A ROMANTIC

One of Mick Dowling’s friends whom I became friendly with
was a railway clerk known as Frenchy. At first I assumed his
name must be “French” till he corrected me. His real name was
Miah Hennessey. He had something like a fixation on Mick. Not
only was Mick a university man, which Miah was convinced he
would have been himself only for the poverty of his family; he
was tall and handsome, with a broad, unimpassive face that
reflected a tolerant but unsusceptible mind. He was a character
not easily swayed; a man who looked neither back nor sideways;
a realist who took everything with a grain of salt—even Miah.

And Miah certainly needed a bagful. He was a big, powerful,
pasty-faced man who alternated between bouts of laziness and
energy. He was exceedingly popular, being both kindly and unassuming;
which was just as well for him because he was something
of a know-all, and could not help understanding everyone's
problems better than they understood them themselves. There
was nothing of the specialist's aridity about Miah; he was alternately
gardener, builder, mechanic, and cook, and he threw as
much energy into one of those peripheral activities as most people
put into the central passion of their lives. It was only natural
that he should occasionally overlook the trifling affairs of the
Great Southern and Western Railway Company.

When he tired of his job, he simply invented an excuse for a
call in town and dropped in on Mick, who was usually hard at
work.

“Are you: back again, Hennessey?” he would growl. “You do
no work yourself, and you'd like to prevent anyone else doing it.”

But when it came to ragging, Miah, with his fluent enthusiasms,
was always more than a match for him.

“You'd better mind yourself, Mick,” he would say in a grave
and gentle tone, putting his hand lightly on Mick’s arm and
whispering. “Sometimes you frighten me. You're so steady that
by the time you're forty it will take two bottles of whisky to relax
you. Mark my words, Mick, you're heading for a really terrible
breakdown.”

Miah’s real passion, the thing he really knew—better than anyone
in Ireland, as he modestly assured us—was France. France
and the French. That was how he came by the nickname. For a
man who had hardly ever been outside Cork, he spoke French
with what seemed to me a remarkable purity of accent; at least,
I flattered myself that I could recognize its purity. The other
clerks thought he was dotty, but none of them would take the
trouble to find out. He knew France, and in France everything
was really better, just as he said: the climate, the food, the drink,
the movies, the books, the girls—particularly the girls. He begged
Mick and me on no account to make up our minds on the subject
of girls till we had sampled the French ones.

Mick was really very fond of him in practice though he disapproved
of him in principle. I never quite knew whether it was the
practice or the principle that really swayed Mick; all I knew was
that he would take things from Miah which would have shocked
him coming from me. I suppose the truth is that they were complementary
types, and that Mick gave Miah a sense of stability,
while Miah gave Mick a sense of the variety and richness of life
he felt he lacked. In private he told me that Miah had a streak of
genius. Then, because he rarely made any statement without
qualification, he added gloomily that, of course, Miah was as mad
as a hatter.

When we went out together, Miah worked himself into ecstasies,
trying to induce us to drink claret instead of stout. He
sipped reverently, closed his eyes, and murmured lines of love
poetry in French; and I, gathering that wine was the secret of
French lightness, logic, and lovemaking, felt my palate being
schooled, but after one mouthful of claret Mick returned to stout
and refused to give wine a second chance. He said it reminded
him too much of Parrish’s Food. On another occasion, Miah produced
a battered packet of French cigarettes which some tobacconist
had procured for him, and begged us to say honestly, if
given our chance, we would ever smoke anything else. His eyes as
he watched us were soft with tears, and I couldn’t find it in my
heart to say the damn things made me sick, but Mick, having
smoked the first one down to the butt, said he’d give up smoking
if that was the only alternative. Miah got us tied up with extraordinary
and most alarming women to whom he introduced us
under false names, but though Mick was exceedingly tolerant and
allowed himself to be referred to as Joe Murphy, nobody could
ever divert him even for half an hour from his own Babiche. He
was a man who never looked either back or sideways. He continued
to nag at Miah to do something practical for himself, and
Miah, with a glass of sour claret before him and an unwholesome
cigarette between his lips, smiled sadly and asked if Mick meant
that he should get himself appointed station-master of Ballydehob.
His own ideas for the future were never less than magnificent
if only they had remained the same for two days running.

