Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Read online

  ‘I know what you mean.’ He shaved again. He said he felt better. O’Shea began to speak but Eugene interrupted him. He said:

  ‘Johnny Basset says the Printer is in tip-top fettle. Did you ever think of racing your man there?’ He pointed his razor at the greyhound. He laughed, scraped foam and bristle from his neck. He rinsed the razor under the tap.

  ‘Mr Sinnott, would you not reconsider?’

  Eugene removed the blade and dried it on a towel. He wiped his face and put away his shaving things. Then he crossed the room to where O’Shea was standing.

  ‘Does it matter a damn?’ he said. ‘A sharpener with a globe on it, O’Shea, so that she can travel about on it: what’s wrong with that? Is she the Queen Mother, O’Shea, that you’re making a fuss? Is this joint Buckingham Palace? She’ll be ninety-two years of age.’

  ‘Mr Sinnott –’

  ‘Four or five people a year, O’Shea, come into this place. O’Neill’s Hotel has had its day, can’t you understand that? She’s a woman who never heard a human voice.’

  ‘She’s your mother, Mr Sinnott.’

  ‘She is.’

  ‘The hotel was famous once. The hotel was thronged from top to bottom –’

  ‘Things have changed, O’Shea. The area’s not what it was.’

  ‘You don’t care, Mr Sinnott. You’re down in Riordan’s drinking sherry –’

  ‘I am, O’Shea.’

  Mechanically, Eugene offered O’Shea a cigarette but O’Shea didn’t take one. Is it a sin that they go to Mass with nothing on their heads? he had written. What’s wrong with the world, Mrs Sinnott?

  ‘Why wouldn’t I drink sherry?’ enquired Eugene. ‘I have the one life only.’

  He put on his collar and tie, and as he completed the task a voice called out in O’Neill’s Hotel, demanding instant attention.

  The two men, although not in the mood for this, looked at one another. The voice continued. O’Shea quietly opened the door and they listened, standing together in the kitchen passage.

  ‘Mein Herz ist voller Liebe fur alle Menschen,’ cried Mrs Eckdorf. ‘t jemand da?’

  ‘It’s not real,’ said O’Shea in a whisper. ‘There’s some ghostly thing in the hall.’ But Eugene said the voice did not come from a ghost but from a person who was possessed of a distressed mind. ‘A female lunatic,’ he said.

  ‘Wer ist es?’ cried Mrs Eckdorf, and Eugene repeated his opinion. O’Shea shook his head. He began to say something, and then paused. They remained as they stood, listening to the silence until they heard Mrs Eckdorf’s voice again, more quietly bringing to them words from a German song.

  ‘My God!’ murmured O’Shea. He looked at Eugene, trying to catch his eye and finding himself instead staring at the yellow distemper of the passage wall.

  ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen,’ sang Mrs Eckdorf, lending the words a morose harmony of her own. ‘Es ist ein Ros’ entsprungen.’

  In a brown suit, with a watch-chain running across his stomach from one pocket of his waistcoat to another, Mr Smedley had that morning, while Mrs Eckdorf dawdled, hurried through the city streets from one business appointment to another. Now, finding time between one engagement and the next, he paused in a public house and dropped into an enquiring conversation with its barman, being anxious to establish, even at this early hour, the extent and availability of the city’s fleshly pleasures. The barman, having listened to his queries, offered no reply.

  ‘You know the kind of thing I mean,’ urged Mr Smedley with a smile. ‘I’m a man of vigour.’

  ‘Keep talk of that nature to yourself, please,’ replied the barman unpleasantly. ‘We make do with our wives in this town.’

  5

  ‘The Excelsior Bar of Riordan’s public house was a dimly lit place, with walls that had been painted pink by the late Mr Riordan in pursuit of his belief that inebriation was pleasanter if induced in an atmosphere of rosiness, which was something he had read in a trade magazine. In front of the dark upholstered seating that lined these walls, tables were spaced so that a customer could be alone, a little away from the other customers, in order to meditate or doze. There was matting on the floor that absorbed the sound of footsteps, and there was no television set.

