Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 7

  Twenty minutes later, in Bachelors’ Walk, she encountered two card-sharpers, one of whom carried a large cardboard box which bore the legend Kellogg’s Cornflakes The Sunshine Breakfast. He was a red-haired man, tall and heavily constructed, with evasive eyes. His companion was smaller and excessively dirty. She photographed them and then moved on, only to find herself pursued by the men, who demanded money with menaces, claiming that she had offered them money in return for permission to take their photographs. They reminded her that they had specially performed their trick on the cardboard box and had risked observation by the plain-clothes police. All that, they said, they’d done to oblige her.

  Mrs Eckdorf balanced her camera on the wall that ran above the river. She photographed two nuns crossing the Metal Bridge.

  ‘Local interest,’ she explained. ‘There’s local interest everywhere.’

  ‘We’re working men,’ said the smaller man.

  ‘You’re local interest to me,’ murmured Mrs Eckdorf, again setting her sights on the nuns.

  ‘Excuse me, missus,’ began the red-haired man in a threatening way, edging closer to Mrs Eckdorf, his shoulder actually touching her clothes.

  ‘Buzz off,’ said Mrs Eckdorf snappishly, thinking it was extraordinary the way people in this city were always asking for money.

  ‘You promised us,’ shouted the red-haired man. He took her elbow in his left hand. He raised the cardboard box slightly in the air. ‘You said a consideration, missus.’

  Mrs Eckdorf stared into the eyes of the man and spoke while doing so. She told him to release her elbow and to stand well back.

  ‘I’m a professional photographer,’ she said. ‘I cannot possibly go paying out cash for every piece of local interest I find. You must see that.’

  ‘I see nothing,’ cried the red-haired man. ‘We risked arrest standing up there, exposed for you –’

  ‘There’s a Superintendent in uniform,’ said Mrs Eckdorf quietly, ‘on the other side of the street.’

  She waved at the Superintendent, who was strolling along, tapping the calf of his right leg with a cane. He was in the company of two members of his force, a pair of dignified Civic Guards immaculately turned out. She lifted her camera and photographed the three of them. Then she trained her lens on the backs of the card-sharpers, who were sidling urgently away.

  Having waved again at the Superintendent, she continued on her journey. She passed by the humped metal bridge and strode along Ormond Quay, occasionally snapping the shutter of her camera at people or vistas that took her fancy. She thought, as she walked past empty shops and hoardings that advertised the services of a hypnotist, that Hans-Otto’s face was a face she should never have expected understanding from. In the apartment she still occupied in the Lipowskystrasse she had spoken frankly to Hans-Otto one evening four years ago: she had sat with him for several hours in the fading light, telling him the things about herself that he apparently had been unaware of when he married her. She remembered now the bony face of Hans-Otto, with its very dark jowl seeming to shine in the gloom, while she said she couldn’t understand any man marrying a woman without knowing by instinct her nature. He had lifted a glass of cognac to his lips. ‘Du hast mich betrogen,’ he said, and she had instantly denied that she had betrayed him. But Hans-Otto shouted at her then to keep her lies to herself, he refused to listen to reason or explanations: he had appeared suddenly to be a jungle beast with cognac in its hand, storming about the place, issuing threats and accusations.

  Mrs Eckdorf photographed a seagull swooping over the river. She glanced about it at the sky and said to herself that the weather was set for the day: the light-blue sky was empty of clouds, the haze that earlier had obscured the sun was gone. She took a pair of dark glasses from her handbag and placed them before her eyes. Hans-Otto had asked for a divorce. Hans-Otto had said that in any case he was tired of her.

  A year before, he had wept when she’d told in court of how Hoerschelmann had hit her: how he had lifted a small table from the carpet and had struck out powerfully with it, how fortunately she had managed to escape the brunt of its weight. She told of how on another occasion she believed he had put some kind of drug in a plate of Nierensuppe she was eating, causing an illness that had brought her close to death.

