All three of us went to the kitchen, but Mrs Flynn knew as little as Josephine, so went to look for Tim Paddy. ‘The poor bloody bugger,’ he said, but didn’t say much else. We even dared to ask O’Neill, tracking him down to his onion beds. He actually spoke to us. He told us to go away.
My father and mother didn’t return at lunchtime. Geraldine, Deirdre and I sat around the dining-room table in a way that seemed very strange to us. Geraldine had been in the room with my mother when my father began to call her name in the hall below. ‘They’ve hanged Doyle,’ was what he had said when they stood together on the landing. ‘He was missing all night.’ I explained to my sisters about death by hanging because I’d asked Father Kilgarriff and he’d told me that the weight of the body snapped something in the neck. Deirdre began to cry. Tears dripped into her cold rice pudding; Geraldine scolded her.
‘Doyle was involved with the Black and Tans,’ my father told me later that afternoon, and did not say more except that the murdered man had sold information in the neighbourhood, to a Sergeant Rudkin. He had had no political leanings himself, neither Republican nor imperialist. ‘They’d have regarded his tongue as the instrument of his treachery,’ my father explained.
Deirdre had a dream about the body hanging from the branch of a tree, the bloody tongue picked up by a magpie. Geraldine drew a picture that included this magpie, in which Doyle was represented as a devilish-looking creature with staring black eyes. But when my mother found the drawing she furiously burned it, saying that a dead person must be respected no matter how despicable he had been in life.
‘Ah now, it’s best forgotten,’ Mr Derenzy replied when I asked him about the murder. He shook his head, causing the red fluff of his hair to spring up and down. He began to talk about something else, and it wasn’t until our conversation had come to an end that I realized he was afraid. When I asked Johnny Lacy he told me that the Black and Tans were loyal to their spies and rarely failed to avenge a death, justly or unjustly finding another victim. ‘I wouldn’t cross the yard in the dark,’ Mrs Flynn announced.
Yet life settled down again and when I think of that hot summer at Kilneagh I still hear the whisper of Josephine’s singing as she dusts and polishes. Aunt Fitzeustace cuts the grass, old Hannah arrives from the village to scrub the floors and do the washing, Tim Paddy leaves spinach for Mrs Flynn at the back door, O’Neill is hunched among his high delphiniums. The mill-yard bakes in the afternoon sun, my father walks the length of the avenue, his labradors slouching with him.’/ am old, but let me drink,’ my mother prompts in the scarlet drawing-room and adds in the silence that follows: ‘Bring me spices, bring me wine.’ Even while she speaks the shadow of Doyle hovers in the drawing-room, as it hovers everywhere else. The magpie from Deirdre’s dream swoops for the tongue, flies settle on the blood as I had seen them settle on the carcass of a sheep. One of these days it will all be all right, my mother says again; and my father assures me that it can’t be long now before the Black and Tans are recalled to England.
In early September Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy went to the sea for their summer fortnight. Their many suitcases were loaded into the basket-trap one Friday morning and Tim Paddy stood ready to accompany them to the railway station at Fermoy. They stayed in Miss Meade’s boarding house in Youghal, and my father used to urge Mr Derenzy to take his holidays at the same time in order to accompany them. He swore that Aunt Pansy would come back engaged, but Mr Derenzy could never be persuaded, no doubt considering the suggestion improper.
‘Good-bye, good-bye,’ we shouted after the basket-trap, and Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy waved. Their dogs barked in the orchard wing and Father Kilgarriff hurried to calm them, an extra duty in the absence of my aunts. Philomena went to stay with her twin sister in Rathcormack.
Later that same day, when my father and I were in Fermoy ourselves, we saw a soldier whom my father identified as Doyle’s friend Sergeant Rudkin. The man was lighting a cigarette at a street corner, one hand cupped against the wind. Noticing my father, he raised that same hand in greeting.
‘He’s just inherited a greengrocer’s shop,’ my father said quietly. ‘In Liverpool.’
He watched Rudkin turning a corner and then said he’d once met him, here in Fermoy one night. ‘Oh, very agreeable, he was. He had a drop too much taken when he told me that about his shop.’
