The Bay

by L. A. G. Strong

  “Nothing is wrong,” she said, and coughed softly. “I’m going to be married.”

  It was true. He was an elderly old fellow, by name Walters. He had followed the sea. I remember him well, a decent old chap with a wooden leg, who always wore neat navy-blue serge suits, and a peaked cap, and called me “My hearty”. Jealous though I wanted to be, and angry with him though we all were for taking Ann Dunn away, we couldn’t but like him.

  “He needs me,” said Ann Dunn to my mother. “He needs a home, and I can give him one.”

  “But, Ann Dunn—hasn’t he——”

  “He has money saved, and I have my bit of property.” She meant the basement. She always called it that. It had been left her by an aunt. “So it will be all right.”

  My mother looked at her helplessly.

  “Well, Ann Dunn, I’m sure I hope you’ll be very happy.” Then she stretched out her arms, and Ann Dunn was in them. But only for two or three seconds. She didn’t favour emotion.

  Well, she married the old fellow, and very happy they were. I went often to see them in Fitzwilliam Street, and Ann Dunn always gave me a big tea with a pullet’s egg, and Walters always gave me a great big peppermint ball out of a tin which he kept beside him in a let-in cupboard by the fire, where he sat. It was always his, that cupboard and that tin. Ann Dunn had nothing to do with it. It was his gesture of independence, for everything else in the place was Ann Dunn’s, and she took all the initiative. She didn’t boss him, or anything like that. He left the ordering of everything to her, and she did it naturally. But when he gave me the peppermint ball we were man to man. It was a very large peppermint ball. It filled my whole cheek, and I was hardly able to say anything. My good-byes were muffled, and I had great trouble not to dribble out of the corners of my mouth as I said them. The peppermint ball used to last me all the way home.

  That happy state of affairs endured for eighteen months, or two years. Then Walters died, quite suddenly, of a stroke. It was assumed at first that Ann Dunn should come back to us. But, to our surprise, she decided to stay on where she was.

  “But, Ann Dunn, won’t you be lonely, all by yourself?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  And it seemed she wasn’t. She used to come over, to help us, whenever we wanted it. Spring cleaning, for instance, was one of her festivals. She moved in, with her holdall, to superintend and achieve it. Any of the family who were in difficulties —the older generation, and the in-laws, I mean, for, as I said, my mother was an only child—they, plus their connections, down to the dimmest recesses of second cousinship several times removed, all felt entitled to call on Ann Dunn in times of crisis, and she appeared to acknowledge the responsibility. The holdall made many peregrinations, but the tin trunk stayed at Fitzwilliam Street, guarding the basement till Ann Dunn, her task completed, should return.

  The one person she jibbed at was my Aunt Edith. Aunt Edith frowned at her, privately disliked her, and would not let her alone. She had called in Ann Dunn once, relying on the family tie, and Ann Dunn had not refused. But there was this about her and her help. When she came, and was shown what it was she had to do, from caretaking or cleaning to nursing diphtheria or measles, Ann Dunn had to do things her own way. It was the best way, always. That the family recognised, all except Aunt Edith. Aunt Edith wanted a subordinate, who would take orders. The result was that Ann Dunn, after a brief interview, repacked her holdall and departed with an exterioras placid as when she came, but resolute never again to cross Aunt Edith’s threshold.

  This resolution, as you all have seen, she broke—on my account: and if I have managed to suggest to you anything of the character of this small indomitable woman, you will appreciate the devotion that led her, after my parents’ death, to come in and do for Aunt Edith, who had, as usual, parted with her domestic. No parlourmaid, cook, housemaid, tweeny, char, nothing in cap and apron could stand a long dose of my Aunt Edith.

  In a parenthesis, I am worried about my Aunt Edith. At a distance of fifty years, I can see her dispassionately enough. All the same, I run a real risk of presenting her to you as an ogre, or as the familiar thwarted spinster of fiction. I see her rather as a joyless woman driven on remorselessly by her religious belief and sense of what was right, unconsciously furious at the compulsion it held on her and the things it made her miss, and visiting this fury, and the ill-health it caused her, on all and sundry. If she drove others and gave them no peace, she gave herself no peace either.

