The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  ‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Just touch the side of the coffin so, and that’ll be your goodbye. And I’ll give your poor Pappie a last kiss from you.’

  She brushed her lips on his forehead; then she bent over the open casket. That’s when she became father and mother to him.

  He plays with his spectacles but doesn’t put them on. Without them, everything softens, mystifies. Out of the mist, she comes to him, cycling on a Shamrock Cycle, bought new from the factory. A gleaming black frame and shiny silver wheels that make a ticking sound. She pedals fiercely, her brow knotted, her skirts as ballast. She comes to a halt before him with a squeal of brakes, her booted toe decorously set on the kerb. She taught him to cycle on the footpath outside Innisfallen Parade. The bike was much too big for him and he had to stand up on the pedals while she steered from behind, her hand on the saddle springs.

  ‘Don’t let go,’ he cries into the wind, as he wobbles and weaves, his sticky hands trying to find purchase in the rubber stocks of the handlebars.

  ‘Look ahead of you,’ she admonishes, ‘look where you’re going!’

  He puts his glasses back on, settling them on the bridge of his nose, just in time to avoid the fall.

  The Queen’s Jubilee was Bella’s idea.

  ‘Jack would love the spectacle, Mother,’ she said, ‘and isn’t it history in the making?’

  History, he thinks, history is our undoing.

  He remembers his childish excitement, walking through the milling throng. Women in their Sunday best, youngsters straddled around lamp-posts like roosting crows, trying to get a better view. The crowds were four-deep along the procession route. They were crushed almost to extinction on Dame Street as the dignitaries rolled by. His mother and Bella had to crane their necks to catch a glimpse when all he could see were backsides.

  ‘Let’s try to get to the front,’ Bella said.

  ‘I hope you haven’t led us into danger,’ his mother replied as they squirmed through the crowd, each one manacling him, a wrist apiece.

  ‘Ah Mother, sure isn’t it all good-humoured and no sign of those ruffians who threatened to spoil the day.’

  The ruffians would become his crowd, who wanted to break with the Crown. But that is later, much later. He mustn’t contaminate his story with afterthoughts for if he can’t find himself as a child, how will he ever find Bella?

  She is there, one minute holding him by the hand, and the next gone, the connection broken, his hand flailing in thin air as he is lifted off his feet. Unmoored, the ground sickeningly receding, his boots skeetering and rasping on the cobbles but finding no purchase while the crowd swells and surges, as if a great wind has swept through them. He’s clawing at coat-tails but there is nothing to cling on to. Beneath him, he can hear the scrape and shuffle of hobnails though he can find nowhere solid for his own feet. He raises his eyes to the blue pocket of sky that was there a minute ago, but all he can see are ballooning banners, and in his ears, the smacking stammer of bunting, a blaring brassy din.

  ‘Bella!’ he manages to cry out as he begins to sink.

  ‘Mind the child, lads, mind the child,’ someone says. Then suddenly he is being scooped up. His mother elbows her way in, freeing up a necklace of air. She catches him and hoists him on her shoulders. He is above the crowd that almost closed over him.

  ‘I have you,’ she says examining him fiercely for marks, ‘I have you now.’

  And then Bella is by their side, all breathless.

  ‘Look, look,’ she says.

  She’s pointing at the soldiers filing past, a blaze of colour, a regiment of crimson and white, the chestnut sheen of horses, the fluttering of plumage.

  ‘See, look, it’s the Liverpools,’ she says, jubilant.

  ‘Where did you get to?’ his mother demands. ‘The child was nearly trampled to death while you were busy having your head turned.’

  ‘There he is!’ Bella says.

  He follows her finger, peering intently. He’s always afraid he’ll miss something on account of his eyes.

  ‘There’s who?’ he asks.

  ‘Corporal Beaver, of course! Doesn’t he look a picture? Wave to him, Jack, so that he may see you.’

  But they all look the same to him. Then one detaches himself, a brash-looking fellow with shoulder taps and a bugle, who delivers a saucy wink in their direction. Bella hallooes and waves back. Something childish within him curdles.

  *

  ‘Mother says you have a puncture,’ Isaac said. ‘We’ve come to mend it.’

