Asking For Trouble

by Patricia Craig

  Then it strikes us that perhaps we ought to go back and look for Maire, in case she is getting into difficulties with the third party. So it’s out into the blackness of the night once more. (Poor Kathleen, Angela and the rest of our roommates do not get much peace to sleep, on that occasion and others.) Eventually we track down Maire to a hen house, where she’s locked in the arms of her man and not very pleased to be interrupted – ‘I’ll come in a minute,’ she says. ‘Go back to bed.’ It seems, after all, she has had the best of the bargain. But we refuse to be waved away, and drag her bodily back to the house, where a further outbreak of laughter occurs as she describes with relish the bald man’s proficiency, saying it serves us right to suffer a let-down in this respect, for allowing ourselves to be mislaid by superficialities such as a good head of hair.

  ‘What a night!’ goes the exclamation in my juvenile diary, referring to this episode or one very like it. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever laughed so much in my life’ – well, I go on, leaving aside a ceilidhe on the previous evening, when Maire (Maire again) finds herself pursued by an avid fat schoolboy about four foot six inches in height, and has to run and hide in the ladies’ lavatory every time she sees him coming. An buachaill ramhar – the fat boy – and Maire’s aghast evasion of him: these fragments, or possibly figments, have a place in the general uproariousness which seemed to characterise our stay in the Gaeltacht – well, the greater part of it at any rate, and before retribution sobered us up. In my diary I note, colloquially, on the subject of Maire’s antics: ‘We were all in fits at her.’

  And what, you might wonder, in the midst of all this jollity, has become of Maghnas Bell and my enthralment with him? Shouldn’t this state of mind have kept me from fooling around with anyone else (given that our teacher, handsome Martin Henderson, my second choice among the men in the Gaeltacht that summer, clearly isn’t to be diverted away from his fiancée and takes no amorous interest in me or anyone else among his charges)? The truth is that after the first week or so, and greatly to my chagrin, I am paid decreasing attention by Maghnas, who, it seems, has only a limited use for juvenile venery. (His own age is twenty-three or thereabouts.)

  A flirtation continues to be carried on between us whenever we meet, but – for whatever reason – we hardly ever do meet. He isn’t in Sharkey’s shop when I go in there, he stops attending ceilidhes, he’s not at home at Peadar Bhig’s when I drop in on Olivia. Hanging around at spots where he might be expected to appear produces no result. All that’s left to me, in these dispiriting circumstances, is to suffer as flamboyantly as possible. It’s not a bit of use for my friends, old and new, to advise me to catch myself on. A lot of energy is expended by me on sighing and groaning over my bereft state.

  There’s a reason for this: I have taken it into my head that a connection exists between experiencing an emotional crisis and having an interesting personality. Well, I am sixteen; I suppose a bit of silliness and superficiality is in order. And, for all the play-acting, it can’t be denied that it’s painful, at any age, to find one’s dearest longings unreciprocated. I am thankful for all the abundant goings-on, of every sort, which actually leave me very little time to mope. And thankful, too, for the enchantments of the place: the curved bays, dry-stone walls, ferocious breakers, jagged coastline, dramatic headlands, poverty-stricken houses scattered here and there about the rock-strewn territory like clumps of daisies on a lawn.

  Maghnas’s defection is bad enough, but worse is to follow. A morning comes when I am sitting, as usual, in our classroom at Coláiste Bhrighde, surrounded by talk and laughter, awaiting the arrival of the teacher. Out of the blue, my friend Olivia – the recipient of my most candid confidences about my current infatuation – turns to me and announces blithely that she can hardly keep her eyes open through, she alleges, having been kept awake half the night by Maghnas Bell and his brothers, who’d stolen into the visitors’ beds in the small hours, occasioning great excitement and amusement. Not that it’s the first time they’ve behaved like this, she goes on; in fact she and the other girls staying in the house take turns in this manner with the Bell brothers nearly every night – and she, as a matter of choice, prefers the brother named Dermot.

