The Woman's Daughter

by Dermot Bolger

  For a library assistant to be trapped inside the office on a summer’s day was torture, to be out on a van paradise. That first morning Billy drove us to Portrane and Donabate. Victorian turned out to be Joanie’s favourite word, used for everything she liked. The instant old wooden pubs we passed with the plastic signs and red leather seats still in a skip on the pavement outside, the Madonna-style outfits in the magazine in her hand.

  We stopped at Corballis Cross, a lone golfer searching for his ball in a bush behind us, the sea broken by the old Martello tower. The battered kettle steamed on the rickety stove, Billy made tea in chipped mugs, then we settled down to playing cards, the deals broken by the occasional elderly borrower. Joanie had a way of laughing that involved her whole body, she would tell the bluest jokes for hours before her face suddenly succumbed into a scarlet blush. At one o’clock we scrambled over the rocks and walked along the beach together. Who began the play-acting I’m not sure, but suddenly the three of us were shaking sand from our hair. We ran between the tufts of grass on the dunes, ambushing each other on those concealed sandy hollows. I stumbled and she caught me by the neck, shovelling sand down my shirt before racing shrieking away. Billy had been left a little way behind us. I watched her scramble up the slope and stumble at the top just before I caught her. She twisted from me and we tumbled together, her legs cool against my arms, her face close with short excited breaths. I landed on top. Her dress had ridden up to reveal white suspenders and the palest of pink knickers flecked with fine grains of brown sand. We looked at each other without moving, her eyes serious and yet mocking, defying me to do something. I glanced up. Billy was watching us from the crest of the dune.

  ‘Is it that time already?’ he said softly and turned to walk back.

  Even the trams have been extended this far. Two horses draw them to the bridge over the Tolka where a third is harnessed by the wall of the Botanic Gardens to pull the tramcar up the glistening slope of Washerwoman’s Hill to its terminus. We are quite a growing township here. When I walk down to buy the Dublin Evening Mail Barre, the grocer, raves on about the extravagance of asphalting the paths and removing the mud heaps. ‘Four shillings and sixpence per yard,’ he shouts, thumping his fist on the counter. ‘What sort of outlay is that for a poor township like ours?’ The well-gravelled path did in his father’s time.

  I leave him there fingering his huge moustache, one eye peeled for carts turning out of Slut’s Alley, and I think of my own father as I walk up the hill towards home. He too has come up in the world, his own stone cross, even if bought by me years later, with the inscription he could not have read in the great cemetery which shares this parish’s name. Often in my head I try to tell him of my world, imagining his wonder at each invention, each new technical term. How far away famine seems from here, how distant three decades have become. We live in an age of science and change, of certainty and strength. I tell him this in my head as I walk, reassuring him that the hunger he dreaded for his family has long passed.

  I own my own cottage between the barracks and the model school, within sight of the last street light beside the convent wall. Already I can see my daughter, white and blue in her Sunday dress, coming through fields of poppies to the banks of the Tolka. My profession is secure – the world will always need Latin and Greek. As long as I remain subservient and decorative the rich will find no reason to dispense with me. The future is bright as a shining new penny. So why do my talks with my dead father always become attempts to reassure myself?

  Beyond the tram terminus the fields resume, the old coach road cutting through them down to the bridge. On the right a row of new labourers’ cottages – Bridget’s father’s among them – stone walls and slate roofs looking down on the third-class cabins with mud walls nearer the river bank. Across from it the mound where the poor buried their famine victims, often still breathing, in open pits outside the railings of the new municipal city of the dead stretching down to the river. Next to it a tavern plies its trade, and across from that, by the walls of the asylum, the great wood begins. The small stream which gives that place its name can be glimpsed trickling down a gully through the trees by the roadside. Beyond the woods a second asylum appears, although the residents of our larger houses prefer to describe it as a rest home for patients of the upper and middle classes suffering from alcoholic excesses and other disorders. It boasts extensive pleasure grounds and views over the city. A fife and drum band march on Sundays to the indifferent stares of its inmates. But do not pass its gates. Turn left through the woods instead, cross the stream at Savages Lane to where the estate of Shallon House, the townland of the gallows, begins.

