Penelope unbound, p.1
Penelope Unbound, page 1
Penelope Unbound
Dublin-born Mary Morrissy is the author of three novels, Mother of Pearl, The Pretender and The Rising of Bella Casey, and two collections of stories, A Lazy Eye and Prosperity Drive. Her short fiction has been anthologised widely and two of her novels have been nominated for the Dublin Literary Award. Her debut, Mother of Pearl, was shortlisted for the Whitbread Award and she’s won a Hennessy Award and a Lannan Foundation Award for her fiction. A member of Aosdána, she is a journalist, a teacher of creative writing and a literary mentor. She blogs on art, fiction and history at marymorrissy.com.
Penelope Unbound
Mary Morrissy
First published 2023 by Banshee Press
Ebook first published 2023 by Banshee Press
www.bansheelit.com
Copyright © Mary Morrissy, 2023
All characters in this publication are fictitious, and any resemblances to real persons, living or dead, are purely coincidental.
No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher. All rights reserved.
A CIP record for this title is available from the British Library.
Banshee Press gratefully acknowledges the financial assistance of the Arts Council.
ISBN 978-1-7393979-3-7
ISBN 978-1-7393979-1-3 (Kindle)
ISBN 978-1-7393979-2-0 (ePub)
Set in Palatino by Eimear Ryan
Cover design by Anna Morrison
Printed and bound in Great Britain by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A.
In memoriam:
Ursula Morrissy (1954–2019)
Charlie McCann (1952–2021)
And I thought, as I wiped my eyes on the corner of my apron: This is an ancient gesture, authentic, antique,
In the very best tradition, classic, Greek;
Ulysses did this too.
But only as a gesture,—a gesture which implied
To the assembled throng that he was much too moved to speak. He learned it from Penelope …
Penelope, who really cried.
– ‘An Ancient Gesture’, Edna St.Vincent Millay
Encore
June 16, 1915
The woman who makes her way painfully to the high pew at one end of the vestibule of the Antient Concert Rooms is only barely in her thirties, but she’s uncertain on her feet. She leans on a stick and her gait is staggered like a gondolier poling in a choppy lagoon. She is dressed seriously. A charcoal dress coat and three-quarters skirt with a faint stripe, a silky cowl-necked lilac blouse that seems to fight with the formal suit, a pair of black button boots. Her chestnut hair blooms under a purple cloche set low on her forehead like a cloud. A fabric flower embroiders the rim. She wears pigeon-coloured gloves, one on, one off.
To the side of the high-backed seat there’s a marble fireplace with a vast mirror framed elaborately in gold, where she stops to touch her hair distractedly. But she sees only the birds and balls of the encrusted frame and, in the reflection behind her, the blue-badged stewards gathered in tight knots, murmuring among themselves. She folds herself down, inch by inch, onto the upright pew from where she will have an unrestricted view of the circular staircase that sweeps up to the circle.
The commissioner presumes she has come out from the performance for a breath of air; it can be stuffy in the theatre when it’s a full house. Some of the lady patrons can get overcome – the music, you see, it makes them weak, or certain tenors do. What the liveried gentleman doesn’t realize is that the woman hasn’t been at the performance. She has only just arrived, and she has timed her arrival for the finale. She is here on a mission. An assignation, if you will, except the other party does not yet know she is here. It will be a surprise to him, although it could be said that he sought the encounter out, in a subterranean manner. Brought it upon himself, the woman in the charcoal suit would say.
When she has settled herself, she reminisces about the last time she was in the Concert Rooms. Eleven years ago. Imagine! For that performance, she was sitting in the front row and the tenor who’s on stage tonight sang his heart out. For her, she believed, to her. That was when love was new and everything was just starting and she was proud, even in her green velveteen which had a couple of bald patches in the rear of the premises. Afterwards, they’d gone on to The Crowing Cock and she remembered how delighted he was with himself and how delighted she was in him.
