The springs of affection, p.14
The Springs of Affection, page 14
“It’s my son’s room up there,” she said. “I’ll let you see into it, but you have to come down to the kitchen first of all and let your mother have a cup of tea.”
The child refused milk and drank tea with the two women. When she had eaten everything on the table, she got up and began to wander around the kitchen.
“This is mine,” she said, touching the chair on which she had been sitting.
She touched the gas stove. “This is mine,” she said.
“She’s always acting around,” her mother said indifferently, keeping a tight grip on the handle of her teacup as it sat in the saucer. “I’m grateful for the tea, ma’am,” she added. Since sitting down at the table she had gone sleepy, basking in the warmth of the range.
“This is mine,” said the little girl, putting her hand up to the checked curtain at the window.
“Now,” said Mrs. Derdon, seeing that the tea was all finished, “would you like to see the room upstairs?”
“I want to see in there,” the child said pertly, as they ascended the three steps to the hall. She pointed at the sitting-room door and darted to open it.
“This is mine,” she shrieked. “This is mine, this is mine.”
She touched the sofa, and the two upholstered chairs, and the table of ferns, and the mantelpiece vases, and the china figures standing neatly spaced on the piano, where they were safe since it was never opened.
“This is mine,” she screeched, squatting on the carpet like a big bedraggled frog.
“A lovely place you have, ma’am,” the mother said.
“Now we’ll go upstairs and see what’s there,” said Mrs. Derdon, with an awkward, encouraging smile. The child slipped adroitly past her, dodging her hand, and streaked up the stairs as though she knew the house.
When they reached Father Derdon’s room, she was standing at the window with her face pressed to the glass and the white curtain bunched out of her way.
“There’s the gate we came in at,” she cried to her mother, beckoning excitedly. She tugged at her mother’s hand. “And there we are, Mam, coming up the street. Look at us out there.”
A little girl with long shining ringlets and a pink coat walked up the terrace, and with her a lady wearing a fur scarf on her shoulders.
The child took her eyes from the window to stare at her mother. “The lady there is you, Mam, and that’s me with the coat and the curly hair.”
The mother gave her a derisive push.
“Go on with you,” she said, smiling sheepishly at Mrs. Derdon.
The child pulled violently and cried out with temper.
“There we are!” she screamed. “Look at us out there.”
“Shut up your mouth. I’m getting sick and tired of your lies,” the mother cried, giving her a hard slap. The child grinned quickly up at them before the tears had gone back into her eyes.
“You slap her too often altogether,” Mrs. Derdon protested.
“Ah, you know yourself it’s the only way to get any sense into them, ma’am. This one’s got into the habit of telling lies and trying to show off every minute. She’s got too impudent.”
The child left the window and bounced on the bed.
“This is mine,” she said, a trifle subdued, winding her long dirty fingers over the end rail. Her fingers were like twigs, her eyes were sharp as thorns; there was neither love nor shame in her smile. She lay back on the bed and stretched her ragged arms across the white quilt.
“That’s a brooch you have on you,” she said inquisitively.
Mrs. Derdon was wearing an elaborate brooch of gold and blue enamel. She put her hand up and touched it.
“I’ll tell you what I’ll do. I’ll give it to you for a present,” she said quickly, and she leaned over the end of the bed and pinned the brooch to the child’s dress, where it lay heavily among the rags as though it had been thrown away. The child glanced triumphantly at her mother who, observing Mrs. Derdon for the first time, wore a startled and distrustful air. The poor woman grew jumpy, fearful that the gift might be regretted before they had time to get out of the house. She urged the child to get up off the clean quilt, and to stop annoying the lady, and to say thanks for the lovely brooch. The child, an experienced conspirator, hopped obediently off the bed and was downstairs in the hall before her mother had finished blessing their benefactor.
Mrs. Derdon regretted her brooch before she had the door well shut on the two hastening backs. It was a brooch that had come to her at her mother’s death. Her mother had worn it day and night, and used to leave it lying among her hairpins when she went to bed. It had been familiar to the eyes of her long-dead father. Some of her own earliest memories depended on it, and now she had set it adrift. The only thing remaining to her out of the past was the patchwork quilt on the bed above.
It was not the first time she had given in haste like that and regretted it. John’s baptismal shawl, that she had spent long months making, had gone the same way, to a poor woman at the door, and a pair of new gloves of her own, another time. Sometimes she wondered if she hadn’t spent her whole life giving away the things she valued the most, and never getting any thanks for them. There seemed to be no limit to what people would take. She had often said to John that if you gave people an inch they’d take an ell. Hubert, hearing her, remarked that she had only herself to blame since she forced the ell down people’s necks. Hubert then asked John if he could tell him what an ell was, and they both laughed.
Out of all the poor men and women who had come to the door all the years she had been living in the house, there was not one she had ever run across in the street up to the time she met the man with the crooked hand on O’Connell Street bridge, on her way to buy new sheets.
