Philomena, interrupted, said that at one time O’Neill’s had certainly been a nice enough hotel.
‘Yes?’
Philomena nodded. Years ago when first she arrived there the hotel had been a busy pleasant place. She told Mrs Eckdorf of her position then. It had been a home, she said.
‘And now?’ urged Mrs Eckdorf.
‘Now?’
‘Whatever happened in the meanwhile?’
She listened while Philomena informed her of what she already knew: that Mrs Sinnott was old. ‘My husband takes no interest in it,’ said Philomena, ‘and never has.’
‘You prefer it here?’
‘Well, yes,’ said Philomena, sounding surprised.
She showed Mrs Eckdorf three albums of photographs, saying as she turned the pages that she knew Mrs Eckdorf would be interested, since she carried a camera herself. The photographs had not been taken by her, she admitted, but by her brother- in-law, Mr Gregan. She herself had not ever owned a camera.
Timothy John appeared in a variety of stances, wearing different clothes as the years went by. Most of the photographs had been taken in a garden which was, Philomena explained, the garden attached to the Gregans’ house in Terenure. She pointed at trees and shrubs and said that Mrs Eckdorf had probably seen them when she had called on Enid Gregan. She liked Enid Gregan, she said in passing, and then she laughed over a picture of her son at the age of three, wearing only a white hat. Mr Gregan had amusingly placed his pipe in the child’s mouth, which added a surrealist note to the simple composition. He was fond of children, this tiny woman told Mrs Eckdorf: he had always been keen to play with her son.
In the bungalow, as in the house in Terenure, no clue was dropped. Mrs Gregan had seemed to be a person consumed by disappointment who sought a release by cooking things, only to be disappointed again. Philomena was eaten up by love. And yet Mrs Eckdorf was sure that her face had perceptibly whitened when she’d said that the hotel might have memories for her. You do not go white, she thought, if the memories are happy ones, of a child being born and lovingly cared for. Angrily, she wondered if all these people were not being honest. Was O’Shea’s bizarre talk deliberately employed in order to fog the issue? Had Mrs Gregan spoken about food and Philomena about her son because they deliberately refused to allow their minds to return to certain events? Why had this woman left her husband?
‘I’ve got her a shawl for her birthday,’ said Philomena, taking a black crocheted piece from a paper bag.
‘How very nice.’
Philomena spread it out on the sofa, and then returned it to its paper bag. She wasn’t wrapping it up in its special birthday paper, she explained, because she wanted to show it to Timothy John when he came home. As well as the shawl, she added, she’d be giving her mother-in-law some pots of gooseberry jam,
‘You get the feeling that something might once have happened there,’ said Mrs Eckdorf with a needling irritation in her voice.
‘Happened?’
‘I mean in O’Neill’s Hotel.’
A man called Jack Tyler, Philomena said, had fallen over the banisters one night and hadn’t felt a thing. She recalled other incidents, none of which interested Mrs Eckdorf at all. She began to talk about her son again. Mrs Eckdorf said:
‘It can’t by the sound of things have lasted long.’
‘What?’
‘Your marriage to Eugene Sinnott.’
‘It lasted a year, Mrs Eckdorf.’
‘So Timothy –’
‘Timothy John was three months when Mrs Sinnott said that she had made a mistake: Eugene and I should not ever have married.’
Mrs Eckdorf laughed in an attempt at casualness.
‘Wasn’t it you and Eugene, my dear, who’d made that little mistake, not Mrs Sinnott?’
‘It would be difficult to explain to you.’
Mrs Eckdorf spoke again, and was unable to keep a hint of enthusiasm from her voice as she questioned further.
But Philomena, unmoved in any way at all, replied with finality. ‘The situation was impossible,’ she said.
‘But how could Mrs Sinnott have made the mistake? I mean –’
‘It’s a private thing, Mrs Eckdorf; a family thing.’
10
Morrissey, loitering about the streets, watched for men who had finished their day’s work and might be interested in what he had to offer. ‘Excuse me, sir,’ he said to a man whom at a much later hour, a month or so ago, he had introduced to Mrs Kite. ‘What’s the trouble?’ the man demanded, and Morrissey showed him his photograph of Mrs Kite, asking the man if he remembered her. The face of Mrs Kite was scrutinized. The man frowned and shook his head. ‘Some kind of charity case?’ he suggested.
