by Esther Freud
What in God’s name are you doing here?
The child was smiling as if she’d been clever, and if I’d had my coat on and my purse, I’d have taken her by the arm there and then and marched her back to St Joseph’s.
I caught the train, she said, smart as anything. And a bus from Victoria.
I called to you then, do you remember, and the first thing you wanted to know was where she got the money. You better not have stolen it, you said, but she looked scornful, and she told us that the uncles had given it to her, every time we saw them for a visit they’d pressed a coin into her hand. She’d been saving for an emergency.
What kind of emergency is this? you asked. It was a Tuesday. A perfectly ordinary Tuesday. A little rainy, that was all.
She didn’t say anything. Not at first. Just looked at us with those round eyes. Her hair was in plaits. They did a lovely job with the girls’ hair, you couldn’t fault the nuns for that. Did you not get my letters?
We got your letters; I wanted to kneel down to her then, her lip was quivering, but you kept your hand on my shoulder. So I told her what smart handwriting she had. I told her I was proud.
I said to come and bring me away!
Now, young lady. You wouldn’t stand for that, not after the sacrifices we’d made, and before her temper flared, or yours, I shouted to Margaret to get the child cleaned up.
I called the nuns then, they were frantic, and I told them not to fret, I’d be bringing her right back.
She didn’t say a word all the way to Dorking, not on the bus or the train, and I explained to her, although I’m sure I’d said it before, that she was lucky. There was fresh air in Dorking, not like at home where the place was broken up with craters from the bombs, where rats ran riot through the weeds, and the dust from the wrecking balls, flattening what was left, was enough to make you choke. They had vegetables and eggs in Dorking, and above all else she’d get an education. An education, we believed that, an education would see them straight.
When we arrived at St Joseph’s she marched straight past that lovely Sister Benedict, do you remember her, she hardly came up to my shoulder so tiny she was, and up to her dorm. It was evening prayers. I could hear the voices floating out of the chapel. So pure. But no one shouted at her, although maybe they should have; they just smiled and said the child was most likely tired. It was best she got herself to bed.
It was only a month or so and she was back. Tapping on the glass. This time I knew who it was. Mummy, she wailed when I looked out. Why don’t you come for me? I was too fearful to let her inside, I’d never prise her out again, so I shut the door, ran back for my coat, and shouted to Margaret to mind the others while I was gone. Right, I caught her by the hand and we were away, running down the street to the bus stop. Which train did you get anyway? Who sold you a ticket? We’d taken her money off her the last time, told the uncles not to give a penny more, but she said she’d stood on the road and put out her thumb, and a nice man had driven her all the way to London, dropped her by a place called Ealing, and she’d taken a bus, and when the inspector got on she said she’d lost the penny for her ticket.
I was glad you weren’t there to hear that. Your own child lying, plain as day. I was too taken aback to speak, and this time it was me sitting on the train in silence.
Wait for me in the vestry, Sister Benedict told her when we arrived. She gave me a look as if to say, Leave it to me, I’ll be dealing with her. You’ll not be worried again.
How quiet she was when she came home for the summer. She stayed in her room, reading mostly. Tales of ballet dancers, and princesses. Although she talked to Angela. She always talked to Angela. I used to stop outside their door at night and listen to them, whispering. Angela told me later, much later, when we’d lost her, that it was scary stories her sister was telling, hauntings and murder, and then, in the middle of the night, having frightened her own self witless, she would climb into the big bed where the other two were sleeping and lie there, shivering, between them.
* * *
There were paying guests arriving. The wife of a man who read the news, and their awkward teenage son. Aoife would give them the smart room at the front, the same as last year, move the girls into the attic, while she and Cash could sleep in Rosaleen’s old room.
