SUE

God forgive me, I could never stand my sister’s young men.  Even if
she had had taste, I should still have resented them.  Our house on
the outskirts of Cork was small, and there simply wasn’t room in it
for me and a courting couple. After a day’s work in the office I would
get settled with a book by the fire in the front room, and then I
would hear the creak of the gate, the steps on the path, the knock,
the boisterous voice in the hall—my hall! Sometimes I continued to
read, and dared the fellow to come in and interrupt me, but there was
never any false modesty about Sue’s young men. They always had a warm
corner in their hearts for themselves.  Occasionally I went off to
read in the kitchen, but there, apart from Mother’s solicitude about
whether I was warm enough and whether I could see with ‘the old
gas’—meaning the gaslight fixture that I was reading by—I was almost
certain to be interrupted again by the arrival of one of her old
cronies, come to sit and gossip with her in the kitchen.  So, most
often, when I heard Sue’s young man, I went off, cursing, to my own
bedroom, where there was no heat and ‘the old gas’ was worse even than
in the kitchen. There, lying on my bed with a blanket over my feet, I
listened to the cheerful voices of Sue and her young man sitting in
comfort downstairs before the fire—my fire! Is it any wonder I grew
lepping mad? Sue, of course, said I was sulky and unsociable, and
Mother, who had an excuse for everybody, said the Horgans were all
like that. I grew up with a considerable respect for the sensitiveness
and intelligence of the Horgans.

Sue never had any taste in young men. There was a long string of them,
only one of whom I ever liked, and she dropped him inside a
fortnight. She said he was dull! Mind, I had no very exaggerated
notion of her charms. I knew she wasn’t steady and was always excited
or depressed about something, and when she had nothing to be excited
or depressed about, she came up with the most extraordinary old
pisherogues and superstitions that were supposed to be lucky or
unlucky, according to the mood she was in. But she was warmhearted and
generous, and she had a very good intelligence whenever the fancy took
her to be intelligent.  At any rate she was a cut above the fellows
she walked out with, though it wasn’t until Harry Ridgeway came on the
scene that I began to appreciate what an interesting girl she was.

I had also better be fair and admit that Ridgeway had his points, even
though I didn’t like him. I always thought him a bit too much of a
dandy. He had a pink-and-white complexion like a girl’s, and he
dressed as carefully as any girl.  Usually he wore a well-cut,
tight-fitting suit that never had a trace of beer or tobacco ash on
it, and a pale, correct-looking tie. And he had the impudence to jeer
at my tweeds and my battered old tie and about how I needed a
haircut. At a party he was always in charge of entertaining the dolls,
while I sat with a couple of friends and a half-dozen of stout hidden
behind the sofa, and hoped to God the dolls would let us alone to talk
politics or religion. Ridgeway had no politics, and his religion was
like his ties—pale and correct. What I really mean is that he was a
lightweight, a ladies’ man, though with occasional flashes of wit and
intelligence, but definitely not the sort with whom you’d like to go
to a bar and spend the evening discussing what was wrong with the
country.

Still, I was rather puzzled by Sue’s behaviour, because, though she
went out quite a lot with Ridgeway, she continued to go out as well
with Sidney Healy, who had now been the resident pest for close on six
months. I saw no reason for having two of them about the house,
disturbing me.

‘Are you going steady with that masher?’ I asked her one evening while
she was ironing and Mother washing up.

‘What masher?’ she asked, growing nervous and defensive, though I
hadn’t even raised my voice.

‘How do you expect me to remember all their names? The sickly fellow
with the queer ties.’

‘Harry Ridgeway?’ she said in the same tone. ‘Why would I go steady
with him? Sure, he’s mad on Judy Holmes.’

‘Then why the hell doesn’t he go to Judy Holmes’ house instead of
coming here?’ I asked. ‘Who is this Holmes one, anyway?’

‘She’s the bank manager’s daughter from Montenotte.’

‘Old Holmes’ daughter?’ I asked in surprise. ‘But aren’t they
Protestants?’

