The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  She was busying herself in the scullery, hoping that by reopening the door of the cold press several times, some exotic morsel might come to light that she had somehow overlooked, when Nick came to the doorway. He held the cold potato in his hand as if it were a cannon ball.

  ‘What’s this?’ he roared.

  ‘It’s all there is, Nick,’ she said. ‘I’ll put the kettle on.’

  ‘Tea,’ he bellowed, ‘is that all you’re offering to a man after a hard day’s work?’

  Behind him she could see the anxious faces of James and Valentine.

  ‘It’s Thursday, Nick,’ she said, ‘we’re a bit low.’

  ‘We’re a bit low,’ he repeated. He turned around to find his sons examining him intently. ‘Hear that, boys? Her Ladyship is too high and mighty now to stock the cupboards.’

  ‘Please, Nick,’ she said, hoping he wouldn’t embroil the young ones in his fury.

  But her pleading seemed to enrage him. He raised his hand and flung the potato into the grate. She thought he was going to make a hash of the place, break plates or turn on the furniture, but instead he took one well-aimed swing at her. She reeled backwards, striking her head against the corner of the cold press door which was swinging agape. By the time she’d slithered down on to the floor, her temple was bleeding and her lip was cut. She tried to hoist herself up so that the boys would not see her sprawled so inelegantly thus. But Nick was standing over her so menacingly she thought that if she stood, it would be as if she were standing up to him. James ducked under his father’s arm still guarding the doorway and tried to help her up but she was too much of a weight for him. His son standing there between them seemed to bring Nick to his senses and he retreated to the parlour and sat himself at the table, grumbling softly to himself.

  ‘Come home to find not a decent bit of grub in the house, a cold spud, if you please, and a cup of tea with the leaves used twice over, no doubt. Not the whisper of a sausage even. A fine how do you do for General Beaver …’

  In the midst of the mayhem, a wry thought struck her – Nick’s madness was outranking him.

  She staggered to standing and tried to comfort Valentine who was hiccoughing with the fright of the encounter. Though the sight she presented must have offered little solace. Her lip split, her front tooth cracked, her brow bleeding profusely.

  ‘There, there,’ Bella said, ‘hush now.’

  But she was speaking as much to herself as to the child.

  Leaning heavily on the rim of the sink, she ran the water and bathed her face with the hem of her apron. She stole gingerly into the parlour, for fear even her footsteps might offend, but Nick was slumped in the armchair beside the dying embers of the fire. His eyes were closed, but she wasn’t sure whether that indicated he was asleep or in one of his vivid trances. She sat on one of the hard chairs at the table, the one with the gammy rung, for most of the furniture in the house sported a wound of some kind from Nick’s fits, and she waited. For what she did not know. She had ordered the boys back to bed. James, at first, refused to go.

  ‘I won’t leave you alone with him, Mam,’ he declared.

  Had it come to this, Bella wondered, that her thirteen-year-old son had to shoulder the responsibility of protecting her from his father?

  ‘He’s quiet now, James, he’ll be no more trouble.’

  ‘But what happens if he gets worked up again?’

  ‘Go to bed, James,’ she warned.

  ‘But Mam …’

  ‘Do as you’re bid, James, that’s how you can be a help to me.’

  The kettle began to scream then and Bella answered its piercing call numbly making the unwanted tea. When she returned, James was gone.

  She watched Nick now, the sad downturn of his features in repose, his closed lids and jutting lower lip, his fine jaw gone slack and loose and felt an appalling fondness for him, despite her throbbing lip and aching head. In this state, there was no malice in him; he looked both innocent child and defeated man.

  The house fell into a kind of shocked harmony, the aftermath of the storm with only the mantel clock ticking, parsing out the truce. Nick’s tea curdled in the cup. If anyone were to look in at the scene, lit only by the dying firelight – the tired husband dozing in the chair, his wife sitting at the table seemingly lost in a homely reverie, the children abed – how would he know that anything was amiss? Bella got up quietly and tiptoed to the dresser, fetching down one of the candlesticks. There was the stump of a red candle in it, the wax falling down in frozen icicles. She searched in the pockets of her apron for matches but found none. Just as well, she thought, for even the tiny sulphurous seethe of a match might unsettle the delicate calm. Better to sit in the tranquil shadows and leave the peace undisturbed.

