by Lia Mills
I didn’t want to go to bed, but he told me not to wait up. I’d swear I was awake all night, listening to the birds sing their happy little hearts out over in the Gardens, ’til I longed for a cat to come along and silence them for good, but I never heard him come in.
The next morning when Liam came down for breakfast he was kitted out in the full regalia, minus the cap. Poor, half-blind Beck growled at him, his hackles raised. Everyone stopped what they were doing, like a peculiar version of musical statues, and looked at Liam, or at the dog.
‘It’s the smell off the belt,’ Florrie said, making a face.
It was a strong smell all right. Liam squatted down in front of the dog and spoke to him, rubbing the fur behind his two chestnutty ears. ‘It’s still me inside in here, Beck.’ Beck whined at the sound of his voice. He licked the air in front of Liam’s face. His tail wavered, uncertain.
The letters of the regiment, RDF, gleamed on Liam’s shoulder near a badge that showed a tiger and an elephant mounted on a flaming grenade. Everything he wore was so shiny and stiff and new, it reminded me of when he went away to boarding school. How miserable I was then, being left behind. How happily I’d have gone back, now, and reclaimed that early misery in exchange for this one.
He stood, patted the dog’s head, took his place opposite mine and reached for an egg from the dish. Lockie had fixed his sleeves for him, they were just the right length.
Beck pushed himself in under the table and lay down at our feet. I saw all this as through a rain-lashed window. The chat was of the weather, and how it was such a lovely day for a crossing, and could you please pass the salt and would anyone like a hot drop in their tea? There was a soothing, familiar clatter of cutlery on delft, cups lifted and set back on saucers, Beck’s snores under the table. I couldn’t speak. I was like a girl in a fairytale, under a spell that bound my tongue.
We said our goodbyes in the hall, and kept them short, as Liam had asked. He hugged me hard, as though we’d never fought about his going. ‘Behave yourself,’ he said, playing the lofty older brother, a game he liked, usually guaranteed to get me riled. He was older by all of ten minutes.
‘Why should I?’ I mocked, finding my voice at last. It was an act, we all knew it was an act, but we still had to play our parts, because what else was there to do – howl and shriek and cling to him?
‘Then be sure and leave nothing out when you write. Write often.’
He looked around, at the false smiles and glittering eyes we’d all put on for his benefit: Dad, Mother, Florrie and Matt. Lockie stood further back, near the head of the stairs leading down to the kitchen, her face in shadow. Eva had said goodbye the night before. I nearly envied her, not having to stand around and watch him prise himself loose from us.
He cleared his throat. ‘That goes for all of you. Full reports. Everything.’
I plucked at the stiff, foreign sleeve of his jacket. ‘Liam, I –’
‘Don’t, Katie. I know.’
‘I’m sorry,’ I managed to blurt out, regardless. ‘Be safe.’ My fingers had found their way under his cuff to pinch the back of his wrist. Our old signal. He caught my hand and squeezed it, just the once, and he was gone, out into the bright, noisy street full of morning traffic. Dad walked him to the station. It was what Liam wanted. He’d sent his luggage on ahead.
Beck’s blue-sheened eyes searched the hall. I got down on my hunkers and put my face in his fur. ‘He’ll be back.’ He wagged his tail, panting in the heat, though it wasn’t yet nine o’clock.
‘He’s only gone for training.’ Matt stared through the open door at the empty step, the bright street and the Gardens beyond it, a jarvey passing by. The horse’s hooves clopped along, a metronome. ‘It’ll be over before he has to fight.’
‘Please God,’ Mother said. Lockie closed the door and we all went our various ways.
Lockie and I went upstairs to strip Liam’s bed and turn the mattress before making up the bed for me. It felt like treachery, even though it had been Liam’s idea. Lockie watched me wrestle a pillowcase from the bolster. ‘Don’t fash yourself, girl.’
I couldn’t help it – I was all thumbs. She unfolded a sheet and threw me a corner. We made the bed in silence. One of the things I loved about Lockie was that she never wasted words. Everything she did was smooth and large: the way she swept the broad palm of her hand across the surface of the crisp clean sheet to even out the creases, the easy way she lifted the heavy corners of the mattress to tuck in the edges.
