FIRST LOVE


Peter met Mick Dowling for the first time when he was sixteen and Mick
was eighteen. The age gap between them was wide but it was not the
only thing that divided them. Mick was a university student and Peter
an office boy. He called himself a junior clerk but that was only to
save his face. And as well as that, Peter was moody and contrary,
boastful and inclined to self-pity, unable to concentrate. Now it was
a commercial career he proposed for himself, and he took up
accountancy, but by the following week he had already tired of that
and wanted to be a soldier, a man of action, to travel and see the
world. Then he took up French and smoked French cigarettes. Mick
already stood out among his contemporaries, a grown man, tall,
well-built and extremely sedate. He had an inexpressive face, handsome
in a rough-hewn way, which would have been dull but for the flush
which occasionally lit it up and hinted at the depth of feeling
beneath.

Their first meeting threw Peter into a perfect fever. He knew at once
that Mick was the one man in the world he wanted to be. In the office
he tried to imitate Mick’s manners and way of speech; very slow, very
serious, even dull except for an almost imperceptible streak of
poker-faced humour. But either it did not suit the office or it didn’t
suit Peter, because several of the clerks looked at him in
astonishment and said: “What’s wrong with you, Dwyer? Are you sick?”
When they started to ridicule him he decided to reserve his imitation
of Mick for more suitable company.

Unfortunately, Mick did not seem to like him at all. When they met he
was usually with two friends of his own age, Conway and Hynes, and
Peter had to force his company on them. They treated him as a kid, and
Peter, stung, talked well above his age and station, bragging and
blustering, though at the same time he knew that he was behaving in a
way the very opposite of Mick’s. Sometimes he caught the calm grey
eyes fixed searchingly on him for a moment and then a mask of reserve,
like creeping paralysis, spread down Mick’s handsome face.

Peter took his evening walk up the Western Road, and sometimes caught
Mick, Conway, and Hynes when they were sitting on the river wall below
the bridge and could not escape him. Their departure left him giddy
and inclined to tears. As his bluster only roused their mockery he
resolved to be profound, and for weeks spoke only in a deep voice on
serious subjects, while to keep his face from betraying him he adopted
the air of a man recovering from a serious illness. He thought he saw
Mick give him that furtive puzzled look a little oftener, but then one
evening Mick crushed him with a few words and in a way that showed he
had found Peter out. Peter walked back by Sunday’s Well in the
moonlight, wept a little, and resolved not to speak to Mick again till
he was a great and famous man and could show Mick how wrong he had
been.

This mood lasted a whole day but, with the bottling-down effect of the
office, enthusiasm returned towards evening, and it seemed to him that
it was rather unjust to Mick to punish him so severely for a moment’s
ill humour, and his imagination got to work again. In the talk between
Mick and his friends he had noticed that Mick was more deeply
concerned about religion than they. They only chattered about priests
being rich and having cars and being seen with girls—the usual envious
talk of young men with salaries too small for their imaginations—but
Mick always brought the talk back to fundamentals: Eternity, Hell,
Purgatory, Limbo, Sin. Now Peter knew that fundamentals were his own
strong point. He had studied them all and decided that they were
grossly exaggerated. This, he felt, was the way to attract Mick’s
attention. He succeeded only too well. As he talked, Mick’s face grew
blacker and blacker.

“If you knew what you were talking about, Dwyer,” he said in a low
voice, “you’d want your backside kicked.”

Stung to tears, not so much by the rebuke as by the presence of Hynes
and Conway, whom he despised, Peter retorted by calling Mick “a
crawthumper” and “a bourgeois parasite,” and stamped off, in real
despair this time. How was he to have known that Mick’s intellectual
corns were so tender? He felt now that he had succeeded in making Mick
his enemy for life and that even becoming a great and famous man would
not wipe out the injury.

A week later he ran into the three of them on the Western Road. They
were coming up as he was returning and he deliberately looked the
other way. He didn’t intend Mick to get away with the impression that
he couldn’t be done without. From the corner of his eye he saw Mick
stare and then stop. The others stopped as well.

“Hullo, Peter,” he said.

