King of Morning, Queen of Day (21 page)

Twenty-one days. Exactly five days longer than Jessica Caldwell had been going out with Damian Gorman. It was as if Nature herself were bestowing a blessing on the relationship. Strolling in the stately cool of the National Museum’s corridors, pottering about Sandycove Harbour in a hired rowboat with a gramophone in the stern playing “You’re the Cream in My Coffee,” evening promenades along Dun Laoghaire Pier, passing themselves off as gentry from Kingstown Yachting Club; bicycle expeditions to the wilds of Dalkey and Killiney Head with its view over the bay that the tourist brochures likened to the Bay of Naples but which bore no comparison; or into the Wicklow Hills; by charabanc to Glendalough with jaunting car ride and boat trip to the cave known at St. Kevin’s Bed, all in for one-and-sixpence. In the sixteen days since that first tentative Sunday morning rendezvous by the pond in Herbert Park, she had been out with Damian twelve times.

She would have loved to have been able to tell someone about those sixteen days, but from the first meeting, secrecy had been an unspoken compact between them. She had told her parents she had been out with Em and Rozzie, but she already suspected that they suspected she was seeing a man and
questions
could not be long forestalled. Under no circumstances could they know that their daughter was seeing a unit commander of the Irish Republican Army.

She found some outlet for her confessional need in Jocasta. Her younger sister had always possessed this rocklike, near-ecclesiastical trustworthiness. When you told Jocasta it was you had painted the wash-hand basin black or poured molten lead smelted down from the seals of wine bottles down the plughole, you felt the double satisfaction of having confessed and the knowledge that Jocasta would take that confession to her grave rather than squeal. Jessica found herself regularly well after midnight on the end of Jocasta’s bed enjoying the catharsis of feelings teased out like tangled wool. Dates, times, the exact anatomical location of each kiss and its rating on a scale from one brotherly peck on the cheek to ten impending suffocation; hopes, wild romantic dreams, fantasies. Jocasta sat through them all, silent, listening, lit with her own peculiar inner luminosity. At an early age Jocasta had decided to orient her life along a different axis from the rest of the planet. Jessica suspected that her confessions were as incomprehensible to Jocasta as propositions in analytical chemistry. When she crept back to her room, temporarily shriven, she was certain she could hear the click of a bedroom door shutting. She could never catch her in the act, but she knew The Shite was spying.
Let her listen,
Jessica thought savagely.
Little bitch is probably jealous.

The one thing she did not confess to Jo-Jo was that her flights of fancy were causing her increasing alarm. The new vividness they had taken on since she had begun the sessions with Dr. Rooke had been initially enjoyable; a private reality she could summon and superimpose over the cabbage stench of Mangan’s kitchen and the endless mastication of the Shopper’s Special Luncheoners was a mental balm. But she was losing control of them. They came to her unbidden, in the kitchens, at the tables, on the tram, at dinner with her parents, listening to the wireless. They would descend, a cloud of unknowing, and carry her away. The tram seemed particularly attractive to visions. She regularly missed her stop because she was caught in a daydream that seemed more concrete than any reality. Once she had dreamed of a tiny woman dressed only in strips and scraps of red leather, which Jessica thought rather becoming in a vulgar sort of way, and a blind harper, a man blind from before birth, for blank skin covered the sockets where eyes should have been. Rags and snippets of cloth were tied to his hair, his blond beard, his fingers, the strings of his harp, so that he could feel the world about him in the slightest movement of the air about his body. He played upon the harp, and the small, almost naked woman danced a lewd jig.

That other,
ur
-Dublin, was growing closer to the true Dublin every day. So close now that pieces of that alien city were crossing over into familiar streets. After an inconclusive round in her internecine warfare with Fat Lettie, she had retired to the ladies’ jax for a Woodbine and summoned a vision of herself seated on one side of the unbridgeable gulf the Bible teaches is fixed between heaven and hell, while on the other side, pinch-faced demons were basting Fat Lettie in her own lard on a giant iron griddle, a shrieking, naked mass of melting blubber.

The scream from the kitchens had frozen every forkful of Shopper’s Special between plate and oblivion. Jessica burst from the toilets to find that an entire pan of boiling fat had somehow spilled itself over Fat Lettie. “All over her face and front,” said a shocked Brendan. “Just fell off the stove. She never even touched it. It just fell off the stove.”

