The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘But damn it, Archie,’ I cried, ‘you said yourself she was a serious girl. All you’re telling me now is that she was a sweet one as well. It must have been hell for her, being engaged to two men in the same town and trying to keep both of them happy till the other fellow got tired of her and left her free to marry you.’

  ‘Or free for a third man to come along and put her in the same position again,’ said Archie with a sneer.

  I must say I had not expected that one, and for a moment it stopped me dead. But there is no stopping a man who is in love with a shadow as I was then, and I was determined on finding justification for myself.

  ‘But after all, Archie,’ I said, ‘isn’t that precisely why you marry a woman like that? Can you imagine marrying one of them if the danger wasn’t there? Come, Archie, don’t you see that the whole business of the suicide is irrelevant? Every nice girl behaves exactly as though she had a real suicide in her past. That’s what makes her a nice girl. It’s not easy to defend it rationally, but that’s the way it is. Archie, I think you made a fool of yourself.’

  ‘It’s not possible to defend it rationally or any other way,’ Archie said with finality. ‘A woman like that is a woman without character. You might as well stick your head in a gas-oven and be done with it as marry a girl like that.’

  And from that evening on, Archie dropped me. He even told his friends that I had no moral sense and would be bound to end up bad. Perhaps he was right, perhaps I shall end up as badly as he believed; but, on the other hand, perhaps I was only saying to him all the things he had been saying to himself for years in the bad hours coming on to morning, and he only wanted reassurance from me, not his own sentence on himself pronounced by another man’s lips. But, as I say, I was very young and didn’t understand. Nowadays I should sympathize and congratulate him on his narrow escape, and leave it to him to proclaim what an imbecile he was.

  LONELY ROCK

  I

  IN ENGLAND during the war I had a great friend called Jack Courtenay who was assistant manager in one of the local factories. His job was sufficiently important to secure his exemption from military service. His family was originally from Cork, but he had come to work in England when he was about eighteen and married an English girl called Sylvia, a school-teacher. Sylvia was tall, thin, fair and vivacious, and they got on very well together. They had two small boys, of seven and nine. Jack was big-built, handsome, and solemn-looking, with a gravity which in public enabled him to escape from the usual English suspicion of Irish temperament and in private to get away with a schoolboy mania for practical joking. I have known him invite someone he liked to his office to discuss an entirely imaginary report from the police, accusing the unfortunate man of bigamy and deserting a large family. He could carry on a joke like that for a long time without a shadow of a smile, and end up by promising his victim to try and persuade the police that it was all a case of mistaken identity.

  He was an athlete, with an athlete’s good nature when he was well and an athlete’s hysteria when he wasn’t. A toothache or a cold in the head could drive him stark, staring mad. Then he retired to bed (except when he could create more inconvenience by not doing so) and conducted guerrilla warfare against the whole houeshold, particularly the children, who were diverting the attention which should have come to himself. His face, normally expressionless, could convey indescribable agonies on such occasions, and even I felt that Sylvia went too far with her air of indifference and boredom. ‘Do stop that shouting!’ or ‘Why don’t you see the dentist?’ were remarks that caused me almost as much pain as they caused her husband.

  Fortunately, his ailments were neither serious nor protracted, and Sylvia didn’t seem to mind so much about his other weakness, which was girls. He had a really good eye for a girl and a corresponding vanity about the ravages he could create in them, so he was forever involved with some absolutely stunning blonde. At Christmas I was either dispatching or receiving presents that Sylvia wasn’t supposed to know about. These flirtations (they were nothing more serious) never went too far. The man was a born philanderer. Because I was fresh from Ireland and disliked his schoolboy jokes, he regarded me as a puritan and gave me friendly lectures with a view to broadening my mind and helping me to enjoy life. Sylvia’s mind he had apparently broadened already.

  ‘Did you know that Jack’s got a new girl, Phil?’ she asked, while he beamed proudly on both of us. ‘Such a relief after the last! Didn’t he show you the last one’s photo? Oh, my dear, the commonest-looking piece.’

