One by One in the Darkness

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘What do you do with them over the summer?’

  ‘Mammy looks after the plants, and one of the children takes the fish home: we draw lots to see who it’ll be. By September, it’s usually the same story: the fish is dead, and the plants are so big that they won’t fit on the window-sills any more. The wee fella who was minding the goldfish last year swore the one he brought back was the one he’d taken home but if it was, it had had a traumatic couple of months, for it had shrunk by a good two inches.’

  Cate laughed. She was wandering around the room now looking at everything: the trays of wax crayons and the crates of wooden bricks; the paintings of skewed mothers and fathers lolling outside vivid, pointed houses with trees like lollipops; the list of words for colours written up in the colours themselves. Sally was glad that she hadn’t said anything resentful, for it would only have caused bad feeling. Moreover, it might have given the impression that she wasn’t pleased Cate was going to have a baby, and that wasn’t the case at all. It was the circumstances of the pregnancy that caused problems for their mother, and therefore problems for the family. As far as Sally herself was concerned, the only thing that mattered was that Cate felt good about it, and she strongly suspected that she was hiding her delight for the time being: as Sally was herself. She truly was thrilled that there would be a baby in the family, and she felt sure that their mother would in time come round to the idea too. It was just getting her to that point that was delicate, and that was the key issue at the moment. Looking at Cate now, Sally noticed that she was wiping her eyes, and she decided it would be best not to ignore this.

  ‘Ah, don’t go getting all broody on me. Wait a few years and you’ll see all this in a different light. You’ll have more than your fair share of Play Doh pressed into your carpets and Lego down the back of your sofa, believe you me. You’ll be longing for a bit of intelligent adult conversation, never mind a bit of peace and quiet.’ Fortunately, Sally had hit the right note with her lightly teasing tone. Too mocking, and Cate would have dissolved into floods of tears; too soft and sentimental, and she would have done exactly the same. As it was, she laughed again, wiped her eyes again, and there were no more tears.

  She turned to look at Sally, who was perched now on her teacher’s chair, her hands sunk deep in her pockets. She was still so small, Sally, with her fine bones and her delicate face, and the way she wore her straight, toffee-coloured hair pulled back and tied in a ribbon emphasised her childlike appearance. But there was something about her that undercut this impression: something about her brow, the set of her mouth, that made her look like a child who had seen more than she ought to have done, a child who knew too much. Cate had never noticed this in her before, and she wondered when the change had come about. Sometimes she realised that she probably didn’t know Sally as well as she knew Helen. She had assumed that her younger sister had a less complex personality than was actually the case, and Cate had therefore wrongly taken for granted what Sally’s thoughts and feelings on certain matters would be. She was ashamed of this, looking at Sally now, who was sitting with her legs crossed, swinging her right shoe loosely from her toes.

  ‘Do you ever regret that you stayed at home, Sally? That you never went away?’

  The shoe fell to the floor, clattering loudly on the boards.

  ‘I used to,’ she said, ‘a long time ago; and then it passed and I was glad to be here, and now, well, now it’s different again. It’s funny. All I ever wanted to do when I was growing up was to be a teacher and get a job here.’ She paused, and pursed her lips. She didn’t know how to explain to Cate that perhaps that wasn’t the truth. Maybe she had only become a teacher to please her mother, and to be like her. She shrugged. ‘Anyway, I left college and they offered me this post. The very day I started working, I felt trapped. I wanted out.’

  ‘I never knew that.’ Cate said.

  ‘You never asked me, did you? In any case, I kept it well hidden. I gave Mammy a hint of it one night, said something to her about wasn’t there a proverb about anyone being able to have whatever they wanted in this world, on condition that it wouldn’t bring them the happiness they expected. She picked up at once what I was getting at: “You’re not trying to tell me …” she said, and I could see there was anger there, that I’d never be able to explain it to her. So I backed off at once, told her I was happy, I was grand, and that was an end to it. But I still felt restless for a good few years after that. And then I got used to it. You can get used to anything, can’t you? That’s what people say. Maybe it’s true.’

  ‘But why didn’t you go?’ Cate said. ‘I know Mammy and Daddy wouldn’t have minded in the long run.’

