by Rose Doyle
'He might be.' Sarah threw a stone into the canal. The ripples spread out and out but the midges went on massing and circling, undisturbed. I was hurt by her secrecy but said nothing. I did allow myself a sniff, however.
'I'll talk to you again,' Sarah said.
'When?' I demanded.
'Not with your father around, that's for certain,' Sarah said and I heard him then, his heavy footsteps pounding the road even before I turned. 'He'll collapse with his heart. You'd best go back to the house with him.'
'You've a lot of secrets,' I said quickly. 'What secret did you threaten my mother with?'
'Alicia, come home now, come back to the house with me.' My father's panting was like a steam engine, loud and puffing when he was still five feet away.
'I did what I could for you, Sarah, but you're on your own now.' When he stopped beside us the gasping breaths were full of whiskey and port. 'You were always pig-headed and look where it's got you.' To me he said, 'Come on home now, don't have me begging you.'
'I'm coming,' I said, 'but shouldn't Sarah come with us to wait for Bess at the house?'
'No. She can go on home for herself. It's early, not ten o'clock yet. I'll get a carriage for Bess when she's ready to go.'
'I wouldn't go back there anyway,' Sarah said.
'We have things to talk about,' I said, 'when will I see you?'
'I don't know,' she said.
I could see that she was tired, that her anger had exhausted her and, now it was gone, that she was beginning to face the ruinous reality of being without work.
'I have a present for you,' I said, 'I only this evening unpacked it. I've something for Bess too, and for Mary Ann. Presents for all of the Rooneys . . .'
I was aware of a pleading in my voice, but I was filled with a desperate fear that I might lose her. Even if she never told me her secrets I needed to be with her. I had no one else.
'Will I see you tomorrow?'
'Alicia,' my father urged me as he took my arm, 'come.'
'I don't know,' Sarah said again. She moved away.
'I'll come to Henrietta Street,' I called after her. She was running.
'You will not go to Henrietta Street,' my father said, 'Sarah is no longer a fitting companion for you. She has other friends now, at any rate.'
I looked at him. I had never seen him so weary, so unbearably sad.
'What happened tonight is for the good of everyone,' he said but I knew he didn't believe it. 'I've done all that I can to keep the peace. You and I will just have to go along with your mother and her plans from now on, Alicia. It's the only way.' He shook his head. 'You visiting Henrietta Street will not be part of her plans.'
Sarah, in the distance, was gone too far to hear.
CHAPTER SIX
Allie
It was two full days before I managed to get to Henrietta Street. During that time Mary Connor was a persistent guard dog, on my heels every time I turned round. My mother was an efficient warden too, piling me with sewing jobs that would have been Sarah's to do if she'd been there. They would help keep me occupied, she said. By the morning of the third day I'd had enough.
Close to midday my mother came into my bedroom. I'd gone there hoping she would leave me alone.
'Dr McDermott, you'll be pleased to hear, has been most understanding about your lapse of manners.' She paced as I sewed. When I didn't reply she sighed deeply. 'He's a good and kind man, Alicia, with a fine medical practice and an elegant home in Marlborough Road. He's got independent means, of course, and wouldn't practise medicine at all but for his devotion to his patients.' She paused. 'He's a lonely man too since his wife died.'
Still I said nothing, easy enough to do since I hadn't a desire in the world to talk about Dr Maurice McDermott. My mother gave an irritable tsk of her tongue and lifted the hem of the dress I was sewing. I was replacing the ribbons and lace which had been removed when it was washed.
'You'll be careful, won't you Alicia? You know how I dislike large or ugly stitching.'
I knew. ‘I’ll be careful,' I said. I would be slow too. She'd be lucky if I finished the dress in a week.
'Mary will be engaging a girl to take Sarah's place immediately,' my mother stood over me, 'she assures me there are countless numbers wanting to go into service. Sarah was difficult, impossible to train and a lazy worker. Mary will be able to run the household more efficiently with a smarter, more amenable girl.' She moved away, her impatience with me filling the room. 'Bess will need to smarten up too.' I looked up at her then. She was by my dressing table, uncorking my precious vial of attar of roses. The girls in the convent had given it to me when I left.