  Now she lived alone in the apartment in the Lipowskystrasse and wondered often if it would be forever her home. In her bedroom, the low, square bed had a cinder-grey bedspread on it. Everywhere, throughout the apartment, there was steel furniture with grey cushions or trimming on it, and cinder-grey carpeting stretched from wall to wall of every room. There were light-fittings that were of steel also, the woodwork was unpainted but had been gently dyed to reflect the motif of steel and cinder. In her studio, which looked out over the Theresienwiese, her favourite photographs, blown up to great dimensions and each behind a sheet of plastic, hung from metal rods that swivelled ingeniously from a central fixture. There were more than a hundred of them, the cream of many thousands, all of people from the cities and villages of four continents, people laughing or weeping, people in agony or smiling, people awkwardly posing or caught unawares. In this studio she wished to perform the remainder of the work she had begun. To this room, with its fathomless grey walls and serene calm, she wished to return from Bahia Blanca or Bingerville or Halmahera, or wherever it was she felt called upon to attend with her Mamiya. In this room, all of a sudden on that evening four years ago, Hans-Otto Eckdorf had said that she was mad.

  ‘Du Schwcin!’ cried Mrs Eckdorf at the corner of Capel Street. ‘Gott im Himmel, du knöchernes deutsches Schwein!’

  People looked at her, pedestrians and cyclists, surprised that a well-dressed woman in dark glasses and a hat was standing on the pavement speaking emotionally in a foreign language. A garda on point duty cast a glance in her direction and was reassured when she smiled at him.

  She crossed the river, recalling another statement that Hans-Otto had made that evening: that the facts of her previous marriage were not as ever she had claimed. She it was, he pronounced in a gritty voice, speaking both in English and in German, who had lifted the table from the floor. She it was who had struck Hoerschelmann with it, breaking a small bone in his shoulder. She had torn the flesh of Hoerschelmann’s face, she had put sleeping drugs in his Nierensuppe lest he should be a nuisance to her at night. ‘Du bist das grausamste Wetb, das jemals gelebt hatl’ Hans-Otto Eckdorf, a manufacturer of typewriters, shouted at her that evening fours years ago; and then, to make certain she understood, he repeated the accusation in slow, lugubrious English: ‘You are the cruellest woman that ever lived.’ Hoerschelmann, he bitterly added, had agreed to any story she cared to invent in order to be rapidly rid of her; Hoerschelmann had willingly paid alimony, and he himself would willingly do the same.

  In Merchant’s Quay she placed her camera on the river wall and prepared herself to photograph, across the width of water, the Courts of Justice. She took the picture and said to herself then that she must be close to O’Neill’s Hotel. ‘Thaddeus Street? Am I near it?’ she asked a youth who had come to watch her at work. ‘Ah, you’re not,’ he said, and then directed her. She smiled at him and walked on.

  Why should she care about either of them? Was it not more important that she should dip with her camera into the souls of people than that she should bleakly please two German businessmen? They had come to her, demanding her, paying her compliments that were grotesque in their lavishness, pressing upon her adoration and passion. Yet between the moment of their warmest desire and the moment when they rejected her she had not altered. She was the same woman, thinking the same thoughts. She remembered suddenly the man she had sat next to on the plane and how he had not understood at all when she’d tried to explain that only human understanding could save the world in the long run. He had not been equipped to understand that mysteries had no right to exist because mysteries interfered with human understanding and with truth. How could Hoerschelmann or Hans-Otto have sympathy and love for the
man on the plane, or how could the man on the plane have sympathy and love for them, if they all appeared as mysterious and private figures? Her book about the old Sicilian priest, Tomaso Leoni, who had lost his faith, had brought her several thousand letters from all over the world, in many languages. Yet the story of Tomaso Leoni, told almost entirely in photographs, had been an extraordinarily personal one: there were few who could have shared the experiences of the old priest, the spiritual suffering that the lines on his face revealed, the loss and the emptiness in his life, and the agony that his peasant parishioners had suffered also. But thousands of hands had picked up pens and written to say that she had caused them to feel a nagging sorrow, to say she had caused them to understand the torment of all those strangers.

  ‘We must know one another,’ murmured Mrs Eckdorf, not smiling as she spoke. ‘Only that makes sense.’

