Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Read online

  ‘Well,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘what do you think of it all?’

  He smiled at her and said nothing. His eyes returned to the printed message in front of him.

  ‘Me,’ she said, ‘and all that?’

  ‘Well –’

  ‘You think I’m being half-baked when I say my professional intuitions can sense a tragedy in the past. You remind me,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, ‘of Hans-Otto. You probably think I’m a lunatic.’

  ‘What I honestly think,’ said the man quietly, ‘is that no one has the right to go poking about in other people’s lives in order to make money, or indeed for any other reason. There’s such a thing as privacy.’

  ‘We are all God’s creatures,’ replied Mrs Eckdorf equally quietly. ‘We concern one another. That old woman there is the concern of Hans-Otto Eckdorf and he of her. Agnes Quin is your concern –’

  ‘Agnes Quin is not my concern –’

  ‘Oh yes. As I am too. As O’Shea, the hotel’s solitary porter, is, and Eugene Sinnott and Philomena. Would you and I, if we spent a time together, come closer to one another’s minds? Would we fall in love on the beaches of Tahiti? We do not take to one another, yet that could happen. We are all part of one another, my dear, and we must all know one another better.’

  Listening to this, the red-cheeked man became angrier. He pretended to look through the window of the aeroplane at the darkness. He raised his left shoulder and edged himself around so that he was presenting most of his back to Mrs Eckdorf.

  ‘Terrible things took place in O’Neill’s Hotel,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf shrilly, making sure that her voice carried to her companion. ‘Call me what you will, but of that I’m certain. You’re a man who goes to houses like O’Neill’s Hotel and fails to spare a thought for the people there. Cherubim and Seraphim might –’

  ‘I do not go to houses like O’Neill’s Hotel,’ shouted the man. ‘You’re talking a lot of damn rubbish.’

  ‘No,’ said Mrs Eckdorf.

  ‘You’ve been sitting there talking rubbish to me about people I’ve never even heard of. I understand nothing of your conversation, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  ‘Well, then, let me begin again. A barman on an ocean liner—’

  ‘Will you please not speak to me!’

  ‘A barman on an ocean liner met in that city below us a street-walker called Agnes Quin –’

  ‘I have asked you to be quiet, Mrs Eckdorf. I have no wish to sit on an aeroplane quarrelling with a stranger.’

  ‘There is something greater than just a skeleton in a cupboard there. There is something which, when known to other people – when seen in documentary form by other people – will help those other people: Hoerschelmann, Hans-Otto, people in Germany and England and in the United States of America, and Italy and France, and everywhere. Can you understand that? I’m quite a famous photographer.’

  ‘My God!’ murmured the man.

  ‘What’s the matter with you?’

  ‘Nothing is the matter with me.’

  ‘I believe you think it odd of a barman on a ship to confess to me that he had visited such a place: I thought it odd too, until afterwards I realized that when I mentioned human stories he couldn’t help himself. He felt the presence of a human story. Intuitively, I felt the same. I can’t make it clearer than that, I’m afraid.’

  ‘I don’t know you, Mrs Eckdorf, and I don’t at all wish to know these facts you’re telling me. For my part, I can’t make it clearer than that, either.’

  ‘I am advancing upon the lives of these people,’ said Mrs Eckdorf loudly, ‘so that others may benefit. Please don’t forget that.’

  ‘It’s an unpleasant contemporary thing,’ cried the man with sudden passion, ‘this poking into people’s privacy with cameras in the cause of truth. Films are made and earnest television programmes. I can well imagine your shiny books.’

  ‘Morrissey,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, and Agnes Quin. And Eugene Sinnott and Philomena. And the daughter who turned her back on that yellow hotel, and some man the daughter married. And Mrs Sinnott who neither hears nor speaks, about to become ninety-two. What are the lives of these people like? How are they the victims of other people, or of each other maybe? Has tragedy made them what they are? What would they say if they knew that a skilled photographer was flying in for the birthday of the woman who sits at the centre of them all? What happened once –’

  ‘Shut up,’ cried the man in a snarling voice and threatened then that if Mrs Eckdorf did not at once cease talking he’d make an official complaint.

