by Lia Mills
All trace of expression smoothed out of Frieda’s face. ‘At least remember, you swore. On your honour.’
I waited for Alanna in Eva and Bartley’s freshly painted hall. The walls were a pale shade of blue, the cornices and mouldings gleamed white. Nan said to wait upstairs in the parlour, but I liked the clean smell of paint, and besides the upstairs room would be chilly and stale without Eva in it. I shifted on the seat, an uncomfortable backless bench upholstered in brown and gold. It was part of a brand-new contraption, the other half being a stand for the telephone. Against the opposite wall, the grandfather clock’s burnished mahogany casing would put you in mind of a coffin. Its reedy, insistent tick said time was falling away.
I stared at the ugly black mass of the telephone. It was nothing short of a miracle that a word spoken across the sea in England could travel along a length of wire, direct to an ear in Dublin. I picked up the receiver. A strange, disconnected crackle sounded down the line. ‘Hello?’ I whispered.
Something spat in my ear. ‘Hello, yes?’ It was a woman’s grating voice. ‘This is the operator. What number did you want to reach?’
The receiver fell out of my hand. I pushed it back on to the antlered apparatus that cradled it.
‘Here we are!’ Nan, on the stairs, had Alanna by the hand. ‘Was there someone on that yoke?’
‘I knocked it, by mistake.’
Alanna’s face was pale and still, watchful. Her fine brown hair was gathered into a black velvet ribbon at each side of her head, in two high ponytails that curled to the shoulders of her sky-blue pinafore.
‘Hello, Alanna. That’s a pretty dress. Isn’t it Eva’s favourite colour?’
Her face softened a little. ‘Yes. Can we go and see her?’
‘Ah, no. It’s not allowed.’ I caught the echo of what Bartley had said to us and frowned. Alanna frowned back at me. Nan looked from one to the other of us and laughed.
‘Well, yiz’ll have a fine time, at this rate.’ She held up a brown paper bag. ‘Here’s crumbs, for the ducks.’ It was impossible to guess her age. Her black hair had silver flecks in it, but her face was unlined. She had the hands and feet of a larger person attached to the narrow, wiry body of a restless boy. She’d looked the same as long as I’d known her, as long as Eva had been married, eight years.
Alanna took the bag of crumbs, with little enthusiasm, and we went out. We passed the Cancer Hospital and turned on to the broad street that encircled the Green. Cabs clipped past in both directions, the horses’ hooves striking brisk sparks of sound from the road. Motor-cars made a line in front of the Shelbourne. Beyond them were the sculpted women whose patient arms held up brass lamps. A gleaming, cream-coloured De Dion-Bouton was parked at an angle on the corner. Alanna followed me over to have a closer look. We admired the gleaming bodywork of the car, its round lamps like eyes. ‘It’s so shiny!’ Alanna said.
‘It’s beautiful. Isabel’s father has one just like it, but his is green.’
Alanna wrinkled her nose, puzzled.
‘You know Isabel – she’s Liam’s fiancée.’ Was.
‘Who’s Liam?’
She might as well have kicked me full in the chest. Her eyes were the palest shade of blue, almost colourless. Like Con’s. Unnerving. ‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘I remember.’
Did Eva never talk about him? I didn’t often say his name out loud myself. It felt too dangerous, a bladed hook that could split my chest and drag my heart from its hiding place. If you love someone, and that person dies, all that love becomes a burden, a weight accumulating, pooling inside you, with nowhere to go. What do you do with it? Sometimes I tried to arrange it, stack it up as if on shelves – this aspect of Liam and that. Sometimes it gathered itself into a shape, a shadow, peeled itself off the ground and attached itself to my heel. It followed me and spoke, in Liam’s voice, words I’d memorized from his letters. These things were so vivid, for me – yet Alanna might as well never have known him.
I shivered. I’d gone and given myself a proper fright, in broad daylight on a sunny holiday, other people ambling about the streets in no obvious hurry, untroubled by thoughts of remembering and forgetting. And I’d a child brooding beside me, waiting to see what I might offer her by way of a substitute for her mother, my sister, and surely expecting more from me than gloomy thoughts.
