Friends Indeed Page 11

  'She's nothing of the sort.' I shook my head.

  'You talk a lot about her, Sarah.' He looked embarrassed.

  I knew then that I was right and that the real reason he'd taken against Allie had to do with jealousy. He worried that she would occupy too much of my time and that he would see less of me.

  'She'll never come between us,' I said. He went on staring into the water and I squeezed his hand. 'But she will always be my friend. In a strange way she's a part of me, the closest I have to a sister now Mary Ann is dead.'

  He didn't answer for a while. The reeds around us were high as our waists and burned brown with the sun. They framed our reflections in the water, the blue sky above like a curtain behind us. I thought how nice it would have been for a photographer to make a picture of what would in minutes be a memory.

  'I will like her because you do,' Jimmy said at last. He pulled me close again. 'You stayed away too long. You should have come to me sooner.'

  'You said you would find a place for us to be alone,' I reminded him. 'Did you keep your promise?'

  'I did.' He hesitated. 'It's not a palace but it's far enough from here, and from your home, for us not to be seen together.’

  'Can we go there now?'

  Jimmy had found a boarding house by Kingsbridge railway station where rooms could be rented for the day, or for an afternoon or night if couples could be together that long. It was not a palace, as he'd said, but for a house which made its money from illicit love it had a surprising air of decency about it.

  Maybe it mirrored the attitude of the woman who took Jimmy's money and gave us the key to our room. She was round and pleasant, in a dark green dress with a lace collar. She said she hoped we would like the room and made what we were about to do seem the most natural thing in the world. Which of course it was, if nature was the only law to be obeyed.

  Jimmy stood in the middle of the room, looking around. He had his hands in his pockets and looked carelessly handsome and devil-may-care. I knew he was as nervous as I was.

  'Is it all right?' he said and I looked slowly around, nodding.

  The brass bedstead had a dark blue cover and the walls were another, paler, blue. There was a wardrobe, two easy chairs and a standing mirror. Over the bed hung a picture of a bird.

  It was perfect.

  I went to the window and gazed across to where the river Liffey was making its way lazily out of the town. The room looked out on the railway station too. I'm sure it was because I was about to become a woman that I all at once and clearly recalled an incident from my girlhood with Allie.

  We could have been no more than nine or ten years old. A misguided search for Sandymount Strand had ended at the back of the very same station. We'd been set upon there by boys and for days afterwards Allie had accused me of deserting her when all I'd done was run for help. How she could have believed I would leave her I don't know, unless it had to do with her mother's cruelty making her uncertain about affection in others. Even about how much I cared for her. In any event, our friendship had been made stronger by our understanding of that day. That and the fact too that my father owed her his life, whatever its quality. Only months after our excitement in the train sheds Allie, hearing a sound, had gone fearlessly down to the cellar in her father's pub. Finding my poor father pinned under fallen barrels she'd held the door to stop any more from tumbling on to him. Then she'd screamed like a tinker until help came. This deed, she said later, made her and me 'equal in the matter of helping one another'. I would always be grateful to her. My father's feelings were another matter.

  Jimmy, coming to stand behind me, put thoughts of the past out of my head. The railway station, that day, was full of the bustle of men and women coming and going, of carriages and omnibuses lined up outside and a great many soldiers.

  'Where are they sending the soldiers?' I asked.

  I hadn't asked him again about India. I didn't care where the soldiers by the station were being sent. The question was to fill the silence. Because I didn't know what else to say, now we were alone.

  'They're on their way to the Curragh,' Jimmy put a hand on my shoulder, 'they're no concern of ours.' With his other hand he closed the curtains. They were a dark saffron colour and the late September sun, shining through them, made the room golden. 'I love you, Sarah.' He turned me to face him and I traced the outline of his mouth with my finger.

  'I'm afraid,’ I said.

  'Don't be,' he kissed me on the forehead. 'Not of me.'

  He was trembling, a little, when he pulled me against him and put his face in my hair. He pulled the pins out with his teeth and as it fell loose spread it across my shoulders. 'Your black curls were the first thing I noticed about you,' he said, 'and after that your face.'

