Goosefoot, page 3
They parted outside the pub an hour later, but before he said goodbye he put his hand in his pocket and drew out two green and red balloons.
“Here, take this home and blow it up at leisure.” He handed her the green one.
“Now, why should I do that?”
“Try it and see. It can be very relaxing after a grueling day.”
“Are you going to blow yours up?”
“Oh, yes, when I get home.”
She put the balloon in her handbag so as not to offend him and walked back to the guest house with the feeling that the city was as mysterious as the country. The advertisement said to ring after seven, so she rang at half-past six in the hope that she might be first. The phone rang for two minutes and, as she was about to put it down, she heard a weak “hello” from the other end. It was an unusual voice, quiet as a whisper, a mere exhalation above the muffled crackle of the line, and it said that she could call round in twenty minutes but not after forty as the owner of the whisper was going out. Half an hour later she paused before a red-brick and pebble-dash house in Lazar’s Park, and a quiet wraith of a girl led her up the stairs to the second floor. The flat consisted of a living room facing south, a bedroom facing north, and a curtained-off kitchenette from which came the reek of fried steak and onions. She liked the living room best because the sparseness of the furniture gave an impression of light and space. The bedroom on the other hand was cramped and dark, dominated by an enormous double bed that looked like a too-high trampoline.
“That’s the grand lit,” came the hesitant whisper. “As you can see, it’s a cozy flat. The only drawback is the double bed. If you come, we’ll have to share it, and it isn’t everyone who likes sharing a bed. I myself wouldn’t share with everyone, and not everyone would want to share with me.”
“It’s a tricky business but I’m willing to take a chance,” said Patricia.
“First, we’ll talk over coffee and then we’ll both know better. I’m Monica Quigley.”
“And I’m Patricia Teeling. I’m a science teacher, new to the town, just up from the country.”
“Don’t worry about that. I’m a culshie too.”
Monica made coffee and sat on a faded sofa bearing pictures of a pink kingfisher in action. She was small and thin with yellowy skin and darkly darting eyes that kept returning to the ring on the second finger of her left hand. She had black, straight hair like an Indian, which appeared as a shadow on her upper lip and as a fine net on the white shins of her unstockinged legs. Everything about her was petite, and Patricia felt that she was the most delicately formed creature she had seen since the death of her pet rabbit when she was seven. Yet, in sitting upright on the edge of the sofa, she gave the impression of extreme alertness, of a hungry cat gathering strength for a spring.
They talked about the cost of living and letting live, about the jobs they did, and about what they both liked to do in the evenings, and perhaps because Patricia had just drunk two pints of stout they both found themselves laughing.
“Do you mind if I ask you a personal question?” Monica said.
“I’ll tell you when I hear it,” Patricia smiled.
“If you think it too personal, you needn’t answer.”
“What is it?”
“Are you experienced?”
“As a teacher?”
“No, as a woman.”
“I’ve sat with men in the back rows of cinemas and dealt with wandering hands,”
“I meant something more serious than hands.” Monica revolved her ring as if she were trying to find the combination of a safe, and her eyes shone like dark beads on yellow silk.
“What do you mean?”
“Are you a virgin?”
“Are you?”
“Yes.”
“I’m one too.”
“You’re not pretending?”
“Why should I pretend to something that most girls lose as easily as a paper handkerchief?”
“Would you call girls like that riff-raff?”
“No, but I would say that they think life simpler than it is.”
“If one of them came a cropper, would you enjoy a sense of schadenfreude?”
“Who is he when he’s at home?”
“Would you glory in the bad news?”
“I might in a curious way wish it had happened to me.”
“You’re not a puritan, then?”
“Now, you are being personal.”
“I ask only because I like risqué talk but not risky behavior.”
“Now can I ask you a personal question?” Patricia smiled.
“I’m from Ballyhaunis. There’s no such thing as a personal question in Ballyhaunis.”
“Why did you bring up virginity?”
