My Oedipus Complex (8 page)

But the place that had the greatest attraction of all for me was the Douglas Road where Father's friend, Miss Cadogan, lived, only now she wasn't Miss Cadogan but Mrs O'Brien. Naturally, nobody called Mrs O'Brien could be as attractive to the imagination as a French chef and an elderly shopkeeper with eleven thousand pounds, but she had a physical reality that the other pair lacked. As I went regularly to the library at Parnell Bridge, I frequently found myself wandering up the road in the direction of Douglas and always stopped in front of the long row of houses where she lived. There were high steps up to them, and in the evening the sunlight fell brightly on the house-fronts till they looked like a screen. One evening as I watched a gang of boys playing ball in the street outside, curiosity overcame me. I spoke to one of them. Having been always a child of solemn and unnatural politeness, I probably scared the wits out of him.

‘I wonder if you could tell me which house Mrs O'Brien lives in, please?' I asked.

‘Hi, Gussie!' he yelled to another boy. ‘This fellow wants to know where your old one lives.'

This was more than I had bargained for. Then a thin, good-looking boy of about my own age detached himself from the group and came up to me with his fists clenched. I was feeling distinctly panicky, but all the same I studied him closely. After all, he was the boy I might have been.

‘What do you want to know for?' he asked suspiciously.

Again, this was something I had not anticipated.

‘My father was a great friend of your mother,' I explained carefully, but, so far as he was concerned, I might as well have been talking a foreign language. It was clear that Gussie O'Brien had no sense of history.

‘What's that?' he asked incredulously.

At this point we were interrupted by a woman I had noticed earlier, talking to another over the railing between the two steep gardens. She was
a small, untidy-looking woman who occasionally rocked the pram in an absent-minded way as though she only remembered it at intervals.

‘What is it, Gussie?' she cried, raising herself on tiptoe to see us better.

‘I don't really want to disturb your mother, thank you,' I said, in something like hysterics, but Gussie anticipated me, actually pointing me out to her in a manner I had been brought up to regard as rude.

‘This fellow wants you,' he bawled.

‘I don't really,' I murmured, feeling that now I was in for it. She skipped down the high flight of steps to the gate with a laughing, puzzled air, her eyes in slits and her right hand arranging her hair at the back. It was not carroty as Mother described it, though it had red lights when the sun caught it.

‘What is it, little boy?' she asked coaxingly, bending forward.

‘I didn't really want anything, thank you,' I said in terror. ‘It was just that my daddy said you lived up here, and, as I was changing my book at the library I thought I'd come up and inquire. You can see,' I added, showing her the book as proof, ‘that I've only just been to the library.'

‘But who is your daddy, little boy?' she asked, her grey eyes still in long, laughing slits. ‘What's your name?'

‘My name is Delaney,' I said, ‘Larry Delaney.'

‘Not
Mike
Delaney's boy?' she exclaimed wonderingly. ‘Well, for God's sake! Sure, I should have known it from that big head of yours.' She passed her hand down the back of my head and laughed. ‘If you'd only get your hair cut I wouldn't be long recognizing you. You wouldn't think I'd know the feel of your old fellow's head, would you?' she added roguishly.

‘No, Mrs O'Brien,' I replied meekly.

‘Why, then indeed I do, and more along with it,' she added in the same saucy tone though the meaning of what she said was not clear to me. ‘Ah, come in and give us a good look at you! That's my eldest, Gussie, you were talking to,' she added, taking my hand. Gussie trailed behind us for a purpose I only recognized later.

‘Ma-a-a-a, who's dat fella with you?' yelled a fat little girl who had been playing hop-scotch on the pavement.

‘That's Larry Delaney,' her mother sang over her shoulder. I don't know what it was about that woman but there was something about her high spirits that made her more like a regiment than a woman. You felt that everyone should fall into step behind her. ‘Mick Delaney's son from
Barrackton. I nearly married his old fellow once. Did he ever tell you that, Larry?' she added slyly. She made sudden swift transitions from brilliance to intimacy that I found attractive.

‘Yes, Mrs O'Brien, he did,' I replied, trying to sound as roguish as she, and she went off into a delighted laugh, tossing her red head.