“Oh, hullo, Mick,” Peter said with fictitious surprise.

“Come along back with us,” Mick said more by way of an order than an
invitation.

Peter was so astonished that he was modest and almost silent for a
quarter of an hour. He couldn’t make it out. He didn’t know whether
Mick had recognized the justice of his charge about being “a bourgeois
parasite” or was so full of pity for his ignorance that he wanted to
be kind. To be truthful with himself, he had to admit that he didn’t
give a damn. The main thing was that Mick had wiped out the injury.

But there were stranger things to come. On the way back Hynes stopped
outside a pub and suggested a drink with something like a gangster
air. As Peter had only a shilling and didn’t know whether or not it
would buy a round of drinks he pleaded an appointment. Mick didn’t
even ask whom the appointment was with. He merely took Peter firmly by
the arm and pushed him in, laughing and uneasy. In a furtive whisper
Hynes asked each what they’d have, and Peter, copying the others, said
in a low voice: “Stout, please.”

“Stout, right,” said Hynes with a nod.

“He’s having ginger beer, Bill,” Mick said quietly, and Peter,
thrilled at the tone of quiet authority with which he spoke, said at
once: “All right. Ginger beer will do.”

He watched to see how much Hynes paid, and then stood up and said with
a grown-up air: “Same again, lads?” But before the others could reply
Mick had chimed in with his poker-faced air.

“There’s a bobby in plain clothes at the bar. Children under twelve
aren’t supposed to be here. I’d hide if I was you.”

Peter felt suddenly close to tears. It was not only a recognition that
his position was privileged by the fact that he couldn’t afford it; it
was an admission that he was now, really and truly, one of the group.

Clearly, Hynes and Conway could not understand what Mick saw in him,
and when they got Peter alone they ragged him unmercifully, but even
their ragging was now on a different key; it was the ragging of a
mascot whose extravagances provided them with entertainment, not the
ragging of an outsider who tried to butt in. Even alone he was
protected by his friendship with Mick. Mick called for him and Peter
suffered endless embarrassment mingled with pride, knowing his visits
were talked of. He in turn soon got to know Mick’s people, who lived
in a small house on a terrace. His father was a builder, his mother a
tall, sugary, pious woman who was a sore trial to Mick. She was a
hard-working woman but she had no method, was always losing or
mislaying money, borrowing to make it up so that her husband wouldn’t
know, and then taking sips of whisky on the side to nerve her for the
ordeal of “telling Dowling.” If she worried about her husband and son,
this was pure good-nature on her part, because she had cause enough to
worry about herself. All the same it riled Mick, particularly when she
made novenas for him to pass his examinations. When everyone in the
university recognizes your industry and brilliance, it’s not pleasant
to have all the credit go to the Infant Jesus of Prague or St. Rose of
Lima. Mick argued with her and denounced her superstition, but she
only looked at him with a pitying, good-natured smile and said: “We’re
all smart when we’re your age.”  She was a plain woman who looked on
heaven as a glorified extension of the County Council, where saints,
with the faces of County Councillors, made it their business to look
after the interests of relatives and constituents.

Though Mick was rather silent about his parents, he once confessed to
Peter that it was largely because of her that he was so touchy about
religion. He lived in dread of losing his faith. To Peter, strong on
fundamentals, this did not seem such a serious loss, but Mick went on
to explain that it was different for him because he was a man of
ungovernable passions and religion was the only thing which stood
between them and him. When he walked through town he averted his eyes
from the shopwindows with their frillies and half-dressed tailors’
dummies, and suffered agonies of conscience with Babiche Regan, the
girl he walked out with, comparing his own gloomy fantasies of lust
with her radiance and innocence. But Peter knew himself to be of
coarser stuff altogether; though he had no Babiche Regan to act as a
standard for judging himself, he was merely thrilled by the blast of
inconsequence and frivolity that came from the nightdresses in
shopwindows and explained and humanized the frosty beauties who
ignored him in the street; and though he now realized that Mick’s
quiet manner concealed passions stronger than his own, and continued
to admire him as a marvel of self-control, he felt no conflict
whatever in himself and thought that, if all he heard was true, sexual
experience and losing one’s faith were equally interesting and
exhilarating.

