‘Transfer,’ barked the ginger keeper at the wardress. ‘Leeper. Archie.’
The name, even in this slangy locution, reached Bella as if from a deep, watery recess.
‘Where to?’ the wardress asked.
No, it could not be! She felt for an instant an eerie sensation as if time were doubling up on itself. She was returned to the cowed young teacher standing on the threshold of St Mary’s Infant School to be interviewed for the position of Principal Infant Teacher. She brushed the memory away. It must be another man of the same name.
‘Incurables wing,’ one of the keepers said loudly.
Bella pulled her plain shawl around her, hoping that might grant her invisibility. But something in her furtive gesture must have caught this Leeper’s eye for suddenly the chaplain wheeled around and called out to her down the long passageway of time.
‘Miss Casey?’
She could not mistake that voice.
‘Yes, you, down there,’ he repeated. ‘Come out of the shadows so that I may see you.’
There were no shadows here, only the vast emptiness of the hallway and the darkness of her own heart. But meekly, Bella obeyed.
‘Miss Casey, isn’t it?’ It was so long since she’d been Miss Casey that she barely recognised herself in the old appellation.
The clergyman shuffled forward flanked still by the keepers and they faced one another like chess pieces on the chequered floor. Bishop and pawn. There could be no doubt now. There was that inward face, the hair more unkempt than she remembered, that goitred eye. He seemed bowed down in some way, not as tall as she remembered. Her first impression of him that day of her interview in the schoolroom was that he was kindly. She recalled that when Miss Kidd asked her to play ‘Abide With Me’ on the harmonium and she stumbled over the second bar because she was so nervous and the instrument was new to her, it was he who had come to her aid. Laying a calming hand on her shoulder, he had motioned her to stop and turned to the Guardians.
‘May Miss Casey go back to the beginning and start again …?’
She felt lost in time, claimed by unruly recall. Was it this place? Could it unnerve you, render you as unstable as the people it housed?
‘It is you,’ he said.
And she had the self-same thought. This was no ghostly double, but the man himself, or a shadow of him. Leeper. His ministry among the mad now.
‘Isabella!’ He moved forward boldly.
She stepped back, her hands fluttering to her mouth like a nervous girl.
‘I …’ she began.
‘I knew you’d come. I told them.’ He jerked his head towards the two keepers. The ball of his jawbone chafed against his collar. ‘Isabella will not let me rot in this place, I said …’
‘Now Reverend,’ the second keeper said. He was a rotund, bespectacled man with several chins. ‘Why don’t you leave this good lady in peace?’
Bella recognised the tone; she had often used it herself, a teacherly chiding of an obdurate child. Something on the keeper’s wrist glinted, catching a shaft of sun glitter. It dazzled her momentarily until she realised what it was. It was a silvery bracelet with which Leeper was tethered to the fat keeper. He was an inmate of this place, not a servant to it!
‘I have never stopped loving you, Isabella dear …’
‘Steady on now Padré, less of the purple prose, if you please,’ the keeper admonished.
‘Isabella, please,’ Leeper implored.
‘Do you know this gentleman, Missus?’ the keeper enquired.
But Bella was incapable of answering. Did she know him? The entire course of her life had been dictated by him. For thirty years she had been trying to escape his morbid sway. A wave of defeat washed over her. But then she looked at this supplicant creature in front of her with his quavering pleas, a sob in his voice. Wasn’t he the one in chains? She felt a surge of power.
‘No,’ she said firmly, ‘he has mistaken me for someone else.’
Leeper’s face collapsed. He buried his face in his hands jerking the keeper’s manacle in the process.
‘Hear that, Padré, you’re wasting your sweetness on the desert air. Come along, now, let’s get you moving.’
‘No, no wait,’ Leeper cried out as they ushered him towards the main door. He tried to twist his head backwards to appeal to her again. ‘Don’t let them take me away.’ He was shrieking now. ‘Save me, Isabella, save me, save me, save me …’
Save him? She put her fists to her ear to drown out his dwindling cries. Save him? She made towards the counter so that she could have something solid to hold on to.
