No Peace for Amelia

by Siobhán Parkinson

  As soon as the teacher left the classroom, a murmur broke out, which seemed somehow to have Amelia at its centre. She still didn’t know what it was all about. One girl caught her eye and made a jerking movement with her head, towards an empty desk, the desk where Lucinda Goodbody usually sat this term. Amelia looked at the empty place, but Lucinda was often late for school, so late that she sometimes missed the first lesson, and it didn’t strike her as all that very odd. Maybe she’d done it once too often and was now going to be disciplined for it. Maybe the others had heard that she was in some sort of disgrace. But would that really cause such a level of interest and murmuring among her classmates? Hardly. Just then, the next teacher came bowling into the classroom, a large globe in her arms, and the whispering subsided again.

  After the second period it was time for coffee-break, and the girls all stood up and milled about with more agitation than usual at break time, some of them casting odd looks at Amelia. She wondered if she had a smudge on her nose – she shared with Mary Ann a talent for getting streaks of dirt on her face – or if her hair had come loose. She rubbed her nose briefly with one hand and patted her head anxiously with the other, but her hairpins seemed all to be in place. She looked down then at her dress, which seemed to be in order, and her boots matched too. It wasn’t her appearance. They must know something. They must have heard. Maybe Patrick had been apprehended on the road to Ashbourne and had mentioned that the Pims had harboured him. He wouldn’t do that to them, would he? How could he betray them, after they had helped and trusted him?

  As she was checking her attire, and running thoughts about Patrick’s probable arrest through her mind, her friend Dorothea Jacob came up to her, took her by the wrist, and pulled her urgently into a corner. The whispers grew louder, and all heads seemed to be turned away from Amelia, but all were held at a taut angle that suggested their owners were bursting to turn and look at her.

  ‘Amelia,’ said Dorothea gently. ‘There’s a rumour going around. I don’t know if it’s true.’

  Amelia could feel anxiety wash over her, and she gripped Dorothea’s hand hard. They must have arrested him. He must have squealed.

  ‘But I think you ought to know what they are saying.’ Amelia heard Dorothea’s kindly voice as if it was coming through on a badly tuned wireless.

  ‘Yes?’ she said, having swallowed first to try to relieve the dryness in her mouth.

  ‘People are saying that Frederick Goodbody has been killed in the war.’

  Everything went all colours, all wavery, everything shone about the edges, a strange, almost angelic singing rang in her ears, and a slow, swinging sensation gripped her body in a seductive grasp, as if she was being swung, down, down, down, with a slow swoop in a giant swing-boat at a carnival; then it all stopped, the lights, the kaleidoscopic movements of colours, the singing, the swinging, swooping, falling feeling; it was all muffled, blurred.

  When she opened her eyes she was lying on the schoolroom floor. Far above her she could hear the humming sound again, only louder, more intense, like upset and angry bees swarming from an invaded nest. A great white moon hung in the air, just above her. She could see now what they meant about the man in the moon. Certainly, if you squinted carefully, you could see a face in the moon. Definitely a human face. Wasn’t that odd, Amelia thought. But then the man in the moon started to move his lips, and he spoke to Amelia in Dorothea’s voice, and his great white moonface came closer to hers, and her head was lifted up and someone held something saline and whiffy to her nose, and then pressed a glass of water to her lips.

  Amelia drank the water, though it was warm and unpleasant-tasting, and then she sat up wonderingly, wishing the bees would go away, buzz off somewhere else and leave her with Dorothea the moon to ward off the ache that was starting.

  ‘I have a headache in my throat, Dorothea,’ she whispered.

  ‘Yes, of course you have, dear. I know how it is when you faint. It happened to me once. Now, see if you can just get to your feet long enough to sit properly on a chair. It can’t be comfortable or clean down there on the floor.’

  Arms appeared around Amelia’s body. She closed her eyes and gave herself up to the arms’ embrace, and in a moment she found herself sitting on a bentwood chair, with more water being pressed on her. She pushed the glass aside, and someone passed another ammoniac whiff under her nose.

