Collected Stories (78 page)

Another stiff jump took her past him.

“Why don't you do it for the blacks, Nan?”

“I'm doing it for them, too, sure.”

But though her brothers could ease the pangs of childhood for her, adolescence threw her on the mercy of life. Her mother, a roly-poly of a woman who went round a great deal with folded arms, thus increasing the impression of curves and rolls, was still a beauty, and did her best to disguise Nan's ugliness, a process that mystified her husband, who could see nothing wrong with the child except her shaky mathematics.

“I'm no blooming beauty,” Nan would cry, with an imitation of a schoolboy's toughness, whenever her mother tried to get her out of the rough tweeds and dirty pullovers she fancied into something more feminine.

“The dear knows you're not,” her mother would say, folding her arms with an expression of resignation. “I don't suppose you want to advertise it, though.”

“Why wouldn't I advertise it?” Nan would cry, squaring up to her. “I don't want any of your dirty old men.”

“You needn't worry, child. They'll let you well alone.”

“Let them!” Nan would say, scowling. “I don't care. I want to be a nun.”

All the same, it made her self-conscious about friendships with girls of her own age, even pious ones like herself. They, too, would have boys around, and the boys wanted nothing to do with Nan. Though she carefully avoided all occasion for a slight, even a hint of one was enough to make her brooding and resentful, and then she seemed to become hideous and shapeless and furtive. She slunk round the house with her shoulders up about her ears, her red-brown hair hanging loose, and a cigarette glued loosely to her lower lip. Suddenly and inexplicably she would drop some nice girl she had been friendly with for years, and never even speak of her again. It gave her the reputation of being cold and insincere, but as Dinny in his shrewd, old-mannish way observed to Mick, she made her real friends among older women and even sick people—“all seventy or paralyzed,” as he put it. Yet even with these she tended to be jealous and exacting.

Dinny didn't like this, and his mother thought it was awful, but Nan paid no attention to their views. She had become exceedingly obstinate in a way that did not suit either her age or her sex, and it made her seem curiously angular, almost masculine, as though it were the psychological aspect of her ugliness. She had no apparent shyness and stalked in and out of a room, swinging her arms like a boy. Her conversation changed, too, and took on the tone of an older woman's. It was not dull—she was far too brainy to be dull—but it was too much on one key—“crabbed” to use a local word—and it did not make the sharp distinctions young people's conversation makes between passion and boredom. Dinny and Mick could be very bored indeed in one another's company, but suddenly some topic would set flame to their minds, and they would walk the streets by the hour with their coats buttoned up, arguing.

Her father was disappointed when she refused to go to college. When she did go to work, it was in a dress shop, a curious occupation for a girl whose only notions of dress were a trousers and jersey.

T
HEN
one night something happened that electrified Mick. It was more like a transformation scene in a pantomime than anything in his experience. Later, of course, he realized that it had not happened like that at all. It was just that, as usual with those one has known too well, he had ceased to observe Nan, had taken her too much for granted, and the change in her had come about gradually and imperceptibly till it forced itself on his attention in the form of a shock.

Dinny was upstairs, and Mick and she were arguing. Though without formal education, Mick was a well-read man, and he had no patience with Nan's literary tastes, which were those of her aged and invalid acquaintances—popular novels and biographies. As usual, he made fun of her and, as usual, she grew angry. “You're so damn superior, Mick Courtney,” she said with a scowl and went to search for the book they had discussed in the big mahogany bookcase, which was one of the handsome pieces of furniture her mother took pride in. Laughing, Mick got up and stood beside her, putting his arm round her shoulder as he would have done at any other time. She misunderstood the gesture, for she leaned back on his shoulder and offered herself to be kissed. At that moment only did he realize that she had turned into a girl of startling beauty. He did not kiss her. Instead, he dropped his arm and looked at her incredulously. She gave him a malicious grin and went on with her search.

