by Anne Doughty
Elizabeth, do ye mind the wee key you used to keep in its cellophane bag? Well, here is another wee key. But see you take it out and use it for what it was intended.
Your loving Uncle, Albert.
Tears rolled down my cheeks. I could hear the way he said, ‘Do ye mind?’ instead of ‘Do you remember?’ which was what town people said. Who else in all my family would have paid the slightest attention to my little key, once the dearest of my childhood treasures?
I’d run out of hankies, so I had to go to the bathroom and pull off a long piece of toilet roll. I blew my nose, mopped myself up and read the bit about the key again. I wasn’t sure I understood it either, whether I was of sound mind or not.
I stared at the clock and began to recall what Uncle Albert had once explained to me.
‘Ye see, Elizabeth, in the old days people used to put anything they had of any importance under the clock. It might be a land deed, or the money for the rates, or a letter from Amerikay. But the newer clocks had no space underneath them, they weren’t raised up the way the older ones were, so there was nowhere to put anything, till one bright spark comes along and has this great idea. He puts a wee drawer at the back of the clock where ye can’t even see it and he puts a lock on it. An’ he advertises it as a Security Clock and sells thousands.’
I turned the clock round to face me. The drawer was the full width of the base and about an inch deep. The wood was dark with smoke from the fire, but the tiny keyhole was perfectly visible. I picked up the keys. There were the two brass ones I had seen him use every Saturday night to adjust the time to the wireless and wind it for the week. And then there was a very small one, smaller than my key that I had never used.
It took only a moment to do as I had been bidden. I turned the key in the lock. It clicked round without sticking. Gently, I eased open the drawer. A thick wodge of creased paper filled it. Only it wasn’t paper. When I unfolded the neat pack he had folded to fit the drawer exactly, I found it was made up of old five pound notes just like the note the Brigadier had given to Ben and me. I started to count and began to cry again. One hundred. Two hundred. Three hundred. I sat back on my heels, the tears pouring unheeded down my cheeks. Dear Uncle Albert had left me his entire life savings.
Chapter 22
After the initial shock, I was faced with the problem of what to do about Uncle Albert’s money. If I told my parents I could be quite sure my mother would expect her share. At the very least, she would insist I now ‘pay for my keep’ after three years of ‘having to be kept’. However I might try to explain the workings of the means test and its effect on my scholarship, she had never accepted that my father received an allowance for my board and lodging. If it didn’t arrive in cash, it didn’t exist.
I considered approaching my father but decided there was little point. Outside the shop, he so seldom made decisions about anything that he’d only pass it up the line to my mother. In the end, I went to the bank and put all the money, except for ten pounds, into a deposit account. When I discovered that my shiny, new pass book with its single entry fitted the drawer at the back of my clock, I was quite delighted. It seemed so appropriate for me to tuck the little book away, turn the key on it, and slide the clock back under the bed, my secret safe from prying eyes.
I spent a long time planning what I should buy and send as thank you presents to all my friends in Lisara. Mary and Paddy came top of my list and I began to fill a small box with little treats for them.
‘So why do you want a dispensary label, Lizzie?’ Ben asked, laughing.
‘For Paddy’s medicine. I’ve got him a half-bottle of Powers and I want a proper doctor’s scribble that you can only just make out, saying “Take as required or as prescribed by your physician.”’
‘All right, I’ll see what I can do when I’m up at the Royal tomorrow,’ he agreed, as we parked our files and settled ourselves with coffee in the students’ union. ‘What about Mary?’
‘Fine red wool scarf and matching gloves. She loves bright colours but she always buys black. And real coffee. It will pack nicely round the whiskey.’
‘And Sean?’
‘Photo of his cottage with the flower tubs in bloom. Two enlargements, so he can send one to his brother.’
‘Geoffrey?’
‘Second-hand copy of The Cycles of the Kings, by Myles Dillon. I had an incredible bit of luck: it’s out of print but I found it in Smithfield for two shillings.’
