by James Hanley
‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘Fastening my bootlace,’ replied Peter. He sat up again. ‘Tell me, Dad,’ he said, and he leaned his hands on his father’s knees. ‘Tell me, is it true that Joe Kilkey is twenty years older than Maureen, and that she had to marry him?’
‘What’s that?’ Mr Fury was thoroughly awake now. ‘Who told you that?’
‘I just heard it,’ said Peter.
‘Well, it’s a damned lie. I’ll bet you any money it was your Aunt Brigid. Any money you like. Maureen’s all right. So’s Joe Kilkey. All they want is to be left alone. She’s got a quiet, decent man for a husband. That’s what your mother wants, Peter. A quiet, decent man like Joe Kilkey. She ought never to have married me. I’m too harum-scarum. I can’t settle down in any one place for long.’
‘Are you going to sea again, Dad?’ asked the boy.
‘I don’t know,’ replied Mr Fury. This was a question he wasn’t in the mood for answering.
‘I hope your mother’s all right,’ he said. He had been thinking of her all the morning.
Peter thought, ‘Mother’s out! We’re alone. The time for asking questions has come.’
He looked at his father and said, ‘The other night I called to see Maureen, and she never opened the door for me.’
‘Perhaps she didn’t hear you,’ said Mr Fury. He got up from the sofa. ‘Maureen wouldn’t do a thing like that,’ he went on. He took a spill from the mantelshelf and lit his pipe. He puffed frenziedly at the pipe.
‘Hang it!’ he exclaimed. He sat down and began to clean the pipe.
‘If Maureen saw you and didn’t open the door, maybe she had a reason. Your sister, like the rest of the family, contributed to your keep at the college. Also, like the rest of us, she goes to chapel. Well, I don’t exactly know – but I hope she does. She’ll hear things. By now your Aunt Brigid will have met everybody in the parish! But now that you’re asking questions, perhaps I, as your father, can return the compliment. Just what happened that you had to leave Ireland? I know, mind you! And it’s not inquisitiveness on my part, let me assure you of that, Peter, but just that to hear it from your own lips is better. You understand?’ He crossed to the sofa and looked down at his son. ‘You’re no child now. Your mother thinks so. Well, that suits her. I won’t interfere. Why did you have to go?’
The boy looked up at his father. ‘This little old man has slaved all his life. Can I begrudge him an answer?’
‘I went with another fellow named Carlow to a house,’ said Peter. ‘There were other lads from the college there as well as me. There were women there, about ten of them. There was an old woman too. It was her house. She used to stand outside the college gates. Whenever the fellows were coming out she used to sell things to us. One day Carlow and I bought a little rubber boy from her. She said it came from Italy. The rubber boy was full of water. She showed us how to work it. When we went back that night, Carlow said to me, “That’s Judy Scanlon, old Judy Scanlon! She’s one of these.” At first I didn’t know what he meant. Later I found out. Carlow was testing this rubber boy under the tap. It wouldn’t work. It was blocked up. There was paper inside. It was a note: “Come to see me one day. I’ll give you a good time.” Carlow begged me to go with him. “It’s no secret,” he said. “Everybody goes. The Brothers know. They close their eyes to it. It can’t be helped.”’
During this recital Mr Fury had assumed a hunched position. He had bent right over, as though engaged in a minute scrutiny of his son, as though he were asking himself, ‘What is this? What is it all about? Is this the little boy upon whose head the bishop placed his aged hand; in whose coat Father Moynihan pinned the silver medal?’
‘And did you go?’ An involuntary utterance. He was hardly aware that he had asked the question. He knelt down. ‘Look at me,’ he said. ‘Look at your father.’ Peter raised his head.
‘Did you go with Carlow?’ asked Mr Fury. Peter could see the feverish workings of the muscles in his face; his hands trembled by his side.
‘Yes, Father! I went with him.’ The man clenched his two hands. ‘Went with him – went with him’; he kept repeating the phrase until it tapered to a mere whisper. Then he rose to his feet.
‘Well,’ he said. ‘That’s honest, anyway. I won’t say any more than this. I am indeed both sorry and glad. Sorry and glad. Funny to say that, isn’t it? Well’ – he passed his hands across his face. ‘Enough, I’m not going to go into that business again. But you take my advice and steer clear of all that. If this man gets you to sea, then it’s a heaven-sent opportunity. You’re the only one in this family who has never ailed like this. Shake hands,’ he said, ‘shake hands. I’m glad you told me. Your mother swore she would tell me nothing. There! It’s all forgotten. I only want you to remember that your mother did much for you. Much! And you’ve got to do something to help her now.’
