‘We’ve a real scrubber in the family now,’ Mick said.
Why Tom should fasten on to such a specimen, Bella had no idea. If Mary had had a slender heel or a fiery spirit, she might have understood.
‘Is there not a nice Protestant girl out there you could marry?’ she asked Tom for she happened to be in Abercorn Road when he brought his prospective bride around to meet Mother.
‘Ah Bella, don’t be like that,’ he hissed at her. ‘I thought you, at least, would not be so quick to judge.’
They sat all together in the front room. Mary in her caved-in hat and egg stains on her bodice, her paw clasped around a glass of beer, for Tom had brought drink in the hope of lubricating the occasion. But even so, it was hard to get a word out of her, bar yes and no, though Bella tried.
‘And where is it you’ll live after wedding?’ she asked Mary.
Mary stared glumly at Bella with her one good eye. Her expression − a mixture of timidity and obstinacy − Bella remembered from backward children in the schoolroom.
‘Don’t mind her, Mary,’ Tom reassured her, ‘Bella’s not the sergeant-major she appears.’
The girl smiled tightly with downcast eyes, fingering her mouse-brown hair.
‘Now Bella, don’t be giving her the third degree.’
‘I was only making conversation.’
But it appeared that this was another social grace Mary Kelly lacked.
‘We’ll be moving to Richmond Terrace, a grand place, isn’t it, Mary?’ Tom said airily.
Mary nodded dully.
Poor Mother, Bella thought. Richmond Terrace was a stone’s throw from Mother’s old place on Hawthorn Terrace. The houses there had the same brown stone, large bay windows and pretty little gardens. If anything, they were bigger and airier. Bella knew what her mother would be thinking. As they moved down, the likes of Mary Kelly was moving up.
A LOST BOY
Bella arrived at Mother’s one Monday morning with a basket of washing and little Nicholas in her arms. She hallooed a greeting as she climbed the stairs as much to warn off the Shieldses downstairs as to alert Mother of her arrival. Jack was in the front room, as usual, the door left ajar. For months now he had been studiously ignoring her on her visits, keeping to himself and his books. She halted on the landing and set the washing down. She sent Nicholas tottering towards the kitchen. Enough, she thought, I have been punished long enough and for a crime not of my doing. This fight had not been with her, but with Nick and she was tired of tip-toeing round it. She would have it out with Jack once and for all. She peered through the crack in the door to see where he was in the room. There was the sound of lapping water and she saw that the hip-bath had been set down before the hearth. He must be at his ablutions. She made to step away but just at that moment, Jack rose out of the water. For the first time since he was a child, Bella saw him naked. She lingered, gazing at him through the aperture. These very limbs she’d washed, this chest she’d swathed in soap, this hair doused, these eyes bathed, and yet she could not take her eyes off him. Her face was afire – not because she was unused to nakedness for when you are a married woman there is not much novelty in that – but because she was viewing her brother as a man, as if in that moment he had sprung full-grown into manhood. She could not stop from looking. What was wrong with her, roused by the sight of her naked brother? She, who had once been so high and mighty in her purity, awash now with a strange glow that made her more mistress than mother, more slattern than sister. This body is but the physical self, Bella, she admonished herself, only the shell we inhabit like the creatures scuttling on the sea bed. She had gazed too long and it had alerted him. Jack hurriedly cloaked himself in a towel.
‘Who’s there?’ he called out.
‘It’s me, Bella,’ she called out as she rapped on the door. ‘Are you decent?’
To hide her own shame.
Dia dhuit, he chanted when she entered. There he was again spouting his new Gaelic lingo. Conas atá tú?
He wore the towel around him like some savage in a grass skirt.
Tabhair póg dom, he said with a cheesy smile and when that elicited no response he reverted to the vernacular.
‘Is it yourself?’
She bristled, but at least, she thought, they were talking.
‘And who were you expecting? The King of England?’
‘I’d sooner have Cathleen Ní Houlihan,’ he replied, fishing up his shirt and shrugging it on.
