Strumpet City (25 page)

‘If I was you,’ Hennessy advised, ‘I’d make up another ballad. About Larkin going to gaol.’

‘Do you think they’d like it?’

‘They’ve gone so mad about Larkin now,’ Hennessy assured him, ‘they’d get down on their knees to lick it off the streets. That’s what I wanted to suggest to you.’

‘You’re a man of unusual sagacity,’ Rashers told him, admiringly. He began to finger the tin whistle again. Already his mind was at work. He was thinking hard. Hennessy, catching sight of Mulhall and Pat Bannister, rose and went down the street to join them.

Mary arranged a meal of bread and stew on the table while Fitz left the collection box on the dresser and went into the kitchenette to wash. When he was working she could manage, with difficulty, to provide three meals a day. They had tea and bread for breakfast and supper. The main meal followed a pattern she had picked up from the wiser among the older women—meat on Sundays, cold scraps on Monday, stew on Tuesday. On Wednesdays and Fridays she got herrings cheap. She usually managed to have bread and potatoes. Several times in their few years of marriage they had gone to bed hungry. It took a long time to recover from a strike, to pay off grocers, to clear themselves with moneylenders. She herself was always the first to go short and the arrival of the children made it harder. She watched them as carefully as she could. Whatever else suffered she had tried to give them fresh milk all the time, but once or twice she had found it necessary to water down the condensed milk for them, despite the advice of the doctor in the hospital. Advice was one thing—finding money another. When Fitz returned and sat down she took a little of the food herself and said to him: ‘I had a visitor today.’

‘Not Mrs. Hennessy again?’

Every other day Mrs. Hennessy came to borrow something—a sprinkle of salt, a few spoons of tea or sugar.

‘You’ll never guess,’ she challenged.

It was seldom she had news. She smiled, waiting for him to question her.

He thought and then said: ‘His Excellency, the Governor General.’

‘You’re not even trying.’

Because she wanted him to guess he made an effort, but after some further thought he said: ‘I give up.’

‘Father O’Connor.’

The news was unexpected. With satisfaction she saw him lay down his knife and fork. Then he said, critically, ‘It’s taken him long enough to find his way.’ He had never forgotten Father O’Connor’s advice to Keever.

‘He came about Miss Gilchrist. She’s in the workhouse.’

‘So that’s where they put her.’ He said it grimly. They had often wondered about her.

‘How long is she there?’

‘Over two years, he tells me. He wants me to visit her. I was thinking of going on Sunday.’

‘Of course,’ he said. ‘I’ll mind the youngsters.’

‘You won’t have a meeting or anything?’

‘I’ll mind them whether I have or not,’ he promised.

‘She always liked a pinch of snuff,’ Mary remembered, ‘I’ll bring her some.’

He nodded. She wondered what he had been doing all day. Walking the main streets with a box in his hand, sticking it under people’s noses, being told to move on by policemen, who were always ready to make trouble. She found it hard to understand what attracted him in the speechmaking and the upheavals or to see the sense in strikes which always lasted too long and brought too little in the end. It seemed more sensible to take the steady work when it was going and leave the quarrels to others. There were children now to suffer. But she said nothing of that to him either. He knew his own mind and she trusted him to do what was best. It was not her business. She took her empty plate to the dresser and as she shifted the collection box she noticed its weight.

‘You did well today,’ she remarked.

‘They sentenced him to twelve months this morning,’ he said. ‘The whole city is on our side since the news came out—even the silk hats. We’re having a protest march tonight.’

She heard his plate being pushed aside and went over to take it.

‘Are you going?’

‘I couldn’t miss it.’

That meant he would go on straight to the job. He was on night work.

‘I’ll make up your supper for you before I wash the dishes,’ she said, accepting his decision without comment.

He went over to sit at the window, which she had opened at the bottom. On summer evenings they often sat there together, watching the skies growing darker, listening to the life of the street. It was not possible any more to go walking on the strand or swimming together, because of the children. They had tried to get a pram, but there was always something else to be bought first. She tried not to mind. In a way it brought them closer together. While she was making up his supper parcel he said:

‘It was very quiet when I came in. What happened to everybody?’

