by Maggie Wadey
At Christmas, when she’d been working at the Mills for close on five years, Mary Rose was given a bolt of green cloth. What more does she want? For all Mick Gavin is a local farmer, with twenty-five acres of land near Borrisokane, he’s never before shown his face at the Kavanaghs’ so far as the little girls know – and they know most things.
Still, here they are, together, she leaning on his arm, her neat dark head bowed, her companion holding his hat flat against his chest like a man marching in a funeral, the breeze tumbling his greying curls. That submissive look on their sister’s face and the masterful cut of Gavin’s shoulders produces an odd, contradictory state of emotion in the girls: irritation mixed with excitement, mockery with awe. A stranger has come courting their sister. This fact, this atmosphere as strong as liquor, affects them all, the way the approach of bad weather affects cattle, making them restless, excitable, nervy.
Blood-curdling screams are what Agnes would in retrospect associate most with the preparations for Mary Rose’s wedding. Once or twice a year, Pat takes a pig down to the Slatterys’ to be slaughtered. Of course the pig, known to the children by name and nature, always screams. It’s only fitting that not a morsel of him, not a strip of skin or a cup of blood, is wasted. Soon his living flesh is transformed into pink slabs of meat, into washed tripe and black pudding. His trotters are split open, breadcrumbed and fried, a treat of such mouth-watering delicacy that even the girls are reduced to silence while the brothers quarrel over who is to get a share of the meatier, hind feet. The leftovers are taken and boiled down for gelatin and Mrs Kavanagh will use every last little scrap of flesh to make brawn. For the wedding breakfast a mountainous joint of bacon is salted, boiled with a bucketful of herbs and onions, and set aside to cool in its coat of glistening fat.
Although John Kavanagh will go from house to house inviting those closest to the family – and many who are not – to his daughter’s wedding, this is widely thought of as an unnecessary formality. In fact, some of the invited will feel insulted, taking it as a sign that their presence at Mary Rose’s wedding wasn’t taken for granted. It’s a fine line the parents have to tread. The mother judges she must provide for fifty. But then, to avoid the shame of guests standing at a bare table, provisions rise adequate for eighty: as well as the bacon she decides there must be rabbit stew with dumplings, and four boiled chickens. Which is how Agnes gets her first, long-awaited chance to wring a chicken’s neck.
She has already chosen her victim: the white Rosecomb with pink eyes, a great one for self-important clucking when, as Pat puts it, ‘She’s done no more than lay a fart, which I can do very well for myself.’ Having observed her mother’s technique well, Agnes dispatches the bird quickly and efficiently. Gutting it is another matter, but the mother isn’t going to allow her little assassin the thrill of a kill without having to deal with the smelly aftermath. The neck, heart and liver are put aside to be used in the pot. The white feathers are added to the bag of feathers, mostly black and red, that Mrs Kavanagh is collecting to stuff a cushion with. The head, the feet, the entrails are fed to the remaining pigs.
A long table has been set up on the gravel outside the front door. The cloth lifts in the breeze and petals from a jug of roses scatter over the food. The wedding cake stands out of sight on a cold slab in the outhouse, its snowy perfection protected under muslin, chastely awaiting its moment with the knife. The kitchen settle has been turned to face the open door and the elderly sit either here – where they complain of not being able to see or hear anything, but no one takes a blind bit of notice – or on the wooden chairs and boxes that have been placed outside for them in the shade. Every familiar thing is out of place and strange. It’s a hot day and the men, having walked up from the church faster than usual, stand panting and mopping their faces, waiting for the beer barrel to be tapped and the drinking to begin. Their women gather awestruck before the table where Mrs Kavanagh has done exactly what she said she would do and laid out enough food to feed a small army. The sun reflects off the white cloth, off the glass, off the knives and forks to dazzle the women into the closest thing to silence they are ever likely to achieve: a low sibilant murmur, like a crowd at prayer. Considering the splendour of the wedding breakfast, there is the same thought in every head: the Kavanaghs have five more daughters to marry.