  But to come back to Ann Dunn. She stayed with my Aunt Edith for a while, going back each night to Fitzwilliam Street. Aunt Edith didn’t like that, for a start. She didn’t like Ann Dunn to be independent. When you came to think of it, Ann Dunn was a householder like herself. This galled her, and led her to order Ann Dunn about. Ann Dunn went her own way: she would silently defeat Aunt Edith every day of the week: but it was obvious such a state of things couldn’t go on. Ann Dunn waited till a school was settled for me. She waited to see how I got on there. I’d find her ready for me each afternoon, when I got back, with my tea all set out: and she’d sit there, her hands folded on her lap, while I ate it. I quickly got used to this, and held on to it as part of the pattern of my life— you know the way most sorts of male beings do that, how soon we form habits and how tight we cling to them: so that it was a real shock when, one wet afternoon, she told me she couldn’t stay any longer.

  I cried out in dismay. I got up from the table, ran over to her, and caught her hands.

  “Ann Dunn, darling! Don’t leave me.”

  The plea must have hit her, but she showed no sign.

  “I must,” she said. “You see, I have my own little house to look after. And you’re all right now, at that nice school. And, you know, your Aunt Edith doesn’t wish me to stay.”

  I was on the point of protesting, but fell silent. Ann Dunn, as usual, had gone straight to the point. Aunt Edith was never so well served as when Ann Dunn was there, and nothing would have pleased her better than to keep such a paragon, if only the paragon had not been Ann Dunn.

  So Ann Dunn left, not without acid commentary from my Aunt Edith, made, not to her, but to me.

  “I don’t know what is coming to the lower classes,” she finished up. “They are utterly selfish. They have no sense of responsibility.”

  “Ann Dunn has her house,” I said, keeping my anger down as best I could. “She’s responsible for that.”

  “House!” said my aunt. “It’s nothing but a basement.”

  “Anyway, it’s hers. And she pays rates on it.”

  “A great mistake,” said Aunt Edith, referring, I knew, to the original bequest. “Giving her ideas above her place.”

  “What,” I said, opening my eyes wide, “a mistake to pay the rates? I thought that was the law.”

  “Don’t be pert,” snapped my aunt. “You know perfectly well what I mean.”

  The next instant, I don’t know why, I was crying and beating with my fists against Aunt Edith’s flat bosom.

  “You’re not to speak against Ann Dunn, you’re not to, you’re not to!” I stormed at her. “She’s the best person in the world.”

  My Aunt Edith fell back. She went very white. Then she recovered herself, and slapped my face twice, very hard. She sent me up to bed, and came in and stood with a cane while I undressed. I was afraid she was going to use the cane on me, and kept my trousers on as long as I could: but she simply stood there, very white, holding the cane in an attitude that was, I can see now, half ridiculous, half pathetic. But I was too young and too scared to see it then. I kept on the far side of the bed, edged my trousers down, and slipped my nightshirt over my head as quickly as on the coldest night of the year. I had a moment of real panic when it was over my head, and I was defenceless, and couldn’t see her.

  “I was going to whip you,” she said, when, hardly able to believe my good luck, I had leaped in between the sheets, and lay flat on my back, breathing fast. “I’m not sure it isn’t my duty to whip you. I beli
eve I am failing in my duty. But I am giving you the benefit of the doubt. What you did was wrong, terribly wrong and wicked. But you did it in fancied loyalty to someone else. You have not had a proper upbringing, or proper care. I shall make it my business to repair what has been left undone.”

  I opened my mouth to speak in defence of my parents, but to my shame, I said nothing. Instead, I began to cry. I turned my face away from her, and buried my head in the pillow. When, after a long time, I turned my aching head, she was gone.

  The winter light faded, and the room grew dark. People passed in the street, talking with hoarse comfortable Dublin voices. Some small boys cried out shrilly, and I heard their bare feet padding as they ran along the pavement. A milk cart jingled by, and the driver called a greeting to the maid three doors down. I knew his voice: it was Sam Gooney. I wanted to call out and tell them my sad tale: the tears welled into my eyes again, and I only stopped crying when a pale orange splash of light jumped on the ceiling. The lamp had been lit on the other side of the street.

