My Oedipus Complex (42 page)

Every old bachelor has a love story in him if only you can get at it. This is usually not very easy because a bachelor is a man who does not lightly trust his neighbour, and by the time you can identify him as what he is, the cause of it all has been elevated into a morality, almost a divinity, something the old bachelor himself is afraid to look at for fear it might turn out to be stuffed. And woe betide you if he does confide in you, and you, by word or look, suggest that you do think it is stuffed, for that is how my own friendship with Archie Boland ended.

Archie was a senior Civil Servant, a big man with a broad red face and hot blue eyes and a crust of worldliness and bad temper overlaying a nature that had a lot of sweetness and fun in it. He was a man who affected to believe the worst of everyone, but he saw that I appreciated his true character, and suppressed his bad temper most of the time, except when I trespassed on his taboos, religious and political. For years the two of us walked home together. We both loved walking, and we both liked to drop in at a certain pub by the canal bridge where they kept good draught stout. Whenever we encountered some woman we knew, Archie was very polite and even effusive in an old-fashioned way, raising his hat with a great sweeping gesture and bowing low over the hand he held as if he were about to kiss it, which I swear he would have done on the least encouragement. But afterwards he would look at me under his eyebrows with a knowing smile and tell me things about their home life which the ladies would have been very distressed to hear, and this, in turn, would give place to a sly look that implied that I was drawing my own conclusions from what he said, which I wasn't, not usually.

‘I know what you think, Delaney,' he said one evening, carefully putting
down the two pints and lowering himself heavily into his seat. ‘You think I'm a bad case of sour grapes.'

‘I wasn't thinking anything at all,' I said.

‘Well, maybe you mightn't be too far wrong at that,' he conceded, more to his own view of me than to anything else. ‘But it's not only that, Delaney. There are other things involved. You see, when I was your age I had an experience that upset me a lot. It upset me so much that I felt I could never go through the same sort of thing again. Maybe I was too idealistic.'

I never heard a bachelor yet who didn't take a modest pride in his own idealism. And there in the far corner of that pub by the canal bank on a rainy autumn evening, Archie took the plunge and told me the story of the experience that had turned him against women, and I put my foot in it and turned him against me as well. Ah, well, I was younger then!

You see, in his earlier days Archie had been a great cyclist. Twice he had cycled round Ireland, and had made any amount of long trips to see various historic spots, battlefields, castles, and cathedrals. He was no scholar, but he liked to know what he was talking about and had no objection to showing other people that they didn't. ‘I suppose you know that place you were talking about, James?' he would purr when someone in the office stuck his neck out. ‘Because if you don't, I do.' No wonder he wasn't too popular with the staff.

One evening Archie arrived in a remote Connemara village where four women teachers were staying, studying Irish, and after supper he got to chatting with them, and they all went for a walk along the strand. One was a young woman called Madge Hale, a slight girl with blue-grey eyes, a long clear-skinned face, and a rather breathless manner, and Archie did not take long to see that she was altogether more intelligent than the others, and that whenever he said something interesting her whole face lit up like a child's.

The teachers were going on a trip to the Aran Islands next day, and Archie offered to join them. They visited the tiny oratories, and, as none of the teachers knew anything about these, Archie in his well-informed way described the origin of the island monasteries and the life of the hermit monks in the early mediaeval period. Madge was fascinated and kept asking questions about what the churches had looked like, and Archie, flattered into doing the dog, suggested that she should accompany him on
a bicycle trip the following day, and see some of the later monasteries. She agreed at once enthusiastically. The other women laughed, and Madge laughed, too, though it was clear that she didn't really know what they were laughing about.

Now, this was one sure way to Archie's heart. He disliked women because they were always going to parties or the pictures, painting their faces, and taking aspirin in cartloads. There was altogether too much nonsense about them for a man of his grave taste, but at last he had met a girl who seemed absolutely devoid of nonsense and was serious through and through.

Their trip next day was a great success, and he was able to point out to her the development of the monastery church through the mediaeval abbey to the preaching church. That evening when they returned, he suggested, half in jest, that she should borrow the bicycle and come back to Dublin with him. This time she hesitated, but it was only for a few moments as she considered the practical end of it, and then her face lit up in the same eager way, and she said in her piping voice: ‘If you think I won't be in your way, Archie.'

Now, she was in Archie's way, and very much in his way, for he was a man of old-fashioned ideas, who had never in his life allowed a woman he was accompanying to pay for as much as a cup of tea for herself, who felt that to have to excuse himself on the road was little short of obscene, and who endured the agonies of the damned when he had to go to a country hotel with a pretty girl at the end of the day. When he went to the reception desk he felt sure that everyone believed unmentionable things about him and he had an overwhelming compulsion to lecture them on the subject of their evil imaginations. But for this, too, he admired her – by this time any other girl would have been wondering what her parents and friends would say if they knew she was spending the night in a country hotel with a man, but the very idea of scandal never seemed to enter Madge's head. And it was not, as he shrewdly divined, that she was either fast or flighty. It was merely that it had never occurred to her that anything she and Archie might do could involve any culpability.

That settled Archie's business. He knew she was the only woman in the world for him, though to tell her this when she was more or less at the mercy of his solicitations was something that did not even cross his mind. He had a sort of old-fashioned chivalry that set him above the commoner
temptations. They cycled south through Clare to Limerick, and stood on the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic; the weather held fine, and they drifted through the flat apple country to Cashel and drank beer and lemonade in country pubs, and finally pushed over the hills to Kilkenny, where they spent their last evening wandering in the dusk under the ruins of mediaeval abbeys and inns, studying effigies and blazons; and never once did Archie as much as hold her hand or speak to her of love. He scowled as he told me this, as though I might mock him from the depths of my own small experience, but I had no inclination to do so, for I knew the enchantment of the senses that people of chaste and lonely character feel in one another's company and that haunts the memory more than all the passionate embraces of lovers.

