It was some moments before Emily spoke. ‘What I know, Sally, is this,’ she said at last. ‘The next time Cate comes home from England for a holiday, she won’t be on her own. She’ll have a wee baby with her. And I can make the pair of them welcome, or I can always be reminding Cate, even without saying anything directly to her, how bad a show it is for the child to have no father. And I could go on doing that until the child itself is old enough to know what’s going on. But where would that get any of us? It’s what your daddy was always saying, life’s too short for that sort of thing. And yet it is a bad show, Sally, what’s happened. I won’t be able to feel the way I ought to or indeed want to for a while yet. And you and Cate are going to have to bear with me on that. I know what’s required of me, but it’ll take time. Cate will have to be told that.’
Sally smiled. ‘This is as much as I ever expected you to be able to say at this stage; in fact I think it’s great you’re already this far forward. You’re right, too, Cate will have to have this explained to her.’
They heard the sound of a car pulling up outside the house. ‘That’ll be her now. Stay there, I’ll let her in, and I’ll send her in to you, and you can tell her about it yourself, right now.’
Chapter Ten
They still went over to see Brian’s and Lucy’s family every Sunday afternoon. On one such day together with their cousins, they went out for a walk by the shore of the lough, and when they came back, they could hear voices raised in anger as they approached the house. On going into the kitchen, they found all three brothers locked in dispute.
‘I’m not trying to make out it wasn’t a bad business,’ Brian was saying, ‘for it was.’
‘“Bad business”?’ Peter shouted. ‘For Christ’s sake, it was a massacre!’
Even before he said this the children had guessed what the adults were arguing about; even when they had been down by the shore they knew that their parents would be talking about the bombings in Belfast, because for the past two days, no one had spoken about anything else. That Friday, twenty-two bombs had exploded in the city centre in the space of an hour and a quarter. Nine people were killed, although at first it had been thought that the toll was eleven: the dead had been so badly dismembered that the emergency services had had difficulty in knowing how many bodies they had actually found. Apart from the bombs, the IRA had made many hoax warnings that day, so that the city had been thrown into complete confusion, and people tried desperately to escape, only to find their way blocked every way they turned. Six of the people who died had been taking shelter in a bus station, having been warned away from a place near by.
‘Don’t you even begin to try to explain or justify what happened,’ Charlie said, but Brian pressed on, loudly saying it was the fault of the British army, for having deliberately not passed on all the warnings in time.
‘And if it had been one of your family killed, if it had been Lucy, or Declan, are you telling me you would still be talking the way you are?’ Peter said.
‘You have to see it in context,’ Brian replied. ‘This is a war, and in a war these things happen,’ but he was again howled down by his brothers, neither of whom would make any direct connection between this and certain other things which had happened in the past. The children remembered the grief and anger of their parents six months earlier, when thirteen people had been shot dead in Derry. Their family, like almost all the families they knew, had hung a black flag from the window of their house; and the schools which the children attended had been closed for a day, as a mark of respect. ‘That was wrong and this is wrong,’ Charlie said now; ‘the one doesn’t make the other right.’
In the middle of the following night, Helen, who was a light sleeper, heard her father go past the door of her bedroom, and down the stairs. She waited and when, after what seemed to her like a long period of time, he hadn’t returned, she crept out of her bed and tiptoed down to join him.
The whole house was still in darkness, and she groped her way along the hall until she stood at the open door of the kitchen. She could see the glow of his cigarette at the far side of the room, but even without that, she knew she would have been able to sense his presence there. ‘Daddy,’ she said, softly so as not to frighten him. He called her over to him and she went, the tiles of the floor stone cold under her slipperless feet, and when she reached him he wrapped his arms around her and hugged her tight. His stubble was rough against her face, but she didn’t care, and she drank in the smell of him, which was tinged with cigarette smoke. ‘What if …?’ he said eventually, and he embraced her harder. ‘What if …?’ but he couldn’t finish what he was trying to say, and she realised that he was crying. She knew now, all in a rush, what he was thinking; and there, in the darkness, it was as if she had already lost him, as if his loved body had already been violently destroyed. They clung to each other like people who had been saved from a shipwreck, or a burning building; but it was no use, the disaster had already happened. All over the country, people were living out the nightmare which she now dreaded more than anything else. Who was she to think she deserved to be spared? He took her back up to her room and tucked the blankets tightly around her in the bed; he stroked her face and told her he loved her; he told her to sleep. But she gained a dark knowledge that night which would never leave her.