  She walked on, noting tall houses that overlooked the river, where gracious living must once have thrived: sacking hung often where windows should have been, and people lived behind it. In other houses lace curtains trailed, grey and seeming damp. It was a city that was keen on curtains of lace, she’d noticed, and Venetian blinds, and gangling television aerials that made a pattern in the sky.

  All about her children ran, ragged and shrill, for ever begging. She saw advertisements for Crested Ten, which seemed to her too beautiful and strange a title to represent a kind of whiskey. She had seen, somewhere, the Machusla Ballroom and could not forget those two words strung together either, nor Sweet Afton Cigarettes, which had blinked at her from a neon sign. In St Stephen’s Green the air had been fresh like country air, but now a cloying smell, as though from creatures already dead, came from the river; and from some houses came the smell of poverty. We are fighting still were words she read, chalked on a boarded doorway.

  ‘Thaddeus Street?’ she said.

  She listened and continued on her way. She left the river behind her and turned to her left, up St Augustine Street. The shutter of her camera opened and closed repeatedly, she smiled politely at those who paused to examine her. She said to herself that she would return when there was fog, for already in her mind she could see the scene and its people on a day that was gloomier than this one. She saw the forms of men and women huddled in their clothes against a penetration of weather, she imagined buildings and patches of wasteland in a grey wash that would come out gorgeously in black and white.

  ‘Do you get much fog at all?’ she enquired of a middle-aged man carrying a basket.

  ‘Stuff in the air,’ explained Mrs Eckdorf when he did not reply. ‘Like thick mist.’

  The man looked at her, still not speaking.

  ‘Fog,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘You know.’

  ‘I know what fog is,’ said the man. ‘What about it?’

  ‘Do you get much?’

  The man walked on, pushing past Mrs Eckdorf, striking her knee with his basket. She turned to take a photograph of him and at that moment he also turned and told her to leave him alone.

  ‘I don’t mean now,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf, suddenly aware that there was a misunderstanding. ‘I mean in winter, sir. Fog in winter.’

  A woman with curlers in her hair, wheeling a pram containing a small chest of drawers, spoke to the man, whom she addressed as Mr Greevy. He said that Mrs Eckdorf was drunk.

  ‘No, no,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf, drawing back her lips and tinkling with professional laughter. ‘No, no, no, no. I was asking about fog,’ she said to the woman. ‘I like the effect in my photographs.’

  ‘Fog,’ said the woman.

  ‘I’m a photographer,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘My name is Ivy Eckdorf.’

  ‘There is no fog at all this time of the year,’ said the woman with the pram.

  ‘That is what I’m saying,’ agreed Mrs Eckdorf, trying to smile at the woman and at Mr Greevy, although neither of them was smiling at her. ‘What I am saying is that I would like to return at the time of year when the fogs come.’

  She had moved closer to them. ‘What awfully nice cloth!’ she said, feeling the lapel of Mr Greevy’s serge jacket. He was about to protest and then he changed his mind. He eyed Mrs Eckdorf’s handbag and her camera and her pale linen clothes. He removed his hat and held it in his hand, in the same hand that already held the basket.

  ‘Are you a tourist?’ the woman asked.

  ‘No, no. I’m here after local interest. I’m here to take photographs and I’d like to take some more, quite honestly, when the fogs descend. If they descend, which is what I am asking you. I’m not myself German, if that’s what worries you. I was born in England.’

  ‘We don’t get much fog,’ said the woman. ‘Ah, well, we do the odd time, coming up off the river, only it doesn’t last long.’

  ‘We would get a night of it,’ said Mr Greevy in a notably altered manner, ‘and then again we wouldn’t see a sign of it for the winter. It comes and goes, the fog we have.’

  ‘We had it around Christmas. It came off the river two days before Christmas and we had it for a week. D’you remember that?’ the woman said to Mr Greevy, and he nodded his head.

  ‘I have the wife in hospital,’ he said, addressing himself directly to Mrs Eckdorf, ‘with broken knees.’

  ‘God, isn’t that shocking!’ cried the woman with the pram. ‘Is she bad, Mr Greevy?’

  ‘She’s not so hot at all. She came down off a ladder,’ Mr Greevy said to Mrs Eckdorf, ‘when she was repairing a ceiling. I’m off work myself for the last three years.’

