The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Mrs Garvin had even worse misgivings.

  ‘I don’t want that woman in the house, Jimmy,’ she said, clasping her hands feverishly. ‘She’s the one I really blame for the trouble with your father.’

  ‘Well, she’s hardly going to make trouble between you and me,’ said Jimmy, who had privately decided that his aunt was a fool.

  ‘That’s all you know,’ his mother said bitterly.

  In this she was right, but even she did not realize the full extent of the trouble Aunt Mary was preparing for them when she called. From Jimmy’s point of view there was nothing wrong. Aunt Mary cluck-clucked with astonishment when he played the violin for her, when he sang, and when he really explained what was happening in Europe.

  ‘Oh, Jimmy,’ she said, ‘I’d love your father to hear you sing. You have his voice. I can hear him in you.’

  ‘Oh, no, I don’t think so, Mrs Healy,’ his mother said hastily. ‘Jimmy has far too much to do.’

  ‘Ah, I was only thinking of a week or ten days,’ Aunt Mary said. ‘’Twould be a change for him.’

  ‘I think he’s much too young to travel alone,’ Mrs Garvin said, quivering. ‘In a year or two, perhaps.’

  ‘Oh, really, Mum!’ exclaimed Jimmy, cast down from the heights of abstract discussion. ‘I think I’m able to travel alone by now.’

  Aunt Mary had engaged his interest, and well she knew it. He had always been curious in a human way about the father he did not remember, and, being a born learner, was even more curious about England, a country he was always reading about and hearing of, but had never seen. He had more than his share of boyish vanity, and he knew that English contacts would assure him prestige among his fellow-students.

  For twelve months, off and on, he argued with his mother about it, but each time it alarmed her again. When she finally did consent, it was only because she felt that it might be unfair to deprive him of a chance of widening his knowledge of the world.

  So, at least, she said. But whatever she might say, and for all her fears, she was flattered, and with every bit of feminine vanity in her she desired the opportunity of showing off to her husband and his family the child they had abandoned and whom she had made into a paragon.

  III

  Jimmy’s first sight of his father in Paddington Station came as a considerable shock to him. Somehow, whenever he had imagined his father it had been as a heavy man with a big red face and a grey moustache, slow-spoken and portentous; but the man who met him in a bowler hat and a pale grey tie was tall and stringy with a neat dark moustache and an irritable, worried air. His speech was pleasant and well-bred; his manner was unaffected without being demonstrative; and he had a sense of quiet fun that put Jimmy at his ease. But he didn’t like to see such a distinguished-looking man carrying his cheap suitcase for him.

  ‘Do let me carry that!’ he said anxiously.

  ‘Oh, that’s all right, son,’ his father said lightly. ‘By the way,’ he added smoothly, ‘you’ll find I talk an awful lot, but you don’t have to pay any attention. If you talk, too, we’ll get on fine. That’s a hell of a heavy bag. We’d better get a taxi.’

  It was another surprise to Jimmy when, instead of taking him to some boarding house in the suburbs, his father took him on an electric train to a station twenty-odd miles from London. To Jimmy it seemed that this must be the heart of the country, but the big houses and the tall red buses he saw did not seem countrified. There was a car waiting outside the station, and his father drove him over high hilly country full of woods and streams down into a little red-brick market town, with a market house on stilts in the middle of the street, and up the hills again. To Jimmy it was all new and exciting, and he kept looking out and asking intelligent questions to which he rarely got satisfactory answers.

  ‘Oh, this damn country!’ his father said testily. ‘You have to drive five miles out of your way to avoid a hole in the road that’s preserved because Alfred the Great fell into it. For God’s sake, look at this for a main road!’

  While Jimmy was still wondering how you would preserve a hole in the road, they reached a village on top of the hills, a long, low street open on to a wide common, with a school, a church, a row of low cottages, and a public-house with a brightly painted inn-sign and with green chairs and tables ranged in front of it. They stopped a little up the road outside a cottage with high pilastered chimneys and diamond-paned windows, and a row of tall elms behind.

  ‘You’d want to mind your head in this damn hole,’ his father said as he pushed in the door. ‘It may have been all right for Queen Elizabeth, but it’s not all right for me.’

