Kate

by Siobhán Parkinson

  I looked at my feet. I lined up my two brown toecaps and stood very still.

  ‘An emergency, Mrs Delaney?’

  Please don’t let her say it. I could feel a blush creeping up my cheeks. I kept my eyes fixed on my feet.

  ‘Yes, Mother, a …’ My mother searched for the formal word. ‘A confinement,’ she said.

  ‘I understand,’ said Mother Rosario.

  ‘Young Liz …’

  I squeaked in terror. ‘Mam!’

  ‘Well, it doesn’t matter, the poor girl … the poor woman was in a bad way. Haemorrhaging to beat the band, Mother.’

  I blushed harder. Haemorrhaging – that was blood. Why did she have to mention blood?

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ said Mother Rosario.

  ‘Anyway, I had to leave Kate in charge of the younger ones, and, well, a few things went wrong, she’s only young, she hasn’t much experience, you can’t blame her for being late, Mother …’

  ‘Mrs Delaney, we are not here to blame Kate for anything. I just wanted to have a little chat with you, to make sure everything is all right at home. Your husband is out of work?’

  This time it was my mother who blushed.

  ‘The factory closed down, Mother. He had a good job, he was foreman, but …’

  ‘Please, Mrs Delaney, I don’t wish to pry. I just wondered if he would be interested in a bit of work in the convent gardens? Just a few hours a week, but he could do it in his own time, when it suits him. Our gardener is getting on, coming close to retirement, he needs a hand, and if we find the right assistant, well, who knows, the job will come up in a year or two …’

  Assistant gardener, working for the nuns. Da wouldn’t think much of that, but at the same time, well, you know what they say – beggars can’t be choosers. I held my breath.

  ‘I will mention it to him, Mother,’ said Mam. I could hear that she was pleased. ‘Thank you,’ she added.

  ‘Right, well, now, with regard to young Kate here, can you assure me that everything is all right at home, nothing is worrying her?’

  ‘She’s fine, Mother. Nothing like that. She’s a good girl, only that she asks so many questions.’

  ‘That reminds me,’ Mother Rosario said, turning to me, ‘about your theological question.’

  What was she on about?

  ‘Saint Patrick lived at a time before Catholics and Protestants parted company. He was a Christian, and he belongs to all Christians. Does that answer your question?’

  ‘Yes, Mother,’ I whispered, but I’d have to think about that one. We always thought the devil lived in the Protestant church, but that couldn’t be true if they were Christians too.

  ‘I believe she’s talented,’ Mother Rosario went on, speaking to my mother again.

  ‘I beg your pardon, you believe …?’

  This was clearly the first time my mother had heard it, and it was news to me too. I was terrible at school, always getting my sums wrong. I wasn’t much at spelling either, though my handwriting was not too bad, and the teacher never asked me to read out my compositions, the way she did with the clever girls. I always came last in the races on sports day, too. I didn’t see where this talent of mine could lie.

  ‘Musical, Mrs Delaney, I hear she sings.’

  Right enough, I was always humming and warbling about the place, though I’d never thought of it as being ‘musical’. Everyone in my family sang, songs like ‘Molly Malone’ and ‘Are you right there, Michael?’, songs off the wireless like ‘Stormy Weather’ (that was Da’s favourite), hymns, sometimes, ‘I’ll Sing a Hymn to Mary’ and ‘Sweet Heart of Jesus.’ (Patsy brought the house down one day when we sang that, she said she didn’t know Jesus had a sweetheart. Mam made her wash her mouth out with soap, the poor little girl, she wasn’t trying to be funny or disrespectful, she just misunderstood.)

  ‘Musical?’ said Mam, wonderingly. She’d obviously never thought of it that way either.

  ‘Now, I know you probably … if you’ll forgive my saying it, I don’t wish to be indelicate, but you probably can’t aff … I mean, you probably haven’t got a piano at home?’

  ‘No, Mother.’

  I winced at my mother’s tone. You could cut it with a knife, as Da would say.

  ‘She could practise on one of the school pianos, of course, if she wanted to take lessons.’

  ‘Piano lessons? Mother Rosario, I think …’

  ‘Well, maybe not, Mrs Delaney. Perhaps you’re right. But what would you think about dancing lessons? That might suit a musical child.’

