The Rising of Bella Casey (23 page)

She was sitting in the rocker by the dimly glowing grate, the boys abed, the girls still abroad somewhere. She was reading, and for a moment some old admiring flame leapt in his heart, as if time had doubled back on itself and these past twenty years had been a nightmare from which he had just been roused. He saw the scholar Bella with her books spread about her, glow of the oil lamp on her bowed head. But he shook off the consoling fantasy. It wouldn’t be Racine she’d be reading, or
Love’s Labours Lost
; no, more likely some cheap novelette and when she looked up, it was not as Isabella Casey but as Bella Beaver. Her blouse warning of its end, a soiled apron, a pair of shattered boots.

‘It’s Beaver,’ he said simply.

This was their new language with one another, a
terminal
shorthand.

‘Nick?’ she asked, rising slowly, the rocking chair nodding in her wake at lullaby pace. She moved to embrace him. Standing in the poor light, his coat and muffler making a soft embrace against her threadbare blouse, he felt like the ghostly
embodiment
of the man he’d come to bury. Bella’s shoulder blades were like two crushed wings in his arms. He thought he felt something give inside her. A tiny knuckled cracking as if she had reached her breaking point. He expected tears but she
merely clung to him, dry-eyed. Had she, too, mistaken him for the Bugler, the husband of old, the soldier returned? But whatever phantasm it was, it couldn’t hold. The icy draught from the open door fingered its way into the room. Death entered the household.

‘It’s all over, so,’ she said.

Amen, he breathed, amen.

By the time the funeral was paid for, it was bread and scrape for every meal. Bella’s precious items - her candlesticks, the wedding bowl, her engagement ring – had been in and out of hock a dozen times, just to cover the necessities. A pair of boots for James, a bottle of quinine for the baby, Valentine’s school fees. Meanwhile, Susan sat at home and embroidered squares, a proper little Lady Muck. That girl was like a statue behind glass, an object of veneration, the virgin child.

‘Put Susan to work,’ he told Bella. ‘My god, woman you’re in dire straits.’

‘No, Jack, I can’t, I promised …’

‘And who did you promise?’ he persisted, thinking this was some youthful pledge she’d made to Beaver. Part of her loyalty to old things.

‘I promised myself,’ she said, ‘that I would spare her that.’

‘Spare her what?’

‘She wasn’t brought up to work.’

‘And why not?’

‘Because …’ Bella seemed lost for words. ‘She needs protecting.’

‘From what, in god’s name?’

‘The slings and arrows …’

It was his rule never to lose his temper until it would be detrimental to keep it, but this was no time for Shakespeare. He raised his voice.

‘It isn’t natural, Bella. How can you keep her from life?’

‘Susan is an innocent.’

‘Only because you’ve
made
her so.’

She smiled at him. Not wanly, but as if this were some great victory.

Like all their arguments, it ended in uneasy truce. But,
something
in what he said must have struck home and spurred Bella into action. This time he entered in mid-scene. Bella standing by the stove, stirring a thin concoction.

‘I’ve just been telling Susan that I’ve made arrangements for her to go out to work.’ She said it in a tone that begged endorsement. Pitifully bright.

Susan glared at her mother with such hostility, it was as if Bella had just struck her. She was loitering by the window. Thin hands, thin face, a thin demanding nature, he’d always thought.

‘Yes,’ Bella replied.

‘But you said …’

‘I know what I said, Susan, but …’

‘You said you would never allow me to roughen my hands, to mix with a bad crowd, to demean myself with common labour …’ There followed a litany of all the foolish principles Bella must have declared when she could afford to have them. Before Susan could exhaust her list, Bella interrupted her.

‘Look here, my lady. You eat, don’t you?’

Susan nodded dumbly.

‘Well, there’s not enough food for you here.’

‘You would deny me food?’ Susan asked, incredulous.

For once, he was at one with Susan, aghast at his sister’s shrewish ultimatum. Oh Bella … so against her nature was it that she had to reach for cruelty to go through with it.

‘Yes,’ Bella said, buoyed up by her imposture. ‘From now on you have to earn what you eat.’

‘If Dada were here, he wouldn’t stand for this,’ Susan said. The ghost of Beaver hovered, done honour by the only one who maintained tenderness for him.

‘Well, he’s not. So it’s me you have to deal with now,’ Bella said. ‘And isn’t he the reason we’re in this pickle?’

‘Is he to be blamed for being sick, and then to die?’ Tears threatened.

Tell her, he willed Bella, tell her.

But Bella hadn’t the bottle for the undiluted truth. She would not tell the girl that her precious father had brought the pox into the house and with it ruin on them all. If it were up to him, he would have ripped the scales from Susan’s eyes.
He would have told her all and rid her of this useless,
much-prized
innocence of hers. Susan wiped her face. Hot tears gave way to sullen resignation.

‘What class of work?’ she asked.

‘At the Misses Carolan on Sackville Street. Oh Susan, you should see it, those hats are only gorgeous, with feathers and plumes and my friend, Clarrie, is in charge there, and she’ll look out for you.’

He imagined Bella going cap-in-hand to the plush milliner’s, begging for a job. From Clarrie Hamilton, of all people! She who had never reached Final Standard! Whose forthright manner and lack of social graces Bella had once been so lightly mocking of. Now it was the likes of Clarrie Hamilton who had Bella’s welfare in her gift. The new world, Bella, he wanted to say, welcome to the new world.