The suburb in which she lived was about a twenty-minute bus ride from the center of the city, but she seldom made the journey except for a special reason. The bus run came to an end at the near side of the Liffey, and she was glad of that, because it gave her an excuse to walk across the bridge and get a look at the river. There were crowds of people about. Mrs. Derdon was wearing black laced shoes that she had polished before leaving the house, and the soles were so thin that she was made aware of the hard pavement at every step. Being still a countrywoman, she was accustomed to clearer streams, but she still was anxious for a sight of the dark forceful Liffey in her high bed. As she walked across, feeling the cold push of the wind on her face, she spotted the man with the crooked hand, stealing along near the parapet, guarding his hand before him. As they came face to face, he raised his eyes and saw her. At the sight of her, his face expressed such surprise and welcome that she put out her hand and began to speak to him, but he recovered himself and touched his cap and passed her by. She continued on, and a few seconds later turned to look for his back in the crowd, but he had disappeared. She stepped out of the stream of people and looked searchingly all the length of the bridge, but he had really gone. She thought he must have been in an extraordinary hurry, to get out of sight so fast.
Going home on the bus, she thought with satisfaction that the encounter on the bridge would give her the chance she had been looking for, to strike up a conversation with him. She made up a dialogue between them:
SHE: I saw you on the bridge the other day.
HE: Yes. I saw you, too. I would have spoken, but you seemed to be in a hurry. How strange that we should meet.
SHE: Not at all. It’s a small world.
Or she might say:
“You’ve been coming to the door a good many years now.”
No, that would never do. He might think it was a hint to stay away. She might take a joking tone, asking him what was the great hurry he was in on the bridge. Well, the words would present themselves when the time came.
That Thursday, when he did not turn up at the door at the usual time, she became uneasy and spent the rest of the afternoon waiting for him in the front sitting room. At five past six Hubert turned the corner of the terrace and walked slowly up to the house, as he did every night. When she saw Hubert she realized that the man with the crooked hand would not be coming at all. She went and took his money off the hall table, where she had left it early in the day, and put it into a cup on the kitchen dresser. Hubert let himself in with his key, and finding the tea not ready, not even started, he inquired in surprise if he was early. He compared his watch with the clock on the sitting-room mantelpiece, and called cheerfully down to the kitchen that he would like a boiled egg.
When they were sitting at the table having their tea, she told him about meeting the poor man on the bridge and about him not turning up at the door.
“You probably frightened the life out of him,” Hubert said placidly. “Running up to him like that with your hand out, especially since there was nothing in it.”
“But I was only going to say a word to him; there’s no harm in that.”
“All you have to do is look at that man’s face, for God’s sake. A man like that has no use for your fuss and talk, Rose. Give him whatever you want to give him, but let him alone.”
“But he looked so glad to see me, Hubert. I never saw anybody in my life so glad to see me.”
“He’ll know better next time. How was he to know you’d want to embrace him.”
“Hubert, the way you always put me in the wrong.”
“Rose, honey, you bring it on yourself. You will not get it through your head that in this life you have to learn to leave well enough alone.”
After a moment of silence, to give him time to take the top off his egg, he said consolingly that he was sure the man with the crooked hand would be back, as soon as he got over his fright. He added that if the man didn’t come back, it might be just as well, since it would save them a little money. He was only joking, saying that. He meant no harm.
On the following Thursday the man with the crooked hand appeared at the door as he always had, in the middle of the afternoon. As soon as she saw him she knew that he would not say anything. She had made up her mind that she would leave him alone unless he said something of his own accord. He held up his sore hand and gazed at her without a sign of the radiance that she had seen in his face on the bridge. If he felt ashamed that he had given himself away, there was no sign of that either. He was too far gone in want. He was gone out of reach. It gave her great comfort to see him at the door again. She never afterward thought of getting him into conversation, and after a while she forgot the curiosity that had devoured her concerning him, although she continued to watch for him, and for the others who came.
An Attack of Hunger
__________
MRS. DERDON had the face of a woman who had a good deal to put up with. At this moment, she was in the kitchen, putting up with getting the tea ready for herself and her husband. Her husband’s name was Hubert. She was putting up with setting out the two cups and the two plates and the two saucers and so on, two of everything. There was no need now to set the table for more than two people. The third place was empty, and the third face was missing. John, her son, had left the house and he would not be back, because he had vanished forever into the commonest crevasse in Irish family life — the priesthood. John had gone away to become a priest.
The thought that Mrs. Derdon was not putting up with (because she had never faced it) was, Oh, if only Hubert had died, John would never have left me, never, never, never. He would never have left me alone …. But she was putting up with the secret presence of this thought in her spirit, where it lived hidden, nourishing itself on her energy and on her will and on her dwindling capacity for hope.
She had never made up her mind about anything. Decision was unknown to her. Her decisions, the decisions she made about the food she put on the table and about various matters about the house, were dictated by habit and by the amount of housekeeping money Hubert allowed her. Hubert was a frugal man. It was not that he meant to be unkind, but he was careful. He had calculated that the household could be run on such and such a sum, and that was the sum he produced every Friday morning. He always had it ready in his hand, counted out to the penny, when he came downstairs on his way to work. Every Friday morning she waited at the foot of the stairs and he handed her the money without a comment.
