Light A Penny Candle (31 page)

Mam laughed. ‘And where are you going to go to first in the world? Wicklow Town, maybe as far as Wexford?’

‘I’ll go somewhere Mam. It’s just to let him know that I know my limitations in a way.’

Mam ruffled her hair and laughed again. ‘You’re an entertainment in yourself. No wonder Tony Murray’s delighted with you.’

On the hall table was a letter from London. Aisling snatched it eagerly and took it up to bed. This was the promised letter from Elizabeth which was going to tell her everything. It seemed quite thick as well.

She took a glass of milk and a piece of cake from the kitchen first and sat down to enjoy the story.

But when she opened the envelope the letter was very
short
. What made the bulkiness was a parcel of four five-pound notes, English ones with pictures of the King of England on them wrapped in tissue paper.

The letter was certainly not telling at all.

Dear Aisling,

Is it silly to remember things we did as children, or is it not? Do you remember, when we became blood sisters by mixing our blood in the bottle, we swore to help each other if one was in trouble?

I need your help now. Please, please come to England. I’m sending you the money for the fare. Please come now. You must be here for Saturday. It’s Father’s fiftieth birthday and I can’t cope with it by myself. Please come. I’ll tell you everything when you get here. Don’t let Aunt Eileen know how urgent it is. Pretend that you just want a holiday. Please.

Elizabeth

Well, thought Aisling, isn’t that the best bit of luck ever? A chance to see the world and broaden my mind not ten minutes after I started looking for one. It’s fate.

Elizabeth hadn’t noticed that her breasts were getting bigger but she had noticed that her period was very late. It was now three weeks overdue. It had never been more than four days late. She had deliberately put it out of her mind in the hope that it might have been nervousness, tension or any of the reasons which she had read in a medical magazine.

But on the Sunday night after Johnny had driven her home to Clarence Gardens and sped off again, she could no longer dismiss it. Twenty-one days. She checked the calendar again and even smiled ruefully since she knew that this is what so many nervous girls all over the world must be doing at that minute. Saying to themselves that it couldn’t possibly be true, and it couldn’t happen to them, and trying to get rid of the hard knot of fear and disbelief that was forming in their chests.

Elizabeth looked out the window and saw Father in the garden. For some reason his ineffectual pottering, his unsuccessful attempts to trail the honeysuckle over the wall, and his sense of bafflement because it lay on the ground and got tangled, seemed to her unbearably sad. He could be seventy she thought, not fifty. He looked so dull and beaten and as if he had always known he would never amount to anything.

If Johnny had been in that garden there would have been life and laughter. There would have been movement and experiment and sudden flashes of inspiration, and determined hammering of stakes into the ground. If Mother was here in one of her good moods she would laugh too and go at it with interest, and Harry would bluster and laugh and make some fun out of it. But Father looked as if he were already dead and as if everything he did were some kind of sad duty forced on him beyond the grave.

Poor dead Father, nothing to live for, nothing to hope for; even bridge had revealed untoward dangers with that
terrible
widow Ellis in pursuit of him. Elizabeth decided to put away the calendar and its message of despair and go down to the garden to help him.

He was surprised to see her.

‘Oh hallo. Didn’t know you were in.’

‘Yes, I came in about an hour ago.’

‘Did you have tea?’

‘No, I’d have called you if I had made tea. No, I went upstairs to my room for a bit.’

‘Oh I see.’

‘What are you doing, Father?’

‘My dear, what do you think I’m doing? I’m trying to do something with this wilderness of a garden.’

‘Yes, but what in particular? If you tell me what it is, perhaps I can help.’

‘Well … I don’t think it would be any use …’ He stood looking like an old bewildered bird.

‘Are you weeding this bed?’ she asked through gritted teeth.

‘Well … it’s so overgrown … you see.’ He waved at it.

‘Yes so it is. Shall we start weeding it now, then, Father? You start at that end, and I’ll start here… and we’ll meet in the middle.’

‘I don’t know if that would work.’

She controlled her voice with a great effort, by taking it down an octave from where she had been about to speak.

‘Why would it not work, Father?’ Each word equal emphasis, no sign of rage on her face.

