Academy Street (5 page)

‘
I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.
’

It is the look on his face that tells her he has heard her. She has heard herself
too. The sound has come out of her mouth, the words are working. They look at each
other. He bites his bottom lip. She holds her breath.

‘Well, are you now, Missy!’ he says, smiling. ‘Are you indeed! And who says I’ll
have you? Hmm? Who says I’ll marry you!?’

‘I say.’

‘Sure, I might be long married by then. I might have a wife of me own by the time
you grow up,’ he says. ‘Mmm… Unless you marry me now.’ And he turns and looks around.
‘Where’s the broom at all?’

She had forgotten that part of the wedding game, that the bride and groom have to
step over the broom to get married. He walks into the darkness and brings out an
old yard brush.

‘Now, Missy, I think we’re all set. Except for the priest!’ He goes outside and lays
the brush flat on the gravel. Then he whistles and Captain appears and he says,
Sit
,
and Captain sits still and obedient.

Mike comes and gives her his arm. Through the open door she walks beside him into
the winter sun. Captain is there, waiting. Mike begins to hum. She looks up at the
sky and hums too and then Mike hums louder as he skips along,
almost dancing, with
her arm through his. And then they stand before Captain, and Mike tells her what
to do, what to say, when to jump over the broom.

‘And you, too,’ she says. ‘You’ve to jump over the broom too, or else you’re not
married.’

‘Oh, I’ll jump, I’ll jump, to be sure.’

‘And then will we go and live in your house in Connemara?’

‘We will. We’ll go and live in Connemara.’

And so, standing side by side, they begin. He takes her hand, and bows and says,
‘Miss Teresa Lohan, do you take me, Michael Joseph Connolly, to be your husband,
for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, all the days of our lives?’

Captain cocks his head and whines and she laughs and says, ‘I do,’ and jumps over the broom. And then it is her turn.

‘Will you, do you, Mike Jophus Connolly take me Tess Lohan as your wife?’

‘I do.’

He jumps over the broom to her side, and puts his hand in his pocket and brings out
hay seeds and chaff and tosses them over their heads. And just as he takes her two
hands in his and begins to dance her around the yard, Claire walks out of the house
onto the front step and sees them and smiles and comes towards them. Tess waves,
calls out, and Claire begins to run, the morning sun on her back.

3

AND THEN, WHEN Tess is ten, there is a real wedding in the house. It is summer again,
after a long winter when animals died in the fields and snow fell in May, and Oliver
came home. There is something about each day now that she holds dear. Oliver’s return
for one thing, and something she noticed on those winter nights when she would kneel on her bed and melt a peep-hole on the frozen window pane and view everything under
snow—the lawn and the trees, the walls and barns and outhouses—all still and beautiful
in the moonlight: the feeling that she has grown older and stronger, and safer, and
the world has survived and become a little lovelier.

On the morning of Evelyn’s wedding Denis drives them all to the church in the new
Hillman Minx saloon her father bought that spring. Maeve, who is home from boarding
school for the holidays, and Tess are wearing new frocks. In the
chapel there are
bog asphodels on the altar. The bridegroom sits in the first pew with his brother.
It is only the second time that Tess has seen him and he seems to her almost as old
as her father.

The wedding breakfast is held at Easterfield. The guests sit at the long table in
the dining room. The rations have ended and there is a great spread of food and more
talk and laughter in the house than Tess can ever remember. Your mother would be
very proud today, someone tells Evelyn. Tess has not given much thought to her mother
in recent times. Her face is fading from memory. She tries to picture her mother
in these rooms, touching and dusting things, curtains, cushions, softly closing doors.
She glances around the room. A feeling sometimes rises in her: the sense of things
being alive. When she walks into the coach-house or the cow-house she has the feeling
of having just interrupted something. Lately the thought that all the things around
her, the things that matter, and move her—the trees and fields and animals—have their
own lives, their own thoughts, has planted itself in her. If a thing has a life,
she thinks, then it has a memory. Memories and traces of her mother must linger all
over the house—in rooms and halls and landings. The dent of her feet on a rug. On
a cup, the mark of her hand. She wonders if on certain warm nights, when the whole
house is sleeping, her mother’s soothing self returns, or memories of her return,
bringing comfort to things, and promise for their patient waiting. Outside too, the
small yard, the fowl-house—do they miss her? Does the laurel tree remember sheltering
her? Tess
looks down at her hands. Even as she has these thoughts she knows they
are not something she will ever put into words.