  ‘Let her be, now. Just let her be. Shoo off the lot of you,’ she could hear Dorothea say, as she sat with eyes still closed, and then she heard the door opening and closing, opening and closing, and at last the bees had stopped and Amelia sat in a silence broken only by her own breathing and the companionable sound of Dorothea’s breathing, close to her ear.

  Amelia Comes Home

  Though she was conscious at the time, Amelia never could recall how she got home that day. She certainly didn’t travel under her own steam. Dorothea arranged it all, she knew that, and somebody drove them to Casimir Road, but she couldn’t even tell afterwards if they went by motor car or in a horse-drawn vehicle.

  She remembered standing on the doorstep, supported by Dorothea’s friendly arm, and she noticed particularly that the irises had faded. The daffodils had died off earlier in the week, after their last splurge of golden glory on Easter Day, but this was the first time that she noticed the irises, the remains of the flowers hanging like shameful and sickly rags on watery green stems. When Mary Ann opened the door, Amelia broke out of Dorothea’s encircling arm and stepped forward. Mary Ann’s arms went around her.

  ‘What ails you, my pet lamb?’ said Mary Ann. ‘What’s the matter at all?’

  ‘Oh, Mary Ann, look at the irises!’ Amelia said, in a strange, sad voice. ‘They’re all dead and faded and withered away.’

  Mary Ann expressed no surprise at this, though of course she was deeply surprised that Amelia should make such an apparently irrelevant remark.

  ‘That’s right, pet, they’ve had it and no doubt about it,’ she agreed, still holding Amelia in both her arms. She looked around Amelia then, to Dorothea, who still stood on the doorstep.

  ‘Frederick,’ Dorothea mouthed. ‘Dead.’

  Mary Ann nodded. She had thought as much, as soon as she had seen Amelia’s face waxen with grief, though her eyes were dry.

  Between them, Dorothea and Mary Ann got Amelia upstairs and into bed with a hot water bottle and an extra blanket, and Mary Ann closed the curtains she had flung open that morning with such vigour and relief.

  ‘I didn’t mean to forget him, Mary Ann,’ Amelia murmured from under the blankets. ‘I wouldn’t ever have preferred anyone else, not really.’

  ‘No, no, of course you wouldn’t. Your best beau.’

  ‘Only I hadn’t heard from him for ages.’

  ‘Hush, lovey, don’t talk now.’

  ‘But how could I hear from him, if he was already …?’

  ‘Hush, now, hush.’

  ‘Oh, Mary Ann, I thought maybe he’d forgotten about me. On Easter Monday, you remember the day of the picnic, I felt so close to him. Almost as if he was there with us. I thought this meant a letter must be on its way. I was sure on Tuesday there’d be one. And then, the GPO was all in turmoil, and so I wondered then if that was why I hadn’t heard.’

  ‘Amelia, go to sleep now. We’ll talk later. I promise you.’

  Amelia turned over with a sigh and her two friends left the room.

  Dorothea explained to Mary Ann on the landing that it was all just a rumour at this stage, but she had a pretty shrewd idea it was true, and Lucinda wasn’t at school, which seemed to confirm it.

  Mary Ann nodded.

  ‘Will you go for her mother?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, of course. My brother will take me. He’s still outside in the car.’

  Mary Ann gave directions to Dorothea and saw her off. Then she went in to Amelia’s grandmother, who sat solemnly waiting to hear what was amiss, for she had heard unusual sounds in the hall, and the unsteady voice of her grand-daughter
bewailing the withering of the irises in the narrow border under the bay window in the little front garden. The bulbs had faded quickly this year, forced beyond their maturity by the unexpected warm spell.

  She nodded when Mary Ann gave her the news.

  ‘Ah, men and their wars,’ she said, unsurprised.

  ‘It’s a very wicked thing, Ma’am,’ agreed Mary Ann piously, well aware of the old lady’s view of war-making.

  ‘But he was a brave and honourable young man. We mustn’t forget that.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Mary Ann mournfully.

