‘No,’ Aisling replies kindly, but without hesitation. ‘But I’ll lend you ten pence. You can pay me back when we get home.’ She pauses for a second before adding helpfully, ‘Maybe you could use the stamp to send a letter to your father?’
‘My father?’
Orla cannot imagine writing to her father, to whom she has hardly ever said more than a few superficial words. She knows he loves her because he looks at her kindly and gives her a kiss before he leaves for work in the morning and before she goes to bed. His face crinkles up happily at these times and his eyes twinkle. But he is not able to talk to her. If she is alone with him, in the car for instance, an awkward silence grows between them and fills up all the space around them. Neither of them can do a thing about it. That is another difference between Aisling and Orla. Their fathers. Aisling has the kind of father who talks. Orla knows they go for walks together, go to the pictures together. She has met Aisling’s father at parties and outings, and he can talk to children as easily and naturally as a woman can. Aisling’s father has light, smooth hair, long clean white hands. He wears a tweed jacket and fawn trousers. His shirts are pale green, pale yellow, pale turquoise, and seem to be made of some specially soft material. His shoes are suede loafers. Everything he wears is light in colour, to emphasise the cleanliness of his person and perhaps his occupation. In his smoothness, his blondness, his tallness, he seems to Orla to belong to another species from her father. Her small round father, with his red, weathered face, twisted, large hands with fingers as thick as thumbs. On work days he dresses in an old dark grey suit, a torn maroon jumper, huge creased black boots. A battered cloth cap. He smells of mortar, a sour wet smell, when he comes home late in the evenings from the building site.
At dinner he talks about the news, he shouts and rants about the North of Ireland. ‘Let them shoot themselves to bleddy bits,’ he shouts after his plate of ten potatoes and some meat, when he is drinking his cup of tea and eating a biscuit. ‘That’s good enough for them. Let them blow themselves out of it, that’s all they were ever good for! Bleddy hooey!’ he sneers, about something a politician might say. ‘They’re all the bleddy same, that crowd. Out for what they can get!’
He is vociferous in his condemnation of almost everything that is going on in public life, he distrusts everyone: politicians, public figures, the men who report the news on radio and television. All public life he regards as incorrigibly and inevitably corrupt. That seems to be his long-held and steadfast belief, and you would think he would be used to it all by now. But every day he is angered afresh when he listens to the news. Angered so that his face, relaxed after his meal, grows a fiery red and his usually low, gentle voice is raised in rage over the green tablecloth with a border of ducks, the potato dish and the plate of marshmallow biscuits. You would think he would stop listening to the news, but he doesn’t. On the contrary he is addicted to it. The news must be turned on – indeed, the radio is on all the time, from when he and Elizabeth get up, early in the morning, until seven o’clock or later at night, when they turn it off and switch on the television set. He must be clued in to what is going on, in order, it seems, to be enraged.
His other interest is his own past. When he is not shouting about the North of Ireland, about Jack Lynch or Neil Blaney, he tells anecdotes about men he worked with long ago in England and Scotland. He remembers the smallest incidents in great detail, dramatises them and fleshes them out with dialogue. Every word anyone said twenty years ago he recalls. But he never talks about what is going on now, what is going on every day in his working life. It is as if he realises that it is of no interest to Elizabeth and Orla, that it is something they would prefer simply to ignore. Neither does he talk to Orla about her life. Closed books they are, to each other, although they are fond of one another. Or is that a myth, propagated by Elizabeth, who has no compunction about speaking up on behalf of other people? ‘Orla is the apple of Daddy’s eye,’ she says. ‘Oh yes, she can do no wrong.’ Maybe Elizabeth has said this so often that they have both fallen into the habit of believing it, although no communication of any kind, good or bad, ever takes place between them.
