Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  ‘You need a bit of company,’ Mr Smedley said, ‘when you’re in a strange land. Any man of vigour does.’

  Mr Smedley laughed and Mrs Eckdorf, glancing at him, noticed that his teeth were set in a particularly small jaw. They were crowded and pointed. Their whiteness shone, as though Mr Smedley used a special kind of toothpaste.

  ‘I was once in the cement business,’ said Mr Smedley, while waiting for Mrs Eckdorf to complete her toilet.’I packed in the job one Friday night. I walked home to the wife and told her. The following Tuesday I went in on the cardboard line.’ He said his wife was the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. ‘She knows a trick or two,’ he added with a laugh.

  She experienced disgust at the sight of his small jaw and his shining teeth, and this talk about the daughter of a Presbyterian minister. He was here for lechery, on this particular afternoon, at this chosen time.

  ‘I’m interested in the East,’ said Mr Smedley.

  Mrs Eckdorf, with the Mamiya hanging from her neck, held the door open. They went downstairs together. She would photograph him in the hall, for it would be necessary to photograph him, since he represented the hotel as it was today.

  ‘The East,’ said Mr Smedley, ‘has a certain amount to offer a man of vigour.’

  ‘Stand there,’ requested Mrs Eckdorf, pointing towards the row of tall chairs.’Do not sit down, if you don’t mind.’

  ‘Am I to wait? Look here, I’d rather you didn’t.’

  She took a photograph of Mr Smedley looking alarmed. She paid no attention when he said she had no right to do that. He came towards her aggressively, and as he did so Morrissey and Mrs Dargan came into the hall from Thaddeus Street, dripping rain.

  ‘Hi,’ said Mrs Dargan, crossing at once to Mr Smedley, so that Mrs Eckdorf was able to catch them together in her lens. Glancing at her, Morrissey seemed nervous again.

  ‘Stop taking those pictures,’ shouted Mr Smedley.

  ‘You are a vicious man,’ replied Mrs Eckdorf in a voice so low that it only just carried to him.

  ‘Look here, what’s going on? Who are you, for God’s sake?’ demanded Mr Smedley rudely of Mrs Dargan. ‘Where’s Agnes Quin?’

  ‘In a convent,’ said Mrs Dargan.

  ‘It’s all right, sir–’ Morrissey began.

  ‘It bloody isn’t all right. You made me a guarantee last night–’

  ‘Agnes let me down, sir, at the last minute. I’m sorry about that, sir.’

  ‘Are you spending much?’ whispered a voice in Mr Smedley’s ear, and he realized to his horror that it came from the throat of the enormous woman.

  ‘I thought you’d be interested in Mrs Dargan,’ said Morrissey. ‘Mrs Dargan is agreeable, sir–’

  ‘I do not want Mrs Dargan,’ cried the cardboard salesman. ‘Mrs Dargan is deformed–’

  ‘It’s Mrs Kite you said was deformed, sir. That’s Mrs Dargan beside you.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Mrs Dargan.

  ‘Agnes Quin has made off,’ said Mrs Dargan. ‘Morrissey thought maybe you’d be interested.’

  Mr Smedley, who from the moment of waking that day had been anticipating with keenness the encounter with Agnes Quin, wondered if he had entered an asylum for the crazed. The undersized man whom he had met last night had sniggered when the woman had said in an extraordinary way that he was vicious. It was not usual in a house to be told you were vicious and then to have a woman the size of an elephant foisted on you. He had done what the undersized man had asked him to do: he had reported at the hotel and gone to a certain room, in which he had presumed Agnes Quin would be waiting. Instead he had found a woman asleep with her mouth open, who had woken up and asked him what he wanted. What did they mean that Agnes Quin had gone into a convent?

  ‘You made me a guarantee,’ shouted Mr Smedley, trying to catch Morrissey’s eye and failing.’I paid you six shillings in advance. I want that back.’

  He reminded her of Hoerschelmann. The unpleasant spectacles he wore rested on his nose in the same manner as Hoerschelmann’s had, and his personality featured the same distasteful blend of cockiness and whine. Mrs Eckdorf closed her eyes and heard the salesman’s protesting voice and the murmuring of Mrs Dargan, and it came to her abruptly and with clarity that the salesman must mount the stairs. He must mount the stairs, she said to herself, and he must vent his lechery on the flesh of the well-built woman while the birthday party continued below. It was necessary that he should do so: it was part of a pattern of which she herself was another part. She opened her eyes. She said:

  ‘Mrs Dargan has been brought to this hotel at great cost. For the sum of fifteen guineas, Mr Smedley, plus four further shillings for Morrissey here–’

  ‘Now, bloody hell,’ roared Mr Smedley.

