The Mask and Other Stories

by Nesta Tuomey

‘Ah now, Mrs. Reilly, I think you’re being too hard on poor Miss Carney,’ said May Galvin laughing. She could have pointed out that life in Nan’s house left much to be desired with Annie constantly locking away the eatables, the bread in particular.

  ‘May she die roaring,’ said Nan sourly. ‘Ah she couldn’t have luck. Nor him neither!’ Her lips bunched over something rotten as she dwelled on her wrongs.

  Where her own sex was concerned Nan did not pull her punches. Not for her the cosy relationships other women enjoyed, gossiping on weekday afternoons over tea and muffins. The truth of it was Nan mistrusted her own sex and they had just reason to mistrust her. Friendship with Nan was very much of an arbitrary nature, they soon found, and easily set aside, no matter of how long duration, in favour of the male sex. In this respect Nan was very much a man’s woman. ‘If there were no bad women there’d be no bad men,’ was a view she strongly held.

  ‘Oh aye, Iggy’s the chatterbox, right enough,’ the purser hooted, delighted at his own wit.

  Nan continued cremating toast, a cigarette-butt drooping on her lower lip. Ignatius Carney had never been much company she was forced to admit – a favourite expression of hers and how she rated in terms of usefulness family and lodgers alike - but he had been there as second fiddle to the purser, another male presence in the house, the willing sampler of her famous scones (more past than present) and, if needed, one more bulwark against the lonely ravages of old age. The irony of it struck her now.

  ‘And what about you,’ she rounded on her husband. ‘You with your head always stuck between the pages of a book. I’da been in a queer way if I was relying on you for company. God help us all! Give us the marge, Sadie.’

  Sadie did. Nan spread it thick and yellow on the dusky toast. No matter what the purser said she knew life in the Carney household would not be all joy. Far from it! With relish she began describing the barren scene for the benefit of the girls. The purser got up and left the room. Like Annie, he had a short span of attention.

  By teatime Nan’s sympathies had switched around again. ‘Ah what else could poor Mr. Carney do?’ she posed the question with the scrambled eggs. ‘Sure he was only acting out of family feeling.’

  ‘I see Iggy’s the white-headed boy again,’ observed the purser, grinning around the table. But Nan wasn’t listening. She was busy rearranging the furniture in Mr. Carney’s room. She adorned the bed with a frilly bedspread and matching pillows. So what about November? She’d soon fill that room. She reached in the window and drew out the faded notice. After a moment she scored out ‘Suit settled man’ and wrote instead ‘Suit mature woman’. It was the first time she had advertised her own sex. A whole new sea of possibilities. She dropped the bait behind the net curtain.

  By the second week in November Nan’s new lodger, Maisie Moroney, night-club artiste, was installed. Nan put her in Mr. Carney’s old room and gave her a latchkey – reluctantly, for she kept late hours and the sound of her taxis arriving and departing on the road woke everyone up.

  ‘Just off to earn the daily crust,’ she would cry, meeting them on the stairs, ‘Tar-ar! Mind how you go!’ Her accent was a mixture of Southern Irish with a Cockney overlay. Day or night she dressed in luridly coloured sheath dresses, gold and silver bracelets in jangling opposition on either plump wrist. She seemed insulated against the cold, her only concession to the worsening weather was the addition of a feather boa to her ensemble.

  Fearing for her electricity bill Nan plunged the landings in darkness after ten o’clock and clawed her way dangerously to bed. Maisie snapped them on again and they stayed burning till Annie went down at seven to light the Aga. In retaliation Nan replaced the bulbs. An eerie twilight pervaded.

  In or out, Maisie kept her room locked. Nan was disappointed. She had looked forward to a good rummage. Maisie forgot one day while urgently attending to a call of nature and Annie, dustpan in hand, stood transfixed by the life-sized poster covering one wall. In her religious fervour she mistook the orgy of cavorting flesh for a biblical tableaux. She hurried to inform her mistress.

  ‘Hardly decent,’ Annie said.

  Nan heard her in silence. She imagined it was a scene from one of Maisie’s triumphs and yearned to see it. Only she was anxious not to wrong-foot herself with her new lodger she would have gone in with her own key on the pretext of sounding the windows.

