The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  But one day in the office he got chatting with a girl called Janet who had something to do with personnel. She was a tall, thin, fair-haired girl with a quick-witted laughing air. She listened to him with her head forward and her eyebrows raised. There was nothing in the least alarming about Janet, and she didn’t seem to want to convert him to anything, unless it was books, which she seemed to be very well up in, so he asked her politely to have supper with him, and she agreed eagerly and even called him Mick without being asked. She seemed to know as if by instinct that this was what he wanted.

  It was a great ease to him; he now had someone to argue with, and he was no longer scared of the country or the people. Besides, he had begun to master his job, and that always gave him a feeling of self-confidence. He had a quiet conviction of his own importance and hated servility of any sort. One day a group of them, including Janet, had broken off work for a chat when the boss’s brisk step was heard, and they all scattered – even Janet hastily said: ‘Good-bye.’ But Mick just gazed out the window, his hands still in his pockets, and when the boss came in, brisk and lantern-jawed, Mick looked at him over his shoulder and gave him a greeting. The boss only grinned. ‘Settling in, Darcy?’ he asked. ‘Just getting the hang of things,’ Darcy replied modestly. Next day the boss sent for him, but it was only to ask his advice about a scheme of office organization. Mick gave his opinions in a forthright way. That was another of his little weaknesses; he liked to hear himself talk. Judging by the way the boss questioned him, he had no great objection.

  But country and people still continued to give him shocks. One evening, for instance, he had supper in the flat which Janet shared with a girl called Fanny, who was an analyst in one of the factories. Fanny was a good-looking, dark-haired girl with a tendency to moodiness. She asked how Mick was getting on with Mrs Penrose.

  ‘Oh,’ Mick said with a laugh, sitting back with his hands in his trouser pockets, ‘she still calls me Mister Darcy.’

  ‘I suppose that’s only because she expects to be calling you something else before long,’ said Fanny.

  ‘Oh, no, Fanny,’ said Janet. ‘You wouldn’t know Penrose now. She’s a changed woman. With her husband in Egypt, Peter posted to Yorkshire, and no one to play with but George, she’s started to complain of people who can’t appreciate the simple things of life. Any day now she’ll start talking about primroses.’

  ‘Penrose?’ Mick exclaimed with gentle incredulity, throwing himself back farther in his chair. ‘I never thought she was that sort. Are you sure, Janet? I’d have thought she was an iceberg.’

  ‘An iceberg?’ Janet said gleefully, rubbing her hands. ‘Oh, boy! A blooming fireship!’

  ‘You’re not serious?’ murmured Mick, looking doubtfully at the two girls and wondering what fresh abyss might remain beneath the smooth surface of English convention.

  Going home that night through the pitch-dark streets, he no longer felt a complete stranger. He had made friends with two of the nicest girls a man could wish for – fine broad-minded girls you could talk to as you’d talk to a man. He had to step in the roadway to make room for a couple of other girls, flicking their torches on and off before them; schoolgirls, to judge by their voices. ‘Of course, he’s married,’ one of them said as they passed, and then went off into a rippling scale of laughter that sounded almost unearthly in the sinister silence and darkness.

  A bit too broad-minded, thought Mick, coming to himself. Freedom was all very well, but you could easily have too much of that too.

  But the shock about Penrose was nothing to the shocks that came on top of it. In the spring evenings Janet and he cycled off into the near-by villages and towns for their drinks. Sometimes Fanny came too, but she didn’t seem very keen on it. It was as though she felt herself in the way, but at the same time she saw them go off with such a reproachful air that she made Janet feel bad.

  One Sunday evening they went to church together. It seemed to surprise Janet that Mick insisted on going to Mass every Sunday morning, and she wanted him to see what a Protestant service was like. Her own religion was a bit mixed. Her father had been a Baptist lay preacher; her mother a Methodist; but Janet herself had fallen in love with a parson at the age of eleven and become Church for a while till she joined the Socialist Party and decided that Church was too conservative. Most of the time she did not seem to Mick to have any religion at all, for she said that you were just buried and rotted and that was all anyone knew. That seemed the general view. There were any amount of religions, but nobody seemed to believe anything.