I enjoyed these Friday outings to Fermoy, collecting groceries that had been ordered the week before, buying household items for my mother and Mrs Flynn, and sometimes for my aunts. We always went for tea and sandwiches to the Grand Hotel, where my father talked to people I did not know. “Well, fellow-me-lad,’ a man would say and, finding it difficult to continue, would laugh and tap me on the head. Others would remark on my growth, or notice that I had the Quinton eyes. I liked it best when we went early to the hotel so that I could have my tea and then do what shopping remained, rather than wait in the hallway while my father conversed with his friends in the bar. The shop people always asked after my mother and my aunts, and occasionally after Mrs Flynn.
On the Friday when we saw Sergeant Rudkin there was green knitting wool to be matched and an order placed for oilcloth. There was a set of bolts to be collected from Dwyer’s hardware, and a cough remedy from the Medical Hall. I did all that while my father was in the hotel and at six o’clock we set out for Kilneagh. The Black and Tan sergeant was on my mind because it seemed strange to me that a member of a force which my father spoke of with revulsion should greet him on the street.
‘He was with poor Doyle the night I met him,’ he explained when I asked. ‘It would never have done to walk past your own employee, Willie.’
I accepted-that, and understood it. My father said:
‘Doyle, you see, was in a difficult position. He’d fought beside that man in Belgium.’
I asked if Doyle had been married. He shook his head. A moment later he added:
‘It should never have happened, Willie. That hanging was a terrible thing.’
He spoke deliberately, with an unusual firmness that reminded me of his saying that Collins’s men would not be invited to drill at Kilneagh. We sat together in the dog-cart, stopping in Lough so that he could call in at Sweeney’s for a drink and further conversation. I waited in the yard and Mrs Sweeney brought me out a plate of biscuits. We made our way then, slowly, through the village, between the two rows of colour-washed cottages, past Driscoll’s shop and the Church of Our Lady Queen of Heaven. We turned eventually into the avenue of Kilneagh, my father humming beneath his breath as he often did on our Friday journey home.
‘I hate having to go away to the school,’ I said without looking at him, dropping the confidence into the euphoria which appeared to be there between us. He continued to hum during the lengthy pause which occurred before he replied.
‘Oh, we can’t have you uneducated, Willie. We couldn’t have that, you know.’
The words were precise, with a ring of finality about them, yet my father’s tone was as lazy as ever. It matched our unhurried progress as we passed through the white gates of Kilneagh and proceeded up the avenue between the two lines of beech trees. The labradors made a fuss on the gravel in front of the house, jumping up at both of us, and the stray dogs rushed round the side of the house. My father had presents for Geraldine and Deirdre and as I watched him giving them their parcels I knew I was going to have to go to the school he thought so much of. Perhaps it was the inevitability of it that caused me, for the first time, to feel that further dwelling on the matter would be something to be ashamed of, that further reference to it would belittle myself in my own eyes as much as in his. I was my father’s favourite, though he tried to hide the fact by paying extra attention to my sisters. For my part, I was fonder of him than of anyone else.
I awoke with a tickling in my nostrils. I lay there, knowing that something was different, not sure what it was. There was a noise, like the distant rushing of wind in trees.
Too drowsy to wonder prope
rly, I slept again. There were voices calling out, and the screaming of my sisters, and the barking of the dogs. The rushing noise was closer. ‘Willie! Willie!’ Tim Paddy shouted.
I was in Tim Paddy’s arms, and then there was the dampness of the grass before the pain began, all over my legs and back. The ponies and my mother’s horse snorted and neighed. I could hear their hooves banging at the stable doors.
There were stars in the sky. An orange glow crept over the edges of my vision. The noise there’d been had changed, becoming a kind of crackling, with crashes that sounded like thunder. I couldn’t move. I thought: We are all like this, Geraldine and Deirdre, my mother and father, Josephine and Mrs Flynn; we are all lying on the wet grass, in pain. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy would be asleep in Miss Meade’s boarding house in Youghal; Philomena would be asleep in Rathcormack; for all I knew Father Kilgarriff was dead.
