THE LITTLE MOTHER

1

Joan lived in a little terrace house near Cork Barrack with her
parents and her younger sisters, Kitty and May. Mick Twomey was a
builder, honest, hard-working, unbusinesslike and greatly esteemed. He
was small, slight and quick-moving, with a clear complexion and red
hair and moustache. Joan worshipped him, because whenever she got into
some childish scrape she didn’t want her mother to know about she went
to him, her eyes popping, her voice a thrilling whisper, for the
‘loan’ of a shilling. ‘And you won’t tell Mummy, will you, Dad?’ she
would ask, and he would say indignantly: ‘What business is it of
Mummy’s? This is between you and me, girl.’ What was more, he said it
in a way you could believe. It was wonderful to have someone you could
trust the way you could trust her father.

Her mother was a beauty; slight, attractive and sentimental, who
mourned over the wrongs of Ireland, romantic love and the sufferings
of the poor, and seemed to get a great deal of pleasure from them. Her
husband, who had been a revolutionary in his youth, had come to the
age of being sarcastic about all three, but Mrs Twomey remained
faithful to any cause she once took up. She said prayers for the
success of the Republicans at elections, dreamed in a most
undemocratic way of titled romances for her daughters, and entertained
beggars in the house. Mick would arrive unexpectedly to find some old
shawly beggar woman eating her dinner in the kitchen and slam into the
sitting room in a wild rage, but in secret he adored his wife and told
his daughters that they’d never be a patch on her. He knew how to take
advantage of her sentimentality as well, for whenever he got in wrong
with her he had only to drop a gruff remark about somebody from
Killarney—Killarney being where they’d spent their honeymoon—and sure
enough, in no time she would be going about the house, singing in a
sweet cracked voice _By Killarney’s Lakes and Fells_. It was so easy it
was mean, and it went to Mick’s heart to do it, but he was old enough
to value peace in the home.

The three girls were spoiled and from the time they reached the age of
twelve you could find them round the gaslamp in the evening, or
slinking up dark laneways with boys who were wilder than
themselves. Joan had a broad, humorous face, a gay and dashing manner
and a great flow of gab. She was big round the bosom and rear and
walked with a roll that her father said was like a
drum-major’s. Kitty, the second girl, was taller and had a better
figure. She dressed better, too, because she had a passion for
dressmaking and couldn’t see an old frock without realizing its
possibilities. She was an untidy, emotional girl who took after her
mother and was, accordingly, her father’s favourite. May, being only
thirteen, couldn’t really be very wild, but with her miniature
features, she promised to be the best-looking of the three, and there
was something about her quick wit and quick smile that indicated she
would take full advantage of it.

Mrs Twomey, being nearer their age than her husband’s, couldn’t
control them at all. She would fly into a rage and go for them with
whatever came handiest, and then remember some identical occasion in
her own girlhood and her own mother’s indignation until, forgetting
all about the cause of her rage, she went round singing _Mother
Machree_ and the girls, forgetting their sore bottoms and injured
dignity, would join in. Sometimes Mick, coming home from work in the
evening, would hear them singing from the road outside, and, when he
threw open the kitchen door, see the four of them sitting in darkness
round the range and the fresh tears shining on their cheeks. ‘Name of
God, are ye at it again?’ he would growl, striding over to light the
gas. ‘I suppose none of ye thought about supper?’

Sunday was Mrs Twomey’s favourite day because after chapel in the
evening the girls brought home their friends and their friends’
friends. The gaslamp was lit at the foot of the little square outside;
the gasjets hissed at either side of the fireplace in the front room,
and the oil-lamp on the round table gave light to the piano. Kitty,
the hostess of the three girls, made the tea and Joan played. Dick
Gordon, Joan’s fellow, usually started things off by singing
_Toreador_ or _The Bandolero_ in a weak baritone. He was a tall,
handsome young fellow with a long clear face, and while he sang Mrs
Twomey smiled fondly and discussed himself and his family in what she
thought was a whisper.

She was very glad of him for Joan, though there was something missing
somewhere which she attributed to a Protestant streak, way back. He
wasn’t interested in republicanism and was even less interested in
religion. He didn’t go to the Sacraments, or even to Mass, unless it
was to meet somebody at it. He was a well-read boy, and, seeing that
both his own family and the Twomeys were mad on religion, he had out
of pure kindness of heart studied the Bible and several other
religious works, only to find them all filled with people rising from
the dead or ascending into the sky without any means of
locomotion—things no practical engineer could credit.

‘And you mean you don’t really believe in God, Dick?’ Mrs Twomey asked
wonderingly.

‘Afraid not, Mrs T,’ he replied quite cheerfully, as though he were
not afraid at all.

‘You don’t believe in anything?’

‘On the contrary, I believe in everything—everything I can put my
hand on, that is.’

‘You will, Dick,’ she said solemnly. ‘One of these days when all the
things you can put your hand on are no help to you, you’ll see God as
plain as you see me.’

‘That’ll be the day,’ he said with cheerful irreverence.


2

Each winter Mrs Twomey, who had a weak chest, suffered from
bronchitis. She had ceased to pay much attention to it herself and
treated it almost like an old friend. Besides, it was an ordeal for
her to stay in bed or even at home, because she liked her trips into
town and her gossips with old cronies on the way.

The winter after Joan became seventeen she had one of her usual
attacks and recovered, and on the first sunny day went into town to
Mass. She came back, feeling weak, and that night her bronchitis was
worse. By the following evening she could scarcely breathe and sat
propped up on pillows. Old Dr Mulcahy, who had been in gaol with Mick,
thought it best not to remove her. In the early morning she had an
attack of breathlessness and became so violent that it took Mick and
Joan to hold her down. Mulcahy came and gave her an injection which
put her to sleep. Then he took Mick into the front room.

‘We’re very old friends, Mick,’ he said, ‘I think I’d better prepare
you for a shock.’

Mick drew himself up.

‘Is that the way it is, Peter?”

‘I’m afraid so. Even if she gets through this I’m afraid she’ll be an
invalid for the rest of her days.’

‘I don’t care what she is, Peter,’ Mick replied violently. ‘So long as
they leave her with me.’

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Mulcahy said gloomily. ‘There aren’t many like
her. Send the elder girl into me, Mick. I want to talk to her’

That evening Dick Gordon came and sat in the front room, talking
quietly to Mick and the girls. Now and then the gate creaked as some
old neighbour came to inquire. Mulcahy had been again and gone,
leaving a morphia syringe behind him. The attacks of breathlessness
had become so violent that there was no other way of controlling them,
and the breathing was so terrifying that none of them could stay in
the bedroom for more than a few minutes.

Instead, Mick would open the door softly and tiptoe up the stairs for
a few minutes at a time. Dick interjected some quiet remark that was
only intended to ease the strain. Coming on to morning, Mick jumped up
and rushed up the stairs, and it was only then that they realized the
breathing had stopped.

‘Joan! Joan!’ they heard him scream in an unnatural voice. ‘She’s
gone! Your poor mother is gone!’

Joan gathered herself up to scream as well but Dick grabbed her firmly
by the shoulders. ‘Quiet, now, Joanie!’ he said in the low voice one
might use to a child, and he smiled at her as one might smile at a
child. She put her head in her hands and began to sob with the
others. When they went upstairs Mick was kneeling by the head of the
bed. Their mother’s head had fallen feebly forward and the jaw was
dropped in an expression of utter weariness.

‘Take Daddy downstairs now, Dick,’ Joan said, gaining control of
herself. ‘I can manage.’

‘I’ll stay, Joanie,’ said Kitty.

‘No, Kitty,’ Dick said firmly. ‘Let Joan handle this’.

They returned to the front room and Dick led Mick Twomey to an
armchair by the window and then poured him out a drink. He nodded
acknowledgement but when he tried to raise the glass he could not
bring it to his mouth. Dick took his hand and held the glass for
him. Then Dick drew the curtain and daylight came in through the drawn
blind. He raised it and stood for a few moments looking out at the
still square where the gaslamp was still burning and at the fields and
trees on the hillside above. ‘Oh my!’ he sighed with a curious boyish
air and drew the blind again just as Joan entered. Her father rose
with an erect and soldierly movement and drew the other girls up with
him by the hand. Then he turned to Joan and presented them with a
curious air of formality.

‘You must be a mother to them now, Joan,’ he said with a firm
voice. ‘They have no one else only you.’


3

That little scene made an extraordinary impression on Joan. She was
over-wrought, and it seemed to her to have something of the quality of
a religious dedication, as though it were a taking of vows.

