Fallen (10 page)

‘She was wearing it when I saw her, a couple of weeks ago. On the other hand.'

‘I haven't seen her in months,' Florrie said.

‘No more have I.' Mother put an orange crate on the floor and sat beside Florrie at the table. ‘It'll be interesting to see how she's changed.' She set about refolding the linen. ‘I don't see the fuss about Dun Emer goods. Too obvious for my taste. Give me a piece of fine French lace any day.'

‘Why should Isabel have changed?' I said. ‘I don't think she has.'

‘Well, if she bothered to stay in touch –'

‘I'm in touch with her,' I said. ‘But, then, I make the effort.' I caught myself. I didn't want to stir up an argument, today of all days. This evening would be Isabel's first time in the house since Liam's Month's Mind. I wondered who dreaded it the most.

‘Have we nearly finished here? I said I'd take Alanna for a walk at lunchtime, and – well.' They knew the rest: meeting Isabel; afternoon tea at Percy Place with Hubie Wilson, then back here for supper.

Mother smoothed the last fold of the cloth and slid it back into its packaging. ‘Isabel should really give it back, the ring.'

‘What?' I looked at Florrie, and she at me.

‘It belonged to Bill's mother. Alanna could have it. Should have it, by rights.'

Florrie shook her head in warning but I couldn't stay quiet. ‘You can't mean it. Liam gave Isabel that ring.'

Mother's eyes reddened. ‘What of it? She won't marry him now.'

I was literally deprived of speech.

‘Mother.' Florrie leaned in between us. ‘We've finished here. Will you come upstairs and help me sort through my wardrobe?'

Mother pressed her fingertips to her eyes and stood up to
go with her. I watched them, Florrie's confident hand at Mother's back. Regret for my own awkwardness pressed on my ribs.

Out on the sunlit street, a tram hissed by along the east side of the Square. Although it was mild out, I wore Liam's gabardine. Unbelted, it billowed around me like a cloak, made me feel strong and other than I was. I crossed the road, passed the fat tabby curled asleep in the window of the Rotunda lodge, and walked down the slope of the Square. The Parnell monument waited at the bottom, impassive reminder of the day Liam's telegram came, and beyond it the length of Sackville Street leading south to the river, the ring of mountains beyond.

A familiar figure came striding towards me from Parnell Street, my schoolfriend Frieda Leamy, wearing her nurse's uniform under her dark blue cloak, without the hat. Her fair hair was pulled back into a bun. It had been an age since we spent any proper time together.

‘I've been called in,' she said. ‘Some mystery illness has caused people to miss their shifts this morning.'

I fell into step with her, as if we were off to school again, and we linked arms. ‘What kind of illness?'

‘Holiday-itis, I'd say.' Frieda had a rich, throaty laugh. ‘It's annoying, all the same. My parents have gone to the Fairyhouse Races. I had to leave Maria in charge.' Maria was Frieda's giddy thirteen-year-old sister. I told her I was taking Alanna to feed the ducks in Stephen's Green and asked if she knew anything about the nursing home Eva was in, Nan Moorhead's, which was not far from the hospital where Frieda worked, in Baggot Street.

‘I'm sure it's grand. I've heard nothing bad about it, anyway.'

‘I've to meet Isabel, after.'

‘How is she? I saw her letter in the paper, against the war.'

‘Mother was furious.'

‘I'm sure.' There was no love lost between Frieda and my mother.

‘We're going to meet Captain Wilson, May's nephew. He knew Liam at the Front. Liam said he showed him the ropes when he first arrived.' I didn't tell her it was Hubie Wilson who'd recommended Liam's early transfer. Dad said we couldn't hold that against him. Liam had made up his mind to get out there as fast as they'd have him; he'd more than one person putting words in various ears, and if it hadn't been this posting it would have been another, sooner rather than later. But, if not for me, May wouldn't have told Hubie Wilson about Liam, and Hubie wouldn't have intervened. Liam might still be in a training camp in England – or even here. I couldn't bear to think about it.

‘What?'

I'd stopped walking. Frieda was looking back at me. We'd reached the Pillar. I pretended I'd stopped to admire the flower-sellers' wares. Lines of people were waiting on trams to take them to the seaside or out to Poulaphouca. There was a queue at the cab stand.

