My Oedipus Complex

by Frank O'Connor

  You see, in his earlier days Archie had been a great cyclist. Twice he had cycled round Ireland, and had made any amount of long trips to see various historic spots, battlefields, castles, and cathedrals. He was no scholar, but he liked to know what he was talking about and had no objection to showing other people that they didn’t. ‘I suppose you know that place you were talking about, James?’ he would purr when someone in the office stuck his neck out. ‘Because if you don’t, I do.’ No wonder he wasn’t too popular with the staff.

  One evening Archie arrived in a remote Connemara village where four women teachers were staying, studying Irish, and after supper he got to chatting with them, and they all went for a walk along the strand. One was a young woman called Madge Hale, a slight girl with blue-grey eyes, a long clear-skinned face, and a rather breathless manner, and Archie did not take long to see that she was altogether more intelligent than the others, and that whenever he said something interesting her whole face lit up like a child’s.

  The teachers were going on a trip to the Aran Islands next day, and Archie offered to join them. They visited the tiny oratories, and, as none of the teachers knew anything about these, Archie in his well-informed way described the origin of the island monasteries and the life of the hermit monks in the early mediaeval period. Madge was fascinated and kept asking questions about what the churches had looked like, and Archie, flattered into doing the dog, suggested that she should accompany him on a bicycle trip the following day, and see some of the later monasteries. She agreed at once enthusiastically. The other women laughed, and Madge laughed, too, though it was clear that she didn’t really know what they were laughing about.

  Now, this was one sure way to Archie’s heart. He disliked women because they were always going to parties or the pictures, painting their faces, and taking aspirin in cartloads. There was altogether too much nonsense about them for a man of his grave taste, but at last he had met a girl who seemed absolutely devoid of nonsense and was serious through and through.

  Their trip next day was a great success, and he was able to point out to her the development of the monastery church through the mediaeval abbey to the preaching church. That evening when they returned, he suggested, half in jest, that she should borrow the bicycle and come back to Dublin with him. This time she hesitated, but it was only for a few moments as she considered the practical end of it, and then her face lit up in the same eager way, and she said in her piping voice: ‘If you think I won’t be in your way, Archie.’

  Now, she was in Archie’s way, and very much in his way, for he was a man of old-fashioned ideas, who had never in his life allowed a woman he was accompanying to pay for as much as a cup of tea for herself, who felt that to have to excuse himself on the road was little short of obscene, and who endured the agonies of the damned when he had to go to a country hotel with a pretty girl at the end of the day. When he went to the reception desk he felt sure that everyone believed unmentionable things about him and he had an overwhelming compulsion to lecture them on the subject of their evil imaginations. But for this, too, he admired her – by this time any other girl would have been wondering what her parents and friends would say if they knew she was spending the night in a country hotel with a man, but the very idea of scandal never seemed to enter Madge’s head. And it was not, as he shrewdly divined, that she was either fast or flighty. It was merely that it had never occurred to her that anything she and Archie might do could involve any culpability.

  That settled Archie’s business. He knew she was the only woman in the world for him, though to tell her this when she was more or less at the mercy of his solicitations was something that did not even cross his mind. He had a sort of old-fashioned chivalry that set him above the commoner temptations. They cycled south through Clare to Limerick, and stood on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic; the weather held fine, and they drifted through the flat apple country to Cashel and drank beer and lemonade in country pubs, and finally pushed over the hills to Kilkenny, where they spent their last evening wandering in the dusk under the ruins of mediaeval abbeys and inns, studying effigies and blazons; and never once did Archie as much as hold her hand or speak to her of love. He scowled as he told me this, as though I might mock him from the depths of my own small experience, but I had no inclination to do so, for I knew the enchantment of the senses that people of chaste and lonely character feel in one another’s company and that haunts the memory more than all the passionate embraces of lovers.

  When they separated outside Madge’s lodgings in Rathmines late one summer evening, Archie felt that he was at last free to speak. He held her hand as he said good-bye.

  ‘I think we had quite good fun, don’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Oh, yes, Archie,’ she cried, laughing in her delight. ‘It was wonderful. It was the happiest holiday I ever spent.’

  He was so encouraged by this that he deliberately retained hold of her hand.

  ‘That’s the way I feel,’ he said, beginning to blush. ‘I didn’t want to say it before because I thought it might embarrass you. I never met a woman like you before, and if you ever felt you wanted to marry me I’d be honoured.’

  For a moment, while her face darkened as though all the delight had drained from it, he thought that he had embarrassed her even now.

  ‘Are you sure, Archie?’ she asked nervously. ‘Because you don’t know me very long, remember. A few days like that is not enough to know a person.’

  ‘That’s a thing that soon rights itself,’ Archie said oracularly.

  ‘And, besides, we’d have to wait a long while,’ she added. ‘My people aren’t very well off; I have two brothers younger than me, and I have to help them.’

  ‘And I have a long way to go before I get anywhere in the Civil Service,’ he replied good-humouredly, ‘so it may be quite a while before I can do what I like, as well. But those are things that also right themselves, and they right themselves all the sooner if you do them with an object in mind. I know my own character pretty well,’ he added thoughtfully, ‘and I know it would be a help to me. And I’m not a man to change his mind.’

  She still seemed to hesitate; for a second or two he had a strong impression that she was about to refuse him, but then she thought better of it. Her face cleared in the old way, and she gave her nervous laugh.

  ‘Very well, Archie,’ she said. ‘If you really want me, you’ll find me willing.’

  ‘I want you, Madge,’ he replied gravely, and then he raised his hat and pushed his bicycle away while she stood outside her gate in the shadow of the trees and waved. I admired that gesture even as he described it. It was so like Archie, and I could see that such a plighting of his word would haunt him as no passionate love-making would ever do. It was magnificent, but it was not love. People should be jolted out of themselves at times like those, and when they are not so jolted it frequently means, as it did with Archie, that the experience is only deferred till a less propitious time.

  However, he was too innocent to know anything of that. To him the whole fantastic business of walking out with a girl was miracle enough in itself, like being dumped down in the middle of some ancient complex civilization whose language and customs he was unfamiliar with. He might have introduced her to history, but she introduced him to operas and concerts, and in no time he was developing prejudices about music as though it was something that had fired him from boyhood, for Archie was by nature a gospel-maker. Even when I knew him, he shook his head over my weakness for Wagner. Bach was the man, and somehow Bach at once ceased to be a pleasure and became a responsibility. It was part of the process of what he called ‘knowing his own mind’.

  On fine Sundays in autumn they took their lunch and walked over the mountains to Enniskerry, or cycled down the Boyne Valley to Drogheda. Madge was a girl of very sweet disposition, so that they rarely had a falling-out, and even at the best of times this must have been an event in Archie’s life, for he had an irascible, quarrelsome, gospel-making streak. It was t
rue that there were certain evenings and week-ends that she kept to herself to visit her old friends and an ailing aunt in Miltown, but these did not worry Archie, who believed that this was how a conscientious girl should be. As a man who knew his own mind, he liked to feel that the girl he was going to marry was the same.

  Oh, of course it was too perfect! Of course, an older hand would have waited to see what price he was expected to pay for all those perfections, but Archie was an idealist, which meant that he thought Nature was in the job solely for his benefit. Then one day Nature gave him a rap on the knuckles just to show him that the boot was on the other foot.

  In town he happened to run into one of the group of teachers he had met in Connemara during the holidays and invited her politely to join him in a cup of tea. Archie favoured one of those long mahogany teahouses in Grafton Street where daylight never enters; he was a creature of habit, and this was where he had eaten his first lunch in Dublin, and there he would continue to go till some minor cataclysm like marriage changed the current of his life.

