Veronica coughed and waited until he looked up from his paperwork from where he sat in his high-backed chair, his large frame obscuring the evening sun.
‘Eddie tells me you’d like to go to secretarial school.’ He looked down at his papers and shuffled them into another pile. ‘Veronica, the only secretarial schools are in Dublin. Your mother thinks that’s not a place for young women. I assume you see the papers in the shop, and I talked it over with your mother, and she doesn’t want you to go.’ He didn’t take his eyes off her as he spoke. ‘But…’ He paused. ‘Personally, I think it may be good for you. I have a good friend who has a secretarial school in Dublin, and he’ll take you. And you can stay with my sister Betty and her husband, Tom. And your uncle Tom said he would look after you.’
‘I’m, I’m…’
‘Well, what do you think?’
Her heart raced; her mind whirled.
‘Yes, Daddy, I’d love to go, and I’ll make you so proud of me.’ Veronica said it quickly in case he changed his mind.
‘You start the first week of September, and you are to stay with your Uncle Tom and Aunt Betty. They live near St James’s Gate, beside the Guinness brewery where Tom works. They’ve room for you.’ He paused. ‘Now with Padraig gone.’
Padraig had been their only child. Every summer, Tom and Betty sent Padraig to Virginia for a few weeks to help with the hay. But like many Dubliners, when the war started, he’d joined the Fusiliers to fight in the trenches in France. He had only been gone a few months when Betty got a telegram to say he had been killed at Suvla Bay, Turkey. Apparently, Betty didn’t speak for months. At the funeral, she didn’t cry, but when the tears came, they fell in a continuous stream.
‘Thank you, I won’t let you down,’ said Veronica. She wanted to run and hug her father, but he always dismissed any affection she tried to show him when she was a young child.
‘I need you to give Tom a parcel for me.’ He paused. ‘And you’re not to tell Susan about it or your mother.’
Veronica had no interest to ask him what he meant. She wanted to leave and share her good news with Susan. She was going to Dublin! Nodding and closing the door, she saw Susan in the front garden and knocked at the window, gesturing wildly at her sister to come inside the house. Susan walked towards the house leisurely, humming and picking rhododendrons on the way to replace the withering ones on the hall stand. It began to drizzle, and she shook her head. Like Veronica, she had a mass of unruly uncontrollable curly hair that only pins could tame. A hairpin fell onto the tiles on the porch, and she languorously picked it up to stick it back in her hair.
‘Quick, Susan,’ Veronica said, impatient with her sister. ‘I have something to tell you,’ she whispered, signalling her to follow her upstairs. On the landing, Veronica watched Susan stop at the bottom of the stairs to look in the mirror and pushed a rogue blonde strand of hair in place.
‘Come on, for God’s sake!’
Susan followed Veronica into their bedroom. Veronica grabbed Susan by her hands. ‘I’m going to Dublin to learn to be a secretary.’
‘What? Why?’
‘What do you mean “why”? To learn to type and to learn shorthand, and file. It will be so exciting. They have electricity in the homes in Dublin, and the street lamps are lit by electricity too. There are trams, and cars bringing people to destinations you could never dream of going!’
Virginia had electricity from Eliot’s Mill generated by the Blackwater River, but only a few benefited from it.
Thunder rolled in the distance. The blue skies of earlier in the day were now dark with thick clouds. Susan’s attention veered back to her loose strands of hair. Veronica didn’t have the energy for further conversation with her sister. She may have become her closest confidante, but that was only because of a chance of nature, not by choice; they were worlds apart. She missed Eddie, and sadness enveloped her like the mist on the morning lake, only this would not clear. She opened the door of her mahogany wardrobe, wincing at the overpowering smell of mothballs. Mrs Slaney, the cook and part-time housekeeper, hung Veronica’s clothes in colour order. This habit perplexed Veronica. Most of her dresses looked new – she would hardly be home from Sunday Mass when her Sunday shoes and skirt would be swapped for her hobnail boots and old skirt so she could go fishing, or to the woods.
Veronica heard footsteps on the landing, and she knew they were Eddie’s. Susan had returned to fixing her hair, and Veronica went out to the landing.
