“And now, Mrs. Bedford, what can I do for you?”
“I don’t need much today, Mr. McGovern.” Katherine’s voice sounds almost monotone. “I need some butter, please, Mr. McGovern, marmalade, a small bag of potatoes, and . . . eh . . . what green vegetable do you have?”
“I have a lovely ruby ball cabbage for you, just in. And it’ll be lovely with that bit of butter, so it will.”
“That’ll do fine, Mr. McGovern.”
“You’ve heard the news?” Mr. McGovern seems suddenly grave. His eyes widen as he looks at Katherine.
“Yes, some of it.” Katherine knows immediately that he is referring to the civil unrest in the city.
“Word has it, Mrs. Bedford, that soldiers are to be drafted into Belfast this afternoon, this afternoon, onto the streets.” Mr. McGovern keeps his voice low. “If you ask me, that’s very serious.”
Katherine’s head begins to fill again with the words George had whispered to her in the dark, early hours of that morning.
“This afternoon?”
“Yes, as far as I know, Mrs. Bedford. There were riots all over the west of the city, spilling out in all directions. Crowds gathering on the streets, baton charges, families burned out of their homes. Reports of shootings, bombs. If you ask me, it’s very serious.” Mr. McGovern shakes his head. “They can put a man on the moon, but what good is that to us, Mrs. Bedford?”
“And the boy. There was a boy shot dead?” Katherine looks for confirmation.
“Yes,” Mr. McGovern replies solemnly. “They say it was an accident, but—”
Just then, another customer comes into the shop.
“Ah, Mrs. Forsythe.” In an instant, Mr. McGovern’s smile is back. “I’ll be with you in just one minute.” Then he turns to Katherine, “The Belfast Telegraph—it’ll be in shortly. I’ll put one aside for you, Mrs. Bedford?”
“Yes, Mr. McGovern, I can send Maureen down for it later.”
Mr. McGovern hands Katherine her little net bag of groceries.
The climb back up the road from the shops exhausts Katherine, more than she can ever remember before. She can hardly get a breath. And there is really no shopping to speak of, nothing inordinately heavy. Something is draining her.
By the time she gets back home from McGovern’s, the weather has changed. Whatever warmth there was is gone. Spats of dirty gray rain fall impatiently out of the sky. Katherine hauls Stephen’s pram up the back steps of the house and into the back room, Stephen cooing happily and clapping his hands at her efforts. Katherine lifts Stephen out of the pram and, after putting him on the floor with the little net bag full of groceries to play with, pushes the pram out into the hallway. Coming back into the kitchen, she sees how the blankets under the sink are sopping wet. She searches for the address book with Harry Gray’s number again, rifling through the household receipts, the information leaflets, the embroidery thread, the bills, the fat bundles of seed packets caught up with bits of string, the kitchen scissors, the shoelaces, which pack the kitchen drawer. She cannot find the address book. Rain hits more insistently against the windowpane.
She remembers the sheets on the clothes line and moves quickly to save them. She pulls the white cotton sheets off the line and throws them over her shoulder, leaving the pegs on the line. She rushes indoors. The heavens open. Suddenly appearing behind her is Elsa, soaking wet, her arms and legs bleeding.
“Oh my God, Elsa! What happened to you?”
“I fell into the blackberry bushes.” Elsa’s tone is sullen. Elsa looks at her mother. She wants to tell her mother what happened at the blackberry bushes, but something is stopping her, as though she feels there is something dirty about it.
“You fell into the blackberry bushes?” Katherine sounds incredulous. “But your arms . . . your legs, ach, Elsa . . . the side of your face! Are you all right?”
Katherine moves instinctively forward to touch Elsa, but Elsa shrinks back from her mother and lowers her head. “I’m fine,” she mumbles.
“Those scratches’ll need washing.”
“I’ll do it myself.”
“It looks so sore, Elsa.”
“It’s not.”
“It needs tending.”
“I’ll do it myself!”
“You’ll need plasters.”
“No, I won’t! I’m all right!”