After Evelyn’s marriage Miss Tannian comes more often, bringing cakes and tarts she
has baked, sometimes arriving just before teatime so that she has to be invited to
eat with them. She cuts up Oliver’s food and butters his bread and tries to wipe
his face, before he bats her away. Everyone grows nervous. Tess feels sorry for her.
Her father says nothing but frowns often and one evening before they’re finished
he rises suddenly from the table and storms outside. Later, when Miss Tannian is
leaving, Tess sees him cross the courtyard and stand talking to her. Miss Tannian
looks flustered and lowers her head and seems to shrink and slide into her car. Many
weeks pass before she returns and when she has finished testing the hens for pin-feathers
she does not linger or enter the house. She rarely visits after that. Once, her father
asks, ‘When was Rose here last?’

It is June and she is in her last week of 6th class, the end of her time in national
school. She and Oliver walk home, down the avenue and into the yard. There are men
gathered around the old well in the corner. Years ago, long before Tess was born,
the well was covered with a flagstone, for fear that the old women from the village
who came for water would fall in. For as long as Tess remembers her family has gotten
their drinking water from the village pump. On summer evenings the older boys and
girls of the village gather there, giddy and tense, something in the air always.
One evening her father
came over the road and hunted herself and Claire home. ‘Get
home out of that, ye.’ His face was red with rage. He did not want them mixing. Now
the flagstone is pulled away. He will sink his own pump and men have come to take
a sample from the well for testing.

Mike Connolly is holding the end of a rope that snakes down into the darkness. The
men edge closer. Her father calls Denis’s name. Then he waits. And again,
Denis
.
A strange quiet falls on them. Mike Connolly leans over and peers in. She feels fear
gathering in the men, a holding of breaths. And then there’s a stirring, a shifting
of feet and bodies. ‘He’s coming,’ her father calls. Her father is so full of anger
or irritation always, but now his face is open and bright and his voice is full of
relief and for the first time she understands something about his life as a father.
She moves closer, sees that there are stone steps descending inside the well and,
as she gazes down, Denis begins to appear out of the darkness. Step by step he climbs,
his black head and white face and long thin body rising up out of the well until,
pale and dazed, he surfaces and blinks in the sunlight. Mike Connolly puts out a
hand and Denis takes it and steps over the edge onto the gravel. He passes a water
bottle to one of the men, his hand shaking. Then, without a word, he turns and crosses
the yard.

In September Tess will go, along with Maeve, to the convent boarding school in a
town twenty miles away. In the weeks before, preparations are made and new clothes
are bought. She has the feeling that these are her last days. She walks
around the
house and yard, uneasy. She would like her father to notice her, to acknowledge that
she is leaving. Just once, she would like to please him.

At the school she is accompanied everywhere by the peal of bells, the smell of wax
and the echo of her feet on polished floors. A feeling of melancholy registers when
the strains of hymn-singing waft out from the chapel. In the classroom teachers in
gowns stand on the raised dais, and some, with just a word or a hand on a book, hint
of things to come, of a wider world that gives her a feeling of lift and light and
promise. At night in the dormitory the sound of forty sleeping girls commingles
with thoughts of home and Oliver and Claire and her father, and Denis, in his silence.
Some nights she cries. She would like to have taken them all with her, make them
all fit into her new world. So this is homesickness, she thinks. But there is something
about the pitch of her pain that is not all terrible. There is something true and
clear and cleansing about it that makes her want to endure it. It is a test, a wall
she must break through. She takes comfort in knowing that Maeve is there, that somewhere
in the building there is one who shares her blood and knows everything of her life
before now.

