THE STUDY OF HISTORY

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

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

“How much was Mr. Riordan’s fortune, Mummy?” I asked thoughtfully.

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

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

“And weren’t you ever sorry for poor Mr. Riordan?” I asked severely.

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

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

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

“You could,” she would say, looking into the fire. “Daisies!”

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

“Yes,” Mother would say, scowling. “May Cadogan!”

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

“She should be,” Mother would say in disgust. “With six of them!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I was a great trouble to you,” Mother would say, in a blaze.

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

“She could talk of hair!” Mother would hiss. “With her carroty mop!”

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

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

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

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

But the place that had the greatest attraction of all for me was the
Douglas Road, where Father’s friend Miss Cadogan lived, only now she
wasn’t Miss Cadogan but Mrs. O’Brien. Naturally, nobody called
Mrs. O’Brien could be as attractive to the imagination as a French chef
or an elderly shopkeeper with eleven thousand pounds, but she had a
physical reality that the other pair lacked. As I went regularly to the
library at Parnell Bridge, I frequently found myself wandering up the
road in the direction of Douglas and always stopped in front of the long
row of houses where she lived. There were high steps up to them, and in
the evening the sunlight fell brightly on the house-fronts till they
looked like a screen. One evening as I watched a gang of boys playing
ball in the street outside, curiosity overcame me. I spoke to one of
them. Having been always a child of solemn and unnatural politeness, I
probably scared the wits out of him.

“I wonder if you could tell me which house Mrs. O’Brien lives in,
please?” I asked.

“Hi, Gussie!” he yelled to another boy. “This fellow wants to know where
your old one lives.”

This was more than I had bargained for. Then a thin, good-looking boy of
about my own age detached himself from the group and came up to me with
his fists clenched. I was feeling distinctly panicky, but all the same I
studied him closely. After all, he was the boy I might have been.

“What do you want to know for?” he asked suspiciously.

Again, this was something I had not anticipated.

“My father was a great friend of your mother,” I explained carefully,
but, so far as he was concerned, I might as well have been talking a
foreign language. It was clear that Gussie O’Brien had no sense of
history.

“What’s that?” he asked incredulously.

At this point we were interrupted by a woman I had noticed earlier,
talking to another over the railing between the two steep gardens. She
was small and untidy looking and occasionally rocked the pram in an
absent-minded way as though she only remembered it at intervals.

“What is it, Gussie?” she cried, raising herself on tiptoe to see us
better.

“I don’t really want to disturb your mother, thank you,” I said, in
something like hysterics, but Gussie anticipated me, actually pointing
me out to her in a manner I had been brought up to regard as rude.

“This fellow wants you,” he bawled.

“I don’t really,” I murmured, feeling that now I was in for it. She
skipped down the high flight of steps to the gate with a laughing,
puzzled air, her eyes in slits and her right hand arranging her hair at
the back. It was not carroty as Mother described it, though it had red
lights when the sun caught it.

“What is it, little boy?” she asked coaxingly, bending forward.

“I didn’t really want anything, thank you,” I said in terror. “It was
just that my daddy said you lived up here, and, as I was changing my
book at the library, I thought I’d come up and inquire. You can see,” I
added, showing her the book as proof, “that I’ve only just been to the
library.”

“But who is your daddy, little boy?” she asked, her grey eyes still in
long, laughing slits. “What’s your name?”

“My name is Delaney,” I said. “Larry Delaney.”

“Not _Mike_ Delaney’s boy?” she exclaimed wonderingly. “Well, for God’s
sake! Sure, I should have known it from that big head of yours.” She
passed her hand down the back of my head and laughed. “If you’d only get
your hair cut I wouldn’t be long recognizing you. You wouldn’t think I’d
know the feel of your old fellow’s head, would you?” she added
roguishly.

“No, Mrs. O’Brien,” I replied meekly.

“Why, then indeed I do, and more along with it,” she added in the same
saucy tone, though the meaning of what she said was not clear to
me. “Ah, come in and give us a good look at you! That’s my eldest,
Gussie, you were talking to,” she added, taking my hand. Gussie trailed
behind us for a purpose I only recognized later.

“Ma-a-a-a, who’s dat fella with you?” yelled a fat little girl who had
been playing hopscotch on the pavement.

