She withdrew to the sofa at the far side of the room, where Peter was sitting. Brian’s dog, Spike, was sitting at his feet, with it’s head lolling against Peter’s knees. He had his left hand on the dog, stroking and ruffling the hair on it’s neck; and in his right hand he held a tumbler of neat whiskey, from which he was steadily drinking. He barely spoke, just nodded or said ‘Aye,’ when Brian asked for confirmation of some point he was making. As he raised the glass to his mouth, Helen noticed the frayed cuff of his shirt, and suddenly she made the connection between Peter and what Brian was saying. She saw Peter being dragged out of an army jeep, being sworn at and kicked, she saw soldiers scream abuse in his face, saw them twist his arms up behind his back until he cried out. He drained his glass as though it had contained water, and quietly asked Declan to bring him over the bottle from the table. Helen felt a terrible anger now too, an anger she would never forget.
But no sooner were they all back at school, and trying to settle down for the autumn, than something else happened, which broke into their lives and upset them. One night, in late September, Tony Larkin, the eldest brother of Helen’s school friend Willy Larkin, died planting a bomb at an electricity pylon over near Magherafelt. ‘A pylon,’ their father said bitterly when he heard the news. ‘A fucking electricity pylon,’ and that startled them, for he almost never used language like that. ‘Where did he think that was going to get any of us? Did he think that was going to free Ireland?’ Tony was nineteen. Lucy rang them early in the morning to tell them what had happened, Mrs McGovern having phoned her. Everyone wanted to save everyone else the shock of hearing it for the first time on the radio. But even forewarned, there was something unsettling about watching the television that evening, and hearing a name so familiar pronounced in so distant and public a way. The newsreader struggled with the pronunciation of the name of the place where Tony had died. All that day they had heard people talk in hushed, grieved tones about what had happened, and it was odd now to hear the same story told blankly and without emotion.
Helen remembered how much Willy had looked up to Tony; how he had boasted about him. ‘Our Tony’s not afraid of anything, so he’s not.’ Once Tony had killed a fox. He gave the skin to Willy, who brought it into school to show everybody; and that was what Helen remembered now, the rank smell of the red pelt, and Willy stroking the fur with his hands and saying, ‘There’s nobody in the country as brave as our Tony.’ When Helen closed her eyes, she saw the desolate field where foxes lived, and where Tony died; a field bound by dense hedges of hawthorn and sloe. She and Kate had heard the bomb explode. Just as they drifted off to sleep the night before, there’d been a long rumble in the distance. They’d both known at once that it wasn’t thunder, and not just because the weather earlier that evening hadn’t promised thunder. Already they had learnt to distinguish between that noise and the flat, sullen trailing sound a bomb made. ‘I wonder where that is,’ Kate had said, and then they’d fallen asleep.
That night, their parents went to the wake, and when they came home the children could see that their mother had been crying. A strange atmosphere hung over everyone and everything at the time of Tony’s death, a hushed and grieved air, and there was a distance between people, as though no matter how much they talked, they remained deeply isolated from each other. The children noticed this at home, at school, where they said prayers for Tony, and for his family; and it was most apparent in the church on the day of Tony’s funeral, which they attended at their father’s insistence. They were shocked when they saw Willy and his family, for they looked as if they were living in some other dimension; and the children thought that if they had tried to speak or to communicate with them in any way, the family wouldn’t have been able to connect. Mrs Larkin looked as if she were locked into some terrible dream, from which she didn’t have the energy to struggle to awaken. She looked as if she had been crying for two solid days; and when Kate said this to Emily later that day her mother replied, ‘You’re probably right in that.’ They had never before seen so many people packed into the small church, and by the end of the funeral, Kate thought she might faint from the heat and the stuffy air, and the heavy smell of incense as the coffin was carried out. As soon as they were outside the doors of the church, a tricolour was put over the coffin, and a beret and black gloves placed upon it. Brian told them afterwards that he’d heard that Father Black had forbidden them to put the flag on the coffin while it was still inside the church building. Six men and women emerged from the crowd. They were dressed all in black, with black berets and dark glasses, and they walked three on either side of the cortège from the door of the church to the graveside. Amongst them Helen recognised the fair-haired girl whom she’d seen with Tony at the carnival, and on other occasions; and in spite of the dark glasses, you could see that she’d been crying too. Father Black said the last prayers of the ceremony as the coffin was lowered into the ground, and the people standing near by heard Mrs Larkin say, ‘Tony, Tony, how am I ever going to live without you?’
