Only young Charlie was occasionally mystified by his Uncle Tom; he hated calling for Peter unless he was sure his uncle was out, for otherwise he might be sent into the front room to talk to him. The front room alone was enough to upset any high-spirited lad, with its thick carpet, mahogany sideboard, ornamental clock, and gilt mirror with cupids. The red curtains alone would depress you, and as well as these there was a glass-fronted mahogany bookcase the length of one wall, with books in sets, too big for anyone only a priest to read: The History of Ireland, The History of the Popes, The Roman Empire, The Life of Johnson, and The Cabinet of Literature. It gave Charlie the same sort of shivers as the priest’s front room. His uncle suited it, a small, frail man, dressed in clerical black with a long pinched yellow face, tight lips, a narrow skull going bald up the brow, and a pair of tin specs.
All conversations with his uncle tended to stick in Charlie’s mind for the simple but alarming reason that he never understood what the hell they were about, but one conversation in particular haunted him for years as showing the dangerous state of lunacy to which a man could be reduced by reading old books. Charlie was no fool, far from it; but low cunning and the most genuine benevolence were mixed in him in almost equal parts, producing a blend that was not without charm but gave no room for subtlety or irony.
‘Good afternoon, Charliss,’ said his uncle after Charlie had tied what he called ‘the ould pup’ to the leg of the hallstand. ‘How are you?’
‘All right,’ Charlie said guardedly. (He hated being called Charliss; it made him sound such a sissy.)
‘Take a seat, Charliss,’ said his uncle benevolently. ‘Peter will be down in a minute.’
‘I won’t,’ said Charlie. ‘I’d be afraid of the ould pup.’
‘The expression, Charliss,’ said his uncle in that rasping little voice of his, ‘sounds like a contradiction in terms, but, not being familiar with dogs, I presume ’tis correct.’
‘Ah, ’tis,’ said Charlie, just to put the old man’s mind at rest.
‘And how is your father, Charliss?’
‘His ould belly is bad again,’ said Charlie. ‘He’d be all right only the ould belly plays hell with him.’
‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ his uncle said gravely. ‘And tell me, Charliss,’ he added, cocking his head on one side like a bird, ‘what is he saying about me now?’
This was one of the dirtiest of his Uncle Tom’s tricks, assuming that Charlie’s father was saying things about him, which to give Ben his due, he usually was. But on the other hand, he was admitted to be one of the smartest men in town, so he was entitled to do so, while everyone without exception appeared to agree that his uncle had a slate loose. Charlie looked at him cautiously, low cunning struggling with benevolence in him, for his uncle though queer was open-handed, and you wouldn’t want to offend him. Benevolence won.
‘He’s saying if you don’t mind yourself you’ll end up in the poorhouse,’ he said with some notion that if only his uncle knew the things people said about him he might mend his ways.
‘Your father is right as always, Charliss,’ said his uncle, rising and standing on the hearth with his hands behind his back and his little legs well apart. ‘Your father is perfectly right. There are two main classes of people, Charliss – those who gravitate towards the poorhouse and those who gravitate towards the jail.… Do you know what “gravitate” means, Charliss?’
‘I do not,’ said Charlie without undue depression. It struck him as being an unlikely sort of word.
‘ “Gravitate,” Charliss, means “tend” or “incline”. Don’t tell me you don’t know what they mean!’
‘I don’t,’ said Charlie.
‘Well, do you know what this is?’ his uncle asked smilingly as he held up a coin.
‘I do,’ said Charlie, humouring him as he saw that the conversation was at last getting somewhere. ‘A tanner.’
‘I am not familiar with the expression, Charliss,’ his uncle said tartly and Charlie knew, whatever he’d said out of the way, his uncle was so irritated that he was liable to put the tanner back. ‘We’ll call it sixpence. Your eyes, I notice, gravitate towards the sixpence’ (Charlie was so shocked that his eyes instantly gravitated towards his uncle) ‘and in the same way, people gravitate, or turn naturally, towards the jail or poorhouse. Only a small number of either group reach their destination, though – which might be just as well for myself and your father,’ he added in a low impressive voice, swaying forward and tightening his lips. ‘Do you understand a word I’m saying, Charliss?’ he added with a charming smile.
