Collected Short Stories (15 page)

‘Aren't they the divils?' she said.

‘Wait and I'll go up to them, Mary.'

‘No, no, Frank, you might frighten them.'

‘Frighten them!'

‘Well, I didn't mean frighten – I meant – how will I explain it.'

‘Aye, just how will you explain it! Look,' and he shook his knife in the air, ‘them two boyos is playing on you. I know what I'm talking about and if you'd take my advice you'd pack them off to the country.'

‘Och, after all, Frank, they're only children and I often think if I could get one of the new houses at the outskirts of the city they'd get as much of the country that'd do them,' and looking up at the ceiling she shouted: ‘Get into bed there, and go asleep or I'll go up with the strap.'

In the street there was the scrape of a shovel on stone and then a cart knocking its way past the window. She smiled: ‘They were watching the council men lifting the sweepings off the street.'

Frank said nothing. He drank what was left of his tea and rattled the cup down on the saucer with an air of finality. She stretched out her hand: ‘Another cup, Frank?'

‘I've had enough,' he said. She tried to coax him, and as she held out the teapot towards him he covered the mouth of his cup with his hand. ‘If I wanted it I'd take it,' he tried to say casually.

She smiled at him: ‘You're an awful man!'

He lit a cigarette and turned round in his chair toward the fire. She, herself, stopped eating, and with her little finger toyed with the crumbs on the plate. A heavy constraint pressed upon her. She sighed.

‘Do you know what I was thinking?' he said, flicking the ash of his cigarette into his cup. ‘What about coming for a walk on Sunday night now that the moon is full. A walk these nights would do you good and there'd be nobody to bother us.'

She sat irresolute for awhile, manoeuvring the crumbs into a tiny heap and disarranging them again.

‘Well, what do you say?' he pressed.

‘I'd love to go Frank, but it's impossible,' and she motioned with her hand to the ceiling. ‘I've never left them in the house by themselves.'

‘So you care more about them than you do for the man that loves you!'

‘Frank!' and she leaned over and touched his hand. ‘God knows what mischief they'd be up to.'

‘They're big enough and old enough to look after themselves for one night,' he said, withdrawing his hand from hers.

‘But look, Frank, if I met you outside the house it would be wrong and when I meet you inside the house it's wrong.'

‘How?'

‘The neighbours!'

‘So that's it! The neighbours!' he sneered. ‘You've the damned neighbours on the brain … I'll see you at the tram-depot at eight on Sunday night and we'll go up the Glen Road together.' He turned completely round to the fire, took the tongs and lifted pieces of unlit coal and piled them on the handful of glow in the centre of the fire. There was a knock on the ceiling.

‘At it again,' he said, and opened his newspaper.

Another knock followed and Tom's voice rhyming: ‘Mother, John wants a drink of water … John wants a drink of water … John wants a drink …'

Without a word she got up, went into the scullery for cup of cold water, and while John was drinking it she stood silently by the bare window gazing down at the clean, moonlit street.

‘If there's another word out of you I'll not bring you to see your granda tomorrow!' she said with sudden anger.

Frank was on his feet when she came back to the parlour.

‘You're not going so soon?' she said.

‘I promised my sisters I'd be home early tonight,' and he looked into the mirror and combed back his hair.

‘Stay for a while,' and she placed a hand on his shoulder.

‘I can't,' he said, and he stooped and kissed her, ‘Sure it won't be long till Sunday.'

When he was at the door he looked at the moon skimming through the shreds of cloud: ‘Look at that for a night! And there we were stuck in the house.'

‘It's lovely,' and she gave a half smile.

‘Sunday at eight,' he said. ‘Don't forget.'

She nodded, and when he was gone she sat for awhile staring into the fire and twisting the wedding ring on her finger. Then realising that she was crying, she shrugged her shoulders, and lifting the cups and saucers on to a tray she carried them into the scullery to wash.

