An End to Autumn (14 page)

“I suppose there can be as much sentimentalism about the sea as there can be about tenements. I was brought up in one myself but I can’t say that I liked it. And as for the sea I know that there’s the Masefield syndrome and all that but I have always thought that there was nothing interesting about a lot of uneventful water.”

(Good stuff for the peasants this, thought Tom furiously. “The Masefield syndrome, would that be something like an airport now. How deep the ould one is.”)

“I don’t know about that,” said Mrs Murphy. “The sea can be very pretty on a calm day. My husband liked the sea and he missed it too. He used to go trout fishing when we were in Connemara. He was very keen on the fishing.” And she looked defiantly around her as if she were defending his sacred memory against attack.

At that moment to Tom’s chagrin his mother dropped her fork but before he could do anything about it Vera had picked it up. His mother, flustered and red in the face, said nothing but Ruth Donaldson, not one to miss a weakness in one of his allies, remarked “That wine must be stronger than we thought.” His mother looked down at her plate like a corrected schoolgirl, and Tom shaking with rage thrust again at Ruth Donaldson,

“We’re so glad you like it so much,” pointing to her empty glass. “Would you like some more?”

“Yes, please,” blatantly impudent.

“They do say,” said Mrs Murphy, “that winos are worse than alcoholics. I have heard that said,” and she gazed around her with a brisk innocent air.

The candles fluttered a little in the draught which came from the window and Mrs Mallow, as if her inhibitions were beginning to wear off with the wine, remarked,

“It’s not often you see candles on a table nowadays, though you see them in hotels. Do you remember, Tom, that hotel where they had the candles?”

“Yes,” Tom replied, furious that she was offering Ruth Donaldson some of their history.

“Oh, where was that?” Ruth Donaldson asked in the same sweet tone as before. “Was that in Edinburgh?”

“It was,” replied Mrs Mallow eagerly. “It was in a hotel in Edinburgh though I can’t remember its name now. Tom took me to dinner there one night and I think we had duckling and oranges there too. Tom liked it very much, didn’t you Tom?”

Before Tom could answer Ruth Donaldson probed, “Oh, did you go out to dinner often then? It’s nice to see such close affection between son and mother. And rather unusual.” She paused. “I must say that I didn’t like my own mother very much. She was a very difficult woman, but I’m sure you’re not that, Mrs Mallow. She was always telling me to do this and that, and not to be out too late. But I suppose one must understand that.”

“I would imagine that you would show great understanding,” said Tom recklessly. She looked at him across the table, murderously. “I only meant,” Tom continued in a voice that was as sweet as her own, “that your knowledge of religion and your obvious belief in it would help you to deal with other people in a charitable manner.”

“Religion has nothing to do with it,” Ruth Donaldson replied bluntly as if she had discarded caution and etiquette.

“Oh I thought religion might have something to do with it. I thought it taught us about love. But perhaps I am mistaken. They make so many new discoveries nowadays.”

Vera’s eyes were moving from Tom to Ruth and back again as if she were at a tennis match but at no time did she make any effort to speak. What are you playing at, Tom thought savagely, cursing under his breath. What have you set up here? But before he could pursue what had now become an open argument between himself and Ruth Donaldson, Mrs Murphy said:

“We have a good young priest here, you know. He’s very good to the old people. He goes round in his car and he visits the Protestants too. He’s very kind.”

Ruth Donaldson gazed at her in disgust and then suddenly said, abruptly, “I wonder if I could go to the bog for a moment.”

“This way,” said Vera, and the two of them left the dining room, leaving Tom alone with his mother and Mrs Murphy.

“She doesn’t seem to be very well,” said Mrs Murphy smiling at him. “Perhaps she’s had too much to drink. She seems a very unhappy young woman.” Not unhappy, thought Tom, simply wicked, evil. Unhappiness if it is unhappiness can cause evil and wickedness. There will be trouble before we get her out of the house.

“Don’t you worry,” he told Mrs Murphy. “We are very glad to see you.”

“Tom got these plates as a wedding present,” said Mrs Mallow casting around for something to say. “He and Vera have been married for five years now.”

“Oh?”

