Inch Levels

by Neil Hegarty

  But it was an embarrassing episode. At any rate, embarrassing for her. For her father too, probably. The photographer, fifty-ish and stout, had no idea how to handle Cassie. I ought to be used to it by now, she thought, the way that some people can’t manage Cassie. In their usual place, among their usual people – the shopkeepers, the neighbours and farmers – folk usually could muddle through: she was one of their own, after a manner of speaking, and they were used to her odd ways: the way she avoided catching anyone’s eye, avoided conversation, avoided company. The photographer, though: he was unused to all of this – and his way of managing her was the especially embarrassing way: by treating her, behaving around her, speaking to her as though she was a toddling infant; and how to organise a family photograph when one of its subjects wouldn’t or couldn’t look at the camera? I don’t know, Sarah thought: I don’t bloody well know.

  ‘Will you not smile?’ the photographer coaxed; and now he appealed to Sarah herself. ‘Will she not smile? Can you get her to smile?’ Sarah smiled even wider, she smiled for two – but she could see that Cassie looked trapped, cornered; smiling was the last thing she would ever do. And then the photographer decided to take matters into his own hands, to organise them, to make a success of this stiff, stilted tableau. ‘This way!’ he said, ‘I need you turned around,’ for Cassie was angled now into the corner, into the wall. ‘This way!’ he said again with a sort of dreadful jollity, and then he took – grasped, really – Cassie by both elbows and began to manoeuvre her into position as though she was a piece of heavy furniture, to be slotted or managed.

  Sarah watched this as though from across a suddenly opening gulf in the floor of this hot studio; Brendan too watched, seemed frozen. Cassie might scream, she might bawl: she could not bear to be touched; there was no way of knowing how she would react to being hauled around. Instead, mercifully, she froze – as though, it seemed to Sarah, she suddenly was a piece of furniture – and seemed to bow to this handling. He moved her around, then, to the left, out from the wall, towards the mahogany chair. ‘There!’ he said again. ‘That’s lovely now. And your da there, and you,’ he pointed at Sarah and then at the floor, ‘you just there.’

  They came to, and moved, taking their places: Brendan seated on the heavy mahogany chair, the girls on either side. The mahogany chair was, they knew, the photographer’s pride and joy: most of the people in the area who could afford to have a family portrait taken – not many – came to this man, and the mahogany chair therefore featured on many a local wall. ‘And now smile,’ the photographer instructed again, looking up and nodding and smiling himself with relief. ‘Nice big smiles,’ he said.

  The photograph was taken, and they thanked him and left, bursting from the airless studio and onto the street. They walked across Waterloo Place, each taking long breaths of air. Sarah tried to lower her shoulders, to wash away the tension. Brendan – for this was the next stage in this exhausting afternoon – was taking them for tea and buns in the Golden Teapot: and so they took their places in the windows of the cafe, and had their tea, their buns and watched the crowds milling outside. ‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’ Brendan said, and he looked at them with sudden, unfamiliar appeal. Cassie, seemingly utterly concentrated on the jammy bun before her, said nothing; Sarah nodded and smiled again, the muscles in her face tired and aching from the efforts of the previous half-hour. ‘It was nice,’ she said, and she smiled and smiled, and Brendan looked down and in silence addressed his own jammy bum. There was a lump in Sarah’s throat as she looked at them: at the table, the tea cups and buns, at the street scene outside. There seemed an embargo on every word, on everything she might have said.

  Then Cassie looked up and popped the tension. ‘It was nice,’ she said and now she smiled at last, the unfamiliarity, the tension of the photographic studio suddenly sloughed off. ‘And these are nice buns,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And now Brendan seemed to smile a proper smile, a normal smile, and he sat back with relief into the red plush material of the seat. The tears were very near, but Sarah had her own bun on which to focus, her own tea to stir; and the tears to manage, and the pressure in her throat: they passed.

  The photograph arrived a fortnight later, neatly parcelled, silver framed and tied with brown twine.

  ‘It’s nice,’ said Isobel.

