by James Hanley
‘Go out,’ Mrs Fury said. Dennis Fury took her at her word. In two minutes he was hurrying down Hatfields. He was like a man who has suddenly remembered an important engagement. But his destination was nowhere in particular. Simply ‘out’. As soon as the back door closed, Mrs Fury called to her son:
‘Did you leave that note at Price Street?’
‘Yes, Mother.’ He heard her washing down the drainboard.
‘You put it under the door as I said?’ She was wringing out the cloth into the sink.
‘Yes, Mother,’ Peter called back.
‘Did you wait until Mr Kilkey had gone out?’
‘Yes.’
Mr Joseph Kilkey, when not working, always went out to the half-past eight Mass at St Sebastian’s.
The house was silent again. The woman came into the kitchen. Her sleeves were rolled up beyond the elbow.
‘Has your father gone?’ she asked. She had actually seen her husband pass down the back yard as she stood behind the window, washing up, but now she seemed to have completely forgotten it.
‘He’s gone, Mother.’
‘Then you go too,’ she said. ‘You can easily catch your father up. Go for a walk with him.’
The boy seemed not to comprehend.
‘I said, Go out,’ replied Mrs Fury. ‘You’re in the way here.’
‘Yes. All right. I’ll go out,’ Peter said. He put his coat on and went out.
The woman sat down. She was alone at last. They had gone out. She felt the air was clearer. Now she could get on with her job. She got up and threw the window open. That was better. Now she could begin. She stood by the window contemplating. Should she begin at the top or at the bottom. The whole house was a disgrace. Suddenly she said, ‘I’ll begin at the top.’ She went into the back kitchen, armed herself with bucket, cloths, soap, and scrubbing-brushes. Yes, the place was like a pigsty. She filled the bucket and went straight upstairs. She went into Mr Mangan’s room. She would do his first, then the boy’s. After dinner she would do her own room and the kitchen and back kitchen. She began to clear the clothes from her father’s bed.
Anthony Mangan’s room contained a large iron bedstead, a cane chair, and a table. The floor was covered with oilcloth, now almost worn bare. Two rusty laths from the bed trailed upon the floor, so that each time the bed was moved to be made up the laths scraped the cloth. This continuous scraping soon trod great holes in the oilcloth. Mrs Fury now removed the bed from the wall. The bed consisted of straw mattress, sheet, blanket, and two overcoats. The sheet was stained with slobber. The woman flung the bed-clothes on to a chair, turned the mattress up, and then flung up the window. She carried the bucket to the corner, knelt down and began to scrub. When the oilcloth was wetted it threw up an odour, partly the smell of its own cloth, partly from a kind of staleness that lay hidden beneath it, and that rose up each time the woman scrubbed the floor. Each scrubbing was a revelation. It revealed more clearly how worn the cloth was, and there was always that thin film of mould between it and the floor. At one time this sheet of oilcloth had been lifted and the wooden floor thoroughly scrubbed; now it was impossible. The oilcloth if lifted would come to pieces. Only its own rot seemed to hold it together. Moreover, it was practically glued to the floor. As she scrubbed with great circular movements of her right hand, which movements she changed alternately, the circular movements had a peculiar effect upon her. They made her dizzy. Sometimes her hand made sweeping circles long after the desire to scrub had left her, as though through long habit she had become a slave to its rhythm, a rhythm that pulled one to the floor, that held one’s knees in a vice-like grip. She experienced this dizziness now. She was kneeling just at the end of the bed. The strong smell of carbolic soap filled the room. She had finished scrubbing a patch of the oilcloth to her satisfaction, but somehow her arm, as though controlled by some force outside her own body, continued to make these rotary movements. At such times she instinctively put her hand out and caught the leg of the bed, or the chair, or the corner of the table. It had a steadying effect. The other arm stopped moving. Mrs Fury caught the rail of Mr Mangan’s bed, and rested back on her heels. After she had rested a while she began again. Mr Mangan’s room was even dirtier than she had thought. She had now reached the door. Outside of this was a clean white patch of boarding from which she had taken a small green carpet upon which to kneel. The smell of carbolic came through to the nostrils, as though it rose vaporous from some hidden cavity of the boarding. The woman rose to her feet and surveyed the room.