  ‘Are you really sure of that? I’m not convinced that you’re right. Who knows? Anyway, I knew that if I went away, I’d never be able to come back. I wouldn’t have been allowed back, for one thing. This was a permanent post, and I discreetly looked into the possibility of my getting leave, maybe just for a year, but no. And I always knew that I would want to come back, so I had a straight choice: go away and stay away, or stay put. So here I am.’

  ‘How could you be so sure that you would want to come back? Maybe you’d have enjoyed life more elsewhere, and wanted to stay away?’

  Sally laughed. ‘I was afraid of that. I was afraid that I would make strong links in some other place, but not strong enough, so that I’d feel discontented wherever I was. When I was over visiting you in those days, I used to think how great it would be to live there, but there was another side too. I felt loyal to home. I hated it when people said horrible things about Northern Ireland. Once, when I was in London I met a man, and he asked me where I was from. When I told him he said, “Oh well, you can’t help that,” and his friend laughed. I was so angry. I thought if I lived there, that was the sort of thing I’d have to put up with, and I wasn’t prepared to stand for it. But it passed, anyway, and I did settle down at home.’ She paused. ‘It was all right, until Daddy died.’ She took a deep breath. ‘Now, I want out again. If it wasn’t for Mammy, I’d leave tomorrow. I can’t stand being in Northern Ireland. All that guff about it being a great wee place, and the people being so friendly. I feel ashamed for having gone along with all that; other people were being killed the way Daddy was, and I was one of the ones saying, “There’s more to Northern Ireland than shooting and bombing.” Anyway, I hinted to Mammy again, very gently, that I’d like to go away, but she wouldn’t hear tell of it. She needs me now. And maybe I need her too.’

  Sally was aware of the tremendous emotional dependency expressed in these final understated remarks. It was as much as she would admit to Cate; and Cate would expect no more. They rarely spoke of how their mother had taken possession of Sally so quickly and so completely. She would, of course, have denied it, but the last thing their mother ever wanted for Sally was for her to be autonomous and independent. It suited her perfectly to have her youngest daughter as a companion, whose will and whose nature she had formed to fit with her own needs. So completely had this been achieved that when Sally felt she lacked privacy in her life, or that her mother was selfish in her behaviour towards her, these thoughts were immediately joined by a searing guilt for allowing herself to entertain such ideas.

  ‘But it’s not just Mammy,’ she quickly added. ‘I remember being on holiday in Italy once, and loving it there until I saw this two-day-old English newspaper in a kiosk, with a report on the front page about a car bomb having exploded in Belfast. All at once, I wanted to be there. I felt guilty for not being at home, not that it would have made the slightest bit of difference. I mean, apart from the odd holiday I’ve been here right through the Troubles, and it hasn’t made a blind bit of difference to anything. There hasn’t been so much as a shot less fired because of me, but it would have made a difference if I hadn’t been here, it would have made a difference to me. I can’t explain it any better than that.’

  ‘Don’t worry,’ Cate said, ‘I know what you mean.’ She remembered many such moments similar to the
one Sally had described. One in particular had always remained vivid in her mind. It had been an evening in winter, and she had been working in the kitchen, slicing up beef in thin strips to make a stir-fry. The news was on the radio, and she’d only been half-listening to it, until they started to report on a man who had been found shot in South Armagh the previous night. They were interviewing the local priest who had been called out to anoint the man’s body where it lay, in a secluded lane. Cate stopped chopping and put the knife down, as she listened to the soft, hesitant voice describing the rain and wind of the dark night, the long wet grass in which the body lay, how he had gone afterwards to break the news to the man’s widow; and his soft voice, his sorrow, were compulsive and terrible. It entered Cate’s mind like some gentle, awful thing from a dream, seeping from the radio into the bright, warm kitchen where she stood, looking now in revulsion at the cut, heaped meat on the bloodstained wooden board. She didn’t know why, but she wanted then to be home.

  ‘I often think,’ Sally said, ‘about that remark, “If you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem.” I don’t know if I believe that.’

  ‘Are you still in the SDLP?’ Cate asked, and Sally laughed out loud.

