The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  Aged fifteen, she has reached nearly her full height of five foot six and a half inches. Her back is straight and her bearing, now that she’s on the verge of womanhood, has a proper pride. Already she’s not the sort of young woman to be taken lightly. She also usually has her own small supply of Woodbine cigarettes in her pocket. Sometimes the girls go out the back for a shared smoke, sitting on the cold cellar step in a square of winter sunshine the colour of urine, with as much warmth to it as a nun’s kiss. They’ve no sooner perched their bums than the yard-boy appears and sidles over to beg a puff. The girls refuse. The boy – sent into their father’s employ from the Brothers’ institution for orphans in Limerick when he was thirteen – has deprivation and ill treatment written into every line of his body. The girls show him no compassion and are mildly averse to his company, repelled by his drab hair and blotched skin.

  Today, however, his long raw face, the awful potential of his absurd masculinity, strikes them as the funniest thing they’ve ever seen. Offended, basking in the attention, the boy folds his skinny limbs and slides down to sit leaning against the wall, picking at his thumbs. Agnes looks over at him, gasps, and breaks up with laughter. The sisters look at her from under their black eyelashes, long shrewd looks that make her laugh even more. It ends with her getting hiccups.

  My mother always told me that, as a young woman, she didn’t trust men. Her explanation as to why was vague. She had decent brothers, after all, and a particularly loving father. What she said was, ‘You heard things.’ Adding, ‘The Brophys were town girls. They knew more than I did.’ It was the Brophys who gave her what are called ‘the facts of life’. She was certainly never given them at home. As Annie exclaimed when I raised the subject with her, ‘We knew nothing! Nothing!’ My grandmother didn’t even get around to telling her daughters the facts of menstruation. The only thing Kate ever said on the subject was what she said to all the girls as they hit puberty: ‘Mind yourselves now! Don’t let the boys touch you or you’ll be sorry.’ And Agnes, not even to her dearest friends, not even during those scandalous afternoons when the Brophys communicated all and everything, not even then was she able to confess that her own ‘monthlies’ had already started. A couple of weeks before the afternoon just described, Agnes had spent two days with her knickers stuffed with any old rags she could find before sister Bridie, giving her a pitying look, had said, ‘You’ll need these,’ and threw her a half-empty pack of sanitary towels. Without showing her how to fix them or, in a house full of men, how to dispose of them.

  ‘Tell mother you’ll be needing a shilling a month from now on. She’ll know what you mean.’

  And though Agnes eventually steeled herself to tell Nancy about her periods – (which is all she did for me) – she never disclosed anything else. The other ‘facts of life’ remained, literally, unspeakable.

  There is a painting of Saint Agnes hanging above the long dining table in the convent refectory. Accompanied by her lamb, the saint is standing amongst lilies to symbolise her purity, and holding a palm to indicate her martyrdom. When Agnes first arrived at the convent this painting, with AGNES written in black capital letters across the bottom, was a source of fascination. Agnes was dazed by the sight of her own name at the foot of such a beautiful image. Noticing her interest, Sister Brigit one day gave her the saint’s legend to read. It was a much-thumbed little booklet with graphic illustrations in a childish style of both the saint’s swooning beauty and her torments. On the frontispiece the reader is told that Saint Agnes, who has a church in Rome still dedicated to her, was murdered in 305 AD. Agnes didn’t want to read on but found herself powerless to stop:

  ‘When she was twelve or thirteen, Agnes took the eyes of a Roman prefect who had seen her coming home from school. He begged her to marry him, but she told him she was already engaged to be married – to Christ. Choosing Christ over the son of a Roman prefect had its consequences. The law gave Agnes a choice: either she could be a Vestal Virgin and make sacrifices to Roman gods – to Venus, Mars or Jove pictured about to hurl a thunderbolt – or she could be exposed naked in a brothel. Agnes chose the brothel but was miraculously saved from the “most shameful of fates” by death: she was stabbed in the throat by one of her “disappointed suitors”’.

