The English Daughter

by Maggie Wadey

  Sometimes William falls into an irritable-looking dream, standing with one hand cupping his elbow and the other loosely curled around a cigarette that has an unfamiliar, sweet scent. The scent lingers in the hall and dining room. Agnes finds one of the cigarette’s coloured paper and gold tips ground out on the path to the kitchen garden. She observes the young men as she goes about her chores and they, of course, observe her. William is heard to remark that she’s a huge improvement on his mother’s previous cook – a remark he makes before having eaten any of her food. But only one of the young men takes Agnes’s eye, not because he’s good-looking so much as because he’s the least arrogant of his companions, his voice is the quietest, and when his eyes rest on Agnes they do so with interest but no obvious sense of superiority. She learns he’s an Englishman, on his first visit to Ireland. So! she thinks, they’re not all like the soldiers in Puckaun. The men with sour breath, men she’d heard called ‘the scum of the earth’.

  There have to be oysters, apparently, oysters from Galway. Agnes is incredulous that anyone can eat the things. And cold beef. And trifle. Trifle with raspberry jam – no other will do. The fact is, there’s to be a ball, and Mrs Minchin is determined to make it the occasion of the decade. If the thirties is a time of anxiety and deprivation, her party will be remembered as a triumph over difficult circumstances. Everything and everyone is pulled into the gravitational field of her passion. Every lily, every rose, every branch of lilac in the garden is used to decorate the house: the ballroom, the dining room, the stairs, and the blue bedroom, which is to be put aside for the young women to use for their coats and to rearrange their hair. Outside, Chinese lanterns are hung in the trees and cushions placed on the stone benches. To Agnes, it’s fairyland. Far from feeling nervous about her own essential role in the proceedings, not a bit of it. She is protected by magic. Busherstown is under a spell. As twilight falls, the musicians arrive to stand in the glass porch that adjoins the ballroom to play the traditional reels and dances, many of which Agnes knows.

  In this lyrical setting, the behaviour of the young people is almost comically stiff. In an hour or so it thaws to positively liquid. Halfway through dinner the place erupts into a wet-napkin battle, set off by William hurling a champagne-sodden napkin at his favourite girl. In the garden, amongst the palely flowering hydrangeas, couples embrace, invisible in the darkness but for the men’s white shirtfronts – and, in one case, a soft white thigh and a man’s white buttocks. The young man’s companions – loudly condemning him for having forgot himself – rush at him and beat him across the backside with knotted napkins. The young women are as bad as the men. In the early hours they’re bundled away by their parents or chauffeurs, drunk and bedraggled.

  The pungent scent of exotic cigarettes drifts into the kitchen and seeps in under Agnes’s locked door to where she lies sleepless and rigid with disapproval. Footsteps softly approach her room, softly the door handle turns, but no one speaks. Soon comes the sound of footsteps stealing away again with a thud and a muttered curse as the man misses the last step down into the kitchen.

  William stays on just long enough to play at least two of his young women guests off against one another – inducing mild hysterics in their mothers. One day in the lull after lunch, the young Englishman with the quiet voice follows Agnes into the orchard. In his hand he has a box of those foreign cigarettes which he offers, opening the lid and saying, ‘Would you care for a cigarette?’

  ‘Not one of those, thank you,’ she says.

  She spoke quickly, softly, but the implication of what she said must have been clear because after a moment, he nods politely and goes away. Then a few days later he and the other young gentlemen leave. The staff have seen it all before. Agnes understands that her first impression of Busherstown – that in this house there were no shadows – was of course wrong. There’s not only the long-dead husband and the ‘queer’ younger son, but William is a womaniser. Not just that. Her brother Tom is, maybe, a ‘womaniser’, but William is heartless. As perhaps his father was, too? This understanding now lives side by side with the comfort Agnes herself takes from Busherstown and its owner.

  Shortly after William’s departure, Mrs Minchin goes away as well. It’s her custom to be away for a few days after William’s visits. Each time she thinks she won’t, but without him the house is intolerable. She becomes uncharacteristically short-tempered. Even Agnes gets the sharp side of her tongue for overcooking the beef. Vexed with herself, Mrs Minchin has Violet pack up in a hurry and dashes off in the motor to the railway station at Thurles, vanishing abruptly from the demesne in a cloud of dust and irritability, both of which take some time to settle. On these occasions she always, and with every sign of distaste, goes to stay with her sister in Dublin. Where Oscar is very much not welcome.

