The Rose Garden (28 page)

Mary stared indifferently at him, and he hesitated to speak for
fear of provoking her into some further rigmarole. After a few seconds the rising silence in the room pushed him to his feet almost in spite of himself, but at the door he turned and whispered that he would speak to Father Dodd immediately about the arrangements for the funeral, which would probably be on Thursday. He then said that he would call back later in the day to see how she and the children were getting along, and he added that Father Dodd himself might even find time to come—just for a few minutes, of course, because he was greatly taken up at this time of the year, between Christmas and Easter.

As he felt his precarious way downstairs, he couldn't help rehearsing a question that he knew he would never ask, because it would seem uncharitable. The question was what sort of a woman is it could sit beside her husband's body, with her unfortunate children in the next room, and think only about herself?

The Beginning of a Long Story

T
he front door should have been painted before this. Now it was too late. The mother had put off having the front door painted, and now the winter had settled in and the weather was very bad. It was much too late in the year to do any outside painting. It was the worst winter Dublin had seen in years. Everybody said so. There was nothing but rain, day after day. Everything got very damp, and every funeral marked the last chapter in a story that always began with somebody getting his feet wet. The mother mourned over her garden, which was being killed by the frost, and she worried over the colds and the flu and the pneumonia that were in the air, and she said that every time she went to the front door she was mortified because it was in such bad condition it made the house look like a tenement. The house did not look like a tenement. It looked like itself, a small plain house in a row, faced from the other side of the terrace by a row of other houses just like it, all made alike of undistinguished gray stone with slate roofs and tiny front gardens protected by iron railings. It was a very ordinary house, a regulation uniform for the lives of certain families, or for some families at a certain stage in their lives. It was better than a
workingman's house but not good enough for a successful man and his family to live in. It was a clerk's house, and the man who lived in it was a government clerk with a wife and three small daughters.

Ellen was the eldest. She was eight. The mother had kept her at home for the day because of the flu that was going around. The flu had been going around all winter, and no more that day than usual. The flu was only an excuse. The fact was that the mother had woken up that morning filled with the passionate determination to keep all three of her children safe at home under her roof and with her all day long. It was her gesture against the cruelty of the winter, to deprive it of Ellen's warm body for one day. Johanna, the middle one, was already out of school with a cold, and Bridget was too young to be sent to school. Bridget was only four.

The mother had a fire going in the back bedroom for Johanna, who was in bed there, and the coal range was going all day in the kitchen, but the other rooms in the house were cold. The front sitting room was cold. The back sitting room, which they also called the dining room, was cold. The front bedroom, where the mother and father slept in their big brass bed, was cold. The bathroom, halfway up the stairs, was cold, and the little room they called the boxroom, next to the bathroom, was cold and felt damp. The narrow linoleum-covered hall that led from the kitchen to the front door was like a dungeon, it was so cold. The mother said it was just like a dungeon in the hall. All the cold air that forced its way in when the front door was opened died in the hall when the door was shut again, and died on the stairs that led up to the halfway landing.

There was dark-red carpet on the stairs, held in place by brass rods. The mother polished the brass rods every week, starting at the top and kneeling on every step on her way down. It was not
a long way. One time she had taken all the rods out of the stairs and had taken them down to the kitchen to give them all a proper cleaning and Bridget had worked her way in under the carpet and had sat there on the bare stair, making a big lump in the middle under the carpet, and nobody could go up or come down. There was no one upstairs. They were all downstairs. The mother and Ellen and Johanna had stood at the foot of the stairs and implored Bridget to have sense and come out but Bridget only laughed and said she would come out when she liked. Ellen thought they might all take hold of the end of the carpet and pull it taut and tight so that Bridget would be squeezed out, but Johanna said that if the carpet got Bridget the wrong way—if it got her flat on her back—it might smother her and she might be dead by the time they got her out.

“Oh, don't say the like of that to me,” the mother said sharply. “Don't ever say a thing like that again.”

The stairs were very narrow, but the mother thought that if she made a quick rush up the stairs and got a good hold on Bridget she might drag her out by main force, but as soon as she set her foot on the bottom step Bridget began to wriggle around under the carpet and the mother got nervous and put her foot down into the hall again.

“She's so small,” she said to Ellen and Johanna, “and her bones are not all formed. If I came down with my foot on some part of her I might damage her for life.”

At the end of an hour Johanna began to cry because she wanted to go upstairs to the bathroom and the mother lost patience and shouted at Bridget that if she didn't come out from under the stair carpet this very minute she'd come up there and drag her out and whack her till her bottom was bright red. When Bridget heard the words “whack” and “bottom” she began to cry. When Bridget cried she bawled and her mouth got very large. When she cried
her mouth got enormous. Ellen and Johanna rushed around to the end of the stairs to see if they could get a look at her and Bridget edged toward them away from the wall and tilted the carpet up so that they could see her and greeted them with a wild howl to show them she was not just pretending to cry. Her mouth was stretched wide, and around it her face was only a bright-red rim with her little nose stone white in its center. Ellen knew that a stone-white nose is a bad sign. It meant that the rage had carried the blood to the top of Bridget's head.