‘I’ll leave you to it,’ she said, when we’d finished. She looked around the room, then at me. ‘Make the most of it, Katie. He didn’t leave it for you to be miserable in. He thought you’d like it.’ She swept her hand across the eiderdown one last time, though it was perfectly smooth already. ‘There’s a mirror in the box room, behind the gun cupboard. I’ll look it out for you later.’
After she’d gone back down to the kitchen, I moved my clothes from the chest of drawers I shared with Florrie in our room at the front of the house. I carried them, drawer by drawer, across the landing to Liam’s room in the back, swapped their contents with his and returned them to Florrie’s room. It didn’t take long. It turned out there wasn’t much in our room that was actually mine.
When everything was laid out and neat in Liam’s room, I didn’t want to stay there, cuckoo that I was. I should have let Matt have it, after all. I opened the window, as wide as it would go, and went downstairs after Lockie.
October 1914
‘Did we make a mistake about the university?’ Dad asked me as we walked across town together, on a fine evening early in October.
We were on our way to a lecture about Georgian Dublin, in the Mansion House. It was Dad’s idea. ‘Should be right up your street, Catkin,’ he’d said. He most likely wanted to get me out from under Mother’s feet to a respectable, fixed location where he could keep an eye on me to her satisfaction, but I was happy enough to go. There were worse ways to spend your time than thinking about the Georgians and their prosperous city.
How things change. Liam was in a training camp in Dorset. We liked knowing he was safe, but he was keen to get to France, or Flanders, somewhere that mattered. I want to do my part, he wrote in his letters home. To me, he wrote about the boredom and exhaustions of drill. He said he knew there were momentous tests in store; he wanted to get out and face them. The waiting, he said, was what kept him awake at night, in spite of days of more physical activity and fresh air than he’d ever known.
‘I’m worried about you, Catkin,’ Dad said. ‘You spend too much time alone.’
‘Far from it, I don’t get enough time alone.’
The atmosphere in the house was horrible. Mother and I grated on each other’s nerves. She said she wanted to stop me brooding, but I had my own ideas as to what she was at when she devised things to keep me busy. I had got into the habit, whenever I could escape the house, of going on long, aimless walks, and Mother objected. Tramping, she called it. No way for a solicitor’s daughter to behave. I wished she’d leave me in peace to walk off my worry and loneliness my own way, but she wouldn’t have it. It would give scandal, and wasn’t it just absolutely typical of me, to be looking for notice and causing aggravation, when it was Liam we should all be thinking about and praying for.
She insisted I go to lessons in musical appreciation with Florrie, even though I was tone deaf. I’d spent the past week trying to learn the artistic arrangement of flowers from her friend Minnie Whelan, who boasted the best garden in Glasnevin outside of the Botanics. I didn’t mind the music so much. I wished I could understand it, since other people got such pleasure from it. I didn’t even mind Minnie and her flowers; they were lovely, and the way Minnie talked about them made them interesting. But I did mind having to join Mother’s knitting circle every Friday after Mass, making socks and mufflers for soldiers at the Front. I’d ten thumbs when it came to any kind of needlework.
‘Go easy on your mother,’ Dad said. ‘She does
her best.’
I knew perfectly well that she was the one who’d objected to my return to college. She’d have stopped me going in the very first place, if she’d had her way, just as she’d prevented Eva from going to the School of Art. I sometimes wondered if she’d regretted that. Eva went on to marry Bartley, a Protestant, despite everything Mother did to try to stop her.
‘Is it really the money?’ I’d asked Dad, when he told me I couldn’t go back for a higher degree.
He went pink in the face. ‘It’s not the only reason. You’ll have to ask your mother.’
When I pressed her, she told me she’d seen Mary Corballis loitering in the porch of the National Library, a dozen laughing men grouped around her. ‘What’s more, no one seemed to think a thing about it. If that’s the sort of carry-on we can expect from university women, you needn’t think I’ll ever give it my blessing!’ She gave me an old-fashioned look. ‘No daughter of mine.’
