Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 5

  Mr Gregan put down his pipe and took from a drawer in his desk a tube of fruit-gums. He ate one, for his mouth felt hot and bitter from an excess of tobacco smoke. Should he telephone her again? he wondered. There was no doubt about it, if she’d only relax herself for five minutes and go down the road for a bottle of stout she’d feel improved. He tried to see her in his mind’s eye leaving their house, making certain the door was secure behind her, and then entering one of the bars in Terenure. ‘A bottle of stout when you’re ready,’ he tried to make her say, but he shook his head over his efforts. He himself, when a bit of difficulty arose in the Department, would take himself across the road to the Pearl Bar or up to the College Mooney. Twenty minutes with a glass in front of you and you felt as right as ninepence again, able to tackle anything, able even to think of the disappointments in your life without entering depression. In this day and age there was nothing whatsoever to prevent the wife of an insurance man from going into a public house in the middle of the morning in order to relax her mind. He wondered if he’d made it clear what he’d meant, or if she’d listened to him properly. She had a way of not listening when he was talking to her, which he found a bit irritating, but nothing of course for a mild-tempered man to write home about.

  He picked up the telephone and asked for his home number, thinking that he’d explain it further and point out to her that there was no reason at all why she shouldn’t do something she’d never done before. He’d remind her that when the barman brought her the stout she should pay him at once and drink it slowly; he’d tell her to bring a newspaper in with her so that she’d have something to do. He listened to the ringing at the other end and he remembered her suddenly, standing in the hall of his mother’s house on the night they’d fixed the date of the wedding, a few weeks after she’d left the hotel because of the bit of trouble there’d been. ‘We’ll have six children,’ he’d said. ‘Five boys and a girl.’ He thought of the two glass-houses that were standing empty in the field he’d bought, and he saw himself in the fullness of time picking orange tomatoes from healthy plants and bringing them back to her, charging her nothing for as many pounds as she wanted. In the fullness of time he would erect other glass-houses until the field was full of them. He would spend his days there, with a couple of assistants, young lads who’d share his interest. He would cease to work in an office, which was something he had always wished to do, although he doubted that she knew it. The telephone in his house went on ringing, until in the end he replaced the receiver, still thinking of the glass-houses as one day they would be.

  Carrying his tie and his collar and his two shirt-studs, Eugene passed through the hall and entered a passage that led to the kitchen, and then entered the kitchen itself. It was a huge cavernous place with a mass of hooks suspended from dark ceiling-beams: once it had been the hub of everything. Beneath barred windows three sinks were separated by draining-boards that stretched beyond them to either wall. Copper pans and kettles had once upon a time thronged shelves near by, but the shelves were empty now: a man had come one day and had offered Eugene a good price for the copper-ware, which Eugene, in O’Shea’s absence, had accepted. The dressers were still full of red-and-white crockery: plates piled high, gravy boats, cups and saucers, dishes and serving bowls. Old bills on lengths of wire hung from cup-hooks; thick cookery books, neatly arranged by O’Shea, lined the lower shelves. A long wooden table of proportions that matched those of the kitchen itself stood on the flagged floor, with chairs all around it. A kettle murmured over the fire in the old-fashioned range, a clock ticked loudly on the mantelshelf, registering a quarter to ten.

  Eugene placed his tie and his shirt-collar, with the two collar-studs, on the edge of the table. He sat down beside them and picked up a morning newspaper that O’Shea had earlier been reading. He perused it with care for twenty minutes, sitting at the table with the pages spread out before him. Malacca was tipped to win at Harold’s Cross, rumours about Yellow Printer’s limitations were denied. Ginger Bomb had won at Bath, and Spinning Top, Two Seater, Priority, Pettyless and Primstep at Pontefract. Courageous was tipped for the double at Lingfield. The strike of three thousand semi-skilled and unskilled Dublin Corporation employees had entered its fourth day. A man had been sentenced to three months’ imprisonment for stealing from a handbag. At Brighton the £35 filly Qalibashi had won at twenty to one, Whisky Poker was selected for the three o’clock at Redcar, and Whisky Noggin for the three thirty. Privy Seal would win at Ascot.

