When she was silent I said, “I’m keeping to my end of the bargain. Meet me at ten in The Bell at the bottom of Fleet Street. That’s if you want to meet me.”
“But everybody’s expecting you. And don’t you want to see your child at least once?”
“No. And I’m sorry. Meet me at ten in The Bell if you want to meet me.”
As I’d plenty of time, I walked from Cromwell Road across London to the pub. Walking in a city where a great deal of time has been spent is like walking with several half-tangible, fugitive images that make up your disappearing life. There had been snow and there was packed ice along the edges of the pavement. I loved the glow of the night-lights. If one could be free of this clinging burden of tension it would be a lovely place to walk in, asking nothing but to be free to walk and look and see, hunch shoulders against the cold. Except I was too old not to know that it was by virtue of this very tension that it took on the apparel of happiness.
She came through the door on Fleet Street just before ten, with a man in his forties, red hair thinning, his powerful body managing to look awkward and ill at ease in his blue suit and shirt and tie. He was plainly Irish, from a line of men who had been performing feats of strength to the amazement of an infantile countryside for the past hundred years, adrift in London now, pressing buttons on a tower crane, and I knew at once he was Michael Kavanagh.
“I wanted to come on my own,” she said in a low pleading voice, “but Michael insisted on driving me. He’s been wanting to meet you for a long time.”
“That’s fine with me. I’m glad to meet you,” and he reluctantly gave me his hand. That he was raging with uneasiness showed in his every movement.
“What’ll you have to drink?”
“A light and bitter,” he said and she had a glass of lager.
With the warm brown wood of the bar, the white mantles hanging from the gas lamps, the governor in his long shirt
sleeves behind the solid counter, it could have been a very pleasant place to talk and drink.
“Well, what are you going to do?” Kavanagh was going to sort me out quickly.
“I don’t know,” I said and watched him finish the pint, order another round from the bar. She was worn and looked as if she’d been through a severe illness. The grey in her hair showed much more. I found myself completely indifferent to her, as if we’d both journeyed out past touching. Kavanagh drank the second pint more slowly.
“How do you mean you don’t know?” he pursued.
“What is there to do now? Either the child is adopted or kept.”
“And it’s no concern of yours, like?”
“It is some concern.”
“Some concern… after all you’ve put this poor girl through. It’d make stones bleed.”
“I’d prefer if the child could be adopted. That way it’d have two proper parents.…”
“I couldn’t give the child away. I don’t know how anybody that even saw him could give him away,” she said. But I hardly looked at her. It was with Kavanagh I’d have to contend.
“Well, you better come back to the house and see your good handiwork anyhow. That’s all the girl says that she wants. Many a man would go on his bended knees at the very thought that such a girl should even think of marrying him. And all she wants from you is to go back to the house for an hour. That’s all she says she wants. And if that’s the way you are, in my humble opinion, she’s well rid of you.”
“Come back with us to the house,” she put her hand on my arm. “That’s all I ask. If you want you can walk out of the house after that, and be as free as you want to be.”
“I’m not going back to the house. And I’m not seeing the child.”
“What did you come to London for, then? Why didn’t you
skulk with the rest of the craw thumpers back in good old holy Ireland that never puts a foot wrong?”
“I’m leaving,” I said. Time had been called several minutes before. And we were attracting the governor’s eye. Twice he had come out from behind the counter and lifted our glasses.
“Goodnight. Thanks,” I said to him and turned to go out by the back way, towards St Brides. I had just let the door swing when Kavanagh caught me and pulled me against the wall, “Are you coming or not?”
“No,” I pushed against his arms but it was like pushing against trees.
“Are you coming or not?” and he started to shake me. I had no fear, feeling apologetic in the face of my own coldness, having the bad taste to remember a Civil War joke, “Who’re you for?” the man with the gun was asking the drunk outside the pub: “I’m for yous.”
“Are you coming or not?”
“No.”
