Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

‘She said she could eat me,’ said Eugene, standing in the centre of the bar with a glass of medium dry sherry in his hand. ‘She paid a compliment about O’Shea’s old animal.’

  ‘I heard of that kind of thing,’ said Agnes Quin. ‘They go into a hotel, Eugene, and the next thing is they owe you sixty pounds.’

  ‘They leave suitcases behind them,’ said Mrs Dargan, ‘full of cement blocks.’

  There was further conversation about dishonest conduct in hotels. Eddie Trump related an anecdote concerning a man he’d heard of who had managed to spend two years in a hotel without ever paying the bill. Mrs Dargan remarked that it would terrify you, the activities people got up to these days.

  ‘I had a dream last night,’ said Eugene. ‘I want to tell you, Eddie.’

  ‘I had a dream myself,’ said Eddie Trump, ‘that I was teaching Geometry in a school. I had two triangles chalked up on a blackboard and I was trying to prove to the lads that the sides of one were equal to the sides of the other. I was making a wholesale bollocks of it.’

  ‘Geometry,’ repeated Eugene. ‘There was a horse called Geometry about fifteen years ago.’

  Reaching for a bottle, Eddie Trump laughed.

  ‘There’s a thing called Mark Ruler at Lingfield,’ said Eugene. ‘E. Davies up. You’d use a ruler drawing triangles, Eddie.’

  Eddie Trump looked doubtful. ‘It could be,’ he said.

  ‘Or the three-thirty Handicap at Ascot. R. Fawdon on Resolved. Isn’t that a word you have in Geometry?’

  ‘I don’t think there’s a thing in it, Eugene. I spent an unprofitable night.’

  ‘I had a dream you dropped dead, Eddie.’

  The barman, a glass tilted in his left hand to receive the beer he was pouring from a bottle in his right, wagged his head slowly. Mrs Dargan sighed. In a whispering voice she remarked to Agnes Quin that this bar was an impossible place, the way people were constantly relating the dreams they had. She gave it as her opinion that there were more dreams related in Riordan’s public house than anywhere else in Europe; she’d take a bet on that, she offered, only it could never be proved.

  ‘The death was given out on the wireless, Eddie. You died in Washington Zoo.’

  ‘I was never in that place.’

  ‘Keep well away from it,’ advised Mrs Dargan.

  ‘Was it heart?’ Agnes Quin enquired. ‘Did they give the cause on the wireless, Eugene?’

  ‘He was eaten by an elephant,’ said Mrs Dargan. ‘An elephant thought Eddie was a bun.’

  Eugene said that that wasn’t so. No details had been related concerning the manner of the fatality except that at the time a bottle was being uncorked.

  ‘There was a relevance in it,’ he said, ‘because the bottle was of Germanic origin. There was a second relevance because O’Shea came in the door there and said a circus man was looking for accommodation. D’you see what I mean?’

  Eddie Trump shook his head.

  ‘I do not, Eugene.’

  ‘Your woman above in the hotel has a touch of the sawdust about her.’

  ‘Is that what she is?’ said Agnes Quin. ‘Out of Duffy’s Circus or something?

  ‘Ah no, no.’ Eugene paused, swaying his body back and forth, his eyes screwed up against the smoke from his cigarette, ash falling on to his waistcoat. ‘You could see her on the back of a horse going round in the ring. She’s that type of woman.’

  ‘Is that so?’ said Eddie Trump.

  ‘She has a big red mouth like a clown would have. D’you mind me referring to the death, Eddie?’

  Eddie Trump said he didn’t mind at all. It was interesting certainly, he said, a woman like that coming into O’Neill’s Hotel.

  Eugene handed round his packet of cigarettes.

  ‘Niersteiner Domtal was on the label of the bottle,’ he said. ‘Have you heard of it, Eddie?’

  ‘I have of course. A great old wine.’

  ‘Keep well away from it,’ advised Mrs Dargan.

  ‘What’s the woman want?’ Agnes Quin asked, and Eugene replied that he didn’t know. She came into the hotel, he said, saying she was looking for a grail. He repeated the details of his dream, drawing attention to the fact that O’Shea had said the circus man required warm stabling for his animals.

  ‘She has definitely no animals with her,’ he reported, and he went on talking, telling about the dream in which he’d been paddling in the sea at Dalkey. ‘A dog came up and sniffed me,’ he said, and then, reminded of the event by his reference to a dog, he mentioned the forthcoming Greyhound Derby. ‘I saw on the paper,’ he said, ‘that it’ll be the greatest race ever run on Irish soil.’

