Collected Stories (65 page)

“You wouldn't do that to us, Joan?” he asked, growing pale.

Joan strode to the door with an actressy air.

“The child has no other mother,” she said with her hand on the handle and the door half-open. “I have to be a mother to her.”

This was another bluff, for at that moment Joan's sentiments were very far from being maternal, but it worked. Timmy grabbed her and closed the door again. He was, as Tony Dowse said, an excitable man. He begged her to be reasonable, not to be so uncompromising—nothing would happen beyond an occasional meeting and letter.

“The first time I see another letter of yours with May, I go straight to your wife,” she said.

That did it. Timmy shed a few tears, but he produced the bundle of letters, and Joan went down the stairs and along the Grand Parade in the afternoon sunlight, full of triumph and miserable as hell. She had a stocky figure with a permanent roll on it, and she bowed and called greetings to her friends, and at the same time wished she were dead. Like most of the men who came her way, Timmy was a coward. If only he had had the courage to tell her to go to blazes, the story might have had a different ending, for she loved a man of spirit. Having denounced Timmy to his face as a vile seducer, she was now filled with the desire to go back and denounce him as an old molly. She knew if she had been in love with anybody as Timmy was supposed to be in love with May, and written him all those poetic letters about reality not existing for her, she wouldn't have been scared off by the threats of any relative, least of all a girl. “Schoolgirl stuff,” indeed! She'd show May which of them was the schoolgirl.

That evening, as they were washing up after supper, May gave her her opportunity. Very gently, as though she were ashamed of the way she had spoken earlier, she asked if there was anything else Joan wished her to do, as she had promised to meet Timmy and some friends at a hotel in town for a drink. She spoke as though Joan were already a confidante and partner.

“I'm afraid you won't be seeing any more of Timmy MacGovern, May,” Joan replied in a hesitating tone which was intended to represent regret. And at that moment she did feel rather sorry for “the child.”

“Won't I?” May asked with amusement, taking up the challenge.

“I doubt it,” Joan said candidly.

“You mean you'd like me to try?” May asked quietly, putting down the dish she had been drying. By this time Kitty would probably have broken it on Joan's head, but May's fantasy was of a kind which could not be easily affected from outside.

“Oh, I'm not trying to stop you, girl,” said Joan with a shrug, and went into the sitting room. She came back with her handbag, took out the picture of May, and tossed it on the table with the air of an old card-sharper producing the missing ace. “Don't you think you'd better have that back?” she asked mildly.

May grew a little more serious, but she was not one to be swept off her feet by any sort of histrionics.

“Where did you pinch that?” she asked lightly.

This time it was Joan who had to restrain herself from flinging something at May. Instead, she smiled and took out the bundle of letters.

“And those,” she said mockingly.

May picked one up and looked at it casually. Then she glanced at Joan.

“Check,” she said. “Now tell us what it's all about.”

Then as May swung her legs from a corner of the kitchen table, Joan described her interview with Timmy. She didn't exaggerate her own part in it. She didn't need to with the evidence of Timmy's weakness of character staring them both in the face. By the time she had finished, Joan had talked herself into good humor again. “To tell you the truth, May,” she said candidly, “I think you're a hundred times too good for him.”

“I'm beginning to think the same myself,” said May, and Joan knew that she meant it. If Timmy came crawling to her now, May wouldn't have him. Not after that humiliation. Schoolgirls were queer like that. Joan knew. She had been one herself—an awful long time ago, it seemed.

That was the end. Timmy took to his bed with thrombosis; Eily Geraghty nursed him and marvelled again at men's reputation for endurance; Tony Dowse visited him and found him sitting up with a shawl round his head, weeping and waving his hands.

“It's the old mistake, MacGovern,” Tony said, showing his big teeth in a mournful smile. “I knew what was going to happen. It's just like that ghost in Glengarriff. It's all imagination, all imagination.”

But May's imagination was playing about a tall and sulky young man who played golf and drove a small sports car. She tried to interest him in a caravan and talked a lot to him about tinkers, but he wasn't even interested. In this world one can't have everything.

