Unapproved Route Between men and women, as between neighboring states, there are approved roads which visitors must take. Others they take at their peril, no matter how high-minded their intentions may be. When I lived in England I became friendly with another Irishman named Frankie Daly. Frankie was the sort of man men like. He was scrupulous, but not so as to irritate people who might have scruples of a different kind. Exacting with himself, he was tolerant of others. The good qualities he had—conscientiousness, loyalty, and generosity—were not those he demanded of his friends, and, as a result, they made great efforts to show them where he was concerned. Even Mick Flynn, who lived by borrowing, made a hullabaloo about paying back a pound he owed to Frankie. Frankie and I were also friendly with two schoolmistresses who had a little cottage in School Lane, and they frequently joined us in the pub for a drink. Rosalind and Kate could have been sisters, they had so little in common. Kate was a born spinster, lean, plain, and mournful, and with the kindest heart in the world. She was very left-wing and tended to blame capitalism for most of her troubles. Rosalind was a good-looking girl with a fat and rather sullen face, who was always up and down with some man, usually—according to Kate, at any rate—of the shadiest kind. Women with a man on their hands usually vote Tory—they dislike being interrupted—and Rosalind was a Conservative. Cooking being a form of activity associated with love-making, she was also an excellent cook, while Kate, who adored food, not only couldn’t cook herself but was driven into hysterics of fastidiousness by the mere sight of cooking fat. She felt about grease as she felt about men, and I sometimes had a suspicion that she identified the two. I often wondered how she could face the liquidation of capitalists and all the blood and mess it would involve. One day another fellow countryman of Frankie and myself turned up on a temporary job. He was a shambling, good-natured, highspirited man, given to funny stories and inexplicable fits of morose anger. Lodgings were scarce and hotels expensive, so the girls offered him a room in the cottage. He settled down so well with them that inside a week or so he and Rosalind were lovers. She simply could not be kept away from men. Kate then devoted herself entirely to the task of hating Jim Hourigan, and being as rude to him as she dared with Rosalind there. Having a lover of Rosalind’s in the cottage was like having endless greasy frying-pans to dodge; she couldn’t move without seeing a masculine singlet or a pair of socks. Kate derived enormous pleasure from her own griefs, and she told us with gloomy humor that it had been bad enough before, lying awake and wondering what Rosalind was up to. She couldn’t kick up a row with Rosalind, who had an unpredictable and violent temper where men were concerned. Kate rationalized this to herself by saying that Rosalind, being a girl of exceptional intelligence, knew they were all wasters but was too proud to admit it. She told us that Rosalind never had had any taste, that all the men she knew had exploited her, that Jim Hourigan was only another of them, and that the only consolation was that she was there herself, ready to pick up the pieces when the inevitable disillusionment came. Frankie and I only laughed at Kate’s groans. We didn’t know what sort Jim Hourigan was, and we didn’t really care much. When his job ended, he returned to Ireland after making many promises of bringing the girls for a long summer holiday there, and of returning himself at the first opportunity. Kate was very cheerful because she was quite convinced that he didn’t mean a word of it—she had the lowest view of his character and motives—and was delighted to have Rosalind and the cottage to herself again. Rosalind, too, was cheerful because, never before having had anything to do with an Irishman, she took all his promises for gospel, had everything ready for her holiday in the summer, and was certain that Hourigan would then ask her to marry him. She wrote him long, animated letters, cleverly recalling our little town and the characters he had met there, and quoting Kate’s doleful predictions about the weather, the European situation, and the cost of living. There was an alarming lack of response to her letters; finally they did produce a wet spark of a picture postcard saying how much Hourigan looked forward to coming back, which might have encouraged a more persevering correspondent but merely infuriated Rosalind. She wasn’t accustomed to having her brilliant letters treated with such lack of ceremony and told him so, but this didn’t produce even a spark. Kate began to put on weight, though how she did was a miracle, because Rosalind was so upset that she refused to cook, and Kate had not only to eat sausages—which she loathed—but even to