Collected Stories (13 page)

“A what, Matt?” Charlie asked, skipping down the steps on the scent of news. (He was like his father in that, too.) “You don't mean one of the Luceys is after forgetting himself?”

“Then you didn't hear about Peter?”

“Peter! Peter in trouble! You're not serious, Matt?”

“There's a lot of his clients would be glad if I wasn't, Cha,” Mackesy said grimly. “I thought you'd know about it as ye were such pals.”

“But we are, man, we are,” Charlie insisted. “Sure, wasn't I at the dogs with him—when was it?—last Thursday? I never noticed a bloody thing, though, now you mention it, he was lashing pound notes on that Cloonbullogue dog. I told him the Dalys could never train a dog.”

Charlie left Mackesy, his mind in a whirl! He tore through the cashier's office. His father was sitting at his desk, signing paying-orders. He was wearing a gray tweed cap, a gray tweed suit, and a brown cardigan. He was a stocky, powerfully built man with a great expanse of chest, a plump, dark, hairy face, long quizzical eyes that tended to close in slits; hair in his nose, hair in his ears; hair on his high cheekbones that made them like small cabbage-patches.

He made no comment on Charlie's news, but stroked his chin and looked worried. Then Charlie shot out to see his uncle. Quill, the assistant, was serving in the shop and Charlie stumped in behind the counter to the fitting room. His uncle had been looking out the back, all crumpled up. When Charlie came in he pulled himself erect with fictitious jauntiness. With his old black coat and wrinkled yellow face he had begun to look like an old rabbi.

“What's this I hear about Peter?” began Charlie, who was never one to be ceremonious.

“Bad news travels fast, Charlie,” said his uncle in his dry little voice, clamping his lips so tightly that the wrinkles ran up his cheeks from the corners of his mouth. He was so upset that he forgot even to say “Charliss.”

“Have you any notion how much it is?” asked Charlie.

“I have not, Charlie,” Tom said bitterly. “I need hardly say my son did not take me into his confidence about the extent of his robberies.”

“And what are you going to do?”

“What can I do?” The lines of pain belied the harsh little staccato that broke up every sentence into disjointed phrases as if it were a political speech. “You saw yourself, Charliss, the way I reared that boy. You saw the education I gave him. I gave him the thing I was denied myself, Charliss. I gave him an honorable profession. And now for the first time in my life I am ashamed to show my face in my own shop. What can I do?”

“Ah, now, ah, now, Uncle Tom, we know all that,” Charlie said truculently, “but that's not going to get us anywhere. What can we do now?”

“Is it true that Peter took money that was entrusted to him?” Tom asked oratorically.

“To be sure he did,” replied Charlie without the thrill of horror which his uncle seemed to expect. “I do it myself every month, only I put it back.”

“And is it true he ran away from his punishment instead of standing his ground like a man?” asked Tom, paying no attention to him.

“What the hell else would he do?” asked Charlie, who entirely failed to appreciate the spiritual beauty of atonement. “Begod, if I had two years' hard labor facing me you wouldn't see my heels for dust.”

“I dare say you think I'm old-fashioned, Charliss,” said his uncle, “but that's not the way I was reared, nor the way my son was reared.”

“And that's where the ferryboat left ye,” snorted Charlie. “Now that sort of thing may be all very well, Uncle Tom, but 'tis no use taking it to the fair. Peter made some mistake, the way we all make mistakes, but instead of coming to me or some other friend, he lost his nerve and started gambling. Chrisht, didn't I see it happen to better men? You don't know how much it is?”

“No, Charliss, I don't.”

“Do you know where he is, even?”

“His mother knows.”

“I'll talk to my old fellow. We might be able to do something. If the bloody fool might have told me on Thursday instead of backing that Cloonbullogue dog!”

Charlie returned to the office to find his father sitting at his desk with his hands joined and his pipe in his mouth, staring nervously at the door.

“Well?”

“We'll go over to Asragh and talk to Toolan of the Guards ourselves,” said Charlie. “I want to find out how much he let himself in for. We might even get a look at the books.”

