‘No. There’s a stiff in the car.’
Fully aware of the dramatic quality of his announcement he rose in gloomy meditation, crossed to the window and spun up the blind, as though to assure himself that the ‘stiff’ was still there. The others looked at one another in stupefaction.
‘And how did you come by the stiff?’ asked the Darling at last.
‘A fight outside Dunmanway this morning. He got it through the chest.’
His audience looked at one another again. There was a faint gleam of satisfaction in Michael Redmond’s eyes that seemed to say, ‘There! What did I tell you?’ The doctor sat down and lit a cigarette before he resumed.
‘He was all right when we left B—. At least I was certain he’d be all right if only we could operate at once. There was no ambulance – there never is in this bloody army – so I dumped him into the car and drove off for Cork. We had to go slow. The roads were bad, and I was afraid the jolting might be too much for him. I swear to God I couldn’t have driven more carefully!’
He took out a handkerchief and wiped the sweat from his face.
‘We talked a bit at first. He spoke very intelligently. He was a nice boy, about nineteen. Then I noticed he was sleepy as I thought, nodding and only answering now and again, but I paid no heed to that. It was only to be expected. It was getting dark, too, at the time, and I had to keep my eyes on the road. Then, as I was passing the cross a half-mile back, I got nervous. I can’t describe it – it was a sort of eerie feeling. It may have been the trees; trees affect me like that. Or the mist – I don’t know. I called back to him and he didn’t answer, so I stopped the car and switched on a torch I have (here he fumbled in his pockets, produced the lamp, and switched it on in evidence). Then I saw his tunic was saturated with blood. The poor devil was stone dead.
‘So I’m in a bit of a hole,’ he added irrelevantly.
They sat still, and for the first time Helen heard the pock-pock of the rain against the window like the faint creak of a loose board.
‘I thought there might be someone here who’d come into town with me. I don’t like facing in alone. I’m not ashamed to admit that.’
He was watching Jordan out of the corner of his eye. So were the others, for at the same moment all seemed to become aware of his presence. He seemed to project an aura of emotional disturbance.
‘Well,’ he began hesitantly, seeing their eyes on him, ‘what can I do?’ He gave a shrug that said the very opposite of what his face was saying. ‘I’ll admit I’d like to help you. I don’t want to see another man in a hole but – when the thing’s impossible?’
‘I’d bring you back tomorrow night.’
‘Of course.…’ Jordan hovered upon the brink of an avowal. ‘There’s another reason. The wife and kiddies. I haven’t seen them now for close on three months.’
‘You’ll be absolutely safe,’ said the doctor with growing emphasis. ‘Absolutely. I can guarantee that. If necessary I can even speak for the Commanding Officer. Isn’t that enough for you?’
Jordan looked at Redmond and Redmond looked back with a shrug that seemed to say, ‘Do as you please.’ Jordan was alone, and knew it, and his face grew redder and redder as he looked from one to another. A helpless silence fell upon them all, so complete that Helen was positively startled by the doctor’s voice saying, almost with satisfaction:
‘Plenty of time, you know. It’s only seven o’clock.’
She looked at her watch and rose with a little gasp of dismay. At the same moment Jordan too sprang up.
‘I may as well chance it,’ he said with brazen nonchalance, his hands locked behind his head and a faint smile playing about the corners of his mouth. ‘A married man needs a little relaxation now and then.’
‘Certainly,’ said Michael Redmond.
Though there was no sarcasm in the voice Jordan looked up as though he had been struck.
‘You people know nothing about it,’ he said sharply, and wounded vanity triumphed over his assumed nonchalance. ‘Wait until you’re married! Perhaps you’ll see things differently then. Wait until you’ve children of your own.’
He glanced angrily at the girls.
Considine waved a vague, disparaging hand.
‘Why, it’s the most natural thing in the world,’ he said, imparting a sort of general scientific absolution to the sentiment implied. ‘The most natural thing in the world.’
The others said nothing. The two girls went upstairs, and while Helen changed back into her shoes and gaiters May Crowley sat on the bed beside her, and a look of utter disgust settled upon her vapid mouth.