Words, words, words, thought Tom. What use is language after all? Here we all are in the middle of an unspoken struggle, each bringing to it his or her own troubles and thoughts, and our words pass like ghosts about the battlefield. He poured out some more wine for himself and drank it quickly. Bugger it all, he thought, is this what Vera and I have been avoiding in the past, all these tears and bitternesses, scenes like these. Did we stay alone with each other in protection against the barbs and stings of this sort of painful reality. As he looked at his mother, he saw that she was staring down at her plate while Mrs Murphy was pretending as hard as she could to be studying a picture of a fawn in a green wood that was hanging on the wall.

Vera and Ruth Donaldson came back in, and Tom stared with loathing at the latter’s flat slab-like face. They continued to eat their duckling in silence for a while.

Without any warning, Ruth Donaldson began where she had left off, “Religion? What is it anyway? How does it help? I mean, look at us. Old, ugly, happy or unhappy, what does it do for us? Tell me that. Can anyone tell me that? My own mother was a religious woman but that didn’t prevent her from being a bitch. Look at you,” she said to Mrs Murphy, “I’m sure you’re a good Catholic. I’m sure you’re interested in candles and the Mass and things like that but how does that help us in the end. Can anyone tell me that?” And her sick eyes fastened on them.

“Oh I wouldn’t say that,” said Mrs Murphy. “I wouldn’t say that at all. I mean we don’t just believe in candles do we? Religion can help you to bear your grief. When my own husband died I don’t know what I would have done without the priest.”

“The priest! These people tell you what you want to know. That’s all they do. Here we are sitting in this room and we are all hiding things aren’t we? Our good host is hiding the fact that he doesn’t like me. You’re hiding the fact that you don’t like me. And your good mother, Mr Mallow, is hiding the fact that she doesn’t like me either. And we are all religious people. Yet I’m sure …” she stopped suddenly, gazing at them in a sort of drunken astonishment. “I see it all. Beyond language, beyond good manners, beyond society, beyond all that, we hate each other. Oh I know you think I’m drunk but I’m not drunk. I’m just telling the truth and nobody likes to hear the truth. Why doesn’t Mr Mallow like me? Tell me that. Well, I’ll tell you then. It’s because he doesn’t like people who tell him the truth. Perhaps he doesn’t like his mother to be unhappy. Perhaps that’s why he brought her here. Perhaps he doesn’t even like her. Tell me that, Mr Mallow.”

“Look, Miss Donaldson,” said Tom fixing her with enraged eyes, “we’re putting up with a lot from you. You seem to be confusing argument with bad manners. However if you’re putting us in the situation that you want the truth since that seems to be your gimmick for tonight, I’ll tell you something. It’s none of your business but I brought my mother here because that is what one ought to do.”

“Why?”

“Why? Because I want to look after her.”

“Do you really?”

The words hung between them for a long moment like a challenging flag above a battlefield and then Ruth Donaldson said, “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Perhaps I should leave.”

“No,” said Tom decisively for at that moment he was struck by pity for her unhappiness and recognising that the pity was nevertheless a weakness, he repeated, “No. There is no reason why the truth should not be spoken when the truth is necessary, and I suppose it’s always necessary.”

“It’s all right, Miss Donaldson,” said his mother. “It’s all right. Don’t worry about me.”

Tom looked from one to the other and his pity was for the two of them, for their stricken faces, for the terror that haunted the table, and he thought: I’m the liberal, the useless liberal. I am being tormented by too much pity and reason. I should be harder than I am. If I weren’t weak I should put this woman out of the house beyond the circle of our welcome, into the darkness to howl like a wolf there if she wants to. If I had any deep feeling that’s what I should do, if I had principles. But all he did was to say to Vera, “I’ll help you to bring the sweet in.” And he got up from the table followed by Vera. Finding himself alone with her he shut the door fiercely behind him.

“I hope you’re satisfied. What the hell are you up to?” He went up to her and thrust his face against hers.

“What do you mean what am I up to?”

“I told you not to bring that woman here, and now look what’s happening. She’s creating hell in there just because she’s unhappy.”

“And what about me?” Vera retorted equally fiercely, “Do you not think that I’m unhappy?”

“You? What are you unhappy about?”

“What am I unhappy about? I see you going back more and more to your mother and leaving me behind and you ask me what I’m unhappy about.”

“What are you talking about?” said Tom in genuine astonishment.

“Oh, perhaps you don’t see it. But I see it. You went to church with her, you betrayed your principles, and what did you do that for except that you love her more than you love me.”