clean the disgusting frying-pan herself. But that wasn’t the end of Kate’s troubles. Imprudent as usual, Rosalind was having a baby. Now, in the natural way of things, a nice baby without any messy father to get in the way would have been Kate’s idea of bliss, but bliss of that sort is not contemplated in English provincial towns. To begin with, Rosalind would lose her job; women teachers cannot have babies without marriage lines; the thing is unknown. Besides, the landlady would be bound to ask them to leave; this was also part of the drill, and even if the landlady had been a considerate woman, which she wasn’t, she would still have found it difficult to overlook such conduct. They would have to try and hush things up and put the baby out to nurse. This was where Rosalind became completely unmanageable. She said she wanted to keep her baby, and she didn’t mind who knew. Just the same, she stopped coming to the public-house with the rest of us, and Kate, gloomier than ever, came alone. She was depressed by her failure to make Rosalind see reason. It would only be for a couple of years, and then they could make some arrangement, like pretending to adopt the baby. “That wouldn’t be so very good, Kate,” Frankie said when she mentioned it to him. “Well, what else can she do, Frankie? Go out as a charwoman?” “Those are questions that answer themselves, Kate,” he said stubbornly. “A baby put out to nurse is a question that never answers itself.” Next evening, without saying anything to Kate or me, he called at the cottage and found Rosalind sitting alone over the fire. “Coming down to the pub, Rosa?” he asked cheerfully. “No, Frankie, thanks,” she said, without looking up. “Why not? You know it’s not the same without you.” She covered her face with her hands. Frankie sat awkwardly with his legs stretched out, sucking his pipe. “Kate tells me you don’t want to part with the child.” “It seems I’m not likely to be asked.” “All the same, I think you’re right and Kate is wrong,” he said gravely. “That’s easily said, Frankie,” she replied. “It isn’t so easy for Kate, with her job to mind.” “If that’s how you feel about it, wouldn’t it be better for you to marry?” “The man who got me would get a treasure,” she said savagely. “Whistled after in the street!” “That’s a matter for him,” said Frankie. “Plenty of men would be very glad to marry you. You mustn’t let a thing like this make you undervalue yourself.” “Ah, talk sense, Frankie!” she said wearily. “Who’d marry me in the middle of all this scandal?” “I would, to begin with—if you hadn’t anyone you liked better.” “You?” she asked incredulously. “And consider myself very much honored,” Frankie added steadily. “Are you serious, Frankie?” she asked, almost angrily. “Of course I’m serious.” “And face all the humiliation of it?” “There isn’t any humiliation,” he said flatly. “That’s where you’re mistaken. There’s no humiliation where there hasn’t been any offense. The offense is in deceiving others, not in being deceived ourselves.” “Oh, I can’t, Frankie, I can’t,” she said desperately. “I’ve made a fool of myself over this waster, and I can’t let another man shoulder my burdens.” “There’s no particular burden either,” he said. “You mustn’t think I’m asking you only because you’re in a fix. I’d have asked you anyway when this thing was all over and you could make up your own mind. I’m only asking now in case it might make the immediate future a bit easier.” “Why didn’t you ask me before?” “Maybe because I felt I hadn’t much to offer you,” Frankie said with a shy smile. “My God,” she said, rising. “I’d have married you like a shot.” She sat on his knee and hugged him despairingly. He was a clumsy lover. He talked in an apologetic, worried tone about his job, his home, and his family; how much he earned and where they could live. She didn’t listen. She thought of what it would mean to her to start life again, free of this nightmare. Then she took him by the shoulders and looked into his eyes with the air of a sleepwalker. “I’ll do it,” she said. “God help me, Frankie, I hate it, but I’ll do it for the kid’s sake. All I can say is that I’ll make it up to you. You needn’t be afraid of that. I’ll make it up to you all right.” Kate, whose low view of life had led her to take a low view of its Creator, almost got converted because of it. She had always liked Frankie, but her experience of people she liked had been that they only got her into fresh trouble, and that it was better, if you could manage it, to have nothing to do with anybody. She wasn’t the only one who admired Frankie’s behavior. It dawned on others of us that he had done exactly what we would have done ourselves except for what people might think. Actually, as we discovered, “people,” meaning the neighbors with one or two exceptions, liked Rosalind and were pleased to see her escape the machine of social ignominy reserved for