  In the New Year, when her engagements were presumably lighter, Maisie was freer in the evenings and Nan got in the habit of inviting her into her sitting-room. They sat toasting their toes at Nan’s two bar electric fire, sipping punch and swapping stories. Nan was intrigued by the younger woman’s freedom of movement. She had never gone further than Cork herself and was avid for the glitz of London. Vicariously she toured with Maisie from town to town, parading the footlights; gobbling like cheap wine the tales of back-stabbing and blighted love. When Maisie mentioned names that had been big in their day, she nodded wisely, as though intimately acquainted. Sometimes she was betrayed into reaction.

  ‘Not her and that fellah!’ she protested.

  ‘Cross my heart and hope to you-know-what,’ agreed Maisie, absently topping her whisky. Once she had been on the same stage as Frankie Howerd and shared cocktails backstage. This shoulder-rubbing with celebrities impressed Nan more than anything else. She had a bawdy sense of humour and no one could out-smut Frankie. At such times Maisie undoubtedly had the upper hand. But Nan was a householder, a woman of property. Mostly she felt superior to Maisie who owned nothing that did not fold into a suitcase. An enjoyable sensation.

  ‘It’s a tonic having her in the house,’ she told everyone, ‘The laughs we have!’ For the first time she had a friend of her own sex. Mr. Carney might never have existed. Even Sergeant Breen with whom Nan was wont to crack a bottle of Fifteen Year Old whisky was dropped.

  ‘That old codger,’ said Maisie with a reminiscent leer. ‘I could tell you things.’ Nan questioned her to find out what she meant. Ah, said Maisie, that’d be telling. What was she getting at? Ah, nothing really. Nan was maddened. ‘Well,’ she prompted, ‘Well? Go on!’

  Maisie let out a screech, ‘Giving me the eye, the old goat. I seen his type before. A hand up a girl’s skirt quick as look at you.’

  Nan was flabbergasted. She began to see the sergeant in a new light. Her fat shoulders heaved. Together they supported each other, snorting and giggling, till Maisie’s mascara ran.

  In the spring Maisie was in raptures over some new show. She was vague as to details but it meant she would be rehearsing in the afternoon and evenings. Nan hardly ever saw her. It was three months since she had taken her into her house and she wondered how she had spent her time before Maisie came. The daffodils were out and sun showed up the dust everywhere. Nan had no interest in her property. She sat at the window staring out, changing her mind every minute about going to town in case Maisie returned early, snapping at the purser when he told her she was becoming a right streak of misery.

  One evening Maisie brought in a man she introduced as the leading light in the new show, and a thickset fellow in an Arran sweater, his hair barbered so short Nan winced. ‘Don’t disturb yourselves, folks,’ Maisie begged. ‘We’re not stopping. Just looked in to say nightie-night.’

  ‘Aren’t you the great stranger,’ Nan reproached with a distressed smile. ‘And here’s the sergeant come over the road to hear all about your show. Wouldn’t youse sit down with us and have a drink?’ she coaxed, starved for a bit of gossip.

  The sergeant waved his glass and looked vaguely at his shirt buttons. He was not enamoured of Maisie.

  ‘Don’t be tempting me,’ Maisie screeched, ‘and me wid me tongue hanging out.’ With excitement her origins became more pronounced. ‘Gimme a rain check, Auntie dear. Opening night next week.’ And the trio went upstairs.

  ‘A tough class of an actor,’ observed the purser. ‘What’s he playing...Billy Bud?’

  ‘You shut up,’ said Nan, ‘What do you know about the stage? Only what
came out of a book.’ She felt cheated. Two men! How she would have enjoyed entertaining them. A sense of rejection swamped her as she refilled the sergeant’s glass. She avoided his eye, remembering Maisie’s derision. Only he was good enough for her now. She felt tainted in his company.

  A week later, Nan had occasion to inspect her property and happened on a scene which blew the myth of Maisie the showbiz artiste once and for all out the window. Imagining the house deserted she unlocked a door to find Maisie displaying her charms (which were not inconsiderable) to a similarly liberated nude figure. Nan’s scandalised gaze travelled from the orgy on the bed to the Rabelaisian poster overhead. Hysteria choked her. This was no rehearsal but the real thing. She groped behind her for the door. The entwined figures hastily parted. Nan turned and stumbled, almost tripped down the stairs, to the sanctuary of her kitchen where the purser dozed over his book.

  ‘The trollop,’ she spat, ‘Deceiving decent folk. Go up at once,’ she commanded her husband. ‘Throw the pair of them out.’