  Jimmy found himself in a combination living- and dining-room with a huge stone fireplace and low oak beams. A door on the right led into a modern kitchen, and another at the end of the room seemed to lead on to a stairway of sorts. A woman and a little girl of four or five came slowly through this door, the woman lowering her head.

  ‘This is Martha, Jim,’ his father tossed off lightly as he kissed her. ‘Any time you want her, just let me know. She’s on the youthful side for me. Gussie, you old humbug,’ he added to the little girl, ‘this is your big brother. If you’re nice to him he might give you five bob.’

  Jimmy was stunned, and his face showed it. This was something he had never anticipated and did not know how to deal with. He was too innocent to know even if it was right or wrong. Of course, things might be different in England. But, whatever he believed, his behaviour had been conditioned by years of deference, and he smiled shyly and shook hands with Martha, a heavy, good-looking woman, who smiled back without warmth. As for Gussie, she stood in a corner with her legs splayed and a finger in her mouth.

  ‘Sherry for you, son,’ his father called from the farther room. ‘I have to take this damn whiskey for my health.’

  ‘Before you take it, I’d better show you your room,’ said Martha, picking up his case. ‘You’ll need to mind your head.’

  ‘Oh, please, Martha!’ he said anxiously, but she preceded him with the bag, through the farther room where his father was measuring whiskey in a glass against the light and up a staircase similar to that in the dining-room. In spite of the warning, Jimmy bumped his head badly, and looked in good-humoured disgust at the low doorway. The stairs opened on to an attic room with high beams, a floor that sloped under the grey rug as though the house were on the point of collapse, and a low window that overlooked the garden, the roadway, and the common beyond, a cold blue green compared with the golden green of home. Beyond the common was a row of distant hills.

  When he went downstairs again they all sat in the big room under his, and he took the sherry his father offered him. He was too shy to say he didn’t drink. It was a nice room, not too heavily furnished, with its diamond-paned windows looking on to the gardens at the front and back, and with a small piano. This gave Jimmy the opening he needed. It seemed that Martha played the piano. In spite of their common interest, he found her very disconcerting. She was polite, and her accent was pleasant, but there seemed to him to be no warmth in her. He had trained himself to present a good impression without wasting time; he knew that he was polite, that he was intelligent, and that he had a fine voice; and it was a new experience for him to find his friendliness coming back to him like a voice in an empty house. It made him raise his voice and enlarge his gestures until he felt that he was even creating a disturbance. His father seemed to enjoy his loud-voiced caricature of Aunt Mary extolling the scholarship of Great Uncle Harvey, a character who struck Jimmy as being pure farce, but a moment later, having passed from amusement to indignation, he was irritably denouncing Great Uncle Harvey as the biggest bloody old humbug that had ever come out of Macroom. He was a man who seemed to move easily from mood to mood, and Jimmy, whose own moods were static and monumental, found himself laughing outright at the sheer unexpectedness of his remarks.

  After supper, when Martha had gone to put Gussie to bed, his father stood with his hands behind his back before the big stone
fireplace (which, according to him, had already asphyxiated three historical personages and would soon do for him). He was developing a stomach and a double chin, and Jimmy noticed a fundamental restlessness about him, as when he failed to find some letter he was searching for and called petulantly for Martha. She came in with an expressionless air, found the letter, and went out again. He was a man of many enthusiasms. At one moment he was emotional about Cork and its fine schools, so different from English ones, where children never learned anything but insolence, but a few minutes later, almost without a change of tone, he seemed to be advising Jimmy to get out as quick as he could before the damn place smothered him. When Jimmy, accustomed to an adoring feminine audience, gave him the benefit of his views on the Irish educational system, its merits and drawbacks, he sat with crossed legs, looking away and smiling as though to himself while he twirled the glass in his long sensitive fingers. He was something of a puzzle to Jimmy.

  ‘I suppose you must think me a bit of a blackguard,’ he said gruffly, rising again to give the fire a kick. ‘The truth is, I hadn’t the faintest idea what was happening you. Your mother wouldn’t write – not that I’m criticizing her, mind you. We didn’t get on, and she deserves every credit for you, whatever your aunt or anyone else may say. I’d be proud of her if she was my mother.’

