Fathers Come First Page 7

  I wondered why she left—all those men, why come back to Ireland? She was quick to see I was becoming skeptical. ‘Tell me about yourself. What was Gay Paree like then? Go on, tell it all.’

  All. I told about Henri. I told about our making love. I didn’t tell about his creeping off to Madame’s bedroom. I said, I crept off to Monsieur’s bedroom. I said Monsieur and I had a passionate affair. I had Monsieur and I leaping at each other like mad beasts whenever Madame’s back was turned.

  Valerie said, ‘Jaysus, I know. Once you get a taste for it you can’t stop.’ I almost laughed then but choked into the coffee cup, ‘Mmm.’

  It was a taste for loneliness, but a new kind of taste. Not the loneliness of being home, being ten or twelve or fifteen. That was quiet and formal and stretched, how the sea on a dull day stretches to the horizon, stiff and flat. Not even the loneliness of school, of lying in your bed, of wondering when would life start with all the love and roses and linked arms. No, quite a new taste. Of being taken and held and touched. Of being left. Forbidden tastes—like Eve in the Garden of Eden. A beautiful, beautiful fruit. She tastes it. Aha! Down they come on her. Out you go my dear, this minute, the wilderness awaits you ...

  Valerie had a job in a boutique just down the road. She said to come down with her and have a look around. The boutique was run by this girl with very straight black hair and clear skin. She wore a long dress, a sort of elongated t-shirt. You could see her hipbones under the dress. Valerie introduced us and the girl gave a quick up-down look. Too tall? Or short? Or fat? Or thin? She had her dresses to sell and the bodies had to fit them. Not, as you might think, the other way around.

  This girl must have been only three or four years older than us. Yet, she was hard—her face was a mask, a beautiful, made-up, polished mask, but the mask had also become her face. She said, ‘Make us a cup of coffee, Val, before we re-open.’ Valerie was in awe of her, you could see that. She lit up a cigarette and then walked over to one of these tree-type hat stands where the clothes were hanging on big red and purple hangers. ‘Try this on,’ she said to me. She handed me a long red dress, the back criss-cross tied like tennis shoes or a German sausage.

  I went into one of these changing cubicles. My head stuck out over the top. My hands were sticky. I was sure I’d mark the dress, ruin it. I came out. The girl came over and stood me in front of a mirror. This way, that way, pulling, fluffing my hair out, smoothing the dress over my behind, tucking it up under my bosoms. Unembarrassed, I could have been a dressmaker’s dummy, the way this girl touched me, unashamedly.

  She stood back. ‘Have you ever tried modelling?’

  ‘No,’ I said, giggling. Me, a model?

  ‘You should,’ she said. She didn’t notice the giggle. ‘You’ve got a good figure; with a bit of training I think you’d make a very good model. Off and on we need someone to model our stuff—we have sort of fashion show happenings in the street to advertise our wares.’

  I looked at myself in the mirror. A white face, black hair. Green eyes. ‘A real colleen,’ one of the teachers at school had said, and had made me Caitlin Ni Houlihan in her history play.

  The coffee was ready. I took the dress off. The girl was rearranging things in the window. She’d forgotten? Valerie and I drank our coffee. Valerie grinning—she’d introduced me, she was part of it.

  I said I must go. The girl said, ‘Bye now.’ Obviously she’d forgotten. She was pinning back a jersey dress on a plaster model in the tiny window.

  I didn’t get home till late that afternoon. My father said he wanted to talk to me in his study. When I was small I used to go and sit in his study. He had a big oaken desk and I used to climb under the arch where your knees were supposed to go and sit there while he worked. I can still hear his pen squeaking across the paper over my head. That was before he remarried. By then I was too big to sit in there anyway.

  ‘Elizabeth, my dear child’ he started. It was going to be serious. Elizabeth, my dear child. He said, ‘Your stepmother and I are worried about you. Spending so much time in your room, or mooning about the house. It’s not good, you know, at your age.’ One hand was resting on his desk, on top of a manuscript. Mary must have said, ‘I think you should talk to Elizabeth.’ He’d never have thought of it himself.

