There was a bus stop, but Sandra Pond was not standing by it. Nor was she on the pavements that stretched on either side of a road that was busy with Saturday-morning traffic. Nor did she emerge from the telephone box, nor from the newsagent’s, nor from Walton’s the fruiterer’s.
Sarah waited, still looking about. Sandra Pond had been genuinely sorry; she’d meant it when she’d said she’d hated causing the upset. ‘Please come and have coffee,’ were the words Sarah had ready to say now. ‘It’s really quite all right.’ But she did not say them, because Sandra Pond had not lingered. And in a million years, Sarah thought, she would not ever find her.
Attracta
Attracta read about Penelope Vade in a newspaper, an item that upset her. It caused her to wonder if all her life as a teacher she’d been saying the wrong things to the children in her care. It saddened her when she thought about the faces that had passed through her schoolroom, ever since 1937. She began to feel she should have told them about herself.
She taught in a single schoolroom that hadn’t altered much since the days when she’d been a pupil in it herself. There were portraits of England’s kings and queens around the walls, painted by some teacher in the past. There were other pictures, added at some later date, of Irish heroes: Niall of the Nine Hostages, Lord Edward FitzGerald, Wolfe Tone and Grattan. Maps of Europe and of Ireland and of England, Wales and Scotland hung side by side. A new blackboard, attached to the wall, had ten years ago replaced the old pedestal one. The globe had always been there in Attracta’s time, but since it did not designate political boundaries it wasn’t much out of date. The twenty-five wooden desks more urgently needed to be replaced.
In the schoolroom Attracta taught the sixteen Protestant children of the town. The numbers had been sometimes greater in the past, and often fewer; sixteen was an average, a number she found easy to manage when divided into the four classes that the different ages demanded. The room was large, the desks arranged in groups; discipline had never been a problem. The country children brought sandwiches for lunch, the children of the town went home at midday. Attracta went home herself, to the house in North Street which she’d inherited from her Aunt Emmeline and where now she lived alone. She possessed an old blue Morris Minor but she did not often drive it to and from her schoolroom, preferring to make the journey on foot in order to get fresh air and exercise. She was a familiar figure, the Protestant teacher with her basket of groceries or exercise-books. She had never married, though twice she’d been proposed to: by an exchange clerk in the Provincial Bank and by an English visitor who’d once spent the summer in the area with his parents. All that was a long time ago now, for Attracta was sixty-one. Her predecessor in the schoolroom, Mr Ayrie, hadn’t retired until he was over seventy. She had always assumed she’d emulate him in that.
Looking back on it, Attracta didn’t regret that she had not married. She hadn’t much cared for either of the men who’d proposed to her and she didn’t mind being alone at sixty-one in her house in North Street. She regularly went to church, she had friends among the people who had been her pupils in the past. Now and again in the holidays she drove her Morris Minor to Cork for a day’s shopping and possibly a visit to the Savoy or the Pavilion, although the films they offered were not as good as they’d been in the past. Being on her own was something she’d always known, having been both an only child and an orphan. There’d been tragedy in her life but she considered that she had not suffered. People had been good to her.
English Girl’s Suicide in Belfast the headline about Penelope Vade said, and below it there was a photograph, a girl with a slightly crooked smile and freckled cheeks. There was a photograph of her husband in army uniform, taken a few weeks before his death, and of the house in Belfast in which she had later rented a flat. From the marks of blood on carpets and rugs, the item said, it is deduced that Mrs Vade dragged herself across the floors of two rooms. She appears repeatedly to have fainted before she reached a bottle of aspirins in a kitchen cupboard. She had been twenty-three at the time of her death.
It was Penelope Vade’s desire to make some kind of gesture, a gesture of courage and perhaps anger, that had caused her to leave her parents’ home in Haslemere and to go to Belfast. Her husband, an army officer, had been murdered in Belfast; he’d been decapitated as well. His head, wrapped in cotton-wool to absorb the ooze of blood, secured within a plastic bag and packed in a biscuit-tin, had been posted to Penelope Vade. Layer by layer the parcel had been opened by her in Haslemere. She hadn’t known that he was dead before his dead eyes stared into hers.