‘I do not,’ said Charlie.
‘Good man! Good man!’ his uncle said approvingly. ‘I admire an honest and manly spirit in anybody. Don’t forget your sixpence, Charliss.’
And as he went off with Peter, Charlie scowled and muttered savagely under his breath: ‘Mod! Mod! Mod! The bleddy mon is mod!’
2
When the boys grew up Peter trained for a solicitor while Charlie, one of a large family, followed his father into the County Council. He grew up a very handsome fellow with a square, solemn, dark-skinned face, a thick red lower lip, and a mass of curly black hair. He was reputed to be a great man with greyhounds and girls and about as dependable with one as with the other. His enemies called him ‘a crooked bloody bastard’ and his father, a shrewd man, noted with alarm that Charlie thought him simpleminded.
The two boys continued the best of friends, though Peter, with an office in Asragh, moved in circles where Charlie felt himself lost; professional men whose status was calculated on their furniture and food and wine. Charlie thought that sort of entertainment a great pity. A man could have all the fun he wanted out of life without wasting his time on expensive and unsatisfactory meals and carrying on polite conversation while you dodged between bloody little tables that were always falling over, but Charlie, who was a modest lad, admired the way Peter never knocked anything over and never said: ‘Chrisht!’ Wine, coffee-cups, and talk about old books came as easy to him as talk about a dog or a horse.
Charlie was thunderstruck when the news came to him that Peter was in trouble. He heard it first from Mackesy the detective, whom he hailed outside the courthouse. (Charlie was like his father in that; he couldn’t let a man go by without a greeting.)
‘Hallo, Matt,’ he shouted gaily from the courthouse steps. ‘Is it myself or my father you’re after?’
‘I’ll let ye off for today,’ said Mackesy, making a garden-seat of the crossbar of his bicycle. Then he lowered his voice so that it didn’t travel further than Charlie. ‘I wouldn’t mind having a word with a relative of yours, though.’
‘A what, Matt?’ Charlie asked, skipping down the steps on the scent of news. (He was like his father in that, too.) You don’t mean one of the Luceys is after forgetting himself?’
‘Then you didn’t hear about Peter?’
‘Peter! Peter in trouble! You’re not serious, Matt?’
‘There’s a lot of his clients would be glad if I wasn’t, Cha,’ Mackesy said grimly. ‘I thought you’d know about it as ye were such pals.’
‘But we are, man, we are,’ Charlie insisted. ‘Sure, wasn’t I at the dogs with him – when was it? – last Thursday? I never noticed a bloody thing, though, now you mention it, he was lashing pound notes on that Cloonbullogue dog. I told him the Dalys could never train a dog.’
Charlie left Mackesy, his mind in a whirl. He tore through the cashier’s office. His father was sitting at his desk, signing paying-orders. He was wearing a grey tweed cap, a grey tweed suit, and a brown cardigan. He was a stocky, powerfully built man with a great expanse of chest, a plump, dark, hairy face, long quizzical eyes that tended to close in slits; hair in his nose, hair in his ears; hair on his high cheekbones that made them like small cabbage-patches.
He made no comment on Charlie’s news, but stroked his chin and looked worried. Then Charlie shot out to see his uncle. Quill, the assistant, was serving in the shop and Charlie stumped i
n behind the counter to the fitting-room. His uncle had been looking out the back, all crumpled up. When Charlie came in he pulled himself erect with fictitious jauntiness. With his old black coat and wrinkled yellow face he had begun to look like an old rabbi.
‘What’s this I hear about Peter?’ began Charlie, who was never one to be ceremonious.
‘Bad news travels fast, Charlie,’ said his uncle in his dry little voice, clamping his lips so tightly that the wrinkles ran up his cheeks from the corners of his mouth. He was so upset that he forgot even to say ‘Charliss’.
‘Have you any notion how much it is?’ asked Charlie.
‘I have not, Charlie,’ Tom said bitterly. ‘I need hardly say my son did not take me into his confidence about the extent of his robberies.’