  In my first days there I thought often of Hegerty and my father, their rows in that tenement over my weak frame. It began with the overwhelming whiteness of the first pages I glimpsed. The other boys left me alone after the Black Church, ridiculing me but yet slightly afraid. I enjoyed my difference. I could turn Hegerty’s leather covers in peace, run my palm over the smooth, unevenly cut pages. The print represented nothing except a strange reassuring order. It fitted each page, proportioned, complete. When I closed my eyes the black letters lingered, soothing me as if the noise of boys and the smells and shouts of the house were filtered out.

  One day Hegerty’s hand touched my shoulder. I looked up. He had risen from the table, was staring down at me.

  ‘Can you read?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then what can you see?’

  ‘It’s perfect, Sir … like it contains everything.’

  ‘What language is it?’

  ‘The language of books, Sir. Different from what we speak.’

  ‘What age are you, boy?’

  ‘Almost eight and a half, Sir. Soon Dada says I’ll be ready for work.’

  ‘You know where my school is. Come to me there in the morning.’

  ‘But my Dada says …’

  ‘Be there or I’ll split your blasted Dada’s head open.’

  I have never rid myself of the smell of that house. Sometimes when I bathe I still stop and sniff. Rain came in the smashed fanlight, ceilings that were once painted now flaked away into white chalky dust. Even as I ran upstairs my exhilaration vanished. Irish was a language spoken by my parents behind our backs. A backward trait which would drag us down if we caught a grasp of it. Only my mother relented, whispering half-daft stories we could barely follow on Sunday evenings. Books were objects which authority used to keep us in our place. My father’s cramped room had space only for the functional English of the streets.

  So I said nothing and retreated sullenly back into the tussle of limbs on the landing until the following evening when Hegerty’s step silenced us. My brothers ran in to shelter, leering from behind my father’s chair. They argued for half an hour while I listened out on the landing, the hordes of other children stomping up and down, the women slopping out their families or bent under buckets of water.

  ‘The boy has to work like the rest of his kin. What future is there in this learning, what use is it for him at all?’

  ‘The boy has words in his head, God blast you man. What class of labour will you find for him with thousands already out on the streets, old men before they are twelve?’

  The door opened and Hegerty strode past me, down the stairs, not looking back. He slammed his own door and reluctantly I walked inside. My father sat at the chipped table, my brothers and sisters huddled now like a heap of rags on the bed. They looked at me already like I was a stranger. My mother fussed by the window, near tears and bewildered. The door behind me opened again. Hegerty stood glaring on the threshold. He flung the coins across the bare floor.

  ‘There’s as much as you’d earn from him labouring. He’s hired out to me now. See you have him down early in the morning.’

  The door shut and still nobody moved. The eyes and mouths of my brothers and sisters all formed three perfect Os. I knew my father wanted to smash the cracked plate before his hands. In Sligo he would not have been so
easily conquered. McAndrew’s cattle blinded with a knife the night after the agent drove two tenants off, a thirty-mile walk, when the famine was at its worst, for a day’s relief work building a Government pier that crumbled back into the sea. Give him stones or bricks or human blood and he would deal with them. Here with Hegerty in the city he encountered words. He backed off, frightened of their closed secrets. He nodded at my mother who ran forward to gather up the money, thrusting a coin into my sister’s hand, pushing her towards the door. The bundle of rags on the bed dispersed in an excited clamour like birds taking off. They pushed around me with shouts and laughter, giddy at the sudden prospect of food.

  In the mornings Joanie would be the first to climb on to a van before the cleaners were off and, hogging the seat at the end, would take down a book on anything Victorian. Period romances, biographies of Prince Albert, books of old photographs gathering dust on the oversized shelves. The girls restocked around her. If one dumped a pile of books beside Joanie she’d smile vaguely and look back at the sepia albums. Back in the office while the others pretended to look busy she’d vanish into the storeroom and rip the plastic covers off a few hardbacks. She’d smoke cigarettes taken with great display from a battered cigarette case, with the damaged books piled in front of her, only bothering to pick up the scissors or Sellotape when someone important entered.