A burst of applause from within brings her back. That’s it, she thinks, that’s the end, and her stomach does a fluttery heave. But no, there’s an encore. She thinks she can make out the strains of ‘The Lass of Aughrim’, or is it just the memory of it trying to reach her across the years? He sang that very song the last time. She clears her throat of a strange catch. There’s more clapping, extended this time, and much hallooing. The bouquets must surely have been thrown by now.
This is it, then.
The stewards scatter and take their positions. At first, it’s just a trickle, the single attenders, lonely waders who want to fly off before the throng, then the spreading pool of the stalls ebbs by, all talk and snatched opinions, some lingering here, others congregating on the steps outside. Soldiers in khaki with their dolled-up girls, loud student types from the cheap seats. Then lastly the balcony crowd, they take their time. The woman scans them all. She’s afraid she might miss him in this throng. But when the foyer clears, she feels only her singularity. Her nerves are ajangle. She will recognize him, won’t she?
Ah Norah, for God’s sake, it’s like riding a bicycle, sure you couldn’t forget. Wasn’t he your heart once?
She can see the commissioner eyeing her doubtfully but she avoids his gaze. He probably thinks she has a crush on the tenor and is waiting for an autograph on her programme, though of course she has no programme. But the commissioner is not an observant man. Don’t worry, she wants to sing out to him, I’m not setting up headquarters, I just have some unfinished business with the man of the moment.
She hopes there isn’t a stage door. That way he could escape without ever having to face her. But no, he’ll still be upstairs in the green room lapping up praise. Always did like to be admired.
Imagine that he ended up as a singer! After all his old guff about the writing. She remembers how he scribbled his way across Europe using the lid of their suitcase as a makeshift desk. That’s how devoted he was. She smarts now at how often she berated him over it. Throw over that old writing business, she used to say, there’s no money in it. Whereas music … Seems like he finally took her advice and saw sense. But really, she only urged the stage on him because she never really understood what his writing was all about. Nothing happened in those stories of his. Remember the one about the sisters and the old priest who dies in the end and what about it? Or the little boy going to the bazaar who gets nothing because he’s left it too late. Or the girl who draws back from going off to Buenos Aires with her beau at the last minute. For no good reason. Unlike herself, who did go off without a second thought. She remembers that he cogged little details from her for that story. The palpitations that girl had were the ones she herself would get after one of her uncle’s beatings. She felt sure she recognized that old priest as well, a version of a curate she knew in the Presentation Convent in Galway.
He stole from her all the time, did Jim Joyce. He was a smash-and grab-merchant. Isn’t that what he did to her in the heel of the hunt? Took what he wanted and vamoosed. And what’s worse, didn’t she let him?
Foolish girl that she was.
But not anymore.
She’s tormented herself over the years with the thought that if she’d only waited another hour outside that blessed railway station, her life would have been very different. She’d have been living out foreign as he’d always promised. It would be her in the front row tonight throwing kisses in the air at him, her lawfully wedded … but no, she stems that kind of idle speculation. Particularly here, particularly now. He left her in the lurch. She could have waited till Kingdom Come, he still wouldn’t have appeared because he never meant to return to her.
And yet … here he is now, eleven years on.
The commissioner is closing over the big double doors to the street, reaching up to shoot the bolts and looking over his shoulder as he does.
Closing up now, ladies and gents, he calls, out of habit probably, but he’s looking directly at her. There is no one else. She can almost sense his narrowed eyes and imagine the calculations he’s making about her. A streetwalker? An aggrieved wife? A woman with bad news. A woman who’s owed. But she’s immune to his sort. Jumped-up lockhard. He might be all gussied up in a gold-crusted black suit, but his moustache looks nicotiney and there’ll be ochre stains on his fingers underneath those white gloves.
You can glare all you like, she thinks, but this time I’m staying put till the bitter end.
Mrs Smith
June 15, 1915
Mrs Smith?