  ‘You’re a smug, unimportant man,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, and did not speak to him again. She applied lipstick to her mouth and powdered her cheeks. She hummed to herself, and after a time she addressed a passing hostess, enquiring about the weather. ‘Is it good down there?’ she asked. The hostess smiled at Mrs Eckdorf. Less than ten minutes ago the pilot had spoken to the passengers, telling them where they were and the weather that night in Dublin was cloudless. ‘They’re enjoying a heatwave actually,’ the hostess said to Mrs Eckdorf.

  ‘Thank God for that,’ said Mrs Eckdorf and added that, being a photographer, weather was her bread and butter. That night she would rest luxuriously: she would rest with a sleeping-pill, and tomorrow she would begin the day early.

  2

  The people towards whose lives Mrs Eckdorf was advancing awoke in their various resting places on the morning after Mrs Eckdorf’s arrival in their city. O’Shea, the hotel-porter, was the first to do so. He was a tall man with a thin white face and below it a thin neck. His eyes were nervous, as though reflecting some inner anxiety, dark hair was light upon his head, his teeth protruded slightly. He left his bed in the moment that his eyes opened, and drew on to his spare body the faded uniform of his calling. A greyhound rose from a corner of his bedroom, stretching and wagging its tail.

  On the way down the stairs of the hotel O’Shea met the source of Mrs Eckdorf’s information in the person of Agnes Quin. He passed her by without a word, noting out of the corner of his eye an elderly man in the shadows behind her. The two waited as he descended. They saw his mournful figure reflected in a mirror that hung on heavily embossed, almost black wallpaper. Here and there on the staircase wall the paper had become dislodged in the warm summer of 1946, and O’Shea had fixed it in place with nails. Its edges curled inwards, revealing between long strips the paler plaster of the wall itself. The clumps of nails, placed at the top of the paper so that each piece might hang freely, had become rusty and were now unnoticeable on the dark, uneven surface.

  In the pillared hall of the hotel, with its balding maroon carpet that extended up the stairs, eight chairs echoed a grandeur that once had been. They were tall, like thrones, their gilt so faded and worn that it looked in places like old yellow paint, their once-elegant velvet stained with droppings from glasses of alcohol. Behind this row of chairs, prone on the carpet, lay a man into whose rump O’Shea’s boot was now driven with force. His eyes watched as the shrimpish form of his enemy Morrissey moved swiftly, without speech, across the hall and out of the hotel. O’Shea continued on his way to the kitchen, his greyhound loping behind him. Agnes Quin and her companion came down the stairs. Early morning in this house wasn’t ever much different.

  Mrs Sinnott awoke and her mind immediately filled: she saw scenes in Venice and the faces of her two children at different times in their lives, and the face of her husband who had been shot in 1911. I am saying you should marry me, he had written on a scrap of paper, a scrap she still possessed, for she had never believed that she would receive a message like that. She had shaken her head at the time, smiling at the fair face of this man who once had written that his name was Leo.

  She remembered then that the day following this one would be her ninety-second birthday and she wondered how long she would go on living, or if she would live through the present day. Often her heart murmured and she felt a pain, which was, she knew, to be expected at her age. She was frail in appearance, but did not give the impressi
on of delicate health; there was a strength about the way she moved, although she moved slowly as if conserving energy. Her face was thin and as sharp as an axe, with neat grey hair which soon she would attend to for the day ahead, pinning it up at her dressing-table, peering at her reflection with black eyes like currants. She would lie on a bit, she thought, as every morning she thought: she would take her time. She would wonder and remember in the silence, looking straight ahead of her at an azure wall.

  In the room beneath, Eugene Sinnott, a man of fifty-eight, opened his eyes and at once closed them again, blaspheming quietly. There was sunlight in the bedroom. He felt its presence on his face and on the backs of his hands, which lay outside the sheet that covered him: again, he reflected, he had omitted to draw down the blinds the night before. The warmth made him uneasy, as did the reddish, unsatisfactory darkness he had induced by dropping the lids over his eyes against the glare.