Behind them a cart is crawling laboriously up the hill. It’s crawling because of the nature of its load, both heavy and precious: a piano. A small, black, upright piano. Having had their attention drawn to it by the creaking of the cart’s wheels, the guests move away from the table and go to the wall where they jostle one another for a better look. The lid of the piano is open; the keys are yellow, like teeth in an old mouth, and the brass-plating on the foot pedals has been worn away.
Mick Gavin, looking unexpectedly handsome and expansive, has been moving amongst the guests with a lordly air. His double-breasted jacket, buttoned for propriety, only gives away its not being brand new by being too tight across the belly and showing a shine on the right elbow. He has given his arm to one woman after another to escort her to the table, and if he hasn’t remembered or perhaps never knew the woman’s name, he makes up the shortfall with a throwaway ‘Darlin’, the easiest fellow in the world. He overloads plates in the most generous manner imaginable. His grizzled curls shine. Now he crosses to the wall and shouts in recognition of the bowler-hatted man with the cart.
It turns out the piano is a wedding gift from the groom to the bride’s family. Weren’t there five girls left to enjoy a chance to tinkle the ivories? The five said girls look askance at one another. Could the man be serious? The gift is of course thought excessive – foolishly, embarrassingly excessive – but there seems to be more against it than that. A flush spreads up Mrs Kavavangh’s neck.
‘That piano’s got Lisduff written all over it,’ someone observes under his breath. Agnes is aware that Lisduff House has recently been vandalised, and there is laughter as someone else claims to know who it was had smashed the chandelier: ‘With a sheep hook!’ But when Agnes edges over to get a look at the piano she can find only three words written on it. In flowery brass letters across the inside of the lid it says Broadwood and Sons.
When their bellies are satisfied the guests turn their attention to finer things. Those in the know tell of how people from miles around walk up the lane on a summer evening to see Mrs Kavanagh’s garden, to smell the flowers – ‘Sure, you can come up in December and she’ll have a bunch of flowers, those are her flowers you’ll be seeing in the church’ – and they are proprietorially familiar with them, getting the names wrong and exaggerating the work involved. They squint in through the open front door at the immaculate floor, the jars of red apple jelly on the dresser and the brass lamp glinting on its chain above the mother’s chair – and Mrs Kavanagh herself, now isn’t she a fine sight today?
More than any of the guests, it’s Agnes who’s fascinated by her mother’s public manner – ‘queenly’ she thinks of it. How straight her mother’s back is, how clean and white her strong hands which she’d spent an age scrubbing that morning – how impressive her garden, her table, her handsome and well-dressed children – the jelly made from their own apples, the rabbits from their own woods, the slab of pink ham from their own pig – the roll call of plenty makes Agnes dizzy. Most thrilling of all, the belief that thrums through her all that glorious day, is her certain knowledge that this, one day, is what her mother will do for her.
The fiddlers, the two Lynch brothers, with a middle-aged woman from Terryglass who plays the melodeon, have set themselves up with their backs to the blossoming flower beds. Now the woman taps one booted foot and, with a nod to the fiddlers, she begins to squeeze the melodeon on her lap with the grim-faced determination of someone reviving a corpse. The sound galvanises Mud Foley who until now has divided her attention between smoking and eating. Either way, her mouth was full and she had kept an unusual silence. Now she taps her pipe out, puts it in her pocket and asks Fath
er Fogarty, is he dancing? The young priest undertakes this office without flinching and the pair go at it with such enthusiasm they set the others off. Soon a dozen or so couples are batting off one another, apologising, laughing and having a fine old time showing off their paces. Pat nods to Tom and the nod means, ‘Remember, if old Mud Foley catches fire it’s our job to put her out.’
But Pat has already taken a little too much interest in the beer, and Tom is consumed in a fire of his own making as he takes his girl by the waist and, for the first time, feels the soft dough of her hip under his hand. The musicians, to give their pumping elbows more room, have stepped back into the flowers, but even Mrs Kavanagh doesn’t seem to mind. She turns to smile as her husband comes up beside her. Agnes holds her breath: she sees that her parents are about to join in. She sees her father take the mother’s hand, sees the mother hang back a moment, then step into him until they are touching from breast to knee – then they move together for all the world as if they’ve done this before, many times, in some other, secret life that Agnes knows nothing about. She’s never seen them so close, never seen them touch except in the act of working together. Shyly, her heart pounding, she looks away.