  ‘The girl has this job sussed already,’ Billy claimed after a week. ‘There are girls here ten years who are only trotting behind her.’

  And he was right. She seemed without nerves or fear of anybody. Her mind was a polished stone focused just on what concerned her. Although I was only a decade older, in that office we seemed from distant generations. Put on or not, she had an air of having already seen more of life than the rest of us. And yet parts of her were childish, a constant boasting about her family’s success, a way of walking as though the eyes of every man in the room couldn’t leave her.

  Only out on the vans did she open up, joke as we climbed into the cabin, throw her hair back and tease Billy as he drove. The rosters should have meant we were out together only occasionally, but after six years I knew how to twist them, and without any conscious plans I began to pair Joanie and myself together.

  That first month we covered the whole of North Dublin; every tiny seaport and rural village, secluded housing estates dropped as if by chance among fields of corn, children zigzagging across hillocks of muck like soldiers in the Great War to queue with books on the half-finished fringes of the city.

  ‘You look jaded,’ Billy shouted to her one morning as I leaned against the counter flap to hold on to a boiling kettle in the traffic.

  ‘It’s my sister,’ Joanie said. ‘She’s only eighteen months. Drives me crazy at night with her crying. She’s in with my parents but they sleep like logs.’

  That lunch-time near Ballyboughal she told us about her home; the granny in the private geriatric hospital whom they visited on Sundays when her father, a sales manager based in London, was home. Her brother who had finished two years in London University, her elder sister who was training as a British Airways hostess. Billy rolled his eyes, impressed.

  ‘How many younger than you?’ he asked.

  ‘Just the one. My little sister.’

  ‘That’s quite a gap.’

  ‘So what if it is?’ Joanie said and stared moodily out at the trees on the crossroads where we had hidden the van.

  That night Billy offered to drop her at her door. We halted at the traffic lights at the end of the carriageway. Joanie pointed at the new town houses half-way up the hill.

  ‘Daddy’s car’s there,’ she said. ‘He must be home.’

  ‘They’re new houses,’ Billy said, ‘I thought you had always lived here?’

  ‘No, somewhere else,’ Joanie replied, ‘somewhere different.’

  In the rear-view mirror I watched her shrink into a motionless black speck refusing to budge until we were gone.

  We worked from dawn until the last light could be wrestled from the sky, then huddled over candles till my eyes ached as if needles were pushed through the pupils. Hegerty brought me through every volume on his floor, dismissive of English but accepting its purpose, lingering like an old miser with a naked girl over every closely printed phrase of Latin. He closed his school in the lane, made me wait in the rain outside the houses he tutored in, gibbering to me in Latin as we pushed our way home through the packed streets. I learnt fast and if I dozed a fist against the side of my skull reminded me of lessons undone. He wanted my attention for every word, thrilling in my grasp of pronunciation, reliving each fresh revelation of language through me again.

  Late at night I would climb upstairs, fight for a space in the mass of bodies on the straw mattress in the corner. My brothers and sisters shifted grudgingly, greedy for space and warmth. I no longer belonged to them, felt their resentment even as they ate whatever scraps of food Hegerty’s few coins brought in. They gave to each other while Hegerty taught me to withhold, to gather the strength to master the books and not fall asleep, risking a blow to my neck. He taught me Greek and Latin and how to be apart until even their derision did not register. I lived in a world without rich or poor, a sphere of cold and rigid letters.

  When deep hunger visited the city Hegerty fed me scrapings without them knowing, when scarlet fever broke out he refused to allow me to return home. I shared his rough bed, felt the hard ridges of his bones dig into me as he slept, watched with him as three of my brothers were carried off in coffins tacked together from packing cases. For a fortnight we both starved on soup that was little more than water with pepper so he could buy me an old suit off the cobbles in the market. Now I followed him into homes in Phibsborough and Drumcondra, papists trying to cast off the accents of the poor, watched their dumb children stutter over my immaculate words. And always he spoke of me as his protégé, whispering urgently to bored parents on the doorsteps, searching for the scholarship that would make me secure.

