‘Yes, yes,’ Miss Casey replied, though she staggered to a chair and sat heavily.
‘Are you sure, my dear?’ She allowed herself the endearment. Her elderly mother, a cranky invalid, couldn’t abide sweet talk, so Miss Quill had to practise using such intimacies. She felt Miss Casey’s brow, for her life as a tender made her vigilant about fevers.
‘Oh look at you,’ she said, ‘you’re quite done in.’
‘Really, Miss Quill, just a little stitch in my side.’
‘Once that’s all it is,’ she said.
‘What do you mean?’ Miss Casey said, rather sharply.
Miss Quill felt rebuffed, as if there was something unseemly about her concern.
‘You must be careful, Miss Casey, even strong healthy young women like you can fall prey to the consumption.’
‘Oh I’m sure it’s not that,’ Miss Casey said.
The invincibility of the young, Miss Quill thought as she turned away, but she would not offer the hand of friendship again.
As Bella’s waist thickened, her hearing seemed to multiply. She strained after each scuffle at the hall door, desperate that she might miss Nick if he paid a visit. She would often race down the three flights of stairs, convinced it was him, only to throw the door open on an empty street. When he finally arrived, so great was her relief she fell upon him on the doorstep, her arms clinging to his broad shoulders and her tears dampening his saucy tunic. Their breaths mingled in the frost-bitten air.
‘My, my, Bel, that’s quite a welcome for a chap.’
She disengaged immediately, relief giving way to dread for now indeed was the moment of truth.
‘Well,’ he demanded cheerfully, ‘aren’t you going to let me in? Or are we to conduct our business out on the street?’
She stood back and let him pass. He moved ahead of her, all clank and swagger. She followed with considerably more deliberation. When they reached her quarters, he sat magisterially at the table and surveyed her.
‘Got your letters,’ he said, ‘so what’s all the mystery?’
She stood before him, wringing her hands, not wanting to begin her dolorous confession for it was clear from his demeanour that he had no inkling. She did not know where to start or how to prepare him. She didn’t want to blurt it out all at once when he was hardly in the door.
‘I’d have come before but we were posted to the Curragh on training.’
He rattled on about the bleak accommodations in the Curragh, confined to barracks mostly except for long tramps on the plains, forced marches and a great deal of square-bashing.
‘Miserable spot if you ask me, in the back of God-speed, with too much nature for my liking and nothing in the way of entertainment for a chap bar a few dingy taverns and the natives are less than friendly, crowd of ragamuffins, surly and full of backchat. Why this one yokel threw down a challenge to me and Vizard. You remember Vizard, your friend Clarrie was quite smitten with him, not for his looks I’ll be bound, but he’s a steady type and an all-round good …’
She felt she had to stem the flow of talk.
‘Nicholas,’ she said with something of the schoolroom for he stopped immediately.
For a minute they were both stalled in an attitude of hideous silence.
‘Nicholas,’ she began again.
‘What is it, Bel? Spit it out, girl.’
‘I have something to tell you …’ Now that it had come to it, she couldn’t bring herself to utter it. She tried a different tack.
‘Do you notice anything different about me?’
‘What’s this Bel, fishing for compliments? You look just dandy to a man who’s been on short rations.’ He rose and moved to embrace her. ‘Why don’t we get reacquainted?’
He swung her round which made her feel quite dizzy and she had to raise her hand to get him to stop.
‘Please …’
This was no way to behave, to be so free and easy with his gestures as if all he needed to do was to appear and bob’s your uncle, as he would say. When all this time she had …
‘Is it your time?’ he asked. She was aghast at his familiarity with a woman’s biologicals and to talk about it openly!
‘For God’s sake, Bella, what the hell is it?’
He was riled up now – how else to explain his taking the Lord’s name in vain? She drew a deep breath.
‘I’m with child,’ she said.
‘Oh holy God,’ he said, ‘Sweet suffering Jesus!’
‘Nick!’
He fetched out his flask and took a deep draught.
‘How long?’
‘Nearly four months.’
‘There’s a woman I’ve heard of …’
She raised her hand to stop him.
