Collected Stories (62 page)

“Oh, for Heaven's sake, Jimmy, don't blame yourself for this,” she cried in an agony of maternal feeling. “This was all my fault.”

“No, it wasn't,” he said miserably, turning his head away and dropping his editorial air. “It was mine.”

“It wasn't, Jimmy, it wasn't,” she said eagerly, shaking her head. “I brought you here with that intention. I know I'm a fool. I know I don't know anything about it. You can't imagine what a bitch I am.”

“Oh, you're not,” he replied in the same tone, his body as stiff as that of a small boy in a fit of the glooms. “It's just that you're so changed. I don't seem to be able to get at you as I used.”

“But that's exactly why I wanted you to make love to me, Jimmy,” she cried. “I can't get at you either.”

“Yes,” he added with a sob of jealous rage. “And it's all that damn fellow in Dublin. He's the one who changed you.”

“You're wrong there, Jimmy,” she cried earnestly, taking him by the shoulders and making him look her between the eyes. “I swear you're wrong. I'm not in the least changed, and he didn't do anything to me. You do believe me, don't you? You know I wouldn't let him do that?” Then the falsehood touched the chord of hysteria in her and she began to sob, pulling wildly at her hair. “Oh, I'm a fool. I do my best, but I don't know anything. And you're right. It is awful.”

“Not awful,” he said, weeping. “It's just that it's not the right thing for us.”

And again she saw the situation through his eyes—as something beautiful that had been irretrievably spoiled by an hour of boredom and dissatisfaction, and which could never be the same again, because innocence had gone out of it.

When he left her, she threw herself on the bed and wept in earnest. She was finished. She had done her best and everything had been wrong. The morning light brightened her room and revealed to her her own wickedness and folly. She knew that, whatever about her deception of him, Jimmy would never forgive her lies. She could not marry him while any possibility existed of his discovering the truth.

Yet, even while she wept, she seemed to see Denis, his plump face aglow with good-natured laughter, and hear his silky, insinuating voice. So she imagined she could get along without him now, did she? She thought there was nothing left for her to learn? She felt so resentful that she stopped crying, put her fists under her chin, and glared at the wall before her while she argued it out with herself. After all, where had she gone wrong? What lesson was it she had failed to learn properly? Was it her fault or was it Jimmy's?

“Oh, damn!” she said suddenly. She sprang up, dressed in a hurry and rushed downstairs to the telephone. She had some minutes to wait for her call and stamped nervously up and down the hall with her eye on the stairs, afraid that Jimmy might appear. Then the bell rang and a meek, sleepy voice answered her. She could almost see the narrow bed against the wall with the telephone on a table at its head and hear the bells in the square, calling people to Mass, and her heart overflowed. All the time she had thought that she was learning the business of love, but now she knew every man and woman is a trade in himself, and he was the only trade she knew.

The Little Mother

I
N MY YOUTH
there was a family that lived up Gardiner's Hill in Cork called Twomey. It consisted of father, mother, and three pretty daughters, Joan, Kitty, and May. The father was a small builder, honest, hard-working, unbusinesslike, and greatly esteemed. The mother was a real beauty, tall, attractive, and sentimental, who wept profusely over the wrongs of Ireland, romantic love, and the sufferings of the poor. At least once a day Mick Twomey, coming in and finding a beggar eating his dinner on a chair outside the front door, or warming himself in the kitchen over the fire, denounced her imbecility, but in secret he adored her, and told his daughters that there wasn't a woman in the world like her.

The girls were as wild as they make them; they were spoiled; there was no doubt of that. May, being only thirteen, couldn't be really wild, but there was something about her gentle smile and insinuating air which indicated that this was only a pleasure deferred. Joan, the eldest, had a broad, humorous face, an excitable manner, and a great flow of gab. Kitty, the second girl, was an untidy, emotional sort, who took more after her mother than the others and was her father's pet. Mrs. Twomey couldn't control them. She would fly into a wild rage against one of them, and threaten to tell their father, and then remember an identical occasion in her own girlhood and laugh at her own naughtiness and her dead mother's fury till, the immediate occasion of her emotion forgotten, she went about the house singing sentimental songs like “Can You Recall that Night in June?”

