THE PRETENDER


Susie and I should have known well that Denis Corby’s coming “to play
with us” would mean nothing only trouble. We didn’t want anyone new to
play with; we had plenty, and they were all good class. But Mother was
like that; giddy, open-handed and ready to listen to any tall
tale. That wouldn’t have been so bad if only she confined her charity
to her own things, but she gave away ours as well. You couldn’t turn
your back in that house but she had something pinched on you, a
gansey, an overcoat, or a pair of shoes, and as for the beggars that
used to come to the door—! As Susie often said, we had no life.

But we were still mugs enough to swallow the yarn about the lovely
lonesome little boy she’d found to play with us up on the
hill. Cripes, you never in all your life got such a suck-in! Eleven
o’clock one Saturday morning this fellow comes to the door, about the
one age with myself only bigger, with a round red face and big green
goggle-eyes. I saw at the first glance that he was no class. In fact I
took him at first for a messenger boy.

“What do you want?” I asked.

“Me mudder said I was to come and play with you,” he said with a
scowl, and you could see he liked it about as much as I did.

“Is your name Corby?” I asked in astonishment.

“What’s that?” he asked and then he said: “Yes.” I didn’t honestly
know whether he was deaf or an idiot or both.

“Mummy!” I shouted. “Look who’s here”—wondering at the same time if
she could have seen him before she asked him to the house.

But she’d seen him all right, because her face lit up and she told him
to come in. He took off his cap and, after taking two steps and
hearing the clatter he made in the hall with his hobnailed boots, he
did the rest of it on tiptoe.

I could have cried. The fellow didn’t know a single game, and when we
went out playing with the Horgans and the Wrights I simply didn’t know
how to explain this apparition that hung on to us like some sort of
poor relation.

When we sat down to dinner he put his elbows on the table and looked
at us, ignoring his plate.

“Don’t you like your dinner, Denis?” asked Mother—she never asked us
if we liked our dinner.

“What’s that?” he said, goggling at her. I was beginning to notice
that he said “What’s that?” only to give himself time to think up an
answer. “’Tis all right.”

“Oh, you ought to eat up,” said Father. “A big hefty fellow like you!”

“What does your mummy usually give you?” asked Mother.

“Soup,” he said.

“Would you sooner I gave you a spoon so?”

“I would.”

“What do you like for your dinner and I’ll get it for you?”

“Jelly.”

Now, if that had been me, not saying “please” or “thank you,” I’d soon
have got the back of my father’s hand, but it seemed as if he could
say what he liked and only eat what suited him. He took only a few
mouthfuls of potatoes and gravy.

After dinner we went up to our bedroom so that we could show him our
toys. He seemed as frightened of them as he was of a knife and fork.

“Haven’t you any toys of your own?” I asked.

“No,” he said.

“Where do you live?” asked Susie.

“The Buildings.”

“Is that a nice place?”

“’Tis all right.” Everything was “all right” with him.

Now, I knew the Buildings because I passed it every day on the way to
school and I knew it was not all right. It was far from it. It was a
low-class sort of place where the kids went barefoot and the women sat
all day on the doorsteps, talking.

“Haven’t you any brothers and sisters?” Susie went on.

“No. Only me mudder. ... And me Auntie Nellie,” he added after a
moment.

“Who’s your Auntie Nellie?”

“My auntie. She lives down the country. She comes up of an odd time.”

“And where’s your daddy?” asked Susie.

“What’s that?” he said, and again I could have sworn he was thinking
up an answer. There was a longer pause than usual. “I tink me daddy is
dead,” he added.

“How do you mean you think he’s dead?” asked Susie. “Don’t you know?”

“Me mudder said he was dead,” he said doubtfully.

“Well, your mother ought to know,” said Susie. “But if your daddy is
dead where do ye get the money?”

“From my Auntie Nellie.”

“It’s because your daddy is dead that you have no toys,” Susie said in
her usual God-Almighty way. “’Tis always better if your mummy dies
first.”

“It is not better, Susie Murphy,” I said, horrified at the coldblooded
way that girl always talked about Mummy. “God will kill you stone dead
for saying that. You’re only saying it because you always suck up to
Daddy.”

