Into Exile

by Joan Lingard

  ‘No,’ he said, for he knew that it was only that way that he would have Brede at all. And he wanted Brede, he was sure of that, for being with her was like a long sunny day that went on and on.

  ‘Go on, finish your tea, Robert,’ said Brede. ‘I don’t like the sight of a hungry man. We’ll manage with the money, Kev, for Ma’ll have her widow’s pension and the family allowances. And maybe Sadie and I can get jobs on the farm too. I wouldn’t mind working in the house cleaning and mending.’

  ‘Sadie might mind,’ said Kevin bluntly. ‘Have you thought of that?’

  ‘Surely not,’ said Brede. ‘Once she sees it’s the only way.’

  ‘I don’t think I could ask her to do all that for me. Have two children to live with us, work for my family, live in the middle of County Tyrone.’ The more he pictured it the less he saw Sadie there, swamped by McCoys, partaking in their commune. ‘It’s a lot to ask of anyone.’

  ‘But she’s your wife,’ Brede objected. ‘Surely when you’re married you expect to help one another out?’

  ‘Help yes, but sacrificing yourself altogether? That’s a different matter.’

  ‘But Robert’s doing it for me.’

  ‘Ay, well … that’s different. After all, he lives in Tyrone already, it’s his home.’

  ‘Does Sadie like London all that much?’ asked Brede.

  ‘No,’ said Kevin, and then he could stand no more of it. For the first time he could not talk with his sister Brede. She seemed not to understand. To her it was a simple thing, the answer to her prayers. She saw them all living in three cottages as happy as sandboys, with the birds singing overhead, not a ripple to disturb the peace. And yet she knew Sadie. He opened the kitchen door, saying that he was going for a walk.

  ‘Will you think it over?’ she said. ‘Please!’

  He would think it over, he gave her his promise before he went out. The streets were the only place he could be alone to think and not be badgered by his family. He walked, with his hands bunched into the pockets of his jacket for warmth, his collar up against the whip of the wind. There was a disturbance further along past the scrapyard; instinctively he turned about, taking another way. He headed for the river for there he could find peace.

  The water was dark, lapping gently, soothing his brain. He leant against a tree, watching the dark shadows, listening to the sound of the night. In many ways he would not mind living in the country: all the things that Brede said about it were true. It was something that he would not be afraid to try even though he liked the town with streets, people, shops, and always something going on. He would be prepared to try it but every time he reached that point he could go no further. For there was Sadie barring the way. How could Sadie live next door to his mother? His mother was a peaceful woman but he sensed that she and Sadie would not hit it off: there was too much that was different between them. How could Sadie take seven children and a sister and brother-in-law? And all Catholics?

  He could hear her voice.

  ‘Set up in a commune with eleven Micks? You’ve got to be joking!’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  A letter from Kevin. Sadie stood in the hall and looked at it, not rushing back into her room as she would once have done to see what was in it. Every letter he wrote, the few that there had been, had annoyed her in some way or other. In one he had said that he had forgiven her. That had made her rage! She did not want his forgiveness and thought he had a queer cheek on him for thinking he was holy enough to grant it. ‘Who do you think you are?’ she had written back. ‘A priest?’ She had told Rita who had shaken her head and said it was time Sadie was forgetting him altogether for there was Joe just crazy about her, ready to give her anything. Sadie did not answer Rita. How could she forget Kevin? Sure, he annoyed her, but when she thought of his dark eyes and the way he had of looking at her she melted right to the middle.

  Mrs Kyrakis shuffled along the passage to see if there was any mail for her.

  ‘One minute,’ she called, when she saw Sadie hovering in the hall. ‘I tell you before.’ She waved her fat finger. ‘Now I tell you the last time. No more parties in your room. The noise last night is enormous.’

  The noise from many rooms in the house was enormous but Sadie did not dare say so. The West Indians sang and played their gramophone so that you could hear it plainly a block away. Sadie thought Mrs Kyrakis was determined to get her out. She probably wanted the room for a relative, Rita had suggested.

  Sadie took the letter into her room. She opened it. It was the longest letter he had ever written. She separated the pages in her hands, then began to read quickly.

