Collected Stories

Memories of Youghal

He did not, he said, remember the occasion of his parents’ death, having been at the time only five months old. His first memory was of a black iron gate, of his own hand upon a part of it, and of his uncle driving through the gateway in a Model-T Ford. These images, and that of his uncle’s bespectacled face perspiring, were all in sunshine. For him, so he said to Miss Ticher, the sunlight still glimmered on the dim black paint of the motor-car; his uncle, cross and uncomfortable on hot upholstery, did not smile.

He remembered also, at some later time, eating tinned tomato soup in a house that was not the house of his aunt and uncle; he remembered a tap near a greenhouse; he remembered eating an ice-cream outside Horgan’s Picture House while his aunt engaged another woman in conversation. Pierrots performed on the sands; a man who seemed to be a priest gave him a Fox’s Glacier Mint.

‘The gate was tarred, I think,’ he said. ‘A tarred black gate. That memory is the first of all.’

The elderly woman to whom he spoke smiled at him, covering with the smile the surprise she experienced because a stout, untidy stranger spoke to her so easily about his memories.

‘I recall my uncle eating the tomato soup,’ the man said, ‘and my aunt, who was a severe woman, giving him a disapproving glance because of the row he was kicking up with it. The tap near the greenhouse came from a pipe that rose crookedly out of the ground.’

‘I see,’ she said, smiling a little more. She added that her own earliest memory, as far as she could remember, was of a papier-mâché spotted dog filled with sweets. The man didn’t comment on that.

‘Horgan’s Picture House,’ he said. ‘I wonder is it still going strong?’

She shook her head. She said she didn’t know if Horgan’s Picture House was still standing, since she had never been to the town he spoke of.

‘I first saw Gracie Fields there,’ he revealed. ‘And Jack Hulbert in a funny called Round the Washtub.’

They were reclining in deck-chairs on a terrace of the Hôtel Les Galets in Bandol, looking out at the Mediterranean. Mimosa and bougainvillaea bloomed around them, oranges ripened, palm trees flapped in a small breeze, and on a pale-blue sky the sun pushed hazy clouds aside. With her friend Miss Grimshaw, Miss Ticher always came to Bandol in late April, between the mistral and the season, before the noise and the throbbing summer heat. They had known one another for more than thirty years and when, next year, they both retired at sixty-five they planned to live in a bungalow in Sevenoaks, not far from St Mildred’s School for Girls, where Miss Ticher taught history and Miss Grimshaw French. They would, they hoped, continue to travel in the spring to Bandol, to the quiet Mediterranean and the local bouillabaisse, their favourite dish.

Miss Ticher was a thin woman with a shy face and frail, thin hands. She had been asleep on the upper terrace of Les Galets and had wakened to find the untidy man standing in front of her. He had asked if he might sit in the deck-chair beside hers, the chair that Miss Grimshaw had earlier planned to occupy on her return from her walk. Miss Ticher felt she could not prevent the man from sitting down, and so had nodded. He was not staying in the hotel, he said, and added that his business was that of a detective. He was observing a couple who were at present in an upstairs room: it would facilitate his work if Miss Ticher would kindly permit him to remain with her and perhaps engage in a casual conversation while he awaited the couple’s emergence. A detective, he told Miss Ticher, could not be obvious: a detective must blend with the background, or at least seem natural. ‘The So-Swift Investigation Agency’, he said. ‘A London firm’. As he lowered himself into the chair that Miss Grimshaw had reserved for herself he said he was an exiled Irishman. ‘Did you ever hear of the Wild Geese?’ he enquired. ‘Soldiers of fortune? I often feel like that myself. My name is Quillan.’

He was younger than he looked, she thought: forty-five, she estimated, and seeming to be ten years older. Perhaps it was that, looking older than he was, or perhaps it was the uneasy emptiness in his eyes, that made her feel sorry for him. His eyes apologized for himself, even though he attempted to hide the apology beneath a jauntiness. He wouldn’t be long on the terrace, he promised: the couple would soon be checking out of the hotel and on behalf of the husband of the woman he would discreetly follow them, around the coast in a hired Renault. It was work he did not much care for, but it was better than other work he had experienced: he’d drifted about, he added with a laugh, from pillar to post. With his eyes closed in the warmth he talked about his childhood memories while Miss Ticher listened.

‘Youghal,’ he said. ‘I was born in Youghal, in County Cork. In 1934 my mother went in for a swim and got caught up with a current. My dad went out to fetch her and they both went down.’

