The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  ‘So, you’re after getting yourself an education at last, is it?’ His eyes are bright with mischief. ‘Tell me the dates of the kings of Ireland and where the cuckoo builds her nest?’

  ‘There’s no kings of Ireland!’ says Cathleen scornfully. ‘And cuckoos don’t have nests.’

  Schol laughs ruefully and goes through the curtain into the darkened bar where a policeman with a gun on his belt is buying ten Woodbines and a packet of Peg’s Legs.

  Returning to the spot where they’d earlier hidden their boots the girls find them gone. A quick search of the surrounding area reveals precisely nothing and this nothing has the power of an unexpected blow to the head. The absence of the boots is like infinity, ungraspably vast, awesome, dizzying in the consequences that stack up behind the one massive, relentlessly awful consequence: their mother’s anger. They can’t go home without the boots. It occurs to them not to go home at all. To stay out on the hillside all night and offer up their suffering to propitiate their mother’s awful fury. They will be cold, hungry. Lost. Surely they can earn her pity?

  Cathleen sits down on a tussock and refuses to budge. So Agnes goes on alone, lugging their sister – Nancy has suddenly lost the use of her legs – over the difficult bits and through the whitethorn with which the ditches are planted. Nancy doesn’t complain. And maybe because she always feels protected by Agnes, she just can’t seem to grasp the inevitability of maternal anger. Her good-tempered moon-face is scarlet, her legs scratched with brambles, her eyelids drooping with exhaustion. Her bare, mud-caked feet are the first thing the mother notices.

  With the worst of the storm over, their father – in an unusual gesture – briefly puts a hand on each child’s head and suggests mildly that he’ll go back with them to make a proper search. Who knows but the girls mistook where they hid their boots? They may still be there, or lying just some little way off having been the playthings of foxes. As they go back down the path they can hear the sound of Cathleen humming where she sits on the tussock, hugging her knees. A thorough search of the ditch and the field yields nothing. Then, passing under an ancient crab tree at the edge of the wood, John Kavanagh’s head collides with something. Three pairs of boots dangle by their laces from a branch, out of sight amongst clusters of sour little green apples. Without proof, accusations can’t be made, but the culprit is identified with passionate certainty by all three girls as little Mick Foley, one of Mud Foley’s boys. From this day on Mick is known, to his professed incomprehension, as ‘Boots’ Foley.

  When the father and his girls get back to the house Mrs Kavanagh has gone out to the outhouse, where she’s making up a wreath for a wedding. She works standing at a long, slate counter, and the outhouse is cold. As she moves about, she coughs, a hollow sound the children have become so familiar with they scarcely hear it. Before stepping on to the clean kitchen floor, John Kavanagh takes off his boots and puts them down beside the step. The girls do the same with the boots they’ve carried home in their hands. They put them, as always, neatly side by side and Agnes goes down on one knee to do what the others don’t bother to do: that is, to pull the laces loose and very exactly even in length, and to yank the tongue of the boot out to facilitate getting her foot into it in the morning – or maybe it’s her way of sticking her tongue out at her mother. Who knows, even Agnes doesn’t know, but that’s the way it has to be. Then the girls grip the doorjamb with one hand and with the other they brush the dirt from the soles of their feet. Agnes drives one of her mother’s guinea fowl out, finding relief in an outburst of scolding and rushing about. The day’s baking stands on a wooden board on the dresser. It goes without saying they can’t touch it. The sisters perch on the edge of the settle, their stomachs growling. Then, at a nod from their father, they dash outside to find the donkey.

  As the girls haul the water barrel up on to the donkey’s back, they hear his low voice, and hers, the mother’s, answering. The children listen gratefully a moment, but as they set off down the hill they don’t say anything themselves. It could have been worse. They could have been sent to bed hungry. The coolness of the path descending under the trees is like an augury of the well they are going to. On the way down, with an empty water barrel, the donkey can take the weight of one of the girls and this evening it’s Agnes’s turn. She presses her face into the dear beast’s neck, and grips his grey flanks needily between her legs. She breathes in his donkey smell and pats his broad, hard cheeks that remind her of the cheeks of the bellows they keep by the hearth. She runs his ears through her hands, testing the slightly greasy texture of his fur on her palm. Then, having assured herself that everything is as it should be, she lies limp, allowing the donkey’s warmth to seep into her, lolling in time with the smooth, quick scurry of his hooves.