But his own life continued to be bounded by home and the office, and
whenever he met a girl he became impossible. It was just as with Mick
only worse; the profound sense of his own inadequacy hit him like a
gale of wind, and at once he began to rave about Tolstoy and his views
of women. What was worse, he even did it to Babiche and Rosemary. One
evening Mick and himself met them in town, and Mick, whose passions
were probably giving him trouble, suggested that the four of them go
for a walk over the hills to the river. It was an attractive
suggestion; too attractive for Peter, because his panic grew to such
an extent that within ten minutes his conversation had sent the two
girls flying. It was a summer evening and Mick stood in an almost
empty street, looking after them, his hands in his trousers pockets
and as mad as ever Peter had seen him look.

“What the hell did Tolstoy say about women anyway?” he asked gruffly
over his shoulder without even looking at Peter.

“Oh, about clothes,” stammered Peter, feeling only too well how
unconvincing it sounded. “That women are only interested in a man’s
clothes.”

“Sounds as if Tolstoy wanted his backside kicked too,” Mick said
gloomily.

Peter’s eyes suddenly filled with tears.

“It’s only nerves, you know, Mick,” he said in a high, squeaky voice.

Mick thought about that for a moment and then gave a faint grin.

“I used to talk to Babiche about building,” he said.

Babiche was really pretty and attractive and unlike any other girl
whom Peter had met. He was really quite satisfied that she escaped
from Tolstoy’s generalization. She was frank, inconsequent, and
startlingly generous. When Mick took Peter to her house she insisted
on showing him the bathroom herself, and when they met in town and he
had the nerve to ask her to have coffee she wanted to force a
ten-shilling note on him. She was the only girl Peter had met who
seemed to have any intuition about the agonies of self-consciousness
that young fellows went through, and Peter could well believe that she
had cured Mick of talking about building technique.

He sometimes felt that if only he had been lucky enough to discover
her for himself she could have cured him too, but as Mick’s intended
she could do nothing for him. For Mick’s sake he tried hard to like
her, but he couldn’t like anyone who took Mick away from him so many
nights in the week. When they were going to the theatre he spent a
gloomy day in the office because of the lonesome evening which faced
him. When they went for a walk he turned deliberately in the opposite
direction, trying to say lightly to Hynes or Conway when they asked
where Mick was: “Oh, out with the doll as usual.” And then when Mick
and he met he had to listen to Mick repeating her amusing remarks, all
off at a tangent, and all, according to Mick, who seemed to brood over
them as though they were oracles, peculiarly and even unnaturally
apposite and witty, and pretend to be amused himself while wondering
at the blindness of such a brilliant man. He wished to be just but he
knew he was jealous.

Mick, who seemed to recognize it, tried bringing Peter with them but
Peter talked so much that Babiche never got a chance. Then she took a
hand by bringing Rosemary as well. Babiche was convinced that Rosemary
was an intellectual, and that, since Peter was intellectual too, they
should hit it off. Actually Rosemary, gold to Babiche’s black, though
quite as pretty, was the silliest girl God ever put into the
world. Mick had a very soft spot for her, but then Mick had what Peter
lacked, a philosophic interest in the silliness of girls compared with
the silliness of fellows. Rosemary attended the School of Art and
fooled with amateur theatricals. Naturally Peter could not let her get
away with this, and whenever she talked of some dim acquaintance in
the School of Art who was supposed to draw well he said firmly that no
modern could draw except perhaps Degas, knowing perfectly well that
Rosemary would never have heard of Degas or remembered it if she had.

