The Collected Stories

  ‘Oh, he’s well enough,’ he said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday, while I sat patiently. ‘The old aunt’s kicking up again.’

  My mother, passing him his tea, nodded. She remarked that in her opinion Mr McNamara’s aunt should be placed in an asylum, which was what she always said when the subject of Mr McNamara’s aunt, reputedly alcoholic, cropped up.

  My mother was tallish and slender, but softly so. There was nothing sharp or angular about my mother, nothing wiry or hard. She had misty blue eyes and she seemed always to be on the point of smiling. My father was even taller, a bulky man with a brown face and a brown forehead stretching back where hair once had been, with heavy brown-backed hands, and eyes the same shade of blue mist as my mother’s. They were gentle with one another in a way that was similar also, and when they disagreed or argued their voices weren’t ever raised. They could be angry with us, but not with one another. They meted out punishments for us jointly, sharing disapproval or disappointment. We felt doubly ashamed when our misdemeanours were uncovered.

  ‘The train was like a Frigidaire,’ my father said. ‘Two hours late at the halt. Poor Flannagan nearly had pneumonia waiting.’ The whole country had ivy growing over, it, he said, like ivy on a gravestone. Eating bacon and sausages with his special knife and fork, he nodded in agreement with himself. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland,’ he said when his mouth was momentarily empty of food. ‘Anthracite motor-cars, refrigerators on the Great Southern Railway. Another thing, Molly: it’s the opinion in Dublin that six months’ time will see foreign soldiers parading themselves on O’Connell Street. German or English, take your pick, and there’s damn all Dev can do about it.’

  My mother smiled at him and sighed. Then, as though to cheer us all up, my father told a story that Mr McNamara had told him, about a coal merchant whom Mr McNamara had apparently known in his youth. The story had to do with the ill-fitting nature of the coal merchant’s artificial teeth, and the loss of the teeth when he’d once been swimming at Ringsend. Whenever my father returned from a meeting with Mr McNamara he brought us back such stories, as well as the current opinion of Mr McNamara on the state of the nation and the likelihood of the nation becoming involved in the war. ‘The opinion in Dublin’ was the opinion of Mr McNamara, as we all knew. Mr McNamara drove a motor-car powered by gas because there wasn’t much petrol to be had. The gas, so my father said, was manufactured by anthracite in a burner stuck on to the back of Mr McNamara’s Ford V-8.

  Returning each time from Dublin, my father bore messages and gifts from Mr McNamara, a tin of Jacob’s biscuits or bars of chocolate. He was a man who’d never married and who lived on inherited means, in a house in Palmerston Road, with members of his family – the elderly alcoholic aunt who should have been in an asylum, a sister and a brother-in-law. The sister, now Mrs Matchette, had earlier had theatrical ambitions, but her husband, employed in the National Bank, had persuaded her away from them. My father had never actually met Mr McNamara’s insane aunt or Mrs Matchette or her husband: they lived through Mr McNamara for him, at second hand, and for us they lived through my father, at a further remove. We had a vivid image of all of them, Mrs Matchette thin as a blade of grass, endlessly smoking and playing patience, her husband small and solemn, neatly moustached, with dark neat hair combed straight back from what Mr McNamara had called a ‘squashed forehead’. Mr McNamara himself we imagined as something of a presence: prematurely white-haired, portly, ponderous in speech and motion. Mr McNamara used to frequent the bar of a hotel called Fleming’s, an old-fashioned place where you could get snuff as well as tobacco, and tea, coffee and Bovril as well as alcoholic drinks. It was here that my father met him on his visits to Dublin. It was a comfort to go there, my father said, when his business for the day was done, to sit in a leather chair and listen to the chit-chat of his old companion. The bar would fill with smoke from their Sweet Afton cigarettes, while my father listened to the latest about the people in the house in Palmerston Road, and the dog they had, a spaniel called Wolfe Tone, and a maid called Kate O’Shea, from Skibbereen. There was ritual about it, my father smoking and listening, just as a day or so later he’d smoke and we’d listen ourselves, at breakfast-time in our house in the country.

