Collected Stories (36 page)

Then I got the inspiration, as it seemed to me, direct from Heaven. Suppose I took the gun and gave Sonny the book! Sonny would never be any good in the gang: he was fond of spelling, and a studious child like him could learn a lot of spellings from a book like mine. As he hadn't seen Santa any more than I had, what he hadn't seen wouldn't grieve him. I was doing no harm to anyone; in fact, if Sonny only knew, I was doing him a good turn which he might have cause to thank me for later. That was one thing I was always keen on; doing good turns. Perhaps this was Santa's intention the whole time and he had merely become confused between us. It was a mistake that might happen to anyone. So I put the book, the pencil, and the pen into Sonny's stocking and the popgun in my own and returned to bed and slept again. As I say, in those days I had plenty of initiative.

It was Sonny who woke me, shaking me to tell me that Santa had come and left me a gun. I let on to be surprised and rather disappointed in the gun, and to divert his mind from it made him show me his picture book, and cracked it up to the skies.

As I knew, that kid was prepared to believe anything, and nothing would do him then but to take the presents in to show Father and Mother. This was a bad moment for me. After the way she had behaved about the langing, I distrusted Mother, though I had the consolation of believing that the only person who could contradict me was now somewhere up by the North Pole. That gave me a certain confidence, so Sonny and I burst in with our presents, shouting: “Look what Santa Claus brought!”

Father and Mother woke, and Mother smiled, but only for an instant. As she looked at me her face changed. I knew that look; I knew it only too well. It was the same she had worn the day I came home from langing, when she said I had no word.

“Larry,” she said in a low voice, “where did you get the gun?”

“Santa left it in my stocking, Mummy,” I said, trying to put on an injured air, though it baffled me how she guessed that he hadn't. “He did, honest.”

“You stole it from that poor child's stocking while he was asleep,” she said, her voice quivering with indignation. “Larry, Larry, how could you be so mean?”

“Now, now, now,” Father said deprecatingly, “'tis Christmas morning.”

“Ah,” she said with real passion, “it's easy it comes to you. Do you think I want my son to grow up a liar and a thief?”

“Ah, what thief, woman?” he said testily. “Have sense, can't you?” He was as cross if you interrupted him in his benevolent moods as if they were of the other sort, and this one was probably exacerbated by a feeling of guilt for his behavior of the night before. “Here, Larry,” he said, reaching out for the money on the bedside table, “here's sixpence for you and one for Sonny. Mind you don't lose it now!”

But I looked at Mother and saw what was in her eyes. I burst out crying, threw the popgun on the floor, and ran bawling out of the house before anyone on the road was awake. I rushed up the lane behind the house and threw myself on the wet grass.

I understood it all, and it was almost more than I could bear; that there was no Santa Claus, as the Dohertys said, only Mother trying to scrape together a few coppers from the housekeeping; that Father was mean and common and a drunkard, and that she had been relying on me to raise her out of the misery of the life she was leading. And I knew that the look in her eyes was the fear that, like my father, I should turn out to be mean and common and a drunkard.

My First Protestant

I
T WAS
when I was doing a line with Maire Daly that I first came to know Winifred Jackson. She was my first Protestant. There were a number in our locality, but they kept to themselves. The Jacksons were no exception. The father was a bank manager, a tall, thin, weary-looking man, and the mother a chubby, pious woman who had a lot to do with religious bazaars. I met her once with Winifred and liked her. They had one son, Ernest, a medical student who was forever trying to get engaged to some trollop who had caught his fancy for the moment—a spoiled pup if ever there was one.

But Winifred caused her parents far more concern than he did. They probably felt she had to be taken seriously. She and Maire were both learning the piano from old Streichl, and they became great friends. The Dalys' was a grand house in those days. The father was a builder; a tall, thin, sardonic man who, after long and bitter experience, had come to the conclusion that the whole town was in a conspiracy against him, and that his family—all but his wife, whom he regarded as a friendly neutral—was allied with the town. His wife was a handsome woman, whose relations with the enemy were far closer than her husband ever suspected. As for the traitors—Joe, Maire, Brenda, and Peter, the baby—they had voices like trumpets from shouting one another down and exceedingly dirty tongues to use when the vocal cords gave out.

