The Rising of Bella Casey

by Mary Morrissy

  BROADWOOD

  THE GREAT SILENCE

  The first night home in Abercorn Road, Bella lay wakeful well into the night, gazing at the moon. Clouds scudded across its face so that it seemed to frown as if the very heavens disapproved. But the rest of the household slumbered not noticing the recrimination of the elements. It was an odd sensation to lie so close to Mother that she could almost hear her heartbeat, though when she turned on her side it was her own pulse she could hear and it disturbed her. For it was just one more thing she had no dominion over. She watched Mother’s stony profile hoping that she might, in sleep, steal from her some glimmer of forgiving softness. But even in slumber, her mother did not seem to yield. Bella felt the leaden weight of her years, and the downward spiral of her circumstances like a clock running down, that had brought her back to the beginning again, but in such a reduced state. As the moon turned its eyelid down, Bella thought this must be what it is like to be dead, to have already entered the Great Silence.

  But if her spirit was restless, her body was like as a corpse on a slab. As if an unseen hand, dispassionate as a coroner, had stripped her, bared her breast, her Mount of Venus, her very liver and lights, in search of the root of her ruin. That God was ever-watchful, she had always believed. Now she felt another presence, this one with a voice. Perhaps it was the voice of her conscience, so long dimmed in service to a respectable life. Bella Casey – for this is how the voice spoke as if she were starting out again – this is your epitaph. That you ruined a life in return for your own ruined life. An eye for an eye.

  Even now, months after his death, the thought of Nick made her wither. Regret was too polite a word for it, too lady-like a sentiment. She could dispense with such refined feelings now for she did not merit them. She might as well have laced his porter with arsenic. Had she done so, at least he would have had a quick, intoxicated death, as opposed to the tormented end he had, straining after phantoms. There was no chance, either, of expiating her sin. Who was there left to tell? She envied those Catholics their weekly jaunt to the confessional. If she could only whisper her crime into the velvet darkness … but of, course there was always a clergyman present. And Bella would not confide in any clergyman. The Romanists talked of a place called Purgatory where sinners gathered awaiting a final verdict and from which they might be rescued by indulgences paid by the living. Bella had always found the idea repugnant, worse even, idolatrous. For how can a soul be bought into the light? That is in the Lord’s dispensation, and His alone. But now if she could only believe that there was such a place for her, she would have gladly embraced it. She would have settled for anywhere that was not the eternal fires of Hell. Unless, of course, she was in Hell already. For surely it was the devil’s own revenge that not only had she destroyed Nick with her false heart, but she had engendered in her children the possibility of repeating his madness. And how many years of reprieve could she expect for herself, before the dread syph would show itself again? She was on borrowed time, living in her own epilogue. I can’t go on, she thought. But she did.

  When she went to rouse the boys in the morning, Jack opened a sticky eye and cast her a baleful glance. This had been his kingdom, now it was strewn with bodies more like a pauper’s ward than a parlour. There was a smell of stale breath exhaled and foetid socks and damp overcoats used to supplement the bedding. Mother was already up with the kettle boiling and a bleary-eyed Mick soon joined her. There wasn’t space for all of them to eat in the kitchen so Bella brought the boys their bread and scrape to them where they lay. James had his downed and was up and dressed and gone in the space of five minutes as if he couldn’t wait to get away. She did not know if it was shame or pride that made him so keen to escape. Of all her boys, he was the one who kept himself and his thoughts private from her.

  Babsie busied herself with the tea and light-hearted banter with Mick, or as much banter as he could stand with a pounding head. The two of them stepped out together, he already late for his nine o’clock start at the GPO, and she hurrying off to pick up her union relief. Only Susan slept on, blissfully it seemed, as if their contingency was no longer a concern of hers.

  Before she sent him off to school, she took Baby John into the yard and splashed water on his face from the tap. It was only a lick and a promise given the upheaval of the night before. They met Mrs Shields from downstairs dragging her own son to the tap on the same mission.

  ‘Bella,’ she said and nodded warily.