  There were my three sisters and myself: I was the oldest, the only boy. We lived in a house that had been in the family for several generations, three miles from Curransbridge, where the Dublin train halted if anyone wanted it to, and where my father’s granary and mill were. Because of the shortage of petrol, my father used to walk the three miles there and back every day. Sometimes he’d persuade Flannagan, who worked in the garden for us, to collect him in the dog-cart in the evening, and always when he went to Dublin he arranged for Flannagan to meet the train he returned on. In the early hours of the morning I’d sometimes hear the rattle of the dog-cart on the avenue and then the wheels on the gravel outside the front of the house. At breakfast-time the next morning my father would say he was glad to be back again, and kiss my mother with the rest of us. The whole thing occurred once every month or so, the going away in the first place, the small packed suitcase in the hall, my father in his best tweed suit, Flannagan and the dog-cart. And the returning a few days later: breakfast with Mr McNamara, my sister Charlotte used to say.

  As a family we belonged to the past. We were Protestants in what had become Catholic Ireland. We’d once been part of an ascendancy, but now it was not so. Now there was the income from the granary and the mill, and the house we lived in: we sold grain and flour, we wielded no power. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ the Catholic children cried at us in Curransbridge. ‘Catty, Catty, going to Mass,’ we whispered back, ‘riding on the devil’s ass.’ They were as good as we were. It had not always been assumed so, and it sometimes seemed part of all the changing and the shifting of this and that, that Mr McNamara, so honoured in our house, was a Catholic himself. ‘A liberal, tolerant man,’ my father used to say. ‘No trace of the bigot in him.’ In time, my father used to say, religious differences in Ireland wouldn’t exist. The war would sort the whole matter out, even though as yet Ireland wasn’t involved in it. When the war was over, and whether there was involvement or not, there wouldn’t be any patience with religious differences. So, at least, Mr McNamara appeared to argue.

  Childhood was all that: my sisters, Charlotte, Amelia and Frances, and my parents gentle with each other, and Flannagan in the garden and Bridget our maid, and the avuncular spirit of Mr McNamara. There was Miss Sheil as well, who arrived every morning on an old Raleigh bicycle, to teach the four of us, since the school at Curransbridge was not highly thought of by my parents.

  The house itself was a Georgian rectangle when you looked straight at it, spaciously set against lawns which ran back to the curved brick of the kitchen-garden wall, with a gravel sweep in front, and an avenue running straight as a die for a mile and a half through fields where sheep grazed. My sisters had some world of their own which I knew I could not properly share. Charlotte, the oldest of them, was five years younger than I was, Amelia was six and Frances five.

  ‘Ah, he was in great form,’ my father said on the morning of my thirteenth birthday. ‘After a day listening to rubbish it’s a pleasure to take a ball of malt with him.’

  Frances giggled. When my father called a glass of whiskey a ball of malt Frances always giggled, and besides it was a giggly occasion. All my presents were sitting there on the sideboard, waiting for my father to finish his breakfast and to finish telling us about Mr McNamara. But my father naturally took precedence: after all, he’d been away from the house for three days, he’d been cold and delayed on the train home, and attending to business in Dublin was something he disliked in any case. This time, though, as well as his business and the visit to Fleming’s Hotel to see Mr McNamara, I knew he’d bought the birthday present that he and my mother would jointly give me. Twenty minutes ago he’d walked into the dining-room with the wrapped parcel under his arm. ‘Happy birthday, boy,’ he’d said, placing the
parcel on the sideboard beside the other three, from my sisters. It was the tradition in our house – a rule of my father’s – that breakfast must be over and done with, every scrap eaten, before anyone opened a birthday present or a Christmas present.

  ‘It was McNamara said that,’ my father continued. ‘Ivy-clad Ireland. It’s the neutral condition of us.’

  It was my father’s opinion, though not my mother’s, that Ireland should have acceded to Winston Churchill’s desire to man the Irish ports with English soldiers in case the Germans got in there first. Hitler had sent a telegram to de Valera apologizing for the accidental bombing of a creamery, which was a suspicious gesture in itself. Mr McNamara, who also believed that de Valera should hand over the ports to Churchill, said that any gentlemanly gesture on the part of the German Führer was invariably followed by an act of savagery. Mr McNamara, in spite of being a Catholic, was a keen admirer of the House of Windsor and of the English people. There was no aristocracy in the world to touch the English, he used to say, and no people, intent on elegance, succeeded as the English upper classes did. Class-consciousness in England was no bad thing, Mr McNamara used to argue.