When she stood with her father and sisters by the grave on a hillside
over Cork Harbour, she promised the dead woman that she would try to
be everything she had been to them. She had no illusions about
herself. She knew her mother had been a creature apart, whose
innocence had kept her emotions always fresh and beautiful. Joan felt
sure that she had no such innocence, but she thought that maybe she
might have character, and the thought filled her with a certain
mournful pride. It was as though within a few days her whole nature
had changed: as though she no longer had a father and sisters, only a
husband and children; as though, in fact, her girlhood had suddenly
stopped.

For months their little house was gloomy and dark. It had something to
do with the deep vein of sentimentality in them all. Suddenly one of
the girls would forget herself while washing clothes in the kitchen
and start to hum some song of their mother’s and as suddenly stop in
the middle of a bar. Then would follow a few intolerable moments of
widening comprehension that would end in tears.

But it couldn’t go on like that. However Joan’s thoughts might wander,
meals had to be cooked, laundry had to be done, bills had to be
paid. And though the house and furniture were now all that was left of
her mother, they too were responsibilities, and Joan knew that they
would have to be changed.

The house was old, and it was old-fashioned, and nothing in it had
been altered in the twenty-odd years of her parents’ marriage. There
was still only gas in the front room, and the furniture, bought
second-hand at auctions in houses three times the size, was a
joke. Joan was ashamed that they didn’t have a bathroom. It struck her
as all wrong in a family of girls that fellows would always be walking
through the kitchen, seeing things they shouldn’t see and coming in
with big bumps on their foreheads after finding their way to the
lavatory. Above all, she wanted to get rid of the range from the
kitchen and make it into a comfortable living room. Mick did wire the
house for electricity, but he made excuses about the bathroom and the
kitchen, and she knew she must go slowly with him because every change
would seem to him like a betrayal of her mother. He wanted to die
among the things that had been hers. Joan wanted to make a new life
for them all.

Besides, there was a change in herself. The excitement in her blood
when dusk came and the last light lingered on the fields and trees
opposite the house was no longer the same. It had used to be like a
fever; the cows lowing in the fields behind, the children shouting
from the gateways, the pool of light round the gaslamp at the end of
the square and the intimation of mysterious embraces; but now it was
all touched with sentiment for poor human creatures whose voices would
soon be stilled forever.

It was part of her new gravity that Joan took to going to Mass every
morning. Wet or fine, she plunged out after her father had left for
work, and soon became familiar with the other women. who did the
same. If one were missing she would call on her way home to ask if
there were any messages she could do. Usually there were; it was
extraordinary how helpless people were when they were in trouble, and
in the evening, when she had given her father his supper she would
explode on him with: ‘Daddy, I don’t think anyone knows what goes on
in a place like this.’ At times like these she was very like her
mother; more self-conscious, more melodramatic, but with the same
absorption.

And it had a silvery sort of poetry of its own, thin and sweet and
clear as if it were a world renewed. The neighbours, who only saw it
from outside, admired the way a flighty girl of eighteen turned
gradually into a mature, responsible young woman. But it couldn’t be
expected that her sisters should see it that way. Now, when Kitty was
out with some fellow, Joan actually worried about her. She didn’t
expect anything unreasonable, only that Kitty shouldn’t be out too
late, but even this Kitty resented. One night there was almost a
scene.

‘What kept you out till this hour, Kitty?’ Joan asked, quite politely,
but Kitty started back as though she’d been struck.

‘What’s wrong with you?’ she asked angrily. ‘Who do you think you
are?’

‘Oh, just the new housekeeper, Kitty,’ Joan replied with a nervous
laugh. ‘Who did you think?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kitty replied coarsely. ‘Whoever you are, you’re
getting too big for your boots.’

That night Joan wept as she so often did nowadays. Children never
understood the responsibilities of guardians. And it wasn’t only
Kitty, of course. She remembered how often and unjustly she had blamed
her mother for the same sort of thing.

But Kitty and May soon realized that they had lost a sister and caught
a tartar. It was true that Joan always had a touch of Reverend Mother
about her, and had attempted to make up in knowingness for the
affection that had been diverted from her to her younger sisters, but
that had been mainly swank. In essential things she had remained part
of the juvenile conspiracy, treating parents as enemies, raiding their
stores and smashing up their intelligence system. Now, she had real
authority and harried them mercilessly, particularly poor Kitty, who
had been disorderly from birth, and left a litter of dirty clothes and
pots and pans behind her. Her mother had been content to clean up
after her, knowing poor Kitty had other things on her mind, but Joan
didn’t see why she should do it. Of course, she was always polite, but
then, it seemed to be the politeness that got on Kitty’s nerves.

‘Kitty!’

‘Well?’

‘In the hall, dear,’ Joan would sing out, ‘That thing on the floor.’

‘What about it anyway?’

‘Nothing, Kitty, only it looks like your good coat. I wonder if you’d
mind hanging it up’

‘Would you mind?’ Kitty would mutter to May. ‘Would you please oblige
by removing your noxious presence from the premises? That one!’

Joan realized that none of them had been taught orderly habits, and
that even in their school work it came against them. May was brilliant
but her marks were shocking, so she had to stay in for an hour each
evening and do maths and French with Joan who rapped her knuckles with
a ruler and scolded her in a shrill voice for neglecting her irregular
verbs. As if the life of any pretty girl were affected by irregular
verbs!

And, having deserted to the enemy, Joan was worse than any parent
because she had their whole intelligence service broken up from
within. She would be waiting for them at the door, her arms folded,
looking up and down the road for them till she trained them to scout
first. Kitty would put her head quickly round a corner and sayin a
despairing tone: ‘Christ on a bicycle! That one is there again!’ May
thought this was cowardice, and said so, but even she knew that Joan
was a problem. It was no good telling her you’d been dressmaking up
the road when you’d really been out Mayfield with a boy because she’d
done it too often herself and would be bound to find out the truth
next morning at Mass from some old Biddy like herself. They had to
tell the truth but they did it with bitterness in their hearts, not so
much because they were afraid as because it derogated from their
femininity; and in the intervals of wheedling and scolding they lapsed
into mute and sullen conspiracy.

All the family learned from the new situation, but Joan, who was at
the centre of it, learned most. She found it was far from being the
romantic change of parts she had first imagined and not at all a
matter of her father and herself on the one hand, and ‘the children’
as she liked to call them on the other.

At first, when she discussed money matters with Mick she was flattered
by the grown-up tone of mournful candour in which he replied, but in
time she began to suspect that the candour was fallacious—the accounts
varied too much. It was hard to believe, and she hated to believe it,
but her father was not always truthful.

One day, when she was worried about bills, she saw Kitty with a
handful of silver.

‘Where did you get all the cash, Kitty? she asked lightly.

‘Cash?’ Kitty retorted with an attempt at brazening it out. ‘What
cash?’

‘You needn’t bother to tell me any lies, Kitty,’ Joan said in an
off-hand way. ‘I can guess.’

‘You can guess what you like,’ said Kitty, now thoroughly alarmed as
she saw her source of independence threatened. ‘I got it from Aunt
Molly, as you’re so inquisitive.’

Joan was too digusted to argue with her. Her father, thinking she kept
them short deliberately, had been supplying them in secret. That was
his gratitude! She could see it exactly as though he were some man who
had been unfaithful to her and imagine the mockery of her rivals. Mick
was horrified when she challenged him with it.

‘For God’s sake, girl!’ he exclaimed. ‘I gave her a couple of
bob. What harm is that?’

‘You gave it to her behind my back,’ said Joan.

‘Well, would you want her to know what I gave you?’

‘Ah, ’tisn’t alike,’ she said with an angry shrug. ‘I suppose you know
what they think themselves—that I grudge it to them?”

‘Ah, don’t be silly, girl!’ he said. ‘How could they think anything of
the kind?’

He argued, pleaded, even lost his temper with her, but she was
remorseless. He had been unfaithful to her, and, like every other
deceived wife, she knew her disillusionment was a weapon. Never again
would he betray her. Even later, when she went beyond the beyonds and
challenged him about his drinking—a thing her mother would never have
dared to do—he endured it patiently. Now she had three quivering
victims, a thing that might have gone to the head of a less emotional
girl than she was.


4

But Dick Gordon got the worst of it, and he did not understand it at
all. Joan had always been what he thought of as a good girl, but she
had also had her share of devilment. A couple of times when they
stayed in Crosshaven she had slipped into his bed, and Dick, who
understood that part of her very well, knew that she was only trying
it out. It merely meant that she felt perfectly safe with him, which
she was.

