Fallen (20 page)

‘Do you have more?'

‘I've a box of them upstairs. You should take some with you if you go out. Just go in and help yourself. These times, they're better than money.'

I took two cigarettes from the box and passed him one. I lit my own with a match from the box on the mantel, and extended the match to him.

He leaned down to the flame, sucked in a lungful of smoke as though it were fresh air and he emerging from deep underwater, and breathed it out in a long, satisfied sigh.

Watching me, his eyebrow made a steeper crease. ‘You really are a smoker.'

‘Con says it's good for us. A shield against disease. Even Mother smokes. Lots of women I know do.'

‘Who's Con?'

‘A family friend. A schoolfriend of Liam's. He's a doctor.' But so was Bartley, who didn't favour smoking at all. ‘You were saying?'

‘Where was I?'

‘Pretending to be brave.'

He gave a mock-bow. ‘So I was. Let's see – pretence can be every bit as good as willpower. Does it matter what you call it? The effect is the same. Your legs feel like jelly, but you pretend they're steady. You impersonate a braver man; speak, as though you're on a stage, as though you believe them, the lines you learned in training. You play the part of the kind of officer you'd like to be. God knows, there are more than enough bad ones.' He soothed his ruined hand with the good one. ‘Even with this, I'd go back if I could. I'd stand with those same men and rally them. They deserve that. At least
that. What they really deserve, every last man of them, is to be brought home.'

After a while he gathered himself together. ‘Tell me something about yourself.'

‘There's little to tell. You wouldn't be interested.'

‘I'm interested in anything that has nothing to do with war or killing.'

It was surprising how many things this ruled out. ‘I'm very dull. I've no particular talents, no special destiny.' I worried a mark on the arm of the chair with my thumb.

‘I suppose you'll marry.'

‘I might.' I returned his look. Hated myself for blushing.

‘What will you do, now that Dote's book is finished? Did you like the work?'

‘I loved it.' The words rang through the room with more force than I'd meant. I willed the hateful blush to stay away and rushed on. ‘I've been thinking about a job. A real one. To earn my living. My parents want to move out of town. I don't.'

‘What sort of work could you do?'

‘History was my subject. In school, and in college. I learned to do research, working for Dote. I was thinking about going for a higher degree, but –' There was too much to explain. Sick of the sound of my own voice, I stopped talking.

‘You could probably teach.'

‘In a school, yes. Maybe. It's not what I want.' I sat back. The notion of wanting something had crept out unbidden. I looked at it, alarmed.

‘What do you want?'

I realized how tense I was, every muscle clenched as though to hold myself in check. As though I might spill out of my skin any second. ‘I actually can't think, much, about the future.'

He yawned, put his bad hand to his mouth, apologized.
He was stretched out along the sofa now, nearly horizontal. His eyes half shut, and no wonder. He wasn't long out of hospital.

‘I'm keeping you up.'

‘No, please. Go on.' He settled deeper. His eyes closed all the way.

I took a rug from the blanket box at the window – the black and green and yellow one May and I sat on that day at the Wellington Monument, the very first day I came to this house – and spread it over him. I blew out the candles on the mantel.

I looked back at him from the door. The chill blue light of the moon fell through the window on to his unguarded face. My breath caught. I'd never been alone with a man I wasn't related to for anything like that length of time. In the corner beyond him, Paschal snored on the scarlet cushion where May's Pekingese used to lord it over the house.

‘Goodnight,' I whispered, although they were both fast asleep.

Upstairs, I couldn't get comfy on the lumpy mattress. I thought about home. Let Dad and Matt be there, and let them all be safe.

The blankets scratched my bare arms. I pulled them over my head, made a tent to stifle the sounds of sporadic shooting from the streets. The sheets were icy, a cold that made me think of Liam, the February before he died. I drew my aching feet up to my knees, away from the tundra at the end of the bed, curled into myself for warmth and drifted off to sleep, thinking about the cold that Liam had described in his letters.

It's bitter cold. My fingers cramp on the pen. I'm hunched over the brazier, nearly
IN
the yoke. The pages might scorch. If they did, they'd warm my hands, thaw my frozen (despite two pairs of Mother's best socks) feet. Death could be like this: blood freezing the veins, heart
turned to ice. There's frost on our clothes and hair. Men's feet rot in it. The cold spawns icy visions. At night, the flares breed shadows that swarm through the trenches with the rats. The angel of war moves among the sleepers, touching the ones who'll die with chill fingers, men so cold already they don't sense the warning, or care
.

