Friends Indeed Page 7

  'You haven't been to Paris?' I said.

  'To my shame I have not,' he was mournful, 'but I fully intend making a visit.'

  'When?' His daughter was eating great amounts of Bess's bread. She kept her head down as she spoke. 'When will we go to Paris?'

  'When the time is right,' her father replied vaguely.

  'I would love to go to Paris.' Jane McDermott, her expression forlorn, looked up and into my eyes. 'Tell me what it's like there, please do.'

  'It's much bigger than Dublin,' I thought for a moment, 'and the life there is different. In the evenings the boulevards from the Madeleine to the Bastille are crowded with promenaders. The restaurants are filled with people taking wine or coffee and reading their papers and there are seats under the trees. You find kiosks everywhere selling cigars and tobacco.'

  I'd seen all of this while part of a procession of girls chaperoned by a nun.

  'Maybe, when we go there, you could be a guide to my father and me.' Jane McDermott's round face was pretty when she smiled.

  'All in the future, my dear,' Maurice McDermott said, 'we've only just met Miss Buckley.' He turned to me. 'How are you finding Dublin?'

  'Hot,' I said, 'and smelly.'

  Bess, who was leaving the room, frowned at me from the door.

  'I suppose the city is both of those things, at the moment.' The doctor sighed. 'As long as animals are driven through the city the air will be malodorous. There will also be a subsequent danger to the health of the population.'

  Ned Mulvey laughed. 'It's hot everywhere in the month of August. It's hot in London, where I've lived for the past year, and it's hot in the French capital. By God, but it can smell too in Paris.'

  'It's true that Paris smells,' I agreed, 'but not so much as Dublin.'

  'I found the French people themselves had an overpowering smell about them,' my father said. My mother put a hand to her chest and shuddered.

  Sarah collected our plates. As she left the room, Mary Connor clucking at her heels, my mother leaned towards Mrs Mulvey.

  'Is it true Sir William Wilde has resumed giving parties at his home in Merrion Square?'

  'He continues to entertain,' Edith Mulvey said, 'on Saturday afternoons there can be up to a hundred guests, all the worse for drink when they leave.'

  'The man is shameless,' said my mother.

  'The real shame is that a man who did what he did is allowed to continue the practice of medicine.' Dr McDermott looked severe.

  Sarah and Bess had begun to serve the second course but the only appetite I had was for gossip. 'What did he do?' I asked.

  'He disgraced the profession of medicine and should have been struck off.' Dr McDermott looked even more severe. 'It's a sign of the depraved times we live in that there was only myself and a few others prepared to speak against him.'

  'But Sir William Wilde is known even in Paris as an inventor of medical instruments,' I protested, 'what has he done that was so terrible?'

  'Nothing you need concern yourself with.' My mother was curt.

  'It's easily enough explained.' Ned Mulvey played idly with his drinking glass. 'Sir William and Lady Wilde were brought to court by a Mary Travers on foot of a letter written by Lady Wilde. The jury found for Mary Travers and she was awarded a farthing in damages.'

  This explained nothing as far as I was concerned.

  'What was the letter about?' I asked.

  'It told of an unseemly relationship between Miss Travers and William Wilde,' Ned Mulvey sipped his wine, 'an adulterous relationship.'

  My father, wine now gone down on top of the whiskey, gave a bellow and thumped the table with his fist. 'They were adulterers! The both of them should have been stoned in the streets. It was all over the town that Wilde had assaulted the Travers woman. The wonder of it is that he got away with his life and that not one of this city's great doctors stood to be counted against him.' He stopped and mopped his brow as Bess put his dinner in front of him.

  'I may not be recognised as one of the great doctors,' Maurice McDermott sniffed, 'but I spoke against him to anyone who would listen. There was criticism of him too in the Dublin Medical Press. None of it made any difference. Wilde is a man who cultivates power, and uses it to effect.'

  'Your stand against him is well known, Maurice,' my mother said, 'and both Leonard and I applaud you for it.'

  'Wilde's wife is a Fenian.' Edith Mulvey's voice was low but everyone, her son included, turned to listen to her. 'She writes poems and tracts under the name Speranza, all in favour of the Fenian cause. She would be better occupied spending the time with her two small sons.'