Rosaleen’s room was much as she had left it. Her school uniform hanging in the cupboard, a heap of books on the table by the bed. The bed Aoife had stripped the day she’d left, and now she made it up, easing on a fitted sheet, pulling it tight at its corners. She floated down the top sheet as her own mother, God bless her soul, had taught her, and used the flat of her palms to mould it in under the pillows. When they’d first moved to Barraghmore she’d gone to Youghal and chosen bedspreads for each room, Peach, Lavender, Barley and Harvest, and now she eased the Lavender into the dent below the pillows, cutting a sharp line, then allowing it to swell so welcomingly she felt inclined to let her own tired body fall into the embrace. Instead she sat on the very edge and shuffled Rosaleen’s books, wiping away their outline, looking around for where they could be stored. Gorky. Whoever was that? My Childhood. Aoife flicked through the pages. She was a clean, smooth, large person like a horse. The cheek of it. That was his mother he was describing, but as she read on she saw the poor woman was pregnant. It’s not cholera, she’s in labour. Then the same person, the grandmother. In the name of the son and Holy Ghost. Try and bear the pain, Varyusha. Holy Mother of God who prays for us . . . At least the family were Catholic, however poor and wretched. Aoife bit down a stab of irritation. If Rosaleen wanted stories she could have come to her, and she thought of her mother the year after she lost Maeve, her hair so thin, the teeth loose in her mouth, and Aoife herself getting the little ones up, giving them an apple and a square of cheese and nothing more till tea. The next book was French, Madames this and Mademoiselles that, and Aoife wondered when she’d last had time to read. One Christmas in London, that was it, she’d sat with the younger girls and read Patricia Lynch – Brogeen and the Green Shoes – a chapter a day, between the lunchtime and the evening shifts. She’d been homesick, and it soothed her.
Aoife got up to place the books on the window ledge, and that’s when she saw it – a small, plain volume, but dangerous as sin. The Country Girls. Surely it was banned? The book is filth and shouldn’t be allowed in any decent home. Who was it that had said that? The minister for justice, that’s who it was, and the author an O’Brien, only a girl herself, and she from County Clare. Aoife opened it and saw the scrawl of an inscription.
My Rose, I thought I’d better send you this as I hear they’re burning copies in the street. Hard to imagine that would happen again, so soon. But as you’re over there getting an education, then you might as well make sure all aspects are covered. Love to the nuns. Love, and so much more to you, Felix x
Aoife slapped shut the book. Hadn’t they put a stop to that? Bringing her away as soon as they were warned, but then Felix Lichtman was a foreigner, and what did he care for their ways? She slid the book into the top of the cupboard, slamming a pillow in after it, and then a heavy folded blanket. ‘There!’ She swung the wardrobe closed, and as she turned the key she did her best to push the whole nasty business from her mind.
Wearily Aoife made up the other rooms. Peach she chose for her guests, the girls could have Barley, but as she lifted their linen into the warm space of the attic, she felt overcome with such an ache that she left the sheets in piles – let them make up the beds themselves. ‘Angela,’ she shouted as she came downstairs. She’d tell her no, she’d not be stopping with Rosaleen that summer, but Angela was not in the house. She must have gone on up the road to have a cup of tea with Mrs O’Malley. She was popular, that one, and welcome wherever she went.
There was a walled garden to the side of the house and Aoife took a trowel to the weeds, thrashing and digging and tugging them out by the roots so that by the time the guests drove through the gate and pulled up she had a nice clean border, but the din
ner still not on, so that she must run round into the back yard, in through the kitchen to scrub her hands and tidy her hair and race through into the hall to pull open the door just as the boy, whose name escaped her, heaved their one heavy bag on to the step.
‘Grand to see you again,’ she greeted them. ‘I’ve given you the front room to the right. The same as last year. Dinner will be a little later tonight. Seven o’clock. I hope that’s all right. I thought you might want a rest after your journey.’
The woman still hadn’t said a word, was only nodding, and Aoife blushed as she led them up the stairs, sure they could smell it on her, the fume of that filthy book, the only copy, as far as she knew, in all of Ireland not to have been tossed into the trash. ‘Will you be wanting a cup of tea?’ she asked, although that wasn’t a service she provided, not at ten past five when she had food to prepare, and the woman smiled greedily and said she could kill for a cup of tea. Would they come down?
‘Come down to the lounge, that’s it.’ What did they think, she’d be bringing up a tray? She swung into the kitchen and thumped the kettle on to the hot plate of the range.
* * *
Aoife didn’t see the car until it was almost upon her. A white saloon, and wasn’t that Mr O’Malley winding down his window? ‘Fine weather for ducks.’ He smiled. ‘Can I give you a lift?’ He was heading back the way she’d come.
‘I have the dog.’ She hesitated, and Humphrey looked up at her, his brown eyes willing.
