Collected Stories (48 page)

“You're what?” shouted Elsie. “You have high notions like the goats in Kerry.”

“But I have to make my little brothers' supper, honey,” Ina said laughingly as she smoothed his hair. She was a slight, dark, radiant girl with a fund of energy.

“Tell them make it themselves,” Mick said scornfully.

“Tell them, you!” cried Elsie. “Someone ought to have told them years ago, the caubogues! They're thirty, and they have no more intention of marrying than flying. Have you e'er an old job for us over there? I'm damned for the want of a man.”

Ina rushed upstairs to change. Her two brothers came in, expressed astonishment at Mick's appearance, satisfaction at his promotion, incredulity at his view that the English weren't beaten, and began hammering together on the table with their knives and forks.

“Supper up! Supper up!” shouted the elder, casting his eyes on the ceiling. “We can't wait all night. Where the hell is Ina?”

“Coming out to dinner with me,” replied Mick with a sniff, feeling that for the first time in his life he was uttering a curtain line.

They called for Chris, an undersized lad with a pale face like a fist and a voice like melted butter. He expressed pleasure at seeing them, but gave no other signs of it. It was part of Chris's line never to be impressed by anything. In a drawling voice he commented on priests, women, and politicians, and there was little left of any of them when he had done. He had always regarded Mick as a bit of a softy because of his fondness for Ina. For himself, he would never keep a girl for more than a month because it gave them ideas.

“What do you want going to town for supper for?” he drawled incredulously, as though this were only another indication that Mick was a bit soft in the head. “Can't ye have it at home?”

“You didn't change much anyway,” said Mick with a snort of delight. “Hurry up!”

He insisted on their walking so as not to miss the view of the city he had been dreaming of for months; the shadowy perspective of winding road between flowering trees, and the spires, river, and bridges far below in evening light. His heart was overflowing. Several times they were stopped by neighbors who wanted to know how things were in the outside world. Because of the censorship, their ideas were very vague.

“Oh, all right,” Mick replied modestly.

“Ye're having it bad.”

“A bit noisy at times, but you get used to it,” he said lightly.

“I dare say, I dare say.”

There was pity rather than belief in their voices, but Mick didn't mind. It was good to be back where people cared whether you were having it bad or not. But in his heart Mick felt you didn't get used to it, that you never could, and that all of it, even Janet, was slightly unreal. He had a suspicion that he would not return. He had had enough of it.

Next morning, while he was lying in bed in his little attic, he received a letter from Janet. It must have been written while he was still on the train. She said that trying to face things without him was like trying to get used to an amputated limb; she kept on making movements before realizing that it wasn't there. He dropped the letter at that point without trying to finish it. He couldn't help feeling that it sounded unreal too.

Mick revisited all his old haunts. “You should see Fair Hill,” his father said with enthusiasm. “'Tis unknown the size that place is growing.” He went to Fair Hill, to the Lough, to Glanmire, seeing them with new eyes and wishing he had someone like Janet to show them off to. But he began to realize that without a job, without money, it would not be very easy to stay on. His parents encouraged him to stay, but he felt he must spend another six months abroad and earn a little more money. Instead, he started to coax Chris into coming back with him. He knew now that his position in the factory would ensure a welcome for anyone he brought in. Besides, he grew tired of Ina's brothers telling him how the Germans would win the war, and one evening was surprised to hear himself reply in Chris's cynical drawl: “They will and what else?” Ina's brothers were surprised as well. They hadn't expected Mick to turn his coat in that way.

“You get the feeling that people here never talk of anything only religion and politics,” he said one evening to Chris as they went for their walk up the Western Road.

“Ah, how bad it is!” Chris said mockingly. “Damn glad you were to get back to it. You can get a night's sleep here anyway.”

“You can,” Mick said in the same tone. “There's no one to stop you.”

Chris looked at him in surprise, uncertain whether or not Mick meant what he seemed to mean. Mick was developing out of his knowledge entirely.