  Mother did not fraternise with Mrs Shields on account of the Sacred Heart lamp she had installed in the hall with the ever-present light afore it. Mick used to joke he wouldn’t have a word said against the said lamp for it had lit his staggers home many’s the night. For her part, Mrs Shields objected to the Union flag Mother had hung out to mark the king’s coronation. But Bella was grateful for Mrs Shields’ measured salute, comparing it to the reception in Fitzgibbon Street where there would have been some smart remark to the tune of wasn’t it a marvel how Protestants had to wash just like the rest of us. But Bella determined not to dwell on such thoughts. She was away from the tenements now.

  *

  She shook Susan from her slumber for she would not have her act the sleeping princess while she was under Mother’s roof. Time enough for that when she was married to her Mr Elliott. She dispatched her off to escort Valentine and Baby John to school, admonishing them not to reveal to anyone where they’d moved in case they might be tempted to boast, as boys will, of the high excitement of being on the run. She could certainly trust Susan in this, for as she’d proved, dissembling about her circumstances had become second nature to her in their courtship. She had never once brought Reggie Elliott back to Fitzgibbon Street. She had pretended she was still living in Rutland Place and so when they stepped out, it was back to there that he would walk her and she had to linger by their old door until he went.

  ‘No good will come of such deception,’ Bella had warned her. But Susan had long since stopped heeding her advice, or taking any responsibility for their plight.

  That was clear from the day she had arrived home from the Misses Carolan, announcing that she had thrown aside the job. The very job Bella had had to go begging for. She remembered the humiliation of having to don her best, which wasn’t up to much these days, and throwing herself on the mercy of Clarrie Hamilton. Bella had let her friendship with Clarrie lapse; in Bella’s mind she was too closely associated with the snaring of Nick.

  ‘As I live and breathe, if it isn’t Bella Beaver,’ Clarrie had cried as soon as Bella had pushed open the weighted door of the shop which gave off a merry tinkle.

  She came out from behind the counter and eyed Bella up and down, hands on hips. Then she embraced her warmly. Bella’s hat got squashed in the encounter and she fished it from her head. She had thought it would be bad form to go hatless to a millliner’s, regardless of her mission.

  ‘I swear, Bella Beaver, if that isn’t the self-same hat you bought off me in Mrs Falix’s,’ Clarrie had said unabashedly. ‘How’s that dashing husband of yours?’

  ‘My Nick is dead,’ Bella declared in a forthright fashion.

  ‘Oh Bella,’ she said, ‘I’m frightful sorry to hear that and him still in his prime. What was it took him?’

  ‘Tuberculosis,’ Bella said. How quickly the falsehoods sprang to her lips. Followed hot on the heels by a sneaking admiration for the perverted audacity of it. Wasn’t it a strange state of affairs when she considered consumption the lesser of two evils?

  Clarrie put her hand up to her mouth.

  ‘It’s the reason that I’m here,’ Bella began, dropping her voice though there was no one to hear bar the mirrors ranged about and the preening headgear – large brimmed hats with lacy falls and garlanded with florets of sateen, pearls and cameos, even plover feathers.

  Clarrie took a step backwards and Bella could already see a creeping reservation, whether that was owing to the talk of tuberculosis or the fact that she knew something would be required of he
r. Before Clarrie could fend her off, Bella plunged into her story. ‘You could say we’ve fallen on hard times with Nick gone and all. And our Susan, she’s had her full schooling behind her. She’s a bright girl, Clarrie, wait till you see her, very pretty and she has a beautiful hand. She’d be most presentable in the shop. She even has a little French …’

  ‘Oh Bella,’ Clarrie had said again, pityingly. ‘The Misses Carolan do all the vetting for the floor staff. It’s in their gift alone.’

  She sighed as heavily as Bella did. Then Clarrie brightened.

  ‘Is your Susan any good with a needle, by any chance?’ she asked. ‘We have a couple of girls who do the trimmings …’

  Bella remembered the swell of charity she felt for Clarrie in that moment, though it was Clarrie who was dispensing the charity.

