THE SCHOOL FOR WIVES

The real trouble with love is that people want contradictory things
out of it. Like Jimmy Maguire and his wife. Jimmy was a tall thin
fellow with an eager face, and in his younger days he used to be
something of a Don Juan. There was a little group of them—the
Doctor, Con Bishop, and two or three other bachelors—and they were
all out for a good time.  They used to go shooting and fishing, and
one year, I remember, they took a house in Clare. The things that went
on! Any excuse for a party, and it didn’t much matter to them where
the party was to be—Limerick, Galway, or Cork, what was it, after
all, but a day’s outing? Jimmy was the most reckless of them. They
would be returning to Dublin from one outing when he would hear of a
party somewhere else, and decide they ought to crash it. The Doctor,
who shared a flat with Jimmy, lived in a continual state of alarm at
what Jimmy would do next. Jimmy would do anything if the mood struck
him, and, whatever he did, the Doctor was swept protesting into his
orbit.

‘But it’s all right,’ Jimmy would say, raising a hand. ‘The man is an
old friend. I’ve done business with him for years.’

‘Business?’ the Doctor would say. ‘You don’t even know his name.’

‘Oh, what’s a little thing like that between friends?’

And Jimmy would go up to the house of a perfect stranger and brazen it
out. You wouldn’t think from his rather formal manners that he was so
audacious, but he was. And he could get away with things, for he was
personable and plausible.  Not only would he gain admittance to the
party, he would end by becoming the centre of it. The secret of
Jimmy’s success was his fondness for women. He really liked women, and
had a quite genuine interest in their affairs, and a woman could never
be with him for long without telling him her troubles. Whatever
wonderful way he had of easing their minds, women who confessed to him
wanted to go on confessing, and that was where the Doctor came in,
because he would talk to them over the telephone in that wonderful,
vague, syrupy voice of his, sympathizing with them in their inability
to find Jimmy, while Jimmy in stockinged feet tiptoed around him,
making hideous faces.

All this greatly scandalized the Doctor. But for all his alarm and
pretended disapproval he loved it, of course. He had been devoted to
his mother and, as a result, he was still unmarried and likely to
remain so. Jimmy was his secret life, his wild oats. He was lonely and
sweet-natured and for ever thinking and talking of love. You would go
to see him, and he would fuss about with the drinks, murmuring in his
gentle, worried way about Jimmy and his girls. ‘And some of them
married, my dear fellow,’ he would whisper, giving you a dark look
over his spectacles. ‘I forget whether you like soda. Personally, I
think it gives you indigestion. And he’s so pious! Every year of his
life off to Lough Derg on the pilgrimage, trailing round the holy
stones on his bare feet.  And even there—did I put too much water in
it—he picks them up. At the same time—here’s health, old man—he keeps
trying to reform me. I admit my beliefs mightn’t be all that orthodox,
but I can’t help feeling that his aren’t completely sincere. Mind you,
he’s quite charming about it. He says I’m putting the cart before the
horse, and that sins against morals are less important than sins
against faith. According to him, I’m a Protestant. He says it’s all in
the importance you attach to the First Commandment, or something. I
really can’t follow that sort of argument—I mean, this difference
between sins against faith and sins against morals. Can you?’

At last, after years of piety and skirt-hunting, Jimmy found the girl
he wanted to marry, and he took her by storm.  She was called Roisin
Mooney, and I must say he showed great taste. She was a really nice
girl, the sort you’d swear would be especially reserved as a reward
for virtue. She was enraptured with religion, with the sacraments,
with prayer, and with every form of emotional religion. Nor did
marriage seem to disillusion her. At least twenty times a day that
girl must have told herself that she was the luckiest girl in the
world to be married to a king of men like Jimmy, and twenty times a
day wondered if God would give her the grace to be worthy of him. It
is the unworldly type of woman whose mind is fixed on the saints,
suffering, and sublimation who really appreciates the miracle of a man
in the bed when she wakes in the morning.