  They trooped into the gloomy hallway of Dominick Street. Leaves scampered in behind them. Bella tried to whoosh them out with her foot.

  ‘The Reverend will be on to me about that. The hallway, Miss Casey, must be kept spotless at all times,’ she mimicked. ‘It is the portal of the school and must speak of cleanliness and Godliness and not reek of the tenement.’

  She danced with the whirling leaves.

  ‘Oh bother, let them blow in,’ she said. ‘What difference does it make now?’

  Now.

  She took Isaac out into the yard where the forsaken bicycle was slung against the wall with a front tyre as flat as a pancake.

  ‘I think it must be a slow puncture,’ Bella said with some deliberation, ‘for I always avoid sharp glass on the setts.’

  ‘Sure, what would you know about punctures, fast or slow?’ Isaac scoffed. He flicked the pedal shaft around with his foot. It whined unmercifully. ‘And you haven’t been too busy with the oil neither.’

  ‘The smell of it makes me bilious,’ Bella said.

  ‘What you need, Sis, is a man about the house,’ Isaac said with the air of an expert. ‘What about his nibs, the drum major?’

  There he was again, the Bugler Beaver.

  ‘Would you prefer I’d wait for Nick who would gladly do it for nothing,’ Bella said.

  Nick, when had the Bugler become Nick? The devil incarnate.

  ‘You know the drill, Jack, a pair of forks and a basin of water,’ Isaac said throwing off his jacket and rolling up his sleeves as if he were a field surgeon about to perform an amputation.

  ‘It doesn’t take two to do the job,’ Bella said, ‘Jack’s coming with me. We’ll put the kettle on and when the job is done you can come up for tea and gur cake.’

  He was torn. He liked to be a party to whatever capers Isaac got up to. It was Isaac who would bring the stage to him; amateur theatricals at the Coffee Palace, loud rehearsals in the front room. Without him, there might never have been a Seán O’Casey.

  ‘Oh,’ Isaac sang, ‘who’s the little sissy boy?’

  ‘There’ll be plenty other punctures to be mended,’ Bella said, ‘but there mightn’t be shop-bought cake the next time you call.’

  She took his hand in hers. As they climbed the stairs to her quarters she began a kind of plain chant.

  ‘Remember the day …’ she started and recounted how she had seen him come into the world, how she’d rocked him to sleep, bathed and bandaged his eyes, taught him his alphabet. She made it into a soothing litany, a crooning lullaby. He’d thought it strange then. Now he saw it as a kind of valediction. Lest he forget. And he hadn’t, had he?

  The day she came home with the announcement, he had listened in at the scullery door. A boy could learn more from eavesdropping, particularly with Bella and his mother. Pregnant silences often fell when he was between them. His mother was baking currant bread and had just put the cake in the oven so the sweet pungency of rising dough swelled in the house.

  ‘You are to be married, Bella, is it? And when is the happy day?’

  He knew from his mother’s tone that this was not good news.

  ‘We were thinking March.’

  ‘So soon? What’s the rush?’

  ‘The Liverpools are to be sent to Aldershot …’

  ‘If your father were here to see this day …’

  ‘Don’t bring Pappie into this,’ Bella said in a beseeching tone.

&nbs
p; ‘What about your job? And your pension? Is all that going to be thrown over for a little drummer boy?’

  ‘I can teach after I am married. Anyway, won’t Nick look after me?’ Listening outside the door, he pictured Bella, a glittery hardness to her eye.

  ‘As he has done already?’

  There was some movement from within, the stifling of tears, he was sure. Bella seemed to be forever dissolving these days.

  ‘And you can stop your snivelling right now, milady, for you’ll get no quarter from me. To think that you have the gall to march in here and expect my blessing, is it?’

  ‘Mother, please …’

  ‘And what about your music? And your French? They’ll be of no use to you when you’re plain old Mrs Beaver.’

  ‘I don’t know so much about that, after all isn’t Nick something of a musician himself?’ Bella shot back.

  ‘A few rattles on a drum and a couple of bugle calls?’ He could see his mother’s curled lip.

  ‘A girl should give up a lot for love,’ Bella said.

  ‘Seems to me, milady, you already have.’