  There they were in their Sunday best: Brendan smiling in the chair and Sarah smiling a little madly; and Cassie, her chin tucked well in, looking off to one side.

  ‘You’ve a nice smile,’ said Isobel.

  The photograph was hung on the kitchen wall; and never referred to again. For a long time, Sarah wondered about it: about its very existence, about Brendan’s motivations for summoning it into being. It could not have been commissioned for the usual reason that people commission such items: to place on a wall in order to demonstrate familial togetherness and normality – because people seldom came to visit, no, they never came to visit, except for Father Lynch, and even he had his visits rationed. And besides, the family had already had a branch lopped off: why, she thought, why frame the reminder, the remainder, the stump of it, and hang it on the kitchen wall?

  Eventually – at last she thought she might understand why her father had arranged the taking of the photograph. It was his gesture to Cassie: a sort of groping towards a declaration of love, of tenderness, of gratitude, of familial unity. Wordless – naturally – but at least well framed. It was not such an amazing, unexpected message to try to deliver: and maybe, she thought with pain, maybe it says more about me that it’s taken so long for the idea to occur. She wondered, then, if Cassie had ever come to the same conclusion.

  *

  Help me, Cassie thought: help me, help me. The man was pulling and grabbing and tugging; smile, smile smile. I need Sarah to help me, I need someone to help me. But Sarah can’t help; and Brendan is about to burst; I can feel it in the air. All the way on the bus he has been about to burst. He wants this to happen and he doesn’t want it to happen; he wants someone to be here who can’t be, who’ll never be here again. Tears stung her eyes, but, but – he wants this to happen, he wants this to happen for me, and I can’t cry. She took a breath and held her breath and allowed the man to pull her round, to drag her across the carpet to the chair sitting in the middle of the floor. There, stand there and smile, smile, smile. I can’t smile, this is all I can do. It’s all I can do. Brendan said we could go for tea after this: I’ll have tea and something sweet, with a crunchy sugar topping, or smooth white icing, and split and filled with blackcurrant jam. The Golden Teapot, Brendan had said: we’ll go to the Golden Teapot; they say it’s nice, and we’ll have a nice tea to ourselves. Smile, smile, smile, but I can’t smile. Brendan is too sad, Sarah is too sad, for me to smile. To smile would be a sin. I can’t smile.

  *

  Her father had wanted so much for her. Sarah knew this. Brendan’s hunger for success, for education: these had been undiminished by time – and his clever daughter should have all that he had been denied, should win scholarships and attend the University, should have every opportunity to absorb the marvellous world.

  She should be a credit to her mother’s memory.

  But he came to his senses in the end.

  Brendan did not at first reckon with the scarcity of money, or scholarships, of opportunity – but yes, he came to his senses in the end. And more embittered, and more extreme, blaming now the British for his woes and the woes of his country: the British, who still clung to their little harbour in this far corner of Ireland. She remembered how he clung to this idea, as the only certainty in an uncertain world. When they left, life would be better: he knew this.

  But they would never leave, not really. And he knew this too.

  Well, they gave up on their little harbour, at least. Brendan made sure of witnessing their final departure, in the autumn of the year before the war began: he made sure the two girls did, too.

  *

  The spring of 1938. Sarah stood with Cassie on the crest
of the hill and looked out over Lough Swilly. The fort at Dunree loomed. Powerful, she heard a woman murmur, meaning dramatic – and powerful it was: the engineers who built the fort and harbour here (to keep Napoleon at bay, she knew this from her history lessons) surely had an eye for drama, for power: the weathered grey buildings perching at the end of a high promontory, water stretching on either side. The lough narrow and silvery – sleek, she thought now, like a fish, like a seal – and flat calm on this windless day, with the peak of Inch Island amid its flatlands far away to the south, the open Atlantic to the north. As she watched, a cormorant glided, landed on the surface of the water with a brief flap of wings and an explosion of ripples, dived, vanished, reappeared far away. On the opposite shore, the hills were blue-grey and indistinct in the misty air. Cassie took her hand – and Sarah turned, smiled at her. ‘Isn’t it good, Cassie?’ Cassie nodded.