He walked on, and when Morrissey ran after him to explain he said he had never seen either Morrissey or the woman in the photograph before. ‘In Queen Street,’ Morrissey reminded him. ‘You were driving a blue Cortina, sir: would you be interested in meeting that female again at all?’
The man told Morrissey to get off the streets. With his right index finger extended, he gestured peremptorily and when Morrissey did not move he drove his finger powerfully into Morrissey’s stomach. ‘You low bastard,’ he said.
Morrissey made no reply. For a moment he believed that the surface of his stomach had been punctured, giving him grounds for legal action. But when he looked at the finger he saw that it was bloodless. The man repeated his insults and walked away.
My God, thought Morrissey, does he own the town? Is he the damn Lord Mayor? Well within living memory, this violent man had opened the door of a blue Cortina and had beckoned to Morrissey in Queen Street. ‘Any chance of a mott at all?’ he had enquired, his face jovial in anticipation. He had offered Morrissey a cigarette, which Morrissey had taken. ‘Isn’t that a great-looking woman?’ Morrissey had said, displaying the photograph of Mrs Kite, and the man had agreed that she was. They had gone together to the street where Mrs Kite was usually to be found. The man had paid him six shillings and had driven off with Mrs Kite in the front of the car beside him.
Meditating on this new evidence of hypocrisy, Morrissey continued in his search for lone men. His eyes darted swiftly about the faces that moved by him, most of them a little higher than his own. The men were hurrying, or engaged in the rapid purchase of an evening newspaper. One of them dropped a penny without noticing: Morrissey watched it roll and bent down to claim it. As he put it in a pocket and glanced again around him, he saw Mrs Eckdorf.
Morrissey had been surprised when O’Shea had written that a woman from Germany had come to stay in the hotel and later had led her into Mrs Sinnott’s room. It was unusual for anyone to lodge in the hotel; and it was more unusual that the person referred to should be a well-dressed female with a hat. She was moving along now, he noticed, at a fairish pace, looking for something. Since at this unprofitable time of day little could be lost by the action, he dropped into step behind her, thinking about her and wondering if a time would ever come when he could offer to those in need a woman such as this.
Unaware that she had excited attention, Mrs Eckdorf advanced in a rage. Her taxi-driver, a species of idiot, had delivered her at the wrong insurance company. Taking the man at his word, she had hurried up the steps of a prosperous building and had asked to see, most urgently, the son of Eugene and Philomena Sinnott. She had wasted a quarter of an hour insisting and arguing with a receptionist, who appeared to be of the same order as the taxi-man. She had then been told that the insurance company she sought was a rival concern that lay fifty yards along the street. People bumped into her as she searched for it. She swore at them, thinking that as a result of all this rubbishy carry-on the narrow-headed son would have left his office and would by now be seated on a bus.
It was not, however, the frustration of having been delivered to the wrong insurance company that so angered Mrs Eckdorf: it was the feeling that she was in the wrong city. For the first time in her professional life she felt she had made a mistake
. Absurdity had landed her where she was: her instinct for a human story, which had never before been wrong, had deluded her utterly. In the taxi-cab that had carried her from the bungalow she had felt, suddenly and frantically, that she was cracking up, that all of the ugliness in her life, Hoerschelmann and Hans-Otto Eckdorf, had without warning defeated her, that the loud-mouthed barman on the ship had played some unpleasant joke. She was in a city she did not wish to be in, having flown by night, risking her life. She had consorted with beggars and card-sharpers, and had ridiculously moved into a disgusting hotel. She had listened to the obsessions of two women who were as ordinary as the pavement she stepped on. She had wasted her time with a preposterous hall-porter, she had said to an inebriate that he had gentle eyes.
Morrissey, several yards behind Mrs Eckdorf, was surprised when suddenly she screamed. People stopped and looked at her. A woman went to her and attempted to seize her hand, but Mrs Eckdorf pushed the woman roughly away. In a shrieking voice she cried that she had felt the presence of people weeping. Was this the end of a woman’s life, that a farce should drift her into madness?