  He read slowly, and then he folded the paper, ready for O’Shea to carry upstairs with Mrs Sinnott’s breakfast. He sat considering a few of the facts he had absorbed, listening to the ticking in the clock. Within a couple of minutes his head dropped on to his chest and he returned to sleep. He snored softly; he dreamed he was standing in Riordan’s public house.

  ‘It’s a fine day,’ said O’Shea’s voice in Eugene’s dream, and he opened his eyes to find that O’Shea was crossing the kitchen with a commodity wrapped in a newspaper. The greyhound followed him, its nose close to the flags of the floor, as though sniffing the trail of a mouse.

  ‘I think they’re fresh this week,’ O’Shea said. He put the herrings on one of the draining-boards and loosened the paper that wrapped them.

  ‘I had several dreams,’ said Eugene.

  ‘Have you seen your mother?’

  Eugene nodded and continued to nod. He enquired as to the nature of the fish and received a reply. He said:

  ‘I dreamed that Eddie Trump was dead, passed out after uncorking a bottle.’

  O’Shea, Eugene knew, never dreamed. He didn’t know what it was to fall asleep and enter a world of fantastic happenings. He was incapable, which was why he was resentful; he was jealous of those who had the knack.

  O’Shea cut the heads and the tails off the herrings. He slit them open beneath a running tap and cleared the offal from their stomachs. Behind him, he could hear Eugene muttering to the greyhound, making a clicking sound to attract its attention. He finished gutting the last of the fish and for a moment, while the noise behind him continued, he glanced through the window into a yard that was half in sunshine and half in shadow. Horses had once been stabled there, brewery drays had rolled over the cobbles to deliver porter in barrels. It was peaceful in the yard now: an old cat, owned by nobody, slept near a dustbin in the gathering August heat; no birds sang in the hornbeam tree.

  ‘D’you remember the time,’ said Eugene, ‘that Jack Tyler fell over the banisters?’

  He took a matchbox from his left-hand trouser pocket. He selected a match and poked it into a tooth at the back of his mouth. How are you feeling today? he had written and she had nodded over the words, implying that she felt well. He had written down the dreams he’d had because she always displayed an interest. When he won something from a tip he’d received he always reported it, which pleased her too. He had stood for a moment with his tie and his collar and his studs, and then he had come away.

  ‘Have you thought about a birthday gift at all?’ O’Shea said.

  Eugene took the match from his mouth. He examined a grey shred on the end of it. He said he thought it must be a particle of mutton.

  ‘You’ve not forgotten, Mr Sinnott?’

  ‘No, no.’

  He took the shred of food from the end of the match and returned the match to its box. He sighed and closed his eyes.

  O’Shea dried the herrings on a cloth and took a frying-pan from a shelf beneath the sink he had been working at. He placed the pan on the range. He took a jar of fat from one of the dressers; he cut a piece from it and allowed it to drop on to the warm pan.

  ‘Jack Tyler was alive till a while back,’ said Eugene, ‘and then he died with his boots on. One Saturday at Leopardstown.’

  The herrings sizzled on the pan. Forty-four years ago, when he had walked into O’Neill’s Hotel for the first time, he had seen Eugene Sinnott in the hall, a youth of fourteen like himself. ‘Is Mrs Sinnott about?’ he had said to him, and
Eugene Sinnott had replied that she was in the dining-room and had then agreed to lead him to her.

  ‘I showed you the little Virgin I got,’ said O’Shea. ‘What kind of a gift did you think of? Will I buy something for you, Mr Sinnott?’

  ‘We could do worse than a pencil-sharpener.’

  O’Shea turned from the range. He looked at Eugene sitting there, his two hands concentrated on the lighting of a cigarette. In a quiet voice he reminded him that for three years now he had given his mother a pencil-sharpener for her birthday. He reminded him that last year he had pointed out that another pencil-sharpener wasn’t necessary. Mrs Sinnott had plenty of pencil-sharpeners, he said. She’d had plenty, he said, even when Eugene had begun to give her extra ones. If there was one object in the world that she didn’t need it was another pencil-sharpener.