Her gesture was her mourning of him. She went to Belfast to join the Women’s Peace Movement, to make the point that somehow neither he nor she had been defeated. But her gesture, publicly reported, had incensed the men who’d gone to the trouble of killing him. One after another, seven of them had committed acts of rape on her. It was after that that she had killed herself.
A fortnight after Attracta had first read the newspaper item it still upset her. It haunted her, and she knew why it did, though only imprecisely. Alone at night, almost catching her unawares, scenes from the tragedy established themselves in her mind: the opening of the biscuit-box, the smell of death, the eyes, blood turning brown. As if at a macabre slide-show, the scene would change: before people had wondered about her whereabouts Penelope Vade had been dead for four days; mice had left droppings on her body.
One afternoon, in order to think the matter over in peace and quiet, Attracta drove her Morris Minor to the sea at Cedarstrand, eight miles from the town. She clambered from the strand up to the headland and paused there, gazing down into the bay, at the solitary island it held. No one had ever lived on the island because its smallness would have made a self-supporting existence impossible. When she’d been growing up she’d often wondered what it would be like to live alone on the rocky fastness, in a wooden hut or a cottage built of stones. Not very agreeable, she’d thought, for she’d always been sociable. She thought it again as she turned abruptly from the sea and followed a path inland through wiry purple heather.
Two fishermen, approaching her on the path, recognized her as the Protestant teacher from the town eight miles away and stood aside for her to pass. She was thinking that nothing she might ever have said in her schoolroom could possibly have prevented the death of a girl in a city two hundred miles away. Yet in a way it seemed ridiculous that for so long she had been relating the details of Cromwell’s desecration and the laws of Pythagoras, when she should have been talking about Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. And it was Mr Purce she should have recalled instead of the Battle of the Boyne.
The fishermen spoke to her as she passed them by but she didn’t reply. It surprised them that she didn’t, for they hadn’t heard that the Protestant teacher had recently become deaf or odd. Just old, they supposed, as they watched her progressing slowly: an upright figure, spare and seeming fragile, a certain stiffness in her movement.
What made Attracta feel close to the girl in the newspaper item was the tragedy in her own life: the death of her mother and her father when she was three. Her parents had gone away, she had been told, and at first she had wept miserably and would not be comforted. But as days passed into weeks, and weeks into months, this unhappiness gradually left her. She ceased to ask about her parents and became used to living in her Aunt Emmeline’s house in North Street. In time she no longer remembered the morning she’d woken up in this house in a bed that was strange to her; nor could she recollect her parents’ faces. She grew up assuming they were no longer alive and when once she voiced this assumption her aunt did not contradict it. It wasn’t until later in her childhood, when she was eleven, that she learnt the details of the tragedy from Mr Purce, a small man in a hard black hat, who was often to be seen on the streets of the town. He was one of the people she noticed in her childhood, like the elderly beggar-woman called Limerick Nancy and the wild-looking builder’s labourer who could walk a hundred miles without stopping, who
never wore a jersey or a coat over his open shirt even on the coldest winter days. There were other people too: priests going for a walk in pairs, out along the road that led to the golf-course and to Cedarstrand by the longer route. Strolling through the afternoon sunshine there were nuns in pairs also, and there was Redmond the solicitor hurrying about with his business papers, and Father Quinlan on his bicycle. At night there were the florid country bachelors tipsily smiling through cigarette smoke, lips glistening in the street-light outside Colgan’s public house. At all times of day, at all the town’s corners, the children of the poor waited for nothing in particular.
The town was everything in Attracta’s childhood, and only some of it had changed in the fifty years that had passed. Without nostalgia she remembered now the horses and carts with milk-churns for the creamery, slowly progressing on narrow streets between colour-washed houses. On fair-days the pavements had been slithery with dung, and on fair-days they still were. Farmers stood by their animals, their shirts clean for the occasion, a stud at their throats, without collar or tie. Dogs slouched in a manner that was characteristic of the dogs of the town; there was a smell of stout and sawdust. In her childhood there had been O’Mara’s Picture House, dour grey cement encasing the dreamland of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. Built with pride in 1929, O’Mara’s was a ruin now.
