Country Girl: A Memoir (14 page)

Sunday, and the coast was clear. I had made a sponge cake and laid a tea tray. “Nice place,” he said, as he climbed the three flights of stairs covered in dark linoleum and entered the kitchen, which doubled as sitting room. He was in a shabby suit, unshaven, and without the pancake makeup, but still irresistible. He had never seen a tea cozy before. It was one of my mother’s, made of mohair, with a mohair picture of a white
cottage and a small red hall door. He thought it was nifty. “Nifty” was a favorite word of his.

As we sat on the sagging horsehair sofa, exchanging sweet nothings, an unfortunate thing occurred. The door of a washstand, in which we kept saucepans, colanders, frying pans, and a drum of Vim, crept open of its own accord, revealing our ramshackle domestic life. He didn’t seem to notice, as he was already exploring the nape of my neck, my throat, saying ordinary, but in that context amazingly poetic, things, and I was thinking to myself how lucky to have been singled out after weeks of patient pursuit. The hooks of my brassiere yielded to his touch with a willingness. When he removed my silk stockings and flung them into a nether corner, two unnerving thoughts arose, one that my sister or Anna would return early and the other that the stockings, which had been twice to the invisible menders, would not survive this brawl and could not be repaired with nail varnish.

But circuitousness could go only so far. He was now begging for the comforts of the bedroom, and as his entreaties intensified, so did my balk. I was skirting matters, jumping up to make tea, except that he had no interest in tea. He drew me back down quite roughly, and I was now on his lap, trembling, him telling me not to tremble because it would not hurt. The dilemma, I tried to tell him, was that my sister or Anna, both highly religious, would be returning at any moment. Why hadn’t I mentioned that earlier? We could have met somewhere else. There were quiet dells in Phoenix Park. He was getting testy. In a moment of sheer madness, I suggested he might sing “
Brush Those Tears from Your Eyes
.” Sing to you! There was nothing for it but candor. I spoke of my fears, and sensing them, he cradled me in the crook of his arm, called me “Baby,” and said there was nothing to be afraid of as “he could go through me like butter.” It was shocking altogether.

Pointing to the wall clock, I said they were due back by three, which allowed for a mere eleven minutes of canoodling. Holding me fiercely, he said he was “game ball” and it could all be over and done in less. Love’s dream, that mystic linking which binds souls as well as bodies, had snapped and I hauled myself out of his embrace. What did I want? “What do you want?” he asked, saying my name, which he must have remembered from the day he gave me his autograph, prior to this first rendezvous. The spell was broken. He saw that it was a waste of time, moved to the kitchen chair, took out his bicycle clips and snapped them around the ankles of his navy gabardine trousers. Then, standing before the mirror that was next to the holy water font, he took out a broken white comb and ran it through the spill of his beautiful, soft brown hair. “Tolloll,” he said, as he had got his smile back, and hurried out and down the stairs.

The phrase was new to me, and I reckoned it was Dublin slang. I would come across it again before too long, when I began to read James Joyce and found a Mr. M’Coy spoke it to Leopold Bloom after some aimless conversation. Naturally, because of the fiasco that had happened, I was too ashamed to go back to the Capitol Theatre, so my free half-day was spent in bookshops and at bookstalls.

Dublin was a more trusting town in 1950, and secondhand books would be left on trestle tables outside the shop, with canvas awning above to keep off the downpours. Anyone who might want to could appropriate a book and walk off. It was at a stall in Bachelor’s Walk, overlooking the Liffey, that I found a slim volume called
Introducing James Joyce,
by T. S. Eliot. I opened it at random. The paper was a pale lemony color, the print was small, the letters in a deep, indented black. A sentence shot up at me: “All blessed themselves and Mr Dedalus with a sigh of pleasure lifted from the dish the heavy cover pearled around the edge with glistening drops.” The scene was
the Christmas dinner in the Dedalus house, seen through the child’s eyes of young Stephen. There was the great fire banked high, heartiness and witticisms, the plum pudding studded with peeled almonds and sprigs of holly, merriment, glasses replenished until the sudden dispute arose about priests meddling
in politics and the church’s hounding of Charles Stewart Parnell once it became known that he was an adulterer. Reading it, I realized that it could have been a Christmas dinner in our house or many a house in Ireland, maybe not with the same erudition but with the same bitterness that split people and made them spiteful and unforgiving. I bought it for fourpence and carried it with me everywhere, including to pharmacy lectures, so that I could read it at will and copy out the sentences, luminous and labyrinthine as they were. It was when I copied them that I began to realize how great they were, the short, flawless snatches of dialogue, lush descriptions of corpses and steers and pigs and kine, of sea and sea stones, and then the extraordinary ascensions, in which worlds within worlds unfolded.

