Fathers Come First Read online

  I’d just ring him and see if he was all right. I didn’t know his number. I’d get it from the switchboard girl at the television station.

  I got the number. I said I was a concerned friend, just back from Paris. The girl said, ‘We’re not supposed to, you know.’ I said, ‘I know, but it is rather urgent.’

  I rang. His voice answered. He didn’t sound dying. He sounded fine. I listened to him for a bit saying, ‘Hello, Hello,’ then more angrily, ‘Look, who is this?’ Then I put the phone down.

  I went up to the bathroom. My hands were trembling. My mouth tasted awful with the cigarettes. I looked at myself in the mirror. I made faces—faces like we used to make at school. ‘You’re horrible, horrible, I hate you, you’re a fool, a flea-bitten eejit …’

  I watched the tears popping out and coming down and then this girl’s face awash in the mirror, swishing and crumpling.

  I thought to my face in the mirror, What’s wrong with me? Do I smell? Have bad breath? Am I so uninteresting? So awful?

  I thought of Colin in the car. ‘We mustn’t keep the Professor’s daughter out too late.’ I thought, It’s this damn house. Nobody would want to come here; it’s like a morgue. Father locked in his study with his bloody books, Mary and her bloody friends. I thought, I’ll get a flat. I’ll go and live on my own in a flat. That should be better.

  —5—

  ‘Love,’ said the carrot-haired student lying across my bed, ‘Love is a compromised battleground. The young hurtle about on it clashing their fine, strong weapons and shouting war cries at each other. Only the old come slowly, carrion-picking over the fields, proclaiming vanished victories.’

  ‘Aha,’ I said.

  ‘So what about truth then?’ I said. First Love, then Truth.

  ‘Truth,’ said this student, ‘truth is all the grey bits in between the things we hate and love most. Truth is the stubbing of your toe on the way to the bathroom to commit suicide.’

  I got up to make coffee. We could go on like this for hours.

  This is really living, I thought. My own flat, a student dropping in in the evening talking about Love and Truth.

  Mary and my father hadn’t seemed too surprised when I said I wanted to move into a flat of my own. Mary’s jolly friend had said to her, ‘Oh it’s all the rage for young people nowadays.’ That had been enough to convince her. Mary always made decisions like that; she’d hear somebody saying something on Woman’s Hour on the BBC, or read an article in a magazine, or her friend would say, ‘It’s all the rage,’ Mary would say, All right.

  I found the flat through the students’ accommodation officer at College. The student who had it had to go back to England. Her mother was dying. The rent was two pounds, ten a week. Father said he’d pay it. The College gave me a raise. That gave me six pounds, ten a week to live on.

  Mary gave me a desk and an old electric kettle and made curtains for the main room. My first Sunday there she and Father came for tea. I made queen cakes and we were all rather embarrassed. Mary kept saying, ‘Well now, you look real comfy here.’

  The first few weeks in the flat had been quite frightening. Evenings seemed incredibly long. I used to sit at the window and watch people walking along the canal: men with dogs, stiff men chucking their dogs’ leads and uttering curt orders to them—some men can’t leave their dogs alone; old-age pensioners who’d sit on benches for hours, transfixed by the weight of the years they’d lived and the few still to go, terrified of sputtering out—you’d want to shout out to them: Get up, dance, make love, booze, go out with a bang!—but they’d just sit there with their frozen faces. As soon as spring started into summer the children would come. Skinny, white-ribbed children with skinny dogs, all of them shouting and barking and the kids jumping into the dirty canal water. The kids would whistle and shout ‘Hello there young one’ if you went out. They were really old kids, workers’ kids.

  In February, I met this student. He came into the library office one day to explain to Miss Gore-Browne why he hadn’t

  returned a particular book yet. She was out. He came back the next day and asked if I would like a cup of coffee. We started going round together, to the film society and the drama society. Things like that. I used to tell myself I quite liked him and listened to him attentively. Really I think I felt he was better than nothing, so I must have pitied him too.

  This was a Saturday. I was making coffee and looking out the window at the canal. From so high you couldn’t see the old bicycle frames and tin cans sticking in the muddy edges.

