My Oedipus Complex (7 page)

‘What's all this about?' the priest hissed, getting angrier than ever and pushing Nora off me. ‘How dare you hit the child like that, you little vixen?'

‘But I can't do my penance with him, father,' Nora cried, cocking an outraged eye up at him.

‘Well, go and do it, or I'll give you some more to do,' he said, giving me a hand up. ‘Was it coming to confession you were, my poor man?' he asked me.

‘ 'Twas, father,' said I with a sob.

‘Oh,' he said respectfully, ‘a big hefty fellow like you must have terrible sins. Is this your first?'

‘ 'Tis, father,' said I.

‘Worse and worse,' he said gloomily. ‘The crimes of a lifetime. I don't know will I get rid of you at all today. You'd better wait now till I'm finished with these old ones. You can see by the looks of them they haven't much to tell.'

‘I will, father,' I said with something approaching joy.

The relief of it was really enormous. Nora stuck out her tongue at me from behind his back, but I couldn't even be bothered retorting. I knew from the very moment that man opened his mouth that he was intelligent above the ordinary. When I had time to think, I saw how right I was. It only stood to reason that a fellow confessing after seven years would have more to tell than people that went every week. The crimes of a lifetime, exactly as he said. It was only what he expected, and the rest was the cackle of old women and girls with their talk of hell, the bishop, and the penitential psalms. That was all they knew. I started to make my examination of conscience, and barring the one bad business of my grandmother it didn't seem so bad.

The next time, the priest steered me into the confession box himself and left the shutter back the way I could see him get in and sit down at the further side of the grille from me.

‘Well, now,' he said, ‘what do they call you?'

‘Jackie, father,' said I.

‘And what's a-trouble to you, Jackie?'

‘Father,' I said, feeling I might as well get it over while I had him in good humour, ‘I had it all arranged to kill my grandmother.'

He seemed a bit shaken by that, all right, because he said nothing for quite a while.

‘My goodness,' he said at last, ‘that'd be a shocking thing to do. What put that into your head?'

‘Father,' I said, feeling very sorry for myself, ‘she's an awful woman.'

‘Is she?' he asked. ‘What way is she awful?'

‘She takes porter, father,' I said, knowing well from the way Mother talked of it that this was a mortal sin, and hoping it would make the priest take a more favourable view of my case.

‘Oh, my!' he said, and I could see he was impressed.

‘And snuff, father,' said I.

‘That's a bad case, sure enough, Jackie,' he said.

‘And she goes round in her bare feet, father,' I went on in a rush of self-pity, ‘and she know I don't like her, and she gives pennies to Nora and none to me, and my da sides with her and flakes me, and one night I was so heart-scalded I made up my mind I'd have to kill her.'

‘And what would you do with the body?' he asked with great interest.

‘I was thinking I could chop that up and carry it away in a barrow I have,' I said.

‘Begor, Jackie,' he said, ‘do you know you're a terrible child?'

‘I know, father,' I said, for I was just thinking the same thing myself. ‘I tried to kill Nora too with a bread-knife under the table, only I missed her.'

‘Is that the little girl that was beating you just now?' he asked.‘

‘ 'Tis, father.'

‘Someone will go for her with a bread-knife one day, and he won't miss her,' he said rather cryptically. ‘You must have great courage. Between ourselves, there's a lot of people I'd like to do the same to but I'd never have the nerve. Hanging is an awful death.'

‘Is it, father?' I asked with the deepest interest – I was always very keen on hanging. ‘Did you ever see a fellow hanged?'

‘Dozens of them,' he said solemnly. ‘And they all died roaring.'

‘Jay!' I said.

‘Oh, a horrible death!' he said with great satisfaction. ‘Lots of the fellows I saw killed their grandmothers too, but they all said 'twas never worth it.'

He had me there for a full ten minutes talking, and then walked out the
chapel yard with me. I was genuinely sorry to part with him, because he was the most entertaining character I'd ever met in the religious line. Outside, after the shadow of the church, the sunlight was like the roaring of waves on a beach; it dazzled me; and when the frozen silence melted and I heard the screech of trams on the road my heart soared. I knew now I wouldn't die in the night and come back, leaving marks on my mother's furniture. It would be a great worry to her, and the poor soul had enough.

Nora was sitting on the railing, waiting for me, and she put on a very sour puss when she saw the priest with me. She was mad jealous because a priest had never come out of the church with her.