He continued to go through every one of the names of all the people I’d written about, asking what I’d worked out for each of them.
‘You have been busy, haven’t you? Hasn’t your mother been asking questions?’
‘No. She’s far too bound up in her own affairs. It is Christmas, you see, and the only good thing about Christmas in the Stewart establishment is that she wouldn’t notice if I dropped dead.’
‘Don’t do that, Lizzie?’
‘Do what?’
‘Drop dead. I’d miss you so. Besides, you’d make a rotten angel.’
‘And why would I make a rotten angel, Ben Milligan?’
‘You’d never be able to keep your harp in tune. Will you come to the carol service at St Jude’s? Guaranteed no sermon.’
‘Yes, if you’ll tell me what you’d like for your present. You helped me too, in lots of ways.’
‘You, mostly.’
‘What?’
‘For my present. And my future. You. That’s what I’d really like.’
He said it so easily and lightly, so completely the direct and forthcoming Ben I’d always known, I was amazed to find myself blushing. I was grateful when a crowd of agriculture students at the next table rose en masse and filled the air with noise, and the space around us with duffel-coated figures. I just managed to mutter something inane about not giving him handkerchiefs or socks before I left him to go to my tutorial.
Halfway up the stairs to the department it suddenly hit me that Ben hadn’t mentioned Patrick when he’d taken me through the list of the friends from Clare for whom I’d bought presents. Once again I berated myself for not telling him about Patrick the very moment I got back. Half a dozen times I’d made up my mind to do it and not been able to manage it. But far worse, I’d not even been able to mention Patrick in ordinary conversation. I was sure Ben sensed something wasn’t quite right.
It would explain why I would suddenly be aware of him drawing back sometimes, when we were at our happiest and easiest, even avoiding contact, kissing me briefly only when we parted.
I felt sad, sad and anxious. I couldn’t see what I was going to do. All at once, finding a suitable Christmas present for Patrick had become a major undertaking with very little joy in it, while giving Ben what he most wanted raised issues I simply couldn’t begin to resolve.
Later that day, I sent off the first parcels and packets. By the end of the week, they had all gone. I had collected my thesis from the binders and handed in my term essay. There was nothing left now but to resign myself to the Christmas vacation and the unavoidable festivities of the season.
Christmas week was grim. Far from being white, the rain sheeted down and produced a landscape made up of washes of grey, dark brown and black. Looking out of my bedroom window each morning over dripping backyards and minute squares of sodden grass, I tried to tell myself that things would improve as the year turned. But I wasn’t convinced.
The ordeal of the gathering at Short Strand, where my mother and her sisters convened to demolish the obligatory turkey on Christmas Day, made Uncle Joe’s funeral seem like a rather jolly outing. Somewhat to my surprise I got through without the usual depression and took to working in my room when not required for family duty, a baize-covered card table wedged between the electric fire and the edge of the bed on which I had to sit. My own legs and the legs of the table got scorched regularly, but the alternative was to freeze. I had long ago abandoned the impossible task of trying to write while wrapped in an eiderdown.
The post was dis
rupted after Christmas, but even allowing for that, the gap in Patrick’s letters had grown wider. When the next fat letter arrived on a bleak New Year’s morning, I carried it off to my room at once, but didn’t open it immediately. I sat down again at my card table and arranged my notes and coloured paper markers into neat piles until there was a clear space for the white envelope to sit in their midst.
The patterns I’d produced brought back that last evening of Geoffrey’s when we’d persuaded Mary to read the cards for us. With her usual disclaimer that she was no good at it, she’d dealt out the battered rectangles in circles and squares, calling each pattern by a different name. The Wheel of Fortune. The Marriage Bed. The Hand of Friendship. I had listened closely, anxious to hear anything that might point to a future with Patrick, the one future that seemed at all relevant to me, despite all the difficulties it would involve.
But there was nothing in what Mary said that I could connect directly with Patrick, however I might try to interpret the ambiguities of what she said.