‘And who’s she when she’s at home?’ Bella said. She was piqued by his cryptic talk, half-English and half this other peasant patois but they seemed to have fallen into conversation as if there had never been any trouble between them.
‘Heard a bit of news that might interest you,’ he said, pulling on his trousers. She averted her eyes, as much a show of modesty for herself as for the sake of decorum. ‘Remember that Reverend of yours?’
She blushed to the roots of her hair. The possessive haunted her. Not mine, she wanted to say, not mine.
‘What’s his name, now?’ Jack was musing as he buttoned up his shirt.
Superstition would not allow her to supply the name.
‘Ah, you know him, the curate in St Mary’s.’
Still, Bella would not utter it.
‘Leeper,’ he said saving her, ‘that’s it!’
‘What of him?’ she asked, his name producing the old leaden feeling of dread.
‘Poor devil,’ Jack said.
A surge of relief ran through her.
‘Dead?’ she prompted. Let him be dead, she wished, then I would be free, my sins washed away. She wanted the sentence to be pronounced not once, but twice.
‘No, no,’ Jack said, tapping his temple, ‘something gone in the upper storey.’
‘What happened?’
‘He lost the run of himself completely – started pressing himself upon some young teacher at the school. She reported him to the Board.’
‘You don’t say,’ Bella replied, for despite the blood thrumming through her veins, she wanted to maintain the appearance of disinterest. But in her heart she was exultant. ‘He’s been removed,’ Jack was saying but she paid no more attention. The Devil mend him, she thought savagely. Not dead, then, but the next best thing. She was jubilant. She showed no mercy even in her private thoughts. She thought only this – now, at last, I can be free of him.
It was shortly after this that little Nicholas began to fail. He had been a very starling of a child with a mop of black birth hair. He was small and a little jaundiced on delivery but he had come without a doctor, suckled well and appeared to thrive. The illness started with his being out of sorts and not interested in eating but Bella did not pay that much mind. Then all he wanted to do was sleep. She would rouse him with the others in the morning but he crawled on to the sofa after breakfast and was deep in slumber by the time she had packed the older ones off to school. For several days he stayed drowsy like this, but his trouble seemed so vague she did not worry. It was a bit of a blessing, for he was at that age when he was stuck in everything, burrowing under her feet, or gathering her pot lids and clattering them together as if he were in a recruiting band. Some small fever, she thought, for he was a little hot and bothered. If it had been croup or scarlatina, she would have known the signs, but there was nothing to report bar this listlessness and a cloudy look to his eye. There were little spots of copper-coloured rash too, but she paid no heed to it. Hadn’t she taught whole classrooms of infants, their faces blossoming with roseola? When he started refusing his food she determined to take him to the dispensary, but Nick put her off.
‘He probably got into the bird feed and made a pig of himself.’
She decided to take him into their bed, nonetheless. Nick did not approve.
‘What if you overlay him in your sleep?’ he asked for such a thing had happened to his mother who suffocated a new-born in that manner.
‘Our Nicholas is too big for that,’ she told him, ‘it would take a whale to s
nuff the life out of him.’
‘That’s all very well, Bel, but the marriage bed is no place for a child.’
And by that he made his meaning clear.
There were times when Bella had to submit to Nick’s demands when she had not much mind for them. Having borne five children, her desires ran to the simpler pleasures of unmolested rest and dreamless sleep. But a man’s appetite remains youthful for longer and Nick would have his way. She would never refuse him, if only for the memory of her youthful surrender and how it had saved her. She had never been one of those women who stared up at the ceiling finding maps of Corsica and Spain in the stains there, while their husbands satisfied their marital entitlements. There was a tender place in the nape of her neck – she often thought it the last seat of her innocence, a location untouched, unseen by others – that if Nick were to press his lips to, she would find herself melting … Was that what made her go against her better judgement that night? If only she rightly knew. What made her lift Nicholas from the hollow of their bed and place him back between his brothers when it came time to sleep? What sweet word or inflamed need of Nick’s persuaded her to abandon her baby in favour of the marriage contract? The pity of it was that afterwards, Bella could not remember how it came about; she could only remember the consequences.