  ‘Now, now, who’s jealous?’ Jack would say severely, wagging his finger at her.

  ‘Really, Jack,’ she would reply with bland insolence, ‘I’d have to have a very poor opinion of myself to be jealous of that. Didn’t you say she was something in Woolworth’s?’

  To complete the picture of an entirely emancipated household, I was supposed to be in love with her and to indulge in all sorts of escapades behind his back. We did our best to keep up the game, but I am afraid she found me rather heavy going.

  There was a third adult in the house; this was Jack’s mother, whom Sylvia, with characteristic generosity, had invited to live with them. At the same time I don’t think she had had any idea what she was letting herself in for. It was rather like inviting a phase of history. Mrs Courtenay was a big, bossy, cheerful woman and an excellent housekeeper, so Jack and Sylvia had at least the advantage of being able to get away together whenever they liked. The children were fond of her and she spoiled them, but at the same time her heart was not in them. They had grown up outside her scope and atmosphere. Her heart was all the time in the little house in Douglas Street in Cork, with the long garden and the apple trees, the old cronies who dropped in for a cup of tea and a game of cards, and the convent where she went to Mass and to visit the lifelong friend whom Sylvia persisted in calling Sister Mary Misery. Sister Mary Misery was always in some trouble and always inviting the prayers of her friends. Mrs Courtenay’s nostalgia was almost entirely analogical, and the precise degree of pleasure she received from anything was conditioned by its resemblance to something or somebody in Cork. Her field of analogy was exceedingly wide, as when she admired a photograph of St Paul’s because it reminded her of the Dominican Church in Cork.

  Jack stood in great awe of his mother, and this was something Sylvia found it difficult to understand. He did not, for instance, like drinking spirits before her, and if he had to entertain while she was there, he drank sherry. When at ten o’clock sharp the old woman rose and said: ‘Wisha, do you know, I think I’ll go to my old doss; good night to ye,’ he relaxed and started on the whiskey.

  There was hardly a day, wet or fine, well or ill, but Mrs Courtenay was up for morning Mass. This was practically her whole social existence, as her only company, apart from me, was Father Whelan, the parish priest; a nice, simple poor man, but from Waterford – ‘not at all the same thing,’ as Sylvia observed. For a Waterford man he did his best. He lent her the papers from home; sometimes newspapers, but mostly religious papers: ‘simple papers for simple people,’ he explained to Sylvia, just to show that he wasn’t taken in.

  But if he implied that Mrs Courtenay was simple, he was wrong.

  ‘Wisha, hasn’t Father Tom a beautiful face, Phil?’ she would exclaim with childish pleasure as she held out the photograph of some mountainous sky-pilot. ‘You’d never again want to hear another Passion sermon after Father Tom. Poor Father Whelan does his best, but of course he hasn’t the intellect.’

  ‘How could he?’ Sylvia would say gravely. ‘We must remember he’s from Waterford.’

  Mrs Courtenay never knew when Sylvia was pulling her leg.

  ‘Why then, indeed, Sylvia,’ she said, giving a reproving look over her spectacles, ‘some very nice people came from Waterford.’

  Though Mrs Courtenay couldn’t discuss it with Sylvia, who might have thought her prejudiced, she let me know how shocked she was by the character of the English, who seemed from the age of fift
een on to do nothing but fall in and out of love. Mrs Courtenay had heard of love; she was still very much in love with her own husband, who had been dead for years, but this was a serious matter and had nothing whatever in common with those addle-pated affairs you read of in the newspapers. Fortunately, she never knew the worst, owing to her lack of familiarity with the details. Once an old schoolmistress friend of Sylvia’s with a son the one age with Jack tried to start a little chat with her about the dangers young men had to endure, but broke down under the concentrated fire of Mrs Courtenay’s innocence.

  ‘Willie’s going to London worries me a lot,’ she said darkly.

  ‘Why, then, indeed, ma’am, I wouldn’t blame you,’ said Mrs Courtenay. ‘The one time I was there, the traffic nearly took the sight out of my eyes.’

