Fallen (9 page)

‘Your kettle is always on.' I let the satchel strap fall from my shoulder and put it down. ‘Do you mind if I leave this here for a while?'

‘Is it heavy, pet?' May was in an apron at the kitchen table, which was spread with newspapers. She'd a row of plant pots in front of her and was spooning soil into them from a small zinc bucket, three clay pots of vivid red and pink flowers on chairs beside her. ‘I told you, Dote. It's not right to have the girl lugging reams of notes around.'

I hesitated. ‘That's not it. I've Liam's letters in there. My mother is looking for them.' I felt as though I were making my way through a cold incoming tide, up to my chin in water, testing the seabed with each tentative step, expecting it to shelve away any minute. ‘I've brought them here for safekeeping.'

Dote and May exchanged a look.

‘They're letters he wrote to his fiancée – and to me. He asked me to keep them safe.' My cheeks burned, but every word was true.

‘Leave them upstairs in the dining room,' Dote said. ‘Along with the notes. They'll be safe there.'

I knew it, and I was grateful. I brought the satchel upstairs and stowed it in a corner, out of the way. It looked perfectly at home there, unremarkable. Relieved, I hurried back down to the kitchen, where Dote was scalding the teapot and May had resumed her peculiar business with the soil and the spoon. I felt a huge wave of affection for them both, and all the differences between their house and ours.

‘What are you doing?' I asked May.

‘She's repotting her geraniums,' Dote said. ‘Really, May, how are we supposed to have tea, with the table smothered in dirt?'

‘Cleanest dirt there is. We can go outside to eat.'

‘Isn't that just typical,' Dote grumbled. ‘The plants get the furniture and we have to fend for ourselves outside.'

‘Al fresco! Nothing better.' May stood up and wiped the palms of her hands on a rag, then on her apron, then through her flyaway hair. ‘And no time like the present. Come on outside with me, pet. Fresh air – it works wonders.'

Going home that evening, I took a tram as far as the Pillar. I was too tired to walk. I didn't feel like talking to anyone when I got in. I was too tired to eat. I asked Lockie to tell my parents I'd given Liam's letters back to the people who wrote them. Hoping to be left in peace, I brought a mug of cocoa upstairs to bed with me, but before I'd time to drink it I fell asleep.

Liam's anniversary, and the sun came up beaming.

I was to meet Isabel later and bring her to Percy Place for tea with May's nephew, Hubie Wilson, who'd been discharged with wounds and was on his way home to Mullingar from a military hospital in England. But, first, there was the anniversary Mass to get through. I crossed the landing to Florrie's room, looking for company. She was propped up on her pillows, rubbing cream into her neck. The room reeked like a flower shop, worse even than when I'd shared it with her. Something sickly sweet, gardenia or lily, predominated.

‘A year today,' I said.

‘I know.' Some unease flared in her face. Of course she knew – hadn't she been counting the days until she could marry Eugene Sheehan? They'd settled on the first Friday in June, six weeks away, for a bit of distance from the anniversary, but the presents had already started to arrive: linen, silver, Waterford this, Belleek that.

I went over to the window and looked out. A flaw in the glass, the hint of a curve, suggested water, but it was a good-looking day. Young leaves shone on the trees across the road, amid hints of colour that the sun would tease out later: white, cherry-pink, burnt-orange. They were wasted on me.

Down on the street, two skinny dogs, a whippet and a reddish mongrel missing a tail, fought over some bloody-looking scrap. They lunged at each other, pulled apart, attacked again, their faces mashed up close and snarling. Soon the scrap, whatever it was, split apart. A splinter of bone emerged, white as a moon, and the mongrel loped off with it. The whippet
limped in pursuit. What was a well-bred dog like that doing loose on the streets?

I traced the warp in the glass with my finger. Once Florrie was married, the rest of us would pack up in earnest. Dad had finally agreed to move to Kingstown, near the sea, where the air was better and the neighbours would be more to Mother's liking. He said there was nothing to stay for.

There was everything to stay for. We were born in this house. Its traces were in all our memories, as we'd left traces in it. Inflections of our grandparents' voices lingered on the landings, came out at the end of Dad's sentences and were echoed in my own. Our footsteps had smoothed the floors, worn away the centre of each stair. Old slams were stored in the doors.

My reluctance wasn't only sentiment. Suppose there'd been a mistake and Liam came back – how would he find us, if we'd moved? It could happen. Or suppose a final letter had gone astray. Suppose it turned up in a French farmhouse or a Belgian church, months or even years from now. It would be delivered to this address. ‘Not known', the new householder would write on the envelope. ‘Return to sender'.

‘Strange to think we'll all be gone from the house, come the summer.'