“I do not always suck up to Daddy, Michael Murphy,” she replied
coldly. “And it’s true. Everyone knows it. If Mummy died Daddy could
still keep us, but if Daddy died, Mummy wouldn’t have anything.”

But though I always stuck up for Mummy against Susie, I had to admit
that her latest acquisition wasn’t up to much.

“Ah, that woman would sicken you,” Susie said when we were in bed that
night. “Bringing in old beggars and tramps and giving them their
dinner in our kitchen, the way you couldn’t have a soul in to play,
and then giving away our best clothes. You couldn’t have a blooming
thing in this house.”

Every Saturday after that Denis Corby came and tiptoed in the hall in
his hobnailed boots and spooned at his dinner. As he said, the only
thing he liked was jelly. He stayed on till our bedtime and listened
to Mother reading us a story. He liked stories but he couldn’t read
himself, even comics, so Mother started teaching him and said he was
very smart: A fellow who couldn’t read at the age of seven, I didn’t
see how he could be smart. She never said I was smart.

But in other ways he was smart enough, too smart for me. Apparently a
low-class boy and a complete outsider could do things I wasn’t let do,
like playing round the parlour, and if you asked any questions or
passed any remarks, you only got into trouble. The old game of
wardrobe-raiding had begun again, and I was supposed to admire the way
Denis looked in my winter coat, though in secret I shed bitter tears
over that coat, which was the only thing I had that went with my
yellow tie. And the longer it went on, the deeper the mystery became.

One day Susie was showing off in her usual way about having been born
in Dublin. She was very silly about that, because to listen to her
you’d think no one had ever been born in Dublin only herself.

“Ah, shut up!” I said. “We all know you were born in Dublin and what
about it?”

“Well, you weren’t,” she said, skipping round, “and Denis wasn’t.”

“How do you know he wasn’t?” I asked. “Where were you born, Denis?”

“What’s that?” he asked and gaped. Then, after a moment, he said:
“In England.”

“Where did you say?” Susie asked, scowling.

“In England.”

“How do you know?”

“Me mudder told me.”

I was delighted at the turn things had taken. You never in all your
life saw anyone so put out as Susie at the idea that a common boy from
the Buildings could be born in a place she wasn’t born in. What made
it worse was that Mummy had worked in England, and it seemed to Susie
like a shocking oversight not to have had her in a place she could
really brag about. She was leaping.

“When was your mummy in England?” she asked.

“She wasn’t in England.”

“Then how could you be born there, you big, silly fool?” she stormed.

“My Auntie Nellie was there,” he said sulkily.

“You couldn’t be born in England just because your Auntie Nellie was
there,” she said vindictively.

“Why couldn’t I?” he asked, getting cross.

That stumped Susie properly. It stumped me as well. Seeing that we
both thought Mother had bought us from the nurse, there didn’t seem to
be any good reason why an aunt couldn’t have bought us as well. We
argued about that for hours afterwards. Susie maintained with her
usual Mrs. Know-all air that if an aunt bought a baby she stopped
being his aunt and became his mummy but I wasn’t sure of that at
all. She said she’d ask Mummy, and I warned her she’d only get her head
chewed off, but she said she didn’t mind.

She didn’t either. That kid was madly inquisitive, and she had ways of
getting information out of people that really made me ashamed. One
trick of hers was to repeat whatever she’d been told with a
supercilious air and then wait for results. That’s what she did about
Denis Corby.

“Mummy,” she said next day, “do you know what that silly kid, Denis,
said?”

“No, dear.”

“He said he was born in England and his mother was never in England at
all,” said Susie and went off into an affected laugh.

“The dear knows ye might find something better to talk about,” Mother
said in disgust. “A lot of difference it makes to the poor child where
he was born.”

“What did I tell you?” I said to her afterwards. “I told you you’d
only put Mummy in a wax. I tell you there’s a mystery about that
fellow and Mummy knows what it is. I wish he never came here at all.”

