‘You’ve had misfortune, Attracta.’ Solemnly he nodded, repeating the motion of his head until she wished he’d stop. ‘It was a terrible thing to be killed by mistake.’
Attracta didn’t know what he was talking about. They passed by the last of the shops in North Street, Shannon’s grocery and bar, Banim’s bakery, the hardware that years ago had run out of stock. The narrow street widened a bit. Mr Purce said:
‘Has she made a Catholic girl out of you, Attracta?’
‘Who, Mr Purce?’
‘Devereux’s woman. Has she tried anything on? Has she shown you rosary beads?’
She shook her head.
‘Don’t ever look at them if she does. Look away immediately if she gets them out of her apron or anything like that. Will you promise me that, girl?’
‘I don’t think she would. I don’t think Mr Devereux –’
‘You can never tell with that crowd. There isn’t a trick in the book they won’t hop on to. Will you promise me now? Have nothing to do with carry-on like that.’
‘Yes, Mr Purce.’
As they walked he prodded at the litter on the pavement with his walking-stick. Cigarette packets and squashed matchboxes flew into the gutter, bits of the, Cork Examiner, sodden paper bags. He was known for this activity in the town, and even when he was on his own his voice was often heard protesting at the untidiness.
‘I’m surprised they never told you, Attracta,’ he said. ‘What are you now, girl?’
‘I’m eleven.’
‘A big girl should know things like that.’
‘What things, Mr Purce?’
He nodded in his repetitious manner, and then he explained himself. The tragedy had occurred in darkness, at night: her parents had accidentally become involved with an ambush meant for the Black and Tan soldiers who were in force in the area at the time. She herself had long since been asleep at home, and as he spoke she remembered waking up to find herself in a bed in her aunt’s house, without knowing how she got there. ‘That’s how they got killed, Attracta,’ Mr Purce said, and then he said an extraordinary thing. ‘You’ve got Devereux and his woman to thank for it.’
She knew that the Black and Tan soldiers had been camped near the town; she knew there’d been fighting. She realized that the truth about the death had been counted too terrible for a child to bear. But that her parents should have been shot, and shot in error, that the whole thing had somehow been the responsibility of Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey, seemed inconceivable to Attracta.
‘They destroyed a decent Protestant pair,’ Mr Purce continued, still flicking litter from the pavement. ‘Half-ten at night on a public road, destroyed like pests.’
The sun, obscured by clouds while Attracta and Mr Purce had made the journey from the centre of the town, was suddenly warm on Attracta’s face. A woman in a horse and cart, attired in the black hooded cloak of the locality, passed slowly by. There were sacks of meal in the cart which had probably come from Mr Devereux’s mill.
‘Do you understand what I’m saying to you, Attracta? Devereux was organizing resistance up in the hills. He had explosives and booby traps, he was drilling men to go and kill people. Did nobody tell you about himself and Geraldine Carey?’
She shook her head. He nodded again, as if to indicate that little better could be expected.
‘Listen to me, Attracta. Geraldine Carey was brought into this town by the man she got married to, who used to work at Devereux’s mill. Six months later she’d joined up with Devereux in the type of dirty behaviour I wouldn’t soil myself telling you about. Not only that, Attracta, she was gun-running with him. She was fixing explosives like a man would, dressed up like a man in uniform. Devereux was as wild as a savage. There was nothing Devereux wouldn’t do, there was nothing the woman wouldn’t do either. They’d put booby traps down and it didn’t matter who got killed. They’d ambush the British soldiers when the soldiers didn’t have a chance.’
It was impossible to believe him. It was impossible to visualize the housekeeper and Mr Devereux in the role he’d given them. No one with any sense could believe that Geraldine Carey would kill people. Was everything Mr Purce said a lie? He was a peculiar man: had he some reason for stating her mother and her father had met their deaths in this way?
‘Your father was a decent man, Attracta. He was never drunk in his life. There was prayers for him in the chapel, but that was only a hypocrisy of the priests. Wouldn’t the priest Quinlan like to see every Protestant in this town dead and buried? Wouldn’t he like to see you and me six foot down with clay in our eye-sockets?’