  ‘Oh that makes all the difference in the world, doesn’t it? Sally Quinn’s got her wee SDLP card, so we can all rest easy in our beds, we can all sit back and wait for peace to break out. Yes, I’m still a member, for what that’s worth. I only ever joined because Mark, the headmaster in this school, asked me to, and it would have been embarrassing to refuse. I suppose I’m not being quite honest in saying that. I do support their principles, with a few reservations; but they’re as good as you’re going to get. And I know that there are lots of people who support Sinn Fein in a similar vein. The parents of a lot of the children in this school, for example. The SDLP’s too middle class for them to feel comfortable with it, they don’t feel it can truly speak for them. Lots of them would have much stronger Republican sentiments than I do, but that doesn’t mean that they’re completely comfortable with everything Sinn Fein says or does. They know at least that the root of all the trouble here is a political problem, and I give them credit for that. It’s more than some of the politicians in this country will admit.’

  Cate was standing at the back wall of the classroom now. ‘Sally,’ she said, ‘do you blame Brian for what happened to Daddy?’

  ‘No,’ Sally said immediately; and then after a moment, ‘Well, maybe sometimes, yes.’ And then: ‘Ach, I don’t know. Does it matter?’

  ‘I’d have thought so.’

  ‘To Brian?’

  ‘No, to you. I’d have thought it would be important to you to know exactly what you felt about something like that.’

  Sally narrowed her eyes and looked at her sister. ‘Can I remind you of something, Cate? In this society it’s the people who aren’t confused, it’s the people who know exactly what they think and feel about things who are the most dangerous. As regards Brian, I might blame him more if it wasn’t that he blames himself so much. He talks to me about it from time to time. I asked him not to mention it to Mammy any more, because it only upsets her. Less than a month ago he was still on at the same old thing, “If only I’d got back to the house a few minutes earlier.” But I said to him, what odds would it have made? They’d just have killed the two of them, and Lucy would be left today the same as Mammy, and where would that have got any of us? It’s a waste of emotional energy, but he can’t seem to stop it. And he’d had his doubts for a long time before Daddy was killed. I remember years ago you’d have heard him talking about a thing being an “act of war”. If you said about the IRA having done something he’d have answered you at once about things the British army had done, or the British government. And he still is a Republican, he always will be; it’s too deep with him for that ever to change. But there are things he can’t stomach now, things he won’t defend. Cate, he saw what they did, and Lucy did, too. You saw for yourself last night the effect it’s had.’

  On Wednesday evening, Sally and Cate had gone with their mother to visit Brian. It was a smaller event than Brian had hoped for at the start of the week: they didn’t have time to invite Una over, for it was Sally who had called and suggested they go that very evening, partly as a way of distracting both Cate and her mother from Cate’s news.

  Cate had thought she understood what had happened to Brian’s house, and that was why she had refused to go there since the killing. She was afraid of what she might imagine lying on the uneven red tiles where, as children, they’d crouched at Halloween to crack nuts with a hammer. Finally, she’d let herself be persuaded by Sally’s and Brian’s pleading: ‘It’s different now.’

  But it was the difference that was the problem; the room so utterly changed that only the familiar view from the window of hedges and sky proved that it was indeed the place Cate remembered. She’d stared around at the sterility, the newness of everything: the stripped pine units, the vinyl flooring, the high-backed chairs where Brian and Lucy sat looking ill at ease, no longer completely at home in their own kitchen.

  ‘I suppose it needed done anyway,’ Lucy said, and Brian mumbled, ‘Ach, it was grand the way it was, but what can you do?’

  What indeed? The changes meant that Cate didn’t imagine her father lying murdered on the floor, as she had feared, but it also meant that she couldn’t imagine the nut-cracking either. She had always thought of her childhood not principally in terms of time, but as a place to which she could always return. Now that was over. What was the word Lucy had used two years ago? ‘Desecrated’. That was it. ‘The place is desecrated.’