‘And what are you going to do?’
‘What can I do?’ The lines of pain belied the harsh little staccato that broke up every sentence into disjointed phrases as if it were a political speech. ‘You saw yourself, Charliss, the way I reared that boy. You saw the education I gave him. I gave him the thing I was denied myself, Charliss. I gave him an honourable profession. And now for the first time in my life I am ashamed to show my face in my own shop. What can I do?’
‘Ah, now, ah, now, Uncle Tom, we know all that,’ Charlie said truculently, ‘but that’s not going to get us anywhere. What can we do now?’
‘Is it true that Peter took money that was entrusted to him?’ Tom asked oratorically.
‘To be sure he did,’ replied Charlie without the thrill of horror which his uncle seemed to expect. ‘I do it myself every month, only I put it back.’
‘And is it true he ran away from his punishment instead of standing his ground like a man?’ asked Tom, paying no attention to him.
‘What the hell else would he do?’ asked Charlie, who entirely failed to appreciate the spiritual beauty of atonement. ‘Begod, if I had two years’ hard labour facing me you wouldn’t see my heels for dust.’
‘I dare say you think I’m old-fashioned, Charliss,’ said his uncle, ‘but that’s not the way I was reared, nor the way my son was reared.’
‘And that’s where the ferryboat left ye,’ snorted Charlie. ‘Now that sort of thing may be all very well, Uncle Tom, but ’tis no use taking it to the fair. Peter made some mistake, the way we all make mistakes, but instead of coming to me or some other friend, he lost his nerve and started gambling. Chrisht, didn’t I see it happen to better men? You don’t know how much it is?’
‘No, Charliss, I don’t.’
‘Do you know where he is, even?’
‘His mother knows.’
‘I’ll talk to my old fellow. We might be able to do something. If the bloody fool might have told me on Thursday instead of backing that Cloonbullogue dog!’
Charlie returned to the office to find his father sitting at his desk with his hands joined and his pipe in his mouth, staring nervously at the door.
‘Well?’
‘We’ll go over to Asragh and talk to Toolan of the Guards ourselves,’ said Charlie. ‘I want to find out how much he let himself in for. We might even get a look at the books.’
‘Can’t his father do it?’ Ben asked gloomily.
‘Do you think he’d understand them?’
‘Well, he was always fond of literature,’ Ben said shortly.
‘God help him,’ said Charlie. ‘He has enough of it now.’
‘ ’Tis all his own conceit,’ Ben said angrily, striding up and down the office with his hands in his trouser pockets. ‘He was always good at criticizing other people. Even when you got in here it was all influence. Of course, he’d never use influence. Now he wants us to use it.’
‘That’s all very well,’ Charlie said reasonably, ‘but this is no time for raking up old scores.’
‘Who’s raking up old scores?’ his father shouted angrily.
‘That’s right,’ Charlie said approvingly. ‘Would you like me to open the door so that you can be heard all over the office?’
‘No one is going to hear me at all,’ his father said in a more reasonable tone – Charlie had a way of puncturing him. ‘And I’m not raking up any old scores. I’m only saying now what I always said. The boy was ruined.’
‘He’ll be ruined with a vengeance unless we do something quick,’ said Charlie. ‘Are you coming to Asragh with me?’
‘I am not.’
‘Why?’
‘Because I don’t want to be mixed up in it at all. That’s why. I never liked anything to do with money. I saw too much of it. I’m only speaking for your good. A man done out of his money is a mad dog. You won’t get any thanks for it, and anything that goes wrong, you’ll get the blame.’
Nothing Charlie could say would move his father, and Charlie was shrewd enough to know that everything his father said was right. Tom wasn’t to be trusted in the delicate negotiations that would be needed to get Peter out of the hole; the word here, the threat there; all the complicated machinery of family pressure. And alone he knew he was powerless. Despondently he went and told his uncle and Tom received the news with resignation, almost without understanding.
But a week later Ben came back to the office deeply disturbed. He closed the door carefully behind him and leaned across the desk to Charlie, his face drawn. For a moment he couldn’t speak.
‘What ails you?’ Charlie asked with no great warmth.