  When his mistress is away Oscar cries, real tears of grief, like a human. The gardener takes the creature by his black jowls and looking into his face says solemnly, ‘She’s gone away, your mistress has, and she’s not coming back.’ Oscar listens with his head on one side while fat, slow tears spill out of his black, wet-plum eyes and roll down his cheeks. He refuses food and by the second or third day his digestion is upset. He sits by the French windows sighing and farting, looking for his mistress, refusing to walk out even with Geoffrey, who has to tuck him under his arm and carry him into the orchard to do his business. The staff are beside themselves with laughter at the sight of Oscar squatting in the grass, his watery eyes turned up to his master who leans over him murmuring encouragement in vain until finally his patience runs out and, with a flap of his handkerchief, he walks away back to the house. In an uncharacteristic burst of alacrity, Oscar bombs after him. But too late. The French windows are closed on his sad little monkey-face.

  Mrs Minchin comes home with biscuits and chocolate for Oscar, and a new cookbook for herself and Agnes. Together they experiment with poached turkey served with celery sauce and duck with gooseberries. But Agnes knows her employer’s mind is elsewhere. Her own mother could at least count on Patrick, her first and favourite son, to stay and take care of the place and his parents. To keep going what they’d started. But William isn’t a man to count on. Agnes’s abiding image will always be that of her employer sitting in her chair in the drawing room turned towards the long south-facing windows, bathed in light like a TB patient. Yes, like a convalescent taking the sun for her medicine, her book face-down on her lap and Oscar asleep at her feet, waiting.

  Agnes is taken ill with excruciating stomach pains. Thinking it’s just especially bad period cramps, she prepares the evening meal as usual – duck, as it happens, with all the trimmings, followed by jelly with whipped cream as a treat for the elderly uncle – then she takes to her bed with a hot-water bottle. She suffers stoically through a sleepless night, enduring the extra discomfort of coughing in her smoke-filled room. But in the morning she’s unable to get out of bed. Violet runs to Mrs Minchin, and Mrs Minchin comes in to see her. She sits on the bed patting Agnes’s hand and murmuring, ‘Good girl, good girl. Now don’t fret, my dear. We’ll look after you.’

  The Minchin family doctor is sent for.

  Realising, presumably, that it’s not a family member he’s been summoned to see, Doctor Hough takes his time arriving. Agnes is awed to hear Mrs Minchin reprimanding him in a low voice outside her door. As the man unceremoniously draws back the bedclothes, Agnes closes her eyes. It occurs to her that he may have suspected she was ‘in trouble’. But within seconds it appears that her case is urgent. The doctor’s diagnosis is appendicitis with the complication of severe peritonitis. Agnes is wrapped in blankets and laid on the back seat of Doctor Hough’s car to be taken immediately to the hospital in Nenagh. Although the pain almost makes her pass out she doesn’t moan once. Violet begs to be allowed to accompany her, but Mrs Minchin refuses. The interior of the car smells of leather. It’s raining. As they drive, the slow windscreen wipers squeak and branches of overhanging trees scribble on the windows. In Nenagh H
ospital, a nurse injects Agnes with morphine and the surgeon informs her they don’t have the necessary equipment to operate. So, it’s into Dublin by ambulance, with a trainee nurse in uniform sitting beside her as they race through the darkening countryside. When the ambulance lurches from side to side, Agnes groans and the nurse taps crossly on the glass, but the driver ignores her signal. Perhaps he’s right. Agnes’s condition is potentially fatal and by the time they arrive in Dublin she’s unconscious.

  4

  Agnes is there in the Dublin hospital for five weeks – though whether this is in the winter of 1930 or at some other time I’m not certain, as I’m not certain of other things during this period when my mother was nineteen and my aunt Nancy would have been eighteen in the November.