‘Ah, look at that now! How well the old divil didn't forget me! You can tell him I didn't forget him either. And if I married him, I'd be your mother now. Wouldn't that be a queer old three and fourpence? How would you like me for a mother, Larry?'

‘Very much, thank you,' I said complacently.

‘Ah, go on with you, you would not,' she exclaimed, but she was pleased all the same. She struck me as the sort of woman it would be easy enough to please. ‘Your old fellow always said it: your mother was a
most
superior woman, and you're a
most
superior child. Ah, and I'm not too bad myself either,' she added with a laugh and a shrug, wrinkling up her merry little face.

In the kitchen she cut me a slice of bread, smothered it with jam, and gave me a big mug of milk. ‘Will you have some, Gussie?' she asked in a sharp voice as if she knew only too well what the answer would be. ‘Aideen,' she said to the horrible little girl who had followed us in, ‘aren't you fat and ugly enough without making a pig of yourself? Murder the Loaf we call her,' she added smilingly to me. ‘You're a polite little boy, Larry, but damn the politeness you'd have if you had to deal with them. Is the book for your mother?'

‘Oh, no, Mrs O'Brien,' I replied. ‘It's my own.'

‘You mean you can read a big book like that?' she asked incredulously, taking it from my hands and measuring the length of it with a puzzled air.

‘Oh, yes, I can.'

‘I don't believe you,' she said mockingly. ‘Go on and prove it!'

There was nothing I asked better than to prove it. I felt that as a performer I had never got my due, so I stood in the middle of the kitchen, cleared my throat and began with great feeling to enunciate one of those horribly involved opening paragraphs you found in children's books of the time. ‘On a fine evening in spring, as the setting sun was beginning to gild the blue peaks with its lambent rays, a rider, recognizable as a student by certain niceties of attire, was slowly, and perhaps regretfully making his way…' It was the sort of opening sentence I loved.

‘I declare to God!' Mrs O'Brien interrupted in astonishment. ‘And that fellow there is one age with you, and he can't spell house. How well you wouldn't be down at the library, you caubogue you!…That's enough now, Larry,' she added hastily as I made ready to entertain them further.

‘Who wants to read that blooming old stuff?' Gussie said contemptuously.

Later, he took me upstairs to show me his air rifle and model aeroplanes. Every detail of the room is still clear to me: the view into the back garden with its jungle of wild plants where Gussie had pitched his tent (a bad site for a tent as I patiently explained to him, owing to the danger from wild beasts); the three cots still unmade, the scribbles on the walls, and Mrs O'Brien's voice from the kitchen calling to Aideen to see what was wrong with the baby who was screaming his head off from the pram outside the front door. Gussie, in particular, fascinated me. He was spoiled, clever, casual; good-looking, with his mother's small clean features; gay and calculating. I saw that when I left and his mother gave me sixpence. Naturally I refused it politely, but she thrust it into my trousers pocket, and Gussie dragged at her skirt, noisily demanding something for himself.

‘If you give him a tanner you ought to give me a tanner,' he yelled.

‘I'll tan you,' she said laughingly.

‘Well, give us a lop anyway,' he begged, and she did give him a penny to take his face off her, as she said herself, and after that he followed me down the street and suggested we should go to the shop and buy sweets. I was simple-minded, but I wasn't an out-and-out fool, and I knew that if I went to a sweet-shop with Gussie I should end up with no sixpence and very few sweets. So I told him I could not buy sweets without Mother's permission, at which he gave me up altogether as a cissy or worse.

It had been an exhausting afternoon but a very instructive one. In the twilight I went back slowly over the bridges, a little regretful for that fast-moving, colourful household, but with a new appreciation of my own home. When I went in the lamp was lit over the fireplace and Father was at his tea.

‘What kept you, child?' Mother asked with an anxious air, and suddenly I felt slightly guilty, and I played it as I usually did whenever I was at fault in a loud, demonstrative, grown-up way. I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my cap in my hand and pointed it first at one, then at the other.

‘You wouldn't believe who I met!' I said dramatically.

‘Wisha, who, child?' Mother asked.

