She turned the pages of her book again. Annie Oakley. Big Chief Sitting Bull. Davy Crockett. Willy Larkin wasn’t concentrating on his book either. Suddenly he leaned over and whispered, ‘Why has Davy Crockett got three ears?’
‘Why?’
‘Because he’s got a right ear and a left ear and a wild frontier.’
‘Willy and Helen, what are you tittering about?’
‘Nothing, Miss.’ They pretended to be interested in their books again. Helen sneaked a look at the watch she’d been given last Christmas. Twenty more minutes to go.
She was looking forward to the weekend, because their daddy was taking them into Ballymena to buy new water boots. They’d probably have to call and see Granny Kelly too: that wouldn’t be so nice, especially if Uncle Michael was there. She wondered if Sally would be well enough to go with them tomorrow, because she’d had one of her nosebleeds this morning. Helen had been called out of class to go and comfort her. Sally’s teacher had made her lie on the floor and had put the cold iron key of the school gate on the back of her neck. Sally had made a big fuss about it, but the bleeding had stopped, and she’d looked better when Helen saw her again at lunchtime.
She wished that the bell would ring so that they could go home, although usually she liked school. She was the best in the class, Miss Wilson said; she got the best marks in everything and she had the neatest handwriting. The only thing she wasn’t very good at was spelling. Up at the front of the classroom there was a poster covered with lots of small pieces of paper, and at the top Miss Wilson had written in big letters ‘Our First Day With Ink’. From where she sat, Helen could pick out her own work, blotless and exact. Over by the window was the nature table. There was a bird’s nest on it, and the broken shells of a blackbird’s eggs that someone had found. There was a wasp’s nest too, and then jam-jars with twigs in them, and a label glued on each to say what the twigs were: horse-chestnut, hips, haws, hazel, snow-berries. The fruits were all wrinkled because the nature table was beside a radiator. On the window-sills were pots of geraniums and busy Lizzies. At breaktime every day when the children were drinking their milk Miss Wilson had some tea. Between break and lunch she would leave the tea pot aside, and then as soon as the bell went for lunch and they’d finished saying the Angelus, she’d pour the cold tea into the flower pots, until it seeped out into the saucers.
At last! One of the bigger boys or girls was ringing a handbell down the corridor, and everybody in Helen’s class got up from their desks. They packed their books into their bags and put their chairs upside-down on their desks. The board was wiped clean while Colette and Anthony brushed the floor, because it was their turn to do it. They all gabbled a quick prayer to their guardian angel to look after them when they were on the way home from school; then ran out to the cloakroom to change their shoes and put on their coats.
The next morning, when they were getting ready to go into Ballymena, Helen said to her mammy flat out, ‘I don’t like going to see Granny Kelly.’ Their mammy, who was wiping Sally’s face with a damp flannel, pretended to be shocked. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say, Helen.’
‘Well, you don’t like it, do you? You hardly ever come with us. It’s always Daddy who takes us to see her. Why don’t you come with us today?’
‘Oh, I can’t go to Ballymena,’ she said, uncurling Sally’s fists and wiping the palms. ‘I have too much to do; I have to mind the house.’ Sally was whinging because she didn’t want to go either, she wanted to stay with Mammy.
In the car on the way there Helen sat in the front because she was the eldest, and as they drove along she tried her father with the same remark. ‘I don’t like visiting Granny Kelly.’
‘Neither do I,’ he said.
‘Why?’ she asked, and he thought for a moment before replying. ‘Because she doesn’t like me. Your granny was cross with me for marrying your mammy. Mammy had been to the college in Belfast and worked hard and got all the exams to be a teacher, like her daddy had been, and Granny Kelly wanted that more than anything else in the world. And then as soon as your mammy got out of the college she met me and wanted to get married.’
‘Couldn’t she have done both? Worked and still got married?’
‘Then who would have looked after you when you came along?’