I'd a sensation of falling, in my sleep. The bed, the floor beneath it, fell away and I plunged through space, dipping and reeling towards nothingness. How can you move faster into less? That's what it felt like, the hourglass again, time pressing me thin to squeeze me faster through its narrows. I woke in blind panic under unfamiliar weight. It might be like this to lie in a wartime grave, trapped and suffocating, your ears ringing. Not knowing if the noise you heard came from inside your head or out. I fought free of the blankets and came up struggling for air, full of dread.

Liam stepped into a column of mud that exploded into fragments of brick and glass. All around him, men and pieces of men writhed, maggots at work in their mouths. Hubie turned his pale face to me, the sockets of his eyes empty. Guilt ground my stomach to powder, something left undone, a thing that might have saved him.

I woke to the sound of gunfire. It was still dark. I rose and went to the window. All I could see was a series of steep black roofs, a hint of mist, the stillness of trees. Clouds scudded across the face of the waning moon. A vixen, or something like it, cried an eerie, lonely screech. Wishing I knew for sure where Matt was, I went back to bed and fell asleep, the spatter of bullets like heavy rain on a corrugated roof.

A confused impression of a giant bell shattering tore me from sleep. The lumps in the mattress were unfamiliar. The bed made a wrong angle with the door and the window, each where the other should have been. A squat wardrobe, nothing like the one in Liam's room, straddled a corner. The harsh echo faded away. The room began to make sense as events came back to me. Percy Place. Hubie. Gunfire, but nothing like the noise I'd just heard, the worst wrong note ever struck. I took a crimson dressing gown from a hook behind the door and went out to the stair, tying the belt. My mouth was dry and tasted of last night's cigarettes.

‘What was it?' May was on the return, beside the plant-stand, a hand clapped to her mouth. Her eyes had a blind, watery cast to them.

‘I'm not sure. Where are your spectacles, May?'

She groped in the pocket of her flannel dressing gown and pulled them out with shaking hands. ‘I'm sorry, pet, I'm useless. Would you?'

I opened the stalks of her glasses for her, put them on her face.

‘It's my head. It's thumping.'

There was another crash outside, like dust-bins falling, their lids shattering and all the steel shards rolling to rest in separate corners of the world. It sounded as though the entire city would shatter. A chorus of dogs set off a ghastly racket of barks and howls.

Hubie appeared at the top of the stairs, fully dressed. ‘They're here.' He scanned the high window and came down to take May's arm. ‘We'll go down to the back.'

I had to dress, but first I crossed to the bedroom window and peeked out, on a slant that gave me a view of the still, inky water of the canal, the mirrored trees, a perfect blue sky. Dull thumping sounds came from the direction of the river. Not as loud as before, but more sustained. A dog loped across the road and vanished down a side street. A cyclist rode the length of the street, turned on to the bridge and went on towards town, unchallenged.

Footsteps on the stairs, then on the landing. ‘What's keeping you?' Hubie's voice was low, as though someone outside might hear us.

‘I'll come in a minute.'

‘Can you see anything?' He came into the room and stood behind me, looking out over my shoulder.

I straightened, conscious of his warmth, that he was fully dressed and I was anything but. The fabric of his clothes was all the more substantial for being near the thin crimson dressing gown, the borrowed cotton nightdress, the untidiness
of my hair. I moved away, opening a vista of unmade bed, crumpled sheets I hurried to cover with the eiderdown. ‘What was that noise?'

‘A field gun. They mean business. It won't be long now.' He raised an eyebrow, reached a finger to the gold piping on the dressing-gown's cuff. ‘You should always wear these colours.' There was a glint in his eye. Was he mocking me? His rosy mouth was pursed, fleshy, over his tufted beard. I wondered was it as soft as it looked.

‘I'll follow you down.'

That crooked eyebrow of his, along with the beard, gave him a wicked look. I held the robe together at my throat.

He clamped his gloved hand to his waistcoat, made a little bow. ‘Forgive me,' he said in a low voice as he went out. I shut the door behind him, checked the latch and got dressed in the clothes I wore yesterday. I ran up to Dote's room to drag a brush through my hair, dipped a finger in her toothpowder to scour my teeth. Her room looked on to the garden, the backs of other houses. Nothing moved out there. There was only a dazzling, unbroken sky, the clean glow of sunshine after rain, thin young leaves on the trees and May's flowers, not yet fully open to the day.