Then, one day, when he wasn’t feeling as full of bounce as
usual, he would break down—really break down, I mean—and
with his head in his hands lament that he was wasting his life
and must leave the railway and take up some career with reasonable
hopes of advancement. Mick was the only one who could
work him up to this point, but even Mick couldn’t keep him up
to it, and a few days later Miah would be doing a wonderful
turn, imitating his own tears and Mick’s wooden countenance
for any of our friends he happened to run into, Mick would pretend
to be annoyed, but it was rarely more than pretence.

“Get out, you fat slug!” he would growl at Miah. “You’ll get
the sack one of these days, and you’ll laugh at the other side of
your puss.”

“Oh, no, Mick,” Miah would say serenely. “I won’t get the
sack. You’ll get the sack, and you’ll be so upset that you’ll have
a nervous breakdown and take to the bottle. That’s the only
thing that worries me. Now, if you’d be said by me and drink
wine‒”

Mick and I sometimes discussed whether he really enjoyed the
wine and the smelly cigarettes or was only kidding himself.
Mick in his growling, critical mood maintained that it was only
part of an act that was becoming second nature; but I sometimes
wondered which was the act, and whether stout, Virginia
cigarettes, Sunday Mass, and Babiche were quite so substantial
as they sometimes seemed. I knew Mick would always prefer
the local drink and the local doll, always make the best of his
circumstances, but I doubted my own capacity for doing so.

Then, like the rest of us, Miah got limed in nature’s snare by
one Susie Morgan. In that particular matter it would be hard to
say who really got caught, for Susie lived in a small terrace house
with three brothers and two sisters, and was so overcome by
the yarn Miah spun her that she hadn’t a chance of behaving
like a self-respecting snare. He wooed her in a haze of euphoria.
He was going to the university to pass an exam in something or
other (he was never sure what), and take a job in the south of
France (he was never sure where), and have what he called “a
villa” of his own where the sun would shine on them during all
but fourteen days of the year (it had been established statistically)
for the rest of their natural lives. No wonder the poor girl felt it
was God sent him. Meanwhile, it was a joy to hear him criticize
the bad way everything was done in Cork and describe the
wonderful clotheslines with pulley-blocks they would have in
their own back yard. She believed it all and married him.

Mick and I were both a bit soft on Susie, and Miah encouraged
it. Frenchwomen were notoriously broad-minded, and it probably
gave him the illusion of being married to one, though it had
no such effect on us. Susie was small and slight; she had a long,
eager face like an energetic version of a Pre-Raphaelite madonna,
with long, fair hair brushed down at either side. She really was
quite mad on Miah, but she couldn’t let him alone. They had
scarcely set up house when she began interrupting him to ask
about the clotheslines.

“I’ll try and manage a half day for it next week, Susie,” he
said gently in the tone you’d use to a child who wanted you to
play with him.

“But we need them badly, Miah. Couldn’t you do it now?”

“How could I, Susie?” he asked with a touch of severity.
“Don’t you realize that I have to get the pulley-blocks?”

“Really, Miah!” she exclaimed, clasping her hands anxiously.
“The way you go on about those old pulley-blocks! Couldn’t you
put up an ordinary line for me, so?”

“An ordinary line would only be a waste of time, dear,” he
said sadly. “Anything that’s worth doing is worth doing well.”

When Susie got one of her brothers to put up the lines for
her, Miah was hurt. He said with tears in his eyes that he hadn’t
thought she was so hard. Then he got a fit of energy and did the
job properly—a really fine job that any woman might well be
proud of—and even put up a cupboard in the kitchen for her.
But even this didn’t satisfy Susie. Next thing she wanted was
shelves.

Miah was rather disappointed in Susie. It seemed to him that
Irishwomen could never rise above shelves. You threw good-looking
young fellows in their way, but they only mothered them
and tried to make them take cod-liver oil. They wouldn’t let
you rest of an evening, but wanted you to chop wood or fetch
coal or put a washer on the tap. They even followed you to the
lavatory when you had ensconced yourself there with an illustrated
magazine and nagged at you through the keyhole. A man
had nothing like the same peace with his wife as he had with his
mother. It is a discovery that many Irishmen have made from
time to time.

