Collected Stories (80 page)

Mick, imagining the effect of Mrs. Ryan on any well-organized convent, decided that God would probably not hold it too much against her, but he made up his mind to visit Nan. The convent was on one of the steep hills outside the city, with a wide view of the valley from its front lawn. He was expecting a change, but her appearance in the ugly convent parlor startled him. The frame of white linen and black veil gave her strongly marked features the unnatural relief of a fifteenth-century German portrait. And the twinkle of the big brown eyes convinced him of an idea that had been forming slowly in his mind through the years.

“Isn't it terrible I can't kiss you, Mick?” she said with a chuckle. “I suppose I could, really, but our old chaplain is a terror. He thinks I'm the New Nun. He's been hearing about her all his life, but I'm the first he's run across. Come into the garden where we can talk,” she added with an awed glance at the holy pictures on the walls. “This place would give you the creeps. I'm at them the whole time to get rid of that Sacred Heart. It's Bavarian, of course. They love it.”

Chattering on, she rustled ahead of him on to the lawn with her head bowed. He knew from the little flutter in her voice and manner that she was as pleased to see him as he was to see her. She led him to a garden seat behind a hedge that hid them from the convent, and then grabbed in her enthusiastic way at his hand.

“Now, tell me all about you,” she said. “I heard you were married to a very nice girl. One of the sisters went to school with her. She says she's a saint. Has she converted you yet?”

“Do I look as if she had?” he asked with a pale smile.

“No,” she replied with a chuckle. “I'd know that agnostic look of yours anywhere. But you needn't think you'll escape me all the same.”

“You're a fierce pray-er,” he quoted, and she burst into a delighted laugh.

“It's true,” she said. “I am. I'm a terror for holding on.”

“Really?” he asked mockingly. “A girl that let two men slip in—what was it? a month?”

“Ah, that was different,” she said with sudden gravity. “Then there were other things at stake. I suppose God came first.” Then she looked at him slyly out of the corner of her eye. “Or do you think I'm only talking nonsense?”

“What else is it?” he asked.

“I'm not, really,” she said. “Though I sometimes wonder myself how it all happened,” she added with a rueful shrug. “And it's not that I'm not happy here. You know that?”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “I've suspected that for quite a while.”

“My,” she said with a laugh, “you
have
changed!”

He had not needed her to say that she was happy, nor did he need her to tell him why. He knew that the idea that had been forming in his mind for the last year or two was the true one, and that what had happened to her was not something unique and inexplicable. It was something that happened to others in different ways. Because of some inadequacy in themselves—poverty or physical weakness in men, poverty or ugliness in women—those with the gift of creation built for themselves a rich interior world; and when the inadequacy disappeared and the real world was spread before them with all its wealth and beauty, they could not give their whole heart to it. Uncertain of their choice, they wavered between goals—were lonely in crowds, dissatisfied amid noise and laughter, unhappy even with those they loved best. The interior world called them back, and for some it was a case of having to return there or die.

He tried to explain this to her, feeling his own lack of persuasiveness, and at the same time aware that she was watching him keenly and with amusement, almost as though she did not take him seriously. Perhaps she didn't, for which of us can feel, let alone describe, another's interior world? They sat there for close on an hour, listening to the convent bells calling one sister or another, and Mick refused to stay for tea. He knew convent tea parties, and had no wish to spoil the impression that their meeting had left on him.

“Pray for me,” he said with a smile as they shook hands.

“Do you think I ever stopped?” she replied with a mocking laugh, and he strode quickly down the shady steps to the lodge-gate in a strange mood of rejoicing, realizing that, however the city might change, that old love affair went on unbroken in a world where disgust or despair would never touch it, and would continue to do so till both of them were dead.

Fish for Friday

N
ED
M
AC
C
ARTHY
, the teacher in a village called Abbeyduff, was wakened one morning by his sister-in-law. She was standing over him with a cynical smile and saying in a harsh voice:

“Wake up! 'Tis started.”

“What's started, Sue?” Ned asked wildly, jumping up in bed with an anguished air.