Helen thought about this. Aunt Lucy was still working in the cigarette factory, but then she had Granny Kate to look after the baby and mind the house until Johnny and Declan and Una got home from school. ‘I don’t suppose Granny Kelly could have come and lived with us and looked after us,’ she said uncertainly.
‘What do you think?’ her daddy said, looking at her sideways. ‘Would you have liked that?’
‘Oh, I like things just as they are,’ Helen said quickly, and her daddy laughed.
‘So do I,’ he said.
Helen often used to think how, if one of her grannies had died before she had known them, she would have been left with a very limited idea of what a granny was. If she had known only Granny Kelly, she would have thought that all grannies were sad and forbidding, that they dressed only in black and lived sunk in deep chairs in dank parlours. If she’d only had Granny Kate to go by, she’d have thought a granny was someone who liked big hats and bright clothes, who always had a book or a magazine propped behind the taps of the kitchen sink when she was peeling potatoes, who couldn’t pass a pram without stopping to admire the baby in it, and who had a fat, juicy laugh, so loud you could hear it through thick walls and closed doors.
Granny Kelly lived in a grey-painted terraced house with huge bay windows, not far from the centre of Ballymena. It was Auntie Rosemary who opened the door and led them into the dim parlour, where Granny Kelly was sitting. Helen felt a pain in her tummy, the sort you got when the teacher asked you a question and you didn’t know the answer, and you knew she was going to be cross, because you should have known. She sat down on the sofa between Kate and Sally. One reason they didn’t like visiting Granny Kelly was that it was so boring. Usually their cousins were out when they called, and they weren’t as much fun as Uncle Brian’s family anyway. They had no garden, no dogs or cats, and the television was never turned on when they were there. Very occasionally Kate or Helen would be called upon to recite a poem they had learnt at school, or to play something on the tinny piano, but in general, all they had to do was sit for an hour like pins in paper and behave themselves. Sometimes as she talked to their father Granny Kelly would stare hard at one of the girls, as if she didn’t know who you were, and she was trying to find out by looking at you hard, from your shoes to your hair-ribbons. Helen hated this, for by the time Granny Kelly turned her stare upon one of the others, Helen would feel guilty of all sorts of things she hadn’t done. She’d feel her face go red, and she would want to say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ even though nobody had accused her of anything.
Auntie Rosemary sat a few moments and then went off to the kitchen. No sooner had she gone out than Uncle Michael came in. ‘Hello, Charlie, hello, girls. Emily didn’t come with you? Ah well. How’s Kate? How’s Sally? Well, Helen, how many slaps did you get at school this week?’
‘None,’ she said sullenly.
‘Helen’s a good scholar,’ her father said, smiling at her. Uncle Michael made the same silly joke every time she saw him. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ he went on. Helen knew the answer to this, but she wasn’t quite sure how you said the word.
‘I’m going to be an e-… an e-…’
‘An eejit? Sure you’re that already,’ he interrupted her, and burst out with laughter at his own joke. Even Granny gave a nasty little smile. The feeling in the pit of Helen’s stomach was worse now, but she was angry, too.
‘Someone who goes to Egypt,’ she said, as coldly as she could, ‘and looks for mummies.’
‘Sure your mammy’s at home in the house,’ he said, pretending to be baffled, and giving Granny Kelly a wink. ‘What do you want to go off to Egypt for?’
‘Not mammies, mumm
ies,’ said Kate, who always stuck up for Helen. ‘They’re people that have been dead for thousands of years, and they’re all wrapped up in bandages, and they have lovely jewellery and some of them have a thing on them like a false face only it’s made out of solid gold. Isn’t that right, Helen?’
‘Yes,’ said Helen faintly, sorry now she’d ever brought up the subject. She should have said she wanted to be a teacher, then they’d have left her alone.
‘Helen’s going to do great things altogether,’ said her father, smiling proudly at her.
‘Oh, she’ll put all that nonsense out of her head as soon as she grows up,’ Granny Kelly said. ‘First man looks twice at her, be he selling blades on a street corner, she’ll be off after him, and you’ll hear no more talk of her great ideas, you mark my words.’