  ‘Ten if you like, sir,’ said Mrs Dargan.

  Rage distorted the countenance of Mr Smedley. Obscenities dropped from his lips. He appeared to be about to attack Morrissey, but Mrs Eckdorf and Mrs Dargan stepped between them.

  ‘I’m sorry about Quin,’ said Morrissey. ‘Mrs Dargan will do the job –’

  ‘For ten,’ said Mrs Dargan, nudging Mr Smedley with her elbow. ‘You’ll never regret it, sir.’

  ‘I came to meet a girl called Agnes Quin, whose snap I was shown –’

  ‘She’s saying her prayers,’ said Mrs Dargan, simpering at Mr Smedley, her mind excited by the sums of money that were being bandied about. She’d made twelve shillings the night before.

  ‘Do you,’ enquired Mrs Eckdorf, ‘or do you not wish to pleasure yourself?’

  He looked at her. Intimacy developed in his gaze. He moved towards her, opening his mouth to speak.

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Eckdorf.

  Mrs Dargan was still standing close to him, moving with him when he moved. The calf of her right leg was pressed against his, a liberty which for the last few minutes he had permitted He shifted his leg now; Mrs Dargan shifted hers in the same direction.

  ‘I couldn’t pay money like that,’ said Mr Smedley.

  ‘Eight pounds ten,’ suggested Mrs Dargan quickly, pressing with her knee.

  ‘Five,’ offered Mr Smedley, not looking at Mrs Dargan.

  ‘We’ll see Paradise for that, sir,’ said Mrs Dargan.

  ‘And four shillings for that man there,’ insisted Mrs Eckdorf.

  Money changed hands in the hall, an activity that, unnoticed by its principals, Mrs Eckdorf recorded.

  Morrissey led the way upstairs. ‘What kind of a woman was that?’ Mrs Eckdorf heard Mr Smedley say when he imagined they were out of earshot. She heard Mrs Dargan issue a throaty laugh; a sound of some kind, probably a laugh also, came from Morrissey. She did not blame either of them for laughing at her.

  She waited for Morrissey to return, and when he did she asked him where the couple were. He said they were in the back room on the first floor.

  ‘I’m glad,’ she murmured quietly, ‘you got the extra four shillings. A man like that has to be watched.’

  ‘He’s like them all, missus.’

  ‘No. He’s worse, Morrissey. He’s like a man I was married to.’

  ‘Dargan will settle him,’ promised Morrissey, passing through the glass doors of the hotel.

  She would have liked to chat for a while with Morrissey, to have asked him about Miss Lambe of Wigan and the stamp-collector he had once met, and other details she had read about in his conversations with Mrs Sinnott. She would have liked to apologize for her initial rudeness to him in the insurance office. Thinking that, she went swiftly to the doors he had passed through. She called after him, but he did not come back.

  Slowly she went upstairs, knowing she should not move slowly because the birthday party was by now under way. Yet it seemed as important that she should allow a degree of progress to be made in the back bedroom before she made her stealthy entrance. Her hatred of the man who had told her that the East had much to offer a man of vigour increased as she advanced. What right had such a creature to quibble over a price or to make any prot
est whatsoever? What right had he to come here on the birthday of a woman whose goodness had worked a human miracle? Her hatred was like a living thing within her. It tugged at her, like the hatreds she felt for certain other people, and it would increase, she knew, until the moment came when the lecher should be called upon to play another part, until he and she gazed in wonderment at one another, refreshed by understanding.

  She turned the handle of the door and found that the blind had been discreetly drawn. The rain beat noisily on the window behind it. Sounds came from a bed.

  She closed the door quietly and when her eyes became used to the dark she saw two piles of clothes on the floor, the salesman’s more abandonedly thrown than Mrs Dargan’s.

  ‘Lay off that,’ the voice of Mrs Dargan was protesting as Mrs Eckdorf crept forward to pick up his clothes: trousers, shirt, tie, a waistcoat with a watch-chain hanging from it, jacket, underclothes, socks, and two black shoes.

  She went to the dining-room that had a smell in it and put the clothes and the shoes in a sideboard.

