The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘Come away out of that,’ he said. ‘Leave it be. It’s looters’ leavings. Some gurrier will be back for it, you can be sure, and we’ve had enough strife for one day.’

  But she could no more have left it than she could have abandoned a child.

  ‘Here,’ she said, looking hurriedly around her, ‘you catch it by the other end.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘We cannot leave it here like this. It’ll only get destroyed.’

  He looked at her aghast.

  ‘Are you mad, or what, Mam?’

  She was mad, maddened with desire, or greed. She was not even sure of the difference. Who knew what had taken hold of her, a respectable fifty-year-old widow eyeing up a piano in the middle of a battlefield and wanting it for herself.

  ‘Are you going to let your mother struggle with this alone?’ she demanded.

  Her voice came out shrill and panicky to her own ears. But it galvanised her son. He put his shoulder to the piano and none too gently began to push. The strings let out a timorous screech. With Valentine at one end and her at the other, they loosed the piano from the rut which had obviously defeated their thieving predecessors and with enormous effort, they levered it on to the kerb and got it rolling on its brass casters. Valentine set his shoulder against it and began to push. Mrs Beaver pulled from the front as if leading a reluctant beast. Every so often she would halt their progress. The strings would issue a celestial sigh of relief. She would lift the lid and check the shivering keys. Then she would throw her shawl over the top. It looked pathetic as if she thought this would disguise what they were at.

  ‘Ah Mam, give over with the inspections or you’ll get us killed,’ Valentine shouted at her. ‘Or bloody banged up in a polis cell.’

  His mother let the oath pass, a sure sign she was not in her right mind. She was forever chastising him for rough language. Twice he was sure he heard a policeman’s whistle but it was only the casters shrieking for want of oil.

  ‘We are like Sisyphus with his burden,’ his mother said between gasps of exertion. Valentine Beaver loved his mother, but sometimes he wondered if she was a bit soft in the head. As they heaved and pushed, he kept a scouring eye out on every side-street they passed for signs of the law. As if reading his mind his mother said: ‘If we are challenged, we will say that I am the Principal Teacher at the Model School in Marlborough Street and this here’s the school piano that we are trying to save from the ravages of war.’

  The notions! As if anyone would mistake his tenement-thin mother for a professional lady. One look at her dour, serviceable skirts, her speckled grey hair all awry and escaping from the grasp of a gap-toothed comb, her front tooth cracked where his father had given her a belt once, would give the game away. They rumbled their prize on. As they progressed, they had to halt several times for his mother was quite out of puff and it is heavy labour shunting a piano. The casters were wayward and apt to follow their own direction. No more than his mother. Each time they stopped, sweat pouring from his brow, he would beg, ‘Let’s leave it here, Mam, and be done with it.’

  But her only reply was to lean into the haunch of the damn piano as if she were involved in birth labour.

  They were not stopped, not by anyone in a uniform that is, though they got some queer looks from the few citizens they passed. As they travelled his mother seemed to grow bold, a haughty jib to her jaw, so by the time they’d made it to the Five Lamps, he swore she would have cowed any challenger with a mere look. He was never so glad to reach Brady’s Lane with all the doors thankfully shut for they would have faced the third degree had the neighbours been about.

  ‘Mam has entirely lost her wits,’ he declared as they struggled to push the Broadwood over the threshold. ‘She made me lug this yoke all the way from Mecklenburgh Street!’

  ‘Where’s the bread?’ Babsie enquired, arms folded in indignant fashion across her chest.

  ‘I’m hungry,’ Baby John wailed.

  But Mrs Beaver ignored both lamentation and rebuff.

  Once inside she examined the piano for signs of damage. It was a wretched and undignified way to treat a precious musical instrument, akin to violent assault, but it seemed to have escaped unscathed. She beckoned to Babsie and John to help her put the piano in place under the four-squared window that squinted on to the street. She stood back to admire it. Her very own piano, the sum of every fine and noble aspiration she had ever nurtured. She pulled up a kitchen chair and dredged up from memory Mozart’s Rondo Alla Turca. Her ruined fingers knew their way about though her swollen joints were rusty. She stumbled through to the end, her children clustered around her as if at a recital, but they were surly with puzzlement. This gaiety of their mother’s was a mood they did not know. When she had finished she eyed them fiercely, an expression they were more familiar with.