  For the moment I am flabbergasted, and unable to comment on these outrageous revelations. I just sit there looking blankly at Olivia. Then, as the class gets going, I start to succumb to puzzlement and dismay, at the same time trying, under the eye of Martin Henderson, to fix my attention on a story about the poet Peadar Ó Doirnín, and then to make sense of some bemusing instruction concerning the subjunctive mood.

  All the time, it’s as if I’ve suffered a fearsome blow to the chest. I sit there envisaging the three Bell brothers creeping about the house in the dead of night, turning the handle of the girls’ bedroom door and thrusting themselves unceremoniously into one or other of the visitors’ beds. How was there room for them? How much of their clothing did they keep on? How far did things go? (As to that – I never do get at the truth of the matter.) Have they all gone mad – the girls incontinently relinquishing every social and moral precept they’ve grown up with; the boys so desperate they don’t give a damn who their bedfellows are, or whether their night-time activities will cause a scandal of such proportions that the whole system of Gaeltacht holidays will be brought to an end?

  Good heavens, my thoughts run on, I know all the girls who sleep in that room, and some of them are so ill-favoured, gauche and priggish that you’d be within your rights in consigning them to a convent. Yet here they are – if Olivia’s report is true, if it’s not some ill-conceived tease she’s inflicted on me – for all the world carrying on like the inmates of a brothel. It doesn’t make any sense. They go to Mass every morning – I know they do – kneeling there before the altar with butter-wouldn’t-melt expressions on their horrid faces. It doesn’t make any sense.

  I am overtaken by anger – anger at Maghnas for ditching me, for deriving more enjoyment from multiple half-baked couplings; anger at Olivia for not repulsing him; but most of all for her incomprehensibly off-hand disclosure of these shocking goings-on at Teach Pheadair Bhig. Didn’t it occur to her that I would find it upsetting to be put in the picture in this casual way? Has her judgement been impaired in every respect? Has the Gaeltacht atmosphere gone to all our heads?

  Somehow I get through the rest of the morning, and then I am gathered up and borne away by Maire, Susie, Kathleen and other friends from Teach Eddy Doyle, who do seem to understand the effect Olivia’s news has had on me. (Well, I imagine that consternation was plainly imprinted on my face.) ‘What’s the matter with her?’ Susie wants to know, referring to Olivia. ‘She couldn’t wait to tell you – and to tell everyone else within earshot. I don’t think it’s anything to boast about.’

  Some time later – I am not sure how, or when – I find myself with Olivia, just the two of us, picking our way along a narrow, overgrown pathway, edged by dry-stone walls, heading down towards the beach. It is late afternoon, the air is sultry, bees and butterflies are everywhere. Even now, if I think back, I can hear her voice assuring me that it won’t ever happen again, that she’s probably exaggerated the whole business anyway, that it’s just a bit of sport she thought I’d be interested to hear about. Besides – a slight contradiction creeps in here – besides, it’s as well for me to know what Maghnas is like. Her motives in telling me were perfectly altruistic; it surprises her that I’ve taken it amiss. I shouldn’t let an ephemeral episode involving an unimportant holiday acquaintance come between us – we, who’ve been friends, kindred spirits, in and out of one another’s houses since the age of eleven. All right, I won’t, I’ll forget the whole thing, it’s nothing to me what Maghnas Bell does; and as for understanding what he’s like – that was plain to me from the first moment I laid eyes on him. (This is not strictly true.)

  I am recovering. I ask about the plain girls in the bedroom: Maeve McWaters, Frances Quinn, even our friend Colette; surely it can’t be true, I say, that the
se have succeeded in luring men into their beds? Well, says Olivia, it’s not exactly a matter of luring; whatever happens, happens in the dark; the Bells take no notice of lumps such as these in the daytime. Probably they, the boys, are not sure who they’ve been in bed with. There is no romance in the activity at all; it is all expediency. This affords me quite a bit of consolation.

  Olivia and I renew our friendship, but things are never quite as intimate between us again.

