One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  But although she knew this side of Sally existed, Emily had been taken aback by her assertiveness on Monday, when Cate told them she was going to have a baby, issuing commands, packing Cate off to Belfast the next day and then going to work on Emily to win her round. It was the first major disagreement she’d had with Sally in her life. Even in the smallest things they were usually in accord, agreeing so easily on such matters as what colour to decorate the spare bedroom, so that any dissent was only initial, was like the hesitancy you might have in your own mind between the leaf green and the shell pink. It wasn’t like two people discussing something, it was like one mind thinking aloud, debating with itself until it reached a decision as to what it liked best.

  Emily had slept badly on Monday night, not because she was lying awake thinking about Cate, but because she found herself thinking about her own life and the course it had taken, thinking about her childhood in particular with an attention to detail she rarely allowed herself.

  She couldn’t remember her father’s face properly, and that had always troubled her, puzzled her too, because she could remember other aspects of him so clearly: the tweed waistcoat that smelt of tobacco when you pressed your face into it, the bloodstone ring, the clip of his fountain pen in the breast pocket of his jacket. Images unfolded in her mind like flowers. She was sitting on his knee by the hearth and he showed her pictures in the embers of the fire: a man walking along a road, a cat washing itself, a house in a forest. She was sitting in class in the white school where he was headmaster. They had put their heads on their folded arms to rest, and she could hear the soothing drone of children in the next room reciting their tables: ‘Two ones are two, two twos are four, two threes are six, two fours are eight…’ and the sound was like a warm rug wrapped around her. After it rained, there was a rich smell of earth and vegetation. Her father took her to the beach, and they walked along the pale sand. They collected shells in a tin bucket, and he told her that all the seas were one sea, that one ocean merged imperceptibly into the next. The sea at the top of the world was cold, there were polar bears there, and icebergs; but the ocean in the tropics was warm and blue and there was coral there, and marvellous coloured fish. And then, later, she came to understand that time was like the ocean, in that all the things that had happened in the past were linked in an extraordinarily simple way. History was no more than the effect of one day following another, one day following another, spooling back from the present to a time when women wore odd hooped skirts and bonnets that hid their faces, back to a time when men killed each other with swords and thought the world was flat, back to a time when people lived in caves.

  And then one morning her mother came to her bed and shook her out of her sleep; shook her out of the warm, happy dream that had been her life up until that moment, and told her that her daddy was dead, her daddy had gone to Heaven. She never saw him again.

  Later that morning, she and Michael were driven through a landscape locked in a drizzling mist to stay in Ballymena with their mother’s sister. They spent three days there, finding it impossible to play, as they were commanded to, in the high, dusty rooms where the light was grey and the only books available were heavy and huge, with close dark type and no pictures. Michael cried for his parents, cried for boredom, cried for fear; and Emily made desultory, big-sisterly attempts to comfort him, telling him that they’d soon be going home.

  But when they were taken back to be with their mother, she was busy packing. ‘It’s not our house,’ she explained briefly. ‘We have to make way for the new teacher who’ll be taking over your daddy’s job.’ Until she saw their mother efficiently breaking it up into it’s component parts, she hadn’t thought of their home as being made of a series of independent objects. She’d thought that the dresser and the long pale table could exist only in relation to each other as a part of their kitchen, and it unsettled her to see her mother coolly decide to sell the one, and take the other with them when they left. There wouldn’t be room in their aunt’s house for all their things, and their mother expected them to understand this and to co-operate, not to be sentimental and selfish; so there was a tremendous fight over Emily’s bucket of shells, a fight that began with a request, moved to coaxing, insistence, tears, shrieks, and ended with a full-blown tantrum, Emily kicking the bucket to the far side of the room and screaming that if she couldn’t have the shells, she didn’t want anything ever again.

  In the years that followed, this rage would occasionally make itself felt. Her spirit was broken by the time she was twelve, but spirits, whether those of a child or a society, never break cleanly, and the people who didn’t understand this were shocked when the dull, quiet girl, so eager to please, suddenly displayed a violent temper. They thought these two sides of her were at odds; couldn’t understand that the malevolence was the logical corollary to the obsequiousness. One day followed another, and the image of the man she’d loved, who’d made his handkerchief into a mouse to make her laugh, who’d walked with her on the beach, and explained things to her, was replaced with a myth, a distant figure frowning in a picture frame, whom she could honour only by becoming a teacher, like him, and all her memories became like dreams.

  ‘Nobody asked me if I wanted to be a teacher,’ she would say to her daughters, years later. ‘I was put to it. It would never have crossed Mammy’s mind to ask me if I might have preferred to do something else. But I was lucky, I liked it more than I expected I would.’

  She remembered how Cate had remarked once that it was only when you lived away from Northern Ireland that you realised, on returning, how deeply divided a society it was, and how strange the effect of that could be. As an example, she’d cited the time when Sally had absent-mindedly answered a hairdresser’s stock question ‘Where are you going for your holidays this summer?’ with the word ‘Italy’, and how she’d seen the woman’s face change colour in the mirror. She continued to snip in silence for a few moments more, then said, ‘Will you be staying in the Vatican?’