  I took a cigarette out of my bag and lit it. He looked surprised. He knew so little about me really. I’d been smoking for four weeks, ever since I came back from Paris. He hadn’t noticed.

  He looked at his desk and then at me. What had Mary said to him? He said, ‘I think you should get a job really. Just to get you out of the house a bit. I’ve been talking to some people at the College.’

  So they’d arranged it already. I felt bitter, and then I didn’t mind. Why not? Perhaps a job would be better than hanging around here. College? I might meet some people, make friends.

  ‘You should be getting around a bit, making friends, meeting people. You’re only young once.’ He made eighteen sound like a heart condition. He said, ‘We could set off together in the mornings—like proper workers.’ That was the bargain then. The two of you.

  ‘What sort of job might I do?’ I liked the thought of us setting off together in the mornings in his little grey Fiat.

  The people at the College said I could have a job as a filing clerk in the library. My pay would be five pounds, ten shillings a week and I could eat lunch in the college canteen.

  The library was run by a woman called Miss Gore-Browne. ‘Browne with an E’ she’d say whenever she spelled her name for anyone. She wore long tweed skirts and her bosom sagged inside heavy cardigans. Mary said she was ‘aristocracy come down in the world’. She had BO and her bedsitter in Sandymount was filled with heavy dark furniture—all she could save from the auction of her family’s country seat in Sligo. Miss Gore-Browne knew every book in the library. The students would think up really obscure volumes to ask her about and she’d be striding across the library and picking it out, whistling a zzz through her teeth.

  I hated the students. It was like a club, their College. They’d smell an outsider by instinct. The students with their easygoing ways and their long hair and their freedom—they’d cut you dead as quick as look at you if you weren’t one yourself. Walking across the quadrangle became a torture; I was always waiting to slip on the cobblestones, or for my knickers to fall down, or something. The students would be there, waiting. I sat in the office next door to the library and kept the index up to date and licked envelopes and made tea and sometimes read books that came in.

  I only ate in the canteen once. I sat by myself at a table and ate off a tin tray. Irish stew, jelly and cream, coffee and a cake. We’d all gone shuff-shuffling up the line, picking out things from under glass covers, like well-trained animals: pick, pick. Some of the girls just had crackers and cheese and milk, others went overboard and grasped things and pushed their way to the tables to sit down and you could almost see their faces flat into the dish, gobbling.

  Girls always seemed to be like that, either picking or stuffing.

  I thought the meal would never be over. The canteen was very hot and the students were all shouting at each other across tables and banging their trays down. I felt the weight of my hand lifting the food up and my mouth opening and closing on it. The noise of chewing it and then swallowing it in lumps. I went through every piece. Getting up and walking out was going to be the hardest part. I knocked my bag against this boy’s head as I was leaving—’Look out will you,’ he said, turning, and I ran up the stairs and out of the College and down to the river and thought, I’ll never go back there, never.

  After that I went down to the river every lunchtime. I’d lean over the parapet and always expect to see something horrible floating just below the surface. The river was like a murderer.

  I thought I was very tragic. I thought if somebody tall and handsome and brave came up to me I’d tell him how sad I was. I’d tel
l them about Jack Hickey and about Henri, the blonde boy. I’d be mysterious. I’d say, ‘It all began with my father you know...’

  I’d go for walks and look at men and women together. I’d think some of those women were so damn ugly, and how did they do it? All of them with men linking their arms.

  A boyfriend. Somebody to go to the pictures with. Somebody to walk through College with and show those students. Somebody to say you’re this or you’re that. Somebody to hold you.

  How to go about it? Stand on the Metal Bridge with a sign round your neck: Please I need a friend? Pass a note to one of the students saying that you’d sleep with him? How do you get a boyfriend?

  —3—

  My father’s study at the College looked out on the old Irish houses of Parliament and down a wide street with four lanes of traffic and tall buildings on either side. Sometimes the buildings could be friendly, showing you their gothic tops or ornate, balconied attics. Other times they would threaten to crush you down flat.