  Susan came home presently from a night out with her Reggie, a romance that had blossomed from the night that Nick had gone missing. Bella put her finger to her lips to forestall any questions about the ruin of her face. She motioned Susan to go to bed. Babsie came in shortly afterwards.

  ‘I’m dying for a drop of tea,’ she said, glancing over at her father then fixing on Bella’s split lip. ‘What’s this?’

  ‘Don’t start now, Babsie,’ Bella urged her, ‘all is peaceful and we want to keep it that way.’

  Nick stirred then and opened a beady eye.

  ‘Go,’ Bella urged, ‘go on.’

  But Babsie hovered. Spittle flecked Nick’s tunic where he had drooled.

  ‘Did you wake up?’ Bella asked in as pleasant a voice as she could muster.

  He rose unsteadily to his feet and Bella went to help him, to hold the crook of his arm and steer him upstairs to bed. But something about the way she touched him – was it too maternal or did he divine pity in it? – ignited the rage she had thought was spent.

  ‘Get your hands off me, you Jezebel,’ he muttered and pummelled her arm with his fist. Another blow hit her across the cheek.

  ‘Please Nick, no more.’

  ‘What have you done to Mam?’ Babsie shouted at him. ‘You’re nothing but a bully!’ Oh my fiery girl, Bella thought.

  Nick halted in his tracks. Then he began to circle the table so that Bella was forced on the move. He prowled around once, then twice the perimeter of the table, stalking her. Then suddenly he stopped, his bleary gaze settling on the candlestick. He swiped it up and came at her again brandishing it over his head like a sabre.

  ‘Please Nick, please, don’t hit me again. Please …’

  At which point the door to the street burst open and Jack stood there with James at his side. The boy must have gone for his uncle when all the time Bella had thought him safely in bed. She didn’t know which shamed her more – that his father had frightened the boy so that he’d gone looking for help, or that Jack was standing there in the doorway witnessing her pleadings.

  ‘I told you Uncle Jack, he’s nearly murdering her …’ James said.

  On hearing the childish voice, Nick paused in his assault, frozen in an attitude of battle and Jack, seizing the opportunity, swung a frenzied fist at him and sent him sprawling.

  ‘Take that, you bloody villain,’ he said so quietly it came out conversational.

  He wrenched the candlestick from Nick’s grasp and brought it down on his head felling him completely. From nowhere a stray memory came to Bella of a small boy smashing a crab to pulp on the strand in Bray.

  NEW SPECTACLES

  The whole house was up by now – and half the street as well, probably. Bella had often heard marital disharmony in other houses late at night like this; now it seemed, despite her best efforts, the Beavers were at the one level with their neighbours. Susan, flitting about in her chemise was trying to quieten Valentine and Baby John, both wide-eyed at the bloody spectacle. Babsie hadn’t even had a chance to take off her coat. Armed with a bottle of iodine, she was tending Bella’s bleeding brow. Bella’s fissured tooth throbbed, but there was nothing Babsie could do for that. James set to and rebuilt the fire in the grate. Jack, mean
while, was out in the yard, dishing out some stern words to Nick who had come to and sat cowed in a corner like a schoolroom dunce.

  ‘You’ll have no more gyp from him tonight,’ Jack said when he came back in. ‘Leave him out there till he sobers up.’

  What would the neighbours make of that? Nick corralled in the yard with his birds until morning.

  ‘This is what he’s reduced you to, Bella,’ Jack said, and with those doubtful words of benediction, he left her to the disarray.

  ‘Maybe he needs spectacles,’ Susan said as she viewed her father through the window of the scullery. ‘Remember when he mistook Babsie for a man that time?’

