Before the Fall

by Orna Ross

  He went across and stuck his head in under the car canopy, a small respite. "What are you saying to me?"

  "The door of the house, down the far end," he said, pointing. "You might have better luck down there."

  It was what Brosnan had intended to do, the obvious thing to try once he'd got no reply in the shop, but he didn't trouble to say so.

  He ran back through the rain. Since the fog lifted yesterday, these bitter, gusty squalls had assailed them. Filthy weather. He put out his hand to bang the brass knocker but, as soon as he touched it, the door nudged ajar. From within, he could hear a strange noise, a child's voice it sounded like, and it seemed to be grunting, querulously: eh – eh – eh. He gave a small cough and knocked politely, at which the door swung inwards and two frightened eyes stared back at him from the end of the stairs. They belonged to a young woman, a fine-looking girl in her early twenties, sitting on the bottom step.

  She didn't get up, or change her expression, or in any way acknowledge that he was there. Beside her was a baby sitting up in a pram and it was from this small person that the grunts were emanating. Eh – eh – eh: reaching towards her toy that had fallen to the floor, one of those woollen sacks that makes a noise upon shaking.

  "I'm sorry to disturb you, Miss." Raindrops falling from the peak of his cap so he took it off. She didn't answer, just stared at him as if his face was a mirror.

  "I'm making a visit to all the houses in the area on behalf of the National Army."

  Again she made no reply. Then the penny dropped with him. She must be the loony, the dead man's sister. Gallagher had filled him in on the queer set-up in this house. What a tragedy, a looker like her. That pale skin under the red hair was a striking combination.

  "May I?" When she made no indication, he stepped in. He felt his best ploy would be to play innocent. "I'm making enquiries about one of our officers, lost to us here yesterday. A local man, Lieutenant Dan O'Donovan. Was he known to you?"

  Her stare was unnerving.

  "Eh – eh – eh..." continued the child. He'd have thought no woman could ignore those sounds. He felt like going over himself — him, a man, and a stranger to the child — and picking up the thing and handing it to her. He would have, only it didn't seem right. An internal door opened and another young woman came through, about the same age. Dark to the other girl's red, not as pretty in the face. Not today, anyway: her eyes were swollen and her face blotchy, either she had a bad cold or she'd been crying. She stopped dead when she saw him in the hall and affectedly eyed his uniform, up and down, the familiar sneer of the die-hard distorting her face. "What do you think you're doing in here?"

  "Sorry to disturb you, miss," he said. "This lady let me in."

  "Did you, Norah?"

  No answer for her either. The child raised its voice, turning its grunts to a cry. The second girl saw the problem instantly, retrieved the toy from the floor, beamed back at the wet, pink-gummed smile that rewarded her and turned a frown on him, all in one fluid move. To him she said, "I didn't hear the knocker."

  "I'm here about the dead officer found in this vicinity yesterday."

  "Well, you should never have been let in here so I'll thank you now to leave the way you came."

  "I'm afraid I can't do that, miss. I've questions to put to you both, and to the rest of the household too, if I may."

  "You may not."

  "Look," he said, trying for patience, "a man is —"

  She held up her hand. "Save your talk."

  "I have to insist —"

  "No, I insist. I insist on your respect. My mother died in the room above us one hour ago."

  Jesus, what rotten blasted timing. Was he mistaken or was that a smile from the lunatic girl?

  "Oh!" he said. "I'm sorry. I didn't know, I..."

  "We haven't had time yet to put up the card on the door."

  He found his equilibrium. "I'm sorry for your trouble," he said. "May she rest in peace."

  "So we won't be receiving any Free State detectives or whatever you are." She ran that disdainful look up and down his uniform again. "Or answering any Stater questions either. Not today."

  She was enjoying this. She was upset of course — her mother was dead — but a part of her was enjoying his discomfort. The lunatic girl's face looked impassive but somehow managed to register hostility too.

  "I'm sorry for your trouble," he said. "Sincerely."

  "You shouldn't have let yourself in without a by-your-leave."