When I got downstairs, the shelling was a steady distant rumbling. No one spoke. The house trembled, but it might have been my heart that shook at the prospect of the hours ahead, hours that had to be crossed, no matter what. I couldn't imagine what all those men must be feeling in the various buildings that concealed them, or the ones coming to roust them out. I tried, and failed, to see Matt among them. But, whoever they were, they had sisters too, and mothers, who would be sick about them now.

I wanted to go home, to see my own house safe and solid. To touch the warped glass of the upstairs window, to sit at
the kitchen table with Lockie, shelling peas. I wondered how she and Mother and Florrie were faring, over in Eugene's house. I was glad I wasn't there. Every single thing that happened in that woman's life was a cause for complaint. She'd be making a meal of this – whatever it was.

The milk had turned. It made white clumps in the tea, which glistened, as though there was oil in it. I poured mine into a cup for the monkey. He drained the lot and scooped around the inside with a hooked finger.

Hubie separated the rind from a rasher and passed it to Paschal. The bread was stale, dry as sawdust. I pushed my plate away. ‘How can you all eat?' Although in fact May was crumbling her crust with her nails.

An explosion, louder than the others, made the glass shiver in the windows. ‘Where do you think the guns are?' I asked.

Hubie tipped his head, listening. ‘I'd say that one came from somewhere near the river, maybe on it. The troops inside Trinity College will set some up as well, if they haven't already done it. They'll take the buildings between there and the Post Office, as they can.'

‘Take?'

‘Shell.' He moved the teapot to the centre of the table. ‘Say this is the Post Office. This knife is Sackville Street, running past it, and this one here's the river.' The sugar bowl was Trinity, the milk jug the bank. His black glove ran between them all, describing a tightening circle. He named the likely vantage points and arranged place mats to represent them. ‘If I had the running of it.' He sat back and surveyed the ruin of the table. One of his mats was bang in the middle of Rutland Square.

‘How will I get home?'

‘You won't, 'til it's over.'

I looked at Dote, as if she could solve this. ‘They'll be safe in Cabra, won't they?'

‘As safe as we are,' said Hubie. Did he even know where Cabra was? Why were we taking his word for everything?

May's cup shook in her hand. Tea slopped over the table.

‘I didn't mean to frighten you.' Hubie took her hand and held it in his good palm, smoothing it with the broad, blunt paw of his hurt one. It was mesmerizing to watch, the most substantial thing in the room.

He suggested that we take down the paintings and maps and wrap them in sheets, as though we were moving house. ‘Like a spring-clean,' Dote said brightly to May, who took her hand away from Hubie and put it in her lap, under the table, saying they'd done the spring-clean already, she didn't want to do another one. After a small silence she said she'd better go up and lie down for a bit. Dote went with her, saying something about a faulty catch on a window that needed seeing to.

‘Do you really think it's necessary to pack everything away?' I asked Hubie, when they'd gone.

‘People need something to do.'

I was disappointed to realize that he thought us children, to be managed and directed and distracted.

He insisted on going out, to gather whatever information he could. Before he left, he gave strict instructions that we should stay indoors. ‘But, if you must go out, stay away from Mount Street Bridge. Those fellows in the corner house mean business.'

The air of the house hung heavy as a curtain when he'd gone. While May slept, Dote and I took down the paintings and the maps and May's father's medals and commendations, wrapped them up and put them away. The dejected oblongs of darkness they left behind on the walls depressed Dote, so she called a halt to it and we sat in the kitchen, where May's floral prints remained. We tried and abandoned a game of peggity, played a few hands of old maid before agreeing
there were few things more tedious than a game of cards when your heart wasn't in it.

Neither of us wanted tea without milk, so we just sat, talking. I was curious about Hubie. Dote told me about his family's sprawling country house, the varying fortunes of the farm, how Hubie's brother Tom wanted to breed horses and Tom's wife, Philippa – who had been Hubie's fiancée – was the daughter of a famous breeder and trainer. ‘I hate to say it, but she's more suited to Tom.'

She said Hubie was always making things when he was a boy. Ingenious things, like a contraption for beating carpets; a hinged and folding ladder; a mechanical raft that worked as a ferry across a fast-flowing river at the back of the house. The younger children, his brothers and sisters, used to spend hours on it, playing ferryman. They pulled themselves across the water on the rope he'd rigged between two trees, moving long-suffering animals, dogs and cats and nursling lambs, from one side to the other and then back again.