Everybody was afraid now. People were being abducted and killed; sometimes shot, sometimes beaten to death or mutilated with knives. Bombs exploded, often without warning, killing or maiming anyone who had the misfortune to be near by. A parked, empty car, even on a deserted country road, was now a thing to be feared. Sammy who drove the travelling shop, and the man who sold hardware out of a van, had both long since stopped calling at their house. Charlie accepted this because it wasn’t a personal slight: as Protestants they no longer felt safe driving around a Catholic area at night. They no longer called with anyone the Quinns knew; but Charlie took to heart Wesley Campbell’s refusal to do business with him any longer.
Wesley was a painter and decorator from Castledawson. Over the years he had done work for the family, many times, and they had always been happy with him, because he worked quickly and neatly, and charged a fair price for his labours. More than that, they had enjoyed his company. Every day he would have lunch with them, and during the meal he would keep them amused with droll stories about his mother, who lived with him and his wife. He used to compliment Emily on her baking; and all told, he was a friendly, kind-hearted man. So when Charlie rang him up and asked him when he would be free to come to paper two rooms for them, he was upset to find him evasive. ‘I have a terrible amount of work on hand these days; I can’t make any promises. I’ll get in touch with you in a month or two, maybe.’
Charlie paid no heed to the ‘maybe’, and rang him up again later that year. This time it was Wesley’s wife who answered the phone, and she left him in no doubt whatsoever that Wesley wasn’t available to work for him, nor would he be at any time in the future. This curt dismissal left Charlie in a gloomy mood for days. ‘Me and Wesley got on great together,’ he kept saying. ‘Why is he doing this to me? Sure he knows it makes no odds to me what church he goes to on a Sunday. If he never put his foot across the threshold of a church that would be his business. Maybe I’ll ring him up again and tell him.’
‘You’ll do nothing of the sort,’ Emily said quickly. ‘Leave the man alone. He’s probably too frightened to come to a Catholic house now, and you’ll only embarrass him if you force the point.’
‘Maybe you’re right,’ he said, and then, after a long pause he added, ‘That’s the terrible thing, Emily, you’re probably right. Wesley afraid to come to my house. That shows you the pass we’ve come to in this country.’
His unhappiness about this episode was only compounded when he admitted defeat and hired a local man, who turned out to be a sloppy worker, and charged Charlie a fortune.
That September, Kate joined Helen at the grammar school, and did so with a bad grace. It wasn’t so much that she
wanted to stay at primary school; but she was appalled by the green uniform which she would have to wear every day for the next seven years. ‘It’s like being in jail, so it is,’ she grumbled, and she complained too, once term started, that the teachers were praising Helen to her all the time. They said she would have to be a hard worker, and exceptionally well behaved, if she wanted to be considered as good a student as her sister. ‘They might at least wait until they see what I’m like before they start making comparisons, and giving me such a hard time,’
Towards the end of that year, Granny Kelly died. It was Charlie who took the call from Michael and broke the news to Emily. The children, who were in the next room, heard her screaming ‘No! No!’ and rushed in to see what was wrong. They found their father trying to restrain their mother, who was howling and weeping. ‘Why are you so upset?’ Sally asked innocently when she heard the news. ‘I thought you didn’t like Granny Kelly at all,’ and this only made their mother cry all the more.