The park smelled of cut grass and spun sugar. In the distance, a barrel organ played its tinny song. People strolled among the formal flowerbeds, where pansies grew in vivid blocks of red, purple, yellow. Others lounged on deckchairs around the bandstand. Lovers, groups of friends, students out with their books – as if they could actually study here. They didn’t even pretend to look at the pages spread open in front of them, lifted their faces to the high blue sky instead. It was hard to believe that, two years before, Liam and I were among them, our heads full of dates and facts, not worried about anything more urgent than which questions were most likely to come up in our final examinations.
A man with a cart was selling leftover Easter sweets beside the lake. We were walking in his direction when we heard a commotion from the direction of the park’s main gate. A nursemaid hurried past, dragging a sulky-looking boy in a sailor suit. He’d a toy sailboat clutched to his chest with his other arm, spreading a dark stain of damp on the blue of his jacket.
A young man came up behind her. Little more than a boy, really. Short and skinny, he wore the dark green coat of the Citizens’ Army, with a bandolier slung across his chest. A wide-brimmed hat jammed low on his forehead shadowed his freckled face. I looked again. That really was a gun in his hands, muzzle half raised in our direction.
‘Yiz have to quit the park.’
‘Are you from the theatre?’ I asked him.
He cleared his throat and tried again. ‘We’re taking the park. In the name of the Republic. Yiz have to leave.’
‘Is this real?’ I pulled Alanna in behind me and looked around. The deckchairs were empty. A crowd of people filed towards the gate. A couple were arguing with a man dressed like this one. Over by the shrubbery, men were busy digging. A woman in green breeches conferred with two men through the railings. All three of them held guns. Passers-by glanced in, stopped to take a closer look, were told to move on. A group of women carried boxes into the summer house. One wore a Red Cross cuff on her arm.
A week or so earlier there’d been uproar over a document that came out of the Castle, a plan to suppress so many organizations that the whole city would have been affected, directly or not. One story had it that thousands were to be arrested and soldiers were to be billeted on ordinary homes. It was rumoured that conscription would begin any minute. All the while men in makeshift uniforms marched and drilled in public places, getting in people’s way, holding up the traffic, as they’d done for months. There were squads of little boys who mocked them, and squads of little boys who copied them.
Dad said it was all a cod, except the conscription. That could happen, right enough. He said the marching and drilling was only posturing and false alarms. They wouldn’t dare try anything more. Not with so many Irishmen fighting and dying in the war.
Only yesterday, a notice had appeared in the Sunday Independent, saying that all manoeuvres had been cancelled. We admired the bare-faced cheek of it, then forgot all about it.
Now here was this young man with a rifle that looked real enough, hooshing us out of the park. I looked straight at him, and he at me. He was close enough to touch. The coarse fabric of his jacket smelled of damp. ‘Out with you,’ he said.
A curious shivering sound, like a thousand glasses shattering, came from a distance. A kind of fury was thick in my neck: This goes too far. But with Alanna beside me, I had to do as he said. I took her hand and we hurried along the path and out through the gate.
Windows had been broken in the buildings around the Green. Furniture was being carried out of them and heaped in a pile that blocked the street. Groups of people stood around watching, in the road and on the steps of the
hotel, but no one tried to interfere.
I urged Alanna across the road and back along Hume Street. Her steps dragged as she tried to look back over her shoulder. Sudden shouts erupted behind us, then a rat-a-tat-tat! followed by a scream. I tightened my grip on Alanna’s hand and hurried on.
Nan was waiting at the door when we got back.
‘There was a man with a gun!’ Alanna said.
‘There’s windows broken all round the Green,’ I said.
Nan’s eyebrows disappeared into her thick fringe. Her narrow, freckled face was sly and lively. ‘Who’s done it?’
‘I’m not sure. They’d different uniforms on them, and I saw a Red Cross armband.’
Nan took Alanna’s hand. ‘Come on down to the kitchen with me, child, and we’ll get some food into you. You must be famished, after all that.’
‘I’ll be after you in a minute.’ I took off Liam’s coat and folded it on to the stool beside the telephone. The hall door banged open. I jumped, but it was only Bartley.
