Strumpet City (2 page)

He put aside his paper and held out his cup.

‘Don’t quite fill it,’ he requested.

She began to pour. Suddenly a thundering salvo shook the room. The windows rattled and the tableware danced. Mr. Bradshaw jumped and let his cup and saucer slip from his fingers. Mrs. Bradshaw, in her efforts to stifle a scream, continued to pour strong tea over the tablecloth for some seconds. The royal party were coming ashore. Mr. Bradshaw’s watch had not been fast. It was, in fact, three minutes slow.

About an hour later the royal cortège left Kingstown. Mr. and Mrs. Bradshaw, recovered from their upset, waved loyally from the upstairs window. Mary stood behind them, her heart beating with excitement. The procession moved into Crofton Road, turned into Monkstown and paused at Blackrock for yet another address of welcome. The King had been informed of Kingstown’s determination to supply small cottages for the labouring classes and gave the scheme his unqualified approval. The health and efficiency of the labourer depended to a great extent, he said, on a happy home life. He was much touched by their warm and generous welcome. Thousands lined the royal route. They waved flags and bantered good-humouredly with the police. It was the same all the way along Rock Road, Ailesbury Road and Donnybrook. At Morehampton Road, a series of Venetian masts had been erected on both sides of the broad central avenue which divided Herbert Park and the route leading from there to the central bandstand quivered under gay bunting. Slender flag-staves with suitable banners had been affixed to the ornamental light standards. There was a wealth of flowers and plants. A journalist, recording their Majesties’ arrival at the exhibition, observed that the people raised lusty cheers of loyal welcome. He noted something further, something which might be interpreted as a manifestation of Divine approval. Just as the Anthem was being played the clouds dispersed, the July sun blazed out, the watching thousands cheered afresh. There had been some doubt about the sky’s intentions. Now they smiled at one another in relief. ‘King’s weather,’ they remarked.

At the speech of welcome there was a little incident which did not escape the attention of the onlookers. His Majesty, having replied, called for his sword. Lord Aberdeen spoke
sotto voce
to the organising chairman, Mr. Murphy. He was then obliged in turn to speak
sotto voce
to His Majesty, who moved on to other business with characteristic composure. A few astute onlookers tumbled to it that a knighthood had been refused.

It was the second small cloud to trouble the minds of those who were responsible for the King’s content during his short stay. The man directly concerned was Sir Arthur Vicars, Ulster King-at-Arms and custodian of the jewelled Royal Order of St. Patrick. These had mysteriously disappeared from Dublin Castle only a few days before. They were valued at over £50,000. Worse still, they were the jewels worn on state visits by the reigning Monarch of England. The King would have to do without them. Mr. Birrell, the Chief Secretary, was openly of the opinion that the Chief Herald and Ulster King-at-Arms had stolen them himself. Social opinion was divided between those who endorsed his view and those who deplored his lack of restraint. Meanwhile the Treasury, in a practical frame of mind, offered £1,000 reward for information leading to the recovery. And the King, imperceptibly diminished in splendour, went, unbejewelled, to the Viceregal Lodge.

Rashers Tierney rose that morning about the same time as King Edward. First the dog barked and then a hand reached down and shook his shoulder. It was very dark in the basement. The form above him could have been Death, or a ghost, or the hangover figure from a nightmare. Rashers was lying on straw. It was no cleaner than it could be in the damp and dirt of the almost windowless cellar. Recognising the figure at last as that of Mrs. Bartley, he threw aside the nondescript rags which covered him. There was no need for any modest precautions. He was fully dressed.

‘I boiled you a can of water,’ Mrs. Bartley said, ‘you’ll want it for to make tea.’

Rashers gurgled to dislodge the sleep phlegm from his throat and spat on the floor.

‘The blessings of God and His Holy Mother on you for the kind thought,’ he said.

‘You’re welcome,’ Mrs. Bartley said. She looked around the hovel. It distressed her. She lived herself in the front parlour with her husband and five children. There were ten rooms in the house and ten families. Nobody regarded Rashers’ room as being in the house. It was under it. It cost him one shilling and threepence a week—when he could pay it.

‘Did you see me little flags,’ Rashers asked, stretching his hand behind his pillow and dragging out a board for Mrs. Bartley’s inspection. They were home-made favours with four ribbons apiece.

