Light a Penny Candle

by Maeve Binchy

  Dear Elizabeth,

  This is meant to be a happy Christmas letter, but I’ve never felt so fed up in my life. Mam’s after saying that I should tell you all the news, but honestly there’s nothing to tell. The place is so boring and I look so awful, I look so ugly, and there’s nothing to do and everyone’s in bad tempers like weasels. Sister Catherine’s really a devil. I know you wouldn’t hear a word against her, and she had a soft spot for you because you understood all those awful things, trains coming into a station and the platform half a mile long… but really she’s the end. She has it in for me.

  She called to the shop. To the shop. A nun coming all the way to talk to Mam at work. She said to Mam and Dad that I would have to be taken away from the school because I was a distraction and a bad influence on the rest of the class. I was getting one last chance.

  Honestly it’s not fair. I don’t do nearly as much to disrupt her stupid classes as others I could mention. It’s only because she never liked me, it’s only because she can see me easily because of my hair. I wish you were here. You used to be able to make them see that things weren’t serious. She said that as a favour, and one last chance I’ll be taken back next term, but I’ll be watched like a hawk. What’s so new about that, I wonder? I’m watched like a hawk anyway.

  I wish you could come here for Christmas and cheer us up. We never seemed to fight so much when you were here, or maybe we fight much more nowadays and it would still go on if you came back. But I don’t think so. Mam said after the vicious, evil Sister Catherine left that you had the right attitude about work, you just put your head down and did it. I wish I could. I wish I could put my head down but it’s so pointless. Seems so useless.

  Maureen’s doing a line with that stupid Brendan Daly, you remember him, they live in that place with the huge falling-down barn we used to pass cycling to school when we went round by the river. We used to say it was more of a barn than a farm. Anyway, he’s serving his time in some food firm in Dublin and he met Maureen at a dance, and now they’re going out together. Imagine going all the way to Dublin and having a life of your own and meeting someone from Kilgarret! Joanie and I say that when we leave and go into the world the first question we’ll ask every single person is, ‘Are you from Kilgarret?’ Then we won’t be in any danger of falling for someone from here.

  Maureen’s all silly and giggly and she actually calls him ‘my Brendan’. You’d die laughing if you heard her. Daddy was asking her would she get the ring for Christmas, and Maureen got all annoyed and said she was twenty-one and could do what she liked. Daddy said he was only asking a civil question and when Maureen had gone off in floods of tears, Mam said to Dad that he should be more gentle because Maureen was obviously hoping for the ring but didn’t dare to let us know that in case it didn’t happen.

  Honestly imagine marrying Brendan Daly and his awful sticky-out teeth! Imagine going to bed in the same bed as him and imagine being stuck with him forever and ever for the rest of your life.

  Joannie thinks it’s very funny, she keeps calling Brendan my ‘brother-in-law’ and whenever we’re going to school she says, ‘Will we ride past your in-laws’ barn?’ Joannie’s very funny now, you’d like her more than we did last term, she’s got more lively.

  It’s funny in your letters when you mention Monica. I always think of the cat. I never heard of anyone else called Monica. When you said you went to Brief Encounter with Monica I thought for a moment that you had taken a cat to the cinema. I saw it too, it came here two weeks ago for three nights. Everyone cried except me. I thought they were stupid not to go away together. I mean in England they can do that, there’s divorce and everything and it’s not against the religion. There was no reason for them to stay with their awful husbands and wives, except just to make a plot.

  I said that to Mam and she said I had a lot to learn about loyalty and making a bargain and keeping it. Whatever I say or do it appears I have a lot to learn.

  I have awful spots, on my forehead and on my chin. Joannie says that you can’t see them much but when I asked Eamonn he said they were like lighthouses and that if people got lost they could see their way home by the red glares on my face.

  Can you think of one single piece of cheering news to tell me? Like that you’ll come and stay, or come back and live here. Or what am I to do to get that rotten, bad, half-mad Sister Catherine off my trail?