She asked him over and over to explain again from the beginning what
he had felt when he first met her and how it was he had seen anything
in such a plain, stupid, uneducated girl as herself. And Jimmy, who
found it difficult to remember even where he had met her and whose
approach to all women had been standardized down the years, tried to
look portentous and understanding, and said that a legal training was
a great aid in seeing through appearances. Roisin shook her head
doubtfully. She had known other lawyers, and they had never seen
through her. Clearly it couldn’t be anything but inspiration, and she
worried her own vivid recollections, trying to see portents and
miracles in them, but she couldn’t, because, as she recognized
herself, she wasn’t clever.

Jimmy had a rajah’s life with her. To say that Roisin was a good
housekeeper would be an absurdity. She kept house for him as a
musician writes a symphony or a saint pursues a meditation—on her
knees, in quest of the absolute. When he got home from the office, she
knelt at his feet and took off his shoes, while Jimmy made faces to
indicate the various inconsiderate ways in which she hurt his
feet. When she had got him a drink and asked him for the tenth time if
it was all right, she sat on a little stool and looked up adoringly at
him while that scoundrel pontificated. And when he came home drunk and
climbed into bed, with his bowler hat down over his eyes and his
umbrella resting neatly on his left arm, she gently relieved him of
both, took off his shoes and socks, opened his collar and tie, and
crept into bed beside him, thanking God for the gift of a wonderful
husband. She was a real pet.

Those who had known Jimmy in his bachelor days wondered how long
exactly it would take him to grow tired of living with a saint and
long for the open road again and the wild parties in Galway and
Cork. But that was not how it happened at all. Instead, Jimmy began to
drop all his old friends, the Doctor among them. He didn’t do it
blatantly or rudely, because, whatever faults Jimmy may have had, he
was a thorough gentleman. But he dropped them just the same.
Occasionally the Doctor would run into him in Dame Street, coming from
his office, and Jimmy’s face would light up, and the pair of them
would drop into the Wicklow Bar or Davy Byrne’s, while Jimmy sketched
the wonderful party he was going to give for all his old friends, till
that glazed look came in his eye and he had to go home in a cab.

But the Doctor noticed that no matter how glazed Jimmy’s eyes got, the
invitation never became more precise.

‘Jimmy,’ he said dryly, ‘I don’t want to be offensive or personal in
any way, but if you’d put a tenth of the energy into giving that party
that you put into talking about it, we might have some chance of
attending it before we die.’

‘Next week definitely Pat,’ said Jimmy, drawing himself up with a
frown. ‘Thursday or Friday, depending. I’ll ring you.’

But the next week came and he didn’t ring, and there was no party. The
Doctor was hurt. He realized that Jimmy was dropping the old crowd for
business acquaintances, clients, and priests. Particularly priests. A
man who is trying to exorcize his past can’t do better than
priests. Now when he got a bit high, Jimmy talked about the Dialogue
Mass instead of ankles, or the difference between ourselves and the
Greek Orthodox Church. He took Roisin to the pictures, wearing the
impeccable bowler hat and carrying the umbrella.  Jimmy was on the way
up. In no time now he would be solicitor to half a dozen government
agencies.

Jimmy’s old friends couldn’t help being curious about the eager,
dark-haired girl he had married, but what they didn’t know was that
Roisin was even more curious about them.  Marriage was still
wonderful. She was having a baby, and she lit candles to Jimmy, she
was full of Jimmy, but none of the people he brought to the house
really knew Jimmy.  When Roisin had one drink in—one drink was
always enough to loosen her tongue—she had to tell the whole amazing
story of Jimmy’s courtship. ‘And do you know how that fellow proposed
to me?’ she would say. ‘He made me sit on the side of the road and
then took out his handkerchief and _knelt_ in front of me as if I was a
statue. “Jimmy Maguire!” says I. “Get up out of that or you’ll ruin
your new trousers.” ’

But when she looked at their polite, vague, smiling faces, she had the
feeling that they only thought her a fool. And in the middle of the
night she woke Jimmy to ask him to tell her frankly whether she hadn’t
ruined his life. Jimmy yawned and said no, she was doing fine.