  Stories of the saints were fortunately not the only stories Agnes was introduced to at the convent. The girls were given the ‘high’ literature of Ireland, too: the poetry, the sagas and the folklore. They were encouraged to read some of this in Gaelic, some in Lady Gregory’s English translation. This glimpse of another, higher order of being inspired her, offering a heady freedom from the tyranny of the mundane. Agnes responded with almost excessive delight. The essays she was set for homework consumed more and more of her time. Her favourite amongst the sagas was the story of Fionnuala and her brothers who, in the shape of swans and after many years of exile, return to their home which is now nothing but a green hillock, without a house, without a fire, without a hearthstone. Cycling home towards her own house on a green hillock, Agnes spoke aloud to herself the words of Fionnuala’s complaint, words she couldn’t imagine she would ever forget:

  ‘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 bitterness to my heart. Without dogs, without hounds for hunting, without women, without great kings; we never knew it would be like this when our father was in it.’

  One still summer evening, having toiled slowly up the hill, Agnes grinds to a halt, then, standing her bike up against the fence she leans watching her brother as he works a young chestnut horse that belongs to his employer’s daughter. Tom’s grace and strength had been with him even as a little boy, a way of moving as individual as a fingerprint. He works on the animal with a gentle but implacable will and finally the horse acknowledges that the man is his master – or perhaps that, like two dancers, they are equal, engaged in a shared enterprise. When asked what it is he loves so much about working with horses, Tom replies, ‘Horses know they’re alive, but they don’t know they’re going to die.’

  The air, thick with gold dust from the hayfields, is sweet and heavy. Sweat has made dark patches on Tom’s shirt. His rolled-up sleeves expose an inch or two of milky-white skin above his dark forearms. A man made for this place, this moment. But Agnes knows this perception of her brother is deceptive. Tom’s not what he seems. The bright hard surface of things, their lovely impenetrability, no longer deceives her. After all, she’s a young woman now, and she’s not quite what she seems either. More or less subconsciously, a sad note has sounded in the core of her being.

  As she wheels her bike on up to the house, Agnes can see the front door stands open, as it always does in fine weather. Not a leaf nor a petal in her mother’s garden stirs. ‘It is a wonder to me, this place…’ Agnes can hear her sisters’ voices, but for the moment she doesn’t want to go inside. Once inside, it would be difficult to keep the words of the poem in her head. She doesn’t want to see her mother who at five o’clock in the afternoon has no choice but to be there, inside, working. And Sean, Mary Rose’s little boy, now aged six, will be there in his clean grey suit, kicking his heels against the settle. Agnes doesn’t even want to go out the back with Nancy to smoke on the sly and laugh over nothing, over everything. She would like to be solitary, invisible as the wind moving over the green hillside. She would like to be the young fox moving cautiously amongst the cows in the field, on tiptoe, his brush sweeping across the damp grass behind him like a coat-tail held up out of the muck, nose high and showing his white chops.

  2

  The following summer, the summer of Agnes’s sixteenth year, a dance master with the nickname ‘Britt’ began to walk out from Nenagh to the surrounding villages to give dance lessons. Not traditional stuff, which the people knew well enough for themselves, but the quickstep, the foxtrot and the waltz. There was a craze for dancing. This was partly down to the pictures. A cinema had opened in Nenagh. It showed Buster Keaton films, and
Gladys Cooper in The Bohemian Girl. The music, the comedy, the close-ups allowing undreamed-of intimacy, kept the audience mesmerised. The world was coming to call and people were losing their innocence, becoming self-conscious, comparing themselves and one another with film stars. The classes took place in Paddy Dwan’s barn in Carney, opposite the public house, and Britt – an excellent man on the flute – provided the music himself, helped out sometimes by a man on the accordion. Britt had small brilliant eyes and narrow feet in patent shoes. The timing of his arrival depended somewhat on the weather. In order to earn their dancing pennies, Nancy and Agnes delivered the wreaths their mother made, or took eggs to market at Borrisokane. It might have been as well if Mrs Kavanagh had kept to the habit of doing these chores herself, the only chores that got her out into the world, but no one was to know that at the time.