Attracta didn’t believe that, and more certainly now it seemed to her that everything Mr Purce said was untrue. Catholics were different; they crossed themselves when they passed their chapel; they went in for crosses and confession; they had Masses and candles. But it was hard to accept that Father Quinlan, a jovial red-haired man, would prefer it if she were dead. She’d heard her aunt’s maid, Méta, saying that Father Fallon was cantankerous and that Father Martin wasn’t worth his salt, but neither of them seemed to Attracta to be the kind of man who’d wish people dead. ‘Proddy-woddy green-guts,’ Catholic children would shout out sometimes and the Protestants would call back the familiar reply. But there was never much vindictiveness about any of it. The sides were unevenly matched: there were too few Protestants in the town to make a proper opposition; trouble was avoided.
‘He was a traitor to his religion, Attracta. And I’ll promise you this: if I was to tell you about that woman of his you wouldn’t enter the house they have.’ Abruptly he turned and walked away, back into the town, his walking-stick still frantically working, poking away any litter it could find.
The sun was hot now. Attracta felt sticky within her several layers of clothes. She had a chapter of her history book to read, about the Saxons coming to England. She had four long-division sums to do, and seven lines of poetry to learn. What potions have I drunk of Syren tears, the first one stated, a statement Attracta could make neither head nor tail of.
She didn’t go straight home. Instead she turned off to the left and walked through a back street, out into the country. She passed fields of mangels and turnips, again trying to imagine the scenes Mr Purce had sketched for her, the ambush of men waiting for the soldiers, the firing of shots. It occurred to her that she had never asked anyone if her parents were buried in the Church of Ireland graveyard.
She passed by tinkers encamped on the verge of the road. A woman ran after her and asked for money, saying her husband had just died. She swore when Attracta said she hadn’t any, and then her manner changed again. She developed a whine in her voice, she said she’d pray for Attracta if she’d bring her money, tomorrow or the next day.
Had Mr Purce only wished to turn her against Mr Devereux because Mr Devereux did not go to church? Was there no more to it than that? Did Mr Purce say the first thing that came into his head? As Attracta walked, the words of Archdeacon Flower came back to her: in stating that Mr Devereux was now as gentle as a lamb, was there the implication that once he hadn’t been? And had her aunt, worried about Geraldine Carey, been reassured on that score also?
‘It’s all over now, dear,’ her aunt said. She looked closely at Attracta and then put her arms round her, as if expecting tears. But tears didn’t come, for Attracta was only amazed.
Fifty years later, walking through the heather by the sea, Attracta remembered vividly that moment of her childhood. She couldn’t understand how Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey had changed so. ‘Maybe they bear the burden of guilt,’ Archdeacon Flower had explained, summoned to the house the following day by her aunt. ‘Maybe they look at you and feel responsible. It was an accident, but people can feel responsible for an accident.’ What had happened was in the past, he reminded her, as her aunt had. She understood what they were implying, that it must all be forgotten, yet she couldn’t help imagining Mr Devereux and his house-keeper laying booby traps on roads and drilling men in the hills.
Geraldine Carey’s husband had left the town, Mr Purce told her on a later occasion: he’d gone to Co. Louth and hadn’t been heard of since. ‘Whore,’ Mr Purce said. ‘No better than a whore she is.’ Attracta, looking the word up in a dictionary, was astonished.
Having started, Mr Purce went on and on. Mr Devereux’s house wasn’t suitable for an eleven-year-old girl to visit, since it was the house of a murderer. Wasn’t it a disgrace that a Protestant girl should set foot in a house where the deaths of British soldiers and the Protestant Irish had been planned? One Saturday afternoon, unable to restrain himself, he arrived at the house himself. He shouted at Mr Devereux from the open hall door. ‘Isn’t it enough to have destroyed her father and mother without letting that woman steal her for the Pope?’ His grey face was suffused beneath his hard hat, his walking-stick thrashed the air. Mr Devereux called him an Orange mason. ‘I hate the bloody sight of you,’ Mr Purce said in a quieter voice, and then in his abrupt way he walked off.
