The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  To be under the thumb of a domineering, overfed wife? No, Bella thought, she didn’t know what that was like.

  ‘Are you getting by?’ he asked.

  Isaac ambled back to his desk. He was smartly dressed in his high collar and cravat.

  ‘Well, that’s why I’m here.’

  Bella did her well-practised spiel – her widow’s lament, the fees owing at the Model School, Susan’s upcoming nuptials.

  ‘Isn’t your Babsie on the relief already?’ Isaac said.

  ‘I’m asking you as a brother, Isaac, not as some factotum of the union,’ she said to him.

  He rattled the coins in his pocket as if to emphasise how few there were, but he opened the drawer nonetheless and drew out a union money order.

  ‘I shouldn’t be doing this at all, mind you,’ he said.

  He made it out to cash for twenty one and six and signed it with a flourish with his new name – Joe Casey. It was a fortune and she all but kissed him. I’ll never see a poor day again, she thought. But wasn’t that the treachery of money – even a gift horse like this. There was never enough of it.

  She tried her luck with Jack, too, even though he wasn’t earning. But she knew he had a metal box under his bed in which he guarded the petty cash (though not petty to her) for the Laurence O’Toole Pipe Band, an outlandish outfit he’d hooked up with. They were Irisheens, one and all, and ran a social club of sorts somewhere near the Five Lamps, where they put on theatricals and played music, if such the caterwauling Jack produced on his bagpipes could be called. He used to practise in the yard. It was a comical sight, the wheezy bag and sprawling legs of the pipes like an octopus around his shoulders and he huffing and puffing with all his might. What came out could not be classed as music, but a kind of screeching protest as if a bag of cats was being painfully strangled. But as he stood there, it put Bella in mind of Nick. Jack was a poor imitation for he had none of Nick’s fine regalia, only a plain navy tunic over a pair of mended moleskins, but she wondered if the childish dream of being a soldier of the Crown was still lodged deep somewhere in his heart.

  ‘Sure, who would miss a shilling from the band box?’ she said to him.

  ‘I won’t dip into club funds,’ he declared. ‘On principle.’

  ‘Would you see your own starve then?’ Bella demanded. Her new situation had made her bold; timidity being the domain of the well-bred who have no need to importune. ‘Even a tanner would do.’

  ‘If I gave you a sixpence, I’d have to wait three more weeks for La Débâcle.’

  He still had money for books, she noticed. Probably gleaned from the little bits of seditious scribbling he was doing.

  ‘Will Zola feed my children?’

  ‘Isn’t it enough I have to eat my dinner with your brood bearing down on me?’

  ‘They cannot help their situation,’ she replied quick smart. ‘They’re only children, as you once were, when I provided for you. And now all you care about is damned books.’

  ‘Damned books, is it, Bella, there’s a fine contradiction! Wasn’t it you who brought me to the books in the first place?’

  ‘But not to worship them above all else. Not to put them higher than those in need.’

  ‘I do my bit, and more.’

  ‘But not for those close at hand. Oh no, you’d walk a mile for the pipe band or those fellows you hang about with drilling in the hills, but you wouldn’t lend your sister a tanner to buy a schoolbook.’

  ‘Lend?’ He exploded then. ‘And when exactly would I get it back? From now on, Bella, it’s a borrower you’ll forever be.’

  The cheek of him, using the Bard to turn her down.

  When she went to tap off her brother Tom, she was in for a shock. It was several years since they’d come face to face. Mother’s boycott of his Catholic wife meant Tom was lost to Bella too.

  ‘Bella, me old flower, what brings you to our neck of the woods?’

  She was about to begin her litany of pleas – she always came right out it with it; no more beating about the bush for Bella Beaver – but she saw it was an effort for him to stand. She helped him from the open door. He held grimly to the wainscoting and paused on each step to draw in a lungful. They moved cautiously into the parlour where a cheery fire was set. His face was ashen and he was finding it hard to draw breath. She helped him into a chair close to the flames.

  ‘What ails you, Tom?’ she asked with sinking heart, selfishly feeling a downturn of disappointment for she could see he was in strife of a much graver hue than hers.