  Mr Riordan, having served behind his own bar for sixty-two years, had become increasingly interested in the process of inebriation. He enjoyed observing his customers becoming more like themselves; he said it was a joyful thing, and even on mornings when the back lavatory was not a pleasant place to enter Mr Riordan had not shifted from his principles, the chief of which was that only in intoxication were people truly happy. He had given the Excelsior Bar its name in 1933, having been reading in a trade magazine about the cocktail bars of Manhattan, which seemed to him to be curiously and aptly titled. After his death the house had fallen into the hands of his son-in-law, Edward Trump, who had made few changes. He had kept the Excelsior Bar as a small and quiet place that few people entered, a greater number being alienated by all that Mr Riordan had hoped would attract them. It was mainly Eugene Sinnott, Morrissey, Agnes Quin, and a woman called Mrs Dargan, who enjoyed the pink haze of the Excelsior Bar these days: they welcomed a place they could call their own, with the sound of music coming lightly from the television in the public bar and the opportunity for peaceful conversation.

  On the morning of August 9th Morrissey and Agnes Quin were alone in the bar. Like Morrissey, Agnes Quin was dark-haired, but a person of greater proportions than Morrissey, a foot taller, loose-limbed and fleshy, with hair to her shoulders. She was more smartly turned out than he: small silver-coloured ear-rings pierced her ears, her shoes were smart but comfortable, chosen for walking like Mrs Eckdorf’s had been. She wore, this morning, a purple dress and carried a patent-leather handbag. Her face was free of make-up. Her puffed, bruised-looking lips hid teeth that were discoloured and large. Her blue eyes were cautious, constantly on the watch.

  ‘I got her this,’ said Morrissey, taking from his pocket a brooch in the shape of a spider. A green piece of glass formed the body, the legs were of gold-coloured wire. It was attached to a square of cardboard on which a price had been heavily marked.

  ‘Two pounds ten,’ said Agnes Quin.

  ‘You wouldn’t stint yourself,’ said Morrissey. ‘You’d do the best you could on an old woman’s birthday.’

  ‘I’m giving her a cup I saw.’

  ‘A cup, Agnes?’

  ‘A special one she could have for herself. I saw it in a window on the Quays.’

  ‘A gold cup is it?’

  ‘A cup with flowers on it. With a saucer.’

  ‘Isn’t that a peculiar thing to give, Agnes? The legs on that spider are gold, so the man said. That’s a jewel in the middle.’

  He ran his comb through his hair. He looked at the comb after he’d done that and made a dissatisfied noise with his lips. ‘Give us two more bottles,’ he called out. He rose and approached the bar. ‘Isn’t that a grand day for you, Eddie?’ he said.

  ‘There’s rain on the way,’ said Eddie Trump, passing over the bottled stout and receiving payment. ‘It was on the wireless: a deluge from the West.’

  ‘I hate rain,’ said Morrissey, thinking that business was difficult in the rain, especially heavy rain. Hanging about the streets, following men into public houses and trying when you were dripping wet to talk to them about their desires wasn’t as pleasant as it might be. Rain put a damper on things, as Morrissey had often observed

  ‘Eugene’s late this morning,’ remarked Eddie Trump, a big lugubrious man in an apron. Morrissey, receiving his change, agreed that this was so. He returned to Agnes Quin and poured them each a further glass of stout. When he’d finished he took his comb from his pocket and showed it to her. ‘Is that dandruff?’ he said.

  She shook her head, saying it was more likely grit from the air.

  ‘It’s a filthy old town.’ Morrissey returned the comb to his pocket. He made a noise in his nose. He said:

  ‘I
sn’t it a great brooch I got her?’

  ‘Great.’