  The two youngest Kavanagh sisters dance with one another. Agnes has responsibility for Nancy. Nancy isn’t just younger, smaller, prettier. She has no common sense – this has been an article of faith in the family ever since the day that Nancy, all of nine months old, tipped herself out of the tyre in the field and rolled into the ditch. But sometimes when the Devil gets into Nancy he gets into Agnes, too. She can feel it coming on. Her skin prickles. Then every nerve in her body goes slack and liquid with the loss of will to resist, like the moment before falling asleep, only she doesn’t fall asleep, she doesn’t even look the other way, not at all. What she can’t resist is watching Nancy get up to mischief. It’s not that Nancy is malicious or even wilful – Agnes is the wilful one, ‘pig-headed’, as their mother calls her. In fact, Nancy is biddable to a fault, trusting, and inclined to bend with the moment, to give in to her lively sense of the ridiculous. To speak when she should be silent. No one can understand where these traits come from. So being responsible for Nancy is no light matter. Still, Agnes would do anything for the sake of dancing. They all would. It’s like a biological need, a force inside them demanding satisfaction.

  Sometimes when Nancy’s dancing she can’t keep a straight face – can’t keep a straight back either, doubling over and shaking in an agony of laughter. Agnes doesn’t laugh. Every ounce of concentration is in her feet. Sometimes, one of the very few boys makes a clumsy offer, but the girls turn him down without even looking. They’re not here for the boys, and the boys only ask because Brit’s told them to. Besides, they’re still wearing their boots and their hands are none too clean. So girls and boys go through their paces separately, just as they did at Puckaun School, and in this way Britt’s classes avoid the worst censure of the priest who occasionally drops by to put to memory the names of those who are present and to make the remark – much quoted by Nancy – that ‘the Evil One is forever setting his snares for unwary feet’.

  On one of these summer nights, Mud Foley takes her pipe out of her mouth and remarks to Britt, ‘You’ve a fine crowd present.’

  ‘I have,’ says Britt. ‘But when I start collecting it will be small enough.’

  Dan is a notorious offender in this respect, slipping away when the time comes to pay. One night Mick Meara sets his dogs on him as he darts off, weaving in and out between the newly arriving adults and away down the lane. Not that the dogs do anything much when they catch up with Dan, only lick his hand, knowing him as they do and having nothing against him personally. Having received a few caresses, they return to their owner bright-eyed and pleased with themselves.

  Amongst those just-arrived adults is a young man who always turns up in time to watch the last waltz. He steps inside and ducks his head to light a cigarette. Agnes often has to tell Nancy off for encouraging the boys – ‘I DON’T!’ – ‘You DO so!’ – ‘What is it I do?’ – ‘You know!’ – so at first, seeing from the corner of her eye how his head turns to follow them, Agnes supposes this pale-faced young man is after her sister. She pulls Nancy protectively closer, bosom to bosom. But from that same corner of her eyes she also manages somehow or other to notice that the young man has black hair and that his eyes are bluer than they ought to be. Something tells her she’s the one he’s looking at, not Nancy, and her heart does a flip. The young man’s name is Jim Cooney. She hears someone call him that. A nice, plain name. He looks a nice, decent fellow, but then, isn’t brother Tom a nice ‘decent fellow’? Even Dan probably seems that way to someone who doesn’t know him. But Agnes doesn’t trust men, no matter what they’re called.

  As the Kavanaghs, the Graces and the Kennedy girls walk home through the twilight, the sound of music fades behind them, and the sisters love this mysterious moment almost as much as any other. Ahead, the track goes in a long white curve around the hillside, with here and there a dark tree standing, still and silent. Once out of sight of the village Agnes takes off her shoes and walks barefoot, enjoying the intimate wet lick of clay between her toes. Sometimes the young people sing. In darkened cottages along the way, older people and children already in bed hear their voices, not the words, just the singing, the girls it would be, coming closer, passing, and then moving away into the summer night. At Knigh Cross they might stop a while, laughing and talking in low voices before parting, the men looking back over their shoulders.

  Nowadays, the long white road back to Knigh makes for rough going, almost impassable in places. When it enters the acre or so of ancient woodland that still stands near Carney, it’s easier to come off it and take the narrow road that runs past Annie’s place.