  Even now, after seeing Nick carted out feet first into the yard and dumped there like a bag of meal, Susan was too sheltered to see what was before her eyes. And the worst of it was, Bella thought, it was she who had schooled her daughter in this foolish optimism.

  ‘Didn’t Uncle Jack see a surgeon about his eyes? Maybe he could help?’ Susan persisted.

  And to humour her, Bella agreed.

  She let some days pass before she could face calling around to Abercorn Road. Jack was sitting huddled by the fire, poring over a journal which he clapped shut as soon as he saw her.

  ‘Bella,’ he declared a shade too brightly, ‘what brings you here at this hour?’

  She sat down beside him on the sorry sofa, and glimpsed the title of his pamphlet. The Irish Peasant.

  ‘What’s that you’re hiding?’

  ‘Not hiding,’ he replied, ‘it’s something I wrote, my first publication. About Augustine Birrell and the hames he’s trying to make of our schools.’

  ‘Show me so,’ she said.

  He handed it over. She began to read his piece about the Chief Secretary. ‘And though our poor children – the Hope of the Nation – will have to herd together in dismal places which a short-sighted yet well-meaning Government calls schools – though their tender and quick-witted minds be de-Irished and stupefied by a system which a paternal Government calls education; though they are taught to admire and revere the things of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia and especially England; while their own country is to them bare of all useful and inspiring memories – her history unknown, her language unspoken, her music unheard, her achievements despised and her character unloved …’

  Bella halted there for she could read no more of this sedition, its ill-tempered tone and the division the author tried to sow between Ireland and the Crown.

  ‘Can’t you manage any more?’ Jack asked with a curl to his lip. ‘I suppose Elizabeth The Exile of Siberia is more your style now, or some other penny dreadful.’

  ‘I haven’t lost my mind, you know,’ Bella snapped.

  ‘Unlike the Bugler Beaver.’

  ‘It’s about him I’ve come. Susan thinks he needs eye glasses.’

  ‘Oh Bella,’ Jack said with feeling, ‘it’s not his eyes are the trouble.’

  ‘No, no really … hear me out.’

  ‘That man has brought you down,’ he said. ‘Ruined every fine thing in you.’

  He talked of her as if she was already dead.

  ‘No, Jack, you are mistaken. It wasn’t Nick who brought me down.’

  Hot with denial, she almost divulged the secret she swore she’d never tell a living soul. How sweet it would have been to set aside Jack’s certainties and clear Nick’s name once and for all. But she couldn’t for then she would have to admit to a lifetime of deceit and subterfuge.

  ‘So what I saw the other night, that was a thing of nothing, was it?’

  ‘He’s not a well man,’ Bella said, trying to appeal to Jack’s better nature.

  ‘That may well be so,’ he conceded, ‘but a pair of spectacles won’t cure him.’

  ‘What am I to do?’ she all but wailed and did not give a fig what he thought of her. He had seen her at her lowest, a whimpering wreck and her children goggle-eyed with terror, so it was only a little further to give into despair in front of him. Was that what he was waiting to hear – this final abject admission? Was that what unfroze his heart that day?

  ‘I’ll look after it,’ Jack said, ‘but we’ll be taking him to no eye doctor.’

  They led Nick, one on each arm to a certain Dr Leavitt’s rooms on Merrion Square. Nick was docile enough. He’d got it into his head that he was being presented to some high muckety-muck to receive a medal so when Dr Leavitt showed them into his well-appointed rooms – the oak desk, framed certificates of his prowess on the wall and an air of gloomy learning about it – Nick stood squarely and saluted. The doctor cannily enough took in the situation immediately.

  ‘At ease, soldier,’ he commanded.

  Nick sat between them as the doctor did his examination. He shone a light into his eyes and tapped his chest.

  ‘What year is it?’ the doctor demanded.

  ‘1889, Sir,’ Nick said. The year they were married, Bella thought.

  ‘And where are we, good man?’