‘You know, knowing which are the weeds … and which are flowers … it’s so difficult to see … it’s so overgrown you see.’

‘We could take this kind of grass out,
that’s
obviously weed. Then we could look at it again and have a reassessment.’

She stood there looking at him hopefully. Could he not catch a little enthusiasm from her?

He shook his head. ‘I don’t know,’ he said.

Elizabeth went purposefully to the little shed, and took out some cardboard. She folded it into a kneeling mat. She went to her end of the big flower bed and started to wrench big tufts of grass out. ‘Hey, look, this is beginning to look better already,’ she called out. But he stood there, unsure, unwilling to go along with this sudden outburst.

‘Come on, Father,’ she called. ‘In half an hour we’ll have made it look like Kew Gardens.’

He bent over and fiddled again with the honeysuckle.

‘This isn’t a weed, don’t dig up this, this is honeysuckle.’

‘I know Father, we’re just taking grass. Come on. I’ll be catching up on you if you don’t start.’

‘It’s such a wilderness,’ he sighed. ‘No one person could do a garden like this. Not anyone who has a full-time job like I do. Nobody could do a big garden like this without help.’

‘You’ve GOT help,’ called Elizabeth on all fours from the back of the flower bed. ‘I’m helping you.’

‘You see,’ he said. ‘It was allowed to get into this state, and now you need a man twice a week in it.’

Elizabeth worked on. It took her forty-five minutes. The sweat was rolling down her forehead and her clothes were sticking to her. She gathered up a mound of coarse grass, and packed it tightly wrapped in old newspapers into the bottom of the dustbin.

‘The bin-men don’t like grass clippings,’ said Father who had fiddled for forty-five minutes with fronds of honeysuckle.

She sighed. ‘They won’t know what’s in it Father, that’s why I used newspapers. It could be dismembered bodies for all they know.’

He didn’t laugh.

She cleared everything away and had a bath. A hot bath was meant to bring on a period if it was late. There were even stories of a hot bath bringing on even more than a period. Elizabeth felt almost faint when she allowed herself to think that. She patted her stomach, it was still flat. She must be imagining it. She really must have been fancying it. People’s periods were always late. The world was filled with false alarms, all the time.

Father had set the table for their supper. It was sardines and tomatoes on toast. Elizabeth was determined to cheer Father up. It became a game almost, like not walking on cracks in the pavement. ‘If I don’t walk on any lines then I will get an A for my essay.’ Just like that, exactly the same reasoning. ‘If I make Father cheerful and happy then it will turn out that I’m not pregnant.’

The garden was obviously the wrong area. His depression about the unmanageable jungle outside the
door
was not going to be lifted, no matter how much Elizabeth praised what had been done and agreed to do an hour every day … his head still shook ruefully as if there were things in that garden that Elizabeth could not understand, forces fighting back against amateur part-time gardening. She couldn’t really discuss bridge in case Mrs Ellis was remembered. Elizabeth tried but it didn’t work.

‘Do you think she has hopes of coming to live here Father?’ she asked as she trimmed the toast neatly and shook some dried herbs on the tomatoes.

‘I have no idea what that woman thinks or hopes. She is a very common woman. It was a great mistake of Mr Woods to introduce her to the club. He was very badly advised, and utterly misled.’

‘Why don’t you tell her to get lost then if she’s such a nuisance?’

‘Oh you can’t do that. You can’t tell someone not to come.’

‘Why don’t you start up different games then, without her? You know, just drop her casually if she’s so coarse and common? I mean you shouldn’t be forced to play bridge with someone you don’t like. People don’t have to do things they don’t want to.’ Johnny’s attitudes and words tripped lightly and effortlessly from her, but Father didn’t agree.

‘But of course you have to do things you don’t want to. That’s obvious. Everyone has to do things they don’t want to do all the time … Oh Elizabeth dear, don’t put any of those herbs and spices on my tomatoes … I don’t like
them
with that taste … thank you … no of course people can’t please themselves all the time.’

‘But if none of you like her, Father, and she got in by mistake, does that mean you have to put up with her forever?’

‘Yes, unfortunately it does.’