But those days were over. Now, when she thought of it, Joan merely
wondered how she would feel if Kitty were to behave like that with
some young fellow of Dick’s age, and at once it ceased to be
attractive. Even Dick himself was not very reliable—a young fellow
who didn’t believe in God, or eternal punishment, or marriage or
anything. Even if she married him, there would still be endless
arguments about what children should and should not be taught. So far
as he was concerned they would grow up like heathens.

It was a real problem to her and caused her a great deal of worry. She
realized that in her own way she loved him, and often in the evenings
she forgot herself and stood at the door with her arms folded bending
forward to look down the road for him. It was only when she saw him,
coming towards her with his self-confident air, that she remembered
the Protestant grandmother, and in her perturbation picked a quarrel
with him. No, she couldn’t go to the pictures that evening. She
couldn’t go for a walk. She couldn’t even ask him to stay because she
had arranged to coach Kitty for her Civil Service exam. And then she
went into the front room and bawled again.

One night, Mick opened the door and walked in with a puzzled air.

‘What the hell is wrong with you, girl?’ he asked crossly.

‘Me?’ she asked, sniffing back tears. ‘Oh, nothing. Why?’

‘Are you having a fight with Dick?’

‘No, Daddy. It’s not that.’

‘Well, don’t. Dick is a fine young fellow.’ Long ago Mick had promoted
Dick to the position of the son he lacked, and since his wife’s death
this attitude had become fixed in him. ‘Look! Don’t sit here in the
dark, moaning. Put on your hat and coat and go out after him. Tell him
you’re sorry, whether you are or not. He won’t mind.’

Whether it was that he knew her father was on his side or not, Dick
had a curious thickness that made him incapable of recognizing when he
wasn’t wanted. There were times when she thought him the thickest man
in the world. He wasn’t easy at home with a respectable family who
thought the Twomeys were frivolous and unstable. He had been coming to
the house for years until it meant more to him than his own. The old
gate that squeaked, the flower-beds and lilacs, the little front room
were Dick’s romance, and he was prepared to fight for them. This, she
saw, was something she would have to have out with him, and it alarmed
her because she was not very good at scenes. And when this one came,
it was worse than she expected because she made no impression at all
on Dick. It was a spring evening and they were lying in a field over
the harbour—an old haunt of theirs. Dick had his hands linked behind
his head, and when she told him that they must see less of one
another, he merely turned to look at her with an air of pity and
amusement,

‘What makes you think that?’ he asked mildly.

‘Well, things have changed so much, and I have so many new
responsibilities, I wouldn’t like to keep you hanging round,’ she
said, getting nervous.

‘Oh, I have a few responsibilities of my own, you know,’ he said with
a smile.

‘But this may be a matter of years, Dick.’

‘Well, since we suit one another, we may as well put up with a few
delays,’ he replied blandly.

‘But, Dick, we don’t suit one another.’

This time he raised his eyebrows. Dick was an engineer and tended to
treat people as though they were complicated bits of machinery.
Something went wrong; you opened it up and fixed it, and then it
worked perfectly again. She could almost see him working on her now.

‘Don’t we?’

‘I don’t honestly think so, Dick. Not any longer anyhow.’

‘Since how long?’

‘Oh, a long time.’

‘Exactly,’ he said blandly. ‘Since your mother’s death.’

(Joan could almost see it as though it were evidence at the
inquest—‘She had not been the same since her mother’s death.)

‘Ah, Dick, it’s not only Mummy’s death,’ she said impatiently.

‘No, of course not, he went on in the same bland tone. ‘But that is
the most important thing. You’ve had a shock, and you must wait for
the effects to wear off.’

‘Listen, Dick, I wish you’d talk seriously for once,’ she said
angrily. ‘I know I was young and giddy, and I didn’t understand how
much certain things meant to me. I suppose it’s only when someone you
care for dies that you do know.’

‘And that is part of the shock,’ he said positively.

‘It isn’t part of the shock,’ she cried. ‘That’s what I’m trying to
explain. You just think everything is caused by something else and it
isn’t. I’ll get over the shock, as you call it, but I won’t get over
things I believed in all the time, only I didn’t pay enough attention
to them. You don’t believe in any of the things I believe in—that’s
the real trouble. You want me to marry you, and God knows I always
wanted to marry you, but you don’t even believe in marriage. You don’t
believe in sin. You could go off with another girl tonight and there
would be nothing to prevent you.’

‘Or to prevent any of your pious believers,’ Dick said with cold
anger.

‘At least they’d know that what they were doing was wrong, she said.

‘Oh, if it’s only a feeling of guilt you think I’m lacking in, I’ll do
the best I can,’ he said wearily. He got up and brushed himself, but
he was a man who could not keep his anger at boiling point. He looked
down at her and smiled.

‘Give yourself time, Joanie,’ he pleaded. ‘You’ve lost a
wonderful mother, and it seems like the end of the world to you, but
don’t exaggerate. People don’t get on in marriage because they have
the same taste and the same ideas. Your mother didn’t get on with your
father for that reason. You and I didn’t get on for that reason. We
got on because we had respect for one another’s feelings. That’s all.’

It wasn’t all, and she knew it, but it was hopeless to argue with
him. He came back to the house every evening just the same, though
each evening he seemed a little more despondent. He was. From his
limited, logical, liberal point of view her breach with him made no
sense even if he was wrong about religion. Sometimes in his liberal
way he assumed he must be, and that there was probably an essential
flywheel missing that would enable him to enjoy ascensions,
assumptions and apparitions just like anybody else. But he knew the
wild side of Joan better than anyone else, and he could not understand
how the laughing girl who had pushed her way into his bed in
Crosshaven could disappear like that, leaving behind nothing but a
soured, censorious old maid.

He even discussed it one evening with Kitty when he accidentally met
her outside the office—it did not occur to him that she had arranged
the accident—but her explanations only mystified him more.

‘It’s all just pride, Dick,’ she said coldly. ‘Just rotten pride and
vanity. All she wants now is a man she can boss the way she bosses
Daddy and us. You’re too independent for her altogether.’

That evening he asked Kitty to come to the theatre with him, Joan
having already refused. It was Shaw’s _Saint Joan_ and during the last
half Kitty wept almost without ceasing.

‘God, Dick,’ she sobbed, ‘I always wanted to be a saint.’

He was amused and touched, amused by her emotionalism, touched by her
resemblance to her mother. ‘What an astonishing family!’ he thought.
After the theatre she insisted on walking home, swinging from his arm
and stopping before shop windows. Finally she detained him for half an
hour under the gaslamp at the end of the square. She knew she was in
full view of Joan but this neither deterred nor incited her. She
wanted to talk about the play.

‘Do you think I’d let myself get burned the way she did?’ she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Dick said with amusement, leaning against the lamp
post, his feet wide and his hands behind his back. ‘Maybe you would
after changing your mind a few times as she did,’

‘Twelve months ago I’d have been certain of it; she said.

‘And what made the change?’ he asked without realizing what she was
speaking of.

‘You known damn well,’ she said softly.

‘I’m sorry, Kitty,’ he said with real concern.

‘Why would you be? You weren’t rotten to her,’

‘And if you’ll forgive my saying it, neither were you,’ he said with
his gentle smile.

‘I’m the best judge of that, Dick,’ she said without rancour. ‘And
now, what do you think I’m going to do? Say I’m sorry and hope for
another chance? Fat hope I have! It’s all bloody cod, Dick Gordon, and
you know it better than anyone,’

Suddenly she rushed away from him, and as she plunged up the hill he
heard her sobbing as if her heart would break. There were tears in his
own eyes. It was clear that Kitty had grown up with great rapidity.


5

For different reasons the same idea occurred to Joan. Next day it was
obvious that Kitty had fallen head and ears in love with Dick, and
Kitty in love gave off an atmosphere that simply could not be
ignored. She was hoping to see Dick again the following evening, and
when Joan detained her, she burst into tears and said that Joan was
doing it for spite.

‘What on earth do you mean, child?’ Joan asked with an astonishment
that was not quite sincere.

‘Who are you calling “child”? retorted Kitty. (It was the one word
that was sure to madden her.) ‘You pretend you don’t want him, but
you’re mad jealous if he looks at anyone else.’

Joan gaped. It was only now that she was beginning to notice the
change in her own character. Six months before, that skinny,
pasty-faced little brat would not have dared to suggest that any man
would look at her rather than at Joan, without Joan’s showing her how
wrong she was.

