LONELY ROCK I In England during the war I had a great friend called Jack Courtenay who was assistant manager in one of the local factories. His job was sufficiently important to secure his exemption from military service. His family was originally from Cork, but he had come to work in England when he was about eighteen and married an English girl called Sylvia, a school-teacher. Sylvia was tall, thin, fair and vivacious, and they got on very well together. They had two small boys, of seven and nine. Jack was big-built, handsome, and solemn-looking, with a gravity which in public enabled him to escape from the usual English suspicion of Irish temperament and in private to get away with a schoolboy mania for practical joking. I have known him invite someone he liked to his office to discuss an entirely imaginary report from the police, accusing the unfortunate man of bigamy and deserting a large family. He could carry on a joke like that for a long time without a shadow of a smile, and end up by promising his victim to try and persuade the police that it was all a case of mistaken identity. He was an athlete, with an athlete’s good nature when he was well and an athlete’s hysteria when he wasn’t. A toothache or a cold in the head could drive him stark, staring mad. Then he retired to bed (except when he could create more inconvenience by not doing so) and conducted guerrilla warfare against the whole household, particularly the children, who were diverting the attention which should have come to himself. His face, normally expressionless, could convey indescribable agonies on such occasions, and even I felt that Sylvia went too far with her air of indifference and boredom. ‘Do stop that shouting!’ or ‘Why don’t you see the dentist?’ were remarks that caused me almost as much pain as they caused her husband. Fortunately, his ailments were neither serious nor protracted, and Sylvia didn’t seem to mind so much about his other weakness, which was girls. He had a really good eye for a girl and a corresponding vanity about the ravages he could create in them, so he was forever involved with some absolutely stunning blonde. At Christmas I was either dispatching or receiving presents that Sylvia wasn’t supposed to know about. These flirtations (they were nothing more serious) never went too far. The man was a born philanderer. Because I was fresh from Ireland and disliked his schoolboy jokes, he regarded me as a puritan and gave me friendly lectures with a view to broadening my mind and helping me to enjoy life. Sylvia’s mind he had apparently broadened already. ‘Did you know that Jack’s got a new girl, Phil?’ she asked, while he beamed proudly on both of us. ‘Such a relief after the last! Didn’t he show you the last one’s photo? Oh, my dear, the commonest-looking piece.’ ‘Now, now, who’s jealous?’ Jack would say severely, wagging his finger at her. ‘Really, Jack,’ she would reply with bland insolence, ‘I’d have to have a very poor opinion of myself to be jealous of that. Didn’t you say she was something in Woolworth’s?’ To complete the picture of an entirely emancipated household, I was supposed to be in love with her and to indulge in all sorts of escapades behind his back. We did our best to keep up the game, but I am afraid she found me rather heavy going. There was a third adult in the house; this was Jack’s mother, whom Sylvia, with characteristic generosity, had invited to live with them. At the same time I don’t think she had had any idea what she was letting herself in for. It was rather like inviting a phase of history. Mrs Courtenay was a big, bossy, cheerful woman and an excellent housekeeper, so Jack and Sylvia had at least the advantage of being able to get away together whenever they liked. The children were fond of her and she spoiled them, but at the same time her heart was not in them. They had grown up outside her scope and atmosphere. Her heart was all the time in the little house in Douglas Street in Cork, with the long garden and the apple trees, the old cronies who dropped in for a cup of tea and a game of cards, and the convent where she went to Mass and to visit the lifelong friend whom Sylvia persisted in calling Sister Mary Misery. Sister Mary Misery was always in some trouble and always inviting the prayers of her friends. Mrs Courtenay’s nostalgia was almost entirely analogical, and the precise degree of pleasure she received from