  It was against Mick’s principles, but Janet was so eager that he went. It was in a little town ten miles from where they lived, with a brown Italian fountain in the market-place and the old houses edging out the grey church with its balustraded parapet and its blue clock-face shining in the sun. Inside there was a young sailor playing the organ while another turned over for him. The parson rang the bell himself. Only three women, one of whom was the organist, turned up.

  The service, to Mick’s mind, was an awful sell. The parson turned his back on them and read prayers at the east window; the organist played a hymn, which the three people in church took up, and then the parson read more prayers. There was no religion in it that Mick could see, but Janet joined in the hymns and seemed to get all worked up.

  ‘Pity about Fanny,’ she said when they were drinking their beer in the inn yard later. ‘We could be very comfortable in the flat only for her. Haven’t you a friend who’d take her off our hands?’

  ‘Only in Ireland,’ said Mick.

  ‘Perhaps he’d come,’ said Janet. ‘Tell him you’ve a nice girl for him. She really is nice, Mick.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ said Mick in surprise. ‘But hasn’t she a fellow already?’

  ‘Getting a fellow for Fanny is the great problem of my life,’ Janet said ruefully. ‘I’ll never be afraid of a jealous husband after her. The sight of her johns with the seat up is enough to depress her for a week.’

  ‘I wonder if she’d have him,’ Mick said thoughtfully, thinking how very nice it would be to have a friend as well as a girl. Janet was excellent company, and a good woman to learn from, but there were times when Mick would have been glad of someone from home with whom he could sit in judgment on the country of his exile.

  ‘If he’s anything like you, she’d jump at him,’ said Janet.

  ‘Oh, there’s no resemblance,’ chuckled Mick, who had never before been buttered up like this and loved it. ‘Chris is a holy terror.’

  ‘A terror is about what Fanny needs,’ Janet said grimly.

  It was only as the weeks went on that he realized that she wasn’t exaggerating. Fanny always received him politely, but he had the feeling that one of these days she wouldn’t receive him at all. She didn’t intend to be rude, but she watched his plate as Janet filled it, and he saw she begrudged him even the food he ate. Janet did her best to shake her out of it by bringing her with them.

  ‘Oh, come on, Fanny!’ she said one evening with a weary air. ‘I only want to show Mick the Plough in Alton.’

  ‘Well, who’d know it better?’ Fanny asked sepulchrally.

  ‘There’s no need to be difficult,’ Janet replied with a flash of temper.

  ‘Well, it’s not my fault if I’m inhibited, is it?’ Fanny asked with a cowed air.

  ‘I didn’t say you were inhibited,’ Janet replied in a ringing tone. ‘I said you were difficult.’

  ‘Same thing from your point of view, isn’t it?’ Fanny asked. ‘Oh, I suppose I was born that way. You’d better let me alone.’

  All the way out, Janet was silent and Mick saw she was in a flaming temper, though he failed to understand what it was all about. It was distressing about Fanny, no doubt, but things were pleasanter without her. The evening was fine and the sun in wreath and veil, with the fields a bright blue-green. The narrow road wound between bulging walls of flint, laced with brick, and rows of old cottages with flower-beds in front that leaned this way and
that as if they were taking life easy. It wasn’t like Ireland, but still it wasn’t bad. He was getting used to it as he was to being called Darcy. At the same time the people sometimes left him as mystified as ever. He didn’t know what Fanny meant about being inhibited, or why she seemed to think it wrong. She spoke of it as if it was some sort of infectious disease.

  ‘We’ll have to get Chris for Fanny all right,’ he said. ‘It’s extraordinary, though. An exceptional girl like that, you’d think she’d have fellows falling over her.’

  ‘I don’t think Fanny will ever get a man,’ Janet replied in the shrill, scolding voice she used when upset. ‘I’ve thrown dozens of them in her way, but she won’t even make an effort. I believe she’s one of those quite attractive women who go through life without ever knowing what it’s about. She’s just a raging mass of inhibitions.’