‘But I want to know the truth. I’d sooner know it now when I might be
able to do something about it,’ she would say, as if she were begging
the specialist to hold nothing back from her. ‘I do my best, but I
know I haven’t the brains. I was always the same. I never could do
sums. No wonder if they think I’m mad.’

And all the time at the back of Roisin’s mind was the thought that the
person who would really understand her was Josephine Hanrahan. She
knew that Jimmy and Josephine Hanrahan had been very thick. She did
not know in which way, nor did she very much care, but she was certain
that a woman who had been so fond of Jimmy would understand her
feelings. This was where the first rift occurred between Jimmy and
herself, for Jimmy did not like the idea at all. Not that he showed
how troubled he really was. Instead, he pretended to consider the
matter judicially.

‘Now, Josephine is a delightful woman,’ he said in a harsh tone, ‘but
she isn’t your class. Please don’t think I’m being snobbish. There’s
nothing I dislike more. But we have to face facts, and it wouldn’t be
in the woman’s best interests.’

To sacrifice a pleasure in order to spare pain to Josephine appealed
immensely to Roisin’s idealistic mind, but all the same she couldn’t
help wondering if it was really necessary.  And Jimmy, in his quiet
Machiavellian way, fed her another curate, who kept her quiet for a
few months, till she started to wonder what sort of man the Doctor
was.

‘Well, Paddy is a fellow you might find interesting,’ Jimmy said
thoughtfully, filling his pipe. ‘As a study, that is.  But
unfortunately the way we’re situated we can’t very well ask him to the
house. You see, Paddy is an atheist.’

‘An atheist?’ Roisin said, brightening up at once. She had never met
an atheist. ‘You never told me that,’

‘Ah, well, it’s not right to say things like that about your friends,’
Jimmy said loyally. ‘But he might just make an offensive remark in
front of poor Father Joe that would upset him.’

Of course it was a slander; the Doctor was incapable of being
offensive to anybody, but Roisin didn’t know this and had to rest
content with the excuse. Then, after racking his brains, Jimmy dug up
some old businessman who had painted watercolours in his youth and had
known everybody; one night when he was drunk Yeats had brought him
home. But his conversation with Yeats seemed to have been of much the
same kind as his conversation with Roisin. By this time, Little Liam
was born, and for quite a while Roisin’s attention was diverted from
everything else in the world. Except that even then she was slipping
out to the optician’s wife next door for a cup of tea or a glass of
sherry—anything to escape the curates. The optician’s wife was a
shrewd, interfering woman. She didn’t know what Jimmy was up to, but
she knew Jimmy was trying to keep his wife to himself, and that was
enough for her.

One evening the Doctor was sitting in the lounge of the Wicklow Hotel
with Jimmy when Josephine Hanrahan looked in. The Doctor, who was very
polite and very fond of her, jumped to his feet and signalled to her.

‘Don’t bother to get up, Paddy,’ she said. ‘I’m not staying.  If I’m
not good enough to drink with a man in his own house, I see no reason
for doing it in public.’

‘Oh, really, Josephine!’ Jimmy protested.

‘I didn’t think you’d do it, Jimmy,’ she said bitterly. I really
didn’t. I thought you were too big a man to drop your old friends,’

Jimmy looked owlishly at the Doctor, then at her, and held out his
hands. ‘Do I look like a man who’s dropped his old friends?’ he asked
triumphantly.

‘Oh, you’re too clever for that, Jimmy,’ she replied. ‘You’re not
obvious. But you won’t ask us to your house, and you won’t let us meet
your wife. Has Paddy been there?’

‘No, dear,’ the Doctor said, trying to make his voice sound)
smooth. ‘Are you sure you won’t have a drink?’

‘Quite, Paddy,’ she said. But she was not to be shut up. She turned on
Jimmy again. ‘But you’ll invite people who never spoke to you a year
ago and wouldn’t speak to you tomorrow if you hadn’t money in your
pocket.’