Within the world of the town there was for Attracta a smaller, Protestant world. Behind green railings there was Mr Ayrie’s Protestant schoolroom. There was the Church of Ireland church, with its dusty flags of another age, and Archdeacon Flower’s prayers for the English royal family. There were the Sunday-school classes of Mr and Mrs Dell, and the patience of her aunt, which seemed like a Protestant thing also – the Protestant duty of a woman who had, never expected to find herself looking after a child. There was Mr Devereux, a Protestant who never went to church.
No one in the town, not even her aunt, was kinder to Attracta than Mr Devereux. On her birthday he came himself to the house in North Street with a present carefully wrapped, a doll’s house once, so big he’d had to ask the man next door to help him out of the dickey of his motor-car with it. At Christmas he had a Christmas tree in his house, and other children in the town, her friends from school, were invited to a party. Every Saturday she spent the afternoon with him, eating his housekeeper’s delicious orange cake for tea and sticking stamps into the album he’d given her, listening to his gramophone in the room he called his office. He loved getting a huge fire going in his office, banking up the coals so that they’d glow and redden her cheeks. In summer he sat in his back garden with her, sometimes reading Coral Island aloud. He made her run away to the raspberry canes and come back with a punnet of fruit, which they’d have at suppertime. He was different from her aunt and from Mr Ayrie and Archdeacon Flower. He smelt of the tobacco he smoked in his pipe. He wore tweed suits and a striped shirt with a white celluloid collar, and patterned brown shoes which Attracta greatly admired. His tie matched the tweed of his suit, a gold watch dangled from the lapel of his jacket into his top pocket. He was by trade a grain merchant.
His house was quiet and always a little mysterious. The drawing-room, full of looming furniture, was dark in the daytime. Behind layers of curtains that hung to the ground, blue blinds obscured the greater part of the light: sunshine would damage the furniture, Mr Devereux’s housekeeper used to say. On a summer’s afternoon this woman would light a paraffin lamp so that she could polish the mahogany surfaces of the tables and the grand piano. Her name was Geraldine Carey: she added to the house’s mystery.
Mr Devereux’s smile was slow. There was a laziness about it, both in its leisurely arrival and the way it lingered. His eyes had a weary look, quite out of keeping with all the efforts he made to promote his friendship with Attracta and her aunt. Yet the efforts seemed natural to Attracta, as were the efforts of Geraldine Carey, who was the quietest person Attracta had ever met. She spoke in a voice that was often hard to hear. Her hair was as black as coal, drawn back from her face and arranged in a coiled bun at the back of her head. Her eyes were startlingly alive, seeming to be black also, often cast down. She had the kind of beauty that Attracta would like one day to possess herself, but knew she would not. Geraldine Carey was like a nun because of the dark clothes she wore, and she had a nun’s piety. In the town it was said she couldn’t go to Mass often enough. ‘Why weren’t you a nun, Geraldine?’ Attracta asked her once, watching her making bread in her big, cool kitchen. The habit would have suited her, she added, already imagining the housekeeper’s face framed by the coif, and the black voluminous skirts. But Geraldine Carey replied that she’d never heard God calling her. ‘Only the good are called,’ she said.
There’d been a time, faintly remembered by Attracta, when her Aunt Emmeline hadn’t been well disposed towards Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. There’d been suspicion of some kind, a frowning over the presents he brought, an agitation whenever Attracta was invited to tea. Because of her own excitement over the presents and the invitations Attracta hadn’t paid much attention to the nature of her aunt’s concern, and looking back on it years later could only speculate. Her Aunt Emmeline was a precise person, a tall woman who had never married, reputed to be delicate. Her house in North Street, very different from Mr Devereux’s, reflected her: it was neat as a new pin, full of light, the windows of its small rooms invariably open at the top to let in fresh air. The fanlight above the hall door was always gleaming, filling the hall with morning sunlight. Attracta’s Aunt Emmeline had a fear of dankness, of damp clothes and wet feet, and rain falling on the head. She worried about lots of things.