But though Peter could quench the girls’ chatter in a way that made
Mick sigh, they had ways of getting their own back on him against
which he was defenceless. It didn’t even have to be a joke; a glance
or a smile could be sufficient. There were times after he had been out
with them when he felt he had been scratched all over and wondered at
Mick’s lack of taste. Babiche was better than Rosemary, of course;
Babiche at least was human, but all the same she was not good enough
for Mick. It was not her fault that she was shallow, uneducated and
provincial, but there was more than that in it. Jealousy apart, he
felt that she lacked Mick’s nobility of character and that sooner or
later she would be bound to betray his trust. Peter was too modest to
lay claim to nobility himself, but he knew it when he saw it; he felt
that Mick’s crude passions might be less dangerous to their happiness
than Babiche’s good-natured commonness, and that the radiance and
innocence against which Mick contrasted himself was probably no more
than another of his illusions. There was tragedy in the situation. He
saw it all coming, but was powerless to intervene. The disparity of
ages made it impossible. With a younger man—indeed with anyone else
except Mick—he would merely have said: “You know, old man, Babiche is
a very attractive girl but she isn’t your weight.”

Mick left the university and took his first job, in a country
town. For the first time Peter really knew what loneliness was. Mick
wrote frequently and amusingly, and the whole life of the small town
was revealed in his letters, but somehow the life of the city as Peter
tried to bottle it in its own letters seemed cruelly dull; without
Mick it seemed that it could be nothing but dull. He went down and
spent a weekend at Mick’s lodgings and this was wonderful, because
Mick took him to the hotel and laid on all the characters whose
amusing remarks had filled his letters, like the inspector of schools
who said that the only thing he really missed in the Irish countryside
was a nice dish of Roumanian pie. They all seemed to drink a good
deal, and Mick took bottle for bottle with them, but in the way in
which he did everything else, without once losing control of the
situation. Even in drink Mick remained himself.

Back in town, Peter’s loneliness returned worse than ever. He began to
feel that he couldn’t continue there much longer. He too would have to
break out, and if it was only as a labourer in an English town it
would be better than hanging on as a clerk among people whom he
despised. He went for walks only with Conway and Hynes, but since
Mick’s departure they had proved mediocre company. He talked of Mick
to them, but they didn’t seem to realize that they were talking of a
man who was immeasurably their superior. Then he took to calling at
Mick’s house by way of inquiring if there was anything he could do for
Mrs. Dowling, but really to talk of him and get material for his
letters. But Mrs. Dowling too seemed to be unaware that there was
anything remarkable about her son, and seemed inclined to credit it
all to the account of the Infant Jesus of Prague and St. Rose of
Lima. Mick’s father was an intelligent, excitable man who had no truck
with saints, and Peter felt sure that he could tell him a lot about
Mick if only he ever happened to think of him while Peter was there,
but the visits and the occasions when he thought of Mick never seemed
to synchronize, and all Peter got from him were reminiscences of the
Civil War—a trifling affair, as Peter thought. There was nothing else
for it. Babiche was the only one he could talk to about Mick, and to
Babiche he went, Rosemary notwithstanding. With Mick absent and
visited by them both only on occasional weekends, he was prepared to
call an armistice to jealousy.

Babiche seemed to like it too. At least she always lit up whenever he
came, in a way quite different to her old watchful good-humoured
air. It even struck Peter that she was probably a bit lonely herself,
because even if you are not worthy of a man like Mick, he still leaves
a gap in your life. It also seemed to have occurred to her that even
if Rosemary was intellectual it was not in quite the same way as he,
and whenever he called to bring her for a walk she always put on her
hat and coat very firmly without hinting to Rosemary that she might
join them. Rosemary giggled at them both with a malicious and knowing
air.

“I hope Mick Dowling doesn’t get to hear of this,” she said.

“I tell Mick about everything we do,” Peter said in a crushing tone,
but Babiche only laughed and bit her underlip as she glanced in the
mirror over the fireplace.

“Anyway, it’s his own fault for leaving me in Peter’s charge,” she
said as she pulled on her belt, apparently not in the least put out by
Rosemary’s ragging.

Peter didn’t altogether like her taking that tone with Rosemary;
someone, he felt, should really tell the girl that she dragged down
everything she touched to the level of her own sordid daydreaming.

