A Very Irish Christmas

by James Joyce

  The Tommy Crans

  ELIZABETH BOWEN

  HERBERT’S FEET, FROM DANGLING SO long in the tram, had died of cold in his boots; he stamped the couple of coffins on blue-and-buff mosaic. In the Tommy Crans’ cloakroom the pegs were too high—Uncle Archer cocked H.M.S. Terrible for him over a checked ulster. Tommy Cran—aslant meanwhile in the doorway—was an enormous presence. “Come on, now, come!” he exclaimed, and roared with impatience. You would have said he was also arriving at the Tommy Crans’ Christmas party, of which one could not bear to miss a moment.

  Now into the hall Mrs. Tommy Cran came swimming from elsewhere, dividing with curved little strokes the festive air—hyacinths and gunpowder. Her sleeves, in a thousand ruffles, fled from her elbows. She gained Uncle Archer’s lapels and, bobbing, floated from this attachment. Uncle Archer, verifying the mistletoe, loudly kissed her face of delicate pink sugar. “Ha!” yelled Tommy, drawing an unseen dagger. Herbert laughed with embarrassment.

  “Only think, Nancy let off all the crackers before tea! She’s quite wild, but there are more behind the piano. Ah, is this little Herbert? Herbert …”

  “Very well, thank you,” said Herbert, and shook hands defensively. This was his first Christmas Day without any father; the news went before him. He had seen his mother off, very brave with the holly wreath, in the cemetery tram. She and father were spending Christmas afternoon together.

  Mrs. Tommy Cran stooped to him, bright with a tear-glitter, then with a strong upward sweep, like an angel’s, bore him to gaiety. “Fancy Nancy!” He fancied Nancy. So by now they would all be wearing the paper caps. Flinging back a white door, she raced Herbert elsewhere.

  The room where they all sat seemed to be made of glass, it collected the whole daylight; the candles were still waiting. Over the garden, day still hung like a pink flag; over the trees like frozen feathers, the enchanted icy lake, the lawn. The table was in the window. As Herbert was brought in a clock struck four; the laughing heads all turned in a silence brief as a breath’s intake. The great many gentlemen and the rejoicing ladies leaned apart; he and Nancy looked at each other gravely.

  He saw Nancy, crowned and serious because she was a queen. Advanced by some urgent pushing, he made his way round the table and sat down beside her, podgily.

  She said: “How d’you do? Did you see our lake? It is all frozen. Did you ever see our lake before?”

  “I never came here.”

  “Did you see our two swans?”

  She was so beautiful, rolling her ringlets, round with light, on her lacy shoulders, that he said rather shortly: “I shouldn’t have thought your lake was large enough for two swans.”

  “It is, indeed,” said Nancy, “it goes round the island. It’s large enough for a boat.”

  They were waiting, around the Christmas cake, for tea to be brought in. Mrs. Tommy Cran shook out the ribbons of her guitar and began to sing again. Very quietly, for a secret, he and Nancy crept to the window; she showed how the lake wound; he could guess how, in summer, her boat would go pushing among the lily leaves. She showed him their boathouse, rusty-red from a lamp inside, solid. “We had a lamp put there for the poor cold swans.” (And the swans were asleep beside it.) “How old are you, Herbert?”

  “Eight.”

  “Oh, I’m nine. Do you play brigands?”

  “I could,” said Herbert.

  “Oh, I don’t; I’d hate to. But I know some boys who do. Did you have many presents? Uncle Ponto brought me a train; it’s more suitable for a boy, really. I could give it to you, perhaps.”

  “How many uncles—?” began Herbert.

  “Ten pretence and none really. I’m adopted, because mummy and daddy have no children. I think that’s better fun, don’t you?”

  “Yes,” replied Herbert, after consideration, “anybody could be born.”

  All the time, Nancy had not ceased to look at him seriously and impersonally. They were both tired already by this afternoon of boisterous grown-up society; they would have liked to be quiet, and though she was loved by ten magic uncles and wore a pearl locket, and he was fat, with spectacles, and felt deformed a little from everybody’s knowing about his father, they felt at ease in each other’s company.