Nobody said anything for a moment then: their father looked stunned and Sally whimpered into the silence because she knew something was wrong. At the sound of the tea tray tinkling in the hall, Uncle Michael leapt up to open the door for Aunt Rosemary.
There was a mug for Sally in with the cups and saucers, because the last time they’d been there, she had spilt her tea in her lap. Kate helped her little sister, unfolding a paper napkin for her while the plates of tomato and cheese sandwiches circulated. Tea in Granny Kelly’s house didn’t count as real food, it was just another exercise to make sure you knew the rules, and that you kept them, too. You had to have a respectable number of sandwiches before you could have something sweet, and then you had to choose the most unappealing biscuit on the plate, unless urged to go for something nicer (which you almost never were). Helen dreaded being given no option but to eat a piece of Aunt Rosemary’s seed cake ever since the day Kate had remarked that not only did it look like it had mouse shit in it, it tasted like it too. But her luck was in today, for when the plate came to them there was one pink wafer left, which Kate took, and some Rich Tea biscuits, which Helen was content enough to accept.
As the adults chatted, more warily now, Helen gazed around the room. Even though there was a fire burning in the grate, the parlour always felt cold, perhaps because there were so many glass things in it: a glass-topped table with a biscuit-coloured linen runner on it; a china cabinet containing ornaments and the tea sets people had given Uncle Michael and Auntie Rosemary when they had got married, and a glass vase, which never had flowers in it. Over the fire there hung a framed picture of Grandad Kelly, and even though he had died ever such a long time ago, when their mammy was herself a child, his presence hung over the family in a way Helen couldn’t fully understand, because he was seldom spoken of. She couldn’t help imagining he must have been a rather terrifying person, if only because he’d been married to Granny Kelly. Her idea of her other grandfather was completely different, perhaps because she could faintly remember him, or because Granny Kate was always talking about him, telling them funny stories and then the tears would stand in her eyes, even while she was laughing and saying things like ‘God, but there wasn’t an ounce of harm in Francis, so there wasn’t!’ She used to wonder how her mother had borne her father’s death, because the very worst thing Helen could imagine was losing either of her parents. Once she’d asked her mother about it, very timidly, and she’d looked so sad when she said, ‘Oh yes, Helen, it was terrible. It made all the difference to me, all the difference in the world.’
His teaching certificate, with an impressive red seal on it, hung in an alcove, and his books, which no one ever read now, were locked in a glass-fronted bookcase. He’d been the headmaster in a little school up near Ballycastle, and on the mantelpiece was the handbell he’d used to ring, to call the children back from the playground when it was time for lessons again. Helen didn’t even like to look at the bell, because it reminded her of the uproar there’d been one day when Kate picked it up and rang it. First, there’d been the hard metal clang of the bell, shockingly loud in the dim room, then Granny Kelly’s cold fury at such a piece of boldness, then Kate crying with shame and hurt at the scolding she got, then Helen crying because Kate cried and Sally starting to howl, and their father putting his head in his hands: oh, that was the most horrible thing to remember! She looked away quickly from the bell, back at the picture of Grandad Kelly which hung over the fire. He didn’t look stern or forbidding in the picture, but puzzled, quizzical.
Once, when they were on holiday at Portrush, their daddy had driven them round the coast to see Grandad Kelly’s school. Tucked away in a green fold of the hills, it was a white-washed building with a blue door and high windows. Beside the school was the teacher’s cottage, where their mammy had lived when she was small, with her parents and Uncle Michael. It was a lovely place, Helen thought: there were sheep in the fields and drystone walls, and all along the roadside there were hedges of wild fuchsia, purple and dark red. The sea crashed in the distance, and the wind had been blowing.
