“Well, this is all there is,” said Smoot, looking around with a mixture of pride and awkwardness. “The sink works when it takes the notion but the water is cold and it’s a bitch to fill the bucket and drag it over to the tub anytime you need a wash. If you need the toilet, you may use one of the pubs nearby. Only look as if you’re intending to meet someone in there or they put you out on the street.”
“Are we to have fucks and bastards and bitches all the time, Mr. Smoot?” asked my mother, smiling at him. “I don’t really mind, you understand, but just so that I know what to expect.”
Smoot stared at her. “Do you not like my language, Kitty?” he asked, and her smile faded quickly now.
“Don’t call me that,” she said. “It’s Catherine, if you don’t mind.”
“Well, I’ll try to be more of a gentleman around you if it offends you so much, Kitty. I’ll watch my fucking p’s and q’s now that we have a…” He stopped and made a deliberate nod toward my mother’s belly. “A lady in the house.”
She swallowed, ready to pounce, but what could she do when he was providing a roof over her head?
“It’s a grand place,” said Seán finally, to break the tension. “Very cozy.”
“It is,” said Smoot, smiling at him, and my mother wondered whether there was anything she could do to earn his friendship in the way that Seán obviously had but nothing came to mind.
“Perhaps,” she said eventually, glancing at a half open door in the corner, through which she could see a single bed in the adjoining room, “perhaps this was a mistake. There’s not room for three of us here, is there? Mr. Smoot has his bedroom, and the sofa, Seán, was intended for you, I suppose. It wouldn’t be right for me to deprive you of it.”
Seán stared at the ground and said nothing.
“You can top and tail with me,” said Smoot, looking at Seán, whose face had turned scarlet with embarrassment. “Kitty here can take the sofa.”
The atmosphere in the room became so awkward and uncomfortable that my mother didn’t know what to think. Minutes went by, she told me, and the three of them just standing there in the center of the room, not uttering a word.
“Well then,” she said finally, relieved to have found a sentence lurking somewhere in the back of her mind. “Is anyone hungry at all? I think I have the price of three dinners to say thank you.”
A Journalist, Perhaps
Two weeks later, on the day that news reached Dublin that Adolf Hitler had put a bullet in his head, my mother wandered into a cheap jewelry shop on Coppinger Row and bought herself a wedding ring, a small golden band with a tiny gemstone to ornament it. She still hadn’t moved out of the flat on Chatham Street but had reached a discreet understanding with Jack Smoot, who made his peace with her presence by rarely acknowledging it. To make herself useful, she kept the place clean and used what little money she had to ensure a meal was on the table when they came home from work, for Seán had found a place at Guinness’s after all, although he wasn’t particularly enjoying it.
“I carry bags of hops around the place half the day,” he told her as he lay in the bath one evening soothing his muscles while my mother sat on the bed in the next room, her back turned to him but the door half open so they could talk. It was a peculiar room, she thought. Nothing on the walls except a St. Brigid’s cross and a photograph of Pope Pius XII. Next to that was the photograph that had been taken on the day they arrived in Dublin. The boy had done a poor job of it, for although Seán was smiling and Smoot looked half human, her body was split down the middle by the frame, her head turned to her right in annoyance at the way Smoot had pushed her. A single dresser stood against one wall, in which the clothes of both lads were mixed up together as if it didn’t matter who owned what. And the bed itself was hardly big enough for one, let alone the pair of them sleeping top-to-tail. It was no wonder, she told herself, that she heard the most peculiar sounds emerging from there during the nights. The poor boys must have had a terrible time trying to sleep.
“My shoulders are bruised,” continued Seán, “my back is sore and I’m suffering terrible headaches from the smell of the brewery. I may look out for something else soon because I don’t know how long I can stand it there.”
“Jack seems to enjoy it all the same,” said my mother.
“He’s made of stronger stuff than me so.”
“What else would you do?”
Seán took a long time to reply and she listened as he splashed around in the tub. I wonder was there any part of her that wanted to turn around at that moment and let her eyes rest on the body of the young lad in his bath, whether she might have ever considered walking over without an ounce of shame and offering to share it with him? He’d been kind to her and was a handsome devil, or so she told me. It would have been difficult for her not to develop something along the lines of an attachment.
“I don’t know,” he said eventually.
“There’s something in your voice that tells me that you do know.”
“There’s one idea I have,” he said, sounding a little embarrassed. “But I don’t know if I’d be fit for it.”
“Tell me so.”
“You won’t laugh?”
“I might,” she said. “I could do with a good laugh as it happens.”
“Well, there’s the newspapers,” he said after a brief pause. “The Irish Times, of course, and the Irish Press. I have a notion that I could write things for them.”
“What kind of things?”
“Bits of news, you know. I did a bit of writing back home in Ballincollig. Stories and what have you. A few poems. No good, most of them, but still and all. I think I could get better if I was given a chance.”
“Do you mean a journalist?” she asked.
“I suppose so, yes. Am I daft?”
“What’s daft about it? Sure someone has to do it, don’t they?”
“Jack doesn’t think it’s a good idea.”
“And what does that matter? He’s not your wife, is he? You can make your own decisions.”
“I don’t know if they’d even take me on. But Jack doesn’t want to stay on at Guinness’s forever either. He has an idea for his own pub.”
“That’s just what Dublin needs. Another pub.”
“Not here. In Amsterdam.”
“What?” asked my mother, raising her voice in surprise. “Sure why would he want to go there?”
“I suppose it’s the Dutch side of him,” said Seán. “He’s never been but he’s heard great things about the place.”
“What kind of things?”
“That it’s different from Ireland.”
“Well, that can hardly come as a great revelation. There’s canals and the like there, isn’t there?”
“Different in other ways than that.”
He said nothing more and my mother began to worry that he’d fallen asleep and slipped beneath the surface of the water.
“I have a bit of news myself,” she told him, hoping that he’d answer quickly or she’d have no choice but to turn around.
“Go on so.”
“I have an interview for a job tomorrow morning.”
“You do not!”
“I do,” she said as he splashed away again, using the small bit of soap that she’d picked up from a market stall a few days earlier and presented to Smoot, partly as a gift for allowing her to stay and partly as encouragement for him to have a wash.
“Good girl yourself,” said Seán. “Where is it anyway?”
“The Dáil.”
“The what?”