‘I would have great success in all my enterprises. I would cross water with a fair man who stood in the best of loving hearts to me. I would stand out in front of people and I would often have something sharp in my right hand.’
She shuffled a second time and said she would make up my marriage bed. I watched, fascinated, as she laid the cards face downwards. Two each, at the top and bottom of the bed. Two at each side. Two cards within, myself and my lover. Two more she added for the bedcovers. And these she wove deftly between the others to make a solid shape.
‘Come on, astore, pick a card till we turn you over.’
I drew a card from the fan shape she offered me. It was the Queen of Hearts. A good card, I thought, from what I’d learnt so far. But Mary seemed indifferent to it, being for the moment wholly preoccupied with the interwoven construction in front of her. Then she did take it and turned it over.
‘Oh boys a dear, aren’t you the lucky one? Aren’t all the cards light, but for two and those are two old people. You’ll have joy and long life with a fair man. You’ll shed tears in sorrow, but never in bitterness. Tears of weariness, but never of hardship. Tears of longing, but never of regret.’
As her words echoed again in my mind, I closed my eyes on my bedroom and let myself go back to the cottage, feeling its warmth, imagining the smell of the turf, the sharp tang of Paddy’s tobacco.
Geoffrey had watched Mary too, as absorbed as I was. When she turned over his marriage bed however, the cards were all dark and fell apart. She’d blamed the stiffness of her fingers and tried a second time. The same thing happened again.
‘Ah sure you must watch the carpenter that makes your bed, Geoffrey. Don’t be sleeping on one of those put-u-ups for as sure as eggs is eggs it’ll let you down.’
We had laughed easily, but a chill had stolen across my mind and I was grateful when she began to deal again.
‘Choose a card, one each, and exchange it. Now put your left hand over the card you’ve exchanged and I’ll deal the Hand of Friendship for the two of you.’
I saw her smile and I was so thankful.
‘Ah sure good. Don’t I see letters and packets between you, even when oceans divide you. You’ll be spending a fortune on stamps, I’m thinking, for there’ll always be one of you a journey away.’
I put out my hand and touched the white envelope with its Dublin postmark, my name written in black ink. To my surprise, I heard Mary’s voice, as clearly as if she were beside me. ‘Aye, ’tis darkish at the top, but lighter further down. ’Twill all work out with the help o’ God.’
Neither that letter nor the ones that followed through the snowy weeks of January and February brought any resolution to my growing unease. He had spent Christmas at Rathfarnham, he had written, with the cousins he’d mentioned when he took up his duties as executor. He penned lively sketches of the three young sons of the household for me, Andrew, Patrick and Declan, the eldest training to be a pilot with KLM, the second reading history at the University of Cork, and the youngest, at University College, Dublin, given to radical political pronouncements that completely unnerved his quiet, artistic mother. There was also news of Mary and Paddy, of storm damage and flooding in Roadford, where the tiny river, already swollen with winter rain, was inundated by exceptionally high tides. But he still did not refer back to the summer or say that he missed me.
When subsequent fat letters did arrive, invariably they contained newspaper photographs he thought might be useful for my file. But once, he would have said ‘the Green File’, and refer to it affectionately as if it had a life of its own. Then, he’d come back from Limerick with pads of punched paper, handed them to me, and said, laughing, ‘Green File fodder.’ Now there was no more lightness in what he wrote than there was in the slushy streets, where each day’s thaw was enough to make the pavements dirty and slippery but never went on for long enough to dispose of the remnants of the previous week’s snow.
‘Let’s have a weekend in Bermuda,’ said Ben, as we passed the travel agent’s in Royal Avenue on our way to the bookshop one morning early in February.
He looked at me hopefully, but I didn’t even smile.
‘Lizzie, what’s wrong? Is the work getting you down? Or is it your mother?’
I shook my head silently. I really didn’t know why I felt so depressed. Patrick had to be part of it, of course, but I sensed that it was much more than that.