  Sarah’s stomach rumbled: ages since their early breakfast, and then the roads were full and slow, the whole county seemed to have turned out to see this sight. But they were here at last; she could wait a little longer for her sandwiches; and she looked around at the crowd gathered all around her, gathered wherever they could get a good view. They were massed on the hill around them; massed on the curving shingle beach at its foot; massed, precariously, on the ledges and rocks below the battlements of the fort itself.

  And what a crowd. There were people here from all the neighbouring districts; even a scattering of families come by bus from Derry. ‘To bear witness,’ the same woman said, sounding important. But it was odd: it seemed now that there would be little by way of public ceremony – yet the local schools were closed, all of them; and there were announcements from the altar the previous Sunday, and the one before that and the one before that too. The day of the handover was given, and the time; clear enough what Father Lynch expected people to do. ‘This is a moment of history,’ he’d said from the altar. ‘The British are giving up. They’re going home.’ They were surrendering their last toehold in Ireland – and there certainly was excitement in the air, a giddiness that she could feel just by standing here, taking it all in.

  Sarah was conscious of a little confusion too: the British weren’t surrendering their last foothold in Ireland, were they? They were just there, just down the road. But she knew to hold her tongue, to keep her expression neutral.

  ‘What time?’ she asked again; and her father murmured, a few other people in the crowd murmured, noon. They were ranged across the crest of the hill: below, soldiers – ‘our soldiers’ – had closed the approach roads to the fort. ‘This is as close as we can get,’ her father told her, ‘so we might as well make ourselves comfortable,’ and he took off his green-flecked tweed jacket – his good jacket, he was too warm, his face reddening a little bit – and spread it on the heathery ground. He sat and Sarah and Cassie sat and others along the ridge followed their example, and sat too. Her mind strayed from history: she worried about the stew Cassie had made and left for tea; gone too long and it would dry up. She sighed; Cassie glanced at her.

  They were all there, the great and the good amid the crowd: a teacher or two, and a priest or two; one or two posh shopkeepers from the town. Sarah knew all these; her father knew other priests, farmers, other shopkeepers from other towns and from elsewhere in the county. He nodded, said hello; she and Cassie bobbed their heads, bobbed them again. Father Lynch appeared: clever, full of facts – handy at such a time. He looked now down onto the fort. ‘The French,’ he said. ‘They built this to keep out the French. Poor Wolfe Tone: they caught him out there on the water.’ He smiled, too brightly, at Cassie; he turned to Sarah. ‘Do you remember, Sarah?’

  She remembered, how they caught him and dragged him to Derry and then Dublin, where he opened his – what, his windpipe? – with something – with a pen knife? – and he died a horrible death, a ghastly death; they did this at school. ‘Well, no more British ships on Lough Swilly,’ the priest went on in satisfied tones, ‘not after today.’ A pair of grey warships was floating just off the fort, resting, lining up on the grey water. ‘Getting ready to move off,’ said the priest, ‘in an hour or two. And that’ll be an end to that.’ He pointed to the strange flag fluttering above the battlements. ‘The royal ensign,’ he said, bobbing up and down on the heels of his polished black shoes. ‘That’ll be coming down.’ She nodded. He knew everything.

  And in fact, it took less than an hour or two. After half an hour, her father opened the waxy packet of sandwiches and they ate; and a few minutes after that, a volley of shots; Cassie was shushed; and the flag slid down, and a tricolour was raised in its place. The grey ships moved off, smoothly on the water; in a matter of minutes they rounded the point and disappeared into the open ocean. A single Irish ship took their place, resting just offshore; and that, it seemed, was that. ‘Time to go home,’ her father said. He sounded flat, somehow; she felt flat too; the crowd was quiet, sober as it looked out across the water, as it broke up. Cassie said, ‘Are we going home now?’

  Father Lynch reappeared.

