My Oedipus Complex (43 page)

He could have done with her what he would have done with someone in the office and asked her what she meant, but this did not seem sufficient punishment to him. Though he didn't recognize it, Archie's pride was deeply hurt. He regarded Madge's silence as equivalent to an insult, and in the matter of insults he felt it was his duty to give as good as he got. So, instead of having it out with her as another man might have done, he proceeded to make her life a misery. He continued to walk out with her as though nothing had happened, and then brought the conversation gently round to various domestic disasters which had or had not occurred in his own experience and all of which had been caused solely by someone's deceit. This was intended to scare the wits out of Madge, as no doubt it did. Then he called up a friend of his in the Department of Education and asked him out for a drink.

‘The Hale girl?' his friend said thoughtfully. ‘Isn't she engaged to that assistant in St Joseph's? Wheeler, a chap with a lame leg? I think I heard that. Why? You're not keen on her yourself by any chance?'

‘Ah, you know me,' Archie replied with a fat smile.

‘Why then, indeed, I do not,' said his friend. ‘But if you mean business you'd want to hurry up. Now you mention it, they were only supposed to be waiting till he got a headship somewhere. He's a nice fellow, I believe.'

‘So I'm told,' said Archie, and went away with a smile on his lips and murder in his heart. Those forthright men of the world are the very devil once they get a bee in their bonnets. Othello had nothing on a Civil Servant of twelve years' standing and a blameless reputation. So he still continued to see Madge, though now his method of tormenting her was to press her about those odd evenings she was supposed to spend with her aunt or those old friends she spoke of. He realized that some of those evenings were probably really spent as innocently as she described them, since she showed neither embarrassment nor distress at his probing and gibing. It
was the others that caused her to wince, and those were the ones he concentrated on.

‘I could meet you when you came out, you know,' he said in a benign tone that almost glowed.

‘But I don't know when I'll be out, Archie,' she replied, blushing and stammering.

‘Ah, well, even if you didn't get out until half-past ten – and that would be late for a lady her age – it would still give us time for a little walk. That's if the night was fine, of course. It's all very well, doing your duty by old friends, but you don't want to deny yourself every little pleasure.'

‘I couldn't promise anything, Archie, really I couldn't,' she said almost angrily, and Archie smiled to himself, the smug smile of the old inquisitor whose helpless victim has begun to give himself away.

The road where Madge lived was one of those broad Victorian roads you find scattered all over the hills at the south side of Dublin, with trees along the pavement and deep gardens leading to pairs of merchants' houses, semi-detached and solidly built, with tall basements and high flights of steps. Next night, Archie was waiting at the corner of a side-street in the shadow, feeling like a detective as he watched her house. He had been there only about ten minutes when she came out and tripped down the steps. When she emerged from the garden, she turned right up the hill, and Archie followed, guided more by the distinctive clack of her heels than by the glimpses he caught of her passing swiftly under a street lamp.

She reached the bus stop at the top of the road, and a man came up and spoke to her. He was a youngish man in a bright tweed coat, hatless and thin, dragging a lame leg. He took her arm, and they went off together in the direction of the Dodder bank. As they did, Archie heard her happy, eager, foolish laugh, and it sounded exactly as though she were laughing at him.

He was beside himself with misery. He had got what he had been seeking, which was full confirmation of the woman's guilt, and now he had no idea what to do with it. To follow them and have it out on the river bank in the darkness was one possibility, but he realized that Wheeler – if this was Wheeler – probably knew as little of him as he had known of Wheeler, and that it would result only in general confusion. No, it was that abominable woman he would have to have it out with. He returned slowly to his post, turned into a public-house just round the corner, and
sat swallowing whiskey in silence until another customer unwittingly touched on one of his pet political taboos. Then he sprang to his feet, and, though no one had invited his opinion, he thundered for several minutes against people with slave minds, and stalked out with a virtuous feeling that his wrath had been entirely disinterested.

