Fallen

by Lia Mills

  ‘You still have plum juice, here.’ He traced a line down my neck with a knuckle.

  I went upstairs to wash, even though part of me wanted to be found as stained and dishevelled as I was.

  I was upstairs in the bathroom, drying my face, when the back gate opened. I stood very still. It was Con Buckley. His stride made short work of the path. He moved quickly for such a big man. From this vantage point, I fancied I saw a softening in his shape, a hint that all that muscle was losing its grip and would, sooner or later, run to fat.

  I stepped back, out of sight, and called down to Hubie, ‘Someone’s coming!’ I knocked on the window, so Con would know I’d seen him. Wait a minute, I mouthed. I hurried downstairs, twisting my hair up, pushing pins into it to keep it in place. By the time I got to the back door and opened it, I was well and truly frightened. A pulse hammered in my neck. ‘Is it Eva?’

  ‘Bartley asked me to tell you there’s been no change.’ He looked past my shoulder. I didn’t have to turn to know that Hubie had come in behind me. Con looked from one of us to the other. ‘Miss Wilson’s nephew?’

  I hoped I wasn’t fool enough to blush, making the introductions. ‘How did you know I was here?’

  ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Quite. I went to Isabel’s. I have Bartley’s car.’

  ‘They’re allowing traffic?’ Hubie asked.

  ‘Military – and ambulances. Some private cars with Red Cross signs. I got a permit; the hospital needs supplies. There’s no milk, no eggs or fresh meat to be had anywhere in town.’

  ‘Don’t I know it.’

  How peculiar it was to stand between the two of them, a man I once thought I wanted and one whose presence acted like a magnet. Even now, with Con here to watch, I felt a pull towards Hubie. I moved the other way, went to sit at the table in case my legs gave me away.

  ‘I said I’d go to Mick Morton’s dairy,’ Con was saying. ‘They know me there. Isabel’s house was on the way, and Bartley asked me to look in on Alanna. And you. Imagine my surprise when they told me where I’d find you.’ His eyes were pallid. I used to see them full of light, but now they were chill, empty as glass, while Hubie’s glowed, warm as fire.

  ‘Are they all right?’ I asked. Needing something to do with my hands, I clapped them for Paschal, who jumped into them, climbed to my shoulder and sat breathing into my ear, stroking my hair. In the background, Hubie pulled the ends of his moustache, reminding me of how soft it was. How it felt against my own lip. His good hand gathering my hair off my neck.

  The disapproval on Con’s face was new to me. ‘Fine. The park is full of soldiers. Isabel’s turned the house into a refuge.’

  ‘Ah, Con, two women and two little girls hardly amount to a refuge.’

  ‘She’s taken in two families from the cottages as well.’ He put his hands in his pockets and scuffed the floor with his feet. ‘The Judge is none too pleased, I can tell you, at the state of his dining room. There are ten children there, running riot.’ Once, he would have laughed at such a vision. ‘I’d have thought you’d go to help her out, since two of those children were originally in your charge. They expected you yesterday.’

  ‘I was at the hospital.’

  Hubie leaned against the dresser, one ankle crossed over the other, tumbling marbles in his good hand. ‘I stayed to mind the house.’

  ‘I wasn’t speaking to you.’

  ‘Con! What’s got into you?’

  ‘Miss Wilson was in quite a state, about the house, and about the pair of you. The Judge gave me a letter, to allow me to take a detour down here to check on you.’ He pulled a folded piece of paper from his pocket, waved it and put it away again. ‘It was nice of him, but I didn’t need it, since I’ve a permit from the army. I promised to go back at once, if there was bad news. I didn’t think there would be. Mind you, I didn’t expect –’ He came and stood in front of me with his back to Hubie, blocking my view. It made no difference. Even blindfolded, I’d have known exactly where Hubie was. Every inch of me was conscious of the shape he made, lounging against the dresser. ‘Why are you still here, with a field gun out there, right on the doorstep?’

  The imprint of Hubie’s body lingered on my skin, even in places he hadn’t touched. For all I knew, Con would be able to tell. I got up and crossed the room to put Paschal on the straw chair. ‘It’s not on the doorstep.’