The funeral was a dreary affair, conducted in Ballymena under lashing rain. Uncle Michael was wearing a beautifully cut overcoat; Aunt Rosemary was in fur, and having some difficulty in hiding her relief at Granny Kelly’s demise. ‘We looked shabby beside them,’ Kate said that night, ‘and they knew it, too. Mammy was the only person who cared a straw that Granny was dead.’ Emily mourned her mother for months afterwards. She would sit looking out of the window, or would stare at the fire for hours, not saying or doing anything, not reading or knitting or doing crossword puzzles the way she would have done in the past. Sometimes, after the girls had gone to bed, they would hear their parents talking together far into the night, in the downstairs rooms. Occasionally, they would catch some of what was being said; and once Helen heard her father say, ‘There is nothing you can do about the past. All you can do is make sure you don’t make the same mistake again; don’t ever alienate the girls so that they grow up to resent you. Stop thinking about your mammy, and start thinking about Kate.’
They hadn’t been happy with the way Kate was settling into the convent, and the report they received at the end of that year only confused them further. She had consistently high marks, but the comments of her teachers were, in some cases, not so flattering.
‘Are you really bold in class, Kate?’
‘No, Daddy!’
‘Well, your Geography teacher seems to think you are.’
‘Oh she would,’ Kate said, dismissively, ‘she’s just a bore and she only likes bores. Do you know what she teaches us, Daddy? About stones. Can you imagine? She has all these lumps of stone on the window-sill and she expects us to learn their names and how they were formed. Can you imagine anything more dull in the whole world? Anyway, what about Mr Higgins, I bet he says nice things about me.’
‘What does he teach you?’
‘Maths.’
‘He says you’re a delight to teach.’ Kate grinned at this.
‘See?’ she said.
‘I always thought you found Maths boring,’ her father said, looking at her over the top of the report card.
‘I do, it’s even worse than Geography,’ she replied, ‘but Mr Higgins is lovely.’
There was more trouble the following autumn. After school, Kate often went into some of the shops in town, while waiting for her bus home. One day she went into a newsagent’s to look at the magazines, and got so caught up in her reading that she almost missed her bus. She raced out of the shop and jumped on; and was so busy laughing and chattering with her friends that it was only when the bus came to her stop, three quarters of an hour later, that she realised she didn’t have her school bag with her. Charlie rang the police station immediately, but the damage had been done. ‘Major security alert, Kate,’ he said, hanging up the receiver. ‘They have the town centre closed off and the army’s getting ready to blow up your school bag.’
Kate looked horrified, and then she began to smile. ‘You’re pulling my leg, aren’t you?’ But her father didn’t smile back. ‘Afraid not.’
He drove her back to the town to collect the bag, and ‘face the music’, as he put it. They had to go to the police barracks, and an RUC man gave Kate a tremendous telling-off. ‘If I had my way, wee girls like you would be locked up in a cell for the night, to show you how serious this is, and then you wouldn’t be so quick as to leave your property lying around you in future.’
‘It was a simple enough mistake to make,’ Charlie said, as Kate began to snivel, and the RUC man then turned on him. ‘Well it is,’ Charlie persisted. ‘All the child did was to forget her school bag. That it caused such problems is more of a reflection on the sort of country we live in, rather than on her.’ The policeman contented himself with a few remarks about irresponsible parents, and let them go.
Afterwards they sat in the car, and Charlie let Kate bawl her fill. He pulled out a clean white cotton handkerchief and passed it to her; she blew her nose loudly and raised a blotched face to him. ‘I hate it here, now,’ she said, through her tears. ‘It’s horrible. People are getting killed all the time, there’s bombs and everything. Everybody’s frightened or sad. When I grow up, I’m going to go away and live somewhere else.’ She sniffed and added, as an afterthought, ‘and it’s always raining here, too,’
‘Did you buy the magazine you were looking at in the shop?’ he asked her, and she shook her head. He took a fistful of change from his pocket and thrust it at her. ‘Away and get it now, and I’ll wait here; only when you get back to the house, make sure and hide it under your coat so your mammy won’t see it.’
