Sandra. She’s gone. And Auntie Annie is still there, waiting for her stockings. And Elizabeth still hasn’t written. But Orla, battered down by all her problems, is beginning to feel comfortable nevertheless. She is beginning to feel liberated from the comparisons that rule her life in Dublin; she feels, almost, the same as everyone else, what she yearns above all to be. She lives in the same sort of house as her peers, eats the same food, is governed by the same regulations. There is a kind of equality here that isn’t possible in Dublin, land of ‘What Does Your Father Do?’ This is the Gaeltacht, a land of the child. What matters is the length of your hair and your skirt, the sweetness of your smile and your voice and your Irish, the lightness of your step, your ability to make friends.
But of course Orla is not entirely free from her family, not like the other children for whom Tubber is a holiday camp only, a haven removed from every adult connection. Orla relishes the freedom and happiness she senses burgeoning all around her, but she feels these feelings under threat. Try as she will she’s not an ordinary Gaeltacht scholar. Tubber still contains her relations. And her Auntie Annie.
Most of the relations are all right; they’ve seen Orla, even said hello to her as she walks the road to school. They don’t require much contact; they’re busy with their students and they probably realise that Orla would rather be left alone, for now. But Aunt Annie is a different story. She hasn’t any students to keep her busy. She won’t understand Orla’s wish for privacy, her wish not to acknowledge her aunt: how could she? Orla knows she is the focus of her Aunt Annie’s attention. She feels it, like an evil eye, staring at her all the time, as she romps and plays and learns Irish.
The only reason Orla has escaped for so long is that Aunt Annie lives miles from the Dohertys’ house, far away at the other side of the valley, and Aunt Annie seldom goes out anywhere, except to Mass. Orla has had a hard time avoiding her there, but she’s managed to do it so far – she stays at the back of the chapel and dashes out as soon as the priest leaves the altar.
Aunt Annie hobbles up the aisle, hunched like a hedgehog, in her black suit and black hat, her face grimacing and one of her eyebrows ticking, her eyes peering anxiously around, looking for Orla. Orla watches her cautiously, then escapes before she can be caught. Even though she knows that in the end she has to see her Aunt Annie – because she can’t go home to Elizabeth if she doesn’t – she continues to avoid her. Into the third week, the best week, she does that rather than take the plunge. Take the plunge and get it over with. But what would the consequences of that be? Aunt Annie is not the sort of plunge you can take and get over. She’s not rational, she’d want another visit. That Orla is a child is not something her Aunt Annie would understand, or pay any attention to. Elizabeth, who is intelligent, possibly brilliantly so, does not understand this. If she does she has no trouble dismissing it. Orla has no right to be a child. Nobody has or ever had; that is the thinking. Children are there to carry out adults’ orders, first and foremost. Their feelings, and adults do not believe they have any, simply don’t matter.
Tubber is small. Orla knows she can escape for a while, but not for ever. She is amazed that it has gone on for so long, her avoidance. Every minute, except when she is either safely ensconsed in the schoolhouse or hidden deep in the tunnel that covers the burn, she expects to feel the hand on her shoulder. She expects to turn a corner and see Aunt Annie’s peculiar face jerking and nodding at her, and her voice squeaking: ‘Orla! Is that Orla? And how are ya?’ Then Aisling and Sandra and Pauline and the teachers will know. They will know that Orla, whose connections in Dublin are as bad as anyone could wish, has an even worse connection here in Tubber. And they will laugh at Orla behind her back. In their estimation she will sink down to the bottom of the midden, there to remain for ever and ever.
Auntie Annie lives alone in an old farmhouse near the shore: she is the custodian of Orla’s ancestral home. This is the house and farm where Orla’s father grew up, where the Crillys have lived for perhaps centuries, farming and fishing, spinning and weaving, eating and drinking, living and dying. Dancing, telling stories, singing. Crying. From here Crillys have walked to Derry and taken the boat to Scotland, to New York, to Australia, to Gros Iªle. To Normandy. To Vietnam.
