by Maggie Wadey
Nancy goes. Looking ‘like that’. Halfway across the field, following the fox’s diagonal path, she halts and scrabbles in her pocket. When she walks on, Agnes, leaning in their bedroom window, sees a little puff of smoke go up like a retort above her sister’s head. But it’s still Agnes Nancy comes to, never their mother. Nancy is forgetful, trusting. Careless. Agnes is none of these. Which is why, watchful and somewhat intimidating, she has come to take Mrs Brophy’s place amongst the dim shelves in the shop. Agnes learns what macaroni is and she’s stepping out with Jim Cooney.
No, my grandmother’s children are not turning out the way she’d hoped. True, the previous year both Tom and Dan had been away at Ardnacrusha, employed on a scheme for the ‘electrification of the Shannon’, work which had caused the level of Lough Derg to rise, drowning several small islands, the Corikeens, which Kate Buckley had visited as a child with the Bishop of Killaloe. Tom, a mild-mannered young man, had come home with a loud voice and money in his pocket. He wears two wristwatches, one on each wrist, one telling the time in Tipperary and one – so he says – the time in New York. He walks out with two girls. He has gone back to work with horses, but his mother can see he’s not satisfied. The work on the Shannon, the men he met there and the stories he heard, have infected him with restlessness and discontent. Dan, on the other hand, has to be kicked out of bed every morning, seeming unable to believe easy money won’t come looking for him.
Pat, of course, is a different case. His place is secure. Not only his mother’s blue-eyed boy, he’s the eldest son, and is therefore expected – expects – in due course to take his father’s position as caretaker at Knigh, sharing the house with his parents until their death. Whatever else, Pat is a hard worker. But like Tom, he’s taken to staying out at night. At first Kate thinks maybe he’s just leaning up against a fence somewhere in the dark, smoking. A couple of times Agnes hears her mother go hallooing in the fields and along the wood’s edge. She hears the cows answer. But the public house in Puckaun is only twenty minutes’ walk away – though longer on the way back – and the mother, finally, reluctantly, accepts that that’s where he goes.
With the failure of Mary Rose’s marriage, Mrs Kavanagh pinned her hopes on the next two. Bridie and Josie, however, are not only ambitious and hard-working but desperate to get away from home. Showing no inclination for marriage, they’ve taken work in Dublin, apprenticed to a seamstress. Dressmaking has a degree of refinement to it, but apprentices are worked every hour God sends and paid a pittance. Both Agnes and Cathleen have had the benefit of a convent education and much good it’s done them. Cathleen has turned down an offer as school monitor, complaining that just the very idea of waffling through the days teaching filthy brats to speak Irish is enough to make her throw herself in the lough. As for Agnes, helping out at the Brophys’ is all very well but it contributes very little to the family income. Worse, the shop is separated from the bar by only a flimsy curtain.
It wasn’t supposed to be this way. In the Free State there was to be work and opportunity for everyone. There is not. Five years into Ireland’s celebrated independence and all around them the economy stagnates. Industrialization and growth have been written off by the powers that be, both government and Church. The economic war with Britain – ruinous to Irish exports – that had followed the years of violence now elides seamlessly into the Depression of the ’30s. Ireland’s one reliable export continues to be her own people. And perhaps a mother expects to lose her sons. But Kate fears that, without knowing it, the education she encouraged her daughters to have has only prepared them the better to leave her. Either that, or they’ll have to fall back into a life no better than her own.
On the nights of the dance class, Kate sleeps badly and if the wind is blowing in the right direction then, faintly, she can hear the girls singing as they walk home, reminding Kate of her own youth and inducing in her a sense of relentless repetition. The dances at Carney attract boys like the Kavanaghs – boys like Jim Cooney. Decent enough lads but lads with nothing, reincarnations of what John had been when Kate first met him, an innocent young man with bones too big for his skin and no prospects.