‘Well, that’s better!’ she thought. ‘Smells cleaner, and the wind coming through the window will soon dry the floor.’ Oilcloth seemed to imprison and hold water; it never dried as quickly as the boards, she was telling herself as she put the bucket down on the landing and went into the room again. She began to make Mr Mangan’s bed. She paused, holding the sheet in her hand, staring at her father’s expectorations patterning it. Should she wash it? No. Not today. She couldn’t do everything in one day. She went to the door again and stood surveying the floor. ‘That’s done with,’ she said aloud, ‘and it wanted it.’ Yes. And thank God she was able to do it. She thought of Mrs Postlethwaite and her rheumatics, of Mrs Barroise with her water on the knee. Yes, thank God she was able to do it. She picked up the bucket and went into Peter’s room. She sat down on the bed, thinking, ‘This was Desmond’s room.’
Well, really, now she came to think of it, it was disgraceful. That boy had had everything. Everything. And it had only ruined him, swelled his head. She looked at Peter’s bed. Peter’s bed, also of iron, was smaller. Instead of a straw mattress it had a flock bed, two sheets, a blanket, and an overcoat. The overcoat had at one time been worn by Mr Mangan himself. But Dad was younger then, even hale and hearty. In addition to the iron bed, Peter’s room contained a dressing-table. It was very old, its oak polish almost worn away. The back of the dressing-table was made of stout unpolished ply-wood. This dressing-table served two purposes. Everything in the Fury household seemed destined to serve two purposes. Peter’s dressing-table hid a huge hole in the wall. The paper had rotted. Mrs Fury had covered it time and time again with fresh paper. The paper became damp, and finally fell from the wall. Undaunted, Mrs Fury bought a tea-chest, took off the lid, and decided to nail it over the hole in the wall, which was now growing bigger. At that time the dressing-table stood against the window. With the first stroke of the hammer the nail bent, the plaster came away. The wall must be rotten, she thought. Perhaps the landlord would see to it. But that gentleman had somehow forgotten the matter. Mrs Fury decided to move the dressing-table, no feat in itself, but one which caused her endless labour. Desmond had tried again with the tea-chest top. The wall protested – there was a great hole there now! If one cared, one might put one’s head through and look fifteen feet down into the back yard. As she sat on the bed she cast her eyes under this table. Just as she expected. A small pool of water was lodging on the floor. This slowly trickled through and made stains that turned a rich brown upon the ceiling beneath. She stripped Peter’s bed, and as with her father’s room, flung up the window to let the air in. There was a three-legged table, on which stood a small brass oil-lamp. In the corner and nailed to the wall was a shelf containing books. This was always on the point of collapsing. The damp was creeping along the whole wall. Having cleared the room, Mrs Fury went below to get fresh water. She threw a glance at her father as she passed through the kitchen. Mr Mangan sat, both hands on his knees; to Mrs Fury’s great surprise he seemed to be smiling. She was inclined to stop, to see how long that smile would last. But she merely refilled the bucket and returned upstairs again. At half-past eleven she would go down and have a cup of tea. As she knelt down and began to sweep under the bed she noticed soot. Now, as she swept, it rose in clouds. What was this? And here was the strip of carpet all marked with somebody’s feet. Under it more soot. The sheet on the bed was marked too, but she had noticed it in rolling back the bedclothes. Then he knew! Now she understood hi
s remark: ‘My little bit,’ he had said. Denny must have gone to the chimney for it. And she had taken it. She had taken it for that young devil Peter. Yes. And it had gone. But there were still fees to be paid. She hadn’t seen the end of that yet.
Half-way through the scrubbing of Peter’s room she stopped for a rest. She rested standing, leaning against the wall, one hand holding on to the bookshelf. It began to shake, and she loosed her hold of it. She looked at the books on the shelf. A French Primer! Bio-chemistry. History of the World. Les Misérables – in French. Handy Andy, by Lever. She was reading the titles of the books. ‘H’m,’ she muttered. ‘H’m. A lot of rot! Waste!’
Having finished the floor, she remade his bed, dusted the table and dressing-table, and went downstairs. She paused on the bottom stair, as though a sudden thought had arrested her progress, but she only stopped to get breath. She placed the bucket and cloth away. She made some tea, which she drank in the back kitchen, sitting down before the mangle, using the cloth-board as table. Yes. The house must get a real clean-down. It was simply filthy. ‘I wonder?’ she exclaimed. ‘I wonder?’ and rising to her feet began to search the shelves. She lifted the pans and looked underneath. She ran her hand behind them. ‘No. Of course not. That hungry boy must have found it.’