  “Nancy, cut the cake!” exclaimed Mrs. Tommy, and they all clapped their hands for Nancy’s attention. So the coloured candles were lit, the garden went dark with loneliness and was immediately curtained out. Two of the uncles put rugs on and bounded about the room like bears and lions; the other faces drew out a crimson brand round the silver teapot. Mrs. Tommy could not bear to put down the guitar, so the teapot fell into the hands of a fuzzy lady with several husbands who cried “Ah, don’t, now!” and had to keep brushing gentlemen’s hands from her waist. And all the others leaned on one another’s shoulders and laughed with gladness because they had been asked to the Tommy Crans’; a dozen times everyone died of laughter and rose again, redder ghosts. Teacups whizzed down a chain of hands. Now Nancy, standing up very straight to cut the cake, was like a doll stitched upright into its box, apt, if you should cut the string at the back, to pitch right forward and break its delicate fingers.

  “Oh dear,” she sighed, as the knife skidded over the icing. But nobody heard but Herbert. For someone, seeing her white frock over that palace of cake, proposed “The health of the bride.”

  And an Uncle Joseph, tipping the tea about in his cup, stared and stared with juicy eyes. But nobody saw but Herbert.

  “After tea,” she whispered, “we’ll go and stand on the lake.” And after tea they did, while the others played hide-and-seek. Herbert, once looking back through a window, saw uncles chasing the laughing aunts. It was not cold on the lake. Nancy said: “I never believed in fairies—did you either?” She told him she had been given a white muff and was going to be an organist, with an organ of her own. She was going up to Belfast next month to dance for charity. She said she would not give him the train after all; she would give him something really her own, a pink glass greyhound that was an ornament.

  When Uncle Archer and Herbert left to walk to the tram terminus, the party was at its brightest. They were singing “Hark the herald” around the drawing-room piano: Nancy sat on her Uncle Joseph’s knee, more than politely.

  Uncle Archer did not want to go home either. “That was a nice little girl,” he said. “Eh?”

  Herbert nodded. His uncle, glad that the little chap hadn’t had, after all, such a dismal Christmas, pursued heartily: “Kiss her?” Herbert looked quite blank. To tell the truth, this had never occurred to him.

  He kissed Nancy later; his death, even, was indirectly caused by his loss of her; but their interchanges were never passionate, and he never knew her better than when they had been standing out on the lake, beyond the cheerful windows. Herbert’s mother did not know Uncle Archer’s merry friends: she had always loved to live quietly, and, as her need for comfort decreased, she and Herbert saw less, or at least as little as ever of Uncle Archer. So that for years Herbert was not taken again across Dublin to the house with the lake. Once he saw Nancy carry her white muff into a shop, but he stood rooted and did not run after her. Once he saw Mrs. Tommy Cran out in Stephen’s Green throwing lollipops to the ducks: but he did not approach; there was nothing to say. He was sent to school, where he painfully learnt to be natural with boys; his sight got no better; they said he must wear glasses all his life. Years later, however, when Herbert was thirteen, the Crans gave a dancing party and did not forget him. He danced once with Nancy; she was silenter now, but she said: “Why did you never come back again?” He could not explain; he trod on her toes and danced heavily on. A Chinese lantern blazed up, and in the confusion he lost her. That evening he saw Mrs. Tommy in tears in the conservatory. Nancy clung, pressing her head, with its drooping pink ribbons, to Mrs. Cran’s shoulder; pressing, perhaps, the shoulder against the head. Soon it was all right again and Mrs. Tommy led off in “Sir Roger,” but Nancy was like a ghost who presently vanished. A week afterwar
ds he had a letter:

  Please meet me to tea at Mitchell’s; I want your advice specially.

  She was distracted: she had come in to Dublin to sell her gold wristwatch. The Tommy Crans had lost all their money—it wasn’t fair to expect them to keep it; they were generous and gay. Nancy had to think hard what must they all do. Herbert went round with her from jeweller to jeweller: these all laughed and paid her nothing but compliments. Her face, with those delicate lovely eyebrows, grew tragic under the fur cap; it rained continuously; she and Herbert looked with incredulity into the grown-up faces: they wondered how one could penetrate far into life without despair. At last a man on the quays gave her eight-and-six for the watch. Herbert, meanwhile, had spent eight shillings of his pocket money on their cab—and, even so, her darling feet were sodden. They were surprised to see, from the window, Tommy Cran jump from an outside car and run joyfully into the Shelbourne. It turned out he had raised some more money from somewhere—as he deserved.