Her voice shrilled, mentioning the names of people: a priest who had lost his belief in God, a murderer somewhere, a family of people who were incestuous. She would tear the truth from a narrow-headed youth, she cried, for how could it not be true? She would break the narrow-headed youth across her knees, for how could all her intuitions have failed her? And then Mrs Eckdorf walked on, quite calmly, as though her outburst had not occurred. She turned into a building, while Morrissey, intrigued that this female who was so strangely staying in O’Neill’s Hotel should have behaved with even greater strangeness, decided to continue his pursuit of her.
‘A nut,’ a man said to him. ‘There’s a lot about these days.’
Morrissey indicated his agreement. He cast a glance over the man, who appeared to be loitering. Excusing himself politely, he enquired of the man if he would care for the company of a female, making it plain that he did not refer to the female who had just behaved dramatically. The man reacted unpleasantly, issuing oaths and threats. A girl came up to him as Morrissey moved away, and he heard the pair of them laughing. ‘It’s a terrible old town,’ said the girl’s voice amusedly. ‘You wouldn’t be safe!’ He saw himself turning suddenly and going back to them. In the same polite voice he said the man had misheard him, that what he had said was that two million Chinamen had landed in Wicklow and were approaching the city in buses. ‘They’ll not leave a female intact,’ he said, watching the merriment drain from the girl’s eyes.
Not far away, on the second floor of the building that Mrs Eckdorf had entered, another enemy of Morrissey’s laughed also. In the Home and Personal Effects Department, Mr Gregan, lighting his pipe preparatory to leaving the office for the night, recalled what his wife had earlier announced to him about the absence of children in their house in Terenure. He had been mulling the matter over during the course of the day and it seemed to him now to be not unamusing that any woman should inform her husband on the telephone that they were a childless couple. He would mention the matter to Gorman, he decided, when they stopped for a bottle of stout on the way home. Gorman, who was apparently married to a woman without any kind of brain at all, would certainly appreciate it and would probably relate a similar experience he’d had himself. Gorman often said that you could be trying for ever before you’d understand the ways of women, and in that opinion it appeared to Mr Gregan that Gorman was definitely right.
‘Good night, boy,’ Mr Gregan said, passing Timothy John’s desk in the outer office. ‘You’re making up that hour or two, are you?’
‘There’s not much to do, Uncle. Would I wait until an evening when we were busy?’
‘A week well spent, boy. Sit where you are and make up your time.’
Typists obscured their machines beneath black covers, clerks put their pens away and cleared their desks. Everyone in the Home and Personal Effects Department said good night to Mr Gregan, many adding wishes for the weekend. Mr Gregan spoke again to his nephew, in a more confidential voice. ‘Sit where you are,’ he counselled, ‘in case they’re thinking there’s favouritism. Slip out when they’ve gone. I’ll be with you,’ he said to Gorman, who was standing by the door. He put a match to his pipe. ‘A week well spent,’ he repeated.
Timothy John waited. He heard his uncle’s voice continuing on the stairs, saying to Gorman that the week had been well spent and adding that it was a difficult thing to have a relative in a department because everyone was watching for favouritism. ‘He didn’t get in till all hours this morning,’ his uncle said, ‘and not a damn word to say for himself.’
Timothy John put away his pen and cleared his desk. He left the empty department, wondering if the day would ever come when he’d be the head of it and do no actual work. Did his uncle ever get bored sitting in the private office that was partitioned off with glass and ply-board, eating tubes of gums and smoking his pipe? Whenever he went in there to see him about some matter his uncle would tell him to mind the step, which was a joke because there was no step to mind. ‘Have you made a boob?’ his uncle would say when he saw him coming, and Timothy John would always feel frightened then. When his uncle retired, Gorman would be chief and when Gorman retired the position would fall to the employee with the best record, which he hoped would be himself. He’d be a man of fifty-two by then. He walked down the stairs, concentrating on the idea of being fifty-two and in a position of authority, trying not to think of Daisy Tulip with her clothes off. ‘Are you Timothy John Sinnott?’ a woman asked, approaching him from the shadows of the hall.