  ‘If anybody asks,’ she warned, ‘not that it’s anybody’s business, you can tell them this is your mother’s inheritance, do you hear?’

  ‘A likely story, Bella,’ her brother said coming upon the scene, for in her haste to get the piano safely housed, Mrs Beaver had left the street door open.

  Babsie stepped away from the piano. There’d be fireworks now, the girl thought. Her Uncle Jack and her mother were always at loggerheads. Like chalk and cheese, that pair. Her mother, proud, Protestant and loyal to the Crown, her uncle a Labour man, a nationalist, a spouter of Irish, even. And Godless with it, her mother would say. Babsie was surprised to see him for she was sure he would have been mixed up in the rising. Skirmish, she corrected herself.

  Her uncle was forever talking revolution, the workers throwing off their chains. She knew for a fact he’d been off drilling with the Citizen Army.

  ‘Are you not out with them?’ she asked him.

  ‘Ah no, Babsie … this whole business,’ – he jerked his head towards the street – ‘it’s a bloody folly.’

  Her mother’s hands had fallen to her lap. Like Babsie, she was waiting for the lofty condemnation that was sure to come. No matter what he thought of the rising, he would not approve of looting. He stood on the threshold of the cold room – no fire lit, no food on the table,

  ‘Don’t mind me,’ he said, ‘play on.’

  Her mother went back to the keys, reprising the Turkish tune. When she was done, Uncle Jack clapped his hands and let out a whoop of admiration. Then he began to laugh while Babsie and Valentine exchanging perplexed looks.

  ‘What’s the joke?’ Baby John asked.

  ‘Bella fiddles while Dublin burns,’ Uncle Jack said finally, still spluttering with laughter. Her mother made no response to the mirth at her expense.

  ‘Paradise regained, Bella, by hook or by crook!’ Jack tried again.

  ‘By crook,’ Valentine said, scowling.

  But even then her mother refused to be riled. She returned to her playing. A different tune this time, more sombre, a dead march tempo. Babsie flounced into the scullery to put the kettle on. It would have to be third-hand tea now from the last pot they’d brewed. Really, her mother was the giddy limit. Send her out for tea and she comes back with a blessed piano. And then she sits down and gives a recital!

  ‘The Moonlight Sonata,’ her mother announced.

  Valentine knelt before the hearth and tried to rouse a spark from the ashes. Baby John’s stomach grumbled. Mrs Beaver shut them out. Hang them all! Even her brother, once so beloved, trying to bait her on the doorstep. She concentrated on the creeping left hand, like the steady arpeggio of time. Once, she would have favoured the yearning right. She closed her eyes and let her creaking fingers lead her blindly back, back to the beginning of their story.

  ELYSIAN

  MISTRESS OF HER CIRCUMSTANCES

  Her mother, big as a house, was at the washboard in the scullery when her waters broke. She let out a piercing shriek. Bella Casey, two floors up, at the piano in the drawing room, paused, her hands frozen above the keys. It was a Chapell upright with turned columns and panels of fretted silk in the top door,
with the name Elysian carved in gold above middle C. At fifteen, Bella was squeamish in matters biological and irked at being kept from school. Especially since Aunt Izzie had agreed to be on hand; she had been a nurse tender and knew a thing or two about bringing babies home. But Bella’s mother was nervous of this birth; she had lost the two babies before to the croup. Bella, truculent, had spent the day trying to master the Moonlight Sonata. When she heard her mother first cry out, she sat for a few moments praying that this chalice might pass.

  ‘Bella!’

  There was no mistaking the summons a second time. Bella rose and made her way downstairs, full of dread. Her mother stood by the Belfast sink, hands doused in blue, clutching her belly and moaning like an Arab at prayer.

  ‘Get your Auntie Izzie,’ she commanded through gritted teeth.

  Aunt Izzie was somewhere in the upper reaches of the house.

  ‘Go,’ she said again as Bella stared at her mother and realised how very small she appeared and how very large the creature inside her must be and it drumming to come out. She had shot up that winter and found herself being able to look down on her own mother – a queer sensation.