  ‘Actually, no,’ Sally replied. ‘I’m going to Rimini.’

  The whole family had fallen about and laughed till they wept when Sally told them this; and thinking of it helped Emily to understand the point Cate was making. But when she was growing up, it had seemed completely natural that she should go to the local convent school, and after that to a Catholic teacher training college, and on leaving, teach in a Catholic school. Even though her daughters were old enough to remember Northern Ireland before the Troubles started in the late sixties, they’d only been children then, and couldn’t have been aware of just how difficult it had been for Catholics at that time. Emily herself, as a young adult in the fifties, had only vaguely understood it. She remembered sitting in the garden of her aunt’s house in Ballymena on a warm summer evening, listening to the sound of a flute band practising in the distant streets for the Twelfth celebrations. She listened idly first, just thinking how tinny it was, what poor music, but then she began to think about why they were playing, and as the flutes gave way to the harsh clatter of the big drums, she realised that those people hated her, hated her, and would give her and her family no quarter. And she felt not just the mild fear that was so habitual that she took it for granted, but also a bitter anger. Her mother had come into the garden at that moment and Emily had said furiously, ‘Why do we have to listen to that? Why do we have to put up with it?’ and her mother had looked at her with incomprehension. It was, until the time she met Charlie and Brian, her moment of greatest political awareness, but she wouldn’t have been able then to define it thus.

  At that time ‘politics’ meant Stormont, meant a Protestant government for a Protestant people, so if you happened to be a Catholic, the message was clear. You just worked as hard as possible within the tiny scope that was allowed to you, and that in itself was so time consuming and difficult that few, and certainly not Emily, had the insight or the necessary energy to begin even to think of how things ought to be, or might be, changed. Education was the only hope, i
t was like a rope that you struggled to cling to, in the hope of pulling yourself up to a position less disadvantaged than the one in which you started out. Keep your head down, look to your own, and don’t expect too much in any case: nobody ever said those words explicitly to her, but then nobody needed to, because the world around her wordlessly insisted on this every single day of her life.

  She felt ashamed now of her lack of awareness; but then it was only fair to remember that her sense of personal dispossession had been so intense that it perhaps would have been asking too much of her when she was a young girl to unravel the strands of her own unhappiness, to identify and name each cause in turn. Sometimes she remembered what her father had told her about time and the ocean; and the sense of dislocation from her life with him was so great that she couldn’t believe nothing separated her from the past but that simple chain of one day following another, one day following another. The loss of her father, which brought with it the end of her childhood, left in her life a terrible wound which nothing could heal until the moment she walked through the door of a Belfast primary school as a trainee teacher. Lying in bed now, over forty years later, the names and faces of the children came back to her: Martin and Bernadette and Mary and Henry and Joe, with their open faces and harsh accents, their freckles and their scabby knees, their short trousers and cotton dresses: they were lovely children. They gave her more than they ever knew, for they gave her not a path back into her childhood, because that couldn’t be done, but a way of building on the happiness of those early years in a way she would never have thought possible.

  Ballymena was a quiet country market town, and although Emily hadn’t enjoyed growing up there, she’d become used to it’s air of Presbyterian rectitude, it’s rain and Sunday silences. She hadn’t expected to like Belfast, because on the occasional visits she’d made there it had seemed to her a loud, grimy, ugly place. When she went there to attend the teacher training college she found that even if these impressions were accurate, they were irrelevant. It might be an ugly city but it had a beautiful position, tucked between the mountains and the sea. The rows and rows of terraced red-brick houses, with the mills, the yellow gantries of the shipyards, the spires of the churches, and the bare slopes of the Black Mountain together gave the city it’s atmosphere. The air was smoky, and when she woke in the morning, she could hear the clang and rumble of trolley buses going up and down the Falls Road. She didn’t tell her mother, but she decided that when she was qualified, she would do her best to find a job in Belfast, rather than go back to Ballymena as was expected of her.

  She blossomed at the training college, and made friends there, which she hadn’t done in Ballymena because she’d been made to feel that her aunt was doing a great favour in allowing them to live in her house, and that to start bringing other little girls in would be pushing her hospitality to it’s limits. In her first term she made friends with a woman called Agnes Bell, whose father owned a pub near Randalstown. Angular Aggie, they called her, because she stayed skinny no matter how much she ate. ‘Amn’t I a fierce rickle of bones?’ she used to say plaintively, nipping at the flesh on her legs and arms. For all that, she loved clothes, and they’d often gone shopping together in the city centre. Because her father was so well off, Agnes could afford wonderful suits and dresses out of places like The Bank Buildings and Robinson and Cleaver’s which were far beyond Emily’s reach, even after she was qualified and earning a good wage.