  ‘It wouldn’t be much, mind you,’ she had said. ‘And your Susan might find it a bit …’

  ‘We’re desperate, Clarrie,’ Bella interjected for she didn’t want Clarrie to talk herself out of the proposition. ‘Anything, anything … she’d be glad of.’

  That was when the threshold was crossed, when Bella had become poor. Not when all their belongings were piled high on the street, or even the move to Fitzgibbon Street, but there in the plush splendour of the Misses Carolan’s. It was the weak supplication in her voice, her cloying gratitude and the first frank admission of their circumstances to an outsider. And now, all of that gone, for nothing, thrown over on a whim.

  ‘After all this time, I’m still doing beads and fancies,’ Susan wailed.

  Bella’s blood boiled. Was there ever a girl as fickle? Or so wilful. Or contrary. Though she knew from whom all these traits had come.

  ‘You left because of that!’ Bella couldn’t hold the reprimand out of her voice while counting pennies in her head.

  ‘It isn’t fair,’ she had said, ‘your Miss Hamilton gave me to believe that I might hope to serve in the shop one day, but look at me, there’s not a budge and others have been put out front instead of me.’

  Bella noticed how suddenly Clarrie had become her personal creature and was tarred with the same brush as herself – holding out the promise of better.

  ‘Anyway,’ Susan said with a toss of her head, ‘I don’t need that old job anymore. Hasn’t Reggie asked me to marry him?’

  Bella had felt a seize of dread. It was the queer way Susan announced it. Shouldn’t the news of her engagement have been foremost?

  ‘It’s not a matter of necessity, is it?’ She had had to ask. She would not be in the dark ever again through her own timidity.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘Well, you know, Susan, sometimes a girl can …’

  ‘Mother!’ Susan had cried full of righteous indignation. ‘What do you take me for?’

  Susan had looked at her with such malice, it should have wounded her. But she didn’t care, so flooded was she with relief that there was no blot on Susan’s character and that shortly, God forgive her, she would be off Bella’s hands.

  But they couldn’t live off the promise of a marriage. Bella had scavenged through her things, trying to find pawn value in the most meagre of her belongings until her eye lit on the Cadby. Her neighbours on Fitzgibbon Street had thought the piano the personification of her pretensions and she wouldn’t give them cannon balls to fire at her by playing nocturnes or gavottes in their hearing. She had not played it since that Sunday afternoon when Nick had done his worst to her. If she had struck the keys, she feared they would only release a piercing scream that would tell of what had been done there. Every time she looked at it, she saw not only that vile scene replayed over, but a repository of her own shaming guilt of what she had done to Nick.

  ‘Think how much it’ll fetch,’ she had said to Babsie, hoping her new pragmatism would appeal to the most sensible of her children.

  Babsie looked at her with frank dismay.

  ‘But, Mam, it’s your pride and joy.’

  ‘Pride and joy will not keep us from the poorhouse,’ she said firmly.

  But the selling of the Cadby had only bought parole and Bella knew it was only a matter of time before she would have to throw herself once more on Mother’s mercy. For where in the city could she have found a cheaper, meaner home than Fitzgibbon Street?

  With all the children gone, the emptied house seemed to tick with grateful silence, aided by the mantel clock in the parlour. Then the general routine reasserted itself. His lordship, Jack Casey, stayed abed till mid-morning sometimes or at least until the parlour fire had warmed the place up. He would sit enthroned while Mother ferried in his tea and and toasted slices on the flames for him. Then she went about her chores in the kitchen. Bella came upon her washing up and suddenly saw how aged she had become, the evidence of those years apparent in her mother’s craggy cheeks and the whorls of her elbows. It was as if this change had happened in the interval between Bella going into the parlour and stepping back into the kitchen. Mother rubbed a speck of soap from her eyelid with the back of her newly ancient hand – or was it a tear?

  ‘Oh, Bella,’ she sighed.