‘Down there by Reginald Square, some of the boys have used her, very discreet and reliable … I’m sure I could scrape together a few bob ….’
How quickly he had reached for such a dastardly solution! As if she would even consider …
‘It’s too late,’ she said, ‘for that.’
He held his head in his hands.
‘What are we going to do?’ he asked, addressing the floor.
Here was the moment of truth. There was only one thing to be done. If she’d had dreams of a suitor dropping on one knee, then she would have been sorely disappointed with this betrothal scene. Luckily, she had not.
‘You’re going to have to marry me,’ she said.
BATTERSEA, LONDON, 1935
She had married a man who had destroyed every struggling gift she had had when her heart was young and her careless mind was blooming. He had given her, with god’s help, a child for every year, or less that they had been together. Five living, and one, born unsound, had gone the way of the young and good, after being kept alive for three years till it grew tired of the dreadful care given it, leaving her to weep long over a thing unworthy of a tear or a thought …
Seán lifts his hands from the keys and rips the sheets unmercifully from the mulish typewriter. Half the page stays on the roller forming a jagged horizon, the other comes away in his hand. He crumples it into a ball and flings it at the wicker waste basket, narrowly missing it. He takes his glasses off and snaps them shut. With that gesture, he is back in the world again. A strange slippage occurs when he writes. It’s not that he’s unaware of the passing of time. From his desk he can hear the mantel clock, its ticking magnified in the silence of the deserted flat. It isn’t that time slows up, exactly, but that the light of other days seems to creep in, making the present seem odd, dislocated. He is five floors up. He can distantly hear the sound of children, playing in the park opposite. At his window there is a wan sky aching to be blue and a weak sun, tumorous behind cloud. Inside, though, the airless gloom of the past holds sway as if what he’s written has bled not onto the page, but into the very room, fogging and clouding it. He cannot shake it off, the spell of it.
He is trying to write the story of his life, a portrait of the artist as a young man. But before the artist, there was the child, the father of the man. Long before he had been Seán O’Casey, scribe and playwright, he had been Jack Casey, the boy with two mothers. There was the woman who had borne him, who had, as far as he was concerned, blown the very life into him; her sheer will-power had sustained him as if the cord between them had never been severed. And then there was Bella. All airiness and wingéd ambition set beside his mother’s defiant certainties. What a beauty she had been! Something marbled about her skin; her scent, the cool blue of lavender. He can see her, in his mind’s eye, heading off to the teaching academy; dove-grey skirt, crimson cape, brooch at her laced throat, and his childish heart agape. That Bella cannot be resurrected. When he tries to call her up, it is the wretched Mrs Beaver who appears, the charwoman with the ruined hands, her palm always outstretched for coin, as if every penny weighed.
Raising Bella is like trying to polish silver. He rubs and buffs and polishes but what he comes away with is grime. He remembers as a child watching his mother buffing the tea ser
vice in the good room in Dorset Street. Once a month she would fish these yokes out of the sideboard in the front room and go through the sacred ritual. Exotic as chalices, they were, and twice as ceremonial. Were they even meant to be used, he wonders now. He remembers only one occasion. The chief cook and bottle-washer of the teaching academy was coming to visit, to discuss Bella going on to be a teacher. What a palaver that was – you’d swear it was the Queen of Sheba deigning to call. Bella had talked his mother into serving a silver tea. As three-year-old Jack Casey, still in petticoats, he had imagined the tea itself would sparkle. He was crushed to discover that the tea was the same tobacco hue as always.
The silver service was the stuff of treasure. Buried treasure, mind you. Never on show, pushed to the back of the sideboard. Exposure, his mother said, led to tarnishing.
Cleaning it was a filthy job. Swathed in a butcher’s apron, his mother would set to, hands mittened in newsprint, face clenched in sour disdain. She muttered to herself as she worked – a kind of peeved narration; was that where his writing started? – as if she could bully a shine from the duck-billed jug or the urn-like sugar bowl. Whether it was her words or her sweat, the end result was a surface so high it would give you back your own reflection, though the teapot’s belly was more fun-palace mirror than candid looking-glass.