‘Honest to God,’ she said petulantly, ‘wouldn’t he give you the sick, himself and his wife? Why doesn’t he stay at home with her altogether? It’s revolting! He should be kept with a column for five years at a time. He’s been carrying on for years like that, skipping back like a kid to a jampot, and his poor drag of a wife suffering for him. There she is every twelve months trotting out in that old fur coat of hers – the same old fur coat she got when they were married – and she has to face police and soldiers night after night in that condition! If they raid his house at all they raid it twice a week to keep her company. Because he’s such a great soldier! Soldier my eye! If they only knew! But it is revolting, isn’t it, Helen?’
‘I suppose it is,’ replied Helen weakly.
‘Of course it is.… Michael Redmond is more in my line,’ she went on as she stood before the mirror and added a dab of powder to her nose. ‘He’s a man of the world if you understand me, the sort of man who can talk to a woman. I think I prefer him to any of them, with the exception of Vincent Kelly.… Now Vincent is a gentleman if you like. I’m sure you’d love him if only you knew him better.… But Jordan! Ugh! Thanks be to God, Bill Considine is taking him out of this. When he looks at you it’s as though he was guessing how many children you’d have. He’s a breeder, my dear, that’s what he is, a breeder!’
Helen did not reply. She was thinking of the dead boy outside in the car.
‘Helen, child,’ the Darling went on inconsequentially, ‘you’d better stop the night.’
‘No, really,’ said Helen, ‘I must get home.’
‘I suppose you must.’ The Darling looked at her out of indifferent, half-shut eyes. ‘Michael is a sweet man!…It’s the way they hold you, isn’t it, dear? I mean, don’t you know immediately a man puts his arm round you what his character is like?’
When they came downstairs the others were waiting in a group under the hall-lamp; Considine in his uniform cap and great coat; Jordan looking more than ever like a hero of romance in trench-coat and soft hat, his muddy gaiters showing beneath the ragged edges of his coat.
Michael Redmond opened the door, and they felt the breath of the cold, wet night outside, without a star, and saw the great balloon-like laurel bush in the centre of the avenue, catching the golden beams from doorway and window, and reflecting them from its wet leaves. The car was standing beside it out of range of the light. Helen stood behind for a moment while the others approached it, then, fascinated, she followed them. Considine produced his electric torch, and a beam from it shot through the light rain into the darkness of the car. There was nothing to be seen.
Startled, the Darling and Jordan stepped back, and the little group remained for a few seconds looking where the grey light played upon the car’s dark hood. Then the doctor laughed, a slight, nervous laugh, and his hand went to the catch of the door. It shot open with a click and something slid out, and hung suspended a few inches above the footboard. It was a man’s head, the face upturned, the long, dark hair brushing the footboard of the car, the eyes staring back at them, bright but cold. The face was the face of a boy, but the open mouth, streaked with blood, made it seem like the face of an old man. There was a brown stain across the right cheek, as though the boy had drawn his sleeve across it when the haemorrhage began.
No one said anything; all were too fascinated to speak. Then Michael Redmond’s hand
went out and, catching the doctor’s wrist, forced the light quietly away. It went out, and Redmond lifted the body and thrust it back on the seat.
‘Now,’ he said, and the pompousness seemed to have gone from his voice. ‘You’d better start, doctor.’
‘What about you, Miss Joyce?’ asked Considine.
‘I’m cycling in,’ she said.
‘We can pace you, of course. The roads are bad, and we shouldn’t be able to go fast anyhow.’
‘Never mind,’ said Redmond roughly. ‘It won’t take her long to get home.’
Helen liked him more than ever.
He lit her bicycle lamp, and, with a hurried good-bye, she cycled down the avenue. She had gone the best part of half her way before the car caught up on her. Mentally she thanked Michael Redmond for the delay – ‘man of the world, man of the world’, she thought. The car slowed down, and Jordan shouted something which she did not catch and did not reply to. It went on again, and his voice lingered in her ears, faintly repulsive.
The tail-light of the car (the red glass had gone and there was only a white blob leaping along the road) disappeared round a corner, and left her to the wet waste night and the gloom of the trees. Already the rain was beginning to clear; soon there would be a fine spell, with stars perhaps, but the road was full of potholes, and she could almost feel the mud that rose in the lamplight on each side of her front wheel, and spattered her gaiters and coat. And still the voice of Jordan lingered in her ears, and from the depths of her memory rose a bit of a poem that she had heard old Turner quote in college. Had he said that it was one of the finest in the English language? It would be like old Turner to say that. Fat lot he knew about it anyway! But it haunted her mind.
