The tray was the last to be done. She ran her fingers along the cursive lettering, feeling the tiny pieces of dirt lodged in the loops of the writing. This would be the very devil to clean. She smeared the polish on, working it into the pitted tracks the writing made. The silver drank the fluid greedily. She took off the rubber gloves that Mrs Irvine had given her, the better to work the cloth, cloaked around her thumb nail, into the etched inscription. She worked blindly. It was like trying to find the pearl in a shell of grit. She must have spent twenty minutes at it, edging her finger into each last indentation. When she was done, she brought the tray to the window to examine her handiwork. So intent had she been on perfection, of bringing the silver to a pitch of shine, she hadn’t bothered to read what she’d been burnishing. She tilted the tray towards the blanched winter light. The inscription was perfectly legible now. Isabella Casey, it read, Mistress of her Circumstances.
NEW YEAR’S DAY, 1918
Babsie, coming in at noon, found her mother still abed. That in itself was strange for her mother was an early riser, but since Christmas she’d been poorly, laid low with a purulence of the lungs and a wild fever that had made her overheated one minute and perished the next. Babsie had put her husband’s dinner on – oh, how she loved to say that, her husband; Babsie was a new bride – and leaving the door on Clarence Street on the latch she’d run around the corner to check on her mother. She was relieved to find a peaceful scene and not the wracking sounds of coughing that had been going on for days. There was some kind of infection going round. Some people blamed the soldiers for it; a Spanish flu, they called it. Others said it was some kind of swine fever. But that couldn’t be what Mam had, Babsie thought, for when would her mother have been mixing with either of those? She had urged her mother to call in the doctor but Mam had set her face against it.
‘It’s just my old trouble,’ she’d said to Babsie. ‘It goes quiet, you see, for a long time and then … it emerges again.’
The erysipelas was her mother’s old trouble. Soon after she’d taken up charring, her mother’s skin had broken out in a rash. She’d had to wear gloves up to the elbow to hide her contagion. A dress pair with a pearl detail for these were the only gloves her mother owned. But the rash had spread anyway. It found its way to her face and washed up in a high tide close to her hairline. She had to wrap a turban of fabric round her head when going out to keep the condition a secret.
‘People will think it a want of hygiene,’ her mother had said. ‘But it’s a surfeit of cleanliness I’m suffering from, up to my oxters in suds all day.’
If you passed her on the street, you’d have given her a penny, Babsie thought, or be calling the clutchers what with the strange headgear and the dress gloves. The neighbours mistook it for another of her mother’s eccentric affectations. My, my, the airs and graces, they would say, look at the Protestant wan, all tricked up as if going to a ball, and only off to do her charring.
Babsie’s brother John was sitting at the scored table reading a book. Just like Uncle Jack he was, always stuck in a book. She poured tea from the cooling pot. The milk when she added it curdled.
‘How’s she been?’ she asked him.
He shrugged, barely lifting his head from the pages.
‘You’ve let the fire go out,’ she said. She tried to raise a flame from the embers in the grate. The poker made a grinding sound as she hit the firebricks.
‘Shh,’ John said, ‘you’ll only wake her.’
‘I wouldn’t have to do it at all, if you kept the place warm for her. Is it too much to ask?’
Babsie was peppering for a fight so sick with worry was she about her mother. But she seemed to be the only one. She wanted only to be immersed in the newly-minted world of her marriage. Everything about this house, like every other house they’d lived in, spoke of struggle.
‘Has she eaten anything?’ Babsie persisted.
John shook his head. ‘She hasn’t moved since I got up.’
Only then did Babsie get up to investigate. She tiptoed into the back room and over to the bed. Drawing back the covers she placed a hand on her mother’s forehead. She shook her gently by the shoulder.
‘Mam,’ she said gently, ‘wake up.’
She shook again, this time more roughly.
‘Mam,’ she repeated, panicked.
She felt a tiny flicker of irritation. She was forever trying to shake Mam into action. She reached for her mother’s scabbed wrist – peeled back one of the gloves; yes, she even wore them in bed for fear of scratching herself unbeknownst in her sleep – but Babsie knew even before she tried for a pulse.
‘John,’ she said evenly, ‘go and get Reverend Brabazon.’
‘Ah Babs, I’m in the middle of me book,’ he wailed.
Books, she thought, bloody books.
‘Go,’ she ordered, ‘this very minute.’
