‘Would you credit that? Well, that beats Banagher!’
Since this slight interest had been shown, I described the house she had grown up in. It was interesting, I said, that your mother had been connected with the Woodcombe family too. But my voice faltered, for what I was saying suddenly seemed absurd to me. ‘I didn’t realize,’ I said instead, ‘that my cousin had left Kilneagh.’
The shallow-cheeked maid sniffed into the sleeve of her overall and was at once told to be quiet by Mrs Sweeney, who informed me that the girl had a terrible cold.
‘We’re destroyed with colds this winter,’ Mr Sweeney affirmed, but the girl hadn’t a cold. Just for a moment she had wept.
When the meal came to an end Mr Derenzy slipped away and Mr Sweeney went to serve in the bar. After they’d washed up the dishes Mrs Sweeney and the maid put on Wellington boots and left the kitchen to attend to livestock in the yard. I had offered to help with the dishes and the animals, but Mrs Sweeney had been adamant that I shouldn’t lift a finger. I was sitting by the range when the limping man who had passed through the mill-yard entered the kitchen, ‘ whistling the same tune he had been whistling that morning.
‘I’m Johnny Lacy,’ he said. ‘I met you two summers ago. Would you remember?’
‘Yes, of course I do.’
He placed a large glass of dark-coloured beer on the table and drew up a chair beside mine.
‘I married into the Sweeneys. Did Willie tell you that, by any chance? We’re two doors up. The blue-washed cottage.’
‘Willie told me you’d married.’
He reached for his glass and drank a mouthful of the beer. He wiped his lips and whistled again.
‘D’you know that tune?’ he enquired.
‘I’m afraid I don’t.’
‘You can dance “The Rakes of Mallow” to that tune.’
‘I see.’
‘Mallow’s not far from here.’
He drank again. He said:
‘You’ll take the Cork train in the morning?’
I said I would, and he nodded approvingly. I wondered if he had come into the kitchen at the behest of Mr Derenzy or the Sweeneys, in order to ensure that I didn’t decide to dawdle.
‘Where d’you think Willie’s gone to, Mr Lacy?’
He reached again for his glass. Instead of answering he asked if he might fetch me a drink from the bar, but I said I wasn’t thirsty.
‘Willie’s best left,’ he said.
Mrs Sweeney and the maid returned to the kitchen while he was speaking. He stood up at once, and politely insisted that it had been a privilege to meet me again. When he’d gone I asked:
‘Whereabouts in Cork is St Fina’s, Mrs Sweeney? Where Josephine works now?’
She was sitting down at the table, pulling off her Wellington boots. Still wearing her green overall, on which a residue of snow was rapidly dissipating, the shallow-cheeked girl clattered buckets in the sink, washing them out. Instead of immediately answering my question, Mrs Sweeney said that the snow was heavier than ever. She mentioned an abandoned motor-car and said it would need to be towed home by a tractor in the morning.
‘I would like to see Josephine. In case she heard from my cousin.’
‘St Fina’s is on the Bandon road, outside the city. The thing is, miss, I think your cousin would want to be on his own.’
‘But, Mrs Sweeney—’
‘There’s things you wouldn’t want to disturb, girl.’
The early hours of that night passed slowly by.
I lay in a bed that felt faintly damp in spite of Mrs Sweeney’s hot-water bottles. I lay there in a nightdress she had lent me, but I did not sleep. I stared into the darkness, wondering what things were better left undisturbed, and what tale they feared I might carry back to England. Had Mr Derenzy told them I was to have your child? Did all of them know where you were and not wish me to know also because I would trap you into a marriage?
Dwelling upon these doubts and speculations, I wearied myself into an uneasy sleep and dreamed you were showing me the estuary at Cork again. Then suddenly it was different: I was showing you Woodcombe Park. In sunshine, by the mock-Roman summer-house, you put your arms around me, you said you loved me and always would. Among the yew trees there were people in colourful clothes: all over the lawns they were scattered, the Professor and Mrs Gibb-Bachelor, Agnes Brontenby and your friends, Ring and de Courcy. Cynthia was eating a pear and Mavis was with Hopeless Gibbon, and old Dove-White was having his burnt clothes mended by the waiter from the Cafe Bon Accueil. The mullioned windows of the town were beautiful, you said, and when I led you from room to room in Woodcombe Park you said that they were beautiful also.