I found it hard to imagine Hubie as a child, or even in a family. He seemed the sort of person who could have arrived in the world spontaneously, separate and fully formed.

‘That ferry of his made a marvellous toy, but it could have been more. I told him he should patent the idea. He said nonsense, it was the sort of solution people had contrived for hundreds of years – why make a fuss about it?' She drummed her fingers on the table. ‘It's a pity he wasn't more savvy about money. He could do with ways to earn a living now.'

I told her Mr Briscoe had offered me a job, and that I might need to go to London for training.

‘Would you like to go?'

I shifted in my seat, let my gaze stray to the window. ‘This is home.' I didn't know if I wanted to live somewhere Liam had never been.

‘What do your parents say?'

‘I haven't mentioned it.'

The shots outside were more persistent – but distant enough not to be threatening. I found it hard to grasp the appalling truth: that each one had an aim – to extinguish a specific, living target. I had an overwhelming urge to lie down and cry.

Dote patted my hand. ‘What did you and Hubie talk about last night? You were late coming up.'

‘This and that. Liam.' I felt strangely shy, reluctant to say more.

‘Well. I'll go up and check on May.'

When she'd gone, I looked through the bookcase for distraction. There was
The Riddle of the Sands –
how prophetic that had turned out to be! Two books of Mr Stephens's,
The Crock of Gold
and
The Charwoman's Daughter
, both of which I'd loved. Katherine Cecil Thurston's
Fly on the Wheel
. Mother wouldn't have her books in our house; I'd read them here. I took George Moore's
Ave
, hoping to be amused, but couldn't concentrate.

I fiddled with a set of nesting lacquered Burmese boxes. Ovoid, they were inscribed with intricate, swirling patterns, gold and purple and red. Strong colours. I unpacked the smaller boxes and arranged them in a row, six of them, packed them up again. They nestled inside each other sweetly, like Russian dolls, the lids indented just enough to slide home easy as a knife through soft butter. Their weight was smooth in my palm, the lacquer so rich it was almost warm.
Lacquer
. I liked the shape of the word, its silky texture.

Hours passed. I worried about the others, my parents and Florrie and Lockie. I hoped to God Matt was where he'd said he'd be, away over in Rathfarnham, applying himself to his books. A burst of gunfire made me nearly jump out of my skin. Something enormous was happening, and we were
trapped inside it, like one of those boxes, waiting to be released into the next event, the next drama. I couldn't begin to see how I might direct my own life, when all my boxes were set out for me, ready-made, made-to-fit.

More gunfire. The window was a magnet. I couldn't resist looking out. Nothing had visibly changed. The canal was like a length of tin, nailed down between two ranks of houses fronted by road, strips of grass. It seemed solid; it was anything but. Things vanished into it, sank quickly out of sight. A coach and horses, once, with a load of passengers, coming home from a ball at the Castle. Like a fairytale, there would have been footmen and diamonds and too-tight shoes; and dreams, no doubt, of princes – but the water swallowed them all. There'd have been commotion and splashing. There would have been screams, but they'd have been brief, the canal would have swallowed them too, quick enough, and smoothed itself down, like brushing crumbs from a skirt. If you thought about it, you'd be afraid of water. It lay there waiting. You'd be tempted to slip inside it. It looked easy. And the swans swam along its surface as though it were a road, as though it could be walked on.

A hairy bluebottle crept up the glass. At the top corner, it buzzed and turned in tight circles, as if it didn't know there was the space of an entire room at its back. I got up and pulled the sash down so it could escape. It sank too, bouncing and buzzing at the corner of the window-frame, a pantomime of frantic rage. With the window open wide, the fly resumed its buzzing circles, not knowing how close it was to freedom. I could see the veins on its wings.
Shoo!
I said, waving my hands. It sprang away, rediscovered flight and soared off into the morning, leaving me alone in the empty room, to wait.

Stories of atrocities on the Continent brought a sour panic to my throat. I pushed it away. This was Ireland. There were
Irishmen in the British Army. Ireland was part of the Empire. There'd be discipline. There would. British soldiers lived here. They used our shops, stayed in our hotels, walked out with Irish women. Many of them were Irish themselves.
I'm as Irish as you are
.