T
HERE IS (INDEED, THERE
must be) a certain amount of the sixpenny-thriller sleuth in every psychologist, and a certain amount of the psychologist in every detective. All those motives, all those hidden drives and desires, piled high, like so many Freudian peaches we cautiously examine in our search for truth, careful lest we pull the wrong one and the whole pile topples.

It was with not inconsiderable relish, therefore, that I donned the mantle of Holmes, Peter Wimsey, Poirot, and other such worthies and set off, metaphorical bloodhounds baying, on the trail of Jessica Caldwell.

Assuming from my transcripts of the interviews that Jessica had been adopted (I foresee a storm on the horizon when the time comes, as surely it must, when she learns that the people she has called
Mother
and
Father
all her remembered life never were her true parents), I made my first call at the Public Records Office in the Four Courts. I was not particularly hopeful of finding the identities of Jessica’s true parents and was not overly disappointed when the clerk returned to inform me that no reference to a Jessica Caldwell could be found. My frustration rather was reserved for those idiots who, in the all-mighty name of Nationalism, wantonly destroy a nation’s past; too much of our racial memory was burned in the occupation of the Four Courts in 1922 by republican forces, and their subsequent siege and bombardment (with fragmentation shells, dear God!) by Free State Troopers. I had at least one concrete reference to lead me on: Jessica’s harrowing account of the burning to death of her parents in their own home by soldiers could only refer to the burning of Cork City by the Black and Tans during the War of Independence, in reprisal for an ambush in which eleven of their men were killed.

Therefore to the rebel city I went, obtained a room for the night in a rather overgrand (and, to my subsequent regret, overpriced) hotel on Patrick Street and started on my inquiries. They have long memories in Cork. Once I had established the impeccability of my nationalist credentials, the people I met in the hotel bar were only too keen (a zealous light would come into their eyes) to recount the events of that night.

From Jessica’s descriptions and the local testimonies, I narrowed the possible locations down to Merchant’s Quay on the north side of the Lee, in the shadow of Shandon Steeple. Next morning, fortified on a true detective’s breakfast of bacon, tripe, and a local blood pudding called
drisheen,
I crossed the river on foot to further my investigations.

Merchant’s Quay was another of those periodic reminders one comes across with too great a frequency of the grim days from which our nation is only slowly emerging. Elegant town houses built to the refined tastes of the mercantile class of seventeenth-century Cork had been reduced to blackened facades shored up against the final collapse into the waters of the Lee by batteries of timbers and props. In any other city they would have been long ago demolished as an affront to civic pride; in rebel Cork, always on the wrong side of any uprising, they were maintained as a memorial to the Black and Tan’s barbarity. In the entire row only one house had survived. There is always one that obdurately holds out when the fire passes, when the people move out, when the developers move in. This doughty survivor was a Mrs. MacCurtain, ninety-two, and bent treble with arthritis. She took it upon herself to invite me in for tea and fruit brack while she recollected that November night.

“There were only two deaths, though I don’t know whether to be thankful that there were so few, or angry that they were any at all. From number eight, they were. The Mannions. Both of them died in the fire. They got cut off—the fourth floor, do you see? When the Fire Brigade came the Tans slashed their hoses, would you believe? They stretched out blankets, so, for them to jump, and everyone was out in the street, shouting jump, jump, for Christ’s sake, jump! Never mind that their own homes were going up in flames before their very eyes, they were beyond saving, but there still might be hope for the man and the woman and the baby. Did I say they had a little girl? They did, so, no age at all, God love her, for such a terrible thing to be happening to her. The father, he was about to throw the little girl out, and his wife next, but suddenly there was a great whoosh of flame and the roof came down and, well, there was nothing we could do for them. But the little girl was still alive. The window bay had protected her, you see? We all shouted for her to jump, but she was afraid, she was so high up, and she no more than four.