“That’s Larry Delaney,” her mother sang over her shoulder. I don’t know
what it was about that woman but there was something about her high
spirits that made her more like a regiment than a woman. You felt that
everyone should fall into step behind her. “Mick Delaney’s son from
Barrackton. I nearly married his old fellow once. Did he ever tell you
that, Larry?”  she added slyly. She made sudden swift transitions from
brilliance to intimacy that I found attractive.

“Yes, Mrs. O’Brien, he did,” I replied, trying to sound as roguish as
she, and she went off into a delighted laugh, tossing her red head.

“Ah, look at that now! How well the old divil didn’t forget me! You can
tell him I didn’t forget him either. And if I married him, I’d be your
mother now. Wouldn’t that be a queer old three and fourpence? How would
you like me for a mother, Larry?”

“Very much, thank you,’ I said complacently.

“Ah, go on with you, you would not,” she exclaimed, but she was pleased
all the same. She struck me as the sort of woman it would be easy enough
to please. “Your old fellow always said it: your mother was a most
superior woman, and you’re a most superior child. Ah, and I’m not too
bad myself either,” she added with a laugh and a shrug, wrinkling up her
merry little face.

In the kitchen she cut me a slice of bread, smothered it with jam, and
gave me a big mug of milk. “Will you have some, Gussie?” she asked in a
sharp voice as if she knew only too well what the answer would
be. “Aideen,” she said to the horrible little girl who had followed us
in, “aren’t you fat and ugly enough without making a pig of yourself?
Murder the Loaf we call her,” she added smilingly to me. “You’re a
polite little boy, Larry, but damn the politeness you’d have if you had
to deal with them. Is the book for your mother?”

“Oh, no, Mrs. O’Brien,” I replied. “It’s my own.”

“You mean you can read a big book like that?” she asked incredulously,
taking it from my hands and measuring the length of it with a puzzled
air.

“Oh, yes, I can.”

“I don’t believe you,” she said mockingly. “Go on and prove it!”

There was nothing I asked better than to prove it. I felt that as a
performer I had never got my due, so I stood in the middle of the
kitchen, cleared my throat, and began with great feeling to enunciate
one of those horribly involved opening paragraphs you found in
children’s books of the time. “On a fine evening in Spring, as the
setting sun was beginning to gild the blue peaks with its lambent rays,
a rider, recognizable as a student by certain niceties of attire, was
slowly, and perhaps regretfully making his way ...” It was the sort of
opening sentence I loved.

“I declare to God!” Mrs. O’Brien interrupted in astonishment. “And that
fellow there is one age with you, and he can’t spell house. How well you
wouldn’t be down at the library, you caubogue, you! ... That’s enough
now, Larry,” she added hastily as I made ready to entertain them
further.

“Who wants to read that blooming old stuff?” Gussie said contemptuously.

Later, he took me upstairs to show me his air rifle and model
aeroplanes. Every detail of the room is still clear to me: the view into
the back garden with its jungle of wild plants where Gussie had pitched
his tent (a bad site for a tent as I patiently explained to him, owing
to the danger from wild beasts) ; the three cots still unmade; the
scribbles on the walls; and Mrs. O’Brien’s voice from the kitchen
telling Aideen to see what was wrong with the baby, who was screaming
his head off from the pram outside the front door. Gussie, in
particular, fascinated me. He was spoiled, clever, casual; good-looking,
with his mother’s small clean features; gay and calculating. I saw that
when I left and his mother gave me a sixpence. Naturally I refused it
politely, but she thrust it into my trousers pocket, and Gussie dragged
at her skirt, noisily demanding something for himself.

“If you give him a tanner you ought to give me a tanner,” he yelled.

“I’ll tan you,” she said laughingly.

“Well, give up a lop anyway,” he begged, and she did give him a penny to
take his face off her, as she said herself, and after that he followed
me down the street and suggested we should go to the shop and buy
sweets. I was simple-minded, but I wasn’t an out-and-out fool, and I
knew that if I went to a sweet-shop with Gussie I should end up with no
sixpence and very few sweets. So I told him I could not buy sweets
without Mother’s permission, at which he gave me up altogether as a
sissy or worse.

It had been an exhausting afternoon but a very instructive one. In the
twilight I went back slowly over the bridges, a little regretful for
that fast-moving, colourful household, but with a new appreciation of my
own home. When I went in the lamp was lit over the fireplace and Father
was at his tea.