This time he had to wait for over half an hour in the damp and cold, and this did not improve his temper. Then he heard her footsteps, and guessed that the young man had left her at the same spot where they had met. It could, of course, have been the most innocent thing in the world, intended merely to deceive inquisitive people in her lodging house, but to Archie it seemed all guile and treachery. He crossed the road and stood under a tree beside the gate, so well concealed that she failed altogether to see him till he stepped out to meet her. Then she started back.

‘Who's that?' she asked in a startled whisper, and then, after a look, added with what sounded like joy and was probably merely relief: ‘Oh, Archie, it's you!' Then, as he stood there glowering at her, her tone changed again and he could detect the consternation as she asked:

‘What are you doing here, Archie?'

‘Waiting,' Archie replied in a voice as hollow as his heart felt.

‘Waiting? But for what, Archie?'

‘An explanation.'

‘Oh, Archie!' she exclaimed with childish petulance. ‘Don't talk to me that way!'

‘And what way would you like me to talk to you?' he retorted, letting fly with his anger. ‘I suppose you're going to tell me now you were at your aunt's?'

‘No, Archie,' she replied meekly. ‘I wasn't. I was out with a friend.'

‘A friend?' repeated Archie.

‘Not a friend exactly either, Archie,' she added in distress.

‘Not exactly,' Archie repeated with grim satisfaction. ‘With your fiancé, in fact?'

‘That's true, Archie,' she admitted. ‘I don't deny that. You must let me explain.'

‘The time for explanations is past,' Archie thundered magnificently, though the moment before he had been demanding one. ‘The time for explanations was three months ago. For three months and more, your whole life has been a living lie.'

This was a phrase Archie had thought up, entirely without assistance, drinking whiskey in the pub. He may have failed to notice that it was not entirely original. It was intended to draw blood, and it did.

‘I wish you wouldn't say things like that, Archie,' Madge said in an unsteady voice. ‘I know I didn't tell you the whole truth, but I wasn't trying to deceive you.'

‘No, of course you weren't trying,' said Archie. ‘You don't need to try. What you ought to try some time is to tell the truth.'

‘But I am telling the truth,' she said indignantly. ‘I'm not a liar, Archie, and I won't have you saying it. I couldn't help getting engaged to Pat. He asked me, and I couldn't refuse him.'

‘You couldn't refuse him?'

‘No. I told you you should let me explain. It happened before, and I won't have it happen again.'

‘What happened?'

‘Oh, it's a long story, Archie. I once refused a boy at home in our own place and – he died.'

‘He died?' Archie said incredulously.

‘Well, he committed suicide. It was an awful thing to happen, but it wasn't my fault. I was young and silly, and I didn't know how dangerous it was. I thought it was just all a game, and I led him on and made fun of him. How could I know the way a boy would feel about things like that?'

‘Hah!' Archie grunted uncertainly, feeling that as usual she had thought too quickly for him, and that all his beautiful anger accumulated over weeks would be wasted on some pointless argument. ‘And I suppose you felt you couldn't refuse me either?'

‘Well, as a matter of fact, Archie,' she said apologetically, ‘that was the way I felt.'

‘Good God!' exploded Archie.

‘It's true, Archie,' she said in a rush. ‘It wasn't until weeks after that I got to like you really, the way I do now. I was hoping all that time we were together that you didn't like me that way at all, and it came as a terrible blow to me, Archie. Because, as you see, I was sort of engaged already, and it's not a situation you'd like to be in yourself, being engaged to two girls at the one time.'

‘And I suppose you thought
I
'd commit suicide?' Archie asked incredulously.

‘But I didn't know, Archie. It wasn't until afterwards that I really got to know you.'

‘You didn't know!' he said, choking with anger at the suggestion that he was a man of such weak and commonplace stuff. ‘You didn't
know!
Good God, the vanity and madness of it! And all this time you couldn't tell me about the fellow you say committed suicide on account of you.'