Chapter Eleven
THURSDAY
Although the school the sisters had attended as small children and where Sally now taught was less than a mile from their home, it was a mile in the direction of nothing in particular. As a result, Cate had not had occassion even to pass it for many years, and she had not been inside the building since her time as a pupil there. But when Sally talked about her job, Cate would always say how much she would like to see the school again sometime, and on the day after she came back from having stayed with Helen, Sally suggested that they borrow a set of keys from the school caretaker, and satisfy Cate’s nostalgia.
But as they drove there, Sally was annoyed with Cate, and for a foolish reason: Cate was in a good mood. Given that Sally’s motive in suggesting the visit had had precisely that end – to distract Cate and to cheer her up – Sally could see that there was no logic to her own reaction. In spite of that, she couldn’t help feeling resentful. Because she lived away from home, Cate had been spared the pain and emotional labour of helping their mother through her bereavement. And now here was Cate, home with a fresh dose of trouble, and again it fell to Sally to ease the burden: to placate their mother, to plead Cate’s case, to defuse, as far as she could, all tension and anger, and prevent rows. She glanced at Cate, who was sitting beside her. Sally knew she would never be able to broach the subject. The long years of trying to please everyone had taken their toll. Concealing her true feelings if she knew they might cause pain or displeasure to those around her and saying the things she thought people wanted to hear had become so natural to her that she now found it impossible to do otherwise. As if to prove the point, Cate suddenly said, ‘I’ll never forget how good you’ve been to me this week, never,’ and Sally found herself replying automatically, ‘Oh, don’t mention it. That’s what sisters are for.’
They pulled up in front of the school gates and Sally said, ‘Now you have to promise me that you won’t go on about how small everything looks.’
But Cate promised nothing of the sort, and even before they went inside she was exclaiming about how the wall around the playground must have been lowered, because she could see over it so easily now, and she couldn’t believe that the only reason for this was that she had grown so tall. As Sally struggled with the keys Cate went over to the window and, cupping her hands against the glass, she peered in.
‘Oh, this is strange,’ she cried, ‘this is giving me goosebumps, it looks e
xactly the same as I remember it. God, I think I even remember that wall chart, the one with the rainbow on it. Do you think that’s possible?’
‘I doubt it,’ Sally said drily, as she finally managed to open the door. ‘We may not be great about updating the visual aids, but we’re not that bad either!’
‘It even smells the same,’ Cate said, as she stepped inside.
‘And the tiles, I remember the tiles now, but if you’d asked me the colour of the floor, I wouldn’t have been able to tell you. It must feel so odd to you, to be working here.’
‘Not in the least,’ Sally said. ‘I’m used to being here. It would feel far stranger if they closed the place, which they talk about doing often enough. I hardly ever think about the past. Maybe that’s something I missed out on by not going away.’
They were standing in the hallway beside a row of low hooks, above each of which was a piece of paper with a name written on it. ‘I had a tartan shoe-bag, yours was dark green with white spots, and Helen’s was a sort of floral print. I think Granny made them for us. Why do I remember that? Why do some of those things stay in your mind so clearly and others don’t?’ Cate bent down and read the names of some of the children from the paper labels.
‘Patrick Larkin. Is that Willy Larkin’s son?’
‘You wouldn’t need to ask that if you saw him,’ Sally said, ‘for I don’t think I ever saw a child that looked as like his da. You’d maybe ask me if we kept the same kids stashed away for twenty years, never mind the wall charts. Come in here, and I’ll show you the room where I teach. I don’t really like it when it looks like this,’ she went on, nodding at the rows of tables on top of which were stacked all the chairs. ‘You don’t really get the full picture without the children. It looks bare, too, without the plants and the goldfish.’
One by One in the Darkness Page 16