  Sally was still talking. ‘It’s the likes of Aunt Rosemary who annoy me far more than Brian,’ she insisted. ‘She isn’t even trying to understand what’s happening here, and at some deep level, I don’t think she really cares, so long as her nice cosy middle-class life goes on the same as it’s always done. She thinks things are better in Northern Ireland than they were twenty-five years ago, because now there’s a Marks and Spencer’s in Ballymena.’ Cate laughed. ‘I’m not joking,’ Sally said. ‘I don’t think she’d even want peace here if it meant a significant change in the material quality of her life. “If people would just stay out of trouble, if they would only get themselves jobs and work and not even think about politics,”’ Sally mimicked. ‘She’s the last person I know who’ll still say, “One side’s as bad as another.” Christ, what a country.’ She looked around the room and laughed. ‘I’d better watch what I say, I’m usually on my best behaviour in here.’

  ‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘you never told me how you got on with Helen the other day. I didn’t like to ask in front of Mammy.’

  Cate covered her eyes with her hands. ‘God, it was dire!’ she said. The image was still fixed in her mind of Helen’s arrival home. She had rung the bell, because Cate had the keys; and the way she’d leapt up, alarmed at it’s soft chime, meant Cate couldn’t deny to herself how anxious she was about the encounter. But even dire things had their funny side, and when she did open the door the sight of Helen standing there in a navy Alexon suit and cream blouse, a briefcase in one hand and two boxed pizzas held gingerly aloft in the other, did to some extent take the sting out of the moment.

  ‘What did she say to you?’ Sally asked.

  ‘Not much,’ Cate replied. ‘That was the problem.’ She’d strongly suspected that Helen was thinking things which, if she uttered them, would be so hurtful that Cate would never be able to forgive or forget them, that their relationship would be damaged beyond repair. ‘Only a member of your own family really knows how to hurt you,’ someone had once remarked to her, and she remembered how strong an impression this had made on her; a truth she had never before recognised. Oh Helen could have broken her that evening, could have made her weep, made her hate herself; but she didn’t and Cate couldn’t understand why. Helen remained inscrutable, and when Cate blurted out something about knowing it was an embarrassment to the family, and men
tioned Rosemary, a smile had actually flickered around Helen’s lips. ‘Don’t you worry about Auntie Rosemary,’ she said. ‘If there’s any trouble, you leave Auntie Rosemary to me.’

  She asked about the father of Cate’s child, and bizarrely, Cate thought, one of the first things she wanted to know was whether or not she had any photographs of him.

  ‘I think so,’ Cate said, which strictly wasn’t the truth, for she knew that she did. Back in London she had a small album which contained photos she’d taken at a picnic they’d made on Hampstead Heath one day in winter. It had been her idea; he’d thought it foolish at first but she’d won him round, choosing a day which was cold but with a bright sun and hard, clear skies. She’d brought hot wine in a flask and she’d pestered him all afternoon, taking photographs; once or twice asking passers-by to take pictures of them together. He’d got into the swing of it all quickly. They’d eaten the fruit and bread she’d brought with her and he said it was great, that winter picnics were as good an idea as winter holidays. But she remembered how, when she was unpacking the picnic basket alone that evening in her kitchen, she’d caught herself thinking, yes, it had been good, it had been fun, it would have been worth doing even if … if what? She pulled herself up short. He was just a man she liked, that was all, there was nothing behind it; why shouldn’t she go to a park and drink wine and laugh and take photographs with someone she liked?

  ‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think I have some photos somewhere,’ and she knew that someday she would show her child those photos of a man laughing on a park bench, a man raising his glass to the camera, a man looking out from behind a tree; and she would say, ‘That is your father.’ And that would be all she would have to show. The child would gaze at the pictures, would drink them in with it’s eyes, would engage in the impossible task of trying to know this man. And the child would ask passionately the questions which Helen had asked, with seeming dispassion: what is his name? Where is he from? What does he do? Helen left pauses between the questions, and showed no reaction to the answers. How did they meet? Did he know Cate was pregnant? What about the legal side of things, did she need any help with that? Would they keep up contact after the child was born? As the questions became more sensitive Helen’s manner of asking became more gentle, so that Cate felt she could evade them if she wished, that were she simply to shrug and refuse to answer Helen would pass on without comment or surprise. She couldn’t help fearing that all this was just a trick, even a professional trick from her legal work, a way of softening Cate up and making her relax so that her harsh accusations, when she did finally unleash them, would have a more devastating effect. But when, after a very long pause, Helen finally drew the conversation to a close it was in sorrow and not in anger.