The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Terry had not seen the sea before, and it looked so queer that he decided it was probably England. It was a nice place enough but a bit on the draughty side. There were whitewashed houses all along the beach. His aunt undressed him and made him put on bright blue bathing-drawers, but when he felt the wind he shivered and sobbed and clasped himself despairingly under the armpits.

  ‘Ah, wisha, don’t be such a baby!’ his aunt said crossly.

  She and Mr Walker undressed too and led him by the hand to the edge of the water. His terror and misery subsided and he sat in a shallow place, letting the bright waves crumple on his shiny little belly. They were so like lemonade that he kept on tasting them, but they tasted salt. He decided that if this was England it was all right, though he would have preferred it with a park and a bicycle. There were other children making sandcastles and he decided to do the same, but after a while, to his great annoyance, Mr Walker came to help him. Terry couldn’t see why, with all that sand, he wouldn’t go and make castles of his own.

  ‘Now we want a gate, don’t we?’ Mr Walker asked officiously.

  ‘All right, all right, all right,’ said Terry in disgust. ‘Now, you go and play over there.’

  ‘Wouldn’t you like to have a daddy like me, Terry?’ Mr Walker asked suddenly.

  ‘I don’t know,’ replied Terry. ‘I’ll ask Auntie. That’s the gate now.’

  ‘I think you’d like it where I live,’ said Mr Walker. ‘We’ve much nicer places there.’

  ‘Have you?’ asked Terry with interest. ‘What sort of places?’

  ‘Oh, you know – roundabouts and swings and things like that.’

  ‘And parks?’ asked Terry.

  ‘Yes, parks.’

  ‘Will we go there now?’ asked Terry eagerly.

  ‘Well, we couldn’t go there today; not without a boat. It’s in England, you see; right at the other side of all that water.’

  ‘Are you the man that’s going to marry Auntie?’ Terry asked, so flabbergasted that he lost his balance and fell.

  ‘Now, who told you I was going to marry Auntie?’ asked Mr Walker, who seemed astonished too.

  ‘She did,’ said Terry.

  ‘Did she, by Jove?’ Mr Walker exclaimed with a laugh. ‘Well, I think it might be a very good thing for all of us, yourself included. What else did she tell you?’

  ‘That you’d buy me a bike,’ said Terry promptly. ‘Will you?’

  ‘Sure thing,’ Mr Walker said gravely. ‘First thing we’ll get you when you come to live with me. Is that a bargain?’

  ‘That’s a bargain,’ said Terry.

  ‘Shake,’ said Mr Walker, holding out his hand.

  ‘Shake,’ replied Terry, spitting on his own.

  He was content with the idea of Mr Walker as a father. He could see he’d make a good one. He had the right principles.

  They had their tea on the strand and then got back late to the station. The little lamps were lit on the platform. At the other side of the valley the high hills were masked in dark trees and no light showed the position of the Earlys’ cottage. Terry was tired; he didn’t want to leave the car, and began to whine.

  ‘Hurry up now, Terry,’ his aunt said briskly as she lifted him out. ‘Say night-night to Mr Walker.’

  Terry stood in front of Mr Walker, who had got out before him, and then bowed his head.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say good-night, old man?’ Mr Walker asked in surprise.

  Terry looked up at the reproach in his voice and then threw himself blindly about his knees and buried his face in his trousers. Mr Walker laughed and patted Terry’s shoulder. His voice was quite different when he spoke again.

  ‘Cheer up, Terry,’ he said. ‘We’ll have good times yet.’

  ‘Come along now, Terry,’ his aunt said in a brisk official voice that terrified him.

  ‘What’s wrong, old man?’ Mr Walker asked.

  ‘I want to stay with you,’ Terry whispered, beginning to sob. ‘I don’t want to stay here. I want to go back to England with you.’

  ‘Want to come back to England with me, do you?’ Mr Walker repeated. ‘Well, I’m not going back tonight, Terry, but if you ask Auntie nicely we might manage it another day.’