'Bess has always worked hard.'
I was immediately sorry I'd spoken; my mother was playing one of her games and I shouldn't have entered into it. There was a small smile about her mouth as she inhaled the perfume, deep and long, before answering.
'It'll be up to Mary to decide who works here from now on.' She slowly recorked the vial. 'It really has nothing to do with me whether Bess stays or goes.'
'The Rooneys would not survive without Bess's pay,' I said.
'True,' she agreed. She held up the vial. 'This scent is not at all suitable for a girl your age. I'll keep it for myself and buy you something more fitting.'
'It was a present . . .'
'A most inappropriate one.' She left with my perfume.
I dropped her dress as it was, ribbons and lace trailing. She could get the new girl, whoever she might be, to do her sewing for her. I was going to Henrietta Street to see Sarah.
Earlier that morning I'd been talking to Bess. I'd asked about Sarah. Bess was cross.
'Sarah's grand not a bother on her it's Mary Ann I'm worried about she's got a fever and a cough and I want to get home early and that Connor woman's laying more work on me than I can manage.'
We were in the scullery where Bess was scouring a copper pot. I'd never seen her use wood ash with such vigour.
'Is there something I can do?' I said.
'You can stop fighting your parents and accept what's in store for you and put childhood things behind you.' She took a breath. 'You and Sarah are women now and must live the lives of women and stop imagining you can be girls together again.'
'What do you mean?'
'That there are things expected of you now.'
'There are things I expect of myself,' I said, 'and marriage is not one of them.'
'What things?'
I didn't know what I wanted from my life, not yet. But I wasn't going to tell Bess that. 'Sarah is free to live her life as she chooses. I want to be free too,' I said.
'Sarah is not free.' Bess gave a sharp sigh. 'And you should be glad you have the chance of a life that promises comfort and ease.'
'I don't want comfort and ease. I want to feel alive. I want to feel of use.'
Bess put the pot away from her and sighed again. 'You'll learn,' she said.
That was when I decided I would go to Henrietta Street. My mother taking the vial merely copper-fastened the decision.
Getting away was made easy when, after lunch, my mother announced she was off to the milliner's in Baggot Street. Mary Connor, at around the same time, set to work on my mother's gloves, perfuming them for the winter.
I took a carriage and, when we got to Henrietta Street, asked the driver to wait at the end of the hill. It was only a couple of minutes' walk from there to the Rooney house and I wanted to get the feel of the place into my bones again.
It was more than two years since I'd been there and everything about the street filled me with nostalgia: the mansions which had seemed to me, as a child, like stone mountains with windows, the scrubbed steps with women sitting on them, the gaping doors, the screams of children playing a skipping game, the music made by an old man on a melodeon, the snarling of a cat, the curses of men.
It was the same, but it was different too. The houses looked more battered than I remembered, the children thinner and more knock-kneed, the
women watchful and less friendly.
Halfway up the hill I realised they had always been like that, and that it was I who had changed.
My father's tenement was the last building before the few, still fine houses at the end of the street where the King's Inns were. Barristers and solicitors had offices and chambers in them.
The women on the steps bid me the time of day and followed me with their eyes as I passed into my father's house. Once inside it took me a full minute to adjust to the gloom before I could begin to climb the stairs. They were scrubbed white all the way to the Rooneys' door but the dark, red-painted walls were cracked and flaking and there was a stench I didn't want to put a name on.
The door was open. I gave a single, sharp knock and walked inside.
Sarah was there, by a small range set into the wall where the huge old fireplace had been. She was filling a kettle from a bucket of drinking water.
'I came to see Mary Ann,' I said as she looked up, 'and to see you too.'
'Oh, Allie,' she said, and straightened. She was not her usual self. Her face was strained and under her eyes there were semicircles of blue. All in two days. 'Mary Ann's not well at all,' she said, 'she's got worse since this morning.'