  I shouted through, ‘The canal is like a sleeping prostitute, all gaudy and gay and well-used.’

  I looked round the door to see how he was reacting. ‘Umh?’ he said. He was squeezing a pimple.

  Even that didn’t deter. ‘Life,’ I said to myself, ‘is a mixture of the sublime and the ridiculous.’ That term we all spoke in clichés.

  The student’s name was lan, only he spelt it lain, to be different. I felt sorry for him thinking that one ‘i’ made him different. lain was English. His mother was a writer for slick magazines and his father was a financier of something or other. They were terribly rich. They had a house in County Cork where they used to spend a couple of months a year, in winter, so’s the father could hunt.

  I was planning to go to bed with lain. I didn’t find him all that attractive, I just thought, Well he’s someone I could go to bed with. It was a sort of revenge. He liked me more than I liked him. Before it had been the other way round. I used to link his arm sometimes in the street, hoping Colin would pass by and see us. I hadn’t seen Colin for six weeks, or heard from him.

  Iain’s mother had come up to Dublin. We met her in the Shelbourne Hotel for coffee. She said I should come down to their house in Cork for a Hunt Ball. She said I must come down. She took me over. Iain said, ‘You’ll hate it,’ but she’d taken him over long ago.

  I was met off the Dublin train by lain and his father. lain had gone ahead. His father said in this loud braying voice, ‘Aha! So here’s the famed Miss O’Sullivan.’ Everyone on the platform looked round. Then he clicked up porters to carry my weekend case. He was always clicking at people—clicking at porters, and waiters, and servants. I wondered did he click at his wife in bed when he wanted to make love to her.

  Valerie once went to bed with a man who kept saying ‘Just a little more to the left … no, a little to the right now.’ She said it was as if he were teeing up on a golf course. She said, ‘I suppose you’re aiming for a hole in one.’ He didn’t think it funny.

  This family house was like an art gallery. The house was completely unlived-in, untouched. It existed apart, quite separately from its inhabitants. It was a house on display, showing itself

  discreetly and keeping its essence completely to itself. I was given a bedroom with a bathroom attached. The bathroom had two plaster busts of someone who looked like Caesar in a picture in our Latin books, and four gilt-edged mirrors. The mirrors watched, elegant and mocking, while I bathed, pouring half a bottle of foaming bubbly in on top, pretending I was Sophia Loren or somebody.

  lain’s two sisters were over on holiday from London. In London they worked for advertising agencies. They tore around Cork in their father’s Jaguar looking for antiques and laughing at the Irish. ‘The Irish,’ they’d say. ‘Aren’t they extraordinary!’, making a ‘straw’ sound in the middle of ‘extraordinary’, and then they’d shriek with laughter.

  The night of the Hunt Ball one of them came into my bedroom when I was dressing and said, ‘We’re going soon, you’d better hurry up and get out of that dressing gown.’ I said, ‘It’s not a dressing gown, it’s my dress.’ Mary had lent it to me for the occasion. She said I’d be the Toast of County Cork in it. lain’s sister said, ‘You’d better borrow one of my dresses,’ flinging open her wardrobe and saying, ‘Now, take anything you want,’ then turning back the cupboard door showing me sh
elves of make-up and perfumes and saying, ‘Borrow anything you want from here as well. But hurry up.’

  I picked a long green and purple silk dress that hissed when I walked. Everyone said, ‘You look marvellous.’

  Iain and his father wore red hunting jackets because they were a hunting family. The father was once a Master. The sisters both had boyfriends over from London as well and they wore black velvet jackets and floppy silk cravats. Iain said you couldn’t be seen dead in a monkey suit.

  There were about two hundred people at the ball. The men were all in dinner jackets, the women in long silks and satins, with powdered faces and bright bloody lips and small earrings.

  Down each side of the ballroom there was a long table covered in heavy white linen cloths and laid out with glasses and hundreds of knives and forks. The polished dance floor was in the middle and at the top end, seated up on a stage, was the band, ‘The Starlight’; they were all from Cork.