She is fond of all subjects, except Mathematics—algebra, trigonometry with its baffling
formulae—and does well in her exams. But she is wary, watchful all the time. Only
in English class when the teacher recites Wordsworth or John Donne does she briefly forget where she is, carried by sound and image to far-away villages and rivers,
and cathedrals rising
to meet the heavens. At these moments she has the feeling that
there is something at hand, that she is coming close to something she cannot quite
reach, but which she knows is right and beautiful. She does not like to speak in
class and on the rare occasions when she is required to answer a question or recite
a poem her insides contract, and she is rigid with fear that she will say something
foolish and shame herself. When it is her turn to read, the teachers merely nod to
her. She is certain that not one of them knows her name.

She grows to love the school chapel with its sanctuary lamp and stained-glass windows.
On Sundays and holy days—All Souls, Holy Week, Pentecost—the priest reads from the
Scriptures, the Psalms, with a lilting voice, the Latin words pouring over her, more
easily understood now.
Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo.
The swing of the thurible
at Benediction and the smell of incense, the peal of little bells. But it is the
choir—the clear pristine voices and the sombre notes rising from the organ—that stirs
something deep in her.
Panis Angelicus. Tantum Ergo. O Salutaris Hostia.

In her second year her Latin teacher falls ill and a new teacher, Mr Brown, temporarily
takes her place. He is tall, grey-haired and does not wear the black gown that the
other teachers wear. Though he lives in the town, he speaks with a scholarly accent—perhaps
even English. His voice is soft. She notices the kind way he has of listening—how,
when a girl is answering a question he does not look directly at her, but yet fully
attends. One day at the end of class he singles Tess out and asks her to wait back.

She stands before him.

‘I see that you’re from my part of the county, Miss Lohan,’ he says. ‘On the school
roll, your address caught my eye.’

Her heart takes fright. A raft of fears passes through her: he knows her father;
her father has not paid the school fees; she is here under false pretences. She is
an imposter.

He looks out over his glasses at her, and waits. She does not know what he expects.
He sits back, takes off his glasses.

‘I was born in Easterfield House,’ he says, and pauses. ‘I lived there until I was
eight. My family sold the place, and then a few years later your father bought the
house and some of the land.’

She is lost for words. She has never given thought to Easterfield’s past. She cannot
conceive of this man in its rooms, its beds, running through the fields.

‘How is the old house?’ He is smiling, as if asking after a relative.

‘It’s good, sir.’

‘Does the roof still leak? Every so often rainwater would collect in the valley and
burst through the ceiling.’

‘Yes, sir, that happened once, when I was small. The ceilings upstairs were ruined.
I don’t remember it, but the stains are still there.’

‘And your father farms the land? Livestock?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And you have brothers and sisters? A brother, who will inherit the place perhaps?’

‘Yes, sir. Denis, my older brother.’

He looks at her for what seems a long time. She thinks he is about to announce a
visit to Easterfield. He will take her in his car tomorrow and they will arrive,
with no forewarning. She starts to panic.

‘It is quite something, coming on you like this.’ He looks away and is quiet for
a moment. ‘Do you know of Easterfield’s history? Do you know when the house was built?’

‘Yes, sir. My old teacher said it was built in 1678.’

She remembers the day in 5th class when Mr Clarke stopped in the middle of a History
lesson and told her to stand and tell the class about Easterfield. She was mortified.
Her father had bought the house and a hundred acres in 1911, she said in a low voice,
and her parents got married in 1925. She did not say that her mother had once told
her that the house had three hundred and sixty-five windows, a window for every day
of the year. It was not true; she counted them once and got only thirty-seven. ‘We
have an orchard, and two stairs,’ she said, and could think of no more.

‘Is that it? Is that all you know? Sit down, Tess Lohan,’ Mr Clarke said, and then
looked around the class before continuing.