  So he sold the house with the lake and moved to an ornamental castle by Dublin Bay. In spite of the grey scene, the transitory light from the sea, the terrace here was gay with urns of geraniums, magnificent with a descent of steps—scrolls and whorls of balustrade, all the grandeur of stucco. Here the band played for their afternoon parties, and here, when they were twenty and twenty-one, Herbert asked Nancy to marry him.

  A pug harnessed with bells ran jingling about the terrace. “Oh, I don’t know, Herbert; I don’t know.”

  “Do you think you don’t love me?”

  “I don’t know whom I love. Everything would have to be different. Herbert, I don’t see how we are ever to live; we seem to know everything. Surely there should be something for us we don’t know?” She shut her eyes; they kissed seriously and searchingly. In his arms her body felt soft and voluminous; he could not touch her because of a great fur coat. The coat had been a surprise from Tommy Cran, who loved to give presents on delightful occasions—for now they were off to the Riviera. They were sailing in four days; Nancy and Mrs. Tommy had still all their shopping to do, all his money to spend—he loved them both to be elegant. There was that last party to give before leaving home. Mrs. Tommy could hardly leave the telephone; crossing London, they were to give yet another party, at the Euston Hotel.

  “And how could I leave them?” she asked. “They’re my business.”

  “Because they are not quite your parents?”

  “Oh, no,” she said, eyes reproachful for the misunderstanding he had put up, she knew, only from bitterness. “They would be my affair whoever I was. Don’t you see, they’re like that.”

  The Tommy Crans returned from the Riviera subdued, and gave no more parties than they could avoid. They hung sun-yellow curtains, in imitation of the Midi, in all the castle windows, and fortified themselves against despair. They warned their friends they were ruined; they honestly were—and there were heartfelt evenings of consolation. After such evenings, Mrs. Tommy, awaking heavily, whimpered in Nancy’s arms, and Tommy approached silence. They had the highest opinion of Nancy, and were restored by her confidence. She knew they would be all right; she assured them they were the best, the happiest people; they were popular—look how Life came back again and again to beg their pardon. And just to show them, she accepted Jeremy Neath and his thousands. So the world could see she was lucky; the world saw the Tommy Crans and their daughter had all the luck. To Herbert she explained nothing. She expected everything of him, on behalf of the Tommy Crans.

  The two Crans were distracted by her apotheosis from the incident of their ruin. They had seen her queen of a perpetual Christmas party for six months before they themselves came down magnificently, like an empire. Then Nancy came to fetch them over to England, where her husband had found a small appointment for Tommy, excuse for a pension. But Tommy would not want that long; he had a scheme already, a stunner, a certainty; you just wrote to a hundred people and put in half a crown. That last night he ran about with the leaflets, up and down the uncarpeted castle stairs that were his no longer. He offered to let Herbert in on it; he would yet see Herbert a rich man.

  Herbert and Nancy walked after dark on the terrace: she looked ill, tired; she was going to have a baby.

  “When I asked you to marry me,” he said, “you never answered. You’ve never answered yet.”

  She said: “There was no answer. We could never have loved each other and we shall always love each other. We are related.”

  Herbert, a heavy un-young young man, walked, past desperation, beside her. He did not want peace, but a sword. He returned again and again to the unique moment of her strangeness to him before, as a child, she had spoken. Before, bewildered by all the laughter, he had realised she also was silent.

  “You never played games,” he said, “or believed in fairies, or anything. I’d have played any game your way; I’d have been good at them. You let them pull all the crackers before tea: now I’d have loved those crackers. That day we met at Mitchell’s to sell your watch, you wouldn’t have sugar cakes, though I wanted to comfort you. You never asked me out to go round the island in your boat; I’d have died to do that. I never even saw your swans awake. You hold back everything from me and expect me to understand. Why should I understand? In the name of God, what game are we playing?”

  “But you do understand?”