  13

  In front of her on the table were the presents she had opened: a pencil-sharpener in the shape of the world, a tray-cloth, a shawl in crocheted wool, a small image of the Virgin Mary, a grey knitted cardigan from Mrs Gregan. On her dress was the spider that had caught Morrissey’s eye in Woolworth’s, in a jug on the table were the mixed blooms of Mr Gregan, on the dresser was the cup that Agnes Quin had obtained in a shop on the Quays.

  There were plates of biscuits, and bread that O’Shea had earlier buttered meticulously. There was brack, and a spongecake, a jam-roll and two rectangular fruit-cakes. The birthday cake itself was iced in yellow, with orange piping and small edible flowers. It bore no candles.

  Mrs Eckdorf, with her camera, came quietly into the midst of all this. Philomena, seated on one side of Mrs Sinnott, looked up and saw her visitor of the previous afternoon, the woman they’d all been talking about: she was wearing the same clothes and the same white hat.

  O’Shea, whose face had reddened with pleasure at the sight of Mrs Eckdorf, busied himself with tea and a teapot. Timothy John, who had been saying to his father that he’d had a tooth out that morning, paused when he saw Mrs Eckdorf and did not finish the sentence. Eugene sighing, thinking to himself that this woman was a damn nuisance. Mrs Gregan smiled.

  ‘I’m Ivy Eckdorf,’ Mrs Eckdorf said to Mr Gregan. ‘How do you do, Mr Gregan?’

  She spoke in a whisper. She held out her right hand, and Mr Gregan received it.

  ‘I have been given permission by Mrs Sinnott,’ she said in the same quiet way, ‘to obtain photographs of this birthday occasion. Please take no notice of me.’

  Leo had had a camera, Mrs Sinnott remembered. She had leaned against a tree while he looked into it, signalling at her to smile. She had stood in the Spanish Arch in Galway, on their honeymoon, and another time on Patrick’s Hill in Cork. I have never heard your voice, she had written on the back of a brown envelope, and then she saw again her father’s writing, black on yellow paper. He was shot.

  In the yard the leaves of the hornbeam tree dripped. It was better like this, Mrs Eckdorf thought, better than sunshine.

  Their necks craned this way and that, their eyes following her about as swiftly she worked. Her face, Eugene saw, was almost grim. She held her camera low, angling a shot along the surface of the table; she clambered on a chair and caught them each as they looked up at her in surprise.

  Mrs Gregan glanced at her mother and saw that she was wrapped up with her thoughts and appeared to be unaware that a stranger to the family was standing on a chair, frowning into a camera.

  ‘It is something she wants,’ Mrs Eckdorf murmured, returning to the ground. ‘She’ll have a copy of every one.’

  She asked that Eugene should rise and stand by Philomena, and when that had happened, and when she had taken the photograph, she asked that Timothy John should join them, which he, with a glance at his grandmother, did. She asked that Eugene should stand by his sister, and that O’Shea should stand beside the two of them.

  ‘Thank you,’ she said. ‘That’s all I’ll bother you for.’

  She went to a corner of the kitchen to change the film in her camera and they imagined that now she would go away. O’Shea poured boiling water on to the tea in the teapot and placed the teapot on the table. Mrs Gregan said she’d let it wait a bit before dispensing it.

  Watch trap one, Eugene thought: Clinker Flash. Watch Clinker Flash, who had beaten Russian Gun by a neck only a week ago and who shouldn’t be underestimated any more than It’s a Mint, or Drumna Chestnut in trap three. It’s a Mint was a flyer on his night, but what dog on that card could hold a candle to the Printer, who had yet to be headed into the back stretch of the Shelbourne track? No dog, as far as he could see, in this race or in any other. No dog under the sun.

  Mrs Eckdorf began to take photographs again, moving about unobtrusively in the background, not getting in anyone’s way. They were remembering now, she told herself, as they sat there impassive: they were remembering and forgiving too.

  Mrs Gregan poured tea from the teapot, cups were handed round. She smiled at her mother, and Philomena smiled too. Timothy John wished that the woman with the camera would go away. Her voice, noisier then, returned to him from her conversation of yesterday, talking about his father. Sometimes when he came to the hotel he met his father on the stairs, or noticed him sitting in the hall. His father was genial on these occasions: he would tell him he was looking well and occasionally offer him a racing tip.