  The light on the ceiling strengthened, and soon it was quite dark outside. I forgot my hunger, and sank back into a sort of peace. For the first time in my life, I knew that I was alone. The realisation came, I suppose, from the fact that those I depended on were gone; but it was something deeper. I realised in my soul that I was alone. I knew that, for all essential things, I should always be alone; that no one would be beside me in that deserted place where I must make decisions, and that it was better so. I have often come back to that knowledge since, often tried to forget it, sometimes succeeded: but always come back to it in the end, with thankfulness. Thankfulness seems an odd word for a child’s first discovery of his soul’s solitude. But those who have been there will know what I mean. I lay on that bed at peace in my new found loneliness, and, as the peace went deeper, I passed into a state of exaltation in which I saw, clearly and without surprise, that no real harm could ever happen to me: that, in all storms and pestilences, in the midst of ruin and misfortune and beggary, there was something inside me which never could be touched. It was a perilous thing to find out so young, since those who know these things early, who realise them, not from hard experience, but from inward grace, are generally set by the gods the task of winning their certainty outwardly as well as inwardly, of proving on the hard circumference of the world what they already know at the centre. You may be born with a virtue, but you’re damned lucky if you don’t have to prove it in actual practice. You may be born without jealousy, but you can thank your stars if you’re let go through life without losing your girl to another man. At least, that’s my experience.

  It was true this first time, too. My childish exaltation was shortlived. I had drifted into a state beyond feeling, except that I knew I was awake and I could see the light on the ceiling. Every now and then a breath of cool sweet air leaned in at the window, blowing the lace curtains away from the frame. I could hear them, though they made no sound, and see them too, without looking. Indeed, it was too dark to see them. Serene, beyond hope and fear, floating in a timeless air, I loved and pitied everyone. A brutish gruff voice wrangled in the street, and something high answered it, something like the squeal of a cat. It might be Guntey, and Siff, his dwarfish henchman. I saw past their squalor, I peeled them of their rags, and set them in sunny meadows, bathed with streams. A woman hurried by sobbing, clutching her shawl about her. Don’t ask me how I knew about the shawl: I knew. My mind followed her, sought out hers, and comforted it. Gars jangled by: I went with them, and blessed them. A cab drove down the street, clatter clop, clatter clop. Inside it a plump youngish priest sat forward, impatient, troubled, his elbows on his knees, holding tight to an umbrella. I sought him out, and asked him what ailed him. To me, child though I was, it seemed a trifle. I promised him it would all come right. The man and his wife would not do what he feared, and his superior would not be angry.

  I loved the people who went by, I blessed them all, I pitied their distresses, I comforted them. From these details I passed still deeper into a perception of the air or sea in which I was floating, and from that to pure contemplation.

  I was roused by a shock as violent as a blow. The door was pushed open, an unsteady light leaped into the room, and my Aunt Edith came in, carrying a candle. She set the candle down, clicked her tongue, went across to the window, shut it all but a crack at the top, and pulled down the blind. She stood for a minute, facing the window, rigid, with her back to me, and I noticed that the shirt-waist-blouse thing-—I don’t know what they called them, but it had elastic at the waist, and was allowed to fall over this in baggy sort of folds—I noticed that, in one place at the back, it had slipped out somehow, and hung wrong. She took in a deep breath, and I saw that her shoulders were shaking.

  When she turned to me, I couldn’t properly see her face, only the enormous dark shadows of her eye-sockets, and the sucked-in hollow of her cheek beside her mouth. I lay half frightened between the sheets, for, though I didn’t fear her really, I had no idea what she was going to say. I had the illusion that the sheets were stiff, as if I lay between unyielding layers of leather.

  Suddenly Aunt Edith began to talk, not in the explosion I feared, but in a low, hurried tone, the tone of a person saying something that has been on their mind a long time.

  “You have been neglected,” she said. “Your parents neglected to bring you up in a proper fear of God. I was very angry with you this evening, but I see that it is not altogether your fault, and I do not wish to be unjust. The way you have behaved since you came to my house shows that you have been so much neglected, I do not know where to begin. I have shirked my duty all this time. I should have begun at once. I put it off, weakly, but I can put it off no longer.”

  I lay quite still. She made a sudden movement, and I saw she was looking at me.

  “Do you know what God did to the world, when it was full of wicked people?”

  “Do you mean——” my voice sounded loud and harsh. I cleared my throat. “Do you mean the Flood?”

  “Yes. He destroyed the wicked with water. Do you know what He will do when He comes again?”

  “No, Aunt Edith.”

  “He will destroy them with fire. Have you ever burnt your finger?”