I turned around to see Florrie busy with two halves of a lemon, a knife and a bowl, just about balanced on a wooden tray. ‘And I'll be in my own brand-new, spanking-clean house. No draughts, imagine!' She'd scooped the pulp from the lemon while I wasn't looking and a dome of yellow rind now cupped both elbows. She held each in place with the opposite hand. ‘Be an angel, Katie?' She pointed her chin at the tray, then at the dressing table.

‘What's this, now?'

‘Bleaching my elbows.'

I pushed a clutter of creams and lotions aside to make
room for the tray in front of the three-sided mirror and caught a glimpse of my hair, flattened on one side where I'd lain on it. I unpinned it, worked my fingers down through the length of it and took up Florrie's hairbrush to give it a good going-over.

‘I wish you wouldn't use my brush,' she said.

‘I'll clean it when I'm finished.' I let my head fall and the hair with it, nearly to my knees, brushed the underneath with long strokes. It crackled and sparked. I swung it back up again and tamed it with the brush, made an effort to smooth it with my palms.

Florrie watched. ‘Have you heard anything about Con lately?'

‘I saw him at the Concert Rooms the other night. Why?'

She inspected one of her lemon elbow-caps. ‘Glenda saw him there too. She said he had Helen Stacpole on his arm.'

‘And?'

‘Mother thought that maybe you and he …' She let the unfinished sentence hang between us.

‘No.'

‘I thought so too.' She stopped fussing with the rind and looked at me. ‘Did something happen between you?'

Nothing had happened. We'd been awkward with each other when he joined us for Sunday lunches, but before long he led us back to the easy manner we'd had before. He ignored my silences and averted face, made bad jokes, found and met my eye, treated me as a friend. If a person can court friendship, that's what he did throughout that summer. He may not have wanted me, but he liked me, and he let me feel his liking as a kind of balm to my pride. So the shame left me.

Somewhere in the back of my mind I stored away an idea that if he changed his mind and came looking for me, I wouldn't turn him away. I knew what other people saw in
him, different and uncomplimentary things, all true enough. But I'd seen something that went beyond his links with Liam, a thing that was equal to something in me.

Helen Stacpole was the shy, only daughter of doting and wealthy parents. I'd met her at some of Eva's charity bazaars. That night in the Concert Rooms I watched them for a while, unnoticed. Con guided her through the crowd, holding her elbow. I couldn't see the attraction. She'd so little to say for herself, she was sure to bore him rigid inside of ten minutes. Good luck to them.

I cleared strands of my hair from Florrie's brush and swept them into the waste basket. ‘Will I wash this?'

‘I'll do it.' She detached one of her elbows from its yellow cup, then the other, picked bits of fruit from her skin. ‘Your turn will come, Katie. You'll find someone, don't worry.'

Liam stirred in my mind. He'd said the same; now his turn would never come. The normal progressions and milestones of family life would always snag on the ugly nail of his absence.

‘I don't know that I want to.'

‘You will.' She stopped picking at her elbow and wiped her fingers on a piece of flannel. Then she stretched her arms up over her head, rolled her neck, sighed a happy sigh. She was plump and smooth and soft-looking. Mother might have been like this, in her time. Nothing at all like me, or Eva, both of us thin as rails with long necks and pointy chins.

‘I hope Eva's better today,' I said. ‘I wish we could visit. Bartley's a scourge, saying we can't.'

‘She's resting, Katie. Don't go on about it.'

Eva was in a nursing home, convalescing after a serious kidney infection, and here was Florrie giving me filthy looks, all that kittenish contentment and sisterly concern evaporated. She and Mother had a dread that Eugene's people
would get wind of a constitutional weakness and call off the wedding. We had ghosts in the family who were never mentioned: Mother's sister, Abigail, who had died in circumstances we weren't allowed to know, and two infant brothers, born after Florrie. Neither lived longer than six months. Eva had had more than her share of miscarriages too, each leaving her more drained and sad than the last.

I lifted the blankets at the end of the bed and sat in under them, facing Florrie top to tail, the way I used to sleep beside Eva in the days when the three of us shared this room. Before Eva got married and left. Before Liam went off to be a soldier and lent his room to me. I nudged Florrie with my toes.

She jerked her legs away. ‘Your feet are freezing!'

‘It won't be
my
cold feet putting the frighteners on you, in a few weeks.'

‘Katie!' Her face and neck flushed scarlet.

‘Are you nervous about getting married?'

‘Why would I be?'

I nudged her again. ‘You know. After.'

She clamped her lips together so hard they all but disappeared. ‘I don't want to talk about it. Neither should you.'

I gave her a swift kick and got out of the bed.

Back in Liam's room, I lifted my chemise from the chair, pulled it over my head and stepped into my new charcoal-grey linen skirt, a shade lighter than full mourning-black now that the first year was over. My fingers fumbled the buttons at the narrow waist, my hair fell around my face. I stopped struggling, took a breath to calm myself. For weeks I'd been agitated and restless. I felt as though a stone were caught in my throat. Something hot and sticky, like a child's thumbs, pressed against the backs of my eyes.