‘Eddie,’ she whispered to him as he turned to go down the stairs, ‘thank you.’
He waved her away but turned back towards her. ‘Veronica, I really don’t have time for this, I’ve other things to think about.’
‘Things? Like what?’
‘Look, Veronica, I don’t have time, and “Things” is stuff you don’t need to know about.’
He sighed, and took her arms in his hands, looking down at her, so close she saw her reflection in his eyes, and the three brown flecks that distinguished them apart when they were toddlers. ‘Veronica, I’ll be fine.’
But his words didn’t soothe Veronica, remembering her mother’s words about how Tommy Brady was shot.
5
Summer passed and on a beautiful morning in late September Veronica was getting ready to leave for her new life in Dublin. Looking out her bedroom window at the Lough Ramor, she breathed in the stunning view of the lake. She would miss it, but more exciting times were ahead of her. She twirled around a few times, hoping that the stiff new skirt would soften soon. When her mother had given her the pale brown skirt, she had hated it at once.
‘Mother,’ Veronica had said, ‘it’s awful.’
‘Now you are an adult you need to dress like a lady and throw away those hobnail boots and pinafores, and as for dressing in Eddie’s trousers, you can forget all about that. You are a lady now, Veronica.’
As a child, Veronica had worn Eddie’s trousers and shirts. People could not tell them apart. But as Eddie’s hair got shorter, his curls disappeared. Her breasts grew. She hated them. Outside was where she wanted to be, fishing, or in the forest. But as the twins advanced from childhood into adolescence, they filled in the expected roles in the family defined by their gender, Eddie outside helping on the farm and Veronica in the kitchen helping her mother and the cook Mrs Slaney.
‘Veronica, are you listening to me?’ Her mother glared at her. ‘You never listen, how will you cope in the city?’
Now, Veronica looked in the long mirror on her bedroom wall, smothered down her skirt, and pushed her brown curls under her new hat.
She took a yellow primrose from the vase on her chest of drawers and put it in the blue ribbon of her hat, like the ladies at Mass. Maybe she looked nice. She sighed and pulled the flower out and threw it on her bed.
‘I don’t understand why you want to go,’ her mother said, as she stood in the bedroom doorway. ‘What gets into you?’
Veronica groaned. This was a conversation they had many times. ‘Mother, there’s no need to worry. I’ll be fine. I’ll be back in months. It finishes at the end of January.’
Her mother’s eyes watered, and she sniffed.
‘Susan is here, and anyway, Mammy, I’ll be home for Christmas. It’s only a few months away and I’ll be able to help Mrs Smith in the office. Please, it’s all arranged. Sure, you won’t miss me, don’t you always tell me how useless I am in the kitchen? I might learn something useful.’
Her mother sighed, twisting her pearl necklace. ‘I suppose,’ she said and dabbed the corners of her eyes with a white hankie. ‘Stand up straight, Veronica.’
This was more like the mother she knew. Veronica knew sometimes her mother felt it was her duty to play the grieving mother. ‘And, Veronica, don’t forget to write.’
‘Yes, Mammy, I promise, every day.’ It was a promise she wouldn’t keep. She had taken her blue skirt and matching cardigan out of her case and squeezed in her hobnail boots and a pinafore. The thoughts of wearing dresses with flowers made her
shudder; the cardigans she could tolerate but wearing stiff dresses and skirts every day wasn’t what she wanted.
Her father shouted from downstairs, ‘Are you ready, Veronica?’
She gave her bedroom one last look before she shut the door, whispering, ‘Bye, bedroom.’ At the bottom of the stairs, she heard a sound like thunder. She went outside, and her father stood beside a black motor car.
‘I’ve borrowed Dr Reynolds’s motor car for the day,’ he said, rubbing his hand on the bright lamps at the side of the vehicle. ‘I might get one someday,’ said her father. ‘Come on, Veronica, get in. Don’t look scared. It’s not dangerous.’
It wasn’t fear, but the car was part of the reason she wanted freedom. The doctor and her father had been friends since their boarding school days in Terenure College in Dublin.
