Saints and Sinners

by Edna O'Brien

Genres: Literary Fiction; Short Stories

Synopsis

With her inimitable gift for describing the workings of the heart and mind, Edna O'Brien introduces us to a vivid new cast of restless, searching people who - whether in the Irish countryside or London or New York - remind us of our own humanity. A librarian waits in the lobby of a posh Dublin hotel - expecting to meet a celebrated poet while reflecting on the great love who disappointed her. Irish workers dream of becoming millionaires in London, but long for their quickly changing homeland - exiles in both places. A searing anatomy of class is seen through a little girl's eyes. In language that is always bold and vital, Edna O'Brien pays tribute to the universal forces that rule our lives.

Release date: May 9, 2011

Publisher: Little, Brown and Company

Print pages: 272

Sample

IN ONE LAPEL WAS a small green-and-gold harp, and in the other a flying angel. His blue jacket had seen better days. He wore
a black felt homburg hat, and his white hair fell in coils almost to his shoulders. His skin was sallow, but his huge hands
were a dark nut brown, and on the right hand he had a lopsided knuckle, obviously caused by some injury. Above it, on the
wrist, he wore a wide black strap. He could have been any age, and he seemed like a man on whom a permanent frost had settled.
He drank the Guinness slowly, lifting the glass with a measured gravity. We were in a massive pub named Biddy Mulligan’s,
in North London, on St. Patrick’s Day, and the sense of expectation was palpable. Great banners with HAPPY ST. PATRICK draped the walls, and numerous flat television screens carried pictures of the homeland, featuring hills, dales, lakes, tidy
towns, and highlights of famed sporting moments down the years. Little votive lamps, not unlike Sacred Heart lamps, were nailed
in corners to various wooden beams and seemed talismanic on that momentous day. Only three people were there, the quiet man,
a cracked woman with tangled hair gabbling away, and myself.


Adrian, the young barman, was chalking up the promised delights, large Jameson at less than half price, teeny dishes of Irish
stew and apple cake for free. Moreover, the governor had left a box full of green woolly hats and green scarves that were
reserved to be given to the regular customers. Adrian was young and affable, asking if I needed more coffee and wondering
if the quiet man, whom he called Rafferty, would like a refill, in honor of the day. Much to the chagrin of Clodagh, the spry
young assistant, Adrian indulged his nostalgia by playing “Galway Shawl” on the jukebox, over and over again.


The coffee that I had been served was dire, but I lingered, because of being early for an appointment, and picked up a newspaper
that was lying on the vacant table next to me. Disaster and scandals featured prominently. Further unrest was reported in
a northern province of China; an actress was pictured being helped out of a nightclub in a state of inebriation; another photograph showed her arriving only a few hours earlier wearing a white
clinging dress and perilously high heels. A hostage who had been released in some African bush after sixty-seven days in detention
seemed dazed by the posse of journalists who surrounded him. I looked at the weather forecast for New York, where I had often
spent St. Patrick’s Day and stood among milling crowds as they cheered floats and bands, feeling curiously alone in the midst
of all that celebration.


My appointment was with a doctor whom I had been seeing for the best part of a year and who had just moved to this less salubrious
part of London, had left his rooms in Primrose Hill, probably because of the rent’s being exorbitant. This would be my first
time at this new abode, and I dreaded it, partly because I had left, as I saw it, fragments of myself behind in that other
room, with its stacks of books, an open fire, and an informality that was not customary between patient and analyst. Sitting
there, with an eye on the wall clock, I kept checking on this new address and asked Adrian about such and such a road to make
doubly sure that I had not gone astray. Yes, he knew the man, said he had been in several times, which I took to imply that
my doctor liked a drink.


Meanwhile, Clodagh was bustling around in an emerald-green pinafore, reciting a verse for all to hear:

Boxty on the griddle,

Boxty in the pan,

If you can’t make the boxty,

You’ll never get your man.

The light from the leaded-glass panels danced on her shadow as she flitted from table to table, extolling the miracle of the
boxty potato bread and dragging a duster over the round brown tables that bore the mottling of years and years of porter stains.


That done, she began to pipe green tincture onto the drawn pints of Guinness to simulate the emblem of the shamrock, something
Rafferty observed with a quiet sufferance. A noisy group burst in, decked with leprechauns and green gewgaws of every description,
led by a tall woman who was carrying fresh shamrock still attached to a clump of rich earth. In a slightly affected voice
she described writing to her old uncle several times since Christmas, reminding him that the plant must not be detached from
its soil and, moreover, he must remember to sprinkle it with water and post it in a perforated box filled with loam.