  ‘I’ve been poorly this last while, Bella, haven’t been to work in nigh on a month.’ He smiled at her weakly. ‘But once the spring sets in, I’m sure it’ll all straighten itself out.’

  Bella recognised the falseness of his optimism. There is a look that men get when the Lord is set to call them – a caving of the face and a bleak look to the eye – and Tom had that very look.

  ‘Have you not been to the doctor?’ she asked firmly for clearly, someone needed to take command here.

  ‘My Mary’s been looking after me and says there is no need,’ he said.

  ‘All the same …’ Bella said, knowing the penalties of putting off a visit to the doctor.

  The street door banged noisily and Mary Kelly appeared, looking much the same as she had ten years before, with her crooked eye and implacable manner.

  ‘And who is this?’ she demanded, looking at Bella crossly.

  Bella wondered idly if her lazy eye affected what she saw, for she did not have the wit to play malicious.

  ‘It’s Bella, Mary, my sister Bella,’ Tom said.

  Bella rose and went to greet her, not sure if she should offer a hand or an embrace. One seemed too formal, the other too intimate.

  ‘Bella?’ Mary queried, gimlet-eyed and doubtful. She looked Bella up and down.

  ‘My, my, Isabella,’ she repeated, taking in Bella’s mud-spattered skirt, her shawl threadbare from washing. It was a chastening experience for Mary Kelly to look aghast at her and make dim comparisons in her head that were evident on her face. And the name Isabella from this woman’s lips seethed with a low sarcasm.

  ‘Would it not be better,’ Bella ventured, ‘if Tom were to see the doctor?’

  ‘I’ll thank you, Isabella,’ she said, ‘to leave the nursing of my husband to me. I’ve managed to look after him all these years with no help from a cluster of ragged Caseys. Isn’t that right, Tom?’

  Tom looked at Bella, pleading with his eyes, not to draw cudgels with Mary, before he was smothered in a bout of coughing. Mary Kelly made a show of helping him, putting an arm around his shoulders as he buried his face in a handkerchief on which he left small pellets of blood. When the fit subsided, Bella rose to go, relieved she hadn’t shown her hand.

  It was a respectable ceremony. She had seen to it that Susan had a proper address from which to be married. Mick gave her away and paid for a portion of the celebration – although he had already contributed by Bella’s sleight-of-hand to the plum gown Susan wore and the matching hat she’d bought from the Misses Carolan – the favourite item in her trousseau for she had swept into the shop where she had once slaved and ordered it to be custom-made.

  Her new son-in-law, Bella discovered on the day, was a respectful young man who called her Ma’am. He was not what she would have called a looker, but perhaps Susan had learned more by observation than Bella had given her credit for. He was steady in his nature, was Reggie Elliott, and he treated Susan like an exquisite piece of china. Bella was secretly grateful for his pallid manner. He would not be one to make ‘demands’, she thought. When Susan walked down the aisle – steering a worse-for-wear Mick between the pews, instead of the other way round – she felt she had honoured her most solemn vow. Susan had arrived at the church door with all her female innocence intact. She did not, would not, think about the future. The children Susan might have, the sickness they might carry. There was no way of, or use in, warning Susan. She, like Bella, would have to
trust to fate.

  THE TREE OF HAPPENSTANCE

  The Lock-Out was but a memory now and everyone worse off than before. The revolution Jack was forever talking about, the big change, the overturning of the old order had turned out to be a damp squib leaving him, and her Babsie, forlornly unemployed. Most of the girls who had worked beneath her at Harrison’s had slunk back to their positions and glad to have them. But Babsie had been singled out as a ringleader and would be given no quarter. Her vouchers from the union exhausted, she spent weeks trawling through the city trying to find work. But everywhere she went she met the door. Bella watched her slip further each day into the slough of despond.

  ‘I hate to be sponging off Granny Casey,’ she would say.