“Can't his father do it?” Ben asked gloomily.

“Do you think he'd understand them?”

“Well, he was always fond of literature,” Ben said shortly.

“God help him,” said Charlie. “He has enough of it now.”

“'Tis all his own conceit,” Ben said angrily, striding up and down the office with his hands in his trouser pockets. “He was always good at criticizing other people. Even when you got in here it was all influence. Of course, he'd never use influence. Now he wants us to use it.”

“That's all very well,” Charlie said reasonably, “but this is no time for raking up old scores.”

“Who's raking up old scores?” his father shouted angrily.

“That's right,” Charlie said approvingly. “Would you like me to open the door so that you can be heard all over the office?”

“No one is going to hear me at all,” his father said in a more reasonable tone—Charlie had a way of puncturing him. “And I'm not raking up any old scores. I'm only saying now what I always said. The boy was ruined.”

“He'll be ruined with a vengeance unless we do something quick,” said Charlie. “Are you coming to Asragh with me?”

“I am not.”

“Why?”

“Because I don't want to be mixed up in it at all. That's why. I never liked anything to do with money. I saw too much of it. I'm only speaking for your good. A man done out of his money is a mad dog. You won't get any thanks for it, and anything that goes wrong, you'll get the blame.”

Nothing Charlie could say would move his father, and Charlie was shrewd enough to know that everything his father said was right. Tom wasn't to be trusted in the delicate negotiations that would be needed to get Peter out of the hole; the word here, the threat there; all the complicated machinery of family pressure. And alone he knew he was powerless. Despondently he went and told his uncle and Tom received the news with resignation, almost without understanding.

But a week later Ben came back to the office deeply disturbed. He closed the door carefully behind him and leaned across the desk to Charlie, his face drawn. For a moment he couldn't speak.

“What ails you?” Charlie asked with no great warmth.

“Your uncle passed me just now in the Main Street,” whispered his father.

Charlie wasn't greatly put out. All of his life he had been made a party to the little jabs and asides of father and uncle, and he did not realize what it meant to a man like his father, friendly and popular, this public rebuke.

“That so?” he asked without surprise. “What did you do to him?”

“I thought you might know that,” his father said, looking at him with a troubled air from under the peak of his cap.

“Unless 'twas something you said about Peter?” suggested Charlie.

“It might, it might,” his father agreed doubtfully. “You didn't—ah—repeat anything I said to you?”

“What a bloody fool you think I am!” Charlie said indignantly. “And indeed I thought you had more sense. What did you say?”

“Oh, nothing. Nothing only what I said to you,” replied his father and went to the window to look out. He leaned on the sill and then tapped nervously on the frame. He was haunted by all the casual remarks he had made or might have made over a drink with an acquaintance—remarks that were no different from those he and Tom had been passing about one another all their lives. “I shouldn't have said anything at all, of course, but I had no notion 'twould go back.”

“I'm surprised at my uncle,” said Charlie. “Usually he cares little enough what anyone says of him.”

But even Charlie, who had moments when he almost understood his peppery little uncle, had no notion of the hopes he had raised and which his more calculating father had dashed. Tom Lucey's mind was in a rut, a rut of complacency, for the idealist too has his complacency and can be aware of it. There are moments when he would be glad to walk through any mud, but he no longer knows the way; he needs to be led; he cannot degrade himself even when he is most ready to do so. Tom was ready to beg favors from a thief. Peter had joined the Air Force under an assumed name, and this was the bitterest blow of all to him, the extinction of the name. He was something of an amateur genealogist, and had managed to convince himself, God knows how, that his family was somehow related to the Gloucestershire Lucys. This was already a sort of death.

The other death didn't take long in coming. Charlie, in the way he had, got wind of it first, and, having sent his father to break the news to Min, he went off himself to tell his uncle. It was a fine spring morning. The shop was empty but for his uncle, standing with his back to the counter studying the shelves.

“Good morning, Charliss,” he crackled over his shoulder. “What's the best news?”

“Bad, I'm afraid, Uncle Tom,” Charlie replied, leaning across the counter to him.