But Kitty continued to ignore her, and Dick, who seemed. to have the
hide of a rhinoceros, continued to call as though nothing much had
happened except a slight change of object. From Kitty’s rapt look when
she had been out with him, Joan could see that he did to Kitty the
sort of things he had done to herself. At a sign of approval Kitty
would have broken down and told her, and Joan had no doubt at all that
she told May. How could she bring up two children with that sort of
thing going on?

It came to a head one Saturday afternoon when Kitty packed her bag for
the weekend. Joan felt despairing. It was bad enough, having to stay
at home and get everything ready for the Sunday while her mind was on
something else; it was too much to be imagining a bed in Crosshaven
and Kitty slipping into it beside Dick.

‘Where are you going, Kitty?’ she asked in her casual way.

To Crosshaven for the weekend,’ Kitty said, growing pale—casualness
was something she still could not affect. ‘Why?’

‘Who are you going with?’

‘The Caseys. They asked Dick and me. We’re going in their car.’

‘And did you ask Daddy’s permission, Kitty?’

‘No,’ said Kitty, who always grew impertinent when she was
frightened. ‘Did you?’

It was really too much for Joan, who had no faith in her sister’s
capacity for keeping out of trouble and she complained to her
father. He was a bad man to complain to, because he was full of pity
for humanity in general and young fellows of Dick’s age in
particular. He, too, thought she was jealous—it was really
extraordinary, the number of people who got that impression—and of
course, she couldn’t really tell him about the sort of thing that went
on—not without convicting herself.

‘Ah, look here, girl,’ he said irritably, ‘wouldn’t you make it up
with Dick, whatever he did to you?’

‘But honestly, Daddy, he did nothing to me.’

‘Whatever ye did to one another, so.’

‘We did nothing to one another, Daddy. I give you my word, It’s just
that we weren’t really suited. You see, Dick has no religion,’

‘Ah, religion my ass!” her father said furiously. ‘Do you think I had
any religion when I was his age? What the hell do you want him to do
with you—say the Rosary? You make me sick!’ .

It’s not the same thing at all, Daddy,’ Joan said obstinately. ‘Your
generation didn’t have any religion, but there were good reasons for
it. It’s different with Dick. He hasn’t any proper sense of
responsibility, and Kitty hasn’t either. Neither of them knows where
to stop.’

‘Ah, Christ, Joan,’ he said, ‘leave me alone with that sort of talk! I
was the same when I was his age. He’s only knocking round with Kitty
to spite you. It only shows how fond of you he is: Damn it, didn’t I
nearly marry your Aunt Molly after one row I had with your poor
mother, God rest her? And where would you be now if I did? Answer me
that! You should never take things like that to the fair.’

All the same, Mick felt there should be something he could do about
it. After an attempt at talking to Kitty who got up in her dramatic
way and offered to leave the house next morning, he decided that that
wasn’t it. It was only when he ran into Dick Gordon accidentally one
evening on Patrick’s Bridge that he decided to confide in him. He was
like Dick in this, that both found it easier to talk intimately to
men. Men did not drop into blooming sentiment, and anyone listening to
Mick would have thought he was only telling an amusing story. But Dick
thought otherwise, and when he went away he already felt that he owed
it to the man he would have liked for a father-in-law not to make
any more trouble for him at home.

When he next met Kitty he suggested that they should give up meeting
till she had got her exam and was independent. She agreed, reasonably
enough as he thought, and, indeed, she settled down to work with a
deliberation that surprised Joan. Though Kitty gave the impression of
being frivolous and unstable, there was a streak of determination in
her that was very close to desperation. Unfortunately for him, it was
months before Dick realized that it was desperation rather than
reasonableness, and by that time it was too late. He had lost the
second of the Twomey girls without even knowing quite how he had.

6

For some months Joan had been seeing Chris Dwyer off and on. She had
been astute enough to realize that he had fallen in love with her, all
over a remark she had made about a concert, but that he would do
nothing about it as long as she was seen round with Dick Gordon. Chris
was not a dashing type at all, like Dick, and had never except
inadvertently cut in on anyone.

He was a tall, good-looking young man with a long, pale face, clever
eyes, a long, rather suspicious nose, and a weak, gentle mouth. He
spoke in a Sunday’s Well accent, swallowing half his words; dressed
accordingly and even carried an umbrella. ‘I really don’t see what the
objection to it is,’ he said with his nervous laugh. ‘I mean, it’s so
practical.’ You could see that the umbrella meant something special to
him, like a holy medal. Young May, who thought he was a queer, called
him ‘I mean’.

He came of a good family that had descended in the world, and devoted
himself to the care of his mother, a woman of such invincible
refinement that she didn’t even understand what had happened to her
income. The first time Chris asked Joan to come to a concert with him
he told her the whole story of his life so that there could be no
question of his inability to marry her, and Joan, who understood him
perfectly, was very amused because she had no doubt of her
ability to marry him whenever she wanted to.

After that, he took her out on the same evening each week, umbrella
and all. He was an orderly young man who liked to know exactly where
he stood. He was also in his own way a clever one, conscientious and
kind; and out of his great responsibilities he made up funny little
stories which he told with an air of intense gravity that made them
funnier still. When Joan laughed he grew quite hysterical, and his
face became that of an ingenuous boy.

Joan confided in him her troubles with her father and sisters, and
Chris—after a period of meditation—responded with a new version of his
life story that contained admissions about his elder brothers, Bob and
Jim. Bob gambled, and Jim, who couldn’t be kept out of a church had
broken out in very peculiar ways. Joan could not get out of him
exactly what they were, but they were obviously a great trial.

Between family confidences and music, Chris and herself seemed made
for one another, the only difficulty being that each had so many
responsibilities that there was no hope of their ever being more than
friends, but even this formed something of a bond, and they were
genuinely happy in one another’s company. Joan had at last got rid of
the range, and had the kitchen done up in bright simple colours so
that she didn’t mind asking him in, even if they hadn’t a bathroom.
Her father, of course; didn’t like the living room, and had retreated
to the sitting room where things were still unchanged, but Joan had
ideas for that, too. Or she would have, when she had got him to
install the bathroom. She felt she would never be able to deal with a
man as an equal until she could say: ‘Don’t you want to go to the
bathroom?’

All the same, she still had troubles with her family. By the time
Kitty got her job and left home, May was seventeen and a handful, in
some ways worse than Kitty. Kitty had a temper, and wept and used
dirty words, but May was a girl of extraordinary sweetness, with a
disposition as clear as her complexion. She was a slight girl, cool,
resourceful, and insinuating, with a smile that seemed intended merely
to reveal her tiny front teeth, and she had some extraordinary
ideas. For instance, she didn’t believe in class distinctions, and
only smiled tolerantly at Joan’s insistence on a bathroom. It seemed
she didn’t think bathrooms were natural. She was a great believer in
Nature, and Nature to her did not mean a summer bungalow in Crosshaven
but a primitive cabin in West Cork with no bathroom at all. ‘Do you
want to go out to the haggard?’ she would ask, with no consideration
at all for the embarrassment she might be causing a visitor.

It was Chris, who seemed to know everything, who told Joan about May’s
friendship with Timmy McGovern and his crowd. Timmy represented
several Dublin firms and was in line for the Dublin management of
one. He lived on the College Road with his wife—one of the Geraghty
girls from Glenareena (of course, Chris knew about them as well) and
two kids. According to Chris, he was very popular, but not steady;
definitely not steady. Even his best friend, Tony Dowse, said he was
an imaginative man, and everybody knew what Tony Dowse was like!

Joan went straight upstairs and searched May’s bedroom for
letters. There were plenty of these, mostly from Timmy McGovern, and
Joan and Chris read them together in the new living room with a sense
of utter incredulity. Joan knew of old that all love letters were
silly, but these were mad. They would go on for a paragraph in a
jerky, spasmodic style like a broken-down car, and then soar suddenly
into rhetoric about the long winding roads of Ireland or the world’s
not existing any longer for them when they were together.

‘My goodness!’ Chris said with a giggle that sounded like a cry. ‘“The
winding roads of Ireland!” Do you know him?’

‘No, Chris, why?’

‘He must be a ton weight, and his feet are so bad he can hardly walk a
hundred yards,’

‘And a married man!’

‘That’s the worst of it, of course,’ Chris said, sobering up.

‘What am I going to do? If Daddy knew he’d go mad.’

‘You’ll have to talk to her,’ said Chris.

‘Talk to her!’ cried Joan. ‘Wait till I’m done with her!’

But even talking to May was not as easy as it sounded. She was too
well-guarded.

‘May,’ Joan asked dramatically, ‘what’s all this about Mr
McGovern and you?”

‘How do you mean—all this?” May asked sweetly.