It is one of his few memories of the large corner house on Dorset Street, three storeys of high ceilings and draughty landings. Any other impressions of it came through Bella. Fifteen years older than him, she seemed to have lived a lifetime before he came along. She would talk of their first home as if it were some kind of Elysium.
‘Pappie was the named leaseholder there, you know,’ she would declare as if this gave his poor Da some elevated rank. He could have told her that a leaseholder was no more than a jumped-up servant enslaved to a greedy landlord.
The provenance of the silver service was a matter of complicated pride. ‘Oh yes,’ she would say, ‘it was a wedding gift from the Archer side of the family.’ His mother’s people from Chambers Street, more prosperous than the Caseys, were prone to looking down their noses. That must be where Bella got the notions of grandeur. He remembered some years ago dining at Lady Astor’s and thinking how Bella would have loved it. It was a snazzy affair where the food was borne in on enormous silver platters. He’d contemplated nicking one in Bella’s memory. She’d always considered him light-fingered and the idea of posthumously proving her right appealed to him. (He was light-fingered though not in the way she’d suspected; he was a pick-pocket of the imagination.) How he’d have smuggled it out would have been another question. His greatcoat had been taken by a wing-collared flunkey at the door and he’d have needed a satchel to stow one of these monsters away.
Bella loved to inventory the treasures of No 85 – the veined fireplace in the front drawing room, the leafed mahogany dining table, the Chapell piano. A memory comes to him of pewter-coloured light, a high window, a brocade drape. He can feel the furry flock of it against his cheek. Or is that Bella’s dress, made of some purple stuff? She is at the piano, her hands travelling languidly over the keys like a woman in a Vermeer. She hummed when she played as if enraptured by some secret music in her head rather than the embroidered pages in front of her, while he squatted at her puckered hem, working the brassy foot pedals with his dimpled hands. A tiny puppet master, fingers in the dirt.
She was sister first, then nurse and teacher. When he and his brothers came down with scarlatina, it was Bella who ferried broth to them. The boys were pitched into the one room so as they would all come down with the dose at once. Enforced infection. Bella was the only one of them free of contagion. She’d had scarlatina as a child, though it was difficult for him to imagine that she had once been as poxed as they were. He remembered laying his fevered head on her breast and hearing through the pin-tucking of her bodice a silvery ticking. He imagined this was the sound of Bella’s heart. It was only afterwards he realized it was her teacher’s pin watch with the upside-down face he’d heard.
The watch marked time in the infant school. Muzzled light of a basement room with the mottled wainscot and the row of hooks for the children’s coats, fumes from the fire’s pot belly. Bella’s drawings on the wall – A is for Apple, B is for Ball – her mottoes on the board – A soft answer turneth away wrath. She passed between the rows of desks, a rustle of skirts fine-dusted with chalk, the pointer in her hand, though he never saw her use it. In that, she was like his father who had never raised a hand in anger. As a boy, he was parent-proud of Bella. His sister, the Teacher. Even when the other children teased him he didn’t care. He nursed a kind of devotion for her then, heart-scalding and helpless, that shamed him now as a greying man because it smacked of unrequited love. Made him out to be a fool. He shook himself; he would not dwell on it. Back to the fumy schoolroom … the reverend who taught Bible enters the class. Long string of misery he was. The plangent song of tables ceases. Bella raises her hands, palms up, and thirty smocked infants shuffle to their feet.
‘Good morning, Reverend Leeper.’ Greetings chanted as mournfully as evensong.
Bella constantly deferred to him. It was yes Reverend Leeper and no, Reverend Leeper, and three bags full, as she scurried to do his bidding. Maybe she nursed a fancy for him, because he was always complimenting her, making the children complicit in his flattery.
‘Aren’t you the lucky pupils to have such an accomplished teacher as Miss Casey?’ or ‘Miss Casey has done a fine job teaching you your hymns.’
