Through Streets Broad and Narrow

by Gabriel Fielding

  This was their sitting-room and was full of Catholic pictures and junk. There was Our Lady of Lourdes standing against a quarry with flowers at her feet, an enormous Sacred Heart with a vase-like neck dripping perpetual red drops of wax into its surrounding crown of thorns, a small bust of one of the popes and a photograph of a nun with roses kneeling in a grey garden with the whites of her eyes a little exposed between the lower lids and the pupils.

  There was no fire in the fireplace because fires were never lighted before November or December, depending on the weather, when Mary, the younger sister, would fetch out the saved orange peel and put a match to it under the remains of last February’s cinders.

  The orange peel was dried and shrunken as the breasts of a mummy and blazed furiously, because as Mary explained, “it was the oils in it.” They must have gone to great trouble to preserve it, never doing more than slicing the oranges in half in order to get the fruit out of them, and then putting them away in the chip box in the cupboard under the stairs.

  Friday at the Flynns’ was not too bad in the way of supper. The leftovers from the Tertiary tea were still nearly fresh, the bread not yet parting from the cucumber or fish paste, and the spice buns quite soft if soaked first in the excellent brown tea. Nevertheless, John had never succeeded in eating it all, partly because the bread filled him up too quickly and partly because there was a dilemma in his increasing anger at the fare. If anything were left he would get it the following evening and that would save them money; whereas, if for once he consumed it all, they would be pleased that nothing had been spoiled while he would have been used like a waste bin. They seemed to be in an unassailable position and if he had not been so nervous of Dublin, of changing his quarters at all in those first months, he would have been so very resentful from an early date that he would have given in his notice and gone elsewhere.

  He was extremely timid at this time, excusing himself by advancing his late development as a cause. To have been so long at home had made him fearful of leaving Ulsterville Avenue without first consulting everyone about it in Anglesey, which was impossible. Although he did not realize it, this first timorousness up by Glasnevin was the primary symptom of the disease he developed fully only five years later: a caution and suspicion of the Dublin Irish which amounted nearly to paranoia and which dogged him for fifteen years afterwards.

  Despite the constancy of his fear and anger he was always polite: his politeness astonished him, he had never said a word that was not a miracle of courtesy. When they came in as they often did to stand about him and watch him with strange kindness he always pretended to be enjoying the food. He heard them rub their mauve hands as he crunched up the spice buns the Franciscan Tertiaries had been unable to eat a night or two before. He even found himself saying, as he said now, most complimentary things about their kindness in having saved the stuff for him.

  Greta asked him what he was doing that night, was he going to study at his books again? And he told her, no, that he was going down to the Clynches’ in Cork Street.

  “Are you now?”

  He felt them glance at one another behind his back because the Clynches’ were Catholic and they knew it. But they did not know that this did not yet enter at all into his reckoning, that he had not even become socially sensitized; it being as unimportant to him as a political allegiance, or perhaps even a little less so. Theresa Clynche was the one he had his eye on in Cork Street, and what she did on Sunday mornings did not interest him in the very least.

  The Catholicism of the country to him was like its climate; he noticed it occasionally but had it so firmly fixed in his mind that Ireland was Catholic, green and wet that except for the odd time he did not care whether most of the inhabitants carried umbrellas or not. His nonchalance on this was lost quite soon, and in the social sense, quite completely, by the accumulation of trivial incidents like the Flynns’ silver paper party.

  For some reason, conciliatory, no doubt, he suggested on this particular evening that he would help them with it for half an hour or so. While Greta cleared the tea things he went into the next room with Mary and sat down at the table on which the silver paper and the medals were stacked in large bundles and little boxes.

  This was St. Joseph’s room. There were a number of statues of him with and without Family, and at least three different pictures showing him young and in the background: a hale bridegroom. There had been a picture in the Northumberland nursery showing Our Lord and His earthly father at work in the carpenter’s shop using very modern tools, a light breaking round the Child’s head as He held the hammer and the nails; and this was the point, that St. Joseph was just a background figure whom no one would have brought forward to the extent of filling a room with him. Nor making him so young and good-looking.