anything was conditioned by its resemblance to something or somebody in Cork. Her field of analogy was exceedingly wide, as when she admired a photograph of St Paul’s because it reminded her of the Dominican Church in Cork. Jack stood in great awe of his mother, and this was something Sylvia found it difficult to understand. He did not, for instance, like drinking spirits before her, and if he had to entertain while she was there, he drank sherry. When at ten o’clock sharp the old woman rose and said: ‘Wisha, do you know, I think I’ll go to my old doss; good night to ye,’ he relaxed and started on the whiskey. There was hardly a day, wet or fine, well or ill, but Mrs Courtenay was up for morning Mass. This was practically her whole social existence, as her only company, apart from me, was Father Whelan, the parish priest; a nice, simple poor man, but from Waterford—‘not at all the same thing,’ as Sylvia observed. For a Waterford man he did his best. He lent her the papers from home; sometimes newspapers, but mostly religious papers: ‘simple papers for simple people,’ he explained to Sylvia, just to show that he wasn’t taken in. But if he implied that Mrs Courtenay was simple, he was wrong. ‘Wisha, hasn’t Father Tom a beautiful face, Phil?’ she would exclaim with childish pleasure as she held out the photograph of some mountainous sky-pilot. ‘You’d never again want to hear another Passion sermon after Father Tom. Poor Father Whelan does his best, but of course he hasn’t the intellect.’ ‘How could he?’ Sylvia would say gravely. ‘We must remember he’s from Waterford.’ Mrs Courtenay never knew when Sylvia was pulling her leg. ‘Why then, indeed, Sylvia,’ she said, giving a reproving look over her spectacles, ‘some very nice people came from Waterford.’ Though Mrs Courtenay couldn’t discuss it with Sylvia, who might have thought her prejudiced, she let me know how shocked she was by the character of the English, who seemed from the age of fifteen on to do nothing but fall in and out of love. Mrs Courtenay had heard of love; she was still very much in love with her own husband, who had been dead for years, but this was a serious matter and had nothing whatever in common with those addle-pated affairs you read of in the newspapers. Fortunately, she never knew the worst, owing to her lack of familiarity with the details. Once an old schoolmistress friend of Sylvia’s with a son the one age with Jack tried to start a little chat with her about the dangers young men had to endure, but broke down under the concentrated fire of Mrs Courtenay’s innocence. ‘Willie’s going to London worries me a lot,’ she said darkly. ‘Why, then, indeed, ma’am, I wouldn’t blame you,’ said Mrs Courtenay. ‘The one time I was there, the traffic nearly took the sight out of my eyes.’ ‘And it’s not the traffic only, is it, Mrs Courtenay?’ asked the schoolmistress, a bit taken aback. ‘I mean, we send them out into the world healthy, and we want them to come back to us healthy.’ ‘Ah, indeed,’ said Mrs Courtenay triumphantly, ‘wasn’t it only the other day I was saying the same thing to you, Sylvia? Whatever he gets to eat in London, Jack’s digestion is never the same.’ Not to wrong her, I must admit that she wasn’t entirely ignorant of the subject, for she mentioned it herself to me (very confidentially while Sylvia was out of the room) in connection with a really nice sodality man from the Watercourse Road who got it through leaning against the side of a ship. Sylvia simply did not know what to make of her mother-in-law’s ingenuousness, which occasionally bordered on imbecility, but she was a sufficiently good housekeeper herself to realize that the old woman had plenty of intelligence, and she respected the will-power that kept her going, cheerful and uncomplaining, through the trials of loneliness and old age. ‘We’re very busy these days,’ she would sigh after Mrs Courtenay had gone to bed, and she was enjoying what her husband called ‘the first pussful.’ ‘We’re doing another novena for Sister Mary Misery’s sciatica. The last one misfired, but we’ll wear Him down yet! Really, she talks as if God were a Corkman!’ ‘Well,’ said Jack, ‘some very nice people came from Cork.’ ‘But it’s fantastic, Jack! It’s simply fantastic!’ Sylvia cried, slamming her palm on the arm-rest of her chair. ‘She’s upstairs now, talking to God as she talked to us. She feels she will wear Him down, exactly as she says.’ ‘She probably will,’ said I. ‘I shouldn’t be in the least surprised,’ Sylvia added viciously. ‘She’s worn me down.’ II Naturally, Jack and Sylvia both told me of the absolutely stunning brunette he had met in Manchester, driving a Ministry car. Then, for some reason, the flow of confidences dried up. I guessed that something had gone wrong with the romance, but knew better than to ask questions. I knew that Jack would tell me in his own good time. He did too, one grey winter evening when we had walked for miles up the hills and taken refuge from the wind in a little bar-parlour where a big fire was roaring. When he brought in the pints, he told me in a slightly superior way with a smile that didn’t seem quite genuine that he was having trouble about Margaret. ‘Serious?’ I asked. ‘Well, she’s had a baby,’ he said with a shrug. He expected me to be shocked, and I was, but not for his reasons. It was clear that he was badly shaken, did not know how his philandering could have gone so far or had such consequences, and was blaming the drink or something equally irrelevant. ‘That’s rotten luck,’ I said. ‘That’s the worst of it,’ he said. ‘It’s not luck.’ ‘Oh!’ I said. I was beginning to realize vaguely the mess in which he had landed himself. ‘You mean she—?’ ‘Yes,’ he cut in. ‘She wanted it. Now she wants to keep it, and her family won’t let her, so she’s left home.’ ‘Oh,’ I said again. ‘That is rotten.’ ‘It’s not very pleasant,’ he said, unconsciously trying to reassert himself in his old part as a man of the world by lowering the key of the conversation. ‘Does Sylvia know?’ ‘Good Lord, no,’ he exclaimed with a frown, and this time it was he who was shocked. ‘There’s no point in upsetting her.’ ‘She’ll be a damn sight more upset if she hears of it from someone else,’ I said. ‘Yes,’ he replied after a moment. ‘I see your point.’ I don’t know whether he did or not. He had the sort of sensitiveness which leads men into the most preposterous situations in the desire not to give pain to people they love. It never minimizes the pain in the long run, of course, or so it seemed to me. I had no experience of that sort of situation and was all for giving the pain at once and getting it over. I should even have been prepared to break the news to Sylvia myself, just to be sure she had someone substantial to bawl on. Nowadays I wouldn’t rush into it so eagerly. Instead, Sylvia talked to me about it, in her official tone. It was a couple of months later. She had managed to get rid of her mother-in-law for half an hour, and we were drinking cocktails. ‘Did you know Jack’s got himself into a scrape with the brunette, Phil?’ she said lightly, crossing her legs and smoothing her skirt. ‘Has he told you?’ I could have shaken her. There was no need to do the stiff upper lip on me, and at any rate I couldn’t reply to it. I like a bit more intimacy myself. ‘He has,’ I said uncomfortably. ‘How are things going?’ ‘Baby’s ill, and she’s had to chuck her job. Jack is really quite worried.’ ‘I don’t wonder,’ I said. ‘What’s he going to do?’ ‘What can he do?’ she exclaimed with a shrug and a mow. ‘He should look after the girl. I’ve told him I’ll divorce him.’ I hardly knew what to say to this. Sweet reasonableness may be all very well, but usually it bears no relation to the human facts. ‘Is that what you want to do?’ ‘Well, my feelings don’t count for much in this.’ ‘That’s scarcely how Jack looks at it,’ I said. ‘So he says,’ she muttered with a shrug. ‘Oh, don’t be silly, Sylvia!’ I said. She looked at me for a moment as though she might throw something at me, and I almost wished she would. ‘Oh, well,’ she said at last, ‘if that’s how he feels he should bring her here. You can’t even imagine what girls in her position have to go through. It’ll simply drive her to suicide, and then he will have something to worry about. I do wish you’d speak to him, Phil.’ ‘What’s his objection?’ ‘Mother doesn’t know we drink,’ she said maliciously. ‘Anyhow, as if it would ever cross her mind that he was responsible! She probably thinks it’s something you catch from leaning against a tree.’ ‘I’ll talk to him,’ I said. I had a feeling that between them they would be bound to make a mess of it. ‘Tell him Granny need never know,’ she said. ‘He doesn’t even have to pretend he knows the girl. She can be a friend of mine. And at a time like this, who’s going to inquire about her husband? We can kill him off in the most horrible manner. She just loves tragedies.’ This was more difficult than it sounded. Jack didn’t want to talk at all, and when he talked he was in a bad humour. I had had to take him out to the local pub, and we talked in low voices between the family parties and the dart-players. Jack’s masculine complacency revolted as much at taking advice from me as at taking help from Sylvia. He listened in a peculiar way he had, frowning with one side of his face, as if with half his mind he was considering your motion while with the other he ruled it out of order. ‘I’m afraid it’s impossible,’ he said stiffly. ‘Well, what are you going to do?’ ‘Sylvia said she’d divorce me,’ he replied in a sulky voice that showed it would be a long time before he forgave Sylvia for her high-minded offer. ‘Is that what you want?’ ‘But, my dear fellow, it’s not a matter of what I want,’ he said scoffingly. ‘You mean you won’t accept Sylvia’s kindness, is that it?’ ‘I won’t go on my knees to anybody, for anything.’ ‘Do you want her to go on her knees to you?’ ‘Oh,’ he replied ungraciously, ‘if that’s how she feels—’ ‘You wouldn’t like me to get a note from her?’ I asked. (I knew it was mean, but I couldn’t resist it.) III That was how Margaret came to be invited to the Courtenays’. I promised to look in, the evening she came. It was wet, and the narrow sloping High Street with its rattling inn-signs looked the last word in misery. As I turned up the avenue to the Courtenays’, the wind was rising. In the distance it had blown a great gap through the cloud, and the brilliant sky had every tint of metal from blue steel at the top to bronze below. Mrs Courtenay opened the door to me. ‘They’re not back from the station yet,’ she said cheerfully. ‘Would you have a cup of tea?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘All I want is to get warm.’ ‘I suppose they’ll be having it when they come in,’ she said. ‘The train must be late.’ Just then the taxi drove up, and Sylvia came in with Margaret, a short, slight girl with a rather long, fine-featured face; the sort of face that seems to have been slightly shrunken to give its features a certain precision and delicacy. Jack came in, carrying the baby’s basket, and set it on a chair in the hall. His mother went straight to it, as though she could see nothing else. ‘Isn’t he lovely, God bless him?’ she said, showing her gums while her whole face lit up. ‘I’d better get him settled down,’ Margaret said nervously with a quick, bright smile. ‘Yes,’ Sylvia said. ‘Margaret and I will take him up. Will you pour her a drink first, Jack?’ ‘Certainly,’ said Jack, beginning to beam. ‘Nothing I like so much. Whiskey, Mrs Harding?’ ‘Oh, whiskey—Mr Courtenay,’ she replied with her sudden, brilliant laugh. ‘Won’t you call me Jack,’ he asked with a mock-languishing air. I think he was almost enjoying the mystification, which had something in common with his own practical jokes. While the girls went upstairs with the baby, Mrs Courtenay sat before the fire, her hands joined in her lap. Her eyes had a faraway look. ‘God help us!’ she sighed. ‘Isn’t she young to be a widow?’ At ten Mrs Courtenay drew the shawl about her shoulders, said as usual ‘I’ll go to my old doss,’ and went upstairs. Some time later we were interrupted by a sickly little whine. Margaret jumped up with an apologetic smile. ‘That’s Teddy,’ she said. ‘I shan’t be a minute.’ ‘I shouldn’t trouble, dear,’ Sylvia said in her bland, insolent way, and we heard a door open softly. ‘I rather thought Granny would come to the rescue,’ she explained. ‘He’ll be afraid of a stranger,’ Margaret said tensely, and we all listened again. We heard the old woman’s voice, soft and almost continuous, and the crying ceased abruptly. Apparently Teddy didn’t consider Mrs Courtenay a stranger. I noticed as if for the first time the billows of wind break over the house. Next morning, when Teddy had been settled in the garden in his pram, Mrs Courtenay said: ‘I think I’ll take him for a little walk. They get very tired of the one place.’ She apparently knew things about babies that weren’t in any textbook, and uttered them in a tone of quiet authority which made textbooks an impertinence. She didn’t appear again until lunch-time, having taken him to the park—‘they’re very fond of trees.’ His father’s death in an air-crash in the Middle East had proved a safe introduction to the other women, and Mrs Courtenay, who usually complained of the standoffishness of the English, returned in high good humour, full of gossip—the untold numbers blinded, drowned, and burned to death, and the wrecked lives of young women who became too intimate with foreigners. The Poles, in particular, were a great disappointment to her—such a grand Catholic nation, but so unreliable. That evening, when we heard the shriek from the bedroom, there was no question about who was to deal with it. ‘Don’t upset yourselves,’ Mrs Courtenay said modestly, pulled the shawl firmly about her, and went upstairs. Margaret, a very modern young woman, had Teddy’s day worked out to a time-table, stipulating when he should be fed, lifted, and loved, but it had taken that baby no time to discover that Mrs Courtenay read nothing but holy books and believed that babies should be fed, lifted, and loved when it suited themselves. Margaret frowned and shook herself in her frock. ‘I’m sure it’s bad for him, Sylvia,’ she said. ‘Oh, dreadful,’ Sylvia sighed with her heartless air as she threw one long leg over the arm of the chair. ‘But Granny is thriving on it. Haven’t you noticed?’ A curious situation was developing in the house, which I watched with fascination. Sylvia, who had very little use for sentiment, was quite attracted by Margaret. ‘She really is charming, Phil,’ she told me in her bland way. ‘Really, Jack has remarkably good taste.’ Margaret, a much more dependent type, after hesitating for a week, developed quite a crush on Sylvia. It was Jack who was odd man out. Their friendship was a puzzle to him, and what they said and thought about him when they were together was more than he could imagine, but judging by the frown that frequently drew down one side of his face, he felt it couldn’t be very nice. Sylvia was older, shrewder, more practical, and Margaret’s guilelessness took her breath away. Margaret’s experience of love had been very limited; she had fluttered round with some highly inappropriate characters, and from them drew vast generalizations, mostly derogatory, which included all races and men. Jack had been the first real man in her life, and she had grabbed at the chance of having his child. Now she envisaged nothing but a future dedicated to the memory of a couple of weekends with him and to the upbringing of his child. Sylvia in her cool way tried to make her see things more realistically. ‘Really, Phil,’ she told me, ‘she is the sweetest girl, but, oh, dear, she’s such an impossible romantic. What she really needs is a husband to knock some of the romance out of her.’ I had a shrewd idea that she regarded me as a likely candidate for the honours of knocking the romance out of Margaret, but I felt the situation was already complicated enough. At the same time, it struck me as ironic that the world should be full of men who would be glad of a decent wife, while a girl like Margaret, whom any man could be proud of, made a fool of herself over a married man. IV One Saturday afternoon I went up early, just after lunch, for my walk with Jack. He wasn’t ready, so I sat in the front room with Sylvia, Margaret, and Mrs Courtenay. I had the impression that there were feelings, at least on the old lady’s part, and I was right. It had taken Teddy a week to discover that she had a bedroom of her own, and when he did, he took full advantage of it. She had now become his devoted slave, and when we met, I had to be careful that she didn’t suspect me of treating him with insufficient respect. Two old women on the road had made a mortal enemy of her because of that. And it wasn’t only strangers. Margaret too came in for criticism. The criticism this afternoon had been provoked first by Margaret’s inhuman refusal to feed him half an hour before his feeding time, and secondly by the pointed way the two younger women went on with their talk instead of joining her in keeping him company. In Margaret this was only assumed. She was inclined to resent the total occupation of her baby by Mrs Courtenay, but this was qualified by Teddy’s antics and quite suddenly she would smile and then a quick frown would follow the smile. Sylvia was quite genuinely uninterested. She had the capacity for surrounding herself in her own good manners. The old woman could, of course, have monopolized me, but it gave her more satisfaction to throw me to the girls and make their monstrous inhumanity obvious even to themselves. ‘Wisha, go on, Phil,’ she said with her sweet, distraught smile. ‘You’ll want to be talking. He’ll be getting his dinner soon anyway. The poor child is famished.’ Most of this went over my head, and I joined the girls gladly enough, while Mrs Courtenay, playing quietly with Teddy, suffered in silence. Just then the door opened quietly behind her and Jack came in. She started and looked up. ‘Ah, here’s Daddy now!’ she said triumphantly. ‘Daddy will play with us.’ ‘Daddy will do nothing of the sort,’ retorted Jack with remarkable presence of mind. ‘Daddy wants somebody to play with him. Ready, Phil?’ But even this didn’t relax the tension in the room. Margaret looked dumbfoundered. She looked at Jack and grinned; then frowned and looked at me. Sylvia raised her shoulders. Meanwhile her mother-in-law, apparently quite unaware of the effect she had created, was making Teddy sit up and show off his tricks. Sylvia followed us to the door. ‘Does she suspect anything?’ she asked anxiously with one hand on the jamb. ‘Oh, not at all,’ Jack said with a shocked expression that almost caused one side of his face to fold up. ‘That’s only her way of speaking.’ ‘Hm,’ grunted Sylvia. ‘Curious way of speaking.’ ‘Not really, Sylvia,’ I said. ‘If she suspected anything, that’s the last thing in the world she’d have said.’ ‘Like leaning against a ship?’ Sylvia said. ‘I dare say you’re right.’ But she wasn’t sure. Jack walked down the avenue without speaking, and I knew he was shaken too. ‘Awkward situation,’ he said between his teeth. Since Margaret’s arrival he had become what for him was almost forthcoming. It was mainly the need for someone to confide in. He couldn’t any longer confide in Margaret or Sylvia because of their friendship. ‘I don’t think it meant what Sylvia imagined,’ I said as we set off briskly up the hill. We both liked the hilly country behind the town, the strong thrust of the landscape that made walking like a bird’s flight on a stormy day. ‘I dare say not, but still, it’s awkward—two women in a house!’ ‘I suppose so.’ ‘You know what I mean?’ I thought I did, and I liked his delicacy. Being a chap who never cared to hurt people’s feelings, he probably left both girls very much alone. Having had so much to do with them both, and being the sort who is accustomed to having a lot to do with women, he probably found this a strain. They must have found it so likewise, because their behaviour had grown decidedly obstreperous. One evening I had watched them, with their arms about one another’s waists, guying him, and realized that behind it there was an element of hysteria. The situation was becoming impossible. We had come out on the common, with the little red houses to one side, and the uplands sweeping away from them. ‘Last night Sylvia woke me when the alert went, to keep Margaret company,’ he went on in a tone in which pain, bewilderment, and amusement were about equally blended. It was as though he were fastidiously holding up something small, frail, and not quite clean for your inspection. ‘She said she’d go if I didn’t. I’d have preferred her to go, but then she got quite cross. She said: “Margaret won’t like it, and you’ve shown her little enough consideration since she came.”’ ‘Rather tactless of Sylvia,’ I said. ‘I know,’ he added with a bewildered air. ‘And it’s so unlike her. She said I didn’t understand women.’ ‘And did you go?’ ‘I had to.’ I could fill in the gaps in his narrative and appreciate his embarrassment. Obviously, before he went to Margaret’s room, he had to go to his mother’s to explain Sylvia’s anxiety for her old school friend, and having done everything a man could do to spare the feelings of three women, had probably returned to bed with the feeling that they were all laughing at him. And though he told it lightly, I had the feeling that it was loneliness which made him tell it at all, and that he would never again be quite comfortable with either Sylvia or Margaret. ‘Now your days of philandering are over,’ was running through my head. I wasn’t sure that he would be quite such a pleasant friend. Margaret remained for some months until the baby was quite well and she had both got a job and found a home where Teddy would be looked after. She was full of gaiety and courage, but I had the feeling that her way was not an easy one either. Even without the aid of a husband, the romance had been knocked out of her. It was marked by