  "The door was open...I wasn't to know..." He found himself, somehow, walking backwards, towards the door. "I'll have to come back soon. You do understand that?"

  She looked at him like he was a person without morals.

  "We have enquiries that won't wait," he said. "When is your funeral?"

  "We've hardly had time to think of that."

  "I'll see if I can leave it until the day after. As a favour, like."

  Instead of being grateful, she looked at him like he was pure poison to her. "Suit yourself," she said. "You will anyway."

  She turned to the other girl, put out a hand. "Come on, Norah, let's get you two inside." Her voice for the girl was so different, drenched with kindness. She helped her off the stairs, tucked the blanket in around the baby's legs.

  "You can close the door behind you," she said in the tone she had for him, "on your way out."

  And with an arm around her unfortunate friend, she steered the perambulator towards the door at the end of the hall.

  Outside, O'Dwyer had the engine turned off and was smoking again, warm and dry in his vehicle, unscathed by female hostility. "How did it go?"

  "Terrible," he said, climbing in beside him. "They've had a bereavement. The mother of the house has died."

  "Ah, Mrs Parle, has she gone? Lord have mercy on her, she's been sick this long time. And she was only a young woman, forty-five at most."

  "They were in no mood to answer questions. I said we'd come back."

  "Fair enough."

  "So where to now?"

  "Have you any recommendations?"

  "You could try Mrs Mythen in the post office. She's usually good for what's going on."

  "All right," Brosnan said. He didn't hold out much hopes of it, but it would give him time to unravel his twisted-up thoughts. How had that interview gone so awry? He shouldn't have let himself be put on the back foot like that, as if he had done something bad to her on purpose. If only he'd known, he'd have done them first, yesterday, instead of spending the day on the men in the barracks and that girl from the pub. Kavanagh, his superior officer, wouldn't be too pleased: the Parles were central witnesses.

  "What do you think, O'Dwyer? Do you believe they —" he nodded towards the house — "had anything to do with it?"

  "Hmmm. I'd be inclined to say no, but with the state of the country, it's hard to tell which end is up these days."

  "They had a motive."

  "They wouldn't be alone in that."

  "Really? Was O'Donovan not liked? Kavanagh seemed to think he was."

  "Not by die-hards, he wasn't."

  A pause. Then: "Do you know her, the daughter of the house?"

  "Not well. She'd know my sister."

  "She's quite a fury."

  "Really? I never heard that of her. She was the schoolteacher here for a time. Well respected."

  Yes. Kavanagh had filled him in on all that, how she'd lost her job for taking in the lunatic girl and the baby. A rare sort, to do a thing like that. And she was also Cumann na mBan. The country was learning only too well what vixens they could be when roused.

  Brosnan sighed again: to think that when he applied to join the Guards, it was to get away from killing. When he was offered this job in Wexford, he'd jumped at it, thinking policing milder than soldiering, and the divide less bitter here than in County Kerry.

  After the Ballyseedy affair, he'd have jumped at any offer that took him away from his own county. That whole business sickened and shamed him. Some nights when
falling to sleep, he'd find himself trapped in a nightmare watching his colleagues tie those Irregular boys together around a ticking bomb, and seeing it explode them into smithereens. In his dream, he looked through the eyes of the one who had, miraculously, survived intact, who hid watching the body parts of the other eight being divided into nine coffins by the Free State. He didn't want to be part of an army that did such deeds — and then denied them.

  But he needed an income. He had a wife, two children, a third on the way.

  The Civic Guards had offered him a way out. Some said the Guards were only a tame branch of the army, others that this was not the time for their introduction, but Brosnan believed in the idea of an unarmed force and thought Ireland could not have it soon enough. That was what he wanted to be part of: the force of law, not the law of force.

  Yet here he was, somehow, still in the middle of the worst of it. Wexford turned out every bit as embittered as Kerry and he found himself floundering around like a blind man who'd stumbled into the wrong house.

  "You have some chance of getting somewhere with them," Kavanagh had said, when he was explaining the job to him. "A local man would be devoured."