Agnes moves quietly amongst the boisterous guests, treading as softly as one of her mother’s guinea fowl, practising graciousness. She sees the last of the pig fat – Brian, the pig was called – disappear into the maw of an old woman with eyes like soot marks. The men begin to load the cart with furniture, including a couple of the upright chairs the guests have been parking their backsides on, and the contents of Mary Rose’s ‘bottom drawer’, and her clothes – Agnes recognises a dress made from the bolt of creamy-white cloth which was Mary Rose’s ‘leaving present’ from Ballyartella Mills and to which Agnes had contributed, in an act of generosity so painful it had almost killed her, six mother-of-pearl buttons she’d spent her twopence on in Blake’s.
The loading of the cart turns into a shambles due to the alcohol the men have consumed. The groom himself has remained impressively sober. He staggers only very slightly as he hands Mary Rose up on to the seat, and she’s disappointed in him only in that by now he’s given up on his appearance and undone the buttons of his jacket so his belly can be seen hanging like a bag of flour over his belt. Now, with Mary Rose’s aunt, John Kavanagh’s sister, as ‘companion’, the happy couple climb up amongst their belongings. Mary Rose’s long white skirts, laced with muck, trail, in danger of catching in the wheel. One of the male guests, to the cheers of the others, throws himself after the cart and embraces the voluminous skirts like a man catching a steer. Having got his arms full, he throws them on to Mary Rose’s lap where they lie, a white bundle, for all the world like a newborn baby.
As one of the fiddlers strikes up a lament, the cart goes away along the track over the hill. The youngest girls rush after it, waving and shrieking. That’s the last memory Agnes will keep of her sister’s wedding day: Mary Rose sitting up straight and proud, with her husband’s arm around her waist and her sunlit head shining like thistledown.
At the beginning of this narrative I described my mother’s story as hanging by the fragile thread of one woman’s voice. True, but at the same time it wasn’t strictly a monologue. My mother wasn’t speaking into a neutral recording machine. We were classically placed, two women alone by the fireside at night, the older spinning out her stories of the past, the younger weaving them together as best she could. And I should remind myself that it was my English aunt Dorothy who was the storyteller, not my mother. Ironically, that side of my nature isn’t part of my Irish but of my English heritage. My mother would never have turned a real incident into a ‘story’, a little drama told for laughs or shock value. Which isn’t to say I didn’t occasionally get the feeling, not just that my mother was telling me what she thought I wanted, but that I was only hearing what I wanted to hear.
The boots, for instance. Of course I love that, the story of the three little girls hiding their boots on the way to school. But aren’t barefoot Irish children just the kind of thing I’d read about elsewhere? And surely they, unlike the Kavanaghs, went barefoot because they couldn’t afford shoes?
‘Oh we had boots,’ my mother said. ‘But we wanted to be like the others.’
So then I was bound to ask, ‘Wouldn’t the foxes have found the boots?’ I remembered how foxes had taken my shoes from my doorstep in London. And then, ‘What if it poured with rain while they were in school?’
‘We hung them upside down,’ my mother told me. She laughed. ‘The only one who ever forgot, of course, was Nancy.’
‘So Nancy would arrive home with squelching boots? Did she get scolded?’
My mother shrugged.
‘She most likely got a clip round the ear.’ Her head fell back against the chair. ‘And if I’d ever done the same I’d have got two.’ Without looking at me she held up one hand, the first two fingers tightly crossed. ‘But Nancy and I were like that.’
Like recognizing the sound of a ‘true’ note I recognised the truth of what I was hearing. I have an old-fashioned resistance to relativity in matters of truth. If I believed my mother was telling me the truth, then I believed there was a correlation between her words and what she was describing. Which isn’t to say she didn’t make use of the censor’s scissors. I could see it amused her to watch me hoarding all these little details. At the same time it disturbed her. She didn’t quite trust me. As we went on, that was what I became increasingly aware of: gaps, silences, a growing sense I’m not being told everything. She talked, for instance, of walking out as a girl of sixteen with a young man called Jim Cooney who wore a black beret – but she claimed to have no idea of its significance. ‘A black beret?’ my husband exclaimed when I told him. ‘Then he was a member of the IRA.’