“Was it holy water by any chance?” the cracked woman shouted out.

“Shut your gob,” she was told, at which she raised a hectoring finger, claiming, “I was innit before yous was all born.”

As the single sprigs of shamrock were passed around, they somehow looked a little forlorn.

A second group followed hot on the heels of the first group, all greeting each other heartily, spreading coats and bags on
the various tables and commandeering quiet nooks in the alcoves, for friends whom they claimed were due. A cocky young man
with sideburns, wearing a black leather jacket, walked directly to the fruit machine, where the lime-green and cherry-red
lights flashed on and off, the lit symbols spinning at a tantalizing speed. Two youngsters, possibly his brothers, stood by,
gazing and gaping as he fed coin after coin into the machine, and as they waited in vain for the clatter of the payout money,
the younger one held an open handkerchief to receive the takings. The elder, who was plump, consigned squares of chocolate
into his mouth and sucked with relish while his brother looked on with the woebegone expression of an urchin.


I had put the newspaper down and was jotting in a notebook one or two things that I might possibly discuss with my doctor
when, to my surprise, Rafferty was standing above me and almost bashfully said, “Do you mind if I take back my paper?” I apologized,
offering him a drink, but he was already on his way, detached from the boisterous crowd, carrying himself with a strange otherworldly
dignity as he raised his right hand to Adrian in salutation.


Three or four weeks passed before we exchanged a few words.

“What’s the harp for?” I asked one morning when, as had become his habit, he made a little joke of offering me the newspaper.

“To prove that I’m an Irishman,” he replied.

“And the angel?”

“Oh that’s the guardian angel…. We all have one,” he said, with a deferential half smile.

About six months after our first meeting I came upon Rafferty unexpectedly, and we greeted each other like old friends. I
was on the Kilburn High Road outside a secondhand furniture shop, where he was seated on a leather armchair, smiling at passersby,
like a potentate. He was totally at ease out in the open, big white lazy clouds sailing by in the sky above us, surrounded
by chairs, tables, chests of drawers, fire irons, fenders, crockery, and sundry bric-a-brac.


Offering me a seat, he said that the owner believed his presence perked up an interest in business, because once, when he
had been singing “I’ll Take You Home Again, Kathleen,” passersby had stopped to listen and, as he put it, had browsed. Nearby,
a woman haggled over the price of a buckled sieve, and a young mother was in vain trying to get her son off the rocking horse
to which he was affixed. The white paint was scraped in several places, and the golden mane a smudged brown, but to the boy
his steed was noble.


Rafferty rolled a cigarette, folded his tobacco pouch, and, impelled by some inner recollection, began to tell me the story
of coming to London forty years earlier, a young lad of fifteen arriving in Camden Town with his father and thinking that
it was the strangest, sootiest place he had ever seen, that even the birds, the fat pigeons that waddled about, were man-made.
Theirs was a small room, which his father had rented the year previous. It had a single iron bed, a thin mattress, a washbasin,
and a little gas ring to boil a kettle.


The next morning at the Camden tube station, where lorries and wagons were parked and young men waited to be recruited, literally
hundreds of them, hundreds of Irishmen, hoped for a job. A foreman eyed Rafferty up and down and said to his father that no
way was that boy seventeen, but his father lied, insisting that he was. More heated words were exchanged, about effing cousins
and so forth, but eventually Rafferty was told to climb onto the lorry, and he did. I believed (Rafferty said) that a great
future lay ahead of me, but the look of despair on the lads left behind standing in that street was awful, and one I can never
forget.


They were driven a few miles north to where a group of young men were digging a long trench, for the electricity cables to
be put in later on. The paving stones were already taken up and stacked in piles. At his first sight of it, it was hard for
him, as he said, not to imagine those men, young though they were, destined for all eternity to be kept digging some never-ending grave. He was
handed a shovel and told to get to work. The handle of the shovel was short, shorter than the ones he had been used to at
home when he dug potatoes or turnips, and the blade was square and squat. And so I was (he said) put to digging the blue clay
of London, as it was then called, blue from leaking gas and sticky, so sticky you had to dip the shovel in a bucket of water
every so often, then wedge it in under the soil to try and shift it. Lads in a line, stripped to the waist because it was
so hot, each man given a certain number of yards to dig, four foot six inches wide and four foot six inches deep. The foreman
in his green Wellingtons walking up and down, putting the fear of God into us. A brute, and an Irish brute at that. After
an hour of digging, I was half-asleep over the shovel and only for Haulie, I would have been fired. He covered for me, held
me up. He was from Donegal, said the mountains and the hilly roads made him wiry, and that I’d get used to it. Two Connemara
men nearby spoke only the Irish and didn’t understand a word others were saying, but they understood the foreman and the ruthlessness
of him. I didn’t feel hungry, only thirsty, and the cup of milk at half past ten was a godsend. Tea was brewing all day long
in a big bucket, but Haulie said it tasted like senna. Teaboy Teddy was in charge of the grub, and men were given potatoes
and cabbage for the dinner, except that I couldn’t eat. By the time the whistle went in the evening, my hands were bloodied and
my back was ready to break. In the room, I fell fast asleep at the little table, and my father flung me onto the bed, boots
and all, and went out.