  It was a strange, closed village, its people full of a strange, closed pride. Most of them wouldn't talk to him at all and those who did had a drawly, dawdly way with their words so that he had to stretch his ears to make sense of what they were saying. Even his army colleagues seemed to be wary of him. A foreigner, he'd heard himself called.

  And now this. Brosnan took off his cap, smoothed back his hair, wished himself far from Mucknamore, far from Kerry, far from Ireland altogether.

  They'd try this post-office woman, but he hadn't any great hopes of her. People who knew the dead man well were his best hope.

  "A good soldier," Kavanagh had said, describing O'Donovan. "Nothing showy, but brave as he was needed to be. Good leadership ability. All qualities that would have stood to him in the Guards. I'd say he'd have made Inspector."

  "Could it have been an accident, Sir?"

  "It could, I suppose, but I don't believe so. Why would he go out that way by night unless he was forced? Especially the night that was in it. Can you think of any good reason?"

  "It's hard to, all right."

  "You know the danger good men have been living with. He was shot at before, you know, and his house set fire to this autumn gone out. Mind you, this has a different feel to an Irregular shooting, more underhand."

  He had handed him over the file. "Whatever the motive and whoever the cause, we can't have the likes of this going on, Sergeant, or we'll have the English looking to come back, claiming we can't keep control. Over to you. Don't let us down, like a good man."

  O'Dwyer looked askance at him. "Are you all right, Sergeant?"

  "Have you a spare cig?"

  He took it and bent to the light that O'Dwyer struck for him, inhaled the smoke deep. What next? He hadn't the faintest idea. "Right, let's go to the post office, see can we get any good out of them there."

  1995

  No silence is ever total. Here in this hotel room, the quiet is thicker and the underlying noises more muted than the swoosh of the sea and the whine and whack of building work that was my soundtrack for the summer. Here it's corridor voices, wheels whirring over carpet, tea trays tinkling and, outside the window, the rattle and drone of Dublin traffic, muffled by double glazing. Beneath it all, the subterranean creaks and gurgles of a huge central-heating system. The air here is thicker too than the open air of my shed, lined with lemon polish and carpet dust and a trace, despite the cleaners' best efforts, of other people.

  I wonder about them, all the others who have slept in here, the business travellers and holidaymakers, as I lie between my laundered linen sheets, trying to persuade myself to get up. It's four in the afternoon and I've been asleep since two, would be asleep yet, had I not been kicked into waking by you. But it's good that you've roused me; I should already be up.

  In less than an hour, Maeve will be sitting in Bewley's Café, a fifteen-minute walk away, waiting for me. I need to shower and dress and turn myself out. I need to plan what I am going to say when she asks me again why I want to "waste good money" on this hotel room. It is expensive, this square beige space with its peach-and-cream curtains, its pallid furnishings, its innocuous matching paintings of flowers from four different angles in their identical wooden frames.

  So why, my sister wonders, am I staying here instead of at her house, where she has not one but two spare rooms? Neither she nor anybody else would bother me, if that's what I'm afraid of. I could come and go as I pleased. All this she has already said on the telephone, and I know she will say it again today. She will do her best to persuade me. I will not let myself be persuaded.

  She'll also want to know how the writing is progressing and all about hospitals and birthing arrangements and the question of afterwards. The prospect exhausts me, and has me clinging to the mattress. I would ring and cancel our meeting — as I have once already — were it not for her saying at the end of her call yesterday that she had "something" to tell me. Though it seems unlikely, I cannot rid myself of the idea that this something might be to do with Rory.

  I seem doomed to repeat every action of my life. Here I am, pregnant again, having made an abrupt exit again, and here he is, again failing to follow me. It wouldn't be difficult for him to track me down; Maeve's name is listed in the telephone book and though it might be mildly awkward for him to have to telephone her and ask if she knows my whereabouts, it's a small test. Tiny.

  Is he really going to flunk it? After all that he said, surely he cannot leave it like this?

