by Rose Doyle
'Will you be telling them any different when you go back?' Beezy didn't take her eyes off his face.
'There'll be no need for me to mention your name to anyone,' Daniel said.
'There's no one looking for me, then?'
'There's no one looking for you, Beezy.'
Beezy stayed silent for a while. Then, very slowly, she said, 'What they're saying will be the truth soon enough then. I'll be gone to America . . .' She looked at Sarah, 'before the winter.'
It was the first time she'd mentioned her plan, either to me or to Sarah, since coming to the Curragh. I saw relief, and a smile, cross Sarah's face.
Jimmy Vance left for the camp, saying he would send a horsecar to take Daniel to his lodgings in Kildare. The dusk was deepening but Daniel said he would like to take a walk with me anyway, while waiting for the horsecar.
I knew he wanted to talk.
I told him everything that had happened, or almost. I didn't tell him about Alexander Ainslie. He wouldn't have approved or understood and, in any event, it would have been making too much of a small thing.
The dark closing around us made it easy to talk about everything else. It was better not seeing Daniel's face; it was as if he were a priest and we were in the confessional. And like a good priest too Daniel said nothing, holding his counsel while I was speaking and for several minutes afterwards.
When he did at last speak his voice was low and cold. He clenched and unclenched his hands in a fury beside me. 'Mulvey should be hung from a rope until dead. Unfortunately, it's unlikely that will happen. The swine is in London.'
'You know him?' I was surprised.
'I called to your father's house three times, looking for you. Mulvey was there on two occasions.' He paused. 'Later I heard the talk about him and your mother, then that he'd left for London. I thought you'd gone to be away from the scandal about town . . .' He paused. 'I'd no idea Mulvey had—'
'It's in the past,' I cut him short, 'and I've put it behind me. How is my father?'
'Well enough.'
'He's drinking?'
'He is.'
We left it at that and walked silently if not, on my part, peacefully, for a while. My guilt about my father was huge but assuaged a little by the certainty that his drinking was because of my mother. If I'd stayed on living in the Haddington Road house things wouldn't have been any different.
I was worried too about my reception when I went back. In just a little more than three weeks I would be twenty-one. Hopefully, Sarah would be married or have set a date by then and I would be free to go to Dublin and see my father. I still believed we would come to an arrangement about my birthright, and future independence.
I'd said nothing to Sarah about any of this because I didn't want to increase the pressure she felt about setting a marriage date. My and Beezy's futures depended on her nuptials; neither of us would leave her unmarried and unsettled in Kildare. She knew this; it was the reality we all lived with.
I was thinking how much I liked and admired Daniel and how safe I felt, by his side in the dark of the Curragh, when he said, in the caustic way he sometimes had, 'Do you intend pursuing your studies to become a doctor on the Curragh?'
'I've been thinking about going abroad.' I was short. I don't like being laughed at.
'It won't be easy, wherever you go, and you're not helping your cause by staying here,' he said.
'Not easy? It will not be impossible then? Have things changed so much since we last spoke?'
'Yes. I'm prepared to help you gain admittance now. I wasn't then.'
'Why?' His honesty would be his undoing. And yet it was one of the things I admired most about Daniel Casey. 'Why are you prepared to help me now?'
'Because of what has happened to you, because I don't want you to go on living here. It's primeval. It's unhealthy. It's . . . dangerous.'
I didn't ask him why he wouldn't help me before. I didn't want to be told it was because he cared for me and had wanted to protect me from the adversities I was bound to experience as a woman in medicine.
Soon after that we saw the horsecar coming from the camp and went back to the village. Daniel, before he left, said he would be at the village at ten next morning to check on James.
'And to check on you, too,' said Sarah as he drove away. 'Have you told him about Alexander Ainslie?'
'You're the one asked him here. Maybe you should be the one to tell him.' By way of a softener for my curtness I added, 'there's nothing to tell, in any event.'
'You know that's not true,' said Sarah.