  There followed weeks of staccato argument. Bella rehearsing her defences. ‘He’ll steady after marriage’ or ‘It’s not the learned that always make a woman happy’ while his mother clattered at her chores, making her own pronouncements. ‘He drinks too much.’ Or ‘You weren’t brought up to give yourself to a man like him.’ They were like angry birds, pecking over the same stretch of winter ground.

  When the time came he played wedding attendant though he was forbidden to attend the ceremonials. On the morning of the wedding, while Bella arrayed herself for the bridal, his mother stayed in bed with the door firmly shut. The house seemed empty with Mick and Tom away in colours and Isaac at work. So it was left to him to haul out the tin bath and set it down in the parlour. He helped Bella fill it to the brim, staggering beneath the weight of the big cauldron boiling on the stove.

  ‘Like the witches in Macbeth,’ she said as she hefted down the pot to fill the bath. ‘Off with you now, while I go through my ablutions.’

  When she was done, she called out to him, skulking in the hall, to bring the towel. When she rose from the waters, he caught a glimpse, damp flesh, globe of breast and tufts of … like Botticelli’s Venus.

  ‘Turn your back and shut your eyes,’ she commanded, ‘till I have myself covered.’

  He inhaled the waft of perfumed soap, heard the chafing of the towel against her skin, the shrug of her chemise and the flounce of petticoat, the laborious fastening of stays.

  ‘Alright, you can open them now.’

  She was barefoot still. It excited him, as if he had seen her naked. She rolled on her stockings, one leg hoiked on the chair, and then the other.

  ‘Fetch me my dress,’ she said, ‘and don’t be standing there gawping. It isn’t polite.’

  It was an Empire line, indigo blue. The fabric chattered at her neck and whispered at her hips as she pulled it on. Next her hair had to be tamed, the only unruly part of her, if you didn’t include her heart. She let him brush it, static sparking from his hundred strokes, before she deftly plaited it in a barley twist at her neck. She lifted her hat from a milliner’s box that read Madame Felix, the letters in raised gilt so you could read them with your fingers. The hat was made of soft crimson with a single white feather. Using the mirror over the mantel, Bella tilted it this way and that until she was pleased with the effect. She powdered her cheeks, then coloured her lips with a slash of vermilion and smiling coquettishly at herself, she caught his eye in her reflection.

  ‘What do you think?’

  But what did it matter what he thought? None of this was for him. Her mind was racing ahead to her wedding day, and the night that was to follow with Lance Corporal Nicholas Beaver. ‘Cat got your tongue?’

  She stooped to lace the silk ties on her beaded ivory shoes. She threw her coat on, placed a scent bottle of lavender in her muff and put on her pearly gloves, the ones from the Teaching College.

  ‘Something old,’ she murmured. ‘Oh, but I’ve nothing borrowed. Can you lend me something, Jack?’

  What had he to give her? He rummaged in his pocket and drew out a farthing he’d kept back when his mother had sent him for the messages. He placed it in Bella’s gloved palm. It left a little smudge from the grit of the street.

  ‘So you see, you’ll be at my big day, after all, no matter what Mother says!’ she said loudly for the benefit of the closed door.

  *

  The day after the wedding, the newly-weds came to visit. Bella was still in her wedding finery, the Bugler in his dress-up gear.

  ‘Sit down, Corporal Beaver,’ Ma said.

  ‘It’s Nicholas, Mother,’ Bella said. ‘He’s one of the family now.’

  Tea was poured. The remnants of the good china had been brought out, the silver service having been long ago pawned.

  He remembered sidling by the door but he wouldn’t set foot in the room. For though it was the same Bella standing there, in the same clothes he had seen her don the day before, she had been altered, somehow, by the wedding he hadn’t seen. Overnight, she had a wifely tilt, like Mrs Tancred, as if the sister in her had been chased away. It made him shy of her. He’d had another bout of his eye trouble and was wearing a bandage over his left brow. Who would bathe his eyes now, he thought, or apply the Golden Eye ointment?

  ‘Is it your eyes, pet, are they troubling you?’ Bella asked. ‘Why don’t you shake hands with Nicholas, for he’s your brother-in-law now.’

  The Bugler rose.

  ‘Put it there, Sonny,’ he said, offering his hand. Seeing Jack’s piratical tourniquet, he added. ‘Me and Bel will see to it that from now on you’ll not go short of anything.’