  From before dawn on Sundays till the last priest was unrobed he bundled me from front pew to front pew, dressed in my worst rags, a Latin missal held up in my hands.

  ‘These bastards in the skirts have the power now,’ he’d mutter, smiling meekly when one of them glanced down at us from the altar. The reputation he spread grew. I acquired rumours of a vocation before the first stirrings of hair on my body. The priests took me in tow, paid for schooling, university at sixteen, a plot for my father when he died, a dinner in my honour when I graduated with distinction. From a devout bundle of rags in a pew to a priest robed in his finery. What an example to the poor, what an exhibit to be displayed before visiting prelates. They raised their glasses and smiled, beckoning gently towards the seminary.

  I went to Hegerty for advice, careful on the stairs lest I meet my mother or her two daughters who were still unmarried. His skin was jaundiced and stretched on his jaws. He spat out yellow spittle mixed with the hint of blood.

  ‘Run like the clappers of hell from the bastards,’ he said and coughed half his insides up.

  ‘How can I thank you?’

  ‘I’ve a plot long bought in Glasnevin. You buy me a tombstone, boy, and make sure you inscribe it in perfect Latin.’

  The clergy do not like to be cheated. No school would open its doors to me, no Catholic home risk the possibility of their disapproval. And that is how I came to Shallon House, a rarity, a dancing bear, a token poor papist with knowledge. My employers liked me to appear at their parties so guests could marvel at their benevolence. My smile was pitched just above that of a servant’s. I quoted a few phrases and disappeared like a dog that has been patted. Often outside on the lawn leading down to the gate-lodge and woods I would smash my fist in my palm and curse them in every useless language as the waltzes began, the swirl of white skirts at windows. My cell-like room above the servant quarters beckoned. I belonged to no one, stripped of the hungers of my class and given ones no feast could satisfy. If language could smash walls I would have razed
that house. Instead I looked around for something to subvert them, to be master of. It was then, one morning, that I saw Bridget.

  Most afternoons in the office I went for a sleep upstairs in the storeroom, stretched out on the dusty bench beside the old encyclopaedias and the rare Y stock. One Wednesday I heard footsteps on the wooden stairs and leaned forward, waiting to spring to work when they reached my bay. They turned down the next bay and stopped. Joanie’s eyes leaned down to stare across the open-backed shelves.

  ‘Is this Aladdin’s cave?’ she asked. ‘I want a guided tour.’

  I beckoned and began to show her my favourite old books: Forbidden and Suspect Societies from the Catholic Truth Society on the dangers of the Young Men’s Christian Association and Rotary Clubs; hotel brochures promising flushing water closets and running water; the Revd Caswell’s Guide for Young Females of the Middle Classes to be a Model Victorian Wife.

  ‘There should be one somewhere here,’ I said, ‘written by an ancestor of mine. My great grandfather, some class of a Latin scholar but I’m not sure of his surname. Tales of the West of Ireland or some such lark. My grandmother had a copy but they threw it out when she died.’

  Joanie wasn’t listening. Her face lit up as she pored over the ragged cut pages of Caswell’s Guide, pausing at the drawings of clothes and household plans and the photos of carriages.

  ‘I was born too late for all that,’ she said sadly.

  I climbed up and pulled down more dust-covered books, infant mortality statistics and comparisons of Dublin and Calcutta by foreign travellers.

  ‘It wasn’t all coaches and pretty maids and glamour,’ I said. ‘It was pretty poxy for most of our ancestors.’

  ‘Not for me it wouldn’t have been. ‘Joanie was suddenly vehement. ‘I’d have had my own set of rooms and a maid to do my bidding, a carriage with two black horses waiting and a gentleman to offer me cigarettes from a gold case.’

  ‘What if you were born poor?’