  ‘It’s no use stuffing up the child with ideas like that,’ she said sharply.

  ‘You seem to have done that pretty well already,’ Mr Walker said quietly. ‘So you see, Terry, we can’t manage it tonight. We must leave it for another day. Run along with Auntie now.’

  ‘No, no, no,’ Terry shrieked, trying to evade his aunt’s arms. ‘She only wants to get rid of me.’

  ‘Now, who told you that wicked nonsense, Terry?’ Mr Walker said severely.

  ‘It’s true, it’s true,’ said Terry. ‘She’s not my auntie. She’s my mother.’

  Even as he said it he knew it was dreadful. It was what Florrie Clancy said, and she hated his auntie. He knew it even more from the silence that fell on the other two. His aunt looked down at him and her look frightened him.

  ‘Terry,’ she said with a change of tone, ‘you’re to come with me at once and no more of this nonsense.’

  ‘Let him to me,’ Mr Walker said shortly. ‘I’ll find the place.’

  She did so and at once Terry stopped kicking and whining and nosed his way into Mr Walker’s shoulder. He knew the Englishman was for him. Besides he was very tired. He was half asleep already. When he heard Mr Walker’s step on the planks of the wooden bridge he looked up and saw the dark hillside, hooded with pines, and the river like lead in the last light. He woke again in the little dark bedroom which he shared with Billy. He was sitting on Mr Walker’s knee and Mr Walker was taking off his shoes.

  ‘My bucket,’ he sighed.

  ‘Oh, by gum, lad,’ Mr Walker said, ‘I’d nearly forgotten your bucket.’

  Every Sunday after, wet or fine, Terry found his way across the footbridge and the railway station to the main road. There was a pub there, and men came from up from the valley and sat on the wall outside, waiting for the coast to be clear to slip in for a drink. In case there might be any danger of having to leave them behind, Terry brought his bucket and spade as well. You never knew when you’d need things like those. He sat at the foot of the wall near the men, where he could see the buses and cars coming from both directions. Sometimes a grey car like Mr Walker’s appeared from round the corner and he waddled up the road towards it, but the driver’s face was always a disappointment. In the evenings when the first buses were coming back he returned to the cottage and Mrs Early scolded him for moping and whining. He blamed himself a lot because all the trouble began when he broke his word to his aunt.

  One Sunday, Florrie came up the main road from the village. She went past him slowly, waiting for him to speak to her, but he wouldn’t. It was all her fault, really. Then she stopped and turned to speak to him. It was clear that she knew he’d be there and had come to see him and make it up.

  ‘Is it anyone you’re waiting for, Terry?’ she asked.

  ‘Never mind,’ Terry replied rudely.

  ‘Because if you’re waiting for your aunt, she’s not coming,’ Florrie went on gently.

  Another time Terry wouldn’t have entered into conversation, but now he felt so mystified that he would have spoken to anyone who could tell him what was keeping his aunt and Mr Walker. It was terrible to be only five, because nobody ever told you anything.

  ‘How do you know?’ he asked.

  ‘Miss Clancy said it,’ replied Florrie confidently. ‘Miss Clancy knows everything. She hears it all in the Post Office. And the man with the grey car isn’t coming either. He went back to England.’

  Terry began to snivel softly. He had been afraid that Mr Walker wasn’t really in earnest. Florrie drew closer to him and then sat on the grass bank beside him. She plucked a stalk and began to shred it in her lap.

  ‘Why wouldn’t you be said by me?’ she asked reproachfully. ‘You know I was always your girl and I wouldn’t tell you a lie.�
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  ‘But why did Mr Walker go back to England?’ he asked.

  ‘Because your aunt wouldn’t go with him.’

  ‘She said she would.’

  ‘Her mother wouldn’t let her. He was married already. If she went with him he’d have brought you as well. You’re lucky he didn’t.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Because he was a Protestant,’ Florrie said primly. ‘Protestants have no proper religion like us.’

  Terry did his best to grasp how having a proper religion made up to a fellow for the loss of a house with lights that went off and on, a park and a bicycle, but he realized he was too young. At five it was still too deep for him.