‘They’re gorgeous, Mr. Tierney,’ she said.

‘Red, white and blue,’ Rashers said, ‘the colours of loyalty.’

‘My husband doesn’t hold with England,’ Mrs. Bartley said.

‘That’s been catered for,’ Rashers explained, showing her a sample, ‘the green ribbon is for Ireland.’

‘It doesn’t match up, somehow.’

‘It never did, ma’am,’ Rashers said. ‘Isn’t that what all the bloody commotion is about for the last seven hundred years?’

‘Wet your tea before the water’s gone cold for you.’ Rashers reached behind his pillow and brought out a tin from which he took part of a loaf, a tin of condensed milk and a jampot. He took out a cold potato too, but put it back. The rest he left on the straw beside him.

‘I brought you some bread.’

‘I have some,’ Rashers said.

‘It’s as hard as the rock of Cashel,’ Mrs. Bartley pronounced, having felt it.

‘It’ll soften up when I dip it in the tea,’ Rashers explained. ‘I’ll keep yours for afterwards.’

Mrs. Bartley sighed and handed him the spoon. He put in the tea.

‘What’s it doing out or what?’ he asked conversationally as he drank. He meant the weather.

‘It’s dull. I wouldn’t say it was a bit promising.’

‘Let’s hope to God the rain keeps off,’ Rashers said. ‘They’re more given to buying favours and things when it isn’t raining.’

‘Are you taking the dog?’

‘And have him walked on?’ Rashers asked.

‘If you’re not I’ll give him a little something later on.’

‘You’re a jewel.’

‘So long as he doesn’t take the hand off me in the process.’

‘Is it Rusty?’ He called the dog to his side.

‘That’s Mrs. Bartley,’ he explained to the dog, ‘and if you don’t know her by now you bloody well ought to. She’s to come and go as she pleases.’ He patted the dog and looked around at the empty floor.

‘He thinks you have your eye on the furniture,’ Rashers added. Mrs. Bartley laughed aloud.

‘Is the husband working again?’ Rashers asked.

‘All last week, four days this week and a bit promised for next.’

‘Look at that now,’ Rashers approved, ‘isn’t he having the life of Reilly.’

Mrs. Bartley said the children might be calling for her so she would leave the spoon and the can and get them when she was bringing down the scraps for Rusty. She hoped God would give him good luck with his selling.

‘I’ll be rattling shilling against shilling when I get home,’ Rashers said, ‘and the first thing I’ll buy is a tin whistle.’

‘You never found the one you lost?’

‘Never,’ Rashers said, ‘neither sign nor light of it from that day to this.’

‘Bad luck to the hand that took it.’

‘May God wither it,’ Rashers said. He had lost his tin whistle after a race meeting nearly a year before.

‘It was the drink, God forgive me,’ Rashers confessed.

‘It’s a very occasional failing with you,’ Mrs. Bartley said indulgently.

‘Drink and the sun. After the few drinks I lay down in the sun and it overpowered me. When I woke up the whistle was gone.’

‘The children miss it most of all,’ Mrs. Bartley said, ‘they loved you to play for them.’

‘Rusty too. I used to play to the two of us and we were never lonely.’

‘The best music you ever had is the bit you make yourself. It’s a great consolation.’

‘For man and beast alike, ma’am,’ Rashers assented. Mrs. Bartley had a very proper understanding of the whole thing.

When Mrs. Bartley had gone he got up and began to pull on socks, thinking of the whistle he had lost. It had been given to him by Mrs. Molloy, the woman who had reared him. It had earned him coppers at football matches and race meetings. His ambition was to replace it when he had the money to spare. He looked down at his socks and for the moment he forgot about the tin whistle. Both socks had holes in the toes and heels. He thought about that and took them off again. Then he put on his boots. They felt hard and uncomfortable for the amount of walking he would have to do. He took off his boots again, put on the socks and then put on his boots once more. He stood up and stretched. When he yawned, the few rotten teeth seemed very long because the gums had shrunk back almost to the roots. He took his overcoat from among the rags on the bed, tied it about his middle with a piece of cord and took his board with the coloured favours. He put a bottle and the bread into a short sack which he secured so that it hung from his waist. He shut the door on the dog, which whined, went up the decaying stairs, past the pram in the hallway and down the steps into the street.