  He told her that his family was considering a move to Tyrone. His mother, who was now out of hospital, was desperate to go back and leave the streets of Belfast behind her. Kevin went on to tell Sadie of their plan, that she should come and live with them too. He said that at first he had thought it wasn’t on, but after a while he realized there was nothing else on. The family couldn’t get the house without him and if they stayed in Belfast he would have to stay too. Sadie couldn’t come to live with him in this street, so wouldn’t it be better to at least try it in Tyrone?

  ‘You’ve got to be jokin’!’ she said aloud, in horror, thinking of all those McCoys, all Catholics, with their crosses and holy pictures on the walls trooping off to mass every Sunday, and the priest calling and saying, ‘It can’t be easy for you being the odd one out.’

  ‘Kevin McCoy, your head’s cut!’ She read the letter again, to make sure she had got the message right. But she had. He was asking her to come and live with his whole family and work for them! She wondered what he would have said if she’d asked him to live with her ma with her pictures of the Royal Family on the wall and a mural of King Billy on his white horse painted on the gable end of the house.

  She would be late for work! She pushed the letter into her bag, reached for her coat. Outside she met Krishna.

  ‘Good morning, Sadie.’ He was never in a hurry, left always in good time to go to work.

  But even though she was late she could not resist stopping to tell him about Kevin’s letter.

  ‘But that is good,’ said Krishna. ‘It is better when families can all be together.’

  ‘But not his family and me,’ said Sadie. ‘I’d be outnumbered.’

  ‘Or you could become one of them. That would be even better.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ she muttered to herself as she hurried along to the supermarket where she had a temporary job. Everything was temporary at the moment. She worked at a cash point sitting beside a till ringing up the purchases. It was hard work heaving all the groceries around, bags of potatoes, tins of beans and fruit, cartons of soap powder, and especially at the weekend when the store was jammed with people pushing and complaining. By the evening her arms and shoulders ached and her neck felt stiff when she bent it. But she had to eat. Joe was working too, as a labourer, working long hours, making big money. On Sundays they went out and spent it.

  That evening Rita and Sally came with Joe. They sat around talking, marvelling over the idea of Sadie going to live in the backwoods of Tyrone.

  ‘London’s the place for you, Sadie love,’ said Joe.

  They were talking quietly but before long Mrs Kyrakis arrived at the door to announce that she had put up long enough with the noise next door to her room. Sadie would have to leave at the end of the week! Mrs Kyrakis shuffled back to her own room.

  ‘If you own a house in London you can behave like God,’ said Sadie.

  ‘She’s probably got sixty-five cousins due to fly in from Cyprus,’ said Joe.

  ‘You can move in with us, Sadie,’ said Rita. ‘Can’t she, Sally?’

  ‘Sure. We can squash up.’

  ‘Thanks,’ said Sadie. ‘It’ll just be temporary of course. Until I find my own room.’

  ‘You don’t have to do that,’ said Rita.

  ‘But Kevin and I need a room of our own,’ said Sadie, and then saw that they
were looking at her.

  ‘But he’s not coming back, is he?’ said Sally.

  ‘I suppose not,’ said Sadie wearily. It did not seem possible, that he wouldn’t. ‘Can I come and stay till I know what I’m doing?’

  As long as she wanted, they said, and Joe looked pleased. He winked at Sadie but she did not wink back. She wanted to go and sit in a corner and howl, like she’d done as a small child when hurt and bewildered.

  At the end of the week she packed up their things, hers and Kevin’s, the few possessions which they had collected during their marriage, the coloured mugs, plates, cushion covers. She was thinking about her marriage as if it was over and yet she could not believe that. She loved him, they had fought for one another, gone through all sorts of terrible times, even left their families. To be beaten now! She wrote him a letter trying to tell him what she felt, saying that she loved him and wanted to live with him but she didn’t know how she could go to Tyrone with his family. It took her a long time, trying to put the words down properly so that he would not read it the wrong way. She told him too that she was moving in with Rita for Mrs Kyrakis wanted their room. She put the new address at the bottom and said that she hoped to hear from him soon.