That, too, Attracta remembered as she continued her walk around the headland. Mr Devereux afterwards never referred to it, and Mr Purce never spoke to her again, as if deciding that there was nothing left to say. In the town, as she grew up, people would reluctantly answer her when she questioned them about her parents’ tragedy in an effort to discover more than her aunt or Archdeacon Flower had revealed. But nothing new emerged, the people she asked only agreeing that Mr Devereux in those days had been as wild as Mr Purce suggested. He’d drilled the local men, he’d been assisted in every way by Geraldine Carey, whose husband had gone away to Louth. But everything had been different since the night of the tragedy.
Her aunt tried to explain to her the nature of Mr Purce’s hatred of Mr Devereux. Mr Purce saw things in a certain light, she said, he could not help himself. He couldn’t help believing that Father Quinlan would prefer the town’s Protestants to be dead and buried. He couldn’t help believing that immorality continued in the relationship between Mr Devereux and his housekeeper when clearly it did not. He found a spark and made a fire of it, he was a bigot and was unable to do anything about it. The Protestants of the town felt ashamed of him.
Mr Purce died, and was said to have continued in his hatred with his last remaining breaths. He mentioned the Protestant girl, his bleak, harsh voice weakening. She had been contaminated and infected, she was herself no better than the people who used her for their evil purposes. She was not fit to teach the Protestant children of the town, as she was now commencing to do. ‘As I lie dying,’ Mr Purce said to the clergyman who had succeeded Archdeacon Flower, ‘I am telling you that, sir.’ But afterwards, when the story of Mr Purce’s death went round, the people of the town looked at Attracta with a certain admiration, seeming to suggest that for her the twisting of events had not been easy, neither the death of her parents nor the forgiveness asked of her by Mr Devereux, nor the bigotry of Mr Purce. She’d been caught in the middle of things, they seemed to suggest, and had survived unharmed.
Surviving, she was happy in the town. Too happy to marry the exchange clerk from the Provincial Bank or the young man who came on a holiday to Cedarstrand with his parents. Pride goeth before destruction, her pupils’ headlines stated, and Look before you leap. Their fingers pressed hard on inky pens, knuckles jutting beneath the strain, tongue-tips aiding concentration. Ariadne, Finn MacCool, King Arthur’s sword, Cathleen ni Houlihan: legends filled the schoolroom, with facts about the Romans and the Normans, square roots and the Gulf Stream. Children grew up and went away, returning sometimes to visit Attracta in her house in North Street. Others remained and in the town she watched them changing, grey coming into their hair, no longer moving as lithely as they had. She developed an affection for the town without knowing why, beyond the fact that it was part of her.
‘Yet in all a lifetime I learnt nothing,’ she said aloud to herself on the headland. ‘And I taught nothing either.’ She gazed out at the smooth blue Atlantic but did not see it clearly. She saw instead the brown-paper parcel that contained the biscuit-box she had read about, and the fingers of Penelope Vade undoing the string and the brown paper. She saw her lifting off the lid. She saw her frowning for a moment, before the eyes of the man she loved stared deadly into hers. Months later, all courage spent and defeated in her gesture, the body of Penelope Vade dragged itself across the floors of two different rooms. There was the bottle full of aspirins in a cupboard, and water drunk from a Wedgwood-patterned cup, like the cups Attracta drank from every day.
In her schoolroom, with its maps and printed pictures, the sixteen faces stared back at her, the older children at the back. She repeated her question.’
‘Now, what does anyone think of that?’
Again she read them the news item, reading it slowly because she wanted it to become as rooted in their minds as it was in hers. She lingered over the number of bullets that had been fired into the body of Penelope Vade’s husband, and over the removal of his head.
‘Can you see that girl? Can you imagine men putting a human head in a tin box and sending it through the post? Can you imagine her receiving it? The severed head of the man she loved?’
‘Sure, isn’t there stuff like that in the papers the whole time?’ one of the children suggested.
She agreed that that was so. ‘I’ve had a good life in this town,’ she added, and the children looked at her as if she’d suddenly turned mad.