CHAPTER THIRTY
Allie
By noon the next day I knew that it was not Daniel who would have to be told about Alexander Ainslie. Alexander would have to be told about Daniel.
By that time Daniel had asked me to marry him.
Til make you a good husband,' he said, 'and we 'd be compatible in many ways. I could help you with your medical studies.'
Everything he said was true. He was a good man and a kind one. We had interests in common. And he could definitely help with my studies.
'I don't want to marry,' I said.
'Married life couldn't be any worse than the one you're living at the moment,' Daniel said, 'it would get you away from here.'
'I don't need to marry to leave the Curragh.'
'I know that.' He paused. 'The truth is that I'm fond of you, Allie. Very fond of you.' He sighed. 'I love you.'
'I know that,' I said.
I'd known the day before, when we were walking on the Curragh and he'd fulminated about taking Ned Mulvey's life. Such wildly irrational talk from an avowed rationalist had to have its root in something as fallible as love.
'Love is not rational,' I said, 'there's no reasonable test to prove it's—'
'Don't tease me, Allie. I may deserve it but don't do it
anyway.' He looked so miserable I put my hand over his on the table.
We were drinking tea in the Prince of Wales Hotel in Newbridge. It was a dreary place, all got up in brown velvet and dark green paint. But the tea was strong, in the way I'd grown to like it on the Curragh, and the scones were served with sweet blackberry jam.
Daniel, as he'd said he would, had arrived at ten o'clock that morning to check on James. Afterwards, when he'd asked me to come to Newbridge for a drive with him, I'd been glad to say yes. There were things medical I wanted to discuss with him.
I'd been enjoying myself until he brought up the subject of marriage. Now I was uneasy. I took my hand away and reached for another scone.
'I've become a bit of a rationalist myself,' I said. 'It comes from observing love and its effects on the people around me. Take Sarah. Her judgement's gone completely. She thinks this world will become a heaven when she marries Jimmy Vance when in fact she'll be sharing space in the camp with English women of the lowest and loudest sort.'
'I didn't think you were a one for superior airs, Allie,' He raised his eyebrows.
'Neither am I,' I snapped, 'but the wrens are an aristocracy compared to some of the wives I've met in the camp. They live cheek by jowl in the married quarters with their children so I suppose their tempers are stretched.'
'What brings you to the camp?'
It was an innocent question, prompted by simple curiosity. Daniel Casey didn't have a devious bone in his body. I discovered I had a fairly lively set myself.
'There's a market there two days a week,' I said, 'and I've been there with Sarah, when she went looking for Jimmy Vance.'
All true. The lie was in what I omitted; I'd no intention of telling Daniel about Alexander Ainslie. He would be hurt and he would be confused and there was no need for him to be either.
Alexander was merely a casual friend; there was nothing to tell Daniel about him.
But Alexander would have to know about Daniel. I would have to explain to him that my time would be taken up from now on and that I couldn't any longer meet him for walks, or even for tea in his quarters. I'd no worries about ending my fri
endship with him. Daniel was a friend to whom I owed loyalty and his intentions towards me were entirely honourable. Alexander's were not. I was a diversion, as far as he was concerned, a distraction in an army posting he found boring. He liked me, I knew, and his vanity would be pricked by my going. But he would move on, spend more time with his friends in their big houses, forget me quickly.
'Maybe you'll let me come with you to the market next time?' Daniel took a scone himself. 'I'd be curious to see the inside of the camp and how it operates.'
'Maybe I will,' I said.
We munched on our respective scones and I tried to make sense of what was happening.
Daniel would not go away, and I didn't want him to. There was a reassurance in having him about. I'd have preferred him not to talk about marriage but knew that he was as stubborn as he was pragmatic and would pursue the idea to a conclusion.
I hadn't said I would marry him and might never say I would marry him. Then again I might.
I certainly wasn't as appalled by the idea as I would have been five months before.
'Do you care for me at all, Allie?' Daniel asked the question lightly, apologetically almost.
'Of course I do,' I said.