‘Yes, Dad,’ said Peter.
‘All right.’ Mr Fury pulled out his watch. ‘I wonder where your mother has got to? Listen! Can I leave you here to look after your grand-dad? I’m really worried about your mother. I ought never to have let her go.’
‘Yes,’ said Peter. ‘I’ll stay with him.’
Mr Fury put his coat and hat on and went out by the back door. Yes, he was really worried about Fanny. ‘Going off like that without a bite in her belly. Already twelve! H’m! Too far for Fanny to go. But she will do these things. Then she takes it out of me later.’
At the bottom of the entry he stood for a moment. Suddenly he thought, ‘Such coolness! Such coolness! And I was like a cucumber myself. Wonder I never struck him down.’ H’m! Tasting fruit early, he thought. Was that all college life could do? Whip up the dirt in one? He turned into Price Street. Ah! That reminded him. What was this about Maureen refusing to open the door to her brother? She must have heard too. Then it must be that confounded sister-in-law of his. If this very minute he should bump into her, he would put the question to her fair and square: ‘What are all these yarns you are spreading about my children?’ Children! He repeated the word. Then he laughed. Children! He thought of Peter and the rubber boy. Passers-by hailed him. Workmates on the shelf just the same as himself. ‘How do, Fury!’ ‘How do, Denny!’
He hailed them in response. ‘Hello, Jack.’ ‘Fine day, Ned.’
He turned out of Price Street, then stopped again. Where was he really going? What the devil was he thinking about? About Professor Titmouse juggling with the rubber boy; and that leprous-looking woman dancing a bacchanal in the pub? Across the road from where he stood there was a small garden. This miniature park named Eldon Gardens was the resort of children, tramps, out-of-work men and women, decrepit gentlemen down on their luck. Housewives from the neighbouring streets generally made use of its six brightly painted green benches. It was an escape, an asylum from the slaving of the kitchen and the table. Price Street’s young offspring learned to walk on its gravel paths; old men with sticks, looking lecherous and suspicious, sat watching young children playing, the while they poked their walking-sticks savagely into the gravel, as though the free and light movement of these children, their innocent smiles and laughs, struck a blow at their own lecherous spirits. On one of these benches Maureen was sitting sewing when her father stepped into the garden.
‘Why, Maureen!’ said Mr Fury, affecting an astonishment the very falsity of which struck Mrs Kilkey at once. ‘Why,’ he said, ‘what brings you here? Is this a new rendezvous?’ The young woman countered him.
‘This place! Why, Dad, I have been here many a time. It’s I who should be surprised, not you. It’s the first time I have ever seen you here.’ Mr Fury sat down. The search for Fanny must wait just a while. This was a piece of luck. Couldn’t have been better. Maureen put down her sewing.
‘Seen your mother lately?’ asked Mr Fury. He dug his heels into the gravel.
‘Yes, I saw her yesterday. She came round.’
‘Oh! Fancy! Of course, your mother does a lot of things that I know nothi
ng about,’ said her father. ‘Was it anything particular?’ he asked.
‘She looked rather worried,’ said Mrs Kilkey, whose eyes were resting upon her father’s hands. Each time she met her father, her eyes, for some reason or other, wandered to his hands. She noticed their thinness, their whiteness, and above all she noticed their hard scaly appearance. Her father’s hands were mirrors, into which she could look and see reflected all his working years. All his years at sea, in the stokeholds of ships. The hands seemed to cry out. ‘We have done our work! We have done our duty! If you would know this man, then look at these hands.’ So she looked at them now, and at the tattoo marks higher up upon the wrists. Those wrists were like steel. And from his hands her eyes wandered to his face. ‘Poor Dad!’ she thought. ‘Poor Dad!’ Mr Fury took out his clay pipe. When he felt it between his teeth he was content. A pipe offered peace, security. Now he began rubbing up Mr Mulcare’s ‘hard stuff’. Again Maureen looked at her father’s hands. They assumed significance of another kind. It was as though the hands were now happy, feeling that strong sweet-smelling tobacco being vigorously rubbed upon their palms. Had they been endowed with a voice, those hands would have laughed to express their joy in feeling that pipe, that tobacco upon them.
‘No. It wasn’t anything very particular,’ said Maureen. She picked up her sewing again.
‘Joe all right?’ asked her father. He blew the initial cloud of smoke into the air with a flourish, a sort of abandonment, like a man who has Mown all his troubles behind him.
‘Oh yes,’ replied Mrs Kilkey with a casualness that seemed to reveal her indifference to the question. ‘Yes, he’s all right.’