  Mrs Dargan was thinking that she had a touch of indigestion. Eddie Trump wiped the counter with a grey cloth. Eugene began to cough. He gripped the bar with the right hand to steady himself. She’d take two Rennies later on, Mrs Dargan thought, and then she wondered if she could return to a post she’d once had, plucking chickens for a butcher.

  ‘The wife,’ said Eddie Trump, ‘dreamed she was picking marigolds.’

  There was a silence for a moment in the Excelsior Bar. Eugene drained his glass and edged it towards Eddie Trump. He drew smoke into his lungs and slowly released it, watching it curling in the air. He received his glass and paid for its contents. Speaking slowly, he said:

  ‘Would you see anything in it if I said she had yellow eyes?’ ‘Yellow?’ repeated Mrs Dargan.

  ‘Would you see anything in it if you think of the dog coming up to sniff me and the mention of the circus man in the hotel and then your woman coming in and admiring O’Shea’s old animal?’

  Plucking chickens was no joke, Mrs Dargan thought, but it was better in a lot of ways than having to listen to this kind of talk. Eddie Trump could make nothing of it either, she noticed. She shook her head and Eddie Trump shook his.

  ‘A woman with yellow eyes,’ said Eugene, ‘and the emphasis on the dogs. A woman saying she was English born and bred. D’you see what I mean?’

  ‘I do not, Eugene,’ said Eddie Trump.

  ‘Niersteiner Domtal on a printed label. Printed words on a label. D’you see?’

  ‘No, Eugene.’

  ‘Trap four in the Derby.’

  There was a pause. Eddie Trump drank deeply from his glass of beer. He drew a hand across his mouth. He said that as far as he remembered trap four was scheduled to contain Russian Gun.

  ‘I read he’s good,’ said Mrs Dargan. ‘Is Russian Gun the tip, Eugene?’

  Eugene said it wasn’t. Russian Gun, he corrected them, would perform from trap six, which was a good trap to run from. ‘Trap four,’ he said, ‘is a big handicap, but if there’s a dog to beat the animal in it I’ll put two half-notes on that counter tomorrow night.’

  ‘Is it Yellow Printer?’ said Mrs Dargan. ‘Is that the tip, Eugene?’

  ‘An English animal, born and bred, trained by Johnny Bassett, kennelled out at McKenna’s in Cabinteely.’

  ‘A great old dog,’ said Eddie Trump.

  ‘Replenish that,’ said Eugene, pushing forward his glass again.

  ‘Bedad, it’s extraordinary.’ Eddie Trump wiped his hands on the cloth with which he had wiped the counter. It was extraordinary, he said, the way things were, that a woman would travel from Germany and end up by being a tip for a dog-race.

  ‘If you could see her,’ said Eugene, ‘you’d say it’s all she’s fit for.’

  They laughed in the Excelsior Bar, the others imagining what the woman looked like from Eugene’s description. Mrs Dargan experienced another pang of indigestion. Agnes forgot about Mrs Eckdorf and imagined herself walking down a Hollywood boulevard on the arm of a thin man who had once been an admired criminal and was now reformed, an owner of nightclubs. Counting out Eugene’s change, Eddie Trump said that it was an ill wind that blew no good. It was an extraordinary thing, he repeated, and added that he couldn’t wait to take a gander at her himself, this woman with yellow eyes.

  7

  Had Morrissey known
that Mr Smedley was anxiously making himself agreeable to the city’s barmen so that he might question them concerning the city’s pleasures, he would have said that the failure of their paths to cross was typical of the sourness of life. Morrissey was in one place, Mr Smedley was in another. They were not aware on this warm morning of one another’s existence, yet as Mr Smedley sought between business appointments to make arrangements for the evening Morrissey sought to oblige a man with just such requirements. Had he known of Mr Smedley’s travail, he would have said that the absurdity of the situation was only to be expected of a gross and unjust society.

  Morrissey held his fellow men in poor opinion, and had always done so. In his view the world was populated mainly by the hypocritical, by rogues who were untrustworthy even in roguery, by the cruel and the foolish. He had believed as a child that if he turned his back on his enemies they would damage him from behind, and in this he had frequently been proved right. His nature was dominated by suspicion, a quality that broke out in his eyes and was apparent for all to see. Change given him by shop-keepers or publicans he counted meticulously, the mathematics involved coming loudly from his lips. A man in a tobacconist’s had once said to him, having watched this small ceremony, that he had never made a mistake with change: it was something you get used to, the man said, you became quick and accurate over the years. Morrissey, whose manner was occasionally direct, replied that he had suspected the man not of carelessness but of dishonesty. There were a lot of dishonest people in the world: you had to steer a course through them.

