One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  So when she started going out with Charlie a couple of months later, she didn’t let on to her family. Funnily enough, she met him through Agnes too. Agnes had an uncle who was a priest on the Missions in Nigeria, and when he was at home for a holiday, Agnes’s family held a big barn dance to raise money for him to take back to his parish.

  All through their married life, Charlie would tease her because she couldn’t remember the exact moment they met. But Agnes had dragged her around the dance that night presenting her to so many of her friends from home, that the moment when she said, ‘Emily, this is Charlie Quinn,’ became lost immediately in a blur of similar introductions. What Emily did remember was the end of the night, when she was saying goodbye to Charlie. ‘The next time you’re up in Belfast, come and see me,’ she said. ‘I’d like that. Agnes knows where I am.’ He’d looked surprised, as well he might have done, for it must have looked terribly forward. But she was willing to risk having him think badly of her if that was necessary, if the alternative was not seeing him again because she’d stood too much on her dignity. At some point in the evening, after that initial introduction, they’d ended up together again, sitting on a bale of straw, drinking Coca-Cola, and talking. It made her realise how little she cared for Paul. What had mattered was not Paul himself, but that her mother would be impressed with the gifts he gave her, that Miss Regan would notice and admire the fine car in which he came to collect Emily, what mattered were the lunches, the dances, the trips to the cinema, but Paul himself didn’t matter at all.

  When Charlie did come to Belfast and started taking her out, it was Charlie himself Miss Regan commented on, not his possessions. ‘He’s a lovely big fella, Emily,’ she said over their usual breakfast of burnt toast and gluey porridge the morning after she met him. Agnes proved to be a good friend, too, telling Emily not to worry about Paul. ‘I’ve told him already he’s out of the picture.’ Later in the spring she asked Emily if she’d mentioned Charlie to her family.

  Emily said that she hadn’t. ‘Well, I would, if I were you, because they’re going to get a right shock when you tell them you’re getting married, and it turns out to be to some person they’ve never heard tell of.’ Emily didn’t reply, but she took the advice offered. Her mother didn’t seem to notice, though, particularly when she found out how small and poor a farm he had. Emily insisted on this point, and her mother, she realised a long time afterwards, misunderstood this, took it as an indication that she wasn’t, couldn’t be, serious about him. Oh, she’d thought her own mother so cold in comparison with Charlie’s mother when she met her, and there couldn’t have been a clearer display of the difference than when they decided to get married: Emily’s mother’s anger and tears; Charlie’s mother’s tears and delight. Of course they’re delighted,’ Emily’s mother said, ‘they have all to gain and nothing to lose from this. What will you do about your career? I can’t believe you’re just going to throw it away like this.’

  The worst thing was, her mother had a point here, something which Emily herself had thought about without resolving the problem. At the end of her first year’s teaching, they took the children on a trip to Groomsport in County Down for the day. The only photographs she had from her time as a teacher were some pictures one of the other teachers took with a Box Brownie on that day, and every so often she would take them out and look at them. The children had been so excited: it was such a big treat then to go to the sea. The night before, Charlie had asked her to marry him, and she’d said yes. Sitting on the beach, she realised that she’d always thought that someday she probably would get married, but not for a long time. If she went to live in the country, she would have to give up her job in Belfast, but if she was married, it would be hard, maybe impossible, for her to find another job there. It wasn’t seen as right for women to go on working when they were married, they were supposed to stay at home and look after their own children. It was so unfair that she couldn’t have both, she thought, as she watched the children run and scream on the beach. Even Agnes, when she asked her later, wasn’t able to offer her much comfort: they both remembered from the training college stories they heard about women who went for job interviews and who put their engagement rings in their pockets before they went in. But they always got found out, they never got the jobs, and were called deceitful and sly for having tried to hide their intentions.

  A week after Emily told her mother she was engaged, her mother sent her a letter cut out from The Irish News. Emily had seen letters like this before, but coming in the post to her, with no accompanying note from her mother, it had seemed like a poison-pen letter directed to her personally, and the words burned into her mind:

  Sir,

  One notes with sorrow the growing number of girls who, on marrying, selfishly retain their jobs in our Catholic schools, thereby denying employment to unmarried girls who need teaching posts, and, more importantly, to men, many of whom may have wives and children of their own to support. To see such a lack of understanding of their own Christian vocation as wives and mothers makes one wonder if closer attention needs to be paid to the type of girl who is selected to be trained as teachers. Are girls so ignorant of the role God has ordained for them the sort of people to whom we should be entrusting the care of our children?

  Yours, etc.,

  Patrick Gallagher

  She’d responded by tearing the cutting to shreds, and posting it back to her mother, again without a covering letter. Things went from bad to worse after that. Emily became increasingly bloody-minded: she would admit that now. So she couldn’t have both her husband and her job. So be it: she chose to marry. So her expensive education would be wasted: was that not the fault of society, for not letting her use it? Why blame Emily? She made her mother admit without difficulty that it was to give it up for so little that was shocking to her. If Emily had decided to marry Paul, who would inherit his father’s pub and house, that would have been a different matter. Education used as bait to get a good catch was, evidently, not a waste of years of study in the way marrying someone with no money was.

