‘It nearly broke her heart when he went to join it.’
‘It was funny all right.’
‘We were a neutral country.’
Mr Lynch would be still sitting in the bar of Keogh’s. Every night of his life he sat there with his hat on his head, drinking bottles of stout. Other men would come into the bar and he would discuss matters with them and with Mrs Keogh. He would be drunk at the end of the evening. John Joe wondered if he chewed tea so that the smell of the stout would not be detected by his mother when he returned to her. He would return and tell her some lies about where he had been. He had joined the British Army in order to get away from her for a time, only she’d reached out to him from a dream.
‘Lay the table, John Joe.’
He put a knife and a fork for each of them on the table, and found butter and salt and pepper. His mother cut four pieces of griddle bread and placed them to fry on the pan. ‘I looked in a window one time,’ said the voice of Quigley, ‘and Mrs Sullivan was caressing Sullivan’s legs.’
‘We’re hours late with the tea,’ his mother said. ‘Are you starving, pet?’
‘Ah, I am, definitely.’
‘I have nice fresh eggs for you.’
It was difficult for her sometimes to make ends meet. He knew it was, yet neither of them had ever said anything. When he went to work in the sawmills it would naturally be easier, with a sum each week to add to the pension.
She fried the eggs, two for him and one for herself. He watched her basting them in her expert way, intent upon what she was doing. Her anger was gone, now that he was safely in the kitchen, waiting for the food she cooked. Mr Lynch would have had his tea earlier in the evening, before he went down to Keogh’s. ‘I’m going out for a long walk,’ he probably said to his mother, every evening after he’d wiped the egg from around his mouth.
‘Did he tell you an experience he had in the war?’ his mother asked, placing the plate of rashers, eggs and fried bread in front of him. She poured boiling water into a brown enamel teapot and left it on the range to draw.
‘He told me about a time they were attacked by the Germans,’ John Joe said. ‘Mr Lynch was nearly killed.’
‘She thought he’d never come back.’
‘Oh, he came back all right.’
‘He’s very good to her now.’
When Brother Leahy twisted the short hairs on his neck and asked him what he’d been dreaming about he usually said he’d been working something out in his mind, like a long-division sum. Once he said he’d been trying to translate a sentence into Irish, and another time he’d said he’d been solving a puzzle that had appeared in the
‘Have you homework to do?’
He shook his head, silently registering that lie, knowing that there was homework to be done, but wishing instead to accompany Quigley to the chip-shop.
‘Then we can listen to the wireless,’ she said.
‘I thought maybe I’d go out for a walk.’
Again the anger appeared in her eyes. Her mouth tightened, she laid down her knife and fork.
‘I thought you’d stop in, John Joe,’ she said, ‘on your birthday.’
‘Ah, well now –’
‘I have a little surprise for you.’
She was telling him lies, he thought, just as he had told her lies. She began to eat again, and he could see in her face a reflection of the busyness that had developed in her mind. What could she find to produce as a surprise? She had given him that morning a green shirt that she knew he’d like because he liked the colour. There was a cake that she’d made, some of which they’d have when they’d eaten what was in front of them now. He knew about this birthday cake because he had watched her decorating it with hundreds and thousands: she couldn’t suddenly say it was a surprise.
‘When I’ve washed the dishes,’ she said, ‘we’ll listen to the wireless and we’ll look at that little thing I have.’
‘All right,’ he said.
He buttered bread and put a little sugar on the butter, which was a mixture he liked. She brought the cake to the table and cut them each a slice. She said she thought the margarine you got nowadays was not as good as margarine in the past. She turned the wireless on. A woman was singing.
‘Try the cake now,’ she said. ‘You’re growing up, John Joe.’
‘Fifteen.’
‘I know, pet.’
Only Quigley told the truth, he thought. Only Quigley was honest and straightforward and said what was in his mind. Other people told Quigley to keep that kind of talk to himself because they knew it was the truth, because they knew they wanted to think the thoughts that Quigley thought. ‘I looked in a window,’ Quigley had said to him when he was nine years old, the first time he had spoken to him, ‘I saw a man and woman without their clothes on.’ Brother Leahy would wish to imagine as Quigley imagined, and as John Joe imagined too. And what did Mr Lynch think about when he walked in gloom with his mother on a Sunday? Did he dream of the medium-sized glory