So the two brothers with their murdered man
Rode past fair Florence…
Jumbo’s Wife
1
When he had taken his breakfast, silently as his way was after a drunk, he lifted the latch and went out without a word. She heard his feet tramp down the flagged laneway, waking iron echoes, and, outraged, shook her fist after him; then she pulled off the old red flannel petticoat and black shawl she was wearing, and crept back into the hollow of the bed. But not to sleep. She went over and over in her mind the shame of last night’s bout, felt at her lip where he had split it with a blow, and recalled how she had fled into the roadway screaming for help and been brought back by Pa Kenefick, the brother of the murdered boy. Somehow that had sobered Jumbo. Since Michael, the elder of the Kenefick brothers, had been taken out and killed by the police, the people looked up to Pa rather as they looked up to the priest, but more passionately, more devotedly. She remembered how even Jumbo, the great swollen insolent Jumbo, had crouched back into the darkness when he saw that slip of a lad walk in before her. ‘Stand away from me,’ he had said, but not threateningly. ‘It was a shame,’ Pa had retorted, ‘a confounded shame for a drunken elephant of a man to beat his poor decent wife like that,’ but Jumbo had said nothing, only ‘Let her be, boy, let her be! Go away from me now and I’ll quieten down.’ ‘You’d better quieten down,’ Pa had said, ‘or you’ll answer for it to me, you great bully you,’ and he had kicked about the floor the pieces of the delft that Jumbo in his drunken frenzy had shattered one by one against the wall. ‘I tell you I won’t lay a finger on her,’ Jumbo had said, and sure enough, when Pa Kenefick had gone, Jumbo was a quiet man.
But it was the sight of the brother of the boy that had been murdered rather than the beating she had had or the despair at seeing her little share of delft smashed on her, that brought home to Jumbo’s wife her own utter humiliation. She had often thought before that she would run away from Jumbo, even, in her wild way, that she would do for him, but never before had she seen so clearly what a wreck he had made of her life. The sight of Pa had reminded her that she was no common trollop but a decent girl; he had said it, ‘your decent poor wife’, that was what Pa had said, and it was true; she was a decent poor woman. Didn’t the world know how often she had pulled the little home together on her blackguard of a husband, the man who had ’listed in the army under a false name so as to rob her of the separation money, the man who would keep a job only as long as it pleased him, and send her out then to work in the nurseries, picking fruit for a shilling a day?
She was so caught up into her own bitter reflections that when she glanced round suddenly and saw the picture that had been the ostensible cause of Jumbo’s fury awry, the glass smashed in it, and the bright colours stained with tea, her lip fell, and she began to moan softly to herself. It was a beautiful piece – that was how she described it – a beautiful, massive piece of a big, big castle, all towers, on a rock, and mountains and snow behind. Four shillings and sixpence it had cost her in the Coal Quay market. Jumbo would spend three times that on a drunk; ay, three times and five times that Jumbo would spend, and for all, he had smashed every cup and plate and dish in the house on her poor little picture – because it was extravagance, he said.
She heard the postman’s loud double knock, and the child beside her woke and sat up. She heard a letter being slipped under the door. Little Johnny heard it too. He climbed down the side of the bed, pattered across the floor in his nightshirt and brought it to her. A letter with the On-His-Majesty’s-Service stamp; it was Jumbo’s pension that he drew every quarter. She slipped it under her pillow with a fresh burst of rage. It would keep. She would hold on to it until he gave her his week’s wages on Friday. Yes, she would make him hand over every penny of it even if he killed her after. She had done it before, and would do it again.
Little Johnny began to cry that he wanted his breakfast, and she rose, sighing, and dressed. Over the fire as she boiled the kettle she meditated again on her wrongs, and was startled when she found the child actually between her legs holding out the long envelope to the flames, trying to boil the kettle with it. She snatched it wildly from his hand and gave him a vicious slap across the face that set him howling. She stood turning the letter over and over in her hand curiously, and then started as she remembered that it wasn’t until another month that Jumbo’s pension fell due. She counted the weeks; no, that was right, but what had them sending out Jumbo’s pension a month before it was due?