The Saturday following we were all given pennies and Denis and I were
sent off for a walk. I thought it very cool of Mother, knowing quite
well that Denis wasn’t class enough for the fellows I mixed with, but
it was one of those things she didn’t seem to understand and I could
never explain to her. I had the feeling that it would only make her
mad.

It was a nice sunny afternoon, and we stayed at the cross, collecting
cigarette pictures from fellows getting off the trams. We hadn’t been
there long when Bastable and another fellow came down the hill, two
proper toffs—I mean they weren’t even at my school but went to the
Grammar School.

“Hullo, Bastable,” I said, “where are ye off to?” and I went a few
steps with them.

“We have a boat down the river,” he said. “Will you come?”

I slouched along after them, between two minds. I badly wanted to go
down the river, and it was jolly decent of Bastable to have asked me,
but I was tied to Denis, who wasn’t class enough to bring with me even
if he was asked.

“I’m with this fellow,” I said with a sigh, and Bastable looked back
at Denis, who was sitting on the high wall over the church, and
realized at the first glance that he wouldn’t do.

“Ah, boy, you don’t know what you’re missing,” he said.

I knew that only too well. I looked up and there was Denis, goggling
down at us, close enough to remind me of the miserable sort of
afternoon I’d have to spend with him if I stayed, but far enough away
not to be on my conscience too much.

“Denis,” I shouted, “I’m going down a bit of the way with these
chaps. You can wait for me if you like.”

Then I began to run and the others ran with me. I felt rather ashamed,
but at the time I really did intend not to stay long with them. Of
course, once I got to the river I forgot all my good resolutions—you
know the way it is with boats—and it wasn’t until I was coming back up
the avenue in the dusk and noticed the gas lamps lit that I realized
how late it was and my heart sank. I was really soft-hearted and I
felt full of pity for poor old Denis waiting there for me all the
time. When I reached the cross and found he wasn’t there it only made
it worse, because it must have meant he’d given me up and gone home. I
was very upset about it, particularly about what I was going to say to
the mother.

When I reached home I found the front door open and the kitchen in
darkness. I went in quietly and to my astonishment I saw Mother and
Denis sitting together over the fire. I just can’t describe the
extraordinary impression they made on me. They looked so snug, sitting
there together in the firelight, that they made me feel like an
outsider. I came in conscience-stricken and intending to bluff, and
instead I suddenly found myself wanting to cry, I didn’t know for what
reason.

“Hullo,” Denis said, giving me a grin, “where did you go?”

“Ah, just down the river with Bastable,” I said, hanging up my cap and
trying to sound casual. “Where did you get to?”

“I came back,” he said still grinning.

“And indeed, Michael, you should be thoroughly ashamed of yourself,
leaving Denis like that,” Mother said sharply.

“But really, Mummy, I didn’t,” I said weakly. “I only just went down a
bit of the way with them, that’s all.”

I found it difficult enough to get even that much out without
blubbing. Denis Corby had turned the tables on me with a vengeance. It
was I who was jealous, and it took me weeks to see why. Then I
suddenly tumbled to the fact that though he was quite ready to play
with Susie and me it wasn’t for that he came to the house. It was
Mother, not us, he was interested in. He even arranged things so that
he didn’t have to come with us and could stay behind with her. Even
when she didn’t want him in the house he was content to sit on the
wall outside just to have her to himself if she came to the door or
wanted someone to run a message for her. It was only then that my
suspicions turned to panic. After that I was afraid of leaving him
behind me because of what he might do or say when my back was
turned. And of course he knew I knew what was in his mind, and dared
me.

One day I had to go on a message to the cross and I asked him to
come. He wouldn’t; he said he wanted to stay and play with Susie, and
she, flattered at what she thought were his attentions, took his part.

“Go on now, Michael Murphy!” she said in her bossy way. “You were sent
on the message and you can go by yourself. Denis is stopping here with
me.”

“It’s not you he wants to stop with, you little fool!” I said, losing
my patience with her. “It’s Mummy.”

“It is not,” he said, and I saw from the way he reddened that he knew I
had him caught.

“It is,” I said truculently. “You’re always doing it. You’d better let
her alone. She’s not your mother.”.