Clearly she had worried about Mr Devereux. There was an occasion when Archdeacon Flower had been specially invited to tea, when Attracta had listened at the sitting-room door because she’d sensed from her aunt’s flustered manner that something important was to be discussed. ‘Oh, have no worry in that direction at all,’ she heard the Archdeacon say. ‘Gentle as a lamb that man’s become.’ Her aunt asked a question Attracta could not hear because of the sound of a teacup being replaced on a saucer. ‘He’s doing the best he can,’ the Archdeacon continued, ‘according to his lights.’ Her aunt mentioned Geraldine Carey, and again the Archdeacon reassured her. ‘Bygones are bygones,’ he said. ‘Isn’t it a remarkable thing when a man gets caught in his own snare?’ He commented on the quality of her aunt’s fruitcake, and then said that everyone should be charitably disposed towards Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey. He believed, he said, that that was God’s Wish.
After that, slowly over the years, Attracta’s aunt began to think more highly of Mr Devereux, until in the end there was no one in the entire town, with the possible exception of Archdeacon Flower, whom she held in greater esteem. Once when MacQuilly the coal merchant insisted that she hadn’t paid for half a ton of coal and she recollected perfectly giving the money to the man who’d delivered it, Mr Devereux had come to her aid. ‘A right old devil, MacQuilly is,’ Attracta heard him saying in the hall, and that was the end her aunt had ever heard of the matter. On Saturday evenings, having kept Attracta company on her walk home, Mr Devereux might remain for a little while in the house in North Street. He sometimes brought lettuces or cuttings with him, or tomatoes or strawberries. He would take a glass of sherry in the trim little sitting-room with its delicate inlaid chairs that matched the delicacy of Attracta’s aunt. Often he’d still be there, taking a second glass, when Attracta came down to say goodnight. Her aunt’s cat, Diggory, liked to climb up on to his knees, and as if in respect of some kind Mr Devereux never lit his pipe. He and her aunt would converse in low voices and generally they’d cease when Attracta entered the room. She would kiss him good-night after she’d kissed her aunt. She imagined it was what having a father was like.
At the town’s approximate centre there stood a grey woman on a pedestal, a statue of the Maid of Erin. It was here, only yards from this monument, that Mr Purce told Attracta the truth about her parents’ death, when she was eleven.
She’d always had the feeling that Mr Purce wanted to speak to her, even that he was waiting until she could understand what it was he had to say. He was a man people didn’t much like; he’d settled in the town, having come there from somewhere else. He was a clerk in the courthouse.
‘There’s a place I know where there’s greenfinches,’ he said, as if introducing himself. ‘Ten nests of them, maybe twelve, maybe more. D’you understand me, Attracta? Would you like me to show you?’
She was on her way home from school. She had to get back to do her homework, she said to Mr Purce. She didn’t want to go looking for greenfinches with him.
‘Did Devereux tell you not to talk to Mr Purce?’ he said, and she shook her head. As far as she could remember, Mr Devereux had never mentioned Mr Purce. ‘I see you in church,’ Mr Purce said.
She had seen him too, sitting in the front, over on the lefthand side. Her aunt had often remarked that the day Mr Purce didn’t go to church it would be a miracle. It was like Geraldine Carey going to Mass.
‘I’ll walk out with you,’ he said. ‘I have a half day today for myself.’
They walked together, to her embarrassment. She glanced at shop-windows to catch a glimpse of their reflection, to see if they looked as awkward as she felt. He was only a head taller than she and part of that was made up by his hard black hat. His clerk’s suit was double-breasted, navy-blue with a pale stripe in it, shiny here and there, in need of a good ironing. He wore black leather gloves and carried a walking-stick. He always had the gloves and the walking-stick in church, but his Sunday suit was superior to the one he wore now. Her own fair hair, pinned up under her green-brimmed hat, was what stood out between the two of them. The colour of good corn, Mr Devereux used to say, and she always considered that a compliment, coming from a grain merchant. Her face was thin and her eyes blue, but reflected in the shop-windows there was now only a blur of flesh, a thin shaft between her hat and the green coat that matched it.
The Collected Stories Page 92