  ‘But misguided.’

  ‘Indeed, Ma’am.’

  ‘And your brother is also most misguided, Mary Ann. Though I am sure he is an honourable boy too.’

  Mary Ann looked up, startled.

  ‘I am a light sleeper,’ said the grandmother. ‘And I noticed my son’s greatcoat missing from the hallstand this morning.’

  Mary Ann had the grace to blush a deep, deep plum red.

  ‘Such foolishness, and at such a cost,’ went on old Mrs Pim.

  Mary Ann looked ready to argue, but dared not.

  ‘I think they will have to surrender now soon, Mary Ann.’

  ‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Mary Ann again, regarding her toecaps. ‘They are to surrender today.’

  ‘I am glad to hear it. But it will not go well with them,’ said the old lady. ‘Your brother is well out of it. I take it he is in a safe place?’

  ‘I think so, Ma’am.’

  ‘Well, we must pray about it, Mary Ann.’

  ‘Oh yes, Ma’am.’

  ‘Go on about your business so, my dear. Maybe you should look in on Amelia again.’

  ‘No, Ma’am,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I have work to do in the kitchen.’

  Amelia’s grandmother looked at Mary Ann in astonishment for a moment, taken aback by such rudeness. Then she realised what the servant girl meant.

  ‘Very well. I’ll go and sit with her myself,’ she said, and rose up out of her chair with the crinkling sound that her stiff, old-fashioned skirts always made.

  When Amelia awoke, later that afternoon, in a room hazy with curtained sunshine, her grandmother sat in a low chair near her bed.

  ‘Grandmama, oh Grandmama,’ said Amelia with a sigh.

  Her grandmother put a hand over Amelia’s, where it lay white against the white counterpane. Amelia sighed, drew her hand out from under her grandmother’s, and turned to look at the wall.

  Those were the last words she spoke for several days.

  After the Surrender

  The headline was perfectly clear. In fact it almost screamed at Mary Ann: THREE REBELS SHOT. She looked at the thick black strokes the letters made on the paper, and she swayed with fear. It had happened as her brother had predicted. Once the Volunteers surrendered, the leaders would be hanged or shot, he had said. She had thought perhaps he was being over-dramatic. She had hoped that maybe the English would think them all just a bunch of rowdies and let them off with a bit of penal servitude. But she had reckoned without the European war. The English couldn’t afford to let rebellion in Ireland go unpunished while they were at war with Germany. These troublesome Irish would have to be taught a lesson. And now here it was, barely a fortnight after the surrender, the first executions, just as Patrick had feared. Mary Ann still hadn’t heard from him, and she was worried sick about him. Tommy O’Rourke said he had left him outside a particular pub in Ashbourne, where he had requested to be put down, and he hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

  With a heavy heart, she went on to read the body of the newspaper article. It said that Thomas Clarke, Pádraic Pearse and Tomás MacDonagh had been court-martialled and shot the previous day, at dawn, in the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol. It went on to mention other leaders of the Rising – Ceannt, McDermott, Plunkett, Connolly, and Casement. It didn’t mention Thomas Ashe or Eamon de Valera. And it didn’t say anything about executing any more leaders. She knew Pearse and Clarke had been right at the heart of the Rising. Maybe they would stop at that now – make an example of the most central men, and just imprison the rest. They couldn’t shoot the lot of them.

  Mary Ann read the papers more avidly now even than she had done before the Rising, and she read them openly. Apart from Amelia’s grandmother’s revelation that she had had a shrewd idea what had been going on, on that night when Patrick had lain in the garden shed, nobody had mentioned her brother, but there was a tacit acknowledgement in the household that Mary Ann had a personal interest in what was happening, and when the family had finished with their newspapers, they would pass them on to Mary Ann.

  The people of Dublin were satisfied by those first executions. They thought it was good enough for those crazy rebels who had brought destruction to the centre of their city. They were delighted when they saw young hooligans being marched off to the docks to be shipped away to England, to prison camps. Well rid of them, they said they were, and smirked.

