My Oedipus Complex (47 page)

‘What hurry is on you?' he asked irritably.

I mumbled something about it's getting late.

‘Nonsense!' he said. ‘You're not a boy any longer.'

Was he just showing off his strength of will or hoping to put off the evil hour when he would go slinking down the quays again?

‘Ah, they'll be expecting me,' I said, and then, as I used to do when we were younger, I turned to the bookcase. ‘I see you have a lot of Maupassant at last,' I said.

‘I bought them last time I was in Paris,' he said, standing beside me and looking at the books as though he were seeing them for the first time.

‘A death-bed repentance?' I asked lightly, but he ignored me.

‘I met another great admirer of his there,' he said sourly. ‘A lady you should meet some time.'

‘I'd love to if I ever get there,' I said.

‘Her address is the Rue de Grenelle,' he said, and then with a wild burst of mockery, ‘the left-hand pavement.'

At last his guard was down, and it was Maupassant's name that had done it. And still I couldn't say anything. An angry flush mounted his pale dark face and made it sinister in its violence.

‘I suppose you didn't know I indulged in that hideous vice?' he snarled.

‘I heard something,' I said. ‘I'm sorry, Terry.'

The angry flush died out of his face and the old brooding look came back.

‘A funny thing about those books,' he said. ‘This woman I was speaking about, I thought she was bringing me to a hotel. I suppose I was a bit muddled with drink, but after dark one of these places is much like another. “This isn't a hotel,” I said when we got upstairs. “No,” she said, “it's my room.” '

As he told it, I could see that he was living it all over again, something he could tell nobody but myself.

‘There was a screen in the corner. I suppose it's the result of reading too much romantic fiction, but I thought there might be somebody hidden behind it. There was. You'd never guess what?'

‘No.'

‘A baby,' he said, his eyes boring through me. ‘A child of maybe eighteen
months. I wouldn't know. While I was looking, she changed him. He didn't wake.'

‘What was it?' I asked, searching for the message that he obviously thought the incident contained. ‘A dodge?'

‘No,' he said almost grudgingly. ‘A country girl in trouble, trying to support her child, that's all. We went to bed and she fell asleep. I couldn't. It's many years now since I've been able to sleep like that. So I put on the light and began to read one of the books that I carried round in my pocket. The light woke her and she wanted to see what I had. “Oh, Maupassant,” she said. “He's a great writer.” “Is he?” I said. I thought she might be repeating something she'd picked up from one of her customers. She wasn't. She began to talk about
Boule de Suif
. It reminded me of the arguments we used to have in our young days.' Suddenly he gave me a curious boyish smile. ‘You remember, when we used to walk up the river together.'

‘Oh, I remember,' I said with a sigh.

‘We were terrible young idiots, the pair of us,' he said sadly. ‘Then she began to talk about
The Tellier Household
. I said it had poetry. “Oh, if it's poetry you want, you don't go to Maupassant. You go to Vigny, you go to Musset, but Maupassant is life, and life isn't poetry. It's only when you see what life can do to you that you realize what a great writer Maupassant is.”…Wasn't that an extraordinary thing to happen?' he asked fiercely, and again the angry colour mounted his cheeks.

‘Extraordinary,' I said, wondering if Terry himself knew how extraordinary it was. But it was exactly as if he were reading the thoughts as they crossed my mind.

‘A prostitute from some French village, a drunken old waster from an Irish provincial town, lying awake in the dawn in Paris, discussing Maupassant. And the baby, of course. Maupassant would have made a lot of the baby.'

‘I declare to God, I think if I'd been in your shoes, I'd have brought them back with me,' I said. I knew when I said it that I was talking nonsense, but it was a sort of release for all the bitterness inside me.

‘What?' he asked, mocking me. ‘A prostitute and her baby? My dear Mr Magner, you're becoming positively romantic in your old age.'

‘A man like you should have a wife and children,' I said.

‘Ah, but that's a different story,' he said malevolently. ‘Maupassant would never have ended a story like that.'

And he looked at me almost triumphantly with those mad, dark eyes. I knew how Maupassant would have ended that story all right. Maupassant, as the girl said, was life, and life was pretty nearly through with Terry Coughlan.

‘There!' said the sergeant's wife. ‘You would hurry me.'