When they separated outside Madge's lodgings in Rathmines late one summer evening, Archie felt that he was at last free to speak. He held her hand as he said good-bye.

‘I think we had quite good fun, don't you?' he asked.

‘Oh, yes, Archie,' she cried, laughing in her delight. ‘It was wonderful. It was the happiest holiday I ever spent.'

He was so encouraged by this that he deliberately retained hold of her hand.

‘That's the way I feel,' he said, beginning to blush. ‘I didn't want to say it before because I thought it might embarrass you. I never met a woman like you before, and if you ever felt you wanted to marry me I'd be honoured.'

For a moment, while her face darkened as though all the delight had drained from it, he thought that he had embarrassed her even now.

‘Are you sure, Archie?' she asked nervously. ‘Because you don't know me very long, remember. A few days like that is not enough to know a person.'

‘That's a thing that soon rights itself,' Archie said oracularly.

‘And, besides, we'd have to wait a long while,' she added. ‘My people aren't very well off; I have two brothers younger than me, and I have to help them.'

‘And I have a long way to go before I get anywhere in the Civil Service,' he replied good-humouredly, ‘so it may be quite a while before I can do what I like, as well. But those are things that also right themselves, and they right themselves all the sooner if you do them with an object in mind.
I know my own character pretty well,' he added thoughtfully, ‘and I know it would be a help to me. And I'm not a man to change his mind.'

She still seemed to hesitate; for a second or two he had a strong impression that she was about to refuse him, but then she thought better of it. Her face cleared in the old way, and she gave her nervous laugh.

‘Very well, Archie,' she said. ‘If you really want me, you'll find me willing.'

‘I want you, Madge,' he replied gravely, and then he raised his hat and pushed his bicycle away while she stood outside her gate in the shadow of the trees and waved. I admired that gesture even as he described it. It was so like Archie, and I could see that such a plighting of his word would haunt him as no passionate love-making would ever do. It was magnificent, but it was not love. People should be jolted out of themselves at times like those, and when they are not so jolted it frequently means, as it did with Archie, that the experience is only deferred till a less propitious time.

However, he was too innocent to know anything of that. To him the whole fantastic business of walking out with a girl was miracle enough in itself, like being dumped down in the middle of some ancient complex civilization whose language and customs he was unfamiliar with. He might have introduced her to history, but she introduced him to operas and concerts, and in no time he was developing prejudices about music as though it was something that had fired him from boyhood, for Archie was by nature a gospel-maker. Even when I knew him, he shook his head over my weakness for Wagner. Bach was the man, and somehow Bach at once ceased to be a pleasure and became a responsibility. It was part of the process of what he called ‘knowing his own mind'.

On fine Sundays in autumn they took their lunch and walked over the mountains to Enniskerry, or cycled down the Boyne Valley to Drogheda. Madge was a girl of very sweet disposition, so that they rarely had a falling-out, and even at the best of times this must have been an event in Archie's life, for he had an irascible, quarrelsome, gospel-making streak. It was true that there were certain evenings and week-ends that she kept to herself to visit her old friends and an ailing aunt in Miltown, but these did not worry Archie, who believed that this was how a conscientious girl should be. As a man who knew his own mind, he liked to feel that the girl he was going to marry was the same.

Oh, of course it was too perfect! Of course, an older hand would have waited to see what price he was expected to pay for all those perfections, but Archie was an idealist, which meant that he thought Nature was in the job solely for his benefit. Then one day Nature gave him a rap on the knuckles just to show him that the boot was on the other foot.

In town he happened to run into one of the group of teachers he had met in Connemara during the holidays and invited her politely to join him in a cup of tea. Archie favoured one of those long mahogany teahouses in Grafton Street where daylight never enters; he was a creature of habit, and this was where he had eaten his first lunch in Dublin, and there he would continue to go till some minor cataclysm like marriage changed the current of his life.

‘I hear you're seeing a lot of Madge,' said the teacher gaily as if this were a guilty secret between herself and Archie.

‘Oh, yes,' said Archie as if it weren't. ‘And with God's help I expect to be doing the same for the rest of my life.'

‘So I heard,' she said joyously. ‘I'm delighted for Madge, of course. But I wonder whatever happened that other fellow she was engaged to?'

‘Why?' asked Archie, who knew well that she was only pecking at him and refused to let her see how sick he felt. ‘Was she engaged to another fellow?'

‘Ah, surely she must have told you that!' the teacher cried with mock consternation. ‘I hope I'm not saying anything wrong,' she added piously. ‘Maybe she wasn't engaged to him after all. He was a teacher, too, I believe – somewhere on the South Side. What was his name?'

‘I'll ask her and let you know,' replied Archie blandly. He was giving nothing away till he had had more time to think of it.

All the same he was in a very ugly temper. Archie was one of those people who believe in being candid with everybody, even at the risk of unpleasantness, which might be another reason that he had so few friends when I knew him. He might, for instance, hear from somebody called Mahony that another man called Devins had said he was inclined to be offensive in argument, which was a reasonable enough point of view, but Archie would feel it his duty to go straight to Devins and ask him to repeat the remark, which, of course, would leave Devins wondering who it was that had been trying to make mischief for him, so he would ask a third man whether Mahony was the tell-tale, and a fourth would repeat the
question to Mahony, till eventually, I declare to God, Archie's inquisition would have the whole office by the ears.

Archie, of course, had felt compelled to confess to Madge every sin of his past life, which, from the point of view of this narrative, was quite without importance, and he naturally assumed when Madge did not do the same that it could only be because she had nothing to confess. He realized now that this was a grave mistake since everyone has something to confess, particularly women.