Orla did not even have her own bed any more. She had to share with her parents, sleeping at the bottom, with her feet up around their huge, stinky stomachs. It was a big soft mush of a bed, covered by mountains of hairy blankets topped off with a thick squelching eiderdown, purple silk. On the wall over the bolster hung a copy of the Pope’s Blessing of their marriage: Elizabeth had moved this from the bedroom upstairs and got Da to nail it onto the wall, for protection perhaps. The Pope’s hand, surrounded by faint red flowers, was raised over their heads every night as they slept, and their daughter’s feet were raised over their legs.
That was the start of the lodgers. The two big bedrooms of the house had been given over to them – from now on they would share their house with six strangers. The one remaining room, the boxroom, was to be used by Roddy, who was three years younger than her and delicate. He got colds often, he had to be kept warm, he had to drink a lot of milk – which Orla didn’t get, milk being too expensive for girls, according to Elizabeth. (Girls are so hardy was another one of her sayings. They don’t need much food or attention, not like boys. God if boys were as easy to rear as young ones wouldn’t we be blessed? Boys were boys or lads or fellas. Girls were just young ones: they did not merit a generic name of their own.)
There was no sitting room or dining room in the house after the lodgers came: just a kitchen and a hall and a bathroom. All the rest of the house was bedrooms. Orla did her homework in the bedroom at a card table which Tom got for her at an auction in Rathmines. She had an oil stove in the winter. It smelled strongly of paraffin, but its little blue-and-red wick gave out very little heat. Sometimes she had to go into the kitchen and sit in a big chair in the corner, doing her homework on her lap and trying to block the sound of the television out of her ears.
Ever since the day when she was eight and had lost her room, the house was more like a shop or some public place than a house where you go to find shelter from the outside world. The outside had come inside now. There was no escape from it.
The house was full of men. Elizabeth called them ‘the boys’ and loved them. Orla spent her life trying to stay out of their way. It wasn’t easy. They were always coming and going. They were in the hall. They were queuing for the bathroom – one for the six boys and the four Crillys. They were seated around the big table in the kitchen, having their tea, smoking and laughing. Their smoke and their laughs rose on the air and spread all through the house.
Elizabeth was kept very busy, shopping and cooking, frying rashers and eggs, boiling potatoes. Making beds. She even made lunch for the boys, some of them, and this was one of Orla’s jobs: slicing Galtee cheese and putting it on bread, six sandwiches per boy, also a packet for Da.
‘I need the money if you want to go to Secondary!’ was Elizabeth’s reply, on the few occasions when Orla dared to question the need for the boys. She never directly questioned it, or asked why there had to be so many. Wouldn’t four do? Instead of four Elizabeth upped the six to eight: Roddy had to move out of his boxroom; he got a divan in the family room. A boy moved into the boxroom and there was another, desperate, who slept on the landing without even a curtained screen to hide him. There was a dark tone in his skin, his hair was crinkly, so Elizabeth was doing him a favour. His parents were Irish, she was at pains to explain, he was not coloured, she would not have coloureds in the house although God knows they were probably often no worse than the rest of us. But you had to draw the line somewhere. And that was on the landing, with a half-caste – his name was Joe, and he was rather nice, in so far as Orla could allow any of the boys to be nice. Their niceness or otherwise was not her concern. Her concern was that they existed, and had taken over her house. Her wish that they were not there overrode everything else.
She could not admit to anyone that her house was a house of lodgers. She looked with longing at council cottages, at two-roomed flats. Even Sandra, whom she was not supposed to speak to because she lived in a flat, was luckier than her: she had her own room. Her own room. What Orla would have given her right arm for, what seemed to her more unobtainable, more inconceivable, than being the queen of England, Sandra took for granted. Sandra took for granted that her home belonged to her and her parents. When she came home after school, her mother would be in the kitchen listening to the wireless, smoking a cigarette. In private. That is what homes are: private places.