women with more feeling than calculation in them. Frankie and Rosalind were married quietly and went to live in a little cottage some miles outside the town, a rather lonely cottage with low beams, high chimneys, and breakneck staircases, but it had a big garden, which Rosalind enjoyed. She kept on her job; she knew the other teachers knew, but now it only amused her. It was wonderful to have Frankie there as a prop. Up to this, all the men she had lived with had taken advantage of her, and she had accepted it in a cynical, good-humored way as part of the price you had to pay for being too fond of them. She believed, as Kate did, that men were like that, but she was lacking in any desire to reform them. Under Frankie’s care she grew round as a tub, stupid, and quite remarkably beautiful, while Kate managed to look as like the anxious father of her unborn child as a girl could look. But the change in Frankie was even more remarkable. He had always kept a youthful freshness, but now he suddenly began to look like a boy of seventeen. It might have been something to do with Rosalind’s cooking—Kate, who had begun to feel the lack of it, visited them every day—but he rang her up regularly at the school to see that she was all right, raced for his bus to get home early in the evenings, and took her for her evening walk to the pub. He was full of banter and tricks, and Rosalind looked on with the affectionate calm of a woman watching the man she loves make a fool of himself. And it really was pleasant those summer evenings outside the public-house, watching that late flowering of emotion, the bachelor crust of caution breaking up, the little shoots of sentiment beginning to peer out. Their happiness was lyrical. It was only at odd times that Rosalind rememhered her griefs, and usually it was in the earlv' morning when she was waked by the heaving of the child within her, listened to the birds outside their window, and felt deserted even with Frankie beside her. Not to wake him, she sniffled quietly into her handkerchief, her back turned on him and her body shaken with suppressed sobs. When he woke, she still tried to keep away from him. “What ails you now didn’t ail you before?” he would ask humorously. “What you’ve got in me.” “What’s that?” “I told you—a daisy!” “No, that was what I told you,” he said, and slapped her bottom affectionately. Then she bawled without restraint and beat her stomach. “Why can’t it be yours?” she cried despairingly. “One thing at a time,” said Frankie. He believed her; that was his mistake. He really thought when he heard her lonely weeping that it was merely the ambiguity of her position that caused it, and not the humiliation of being rejected and hounded into marriage with someone else by a tramp like Hourigan. Frankie was a decent man; he didn’t realize that in circumstances like those no woman can ever be happy, even with the best man in the world—even with the man she loves. Love, in fact, has nothing to do with it. To ignore that is to ignore a woman’s vanity, the mainspring of her character. Her time came in the middle of the night, and Frankie returned from the nursing home in the early morning in a stupor of misery and astonishment; misery at the mere possibility that her life might be in danger, astonishment that anyone’s life could possibly mean so much to him. He lit the fire, but then found that he couldn’t bear the little cottage without her; it, too, seemed in a stupor of misery, wondering when she would come back, put on that housecoat, boil that kettle, and wash those dishes. He wanted to make himself breakfast, but could not bring himself to touch the things that were properly hers and that stood waiting for her with the infinite patience of inanimate things. He swore at himself when he realized that he was identifying his grief with that of a common teakettle. He had some breakfast in a café, and then went off walking through the countryside, merely halting for a drink while he rang up the nursing home. It was evening before everything was over and Rosalind and the child—a son—safe, and then he took a car straight there. She was still stupefied with drugs when he was admitted, but she clung to him passionately. “Don’t look!” she said fiercely “Not till the next time.” “I thought he was yours,” Frankie said with a grin, and smiled down at the little morsel in the cot. “Cripes!” he added savagely. “Wouldn’t you think they could get them out without clawing them?” “Did you hear the children playing on the doorstep?” she asked happily. “No,” Frankie said in surprise. “What were they playing?” “_Hamlet_, I think,” she said, closing her eyes, and, seeing how her thoughts drifted in and out of the drug, he tiptoed out. In sheer relief he knocked back three whiskeys in quick succession, but failed to get drunk. Then he tried for some of the old gang to sit and drink with, but, by one of