Academy Street (6 page)

‘Easterfield House and estate was owned by the Cannon family from 1678 until the
1800s. King Charles the Second granted them five hundred acres. The house was closed
up in the 1830s but was reopened as a famine hospital to treat the sick and the starving
during the 1840s. The locals.’ He paused, and looked into individual children’s eyes.
Tess had feared he would alight on her again.

Now, Mr Brown reaches into his bag, brings out a book.

‘You know then that the house was used as a hospital during the Famine?’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘And that hundreds of patients died there? I only discovered this myself relatively
recently. A few years ago I compiled a history of all the big houses and estates
in the area. I was quite shocked by what I found out about Easterfield. The unclaimed
corpses were buried on the land. In the ditches, down in the quarry, under trees—the
groves of oak and beech—anywhere. Places that I remember, where I’d played… They
threw lime on the bodies to prevent the stench.’

He grows thoughtful. ‘My family did not come into possession of Easterfield until
some time later. They were, I believe, kind to the tenants.’

Tess nods. All she wants now is to leave. He hands her the book. ‘Perhaps you’d like
to borrow this. Bring it back tomorrow.’

Later, in bed, she remembers talk at school and at the village pump about local people
who claimed to have heard the cries of the dead when they passed Easterfield at night.
She remembers the rope swing that Denis hung from a tree above the quarry for herself
and Oliver, and their laughter as they swung out high over the rocks. In her mind
she moves through the farm, remembering each field, each copse of trees. She sees
the boughs, bare in winter. She feels a chill and pulls the bedclothes tight around
her and tries to sleep.

4

AFTER THREE YEARS, Tess’s schooling comes to an abrupt end. Maeve has gone to train
as a teacher at Carysfort Training College in Dublin and money is scarce. But that
is not all. During the summer Tess spends six weeks away from home, helping Evelyn
following the birth of her third child. From the strain of housework and care of
Evelyn’s babies she is tired all the time. By nightfall she is weak and every breath
she takes is a painful stab. She develops a cough which so alarms Evelyn that the
doctor is summoned.

It is not mentioned, TB, but it is what everyone fears. At the convent, girls would
mysteriously disappear, to return six months later, or not at all. Though it has
never been said, it is, she suspects, what caused her mother’s death. It is why her
mother’s room was fumigated and why they were all tested.

She has pleurisy, not TB. Nevertheless she must spend
three months in the fever hospital
in Galway. Her spirits sink when she enters the ward of thin pale-faced women. She
settles into her bed and looks out at the windless day, time stretching before her.
A flock of starlings rises and blackens the sky. A memory of home, and then of school,
materialises. At that moment she understands and begins to mourn what is lost. Exhausted,
she lies down and looks up at the ceiling, waiting for her lungs to dry up and quieten.
Later, rested, she seeks out books. The hospital library consists of two shelves
of ancient-looking paperbacks at the end of a corridor.
The Lives of the Saints
,
Romeo and Juliet
,
The Red and the Black
,
The World of Plants
. She reads them all.
She counts the days until Denis and Claire and her father come to visit. Then, when
they come, there is not much said and the visit is soon over. When they leave she
stands at the window looking down at patients shuffling around the grounds.

The patients are mainly from the city. But there is one boy, Tony, a shy loping teenager—almost
a man—who is from the country. He is tall—nearly too tall—and hangs his head and
has large agricultural hands. She feels a pull to him and senses his pull too, and
more and more her thoughts turn to him. But then one evening something happens: a
commotion arises at the back of the common room. A woman squeals. There is a rat.
She catches a glimpse of a long creature—brown-and-white like the piebald horse the
tinkers keep—with a tail as long as the body and a belly that grazes the floor, darting
along, disappearing into a hole in the corner. Tony—his eyes wild—is lunging after
it, intent, and then he bends and inserts
his long middle finger into the hole after
the rat. Again and again, he thrusts his finger in to the hilt, poking, jiggling
it around, frantically trying to get at the rat.