  Bella felt a pang of self-recrimination. Her stout-hearted daughter had not abdicated to charity as readily as she had. Her only answer to Babsie’s situation was to stoop to counterfeit, the only tool at her disposal. She wrote a letter purporting to be from Babsie’s supervisor at Harrison’s declaring that she had been a good and loyal employee while in their employ, punctual and hard-working, who’d risen to the top of the assembly line when she’d had to give it up to tend to her sick mother.

  Bella painted a portrait of herself as not alone an indigent widow, but a frail invalid troubled with the quinsy. It was an impudent assertion for her health had up to this time been robust. She wondered afterwards if she hadn’t called down illness upon her head by indulging in such extravagant falsehood. Because Babsie’s name might appear on some blacklist because of her association with the wretched union, Bella used Susan’s instead, and dated her invented indisposition well before the strike so Babsie would not be tainted by any whiff of association.

  It was a long time since Bella had had call to use her penmanship – or her imagination – in such a way. The last time was to secure Jack his first employ, and it felt strange to once again pick up a pen. How easily the lies came forth once she did; no, not lies, for all she said of Babsie was true, but once the ink began to flow she found herself carried away by the world she’d created on the page, in which she became Mr Frederick Leverett, general manager of a plant where she had never set foot. She made her hand bolder than it would be normally so no one might guess there was a female behind it.

  ‘In all my years,’ she wrote, ‘I have never encountered a brighter and more capable young woman, a bright star in a dark world, a jewel in the crown ….’

  She had to do several drafts for Babsie said it was much too fancy.

  ‘It’s not a marriage proposal I’m after, Mam, just a job,’ she said. ‘And anyway, Mr Leverett would never talk like that.’

  It was easier, though, to pretend herself this Mr Leverett Esquire than see herself as she was – a dejected woman with a polished hand, who had the instincts now of a charlatan, a conjurer trying to produce rabbits from a hat.

  The ploy worked, no matter her misgivings, and Babsie landed herself a packing job in Jacobs Biscuit Factory. She had to endure a rigorous inquisition from the manager there, a certain Mr Dawson. Gone were the times when being a Protestant was enough to get a job. This Mr Dawson was a strict type and every girl before him had to submit to an inspection.

  ‘Are you sure you’re not one of Larkin’s girls?’ he barked at Babsie. ‘Is this one of the Liberty Hall blouses I see?’

  ‘I had to deny the Union, else I wouldn’t have got in,’ Babsie said miserably.

  ‘Still and all,’ Bella said, ‘haven’t you got a position and all that Union ever brought you was strife.’

  ‘I’m no better than a scab,’ Babsie said. ‘That’s what it means to be a Dawson girl.’

  ‘I won’t hear of such nonsense,’ Bella replied, in case Babsie’s conscience might get the better of her, for she was thinking, venally, only of the wage packet she would bring in. ‘Just think, you’re not doing this in your own name. According to your reference, aren’t you Susan Beaver, so the crime is hers not yours.’

  Once she would have died rather than impugn Susan’s character in any way; now she was happily bartering her first-born’s good name for profit. She knew that by her deception, Babsie was flourishing on the ill-luck of some other girl and at the expense of another hard-pressed family. But Bella would not surrender to such thoughts for they sounded too like the kind of opinion Jack would hold.

  There was a time when she’d considered the houses on Brady’s Lane as mean. They were no more than hovels, really, with their low-browed windows and sagging lintels but when a cottage came free there – she knew it by the dingy pyramid of shabby belongings piled up on the street outside – the prospect of having her own front door, no matter how humble, brought out the covetous in Bella. When they had been evicted from Rutland Place, there was already another family queuing to gain ingress; now she was the hawk circling on her prey, in this instance, an old woman, close to Mother’s age, and with no living family to tend her, who was bound for the North Ward workhouse. But we are five, she told herself, and justified it by asking whose need was greater. Would her gain make any difference to that poor woman’s plight? Bella stood guard in a doorway opposite the house until she saw the beadles come to take the old woman away. She had gone soft in the head, poor thing, for she mistook them for the constabulary and kept on crying out – ‘I have done nothing wrong, Sir, please Sir, I have done nothing ….’