Maureen stomps into the kitchen. She pulls the cupboard door open and thumps a glass down on the table. She grabs the milk bottle that has been sitting on the kitchen counter and lashes milk from it into the glass. Milk spills off the lip of the glass and spreads over the kitchen table. Maureen takes a quick mouthful of milk from the glass and then dumps it on the table and turns to go.
“You’re not leaving that mess for me to clean up, Maureen!”
“I’ll do it later, Mum.”
“You’ll do it now!”
“What happened you?” Maureen grunts at Elsa.
“Get a cloth and wipe it up, Maureen,” Katherine insists.
“What happened you?” Elsa snaps at Maureen.
Elizabeth bursts into the kitchen.
“Mum! Maureen’s ripped my library book. She just got a pen and ripped it through the pages. The book’s ruined!”
“It was only one page!” Maureen snarls.
“It was not.”
“You weren’t reading it anyway!”
“I was so!”
“You were not!”
“Just because Richard Marr said no when you asked him to go out with you.”
“I never even asked him, so there. You just—”
Katherine cuts Maureen off.
“I don’t want to hear how it happened, or why it happened. Just sort it out between you!” Katherine’s voice is sharp.
“And what happened you?” Elizabeth turns to Elsa.
“You shut up!” growls Elsa.
“Maureen,” Katherine adds quickly “wipe up that mess and change Stephen, will you?”
“Ma-ma,” Stephen calls.
“What?” Maureen’s tone is gruff.
“I said, change him,” Katherine says with deliberation, feeling her temperature rising at Maureen’s insolence.
“But I did that yesterday and the day before—”
Katherine’s head swings abruptly around toward Maureen. “CHANGE HIM!” she screams at Maureen. She screams more loudly than she has ever screamed before. All three girls stare at their mother. They have never heard their mother scream as loudly as this. They all stand frozen to the spot. All three of them stand as strange separate pieces. A moment more, and then Maureen suddenly grabs Stephen and rushes out of the kitchen. Elizabeth follows quickly behind them. Elsa stays for a moment longer, her eyes filling up with tears, before she leaves.
Katherine falls to her knees. Her skin goes cold and her body starts to shake. She feels disorientated and altered. She is folded over like a woman fearing an intruder or an abusive husband, immobilized and yet charged. A white heat is coursing through her. The unfamiliar sound of that voice, her voice, coming up through her, the vicious pitch of it. Like how a car crashing has its own singular, awful, distinct sound, separate from the damage done. The metal in her voice. She holds in that stiff rage and feels the surge of her ridiculous anger cleanse her body and clarify her mind.
Katherine acknowledges it now, her body a curve of pure energy, how she has compromised her life with George. How her betrayal of him has continued. How, throughout her married life, she has held on to the fantasy of Tom’s return.
Had he not died, would he have haunted her so?
Had he not died.
To hold him. To smell his skin. To kiss him . . .
In the back room, where the fibers of love and life are woven together, the air now rings soundless.
There is something bright beside her. Bright, and luminous. She turns her head to look. She can see her own reflection on the blank television screen in the corner of the room. With the white cotton sheets falling across her sho
ulder and down her back, she is a giant ghost moth in a square of endless black, the earth’s edges closing around her in the tilting dark.
“That is not my face,” she says to herself.
10
November 1969
THE SUMMER IS OVER. AUTUMN, TOO. Now the early winter-morning sun casts long, low shadows, as though it is already evening. At night, the chill air freezes the moon and the sky settles still and black.
Back at school Maureen, Elizabeth, and Elsa have been sitting in their respective classrooms, watching their breath mist up in the cold air. In the dim gray light, the pale faces of the stern nuns look as though they have been poached in milk. At break time, when the children will run outside, the blades of crisp grass that border the school yard will snap underfoot.
