by Rose Doyle
‘I know, I know all that. . .' Sarah looked at her hands in her lap. She'd made fists of them. 'There are suspicions all around me here in the street too. But suspicions are one thing and knowing's another.' Her voice hardened. 'Your mother knows. So does that malign midget Mary Connor.'
Her sudden anger was full of bitterness. Sarah Rooney had never been a bitter person. There was something here I didn't know about.
'If my mother knows why is she keeping your secret?' Loyalty and understanding were hardly the reasons.
'It would be better if you never knew what I'm going to tell you,' Sarah spoke slowly, 'but better still that you find out from me than . . . others.' Sarah told me then of her suspicions about my mother. About how she was certain she was betraying my father with another man.
'How do you know? Have you seen her with someone?'
'I know because I've seen her filled with the same fever as myself. And because she had me deliver a love letter for her.'
'Did you read it then?'
'I didn't need to.'
'Did you deliver it into the hand of a man who said he was my mother's lover?'
'No. I delivered it to a house and got a reply in minutes. The maid servant there was the living image of Mary Connor.'
'Which proves nothing. Certainly it doesn't prove that my mother has a lover.'
'I'm sure as anyone could be. She threatened to tell my father I was keeping company with a soldier if I told anyone about the letter.'
'That doesn't prove her letter was to a lover,' I spoke sharply, 'nor that she's an adulteress.'
The idea revolted and frightened me, mostly for my father's sake. I got off the stool and walked to the basin of water and began to rinse and wring the cloth I was using to sponge Mary Ann.
'The letter could have been about any number of things. She's most likely spending my father's money without telling him.'
I heard the pleading in my voice. I didn't want to know what Sarah was telling me. I didn't want to hear proof, if there was any, that my mother was betraying my unhappy, besotted father. He would have nothing to live for if it were true.
Sarah came and stood beside me. 'You're right. I could be wrong.' She put her hand on my shoulder, 'I'm sorry to have upset you.' When I didn't turn from the basin she went on, coaxing a little. 'Jimmy has a friend, another private. His name is John Marsh. Maybe, some afternoon, we could all go to a tea house together . . .'
I turned, shaking my head, saying no, just as Mary Ann called from the bedroom. There was something I had to say and I did, quickly.
'Do you really believe God is punishing you? Don't you think the one suffering here is Mary Ann? Your selfishness is in thinking her pain is your pain. If God is doing anything by making Mary Ann sick he's showing us there is no justice.'
'Is that the kind of God you believe in now?'
'I don't know what sort of God I believe in any more,' I said. She looked so worried I smiled and said, 'That's the God's honest truth.' She smiled too.
The change in Mary Ann came slowly. The illness exhausted her more and more but the terrible tiredness stopped her being fretful. By the seventh day she was more emaciated than ever but strangely calm. The flush had gone from her face and she was pale as the pillow. Except for her lips. Her lips were grey.
That was the day, in the late afternoon, that I asked Dr Daniel Casey how we would know when the crisis had arrived. I whispered the question, standing close to him by the side of Mary Ann's bed. He smelled of carbolic soap.
'We'll know,' he said.
I didn't ask him again.
By the ninth day Mary Ann had become the same grey as her lips all over. The priest came and administered Extreme Unction and the rooms were filled with the smell of the oils and incense. Death seemed very close.
'I've seen worse cases turn around and get well,' Martha said.
She was scrubbing the floorboards; she'd scrubbed them three times already that week. Bess, who that day, and for the first time, hadn't gone to Haddington Road, knelt by her daughter's bed with her rosary beads. Mary Ann's father sat at the table with a single bottle of stout, sipping. It never seemed to empty.
Sarah lit the oil lamp and candles and the smell of paraffin and wax was added to that of the sacred oils. Mary Ann's breathing became so shallow it was at times hard to detect.
Daniel Casey listened to her lungs and then cleared the room of everyone but himself and her mother. 'Her temperature is rising and she needs to be able to breathe. You're not doing her any good,' he said, 'nor yourselves either.'