  ‘Stand just as you are, the two of you,’ requested Mrs Eckdorf. She stepped back and lifted her camera.

  ‘Any assistance I was offered,’ said Mr Greevy, ‘I would take.’

  The Mamiya performed, Mrs Eckdorf smiled. ‘It must look magnificent,’ she said, sweeping her arm about her. ‘The fog like a halo on everything.’

  The woman left her pram beside Mr Greevy and came close to Mrs Eckdorf in order to whisper in her ear. Mr Greevy turned his head away.

  ‘A decenter man never walked the streets,’ said the woman. ‘A few bob would see him right for a day or two.’

  ‘My dear, I’m as penurious as any of you,’ murmured Mrs Eckdorf.

  She touched the woman on the shoulder and walked briskly off. It was marvellous, she thought, when they asked you for money: she had seen them, all over the world, becoming completely natural when the thought of money entered their minds, which was the moment to give the Mamiya its head. When everyone became respectable and well-to-do, Mrs Eckdorf reflected, there would be no more local interest, and the loss would be more considerable than anyone had ever dreamed it could be.

  Behind her she could hear the voices of Mr Greevy and the woman, both employing obscene language in their abuse of her. She wondered about the couple and about the card-sharpers in Bachelors’ Walk and the elderly woman who had begged in St Stephen’s Green. Occasionally, having entered into conversation with a person on a street, she managed to return to the house of the person in order to learn more, in order to steep herself in the background before calling again on her camera. Although interesting, none of the persons she had encountered that morning had seemed to her to justify the effort of deeper investigation that a return to the home involved. Mrs Eckdorf saw in the distance the modern building of the Coombe Maternity Hospital, where twins that morning had been safely delivered. She passed along Marrowbone Lane, moving close to Thaddeus Street.

  The two men ate their breakfast in silence. When he had finished his, Eugene rose and took a shaving-brush and a razor from one of the window-sills and placed them ready on the draining-board. He had poured himself three cups of tea, he had eaten with pleasure his share of the herrings and a few slices of bread. On his plate lay bones and roe. ‘Well, they were fresh today,’ he remarked. ‘As fresh as a daisy, O’Shea.’

  As he crossed to the range with an empty cup in order to get hot water from the kettle, he saw that O’Shea was apparently in a sulk, staring at the brown tea-pot. O’Shea always ate
the roe and the bones of herrings: his plate was empty now, seeming almost as if it had been washed and dried because O’Shea had wiped it repeatedly with pieces of buttered bread. That is the difference between us, thought Eugene: he is a neat and tidy man, he does not enjoy a drink, nor the company of others, he takes life hard, he cannot have dreams at night. O’Shea would spend the whole day brushing the carpet on the stairs of the hotel, raising a dust that settled elsewhere. He would clean the red and green panes in the glass of the entrance doors; he would spend five minutes rubbing at the pan he had fried the herrings on. Eugene sighed, shaking his head slightly. He poured boiling water into the cup and returned with it to the sink. He surveyed his face in a small mirror that hung from a nail between the windows. ‘We’ve run out of shaving soap,’ he said.

  ‘She could be dead for all you care, Mr Sinnott.’

  Eugene, used to the suddenness of this, replied quickly.

  ‘My mother is not dead,’ he said.

  ‘She was in a room one time where a fly was on the window-pane. She signalled to me to let the creature out.’

  Eugene laughed, and O’Shea felt tears coming to his eyes. This man understood nothing, he remarked to himself, and he prayed quietly, in his mind, without moving his lips. Make him gentle like his mother, he asked. He would happily do all that was required of him, he promised, if only this man would not be as he was.

  ‘Someone else,’ said O’Shea, ‘would have told me to take the fly’s life. That is the difference with her.’

  Eugene dipped his shaving-brush into the hot water and tried to entice a lather from a piece of kitchen soap. He shaved for a time in silence. Then he said:

  ‘Did you see Yellow Printer is drawn for trap four? Trap four is a big handicap in a Derby final.’

  ‘Mr Sinnott, she has no use for another pencil-sharpener. When I was up with her breakfast I counted fourteen pencil-sharpeners.’