Sometimes, Josie and Bridie come home for the weekend. Before they do so they write, like strangers, and the gravel in front of the house is raked over a hundred times to be worthy of receiving them. The girls arrive with Dublin written all over them, carrying umbrellas, for pity’s sake, and with diamanté pins in their shampoo-scented hair, like pictures in a fashion catalogue. Bridie in particular is remembered for appearing one summer afternoon, tall and resplendent in a yellow sheath dress wearing a golden hat the size of a bicycle wheel. When news gets out that all five daughters are at home the Garda come up there in droves. Over seventy years later, Annie still remembered the men ‘up there like tomcats after the Kavanagh girls’. Tom is furious beyond reason that his parents would even consider a policeman for a son-in-law but Kate, knowing the realities of life, welcomes them in. The boy Sean likes to sit on the stairs eavesdropping and sometimes a stranger is heard to ask, ‘Who’s the little fella?’
On moonlit summer nights Agnes walks with Jim far and wide but always out in the open, making great circles around the house, going slowly arm in arm, and from under their feet the fresh scent of crushed earth and grass rises up. They halt, every time at the same spot, where Jim picks a spray of something – dog rose or honeysuckle – and presents it to Agnes. They never go into the wood. When my mother remembered this time, innocence and happiness are inseparable.
At Christmas, Agnes helps the Brophys to pack and hand out the charity boxes they give to their poorer customers. The boxes aren’t identical but filled with carefully chosen goods: tea, corned beef and tinned peaches for one, biscuits, cocoa and condensed milk for another. Everyone knows who needs the boxes and no one is insulted by the gift. In fact, it’s all very jolly, with a lot of banter, some of it clean and some of it not so clean, between those giving and those receiving. Hardship doesn’t appear to dull anyone’s wits. The second Christmas, Agnes asks Nancy to join them in the shop, but the girl is busy with her own affairs and says no, all ingenuous surprise that she should even be asked to put herself out. The mother’s only comment is that Nancy is at least paid for what she does. Agnes is offended. Her disgust is fuelled by the old feeling that her mother prefers Nancy, favouring her, even when she’s blatantly misbehaving – or when she’s being selfish and cheap. Like now.
Some kind of gulf – involuntary, silent – has opened up between the sisters.
The Kavanagh children flew the nest in pairs. Tom and Dan were the first to take the boat to England, and when Tom was settled he sent for Cathleen to bring little Sean to live with him. Mrs Kavanagh suspected – correctly – that Josie and Bridie wouldn’t be long after. Dublin was bad enough, but England was a place especially associated with low moral standards. How can you keep to the right ways when you’re far from home, living amongst people who neither know nor care and a priest who’s seen it all before, who sees you as just another example of human frailty and not as a youngster brought up to be clean and decent? If the Kavanagh parents couldn’t even imagine the places where their sons and daughters now walked and ate and slept, how could those places know their children? And if you’re unknown, you are lost.
This must be why, in the summer of 1930, my grandmother formed the intention of visiting Dublin. It’s the first I’ve heard of it, but Annie’s quite certain. Mrs Kavanagh bought a new blouse in Nenagh, and Josie, home for the weekend, gave her a fashionable felt hat decorated with artificial flowers. Annie remembers Mrs Kavanagh talking of little else. But nothing came of it. Somehow it turned out that it was Nancy, not their mother, who went up to join her sisters.
I’m surprised. Nancy? The youngest, and her mother’s favourite daughter. Annie says something else that surprises me: around that same time, Agnes stopped dancing. Then, as Annie recalls it, some time later that same year, Agnes went away from Knigh, too.
‘It was about that time,’ offers Jim, ‘the priest started to go up there to Knigh.’
‘Why was that?’ I ask, recalling Kate’s intense dislike of a priest in her house.
‘Because Mrs Kavanagh stopped going out,’ says Annie. ‘When those girls were all gone, Mrs Kavanagh stopped even going to church. So it was the priest went up there to Knigh.’
Well yes, children grow up and fly the nest. But what could have happened, I wonder, that reconciled my grandmother to the priest with his sweat-stained prayer book coming into her own kitchen, kneeling down on her clean floor, bringing with him like dust in the folds of his black robes whatever it was that she was so averse to. I feel a chill run through my grandmother’s paradise.
‘It was good of him,’ Annie is saying. ‘But then, wasn’t Father O’Meara a walking saint?’
‘Will you talk sense!’ puts in Jim. ‘Father O’Meara didn’t walk anywhere.’