  Happy Christmas to you all, we couldn’t get over that picture of you and your mother. Mam has it in her bedroom on the dressing table. Your mother looks like a beauty queen. Do you get on well with her these days? It must be funny going back and finding a new mother in a way.

  Love from a very miserable

  Aisling

  Mother developed a bad flu just before Christmas. The doctor came and said she must build herself up more, that she had gone to skin and bone. Father and Elizabeth tried to give the doctor a picture of what Mother normally ate during an average day. She had no bread, no potatoes, no puddings. She just picked at things. She looked very pale and listless.

  ‘I’m sorry to be such a trouble,’ she kept saying. Father and Elizabeth had been preparing for Christmas in their own ways, making chains of paper, gathering greenery, holly and ivy from the common, making fancy place cards for the table, reading recipes for novel seasonal punches. Now Mother was ill and it would all be in vain. She refused to have her bed taken downstairs to where the one fire burned.

  ‘That’s out of the question,’ she said faintly. ‘Only invalids and old people have their beds taken down to the living room. I shall stay here until it’s gone.’

  Elizabeth offered to have the chimney in the bedroom swept and light a fire there, but Mother wouldn’t hear of it. She wore mittens and had two hot-water bottles and that was fine. She lay uncomplainingly, her hair lank on the pillow. Father was totally unable to cope with it all. In the bedroom he stood wringing his hands saying, ‘Violet, is there anything we can do?’ in a hushed, death-chamber voice that obviously drove Violet to the limits of her patience with him. Downstairs he would rail senselessly at anything from current dieting fads, to the shortages in the war, to Mother getting colds going to meet friends from the munitions factory.

  Monica’s mother taught Elizabeth how to make broths and hot drinks and how to make a cold compress without drowning the patient and saturating the bed. On Christmas Eve the doctor assured them that there was no danger of pneumonia and that it was just a matter of a slow return to her old energy and her old self. Elizabeth, cheered greatly by the pronouncement, became impatient with Father who was still grumbling and muttering about doctors being know-alls and knowing nothing when it came to it.

  ‘Father, do you never see any good in anything? Can you never see light at the end of the tunnel?’ she snapped.

  ‘Not really,’ he said.

  ‘But that’s a dreadful way to live,’ she said.

  ‘In my experience, lights at the end of the tunnel tend to flicker out,’ said Father.

  Elizabeth thought of last Christmas as she prepared Mother’s beef tea. Last Christmas Day, walking in the frost and early-morning darkness up to mass, shouting greetings at everyone, full of anticipation for the day ahead. Little Niamh had fallen and cut her knee. There had been enormous sympathy, dabbing with clean white handkerchiefs, taking her to a street lamp to examine the wound, but Niamh, more frightened than hurt, was roaring in great bellows.

  ‘Oh Niamh, for goodness’ sake stop crying,’ Aisling had said. ‘Your leg isn’t going to fall off. Don’t spoil Christmas Day.’

  ‘You can’t spoil Christmas Day,’ Donal had said.

  Eileen had lifted the hefty five-year-old up in her arms. ‘Tie a bandage on it Sean,’ she had said briskly. ‘Poor old warrior Niamh. But Donal’s right, of course it won’t spoil Christmas Day, nothing can spoil Christmas Day.’

  Mother’s hand was very thin. The soup spoon looked big and heavy when she held it.

  ‘I’m sorry you’re having such an awful
Christmas, my darling,’ she said to Elizabeth.

  Elizabeth sat like a guard watching that she finished every mouthful.

  ‘You can’t spoil Christmas Day,’ she said like an echo.

  Violet looked at her. There was not a trace of irony in what Elizabeth had said.

  Downstairs George was huffing and puffing with damp sticks to light a fire that wouldn’t catch.

  Tears came down Violet’s pale face.

  ‘It’s all such a dreadful mess,’ she sobbed. ‘It wasn’t meant to be like this. It’s all such a hopeless mess. …’

  ‘Mother, it’s all going to be fine.’ Elizabeth was distraught to see Mother’s shoulders heaving like this. With her foot she closed the bedroom door in case Father should hear and come up to make things worse.