  ‘It’s more than close enough.’

  As though we’d woken it, a horrible metallic drag rumbled outside.

  ‘They’re moving it,’ Hubie said from the window.

  The sound rolled and grew. The cups rattled on their hooks. I put my fingers in my ears. ‘There must be guns near Isabel’s too,’ I said, when the noise subsided.

  ‘There’s a command post nearby. The army are in complete control. It may well be the safest part of town. Yet here you are.’

  ‘Here I am. And the gun’s gone.’

  ‘You’re being irresponsible, Katie. Come away with me, now.’

  ‘If you’re fetching supplies,’ Hubie said, sounding so bored he all but yawned at us, ‘why would you take an extra passenger? Won’t she take up valuable space?’

  I was livid with the pair of them, posturing and grinning at each other like a pair of hyenas. The last thing I wanted was to leave Hubie, to drive away with this unpleasant version of Con to God knew where for God knew how long. But his arrival jolted me back to the reality of conventional life. I saw how my behaviour would look to everyone I knew, and my instinct was to suppress any hint of suspicion before it had time to grow. ‘I’ll go with you,’ I said to Con. ‘Why not? It’ll be an adventure.’

  I ran up to splash cologne on my wrists and at my throat. On the way back, I brushed past Hubie at the bottom of the stairs. Something deep inside me turned. My hands missed the spring of his hair. My ribs wanted to press against his.

  His face was averted from Con, as though he were looking at the monkey, who sat on the newel post, and whose stomach he was scratching in an absent way. But his eyes burned into mine. Paschal swayed gently, his eyes half shut, loving the attention. I stopped to pet him too. Our hands almost touched.

  ‘Do you want your coat?’ he asked.

  ‘It’s warm out,’ Con said. ‘You won’t need it.’

  We went out the way Con had come in. I followed him through the lanes. Despite the sunshine, I wished I’d worn the coat. Hubie would have held it for me, helped me into it. I could have felt his arms around me, his shape behind me, brief and fleeting as a ghost, but there.

  We came out nearly opposite the church on Haddington Road. There was something raw about the morning, as though layers of the city’s skin had rubbed off during the night.

  Con went in front of me to open the passenger door of Bartley’s car. For an instant he hesitated, the open door between us like a Roman’s shield. What was he thinking? He let go the door and stood back. I ducked into the front seat, tugged on the strap and pulled the door shut myself. He stamped around the bonnet to the driver’s side and got in with a hefty slam.

  Bartley’s car was the newest kind of Vauxhall, it needed no crank. Con turned the ignition and the engine fired at once. He looked quickly over his shoulder, pushed in the handbrake and we moved off.

  I’d made a horrible mistake, agreeing to this expedition. Now I’d be confined in a small space with him for however long the journey lasted. I’d have to go wherever he took me, exposed to his scrutiny, his questions, his hateful opinions.

  He drove the short distance to the checkpoint at Baggot Street. A captain broke off a conversation with a private and started towards us; Con leaned forward and showed his face and we were waved on.

  People milled around the entrance to the hospital, on the pavement and the steps. Vehicles of all sorts blocked the road – military cars, private cars with sheets hung in the windows displaying the red cross, a side-car, a cart with no horse in the shaft.

  ‘I’d like to see Eva.’

  ‘I don’t think you’d be let.
’

  ‘I would, if you brought me.’

  ‘Let’s get the milk, then we’ll see.’

  We’ll see. A thing you say to a child. ‘You sound like my father.’

  ‘If I were your father, you wouldn’t be staying out all night with a stranger.’

  Something in me shrivelled and shrank away from him. Memories surged through me, the ghost of old desires, an image of myself curled in his armchair, dragging him against me, the woman shrilling at the door. I looked at his clean profile, the tight downward curve of his mouth. I’d teased him once about how a broken nose could improve his looks, he was too perfect. How wrong I was. The lines of his face were dull, uninteresting. One look and you’d seen it all.

