Light A Penny Candle (11 page)

‘No, she didn’t mean. …’

‘But I did,’ cried Aisling. ‘It’s wrong to come here, to come
here
all dirty and shabby and start frightening Donal and telling him he’s not well. He’s only got a touch of asthma, do you hear me? Everyone knows it … everyone. …’

Eileen stepped in. It was to Aisling she moved, and she put a hand on a trembling shoulder.

‘Come on, Matthew,’ she said calmly. ‘Go home with you at once. If you want to call on us, come back when you’re in better shape. I can’t imagine why you want to come here bringing yourself down to the level of children. Come on, shoo.’

Her voice brought relief to Donal’s face. She was treating the doctor like a bold child.

‘High and mighty Eileen O’Connor,’ he said venomously, looking around him. ‘Too good for this town … educated in England … what did it get you? A house falling down for want of a coat of paint, a husband covered with dirt over in a yard and a lean-to, a crowd of children one more wild than the next. …’

‘We have the best children in town,’ said Eileen. ‘Are you going now or shall I send one of them over for your wife?’

‘The best,’ he laughed. ‘This one will be in the churchyard before much longer, you sent that Maureen away before she disgraced you, and what about young fellow-me-lad strutting about in a Tommy’s uniform?’

Eileen forced herself to laugh. Once she heard the sound of it it encouraged her and her second attempt was almost a peal.

‘My God, Matthew Lynch, isn’t it true what they say about drunks! They weave more fairy tales and have more
imagination
than the people who write books. Listen, will you get out of here before my Sean comes back and kicks you out. …’ She wiped her eyes at the amusement of it all. The children looked at her amazed. Even Peggy, who had come to stand at the door with Niamh in her arms, smiled without quite knowing why. The doctor, deflated and unexpectedly defeated, began to leave. Eileen’s laughter annoyed him more than he could believe. He had only said what was true, why was she laughing? The door slammed and Eileen sat down. Her mirth hadn’t subsided. Cautiously the children moved towards her and Peggy advanced into the room. When the door downstairs banged, Eileen leapt up and looked out of the window.

‘Look at him, the poor buffoon, heading for a few quick ones now to give him the courage to face the wife. Oh dear, there’s nothing so desperate as a drunk man – whatever you two girls do, and you too, Peggy, and you Niamh little heart, for God’s sake don’t marry a drunk. …’

Donal felt excluded. ‘Doesn’t he know what he’s saying? Is he really unreliable?’ he asked anxiously.

‘When he’s like that he’s only got old potatoes rattling around in his head, not brains. Poor fool.’ His insults burned into her like a hot rod pushed down the back of her throat. But she was winning, she was managing to make him ridiculous. She didn’t have to deny what he’d said about Donal if she laughed at everything he said. She watched him pick up a newspaper from a bench near the bus stop, and then he shouted something to her. The window was closed so she couldn’t hear.

‘He’s saying something, Mam,’ said Peggy.

‘I’m sure he is.’ She shivered. ‘Come on, Peggy, since I’m home anyway let’s all have a cup of tea.’

‘He keeps pointing to the paper,’ said Donal.

‘Come on away and we’ll close the curtains, it’s dark almost.’ Peggy scuttled out to the kitchen as Eileen opened the window slightly.

‘That’s cooked your goose … America’s in the war now. … Your snot-nosed boy’ll be sent to fight … it’s getting worse, not better … you’ll lose two sons you cackling old hen … your big Tommy of a son’ll be mincemeat in no time now.’

Eileen closed the window quickly and joined the little group by the fire.

‘What’s he saying, Mam?’ Donal, worried still.

‘Oh, more rubbishing and rawmaishing out of him … the man doesn’t know what day it is … he just goes on and on and on. …’

There were, of course, other mothers who didn’t know if their sons lived or died, but Eileen got no comfort from thinking about them. For some reason which she couldn’t quite explain to herself she had pretended to other people that she heard from him. When a well-meaning or even just curious friend or neighbour would ask, ‘Any word at all from Sean in England?’ she would nod brightly and say yes, she heard from him, he was fine. She said it with quick darting looks in the direction her husband might come from … just brief letters, you know, and people thought
that
the boy wrote to his mother but had fought with his father. In some convoluted way, Eileen thought that this made things more
right
.