‘Oh just the grey and the cold, I suppose. I’ll be better in the spring.’
‘Is it me, Lizzie. Are you fed up with me?’
‘No, I am not,’ I objected fiercely. ‘If it weren’t for you I think I’d go mad.’
‘Thank goodness for that. My penguin suit is nearly ready and it’s only two weeks now to the Medical Formal. That’s something to look forward to, isn’t it?’
‘Oh yes, it is indeed,’ I said quickly, making a huge effort to be cheerful. ‘And February will be nearly over by then. I think January and February ought to be abolished.’
There was no way I could tell Ben that the Medical Formal he was looking forward to so much, was just one more problem for me.
Chapter 23
A few nights before the Medical Formal I folded up my card table, turned off the electric fire and took my one and only long dress from the wardrobe. I unwrapped it from its dust sheet, a layer of filmy tulle over silky white fabric. Hardly the height of fashion with its halter neck and low back, but I had always liked it. I slid it over my head, zipped it up and wriggled experimentally. Tighter on the bust and looser on the waist than when I’d last worn it, but it did still fit.
Made by a local dressmaker for the Sixth Form dance four years ago, this dress had seen service throughout my relationship with George. He had inherited his father’s dinner jacket and as he liked nothing better than dressing up, we’d been to every ball in the university calendar.
But memories of Formals with George were not what was making me anxious over the Medical Formal. George and my life as his girlfriend seemed very far away now. Not only did he avoid me when chance brought us together in the same place, the union, or the library, or the bank, but he’d actually stopped speaking to Ben, after he’d seen us coming out of the library together one day. No, it wasn’t the past that bothered me at all, it was the vicious and hurtful remarks I knew I would have to cope with here in the present because Ben was not at all what my mother had in mind for me.
My mother had known Ben and his family as long as I had, and on the face of it, he seemed to fit in with her list of requirements for a ‘nice, respectable, young man’. He lived in the ‘best’ area of the Ormeau Road in a large, pleasant house. His father was a senior civil servant, his mother, a well-known soprano who had taught singing since her retirement. He had a much older brother and sister, both graduates, one married and living in England, the other a lecturer in Magee College, Londonderry. In another family, such a description would bring her strong approval but for some reason whenever the M
illigans were mentioned in the shop, or by relatives who knew them, she had always announced that they were ‘a very respectable family’ with precisely that tightness of her face and aspect of brow which made it clear she didn’t like them.
But what was even worse than her unreasonable hostility to Ben’s family was her unshiftable conviction that medical students were a bad lot. For years now she had treated them with the same violent distaste she reserved for foreigners, Catholics, coloured people and what she called The English.
When I’d confessed this problem to Ben himself, he’d suggested her reaction might stem from Doctor in the House, the film itself, or perhaps just the posters displayed outside the Curzon when it was showing. He’d tried to be light about it, but, sadly, I couldn’t raise a smile even to please him. Since my return from Clare either her prejudices and her comments had become more virulent, particularly on our Catholic neighbours, or my ability to ignore them had radically decreased. Now, the thought of her bitter and unreasoned comments when she heard I was going to the Medical Formal with Ben, was more than I could bear.
I shivered and took off the dress, wrapped it up and put it away. It was one thing meeting at Sunnyside Bridge when we were going for a walk, or getting off the bus at our respective stops to avoid being seen from the shop, but I could hardly slip down the back stairs in a full length dress.
As I put on my pyjamas and got into bed, tears sprang into my eyes. It was one more problem to add to all the others weighing me down. I had tried so hard to be sensible, to be patient, to get on with my work, to enjoy what I could, but suddenly it seemed as if the burden of the list of things I couldn’t do had become quite intolerable. So many things I could not say, places I could not go, decisions I was in no position to make. It was not simply working so hard for Finals and the confinement of living at home, it was more than that. Every time I tried to think something through I found myself going round in circles. And every circle always led back to what was to happen between me and Patrick.