At Swim, Two Boys - Jamie O'Neill [229]
Aunt Sawney said nothing, only rocked to and fro. She had her beads already in her hands, but there was something in her face, worrisome a touch, the way the mysteries she told this evening would be unusually doleful. “Are you right there, Aunt Sawney?”
She didn’t answer, only stared out the window.
“There you are now,” said Nancy, as the little mouth dribbled its surfeit. In a glance of the swing-glass on the bedroom table, she caught a peek of her reflection. I have a face, she told herself, the color and texture of a turnip. She rebuttoned her blouse. The mite was looking for hiccupping then, and she said to Aunt Sawney, “Will you take her again for a quarter of a mo while I see to them sheets below?”
Aunt Sawney nodded and reached the bundle to her arms. But still she said nothing, only stared her face out the window, that same window on that same strip of lane where these years she had watched her good boy go, come and go, come and go, till he never came no more. And now she had watched the little man too with the black fellow’s gun to his shoulder.
“Are you sure you’re all right in yourself?” she heard Nancy say. The glitter formed in the opaque of her eyes while still she stared, rocking in her chair, with the bundle of babe held close to her shoulder, and her hand tapped on the babe’s back, the whole of her hand, in determined solacing pats.
* * *
“You want to play?”
“Play what?”
“Nap,” said Doyler. He was sprawled on the saraband rug by MacMurrough’s hearth, dealing a kind of demon patience with Aunt Eva’s reserved écarté cards. The evening long their conversation had not risen from the inquisitorial. Feel better?—Aye. Hungry?—No. MacMurrough had roamed the scattered appointments of his bedroom, packing his case, while Doyler hung grimly to hearth and bedlands, a ghettoing of their space. Silly really. “Oh very well,” said MacMurrough.
“I’ve no money,” said Doyler, “so we’ll play for noses instead.”
“Whatever you say. What are noses?”
“Things, you find them usually on your face.”
He gathered the cards and snappily shuffled them. MacMurrough creaked to the floor to sit. He felt a general disgruntlement, a sense of a damper. It was too bad of Jim, he had expected better. This evening, his last in Ireland—a coda to the action, when properly ordered it should have provided the climax, well perhaps not climax, but a generous envoi. The Titian-glow of fire and candles, their voices quieting, his soothing wine: the evening previous repeated in fact, save with the added piquancy of tickets in his pocket, of the imminent and ineluctable tide. Instead he had this fellow parked on his rug the night. The state of the room too displeased him that evinced Jim’s absence more than any maid’s: yesterday’s grate, the cigarette-blue air, the slop and jumble of the sick-bedside.
Fellow wasn’t even sick, merely trouserless.
But MacMurrough took his cards and played the game. And noses, so he found, answered his mood to a turn. Whenever he made his nap, which he made invariably and far too unluckily for his heart, he got to rap Doyler with his winning cards: rap on the nose per point staked. How brave the boy bode, how meek he suffered: it did the soul good to see. They changed to brag, but brag the boy might, MacMurrough had aces. Aces went low, and MacMurrough had kings. The boy’s pugnacious nose reddened to a geranium. “My dear,” said MacMurrough, gathering the pack, “you cannot conceive how it becomes you, a little trouncing.”
“You play a lot at cards, do you?”
“No,” said MacMurrough. “But then I’ve always been,” he began, and finished, “unlucky in love.” Here was a rival’s compliment and Doyler received it grinning, touchingly with his lips closed to contain his laugh. “You’re doyling,” said MacMurrough. “Yes, you’re doyling. I