‘Lemonade!’ your small headmaster cried, hurrying in the garden. ‘You’ve never become a manufacturer of lemonade!’ Your mother laughed, and so did mine; my father said our prayers had been answered. Aunt Pansy took Mr Derenzy’s arm, and Father Kilgarriff said it was only in a dream he’d been unfrocked. ‘That’s what I’m trying to tell you,’ you said. ‘I’d never let you cry. It’s only in a dream that you cried in the fields.’ The shadows stretched out before the sun set on the horizon, the shadows of the yew trees and the people in their colourful clothes. ‘It’s heaven here,’ you explained because the pillars and the windows of Woodcombe Park had become golden in the golden sunlight. That’s where you’d been, you explained: wandering in the places I’d told you about, the rectory and the town and the gardens of Woodcombe Park. No point in staying in a ruin, you explained, and we stood in the mulberry orchard that Anna Quinton had copied. ‘How elegant England is!’ you said. ‘Not frightening like Kilneagh!’ Then you took my hand and we walked among the people at the party.
When I awoke, the first flickers of dawn were appearing around the curtain at the room’s single window. It was a shock to find myself there after the vividness of my dream and as the realities of the day before pressed in upon me I felt tired and melancholy, and longed to sleep again, to go on dreaming. I listened to the early-morning noises and finally pulled the curtain back, spreading a weak morning twilight into the room. I washed and dressed, and at a quarter-past eight went down to the kitchen.
Mr Derenzy had already left for the mill. Mr Sweeney exuded an odour of petrol: he had been working with a tractor in an effort to haul out of a ditch the motor-car his wife had mentioned the night before. Consuming sausages and bacon, he informed me that the snow had stopped falling at five minutes past midnight. He’d been in the yard at the time, dumping crates of bottles. The wind had dropped and in no time at all a galaxy of stars had appeared in the sky.
‘We’ll make you up sandwiches for your journey,’ Mrs Sweeney said. ‘A couple of ham and a couple of jam. You’ll be as right as rain for the day then.’
‘You’ll enjoy yourself on the train,’ said Mr Sweeney. ‘Aren’t you the lucky girl to be going back to England?’
Later that morning I said good-bye to both of them. ‘Good-bye so,’ said Mr Sweeney, wiping an oily palm on his trousers. ‘That’s interesting what you told us about the place in England.’
‘Go back on the steamer today, girl,’ Mrs Sweeney urged in a low voice. She clenched my hand and seemed about to say something else, but did not do so. They would accept no money from me.
The shallow-faced maid was given the task of accompanying me to Driscoll’s shop, where a lift to Fermoy on an outside car had been arranged for me. In cold sunlight, which the fallen snow reflected and intensified, we stood together outside the grocer’s shop and in a moment or two a woman who introduced herself as Mrs Driscoll came out and said we’d be warmer waiting inside since the horse was still being harnessed out at the back. She offered us biscuits from a glass-topped tin, one of a number which ran in a row along the counter. She repeated what I had been told already: that there hadn’t been snow in Lough for fifteen years.
The horse and cart rattled over the ice of the yard at the back of the shop, and someone shouted out that it was ready. I said go
od-bye to Mrs Driscoll and gave the maid a threepenny piece.
‘Oh, miss, miss,’ she cried, her squinting eyes watery with gratitude, and then she hurried me to the car.
‘Hold on to the rail, miss,’ the driver ordered. ‘I don’t want the old horse to go down.’
Obediently, I did as I was bidden and at a very slow pace we made the journey to Fermoy railway station.
5
The nun’s eyes blinked rapidly behind spectacles. The spectacles were so embedded, so tightly held in place, that they might have been there to inflict pain. Her teeth were crowded, jutting from her mouth when she spoke.
