by Brian Moore
“The Guards are holding Con.”
“What?”
“They told me to ring up the court in Cork before five o’clock. I just got through to them now,” she said. “Con and Packy Deane were arraigned this afternoon and charged with stealing a lorryload of scrap iron. Someone informed on them. They’re to come up for trial on the fifteenth of next month.”
“Who told you this?”
“One of the clerks at the courthouse. That’s why I had to ring up before five. The courthouse shuts at five.”
“Why didn’t you tell me you had to phone?”
“Con said I wasn’t to tell you. He said the police would never charge him.” She began to rock again, violently, and as the car rounded a bend her forehead struck the windshield.
“Be careful,” he said. “Did you hurt yourself?”
But she did not seem to hear. She rocked and rocked. “The clerk said he could get five years,” she said, as if to herself. “The caravan is only rented. And I get nothing. I have no assistance, nothing.”
The road ahead came to the crook of the long sea inlet, and the car crossed a narrow bridge and turned up toward Drishane, the mountain, and the yellow, dirty caravan on top of it. He looked at her as she rocked beside him, her blue eyes staring ahead, the glory of her long red hair framing the altar of her perfect features. Impossible to think of so desirable a girl as a waif. But in the last two hours all that had changed. As he watched her rocking to and fro, isolated in her worry and misery, her very youth and beauty seemed an added handicap. What shopkeeper’s wife would allow this girl to work close to her husband? And for that matter, what work could she do? She seemed to have no skills and little education. England? Wasn’t that the Irish answer? She could always emigrate, he supposed.
“What about England? There are jobs there.”
“I was going there last winter. Two fellows I know promised to pay my fare. But Con said if I got a bad turn there, there’d be nobody to help me. They’d put me away like they did Aunt Eileen. And there’s no work here. That’s the God’s truth, I’m telling you. I’ve looked for work. I wrote away to Dublin for a job in nursing. But I never got my School Leaving. You need your School Leaving. I’d do anything to get away from here. But there’s no one wants me.”
I want you. God, how I want you. Never mind the nightmares, the bad turns. You’re so young, you could learn to forget the past. In New York in our big bedroom overlooking Beekman Place you could sleep in peace.
A cyclist lurched suddenly into his line of vision and he had to pull the wheel over sharply to avoid a collision. Looking back, he saw the cyclist waving frantically, as though to stop him. It was the old postman he had seen the other day behind the mountain with Kathleen. Through his side-view mirror he saw him hop off his bike, still waving. Mangan stopped the car and backed up the road.
“It’s Pat the Post,” Kathleen said, rousing herself from her miserable rocking.
The postman undid his satchel. “Nice soft day,” he said, gesturing up at the drizzling rain. “I waved to you, sir, because I have a letter for you that was sent in error to the Sceptre Hotel. Wasn’t it the lucky thing now that I saw you, for I’d have had to head up the mountain tomorrow to give it to you.”
He handed over a large envelope which Mangan recognized instantly by the engraved notation of Weinberg, Greenfeld, Kurtz and Norris. “It’s a Special Delivery, sir. Maybe you’d better read it directly, in case you’d be wanting to make some answer.”
As Mangan tore open the envelope, he heard the old postman say to Kathleen, “I hear Con’s in a bit of trouble.”
She looked up at him sullenly. He smiled, displaying a mouth naked of all but three long yellow teeth. “I hear that he and Packy Deane are assisting the police with their inquiries, as the saying goes. From Cork City jail, no less.”
“So you think that’s funny, do you?”
“Ah, now no offense, Kath. Go on with you. Sure, and it will take better men than the Guards to nail anything on the same Packy. And he and Con are best butties.”
“They are that, I hope,” said Kathleen, as though swearing an oath.
“And what about your letter, sir?” the postman asked. “Not bad news, is it?”
Mangan had not looked at the letter. Now he fingered its several sheets, first glancing at one labeled Disbursements: Funeral, amazed at the size of the total; then going on to sheets of figures mostly to do with Beatrice’s father’s portfolio of investments. He turned quickly to Weinberg’s letter and skimmed its official yet chatty prose. The will would be probated on the twenty-fifth of the coming month. “In the meantime,” Weinberg wrote, “to answer your question, I’d make a rough estimate of the value of the entire estate, including real estate, as being in the region of $800,000.”