  The nuns had given her the name Agnes Quin. Sister Tracy, old and forgetful about what should be said and what withheld, had told her that a man had come to the convent in the middle of one night and had banged about, shouting for the Reverend Mother, who rose from her bed to see him. ‘Will you look after that thing?’ he had said, handing her a living baby. They had attempted to restrain the man, they had pointed out that the facilities at the convent could not be so unorthodoxly used. ‘You’re there for the homeless, aren’t you?’ the man had replied. ‘What’s an orphan-house for?’ He pushed his way from the convent, and when, years later, it became known that Sister Tracy had passed the story on to the child who was presumably his daughter, this elderly forgetful nun wept when she was reprimanded. ‘It’s not an easy life, Agnes,’ the Reverend Mother had said soon after that. ‘It must fill you completely; you must be surer about this than you have ever been sure of anything before.’ She had been sure: she had seen herself clearly in the ascetic habit, a calm novice, compassionate and gentle. She had said so to her Reverend Mother, but her Reverend Mother had quietly replied that all that might not be enough. And then one day the convent orphanage was visited by a woman who was often spoken of, a kindly friend of the orphanage, a woman known to love orphans for their own sake, a Mrs Sinnott. ‘It is a beautiful thing, Mrs Sinnott had written, but it is hard too, as Reverend Mother has warned you. If you do not in the end have the vocation come out and see us: O’Neill’s Hotel in Thaddeus Street. Agnes promised that she would, but a number of years later, on her fifteenth birthday, when she mentioned her desire to do so, that same Reverend Mother shook her head. Hadn’t she noticed, she asked, that Mrs Sinnott had not been to see them for a long time now? O’Neill’s Hotel, she said, had fallen on sad times: no longer were there positions there for young orphan girls. She smiled. ‘You’ve been lucky,’ she said. ‘We’ve found you a place in Ringsend.’

  Agnes left the convent the following Sunday evening, knowing that the nuns and the orphans were praying for her and would continue to do so. She went to work for the English, living with them above their hardware shop, looking smart, so Mrs English said, in a green overall that Mrs English herself, having put on weight, had no longer a use for. She learned to sell nails of different lengths, and bolts and screws for metal or wood, and paraffin oil and cup-hooks, quite soon becoming swift at the task. ‘She’s taken to it like a duck to water,’ Mrs English said, and Mr English agreed.

  At that time she used to go for walks with a boy who whispered often that he loved her, until one night, behind the Electricity Works, he had taken liberties with her unresisting body and afterwards had whispered nothing more at all. He had walked home beside her in silence and she had felt him thinking that he had performed a dirty action. After that, he wasn’t on the lookout for her as he had been in the past, to suggest walks together to Poolbeg Lighthouse. She confessed the sin and accepted the penance, with the face of the boy still vivid in her mind, and his hands seeming to caress her body while the priest’s voice murmured. A little while later, unable to restrain herself, she went to the shoe-shop where he worked. He was going to marry a girl from Tallagh, he said, and she wondered if he had said to himself that night behind the Electricity Works that in spite of love he could not marry her because she had not resisted, because she hadn’t thought to say that what he demanded was a sin. He knelt before her in the shoe-shop, removing old shoes from her feet and placing on them new ones. The back of his waistcoat was black and shiny and there were rubber bands on his arms to protect his shirt-cuffs from the footwear of the customers. He pressed the leather of the shoes to discover where her toes were. He was happier doing that, she thought, than doing what he had done before, ‘Ah God, you look great in them,’ he said, and she went away with the shoes on her feet and her old ones in a paper bag.

  She was courted next by a man called Doyle, whom she met in the Crystal Ballroom. He had said he had money and the expectation of more as a clerk with responsibility: he was securely employed in the offices of a firm that manufactured lemonade and he hinted that there was a tinned-meat business, down near Baltinglass, that would come his way any day now. It became a custom between them to go once a week to the cinema, and as soon as they took their seats the lemonade clerk would spread his waterproof coat over their knees and a few minutes later Agnes would feel one of his roughened hands creeping about beneath her clothes. Once or twice, while his fingers struggled with some difficulty in her garments, she had glanced at him, but always his full attention appeared to be on the screen. He would even give a laugh at some amusing incident in the film, and occasionally he turned to her with a roar of delight and asked her if she’d ever heard anything better. When they had tea and a grill after the film he talked only about inheriting the Baltinglass meat business. ‘I wonder will I ever marry?’ he now and again mused, as though in the company of his mother, of whom he spoke a lot, or with a stranger. He ate heartily on these occasions, usually asking the waitress to bring a further supply of rashers.