And then something happened to break the air of dignified sadness which had marked the day up until then. The men and women in black produced guns, and when someone gave orders in Irish, they raised their arms and fired a volley of shots over the open grave. Many of the mourners applauded loudly; some of the men even whistled and cheered. Their Uncle Brian was one of the men who clapped hardest of all, but their father didn’t join in.
When they got into the car to go home, they sat in silence for a moment, and then he said to them, ‘Never forget what you saw today; and never let anybody try to tell you that it was anything other than a life wasted, and lives destroyed.’
Chapter Nine
WEDNESDAY
She’d always been fond of flowers and plants, but after Charlie was killed it became an obsession; the only thing in which she could become completely absorbed, often the only thing that made any sense to her. She grew sweet pea on a trellis and in a shaded part of the garden she grew red tulips clouded in forget-me-not. Under the windows she grew night-scented stock, and from the hearts of the white-and-purple stars the rich scent reeked at dusk. At Easter the house would be golden with the daffodils she put everywhere in vases and jugs and jars, their trumpets blasting the dim air; and no matter how many she cut more remained, heaving and sinking in thick waves of yellow and green on the deep bank where they grew. Every autumn she grew hyacinths in water. As the days grew shorter she watched the white roots creep down and the green shoots push up and then in the dull light of the year’s end, the extraordinary flowers would burst out, and drench the rooms with their perfume. She made a garden of her husband’s grave. She didn’t know how to pray for him, so she cultivated roses on the earth that sheltered his body, and said to him in her heart, ‘This is for you, Charlie.’ Her daughters teased her about her mania, but she only smiled. She knew they understood. It made her able to bear time, because it hooked her into the circle of the seasons, and time would otherwise have been a horrible straight line, a straight, merciless journey at speed towards death. Instead of which, she had pulled Charlie back into the circle and back into her life, in a way which she wordlessly comprehended, and which offered to her the nearest approximation she would ever have to comfort or consolation.
She was sitting in the conservatory her daughters had had made for her on her sixtieth birthday. She’d been there yesterday morning trying to come to terms with Cate’s news when Sally came to talk to her, and she’d insisted that they go to the kitchen, in case there should be hard words spoken that would poison the air and then she wouldn’t be able to sit amongst the flowers ever again without being assailed by unpleasant memories. The flowers were important because things meant nothing to her, they never had, not since she was a small child. She wasn’t sentimental about any thing. Not long after she was married, the Foreign Missions made an appeal for women to donate their wedding dresses to be sent for women in Africa to use. She’d gone straight home from church and got hers ready to be dis
patched, but Charlie had done all in his power to talk her out of it, and they reached a compromise of sorts when she said she’d give the dress, but keep the veil and the tiara of paste stones she’d worn with it.
After he died, they’d found in his wardrobe a cache of memorabilia she hadn’t known existed: a programme from a dinner dance they’d been to in Halls Hotel in Antrim in 1962, one of Cate’s copy books from when she was in primary four, Christmas and birthday cards the girls had made for him when they were little, and a solemn letter Helen had written him when she was ten and Charlie had been in hospital with gallstones, telling him not to worry about the cattle ‘because Uncle Peter and I are looking after them until you are well again’. Once they’d looked at them, she’d wanted to throw all these things away, but the girls were upset at the very idea. She couldn’t see any point in keeping them, so the sisters had amicably divided the material amongst themselves.
Yes, she’d kept the tiara to placate Charlie, but it never meant anything to her. She let the children use it to play at dressing up as princesses, and in due course it became battered, the veil was faded and torn. Cate had come across it one day when she was about sixteen, and pounced on it. ‘Oh Mammy, will you lend me this to wear when I get married?’ she asked, cramming it on to her head; and they had all laughed to see it, even Charlie, because she had looked so funny, with her bright face under the broken crown of false stones.