  She quarrelled with her mother over her first pay packet, something she never forgot and for which she never forgave her mother because it spoiled the long-awaited delight of having her own money that she had earned for herself. Michael was still at school, and she accepted that she would have to contribute substantially, but her mother thought that what she offered wasn’t enough. More than that, she said that if Emily had any sense of gratitude for everything that had been done for her, and the education she had been given, she would hand over her pay packet unopened every Friday night, and let her mother decide how much should go to the family, and how much Emily should be given for, as her mother put it, ‘her own amusement’. The ‘amusement’ included lodging in Miss Regan’s tiny red-brick house near Clonard, and Emily’s mother did regard that as a luxury which could have been done without if Emily had had the decency to look for a job in Ballymena, so that she could live at home again. ‘No chance,’ Emily had said to Agnes, and the two of them had danced round the room when they both got jobs in the same school in the lower Falls, where Emily had done her teaching practice. She’d needed good clothes too, nothing as classy as the things Agnes wore, but more and better than her mother realised, because it was important for teachers to be well turned out then. Everyone expected it, even the children, and you wouldn’t have been respected if you were scruffy.

  Her daughters thought that the life she’d lived then had been a terrible hardship, although it hadn’t seemed so bad to her. ‘How did you stand it at all?’ they used to ask, but she’d actually enjoyed much of it, and she enjoyed telling her daughters about her life at that time. She described to them the frugal room she’d had in Miss Regan’s house, Miss Regan who couldn’t cook, whose fried eggs were always burnt on the bottom and raw on the top, whose sausages always split in the pan, whose steak suet pudding defied description. They used to go to Clonard Women’s Confraternity together once a week (‘Talk about high living!’ Helen said). Sometimes to treat Miss Regan and to spare herself Emily would tell her not to cook a dinner and they had fish and chips instead, which Emily paid for. Even now, after all those years, Emily remembered how much she had enjoyed those evenings, and if ever anyone passed her on the street eating chips the smell of the vinegar and the fried potatoes brought back to her how much it had meant to her to sit in the minuscule parlour; and the fire in the hearth, Miss Regan’s huge, kind eyes, the sound of the buses and the sound of the rain, the street lights dappling against the pulled blinds. She didn’t try too hard to explain to the girls why she’d felt so contented then, because she’d have had to explain how cold her own home life had been, and even though she knew they knew about that, she would have felt disloyal. Sitting in the parlour in Belfast there’d been a cosiness, an easiness, that she had never felt in her own family home.

  Emily still wasn’t convinced that teaching was an easier job now than then. ‘It was a real profession in my day,’ she used to say to Sally, ‘you were well regarded and society backed you up.’ The children then would never have turned the word on you; Emily could scarcely believe some of the stories she heard now, of even very small children swearing and shouting at their teachers.

  The conditions had been hard, though, there was no denying that: forty children to a class was nothing unusual. Sometimes you had had to share a classroom with another teacher, and then the lessons had to be carefully co-ordinated, so that one group wouldn’t unduly disturb the other. Sally was shocked when Emily said she hadn’t even had a chair, there hadn’t been the space for it: there had just been a teacher’s table pushed up hard against the wall. It meant that she’d been on her feet from the first bell of the day to the last. Often at the end of the week it was as much as she could do to drag herself into the city centre on a Friday afternoon and take the bus to Ballymena. Like most of the passengers, she usually fell asleep as they drove through the countryside. No wonder she’d been so reluctant to hand her wages straight over to her mother!

  Sometimes it made her sad that the children she taught had such a tough future ahead of them. Emily might regret their lack of ambition, but at other times she would think it a blessing that they didn’t have high aspirations that would only be frustrated. When she asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up most of the boys said, ‘I want to drive a horse for Wordie, Miss,’ meaning Wordie Cowan, the brewer. The girls didn’t even have the prospect of the linen mills where their mothers worked, for by the nineteen fifties, even these were being closed down. On the buses Emily shrank from sitting beside the mill workers for f
ear that the long white threads that clung to their clothes would attach themselves to her own coat or dress. She felt guilty, though, about drawing back from these weary women, whose own mothers brought the women’s children to school every day, and placed them in Emily’s care. As far as the unemployed fathers were concerned, the big shipyards and the other heavy industries of Belfast might as well have been on the moon for all the chance they or their sons had of getting a job there, because they were Catholics. Only the most gifted, the most determined and the most hard working had even the slimmest chance of making out well in the world: and yet education was their hope.

  During the course of the first autumn term, Agnes’s brother Paul started to take an interest in her. He’d drive up to Belfast in his father’s black Zephyr, and take her to the cinema, or dancing in the Floral Hall on the rare weekends she stayed in Belfast. She realised afterwards that she hadn’t really been interested in him, he was as skinny as Agnes herself, and it was the attention he paid her that was flattering. She told her mother and aunt about him, not even thinking why: she’d have been shocked if anyone said she was boasting, but that was exactly what it was. She only realised how foolish she’d been when she proudly showed them the crystal necklace he gave her that Christmas. She remembered how her mother had held it up against the light, admiring it’s sparkle, and suddenly her aunt said, ‘He must mean business, Emily.’ She had a cold, strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’ she said, reaching out her hands for the beads which felt to her now like morsels of ice. ‘He has plenty of money, I’m sure as far as he’s concerned it’s just an ordinary wee Christmas present,’ which somehow didn’t add up with the triumph with which she’d first shown them the necklace some moments earlier. Her mother and aunt smiled, and her aunt said, ‘Oh, go away on out of that!’ Emily put the beads back in their box.