An End to Autumn by Iain Crichton Smith Read Free Book Online

my sons were going to school I knew all their names and their nicknames too, and some queer ones they had. But I don’t know them now. I don’t know what they tell them in these schools now. The teachers are as young as the scholars, and the scholars won’t get off the pavement for you. They walk down there five at a time, shouting and screaming and they push you into the gutter. The girls are just as bad as the boys. Is it only one son you have then?”
    “Yes. My husband died when he was young.”
    “Well,” said Mrs Murphy shifting her buttocks on the seat, “my people are in Ireland but I haven’t seen them for thirty years. The last time I was in Ireland it was thirty years ago, come August. My husband came from Connemara. But I don’t know anyone there any more. Your sons leave you and they marry and they’re not the same, whatever anyone says. They may look the same,” and she nodded her small brisk head vigorously, “but they’re not the same. They change. My son who’s in the Army—he’s married too, to a woman from Germany—goes all over the world. He’s never brought me a matchstick though he’s been all over the world. He’s a Lance Corporal now.”
    A man who might have been the gardener passed with a rake in his hand and she shouted at him, “Great day for the flowers, Dan,” and he smiled and waved back. “That’s the gardener. He looks after all the gardens. Nice fellow. Tell you what,” she said, “would you like a cup of tea? I get tired sitting here all the time; I’ve got a restless nature, you see. If you would like to come to the house for a cup of tea you’d be welcome as the flowers in May. If it wouldn’t put you out of your road.”
    Mrs Mallow was surprised by the readiness with which she accepted the invitation, and as she walked beside the bow-legged little white-haired woman who nevertheless waddled briskly along like a sailor in rather a heavy sea, she felt quite happy as if she were setting out on a little adventure. They didn’t have to walk very far for soon they came to a tenement and climbed a stair to the middle flat which had the name MURPHY on the door. Mrs Murphy took a key from a string around her neck and opened the door and Mrs Mallow found herself in a dark lobby and then in a small crowded room of the kind to which she had been used in Edinburgh. She was invited to sit down on an easy chair which had a white cloth over it, and which sat in front of a hearth empty except for newspaper and sticks.
    “I’ll put on the electric fire,” said Mrs Murphy, and did so. “And then I’ll make a cup of tea.”
    Left alone, Mrs Mallow looked round her. Apart from the easy chair in which she was sitting there was another one: there was also a sideboard with some photographs on it, one of a smiling young man in the uniform of a Scottish regiment, wearing a kilt and a diced cap with a badge, and the other of an older, more serious boy who looked solid and responsible, and was probably the manager, if manager he was. She also saw on the sideboard a doll-like structure which showed a crib, the Virgin Mary, a sleeping baby, and various crudely-carved animals which might have been donkeys, all painted in a garish green. And she realised that Mrs Murphy was a Catholic. It was funny that that hadn’t struck her before, for she hadn’t thought that there would be any Catholics in the town, apart perhaps from the Italians in the cafés: but the slightly Irish accent and the name Murphy should perhaps have warned her. She had very mixed feelings about Catholicism: on the one hand she had been brought up in a Protestant family, and on the other she had met many Catholics in the course of her life and she had liked them at least as much as she had liked the Protestants. In fact in the tenement in Edinburgh there had lived next door to her a Catholic woman from Derry who had been one of her best friends, and who every summer went over to Ireland with her asthmatic husband.