  ‘Dancing? What sort of dancing, Mother? Tap dancing? Ballroom dancing?’

  ‘Irish dancing, Mrs Delaney. Part of our national heritage. Lots of our girls do it. It’s a lovely accomplishment for an Irish girl. And it gives them an interest, keeps them out of harm’s way, you might say.’

  My mother wasn’t very keen on Our National Heritage. Her family had all been on the Treaty side in the Civil War and they viewed Irish dancing, the GAA and the Gaelic League as things that Mr de Valera had more or less single-handedly invented to whip up anti-English feeling in the people. Da was more of a Dev man, and he was delighted with the new constitution Dev was after bringing in and the declaration of the republic, but he kept his views to himself when Mam got up on her hobby horse. Dev was very keen on happy maidens dancing on the village green, but it was a long way from the village green to Pimlico, Mam always said, and Our National Heritage didn’t put bread on the table and that was for sure.

  ‘We aren’t very Irishy-Irishy in our house, Mother,’ said Mam. ‘My father survived the Great War but was nearly murdered by his own countrymen when he got home. I don’t think much of that kind of Irishness, and I don’t approve of this Economic War business, either. I say, let Ireland and England live like neighbours and get on together and forget the past. We all need each other in this world, is how I view it, and if you ask me, refusing to trade with England is cutting off our nose to spite our face. Sure, you only have to look at the state of the country, with half the men on the labour and the farmers in a terrible state.’

  Mother Rosario laughed. That made me jump – I’d never heard that sound before.

  ‘My goodness, you are very well informed about politics, Mrs Delaney,’ she said. I knew Mam wouldn’t like that. Why wouldn’t she be well informed? Being poor didn’t mean you had to be ignorant. ‘And you are not entirely wrong, I dare say,’ Mother Rosario went on, ‘But I’m sure you have no actual objections to Irish dancing?’

  ‘Well, no, I suppose not, Mother. I suppose it’s harmless enough.’

  ‘Certainly it is harmless, Mrs Delaney, and better than harmless, it is wholesome and healthy too, great exercise, you know, as well as being patriotic.’

  Sounds like brown bread, I thought. Good for your bowels as well, in all probability, but I said nothing. I didn’t dare.

  ‘And as I say, it keeps a girl occupied in a ladylike sort of way, it’s not like other, pagan forms of dancing – and very few boys, Mrs Delaney, though I dare say Kate isn’t thinking along those lines just yet.’

  I blushed again, but luckily nobody was looking at me.

  ‘All right, so, Mother,’ said Mam, meekly, ‘since you seem to think so highly of it, sure maybe we could give it a spin.’

  ‘Well said, Mrs Delaney. I am sure Kate will love it. Some of the girls in her class do it, let me see – Annie Ruane, Brigid Mullane and Tess O’Hara – they love it, they just love it.’

  I winced again. Tess and Brigid and Annie were the snootiest girls in the class. I wasn’t going to like being lumped in with that lot of stuck-up misses. My own friends, Angela Murphy and Nell Carty, would desert me for sure if I took up with that shower. Besides, they had all been dancing since they were six years old and were sure to be miles better at it than I would ever be. I wished I could catch Mam’s eye and shake my head at her, but she was smiling away at Mother Rosario, all charmed that the interview had turned out so well.

  I
could do without this – and all because I’d burnt the porridge.

  ‘Faith, and you won’t burn it again,’ said Da that night, when I told him the whole story.

  ‘Is that all the sympathy I get?’ I was indignant with him.

  ‘It could be worse,’ said Da dryly. ‘You could have landed yourself a job as an assistant gardener to an oul’ fella with arthritic knees that’d be ordering you about and making you do all the hardest work.’

  That wasn’t much consolation.

  CHAPTER 4

  Polly

  Polly laughed when she heard.

  Polly was really supposed to be called Aunty Mary, because she was Mam’s sister, but she wouldn’t answer to Aunty, said it made her feel about a hundred, and she didn’t much like ‘Mary’ either, too ordinary, she said. ‘Call me Polly,’ she begged everyone. Mam said it made her sound like a dairymaid, and called her Mary, as she always had, but I thought ‘Polly’ was much prettier than Mary.

