by Louise Welsh
Mop began to scream.
I had the light on and was jumping up and down on my bed, shouting to her to stop, when the door was flung open and Mrs Felton came in, her hair a wild heathery mass, a dressing gown of quilted silk, black-blood colour, wrapped round her and tied at the waist with savagery. Rage and violence were what I expected. But Mrs Felton said nothing. She did what I had never seen her do, had never supposed anything would make her do. She caught Mop in an embrace and hugged her, rocking her back and forth. They were both crying, swaying on the bed and crying. I heard footsteps on the garden path, soft, stealthy, finally fading away.
Mop said nothing at all about it to me the next day. She withdrew into her books and sulks. I believe now that the isolated demonstration of affection she had received from her mother in the night led her to hope more might follow. But Mrs Felton had become weirdly reserved, as if in some sort of long dream. I noticed with giggly embarrassment that she hardly seemed to see Mop hanging about her, looking into her face, trying to get her attention. When Mop gave up at last and took refuge in the garden with Dr James on demons, Mrs Felton lay on the dining room sofa, smoking and staring at the ceiling. I went in once to fetch my cardigan – for Mrs Potter was taking me to the medieval town at Lavenham for the afternoon – and she was still lying there, smiling strangely to herself, her long brown hands playing with her necklace of reddish-brown beads.
She went off for a walk by herself on Friday afternoon and she was gone for hours. It was very hot, too hot to be in a garden with only thin apple tree shade. I was sitting at the dining room table, working on a scrapbook of country house pictures Mrs Potter had got me to make, and Mop was reading, when the phone rang. Mop answered it, but from the room where I was, across the passage, I could hear Mr Felton’s hearty bray.
“How’s life treating you, my old Mop?”
I heard it all, how he was coming down that night instead of in the morning and would be here by midnight. She might pass the message on to her mother, but not to worry as he had his own key. And his kind regards to jolly old Margarine if she hadn’t, by this time, melted away into a little puddle!
Mrs Felton came back at five in Peter Elsworthy’s car. There were leaves in her hair and bits of grass on the back of her skirt. They pored over the vinegar mother, moving it back into a cool dark corner, and enthusing over the colour of the liquor under the floating liver-like mass.
“A tender plant that mustn’t get overheated,” said Peter Elsworthy, picking a leaf out of Mrs Felton’s hair and laughing. I wondered why I had ever liked him or thought him kind.
Mop and I were given rosé with our supper out of a dumpy little bottle with a picture of cloisters on its label. By now Mrs Felton must have learned that I didn’t need wine to make me sleep, so she didn’t insist on my having more than one glass. The vinegar mother’s vessel was three-quarters full.
I was in bed and Mop nearly undressed when I remembered about her father’s message.
“I forgot to tell her,” said Mop, yawning and heavy-eyed.
“You could go down and tell her now.”
“She’d be cross. Besides, he’s got his key.”
“You don’t like going down in the dark by yourself,” I said. Mop didn’t answer. She got into bed and pulled the sheet over her head.
We never spoke to each other again.
She didn’t return to school that term, and at the end of it my mother told me she wasn’t coming back. I never learned what happened to her. The last – almost the last – I remember of her was her thin sallow face that lately had always looked bewildered, and the dark circles round her old woman’s eyes. I remember the books on the bedside table: Fifty Haunted Houses, the Works of Sheridan Lefanu, The Best of Montague Rhodes James. The pale lacquering of moonlight in that room with its beams and its slanted ceiling. The silence of night in an old and haunted countryside. Wine breath in my throat and wine weariness bringing heavy sleep…
Out of that thick slumber I was awakened by two sharp explosions and the sound of breaking glass. Mop had gone from the bedroom before I was out of bed, scarcely aware of where I was, my head swimming. Somewhere downstairs Mop was screaming. I went down. The whole house, the house called Sanctuary, was bright with lights. I opened the dining room door.