  ‘But why doesn’t Auntie come down like she always did?’

  ‘Because she married another fellow and he wouldn’t like it.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t he like it?’

  ‘Because it wouldn’t be right,’ Florrie replied almost pityingly. ‘Don’t you see the English fellow have no proper religion, so he wouldn’t mind, but the fellow she married owns the shop she works in, and Miss Clancy says ’tis surprising he married her at all, and he wouldn’t like her to be coming here to see you. She’ll be having proper children now, you see.’

  ‘Aren’t we proper children?’

  ‘Ah, no, we’re not,’ Florrie said despondently.

  ‘What’s wrong with us?’

  That was a question that Florrie had often asked herself, but she was too proud to show a small boy like Terry that she hadn’t discovered the answer.

  ‘Everything,’ she sighed.

  ‘Florrie Clancy,’ shouted one of the men outside the pub, ‘what are you doing to that kid?’

  ‘I’m doing nothing to him,’ she replied in a scandalized tone, starting as though from a dream. ‘He shouldn’t be here by himself at all. He’ll get run over.… Come on home with me now, Terry,’ she added, taking his hand.

  ‘She said she’d bring me to England and give me a bike of my own,’ Terry wailed as they crossed the tracks.

  ‘She was only codding,’ Florrie said confidently. Her tone changed gradually; it was becoming fuller, more scornful. ‘She’ll forget all about you when she has other kids. Miss Clancy says they’re all the same. She says there isn’t one of them worth bothering your head about, that they never think of anyone only themselves. She says my father has pots of money. If you were in with me I might marry you when you’re a bit more grown-up.’

  She led him up the short cut through the woods. The trees were turning all colours. Then she sat on the grass and sedately smoothed her frock about her knees.

  ‘What are you crying for?’ she asked reproachfully. It was all your fault. I was always your girl. Even Mrs Early said it. I always took your part when the others were against you. I wanted you not to be said by that old one and her promises, but you cared more for her and her old toys than you did for me. I told you what she was, but you wouldn’t believe me, and now, look at you! If you’ll swear to be always in with me I’ll be your girl again. Will you?’

  ‘I will,’ said Terry.

  She put her arms about him and he fell asleep, but she remained solemnly holding him, looking at him with detached and curious eyes. He was hers at last. There were no more rivals. She fell asleep too and did not notice the evening train go up the valley. It was all lit up. The evenings were drawing in.

  THE PARAGON

  I

  JIMMY GARVIN lived with his mother in a little house in what we called the Square, though there wasn’t much of a square about it. He was roughly my own age, but he behaved as if he were five years older. He was a real mother’s darling, with pale hair and eyes, a round, soft, innocent face that seemed to become rounder and softer and more innocent from the time he began to wear spectacles, and one of those astonishingly clear complexions that keep their owners looking years younger than their real age. He talked slowly and carefully in a precise, old-fashioned way and hardly mixed at all with the other kids.

  His mother was a pretty, excitable woman, with fair hair like Jimmy’s, a long, thin face, and a great flow of nervous chatter. She had been separated for years from her husband, who was supposed to be in England somewhere. She had been a waitress in a club on the South Mall, and he was reputed to be of a rather better class, as class is understood in Cork, which is none too well. His family made her a small allowance, but it was not enough to support herself and Jimmy, and she eked it out with housework. It was characteristic of our poverty-stricken locality that the little allowance made her an object of great envy and that people did not like her and called her ‘Lady Garvin’.

  Each afternoon after school you would see Jimmy making for one of the fashionable districts where his mother worked, raising his cap and greeting any woman he knew in his polite old-fashioned way. His mother brought him into the kitchen and gave him whatever had been left over from lunch, and he read there till it was time for them to go home. He was no trouble; all he ever needed to make him happy was a book – any book – from the shelves or the lumber room, and he read with his head resting on his hands, which formed a screen between him and the domestic world.