Crilly men have built the house: they have been masons and carpenters for centuries. Almost every chair and bed and table in it was made by their hands. The old clothes that fill the wardrobes were made by the women: Orla’s grandmother, great-grandmother. With wool from their own sheep they spun and wove, dyed and sewed. The house is full of history, it is full of the history of work and creation.
Now it is Auntie Annie’s house.
It is here that Orla’s family has always taken its irregular holidays. Elizabeth, in her more reckless moments, when she is blind with pride or backed up in some corner of snobbery, calls it ‘our holiday home in west Donegal’. There is only one true word in that phrase, namely ‘Donegal’. The house is not even in west Donegal, but in the east of that county. ‘East’, however, is not a good enough word. It is not a tourist word, so Elizabeth, travel agent for the nation, would eschew it automatically. Or perhaps her ignorance of locations is partly real. Lots of women, lots of other people too in those days, could be vague on geographical distinctions of even the most basic kind.
Elizabeth also ignores Aunt Annie, or is ignorant of whatever it is that is wrong with Auntie Annie. There is plenty wrong with her that Orla can see: she is out of kilter, not plumb with the world. Her face is crooked, her mouth is crooked, and she walks with a clumsy and awkward gait; her feet cannot be relied upon to meet the ground at every step. What we would say now is that she lacked co-ordination. When she sets a cup or saucer on the table it often misses and falls to the stone floor. She grabs the handles of red-hot saucepans with her bare hands and gets burnt. Her voice emerges not in the rhythmical singsong of the native accent or the flat tones of Dublin, but in a jerking staccato, screeching one minute, inaudible the next. Observing Auntie Annie you understand that normality consists in being even. Normal people are people who are more or less identical to everyone else, and who fit, tongue and groove, foot and slipper, into their time and place. Normal people are in tune, and the most normal people of all are those who hear the latest air split seconds before the majority and set the tone, beginning to sing in time to it, split seconds ahead of the posse. Everyone in Tubber, almost everyone, is out of step with Dublin and Derry, and by extension the rest of the western world, but on the whole they have their fingers on the pulse of their own region. Its norms, however complex and strange, a mixture of old and new, are known to them, consciously or otherwise. They are not known to Auntie Annie. She is in Tubber but positioned at an oblique angle to it. There was a crooked woman and she had a crooked house. And that woman is Orla’s aunt.
The people of Tubber do not mind. They can deal with the strangeness that crops up among them, especially if it is a strangeness bequeathed by nature. If somebody among them walks crooked they will try to prop that person up so that they can survive in the symmetrical world. Their ethos is that of the neighbourhood more than of the clan or of the family. Networks of friends other than relations or neighbours are completely foreign to them. Because Auntie Annie is either their distant cousin or else their neighbour they look after her, keep an eye on her, do the work that the members of her own family don’t do or won’t or can’t do because they have moved away to another neighbourhood. The more go-ahead people in Tubber, people who have made the transition from the older rural values to a new set not unlike those that prevail in the city, realising that Dublin is not an unsurmountable distance away, might frown and say, ‘The Crillys should do something about Annie Crilly. It’s not right that they leave her there alone and depend on the neighbours to look after her. She’s their responsibility.’ But the others ask no questions. For them connections and responsibilities are ordained by physical closeness more than by ties of blood. ‘Ar scáth a chéile a mhaireann na daoin
e,’ they believe. Meaning that neighbours must rely on one another. This is a neighbourhood where most people’s closest relations live in, say, Philadelphia and come home once in ten years on big holidays, celebratory, boozy, disruptive. Those who stay behind, the survivors or the abandoned, feel more kinship with one another than with those who went away, even if they are their own brothers and sisters.
Their own nephews or nieces.
Orla mutters to herself that she hates Auntie Annie. What she feels is not hatred, however, but the feeling that is much more familiar to her, and that is worse. Shame. She is so ashamed of her aunt that she wishes she did not exist, which is further than you usually go with hatred, that being reserved for people you once loved, probably quite a lot. And what is this shame if not fear, born of a suspicion, an acknowledgement, that Auntie Annie is of no use to her? Is, in fact, a most serious threat? Some relations are an asset because of their good looks or their charm or their money or their success. Lucky relations, their luck spreading from them through the blood of the family. And others are a hindrance. As a relation, Auntie Annie is a disaster. Orla knows that if her friends see her aunt she herself will lose whatever status she has in their eyes, which is not very much. Auntie Annie, even more certainly than the lodgers, will pull her down, down to rock bottom, where she will be left alone, alone and unloved. That is what she fears.
