A Long Long Way Read Free Page A

so-and-so, hah?’ said Mr Lawlor. ‘Yes, Gretta? I expect so. Put down your birds, sonny, and thank you. But don’t thank your father. Tell him I threw them out the window into the street. Tell him I did that, William.’
    Four men killed that day. The phrase sat up in Willie’s head like a rat and made a nest for itself there.

    Although he protested, Mr Lawlor was brought further treats in the coming times and Willie ferried them for his father. Mr Lawlor had lost his work as a carter because of the blow to his head; it was thought by his employer that he was a dangerous man if he had been agitating in Sackville Street. But thousands had forfeited their jobs for the duration of the lock-out and when it was over many found it impossible to get them back. So Mr Lawlor was one of many. And like many another he joined the army so he could get food for himself and send his pay to Gretta. And so he was away for days on end, and although there were women in the other parts of the room that looked out for her, it was easier for Willie to come and talk to her. And they talked about everything that was in their heads to talk about.
    He kept it all a secret from his sisters on instinct and no doubt it was a good instinct, because the truth was that Gretta was a slum dweller and Willie knew what Maud and especially Annie thought about such things, and they would immediately tell his father. And he did not wish that to happen. And he confined himself to going when his father gave him a parcel or a little bit of beef, so it all seemed normal and straight. But he supposed it wasn’t normal and straight exactly. He was in love with Gretta like a poor swan was in love with the Liffey and cannot leave it, no matter how often the boys of Dublin stone her nest. Her voice to him was just music, and her face was light, and her body was a city of gold.
    One day he came and she was sleeping. He sat on a broken chair for two hours watching her breathing, the gappy coverlet rising and falling, her face dreaming. The coverlet fell away and he saw her soft breasts. There were angels on the O‘Connell Monument but she was not like them but he thought she looked like an angel, at least how an angel ought to look. It was as if he were being shown the heart of the world, such beauty in that shabby place. The weather was evil beyond the window, a harsh sleet pinning the darkness with a million pins. He loved her so much he wept. That was how it was for Willie Dunne, and maybe they were matters that could only be taken away from him.

    By the time he was seventeen and she was nearly fifteen, they had been almost a year dodging both the fathers. Gretta was an extremely straightforward person and she knew herself when she saw Willie that first time that he was for her, young though she was. Her world became things before Willie and things after meeting Willie, like the world designates things before and after Christ.
    Perhaps merely by some rough chance he never slighted her or grossly offended her, though they could have a row like the best. She wasn’t so wedded to the idea of his erection as perhaps he was.
    ‘Well, you boys are all the same,’ she said.
    Her father was going to put her to service in one of the Merrion Square houses if he could, or failing that, he thought he might send her down the country to a good family. And he might have done so already except he was fond of her, and his wife had died of a galloping consumption many years before, turning to a wet stick in the goosedown bed at his side. And he had no other companion in the world.
    Willie, for his part, was going to grow rich at the building with Dempsey, and marry her. He felt he could carry the day with her father when the time came.
    But then that other queer time of the war came suddenly and, much against Gretta’s desires, he wanted to go to the war.
    It was difficult for him to explain to her why it was so, because it was difficult to put it into words for himself. He