Winter Song (20 page)

He had not heard, he went on eating. She looked close at him and went on, ‘I wish I knew what you were thinking, for I'm afraid you think nothing but hard of me, the way you are, the way I am, the two of us together like this. You lie like a log on me and you hardly speak. Sure, don't I know the hard trial you had coming to me, but I wish, oh I wish you'd say it was all right, Denny—something's different in you, you've got it there between your eyes, you've got it, and I'm staring at it all the time like an old wall.'

He stopped eating, ‘After my lifetime,' he said, he seemed to drag out the words from a husky throat, ‘to come to this, it makes me real sad, Fanny, sad for you more than meself. You hold so hard, God help you, but you went wrong ways often.'

‘I know.'

She put down the cup she held—she knelt by the bed. ‘Oh, I'm glad you've said it, I'm glad you've said it. I done many foolish things and I'm sorry about them, Denny, I really am.'

He looked at her without speaking, his eyes seemed to say, ‘Go on, old woman, empty yourself.'

‘I done them terrible things—d'you remember that cold afternoon you found your little savings gone, d'you remember the trouble I put my daughter to, and that man below supping there after his hard night, and the way I pinched and scraped them days, and the way I drove people and the way I walked and climbed and didn't care about how or why because, God knows, my head was full of glory all the time I was building up the stone for him to stand on, pushing him all the while towards what I wanted and the glory of it drunken in my head at times. Ah, if he'd done it, if he'd only done it, would I be proud, one good man out of my blessed crew. I never wanted anything else. I never asked anything from nobody. I may have pinched others, but I pinched myself, and look where that priest is now, the poor lad, far north and cold there behind them walls, since he crashed down because of me, but I got his terrible thud in me here, yes, I've got it here. It broke my spirit. I didn't care any more, no more. I walked away that time, I didn't care, all the doors were closed everywhere again, and perhaps it was all a lot of nonsense, and perhaps it was all a lot of fuss, bits of lives that count nothing. Oh yes, I remember every hour and every minute—some things you did not see, and I'm glad of that, how near to the bone you can get on many a dark winter day, you'll never know. You were free. You were away on your old ships, your shipmates there—a devil 'a care in any of them, which I don't begrudge, knowing the lives of the men of the sea. But I know how you feel, fallen, Denny, God help you, but
fair
fallen—yes,
fair
fallen and nothing to be ashamed of, ever. I thank God this day that you are alive, and warm and near me, who never cared tuppence for another single creature 'cept yourself. Never, I swear to you, never. I always loved you, Denny, I'm proud of you, simple man that you are, for you've the gold in you that comes from a good heart. There now, I've said it.'

Her head had gradually fallen to the sheet, and it lay there and he stared at it, and then he put his hand on her, and stroked her hair, and saw there the pitch-black hair gone grey.

‘All that you shouldn't have said, Fanny. Ah, do be easy in that mind of yours.'

She spoke, mumbling into the pillow. ‘Before we go, we shall see him—the one I thought best, the one I tried to keep out of the gutter, the one who was polluted by her, I couldn't speak her name, though I link it with her dirty old father up there in London many a day, where they call the Strand, waiting for the women to come along. That's what my son married, that rotten family. Ah, the things I know. Turned that boy's head, that's all. Oh, look where he is now, behind the wall.'

‘Be easy, Fanny, be easy. Maybe I shouldn't have said what I said, but it was a bit of ice on me all the same, and me foolin' there with Father Moynihan and asking him to take me home. Sure you never wrote, and I didn't ever know how you'd sold up them bits of things and gone to the nuns. Why they're very good people, very kind, but give me an old kitchen and you there, and it's better than all the rest. Be easy, for Christ's sake, and close your mouth now and say nothing more. It's all over and it's all ended the way you wanted it and the way I wanted—I say leave be—leave be. Let's be quiet and close and fair and free again together. There's things I could have done myself and I didn't. Ah, why didn't you marry some fine man, Fanny, what would have lit that candle in your head and searched for another way to you. All I could ever do was a man's business on ships—the work. I've no head, never had. I'm a lump of earth out of the County Clare. Forget it. Forget it.'

