by Joan Lingard
‘I did try to, the day after we came back from France, in the pub, after school.’
‘You mentioned Clarinda’s name, I remember that. You said what a keen pupil she was and eager to see everything in Paris, but you didn’t make it clear, at least I didn’t pick up that there were, well, sexual implications.’
‘Maybe I didn’t,’ said Cormac. He’d thought Archie had almost been trying to ward off his confidence, as if he’d heard rumours and didn’t want or didn’t need them to be spelt out. Or maybe he’d thought he’d been going to hear an admission of guilt? It had been an awkward meeting and Cormac had been aware of his own reluctance to spell everything out. Then Ken Mason, another member of staff, had come in and joined them, and so the subject had changed.
‘You should have come back to me on it,’ said Archie.
‘I suppose I thought it would blow over. You know how it is when you don’t quite want to face up to something?’
‘Yes.’ Archie nodded. ‘Yes, I do know. Sometimes life takes odd directions, doesn’t it, when you least expect it?’
Cormac had never known Archie take an odd turning, or act out of character. His very stability was like a rock for school life to revolve around, and he was a sympathetic listener.
‘It wouldn’t have made any difference even if you had talked to me. I’m bound by a set of rules, Cormac, you know that. I have no option but to suspend you, as from now. On full pay of course.’
‘This very minute?’
‘I’m afraid so. There’ll be an inquiry. It has to go through the proper channels. Oh, and by the way, you’re still under contract to the Education Authority so you are obliged to stay put, to be available if called upon.’
‘So there’s to be no skiving off to South America?’ His attempt to make a joke stuck at the back of his throat.
‘I am sorry, Cormac. Deeply sorry.’
Cormac nodded.
‘And I won’t be able to see you socially, either, you realise that, don’t you, until this business is sorted out?’
Cormac sat for a moment, then he stood up, and putting one foot before the other moved as if in a dream from the quiet of the headmaster’s room into the corridor which was alive with the surge of young, vigorous bodies heading for the freedom of the open air. It was the start of morning break. He banged into some of the bodies, did not even hear their yowls of protest. ‘Watch where you’re going, Mr Aherne!’ He should have done that years ago. That’s what his mother would have said to him, had she been there.
It was break-time, for which he was grateful. His art room was empty. Someone had tipped a chair on its side in their hurry to get out. Automatically, he picked it up and set it to rights. He’d been teaching a first-year class when he’d been summoned, trying to enthuse them about Art. Commitment, he had been telling them, that was the key; no artist had ever achieved anything without commitment. And passion. The ultimate stage was obsession. You had to be obsessed, seized by the throat. They had listened to him, mesmerised, or so it had seemed, though perhaps they had just been puzzled. Some of them were obsessed by football, weren’t they? That had got them, the boys who’d been shuffling their feet; that had helped to focus them. They were beginning to see a glimmer of light when the door had opened to admit Miss Dunlop, the school secretary, with her spectacles dangling from a chain around her neck, come to summon him. ‘Mr Aherne, Mr Gibson would like a word.’
Ah, the power of a word. It could change a life.
He would be summoned again, to make his case, perhaps even at the High Court, where he would be compelled to listen to a flow of words, of evidence against him, if, after investigation, it was thought that he had a case to answer. Did he?
He gathered up his papers, shoved books into a carrier bag, unpinned his Rodin posters and photographs from the wall, and left the building where he had been employed, some would say gainfully, for the past fifteen years.
‘I’m going to phone Grandma,’ Cormac shouts up the stairs to Davy, who is moving around in his new room. Stay out of the way, is what he means. ‘Grandma Aherne,’ he adds in a mutter and closes the living room door.
He has decided he’d better do it in case she should ring their old house to wish them a happy New Year. So, all right, maybe she has never done it before but she could decide to do it now, couldn’t she, for the very first time, and if she got the dialling tone going on and on and on without the answering machine chipping in she might begin to wonder? To panic, even. So he has been telling himself. He flexes his fingers and punches out the number.