But the sacrifice paid off. There was enough money now for the Crillys to live a normal life, at least when they were not at home. They could try out the new foods that were advertised on television. They could go shopping in Dunnes Stores and buy clothes and household equipment. Tom could replace his car, which was twenty years old, with a new Cortina, only two years on the road and one lady driver. Orla could go to Secondary. There would be enough money for the uniform and the new bag and the bus fares and the books, for the hockey stick and the extra lessons and the pocket money and the dances. There would be enough for everything. And Orla would never have to take a part-time job or a summer job. She could concentrate on her studies. She would get an education, get the Junior Ex, or even go to university: suddenly that possibility became real. She could get well-off. Her life was going to be different from Elizabeth’s. Of that they both were certain. She would be a lady driver.
So what did it matter that she hadn’t got a bedroom of her own? That she wouldn’t invite her friends home? That she darted around her own house like a thief, hiding from its strange transient population of young men? That she would be startled, more than once, when one of those young men stayed in her head when she sat upstairs on the bus and travelled five miles to school in the foggy cosy gloom of a Dublin winter, that the image of one or two of them hovered and lingered as she gazed through the misted glass at the glowing shop windows? Images of men who lived in her house but to whom she would never utter a word, men who did not just invade her bedroom, courtesy of their five pounds a week, but also had the power, unconsciously, to take up residence in her head.
Gemini at the Hibernian Hotel
One morning every year, in late April or May, when the leaves on the trees in Herbert Park are a fresh, translucent green, as green as eyes, and there is a real stretch in the evenings, Elizabeth looks out the kitchen window and sees the blossom floating from the apple tree to the grass in the back garden. Angelically languid intimations of immortality. Omnipotence. Eden. ‘Fancy a cream tea this afternoon, love?’ she says, reverting for once to the idiom of her childhood. Orla squirms. She could say no but her answer is always yes.
That afternoon Elizabeth puts on her navy suit and navy-and-white straw boater, usually reserved for Sunday Mass in Whitefriar Street church, where the Crillys sit in the very front seat and where Elizabeth and Orla shout the responses at the top of their lungs, letting the priest and the congregation hear how religious they are. Vatican Two has given them a golden opportunity to show off in a new, vocal way. Little did Pope John the Twenty-third know what he was unleashing on the world.
Tom still mumbles his prayers under his breath, unwilling to open his mouth in church or out of it, no matter what the cardinals desire. Roddy is an altar boy. They gaze admiringly at his every move as he sways around the altar in a red soutane and white surplice, starched and ironed to be stiffer and whiter and superior to every surplice on the Whitefriar Street church’s altar, to every surplice in Dublin, to every surplice that ever existed. ‘Christ have mercy!’ they yell, and their voices boom around the big, gloomy, empty church, like thunder on a grey summer’s day.
Hats are no longer essential for Mass but Elizabeth has a selection in store, from the old days. No mantillas – mantillas were for another kind of woman. Hats, with high cocky crowns and turned-up confident brims. Pins, long and shining, sticking out of them like swords.
She pats herself into her suit, which gleams like a coat of armour, and sticks her pin in her hat. Orla gets togged out in her confirmation costume, purchased in Dublin’s most exclusive children’s boutique, The Gay Child – the m
ost expensive and stylish confirmation costume any girl in Orla’s school ever had. They walk into Dawson Street, saving sixpence bus fare. In the lounge of the Hibernian Hotel Elizabeth sits at a table in the window, where everyone can see her if they looked in. She puts on her snob accent and orders a pot of tea and a selection of cakes. You could have sandwiches as well but why bother?
‘We’ll just have time to slip into Brown Thomas’s and purchase one of them new season’s frocks before we meet Father,’ Elizabeth says, as the waiter places the silver tea service on the white cloth.
‘Yes,’ Orla answers dully.
‘I think that yellow colour would be most suitable for our holidays in Spain, don’t you?’
‘Yes, I do.’
‘And you’ll need another pair of Clarks sandals for the yacht. Clarks are the best. Remember the two pairs you had last year?’