“Because the last girl who shared this flat with me, Sarah-Jill, lost hers while she was here and lost what little dignity she had with it. Don’t think I’m a prude, because I’m not. It was just that she tried to make me feel inadequate. Sharing a bed is a personal thing. The sheets of a shared bed give off two smells, not one. I woke up one morning to find that the second smell was that of stale semen.”
“How did you know if you’re a virgin?”
“I’ve read all Henry Miller. He calls it jism, which, I think, is a distracting word. It makes me think of joss sticks.”
“Joss sticks are sweet-smelling,” said Patricia. “They also grow shorter as they burn.”
“If you want to share this flat with me, you’re welcome.” Monica rolled laughing, liquid eyes.
“I can’t help feeling that we’re two of a kind,” Patricia laughed.
“Before you say that, I’d like to ask you a final question. What name do you give the male sexual appendage?”
“Do you really need to know?”
“Sooner or later the conversation is bound to come round to it, and I believe in establishing the nomenclature in advance.”
“Being a virgin, I haven’t called it anything since I was a girl and played with my two brothers in the hayloft.”
“What did you call it then?”
“A lad most times, but sometimes a micky.”
“We’re too mature now to use childish language,” said Monica. “Sarah-Jill told me that her boyfriend, who was from Donegal, called it the Diúlach but she herself called it a cock, and that, I think, is vulgar.”
“It’s what men themselves call it, and they should know.”
“No, Patricia, we’ll have to find something less obvious in case we talk about it on buses or trains. Penis is too medical and flute has musical connotations that might suggest aberration. The Honorable Member for Cockshire is too English and—”
“I know,” said Patricia. “We’ll call it the membrum virile and then, if necessary, we can talk about it in the company of men since so few of them know Latin.”
“Brilliant,” said Monica. “We’ll call it simply the membrum because it might be unscholarly to imply that all membra are virile. I now see that you and I are going to get on well together.”
“I’d like to move in tomorrow evening if it’s all right with you.”
“I’ll now take you downstairs to meet the landlord, Mr. Mullally. He’s very old, very deaf, and absolutely daft about horses. Since Mrs. Mullally died last year all he does is study form. When she was alive, he used to cook and wash for her, and she would sit all day in the armchair and tell him how much better she could do everything herself if only he would cure her arthritis.”
Mr. Mullally was in his armchair surrounded by the racing pages of The Irish Times, The Daily Telegraph, and The Daily Express. He was tall and fragile with a bony head on which four long strands of hair ran backward like twin rail tracks. His ears and fingernails were also long, his loose cardigan was moth-eaten, and his wet lower lip drooped over a chin which had long since receded into his neck.
“This is Patricia Teeling,” Monica shouted. “She’ll be sharing the flat with me from tomorrow.”
“Sir Launfal will win the 3:15 at Doncaster tomorrow, mark my words. He’ll win by a short head from Trilby.”
“Can I get you anything from the shops tomorrow?” Monica asked.
“The last time I rode was with Larry Olivier in Henry V. I was only an extra, but he said I could handle a horse.”
“We must leave you.” Monica lingered by the door.
“ ‘He which hath no stomach to this fight,
Let him depart; his passport shall be made,
And crowns for convoy put into his purse.’”
“Goodbye,” said Patricia uneasily.
“What you girls need is a little touch of Larry in the night.” Mr. Mullally gave a cackle of a laugh which turned into a phlegm-laden splutter.
“I’ve never seen a man so old,” Patricia said outside the door. “He looks as if he were made from papier-mâché.”
“He’s a good landlord. He never hears a thing.”
As they came out of the dark passage into the hallway, Patricia glimpsed a man’s backside vanishing up the stairs.
“If you listen now, you’ll hear the crash of cutlery,” said Monica. “He’s an Englishman by the name of Baggotty and he beats his wife if he doesn’t like his dinner.”