‘I suppose they are. What about it?’

‘Nothing, only he’s not going to find it very easy to marry her, is
he?’

‘I don’t know. I suppose he can get a dispensation. They have money
enough, anyway. I advised him to propose to her months ago.’

‘Very handsome of you, I’m sure,’ I said with a sniff.

‘There’s nothing handsome about it. She’s the right sort of girl for
him, and she has a bit of money. The poor devil is crazy to get out of
that house of his. His old fellow drinks, and his poor mother is in
and out of hospital the whole time.’

‘I see,’ I said. ‘And because Mr Ridgeway isn’t happy at home, he
thinks he’s entitled to come and make sure that I’m not happy here.’

That evening I didn’t move when Ridgeway came in. It’s bad enough
getting out of a comfortable room for another man, but at least you
have the feeling that one of these days things are going to even
out. But to let him have it as a free gift—chair, fire, gaslight, and
all—was more than anyone could expect. Ridgeway didn’t seem to resent
my staying, and except for that silly-looking tie of his and his
mincing way of balancing a teacup on his knee, I had nothing to
complain of. The man had plenty of conversation, of a kind.  Later in
the evening Sue asked him about Judy Holmes, and he didn’t seem to
resent that, either.

‘Oh, Judy’s playing at the School of Music concert next week,’ he said
excitedly.

‘Go on!’ said Sue. ‘What’s she playing?’

‘The Mozart E-flat, with Humphreys doing the violin part.’

‘Cripes, I’d love to hear her,’ said Sue.

‘We can go together, if you like. What about you, Jack?’

‘No, thanks,’ I said with a smile. I was fond of music, all right, but
I avoided the local amateurs.

However, when Sue returned from the concert, she was full of Judy
Holmes, and I knew there must have been something to her playing, for
Sue in one of her intelligent phases was quite a good critic. She
could have been a good pianist as well, but, being Sue, she never took
the trouble to practise. She sat at the piano to illustrate what she
was saying, and I filled in the violin part with three fingers while
she showed how Judy did it, and when she played a wrong chord she used
a dirty word. I laughed. I was always amused at the contrast between
Sue’s character and the language she used.

In a funny way, hearing about the concert gave me a sort of personal
interest in the Holmes girl, and next time I met her in town I raised
my cap to her. She smiled back rather coolly, and I wondered if she
even knew who I was. She was a tall, thin girl with a long, pale face,
and a good figure concealed in a wide coat like a tent. Her hat was a
plain felt one, like a schoolgirl’s. She was dressed expensively, but
plainly. After that, whenever I found myself daydreaming, I would
think of her as the sort of girl you could take up as you took up
politics or religion—a girl of natural seriousness, who could play
Mozart as he should be played, and with no nonsense about her. Now
when Ridgeway talked about her to Mother and Sue, I found myself
listening to him. They were fascinated by everything he told them
about the Holmeses, and it wasn’t only the money and the bit of style
that interested them, though clearly, for them as for Ridgeway, it had
the appeal of a fairytale. But besides this they both had a genuine
admiration for the qualities of character the Holmeses displayed:
Judy’s daily two hours of piano practice, her dutifulness in answering
letters and remembering birthdays, her mother’s social work, and the
strict and narrow piety of an Irish Protestant family. How narrow that
could be I was reminded one night when Ridgeway reported that one of
Judy’s girlfriends had used a Biblical phrase by way of a joke and Mrs
Holmes had pointed out that it was blasphemy.

‘Sure, when the girl didn’t mean it!’ protested Mother, who never
really minded what people said so long as they smiled at her while
they were saying it.

‘Ah, they don’t look at it that way at all, Mrs Horgan,’ Ridgeway said
with a frown. ‘Of course the girl didn’t mean it, but still they don’t
think you should say such things. And I can’t help admiring them for
it.’

I could see that Ridgeway had Mother and Sue admiring them for it as
well.

