‘It’s not that difficult.’ Pauline doesn’t know what it is like to live anywhere else. The holiday in Donegal hardly counts as living. ‘You just live there, you know, like you live anywhere else.’
‘But the barricades and the bombs and everything ...’
‘Ah yeah. It’s not as bad as people in the South think, you know. Not during the day, anyway, or out where I live.’
‘Of course your father is a Protestant. Maybe that makes a difference?’
‘I don’t think so.’
Orla decides to take the plunge. ‘So are you for a united Ireland or not, then?’
Pauline laughs. ‘United Ireland? Are you?’ she asks, picking a piece of lettuce up in her fingers and staring carefully at it as if it were a map of Ireland.
‘Not really,’ Orla answers. ‘I think it’s more fun having the North.’
‘Being able to get Mars Bars and things, she means,’ Aisling explains helpfully.
‘Yeah, well it’s like having a foreign country sort of on your doorstep,’ Orla adds.
‘Is it?’ Pauline thinks of Italy, where her parents are. Italy is a foreign country.
‘Yeah. Sort of.’
They pause and eat some salad. Sava comes in with a hot pot of tea, and overhears the conversation. ‘There’s after bein a terrible bomb,’ she says, sighing.
‘Where?’
‘In Belfast. They don’t know how many’s killed.’
‘Oh dear!’ says Aisling, politely. She pauses before asking, ‘Was it the ira?’
‘Aye surely.’ Sava puts down the teapot and examines the milk jug, tilting it carefully to see if there is enough milk to serve a second round of tea. There is. ‘The ira surely,’ she drawls, in her sad tired voice. ‘Who else?’ She stands and stares at the wall.
‘The long hot summer!’ Orla says brightly, to fill the vacuum and dispel the uneasiness that Sava’s news has brought to the table.
Pauline gives her a sharp stare and Aisling shakes her head critically.
‘Did I say something wrong?’ asks Orla.
Jacqueline comes back into the room and they all stare at her in acute embarrassment.
‘Jacqueline! Are you all right?’ Aisling is the most grown-up of these girls when it comes to the crunch. She knows how to deal with surprises.
‘It was just a bit of a shock, that’s all. But my mind is made up. I’m going home tomorrow.’
Jacqueline has not had more bad news from Derry. She has found a large fat slug in her salad: that was why she left the room so suddenly. That night, before the céilí starts, she complains bitterly to Headmaster Joe about the Dohertys’ primitive household, about her enforced starvation, about the lack of hygiene in the preparation of food, about her disenchantment with the Irish language and with the climate of Donegal, about her loneliness for her family, about internment, about William Craig, Whitelaw, Ian Paisley, and about several other things. She has surprising reserves of energy and vocabulary when her enthusiasm is ignited and her goal clear. He makes every effort to persuade her to stay. Even though he had marked her as a rotten egg – to any schoolteacher, Jacqueline would have been instantly recognisable as bad news – and he knows her presence in his college is unlikely to be advantageous to anyone, he desperately wants her to stay on. Nobody has ever left this college before. Nobody has ever been expelled either, contrary to popular belief. He would never dream of sending a child away, unless they committed some serious crime, for instance murder. Even then he is the sort of man who would say, There’s more to this than meets the eye, so there is. His belief is that every child is a good child – rather a radical one for the time. Some Irish colleges have a reputation for authoritarianism, for strictness, for military discipline. They do very well: their waiting lists are long and their fees are high. Parents queue up to send their children there, where they will learn who’s boss, where they will be licked into shape, taught Irish at gunpoint and despatched on the next bus if they utter even a single word of English. Headmaster Joe, although he can see that this is where commercial success lies, does not want to run his college along the lines of an army. His primary aim is that the children should enjoy themselves, although they never suspect that. Children going home he regards as the ultimate failure, the ultimate insult to himself as a headmaster, as the father of this college. He spends an hour talking to Jacqueline, seeking to persuade her to give the place one more chance.
But she goes. To everyone’s surprise and subtle dismay she goes, and the next day is full of a grey feeling of failure and dismay.