3
The morning was clear and windless as she walked the short distance between Lazar’s Park and the school. The sun came through the tracery of dirt in the top corners of the windows onto the heads of the juniors as she told them about atmospheric pressure and how to construct a simple manometer. She opened a window to let in the crispness of the morning, noting that God, enjoying one of his many free periods, was walking in the Quad with his forefinger in a black notebook. She watched him approach the lab with a handkerchief to his moustache but before he reached the door he veered and vanished from view. Explaining why a manometer is a more sensitive instrument than a Bourdon gauge, she walked to the back of the class to find him sitting outside under the window like a red-brown stag with upturned nose, already assessing her performance in her second week.
“In the last few years the manometer has been superseded by the electrical pressure sensor,” she said curtly, snapping the window closed.
At lunchtime Robert Foxley drew her attention to God’s white socks.
“They’re pure wool, knitted by his wife,” he said. “She’s afraid he’ll catch his death spying under windows during classes. I noticed he was paying not a little attention to the science lab this morning.”
They both went into the staff room, where their colleagues were smoking like chimneys, out of the sight of the pupils, who were no doubt smoking in the lavatories.
“God is sporting his woolen socks rather early this term,” said the history master. “Last year he didn’t don them till after Michaelmas.”
“He must be planning a change in the weather,” said the classics master. “His socks are a barometer, an aneroid barometer in the sense that they are dry, not wet.”
“Aneroid meaning ‘not wet,’” said the Irish master, who had a passion for conversational annotation.
“We are aware of that,” the classics master reproved.
“Do you mean that his feet don’t sweat?” the Irish master inquired.
“Like all students of Irish literature you have an unerring nose for the obvious,” the classics master replied.
“He should not have donned his woolen socks so early,” the Irish master pursued. “As they say in the Gaeltacht, do not make or break a custom.”
The classics master turned to Patricia.
“A word from the wise.” He took her arm. “I saw you close your window this morning while God was eavesdropping. A tactical error, my dear. Better to let him hear, to let him hear you make a deliberate mistake. He will then take you aside to put you right and, having proved that the headmaster knows more than the master, he will leave you in peace for the rest of the term. Your problem is not a simple one because he knows even less science than Latin. Perhaps you could leave a misspelled word on the blackboard—”
“Isotopes for isotropes,” laughed Foxley.
“Brilliant,” said the classics master. “He will then tell you that the correct form is isotropes, you with tongue in cheek will agree, and headmasterly honor will be satisfied.”
After classes Robert Foxley took her to McGuffin’s to celebrate with a drink and a multicolored balloon. She had come to like his sober demeanor and grave intonation, rare in a man of twenty-five and rarer in a man who was not lacking in humor. She also liked him for refusing to allow her to buy him a drink. He was old-fashioned and reserved, unlike those modern whippersnappers who expect the girls they take out to buy drink for drink. She was reluctant to impose on him, however; so when he asked her if she would like another pint, she said that she must go, that she had some chores to do before dinner. He then gave her a pear-shaped balloon, reserving for himself a long-shaped one, which he blew up until it was as big as a marrow. For a moment he held it out vertically in front of her, then pricked it with a pin from his lapel and said, “Sic transit gloria mundi.”
“Why did you do that?” the barman asked.
“I’ve got plenty more at home,” said Foxley.
She walked back to Lazar’s Park with a feeling of dreamful unreality brought on by the drink and the unexpected bursting of the balloon. On the hallway table was a letter from her mother, which made her think of the dairy, the farmyard, and the balance which hung from a beam in the barn. As she smiled at the “S.A.G.” on the back of the envelope, a disheveled young woman opened the door. She was laden with shopping, three parcels in one hand and two carrier bags in the other; and as she put them down, her large mirrorlike spectacles slid to the tip of her curt-looking nose. She looked vaguely graceless, perhaps harassed, and she reminded Patricia of a backward boy to whom she had given an imposition that morning.
“You live upstairs?” the woman asked. “I’m Gladys Baggotty, I live in the first-floor flat.”
She smiled uncertainly at the stained glass of the hall window, which cast a green triangle on the pallor of her cheek. Patricia took a backward step as if to avoid an eye that could see only incipient necrosis.