  ‘I hear you’re seeing a lot of Madge,’ said the teacher gaily as if this were a guilty secret between herself and Archie.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said Archie as if it weren’t. ‘And with God’s help I expect to be doing the same for the rest of my life.’

  ‘So I heard,’ she said joyously. ‘I’m delighted for Madge, of course. But I wonder whatever happened that other fellow she was engaged to?’

  ‘Why?’ asked Archie, who knew well that she was only pecking at him and refused to let her see how sick he felt. ‘Was she engaged to another fellow?’

  ‘Ah, surely she must have told you that!’ the teacher cried with mock consternation. ‘I hope I’m not saying anything wrong,’ she added piously. ‘Maybe she wasn’t engaged to him after all. He was a teacher, too, I believe – somewhere on the South Side. What was his name?’

  ‘I’ll ask her and let you know,’ replied Archie blandly. He was giving nothing away till he had had more time to think of it.

  All the same he was in a very ugly temper. Archie was one of those people who believe in being candid with everybody, even at the risk of unpleasantness, which might be another reason that he had so few friends when I knew him. He might, for instance, hear from somebody called Mahony that another man called Devins had said he was inclined to be offensive in argument, which was a reasonable enough point of view, but Archie would feel it his duty to go straight to Devins and ask him to repeat the remark, which, of course, would leave Devins wondering who it was that had been trying to make mischief for him, so he would ask a third man whether Mahony was the tell-tale, and a fourth would repeat the question to Mahony, till eventually, I declare to God, Archie’s inquisition would have the whole office by the ears.

  Archie, of course, had felt compelled to confess to Madge every sin of his past life, which, from the point of view of this narrative, was quite without importance, and he naturally assumed when Madge did not do the same that it could only be because she had nothing to confess. He realized now that this was a grave mistake since everyone has something to confess, particularly women.

  He could have done with her what he would have done with someone in the office and asked her what she meant, but this did not seem sufficient punishment to him. Though he didn’t recognize it, Archie’s pride was deeply hurt. He regarded Madge’s silence as equivalent to an insult, and in the matter of insults he felt it was his duty to give as good as he got. So, instead of having it out with her as another man might have done, he proceeded to make her life a misery. He continued to walk out with her as though nothing had happened, and then brought the conversation gently round to various domestic disasters which had or had not occurred in his own experience and all of which had been caused solely by someone’s deceit. This was intended to scare the wits out of Madge, as no doubt it did. Then he called up a friend of his in the Department of Education and asked him out for a drink.

  ‘The Hale girl?’ his friend said thoughtfully. ‘Isn’t she engaged to that assistant in St Joseph’s? Wheeler, a chap with a lame leg? I think I heard that. Why? You’re not keen on her yourself by any chance?’

  ‘Ah, you know me,’ Archie replied with a fat smile.

  ‘Why then, indeed, I do not,’ said his friend. ‘But if you mean business you’d want to hurry up. Now you mention it, they were only supposed to be waiting till he got a headship somewhere. He’s a nice fellow, I believe.’

  ‘So I’m told,’ said Archie, and went away with a smile on his lips and murder in his heart. Those forthright men of the world are the very devil once they get a bee in their bonnets. Othello had nothing on a Civil Servant of twelve years’ standing and a blameless reputation. So he still continued to see Madge, though now his method of tormenting her was to press her about those odd evenings she was supposed to spend with her aunt or those old friends she spoke of. He realized that some of those evenings were probably really spent as innocently as she described them, since she showed neither embarrassment nor distress at his probing and gibing. It was the others that caused her to wince, and those were the ones he concentrated on.

  ‘I could meet you when you came out, you know,’ he said in a benign tone that almost glowed.

  ‘But I don’t know when I’ll be out, Archie,’ she replied, blushing and stammering.