Joe was the eldest; a lad with a great head for whiskey and an even better one for books if only he had taken them seriously, but it was a convention of the Daly family to take nothing seriously but money and advancement. Like a lot of other conventions this one didn't bear much relation to the fundamental facts. The only exception to the convention was Peter, who later became a Jesuit, and Peter had something in common with a submarine. He was a handsome lad with an enormous brow and bright blue eyes; he sometimes saluted you with a curt nod, but more often cut you dead, being submerged. For weeks he sat in his room, reading with ferocity, and then suddenly one night decided to come up for air and a little light conversation, and argued like a mad dog until two in the morning. That, the Dalys said flatly, was what reading did for you.

Yet it was a wonderfully pleasant house on a Sunday evening when the children and their friends were in, and old Daly concluded an armistice with us for the evening. There was always lashings of stuff; the Dalys, for all their shrewdness, could do nothing in a small and niggardly way. If you borrowed a cigarette from one of them, you were quite liable to be given a box of a hundred, and attempting to repay it might well be regarded as a deadly insult. Brenda, the younger girl, slouched round with sandwiches and gibes; Joe sang “Even Bravest Heart May Swell” with an adoring leer at “Loving smile of sister kind”; while Maire, who played his accompaniment, muttered furiously: “Of all the bloody nonsense! A puck in the gob was all that we ever got.”

“Really,” Winifred said with a sigh as I saw her home one night, “they are an extraordinary family.”

I didn't take this as criticism. Having been brought up in a fairly quiet home myself, I sometimes felt the same bewilderment.

“Isn't that why you like them?” I asked.

“Is it, do you think?” she said with surprise. “I dare say you're right. I wish Daddy thought the same.”

“What does he object to?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing in particular,” she replied with a shrug. “Just that they're the wrong persuasion. Haven't I nice girls of my own class to mix with? Don't I realize that everything said in that house is reported in Confession? … Is it, by the way?” she added eagerly.

“Not everything.”

“I hardly thought so,” she added dryly. “Anyhow, they can confess everything I say to them.”

“You're not afraid of being converted?” I asked.

“Oh, they're welcome to try,” she said indifferently. “Really, people are absurd about religion.”

I didn't say that some such ambition was not far from Mrs. Daly's mind. I had seen for myself that she liked Winifred and thought she was good company for Maire, and it was only natural that a woman so big-hearted should feel it a pity that such a delightful girl dug with the wrong foot. It probably wasn't necessary to say it to Winifred. There was little about the Dalys which she wasn't shrewd enough to observe for herself. That was part of their charm.

On the whole her parents did well to worry. What had begun as a friendship between herself and Maire continued as a love affair between herself and Joe. It came to a head during the summer holidays when the Dalys took a house by the sea in Crosshaven and Winifred stayed with them. I went down for occasional weekends, and found it just like Cork, and even more so. By some mysterious mental process of his own, Mr. Daly had worked out that, as part of a general conspiracy, the property-owners of Crosshaven charged high rents and then encouraged you to dissipate the benefits of your seaside holiday by depriving you of your sleep, and insisted on everybody's being in bed at eleven o'clock of a summer night, so, with the connivance of the neutral power, we all slipped out again when he was asleep, for a dance in some neighbor's house, a moonlight swim or row, or a walk along the cliffs. I was surprised at the change in Winifred. When first I had seen her, she was prim and demure, and, when anyone ragged her out of this, inclined to be truculent and awkward. Now she had grown to accept the ragging that was part of the Dalys' life, and evolved a droll and impudent expression which gave people the impression that it was she who was making fun of them. Naturally, this was far more effective.

“She's coming on,” I said to Maire one evening when we were lying on the cliffs.