She feels frustration, too, that Tubber, the idyllic village of her history and her dreams, has to be spoiled for her by Auntie Annie. Paradise Valley, and her closest relation in it is the valley simpleton.
Orla knows people who have handicapped brothers or sisters, children with big smooth troll-ugly faces and short plump lopsided bodies. There are plenty of them in Dublin. They are different from Auntie Annie. They are labelled. ‘Handicapped’ is the label of the time, although like all such labels it changes every twenty years or so. These children – and it is the children one sees mostly, rather than the adults – go to special schools or workshops, often on special marked minibuses, white minibuses with windows full of their strange, broad faces, minibuses that position them firmly on the outside of ordinary society, since all ordinary children travel on double-decker buses or on foot. Their families, although they suffer terrible practical deprivations and terrible emotional worries, do not, or so it seems to Orla, suffer from damage to their pride. (She is wrong about this.) The handicapped children are distanced from them to some extent by the label that is attached to them, as they are distanced from everybody else by the special little buses, the special schools, the special jobs. Everyone knows that they are an accident, something that is separated from the family norm. Everyone knows that now. They occur because their mothers were too old or because some chromosome got pushed out of place or because they were deprived of oxygen in the birth canal. That is probably what happened to Auntie Annie but nobody in Tubber would have noticed it or known. None of the Crillys have ever mentioned it, discussed it, even thought about it, as far as Orla can see. They have always pretended that Auntie Annie is normal, or else they actually believe that she is normal. And how can that be? How can people look at someone who is so odd and acknowledge nothing? Maybe because so many people in that community have twisted bent faces, as if the God who had made them had suffered from a shaking hand, or a malicious sense of humour. Or maybe because they think it would be unkind to mention any flaw, as it would be unkind to point out that a person was exceptionally ugly, or had a bad portwine stain, or, even, a limp or a crippled leg. Unkind because these things were caused by bad luck or bad behaviour and also because nothing can be done about them. Because they themselves feel powerless to do anything about them. That is it probably. ‘What can’t be cured must be endured,’ they would say, with a deep, resigned sigh. ‘It’s the will of God. Ours not to reason why.’ All their proverbs tell them to shut up and accept whatever has happened. Their religion tells them that. Also, that deformed people are in the world for a reason, and are dearer to God than the ordinary, robust run-of-the-mill.
Mainly, though, they turn a blind eye to the flaws and lend a helping hand because their deepest instinct is to be kind and charitable to any underdog. People in cities, it is rumoured, love the rich and successful. People in places like Tubber love the poor and the failures.
The unfortunate thing is that Auntie Annie isn’t bad enough to need acknowledgement even by people who come from another kind of place, from the city, people who know better. Like Elizabeth. Auntie Annie doesn’t have a big head or a deformed body. She is well able to perform all basic domestic and farm functions adequately. She is almost there but not quite, not quite the full shilling but certainly about eighty per cent of it. She can talk and walk and cook and clean and milk the cow and feed the chickens. She can sell eggs to campers or visitors, if they want them, and she can go to the post office to collect her disability pension (so someone had acknowledged something – when? who? the doctor, maybe, or the district nurse). She can dress up in her good clothes – of which she has wardrobesful, masses of silk and creªpe and fine flowing jersey, in the dark and plummy colours and clumsy, jerky shapes of decades gone by, sent in brown parcels over the years from England and America and never thrown away – and go to town, if someone gave her a lift, and to the chapel every Sunday. That is all she needs to do to survive, to live. It is not necessary to go to school or take an exam, to clock in at a job. With her tiny pension and tiny farm she manages, she is a completely self-sufficient person, not even, it seems, poor or deprived. Her house is comfortable: warm as an oven, clean as a cat. Beautiful, since nobody has ever bothered to change it in fifty years. And she looks almost like anybody else.
