The Collar (19 page)

He sprang up at the knock, and found Una at the door, all in furs, her shoulders about her ears, her big, bony, masculine face blue with cold but screwed up in an amiable monkey-grin. Tom, a handsome man, was tall and self-conscious. He had greying hair, brown eyes, a prominent jaw, and was quiet-spoken in a way that concealed passion. He and Una disagreed a lot about the way the children should be brought up. He thought she spoiled them.

‘Come in, let ye, come in!' cried Fogarty hospitably, showing the way into his warm study with its roaring turf fire, deep leather chairs, and the Raphael print above the mantelpiece: a real bachelor's room. ‘God above!' he exclaimed, holding Una's hand a moment longer than was necessary. ‘You're perished! What'll you have to drink, Una?'

‘Whi-hi-hi–' stammered Una excitedly, her eyes beginning to pop. ‘I can't say the bloody word.'

‘Call it malt, girl,' said the priest.

‘That's enough! That's enough!' she cried laughingly, snatching the glass from him. ‘You'll send me home on my ear, and then I'll hear about it from this fellow.'

‘Whiskey, Tom?'

‘Whiskey, Jerry,' Whitton said quietly with a quick conciliatory glance. He kept his head very stiff and used his eyes a lot instead.

Meanwhile Una, unabashedly inquisitive, was making the tour of the room with the glass in her hand, to see if there was anything new in it. There usually was.

‘Is this new, father?' she asked, halting before a pleasant eighteenth-century print.

‘Ten bob,' the priest said promptly. ‘Wasn't it a bargain?'

‘I couldn't say. What is it?'

‘The old courthouse in town.'

‘Go on!' said Una.

Whitton came and studied the print closely. ‘That place is gone these fifty years and I never saw a picture of it,' he said. ‘This is a bargain all right.'

‘I'd say so,' Fogarty said with quiet pride.

‘And what's the sheet for?' Una asked, poking at a tablecloth pinned between the windows.

‘That's not a sheet, woman!' Fogarty exclaimed. ‘For God's sake, don't be displaying your ignorance!'

‘Oh, I know,' she cried girlishly. ‘For the pictures! I'd forgotten about them. That's grand!'

Then Bella, a coarse, good-looking country girl, announced dinner, and the curate, with a self-conscious, boyish swagger, led them into the dining room and opened the door of the sideboard. The dining room was even more ponderous than the sitting room. Everything in it was large, heavy, and dark.

‘And now, what'll ye drink?' he asked over his shoulder, studying his array of bottles. ‘There's some damn good Burgundy – 'pon my soul, 'tis great!'

‘How much did it cost?' Whitton asked with poker-faced humour. ‘The only way I have of identifying wines is by the price.'

‘Eight bob a bottle,' Fogarty replied at once.

‘That's a very good price,' said Whitton with a nod. ‘We'll have some of that.'

‘You can take a couple of bottles home with you,' said the curate, who, in the warmth of his heart, was always wanting to give his treasures away. ‘The last two dozen he had – wasn't I lucky?'

‘You have the appetite of a canon on the income of a curate,' Whitton said in the same tone of grave humour, but Fogarty caught the scarcely perceptible note of criticism in it. He did not allow this to upset him.

‘Please God, we won't always be curates,' he said sunnily.

‘Bella looks after you well,' said Una when the meal was nearly over. The compliment was deserved so far as it went, though it was a man's meal rather than a woman's.

‘Doesn't she, though?' Fogarty exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Isn't she damn good for a country girl?'

‘How does she get on with Stasia?' asked Una – Stasia was Father Whelan's old housekeeper, and an affliction to the community.

‘They don't talk. Stasia says she's an immoral woman.'

‘And is she?' Una asked hopefully.

‘If she isn't, she's wasting her own time and my whiskey,' said Fogarty. ‘She entertains Paddy Coakley in the kitchen every Saturday night. I told her I wouldn't keep her unless she got a boy. And wasn't I right? One Stasia is enough for any parish. Father Whelan tells me I'm going too far.'

‘And did you tell him to mind his own business?' Whitton asked with a penetrating look.

‘I did, to be sure,' said Fogarty, who had done nothing of the sort.