It was a disappointment to her that none of the three had married. When they were growing up she’d always taken it for granted that they would: well, maybe not Sally, but probably Helen, and certainly Cate. It wasn’t likely that it would happen now. People said times had changed, but Cate would find that they hadn’t changed that much, people would still look down on her because she had a baby on her own. It was still a rare man who would take another man’s child on board; and then if they didn’t get on together, that would be the first thing he would cast up to her.
‘I never wanted you to go to London!’ she’d cried to Cate on Monday. ‘I knew it would end in trouble.’ Both Sally and Cate had stared at her mystified. ‘I think you’re missing the point, Mammy,’ Sally had replied. But the point was, that Emily had always felt afraid when she thought of Cate’s life in England. There was no logic to this, when she reasoned it out, for Cate was, and had always been, open to the point of transparency. If she had something to hide, would she have urged her mother so frequently to go and visit her? The invitations were never accepted, but Sally and Helen went to stay with Cate, and they, together with Michael and Rosemary, encountered only the kindness, luxury and generosity that were the essence of Cate. But once, when she was home for a holiday, Emily had gone into Cate’s room and suddenly she understood what it was that troubled her. She looked at the big black Filofax on the dressing table, the glass dish full of rings and gold chains, the neat row of marvellous shoes over by the window: the sophistication of Cate’s possessions made Emily see her not just as a daughter, but as a woman; a woman leading a woman’s life in a vast, anonymous city, and she realised that it was the thought of that that had unconsciously frightened her.
And then there was Helen. Unlike Cate, she was completely dismissive of the idea of marriage, so much so that Emily found it hurtful. She remembered how at Young Michael’s wedding (and what a deal of coaxing there’d been to get Helen to go to it!) Rosemary had said, half as a joke, ‘And what about you, Helen, when are you going to give us a big day?’ Certainly it was tactless, and Helen had a right to be annoyed, but her icy dismissal of the whole idea was so complete, so final, that Emily had been shocked and saddened by it. She couldn’t understand why Helen would feel this way, given that she’d grown up in a house where there was a happy marriage. It wasn’t as if Helen had seen her and Charlie fighting all the time, or Charlie drinking the stars out of the sky, the way some men did. She would have liked to ask Helen, but she was too afraid. She didn’t like to admit that she was intimidated by her own daughter, but it was true. Sometimes when Cate came home she would feel a little strange with her at first, because she was beautiful. She looked like one of the models in that magazine she worked for, but her personality broke through the gloss almost at once. Within ten minutes of coming into the house she would have kicked off her shoes, she’d be looking in the cake tin, she’d be letting the cats into the kitchen to play with them, she’d be driving you mad and making you laugh the way she did when she was ten. But Helen was different, and always had been.
Cate had given her more worry than Helen and Sally put together, and look at the pickle she’d landed herself in now, and at her age, too. When Cate was a teenager Emily’s biggest fear had been that Cate might get pregnant. She remembered lying in bed at night listening to the sound of the rain and the wind, Charlie snoring away beside her, but she wouldn’t close an eye until she heard some old car rattle up to the house, and then the back door would open, and the longer the interval was between the car pulling up and the door opening the more anxious she would be. Then she would hear Cate tiptoe up the stairs, home from the dance that, more often than not, she’d argued about with Emily until she’d been granted grudging permission to attend it. She hadn’t liked some of the boys Cate had gone about with in those days, they were a bit wild, and she worried even more about the ones she didn’t know. Then once, in the middle of an argument she’d lost her temper and said, ‘What if you get into trouble and have a baby, what then? That’ll be your life ruined; and all your education lost.’
‘My education?’ Cate said. ‘What about me? What about the baby? Is that the only thing that matters in life, education? And anyway, how can you say that to me? Everybody’s always making me out to be far worse than I am.’ She was crying by this stage, and Emily ended up apologising to her, but there was a coolness between them for a long time after that. Cate had felt deeply insulted and hurt by what her mother had said.