Yachts, holidays, Brown Thomas, the Abbey, their cousin in Foxrock. Every year Orla knows this outing will happen. She knows when the evenings lengthen, and the birds sing as if there is no tomorrow, and the spring-cleaning of the house is over, that this afternoon will arrive and that she will have to collude with Elizabeth. All year she dreads the morning when Elizabeth looks out the window at the apple tree in bloom, and says, ‘I think we should have afternoon tea in town today!’ Still, every year it comes, inevitable as Christmas. And every year, Orla enjoys it much more in the execution than in the anticipation. Nothing is as bad as it seems.
Sava and her goings-on
Sava and the Dohertys have been displaced by Orla now, as Orla has been displaced by a gang of Micks and Paddys and Éamonns and Tommys and Noels and Seans in Dublin. Orla is the lodger, the one who pays for her bed. The family has been turfed out.
Sava, the daughter with the river-black hair, who waits on the table, has had to hand over her bedroom to Orla and Aisling, a room of dark and ancient moods, the sort of room many people have been born or died in, one suspects glumly, over several centuries. The black iron bars at the foot of the bed are what she has seen first thing every day in her life, until now.
The change doesn’t bother Sava at all. She’s delighted with it.
Now she sleeps on a narrow red tartan divan. When she opens her eyes she sees the roof of the caravan, white patterned with a pale yellow primrose, and then the sky. She loves the red Formica table that she bumps her head against when she sits up suddenly, and the tiny kitchen with its electric rings and little refrigerator. There is no refrigerator in the house, milk is kept cool in basins of water, meat in a wire safe, a thing that looks like a large gas mask, out in the garden. Sava keeps bottles of McDaid’s lemonade, Football Special, in the refrigerator, and drinks it late at night, with ice, while her mother is still washing up in the kitchen and her father is at the pub at the Crossroads.
The Crossroads is where Sava works, at Kathleen Johnson’s hairdressing salon, Kathleen’s Place. In a way the caravan reminds her a little of the salon. It is in the same style, featuring Formica and plastic, bright colours, soft lights. It is as if the people who made the salon – Kathleen, really – and those who designed the caravan acknowledged women’s need for an environment that looks soft and pretty, that is not completely utilitarian. Whereas the people who designed the house – the Congested Districts Board, and a few generations of Dohertys – did not know that, or could not afford to know it. Beauty existed in such houses by accident – a beauty born of harmony of materials with each other and with the landscape. In some country houses, a woman’s strong desire to make her own mark, prettify according to her own will, allowed the addition of blue paint or green paint to the dresser, pots of flowers on the windowsills. But that was rare in Tubber, and mostly the only additional decorative objects took the form of crockery. Banatee had many fine cups and saucers, patterned with every kind and colour of flower, on her dresser and in her parlour cupboard. Sava longed for much more than that, for lightness of every kind, lightness of form and shape and colour and light itself. Dreariness was what she had grown up with, indoors, and what she was reacting against.
Hairdresser’s are seldom truly dreary and Kathleen’s Place is no exception. It is painted pink, and when Sava works there, washing heads of hair and sweeping cuttings from the floor, she wears a pink-flowered smock over her own clothes.
‘That’s a lovely shade you’ve got in your hair,’ Kathleen said the first day Sava came into the shop, her two feet of hair shining on her back like some goddess’s cloak. ‘I wish I could find a rinse that looked like that!’
Kathleen is overweight, with a pleasant round face. Her hair is brown and curly. Both traits are natural, as far as Sava can tell.
‘I’ll let you in on a secret,’ Kathleen confided, in a lowered tone, to Sava. She is the kind of woman who is always letting someone in on a secret, whose discourse consists largely of whispered confidences. To Sava this seems the essence of femininity, the secret code of the club of true women. ‘I’d never let a drop of henna near my hair, not in a million years. It makes it fall out. Never tell a customer that.’ She gave her a dig in the ribs.
‘Do you colour hair a lot?’ Sava was so shy that she could hardly get these words out. When she managed, they were almost inaudible. Kathleen had to strain to hear.
‘Oh no, dearie, not a lot. It’s mostly perms we do here, you know, and haircuts for the fellas. Perms for the old ladies. Sure all the young ones have their hair streeling down around them now, don’t they? Rotten business!’