At times she wondered should she write to Violet and enquire about how to trace a missing boy who had gone to sign up. How did you set the machinery in motion to get him back? Show his birth certificate? Prove he was neither British nor eighteen? Then she knew she would never do that; but she was still tempted to hunt him out, just so that she could write to him. She could even get him to write to her at the chemist’s. The Moriartys were unusual in Kilgarret, in that they were able to keep secrets. She had also read somewhere that you could contact missing persons through the Salvation Army, but it made it very final, in a way, if you asked an organisation like that to hunt for him. While you left it, and hoped and hoped, it didn’t seem too bad. It didn’t actually define him as a runaway son, a missing person. Sean was still going to write some time soon. …

She read the paper on her desk and tried to work out from the reports in the
Irish Independent
whether her son might have been trained by now, or if he were still too young. She went dutifully through accounts of what Stafford Cripps had said, and Churchill had said and Beaverbrook had said and Harold Nicolson had said; but none of them ever said what happened to young Irish boys who went off on boats to join the war. And the paper always referred to it as the Emergency, which seemed less frightening. She followed the progress of events as they
moved
out to the Far East, and of simpler matters nearer home. She read of the austerity measures, gasping at the idea of onions being so precious they were offered as raffle prizes. She read these things privately and without discussing them with Sean, though she didn’t hide her interest either.

She was utterly unprepared for young Sean’s letter when it did arrive, ten months after he had left home. It was from Liverpool. It was very short. He hadn’t wanted to write at all, he said, or at least not until he was properly in the army and couldn’t be got out of it. But there was this woman, his friend’s mam, she was very nice and she said he should write just a word to his own mam because she’d be grieving.
He
had said that there were plenty more at home to keep his mam busy, but Gerry’s mam, Mrs Sparks, had said he should still write. So. He was fine and he was meeting a whole lot of very nice people. He had done this and that until September, because they wanted to know what age was he and they wouldn’t take him until he was actually eighteen. He had sent to Ireland for his birth certificate. He got a copy from the Customs House. He was in a camp now doing basic training. It was very interesting. He often spent time off with Gerry Sparks who was his mate and with Gerry’s mam who was very nice and used to cook very well before the war because nowadays you couldn’t get anything.

He sent her no love, no enquiries, no excuses, no pleas for understanding. His writing was bad and his grammar and spelling poor. Eileen thought of the years with the
Brothers
; she remembered how she and Sean had always thought he was very bright because he was their eldest son; but this was the letter of a near illiterate. She read it again and again, the birth certificate and Customs House and the basic training, and the tears fell slowly down her cheeks.

She didn’t tell anyone about the letter. She kept it folded in her handbag, and she kept the next one and the next, and the fourth one in November when El Alamein was won. She replied almost lightly, raking her letters before she posted them for any hint of anxiety or grievance. She even found funny little things to tell him, about the day the goat got into the shop and knocked down all the boxes; about Maureen coming home from nursing school and practising bandaging so enthusiastically that she stopped the circulation in Eamonn’s arms for ages and ages; about the play that Aisling, Elizabeth and the little Murray girl wrote and performed, which was meant to be a serious and inspirational account of St Bernadette, and was such high comedy that the audience was convulsed. She sent cheerful greetings to Gerry Sparks’s mother and wished there was some way of sending her a few things; but perhaps some time if Sean came home on leave he might be able to take her back a couple of chickens and some butter and eggs?

The life-line to her son was so gossamer thin she didn’t dare to break it. Even telling someone might put it in danger. …

Sean knew that there were letters, but he never
mentioned
them. He grew more silent in the shop; he worked just as hard as ever, but he smiled less and had no time for a chat on Fair Day. Sometimes, Eileen would look at him, bending down in the yard and trying to take the strain out of his back, and she would fill with pity for him. Since the Emergency, coal was almost impossible to get, so they had to fill their outhouses with turf instead. Turf took so much room to store; even the rooms over the shop which had been stacked with brooms and potato baskets, boxes of globes and wicks for the lamps, brushes for whitewash and distemper … they were now all full of turf. Eileen felt she was breathing it through her pores as it billowed out of the grate and covered everything with its flakes.

