The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

But certain physical gestures of hers had become more noticeable – her shoulder blades were drawn high and tight, her fingers forever moving as if rolling tiny pellets against the pads of her thumb – and for some years, a skin condition, rosacea, spoiled the lovely skin of her cheeks. Eventually she found a cream that cured it, but her skin never quite regained its old flawless perfection. For some time I was both very aware of my mother’s unhappiness, and too bound up in my own to give hers much attention. My own problems, though not discussed, must have been an added burden to her.

  Still, my mother often gave the impression of having got more out of life than she’d expected. She had, for instance, a low opinion of her own intelligence. Once, when we were talking about her school days, she told me with a satirical look on her face, ‘I was good at needlework. Of course, you didn’t need to have anything much ‘up here’ for that.’ She tapped her forehead.

  Then she admitted she’d been good at Gaelic, too. I told her I’d read somewhere that Gaelic was the language spoken in the garden of Eden, the language that God used when speaking to the angels. I was never sure what my mother made of this kind of whimsical notion.

  What was undeniable was that as my mother got older she took increasing pleasure in books. I think they enabled her to achieve a degree of emotional independence and equilibrium. She wasn’t one for bodice-rippers or Aga sagas. She liked big themes and subtle writing. When my own first book was published and my plays began to be shown on television my mother was both proud and apprehensive. She acknowledged the skill but, from this close up, she saw that the very nature of the undertaking had something indecent about it, incontinent as the act of confession she’d loathed in her youth, reeking as it did to her fastidious nose of lies and self-indulgence. It entailed, if nothing else, a shocking level of self-exposure and, naturally, the closer to home it got, the more my characters reminded her of me, of her, of my husband, the more disturbing and indecent it seemed. Why did I write about such things? In a kind of nightmare scenario, my mother found herself taken inside my head, inside my heart, into my bedroom. My mother loved literature in private, literature that was safely inside the hard covers of books written by unknown authors. But she was uneasy about my telling tales – in all three senses of that phrase: fictions, lies, betrayals. Which is hardly surprising.

  Who wants all that mess and stink on her own front doorstep?

  On one of those nights when we were alone together in the sitting room after supper, a silence fell. Because my mother didn’t tell her story chronologically, this evening – though we’d already long ago arrived at her maturity – we’d gone back to her early childhood and, as so often, to incidents involving my mother and Nancy. Sometimes it was as if these two little girls had been the only children in the family. I remember I was a little distracted. Tired. We both were. It was winter, not long after Christmas and New Year. We couldn’t know it, of course, but this was to be our last evening alone together. In the silence we could hear the wind rattle through the garden shrubs. Maybe that sound and the bitter cold lapping the house reminded my mother of winters on Knigh Hill. Her face was suffused with a dreamy, slightly foolish look that sometimes came over her in old age. She told me how she’d got into bed recently, warm under the duvet, and thought, ‘Thank God!’ and then, ‘Why do I thank God? I should thank David. He’s given me everything.’

  Soon after we had scattered my mother’s ashes in the river, my father’s life took on a new pattern. Generous and gregarious, he now played bridge two or three times a week, ran errands for friends and neighbours, and had an ever-increasing social life which involved a great many visits to ‘Testicoes’ (aka Tesco) to stock the freezer so that even when asked out to dinner he could always arrive with offerings carried in plastic bags: his own home-made marmalade, vegetable soup, some tiramisu. The plastic bags then came back home again, this time full of scraps for the foxes. My father was busy and to me, my mother’s vigilant daughter, he looked happy as a dog let off its lead.

  To die is to enter a great silence. The fear of being forgotten in that silence is as old as humankind. It’s what much of religion has always been about. What the dead want most is to be kept alive in the memory of the living. But since the dead can’t, in fact, want anything, even their desire to be remembered can only last so long as our memory of them. ‘Remember me, remember me.’ Dido sang those words whilst she was still alive. But Dylan Thomas added to that wistful desire another thought: ‘Remember me, I have forgotten you…’ The dead are at a disadvantage. The thought of forgetting my mother makes me panic. In the forgetting I shall lose her again, and in a more definitive sense than my first loss of her to the soldier who came home from the war. The very first betrayal of this story.