the transference of her allegiance from Jack to Sylvia. And Sylvia was lonesome too. She kept pressing me to come to the house when Jack was away. She corresponded with Margaret and went to stay with her when she was in town. They were linked by something which excluded Jack. To each of them her moment of sacrifice had come, and each had risen to it, but nobody can live on that plane forever, and now there stretched before them the commonplace of life with no prospect that ever again would it call on them in the same way. Never again would Sylvia and Jack be able to joke about his philandering, and the house seemed the gloomier for it, as though it had lost a safety valve. Mrs Courtenay too was lonely after Teddy, though with her usual stoicism she made light of it. ‘Wisha, you get very used to them, Phil,’ she said to me as she pulled her shawl about her. Now she felt that she had no proper introduction when she went to the park, was jealous of the mothers and grandmothers who met there, and decided that the English were as queer and standoffish as she had always supposed them to be. For weeks she slept badly and talked with resignation of ‘being in the way’ and ‘going to her long home’. She never asked about Teddy, always about his mother, and when Margaret, who seemed suddenly to have got over her dislike of the old woman, sent her a photo of the child, she put it away in a drawer and did not refer to it again. One evening, while Sylvia was in the kitchen, she startled me by a sudden question. ‘You never hear about Mrs Harding?’ she asked. ‘I believe she’s all right,’ I said. ‘Sylvia could tell you. She hears from her regularly.’ ‘They don’t tell me,’ she said resignedly, folding her arms and looking broodingly into the fire—it was one of her fictions that no one ever told her anything. ‘Wisha, Phil,’ she added with a smile, ‘you don’t think she noticed me calling Jack his daddy?’ She turned a searching look on me. It was one of those occasions when whatever you say is bound to be wrong. ‘Who’s that, Mrs Courtenay?’ ‘Sylvia. She didn’t notice?’ ‘I wouldn’t say so. Why?’ ‘It worries me,’ she replied, looking into the fire again. ‘It could make mischief.’ ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Sylvia noticed anything,’ ‘I hope not. I made a novena that she wouldn’t. She’s a nice, simple poor girl.’ ‘She’s one in a thousand,’ I said. ‘Why then, indeed, Phil, there aren’t many like her,’ she agreed humbly. ‘I could have bitten my tongue out when I said it. But, of course, I knew from the first minute I saw him in the hall. Didn’t you?’ ‘Know what?’ I stammered, wondering if I looked as red as I felt. ‘That Jack was his daddy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Sure you must.’ ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘He mentioned it.’ ‘He didn’t say anything to me,’ she said, but without reproach. You could see she knew that Jack would have good reason for not telling her. ‘I suppose he thought I’d tell Sylvia, but of course I wouldn’t dream of making mischief. And the two of them such great friends too—wisha, isn’t life queer, Phil?’ In the kitchen Sylvia suddenly began to sing ‘Lili Marlene’. It was then the real poignancy of the situation struck me. I had seen it only as the tragedy of Jack and Sylvia and Margaret, but what was their loneliness to that of the old woman, to whom tragedy presented itself as in a foreign tongue? Now I realized why she did not care to look at the photograph of Margaret’s son. ‘It might be God’s will her poor husband was killed,’ Mrs Courtenay said. ‘God help us, I can never get the poor boy out of my head. I pray for him night and morning. ’Twould be such a shock to him if he ever found out. And the baby so lovely and all—oh, the dead image of Jack at his age!’ Sylvia accompanied me to the door as usual. Now when we kissed good-night it wasn’t such an act on her part; not because she cared any more for me but because she was already seeking for support in the world outside. The bubble in which she lived was broken. I was tempted to tell her about her mother-in-law, but something held me back. Women like their own mystifications, which give them a feeling of power; they dislike other people’s, which they always describe as slyness. Besides, it would have seemed like a betrayal. I had shifted my allegiance. (1954) FP: Harper’s Magazine, 1954-10 Source: The Best of Frank O’Connor, 2009