Jimmy took his glasses off and wiped his long, pale face as though to
reveal the true features below. The character he was trying to assume
now was the haggard, patient, overworked family man, and to give him
his due he did it well.  ‘My dear girl,’ he said kindly, wagging his
glasses at her, ‘in my business I have to entertain people I don’t
much care for.’ He stopped and picked up the bowler hat. ‘This is a
facade. And you know it.’

‘Lies, Jimmy Maguire!’ she said in a whisper. ‘I know your
faults. I probably know them better than you do yourself.  But you’re
not mean, and you’re not calculating and you’re not avaricious.’

He drew himself up, smiled, and raised the bowler to her, ‘Thank you,
my dear.’

‘You didn’t let me finish,’ she went on. ‘I never said you weren’t
jealous.’

‘Jealous?’ he echoed as though he didn’t know what she meant.

‘Yes, jealous.’

But of whom, Josephine?’ Jimmy said, with an elaboration of
astonishment that did not seem genuine.

‘Of your wife.’

‘That shows all you know about Roisin.’

‘No, that shows all you know about her. You’re afraid she’ll do what
other wives have done—wives well known to you.’

The Doctor didn’t know where to look. Jimmy didn’t like it
either. ‘Really, Josephine,’ he said, ‘that’s pretty far-fetched, even
from you.’

‘You never made a bigger mistake in your life, Jimmy Maguire,’ she
said contemptuously. ‘And you’ll regret it.’

‘Extraordinary ideas women get into their heads,’ Jimmy said when she
had gone. ‘I hope that husband isn’t giving her more trouble.’

The Doctor could see he was disturbed. That evening he did not reach
the glazing stage, and they separated at the bus stop by Trinity
College. The Doctor went away feeling thoughtful. For he, too, had
been to the optician’s house and wondered afterwards why on earth he
had been invited and why the optician’s wife had pressed him to come
again. He began to feel that he was involved in an intrigue.

The next time he went there, he saw Con Bishop in a corner, and then
he knew that he was right. Con was another of the old group. He was an
architect, an excitable young man with an Oxford accent. He flirted
with the optician’s wife as he flirted with everybody. The Doctor was
sitting with another medical man, drinking his whiskey, when the door
opened and Roisin Maguire came in. Ignoring everyone else, she went
straight up to the Doctor and took his hands in hers and dragged him
over to the sofa.

‘I’m always wanting to talk to you,’ she exclaimed intensely, gazing
into his eyes.

‘It’s mutual,’ he said, never having seen a technique like this before
—if it was a technique, which he couldn’t be sure of. ‘But I don’t
see as much of Jimmy as I used to.’

‘Ah, who does?’ she said in a husky voice. ‘You can’t see him for
curates. I love my religion—you probably think I don’t, but I do—only
I can’t bear too many priests round the house. Maybe I shouldn’t say
it to you, but I can’t help it.’

‘Why on earth shouldn’t you say it?’ asked the Doctor, overwhelmed by
her manner.

‘I shouldn’t—not to an atheist.’

The Doctor was on the point of asking who had told her this when their
hostess, who felt this was all much too sudden and public, descended
on them. Still Roisin did not let go of the Doctor’s hands. Instead,
she looked over her shoulder at Mrs Lacey and said, ‘Ah, Kitty,
haven’t I waited long enough for a chance to talk to this fellow? Be a
sport and bring me an old drink. Anything at all will do. It all has
the same effect on me...Aren’t I awful?’ she asked the Doctor. ‘I
can never tell the difference between one drink and another.’ But her
mind was not on the drink any more than it was on the party. She had a
sort of rapt, entranced quality, as though she were a sleepwalker
living out a dream. ‘Tell me, aren’t you the one that bailed Jimmy out
when he was arrested in Limerick?’

‘No,’ the Doctor said with amusement. ‘I’m afraid that was Con, the
fair-haired chap over there.’

‘I want to talk to him, too,’ she said, squeezing the Doctor’s
hands. ‘I’m always hearing about ye. And there was a woman in the car
with him the same night, wasn’t there?  He won’t tell me who she
was. That fellow is the devil. Do you know was it Josephine Hanrahan?’