  In a way, Morrissey’s view reflected that of Mr Gregan, whom he had first met one Christmas Eve a long time ago now. Mr Gregan, on his way home from the insurance company, had called in at O’Neill’s Hotel with two Christmas presents for Mrs Sinnott. He had been pumping up the back tyre of his bicycle in Thaddeus Street, and Morrissey, unaware then that the cyclist was the son-in-law of Mrs Sinnott, had dropped into a seasonal conversation with him. After he had suggested that if Mr Gregan was in need of a certain kind of company he could oblige him in the matter, they had gone together to a public house on the Quays, where Morrissey had introduced Mr Gregan to Mrs Kite. ‘I’ll not bother,’ Mr Gregan had whispered to Morrissey when he saw her sitting there, but he had remained none the less and had taken several Christmas drinks with them. Speaking in a professional way, as a man of the business world, Mr Gregan said that a lot of people were criminals under the skin. It was an expression that pleased Morrissey greatly. He repeated it more than once, saying he understood its meaning perfectly. He was sorry when Mr Gregan put on his bicycle-clips again and went away.

  The next time the two met was in Mrs Sinnott’s room a month or so later. Morrissey was about to go, Mr Gregan had just arrived for a lunchtime conversation. Eagerly, Morrissey saluted the insurance man who had spoken so sensibly, but to his astonishment received a curt reply. The man who had talked so long and so agreeably on Christmas Eve appeared to be embarrassed by the memory of that, and on future encounters Mr Gregan was no more forthcoming. ‘We think the same way,’ Mr Gregan had said on Christmas Eve, ‘although we come from two different classes. We’ve a lot in common.’ Morrissey often now heard the voice of Mr Gregan in conversation with O’Shea or Eugene Sinnott, relating pleasantly the improvements he was making to his property. Yet because of the embarrassment, because of the small fact that once upon a time he had wheeled his bicycle in the direction of Mrs Kite at Morrissey’s instigation, there could apparently be no further relationship between them. In the end, Morrissey came to believe that Mr Gregan was as bad as anyone else, an untrustworthy and hypocritical man.

  Having left Mrs Sinnott’s room on this Friday morning, Morrissey stood now, at fifteen minutes past twelve, in McBride’s public house in Thomas Street. He stood alone, drinking a small quantity of whiskey. He was talking to himself in his mind, his voice saying that neither Agnes Quin nor Beulah Flynn was a female you could trust. You would go out of your way to oblige women like that and they wouldn’t hand you the price of a small one. Mrs Dargan was little better: only the night before he had spoken about Mrs Dargan to a man he’d met on Eden Quay, but when he had led the man up to her she had refused to have anything to do with him. Afterwards he had seen them together, Mrs Dargan getting into the man’s motorcar. He had obliged both of them by bringing them together, he had acted in good faith. Yet both had turned their backs on him, both had plotted in order that he should be deprived of his just fee. It amazed Morrissey that these two people, who had never before laid eyes on one another, should have succeeded during the brief moment of the initial encounter in passing to one another the suggestion that they should act deceitfully. ‘She’s a bit touchy,’ he had said as they walked away from the bar in which he had led the man up to Mrs Dargan. ‘Nothing personal at all, mister.’ He had suggested that if the man came with him he would introduce him to a more agreeable woman, but the man said he’d had enough for one night and had gone away quickly. What he’d done, Morrissey guessed, was to return to the bar as soon as Morrissey was out of sight. He could imagine the two of them laughing.

  Beulah Flynn owed him a pound. Mrs Kite, the char-woman, had suddenly become unco-operative. It amazed him that money borrowed should not be paid back and that a woman like Mrs Kite should take it upon herself to talk about a conscience at her time of life. In a just and straightforward world he wouldn’t be expected to associate with such women in the first place, nor would he be obliged to go along to O’Neill’s Hotel in order to earn money by being a help to an elderly person in need of human company. It was Morrissey’s belief that the world, far from being just and straightforward, was disgraceful no matter how you regarded it, an opinion that had been strengthened by his association, many years ago now, with a woman called Miss Lambe.