She answers at once as if the phone has been at her elbow.
‘I thought it might be you,’ she says and waits.
‘Happy New Year, Ma.’
‘Let’s hope it will be a better one than last year.’
He clears his throat and quickly tells her his news.
‘This isn’t your idea of a joke, is it, Cormac?
He tells her it is not. Would that be his idea of a joke, for goodness sake?
‘I never know with you, Cormac. You’re like your da when it comes to joking. You’ve a queer sense of humour at times.’ She sighs and gathers her breath and he keeps his head bowed and the receiver well away from his ear while the storm flashes and the breakers roll relentlessly over him, making, as they crash, a deafening roar. When they have subsided, he hears her say, ‘I always thought it was a mistake for you to marry a Protestant.’
‘For Christ’s sake, Ma, it’s time to give up all that old rubbish!’
‘Rubbish! Is that how you refer to your faith?’
‘I haven’t been a practising Catholic since I was eighteen, and well you know it.’
‘That’s part of your problem, Cormac. Faithless.’
She might well be right; he is not prepared to dispute that. He is conscious of the vacuum inside him which once he could fill with Hail Marys and pleas to God to have mercy on his soul. He still believes he has a soul for inside him somewhere there is something that he can give no other name to and there are times when he has longed to sit in front of a flickering candle and close his eyes. And find peace. That, of course, is the attraction, the notion that seduces. He has done it a couple of times, crept up the steep, exposed steps to St Mary’s Cathedral and lit a candle. And sat there with an empty mind, feeling like a hypocrite, glancing idly round in case his mother or one of his holy aunts might be sitting at the back watching him. Spying on him. There wasn’t much chance of that since the Irish Sea yawned between them, he could thank God for that, at least. But he felt their eyes, nevertheless.
‘Are you still there, Cormac?’ His mother is making the line click at the other end.
‘Yes, I’m still here.’
‘Of course you had to marry her, didn’t you?’
‘I did nothing of the sort. We knew Sophie was on the way but that wasn’t the only reason. We’d been living together for a couple of years.’
He shouldn’t have reminded her of that. Living out of wedlock. In sin. What an eejit he is right enough! Will he never learn to stop passing her the ammunition?
‘Have you another woman?’ Her voice has dropped an octave. He hears the question that lies behind this one. Are you taking after your father in this way too?
‘No, Ma, there’s no one,’ he says and swallows. There is a lie at the heart of the truth he has just told. And each time he remembers it his throat swells. He puts his fingers to his neck, feels the heat gathering. He cannot tell his mother the whole truth.
‘There’s still hope, then?’
‘For Rachel and me? I doubt it.’
‘She was a nice enough girl – I didn’t dislike her – but if you’d married one of your own she might have brought you back to the Faith. Brought up your children in the Faith. And what about the two of them? A broken home is the ruination of children, every mortal knows that.’
Can he lay the blame for his ruination at her door, then, hers and his father’s? She would say their broken marriage was n
o fault of hers; his father was the sinner who walked away. There’s no point in saying anything, he knows that well enough, so he keeps his mouth closed and makes a face at the wall.
‘Holy mother of God,’ she keens, ‘what did I ever do to deserve this?’
‘Nothing, Ma,’ he assures her. Except bring him, her only son and child, into the world, a child with strange notions and ambitions who was not content to become a clerk and work for the gas board or sell insurance. She got the length of forty without bearing a child and then something weird must have happened. A virgin birth? He tells himself to give over. If she could hear his thoughts she might have a heart attack. But that could have been her mistake: not to have remained childless, like her four holy sisters. Originally there were six of them, but two had passed away. Not that the remaining ones are that holy; Mary, for a while, until she’d undergone treatment, was a kleptomaniac, with a notion for bath salts; Sal runs a pub in Dublin; Kathleen in her youth had a long relationship with a married man, a mortician, that ended with the death of his spouse when he upped and married the fancy woman of at least two other men that they knew. Cormac is not aware of any transgressions on the part of Lily, the remaining one of the four, though he has always wondered about her for she is never out of the confession box. But when it comes to holiness his mother is up front there alongside any of her sisters.