  The night before, at four minutes to midnight, he had stood in the centre of the room, thinking of nothing, unbuttoning the jacket of his black suit and then unbuttoning his waistcoat, seizing his braces and drawing them free of his shoulders, stepping from his trousers and then removing his shoes. He had walked to the door to extinguish the light and had entered his bed in his underclothes. One day in 1948 O’Shea had said to him that his three pairs of pyjamas were now beyond repair and he had nodded his head, deciding that it was not necessary to replace them.

  Eugene, on this sunny morning, remembered his dreams. He stretched out his left hand and found a packet of Sweet Afton and a box of matches on the table beside his bed. He lit a cigarette and saw himself as he had seen himself while he dreamed: a man with a plump face that was patterned with exploded veins, a man with a cigarette in the centre of his mouth standing in Riordan’s Excelsior Bar, bald-headed except for a ridge of sandy hair at the back of his neck and tufts of it near his ears. He saw a man in clothes that were marked with cigarette burns, who weighed sixteen stone and measured five foot eleven, whose forehead glistened with a skin of perspiration, whose eyes were pale blue. He had been standing at the bar when Morrissey had entered and announced that Eddie Trump was dead. ‘He dropped dead,’ he said, ‘when he was opening a bottle.’ Morrissey had extracted from a paper bag a bottle of pale wine that had a corkscrew stuck in its cork. Eugene had taken it and had read on the label: Niersteiner Domtal. ‘It came over on the wireless,’ said Morrissey. ‘He died in Washington Zoo.’

  At that moment O’Shea entered the bar and said that Eugene was urgently required in the hotel. He reported that a circus trainer was standing in the hall, requiring rooms and warm stabling for his animals. ‘It’s like the old days,’ said O’Shea, excitedly seizing Eugene by the shoulder. ‘Those circuses pay through the nose.’ Eugene had handed the bottle of hock to Mrs Dargan and against his will had accompanied O’Shea from the bar. They had walked the length of Thaddeus Street in a drizzle, but when they arrived at O’Neill’s Hotel there was no sign of a circus trainer.

  There had been another dream in which he had observed himself slowly descending the stairs of the hotel. O’Shea, waiting for him in the hall, had said there was something wrong with one of the cisterns. He had seen himself later, walking in Dalkey, climbing over rocks and seaweed; he had paddled in the sea, surprising himself by doing that. A dog had come up to him, a black animal of indeterminate breed, and Father Hennessey had appeared in the distance, on the cliffs. Father Hennessey had called down that he wanted to see him some time, and then had turned and walked away.

  Eugene drew smoke into his lungs: he coughed with the cigarette still in his mouth, causing ash to fall on the sheet and on his vest. As far as he could remember, he had experienced no other dreams. With his eyes still closed, he drove his mind back into the night, searching for some particle that he might have overlooked, but he could discover nothing.

  Dreams were important to him, as they were to his friend Eddie Trump, the barman in the Excelsior Bar, for both men had profited from racing tips that their dreaming over the years had revealed. Eugene had first won eight pounds, in 1955, on a horse called Persian Gulf, having dreamed the night before that he was flying on a carpet. Eddie Trump had done even better with the outsider Pin Money, Kevin Moloney up, having dreamed that he’d been holding in his hand two sixpenny-pieces. Their dreams often misled the two men, but they put this down to their lack of skill in interpretation, and regularly pointed out to one another that all that was necessary was practice. It was Morrissey who had first reminded them that dreams were a known source of racing information, a reminder that they had now forgotten but which Morrissey remembered.

  Eugene crushed the butt of his cigarette into a green ashtray that contained a number of other butts. He left his bed and stood for a moment on the brown rug that lay beside it, his arms hanging loosely by his sides, his eyes fixed on a picture of the Virgin Mary that hung between the two windows. He remembered the picture being placed there at the instruction of his mother, a long time ago now, when he was seven or eight. The room had just been redecorated: his mother had chosen a brown wallpaper with small flowers on it and a frieze to match it, and pale buff paint. Modern spring blinds had been installed, the same blinds, discoloured by the sun, that he had forgotten to draw the night before. The floor had been re-stained and the two brown rugs had replaced badly worn linoleum. His mother had carried to his freshened room the framed image of the Virgin, and one of the workmen had driven a nail into the wall between the two windows and had placed the cord of the picture on it.