  ‘So I am,’ said Jimmy with a beaming smile.

  ‘All I mean is that she put herself to a lot of unnecessary trouble, not letting me help you. I can easily see you through college if that’s all you want.’

  ‘Thanks,’ Jimmy replied with the same air of triumph. ‘But I think I can manage pretty well on scholarships.’

  ‘All the better. Anyway, you can have the money. It’s an investment. It always pays to have one member of the family with brains: you never know when you’ll need them. I’m doing fairly well,’ he added complacently. ‘Not that you can be sure of anything. Half the people in a place like this are getting by on credit.’

  It was all very strange to Jimmy. He bumped his head again going up to bed, and chuckled to himself. From far away he heard the whistle of a train, probably going north on its way up the valley towards Ireland, and for a long time he lay in bed, his hands joined on his stomach, wondering what it all meant and what he should do about it. It became plainer when he contemplated it like this. He would just ask his father as man to man whether or not he and Martha were married, and if the answer was unsatisfactory, he would pack his bag and go, money or no money. No doubt his father would make a scene, and it would all be very unpleasant, but later on he would realize that Jimmy was right. Jimmy would explain this to him, and make it clear that anything he did was done as much in his father’s interests as his own; that nothing was to be gained by defying the laws of morality and the church. Jimmy knew he had this power of dominating people; he had seen old women’s eyes filled with tears when he had sung ‘I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen’, and, though he rejoiced in the feeling of confidence it gave him, he took care never to abuse it, never to try and convince unless he was first convinced himself. He fell asleep in a haze of self-righteousness.

  Next morning, after his father had driven him to Mass in the gymnasium of the local club, it did not seem quite so easy. His father seemed a more formidable character than any he had yet met. But Jimmy had resolution and obstinacy. He summed it all up and asked in a casual sort of way: ‘Was it there you were married?’

  His father’s face grew stern, but he answered urbanely enough.

  ‘No. Why?’

  ‘Nothing,’ Jimmy said weakly. ‘I just wondered.’

  ‘Whether a marriage in a gymnasium would be binding? I was wondering the same thing myself.’

  And, as he got into the car, Jimmy realized that this was as far as ever he would get with his big scene. Whatever the reason was, he was overawed by his father. He put it down partly to the difference in age, and partly to the inflexibility of his own reactions. His father’s moods moved too fast for him; beside him he felt like a knight in heavy armour trying to chase a fleet-footed mountainy man. He resolved to wait for a more suitable opportunity. They drove on, and his father stopped the car near the top of the hill, where there was a view of the valley up which the railway passed. Grey trees squiggled across it in elaborate patterns, and grey church towers and red-tiled roofs showed between them in the sunlight that overflowed into it from heavy grey-and-white clouds.

  ‘Lovely, isn’t it?’ his father said quietly.

  Then he smiled, and suddenly his face became extraordinarily young and innocent. There was a sort of sweetness in it that for a moment took Jimmy’s breath away.

  ‘You see, son,’ he said, ‘when I was sixteen my father should have taken me aside and told me something about women. But he was a shy man, and my mother wouldn’t have liked it, so, you see, I’m in a bit of a mess. I’d have done the same for you, but I never got the chance, and I dare say when you’re a bit older you’ll find yourself in a thundering big mess, too. I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were you. Time enough for that when it happens.’

  Then he drove on to the pub, apparently under the impression that he had now explained everything. It struck Jimmy that perhaps he would never reach the point of asking his father for an explanation.

  His father had changed again and become swaggering and insolent. He made Jimmy play a game of darts with him, flirted with the woman of the house, and made cutting remarks to her husband about the local cricket team which her husband seemed to enjoy. Jimmy had the impression that for some reason they all liked his father.

  ‘Silly bloody game, anyway,’ he added with a snort. ‘More like a serial story than a game. Give me a good rousing game of hurling where somebody’s head gets split.’