‘Two policemen were taking a drunken sailor down to his ship. The whole street went off to gape.’

‘I’m surprised Hennessy wasn’t with them.’

‘He was late for it,’ she said, laughing.

He rose again and went into the bedroom, opening the door quietly so as not to waken the children. Almost immediately the room became lonely. He had left his cap beside the collection box and she touched it gently for no conscious reason. She hoped Mulhall was going with him to the protest march. Mulhall was huge and capable. If they stayed together Fitz would be safe. She heard him entering again and found she was holding his cap. He was amused.

‘Are you going out?’ he asked.

‘The dresser is no place for it,’ she said, pretending annoyance. He took it from her and pushed it into his pocket.

‘Nor your pocket,’ she added. He took it out again and placed it solemnly on her head.

‘Maybe you’d like to wear it yourself.’ He kissed her lightly and drew her over to the window.

‘I’m sorry to be going out tonight,’ he said. His voice was tender.

‘Will Mulhall be with you?’

‘He’s to call across for me.’

She said she didn’t mind.

They had half an hour together before Mulhall knocked at the door. Pat was with him. They had slogans painted on sheets of cardboard which they had mounted on sticks. Mulhall’s read: ‘Release Larkin’. Pat’s was general. It said: ‘Arise, Ye Slaves’.

‘What do you think of it?’ he asked, holding it up for inspection.

‘It has a Salvation Army smack about it,’ Fitz criticised.

‘We’d better hurry,’ Mulhall advised.

‘Onward Christian soldiers,’ Pat said.

‘I’ll be after you,’ Fitz promised.

They left. Mary gave him his supper parcel and pressed her cheek against his.

‘Watch yourself,’ she said, earnestly, ‘don’t go where there might be trouble.’

She looked down at the three of them from the window. They stepped out strongly together and were joined on their way by another neighbour. The boards with their painted slogans lent them an air of unfamiliarity. She felt a distance growing between her and them that was greater than the street’s. She stood, the loneliness creeping out from every part of the room. In the flat above a door banged, sending a tremor through the floorboards. She heard the baby beginning to cry and went in to it.

‘Won’t do you a bit of harm,’ Yearling assured him. He left his ’cello lying on one side, placing the bow carefully along it.

‘Well, then . . . but very little.’

It would be his third glass of port, an unprecedented gluttony for Father O’Connor. But Yearling was persuasive and, besides, the evening had been pleasant. Rising from the piano, he went over to the window while Yearling found the bottle of port. The windows looked out on a long, well-kept garden.

“I’ll have whiskey myself,’ he heard Yearling say, from somewhere behind him. ‘It goes better with the last of the day.’ Then he heard him say, ‘Do, please sit down.’

‘I mustn’t delay too long,’ Father O’Connor answered. He sat down, just the same. The piano was an excellent instrument. It had been such a pleasure to play on it. There was none in St. Brigid’s and he had not gone near the harmonium there since his difference with Father Giffley. Yearling, too, had acquitted himself admirably.

‘You play very well,’ he said, still looking at the garden. Shadows lay across it and the night dew was already settling. If he walked down it the grass would keep the imprint of his feet. A good dinner, an hour’s music, a little wine. He was far away now from Father Giffley’s hostility, Father O’Sullivan’s frayed soutanes and common-or-garden mind, from the straw on the floor and the candles in bottles. Here summer came to shed grace and beauty where houses and gardens received her condescendingly, as they would a favoured entertainer. The windows wore tasselled shades, the doors had gay canvas covers to protect their paintwork; ladies with parasols welcomed her as they strolled along the front. Father O’Connor, made daring by the wine, remembered their earlier discussion and put his mood into a question.

‘I omitted to ask what was
your
answer to poverty?’ He heard the clink of a glass as Yearling moved something and almost immediately his good-natured laugh.

‘Man will conquer poverty just as he will conquer the problems of disease and war—by his own determination and intelligence.’

‘Without Christianity?’

‘I don’t know what you mean by Christianity,’ Yearling said. ‘There are too many brands of it.’

‘Without God, shall I say.’

‘The spirit which informs mankind may be of God—I think it probably is; but what God I cannot say.’ Yearling handed him his glass of port and sat opposite to him. ‘Can you?’ he added.