I smiled at his earnest face and dabbed some blackberry jam from the side of his mouth and thought about the ways in which I cared for in him. I respected him, certainly, more than any man I knew — though I didn't know very many to measure him against. I was certainly glad to see him again. And I'd missed him, and our talks about the dire injustices in life and medicine.
'I missed you,' I said.
'Why didn't you write to me then?'
'Because I didn't want you to come here,' I said, 'I didn't want you telling my parents where I was. I wanted to stay away from Dublin.'
All true. But it was also true that I hadn't missed him enough. I'd been preoccupied and occupied and feeling freer than I'd ever felt in my life before. And, if I was honest, Alexander Ainslie had been another reason. Had been.
'I won't force you back to Dublin any sooner than you're ready,' Daniel said, 'but I'll be coming to the village every day. We'll get to know one another here, in the countryside, in a different way. You'll see that I'm indispensable to your life.' He had a dreamy look about him.
A swift, hard apprehension gusted through me. My father, in love with my mother, had pursued her and offered her marriage as an escape from her circumstances. My mother had accepted and never grown to care for him.
I put the thought away, and finished the last of the tea, and remarked airily to Daniel that I'd like to see his lodgings in Kildare. 'The day is only half over and it'll be a pleasant drive back that way,' I said.
The weather was changing and the air sharp. We trotted sedately past roadside trees on which the leaves were beginning to turn. The light too, had lost most of the luminous quality it had displayed in high summer.
Daniel's room was in a two-storey house on the road into the town, his landlady a round, busy woman who was most impressed to have a doctor for a lodger. 'They say it's better to have a doctor than a priest in the house,' she thrilled, 'though I hope we'll never have to call on your services, Dr Casey.'
'I hope so too, Mrs O'Neill. I'd like you to meet a friend of mine, Miss Buckley. I'm hoping that she'll be a visitor here, from time to time.'
'We've no parlour suitable for receiving.' Mrs O'Neill's gaze, when it fixed itself on me, had lost a lot of its welcome. 'But you
being a doctor I'm sure it's all right for your friend to visit you in your room for short spells. In the daylight, of course.' Why Mrs O'Neill thought doctors could be trusted in rooms alone with young women, even in daylight, I'll never know. In Daniel's case however her judgement was sound.
It was clear she didn't know I was a wren. She would soon enough. Her delight in her doctor lodger would wane, if not vanish, when she discovered his 'friend' lived among the wanton harlots of the Curragh. But it was unlikely she would ask him to leave, given his profession.
I said nothing of this to Daniel. Better to take each day as it came.
His room had one window and it looked out over the edges of the Curragh. It had yellow walls and a small, white-painted fireplace filled with turf. There was a narrow, cast-iron bedstead, an easy chair, a desk-table and pitcher with jug.
I stood looking out the window. 'Sarah was intimidated by the size and greenness of the plains when she first saw them,' I said, 'but I thought it liberating. That's what I think of now when I look out over the expanse of it. I think of freedom.'
'You haven't seen it in winter,' Daniel the countryman said, 'with raw gales and rain blowing over it.'
For a brief, hot moment I felt furious at him. He was right, of course, but that wasn't the point; I'd wanted him to feel with me the abandon of the plains and he hadn't. I wondered if he would ever fly with me, ever leave the ground. And if it mattered.
I turned back to the room, facing him. 'I'm aware that I haven't seen it in winter,' I said, stiffly.
'That was small-minded of me,' he said, 'I'm just stupidly jealous of all that you've had here that I've had no part in.'
I liked him all over again. Daniel always had the capacity to surprise me. And himself, I sometimes thought.
'Stay here with me, Allie, don't go back to the wren village.' He made the invitation sound as if he were offering to make tea.
'I can't do that, Daniel, and you know it,' I said crossly.