But then an extraordinary thing happened. Ridgeway proposed, but he
proposed not to Judy, but to Sue. I couldn’t understand it. I knew
that he wanted to make a home of his own, and it wasn’t only that his
father drank and his mother was so sickly that she could not keep
abreast of the housekeeping.  He wanted a background to go with the
ties and suits, and he must have been miserably self-conscious about
any friends that called to his house. You could see the sort of place
he would try and make for himself—a small house in a modern terrace,
with a neatly covered suite of furniture, bought on time, a few
watercolours, and a vase of flowers; and there he would give little
musical parties, and tea would be served in rather dainty cups. But
Sue’s background was just the same as his own, and imagine Sue keeping
a house like that for him. She would wreck the damn place in a week.

I could see that the proposal had come as a real shock to Sue. She
couldn’t understand it, either, and as a result she couldn’t stop
talking of it.

‘But you like him,’ I said. ‘Why shouldn’t you marry him if you want
to?’

‘Ah, how could I?’ she asked doubtfully. ‘He’s not in love with
me. Isn’t that enough?’

‘How sure you are of it!’ I said. I wasn’t really any fonder of
Ridgeway than I had been, but I realized that he would make someone an
excellent husband and that Sue was the sort of girl who might very
easily marry the wrong man or no man-at all. ‘Isn’t that for him to
say?’

‘Ah, it’s not that,’ she said, and she still sounded doubtful.  ‘I
suppose he felt he had to ask me.’

‘He needn’t have felt that at all,’ Mother said earnestly, ‘but it
showed very nice feeling. I was always very fond of Harry, and I only
wish you could marry him.’

‘Oh, for God’s sake, hold on!’ I said, getting angry with them
again. ‘I don’t think Sue even knows what she’s doing.  Nobody ever
proposes to a girl just out of nice feeling.’

‘Harry would,’ Sue said flatly. ‘He’s too soft for his own good. I
dare say he thought people were talking about us.’

‘Nonsense!’ I said shortly. ‘He knows more about girls than
that. Probably he proposed to Judy Holmes and got the cold shoulder.’

‘I wouldn’t say so,’ Sue said thoughtfully. ‘I think he’d have told
me.’

‘For a man you won’t marry you seem to have a remarkably high opinion
of him,’ I said sarcastically. ‘I’d wait and see about that.’

‘Ah, I don’t think so,’ Sue said complacently. ‘Even if he did propose
to her, she’d hardly talk about it.’

‘She’d be the first woman in history that didn’t,’ said I.

‘I wouldn’t be too sure about that, either,’ said Sue. ‘Harry probably
has his own reasons for not proposing to her. I dare say his family
wouldn’t like his marrying a Protestant.’

And suddenly she rang a bell in my head. You see, there were certain
things that I seemed always to have known about myself. One was that
if I fell in love there would be no walking out with other
girls. Another was that if I did fall in love with someone I knew my
family and friends would disapprove of—a Jew or a Protestant—I would
not allow myself to be influenced by them. Whatever other faults I
might have, I knew myself to be a man of seriousness and strength of
character. And these, I knew, were precisely the qualities that
Ridgeway hadn’t got.

‘Ah, so that’s the reason!’ I said, and I dare say triumph showed in
my voice, for Sue turned on me.

‘And what’s wrong with it?’ she asked.

‘Nothing,’ I said. ‘Except that now you’re talking sense.’

I liked that explanation because it enabled me to go on looking down
on Ridgeway. But I still couldn’t understand why Sue didn’t want to
marry him when, quite clearly, she liked him so much. I knew that she
wasn’t acting like the heroine of a sentimental novel and refusing him
for fear of injuring his career. Apart from anything else, Sue had
never read enough novels to know that a heroine might be expected to
act in this peculiar way, and if you had explained it to her, she
would merely have gaped and asked in her commonest tone, ‘What sort of
bloody idiot do you think I am?’ No, the girl had got it firmly fixed
in her head that Ridgeway didn’t care for her, and for that reason
would not marry him.