“Something about Peter, I dare say?” his uncle asked casually, but Charlie noticed how, caught unawares, he had failed to say “my son,” as he had taken to doing.

“Just so.”

“Dead, I suppose?”

“Dead, Uncle Tom.”

“I was expecting something of the sort,” said his uncle. “May the Almighty God have mercy on his soul! … Con!” he called at the back of the shop while he changed his coat. “You'd better close up the shop. You'll find the crepe on the top shelf and the mourning-cards in my desk.”

“Who is it, Mr. Lucey?” asked Con Quill. “'Tisn't Peter?”

“'Tis, Con, 'tis, I'm sorry to say,” and Tom came out briskly with his umbrella over his arm. As they went down the street two people stopped them: the news was already round.

Charlie, who had to see about the arrangements for the funeral, left his uncle outside the house and so had no chance of averting the scene that took place inside. Not that he would have had much chance of doing so. His father had found Min in a state of collapse. Ben was the last man in the world to look after a woman, but he did manage to get her a pillow, put her legs on a chair and cover her with a rug, which was more than Charlie would have given him credit for. Min smelt of brandy. Then Ben strode up and down the darkened room with his hands in his pockets and his cap over his eyes, talking about the horrors of airplane travel. He knew he was no fit company for a woman of sensibility like Min, and he almost welcomed Tom's arrival.

“That's terrible news, Tom,” he said.

“Oh, God help us!” cried Min. “They said he disgraced us but he didn't disgrace us long.”

“I'd sooner 'twas one of my own, Tom,” Ben said excitedly. “As God is listening to me I would. I'd still have a couple left, but he was all ye had.”

He held out his hand to Tom. Tom looked at it, then at him, and then deliberately put his own hands behind his back.

“Aren't you going to shake hands with me, Tom?” Ben asked appealingly.

“No, Ben,” Tom said grimly. “I am not.”

“Oh, Tom Lucey!” moaned Min with her crucified smile. “Over your son's dead body!”

Ben looked at his brother in chagrin and dropped his hand. For a moment it looked as though he might strike him. He was a volatile, hot-tempered man.

“That wasn't what I expected from you, Tom,” he said, making a mighty effort to control himself.

“Ben,” said his brother, squaring his frail little shoulders, “you disrespected my son while he was alive. Now that he's dead I'd thank you to leave him alone.”

“I disrespected him?” Ben exclaimed indignantly. “I did nothing of the sort. I said things I shouldn't have said. I was upset. You know the sort I am. You were upset yourself and I dare say you said things you regret.”

“'Tisn't alike, Ben,” Tom said in a rasping, opinionated tone. “I said them because I loved the boy. You said them because you hated him.”

“I hated him?” Ben repeated incredulously. “Peter? Are you out of your mind?”

“You said he changed his name because it wasn't grand enough for him,” Tom said, clutching the lapels of his coat and stepping from one foot to another. “Why did you say such a mean, mocking, cowardly thing about the boy when he was in trouble?”

“All right, all right,” snapped Ben. “I admit I was wrong to say it. There were a lot of things you said about my family, but I'm not throwing them back at you.”

“You said you wouldn't cross the road to help him,” said Tom. Again he primmed up the corners of his mouth and lowered his head. “And why, Ben? I'll tell you why. Because you were jealous of him.”

“I was jealous of him?” Ben repeated. It seemed to him that he was talking to a different man, discussing a different life, as though the whole of his nature was being turned inside out.

“You were jealous of him, Ben. You were jealous because he had the upbringing and education your own sons lacked. And I'm not saying that to disparage your sons. Far from it. But you begrudged my son his advantages.”

“Never!” shouted Ben in a fury.

“And I was harsh with him,” Tom said, taking another nervous step forward while his neat waspish little voice grew harder. “I was harsh with him and you were jealous of him, and when his hour of trouble came he had no one to turn to. Now, Ben, the least you can do is to spare us your commiserations.”

“Oh, wisha, don't mind him, Ben,” moaned Min. “Sure, everyone knows you never begrudged my poor child anything. The man isn't in his right mind.”