“She’s my aunt,” he said sullenly.

“That’s a lie,” I shouted, beside myself with rage. “She’s not your
aunt.”

“She told me to call her that,” he said.

“That has nothing to do with it,” I said. “She’s my mummy, not yours.”

He suddenly gave me a queer look.

“How do you know?” he asked in a low voice.

For a moment I was too stunned to speak. It had never struck me before
that if his Aunt Nellie could be his mother, Mummy, whom he called
Aunt Kate, could be his mother as well. In fact, anyone could be a
fellow’s mother if only he knew. My only chance was to brazen it out.

“She couldn’t be,” I said. “Your mother lives up the Buildings.”

“She’s not me mudder,” he said in the same low voice.

“Oh, there’s a thing to say!” I cried, though the stupefaction was put
on.

“How could she be me mudder?” he went on. “She was never in England.”

The mystery was so close I felt I could solve it in a few words if
only I knew which. Of course it was possible that Mother, having
worked in England, could be his real mother while his own mother
couldn’t, and this was what had been between them both from the
start. The shock of it was almost more than I could bear. I could keep
my end up at all only by pretending to be scandalized.

“Oh,” I cried, “I’ll tell her what you said.”

“You can if you like,” he replied sullenly.

And of course he knew I couldn’t. Whatever strange hold he had over
her, you simply daren’t ask her a reasonable question about him.

Susie was watching the pair of us curiously. She felt there was
something wrong but didn’t know what. I tried to enlighten her chat
night in bed: how it all fitted in, his mother who couldn’t be his
mother because she’d never been to England, his Aunt Nellie who could
but probably wasn’t because he saw so little of her, and Mummy who had
not only been to England but saw him every week, made a pet of him,
and wouldn’t let you say a word against him. Susie agreed that this
was quite probable, but she was as heartless as usual about it.

“She can be his mummy if she likes,” she said with a shrug. “I don’t
care.”

“That’s only because you’re Daddy’s pet,” I said.

“It is not, Michael Murphy, but it doesn’t make any difference what
she is so long as he only comes every Saturday.”

“You wait,” I whispered threateningly. “You’ll see if his mother dies
he’ll come and live here. Then you’ll be sorry.”

Susie couldn’t see the seriousness of it because she was never Mummy’s
pet as I was, and didn’t see how Denis Corby was gradually replacing
us both in Mother’s affection, or how day after day she mentioned him
only to praise him or compare him with us. I got heart-scalded hearing
how good he was. I couldn’t be good in that sly, insinuating way, just
trying to get inside other people. I tried, but it was no use, and
after a while I lost heart and never seemed to be out of mischief. I
didn’t know what was wrong with me, but I was always breaking, losing,
pinching. Mother didn’t know either and only got more impatient with
me.

“I don’t know under God what’s come over you,” she said
angrily. “Every week that passes you’re becoming more and more of a
savage.”

As if I could be anything else, knowing what I knew! It was Denis,
Denis, Denis the whole time. Denis was sick and had to be taken to a
doctor and the doctor said he was worrying about something. Nothing
was said about the way I was worrying, seeing him turn me into a
stranger in my own house. By this time I was really desperate.

It came to a head one day when Mother asked me to go on a message. I
broke down and said I didn’t want to. Mother in her fury couldn’t see
that it was only because I’d be leaving Denis behind me.

“All right, all right,” she snapped. “I’ll send Denis. I’m fed up with
you.”

But this was worse. This was the end of everything, the final proof
that I had been replaced.

“No, no, Mummy, I’ll go, I’ll go,” I said, and I took the money and
went out sobbing. Denis Corby was sitting on the wall and Susie and
two other little girls were playing pickie on the garden path. Susie
looked at me in surprise, her left leg still lifted.

“What ails you?” she asked.

“I have to go on a message,” I said, bawling like a kid.

“Well, that’s nothing to cry about.”

“I have to go by myself,” I wailed, though I knew well it was a silly
complaint, a baby’s complaint, and one I’d never have made in my right
mind. Susie saw that too, and she was torn between the desire to go on
with her game and to come with me to find out what was wrong.