  ‘Mum,’ he would say, beaming, ‘this book is about a very interesting play they have every year in a place called Oberammergau. Oberammergau is in Germany. In Germany the language they speak is German. Don’t you think I should learn German?’

  ‘Should you, Jimmy?’ she would ask tenderly. ‘Don’t you think you’re learning enough as it is?’

  ‘But if we go to Germany,’ he would exclaim with his triumphant smile, ‘one of us has to know German. If we don’t know how to ask our way to the right platform, how will we know we’re on the right train? Perhaps they’ll take us to Russia.’

  ‘Oh, dear,’ she would say, ‘that would be dreadful.’

  At the same time she was, of course, terribly proud of him, particularly if the maid was there to hear him. For as Jimmy told the story, his mother was always the heroine and he Prince Charming. In a year or two he would begin to earn a lot of money, and then they would have a big house on the river, exactly like the one they were in, with a maid to wait on them who would be paid more than any maid in the neighbourhood, and they would spend their holidays in France and Italy. If his mother was friendly with the maid she was working with, he even offered the position to her. There was nothing like having the whole thing arranged.

  This was how he liked to pass the time while his mother worked, reading, or – if she had the house to herself – wandering gravely from room to room and imagining himself already the owner, looking at himself in the dressing-table mirrors as he poured bay rum on his hair and brushed it with the silver brushes, and speaking to himself in a lingo he took to be German, touching the keys of the piano lightly, or watching from the tall windows as people hurried by along the river bank in the rainy dusk. Late in the evening his mother and he would go home together, holding hands, while he still chattered on in his grave, ancient, innocent way, the way of a child on whom Life has already laid too heavy a burden.

  But as time went on things grew easier. The monks saw that Jimmy was out on his own as a student. Finally, Mrs Garvin gave up the housework and took in boarders. She rented a big house on the road near the tram-stop and accepted only lodgers of the best class. There at last Jimmy could have a piano of his own, though the instrument he did take up was the violin.

  II

  By the time he was ready for the University he had developed into a tall, gangling, good-looking boy, though his years of study had left their mark on him. He had a pleasant tenor voice and sang in one of the city choirs. He had got the highest mark in Ireland in the Intermediate exams, and his picture had appeared in the Examiner, with his right arm resting on a pedestal and his left hand supporting it to keep it from shaking.

  And this, of course, was where the trouble really began, for his father’s family saw the picture and read the story and realized that they – poor innocent, good-natured, country folk –
were being done out of something by the city slickers. The Garvins were a family you couldn’t do out of much, and they coveted their share of Jimmy’s glory, all the more because they saw that he had got it all from the Garvins, who had always been intellectual – witness Great Uncle Harvey, who had been the greatest scholar in the town of Macroom, consulted even by the parish priest. Some sort of reconciliation was necessary; Mrs Garvin’s allowance was increased, and she was almost silly with happiness since it seemed so much like a foretaste of all the things Jimmy had promised to do for her.

  At the same time she feared the Garvins, a feeling with which Jimmy could not sympathize because he had no fear whatever of his father’s family. He was mildly curious, that was all. To him they were just another audience for whom he could perform on the violin or to whom he could explain the facts of the international situation. At her request he called on his Aunt Mary, who lived in a new red-brick house a stone’s throw from the College. Aunt Mary had been involved in a peculiar marriage with a middle-aged engineer, who had left her some money but no children. She was a shrewd, coaxing old West Cork woman with a face that must once have been good-looking. No sooner did she realize that Jimmy was presentable as well as ‘smart’ than she saw that it was the will of God that she should annex him. She was the family genealogist, and while she fed him excellently on tea, home-made scones, and cake, she filled in for him in a modest and deprecating way the family background he had missed.

  It never occurred to her that this might come as an anticlimax to Jimmy. He listened to her with a vacant smile, and even made fun of Great Uncle Harvey to her face, a thing no one had ever presumed to do before, and when he left her she sat, looking out the window after his tall, swinging figure, and wondered if it was really worth her while to pay the call she had promised.