“It’s a tie-pin. You put it in your collar.” “Where d’you get it?”
“I found it on the street.”
“That’s a lie.”
“I found it outside Kickham’s on Christmas Eve.”
“That isn’t true.”
Tears pressed against my eyelids. I didn’t know why they had come so suddenly, or why so urgently they demanded to be released. I realise now they were tears of anger.
“Why are you telling me lies?”
“They’re not lies. Someone dropped the thing on the street.”
“Don’t tell me lies on a Sunday, Harry. Did you steal it? Did you take it off someone at school?”
“I’m telling you I didn’t.”
She stood there in her Sunday clothes, two patches of scarlet spreading on her cheeks, the way they always did when she was cross. I had entered the bedroom I’d once shared with Annie and now had for myself. She’d been there, with the drawer still open. What right had she to go looking in my drawers?
“Frau Messinger gave it to me at Christmas.” “Mrs. Messinger:
“Out at Cloverhill—”
“I know where the woman lives. Are you telling me the truth now?”
“Yes.”
“What’d she give you a Christmas present for?” “She just gave it to me.”
“She gives you cigarettes too. You come back smelling of cigarettes.”
“I smoke the odd one.”
“If your father heard this he’d take the belt to you.”
I did not reply, and it was my mother who wept, not I. In her navy-blue, Sunday clothes she soundlessly wept and I watched the tears come from her eyes and run into the powder of the face she had prepared for going to church. Like Annie and like myself, she was tired of this house, of the two deaf old women who would not civilly address one another, of my father’s lugubrious conversation, and my brothers’ sniggering. I know that now, but at the time I had no pity for my mother’s tears, and no compassion for her trapped existence. I wanted to hurt her because a secret I valued had been dirtied by her probing.
“You will give it back,” she commanded, her voice controlled, her tears wiped away with the tips of her fingers. “You will give it back to the woman.”
“Why would I?”
“Because I’m telling you to. Because I’m ashamed of you, Harry, as you should be yourself.”
“I haven’t done anything.”
“A woman that’s not related to a young boy doesn’t give him a present. I’m ashamed you would have taken it.”
“There’s no harm in a tie-pin.”
My mother hit me. She slapped me across the face, the way she used to when I was younger than my brothers. A sting of pain lingered on the side of my cheek; my whole face tingled hotly.
“You’ll give that back to her.”
I blinked, determined not to cry, looking away from her. The tie-pin was a present, I repeated. You couldn’t give back a present.
“You’ll give it back and you’ll have done with going out to that house.” My mother went on talking, fast and angrily, calling Frau Messinger a wanton and a strumpet. “Oh, a great time she has for herself, with young boys coming out to visit her. Amn’t I the queer fool not to have known?”
I remained silent. I had no intention of return-ing the tie-pin, nor did I intend to discontinue my visits to Cloverhill. If my father knew about this, my mother said, he’d go out there himself and abuse the pair of them.
That wasn’t true. My father would never have gone out to Cloverhill House in such a frame of mind, any more than he would have thrashed me with his belt. All during our childhood there had been this threat of my father’s violence, but whenever some misdemeanour was reported to him he’d been bewildered and at a loss for words. He had taken no action whatsoever.
“Get ready for church,” my mother said.
Later, as we walked up through the town—my father and my brothers, Annie with my grandmothers—my mother said to me that none of them must know what had occurred, or hear anything whatsoever about the tie-pin. It would upset my brothers and sister, and worry my grandmothers; my father would be beside himself for a month. “You’ll be ashamed when you think about it in church,” she said.
I stared stonily ahead, at my father’s back. On Sundays he wore a blue serge suit with a waistcoat, and a collar and tie, and an overcoat when it was cold. It was the only day of the week he looked like a Protestant, a respectable timberyard proprietor who had made his way up in the world, who carried coins in his pocket to distribute among us at the church gates. On other days he wore working clothes, since only they were suitable for the dust and grime of the yard. He still loaded timber himself, and worked the saws and planes. Occasionally he drove one of the lorries.
On the way to church he greeted people he knew among the Catholics coming back from late Mass, the women grasping their prayerbooks, men with collars and ties. You could tell at a glance they were different from us: they didn’t often walk in a family as we did, but in ones and twos, with occasionally a huge bunch of children on their own, sprawled all over the street, chattering busily. The children eyed us, but because of my father and mother they didn’t shout “Proddy-woddy-green-guts” or “dolled-up-heathens.” Our pace was slow because of the two old women, and we always had to leave the house early in order to allow for this. In the church it took them ages to sit down, fumbling and making certain they were as far away from one another as possible. Neither of them stood up for the psalm or the hymns, only for the Creed.
On that particular Sunday, while we progressed through the town and stood waiting in the aisle for my grandmothers to settle themselves, and later while my brothers fidgeted and poked at one another during the service, I continued to be aware of the impression of my mother’s hand on the side of my face. I was not a child, I thought, to be struck so; I could not imagine Houriskey or Mahoney-Byron, or even Mande-ville, undergoing such humiliation. And again I thought: what right had she to go searching under my drawer-paper?
I listened to my father mumbling the responses and wondered if she hit him in anger also; was a blow ever struck when they had their bedroom disagreements? I doubted it: her sharp tongue would do the work for her, it was children who were hit. Hundreds of times during my childhood I had planned to run away after receiving such punishment; here in this pew, not listening to the pulpit admonitions, I had seen myself arriving in a harbour town and slipping under a pile of canvas on a deck. They would be sorry then. I would be carried away, and white-faced and grief-stricken they would pray for my return.
“You’ll go out with it this afternoon,” my mother said on the walk home from church. “And that’ll be the end of the matter.”
She would find it no matter where I put it; not trusting me, she would search high and low. So I hid it at Cloverhill. I dropped it down a crevice between the hall-door steps, and then I pulled the bell-chain. I was shown into the drawing-room and soon afterwards tea was brought in by Da-phie. I smoked three cigarettes.
That spring, at school, I received my first letter from Frau Messinger. Her handwriting was neat and sloping, slender loops on the letters that demanded them, dots and cross-strokes where they belonged. It is such excitement, Harry! We drive in every day. I had not known that building anything could be so much fun. Steel reinforcements were bathed in concrete, walls rose, rubble was levelled and floors laid down, rain fell on the workmen, the roof went on. It has brought such joy to my husband, Harry, that so many people should come and stand by him and are pleased at what is happening. But, oh, how I long for it all to be finished, to sit and watch the screen! “Will the war be over first, or your picture house complete?" a man said to my husband the other day. Once upon a time people were slow to mention the war to him, he being a German, but now all that has gone.