‘She might have done better to go below to the Graces,’ Annie concedes. ‘Or come here, why not, to talk over her troubles. Mother would have listened. It was a woman she needed to talk to.’
‘Maybe she didn’t want to talk?’ I suggest. ‘It was you, Annie, who said my grandmother didn’t blab. You said she spoke “quietly and to the point”.’
‘’Tis true. Excepting Nancy, none of the Kavanaghs were great talkers.’
Then Jim remarks, to no one in particular, ‘Mrs Kavanagh did still go out. She used to walk out alone over the hill.’ He turns to me: ‘She used to go out at twilight to look at the hares, and there was a grand number in them days.’ He laughs. ‘There was a belief then that there were women who turned themselves into hares.’
A censorious look passes from Annie to her brother. I gather up my things and prepare to leave. I kiss Annie on both cheeks. I shake Jim’s hand. I don’t want to talk about my family any more. I’m tired. ‘Stupid with tiredness,’ as my mother used to say. And something more: cold. As if the chill that entered my grandmother’s paradise has got into my bones. Annie’s door opens and I step out into the starlit dark.
The night is mild. Quietly I cross the hillside hoping that I, too, might see a hare. Hares have a double meaning. Nocturnal creatures whose large, almost human eyes gaze at the moon, they are associated with black magic and shape-changing. But because they are believed to sleep with their eyes open, they also symbolise Christian vigilance.
As I walk I brood on what I’ve been told. ‘None of the Kavanaghs were great talkers.’ I think of my mother. When she was old, speech tired her, projecting her voice became a huge effort. But even as a woman with all her strength, a woman who liked to please and entertain, I saw her sometimes flounder under the need to make conversation. Perhaps it was just conversation English-style that inhibited her, making her stiffer than the English themselves, listening, as if anxious she might mistake her cue. By the time I knew her she’d almost completely lost her Irish accent and along with it some of the mischievous, dancing quality that I associate with Irish conversation. Nancy had it in spades. Even in the years when illness was slowly killing her and her voice was gravelly from smoking, Nancy’s eyes and her voice still danced, and when the sisters were together, sometimes when we were laughing together as a family, my mother’s did, too.
Then there’s my aunt Bridie. When Bridie was in the mood, she talked. By the time I got to know her – after the other sisters were dead and my mother had revived some kind of relationship with her – my aunt Bridie was old, a big powerful woman with a warning glitter in her eye. With me, her sister’s snooty English daughter, she kept her guard. The sound of my voice got up her nose. But my husband could charm her – as she could charm him – and I came to realise that Bridie was a great teller of jokes. Smart, sharp jokes. But for all her talk not a word about Ireland. I recall Gerry Adams’s description of the Irish as ‘gregarious garrulous and tongue-tied’ – Annie, for instance, may famously be a talker, yet she’s discretion itself. Telling and not telling in the same breath. And Agnes certainly thought her sister was economic with the truth. ‘You can’t believe a word Bridie says,’ she would say, and maybe at some time in their past Bridie’s ‘economy’ had mattered. But all I knew of it seemed harmless enough. Still, I know what my mother meant. Bridie was both watchful and opaque. In a different life, she might well have been a shaman. My mother was made of altogether lighter stuff. And Kate? Jim telling me how my grandmother used to go out to watch the hares, or even – wasn’t this his sly suggestion – to become one, had sent a shiver of superstitious fear through me.
There was something Annie didn’t want me told – and obviously I didn’t want to hear, since I’d got up and left. My own guess is that it was illness that prevented my grandmother from visiting her neighbours, an illness she wouldn’t have wanted to talk about but which would have benefited from fresh air: TB. She may even have thought she was dying. In fact, she had eleven more years to live, but if she already had death on her mind, might that not explain why she was prepared at last to talk to a priest? To admit him up here into her house, to walk in her garden. On a warm evening, the scent of Kate’s flowers must have been intoxicating. I understand their intense significance to my grandmother.
Standing very still on the dark track I fancy I can smell them now. But there are no flowers and – though I’ve been quiet as a shadow – no hares.