‘May, it’s no use talking like that; Joan said sternly. ‘I read his
letters to you.’

‘Then you know as much about it as I do,’ replied May.

‘You should be proud of them,’ Joan said bitterly. ‘A married man!’

‘They suit me all right,’ May said with a shrug and a splutter. ‘And
married men are much the same as other men from the little I see.’

That was typical of May. She couldn’t even understand that a few words
in front of a priest changed a man’s whole nature—or should.

‘Aren’t you forgetting that they have wives, May?’ Joan asked
sternly. ‘A lovely time his wife would have, getting those letters
read out in court!’ She paused to see if the word ‘court’ would scare
May, but she wasn’t as easily scared as that. ‘May, where is this
thing going to end?’

‘We didn’t decide yet,’ May replied with a guilty smile as though she
blamed herself greatly for letting such opportunities slip. ‘I dare
say eventually I’ll have to go and live with him.’

‘You’ll what, May?’ Joan asked, wondering if the girl were really
sane.

‘Oh, I don’t mean in Cork, of course,’ May said apologetically. By now
she seemed to be blaming herself for a certain weakness of
character. ‘I mean when he gets to Dublin. It might even have to be
London. People in this country are so blooming narrow-minded,’ she
added with indignation. ‘They get in a rut by the time they’re
eighteen—any of them that weren’t in a rut before.’

At any moment now Joan felt that May would start quoting Timmy’s
letters to her and tell her that Ireland didn’t exist either.

‘May,’ she said despairingly, ‘where do you get these terrible ideas
from?’

‘Now, Joan, it’s no use talking like a schoolgirl to me,’ May said
with unusual sharpness, ‘You should have got over that with the
measles. Timmy made a mistake in his marriage, that’s all. Lots of men
do, actually,’ she added in a worldlywise tone that made Joan
writhe. ‘Either he has to put up with Eily Geraghty for the rest of
his life or make a fresh start somewhere else.’

‘Well, he’s making a worse mistake if he thinks he’s going to make a
fresh start with you,’ cried Joan. May only shrugged and pouted a
little. The matter was obviously one she could only discuss on a high
plane of abstraction. Apparently she thought that Joan probably didn’t
exist either.

But Joan showed her. First, she complained to her father, and as usual
he behaved as though she were the guilty party. Then for ten minutes
he thundered at May in the manner of an angry Jehovah, and she was
quite genuinely upset, but it was obvious to Joan that she was upset
on his account rather than her own. It saddened her to see a man of
such independent character reduced to talk about what the neighbours
would think.

But Joan had no intention of letting herself be flouted. One afternoon
she went to the Grand Parade where Timmy McGovern had his office. She
disliked him from the first moment. He was a fat, big-built man with
discoloured teeth, a long lock of dark hair that tumbled over his left
eye, small merry eyes, and small, unsteady feminine feet that seemed
as though at any moment they might give up the ghost. She could see
what Chris meant about the improbability of his travelling the long
winding roads of Ireland in anything but a large car.

Obviously, he was scared to death and gave her a wistful smile as he
led her into his private office. In fact, he had only just arrived
there himself in a series of roundabout routes. He had heard talk
about himself and May, and Timmy was sensitive that way. Whenever he
heard talk about himself he went into hiding. He did really mean it
when he said the rest of the world didn’t exist for him when he was
with May, but when he wasn’t it could be quite alarming.

His office was a small room with a window opening on the vent, a
stationery press, a table, and a couple of chairs. On the table was a
photograph of May, sitting on a rock over a mountain pool, and the
sight of it made Joan mad. She opened her pocket-book and put the
photograph in.

‘If you won’t protect my sister’s reputation, I have to do it, Mr
McGovern,’ she said. ‘Now, if you wouldn’t mind giving me her
letters!’

‘Her what?’ Timmy asked in consternation.

‘Her letters.’

‘I have no letters,’ he said, growing sullen.

‘Well, I have,’ she said grimly. ‘Letters from you to her. And, what’s
more, Mr McGovern, I intend to use them.’

I’m sorry you feel like this about it,’ he said nervously, fumbling
with the spring of his pince-nez.

‘And how do you think I should feel? You should be ashamed of
yourself! A married man with two children, writing like that to a
child—a schoolgirl!’

Nothing would ever persuade Joan but that the few words pronounced in
front of the priest must produce some sort of change, but with Timmy
they didn’t seem to have taken. His eyes clouded with tears.

‘I can explain that,’ he said brokenly. ‘I don’t think you’d be quite
so unreasonable if you knew the sort of life I lead. Mind, I don’t
want you to think I’m complaining of my wife! She was always a good
woman according to her lights, but there was never any understanding
between us. Eily is a peasant, and she hasn’t an idea beyond the house
and the children. When I met May I knew she was the only girl in the
world for me. I love May,’ he added with manly simplicity. I’d die for
her this minute.’

‘Thank you, Mr McGovern, Joan said curtly. ‘She doesn’t need anyone to
die for her. She needs someone to look after her. I didn’t come here
to discuss your disagreements with your wife. I came here to get my
sister’s letters, and to warn you that next time you see her or write
to her, I’m going straight to your wife and then to the priest.’

Joan was bluffing, and she knew it. Timmy, like everyone else in Cork
was vulnerable, but he wasn’t as vulnerable as all that. If he had
told Joan to take a running jump for herself there was very little she
could do that wouldn’t make as much trouble for herself as for him;
but Timmy, a romantic man, lived in an atmosphere of crisis, and he
was scared by the hysteria in her voice. That is the worst of
out-and-out idealism; it so rarely stands up to a well-played bluff.

‘You wouldn’t do that to us?’ he said reproachfully.

She knew then she had him on the run, She rose and went to the door.

‘The child has no other mother, she said. ‘I have to be a mother to
her.’

That did it. Timmy grabbed her excitedly and closed the door she had
just opened. His dark hair was ruffled, and he was scowling and
dribbling. As Tony Dowse said, he was an imaginative man. He begged
Joan to be reasonable; he would respect May if she were his own
daughter. It was just that life was impossible without her.

‘If I don’t get those letters today I’m going straight up to your
wife,’ she said.

Timmy looked at her and sighed. It was a terrible sigh as though at
last the wickedness of the world had been revealed to him. Then he
opened a drawer and took out a bundle of letters. Without looking at
them Joan pushed them into her handbag and went silently down the
stairs. She was full of triumph. At last she felt she had grown up and
spoken to a man twice her age as an equal. She was so pleased with
herself that she went straight to Chris’ office.

‘I got them,’ she said, patting her bag, and Chris smiled.

‘Splendid!’ he said, a little too enthusiastically. ‘Wonderful! Now,
if only you can keep her away from him for a week or two, everything
will be fine.’

‘Oh, that’s all arranged, too,’ she said bitterly. ‘He won’t see her
again.’ And then something awful happened to her and she burst into
wild tears.

‘Oh, darling!’ Chris said, forgetting himself. ‘I knew I shouldn’t let
you do this yourself. I should have seen him. Look, wait a minute and
we’ll go out for a cup of tea. Or a drink? Maybe a drink would be
better”

‘No, thanks, Chris,’ she said, dabbing her eyes and trying to
smile. ‘I’ll be all right. It’s just the strain.’

But it wasn’t the strain, and she stamped through Patrick Street,
shaking her head and drying her eyes. She had suddenly found herself
turned inside out, and instead of feeling triumphant, she felt like
death. Instead of denouncing Timmy as a vile seducer, she wanted to go
back and denounce him as a bloody old pansy. She knew if any man had
been devoted to her as Timmy was supposed to be to May even if it was
sinful, and mortal sin at that, and even if he did have a wife and two
children—and had written her those letters about reality not
existing except when she was round, it would have broken her heart if
he had taken fright as Timmy did.

So the scene she had planned with May took an entirely different turn
from what she intended, as planned scenes usually do. May just sat
there, cold and white and detached and Joan floundered and sobbed
through her explanations. She knew it was none of her business, but
she had done it for the best, and of course, she wasn’t mature enough
for the responsibilities she had taken on, and she hoped May would
forgive her, but May was a hundred times the man Timmy was.

‘That’s what I’m beginning to think myself,’ May said curtly as though
from a great distance, and Joan would have done almost anything to
make it up between them again but she knew she couldn’t. Somewhere
beneath May, as beneath her father, there was that slight streak of
ice beyond which the most devoted interference could not live.