“Oh, Mammy,” Ellen cried, “she's working herself into a passion.”

The mother ran around to the side of the stairs and took two of the banisters into her hands and stared between them at Bridget.

“Oh, and she's got her mouth wide open and it's filling up with dust,” she cried. “Oh, Bridget,” she entreated, “come on out and don't be frightening your poor mother. I didn't mean it, Bridget. Mammy was only pretending. You know I wouldn't whack my little Bridget. It's only that I was afraid you'd be lonely in there by yourself. Come on now, Bridget, come on.”

Bridget stopped wailing and looked at them all, and Johanna got up on her toes and waved at her little sister as though she had not seen her for a long time.

“Come on, Bridget,” Johanna said. “She's not going to whack you.”

Bridget began to smile, and she crawled out and went triumphantly into her mother's arms. The mother clutched her and squeezed her and kissed her and murmured to her as though she was a brave child who had come through some terrible danger. Johanna and Ellen watched them.

“You'd think she'd done something great,” Johanna said.

“It's awful the way she's always looking for notice,” Ellen said.

Bridget had got so dirty from sitting under the stair carpet that
they had to take off all her clothes and wash her all over. When the father heard the story, when he came home that evening, he laughed and said it served the mother right for working too hard and trying to do too much.

“If it isn't the brass rods on the stairs,” he said, “it's the brasses on the front door. And if it isn't the brasses on the front door, it's something else. You'll wear yourself out.”

The mother replied that nothing made a house look as neglected as neglected brass. She added that it was very important to keep up the appearance of a place, especially here in Dublin, where the people were only looking for an excuse to look down on you.

The father threw his evening paper to the floor beside his chair and then he picked it up again and began looking at it. “That's enough of that,” he said, and his face turned red with anger. The mother's face turned red, too. The father looked at his paper and the mother went on with her knitting and Ellen and Johanna looked at each other.

Everybody in the room was thinking about the same thing. They were all thinking about the terrible row the mother and father had had over the tennis club, and how the father had run out of the house and not come back for hours. The tennis courts lay beyond the long cement wall that was the common end wall for all the back gardens of all the houses in the row. The gardens were separated from one another by cement walls, and united by the common end wall. The tennis club was very up to date. It was all surrounded by trees, and in the summertime it was very smart with deck chairs and brightly painted wooden chairs placed around the edges of the courts and at tournament time there was a stand for the judges and a platform for the prize-giving. The afternoon of the row, the father had said that they could all go up and sit in the back-bedroom window. There was a grandstand view of the tournaments from the back-bedroom window, the
father said. It was summertime and they were all in the garden and they could hear the cries and shouts and cheers coming over to them from the courts at the other side of the wall, but they couldn't see anything. But the mother said that she didn't want her children sitting up in the back-bedroom window staring at the people who belonged to the club. If anyone on the courts looked up and saw them, she said, and knew what house they were looking from and who they were, they might think the children were hoping to be asked over. Everyone knew, the mother said, that the people who belonged to the club thought they were better than anybody else, and she didn't want her children put in a position like that. Her face was red and her voice was shaky, but she kept on talking until she had finished.

“Put in a position like what?” the father had asked.

“Put in a position of looking as if they were asking for favors,” the mother had said, and looked as if she might cry.

The father said, “Oh, dear God!” and jumped up from the grass where he had been lying. Once he was up he looked as if he might get down on the grass again, but instead he marched away up the garden and in a minute they heard the front door bang. The children all rushed into the house and along the hall to the front sitting room and looked out through the windows and saw him flying off down toward the main road. The children were glad he was gone, as long as he was going to be cross. But when they got back to the garden the mother looked at Ellen with a frightened, afflicted smile, and Ellen knew that she was nearly crying.

The mother came from the country. She was the eldest child of a small farmer and she had five brothers. Of her life at home she had two remarks to make—she had loved to attend a cow in calf, and calving, and she had hated having to black her father's and brothers' Sunday boots. But sometimes she talked to the children about the place at home, and told them how her father white-
washed the house every year and painted the outside doors and the window frames bright green and always kept the thatch in the best of condition. Her father was better at thatching than any man in the parish, she said, and their place was one of the best-kept places in the parish. But in Dublin, where no one knew her or her family, she felt she had to prove herself. She felt awkward in Dublin, although she liked being in the city. The women on the farms in Ireland had no life at all, she said. In the country, everything was for the boys, the sons. She felt that the people in Dublin looked down on her for her country accent, and she was afraid that her clothes would never look as smart as they should. She often wondered if people were laughing at her. She was very uncertain. She was always unsure of herself except when she was dealing with her children. Besides her children the only people among whom she had any force were the poor men and women who came begging at her door, and her force, for these, could be measured by the kind and quantity of what she gave them—a penny here, two-pence there, a half a loaf of bread, a cup of tea at the door or at the kitchen table, a knitted shawl for an expected baby, a pair of old shoes, old gloves, a jam jar of kitchen fat, a child's vest that was old and small but still useful.