by Lia Mills
I’d arrived at the monument to Parnell. Dote despised it – Gaudy Gus, she called the sculptor, and said his conception was nonsensical, that the soaring granite blocks dwarfed everything else, distorted the perspective of a once lovely street, though admittedly the tram-lines had a head start on him there.
May said the figure of Parnell was just like a policeman directing traffic at a crossroads, making the congestion worse. I liked that about it. It got in our way. ‘Isn’t that the point?’ I said. ‘Like it or not, we can’t ignore it.’
Actually, I liked the entire, solid structure. Parnell stood firm on his plinth, one arm raised, under a golden harp pinned to a soaring granite wall. Liam was fond of quoting the speech the inscription was taken from. I closed my eyes to let the words run through my mind. No man has the right to say to his country, ‘Thus far shalt thou go and no further’. Liam and I were all for a free Ireland, but like Parnell we didn’t believe it was worth shedding blood for. Liam preferred a gradual, planned, parliamentary route – and look, it took him to war just the same.
I crossed the road in front of the statue and moved quickly up past the Rotunda and its gardens, racing the rain, although there was little point, I was soaked through already. I could see the lit windows of our house, caught a glimpse of Matt’s face at the downstairs window and waved to him to let me in. I took the shallow steps up from the street in two easy strides.
‘You’re a lifesaver, I’m drenched!’ I said, when he opened the door. He stood still, blocked my way. I could hear voices in the breakfast room; there were coats piled on the boot box. Upstairs a door slammed. ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
He peered over my shoulder at the rain, then at his feet. His mouth was moving but no intelligible sounds came out of it. My clothes pressed, cold, against my skin. Impatient to get indoors – why would he not stand out of my way? – I turned to see what he was looking at, the sodden trees of the gardens, cowering under a sky as low and billowing as gun smoke. Then I looked back the way I’d come, at the plinth of Parnell’s monument. Thus far. No further. And I knew.
My legs went from under me then. If he hadn’t caught my arm and hauled me upright, I’d have fallen back into the road. ‘Let me go,’ I said, each word breaking in my mouth.
He held me up. A tram passed. A girl at a window stared out at us. I wanted to be her, to be on my way to wherever she was going, knowing anything but this. If not for the tears in Matt’s eyes too, I’d have fought him. I’d have ripped his throat. But I let him drag me inside, and then I was in the parlour and there was Mother, already dressed in full black, receiving callers.
People came and went. Neighbours. Eva and Bartley. Liam’s fiancée, Isabel, was away, visiting an aunt down in Cork. Eva sent her a telegram. Florrie’s Eugene brought his mother, an enormously fat woman, to console ours. Father Carroll came from Marlborough Street and we knelt on the hearthrug to say the Rosary for Liam’s soul. Lockie brought black armbands for us all. I stayed close to Dad, who was pale and quiet. If you looked closely enough, you’d see that he was quivering all over, vibrating like a plucked string. Like old Mr Carton in the library. A single idea echoed through the hollow chambers of my head, No. It’s not true. No.
They passed around the official telegram. No matter how often I looked at the words, I couldn’t retain them. DEEPLY REGRET TO INFORM YOU THAT 10557 2ND LT CRILLY ROYAL DUBLIN FUSILIERS DIED OF WOUNDS LETTER FOLLOWS RECORDS OFFICE
It was dated 24 April. Two days ago. What was I doing, where was I when it happened, and why didn’t I feel it?
When Mother went up to bed that night, she had the look of someone setting out on a long journey, someone we wouldn’t see again for a good long while. Dad said we should all get some sleep if we could, and went after her. Then Florrie went up, and Matt. I sat on, downstairs, unable to face Liam’s room with my things in it.
Eva said she’d stay as long as I wanted, but her skin was grey and her eyes looked bruised, and finally Bartley insisted she go home.
I put on Liam’s gabardine and went out into the darkness. There was no one about to see me walk to Con’s boarding house through the rain that had eased a little, but still seeped and spread through the city. The pavements gleamed wet, as though the old rivers were rising to reclaim their rightful place and banish us. Hundreds of years ago there was just such a flood; people drowned in their own basements. Why would it not come again? I’d welcome the rising water. I’d let it take me.
I’d been to Con’s street just once before, with Liam, but I had a clear memory of the exterior of the house, at the end of a cramped terrace, its brickwork stained and damp, fronted by small, barren gardens. The gate creaked when I pushed it open.
The pocked and pimpled unfortunate who opened the hall door leered when I said Con’s name. ‘Late, aren’t ya?’ She pursed her freckled lips and looked me up and down, lingering on the damp ends of my skirt, the overlarge coat held tight around me by my folded arms. ‘Wait, so.’
I stood under a sputtering lamp in the hall, my mind as hollow as a drum. The place smelled stale, of fried food. My teeth clacked off each other, and I could hear the girl’s rough drawl above. ‘There’s a wan downstairs for ya. In a right state, she is. What’ve ya done now?’
Con took forever to come to the landing. When he saw me, he hurried down the rest of the stairs and pulled me into his arms. ‘I heard.’
I cried then, my mouth open against his neck, howling into the warmth of his skin.
‘Stop gawking and bring hot water, Annie,’ he said. ‘Shush, Katie. We’ll have you warm and dry in no time.’ The girl went off to where the kitchen must have been.
Con kept an arm around my waist, drew me up the stairs to his room. ‘It’s not much,’ he said. ‘I won’t be here long.’ Then the girl was back with a kettle of steaming water, the handle wrapped in a towel. He took it from her. ‘Off with you now, Annie, back to that man of yours. I know you have him hidden in the kitchen.’
She laughed, a gust of onions, and went away.
He eased off my coat, moved an open book from a buttoned leather chair by the fire and settled me into it. My cold, damp clothes clung to my skin.
‘Your lips are blue,’ he said. ‘You should get out of those wet things.’
My teeth chattered, louder than before.
‘At least take off your shoes and stockings.’
He lifted the lime-green bedspread and held it up in front of him, a screen, while I rolled my stockings down with clumsy fingers. I took the towel he gave me next and dried my legs with it, spread it over my hair like a veil, let him drape the lurid bedspread around my shoulders. I’d have done anything he said. The one thing I couldn’t do was think.
He spread my stockings over the fireguard to dry and poured some of the water into a beaker, added whiskey. He poured the rest of the water into a white ceramic shaving bowl, dipped a flannel in the hot water, squeezed it out and wrapped it around my feet. Then he dried my feet and held them in his two warm hands. All the while, Liam’s voice spoke into my mind, retelling a scene from a letter he wrote after his first return from the line: I feel human again, after a bath. The water was ice-cold. It shocked the breath out of me, but when I got out I felt as though I’d been set alight. When we go up to the trenches again it’ll be days before we change our clothes or even get our boots off, although our feet are sodden. Can you imagine that, Miss Hog-the-bath? If there wasn’t so much loose metal and other noisome articles lying about, things I couldn’t bring myself to mention, not even to you, we might be better off with no boots at all.
The idea of Liam out there in wet mud with no boots on him made me weep in a dry, shuddering way, as though the rain had found its way inside me and couldn’t get out. My head sank to Con’s shoulder. His arms came up around me. He smelled of wood smoke and tobacco. He was warm and solid. I burrowed into him.
‘Katie,’ he said. ‘You don’t know what you’re doing.’
But I did. I was maybe a li
ttle delirious, deranged even – but I knew. I wanted to burn, to hurt, to shatter into a million tiny pieces riding violent winds of flame and ruin.
Then it was a fist, banging the door, that shook the room. Con swore.
‘Dr Buckley, you have a woman in there. I won’t have it!’ The door handle turned, but it didn’t open. When did he lock it? ‘I want her out.’
‘She’s just leaving, Mrs O’Reilly.’
‘Be sure she does. I’m waiting.’
He ran his finger along the length of my arm, raising the small hairs. ‘Maybe it’s as well. You’re not yourself.’ But he was the one who was changed, with a cast to his face I hadn’t seen before.
I gathered up my stockings. He leaned back and watched me struggle to pull the damp silk apart with clumsy fingers, so I could put them back on. The door rattled. I rolled the stockings into a ball and put them in the pocket of Liam’s coat. My boots resisted my bare feet, but I forced them on, stiff and strange as they felt. I was stiff and strange myself, as though I found myself suddenly in charge of a large doll made of wood, with no notion of how to direct it.
‘I’ll see you home. They’ll be worried.’
‘They don’t know I’ve gone.’
Damp and all as it still was, I pulled the gabardine tight around me. My fingers flailed, useless, at the belt. Con leaned in and tied it in a knot. ‘Ready?’ He opened the door. I made myself blind to the landlady’s contempt, stalked past her without a word.
We walked the streets in silence, not touching. It was an effort to put one foot in front of the other. I wished him gone, but couldn’t say so. I’d forgotten how to speak.
We parted awkwardly, a few doors from home. Instinct sent me through the half-gate and down the puddled steps to the area door, away from the street. Lockie opened the door, sat me at the kitchen table, boiled a pan of milk and gave it to me in a cup, laced with whiskey. I drained it, shuddering at the taste, and then let her lead me up to bed by the hand. In Liam’s room, I got sense and sent her away. I fancied I was marked in some way that she’d see. When she was gone, I pulled off the sodden gabardine, the reluctant dress beneath it. I climbed on to Liam’s high bed and pulled his covers over my head, wanting darkness. No matter how cold or how dark, I would never, ever, be dark or cold enough.
June 1915
Two months later, on the day that should have been our birthday, the longest day of the year, I spread Liam’s letters out on the bed and reread them in the order they’d been written. I knew them off by heart.
In January, not long after he went to the Front, he’d sent a letter to Mother, full of certainty that he would come through the war unscathed.
Half an hour ago, Jerry sent a storm of shells over. I thought I was a goner. I heard a Rumbling Mary come my way – that’s a 17-inch shell, in case you don’t know – but could I run, or throw myself clear? No, I couldn’t budge. You’ll think I was afraid, but no. I was up to my knees in mud, gripped as tight as though someone poured a ton of cement on me. I stood there, braced for the worst – and the sound roared right on by. After all that, it was only a field ambulance I heard, straining along a track in high gear. The whole thing over in a flash, longer in the telling than in the happening.
So, you see, my life is charmed. There’s no call to worry about me. Our last billet was blown to smithereens not long after we’d left it. That building was hundreds of years old. It’s nothing but a mess of old rubble now, yet here I am, still in one ugly piece.
I should have known better than to believe him. He was cheerful for our parents’ benefit, knowing his letters to them would be read out loud as soon as they arrived and many times over. They were passed around Mother’s sewing circle until the paper wore thin and the ink at the edge of the pages got smudged from too much handling. The letters he wrote to me were darker, meant for my eyes only. A shadow fell on them and deepened as the wet, bitter winter dragged on.
After he died, I went on writing to him in my mind, asking questions that fell like stones into black water and sank out of sight. What is that silence like, Liam? Is it like knives, or a dark net? What happens there?
Grief made fools of us all. There was shock in it, but there could hardly be surprise. A young man goes off to war – what do we expect of him? What did we think would happen? For me, belief in a personal, all-knowing, all-seeing God had already become impossible in the face of what was happening on the Continent. There had been shocking casualties in the Dublin regiments alone. Thousands dead. We’d heard that, in the Dardanelles, many of the Dublins were put off their boats into water that was too deep for them. Pulled under by the weight of their packs, they drowned, while Turkish bullets and mortar-fire tore into their comrades and churned the sea red. The gas unleashed at Ypres, around the time that Liam died, was still claiming lives two months later. Every second person on Sackville Street wore a black armband, or a cuff.
Liam had had his own doubts. We’d both read Mr Darwin’s book. Now I knew my doubt had been a game I played on the surface of my mind. Liam’s death destroyed a deeper faith. It cracked the bedrock of my existence.
His chaplain, Father Fogarty, had written to us to say Liam was a decent, warm-hearted soul. There’s not a man in this company who has not felt the better for a steadying word from him in a dark moment others didn’t notice. He’ll be missed.
When I last saw him, earlier that day, he was calm.
We laid him to rest in a small cemetery in N—, with others who fell the same day. A cross marks the spot. I commend his soul to God our Father, who will keep him safe, until that joyful day when we are all reunited. May you find comfort in that certainty. May he rest in peace.
I was struck by the sentence that stood apart. When I last saw him, earlier that day, he was calm. As though some truth had crept in behind the lines and waited to be claimed. But then: fell.
I’d come to loathe that word; the newspapers were full of it. It masked the raw truth, that men were shot to pieces every day, for no good reason that I could see. In the weeks after Liam was killed, I read the Roll of Honour with a kind of greed, scorning the ordinary ‘Deaths’ in adjacent columns. Why should some people get more than their share of time, when Liam had had so little? I resented every death that came ‘after an illness’ or at a person’s residence. The Roll droned on, repetitive and numbing: ‘Killed in action … from wounds received in action … from gas poisoning in action …’ It named regiments and foreign places, words we’d never heard before last year, as familiar to us now as the street names of our own city. Its mournful, murderous pattern drilling us all into a state of numbed submission, along with that sly little word, fell. Mother said Liam was one of ‘The Fallen’, as though it was an honour. She talked about sacrifice. No one had the heart, or the nerve, to challenge her.
Liam had often mentioned Father Fogarty in his own letters. Mother took comfort in their friendship. She imagined that Liam’s faith had continued strong. ‘It would have helped him,’ she said. ‘Even in the darkest hours.’ That could have been the reason why Liam referred to the priest so often, to console her, but his admiration seemed genuine.
Father Fogarty is as brave as any soldier, he wrote to me. He’s the opposite of the overfed Staffers who strut around and get in our way whenever they come near the Front, which is rare enough. They retreat as fast as they decently can, in their clean uniforms, but Froggy – he’s called that not only for his name, but because of his big eyes – will crawl out in the worst fire-storm to pray with a dying man. He has time for everyone, no matter what their persuasion. He’s patient with me, with my doubt. Mother would say I’ve lost my Faith. I think I’ve discovered Reason. Belief in a benevolent God seems a screen, a shield, for children. Whatever you do, don’t let her know, it would only hurt her. Time enough for those conversations when I come home.
Froggy says, pray anyway. He says faith might be restored to me. I wish for it every night, going to sleep, wondering if I’ll see another morning. Then mo
rning comes and I wish for faith again, wondering will I have safe passage through the light of another day. I wonder, is this wanting a kind of faith in itself? But the gulf between wanting and wishing on the one hand, and belief on the other, is wider than the whole world. To think of it gives me an urge to lay me down, deep in its blackest, most silent depths and sleep, longer than time.
I wrote back to Father Fogarty. If he thought Liam’s calm was important enough to mention, there was more to be said. I asked him what he knew.
My letter was returned. I later learned from May that the priest had been killed by a mortar. She showed me a letter from her nephew, Hubie, describing what happened, how grown men wept when his body was carried back.
‘Liam loved that priest,’ I said. ‘It’s a shame.’
‘You should write to Hubie,’ May said. ‘He’d appreciate a letter. They all do.’
But it was Captain Hubie Wilson who wrote to us. He told a story about a patrol that went out one night shortly before Liam was killed. There was a boy with them, Acheson. He’d not been out long. He got separated from the rest, and when they found him he mistook them for Germans and started firing. The rest were furious, as you’d imagine. Liam made a joke of it, saying they should all be grateful the boy was such a rotten shot. He spent some time with him after, giving him sighting and shooting tips. That Acheson is still with us is nothing short of a miracle. He has Liam to thank for it.
Sometimes I pretended to myself that Liam was still out there, cursing the mud, being kind to new boys, cleaning his rifle. My mind couldn’t fit itself around the shape of his absence. I couldn’t accept that either of us could outlive the other. We were coterminous, weren’t we? Wasn’t that what it meant, to be a twin?
As children we often begged Lockie to tell us the story. Liam was born after a stormy few hours, she said, we couldn’t imagine the like, the window glass rattling in its frames, a gale moaning down the chimneys and Liam’s own noise announcing his arrival – telling it, she made a mewling face and gave a squeaky kitten-cry – and, while the midwife was busy with him, Mother let out a little whimper: Oof!