When he first told Susie about snails in France she held up her
hands in horror and said beseechingly: “Miah, don’t go on
please! You’re only making it up.” When he went out into
the garden and collected a canful of what he said were “genuine
Bourguignons” she went into screaming hysterics. “Miah,
take them away! Take them away, I tell you. I’m going to be
sick.”

“I’m not going to do anything with them yet,” he shouted
angrily. “You have to starve them first.”

“Starve them? What a thing to do! I won’t have them in the
house at all, I tell you.”

“All right, all right,” he said in disgust. “I’ll leave them in the
yard.”

“You will not leave them in the yard, Miah. I won’t stay in the
house unless you take them away.”

So Miah had to take the can of snails to his mother and get her
to starve them. She blinked, tut-tutted, and called him “a mad
divil,” but she did as he asked her. Miah ate them all alone with
great reverence and pride and said unctuously that they were delicious.
All they needed was the right wine.

Miah was genuinely disappointed in Susie. Of course, he asked
a lot of her. No man living within a few hundred yards of his
mother can help feeling at times that he has married the wrong
woman, but I see now that Miah would have been disappointed
in anyone. Mick said that Susie was a girl in a million. Miah
said mournfully that she was frigid. She showed a regrettable
tendency to prefer real shelves to imaginary ones, a thing Miah
couldn’t imagine in any really passionate woman. She would
have preferred real Cork babies with common accents to imaginary
ones in the south of France who spoke French perfectly
from childhood, but Miah, seeing all he had lost in his mother,
had no intention of letting Susie’s attentions be subdivided till
they were safe in France. It was too dangerous. She wouldn’t
eat snails and she wouldn’t make love according to the textbooks
Miah brought home. He had tried Fig. 18 with her on the rug
in front of the fire, and it was even worse than the snails. For
days he went round with a sulky air, and told her mournfully
that if this was how she felt about him, she would have done
better not to marry him. He talked the same way to us. That
is what I mean by his influence on Mick. Mick had never heard
of Fig. 18, and anyone else who had tried to tell him about it
would probably have got a sock in the jaw.

As protection against the perpetual wail for new shelves, Miah
did what many a good man before him has done and fell ill. He
complained of headaches. His mother blamed Susie’s cooking for
them, but it wasn’t the cooking; it was the shelves. Their place
had now been taken by doctors, and Susie was nagging him to
get his headaches seen to till he broke down and told her he
wouldn’t because he already knew he had a tumour on the brain.

“God bless us and save us, Miah!” Susie said despairingly.
“Wouldn’t you get it seen to?

“If my suspicions are right, dear,” he said tragically, “nobody
can do anything.”

“But can’t you make sure, at least?” begged Susie.

“Do you think I could live, knowing I was going to die a
horrible death inside a few months?” he asked, giving her a
ghastly smile of reproach.

“Hell’s cure to you!” Susie’s brothers said when she got them
to put up the shelves for her. “Why couldn’t you marry a decent
tradesman instead of a blooming gas-bag like him? Snails, begod!”

None of the Morgan family ever really got over the snails.
They said it showed that Miah wasn’t all there.

As walks were the only thing that relieved his tumour, he was
less and less at home in the evenings. By this time Mick was
married himself and living with Babiche and their child in a
nice little suburban house, which he worked like a black on.
Miah’s walks were mostly in that direction, and Mick put him
to work as though he hadn’t a tumour at all. Miah was sufficiently
fond of Mick to overlook this, though privately he told
me that Mick was ruining Babiche and the child. I could well
believe that, for Mick was one of those powerful, easy-going, considerate
husbands who will ruin any family and enjoy it. This
was where I disagreed with Miah, who was already turning it
into a romantic novel and assured me that, like himself, Mick
was disappointed in marriage, and if only he had the nerve,
would break away from Babiche and clear out to England or
America. Miah disliked Babiche. She not only answered Mick
back; she answered Miah back as well. She did worse. She told
him that she regretted not being married to him instead of Mick,
as it deprived her of the opportunity of wringing his neck. That,
as Miah said with a sad shake of his head, was enough to show
anybody the sort of woman she was, and he kept on pertinaciously
trying to get Mick to admit that she was frigid too, and
that life in the little house on College Road was hell. If this was
so, Mick managed to conceal it pretty well.