'I brought her a doll,' I said, 'from Paris.' It was all I could think to say.
'A French doll. She'll like that.' Sarah took my arm. 'I'm glad you're here. I'll make tea. I was making it anyway. Mary Ann's asleep. We'll go in to her in a while.' She nodded at an open door. 'She sleeps most of the time.'
'I've got something for you too, and perfume for Bess and your grandmother. I've a scarf for your father.'
I was embarrassed giving the presents to her, I had so much and she had so little and I didn't want her to think me above myself. I'd always needed to be careful with Sarah, who was very protective of her dignity. Once, when I'd given her a straw hat, she'd given it back to me after my mother became angry. Even though I'd refused to wear it she wouldn't take it back again.
But she loved the shawl I’d brought her. It was gossamer-fine, made of a filmy wool in a mauve colour that was all the rage in Paris, with purple tassels made of silk. Sarah draped it about herself in all sorts of ways before striking an elegant pose with it on one shoulder.
'I'll keep it 'til the day I die,' she said, 'and when I'm gone you may have it.'
'What if I die first?'
'Then I'll put it away and never wear it again,' she said.
I sat into an easy chair that was stuffed with horsehair and not a bit comfortable. The room was clean as it had always been but different in the way the street outside had been different. There was a bleakness about it that seemed new to me, a meagre look about the table, four chairs, stool, food cupboard and shelves that made up the furnishings.
But the goldfinch was a happy sight, sitting in his cage on the window ledge, chirping away. The Rooneys had always had a goldfinch; Bess said it was 'to add a bit of cheer'. One had fallen from the ledge once, into the street below. The cage had been smashed to bits but the bird had survived. I reminded Sarah.
'Poor Augustus,' she grinned, more like her old self, 'he was never the same after. That fellow's name is Nero. God knows why my father names them after the Roman emperors. Delusions of grandeur maybe.' She poked at the range to liven up the fire. When the kettle began to hum she put cups on the table. I walked around the room, telling her about my mother and Mary Connor, trying to feel at home in the way I'd used to.
The Rooneys' three rooms had been two very grand ones until they'd been divided up by my father. The room to the front was their parlour and kitchen, though I noticed there was a bed behind a curtain in a corner that hadn't been there before. The other had been made into two bedrooms. Under my feet the scrubbed timber floor was covered in part by worn rugs. The windowpanes were polished and shining.
'Where's Martha?' I said, 'And your father?'
'My grandmother went to the market early so she'll be hawking fruit in the town. My father should be here soon.'
Which meant Cristy Rooney was in the pub and would be home for his tea. No change there.
I stood by the range as Sarah poured and milked our tea. The range was the only heating and I remembered standing in the same spot as a child and shivering and thinking it was warmer in the street below, where at least you could face into the wind and be done with it. In that great room the draughts came from everywhere; viciously and sneakily from round the windows and door, roaring from the fireplace opening.
But that day it was warm, oppressively so for a child with a fever and cough.
'How did you get here?' Sarah put a cup of tea in front of me.
'I took a carriage. I have it waiting for me at the end of the hill.'
'Sarah . . .' Mary Ann's call was low and hoarse.
Both of us went to her.
There was one big, iron bed in the sick room. It was the same bed in which Sarah, her grandmother Martha and Mary Ann had always slept. The curtains were closed tight but an oil lamp burning on a shelf over Mary Ann's head made it easy to see her feverishly hot face. Her breathing came in shallow gasps and her eyes stayed closed when Sarah put a hand on her forehead.
'What is it, a croi, do you want something?' she asked.
'I'm burning, oh, Sarah, I'm burning.' Mary Ann's lips barely moved.
The few words exhausted her. There was hardly anything of her to be seen in the bed; she was a wraith with pale hair spread over the pillow. She'd always looked angelic but now her otherworldliness was frightening.
Sarah lifted her sister's head and spooned water between her parched lips. 'Allie's here,' she said, 'and she's brought you a doll from Paris.'