But Babiche was grand. She never seemed to weary talking of Mick. The
walks they took were his favourite walks, along the river and up the
hills; the things they admired were those that interested him, like
the old Georgian houses behind their belts of trees; and, imagining
how they would strike Mick, Peter imitated his gravity, his
concentration, and his solemn poker-faced humour until Babiche
shrieked with laughter, grabbed his arm and shouted: “Stop!” She said
he was the funniest thing she’d ever seen, and at home she insisted on
his repeating it for her family and their guests. “Go on, Peter!” she
would say eagerly. “Do Mick for us—he’s a scream!” she would add
inconsequently to anyone who happened to be there. And Peter would sit
up stiff in his chair with unblinking inexpressive eyes and,
apparently struggling for every word, announce that mimicry was more
suitable for children than for adults, and Babiche would go into
shrieks of laughter again till she had everyone laughing with
her. “It’s Mick!” she cried. “Mick down to the ground! Do Mick at the
races!” For the first time Peter found himself a social success and
stopped talking of Tolstoy and Degas.

He was almost too successful. This was not the purpose for which his
imitation of Mick was intended at all. He had begun it in the office,
in the same way as he had begun imitating Mick’s handwriting, because
he had at last discovered the person he really wanted to be, and
continued it because when he was lonely it was a way of evoking Mick’s
personality so that he could carry on interesting conversations with
himself on his solitary walks; but when he did it like this before
strangers—even before Babiche—it was not the same thing at all. It
was almost as though characteristics in himself which he didn’t even
know of were crowding to it as a safety valve, and what emerged was
not glorification but ridicule. He always felt uneasy after it, as
though he had exposed the more precious part of himself to mockery,
and he even resented the way Babiche encouraged him. It only showed
her even less worthy of Mick.

But at the same time he could not refuse her, could not even check
her. The truth was that as he grew accustomed to being with her and to
the chaffing of fellows in the office about her he found himself
becoming jealous of Mick as well as of her. His mimicry, which had
been a way of aspiring to Mick, was now turning into a way of being
superior to him. He wanted to be Mick; he wanted to be well-balanced
and serious, and because in some way Mick’s seriousness was connected
with his love of Babiche, Peter felt he must love her too. While he
was with her, though still professing to admire Mick, he found himself
trying to shake Babiche’s confidence in him. Though he knew he was
behaving badly he repeated to her things that Mick had said to him
about the trouble he had with his ungovernable passions. Alternatively
and contradictorily he stressed Mick’s preoccupation with religion and
suggested that Mick would never really be happy as anything but a
monk—preferably a Trappist. Whichever line he took it was to
sympathize with her in having to deal with such an unpredictable
man. At the same time he was slightly annoyed because she didn’t seem
to mind.

One evening as they walked up a dark lane from the river Peter probed
her like that—slyly as he thought. This time it was Mick’s
ungovernable passions that were uppermost.

“I suppose he must have another girl down there,” he said sadly.

“You didn’t meet her?” she asked with interest.

“No, but you know how secretive Mick is. You wouldn’t blame him, of
course—a chap as elemental as that.”

“I’m not blaming him,” she said with a shrug. “I suppose it’s only
natural. I don’t mind.”

They emerged onto an open place above the roofs of a terrace. The
valley of the river stretched up from them, the meadows flooded, the
city in the background, spires peering out of brown mist. It was
obvious that Babiche did not care greatly for Mick. What was worse,
her standards of fidelity were as low as Peter had always
suspected. But he didn’t care about that.

“All right,” he said in a low voice. “If he picks up with another
girl, you take me and then we’ll all be happy.”

She looked at him in surprise for a moment and shrugged herself
again. She seemed more surprised than annoyed.

“Don’t be silly!” she said. “You’d never be satisfied with someone
like me.”

“Don’t be too sure of that,” he said earnestly, taking her hand. It
was so small it almost frightened him into dropping it again, small
and living and frightening like a bird the time you take it up. She
didn’t seem to mind his holding it. She didn’t even seem to mind his
kissing her, but she was alarmed at the way he did it.

“All right, all right,” she said with a grin. “Don’t make a show of
us. Come in here where we won’t be seen.”

After that they returned to her house and she made tea. She seemed
quietly, snugly happy and without a shadow of guilt, and whenever her
eye caught his she grinned and wriggled her shoulders contentedly.
Peter, who would have plunged at once into a discussion of the
difference the evening had made in the relations of both of them with
Mick, felt it might be in bad taste while she continued in this
humour.