J
OAN
had to confide her troubles to somebody, so, even though she felt it was letting down the family, she told Chris the details of May's affair with Timmy MacGovern. Chris appreciated the gravity of the situation, was disgusted at Timmy, and admired Joan's courage, but he wasn't as scandalized as she had feared. He even admitted that at one time there had nearly been a nasty scandal about his brother Bob. “Bob?” Joan cried in stupefaction. “But I thought Bob was a saint.” “That's what we thought too,” said Chris, and described the horror of the early morning call from an old policeman with whom he was friendly and who wanted it hushed up, and the scene at the Bridewell, where some of those who were plaster saints by day were bailed out at night. She respected his reserve in not having told her sooner. Apparently every family, even the most respectable, had things to hide. Respectability, far from being a dull and quiet virtue, was like walking a tight-rope.

Indeed, there were few pleasures more satisfying than those of normality. To walk out of an evening from your normal happy home with a normal respectable young man, and realize that the head of his department, though a Sanskrit scholar, lives in a home where the dirt and confusion created by eight children make life intolerable, and that the second assistant, though a man of genius, is also a dipsomaniac, makes you feel that if cleanliness isn't next to godliness, respectability certainly is. Joan was only beginning to realize her luck and to see that Chris was not only good but beautiful.

But she wasn't yet done with family troubles. May showed a disappointing lack of gratitude for the favor that Joan had done her in breaking off her relations with Timmy MacGovern. She wasn't the sort of girl to make herself unhappy by being cold or distant, but Joan had the feeling that there was watchfulness behind that pleasant manner of hers. A week or two before she married the golfer, she passed Joan a letter from Kitty.

“I don't know that this is any business of yours,” she said dryly, “but it looks to me as if Daddy should be told.”

It certainly looked as if somebody should be told, for Kitty announced in the calmest way in the world she was having a baby by a student called Rahilly. He was apparently a young fellow of very fine character, but with no job and entirely dependent on his parents. Joan read the letter and saw ruin staring her in the face. She realized that if Kitty had a baby, it was doubtful if Chris could marry her, and Kitty's chance of ever getting married would be nil. That was one of the drawbacks of respectability—the odds were so high.

“I suppose you're going to tell Jimmie all about this?” she asked.

“Why wouldn't I?” May asked in surprise.

“If you do,” said Joan, “don't be surprised if your marriage is broken off in a hurry.”

She hoped she might have scared May out of the assumption that her future in-laws would consider Kitty's plight the best of good news. But her father was no better. Weak as usual, he wanted to take all the blame on himself—as much of it as he didn't by implication shoulder off onto her.

“I can't blame the girl, Joan,” he said, shaking his head mournfully from side to side. “It was all my fault for letting her go. That would never have happened if she was in her own home. What is she, after all, but a child, and away there among strangers?”

Joan could have told her father pretty shrewdly what Kitty was, but she thought it better not to. His only solution seemed to be to bring Kitty home, let her have her baby there, and face the shame of it as best they could. Joan knew that was no solution. She decided she must talk to Chris about it, and that evening she met him outside his office and they went to a restaurant.

She didn't have to explain anything to him. No sooner had she begun than she saw by his face that he was already foreseeing even more disaster than was apparent to herself.

“Your father should go to Dublin and see this fellow himself,” he said with a frown.

“But you know what will happen? They'll go out and have a drink and Father will sympathize with him.”

He said nothing to that and talked tangentially for about ten minutes about how difficult things were in the office. Then he asked with something like embarrassment: “Would you like me to go?”

“No, thanks, Chris,” she said, shaking her head. “You might be able to deal with this fellow, but you couldn't deal with Kitty. You don't know what a handful she is. If you think someone must go, I'll go myself.”

“I wish you hadn't to,” he said. “It's going to be very unpleasant.”

“Don't I know it?” she said with a sigh.

Next afternoon she set off for Dublin and was met at Kingsbridge Station by a sullen and resentful Kitty. While they crossed the bridge to the bus stop, Kitty asked with no great interest after her father, May, and the neighbors, and Joan answered good-humoredly. But as they passed the Four Courts, Kitty, affecting innocence, asked what had brought her.