‘It’s too late. There’s no sense talking about it.’ I tucked my hand into the crook of my father’s arm.
He lifted the hand further in and folded his arm around mine. ‘I’ll talk to her again. I’ll bring her around for next year.’
Next year was too far away to be real. I doubted Professor Hayden would take a second application seriously. We’d arrived at the steps leading up to the Mansion House, where Dad was greeted by several acquaintances. Inside, the hall was nearly full. We found seats at the end of a row near the front.
The speaker, a stocky man who looked more suited to work behind a counter than public speaking, stood off to one side, waiting to be introduced. He shuffled his notes with trembling hands. I sympathized. Just as another man rose to the podium to introduce him, a thin woman dressed all in brown appeared at the end of our row. Dad and I moved up to make room for her. She settled a large bag on the floor, took off her soft hat and stuffed it inside the bag quickly, with no regard for its shape. ‘Thank you,’ she whispered, under cover of the applause that welcomed the speaker. Her hair was the colour of steel. Dad smiled and extended his hand. ‘Miss Colclough! How are you?’ He whispered introductions and we settled to listen.
So, there was Liam, off in another country, learning about firearms and explosives and the finer points of drill, and there was I, the youngest person in that room by at least twenty years, listening to a white-bearded antiquarian describe the distinguishing features of the house we lived in – and the thousands of houses like it that characterized the centre of Dublin, remnants of more prosperous times.
Despite my general distraction, I was drawn into the story of the Gardiners, and the development of Mountjoy Square, the next square over from our own. Luke Gardiner had controlled the look of the square by putting covenants in the builders’ leases dictating the dimensions and proportions of the houses, the number of windows and types of door, the acceptable style of brickwork. Residents were prohibited from practising certain trades. No butchers, bakers or candlestick-makers. No distillers or soap-boilers either. I wondered what he’d make of those houses now, most of them crumbling and rotting tenements, and the residents lucky if they’d any kind of work at all.
When the lecture was over, we stood off to the side while people filed out. Dad spoke to Miss Colclough, the latecomer. I gathered that she was one of his clients.
‘What did you think of the lecture, Miss Crilly?’
I’d been mulling it over. ‘It’s strange, that something as actual as a street can come out of one person’s head.’
‘Go on,’ she said.
I groped for words to express what was, after all, quite obvious. ‘To have vision is one thing, but the self-belief you’d need, to implement it – it seems extraordinary. To have so much – I don’t even know the word for it. Potency?’
‘What would it require, d’you imagine?’ She’d tilted her head to listen. There was a slight squint in her small, lively eyes.
‘Well, money.’ But that was too easy. ‘And – a sense of entitlement?’
‘Entitled is right!’ Dad chuckled. ‘No shortage of titles, in that family. Not to mention wealth and lands. For all the good it did them in the end. Is Miss Wilson not with you this evening, Miss Colclough?’
‘She wanted to come but she’s been wretchedly ill, she wasn’t quite up to it.’
Dad said he was sorry to hear it, and asked her to pass on his regards. I thought we were about to leave, but he told me Miss Colclough was writing a book, about the public monuments of the city.
‘I’ve fallen terribly behind these last few weeks,’ she said. ‘I don’t suppose … would you by any chance know of someone who’d like a small job as a research assistant?’
I fidgeted with my gloves. Dad’s eyes creased at the corners, making pleats in the skin of his face. ‘Our Katie has a degree in history – would that be of use?’
‘It might.’ She looked at me, longer than was comfortable. ‘If it would be of interest to you, Miss Crilly?’
I hesitated. Was she offering me actual work? An excuse to get out and about without Mother breathing questions down my neck? But I didn’t think I’d be much use to her. It was only fair to tell her so. ‘I don’t know the first thing about sculpture, I’m afraid.’
‘That makes no matter,’ Miss Colclough said. ‘I suppose you can learn?’ It was a challenge.
‘Yes, I can learn.’
We made an arrangement for a trial, the following week.
Mother was livid when we went home and told her. ‘Is that the Dorothy Colclough who used to be a radical?’ she asked Dad.