  I used to sit in the study if I was early back from my lunch hour walk. If he was there we’d make coffee with the electric kettle Mary had given him, he’d read The Irish Times and I might just look out the window, or read a magazine that I’d bought at the bookstand across the road.

  It was a Friday. I’d got paid before lunch. The brown envelope was in my coat pocket. I’d bought one pound’s worth of magazines. Mary would say I was crazy. I would say, ‘What’s the point of earning money if you can’t spend it on the things you like?’ She’d say, ‘Some people have no consideration.’

  I was looking at this magazine. There was a photo of a group of American teenagers who’d gone into the Himalayas to pray and meditate with an Indian guru. They were all staring straight out of the picture. You’d think people who were praying and fasting would be very disinterested in their physical appearance, but not these Americans. You could see the strain on the girls’ faces and their very washed and brushed hair with maybe a flower pinned at one side. The men held their faces very carefully too, looking out. Mary would say, ‘Oh those hippies, they’re disgusting.’ But it wasn’t that. They were so frightened, so strained, just like girls at a party or dance, terrified not to look acceptable.

  There was a knock on the door. I said, ‘Come in,’ and the door swung open and there was a man with thick curly black hair and a red scarf round his neck, carrying a sheaf of files and papers. Not a student? A lecturer?

  ‘Hello,’ he said, and swung the door to behind him. ‘I’m sorry to disturb you but I’ve come looking for the Prof who knows all about these Fir Bolg men.’

  I said, ‘Professor O’Sullivan will be back at 2.30 p.m.’ I was sitting at my father’s desk. I put my arms over the magazine so this man wouldn’t see it.

  ‘His secretary, are you?’ he asked.

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘his daughter.’ That should quiet him down, I thought.

  ‘Aha,’ and he sat down on the sofa where Father’s manuscripts and students’ essays were piled up. He started looking through them. I thought: The cheek.

  ‘Instead of sitting in this stuffy little office why not come out for a drink with me while we wait for your father?’ he said. ‘My name’s Colin.’ And he gave me a broad smile as if I wouldn’t, obviously, refuse. I didn’t refuse.

  We walked across the quadrangle. I felt sorry for the poor girls on their own.

  Colin walked very fast. He linked my arm crossing the road. He was one of those people who made everything a we-together situation very quickly if he liked you.

  The pub we went into had these paintings of hunting scenes all round the walls. The paintings were in pastel colours with pale horses, pale horsemen, and a sick-looking fox with a huge tail and huge eyes. The bar stools and chairs were covered in chintz. The bar was full of people, mostly men, shouting at one another, standing less than a foot away from each other’s faces and shouting.

  I said I’d have a gin and tonic. Colin said, ‘Go on, be a devil, have something more exotic.’ I said, ‘Okay, Benedictine.’ It was all I could think of. Mary had been given a bottle for Christmas and kept it in the sideboard.

  Colin said he was a television producer. He was working on a series of historical programmes—that’s why he wanted to see the Professor, my father. He was The Expert on the Fir Bolg.

  He said television work was quite fun but got boring like any other job. I was half listening. I was thinking: I’ll become his girlfriend and become famous on television.

  ‘And what do you do, sad eyes?’ he said.

  I flicked my eyes (were they sad eyes?) and said, ‘I’m working in the library—but just as a filler-in.’

  ‘A filler-in for what?’ he said.

  ‘Oh,’ I said, ‘Before taking First Arts next year. I’ve just come back from Paris, so I can’t enrol till September.’ An inspiration, that one.

  ‘A proper little blue stocking?’ he said and was grinning and I felt myself suddenly a bit colder inside. But then we had three more drinks and he walked me back to the library and I felt like dancing across the quadrangle and the cobblestones were like springs to my feet and anything, anything was possible. At about four o’clock I had five cups of tea and then I went home. I told Miss Gore-Browne I was feeling sick—my first hangover.

  After that he came and collected me for lunch one day and I was only wishing the students could see me getting into his little sports car. We went to this dark restaurant. Dark restaurants seemed the nicest places in the world in the middle of bright winter days. I could have stayed forever with the warm feeling from the wine and the darkness and the waiters like moths, hovering.