  Reading a magazine one day, he had come across a small advertisement. This cultured lady, it had said, would like to hear from kindly widowers interested in astrology. He had written at once, and in time a reply had arrived from the North of England, from Miss Lambe, who worked in a boarding-house in Wigan. She it was who in the subsequent correspondence had introduced him to the stars. She it was who had sent him, free of charge, paper-backed books on the subject. I see to the domestic side here, she had written. The house is owned by Mr and Mrs Crosbie. We have nine residents. He had written to say he was a widowed lung specialist, forming the letters of his words carefully, checking the spelling in a dictionary he had managed to take from a bookshop. Her letters to him incorporated lessons on how to read the Tarot and one day, she promised, they would meet and go together to consult the famous shadow-reader, Bhagawan Soaham. She related details of her life, of the troubles she now and again experienced with the domestic staff and with Mrs Crosbie, who was a difficult woman. I envy you not having mundane problems, she had written. I envy you the useful work you do. lung disease is a terrible affliction. In the books she sent him he read about Aquarius and Taurus and Virgo. Being born beneath the sign of Gemini himself, as she was too, he learnt that he must take care when crossing roads and when close to sharp instruments. When Uranus and Jupiter are in your house of true love, Miss Lambe had written , you may enter a happy life. We must both take çare when Venus makes a square aspect to Neptune. She sent him her photograph and he saw a blurred image of a woman in a coat, standing in a garden. He cut from a magazine a picture of a man in evening dress and sent it to her, saying it had been taken at a lung specialists’ conference and was the only reproduction of himself he possessed. I’ve put it in a frame, she wrote, that used to have a picture of Bhagawan Soaham in it. At heart he wasn’t much interested in prophecies, or in shadow-readers or palmists, but he continued to peruse the paper-backed books and the magazines she sent him, and always he opened her letters with eagerness. He took from a bookstall some torn copies of Old Moore’s Almanac and posted them to her, which pleased her enormously, for she had never studied this seer before. He told her about his childhood and how he had battled his way through hi
s studies in order to become a lung specialist. All that is in your horoscope, she wrote. You are a remarkable man. He thought that one day he would write to her, quite out of the blue, and say that in performing an operation on a person’s lungs he had committed a fatal error due to lack of sleep. He would say he had been struck from the medical register because of this error and was now without money or standing. Could I come to Wigan? he would write. Would there be humble work for me in the boarding-house? In his mind’s eye he saw them working together in the kitchen of the house and one day, perhaps, they would marry one another and when the Crosbies died they would receive the boardinghouse as a reward for all their years of servitude. He wouldn’t object if she wished to talk constantly about the stars or insisted on visits to shadow-readers. They would be happy in their companionship, they would develop a relationship and understand one another’s needs.

  Unfortunately for Morrissey, none of that came about. What happened instead was that Mrs Crosbie died and two months later Miss Lambe wrote: An extraordinary event has occurred. Last Friday in the evening Mr Crosbie came down to the kitchen and said he admired me. I did not know that Mr Crosbie was a Gemini too. We will marry in October, with Uranus and Jupiter in our house of true love. That was the end of it. The correspondence dwindled, and it was at that time of his life that Morrissey first began to visit O’Neill’s Hotel and the Excelsior Bar.

  He had often seen Mrs Sinnott at the window of her room and one day, imagining that she smiled at him and knowing that she cared in a special way for the parentless, he entered the hotel. He held with her, in a new exercise-book she handed him, their first conversation. He told her the story of his life, he told her about Miss Lambe, he wrote down prophecies from the paper-backed books because she seemed to be interested.

  Later, in the Excelsior Bar, he interested Eddie Trump and Eugene Sinnott in their dreams. Miss Lambe had reported many of her dreams to him and he had read in one of the magazines she sent him that many famous people derived benefits from racing ‘tips received while they slept. He had repeated the information in the Excelsior Bar, reading the piece from the magazine, and ever since that day, eleven years ago now, the discussion of dreams had become a conversational topic between Eddie Trump and Eugene. But Morrissey, not being interested in sporting matters, had been forgotten in all that. He had listened while the dreams of the gamblers were daily related, he had observed the excitement in their faces when a tip was discovered. A whole new pattern had developed in the lives of these two men, a pattern that could be traced back to his own instigation, yet at no time did anyone in the Excelsior Bar say that if it hadn’t been for him their lives would be less rich. He had subsequently stated in the bar that Old Moore’s Almanac was also a source of gambling advice and that lucky racing colours could be established by the reading of a detailed horoscope, but the two men had laughed at that, telling him not to be ridiculous. He had given them something all those years ago, free of charge, and they were incapable of showing gratitude. He had obliged them as he had endeavoured to oblige Mr Gregan in the matter of Mrs Kite. He had listened to Mr Gregan talking for two hours, he had helped him to wheel his bicycle, yet Mr Gregan, too, had shrugged away all gratitude.