  'I noticed you because you were the tallest of the soldiers in the street,' I said, 'and I gave you my basket because I was tired.'

  All true. It was only as we walked, and he talked in his gentle way, that I'd taken account of other things about him.

  'I want to see your hair against your skin,' Jimmy said.

  I stood very still as he unbuttoned my dress, slowly because his fingers were awkward and the buttons small. I wanted to help him, but didn't. There was an exquisite joy in the waiting. When my dress lay on the floor about my feet we took the rest of my clothes off together, everything until we came to my stockings. I sat on one of the easy chairs and Jimmy unbuttoned my boots and then peeled off my stockings myself.

  When I was naked he laid me on the bed. He looked at me all the time as he took off his uniform and boots. He stood naked himself, and smiling, before he came and lay beside me on the bed.

  'Oh, God,' I whispered though I didn't want God anywhere near me, or even in my thoughts. I closed my eyes and covered myself with my hands.

  'Please don't be afraid,' Jimmy said again. 'Look at me, Sarah.'

  I opened my eyes and saw how close his were, how burning. He kissed me and his hands moved over my back, down to my waist. He turned me so that I lay again on my back.

  'I'm not afraid now,' I said.

  He opened my legs and put his fingers there and I gave a small cry, an instinctive protest.

  'It will be good,' Jimmy whispered into my neck. His breath was hot.

  I made no more protests after that. I heard sounds and words I knew came from me but made no sense and others, distant and urgent, coming from Jimmy. When he climbed on top of me I was ready for him and held him to me in a frenzy of fear that he might stop. I cried out and he covered my mouth with his and moved himself between my legs, at last.

  He came into me slowly and my body, with a will and rhythm of its own, did all it could to make things fine and wonderful for him. My back arched and my legs opened wider and he began to move in me. Thoughts that had nothing to do with that room and Jimmy flashed across my mind, my whole life until then going through my head in moving pictures. Jimmy moved faster inside me and I called his name and rose with him and felt a great swell inside me as stars exploded in a dark red sky.

  When I opened my eyes and turned to look at him Jimmy was lying on his back staring at the ceiling. He seemed as far away from me as he'd seemed close a minute before.

  I said his name, 'Jimmy?' and he turned to me and smiled and touched my face. Then he lay quietly beside me again.

  'It will never be as it was between us,' I said, 'are you sorry?'

  'Not sorry for what has happened.' He sat up, leaning on his elbow, and looked down at me. I was all at once conscious of my nakedness and pulled the bed cover about myself. 'Sorry that I must go back to Beggar's Bush Barracks and leave you. Sorry that we can't be together all of the time.'

  'That'll come,' I said. 'For today we have this room.'

  'We have,' he laughed and gathered me up, bed cover and all, and lifted me off the bed and began to dance. He was a good dancer. We made our own music and danced about the room until we fell, dizzy and breathless and ready to make love again, on to the bed.

  'I'm
alive, and so glad of it,' I said as we lay, warm and close, afterwards. I felt no shame, and no guilt. Not then.

  Jimmy grinned. 'I'm glad you're alive too,' he said.

  He touched me gently all over. He made me feel, for those hours, as if I was precious and wonderful.

  We would spend other afternoons in that boarding-house room, would even come to think of it as our own place. But none would be so perfect or wonderful as that first time.

  The golden glow had gone and the room become dark before we left. We didn't notice.

  I went looking for work. I knocked on the doors of the big houses in Mountjoy Square and Gardiner Street, and further away too. Without references no one was willing to take me on. There were plenty of girls and women with good references willing and able to go into service. My mother, and her work for the Buckleys in Haddington Road, was supporting myself, my father and, for the most part, my grandmother too.

  I decided to pawn the shawl Allie had given me. I'd nothing else of value and it would only be for a week, until I got work. I was certain another few days would turn up something. I went to the pawnshop on a Monday, the usual day for putting things into hock. The way it went was that women pawned what they had on Monday, reclaimed them on Saturday, enjoyed them on Sunday and put them back in again on Monday.

  The line of waiting women that morning was long. You'd have thought they were moving home there were so many framed photographs and mirrors, bed linen and curtains being carried between them.