‘Without any shadow of doubt.’

‘It doesn’t seem to make you any happier.’

‘Because I am not happy about what I see,’ Father O’Connor confessed suddenly.

He had not meant to say it. The sentiment surprised himself. It was the port, perhaps; it was the shadowed garden and its gathering in to itself all the sadness of the fading evening; it was the music, the Bach Arioso Yearling had played so tenderly on his ’cello, and the profound deliberation of the accompaniment which had sounded so well on the excellent piano.

‘You have a hard life,’ Yearling said, with uncharacteristic gentleness.

‘At this moment an old lady who is dying is unhappy because she does not know how she is to be buried. Tomorrow, thank God, I’ll be able to set her mind at rest.’

‘That, at least, is a reason for happiness.’

‘She is only one. What of the others?’

Yearling shrugged at that and said: ‘I don’t care a damn who buries me.’

‘You were never so destitute that the only piece of property you ever owned was your poor body.’

‘If I died,’ Yearling said, ‘I’d be going where the needs of the body didn’t matter any more. Certainly I’d rather not know who was going to bury me than wonder how I was going to live.’

‘There are so many like that too.’

‘And you feel sorry for them?’

‘Don’t you?’

Yearling’s moment of gentleness had passed.

‘Every time I think about them,’ he said, ‘which on average is about once every two years.’

‘You thought about them today.’

‘In times of upheaval. They may yet come out of their hovels in search of a better living—all together, a visitation from the locusts.’

‘After Larkin, perhaps?’

‘Very likely, if today’s sentence is indicative of the enlightened medicine we can expect the law to prescribe.’

‘I’ve been thinking a little about that since you spoke to me.’

Yearling was pleased.

‘So. You see the danger—I mean the social danger, not the spiritual.’

‘I walked past Mr. Bradshaw’s houses today. He has propped them up with wooden supports.’

‘You mustn’t blame him,’ Yearling said. ‘His tenants don’t earn enough to pay an economic rent, unless he crams them six in a room. Even that doesn’t leave him enough for major repairs.’

‘I haven’t blamed him at all,’ Father O’Connor said, ‘he’s not exceptional.’

Yearling tasted his whiskey and, in the half-light that lay about them, took in the sad, white face of the man he had been playing music with. In spite of the tired lines and the pallor, the face was ridiculously young. Did celibacy keep them that way? Or holiness? They read a lot of intellectual stuff which ought at least to give the eyes the set of learning. It had left no mark on this man. Nor had music. He was certainly musical. Tomorrow morning, the fingers that had been so competent on the keyboard and were now white about the stem of the wine-glass would break the wafer that they believed was the Body of Christ. If it was, how could they bear to break it. Cr-a-a-ck. Just like that. Yearling knew. The girl he had known in London had been a Catholic. He had seen for himself.

‘Shall we play some more music?’

‘There’s nothing I’d love more, but I really must watch the time.’

‘You’re not drinking your wine.’

‘I’m not used to it.’

‘Don’t you have it every morning?’

Father O’Connor’s understanding grasped the point slowly. ‘It’s not quite the same thing,’ he said. He spoke with difficulty. A great gap had opened between them, of which only he was aware. Yearling, faintly smiling in the twilight, relished his whiskey. It was loneliness, then. And for ever. No company in the Bradshaws, whom he admired only for good taste and smooth manners, none in Father Giffley, whom he tried hard not to despise or Father O’Sullivan who had a dull mind, none in the ragtag and bobtail of his parish, for whom he had a dutiful love which shrank at every physical contact. And in Yearling, below a now more clearly understood level, no companionship. No real understanding between himself and the poor, or between the world of poverty and the world of comfort. He had left a gracious way of life to do what his heart told him was God’s will, and all he had found so far was disrespect, humiliation, an inner disgust. The devil worked more successfully than he, and the people looked to agitators for deliverance. He had been on the point of telling Yearling about that, of expressing a little of his aloneness and disappointment. Now it was impossible. His unhappiness grew until it became physically painful.

‘I’ll play for thirty minutes,’ he said. It would stop the ache, a temporary sedative. Unintentionally he emptied his third glass of wine.