The children are fine, he tells her. Rachel is fine. He is fine. She need not worry though he knows that she will; it is part of her daily life. He has something else to tell her but that will have to wait. The relaying of one piece of bad news is as much as he can cope with in one phone call.
‘When are you coming over to see me, son?’ she asks, her voice wearied now after her outburst and turning querulous.
‘Soon, Ma. As soon as I can.’
‘You said you’d come over during the Christmas holidays but you never came. Before that it was the summer holidays.’
‘We’ve had a lot to sort out, what with moving house and all that. I’d better give you my new address and phone number.’
She repeats the words and numbers as she slowly transcribes them, out of his sight. He can see her fingers, though, moving slowly and painfully over the lined pale-blue paper. Her hands are arthritic and she’s got a touch of it in her knees but there’s nothing wrong with her head. She forgets little. Nevertheless, he wonders if he should be thinking about sheltered housing, trying to persuade her. They’ve got some really nice properties, Ma, well set up, all mod cons, and it’d be your own wee place, with your own furniture and you could suit yourself and there’d be a warden to take care of you if you fell out of bed, answer your bell when you rang. He’d be wasting his breath. The only person for whom she’d toll a bell would be him. She’d say they’d have to take her out in a long box before she’d budge from her own home.
‘I’ll need to go, I hear someone at the door,’ he lies. The afternoon light is waning beyond the window and he has just realised that he is hungry. He’ll have to go out and buy something from the nearest Pakistani for their supper. Fish fingers and oven chips. His mother would have a fit if she knew.
‘Think about what you’re doing, son,’ she implores. ‘Think about it!’
He is thinking about it, all the time, he tells her, and says goodbye, take care, don’t worry, keep warm, make sure you get enough to eat, I’ll send you a couple of tenners next week, maybe a bit more, but I’m strapped for cash at present, Christmas and all that, you know what it’s like, but I’ll be over soon.
She says God bless.
Now he has given his mother another sorrow to nurse. He tries to comfort himself with the thought that she likes sorrows, that without them she’d feel bereft.
So there she sits in the little front parlour of her red-brick terraced house in Belfast, before a two-barred electric fire with only one bar glowing, the other permanently dead, to keep the bills down. Her shoulders are slumped under a heavy jumper, knitted before her hands turned rickety, her pale hair pinned tightly back, not one strand straggling, her thin legs encased in opaque greyish stockings that help her veins. Her back is held straight and her head is cocked as she listens to the sound of feet going by in the street. Kids knuckling the glass as they go past. Rattling the letter box. Shouting obscenities through the slot. Causing mayhem. It is not as it was when she was a child. Or when her son was a child. Then the young had respect.
She abides by the ten commandments without difficulty. Thou Shalt Not Commit Adultery. Thou Shalt Not Steal. Thou Shalt Not Kill. Oh dear God, how that commandment has been transgressed in her province! How many doorsteps in the city have been stained with blood? The man who lived next door to her sister Lily came to the door to answer a knock one night. What a mistake to answer a knock. To take your life in your hands and open your own front door. There was a time when the front doors stood open and the kids played in and out. ‘Are you in, Missus?’ You trusted even the hawkers to stand in the hallway while you went to get your purse. The man from the Pru would just walk in. Your neighbour came in and out borrowing a half cup of sugar or a few spoons of tea. When you went up the road to the shops you didn’t lock the door. Trust. Faith. Hope. All gone.
Now he has depressed himself. What’s the point in running through all that old guff in his head? It’s not going to change the world.
He opens his front door and looks out into the unfamiliar street. He wonders what Rachel will be doing. Not standing at her door gazing out at the dark, he’ll lay a wager on that. She’ll be unpacking boxes, hanging up pictures, setting out ornaments, creating a new home. She never lies down under adversity. Stop feeling sorry for yourself, boyo! You know that salt smarts in wounds, that it doesn’t do anything to heal them. Weren’t you told that at your mother’s knee? Come on, pick yourself up and stop making a fuss! You were told a lot at your mother’s knee right enough and the trouble is it’s not easy to forget it.