When Kilkey knocked softly on the door and they did not answer him, he turned the knob and walked in. He stood rigid in the doorway, he was terribly moved by what he saw, and was turning to go out when Dennis Fury saw him and said, ‘Come in, Joe, why are you running off like that? Come in. Come in.'

Mrs. Fury got to her feet. ‘Something's happened between them,' he thought, ‘I can tell. Something has been said by one or both. They look different, not like the people I helped into that taxi. I hope the air is cleared at last, for I think they had the coldness to them both and it wouldn't melt.'

‘Yes,' he answered himself, ‘her ashamed of what he had had to come back to and him as frightened as an old hare, as though all the hounds of hell were at the back of him.'

‘I'll just sit down for a minute,' he said. ‘I'm off to my bed directly. I'm tired.'

‘Sit here,' she said, ‘sit here.'

He sat down by her. ‘I see you finished off that stuff. I'm glad. You both want feeding up. Somehow that old Hospice was on the skinny side, but maybe the creatures there have to measure everything out so.'

‘I like this little house,' Mrs. Fury said, ‘it's warm and cosy. I always liked a warm cosy house.'

‘I know. I know. Yes, I'm very lucky,' his voice rose, he suddenly became excited, he said, ‘Now I could show you all the photos of Dermod and me.'

‘I'd love to see them,' she replied, ‘and I know Denny would too, wouldn't you, Denny?'

‘Why,' she exclaimed under her breath, ‘he's fallen off to sleep.'

Mr Kilkey rose, ‘Then you come away downstairs now, and leave him be. All the sleep he can get, all the better for him. Come now, Fanny. There's a nice fire in the kitchen and I'll get up the chair and make you comfortable, and I'll give you the old album.'

They went down the stairs. ‘You'll be comfortable there, I'm sure, and then I must away to bed. I keep yawning and yawning out of me.'

They went into the kitchen. Mrs Turner had cleared the table and generally tidied up. Mrs Fury sat down. ‘How nice a home is,' she said.

He did not answer her, did not want to, this simple remark made him say quickly, ‘Well, Fanny, it's your home if you like. You can stay if you want to.'

She smiled up at him. ‘No, Joe, it doesn't matter. I know it is, of course, but it's too late. We are going away.'

He went across to a cupboard, from which he took a large leather-bound album.

‘She's made up her mind, at last,' he thought as he handed her the book. ‘There's things in that, Fanny,' he said, ‘as will make you laugh.'

He was bending over her, and of a sudden she was looking not at her son-in-law, but at a red mark down one side of his face.

‘The things them soldiers did to you, Joe Kilkey, the things they did to you for not wanting to kill.'

The remark surprised him, upset him. Forcing a smile, he said, ‘Are you comfortable?'

‘Quite comfortable, thank you.'

‘Then I'll away to bed. Maybe you'd give me a call at twelve o'clock.'

‘Why yes, I will.'

He left her sitting there, the open album on her knee. She heard him close the door, heard his heavy tread upon the stairs.

‘What a fine man he really is,' she said to herself, ‘if only Maureen had been happy. If only that girl had been content. But no, ah, she had something of me in her, I'm afraid.'

Slowly she turned over the pages, but somehow these figures, limned on lost hours, seemed dim, unreal. She put on her spectacles.

‘Well, just fancy that,' she said, a smile playing about her lips. ‘That man's kept everything, every single little thing. Peter when he was at that college. Oh. dear, I can hardly look at him somehow—his student's cap on him. And surely, this is my Maureen sitting on a bench, and laughing and gay as could be. And Anthony when he first went into the Navy, and here's Denny, leaning against an old tree, it must have been in the country one day. How changed everything is. Why that man upstairs would have a fit if he saw himself now.'

Over and over went the pages—sometimes she went back again, to the beginning, the silent journey over again. ‘Well, well, so much of it I forget entirely and—yes, this must be Kilkey's boy. It is indeed. What a fine upstanding lad he is—what a pity, what a great pity it is the way things are, for I can see that boy has something to him which should make that girl feel proud.'