‘Let's walk it,' Frieda said, turning away from the queues. ‘I know I should hurry, but – may as well make the most of the sunshine while it lasts.'

I picked up a bunch of purple violets. ‘Look at the gloss on those leaves. Suffrage colours.' I held them close to my face and breathed a deep breath.

‘Are ya smellin' or buyin'?' the woman asked.

I inhaled their scent again and put them back.

‘How's Miss Colclough's book coming on?'

‘It's finished.' This was a sore point. For a year I'd moved through each day to the next with no sense of purpose, time dragging me along behind it. Working for Dote made it almost bearable. She pulled me out of myself and towards
the house in Percy Place, the libraries, the National Gallery, gave me something to think about that wasn't war, or Liam. And, despite myself, I'd begun to catch my mind stretching and waking, against my will, humming sometimes with something like pleasure. But now all that was over. The book was finished. I was lonelier than ever.

‘What'll you do now?'

I hesitated. If anyone would understand that I wanted to work, it was Frieda. ‘I was offered a job last week, in Briscoe's.'

‘The showrooms, on the Green? What kind of job?'

‘Dote asked me to do some typewriting for Mr Briscoe, a catalogue for their next auction. I spent a couple of days there. It was interesting. I liked him. There's a lot to learn. I'd need to do training, possibly in London.'

Mr Briscoe had a gloomy, jowled face, like a bloodhound's. It didn't suit his character one bit. He took the trouble to explain the background of items that I asked about. He showed me an ornate ebony and brass desk with a shallow kneehole, only an indent, really, and eight pillared legs. A Mazarin desk, he said it was. Named for the cardinal. Mr Briscoe showed me how the sort of people for whom the table was designed would have sat, side-on, to accommodate their swords. I couldn't but catch his excitement. Later, he took a necklace of rare black pearls out from the safe and let me try them on. They glowed warm on my neck, sent blood to my cheeks. I'd never seen myself as acquisitive before, but those pearls woke a kind of greed in me. Everything I looked at in the showrooms demanded to be touched, explored, known.

‘What does your mother say?' Frieda asked.

‘I haven't told her yet.' She wouldn't take kindly to the notion that I'd work in a shop – but I could hardly say so to Frieda, whose father was a draper.

We went on across the bridge. On the far side, I was distracted
by the white stone front of the Lafayette Building, its turreted upper storeys like a dream of a castle, woken up in the wrong place and time. All it needed were coloured pennants flying from the buttresses, veiled women at the windows, horses pawing the ground below, impatient to be off.

‘If I tell you something,' Frieda said, ‘promise you won't tell anyone?'

‘Are we back in school now?'

‘It's about Con Buckley. Promise.'

‘Cross my heart and hope to die.' My heart did, actually, pound.

She didn't smile. ‘I know you're friendly with him, Katie, but he's a rat. One of the younger nurses had to leave the hospital on his account.'

I told myself not to listen, that no good had ever come of listening to gossip.

Frieda looked around again, lowered her voice still further. ‘She was going to have a baby.'

I looked at the ground, where uneven paving stones lay in wait for some hapless person to trip on them. ‘It could have been anyone's, so. Why would you spread such a rumour?'

All trace of expression smoothed out of Frieda's face. ‘At least remember, you swore. On your honour.'

I waited for Alanna in Eva and Bartley's freshly painted hall. The walls were a pale shade of blue, the cornices and mouldings gleamed white. Nan said to wait upstairs in the parlour, but I liked the clean smell of paint, and besides the upstairs room would be chilly and stale without Eva in it. I shifted on the seat, an uncomfortable backless bench upholstered in brown and gold. It was part of a brand-new contraption, the other half being a stand for the telephone. Against the opposite wall, the grandfather clock's burnished mahogany
casing would put you in mind of a coffin. Its reedy, insistent tick said time was falling away.

I stared at the ugly black mass of the telephone. It was nothing short of a miracle that a word spoken across the sea in England could travel along a length of wire, direct to an ear in Dublin. I picked up the receiver. A strange, disconnected crackle sounded down the line. ‘Hello?' I whispered.

Something spat in my ear. ‘Hello, yes?' It was a woman's grating voice. ‘This is the operator. What number did you want to reach?'