  It was sad to leave the room, the first place they had lived together. In the beginning how she had hated it, wanted to get away, had called it a prison!

  ‘Now then, don’t be such an eejit,’ she said to herself. ‘Sure it’s only a room. There’ll be others.’

  She shared Rita’s room, sleeping on a divan bed, which in the daytime they used as a settee. Clothes, clean, wet, and dirty, draped the room constantly. Rubbish gathered in corners. Hairs clogged the bathroom sink. Dishes lay unwashed on the draining board until Sadie set to and did the lot. Some days she felt that she couldn’t stand the mess any more, then she put on her old jeans and washed and scrubbed the flat from end to end. She was supposed to be untidy, her mother had told her so all her life. But this was squalor! She grinned at herself. She was beginning to think like a prig!

  ‘My, you’re the real domesticated one,’ yawned Rita, who hated anything to do with domesticity and wished that she could live off paper plates and cups and throw everything away.

  But they were kind to her, and they were good-natured. No one ever fought, and from what Sadie had heard about girls in other flats, that at least was something. Rita and Sally were full of tales of girls fighting over boyfriends and dishes and who should clean the bath. Sally and Rita would never fight over cleaning the bath, thought Sadie, for neither of them would ever ever think of doing it.

  Sadie did not mind picking their hairs from the sink or washing the dishes but she did mind sharing Rita’s room for she never seemed to be on her own. Other people sat in it till late every evening and afterwards she and Rita lay down in a fug of cigarette smoke. Then Rita would start to chatter, raking over the gossip of their crowd, just when Sadie wanted to close her eyes and think of Kevin, and with him in her mind drift into sleep. This was only temporary of course, she told herself every night and morning, otherwise she could not put up with it. She was only waiting until Kevin came to take her away.

  ‘Have patience,’ Lara told her, when she went to visit her after work one day.

  ‘I can’t always have patience,’ said Sadie a little irritably. ‘I’m not a very patient person. I think I’m doing very well.’

  Lara laughed. ‘Yes, you are doing very well.’

  Sadie took the baby and bounced him on her knee. He laughed at her, ducking his head against her cheek. She swung him up high so that he laughed even more.

  ‘I’d like to have a baby one day, Lara.’

  ‘I expect you will,’ Lara put out her arms. ‘Come now, time for food. Stay and eat with us, Sadie. Would you like to?’

  Sadie enjoyed Lara’s curry. It was pleasing to sit at the table with Lara and Krishna and eat well-cooked food. Usually they ate frozen food heated up in the flat, unless Sadie made the effort to cook a proper meal. It was nice to be away from the flat for a while, and from Rita and Sally too.

  When she left Lara and Krishna, she called on Mr Dooley and his dog. They were so pleased to see her that she vowed to call more often, spend fewer evenings sitting in the flat or the café with a crowd of people that bored her most of the time. It was a way of living she had drifted into.

  ‘The street is not the same, Sadie, without you here,’ said Mr Dooley.

  ‘I wasn’t here all that long.’

  ‘Long enough.’

  She wished she was back, in the dingy room, with Kevin. She sighed. Life had taken a wrong turn somewhere.

  ‘When is Kevin returning?’ asked Mr Dooley. ‘He has been gone a long time.’

  ‘Sometime,’ said Sadie.

  The winter was moving on; soon it would be spring. The evenings were lengthening and making Sadie restless.

  She met Father Mulcahy in the street and told him about Tyrone. She had known what he would say to her but as she listened she wondered if he could be right. Was she being stubborn? Should she go and do her duty by Kevin’s family as he said?

  ‘You took him for richer, for poorer, for better, for worse.’

  ‘But it wouldn’t work,’ she cried. ‘It would be crazy.’

  ‘You must search your heart, Sadie,’ he told her.

  She had searched it so often that she no longer knew what she really felt. She argued constantly with herself, sometimes thinking she should go and make the best of it, but most times deciding that she could not, knowing that there was too much stacked against her to take the road to Tyrone. She might end up by hating Kevin and all the McCoys put together.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  Kevin got off the bus and waited by the side of the road until it had turned the corner. Then he looked around, at the green fields and hedges, at the trees which were still bare but promised to bud at any moment. He took in a lungful of the sharp clean air. It was quiet, so quiet that he was aware of every sound, a distant tractor, a bird cheeping, the small sigh of wind through the trees.