those coincidences that always occur at moments like that, we were all out. It was just that he didn’t want to go home. When he did get out of the bus and crossed the common towards the cottage, he saw a man’s figure step out of the shadow of the trees beside it and knew at once who it was. His heart sank. “Frankie!” Jim Hourigan said imploringly, “Id like a word with you.” Frankie halted. He had a sudden feeling of foreboding. “You’d better come inside,” he said in a troubled voice. He went ahead into the sitting room and switched on the light and the electric fire, which stood in the big open hearth. Then he turned and faced Hourigan, who was standing by the door. The man looked half-distracted, his eyes were wild, his hair was in disorder. “What is it?” Frankie asked curtly. “Frankie,” Hourigan muttered, “I want a word with Rosalind.” “Rosalind is in hospital.” “I know, I know,” Hourigan said, flapping his hands like an old man. “She said she was going there. But I wanted to see you first, to get your permission. It’s only to explain to her, Frankie—that’s all.” Frankie concealed his surprise at Hourigan’s statement that Rosalind had told him anything. “I don’t think she’s in a state for seeing anybody, you know,” he said in a level tone. “The boy was born only a couple of hours ago.” “Christ!” Hourigan said, beating the table with his fist and shaking his head as though tossing water from his eyes. “That’s all that was missing. I came late for the fair as usual. My first child is born and I’m not even there. All right, Frankie, all right,” he added in a crushed tone, “I see ’tis no good. But tell her all the same. Tell her I never knew a thing about it till I got her letter. That God might strike me dead this minute if the idea ever crossed my mind!” Frankie looked at him in surprise. There was no mistaking the man’s abject misery. “What letter was this?” he asked. “The letter she sent me before she went in,” Hourigan hurried on, too distraught to notice the bewilderment in Frankie’s voice. “You don’t think I’d have treated her like that if I knew? You can think what you like of me, Frankie, and it won’t be anything worse than I think of myself, but not that, Frankie, not that! I wouldn’t do it to a woman I picked up in the street, and I loved that girl, Frankie. I declare to God I did.” He began to wave his arms wildly again, looking round the little sitting room without seeing anything. “It’s just that I’m no damn good at writing letters. The least thing puts me off. I’d be saying to myself I’d be there before the letter. I said the same thing to her on a card, Frankie, but then the mother died, and I was in a terrible state—oh, the usual things! I know ’tis no excuse, and I’m not making excuses, but that’s the way I am. If I had any idea, I’d have been over to her by the first boat. You must tell her that, Frankie. She must know it herself.” “When did you get this letter?” asked Frankie. “Oh, only yesterday, Frankie,” exclaimed Hourigan, entirely missing the import of Frankie’s question. “I swear to God I didn’t waste an hour. I’m travelling all night. I couldn’t sleep and I couldn’t eat. It was all that damn letter. It nearly drove me out of my mind. Did you see it, Frankie?” “No,” said Frankie. “Well, you’d better. Mind, I don’t blame her a bit, but it’s not true, it’s not true!” He took the letter from his wallet and passed it to Frankie. Frankie sat down and put on his glasses. Hourigan bent over the back of the armchair, reading it again in a mutter. “Dear Jim Hourigan,” Frankie read silently. “By this time tomorrow I’ll be in a hospital, having your child. This will probably be more satisfaction to you than it is to me and my husband. I am sure you will be disappointed to know that I have a husband, but in this life we can’t expect everything.” “Now, that’s what I mean, Frankie,” Hourigan said desperately, jabbing at the lines with his forefinger. “That’s not fair and she knows it’s not fair. She knows I’m not as mean as that, whatever faults I have.” “I wouldn’t worry too much about that,” Frankie said heavily, realizing that Hourigan and he were not reading the same letter. It was almost as though they were not concerned with the same woman. This was a woman whom Frankie had never seen. He went on reading. “If the child takes after you, it might be better for more than Frank and myself that it shouldn’t live. My only hope is that it may learn something from my husband. If ever a good man can make up to a child for the disaster of a bad father, your child will have every chance. So far as I can, I’ll see that he gets it, and will never know any more of you than he knows now.” It was signed in full: “Rosalind Daly.” Hourigan sighed. “You explain to her, Frankie,” he said despairingly. “I couldn’t.” “I think it would be better if you explained it yourself,” Frankie said, folding up the letter and giving it