‘You’re welcome,’ Mrs. Bartley said. She looked around the hovel. It distressed her. She lived herself in the front parlour with her husband and five children. There were ten rooms in the house and ten families. Nobody regarded Rashers’ room as being in the house. It was under it. It cost him one shilling and threepence a week—when he could pay it.
‘Did you see me little flags,’ Rashers asked, stretching his hand behind his pillow and dragging out a board for Mrs. Bartley’s inspection. They were home-made favours with four ribbons apiece.
‘They’re gorgeous, Mr. Tierney,’ she said.
‘Red, white and blue,’ Rashers said, ‘the colours of loyalty.’
‘My husband doesn’t hold with England,’ Mrs. Bartley said.
‘That’s been catered for,’ Rashers explained, showing her a sample, ‘the green ribbon is for Ireland.’
‘It doesn’t match up, somehow.’
‘It never did, ma’am,’ Rashers said. ‘Isn’t that what all the bloody commotion is about for the last seven hundred years?’
‘Wet your tea before the water’s gone cold for you.’ Rashers reached behind his pillow and brought out a tin from which he took part of a loaf, a tin of condensed milk and a jampot. He took out a cold potato too, but put it back. The rest he left on the straw beside him.
‘I brought you some bread.’
‘I have some,’ Rashers said.
‘It’s as hard as the rock of Cashel,’ Mrs. Bartley pronounced, having felt it.
‘It’ll soften up when I dip it in the tea,’ Rashers explained. ‘I’ll keep yours for afterwards.’
Mrs. Bartley sighed and handed him the spoon. He put in the tea.
‘What’s it doing out or what?’ he asked conversationally as he drank. He meant the weather.
‘It’s dull. I wouldn’t say it was a bit promising.’
‘Let’s hope to God the rain keeps off,’ Rashers said. ‘They’re more given to buying favours and things when it isn’t raining.’
‘Are you taking the dog?’
‘And have him walked on?’ Rashers asked.
‘If you’re not I’ll give him a little something later on.’
‘You’re a jewel.’
‘So long as he doesn’t take the hand off me in the process.’
‘Is it Rusty?’ He called the dog to his side.
‘That’s Mrs. Bartley,’ he explained to the dog, ‘and if you don’t know her by now you bloody well ought to. She’s to come and go as she pleases.’ He patted the dog and looked around at the empty floor.
‘He thinks you have your eye on the furniture,’ Rashers added. Mrs. Bartley laughed aloud.
‘Is the husband working again?’ Rashers asked.
‘All last week, four days this week and a bit promised for next.’
‘Look at that now,’ Rashers approved, ‘isn’t he having the life of Reilly.’
Mrs. Bartley said the children might be calling for her so she would leave the spoon and the can and get them when she was bringing down the scraps for Rusty. She hoped God would give him good luck with his selling.
‘I’ll be rattling shilling against shilling when I get home,’ Rashers said, ‘and the first thing I’ll buy is a tin whistle.’
‘You never found the one you lost?’
‘Never,’ Rashers said, ‘neither sign nor light of it from that day to this.’
‘Bad luck to the hand that took it.’
‘May God wither it,’ Rashers said. He had lost his tin whistle after a race meeting nearly a year before.
‘It was the drink, God forgive me,’ Rashers confessed.
‘It’s a very occasional failing with you,’ Mrs. Bartley said indulgently.
‘Drink and the sun. After the few drinks I lay down in the sun and it overpowered me. When I woke up the whistle was gone.’
‘The children miss it most of all,’ Mrs. Bartley said, ‘they loved you to play for them.’
‘Rusty too. I used to play to the two of us and we were never lonely.’
‘The best music you ever had is the bit you make yourself. It’s a great consolation.’
‘For man and beast alike, ma’am,’ Rashers assented. Mrs. Bartley had a very proper understanding of the whole thing.
When Mrs. Bartley had gone he got up and began to pull on socks, thinking of the whistle he had lost. It had been given to him by Mrs. Molloy, the woman who had reared him. It had earned him coppers at football matches and race meetings. His ambition was to replace it when he had the money to spare. He looked down at his socks and for the moment he forgot about the tin whistle. Both socks had holes in the toes and heels. He thought about that and took them off again. Then he put on his boots. They felt hard and uncomfortable for the amount of walking he would have to do. He took off his boots again, put on the socks and then put on his boots once more. He stood up and stretched. When he yawned, the few rotten teeth seemed very long because the gums had shrunk back almost to the roots. He took his overcoat from among the rags on the bed, tied it about his middle with a piece of cord and took his board with the coloured favours. He put a bottle and the bread into a short sack which he secured so that it hung from his waist. He shut the door on the dog, which whined, went up the decaying stairs, past the pram in the hallway and down the steps into the street.
The children in Chandlers Court jeered after him, but Rashers was used to that and scarcely heard them. He had already mapped out his journey in his mind. He would go over the iron bridge, through Ringsend and out the Strand Road to Merrion Gates. There would be a crowd there and on the way he could root in the ashbins of the big houses facing the strand. There were always scraps to be found that way. He could use the side streets to contact the crowds at various points along the route. It would be a long walk. By the time he got back from the procession to the Viceregal Lodge he would have covered ten to fourteen miles. But if he sold all his favours he would earn ten shillings. Rashers kept his mind on that. He deviated only once from his planned route and that was to look for some minutes into the window of McNeill’s music shop. It was still closed, a dingy little shop, with one dusty window and a small entrance door which needed painting. In the window, among instruments of a more aristocratic kind, there was a board displaying tin whistles. It said:
‘Superior toned Italian Flageolets.
Price: One Shilling’
They were masterly looking instruments, and ought to be, Rashers decided, at such an outrageous price. He stared at them for some time. Then he caught sight of his own face and the reflection of his favours in the glass window. He turned away.
The morning air had a sulphur smell about it, a compound of mist from the river, smoke from the ships, slow-drifting yellow fumes from the gas works. It was like the look on Rashers’ face. Hungry, dirty and, because so many things conspired to kill him, tenacious. His beard straggled. His gait was uncertain. He dragged his fifty years in each step forward through the streets of his city. She had not denied him her unique weapons. Almost from birth she had shaped his mind to regard life as a trivial moment which had slipped by mistake through the sieve of eternity, a scrap of absurdity which would glow for a little while before it was snatched back into eternity again. From her air, in common with numberless others about him, he had drawn the deep and unshakeable belief that the Son of God loved him and had suffered on earth for him and the hope that he would dwell with Jesus Christ and His Blessed Mother in Heaven. His city had never offered him anything else. Except her ashbins.
At the sweetshop Mary found her note had been collected and that one from Fitz had been left in its place.
‘He called last night,’ Mrs. Burns said, handing it to her.
‘At what time?’
‘It must have been about nine.’