‘What does he do with himself?’ asked Mr Fury. ‘Joe’s never seen anywhere.’
‘You’ll always find him playing billiards,’ said Maureen. ‘That is Joe’s main pastime. He’s there most evenings. When he isn’t there, you’ll find him with his feet on the fender and a paper on his knee. The man is the greatest reader I ever came across.’
Dennis Fury eyed his daughter up and down. ‘How she’s growing!’ he thought, and seeing her swelling breasts said to himself, ‘Aunt Brigid to a T.’ Well, that was something of an event. Something to look forward to. Mr Fury put a question. There was a certain delicacy about it. Now he felt sorry he had asked it. He saw Maureen blush.
‘If it’s a boy, I’ll make him work,’ said Mrs Kilkey, ‘and if it’s a girl, the same applies. It’s the best cure that I know of every kind of weakness, bodily and mental.’
‘Um!’ Her father smiled.
‘Listen!’ he said. ‘Why didn’t you see the boy the other night? He was very much hurt, Maureen. You never opened the door to him. Why was that? You seem to be changing.’
The colour rose to Mrs Kilkey’s cheeks. ‘Why should I have opened the door to him?’ she asked. ‘Only yesterday Mother came running round to me! Crying! Quite a scene! Joe fortunately wasn’t there. And all over Peter! Why should I want to see him?’
‘He’s your brother,’ said Mr Fury, completely taken aback by his daughter’s manner. ‘He’s only a boy, after all.’
‘He drove everybody from the house. Now, why don’t you admit it, Dad?’ She put down her sewing, and gripped the bench tightly.
‘Drove everybody from the house! Don’t be silly, girl. Desmond wasn’t driven from the house. He had a perfect right to do as he likes. And if it comes to that, you married Kilkey to get out of that other devil’s clutches, didn’t you now? Tell the truth. It’s all very well putting on the airs of a martyr, making people feel your dignity has been offended. Tommy-rot. Christ! Your mother is a woman. Aye, she is in fact a real woman. Worth every one of her damned children. And the like of you closing your door on the boy! God almighty, what he did, thousands have done, millions have done, since the world began, and will go on doing. Now you close your door. Have you any feeling left at all? Or has marriage just destroyed it? Maureen, I think you’re just in a bad temper today. That boy feels ashamed enough. Your mother was hurt. Let me tell you that. She cried. And I know why. She doesn’t want Peter going round to Desmond’s house. But he will go! He will go! The lad has no friends. Everybody he used to know, the boys in the Guild – aye, the holy Chapel Guild – they all cut him. But Peter’s going to sea.’
‘He should have gone long ago,’ snapped Maureen.
Mr Fury laughed. ‘Aye,’ he said, ‘you’re jealous, Maureen, jealous.’
He flung up his hand as though to ward off an imaginary blow. ‘No,’ he said. ‘That’s all right. You needn’t even tell me about it. I know what you are going to say. But I know all about it.’
‘What was I going to say?’ asked Mrs Kilkey. It was one of the rare occasions when she found her father in a bad temper. Something must have happened, to have upset him like this. What could it be?
Her father caught hold of her hands. ‘Listen to me, Maureen. I know your mother took my money. And even when I asked the boy if he had taken it, I even knew then. I only wanted to see what the boy would say. Yes. Your mother took my money, and she used it up.’
‘On Peter.’
‘Well! I suppose so,’ said Mr Fury. ‘But I wouldn’t begrudge the money.’
‘And now she’s looking for more,’ Maureen fired at him. ‘Isn’t that the truth?’
‘I know nothing about that. I hardly know anything. She tells me nothing. But that’s an old habit. And I can well understand it, when I have been away at sea most of my life. Perhaps if I had worked ashore all my life you would have been different children. Ah well!’ He sighed, raised his head, and his eyes appeared to ransack the sky, against which there now appeared a great line of rolling black clouds.
‘I think it’s going to rain.’ he said, though his mind was a complete blank. It seemed to have sunk, collapsed. He lowered his head. ‘Ah, Maureen,’ he said, ‘I wish I had my time all over again.’ His voice was filled with a passionate tenderness as he looked up at the sky; he might have visioned some world of pure fancy, into the calm and peace of which his spirit might have slipped quietly, gently, leaving behind it upon the green bench of the park his tired body.
‘Everyone says that,’ remarked Maureen, ‘when it’s too late.’ She put the sewing in her bag, and made preparation to go.