‘I’m glad I caught you,’ he said. ‘Don’t go out, there’s trouble on the streets.’
‘We’ve been! We got as far as the Green, but they made us leave.’
He set his black bag on the floor, went to the telephone, picked up the receiver. ‘Hello?’ He prodded the connection with his fingers. ‘Hello?’ He took the receiver away from his ear and looked at the earpiece. ‘There’s no line.’
I shifted my feet, wondering if I’d broken it, but Bartley slammed the receiver down even harder than I had. ‘It’s useless. They must have taken out the exchange.’
Alanna came flying up the stairs to hug his knees. ‘Daddy! A man made us leave the park. I wanted to stay, but she wouldn’t let me.’
He swung her up and held her suspended for a minute, studying her face as though to learn it by heart. ‘Quite right too. What would I do, if anything happened to you?’
‘Mam says the park is our garden.’
‘So it is, ours and everyone else’s.’
‘But she –’
‘Go back downstairs, Alanna.’ When she’d gone he said, ‘You should go down with them. Stay ’til the fuss is over. Who knows what’s going to happen next?’ He picked up his black bag.
‘But where are you going, if it’s so much safer indoors?’
‘Back to the hospital, where I can be useful.’ He held up the bag. ‘They’ll see I’m a doctor.’
‘I’ve to meet Isabel,’ I said, but he’d gone.
I called goodbye to Nan and Alanna and went out. Doors stood ajar the length of the street. At the corner of Merrion Row people were grouped in small, conversational knots, looking in the one direction. I joined them, where the street opened to a shoulder of the Green. The barricade in the middle of the road had grown.
‘I’ve to meet someone in the Shelbourne,’ I said, to no one in particular.
‘I wouldn’t chance it.’ A grey-haired man eyed the fifty yards or so between us and the hotel.
‘Aren’t they a right shower of eejits, all the same,’ another one said. ‘I’d a gone for the hotel, myself. Aren’t there beds in it, and no end of food. I’d a let the soldiers have the park, and welcome.’
‘They got it arseways. They’re like rats in a trap, in there.’
A glint of brass in the barricade caught my eye. I edged forward for a better look. There was something familiar about two black-and-gilt turned table legs, pointing up, a fat armchair upside down on top of them. ‘Did they break into Briscoe’s?’ I asked. The desk was upside down – all that marquetry would be destroyed.
‘They did, and hauled the stuff out. Shocking, the waste. Where are you off to?’
I’d half stepped off the pavement. ‘Might they let me take something out, if I asked?’
The woman grabbed my arm. ‘Don’t be a fool, girl. They mean business. They shot a man, a while back, trying to get his cart out of there.’
A car turned on to the Green from Kildare Street, then jerked to a halt in front of a man waving a rifle. Two others with bayonets ran over and leaned on either side of the car. The driver got out, shaking his chauffeur’s cap in their faces. He was pushed over to the pavement by one of the gunmen, while the other got into the car and drove it, hard, into a gap in the barricade.
The driver shrieked at the sound of shearing metal. ‘I’ll get the sack for this,’ he shouted.
I put my head down and walked quickly along the short stretch of pavement to the hotel, slipped inside the main doors. The lovely crimson carpet was all but invisible, there were so many people milling around in the hall: tweed suits, elegant dresses, a pair of khaki uniforms on their way upstairs, a scarlet jacket in the bar, the hum of high and low voices. It was a relief to see Isabel’s fair hair, her calm, rosy skin. She gave a sad smile when she saw me. ‘What’s happening out there?’
‘I was just going to ask you the same.’ The double doors were open to the drawing room. At the sight of snowy-white tablecloths spread under plates of pastries and sandwiches, toast racks, dishes of butter and jam, I felt faint. ‘I forgot to eat. I’m starving.’
A strange zing! was followed by the sound of breaking glass. People jumped to their feet, knocking over cups and plates, and spilled out into the already crowded hall. A waiter in a starched white apron pulled the main door shut and turned the brass key in the lock.
‘They’d never lock us in, would they?’
‘I think they just did.’