  ‘No, it’s all turned out wrong. There’s no point in any of it. I couldn’t be more sorry, but I can’t think what else I could do … I tried my best, but I’m just not a good little housewife … I can’t stand polishing up a house and cooking meals for nothing. …’

  ‘But Mother, it’s not for nothing, it’s for us,’ cried Elizabeth. ‘And we’re very grateful, and when you’re better we’ll help you much more. I was saying to Father that we don’t do enough for you. …’

  Violet looked at her with swimming eyes. ‘You still don’t understand, you’ll never understand. Oh God, it’s such a hopeless mess.’

  She turned her head on the pillow, and Elizabeth decided not to force any more beef tea on her. She sat there for a while but Mother said no more; her breathing became less agitated and then she slept or pretended to sleep. Elizabeth crept out.

  Father looked like a big eager dog as he knelt by the fire with a newspaper hoping the draught would catch the flames. ‘How is she?’ he whispered.

  Elizabeth paused. ‘She’s fine Dad, she’s having a little sleep.’

  She went back to the kitchen table which had been set for the festive meal. There were drawings of robins on cards, with holly in their beaks; Elizabeth had cut them out as shapes. There were three home-made Santa Claus figures propping up the table napkins. Bits of ivy and greenery had been criss-crossed across the table. Elizabeth sat down and looked at the plate of corned beef, and the three pieces of chicken. She had stood in a queue for four hours to get the chicken pieces; the corned beef was from a tin. She felt fifty as she prepared the Christmas dinner.

  Dear Aisling,

  I meant to write, but everything was so confused and awful here, I couldn’t take my mind away from it all. First about you … now remember the way you used to get away with everything by looking as if you were doing something? It worked before, why won’t it work now; or is there any point in saying to Sister Catherine, let’s have a truce? Or what about actually doing what they say and forgetting everything else except work for two terms? Then you’ll be top of the class and they’ll all be delighted and they’ll leave you alone.

  I don’t think the first will work. Maybe we’re all too old now to get away with things, or maybe the nuns are worried about exam results. In your place I would make a truce with Old Catherine. Honestly, she was nice, but you’ll never believe it. She was very lonely, she’s much older than the other nuns. She lives for the pupils, and she’d feel so happy if you had a man-to-man talk, or a girl-to-nun talk. But you won’t I suppose. So that leaves the last solution, work yourself to the bone as they say. You could regard it as a kind of a competition. You’ll show them, you’ll prove them wrong about you. I honestly think you could wipe the floor with the rest of the class. Monica (not the cat!) was asking me about you and I told her you were brighter than anyone here in Weston High, and she couldn’t believe it, because she actually thinks I’m bright. And I’m not, I just put my fingers in my ears and learn.

  Please let me know what happens. I wish you would write every day. I wish I could write every day. It all seems so far away sometimes, and then when I was reading your letter about Maureen and Brendan Daly – of course I remember him, he was awful – it all comes back. Did she get engaged, are they really in-laws now? I suppose we’ll all have to be very polite and not say anything bad about them in case they become Maureen’s nearest and dearest. Isn’t it funny though that she likes him! You’d think Maureen could have anyone. …

  I keep rambling on and on about Maureen because I want to put off writing the next part.

  Everything is so frightening here at home. Mother was very ill over Christmas. She was in bed for ten days, it was a chest cold and flu but she was very weak, and she lay there like a ghost. But she worried all the time about something, and I think that she’s thinking about leaving us and going away. Now please, please, please, don’t tell Aunt Eileen this, I may be wrong, it may have been just because she was so ill. But she kept apologising for things not turning out right, as if something was over.

  I think Dad knows it too and won’t admit it. Whenever I say that we might all do something, you know something cheerful that would please Mother, he just asks what’s the point. If you knew how awful it is. They are both moving around the house apologising if they come into the same room as each other. No, don’t laugh, that’s what it’s like. It seems impossible to try to place it in Kilgarret, with everyone running in and out of rooms all the time, but here there’s only the three of us, and I sit reading and pretending not to be watching them.

