Collected Stories (73 page)

Her time came in the middle of the night, and Frankie returned from the nursing home in the early morning in a stupor of misery and astonishment; misery at the mere possibility that her life might be in danger, astonishment that anyone's life could possibly mean so much to him. He lit the fire, but then found that he couldn't bear the little cottage without her; it, too, seemed in a stupor of misery, wondering when she would come back, put on that housecoat, boil that kettle, and wash those dishes. He wanted to make himself breakfast, but could not bring himself to touch the things that were properly hers and that stood waiting for her with the infinite patience of inanimate things. He swore at himself when he realized that he was identifying his grief with that of a common teakettle. He had some breakfast in a café, and then went off walking through the countryside, merely halting for a drink while he rang up the nursing home. It was evening before everything was over and Rosalind and the child—a son—safe, and then he took a car straight there.

She was still stupefied with drugs when he was admitted, but she clung to him passionately.

“Don't look!” she said fiercely. “Not till the next time.”

“I thought he was yours,” Frankie said with a grin, and smiled down at the little morsel in the cot. “Cripes!” he added savagely. “Wouldn't you think they could get them out without clawing them?”

“Did you hear the children playing on the doorstep?” she asked happily.

“No,” Frankie said in surprise. “What were they playing?”

“
Hamlet
, I think,” she said, closing her eyes, and, seeing how her thoughts drifted in and out of the drug, he tiptoed out. In sheer relief he knocked back three whiskeys in quick succession, but failed to get drunk. Then he tried for some of the old gang to sit and drink with, but, by one of those coincidences that always occur at moments like that, we were all out. It was just that he didn't want to go home. When he did get out of the bus and crossed the common towards the cottage, he saw a man's figure step out of the shadow of the trees beside it and knew at once who it was. His heart sank.

“Frankie!” Jim Hourigan said imploringly, “I'd like a word with you.”

Frankie halted. He had a sudden feeling of foreboding.

“You'd better come inside,” he said in a troubled voice.

He went ahead into the sitting room and switched on the light and the electric fire, which stood in the big open hearth. Then he turned and faced Hourigan, who was standing by the door. The man looked half-distracted, his eyes were wild, his hair was in disorder.

“What is it?” Frankie asked curtly.

“Frankie,” Hourigan muttered, “I want a word with Rosalind.”

“Rosalind is in hospital.”

“I know, I know,” Hourigan said, flapping his hands like an old man. “She said she was going there. But I wanted to see you first, to get your permission. It's only to explain to her, Frankie—that's all.”

Frankie concealed his surprise at Hourigan's statement that Rosalind had told him anything.

“I don't think she's in a state for seeing anybody, you know,” he said in a level tone. “The boy was born only a couple of hours ago.”

“Christ!” Hourigan said, beating the table with his fist and shaking his head as though tossing water from his eyes. “That's all that was missing. I came late for the fair as usual. My first child is born and I'm not even there. All right, Frankie, all right,” he added in a crushed tone, “I see 'tis no good. But tell her all the same. Tell her I never knew a thing about it till I got her letter. That God might strike me dead this minute if the idea ever crossed my mind!”

Frankie looked at him in surprise. There was no mistaking the man's abject misery.

“What letter was this?” he asked.

“The letter she sent me before she went in,” Hourigan hurried on, too distraught to notice the bewilderment in Frankie's voice. “You don't think I'd have treated her like that if I knew? You can think what you like of me, Frankie, and it won't be anything worse than I think of myself, but not that, Frankie, not that! I wouldn't do it to a woman I picked up in the street, and I loved that girl, Frankie. I declare to God I did.” He began to wave his arms wildly again, looking round the little sitting room without seeing anything. “It's just that I'm no damn good at writing letters. The least thing puts me off. I'd be saying to myself I'd be there before the letter. I said the same thing to her on a card, Frankie, but then the mother died, and I was in a terrible state—oh, the usual things! I know 'tis no excuse, and I'm not making excuses, but that's the way I am. If I had any idea, I'd have been over to her by the first boat. You must tell her that, Frankie. She must know it herself.”