She sat down again. Mrs Fury’s one luxury was a quarter pound of best butter, which she bought each Friday out of her father’s pension from Mr Potts, the grocer. This butter she generally placed under one of the iron pans. It was better than roast beef, better than chicken, it was everything to the woman. To Mrs Fury a cup of tea with a slice of bread and best butter was a feast. Now it had gone. Sometimes she went a whole day without anything but this butter on her mind, her thought continually turning to the quiet meal when the others had gone to bed. At one time Brigid Mangan used to send her weekly supplies. That had stopped long ago. Miss Mangan was so busy seeing that the priests’ bread was buttered that she had no time to think of sending anything. ‘I wonder where Denny’s got to?’ she said aloud. ‘I wonder?’
Time to feed Mr Mangan. She heated his milk, put a small drop of brandy into it from the bottle in the cupboard, and went to her father. She was certain that it could only be the brandy that was keeping the old man alive.
Having seen to ‘him’, Mrs Fury once more refilled the bucket and went upstairs, this time to her own room. The front room of the house in Hatfields was larger than any of the other rooms, and its window looked out on the front street. It was oblong in shape. In the corner where the big iron bed stood there was a high shelf, a fixture in the room. All the houses in Hatfields had a high shelf let into the wall of the front room. Here Mrs Fury had erected an altar. It was covered with a white strip of cloth. Upon it there stood a small statue of the Sacred Heart, and two vases containing artificial flowers. When fresh flowers were obtainable, the artificial ones were placed to one side. In front of the statue itself there stood a small red glass lamp, in which a night-light burned. Owing to the semi-darkness of this corner of the room, the light from the lamp threw a rich red glow upon a part of the wall, as well as sending this glow upwards like a sort of halo that hung above the altar itself. The lamp had been burning in Hatfields for seventeen years and had never gone out. Not for one single moment had this light been extinguished. When the night-light had burned through, another was already lighted, waiting to take its place. This everlasting illumination seemed almost symbolic. It was like the woman’s own faith, to which she had clung passionately, and which had never wavered. Against the amorphous mass of everyday urgencies, against these the light threw itself forward like a bright burning shield. She never entered the room without going to this altar. And whenever she stood in front of it, she felt calm and peaceful, as though the tragic face of the figure in front of her had moved, had put out its holed hand and touched her gently upon the shoulder. Her whole soul seemed to rise, her spirit cling to this face and to the light that glowed so redly and softly upon it. Dirt was nothing, filth was nothing, lies, insult, cheating, all these things were only sores that one reflection from that glow could obliterate. Mrs Fury, having scrubbed white the wooden flooring beneath this altar, now rose on her knees, closed her eyes and prayed. And with this closing of the eyes Hatfields had disappeared, its walls crumbled to dust; its dirt, its sameness, its monotony, its people too, had gone as if with a single flash some heavenly fire from the lamp, like a monstrous sun, had burnt and dried it up. And before it had knelt her children, and now she named them: Desmond, John, Anthony, Peter, her daughter Maureen. Naming them, she raised her right hand, making a sort of half-circle, held it for a moment in the air, then made the sign of the Cross. ‘In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’
She lowered her head, her arms had fallen limp to her sides, and she remained thus. It was as though the life in her had suddenly gone out, and thought itself had been drawn up by the red glow towards that face. After a while she got to her feet and continued her work.
She pulled the huge bed from the wall, and two dead flies fell into the film of dust that had collected behind the bed. She picked up a mouldy halfpenny, some rusty nails, an old holed glove. These she placed on the mantelshelf. Then she knelt down and began to scrub. Suddenly she stopped. The hand with the brush stretched out towards the window, the other rested on the iron bucket. She was staring at the wooden floor. For some reason or other the room had seemed to expand, to extend, so that she imagined she knelt on the brink of a veritable wooden desert, that she must scrub to the very end of it, pausing here and there for a rest. It was as though she had seen mirrored there her own life, as though those occasional pauses were merely magic moments stolen from time, from the long day itself. She looked up at the altar again. There was the early rising, the cleaning, the cooking, washing, mending, Mr Mangan, his comfort, the comfort of others. She saw them all now crystal-clear. These things seemed to rise from the wood and confront her. And when they were seen to, there was that quietness and peace, in the corner, where the ceiling glowed red. Everything was worth it. She began to scrub again. Below, somebody had come in. It was Mr Fury. She heard him climbing the stairs, pause outside the room door.