Elizabeth had scraped the dusting of dried herbs off Father’s tomatoes and when he wasn’t looking put them back on again. She set the plates on the table.

‘Tell me about when you were my age or a little older, like say in your twenties. Did people never do what they felt like then?’

‘I don’t know what you mean?’

‘
You
know, when you were starting at the bank, Father. Was the world full of people doing what they wanted to do or is it a sense of duty … one must do this, one must do that?’

‘I don’t really know. …’

‘But you MUST know Father, you must remember. You can’t have forgotten what it’s like to be twenty.’

‘No of course not. …’

‘Well what was it like?’

‘It was very depressing, that’s what it was. Everyone was just back from the war, so many wounded and maimed. Others swaggering, just like they were after the last show. Always making you feel that you had a featherbed life because you didn’t get accepted for the call-up.’

‘It wasn’t your fault.’

‘I know, but tell that to the boys in uniform, practically accusing you of hiding under the bed. All blow and bluster. I went on my eighteenth birthday down to the town centre. My mother didn’t want me to, but I went, I didn’t wait.’

‘Some people went even before they were eighteen, didn’t they Father? Aisling’s brother Sean, the one that got killed, he told me that.’

‘I don’t know whether they did or they didn’t. I hope you’re not saying I should have gone before the age. …’

‘No, Father, I was only remembering something.

‘Well, I went the very day, and volunteered for my country but they put me in a reserve because I wasn’t strong enough. My spine was weak even then, that’s why I still can’t do that gardening. It’s impossible you know to keep a place this size with one. …’

‘Did you go out with a lot of other girls Father, before you met Mother …?’

‘What? What do you mean?’

‘I just wanted to know did you have a lot of social life, and much going out when you were young?’

‘I told you, it was just after the Great War.’

‘Yes, but we hear about the twenties, and the flappers, and all the fun. You know, people doing the Charleston and having
thé dansants
and wearing those amazing hats looking like buckets. …’

‘What…?’

‘Oh Father, you know, you know the sort of image everyone has of the twenties.’

‘Well I assure you that wasn’t the image I had of it. That may have been for a few idle, irresponsible rich people born with silver spoons in their mouths. It wasn’t for me or for the people I worked with.’

‘But Mother was a sort of flapper girl wasn’t she? She used to wear clothes like that. I’ve seen the old pictures, and she went to
thé dansants
she told me. In fact she often writes about them still, and how she used to go and dance to the Savoy Orpheans. …’

‘But why all these questions … what are you asking me all this for?’

‘Father, I’m only trying to get to know a bit more about you … we live in the same house and I hardly know anything about you. …’

‘Oh my dear, don’t be so silly. This is utter nonsense.’

‘No it’s not. We live here together for years and years without my even knowing what makes you happy and what makes you sad.’

‘I can tell you that these silly questions… what was it like all those years ago … make me sad rather than happy. …’

‘But why Father, why? You must have had happy bits when you were young?’

‘Naturally.’

‘Weren’t you happy when you and Mother were in love, and everything?’

‘Now I really don’t think. …’

‘But seriously Father, when you and Mother were expecting me, you know, when Mother went to the doctor
and
got it all confirmed. What did you do? What did you say, did you celebrate or what…?’

‘Please. …’

‘No, it’s interesting to me to know, I’d like to know. Did she come back and say, “It’s confirmed, I am pregnant. It will be born in May” or what?’

‘I don’t remember.’

‘Father I’m your only child, you MUST remember!’ Her voice was becoming shrill. She remembered to lower it.

‘Try to think Father. It would please me.’ He looked at her.

‘I remember your being born,’ he said eventually. ‘But I don’t remember the day I knew.’

‘And were you pleased, or did you think it was a worry and a problem?’

‘Of course I was pleased. …’

‘No, you might have thought it was just another thing to worry about. Why were you pleased? Did you look forward to my being born, being a small thing in a pram …?’

‘Yes, well of course I didn’t know about what a baby would be like in the house … but I was pleased. …’

‘Can you remember why you were pleased …?’

‘Well I think I thought it would make Violet … make your mother more content. She seemed restless.’