Timmy, according to Chris, who had it from Tony Dowse, took to his bed
with an incurable disease and was nursed devotedly by Eily
Geraghty. But Timmy knew that the doctor and Eily were in a conspiracy
to conceal from him what was really wrong, so he applied for a life
insurance policy, saw the doctor and went straight back to bed. When
the policy was returned to him, completed, he got up, went into town
and had a roaring evening with his group. ‘An imaginative man’ as Tony
had always said, almost with admiration.

It seemed to take little out of May. She was different from Kitty in
that. Within a month she was walking out with a handsome young
journalist who drove a sports car, and pleading with him to get him
interested in the winding roads of Ireland, but all he would say was
that ‘the surfaces were very bad’. 

Fortunately for their own peace of mind, men rarely realize that the
intellectual charms of a woman usually derive from the previous man.


7

It seemed to bring Joan closer to Chris. He wasn’t scandalized as she
had feared he would be. Instead, he told her a new and franker version
of his life story, which contained some astonishing revelations about
his brother, Bob. As usual, it was Chris who had been left with the
job of clearing things up with the woman’s husband. Joan admired his
reserve in not having told her before. Apparently every family, even
the best brought-up, had things to conceal; and respectability, far
from being the dreary and monotonous virtue it was supposed to be, was
athletic, perilous, and exhausting. You don’t get bathrooms for
nothing. Joan at last succeeded. in getting Mick to put in one for
them, and the first night Chris came briskly up the hill, hitting his
thigh with his folded paper, she nearly suffocated with pleasure at
the thought that now she could say to him: ‘Wouldn’t you like to go
upstairs?’ Besides, she had rented a summer cottage in Crosshaven for
a whole month.

Of course, there were drawbacks. The neighbours hadn’t minded about
the electric light or even the living room, but the bathroom was an
innovation and unpleasant remarks were made about it. Now, when she
went to Mass in the mornings she no longer knew who among the
congregation did not mind the bathroom and who did, so she tended to
give them all the same thin smile. As a result, people were inclined
to say that the Twomeys were growing out of their knowledge.

At the same time her worries with the children continued. On her
previous holiday Kitty had dodged going to Mass. Joan had discovered
it by accident, and it worried her a lot. Then one morning, soon after
Kitty had gone back, May got a letter from her that made her smile.

‘I suppose we’d better tell Daddy about this, she said
questioningly. ‘Did you know Kitty was going to have a baby?”

‘A what, May?’ cried Joan.

‘A baby,’ May replied almost enviously. ‘It’s this fellow Rahilly
she’s knocking round with. I thought she had more sense.’

‘Show me!’ said Joan, realizing that the bathroom was all in
vain. Better, indeed, if there had never been a bathroom. Kitty was
pregnant, and the father was a student of engineering, who though a
boy of very fine character and intelligence, had no job and was
entirely dependent on his parents. Deduct a bathroom from a baby and
there was an awful lot of plain discredit left. Chris’ mother would
have the advantage of her at last. It was even doubtful if May’s
fellow could marry her, but it was no use saying that to May. She
would only begin to argue about a woman’s right to have a baby if she
wanted it. And already Joan had a shrewd suspicion that May was
beginning to feel left out of things.

Her father was no better. Weak as ever, he wanted to put the blame
everywhere except where it belonged.

‘Ah, I can’t be angry with the girl, Joanie,’ he said crossly. ‘It was
my own fault for letting her go to a strange town by herself. This
would never have happened if she was in her own home. Sure, what is
she only a child?’

‘But what are you going to do about, Daddy?’ she asked.

‘What can you do? You can’t let her have a child up there, alone. Let
her come home and have it.’

‘Is it for the whole road to laugh at us?’ she asked incredulously.

‘Oh, them!’ he said contemptuously. ‘Do you think they didn’t laugh at
your mother when I was in gaol, and she hadn’t enough to keep the
house going? When did they ever do anything but laugh, for all the
good the laughing did them?’

‘But, Daddy, what about May?’

‘What about her?’

‘You don’t think or imagine the Mahoneys will let Jim marry her with a
scandal like that in the house?”

‘If Jim Mahoney is the sort to let his people decide whether he’s
going to marry or not, she’s better off without him,’ said her
father. ‘Anyway, what do you expect me to do? You’d think I was the
father, the way you go on!’

‘I thought you’d go to Dublin and talk to him.’

‘How can I go to Dublin, with work ahead of me that I have to finish
or pay a fine?’ he shouted.

‘Oh, all right, then,’ cried Joan, who had heard about that fine too
often to believe in it now. ‘I suppose I’ll have to go myself.
Somebody will have to go.’

That evening she told Chris about it in a cinema teashop overlooking
Patrick Street. She was surprised how little she did have to tell him,
because he seemed to see difficulties and complications that she
hadn’t guessed at.

‘This isn’t a job for you at all, Joan,’ he said with a worried
air. ‘This is a job for a man.’

‘I know that, Chris,’ she said, ‘but Daddy won’t go, and even if he
did you know what he’s like.’

‘Pretty hopeless, I’d say,’ Chris said with a nervous gigele, and
talked tangentially for ten minutes about things in the office. ‘Would
you like me to go?’ he asked suddenly.

She almost laughed at the idea of the refined and modest Chris trying
to arrange Kitty’s marriage for her, but at the same time she was
touched.

‘No, thanks, Chris,’ she said. ‘I’m sure you’d handle this fellow
better than I could, but you’d never be able to handle Kitty. To tell
you the God’s truth, I don’t know that I can handle her myself,’ she
added sadly.

"You’ll have to see his father and mother, of course,’ Chris said
modestly. ‘It’s going to be very unpleasant. They may even try to buy
you off. If they do, refuse to discuss it. If you do discuss it,
you’re lost. You have to keep threatening them with exposure. That’s a
purely legal thing, I needn’t say. Your father would have to sue for
the loss of his daughter’s services. Kitty’s services wouldn’t be of
any financial importance, but you have to stick with them. You won’t
want a law case any more than they will, but you have to pretend it’s
the one thing you’re looking forward to. It’s a game of bluff,
really. You have to pretend you’re in a stronger position than you
are.’

Then, hearing himself talk, he went into a loud lonely laugh and
cheered up at once. °

‘You’d think I was a real Don Juan, wouldn’t your?’ he asked.

‘I was wondering how you knew all about it, said Joan timidly.

‘Oh, family business,’ he said.

‘Not Bob?’

‘Unfortunately, yes, Bob,’ he replied, almost in a whisper. ‘We don’t
like talking about it. You have to take the line that you don’t care
about proceedings. They settled for a hundred and fifty. Otherwise,
Bob would have had to marry her.’

‘My God!’ Joan said.

She was really appalled at the things you brought on yourself merely
by having a sense of duty. Here was Chris, pious, innocent, and
interested mainly in classical music, and he had to try and outwit the
outraged parents and avert a shotgun wedding while she went to Dublin
to compel some scoundrel to marry her flighty sister.

Next afternoon she set off for Dublin by the afternoon train, and was
met at Kingsbridge by Kitty in a wide summer hat, looking
swollen-faced, sullen and resentful. Joan felt pretty bitter
herself. The evening light was flooding the river, and columns and
towers and spires stood up in it, but she couldn’t even enjoy
it. While they sat in the front seat of the bus Kitty asked politely
but without enthusiasm for her father, May and the neighbours. Each of
them knew a struggle was on.

‘How long are you going to stay, Joan?’ Kitty asked innocently.

‘I suppose that depends on you,’ replied Joan.

‘How does it depend on me?’ asked Kitty.

‘I thought I was coming here to arrange about your wedding,’ Joan
said.

‘know,’ Kitty said with quiet fury. ‘The way you arranged the wedding
between Dick Gordon and me, and Timmy McGovern and May.’

‘I suppose you think I should have let Timmy McGovern run away with
May?’ asked Joan.

‘I don’t see what the hell business it was of yours,’ said Kitty.

‘You wouldn’t be long seeing what business it was if you had to get
married with that scandal in the family,’ said Joan. ‘I suppose you’ll
tell me now that your Mr Rahilly is married already?’

He wasn’t, but, as far as Joan could see, that was about the only
thing that wasn’t wrong with him. She shared a room with Kitty and
another girl in Pembroke Road, and, in spite of the fact that she was
worried out of her wits, she found herself staring in fascination at
the sunlit rank of tall, redbrick houses opposite, or glancing out of
the bathroom window at the mountains over Rathfarnham, and thinking
how much nicer the world was than she had ever imagined.

She met Con Rahilly next evening in a teashop in Grafton Street. He
came in with a heap of books under his arm—an overgrown schoolboy.