‘Are you there, Fanny?’
‘Yes. What is it?’ she asked, her mind wholly upon other things. ‘What is it?’
‘Are you busy?’ asked Dennis Fury. He was leaning on the landing, smoking his pipe.
‘Yes. I am.’ And the tone in which it was conveyed seemed to leave no doubt but that she was. ‘Did you see Peter? I sent him after you.’ Hearing a step, she added loudly, ‘Don’t come in! I’m busy. I left your dinners in the oven. Peter’s plate is on the top shelf, yours on the bottom.’
‘Oh! Righto! Righto!’ Mr Fury replied. He went downstairs thinking, ‘What’s she doing?’
Then he heard the sound of the brush upon the floor. Mrs Fury had begun again. Having scrubbed beneath the bed, she began to push it back against the wall. But for some reason it would not budge. One of its castorless legs had become stuck in the wooden floor. She looked into the bed. She went to the top of the bed and, placing her hands underneath, began to lift. But the bed was stubborn and refused to move, as though it were angry at being disturbed, as though it had resented those festoons of fluff being brushed away from its rusty legs. Mrs Fury went to the door and called, ‘Denny! Denny!’ She sat down on the bed. The effort had been too much for her. Mr Fury came running upstairs.
‘What’s up?’ He burst into the room. He looked at Fanny. She was hot, her face was livid, smudged here and there by dust marks, and a stray feather or two from the pillow had planted themselves on her hair. Her long arms were bare, almost to the shoulder.
‘What?’ he asked again.
‘Will you lift this bed?’ she said. ‘It’s got stuck in the floor. It’s really a nuisance. I do wish I could get another castor for it. I have this trouble every time.’
‘Why don’t you leave it against the wall?’ Mr Fury suggested. He lifted th
e bed up. ‘There!’
Well, that was done, and there wasn’t a word more to be said. When Fanny’s spring cleaning began – he called it spring cleaning though it was the woman’s weekly job – it was best to get out.
‘You look hot,’ he said, and went out of the room.
He tramped heavily down the stairs. ‘Ah!’ thought Mrs Fury. ‘Those stairs! I knew there was something.’
Although the man had lifted the bed clear from the patch where the wood was brown-stained and rotted, it had not occurred to him to push it back against the wall. ‘His dinner would get cold,’ Mrs Fury thought. ‘Wonderful creatures, men.’ She pushed the bed back to the wall. It made a harsh scraping sound. The twenty-five-year-old iron bed was feeling the passage of time. It hated being moved at all. As she scrubbed the last patch near the door she heard Peter coming in. After a while he called up, ‘Dad says what about your dinner, Mother?’
‘Yes! What about it? Have you had yours?’ she called downstairs. One hand lay immersed in the dirty black water, the other held the loose knob of the front room door. The boy shouted up:
‘Yes. I’m going to get mine now.’
‘Well, that’s good,’ the mother called out.
Silence again. She heard the kitchen door close. ‘As long as they have theirs, everything is all right,’ she thought.
She got to her feet, surveying the newly cleaned front room. That was done. What was next? Of course. The landing and the stairs. The landing was dark and smelt musty, probably from the damp film of mould that clung to the bare red-distempered walls. Here and there the plaster had given way. Every time a person ascended the stairs, a shower of dust fell from some new part of the wall that had surrendered to the damp. This dust was now an inch thick upon that part of the floor behind the banisters. The floor was bare. Here and there rusty nails protruded, showing where oilcloth had once been.
The woman went downstairs to refill her bucket. She never glanced at Mr Fury or her son as she passed through the kitchen, though the usual cautionary look was extended to her father. Mr Mangan, however, was quite safe, the great belt lashed round his chair. She emptied the bucket and refilled it with clean hot water from the boiler in the back kitchen. The mice that nightly ran along the shelves of the back kitchens of the houses in Hatfields had a habit of falling into the boilers, and as Mrs Fury ladled the water into the bucket she saw two dead mice. She called to Peter, ‘Come here a minute, Peter!’
