The Collected Stories

whisper that travelled easily up to me, and then he put his arms round her shoulders and roughly hugged her, with his lips pressed on to her lips.

I was seven years of age, the afterthought of the family, as my father called me. My brothers and sisters were all grown up, but I didn’t feel then, not yet, that my parents had given so much to them that there wasn’t a lot left to give me. Once upon a time they had all been a family like any other family: the children in turn had left home, and then, when my mother should have been resting and my father finding life less demanding, I had arrived. I did not ever doubt my parents’ concern for me, but for the six months that he was in our house I felt that Mr Dukelow loved me as much as they did. ‘Say good-night to him for me,’ I often heard my mother calling out to him as he mounted the stairs to tell me my night-time story, and I grew up thinking of my mother as a tired person because that was what she was. Her hair was going grey and her face bore a fatigued look: Mr Dukelow said she probably didn’t sleep well. There were a lot of people who didn’t sleep well, he told me, sitting on my bed one night when I was seven, and I remember he went on talking about that until I must have fallen asleep myself.

Mr Dukelow, who occupied the room next to mine, taught me to play marbles on the rough surface of our backyard. He made me an aeroplane out of heavy pieces of wood he found lying about, and he explained to me that although a star could fall through the sky it would never land on the earth. He told me stories about Columbus and Vasco da Gama, and about the great emperors of Europe and the Battle of the Yellow Ford. He had a good memory for what had interested him at school, but he had forgotten as easily the rest: he had been a poor scholar, he said. He told me the plots of films he’d seen and of a play called Paddy the Next Best Thing. He spoke very quietly and he always answered my questions: a small man, as thin as a willow, bony and pale-faced and supposed to be delicate, different from my father. He was fifty-seven; my father was fifty-nine.

In the middle of the night that my father kissed Bridget Mr Dukelow came to my room again. He switched the light on and stood there in grey-striped pyjamas that were badly torn.

‘I could hear you crying,’ he said. ‘What’s the trouble with you?’

He wore spectacles with fine wire rims, and all his face seemed to have gone into his nose, which was thin and tapering. His greased hair was black, his hands were like a skeleton’s. The first night Mr Dukelow arrived in our house my father brought him into the kitchen, where my mother was reading the Irish Press at the table and Bridget was darning one of her black stockings. ‘I’ve employed this man,’ my father said, and as he stepped to one side of the doorway the bent figure of Mr Dukelow appeared suddenly and silently, and my father gestured in the manner of a ringmaster introducing a circus act. Mr Dukelow was carrying a cardboard suitcase that had too many clothes in it. I remember seeing the flannel material of a shirt protruding, for the case was not fastened as it was meant to be.

‘What are you crying for?’ he asked me on that later occasion. ‘What’s up with you?’

‘Go away, Mr Dukelow.’

A frown appeared on his white forehead. He went away, leaving the light on, and he returned within a minute carrying a packet of cigarettes and a cigarette-lighter. He always smoked Craven A, claiming that they were manufactured from a superior kind of tobacco. He lit one and sat on my bed. He talked, as often he did, about the moment of his arrival at our house and how he had paused for a moment outside it.

Looking at our house from the street, you saw the brown hall door, its paintwork grained to make it seem like mahogany. There was a brass knocker and a letter-box that every morning except Sunday were cleaned with Brasso by Bridget. To the right of the hall door, and dwarfing it, were the windows of my father’s butcher shop, with its sides of mutton hanging from hooks, tripe on a white enamel dish, and beef and sausages and mince and suet.

Afterwards, when he became my friend, Mr Dukelow said that he had stood on the street outside the shop, having just got off the Bantry bus. With his suitcase weighing him down, he had gazed at the windows, wondering about the shop and the house, and about my father. He had not come all the way from Bantry but from a house in the hills somewhere, where he had been employed as some kind of manservant. He had walked to a crossroads and had stood there waiting for the bus: there had been dust on his shoes that night when first he came into our kitchen. ‘I looked at the meat in the window,’ he told me afterwards, ‘and I thought I’d rather go away again.’ But my father, expecting him, had come out of the shop and had told him to come on in. My father was a big man; beside Mr Dukelow he looked like a giant.

Mr Dukelow sat on my bed, smoking his Craven A. He began to talk about the advertisement my father had placed in the Cork Examiner for an assistant. He repeated the words my father had employed in the advertisement and he said he’d been nervous even to look at them. ‘I had no qualifications,’ Mr Dukelow said. ‘I was afraid.’

That night, six months before, there’d been that kind of fear in his face. ‘Sit down, Mr Dukelow,’ my mother had said. ‘Have you had your tea?’ He shook hands with my mother and myself and with Bridget, making a great thing of it, covering up his shyness. He said he’d had tea, although he confessed to me afterwards that he hadn’t. ‘You’ll take a cup, anyway,’ my mother offered, ‘and a piece of fruit-cake I made?’ Bridget took a kettle from the range and poured boiling water into a teapot to warm it. ‘Errah, maybe he wants something stronger,’ my father said, giving a great gusty laugh. ‘Will we go down to Neenan’s, Henry?’ But my mother insisted that, first of all, before strong drink was taken, before even Mr Dukelow was led to his room, he should have a cup of tea and a slice of fruit-cake. ‘He’s hardly inside the door,’ she said chidingly to my father, ‘before you’re lifting him out again.’ My father, who laughed easily, laughed again. ‘Doesn’t he have to get to know the people of the town?’ he demanded. ‘It’s a great little town,’ he informed Mr Dukelow. ‘There’s tip-top business here.’ My father had only six fingers and one thumb: being a clumsy man, he had lost the others at different moments, when engaged in his trade. When he had no fingers left he would retire, he used to say, and he would laugh in his roaring way, and add that the sight of a butcher with no fingers would be more than customers could tolerate.

‘I often think back,’ said Mr Dukelow, ‘to the kindness of your mother that first time.’

‘He kissed Bridget in the hall,’ I said. ‘He said she was looking great.’

‘Ah, no.’

‘I saw him through the banisters.’

‘Is it a nightmare you had? Will I get your mammy up?’

I said it wasn’t a nightmare I had had: I said I didn’t want my mother. My mother was sleeping beside him in their bed and she didn’t know that he’d been kissing the maid.

‘She’d go away,’ I said. ‘My mother would go away.’

‘Ah no, no.’