A SENSE OF RESPONSIBILITY 1 The first time Mrs Dwyer saw anything queer about Susie’s boy, Jack Cantillon, was when his brother, Mick, was killed in a motoring accident. Mrs Dwyer was the mother of a large, loud-voiced family. Her husband was a carpenter, known to his wife as ‘poor Dwyer’, whose huffy shyness had never permitted him to make anything of himself. In spite of the fact that she was twice his build and had ten times his brains, he lectured her as if she were an idiot, and she put up with it as if she were. She was a bossy, bosomy, handsome woman; very devout and very sarcastic She had three boys who were spoiled and three girls who were not, because Mrs Dwyer never had the least regard for women’s rights. ‘Let them give me the money and they can have the rights,’ she said, and she only voted to humour her husband, who naturally attached great importance to his vote. Jack Cantillon had come to the house originally, courting Annie, but after he had been doing it for some time the three girls held a conference and decided he was too slow for Annie and would be better off with Susie, who was slow as well. In return, Susie gave Annie her best blue frock and a pair of new ear-rings. If Jack noticed anything queer about the change he didn’t say much, He never said much anyway. He lived with his mother in a terrace house up the road. She was a thin, ravaged, actressy woman who, according to herself, had come down in the world a lot. She was the widow of a manager in one of the big stores in town, and Jack now worked there as well. He was the elder and steadier of her two sons, but he and his mother had never got on. Her favourite was Mick, who married a girl called Madge Hunt, a good-natured, stupid, sentimental girl. Madge, like his mother, adored Mick, who was easy-going and light-hearted, and she was very shocked at the harshness of employers who expected him to work even when he wasn’t feeling up to it and the unreasonableness of creditors who wanted him to pay back what he owed them, whether he had it or not. She never objected when things got bad, and Mick had to transfer herself and the child back to his mother’s. But a couple of years of marriage improved her sense of reality enormously, and by the time Mick was killed, not too gloriously, in an accident, and she had to go out to work, she was as hard as nails, cold and knowing. Jack took Mick’s death hard, considering that the pair of them had never been very friendly, and began calling regularly on Madge, who lived with her little boy on the road. To begin with, Mrs Dwyer saw nothing wrong in this: a decent grief is a respectable weakness, and she was nothing if not respectable. But it went on too long, till it bordered on insincerity—insincerity, or what was worse, lack of common sense. And it didn’t stop there. Babs, the oldest of the Dwyer girls, who heard everything, heard from the woman who employed Madge that Jack had made her give up the daily work and paid the difference himself. What Madge’s employer said was: ‘There’s a good brother-in-law for you!’ What Babs in her loud, humorous way, said was: ‘How well I wouldn’t find an old fool to do that for me!’ What her mother, a woman of remarkable judgement, said was: ‘That’s queer behaviour in a man that’s supposed to be marrying our Susie.’ She wanted Susie to have an explanation with Jack, but Susie flew in a panic and said she’d be too frightened. In some ways Susie was a judgement on her mother; a dreamy, good-natured girl, but too fond of ‘them old novels’ to have any self-respect. Mrs Dwyer did not read novels and had plenty of self-respect. So far as the boys went, she would defend them with or without justification, but her daughters were the exclusive product of her own intelligence, and could be defended on every reasonable ground. They were personally trained, and if they failed in any particular, she would repair them without charge. Without going into difficult questions of moral theology, one might say that at a pinch she would replace them. She would certainly not let an occasion like this pass without an explanation from Jack. ‘I hear you’re very good to Madge Hunt, Jack,’ she said one evening when she got him alone in the sitting room. ‘Ah, Madge is a fine girl, Mrs Dwyer, he said. ‘And I don’t think it’s very good for a child of Michael’s age to be left with strangers while she’s out at work.’ ‘’Tis hard, Jack,’ she agreed, pleasantly enough. Never having thought of the world but as a vale of tears, she felt no responsibility to defend its inequalities. ‘But won’t it make it harder for you to settle down yourself?’ ‘Begor, I suppose it will—a bit,’ he admitted cheerfully. ‘And you don’t think it’s a long time to ask Susie to wait?’ she asked reproachfully. ‘It’s longer than I like to wait myself, Mrs D, he replied with a grin. ‘I don’t want to stay at home any longer than I can help. Of course, I may get a raise, and if I do, it will nearly cover the few shillings I give Madge. At the same time I can’t be sure of it. I’ve told Susie already that I may have to wait, and if she gets a better offer I wouldn’t stand in her way.’ ‘I hope she doesn’t, Jack, Mrs Dwyer replied with the least shade of pompousness. ‘As you say, if she does, she’ll have to take advantage of it. A girl has only one life.’ Mrs Dwyer was not pompous, but she had a mortifying feeling that Madge Hunt, who wasn’t even intelligent, could get round Jack Cantillon when she failed. ‘I’d have nothing to do with that fellow, Susie,’ she said dryly when she spoke to her daughter later. ‘He hasn’t enough manliness to make any girl a good husband. The Cantillons all take after their mother.’ She could hardly have said worse than that, but Susie was not the sort to drop a fellow merely because her mother told her to. ‘Them old novels’ had her ruined, and when she grew alarmed at the idea that Jack didn’t appreciate her, her only notion of maintaining her self-respect was to make him jealous with another man. In the novels, that always showed them, usually too late. Now, the only way she could do this in a way that would even be noticed by Jack was by flirting with his friend, Pat Farran, and Pat was anything but a good choice for that delicate office. He was tall and handsome, quick-witted and light-hearted. He was delicate. Having been brought up in a household of women and sent to work in an office full of women, he seemed at times to be half a woman himself. He could cook, he could sew, he had an eye for clothes, and never seemed to feel with women the embarrassments most normal men feel. With a girl he was just another girl, so understanding, sympathetic and light in the touch that it never struck her until later that this was the only feminine thing about him. By that time, it was usually too late, and the girl’s affections were engaged. Women were always trying to telephone him, and some of the things he said about them were shocking. Of course, he didn’t mean them that way, but a man has enough to do trying to think as well of women as the conventions require without getting inside information, and as a rule, men didn’t like him much. Susie didn’t really like him either: he didn’t seem to fit into any novel that she’d ever read, but she did want Jack to see that others appreciated her, and for a shy girl it isn’t easy to find an attractive man who’ll make love to her at the drop of a hat. Any other man would have withdrawn from a situation of such delicacy, but Pat lacked all real niceness of feeling. He saw through Susie, was delighted with her profound satisfaction at her own guile, and full of curiosity to know how far she would take it. When he met her with Jack he pretended to be dying of love for her. ‘You’ll come home with me, Susie,’ he would say, embracing her. ‘I can’t live another day without you.’ ‘I can’t, sure,’ Susie would cry, half pleased and half terrified. ‘Ah, why can’t you? It isn’t that fellow you’re afraid of?” ‘But you don’t know what he’s like!’ ‘I don’t? I know him since he was ten. The coldest fish in Ireland! Never cared for anyone only himself.’ ‘Go away, ye whoors of hell!’ Jack would say, helpless with laughter as though it were all a scene from a play. But it wasn’t. Not quite. The Dwyers had a cottage in Crosshaven that summer, and as Pat spent a lot of his time there, the flirtation continued, and Susie even began to enjoy it. The cliffs at night, the noise of the sea and the company of an attractive young man who knew all about love-making gave her a certain sympathetic understanding of other seductions she had read about. Perhaps poor Tess wasn’t as much to blame as she had thought! She had the idea that Pat was beginning to respect her, too, and her mother, who admitted that she liked a fellow who had a bit of the devil in him, was friendly. But of any effect it might be having on Jack, Susie couldn’t see a sign, and she could only wonder if her mother wasn’t right and if there wasn’t something lacking in him. All that summer Pat was unwell, and after he returned to Cork he had to be operated on. Susie had never seen Jack so depressed. Every evening he was out at the hospital. Susie discovered from Pat’s mother that Jack had offered to guarantee a loan so that Pat could get to Switzerland. When she told her mother Mrs Dwyer sniffed and said, ‘That fellow will be supporting half Cork before you get him to the altar.’ ‘But they are great friends, Mummy,’ said Susie, and her mother replied, ‘Friends or not, he has other responsibilities.’ But it was too late for Switzerland. In the week after Christmas Pat died as he had lived, lightly, swiftly and making passes at the nurses with a sort of desperate gallantry that went to Jack’s heart. After the funeral he took to visiting Pat’s parents as he visited Madge Hunt, and busied himself with the tying up of Pat’s small business interests. He was the sort of man whose sympathy could be best expressed over a set of books. But Susie realized that this was something very different from his behaviour after his brother’s death. He kept a picture of Pat on his mantelpiece, and a couple of times when she called she caught him staring at it. As time went on, and she saw it had become a sort of fixation with him, she became more concerned. Women are more jealous of men than they are of other women, though Susie would have been horrified to be told that she was jealous of Pat. She put it all down to concern for Jack: his attitude was morbid, and she must try to change it. But whenever she belittled Pat he either looked pained and changed the subject or else told her that she didn’t understand. This was really too much for Susie, because, after all, it was she whom Pat had made love to, and if she didn’t understand him, who did? ‘Ah, you’re very foolish, Jack,’ she said wearily. ‘You let people influence you too much. I suppose it’s the effect your mother had on you. I’d never let anybody influence me that way. Of course, I was very fond of Pat, but I could see through him. You never saw how shallow he was.’ ‘Now, Susie, don’t let’s argue,’ he said pleadingly. ‘Pat was not shallow. He had a very fine head.’ ‘He was very insincere, though,’ said Susie. ‘Everybody has his own way of being sincere,’ said Jack. ‘Pat was sincere enough, only it wasn’t in your way or mine.’ ‘Ah, for goodness sake!’ she said, laughing at him. ‘You never knew where you were with Pat. He’d be ridiculing you as soon as your back was turned.’ ‘Of course he’d be ridiculing you,’ Jack said almost angrily, ‘but there wasn’t any harm in it. He was the straightest man I ever knew.’ Then Susie realized that her only remaining hope of shaking Jack was to show him what Pat was really like. She knew from novels the effect that always produced. ‘And I suppose you don’t know what Pat was up to with me when you weren’t there?’ she asked quietly, trying to keep her voice steady. ‘I know damn well what he was up to, whether I was there or not, Jack replied with a positive grin. ‘And you don’t even mind that he was living with me?’ she asked, beginning to sniff. ‘He was what?’ Jack shouted, delighting her with his furious air even though it scared her into sobs and tears. You bloody little bitch!’ It was the first time he had ever spoken rudely to her, and she was scandalized at the injustice of it. Anything she had said, she had said only for his sake, to help him to see things better. ‘Oh, it’s all very well for you to criticize,’ she stormed at him through her tears. ‘It’s all your own fault, you and your blooming old responsibilities. I suppose you have no responsibility to me. You knew the sort he was, and you threw me at his head. Any other girl that was kept dragging on the way I was would do the same.’ ‘Not making you a saucy answer,’ he said, rising and glaring down on her like the wrath of God, ‘I don’t give a damn what you did, but I’m not going to have you going round, telling lies about a dead man.’ ‘Lies?’ she exclaimed aghast, clutching her hands on her bosom. ‘What the hell else is it?” ‘It is not lies’ she said, springing to her feet, really furious now. She didn’t mind accusing herself of being an abandoned woman, which is what all the interesting women in fiction are, but to be accused of making it up was the final indignity. ‘Of course it’s lies,” he said contemptuously. ‘Oh, the conceit and vanity of you!’ she screamed in a tone of outrage. ‘You’re so smug that you think a woman couldn’t do it to you. You think Pat couldn’t do it to you! Well, he did, he did, and I don’t blame him. I don’t blame him a bit. You’re just like your mother, rotten with conceit. You’re not natural. My mother said it herself. You don’t even know the temptations people have.’ ‘And as I said before, I don’t care,’ Jack replied, squaring up to her, madder than she’d ever before seen him. ‘But it could cause great pain to Pat’s family to have stories like that going round about him, so don’t do it again, like a good girl.’ Susie realized with stupefaction that, whether he believed her or not made no difference at all to Jack. He would still continue to think more of Pat’s parents’ feelings than of hers. It was no use at all practising scenes from novels on him because no novelist had ever met anyone as unnatural as Jack Cantillon. And there was no hope of sympathy at home, because her family never read novels anyway, and they would either think she was telling the truth and be ashamed of her or that she wasn’t and think she wasn’t right in the head. She went home in a state approaching hysterics and told her mother only that Jack was a most appalling man, a most unnatural man. ‘Well, girl’, her mother replied complacently, ‘you can’t say but that you were warned,’ which was about the most useless thing she could have said, for the more Susie was warned, the more curious she became about Jack, She couldn’t help wondering what worse there was to know about him, and that meant she was tied to him for a long time to come. When a girl ceases to be inquisitive about a man she is really through with him. 2 It was five years before he was in a position to marry her, and by that time Susie’s spirit was broken. He was worse to her than cigarettes to another girl. She frequently thought how wonderful it would be to be married to a western islander, and to be made love to on the shore in sight of the waves, but the western islands were far away, and she would be shy about making advances to an islander, and besides, she would probably catch her death of cold. Mrs Dwyer was