She shamelessly searched their rooms and handbags for love-letters, ostensibly because it was her duty, but really because they reminded her of the letters she had received herself when she was a girl and of the writers, now married, scattered or dead. She was usually so enchanted by them that she never bothered to inquire whether or not the writers were suitable companions for her daughters. She tried to read some of them to her husband, not realizing that all men hated to be reminded of their adolescent follies. “For God's sake, don't be encouraging them in that sort of nonsense!” he snapped. But what was nonsense to him was the breath of life to Mrs. Twomey. She loved it on Sunday evenings when the gas was lit in the little front room, and the oil lamp was placed in the middle of the big round table to give light to the piano, and the girls' friends dropped in for a cup of tea and a singsong. She hung on there till she couldn't decently do so any longer, beaming and asking in stage whispers: “What do you think of Dick Gordon? People say he's not steady, but there's something very manly about him.”

Naturally, Dick Gordon, Joan's boy, was the one whose letters she appreciated the most. He was tall and handsome and bony, with a great back to his head, walked with a swagger, talked with verve, and sang “Toreador” and “The Bandolero” in a reckless baritone. The neighbors were quite right in saying he wasn't steady. He took a drink, was known to have knocked about with bad women, drove a motor bicycle, and brought Joan off to Crosshaven on it for weekends. What was worse, he didn't go to Mass or the Sacraments, and seemed to be entirely lacking in any sense of shame about it. But he was also lacking in any desire to force his views on others. He was an engineer, a well-read boy, and explained to Joan that early in life he had come to the conclusion that people were in a conspiracy to prevent him from enjoying himself, and determined to evade it. It wasn't on principle. He had no principles that anybody could see, and was perfectly respectful of everybody else's, so long as they let him alone.

Dick was not only Joan's sweetheart, but the ideal of the other two girls. Kitty didn't have a boy of her own; she always had a number of them, but none of them came up to Dick's standard. He mightn't be steady, but who at that age ever wanted a sweetheart to be steady? “Here, Joan,” she would say, producing a love-letter for her sister, “did you ever read such blooming nonsense as Sonny Lawlor writes?” And while she and Joan compared and argued, May hung round wistfully and asked: “Can't I look?”

Then one day death laid its hand on the family. Mrs. Twomey died suddenly, and for weeks the girls' beauty was masked by mourning and tears. Mick was so stunned that he behaved almost as though it were somebody else's loss rather than his own. On the day they buried her, he took Kitty and May by the hand and presented them to Joan with a curious formality.

“You'll have to be a mother to them now, Joan, girl,” he said in a low voice. “They have no one else.”

T
HE LITTLE
ceremony made an extraordinary impression on Joan. That night, as she knelt by her bed, she made a solemn vow to be everything to her father and sisters that her mother had been. She had no illusions about its being an easy task, and it filled her with a certain mournful pride. It was as though within a few hours her whole nature had changed; as though she no longer had a father and sisters, only a husband and children: as though, in fact, her girlhood had suddenly become very far away.

Father and sisters, too, realized the seriousness of the occasion and at first gave her every help. On Friday night her father counted out the housekeeping money to her in front of the others and said humbly: “That's eighty-five bob, Joan. Ten for pocket money and five for the club. Think you'll be able to manage?” The girls were so awe-stricken that they hardly dared ask her for money, and it was she who had to press it on them.