Yet they continued to go out together. After his proposal, I felt that
Ridgeway was entitled to whatever facilities the house offered, and I
left the parlour to them. One night, I was sitting with Mother in the
kitchen. Sue and Ridgeway were supposed to be courting in the front
room. All at once a most unholy row began. We couldn’t hear what they
said, but he was talking in a low, bitter voice and Sue was yelling
her head off at him. Mother clasped her hands in prayer and made to
get up, but I signalled to her to stay where she was.

‘The poor child! Mother moaned. ‘God direct me!’ she added, meaning
that she distrusted my direction. The sitting-room door opened and I
distinctly heard Ridgeway use a dirty word. Two dirty words!
Fortunately, Mother either didn’t hear or didn’t understand. Then the
front door slammed behind him, and Mother, with another glance at the
ceiling, from which God could be supposed to be directing her,
muttered, ‘And without even saying goodnight to me!’ It was a real
tragedy for Mother, because she loved Harry Ridgeway’s little airs of
politeness, so different from the roughness of Sue and me. Then Sue
came into the kitchen, bawling, and for five nfinutes it was
impossible to get a stime of sense out of her.

‘Child!’ Mother cried, with what she clearly believed to be
sternness. ‘You must tell your brother and me what he said to you.’
When she referred to me as Sue’s brother, she promoted me to a
position of authority.

‘He asked me to marry him again,’ sobbed Sue.

Mother, being one of the sympathetic souls of the world, was just on
the point of saying ‘The blackguard! He should be ashamed of himself!’
when she realized that it wouldn’t be altogether appropriate, so she
just wrung her hands and said, ‘Well! Well! Well!’

‘After all, that’s nothing to snivel about,’ I said coldly.

‘Who’s snivelling?’ Sue asked, flaring up, as I had expected her to
do. ‘He said things were desperate in his house. It’s not the only
bloody house things are desperate in, if you ask me.’

‘Oh, Sue—’ Mother was beginning when I broke in.

‘And what did you tell him?’

‘The same thing I told him before, of course. So he said he was going
straight off to ask Judy Holmes.’

‘All right,’ I said. ‘And isn’t that what you wanted?’

‘Whether I wanted it or not has nothing to do with it.’ she said. ‘How
the hell could I marry a fellow like that, that would hate the very
sight of me before the honeymoon was over?’

‘Oh, Sue, how can you say things like that?’ Mother exclaimed
indignantly.

‘Because it’s true, woman. I know Jack thinks he is a bit of a
snob. What’s wrong with that? Ye’re all terrified out of your lives of
trying to make yourself out a bit better than ye are. I’d be a snob,
too, if only I had something to be a snob about. He hates a girl even
to use a dirty word.’

‘And perfectly right he is!’ Mother cried. ‘What right has any decent
girl to use language like that, picked up at street corners?’

‘Then what does he want with me? He heard me use it. He told me if I
ever used a word like that again he’d slap my face.’

‘And what did you do?’ I asked, knowing perfectly well what Sue would
do if I told her that.

‘I said it, of course.’

‘Sue, you didn’t!’ exclaimed Mother.

‘I did,’ said Sue, and then began to giggle faintly.

‘And what did he do?’ J asked.

‘Oh, he slapped my face, all right,’ said Sue, her face lighting up.
Obviously the incident had made a favourable impression.  ‘What should
he do?’

‘He should talk to you seriously, Sue,’ Mother said passionately. ‘He
should not do a thing like that. I’m surprised at him—such a nice boy!
Eleven years I lived with your poor father, God rest him, and never
once did he lift a hand to me.’

‘A pity he didn’t lift it to us a bit oftener,’ said Sue.

‘The dear knows, it’s hard to know what to do,’ Mother said, turning
away and shaking her head despondently.

‘Anyway,’ I said, realizing what was in Sue’s mind, ‘you know he’s not
going to ask Judy.’