  As we got further out from town, there were more people about. Men with baskets, out doing the messages. What was the world coming to? Con pulled in to let a military car pass and I saw inside one: a head of cauliflower and stalks of green and purple rhubarb, incongruous against the man’s dark sleeves, his bowler hat.

  The silence in the car built up to an unbearable tension. Eventually he said, ‘You’re not to go back to Percy Place.’

  ‘What’s it to you where I go?’

  ‘The Tierneys’ house is safer.’ He glared at me. ‘You’ve no idea, the extent of it. There’s not enough coffins to go round.’ He said it the way you’d hit someone, meaning to hurt them. ‘They’ve started to bury the dead in people’s gardens.’

  I had to remind myself of all he must have seen at the hospital. No wonder he was on edge.

  There was a roadblock at Ballsbridge. Soldiers, military vehicles. Horses milled around the showgrounds, visible from the queue on the road. When Con said the hospital needed supplies, we were waved through, although the officer warned us we mightn’t be allowed back, if the situation deteriorated.

  We were surrounded by soldiers. A gigantic field gun loomed over the crossroads: an ugly hulk of steel, crouched like a beast from the stone age, its sinister bore directed along the road we’d just travelled. A khaki column stood ready to march, rifles on their shoulders.

  ‘Won’t the rebels put their guns down and go home, when they see all this?’ I thought about waiting, crouched behind walls or sandbags, for a hail of bullets. That boy yesterday, crying for his mother. All the mothers who didn’t yet know they’d never see their boys again.

  We drove on past the level crossing, the abandoned station. I stared out, across the calm waters of the bay to Howth, the peninsula so purple it was nearly black. The sea’s blues were streaked with mauve and green under a high sky, threaded with wisps of cloud. A day full of its own beauty, utterly indifferent to all that was happening within it. It made me ache so hard I was driven to say, ‘It’s lovely out here.’

  ‘Oh, for Christ’s sake, Katie. Let’s not have the weather!’

  I stiffened. ‘What’ll we talk about, so?’

  ‘Are you glad to get away from that character, back there?’

  ‘Who, Hubie?’ I settled against the hard leather seat, looked straight ahead. There were more soldiers out here, many military vehicles, fewer people walking. ‘Why do you ask?’

  ‘Has he inconvenienced you at all?’

  Inconvenienced? I nearly laughed out loud. ‘I’m glad I got the chance to talk to him. About Liam. About the war.’

  ‘Are you, now.’ His voice was flat. I risked a look at his stubborn profile. I’d a giddy sense of power. I could have teased him, but I didn’t, out of respect for all that lay below the surface of his words, not to mention mine.

  ‘I don’t like him.’

  ‘Aren’t you even curious as to what he said?’ Not that I’d have wanted to tell him.

  ‘I can imagine it well enough.’ His pallid look slid over me and back to the road. ‘I don’t need embellishments. What will people think of you, staying alone in a house with a man? Even if he is a cripple.’

  I turned that word, ‘cripple’, over in my mind. Like a faulty bomb, it caused more damage to Con in saying it than to Hubie, its target. His hands gripped the steering wheel like a plate he was getting ready to throw across a room. ‘You could have gone next door. They’d have taken you in.’

  ‘I could, I suppose.’

  ‘Why didn’t you?’

  ‘Why should I? I barely know them. I was in a house that’s like home to me. Not to mention, the monkey needs minding.’

  ‘The monkey.’ There was such contempt in his voice. ‘If you could hear yourself …’ His face was a mask of disgust.

  So that was what it felt like, to turn to stone. I’d thought we were friends, and he despised me. I blurted out the one thing I didn’t mean to say. ‘You’re telling me to be careful what people think? That’s a good one! There’s no shortage of talk about you.’

  He stopped the car so abruptly that I pitched forward. My wrist struck the dashboard. Unapologetic, he pierced me with those pale, hateful eyes. ‘What’s this?’

  I rubbed the sore place. ‘I’ve heard rumours.’

  ‘Have you, now. I’d like to hear them too. Enlighten me.’

  Up ahead, there was a checkpoint. Soldiers looked through the boot of a car. They lifted a box to the ground and turned their attention back to the interior. The driver stood by and watched.