  “Oh, God,” he cried in revulsion. “I don’t want to! And now you’re going to have a stranger child.”

  Her sad voice in the dark said: “You said then, ‘Anybody could be born!’ Herbert, you and I have nothing to do with children—this must be a child like them.”

  As they turned back to face the window, her smile and voice were tender, but not for him. In the brightly lit stripped room the Tommy Crans walked about together, like lovers in their freedom from each other. They talked of the fortune to be made, the child to be born. Tommy flung his chest out and moved his arms freely in air he did not possess; here and there, pink leaflets fluttered into the dark. The Tommy Crans would go on forever and be continued; their seed should never fail.

  Another Christmas

  WILLIAM TREVOR

  YOU ALWAYS LOOKED BACK, SHE thought. You looked back at other years, other Christmas cards arriving, the children younger. There was the year Patrick had cried, disliking the holly she was decorating the living room with. There was the year Bridget had got a speck of coke in her eye on Christmas Eve and had to be taken to the hospital at Hammersmith in the middle of the night. There was the first year of their marriage, when she and Dermot were still in Waterford. And ever since they’d come to London there was the presence on Christmas Day of their landlord, Mr. Joyce, a man whom they had watched becoming elderly.

  She was middle-aged now, with touches of grey in her curly dark hair, a woman known for her cheerfulness, running a bit to fat. Her husband was the opposite: thin and seeming ascetic, with more than a hint of the priest in him, a good man. “Will we get married, Norah?” he’d said one night in the Tara Ballroom in Waterford, 6 November 1953. The proposal had astonished her: it was his brother Ned, heavy and fresh-faced, a different kettle of fish altogether, whom she’d been expecting to make it.

  Patiently he held a chair for her while she strung paper-chains across the room, from one picture-rail to another. He warned her to be careful about attaching anything to the electric light. He still held the chair while she put sprigs of holly behind the pictures. He was cautious by nature and alarmed by little things, particularly anxious in case she fell off chairs. He’d never mount a chair himself, to put up decorations or anything else: he’d be useless at it in his opinion and it was his opinion that mattered. He’d never been able to do a thing about the house, but it didn’t matter because since the boys had grown up they’d attended to whatever she couldn’t manage herself. You wouldn’t dream of remarking on it: he was the way he was, considerate and thoughtful in what he did do, teetotal, clever, full of fondness for herself and for the family they’d reared, full of respect
for her also.

  “Isn’t it remarkable how quick it comes round, Norah?” he said while he held the chair. “Isn’t it no time since last year?”

  “No time at all.”

  “Though a lot happened in the year, Norah.”

  “An awful lot happened.”

  Two of the pictures she decorated were scenes of Waterford: the quays and a man driving sheep past the Bank of Ireland. Her mother had given them to her, taking them down from the hall of the farmhouse.

  There was a picture of the Virgin and Child, and other, smaller pictures. She placed her last sprig of holly, a piece with berries on it, above the Virgin’s halo.

  “I’ll make a cup of tea,” she said, descending from the chair and smiling at him.

  “A cup of tea’d be great, Norah.”

  The living room, containing three brown armchairs and a table with upright chairs around it, and a sideboard with a television set on it, was crowded by this furniture and seemed even smaller than it was because of the decorations that had been added. On the mantelpiece, above a built-in gas-fire, Christmas cards were arrayed on either side of an ornate green clock.

  The house was in a terrace in Fulham. It had always been too small for the family, but now that Patrick and Brendan no longer lived there things were easier. Patrick had married a girl called Pearl six months ago, almost as soon as his period of training with the Midland Bank had ended. Brendan was training in Liverpool, with a firm of computer manufacturers. The three remaining children were still at school, Bridget at the nearby convent, Cathal and Tom at the Sacred Heart Primary. When Patrick and Brendan had moved out the room they’d always shared had become Bridget’s. Until then Bridget had slept in her parents’ room and she’d have to return there this Christmas because Brendan would be back for three nights. Patrick and Pearl would just come for Christmas Day. They’d be going to Pearl’s people, in Croydon, on Boxing Day—St. Stephen’s Day, as Norah and Dermot always called it, in the Irish manner.