Patrick O’Malley got out of the car. He creaked open the boot and stood there under the shelter of its hood. ‘Come, boy.’ He made a sort of cluck with the corner of his mouth, and Aoife joined him. ‘Come now.’ She put an arm round the dog’s wide girth, ‘Good boy,’ and she encouraged him in.
‘That’s very kind,’ Aoife told him once she was in the front seat, the plastic headscarf she’d tied over a silk one, dripping in her lap. ‘I didn’t know I’d come so far.’
‘Got carried away, did you?’ He smiled at her, as if he too lost himself in thought. ‘So, I’ll drop you home, is that it? Or were you wanting to come into Youghal?’
‘Oh no!’ The idea.
Mr O’Malley drove on as if he hadn’t heard. ‘I have to pick up some baking soda for the wife, I’ll only be ten minutes, and I’ll be turning round again.’
‘Thank you,’ Aoife said more quietly. ‘I’d better get home.’ She looked out of the window at the drowned fields and the shivering trees and thought how as soon as she got in she must check the stew slow-cooking in the Aga. They’d need it, come dinnertime, her paying guests, and she wondered how they were getting through the day. Sitting in their car, most likely, looking at the strand. They were a couple from Armagh, the man jolly, full of news, his wife silent, nodding and agreeing with everything he said. Did it always have to be that way, one half of a couple doing all the talking, the other one shut up?
‘You like your walking.’ Mr O’Malley was looking at her. ‘I’ve seen you out and about before.’
‘I didn’t know how much I’d missed it, not till I was back.’ They glanced out through the swish of the wipers. ‘Sweet Youghal Bay, sweet Youghal Bay . . .’ He had a low, slow voice.
Beside your Blackwater, I’m longing to stray
Soon I’ll return, until that happy day
My heart’s in your keeping, oh sweet Youghal Bay.
They laughed, and floundered for the rest of the words.
‘Sweet Youghal Bay,’ Aoife started in again on the chorus. ‘Sweet Youghal Bay . . .’ They were still singing when they swooped past the gates to Barraghmore. ‘You know what?’ She glanced over her shoulder. ‘Maybe I will come into town with you. I could pick up something from the chemist, if you don’t mind dropping me.’ They turned on to the main road, the dog suspicious, his ears down, his nose pointed back the way they’d come.
Rosaleen
SUMMER 1960
ROSALEEN HADN’T BEEN ENTIRELY TRUTHFUL ABOUT HER JOB. She was working at the Daily Express, but not, as she’d told her parents, putting together stories for the news desk. She’d been there six weeks and she’d not seen a typewriter, busy as she was from morning to night, sorting mail in the post room. Each day before eight she entered the building on Fleet Street, passed the uniformed doorman and hurried through the marble foyer to the lifts. However early she arrived, Betty the postmistress was already there, her peroxide hair piled high, a cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth. ‘Good morning,’ she’d say, glancing at the clock, and Rosaleen, fearful of disapproval, looked too. The post room was hot and airless, its one window facing on to a central shaft, and there were two other girls, Sally and Meg, whose job, like hers, was to sort the mail: letters to columnists, packets from photographers, information from overseas which all needed to be placed in the wooden pigeonholes along the walls. Often the letters were addressed to the newspaper itself, without any hint at a department, and it was Rosaleen’s job to open and distribute them. Occasionally it was clear from the first line – a sorrowful letter for the Agony Aunt, grainy images of a faraway conflict for News – but sometimes the contents were mysterious. Stones, out-of-date coins, visionary messages of calamity. Once there was nothing but a length of string. The most prized letters were for the proprietor himself, Lord Beaverbrook, unseen in an office far above them. These Rosaleen would place prayerfully in his pigeonhole, sending with them the hope that one day he would flick through his own paper and see her byline – Rosaleen Kelly – below a front-page report.
By ten o’clock the worst of the mail had been sorted, and there was a minute to sit down. Betty put on the kettle, and as soon as it had boiled, the printworkers – who surely couldn’t hear the whistle above the rolling of the presses – would sidle in. It was Betty they came to see, to hear her teasing and her raspy laugh, although she liked to pretend it was the young ones they were courting, to make Meg blush and Sally stutter. Rosaleen, they all knew, had a boyfriend. Felix Lichtman had rung on her first day; he’d placed a call to the paper from the South of France, where he was on some kind of business, and rare as it was for anyone to telephone from abroad, he’d been put through to Lord Beaverbrook. Hello? Rosaleen imagined the old man picking up the phone, and she smiled at the thought of his surprise when Felix, in his lightly foreign tones, had asked to speak to the girl in the post room.