  ‘Con …’ I tried to draw his attention to the soldiers. He wouldn’t look, but kept his unnerving eyes fixed on me.

  ‘I’m waiting. I didn’t know you were the type for gossip. I thought better of you.’

  ‘Con, the checkpoint. They’re watching. Shouldn’t we drive on?’

  ‘Not ’til you say what you’ve heard, and who from.’

  ‘But –’

  ‘If you’re so anxious to get going, tell me.’

  The soldiers waved us on, but Con wasn’t looking at them. He was looking at me.

  ‘I heard you got a girl into trouble. That she had to go away.’

  ‘And where did you hear this fascinating yarn?’

  ‘Never mind.’ My eyes were on the soldiers. I could have been with Hubie instead of here, digging myself into more trouble with each passing second. ‘Con, they’ve seen us. They’re waving you on.’

  ‘Tell me!’

  ‘No! Drive on.’

  He wouldn’t budge. Three soldiers and an officer strode our way, guns drawn.

  ‘I can guess who it was.’ His eyes flicked to the soldiers and back to me. ‘But I’d rather you said it. I’d want to be sure, before I act on it.’

  I didn’t want to make trouble for Frieda, but he had me cornered.

  ‘It’s a serious matter,’ he went on, ‘telling tales outside the hospital. It could be a sacking offence.’

  He’d given me an opening. I made myself look at him and not at the soldiers as they spread into two pairs, on each side of the car. ‘Why are you talking about the hospital? Do you mean there’s a second girl? There are two of them?’

  Doubt flared in his eyes.

  Some demon had got hold of my tongue. ‘Does Miss Stacpole know?’

  The officer knocked on the window with a swagger stick. Con swung around, as if he really hadn’t seen the soldiers before now, every bit as good an actor as Matt. He let go my wrist, rolled his window down. ‘Good morning, Captain.’

  ‘Everything all right, miss?’ the officer asked.

  I nodded.

  ‘The lady here’ – Con drawled the word ‘lady’ – ‘was giving out to me. You know what they are.’

  Unmoved, the officer demanded papers. Con hunted in the glove box for his military permit, talking all the time in his buttery, crowd-pleasing voice. Supplies in the hospital were running low. The farm he was headed for was less than half a mile further. The sooner we got there the better, or the fresh milk would turn, and only fresh will do when people are ill.

  ‘Supplies are being requisitioned for military use,’ the officer said. ‘You’ve had a wasted journey.’

  While Con made a case for the sick and wounded in Baggot Street – many of w
hom included the officer’s comrades and others, veterans, who were there before all this – the outrage, as Con called it, began. A subaltern walked around the car, studied the tyres, the interior, me. The officer handed back the letter. ‘Drive on. But don’t bother trying this tomorrow. If matters continue as they are, there’ll be no fresh food to spare. We’ll need it for our own men.’ He waved us on.

  Con turned the car inland, in angry silence. A little further on, he veered off the main road on to a bumpy track between a terrace of houses and a church. Then we were in a farmyard where churns of milk and carefully packed boxes of eggs waited. The farmer put the churns on the floor in the back of the car, like maiden aunts settled in a row. He stacked the eggs neatly on the seats.

  I stood in the shade of a beech tree while they loaded the car, transfixed by the pure, sweet sound of larks coasting above the meadow, their song striking straight to the core of me, like liquid honey, forgiving – or mocking – the black blot I was on the beauty of the day. I let myself fill with it. What was it Liam wrote about larks? Something wonderful. In panic, I rummaged through my mind for the letter, but couldn’t find it. I summoned his face instead. Bit by bit I assembled it, his freckles and his snag tooth, the lick of hair across his forehead. I resisted the photograph framed on the mantelpiece at home, which pressed itself forward in his stead.

  ‘The missus said to give ye this as well,’ the farmer said, heaving a sack of flour into the boot. ‘It won’t last ye long, she says, but ye may as well have it as not.’ He straightened, dusted off his hands. ‘Better you than them.’

  On the way back to town, Con drove down side streets and filtered through lanes to avoid the military. ‘How did your parents take Matt’s shenanigans?’