On Canaan's Side (4 page)

‘He has been killed in Picardy,’ said my father. He gained his old bentwood chair and sat gently into it. He was a huge man, and the chair was spindly enough, and perhaps he loved it for that.

There was a great clatter as Maud’s less lucky plate went down onto the floor and smashed enthusiastically into a dozen parts. No one even looked at her.

‘Aye,’ said my father, though we had said nothing, ‘in Picardy. A little village called St-Court. I wonder where that is? Yes, yes.’

And he sighed out with the last sigh in all the world.

Annie just stood. I got a fright when I saw her face. She was often cross, Annie, and rarely smiling, but I had never seen this look. And seeing the look seemed to bring the same feeling into me, and my father’s words found a nest in my breast. I heaved up great sobs, feeling also in my sixteen years a great embarrassment. I had never read any manual of grief certainly, and did not know if it were to be hidden or not. And anyway it could not be suppressed.

‘Poor blessed boy,’ he said, very vaguely, quietly. ‘Do you remember when he was home last and I cleaned him in the tub, and you three banished to the kitchen, and the terrible muck on him and the fleas and the lice, and the ringworm on his skin? Bless me. Do you remember that? And Annie, you teasing us at the door, saying you were going to come in, and Lilly laughing her head off. Poor blessed boy. And no meat on him at all, and when I put the big towel round him, I thought I would lose him in the folds, there was that little of him. But he was strong, he was strong in spite of that. That was Willie. And he was a good boy.’

There was not much done in the house that evening except grieving. The grief at first sat in us, and then leaked out into the chairs, and at last into the very walls and sat in the mortar. I will be bound it is still there, if there were only someone with the heart to sense it, someone there that knew Willie Dunne, a lost name in the history of the world.

The second letter or communication came later, a few months after that dread news. Like all the families of Ireland, of England, France, Russia, Germany, the whole wide world, we did our best to rub two sticks of life together to make a small fire to live by. My father, as the person who had after all created Willie I suppose, mourned him most deeply, most terribly. He had no remnant of him except his soldier’s smallbook, in which he had written his father’s name as his executor, and given our quarters in Dublin Castle as his home place, a battered volume of a strange Russian novel, and the little figure of a horse Willie had picked up somewhere. These items were sent back to my father by Willie’s unit. Annie was given the little horse, myself the Dostoevsky book, and my father kept the smallbook, a quite pristine object considering what it had been through, and I imagined Willie keeping it wrapped in a scrap of tarpaulin maybe, warmed by the heat of his chest. My father in turn kept the volume against his chest, in one of the inner pockets of his uniform, of which there were many, warming the pages in turn with the furnace of his own body. We, three quite grown-up girls already I am sure, especially in our own opinion, genuinely did grow up in that aftermath. One of the strange consequences of her sorrow was Annie lightened in an unexpected way, and was much nicer and gentler to me, so that mixed in with the treacle-heavy sorrow of that time is a little vein of goodness, because she had in other times a tongue that would shave your beard for you.

What arrived now for my father was a letter from Willie’s sergeant. This letter, which probably does not exist now, thrown out on the scrapheap of things as families and all their small stories pass away, became as precious to my father as the smallbook, and was tipped into it. It is so strange to me that I still remember phrases in the letter, maybe because the sergeant, Christopher Moran, in the great effort of writing to my father, who he knew to be a policeman, fell into a queer kind of officialese. It was his ‘solemn pleasure’ to write to him, the letter said. But it gave an astounding account, astounding to us simply because it was uttered, and given freely, of Willie’s simple death in Picardy. How he had heard a German soldier singing, and had sung back to him across no man’s land, only to receive the bullet of a sniper.

‘Just like Willie,’ my father said, in equal simplicity. ‘Always singing.’

I knew even at sixteen that Willie after three years of war had been hollowed out by horror and extinction, and my father maybe knew that too, so that the solace of the sergeant’s letter, describing Willie dying in a moment of generosity and ease, did not have a measure.