  It’s not because of Maghnas, or hardly at all; I’m over that in a week or so, it doesn’t go deep, it really doesn’t matter at all. What should I expect? The Waste Land: ‘And if you don’t give it him, there’s others will, I said.’ I’m too young, I know that, I’m not sophisticated enough for a would-be seducer like Maghnas Bell. But I am sophisticated enough to think it likely that, if we met in, say, ten years or so, the positions would be reversed. Somewhere in the back of my head I’m nourishing intimations that Catholicism, and chastity, are concepts I will grow out of. (I’m not mistaken in this; but the process suffers a setback, because of what happens in Rannafast.) But for the time being, a sense of my own worth has been instilled in me far too strongly to allow me to proffer my person as a kind of sexual punchbag. (The tomfoolery round the side of Teach Eddy Doyle is different in quality, undertaken in a spirit of merriment only. We’re all on the same level, out there in the dark, with no one trying – or not trying seriously – to coerce anyone else.)

  I still wonder about those unprepossessing girls, Olivia’s Rannafast roommates. Did they shut their mouths and refrain from squealing, abandon piety for the moment, for the sake of being able to confide to cronies, later, that boys, against the odds, had shown an interest in them? (‘Look – he came into my bed every night …’) The social and the moral are in conflict here: no one wants to be left outside the glowing circle of boy–girl relationships, intrigues, powerful attractions, social success. One minute all this is in the ascendant; then Catholic teaching. None of us is free from the need to hold the two in some kind of equilibrium.

  When I try to get Olivia to be specific about what takes place on the horsehair mattresses of Teach Pheadair Bhig, all I get is sidetracking and fudging of the issue. Did they or didn’t they? Of course there’s nothing reprehensible in it, she says; nothing their mothers could object to. (Laughter.) Then the next minute she wishes she hadn’t done it, she hopes she won’t miss her period. But surely that means …? She isn’t sure. No, of course she’s sure; she’s only teasing.

  Perhaps it is genuinely a case of ignorance. Would I be able to tell, I ask myself, if things had taken their full course? I think so. But I can’t be certain. Lessons in the mechanics of reproduction are some way in the future. The nearest we get to this is biology – but biology isn’t one of my subjects.

  As for myself and Olivia – it’s practical considerations, really, that scupper our inseparability. Though we haven’t – naturally – the smallest inkling of it, upheavals are imminent. The new term, only a few weeks away, will see us enrolled, in something of a daze, at different schools. No more waiting, for me, at a certain bus stop in the mornings, until I spot Olivia, who is looking out for me, among the hordes of maroon-clad schoolgirls on a bus heading down the Falls Road. Her relatives, holding me to blame for the catastrophe, will attempt to cut off all communication between us. We will have to meet, clandestinely, after school on certain days of the week, in the city centre, within reach of our respective bus stops; she coming in on the Lisburn bus, I on the bus from Ballynahinch. Winter afternoons, rain or sleet falling at dusk, a doorway in Donegall Square West, gossip exchanged over a hurried cup of coffee, running with our satchels to catch another bus, a bus up the Falls, which enables us to stay together until the last possible minute. For a time, we will write to one another (the letters delivered by a go-between), until her parents find out and put a stop to that too. It isn’t a fruitful way to conduct a friendship. And, for both of us, other interests, other alliances, are about to supervene.

  Up until this point, the year after our expulsion, it has been utterly taken for granted, by both of us, that school will be followed by university: no other possible course of events has ever entered our heads. We can’t pass Queen’s, which we do quite often, on our walks about the city, without one or other of us remarking smugly, ‘That’s where we are going to be –’ in three years’ time, or two, or whatever. It’s not that we mean to kill ourselves with work; we simply assume that, somehow, at the right moment, the transfer to a highly desirable, heady kind of student life will be effected easily. We are good, or at least better than average, at passing exams. (It’s true that I have one spectacular failure to my credit, failure in an exam regarded by everyone else as a pushover. Not a public affair: an inner-school test of religious knowledge known as the Bishop’s Exam. I am so resentful at having to sit this footling test at all that I do no preparation and consequently end up with something like fifteen marks out of a possible hundred. This is not to be wondered at. Church history induces agonies of boredom in me – even now, a dimly remembered phrase like ‘the Edict of Nantes’ or ‘the Albigensian Heresy’ – what is that? – causes my spirits to wilt. I am proud of the notoriety this unprecedented failure confers on me – but of course, in the eyes of the nuns, it’s another black mark against me, when my future at the school, or out of it, comes up for discussion.)