May Miss Casey go back to the beginning and start again?
Oh, if only she could go back to the beginning … if only she could start again. But to what point would she return? To which fork in the road? Was there any way to trace the root of her error?
‘You look a little shook, Missus,’ the wardress said.
She produced a water jug and tumbler and poured noisily.
‘You mustn’t mind them,’ she said candidly, ‘when the syph takes hold they fix on even complete strangers with their fancies.’
‘The syph,’ Bella repeated dully.
‘Oh yes,’ the wardress said.
‘But he’s a man of the cloth,’ Bella heard herself say.
‘Oh believe me, Missus, sometimes they’re the worst. The Reverend there has had it for years. It goes quiet, see, and nothing shows, and then …’
Bella heard no more for she had passed into some nether region where every known truth was reversed. He had the syph; he had the syph. The words rang out as if an accusing jury had set up inside her temples. She pounded her forehead with her fists to drive the voices out. They fell silent but were replaced with a judge’s cold arithmetic, a judge who had her own voice. It is you who committed the original sin. Her mind raced. If Leeper had had the syph, then it was he who was the source and she the wanton carrier, a typhus Mary ferrying disease between them and feeding her child the poisonous milk of death. And Nick? He was the wronged party, not once but twice over. It was she who had brought him to this hell. Every righteous conviction she’d held about her life had been mistaken. She was the guilty one; by right, she should be here among the spit-flecked mad. She had manoeuvred poor Nick into marriage with a terrible lie and brought to the degraded union a dowry of pernicious disease that had fingered its way into the deepest chambers of Nick’s mind. No punishment was equal to these sins. In a moment, she had joined the company of the knowing damned.
‘… and there’s no saving them.’ The wardress was winding up a speech she hadn’t heard.
Bella took the water the wardress proffered and drank it in one clean gulp. The taste was pure, as she could never be again. Purity was the fortress of the innocent. There could be no escape for her. Everything in the end led back to Leeper.
She stumbled into the daylight like a dreamer woken from a hectic nightmare. She made blindly for the gates of the asylum, which were now thrown open, letting the pernicious influence of this wretched place free to seep out into the world. She did not stop running until she gained outside. She halted on the cobble to catch her breath. The liver-brick of the houses was solid, the beat of a rope and the chant of little girls skipping, beautifully quotidian. The drifting swirl of leaves, a golden reassurance. And yet she felt herself in a daze out in the unfettered world. It was like being new-born, with calf-legs, but ancient too with the burden of what she had just learned. It was not just that the last remnant of her innocence – or was it ignorance? – had been wrenched from her; it was that now, even in reminiscence, it could never be regained. That view of the world, and of herself in it, was entirely beyond her. She was a fallen woman, not just in the world’s estimation, but in her own too.
TOTNES, DEVON, 1943
In the midst of the whimpering, there she was, starkly stretched out on the family bed, the clothes still disordered, part of her breast showing over the edge of a coarse shift made out of a flour sac
k. The remnants of the old shawl were still wrapped round her head, forming a rowdy cowl from which his sister’s waxy face stared like that of a nun of the higher order of destitution salvaged from it for ever at last. He recognised in the dead face his sister of the long ago, for a swift bloom of a dead youth had come back to mock at the whimpering, squalid things arrayed around it … Here lay all that remained of her piano-playing, her reading in French of Iphiegnia and of her first-class way in freehand drawing. All that had to be done was to get rid of her quick as he could …
There. The deed is done. He feels like a monster. His eyelids are on fire, the skin there craggy and folded like an elephant’s jowl, a sticky yellow ooze snagged between what’s left of his lashes. The old trouble with his eyes. He wants to rub them, strip away the layers of burning skin. He unhooks the rickety arms of his spectacles and lays them down on the scratched desk. Without them, what he has written is reduced to hieroglyphic waves.