‘Ignorant, interfering old fool!' Whitton said quietly, the ferocity of his sentiments belied by the mildness of his manner.

‘That's only because you'd like to do the interfering yourself,' said Una good-humouredly. She frequently had to act as peacemaker between the parish priest and her husband.

‘And a robber,' Tom Whitton added to the curate, ignoring her. ‘He's been collecting for new seats for the church for the last ten years. I'd like to know where that's going.'

‘He had a collection for repairing my roof,' said the curate, ‘and 'tis leaking still. He must be worth twenty thousand.'

‘Now, that's not fair, father,' Una said flatly. ‘You know yourself there's no harm in Father Whelan. It's just that he's certain he's going to die in the workhouse. It's like Bella and her boy. He has nothing more serious to worry about, and he worries about that.'

Fogarty knew there was a certain amount of truth in what Una said, and that the old man's miserliness was more symbolic than real, and at the same time he felt in her words criticism of a different kind from her husband's. Though Una wasn't aware of it she was implying that the priest's office made him an object of pity rather than blame. She was sorry for old Whelan, and, by implication, for him.

‘Still, Tom is right, Una,' he said with sudden earnestness. ‘It's not a question of what harm Father Whelan intends, but what harm he does. Scandal is scandal, whether you give it deliberately or through absent-mindedness.'

Tom grunted, to show his approval, but he said no more on the subject, as though he refused to enter into an argument with his wife about subjects she knew nothing of. They returned to the study for coffee, and Fogarty produced the film projector. At once the censoriousness of Tom Whitton's manner dropped away, and he behaved like a pleasant and intelligent boy of seventeen. Una, sitting by the fire with her legs crossed, watched them with amusement. Whenever they came to the priest's house, the same sort of thing happened. Once it had been a microscope, and the pair of them had amused themselves with it for hours. Now they were kidding themselves that their real interest in the cinema was educational. She knew that within a month the cinema, like the microscope, would be lying in the lumber room with the rest of the junk.

Fogarty switched off the light and showed some films he had taken at the last race meeting. They were very patchy, mostly out of focus, and had to be interpreted by a running commentary, which was always a shot or two behind.

‘I suppose ye wouldn't know who that is?' he said as the film showed Una, eating a sandwich and talking excitedly and demonstratively to a couple of wild-looking country boys.

‘It looks like someone from the County Club,' her husband said dryly.

‘But wasn't it good?' Fogarty asked innocently as he switched on the lights again. ‘Now, wasn't it very interesting?' He was exactly like a small boy who had performed a conjuring trick.

‘Marvellous, father,' Una said with a sly and affectionate grin.

He blushed and turned to pour them out more whiskey. He saw that she had noticed the pictures of herself. At the same time, he saw she was pleased. When he had driven them home, she held his hand and said they had had the best evening for years – a piece of flattery so gross and uncalled-for that it made her husband more tongue-tied than ever.

‘Thursday, Jerry?' he said with a quick glance.

‘Thursday, Tom,' said the priest.

The room looked terribly desolate after her; the crumpled cushions, the glasses, the screen and the film projector, everything had become frighteningly inert, while outside his window the desolate countryside had taken on even more of its supernatural animation; bogs, hills, and fields, full of ghosts and shadows. He sat by the fire, wondering what his own life might have been like with a girl like that, all furs and scent and laughter, and two bawling, irrepressible brats upstairs. When he tiptoed up to his bedroom he remembered that there would never be children there to wake, and it seemed to him that with all the things he bought to fill his home, he was merely trying desperately to stuff the yawning holes in his own big, empty heart.

On Thursday, when he went to their house, Ita and Brendan, though already in bed, were refusing to sleep till he said goodnight to them. While he was taking off his coat the two of them rushed to the banisters and screamed: ‘We want Father Fogey.' When he went upstairs they were sitting bolt upright in their cots, a little fat, fair-haired rowdy boy and a solemn baby girl.

‘Father,' Brendan began at once, ‘will I be your altar boy when I grow up?'

‘You will to be sure, son,' replied Fogarty.

‘Ladies first! Ladies first!' the baby shrieked in a frenzy of rage. ‘Father, will I be your altar boy?'

