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

any of them.
    “You’re right,” she said, “I found that in Edinburgh. There was an Irishwoman who lived beside me in the tenement and she was a very nice woman. She was like a sister to me. A small woman with red cheeks and very blue eyes. She would bring me in scones that she had baked and whenever she went to Ireland she brought me back something. It might be a very small thing like a handkerchief but she always brought something back. Her husband suffered from asthma and he worked in a distillery. Sometimes he could hardly breathe.”
    Mrs Mallow now felt totally at ease and was talking more freely than she had done since first she came to the town. It was as if the small crowded room with its sagging chairs, its sagging sofa and its cluttered photographs had released in her a freedom which she had lost over the years, as if she breathed more relaxedly in that space signed so distinctly with the images of the past—even the Catholic ones—and as she sat there she remembered absolutely clearly her early days. She remembered the Irishman who fought every night with the Protestants outside the dirty noisy pub, and who returned with a black eye which he flaunted as if it were an honour brought back from an ancient unalterable war; she remembered the old coal cellar at the back and the padlock frosted on a winter morning: she remembered the children playing in front of the tenement in their dirty clothes: she remembered the bustle and movement, the drunken women shouting insults at each other, first taking the clothes’ pegs out of their mouths: she remembered it all so clearly it was like an ache in her body.
    “I was happy then,” she thought, “I was never so happy as I was then and I didn’t know it. I didn’t know it at all.” And the nostalgia flooded her so freshly that she almost cried with the pity of it. And Mrs Murphy too was part of that world, she recognised her as she might have recognised an old friend, she too might have walked up that stone stair to her room in that tenement, waddling and shouting, a brawling bow-legged Irishwoman. All those mornings so long ago, cold and clear, when one had been young, and busy. And now there was the becalmment …
    “I’m sorry,” she said to Mrs Murphy, “I didn’t hear you.”
    “I was only saying that anytime you want to visit just come. Just walk up the stair and press the bell. I’m not like the people who … Do you know that there are some people now and they have this little thing on their door like an eye and they look through it and if they don’t want to let someone in they pretend they’re out. What’s the world coming to? Tell me that.”
    And so Mrs Mallow sat there for over an hour and they talked about this and that but mostly about the past, and their thoughts and prejudices fitted each other, for they were both in a similar position, and their complaints and griefs and joys were of the same kind, and so they got on very well together, so that when Mrs Mallow finally and reluctantly left she felt as if she had found a friend whom she could trust, whom she could talk to, whose life to a certain extent duplicated her own: and the fact that Mrs Murphy was a Catholic didn’t bother her at all, not in the slightest, though she wasn’t very happy about the vulgarity of the green crib with the distorted donkeys or whatever they were: they offended her susceptibilities.

 
    5
    W HEN V ERA HEARD about Mrs Murphy she felt more disturbed than she could rationally account for. Her disturbance was compounded of a number of factors. One was that Mrs Murphy was a Catholic. She hadn’t thought that this would disturb her but it did. As had already been said her idea of the best kind of church was one of a chaste artistic almost mediaeval institution which no longer existed and probably never had. It was an aesthetic ideal rather than a religious one. But Mrs Murphy’s Catholic church—or rather what she assumed it was—didn’t fit her idea: it