  It was hard to imagine how clean and stately the ballroom had looked when about four hours later men and women had put on paper hats and were dancing round and round the floor, the women clinging to the men as if they were drowning. The women’s faces were no longer bright and bloody; they looked as if they’d been punched. The men were red in the face and clapping each other on the backs and the women on their behinds, saying ‘Tallyho there, tallyho.’ You’d have thought all these very respectable middle-class people in Cork with neat detached homes and clean children had gone quite mad.

  Everyone drank champagne and it flowed up behind my head, and made my eyes alternately loose and tight. Iain said I didn’t seem to be enjoying it; his face looked quite mean suddenly. I thought, ‘He’s getting his own back because he likes me more than I do him.’ Then this girl from College with blonde curly hair came up and asked lain to dance, and off they went. I thought, Of course I’m enjoying it. I’m just rather frightened.

  I wished Colin were there. He’d laugh at them; he’d say, ‘Quick, look at this woman over here with the duck’s disease,’ and point to a woman with a very low-slung bottom, or he’d say, ‘How about old Head-the-Ball?’ and that would be a Major or someone. He’d make you feel a spectator and you wouldn’t be scared of Iain’s sisters or his mother or the clicking father any more.

  But Colin wasn’t there. He was off somewhere. Off with beautiful girls. You’d seen them at College and at the television station. Girls with their legs brazen and long and their hair

  uncombed and tossed and their eyes looking and challenging, ready to go to bed with the men just for the hell of it.

  One of the sisters’ boyfriends leaned over and said, ‘Men prefer blondes,’ and gave me a wink, and said I looked a million miles away, and could he have the immense pleasure of the next dance. We danced then for quite a long time and he kissed my neck and said he was sure that beneath my cool exterior a passionate woman was trying to get out. I said, ‘Oh really.’ His remark annoyed me.

  Then one of the sisters threw a chop bone at an old boyfriend across the room because she was a bit drunk and very loud, and the chop bone hit one of the waiters. The waiter picked up a glass of champagne and emptied it over her head. She screamed and Iain’s father and a friend jumped up and grabbed the waiter by his elbows and frogmarched him out of the room. The waiter was grinning—he must have waited a long time for the pleasure. Everyone was very shocked—‘The cheek of the bloody man!’ They almost said ‘native’. I thought, Up the Irish and the waiter, and damn the lot of you.

  On the way out we had our pictures taken by an enterprising man who’d turned up at two in the morning with a Polaroid camera and a duffle coat. I still have the picture somewhere. Everyone is leaning slightly to one side with smiles stretched over their strained faces. One of the girls has a long wine stain down the front of her dress.

  When we got home from the dance we all had a whiskey in the big echoing drawing room. Everyone was quieter. I wasn’t frightened any more. The parents went up to bed and one of the sisters put on a record. lain and I started dancing. He had a spot on the back of his neck. He said, ‘Let’s go and make some coffee.’ We went outside and he pushed me up against the wall and started kissing me, wet kisses. That went on for a while then I got bored. Finally I said I was going up to bed. My head was beginning to hurt. Everything smelt of smoke: my hair, my clothes; my mouth tasted of it. I went in and ran a bath in the bathroom with the mirrors and the busts of Caesar. I turned the lights off and got in. It was like a midnight swim, the water holding you up and knowing it could so easily suck you down—deceptive, velvet water.

  I wrapped one of the big towels round me and went back and lay on my bed. The bath and the whiskey. Warm inside and out.

  The door opened with a slice of light. lain came in. He was wearing silk pyjamas. They made me laugh. ‘Shh’, he whispered. He sat on the edge of the bed. He had two cups of coffee. We lit up cigarettes. The kissing downstairs seemed a long time ago. A regrettable time. I wished lain would go. He got into bed beside me. He said he was cold. We finished our coffee in silence.

  Iain’s thing was like a cold, raw sausage. I was holding it in my hand and hoping it would stiffen for him. We were sort of rolling round in the bed. Like people trying to get comfortable. lain was kissing me and saying, ‘I love you,’ and my head had suddenly cleared like the sky on a spring day—one minute there are clouds, the next the wind whishes through and everything is quite clear and washed. I was thinking of seagulls. Somewhere I’d read that they have to nap and beat their wings and sit screaming at each other for hours in order to make themselves sufficiently excited to manage sexual intercourse.