“She's getting more natural,” admitted Maire. “At first she'd disgrace you. It wasn't bad enough wanting to pay for her own tea, but when she tried to give me the penny for the bus I thought I'd die with shame. God, Dan, do you know I was so flabbergasted I took it from her.”

The picture of Maire taking the penny made me laugh outright, for she too had all the Daly lavishness, and there was nothing flashy about it; it was just that the story of their lives was written like that, in large capital letters.

“It's all very well for you,” said Maire, who didn't know what I was laughing at, “but that family of hers must be as mean as hell.”

“Not mean,” I said. “Just prudent.”

“Prudent! Pshaw!”

“Where is she now?”

“Spooning with Joe, I suppose. They're doing a terrible line. She'd be grand for him. She wouldn't stand for any of his nonsense.”

“Is that the sort Joe is?” I asked, closing my eyes to enjoy the sun.

“He's as big a bully as Father,” said Maire, busily tickling my nose with a blade of grass. “God, the way Mother ruins that fellow!—she expects us to let him walk on us. Aren't Protestants great, Dan?”

“We'll see when her family hears she's walking out with Joe,” I said.

“Oh, I believe they're kicking up hell about that already,” she said, throwing away one blade and picking up another to chew, a most restless woman. I looked round and she was sitting with one leg under her, staring away towards the sea. “They think he was put on to her by the Pope.”

“And wasn't he?”

“Is it Mother?” laughed Maire. “God help us, you wouldn't blame her. Two birds with one stone—a wife for Joe and a soul for God.”

I watched Winifred's romance with sympathy, perhaps with a reminiscence of Romeo and Juliet in my mind, perhaps already with a feeling of revolt against the cliques and factions of a provincial town. But for a time it almost appeared to mean more to me than my own relationship with Maire.

One autumn evening when I was coming home from the office I saw Winifred emerge from a house on Summerhill. She saw me too and waved, before she came charging after me with her long legs flying. She always remained leggy even in middle age; a tall, thin girl with a long, eager face, blue eyes, and fair hair. When she caught up on me she took my arm. That was the sort of thing I liked in her; the way she ran, the way she grabbed your arm; her capacity for quick, spontaneous moments of intimacy without any element of calculation in them.

“How's Joe?” I asked. “I haven't seen him this past week.”

“No more have I,” she replied lightly.

“How's that?” I asked gravely. “I thought you'd be giving us a night by this time.”

“Ah, I don't think it'll ever come to that, Dan,” she replied in the same tone, but without any regret that I could see.

“You're not going to disappoint us?” I asked, and I fancy there must have been more feeling in my voice than in hers.

“Well, we've discussed it, of course,” she said in a businesslike tone, “but it seems impossible. He can't marry me unless I become a Catholic.”

“Can't he?” I asked in surprise.

“Well, I suppose he couldn't be stopped, but you know how it would affect his business.”

“I dare say it would,” I said, and mind you, it was the first time the idea of that had crossed my mind—I must have been even more sentimental than I know, even now. “But you could get a dispensation.”

“Yes, if I agreed to have the children brought up as Catholics.”

“And wouldn't you?”

“Really, Dan, how could I?” she asked wearily. “It's all that the parents threatened me with from the beginning. I suppose it was wrong of me really to start anything with Joe, but I couldn't walk out on them now.”

“It's your life, not theirs,” I pointed out.

“Even so, Dan, I have to consider their feelings, just as Joe has to consider his mother's. She wouldn't like to see her grandchildren brought up as Protestants, and they feel just the same. You may think their opinions are wrong, but it would hurt them just as much as if they were right.”

“I think the sooner people with opinions like those get hurt, the better,” I said with a queer feeling of disappointment.

“Oh, I know,” she retorted, flaring up at me like a real little termagant. “You're just like Joe. You're the normal person. I'm the freak; consequently, you expect me to make all the sacrifices.”

We were passing the Cross at the time, and I stopped dead and looked at her. Up to this I had never, I thought, felt so intensely about anything.

“If that's the sort you think I am, you're very much mistaken,” I said. “If you were my girl I wouldn't let God, man, or devil come between us.”