The city streets have become empty black lines that lead nowhere, sealed by a biting frost. Surprisingly, as the frost gathers, intent is held in check for a time and the city is locked quiet. Reflection is an utter possibility. Anger and provocation yield under each glacial veil that falls and the city for a time becomes a beautiful white lie. How easily life slips across the surface now, as ordinary as it comes. People going about their business with only the winters’ vapors tingling through their bones, shopping and paying bills with stiffened notes, making icy trails to work and back, stoking laughter in half-heated foyers, scraping off the thin slush from their boots before they cross a neighbor’s threshold for a cup of tea. Christmas is a little way off and the violent summer seems a distant made-up past. For now, the murk of riot has hardened to a halt. For now a kind of peace has returned. But when the thaw comes after this winter there will still be ice. Thick and black and solid and immovable. After this melting, the city will still be held under an endless winter. And who would have imagined it? Who would have imagined the beautiful white lie melting to a brutal black?
Katherine has the collar of her navy winter coat pulled up across her face to shield her from the piercing wind. Elsa and Isabel have each buttoned their coats right up to the top button and wear woolen hats and gloves and thick woolen tights. Only Isabel wears boots. The fur lining of Isabel’s boots splay untidily at their tops, where two fluffy toggles hang to assist the zipping. The soles, Isabel insists, are slip-proof.
“They’re very nice boots, Isabel,” says Katherine as she walks with the two girls through Belfast’s city center.
They have come to see Hansel and Gretel at the Grove Theatre. Katherine has recently felt a renewed sense of confidence about going into the city. George has felt it too. He has been home more in recent evenings and over the past couple of months was called out to only a few house fires, one factory fire, and one fire at a farm near Comber, where an overheated sow had escaped and had stubbornly chased him through a scant-grassed, muddy field. Although soldiers had been a visible presence on the streets of Belfast since the summer, in terms of political unrest nothing much had been happening. So Katherine had suggested taking Elsa, Elizabeth, and Maureen as a treat to Hansel and Gretel (she also wanted to shake off this constant cold malaise that seemed to be hounding her). Neither Maureen nor Elizabeth, however, had shown any interest in going to the show, so Katherine had then suggested that Elsa bring Isabel.
“Do I have to bring her?” Elsa had asked sourly.
“No,” Katherine had replied, “but you’re either friends with Isabel or you’re not—which is it?”
“I bet she’ll be wearing something new sp-ee-cial-ly for the occasion,” Elsa said imitating Isabel’s pretend-squeaky-clean voice. “I bet she’ll get bought something brand-new.”
“Which is it to be?”
“Okay, then,” said Elsa finally.
Out of the cold now and sitting in the noisy theater, Elsa holds a bar of toffee in her hand and feels as though her fingers have become enormous in the welcome heat. She cannot bite the toffee bar, it is so hard against her teeth. She can only leave small indentations on the brown slab. Her mouth and lips are sticky. Isabel sits between Elsa and Katherine and does not speak, but instead sucks on a boiled sweet. She twists a strand of her blond hair around her finger with a look of self-satisfied contempt on her face.
Elsa cannot decide which is making her feel most uncomfortable, the unruly behavior of the children around her, who are shouting and firing scrunched-up balls of paper at one another, the cloying smell of the musty velvet seats and the flaky, splintery odor of old cigarettes, or the fact that Isabel is sitting beside her. Having Isabel beside her makes Elsa feel as though she has been wrapped in a cold, damp blanket.
Elsa had been right. Not only are Isabel’s boots brand-new but she also wears a brand-new dress bought “sp-ee-cial-ly” for the occasion. Katherine had reacted in stiff surprise when Isabel’s mother had informed her of the purchase, suddenly feeling concerned about whether the afternoon’s experience at the show would match up to the broderie anglaise and the ruffled pleats that Isabel was proudly displaying in front of her.
The roar of the heaters that line the walls of the auditorium suddenly stop and the lights go down. The excited yapping of the children instantly explodes into cheering and squealing. Elsa and Isabel remain silent.
“It’s about to start now,” Katherine says to Elsa, smiling at her. Elsa looks at her mother in the shadowy dark and feels warmed by her smile.
“Do you want some toffee, Mummy?”
“No thanks, pet.”
The show is a strange hybrid. A retelling of the fairy tale with some songs and some comic routines, but it isn’t a pantomime, nor is it a musical, nor is it a play. The program and the poster describe it as “A Magical Extravaganza for All the Family.” But the children in the audience are not settling to take it in and do not seem to care what kind of show it is.