‘What kind of radical?’ I asked. This was what she used to say about Professor Hayden, the most dignified and conservative of all our lecturers.
‘Votes for women,’ Dad said, smiling, teasing me. ‘About as likely as the man in the moon.’
So Professor Hayden and Miss Colclough must know each other. There were several suffrage groups, each with different methods and affiliations, but their paths would surely have crossed at some stage.
‘Didn’t she –’ Mother bit off the end of her sentence.
‘ “Didn’t she” what?’ I asked.
‘Miss Colclough is perfectly respectable, Mildred,’ Dad said. ‘I won’t hear a word against her. It’ll be an interest for Katie. It’ll take her out of herself. This book of hers is for the Academy. It’s a serious business.’
She didn’t look convinced. ‘Mind you, don’t go bringing any of that suffrage nonsense home with you, Katie. I won’t have you turning out like those Sheehy girls.’
On the day we’d arranged, I went to the terraced house on Percy Place, a calm stretch of road on the far side of the Grand Canal, that Miss Colclough shared with May Wilson. Traffic was sleepy and slow there: barges and swans on the water, horses on the towpath. A little further up, the lock could be busy, but their part of the terrace, near the lane, was quiet. Their house was similar to ours but smaller, and of brown brick rather than red. Steep steps led up to their front door over a basement that was practically at street level.
The house belonged to May Wilson, and she was the one who let me in, that first day. Her skin had an unhealthy, yellowish colour, and she moved slowly, but she had kind eyes and lovely hair, perfectly white like the feathers of a swan. The parlour walls were crowded by all shapes and sizes of pictures: drawings and paintings, mostly of buildings and city streets. A collection of tiny exotic animals in mahogany and ivory filled a glass cabinet in one corner, and there were plants on stands in the other three corners and in front of windows.
May declared that we should all be on a first-name footing. ‘Otherwise, we’d “Miss” each other always, and we can’t have that, now, can we?’ She hooted a laugh. I laughed too. She patted my hand. ‘But don’t you go calling Dote “Dorothy”, my dear. She won’t answer to it and I can’t say I blame her, I wouldn’t either. Now, you must come to the area door in future. We do most of our living downstairs, or out in the back garden.’
‘Speak for yourse
lf,’ Dote said, taking me upstairs to look at the dining room she’d turned into a study. Books were piled in neat stacks on the floor and on chairs pushed back against the wall. A crammed bookcase blocked the double doors that would have led through to the parlour. The table was piled high with folders of notes. Two chairs, one on either side, faced each other across the middle. Historical maps were framed on the walls. ‘It looks chaotic, but I assure you I have a system.’
‘I’ve been wondering, would you know Professor Hayden?’ I asked.
‘Of course! You must have been one of her students. That makes you doubly welcome. You must know the debt your generation owes to her? The future is wide open to anyone with an education. No one worked harder than Mary to bring that about for women.’ She sounded wistful.
Dote had hired a cab and a driver to bring us on a tour of the city, as though I were a foreigner. Before we set off, she wrapped a thick green, gold and black tartan rug around May’s legs, in case the open air was too much for her.
I admired the strong neck and pricked ears of the glossy chestnut mare which pulled us briskly along. There were so many miserable nags harnessed to carts hauling goods and people around this city – ever since reading Black Beauty as a child, I could hardly bear to look at them.
‘We hire Mr Dolan any time we can,’ May said.
Dote pointed out statues and plaques I’d never paid heed to before, as well as the ones you couldn’t miss, like the massive Victoria Memorial outside Leinster House. The figures below her included a dying Fusilier, who leaned his head against Hibernia’s thigh.
‘What do you think?’
‘She seems rather – overblown.’
Dote laughed, getting down from the car. ‘She’s a buxom one, all right. Come on, we’ll take a closer look.’
She linked her arm through May’s and we went closer to the memorial. I squinted up at the massive bronze figure of Victoria, curiously spiked and warlike.
‘Look at the lines of the minor figures, how graceful they are,’ Dote said. ‘And the detail, here – see the way the soldier’s foot twists under?’