  Agnes is in the smaller of two women’s wards and, during her weeks here, four women give birth, two die, and one has a visitation from the Holy Virgin which makes her sing, slightly flat, for twenty-four hours without stopping. Or perhaps Agnes in her delirium only imagines it. Throughout the five weeks she’s kept sitting up so as to drain the abscess in her abdomen. Until this has been done, and her temperature has returned to normal, the appendix can’t be removed. There’s a wooden bar across the bed to stop her slipping down. For the first week she’s on nothing but water, for the second, nothing but milk and fish. Her first cup of tea is ambrosia. It’s three weeks before she swings her legs over the side of the bed and shoves her feet into her slippers. Her shins are sharp as knives where the flesh has wasted away, her feet white as the feet of a corpse.

  A nun, scarcely more than a child, offers her a banana and has to show her how to open it. She tells Agnes her father is a sailor. The notes on the foot of Agnes’s bed describe her as ‘RC’.

  ‘What the heck does that mean?’ she asks.

  The child-nun laughs.

  ‘Why it’s for Roman Catholic, of course!’

  Agnes is indignant.

  ‘I’m not Roman,’ she tells the nun. ‘I’m from Tipperary.’

  ‘My dear, we’re all Roman,’ says the nun.

  One afternoon, Nancy comes to visit her. She looks different. She’s wearing a navy coat too big for her and she complains that Dublin is cold and unfriendly. ‘Fair city my backside!’ says Nancy and Agnes tells her not to make her laugh whatever she does or she’ll be in agony.

  ‘Is it splitting your sides you’re worried about?’ asks Nancy, and that does it, they’re off again.

  On Matron’s radio in the hospital they hear John McCormack singing ‘Panis Angelicus’ at the Pontifical High Mass in Phoenix Park, Dublin, to an estimated one million people at the beginning of the Eucharistic Congress. The sound of the Pope’s voice reduces half the patients and the nurses to tears. The sound of McCormack’s voice reduces all of them, even Matron, to tears. So my mother recalled it, though, looking up the date of this congress I see it was, in fact, in the summer of 1932, so perhaps my mother was confusing this occasion with some other Dublin visit?

  The nurses have slung a banner out of the hospital windows which reads ‘God Bless Christ the King’ and the woman in the bed next to Agnes remarks, ‘If it rains now, won’t He have brought it on Himself.’ Nancy visits Agnes every day but this doesn’t always cheer Agnes up as much as it might. Sometimes they just sit on the bed, hand in hand, in silence.

  At the end of the five weeks, Agnes’s aunt and uncle Buckley fetch her to stay with them in the city until she’s strong enough to travel home again. Aunt and Uncle Buckley have two boys and two girls and they live in north Dublin in a little brick house in a row of identical brick houses on Grenville Street, respectable but poor, its back turned, literally, on the warren of streets that lie behind it, between the Rotunda Hospital and the docks. Uncle Buckley does something on the railways – a job he’ll be lucky enough to keep until the Emergency – and leaves the house every morning wearing a grey uniform and cap which he and Aunt Buckley spend a lot of time getting just so at the mirror in the hall. Under his arm is a lunch box made of green plastic, the first time Agnes has seen the nasty stuff and she can’t imagine it will catch on. The bedroom window looks out on to the back of an orphanage – so called, but Agnes understands from her aunt’s expression that these children are born out of wedlock rather than orphaned, and in the mornings she sees the babies, like grubs in their wrappings, set out in rows on the porch in all weathers to take the air.

  On her first walk out, Agnes accompanies her aunt to the shops. Not to the grocer’s or the butcher’s, but along O’Connell Street and over the River Liffey to the fancy shops on Grafton Street. Her aunt doesn’t mean to buy anything, of course, only to indulge her greatest pleasure: window-shopping. Behind shimmering sheets of glass brilliantly lit treasures are piled high. The reflections of the two women graze amongst jewellery, cosmetics, hats, silver. Aunt Buckley’s wonder at these sights never fades, but Agnes tires easily after her operation. As they walk home they go along a crescent of massive old houses with black iron railings and steps up to front doors so huge they seem made for giants. Inside the houses, lamps have been lit but the curtains aren’t yet drawn. A woman stands under a chandelier as she works a pair of white gloves on to her hands, tamping them down between stiff fingers. On the floor of a bright nursery, a boy and two little girls in smocked dresses are doing a jigsaw puzzle. Briefly, aunt and niece duck inside the Church of Saint Audoen and Agnes, having nothing else, puts one of her gloves on her head as a token of respect.

