My Oedipus Complex (24 page)

‘You weren't told it,' she said quietly, showing her claws. ‘But, if you want to know, it's Rita Lomasney.'

‘Do you read much, Miss Lomasney?'

‘I couldn't be bothered.'

‘I read everything,' he said enthusiastically. ‘And as well as that, I'm learning the violin from Miss Maude on the Parade. Of course, it's very difficult, because it's all classical music.'

‘What's that?'

‘
Maritana
is classical music,' he said eagerly. He was a bit of a puzzle to Rita. She had never before met anyone who had such a passion for teaching. ‘Were you at
Maritana
in the Opera House, Miss Lomasney?'

‘I was never there at all,' she said curtly, humiliated.

‘And
Alice Where Art Thou
is classical music,' he added. ‘It's harder than plain music. It has signs like this on it' – he began to draw things on the air – ‘and when you see the signs, you know it's after turning into a different tune, though it has the same name. Irish music is all the same tune and that's why my mother won't let us learn it.'

‘Were you ever at the Opera in Paris?' she asked suddenly.

‘No,' said Ned with regret. ‘I was never in Paris. Were you?'

‘That's where you ought to go,' she said with airy enthusiasm. ‘You couldn't hear any operas here. The staircase alone is bigger than the whole Opera House here.'

It seemed as if they were in for a really informative conversation when two fellows came down Wyse's Hill. Rita got up to meet them. Ned looked up at them for a moment and then rose too, lifting his college cap politely.

‘Well, good afternoon,' he said cheerfully. ‘I enjoyed the talk. I hope we meet again.'

‘Some other Saturday,' said Rita with regret. By this time she would
readily have gone up the Dyke and even watched cricket with him if he asked her.

‘Oh, good evening, old man,' one of the fellows said in an affected English accent, pretending to raise a top hat. ‘Do come and see us soon again.'

‘Shut up, Foster, or I'll give you a puck in the gob!' Rita said sharply.

‘Oh, by the way,' Ned said, returning to hand her a number of the
Gem
, which he took from his jacket pocket, ‘you might like to look at this. It's not bad.'

‘I'd love to,' she said insincerely, and he smiled and touched his cap again. Then with a polite and almost deferential air he went up to Foster. ‘Did you say something?' he asked.

Foster looked as astonished as though a kitten had suddenly got up on his hind legs and challenged him to fight.

‘I did not,' he said, and backed away.

‘I'm glad,' Ned said, almost purring. ‘I was afraid you might be looking for trouble.'

It astonished Rita. ‘There's a queer one for you!' she said when Ned had gone. But she was curiously pleased to see that he was no sissy. She didn't like sissies.

The Lomasneys lived on Sunday's Well in a small house with a long sloping garden and a fine view of the river and the city. Harry Lomasney, the builder, was a small man who wore grey tweed suits and soft collars several sizes too big for him. He had a ravaged brick-red face with keen blue eyes, and a sandy straggling moustache with one side going up and the other down, and the workmen said you could tell what humour he was in by the side he pulled. He was nicknamed ‘Hasty Harry'. ‘Great God!' he fumed when his wife was having her first baby. ‘Nine months over a little job like that! I'd do it in three weeks if I could get started.'

His wife was tall and matronly and very pious, but her piety never got much in her way. A woman who had survived Hasty would have survived anything. Their eldest daughter, Kitty, was loud-voiced and gay, and had been expelled from school for writing indecent letters to a boy. She had
failed to tell the nuns that she had copied the letters out of a French novel and didn't know what they meant. Nellie was placider than her sister and took more after her mother; besides, she didn't read French novels.

Rita was the exception among the girls. She seemed to have no softness, never had a favourite saint or a favourite nun, and said it was soppy. For the same reason she never had flirtations. Her friendship with Ned Lowry was the nearest she got to that, and though Ned came regularly to the house and took her to the pictures every week, her sisters would have found it hard to say if she ever did anything with him she wouldn't do with a girl. There was something tongue-tied, twisted and unhappy in her. She had a curious raw, almost timid smile as though she thought people only intended to hurt her. At home she was reserved, watchful, mocking. She could listen for hours to her mother and sisters without opening her mouth, and then suddenly mystify them by dropping a well-aimed jaw-breaker – about classical music, for instance – before relapsing into sulky silence, as though she had merely drawn back the veil for a moment on depths in herself she would not permit them to explore. This annoyed her sisters, because they knew there weren't any depths; it was all swank.

