of tobacco. He lit one and sat on my bed. He talked, as often he did, about the moment of his arrival at our house and how he had paused for a moment outside it.
Looking at our house from the street, you saw the brown hall door, its paintwork grained to make it seem like mahogany. There was a brass knocker and a letter-box that every morning except Sunday were cleaned with Brasso by Bridget. To the right of the hall door, and dwarfing it, were the windows of my father’s butcher shop, with its sides of mutton hanging from hooks, tripe on a white enamel dish, and beef and sausages and mince and suet.
Afterwards, when he became my friend, Mr Dukelow said that he had stood on the street outside the shop, having just got off the Bantry bus. With his suitcase weighing him down, he had gazed at the windows, wondering about the shop and the house, and about my father. He had not come all the way from Bantry but from a house in the hills somewhere, where he had been employed as some kind of manservant. He had walked to a crossroads and had stood there waiting for the bus: there had been dust on his shoes that night when first he came into our kitchen. ‘I looked at the meat in the window,’ he told me afterwards, ‘and I thought I’d rather go away again.’ But my father, expecting him, had come out of the shop and had told him to come on in. My father was a big man; beside Mr Dukelow he looked like a giant.
Mr Dukelow sat on my bed, smoking his Craven A. He began to talk about the advertisement my father had placed in the Cork Examiner for an assistant. He repeated the words my father had employed in the advertisement and he said he’d been nervous even to look at them. ‘I had no qualifications,’ Mr Dukelow said. ‘I was afraid.’
That night, six months before, there’d been that kind of fear in his face. ‘Sit down, Mr Dukelow,’ my mother had said. ‘Have you had your tea?’ He shook hands with my mother and myself and with Bridget, making a great thing of it, covering up his shyness. He said he’d had tea, although he confessed to me afterwards that he hadn’t. ‘You’ll take a cup, anyway,’ my mother offered, ‘and a piece of fruit-cake I made?’ Bridget took a kettle from the range and poured boiling water into a teapot to warm it. ‘Errah, maybe he wants something stronger,’ my father said, giving a great gusty laugh. ‘Will we go down to Neenan’s, Henry?’ But my mother insisted that, first of all, before strong drink was taken, before even Mr Dukelow was led to his room, he should have a cup of tea and a slice of fruit-cake. ‘He’s hardly inside the door,’ she said chidingly to my father, ‘before you’re lifting him out again.’ My father, who laughed easily, laughed again. ‘Doesn’t he have to get to know the people of the town?’ he demanded. ‘It’s a great little town,’ he informed Mr Dukelow. ‘There’s tip-top business here.’ My father had only six fingers and one thumb: being a clumsy man, he had lost the others at different moments, when engaged in his trade. When he had no fingers left he would retire, he used to say, and he would laugh in his roaring way, and add that the sight of a butcher with no fingers would be more than customers could tolerate.
‘I often think back,’ said Mr Dukelow, ‘to the kindness of your mother that first time.’
‘He kissed Bridget in the hall,’ I said. ‘He said she was looking great.’
‘Ah, no.’
‘I saw him through the banisters.’
‘Is it a nightmare you had? Will I get your mammy up?’
I said it wasn’t a nightmare I had had: I said I didn’t want my mother. My mother was sleeping beside him in their bed and she didn’t know that he’d been kissing the maid.
‘She’d go away,’ I said. ‘My mother would go away.’
‘Ah no, no.’
‘He was kissing Bridget.’
Once, saying good-night to me, Mr Dukelow had unexpectedly given me a kiss, but it was a kiss that wasn’t at all like the kiss I had observed in the hall. Mr Dukelow had kissed me because my mother was too tired to climb the stairs; he had kissed me in case I felt neglected. Another time, just as unexpectedly, he had taken a florin from his waistcoat pocket and had put it under my pillow, telling me to buy sweets with it. ‘Where d’you get that from?’ my father had demanded the next day, and when I told him he hit the side of his leg with his fist, becoming angry in a way that puzzled me. Afterwards I heard him shouting at my mother that Henry Dukelow had given me a two-bob bit and had she anything to say to that? My father was sometimes so peculiar in his behaviour that I couldn’t make him out. My mother’s quietness was always more noticeable when he was present; I loved her for her quietness.
‘He had a few jars in tonight.’
‘Was he drunk, Mr Dukelow?’
‘I think he was.’
‘My mother –’
‘Will I tell you a story?’
‘No, no.’
I imagined Bridget, as I had been imagining her while I lay awake, thinking to herself that she’d give my mother her marching orders. I imagined, suddenly, my mother doing Bridget’s work in the kitchen and Bridget standing at the door watching her. She was a plump girl, red-cheeked, with black curly hair. She had fat arms and legs, and she wasn’t as tall as my mother. She must have been about twenty-five at the time; Mr Dukelow had told me that my mother was fifty-one. Bridget used to bring me the green glass balls that fishermen use for floating their nets, because she lived by the sea and often found them washed up on the strand. She didn’t tell me stories like Mr Dukelow did, but sometimes she’d read to me out of one of the romances she borrowed from a library that the nuns ran. All the books had brown paper covers on them to keep them from getting dirty, with the titles written in ink on the front. I couldn’t remember a time that Bridget hadn’t been in the house, with those brown-covered volumes, cycling back from her Sunday afternoon off with fish and vegetables in a basket. I had always liked her, but she was different from my mother: I was fonder of my mother.