The idea of him writing letters! Orla suspects, dimly, that maybe he can’t, except in theory. Read, yes. He reads newspapers and books as often as he can, so slowly and carefully that he remembers them almost off by heart afterwards. But his life has little need or space for writing – apart from measurements: he always has a pencil behind his ear, a ruler in his breast pocket. But his hands are designed for other purposes: to lay stone on stone, brick on brick; to create houses and towns and cities, edifices that shelter and serve, buildings that endure in the landscape. Even looking at those hands, more like paws than hands, you know that they could not easily manipulate something as fine and flimsy as a pen, which is like a needle in a way, and requires the same slim delicate touch to create the same fragile webs as the needle. Orla’s father belongs to another kind of humanity, the kind that makes tough, blatant, concrete things, things that are essential, that change the landscape and endure in it.
She can’t write to him. All a letter from her would do is surprise and embarrass him. The idea is unthinkable. It surprises Orla that Aisling does not realise this. Although she keeps so many things a secret from Aisling, Orla expects her to understand such things. She even assumes that Aisling must know some of the secrets. She has been to Orla’s house, after all. She has sat in the kitchen and watched Orla ignore two or three strange men walking through it to the bathroom, which is tacked on – by Tom, working on Saturday afternoons and summer nights – at the back of the house. Aisling watched them and said nothing, asked no questions. That means she must already have known not only who those men were, but that Orla was not going to talk about them. Orla expected a lot of Aisling.
She’s met Tom. She should know that he is not the kind of father you write a letter to. ‘Daddy is like Charlie,’ she says by way of explanation. Charlie the Faratee she means.
‘Like Charlie? Not really!’ Aisling ponders this, comparing and contrasting. She likes Tom, although Orla could never believe this. ‘He doesn’t drink, your father, does he?’
‘Oh no,’ says Orla. They have seen Charlie swaying home, just once, one Sunday night, and been righteously indignant. Nobody they know drinks, at least unless it is a funeral or Christmas. Tom doesn’t drink, or smoke. He doesn’t go to the horses or the dogs. All he does is work, at work or at home, sit in front of the telly, and sleep. He’s a perfect father in many ways, but Orla isn’t satisfied. She wants another kind of father, the kind of father who would write letters to his daughter.
Orla does not stop writing. She has no stamps but she still has paper, wads of it, in her suitcase, blue letter pads and blue envelopes, and also several copybooks for the Irish classes. She writes letters, puts them in envelopes, but doesn’t post them: she stacks them on the dressing table, waiting for the day she will have money to buy stamps again. After a while she stops putting the letters in envelopes; she just writes whenever she feels like it and then stuffs the letter into her suitcase, along with the dirty socks and underwear. Some she crumples up and throws out the window, or into the river. That nobody will read the letters no longer matters to her: she feels she is talking to her mother while she is writing them. Orla doesn’t consider the matter logically. She stuffs her letters in the bin as she would stuff them in the letterbox if she could. What happens next ... what happens next is that she starts the next letter.
Aisling sees the envelopes on the dressing table: five of them lie there, propped up by a plaster statue of a woman in a brown habit, some saint, perhaps Saint Therèse of Lisieux, Aisling thinks. She knows about Orla’s predicament but does not consider giving her money for stamps. She gets three pounds a week. It’s just enough, really, and giving money to friends is not something anyone does. Orla wouldn’t like it. She’d be embarrassed. So reasons Aisling, correctly.
The surprising past of Tom and Elizabeth
Eli
zabeth loves Ireland and the Irish language with huge, often-expressed passion. It has never occurred to Orla to ask why. If asked, she would say that she loved Ireland too, and Irish, although ... although, how can she? What is this love, that people talk about? Love your parents, love your country, love your aunt, love your language. People keep ordering her to love them, as they order her to do well in school, to be the best in the class, to make something of herself. To get thinner, to polish her shoes, to set the table, to wash the delph. Love love love! Do it or else!
It surprises everyone to learn that Elizabeth is English. She speaks with a strong Dublin accent, she seldom refers to her past. But it is there, not a secret, just forgotten. Her parents have been dead for years.