  Bella wasn’t even sure whether Mother knew she was standing there. But then she turned to face her and she said it again.

  ‘Oh, Bella.’

  All their battles had come to this. Bella had conquered her, not with her achievements as she’d imagined in her youth, but with her failure. She fled into the parlour and wept noisily. Jack came upon her in this state.

  ‘So,’ he intoned, pompous as a magistrate, ‘this is how it ends, Bella.’

  She felt a surge of revolt. He was the only one who could summon up rage in her with his pronouncements, and this one in particular, for he spoke as if she were already dead and buried.

  ‘I’m not the first,’ she replied, ‘who with best meaning has incurred the worst.’

  Everything was coloured by her crime and the secret of it. She was already judged and damned, so what matter now how low she stooped? What matter now those high-flown ideas of honour? Deceit might have been forced upon her all those years ago, but she had honed it over the years into a dubious art. She used it mercilessly now in the only way she knew how. She begged. Mick was the easiest touch. She’d place herself, as if by happenstance, near the GPO, and be sidling by the kerb at the hour she knew he came off shift. She’d hurry up to him, all breathless, as if some fresh crisis had overtaken her.

  ‘Could you spare a shilling, Mick?’ she’d say.

  For John’s coat is falling asunder; for Valentine must have a jotter for his sums; for the tab at Murphy’s must be paid.

  And he would hand it over.

  ‘Better for you to get it than the publicans, I suppose,’ he would grumble good-naturedly.

  After a while it became such a regular performance that Bella would not have to furnish him with excuses. He would see her approach and be already digging in his pockets. Her aim was to gather up a little extra for a trousseau for Susan. But she did not pretend any of that to Mick, or anyone else she cadged off; instead, she used her children’s growling stomachs, their coughs and sneezes as a blind.

  She moved from one brother to the next. She propositioned Isaac at his place of work. He had left his father-in-law’s employ and now held office in the Union. She made her way to the Northumberland Hotel, swishing past the throng queuing outside his door which had his name on a plaque outside.

  ‘Whose yer wan?’ she could hear them grumbling, as she strode purposefully up the stairs where these creatures clung to the rails, ‘what gives her the right?’

  ‘The claims secretary is my brother, if you must know,’ Bella replied loudly when one of these doxies at the head of the queue laid a hand on her arm. ‘My business is of a personal nature.’

  She knocked firmly on the door but did not bother to wait for a reply. As she pushed it open, she could feel at her back the restless dissatisfaction of the crowd. She closed it quickly and stood face-to-face with her sister-in-law. Johanna Fairtlough was stan
ding in the middle of the room, a vision amidst the sober brown wood, in a tight bodice dress of bright cerise with a matching high hat and a frothy parasol on which she leaned. She was never afraid of colour, was Johanna. She’d got stout since Bella had seen her last at one of her swarries. Which was a long time ago since a woman from the tenements was not a welcome guest at such affairs.

  ‘Bella,’ Johanna said and her eyes popped.

  ‘Sis,’ Isaac said rising from behind his desk, ‘well, this is a surprise!’

  The way he welcomed her, she couldn’t help feeling that he welcomed the interruption more.

  ‘Indeed,’ Johanna said, looking her up and down as her colour rose and she drew herself up to her full height. The shelf of her bosom trembled under its shimmery fabric.

  ‘I came to see my brother in his new high office,’ Bella said.

  ‘Joe’s a very busy man,’ Johanna said, giving off fumes of indignation.

  How was it, wondered Bella, that her brothers were so keen to lose their given names? Jack first, then Isaac.

  ‘Don’t you worry about me, dear,’ Isaac said, ‘never too busy to see family, isn’t that right, Sis?’ He steered his portly wife towards the door and opened it for her. The mutinous clamour of the waiting crowd invaded the room for a moment. Isaac closed it quickly and stood with his back against it as if their need was contagious.

  ‘I was awful sorry to hear about poor Beaver,’ he said. ‘I would have come to the funeral, but Johanna wouldn’t have it, you know how it is.’