“Can’t Denis go with you?” she asked, tossing the hair from her eyes.

“He wouldn’t come,” I sobbed.

“You never asked me,” he said in a loud, surly voice.

“Go on!” I said, blind with misery and rage. “You never come anywhere
with me. You’re only waiting to go in to my mother.”

“I am not,” he shouted.

“You are, Denis Corby,” Susie said suddenly in a shrill, scolding
voice, and I realized that she had at last seen the truth for herself
and come down on my side. “You’re always doing it. You don’t come here
to play with us at all.”

“I do.”

“You don’t, you don’t,” I hissed, losing all control of myself and
going up to him with my fists clenched. “You Indian witch!”

It was the most deadly insult I could think of, and it roused him. He
got off the wall and faced Susie and me, his hands hanging, his face
like a lantern.

“I’m not an Indian witch,” he said with smouldering anger.

“You are an Indian witch, you are an Indian witch,” I said and gave
him the coward’s blow, straight in the face. He didn’t try to hit back
though he was twice my size, a proper little sissy.

“God help us!” one of the little girls bawled. “You ought to be
ashamed of yourself, hitting the little boy like that, Michael
Murphy.”

“Then he ought to let our mummy alone,” Susie screeched. Now that she
saw the others turn against me she was dancing with rage, a real
little virago. “He’s always trying to make out that she’s his mummy,
and she isn’t.”

“I never said she was my mummy,” he said, sulky and frightened.

“You did say it,” I said, and I hit him again, in the chest this
time. “You’re trying to make out that I’m your brother and I’m not.”

“And I’m not your sister either,” Susie screeched defiantly, doing a
war-dance about him. “I’m Michael Murphy’s sister, and I’m not your
sister, and if you say I am again I’ll tell my daddy on you.”

“Michael, Michael Murphy! Susie! What are you doing to the little
boy?” shouted a wrathful voice, and when I looked up there was an
officious neighbour, clapping her hands from the gate at us. There
were others out as well. We had been all shouting so loudly that we
had gathered an audience. Suddenly Susie and I got two clouts that
sent us flying.

“What in God’s holy name is the meaning of this?” cried Mother, taking
Denis by the hand. “How dare you strike that child, you dirty little
corner-boy?”

Then she turned and swept in with Denis, leaving the rest of us
flabbergasted.

“Now we’ll all be killed,” Susie snivelled, between pain and
fright. “She’ll murder us. And ’twas all your fault, Michael Murphy.”

But by then I didn’t care what happened. Denis Corby had won at last
and even before the neighbours was treated as Mother’s pet. In an
excited tone Susie began telling the other girls about Denis and all
his different mothers and all the troubles they had brought on us.

He was inside a long time, a very long time it seemed to me. Then he
came out by himself and it was only afterwards I remembered that he
did it on tiptoe. Mother looked like murder all that day. The
following Saturday Denis didn’t come at all and the Saturday after
Mother sent Susie and me up to the Buildings for him.

By that time I didn’t really mind and I bore him no grudge for what
had happened. Mother had explained to us that she wasn’t really his
mother, and that, in fact, he hadn’t any proper mother. This was what
she had told him when she brought him in, and it seems it was a nasty
shock to him. You could understand that, of course. If a fellow really
did think someone was his mother and then found she wasn’t it would be
quite a shock. I was full of compassion for him really. The whole week
I’d been angelic—even Mummy admitted that.

When we went in he was sitting at the fire with his mother—the one he
thought at first was his mother. She made a fuss of Susie and me and
said what lovely children we were. I didn’t like her very much
myself. I thought her too sweet to be wholesome.

“Go on back with them now, Dinny boy,” she said, pawing him on the
knee. “Sure you haven’t a soul to play with in this old hole.”

But he wouldn’t come, and nothing we said could make him. He treated
us like enemies, almost. Really I suppose he felt a bit of a fool. His
mother was a wrinkled old woman; the house was only a labourer’s
cottage without even an upstairs room; you could see they were no
class, and as I said to Susie on the way home, the fellow had a cool
cheek to imagine we were his brother and sister.


(1950)