  ‘Ah, well, even if you didn’t get out until half-past ten – and that would be late for a lady her age – it would still give us time for a little walk. That’s if the night was fine, of course. It’s all very well, doing your duty by old friends, but you don’t want to deny yourself every little pleasure.’

  ‘I couldn’t promise anything, Archie, really I couldn’t,’ she said almost angrily, and Archie smiled to himself, the smug smile of the old inquisitor whose helpless victim has begun to give himself away.

  The road where Madge lived was one of those broad Victorian roads you find scattered all over the hills at the south side of Dublin, with trees along the pavement and deep gardens leading to pairs of merchants’ houses, semi-detached and solidly built, with tall basements and high flights of steps. Next night, Archie was waiting at the corner of a side-street in the shadow, feeling like a detective as he watched her house. He had been there only about ten minutes when she came out and tripped down the steps. When she emerged from the garden, she turned right up the hill, and Archie followed, guided more by the distinctive clack of her heels than by the glimpses he caught of her passing swiftly under a street lamp.

  She reached the bus stop at the top of the road, and a man came up and spoke to her. He was a youngish man in a bright tweed coat, hatless and thin, dragging a lame leg. He took her arm, and they went off together in the direction of the Dodder bank. As they did, Archie heard her happy, eager, foolish laugh, and it sounded exactly as though she were laughing at him.

  He was beside himself with misery. He had got what he had been seeking, which was full confirmation of the woman’s guilt, and now he had no idea what to do with it. To follow them and have it out on the river bank in the darkness was one possibility, but he realized that Wheeler – if this was Wheeler – probably knew as little of him as he had known of Wheeler, and that it would result only in general confusion. No, it was that abominable woman he would have to have it out with. He returned slowly to his post, turned into a public-house just round the corner, and sat swallowing whiskey in silence until another customer unwittingly touched on one of his pet political taboos. Then he sprang to his feet, and, though no one had invited his opinion, he thundered for several minutes against people with slave minds, and stalked out with a virtuous feeling that his wrath had been entirely disinterested.

  This time he had to wait for over half an hour in the damp and cold, and this did not improve his temper. Then he heard her footsteps, and guessed that the young man had left her at the same spot where they had met. It could, of course, have been the most innocent thing in the world, intended merely to deceive inquisitive people in her lodging h
ouse, but to Archie it seemed all guile and treachery. He crossed the road and stood under a tree beside the gate, so well concealed that she failed altogether to see him till he stepped out to meet her. Then she started back.

  ‘Who’s that?’ she asked in a startled whisper, and then, after a look, added with what sounded like joy and was probably merely relief: ‘Oh, Archie, it’s you!’ Then, as he stood there glowering at her, her tone changed again and he could detect the consternation as she asked:

  ‘What are you doing here, Archie?’

  ‘Waiting,’ Archie replied in a voice as hollow as his heart felt.

  ‘Waiting? But for what, Archie?’

  ‘An explanation.’

  ‘Oh, Archie!’ she exclaimed with childish petulance. ‘Don’t talk to me that way!’

  ‘And what way would you like me to talk to you?’ he retorted, letting fly with his anger. ‘I suppose you’re going to tell me now you were at your aunt’s?’

  ‘No, Archie,’ she replied meekly. ‘I wasn’t. I was out with a friend.’

  ‘A friend?’ repeated Archie.

  ‘Not a friend exactly either, Archie,’ she added in distress.

  ‘Not exactly,’ Archie repeated with grim satisfaction. ‘With your fiancé, in fact?’

  ‘That’s true, Archie,’ she admitted. ‘I don’t deny that. You must let me explain.’

  ‘The time for explanations is past,’ Archie thundered magnificently, though the moment before he had been demanding one. ‘The time for explanations was three months ago. For three months and more, your whole life has been a living lie.’

  This was a phrase Archie had thought up, entirely without assistance, drinking whiskey in the pub. He may have failed to notice that it was not entirely original. It was intended to draw blood, and it did.