Bella would blush and shake her head as if they were a courting couple. If only she had chosen someone like him … instead of the bloody Bugler, strutting about with his peacock swagger and a great welcome for himself. No, no, he wouldn’t squander his time on that waster …
He sits, scowling, before the empty typewriter, fingering the pages, snagged and wrinkled by the force with which he’s whipped them from the roller. When had it become so hard? It was not the first time he’d written about Bella. He’d put magpie variations of her in his plays. Dressed her up as flighty Nora Clitheroe, the nervous new bride in The Plough and the Stars and dressed her down for earnest Mary Boyle in Juno and the Paycock. He had used her prim righteousness – and those challenging breasts – for Susie Monican in The Silver Tassie. Her unaccountable heart he’d given to Minnie Powell. But he wasn’t writing for the stage now. There was no wand of drama, no costume of disguise to depend on. Now he was reduced to the facts of life and feet of clay.
A memory comes of Bella in her righteous prime. Remember that business with the dog when she was flinty as an executioner? His brother, Isaac, had picked up the mongrel, a stray he called Joxer. Wouldn’t the squireens in the dreaming spires just love it that a dog was behind one of his best characters? Joxer, the man, followed Captain Boyle around as slavishly as that dim, faithful mutt had shadowed Isaac. Isaac was his favourite brother, five years and two dead boys between them. They would go off down by the canal and spend hours throwing sticks for the dog. The creature must have been the runt of the litter, God knows, for he was a low-slung creature like a baby carriage with bockety wheels.
One day, Joxer went off on an adventure of his own and bit a child on Fontenoy Street. The irate father of the child came to the house to complain, accompanied by the hapless dog who had led him straight to their door. Bella answered and showed Mr Kirwan into the front room where his father was permanently stationed. He was sick then. In his memory, his father would always be ailing. Some words were exchanged and Mr Kirwan exited. When he was gone, his father ordered Isaac to fetch a sack from the coal hole.
‘Now, you know what you have to do.’
Snivelling, Isaac scooped up the luckless Joxer.
‘Bella, go with him. See that he does as he’s bid. And take Jack with you,’ Da ordered.
He had no idea what was in store. They all set off, Joxer tripping busily at his feet. When they got to the bank of the Royal and turned down on to the towpath, Isaac halted.
/> ‘Ah Bella, don’t make me do it, please don’t make me do it.’
‘Say goodbye to Joxer, now, there’s a good lad, and let’s get this business over with, Isaac,’ she said.
Isaac gave the dog a hug then bundled him into the bag. Bella lifted two large stones that lay in the scuffed grass near the bank. While Isaac held Joxer, wriggling in his hessian shroud, Bella loaded the stones into the bag and tied the knot fiercely.
‘Please Bella,’ Isaac begged.
‘It’s not up to me to grant a reprieve.’
How stern she was then about her father’s business. Isaac handed the struggling bag over and Bella slung it into the scummy water. Joxer set up a terrible yelping. They could hear his muffled death-throes as the bag sank into the dark.
‘Why are we leaving Joxer in the water?’ he asked.
‘Because Joxer has done a bad thing and must be punished,’ Bella said.
Then his father died, or they took him off. That’s how he remembered it. He was sent off to Mrs Tancred’s at the end and was having a high old time, so death was preceded by spoiling. Mrs Tancred had eggs every second day and bought him a hap’worth bag of aniseed balls at the dairy. But while he was away, they’d made his father disappear and in his place a waxwork was lying stiff on a bed of satin as if some ghastly trick had been played. When the time came to screw down the coffin lid, he was fetched in from the street where he was admiring the black-plumed horses and the crested carriage.
‘Time to pay your last respects to your father, now,’ Mrs Tancred said, catching him roughly by the arm and dragging him inside. She prodded him forward.
‘I don’t want to go near it,’ he said. This thing in the box was not his father. He made to run, but Mrs Tancred caught him in her ample grasp; gone now the dispenser of sweetness. He fought against her.
‘Put him down, Mrs Tancred, if you please,’ Bella said quietly.
‘I don’t want to, Bella,’ he said, catching a hold of her mourning skirts.
The Rising of Bella Casey Page 10