The light in the upstairs room is brassy, autumn desperate in her late charms. His divan beckons but to stretch on it now would chime too much with the death-bed. There is no getting away from it. The incriminating scene may be an incomprehensible blur on the page lolling in the typewriter roller, but the memory of the moment is as sharp as pain. Now, as then, he cannot bear Bella’s life, or her living of it. It has made a coward of him. He has just hurried her towards her end. He has played the magisterial god and chopped a decade from her sentence. With one stroke of his gavel, he has rendered Bella dead – again. It is a damnable business, this scribbling. Sometimes he longs to be the man whose only writing duty is the paper dart for the milkman – two pints please. He stares down at his assassin hands. They are strange to him, as if they belong to someone else.
Poor Bella. He cannot break the habit of appending the impoverished title. She seemed to attract misfortune, courted it, you could say. As soon as he thinks this, he berates himself. Blaming the poor for their condition, Comrade Casey? A nice how-do-you do! For a brief spell she’d played the bright scholar with her parcel of books, then the strict school ma’am ruling by arched eyebrow, before falling for the soldier, full of strange oaths. Oh and fall was the word for it. Once she’d met Beaver, Bella’s life had been all fall. Trouble was that his sister’s romance with destitution had demanded witness. His. He’d felt the burden of that witness. Too often he’d found himself playing walk-on parts in her mortification. Even with Beaver out of the way, committed. Committed indeed – the treachery of language!
The eviction was the beginning of it. No sooner was Beaver incarcerated in the Richmond than the notice was posted. It was he who’d brought Bella’s attention to it. It had been plastered overnight on the front door in Rutland Place and was there when he’d come to call. He was allowed to visit Bella now since Beaver wasn’t master of his own wits, let alone lord of this household. He felt a vague twinge of guilt. What kind of puerile superstition was that? As if their damned falling-out over the Boers had hastened the Bugler’s decline. As if words of his had the power to madden! No, Beaver was a fool, wrong-headed, a bully who reached for boycott when he was outdone in argument. A pox on him!
He had just lifted the knocker on Bella’s door when he saw the notice to quit. This is to declare … the proclamation of money-grubbers. His heart sank. He left the knocker fall heavily. The sound echoed in the rinsed early morning. The dawn-bleached street had not yet properly awoken. Red-brick snoozed, curtains drawn on bleary windows. As he stood there waiting for an answer, he remembered the Sundays he’d spent here as a boy, he and his brothers gathered around the piano in full-throated song while Bella accompanied. Even Ma had joined in then, when all was sweet-seeming domesticity.
Bella, with tumbledown hair and still in her nightgown, came to the door. He pointed wordlessly to the notice. She scrabbled at it desperately while looking furtively up and down the street for fear of prying neighbours. But it was a futile task. Jamie, the landlord, had used horse-glue. Anyway, even if she had managed to remove that one, there were two more pasted to the window panes.
The eviction was inevitable, any fool could have seen that. Any fool but Bella. The bully Beaver had at least provided; the madman Beaver couldn’t. Babsie’s pittance from the box factory was all that stood between Bella and penury. He’d heard Jamie making his threats.
‘Eleven weeks Mrs Beaver and it’s marked down agin you in black and white,’ the creeping money-grubber had said.
‘My husband . .,’ Bella began, but Jamie waved her off.
‘Everyone has a hard luck story,’ he said.
No such thing as an hour of need with those boyos. Fumbling in the greasy till.
He was there, too, the day the bailiffs came. Three gruff fellas did the dirty work, making a funeral pyre of Bella’s possessions on the street. How unprepossessing they seemed when piled out on the kerb. The sofa, a ragged beast upended. The wash-stand was forlorn, the fender bled rust-red in the rain. The dresser, once the bulwark of the house, seemed defenceless, the butter-box with the velvet seat, an abdicated throne, the tapestry screen, agape. Bella’s pots and pans, thrifty on the stove, seemed patched and poor on the pavement. The beloved piano, stricken. Her bedstead – wretched source of her downfall – was like a ruined ship run aground.