  'The Wildes are notorious. I've heard talk about them before but I didn't know they had children . . .' Jane McDermott leaned forward, so gaping and agog I wanted to shake her. She had no savoir faire at all.

  'They've two small boys called William and Oscar,' Edith Mulvey snorted, 'who will, I'm sure, be no better than their parents when they're men. Example is all in the matter of raising children.'

  She gave her son a sharp look which he ignored. His eyes were on mine and smiling. I smiled too and for a minute we were conspirators against parents and their ways.

  'They are neighbours of yours?' Jane McDermott's mouth still gaped.

  'Unfortunately, yes. But not friends.' Mrs Mulvey looked down the table at my father. 'You've bought yourself a fine house, Mr Buckley.' Her change of subject was adroit. My father was guaranteed to leap at a conversation about property.

  'I got value for my money,' he said, 'the barracks being at this end of the road got me the place for half the price I'd have paid closer to Baggot Street.'

  'The closeness of the barracks I would have thought rather unfortunate,' she said.

  'Talking of the barracks,' Dr McDermott shook his head, 'there are more troops on the way, according to the papers, to deal with the Fenians and their bombing.'

  'More troops!' My mother gave a groan. 'Be thankful, Edith, that it's only raucous neighbours you have. On this road we are forced to live with the sort of woman who follows soldiers. They're in the street every time one goes outside . . .' she sighed, '. . . and not only in the street. They're everywhere.'

  Sarah, laying dessert bowls on the sideboard, almost dropped one. I tried to catch her eye as she straightened up but she was frowning and preoccupied.

  'The Freeman's Journal said today that the government are withdrawing troops, sending them God knows where,' said Dr McDermott, 'it said they would be replacing them with twice the number. The Fenian leader James Stephens has been arrested in London and they've dispatched a troopship to Dublin this morning with the Highland Light Infantry on board.'

  'I'm all for them withdrawing troops from respectable neighbourhoods such as this,' my mother said. 'We've enough crime and its like to contend with without vulgar soldiery too.'

  Dr McDermott nodded. 'Crime is on the increase everywhere.' He turned to me. 'Even in Paris, they say. But,' he looked round the table, 'medical science may have found a solution. Research shows that crime, disease, even poverty, are the result of inherited tendencies. The population of this city, for instance, has more inherited diseases than could ever be transmitted by animals or otherwise. Eliminate these tendencies and you eliminate the ills in society.'

  He speared a potato and ate, giving the rest of us time to digest what he'd said. I'd read about the ideas he'd put forward and knew they weren't so well founded as he seemed to think.

  'You believe then that criminals inherit whatever it is makes them commit crimes?' I asked, 'and that diseases are inherited too? That the poor are poor because they're defective?'

  'I do,' he answered enthusiastically. 'In time it is hoped to be able to eliminate such aberrations when they occur in the brain and to produce a hereditary pure people. Defectives would be locked up, not allowed to reproduce their own kind.'

  'They should begin with the social slummers of the tenement buildings,' Edith Mulvey said. 'They're everywhere in this city and should be got
rid of for social and sanitary reasons. They make it impossible for respectable people to live decent lives.' She signalled for water and Mary Connor, appearing from the shadows, filled her glass quite deftly while leaning on the stick.

  My father, at the end of the table, looked greatly sobered. He was sitting upright, his hands flat on the table in front of him. Sarah was behind me, at the sideboard, her back to the table. She was standing very still.

  All of this I saw very quickly and for what it was: the quiet before a storm. I started the thunder rolling myself.

  'Got ... rid ... of ...' I repeated Edith Mulvey's words slowly. 'Do you mean to send the people of the tenements to the countryside?'

  She chewed on her food absently before answering. 'I doubt they would be made welcome in the countryside, though the air would no doubt do them good.' She raised her brows at Maurice McDermott. 'Does the medical profession not have a solution?'

  'Sterilisation is the obvious answer since it would limit numbers.' He gave a small cough. 'It's the method agreed by most sane people.'