‘Go on!' Brendan said scornfully. ‘Little girls can't be altar boys, sure they can't, father?'

‘I can,' shrieked Ita, who in her excitement exactly resembled her mother. ‘Can't I, father?'

‘We might be able to get a dispensation for you,' said the curate. ‘In a pair of trousers, you'd do fine.'

He was in a wistful frame of mind when he came downstairs again. Children would always be a worse temptation to him than women. Children were the devil! The house was gay and spotless. They had no fine mahogany suite like his, but Una managed to make the few coloured odds and ends they had seem deliberate. There wasn't a cigarette end in the ashtrays; the cushions had net been sat on. Tom, standing before the fireplace (not to disturb the cushions, thought Fogarty), looked as if someone had held his head under the tap, and was very self-consciously wearing a new brown tie. With his greying hair plastered flat, he looked schoolboyish, sulky, and resentful, as though he were meditating ways of restoring his authority over a mutinous household. The thought crossed Fogarty's mind that he and Una had probably quarrelled about the tie. It went altogether too well with his suit.

‘We want Father Fogey!' the children began to chant monotonously from the bedroom.

‘Shut up!' shouted Tom.

‘We want Father Fogey,' the chant went on, but with a groan in it somewhere.

‘Well, you're not going to get him. Go to sleep!'

The chant stopped. This was clearly serious.

‘You don't mind if I drop down to a meeting tonight, Jerry?' Tom asked in his quiet, anxious way. ‘I won't be more than half an hour.'

‘Not at all, Tom,' said Fogarty heartily. ‘Sure, I'll drive you.'

‘No, thanks,' Whitton said with a smile of gratitude. ‘It won't take me ten minutes to get there.'

It was clear that a lot of trouble had gone to the making of supper, but out of sheer perversity Tom let on not to recognise any of the dishes. When they had drunk their coffee, he rose and glanced at his watch.

‘I won't be long,' he said.

‘Tom, you're not going to that meeting?' Una asked appealingly.

‘I tell you I have to,' he replied with unnecessary emphasis.

‘I met Mick Mahoney this afternoon, and he said they didn't need you.'

‘Mick Mahoney knows nothing about it.'

‘I told him to tell the others you wouldn't be coming, that Father Fogarty would be here,' she went on desperately, fighting for the success of her evening.

‘Then you had no business to do it,' her husband retorted angrily, and even Fogarty saw that she had gone the worst way about it, by speaking to members of his committee behind his back. He began to feel uncomfortable. ‘If they come to some damn fool decision while I'm away, it'll be my responsibility.'

‘If you're late, you'd better knock,' she sang out gaily to cover up his bad manners. ‘Will we go into the sitting room, father?' she asked over-eagerly. ‘I'll be with you in two minutes. There are fags on the mantelpiece, and you know where to find the whi-hi-hi— blast that word!'

Fogarty lit a cigarette and sat down. He felt exceedingly uncomfortable. Whitton was an uncouth and irritable bastard, and always had been so. He heard Una upstairs, and then someone turned on the tap in the bathroom. ‘Bloody brute!' he thought indignantly. There had been no need for him to insult her before a guest. Why the hell couldn't he have finished his quarrelling while they were alone? The tap stopped and he waited, listening, but Una didn't come. He was a warmhearted man and could not bear the thought of her alone and miserable upstairs. He went softly up the stairs and stood on the landing. ‘Una!' he called softly, afraid of waking the children. There was a light in the bedroom; the door was ajar and he pushed it in. She was sitting at the end of the bed and grinned at him dolefully.

‘Sorry for the whine, father,' she said, making a brave attempt to smile. And then, with the street-urchin's humour which he found so attractive: ‘Can I have a loan of your shoulder, please?'

‘What the blazes ails Tom?' he asked, sitting beside her.

‘He – he's jealous,' she stammered, and began to weep again with her head on his chest. He put his arm about her and patted her awkwardly.

‘Jealous?' he asked incredulously, turning over in his mind the half-dozen men whom Una could meet at the best of times. ‘Who the blazes is he jealous of?'

‘You!'

‘Me?' Fogarty exclaimed indignantly, and grew red, thinking of how he had given himself away with his pictures. ‘He must be mad! I never gave him any cause for jealousy.'