“When did you get this letter?” asked Frankie.

“Oh, only yesterday, Frankie,” exclaimed Hourigan, entirely missing the import of Frankie's question. “I swear to God I didn't waste an hour. I'm travelling all night. I couldn't sleep and I couldn't eat. It was all that damn letter. It nearly drove me out of my mind. Did you see it, Frankie?”

“No,” said Frankie.

“Well, you'd better. Mind, I don't blame her a bit, but it's not true, it's not true!”

He took the letter from his wallet and passed it to Frankie. Frankie sat down and put on his glasses. Hourigan bent over the back of the armchair, reading it again in a mutter.

“Dear Jim Hourigan,” Frankie read silently. “By this time tomorrow I'll be in a hospital, having your child. This will probably be more satisfaction to you than it is to me and my husband. I am sure you will be disappointed to know that I have a husband, but in this life we can't expect everything.”

“Now, that's what I mean, Frankie,” Hourigan said desperately, jabbing at the lines with his forefinger. “That's not fair and she knows it's not fair. She knows I'm not as mean as that, whatever faults I have.”

“I wouldn't worry too much about that,” Frankie said heavily, realizing that Hourigan and he were not reading the same letter. It was almost as though they were not concerned with the same woman. This was a woman whom Frankie had never seen. He went on reading.

“If the child takes after you, it might be better for more than Frank and myself that it shouldn't live. My only hope is that it may learn something from my husband. If ever a good man can make up to a child for the disaster of a bad father, your child will have every chance. So far as I can, I'll see that he gets it, and will never know any more of you than he knows now.” It was signed in full: “Rosalind Daly.”

Hourigan sighed. “You explain to her, Frankie,” he said despairingly. “I couldn't.”

“I think it would be better if you explained it yourself,” Frankie said, folding up the letter and giving it back.

“You think she'll see me?” Hourigan asked doubtfully.

“I think she'd better see you,” Frankie said in a dead voice.

“Only for ten minutes, Frankie; you can tell her that. Once I explain to her, I'll go away, and I give you my word that neither of you will ever see me here again.”

“I'll talk to her myself in the morning,” Frankie said. “You'd better ring me up at the office some time after twelve.”

Hourigan shambled away across the common, babbling poetic blessings on Frankie's head and feeling almost elated. How Frankie felt he never said. Perhaps if Hourigan had known how he felt, he might have left that night without seeing Rosalind. He wasn't a bad chap, Jim Hourigan, though not exactly perceptive, even as regards the mother of his child.

But Rosalind had perception enough for them both. When Frankie called next morning, the effect of the drug had worn off, and she knew from the moment he entered that something serious had happened. He was as gentle as ever, but he had withdrawn into himself, the old Frankie of the days before his marriage, hurt but self-sufficient. She grabbed his hands feverishly.

“Is anything wrong at home, Frankie?”

“Nothing,” he replied in embarrassment. “Just a visitor, that's all.”

“A visitor? Who?”

“I think you know,” he said gently.

“What brought that bastard?” she hissed.

“Apparently, a letter from you.”

Suddenly she began to weep, the core of her hysteria touched.

“I didn't tell you, because I didn't want to upset you,” she sobbed. “I just wanted him to know how I despised him.”

“He seems to have got the idea,” Frankie said dryly. “Now he wants to see you, to explain.”

“Damn his explanations!” she cried hysterically. “I know what you think—that I sent that letter without telling you so as to bring him here. How could I know there was enough manliness in him to make him even do that? Can't you imagine how I felt, Frankie?”

“You know,” he said paternally, “I think you'd better have a word with him and make up your mind about exactly what you did feel.”

“Oh, Christ!” she said. “I tell you I only meant to hurt him. I never meant to hurt you, and that's all I've succeeded in doing.”

“I'd rather you didn't let your feelings run away with you again and hurt yourself and the child,” Frankie said in a gentler tone.