‘Really, Miss Twomey,’ he said with an anguished air, the lines over
his eyes disappearing into his cropped hair, ‘I’m terribly sorry for
giving you all this trouble. I really am! I know you don’t believe me,
but it happens to be true.’ Later, she learned that he had this
self-pitying trick of imagining what you felt about him and expressing
it.

‘Well, it’s no use worrying about what’s already happened,’ Joan said
practically. ‘It’s just a question of what we’re going to do about
it.’

‘I know,’ he said despairingly. ‘I never think of anything else. I
keep racking my brains, but I don’t seem to be able to think of
anything.’

‘I hope you’ve thought of marrying Kitty?’ said Joan.

‘You’re hoping a hell of a lot,’ Kitty said gruffly, but Joan knew she
was ready to cry and that young Rahilly was the same.

‘I don’t see what the difficulty is,’ she said brightly.

‘That’s because you haven’t had the pleasure of meeting my mother,’ he
explained with the same mixture of misery and cheek. ‘It’s going to be
a shock to her.’

‘I suppose you think it hasn’t been a shock to my father?’ asked Joan,
and he shuddered. Clearly, he didn’t like people speaking roughly to
him.

‘Con doesn’t mean that at all,’ Kitty said hotly, and Joan saw that
she was in a bad way about him.

‘Then would you let him explain what he does mean?’ asked Joan. ‘My
goodness, I can’t seé what all this hugger mugger is about.’

‘I mean I have nothing to marry on,’ he said with anguish. ‘If I marry
Kitty now, my mother will throw me out.’

‘And what about your father?’

‘She’ll probably throw him out as well. She’s been threatening it long
enough. She really is a woman of remarkable character,’ he added with
rueful admiration, and again Joan didn’t know whether or not he was
mocking her. ‘It’s not that I don’t want to marry Kitty, he added
eagerly. ‘She knows that. It’s just that if I do, I’ll have to do it
quietly.’

‘That would be a very peculiar sort of marriage,’ said Joan.

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ he said wearily, clasping his hands and looking
down the restaurant as though he had recognized an old enemy.

‘I’m afraid my father wouldn’t agree to that at all,’ Joan said with
growing decisiveness. ‘After all, who’s to support Kitty until you’ve
finished college and got a job?’

Young Rahilly gave another shrug and looked piteously at Kitty, but
even Kitty didn’t seem to be able to help with this one. Instead, she
lit another cigarette and pushed the packet towards him. It was a
little gesture of love, but he only shook his head with a crucified
air as if wondering how she could think a cigarette would make up to
him for a broken heart. Joan began to like him even less.

‘I suppose you think Father will support her while she hides away in a
furnished room like a criminal?’ she asked angrily. ‘And all to spare
your mother the shock! Really, Mr Rahilly, I think you’re as bad as
Kitty.’

‘It’s easy for you to talk,’ Kitty said brassily. ‘You don’t know his
mother,’ ,

‘Well, she can’t eat him, Kitty,’ Joan cried at the end of her
patience.

‘I wonder,’ he said with perfect gravity. ‘I’ve sometimes thought it
might be a case of suppressed cannibalism.’

‘Well, she isn’t going to eat me,’ said Joan.

‘Look, Joan, you keep away from Con’s mother,’ said Kitty. ‘This is my
business, and I’ll handle it my own way. I’ll keep my job up to the
last month or so, and after that I’ll find something. I won’t be a
burden on you at all. You talk as if Con was the only one responsible,
but I had something to say to it too.’

And Joan knew at once that Rahilly would accept it from her. Whatever
his mother had done to him, she had deprived him of all initiative,
and he would go on like that, petulantly waiting for some other woman
to make up his mind for him. This time, Joan was going to do the
making up.

‘Oh, all right, Kitty,’ she said. ‘I thought I could settle this thing
quietly but I see I can’t. I’ll just wire for Father and let him deal
with it.’

‘In that case I can give up all hope of getting a degree,’ Rahilly
said with resignation. Then he glanced at her with a certain sort of
boyish frankness. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t really mind,’ he
added ruefully. ‘I don’t think I have the brains for an engineer. I
suppose I can be a clerk if anyone will take me on. I’m not the type
for a labourer—even a labourer,’ again anticipating the slight that
Joan hadn’t altogether intended. After that, she had no doubt
though. She had never seen a more spineless specimen.

Next morning, before Kitty left for the office, Rahilly called at
their lodgings. When they went into the sitting room he was looking
out the window. Kitty went up to him eagerly. Joan realized that all
Kitty wanted was to take him away somewhere and nurse him, which was
probably what he wanted too.

‘What happened, Con?’ she asked.

‘Oh, what I expected,’ he said jumpily. ‘Into the night. Cut off with
a shilling. I can’t help admiring the woman.’

‘But what will you do now?’ Joan asked, shocked in spite of
herself.

‘Get married as soon as I can,’ he replied with a shrug. ‘No point in
getting thrown out for wanting to get married and then not doing it,
is there?’

‘Oh, but this is silly,’ she cried. ‘No mother in her senses is going
to behave like that to her only son. There must be some
misunderstanding. I’ll go and see her.’

‘Do,’ he said. ‘You might like her. Several people do, I’m told.’

It was only that afternoon on the bus out to Rahillys’ that his words
came back to her, and she wondered precisely what he had meant. She
decided that he couldn’t mean what he’d seemed to mean. It was just
that, like all weak people, he had no control of his tongue.

The door was opened by a pale, dark-haired woman who moved with a
certain actressy dignity. She gave Joan a pale smile that seemed to be
directed at someone on the strand behind her. The parlour was a small
room with a high window that overlooked the strand. Mrs Rahilly’s
chair was at one side of the window from which she could view the
passers-by. In the first few minutes, Joan realized from the furniture
that there was money somewhere—not a lot, perhaps, but
sufficient. Joan rattled on, raising her voice and speaking with
affected brightness. She was in a dilemma. To treat the behaviour of
the ‘children’, as she called them, too gravely would imply such a
reflection on Kitty as would justify any mother in having nothing to
do with her. To treat it too lightly would imply that she herself was
no better and justify a mother even more. It was essential to create
an impression of respectability—a little impulsive, but definitely
stable. But Mrs Rahilly seemed to care very little for the stability
of the Twomey character, and Joan’s gay tone came back to her with a
hollow echo.

‘Well, what do you expect me to do, Miss Twomey?’ Mrs Rahilly asked at
last with a sad smile, and Joan felt at once that it would be most
improper to expect anything from such a figure of tragedy.

‘Well, they have to get married,’ she said reasonably.

‘That’s what my son seems to think.’

‘And doesn’t it seem a pity if he can’t take his degree, when he
worked so hard?’

‘It is not only my son who had to work hard,’ said Mrs Rahilly, making
Joan feel she had again said the wrong thing.

‘No, of course not,’ she replied too eagerly. ‘Everybody had to
work. But that’s what I mean—everyone’s work going for nothing.’

‘That is something my son should have thought of first, Miss Twomey,’
Mrs Rahilly said with the same sad smile. ‘Of course, if your family
is in a position to support them and the child until Con qualifies, I
have nothing to say to it. But if you mean that I should provide a
home for them here’ she rose with an actressy gesture of
dismissal—‘I’ve worked hard too. My health would not permit it.’

Now that she had Joan on her feet again she became quite friendly,
almost motherly. As she reached for the door handle she rested on it
and added: ‘I’d better be frank with you, Miss Twomey. I don’t wish to
criticize my own son, but I’m afraid he would not make a good husband
for your sister. His father was always a weak man. He drank, and, of
course, like all drunkards, he did not keep his hand where it
belonged. I had to pay back what he stole. But that is neither here
nor there. My son is weaker still. I did not expect to rear him, Miss
Twomey. It is his digestion. He has every delicacy in his own home,
but he cannot keep it down. What business has a boy like that with a
wife and family?’ Then she raised her head with a calm and tragic air
and added: ‘If she were my sister, I’d send her to the poorhouse
first.’

Joan left almost in tears with frustration. At the same time she
observed a small man in a blue serge suit and a bowler hat get up from
a bench. She noticed that he had a fresh-coloured kindly face and a
small grey moustache. She had no doubt that she was looking at Con’s
father, the man who had not been able to keep his hand where it
belonged. She felt dirty all over. Bitch! Bitch! Dirty bitch! she said
again and again to herself.


8

That night she went back to Cork, without having effected much except
to fix the date of the wedding. She was as sure as she could be of
anything that Con Rahilly would not turn up, so she arranged for them
to marry on the same day as May. Then, if he didn’t turn up the
scandal wouldn’t be quite so bad. To Chris she admitted that she
didn’t feel too secure of herself even then. It seemed impossible that
she should ever steer two such irresponsibles as Kitty and May to the
altar without one or the other running off with a lover, giving birth
to a baby, or something equally inappropriate.