I’m coming to suspect that my mother, in narrating the story of this period in her life, may have been a good deal more troubled and unhappy than she’d been prepared to tell me. That she may have been desperate to get away, to be fully independent. She certainly had ambitions. But for Agnes, aged nineteen, this didn’t mean England, or even Dublin – how else to explain the surprising fact that Nancy had gone away without her?
Agnes had, in fact, been keeping an eye on the noticeboard in the Ladies’ Club in Nenagh for some months. Local jobs were advertised there, services were offered – a thirty-four-year-old ‘lady’s companion’ had been suggesting herself for the best part of a year with no success – and small items named for sale: a Singer sewing machine, and a pair of fawn-coloured high-heeled shoes, size five, ‘as new’. Then, in October 1930, a new notice was pinned up. Agnes’s attention was taken first by the large, beautiful handwriting in royal blue ink. Then by the address, the names: ‘Busherstown’ and ‘Moneygall’. Busherstown.
Now there was a place my mother had talked about, not when I was a child, but on those Monday evenings we had together during her last years.
3
As she walks up the long curved driveway, Busher’s Castle – enclosed deep in a circle of ancient trees – is gradually revealed to her in all its faintly eccentric glory. It’s not, in fact, a castle but a large, imposing house set in parkland and orchards, with turreted towers at each corner. Agnes doesn’t quail. Only when she comes in sight of the huge drawing-room windows, so clean she can’t believe there’s glass in them – so clean that were she a bird she’d stun herself on them – does her heart start thumping. Inside, there are no dim corners. The room is swathed in pale yellow brocade and rose-coloured velvet. It’s like a garden.
Then, as Agnes turns to follow a path around to the back the angle changes, the glass in the window flashes, fills with swirling reflections of grass and trees and in amongst the branches she sees a young woman approaching. It’s not that she doesn’t recognise herself, but she doesn’t quite identify yet with the image she’s created. Her black hair shines, her navy-blue costume is immaculate, her shoes are polished like new conkers. Her walk is confident but decent – there’s no swing to her hips – her back is straight, her white hands are clean as new paper. She’s honest, hard-working and keen to learn. What more could Mrs Minchin, the lady of the house, want?
The answer is, nothing. The Minchins are Anglo-Irish gentry, yet Agnes and Mrs Minchin are the perfect match. Mrs Minchin is a big woman with white hair and one glass eye. Her real eye is brown and her glass eye is blue – ‘Who wouldn’t have blue eyes if
they had a choice?’ she says, by way of explanation – which underscores her resemblance to a well-fed Persian cat. She has surprisingly delicate hands, encrusted with rings, like a child playing at being adult. Her voice is unlike anything Agnes has ever heard before, a mellow voice, yet the vowels are clipped between almost lost, lyrical consonants. Agnes, entranced, occasionally misses the meaning but has the sensation of watching the sentences being written out calmly on the sunlit air between them. It’s immediately taken for granted that Agnes will take the position that falls vacant on the first Friday before Advent, the position of trainee cook.
The word ‘trainee’ had caught Agnes’s eye as much as the words Moneygall and Busherstown. Seeing it she realised it was what she’d been waiting for. She would be trained. Qualified. As a cook she would ‘command a fee’ – the phrase Mrs Brophy had used. She would have a room of her own. She would be prepared. ‘No experience required but good references essential.’ Agnes has her good references ready in her pocket, one from the Mother Superior of the convent, and one from her father’s employers, the Crosses, who are known to the Minchins, though not quite of their social circle. But Mrs Minchin hasn’t asked to see them. She leads Agnes into the kitchen, a long, high-ceilinged room with an iron range and huge cupboards painted cream. It smells of clean dishcloths and, faintly, of mice. But for a large plain calendar and an amusing advertisement for OXO, the walls are bare. Agnes shows no surprise at any of this. But when she’s told she’ll have a kitchen maid and a parlourmaid working under her she gives Mrs Minchin a quick look to see if she’s having her leg pulled. It seems not. It occurs to Agnes the lady may have mistaken her for someone else, some other applicant for the job. She wonders if she should volunteer the references tightly folded inside her pocket, but decides against it. Mrs Minchin is obviously prepared to believe the evidence of her own eyes and ears rather than the testimony of others.