“Go on!” he said with a cautious grin. “Are they as good-natured as that?”

“Better come and see,” Mick said sedately. “I have the very girl for you.”

“You don't say so!” Chris exclaimed with the smile of a child who has ceased to believe in Santa Claus but likes to hear about it just the same.

“Fine-looking girl with a good job and a flat of her own,” Mick went on with a smile. “What more do you want?”

Chris suddenly beamed.

“I wouldn't let Ina hear me talking like that if I was you,” he said. “Some of them quiet-looking girls are a terrible hand with a hatchet.”

At that moment it struck Mick with cruel force how little Ina had to reproach him with. They were passing the college, and pairs of clerks and servant girls were strolling by, whistling and calling to one another. There was hardly another man in Ireland who would have behaved as he had done. He remembered Janet at the station with her desolate air, and her letter, which he had not answered. Perhaps, after all, she meant it. Suddenly everything seemed to turn upside down in him. He was back in the bar in Alton, listening to the little crowd discussing the dead customer, and carrying out the drinks to Janet on the rustic seat. It was no longer this that seemed unreal, but the Western Road and the clerks and the servant girls. They were like a dream from which he had wakened so suddenly that he had not even realized that he was awake. And he had waked up beside a girl like Janet and had not even realized that she was real.

He was so filled with consternation that he almost told Chris about her. But he knew that Chris would no more understand him than he had understood himself. Chris would talk sagaciously about “damaged goods” as if there were only one way in which a woman could be damaged. He knew that no one would understand, for already he was thinking in a different language. Suddenly he remembered the story of Oisin that the monks had told him, and it began to have meaning for him. He wondered wildly if he would ever get back or if, like Oisin in the story, he would suddenly collapse and spend the rest of his days walking up and down the Western Road with people as old and feeble as himself, and never see Niamh or the Land of Youth. You never knew what powerful morals the old legends had till they came home to you. On the other hand, their heroes hadn't the advantages of the telephone.

“I have to go back to town, Chris,” he said, turning in his tracks. “I've just remembered I have a telephone call to put through.”

“Good enough,” Chris said knowingly. “I suppose you might as well tell her I'm coming too.”

W
HEN
Chris and himself got in, the alert was still on and the station was in pitch-darkness. Outside, against the clear summer sky, shadowy figures moved with pools of light at their feet, and searchlights flickered like lightning over the battlements of the castle. For Chris, it had all the novelty it had once had for Mick, and he groaned. Mick gripped his arm and steered him confidently.

“This is nothing,” he said cheerfully. “Probably only a scouting plane. Wait till they start dropping a few wagons of high explosive and you'll be able to talk.”

It was sheer delight to Mick to hear himself speak in that light-hearted way of high explosives. He seemed to have become forceful and cool all at once. It had something to do with Chris's being there, as though it gave occupation to all his protective instincts. But there was something else as well. It was almost as though he were arriving home.

There was no raid, so he brought Chris round to meet the girls, and Chris groaned again at the channel of star-shaped traffic signals that twinkled between the black cliffs of houses whose bases opened mysteriously to reveal pale stencilled signs or caverns of smoky light.

Janet opened the door, gave one hasty, incredulous glance at Chris, and then hurled herself at Mick's neck. Chris opened his eyes with a start—he later admitted to Mick that he had never before seen a doll so quick off the mark. But Mick was beyond caring for appearances. While Chris and Fanny were in the throes of starting a conversation, he followed Janet into the kitchen, where she was recklessly tossing a week's rations into the pan. She was hot and excited and used two dirty words in quick succession, but he didn't mind these either. He leaned against the kitchen wall with his hands in his trouser pockets and smiled at her.

“I'm afraid you'll find I've left my principles behind me this time,” he said with amusement.

“Oh, good!” she said—not as enthusiastically as he might have expected, but he put that down to the confusion caused by his unexpected arrival.

“What do you think of Chris?”

“A bit quiet, isn't he?” she asked doubtfully.