‘No,’ the Doctor said cautiously, ‘I don’t think it was.’ He knew
quite well who the woman was, but he felt that this was dangerous
ground.

‘He’ll never tell me anything,’ she said. ‘But that’s a girl I’d love
to meet—Josephine, I mean.’

‘I fancy she’d like to meet you, too,’ the Doctor said politely.

‘Ah, listen, Paddy,’ she whispered, laying a hand on his knee, ‘would
you ever bring me round to her place some night? You couldn’t tell
Jimmy, of course. He has some daft notion that she’s not class
enough.’

‘Not class enough? Mrs Hanrahan?’

‘Ah, sure, what was my own father only a floorwalker in the Munster
Arcade?’ she said impatiently. ‘I’d ask Kitty Lacey here to invite
her, only Kitty is so blooming inquisitive. She’d want to know what
you had for your dinner.  And I can’t help blabbing everything to
her. I’m that sort, Paddy. I blab. Isn’t it terrible? Do you notice
the way I’m blabbing now?’

The suggestion that anyone might apply the word ‘blabbing’ to anything
so enchanting as Roisin’s conversation came to the Doctor as a shock
as great as hearing himself described as an atheist and Josephine as a
woman of no class.  At the same time, he began to see what the dream
was that gave Roisin the air of a sleepwalker. It was a dream of
Jimmy. She loved the thought that he was a wild, romantic, reckless
man, and when she was polishing his shoes, cooking the dinner, or
bathing the child, she was sustained by that vision of him.

He was touched by it, and soon after that he took her to Josephine’s
little house in Rathgar. He felt nervous about doing it, but then, as
I have said, the Doctor rather liked being in the position of having
to be nervous. Besides, Roisin herself was in such a state that by
force of comforting her he put himself at ease. She ‘blabbed’, as she
called it, all the way.

‘Tell me, Paddy, do you think I’m mad? Sometimes I think myself I’m
not in my right mind. What will Jimmy Maguire say if he hears of it?
He might kill me. Did it ever strike you that he has a distinct look
of Henry VIII? I call him that sometimes. He only laughs at me.’

The Doctor laughed himself at the thought of the ascetic-looking
Jimmy, who resembled an El Greco saint, being compared with Henry
VIII, but now that he realized Roisin had a hankering after that side
of him, it struck him that if the matter were not so delicate and if
only Jimmy had remained intimate with him, it might do no harm to
indicate to him that an occasional touch of the firebrand would go
down well at home. But Jimmy was cautiously extinguishing every bit of
the firebrand in himself—either because, as Josephine thought, he
was jealous, or because he wanted to get on in the world, or possibly
even for a third reason, which the Doctor could not at the moment put
his finger on.  He had ceased to be hurt by Jimmy’s defection. He was
almost beginning to feel sorry for him.

The visit to Josephine was a success. When she opened the door to
them, she smiled in a way that suggested that she would presently
burst into tears, but as Roisin rattled on nervously, Josephine
relaxed. When Roisin went upstairs for a moment, Josephine turned to
the Doctor and said, ‘That old humbug! He would have all the luck,
wouldn’t he?’

‘Are you sure it’s luck, dear?’ the Doctor asked doubtfully.

“Why? There’s nothing wrong, is there?’

‘No. But I thought you said he’d regret it.’

‘Oh, that!’ she said with a shrug. Like all women, she lacked the
courage of her intuitions.

Roisin went home after that visit and the fat was in the fire. If she
had been coming back from a date with a man, she couldn’t have been
more terrified. For now that it was all over she realized her own
duplicity. What was worse, she had made an appointment for lunch and
shopping with Josephine the following week. She knelt before a picture
of the Sacred Heart in her bedroom and asked for strength to be able
to tell Jimmy. She explained to the Sacred Heart, as she had to the
Doctor or would have explained to anyone else, that she couldn’t keep
a thing to herself. She was, as the Sacred Heart knew, a blabber. And
she asked the Sacred Heart not to let Jimmy be too mad with her. Then,
having built up a crisis out of it, she told Jimmy in an offhand way
that would have made any man mad, even one without a past like
Jimmy’s.