  The purser was inclined to take a more cautious view. ‘And what if they’re married?’ he asked, unwilling to risk a killer blow from some outraged navvy.

  Nan gave a great horse laugh. ‘You must think I was born yesterday,’ she said scornfully. But she agreed to wait till the customer, as he could only be, had gone.

  While the purser went back to his book Nan sat like the Sphinx and brooded. Night-club artiste indeed! All this time...and to think she had never even suspected. Oh the slut! She fretted as the couple were an interminable length finishing up their business. A half-hour passed, an hour.

  With an outraged sigh, Nan put on her coat and hat. ‘Tom Breen will know what to do,’ she informed the bristly back of the purser’s head. Although retired five years from duty the sergeant was still a force to be reckoned with – in Nan’s eyes and his own. She hastened stiffly to where she knew she would find him at that time of day, digging the plot behind his house.

  The sergeant’s wife showed Nan in and went to rap on the window. Knocking soil from his boots, the sergeant lumbered up the path. Nan poured out her tale of woe. The deceit, the lies. ‘I was never so took in,’ she gasped. She told him she needed him to enforce law and order. She wanted Maisie Moroney evicted from her house.

  The sergeant sat her down and tried to calm her, told her how he had all along recognised Maisie’s type. Hadn’t he seen her kind in villages all over the country, he said, during his time with the force.

  Nan broke down at this confirmation of her fears. ‘Oh, wasn’t I the right gullible one,’ she wept. ‘Oh, the trollop... when I think... the taxis all hours of the night. Oh! Oh!’

  The sergeant left his wife brewing tea and went up to his bedroom where he kept his old garda uniform protected from moths. He released it from its plastic bag and struggled into it. He was a big man, stout and pot-bellied, overfond of his food and liquor. Once his prospective mother-in-law described him to interested relatives as ‘A fine figure of a man.’ Only now the figure which in earlier years had commanded her admiration was fuller and finer than ever.

  The sergeant turned and caught a daunting glimpse of his own obesity in the mirror. With a sigh he gave up trying to tug great bunches of flesh into his trousers and went down to join Nan. Ten minutes later they were walking in her front door.

  Nan’s niece stared in astonishment, not recognising their old neighbour in the full regalia of the law. ‘Good evening, Sadie,’ the sergeant said ponderously as he stepped past her, exuding a strong smell of mothball.

  ‘Come along, sergeant,’ Nan fussed in unnaturally loud tones, as if hoping to penetrate the walls of Maisie’s room. ‘Straight up... The second door...I’m right behind you,’ and other such assurances to keep him at the sticking point. Perhaps with the same intention of intimidating the enemy Sergeant Breen banged his boots down with unnecessary force on the threadbare carpet.

  Below in the hall the purser leaned with folded arms, sardonically awaiting the reappearance of the arresting party. ‘We’ll hunt the monster out,’ he muttered slyly, meeting Sadie’s eye.

  Nan, shadowing the sergeant’s broad back, began to feel a heady kind of exhaustion. Fearful lest what he had to say might prove too mild for her she prodded him urgently n the small of his back (or where in all that spreading flesh she judged it to be), and held her heart as he pounded authoritatively on a bedroom door.

  In the light from the unshaded spotlight Maisie was seen to pose lumpishly in the doorway. She had put on clothes since Nan had seen her and was clad now in one of her uniform sheath dresses in glaring green.

  ‘No law against giving an old friend his welcome, is there, Sarge?’ she fluttered her mascarad lashes at him.

  ‘Come along now like a good girl,’ the sergeant rumbled wearily from under his cap. Partially obscured by his massive bulk Nan shifted in the gloom.

  Maisie peered around him, ‘Oh, Auntie!’ she cried in her little-girl voice, ‘There you are! Do me a big favour,’ she wheedled. ‘Just another night. Honest, on the level!’

  Nan’s heart steeled. She turned without a word and stumbled downstairs. From behind came Sergeant Breen’s cautioning rumble, ‘Anything you say...’ She shut the door of her sitting-room.

  For weeks Nan kept away from Maisie’s room. On the night of the eviction she had been escorted from the premises by the sergeant, the door shut firmly on her by the purser. Nan had stayed in the kitchen unable to bear the sight. She felt both the betrayer and the betrayed. Before long she heard from the sergeant that Maisie had returned to her old haunts, she had been seen getting on a boat for the other side.