After taking her degree, she got a job in a convent school in a provincial town in the west of Ireland. She and Ned corresponded, and he even went to see her there. At home he reported that she seemed quite happy.

But it didn't last. A few months later, the Lomasneys were at supper when they heard a car stop; the gate squeaked, and steps came up the long path to the front door. Then came the bell and a cheerful voice from the hall.

‘Hallo, Paschal, I suppose ye weren't expecting me?'

‘ 'Tis never Rita!' said her mother, meaning that it was but shouldn't be.

‘As true as God, that one is after getting into trouble,' said Kitty prophetically.

The door opened and Rita slouched in; a long, stringy girl with a dark, glowing face. She kissed her father and mother lightly.

‘What happened you at all, child?' her mother asked placidly.

‘Nothing,' replied Rita, an octave up the scale. ‘I just got the sack.'

‘The sack?' said her father, beginning to pull the wrong side of his moustache. ‘What did you get the sack for?' Hasty would sack a man three times in a day, but nobody paid any attention.

‘Give us a chance to get something to eat first, can't you?' Rita said laughingly. She took off her hat and smiled at herself in the mirror above the mantelpiece. It was a curious smile as though she were amused by what she saw. Then she smoothed back her thick black hair. ‘I told Paschal to bring in whatever was going. I'm on the train since ten. The heating was off as usual. I'm frizzled.'

‘A wonder you wouldn't send us a wire,' said Mrs Lomasney as Rita sat down and grabbed some bread and butter.

‘Hadn't the cash,' said Rita.

‘But what happened, Rita?' Kitty asked brightly.

‘You'll hear it all in due course. Reverend Mother is bound to write and tell ye how I lost my character.'

‘Wisha, what did you do to her, child?' asked her mother with amusement. She had been through all this before, with Hasty and Kitty, and she knew that God was very good and nothing much ever happened.

‘Fellow that wanted to marry me,' said Rita. ‘He was in his last year at college, and his mother didn't like me, so she got Reverend Mother to give me the push.'

‘But what business is it of hers?' asked Nellie.

‘None whatever, girl,' said Rita.

But Kitty looked suspiciously at her. Rita wasn't natural: there was something about her that was not in control. After all, this was her first real love affair, and Kitty could not believe that she had gone about it like anyone else.

‘Still, you worked pretty fast,' she said.

‘You'd have to work fast in that place,' said Rita. ‘There was only one possible man in the whole place – the bank clerk. We used to call him “The One”. I wasn't there a week when a nun ticked me off for riding on the pillion of his motor-bike.'

‘And did you?' Kitty asked innocently.

‘Fat chance I got!' said Rita. ‘They did that to every teacher to give her the idea that she was well-watched. The unfortunates were scared out of their wits. I only met Tony Donoghue a fortnight ago. He was home with a breakdown.'

‘Well, well, well!' said her mother without rancour. ‘No wonder his poor mother was upset. A boy that's not left college yet! Couldn't ye wait till he was qualified anyway?'

‘Not very well,' said Rita. ‘He's going to be a priest.'

Kitty sat back with a superior grin. She had known it all the time. Of course, Rita couldn't do anything like other people. If it hadn't been a priest it would have been a married man or a negro, and Rita would have shown off about it just the same.

‘What's that you say?' her father asked, springing to his feet.

‘All right, don't blame me!' Rita said hastily, beaming at him. ‘It wasn't my fault. He said he didn't want to be a priest. His mother was driving him into it. That's why he had the breakdown.'

‘Let me out of this before I have a breakdown myself,' said Hasty. ‘I'm the one that should be the priest. If I was I wouldn't be saddled with a mad, distracted family the way I am.'

He stamped out of the room, and the girls laughed. The idea of their father as a priest appealed to them almost as much as the idea of him as a mother. But Mrs Lomasney did not laugh.

‘Reverend Mother was perfectly right,' she said severely. ‘As if it wasn't hard enough on the poor boys without girls like you throwing temptation in their way. I think you behaved very badly, Rita.'