  Every Tuesday she went out with him, and when he left her at night – a street or two away from the hardware shop because, he explained, he didn’t want the Englishes to see him – she would walk slowly home, thinking of what life would be like with this man who might one day suggest that they should share it as a man and wife. He had said that since his childhood he had had a wish to live in Drumcondra, and she imagined that: the two of them in a house in Drumcondra and Doyle returning one day and saying he had received his inheritance, that the meat business in Baltinglass was his at last. But often she saw him in a different mood and somehow it seemed more real. A letter would arrive to say that the meat business was bankrupt and would be a debt to inherit, and he would buckle himself into his waterproof coat and go out without eating anything and later return unruly and intoxicated. She imagined repairing his clothes and lifting from a floor his soiled shirts, his socks and his under-garments. She saw him on a chair removing his boots. She heard him whistling and then he looked up to tell her more about his mother, who had died ten years ago. The slight smell he gave off would occasionally enter her nostrils as she walked away from him, back to the Englishes’ shop. As she smelt it, she could see a whole life clearly: Doyle and herself, Doyle assaulting her in silence in a bed, and eight of Doyle’s children. She imagined his naked body.

  ‘Excuse me, girl,’ a man said to her one night in Ringsend, after Doyle had left her. ‘D’you know where South Lotts Road is?’

  There was a strawberry mark on the man’s face, stretching from the centre of his left cheek to his forehead, enclosing his left eye. He wore glasses with pale rims. He was smiling at her.

  ‘Near Bath Avenue?’ he said interrogatively. ‘Or am I walking in the incorrect direction?’ He was a middle-aged man, small and stout, wearing dark clothes: before she noticed his tie she took him to be a priest.

  ‘Over the bridge,’ she said. ‘Turn left, round by the greyhound track.’

  ‘Would you take a drink at all?’

  ‘Pardon?’

  ‘Would you join me in a glass of refreshment?’

  She watched a drizzle falling on his features, as she had watched it five minutes ago falling on the features of the lemonade clerk. Doyle had stood by a street-light, saying there was a good thing on at the Capitol next week and that they’d meet outside the cinema at half-past six. ‘You’re getting wet,’ she had said. He had lifted his hand to his forehead to wipe the damp from it. He agreed that he was getting wet, and went away.

  ‘It’s a poor night,’ the man with the strawberry mark observed.

  ‘A glass of refreshment sets you up.’

  He spoke with a soft accent, as if he came from a long way away; there was nothing nasal about his voice; he was not a Dublin man.

  ‘Ah, no,’ she said. ‘No, no. It’s very good of you. Thank you very much.’

  She remembered, years afterwards, how
she had said to herself that he was not a Dublin man since he didn’t have the nasal sound. She had thought of Cavan or Leitrim without quite knowing what men from those parts spoke like, guessing in her mind. Looking back, she felt that she had known that something was happening, that her brain was piecing together facts in her life while the man spoke to her and as she thanked him for his offer. Seeing the incident from a distance, it seemed that as they stood in the drizzle Sister Tracy was speaking about the advent of her father at the convent, and that Doyle’s fingers were on her flesh.

  ‘What harm’ll it do you?’ said the man with the strawberry mark. His left hand had taken her arm. He was smiling at her more than before, his face with the drizzle on it was turned towards her the way it never occurred to Doyle to turn his. ‘A ginger ale,’ said the man, ‘and a small drop in it. That could cheer the two of us up, you know.’

  She smiled back at him, beginning to shake her head and then not shaking it at all.

  ‘There’s a place called Phelan’s I saw,’ he said. ‘It’ll do us rightly.’

  She had known as she walked with him what was going to happen and she had been seized in those moments with a sudden bitterness. Faces appeared before her as she kept up with him in the rain: the faces of her customers in the hardware shop, of the Englishes, the face of the Reverend Mother and the face of Doyle. She had stood while the green overall was fitted on her body, with love she had given her body to a salesman of shoes who had loved her then too. She felt she could have stabbed their faces now. She could have watched them burn.

  It does you good,’ he said in the bar, and she nodded. It was near to closing time, she reminded him: he should fetch them a couple more. He went away to do so, laughing delightedly.

  He put his arm around her as they walked from the public house. He led her towards the sea, along the dockside near Thorncastle Street. ‘Ah God, it was great meeting you,’ he said. He pressed her body with his arm and drew her into the shadows among timber crates. He smiled at her again. She reached out her hand to touch the skin of his face, asking him for money.