‘I always like being in time for a train,' replied the sergeant, with the equability of one who has many times before explained the guiding principle of his existence.

‘I'd have had heaps of time to buy the hat,' added his wife.

The sergeant sighed and opened his evening paper. His wife looked out on the dark platform, pitted with pale lights under which faces and faces passed, lit up and dimmed again. A uniformed lad strode up and down with a tray of periodicals and chocolates. Farther up the platform a drunken man was being seen off by his friends.

‘I'm very fond of Michael O'Leary,' he shouted. ‘He is the most sincere man I know.'

‘I have no life,' sighed the sergeant's wife. ‘No life at all. There isn't a soul to speak to; nothing to look at all day but bogs and mountains and rain – always rain! And the people! Well, we've had a fine sample of them, haven't we?'

The sergeant continued to read.

‘Just for the few days it's been like heaven. Such interesting people! Oh, I thought Mr Boyle had a glorious face! And his voice – it went through me.'

The sergeant lowered his paper, took off his peaked cap, laid it on the seat beside him, and lit his pipe. He lit it in the old-fashioned way, ceremoniously, his eyes blinking pleasurably like a sleepy cat's in the match-flare. His wife scrutinized each face that passed and it was plain that for her life meant faces and people and things and nothing more.

‘Oh, dear!' she said again. ‘I simply have no existence. I was educated in
a convent and play the piano; my father was a literary man, and yet I am compelled to associate with the lowest types of humanity. If it was even a decent town, but a village!'

‘Ah,' said the sergeant, gapping his reply with anxious puffs, ‘maybe with God's help we'll get a shift one of these days.' But he said it without conviction, and it was also plain that he was well-pleased with himself, with the prospect of returning home with his pipe and his paper.

‘Here are Magner and the others,' said his wife as four other policemen passed the barrier. ‘I hope they'll have sense enough to let us alone.… How do you do? How do you do? Had a nice time, boys?' she called with sudden animation, and her pale, sullen face became warm and vivacious. The policemen smiled and touched their caps but did not halt.

‘They might have stopped to say good evening,' she added sharply, and her face sank into its old expression of boredom and dissatisfaction. ‘I don't think I'll ask Delancey to tea again. The others make an attempt but, really, Delancey is hopeless. When I smile and say: “Guard Delancey, wouldn't you like to use the butter-knife?” he just scowls at me from under his shaggy brows and says without a moment's hesitation: “I would not.” '

‘Ah, Delancey is a poor slob,' the sergeant said affectionately.

‘Oh, yes, but that's not enough, Jonathan. Slob or no slob, he should make an attempt. He's a young man; he should have a dinner jacket at least. What sort of wife will he get if he won't even wear a dinner jacket?'

‘He's easy, I'd say. He's after a farm in Waterford.'

‘Oh, a farm! A farm! The wife is only an incidental, I suppose?'

‘Well, now, from all I hear she's a damn nice little incidental.'

‘Yes, I suppose many a nice little incidental came from a farm,' answered his wife, raising her pale brows. But the irony was lost on him.

‘Indeed yes, indeed yes,' he said fervently.

‘And here,' she added in biting tones, ‘come our charming neighbours.'

Into the pale lamplight stepped a group of peasants. Not such as one sees near a capital but in the mountains and along the coasts. Gnarled, wild, with turbulent faces, their ill-cut clothes full of character, the women in pale brown shawls, the men wearing black sombreros and carrying big sticks, they swept in, ill at ease, laughing and shouting defiantly. And so much part of their natural environment were they that for a moment they seemed to create about themselves rocks and bushes, tarns, turf-ricks, and sea.

With a prim smile the sergeant's wife bowed to them through the open window.

‘How do you do? How do you do?' she called. ‘Had a nice time?'

At the same moment the train gave a jolt and there was a rush in which the excited peasants were carried away. Some minutes passed; the influx of passengers almost ceased, and a porter began to slam the doors. The drunken man's voice rose in a cry of exultation.

‘You can't possibly beat O'Leary,' he declared. ‘I'd lay down my life for Michael O'Leary.'