  Beezy Ryan was there, leaning against the wall, the smoke from a cigarette circling her head. She was the only woman I knew smoked her tobacco in a cigarette. She said a soldier home from the Crimea had shown her how. The other women used pipes. Beezy was not someone I'd have expected to see in the queue for the pawnshop. She was wearing a green satin dress that would have suited the evening better. She beckoned me to join her as I came along.

  'That's a lovely thing.' She fingered the shawl. 'Pity you have to do without it.'

  'It's only for the week.' I moved out of the way of the cigarette smoke. There was a lot of space around Beezy where the other women had moved away too. Some of them didn't want to appear to be in the company of a whore but others, like myself, weren't fond of the smoke and smell of the tobacco. 'Allie Buckley brought it to me from Paris.' I opened out the shawl so she could see the colours.

  'That was nice of her.' Beezy shrugged, indifferent to the shawl immediately I mentioned Allie's name. She'd never liked Allie much, thinking her above herself. I folded the shawl.

  'I've never seen you at the pawn before,' I said, 'business in North King Street must still be slow.'

  Beezy laughed. 'You're the only one to say what the rest of them here are thinking,' she said, 'they'd prefer to whisper and watch and hope for my downfall.' She pulled on the cigarette and blew smoke into the air and looked up and down the line of women. A few returned her stare but most ignored her. Going into battle with Beezy wasn't a good idea.

  'They're hoping, some of this lot, that I'm finished, that I can't pay the rent. There's good, Catholic Christians among them that would rather see my girls in the workhouse than earning an honest penny in a kip house.' She spoke loudly and her voice carried. She seemed to me sober but it was often hard to tell with Beezy. Drunk or sober she was much the same person.

  'That's not an answer to my question,' I said. Beezy laughed again.

  'I'm here on an errand of mercy.' She held up a ticket, the rings on her fingers flashing all colours. 'I've a new girl up at the house. Mary Adams is her name and the poor creature was left in a bad way by the brute she married. She'll be all right now though, now she's with me.' She shook her head, resignedly. 'I'm here to get her wedding ring. She pawned it to get away from him and now she wants it back.' She sighed. 'The vagaries of womankind never cease to amaze me, but if it'll give her peace she might as well have it.'

  We spoke of Mary Ann, but not for long since neither one of us could be trusted to keep going without tears. Beezy had always been kind to my sister, as she was kind to all the children of the neighbourhood. She'd given Mary Ann a white fur muff on her Holy Communion day and Mary Ann had treasured it always.

  It was after I told Beezy about how she'd treasured the muff that we fell silent, inching through the door of the pawnshop as our turn arrived.

  Alfie Toole, the pawnbroker, dealt with business quickly and the crowd of women had thinned a lot as we came close to the counter. Alfie was fair and just and my mother never went to anyone else. It was said that the rooms over the pawn were stuffed to the rafters with unclaimed goods, the floors ready to collapse under the weight. Alfie himself never seemed worried by the prospect. He was always good-humoured and gave a fair price. Maybe the story about the overfilled rooms was a story, nothing more.

  'You lost your position with the Buckleys,' Beezy said as the woman ahead of us began to haggle with Alfie, 'your mother was telling me. I was sorry to hear it. It's the devil's own work, or it could be God's curse, but it's a fact anyhow that troubles never come singly.' She raised her pencilled eyebrows. 'Of course, if you kept your mouth shut it might never have happened.'

  'Maybe you could give me a few lessons, Beezy, on how to be discreet,' I said.

  'You'd be a bad pupil,' she said and shrugged, 'you're too fond of your own opinions.' She didn't seem to be enjoying the cigarette much, squinting at me through the smoke and coughing every so often. 'Maybe I've something to give you would be more useful . . .' Beezy fell silent.

  Alfie, examining the shoes the woman ahead of us had given him, wasn't prepared to give her the price she wanted. Beezy was thoughtful as we waited.

  'What is it you might give me?' I was curious, nothing more. Beezy was generous but there was often a price attached to anything she gave away.