  ‘She’ll come round to me in time,’ Charlie said, with endearing optimism. She never did.

  And Sally knew her mother so well that it was just this point she had worked round to yesterday when she argued Cate’s case. Poor Cate this, it had been, poor Cate that: to begin, her main concern had been to urge compassion. Cate must surely feel bad about what had happened, Sally argued. So what were they, her family, to do? Force her to feel more miserable still? What end would that serve, but to drive her away. Cate only had her family now. This man, whoever he was, had evidently walked away from the situation: were they to reject her too?

  ‘And don’t forget,’ she’d said more than once, ‘it’s a baby we’re talking about, your grandchild, my niece.’

  ‘I never wanted a grandchild in these circumstances,’ she’d said, and was surprised at the vehemence with which Sally had rounded on her.

  ‘And do you think Cate wanted this? I’m sure Cate would have wanted to get married before she had children, but it hasn’t worked out that way, and no one needs reminding of the pity of that less than Cate.’

  Sally was right. You couldn’t always choose what happened in life, but you were free to decide whether or not you thought something was worthy of regrets. ‘If you regret things that don’t merit it, you give them more power, more dignity than they deserve,’ she thought. Sally had pressed on, though, pushing the issue to consequences that Emily might have allowed her mind to flit around, but which it was unbearable to hear spoken aloud. Once she knew the baby was on the way, what could Cate have done about it? Plenty. It would have been easy for Cate to have had an abortion in London, Sally said bluntly, and none of us would have been any the wiser. Is that what you really would have liked? she asked, as Emily howled and wept. No not that, never that. Well then, Sally said. But by having the baby, would she, Cate, be setting up a circle which, she, Emily, would be forever forcing her to square?

 
; It was just this dilemma that Sally was asking Emily to spare Cate. Emily had thought that once she’d married Charlie, her mother would bow to the inevitable and accept him; but she didn’t, and there was nothing Emily could do to change this. If her mother had decided not to accept that Emily had made a good marriage, that was her choice. After a few years, Emily had stopped trying to win her round: she seldom went to visit her: it was always Charlie who took the children to Ballymena to visit their grandmother, insisting that he would never be the cause of a total breakdown in communication between Emily and her family. ‘Life’s too short,’ he kept saying. ‘She won’t always be there, and then you’ll feel bad about it.’

  ‘I feel bad about it already,’ Emily had always replied to him. Believing that she was right and her mother was wrong was no proof against guilt. ‘It was like walking around for thirty years with a nail in the sole of your shoe,’ she used to tell Sally.

  A few years after her mother died, which happened when the girls were still at school, Emily dreamt one night that she was with her family on a raft which was drifting down a river. Only Emily was awake: her daughters, husband, brother and mother were all curled up sleeping, and as she watched them, she was aware of all the things about them which she didn’t like, which annoyed her. Her mother’s rejection of Charlie. Helen’s untidiness, her sarcasm. Cate, in the dream, was wearing her school uniform. Her nails and lips were crimson, and Emily thought bitterly about the rows they had had about make-up and dances and clothes. She looked at Charlie and remembered how angry she’d been when she found out that he’d been giving money to Peter, money they could well have been doing with for their daughters. Long-forgotten incidents, some serious, some trivial, crowded in on her as she stared at her sleeping family with vexation and resentment.

  Suddenly, she became aware of the distant roar of water: aware of what it meant too. The raft was headed for a waterfall. They were all going to drown, and the raft drifted on inexorably. There was nothing she could do to avert disaster.

  How different everything looked in the light of this knowledge! It was laughably foolish to get upset about Cate’s lipstick. Charlie’s largesse to his brother became a virtue rather than a flaw, but most significant of all, her attitude to her mother was transformed by the spirit of compassion and forgiveness she felt now towards her doomed family. She couldn’t change the fact of things but she could change how she saw them, and in that way she could determine the effect they had on her. This knowledge was the nearest she ever came to a reconciliation with her mother, but she found she couldn’t talk to anyone about what she had learnt, not even to Charlie. All she could do was try to tell her daughters that it was important to know what mattered in life and what didn’t, and that often it was the things you wouldn’t have expected that mattered the most, and that a great deal didn’t matter at all.

  She passed her hands over her eyes. It all seemed so long ago, because now everything was different. Against the dream of the raft she had to set another dream, one which had troubled her, night after night, which gave her no peace.