  “Yes. At a picnic at the Scalp. I caught hold of a stick when we were boiling the kettle. Uncle John was there, we——”

  “Then you remember how it hurt. How would you like to feel that pain all over you? In every part of your body? Have you ever seen chestnuts roasting on the stove?”

  “Yes, Aunt Edith.” I was really scared now.

  “Have you seen the way they pop and burst? That is how the eyeballs of the wicked will pop and burst in the fires of God’s anger. How would you like that? And how would you like it, not just for one short death that might take minutes, but for ever?”

  “I—I shouldn’t like it at all, Aunt Edith.”

  “Then take care to live so that you will escape it. That is God’s judgment on sinners. To burn in hell for ever.” She stood absolutely still, except for the tremor in her shoulders.

  “Do you say your prayers?”

  “Yes, Aunt Edith.” I breathed with relief. This was easier ground.

  “Always? Night and morning?”

  “Yes, Aunt Edith. Once or twice I forget, if I’m in a hurry for school. And one night I went to sleep first.”

  “How could you go to sleep first, if you kneel at your bedside?”

  “Mummy said at night I needn’t kneel. I could say them when I got in.”

  “Ach! I knew—wretched softness. Indulgence. I——”

  “Only in the cold weather, Aunt Edith. She said I might catch cold if I knelt in my nightshirt.’’

  “I—well! Luke. Listen to me. You are always, always to kneel down by your bedside before you get in. And ask God to forgive you for showing disrespect to Him all these years.’9

  I felt my inside knot, and my jaw go hard.

  “Mummy said it would be all
right. She said God wouldn’t mind.”

  “She said——! You are telling wicked stories.”

  “She did say it. I asked her, specially.”

  “I cannot think that even Mary—even your mother could take it upon herself to be God’s mouthpiece.” She turned away, and went on to herself. “Even she—— Oh: it’s all of a piece.”

  She stood for so long, muttering to herself, that I thought she had forgotten me. Then she turned again, and spoke in a harsh voice, not looking at me.

  “Luke.”

  “Yes, Aunt Edith.”

  “You are never to touch your body. Never. Do you hear?” I lay in stupefied silence.

  “You are never to—to play with yourself. You know what I mean.”

  I began to stammer.

  “N-no, I don’t, Aunt Edith.”

  “You know perfectly well. You are only pretending not to, to make me-How can you be so-I leave it to your conscience. I shan’t speak to you of it again. Remember, Luke——” She picked up the candle. “The wicked shall burn for ever.”

  She stood, the candlelight on her face, making it gaunter than ever. Her eyes gleamed.

  “Go to sleep now, and remember what I have said. Good night.”

  “Good night, Aunt Edith.”

  After she had gone, I lay sweating, utterly bewildered, and frightened as I had never been frightened before. It wasn’t fear of anything she could or would do to me, but that horrible, indescribable feeling of surprise, as if the solid ground had been pulled away suddenly from under one’s feet, to reveal the horrors of a torture chamber. As if the familiar wall of one’s bedroom or nursery had slid aside to show a den of terrifying animals. The world till then had had its puzzles, God knows. It had been bewildering and frightening enough, but I thought I knew what sort of place it was. I mean, walls and the solid ground didn’t fall away and reveal these horrors. One could trust the familiar friendly things and people to stay friendly and familiar. But this was something new. I’d never liked Aunt Edith, I was prepared for her to be cruel to me, like the wicked aunts and uncles and stepmothers in books. But this was unforeseen. I wanted to ask Ann Dunn about it, but she wasn’t there. Sharply then, for the first time since her death, I turned to my mother. For the first time, I realised that she was gone, and wept for my loss. I had cried before, but dutifully. Don’t mistake me: I loved her dearly, and my father too, though I saw much less of him. But, till that minute, I hadn’t let myself fully take in the fact that they were dead. Think of it, after all. A little chap of six or seven sees his parents off for a holiday, and then is told one day that they have been drowned. He doesn’t realise it. It doesn’t mean anything to him. He doesn’t see them dead, and for quite a while it’s just like the other times when they went away from home. Deep down, he still expects them one day to come back. My mother often went with my father on his business trips, and was away for a fortnight or three weeks at a stretch. I had spent a great part of my time in Ann Dunn’s care, and, as that went on, up till the day Ann Dunn left my Aunt Edith, the surface of my life was not much changed.