To everyone’s surprise, it was not Miah but Susie who eventually
fell ill. Her condition was hopeless from the start. But the
really curious thing was the change that came over Miah. He
seemed to become a different man, quiet, conscientious, and
industrious. Even his mother-in-law admitted it—“Search the
world over and you wouldn’t find a husband like him.” He, who
normally couldn’t be induced to spend an evening in his own
home, hurried back each evening from the office and did most
of the cooking and cleaning. For months he nursed Susie with
genuine devotion, and after her death he collapsed on Mick and
blamed himself for it.

“Nonsense, man!” Mick said sharply. During Susie’s illness he
had developed a new respect for Miah. “If I did for Babiche
what you did for Susie, I’d look for a medal.”

“It’s not the same thing, Mick,” Miah said hopelessly. “Susie
died a disappointed woman. I disappointed her.”

His mother returned to keep house for him, and did so till
her own death five years later, but Miah’s moody fits grew more
protracted, his fits of enthusiasm more exalted. Two short holidays
in France did nothing to settle him. Mick was very concerned
for him. He tried to get him to marry again, but Miah
either felt he could never replace Susie or was afraid of fresh
responsibilities. Then Mick decided that the only hope for him
was to get a job in France.

“It’s just like anything else,” he said to me. “We all have high
notions and nothing but experience can cure us. A few months
working in France and he’d be very glad to settle down at home.”

But this wasn’t as easy as it sounded. Apart from knowing
French, Miah had no particular qualifications for a job in
France, and even if he had, Cork was no place to hear of one.

Then, one day, passing from one bay to the next, Miah did
something no one was supposed to do in theory and everybody
did in practice: he crossed over the buffers of a stationary train,
It didn’t remain stationary, and he was picked out from beneath
it with his left arm mangled unmercifully. He was still conscious,
and was put lying on some bales of cloth while the ambulance
was sent for. Once again that astonishing man had a surprise in
store for everybody. Miah, who worked himself into hysterics
over an imaginary pain in the head, suffered agonies with quiet
courtesy. It was Susie’s illness all over again, as though real
suffering, real grief, came as a relief to him after what he had endured
in his imagination.

It did not last, of course. He lost his arm. Mick and I visited
him regularly in hospital, and he seemed to enjoy being there
and having nothing to do all day but dream. There was a lot of
pother about the compensation, and he enjoyed that too. There
was nothing he liked more than composing withering letters to
the railway company, though his solicitor showed a disappointing
lack of appreciation of the style. Miah’s attention had now
been turned to the law; he thought he might take it up himself
and was sure there should be an opening for a lawyer with style.
This was about as far as he got in planning for the future, and
Mick was very worried about it.

“I’ll be all right, Mick,” Miah said to comfort him. Then he
gave Mick a penetrating look and his voice dropped to an incantatory
monotone. “Has it ever occurred to you, Mick, that
all this was intended?”

“Intended to make you work?” Mick asked with a grit

“No, Mick. Intended to leave me free. Didn’t it occur to you
that it’s almost as if somebody intended to shake me out of the
rut I was getting into and force me to lead the life I should have
been leading?”

But Mick was lacking in those perceptions and intuitions
which seem to come to others from a world outside themselves.

“No, it didn’t,” he growled, rubbing his temple thoughtfully.
“It strikes me that you’re going to find it hard to live on whatever
you get.”

“I’ll be able to live all right on it in France, Mick,” Miah said
with serene confidence.

“You won’t be able to live on it anywhere.”

“But you don’t understand, Mick,” Miah said with genuine
pity. “It’s different in France. Everything is cheaper there.”

Mick was really alarmed. He did not mind the idea of Miah’s
going to France—as I have said, it seemed to him the only
solution—but he had begun to notice what he described as “a bit
of a crack” in Miah’s characters his plunges from enthusiasm to
despair were becoming more marked; and he was afraid that
this might be Miah’s way of escaping from the consciousness of
his crippled state and would be followed by a depression worse
than anything that had gone before.

“I wish you’d be practical,” he said gloomily.