  ‘And it’s not the traffic only, is it, Mrs Courtenay?’ asked the schoolmistress, a bit taken aback. ‘I mean, we send them out into the world healthy, and we want them to come back to us healthy.’

  ‘Ah, indeed,’ said Mrs Courtenay triumphantly, ‘wasn’t it only the other day I was saying the same thing to you, Sylvia? Whatever he gets to eat in London, Jack’s digestion is never the same.’

  Not to wrong her, I must admit that she wasn’t entirely ignorant of the subject, for she mentioned it herself to me (very confidentially while Sylvia was out of the room) in connection with a really nice sodality man from the Watercourse Road who got it through leaning against the side of a ship.

  Sylvia simply did not know what to make of her mother-in-law’s ingenuousness, which occasionally bordered on imbecility, but she was a sufficiently good housekeeper herself to realize that the old woman had plenty of intelligence, and she respected the will-power that kept her going, cheerful and uncomplaining, through the trials of loneliness and old age.

  ‘We’re very busy these days,’ she would sigh after Mrs Courtenay had gone to bed, and she was enjoying what her husband called ‘the first pussful.’ ‘We’re doing another novena for Sister Mary Misery’s sciatica. The last one misfired, but we’ll wear Him down yet! Really, she talks as if God were a Corkman!’

  ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘some very nice people came from Cork.’

  ‘But it’s fantastic, Jack! It’s simply fantastic!’ Sylvia cried, slamming her palm on the arm-rest of her chair. ‘She’s upstairs now, talking to God as she talked to us. She feels she will wear Him down, exactly as she says.’

  ‘She probably will,’ said I.

  ‘I shouldn’t be in the least surprised,’ Sylvia added viciously. ‘She’s worn me down.’

  II

  Naturally, Jack and Sylvia both told me of the absolutely stunning brunette he had met in Manchester, driving a Ministry car. Then, for some reason, the flow of confidences dried up. I guessed that something had gone wrong with the romance, but knew better than to ask questions. I knew that Jack would tell me in his own good time. He did too, one grey winter evening when we had walked for miles up the hills and taken refuge from the wind in a little bar-parlour where a big fire was roaring. When he brought in the pints, he told me in a slightly superior way with a smile that didn’t seem quite genuine that he was having trouble about Margaret.

  ‘Serious?’ I asked.

  ‘Well, she’s had a baby,’ he said with a shrug.

  He expected me to be shocked, and I was, but not for his reasons. It was clear that he was badly shaken, did not know how his philandering could have gone so far or had such consequences, and was blaming the drink or something equally irrelevant.

  ‘That’s rotten luck,’ I said.

  ‘That’s the worst of it,’ he said. ‘It’s not luck.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said. I was beginning to realize vaguely the mess in which he had landed himself. ‘You mean she—?’

  ‘Yes,’ he cut in. ‘She wanted it. Now she wants to keep it, and her family won’t let her, so she’s left home.’

  ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘That is rotten.’

  ‘It’s not very pleasant,’ he said, unconsciously trying to reassert himself in his old part as a man of the world by lowering the key of the conversation.

  ‘Does Sylvia know?’

  ‘Good Lord, no,’ he exclaimed with a frown, and this time it was he who was shocked. ‘There’s no point in upsetting her.’

  ‘She’ll be a damn sight more upset if she hears of it from someone else,’ I said.

  ‘Yes,’ he replied after a moment. ‘I see your point.’

  I don’t know whether he did or not. He had the sort of sensitiveness which leads men into the most preposterous situations in the desire not to give pain to people they love. It never minimizes the pain in the long run, of course, or so it seemed to me. I had no experience of that sort of situation and was all for giving the pain at once and getting it over. I should even have been prepared to break the news to Sylvia myself, just to be sure she had someone substantial to bawl on. Nowadays I wouldn’t rush into it so eagerly.

  Instead, Sylvia talked to me about it, in her official tone. It was a couple of months later. She had managed to get rid of her mother-in-law for half an hour, and we were drinking cocktails.