“Why?” she asked dryly. “Are you after forgetting already? You'd better dress and go for the doctor.”

“Oh, the doctor!” sighed Ned, remembering all at once why he was sleeping alone in the little back room and why that unpleasant female who so obviously disapproved of him was in the house.

He dressed in a hurry, said a few words of encouragement to his wife, talked to the children while swallowing a cup of tea, and got out the old car. He was a sturdy man in his early forties with fair hair and pale gray eyes, nervous and excitable. He had plenty to be excitable about—the house, for instance. It was a fine house, an old shooting lodge, set back at a distance of two fields from the road, with a lawn in front leading to the river and steep gardens climbing the wooded hills behind. It was, in fact, an ideal house, the sort he had always dreamed of, where Kitty could keep a few hens and he could dig the garden and get in a bit of shooting. But scarcely had he settled in when he realized it had all been a mistake. A couple of rooms in town would have been better. The loneliness of the long evenings when dusk had settled on the valley was something he had never even imagined.

He had lamented it to Kitty, who had suggested the old car, but even this had its drawbacks because the car demanded as much attention as a baby. When Ned was alone in it he chatted to it encouragingly; when it stopped because he had forgotten to fill the tank he kicked it viciously, as if it were a wicked dog, and the villagers swore that he had actually been seen stoning it. This, coupled with the fact that he sometimes talked to himself when he hadn't the car to talk to, had given rise to the legend that he had a slate loose.

He drove down the lane and across the little footbridge to the main road, and then stopped before the public-house at the corner, which his friend Tom Hurley owned.

“Anything you want in town, Tom?” he shouted from the car.

“What's that, Ned?” replied a voice from within, and Tom himself, a small, round, russet-faced man, came out with his wrinkled grin.

“I have to go into town. I wondered, was there anything you wanted?”

“No, no, Ned, thanks, I don't think so,” replied Tom in his nervous way, all the words trying to come out together. “All we wanted was fish for the dinner, and the Jordans are bringing that.”

“That stuff!” exclaimed Ned, making a face. “I'd sooner 'twas them than me.”

“Och, isn't it the devil, Ned?” Tom spluttered with a similar expression of disgust. “The damn smell hangs round the shop all day. But what the hell else can you do on a Friday? You going for a spin?”

“No,” replied Ned with a sigh. “It's Kitty. I have to call the doctor.”

“Oh, I see,” said Tom, beginning to beam. His expression exaggerated almost to caricature whatever emotion his interlocutor might be expected to feel. “Ah, please God, it'll go off all right. Come in and have a drink.”

“No, thanks, Tom,” Ned said with resignation. “I'd better not.”

“Ah, hell to your soul, you will,” fussed Tom. “It won't take you two minutes. Hard enough it was for me to keep you off it the time the first fellow arrived.”

“That's right, Tom,” Ned said in surprise as he left the car and followed Tom into the pub. “I'd forgotten about that. Who was it was here?”

“Ah, God!” moaned Tom, “you had half the countryside in here. Jack Martin and Owen Hennessey, and that publican friend of yours from town—Cronin, ay, Cronin. There was a dozen of ye here. The milkman found ye next morning, littering the floor, and ye never even locked the doors after ye! Ye could have had my license endorsed on me.”

“Do you know, Tom,” Ned said with a complacent smile, “I'd forgotten about that completely. My memory isn't what it was. I suppose we're getting old.”

“Ah, well,” Tom said philosophically, pouring out a large drink for Ned and a small one for himself, “'tis never the same after the first. Isn't it astonishing, Ned, the first,” he added in his eager way, bending over the counter, “what it does to you? God, you feel as if you were beginning life again. And by the time the second comes, you're beginning to wonder will the damn thing ever stop.… God forgive me for talking,” he whispered, beckoning over his shoulder with a boyish smile. “Herself wouldn't like to hear me.”

“'Tis true just the same, Tom,” Ned said broodingly, relieved at understanding a certain gloom he had felt during the preceding weeks. “It's not the same. And that itself is only an illusion. Like when you fall in love, and think you're getting the one woman in the world, while all the time it's just one of Nature's little tricks for making you believe you're enjoying yourself when you're only putting yourself wherever she wants you.”