not too pleased with the marriage. She had sized Jack up, and was not a woman to change her mind about people that easily, but she was prepared to tolerate him for Susie’s sake. And, from the worldly point of view, he was rather a better match than the husbands the other girls had got. He was now chief clerk, and in time would probably be manager, like his father. He bought a fine dilapidated old house off the Wellington Road, with tall rooms and wonderful views, and a lavatory somewhere up in the roof that would put the western seacoast in the shade. There the two children were born, Pat and Molly. Of course, the boy had to be called Pat. It seemed as if things were running smooth for them at last. Too smooth for Susie’s comfort. Jack was all right in a pub with a few men, but he did not care for society, and he refused to dance. After his day’s work, all he mostly wanted was to change into old clothes, and read, or play with the children. And she had never really got over the way he had made light of her great revelation. According to her mood, she had two entirely different versions of her relations with Pat, whose picture still stood on the mantelpiece as though nothing had ever happened between herself and him. The first and commoner version was that nothing had—which was perfectly true; the second was that something awful had happened, which was equally true, according to the way you looked at it. When she was in good humour—which was most of the time—there had been nothing between Pat and herself only what she called ‘old cod-acting’, but when things went against her, she looked at the photograph and scowled at the child,and realized that she was no better than a woman of the streets all because of Jack’s monstrous selfishness; and when she felt like that she made him a thorough good, old-fashioned scene in which she wept and screamed and called him an old molly. Jack, staring gloomily out at the grand view of the city, tried to soothe her, but that only made her worse. Finally, when it got too much for him, he would dash down whatever he was reading, say ‘F— you!’ in a thick voice, and go out to get drunk. People who saw him in town at such times brought back reports of a Jack Susie had never seen impudent, witty and scandalous. The first time it happened she was thrilled, but she soon discovered that his emotional vocabulary was limited to one word, and that when he had used it, he had no more to say for himself. Then, trouble caught up with them again. His mother, having managed to exhaust her small means, had entangled herself in a labyrinth of minor debts that could somehow never be subjected to the ordinary processes of accountancy. Mrs Cantillon considered that sort of accountancy common, and she traced Jack’s weakness for it to his father. All Jack could make out was that even if he paid her rent and as many debts as he felt should be paid, it would still be only a matter of months till she was in court again. Jack had his father’s mousy horror of the courts: Mrs Cantillon couldn’t see what was wrong with them. She found district court judges very understanding and very ready to sympathize with her problems. This presented Jack with a horrible alternative. He went up one evening to Madge Hunt to ask her advice. Curiously, Madge, who had begun as something of a nightmare to him, was how his only adviser. She opened the door and instantly put on her best party airs. You could see at once that she was a parish priest’s niece. Oh, my, the kitchen was in such a state! He’d have to come into the parlour. She was sure he’d never forgive her. Michael was out at the School of Commerce. He must be dead after the walk. A drop of whiskey was what her uncle said was the only tonic. Jack put up with it good-humouredly. She was a small woman, flowery in manner, and not as well-educated as you’d expect from a parish priest’s niece—in fact, you could easily mistake her for the proprietress of a country shebeen; but he knew that under the silly convent-school airs there was a cold, clear intelligence and great integrity. ‘Well, Jack,’ she said candidly when he had told her his troubles, ‘it seems to me you’ll have to be a bit of a bastard for once in your life.’ ‘Tell me, Madge, would I have to take lessons?’ he asked with a grin. ‘I’ll give you free lessons, and you’ll find they’ll save you a lot of trouble,’ she said without answering the grin. ‘Put your mother in a home.’ ‘That’s what I find so hard to do,’ he admitted. ‘Well, there you are!’ she said with a shrug and a laugh. ‘If you were the sort of man that found it easy to be sensible, I wouldn’t be sitting as comfortable as I am. Whatever I say will only reflect on myself, but that’s the way life is, Jack. She’ll make a wreck of your home. You know that yourself,’ ‘I fancy she’ll try,’ said Jack. ‘Don’t fool yourself at all, Jack,’ Madge said sharply. ‘There won’t be any trying about it. She’ll do it. You’re not the man to handle her, and I’m not criticizing you. There’s only one way to handle her and that’s to put her in with someone who could. You could put her in with me. I don’t like the woman, but I’d take her for your sake, though ’twould mean more expense to you, because I haven’t the room. But if you ask my opinion, she’d go to the poorhouse first. I’m not saying it to criticize your mother, Jack, because she’s more to you than I am, but there’s only one thing in the world she cares for, and that’s her own way. You’ll excuse me saying so?’ ‘I’ll overlook it,’ he said affectionately. ‘Thanks, Madge. I’ll talk to her about it, and see what she says.’ At the doorway she kissed him, and looked after him as he went back down the road, thinking to herself in her unsentimental worldly way that he was probably the only man in the world she could have been happy with. There weren’t many women who felt that way about him, Perhaps that was why he went to her for advice. She had seen through Mrs Cantillon though, for that was exactly what she felt about Jack’s cruel proposal. First she looked at him with a timid, childlike smile as if she were wondering if he was in earnest. ‘You mean the woman who killed your brother?’ she asked reproachfully. ‘I thought they said it was a truck,’ Jack replied mildly. ‘They were being charitable.’ ‘Then what will you do?’ he asked. ‘Don’t ask me, Jack!’ she begged with the air of a tragedy queen. ‘I’ll promise I’ll be no burden to you.’ Then Jack, seeing she was false all through, became gloomier still, remembering how she had exploited Mick and himself, and realizing that Madge was right and that he could never, never deal with her. Mrs Cantillon, for all her silliness, was a woman of infinite perception. She saw that in the matter of getting her own way, which as Madge had said, was all she cared about, Madge, a hard, sly, cynical woman, would see through her little dramatizations before they even took shape, while Susie, as well as being a much better cook, would be putty in her hands. Mrs Dwyer, a woman of small silliness and excellent perceptions, saw that too. She warned Susie on no account to agree to Mrs Cantillon’s living with them, and; seeing Susie’s complete lack of gumption where anything you could read about in a novel was concerned, she had it out with Jack himself. This time there was no pleasantness about it. She was fighting for her daughter’s happiness and security. ‘I don’t think you realize the dangers of in-laws in your home, Jack,’ she said severely. ‘I think I do, Mrs D,’ he said wearily. ‘I don’t think you do, Jack,’ she said, her voice growing hard. ‘If you did you wouldn’t offer your mother a home with Susie and yourself. I saw more of that sort of thing than you did, and I never yet saw it come to any good. People may mean no harm, but just the same they make mischief.’ ‘Mrs Dwyer,’ he replied with mournful humour, ‘even my mother’s best friend wouldn’t accuse her of meaning no harm.’ Mrs Dwyer smiled, but the smile didn’t last. ‘That’s all the more reason why she shouldn’t be in the one house with you and Susie,’ she said. ‘When you married Susie, you took on certain responsibilities, and they’re not easy. Young people have to have their disagreements, and they have to have them in privacy. I never interfered between ye, good or bad, because I know only too well what it leads to. Marriage is something between two people, and when a third person comes into it, mother or father, priest or lawyer, there’s an end of it.’ ‘If you think I’d be likely to let anyone come between me and Susie!’ he said almost with a goan. ‘You mightn’t be able to help it, Jack,’ she said dryly. ‘Your mother is your mother, whatever anyone might say.’ ‘If that day came I could always cut my throat,’ Jack replied with one of his rare outbursts of violence. She had never seen him like this before, and she watched him with interest. ‘I never got on with her,’ he added candidly. ‘I blamed her for the way she spoiled Mick. After my father’s death I blamed her for the way she turned us against him. I knew then he was a fine man.’ ‘He was,’ she said unemotionally. ‘That’s true. He was a fine man.’ ‘She told us lies about him. She doesn’t know what the truth is. But she worked hard, and she was generous to those she liked. Old people have to live too, Mrs Dwyer.’ ‘They have, Jack,’ she said without expression, ‘but they haven’t the same claims as young people. For everyone’s sake, your mother would be better in a home. I have to think of Susie.’ ‘And I have to think of Susie and my mother,’ he said gloomily. ‘You may have to choose, Jack,’ she said quietly. ‘There are certain things you have no choice about, Mrs Dwyer,’ he replied, and again she realized with irritation that this intolerably weak man, who allowed himself to be imposed on by his calculating mother, had a sort of doggedness that made him safe from being influenced by a woman of character like herself. ‘Well, don’t blame me if you wreck your home,’ she said with finality. ‘I wouldn’t blame you, anyhow,’ he replied. ‘And don’t expect me to go into it,’ she added severely. ‘I’m sure what you’re doing is wrong, and that it will come to a bad end, and I won’t make mischief, but I won’t go where mischief is being made.’ With characteristic determination she kept her word. She did not visit Jack’s house again, though the children came up regularly to see her, and Jack himself came every Sunday after Mass. She always received him with especial cordiality. She had too much pride to let herself be flouted, but it pleased her that he could take her rebuke in that impersonal way. ‘God knows he’s not natural,’ she said to her daughters, ‘but you can’t help liking him.’ And that, from a woman of Mrs Dwyer’s calibre, was a real concession. 3 It must be admitted that she had miscalculated Mrs Cantillon’s style though not her content. She made hell of the home all right, but not in the straightforward way Mrs Dwyer expected and could have partly countered. She made no attempt to make Susie’s life difficult and contented herself with making a hell of Jack’s. The silliness of Mrs Cantillon had an aspect that was not far removed from genius. She knew his weaknesses in a way that Susie had never known them, because they had been largely created by herself, and she remembered with attachment childish humiliations he had endured. She knew that though a married man and a father, he had always remained something of a bachelor; had lived all his life in the one small suburb of Cork, knowing no more of his neighbours than was necessary for the small courtesies of life—weddings, christenings, and funerals—while his mother boasted that she knew everything about everybody. After his day’s work he liked to change ceremonially into old trousers, but his mother began to jolly him into taking Susie out. On the surface it was all the height of good nature, and Susie, who found long-extinguished aspirations for society reviving in her, took it all at its face value. ‘Sure, it’s all for my own sake, girl’, her mother-in-law said. ‘What other chance have I of getting the children to myself, and, what other chance have you and Jack of enjoying yourselves?” The worst of it was that she could not keep from tinkering with money, which seemed to have a sort of fascination for her. Jack didn’t mind the occasional bet, though she started Susie betting as well, but when he discovered from a solicitor that Susie’s savings were being put into house property he lost his temper. Susie screamed at him that he’d sooner let his money rot in the bank than put it to some use, and he replied that if his mother had done the same she might have been able to pay her rent instead of living with them. The queer thing was that as the home grew more wretched Susie came to depend more on her, and even had arguments with her own mother about it. Susie argued eagerly with her that Mrs Cantillon wasn’t so much to blame as Jack. In all their disagreements it was Jack with his monstrous egotism who had been at fault. He had always been that way, even as a boy—self-centred and cold—unlike Mick, who was sunny and generous and warm. If Madge Hunt had decided that she had married the wrong brother, Susie was well on the way to believing the same. But finding herself on the same side as Mrs Cantillon about anything was something Susie’s mother did not propose to let pass. ‘Ah, for goodness’ sake, child!’ she said. ‘As if the whole road didn’t know what Mick Cantillon was like.’ ‘He was terribly misjudged all the same, Mummy,’ Susie said tragically. ‘He was, I hear!’ her mother retorted coarsely. ‘Don’t be fooling yourself at all now, Susie. Your husband may be foolish, but his brother was never any good, and his mother is downright bad, and let nobody persuade you otherwise.’ And, on the day that Mrs Cantillon was found unconscious and dying at the foot of the stairs, Mrs Dwyer walked in to look after the children, and the quarrel was over. In fact, as nobody but herself realized, the quarrel had been over for a long time. Mrs Dwyer had been impressed by something which also would have occurred to no one but herself. His mother had shaken Susie, but she had not shaken Jack. A man who could resist the influence of a bad woman was something Mrs Dwyer had never encountered before. Mrs Dwyer was facing troubles of her own at the time. ‘Poor Dwyer’ had been dead for several years; Jim, the last of the boys, had married, and she was living on her own. Characteristically, this, instead of making her brood, gave her a new lease of life. What to anyone else would have been the end of a way of living was to her the beginning of another. She plunged straight into a life of dissipation, travelling to Blackrock and Douglas to visit old friends, playing cards, going to the pictures and refusing to mind her grandchildren. ‘Wisha, aren’t I right?’ she said to Jack with a shrug. ‘Aren’t I fussing round them long enough? God knows, you have no notion, the comfort it is not to have anyone but yourself to look after.’ But she had left it a bit late before taking her fling. Soon afterwards she developed arthritis, and Susie came to nurse her. But it looked as though her independence was over. She couldn’t be left alone in the house, and would have to go and live with one of the boys—a bitter humiliation for a strongminded woman. Tim, an easy-going fellow, would have had her readily enough, but easy-going fellows get easy-going wives, and it was most unlikely that Mrs Dwyer, who boasted that she had never seen the day when a properly-cooked dinner wasn’t served in her house, would put up with Nora and her perpetual round of sausages. Ned’s wife had six children, and there was no room unless they took a bigger house. Jim, being only just married, hadn’t enough furniture, and it would take a lot to make the house liveable-in. It wasn’t that the boys didn’t love their mother or wouldn’t have died for her if the occasion arose, but they were all in difficulties themselves. Susie, who had a heart for everyone’s troubles, understood this perfectly, and her heart bled for each of them in turn, but her sister, Babs, told them roundly that they were a bloody pack of wasters and then went upstairs to tell her mother the same. ‘How often did I say it to you?’ she shouted, with her arms folded like a market woman. ‘How often did I tell you you were ruining them, and you wouldn’t pay a bit of attention to me? One of them wouldn’t eat a slice of bread unless you buttered it for him, and none of us could get anything, and that’s the thanks you get for it.’ Babs was a forthright girl who could be counted on to make everything as difficult as possible for everyone else. Her mother listened with amusement. ‘The Lord lighten their burdens!’ she said dryly. ‘As if I’d be under an obligation to any of them!’ ‘Well, what are you going to do, woman?” asked Babs. ‘You can’t stop here.’ ‘I’m going up to the Little Sisters where I can be properly looked after,’ said her mother. ‘I have it fixed this two years past. Did you think, after all my years, I’d go into another woman’s house to have her telling me what to do? What a fool I am!’ The whole family realized when it was put to them, that, regrettable as it was, it was only what they had always anticipated, A woman of strong character like their mother could never become an encumbrance in the house of a daughterin-law. She would have to die as she had lived, saucy and strong and independent. The only one who didn’t take it that way was Jack. ‘I suppose they know it’s going to kill her?’ he asked Susie. ‘Oh, Jack, you don’t think that?’ ‘I don’t think it at all,’ said Jack. ‘I know it.’ ‘But, sure, she couldn’t get on with any of the wives!’ ‘And do you think she’s going to escape other women by going into a home?” he asked sarcastically. ‘I suppose she isn’t,’ said Susie, who was sufficient of a fretter to be easily cast down. ‘But what else can you do with her? You know what she’s like when she has her mind made up.’ ‘I wonder if she has her mind made up,’ he said lightly, and then talked about something else. But Susie could see he hadn’t stopped brooding about it at all. Next evening, after a long walk up Montenotte and back by Mayfield, he called at the Dwyers’. The walk was part protocol, part technique: to call without the excuse of a walk would have made the visit official. Babs was in charge, and her mother ordered her out to make tea for Jack. Marriage made no difference to the Dwyer girls. Inside the door, they instantly reverted to a position of dependence and would do so while she had a roof over her head. And Jack’s bread would be buttered for him the way ‘poor Dwyer’s’ bread had been buttered because men liked it that way. ‘I hear you’re going up to the Little Sisters?’ Jack said with apparent amusement as they sat over the bedroom fire in the dusk. ‘Sure, of course I am, boy,’ she replied lightly. ‘You know what I always thought of in-laws. Can you imagine me turned loose on one of them? Not, between ourselves, Jack Cantillon, that I’m not a better woman than any of them, as old as I am.’ ‘I’d put my money on you anyway,’ he said, amused that even in her hour of defeat she had kept her vanity. ‘God knows, Jack,’ she said, leaning forward with her hands on her knees and staring into the fire, I don’t know what sort of women are they rearing. They’re good for nothing only drink and gossip—not but I always liked a little drop myself, in reason. That wife of Tim’s—I don’t care to be criticizing, but I don’t know is she ever right. If I was a man and a woman offered me sausages for my dinner two nights in a row I’d crown her with the frying-pan. I declare to God I would.’ ‘You wouldn’t come to Susie and me?” he asked, dropping his voice so as not to be heard by Babs. ‘You’d be no trouble. The room is there since the mother died.’ ‘Was it Susie suggested that?’ she asked with apparent pleasure that didn’t take Jack in at all. He congratulated himself on observing protocol. Mrs Dwyer might just be prepared to discuss such an offer from a man, particularly a man who had only just dropped in casually on the way from a walk, but to have it made by a daughter would have been a derogation. ‘Oh, I didn’t discuss it with Susie,’ he said hastily. ‘It only just came into my mind. Of course, Susie would have to have the last word.’ The last word, not the first. That had to come from a man. ‘Wisha, Jack, boy,’ she said, dropping protocol, ‘I’m easy where I go. I had my day, and I must only be satisfied. At the same time, mind you, I’m glad to be asked. ’Tis a fright to feel that nobody wants you. I suppose vanity is the last thing that dies in us.’ ‘Oh, vanity!’ he said. ‘You never told me you were that way. Tell me, will you come to us?’ ‘I will not, Jack, thanks all the same. Ye had enough of in-laws to last ye the rest of yeer lives—not criticizing your poor mother, God rest her, whatever I might say while she was alive. ‘’Tis often I thought since how right you were, in spite of us all. I suppose ’tis only when your own turn comes that you see who was right and who was wrong. Besides,’ she added, ‘I wouldn’t give it to say to the boys.’ ‘I thought of that,’ he agreed seriously. ‘I thought you might let me ask them. I feel sure they wouldn’t stand in the way if they felt you were going to be more comfortable,’ She searched his face to see if he was smiling. He wasn’t though she had too much respect for him to take his words at face value. As a card player she knew it was small use studying expressions. ‘To tell you the God’s truth, Jack,’ she said, ‘I’d hate to be in an institution. God forgive me, I could never like nuns. I don’t think they’re natural. But I warn you, you’d be a fool to take me in. I’d be no acquisition to you. I’d promise the earth and I wouldn’t mean a word of it. Old people are a mass of selfishness. We’re like babies. You have no idea. You’d be waiting here for someone to bring you a cup of tea, and if your nearest and dearest died while you were waiting for it, you wouldn’t care. And isn’t it only natural?’ she added, cocking an argumentative eyebrow at him. ‘Sure what else have we to look forward to?’ ‘I’ll talk to Susie about it,’ he said, as though there was anything poor Susie could say that would make any difference. But once they got used to the idea, it seemed to the whole family that this was how it was bound to happen. Their mother would be impossible in an institution unless she were made matron at once. Jack was steady; he had a good job; he was the born burden-carrier, and in the matter of money would never be able to embarrass them as a real member of the family could have done. But, as things turned out, Mrs Dwyer was anything but a liability. Maybe it was the thought that she had escaped the home that gave her a new lease of life. The first evening Jack came home from work she had his old trousers warming before the fire, and told him to change there. ‘At my age, as if I couldn’t look at a man with his trousers off!’ she exclaimed. ‘Do you want me to go out?” ‘I do not,’ said Jack. ‘Wisha, why would you?’ she replied cheerfully. But in some ways she was a great trial to Susie. She looked after him as if he were a child, trying to anticipate what he really liked—never an easy thing with a man who never seemed to express a preference for anything. She started cooking special dishes for him; things she hadn’t cooked for thirty years, and then lamented that ‘her hand was out’. She was so pleased not to be treated as an imbecile, as ‘poor Dwyer’ had treated her, that she even started to read papers and books so as to be able to talk to him. ‘Pick out some books for me there, Jack,’ she would say modestly. ‘Not one of them old love stories. Something sensible.’ And then she would read for an hour with great concentration and say dryly: ‘He got a queer one all right when he went about it. A wonder he wouldn’t take a stick to her!’ When Susie started her first big row with Jack, her mother lowered her book and asked sharply: ‘Susie, what way is that to talk to Jack?’ and Susie broke down and went upstairs to weep. When Jack went to follow her in his usual way, Mrs Dwyer said firmly: ‘Stop where you are, Jack. You only make her worse.’ She put down her book and slowly followed Susie upstairs. She knew Jack didn’t like it; she knew he remembered her warnings against permitting outsiders to interfere, but she also knew how her own daughters should be handled, which he never would. ‘The trouble with you is that you don’t know a good man when you meet one,’ she told Susie, who was lying on the bed, weeping, and waiting for her husband to comfort her the way any married woman would. ‘I only wish to God that I’d had a husband like him—not criticizing poor Dwyer, God rest him.’ ‘God is good,’ said Susie between her tears. ‘I mightn’t last long between the pair of ye.’ As her mother chose to ignore this, she called defiantly at her through the closed door. ‘Oh, ye’d be well-suited, the pair of ye!’ She mightn’t have been too far wrong. On her death-bed Mrs Dwyer asked Jack and herself to see that she was buried with them. She did not ask it with any particular eagerness, but even then, she surprised Jack, because she was a woman who had always despised sentiment, disliked anyone who professed to ideals above money and security, and expressed complete indifference about where she was buried. That caused real friction in the family, but Jack suddenly turned obstinate and even cold. Years later, Susie, searching through a few old papers in his desk, found the undertaker’s bill. It came as a shock, and she wept bitterly for a few minutes, and then began to wonder why on earth he had kept it. There were still one or two things that puzzled her about him. There was no escape for her now; a woman who had not ceased to be inquisitive about the man she had married. (1952)