‘That’s all you know about him,’ Sue replied, beginning to sob
again. ‘He’s probably asking her now. And she’s the right girl for
him, whatever his family or anyone else thinks.’

Then she went up to her room to live it all through again, and bawl a
bit more, while Mother sat by the fire and sighed over the
contrariness of everything. Of course, she knew that Sue was doing the
right thing, but she couldn’t help wishing she wasn’t. As for me, I
was beginning to make discoveries about my extraordinary sister. I
knew now that she had refused to marry Harry Ridgeway because she
genuinely believed he didn’t care for her. The poor fool had so often
expressed his admiration for Judy and her family that he had even
persuaded those two romantic women to admire them as well, and Sue
could only think of love in terms of admiration. Admiration, that is,
of positive virtues she recognized and respected. She was quite
certain that she had none of those particular virtues herself, and yet
she would keep on hoping that some day some man would discover
something positive to admire in her. Perhaps, after all, she wasn’t
even so extraordinary; perhaps a lot of other women confuse love and
admiration in the same way, and never realize that a man may love them
as much for their faults as their virtues, and may think with delight
of the way they begin to sparkle when everyone else is going home, or
forget themselves and swear. At the same time, I knew it was something
I should never be able to explain to Sue, and for some reason this
made me feel unusually tender to her in the weeks that followed. I
even took her to the pictures a couple of times, when she and everyone
else knew I hated the pictures.

But she had been right about Harry Ridgeway. That night or next day he
had gone straight to Judy Holmes and proposed to her and been
accepted. He’d even induced herself and her family to sign along the
dotted line in connexion with the religion of the children. I had to
admit that when it came to the point, Ridgeway, ties and all, was
masculine enough.

It might have been better for him if he hadn’t been. I met the pair of
them one night on Patrick’s Bridge. She was, as usual, plainly
dressed, while Ridgeway was even more the dandy than before. Between
them they made me feel very awkward, with my long hair, my cap, and my
rough tweeds, but Ridgeway seemed very pleased to meet me.

‘You’ve heard of Sue’s brother, Jack,’ he said to Judy.

‘Almost as much as I’ve heard of Sue,’ she said with a thin smile. ‘I
suppose he’s another charmer?’

‘Oh, begod, he is not,’ Ridgeway said with a loud laugh.  ‘Sourest
blackguard you’ll find about this town.’

‘Ah, he probably only needs a girl to make a lot of him, as you do of
Sue,’ she said archly.

‘Come on, Holmes!’ he cried. ‘You never heard the half of Sue.’

‘No, you didn’t get much chance of telling about her, did you, poor
fellow?’ she said in a mocking drawl. ‘But you do get these dreadful
obsessions with people.’

We said goodnight, and I went on through town. It was only when I was
halfway down Patrick Street that it dawned on me that Judy hadn’t been
exactly pleasant to me.  For some reason I always approached people on
the assumption that they intend to be nice to me, and it usually takes
time before I realize that they haven’t been. I had gone the full
length of the street before I thought, ‘My God, that girl is a devil!’

As I strolled home that night, I could see as clearly as if I were
living through it how dearly Ridgeway was going to pay for his
harmless snobbery. I could also see why he might have been afraid of
bringing a girl like that into his own family. People of our class are
plain and rough, but nobody is so plain and rough that they wouldn’t
resent her tone, and from this time on Ridgeway would have to depend
for his friendships on his wife’s family and their friends.

I was so full of my own discovery that while I was telling Mother and
Sue, it never once struck me that they might feel differently about
it. They listened in silence, and then Sue lit a cigarette and said,
‘God damn her!’ and Mother didn’t even protest. She was too
shaken. ‘The poor, deluded boy!’ she said softly, clasping and
unclasping her hands.

Then I saw that both had tears in their eyes, not only for Harry
Ridgeway and his aspirations but for their own. It was as if life had
betrayed them by being less generous than they themselves were. I
kissed them before I went to bed. It was not a custom of mine, but I
felt extraordinarily proud of them both.

(1958)