  ‘I think, if you wouldn’t mind,’ said Mr Gregan, ‘you should finish off now.’

  He had risen from the table and was standing beside her.

  She shook her head. She said he didn’t understand, but that soon she’d explain. There was beauty in the kitchen, she said, speaking so softly that Mr Gregan did not hear her.

  ‘What?’ said Mr Gregan.

  She gently pushed him back towards the chair he’d been sitting on, but Mr Gregan did not sit down.

  ‘Please just continue,’ pleaded Mrs Eckdorf.

  ‘It’s a family occasion,’ Eugene said suddenly and unexpectedly, pulling his head around to look at her. His hands were trembling, she saw. He began to say something else, but changed his mind and lit a cigarette instead.

  ‘It’ll be nice to see the photos,’ Mrs Gregan said, ‘but we’d like to be alone with my mother now.’

  The tips of Mrs Sinnott’s fingers rapped on the surface of the table; her eyes indicated that Mrs Eckdorf’s presence did not offend her.

  Something was wrong, Philomena thought. She watched Mrs Eckdorf moving away from the table and again lifting her camera She heard her sister-in-law say that they’d better take no notice. Opposite her, Eugene was angry.

  Mrs Sinnott, having drunk from the birthday present of Agnes Quin, selected a biscuit wrapped in green silver-paper, from which she slowly removed the wrapping and nibbled at the chocolate confection beneath it.

  ‘She’s very kind,’ Mr Gregan said to Mrs Eckdorf. ‘She never turns people away. But this is private, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  Remembering the day, Father Hennessey rose from his bureau with a sigh. On a damp afternoon, with the electric fire going, there was nothing he liked better than to sit and write. On his way through the hall he took an umbrella from the hallstand. ‘It’s Mrs Sinnott’s birthday,’ he said to his housekeeper. ‘I’ll not be long.’

  On the street he unfolded his umbrella, thinking neither of Mrs Sinnott nor the people associated with O’Neill’s Hotel, but of the saint whose day it was. St Laurence remained in his thoughts until he arrived in the kitchen of the hotel and saw that something was wrong.

  ‘I’m Mrs Eckdorf,’ a woman with a camera said to him, addressing him in low tones, as a woman might address him in the Confessional.

  ‘Ah, Father Hennessey,’ said Mr Gregan.

  Mr Gregan, who had not been sitting down when the priest entered the kitchen, came to him now a
nd shook his hand, at the same time whispering.

  ‘We’re having trouble with this woman,’ he said.

  This was the woman that O’Shea had wildly talked about, whom O’Shea had said was going to buy the hotel. She smiled at him, but he took no notice of her, or of Mr Gregan, whose hand was on his arm. He went to Mrs Sinnott and wrote a birthday message in her exercise-book, as he did every year.

  ‘I think she’s doing this to get in with Mrs Sinnott,’ Mr Gregan said. ‘She wants to buy the hotel.’

  Father Hennessey looked at O’Shea, who was standing by the range. He would have liked to ask O’Shea’s forgiveness for doubting his word, but he thought that this was clearly not the moment for it. He did as well as he could. He said:

  ‘O’Shea told me that.’

  Conversation continued while Mrs Eckdorf went on taking photographs. Mrs Gregan talked to Father Hennessey about the work she was engaged on for the Society of St Vincent de Paul, her husband told Eugene that the best fertilizer for tomato plants was slaughter-house blood. Eugene, he urged, must come up and see the field he’d bought, and the two glass-houses. The home-grown tomato could not be beaten: there would always be a steady market for the home-grown tomato because its quality was superior and it could be put up for sale in a fresher condition than tomatoes that had to be imported. It was a ridiculous state of affairs, Mr Gregan said, that a country like this had to import tomatoes in any shape or form. Eugene nodded and Philomena nodded, as did Timothy John. ‘You’ve settled down well in the Department,’ Mr Gregan said to Timothy John, and Timothy John, remembering that he had been in the Department for ten years, nodded again.

  Eugene wondered if the rumours that had circulated about the Printer’s dislike of trap four had any foundation whatsoever. The way people talked you’d think he had never run from any trap but trap six in his life. What trap, for God’s sake, was he running from when he broke the record set up by the Prince of Bermuda, and broke two tracks records at the White City?

  ‘We’re having a raffle in the autumn,’ Mrs Gregan said to Father Hennessey. ‘Ten of us are going out on the streets with tickets.’