But that phase didn't last. She discovered a change even in herself. The excitement in her blood when dusk fell on the fields and trees behind the little terrace house and the gas lamp was lit at the street corner was no longer the same. It was always qualified by her new sense of responsibility. When Kitty was out with a boy, Joan realized that it wasn't any longer an adventure she could share with her on her return, but a burden she could share only with her father. Dick was very quiet and anxious to be helpful, but he couldn't understand her anxiety about Kitty. He knew that Kitty was giddy, but he didn't see what a responsibility it imposed on her. She didn't expect anything unreasonable, only that Kitty should be in at proper hours, but Kitty seemed to resent this far more from her than she had resented it from her mother. “Here, what's coming over you?” she asked pertly. “Who do you think you are?” She even said that Joan was getting too big for her boots. There were times when Joan felt old and tired. Children never understood the responsibilities of their parents and guardians. They never realized the way budgets had to be balanced so that the loss of an umbrella or the breaking of a teapot could leave you worried and distraught for days. When she remembered how often she had blamed her own gentle and self-sacrificing mother on that very score, she wept.

To give her strength to get through the day she took to going to Mass every morning. The neighbors, who saw it only from outside, were enormously impressed by the way a flighty girl of eighteen developed into a mature, responsible young woman who saw that meals were cooked, clothes washed and mended, and bills paid on time. But Kitty and May realized that they had lost a sister and caught a tartar. It was true that Joan had always had a touch of Reverend Mother about her; had been serious and bossy and attempted to make up in knowingness for the affection which had been diverted onto her younger sisters. But this had only been swank. In all essential matters she had remained part of the juvenile conspiracy—treating their parents as enemies, raiding their stores, and defeating their intelligence system.

Now that she had deserted to the enemy, she was worse than any parent because she knew all their tricks—the whole secret set-up of schoolbooks, fees, carfares, clothes, and boy friends—and they could do nothing without her knowledge. Now it was their intelligence system that was dislocated. Whenever they wanted something out of the ordinary, they had to tell her why and they had to tell the truth. They did, but they resented it far more than they resented her occasional fits of panic and meanness, because it derogated from their femininity, and in the intervals of scolding and wheedling they lapsed into a mute and sullen conspiracy which she felt was quite unjustified.

All the family learned things from the new situation, but Joan, who was the heart of it, learned the most. She discovered that it was far from being the romantic change of parts which she had first imagined, and not at all a matter of her father and herself on the one hand and “the children,” as she liked to call them, on the other. Her father had a secret life of his own, which was not at all easy to penetrate. At first, when she discussed her difficulties with him, she was flattered by the mournful candor with which he responded, giving her chapter and verse for his earnings, and she loyally and vigorously denounced to shopkeepers and neighbors the thoughtlessness of customers who left big accounts outstanding. Besides, no matter how hard up he might be, he always managed to find her a something extra, wherever he got it or whatever he had to sacrifice to obtain it. Sometimes the sacrifice was so patent that she begged him to take it back, but he shook his head mournfully and replied: “No, no, child. You need it more than I do. I can get along.”

But in time she began to suspect that the candor was fallacious and the sacrifice imaginary—the accounts varied too much. It was hard to believe, and it hurt her to believe it, but it had to be faced: her father was not truthful. What she was too young to see was that it had to be so; a man's income and expenditure are necessarily up to a point subjective, for you must leave room for optimism and pessimism, and to tie him to mere figures is to deny him a temperament. Joan wanted an objective income because it was she who was blamed when things went short. Kitty even went so far as to call her “a mean bitch,” and Joan, to keep from weeping, drew herself up and said with dignity: “I'm afraid you're not old enough to understand Daddy's difficulties, Kit.”

But even if she couldn't break down her father's secrets, nothing her sisters did could be kept from her. One day, when she was really worried about making ends meet, she saw Kitty open her handbag and turn over a handful of silver. Her first scared thought was that Kitty might have stolen it.

“Where did you get all that money, Kit?” she asked.

“What money?” Kitty asked with an attempt at brazenness, though she turned pale. “I have no money.”

“Don't try to fool me. That money in your bag.”

“But 'tis only a couple of pence—look!” Kitty wailed, opening her handbag and taking out a few coppers. Joan had had time to realize that she hadn't stolen it. She hadn't stolen it, but she was going to spend it on the pictures or on buying cigarettes for some young waster she was going out with, while Joan was left to worry.