Mr Felton was leaning against the table, the shotgun still in his hand. I think he was crying. I don’t remember much blood, only the brown dead nakedness of Mrs Felton spread on the floor with Peter Elsworthy bent over her, holding his wounded arm. And the smell of gunpowder like fireworks and the stronger sickening stench of vinegar everywhere, and broken glass in shards, and Mop screaming, plunging a knife again and again into a thick slimy liver mass on the carpet.
THE DEATH OF PEGGY MEEHAN
William Trevor
William Trevor Cox (b.1928) was born in County Cork, Ireland. His father was a bank manager who frequently moved branches, and Trevor had attended thirteen different schools by the age of thirteen. He read history at Trinity College, Dublin, after which he became a teacher in Northern Ireland and then England. Later he worked as a copywriter before becoming a full-time writer in 1965. Trevor’s awards include the Bob Hughes Lifetime Achievement Award in Irish Literature. He lives in Devon with his wife, Jane Ryan.
Like all children, I led a double life. There was the ordinariness of dressing in the morning, putting on shoes and combing hair, stirring a spoon through porridge I didn’t want, and going at ten to nine to the nuns’ elementary school. And there was a world in which only the events I wished for happened, where boredom was not permitted and of which I was both God and King.
In my ordinary life I was the only child of parents who years before my birth had given up hope of ever having me. I remember them best as being different from other parents: they were elderly, it seemed to me, two greyly fussing people with grey hair and faces, in grey clothes, with spectacles. “Oh, no, no,” they murmured regularly, rejecting on my behalf an invitation to tea or to play with some other child. They feared on my behalf the rain and the sea, and walls that might be walked along, and grass because grass was always damp. They rarely missed a service at the Church of the Holy Redeemer.
In the town where we lived, a seaside town thirty miles from Cork, my father was employed as a senior clerk in the offices of Cosgriff and McLoughlin, Solicitors and Commissioners for Oaths. With him on one side of me and my mother on the other, we walked up and down the brief promenade in winter, while the seagulls shrieked and my father worried in case it was going to rain. We never went for walks through fields or through the heathery wastelands that sloped gently upwards behind the town, or by the river where people said Sir Walter Ralegh had fished. In summer, when the visitors from Cork came, my mother didn’t like to let me near the sands because the sands, she said, were full of fleas. In summer we didn’t walk on the promenade but out along the main Cork road instead, past a house that appeared to me to move. It disappeared for several minutes as we approached it, a trick of nature, I afterwards discovered, caused by the undulations of the landscape. Every July, for a fortnight, we went to stay in Montenotte, high up above Cork city, in a boardinghouse run by my mother’s sister, my Aunt Isabella. She, too, had a grey look about her and was religious.
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It was here, in my Aunt Isabella’s Montenotte boardinghouse, that this story begins: in the summer of 1936, when I was seven. It was a much larger house than the one we lived in ourselves, which was small and narrow and in a terrace. My Aunt Isabella’s was rather grand in its way, a dark place with little unexpected half-landings, and badly lit corridors. It smelt of floor polish and of a mustiness that I have since associated with the religious life, a smell of old cassocks. Everywhere there were statues of the Virgin, and votive lights and black-framed pictures of the Holy Child. The residents were all priests, old and middle-aged and young, eleven of them usually, which was all the house would hold. A few were always away on their holidays when we stayed there in the summer.
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In the summer of 1936 we left our own house in the usual way, my father fastening all the windows and the front and back doors and then examining the house from the outside to make sure he’d done the fastening and the locking properly. We walked to the railway station, each of us carrying something, my mother a brown cardboard suitcase and my father a larger one of the same kind. I carried the sandwiches we were to have on the train, and a flask of carefully made tea and three apples, all packed into a sixpenny fish basket.