She was born on the Isle of Wight of all places, in the village of Shanklin, a place which, in 1925, had as little in common with Tubber, where Tom was being born in that same year, as with a gathering of grass huts on the Trobriand Islands. Shanklin was then, as now, a busy holiday resort, known for its smugglers’ chine, a shady path snaking down a steep cliff to the Channel, and a summer cottage, mullioned and deeply thatched, which had once been the property of Keats. On the Isle of Wight the nightingale can be heard. It is that much farther south than Tubber.
Elizabeth’s parents had owned a small guesthouse on one of the streets of tightly packed, bay-windowed Victorian houses that link the coast of Shanklin and its old picturesque centre with the railway station inland. ‘Mount Pleasant House’, the sign in the narrow front garden proclaimed. ‘Half Board and Full Board. All Rooms Cleaned Daily’. A separate sign saying ‘Vacancies’ or ‘No Vacancies’ dangled by a chain from the main sign. Elizabeth’s job, one of many she had as a little girl, was to change the smaller sign as the need arose.
Her childhood was not spent swinging around lampposts on a Dublin street, as her accent and demeanour might indicate, but on a beach in the south of England. Breakwaters, bathing huts, Punch and Judy shows. Kiosks gaily striped like Arthurian pavilions displaying buckets and spades, shining rubber beach balls, spinning stars pink and yellow and blue: these were the pictures that filled her childhood. She worked the beach herself, from the age of thirteen, walking all day up and down carrying a tray filled with marinated mussels and pickled cockles, which she sold for a farthing a scoop to people sitting on the sand.
She was doing this in the summer of 1946. Portsmouth had been the target of heavy bombing during the war. The Solent was flecked with battleships, and mines were still being detonated regularly on the island coast, but children who had not been born when the war started built sandcastles and paddled as dark ships passed in front of their eyes on the summer sea, the donkeys plodded in the soft sand, the brass band played at the end of Shanklin pier. ‘Rule Britannia’, they played. ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’.
Elizabeth had worked in the kitchen of the base in Portsmouth, as close as a woman would come to action if she stayed in England. She had had a boyfriend, a boy from Taunton. He had been killed in Avranches on the eighth of June, just two days after D-Day. Since then she had not gone steady with anyone, and from Christmas 1945 she had come to live with her parents again. She knew she would leave the island and thought she would like to live in London, but for the summer she stayed to work the beach.
It was a fine summer, and the brilliant light of the sea and sun attracted her. Each morning her heart lifted, improbably cheerful, when she walked down the sunlit road to the quayside where she bought shellfish and stocked her tray. She had cared about Eddie with a light giddy love, which had seemed to float recklessly above the reality of its time. She had been sorry when the news came. ‘Heartbroken’, she had said – and acted, and, for a time felt. But that feeling had been as light as the love, and it floated off very quickly. Eddie had not made his mark on her in any way. He had had neither the power to impress her deeply nor the time to leave a mark, by devotion or betrayal. Elizabeth was just twenty when the war finished. Like all girls, she understood that the population of men of her age, in her part of the world, had been depleted. You could see, even in Shanklin, a distinct lack of males in their twenties and thirties. But she was not one of those who worried seriously about this sort of problem, being aware of her position in the sexual pecking order. Elizabeth had abundant black hair, a good complexion, a slender-enough body, by the standards of that time. Since she was thirteen all men had looked at her with careful attention. At almost any time since then, she had been aware of at least half a dozen who let her know that they desired her. Men existed for her, to be chosen by her, not the other way round. There were not so many, the choice was not so apparent now, but she could not believe that for her that would matter.