“What kept you, child?” Mother asked with an anxious air, and suddenly I
felt slightly guilty, and I played it as I usually did whenever I was at
fault—in a loud, demonstrative, grown-up way. I stood in the middle of
the kitchen with my cap in my hand and pointed it first at one, then at
the other.

“You wouldn’t believe who I met!” I said dramatically.

“Wisha, who, child?” Mother asked.

“Miss Cadogan,” I said, placing my cap squarely on a chair, and turning
on them both again. “Miss May Cadogan. Mrs. O’Brien as she is now.”

“Mrs. O’Brien?” Father exclaimed, putting down his cup. “But where did
you meet Mrs. O’Brien?”

“I said you wouldn’t believe it. It was near the library. I was talking
to some fellows, and what do you think but one of them was Gussie
O’Brien, Mrs. O’Brien’s son. And he took me home with him, and his
mother gave me bread and jam, and she gave me _this_.” I produced the
sixpence with a real flourish.

“Well, I’m blowed!” Father gasped, and first he looked at me, and then
he looked at Mother and burst into a loud guffaw.

“And she said to tell you she remembers you too, and that she sent her
love.”

“Oh, by the jumping bell of Athlone!” Father crowed and clapped his
hands on his knees. I could see he believed the story I had told and was
delighted with it, and I could see, too, that Mother did not believe it
and that she was not in the least delighted. That, of course, was the
trouble with Mother. Though she would do anything to help me with an
intellectual problem, she never seemed to understand the need for
experiment. She never opened her mouth while Father cross-questioned me,
shaking his head in wonder and storing it up to tell the men in the
factory. What pleased him most was Mrs. O’Brien’s remembering the shape
of his head, and later, while Mother was out of the kitchen, I caught
him looking in the mirror and stroking the back of his head.

But I knew too that for the first time I had managed to produce in
Mother the unrest that Father could produce, and I felt wretched and
guilty and didn’t know why. This was an aspect of history I only studied
later.

That night I was really able to indulge my passion. At last I had the
material to work with. I saw myself as Gussie O’Brien, standing in the
bedroom, looking down at my tent in the garden, and Aideen as my sister,
and Mrs. O’Brien as my mother, and, like Pascal, I re-created history. I
remembered Mrs. O’Brien’s laughter, her scolding, and the way she
stroked my head. I knew she was kind—casually kind—and hot-tempered,
and recognized that in dealing with her I must somehow be a different
sort of person. Being good at reading would never satisfy her. She would
almost compel you to be as Gussie was: flattering, impertinent, and
exacting. Though I couldn’t have expressed it in those terms, she was
the sort of woman who would compel you to flirt with her.

Then, when I had had enough, I deliberately soothed myself as I did
whenever I had scared myself by pretending that there was a burglar in
the house or a wild animal trying to get in the attic window. I just
crossed my hands on my chest, looked up at the window, and said to
myself: “It is not like that. I am not Gussie O’Brien. I am Larry
Delaney, and my mother is Mary Delaney, and we live in Number 8,
Wellington Square. Tomorrow I’ll go to school at the Cross, and first
there will be prayers, and then arithmetic, and after that composition.”

For the first time the charm did not work. I had ceased to be Gussie,
all right, but somehow I had not become myself again, not any self that
I knew. It was as though my own identity was a sort of sack I had to
live in, and I had deliberately worked my way out of it, and now I
couldn’t get back again because I had grown too big for it. I practised
every trick I knew to reassure myself. I tried to play a counting game;
then I prayed, but even the prayer seemed different, as though it didn’t
belong to me at all. I was away in the middle of empty space, divorced
from mother and home and everything permanent and familiar. Suddenly I
found myself sobbing. The door opened and Mother came in in her
nightdress, shivering, her hair over her face.

“You’re not sleeping, child,” she said in a wan and complaining voice.

I snivelled, and she put her hand on my forehead.

“You’re hot,” she said. “What ails you?”

I could not tell her of the nightmare in which I was lost. Instead, I
took her hand, and gradually the terror retreated, and I became myself
again, shrank into my little skin of identity, and left infinity and all
its anguish behind.

“Mummy,” I said, “I promise I never wanted anyone but you.”