'A doll! Let me see it then.' Mary Ann opened her eyes. Another thing about Mary Ann was that she'd always been a child who got her priorities right. She smiled and reached for the doll and immediately began to cough.
I thought her body would be torn asunder, it was so racking, so consuming of her small energies. Sarah held her and I could do nothing but watch and hold on to the useless, smiling doll.
'It's pneumonia and it'll have to take its course,' Sarah said. 'Nana spent this morning and last night putting hot mustard poultices on her chest. It did some good then but she's getting worse, I can feel it. . .' Her voice filled with panic as Mary Ann convulsed again in her arms. After a minute or so she gave a last, sighing cough and lay back on the pillows.
'I'll make another poultice and I need more camphorated oil,' Sarah said. 'Will you go to the apothecary, Allie? You remember him, in Capel Street?'
'Wouldn't it be better to get the doctor?'
'My mother and Nana have more faith in the apothecary than in ten doctors. They say he has the purest medicine of all. He makes up his own cures, right there in the shop.'
'But doctors are learning all the time, finding new cures. In Paris…'
'This is Dublin,' Sarah said, 'and there's no use you talking all the time about Paris. You saw the other night what passes for a doctor in this town. It's different with the apothecaries. The people are all the same to them. The apothecaries believe everyone deserves a chance to live. Will you go to Capel Street or do I have to go myself?'
I put the doll on the pillow before I left, close to Mary Ann's face so that she could see it when she opened her eyes. Its painted, porcelain face looked obscene next to that of the sick child.
The carriage got me to Capel Street in minutes. The apothecary was the same Bernard Wilmoth I could remember the people always going to, a slight, dark-faced, infinitely sympathetic man. He stood behind his three-foot-long mahogany counter and I joined the queue of women with their demands for skin and stomach bottles, tablets for the kidneys, foot pastes. He had time for them all and when he couldn't find what he wanted on the narrow shelves behind him he got it from an unseen helper through a hatch in the end wall.
Though he did indeed seem to have a cure for everything I wasn't persuaded he would have one for Mary Ann. His cures were for the general ills o
f mankind; a good doctor would come to the little girl's bedside and examine and do what was best for her in particular.
Bernard Wilmoth gave me the measure of camphorated oil without question.
Sarah's grandmother Martha and her father were there when I got back to the rooms. Martha took the oil from me and put her hard, bony hand on my shoulder. 'You're a good child,' she smiled, 'though I suppose you think yourself a woman now.' It was from her grandmother that Sarah got her inches. Towering over me, her white hair in a long plait, she made me feel the child she still thought I was.
'I'm nearly twenty,' I said, 'the same age as Sarah.'
'Yes, indeed you are.' She took her hand away. 'I thought myself a woman and was married at that age. I'm hoping Sarah will have more sense.'
She said nothing about my parents' lack of sense in wanting to marry me off. Sarah pretended not to hear but her lips tightened and I knew she was angry, on her own account.
Martha went to Mary Ann and I sat for a minute at the table with Cristy Rooney.
'Cut me a piece of bread, there's a good girl.' He shook open the newspaper and I cut a couple of slices of Bess's soda bread.
If the world had been coming to an end Bess would still have baked bread. And if the world had been coming to an end Cristy Rooney would have read the paper and pretended it wasn't happening, just as he was now avoiding the reality of his sick daughter.
He had fine, curly hair and a wasted body with an empty trouser leg where once there had been a limb. He'd lost his courage, along with his leg, in the hour he'd lain half dead under fallen barrels in my father's public house. I was the one had found him and Sarah and Bess always said I saved his life. Cristy Rooney himself always said I'd have done him a bigger favour by leaving him to die. Drinking and reading the papers and shouting for a free Ireland had been his main occupations since then.
But he'd also become a tyrant to his family, tyranny being the refuge of the enfeebled and powerless. I knew well how quickly he could become full of a bitter fury so I put jam on his bread and listened while he read aloud what the paper had to say. The goldfinch, as if on purpose, sang the whole time.