‘Miss Cadogan,' I said, placing my cap squarely on a chair and turning on them both again. ‘Miss May Cadogan. Mrs O'Brien as she is now.'

‘Mrs O'Brien?' Father exclaimed, putting down his cup. ‘But where did you meet Mrs O'Brien?'

‘I said you wouldn't believe it. It was near the library. I was talking to some fellows, and what do you think but one of them was Gussie O'Brien, Mrs O'Brien's son. And he took me home with him, and his mother gave me bread and jam, and she gave me
THIS
.' I produced the sixpence with a real flourish.

‘Well, I'm blowed!' Father gasped, and first he looked at me, and then he looked at Mother and burst into a loud guffaw.

‘And she said to tell you she remembers you too, and that she sent her love.'

‘Oh, by the jumping bell of Athlone!' Father crowed and clapped his hands on his knees. I could see he believed the story I had told and was delighted with it, and I could see too that Mother did not believe it and that she was not in the least delighted. That, of course, was the trouble with Mother. Though she would do anything to help me with an intellectual problem, she never seemed to understand the need for experiment. She never opened her mouth while Father cross-questioned me, shaking his head in wonder and storing it up to tell the men in the factory. What pleased him most was Mrs O'Brien's remembering the shape of his head, and later, while Mother was out of the kitchen, I caught him looking in the mirror and stroking the back of his head.

But I knew too that for the first time I had managed to produce in Mother the unrest that Father could produce, and I felt wretched and guilty and didn't know why. That was an aspect of history I only studied later.

That night I was really able to indulge my passion. At last I had the material to work with. I saw myself as Gussie O'Brien, standing in the bedroom, looking down at my tent in the garden, and Aideen as my sister, and Mrs O'Brien as my mother and, like Pascal, I re-created history. I remembered Mrs O'Brien's laughter, her scolding and the way she stroked my head. I knew she was kind – casually kind – and hot-tempered, and recognized that in dealing with her I must somehow be a different sort of
person. Being good at reading would never satisfy her. She would almost compel you to be as Gussie was; flattering, impertinent, and exacting. Though I couldn't have expressed it in those terms, she was the sort of woman who would compel you to flirt with her.

Then, when I had had enough, I deliberately soothed myself as I did whenever I had scared myself by pretending that there was a burglar in the house or a wild animal trying to get in the attic window. I just crossed my hands on my chest, looked up at the window and said to myself: ‘It is not like that. I am not Gussie O'Brien. I am Larry Delaney, and my mother is Mary Delaney, and we live in Number 8 Wellington Square. Tomorrow I'll go to school at the Cross, and first there will be prayers, and then arithmetic and after that composition.'

For the first time the charm did not work. I had ceased to be Gussie all right, but somehow I had not become myself again, not any self that I knew. It was as though my own identity was a sort of sack I had to live in, and I had deliberately worked my way out of it, and now I couldn't get back again because I had grown too big for it. I practised every trick I knew to reassure myself. I tried to play a counting game; then I prayed, but even the prayer seemed different as though it didn't belong to me at all. I was away in the middle of empty space, divorced from my mother and home and everything permanent and familiar. Suddenly I found myself sobbing. The door opened and Mother came in in her nightdress, shivering, her hair over her face.

‘You're not sleeping, child,' she said in a wan and complaining voice.

I snivelled, and she put her hand on my forehead.

‘You're hot,' she said. ‘What ails you?'

I could not tell her of the nightmare in which I was lost. Instead, I took her hand, and gradually the terror retreated, and I became myself again, shrank into my little skin of identity, and left infinity and all its anguish behind.

‘Mummy,' I said, ‘I promise I never wanted anyone but you.'

When I was a kid there were no such things as holidays for me and my likes, and I have no feeling of grievance about it because, in the way of kids, I simply invented them, which was much more satisfactory. One year, my summer holiday was a couple of nights I spent at the house of a friend called Jimmy Leary, who lived at the other side of the road from us. His parents sometimes went away for a couple of days to visit a sick relative in Bantry, and he was given permission to have a friend in to keep him company. I took my holiday with the greatest seriousness, insisted on the loan of Father's old travelling bag and dragged it myself down our lane past the neighbours standing at their doors.