  Really, when I thought about it, Polly was my best friend in those days. Angela and Nell were good pals, but they were only twelve too, like me. Polly was nearly twenty, which seemed the height of sophistication to me, and she was glamorous and full of fun. She wore bright red lipstick and silk stockings and she smoked up the chimney so my mother wouldn’t get the smell, as if she was her mother too, not her older sister, and she flew around the place, always singing and cracking jokes and cheering everybody up. She dropped in to our house most evenings on her way home from Jacob’s, the biscuit factory where she worked, and some days she brought a bag of broken biscuits with her and we had a feast.

  ‘Hey, Missus, have you any broken biscuits?’ she used to say, flinging the bag of biscuits on the kitchen table.

  ‘Yes,’ we chorused. We all knew our line.

  ‘Well, why don’t you mend them so!’ she finished, and we all went into kinks of laughter, even though the joke was as old as the hills.

  You weren’t allowed to take biscuits out of the factory. You could eat as much as you wanted, but you couldn’t take any home. They did random searches on the workers as they left in the evenings, and if you were caught, you were fired, and that was that, so nobody dared to break that rule. But you could buy a bag of broken biscuits very cheaply. The thing was, you never knew what would be in the bag. It was like a lucky dip. It could be Lemon Puffs or Café Noir or Toytown Iced or Kerry Creams or a mixture. You just didn’t know, but we gobbled them all up regardless. We all loved to hear Polly’s laugh on the stairs, because whether or not she had biscuits for us that day, she kept us entertained with gossip about the people she worked with and little incidents that happened: rows between the workers and the bosses, stories about pigeons flying into the biscuit dough, practical jokes the workers would play on the youngest, newest staff members, sending them off on daft messages, like asking the foreman for a bucket of steam.

  ‘Irish dancing, if you don’t mind!’ Polly laughed again. ‘Well, you’ll be the lovely colleen and no mistake. Flouncing and bouncing you’ll be, and kicking up your feet like a hen with fleas.’

  ‘I’ll give you fleas!’ I said with a laugh, but I didn’t feel like laughing. I was afraid those snobby girls, Tess and her friends, would show me up and that I would make a fool of myself, clumping around on my big, clumsy spaugs. It was all just a big embarrassment, as far as I was concerned.

  ‘How’s Shamy Macnamara?’ I asked, to change the subject. Bringing up the subject of Shamy was a great way to get a rise out of Polly.

  ‘Don’t be talking!’ said my aunt. ‘He has me moidhered, so he has.’

  Shamy Macnamara was ‘after’ Polly. He had set his heart on marrying her, but Polly would have none of it. She always said there wasn’t a man in Dublin that was good enough for her, and that was a good thing, because then she wouldn’t have to marry anyone and she could be her own boss all her life and have her own income, and she wouldn’t be worn out having millions of babies either, the way all the other poor women were.

  ‘You and me, Kate,’ she would say, ‘we’ll be old maids together, won’t we? We’ll live in a garret and eat chocolates all day long and lounge around in our nightgowns until midday and we’ll paint our toenails red and we won’t darn any man’s socks for him, will we?’

  ‘We won’t!’ I would answer delightedly. ‘We’ll be independent women, won’t we, Polly?’

  ‘We will. Ladies of leisure. We’ll have brandy flips for breakfast and colcannon for tea and we won’t call the king our better.’

  ‘Except Saturdays,’ I would interject. On Saturdays, we were going to have a big fry-up in Bewley’s café for breakfast, rashers, sausages, black and white puddings, fried eggs, fried tomato, mushrooms – the works.

  Even if Polly had a mind to marry, it wasn’t the likes of Shamy Macnamara she’d hitch up with. Shamy didn’t take a drink beyond a couple of glasses of Guinness with the lads on a Saturday night, and he was very good to his old mother, but he wasn’t very handsome, and he had an annoying way of hanging his head and looking at his feet at the first sign of trouble, not the sort of hero you’d like to have about the place, as Polly put it.

  ‘Rhett Butler, now there’s a man!’ Polly said dreamily.

  ‘Would he be anything to the Butlers of Kilkenny?’ Da asked, just to annoy her.

  ‘He would not, he’s an American in a book I’m reading and he’s a gorgeous man altogether, so he is.’

  ‘What book is that?’ Da asked.