When the kettle boiled she made the tea, poured it out into two tin ponnies, and sat into table with the big letter propped up before her as though she was trying to read its secrets through the manilla covering. But she was no closer to solving the mystery when her breakfast of bread and tea was done, and, sudden resolution coming to her, she held the envelope over the spout of the kettle and slowly steamed its fastening away. She drew out the flimsy note inside and opened it upon the table. It was an order, a money order, but not the sort they sent to Jumbo. The writing on it meant little to her, but what did mean a great deal were the careful figures, a two and a five that filled one corner. A two and a five and a sprawling sign before them; this was not for Jumbo – or was it? All sorts of suspicions began to form in her mind, and with them a feeling of pleasurable excitement.
She thought of Pa Kenefick. Pa was a good scholar and the proper man to see about a thing like this. And Pa had been good to her. Pa would feel she was doing the right thing in showing him this mysterious paper, even if it meant nothing but a change in the way they paid Jumbo’s pension; it would show how much she looked up to him.
She threw her old black shawl quickly about her shoulders and grabbed at the child’s hand. She went down the low arched laneway where they lived – Melancholy Lane, it was called – and up the road to the Keneficks’. She knocked at their door, and Mrs Kenefick, whose son had been dragged to his death from that door, answered it. She looked surprised when she saw the other woman, and only then Jumbo’s wife realized how early it was. She asked excitedly for Pa. He wasn’t at home, his mother said, and she didn’t know when he would be home, if he came at all. When she saw how crestfallen her visitor looked at this, she asked politely if she couldn’t send a message, for women like Jumbo’s wife fre
quently brought information that was of use to the volunteers. No, no, the other woman said earnestly, it was for Pa’s ears, for Pa’s ears alone, and it couldn’t wait. Mrs Kenefick asked her into the parlour, where the picture of the murdered boy, Michael, in his Volunteer uniform hung. It was dangerous for any of the company to stay at home, she said, the police knew the ins and outs of the district too well; there was the death of Michael unaccounted for, and a dozen or more arrests, all within a month or two. But she had never before seen Jumbo’s wife in such a state and wondered what was the best thing for her to do. It was her daughter who decided it by telling where Pa was to be found, and immediately the excited woman raced off up the hill towards the open country.
She knocked at the door of a little farmhouse off the main road, and when the door was opened she saw Pa himself, in shirt-sleeves, filling out a basin of hot water to shave. His first words showed that he thought it was Jumbo who had been at her again, but, without answering him, intensely conscious of herself and of the impression she wished to create, she held the envelope out at arm’s length. He took it, looked at the address for a moment, and then pulled out the flimsy slip. She saw his brows bent above it, then his lips tightened. He raised his head and called, ‘Jim, Liam, come down! Come down a minute!’ The tone in which he said it delighted her as much as the rush of footsteps upstairs. Two men descended a ladder to the kitchen, and Pa held out the slip. ‘Look at this!’ he said. They looked at it, for a long time it seemed to her, turning it round and round and examining the postmark on the envelope. She began to speak rapidly. ‘Mr Kenefick will tell you, gentlemen, Mr Kenefick will tell you, the life he leads me. I was never one for regulating me own, gentlemen, but I say before me God this minute, hell will never be full till they have him roasting there. A little pitcher I bought, gentlemen, a massive little piece – Mr Kenefick will tell you – I paid four and sixpence for it – he said I was extravagant. Let me remark he’d spend three times, ay, and six times, as much on filling his own gut as I’d spend upon me home and child. Look at me, gentlemen, look at me lip where he hit me – Mr Kenefick will tell you – I was in gores of blood.’ ‘Listen now, ma’am,’ one of the men interrupted suavely, ‘we’re very grateful to you for showing us this letter. It’s something we wanted to know this long time, ma’am. And now like a good woman will you go back home and not open your mouth to a soul about it, and, if himself ask you anything, say there did ne’er a letter come?’ Of course, she said, she would do whatever they told her. She was in their hands. Didn’t Mr Kenefick come in, like the lovely young man he was, and save her from the hands of that dancing hangman Jumbo? And wasn’t she sorry for his mother, poor little ’oman, and her fine son taken away on her? Weren’t they all crazy about her?
My Oedipus Complex Page 12