Buttons fastened, I stood in front of the mottled rectangle
of mirror, tilted back against the wall at floor level, to inspect myself. Lockie had hauled this mirror out of the box room when Liam went away, but we never got around to fixing it to the wall. At first it didn't seem worth it, since he'd be home any day and wouldn't thank us for the addition. Then there was all the talk of moving house, so what was the point? After that came the paralysis of not wanting to do anything that might remind us that he wouldn't, ever, be coming back.

I looked into the angled recess of glass. A silvered pool at my feet reflected the high corner between wall and ceiling behind me, where Liam's shaving mirror hung. The shadows were suggestive. In a certain light, they wavered. In the way that paired mirrors throw out an infinity of reflections, I thought I might see back through time, if I looked hard enough. I might catch a glimpse of Liam, before he left.

There was the rest of a fractious morning to get through, everyone out of sorts. First, we had Liam's anniversary Mass in the Pro-Cathedral. The congregation was small, nothing like the day before, Easter Sunday, when the church was crammed to bursting, standing room only at the back, half the congregation got up in new finery, the other half wheezing and coughing in clothes they'd got out of hock for the occasion, lucky if there were laces in their shoes. Against the collective smells of so much humanity, Mother and Florrie had worn orange-and-clove sachets on ribbons tied to their wrists. They wore them again today, when there was no need for them.

After Mass we had a queasy breakfast. Dad planned to get the train to Bray and walk the sea path to Greystones and back. I followed him out to the hall and found him belting his walking coat. He pulled a soft cap out of the large pocket and stretched it into shape. I stood behind him while he put
it on, looking over his shoulder at his face in the mirror. ‘Don't forget Isabel's coming to supper,' I said. ‘You'll be home in time, won't you?'

He laughed at my expression. ‘Why wouldn't I?'

‘I still don't think it was a good idea to ask her.' I looked back at the dining-room door. ‘Mother's got such a wasp in her ear.'

‘That's rubbish, Katie. We're over all that now.'

I didn't feel sure about that. Isabel had taken up with a peace crowd run by a woman called Louie Bennett. A letter denouncing the war was printed in several newspapers in February, the
Freeman
as well as the
Independent
. It deplored conditions in the trenches for men on all sides, and the hardships of families left fatherless. There were a dozen signatories and Isabel was one of them.

‘Mildred has Liam's memorabilia book, to show her,' Dad said. ‘There'll be no politics, I won't allow it.' He jammed the cap down around his ears, a parody of the
hear no evil
monkey, and left.

I hoped he was right, but I was afraid it would be difficult for Isabel, in front of all of us, to look through the scrapbook Mother had made. I'd had time to make peace with it. I'd even added some of Liam's safer letters to the collection. Isabel had sent a photograph, along with a transcription of a poem by Mr Yeats, one that Liam had written into her journal the evening they got engaged.

Matt came downstairs, on his way to a friend's house in Rathfarnham to study for his final examinations. The holdall he carried looked heavy.

‘Have you got an entire library in there?' I asked.

He'd a shifty expression on his face. ‘I've a lot of time to make up for.'

‘That you have. Well, don't forget to be here when Isabel comes.'

‘I had forgotten. I might not be here, Katie. I'm sorry. Don't wait.'

‘Suit yourself. Don't you always?'

I went into the dining room to say goodbye. Mother and Florrie were looking through the wedding presents spread out on the table. There were several unopened brown-paper parcels. Florrie tore into one and a gift label fell out. I picked it up and handed it to her. She put it down among spills of paper. I rescued it, watching her open the parcel. ‘You'll want to know who sent it. Do you have a list?'

‘We'll remember.' Florrie was flushed and happy-looking. Of a sudden I felt small and mean-spirited. A shadow crossed my memory, but I shrugged it off and caught Florrie's eye. ‘You look lovely today, Florrie. All this suits you.'

She laughed that sudden bark of hers and batted my arm. ‘Go on out of that. Are you going out?'

What harm would it do if I was to stay and show interest in her spoils? ‘In a minute. I'll help if you like. Let me find some paper and a pencil.'

About twenty minutes later – twenty minutes of unwrapping, exclaiming, discussing gift and giver – I entered a pair of silver sauce-boats with matching ladles on the list. I wondered about the hallmarks. If I knew how to read them, we'd know when they were made, where and by whom. I wondered how to say it, but Mother went looking for a box to store everything in and I missed my chance. Florrie held up the last item, a Dun Emer tablecloth, for my inspection.

I fingered the material. ‘It's a good design. I like the band of colour.'

Florrie folded it away. ‘Not my taste. It's from Mrs Finlay. By the way, Katie, does Isabel still wear Liam's ring?'

Mother had come back in. She stood behind Florrie, listening for my answer.