Morrissey, standing outside on the steps, close against a green entrance door which was partly open, overheard that question and was interested in it. He had observed Mrs Eckdorf hovering in the gloom of the hall and he heard her now suggest that she should be taken to the offices of the insurance company for the purpose of conversation; he heard some stumbling reply from her companion. He allowed them to begin their ascent before he pushed the green door inwards.
The hall was square and had a concrete floor. Two bicycles, seeming as if they had not been used for a considerable time, leaned against a green wall. Morrissey had seen other bicycles being wheeled from the hall and down the steps. It had whetted his interest to see Mr Gregan with the same bicycle that he had pushed that day in the direction of Mrs Kite. Why, wondered Morrissey as he observed that, was the woman from the hotel visiting Gregan’s place of work?
The hall contained a wooden table on which lay an assortment of unclaimed letters, many of them now dirtied by dust. Morrissey passed them by and mounted the stairs. He could hear the voice of Mrs Eckdorf above him and the murmuring of Timothy John Sinnott, a person he had never met. Narrow corridors ran from the first-floor landing, glass doors were marked with titles, all the walls were painted green. Morrissey continued his pursuit past that landing, to the second floor. There, cautiously poised for flight, he listened outside an open door, standing to one side.
He heard Mrs Eckdorf repeating her reasons for being in O’Neill’s Hotel. To his surprise, he heard her relate her desire to buy the place. She said that old Mrs Sinnott would soon pass beyond the care of a porter, which was something that she had pointed out to the porter himself. And then, in a peculiar way, the woman who had had an outburst on the street spoke about Eugene Sinnott.
‘Do you realize,’ she said, ‘that a man like your father could easily set fire to that place?’
He might be lying in bed, she explained, and his cigarette might drop on to the blankets. Fires in hotels were always starting like that, dry old blankets going up like nobody’s business. She’d seen it happen.
Morrissey listened with care. No comment came from Eugene Sinnott’s son. Then the woman said:
‘Your father’s given up to drink and decadence. Why is that?’
‘My father drinks a bit, certainly he does.’
‘Why is it?’
‘My father lives his own
life, Mrs Eckdorf.’
‘Why doesn’t he live in the bungalow?’
‘My mother and my father parted. A long time ago now.’
‘Where would he live? If the hotel changed hands, what about your father? Would he live in a stables some place, a character like that?’
‘Look now, Mrs Eckdorf –’
‘What happened once?’
‘I’m afraid I don’t follow you at all, Mrs Eckdorf. I have to get home, you know. I don’t know what you mean –’
‘The man we’re talking about is your father. You would not exist were it not for your father. No one can exist without a father, or a mother either.’
‘I know, Mrs Eckdorf.’
‘Can’t you think of your father, for God’s sake?’ cried out Mrs Eckdorf’s voice, startling Morrissey as he stood there. ‘Think of his existence while you live your luxurious life. Your grandmother bought that bungalow for you. Your grandmother has kindly supported you all these years.’
‘My grandmother –’
‘Honour thy father. That’s a holy commandment.’
Morrissey heard Eugene Sinnott’s son protesting again that he didn’t understand. He heard the female say that O’Neill’s Hotel was the haunt of street-walkers. ‘O’Shea is in the dumps,’ she said. ‘Agnes Quin by the sound of her is a bag of nails. D’you see what I mean?’
‘No.’
‘Your father rises up in the morning, he returns to bed at night. He hasn’t had a midday meal for twenty years. His days are passed in a public house. Why is that?’
‘I don’t know, Mrs Eckdorf.’
‘Of course you do. Why is it now?’
Morrissey heard the youth reply that he couldn’t make out what any of this had to do with Mrs Eckdorf’s proposal to purchase the hotel. He said again that his father lived his own life.
‘Go home,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘If you will not help me, you will not.’
It seemed to Morrissey as he listened that the female might be weeping. Her voice was sorrowful, certainly, reminding him of Mrs Kite’s voice one night after a man had turned nasty in Loftus Lane.
Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 16