Through the fever of this nightmare floated the two portraits in the drawing-room, my dog-faced great-grandfather and plain, merciful Anna Quinton. I seemed to be in the drawing-room myself, gathering up my school books and placing them in the corner cupboard. After that I was in the dog-cart, asking my father why Father Kilgarriff had been unfrocked. I saw that the teeth glistening in the confessional were Anna Quinton’s, which was why Father Kilgarriff read her letters. I would understand such things, my father said, when I went away to school: that was why I had to. I would understand the love of Mr Derenzy and Aunt Pansy, and the different love of Tim Paddy and the Sweeney girl.
‘Don’t move, Willie. Don’tmove. Just he there.’ Itwas Josephine who whispered to me, and then there were other voices. There were men shouting, asking questions. ‘Who are you?’ one question was, and someone else said: ‘He’s O’Neill. He’s a gardener in this place. That fellow’s his son.’ There was a gunshot and then another. They seemed like part of the crackling noise, but I knew they weren’t because they were closer to where I lay. ‘Oh, Mother of God,’ Josephine whispered.
Men walked by me. ‘Is there a bottle in the car?’ a voice asked. ‘Christ, I need a drop.’ Another voice said: ‘Hold on to your nerves, hero.’
There were further gunshots and one by one the dogs stopped barking. The horse and the ponies must have been released because I heard them galloping somewhere. Something touched my leg, the edge of a boot, I thought. It grazed the pain, but I knew that I must not call out. I knew what Josephine had implied when she’d whispered to be still. The men who were walking away must not be seen; they had been seen by O’Neill and Tim Paddy, who must have come up from the gate-lodge. My eyes were closed, and what I saw in the darkness was Geraldine’s drawing of Doyle hanging from the tree, the flames of the drawing-room fire making a harmless black crinkle of it.
4
Kisses it says, scratched on the varnish of a table. Big Lily with her tits bare it says on the whitewash of the lavatory, the third cubicle of the row. Initials and dates decorate a doorway, and once used to fascinate me. The doorway is in the mill, the table in a schoolroom in the city of Cork, the whitewashed lavatories in the school my father had gone to also. Kisses was a girl’s nickname. Big Lily was the wife of the night watchman. The initials belonged to the men who, down the generations, had worked the mill.
The schoolroom was in Mercier Street, across the city from Windsor Terrace at the top of St Patrick’s Hill, where my mother and I lived with Josephine. I didn’t know why this school had been chosen for me, only that I was still too young to go to the one in the Dublin mountains. Mercier Street Model School had twenty-three pupils, boys and girls, all of them Protestants. It was run by Miss Halliwell.
‘Willie Quinton,’ she said the morning I arrived. ‘Children, this is Willie Quinton.’
Josephine had walked across the city with me, and I thought of her making the journey back, shopping as she had said she would. I wished I was with her. I wished I was sitting in my mother’s bedroom, on the chair she said was specially mine, beside her bed. The children in the schoolroom had the sharp features and the unfriendly eye of town children. A girl had giggled when Miss Halliwell repeated my name.
‘Well, dear,’ Miss Halliwell said now, ‘and which class shall receive you, I wonder? Children, I believe Willie has a scholarly look about him.’
Miss Halliwell was lean, with the look of a wilted cowslip. I had heard my mother describe her as a girl, but she did not seem like a girl to me.
‘Geometry?’ she enquired. ‘Algebra? You’ve made a start with both? And French likewise? So, too, with history and geography? Arithmetic, with Latin, we take for granted.’
She smiled at me, the tired petals of her face reviving for a moment. She was being sympathetic, but in the schoolroom you could tell that this was not her usual mood, that strictly speaking she was cross.
‘I haven’t learned any French,’ I said.
‘Ah.’
She sat at a large table, around which were spread the members of her most senior class. At the smaller tables sat the junior classes, in twos and threes. The walls of the schoolroom were green, covered with shiny maps and charts. I was soon to learn that while the senior class grappled with parsing and analysis or the elaborations of a
French verb, Miss Halliwell’s voice would follow the movements of her cane over a reading chart with pictured objects on it: A for Apple, B for Boot, C for Cat.
‘That’s a pity about French, dear.’
‘Father Kilgarriff didn’t know French. My mother was going to teach me.’
‘Ah.’
She smiled again. She said:
‘Kilgarriff? That’s a funny name. A priest, Willie?’