  Bella and I, he thought, expecting Bella to correct him. She made no exceptions for bad grammar. But there was no word of reprimand for the Bugler. Reluctantly, he offered his hand. The Bugler crushed it so firmly he heard his own fingers crack.

  ‘Don’t fret about that, Mr Beaver,’ his mother said icily, refusing the Bugler his rank, ‘I’ll see to it that the boy is provided for, thank you very much. For it’s a poor thing to have to depend on anyone.’

  But they had always depended on Bella. Hadn’t they lived with her, shared her quarters above the school on Dominick Street? Hadn’t she given him the benefits of her book learning, her Shakespeare, the movements of the heavens?

  ‘We were thinking of going out to Bray,’ Bella said. ‘We thought it would be nice for Jack to come along. Wouldn’t you like, that, Jack?’

  ‘I don’t know if it’s suitable,’ his mother said, ‘with a pair of honeymooners.’

  ‘The fresh air would do him good, for his lungs and such.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with his lungs,’ Ma replied.

  ‘We haven’t much time, Bel,’ the Bugler said. ‘If we’re to catch the next train.’

  You have all the time in the world, he thought savagely.

  ‘Anyway, his eyes are too bad altogether,’ his mother said.

  The conversation went on above his head.

  ‘I don’t want to go,’ he announced to silence them.

  Bella knelt down and caressed his cheek. ‘Wouldn’t you like to go on the train and see the sea? And there’d be donkey rides and all.’

  ‘I don’t want to see the old sea,’ he replied, jutting out his lower lip.

  ‘Of course, you do,’ Bella coaxed. Then she whispered into his ear. ‘Don’t you want to come and paddle in the pools that are left when the tide goes out? Just you and me.’

  Even then, he only half-believed but he nodded his assent.

  ‘There,’ Bella said, casting a victorious look in Ma’s direction, ‘that’s more like it.’

  ‘We should be off …’ the Bugler said.

  ‘He can’t go looking like that,’ his mother said, ‘look at the state of his hair.’

  ‘Like the quills of the fretful porcupine,’ Bella said. Hamlet, he recog
nised now, though not at the time, when no one understood, particularly not the Bugler. Even at ten he read better than his brother-in-law who could manage the newspaper but only with his lips moving. A clean collar was fetched. Then his mother took out a brush and attacked his hair.

  ‘Stand still, would you?’ his Ma said as he squirmed and let out a yelp. ‘I hope, Bella, you’ll be able to keep him in check on the train.’

  ‘Nick will hold his hand, won’t you, Nick?’

  ‘Only if he’s a good boy,’ the Bugler said. ‘All I can say is that he’s the fortunate fellow to have a sister like you, Bel.’

  Bel. That was not her name. Her name was Bella. Beautiful bees, eloquent elles. Bel was hard and sharp and flat. Dolorous as the call of church or schoolyard. Overnight, the Bugler had stripped her name of music.

  When they got to the station, the Bugler peered through the porthole of the ticket office and slid the coins into the scooped hollow set into the wood like the bowl of a silver spoon. The clerk peered over his spectacles and spotting him said. ‘And will you, young fella, be following your Da into the colours?’

  But he’s not my Da, he was about to say, when Bella did not put the clerk right. He felt tears brimming. I will not cry, I will not cry.

  The Bugler palmed the tickets and led them down on to the platform.

  ‘Which carriage?’ the Bugler asked. But he would not play that game. He would not be diverted from his pain.

  No sooner were they settled in, than the train gave a terrific lurch and let out a dry squealing retch. The carriage juddered catching them all unawares, throwing the Bugler and Bella together. The Bugler nuzzled into Bella’s neck.

  ‘And how’s my little wifey?’ he whispered.

  ‘Give over, Nick,’ she said, ‘not in front of the child.’ As if he couldn’t see, as if his being there made no difference at all. The Bugler sighed extravagantly and leaned back against the seat, holding Bella’s hand firmly in his lap. As if he owned her.

  ‘Look,’ Bella said when they reached Booterstown, ‘at the birds wheeling over the marsh.’ But he only saw flecks of smut, tossed about by the wind.