My introduction to literature. Published by Faber & Faber in 1942.

The pawnshop with its three golden balls was in Capel Street, and it being Monday morning, it was busy. My good Gor-Ray skirt was getting known in the Crystal Ballroom, and as I hardly ever got asked up, I decided to pawn the skirt. I took the morning off from the chemist on the excuse of being sick. Only twice in the four years of my apprenticeship did I take a morning off, one for the pawnshop and one for the morning I had my ears pierced. The counter was full of stuff, old clothes and suits, basins with sheets and pillow slips, good suits, blazers, false teeth, and a skeleton that a medical student had brought. It was a sickly yellow, like the keys of an old piano. People pawned on Monday morning and usually managed to retrieve their stuff by Saturday. A man kept aiming his snooker cue at each of us, calling it Gilda, which he had named after Rita Hayworth, “the good-bad woman Gilda.” Then we were treated to a rigmarole of how he came to get it, having suffered an accident on a building site, his trousers getting caught in the wire
mesh, ending up a cropper, unemployed, and having to wait two years for the compensation money. Quite suddenly he took issue with the pawnbroker, called him a usurer, a feckin’ usurer, and said we were all being shafted. That was the thing about Dublin, stories abounding and so many of them hinged on poverty. I got a five-pound note for the skirt along with the blue docket to redeem it, except that I knew I would not go back, as it would never feel the same again.

What with my expiring virtue and limited wardrobe, I was storming heaven, this time not for love but for money. My prayer was answered. My sister was a secretary and worked for someone “high up” in the railway company, and I received a commission to write a weekly column for their magazine. It was to be six hundred words in length, lighthearted, and of interest to women. I would receive the exorbitant fee of a guinea. I chose the pen name “Sabiola,” not knowing how I came by it, except, I dimly recalled, it was the name of a concubine in the court of King Farouk of Egypt. An image of a vamp with bobbed hair and a cigarette holder, supposed to be a likeness of me, was featured at the top of each of these nonsensical jottings. My pieces had to contrast with more serious features, such as The Plaint of a Pensioner, Strange Rail Crashes, Tributes to Dublin Busmen, Illegal Haulage, The Knock Shuttle Service, and the dawn of the Dandy Diesel since “the sun was setting on the steam locomotive.” With no time to walk the city or interview people, my topics tended to be somewhat generalized and ranged from the joys of golden autumn evenings to the culinary skills for tossing a Shrove Tuesday pancake. I would go into the dress shops to inquire from buyers the latest trends in fashion and learned that as hair was expected to be longer, due to our incontinent skies, the Dublin ladies were soon to adopt the American craze and go “beret-mad.” It was a long way from James Joyce.

From the outskirts, Dublin seemed like a fairy-tale city, with its necklace of lights lending a pink flush to the sky that paled the farther one moved from it. We had gone there by bus, Peter Abelard and I. I think it was clear that it was to be the night when something momentous would happen. I had first set eyes on him in a newspaper office, where I went again and again with articles, in the hope that one might be accepted. Through the long plate-glass window in the newsroom I could see the journalists at work, and he seemed the most thoughtful, his eyes always lowered and his eyelashes long and sandy. In secret I had called him Peter Abelard, who for the love of Héloise had been castrated by the medieval clerics of Cluny.

Then one night I had occasion to speak to him. An article of mine had been accepted by the women’s page of the paper. It was about a seaside resort as yet undiscovered. I had gone there and simply wrote down what I saw, the big waves, green and vaulting, and the long spit of wet yellow sand and a lonely-looking tower in the distance. My pride in having it accepted was very great, knowing that people at home would read it and that my mother might forgive me my literary aspirations. On my way from pharmaceutical lectures, I had gone to collect the guinea that was due to me and which the editor said I would find on her desk. There to my delight was the warm sheet of newspaper, the ink still wet on it: “Portrane has not yet been discovered,” but instead of my name, it was my sister’s. Deprived of my moment of glory, I went into the corridor to search for an editor, a subeditor, anyone who could right this wrong. I could see them all through a window, editors and compositors, all at work, Peter Abelard among them. He saw me wave the page, somewhat agitated, and came out. He took it and withdrew into an inner room, and after some time returned, my own
name now in bold, black print on the heading. He asked if I might like a drink sometime and we met in a pub in Drumcondra on three occasions, hands touching one another under the table, and the whiskey, to which I was not accustomed, like fire
in my gut. One evening the friendly girl behind the counter who got to know us asked if we were getting engaged and he smiled the most beautiful, inscrutable smile.