When he was gone, Babsie drew the curtains and stopped the clock. There was no mirror to cloak, her mother having gone beyond gazing at her own reflection. She put the kettle to boil, for whom she did not know. It was just something to do so she would not have to approach the bed again and look on her mother’s closed-in face. She could not take it in; that the end would come like this, so quietly, as if her mother had just suddenly upped and surrendered. Typical, Babsie thought, and inexplicably she felt her ire rising again. It was something she had never understood. It wasn’t that her mother had lacked spirit – hadn’t she raised up five of them as a widow? – but her striving seemed always directed at appearances, the look of things as opposed to how they were. Well, Babsie thought, looking around, something would have to be done here. The scene looked peaceful, though hardly dignified. Her mother’s face had a par-boiled look where previous bouts of the erysipelas had left angry blotches. The gloves and the makeshift turban seemed foolish and pathetic, and Babsie set to, unwinding the scarf from her mother’s head and peeling off the gloves, so that when the clergyman saw her, she would not look like something out of a harlequinade. She loosed her mother’s hair from the matted mound the scarf had made of it. Babsie lifted her head then while she combed the tangles out of it. When she laid her mother’s head back on the pillow, her hair settled like a tortoiseshell fan. Babsie laid her mottled arms by her side. Then she straightened the bed.
Something tinny fell off as she turned down the counterpane. She had to go down on all fours to retrieve it. It was her mother’s little birdcage. It was a useless little thing, she thought, not even brass but brightly painted metal made up to look like silver. No pawn shop in town would look twice at it and so it had survived, a priceless treasure. She weighed it in her hand and then lifted her mother’s and folded the stiffening fingers around it in a fist. Tears came then, but nothing operatic – that was not in Babsie’s nature. She wiped her eyes and marched purposefully into the other room to fetch the two-pair candlesticks. There was a large dent in the stem of one, from what Babsie couldn’t recall. A domestic skirmish with her father, no doubt. One of the many. She lit them with a taper from the reawakened fire and set one down on each side of the bed. She bent and kissed her mother on the brow. Then Babsie passed her fingers in swift benediction over her mother’s eyelids and closed them, her lips moving to some silent prayer.
When John came back, she sent him off to fetch Susie. She left the Reverend to do his business behind closed doors. With a man of God in the house, her mother would not be alone; that was important. Now she would have to go to break the news to Granny Casey. But when she got to Abercorn Road, she halted, not wanting to make the terrible announcement. The door was thrown open to the street – the Shieldses downstairs were not particular about it. Babsie felt a surge of fellow-feeling for them because Granny Casey had such a set against them, being Catholics and all. But Babsie had all but converted herself to marry her lovely Starry in St Laurence O’Toole church this November just gone by and she didn’t care who knew it.
Granny Casey had been bitterly disappointed, Babsie could tell, th
ough she had said nothing. But Granny Casey had a way of letting you know what she thought without ever opening her mouth. Both Uncle Tom and Uncle Isaac had married out and she’d never forgiven either of them; now the weakness was passing on to the next generation; that would be Granny Casey’s view, Babsie knew.
The strange thing was that her own mother had barely turned a hair when Babsie broke the news. She had been expecting frosty silence, mute disapproval.
‘He’s a good man, isn’t he?’ her mother had asked, sounding vaguely quarrelsome.
‘You know he is, Mam.’
‘Well, that’s the most important thing, so.’
‘Then you’ll come to the wedding?’
‘I will, of course, and why wouldn’t I?’
‘Even though it’ll be a Catholic ceremony?’
Babsie was incredulous. Her mother was always looking down her nose at Catholics. When they lived in Fitzgibbon Street, surrounded by them, she could hardly bring herself to salute them. When I die, she used to say, the word Protestant will be found written on my heart as Queen Mary thought Calais would be on hers.
‘It’s just that Starry’s people won’t stand for him marrying me unless the children are brought up in his church,’ Babsie said for she had all her arguments rallied and felt obliged to use them. ‘Sure isn’t it the one God we all go to in the end, that’s what Starry says.’
‘I don’t hold with that at all,’ her mother said and Babsie braced herself for a row, ‘but I won’t deny anyone’s good nature.’
‘But it’s a lot to give up,’ Babsie countered, playing devil’s advocate despite herself. She had told Starry she would elope with him if her mother didn’t give her consent, and the daring of such an escapade appealed to her. But her mother remained implacably in favour.
‘A girl,’ her mother had said, ‘should give up a lot for love.’ That was her final word.
AFTERWORD
Seán O’Casey (1880−1964) is one of Ireland’s premier playwrights. He also wrote six volumes of autobiography, in which his only sister, Bella, featured. For reasons that have never been clear, O’Casey prematurely killed Bella off in his autobiographies − about ten years before her time. She actually died at the start of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918.
The Rising of Bella Casey is a fictional reinterpretation of her life.
About the Author
Mary Morrissy is the author of two novels, Mother of Pearl and The Pretender, and a collection of short stories, A Lazy Eye. She is a winner of the prestigious US Lannan Prize and the Hennessy Award for short fiction. Her short stories have been widely published and anthologised in the UK and the US.
She teaches on the MA programme in Creative Writing at University College Cork and divides her time between Dublin and Cork.
Copyright
This eBook edition first published 2013 by Brandon,
an imprint of The O’Brien Press Ltd,
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Website: www.obrien.ie
First published 2013
eBook ISBN: 978–1–84717–613–4
Copyright for text © Mary Morrissy 2013
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The O’Brien Press Ltd.
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