  I throw aside the covers but I can't propel myself out. What I'd like to do is escape into another nap. Since coming to Dublin, that's all I seem to do: drift in and out of sleep between bouts of writing. I no longer run, have to force myself even to walk. Breakfast and dinner come to me via room service because going downstairs to negotiate waiters and other diners feels like too much bother. I'm growing heavier and slower. My face and arms and wrists are swollen now, as well as my belly, and I get short of breath just taking a shower.

  It's all your fault, especially the tiredness, not helped by your inability to tell night from day. Whenever the mood takes you, off you go on the move, kicking and nudging and poking me from inside. I have surrendered to your rhythm and spend some of most days asleep and some of most nights awake (last night I worked from two to five a.m., transcribing some of Norah's notes onto my new computer).

  So here I am. This is as far as I've got: lying in an anonymous hotel room, teetering on the edge of sleep, feeling what I think is your heel against my rib, convulsed inside my own longing. Longing, longing, longing like a lovesick teenager, pinning my hopes on this meeting with my sister, shrinking from what I suspect will be their disappointment.

  I walk in sunshine through the regimented flower-beds of St Stephen's Green to meet Maeve, past ducks that look just like the ones Rory and I used to feed when we were students. People sit on benches and stroll or stride along the paths, but Dublin's short lolling-on-the-grass season is over until next year. The park is busy, though it's mid-afternoon and the after-work crowd has not yet started to pour through. Despite the crowds, I can never believe in Dublin as a real city. It's about the same size as San Francisco, but feels much smaller, and its loudly touted, new-found cosmopolitanism always seems to me unconvincing, like a child rigged out in its mother's high heels. The biggest village in the world, Oscar Wilde called it, and the description still fits.

  I negotiate my bulk through the throngs, down Grafton Street and into Bewley's, past the pile-up of pastries at the take-away counter, into the bowels of the cafe. It takes my eyes a time to adjust to the dim light. Maeve is sitting in one of the low red booths at the back, waving at me. She looks haggard, forcing her mouth into a crooked smile. I bend to kiss her cheek and up close I can almost smell the misery from her. I want to turn and run out the door.

 
Her skin, despite its pallor, is hot under my lips. "You okay?" I ask.

  "Sure. Fine. You?"

  "Fine."

  Our eyes meet and we hover inside a moment of possibility. Disconcerted, I point at her cup. "Would you like another one of those?" There's a ring of cold coffee lining the inside of the half-empty cup in front of her. She must be here a while.

  She nods. "Please."

  "Black?"

  "Lovely. Thanks."

  This is ridiculous, I think as I shuffle along the line-up at the counter, waiting to order. She is not fine. I am not fine. So after I return to the table, and hand out the coffee and the spoons, and put away the tray, I ask her straight: "Maeve, what's wrong?"

  She shakes her head, takes a slim tin of artificial sweetener from her bag, tips two small, white pills into her coffee. Shrugs. Sighs. Shakes her head again. I wait. Eventually it comes. "Donal's gone."

  "Donal?" This is so far from what I expected that I sound like I've never heard of anyone called Donal. "Gone?"

  "Yes, Jo." She wipes a hand across her forehead, irritated. "Donal, as in my husband. Gone, as in left me."

  So there is nothing of Rory here, thinks selfish, selfish me. "Maeve, that's terrible."

  Her mouth wobbles, goes misshapen. "I know. Of all the times...Now...Mother —"

  She breaks off. I know what she means, and yet I can see how this, and her way of saying it, even her way of feeling it, could infuriate.

  "But is it permanent? What's going on?"

  She reaches into her bag again, this time for paper tissues, crinkly in their plastic handipack. "He blames Mother," she says, snapping the pack back into the bag. "While she was sick I had to go down to Mucknamore, a lot. Naturally. But he resented it. And I resented him not supporting me through it." She shrugs. "According to him, in that time we grew too far apart."

  "And is he right?"

  "If we did, there was no need for it. He always griped about Mother, you've no idea. He could be completely ridiculous about it. It was pathetic: a grown man jealous of an old woman and her needs."