“Oh, but I am practical, Mick,” Miah said excitedly. “It’s you
who’re not practical, I could live like a rajah on less than that in
France. I have it all worked out.”

“I hope it keeps fine for you.”

“Oh, but it will, Mick,” gurgled Miah, and his fat face glowed.
‘That’s what it does in the south of France, You see, the trouble
with you is that you’re doing what you’ve always done—inventing
obstacles.”

“I haven’t noticed any shortage of obstacles.”

“But what else are you doing, Mick?” asked Miah with love
and admiration mingled in his tone with wonderment at Mick’s
obstinacy. “A man like you, who could be earning thousands,
sticking in a hole like this for a couple of lousy hundred! I’m
not an old man. I can work even with one hand. I might even
marry again,” he went on with growing enthusiasm, “The
French are wonderful housekeepers; you have no idea. And you
and Larry could come out and stay with us, and we’d sit on the
terrace of an evening and drink our couple of bottles of wine.
Wouldn’t it be marvellous?”

And, of course, he managed temporarily to convince us, as he
had so often convinced us before, and we wandered back through
greasy streets under an indiarubber sky, wondering how we
could stick a hole like Cork for the rest of our days. Some little
town in the south of France which we had never seen was running
through our minds—oh, nothing very ambitious; like Miah
we did not ask much of life: some little town like Carpentras or
Tarascon which formed an image of grace and completeness and
made all our surroundings seem trivial. Mick was doing very well
for himself; he had attracted the attention of someone in the
Department of Education and would end up as a school inspector,
but in Ballydehob, not in Carpentras.

When Miah came out of hospital he was in no hurry to go. He
took to dropping in on us at work, just to let us know how
things should be done. We both lacked system, it seemed. He also
took his time about disposing of the house and furniture, but
even these went at last, and one day when Mick called to bring
him home with him, he found Miah sitting on a box in the
empty kitchen, weeping. Mick felt like tears himself, though he
wasn’t the sort to show it. It was only now that we were losing
him that we realized how much Miah had meant to us, how
much of our lives he had made tolerable by his fantasies. The
city would be a more depressing place without him. Mick even
admitted to me with a sly grin that he was beginning to think
Miah was right and that he really was a disappointed man.

They took his bags over to Mick’s house. Miah had always
sneered at the house, but he didn’t sneer now. He even developed
a capacity for amusing himself with the children—there were
now two of these—and became something of a hero with them.
He admitted that Mick had a nice little home and that Babiche
was a good wife, a very good wife, even if she did answer back.
What use was a wife without a bit of spirit?

“Of course, Mick,” he said sadly, “you always knew how to
respect her. I never really began to respect Susie till I lost her.

When we saw him off at the station he was weeping. We found
it hard enough to keep our own faces bright as the train slid out
under the tunnel with the great sandstone cliff and the houses
on top. Already we imagined it emerging at the other side of the
city, at Rathpeacon, among the green fields, as if in a different
world, and something of our youth gone with it. In a small place
like Cork funerals are frequently less harrowing than separations:
one has no illusion that the dead are enjoying themselves in one’s
absence.

But we weren’t yet done with Miah’s surprises. He stayed in
London to visit some cousins whose existence he had never before
seemed aware of. Next he was in Birmingham, looking for
a job there. He was waiting for the fine weather to go to France.
It was all very strange.

It took us weeks to realize the truth. Miah simply had no intention
of going to France. He had never any intention of going
there. All his life he had been using it as an escape from a reality
which was too oppressive for him, and now that it threatened to
become a reality itself, he could not face it. But it was not until
the fine weather came that we really admitted to ourselves that
only that his home was broken up and himself too tired to start
again, he would have been back with us by the first boat.

Instead, he hung on for a year, betwixt and between, till
gradually he sank into a tramp‒oh, none of your down and outs, of
course; a comfortable tramp who knew where to go and what to do,
but all the same a tramp, driven on by some restlessness beyond
human reason.

Eventually, to the romantic, reality itself becomes romance, but not
until he has let it slip from his hands. That is the romantic’s tragedy.


First published: Evening News (London), 1951-08.
Source: More Stories by Frank O’Connor; Alfred A. Knopf: New York. 1967.
URI: https://archive.org/details/morestories00ocon