  ‘South Camp, Aldershot, sir.’

  ‘Very good,’ Dr Leavitt said, ‘and why are we here?’

  ‘I am the best shot in the regiment and I’m about to receive my prize plus a good conduct badge.’

  Dr Leavitt stroked his bushy grey beard, tinted here and there with the russet of his youth. He was completely bald on top and so the whiskers were like ebullient compensation.

  ‘And this lady, my good man, who is she?’

  Nick turned his head and looked quizzically at Bella. What he saw was a patchwork of his own handiwork – a yellowed eye, a cracked tooth.

  ‘Some doxy, sir, if you’ll pardon me. Camp is full of them.’

  Bella flinched. This was more cruel a blow than any inflicted by his fists. It was as if he saw through her at that moment, saw through all her pretences, as if each swipe he’d taken at her had been a righteous retribution for her ancient deception of him.

  ‘I shall have to conduct a further examination,’ Dr Leavitt said. ‘Of an intimate nature. Would you both kindly wait outside?’

  Nick looked at her with childish panic.

  ‘He’s not good with strangers,’ Bella said.

  ‘It’s quite alright, Mrs Beaver. I have the measure of him.’

  Jack opened the door and she stepped out into the hallway with him.

  ‘What’s all that in aid of, do you think?’ she asked Jack once the door was shut on them. She found herself looking to him to have the answers, in the same way he had once looked to her.

  ‘He’s checking out his privates, Bella,’ Jack said.

  Before she had time to reply to this lewd candour, Dr Leavitt opened the door and ushered them back into the room of scrolls.

  ‘Do yourself up, soldier,’ he said to Nick.

  ‘Take him out, Mr Casey, would you?’ he said to Jack.

  ‘Beaver,’ Jack said in a clipped manner to Nick, ‘this way.’

  He had to direct Nick out for he had trouble negotiating rooms with which he was unfamiliar. He found it hard to find the exit.

  ‘You do know what’s happening to your husband, Mrs Beaver,’ Dr Leavitt said when the door had closed behind them.

  Bella shook her head.

  ‘He’s going mad. I was going to say quietly, but by the looks of you, he’s quiet no longer.’

  She blushed as if some terrible secret had been revealed, but it was written on her face.

  ‘He has the general paralysis of the insane, the GPI, we call it.’

  ‘Insane?’ she repeated dully.

  ‘He was a soldiering man, your husband, was he not?’

  ‘Yes, the King’s First Liverpools,’ she replied, feeling a debt to be as proud of Nick’s position as he once had been.

  ‘I see,’ the doctor said.

  ‘I thought it was just the drink and maybe some trouble with his eyes. If I could only wean him off the whiskey, he might be more quiescent. It makes him agitated, you see, more prone to …’

  ‘I’m afraid, Mrs Beaver,’ the
doctor interrupted, ‘we cannot blame the demon drink for his condition. It goes a long way back, to his youth, if you know what I mean.’

  But still she did not know what he was driving at. For the first time in her life Bella felt stupid and knew what it must be like to be the dullard in the classroom.

  ‘You have children, Mrs Beaver?’

  ‘Yes, five living.’

  ‘And dead?’

  ‘Just the one, our Nicholas, he died of the convulsions.’’

  ‘I see … convulsions, you say?’

  The image of baby Nicholas came to her mind, his sudden, awful end.

  ‘And you, Mrs Beaver, are you quite well? Enjoy good health, do you?’

  It seemed a queer thing for him to be making small talk about her health.

  ‘No sores. Rashes? Complaints?’ he queried. ‘I mean, besides the obvious …’

  Her broken features kept on intruding.

  ‘I don’t understand, Dr Leavitt, what has my health got to do with Nick?’

  ‘Quite a deal, my dear,’ he said.

  The endearment caught her off guard so out of place was it.

  ‘Listen to me, Mrs Beaver,’ he said, leaning low over the desk like a conspirator. ‘There is only one thing to be done here. You must certify your husband, sign the papers and have him committed.’