The character of the wicked old woman who owns the gingerbread house is played by a man. He is trying out a high voice, but every now and then his confidence wanes and his baritone notes slip through. His movements are wiry and mechanical. He is dressed like a pantomime dame with a large unstable wig that he cannot leave alone and a wide skirt, on the hem of which he keeps trampling. He tugs at his costume to free it, and then he tramples on it again.
Isabel turns to Katherine. “I need to go to the toilet, Mrs. Bedford,” she says in a dull voice.
“Em . . .” Katherine looks around her and then says to Isabel, “There they are just over to the right.” She points to the side of the auditorium and Isabel slips out of her seat. “Are you all right going on your own?”
“Yes, Mrs. Bedford. And I think I’ve got toffee in my hair.”
“Oh dear. Careful of your dress, Isabel.” Katherine cannot help but be a little concerned about Isabel’s new attire. “You’ll find us again easily enough?”
“Yes, Mrs. Bedford,” replies Isabel flatly, and pushes past Elsa.
Elsa immediately moves into the seat vacated by Isabel so that she is now beside her mother. Katherine reaches over to Elsa and gives her a warm, tight hug and kisses her on the top of the head. Elsa looks up at her mother.
“What d’ye think, Mummy? Do you like it—the show?” Elsa is animated now, smiling and raising her eyebrows in anticipation of her mother’s response.
“Oh—I think it’s”—Katherine quietly struggles to find some appropriate words, “it’s colorful and it’s rather entertaining, don’t you?”
Elsa’s eyes widen.
They both turn their heads to look up at the stage. A dwarf dressed as a wood elf has now come onstage and is skipping in little circles as he casts some spell or other on two children who are standing under a tree. He appears angry and waves his arms impatiently. The two children are distracted by the noise in the auditorium and they speak so quietly on the stage that they cannot be heard. The wicked old woman applauds the dwarf and cackles and then her wig slips sideways and she tries to fix it as she makes a face. She asks the children in the audience a question, her voice croaking with the effort, but no one replies over the general noise.
Ka
therine leans into her daughter.
“Don’t you think it’s rather entertaining?” Katherine starts to laugh a little. Elsa looks at her mother and then she starts to laugh, as well. She knows now that her mother thinks the show is not very good but doesn’t want to say it. They are both trying to stifle the laughter they feel rising inside them, their shoulders shaking. Katherine’s hand is now covering her mouth. Elsa’s face is broad and beaming. They know that they should not be laughing, and this makes them laugh all the more. Katherine has a stitch now and holds her stomach. Elsa is imitating her mother’s movements and wraps her arms around her middle and bends her head forward and then throws it back. Elsa’s face is bright from watching her mother, watching everything about her. Katherine wipes away the tears of laughter that have now welled up in her eyes. Elsa copies her mother, even though her own eyes are dry. Katherine cannot help it and starts to laugh loudly. Elsa laughs, too, making squeaks and yelps, her eyes fast on her mother. Elsa is so wrapped up in her mother now. She thinks this is all so wonderful, this sharing, this laughing with her mother and no one else in the whole world understanding it, because it is only they who know.
Isabel reappears. Noticing that her seat has been taken by Elsa, she plonks herself rudely into the empty seat and gives a suspicious sideways look at both mother and daughter. She seems put out by their private joke.
The wicked old woman onstage bursts into song and Katherine and Elsa get taken by a fresh bout of laughter because the song sounds so ridiculous. As Katherine watches, she is struck by something familiar about the actor who is playing the wicked old woman and, as her shoulders shake, she holds up the program in front of her, squeezing her eyes slightly to see better in the dark, and finds the name Charlie Copeland mentioned in the playbill. It is enough to wind her laughter down.
“Oh, it’s Charlie, my goodness—!” She looks up at the stage and then turns to Elsa. “Imagine that!” she says with a great sigh.
Katherine feels filled with fresh air after the laughing. She looks at Elsa as though Elsa is her savior.
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