She rose in the graveyard hours to check on Nicholas and found blood streaming from his nose. It took an age to staunch the flow. When she had, she bundled him tightly in a shawl and went straight to the doctor’s house on Rutland Square, by-passing the dispensary which would not be open at this hour. And even if it were, she would only be given a red ticket and made to wait. It was gone the time to be quibbling over a doctor’s fee. It was an ungodly hour to be knocking on a door with a shiny plate outside but she did not care a jot anymore. The fierceness of mother love overtook her and turned her docile nature suddenly, if belatedly, pugnacious.
She had visited Dr Phineas Wood once before with Babsie when she’d come down with the croup, remembering how quickly a child could succumb to that dread disease from her two dead brothers long ago, and he had not let her down. This time a maid opened the door after she had rapped fiercely several times.
‘Is the doctor at home, Miss?’ she asked but she didn’t wait for an answer for Bella knew by the cut of her she was ripe for refusal. She marched past her into the dim hallway.
‘This child needs attention,’ she said, ‘go and get the doctor directly, if you please.’
Nicholas stirred in her arms. The maid scurried off. If God would only spare her son, she prayed, she would never … The doctor appeared from the back of the house, crumbs on his vest, his cravat crooked from being hurriedly put on.
‘What’s all of this, now?’ he said, lifting his fob watch from his vest pocket and consulting it like a railway inspector. He was put out by being called from his breakfast.
‘It’s Mrs Beaver, Sir,’ she said. ‘This here is my Nicholas, he’s been poorly for days, sleeping all the time, and now this …’ She gestured to the blood on her breast, the child’s laboured breathing.
The doctor peered darkly at Nicholas’s face.
‘Why was this child left so long?’ he asked sharply, narrowing his eyes suspiciously. And what could Bella say? Because I would not stand up to my husband? That was no excuse.
‘Well?’ he demanded, no longer the kindly gent, but the judge and executioner.
‘I thought,’ she began, ‘I thought he was just off his food, maybe his teeth. I thought it might pass … He’s always been so strong, never sick a day in his life.’
She could hear the feeble pleading in her voice as if Dr Wood stood in for God and she was begging for his absolution.
‘This rash here, how long has the child had it?’
Before she could reply, Nicholas came alive in her arms, his eyes wide with astonishment. His face turned puce, his little body went rigid. He flailed in her grasp like a slippery fish. If the early part of his illness was marked by acquiescence, this part was swift, noisy agony. He wailed and thrashed and screamed as if possessed by an evil spirit and then as suddenly as it had started, his animation ceased and he lay quiet again. The convulsion over, the doctor tried to prize him from Bella’s arms.
‘Hand him over, Mrs Beaver,’ Dr Wood said. ‘He’s gone.’
‘Gone?’ she repeated dully. She tried to waken Nicholas, shaking his damp head, crushing her lips to his mouth.
‘You’re a doctor, do something,’ she screamed.
‘Mrs Beaver,’ the doctor insisted. ‘God has come for him …’
‘No!’ she cried as the two of them tussled over the child. ‘No! Is it that I did not come in time, is that it?’
‘Mrs Beaver, it would not have mattered when you came, this child was doomed from the start.’
She relinquished her hold then, remembering before the blackness took hold that not so long ago she had wished Leeper dead. Now she had been sent the cup of her deserving.