“No, not bad news,” he told the toothless postman.
“No answer, then?”
“No, thanks.”
“Well, I’ll be on my way then, sir, as soon as you sign this receipt for the letter.”
Mangan took the form and a pen and signed. The postman turned to Kathleen. “Now, don’t you worry your head. Con will be all right. He’ll be all right.”
Mangan started the engine. He noticed she had begun to rock again. Eight hundred thousand. A hell of a lot of money. A great fortune in Ireland. He waved to the postman as they drove off. She rocked. She is in misery because she thinks she will not be able to manage her life if her drunkard brother goes to jail. But I can manage her life. I can take her away from here. I can show her London and New York. I can get her doctors and sedatives for her “bad turns.” Beatrice never needed me. This girl needs me.
And so he took her home, through Drishane and up the winding road past Duntally, where Dinny lived with his half-mad mother, and on up to the very top of the mountain and the dirty yellow caravan on the topmost ridge. And as he parked the car there, her mood seemed suddenly to change. Her dog ran toward her, barking, and she went to it and in the way of a little girl picked it up, fondling it as though it were a doll, running across the wet grass to the caravan steps, her gloom gone, swift as childish tears. Again he thought of her as a child, his troubled child to whom he would be father and lover and fairy prince. But as he picked up the liquor bottles and followed her toward the caravan a less flattering simile came to mind, not fairy prince but Sugar Daddy, thirty-six and eighteen. Crabbed age and youth cannot live together.
But thirty-six wasn’t old, was it? Never mind what they said in his youth about not trusting anyone over thirty. He watched her skip up the steps of the caravan after pushing the dog back into its lair beneath the chassis. Pygmalion replaced the Sugar Daddy image: he would bring her to New York, buy her clothes, teach her table manners, send her to college, Professor Higgins to her Eliza. But he remembered that Professor Higgins did not sleep with Eliza. Not bloody likely. A truer model was probably the professor in The Blue Angel, the stout Emil Jannings playing the love-besotted academic, standing in the wings in some run-down cabaret crowing like a cock on the orders of Marlene Dietrich, his imperious young tart of a mistress. Co-co-ri-co! Co-co-ri-co!
“What are you screwing up your face like that for?” she asked as he came in, ducking his head at the low caravan door.
“Co-co-rico-co!” he crowed. “I was imitating a cock.”
“That doesn’t sound like a cock,” she said. “Not an Irish cock. But then you don’t have an Irish cock, do you?” She laughed smuttily and went to the sink. “Gin,” she said. “That’s your only man. Let’s have a bit of gin, now. Are you hungry? Do you want me to fry you up some rashers and sausage?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“You need looking after,” she said, opening one of the fresh gin bottles and pouring lavishly into two half-washed tumblers. She added a splash of bitter lemon. “You poor old soldier,” she said. “I keep forgetting you’re just out of the hospital. Are you tired? Do you want to lie down on the sofa for a while?”
He looked
at the dirty green plush sofa, its pelt rubbed bare along the back and armrests. “I wish we could go down to the other house,” he said.
She took her drink and sat on the sofa. “Come here a minute,” she said. “Sit by me. Tell me. Do you like me at all?”
He looked at her saint’s profile. It seemed almost sacrilegious to answer with a simple yes. “Kathleen,” he said, “do you know I never met anyone as beautiful as you?”
“But do you like me?”
“I’m mad about you. I’d do anything in the world for you.”
“Ah, you’re joking me.” She drank more gin. “You were married to a fillim star,” she said, as though reminding herself.
“You’re much more beautiful than she was.”
“I’ll bet at your age you’ve said that to a lot of girls.”
“At my age?” He was wounded. “How old do you think I am, then?”
“You must be thirty, at least.”
“Does thirty seem old to you?”
She stared at the soiled chenille rug. “I was thinking,” she said. “Con will be over thirty by the time he gets out of jail.”
“But he hasn’t even been tried yet.”
“He did it,” she said. “And I know in my bones that they’ll get him for it.” She looked at him. “You said you’d do anything for me. Would you lend me my fare to America?”