  The children of the Guild of Mary had collected a vast amount of silver paper from chocolate boxes and packets, cigarette cartons and the insides of tea chests. There was even some tangerine silver paper left over from somebody’s Christmas the year before and they must have scoured the slum pavements and shops to collect it because some of it was gutter-dirty and mixed up with old bills and apple peel. It had all to be smoothed out and folded flat and packed neatly to go off to the hospital or some sodality or other; and once this was done and it had been weighed and priced, the children would get their Vatican medals in exchange: pope’s heads, miraculous plaques, and Sacred Hearts with thorns through them.

  “Do you give them oranges or anything with the medals?” he asked Mary.

  “Who? The chilldren?” (Mary pronounced it like that always, making them sound very cold and poor.)

  “Yes, the children who collected it?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “They wouldn’t be wanting them.”

  “Well, cocoa then, in the winter?”

  “Notatall,” she said; all in one word, for emphasis.

  “But they’re slum children, aren’t they?”

  “They’re poor,” she said, pronouncing it “poohr.” “They’re very poohr, all right.”

  “Well, then, surely you ought to give them something to eat? They can’t eat these,” he said, dripping a rain of medals through his fingers.

  “They’d rather have them all the same,” she said, lifting her voice as Greta came in. “Wouldn’t they, Greta? Here’s Mr. Blaydon wanting to know if we give the chilldren oranges or cocoa with the medals?”

  The cucumber and fish paste rising and souring him as much as the scorn he thought he detected in her voice, he said, “We always fed them. In my father’s parish in the north of England, the Wolf Cubs, Guilds, Mothers, Scouts and Guides always got a bellyful summer and winter; not just a bellyful of talk, but of food as well. Why, even after Communion, there was the parish breakfast, buns and marmalade, home-baked bread and tea and sugar. Tea cakes!”

  “Ah, Commungyon,” they said together.

  “He doesn’t understand,” said one of them as they both went on so greedily at the silver paper that it might have been his money they were counting and storing away.

  “No, I don’t! Not if you take their silver paper and sell it while they are hungry. Our Lord commanded that you should feed my sheep.”

  “Ah! St. Peter,” they whispered together.

  “Hell!” he said, pushing back his chair.

  “Now don’t be angry,” said Greta.

  “No, don’t be flaring at us,” added Mary. “You see it’s right even though we can’t explain. It’s very hard to be finding the words: the chilldren want the medals.”

  “More!” said Greta. “They want them more; and the poorher they are, don’t they want them desperately?”

  “Well, in any case, I’ll have to be going,” he said, rising impatiently from his chair. “There’s never time to explain something that’s wrong. You’ll find that; I have already.”

  “So you’re very young,” said Mary. “Isn’t he, Greta?”

  “He’s young and a little lonely just
now.”

  “That’s nothing to do with it,” he said. “It’s the children that matter. I’ve seen some of them already, they’re lighter than birds and I have a friend who’s going to be a good doctor who says half of them have the rickets over here. We don’t have rickets in England.”

  “England!” they said with just a suggestion of sighing in the way they looked upwards at the ceiling. And, as he got to the door, “Well, goodnight now, Mr. Blaydon, and if you’re wanting a warm drink when you come back in from the Clynches’, there’s some milk in the kitchen.”

  And water in the tap, he thought, as he went up to his bedroom to brush and brilliantine his hair before going down to the Clynches’, whom he had met on that first weekend with George through an introduction of Molly Fagan’s, an Irish friend of Mother’s. He had remembered the Clynche family ever since because he had liked the look of both the daughters, Aileen, the elder one, and Theresa, the younger.