The rain and wind could be heard beating strongly against the window and in the middle of the roar and the torrent, but protected for the moment against it, the two of them stood staring at each other, the plates forgotten on the table.

“What do you mean I love my mother more than I love you? I thought you said that reason was enough. If we were reasonable, you said.”

“I know I said that but I was wrong. Reason has nothing to do with it. I can’t help it if I see you leaving me day after day. You want to be with her.”

“I don’t understand you. I love my mother but that has nothing to do with my love for you.”

As he looked at her it seemed to him that her marble poise, her glacial whiteness, were beginning to melt in front of his eyes.

“What’s wrong with you?” he asked making as if to touch her.

“Keep away from me. It never occurred to you that I’ve been suffering though you’re very concerned about your mother’s sufferings. All your principles are for others not for me.”

“Oh to hell,” said Tom banging the table with his fist in frustration, “one tries one’s best and then everything is spoiled by people’s ridiculous emotions. By trivialities.”

“There you go again. Trivialities. Anything that’s serious you call a triviality. It’s not a triviality. It’s life.”

“What did you say?”

“I said it’s life, something you’ve never thought about and never understood. Life. That’s the word I used.”

And then Tom felt a dreadful sorrow descending on him like a frightening disease, a sorrow worse than he had ever known. Life, was this then life, this conflict. Was life after all choice? Up until that moment he had never had to make a real choice, he had been protected by words and badinage, by the smooth progression of his days. Was this then really life, this shell of a lighted room beaten upon by the wind and the rain, the two of them as if afloat in a gale, on the stormy bitter waters?

They gazed at each other like enemies across the table on which lay the plates and the spoons and the glittering knives.

“We’ll talk about it later,” he said.

“We’ve talked about it long enough. You want to go home to your mother. Can you not see that in inviting her here that is exactly what you were doing? You were avoiding death. You were avoiding old age. You thought you would keep her alive forever. Is that not what you thought?”

“No,” he shouted in agony, “No.”

“Yes, yes, yes,” she said but more quietly than him, “Yes, it is what you were doing. You wanted perfection, you wanted to be her child again. And now if you’ll kindly get out of my way, I’ll take the sweet in.” He followed her into the room where the three women were sitting in a tense silence and helped her to put the plates on the table.

They ate their sweets without incident and then returned to the living room and sat down in their chairs again leaving the dishes to be washed later. Vera poured out more drinks for everyone except Mrs Mallow.

From then on, Tom, drinking heavily, felt the evening becoming more and more unreal as if by allowing Ruth Donaldson her bridge-head he had made an almost complete surrender.

At one point in the evening, Mrs Murphy suggested a sing song, and the two of them accompanied occasionally by his mother sang ‘Danny Boy’ while Vera gazed at them disapprovingly. But Tom had given up thinking and he sang the verses of the song as if he were descending with Mrs Murphy to a world forever lost yet forever, humiliatingly, yearned for.

Through a haze of cigarette smoke and drink, he saw the exiled Mrs Murphy reaching back into her sentimental past, as if to drink at these false waters, and he was with her, dancing in the middle of the floor, and watching his wife and Ruth Donaldson, stony-faced, regarding them. But he didn’t care. Out of his mouth and out of his heart poured that momently-loved music, while beside him on the sofa, splay-legged and happily prominent, there sat Mrs Murphy, who had bowed to her audience after the song. Pal of mine, he thought, salt of the earth, ould Mrs Murphy friend of my youth, representative of healthy humanity, dance for us again, fertility symbol, honest stair-cleaner in our waste land, leprechaun of green old emerald Ireland.

And drunkenly he turned to Ruth Donaldson, “What did you think of that eh? Where thou goest I shall go, eh? I saw you looking at my wife,” and he wagged his finger playfully at her, “Oh I saw you, religious expert. Let’s have some truth now. Let’s have some truth. And the truth is this. Why do you hate every honest emotion? Are you visiting the sins of the mothers on us, eh? But the truth is, dear Ruth, that we’ve failed. We’ve all failed. You’ve failed and we’ve all failed. We’ve all failed to be human beings. Haven’t you in particular, if I may speak in my gauche way, failed to understand, haven’t you? It’s all very simple really. Everything is very simple. Haven’t you failed to understand?”