  I’m calling on the O’Briens to ask about Jim Cooney. But when I raise his name my companions look blank. I mention the fact that my mother had spoken as if her parents had reservations about Jim Cooney, not that he wasn’t a decent lad, but that he was a humble farmer’s son – and as we all know my grandmother had ‘notions’ – or was it more to do with the black beret my mother remembered him wearing? This, Jim agrees, could have given the Kavanaghs reservations, for the black beret certainly had a political meaning, though Jim is ambiguous as to what that was: Yes, possibly the IRA, but a black beret was just as likely the Blue Shirts, an organization at the opposite end of the political spectrum. No, no, Annie corrects him, the Blue Shirts came later, in the ’30s. And that’s as far as it goes. Neither Jim nor Annie remember this young man who’d taken my mother’s fancy. What they do recall is her reputation as a dancer. A grand dancer. Yes, it was well known. And Jim is suddenly bursting to tell me something.

  ‘Will I tell you a story about your mother?’ says Jim. ‘I had it from the man himself, a man in his sixties when he told me but remembering well a time when he was a lad. Agnes was maybe fifteen or sixteen years old when she was walked home from a dance – a ceili it was, here below at Knigh Cross – by the first boy she ever danced with, a local boy called Mick Flynn, a boy she’d known all her life. It was still only twilight because she would be expected home before dark. They went slowly up there under the trees and Mick put his arm around your mother’s waist. She didn’t complain and Mick thought he might have been in luck with a kiss if only the road had been long enough. But as they neared the brow of the lane, the door of the Kavanagh house went, and they guessed it was her father coming out to see where his daughter had got to. Mick decided to scarper and hid behind a bush from where he overheard John Kavanagh say to Agnes, “Are you on your own?” “Yes,” your mother replied, all innocence. “Did none of those young men have the manners to walk you home?” your grandfather asked indignantly.’

  The following summer, if Agnes wears her new high heels – cast-offs of Josie’s, actually, but new to Agnes – she’s as tall as the dance teacher by all but a whisker. She’s begun to stay on for the adult classes whether her parents like it or not. It’s whilst dancing the foxtrot with Jim Cooney for the first time that he asks her, is she still at school? No! she counters, does it look like it? The truth is, she’s leaving school in July, in a few weeks’ time. Sooner than might have been expected. Agnes hasn’t done well at the convent. The fact is, when she sits down to write an essay her feelings and ideas get all muddled. What
was clear and fresh in her head turns to mush on the page. Her last school report confirmed this. The nuns wrote that her needlework was excellent. They recognised her unusual sensitivity to the Gaelic language and to literature. They praised her as a good worker, but she was not clever. Agnes had never imagined she was. And she’s finding it shockingly easy to avoid reading the disappointment on her mother’s face.

  Since the first evening she followed Britt’s steps, since then Agnes has known – and to be honest, half the girls in Paddy Dwan’s barn feel the same – that she’s a dancer. And now she’s part of a dancing couple, their relationship defined – and limited – by a series of moves she has by heart. In my mind’s eye I see them, Jim and Agnes, their two black heads, black as coal both of them, and their feet going smoothly and easily, effortlessly in harmony. This is what Agnes lives for: the almost mechanical pacing of their legs, broken every so often by an immaculate slow spin on their toes, the occasional warm fan of his breath on her cheek, the guiding pressure of his hand on her back.

  Having left the convent, Agnes keeps herself occupied and earns a few shillings ‘helping out’ at the Brophys’. Of course helping out in a grocer’s shop isn’t much, but it’s preferable to what Nancy’s doing. Agnes certainly thinks so. Nancy, who not only didn’t follow Agnes to the convent but left school just before her fourteenth birthday and is employed as housemaid at the Protestant glebe house in Puckaun, working for the Reverend Burroughs whose sons (the boys who’d been at Puckaun School with Agnes and Nancy) are now, like the Kavanagh sisters, almost-but-not-quite grown up. The sisters have their first serious row when Agnes accuses Nancy of thinking too little of herself. Of being lazy and stupid. Ending: ‘And don’t go out of this house looking like that with your hair all over the place and Josie’s old shoes on you!’