‘We don’t know why you’ve come,’ she said. ‘To ask if I might talk to Josephine.’
I stood with the nun in the hall of St Fina’s, a huge expanse of brown and cream tiles, freshly washed, still smelling of Jeyes’ Fluid.
A wide pitchpine staircase, gleaming with linoleum, rose gently and then sharply formed an angle. This linoleum bore a pattern of greens and reds and blues, faded now to a nondescript speckling. The walls were nondescript also, an oatmeal shade that did not catch the eye. The hall was empty of furniture.
Beads jangled as the nun shifted her weight from one foot to the other. ‘Better it would be,’ she said, ‘to write a letter.’
‘There isn’t time to write a letter. It’s very important.’
‘Excuse me then.’
She went away, her black shoes silent on the tiles. She disappeared through a door, which she softly closed behind her. Another nun descended the stairs with rags and a tin of polish in her hand. She smiled at me and said good-morning.
More than twenty minutes went by before Josephine entered the hall. She looked different in her lay sister’s clothes, less pretty than in the uniform she’d worn before. Breathlessly, as if she’d been running, she spoke before I could.
‘I couldn’t think who it was who’d come.’
‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to alarm you.’
‘Did someone tell you I was here? Are you in Cork on a visit, miss?’
‘Do you know where my cousin is, Josephine?’
‘Oh no, miss. No, no.’ The worry in her voice was an echo of Aunt Pansy’s and Mr Derenzy’s. I remembered the moment when the Sweeneys’ maid had wept.
‘Do you think he’s in Ireland, Josephine?’
‘He didn’t say to me, miss. He didn’t say he intended to leave the mill.’
She fidgeted with a dish-cloth she held. The cloth was blue and white. It had a damp look, as if she had been drying dishes with it.
‘I came here to find him, Josephine. I came all this way.’
She nodded, and then said she should not have gone to Kilneagh that day, leaving your mother alone. Abruptly she turned and hurried from the hall, and as she did so the nun with glasses descended the stairs, holding out a charity box.
‘If you could help us at St Fina’s,’ she said.
Distractedly, I found a coin and pushed it at the slot in the box. I would have run after Josephine if the nun hadn’t arrived. I still tried to, but she had already disappeared and the nun with the glasses shook her head. She opened the hall door, drawing back bolts which she had secured in place when she’d admitted me. She blinked again and smiled, the crowded teeth bursting from her face.
‘Josephine’s not at peace yet,’ she said.
‘At peace?’
There was no reply. The door closed and I walked away from the sprawling mansion that might once have been the pride of a local family and was now a convent institution. I passed down a long, straight avenue, not at all like the avenue at Kilneagh, being open to fields on either side. An elderly man, poorly dressed, emerged from a gate-lodge. It was a lovely day, he said, touching his cap. ‘Thank God for that, miss.’
I returned to the Shandon Boarding House. Willie will look after me, I had written in the note I had left behind in the rectory. Please do not worry. I wrote a further letter now, as humbly as I could, requesting forgiveness and protesting repentance. But I did not give the address of the boarding house and I didn’t reveal that you had not been at Kilneagh.
I walked about the streets, half hoping that I’d meet you, that suddenly you’d be there. Brooding, not knowing what to do, no longer praying, I wept and often could not cease. The weather remained cold, but it did not snow again.
In Thompson’s Cafe, surrounded by warm-cheeked countrywomen and men gossiping in their sing-song city voices, I dawdled through those two afternoons, preferring to be there than in the dour boarding house. The steaminess and gaslight made the cafe cheerful, and sometimes I would close my eyes and pretend that you were pushing your way through the crowds to where I sat. ‘John Gilbert’s marvellous,’ a woman at my table remarked to her companion when once I pretended so. I opened my eyes and there were bronze chrysanthemums on top of a basket of shopping and a cherry falling from the cake the other woman ate. It was extraordinary that people did not guess at my misery, that the punishment I suffered did not show in my face.