  At the time of his first visit in 1934, Aileen had been married about three months to a young doctor called Dennahay who was serving abroad somewhere in the British Air Force. She showed him her rings and kept telling him how wonderful marriage was. One afternoon, when Theresa was on duty in the hospital where she worked, Aileen had taken him on the open tram out to Howth Head and on the way back had shown him her honeymoon photographs. They were very tempting: mostly of her in a hotel bedroom in a filmy nightdress looking tired and made up, one or two of her lying in the heather with her hair down or posed on a rock. There were none of her husband and John had asked her why.

  “What’d be the difference in a man?” she had replied. “Aren’t most of them on a permanent honeymoon from the time they grow up? Now look at this one! Those are the earrings Anthony gave me—the last present I’ll have until he gets his leave next year.”

  “Does Theresa want to get married?” he had asked.

  “She wouldn’t know yet; she’s so young.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “She will be all right but she doesn’t have a thought of such things—being a dedicated probationer at the Children’s Hospital.”

  “Even with all your mother’s lodgers rushing in and out?”

  “The students have to pass their exams.”

  “So did your husband, presumably?”

  “Anthony never dated me until he was in his fourth year.”

  They had held hands on the way back; but Aileen had made it quite clear that she would go no further. That night, indeed for several weeks afterwards, he was troubled by thoughts of being qualified, married and on a Lake District honeymoon with Theresa wearing earrings and makeup. He was troubled because it couldn’t possibly come true for another six or seven years and probably wouldn’t even then.

  But when he reached their house that evening almost a year later it was the same as ever, taking the domestic pattern it had assumed that first weekend so long ago and maintaining it throughout the whole of his Theresa phase.

  For one thing, twelve months ago the two elder Clynche boys, Brittas and James, had been charged with making a new basement lavatory for their mothers’ lodgers and there had been jokes about it even then. This lavatory was never completed; it was in keeping with the plans for Brittas which never wavered simply because the target was never specified. It was only understood that he was working these last three years in the coal office in O’Connell’s Quay “strictly pro tem” before going somewhere else that would be “intirely executive.” He appeared to like John in a tired way and John, responding to this, came to dread the weekends when Brittas wasn’t there, only James and Kevin, the youngest, and the bridge party upstairs in Theresa’s bedroom.

  James was long-faced and even more tired than Brittas. John never discovered what he did but it was very obvious that he detested it, that it filled him with the greatest hatred for everything he disliked and most particularly Englishmen, with good clothes, hanging round his sister Theresa. Later, when the conversational undertone of Dublin had become familiar to him, the long slow monotone about the Six Counties, “Dev” and the Post Office Rising and the Black and Tans, John began to understand the set of James’ chin and the grey look he had about his ingoing mouth whenever he heard an English accent. It was very easy to imagine him standing armed by a park wall with a Unionist peer somewhere on the other side of it, or organizing a dawn execution in the Phoenix Park.

  Fortunately, the rest of the family made him very welcome in their different ways. Kevin smoked his cigarettes, Brittas pulled his leg gently while old Brigid, when she was “dummy,” came down from the bridge party and talked at a great rate through her unpinned white hair. She was usually in what she called her “dishabille”; a long black dress of some sort ash-patched from her cigarettes and strewn with the hairs which were not so much white as yellow from the fumigation of her Sweet Afton cigarettes.

  Really her body was very ugly and unkempt; it didn’t do to concentrate on any part of it below the chin. She had quite forgotten her feet and legs, wearing any old bedroom slipper or tramped-down shoe with terrible stockings. Care and some presence of mind began at the hips with corsets and a fairly regular brassière which could be seen askew over her abandoned breasts. But she did remember her face. Though devoid of makeup, it was always washed and full of fire and enthusiasm for one thing or another; for her children, lineage, her bridge hands, or a horse she had backed.

  It never struck John until much later, when he had moved on and up into the deep country and met the County, that Brigid Clynche was no more than an Irish slattern dragging up her family between Mass and the cards while her husband fried the Limerick bacon in the basement. When it did strike him it still was not true.