  In the middle of the night I wake with a pounding heart. Lying in the dark I’m helpless under the cold weight of my own physical decay: age and death are like a stink coded into every cell of my body. I have the sense that I can feel each individual cell turning to foul dust deep inside me. Life does death’s work for it, in slow motion. Like having the wrong man pick me out across a bright, crowded room. The slow death of old age. Stasis. My work lies like stone in my chest, unspoken. Lying awake, I’m dimly aware that self-pity also has a life, and therefore a death, of its own. This is how my nights are.

  But last night the dog fox woke me. His abrupt, cold bark ricocheted off the back walls so close he might have been in the room with me. It brought to mind my mother telling me about a woman who fell asleep one afternoon and woke to find a fox curled up on the sofa beside her. When the fox ran outside the woman didn’t get up and follow him. Perhaps it was a decision she made, or perhaps she was just too lazy – or too frightened? There are people who are afraid of all animals. I don’t know. I don’t know where this happened, or who the woman was. Fragment of a story, like a dream that speaks to me of choices not made, of potential unfulfilled. Of instincts not followed.

  Perhaps because of this story, last night, instead of staying where I was, tossing and turning, quietly I got out of bed and went down to the back door. It opened soundlessly on to the damp garden. It was later than I thought, and the sun already rising. The bark came again, close by, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up. A young red fox came over the fence with something I couldn’t identify in his mouth. So close, I heard his claws scratch on the wood as he jumped down. Seeing me by the door, he hesitated and moved his tail a little. He was so much at home I thought he must be the one who craps on my doorstep and leaves his stink hanging in the porch. I very much wanted to touch him. I wanted my domesticated hand to lie on his rough red coat, for him to leave his feral scent on my skin. But the fox – immune to such human confusion – tightened his elegant jaw on his kill and, with the weightless hop of a bird, went back over the fence and away, leaving a trace of blood on the paving stones. I thought of a passage I’d read somewhere in Isak Dinesen about the perfection of foxes: ‘the fox does excellently well at being a fox. All that he does or thinks is just fox-like and there is nothing in him from his ears to his brush which is not beautiful and perfect, which God does not wish to be there, and the fox will not interfere with the plan of God.’

  I go back inside and make tea. I recall how, not long after my mother died, my father had said to me, ‘Your mother never really told me why she left Ireland.’ With the sun on my hands, I look at the notes I have of our Monday evening conversations and start work on them for the first time. They’re in a mess. I begin to arrange them both chronologically and according to themes: school, growing up, work and so on.

  I do this early each morning, getting straight out of bed to go to my desk. I sleep well. Something inside me has been set in motion and it begins.

  Part Three

  Going Back

  1

  ‘…and the children of Lir stayed in exile in their guise of swans until it came time for them to go back to where their father was with his household and all their own people. So they set out flying thro
ugh the air lightly till they came to Sidhe Fionnachaidh where they gave out three sorrowful cries and Fionnuala made this complaint: ‘It is a wonder to me this place is, and it without a house, without a dwelling-place. To see it the way it is now, Ochone! It is a bitterness to my heart...’

  – The Irish saga Gods and Fighting Men in a translation by Lady Gregory

  Furze is in abundant bloom on this flat, upland area in the North Riding of Tipperary. A summer-blue sky is all around me, and flat-bottomed clouds whose shadows fall down through the air like shafts of grey sunlight. The little road is straight and empty, seeming to lead nowhere, and I walk until I reach the point where the old bogland begins. Here on the upland the light shifts like water over the heather-clad bog. I had thought this might be where my grandfather, John Kavanagh, walked alone that day, through air similarly ablaze with furze-blossom, coming to his decision to reject his inheritance, to leave home, to ask Kate Buckley to marry him. The scent of furze is warm and sweet. There’s a light breeze and not a car, not a sheep, not another human being in sight. This upland scene is all golden expectancy, unpeopled because, although I’m here in search of my forebears, I haven’t found them yet and even if my grandfather came walking towards me now I wouldn’t recognise him.

  On the desk in my rented cottage I’ve set out my maps and the notebooks containing my mother’s memories, ready to match them against the real thing. But the real thing evades me. No one in Borrisokane, where my grandfather was born, remembers the name Kavanagh, nor can I find any trace of the ‘darling little thatched cottage’ where my mother recalled visiting her grandmother. I decide to reassure myself with a visit to somewhere familiar: the graveyard at Knigh.