‘All right, if you say so,' Rita said shortly with a boyish shrug, and refused to talk any more about it.

After supper, she said she was tired and went to bed, and her mother and sisters sat on in the front room, discussing the scandal. Someone rang and Nellie opened the door.

‘Hallo, Ned,' she said, ‘I suppose you came up to congratulate us.'

‘Hallo,' Ned said, smiling primly with closed lips. With a sort of automatic movement he took off his overcoat and hat and hung them on the rack. Then he emptied the pockets with the same thoroughness. He had not changed much. He was thin and pale, spectacled and clever, with the same precise and tranquil manner – ‘like an old Persian cat', as Nellie said. He read too many books. In the last year or two something seemed to have happened him. He did not go to Mass any longer. Not going to Mass struck all the Lomasneys as too damn clever. ‘On what?' he added, having avoided any unnecessary precipitation.

‘You didn't know who was here?'

‘No,' he said, raising his brows mildly.

‘Rita!'

‘Oh!' The same tone. It was part of his cleverness not to be surprised at
anything. It was as though he regarded any attempt to surprise him as an invasion of his privacy.

‘She's after getting the sack for trying to run off with a priest,' said Nellie.

If she thought that would shake him she was badly mistaken. He tossed his head with a silent chuckle and went into the room, adjusting his pinc-nez. For a fellow who was supposed to be in love with her, this was very peculiar behaviour, Nellie thought. He put his hands in his trousers pockets and stood on the hearth with his legs well apart.

‘Isn't it awful, Ned?' Mrs Lomasney asked in her deep voice.

‘Is it?' Ned purred, smiling.

‘With a priest!' cried Nellie.

‘Now, he wasn't a priest, Nellie,' Mrs Lomasney said severely. ‘Don't be trying to make it worse.'

‘Suppose you tell me what happened,' suggested Ned.

‘But sure, when we don't know, Ned,' cried Mrs Lomasney. ‘You know what that one is like in one of her sulky fits. Maybe she'll tell you. She's up in bed.'

‘I may as well try,' said Ned.

Still with his hands in his pockets, he rolled after Mrs Lomasney up the thickly carpeted stairs to Rita's little bedroom at the top of the house. While Mrs Lomasney went in to see that her daughter was decent he paused to look out over the river and the lighted city behind it. Rita, wearing a pink dressing jacket, was lying with one arm under her head. By the bed was a table with a packet of cigarettes she had been using as an ashtray. He smiled and shook his head reprovingly.

‘Hallo, Ned,' she said, reaching him a bare arm. ‘Give us a kiss. I'm quite kissable now.'

He didn't need to be told that. He was astonished at the change in her. Her whole bony, boyish face seemed to have gone soft and mawkish and to be lit up from inside. He sat on an armchair by the bed, carefully pulling up the bottoms of his trousers, then put his hands in the pockets again and sat back with crossed legs.

‘I suppose they're hopping downstairs,' said Rita.

‘They seem a little excited,' Ned replied, with bowed head cocked sideways, looking like some wise old bird.

‘Wait till they hear the details!' Rita said grimly.

‘Are there details?' he asked mildly.

‘Masses of them,' said Rita. ‘Honest to God, Ned, I used to laugh at the glamour girls in the convent. I never knew you could get like that about a fellow. It's like something busting inside you. Cripes, I'm as soppy as a kid!'

‘And what's the fellow like?' Ned asked curiously.

‘Tony? How the hell do I know? He's decent enough, I suppose. His mother has a shop in the Main Street. He kissed me one night coming home and I was so furious I cut the socks off him. Next evening, he came round to apologize, and I never got up or asked him to sit down or anything. I suppose I was still mad with him. He said he never slept a wink. “Didn't you?” said I. “It didn't trouble me much.” Bloody lies, of course; I was twisting and turning the whole night. “I only did it because I was so fond of you,” says he. “Is that what you told the last one, too?” said I. That got him into a wax as well, and he said I was calling him a liar. “And aren't you?” said I. Then I waited for him to hit me, but instead he began to cry, and then I began to cry – imagine me crying, Ned! – and next thing I was sitting on his knee. Talk about the Babes in the Wood. First time he ever had a girl on his knee, he said, and you know how much of it I did.'