‘I’m getting out of it,’ one of them said after a pause. ‘Back of beyond, miss.’
She began at the beginning. She tried to get into the children’s minds an image of a baby sleeping while violence and death took place on the Cork road. She described her Aunt Emmeline’s house in North Street, the neat feminine house it had been, her aunt’s cat, Diggory, the small sitting-room, her aunt’s maid, Meta. She spoke of her own very fair hair and her thin face, and the heavy old-fashioned clothes she’d worn in those days. She spoke of the piety of Geraldine Carey, and the grain merchant’s tired face. The friendship they offered her was like Penelope Vade proclaiming peace in the city where her husband had been killed; it was a gesture, too.
‘His house would smell of roses on a summer’s day. She’d carry his meals to him, coming out of the shadows of her kitchen. As if in mourning, the blue blinds darkened the drawing-room. It was they who bore the tragedy, not I.’
She described Mr Purce’s face and his grating voice. She tried to make of him a figure they could see among the houses and shops that were familiar to them: the hard black hat, the walking-stick poking away litter. He had done his best to rescue her, acting according to his beliefs. He wanted her not to forget, not realizing that there was nothing for her to remember.
‘But I tried to imagine,’ she said, ‘as I am asking you to imagine now: my mother and father shot dead on the Cork road, and Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey as two monstrous people, and arms being blown off soldiers, and vengeance breeding vengeance.’
A child raised a hand and asked to leave the room. Attracta gave permission and awaited the child’s return before proceeding. She filled the time in by describing things that had changed in the town, the falling to pieces of O’Mara’s Picture House, the closing of the tannery in 1938. When the child came back she told of Mr Purce’s death, how he’d said she was not fit to teach Protestant children.
‘I tried to imagine a night I’d heard about,’ she said, ‘when Mr Devereux’s men found a man in Madden’s public house whom they said had betrayed them, and how they took him out to Cedarstrand and hanged him in a barn. Were they pleased after they’d done that? Did they light cigarettes, saying the man was better dead? One of those other men must have gone to a post office with the wrapped biscuit-box. He must have watched it being weighed and paid the postage. Did he say to himself he was exceptional to have hoodwinked a post-office clerk?’
Obediently listening in their rows of worn desks, the children wondered what on earth all this was about. No geography or history lesson had ever been so bewildering; those who fo
und arithmetic difficult would have settled for attempting to understand it now. They watched the lined face of their teacher, still thin as she’d said it had been in childhood, the fair hair grey now. The mouth twitched and rapidly moved, seeming sometimes to quiver as if it struggled against tears. What on earth had this person called Penelope Vade to do with anything?
‘She died believing that hell had come already. She’d lost all faith in human life, and who can blame her? She might have stayed in Haslemere, like anyone else would have. Was she right to go to the city where her husband had been murdered, to show its other victims that her spirit had not been wholly crushed?’
No one answered, and Attracta was aware of the children’s startled gaze. But the startled gaze was a natural reaction. She said to herself that it didn’t matter.
‘My story is one with hers,’ she said. ‘Horror stories, with different endings only. I think of her now and I can see quite clearly the flat she lived in in Belfast. I can see the details, correctly or not I’ve no idea. Wallpaper with a pattern of brownish-purple flowers on it, gaunt furniture casting shadows, a tea-caddy on the hired television set. I drag my body across the floors of two rooms, over a carpet that smells of dust and cigarette ash, over rugs and cool linoleum. I reach up in the kitchen, a hand on the edge of the sink: one by one I eat the aspirins until the bottle’s empty.’
There was a silence. Feet were shuffled in the schoolroom. No one spoke.
‘If only she had known,’ Attracta said, ‘that there was still a faith she might have had, that God does not forever withhold His mercy. Will those same men who exacted that vengeance on her one day keep bees and budgerigars? Will they serve in shops, and be kind to the blind and the deaf? Will they garden in the evenings and be good fathers? It is not impossible. Oh, can’t you see,’ she cried, ‘what happened in this town? Here, at the back of beyond. Can’t you appreciate it? And can’t you see her lying there, mice nibbling her dried blood?’