Collected Stories (76 page)

It was a great relief to him to get back to Fair Hill, put his feet on the mantelpiece, and study in books the places he had been. Shiela, too, came to understand how good a marriage could be, with the inhibitions of a lifetime breaking down and new and more complicated ones taking their place. Their life was exceedingly quiet. Each evening Jim came puffing up the hill from town under a mountain of pullovers, scarves, and coats, saying that the damn height was getting too much for him, and that they'd have to—have to—have to get a house in town. Then he changed into old trousers and slippers, and lovingly poured himself a glass of whiskey, the whiskey carefully measured against the light as it had been any time in twenty years. He knew to a drop the amount of spirits it needed to give him the feeling of a proper drink without slugging himself. Only a man with a steady hand could know how much was good for him. Moderation was the secret.

After supper he put his feet on the mantelpiece and told her the day's news from town. About nine they had a cup of tea, and, if the night was fine, took a short ramble over the hill to get the view of the illuminated city below. As Shiela had learned, by this time Jim was usually at the top of his form, and it had become unsafe for anyone to suggest a house in town. Fair Hill had again become the perfect place of residence. The tension of the day completely gone, he had his bath and pottered about the stiff, ungainly old house in his pajama trousers, scratching himself in elaborate patterns and roaring with laughter at his own jokes.

“Who the hell said I had a father fixation?” Shiela asked indignantly. “I didn't marry my father; I married my baby.”

All the same, she knew he wasn't all that simple. Paddy, his son, lived in Dublin, and though Shiela suspected that he was somewhat of a disappointment to Jim, she could never get a really coherent account of him from Jim. It was the same with his first marriage. He scarcely spoke of it, except once in a while to say “Margaret used to think” or “a friend of Margaret's”—bubbles rising to the surface of a pool whose depths she could not see, though she suspected the shadow that covered it. Nor was he much more informative about less intimate matters. If he disliked people, he disliked talking of them, and if he liked them, he only wished to say conventional things in their praise. As a student of Jane Austen and Henry James, Shiela wanted to plumb things to their depths, and sometimes it made her very angry that he would not argue with her. It suggested that he did not take her seriously.

“What is it about Kitty O'Malley that makes her get in with all those extraordinary men?” she would ask. “Is it a reaction against her mother?”

“Begor, I don't know, girl,” he would say, staring at her over his reading glasses, as though he were a simpleminded man to whom such difficult problems never occurred.

“And I suppose you never bothered to ask yourself,” she would retort angrily. “You prefer to know people superficially.”

“Ah, well, I'm a superficial sort of chap,” he would reply with a benign smile, but she had the furious feeling that he was only laughing at her. Because once, when she did set out deliberately to madden him by sneering at his conventionality, he lost his temper and snapped: “Superficially is a damn good way to know people.” And this, as she realized, wasn't what he meant either. She suspected that, whereas her plumbing of the depths meant that she was continually changing planes in her relations with people, moving rapidly from aloofness to intimacy and back, enthusing and suspecting, he considered only the characteristics that could be handled consistently on one plane. And though his approach was by its nature inaccurate, she had to admit that it worked, because in the plumbing business you never really knew where you were with anyone.

They had other causes of disagreement, though at first these were comic rather than alarming. Religion was one; it was something of an obsession with Shiela, but on the only occasion when she got him to Mass, he sighed, as he did when she took him to the pictures, and said mournfully as they left the church: “Those fellows haven't changed in thirty years.” He seemed to think that religion should be subject to the general improvement in conditions of living. When she pressed him about what he thought improvements would be, it turned out that he thought churches should be used for lectures and concerts. She did not lose hope of converting him, even on his death-bed, though she realized that it would have to be effected entirely by the power of prayer, since precept and example were equally lost on him.