  In the spring, Nan saw her in every dyed blonde that hailed a taxi or wobbled past the house on spindle heels. When she went to town she headed for the theatres, to scan the showbiz photographs and illuminated names. People queued at the box office, purchased programmes. Maisie’s deceitful face seemed to smirk from every billboard. Then Miss Quinn collapsed from starvation and was found in bed, more dead than alive. The ambulance took her away. The purser went down the country on a long threatened visit. Sadie and May graduated from college and went to London to get work. When Nan came back from seeing them off at Dublin airport she sat alone in the kitchen drinking tea. Her shoulders were hunched, her hair unpermed; she had aged since Maisie left.

  Outside, Annie indulged her green finger, poking geraniums in the earth. Nan’s cat snoozed in the sun. Inside, an unnatural stillness prevailed. As if the rooms were crouching, just lying in wait! Nan shivered, and allowed herself be drawn upstairs.

  Maisie’s room showed signs of a hasty departure. The wardrobe door swung open, the huge poster still dominated the wall. Nan stared intently at the plump simpering nudes and sneering satyrs in an attempt to wrest an answer from their writhing limbs but all she could see was a remarkable resemblance to those she had surprised on the bed that day. Women were ever the fall of man. ‘Temptresses!’ Nan groaned. ‘Jezebels!’ the words coming in a lonely croak from her throat.

  She went downstairs and took the yellowing sign from the window. She severed it and shoved the pieces in the grate. Beyond the dingy net she set a balding cactus and went to sit and brood over her cooling tea. Nan Reilly’s brothel-keeping days were well and truly over.

  False Alarm

  Miss Simpson’s house was set on three-quarters of an acre; a fortress surrounded by neat rows of semi-detached houses. Her family had originally owned all the land for miles about but over the years gradually sold it off, bit by bit, until now it was the only one of its kind. With all the new houses springing up around her, she was like a rock that has been submerged a long time and is suddenly covered in barnacles. She was accustomed to being alone and had no need of anyone. Now this was beginning to change.

  Despite her advancing years Flora Simpson was a woman who looked and was youthful. Out in all weathers clad in loose-fitting slacks and white sneakers, the red of her Arran cardigan could be glimpsed like some exotic Nomadic bloom ami
dst the foliage, or blossoming suddenly at the top of a ladder, hooked somewhat precariously to the gutters of the house. She had her own set of plumbing rods, something was always getting stuck in the drains for she was a good cook but a careless housekeeper.

  She took pride in never having to call in outside help, delighted in tackling what was regarded as the preserves of the experts. Nothing seemed beyond her. Then one afternoon while she was down the garden building a bonfire with the help of the neighbouring Rooney boys, her house was robbed and vandalised.

  Among life’s big traumas Flora rated the burglary as the most disturbing since she had come across her father slumped dead in the rockery, his face pressed deep in the grape hyacinths. She had doubted she would ever get over the shock. Twenty years later the break-in relegated it to a less acute place on her emotional register. Overnight, she aged, began to doubt what formerly she had accepted unquestioningly.

  The brazenness of the daylight raid struck Flora with dread. She grew afraid to stay in the house and afraid not to be in it. It was a fear which accompanied her at all times, except perhaps, for a few brief moments in the day.

  When pruning a rose bush she felt almost happy, then anxiety like a grey hood coifed her spirits and she would hasten indoors, a strange dread in her heart and an even stranger dislike, for she doted on the rambling old building in which she had lived all her life.

  As the weeks wore on the neglected state of her property drove Flora outdoors again. She stood, her troubled gaze moving past the rusting swing to encompass the tennis court, its demarcation lines concealed beneath the lavish pampas grasses sprung into lushness by unseasonably heavy rains. She found it hard to believe it was not even a month since the eldest Rooney boy had gone over the whole place with the motor mower. In that short space it had turned into a wilderness. Soon it would need a scythe.

  In the past Flora remembered her grandfather tackling what was then a meadow covered in thistles and scutch grass. She had watched the sun spark flashes of light off the curved blade as he swung it rhythmically through the tangled vegetation. With his stooped back and wild mop of white hair she had been reminded of Old Father Time in her storybook. ‘What a lot of land we had in those days,’ she thought. ‘At least six times as much as now.’