  ‘What ails you, girl?’ Mother all but roared. ‘Go, would you?’

  Soon her mother would be felled like a tree, petticoats up about her and her privates all on show. There wouldn’t even be time to lead her to the bed where Izzie had laid newspaper to spare the linen. Bella wanted to flee. Luckily Aunt Izzie bustled in at that moment and took charge.

  ‘Water, Bella, if you please,’ she barked, ‘and plenty of it’.

  ‘That girl is useless,’ Bella heard her mother say as they set to about their sordid struggle. Mother yelling and Aunt Izzie shouting until their voices bled into one and then slowly, inch by bloodied inch – the head emerged, not like a child at all but like some… some thing, angry and inflamed, with Mother at one end clenching around her prize and Aunt Izzie at the other ignominious end trying to take it from her. And it was as if Mother wouldn’t let go and so the pair of them tussled like a pair of dogs over offal until Aunt Izzie won and Bella’s brother Jack was delivered on the floor of the scullery. Bella, blood-stained, sud-smeared witness, felt she had birthed the child herself.

  He was born with a caul. It was like a veil that covered his eyes. Straight after the birth, Aunt Izzie placed a sheet of paper over the baby’s head and peeled the caul away with her fingertips. The next day, rising prematurely from her childbed, Bella’s mother dispatched Izzie off with instructions to go down to the Seaman’s Mission on the Quays and sell it off. Bella’s father had already refused though he was in the way of going there whenever a big ship was in port to do his proselytising. His title at the Church Mission on Townsend Street was clerk but he was much more than a keeper of accounts. He taught Bible study on Sundays to working men and in the evenings he would often tramp around the docks with pamphlets culled from the tracts of the Reverend Dallas. The one who had ‘saved’ Pappie. Though Bella found it hard to believe, her father had been born a Romanist. He had devoted his life to repaying his debt to Reverend Dallas, despite the aggravation it caused him. On his rounds, people would spit at him and call him a souper. Ragged children – egged on by their mothers – would run after him in the street and chant ‘Go way, you dirty pervert.’ For that is what those ill-educated roughs called evangelicals. But her Pappie suffered their insults in silence. A soft answer, he would say, turneth away wrath.

  Aunt Izzie came back with two guineas for the caul. A certain Captain Boyle, bound for the Cape Horn, had purchased it believing it would save him from shipwreck and drowning.

  ‘It’s akin to Popery believing in such charms,’ Pappie had said, scowling as Mother pocketed the money.

  But then he cheered.

  ‘Now, David Copperfield,’ he mused, ‘he was born with caul and didn’t he turn out well in the heel of the hunt?’

  But so was Hamlet, Bella was about to say, since Pappie was calling on literature as witness. But she held her tongue. It didn’t do to boast idly of knowledge.

  Jack did not fall to the croup like the two before him for Mother watched him like a hawk. She rubbed tallow on his chest at the rumour of a cold. If she heard even the ghost of a cough she’d be off down to the apothecary on Talbot Street for a tuppence worth of squills. But in the end it was his eyes that came to scourge him. From the age of five he was tormented with trachoma and this led on to conjunctivitis. She and Mother tried to ease his pain with zinc and rosewater and poultices of tea-leaves. They took turns dousing his head in a bucket of cold water while trying to make sure his eyes were open – a certain cure, or so they said. He must have been the most baptised child in Ireland. And to add insult to injury, they had to bandage his eyes for left to his own devices he would have rubbed them raw. So the poor mite was often plunged into darkness. It was a strange cure, Bella thought, being made blind to prevent blindness. Her mother was at the end of her tether with him. Until she heard tell of a Dr Storey at the Ophthalmic Hospital by the back of Trinity College. He prescribed Golden Eye ointment which it was Bella’s job to apply underneath the child’s eyelids. The battles she had with him! She almost had to rope him down. Bella cared for all her brothers, of course she did. She was the eldest, she’d minded Mick and Tom and Isaac, she’d organized them and bossed them about, tied their shoelaces, wiped their noses. But she loved Jack. Maybe it was because she had seen him being born? That she had known him before he had opened his sticky eyes to the world, before he even knew himself? Or was it that she was tied to him by love and pain, in equal measure?