  ‘God, this is a beautiful country,’ he muttered to Jimmy, standing at the door with one hand in his trousers pocket, the other holding his pint, while he smiled across the sunlit common, and again his face had the strange sweetness that Jimmy had noticed on it before. ‘You’d be a long time at home before you could go into a country pub on Sunday and meet a crowd like this.’

  There was a sort of consistency about his father’s inconsistencies that reminded Jimmy of the sky with its pennants of blue and cascades of silver, but he found he did not like him any the less for these. He did not feel quite so comfortable on the train back to Ireland, wondering what he should tell his mother, feeling that he should tell her nothing, and knowing at the same time that this was something he was almost incapable of doing.

  Naturally, he told her everything in the first half-hour, and, when she grew disgusted and bitter, felt he had betrayed a confidence.

  ‘What did I say about your aunt?’ she exclaimed. ‘All the time she was pressing you to go there, she knew what it was like.’

  ‘I’m not so sure that she did know,’ Jimmy said doubtfully. ‘I don’t think Father tells her much.’

  ‘Oh, Jimmy, you’re too innocent to know what liars and cheats they all are, all the Garvins.’

  ‘I didn’t think there was much of the cheat about Father,’ Jimmy protested. ‘He was honest enough about it with me.’

  ‘He was brazen about it,’ his mother said contemptuously. ‘Like all liars. ’Tisn’t alike.’

  ‘I’m not sure that he was brazen,’ Jimmy protested weakly, trying in vain to assert himself again in his old authoritative way. ‘It’s just that he’s not a good liar. And, besides,’ he added knowingly, folding his hands on his lap and looking at her owlishly over his spectacles, ‘we don’t know the sort of temptations people have in a place like England.’

  ‘Temptations aren’t confined to England,’ she said with a flash of temper.

  By this time she was regretting bitterly her own folly in allowing him to visit his father. She resented, too, his father’s having brought him to a public-house, even though Jimmy explained that he had only drunk cider, and that public-houses there were different. But her full bitterness about this was reserved till later, when J
immy started going to public-houses on his own. He now had a small allowance from his father, and proceeded to indulge his mother and himself. He had made friends with a group that centred on the College: a couple of instructors, some teachers, some Civil Servants – the usual run of small-town intellectuals. Up to now, Jimmy had been a young fellow with no particular friends, partly because he had had no time for them, partly because, like most kids who have no time for friends, he was scared of them when they made advances to him.

  It was about this time, too, that he acknowledged my existence, and the pair of us went for occasional walks together. I admired him almost extravagantly. Whatever he did, from the way he chose his ties to the way he greeted a woman on the road or the way he climbed a fence, was done with an air, while I stumbled over all of them. It was the same with ideas; by the time I had picked myself up after making a point, Jimmy would be crossing the next obstacle, looking back at me and laughing triumphantly. He had a disciplined personality and a trained mind, and, though he was sometimes impressed by my odd bits of knowledge, he was puzzled by my casual, impractical interests and desultory reading. He was a good teacher, so he lent me some elementary books and then started to take me through them step by step, but without much effect. I had not even the groundwork of knowledge, while he was a natural examination-passer with a power of concentration that I lacked completely.

  At the same time I was put off by his other friends. They argued as people do who spend too much of their time in public-houses – for effect. They were witty and clever and said wounding things. In spite of my shortcomings, I had a sort of snobbery all my own. I felt they were failures, and I had the feeling that Jimmy only liked them for that very reason. His great weakness was showing off. I sat with them one evening, watching Jimmy lower his beer and listening to him defend orthodoxy against a couple of the others who favoured various forms of agnosticism. He argued well enough in the stubborn manner of a first-year philosophy student. Then he sang for us, a little too well for the occasion. I did not like it, the picture of the fellow I had known as a slim-faced, spectacled school-boy, laying down the law and singing in a pub. He was idling, he was drinking – though not anything like as much as his mother believed – and he had even picked up a girl, a school-teacher called Anne Reidy with whom he went to Crosshaven on week-ends. In fact, for the first time in his life Jimmy was enjoying himself, and, like all those who have not enjoyed themselves in childhood, he was enjoying himself rather too much.