‘Oh, Jimmy, do you know who I ran into today? Josephine
Hanrahan.’ There was no response at all. ‘God, Jimmy,’ Roisin rattled
on despairingly, ‘she’s a lovely woman. Why didn’t you let me meet her
before? We went into her place for a minute.’

‘We?’

‘I met her with Paddy, and she asked us in.’

Jimmy knocked the ashes out of his pipe and slowly turned on her. He
frightened her. His face looked old and sour and caved in. He said,
‘Does this mean you intend to defy me?’

‘Defy you, Jimmy?’ she said, her hands pulling nervously at her
dress. ‘Sure, I never defy you. I said I’d have lunch with her. Is
there anything wrong with that?’

‘That remains to be seen.’

‘But what could I say, Jimmy? I didn’t want to hurt her feelings.’

‘You could have put her off,’ he said. ‘As you’d put off any other
unsuitable invitation.’

‘But I don’t see what there was unsuitable about it. I liked the girl,
the little I saw of her.’

‘The little you saw of her, precisely,’ Jimmy said, holding up his
finger in warning. ‘You don’t really know that woman, and I do. There
are things about her I’d sooner not discuss. Things I’d prefer not to
say about an old friend.’

‘What things, Jimmy?’ Roisin asked eagerly.

‘I said I’d sooner not discuss them,’ Jimmy replied severely. But his
training as a lawyer probably made him feel that this was
unconvincing. Evidence was what was needed. ‘I don’t remember too
well, but there was some talk about a girl in Drumcondra that jumped
out of a third-storey window.’

‘Is it in Drumcondra?’ exclaimed Roisin, who found it difficult to
keep up another person’s tone. ‘Sure if I was living there I’d jump
out of a window myself.’

‘Well, maybe it wasn’t Drumcondra,’ he conceded.  ‘Anyway, she was
killed. I’m not saying it was ever brought home to Josephine. For all
I know, she may be as innocent as yourself. But you do not want to be
mixed up with people like that. Particularly while she’s knocking
around with a fellow like Paddy Baldwin.’

‘Ah, for goodness’ sake, you’re not going to say there’s anything
between the pair of them!’ cried Roisin. ‘I don’t believe a word of
it, Jimmy. I think he’s lonely and she just mothers him.’ Jimmy
laughed harshly, and she looked up at him in surprise.

‘Paddy is an old friend,’ he said, ‘and I have no wish to criticize
him. His mother, God rest her, could have told you the truth.’

‘His mother?’ Roisin cried incredulously. ‘But Josephine says he was
crazy about her.’

‘She died of a broken heart,’ Jimmy said.

Then he did an extraordinary thing. He went on his knees and joined
his hands. You can imagine Jimmy, six foot of him, on his
knees. ‘Roisin,’ he said, ‘won’t you keep away from that crowd, for my
sake? You’re too good for them.  They’ll only corrupt you the way
they’ve corrupted others, all for their own amusement. I know them of
old, and I curse the day I had anything to do with them. That’s what I
wanted when I married you—to get away from it all. And there’s another
thing,’ he added, closing his eyes and staring up in agony at her like
a blind man asking for a penny. ‘I didn’t want to tell you, but you’d
better know before it’s too late. My family were all a little unstable
mentally. On my father’s side, of course. I couldn’t bear a mental
shock. My uncle was insane when he died. You wouldn’t want to drive me
to that.’

“Your uncle?’ Roisin cried. ‘Which uncle?

‘Willie,’ he replied humbly. ‘It was kept a great secret. We didn’t
want anyone to know.’

‘I think,’ Roisin said, speaking with real indignation, ‘I might have
been told before now.’