  ‘They get blunt,’ said Eugene.

  ‘Mr Sinnott, they do not get blunt.’

  ‘The people that come to see her do a lot of writing. She has exercise-books full of it –’

  ‘I have seen the exercise-books, Mr Sinnott.’

  ‘Get her a new little sharpener. Spend up to four shillings.’

  He placed two florins on the table. A coloured pencil-sharpener, he said, a gay colour that would cheer her up.

  ‘Don’t stint it, O’Shea. Don’t get shoddy goods for the sake of a coin or two. I’m obliged to you now, O’Shea.’

  ‘She asked me to get her a scissors in April. I said to you last year a pair of scissors might have suited her. You didn’t listen, Mr Sinnott.’

  ‘There’s a sharpener I saw one time done out in the shape of a globe. It had a coloured map of the world on it and you opened it down the equator to get out the shavings. Could you find one of those, d’you think?’

  ‘Would you not think a little bowl for flowers, Mr Sinnott? Or a picture she could hang on the wall?’

  ‘You’ve always a better idea,’ shouted Eugene in sudden anger. ‘You’re a servant in this house, O’Shea. Will you do what you’re told? Will you get on with it, for Christ’s sake? A bloody pencil-sharpener.’

  O’Shea turned away, unable to pursue the conversation. He gathered the plates and cups and placed them on the table. He set places for both of them. He laid Mrs Sinnott’s tray.

  O’Shea annoyed him sometimes, Eugene thought, with all his old talk. He was always in the sulks, going on about something when there was no need to at all. You might be talking to the wall when you were talking to O’Shea for all the notice he took. He looked at him and said:

  ‘Did you dream, O’Shea?’

  O’Shea didn’t reply. He poured some of the water from the kettle into two tea-pots. He buttered bread for Mrs Sinnott.

  ‘I had a dream I was paddling in the sea at Dalkey and Father Hennessey was up on the cliff and a black dog came up to sniff me. I had another dream that you were on about the condition of a cistern.’

  O’Shea placed Mrs Sinnott’s herring on a warmed plate and moved towards the door, carrying the tray.

  ‘There was another thing too,’ said Eugene. ‘You came into Riordan’s and said there was a circus man back at the hotel. You were talking through your hat.’

  ‘She’s up there in her room,’ said O’Shea quietly, ‘and her house is being used for immoral purposes.’

  ‘You’re talking out of turn, O’Shea.’

  ‘Who’ll change the sheets after Agnes Quin?’

  He left the kitchen and Eugene Sinnott remained where he was, awaiting the porter’s return. Had his mother dreamed? he wondered. What sort of a dream, he wondered, would a deaf woman of ninety-one have?

  In the bungalow I see myself, Philomena had written. I am sitting alone, there is no more work to do. In the early morning I am thinking of him and he is in another house. He has forgotten me then.

  On the morning of August 9th, a long time after composing these sentences, Philomena, in the Church of the Assumption in Booterstown, prayed for Mrs Sinnott, and for herself, and for the happiness of her son. She sat for a moment thinking of her son, seeing his face clearly. Clothes he wore came into her mind: two navy-blue suits, shirts and socks that she washed and repaired, ties she had bought for him. When he was sixteen she had bought him a safety razor and six blades in a chemist’s. They had gone together to the pantomime every year in the Gaiety Theatre. She had watched him play with his Meccano sets. Every Sunday they still walked together on Sandymount Strand, she a slight figure in her grey coat and the hat they had bought for her one autumn together, he tall and thin, straight as a die.

  ‘Oh God, don’t let it happen,’ she whispered. ‘Oh God, I know it’s a sin to ask You. It’s only that I love him.’

  It was more than a month since the Saturday morning in Lipton’s when he hadn’t heard what she was saying to him. ‘Will we buy a bit of porksteak for the dinner?’ she’d said, looking at the porksteak on the counter. She had felt the absence of his reply and glanced up quickly: his eyes were fixed on a girl who was cutting cheese, staring at the girl’s neck, bare beneath her white overall. His eyes moved while she watched, to the hands that were slicing through the cheese with a length of wire. They moved again, to the girl’s face. The girl was coarse, she had thought: a fat girl, with black wiry hair and cold-looking red hands. ‘Will we have porksteak for the dinner?’ she had said more loudly to him, pulling at his sleeve, and he had turned to her, smiling, saying that porksteak would be lovely.