‘It’s for you,’ Betty mouthed to her when the call was redirected. ‘Hope it’s nothing serious.’ Rosaleen had swallowed, involuntarily smoothing down her hair.
‘Made the news yet?’ Felix was laughing, and she’d had to turn away from the curious faces of the others. ‘Felix,’ she whispered, as sternly as she dared, ‘you’re not allowed to call me here. It’s emergencies only.’
‘This is an emergency.’ His voice was low. ‘I’m travelling back today and I need to be sure that you are free for supper.’
‘I may be,’ Rosaleen said with due solemnity, and before she replaced the receiver she amended her reply. ‘I am.’
It had been Felix who had found her the job. She’d written to him as soon as she’d finished at Loreto. I’m ready for my escape, although I’ll need something to come back for. And he’d replied by return to ask wasn’t it enough that she was coming back for him? She’d sat in her bedroom and held the letter to her heart, and this time when Kitty banged on the door she’d ignored it. She didn’t want another discussion about her future, about what college she might apply to now she had such astonishingly good grades in her matric. ‘There’s no better place than Cork.’ Her mother was determined, and Rosaleen had been unable to resist derailing her by suggesting she might try for Trinity.
‘Trinity? They’ve a ban on Catholics attending, you know that.’
‘Church restrictions,’ Rosaleen came back. ‘It doesn’t say a ban. There was a girl from the convent whose brother got a special dispensation.’ She could see she’d sown a seed of hope. Aoife Kelly’s daughter, Aoife Herlihy that was – graduating from Trinity!
‘I could talk to the priest.’ She was all a-scatter, and when Daddy came in she passed on the news.
‘You always were trouble.’ He looked at her, impressed. ‘You’ll have us writing to the Pope for you, is that it?’
‘Or maybe I could try’ – she couldn’t help herself – ‘for the Sorbonne in Paris?’
‘Paris?’ he spluttered, and he saw then, a moment too late, that what she wanted was to get away.
‘At least go and look at Cork?’ her mother tried again, but her father slammed his fist against the table. ‘That’s enough!’
Within a week Felix found a man who knew a man who said she could come and work at the Express. A job. A professional position. Her parents hadn’t a word to say against that, although they might have if they’d known who had arranged it. Her father bought her a ticket for the ferry while Mummy wrote to the aunties to ask if they could put her up, until she found herself a room closer to her work. Her work on the news desk. Her work as a journalist for a national newspaper. Auntie Mavis wrote back to say, of course, Rosaleen was always welcome. She could sleep in with her Nana Isabelle. There would always be room.
On her last day Rosaleen drove with her mother to Kilcrea. They sat side by side, wordless in the car, watching the fields and the narrow roads. They parked on the lane outside the priory and, passing through the wishing gate, walked along the soft avenue of grass. She knew Mummy liked to say her prayers alone – her parents were buried here, Joseph and Cathleen, and beside them, a sister, Maeve, lost before she was grown. On the other side were a multitude of Horgans. There’d been a Horgan at Loreto, and here, surely, were the girl’s relatives stretching back through time. As her mother knelt beside the Herlihy grave, mumbling her messages, Rosaleen wandered through the ruins, stepping in and out of the ancient rooms, reading the writing on the tombs. She sat with her back against a flinty wall and closed her eyes. Not long now, she told Felix, and I’ll be on the ferry. She thought of the letters she’d composed this way, and she blushed to remember how she’d described to him the progress of the crops, the hogs, the ewes and lambs, and the settling in of the new pale cattle – Charolais, they were – which produced such creamy milk that her father kept it separate from the rest, driving the churns to Castlemartyr first thing in the morning. Sorry, she told him now, there’s not a lot of news in these parts, although of course she could have mentioned Declan Shaughnessy, who drove over last Saturday and whisked her away in a sports car to a club in Cork where they’d danced so long and late even her father had given up waiting and taken himself to bed. Will we take a trip to France ourselves? He’d promised her they would, but here, in the damp green silence of Kilcrea, it seemed too much to ask.
