FEBRUARY 11th, 1958: Brian Friel, in his persona as a much put-upon man, wrote this column in the series he contributed toThe Irish Times in the late 1950s and early 1960s.
MY WIFE has an unnerving habit of suddenly lifting her head like a setter picking up the scent and making a tense, dramatic announcement: “A mouse!” or: “Visitors coming!” or: “Baby awake!”. It is a sort of dark gift she has, a mental radar that warns her of approaching events minutes before there are any perceptible signs of them.
But it is the telegraphic starkness of her utterances that upsets me. It somehow dooms the happening before it has a chance.
For example, when she says: “Visitors coming!”, even though I hear no footsteps outside, I know that when I open the door there will be someone like Joe Bryson with his winking glasses and his wife dabbing at her nose with a handkerchief or perhaps the Blacks or the O’Donnells – someone, anyhow, that I detest seeing . . .
The night before last she was at it again, threatening with her foreknowledge. We had just got the children to bed and I was settling in to have a look at the papers when she went taut and announced: “Ambulance!”.
I put on my reading glasses, looked at the headlines and put up my old feeble pretence of not hearing her.
“Ambulance stopped!”
I looked across then and said with unaffected casualness, “Is that so?”, hoping that my nonchalance would balance, even outweigh, her keenness. Then I too heard the engine cut out and the subdued voices in the street.
“Who’s sick? Is it one of the Traceys? Did you hear of anyone in the street being sick?”
After the frugal beginning, her sudden flow of words drowned me. I took off my glasses; it was not worth putting up even a token fight. She was at the window now and peering out through the slit at the edge of the blind.
“One of the Traceys, as I thought,” the commentary began. “The driver is knocking at the door and an attendant is getting a stretcher ready at the back. Mrs. Tracey is answering the door – that rules her out – it must be him or Jackie. Jackie, I would say. He hasn’t been looking well recently. Very yellow. They are carrying the stretcher in to the house now. Mrs. Tracey is crying, as far as I can see. Can’t be him, then. Jackie after all . . . Take a walk up the far side of the street and find out who it is. Pretend you are going to Breen’s for cigarettes.”
“No,” I said. At any other time she would have taken huff at my tone. But now she accepted my refusal as another barrier to be overcome. She was back at the window.
“They’re carrying him out.”
“It may be Jackie’s fiancée,” I suggested slyly. “She’s there most nights, isn’t she?”
That was too much. She ran to the door, switched off the light, dashed back to the window and let up the blind. I watched my toes in the red glow of the fire.
“They can scarcely carry him, whoever it is. But it definitely is not a girl,” she said. “And they have blankets up around his neck. But I think it is . . . it looks like . . . I’m almost sure it is . . .”
Then I remembered: old Tracey never paid me back the ten shillings he got from me that night at the poker game. I sprang to her side. “Who is it? Do you hear me, woman? Who is it?”
But I was late; they were closing the ambulance door and Mrs. Tracey was standing framed in the hallway. The ambulance drove away.
I groped my way back to the fireside to my chair. My wife pulled down the blind. We sat in the dark. Neither of us spoke for a good five minutes.
“Now we won’t know until the morning,” she said. She made it sound like a week away.
But I could not wait even until the morning. “I’m going out for cigarettes,” I said.