  He walked close to the hedge, letting his fingers trail against it, feeling the dampness that remained of the morning dew. A horse was grazing in the field, greyish-white, with the heavy legs of a farm horse. He looked up briefly at Kevin, tossed his head, then returned to the fat grass.

  The farmhouse was large and square, red-bricked, a solid house that suggested peace and quiet and security. It might be false security, no one could be sure, for there was no real peace anywhere in the province. Gunmen visited lonely farmhouses from time to time looking to put a bullet through the farmer’s head. Red creeper climbed the walls of the house, a large copper beech stood in the middle of the lawn in front of it. Close by the barns were grouped. Kevin liked the look of the barns; he could live in one of those, he thought, and smiled. He liked the look of the whole scene.

  After half a mile farther on he came to the farm cottages. On the left stood one on its own; on the right a group of three, terraced. They were small but gave out a feeling of being cared for, with the window frames freshly painted, and trees protecting them from the wind. Yellow curtains hung at the windows of the first cottage; the windows of the other two were blank. He peered through, saw empty, rather small rooms. But he was not used to large rooms so that did not bother him. There were other things that did.

  The thought of Sadie living in a flat with Rita and Sally bothered him. He hadn’t liked them very much with their silly giggles and fluttery eyes, their way of looking round the room as if they’d never seen anything as cheap and nasty before. He had always thought of Sadie in their own room keeping his place for him, until he went back. But then he had not gone back. And he could not blame her, Mrs Kyrakis had wanted the room, she had to live somewhere, the girls had offered their flat. She would be sitting with them in the evenings giggling and gossiping and boys would be coming in and out. Joe would be coming in and out. That bothered him.

  He tried instead to think of Sadie li
ving in one of the cottages, coming out through the door to hang up her washing and meeting his mother coming to hang up hers. The picture did not gel. He saw her more easily sitting in Rita’s flat with Joe eyeing her, making her laugh.

  ‘Kevin!’

  He turned to see Robert coming along the path. He wore corduroy trousers and a sweater, and there was mud on his boots. He was smiling.

  ‘Grand to see you. Come on and meet my mother and father.’

  He took Kevin to their cottage. Mr and Mrs Burke were kind and friendly. They had spent a lifetime in the country, could speak only of the farm, thought the town was a place for the idle and the wicked. It would be good for Kevin’s family to get away from it all, they said, and Kevin agreed. They would welcome the McCoys and do everything they could to make them feel at home. Kevin thanked them. He could see his mother and Robert’s getting along nicely, having cups of tea together and chatting about the children and the terrible state of the world. His mother would not stray far from the farm once she got here: it would be a retreat for her. There was nothing wrong with that, Kevin decided, not for her, but he could not see Sadie in retreat, nor himself either.

  He had lunch with the Burkes. The meal was a big plateful of Irish stew followed by steamed jam pudding.

  ‘Boy, that was great!’ he said. The food sat well in his stomach.

  ‘I like to see a man eat a good meal,’ said Robert’s mother contentedly.

  ‘I’m sure our Brede will look after Robert well.’

  ‘We’ve no doubts on that, Kevin. We’re right fond of the girl already.’ Robert smiled. Everything was going to be all right. Kevin could see Brede here, smiling too. She would be contented, probably grow in the end like Robert’s mother, a pink-cheeked country-woman whose life centred around her kitchen and garden, taking pleasure in seeing the menfolk come in from a hard day outside to sit at the table and do justice to her cooking. But he could not see Sadie in such a role.

  After lunch Robert took Kevin to meet Mr O’Brien the farmer. He gave Kevin a firm handshake. He was a big man who looked as if he lived in the open air. Red cheeks with small purple veins, clear eyes. They all seemed so healthy, thought Kevin, and unfussed. In their street in Belfast the women were shrill and harped at their children, the men were dark-faced and wary. There was reason for them to be that way: they had had plenty to set their nerves on edge and it was a miracle that they had stayed as sane as they had.