  There are ferns growing around the mouth of the well. Cathleen fixes the rope to their bucket and drops it down. It smacks the water, rolls on to its side and slowly at first, then in a great rush, it fills. Cathleen leans out over the side until she can see her own outline shuddering on the bright coin of water.

  ‘Arse!’ she shouts. ‘Arse, arse, arse,’ replies the well with the weary tone of someone humouring an old joke.

  ‘ARSE!’ screams Nancy, shrill enough to wake the well up.

  They count the echoes.

  ‘That’s seven arses,’ says Agnes gravely.

  It takes all three of them to haul the full bucket up and, careful not to get soaked, to hoist it high enough to tip the water into the barrel. Eight buckets in all. They lean on the wall to get their breath back. Nancy faces down into the dark damp hole.

  ‘Where do all the arses go?’ she asks, and not entirely unaware of her own whimsicality.

  Cathleen gives her a punch.

  ‘They lie down there waiting for the next time you come by and then they’ll all blow off together in one enormous great fart till you faint dead on the ground.’

  ‘POOH!’ they scream, pinching their noses.

  ‘Holy Mary SAVE ME!’ they shriek, reeling, and fainting dead away on the puddled grass.

  The donkey turns his eyes to look at them over his shoulder. By the time they’re halfway back up the path, pushing the loaded donkey ahead of them, they don’t have the energy to laugh any more.

  From deep inside the wood, Patrick, who has meanwhile been told the story of the boots, sees their small figures toiling up the hill, the sun on Cathleen’s fair head. Patrick is cutting scallops to sell for thatching. The wood is his territory and, since his fourteenth birthday, his responsibility. He knows every tree here, oaks, elm, beech and ash as well as the hazel. He would know them blindfold by the feel of their bark. He clears them, removing some of the dead trees and branches, leaving some to nature. He treats the wounds inflicted by storm or wildlife. His leg is tiring him. It feels twice the weight it was when he got out of bed in the morning. He’s used to it, of course, and won’t say anything when he goes home, avoiding his mother’s pitying eyes as best he can. He touches his fingers to the roll of baccy in his pocket.

  The evening meal is over. The family is down on its knees for the saying of the rosary. They’re in a semicircle, more or less facing, without really seeing, the Sacred Heart with its little red oil lamp. Mary Rose, symbolically, kneels somewhat apart, her neat brown head bowed. She’s the oldest child, the plainest, the quietest, the most inclined to do her parents’ bidding. Next to their mother, shifting about on their knees like pilgrims on Mt. Croagh Patrick, wincing, giggling, tugging at the hems of their dresses, are the two middle girls. Like the youngest three, Bridie and Josie form a separate unit, paired as opposites, complementing one another so exactly it’s like a little joke on nature’s part. Josie is the beauty of the family, so fair and blue-eyed that Bridie’s had to make do with being strong and handsome. And secretive. Bridie never gives anything away, not even the time of day. Agnes, late and in a dither one morning, asked had she got the parting down the back of her head straight? Bridie said God only knew if it was straight or cr
ooked and why did she want to know anyway? It may be her pairing with Bridie that has brought out an independent, not to say stubborn streak in Josie. Josie has never asked an opinion of anyone, let alone permission, and now, aged twelve and pretty as spring, she’s growing up to be a cause of anxiety to the parents who no more worry about Bridie than the iron by the fire.

  As to the younger boys, it would be perverse of the parents to worry about the elder, Tom, who is hard-working and loved by everyone. And Dan, at the exact middle of the family, is the one who somehow always slips their minds – the child who can get away with murder because his mother and father are mostly looking the other way. Just now, kneeling almost hidden behind the upright back of the settle, Dan experiments with sticking his thumb up his nose then wiping it on the settle to make the others laugh. But the only one who notices is Agnes. She closes her eyes in disgust and searches her teeth for pips, for a trace of strawberries.