Pauline is left alone at the back of the house
Pauline is left alone in the room at the back of the house, overlooking the garden and the burn.
‘Sandra could move in with her,’ Aisling suggests.
‘Yes.’ Orla is not enthusiastic, but realises that the house will be different, lonelier, with one person gone. Three is not enough for a house. Three is not a crowd but a mistake.
‘I’m going to tell her.’
‘Does Pauline want to share with Sandra, though?’
‘Sandra?’ Pauline screws up her face. ‘That girl you know?’
‘She’s in our class.’
‘Share with someone from Dublin? I don’t know.’ Pauline can’t imagine what it would be like. Dubliners. She thinks they are dirty: they don’t seem to have enough underwear, and their socks are grubby.
‘Sandra mightn’t want to move anyway, now. I think she likes Carrs’ and all that crowd there.’
‘Monica Murphy and Noeleen Talbot, how could she?’
‘Yeah. But she’s used to them.’
Pauline moves around the little room, feeling it expand around her. The oak tree seems blacker and shiftier now that she’s alone. The moon flits more dramatically in and out of the clouds. She pulls the curtains: darkness has always filled her with anxiety. She pulls her postcards from the bottom of her canvas bag, and examines them. Botticelli’s Venus, says one. A naked lady, with a face a bit like Jacqueline’s, rises out of a seashell, the kind you can use as an ashtray. Clams or oysters live in those shells, usually. The Duomo in Sienna, a dark, rusty red. Leonardo’s David. The Duomo, Florence. The Duomo, Perugia. The Duomo, Pisa.
It’s all churches. Are they Catholic or Protestant? Her mother doesn’t say, but they look Catholic. All the pictures and statues.
‘Tan deepening daily.’
‘Sienna glorious, the colour of flowerpots, like a city on the moon. Wish you could see it!’
‘Perugia unbelievable. Green and gold, old stone. A surprise a minute.’
It’s not the first time they’ve left Pauline to go on a holiday together, without her. Two years ago they went to Malta, and before that to New York, to Vienna, and to Paris one winter for a long weekend. She stayed with her granny, in the Waterside, on most of those occasions. Twice her babysitter came and stayed at the house – that was after her granny died and after she’d got Shep. The babysitter is feeding Shep now, coming in twice a day, Pauline hopes. She hopes Shep is taken for a walk, at least occasionally, but doubts it. The babysitter, Nuala, doesn’t like walking much.
Granny hadn’t had a lot of time for Maureen, Pauline’s mother. She never spoke about her at all, or to her: when Pauline visited, it was with her father or alone.
‘Why?’
‘Ah you know,’ her father had said. ‘Don’t get on.’
‘Lucky me!’ Maureen laughed. ‘One in-law less.’
But in fact Maureen has no contact at all with her in-laws. Blood is thicker than the law, as far as Douglas’s family are concerned. And it is Pauline alone who dances the dangerous dance across the minefield that divides her mother’s and her father’s territory. The domestic borderland separating Stewart from Paddy, Myrtle from Eileen, is Pauline’s special inheritance. All the adults in her life avoid stepping on it, and only one or two even acknowledge its existence.
‘Them snotty relations of your da’s,’ Auntie Eileen said once, when Paul
ine mentioned that she and her father had Sunday dinner with their granny. ‘I don’t know how your ma puts up with it.’
So I don’t.
So I don’t.
Maureen puts up with it because she fell in love with Douglas when she was eighteen, working in a factory, a shirt factory, of course of course, what else. The white shirt-tails, the starched collars, rolling down the conveyer belt: she machined on the collars, that was her job. She’d wanted to be an air hostess but her mother had laughed at her. Are ye mad? Sure there isn’t even an airport here! Where would ye go to be an air hostess?
Dublin was where occurred to Maureen.
‘They’ll na take ye. I never heard of anyone from here bein an air hostess in Dublin, or anywhere else.’