‘But how could I, Archie?' she asked despairingly. ‘It's not the sort a thing a girl likes to think of, much less to talk about.'

‘No,' he said, breathing deeply, ‘and so you'll go through life, tricking and deceiving every honourable man that comes your way – all out of pure kindness of heart. That be damned for a yarn!'

‘It's not a yarn, Archie,' she cried hotly. ‘It's true, and it never happened with anyone, only Pat and you, and one young fellow at home, but the last I heard of him he was walking out with another girl, and I dare say he's over it by now. And Pat would have got over it the same if only you'd had patience.'

The picture of yet a third man engaged to his own fiancée was really too much for Archie, and he knew that he could never stand up to this little liar in argument.

‘Madge,' he said broodingly, ‘I do not like to insult any woman to her face, least of all a woman I once respected, but I do not believe you. I can't believe anything you say. You have behaved to me in a deceitful and dishonourable manner, and I can't trust you any longer.'

Then he turned on his heel and walked heavily away, remembering how on this very spot, a few months before, he had turned away with his heart full of hope, and he realized that everything people said about women was true down to the last bitter gibe, and that never again would he trust one of them.

‘That was the end of my attempts at getting married,' he finished grimly. ‘Of course, she wrote and gave me the names of two witnesses I could refer to if I didn't believe her, but I couldn't even be bothered replying.'

‘Archie,' I asked in consternation, ‘you don't mean that you really dropped her?'

‘Dropped her?' he repeated, beginning to scowl. ‘I never spoke to the woman again, only to raise my hat to her whenever I met her on the street. I don't even know what happened to her after, whether she married or not. I have some pride.'

‘But, Archie,' I said despairingly, ‘suppose she was simply telling the truth?'

‘And suppose she was?' he asked in a murderous tone.

Then I began to laugh. I couldn't help it, though I saw it was making him mad. It was raining outside on the canal bank, and I wasn't laughing at Archie so much as at myself. Because, for the first time, I found myself falling in love with a woman from the mere description of her, as they do in the old romances, and it was an extraordinary feeling, as though there existed somewhere some pure essence of womanhood that one could savour outside the body.

‘But damn it, Archie,' I cried, ‘you said yourself she was a serious girl. All you're telling me now is that she was a sweet one as well. It must have been hell for her, being engaged to two men in the same town and trying to keep both of them happy till the other fellow got tired of her and left her free to marry you.'

‘Or free for a third man to come along and put her in the same position again,' said Archie with a sneer.

I must say I had not expected that one, and for a moment it stopped me dead. But there is no stopping a man who is in love with a shadow as I was then, and I was determined on finding justification for myself.

‘But after all, Archie,' I said, ‘isn't that precisely why you marry a woman like that? Can you imagine marrying one of them if the danger wasn't there? Come, Archie, don't you see that the whole business of the suicide is irrelevant? Every nice girl behaves exactly as though she had a real suicide in her past. That's what makes her a nice girl. It's not easy to defend it rationally, but that's the way it is. Archie, I think you made a fool of yourself.'

‘It's not possible to defend it rationally or any other way,' Archie said with finality. ‘A woman like that is a woman without character. You might as well stick your head in a gas-oven and be done with it as marry a girl like that.'

And from that evening on, Archie dropped me. He even told his friends that I had no moral sense and would be bound to end up bad. Perhaps he was right, perhaps I shall end up as badly as he believed; but, on the other hand, perhaps I was only saying to him all the things he had been saying to himself for years in the bad hours coming on to morning, and he only
wanted reassurance from me, not his own sentence on himself pronounced by another man's lips. But, as I say, I was very young and didn't understand. Nowadays I should sympathize and congratulate him on his narrow escape, and leave it to him to proclaim what an imbecile he was.

Ned McCarthy, the teacher in a village called Abbeyduff, was wakened one morning by his sister-in-law. She was standing over him with a cynical smile and saying in a harsh voice:

‘Wake up! 'Tis started.'