  'I'm sane and I don't agree,' I said, 'and nor do a great many other sane people. What you're talking about is simply a theory being put about by a mad Italian and a few followers.'

  'You have become too French in your thinking, Miss Buckley,' Dr McDermott wagged a reproving finger, 'and you have been protected from the horrors of life by loving parents.' This earned him a gracious smile from my mother. 'Dr Cesare Lombroso is not mad, though the French like to think so because they didn't come up with the idea themselves.' He laughed and his daughter laughed. The rest of the table smiled.

  It was at that point Sarah whirled from the sideboard, her skirts making a sound like a sudden wind. She stepped into the light, behind Dr McDermott's chair.

  'I am poor. I live in a tenement. Are you saying that society would be better off if myself and people like me were stopped from having children?' The doctor did not turn. 'Would you have my younger sister made barren? And my mother, who cooked for you tonight? They are poor too.'

  Mary Connor made a clucking sound but Sarah waved her away. 'You're right that we inherit poverty. All belonging to me, seed, breed and generation, were born to poverty. But it was society made them poor, not their breeding and not their seed. The poor are kept poor and in their place and always have been. Now it seems that even their right to life is to be taken from them…'

  God knows when she would have stopped if Mary Connor hadn't stood in front of her. I was standing myself by then, ready to support Sarah. Mary Connor tapped the floor, twice, with her walking stick.

  'Sarah has forgotten her place,' she said, 'she will apologise and resume her duties.'

  Sarah waved a dismissive hand at the housekeeper, knowing she'd gone too far, that there was no point now in holding her tongue. She was finished in Haddington Road and Mary Connor, realising she'd no more control over her, looked incandescent with rage. Had Sarah not been so close to Maurice McDermott's back I think she would have struck her with the stick.

  'I want to know,’ Sarah demanded, 'if Dr McDermott thinks I should be denied the right to have children because I'm poor.'

  'You will leave the room, Sarah.' My mother's fingers drummed on the table, always a bad sign. 'Leave at once.'

  'It wasn't my intention to cause offence in your home,' Dr McDermott spread his hands in a helpless gesture. 'But perhaps your maidservant should at least refrain from having children until she knows her place.' He still didn't turn to face Sarah.

  'You are free to discuss anything you like at my dinner table,' my mother said, 'it is Sarah who has forgotten her place.'

  'Sarah has a right to be offended. But I'm sure she'll accept that Dr McDermott didn't have her in mind when he gave his views.' My father was dignified, and sad: a peacemaker who knew he wasn't going to make anyone happy.

  My mother's fingers beat faster on the table. 'Leave the room, Sarah, and send Bess to finish serving the meal.' She turned to her guests. 'She will not attend at table again in this house. None of you will ever again be faced with such rudeness, I promise you.'

  'Dr McDermott has not answered my question,' Sarah said and I wondered how my mother could have forgotten how stubborn she was. 'He cannot even look one of those he would condemn in the face.'

  'Come Sarah,' Mary Connor's hand gripped Sarah's arm, tightly, 'you can gather yourself together in the kitchen.'

  Sarah looked down at her. 'He would have you made barren too, Mary Connor, if you were a younger woman.'

  'Leave!' My mother stood. 'You are no longer in service here.' She was breathing hard. My father, at the other end of the table, got to his feet as well.

  'There's no value in upsetting the whole dinner table on account of a misunderstanding,' he said, walking slowly to stand beside Sarah. 'The doctor was not talking about you, Sarah, nor about your mother or family. I want you now, for the sake of all the years I have known you and your family, to go to your mother in the kitchen.'

  My mother joined her hands and appeared to be praying. Her knuckles were white and Sarah, looking at her, hesitated.

  'Get out!' My mother's voice cracked, and I saw a flicker of triumph cross Sarah's face. We were in the eye of the storm. 'You are a trollop and I should never have allowed you inside my door.'

  'Sticks and stones may break my bones, Harriet Buckley, but names will never hurt me,' Sarah was harsh, 'and you can never, at any rate, call me deceiving, or a betrayer. I'm going, but remember that I take a secret with me. Treat my mother well, and treat her fair, and that secret will stay with me.'

  'Vixen!'