  He did not often go up to the bridge room but he caught the essence of it from Groarke’s Foxrock aunt, who, he discovered, had been an habituée of it for years. They were all tea women up there, smoking smoking smoking their dangling Sweet Aftons and drinking drinking the best tea in the British Isles. Most of them were in their late forties at the really grand stage where their bodies bulged and their eyes were full and they had so much experience and sharpness to get across in between hands that their scoring was always in doubt because of the ardour of their talk. It was his impression that their fat racy gatherings were quite sexless, that they were in some strange sense similar to their Massings, a great gaggle of mothering wives or widows, counting their cards as they counted their beads waiting for sure Heaven when the games and absurdities were over for ever.

  Aileen had her own room at the top of the house somewhere and he was rarely in there. It was a perch where she waited and preened like a Madame Butterfly dreaming of her Pinkerton and storing the wages she earned in Switzers’ dress department. When things were going badly for him with Theresa, which was all the time, she would listen to his confidences and advise him sadly and quite uselessly. She would say, “Ah, she’s young, John, she’s never been out of Ireland yet. You’ll just have to wait and not frighten her or make her suspicious and she’ll learn to trust you.”

  Trust me, he thought, looking at Theresa and listening to the misty sound of her voice. What’s the good of taking her to the Theatre Royal weekend after weekend, having coffee at the Shamrock and then tramming back here to James and Kevin yawning in the cigarette smoke? What shall I tell her about, talk of? I’ve told her everything and listened to everything: the baby who had a pyloric stenosis in her ward, what the surgeon said, and it’s Kevin’s birthday Tuesday.

  It’s myself I want to put across to her, that’s all. Why can’t she be interested in me? Filled with admiration at all the things I’ve told her about the past and the infinite possibilities of my future? I want to drop all this swanking and everything and be permanently admired like Pinkerton. On the films they get accepted; they don’t have to talk all the time, the girls just fall for them. It’s understood. And then he would hear her laugh at something or catch the clarity of her eyes and think, Good God! she should have been at my feet months
ago. I come from England, I have what must seem an awful lot of money, I’ve travelled and the steward said I was good-looking. What’s more she’s only a probationer nurse at the Children’s Hospital and I’m going to be—he would shoot a long line about his medical ambitions and she would half-listen with her eyes and say nothing.

  She was a bird on a perch and you couldn’t get a bird on a perch. He tried to cage her in with words and feed her with the seeds of a consuming admiration so that then they should start. He never specified what it was that they should start; it certainly was not marriage at this stage. It was just love; love as warming, active and uncircumscribed as the loves of others appeared to be, the loves of the films which lasted a couple of hours or a lifetime, several months or a weekend. Something to be sure of, a circle without beginning or end of admiration, necking, talks and silences; unordained but necessary, essential.

  She would hardly ever let him kiss her, and when he did she gave nothing. She just stopped thinking her bird-like thoughts for a moment, or singing the song that was quiet as a robin’s, and pecked at the ant of his kiss and pushed him away. He lusted after her exceedingly.

  The lust kept him going long after all other desires had starved of inanition. It was a curious thing, more or less the residue of a sort of poetry; or if not the lees of this excitation, then the beginning of it. But whatever it was, whether the primer of the charge or its dull remainder, it stayed with him always, keeping him going back constantly to the house in Cork Street, Saturday after Saturday, and hanging heavily about him all the way back to Glasnevin when Sunday was over, to weight the following days of the week until Saturday came round again.

  In an insufficient way he told Groarke about it and Groarke gleamed and made wicked jokes about it. He said, “Take your mackintosh with you.”

  “What d’you mean?”

  “When you take a woman out, make sure it’s raining and get down in a field or under a tree with your mackintosh.”

  He ended this by laughing terribly and then said, “For Christ’s sake come and do the femur.”