Scrawn-thin Gertie Devenney’s voice knifes its way from the front hall into the well of the stairs, up three flights to where Mrs Smith is standing at the bow window on the top landing of Finn’s Hotel. Below, the playing fields of Trinity. The distant cricketers canter over and back like wind-up soldiers – in this heat! – to little outbursts of ragged applause. From here the spectators are tiny as children. George is among them although she can’t make him out. The porter at the back gate gives him the nod and lets him pass; our youngest little scholar, he calls George. She opens the window and leans out. To think that this morning it was cloudy, even spat a bit. Now it has the look of thunder. Thunder always reminds her … Mother of Moses, it’s so blasted close that what she’d like to do is to wrench open her high-necked blouse, loosen her stays, let her hair down. But she doesn’t. No, she remains stalled by Gertie’s call.
The girl is like a baba woken from a nap who wants to be picked up immediately, but if you left her for a bit, well, she might nod off again. Mrs Smith knows the routine. She stealthily slides the window shut and goes back to dusting the decorative urns perched on flower stands that guard the guest lounge – three curlicued chairs crouched around a low table.
Mrs Smith!
She holds her breath and counts to ten, as if that will do any blessed good. Gertie will pursue her now that the solemn peace of the napping hour – la penichella: the word makes her smile secretly – has been disturbed. It is three o’clock on a hot, windless mid-week afternoon. The panes of the bow window, which bellies out over air, divide the view into high blue sky and green coiny leaves. Nine portions of summer.
The dusting is not her job, of course, it’s Gertie’s, but Mrs Smith has never lost the habit of stowing about her person a spare shammy so she can chase the fine city dust that settles on everything when the front door is thrown open, as it is now, to cool the blessed place down. Gertie hasn’t called again and she wonders if her trick of waiting has worked. But even so, it’s no earthly good – the peace has been shattered now like the breaking of a vase, the pieces lying there, rebuking you with their ruin. Still, she makes no move and is staring out the windows when Gertie, who’s taken the stairs two at a time, arrives on the landing to a sudden halt, hair escaping from her mob cap and her breath coming out in oniony gasps. What did the child have for dinner?
Oh Mrs Smith. Softer now, surprised by her stillness. Beg your pardon, Ma’am.
What is it, Gertie? Cross to be interrupted from her referee, that’s what Hector used to call it. He liked to use such words, being able to switch from one lingo to another mid-stream.
There’s a gentleman … Gertie begins, but being almost out of puff, she stops there. Isn’t there always? A gentleman who’s lost his key, a gentleman who wants his shoes polished, or wants an early call, or would like the kitchen to rustle something up for him after hours because he’s come in from O’Neill’s or Davy Byrne’s three sheets to the wind and has a mind for a sandwich, white bread if you please, and ham and a dollop of mustard if you have it, to line the bag …
Yes, Gertie, and it comes out snappish and Mrs Smith realizes it’s the mythical gentleman she’s irritated with.
There’s a gentleman, Gertie repeats.
Yes, you said that. Now it’s Gertie she’s irritated with. What about him?
There’s a gentleman at the desk, Gertie manages to get out and Mrs Smith thinks Lord God, will she go back to the beginning every time she adds a new bit to the story.
Yes … and?
And he wants to see the maids’ quarters.
Well, now, that’s a new one. There was once in the past, long before Gertie’s time, a gentleman – if you could call him that – who was found in the maids’ quarters with a girl from Leitrim who was trying to fend him off while her two companions jittered and screamed, all of a dither at the impropriety of it all. But that was in the wee small hours, not in broad daylight and the girl in question Martha, Martha, Martha what? Cohen? Conmee? Coleman? Began with a C anyway – had invited the self-same gent upstairs to show him where she slept, she said, I ask your holy pardon. To show him what? The crown jewels, more like. That’s what he was expecting, anyway, and sure aren’t they all only after the one thing. But no, this is something else. This gent is looking for permission!