Maureen applied. She wrote away to Aer Lingus in Dublin and got the application form. It asked if she had a fluent knowledge of Irish and she left that bit blank, although she knew a bit. They learned it after dancing on Saturdays.
They didn’t answer the application at all. Not even an acknowledgement.
Maureen didn’t tell her mother or anyone else about it. Until she met Douglas, who owned the shirt factory.
He stopped one day when he was walking through the workroom, nodding and smiling, lord of the manor. He stopped when he saw Maureen. Nothing unusual there. Everyone stopped, in their tracks, the first time they saw her.
‘Hello!’ he said.
‘Hello.’ Maureen broke a piece of thread with her teeth and concentrated on her work, as any of the factory girls would have done in the circumstances.
‘You’re new here?’
‘Yes. I started a month ago.’
It was the ‘yes’ that did it, Douglas thought. ‘Yes’ not ‘Aye’. It proved something, he liked to imagine. It proved Maureen was different from the other factory girls, promising, individual. Thus he rationalised, when he had to.
His mother did not share his opinion.
‘She’s going to be an air hostess,’ he had said helplessly, having heard the story of Aer Lingus.
‘An air hostess,’ his mother hissed.
‘You’re a bigot.’
‘Don’t you dare accuse me of any such thing.’ She was dressed in red, a colour bossy people liked to wear. Her grey hair was coiffed and stylish, her lips creamed crimson. She had an air-hostessy look about her herself, he realised. In fact she had a Maureen look about her.
Sorry mother!
‘You’ll learn all about bigotry when you marry her and her filthy relations come to show their respects. What do they think about this?’
‘They don’t know yet.’
‘You know what they’ll do when they find out? Tar and feather, I believe, is their usual reaction. Cutting off the hair of the girl and ... Don’t do it.’
‘I love her.’
‘Love! It’s not just that she’s one of them, anyway. For Heaven’s sake she works in the factory.’
‘I know.’
‘You could ...’
Have her. Without marrying. She was about to say that but bit it back. He did not hold it against her. Of course she believed it, that it would have been a viable way out. But she would not have believed it if she had ever deigned to meet Maureen.
They hadn’t tarred and feathered her, or kneecapped him or tried to burn them out of their house. But his relations had frozen her out, completely. The wedding – in Paris – they had not attended at all. Eileen and Kathleen came to cheer her up, although they considered the whole thing a bad idea.
Still, Douglas was nice enough, when you got to know him. And Maureen was getting a fine house on the Culmore Road, old but renovated, with a good kitchen. She would not have to work in the factory again as they had to, even though they were married.
Pauline was born at the end of the first year. Maureen would have liked to have her brought up as a Protestant. But even Douglas could not agree with her on that.
‘It won’t matter. She won’t fit in,’ he said.
‘Why? You’re her father.’
‘Yes. But you’re her mother and that’s what matters.’
‘I’m willing to make the sacrifice. My family won’t like it.’
‘They won’t abandon her. But mine will. Even if she’s Protestant. She’ll be your daughter first and foremost.’
Maureen capitulated.
Douglas was wrong about his family, however. They ignored Pauline for about two months. Then his mother asked him if she could call and give her a present. He arranged it: Maureen went shopping. His mother had not had a grandchild before, and after that visit she could not keep away. Pauline became a regular visitor to the house in the Waterside. She preferred it, if forced to choose, to her other granny’s house, a small red-bricked place in Ross Street. But the main difference between the two grannies was that one was rich and one was poor, not that one was Protestant and one was Catholic. She liked the house in the Waterside because it was big and elegant, and more exciting than the modern, stucco house she lived in herself. Her granny had treasures: a music box the size of a trunk, with a silver xylophone inside. You slotted in disks and it played ‘It’s a Long Way to Tipperary’, Brahms’s lullaby, and ‘Rule Britannia’. She also owned a penny-farthing bicycle, stored in a shed at the end of her long, shady garden. There was a collection of hats in the attic. And many other things. The granny in Ross Street owned nothing at all: they had had to throw away everything because the house was so small. Two bedrooms, a kitchen and a sitting room the size of a stamp. And she had had seven children. Three of them still lived there.