A bachelor, and Veronica’s godfather, he spoiled her, taking her regularly for trips in his car around the drumlins of Cavan. Unknown to her father, Dr Reynolds had shown Veronica how to drive his car on her sixteenth birthday. This was when she had tasted her first real freedom. Veronica’s gloved hands had clutched tight around the steering wheel and her body moved with the wheels of the car as it swerved around the corners. The pins in her hair loosened, her curls freed in the wind. It was an exhilaration, a freedom she had never experienced before. From that day she knew there was more to life than inside the four walls of her home.
Veronica turned. Eddie stood beside their mother, his cap in his hand. She always felt his presence before she saw him. He now had the start of a moustache and was beginning to look like a man.
‘Veronica, we’d better leave. It looks like it’ll rain, and we must be in time for the train.’
The train station was in Oldcastle in Co. Meath, six miles from Virginia.
She waved to her mother and Eddie, their eyes locking. He gave her a nod, no words needed, and a rough, quick hug.
‘Veronica, let’s go.’ And her father started the car.
On the drive to the station, the fresh September breeze challenging her tightly pinned hair, she closed her eyes, enjoying the wind on her face. On arrival, her father parked the car at the front entrance, careful not to leave it too near the row of bikes.
‘You wait on the platform. I’ll bring your bags and get your ticket.’
‘Are you… are you not coming to Dublin with me?’
‘No. The parcel for Tom, it’s in your big case, the brown one. And don’t let anyone see it, even Betty.’
Veronica heard a whistle before she saw the train snake around the corner.
‘Daddy, eh.’
‘Come along, Veronica, hurry. You go and wait on the platform. I’ll get your ticket at the office. Go on, girl. I’ll only be a minute or two.’
Hesitantly, she joined the crowd of passengers. A mother holding a young girl by her hand, her arms pin thin. Farm labourers with rolls of clothes tucked under their arms. Veronica stood beside three girls. They were wearing black and white domestic uniforms. She wondered where everyone was going, trying to imagine what their lives were like.
She jumped at the sound of her father’s voice. ‘Come on, Veronica,’ he said, his voice impatient now. ‘You are in the second-class carriage. There are Mrs Lynch and her daughter, follow them.’ He looked long and hard at her, his eyes softening. ‘Veronica, you will be all right. This is what you want, isn’t it?’
Veronica swallowed. ‘Yes, Father, I’ll make you proud of me.’
The train’s whistle blew again.
Her father held her elbow, guiding her through the passengers to an empty carriage. He stood back to hold the door open and then hugged her tight. His breath warm on her ear, he whispered, ‘Remember Veronica, don’t show the package to anyone, just give it to Tom.’
The conductor shouted, ‘All aboard.’ He waved Veronica to hurry onto the train. Settled at the window seat, she watched her father through the train windows as he left the station. Doubts were beginning to rise. Was she doing the right thing? She had never been further than Kells.
She shifted uncomfortably on the hard, wooden seat, wishing she had listened to her father’s suggestion to take a cushion. Soon the train was rattling across the countryside, flat pastures filled with grazing cows and sheep soon replaced by hills. The full thick black clouds gave in to a build-up of pressure and rain began to fall diagonally on the windows. Veronica drank in the unfamiliar countryside. She hadn’t known that continuous rolls of hills could stir such excitement and wanted more.
Her stomach rumbled, and she looked around the carriage to see if anyone had heard. A woman opposite nodded and smiled at her. Veronica laid her sandwiches on the table in front of her. The children opposite her whispered something to their mother, and she shook her head. Veronica tried to ignore the way the children stared at the food. She leaned over and handed them the sandwiches. They snatched them; in one bite, they were gone, before their mother could scold them. The mother smiled a shy thank you.
After lunch, sleep took hold of her. The train whistle blew, jolting her awake as they slowed into Broadstone Station. A flash of sunlight filled the carriage before the platform roof of the station replaced the sky. She stretched, and her stomach somersaulted. The passengers in her carriage were all standing now, buttoning the coats on their children, fixing their hats and smoothing down skirts or trousers crumpled after the long journey.
‘Are ye here to work?’ a boy asked her, his face like one large red freckle. ‘I’m going to work at the docks.’