‘Funny!’ he said. ‘Funny! I never had the pleasure of seeing any of you children grow up, never had the pleasure of saying good-night, of cuddling you in the blankets, of taking you out for walks. Aye! I would have loved that. But perhaps I was a silly old beggar. Oh well …’
‘Yes, Dad. You’re getting sentimental and silly.’
‘Yes,’ said Mr Fury. And at that moment he bowed his head, and a single tear-drop splashed upon his gnarled and crooked fist. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes.’
Maureen had risen to her feet. She was looking towards the park gates, unconscious of the fact that her father had suddenly given vent to his feelings. The man rubbed his eyes, feeling ashamed, thinking Maureen was looking at him, but Mrs Kilkey seemed indifferent to all that.
‘I’m going now, Dad,’ she said. ‘I shall see you again soon.’
‘Yes. Yes of course, ta-ta, good-bye,’ he said, without glancing up at his daughter.
‘Dear me! Dear me!’
He laid his head in his hands and cried like a child.
2
Peter had just fed Mr Mangan. He had woke suddenly and yawned, so that the boy, who had been reading on the sofa, let fall the book and looked across at the figure in the chair. Peter laughed. There was something so comical about his grandfather. And that mouth which opened and closed, it reminded him of a duck fishing in the mud for food. He had given him his milk pudding, exercising the greatest patience in doing so. Where on earth had his father got to? From three till four the boy had spent time sitting on the wall watching the wizened little woman from number nine wash her clothes at the dolly-tub standing in the middle of the yard. Then he had gone in, made some tea, cut bread and butter, and so appeased his growing hunger.
Mr Mangan was still asleep. He had been snoring some seven hours now. Peter wandered up and down stairs, bored, disconsolate. Well, it would soon be half-past seven. At half-past six he had given up all hope of meeting his brother at the Blue Bird Café, but just as it struck the half-hour his father came up the yard. Peter went and unlocked the back door.
‘Hello, Dad!’ said the boy, but Mr Fury did not reply. He pushed roughly past his son, and went into the kitchen. He sat down on the sofa.
‘Oh!’ he exclaimed.
He looked hot and tired. An unsuccessful journey. He had walked the six miles to town and back again. He looked at his son.
‘Hanged if I know where your mother has got to! I knew right well she’d meet difficulties going down there. But she never will listen to me. Have you had your tea?’
‘Yes, Dad. There’s tea in the pot now.’
‘Has slobberer had anything?’
Peter picked up the pudding dish. ‘Just had this,’ he said. ‘He was asleep all the afternoon.’ He put the basin back on the table.
‘Looks as if you are waiting to go out,’ Mr Fury said. ‘Where are you going?’
‘A walk,’ Peter replied.
Mr Fury got up and took off his coat. Then he rolled up his sleeves and went to the fire. ‘You let this go out,’ he said.
Peter said nothing.
Mr Fury put the blower up. ‘Light the gas,’ he growled. ‘The bloody house looks like a railway station.’ The boy lit the gas, then he stood waiting.
‘All right. You go ahead and do whatever you want to do,’ said his father. ‘I know you want to go out. You’ve been stuck with “him” all day, so I suppose you can go out. But don’t you be late! Understand? If you are, then look out.’
‘Yes, Dad.’
This warning had a double meaning. He could look out for his father, and he could look out for his own head, for after ten o’clock the military cleared the streets. Soldiers and Specials were gradually encroaching upon the neighbourhood of Hatfields. Apart from the mob violence and sporadic looting, the authorities were afraid of the different religious factions coming to blows. A rather ugly little incident on the King’s Road the previous night had made them unduly apprehensive. So after ten Peter was to look out for his head. Peter had promised that he would. At twenty minutes to eight he left the house. Mrs Fury had not then returned. The boy was looking forward to this meeting with his brother. For one thing, he would be different from the others. Maureen didn’t even want to see him. He still felt uncomfortable. That sudden return from Cork had upset everything. He couldn’t feel at ease in the house. The distance between his parents appeared to grow. Well, Desmond at any rate wouldn’t start piling it on. And there was nowhere else to go. The boys in the neighbourhood with whom he had first gone to school openly snubbed him. These boys had now left school and were working in shop and factory. He had met two of them. They had called him ‘snob’. When Maureen refused to open the door to him, Peter felt more wretched still. Now his spirits had risen. He liked his elder brother. They had spent much of their time together on fishing excursions. As he turned out of Hatfields into the King’s Road he thought, ‘Poor Mother! Out all day.’ Where had she got to? Why hadn’t she let him go to town to interview this Mr Lake? He felt quite capable of doing so.