“Well, I hope I came up to meet your future husband, Kit,” Joan replied quietly.

“Not blooming likely!” said Kitty.

“What on earth do you mean, Kitty?” Joan asked sternly.

“I know what you want, you jealous thing!” Kitty muttered fiercely with the throb of tears in her voice. “You want to interfere between me and Con the way you interfered between me and Dick Gordon and between Timmy MacGovern and May. I know all about it. You're not going to be let.”

“I suppose you'll tell me next I shouldn't have interfered between Timmy MacGovern and May,” Joan asked sweetly.

“I don't see what the hell business it was of yours,” Kitty retorted hotly.

“I'd soon be told what business it was if I had to meet your young man's family with a scandal like that hanging over us,” said Joan. “I hope you're not going to tell me that he's married?”

No, he wasn't married, but as it turned out, it was almost as bad. Joan met him that night in a cinema restaurant. He came in with a heap of books under his arm, a thin, dyspeptic, worried-looking lad with spectacles.

“Really, Miss Twomey,” he began, “I'm terribly sorry about all this. I really am.”

“I'm sure of it,” Joan agreed sweetly, “but what we've got to discuss now is what we're going to do about it.”

“I know,” he said. “I don't think about anything else. I keep racking my brains, but I simply don't seem to be able to think of anything.”

“Well, I presume at least that you're going to marry her?”

“You're presuming a lot,” Kitty cut in. “It isn't as easy as all that.”

“Would you mind telling me what the objections are?”

“Well, it's my parents,” he wailed. “It would be an awful shock to them.”

“And I suppose you think it hasn't been a shock to my father?” she said sternly.

“Con doesn't mean that at all,” Kitty put in hotly.

“Then what does he mean?”

“I mean, Miss Twomey, that I haven't got anything, and if I did marry Kitty we'd have to keep it dark or my parents might throw me out.”

“That would be a very peculiar sort of marriage, Mr. Rahilly.”

He shrugged his shoulders, looking more crushed than ever, and his eyes wandered all over the restaurant as though in search of counsel.

“I don't think Kitty's father would like that sort of marriage at all,” she added firmly.

“Well, I can't say I like it, but I don't see what else we can do.”

“And who's to support Kitty until you've finished college and got a job.” Con clutched his head and looked at Kitty, but even Kitty didn't seem to be able to help him in this dilemma. Joan could see that he was an intolerably weak character, entirely under the thumb of his parents; that he wasn't even considering seriously the possibility of a secret marriage, and that even this she would not succeed in achieving unless she dealt with him firmly. “I suppose you mean my father can support her while she hides away in furnished lodgings like a criminal, all to spare your parents the shock. Really, I think you're as irresponsible as Kitty, if not worse.”

“It's easy for you to talk,” Kitty said bitterly. “You don't know his mother.”

“Well, she can't eat him, Kitty.”

“That remains to be seen, Miss Twomey,” he said, and she flashed an angry look at him, but he seemed to be quite serious. “As Kitty says, you don't know her.”

“Well, I'm going to get to know her within the next couple of days,” said Joan. “I'll leave it to you to prepare her.”

He threw up his hands in despair.

“You're not going to get to know her,” said Kitty. “This is my business, not yours.”

“Very well, Kitty. Then I'll wire for Father, and he can deal with you. As a matter of fact,” she added untruthfully, “he'd be here now, only for me.”

“Then I can give up all hope of continuing at college,” Con said, giving it up as a bad job. “I don't mind. I probably wouldn't have been any good as a doctor anyway. I suppose I can be a clerk, if anyone will take me. As you can see, I'm not the type for a laborer.”

Joan thought she had never seen such a weak specimen of an entirely degenerate type. She wasn't at all sure but that it would be better for everybody if she didn't interfere. The following evening she took the bus to the Rahillys' house. It was an old-fashioned terrace house on the strand with a great view of the bay and Howth. The door was opened for her by Mr. Rahilly, a red-faced, boozy man with pleasant manners. Mrs. Rahilly was sitting in the front room by the window. Mr. Rahilly introduced them and then disappeared.