For the rest of the evening he could not take his eyes from her. Now he could easily analyze the change for himself. He remembered that she had been ill with some type of fever and had come out of it white and thin. Then she had seemed to shoot up, and now he saw that during her illness her face had lengthened, and one by one each of those awkward lumps of feature had dropped into place and proportion till they formed a perfect structure that neither age nor illness could any longer quite destroy. It was not in the least like her mother's type of beauty, which was round and soft and eminently pattable. It was like a translation of her father's masculinity, tight and strained and almost harsh, and she had deliberately emphasized it by the way she pulled her hair back in a tight knot, exposing the rather big ears. Already it had begun to effect her gait, for she no longer charged about a room swinging her arms like a sergeant-major. At the same time she had not yet learned to move gracefully, and she seemed to drift rather than walk, and came in and went out in profile as though afraid to face a visitor or turn her back on him. And he wondered again at the power of habit that causes us to live with people historically, with faults or virtues that have long disappeared to every eye but our own.

For twelve months Mick had been going steadily with a nice girl from Sunday's Well, and in due course he would have married her. Mick was that sort, a creature of habit who controlled circumstances by simplifying them down to a routine—the same restaurant, the same table, the same waitress, and the same dish. It enabled him to go on with his own thoughts. But whenever anything did happen to disturb this routine it was like a convulsion of Nature for him; even his favorite restaurant became a burden, and he did not know what to do with his evenings and weekends. The transformation of Nan into a beauty had a similar effect on him. Gradually he dropped the nice girl from Sunday's Well without a word of explanation or apology and went more and more to the Ryans', where he had a feeling of not being particularly welcome to anyone but Dinny and—sometimes at least—Nan herself. She had plenty of admirers without him. The change was there all right. Mr. Ryan, a tall, bald, noisy man with an apelike countenance of striking good-nature, enjoyed it as proof that sensible men were not put off by a girl's mathematics—he, poor man, had noticed no change whatever in his daughter. Mrs. Ryan had no such pleasure. Naturally, she had always cared more for her sons, but they had not brought home with them attractive young men who were compelled to flirt with her, and now Nan took an almost perverse delight in keeping the young men and her mother apart. Beauty had brought out what ugliness had failed to do—a deep resentment of her mother that at times went too far for Mick's taste. Occasionally he saw it in a reversion to a heavy, stolid, almost stupid air that harked back to her childhood, sometimes in a sparkle of wit that had malice in it. She made up for this by what Mick thought of as an undue consideration for her father. Whenever he came into the room, bellowing and cheerful, her face lit up.

She had ceased to wear the rough masculine tweeds she had always preferred, and to Mick's eye it was not a change for the better. She had developed a passion for good clothes without an understanding of them, and used powder and lipstick in the lavish tasteless manner of a girl of twelve.

But if he disapproved of her taste in dress, he hated her taste in men. What left Dinny bored made Mick mad. He and Nan argued about this in the same way they argued about books. “Smoothies,” he called her admirers to her face. There was Joe Lyons, the solicitor, a suave, dark-haired young man with mysterious slitlike eyes, who combined a knowledge of wines with an intellectual Catholicism, and Matt Healy, a little leprechaun of a butter merchant, who had a boat and rattled on cheerfully about whiskey and “dames.” The pair of them could argue for a full half-hour about a particular make of car or a Dublin hotel without, so far as Mick could see, ever uttering one word of sense, and obviously Lyons despised Healy as a chatter-box and Healy despised Lyons as a fake, while both of them despised Mick. They thought he was a character, and whenever he tried to discuss religion or politics with them they listened with an amusement that made him furious.

“I stick to Mick against the day the Revolution comes,” said Healy with his leprechaun's laugh.

“No,” Lyons said, putting his arm patronizingly about Mick, “Mick will have nothing to do with revolutions.”

“Don't be too sure,” said Healy, his face lit up with merriment. “Mick is a sans-culotte. Isn't that the word, Mick?”

“I repeat no,” said Lyons with his grave smile. “I know Mick. Mick is a wise man. Mind,” he added solemnly, raising his finger, “I didn't say an intelligent man. I said a wise one. There's a difference.”