Poor Willie. There is hardly anyone alive that remembers him besides myself and Bill. I am sure there is no one but me, Annie and Maud are dead, my father is long long dead, and of course Bill is dead. Bill that gazed on his great-uncle’s photograph in an American house, and knowing almost nothing about him, smiled at him across the many decades, and maybe, now I think of it, took something of a tune from him in joining the army.

Then came Tadg Bere to see my father. Willie had three memorialists, and the third was Tadg.

Tadg Bere. He looked like he had swum the Channel and the salt had scoured him out, his face was that clean. Which was an achievement, considering he had sat in trenches for years. Trench dirt didn’t always wash out, I am sure. A beautiful rinsed-looking boy, or so I thought as he sat with my father, giving him his own memories of Willie, as a friend and fellow private in the platoon. He had stayed on in the army and spent some months with the South Irish Horse in Cologne on traffic duty, since his own regiment had been destroyed in the war, only itching, as he told my father, to be able to come to Dublin and speak to Willie’s people, as he thought Willie would have liked. It was then I really understood that Willie had been valued in the army, loved indeed I suppose. This boy we knew nothing about, except that he was from Cork city, and heading home directly after talking to us, had been part of Willie’s world, unknown, dark and frightening, but with friendship in it. I don’t know why that struck me in particular. I turned it over and over in my head.

My father for his part sat quietly as Tadg Bere spoke, only nodding his head now and then, and sometimes shaking it. By now, I suppose somewhere in 1919 it must have been, my father was about to retire, and go home to Wicklow. There were those new murders everywhere in Dublin, dozens of Royal Irish Constabulary men had been done away with, in ambush, in pubs, in beds. My father had reached sixty-five just as all the world he knew had gone on fire, big flames, dark smoke and all.

‘The thing about Willie was,’ Tadg Bere was saying, ‘it wasn’t just you could be depending on him, you knew he was keeping a weather eye out for you, like you might a brother. So I was always thinking, that was a sorta compliment to his family, that they had reared him up in that frame of mind. And what I am wanting to say to you, and have wanted ever since that day we buried him, the poor lad, and stuck his rifle over the grave, and his helmet on top of that, me and the sergeant and Willie’s best pal Joe Kielty, that was kilt after also, ever since that day, over by St-Court so it was, and the war nearly over in those parts, and the bloody old Hun excusing my French driven back, was, was …’ And here Tadg drew breath, and for some reason looked over the bare boards and our little Turkish carpet in the centre, to me, and smiled, and in that smile, I swear to God, I read something of the future, like a proclamation. ‘Was, by Jesus, Chief Superintendent, by Jesus, he loved you all. We knew of Annie and Maud and yourself, and little Lilly there, and he never tired of telling us how good and pretty you were, Miss Dunne, so he didn’t. And I thought I had better come to ye some day and just be telling you that.’ ‘And we are immensely grateful,’ said my father at last, heaving his voice out of the dark cavern of his breast up into the room. ‘We are. How tremendously kind of you to stop on your way home, and I am sure your family is longing to see you, and so grateful themselves that the war spared you. That the war spared you.’

Then Tadg Bere stood up, feeling it was time to go and he had done what he had come to do.

‘There was no one like Willie,’ he said. ‘That’s a fact.’

‘Now, Lilly,’ said my father, rising also, and taking Tadg’s hand in a handshake, ‘you be walking this lad down to the gates. And look about you, Tadg, as you go through the town to the station. These are different times, and there are some will not like to see your uniform. We had a great procession just recent, you know, the victory parade, and thousands came out to remember, and thank you lads, but there are others now, tucked away in the crowds, that don’t like to see khaki. They do not.’

‘Well and, sir, I can surely look after myself. Thank you, sir.’

I crossed the cobbled square beside him, feeling a bit strange suddenly, to be with a stranger, in my old summer dress. And I wished I had taken a cardigan with me, because it was autumn now and cold, and a huge lid of dark grey cloud sat over the city. And a boy like Tadg, who had gone into the army at eighteen, and was coming out the other end at twenty-two or so, like Willie would have done, he had probably not been with the female species for a long time, unless I suppose those wild women that serve soldiers in broken towns. Not to say that there weren’t regiments of such women all up Montgomery and Marlborough Streets, because of the barracks, in that very city of Dublin, there were. But I did not think he knew much of talking to ordinary girleens like me, and he said almost nothing to me. But just as we reached the sentries at the Dame Street gates, those humorous lads let us say, who would not let me pass without some quip, Tadg surprised me. He stopped in the lee of the old granite gates, as if he had known me all his life, and spoke quietly and calmly.