  My father took from the side pocket of his jacket a small wrapped object. As he did so, my sisters rose from the breakfast table and marched to the sideboard. One by one my presents were placed before me, my parents’ brought from the sideboard by my mother. It was a package about two and a half feet long, a few inches in width. It felt like a bundle of twigs and was in fact the various parts of a box-kite. Charlotte had bought me a book called Dickon the Impossible, Amelia a kaleidoscope. ‘Open mine exceedingly carefully,’ Frances said. I did, and at first I thought it was a pot of jam. It was a goldfish in a jar.

  ‘From Mr McNamara,’ my father said, pointing at the smallest package. I’d forgotten it, because already the people who normally gave me presents were accounted for. ‘I happened to mention,’ my father said, ‘that today was a certain day.’

  It was so heavy that I thought it might be a lead soldier, or a horseman. In fact it was a dragon. It was tiny and complicated, and it appeared to be made of gold, but my father assured me it was brass. It had two green eyes that Frances said were emeralds, and small pieces let into its back which she said looked like rubies. ‘Priceless,’ she whispered jealously. My father laughed and shook his head. The eyes and the pieces in the brass back were glass, he said.

  I had never owned so beautiful an object. I watched it being passed from hand to hand around the breakfast table, impatient to feel it again myself. ‘You must write at once to Mr McNamara,’ my mother said. ‘It’s far too generous of him,’ she added, regarding my father with some slight disapproval, as though implying that my father shouldn’t have accepted the gift. He vaguely shook his head, lighting a Sweet Afton. ‘Give me the letter when you’ve done it,’ he said. ‘I have to go up again in a fortnight.’

  I showed the dragon to Flannagan, who was thinning beetroot in the garden. I showed it to Bridget, our maid. ‘Aren’t you the lucky young hero?’ Flannagan said, taking the dragon in a soil-caked hand. ‘You’d get a five-pound note for that fellow, anywhere you cared to try.’ Bridget polished it with Brasso for me.

  That day I had a chocolate birthday cake, and sardine sandwiches, which were my favourite, and brown bread and greengage jam, a favourite also. After tea all the family watched while my father and I tried to fly the kite, running with it from one end of a lawn to the other. It was Flannagan who got it up for us in the end, and I remember the excitement of the string tugging at my fingers, and Bridget crying out that she’d never seen a thing like that before, wanting to know what it was for. ‘Don’t forget, dear, to write to Mr McNamara first thing in the morning,’ my mother reminded me when she kissed me good-night. I wouldn’t forget, I promised, and didn’t add that of all my presents, including the beautiful green and yellow kite, I liked the dragon best.

  But I never did write to Mr McNamara. The reason was that the next day was a grim nightmare of a day, during all of which someone in the house was weeping, and often several of us together. ‘My father, so affectionate towards all of us, was no longer alive.

  The war continued and Ireland continued to play no part in it. Further accidental German bombs were dropped and further apologies were sent to de Valera by the German Führer. Winston Churchill continued to fulminate about the ports, but the prophecy of Mr McNamara that foreign soldiers would parade in O’Connell Street did not come true.

  Knitting or sewing, my mother listened to the BBC news with a sadness in her eyes, unhappy that elsewhere death was occurring also. It was no help to any of us to be reminded that people in Britain and Europe were dying all the time now, with the same sudden awfulness as my father had.

  Everything was different after my father died. My mother and I began to go for walks together, I’d take her arm, and sometimes her hand, knowing she was lonely. She talked about him to me, telling me about their honeymoon in Venice, the huge square where they’d sat drinking chocolate, listening to the bands that played there. She told me about my own birth, and how my father had given her a ring set with amber which he’d bought in Louis Wine’s in Dublin. She would smile at me on our walks and tell me that even though I was only thirteen I was already taking his place. One day the house would be mine, she pointed out, and the granary and the mill. I’d marry, she said, and have children of my own, but I didn’t want even to think about that. I didn’t want to marry; I wanted my mother always to be there with me, going on walks and telling me about the person we all missed so much. We were still a family, my sisters and my mother and myself, Flannagan in the garden, and Bridget. I didn’t want anything to change.