Tom Crilly had been a private in the 25th Regiment through the sheer bad luck that drafted thousands of Irishmen, citizens of a neutral country, into the British Army. In 1936 he had spent his first winter working in Glasgow as a brickie, and from there he had edged his way down through Manchester, Birmingham, London as far as Southampton, living in digs, working for Irish contractors on the lump, always itching to move along and see some new place, the gratification of this desire to explore being his compensation for the life of the immigrant labourer. He worked, in those days and now again, from Monday to Saturday, seven in the morning until dark, whenever it fell. On Sundays he slept till eight and then explored his neighbourhood, whatever it happened to be. Edinburgh, Argyll, the Hebrides, the Cotswolds. York Minster, Westminster Abbey, Salisbury Cathedral. Folkstone and Dover, the Vale of the White Horse. The tourist spots of England, Scotland and Wales were as well known to him as to any well-heeled visitor from America or the Continent, motoring through the land in the mild summer months with baskets of chicken and strawberries in the boot, or travelling in first-class railway carriages, dining on roast beef with silver cutlery and crystal as the burgeoning elm trees brushed the windows of the train. He went on a bicycle, on Sundays spread over three years, to all the requisite places. How did he even know where to go? He read about them, in books bought at second-hand shops. Know Your England. Baedeker. Along with other books, collections of poetry, mainly romantic, always nineteenth-century. He had a special old suitcase for books, carted around the land along with his small cardboard case containing suit, work clothes, underpants. Whskip-1.3ptordsworth and Coleridge, Keats and Shelley. Lord Byron was his favourite. He knew Childe Harold by heart.
In so far as he had any political views he was with de Valera – neutral, listing towards Germany rather than England. English people as Tom had known them in Ireland were an overclass, superior, polite, dangerous. In Scotland and England his close associates were Irish expatriates, and the English he encountered in the shape of landladies or occasional tradesmen he could not connect with the political entity known as England, represented for him by the King, whom he could not take seriously, and by Winston Churchill, whom he disliked because he was too fat, pompous, snobbish. It seemed to Tom, in so far as he considered it at all, that the few poor English people he met were more essentially Irish than anything else, had more in common with him than with the other English, who ruled the country and whose war it really was. He did not know much about Hitler until the war was half over. The prisoners of war he encountered he pitied. He was frequently in the guardroom being punished for giving cigarettes to German prisoners. He had not wanted to be engaged in the war and his record was inglorious. Some weeks before the invasion of Normandy he had a period of furlough. His sergeant gave him the nod, suggesting that he would be wise not to return. He deserted, staying in Donegal until the end of 1945. But in the spring of 1946, bored and short of money, he returned to England, running the slight risk of imprisonment. That summer he was working in Southampton, with a builder from Mayo called Healy, a risk taker himself, a crook, who had been in prison three times already on charges of burglary. Healy robbed meters, almost as a hobby – when he was not cutting corners, taking money for work not done, defrauding clients. Times were good for builders, however, just t
hen, and for the moment he concentrated on work rather than crime. Since he was known to be unreliable in paying wages he had to take anyone he could get, and considered himself lucky to get someone like Tom Crilly, a skilled bricklayer but one whom it was an offence to employ.
Tom came to the Isle of Wight in order to look at Keats’s cottage. He crossed by ferry to Ryde and then took a bus to Sandown. From there he walked along the cliff path to Shanklin, a walk of about two miles. (It was his habit, whenever possible, to build some sort of outdoor exercise into his Sunday afternoon tours, since he seldom had time to walk during the week.)
When he reached the end of the path he decided to go down onto the beach and eat his sandwich there before looking for the cottage, which is close to the village. This entailed walking down a flight of about two hundred steps, since the cliff is very high at this point. At the bottom of the steps he found Elizabeth, who sometimes stood here when she grew tired of walking up and down the sand. She was wearing a short blue dress, considerably shorter than the style dictated by the fashion moguls of 1946. Elizabeth had some long skirts but considered them too hot, and perhaps also too maidenly, for the seaside. Even then she had a mind of her own.
Tom stared at her hair, which looked as if it was on fire. Elizabeth felt his stare but paid no attention to him, not even shifting her leg or arm. She was used to being stared at.
‘I’m looking for Keats’s cottage,’ he said, actually looking at the mussels in her tray. ‘Do you know where it is?’
‘Yes,’ Elizabeth said. ‘It’s just at the top of that flight of steps. You go back up and then walk down the first road you come to and you’ll see it.’
‘Will you come with me, please?’ Tom asked.
‘Come with you? Up all them steps ?’
The Dancers Dancing Page 13