Before, when John was still at home, he would sometimes be there when Hubert gave her the money, and then the two of them, she and John, would exchange a look. On her part the look said, “You see the way he treats me.” And John’s look said, “I see. I see.” They agreed that Hubert knew no better than to behave the way he behaved. This knowledge, that Hubert knew no better, formed the foundation and framework of the conspiracy between them that made their days so interesting and that gave a warm start to most of their conversations. They were always talking about Hubert. There was no need for Hubert to do anything unusual to get himself talked about — not that he ever did do anything unusual or out of the ordinary. All he had to do was go about in his habitual way, coming in after work and sitting down with the paper and then sitting down to his tea and going to bed and getting up in the morning and doing all the things he always did in his routine that never varied and that at the same time never became monotonous. There was something insistent about Hubert’s daily procedure that called attention to itself, as though he was behaving as he did on purpose, and as though at any moment he might drop the charade and turn and show them the face they both suspected him of possessing, his true face, the face of a villain, the face of a man of violence, capable of saying and doing the most passionate and awful things, shocking things. He kept them in a constant state of suspense, and they were always exchanging looks when he was in the house, even when they only heard him walking about upstairs. But Hubert maintained his accustomed countenance, mild, amiable, complacent, burnished with his natural distrust of everyone and of every word anyone said, and held in firm focus by his consciousness of the worth of his own judgment.
Now, with John gone, there was no one for Mrs. Derdon to exchange glances with. There was no one for her to look at, except Hubert, and Hubert could turn into a raving lunatic, frothing and cursing, and there would be no one to see him except herself. There was no one to look at her, and she felt that she had become invisible, and at the same time she felt that in her solitude she followed herself about the house all day, up and down stairs, and she could hardly bear to look in the mirror, because the face she saw there was not the one that was sympathetic to her but her own face, her own strong defenseless face, the face of one whose courage has long ago been petrified into mere endurance in the anguish of truly helpless self-pity. There was no hope for her. That is what she said to herself.
There was no hope for her inside the house. Her entire life was in the house. She only left it to do her shopping or to go to Mass. She went to the early Mass on Sundays (she and John had always gone together), and Hubert went to the late Mass by himself. It had been many years before John left since the three of them had gone for a walk together, and she and Hubert never went anywhere or visited anyone. He never brought anybody from the shop to his house, to spend an evening or to see the garden in the summertime or anything like that. From the time they were married, Hubert had shown that he distrusted her with money — he said she had no head for money — and as the years went by he had come to distrust her presence everywhere except in the house. In moments of nervousness — with the priests at John’s school or at occasional gatherings they had attended in the early days of their marriage — Hubert had noticed that his wife turned into a different person. In the presence of strangers, she sometimes took to smiling. One minute she would produce a smile of trembling timidity, as though she had been told she would be beaten unless she looked pleasant, and then again, a minute later, there would be a grimace of absurd condescension on her face. And before anyone knew it, she would be standing or sitting in stony silence, without a word to say, causing everybody to look at her and wonder about her. And if she did speak, she would try to cover her country accent with a genteel enunciation, very precise and thin, that Hubert, from his observation of the world, knew to be vulgar. He felt it was better to leave her where she felt at ease, at home. Somehow she wasn’t up to the mark. She wasn’t able to learn how things were done or what to say. She had no self-confidence, and then, too, her feelings were very easily hurt. If you tried to tell her anything she took it as an insult. Hubert thought it was very hard for a man in his position to have to be ashamed of his wife, but there it was, he was ashamed of her. And he was sorry for her, because her failure was not her fault. She had been born the way she was. There was nothing to be done about it.
When Mrs. Derdon turned away from the mirror that reflected her hopelessness, she saw the walls of her house, and its furniture, the pictures and chairs and the little rugs and ornaments, and the sight of all these things hurt her, because she had tried hard to keep the house as it had been when John left it, and the house was getting away from her and away from the way it had been when John lived in it, when she and John lived in it together. There seemed to be no way of controlling the change that was taking place in the house. Two of the cups from the good set had slipped out of her hands for no reason at all when she was taking them with the rest of the good china to wash, and now her arrangement of glass and china in the glass-fronted cupboard in the back sitting room looked incomplete. There was a big stain on one of the sofa cushions in the front sitting room and she did not know how it had got there. One of the children from the neighboring houses threw a ball into the front garden and crippled a rose tree that had grown in safety for years there. She herself in a fit of despair removed a little pile of newspapers and magazines and pamphlets that John had left on his desk in his bedroom. She had not thrown them out, they were on the bottom shelf of the cupboard in the kitchen, but even if she carried them back up to his room they would not be exactly as he had left them, and they would never again look just as they had when he had last seen them. And she bitterly regretted pulling out the rusty little wad of newspaper that he had been accustomed to stuff underneath the door of his wardrobe to keep it tightly shut. She had thrown it into the fire and fitted a new bit of newspaper under the door. Nothing would ever be the same.