  Only, since I was last here, someone’s been at work cutting the grass, trimming the edges and uprooting nettles. The white hawthorn that once marked my grandparents’ grave is gone and I have no exact memory of its location. Here, by the west wall? Or over there by the ruins of the old chapel? I am unreasonably distressed by this lacuna. Old gravestones have been revealed and new headstones of shiny black marble have been erected. Certain names are engraved here more than once: Foley, McGrath, Grace. But no Kavanagh. Time has closed over them. I climb over the wall and begin to make my way up the steep lane towards the house on Knigh Hill.

  It’s a spring afternoon. The hillside is bright with sunshine and the dirt lane is thick with dust. On either side grows a profusion of yellow dandelions with remarkably large flowers and, almost hidden in the moist shade, lords and ladies with pale pink pokers, something I’ve never seen before. A pair of chaffinches is working the tops of the ash trees, gossiping as they go and littering the dust with the trees’ flower buds. I know this is the lane the little girls came down with the donkey to fetch water. But I’m disorientated. A new line of giant electricity pylons strides up and over the hillside, and surely the ruined tower’s in the wrong place. Most strikingly of all – though it didn’t strike me last time I was here – there’s no wood. Yet surely my Uncle Pat spent his working life caretaking Knigh Wood?

  As I begin to make my way up the lane on my right, a curved driveway leads up to the shiny front door of a prosperous farmhouse. Behind it, a small grey house standing in ruins. Ducking under a line of barbed wire I go towards it, and in doing so I raise the owner, a youngish man named Quigley, who emerges from one of the outhouses wiping his hands on his shirt. When I suggest the grey ruin may be the house where my mother was born he looks bewildered, affronted even, then asks her name.

  ‘Kavanagh,’ I say firmly, but anticipating denial.

  The man’s face lightens. He points up the hill.

  ‘The house is up there,’ he says. ‘It’s well known. The fields on the left-hand side are still called Kavanagh’s fields.’ Adding gently, ‘It was before my time.’

  I walk on close to tears. A trace of them at last, the memory of a memory. ‘It’s well known.’ These fields once belonged to my grandfather.

  The house is in a state of bitter dereliction. Windows have been filled in with cement blocks, like eyes blanked out, and the yard my mother once looked down on shifts and rustles with sheets of black plastic. Liquid brown cow shit splatters the ground. This is where Mary Rose’s wedding party took place, where my grandmother kept the gravel raked immaculate as any Japanese Zen garden, and where the flowers were an amazement to her neighbours. A great barn with an ugly tin roof now blocks the still-magical view.

  Bewildered and clumsy, I clamber over unused farm implements and stinking sacks of old sheep’s wool into the interior. A huge, rusting mechanical drill or harrow takes up most of the space. Here’s where the family knelt to say the rosary. Amongst black patches of damp on the walls I find one little patch of colour. It’s a strip of flowered wallpaper with, underneath it, several layers of paint: blue, green, and white. When I scratch the white it comes away like chalk: lime. Here is the blackened hearth with its wooden mantle. It runs almost the entire width of one wall. There’s not much left in the way of an upper floor but on the back wall, like a stencil, runs the outline of a flight of stairs leading up to what would have been the main bedroom out of which doors once opened into two – possibly three – smaller rooms.

  On the other side of the hearth, a door leads into a smaller room with a little fireplace set into the back of the chimney breast. I remember my father saying that when he visited he slept in a room on the ground floor. And in the wall opposite the hearth, a door leads through into what was another, narrower section of the house but which is now a tumbledown mass of ivy-covered rubble. Damp blooms everywhere on the walls. Beams and broken floorboards dribble yellow pyramids of dust on to the disorder below. A draught yawns a stale cold breath from the corners. The chill enters my bones like fear. I scramble in an idiotic sort of panic back outside. When I step away to look up, I see that the roof is in surprisingly good nick. But the low wall that once enclosed the narrow front garden, the garden itself, the trellised archways and the yard where my grandmother kept her pet guinea fowl, gone, all gone.