The same drudge (he continued) every day, but they talked and yarned to keep the spirits up. They would talk about everything
and anything to do with home. One lad caused riots of laughter when, out of the blue, he announced that turnips needed the
frost to taste sweet. He got christened Turnip O’Mara instantly. Nicknames meant for greater camaraderie, down there in the
trenches, a brotherhood, us against them, the bull of a foreman and the contractors and subcontractors, who were merely brutes
to us—downright brutes. We might chance upon treasure. The legend was that someone had found a Roman plate worth hundreds,
and someone else dug up a wooden box with three gold crosses, which he pawned. All we found were the roots of trees, embedded
and sinewy, the odd coal bill, and rotten shells of gas piping that German prisoners of war had laid in the ’40s. On Thursdays a Cork man arrived in a green van to hand out the wages, his bodyguard, also a Cork man, wielding a cricket
bat in case of robbery. Men felt like kings momentarily. I got four pounds, which I had to hand over to my father, who also
made me write a letter to my mother to say how happy I was and how easily I had settled into life in London. So much so that she wrote and said she hoped I would not acquire an English accent, as that
would be faithless.


I really knew nothing of London (Rafferty said, apologetically), nothing except the four walls of the room, the broken springs
of the bed, the street that led to where the wagons and lorries picked men up, and the big white, wide chapel with three altars,
where the Irish priest gave thunderous sermons on a Sunday. I was full of fears, thought everything was a sin. If the Holy
Communion touched my teeth I thought that was a mortal sin. After Mass we had a cup of tea in the sacristy and biscuits dusted
with sugar. Sundays were awful, walking up and down the streets and looking at the dinginess of the shop fronts and dirty
net curtains in upstairs windows and the old brickwork daubed black. My father went off very early of a Sunday, but I never
knew where to.


We had one book on the small shelf in our room. It was by Zane Grey. I must have read it dozens of times. I was so familiar
with it that I could picture swaths of purple sage and cottonwood in Utah, outlaws, masked riders, and felons trailing each
other in the big open ranges, one area peculiarly named Deception Pass. I think I swore that I would go there, because I missed
the outdoors, missed roaming in the fields around home and hunting on Sundays with a white ferret. My poor mother was writing
at least twice weekly, pleading with my father to come home, saying that she could not mind children, do farmwork, and take in washing, and, moreover, that she was suffering increasingly from dizziness.
Eventually my father announced that he was going home, and shortly before he did, something happened. We were in the room,
and the landlady called my father to the telephone, which was in the kitchen. I thought that maybe my mother had died, but
no, he came back in whistling and smiling, handed me two and six and told me to go to the Italian restaurant on the high street
and stay there until he picked me up. I lingered for three hours, but no sign of him. The place was shutting. They were putting
chairs up on the tables, and a woman waited, the mop already sunk in a bucket of water, to wash the floor. When I got back,
the bedroom door was locked. I knocked and waited and knocked, and my father shouted at me to go down the hall, into the back
garden. Instead I went towards the hall door. Not long after, a tall, blond woman, wearing a cape, emerged from our room.
She was not a patch on my mother. The way she picked her steps, so high and haughty, I could see that she thought herself
way above us. She threw me a strange condescending smile. My father went mad when he saw where I was standing. He said nothing,
just drew me into the room by my hair, pulled my pants down and beat me savagely. He kept saying the same thing over and over
again as he was belting me—“I’ll teach you… I’ll teach you honor… and I’ll teach you obedience… and I’ll teach you to respect your elders. I’ll teach you I’ll teach you I’ll teach you,” raving mad at having been found
out.


A good bit after my father went home (Rafferty continued), I started going to the pub. I was feeling more independent then.
I’d go to the Greek café that had been renamed Zorba and have rashers and eggs and fried bread. The kitchen was behind the
counter, and the Irish lads had taught Zorba to forget the kebabs and stuffed vine leaves and master the frying pan. Then
I’d go straight across to The Aran pub, pure heaven, the w. . .