On her return home, she slips back into life at Easterfield, into the rounds of housework
and the comings and goings on the farm, under the roof with her father and brothers
and Claire, and Mike Connolly. Though she herself does not feel delicate, the word
attaches to her, and she is spared from heavy tasks and farm work. She begins to
mark events—the births of Evelyn’s children, Oliver leaving the national school,
her father’s £200 win on the Sweepstakes, the arrival of electricity. In the dark
corner under the back stairs she writes these dates on the distempered wall. When
she is eighteen Denis teaches her to drive and, from then on, she regularly drives
her father to fairs and funerals. One hot summer’s day, with Maeve home on holidays
from her teaching job in Dublin, they drive their father to the sheep fair in the
town, leaving him to his business among the pens and carts and dealers. They browse
the shops for an hour, and then, flushed and giddy and parched with the thirst, they
enter the hotel in the square. In the carpeted lounge off the hall they stand at
the bar and order two glasses of orange and turn to find their father sitting with
a group of men in the corner, talking and drinking and haggling over prices. When
he sees them his face darkens. He does not acknowledge them, or even glance at them
later when they leave. On the way home his fuming silence fills the car. Inside the
house, he breaks out.
They have no shame entering a public bar like that, sitting
up on high stools with men watching them. Like street walkers. Laughing and streecing
and making a show of themselves. Making a show of him. ‘How is it at all that things
are always going against me?’

He is full of aggravation. They have learned not to respond to his barging, his oppressive
silence, his sighing. They have each, in their separate ways, learned how to read
him, how to evade his wrath, how to gauge when his guard is down and they might seek
advantage. Over the summer the three sisters, with Denis at the wheel, drive to dances
organised by the Pioneer Association or the Ploughing Association and to carnivals
held in marquees in local towns. Always, the next morning there is an inquisition.
Who did ye meet? Who did ye talk to? Were the Burkes there?
Tess lets the others
answer. She remembers the men lined up on one side of the dance floor and the women
on the other. She danced with every man who asked her, not because she wished to,
but because she sensed something of the dread that these hopeful anxious men had
endured just to ask, and the awful humiliation they would suffer if she refused.

Out of the blue, a letter arrives from their mother’s sister Molly, in America, inviting
Claire to come out. At first Tess thinks it is a holiday invitation. But the word,
and the image of the place,
America
, evoke a feeling of exile and eternal loneliness.
In the weeks following, as the practicalities are worked out—Molly secures a job
for Claire at the Bell Telephone
Company where she herself works—and the departure
date is set, a feeling of dread falls on Tess.

She does not go with Denis and Oliver and their father to see Claire off at Cobh.
She does not want to possess a memory of that parting. The feeling that everything
good in her life is now vanishing is too much to bear. She sits in the quiet of the
house all morning. She takes down notepaper and envelopes and writes to the only
two hospitals in Dublin whose names she has ever heard of. In neat handwriting she
states her eagerness to train as a nurse. She gives details of her education and
asserts her suitability for the profession.
My late mother was a nurse and I would
like to continue the family tradition in this vocation
.

A month before her twentieth birthday she receives a letter from the Mater Hospital
offering her a place as a trainee nurse, pending an interview, character references
and the payment of a fee. On a September morning she boards the train at Woodlawn
Station and is ferried across the country, into the unknown. Somewhere in the midlands
the sky darkens and the train slows to a halt in the middle of nowhere. There is
an eerie silence in the carriage. Suddenly a fork of lightning cuts the sky in two.
With her heart crossways she watches the lighted sky as each angry flash erupts and
dazzles and disappears.

She resides in the Nurses’ Home among other girls from the country. Every morning
she dons her starched uniform and white shoes and goes on duty. In the evenings she
attends
classes. She is eager, and learns quickly, in both theory and practice. At
night she sits on her bed poring over her textbooks, occasionally startled by a siren
in the streets outside. She writes to her father every fortnight and to Claire in
New York almost every week. On her days off she walks along O’Connell Street, gazing
in shop windows, occasionally entering Clerys to buy nylons or a cardigan and once,
during their winter sale, a herringbone tweed coat with a fur collar and cuffs. She
goes to the cinema with a girl from Cork, but mostly avoids social gatherings and
nights out. The shyness she feels among others, and the terrible need to fit in,
cause her such anxiety that when the evening arrives the prospect of going among
people renders her immobile, disabled, sometimes physically sick. Whenever possible,
she opts for night duty, the low lights and the hush of the ward offering the closest
thing to solitude available in a working life. When she meets the gaze of an attractive
young doctor at a patient’s bedside she blushes and averts her eyes, longing to respond
with a flirtatious smile or remark, like the other girls do. She joins the library
at Phibsborough, borrows two novels each week, goes for walks along the city streets
and down by the river. One day, on Townsend Street, she stands at the entrance to
a new building that houses a swimming pool and reads a notice for swimming classes.
She has an image of herself cutting a swathe, a solitary furrow, through still blue
water. During the two years of her training, and afterwards as a ward nurse, she
is warm and polite with her colleagues, but fails to form one lasting friendship.