In the house in Montenotte my Aunt Isabella told us that Canon McGrath and Father Quinn were on holiday, one in Tralee, the other in Galway. She led us to their rooms, Canon McGrath’s for my father and Father Quinn’s for my mother and myself. The familiar trestle-bed was erected at the foot of the bed in my mother’s room. During the course of the year a curate called Father Lalor had repaired it, my aunt said, after it had been used by Canon McGrath’s brother from America, who’d proved too much for the canvas.
“Ah, aren’t you looking well, Mr Mahon!” the red-faced and jolly Father Smith said to my father in the diningroom that evening. “And isn’t our friend here getting big for himself?” He laughed loudly, gripping a portion of the back of my neck between a finger and a thumb. Did I know my catechism? he asked me. Was I being good with the nuns in the elementary school? “Are you in health yourself, Mrs Mahon?” he inquired of my mother.
My mother said she was, and the red-faced priest went to join the other priests at the main dining-table. He left behind him a smell that was different from the smell of the house, and I noticed that he had difficulty in pulling the chair out from the table when he was about to sit down. He had to be assisted in this by a new young curate, a Father Parsloe. Father Smith had been drinking stout again, I said to myself.
Sometimes in my aunt’s house there was nothing to do except to watch and to listen. Father Smith used to drink too much stout; Father Magennis, who was so thin you could hardly bear to look at him and whose flesh was the colour of whitewash, was not long for this world; Father Riordon would be a bishop if only he could have tidied himself up a bit; Canon McGrath had once refused to baptize a child; young Father Lalor was going places. For hours on end my Aunt Isabella would murmur to my parents about the priests, telling about the fate of one who had left the boardinghouse during the year or supplying background information about a new one. My parents, so faultlessly regular in their church attendance and interested in all religious matters, were naturally pleased to listen. God and the organization of His Church were far more important than my father’s duties in Cosgriff and McLoughlin, or my mother’s housework, or my own desire to go walking through the heathery wastelands that sloped gently upwards behind our town. God and the priests in my Aunt Isabella’s house, and the nuns of the convent elementary school and the priests of the Church of the Holy Redeemer, were at the centre of everything. “Maybe it’ll appeal to our friend,” Father Smith had once said in the diningroom, and I knew that he meant that maybe one day I might be attracted towards the priesthood. My parents had not said anything in reply, but as we ate our tea of sausages and potato-cakes I could feel them thinking that nothing would please them better.
Every year when we stayed with my aunt there was an afternoon when I was left in charge of whichever priests happened to be in, while my parents and my aunt made the journey across the city to visit my father’s brother, who was a priest himself. There was some difficulty about bringing me: I had apparently gone to my uncle’s house as a baby, when my presence had upset him. Years later I overheard my mother whispering to Father Riordon about this, suggesting – or so it seemed – that my father had once been intent on the priestly life but had at the last moment withdrawn. That he should afterwards have fathered a child was apparently an offence to his brother’s feeling of propriety. I had the impression that my uncle was a severe man, who looked severely on my father and my mother and my Aunt Isabella on these visits, and was respected by them for being as he was. All three came back subdued, and that night my mother always prayed for much longer by the side of her bed.
“Father Parsloe’s going to take you for a walk,” my Aunt Isabella said on the morning of the 1936 visit. “He wants to get to know you.”
You walked all the way down from Montenotte, past the docks, over the river and into the city. The first few times it could have been interesting, but after that it was worse than walking on the concrete promenade at home. I’d have far preferred to have played by myself in my aunt’s overgrown back garden, pretending to be grown up, talking to myself in a secret way, having wicked thoughts. At home and in my aunt’s garden I became a man my father had read about in a newspaper and whom, he’d said, we must all pray for, a thief who broke the windows of jewellers’ shops and lifted out watches and rings. I became Father Smith, drinking too much stout and missing the steps of the stairs. I became Father Magennis and would lie on the weeds at the bottom of the garden or under a table, confessing to gruesome crimes at the moment of death. In my mind I mocked the holiness of my parents and imitated their voices; I mocked the holiness of my Aunt Isabella; I talked back to my parents in a way I never would; I laughed and said disgraceful things about God and the religious life. Blasphemy was exciting.