Then the detestable Rosemary came in and seemed to understand it all
at a glance. She stood in the doorway, tapping a theatre program on
her knee, and looked knowingly from one to the other.

“Sorry to intrude,” she said in a high, giggling, affected voice. “You
really should have a red light outside the studio. Babiche, have you
been at my rouge again?”

Babiche tucked in her chin, grinned knowingly, and did something
attractive and silly with her back hair. Peter sat and glowered in
silence. It was as though Rosemary had been expecting and prophesying
it for months and Babiche was amused at her shrewdness. She
accompanied Peter to the gate and he kissed her good-night in a tumult
of emotion. In his arms she felt real, but she looked and spoke like
something out of a fairy tale. Obviously, ‘Tolstoy hadn’t a
clue. Peter felt suddenly as though he had become ten years older,
full of power, peace, and self-confidence, never again to be shaken to
the heart by some generalization out of a book. He had broken out of
the magic circle of fantasy into the wide world of reality where Mick
lived. He was Mick; he was loved by the girl Mick loved; what better
proof could anyone ask for? The moon was high in the sky over the
valley of the city, where now the mist was white, and he stood for a
few moments in a gateway, looking down at it through the bars as
though he had just given birth to it.

Then his mind reverted to the problem Babiche’s nonchalance had
deferred. What was to happen about Mick? He could, of course, take
Babiche from Mick, but when it came to the point he felt that he
needed Mick more than Babiche. His duty to Mick required him to see
that nothing of the sort occurred again. This would be a strain, but
nothing like the strain it would have continued to be unless it had
happened. Since it had, and could not be denied, he was enabled to
bear the thought of the future with equanimity. He would easily find
another girl, since after Babiche the rest would be child’s
play. Nothing whatever could now stop him in a career of conquest. But
it occurred to him that it might be difficult to make Babiche take the
same noble view. As Peter had always suspected, she was an impulsive,
sensual girl who always needed a man about her. And again it
astonished him that Mick, years older than he and so much more
brilliant, had not realized it for himself. Babiche was a nice girl, a
really delightful girl, but quite unworthy of his friend.

Unfortunately, this was something that Peter still could not tell him,
even now. Particularly now. It would always have to remain a secret
between Babiche and himself, and this would be made far more difficult
by the malice of Rosemary who, to avenge the way he had humiliated her
on the subject of Degas, would take any opportunity of injuring him
with Mick. This time it was his own blindness that he wondered
that. As a realist he should have seen that Rosemary expected what had
happened merely because she knew her sister so much better than Mick
or himself knew her, and had merely waited cynically for the moment
when some man would give her an opportunity. Probably the only thing
which had surprised them both was the length of time Peter had taken
about it. There were depths of unworthiness in Babiche which even he
had not suspected. She wouldn’t do; she wouldn’t do at all. It was
madness to have endangered his friendship with Mick over such a woman.

But it was only in bed that the full madness of his conduct was
revealed to him. He had indeed proved Babiche unworthy of Mick, but
only at the cost of proving himself unworthy of him. Mick would
forgive Babiche because unworthy women had the advantage of being
forgiven. He wouldn’t be forgiven, and all his ideas of covering it up
were only fantasies. He couldn’t lie to Mick because Mick was both
inside and outside him; he was Mick, and he knew that the Mick within
him would not let him rest. His mistake had been in trying to become
Mick in the outside world as well, for in that process he had become
something which the real Mick would despise.

He knew it was hopeless. He did not go to Babiche’s again. She wrote
asking him to tea—a cheerful, inconsequent, rattle-pated letter that
showed her entirely devoid of any sense of guilt—but he didn’t
reply. Mick came home on holidays but didn’t call to see him. Peter
knew he had learned the whole story from herself, or worse, from
Rosemary. All lies, he knew, but no lies could be worse than the
truth. In sober moments he realized that it was only growing-pains.
There would be other friends and other girls but never again anything
like this. His treachery had made two parts of him. He had become a
man. But the idea gave him singularly little comfort.


(1952)

Source:_The Stories of Frank O'Connor_,
New York, 1952, Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 82-95.