  Could you pray that it will be all right? I suppose you must know that I sort of gave up my faith. I never knew if I really had the faith anyway, since you wouldn’t let me go to communion and confession, but whatever I had of it is gone. Just pray that Mother won’t go away with Mr Elton, please Aisling, and ask people at school to pray for a special intention. I know you won’t tell anyone. Mr Elton’s very nice, it was he who took that silly picture, the present to you all, and he’s always laughing and making jokes. And now that Mother’s better and everything, she meets him a lot, and I’m so afraid he and she might be thinking of going off together. Sometimes when I come in from school and there’s a note from Mother on the table saying she may be late, I’m almost afraid to read it in case it’s saying more than that.

  I may be wrong. Remember the time we all thought that Eamonn was drowned in the river, and he’d just gone home the other way? Well, that’s the kind of fear I have now.

  Love from

  Elizabeth

  Harry had said that no good came out of lies. Harry had said that there was nothing evil and wrong about falling in love, and now Violet must take the deception out of it by telling them. She must say it fair and square to George, she must tell Elizabeth. She must explain that there was no need for hurt or blame.

  Violet wished it was as easy as that. Harry’s wife, long gone from anyone’s life and living in the west of England with her new husband, presented no problem. Harry had no children. He would be very happy to include Elizabeth in their household if she wanted to come. He was starting a new business, they would have a flat over the premises. There would be plenty of room for the girl.

  Violet decided to tell them the day before Elizabeth’s sixteenth birthday. But she knew that they both had seen it coming. The May sunshine fell on the table and on Violet’s restless thin hands, which twisted and turned as she spoke.

  Father didn’t answer. He just sat there with his head bent.

  ‘George, please say something,’ Violet said.

  ‘What is there to say? You’ve made up your mind.’

  ‘Daddy, don’t let it happen, say something to show Mother you want her to stay,’ begged Elizabeth.

  ‘Mother knows I want her to stay,’ said George.

  ‘Oh don’t be so weak Daddy, do something,’ Elizabeth cried.

  George lifted his head.

  ‘Why am I the one who is weak, why am I the one who must say something, do something? I’ve done nothing. I’ve just done what anyone else does, plod along. This is what happens.’

  ‘But George, we have to talk, we have to talk about arrangements.’

&nb
sp; ‘Make whatever arrangements you like.’

  Elizabeth stood up.

  ‘If you have to talk about arrangements, like for a battle, you won’t want me here. I’ll go upstairs and I’ll come down when you’ve finished.’

  George had stood up also.

  ‘No, there’s no talk about arrangements. Do what you like Violet, set up whatever you want. I presume you want me to divorce you, you’re not suggesting that I give you evidence or anything. …’

  ‘No, of course. …’

  ‘Fine, then whenever it’s to be done get some solicitor to write a letter. …’

  ‘But George. …’

  ‘That’s all, isn’t it? I’m going out for a walk now. I’ll be back at teatime.’

  ‘But Daddy, you can’t walk out now, you can’t just go out of the room and not discuss it. …’

  ‘George, what about Elizabeth, what will we do? Will you …? I mean. …’

  ‘Elizabeth is a grown-up girl, she’s almost sixteen years of age. She can go with you or stay here, or move between both houses … I presume you will have a house. Your friend isn’t going to expect you to live in his van is he …?’ George had reached the door. ‘I’ll be back for tea,’ he said and closed it behind him.

  Violet and Elizabeth looked at each other.

  ‘I’m sorry Daddy was so weak, he’s a bit afraid of you, that’s it,’ Elizabeth said.

  ‘Oh …’ Violet began to speak but she was choked with emotion. She moved over and held Elizabeth’s hand. ‘Do you understand, do you have any understanding?’

  Elizabeth sighed. ‘Yes Mother, I do, I think I do. It’s awful, but I think I do understand. And you’d better cheer up because if the point of going off with Mr Elton is to have more life and fun and zing and everything, there’s no point in feeling guilty and wretched. …’

  ‘It’s not going off, it’s only half a mile away. Will you come? Harry wants you to, and I do. Very much.’