Then, just as the train was about to start, a young woman in a brown shawl rushed through the barrier. The shawl, which came low enough to hide her eyes, she held firmly across her mouth, leaving visible only a long thin nose with a hint of pale flesh at either side. Beneath the shawl she was carrying a large parcel.

She looked hastily around; a porter shouted to her and pushed her towards the nearest compartment, which happened to be that occupied by the sergeant and his wife. He had actually seized the handle of the door when the sergeant's wife sat up and screamed.

‘Quick! Quick!' she cried. ‘Look who it is! She's coming in. Jonathan! Jonathan!'

The sergeant rose with a look of alarm on his broad red face. The porter threw open the door, with his free hand grasping the woman's elbow. But when she laid eyes on the sergeant's startled face she stepped back, tore herself free, and ran crazily up the platform. The engine shrieked; the porter slammed the door with a curse; somewhere another door opened and shut, and the row of watchers, frozen into effigies of farewell, now dark now bright, began to glide gently past the window, and the stale, smoky air was charged with the breath of open fields.

The four policemen spread themselves out in a separate compartment and lit cigarettes.

‘Poor old Delancey!' Magner said with his reckless laugh. ‘He's cracked on her all right.'

‘Cracked on her,' agreed Fox. ‘Did ye see the eye he gave her?'

Delancey smiled sheepishly. He was a tall, handsome, black-haired young man with the thick eyebrows described by the sergeant's wife. He was new to the force and suffered from a mixture of natural gentleness and country awkwardness.

‘I am,' he said in his husky voice. ‘The devil admire me, I never hated anyone yet, but I think I hate the living sight of her.'

‘Oh now, oh now!' protested Magner.

‘I do. I think the Almighty God must have put that one into the world with the one main object of persecuting me.'

‘Well indeed,' said Foley, ‘ 'tis a mystery to me how the sergeant puts up with her. If any woman up and called me by an outlandish name like Jonathan when everyone knew my name was plain John I'd do fourteen days for her – by God, I would, and a calendar month.'

The four men were now launched on a favourite topic that held them for more than a hour. None of them liked the sergeant's wife and all had stories to tell against her. From these there emerged the fact that she was an incurable scandalmonger and mischiefmaker who couldn't keep quiet about her own business, much less about that of her neighbours. And while they talked the train dragged across a dark plain, the heart of Ireland, and in the moonless night tiny cottage-windows blew past like sparks from a fire, and a pale simulacrum of the lighted carriages leaped and frolicked over hedges and fields. Magner shut the window and the compartment began to fill with smoke.

‘She'll never rest till she's out of Farranchreesht,' he said.

‘That she mightn't!' groaned Delancey.

‘How would you like the city yourself, Dan?' asked Magner.

‘Man dear,' exclaimed Delancey with sudden brightness, ‘I'd like it fine. There's great life in a city.'

‘You're welcome to it,' said Foley, folding his hands across his paunch.

‘Why so? What's wrong with it?'

‘I'm better off where I am.'

‘But the life!'

‘Life be damned! What sort of life is it when you're always under someone's eye? Look at the poor devils in court.'

‘True enough, true enough,' agreed Fox.

‘Ah, yes, yes,' said Delancey, ‘but the adventures they have!'

‘What adventures?'

‘There was a sergeant in court only yesterday telling me one thing that happened himself. 'Twas an old maid without a soul in the world that died in an old loft on the quays. The sergeant put a new man on duty outside the door while he went back to report, and all he had to do was kick the door and frighten off the rats.'

‘That's enough, that's enough!' cried Foley.

‘Yes, yes, but listen now, listen can't you?' cried Delancey. ‘He was there ten minutes with a bit of candle when the door at the foot of the stairs began to open. “Who's there?” says he, getting a bit nervous. “Who's there I say?” No answer, and still the door kept opening. Then he gave a laugh. What was it only an old cat? “Puss, puss,” says he, “come on up, puss.” Then he gave another look and the hair stood up on his head. There was another bloody cat coming in. “Get out!” says he to scare them, and then another cat came in and then another, and in his fright he dropped the candle. The cats began to hiss and bawl and that robbed him of the last stitch of sense. He made down the stairs, and if he did he trod on a cat, and went down head over heels, and when he tried to grip something 'twas a cat he gripped, and he felt the claws tearing his face. He was out for three weeks after.'