  Bella had gone as far as Fifth Standard in the Model School when Miss Arabella Swanzy suggested she go on to be a teacher. Miss Swanzy was the head governess of the Teaching College and called in person to press upon Bella’s mother the advantages a profession would bestow on a girl in her circumstances. That was how she put it – ‘her circumstances’ – even though Miss Swanzy was shown into the good room in No 85 and was plied with tea from the silver service. Mrs Casey was impressed with Miss Swanzy’s regal bearing and afterwards remarked on how clever she appeared.

  ‘Miss Swanzy said you’d have something solid with the teaching. You cannot be dismissed and the position takes a pension.’

  It seemed Miss Swanzy had said all the right things, Bella thought. Her Pappie was already converted. He had always taken a quiet pride in Bella’s achievements. Her mother was more impressed with the financial prospects though she nearly had a fit when she looked at the list of apparel Bella would need for the College.

  ‘One Shawl or Wrap, Two Hats, One Jacket or Mantle, One Ulster,’ her mother began, her tone laced with indignation.

  ‘Two Dresses, Two Outside Petticoats, if you please, Six Pairs of Drawers.’

  She paused there, for effect.

  ‘Four Bodices, Two Pairs of Gloves – One Outdoor Woollen, One Indoor White, Formal With Pearl Detail.’

  She paused again.

  ‘I ask your pardon! Pearl detail, did you ever hear the like?’

  ‘Now Sue,’ Pappie interjected.

  ‘Is it some class of Swiss Finishing School we’re sending her to?’ Mother went on, undeterred, and Bella feared her fate might be decided on the strength of a pair of blessed pearly gloves. ‘Sure this will cost a holy fortune!’

  ‘If this is what our Bella needs to get ahead, than that’s what she must have,’ Pappie said with the kind of firmness that put a stop to Mother’s grousing.

  ‘I only hope said pair of gloves will help her find a husband,’ she said, adding with a little touch of spite, ‘Miss Swanzy, I see, is on the shelf.’

  On Bella’s first night in the college, Miss Swanzy ordered that baths be drawn.

  ‘I don’t know what this is all in aid of,’ one of the other students said as they stood, two by two, with their towels and soap bars on the corridor.

  ‘Some of these girls,’ she said looking straight at Bella, ‘will never see a bath when they get out.’
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  How dare she, Bella thought, cataloguing in her head the appurtenances of home. The running water in the scullery, their own privy and two reception rooms with lace curtains tied with crimson cord, a horsehair sofa, a portrait of the Queen at one side of the mantel and a picture of Lord Nelson on his way to Trafalgar Bay on the other. But this haughty specimen could see no evidence of any of this in Bella; she saw only a scholarship girl, a charity case.

  ‘Excuse me, Miss Collier,’ Mildred Purefoy said before Bella had time to open her mouth. (It was the rule that the students should not use their Christian names with one another. It breeds informality, Miss Swanzy said.) Mildred was a Quaker, tall and beaky, who tried to be a peacemaker. ‘It doesn’t do to make such uncharitable judgements. We are all equal here, and more importantly, we are all equal before Our Maker.’

  ‘Don’t be preaching God to me,’ Prudence Collier snapped back. She was an ugly girl, Bella thought, ugly in nature if not in looks. ‘You, who goes neither to chapel or to church.’

  ‘Let us at least act like ladies, then,’ Mildred pleaded, ignoring the taunt.

  Of all of them, Mildred was the closest to that exalted condition. Her father held a high position in the Belfast and Oriental Tea Company and she would go on to be a governess to a double-barrelled family in Kildare.

  ‘Hark at her! Ladies, is it?’ Miss Collier tossed her brassy curls.

  The simmering row might have escalated had Miss Swanzy not intervened ushering Bella into a narrow cubicle. As she filled the bath and disrobed she felt a cloud of disappointment descend, mingling with the steam rising from the claw-footed bath. As a girl without sisters, she had hoped to find amiable companions among her classmates. Instead, on her first night, she had provoked bitter disagreement, without even having her own say in the matter.

  ‘A teacher,’ Miss Swanzy would intone, ‘must be morally above reproach.’