No wonder she was hard on Kitty when her notice was up and she came
back to Cork to prepare for the wedding. Joan warned her father not to
encourage her in any way, and, except for stolen confidences with May,
who was as shameless as herself, Kitty was treated as an abandoned
woman who had brought disgrace on them all—or would if she weren’t
stopped.

Meanwhile, her attitude to Chris changed in an extraordinary way. They
spent August in a little seaside cottage in Crosshaven. Her father of
course didn’t come. He’d tried it once, and after forty-eight hours he
was like a raging demon, complaining that there was nothing in that
bloody place but the water. Kitty and May were staying there, with
May’s boy, a tall, athletic fellow given to practical jokes that
irritated Joan. One night, when the other three had gone to a dance,
Joan and Chris were sitting in a nook on the cliffs. Something about
the beauty of the harbour in twilight made her despondent.

‘I don’t know how it is,’ she said irritably. ‘You work and work, and
do your best for everybody, and meantime, your own life slips by.’

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Chris said, taking her hand. ‘It seems futile,
of course, but if you’re born with that sort of character you have to
go through with it. You don’t do it for other
people’s satisfaction, you know. You do it for your own as well.’

‘And a hell of a lot of good it is for you, she replied
impatiently. ‘Ah, Chris, nobody’s born with that sort of
character. You weren’t born just to be censorious and bossy and
quarrel over halfpence. You could get just as much out of life as the
others, and more.’

‘That’s true, of course,’ he said thoughtfully. Up to a point, I
mean. It’s funny, but everything in life is only up to a point. And
families do force you into a certain mould, even if it doesn’t suit
you. Like me, for instance. I suppose I’m really only interested in
music. But then Bob turns into a bit of a playboy, and as a result Jim
gets religion in the wrong way, and I have to be the Old Reliable and
look after the pair of them as well as Mother. It’s silly really, I
suppose. I sometimes think only children have an awful lot to be
thankful for.’

‘One of these days I’m going to be an only child,’ Joan said.

‘They went back to the cottage, hand in hand. Chris went to bed and
lay awake reading. Suddenly the bedroom door opened and Joan stormed
in in her nightdress. He had never seen her like this before. She was
angry, amused and very, very beautiful.

‘For God’s sake, push in there, Chris Dwyer!’ she said shrilly. ‘I
have to have someone to talk to, or I’ll go out of my blooming mind.’

Chris, who was always modest, blew out the candle. As a romantic
lover, Chris was no great shakes, but he knew desperation when he saw
it, and he put his arm about her and patted her gently as one would
pat a child.

And then, to Joan’s great astonishment, he stopped patting her, and
said a number of things that astonished her and made her want to weep,
so that she was not quite up to it when he treated her as Dick Gordon
had never done. Then he yawned and asked if it wasn’t wonderful and
said they should go to Italy at once. He had always wanted to go to
Italy and something had always stopped him, but this time he was
determined about it. When they heard the voices of the others from the
cliff, Joan jumped out of bed and rushed into the hall. Suddenly, at
the door she stopped and shouted back at him in laughter and delight—

‘Now, Chris Dwyer, you’ve got me into trouble, and you’d better marry
me quick!’

9

In that haze, it seemed even more impossible for Joan to do what she
had set out to do, but she did it. To her great surprise, Con Rahilly
arrived in time for the wedding—when driven to it, those dependent
mother’s boys sometimes showed extraordinary manliness. His father had
shaken him silently by the hand and slipped him a five pound note,
borrowed specially for the occasion, and Con said he was going to get
it framed. Mrs Rahilly had refused to leave her room or even say
goodbye. ‘You can’t beat the true Irish mother,’ Con said with his
abstracted air. He had already rented a furnished room in Leeson
Street, and the father of a college friend had made a small job for
him, selling women’s underwear—of all things! Chris, with whom he
stayed, could make nothing of him and thought he wasn’t quite right in
the head, but Joan’s father, for some reason, took a fantastic liking
to him, laughed at his grisly jokes, told him there would always be a
room in his house for him, offered to back a loan for him, and then
told Joan that Kitty had picked the best man of them all. When she
asked what he meant, he said Con was the only man that he’d trust with
a rifle—a typical obscure joke from an old revolutionary.

It was a lonely house when the double wedding was over and the guests
had gone. Now that her task was completed and her responsibilities
almost at an end, Joan felt empty inside. It was as though her mind
could not settle on the present and ranged back over the years to the
time when she had been a little girl. She sat over the fire in the
front room with her father, talking into the early hours of the
morning. Though neither of them mentioned it, it was her mother’s
death they were both thinking of ~ the sitting there at the same hour,
listening to that ghastly breathing overhead. This, too, was a sort of
death, and the new life that was waiting for her was something that
she shrank from.

‘I suppose Chris and I will be getting married too, as soon as we
can,’ she said lightly. ‘I hope you won’t mind?’

‘Mind? he asked. ‘Why should I mind?’

‘Because I’m afraid we’ll have to go and live in Dublin.’

‘Why in Dublin?’ he asked.

‘Oh, well,’ she said, dabbing her eyes, ‘Chris is mad on classical
music, and you can’t hear a single thing in this blooming place. There
are concerts and all sorts in Dublin.’

‘And what about Chris’ mother?’ he asked. ‘Is she going with you?’

‘Indeed, she is not, said Joan. ‘She can stay with Bob if she wants
someone to look after her. She won’t find him as easy to get on with
as Chris, but that’s her look-out. What about you, though? Wouldn’t
you like to live with May?’

‘I would not,’ he said flatly.

‘Chris said to tell you you could always come and live with us,’ she
said, realizing for the first time how big it was of Chris.

‘Ah, Chris has enough responsibilities without me, her father
said. ‘I’ll be all right, you’ll see. I’ll get some old woman in to
cook my supper and I’ll be fine.’

And she knew he would do his best to die where he had lived, among the
little memorials of the woman he had loved, and for one wild minute
she felt she wanted to do the same. She put her head in her hands and
began to sob quietly. Her father got up and re-filled her glass. Then
he stood, looking down at her.

‘What’s wrong, child?’ he asked quizzically.

‘I don’t want to go to Dublin,’ she sobbed. ‘I don’t want to leave
Cork. I want to stay here and look after you.’

‘If you don’t want to you don’t have to,’ he said gently.

‘I do.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m—I’m having a baby—oh, Jesus!’

At first she thought he was going to hit her, and then she saw he
was almost on the point of laughing.

‘Here!’ he said, thrusting the glass on her. ‘Take a pussful of this!
What’s wrong with having a baby?’

‘I’d be disgraced if I stayed on here.’

He poured himself a drink.

‘Is it Chris?’

‘Yes.’

‘And ye’re getting married?’

‘Yes?

‘What the hell disgrace is there?. Isn’t it your own business?’

Snivelling into her glass, she saw him back in his own chair, grinning
at her as he had grinned when she had come to him for the ‘loan’ of a
shilling.

‘It isn’t. I’m a liar and a hypocrite. I bullied you and the girls and
ye have every reason to despise me.’

‘Do you think I despise you?’

‘You have good reason to. And Dick Gordon was so good, and I was
rotten to him, and I was rotten to May and rotten to Kitty, and
they’ll never forgive me.’

‘Come here to me!’ he said, and she got up like a sleepwalker and
crossed the room to him. ‘Come on! You can sit on my knee. It’s a long
time since you did. Now, I want you to listen to me. You know I was
fond of your mother, and what sort of life do you think I gave her? I
had the best wife the Lord God ever gave a man in this world, and I
treated her as I wouldn’t treat a dog. I wake up in the middle of the
night and think about it and cry, and a hell of a lot of good that is
to her or me! But even if I was as decent a man as I wanted to be,
what sort of life do you think I’d have given her? A damn poor life,
but all I had.’

Then his voice took on the curious formality she had noticed once
before.

‘If your mother is anywhere, she’s here tonight, and what she has to
say, I’m saying for her. We’re proud of you, and we’re delighted
you’re getting married. There’s nothing we’d hate more than to see you
without kids of your own. You’re a great girl, and we’re glad you’re
getting a fine steady fellow like Chris. And thank Chris from both of
us for offering me a home, but I’ll stick with the one that she made
for me.

‘Now, it’s a long time since I put you to bed, and probably it’s the
last time, but it’s time little girls were asleep. Come along! Sleepy
bye!’


(1954)