  ‘We got rid of them, girls,’ he said. ‘At last,’ he repeated: Sarah watched him there on the ridge of the hill, the shadowy water, the view of blue hills fading now into afternoon mist. He paused, rubbed his jaw. ‘At last,’ he said again and seemed now to gather himself. ‘And no last-minute problems either,’ he added with more energy. ‘It was the last-minute problems that I was afraid of, but everything went well in the end.’ He finished gathering himself now, and looked at Sarah indulgently.

  ‘And what did you think, Sarah?’ He paid no attention now to Cassie, who paid no attention to him.

  ‘It was a little quiet, Father. I expected something more exciting.’

  Her father looked at her too, but Father Lynch merely sucked his teeth thoughtfully.

  ‘Well, Sarah,’ he told her, ‘the event is exciting enough in its own way. That’s the thing to remember.’

  ‘No, I know, Father – but maybe the government should have made it more public. I mean, more of a ceremony; something like that.’

  Now everyone seemed to be looking at her. Cassie took her hand. Father Lynch nodded, spoke in bracing fashion:

  ‘Indeed, Sarah, but that’s not really the point. The spectacle isn’t really the point, is it? Not the main thing.’

  ‘I know, Father, but surely –’

  Her father cut in. ‘How will you be getting back, Father?’

  ‘Dr Harvey has kindly offered me a run home,’ the priest told him. He nodded across at the doctor and then nodded at them, dismissed them, began to move away. ‘So I’ll bid you good day.’ The two men strode off.

  Her father said: ‘You can never just hold your tongue, can you? Always this cleverness. He didn’t want to hear you, didn’t you see that?’

  Sarah blushed, painfully. ‘He asked me and I told him. There’s nothing wrong with that.’

  ‘It isn’t your place to go talking back and giving cheek to anyone – and to priests least of all.’ He spoke quietly, always a bad sign. All the same, Sarah opened her mouth once more.

  ‘Be quiet, Sarah.’

  Cassie turned, stared.

  ‘I only said –’

  ‘We’ll be getting back.’ He took her arm firmly; she wriggled, for his grip was painful, but he merely grasped her more tightly and pulled her along. ‘Come, Cassie,’ for Cassie was hanging back, agitated, threatening tears. ‘Cassie,’ he said again, ‘come.’

  The evening at home was quiet, quieter even than usual. They’d been away too long; the stew was ruined. ‘You’re spoiling it for yourself,’ Brendan said once, between breaths. Scholarships were slipping away: the priest didn’t like girls to be too clever. She took the beating silently. That was the first time.

  *

  Brendan watched the priest approach, picking his way through the thinning crowd, over the rocks and springy, blooming heather.

  ‘Well, Sarah? What did you think of all that?’

  He felt a small welli
ng of pride. Father liked to distinguish the girl, liked to pick her out of the crowd. She was clever, she read and studied hard; she’d be up for the County Scholarship, maybe, in a couple of years. But Brendan’s fear was pressing this pride away. Too few avenues available to his daughter: what her ambitions might be, he could not say – but whatever they were, she would most likely have to put them away. His finances could no longer cope with the expense of her schooling; if the Scholarship didn’t come along, they’d have to make other arrangements for her. That was clear.

  ‘It was a little quiet, Father. I expected something more exciting.’

  He watched as the priest and his daughter wrestled politely. Again, a tentative flutter of pride, shot through with pain; others were watching, others observing her brains, her will; again, he set these sensations firmly aside; he must maintain his neutral, impassive expression. ‘The spectacle isn’t really the point,’ the priest said – though not with heat, Brendan saw, but rather mildly, with amusement. With appreciation? – though no, there was a look in the priest’s eye that Brendan saw, and understood. An intervention was necessary: too many people were listening, and Sarah already getting a name around town for being too clever by half. It was a deadly game, this: for the future might keep her here; she must be roped in for her own sake.

  He took her arm and rounded up Cassie and they moved along smartly towards the distant station; and he felt – not for the first time – a sensation of heaviness in his throat. God knows, he was familiar with this sensation by now: he might have wept once, though never in public – but he lost this ability, long ago.