  We went to the theatre and he kissed me and said I was his favourite lady. A favourite among how many? I thought, but didn’t say anything, and jumped on the thought and buried it. We had dinner after the theatre and he listened and it was almost like God listening: ‘Tell me exactly what the problem is, and we’ll solve it.’

  He drove home and the city was quiet and the roads opened up like long carpets of moonlight for us. We kissed in the car outside the house and I was kissing him and kissing him, and then he pulled back a little and he pinched my nose between his thumb and finger and said, ‘It will all come to you soon enough, one day.’ I wanted to say ‘Take me and keep me and let me live with you and in you and …’ On the front steps he gave me a formal kiss on the cheek and said, ‘We mustn’t keep the Professor’s daughter out too late, must we?’ and then he was jumping down the steps and gone.

  I went in and made myself a cup of tea and sat for a while in the kitchen and thought if I were with him, with him all the time I wouldn’t have to worry any more about not doing anything. I would just be.

  One night he came to dinner to talk to Father about the Fir Bolgs. He’d sketched out a script and Father was checking it. He arrived very sober and in a dark suit with pinstripes—a gangster’s suit from Chicago. He had a wide, salmon-pink tie. He called Father ‘Sir’.

  I’d spent the whole day changing the furniture round in the house. I was pinning up an Aubrey Beardsley poster in the hallway and Mary said, ‘Take that down at once,’ and I burst into tears and said she was an old witch.

  The zip got stuck in my favourite dress and I got red in the face and got a whiff of sweat smell from under my arm and rushed back into the bathroom and lashed talc under my arms and cursed Mary for not allowing me to have deodorant. She said it gave people cancer.

  I put on some eye make-up. Some brown stick and some mascara. Some of Mary’s powder on my nose and chin. Some scent —a drop behind each knee, a drop behind each ear, a drop between the breasts. Those, said the magazine, are the erogenous zones—the places for perfume.

  During dinner I said, the words bumping out, ‘One of the distinctive physical characteristics of the Fir Bolg was their Mediterranean features. Dark, flashing eyes.’ Father looked over and said, ‘Well now, I didn
’t know you knew anything about the Fir Bolg, Lizzie.’ I blushed hot, even in my eyes, and said, ‘Oh, a teacher told us that at school.’ I’d read it that afternoon in one of Father’s books.

  When he was going I stood between my parents at the door. Colin shook hands with each of us. I wanted to run down the path after him, hug him. He turned and gave a wave at the gate.

  ‘Interesting young man,’ my father said. I looked at him. It was the first time I thought his judgement imperfect.

  —4—

  I was waiting for the phone to ring. I kept picking it up to listen to the purring sound to make sure it was working. I rang the operator. In a crackly voice—could he ring me as I thought maybe our phone was out of order? I put the phone down. It rang.

  ‘Operator here, Miss, your phone seems bang on.’ I put the phone down. Got up and lit a cigarette. Mary came through the hall. ‘Aren’t you getting cold sitting there?’ A pause, then, ‘Try not to smoke so many cigarettes, Elizabeth, it makes you look so old.’ Old is it? I thought, I’m as old as the caves in Kerry. I’m as old as pain.

  The phone rang. I ran and picked it up, heart beating, thudding. It was the operator. ‘Suppose you wouldn’t like to come out for a pint some night, darling?’ he said, his voice honeyed. ‘Oh God,’ I said and slammed down the phone.

  Why doesn’t he ring? Oh why, why, why?

  Why don’t I ring him? What would I say? ‘Hello Colin, it’s me, Lizzie, you remember me? How are things? I just thought I’d ring you and see how you were, you know.’

  You know. I couldn’t ring him. Why? You just can’t. Girls wait to be rung. Unless they’re whores or something. Those are the rules. If he wanted to see you he’d ring. If he didn’t, he didn’t. Maybe he was sick. Lying alone in his flat, quietly dying. I didn’t even know where he lived. Maybe a stench was coming from under his doorway. Milk bottles and papers piled outside. Maybe he’d be found, bloated and green, like that dead seal we once found washed up by the sea.