back. “You think she’ll see me?” Hourigan asked doubtfully. “I think she’d better see you,” Frankie said in a dead voice. “Only for ten minutes, Frankie; you can tell her that. Once I explain to her, I’ll go away, and I give you my word that neither of you will ever see me here again.” “I’ll talk to her myself in the morning,” Frankie said. “You’d better ring me up at the office some time after twelve.” Hourigan shambled away across the common, babbling poetic blessings on Frankie’s head and feeling almost elated. How Frankie felt he never said. Perhaps if Hourigan had known how he felt, he might have left that night without seeing Rosalind. He wasn’t a bad chap, Jim Hourigan, though not exactly perceptive, even as regards the mother of his child. But Rosalind had perception enough for them both. When Frankie called next morning, the effect of the drug had worn off, and she knew from the moment he entered that something serious had happened. He was as gentle as ever, but he had withdrawn into himself, the old Frankie of the days before his marriage, hurt but self-sufficient. She grabbed his hands feverishly. “Is anything wrong at home, Frankie?” “Nothing,” he replied in embarrassment. “Just a visitor, that’s all.” “A visitor? Who?” “I think you know,” he said gently. ‘What brought that bastard?” she hissed. “Apparently, a letter from you.” Suddenly she began to weep, the core of her hysteria touched. “I didn’t tell you, because I didn’t want to upset you,” she sobbed. “I just wanted him to know how I despised him.” “He seems to have got the idea,” Frankie said dryly. “Now he wants to see you, to explain.” “Damn his explanations!” she cried hysterically. “I know what you think—that I sent that letter without telling you so as to bring him here. How could I know there was enough manliness in him to make him even do that? Can’t vou imagine how I felt. Frankie?” “You know,” he said paternally, “I think you’d better have a word with him and make up your mind about exactly what you did feel.” “Oh, Christ!” she said. “I tell you I only meant to hurt him. I never meant to hurt you, and that’s all I’ve succeeded in doing.” “I’d rather you didn’t let your feelings run away with you again and hurt yourself and the child,” Frankie said in a gentler tone. “But how can I avoid hurting myself when I’m hurting you?” she asked wildly. “Do you think this is how I intended to pay you back for what you did for me? Very well; if he’s there, send him up and I’ll tell him. I’ll tell him in front of you. I’ll tell you both exactly how I feel. Will that satisfy you?” “He’ll call this afternoon,” Frankie said firmly. “You’d better see him alone. You’d better let him see the child alone. And remember,” he added apologetically, “whatever you decide on I agree to beforehand. I may have behaved selfishly before. I don’t want to do it again.” He smiled awkwardly and innocently, still bewildered by the disaster which had overtaken him, and Rosalind held her hands to her temples in a frenzy. She had never realized before how hurt he could be, had probably not even known that she might hurt him. “I suppose you think I’m going to let you divorce me so that I can go back to Ireland with that waster? I’d sooner throw myself and the child into a pond. Oh, very well, I’ll settle it, I’ll settle it. Oh, God!” she said between her teeth. “What sort of fool am I?” And as he went down the stairs, Frankie knew that he was seeing her for the last time as his wife, and that when they met again, she would be merely the mother of Jim Hourigan’s child, and realized with a touch of bitterness that there are certain forms of magnanimity which are all very well between men but are misplaced in dealing with women, not because they cannot admire them but because they seem to them irrelevant to their own function in life. When he saw Hourigan again, he knew that the change had already taken place. Though nothing had been decided, Jim Hourigan was almost professionally protective of Frankie’s interests and feelings. That was where the iron in Frankie came out. He made it plain that his interests were not in question. There were plenty—Kate among them—to say that he had behaved absurdly; that with a little more firmness on his part the crisis would never have arisen; that Rosalind was in no condition to make the decision he had forced on her and needed only gentle direction to go on as she had been going; that, in fact, he might have spared her a great deal of unhappiness by refusing to see Jim Hourigan in the first place. As for unhappiness, nothing I have heard suggests that Rosalind is unhappv with Jim Hourigan. It is a grave mistake to believe that that sort of thing leads to unhappiness. Frankie’s conduct certainly does, but is that not because to people like him happiness is merely an incidental, something added which, taken away, leaves them no poorer than before? 112 (1952)