  'Work,' she said as Alfie and the woman arrived at an agreement, 'I'll give you work, as many days a week as you

  can manage. I'll pay you better than the Buckleys did but I'll expect you to look after the place and not be bothering me.' She gave a short laugh. 'Myself and the girls can't be expected to do everything.'

  I stared at her. 'I'm not so desperate as to go working in a kip house.' Because I was shocked I didn't stop to think of the insult this would be to Beezy. 'I'll find something . . .'

  'You might, and you might not.' Beezy, fingering the shawl again, was cool. 'Could be you'll have this in the pawn a lot longer than a week. All for the sake of being too proud to wash and clean in a kip house.'

  I was silent while Beezy did her business with Alfie, ashamed of my response. I wished I'd chosen my words with more care.

  Beezy wasn't like some of the other madams around. Her girls came to her of their own free will and it was well known that she looked after them well. Unlike other madams too Beezy Ryan didn't recruit from the ranks of the unfortunate or from country girls new to the city.

  Not that any of this made much difference when it came to the question of me working for her. My parents would never accept it. My mother would pray her way into an early grave and my father would lay siege to North King Street, even if l went in there as a missionary.

  'I'm sorry, Beezy, and I'm grateful to you.' I touched her arm as she examined the ring Alfie handed her. Beezy trusted no one and was checking the name on the inside of the gold band. 'But you know yourself how things are around here — if I go to work for you I'm finished as far as getting work anywhere else goes. And my father . . .'

  'Your father . . .' Beezy was dismissive. Oddly, though men were her business, she didn't like them much. 'Cristy Rooney had a bit of bad luck with his leg but he's been making the world and your mother suffer ever since and I don't agree with that. As for the work…well, a bird in the hand is worth two in the bush.' She gave a loud laugh and, when I didn't laugh at the bawdy meaning, turned to the women behind us. 'That's right, isn't it girls? A bird in the hand's worth two in the bush . . .' She laughed again. This time some of the women laughed with her.

&nbs
p; I turned to Alfie with my shawl.

  'Nice bit of crafting in this,' he said when he held it to the light. 'Very nice.' Alfie always recognised quality.

  'It's a lovely thing, right enough,' Beezy said, 'and its owner wouldn't have to pawn it if she wasn't too proud to take work when it's offered her.'

  I did a deal with Alfie and he began writing me a ticket.

  'You know what you're saying isn't true,' I said to Beezy, 'you know full well that my parents wouldn't stand for me working for you.'

  'Are you telling me you do everything your parents want you to?' Beezy gave me a hard look and I turned away, took my money from Alfie and started toward the door. She followed.

  'It's time you started looking out for yourself, Sarah, and money's what counts, when all's said and done. I'm offering you good money. I need someone I can trust to keep the house in order for me and you need the work. We'd suit each other well.' She gazed along the line of women still in the street as we came out into the sunshine. 'I don't see a procession of people coming up to you with work.'

  'Let me think about it for a few days,' I said. Maybe a way could be found, an agreement made with my parents and grandmother.

  I would have to find agreement in myself too. Though I liked Beezy some of her girls wouldn't be the easiest in the world to get along with. Drink and fighting over men were in the nature of their world. As well as this I was neither as brave nor as shameless as Beezy about how I earned my living.

  Work and prayer were what occupied my mother in the weeks following Mary Ann's death. Her lips were in perpetual, muttering motion. She prayed for my father that he might come off the batter and for my grandmother that she might learn to peacefully accept my sister's death. She prayed for Mary Ann's soul too. These last prayers I thought unnecessary.

  'Is Allie getting out of the house at all?' I asked her the day after I met Beezy.

  'No.' My mother looked worried but at least she stopped praying. She was sitting in a chair by the window and put her rosary beads down when I sat opposite her. 'The poor child spends entire days in her room Mary Connor brings her food there so I don't see her even at meal times the few minutes I saw her this last week she was very morose and gone into herself.' She sighed. 'I had to cook three dinners for that Dr McDermott and his daughter and he's visited the house in the afternoons too,' she took a breath, 'Leonard Buckley's away in Belfast God knows why he'd want to go there the mother comes and goes about her own business.' She shook her head. 'There were a few days last week when Allie's door was locked but it's not any more so I suppose she's resigned to her fate.'