There’s no one up in the maids’ quarters at the moment, Mrs Smith knows. She keeps track. Two on duty and two on their afternoon off, and on a fine sunny day like this, they won’t be stretched on their beds. So what exactly would a gentleman be doing up there? Is he some class of inspector?
And did he say why he wanted to see the maids’ rooms?
Suddenly, maybe because she’s regained her breath, Gertie turns eloquent.
Oh yes, Missus, he says he used to know a maid here long ’go, stepped out with her, I believe, and he wants to see it for old times’ sake, she parrots – word for word, it sounds like.
The dirty article! And what would he be doing if he was granted entry, sniffing the sheets, is it?
And where is this gentleman now?
I left him below, Missus.
Below is right.
Very well, Gertie, you go on down and tell him I will be with him presently.
The girl turns away, then back again.
Oh and Missus, Gertie says, he’s a foreign gentleman.
Mrs Smith feels a heart-lurch. It couldn’t be Hector, could it? Foreign?
But then what would Hector be doing looking for the maids’ quarters? Wouldn’t he just ask for her direct? The girl has obviously got the wrong end of the stick.
Gertie, fix yourself up there, Mrs Smith says, pointing to the girl’s mob cap perched on her flaming hair like a mushroom, and then to her apron. She tries to calm her frizz, tugs at her bodice and apron to get them straight but sure she’s crooked herself, one eye smaller than the other, one leg shorter. And still she stands there, mouth open like a codfish, if a codfish had teeth.
Well? What are you waiting for?
Gertie jumps to attention. She turns and scurries downstairs, intent on her mission, muttering to herself the message she’s been given so she won’t forget it. Mrs Smith will be with you presently. She recalls the gossip in the maids’ room that once, oh years ago now, Mrs Smith was a chambermaid here before she was married out foreign, or was it England, and made a widow. She must have been fierce young when she was made a widow, the other girls said, as if they doubted the story. They counted up on their fingers. And poor little Georgie, left without a dada! But the story was that’s how Missus came to be chief cook and bottle washer in Finn’s, because she was left a small fortune when her husband died.
Could he be the gent down below? But if Mrs Smith’s a widow, sure Mister Smith has to be dead, unless the man in the hall is a ghost. But he looked real enough with his straw hat and his white suit and spectacles flashing in the sun that made his eyes blind.
A floor above, Mrs Smith is peering into the glass and remembering those evenings in the maids’ rooms, the cramped and lonely boredom of girls cooped up together, keyed up with love and the promise of it, pawing letters with DVs and must closes. Sighing, or turning their faces to the wall for tears. What would a stranger be up to in there? Up to no good, that’s what. She will go down now directly, give him a flea in his ear and send him packing.
But the memories of those times hold her, there on the landing, there in the ticking afternoon, and transport her to a time when she was like Gertie Devenney. Never as innocent, mind you, or as useless, and the cut of her! What ails her? Is it love? Could anyone love Gertie Devenney? Now Norah, she chastises herself, don’t mock the afflicted, as she thinks of Gertie’s lame leg. Or is she homesick, is that it? Is she pining for her mammy? Thrown out of the nest too soon. What is she, sixteen? When Norah was that age she couldn’t wait to be shut of them all, but of her Uncle Tommy in particular with his wagging finger. No, she didn’t miss them, well, maybe Pappie, poor banished Pappie. It’s half a lifetime since she fled Galway without saying goodbye to any of them and she hasn’t darkened their door since. They have no idea where she is, not even that she’s back in Dublin a good seven years now, and she’s going to keep it that way. Though she wouldn’t half mind boasting to Uncle Tommy who used to warn she’d end up on the street the way she was behaving. The wildness in her then, he couldn’t be dealing with it. End of his tether, he’d say, spittle flying and reaching for the stick. She wasn’t having any more of it, being punished for what came natural. Uncle Tommy who knew nothing about girls but how to beat them. Did he give that poor Bedelia, the creature he married, the same treatment? Probably.