Sava has been with Kathleen for two years now. She can do perms herself, cut boys’ and men’s hair. She talks to customers in her subdued drawl: she always sounds as if she is on the verge of expiring from exhaustion, an effect that belies the truth, namely that she is endowed with exceptional stamina. She requires only five or six hours’ sleep a night and spends a lot of time lying in bed, wide-eyed, pondering the events of her quiet but active life.
It was in Kathleen’s Place that she met Sean, her boyfriend, one month before the Irish college started. He came in to have his hair trimmed, and Kathleen gave him to her to practise on. Sava knew, after she had snipped the soft hairs on the back of his plump white neck, and felt his neat, tender ears, that she would see much more of him, although she did not know how this state of affairs would come about.
Right now she is on a holiday, so-called. She took the first two weeks of July to help her mother out with the scholars, spoilt wee brats from Derry and Dublin. Sava barely distinguishes one lot from the other, since she spends little time talking to them. They all look similar: prim schoolgirls, overfed, seldom good-looking, who attend convent schools and will be teachers when they grow up. Lucky for them because who would marry them? Pauline is different, Sava admires Pauline’s graceful figure, brown eyes. She reminds Sava of Elizabeth Taylor starring in National Velvet. Her eyes that same almond shape. She doubts if Pauline will become a teacher. She is the worst Irish speaker Sava has ever come across, and competence in Irish appears to be a prerequisite for professional success. That’s why these people pay good money to come to a hole like Tubber, a place nobody ever visited before now unless they had relations there.
On Sunday, Sava dances at the Fairyland Ballroom in Glenbeg. The ballroom is a big wooden shed, set on the roadside in a flat and exposed plain. Glenbeg has no defining feature of any kind, not even a school or a church, apart from this ballroom, but it is within easy reach of several towns. Sava drives there with Kathleen and Kathleen’s boyfriend, Denis Coll, and another girl called Mary Friel, a plain, fat girl who is an embarrassment to her in some ways and in others a protection. Sava likes her, however. Mary is an old friend, from Tubber, and sometimes she is glad of her companionship.
Sava has a white dress: white shiny satin with small turquoise spots, full leg-of-mutton sleeves. The skirt is lightly gathered and stops two inches down her thighs; her hair is slightly longer than the dress, and at the back it hangs over the edge of the hem in a fringe. She wears the dress with white tights and whit
e platform shoes. The dress shivers and gleams as she walks into the ballroom, stepping from the warm evening into the dark, disco-lit interior already throbbing with song. Big Tom and the Mainliners, the favourite band of the time in Ireland, is playing and already there is a large crowd. Mary Friel wants to go to the Ladies – girls who look like that always do, they need to check their faces for shine, for lack of lipstick, for anything that will make them look even worse than they already are. Sava goes along with her out of a sense of obligation even though this kind of exercise bores her: for her it is unnecessary.
When they return, a new dance is just starting and the men are moving en masse towards the women. The tradition of women on one side, men on the other, is now considered passé here, but of course members of the same sex tend to congregate in little groups here and there anyway, preferring the comfort and protection of their own kind until they have to take their courage in their timid feet, take the plunge, face the music – join the dance. There is a jumble of groups, little huddles of men or of women, all around the edge of the hall. The old system was simpler: then you knew, literally, where you stood, and could examine all the men or all the women at a glance.
A man with brown hair, very thin, and a lined, red face approaches Sava and asks her to dance. ‘No thanks,’ she says. ‘I’ve got a boyfriend.’ A simple lie which she learned from Kathleen two years ago. He doesn’t believe her, old faggot, and scowls, muttering under his breath, as he moves off. Sava shrugs and smiles. A young man with red hair invites her up and she goes. But all the time she dances, her eyes are checking the groups of men, and she does not lose herself in the rhythms of the music, music of which she is very fond. She cannot lose herself, she cannot relax, even though the boy is clean, smells of Old Spice, has a job with the county council in Letterkenny. He even manages to make a joke or two above the noise of the music. Sava loves jokes, believes that that is what men are for, making jokes. But she smiles distantly, her thoughts elsewhere.
The Dancers Dancing Page 9