“Then out of the crowd walked these two tinkermen. We didn’t know who they were, where they came from, what they were doing there, but before anyone could say a word, they walked into the house; into the fire, would you believe? Straight in. Now, I was there, I will tell you what I saw, with my own eyes, and that was that the one who went in first, a small, swarthy man, like an Eyetalian, he was scattering what looked like dust from a bag over his shoulder, and when the dust fell, the flames died down. The next we saw of them, they were up in the window beside the girl. We all shouted, ‘Throw her down, Throw her down!’ but the other one, the tall, thin one, he picked her up in his arms and turned away, as if he meant to come back through the fire. They hadn’t gone two steps when all of a sudden there was a tremendous boom! Must have been a gas main going up, or something, and this ball of fire blew the rest of the windows out. I tell you, the flames shot up one hundred feet, so they did, and it was a fireman himself told me that, so. Well, we all thought, there’s another two poor brave idiots gone to their Maker, and the little girl with them, poor thing. Why hadn’t they listened and done like we’d said and thrown her out? But then what did I see, but the flames in the hallway snuffed out like a candle and the two of them come walking out with the little girl like they were on a Sunday afternoon walk on Crosshaven Promenade. They set the little girl down and in all the rush and haste they had disappeared through the crowd before anyone thought to talk to them. Hadn’t even stopped to be thanked, and we never knew who they were or where they had come from. They came and went without a single word. But for them there’s not one would have survived in number eight. And I know what I saw with my own eyes, and other folk will tell you what they saw with theirs, and what happened is a miracle, a real Hand of God miracle.

“I tell you this one last thing: after the fire, the brigade checked their blankets and tarpaulins we’d wanted them to jump into, and they said they were so old and worn that anyone who jumped in would have gone straight through. Straight through. So that tall, thin one, he must have known, though don’t ask me how, because we’ll never know, none of us.”

I asked what had happened to the little girl. Mrs. MacCurtain replied that she had been taken by a sister who lived in Dublin, and had later married a Protestant. It was not a mixed marriage; the woman in question had been confirmed into the Church of Ireland, a thing she regarded as an outrage to nature.

Satisfied, I was preparing to leave when Mrs. MacCurtain piped up like a little bird with a final reminiscence.

“Oh, yes, I quite forgot to tell you, Mr. Rooke. This was a strange thing. When the little girl was adopted by Mrs. Mannion’s sister, it was the child’s second adoption in almost as many years. You see, she had already once been adopted, so, by the Mannions. Poor old Mrs. Mannion was told by the doctors she could never have any children of her own, a dreadful curse to visit upon a woman,” (she crossed herself devoutly) “so she adopted a little girl from the Sisters of Divine Visitation.”

I was surprised to find that the nuns of Visitation Convent were not a foundling order. Presented with an orphan, I had automatically placed her in an orphanage. The Sisters of Divine Visitation were a brisk and bustling missionary order engaged in good works of supererogation across four continents. Their convent on the Mallow Road out of Cork was bright, clean, modern, and clearly very well-funded. The current Mother Superior was a fresh-faced, dynamic, almost aggressive woman in her early forties. Sister Agnes, her predecessor, had retired from supervision of the sisters five years before at the venerable age of seventy-four. A skipping teenage novice (too worldly by far ever to make a success of life in orders) took me to the cloister garden where Sister Agnes liked to spend clement afternoons in the sunlit recollection of the past. Sister Agnes was a tiny bone of a woman. Seeing her wheelchair among the buddleias and fuchsias, I made the error of mistaking serenity for senility: her recall was instant and total.

“Such a dear little thing—like a daughter to us all, a ray of sunshine in our close community. Women in close community can be such terrible old bitches. Sisters in Christ no exception. But little Bernadette-Mary brought out the good in us—all these maternal feelings that a vow of celibacy is supposed to dissolve away like smoke, which, of course, it doesn’t. She was very tiny when she came to us, a mere babe in arms. I suppose we should have given her over to one of the foundling orders, but, one sight of her, well, could you? We had her baptised at once and hired a wet nurse from Grangegorman, a poor woman who’d just lost her fifth, and she looked after Bernadette-Mary until she was weaned. After that she stayed with us here in the convent, and she would probably still be here if the bishop hadn’t heard about the child. There was a terrible to-do, we just managed to keep it out of the papers. The thought had never occurred to us, you see, but everyone would have thought the child was one of ours, and that would have been a terrible scandal, indeed. The bishop insisted we have the child adopted at once. We approached the woman who’d wet-nursed her, but she had her hands full with her second attempt at a fifth, so, after much searching—I was very particular about who would look after our Bernadette-Mary—she was put with a couple called Mannion. Nice people, they were. We were all very sad to see her go. Something went out of the convent the day she left to go to her new parents. She was almost three.”