He couldn’t be sure since he’d never had the chance to examine the Beaver child. And then the mother fainting clean away like that. The maid examined her person but she carried no identification, so Dr Wood had to consult his files to find an address for her. Didn’t the woman say she had brought another child to him? But that child only had the croup; he’d known how to treat that. The maid had to be sent to summon the husband while he lay the dead child on the ottoman in the hall. He saw to Mrs Beaver with some smelling salts. But when she came to, she made strange with him, beating at him with her fists and mistaking him for someone called Leeper. He had the damnedest job trying to control her. The husband came then – a healthy looking brute, despite it all – and he had to be told. The maid, on instruction, had only said there was an emergency. So there was a distraught wife and a dead son for Mr Beaver to deal with, and between the jigs and the reels, Phineas Wood couldn’t bring himself to ask medical questions in the midst of all that grief. So he wrote convulsions on the death cert. It wasn’t a lie. That’s what had killed the boy, regardless of what had led up to it.
THE BALLSBRIDGE EXHIBITION
The girls were abject at the loss of Nicholas. Susan and Babsie had doted on him, vying with one another to have him sit on their laps and bringing him out on the street to show him off in his best petticoats. James did not make much remark about the passing of the baby; Nicholas had been too small to play taws or climb trees or skim stones on the canal. But Valentine, being closest in age, was baffled by his absence. He searched the house for days convinced that his little brother had gone to play the hidey game and was still undetected in a musty, overlooked corner. But after several weeks, even he gave up the ghost. There was no such surrender for Bella and Nick. The dead child weighed, heavy as an anchor. It was as if Nicholas still lay there on the sheets, in the hollow of their bed, his cries lingering in the night as if in protest at the selfish embraces that had dislodged him, while they had attended to their own desires. Each time Nick reached out to touch Bella’s arm in the night or throw a lazy arm across her, she would remove it, even if it happened in the unknowingness of sleep. They suffered in silence though in her heart, Bella knew that between them – Nick by stubborn will and she by weak submission – they had let their lovely son die.
There was one punishing consequence that ensured they could never forget. Another child was on the way. John was born with the navel cord twice around the neck and once around the shoulder, which caused Bella hours of hard labour. Afterwards she had to go to the Adelaide. The afterbirth had grown to her side and when that was taken away she had to be syringed to stop the mortification. The doctor had to tear the afterbirth away with his fingers. When it was done, he warned Bella that it would be dangerous to bear any more. She did not think this would be any sacrifice. Since John had been conceived, Nick had not troubled her. But directly after his birth he began to insist once more upon his conjugal due, except this time he did it not with a tempting word but with a maddened eye. Five babies – no, six, fo
r Nicholas had still to be counted − had been reared in their house, and though, by times, they had all bawled their heads off, it had never knocked a feather out of Nick. He had, indeed, slept soundly through night feeds and added to the racket by his own not inconsiderable trumpeting. But, for some reason, Nick could not bear this new-born’s cries. They seemed to magnify in his head and he made such a fuss about the noise that Bella had to wean John early. She thought that Nick wanted only for tranquility. When baby John woke in the night she supposed that Nick, like her, heard Nicholas’ cries – the ones that had gone unanswered – and the guilt was too much to bear. But as soon as she moved the baby out of the bed, she realised how mistaken she was. It was his own voluptuous wishes Nick wanted satisfied and he was in no mood for tepid refusals.
‘The doctor says I cannot be with child again, Nick,’ she said to him the first night he came in from the alehouse, bloated with beer and insistent with it.
‘And is the medicine man to decree what goes on between a man and his wife?’ he snarled back at her under the covers. He made a grab at her chemise. ‘I’ll have no witch-doctor tell me what my rights are.’
He pulled her roughly towards him. ‘I’m only asking for my due, Bel.’
‘Please Nick,’ she begged.
‘Please Nick,’ he mimicked in a high-pitched whine. ‘Don’t give me that old guff, Bel. Pull down your bloomers and give your husband his satisfaction.’
He bunched a fist at her face while grappling at her nether regions to gain entry.
‘Or I’ll make you.’
She could feel the hard rod of his appetite.
‘How so?’ she asked in the hope her talking might distract or exhaust him.
‘Is this an effing debating society or will I have to give you a belt to get my way?’
The Rising of Bella Casey Page 16