  Mary Ann would read accounts of what was happening out of the papers to Amelia in the afternoons, when she had a lull in her work, and Amelia would sit dreamily and listen to her. Mary Ann commented on every story, blessing herself sometimes, exclaiming, crumpling up the paper with anger and frustration, on occasion, but Amelia just sat and listened. She hadn’t said another word since the day Dorothea had brought her home from school, and she hadn’t eaten very much either. Her mother was distracted with worry about her, but her grandmother said she was just grieving, and it was perfectly natural, and she would be all right.

  ‘But it’s not perfectly natural just to sit still all day, Grandmama, and say nothing,’ Amelia’s mother insisted. ‘It’s natural to cry and wail and wring one’s hands.’

  ‘On the contrary,’ said the grandmother with dignity, and said no more.

  Sometimes, while she lived through these silent days, Amelia would practise on her mother’s typewriter, which she hadn’t touched for some time. She copied out poems – love poems, sonnets, war poems – which gave her plenty of practice at carriage returns and capital letters, and she carried her pale, wobbly, oddly spaced and occasionally misspelt versions of the poems around with her sometimes, and read them to herself and smiled a small, secret, wan smile. Mary Ann observed this behaviour, but she passed no remarks. She shared Amelia’s grandmother’s conviction that Amelia was all right, really.

  A day or two later, more men were shot, and a few people started to get a little uneasy. And then more were shot after that again, and so it went on, day after day, story after story of penal servitude, deportation, and execution, one execution after another, till there were sixteen dead, and thousands in prison. By now the people were beginning to get rather restive. They didn’t like the idea of so many secret courts martial and executions announced only after they had happened. And when they read that James Connolly had to be tied to a chair to face the firing squad, because he was already badly wounded, they started to murmur. The murmuring grew till it reached a loud hum, and people who only last week had been jeering the fighters were beginning to feel sorry for them and to shake their fists instead at soldiers of the Crown in the streets.

  Mary Ann just hoped that Patrick had been rounded up and interned in a prison camp in England. She had an idea that he would be safer over there. Anyone they deported wouldn’t be shot at least.

  A Keepsake for Amelia

  One day, Amelia had a visitor. It was Mary Ann who opened the door to him, and she was very taken aback, for there stood on the doorstep the very image of Frederick Goodbody, as she had last seen him, and standing there as he had done that day, and in the same uniform. He swept his hat off as soon as she appeared at the door, with just the gesture Frederick had used, and held it politely over his heart. He stood between Mary Ann and the sun, with the result that though she could see the outline of his stance clearly, dark against the sunlight, she couldn’t make out the details of his face, and his whole figure gave off a ghostly aura of flickering light and shadow.


  When he spoke, Mary Ann knew it wasn’t Frederick, nor his ghost for that matter. He had a soft country accent, quite unlike Frederick’s crisp tones.

  ‘I’ve come to see a Miss Amelia Pim,’ he said. ‘Is this the right house?’

  ‘Indeed it is,’ said Mary Ann and flung the door wider in a gesture of welcome, for she felt this was a visitor that would do Amelia good. In spite of feelings running high in the town, she hadn’t the least desire to shake her fist at this man, or to spit insults in his face, just because he wore the king’s uniform.

  She thought for a moment about ushering the soldier into the drawing room as she had done with Frederick the day he had called to say goodbye, but she remembered the awkwardness that had arisen on that occasion, so she said, rather brazenly: ‘She’s down in the kitchen with me at the moment, actually. Would you mind if I showed you in there, as the other rooms are engaged? We’re very informal here,’ she added, by way of excuse for this unconventional suggestion.

  The soldier didn’t look in the least put out.

  ‘The kitchen would be lovely,’ he said. ‘I like to be close to the kettle myself.’

  So Mary Ann stepped ahead of the soldier and put her head around the kitchen door.

  ‘Visitor for you, Amelia,’ she said, cheerily. She always addressed Amelia as if she expected to receive an answer, as if she wouldn’t give in that Amelia had withdrawn into herself for a while.