Granny Gallagher had only Douglas and his sister Myrtle, who was married in England. Their father had died when Douglas was young. Pauline used to think that meant he died when Douglas was seven or eight, but she has only begun to understand recently that he is much much older than her mother, fifteen or twenty years older. When she asked he would not tell her what age he was. But it meant his father died when Douglas was already grown-up.
On some Sundays, when Pauline was small, she had visited her granny in Ross Street, on others her granny in the Waterside. Since her Waterside grandmother had died she had given up Ross Street as well, although her granny there was going strong.
‘So, have you thought about sharing with Sandra?’ Aisling asks at breakfast.
‘I don’t mind.’
‘It’ll be better than being alone,’ Aisling says.
‘I’m used to being alone.’
‘You’re an only child?’
‘Yes.’
‘Are your parents having a good time in Italy?’
‘Yes. They are having a good time in Italy. They write to me every day.’
‘Don’t you wish you were with them?’
‘ I’m better off here.’
Postman Joe don’t go slow be like Elvis go man go
Orla goes up to Headmaster Joe and asks if he has left something at the bottom of the bag, by mistake.
He looks at her impatiently – he is hungry for his lunch – but turns the white canvas bag inside out.
‘I’m afraid not, a thaisce,’ he says. Then he stares over the top of his black frames and pats her head. ‘Tomorrow is another day.’
She manages to get to the toilet before she cries; it’s the first time she has broken down; her patience is reaching breaking point at last.
‘Why don’t you ring them?’ Aisling asks. Orla has not exactly confided in her, because this is not the sort of situation that Aisling could understand, or sympathise with. She would relegate it to the vast sea of difference that separates her and her family from Orla’s. She would find it mildly embarrassing, that is all, and feel helpless.
‘Is there a phone?’ Orla has never seen one. That is the sort of place Tubber is, the sort of place where there isn’t a phone in any house, not even in the school.
‘I think there’s one in the post office. You have to ask the woman there to let you use it.’
‘Well... I’ve no money,’ Orla says.
‘Oh.’ Aisling’s mouth makes a small red moue and her cheeks flush. ‘Well, you’ll probably get a letter soon anyway.’
‘I haven’t had even one. You’ve had heaps.’
Aisling puffs her cheeks and blows out some air. ‘I’ll ask my mother to call yours. ok? And tell her to write.’
‘Yeah.’
‘What’s your phone number?’
‘We haven’t got a phone.’ Orla reddens, admitting a secret. The only way she can phone home is to phone Mrs Madden, the woman next door.
‘Oh yeah. I forgot. Well. She can call around. She knows the address.’
Orla envisages Aisling’s mother calling round to her house, talking to Elizabeth. The vision is too painful to bear. Pushing it out of her mind – and what else can she do about it – she changes the subject to Sandra. Sandra has said she would like to move houses, even though she’s happy enough where she is. Aisling has promised her they’ll talk to Banatee about it at lunchtime.
Lunch without Jacqueline is curiously quiet. Deprived of her partner, Pauline has little to say. She stares at her latest postcard and nods yes or no to queries. They are eating chips: since Jacqueline’s departure, they have had them every day. Eggs and chips, sausages and chips, beans and chips, rashers and chips, potato cakes and chips, fish fingers and chips. Chips on their own. Banatee spends half the morning peeling potatoes, the potatoes grown by Charlie and Micheál, bockety brown Queens thickly coated with clay. She peels the spuds; Sava slices them into fingers, plunging the knife into the slippery cream flesh and listening to it swish through till it hits the rut of the wooden breadboard. She has cut her finger twice, and the bright red blood has ribboned into the watery potato flesh, colouring everything pink. Dangerous work, chip making. Next week Sava will have to go back to work at Kathleen’s Place, to which she is looking forward. Cutting hair is easier than cutting potatoes. How Banatee will manage without her is anybody’s guess.
The Dancers Dancing Page 11