‘Willie spoke of you so often,’ he said. ‘And he worried about you so. When the rebels rose those few years ago here, he worried all the more. I used to see him sitting there in trenches, like a lobster boiling, fretting and fuming and worrying. So I came particular to see you, and to say, if there is ever anything you need me to do, I will do it. And if you will let me say, now I am seeing you, I know everything he did say about you was true, and I am only so glad that I met you, indeed and I am.’

And he held out his hand to me for shaking. I was dumbstruck. No one had ever made such a speech to me. In fact I wonder was it the first time I was ever spoken to as a grown woman, not a girl. And I suppose I was a girl still all the same. But I felt a heat flush all the way up my body, and I am sure a red rose of heat blushed up into my neck and face, I could feel it anyhow.

‘If I write you a letter, will you answer it? I am sorry to be so odd to be talking like this. But I live in Cork city, and to be sure, I will be back in Germany a while longer. Then I don’t know what I will do. I didn’t like to say to the Super, but my ould man is in the Irish Volunteers, and he don’t like me much in the army at all, so I don’t know if I can go back to Cork when I am finished with this uniform. So I may come to Dublin instead and see what work there might be. I am told there is little enough work anywhere.’

I only nodded my head, he had given me such a fright.

‘You’re saying yes then to a letter?’

I reached into myself for an answer, come on, Lilly, come on, Lilly, speak.

‘I am,’ I said, and it was a great victory that I did, worthy of a parade I thought.

Then with a salute to the sentries off he went down the lane to Dame Street and away. As he turned the corner, he looked back, and seeing me still there shivering in my dress, looked surprised enough, and waved a hand, and waved again. And my own hand went up in a slight wave, the sentries gazing on all this and laughing, laughing.

I was deep in the memory of Tadg Bere when I heard a car draw up at my gate and thought I knew the engine. Here was Mrs Wolohan now after all. She came in my door as she always did, and why not, since it was her own house really that she had lent me after I retired? There had been no onus on her at all to do anything for me. It was such a nice sort of a cottage, she might have rented it out to the summer people for a tidy sum. But she hadn’t. Twenty-odd years I have been installed here, so she might have wearied of her generosity. But no.

‘Well, well, you are all shipshape here,’ she said, coming into the kitchen. She had a bundle of something wet wrapped in a cloth, which I supposed was the promised strawberries, which she ferried over to the sink. She was as neat as a starched pillow in her white trousers and light blue shirt. She is sixty years old and I suppose could with justice be ground down by all the sorrows of her life, but somehow she has learned how to wriggle free. There have been many brambles in her path, but she has ducked around them. Perhaps in truth that is a recent victory. For some of the years I tended her, she was so sad that her silence became habitual, she rarely sallied forth into the world. But now these new days after her husband’s death, and when the first deep grief of that has abated, have brought her onto fresh ground. There is a crispness to her, and to her talk, like someone had brought her basket of conversation and rinsed it all out, and washed it, and starched it; and an old wittiness that had been hers when she was young has returned. She likes to tease, never more so than when other people might have offered sincere platitudes, as now after Bill’s funeral. But her teasing was more welcome to me. I could not now be consoled, so I preferred her sharpness, and anyhow, I had been reared with a similar tongue, that had resided in my sister Annie’s mouth.

‘I think I will have to get you to do something about that hair,’ she said. ‘You will come into town with me next week, and Gerard will do something with it. Our good friend Ger
ard
,’ she said, mocking the foreign pronunciation, ‘whose real name I understand is Chuck, but never mind.’

‘Do you think anyone cares what an eighty-nine-year-old person does with her hair?’ I said.

‘Never more important. When I am eighty-nine I will be having a makeover every few weeks. No one will be able to credit my beauty. It will be astounding.’