He went to her and sat beside her on the dirty sofa. He put his arms around her and kissed her plaster-cold cheek. “I’ll do more than that. I’ll take you myself.”
“I don’t want you to take me. We have an aunt in Pittsburgh on my mother’s side. She’d write a letter for me so that they’d let me in. But I couldn’t be asking her for the fare, for her husband is just a lift man that runs the lift in some office there. Anyway, they’d write the letter for me saying they’d look after me. What sort of place is Pittsburgh?”
“It’s no place,” he said. “Listen, I have a big apartment in New York City. And I have a very nice summer house right on the sea out in Long Island.” He kissed her again. He sang:
“Oh, I will take you home, Kathleen,
To where you heart has never been,
Way across the ocean wide,
I will take you to my home, Kathleen.”
She looked at him. “Did you just make that up?”
“No, it’s an American song. Don’t you know it?”
She shook her head. “Don’t be singing or saying any more poems, will you?”
“Why not?”
“I don’t like it. And with that face on you and saying poems, you’re like somebody’s ghost.”
“Your uncle Michael?”
“Ah, let me alone.” She disengaged herself from his arm, got up, and went to the sink, where she poured herself more gin.
“Careful with that,” he said.
“It’s your only man, gin.” She laughed. “It’s right for what ails you.” She drank and, drink in hand, went to the caravan’s dirty window and, pulling aside the faded curtains, looked at the dark bluff of mountain outside. “I could manage in America,” she said. “At least I’d be away from all of this. Last summer I worked in a hotel up in Ennis. It’s called the Old Ground Hotel, did you ever hear tell of it?”
“No.”
“Oh, it’s very grand. I made the beds. I could do that in America.”
“You wouldn’t have to. I’d be your sponsor.”
But she continued to look out of the dirty window. “I met an English fella the time I was in Ennis. He was like yourself, over on his holidays. I met him at a dance, and when I told him I was at the Old Ground, he didn’t know that I meant I was working there. He wanted me to go to England with him. He said he was mad for me. Just like yourself. And do you know? When he found out it was as a maid I was working in the hotel, he was ashamed to sit in the lounge bar of the hotel with me. It would be no different with you. You’re only with me now because you’re on your holidays.”
“That’s not true. I’ll prove it.”
“Oh, there’s no need for that.” She turned from the window and looked at him. “I’ll tell you what. You lend me my fare to Pittsburgh and a few quid to get me started and I’ll go down to the house with you tonight and stay with you and look after you and do whatever you want for as long as you’re here in Ireland.” She made a mock gesture of spitting in the palm of her hand and held her hand out, palm upward, in the same gesture he had seen the cattle dealers use in Bantry when they struck a bargain. “Put your hand on it,” she said. “It’s a fair bargain. You’ll not regret it.”
He took her hand in his. “But I mean it,” he said. “We’ll go to America together.”
“I don’t want that. I made you an offer. You lend me the fare and give me, say, fifty quid as a thank-you present. That’s what I want. No more and no less.”
He laughed and kissed her. “Whatever you want,” he said. “I told you I’ll do whatever you want.”
“Right, then.” She went to the sink, put bread, butter, gin, and a chocolate cake into a cardboard carton. “Do you want a fry before we go down to the house?”
“No, I’m not hungry.”
“All right, I’m ready, so,” she said. She switched on the flashlight and blew out the kerosene lamp. “Come on,” she said.
In the flashlight’s cold beam he looked at her. She was trembling. “Look, we don’t have to go down there. I mean, if it upsets you.”
“No, I’ll be all right.” She ran down the steps. “Come on,” she called. “And close that door.”
He came out and shut the caravan door. The dog had run out from under the steps and was frisking about his mistress, a moving blur of excitement in and out of the circle of her flashlight. Gradually, as his eyes became accustomed to the night, he saw that the sky was a shifting chiaroscuro of grays and blacks, backlit by a cold theatrical moon. The clouds, running as before a storm, sundered as they struck the mountain face, bringing with them a light drizzling curtain of rain. Ahead of him she walked swiftly across the field and onto the precipitous narrow road, the dog padding along on her left, her flashlight searching out the ground in an erratic sweep. He heard the clink of bottles in one of the plastic bags slung over her arm and the gravelly sound of her footsteps as she started down the steep road toward the gray sinister house, its rooftop and east wall now visible above the fuchsia hedge which hid its yard.