  There it was again – prohibitions, exhibitions, inhibitions! He wished to God Janet would use simple words. He knew what exhibitions were from one old man in the factory who went to jail because of them. You would assume that inhibitions meant the opposite, but if so, what were the girls grousing about?

  ‘Couldn’t we do something about them?’ he asked helpfully, not wishing to display his ignorance.

  ‘Yes, darling,’ she replied with a mocking air. ‘You can take her away to Hell and give her a good roll in the hay.’

  Mick was so staggered that he didn’t reply. Even then it took a long time for Janet’s words to sink in. By this time he was used to English dirty jokes, but he knew that this was something different. No doubt Janet was joking about the roll in the hay – though he wasn’t altogether sure that she was joking about that either and didn’t half hope that he might take her at her word – but she was not joking about Fanny. She really meant that all that was wrong with Fanny was that she was still a virgin, and that this was a complaint she did not suffer from herself.

  The smugness horrified him as much as the savagery with which it was uttered. Put in certain way, it might be understandable, and even forgivable. Girls of Janet’s kind were known at home as ‘damaged goods’, but he had never permitted the expression to pass. He had a strong sense of justice and always tended to take the side of the underdog. Some girls had not the same strength of character as others; some were subjected to greater temptation than others; he had never met any, but he was quite sure that if he had he would have risen to the occasion. But to have a girl like that stand up and treat her own weakness as strength and another girl’s strength as weakness was altogether too much for him to take. It was like asking him to stand on his head.

  Having got rid of her spite, Janet began to brighten. ‘This is wonderful,’ she sighed with tranquil pleasure as they floated downhill towards Alton and the Plough, a pleasant little inn, standing at the bridge, half-timbered above and stone below, with a big yard to one side where a dozen cars were parked, and at the other a long garden with rustic seats overlooking the river. Mick didn’t feel it was so very wonderful. He felt as lonely as he had done in his first weeks there. While Janet sat outside, he went to the bar for beer and stood there for a few minutes unnoticed. There was a little crowd at the bar; a bald fat man in an overcoat, with a pipe, a good-looking young man with a fancy waistcoat, and a local with a face like a turnip. The landlord, a man of about fifty, had a long, haggard face with horn-rimmed glasses, and his wife, apparently twenty years younger, was a good-looking young woman with bangs and a Lancashire accent. They were discussing a death in the village.

  ‘I’m not against religion,’ the local spluttered excitedly. ‘I’m chapel myself, but I never tried to force me views on people. All them months poor Harry was paralysed, his wife and daughter never so much as wet his lips. That idn’t right, is it? That idn’t religion?’

  ‘No, Bill,’ the landlord said, shaking his head. ‘Going too far, I call that.’

  ‘Everyone is entitled to his views, but them weren’t old Harry’s views, were they?’

  ‘No, Bill,’ sighed the landlord’s wife, ‘they weren’t.’

  ‘I’m for freedom,’ Bill said, tapping his chest. ‘The night before he died, I come in here and got a quart of old and mild, didn’t I, Joe?’

  ‘Mild, wadn’t it, Bill?’ the publican asked anxiously, resettling his glasses.

  ‘No, Joe, old and mild was always Harry’s drink.’

  ‘That’s right, Joe,’ the landlady expostulated. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  ‘Funny,’ said her husband. ‘I could have swore it was mild.’

  ‘And I said to Millie and Sue, “All right,” I said. “You got other things to do. I’ll sit up with old Harry.” Then I took out the bottle. His poor eyes lit up. Couldn’t move, couldn’t speak, but I shall never forget the way he looked at that bottle. I had to hold his mouth open’ – Bill threw back his head and pulled one side of his mouth awry in illustration – ‘and let it trickle down. No. If that’s religion give me beer!’

  ‘Wonder where old Harry is now?’ the fat man said, removing his pipe reverently. ‘It’s a mystery, Joe, i’nt it?’

  ‘Shocking,’ the landlord said, shaking his head.

  ‘We don’t know, do we, Charles?’ the landlady said sadly.

  ‘Nobody knows,’ Bill bawled scornfully as he took up his pint again. ‘How could they? Parson pretends to know, but he don’t know any more than you and me. Shove you in the ground and let the worms get you – that’s all anybody knows.’