  What gives us such confidence in our academic abilities? It’s not the school, that’s for sure; it isn’t a good school, its priorities are askew. I remember an occasion when four or five of us, fifth-formers, are positively keen to relinquish most of the free periods we get in a week, in order to sit in at the back of a class which is learning German. We’ve consulted the timetables and worked out that it can be done. However, when we turn up clutching pens and exercise books, and wearing eager expressions on our faces, we are scolded for presumptiousness – ‘How dare you come uninvited into my class, I never heard the like of it’ – made to look foolish in front of a lower form and sent away with a flea in our ear. There are only two teachers, sisters, Miss Casement Senior and Miss Casement Junior, in all the years I spent at that school, whose attitude is humane and positive, whom I can recall without flinching. (Instead of watching the clock and trying not to yawn, the state most lessons reduce one to, I hate it when Miss Casement Senior’s English classes end.)

  No, whatever encouragement I get, I get at home. I am lucky enough to have parents who have never once, throughout my life, withheld approval, complained, or criticised any action I have taken (and many of these actions must have run counter to their expectations for me, their only child). My mother is a Queen’s graduate, a scholarship girl, the first member of her family to go beyond elementary education, as far as I know. She doesn’t doubt that I will get to Queen’s too, in my turn, if I put my mind to it.

  Our ambition, mine and my friend Olivia’s, now strikes me as unduly modest; we might have aimed higher, as high as Trinity College Dublin even, given the right preliminary conditions. Our liking for gallivanting never precluded a certain scholarly bent – and we’d have got on better, I do believe, in circumstances in which the acquisition of knowledge took precedence over piety and tractability. In other words, as pupils at a normal school. When I read a piece of autobiographical writing such as Margaret Forster’s Hidden Lives – to take that example – I am overwhelmed by vicarious elation (more elation, in this instance, than the author seems to have experienced herself) at the triumph of this working-class girl, a girl from a council estate in the North of England, in securing scholarships at both Oxford and Cambridge – embarras de choix.

  I’m astonished, too, when I consider the case of another bright sixteen-year-old, Lorna Sage – my exact contemporary – who found herself pregnant without being altogether sure how it had happened (she tells the story in her vivid memoir, Bad Blood), and showed a fierce determination not to let motherhood, or early marriage, be an impediment to academic achievement. It’s an astonishing st
ory, to me, chiefly because of the attitude of her Shropshire school: true, she encountered some disapproval, but also a lot of support, in particular from older women teachers imbued with a left-over suffragist spirit, teachers who’d no more have sanctioned a waste of intellectual gifts than they’d have taken to rock-and-roll singing themselves. There was no question of post-parturition Lorna being refused permission to sit her A levels.

  She even became something of a heroine among her schoolfellows on account of her predicament, and her handling of it. ‘It was my first and last moment of popularity in six years at Whitchurch Girls’ High School,’ she claims, wryly. The irony is that it wasn’t pure lust or social defiance that had got her where she was – more a kind of foolhardy innocence. As for me, it seemed that sex was to be my undoing, even before I’d ever properly engaged in it.

  Perhaps this is the moment to record a criticism directed at me, when I was eighteen or nineteen, by an acerbic friend: ‘There are other things in life, you know.’ Well yes, I do know that, as a matter of fact – just as I know that a lot of girls among my contemporaries are resolutely unsusceptible to the lure of the erotic. It’s a combination of Catholicism, a no-nonsense disposition and failure to overcome the unease and embarrassment which surrounds the topic. Some of these girls are just late developers, stuck in a juvenile mode of equating sex with silliness, and crossly repudiating an undue interest, or any interest at all, in the sordid business; while for others, it’s as if this dimension has been left out of their personalities altogether. For the rest of us, who make no bones about perpetually experiencing what the novelist John Banville has described as ‘an elated, twittery state of adolescent expectation and surmise’, no doubt the whole thing is intensified by the hush-hush, forbidden garnish imposed on top of it.