  Mary Connor, either by design or because her stick slipped, pushed against Sarah who, instinctively moving backwards, collided with the sideboard. The wine jelly, in its bowl where she'd left it close to the edge, slid gently off the polished surface and crashed to the floor. It oozed slowly, spreading until it formed an almost perfect dark red circle.

  The door opened and Bess stood there.

  'The price of the crockery will come out of what pay you have coming to you, miss.' Mary Connor, her skirts splattered with jelly, made a clicking sound with her teeth. 'Your mother will clean up after you.'

  Nobody moved, or spoke, as Sarah walked past her mother and through the door into the hallway. She tore the white cap from her head and threw it behind her as she went.

  'Was there an accident?' Bess spoke to my father. She made no attempt to go after Sarah.

  'Your daughter has left my employ,' my mother said as she sat down, 'and the dessert is ruined. We will have some sweetmeats with chocolate in its place.'

  Bess looked at the pool of wine jelly. 'I'll see what I can do,' she said. Mary Connor hobbled out of the room after her.

  'I've never cared for sweetmeats,' I said, 'so you will please excuse me.' I sidestepped the jelly and was in the hallway when my father, halfheartedly, called to me to come back.

  Sarah had gone a good distance, almost to the corner with Northumberland Road, before I caught up with her. It was fully dark now, the gaslights all lit up and the people of the night in the streets. I saw two women I felt sure were prostitutes — their hair was long down their backs and they clung, giggling, to one another as they went along. A man, young and clean-shaven, said something to me as I hurried along and I know he thought me one of their profession. I called to Sarah but she didn't turn until I was just a couple of feet behind her.

  'You should have stayed with your guests.' The walk had not improved her temper.

  'What will you do?' I said, 'you're finished with my mother, that's for sure.'

  'I know that poor eejit of a man was just making himself big, talking like that,' she said, 'but I couldn't keep quiet.'

  'No, you couldn't. I'd have done the same thing myself.'

  'I know you would,' she sighed and we began walking together, side by side, two of my steps to one of hers in the way we'd always had.

  'It's nonsense, what he was saying, you know that,' I said.

&n
bsp; 'What little you know, Allie Buckley.' She was pitying. 'The poor are not human to such people. It could well happen.'

  'Dr McDermott is a buffoon, you said so yourself,' I reminded her impatiently, 'and the Mulvey woman is evil and cold. I don't know why my parents have such people to their house.'

  'The buffoon is the man they want you to marry,' Sarah said. I said nothing for a while. We walked more slowly, Sarah letting me take in what she'd revealed. The night air was clammy but I felt cold.

  'The thought occurred to me but was so ridiculous I put it away,' I said at last. It was true. When the gauche Jane had asked about Paris I'd for a wild moment thought she saw me in the role of stepmother. I'd been right. No wonder she'd stared at me the evening long.

  'So you attacked him on my account as much as on your own?'

  'I suppose I did.'

  'He's old and ugly as sin,' I said.

  'He's rich,' said Sarah, 'and he's a widower. He wants a stepmother for his daughter.'

  'Bess told you this?'

  'She did. He's your mother's choice.'

  'But my father went along with it. He would marry me off to that . . .' I couldn't find a word.

  'Hairy toad,' Sarah supplied and though it wasn't so very funny we giggled, and then laughed, holding on to one another until tears ran down our cheeks and we had to lean over the wall of Mount Street bridge to gather ourselves together. The tears were joyless by then, a lament for the carefree days of our girlhoods, when nothing had been expected of us and we had all the time in the world to be together.

  'It's not so funny as all that,' I said at last. Midges, millions of them, circled and massed above the murky canal waters. 'I thought my parents had Ned Mulvey in mind. He's handsome enough, at least, even if he's oldish and has that woman for a mother.'

  'You're as well off without either one of them,' Sarah was sharp, 'you should marry for love, nothing less.'

  'Is that what you intend doing?' I said.

  'Nothing less.' Sarah, shrugging her shoulders and waving a hand, was too airy by half. I knew her. She was hiding something.

  'You have a beau, haven't you?' I said. 'Is he someone in the Beggar's Bush Barracks?'