No children played in the playground, but a light shone from the two schoolroom windows. I pushed open the door and walked down a passage. ‘Yes?’ Miss Halliwell called out while my knuckles were still raised to rap on the panels of the door to the schoolroom.
Among the maps and charts, the table she sat at stacked with exercise-books, the schoolteacher was younger than I had imagined. You had given me the impression of a woman in middle age: Miss Halliwell was not yet that.
‘Oh yes, I do so very well remember Willie. Please sit down.’
I sat on the edge of a battered desk. I explained how I had come from England only to find that you had disappeared, that all I could think to do was to ask people you had mentioned if they had news of you.
‘Willie’s no longer at his mill?’
‘No.’
‘Ah …’
The exhalation was soft. Behind the pile of exercise-books there was a daydream in Miss Halliwell’s eyes.
‘I only wondered,’ I began, ‘if perhaps you’d heard something here in Cork. Willie pointed out this schoolroom once. There was just a chance you might have heard something.’
‘Ah, no.’ Miss Halliwell smiled distantly. She ran a thin forefinger around the edge of a text-book, at the same time turning her head away and keeping it quite still, as if posing for a portrait.
‘I used to feel sick at heart,’ she said, ‘when I thought about what had happened to that boy. It made me sick at heart, that fearful tragedy and all it left behind.’
‘Miss Halliwell, is there anyone else you can think of who might know?’
‘His mother was a drunkard. Every day the child would walk home to that. No matter how well he had recovered there was always his mother’s selfishness to remind him.’
‘I feel that no one is telling me the truth. I feel there’s something being hidden. Even Josephine—’
‘Josephine?’
‘The housemaid the Quintons had.’
‘Oh yes, a housemaid brought him up.’ She spoke bitterly, the dreaminess gone from her face. It had been horrible, she said, a child alone with a mother who was given up to drink, with only a housemaid to look after him. ‘Can you blame him for going away?
Can you blame him for leaving this miserable country and starting life afresh? Perhaps we should all do that.’
I stood up. Miss Halliwell had no idea what I was talking about when I said that something was being hidden. She knew nothing about your whereabouts; I apologized for disturbing her.
‘Is there some reason why you should communicate so urgently with your cousin?’
‘Yes, there is.’
‘You haven’t told me.’
‘It doesn’t matter now. I’ve been a nuisance to you. I’m sorry, Miss Halliwell.’
‘I loved him, I dearly loved him. That isn’t easy, you know.’
I didn’t know that; you hadn’t told me; perhaps you hadn’t known yourself. Miss Halliwell said:
‘I
met your cousin on the street one day. I invited him to tea, but he did not wish to come. No, don’t go yet.’ Again there was the soft exhalation of her breath. ‘Of course that boy must start afresh. This country has fallen to pieces since they had their revolution. Gunmen run it now.’
‘I don’t know what to do, Miss Halliwell. I am going to have Willie’s baby.’
‘Gunmen,’ Miss Halliwell repeated, and then abruptly stopped.
‘That’s why I came back,’ I said.
A horse and cart went by in Mercier Street. A contortion twisted the features that you had once likened to a wilted flower.
‘Willie’s baby,’ I repeated.
‘My God …’
‘If Josephine had still been in the house in Windsor Terrace I might have stayed there and waited for him.’
‘What on earth are you talking about?’
‘I have very little money, Miss Halliwell. I have lodgings in a place where they make me pay every morning before I leave the house. Soon I shall be destitute.’
‘How dare you come here in this manner.’
‘I know I shouldn’t have. I’m sorry.’
‘You come here to beg, a child I have never seen before, saying you are Willie Quinton’s cousin—’
‘I am his cousin. And I am not begging.’
‘It’s a lie, what you say about a baby.’ Her hand reached out and grasped my wrist. ‘You speak of other people’s lies but you are telling lies yourself.’
‘No, it isn’t a lie, Miss Halliwell.’
The grip on my wrist tightened. In her faded face the schoolteacher’s lips were drawn back in distaste, and when she spoke a fine mist of saliva moistened my forehead.