Veronica nodded, words lost in her throat. She didn’t know what the docks were.
Looking out at the crowded station, Veronica had never seen so many different people in one place.
The conductor walked past, telling everyone to hurry and collect their luggage which was piled on the platform.
Suddenly, British soldiers thundered past in unison. Their boots pounded the wooden floorboards, marching with a determination reserved for people who thought they were superior. A path opened, allowing them to pass, rattling guns hanging from their shoulders.
People were standing behind the railings, searching the passengers’ faces for loved ones.
Tom sluggishly walked towards her, slower than she remembered the last time she had seen him at her cousin’s funeral. Her mother told her once that years of lifting barrels hadn’t helped his health. He took off his worn cloth cap to reveal thinning, tobacco-coloured hair.
He shook Veronica’s hand then; his grip was firm, and his skin was rougher than her father’s. He had aged since the time she had met him at Sheamus’s funeral. His lined face emphasised the sadness in his tired eyes.
‘Betty is at home and getting the supper ready; she’s looking forward to you coming.’
The bustling station was so different from Virginia. The smells, the noise, even the air felt different.
‘Come on, Veronica, our dray is outside,’ Tom said.
Outside the smell of urine stung her nose. At home on the farm, the farm smells escaped with the wind. Here in the city, it hung in the air, leaving a stale taste in Veronica’s mouth.
‘Come on, Veronica, climb up. That’s a good girl. It’s not far to your new home. That’s right, hold your case tight, it can be bumpy.’ With a flick of the reins, the horse snorted, and they started to move. ‘I’m sure you’re nervous, but you’ll be grand.’
The slow, bumpy journey allowed her to take in her new surroundings. Thick black clouds finally broke, emitting a drizzle of rain diluting the foul infusion of smells of Dublin. Her leg jittered in rhythm with the wheels moving across the cobblestones.
Tom leaned forward, cracking the reins. ‘C’mon boy, faster. I borrowed this for the day and have to get it back to the brewery for deliveries later.’
The horse and cart rattled across the cobblestones, past a few children with dirty torn clothes playing in front of three-storey buildings. Women sat on the steps, their shawls pulled tight, and their faces grim. Tom pulled the reins, halting the
horse, to allow a group of people on bicycles to pass. A young lad on a bike swerved, grinning. He shouted, ‘Sorry, sir.’
‘Not long now,’ Tom said, waving at the boy.
She wished her heart would slow, it hurt her rib cage. Her mind overloaded with noises and smells. People looked different. It was a lot stranger than she thought it would be.
They crossed a bridge.
‘Daddy told me to give you a package,’ said Veronica. ‘It’s in my case.’
‘Grand.’ Tom was quiet for a few minutes. ‘Just keep it in your room, and I’ll get it soon from you. Look, Veronica.’ He pointed straight ahead. ‘Your new home, Thomas St.’ He pulled the reins to slow the horse.
Veronica noticed a different smell.
‘What’s that smell?’ She winced as she put her hand quickly to her nose.
‘That would be O’Keefe the Knackers. It’s where they kill all the cattle. The smell is sometimes people.’
Veronica didn’t understand what he meant. They entered a narrow street where the sun fought but failed to light the street between the high buildings. Tom stopped outside one of the red-brick houses.
‘Yer new home, Veronica. Come on, love. You’ll be fine. I know it’s different than the country, but I’m sure you’ll get used to it, and Betty could do with the company.’
She wished she could say something to him, but her throat was so dry she just nodded at him. Her new home was in front of her. The red-brick three-storey terraced house had a basement partly hidden with black railings. She wondered whether the servants lived there. The high windows were like her own home, but most of the sashes were pulled tight. At home, they would be open to let in the light and the breeze from the lake, keeping it bright and fresh. Tom helped Veronica off the dray, and her shaky legs carried her up the steps to the black front door. Once inside the building, with the doors closed, the hallway was sparse compared to her home and smelled of musty damp. She heard a baby crying behind one door; she assumed it belonged to one of the staff.
Tom went up a flight of stairs to the door at the top of the stairs, to another hall then into a small room. A modest room. ‘Betty, love, Veronica is here,’ Tom gently said.
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