I was by the window. The goldfinch was singing and in the street below some men were playing a tossing game when Bess's voice called, 'She's going from us.'
I went to the door of the bedroom with Sarah. Martha, behind us, stopped scrubbing. Mary Ann's breathing pattern had changed. Deep breaths were followed by shallow ones as she fought for life.
'Prayers are all we have now,' said Bess and everyone prayed, silently and together. The doctor, helplessly watching his patient, was expressionless. He could very well have been praying too: it would have been hard not to, even for an atheist. After a while Mary Ann, exhausted, stopped breathing and didn't start again.
'We can pray for her immortal soul now,' Bess said.
Mary Ann was laid out in her first communion dress and veil on the bed in which she had died. Bess made a chapel of her child's hands and entwined her fingers with white rosary beads. The neighbours came and draped white sheets over the walls of the room and hung black bows across them and dipped a quill in holy water and sprinkled Mary Ann's dead body. Then everyone prayed, the rooms and landing filled with men, women and children. Most people wept.
When the prayers were over, and the adults were drinking tea, four of Mary Ann's small friends came to Bess. The biggest of them, a boy of about twelve with a box in his hand, was pushed forward by the girls.
‘We made a collection,' he said, 'it's in there. It's for you to buy her a wreath of flowers.'
'Thank you, Joseph.' Bess took the box.
'We saw Mary Ann,' one of the small girls said, 'there's a new star in the sky. It's her. She's up there already.'
'I know she is,' said Bess, 'I know she is.'
After a while the men, and some of the women, left for the pub with Cristy Rooney. Only Bess and Martha and a couple of keening women stayed on in the room where Mary Ann lay dead.
I sat at the table with Sarah and Dr Daniel Casey.
'I should have been able to do something for her.' He put his head in his hands. 'There should be a cure for pneumonia. It shouldn't be able to take a young life like that.'
'You did all you could, all that you knew how.' Sarah's voice was flat. 'No one expected you to save her from that disease. We're grateful to you for being here.'
He was stubbornly miserable. 'It is up to those of us privileged to be physicians to conquer disease . . .'
There was a pomposity in this I couldn't abide. I cut him short. 'You're only a doctor,' I said, 'you're not God Almighty. Anguishing like this won't do you, or anyone else, any good.'
'Forgive me.' He flushed. 'I shouldn't have troubled you with my conscience.' He stood. 'It's time I was going . . .' He spoke stiffly and I wished I'd kept my too-sharp tongue to myself. I'd offended him. 'You should get some sleep, all of you,' he said. 'Sleep is essential for life and health. Studies show that physical and mental disturbances occur after even a few days of sleeplessness.' He stopped, aware of Sarah and me staring at him. 'Forgive me again. I can only offer a lack of sleep as an excuse for my insensitivity.'
'There'll be no sleep here tonight,' Sarah said. 'Mary Ann is sleeping enough for all of us.'
I left with Dr Casey. My parents would have to be told of Mary Ann's death and my father asked to pay for her funeral.
Lack of sleep seemed to have the effect of making the doctor more talkative. He discussed the mist, circling us like damp silk, the approach of autumn, the fact that Victor Hugo was reported to
have asked for £20,000 for his new novel.
'It's to be called Ninety-three and will come out in ten volumes. There are fears that the French government will stop it being published and sold in France.'
'They will bury Mary Ann in Glasnevin cemetery,' I said, 'in the grave with her brother. He died when he was a year old. From diphtheria.'
'I didn't know . . .'
'How could you? I hardly remember myself. When Mary Ann came along she replaced him, in a way.'
'I see, and now she is dead too.' He hesitated. 'I wouldn't like you to think me insensitive, Miss Buckley.' He stopped again, clearing his throat and searching for words. 'It's in my manner, rather than the reality of how I am. An unfortunate characteristic.'
'Maybe it's that you're too sensitive,' I said.
'No. It's not that. It's that I'm a rationalist.' He seemed proud of this.