The following morning, Saturday, she was on her knees scrubbing the front doorstep before the smoke was rising from the chimney-pots in the neighbouring houses. She hummed to herself as she rubbed the soap on the scrubber and swept it in a half-circle in front of the door. Blinds were drawn in all the houses and a cat on a windowsill lay asleep beside two empty milk bottles. Nothing ruffled the chilly stillness of the morning except the streaky noise of the scrubber, the sharp rattle of her bucket, and the unchanging hum-hum of the factory at the top of the street. Steam rose from her fingers as she wrung out the cloth and got to her feet to wipe a few scribbles of chalk from the wall of the house. ‘It's always my house they use as a blackboard,' she said to herself, as she rubbed off a child's handwriting from the bricks. ‘Please God, it'll not be long till I leave this place for good.' She came inside, put the boys' clean shirts to warm at the fire, and when she had made the breakfast she awakened them to pay their weekly visit to the workhouse.

As she walked down the street, John at one side of her and Tom at the other, she held her head high for she noticed the kitchen blinds being raised and a man in his shirt and trousers lifting a milk-bottle from a windowsill. Where is she off to at this time of the morning, they'd be saying – and God knows what answers they'd make for themselves. If they knew where the old man was they'd soon raise the colour to her cheeks and maybe get one of the children to chalk it up on the flagstones of the street or even on the wall of the house. Little they knew about where he was and she'd make sure they'd never know it. She always arrived early at the workhouse to have her visit over before the crowd of visitors thronged the main entrance gates.

This morning she was very silent as she got off the tram and made her way through the workhouse grounds with the autumn leaves hopping on the wind at her feet and her two boys tugging at her coat and asking to be allowed to run on in front. She spoke to them in a hushed voice and they, themselves, spoke back in the same way, quelled by the mysterious quiet of her manner. But when at last they came to the long flight of stairs that led to the ward they broke away from her, and when they entered the ward with its twelve aluminum-painted beds their granda saw them and he sat up in his red-flannel jacket and held out his hands to them as they ran to each side of his bed. ‘You're the early fellas,' he said, ‘First in and first to go … And how are ye at all, at all,' and he ruffled Tom's hair and then John's. Tom noticed an egg-stain on the red-jacket: ‘I see they've been stuffing eggs into you.'

‘Aw, aw, is that you, Tommy, my oul' codger!' said the granda.

‘Don't be telling me you don't know me.'

‘I know you all right, my oul' jack-in-the box. Come closer till I feel your muscles.' And when he got Tom near him he rubbed his bristly chin against the boy's. ‘Do you feel the jag of that! Will you tell Smith, the barber, to come up and give me a decent shave. The fella they've here is no good and he charges me a sixpence that I can ill afford.'

The mother came into the ward, walking down between the beds, looking neither to right nor left, and sat down on a chair at the bedside, her handbag on her lap, a small brown parcel dangling from her finger.

‘My mother is going to get us a dog, granda,' John was saying.

The mother leaned across the bed and handed the parcel to the old man: ‘There's a little tobacco and some tea,' she put in.

‘Thank you kindly, girl,' he said, and his hands fumbled to open the knot of the parcel.

‘You needn't open it – there's only an ounce of plug and a quarter of tea in it.'

‘You're a good girl,' he said, leaving the parcel on the table at the head of the bed. ‘And how are you keeping since?'

‘The same us usual,' she said, keeping very erect on her chair, her eyes now on the ivory buttons of his red jacket, and now on his metal watch tied with a shoe-lace to the rail of his bed.

‘We're getting a dog soon,' John said again.

‘Stop chattering and let me talk to your granda,' she said, and she glanced to the foot of the ward and saw an old man beckoning to them. ‘There's your old friend with the ear-phones calling you. Away the both of you and hear the music.' And when they were gone, her father looked at her eyes without flinching: ‘Anything strange?' he said.

‘Nothing,' she said, avoiding his eyes. ‘Are you keeping well, yourself?'

‘Too well, daughter, too well. If I'd pain or ache I might sleep for awhile and not feel the long days passing. But I'm too well, and there's nobody to talk to. Old Billdoe in the next bed is as deaf as a stone and the only comfort left me is to say my beads … Aw, girl, the doctor'll be sending me back to the body of the house – amongst the derelict, the nameless and the shameless. Would you not take me out, girl, till after Christmas and maybe in the spring of the year I might take a run down to the country and get a corner in some old neighbour's house.'