  After about an hour I told Iain he’d better go. What would his mother say if she came in in the morning?—it would be worse than finding him in bed with the maid. So we didn’t see so much of each other when we got back to Dublin.

  —6—

  The girl in Valerie’s boutique had forgotten me. ‘I tried on a red dress one day,’ I said, ‘And you said I should take up modelling.’ The girl was busy; a new consignment of clothes had just arrived. She said, ‘Just a minute then.’ It was lunchtime. The boutique was closed. Valerie made us all some coffee. I thought, Why did I come? She probably says that to everyone.

  I told Valerie about the dance in County Cork. She said, ‘It sounds really brutal.’ I said it was that, brutal. She said, ‘How’s the old love life then?’ and flipped her eyes at me. I said, ‘So so.’ I said this madly rich Englishman was desperately in love with me, but. ‘But what?’ said Valerie. ‘Oh I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I find him rather boring.’ I hadn’t seen lain for a week; he was the rich Englishman.

  It was a Saturday morning. The canal was silky from the sun. I was sitting in the flat and reading an article in a magazine about a model in London. She said she made a hundred pounds per photographic session. There were pictures of her in smart restaurants with Italian-looking men; there were pictures of her in very clean, pretty bras and pants making her face up at a beautiful dressing table with a broderie anglaise frill; there were pictures of her doing her modelling, lips pushed forward, hand on her hip, head thrown back, hair blowing. The girl said, ‘Modelling can really change your life. You don’t have to be beautiful to do it—just know how to make the best of yourself.’

  I thought of that girl in the boutique. She said I should try modelling. If it changed my life it was worth trying then, wasn’t it? I put on my best clothes and walked down to the boutique to ask her what I should do. Here I was and she couldn’t remember me.

  She was standing in the middle of piles of clothes, coffee in one hand, pencil in the other. ‘Ah yes, now I remember—the hamstrung.’ ‘The what?’ I said. ‘The hamstrung,’ said the girl, ‘we nicknamed the dress that because of the lacing.’ I said, ‘It reminded me of tennis shoes.’ She didn’t say anything; she just looked at me as if to say, For heaven’s sake, look what the cat’s brought in.

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nbsp; I thought, There’s many a slip … and I thought of a nun at school who used to say it: ‘There’s many a slip ‘twixt cup and the lip.’ I asked her once what it meant. She said, ‘For instance, if a man were jumping off a bridge, committing suicide, between the decision to jump and the long fall down to when he hit the water, he might change his mind. He might decide he didn’t want to die after all. Of course,’ said this nun, ‘Of course it would be too late for the body to be saved but never too late for the soul. We can be sure that the good God would forgive such a man—even at the last minute.’ I was haunted by that man for weeks afterwards. I could see his tortured, grey face and him plummeting like a knife to the cold river saying, ‘Oh no, no, no ... ’

  The girl said ‘Yes.’ She was looking through a notebook. ‘Here it is.’ She handed me a black card with gold lettering. The lettering said Suzanna’s School of Charm. It gave an address and a telephone number. I looked at the card. I said ‘Thank you very much.’ I looked at the card again, then at Valerie, then at the girl. The girl broke out laughing; the sound came out like a vase cracking. ‘You really are a little greenhorn aren’t you?’ she said. ‘If you want to be a model, kiddo, then you’ve got to take a modelling course. This card is the card of a modelling school. Maybe they’ll accept you.’ She was savage and sad, this girl; she’d laugh at you then give you a hand up again.

  She said she knew Suzanna, the girl who ran the modelling school. She’d ring her up and make an appointment for me. I said, ‘Yes, thank you, yes.’ I wished and wished I hadn’t started this whole damn business. I wished I’d gone shopping with Mary, or walking, or anything.

  The girl spoke to Suzanna. She said a young dolly friend of hers wanted to try a bit of modelling; she said, ‘Yes, she’s not bad, a bit gauche but a good figure, long legs … yes, okay, fine, tutty bye now … byeee.’