“But how can I avoid hurting myself when I'm hurting you?” she asked wildly. “Do you think this is how I intended to pay you back for what you did for me? Very well; if he's there, send him up and I'll tell him. I'll tell him in front of you. I'll tell you both exactly how I feel. Will that satisfy you?”

“He'll call this afternoon,” Frankie said firmly. “You'd better see him alone. You'd better let him see the child alone. And remember,” he added apologetically, “whatever you decide on I agree to beforehand. I may have behaved selfishly before. I don't want to do it again.”

He smiled awkwardly and innocently, still bewildered by the disaster which had overtaken him, and Rosalind held her hands to her temples in a frenzy. She had never realized before how hurt he could be, had probably not even known that she might hurt him.

“I suppose you think I'm going to let you divorce me so that I can go back to Ireland with that waster? I'd sooner throw myself and the child into a pond. Oh, very well, I'll settle it, I'll settle it. Oh, God!” she said between her teeth. “What sort of fool am I?”

And as he went down the stairs, Frankie knew that he was seeing her for the last time as his wife, and that when they met again, she would be merely the mother of Jim Hourigan's child, and realized with a touch of bitterness that there are certain forms of magnanimity which are all very well between men but are misplaced in dealing with women, not because they cannot admire them but because they seem to them irrelevant to their own function in life. When he saw Hourigan again, he knew that the change had already taken place. Though nothing had been decided, Jim Hourigan was almost professionally protective of Frankie's interests and feelings. That was where the iron in Frankie came out. He made it plain that his interests were not in question.

There were plenty—Kate among them—to say that he had behaved absurdly; that with a little more firmness on his part the crisis would never have arisen; that Rosalind was in no condition to make the decision he had forced on her and needed only gentle direction to go on as she had been going; that, in fact, he might have spared her a great deal of unhappiness by refusing to see Jim Hourigan in the first place.

As for unhappiness, nothing I have heard suggests that Rosalind is unhappy with Jim Hourigan. It is a grave mistake to believe that that sort of thing leads to unhappiness. Frankie's conduct certainly does, but is that not because to people like him happiness is merely an incidental, something added which, taken away, leaves them no poorer than before?

The Study of History

T
HE DISCOVERY
of where babies came from filled my life with excitement and interest. Not in the way it's generally supposed to, of course. Oh, no! I never seem to have done anything like a natural child in a standard textbook. I merely discovered the fascination of history. Up to this, I had lived in a country of my own that had no history, and accepted my parents' marriage as an event ordained from the creation; now, when I considered it in this new, scientific way, I began to see it merely as one of the turning-points of history, one of those apparently trivial events that are little more than accidents but have the effect of changing the destiny of humanity. I had not heard of Pascal, but I would have approved his remark about what would have happened if Cleopatra's nose had been a bit longer.

It immediately changed my view of my parents. Up to this, they had been principles, not characters, like a chain of mountains guarding a green horizon. Suddenly a little shaft of light, emerging from behind a cloud, struck them, and the whole mass broke up into peaks, valleys, and foothills; you could even see whitewashed farmhouses and fields where people worked in the evening light, a whole world of interior perspective. Mother's past was the richer subject for study. It was extraordinary the variety of people and settings that woman had had in her background. She had been an orphan, a parlormaid, a companion, a traveller; and had been proposed to by a plasterer's apprentice, a French chef who had taught her to make superb coffee, and a rich and elderly shopkeeper in Sunday's Well. Because I liked to feel myself different, I thought a great deal about the chef and the advantages of being a Frenchman, but the shopkeeper was an even more vivid figure in my imagination because he had married someone else and died soon after—of disappointment, I had no doubt—leaving a large fortune. The fortune was to me what Cleopatra's nose was to Pascal: the ultimate proof that things might have been different.

“How much was Mr. Riordan's fortune, Mummy?” I asked thoughtfully.

“Ah, they said he left eleven thousand,” Mother replied doubtfully, “but you couldn't believe everything people say.”