  ‘Did you know Jack’s got himself into a scrape with the brunette, Phil?’ she said lightly, crossing her legs and smoothing her skirt. ‘Has he told you?’

  I could have shaken her. There was no need to do the stiff upper lip on me, and at any rate I couldn’t reply to it. I like a bit more intimacy myself.

  ‘He has,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘How are things going?’

  ‘Baby’s ill, and she’s had to chuck her job. Jack is really quite worried.’

  ‘I don’t wonder,’ I said. ‘What’s he going to do?’

  ‘What can he do?’ she exclaimed with a shrug and a mow. ‘He should look after the girl. I’ve told him I’ll divorce him.’

  I hardly knew what to say to this. Sweet reasonableness may be all very well, but usually it bears no relation to the human facts.

  ‘Is that what you want to do?’

  ‘Well, my feelings don’t count for much in this.’

  ‘That’s scarcely how Jack looks at it,’ I said.

  ‘So he says,’ she muttered with a shrug.

  ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Sylvia!’ I said.

  She looked at me for a moment as though she might throw something at me, and I almost wished she would.

  ‘Oh, well,’ she said at last, ‘if that’s how he feels he should bring her here. You can’t even imagine what girls in her position have to go through. It’ll simply drive her to suicide, and then he will have something to worry about. I do wish you’d speak to him, Phil.’

  ‘What’s his objection?’

  ‘Mother doesn’t know we drink,’ she said maliciously. ‘Anyhow, as if it would ever cross her mind that he was responsible! She probably thinks it’s something you catch from leaning against a tree.’

  ‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said. I had a feeling that between them they would be bound to make a mess of it.

  ‘Tell him Granny need never know,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even have to pretend he knows the girl. She can be a friend of mine. And at a time like this, who’s going to inquire about her husband? We can kill him off in the most horrible manner. She just loves tragedies.’

  This was more difficult than it sounded. Jack didn’t want to talk at all, and when he talked he was in a bad humour. I had had to take him out to the local pub, and we talked in low voices between the family parties and the dart-players. Jack’s masculine complacency revolted as much at taking advice from me as at taking help from Sylvia. He listened in a peculiar way he had, frowning with one side of his face, as if with half his mind he was considering your motion while with the other he ruled it out of order.

  ‘I’m afraid it’s impossible,’ he said stiffly.

  ‘Well, what are you going to do?’

  ‘Sylvia said she’d divorce me,’ he replied in a sulky voice that showed it would be a long time before he forgave Sylvia for her high-mi
nded offer.

  ‘Is that what you want?’

  ‘But, my dear fellow, it’s not a matter of what I want,’ he said scoffingly.

  ‘You mean you won’t accept Sylvia’s kindness, is that it?’

  ‘I won’t go on my knees to anybody, for anything.’

  ‘Do you want her to go on her knees to you?’

  ‘Oh,’ he replied ungraciously, ‘if that’s how she feels –’

  ‘You wouldn’t like me to get a note from her?’ I asked. (I knew it was mean, but I couldn’t resist it.)

  III

  That was how Margaret came to be invited to the Courtenays’. I promised to look in, the evening she came. It was wet, and the narrow sloping High Street with its rattling inn-signs looked the last word in misery. As I turned up the avenue to the Courtenays’, the wind was rising. In the distance it had blown a great gap through the cloud, and the brilliant sky had every tint of metal from blue steel at the top to bronze below. Mrs Courtenay opened the door to me.

  ‘They’re not back from the station yet,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Would you have a cup of tea?’

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘All I want is to get warm.’

  ‘I suppose they’ll be having it when they come in,’ she said. ‘The train must be late.’

  Just then the taxi drove up, and Sylvia came in with Margaret, a short, slight girl with a rather long, fine-featured face; the sort of face that seems to have been slightly shrunken to give its features a certain precision and delicacy. Jack came in, carrying the baby’s basket, and set it on a chair in the hall. His mother went straight to it, as though she could see nothing else.

  ‘Isn’t he lovely, God bless him?’ she said, showing her gums while her whole face lit up.