“Ah now, Jack,” said Seán, and the disappointment in his voice was so touching that my mother knew immediately that she would not want to be on the receiving end of such a tone.
“That’s what we call a joke,” said Smoot, quietly chastised.
“Ha,” replied my mother, “ha.”
Smoot shook his head and continued on, and she was free to look around at the city, a place she had heard of all her life that was supposedly full of whores and atheists but that seemed much like home, only with more cars, bigger buildings and better clothes. In Goleen, there was only the working man, his wife and their children. No one was rich, no one was poor and the world maintained its stability by allowing the same few hundred pounds to pass back and forth from business to business, from farm to grocery store and from wage packet to public house on a regular basis. Here, though, she could see toffs in dark pinstriped suits sporting carefully constructed mustaches, ladies in their finery, dockers and boatmen, shop girls and railway workers. A barrister walked by on his way to the Four Courts in full regalia, his black poplin gown inflating in the air behind him like a cape, his white bobbed wig threatening to blow off in the breeze. From the opposite direction, a pair of young seminarians, weaving on the pavement with drink, were followed quickly by a small boy with a coal-blackened face and a man dressed as a woman, which was a creature she had never seen before. Oh, for a camera! she thought. That’d soften their cough in West Cork! As they came to the crossroads, she turned to look down the length of O’Connell Street and saw the tall Doric column that stood halfway along with the statue standing proudly on the plinth, its nose in the air so it didn’t have to inhale the stink of the people it lorded over.
“Is that Nelson’s Pillar?” she asked, pointing toward it, and both Smoot and Seán looked around.
“It is,” said Smoot. “How did you know that?”
“It wasn’t a hedgerow school I went to,” she told him. “I can spell my own name too, you know. And count to ten. It’s a fine thing all the same, isn’t it?”
“It’s a load of old stones thrown up to celebrate the Brits winning another battle,” said Smoot, ignoring her sarcasm. “They should send the bastard back to where he came from, if you ask me. It’s been more than twenty years since we achieved independence and still we have a dead man from Norfolk looking down over us, watching our every move.”
“I think he adds a certain splendor to the place,” she said, more to annoy him than anything else.
“Do you now?”
“I do.”
“Good luck to you so.”
She would get no closer to Horatio on this occasion, however, for they were walking in the opposite direction, making their way along Westmoreland Street and past the front gates of Trinity College, where my mother stared at the handsome young men gathered beneath the arch in their smart clothes and felt a twitch of envy in the pit of her stomach. What right did they have to such a place, she wondered, when it would forever be denied to her?
“They’d be a right stuck-up bunch in there, I’d say,” said Seán, following the direction of her eyes. “And all Protestants, of course. Jack, do you know any of the students in there at all?”
“Oh, I know every one of them,” said Smoot. “Sure don’t we all go out for dinner together every night and toast the King and say what a great fella Churchill is.”
My mother could feel a flame of irritation begin to burn inside her. It hadn’t been her idea to share lodgings for a few nights with them, it had been Seán’s, and an act of Christian charity on his part at that, but the plan made, she couldn’t see why Smoot had to be so rude about it. Along up Grafton Street they went anyway before turning right on to Chatham Street and finally to a little red door next to a pub where Smoot removed a brass key from his pocket and turned to look at them.
“There’s no landlord on the premises, thank Christ,” he said. “Mr. Hogan stops by on a Saturday morning for his rent money and I meet him outside and all he ever talks about is the bloody war. He’s up for the Germans. Wants them to make it one-all. The feckin’ eejit thinks that it’d be great justice if the Brits had their backs broken but what would happen next, I say to him, What’s the next country along? We are. We’d all be saluting Hitler by Christmas and goose-stepping down Henry Street with our arms in the air. Not that it’ll come to that though, sure the bloody thing is almost over. Anyway, I pay rent here of three shillings a week,” he added, looking at Catherine, and she took his point without saying anything to acknowledge it. Seven days in a week, that meant five pence a day. Two or three days: fifteen pence. That was only fair, she decided.
“Penny pictures!” called a boy walking down the street with a camera hanging around his neck. “Penny pictures!”
“Seán!” cried my mother, tugging at his arm. “Look at that. A friend of my father’s in Goleen had a camera. Have you ever had your picture taken?”
“I haven’t,” he said.
“Let’s have one now,” she said enthusiastically. “To mark our first day in Dublin.”
“Waste of a penny,” said Smoot.
“I suppose it would be a nice memory,” said Seán, waving the boy over and handing him a penny. “Come on, Jack. You get in it too.”
My mother stood next to Seán but when Smoot came over he elbowed her out of the way and the shutter clicked just as she turned to him in irritation.
“You’ll have it in three days,” said the boy. “What’s the address?”
“Right here,” said Smoot. “You can throw it through the letter box.”
“Do we only get one?” asked my mother.
“They’re a penny each,” said the boy. “If you want a second, it’ll cost you more.”
“One’s grand,” she said, turning away from him as Smoot used the key to let them in.
The staircase was narrow, allowing only one person to ascend at a time, the wallpaper yellow and peeling from the walls on both sides. There was no handrail and as my mother reached for her bag, Seán picked it up and ushered her forward after Smoot.
“Go along between us,” he said. “We couldn’t have you fall and injure the baby.”
She smiled at him gratefully and when she reached the top she entered a small room with a tin bathtub in one corner, a sink and, running along the far wall, the most enormous sofa that my mother had ever seen in her life. How on earth anyone had ever got it up the stairs was a mystery to her. It looked so plump and comfortable that it was all she could do not to collapse into its embrace and pretend that all her adventures of the last twenty-four hours had never happened.