  Eugene withdrew his gaze from the soft face he had known for so long. He dressed himself slowly, not thinking about the face, but remembering instead Morrissey saying that Eddie Trump was dead. He wondered if it would upset Eddie Trump to hear the dream retailed and he attempted to estimate how he would feel himself if someone in Riordan’s public house related the same thing about himself. He placed a foot on the edge of a white-painted table that bore a china jug in a basin; he tied the laces of his shoes. In a mirror that hung on the wall above the white table he could see reflected the bed he had slept in and the table beside it. Into this room, some time between the distant past and now, he had brought his wife. She had paused at the door and then had walked forward, while he, not quite sure of what he should do, had opened a window. The narrow bed that had been there then had been dismantled and exchanged for the large bed in his mother’s room, which was something she herself had suggested. He remembered her standing above O’Shea while he toiled with a pair of pliers and a wrench, endeavouring to unbolt various parts. It was a bed I bought in Roche’s Stores, she had written. You were born in it, Eugene. And Enid too.

  Lightly whistling a popular tune of the past, Eugene lifted from a chair near the white table a shirt-collar, a striped tie, and two collar-studs. Later in the morning, after he had shaved himself, he would put on both collar and tie, for those additions to his dress were ones that he did not ever care to be without when he emerged from his mother’s hotel and stepped into Thaddeus Street to begin his day.

  Far away from Thaddeus Street, in the suburb of Terenure, Mrs Sinnott’s daughter, who fifty-one years ago had been christened Enid Mary and was now Mrs Gregan, listened to her husband’s voice talking about tomatoes. She looked away from him, hearing him say that there was a fortune to be made on the side. Tomatoes, he said, were always in demand.

  His mouth consumed food, his eyes behind his spectacles were fixed on his knife and fork. Soon, still speaking, he would rise from the table and leave the room. She’d hear him whistling and when the whistling ceased she’d guess that he had paused to light his pipe. His footsteps would thump on the stairs, a slow and heavy tread, going up and down several times.

  ‘You know what I mean, Enid?’ he said, rising from the table.

  She said she did. She cut a piece of toast, trying to think about a recipe for Frangipan Tart. Two eggs, she said to herself, one and a half ounces of sugar, one and a half ounces of butter, half a pint of cream, hal
f a pint of milk, a quarter of an ounce of flour, one bay leaf, lemon rind, nutmeg, short-crust… Upstairs he banged the lavatory door so that she felt the reverberation. Mix the flour smoothly, she thought, with a little milk. Simmer the remaining milk with the bay leaf, lemon rind and a pinch of nutmeg.

  He stood before her in his soft, fawn mackintosh coat, bicycle-clips gripping his ankles, a brown hat on his head. He was head of the Home and personal Effects Department of an insurance company, a department into which he had taken Eugene’s son, Timothy John, feeling it to be his duty, since Timothy John didn’t appear to know what to do with himself.

  ‘Good-bye so,’ he said, speaking through smoke, his pipe in his mouth.

  He went away, and she watched from the window, drawn to the window, as she was at his departure every morning. He wheeled his bicycle down the short path. His fingers touched the front tyre and then the back one, checking the pressures. He knocked his pipe out and then slowly, with the bicycle leaning against his body, filled it again with tobacco. He cupped his hands around the bowl, firing the tobacco in his own particular manner, employing a method, so he had told her, that he had perfected himself.

  In another suburb, in Booterstown, Philomena, wife of Eugene and daughter-in-law of Mrs Sinnott, fried rashers and eggs in the kitchen of a bungalow. In contrast to Mrs Gregan, who was tall and grey and square-faced, Philomena was a tiny woman, with hair that was as black as ever it had been and with chestnut-brown eyes in an olive face.

  ‘Don’t forget now,’ Philomena said to her son, for whom she was cooking the food, ‘you have to go to the dentist.’

  He, shaved and cleanly-attired, sat waiting at the kitchen table: Timothy John, twenty-eight, whose face, set in a narrow head unlike either of his parents’, at once suggested his timid nature. The day would be the same as other days, he reflected as he waited, except that an electric drill would grind into one of his teeth.