“Scared,” replied Mick with a sniff of amusement. “He'll soon get over that. Should we go off somewhere for the weekend?”

“Next weekend?” she asked aghast.

“Or the one after. I don't mind.”

“You're in a hurry, aren't you?”

“So would you be if you'd spent a fortnight in Cork.”

“All of us?”

“The more the merrier. Let's go somewhere really good,” he went on enthusiastically. “Take the bikes and make a proper tour of it. I'd like Chris to see a bit of the country.”

It certainly made a difference, having Chris there. And a fortnight later the four of them set off on bicycles out of town. It was a perfect day of early summer. Landscape and houses gradually changed; old brick and flint giving place to houses of small yellow tile, tinted with golden moss, and walls of narrow tilelike stone with deep bands of mortar that made them seem as though woven. Out of the woven pullovers rose gables with coifs of tile, like nuns' heads. It all came over Mick in a rush; the presence of his friend and of his girl and a country that he had learned to understand. While they sat on a bench outside a country public-house, he brought out the beer and smiled with quiet pride.

“Good?” he asked Chris with a slight lift of his brows.

“The beer isn't up to much, if that's what you mean,” replied Chris, who still specialized in not being impressed.

In the late evening they reached their destination, having cycled through miles of suburb with gardens in flower, and dismounted in the cobbled yard of an inn where Queen Elizabeth was supposed to have stayed and Shakespeare's company performed; the walls of the narrow, twisting stairs were dark with old prints, and the windows deep embrasures that overlooked the yard. The dining room had great oak beams and supports. At either end there was an oak dresser full of window-ware, with silver sauceboats hanging from the shelves and brass pitchers on top.

“You'd want to mind your head in this hole,” Chris said with an aggrieved air.

“But this place is four hundred years old, man,” protested Mick.

“Begor, in that time you'd think they'd make enough to rebuild it,” said Chris.

He was still acting in character, but Mick was just the least bit disappointed in him. He hit it off with Fanny, who had been thrown into such a panic that she was prepared to hit it off with anyone, but he seemed to have lost a lot of his dash. Mick wasn't quite sure yet but that he would take fright before Fanny. He would certainly do so if he knew what a blessed innocent she was. Whenever Mick looked at her, her dark, sullen face broke into a wistful smile that made him think of a Christian martyr's first glimpse of the lion. No doubt he would lead her to paradise, but the way was messy and uncomfortable.

After supper Janet showed them the town and finally led them to a very nice old pub which was on no street at all but was approached by a system of alleyways. The little barroom was full, and Janet and he were crowded into the yard, where they sat on a bench in the starlight. Beyond the clutter of old tiled roofs a square battlemented tower rose against the sky. Mick was perfectly happy.

“You're certain Fanny will be all right with Chris?” Janet asked anxiously.

“Oh, certain,” replied Mick with a slight feeling of alarm lest his troops had opened negotiations behind his back. “Why? Did she say anything?”

“No,” said Janet in a bustle of motherly solicitude, “but she's in a flat spin. I've told her everything, but she's afraid she'll get it mixed up, and if anyone could that girl will. He does understand, doesn't he?”

“Oh, perfectly,” said Mick with a confidence he did not feel, but his troops were already sufficiently out of hand. If Janet started to give orders they would undoubtedly cut and run.

When they returned to the hotel and the boys retired to their room, the troops were even more depressed.

“A fellow doesn't know how well off he is,” said Chris mournfully.

He said it by way of a joke, but Mick knew it was something more. Chris was even more out of his element than he had been. All his life he had practiced not being impressed by anything, but in this new country there was far too much not to be impressed about.

“Why?” Mick asked from his own bed. “Would you sooner be up the Western Road?”

“Don't talk to me about the Western Road!” groaned Chris. “I think I'll never see it.”

He didn't sound in the least dashing, and Mick only hoped he wouldn't break down and beg Fanny to let him off. It would be a sad end to the picture he had built up of Chris as the romantic Irishman.