Besides this there was the subject of his health. In spite of his girth and weight, she felt sure he wasn't strong. It seemed to her that the climb from the city each evening was becoming too much for him. He puffed too much, and in the mornings he had an uproarious cough, which he turned into a performance. She nagged him to give up the pipe and the whiskey or to see a doctor, but he would do neither. She surprised him by bringing the doctor to him during one of his bronchial attacks, and the doctor backed her up by advising him to give up smoking and drinking and to take things easily. Jim laughed as if this were a good joke, and went on behaving in precisely the same way. “Moderation is the secret,” he said as he measured his whiskey against the light. “The steady hand.” She was beginning to realize that he was a man of singular obstinacy, and to doubt whether, if he went on in this way, she would have him even for the eight years that the Gaffney expectation of life promised him.

Besides, he was untidy and casual about money, and this was one of the things about which Shiela was meticulous.

“It's not that I want anything for myself,” she explained with conscious virtue. “It's just that I'd like to know where I stand if anything happens to you. I'll guarantee Paddy won't be long finding out.”

“Oh, begor, you mightn't be far wrong,” he said with a great guffaw.

Yet he did nothing about it. Beyond the fact that he hated to be in debt, he did not seem to care what happened to his money, and it lay there in the bank, doing no good to anyone. He had not made a will, and when she tried to get him to do so, he only passed it off with a joke.

Still refusing to be beaten, she invited his solicitor to supper, but, whatever understanding the two men had reached, they suddenly started to giggle hysterically when she broached the matter, and everything she said after that only threw them into fresh roars of laughter. Jim actually had tears in his eyes, and he was not a man who laughed inordinately on other occasions.

It was the same about insurance. Once more, it was not so much that she wanted provision for herself, but to a girl who always carried an identification card in her handbag in case of accidents it seemed the height of imprudence to have no insurance at all, even to pay for the funeral. Besides—and this was a matter that worried her somewhat—the Gaffney grave was full, and it was necessary to buy a new plot for herself and Jim. He made no protest at the identification card she had slipped in his wallet, instructing the finder of the body to communicate at once with herself, though she knew he produced this regularly in the shop for the entertainment of his friends, but he would have nothing to say to insurance. He was opposed to it, because money was continuously decreasing in value and insurance was merely paying good money for bad. He told her of a tombstone he had seen in a West Cork cemetery with an inscription that ran: “Here Lie the Remains of Elizabeth Martin who.” “Poor Elizabeth Martin Who!” he guffawed. “To make sure she had the right sort of tombstone, she had it made herself, and the whoors who came after her couldn't make head or tail of the inscription. See what insurance does for you.… Anyway, you little bitch,” he growled good-humoredly, “what the hell do you always want to be burying me for? Suppose I bury you for a change?”

“At any rate, if you do, you'll find my affairs in order,” Shiela replied proudly.

S
HE HAD
sent postcards to Matt from France, hoping he might make things up, but when they returned to Cork she found that he had taken a job in the Midlands, and later it was reported that he was walking out with a shopkeeper's daughter who had a substantial fortune. A year later she heard of his engagement and wrote to congratulate him. He replied promptly and without rancor to say that the report was premature, and that he was returning to a new job in Cork. Things had apparently not gone too well between himself and the shopkeeper's daughter.

Shiela was overjoyed when at last he called on them in Fair Hill, the same old Matt, slow and staid, modest and intelligent and full of quiet irony. Obviously he was glad to be back in Cork, bad as it was. The Midlands were too tame, even for him.

Then Shiela had her great idea. Kitty O'Malley was the old friend of Jim's whose chequered career Shiela had tried to analyze. She was a gentle girl with an extraordinary ability for getting herself entangled with unsuitable men. There had already been a married man, who had not liked to let her know he was married for fear of hurting her feelings, a mental patient, and a pathological liar, who had got himself engaged to two other girls because he just could not stop inventing personalities for himself. As a result, Kitty had a slightly bewildered air, because she felt (as Shiela did) that there must be something in her which attracted such people, though she couldn't imagine what it was.