“Are you ready so?” Father Parsloe asked when my parents and my aunt had left for the visit to my uncle. “Will we take a bus?”
“A bus?”
“Down to the town.”
I’d never in my life done that before. The buses were for going longer distances in. It seemed extraordinary not to walk, the whole point of a walk was to walk.
“I haven’t any money for the bus,” I said, and Father Parsloe laughed. On the upper deck he lit a cigarette. He was a slight young man, by far the youngest of the priests in my aunt’s house, with reddish hair and a face that seemed to be on a slant. “Will we have tea in Thompson’s?” he said. “Would that be a good thing to do?”
We had tea in Thompson’s café, with buns and cakes and huge meringues such as I’d never tasted before. Father Parsloe smoked fourteen cigarettes and drank all the tea himself. I had three bottles of fizzy orangeade. “Will we go to the pictures?” Father Parsloe said when he’d paid the bill at the cash desk. “Will we chance the Pavilion?”
I had never, of course, been to the pictures before. My mother said that the Star Picture House, which was the only one in our town, was full of fleas.
“One and a half,” Father Parsloe said at the cash desk in the Pavilion and we were led away into the darkness. THE END it announced on the screen, and when I saw it I thought we were too late. “Ah, aren’t we in lovely time?” Father Parsloe said.
I didn’t understand the film. It was about grownups kissing one another, and about an earthquake, and then a motorcar accident in which a woman who’d been kissed a lot was killed. The man who’d kissed her was married to another woman, and when the film ended he was sitting in a room with his wife, looking at her. She kept saying it was all right.
“God, wasn’t that great?” Father Parsloe said as we stood in the lavatory of the Pavilion, the kind of lavatory where you stand up, like I’d never been in before. “Wasn’t it a good story?”
All the way back to Montenotte I kept remembering it. I kept seeing the face of the woman who’d been killed, and all the bodies lying on the streets after the earthquake, and the man at the end, sitting in a room with his wife. The swaying of the bus made me feel queasy because of the meringues and the orangeade, but I didn’t care.
“Did you enjoy the afternoon?” Father Parsloe asked, and I told him I’d never enjoyed anything better. I asked him if the pictures were always as good. He assured me they were.
My parents, however, didn’t seem pleased. My father got hold of a Cork Examiner and looked up the film that was on at the Pavilion and reported that it wasn’t suitable for a child. My mother gave me a bath and examined my clothes for fleas. When Father Parsloe winked at me in the diningroom my parents pretended not to notice him.
That night my mother prayed for her extra long period, after the visit to my uncle. I lay in the dimly lit room, aware that she was kneeling there, but thinking of the film and the way the people had kissed, not like my parents ever kissed. At the convent elementary school there were girls in the higher classes who were pretty, far prettier than my mother. There was one called Claire, with fair hair and a softly freckled face, and another called Peggy Meehan, who was younger and black-haired. I had picked them out because they had spoken to me, asking me my name. I thought them very nice.
I opened my eyes and saw that my mother was rising from her knees. She stood for a moment at the edge of her bed, not smiling, her lips still moving, continuing her prayer. Then she got into bed and put out the light.
I listened to her breathing and heard it become the breathing which people have when they’re asleep, but I couldn’t sleep myself. I lay there, still remembering the film and remembering being in Thompson’s and seeing Father Parsloe lighting one cigarette after another. For some reason, I began to imagine that I was in Thompson’s with Father Parsloe and the two girls from the convent, and that we all went off to the Pavilion together, swinging along the street. “Ah, isn’t this the life for us?” Father Parsloe said as he led us into the darkness, and I told the girls I’d been to the Pavilion before and they said they never had.
I heard eleven o’clock chiming from a nearby church. I heard a stumbling on the stairs and then the laughter of Father Smith, and Father Riordon telling him to be quiet. I heard twelve chiming and half past twelve, and a quarter to one, and one.