THE REBEL Almost from the first evening Don MacNamara dropped into the little pub he found himself accepted there. And that in itself was unusual for the English don’t cotton on to strangers. It wasn’t much of a pub; just a plain red-brick building in the village street with a parlour on the left where the ladies drank gin and a bar-room on the right where the men drank beer and played darts. The bar itself was in the hall-way, and behind it was a dark kitchen with a cellar beneath it where the beer was kept. Jim Wright, the publican, was a local man who worked in the factory by day; a thin, melancholy, obliging man with spectacles. His wife, Carrie, was a townie from Lancashire, a tremendous worker in the way of North Country women. In the morning when you passed the pub you saw her scrubbing with the wireless going full blast, and when she saw you she went full blast too. She was a shy girl who at first seemed plain and stupid, and was always nervous that she might be saying the wrong thing or giving the wrong change. But she didn’t look plain or stupid when Don was around. He would come in, scarcely lifting his feet, an insignificant-looking man with a ravaged dyspeptic face and a tubercular complexion, a thin bitter mouth and long, limp hair, and all at once she was in a glow, putting on a turn as a fast piece of goods from the factory or making insulting remarks to the men till she had the place in a roar. It wasn’t that Don said or did anything very unusual. It was just a feeling of quiet enjoyment that seemed to emanate from him and made people feel good. He liked the country and he liked the people. The locals responded by confiding their troubles to him, like Eddie, an old friend of the publican’s, who waited for Don like the souls in Purgatory just to tell him a bit more of his tragic life-story. ‘I don’t know how the hell it is,’ Don would say with his dead-pan humour. ‘I don’t know whether it’s the way the English suffer more than anyone else, or whether they can’t find anyone that will listen to them, but the whole population seems to have been waiting for me to tell me the horrible agonies their mothers died in or how their wives ran away with someone else. I think I must have some sort of charm on me.’ The other customers agreed that Don did have a hard time with Eddie’s hard life, but it was held greatly in his favour that he never hurt poor Eddie’s feelings. ‘The Irish are like that,’ they said approvingly. ‘Very kind.’ ‘They are like hell,’ Don said mockingly. ‘Is it people that come here by the hundred thousand just to get away from one another? Kind, how are you?’ He never had a good word to say for Ireland himself, which they accepted as another form of his Irishness. ‘Don’s like all the Irish,’ they said. ‘A bit of a rebel.’ ‘Rebels, how are you?’ added Don malevolently. ‘Is it people that are afraid to eat meat on Friday for fear someone would turn them into a goat. Mind, I’m not saying they’re not smart with a certain class of a weapon. Anonymous letters, for instance. With an anonymous letter an Irishman is out on his own. He can get his man at a hundred miles.’ ‘But you fought us, Don!’ they protested. ‘We did not fight ye,’ said Don, the poison dropping from the side of his thin mouth. ‘We sent anonymous letters all over the world about ye, and we shamed ye.’ And then, with his battered face wrinkled up, he went into a melancholy caw of laughter. They knew, of course, that he was exaggerating. Don always exaggerated things like that. You had only to look at himself if you wanted to see a born rebel. He was opposed on principle to every form of authority from the police to the Communist shop-stewards; he had only one answer to every order—‘Why?’—and it was remarkable how rarely anyone could produce a satisfactory answer. Sometimes a fellow called Claude, who had risen to be an officer during the War, felt it his duty to defend discipline and stood up for the shooting of deserters, but Don overwhelmed him with scorn, pacing round him in tiny strides, his fists clenched, his face distorted with passion. ‘My bold hero!’ he snarled. ‘What else would ye do with them? Sure, ’tis only the miracles of God that keeps ye fighting at all. ‘’Tis a wonder ye don’t shoot their wives and children as well. That would teach them to be frightened.’ He flared up at the least hint of injustice, and it was not the professional humanitarianism of the shop-stewards. He would see poor old Willy Wagtail, as they called him, hanging round the pub with what Don called ‘a mouth’ on him, and bring him in for a drink. He didn’t like Willy any more than the others did, but as he said in his mocking way: ‘If there’s one thing in this world I can’t stand, ’tis the image and likeness of God in want of a pint.’ Within a week everyone except her husband saw that Carrie was head and ears in love with him. It was only natural, of course. The girl wasn’t really happy there. She was a superior sort of girl, with the North Country passion for self-improvement which is almost like an instinct in its violence, and Jim was a village boy who never wanted to leave his village, and had no interest but his car which he took to pieces every second week. One day when Don came to the pub she was alone, and began to talk of her troubles with Jim, and Don put his arms about her and kissed her. Don was like that. He would almost have done the same with Willy Wagtail, but while Carrie clung to him he realised that she was a different proposition from Willy Wagtail—an intelligent, passionate woman who was in love with him and would stick at nothing to get him. In a way it was a pleasant change from his own wife whose one conception of the duties of marriage was to make sure he didn’t eat meat on Friday. And he, after all, had mocked at marriage and fidelity as just another of those regulations to ensure that no one eats meat on Friday or takes a drink after ten, not a ha’porth more reasonable and a good deal less practical, After that, everything was different, for him and for her. He encouraged her to do things on her own; to see places she had always longed to see, to read and study and listen to the sort of music she liked. Carrie began to see life opening up in every direction about her. Of course, Don, with his embarrassing straightforwardness, could no more have carried on a love-affair than he could have flown, but Carrie surprised him by her qualities of calculation and determination, and planned the whole thing as if it were a military campaign. And it was not, as he knew, that she was accustomed to that sort of thing, for, according to herself, he was her first, and she was not the sort of girl to lie to a man she loved. Again, it was the North Country grit. Every few weeks she went off to spend a couple of days with her old parents who still lived in Burnley. Usually, she took Jim’s car. Don would set off on his bicycle, supposedly to visit friends of his who lived near London; drop it at a station, and take the train to some spot where Carrie picked him up and they could go off together to places she wanted to see like Oxford or Stratford on Avon. It always came as something of a shock to him to find her waiting for him on the platform. He remembered her as he had seen her first, energetic, tight-lipped and a little bit grim, and was moved to see her looking for him, her face all smoothed out, eager, light-hearted and mawkish as a young girl. They stayed in some pleasant old inn whose name she had looked up; went to the theatre or visited some museum. It didn’t much matter what they did. He could see her expanding under his eyes, becoming more confident of herself and her judgment of things. She discovered quite a taste for antiques, and they spent hours in some old shop from which she emerged clutching a pair of brass candlesticks apparently made by the village smith in a shape which was unconventional but nice. And anyway, for thirty bob they were a gift. These were days that Don knew he would not forget, but apart from them he was not altogether happy. With a character like his he could not be at his ease in the pub, talking to Jim or the customers. He knew the customers guessed at the real state of affairs from the way Eddie ceased to tell him about his troubles and switched to a peculiar romance he had had with a ‘certain lady in Cairo’ for whom he had felt ‘a deep veneration.’ As Jim’s friend as well as Don’s, Eddie felt sympathetic but sad. Don hated to give an imaginary account of how he had spent the weekend, and suffered from extraordinary waking night-mares in which he forgot himself and in his old straightforward way told the literal truth about what had really happened. Not only did Carrie not seem to mind, but Don sometimes felt she enjoyed it. As she washed glasses, she entered enthusiastically into conversations about her parents and their state of health and mind which merged into confidences about the peculiarities of elderly people; and Don, twisting his mouth into a wry smile, realised that the girl didn’t even know she was telling lies. It was worse when Jim had to go to the North of England on a special job, for a pub is one of those places where thieves know there is always a certain amount of money, and Don realised that it was taken for granted that he should keep Carrie company. It should have been a heaven-sent honeymoon for them both, but for Don it was anything but that. Of course, there were odd hours when he forgot himself and let himself go; when he came in from work to find Carrie waiting for him so that they could have a drink together before supper and the opening of the pub, or when he woke in the morning to see her bringing in a cup of tea while outside the window there was a green hill with a thatched Elizabethan cottage perched on top of it against the sky like the Ark come to rest, and they seemed like an old married couple. But there were longer and worse spells when he remembered what they really were. Carrie loved to play that they were married and lay out Jim’s pyjamas, dressing gown and slippers, and she was hurt when he insisted on wearing his own old night shirt and coat. ‘But why, Don?’ she asked anxiously. “You don’t mind if they’re Jim’s, do you?’ and all he could say was ‘Ah, I like my own things, girl.’ It was the same with food. Much as he liked eating at home with her, he stayed out several evenings in town rather than come back to a meal, and face the gentle look of Eddie in the bar, a look that wished him every happiness but wished too that the happiness should not hurt Jim. ‘Ah, don’t mind me, Carrie,’ he said miserably. ‘I suppose I’m a cranky bastard, but I don’t like eating another man’s food.’ ‘But the house is as much mine as Jim’s, Don,’ she said despairingly. ‘Don’t you think I work as hard as Jim does?’ ‘You do, and harder,’ he said. ‘Ah, don’t you see I’m not criticizing you at all. But what I’m looking forward to is a couple of days by ourselves in Brighton...I only wish to God I was there now!’ “Yes, Don,’ she said, meek but misunderstanding. ‘I know what you mean. We’ve had wonderful times together. But I don’t really like hotels or boarding houses. I mean, they’re not like home, are they?’ ‘No, of course they’re not, but you’re not beholden to anybody for them either.’ ‘Still, it’s never like being married, Don, is it? I mean, you can’t help feeling that you’re doing wrong.’ ‘How the blazes do you make that out?’ ‘I don’t know, Don, but it seems that way. I suppose it’s different for a woman. A woman doesn’t really feel the same, not without her own things.’ And Don couldn’t help feeling that there must be something queer about women, to think less of deceiving their husbands at home than of doing so in a hotel bedroom, while Carrie felt that there must be something wrong with Don to see more guilt in a thing done at home than in a hotel room, and began to wonder if he really cared for her as much as he said. That showed how little she understood him because the only thing in his mind was how soon he could get them both out of the situation they were in. It wasn’t easy. He hated to do something to his poor decent wife that she wouldn’t even understand, and beside that, there was the question of keeping two homes. Carrie pointed out that she had a little money of her own, but he refused to consider letting her spend this. Then she pointed out that she was quite capable of supporting herself, but he wouldn’t consider that either. She thought it hard of him, as she thought it hard of him to slight her little attempts at domesticity, and she could not understand that he didn’t want either because he felt he hadn’t earned it, and got more of the real feeling of home from a shabby hotel bedroom on which he felt he had some claim. There are certain things no woman ever understands in love, and one is the determination of a man like Don to pay for his girl as he would pay for anything else he regarded as his own. The idea of ownership is fixed more firmly in a man’s mind than in a woman’s, and ownership is as much a matter of duties as of rights. Don’s way of love-making was to look for another job where he could earn overtime. It was almost a relief to him when Jim got back from the North and he didn’t need to stay in the pub any longer. It was no pleasure to Carrie because Jim came back too ill to work. He was self-conscious about his sickly looks and sat in the kitchen behind, listening to the wireless, absorbed in some dream of his own misfortunes. Don had to go and talk to him there, and found it doubly uncomfortable because Jim kept his eyes averted in a way that suggested hostility. ‘Doctor says I ought to get out more,’ he muttered to the stove. ‘It’s not so easy.’ ‘Why don’t you go with Carrie, so?’ asked Don. ‘Carrie’s got other things to do,’ Jim said hopelessly. “Well, why don’t you come walking with me?’ asked Don. ‘I’m fond of walking, not like the rest of ye.’ ‘Could I, Don?’ Jim cried with sudden eagerness. ‘Could I really?’ And he called out to Carrie who was working in the bar: ‘Carrie! Don here says he’ll walk with me.’ ‘That’s right,’ she said, standing in the doorway with her hands on her hips. ‘That’s what you need, you lazy old devil!’ Carrie was genuinely pleased. She felt it was just what her husband needed, and besides it would put an end to a lot of casual talk. Besides, she had something of a woman’s pleasure in bringing together husband and lover. But Don, who could not have understood this even if she had been able to explain it to him, was miserable. He was the sort of man who had to do a kindness even if it killed him, but kindness to a man he felt he had wronged was no better than treachery. Jim was in too bad a shape to notice what he was feeling. They set off for a long walk across the fields, up the hill as far as the church and manorhouse and back by country lanes. Don found Jim a better companion than he had expected. He was a country boy, and he knew every house in the neighbourhood and every grave in the churchyard. From the top of the hill he showed Don three counties and also some of their biggest houses. On these and on the families who occupied them he was positively entertaining, all the more because he did not understand why Don should be so entertained. He was only telling facts. After they returned he already declared he was feeling better and insisted on drinks all round. ‘I don’t want any blooming doctor,’ he declared from the bar. ‘Don’s the doctor for me.’ It was Willy Wagtail all over again. Jim discovered a new interest in life, planning walks they could take together and places about which he felt he could talk interestingly to Don. A lot of the time they were of no interest to anybody, but Jim was beginning to see himself as quite a deep fellow who hadn’t appreciated his own talents. His health really did improve, though not, Don suspected, so much from exercise as from having a new interest. He was a creature of habit, and it had made an old man of him before his time. ‘You saved my life, Don,’ he said one day they were walking up the hill from a church where Jim had taken him to see what he described as a real curiosity—a church bell hung in a tree. ‘I know I’m not much company. I never had conversation like Eddie or the others. Didn’t have their experience, I suppose. I brood too much, I know.’ “You and Carrie ought to get away more together,’ Don said flatly. ‘Too hard with the pub, Don,’ said Jim. ‘Then get rid of the bloody pub.’ ‘I like it, Don,’ Jim replied simply. ‘Anyhow, Carrie wouldn’t care for me to be away with. Fact is, in my job I’ve got to have a wife, but I never was much at my ease with women. I’m happier in a pub with a lot of men. Can you understand that, Don?’ ‘I suppose so,’ said Don, who could understand it only too well. Ireland was full of people like Jim, which was probably what had the country the way it was. ‘Now, Carrie likes you, Don. Carrie likes people with conversation. Next time she goes to Lancashire, you should go with her. You'd like it there. It’s different.’ And next time Carrie was going to her parents, Jim insisted that she should take Don as well. He even worked out an itinerary and leaned in the front of the car explaining it to Carrie. She listened to him with a slight smile. Even in matters of life and death no woman gets over her amusement at the ambiguities of daily life. But when she asked Don if they should spend the night in the old inn outside Lichfield he shook his head. ‘I can’t, Carrie,’ he said despairingly. She stopped the car and put her hands on her lap. ‘You mean you don’t want me any more, Don?’ she asked in a dead voice. ‘I mean nothing of the sort. It’s that poor devil.’ ‘He’s not the only one to be pitied, Don.’ ‘I never thought he was.’ ‘Oh, yes, Don, you did. Ever since you got so friendly to Jim, you’ve changed to me. I don’t blame you. I suppose there’s two sides to every story. You think I’m not being fair to him.’ ‘It’s not that, Carrie, it’s not that. It’s only that I see now the man belongs to the place and he doesn’t want to leave it.’ ‘And I don’t belong to it and I do want to leave it,’ she said dully. I suppose that’s my bad luck. But I don’t want to press you. I don't suppose I’d care so much except you’re the sort that has to be pressed,’ ‘All right, all right,’ said Don. ‘Why don’t you say it? You think I’m a mean, cowardly, guilt-ridden bastard.’ ‘No, Don,’ she said, shaking her head. ‘It’s not that.’ ‘What else is it?” ‘It’s just that you’re a different sort of man from what you thought you were,’ she said, and gave him a long, curious look. ‘Exactly,’ he said bitterly. ‘I thought I was a great fellow and I could do anything I liked, and it was only the sort of miserable life I led that made me close and cautious. And now when I go back to Ireland, I won't even have that satisfaction. I’ll know ’tis all in myself. Come on and we'll stay here.’ ‘No, Don,’ she said firmly. ‘Not if you think it’s wrong.’ ‘What does it matter what I think any longer?’ he asked. ‘Anyway we'll probably never get another chance.’ He was right in this at least, though that may have been her doing rather than his. She was shrewd enough to see that the man was so hurt in his pride that he would almost have welcomed pressure from her to break altogether with his past. But she saw too that it was the responsible man in him, not the rebel, who had revolted against things as he found them and now when at last he was free and could have the sort of wife and home he longed for, it was only the responsible man that remained. She had some notion of the tragedy it represented for him, but she knew as well that it would be a much worse tragedy if now he were to try and live out his life with a personality that was no longer his own. (1952?) Source: Steinmann, Michael (ed.). _A Frank O'Connor Reader_. Syracuse University Press, 1994. pp. 148-156