She bent her head and smoothed out a crease in her skirt. A woman with a black shawl on her head shuffled in to visit Billdoe and she looked at Mary before sitting down. ‘That's a coul' mornin', Missus, the climb up them stairs hasn't left a grain of breath in me – not a damned happorth has it left.' She let the shawl fall slack from her head and shouted into Billdoe's ear: ‘I've brought you some of Quinn's best sausages,' and her voice rang through the ward. She tore the paper off the parcel and held out a clump of pork sausages: ‘They cost a bob a pound – they're the very best.'

Billdoe took them in his hand and began eating a raw sausage.

‘Give them to the nurse and she'll cook them for you,' she shouted, trying to take them from him.

He stared at her with a stupid, affronted look: ‘I wouldn't give them God's daylight if I could keep it from them.'

She arranged the shawl about her head and looked across at Mary: ‘There's the cross-grained article I've to deal with, Missus. But I fair miss him out of the house all the same – I do indeed.'

Mary smiled thinly and patted the white quilt on the bed. Tom came running back: ‘Granda, I heard a drum and a fiddle on the ear-phones and the man said it came through the air from Paris.'

‘We'll be going soon,' Mary said, and Tom ran back to get John.

‘What's troubling you, girl?' and he leant close to her.

‘Nothing,' and she shook her head.

‘There's something, girl, and if it's that Frank fella that's running after you, in God's name put him out of your head. He's no good, I tell you. He's no good,' and he raised his voice.

‘Hoosh, hoosh,' she said. ‘The people will hear you.'

He took her hand and she noticed how cold and thin it was. He lowered his voice: ‘I'm not thinking of myself, girl, God knows I'm not. I'm thinking of what's best for you and the two boys. But Frank – ah, God in heaven – he's not worth that!' and he snapped his fingers in the air. ‘He's not worth a dead match, so he's not. He's too settled in his ways and he'll not fit in with your ways and there'll be nothing but trouble.'

‘It's cold,' she said, rubbing the backs of her hands and trying to ward off his talk.

‘I never heard him speak a kind word to the children since the first day he darkened the door. I never seen him bring them a little toy or a wee bit of a sweet like many another. He has no nature in him, Mary. Ah, if you were thirty I'd tell you to marry again, but not to the likes of him. You're forty-three come next December 12th.'

She flushed on hearing her age breathed so loudly, and she glanced at the shawled woman to see if she had heard.

‘Who said I was going to marry again,' she whispered and tried to smile.

‘It'd be better for us all to get away to a place in the country where'd we live out our simple bit of life,' he said.

‘The country! I couldn't bury myself in the country – not after all I came through. And the boys' education?'

‘They'll get education enough that'll do them. Look at me since I left the country fifty years ago. Look at me – ruined and flung to the side and not a place of my own to lay my head. And didn't I see the schoolmaster's son in the country and the policeman's son and the priest's nephew all going to big colleges and not one of them ever earned his bit of bread in his own country – out to foreign lands they went every man jack of them, and God knows if they're alive now or dead. Education! Is there one of them that wouldn't envy a man ploughing his own bit of land or talking about his own beasts in the fields? There is not! I had a good life at my doorstep in the country and I didn't know I had it. I left it fifty years ago and now I know it! Blessed God in Heaven, I know it – and me shut between the black walls of a workhouse and my end coming.'

‘Shoosh, shoosh,' Mary said.

Tom and John came running back and stared at Billdoe picking up the crumbs of raw sausage from the bedclothes.

‘You're back again,' the granda sighed to them.

‘We'll have to go now,' Mary said, for she saw another visitor enter the ward – some day someone would be sure to see her if she wasn't careful!

‘Well, John,' said the granda, ‘what about that big dog you were telling me about.'

‘He's getting no dog,' the mother said. ‘Come now till we get home.' And she stood up to take her leave.