As a matter of fact she looks like Orla. At least that is what people in Tubber say.
‘You’re the image of your Aunt Annie!’ They see the same colouring, the same shape of face and feature, and ignore the differences of age and expression and fashion, which to them are an irrelevance. They do not seem to know anything about children, or perhaps they know but do not care. They do not know that children want to look only like themselves, or else, perhaps, like the most glamorous person they know. Orla would not mind being told that she looks like Mary Quant or Twiggy, but she does not want to look like her mother or her father or any of her relations, and she certainly can’t bear to be told that she looks like Auntie Annie.
It is another reason for wanting to avoid her, not wanting to look at her twitching strong unadorned face, her sometimes sour and resentful face, and think that that, and not the familiar and, it seems to Orla, pleasant if flawed image that appears in the mirror, is what she looks like.
So the package containing the used elastic stockings lies in the corner of her suitcase, a repulsive reminder of her duty, a mark of her guilt. Because she knows she should be kind to Aunt Annie. She knows she should acknowledge her. This has been impressed on her by Elizabeth, who for some reason wishes to force Orla to face this demon, to confess it, to show her aunt to her friends, to her girlfriends. Maybe because Annie is not Elizabeth’s own relation and does not tarnish her image in any way, she would like Orla, superior intelligent educated, rather standoffish Orla, to have to face the fact of Aunt Annie. Orla’s aunt, Orla’s blood, so much so that Orla looks like her. That, Elizabeth thinks, will be good for Orla and force her to see where she fits into the great order of the universe, lest she begin to feel she is superior to Elizabeth.
Or maybe it is not so vindictive. Maybe Elizabeth wants to place Orla side by side with Aunt Annie so she can show Orla off. Look, she might think. That is where my husband comes from. This is his sister. And look what I have done for him, see what I have created. Orla. A pretty and normal child, clean and nicely dressed, with a smooth face and clever eyes. Spot the difference! Elizabeth, like all mothers, uses her child to demonstrate to the world what she once was. I am old and ugly now, they say, but look at this, look at this. As she is now, so was I. And also to say, I am out of touch with things but look at her. She is with it. She i
s in the right place and the right time. Deal with me through her because she is the one who represents our family now. She is the family future, the embodiment of its achievement so far. She can speak grammatical English and fill in forms, she can make telephone calls to authoritative figures and remain cool. Thus far have we advanced. Maybe this is how Elizabeth sees it. Whatever the reasoning behind her insistence that Orla show Auntie Annie to her friends, she does not do the same herself. She has never, for instance, considered inviting Auntie Annie to stay with them in Dublin, not even for a weekend, even though the Crillys are regular visitors to the house in Tubber.
The road to the shore
It is because Aunt Annie lives near the sea that Orla avoids swimming, although she loves swimming more than anything else. Aisling, who suspects something, nags her. ‘Why don’t you ever go swimming? I’m sick and tired of rounders every day. This is supposed to be the summer, our summer holiday, for heaven’s sake!’
Orla always makes some excuse. It is surprising how many excuses she can make up, when pushed. Her powers of invention know no limit. She is sick, she is cold, she is tired, Monica laughed at her swimming togs. She is afraid of Killer Jack.
The worst thing that could happen for Orla is a spell of good weather. But this so seldom occurs in Donegal that it would be a miracle if it did. Miracles occur, though. Even Ireland has an occasional heatwave and in the third week in July, until then one of the coldest Julys on record, the summer weather arrives, like a film star suddenly pulling up in a silver Rolls-Royce in the muddy farmyard and halooing to the farm folk, as they emerge, blinking, from their dark byre or barn: ‘Yoo hooo! I’m here! Surprise surprise!’ A blue and gold day, a glamorous day of satin water and azure sky. The temperature is twenty-six degrees. In the eighties, people said then, meaning as hot as abroad, as hot as they could stand, as hot as America or Spain.
The Dancers Dancing Page 15