‘Well,' she asked coldly, after he left me, ‘what did he give you?'

‘Three Hail Marys,' I said.

‘Three Hail Marys,' she repeated incredulously. ‘You mustn't have told him anything.'

‘I told him everything,' I said confidently.

‘About Gran and all?'

‘About Gran and all.'

(All she wanted was to be able to go home and say I'd made a bad confession.)

‘Did you tell him you went for me with the bread-knife?' she asked with a frown.

‘I did to be sure.'

‘And he only gave you three Hail Marys?'

‘That's all.'

She slowly got down from the railing with a baffled air. Clearly, this was beyond her. As we mounted the steps back to the main road she looked at me suspiciously.

‘What are you sucking?' she asked.

‘Bullseyes.'

‘Was it the priest gave them to you?'

‘ 'Twas.'

‘Lord God,' she wailed bitterly, ‘some people have all the luck! 'Tis no advantage to anybody trying to be good. I might just as well be a sinner like you.'

The discovery of where babies came from filled my life with excitement and interest. Not in the way it's generally supposed to of course. Oh, no! I never seem to have done anything like a natural child in a standard textbook. I merely discovered the fascination of history. Up to this I had lived in a country of my own that had no history, and accepted my parents' marriage as an event ordained from the creation; now, when I considered it in this new, scientific way, I began to see it merely as one of the turning-points of history; one of those apparently trivial events that are little more than accidents, but have the effect of changing the destiny of humanity. I had not heard of Pascal, but I would have approved his remark about what would have happened if Cleopatra's nose had been a bit longer.

It immediately changed my view of my parents. Up to this they had been principles, not characters, like a chain of mountains guarding a green horizon. Suddenly a little shaft of light, emerging from behind a cloud, struck them, and the whole mass broke up into peaks, valleys, and foothills; you could even see whitewashed farmhouses and fields where people worked in the evening light, a whole world of interior perspective. Mother's past was the richer subject for study. It was extraordinary the variety of people and settings that woman had in her background. She had been an orphan, a parlourmaid, a companion, a traveller; and had been proposed to by a plasterer's apprentice, a French chef who had taught her to make superb coffee, and a rich elderly shopkeeper in Sunday's Well. Because I liked to feel myself different, I thought a great deal about the chef and the advantages of being a Frenchman, but the shopkeeper was an even more vivid figure in my imagination because he had married someone else and died soon after – of disappointment, I had no doubt – leaving a large
fortune. The fortune was to me what Cleopatra's nose was to Pascal; the ultimate proof that things might have been different.

‘How much was Mr Riordan's fortune, Mummy?' I asked thoughtfully.

‘Ah, they said he left eleven thousand,' Mother replied doubtfully, ‘but you couldn't believe everything people say.'

That was exactly what I could do. I was not prepared to minimize a fortune that I might so easily have inherited.

‘And weren't you ever sorry for poor Mr Riordan?' I asked severely.

‘Ah, why would I be sorry, child?' she asked with a shrug. ‘Sure, what use would money be where there was no liking?'

That, of course, was not what I meant at all. My heart was full of pity for poor Mr Riordan who had tried to be my father; but, even on the low level at which Mother discussed it, money would have been of great use to me. I was not so fond of Father as to think he was worth eleven thousand pounds, a hard sum to visualize but more than twenty-seven times greater than the largest salary I had ever heard of – that of a Member of Parliament. One of the discoveries I was making at the time was that Mother was not only rather hard-hearted but very impractical as well.

But Father was the real surprise. He was a brooding, worried man who seemed to have no proper appreciation of me, and was always wanting me to go out and play or go upstairs and read, but the historical approach changed him like a character in a fairy-tale. ‘Now let's talk about the ladies Daddy nearly married,' I would say; and he would stop whatever he was doing and give a great guffaw. ‘Oh, ho, ho!' he would say, slapping his knee and looking slyly at Mother, ‘you could write a book about them.' Even his face changed at such moments. He would look young and extraordinarily mischievous. Mother, on the other hand, would grow black.

‘You could,' she would say, looking into the fire. ‘Daisies!'

‘ “The handsomest man that walks Cork!” ' Father would quote with a wink at me. ‘That's what one of them called me.'

‘Yes,' Mother would say, scowling. ‘May Cadogan!'

‘The very girl!' Father would cry in astonishment. ‘How did I forget her name? A beautiful girl! 'Pon my word, a most remarkable girl! And still is, I hear.'

