“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.
“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