  Earlier that evening, as the girls came up from the well, Pat had come limping out of the woods. Cupped in his black hat were wild strawberries. As he trickled an equal portion into each of their aprons, the girls smelt cigarettes on his fingers. The woods were already darkening behind him and Pat’s fifteen-year-old face had something sly, ancient, derisive about it, unwilling to acknowledge his own act of kindness.

  Now, kneeling beside his parents, the only one of the children to have a sugan chair, his position is as symbolic as that of Mary Rose – who is apart, and has no chair. Naturally, the three youngest girls don’t have chairs either so they face the settle, a position Agnes dislikes because the settle is where visitors plant their bums and she fastidiously refuses to put her face anywhere near it. Sometimes she sinks down with her forehead almost touching the ground, an image of exaggerated and unconvincing piety. Usually, avoiding the stomach-churning sight of the Sacred Heart, she looks off to one side at the dresser, or towards the door, whilst her father’s voice, accompanied by the little clicking sounds of eleven sets of rosary beads, intones the prayer.

  ‘Hail Mary, full of grace, blessed art thou amongst women and blessed is the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.’

  Obediently, the children give their bored replies: ‘Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners…’

  On shelves just inside the door is a display of glass. In summer, when sunshine falls in at the open door, it sparkles like the best crystal and Agnes promises herself that when she’s grown up she’ll be like her mother and make a collection of crystal. Her eyes go to a shelf on the dresser where there’s a double pack of cards and a box containing a game of Lotto. Sometimes after prayers the three youngest are allowed to stay up a little, long enough for just one game. The illustrations on the cards are scenes from the Bible and this is one of Agnes’s most intense pleasures: examining every last detail of these tiny pictures which are printed with only three colours, green, blue and yellow. Here is the Good Shepherd, and here the widow giving her mite. Here is Moses descending from the mountain with the Ten Commandments. Here is Jonah curled safe inside the belly of an enormous, friendly looking fish. And here is Agnes’s favourite: the flight into Egypt. Mary’s cloak, which shelters the sleeping baby, is the deep blue of an evening sky. The noble grey donkey carries them tirelessly, his little feet scurrying over the sand.

  When the three little girls go up to bed, the sound of their parents’ voices continues downstairs, just a few words, batting quietly back and forth between them while the mother sews. The children can also hear the creak of the trees behind the house, and the squeak of their mother’s lamp as she runs it up on its chain then sits for just a few moments – you might be able to count to fifty before hearing her feet on the stairs – hands folded, doing nothing before she goes to bed. Tom lies on the settle reading a Zane Gray western, of which he has quite a collection. Dan mooches up and down outside the open front door, kicking the gravel until his father, without taking the pipe from his mouth, growls, ‘Will you stop that!’ Dan has had his moment of attention. After everyone else has gone up, Pat – with the independence of his fifteen years – steps outside, rolls a cigarette and, with eyes as large and deep as the donkey’s, he watches the stars turn.

  Just as everything has gone quiet and still, as the last of the girls is dropping off to sleep, the rattle of a carriage starts up in the distance. It is the headless coachman, driving full pelt up and over the hill, past the house and away along the road to Nenagh, leaving the Kavanaghs safe and sleeping, deep in the ocean of night. On occasion a dark figure might then be seen leaving the house. John Kavanagh is going out to secure the foxes’ holes.

  A good Irish Catholic, my grandfather owned neither a gun nor a Bible. But he and each of the children had his or her own confirmation prayer book, bound with a hard creamy-coloured front of mock ivory with a cross embossed on it. I saw the one belonging to my Aunt Josie on her bedside table, after a lifetime of use bulging with little holy images, broken-backed, with her name and the date September 1915 written in a rather bold, scrawling hand – her mother’s, I supposed (or perhaps, as in my own prayer book, her father’s) – on the marbled flyleaf. Aunt Nancy went to the grave with hers, for all she had married an Englishman, but my mother did not keep hers. She kept nothing from Ireland.