“I’m Patricia Teeling. How do you do?”
“I’m exhausted, if you must know. I’ve been shopping in Grafton Street—it’s so expensive—and my feet and back are killing me. The first thing I’m going to do is make a nice cup of coffee. Perhaps you’d like one too?”
Her thin, damp hair barely covered her ears. Little beads of sweat had formed on her upper lip. She was fleshless and fragile, the kind of woman who would have fainted regularly had she lived in the nineteenth century.
“I mustn’t. I should be getting the dinner,” Patricia said.
“Oh, come on. I’ve got a Bewley’s brack. I never come home from Grafton Street without one.”
Patricia followed the thin, flat shoes, calfless legs, and narrow bottom up the stairs. The young woman seemed a strange, otherworldly woman, a woman you could easily imagine being beaten after dinner every evening and accepting it as part of the inexorable scheme of things.
The flat was full of creaky furniture and a smell of mice that was sharpest by the kitchen door, and the dark green walls were hung with tiny modern paintings of indeterminate horsemen, ancient warriors perhaps returning in defeat from battle. The warriors were shadowy silhouettes, and the sky behind them, a burning yellow, made windows of sunlight in the gloom of the walls and seemed to extinguish what little brightness came through the net curtains of the real window.
Mrs. Baggotty vanished into the kitchen, from which soon came the whine of an electric coffee grinder. Patricia sat on a frayed sofa with patched cushions and stared at one of the warrior horsemen, who seemed to be wearing a high-heeled shoe, and she found herself thinking that people fail to fulfill themselves in many ways. Mrs. Baggotty came back with the coffee and brack and sat on the other frayed sofa. It was lovely coffee, strong and hot; it could have been made only by a woman who appreciated good things and knew how to make them. In a word, Mrs. Baggotty wasn’t as helpless as she looked. Without spectacles, her face had a certain secret beauty that made her green eye shadow the natural concomitant of her porcelain-pale cheeks. Patricia had seen that face before. She had seen it in a painting, but she could not say when or where. She found herself warming to Mrs. Baggotty; she felt half-ashamed of the wish for withdrawal she experienced when she first looked at her in the hallway.
Mrs. Baggotty was not a conversationalist. She drank her coffee with absent-minded enjoyment, while Patricia made small talk about the fine weather, the price of vegetables, and Mr. Mullally. Yet Patricia did not feel uneasy in her company. Her silences were thoughtful, not embarrassed, and they made Patricia wonder about the nature of the man who could choose such a rare creature for a wife and then, if Monica was to be believed, ill-treat her. As Patricia put down her empty cup, Mrs. Baggotty suddenly remembered to say something.
“We could have had so much,” she mused. “If only Bernard were a different man. While he was a Fleet Street journalist, we were relatively well off. But the day he got the idea that he was an artist and gave up journalism to write put an end to all that. Now we never know where we are. He’s hopeless with money, and the worry of being without it keeps him from working. Some writers don’t need money, but Bernard needs more of it than many a banker. When he’s broke and unhappy what he writes is no good; and when I tell him so he says I’m being disloyal.”
She placed the cups and saucers on a tray as if she had never uttered a word, and Patricia thought that she would not speak again for perhaps another half-hour. She smiled sweetly, however, as Patricia rose to go.
Patricia was pleased to be alone again, sitting by the window of the living room, which Monica called the turret room because it was at the top of the house and seemed to overhang the street. The red-roofed houses on the other side looked only an arm’s length away and the narrow gateways between the hedges seemed far below. It was all an optical illusion, she told herself. The street was at least fourteen feet wide, and she was only three storeys up. She closed her eyes, grateful for the silence of the street and flat. Then the phone rang in the hallway, and as she went to the landing Mrs. Baggotty called up the stairs. Monica had rung to say that she would be working late at the bank and that she did not want dinner. Alone again, Patricia sat by the window and opened her mother’s letter:
