by Lia Mills
I knew we were in a hurry, but I stood up on tiptoe, as if that would let me see through the crowds, beyond Nelson and the overhead cables, all the way north to our house. ‘We live up that way,’ I said. ‘I should go and see if the house is all right.’
‘You’ll never get through that crowd, Katie.’ It was the first time I’d heard my name from his mouth. It felt like a touch, like his hand at my elbow, guiding me in through the door to the building. ‘Come on, we’re late.’
Upstairs, a clerkish young man and his portly companion were discussing a battle that had been fought in Dame Street, how soldiers and insurgents alike had needed to shout at bystanders to get out of the way. The portly one was not unlike Florrie’s Eugene, the way his plump fingers were tucked into the pockets of a straining waistcoat.
‘Where’s Mr Sheehy-Skeffington?’ I asked, when they’d finished talking. ‘Did he not call a meeting?’
I admired Mr Sheehy-Skeffington. He was a familiar figure around town, often to be seen taking notes at lectures for his newspaper, having lunch in the vegetarian restaurant on Foster Place or locked in earnest debate with someone on the street – he’d talk to anyone. He’d stroke a tangle of beard, head to one side, eyes on the ground, as though inspiration might be found in a gutter or emerge from a drain. He was a soft touch for guttersnipes. People mocked him, but they smiled when they caught sight of him. He was known as the Peace Man. Some wags called him the Ladies’ Man, because of the Votes for Women button he wore on his lapel.
The clerk took a watch out of his pocket. ‘Twenty past six. We’ve been here ten minutes and there’s no sign of him.’
‘We were later than I thought,’ Hubie said to me. ‘The meeting was to start at half past five. Maybe we missed him.’
Footsteps on the stairs made us turn to the door expectantly, but it was a scarlet-cheeked woman who came in, breathing heavily. ‘Mercy,’ she said when she got her breath back. ‘Those stairs’ll be the death of me. Mr Thompson from downstairs sent me up to tell you, you missed the man.’ She took another big breath and sighed it out, fanning her face with her hands. ‘He waited a half-hour or so, and no one came. Then he left.’
‘Do you know where he went?’ Hubie asked.
‘Home for his tea, if he’d any sense. Where we all should be. We’ll be locking up the doors in a minute.’
‘We might as well go on, so,’ the clerk said. ‘There’s not much to be done with just the four of us.’
‘We’d best be going too,’ Hubie said, when they’d left. ‘The streets are quieter, in any case.’
It was true. When we came out, the looters had retreated to the far end of Sackville Street. I stretched my neck to see as far up the street as I could.
Hubie took my arm. ‘Come on.’ He steered me past the bank and across Dame Street. Further up, we crossed back again to walk in the shelter of Trinity’s walls. He said the presence of the soldiers who’d taken over the college might be enough to bring the situation under control.
I found myself telling him everything: Matt’s absence, Liam’s guns. I tugged the gabardine tighter around me, folded my arms across my waist. Walked faster. Hubie said nothing.
We’d reached the corner of Merrion Square. He paused to read an anti-fraternization handbill posted to a telegraph pole.
‘Pay no attention,’ I said, walking on. He came too, his face unreadable. I was mortified, and angry on his behalf. ‘Every time you turn around, someone’s pushing a handbill at you, or dangling a leaflet, or haranguing you from a soapbox. There’s always someone telling you what to think, trying to make up your mind for you.’
‘Do you agree with them?’
My face burned. ‘I might have, once. I’ve no time for them now.’
‘Did Liam change your mind?’
‘Not directly.’ Not soon enough, was what I meant. ‘In some ways.’
‘For instance?’
‘Well – once he enlisted in the Dublins, I couldn’t refer to the Traitors’ Gate any more – how could I? Liam was no more a traitor than I am.’
‘Traitors’ Gate?’
‘The Fusiliers’ Arch. The main gate into the Green.’
‘Ah.’
A fresh outburst of shots came from near the canal. We stood, still as stone. He pulled me into a doorway. The silence that followed was like a dream, all pearled light and gleaming water, black trees mirrored on a silver that verged on blue, the sky come down to slake its thirst at the bridge. He was so close I felt the rise and fall of his breath against my arm. I didn’t know how much time passed before he said we should run across the road.
Safely across, we crept up the street to the smaller bridge in the shelter of the houses, my pulse so loud in my ears I was sure it would give us away. At the bridge he went in front, bent double. I copied him. We didn’t exchange a word ’til we were at May’s door. I’d never been as glad of anything as I was of the shelter of her solid stone steps.
‘Well done.’ That voice of his seemed to come from behind my own breast-bone. ‘You’re sure-footed. And you don’t talk too much.’ Which saved me the need to answer. ‘I’ll go to Mr Hyland and see if the situation has changed. They have a good vantage point there, on the corner.’
I didn’t feel so safe any more. ‘Don’t go.’
‘I’ll go by the lane. Bolt the door when you get in.’ He looked up and down the road. ‘The longer it takes the troops to get here, the fiercer the fighting is likely to be. They must be planning to come in hard.’ His eyes came back to me. There was confusion in them. Had he forgotten who I was? ‘Keep the shutters closed and the curtains drawn. Don’t answer the door. I’ll come back by the lane too.’
‘I wish you wouldn’t.’
He raised the scarred eyebrow. ‘Which do you wish I wouldn’t do, go or come back?’ That teasing look. A silence opened, like a tunnel. He was the one who broke it. ‘Don’t worry about me.’
‘I was hoping to talk to you –’
‘Later.’
When I got in, May was feeding scraps to Paschal in the parlour. ‘You found him!’
‘He was hiding in a tree.’
The monkey blinked at me, mashed his lips on a pellet of bread. Dote was tidying cups and glasses on to a tray. She looked worn out. I took the tray from her and carried it to the kitchen. While we cleared the dishes into the sink, a cup slipped from her hands and shattered on the tiled floor.
‘Stupid!’ She was shaking and pale.
‘It’s the strain. Sit down.’
‘It was part of a set,’ she said. ‘It belonged to my mother.’ She looked ready to cry.
I collected the shards into a twist of paper. ‘We’ll find someone who can fix it. You go to bed, I’ll wait up for Hubie.’
May carried Paschal upstairs with her. Later, when she was asleep, I heard him scratching at her door, and let him out. She was snoring, loud, in a nightcap like a turban.
Downstairs again, with Paschal’s soft weight warming my lap, I rested my head on the back of the chair and listened to sounds like circus whips and firecrackers. The evening light, filtered through the curtains, glowed like a sunset. Paschal caught hold of my chin between his – what would you call them, paws? They were so like hands – and looked into my eyes. Uncomfortable with his study, I turned his head away. ‘Go to sleep.’
What if Hubie didn’t come back? The room darkened and turned cold while I waited, but some lethargy held me there. At last I heard the latch lifting on the back door. I moved the sleeping monkey to the dog bed and went down to meet him.
He came in quietly and put a finger to his lips when he saw me. I leaned against the dresser and waited while he latched the door, went to the window and looked out. At last he turned around, took off his hat and rubbed his springy hair with the damaged hand. ‘It was strange: the schoolhouse was empty. There were men there last night.’ He followed me into the back sitting room, took the matches and lit a row of candles on the mantel.
‘I wish t
hey’d left the gas supply intact,’ I said.
He took the marbles from his pocket, held them in his cupped left palm and rolled them, one over the other and back, over and back. ‘Maybe they wanted to prevent an explosion, when the shooting starts.’
‘Are you for them, now?’
‘I don’t envy them. They’re brave. Foolish, but brave.’
‘So why did those others leave – did they get tired of waiting? Or think better of it all? Maybe that’s what the army wants to happen.’
‘You mean, that’s what you’d like to happen.’ The marbles clicked and grated in his hand.
‘What do you think, then?’
‘Who knows? Maybe they funked it. The waiting would get on anyone’s nerves.’ He dropped his hat on a stool, put the marbles into it and went to the drinks cabinet, where he studied the bottles. ‘I think it’s dawned on them that the Germans aren’t exactly in a rush to swell their ranks. They’re on their own. You’d nearly be sorry for them.’ He checked the watch on his wrist, then looked at me. ‘Join me for a drink?’
‘Just soda water.’ What if he couldn’t manage the siphon? ‘Let me.’
He stepped between me and the siphon. ‘No.’ There was that bristling in the air again, a raw heat that ran the length of my body. I sat into the nearest chair, not watching him work the siphon, but aware of the sounds it made, the whisper of his leather glove on metal, the click of the handle, followed by the hiss and splash of gas and water. When he brought the glass over to me, I caught sight of the watch again.
‘Why do you wear a watch on your wrist?’
He tasted his drink and smiled. ‘Do you not approve?’
‘It’s just – I don’t know any other men who do.’
‘I used to think it effeminate,’ he said. ‘But in the trenches, they make more sense on your wrist than buried in your pocket. They’re efficient. I think they’ll catch on.’ Then, more serious, ‘I wonder when the army will make their move. What they’re waiting for. It’s possible that, the longer it takes, the heavier the retribution will be. I wonder if I was wrong, letting you all stay here.’
‘Did you say, letting us?’
‘I meant encouraging. I encouraged you to stay. Is that better?’
‘Marginally.’
I wanted to hold back time, force it to a slower pace: the stillness of the canal as opposed to the tidal pull of the river, say. From where I sat, the round mirror on the wall opposite the window became a disc of light, reflecting a perfect circle of paling sky. It could be a hole in the wall, leading to another world.
He followed my gaze. ‘It looks like a porthole.’
I was startled by how closely his thought followed mine. ‘I’ve never been on a ship. Not properly.’
‘Only troopships, me. What do you mean, not properly?’
‘Liam and I stowed away once. Tried to. We nipped up a gangplank when no one was looking.’ If I closed my eyes I could hear the mast creak, feel the dipping motion of the boat under us, smell the tar. The crow’s nest was dizzy against a sky that moved with the clouds, the deck scrubbed clean as a dance floor.
‘How far did you get?’
‘Nowhere! They caught us, each by an ear, and marched us off again. We were lucky they didn’t do worse.’ I had to smile. ‘Liam said they made us walk the plank, but it was wasted, we couldn’t tell anyone.’
‘How old were you?’
‘Seven? Thereabouts. It was a time – but you don’t want to hear.’
‘I do.’
It was a summer when Mother caught a fever. Her hair stuck to her head, her cheeks were like two pots of Egyptian rouge. She plucked at the bedclothes and muttered to herself, and didn’t recognize us when we went to the door of her room to say goodnight.
The doctor came every day and the priest was sent for, twice. Dad was haggard, his own cheeks hollow. When the fever broke and she was strong enough, she was sent off to stay with her sister, who lived near the sea. She was gone for weeks.
While she was away, we ran wild. Matt had a nursemaid still, a woman called Ellen, who took us on long walks every afternoon when he was asleep, leaving Lockie to listen out for him. Only, the walks weren’t quite what they seemed. Ellen had a fondness for the public houses around the railway stations, and that’s where she used to take us. When we got bored with the talk in the dim, malted dark, we’d go out into the lanes, to play jack-stones and kick-the-can with other children. Sometimes we explored the arches; other times we went down to the docks. It was one of those days that we stowed away.
It came out when a DMP man brought the three of us home one day, in the back of a cab. Ellen was singing, waving her skinny arms as though the horse were an orchestra and she its conductor. She didn’t want to get out.
The policeman asked Lockie to bring Dad to the door. ‘This wan insists she lives here, sir.’
We skipped up the steps, singing into each other’s faces.
‘Who should I see, but a Spanish la-a-ady …’
‘Whack! for the tooralooralay!’
We gave each other cheerful slaps with every whack, but when I tried one on Lockie, she gave me a box that made my head ring. She grabbed a hold of us by the ears, the same exact way the sailor had. ‘The plank, Katie!’ Liam whispered and we went bravely up the stairs to our doom. She shut us in Liam’s room, while she went back to help Dad with Ellen, who we never saw again.
It was a good story and I’d plenty of practice telling it. It made Hubie laugh. But I was overcome with sudden grief for the boy Liam had been. For the closeness we’d had. Matt got a new nurse and we were reined in, but we’d developed a taste for escape, and one way or another we managed it as often as we could. Down to the railway, or the docks. I only had the nerve for it because Liam was with me to share the adventure and the trouble.
The sick weight in my heart made me think of the time we went into the markets. I hated it, the ground slippery with stinking droppings, the air heavy with cries and moans. Eva coaxed me to say what was the matter, when we got home. I cried, telling her about the cow which had looked right at me with a rolling, frantic eye. ‘If you’d heard her moan, Eva. I swear she watched me go. Blaming me for leaving her there. Begging me not to. Can we go back, can we save her?’
‘That’s just the sound they make, pet. It doesn’t mean what we’d mean.’
‘How do you know?’
‘I just know.’ Although of course she didn’t. They might not know that it’s death they face, but why would a brute creature slipping around in the entrails and droppings of its fellows, surrounded by shrieks and death, not feel fear?
‘Tell me more about Liam,’ Hubie said.
‘He was expelled from school, did he tell you that? He skipped out one day, without permission, to go to Eva’s wedding.’
‘Doesn’t sound like Liam, to abandon a post without leave. Why did he not have permission to go to your sister’s wedding?’
‘She married a Protestant,’ I said. ‘In a Protestant church. Our mother wasn’t happy; she didn’t go herself. She didn’t want us to go. I think it was her who kept him home, after. She was mortified by all the fuss. The whole school had been out combing the grounds, looking for him.’
I’d ducked school as well that day. I’d heard Mother tell Eva she was bound for hell and I didn’t want her to have to go there alone. I was sitting at the back of the church in a state of terror when Liam slunk into the pew beside me, grinning, smelling of straw and warm milk after the lift he’d taken on a milk-lorry. The bonus of it was that after all the fuss died down, Liam went to the day school around the corner. Eva left home that day, but Liam came back.
A shadow threaded a path across the mirror’s disc of imaginary sky. Bombers had visited England. I knew that nights at the Front were anything but still, from Liam’s letters. The grandfather clock in the hall chimed the quarter hour, reminding me that morning would come. Hubie was due to leave, to go back to his family, as soon as the trains were runnin
g. If I wanted to know anything about Liam, now was the time to ask.
‘In his letters, Liam said that when he first got out to France, you told him how to get over his nerves. What did you tell him?’
‘I don’t remember.’
‘You must.’
Distant sounds punctured the night, harmless as corks in champagne bottles. It was hard to believe that they had murder in mind.
His good hand worried the skin of his face. ‘I can only say what helped me. I don’t remember telling anyone else. I went on leave when he arrived – I’d have been asleep on my feet by then. It does happen.’
‘I know.’ That was in his letters too.
Silence. I was about to ask something else when he began to speak. ‘It wasn’t the rum we got before a show, or even the hundreds of other men, all bent on the same thing; neither would be enough, although they help. It’s simple, really. You have to pretend you’re not afraid.’
‘Pretend?’
‘As hard as if your life depends on it, because it does. If you can hold on to enough of yourself to do that, you’re halfway there.’
‘I don’t understand.’
His expression mocked me. ‘I suppose you’re a romantic. To thine own self be true, am I right?’
‘Why would you say such a thing? You don’t know me at all.’
‘I apologize.’ But he didn’t look in the least repentant. He looked angry.
‘Go on.’
He pulled the cigarette case from his pocket and fumbled with the catch. At last it sprang open. He held it out to me. One side was empty, the other nearly so.
‘Do you have more?’
‘I’ve a box of them upstairs. You should take some with you if you go out. Just go in and help yourself. These times, they’re better than money.’
I took two cigarettes from the box and passed him one. I lit my own with a match from the box on the mantel, and extended the match to him.
He leaned down to the flame, sucked in a lungful of smoke as though it were fresh air and he emerging from deep underwater, and breathed it out in a long, satisfied sigh.