Shiela saw it all quite clearly, problem and solution, on the very first evening Matt called.

“Do you know that I have the perfect wife for you?” she said.

“Is that so?” asked Matt with amusement. “Who's she?”

“A girl called O'Malley, a friend of Jim's. She's a grand girl, isn't she, Jim?”

“Grand girl,” agreed Jim.

“But can she support me in the style I'm accustomed to?” asked Matt who persisted in his pretense of being mercenary.

“Not like your shopkeeper's daughter, I'm afraid.”

“And you think she'd have me?”

“Oh, certain, if only you'll let me handle her. If she's left to herself, she'll choose an alcoholic or something. She's shy, and shy girls never get to be courted by anything less dynamic than a mental case. She'll never go out of her way to catch you, so you'd better leave all that to me.”

Shiela had great fun, organizing meetings of her two sedate friends, but to her great surprise Jim rapidly grew bored and angry with the whole thing. After Matt and Kitty had been three times to Fair Hill and he had been twice to supper with them, he struck. This time Shiela had arranged that they were all to go to the pictures together, and Jim lost his temper with her. Like all good-natured men, when he was angry he became immoderate and unjust.

“Go with them yourself!” he shouted. “What the hell do you want mixing yourself up in it at all for? If they can't do their own courting, let them live single.”

She was downcast, and went to the bedroom to weep. Soon after, he tiptoed into the room and took her hand, talking about everything except the subject on her mind. After ten minutes he rose and peered out of the low window at the view of the city he had loved from boyhood. “What the hell do they want building houses here for and then not giving you a decent view?” he asked in chagrin. All the same, she knew he knew she was jealous. It was all very well arranging a match between Matt and Kitty, but she hated the thought of their going out together and talking of her the way she talked of them. If only Jim had been her own age, she would not have cared much what they said of her, but he was by comparison an old man and might die any day, leaving her alone and without her spare wheel. She could even anticipate how it would happen. She was very good at anticipating things, and she had noticed how in the middle of the night Jim's face smoothed out into that of a handsome boy, and she knew that this was the face he would wear when he was dead. He would lie like that in this very room, with a rosary bead he could no longer resent between his transparent fingers, and Matt, in that gentle firm way of his, would take charge of everything for her. He would take her in his arms to comfort her, and each would know it had come too late. So, though she did wish him to have Kitty if he could not have her, she did not want them to be too much together in her absence and hoped they might not be too precipitate. Anything might happen Jim; they were both young—only thirty or so—and it would not hurt them to wait.

When they did marry six months later, neither Matt nor Kitty knew the generosity that had inspired her, or the pain it had caused her. She suspected that Jim knew, though he said no more about it than he did about all the other things that touched him closely.

Yet he made it worse for her by his terrible inability to tidy up his affairs. All that winter he was ill, and dragged himself to the shop and back, and for three weeks he lay in bed, choking—as usual, with a pipe that gave him horrible spasms of coughing. It was not only that he had a weak chest; he had a weak heart as well, and one day the bronchitis would put too much tension on the overstrained heart. But instead of looking after himself or making a will or insuring himself, or doing any of the things one would expect a sickly old man with a young wife to do, he spent his time in bed, wrapped in woollies and shawls, poring over house-plans. He had occupied his father's unmanageable house on Fair Hill for twenty years without ever wishing to change it, but now he seemed to have got a new lease of life. He wanted to get rid of the basement and have one of the back rooms turned into a modern kitchen, with the dining room opening off it.

Shiela was alarmed at the thought of such an outlay on a house she had no intention of occupying after his death. It was inconvenient enough to live in with him, but impossibly lonely for a woman living alone, and she knew that no other man, unless he had Jim's awkward tastes, would even consider living there. Besides, she could not imagine herself living on in any house that reminded her of her loss. That, too, she could anticipate—his favorite view, his chair, his pipe rack, emptied of his presence—and knew she could never bear it.