Father Kilgarriff had been shot when he’d appeared in’the yard, but unlike O’Neill and Tim Paddy he had survived his wounds. Aunt Fitzeustace and Aunt Pansy, returning from Youghal as soon as they heard the news, had nursed him in the orchard wing, which was the only part of Kilneagh that had not been destroyed. The gate-lodge had been burnt to the ground, a final gesture as the Black and Tans hastened away in their motor-car.
I didn’t say anything when Miss Halliwell remarked that Kilgarriff was a funny name. Amusement passed from face to face in the schoolroom. There was more giggling.
‘Stop that unpleasant noise,’ she snapped, anger flaming her cheeks. ‘If there is something to snigger at, one of you can put a hand up and say so. A priest, dear?’
‘Father Kilgarriff is a priest.’
‘It’s perhaps not surprising then that he didn’t know French.’
Laughter followed this remark, obedient and noisy, not like the sniggering. Miss Halliwell paused, waiting for silence before she said:
‘The priests of Ireland are not well-travelled. Not renowned for travel, Willie.’
I moved my head, half nodding it. I felt disloyal to Father Kilgarriff. ‘I thought the monks,’ I began, about to repeat what he had told me: that the Irish monks of many centuries ago had travelled endlessly, bringing to a heathen Europe the Christian faith.
Miss Halliwell interrupted by shaking her head. Her eyes glistened, and to my horror I realized that the tears which were gathering had to do with her concern for me. ‘Sit there, my dear,’ she softly commanded, gesturing towards a table at which the children were younger than I was. ‘Poor Willie,’ she whispered later that morning when she inspected a piece of work she had set me. She did not blame me for being backward because a priest had taught me. She did not blame me for anything. Her fingers touched my head in passing, her eyes were lurid with compassion. ‘We’ll do our best,’ she whispered at the end of that day. ‘Together we’ll do our best, dear.’
More than anything I didn’t want sympathy. The scarlet drawing-room no longer existed. Never again would Tim Paddy lean on his brush handle, nor Mrs Flynn set off to mass in her Sunday clothes. Never again would I walk to the mill with my father, up the sloping pasture, down through the birch wood. Yet at night in bed I no longer sobbed before I went to sleep. I could think about my father and my sisters without involunt
arily tearing at the palm of one hand with the fingernails of the other. I could even imagine Geraldine and Deirdre in the heaven I had heard so much about, a territory that remained vague even though I now had greater reason to wonder about it. I imagined Mrs Flynn and Tim Paddy and O’Neill there also, and of course my father.
‘Together we’ll do our best, dear,’ Miss Halliwell whispered. ‘I am here to be your friend, Willie.’
My mother and I might have lived in the orchard wing with my aunts and Father Kilgarriff, but my mother had said she could not. Father Kilgarriff looked after the cows on his own now. My mother’s horse and the ponies had been given away. My father’s labradors had been shot that night with the other dogs.
‘I’m really quite all right, Miss Halliwell.’
‘Dear Willie, of course you are.’
After that first day I made the journey on my own from the house in Windsor Terrace to Mercier Street Model, and back again each afternoon. The city had been badly damaged in the fighting; half of Patrick Street was gone, shops and buildings blown apart by the Black and Tans. I hurried by them, always preferring the quays and docks. Often I stopped to watch the cargo ships unloading, wondering what it would be like to be a seaman. I wandered slowly home by roundabout routes, past the warehouses of Tedcastle, McCormick and Company, past Sutton’s Mills. I learnt the names of the streets: Anglesea Street, where the drunk woman stormed abuse at her reflection in a shop window, Cove Street, where the burnt-down laundry was, Lavitt’s Quay and Fapp’s Quay and Kyrl’s Quay.
Often I found myself miles out of my way, lost in the slums. Other children shouted at me, ragged creatures, dirty and barefooted. Shawled women begged, but I had nothing to give them. I watched pitch and toss being played, and once a man who trailed a greyhound on a string told me this animal could race faster than any dog in Ireland. ‘Blarney Boy’s the name we’ve given him. You’ll tell people yet, son, you saw Blarney Boy on the streets of Cork.’ But I never did.