“Ah, well,” said Tom with his infectious laugh, “they say it all comes back when you're a grandfather.”

“Who the hell wants to be a grandfather?” asked Ned with a sniff, already feeling sorry for himself with his home upset, that unpleasant female in the house, and more money to be found.

He drove off, but his mood had darkened. It was a beautiful bit of road between his house and the town, with the river below him on the left, and the hills at either side with the first wash of green on them like an unfinished sketch, and, walking or driving, it was usually a delight to him because of the thought of civilization at the other end. It was only a little seaside town, but it had shops and pubs and villas with electric light, and a water supply that did not fold up in May, and there were all sorts of interesting people to be met there, from summer visitors to Government inspectors with the latest news from Dublin. But now his heart didn't rise. He realized that the rapture of being a father does not repeat itself, and it gave him no pleasure to think of being a grandfather. He was decrepit enough as he was.

At the same time he was haunted by some memory of days when he was not decrepit, but careless and gay. He had been a Volunteer and roamed the hills for months with a column, wondering where he would spend the night. Then it had all seemed uncomfortable and dangerous enough, and, maybe like the illusion of regeneration at finding himself a father, it had been merely an illusion of freedom, but, even so, he felt he had known it and now knew it no more. It was linked in his mind with high hills and wide vistas, but now his life seemed to have descended into a valley like that he was driving along, with the river growing deeper and the hills higher as they neared the sea. He had descended into it by the quiet path of duty: a steady man, a sucker for responsibilities—treasurer of the Hurling Club, treasurer of the Republican Party, secretary for three other organizations. Bad! Bad! He shook his head reprovingly as he looked at the trees, the river, and the birds who darted from the hedges as he approached, and communed with the car.

“You've nothing to complain of, old girl,” he said encouragingly. “It's all Nature. It gives you an illusion of freedom, but all the time it's bending you to its own purposes as if you were only cows or trees.”

Being nervous, he didn't like to drive through a town. He did it when he had to, but it made him flustered and fidgety so that he missed seeing whoever was on the streets, and the principal thing about a town was meeting people. He usually parked his car outside Cronin's pub on the way in, and then walked the rest of the way. Larry Cronin was an old comrade of revolutionary days who had married into the pub.

He parked the car and went to tell Larry. This was quite unnecessary as Larry knew every car for miles around and was well aware of Ned's little weakness, but it was a habit, and Ned was a man of more habits than he realized himself.

“I'm just leaving the old bus for half an hour, Larry,” he called through the door in a plaintive tone that conveyed regret for the inconvenience he was causing Larry and grief for the burden being put on himself.

“Come in, man, come in!” cried Larry, a tall, engaging man with a handsome face and a wide smile that was quite sincere if Larry liked you and damnably hypocritical if he didn't. His mouth was like a show-case with the array of false teeth in it. “What the hell has you out at this hour of morning?”

“Oh, Nature, Nature,” said Ned with a laugh, digging his hands in his trouser pockets.

“How do you mean, Nature?” asked Larry, who did not understand the allusive ways of intellectuals but appreciated them none the less.

“Kitty, I mean,” Ned said. “I'm going to get the doctor. I told you she was expecting again.”

“Ah, the blessings of God on you!” Larry cried jovially. “Is this the third or the fourth? Christ, you lose count, don't you? You might as well have a drop as you're here. For the nerves, I mean. 'Tis hard on the nerves. That was a hell of a night we had the time the boy was born.”

“Wasn't it?” said Ned, beaming at being reminded of something that seemed to have become a legend. “I was just talking to Tom Hurley about it.”

“Ah, what the hell does Hurley know about it?” asked Larry, filling him out a drink in his lordly way. “The bloody man went to bed at two. That fellow is too cautious to be good. But Martin gave a great account of himself. Do you remember? The whole first act of
Tosca
, orchestra and all. Tell me, you didn't see Jack since he was home?”