The children in Chandlers Court jeered after him, but Rashers was used to that and scarcely heard them. He had already mapped out his journey in his mind. He would go over the iron bridge, through Ringsend and out the Strand Road to Merrion Gates. There would be a crowd there and on the way he could root in the ashbins of the big houses facing the strand. There were always scraps to be found that way. He could use the side streets to contact the crowds at various points along the route. It would be a long walk. By the time he got back from the procession to the Viceregal Lodge he would have covered ten to fourteen miles. But if he sold all his favours he would earn ten shillings. Rashers kept his mind on that. He deviated only once from his planned route and that was to look for some minutes into the window of McNeill’s music shop. It was still closed, a dingy little shop, with one dusty window and a small entrance door which needed painting. In the window, among instruments of a more aristocratic kind, there was a board displaying tin whistles. It said:

‘Superior toned Italian Flageolets.
Price: One Shilling’

They were masterly looking instruments, and ought to be, Rashers decided, at such an outrageous price. He stared at them for some time. Then he caught sight of his own face and the reflection of his favours in the glass window. He turned away.

The morning air had a sulphur smell about it, a compound of mist from the river, smoke from the ships, slow-drifting yellow fumes from the gas works. It was like the look on Rashers’ face. Hungry, dirty and, because so many things conspired to kill him, tenacious. His beard straggled. His gait was uncertain. He dragged his fifty years in each step forward through the streets of his city. She had not denied him her unique weapons. Almost from birth she had shaped his mind to regard life as a trivial moment which had slipped by mistake through the sieve of eternity, a scrap of absurdity which would glow for a little while before it was snatched back into eternity again. From her air, in common with numberless others about him, he had drawn the deep and unshakeable belief that the Son of God loved him and had suffered on earth for him and the hope that he would dwell with Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother in Heaven. His city had never offered him anything else. Except her ashbins.

At the sweetshop Mary found her note had been collected and that one from Fitz had been left in its place.

‘He called last night,’ Mrs. Burns said, handing it to her.

‘At what time?’

‘It must have been about nine.’

Mary tried to remember what she had been doing at nine o’clock the previous evening. She remembered that she had been talking to Miss Gilchrist over a cup of cocoa. She remembered the scrubbed surface of the table, the sad, evening light outside, Miss Gilchrist’s talk of Fenians.

‘He was on his bicycle,’ Mrs. Burns volunteered.

‘Had he been swimming?’

‘He must have been. He had his togs wrapped about the handlebars.’

‘He was probably at Seapoint. Thank you, Mrs. Burns,’ she said, and went out into the street. She was suddenly shy of Mrs. Burns. The note read:

Dear Mary

I’m going on at twelve tonight, finishing at twelve tomorrow. I’m hoping you will be free. You remember you said you might. I’ll be at the usual place from two o’clock. Even if it is much longer than that before you are free don’t feel it would be too late. I’ll wait.

What do you think of the decorations?

Fitz

PS. Give my regards to King Ed.

She folded the note and saw that it was almost half past one by the town hall clock. Fitz would be waiting at the Liffey Wall, where Butt Bridge let the heavy traffic cross from the South Wall into Beresford Place. The sun was now full and warm in the cloudless July sky, so she travelled on the top section of the tram. It was open to the heat and the light. There was hardly anybody else. The trolley sang and rattled in front of her, bucking and sparking when the wires above it crossed at junctions, its great spring stretching and contracting like a concertina. She would be late, but Fitz would not mind. It was over a year now since their first meeting. It had happened at Seapoint too. She had gone down to the strand, passing close to a young man who was sitting on the rocks and who smiled at her. She ignored him. Down at the water’s edge she removed her shoes and began to paddle, holding her skirts away from the water but as little as possible because of the young man. He was watching her. Although there was no one else on the beach the situation did not trouble her. It had been a nice smile. She felt quite sure there was nothing to worry about and that the young man meant nothing more dangerous than gentlemanly admiration. It was nice to be admired from a respectful distance, to feel the water cool about her ankles and look down through it at the wrinkled sand. She paddled for half an hour and was on her way across the sand to fold a spot where she could sit and put on her shoes again when she walked on the shell. It cut deeply into the sole of her foot and when she felt the pain and saw the gush of red blood she cried out and stumbled. Tears clouded her eyes so that when eventually the young man bent over her she felt his presence for quite a while before she could see him clearly.