“Well, you’ll be took,” he started to drag me. At that, strength came to me, and I managed to free one arm, and strike and kick. Then I was spun completely free, and I could feel the blows come so fast that I could not be certain where they were coming from, and the hardness of the wall. I must have been falling, for the last I remember was striking out at her as she came towards me with outstretched hands. I must have lost consciousness for moments only, for they were quarrelling nearby when I woke. “What did you want to do that for?” she was crying. “You’ve gone and ruined everything.”
“Leave him there and to hell with him. To hell with both of you and all stupid women.”
I was at the bottom of steps. Quickly I pulled off shoes, and rose, holding the shoes in my hand, and stole round by the church.
“He’s gone,” I heard, and I tried to hurry but I wasn’t able.
There was a deep doorway in a lane somewhere off the church whose gates hadn’t been locked across and I went in and sat on the innermost steps.
I heard them searching for me but they never came quite my way. Only once did they get close enough for me to hear their voices and then I couldn’t be sure of the words, “I told you he’s done a skunk. He was only faking being hurt. There’s no need to worry over that gentleman. I’m telling you that cunt will take good care of himself.”
Soon there was no one near, the spasmodic jerky sound of the distant night traffic, some aeroplanes, their landing lights flashing as they came in over the Thames. I felt the cold and it was painful to move my lips and my face seemed numb, one eye was closed; and I was extraordinarily happy, the whole night and its lights and sounds passing in an amazing clarity that was yet completely calm, as if a beautiful incision had been made that separated me from the world and still left me at pure ease in its still centre. I could walk except for a dragging foot, but I hesitated to feel my ribs and face. When I did manage to bring myself to look closely by the light of a streetamp in a barber’s window, I knew I’d have to be very careful not to run into any policeman on the beat.
A milk bar saw me through till morning. I sat in a corner with a newspaper and let the coffee go cold. Using the newspaper as a screen I was able to examine my face in a far mirror but wouldn’t have recognized it except by moving my hands and the newspaper’s angle. The one cut that would need stitches was across the upper lip where the blow had cut it right across against the teeth. For a while everything had that same ethereal clarity, but that went too, in tiredness and stiffness and some pain. As soon as it was light I took a taxi to the airport. At such times, it is a great blessing to have money. It was now extremely painful for me to make the slightest facial movement. One or two people did make gestures towards my appearance in the airport that made me laugh, but the laughing too was painful so that I had to turn and lean against the wall.
Now it was a luxury to be flushed from one end to the other and I got a taxi to a doctor who stitched the lip. He thought there were no bones broken but wanted me to go for X-rays. He said he thought it’d be three weeks or so before I was presentable.
My luck seemed to be holding. There was no telegram waiting for me on the glass-topped table when I got in.
She has lived so long, I thought, let her live for three weeks more. I thought I’d never make the last steps of the stairs once I saw the door. I had just the one simple, fixed idea—to crawl to the bed and sleep. There is nothing that can stand against an overwhelming desire for sleep. It is as strong as death.
I slept late, but my aunt did not wait for my appearance to heal.
Mrs O’Doherty died at four
, the telegram said.
I knew by the formality of the name that my uncle had sent the telegram. I watched the coarse paper start to shake in my hand and tried to say, backing away from the emotion I could not fight down, that I had known for a long time she would not get better, and it would be like her to pick this most inconvenient time to go, when my appearance was guaranteed to cause general mirth and head-wagging all over the small countryside: “Did you see the appearance of your man carrying the coffin? He
was
a sight”; but still emotion kept rising treacherously: her sturdy independence, her caustic laugh, her anger and her kindness, her person, the body of all life, growing, fighting, joying, weeping, falling, and now gone; and suddenly it beat me. I broke, and far off I could hear the wildness in my crying. Guard the human person well even in all its meanness, in its open hand, spite, venom, horror, beauty —profane sacredness, horrible contradiction.
I was so disturbed I needed to tell some person and walked to the end of the road and rang Maloney. I was surprised by my own matter-of-factness as I told him that I’d be out of the city for some days because of my aunt’s death. He received
the news with formal gravity. He even asked me her name and where she was likely to be buried.
When I rang my uncle I could tell even on the phone that he was practically unable to move with the sense of his own importance in the importance of the occasion. He insisted that he meet me off the train and when I glimpsed him as the train pulled into the small station he had taken up the most prominent position on the platform, iron-clad in the security of his role.