Occasionally, on a Saturday when she is off duty, she meets up with Maeve, in from
her digs in Blackrock, and the two sisters stroll around the city. Once, in February,
as they walk along the footpath outside the GPO, a street photographer appears before
them and takes their picture. They are walking arm in arm, both in fashionable tweed
coats and pointed black shoes. Later when Tess looks at herself in the photograph
she sees for the first time what others must see—a young woman with a nice enough
face and smiling eyes—something that does not accord with the image of herself she
carries within. She places the photograph in an envelope and writes a note and addresses
it to Claire, care of her aunt Molly’s, 731 West 183rd Street, New York. She looks
at the address for a long time.
183rd Street.
She says it aloud. She sees Claire
there, sitting in a chair. She feels something, a streaming across, at that moment.

With each trip back to Easterfield, changes accrue. Captain is gone. He slunk from
the shadows on his belly one day and lay under the wheel of the car as it entered
the yard. Often, she replays this image in her mind and remembers his small black
eyes gazing into hers on those nights when she took him up to her room. Mike Connolly
returned to his own people in Connemara, too old and ill now—and no longer needed—to
endure the labour or fulfil the duties he had performed at Easterfield for nearly
thirty-five years.

Oliver, more than anyone, has changed. He is tall and handsome with a shock of blond
hair and mischievous blue eyes—so different from Denis’s dark brooding looks. You
will charm the birds in the trees, she tells him. And your beauty will cast a spell,
she thinks. He has learnt to drive. He takes the car out at night to pubs and dances,
indicating a certain wildness of character that is not ordinarily tolerated in Easterfield
but to which, somehow, her father turns a blind eye. Tess slips into her old ways
with her father when she is back—an attitude of reverence, obedient service, meekness.
She has seen him age. One night in the kitchen a memory surfaces. It is, she thinks,
her first memory of him. She is no more than two or three years old and she is in
his arms, being lifted high onto the back of a horse. She is terrified and starts
to cry and he lifts her down, then holds her against his warm face.

A peaceful lull falls on the kitchen and she looks at him. ‘Will I cut your hair?’
she asks. He turns his head towards her, and she waits to be denounced. He looks
at her, baffled, stunned, as if he has suddenly found himself somewhere else. His
chin begins to quiver, and he looks down. She is flooded with tender feelings for
him. She sees for the first time all he has endured. Holding things together, holding
himself together, poised, always, to defend against a new catastrophe. She gets up
and lays a towel on his shoulders and begins to cut his hair. Neither of them says
a word. She is moved by his silent acquiescence. Gently she takes each strand and
cuts, the sound of the scissors in the air between them, the hair falling to the
floor. And his sorrow, for all that is lost, lying silent within him.

PART TWO

5

LATE IN THE summer of ’62 Tess flew on a TWA flight from Shannon Airport to New
York. Before she left that morning her father handed her a £50 note, and then shook
her hand formally, awkwardly. Denis and Maeve, and Evelyn in a hat and pregnant again,
sat into the car. As they drove away Tess looked back at the house, her eyes lingering
on the upstairs windows, then out at the land. Halfway down the avenue, Denis stopped
the car to get something from the boot. She turned her head to the lone ash tree
among the beeches and saw, for the first time, a band of barbed wire embedded in
the trunk, the flesh forced to grow over the spikes in pained little folds and swellings.
Denis sat in and they drove on. How had she missed this before? Who had done it?
This was Lohan land, a Lohan tree. So, a Lohan hand.