  After the death of my father Mr McNamara lived on, though in a different kind of way. The house in Palmerston Road, with Mr McNamara’s aunt drinking in an upstairs room, and the paper-thin Mrs Matchette playing patience instead of being successful in the theatre, and Mr Matchette with his squashed forehead, and Kate O’Shea from Skibbereen, and the spaniel called Wolfe Tone: all of them remained quite vividly alive after my father’s death, as part of our memory of him. Fleming’s Hotel remained also, and all the talk there’d been there of the eccentric household in Palmerston Road. For almost as long as I could remember, and certainly as long as my sisters could remember, our own household had regularly been invaded by the other one, and after my father’s death my sisters and I often recalled specific incidents retailed in Fleming’s Hotel and later at our breakfast table. There’d been the time when Mr McNamara’s aunt had sold the house to a man she’d met outside a public house. And the time when Mrs Matchette appeared to have fallen in love with Garda Molloy, who used to call in at the kitchen for Kate O’Shea every night. And the time the spaniel was run over by a van and didn’t die. All of it was preserved, with Mr McNamara himself, white-haired and portly in the smoke-brown bar of Fleming’s Hotel, where snuff could be bought, and Bovril as well as whiskey.

  A few months after the death my mother remarked one breakfast-time that no doubt Mr McNamara had seen the obituary notice in the Irish Times.’ Oh, but you should write,’ my sister Frances cried out in her excitable manner. My mother shook her head. My father and Mr McNamara had been bar-room friends, she pointed out: letters in either direction would not be in order. Charlotte and Amelia agreed with this opinion, but Frances still protested. I couldn’t see that it mattered. ‘He gave us all that chocolate,’ Frances cried, ‘and the biscuits.’ My mother said again that Mr McNamara was not the kind of man to write to about a death, nor the kind who would write himself. The letter that I was to have written thanking him for the dragon was not mentioned. Disliking the writing of letters, I didn’t raise the subject myself.

  At the end of that year I was sent to a boarding-school in the Dublin mountains. Miss Sheil continued to come to the house on her Raleigh to teach my sisters, and I’d have far preferred to have remained at home with her. It could not be: the boarding-school in the Dublin mountains, a renown
ed Protestant monument, had been my father’s chosen destiny for me and that was that. If he hadn’t died, leaving home might perhaps have been more painful, but the death had brought with it practical complications and troubles, mainly concerned with the running of the granary and the mill: going away to school was slight compared with all that, or so my mother convinced me.

  The headmaster of the renowned school was a small, red-skinned English cleric. With other new boys, I had tea with him and his wife in the drawing-room some days after term began. We ate small ham-paste sandwiches and Battenburg cake. The headmaster’s wife, a cold woman in grey, asked me what I intended to do – ‘in life’, as she put it. I said I’d run a granary and a mill at Curransbridge; she didn’t seem interested. The headmaster told us he was in Who’s Who. Otherwise the talk was of the war.

  Miss Sheil had not prepared me well. ‘Dear boy, whoever taught you French?’ a man with a pipe asked me, and did not stay to hear my answer. ‘Your Latin, really!’ another man exclaimed, and the man who taught me mathematics warned me never to set my sights on a profession that involved an understanding of figures. I sat in the back row of the class with other boys who had been ill-prepared for the renowned school.

  I don’t know when it was – a year, perhaps, or eighteen months after my first term – that I developed an inquisitiveness about my father. Had he, I wondered, been as bad at everything as I was? Had some other man with a pipe scorned his inadequacy when it came to French? Had he felt, as I did, a kind of desperation when faced with algebra? You’d have to know a bit about figures, I used, almost miserably, to say to myself: you’d have to if you hoped to run a granary and a mill. Had he been good at mathematics?

  I asked my mother these questions, and other questions like them. But my mother was vague in her replies and said she believed, although perhaps she was wrong, that my father had not been good at mathematics. She laughed when I asked the questions. She told me to do my best.