He left his deck-chair and went away, and strangely she wondered if perhaps he was going to find a place to weep. An impression of his face remained with her: a fat red face with broken veins in it, and blue eyes beneath dark brows. When he smiled he revealed teeth that were stained and chipped and not his own. Once, when laughing over a childhood memory, they had slipped from their position in his jaw and had had to be replaced. Miss Ticher had looked away in embarrassment, but he hadn’t minded at all. He wasn’t a man who cared about the way he struck other people. His trousers were held up with a tie, his pale stomach showed through an unbuttoned shirt. There was dandruff in his sparse fluff of sandy hair and on the shoulders of a blue blazer: yesterday’s dandruff, Miss Ticher had thought, or even the day before’s.

‘I’ve brought you this,’ he said, returning and sitting again in Miss Grimshaw’s chair. He proffered a glass of red liquid. ‘A local aperitif.’

Over pots of geraniums and orange-tiled roofs, across the bay and the green sea that was ruffled with little bursts of foam, were the white villas of Sanary, set among cypresses. Nearer, and more directly below, was the road to Toulon and beyond it a scrappy beach on which Miss Ticher now observed the figure of Miss Grimshaw.

‘I was given over to the aunt and uncle,’ said Quillan, ‘on the day of the tragedy. Although, as I’m saying to you, I don’t remember it.’

He drank whisky mixed with ice. He shook the liquid in his glass, watching it. He offered Miss Ticher a cigarette, which she refused. He lit one himself.

‘The uncle kept a shop,’ he said.

She saw Miss Grimshaw crossing the road to Toulon. A driver hooted; Miss Grimshaw took no notice.

‘Memories are extraordinary,’ said Quillan, ‘the things you’d remember and the things you wouldn’t. I went to the infant class at the Loreto Convent. There was a Sister Ita. I remember a woman with a red face who cried one time. There was a boy called Joe Murphy whose grandmother kept a greengrocer’s. I was a member of Joe Murphy’s gang. We used to fight another gang.’

Miss Grimshaw passed from view. She would be approaching the hotel, moving slowly in the warmth, her sunburnt face shining as her spectacles shone. She would arrive panting, and already, in her mind, Miss Ticher could hear her voice. ‘What on earth’s that red stuff you’re drinking?’ she’d demand in a huffy manner.

‘When I was thirteen years old I ran away from the aunt and uncle,’ Quillan said. ‘I hooked up with a travelling entertainments crowd that used to go about the seaside places. I think the aunt must have been the happy female that day. She couldn’t stand the sight of me.’

‘Oh surely now –’

‘Listen,’ said Quillan, leaning closer to Miss Ticher and staring intently into her eyes. ‘I’ll tell you the way this case was. You’d like to know?’

‘Well –’

‘The uncle had no interest of any kind in the bringing up of a child. The uncle’s main interest was drinking bottles of stout in Phelan’s public house, with Harrigan the butcher. The aunt was a different kettle of fish: the aunt above all things wanted nippers of her own. For the whole of my thirteen years in that house I was a reminder to my aunt of her childless condition. I was a damn nuisance to both of them.’

Miss Ticher, moved by these revelations, did not know what to say. His eyes were slightly bloodshot, she saw; and then she thought it was decidedly odd, a detective going on about his past to an elderly woman on the terrace of an hotel.

‘I wasn’t wanted in that house,’ he said. ‘When I was five years old she told me the cost of the food I ate.’

It would have been 1939 when he was five, she thought, and she remembered herself in 1939, a girl of twenty-four, just starting her career at St Mildred’s, a girl who’d begun to feel that marriage, which she’d wished for, might not come her way. ‘We’re neither of us the type,’ Miss Grimshaw later said. ‘We’d be lost, my dear, without the busy life of school.’

She didn’t want Miss Grimshaw to arrive on the terrace. She wanted this man who was a stranger to her to go on talking in his sentimental way. He described the town he spoke of: an ancient gateway and a main street, and a harbour where fishing boats went from, and the strand with wooden breakwaters where his parents had drowned, and seaside boarding-houses and a promenade, and short grass on a clay hill above the sea.

‘Near the lighthouse in Youghal,’ said Quillan, ‘there’s a shop I used buy Rainbow Toffees in.’

Miss Grimshaw appeared on the terrace and walked towards them. She was a small, plump woman with grey hair, and short legs and short arms. Generations of girls at St Mildred’s had likened her to a dachshund and had, among themselves, named her appropriately. She wore now a flowered dress and carried in her left hand a yellow plastic bag containing the fruits of her morning’s excursion: a number of shells.