I looked around. Porters and waiters were urging people towards the back of the building in a pack that got denser by the second. ‘We have to get out,’ I said.
Isabel looked doubtful. ‘With shooting outside?’
I told her there’d been crowds standing around watching the goings-on when I came in, and no one troubling them. There was an air of unreality to it all. Nobody would want to hurt the likes of us, and there’d always be a building to duck into, for safety, if it came to it. I stopped a waiter carrying a tray of dirty dishes to ask about the service entrance. He nodded at an uncarpeted flight of stairs in a corner, going down.
‘Do you mind?’ Not waiting for an answer, I took an uneaten scone off a plate and told Isabel to come on. I felt giddy as we clattered down the stairs, ignoring looks of disapproval from the lobby. In the basement there were smells of roasting meat from the kitchen that made my stomach churn. And there, beyond the kitchen, was the door. A kitchen porter came out of a cupboard and told us we couldn’t go that way, but on we went. I pushed the door, which opened on to a yard, scaring a black cat from an ash-bin. The lid of the bin hit the ground and rolled away, causing a ringing, steely echo. We held on to each other, laughing in fright. The cat jumped the height of the wall and looked down at us, a pink tongue sweeping its face, its tail twitching.
Kildare Street was almost empty – no trams, no traffic. Footsteps echoed to our left, as two men in cloth caps and bulky overcoats came out of an alley. One of them held a long, narrow leather case. Isabel nudged me. We drew in closer to each other. The men gave us sidelong looks as they passed. It wasn’t ’til I saw the flute case for what it was that I realized I was holding my breath, and let it out in a big gusty sigh.
Avoiding the Green, we passed the museum and the library, and went on down to the corner where Con once kissed my wrist. The grocer’s shop was shuttered for the holiday.
On Clare Street, we saw a small file of men go through the Lincoln Gate to Trinity, as orderly as a turnstile at a football match. A tram had stopped in its tracks on the north side of Merrion Square. Mount Street stretched beyond it, to the bridge. Its stillness made me think of the puzzles Alanna liked. What is wrong with this picture? When you looked closely, it was easy to spot the ludicrous features, the umbrella in the tree, the parrot perched on a policeman’s head; others were harder to solve.
‘Have you met this Captain Wilson yet?’ Isabel asked, as we passed the empty tram.
‘He only got here on Saturday.’ Hubie Wilson was on his way home to
Mullingar after months convalescing in an English hospital. He’d lost most of one of his hands, among other wounds. Dote said life was the main thing, after all, and May said yes, but Hubie would take it hard. He was a practical man, good with his hands. Clever when it came to fixing things that were broken. She’d written to him in the hospital, but only stilted letters came back, polite phrases written in a stranger’s script. Nothing at all like her Hubie.
I reminded Isabel about the letter I’d shown her the year before, the one Captain Wilson wrote to us after Liam was killed. I wondered if the hapless Acheson was still alive.
‘Is he travelling alone?’ she asked.
‘I think so.’
‘It must be a lonely journey, going home injured. After losing so many of his friends.’
‘He’s staying with May,’ I said. ‘She’s his aunt.’
‘Still – if it was Liam –’ She turned her unnaturally pale face to mine. ‘One of us would have gone to fetch him, surely.’
‘There’s some trouble at home, I think.’ I was reluctant to tell Isabel what May had confided to me, that Hubie’s eldest brother Tom had gone and married Hubie’s fiancée while he was at the Front. His father had gone to the convalescent hospital to break the news. His parents supported the match, for one of those country reasons to do with land, the eldest son and shared boundaries. It was too much to know about a person we’d never met. Instead, I said, ‘Mother didn’t want to meet him.’
‘Does she blame him, for Liam?’
I could hardly say no, she blames you, but in any case she didn’t wait for my answer. ‘I do,’ she said. ‘A little. If not for him, Liam might still be safe in a training camp.’
‘Isabel, I – let’s go this way, I prefer it.’ I steered Isabel up the east side of Merrion Square. Sunlight played off the reveals, making the houses shimmer the length of the street and beyond, as though they were alive. The hills in the distance cast their bluish light our way.