  Just once, in the summer of 1938, my father went to Ireland to meet my grandparents. A reliable but uninformative witness, he remembers them as ‘nice, decent people’. When pressed, my father (who can recite mile upon mile of Kipling and Gilbert and Sullivan) could add only that they were both tall and dark. John Kavanagh would take a coal from the fire with his bare fingers and hold the live part to the baccy in his pipe to get it going. My mother remembers him looking through the local paper, shaking it out, then smoothing it flat with the careful gesture of a man smoothing the flank of a nervous horse. He played cribbage with his ‘cronies’ – my mother’s word – and both he and his mother smoked clay pipes. He never in his life visited a doctor and he had no toothbrush: all his life he kept his own teeth, which he cleaned with little twigs cut from oak wood. It was his custom to get up at first light in order to walk the horse in the dew.

  Now my grandparents lie in an unmarked grave, under a white hawthorn tree in a little graveyard in a field that has run wild. Thirty years ago, I travelled to Tipperary with my husband and nine-year-old daughter. We found the house on Knigh Hill, derelict, used only to store farm machinery in. I don’t believe it occurred to me to try finding either the Slatterys or the Clearys, names my mother had mentioned with affection. It was all too long ago, too far away. In a field of blowing grass beside the ruin of an old chapel we discovered the graveyard. But it scarcely registered on me that these ancient ghosts, this romantic fragment, was all that was left of the flesh-and-blood parents who had loved and raised my mother. The tide of my own life was strong and it was carrying me in the opposite direction. We were on our way to Donegal on holiday. Donegal, the best part of two hundred miles away from Puckaun, meant nothing more to me than a beautiful, rocky coastline. The weather was perfect. The beach, made up of exquisite shells the size of pinheads, was divine. We might as well have been in the Mediterranean – which, the following summer, we were.

  3

  Recently, the sounds from Kennedys’ bar had changed: the voices were harder, more like flint striking stone than pebbles turning companionably over in water. Although the children had been told that the war in England was over – my mother was referring here to the First World War, of course – there were soldiers and police everywhere, English soldiers and still more English policemen. My mother offered no explanation for this except to say that for some time there’d been a notice up in Kennedys’ window informing honest young men that the Royal Irish Constabulary had need of them. But either there were no honest young men in Puckaun, or they’d not taken a fancy to life in barracks.

  So it was these Englishmen who’d come instead, though why they’d want to was a mystery, especially when they had to put together some kind of mismatched uniform for
themselves. There were bottle-green trousers enough to go round – unless you examined them closely they looked black – but the men had had to top them with any old khaki jackets they could find. When these men were around there was an explosive atmosphere. They winked and joked with the children but Agnes took a violent dislike to them. When they laughed in her face and flicked her pigtails over her shoulder, she thought their hearts must be as sour as their breath. Nancy fell for the jokes and the sweets, but Agnes hated them. Behind their backs she heard them referred to as ‘scum’, even by the people who, having no choice in the matter, took their money.

  The children never see any of these men away from the village or the road, but sometimes as they go home along the path beside the woods they find themselves looking over their shoulders. If they catch one another at it they give each other mocking shoves, then explode with laughter and race up the hill. Home is all the sweeter.

  One day, a man of a different sort walks over the hill and along the lane that’s white with dust so deep the fellow seems to be an inch or two off the ground, walking on cloud. A thickset man with grey eyes. On either side of him the thorn trees are in bloom, like clotted cream, and high above him larks are singing. When he reaches the house his boots and his black hat are dredged white. Seeing the mother throw him that look of hers, a frown that draws a fine mesh of lines like a net over her face, the man – who had been about to set foot over the doorstep – flushes and stoops awkwardly to pull off his boots. As he does so, his bowler hat falls off his head and rolls across the kitchen floor to take its place at the fireside. A suitor has come courting Mary Rose. He and Mary Rose are allowed to go walking, formal as a couple on a promenade.

  Mary Rose is twenty. She works as a junior in the office at the Ballyartella Woollen Mills where she’s allowed to handle the money, and when she comes home her fingers smell of coppers. The three youngest sisters are in awe of this smart young woman with money in her pocket and first call on the hot water. There’s a hook behind the office door which is specially hers to hang her coat on in the mornings.