‘At a later time,’ said Quillan, ‘I joined the merchant navy in order to get a polish. I knocked about the world a bit, making do the best way I could. And then a few years back I entered the investigation business.’

Miss Grimshaw, annoyed because an unprepossessing man in a blazer was sprawling in her chair, saw that her friend was holding in her hand a glass of red liquid and was further annoyed because of this: they pooled their resources at the beginning of each holiday and always consulted each other before making a purchase. Ignoring the sprawling man, she asked Miss Ticher what the glass contained, speaking sharply to register her disapproval and disappointment. She stood, since there was no chair for her to sit on.

‘I never went back to Youghal,’ the man said before Miss Ticher could reply to Miss Grimshaw’s query. ‘I only have the childhood memories of it now. Unhappy memories,’ said the man to Miss Grimshaw’s amazement. ‘Unhappy memories of a nice little place. That’s life for you.’

‘It’s an aperitif,’ said Miss Ticher, ‘that Mr Quillan kindly bought for me. Mr Quillan, this is Miss Grimshaw, my friend.’

‘We were discussing memories,’ said Quillan, pushing himself out of the deck-chair. ‘Miss Ticher and myself were going down Memory Lane.’ He laughed loudly, causing the teeth to move about in his mouth. His shoes were scuffed, Miss Grimshaw noted; the blue scarf that was stuck into the open neck of his shirt seemed dirty.

Again he walked abruptly away. He offered Miss Grimshaw no greeting and Miss Ticher no farewell. He moved along the terrace with the glass in his hand and a cigarette in his mouth. His trousers bagged at the back, requiring to be hitched up.

‘Who on earth’s that?’ demanded Miss Grimshaw. ‘You never let him pay for that stuff you’re drinking?’

‘He’s a detective,’ said Miss Ticher. ‘He’s watching a couple for a husband. He followed them here.’

‘Followed?’

‘He’s in the investigation business.’

Miss Grimshaw sat in the chair the man had been sitting in. Her eyes returned to the glass of red intoxicant her friend was still holding. She thought to herself that she had gone out alone, looking for shells because Agnes Ticher had said she was tired that morning, and the next thing was Agnes Ticher had got herself involved with a bore.

‘He smelt,’ said Miss Grimshaw. ‘I caught a most unwelcome little whiff.’

‘His whisky,’ Miss Ticher began. ‘Whisky has a smell –’

‘You know what I mean, Agnes,’ said Miss Grimshaw quietly.

‘Did you enjoy your walk?’

Miss Grimshaw nodded. She said it was a pity that Miss Ticher hadn’t accompanied her. She felt much better after the exercise. She had an appetite for lunch, and the salt of the sea in her nostrils. She looked again at the glass in Miss Ticher’s hand, implying with her glance that the consumption of refreshment before lunch could serve only to fatigue whatever appetite Miss Ticher had managed to gain in the course of her idle morning.

‘My God,’ said Miss Grimshaw, ‘he’s coming back.’

He was coming towards them with another deck-chair. Behind him walked a waiter bearing on a tin tray three glasses, two containing the red liquid that Miss Ticher was drinking, the third containing ice and whisky. Without speaking, he set up the deck-chair, facing both of them. The waiter moved an ornamental table and placed the glasses on it.

‘A local aperitif,’ said Quillan. ‘I wouldn’t touch it myself, Miss Grimshaw.’

He laughed and again had difficulty with his teeth. Miss Ticher looked away when his fingers rose to his mouth to settle them back into place, but Miss Grimshaw was unable to take her eyes off him. False teeth were common enough today, she was thinking: there was no need at all for them to come leaping from the jaw like that. Somehow it seemed typical of this man that he wouldn’t bother to have them attended to.

‘Miss Ticher and Miss Grimshaw,’ said Quillan slowly, as though savouring the two names. He drank some whisky. ‘Miss Ticher and Miss Grimshaw,’ he said again. ‘You’re neither of you a married woman. I didn’t marry myself. I was put off marriage, to tell you the truth, by the aunt and uncle down in Youghal. It was an unnatural association, as I saw from an early age. And then of course the investigation business doesn’t exactly encourage a fellow to tie up his loose ends with a female. My mother swam into the sea,’ he said, addressing Miss Grimshaw and seeming to be pleased to have an opportunity to retail the story again. ‘My dad swam in to get her back. They went down to the bottom like a couple of pennies. I was five months old.’