'Does that mean you can't be sensitive? Don't rationalists have feelings?'
'Yes, of course they do. But as a rationalist I believe reason is the only source of truth and so can't be governed by my feelings.'
'You'll do well as a doctor then,' I said.
He missed the irony in this and said, with some passion, that he hoped he would since doctoring was to be his life's work. I was tired and saved from hearing more by the almost immediate arrival of a horse cab.
He put me into it and this time stood in the road watching until we spun round a bend and into Rutland Square.
My father paid for Mary Ann's funeral. I didn't have to ask him. He left Haddington Road as soon as I got home the evening of her death and went straight to Henrietta Street. My mother didn't go with him, saying her fear of death would make a visit too upsetting for both herself and the Rooneys. It was the first I'd heard of my mother having a fear of death.
Though the month of September was more than half over the day of Mary Ann's funeral was bright and sunny. My father and I went to the church and graveside but my mother stayed outside the cemetery in Glasnevin in the elegant hired carriage.
Daniel Casey arrived in a fluster as the priest finished the graveside prayers and was shaking the holy water. He stood beside my father and myself as the gravediggers threw the first shovels full of earth on to the coffin. Cristy Rooney helped them. Sarah, her mother and grandmother all threw down some earth too.
While the grave slowly filled I introduced Dr Casey to my father.
'Your daughter has a skill and patience with the sick,' he said. He'd never said this to me and I was glad to hear it now. The news didn't greatly impress my father, however.
'I'd prefer if she applied her skill and patience elsewhere,' he said.
Sarah joined us then, in such bad temper that my father had the wisdom to say nothing more. Her grief had taken the form of a great fury at the ill-health and poverty which took so many children's lives. The grave was all but filled in when she said, with the bitterness I'd seen growing in her,
'Doctors don't need sterilisation to do away with the poor. Poverty and sickness will do it for them. It kills children and the women who bear too many of them. It kills the men who father the children when they can't get work and become diseased . . .' She stopped and I put my arm through hers.
'I'm sorry I couldn't do more for your sister,' Daniel Casey said stiffly, 'and I am not in favour of harming the poor.'
'I didn't mean to criticise you,' Sarah assured him quickly, 'I'd another doctor in mind.' She glared at my father who kept his gaze on the grave and his mouth shut. 'I was thinking of remarks made by a Dr Maurice McDermott, who is a friend of Mr Buckley's.'
'I've met Dr McDermott and don't share his views on many subjects.' Daniel Casey shrugged. 'He's not a notably good physician either.'
'He's a fine doctor,' my father contradicted him, 'and well thought of. I wouldn't be considering him as a husband for my daughter otherwise.'
'Forgive me.' Dr Casey's embarrassment was profound, his face an immediate and unbecoming pink. 'I'd no idea ... I wouldn't have given my views . . .' He turned to me. 'I wouldn't have been so insensitive as to insult your fiance.'
He was gone before I could assure him that he'd done nothing of the sort. I felt as if a net was closing in around me, as if my life and choices were being relentlessly taken from me. I turned on my father. I might have been less harsh if I hadn't been so distressed about Mary Ann.
'You may be considering Dr McDermott as a husband for me, Father, but I'm doing nothing of the sort myself,' I said. 'I will marry whom I like and when I like and not at all if it doesn't suit me.
'Enough is enough, Alicia.' He kept his voice low for the sake of Sarah and those around. 'You've gone too far with having your own way. Your gallivanting days are over. We will go now.' He held out his arm. I didn't take it. 'You've done all that you can here and in Henrietta Street. I want you to leave here now and come home with your mother and me in the carriage.' He nodded to Sarah. 'Alicia will be busy for the next while. Good day to you.'
Rather than cause a row I walked ahead of him to the carriage. Before getting inside I looked back at Sarah. She was standing by the grave with her head bowed and didn't see me as I lifted my hand in farewell. I climbed into the carriage and sat opposite my mother and felt the full weight of her oppressive discontent.
I would feel it a lot more in the weeks to come.
I began asking questions.