  I walk on past the trees towards the brow of the hill. There I scramble under the fence and tack at a diagonal across one of my grandfather’s steep fields to the circle of sunlit stones on the summit. A fox lies there curled in the warmth. Sensing me his head lifts, his ears, eyes and pointed snout fix me for a moment like an aimed arrow, then he cedes the cairn to me and lopes off, a russet-coloured stain slipping down through the grass. Like my mother before me, and mindful that this is a fairy ring – not a home of hobgoblins, as was once believed in England – I sit on one of the stones amongst the sheep droppings and the flowers, and gaze back the way I’ve come.

  To the south I can see the purple smudge of the Silvermine Mountains where, I’ve learned, a number of English miners were massacred by Irish Catholics during the pre-Cromwellian rebellions of the 1640s. To the west, the Nenagh river – on whose greens banks Saint Patrick walked – coils through flat lowlands past the wool mill at Ballyartella to discharge itself at Dromineer into Lough Derg, a little peacock-coloured corner of which is visible from up here. One blistering afternoon in the 1920s, Dr Courtney – a fine all-round athlete and medical officer at Knigh Cross dispensary for forty-two years – swam the two miles or so from Dromineer to the other side of the lake. He did so not only because he could, but also to encourage the locals to take to the water, in which he failed.

  To the north, Blind Lane goes on towards the ancient woods of Carney, and Claree, and on beyond that to the lowland bogs and Borrisokane, home of my Kavanagh forebears, a town described in 1845 as ‘a poor, spiritless, desolate place’. It was in the needy environs of Borrisokane that John Kavanagh’s mother, my own mother’s beloved ‘Gammy’, worked as a nurse, or, more strictly, a ‘handywoman’, as these unqualified nurses were known. In the fields and hedgerows she picked wild flowers and leaves to make the herbal remedies for which, my mother had told me, she was well known. Herbs were best pulled on Mondays and Tuesdays, she used to say, not Sunday. Accor
ding to Gammy, ‘A Sunday cure is no cure.’ As I recall this, my great-grandmother appears in my mind’s eye: a small neat woman in black cape and bonnet, a red petticoat flaring at her hem, moving briskly away along the white lane.

  Turning to look east I can see Lough Eorna, an innocent blue blink of water in which the two girls drowned when the ice gave way beneath them. And the ruined tower, known as Knigh Castle, looks from up here to be standing in the right place again, there on sloping ground just above the crossroad. The men who built this tower in the sixteenth century were the O’Kennedys and they dominated this territory for close on five hundred years. Their name – which they would give to a future president of the United States – derives from the Irish ‘ceann eidig’ or ‘ugly head’. The tower was built of the rock it stands on: limestone. Grey limestone for the walls of houses and churches, white limewash for the interiors, grey powder of quicklime with which to fertilise the fields, lime gravel for my grandmother’s garden pathway. Limestone makes water extremely soft. No wonder the Kavanagh girls were famous for their complexions. Sitting up here in the sunshine, this glorious chiefdom, spread from my feet to the far horizon, seems a place well worth living and dying for. And there below, just visible through the trees, is the grey roof of my grandparents’ house, from here looking inviolate.

  I’m sitting on a hard chair in the dingy lobby of the Nenagh registrar’s office waiting my turn. I’ve chosen this chair rather than the vacant padded one because the padded one has a dubious-looking stain on it. Every so often someone emerges diffidently from the office, their business done, a little hatch in the wall opens, and the next person is summonsed inside. We’re nearly all of us middle-aged or elderly women, quiet and patient, our body language clearly telling the world we mean to be no trouble to anyone. We have a right to be here in an anteroom of officialdom, but our right to the inner sanctum is something we passively hope for rather than assert. I can’t see who it is who does the summonsing but it’s a woman’s voice, firm yet dulcet, very Tipperary. It inspires confidence in me that the registrar will be both efficient and sympathetic. I’m here to collect a copy of my mother’s birth certificate and copies of my grandparents’ death certificates. (When I asked my mother what her parents had died of, she shrugged and said, ‘I wouldn’t be surprised if mother died of TB and father just gave up.’) As I wait I get more and more nervous. This move into a world of official records – a world my mother so hated – a world of facts written down in black and white, some of them facts she withheld from me, feels disloyal.