She left the room and slowly descended the stairs. There were framed prints of old motor-cars on the wall and she paused now and again to examine one, emphasizing to herself her own continued calmness. She was thinking that she’d get herself a job. She might even tell Edward that Dr Abbatt had suggested their marriage should end since she wasn’t able to live with her thoughts any more. She’d insist on a divorce at once. She didn’t mind the thought of it now, because of course it would be different: she was doing what she guessed Dr Abbatt had been willing her to do for quite a long time really: she was taking matters into her own hands, she was acting positively – rejecting, not being rejected herself. Her marriage was ending cleanly and correctly.
She found her coat and thanked the dark-skinned maid who held it for her. Edward was probably at the party by now, but in the new circumstances that was neither here nor there. She’d go home in a taxi and pack a suitcase and then telephone for another taxi. She’d leave a note for Edward and go to a hotel, without telling him where.
‘Good-night,’ she said to the maid. She stepped towards the hall door as the maid opened it for her, and as she did so she felt a hand touch her shoulder. ‘No, Edward,’ she said. ‘I must go now.’ But when she turned she saw that the hand belonged to Mrs Ritchie. Behind her, looking tired, stood the General. For a moment there was a silence. Then Anna, speaking to both of them, said:
‘I’m extremely sorry. Please forgive me.’
‘We were worried about you,’ said Mrs Ritchie. ‘Will you be all right, my dear?’
‘The fear is worse than the reality, Mrs Ritchie. I can no longer live with the fear.’
‘We understand.’
‘It’s strange,’ Anna said, passing through the doorway and standing at the top of the steps that led to the street. ‘Strange, coming to a party like this, given by people I didn’t know and meeting you and being so rude. Please don’t tell me if my husband is here or not. It doesn’t concern me now. I’m quite calm.’
The Ritchies watched her descend the steps and call out to a passing taxi-cab. They watched the taxi drive away.
‘Calm!’ said General Ritchie.
‘She’s still in a state, poor thing,’ agreed his wife. ‘I do feel sorry.’
They stood on the steps of the Lowhrs’ house, thinking about the brief glance they had had of another person’s life, bewildered by it and saddened, for they themselves, though often edgy on the surface, had had a happy marriage.
‘At least she’s standing on her own feet now,’ Mrs Ritchie said. ‘I think it’ll save her.’
A taxi drew up at the house and the Ritchies watched it, thinking for a moment that Anna Mackintosh, weak in her resolve, had returned in search of her husband. But it was a man who emerged and ran up the steps in a manner which suggested that, like the man who had earlier misbehaved on the dance-floor, he was not entirely sober. He passed the Ritchies and entered the house. ‘That is Edward Mackintosh,’ said Mrs Ritchie.
The girl who was paying the taxi-driver paused in what she was doing to see where her companion had dashed away to and observed two thin figures staring at her from the lighted doorway, murmuring to one another.
‘Cruel,’ said the General. ‘The woman said so: we must give her that.’
‘He’s a kind man,’ replied Mrs Ritchie. ‘He’ll listen to us.’
‘To us, for heaven’s sake?’
‘We have a thing to do, as I said we might have.’
‘The woman has gone. I’m not saying I’m not sorry for her –’
‘And who shall ask for mercy for the woman, since she cannot ask herself? There is a little to be saved, you know: she has made a gesture, poor thing. It must be honoured.’
‘My dear, we don’t know these people; we met the woman quite in passing.’
The girl came up the steps, settling her purse into its right place in her handbag. She smiled at the Ritchies, and they thought that the smile had a hint of triumph about it, as though it was her first smile since the victory that Anna Mackintosh had said some girl was winning that night.
‘Even if he’d listen,’ muttered the General when the girl had passed by, ‘I doubt that she would.’
‘It’s just that a little time should be allowed to go by,’ his wife reminded him. ‘That’s all that’s required. Until the woman’s found her feet again and feels she has a voice in her own life.’
‘We’re interfering,’ said the General, and his wife said nothing. They looked at one another, remembering vividly the dread in Anna Mackintosh’s face and the confusion that all her conversation had revealed.
The General shook his head. ‘We are hardly the happiest choice,’ he said, in a gentler mood at last, ‘but I dare say we must try.’
He closed the door of the house and they paused for a moment in the hall, talking again of the woman who had told them her troubles. They drew a little strength from that, and felt armed to face once more the Lowhrs’ noisy party. Together they moved towards it and through it, in search of a man they had met once before on a similar occasion. ‘We are sorry for interfering,’ they would quietly say; and making it seem as natural as they could, they would ask him to honour, above all else and in spite of love, the gesture of a woman who no longer interested him.
‘A tall order,’ protested the General, pausing in his forward motion, doubtful again.
‘When the wrong people do things,’ replied his wife, ‘it sometimes works.’ She pulled him on until they stood before Edward Mackintosh and the girl he’d chosen as his Mark-2 wife. They smiled at Edward Mackintosh and shook hands with him, and then there was a silence before the General said that it was odd, in a way, what they had to request.
An Evening with John Joe Dempsey
In Keogh’s one evening Mr Lynch talked about the Piccadilly tarts, and John Joe Dempsey on his fifteenth birthday closed his eyes and travelled into a world he did not know. ‘Big and little,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘winking their eyes at you and enticing you up to them. Wetting their lips,’ said Mr Lynch, ‘with the ends of their tongues.’
John Joe Dempsey had walked through the small town that darkening autumn evening, from the far end of North Street where he and his mother lived, past the cement building that was the Coliseum cinema, past Kelly’s Atlantic Hotel and a number of shops that were now closed for the day. ‘Go to Keogh’s like a good boy,’ his mother had requested, for as well as refreshments and stimulants Keogh’s public house sold a variety of groceries: it was for a pound of rashers that Mrs Dempsey had sent her son.
‘Who is there?’ Mr Lynch had called out from the licensed area of the premises, hearing John Joe rapping with a coin to draw attention to his presence. A wooden partition with panes of glass in the top half of it rose to a height of eight feet between the grocery and the bar. ‘I’m here for rashers,’ John Joe explained through the pebbly glass. ‘Isn’t it a stormy evening, Mr Lynch? I’m fifteen today, Mr Lynch.’
There was a silence before a door in the partition opened and Mr Lynch appeared. ‘Fifteen?’ he said. ‘Step in here, boy, and have a bottle of stout.’
John Joe protested that he was too young to drink a bottle of stout and then said that his mother required the rashers immediately. ‘Mrs Keogh’s gone out to Confession,’ Mr Lynch said. ‘I’m in charge till her ladyship returns.’
John Joe, knowing that Mr Lynch would not be prepared to set the bacon machine in action, stepped into the bar to await the return of Mrs Keogh, and Mr Lynch darted behind the counter for two bottles of stout. Having opened and poured them, he began about the Piccadilly tarts.