‘How horrible,’ said Miss Grimshaw.

‘If it hadn’t happened I’d be a different type of man today. Would you believe that? Would you agree with me, Miss Grimshaw?’

‘What?’

‘Would I be a different type of man if the parents had lived? When I was thirteen years of age I ran away with an entertainments crowd. I couldn’t stand the house a minute more. My uncle never said a word to me, the aunt used look away when she saw me coming. Meals were taken in silence.’ He paused, seeming to consider all that. Then he said: ‘Youghal’s a place like this place, Miss Grimshaw, stuck out on the sea. You know what I mean?’

Miss Grimshaw said she did know what he meant. He talked a lot, she thought, and in a most peculiar way. Agnes Ticher was keeping herself quiet, which no doubt was due to her embarrassment at having involved them both with such a character.

‘I have another memory,’ said Quillan, ‘that I can’t place at all. It is a memory of a woman’s face and often it keeps coming and going in my mind when I’m trying to sleep in bed. Like the black iron gate, it’s always been there, a vague type of face that I can discern and yet I can’t. D’you know what I mean?’

‘Yes,’ said Miss Ticher.

Miss Grimshaw shook her head.

‘I told a nun about it one time, when I was a little lad, and she said it was maybe my mother. But I don’t believe that for an instant. Will I tell you what I think about that face?’

Miss Ticher smiled, and seeing the smile and noting as well a flush on her friend’s cheeks, it occurred to Miss Grimshaw that Agnes Ticher, having been imbibing a drink that might well have been more intoxicating than it seemed, was by now a little tipsy. There was an expression in Agnes Ticher’s eyes that suggested such a condition to Miss Grimshaw; there was a looseness about her lips. In a playful way, she thought, she would tell the story in the common-room when they returned to St Mildred’s: how Agnes Ticher had been picked up by a ne’er-do-well Irishman and had ended up in a squiffy condition. Miss Grimshaw wanted to laugh, but prevented herself.

‘What I think is this,’ said Quillan. ‘The face is the face of a woman who tried to steal me out of my pram one day when the aunt left the pram outside Pasley’s grocer’s shop. A childless woman heard about the tragedy and said to herself that she’d take the child and be a mother to it.’

‘Did a woman do that?’ cried Miss Ticher, and Miss Grimshaw looked at her in amusement.

‘They’d never bother to tell me,’ said Quillan. ‘I have only the instinct to go on. Hi,’ he shouted to the waiter who was hovering at the distant end of the terrace. ‘Encore, encore! Trois verres, s’il vous plait.’

‘Oh no,’ murmured Miss Ticher.

Miss Grimshaw laughed.

‘An unmarried woman like yourselves,’ said Quillan, ‘who wanted a child. I would be a different man today if she had succeeded in doing what she wanted to do. She would have taken me away to another town, maybe to Cork, or up to Dublin. I would have different memories now. D’you understand me, Miss Grimshaw?’

The waiter came with the drinks. He took away the used glasses.

‘If I close my eyes,’ said Quillan, ‘I can see the whole episode: the woman bent over the pram and her hands going out to the orphan child. And then the aunt comes out of Pasley’s and asks her what she thinks she’s doing. I remember one time the aunt beating me on the legs with a bramble stick. I used eat things from the kitchen cupboard. I used bite into Chivers’ jellies, I well remember that.’ He paused. He said: ‘If ever you’re down that way, go into Youghal. It’s a great place for fresh fish.’

Miss Grimshaw heard voices and looked past Miss Ticher and saw a man and a woman leaving the hotel. They stood for a moment beside the waiter at the far end of the terrace. The woman laughed. The waiter went away.

‘That’s the pair,’ said Quillan. ‘They’re checking out.’

He tilted his glass, draining a quantity of whisky into his mouth.

The man, wearing dark glasses and dressed in red trousers and a black leather jacket, lit his companion’s cigarette. His arm was on the woman’s shoulder. The waiter brought them each a drink.

‘Are they looking this way, Miss Grimshaw?’

He crouched in the deck-chair, anxious not to be observed. Miss Grimshaw said the man and the woman seemed to be absorbed in one another.

‘A right couple to be following around,’ Quillan said with sarcasm and a hint of bitterness. ‘A right vicious couple.’

Suddenly and to Miss Grimshaw’s discomfiture, Miss Ticher stretched out an arm and touched with the tips of her fingers the back of the detective’s large hand. ‘I’m sorry,’ Miss Ticher said quietly. ‘I’m sorry your parents were drowned. I’m sorry you don’t like the work you do.’