CHAPTER EIGHT
Sarah
My anger at a world which gave no chance to the poor, at a disease which took the innocent, at myself because I could do nothing, lasted for nearly a week after Mary Ann's death. Then it turned to sorrow, and I wept.
I wept for the times I could have been kinder to my sister, for the times she had been unhappy, for the pain she had endured while dying.
I wept most of all for the life she would never have.
When I wasn't weeping I saw her in every group of playing children in the streets and turned, full of momentary and stupid forgetfulness, whenever I heard the cry of a young girl. She was of course never with them or one of them. She never would be again.
My father went to the pubs and my mother worked to keep him there. That, at least, was how it seemed: she worked and he drank and very little was said by either of them. My grandmother worked too, selling fruit in the streets. But her face was like flint and people avoided her. She came home most days with the basket still less than half empty.
I made love with Jimmy Vance. It seemed more than ever the right thing to do: with death so quick to take life there was no time to be wasted. I wanted to feel alive and I wanted Jimmy Vance.
There was something else at work in me too but it would be a long time before I could admit it to myself.
'I didn't know what had happened to you,' Jimmy said when we met. Mary Ann had been dead a week. 'I thought maybe you were ill, or that you'd got work in some forbidden, distant part of the town.'
He held me tight against him as we walked along. When I'd arrived to meet him, at the lower end of the canal to start our stroll along the towpath, he'd looked so glad to see me I'd almost wept with the pleasure of it. Almost.
I was close to tears a lot of the time and wasn't proud of the fact. Tears were for the idle, my mother said, and she was right. If I'd had work to do I wouldn't have had half so much time for them.
'Did it never occur to you that I might have tired of you?' I managed to joke.
'No. Any more than it occurred to me that your sister might be dying. I'm sorry, Sarah, for you and for your family.' There was nothing I could say to this so he said, for the both of us, 'It's hard to accept that the young can be taken.'
We moved slowly along and he listened while I spoke of Mary Ann. I told him the sort of person she'd been, how full of fun. I described the pure gold colour of her hair, and her sweet singing voice. I told him the story of how, one day, she'd rolled under a carriage and come out the other side without a scratch.
'Everyone said she'd a charmed life,' I said, 'but they were wrong.
She had the bad luck to be born poor and of the labouring classes.'
'She could be lucky and a member of the labouring classes too,' Jimmy said. 'It's not unknown.'
'It's rare enough to be almost unknown,' I said, 'though I'll grant you that bad luck doesn't only follow the poor. My friend Allie, for all her father's money, has the meanest of existences.
'What's happened to her now?'
The way he said this I'd the feeling, and not for the first time, that he didn't care for Allie. Since he'd never met her it had to be something I'd said about her. Either that or he was jealous on account of my friendship with her, as she was of mine with him. All of that would end, I felt sure, once they met.
'She's being kept like a prisoner in the Haddington Road house by her parents and that dwarf of a housekeeper, Mary Connor. Her mother and father have chosen a husband for her, a doctor with a face like a bulldog and a daughter my age.' I pictured him and shivered, despite the heat. 'The poor man can't help how he looks though he could do with improving his character. It badly needs it. But he's rich, so it's unlikely he'll change.'
'Will your friend marry him?'
'No. Not if she lives to be a hundred. But her parents will persist and she will persist in saying no and . . .' I stopped and we looked together into the waters of the canal. 'I don't know what will happen, what will become of her. Any more than she does herself.'
The canal didn't have answers, no matter how long I looked. It didn't have the cleanest or most beautiful of waters either. But it was still and quiet and we had the towpath to ourselves.
'I worry about her,' I said. 'I've seen so little of her since she came home and nothing at all of her this last week.'
'She'll be all right. Women like your friend have a way of rising, like the phoenix, from setbacks,' Jimmy said.
'You dislike her,' I said, 'and without even meeting her. Why?'
'I neither like nor dislike her. Judging from all you've said about her, though, she seems to me someone who was a spoilt child and is now a spoilt woman.'