They’d never had any trouble with Helen going out to dances, because she’d never looked to go, she’d only ever attended to her school books. Emily had never seen anybody who studied as hard as Helen, and now she thought that perhaps she and Charlie should have tried to persuade her to go out more, although at the time she had been glad. She used to say that if the three of them had been like Cate she would have been at her wits’ end with them. Oh it was all very well that Helen had a good job and money and a house, she’d made it to the top of the tree, but the price had been too high. She’d always been deeply serious, even when she was a child, yet Emily had never thought she would grow up to be so cold and formidable. Once, when they were all at the convent, Sister Benedict had said to Emily, ‘Helen is, if anything, too much of a paragon. Kate is an imp, but she is also one of the most likeable girls in this school. And Sally does what she’s told.’
She had never wanted daughters anyway: did they know that? Of course she’d never told them, but she read somewhere that children could pick up and understand far more than you would ever imagine in a house, even when they were tiny. She’d felt guilty at her own disappointment when Helen had been born, healthy and safe but not the son for whom she had longed. Charlie didn’t care, in fact he’d been delighted. He said he didn’t understand all the fuss about having boys. ‘It’s not as if we’re royalty,’ he’d said, ‘and by the time she’s grown up, women will be less put down than they are now.’ All the Quinns had been delighted with Helen, because Charlie had had no sisters, and Brian’s and Lucy’s first child had been a boy too, so a girl was a great novelty in the family. Maybe that was why Helen and Cate had been closer to Charlie, right from the start. Helen was always so self-possessed, unlike Cate, who from day one had yowled and cried freely for whatever she needed or wanted, who had learnt how to charm people from before she could walk. ‘She has me wound round her wee finger,’ Charlie used to say, as if nothing could give him greater contentment.
And then when Emily was pregnant for the third time she’d been afraid that if it was another girl, she wouldn’t be able to love it
at all. The irony was, that she ended up closer to Sally than to either of the others. All the nurses in the hospital had remarked how much the new baby resembled Emily; and then she’d been weak and frail right from the start, so that she needed her mother in a way that perhaps Helen and Cate had not. Was it that she had known then that Sally would be her last child, and that the idea of a son was just a dream to be forgotten? From the very beginning they’d clung to each other, literally clung, Sally holding her skirt, holding her hand, always sitting beside her and pressing up close, as if she wanted to be absorbed back into Emily, as if she wanted to become her. And then the terrible days when she started school. Helen had gone off calmly when her time had come, and Cate, bored at home without her elder sister, had clamoured to be allowed to go too. But Sally had screamed and clutched the bannisters every morning for the first six weeks. It was Charlie who’d prised her fingers away and carried her, roaring, with her fists flailing, to the car where Helen and Cate were waiting, bemused and mildly entertained by the spectacle their little sister offered. Emily herself had lain on her bed and wept as the car drove off. The house was empty, and silent without the children; she’d hated it, and she kept Sally home on the slightest pretext, for the merest sniffle or ache.
Even now Sally was still slighter and frailer than her sisters, but there was a strength in her that Emily, who had thought she knew her youngest daughter to the depths of her soul, hadn’t realised existed. She’d seen it first when Charlie was killed, not so much in the immediate aftermath, but in the weeks and months that followed, when other people thought she was probably beginning to ‘get over’ what had happened (as if she ever could!). Sally had known instinctively what she needed then, she’d known the times when Emily was truly helpless with grief, and then she’d cooked for her and looked after her. But she’d also known the times when Emily needed firmness, needed to be pushed. Then Sally would ask her mother to make scones or to let down the hem on a skirt for her, or insist on some other domestic chore that was exactly the distraction Emily needed. Sometimes Sally listened to her far into the night as she talked about Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Sometimes she told her sharply that there was no point in wallowing in grief, ordered her to talk about something else; and all this tenderness and sharpness was administered with an exact, even eerie, knowledge of what sort of treatment Emily needed at any given moment.
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