  My own first memories of Dublin are of the canal at Ballsbridge in the winter of 1961. I associate it with the song ‘Moon River’ which was so popular that year you couldn’t get away from it, neither in London, nor Paris, nor Dublin. My boyfriend had a room in a boarding house that looked out on to the canal where swans came down on to the black water. I remember the icy-cold streets and the ice-cold, not entirely clean sheets on the bed. There were two sooty windows with thin curtains across them. In the room next door was a young man from Ballymena, in Northern Ireland, called Dermot. He tore shelves from the walls of his room to burn in order to keep warm. Like my mother on her first visit to Dublin, I was nineteen. Whilst waiting to go to university I was earning my keep – just – modelling, enough to buy a cut-price fur coat that had the barefoot street kids running after me.

  This was the first time I’d visited Ireland and I was there not because of my maternal connection to the place, not at all, but because my English boyfriend was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Dublin’s ‘Protestant’ university, founded by Elizabeth I in 1592. Catholics were told they were in danger of mortal sin if they attended Trinity. The year I was there, students at the Catholic University College still stood in prayer at the sound of the Angelus bell.

  Unlike my mother and her aunt, we didn’t window-shop on Grafton Street, and although I stayed for ten days I made little effort to explore the city or learn its history. I was beginning at that time to build a romance of Ireland, to relate to it as to another woman, always feminine, an outsider, outside ‘the establishment’, a country that had suffered contempt, domination and exploitation by England, possessed of a nature that was poetic, mythical and austere. Wild. The place my mother came from almost as mythically as Aphrodite had risen from the waves. That was the fanciful and only half-conscious picture I was building. I breathed in the atmosphere of the place but was happy to remain shockingly ignorant of what lay outside my own narrow sphere. Much of my time was spent in the college theatre, the Trinity Players, where my boyfriend was in a production of a play by John Mortimer. Either there or at the cinema, watching black-and-white movies of the nouvelle vague – those allowed past the Irish censors – Les Cousins, and Lift to the Scaffold – in which we found exquisitely moody and frankly amoral role models for our sexual and intellectual liberation. In the afternoons we made love in the damp bedroom, and at night we lay wreathed in Arabic music from Radio Cairo played by an Egyptian student in the room above.

  Like a whole lot of other people in our generation
– in every generation, perhaps – we thought we’d both invented and copyrighted sex, and the evidence that everyone else was at it like knives made no impression on us whatever – or at least not on me. We were the first and only and there was nothing in the least casual about it. It was the Garden of Eden. We were refusing to inherit our parents’ sense of shame. But, though we didn’t acknowledge it, we were still their children.

  Forty years later when – en route to Tipperary – I’m back in Dublin and, recalling my first visit to the city, I tell my friends there were two pieces of good news during that time: John heard that he’d won a scholarship to RADA, and I heard I’d finally passed my Latin examination, which meant I was going to be able to take up my place at University College, London, to read Philosophy. In that cold, glittery city, pockmarked with poverty, we celebrated. What I didn’t tell my friends was that, during that icy long-ago winter in Dublin, I also discovered I was pregnant.

  5

  The first night she’s home from the hospital, Agnes is woken by the sound of the fox barking. She thinks of the cold hillside and the animal’s body tensed in the dark. But when the bark comes again she realises it’s her mother’s cough, not coming from the other side of the bedroom wall but outside, in the garden, or on the lane. With a thumping heart, she goes to the window. She sees her mother walking up towards the cairn. Then a shadow moves out of the house immediately below. John is going quietly after his wife with her shawl over his arm.

  Inside the house everything’s exactly as it was but nothing’s quite as Agnes remembers it. Or maybe it’s not exactly as it was. Immaculately clean as ever, but the old sense of effortless good order has gone. Kate doesn’t bake her own bread any more and with so little sewing to do, sometimes in the evenings she sits by the fire with idle hands. On these occasions her eyes often come to rest on her husband with an odd expression, benign but curious, as if she’s never seen him before. With Pat and Agnes the only children left at home the place, like Busherstown, is full of silences and shadows. When they kneel for the telling of the Rosary, where there were eleven of them, now there’s only four – that is to say, there are four when Pat obliges them with his presence – like the survivors of some catastrophe.