She covered the photograph with her hand.

‘And that was me, too. Yes, me again. The things I did that time. I was all wrapped up in one who came up on a wave in my own head—why I can see him now, as I saw him then—on top of that wave and holding me up by it, and saw him with his white surplice on, and his blessed hand touched with the oil. What a dream that was, a cruel dream.'

She removed her hand. She looked at the photograph of her daughter. She spoke to it. ‘Maureen, I ruined you too, and up there lies a warm-hearted man in a cold room—'cos of me. If that one ambition I had to make one man good and upright hadn't clutched at me, I might not have forced you into that awful jute factory years ago, you were young and pretty then, and innocent as the day, and then that filthy creature got hold of you and away you went into many an old broken hour I have no doubt, and many a time you must have thought of the living child. Oh, God, the things I did, and didn't I believe in them too, I did indeed and the things that come out of it. The misery, the humiliations, the arguments, the awful silences. Yes, one of my children yelped like a cur. And the pollution—the pollution—a nice thing I've come to now.'

She closed the book. ‘But it's finished. I couldn't drag up out of my head even the wisp of a dream of anything. I had one and many paid for it. Never again. It's all over now.' Her thoughts took flight, back to the first day, the day of her landing in Gelton.

‘Miles and miles away,' she thought, ‘miles and miles and miles.'

Finally, she shut the book. She got up, began wandering about this tiny living-room, she stood, she touched objects with her hand, she picked up odd things, examining them.

‘I remember every one of them things—every single one of them. How such little things bring back the memories. I wonder if Maureen will ever return to this man. I wonder on that—I do—it's hard on a man alone, a woman's so different, she has the other kind of loneliness, men don't understand what that is, I don't suppose they ever will.'

She stood looking out on to the Bonim Road, with its long stretch of houses, so pressed together, so close and clutched in their ugliness. ‘I'll remember all the roads in this place—every one of them. Now there's three things only I want to do before I go away to my sister. I want to take him up to that northern place to see Peter, a man now, I know, and beyond me. Yes, I have a strange feeling, I don't know what lights it in my head, but I have that feeling that if I don't see him now, I may never do so again. No matter what he did, I'll be the same to him always—what's a few lies and a mad thirst for lust in young bones. Nothing. Ah, it'll be so nice seeing that lad again. A silly fool of a boy to have stuck a knife into one who made a fine hell round me and might have choked me out, as she was choked. How I wish it had never happened, and that man—will I ever forget that thing moving like a ghost in rope shoes and carrying about with him the meanest-looking hands I ever saw on a creature? Why, I've often dreamed of him knocking at my door, often.'

Her fingers played with the curtains.

‘And then I shall go down once more, the way I always did, and so it'll be nothing to me. I'll go down to that building and I'll see about something for that man upstairs. I daresay there'll be something, something of a pension for him after all them years at sea. I'll do that. And then I'd like to take a tram for the last time and go sailing through the streets and roads of this place for the last time. Yes, I'd love to do that. They rattled about and made such a noise, and threw you about all over the place, but all the same there was something nice about them old trams—they were gay with their green colours and their red colours. There was one I remember well, it took Denny and me away out to the country one day, oh, it was nice …' Her expression softened—she remembered this tram, vividly—a feeling, soft as velvet, stole over her, seemed to melt everything, breaking down the hard line of mouth, struck tension from the hands, dimmed the bright eye.

‘Yes, we'll do them things together, Denny and me, for the last time. It'll be nice, and I'm sure it won't do him the ha'p'orth of harm—why he's come on grand these three days now—he talks more to me than he ever did, ah, he may go back to these things and like them—he'll think of the good times we used to have. I'm happy now—Denny is everything I ever wanted, but I didn't seem to know, and he's the queer way of showing me what I meant to him. I think I'll go up to him now. I wonder what time it is, that old clock has stopped. Why I can hear old Kilkey snoring away from where I stand—he always slept so deep and heavy, but I expect that's the work he does—Lord bless us, he must have stepped over the gangway of over a thousand ships in his time.'