‘Your uncle passed me just now in the Main Street,’ whispered his father.
Charlie wasn’t greatly put out. All of his life he had been made a party to the little jabs and asides of father and uncle, and he did not realize what it meant to a man like his father, friendly and popular, this public rebuke.
‘That so?’ he asked without surprise. ‘What did you do to him?’
‘I thought you might know that,’ his father said, looking at him with a troubled air from under the peak of his cap.
‘Unless ’twas something you said about Peter?’ suggested Charlie.
‘It might, it might,’ his father agreed doubtfully. ‘You didn’t – ah – repeat anything I said to you?’
‘What a bloody fool you think I am!’ Charlie said indignantly. ‘And indeed I thought you had more sense. What did you say?’
‘Oh, nothing. Nothing only what I said to you,’ replied his father and went to the window to look out. He leaned on the sill and then tapped nervously on the frame. He was haunted by all the casual remarks he had made or might have made over a drink with an acquaintance – remarks that were no different from those he and Tom had been passing about one another all their lives. ‘I shouldn’t have said anything at all, of course, but I had no notion ’twould go back.’
‘I’m surprised at my uncle,’ said Charlie. ‘Usually he cares little enough what anyone says of him.’
But even Charlie, who had moments when he almost understood his peppery little uncle, had no notion of the hopes he had raised and which his more calculating father had dashed. Tom Lucey’s mind was in a rut, a rut of complacency, for the idealist too has his complacency and can be aware of it. There are moments when he would be glad to walk through any mud, but he no longer knows the way; he needs to be led; he cannot degrade himself even when he is most ready to do so. Tom was ready to beg favours from a thief. Peter had joined the Air Force under an assumed name, and this was the bitterest blow of all to him, the extinction of the name. He was something of an amateur genealogist, and had managed to convince himself, God knows how, that his family was somehow related to the Gloucestershire Lucys. This was already a sort of death.
The other death didn’t take long in coming. Charlie, in the way he had, got wind of it first, and, having sent his father to break the news to Min, he went off himself to tell his uncle. It was a fine spring morning. The shop was empty but for his uncle, standing with his back to the counter studying the shelves.
‘Good morning, Charliss,’ he crackled over his shoulder. ‘What’s the best news?’
‘Bad, I�
��m afraid, Uncle Tom,’ Charlie replied, leaning across the counter to him.
‘Something about Peter, I dare say?’ his uncle asked casually, but Charlie noticed how, caught unawares, he had failed to say ‘my son’, as he had taken to doing.
‘Just so.’
‘Dead, I suppose?’
‘Dead, Uncle Tom.’
‘I was expecting something of the sort,’ said his uncle. ‘May the Almighty God have mercy on his soul!…Con!’ he called at the back of the shop while he changed his coat. ‘You’d better close up the shop. You’ll find the crepe on the top shelf and the mourning-cards in my desk.’
‘Who is it, Mr Lucey?’ asked Con Quill. ‘ ’Tisn’t Peter?’
‘ ’Tis, Con, ’tis, I’m sorry to say,’ and Tom came out briskly with his umbrella over his arm. As they went down the street two people stopped them: the news was already round.
Charlie, who had to see about the arrangements for the funeral, left his uncle outside the house and so had no chance of averting the scene that took place inside. Not that he would have had much chance of doing so. His father had found Min in a state of collapse. Ben was the last man in the world to look after a woman, but he did manage to get her a pillow, put her legs on a chair and cover her with a rug, which was more than Charlie would have given him credit for. Min smelt of brandy. Then Ben strode up and down the darkened room with his hands in his pockets and his cap over his eyes, talking about the horrors of airplane travel. He knew he was no fit company for a woman of sensibility like Min, and he almost welcomed Tom’s arrival.
‘That’s terrible news, Tom,’ he said.
‘Oh, God help us!’ cried Min. ‘They said he disgraced us but he didn’t disgrace us long.’
‘I’d sooner ’twas one of my own, Tom,’ Ben said excitedly. ‘As God is listening to me I would. I’d still have a couple left, but he was all ye had.’
My Oedipus Complex Page 25