He sighed and said nothing and pulled out recent copies of
The Lancet which he'd brought for me to read. We sat at the table and went through them, disagreeing about an article on the health hazards of tobacco. I held, with the article, that the dangers were the same whether tobacco was taken in by smoking or chewing or sniffing it in snuff. Daniel held that smoking was the most potent danger because of tar and carbon monoxide formation. We exhausted our combined knowledge and still couldn't agree.
I stayed the best part of an hour and then said I must be going. It was early evening and he would have come with me but I told him no, I would take the horsecar back to the wren village alone. He had letters to write, his absence to explain, and was easily persuaded.
He went to the window and searched the street for a horsecar. 'I'll come to the village in the morning.'
I lied then, outright. 'Don't do that, Daniel,' I was firm, 'the water wagon came today so tomorrow Sarah and I do our washing.'
'The afternoon then.' He turned, agreeable and unsuspecting. 'I'll come at four o'clock.'
There was no reasonable or convincing way of putting him off. I would have to visit the camp and Alexander Ainslie and be back in the village by that time, or a little later.
'Five o'clock,' I said.
Daniel nodded, smiling. 'I'll bring food. We'll have supper together, you, me, Sarah and Beezy Ryan. A reunion.' He looked eager, pleased with his idea.
'We'll have supper.' Agreeing, I crossed my fingers. Deceit did not suit me. My mouth felt dry, my stomach hollow.
'You're pale.' Daniel, frowning, came and stood beside me. 'Staying out there is madness, Allie. Mrs O'Neill might have another room . . .'
'No,' I was sharp, 'in the first place she would find out soon enough that I'm a wren and then we'd both be without a place to stay. In the second it will not be much longer until Sarah marries. I'm not going to desert her.'
I could have added a third — that he hadn't the money to be paying for rooms for both of us — and a fourth about my own lack of money.
Alexander Ainslie was a fifth reason. He deserved to be told before I moved into rooms with another man.
'You'd better go then before it gets any darker.' Daniel took my hands into one of his own and studied them, separating the fingers, stroking each one as he did so. He looked very serious and very young, his red hair almost into his eyes and his thin face, in the gloom, not so ordinary at all.
'Is everything in anatomical order?' I joked to quash a sudden rush of tenderness. He was, still, so very
much, a boy trying to be a man.
'Beautifully so,' Daniel answered without looking up, 'despite the rough work you've put these small fingers to . . .'
'I must put them to more work this evening.' I jerked my hands and he let them go at once.
'I'm sorry,' he said stiffly, 'I didn't mean to frighten you, or to offend.'
'You didn't,' I touched his cheek, 'it's just that I'm no better than you are at . . .' I stopped.
'At what, Allie?'
'At courtship, I suppose.'
'Are we courting then?'
'We might be.'
'May I kiss you then?'
'You may.'
We kissed twice. The first kiss was timid, a feathery, hesitant, brushing of lips against lips, an exploration of possibilities.
The second kiss was a kiss. It even started off differently, with an insistence in the way our mouths came together, a turbulence in the moulding then clinging together of our bodies. I closed my eyes and allowed myself to feel, only to feel, not to think or see or even hear. Daniel's hands were in my hair and on my back, holding me hard against him. His mouth forced my lips to open and I felt his teeth, then his tongue against my own. I felt
myself melting, losing all control of my responses which were urgent as his were, demanding more of these feelings, more of this pleasure.
Then other feelings reasserted themselves. A shiver of fear, a tremor of caution. I came to my senses.
'No, Daniel, we can't. . .' I pulled away and he let me go, but almost at once reached for me again. This time he held me against him gently, with all the careful tenderness I'd seen loving parents bestow on their children.
'We will be together, Allie,' he vowed into my hair.
Even then I didn't, couldn't, reassure him in the way he wanted.
'I'm glad you came to the Curragh,' I said and took him by the hand, quickly, out of that room and its intimacy.
I walked to the camp to see Alexander early next morning; I'd no arrangement made to see him that day, nor indeed for two days following, so had to hope against hope that he would be free to see me. Arriving, unannounced, to meet him in the camp was something I hadn't done before; I didn't stop to think how wise it was to do it now.