Perhaps my mother was scarcely aware of leaving things out – if she was – perhaps gaps and silences are all the true work of memory, or rather, forgetting. On these Monday evenings, she and I are quite alone but, in speaking to me, is there still a level of discretion at work – good manners, even? I am English. My father is English. Does it seem impolite to mention the hatred and the violence that lies between the English and the Irish? As Elizabeth Bowen has it, ‘large areas are left unexplored by both sides, for reasons of bad conscience, good manners and convenient amnesia.’ Ah, yes. ‘Convenient amnesia.’ When my mother mentions the black beret, for instance, or when she describes the best way to wring a chicken’s neck, there’s that faint mocking look, a quick sly glance to see what I make of it, a quick changing of the subject. She was telling and not telling in the same breath.
I had some larger, brighter copies made of the photograph of the house on Knigh Hill. One evening I asked her about the little boy. Who was he? For a moment she seemed unsure, then she told me the child was Sean Gavin, Mary Rose’s little boy. So, is the young woman Mary Rose, I asked? My mother became rather vague – no, she thought not. Bridie maybe. Then she said, ‘Sean lived with us for a while. We girls hated it. He got into everything.’ Surprised, I asked, ‘Did he live with you for long?’ There was a pause. ‘Oh, a while,’ my mother said. ‘Then he went over to England.’ Of course. Sean’s mother was ‘Manchester Mary’. I’d learned the story of Mary Rose bit by bit over the years. When I was small I knew she was called Manchester Mary but I’d no idea why. Later, I learned she’d gone to England where she ran a boarding house in Manchester. I hadn’t pictured a son at all, but here he was, a little cuckoo in the Kavanagh girls’ nest. Was he there until things were set up for him to join his parents, I wondered? My curiosity was aroused but, sensing an uncomfortable area, I asked no more. My questions could wait until another of our Monday evenings together, evenings that seemed to stretch endlessly ahead of us.
Part Two
The Age of Reason
1
‘One starts out light as a feather, then everything gets difficult.’
– Henry Green, Concluding
My parents had very different nature
s. He was fixed, she was spontaneous. She, who disliked planning, lived with a man one of whose favourite maxims was, ‘Time spent in reconnaissance is seldom time wasted.’ An intelligent man, my father could sometimes be misled by an idea of how things ought to be into expecting them to be that way in reality – and being seriously put out when they weren’t. A mistake my mother never made. As a younger man my father was habitually not just punctual but a little early for engagements. She would insist that if you were asked for seven o’clock you shouldn’t arrive at seven, nor even ten past. No, you wouldn’t be welcome before seven fifteen. To which my father’s reply was, ‘If I’m asked for seven then I take it that’s when I’m expected.’ My mother never believed the weather forecast (always part of my father’s reconnaissance) nor anything else she read in newspapers. She attributed selfish or corrupt motives to everyone in authority – long before it became fashionable to do so – and whereas my father has certainly never suffered fools gladly, my mother was less easily fooled. The only thing that occasionally wrong-footed her was her own scepticism. My father certainly thought so. He was angered when she whispered after the cremation of his much-loved uncle, ‘I bet they give you any old body’s ashes – I bet they just shovel up a few pounds of the stuff and write a name on it.’
My mother saw through things. Yet when she tried to express her ideas, when she stood up to my father – knowing in her bones sometimes that she was right – the ineffectiveness of her arguments made her grind her teeth in fury. My mother loathed, feared and was mortified by the IRA with whom she felt she, as an Irish woman in England, was unjustly identified. This didn’t always prevent her from racing hotfoot to the defensive position from which she argued, ‘Why is it, when the IRA throw bombs they’re murderers, but when the English go to war and drop bombs that kill thousands of innocent civilians, then it’s patriotism and principle? The IRA are patriots, and no matter how mistaken they are, they have principles. What’s the difference?’ Of the war that had taken her young husband away from her for five years, she once said provocatively, ‘You young men only went off to fight because you had to.’