He shrugged away the sympathy, although he seemed not surprised to have received it. He said again that if his parents had not drowned he would not be the man they saw in front of them. He was obsessed by that idea, Miss Grimshaw considered. If the woman had succeeded in taking him from the pram he would not be the man he was either, he said: he’d had no luck in his childhood. ‘It’s a nice little seaside resort and yet I can never think of it without a shiver because of the bad luck that was there for me. When I think of the black iron gate and the uncle sweating in the Ford car I think of everything else as well. The woman wanted a child, Miss Ticher. A child needs love.’

‘A woman too,’ whispered Miss Ticher.

‘But the woman’s a figment of Mr Quillan’s imagination,’ Miss Grimshaw said with a laugh. ‘He made up the story to suit some face in his mind. Couldn’t it be, Mr Quillan, that the woman’s face was the face of any woman at all?’

‘Ah, of course, of course,’ agreed Quillan, glancing surreptitiously at the couple he was employed to glance at. ‘You can never know certainly about a business like that.’

The couple, having finished their two drinks, descended a flight of stone steps that led from the terrace to the terrace below, and then went on down to the courtyard of the hotel. The waiter followed them, carrying their luggage. Quillan stood up.

Miss Ticher imagined ironing his blazer. She imagined his face as a child. For a moment, affected as she afterwards thought by the red aperitif, it seemed that Miss Grimshaw was the stranger: Miss Grimshaw was a round woman, unknown to either of them, who had materialized suddenly, looking for a chat. Having no one’s blazer to iron herself, Miss Grimshaw was jealous, for in her life she had known only friendship.

‘In 1934,’ said Miss Ticher, ‘when you were five months old, Mr Quillan, I was still hopeful of marriage. A few years later I would have understood the woman who wished to take you from your pram.’

Miss Ticher’s face was crimson as she spoke those words. She saw Miss Grimshaw looking at it. She saw her looking at her as she clambered to her feet and held a hand out to the detective. ‘Goodbye,’ Miss Ticher said. ‘It was nice to hear your childhood memories.’

He went away in his abrupt manner. They watched him walking the length of the terrace. Miss Ticher watched his descent to the courtyard.

‘My dear,’ said Miss Grimshaw with her laugh, ‘he bowled you over.’ The story for the common-room was even better now. ‘A fat man,’ Miss Grimshaw heard herself saying on the first evening of term, ‘who talked to Agnes about his childhood memories in a place called Youghal. He had fantasies as well, about some woman pilfering him from his pram, as though a woman would. In her tipsiness Agnes entered into all of it. I thought she’d cry.’

Miss Ticher sat down and sipped the drink the man had bought her. Miss Grimshaw said:

‘Thank heavens he’s not staying here.’

‘You shouldn’t have said he made up that story.’

‘Why ever not?’

You hurt him.’

‘Hurt him?’ cried Miss Grimshaw.

‘He’s the victim of his wretched childhood –’

‘You’re tipsy, Agnes.’

Miss Ticher drank the last of her red aperitif, and Miss Grimshaw glared through her shining spectacles, thinking that her friend looked as if she’d just put down a cheap romantic novel.

‘It’s time for lunch,’ announced Miss Grimshaw snappishly, rising to her feet. ‘Come on now.’

Miss Ticher shook her head. ‘Near the lighthouse there’s a shop,’ she said, ‘that sold in those days Rainbow Toffees. A woman like you or me might have seen there a child who ran away from loneliness.’

‘Lunch, dear,’ said Miss Grimshaw.

‘How very cruel the world is.’

Miss Grimshaw, who in reply had been about to say with asperity that no one must let emotional nonsense play tricks on the imagination, instead said nothing at all. Three unnamed drinks and the conversation of a grubby detective had taken an absurd toll of Agnes Ticher in the broad light of day. Miss Grimshaw no longer wished to think about the matter; she did not wish to recall the words that Agnes Ticher in her tipsiness had spoken, nor ever now to retail the episode in the common-room; it was better not to dwell on any of it. They were, after all, friends and there could remain unspoken secrets between them.

‘It is all second best,’ said the voice of Agnes Ticher, but when Miss Grimshaw looked at her friend she knew that Miss Ticher had not spoken. Miss Grimshaw went away, jangling the shells in the yellow plastic bag and screening from her mind the thoughts that were attempting to invade it. There was a smell of garlic on the air, and from the kitchen came the rich odour of the local bouillabaisse, the favourite dish of both of them.