Sean looked older than a man in his forties should look. Perhaps, Eileen thought, he had the worst of all worlds: living in the country but without the countryside’s healthy life; a father of six without a father’s hope and pride in his eldest son taking over the business. He had always been the one with energy and drive; he had saved and hoarded to buy this small place … the year of the Treaty. It had all been so symbolic. A new nation, a new business; and there they were, twenty years later and their son out fighting for that same country from which they had won their freedom. … And Sean himself, who had seen this shop as a life’s dream come true, was out in the cold yard, rooting around behind the road signs for some spare plough-shares. It was raining, and his head was getting very wet. Eileen left her little glass cage and, a bag over her head, went out to help him.

She held the huge black and yellow road signs, which had been taken down during the Emergency to confuse any invaders, and made room for him to find the bits of machinery.

‘We’ll do a great tidy-up on this lot, one day,’ he said, gratitude in his tone if not in his words.

‘I know we will,’ she said. She wondered, as she spoke, whether he knew or cared that his son was spending springtime fighting in North Africa. The excitement had been so great when his call-up papers had arrived that even Gerry Sparks had added a few more words to the letter. Gerry was going with him. Eileen still didn’t know whether Sean ever read his son’s letters. She often left her bag open so that he would see them; but he never made any mention of it and they never seemed to have been disturbed when she returned.

Donal had eventually moved to the Brothers’, having been persuaded to spend another year at the convent after he had made his first communion. It wasn’t usual for a boy to stay there until he was eight, but Sister Maureen had managed to convey that it was perfectly reasonable. She had said, privately, that they should give him one more year before he had to face the rough and tumble of the school yard down at the Brothers’. Another year might make his breathing easier, his anxieties less. Eileen, who would have been happy for Donal to be educated for the rest of his life with the kind Sister Maureen, agreed readily. But the day had had to come, and now her delicate
child
was coming home every day, clothes torn, face terrorised, lips sealed. ‘I fell,’ he said, every day. Eamonn was worn out defending him.

‘You see, Mam,’ Eamonn explained, ‘the fellows pick on Donal because he’s nearly nine, fellows of just eight, and they’re too tough and then I have to go an’ clout them, and then the other fellows come up to me and say what am I doing clouting fellows of only eight for when I’m fourteen. It’s desperate, Mam. That’s why my coat’s torn again.’

Aisling and Elizabeth, cycling home from school – arms touching, dangerously sophisticated thirteen-year-olds, with no time for the bold rough lads from the Brothers’ – saw a crowd gathered around someone lying at the side of the road. Together, they slowed down and curiosity made them get off the bikes to see what had happened. At almost the same moment they recognised Donal’s scarf, a long multi-coloured one that Peggy had knitted from bits of spare wool. Peggy loved wrapping him up in it every morning and would turn him like a top until he was under three layers at least. At exactly the same moment they dropped their bicycles in the middle of the road and ran to him. The other boys were looking frightened.

‘He’s only putting it on,’ muttered one.

‘Look at his eyes,’ said another. …

Donal lay on the side of the road gasping for breath, his hands flailing in the air; his scarf lay trailing in the mud, one end of it still caught in the top button of his coat. Aisling was on her knees beside him in a flash. Just as she
had
seen her mother do a dozen times, she loosened his coat and his shirt collar with a wrench, at the same time raising his head on her arm.

‘Take your time, Donal, you’ve got all the time in the world. As slowly as you like. Don’t fight it,’ she murmured. Elizabeth was on her knees at the other side, helping with the support. Her pale hair was in her eyes, her lisle stockings wet and torn from kneeling on the ground, her up-turned bicycle forgotten.

‘Your breath is coming, that’s it, in, out, in, out, that’s it, you’ve got it again. …’

Aisling stood up and faced the seven boys, who were all just as shocked by the sudden swoop the girls had made as by the whites of Donal O’Connor’s eyes.