It was strange to think of the brightness there’d been there when you were sitting now in a chilly, dim parlour. A small lamp was lit on a table beside Granny Kelly, and the only other light in the room was whatever managed to seep in through the long cream blinds which were drawn against the sky. Granny Kelly had to sit in the dark all the time because she had bad eyes, and suddenly Helen thought how horrible that must be for her. No wonder she was grumpy. If Helen was old and stiff and had to wear black clothes all the time and sit in the dark, she would probably be irritable too. That was what Granny Kate was always saying, that you could never really know what it was like to be another person, and because of that, it was wrong for you to judge them. Only God could judge, because only God could see into people’s hearts.
But what a relief it was when their father looked at his watch and stood up! Then, their goodbyes made, they stepped into the street, and it was as if they’d been in the house for a week, rather than an hour or so. Even though it was a day in winter and it was starting to rain out of a cloudy sky, it still seemed bright and fresh to be out in the air again.
They got their Wellingtons: black ones for Helen and Kate, red ones for Sally, their daddy and the shop assistant anxiously pressing the toes of each in turn to make sure that the fit was right. Kate would have liked to have red wellies too, but they didn’t have them in her size. They did some other bits and pieces of shopping, and then he took them into a café and bought them sausage and chips and a bottle of Fanta each, while he had some more tea and a piece of apple pie, and smoked a cigarette. He looked much happier than he had done earlier.
‘I hope I’m not like Granny Kelly when I get old,’ Kate said, shaking the ketchup bottle over her chips.
‘Oh, there’ll be no fear of that,’ their daddy said. ‘You’ll be like your Granny Kate, you’re as like as two peas in a pod, so you are.’
Kate beamed. ‘Helen’ll be like Granny Kelly, then,’ she said impishly.
‘I will not!’ Helen protested, but their daddy just smiled. ‘Ah, Helen’ll be her own woman, won’t you, love?’
After that he bought them a comic each, and a quarter of sweets that were weighed out for them from glass jars: Clove Rock for Helen, Cherry Lips for Kate, Jelly Babies for Sally. He also bought a box of Milk Tray chocolates for their mammy.
Sally slept in the car on the way home, while Kate read her comic. Helen, who was in her usual place in the front seat, would have liked to have read hers too, but she thought it was more polite to talk to her daddy and keep him company. She liked the journey, anyway, especially the part where you came over the top of Roguery, and far below you could see Lough Neagh, and over to the right was Lough Beg, that their daddy called The Wee Lough, and in the distance were the mountains. When you came over this road at night, it looked like you were driving towards some huge city, because of all the lights, but during the day you could see that it was all just a scattering of small towns, villages and isolated farms.
She wondered if their mammy would be waiting for them, and as the car pulled up at the front of the house they could see her face look out anxiousl
y from behind the parlour curtains.
Chapter Five
MONDAY
She rang David at his home rather than at the television studio, because if he was at work at this time of day it meant he wouldn’t be able to see her this evening, so there was no point in contacting him there. She was relieved when she heard his voice on the other end of the line, brisk and distant as he said his number, and warming immediately when he realised who was calling him.
‘Helen, how are you?’
‘I’m fine,’ she said, stiffly. It was a sort of code that had evolved between them, so that David would automatically realise that she wasn’t alone, would probably guess, correctly, that Owen, the solicitor with whom Helen worked, was near by and couldn’t but overhear her conversation. What David couldn’t know was that Helen was particularly sensitive about this today because she’d blundered a few hours earlier, having had a loud, tactless row with her mother, losing her temper and shouting down the phone in such a way that Owen was bound to hear her, even though he was in the next room. She’d felt embarrassed and repentant as soon as she hung up, and as a result was perhaps overly cautious now.
‘I wondered if you’d like to come over for an hour or so this evening.’
‘Are you in poor form?’ he asked.
‘Oh, I’ve known better, I must say,’ she replied, in even tones, frowning and doodling tight black grids with heavy pressure on the telephone pad.
He said he would love to come. ‘Steve’s off in London this week, so I’m here on my own anyway.’
‘I can send out for a Chinese.’ She heard him swearing on the other end of the line, and smiled. ‘No, wait, I think there’s a sort of a pie thing in the fridge. Or did I eat that? I can’t remember.’
One by One in the Darkness Page 5