  It depressed Mick even more, for he felt that in some way Janet’s views and those of the people in the pub were of the same kind and only the same sort of conduct could be expected from them. Neither had any proper religion and so they could not know right from wrong.

  ‘Isn’t it lovely here?’ Janet sang out when he brought the drinks.

  ‘Oh, grand,’ said Mick without much enthusiasm.

  ‘We must come and spend a few days here some time. It’s wonderful in the early morning.… You don’t think I was too bitchy about Fanny, do you, Mick?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not that,’ he said, seeing that she had noticed his depression. ‘I wasn’t thinking of Fanny particularly. It’s the whole set-up here that seems so queer to me.’

  ‘Does it?’ she asked with interest.

  ‘Well, naturally – fellows and girls from the works going off on weekends together, as if they were going to a dance.’

  He looked at her with mild concern as though he hoped she might enlighten him about a matter of general interest. But she didn’t respond.

  ‘Having seen the works, can you wonder?’ she asked, and took a long drink of her beer.

  ‘But when they get tired of one another, they go off with someone else,’ he protested. ‘Or back to the fellow they started with. Like Hilda in the packing shed. She’s knocking round with Dorman, and when her husband comes back she’ll drop him. At least, she says she will.’

  ‘Isn’t that how it usually ends?’ she asked politely, raising her brows and speaking in a superior tone that left him with nothing to say. This time she really succeeded in scandalizing him.

  ‘Oh, come, come, Janet!’ he said scornfully. ‘You can’t take that line with me. You’re not going to pretend there’s nothing more than that in it?’

  ‘Well, I suppose, like everything else, it’s just what you make of it,’ she replied with a sophisticated shrug.

  ‘But that’s not making anything at all of it,’ he said, beginning to grow heated, ‘If it’s no more than a roll in the hay, as you call it, there’s nothing in it for anybody.’

  ‘And what do you think it should be?’ she asked with a politeness that seemed to be the equivalent of his heat. He realized that he was not keeping to the level of a general discussion. He could distinctly hear how common his accent had become, but excitement and a deep-seated feeling of injury carried him away.

  ‘But look here, Janet,’ he protested, sitting back stubbornly with his hands in his trouser pockets, ‘learning to live with somebody isn’t a thing y
ou can pick up in a weekend. It’s a blooming job for life. You wouldn’t take up a job somewhere in the middle, expecting to like it, and intending to drop it in a few months’ time if you didn’t, would you?’

  ‘Oh, Mick,’ she groaned in mock distress, ‘don’t tell me you have inhibitions too!’

  ‘Oh, you can call them what you like,’ retorted Mick, growing commoner as he was dragged down from the heights of abstract discussion to the expression of his own wounded feelings. ‘I saw the fellows who have no inhibitions, as you call them, and they didn’t seem to me to have very much else either. If that’s all you want from a man, you won’t have far to go.’

  By this time Janet had realized that she was dealing with feelings rather than with general ideas and was puzzled. After a moment’s thought she began to seek for a point of reconciliation.

  ‘But after all, Mick, you’ve had affairs yourself, haven’t you?’ she asked reasonably.

  Now, of all questions, this was the one Mick dreaded most, because, owing to a lack of suitable opportunities, for which he was in no way to blame, he had not. For the matter of that, so far as he knew, nobody of his acquaintance had either. He knew that in the matter of experience, at least, Janet was his superior, and, coming from a country where men’s superiority – affairs or no affairs – was unchallenged, he hesitated to admit that, so far as experience went, Fanny and he were in the one boat. He was not untruthful, and he had plenty of moral courage. There was no difficulty in imagining himself settling deeper down on to his bench and saying firmly and quietly: ‘No, Janet, I have not,’ but he did not say it.

  ‘Well, naturally, I’m not an angel,’ he said in as modest a tone as he could command and with a shrug intended to suggest that it meant nothing in particular to him.

  ‘Of course not, Mick,’ Janet replied with all the enthusiasm of a liberal mind discovering common ground with an opponent. ‘But then there’s no argument.’

  ‘No argument, maybe,’ he said coldly, ‘but there are distinctions to be made.’