  She was standing in Lucy’s kitchen, and at her feet was a long thing over which someone had thrown a check table cloth. There were two feet sticking out at one end, wearing a pair of boots she’d helped Charlie to choose in a shop in Antrim. The other end of the cloth was dark and wet; there was a stench of blood and excrement. At the far side of the room, a young man was cowering: eighteen, nineteen years old at the most, a skinny, shivering boy in jeans and a tee-shirt, with ugly tattoos on his forearms. His face was red and distorted because he was crying. ‘Please, Missus,’ he kept saying to Emily, ‘please, Missus, I’m sorry for what I did, I’m sorry, so I am, please, Missus …’ She stood staring at him until he was crying so hard that he could no longer make himself understood. Then Emily spoke, quietly, distinctly.

  ‘I will never forgive you,’ she said.

  Oh she couldn’t tell even her own daughters what it was like to wake from a dream like that and know it was the truth, to know that your heart had been forced shut. To be a woman in her late sixties, to have prayed to God every day of her life, and to be left so that she could feel no compassion, no mercy, only bitterness and hate, was a kind of horror she had never imagined.

  She had confided only in Father Johnston, the young curate who had anointed Charlie, and she’d talked to him, oddly enough, because she believed he wouldn’t be able to understand. He came to see her frequently after the killing. They sat facing each other across the kitchen table. Sometimes there would be long silences in which neither of them spoke. She turned away from him, looked out of the window at the winter sky, the bare trees, the grey waters of the lough.

  ‘The world’s empty to me without my husband,’ she said to this young man, who’d probably never known what it was to take a girl in his arms and kiss her, much less share his life with someone for almost forty years. ‘I can’t forgive them for what they did, Father. I’ll tell you more than that: I don’t want to be able to forgive them either.’

  ‘Mrs Quinn,’ the curate said, and the tone of his voice made her turn towards him again. ‘I saw what they did to your husband. If somebody did that to my father, I wouldn’t be able to forgive them either. I think the best I could manage would be to pray that someday I might be able to want to forgive them.’ They sat in silence again for some moments. ‘I hope you don’t mind that I come to see you so often,’ he said, and Emily had realised then that it was as much to console himself as to console her that he came to her house. ‘I go to see the other Mrs Quinn too, but that’s different, being there …’ His voice trailed away, and he dropped his eyes, embarrassed, realising he had said too much. Brian had told her that he had heard the priest being sick out in the yard after what he’d seen in the house.

  ‘You’re always welcome here, Father,’ Emily said. He smiled timidly at her, and she thought of how she had longed for a son. She called him ‘Father’ but she thought of him as a child.

  He’d have been little more than a baby when the Troubles started, for it was twenty-five years ago now. When she was at school, she’d read about the Thirty Years War, and she remembered asking the teacher how there could have been such a thing. ‘Did they fight battles every single day for the whole of the thirty years, Miss, or did they stop for a rest every year or so?’ The teacher had said that she didn’t know.

  Not long before Cate came home, Sally had taken Emily into Ballymena to do some shopping. They went into the Skandia to have their lunch, and at a nearby table they saw Mrs Larkin. Emily said hello to her, and they exchanged a few words; but during their meal, she found that she couldn’t help looking over at Mrs Larkin. A wee woman in a grey coat, you’d never have picked her out in a crowd, you’d never have been able to guess all she’d been through: how she stayed closed in her bedroom for months after Tony died; how she wouldn’t utter a word, as if she had been struck dumb; how she’d been in and out of the mental hospital for years after that, until gradually she began to speak a little, to live again a little. At Charlie’s wake she’d gripped Emily’s hand and said, ‘If people tell you you’ll get over it, Mrs Quinn, don’t believe them, because it isn’t true.’ There’d been well over three thousand people killed since the start of the Troubles, and every single one of them had parents or husbands and wives and children whose lives had been wrecked. It would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning.

  Look at Lucy: poor Lucy, who had always been so relaxed, so easygoing. She’d been on tranquillisers and sleeping tablets for months after she saw Charlie being killed. They’d had a big security light installed in the yard, that switched itself on when anybody came near the house; and bolts and double locks fitted on the doors. It was like Fort Knox when you went over to see Brian and Lucy now, you could hear the keys rattling as they let you in; and still Lucy was living on her nerves.

  Nobody could fathom t
he suffering the Troubles had brought people, and all the terrible things that had happened. When Sally came in a moment later with a cup of tea and some biscuits for Emily, it somehow confirmed this: Sally going over to the window and saying wasn’t that a lovely chaffinch on the tree there; asking Emily if she was warm enough; admiring the Dutch fern Helen had bought for her a couple of weeks ago: this affectionate ordinariness was the dearest thing in life for Emily, and that was what had been destroyed: Charlie should have been there with them.

  Sally turned away from the plants and sat down opposite her mother. ‘Well, have you had a reasonable afternoon? Did you have a good think about things?’

  ‘Ah, my mind’s been all over the place. I was thinking about your daddy.’

  ‘And about Cate?’

  ‘I thought about all of you.’

  Sally paused. ‘And Cate?’ she persisted gently.