He had stayed on guard with James and Valentine, while Bella took Susan and the baby and went hunting for somewhere they could lay their heads. Why she brought Susan along, he couldn’t fathom. On Bella’s say-so, the girl had been treated like a veiled novice. Another of Bella’s vanities, that took on the hue of delusion. He could have told her that Susan’s well-tended air, her neat bonnet and smart coat would be an obstacle on the mean streets where they would be forced to look for lodgings. The girl would be taken for the District Nurse, or, worse, the lady from the Cruelty Society and be distrusted instanter. And should she open her mouth, she would add to the suspicion that she was on some ‘official’ mission, for the girl had been encouraged in an accent. But he said nothing. Bella would only get uppity and accuse him of trying to peddle his ruffian politics.
She found a two-pair front room in a tenement on Fitzgibbon Street. The gable of the house was propped up by two great shafts of timber set in a field of rubble where its neighbour had once stood before it had collapsed. Truly, they were living in the ruins of Empire.
‘The place is full of RCs,’ Bella said as they stepped over the threshold. ‘Who else would live in such parlous disarray?’
His argument, if he’d voiced it, would have been why should anyone be forced to live like this. It made his bile rise, not just for Bella’s sake, but for the whole damned human race.
The walls were peeling – in places near the double windows, the plaster had come right away showing the pitiful skeleton of the house. Laths like fragile bones, innards of crumbling shale. The only clue to the room’s former grandeur was in the ceiling rose. Centre-stage in the high-browed room. The floorboards creaked, the windows shivered. The lock on the door was gammy from too many forced entrances.
He watched as Bella and the girls scoured the floor – the place was crawling – and threw down rugs and pushed the sofa into familiar territory before the stove. Bella set the wash-stand behind the door. Here they would have to wash themselves and all they owned. The drop-leaf mahogany table that had come from Dorset Street, well-scored and scorch-ringed now, stood in front of the dresser, in a vain attempt to recreate the vintage comforts of Rutland Place. She ordered the piano to be placed in the Alcove Right. It might have looked the worse for wear out on the street, but in this room it seemed positively grand, as did Bella, though to her detriment. A tenement was no place for remnant respectability. The stage was set.
The boys slept top to tail on the one mattress in the Alcove Left. Bella and the girls shared the bed of shame. She had strung up a curtain around the girls’ bedding – to preserve modesty, she told him, though in this squalid crush, how could anyone hold on to a modicum of dignity? He said as much, couldn’t stop hims
elf.
‘Dignity,’ Bella said, ‘comes from within.’
Her pious certitudes infuriated him.
‘It’s slums like this that lost me my faith in god and man,’ he said.
‘Don’t go conjoining our situation with any of your newfangled notions,’ Bella said sharply, ‘for I won’t have you spouting Darwin at me, who would have us all on the one level as chimpanzees.’
But looking at this crowded room – with the howls of children off-stage, the bellowing of husbands, the clatter of boots in rooms bereft of furniture and draperies – he thought the monkey in the jungle had a better situation.
*
The commode, as Bella termed it for she refused to call it the slop bucket, was housed behind the tapestry screen, once a proud appurtenance of the parlour. Susan was aghast at the lack of a lavatory.
‘Nothing lah-di-da like that here, young Miss,’ said Mr Pilgrim, the landlord’s agent – a vile breed. ‘You brings your own slops to the yard and the dung dodgers come twice a week.’
‘It’ll only be for a short while, Susie,’ Bella said trying to quell alarm with falsehood. Was it to comfort the girl, or herself? But Susan refused to go when anyone else was in the room. So it became the drill for them all to be banished to the hallway while she attended to her duties. Visitors included. The neighbours found their exile hilarious and who would blame them? At first, they put it down to some Protestant practice of the Beavers.
‘Is it like our Rosary?’ one of the neighbours asked him, a raddled woman with a drinker’s face, built solid as a street post box. Mrs Madigan, she was, though he didn’t know her by name then. ‘Or is it the indulgences, with all the travelling in and out youse are doing?’
The denizens of Fitzgibbon Street didn’t beat around the bush. When they were curious, they asked, when they had something to say, they told you. Living cheek-by-jowl removed the niceties.
The Rising of Bella Casey Page 20