‘She should be,' Mother would say in disgust. ‘With six of them!'

‘Oh, now, she'd be the one that could look after them! A fine head that girl had.'

‘She had. I suppose she ties them to a lamp-post while she goes in to drink and gossip.'

That was one of the peculiar things about history. Father and Mother both loved to talk about it but in different ways. She would only talk about it when we were together somewhere, in the park or down the Glen, and even then it was very hard to make her stick to the facts, because her whole face would light up and she would begin to talk about donkey-carriages or concerts in the kitchen, or oil-lamps, and though nowadays I would probably value it for atmosphere, in those days it sometimes drove me mad with impatience. Father, on the other hand, never minded talking about it in front of her, and it made her angry. Particularly when he mentioned May Cadogan. He knew this perfectly well and he would wink at me and make me laugh outright, though I had no idea of why I laughed, and anyway, my sympathy was all with her.

‘But, Daddy,' I would say, presuming on his high spirits, ‘if you liked Miss Cadogan so much why didn't you marry her?'

At this, to my great delight, he would let on to be filled with doubt and distress. He would put his hands in his trousers pockets and stride to the door leading into the hallway.

‘That was a delicate matter,' he would say, without looking at me. ‘You see, I had your poor mother to think of.'

‘I was a great trouble to you,' Mother would say, in a blaze.

‘Poor May said it to me herself,' he would go on as though he had not heard her, ‘and the tears pouring down her cheeks. “Mick,” she said, “that girl with the brown hair will bring me to an untimely grave.” '

‘She could talk of hair!' Mother would hiss. ‘With her carroty mop!'

‘Never did I suffer the way I suffered then, between the two of them,' Father would say with deep emotion as he returned to his chair by the window.

‘Oh, 'tis a pity about ye!' Mother would cry in an exasperated tone and suddenly get up and go into the front room with her book to escape his teasing. Every word that man said she took literally. Father would give a great guffaw of delight, his hands on his knees and his eyes on the ceiling and wink at me again. I would laugh with him of course, and then grow wretched because I hated Mother's sitting alone in the front room.
I would go in and find her in her wicker-chair by the window in the dusk, the book open on her knee, looking out at the Square. She would always have regained her composure when she spoke to me, but I would have an uncanny feeling of unrest in her and stroke her and talk to her soothingly as if we had changed places and I were the adult and she the child.

But if I was excited by what history meant to them, I was even more excited by what it meant to me. My potentialities were double theirs. Through Mother I might have been a French boy called Laurence Armady or a rich boy from Sunday's Well called Laurence Riordan. Through Father I might, while still remaining a Delaney, have been one of the six children of the mysterious and beautiful Miss Cadogan. I was fascinated by the problem of who I would have been if I hadn't been me, and, even more, by the problem of whether or not I would have known that there was anything wrong with the arrangement. Naturally I tended to regard Laurence Delaney as the person I was intended to be, and so I could not help wondering whether as Laurence Riordan I would not have been aware of Laurence Delaney as a real gap in my make-up.

I remember that one afternoon after school I walked by myself all the way up to Sunday's Well which I now regarded as something like a second home. I stood for a while at the garden gate of the house where Mother had been working when she was proposed to by Mr Riordan, and then went and studied the shop itself. It had clearly seen better days, and the cartons and advertisements in the window were dusty and sagging. It wasn't like one of the big stores in Patrick Street, but at the same time, in size and fittings it was well above the level of a village shop. I regretted that Mr Riordan was dead because I would like to have seen him for myself instead of relying on Mother's impressions which seemed to me to be biased. Since he had, more or less, died of grief on Mother's account, I conceived of him as a really nice man; lent him the countenance and manner of an old gentleman who always spoke to me when he met me on the road, and felt I could have become really attached to him as a father. I could imagine it all: Mother reading in the parlour while she waited for me to come home up Sunday's Well in a school cap and blazer, like the boys from the Grammar School, and with an expensive leather satchel instead of the old cloth school-bag I carried over my shoulder. I could see myself walking slowly and with a certain distinction, lingering
at gateways and looking down at the river; and later I would go out to tea in one of the big houses with long gardens sloping to the water, and maybe row a boat on the river along with a girl in a pink frock. I wondered only whether I would have any awareness of the National School boy with the cloth school-bag who jammed his head between the bars of a gate and thought of me. It was a queer, lonesome feeling that all but reduced me to tears.