  Bella hardened her heart against the woman’s protests with strict words to herself. What had she done to deserve her fate? But there was no good in tracing the roots and branches of the tree of happenstance. Knowledge was a burden, not a cure.

  No sooner had the beadles gone than several doors on the street opened and the occupants of Brady’s Lane edged their way out as if they’d been waiting, hands on latches, for the commotion to die down. They set upon the rickety pile of goods like flies on dung, plucking a basin here or a chair there or hauling away the old woman’s sunken mattress. Bella waited for the pilfering procession to peter out and only then did she make her way across and push open the beaten-looking door. She felt a great swell of possession as she stepped in, so much so that she camped out in the house so that it would not be left unattended for someone else to nab. She wanted to be well-established before the landlord made an appearance.

  The landlord turned out to be a lady, a Mrs Irvine from Drumcondra, who owned several houses on the lane. She was a woman of the right persuasion and when she turned up to find a Protestant in situ – with three earners in the family, Bella was able to boast, with Babsie back in employ – she turned a blind eye to the fact that Bella had taken up residence by sharp practice. They were dingy quarters with only two small rooms and a scullery out the back in a lean-to. The old woman had let the place sadly go. It smelled something dreadful of unwashed skin and reeking odours of a personal nature, but it might as well have been the Lord Mayor’s mansion, as far as Bella was concerned. They had so little left to transport that they were able to carry it in their embrace. A table, chairs, some crockery, the pickings from Mother’s. Valentine and John took one end each of the bedstead and rolled it home. The candlesticks, the wedding bowl, her dainty gloves from the academy – this was the random flotsam that had washed to the shore. There was, she realised, no logic to the survival of things. No more than people. For it was on the day the Beavers moved into their new abode that Bella got the news of Tom’s passing.

  The last person she expected to see at the funeral was Johanna Fairtlough, particularly since Tom was buried according to the Anglican rite. But no sooner was Tom lowered into the ground than Johanna, disrespectfully late, stalked up the avenue of the graveyard beneath the tossing trees. She was all kitted out for mourning – a black suit with saucer buttons, a sombre high-necked blouse, a soft black hat, but her mood was far from solemn. Hardly waiting for the rector to say his piece she launched into a tirade.

  ‘Is that you there, Bella Beaver?’ she all but shouted. ‘I hope you’re satisfied now.’

  ‘Whatever do you mean,
Johanna,’ Bella said, trying to steer Johanna out of Mother’s hearing for she was pure distraught at having lost poor Tom. ‘Please, Johanna, not here.’

  She must have had drink on board. How else to explain such unseemly behaviour?

  ‘Yes here, Mrs Beaver,’ she said, ‘right here in front of everyone who knows you.’

  Bella wondered what she had done to excite Johanna’s ire – bar breathing.

  ‘Would any of you like to know where your precious Isaac Casey is? ‘She must have been agitated for she didn’t even call him Joe. ‘And not able to be here to mourn his brother?’

  None of them could supply an answer for they had all been perplexed by Isaac’s absence.

  ‘Beyond in England, he is, thanks to his sister here. Mrs Bloody Beaver!’

  That was going too far, swearing in a churchyard!

  Mick tried to intervene. ‘Steady on, now Johanna, we’re all upset this day of our Lord, so don’t be adding to the anguish.’

  But Johanna was not to be pacified.

  ‘Had to set sail for Liverpool like some vagabond leaving me alone with three orphans, one of them in petticoats, and no money coming in.’

  ‘She,’ Johanna declared, pointing her umbrella in Bella’s direction, ‘she has been the ruination of us.’

  Bella blanched. The accusing finger never failed to terrify. She was always waiting for the terrible truths of her own life to be revealed. She felt all eyes on her, but she couldn’t fathom what Johanna was talking about. What had she done? Was she forever to be guilty of crimes she didn’t know about?

  ‘Plants herself at the top of the queue for a hand-out from the union, even when her own daughter is on the Relief. And my Joe, out of the goodness of his heart, doles her out a bit on the QT, and what’s the consequence? He’s hauled over the coals for putting his hand in the till!’