  Often since, when they had passed the shop, she’d seen him glancing through the window. She imagined him in the morning, going to work, hanging about to catch a glimpse of the girl. She imagined him walking into the bungalow and saying that he was thinking of getting married. ‘Wait a second,’ he’d say, and then he’d go away and return with the girl, whom he’d left standing in the garden. ‘Isn’t she lovely?,’ he’d say.

  ‘Oh God, forgive me,’ she whispered. She saw the girl walking with him, she saw them sitting in a cinema. The lips of the girl kissed her cheek as a daughter might; she felt herself flinching. ‘Oh dear sweet Jesus,’ she said.

  The bungalow would be the same except that he would not be there and his clothes would be gone and his room would be like a graveyard. It had happened so easily, like a leaf falling from a tree, like the sun disappearing: they had stood in Lipton’s together and it had happened as they stood there. Ever since she had felt the presence of the girl in his thoughts; she had felt his desire for her, although she knew he did not suspect that she was aware of it. She had thought they would go on together in the bungalow, eating together and talking about the day he had spent; she had thought he’d decided that that was how he wished his life to be, that he wanted nothing else. But already, even though she was sure he hadn’t yet got to know the shopgirl, she felt that she was sharing him, and if it wasn’t this girl who would walk into the bungalow and kiss her on the cheek it would be some other.

  He’s all I’ve got, she had written in Mrs Sinnott’s room, ashamed to write more, or to confess that she was jealous in anticipation. But Mrs Sinnott knew. God gave and took away the words in Mrs Sinnott’s eyes: life was not easy. ‘Isn’t she lovely?’ said the voice of Timothy John again, and his face smiled at her, and she saw again the cold red hands slicing mouse-trap cheese.

  Thirty-four years ago she had come to O’Neill’s Hotel from West Cork, sent there by an uncle who had arranged the matter by letter with Mrs Sinnott. Her mother had just been admitted to the hospital in Clonakilty, her father a year previously had driven a hook into his hand and, failing to consider the wound, had died of blood-poisoning. ‘She will hardly come out, Philomena,’ her uncle had said to her, unable to hold back his tears. ‘The nuns will be good to her.’ She had wept too, thinking of her mother in the hospital bed, her mother who hated even to sit down. ‘Clonakilty, God help us!’ people used to say, making a joke about the town. Her mother would die there, and she would die quite quickly because of her loathing of being enclosed. I’m sorry, Philomena, Mrs Sinnott had written
. You’ve had bad fortune.

  She had stood in the dining-room of the hotel with two cardboard suitcases in her hands, holding them until Mrs Sinnott indicated that she should place them on the floor. She had come from Clonakilty by bus and then, with difficulty, had found her way to Thaddeus Street.

  You’ll be tired, Mrs Sinnott had written.

  She shook her head.

  Mrs Sinnott had been helping to clear the tables after the six o’clock meal. She sat down and indicated that Philomena should sit down also. Between them there was a pile of plates, the top one marked with traces of egg-yolk, knives and forks arranged on it in two sections.

  I would have to train you, Philomena, Mrs Sinnott wrote. What age are you now?

  Fifteen.

  It was an excitement, spelling out a conversation, communicating in this formal way and watching Mrs Sinnott’s face as she read the replies she received. Mrs Sinnott was never in a hurry. She carried an exercise-book and a pencil in the pocket of her apron, but even with that facility she didn’t wish to communicate much. It surprised Philomena that she didn’t read people’s lips, but afterwards she thought that perhaps she preferred not to know everything that was going on about her. There was a tranquillity about her face that might have come from the silence that held her: she made her condition seem almost a blessing.

  There is a nice room and of course all board. Mrs Sinnott referred to wages, explaining that they would be slight at first but would increase as time went by. She was responsible, she wrote, for insurance stamps.