Extraordinary as it was for her to see this great man at her feet, it
wasn’t him she was thinking of now. It was Little Liam. Liam was a
curious child. He always hated to be denied anything, and if you spoke
severely to him he screamed with rage. Was it possible that Liam had
inherited the family weakness, and had she in her innocence made it
worse by frustrating him when she should have comforted him and given
in to him? For the first time she was really angry with Jimmy, and
went upstairs to look at the child, and then knelt by his bedside and
promised the Sacred Heart that she would never cross him again,
whatever he wanted.

She was a serious girl, and she knew that she could not imperil her
marriage by doing something that Jimmy disapproved of, so she rang up
Josephine and excused herself because of illness. But she was also a
rotten liar. When Josephine, a woman who’d give you the shift off her
back, heard that Roisin was ill, she announced that she was coming
over to look after the house for her. Then Roisin’s heart misgave her,
and she asked Josephine over for tea. She felt terrible about it
because she knew that she was no good at explaining things if the
explanation involved any improbabilities, and she was certain that
Josephine would see through it all. She did. Within five minutes she
knew that Roisin was acting under Jimmy’s orders and went white with
rage. It was bad enough that he would not invite her to the house. To
make it plain that he did not think her a proper acquaintance for his
wife was too much. When he was ill and a bachelor, he simply packed
his bag and came to her house and stayed there till he was well. So
she told Roisin this, and Roisin shook her head despairingly.

“What can I do?’ she asked.

‘Whatever you like,’ said Josephine. ‘I wouldn’t allow my husband to
give me orders like that.’

Roisin realized unhappily that a partial explanation was not
enough. ‘But it isn’t only that, Josephine,’ she said. ‘I’m afraid to
contradict him. You see, it’s in the family. He had an uncle that was
queer.’

‘It’s the first I’ve heard of it,’ Josephine said.

‘Well, to tell you the truth, it’s the first I heard of it, too,’ said
Roisin.

‘But who told you?’ Josephine persisted.

‘He did—Jimmy, I mean. He told me it was dangerous for him to be
upset.’

‘And you’re quite sure he’s not making it up?’

‘Would a man say a thing like that about his own family if it wasn’t
true? Sure, that would be crazy out and out. I’d sooner ’twas
true. You don’t think it isn’t?’ she added anxiously.

‘I’ll make it my business to find out,’ Josephine said grimly.

‘But if that’s not true,’ Roisin wailed, ‘then I suppose Paddy’s
mother didn’t die of a broken heart, either.’

‘Paddy’s mother?’ cried Josephine. ‘She worshipped the ground he
walked on. And with good reason. I don’t know what’s come over your
husband, Roisin. I never knew him to tell lies like that.’

‘It isn’t lying, that’s the awful part of it,’ Roisin said in
distress. ‘Josephine, I’ve never breathed it to a soul, and I wouldn’t
say it now only I know it’s not true. Actually, I knew all the time it
wasn’t true. You will understand me, won’t you? I’m only telling you
to show how crazy he is.  That woman in Drumcondra that was supposed
to have committed suicide because of you...’

At that point, Josephine nearly went crazy herself, and nothing but
loyalty to Roisin prevented her from going straight to Jimmy’s office
and demanding a signed retraction. Anyway, it made no difference. For
if there is one impression a man must never leave upon his wife it is
that he is emotional and unstable, because it means that the woman at
once begins to feel the whole business of judgement and decision
devolves upon her, and a woman who feels that no longer respects her
husband. So Roisin continued to meet the gang, and take one drink,
which always made her tight, and she developed a violent crush on Con
Bishop, whose Oxford accent probably reminded her of Henry VIII. She
and Josephine were devoted to one another, though not in the way
Roisin would have wished, with Josephine as the confidante of her
passion for Jimmy. Rather, she was the confidante of Roisin’s doubts
of Jimmy, the woman she would rush to whenever there was trouble
between them. Jimmy, on the other hand, for ever alienated from all
his old friends by his slanders, took to going to chapel in the
evenings and praying that his wife would not do something it would
have taken a convulsion of nature to make her do, and at home he was
ordered about as if he were a child.

(1966)