  ‘Gone with the Wind,’ said Polly dreamily. ‘I got it out of the circulating library. It’s a love story, you wouldn’t understand, Tommy Delaney, you old gom, you. The main character is called Scarlett. Isn’t that romantic? Scarlett O’Hara.’

  ‘O’Hara? Well, now, that’s an Irish name too. Would she be anything to …’

  ‘Don’t!’ Polly kicked off her shoes and perched her pretty little stockinged feet, with the dark line of the seam across her toes, up on the mantelpiece. The hem of her dress dipped almost to the floor, and she leant back and yawned. ‘Throw us an old Custard Cream, there, Kate,’ she begged.

  I complied and the conversation changed again, this time to my father’s chance of work with the nuns.

  ‘They’ll have you crawthumping all over the place,’ Polly warned him, flicking her toes in his direction. ‘It’ll be devotions and missions and novenas and sodalities and the lord knows what for you, you’ll be destroyed going to church, so you will.’

  ‘Going to church never did anyone any harm,’ said my mother stiffly.

  ‘It’s true for you, Alice,’ said Polly piously, but she winked at me.

  It always surprised me to hear my mother being called by her first name. Polly was the only one who used it. The neighbours all called her Mrs Delaney, and even Da nearly always called her ‘your mother’, when speaking to us children, or ‘asthore’ when he addressed her directly. That was because he was from the country.

  ‘Anyway,’ Polly said quietly to me when the others were talking about something else, ‘I’ve bigger fish to fry than Shamy Macnamara.’

  ‘Oh! I thought you weren’t going to marry anyone at all,’ I said, remembering our fantasy about the garret and the chocolates and the painted toenails.

  ‘Who mentioned marriage? I’m just talking about having a bit of fun.’

  ‘Oh!’ I said again. I wasn’t sure about this, but I kept quiet about it. It wasn’t the kind of thing I thought my mam would want to hear about.

  ‘I brought you something,’ Polly said then.

  ‘I know, the broken biscuits,’ I said. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘No,’ she said. ‘Something for yourself.’

  She slipped a small gold tube into my hand.

  ‘It’s only half used,’ she whispered. ‘I got a new one, a colour that suits me better, but this one is still good. It’ll look terrific on you, with your red hair, dead dramatic.’

  I looked at the tube. Lipstick. I was too young for lipstick, but I was dying
to see what I looked like with it on, all the same.

  ‘Come into the bedroom with me,’ I whispered, and Polly nodded.

  ‘Oh, just to do a few girl things,’ she said, when Da asked where we were off to. ‘A policeman wouldn’t ask us.’

  ‘Hmm,’ he said, and wagged a finger at her. ‘Don’t you be leading our Kate astray, now, Mary.’

  ‘Who’s Mary?’ said Polly, looking all around her with a puzzled look on her face. ‘I don’t see any Marys, do you, Kate? Unless you mean your woman up there.’

  She pointed at a bottle of Lourdes water that my mam kept on the mantelpiece. It was in a beautiful milky white glass bottle in the shape of a statue of the Blessed Virgin. The screw cap was a blue crown with spiky bits and she had a blue sash too down the front of her long white dress.

  ‘You will go straight to hell for blasphemy,’ said Mam, who’d overheard.

  ‘I will not. It’s not blasphemy to say her name is Mary, when it is. I tell you what, if you call me Polly, I won’t mention herself at all, is it a bargain?’

  Before Mam could answer, she pulled me by the wrist into the bedroom and slammed the door. Then she opened the door again and stuck out her tongue at Mam and gave a giggle. I don’t think Mam saw.

  ‘Now, watch me,’ she said, and I watched.

  She stretched her lips and expertly applied a coat of bright red lipstick. ‘Geranium, it’s called,’ she said. She didn’t bother with a mirror. Then she chomped down on a scrap of newspaper, leaving bright red lip marks like kisses on the margin, and applied the lipstick a second time, this time rolling her lips together to spread the colour evenly.

  ‘Your turn,’ she said, and handed me the tube of lipstick.

  But I’d changed my mind about wanting to try it.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Da’ll kill me if he sees. I’ll try it some day when he’s out.’

  ‘Watering the nuns’ roses!’ said Polly with a giggle and flung herself back on our bed, making wide cycling movements with her legs and wriggling her toes in her stockinged feet.