Mick could not help being angry. When they talked that way to Dinny, he only blinked politely and drifted upstairs to his book or his gramophone, but Mick stayed and grew mad. He was hard-working, but unambitious; too intelligent to value the things commonplace people valued, but too thin-skinned to ignore their scorn at his failure to do so.

Nan herself had no objection to being courted by Mick. She was still under the influence of her childish infatuation, and it satisfied her vanity to be able to indulge it. She was an excellent companion, active and intelligent, and would go off for long walks with him over the hills through the fields to the river. They would end up in a public-house in Glanmire or Little Island, though she soon stopped him trying to be extravagant in the manner of Healy and Lyons. “I'm a whiskey-drinker, Mick,” she would say with a laugh. “You're not a whiskey-buyer.” She could talk for an hour over a glass of beer, but when Mick tried to give their conversation a sentimental turn she countered with a bluff practicality that shocked him.

“Marry you?” she exclaimed with a laugh. “Who died and left you the fortune?”

“Why, do I have to have a fortune?” he asked quietly, though he was stung by her good-natured contempt.

“Well, it would be a help if you're thinking of getting married,” she replied with a laugh. “As long as I remember my family, we never seem to have been worried by anything else.”

“Of course, if you married Joe Lyons, you wouldn't have to worry,” he said with a hint of a sneer.

“From my point of view, that would be a very good reason,” she said.

“A classy car and St. Thomas Aquinas,” Mick went on, feeling like a small boy, but unable to stop himself. “What more could a girl ask?”

“You resent people having cars, don't you?” she asked, leaning her elbows on the table and giving him a nasty look. “Don't you think it might help if you went and got one for yourself?”

The wordly, middle-aged tone, particularly when linked with the Ryan go-getting, could be exceedingly destructive. There was something else that troubled him, too, though he was not sure why. He had always liked to pose a little as a man of the world, but Nan could sometimes shock him badly. There seemed to be depths of sensuality in her that were out of character. He could not believe that she really intended it, but she could sometimes inflame him with some sudden violence or coarseness as no ordinary girl could do.

Then one evening when they were out together, walking in the Lee Fields, he noticed a change in her. She and another girl had been spending a few days in Glengarriff with Healy and Lyons. She did not want to talk of it, and he had the feeling that something about it had disappointed her. She was different—brooding, affectionate, and intense. She pulled off her shoes and stockings and sat with her feet in the river, her hands joined between her knees, while she gazed at the woods on the other side of the river.

“You think too much of Matt and Joe,” she said, splashing her feet. “Why can't you feel sorry for them?”

“Feel sorry for them?” he repeated, so astonished that he burst into a laugh.

She turned her head and her brown eyes rested on him with a strange innocence. “If you weren't such an old agnostic, I'd say pray for them.”

“For what?” he asked, still laughing. “Bigger dividends?”

“The dividends aren't much use to them,” she said. “They're both bored. That's why they like me—I don't bore them. They don't know what to make of me.… Mind,” she added, laughing in her enthusiastic way, “I love money, Mick Courtney. I love expensive clothes and flashy dinners and wines I can't pronounce the name of, but they don't take me in. A girl who was brought up as I was needs more than that to take her in.”

“What is it you need?” asked Mick.

“Why don't you go and do something?” she asked with sudden gravity.

“What?” he replied with a shrug.

“What?” she asked, waving her hands. “What do I care? I don't even know what you like. I don't mind if you make a mess of it. It's not failure I'm afraid of. It's just getting stuck in the mud, not caring for anything. Look at Daddy! You may not think so, but I know he's a brilliant man, and he's stuck. Now he hopes the boys will find out whatever secret there is and do all the things he couldn't do. That doesn't appeal to me.”

“Yes,” Mick agreed thoughtfully, lighting a cigarette and answering himself rather than her. “I know what you mean. I dare say I'm not ambitious. I've never felt the need for being ambitious. But I fancy I could be ambitious for someone else. I'd have to get out of Cork though. Probably to Dublin. There's nothing here in my line.”