“Well,” he was coming comfortably towards me with some profundity like
She’s gone
or an equally swollen silence, when my appearance brought him to a quick check. First I saw disbelief, then outrage, and in a voice that clearly accused me of having done it all to embarrass him, he said, “I take it that the other fella is at least dead.”
“I’m sorry,” I found the laughing painful but couldn’t stop it.
“Well what’s happened?” he cleared his throat, his face an exaggerated version of hurt, and I decided not to lie. His focus was now so sharp that he’d probably be able to tell if I was lying.
“I got beaten up,” I said.
“Tell me more news,” he interposed sarcastically. “You’ll be a wonderful addition for the next few days. You might even make the papers.”
“Anybody can get beaten up. Somebody just turned on me. It wasn’t my fault. There wasn’t even a fight,” but I saw the question did not go from his eyes but held steady. “Yes, there was a woman mixed up in it. It hurts like hell to have to talk.”
“You’ll never learn sense,” he said.
He had brought the big car to the station. After about a mile of silence I said, “It’s done now and I’m sorry. I was hoping she wouldn’t go so soon. The question is what am I to say?”
“Say what?”
“How it happened. I don’t suppose I should tell the truth.”
“Are you joking?” the way he said it I knew all was well. That great institution, the family, was closing ranks.
“Well, what will I say?”
“Didn’t you go to school long enough to think something up?”
“It’s not all that easy when yourself is at the centre of the trouble.”
“Well, why don’t you say”—he cleared his throat, sounding like a sudden change of faulty gears—“Why can’t you say you were in a car crash?”
“Will they believe it though?”
“What do you care whether they believe it or not? As long as they have no way of finding out!”
There were several cars in front of the house. Inside the house all the doors were open.
“I’m sorry,” I shook Cyril’s hand in the hallway.
“I know that.”
“I’m sorry to look like this. I was in a car crash.”
“You’re sure you’re able to be up?” he asked.
“I’m all right. It just looks bad.”
Several people shook my hand, “I’m sorry for the trouble.”
“I know that indeed,” the response had been fashioned for me long years ago. I climbed the stairs to her room. There were four people sitting about the bed on chairs, two women and two men. I knelt at the foot of the bed. I looked at her face, her form beneath the raised sheet, the beads twined through her fingers. What a little heap of grey flesh the many coloured leaping flame burns down to. The two men were drinking whiskey with a chaser of beer. There was port or sherry in the women’s glasses. One of the men was remembering her when she first came to the town as a young girl to work in Maguire’s shop, and how young she was still when she opened her first shop, in this very house, above which she was now lying. They mustn’t have been used to ashtrays, for one of the men pushed his cigarette end into the neck of the beer
bottle between his feet where it began to hiss. When I rose from my knees the four people shook my hands and one of the men offered me his chair which I was able to refuse.
My uncle was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, clearing his throat before saying loudly, “We better go now and see that man about the car insurance.” Some people stopped me to shake my hands as I followed him out in an uncaring numbness.
“She looks good,” he said as we got into the big car.
“Who laid her out?” and he named two women.
“They did a nice job. What men do we have to see about the insurance?”
“No man,” he laughed. “It was an excuse to get you out. Haven’t you been in a car crash! We won’t need to go back now till the removal. And I thought we might as well dawnder out to my place. That’s where you’ll be staying tonight. There’s a room made up.”
“What happened in the end?” I asked.
“I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said as he suddenly turned up the avenue to his new house. “I’ll tell you in the house.”
It was a big slated nineteenth-century farmhouse, five front windows and a solid hall door looking confidently down on the road. We drove round by the cobbled back and parked in the yard, which was completely enclosed by out offices, their red iron roofs dull with rain. It was very warm in the kitchen, and the first thing he did was to shake down the Stanley and pile in more coal. Blue and white mugs hung from hooks on the deal dresser, and an oilcloth in blue and white squares covered the big deal table. Wedding and baptism photos, even one ordination group, hung with the religious pictures around the tall walls. I found it very lovely.