The houses across the street stand in a regimented row, their staircases lined up in serried ranks, like soldiers on parade. A few lights glow. Lighted windows reassure him. He likes signs of human habitation, is uneasy when he stays too long in country retreats with no other person in sight. What are they doing behind those lit windows? Watching telly. Sleeping off the New Year booze. Playing happy families. Mr Plod the policeman, Mrs Plod and all the little Plods. He wasn’t too good at the Plod bit though he loves his children dearly. You’re too restless for your own good, Cormac, his mother said, when she had him at her knee.
Above the rooftops a few stars are coming into the deepening sky. They haven’t changed. It’s just the bloody earth that has.
He goes inside, calls out again to Davy. ‘We’ll go and see if we can find a Chinese open. Their New Year’s different.’
Chapter Two
Mornings are not Cormac’s best time, unlike his mother who used to be up with the lark, as she termed it, though no larks ever sang in their back yard. He struggles up to quell the alarm, dresses, and prepares his son’s breakfast. Davy is no better than he is in the morning.
‘Come on, Davy,’ he exhorts, ‘eat up your egg! And stop messing around.’
‘You’re not eating anything.’
‘I’m not going to school.’
‘You’re lucky.’
‘There’s different ways of looking at it.’
‘Why aren’t you going?’ The boy is just stalling, he doesn’t really want to know, he senses that it’s difficult ground to tread on and he has been only too ready to accept what he was told: that his father has given up teaching to have more time for his sculpture.
‘I’m not hungry,’ he says finally and pushes the plate away.
‘But I made it specially—’ Cormac removes the mangled egg. He doesn’t know what he’s making so much fuss for; he has given Davy his breakfast on numerous occasions, got him ready for school, taken him there. He doesn’t have to prove anything, not on that score, anyway.
‘Away and get dressed, pronto! You do
n’t want to be late. You’ll just start the day on the wrong foot.’ He puts the dishes in the sink, on top of last night’s, and runs hot water on them, to be washed properly later. He hasn’t yet adjusted to the idea of no dishwasher. They sold it as a fitment with the house. As Rachel said, neither of them would have room for it in their new kitchens. She has a much more practical outlook on life than he has.
He clears a space on the draining board and quickly makes up two large wholemeal sandwiches, one with cheddar cheese and pickle, the other with peanut butter. That is one thing he is proficient at: making sandwiches. He puts them into a Tupperware box along with an apple and a packet of salt and vinegar crisps.
‘Davy!’ he calls, putting his head round the door. He can’t hear any movement. He climbs the stairs to find Davy sitting on the bed reading Terry Pratchett. ‘Hey, this won’t do!’ He takes the book from the boy’s hands.
‘I’ve got a sore throat.’
‘Tell me another one!’
‘I have! It’s very sore.’ He is prone to sore throats. ‘You can look if you want to.’
‘OK, I will.’ Cormac returns to the kitchen, washes a dessert spoon and rummages amidst the boxes on the floor for his small pocket torch, which cannot be found, and so he settles for the large black rubber one. He goes back up the stairs. ‘Right then, open up! Call that open? I can’t even get the spoon in.’ He places the back of the spoon firmly on Davy’s tongue and clicks on the torch. The beam floods Davy’s face as well as the cavity of mouth, making him yelp and scrunch up his eyes.
‘You’re blinding me.’
‘Looks perfectly all right to me,’ says Cormac, withdrawing the spoon. He hasn’t been able to see a thing. ‘I’ll give you some vitamin C and a drink of orange juice just to make sure.’
‘We haven’t got any orange juice.’
Cormac makes a mental note to add that to his shopping list. Then he tells Davy to finish dressing, fast! His patience is not elastic. ‘You know what happens when a rubber band gets stretched too far.’