And then, suddenly, the dog ran ahead of her, yelping as though it had been kicked. Her flashlight searched for it and found it, fur flat on its skull, snarling in a mixture of rage and fear as it stood in front of an opening in the ditch. The flashlight leaped about like a will-o’-the-wisp but discovered nothing. The hedge was low and sparse, the hole in the ditch revealing only a green slope which culminated in the gray stone of the mountain bluff. But the terrified dog continued its ear-offending yelps until Kathleen, shouting, bent, picked up a stone from the road, and threw it, striking the dog in the hindquarters. “Gerroutofthat, Spot! Go on home. Go on!” She lifted a second stone and threw it, missed the dog, who turned tail and went larruping up the narrow road, barking, turning its head back as though it were pursued.
“What caused that?” Mangan asked.
“It might be a cat.”
She turned away from the gap in the ditch and went on down toward the house, he following a pace behind her. His swollen lip throbbed constantly; the gin he had drunk on and off since afternoon had failed to deaden the pain of his many bruises. He felt dull and brutish, a stumbling bull led on by the nose ring of his lust. He looked at his keeper as she hurried ahead, leading him into the yard of the old house. He thought of the cattle drover’s gesture she had made just now when she proposed her bargain, the mock spit on her palm before she led away her prize, a prize worth, perhaps, a passage to America and a few pounds for services rendered, but old, unsuitable to accompany her on her journey to a new life. Co-co-ri-co!
And now, having entered the yard, he looked up at the high sloping roof, vis
ible in the light of that cold theatrical moon which appeared over the top of the mountain ridge, and as Kathleen hurried forward and bent down, her flashlight finding the rug and the key hidden under it, the house gave out that piteous cry he had heard before, as though some small animal were trapped in its roof. “Did you hear that?” he said to Kathleen, but she had found the key and wrenched it around in the lock, dragging the door open with a harsh clatter of its wooden floorboard on the stone. As always, he experienced the minatory presence of the building which faced him, but as the small cry echoed in his ears, he felt a new and strange sensation. It was as though the house feared him, feared his approach, feared his penetration of its secrets. And so, with Kathleen’s impatient light to guide him, he made his way down the hall mined with tin pots and cans, aware of her increasing nervousness but losing his own unease.
“There’s two lamps in the kitchen, we’ll get them and bring them upstairs. That way we’ll have plenty of light in the room.”
He obeyed her, lighting matches in the dank kitchen as he took the glass cones off the kerosene lamps and turned up the wicks. Then, each holding a lamp, they made their way out again and started the ascent of the stairs. “Do you want to go to the toilet?” she said. “Well, go then, because once we’re up, I don’t want you up and down the stairs in the night.”
“All right.” He left her and went down the back passage to the narrow lavatory with its ball-and-chain tank and cut newspapers stacked in the toilet-paper box attached to the door. He saw her light going up the flight of stairs and then, his own lamp filling the lavatory’s narrow space, urinated and went to wash his hands in the little sink in the adjacent bathroom. It was as he came out of the bathroom that he heard the cry again, and this time it was close, so close that he started and his hand holding the lamp shook in alarm. It was just ahead, wasn’t it? Slowly, he went forward into the hall corridor. He could hear her footsteps on the floorboards of the bedroom above and, looking up, could see the light streaming onto the first-floor landing from the opened bedroom door. Could it be a rat or a bat which uttered that small, piteous cry, not quite animal, yet not quite human, either? Let it be. He should go up. She was alone, she was afraid, and she was waiting for him. But as he went toward the staircase, he noticed to his surprise that the door of the sitting room was open. He had always been careful to close it. And Kathleen had not opened it. Slow, aware of the sound of his own footsteps, he went down the hall and into the room. His kerosene lamp filled the shadowy parlor with a warm golden light, bringing furniture, photography, portraits, and bric-a-brac into focus as though a stage were suddenly lit. He stood staring at the Victorian clutter, seeing for the first time the heavy green plush curtains drawn back from the bay windows. It seemed that at any moment he might hear the sound of voices in the hall as dinner guests returned for an evening of conversation here in the parlor with music perhaps and maybe a song or two.