The receiver fell out of my hand. I pushed it back on to the antlered apparatus that cradled it.

‘Here we are!' Nan, on the stairs, had Alanna by the hand. ‘Was there someone on that yoke?'

‘I knocked it, by mistake.'

Alanna's face was pale and still, watchful. Her fine brown hair was gathered into a black velvet ribbon at each side of her head, in two high ponytails that curled to the shoulders of her sky-blue pinafore.

‘Hello, Alanna. That's a pretty dress. Isn't it Eva's favourite colour?'

Her face softened a little. ‘Yes. Can we go and see her?'

‘Ah, no. It's not allowed.' I caught the echo of what Bartley had said to us and frowned. Alanna frowned back at me. Nan looked from one to the other of us and laughed.

‘Well, yiz'll have a fine time, at this rate.' She held up a brown paper bag. ‘Here's crumbs, for the ducks.' It was impossible to guess her age. Her black hair had silver flecks in it, but her face was unlined. She had the hands and feet of a larger person attached to the narrow, wiry body of a restless boy. She'd looked the same as long as I'd known her, as long as Eva had been married, eight years.

Alanna took the bag of crumbs, with little enthusiasm, and we went out. We passed the Cancer Hospital and turned
on to the broad street that encircled the Green. Cabs clipped past in both directions, the horses' hooves striking brisk sparks of sound from the road. Motor-cars made a line in front of the Shelbourne. Beyond them were the sculpted women whose patient arms held up brass lamps. A gleaming, cream-coloured De Dion-Bouton was parked at an angle on the corner. Alanna followed me over to have a closer look. We admired the gleaming bodywork of the car, its round lamps like eyes. ‘It's so shiny!' Alanna said.

‘It's beautiful. Isabel's father has one just like it, but his is green.'

Alanna wrinkled her nose, puzzled.

‘You know Isabel – she's Liam's fiancée.' Was.

‘Who's Liam?'

She might as well have kicked me full in the chest. Her eyes were the palest shade of blue, almost colourless. Like Con's. Unnerving. ‘Oh, yes,' she said. ‘I remember.'

Did Eva never talk about him? I didn't often say his name out loud myself. It felt too dangerous, a bladed hook that could split my chest and drag my heart from its hiding place. If you love someone, and that person dies, all that love becomes a burden, a weight accumulating, pooling inside you, with nowhere to go. What do you do with it? Sometimes I tried to arrange it, stack it up as if on shelves – this aspect of Liam and that. Sometimes it gathered itself into a shape, a shadow, peeled itself off the ground and attached itself to my heel. It followed me and spoke, in Liam's voice, words I'd memorized from his letters. These things were so vivid, for me – yet Alanna might as well never have known him.

I shivered. I'd gone and given myself a proper fright, in broad daylight on a sunny holiday, other people ambling about the streets in no obvious hurry, untroubled by thoughts of remembering and forgetting. And I'd a child brooding beside me, waiting to see what I might offer her by way of a
substitute for her mother, my sister, and surely expecting more from me than gloomy thoughts.

The park smelled of cut grass and spun sugar. In the distance, a barrel organ played its tinny song. People strolled among the formal flowerbeds, where pansies grew in vivid blocks of red, purple, yellow. Others lounged on deckchairs around the bandstand. Lovers, groups of friends, students out with their books – as if they could actually study here. They didn't even pretend to look at the pages spread open in front of them, lifted their faces to the high blue sky instead. It was hard to believe that, two years before, Liam and I were among them, our heads full of dates and facts, not worried about anything more urgent than which questions were most likely to come up in our final examinations.

A man with a cart was selling leftover Easter sweets beside the lake. We were walking in his direction when we heard a commotion from the direction of the park's main gate. A nursemaid hurried past, dragging a sulky-looking boy in a sailor suit. He'd a toy sailboat clutched to his chest with his other arm, spreading a dark stain of damp on the blue of his jacket.

A young man came up behind her. Little more than a boy, really. Short and skinny, he wore the dark green coat of the Citizens' Army, with a bandolier slung across his chest. A wide-brimmed hat jammed low on his forehead shadowed his freckled face. I looked again. That really was a gun in his hands, muzzle half raised in our direction.