‘And what will I be doing?’ Susan asked.

‘I told Clarrie how good you were with a needle and she said you’d be just the ticket for all those small finicky bits on the hats and the like.’

This, he thought, is what your mother has been saving you for. A life of miniature slavery.

Work was a rude awakening for Susan. For the first time he felt for the girl. She slaved in a dark, ill-lit room behind the Misses Carolan shop, where oil lamps burned all day and a cluster of girls slaved over trimmings for the gentry. Luckily
for her, she didn’t understand the mechanics of her
exploitation
, how every fancy she sewed propped up the class divide. She only knew that her fingers bled for weeks from where she had inadvertently stabbed herself, that Miss Carolan threw any piece that was not picture-perfect back on the cutting-room table to be ripped and done again. In her first week, she spent three days - three days! - attaching sequins, one by one, to a hat bound for the lady of the Vice-Regal Lodge.

‘Her perspiration was woven into that wretched piece,’ Bella complained, ‘so often did she have to go back over it.’

‘It’s a sweat shop, Bella,’ he told her, ‘that’s what oils the capitalist engine.’

‘But this was
your
idea!’ Bella cried.

‘That girl’s sweat is all that stands between you and the workhouse ward.’

Only in Bella’s other girl, Babsie, could he see the change he hoped would come. How she and Susan had grown up in the same household, fruit of the same loins, he could never fathom. Like chalk and cheese, they were. Babsie, stalwart and sound and wearing the ribbon, where Susan was brittle and fey. He cheered inwardly when she led her box factory girls out into the street.

‘A strike, is it?’ Bella was beside herself.

‘The union, Mam, the Trades Union. One out, all out,’ Babsie said.

‘The same union your Uncle Jack’s always preaching about, is it?’

Bella spoke of him as if he weren’t there.

‘They sacked Jennie Claffey,’ Babsie said. ‘We’re all going to walk out for her.’

‘Since when were you mixed up in that class of thing?’

‘Ah Mam, you don’t be listening to me, that’s the trouble.’

Babsie had a point. Her mother fretted night and day over Susan, but Babsie, being resolute, was overlooked. The noisy world hears least of strongest minds.

‘How are we going to manage with you out on the street?’

‘It was a clear case of victimisation, Mam!’

‘Isn’t one victim enough for you?’ Bella demanded.

He could hear the panic in her voice.

‘Uncle Jack,’ Babsie appealed. ‘You’re with me, aren’t you?’

‘Don’t be looking to him,’ Bella said, ‘Uncle Jack is not going to put food on our table for all his talk.’

‘You won’t persuade me out of it, Mam, it’s all decided. A principle’s a principle.’

‘It’s all just empty talk, Babsie.’

Then Bella turned the residue of her ferocity on him. ‘This is all your fault. I curse every incendiary word she’s heard from you. And do you know the worst of it? I opened the door to this corruption. I let you in.’

Was this how she saw him? An agent of contamination?
When he was the sole guardian of all that was fine in her, even when Bella herself seemed to have forgotten it. He had cherished the memory of the young woman in the cape and skirt with the satchel full of books, and the careless, blooming mind. He had burnished it, for God’s sake, daily. Love can do that, smooth away the weary lines, unwrinkle the puckered pouches beneath the eyes where unshed tears are stored. Unpepper hair. Halt the downward drift of mouth and hopes.

But there was some contagion even Bella couldn’t blame him for. The Lock-Out had them all outside. At last, he thought, it begins! The city roused itself from its supplicant torpor. The toffs arriving for the Horse Show in Ballsbridge found the trams lying idle and deserted. Let them ride their stallions home. The match girls, the poplin workers, the foundry-men all followed suit, and made a theatre on the streets, instead of playing docile at their benches. He remembered still the foment, the rush of exhilaration like thousands finding
infatuation
at the one time. Larkin on the balcony, hands raised not in surrender, but in exhortation. Arise! Who runs the city now?
His
crowd, at last. Shoulder to shoulder, the over-worked, the under-paid, the ants that toiled by day and night, turned into one solid mass. Until the constabulary charged them with batons raised. Enemies of the people, drink on their breaths. Club us, he thought, and we will rise again for there are more of us than you can imagine. Orators sprouted on every corner
in megaphone semaphore.
More pay! A shorter week! Down with scabs!

Even Bella reaped the benefits. Her slate at the Pioneer Stores was into double figures, but Mr Heneghan had a son on the railways and he went easy on any family with a striker in their midst. Surely now, he thought, she will see how her plight is as one with those on the street, not separate to it. But, damn and blast it, if that flibbertigibbet Susan didn’t drive her back into the arms of singular respectability.

When all the world was losing theirs, Susan ditched her job at the Misses Carolan. Some young man had turned her head and popped the question. The promise of ring papers finally brought Bella’s poverty home to roost. If the girl was to wed, Bella had decided, it would have to be from a decent address.

She did a runner from Fitzgibbon Street, owing all around her. Stole away in the dead of night, leaving half her meagre
appurtenances
behind her. He didn’t mind that – that wretch Pilgrim deserved no better, two bob a week for that hole! Fight fire with fire, that was his motto. But Bella had run out of places to run to; there was nowhere left but home. He arrived back to Abercorn Road late one evening to the invasion. Bella and her brood were ensconced in the front room.
His
room. Now a rag-and-bone shop. The house, once a sanctuary, was like a barracks hall. Nowhere to sit, not even a corner of a table at which to write, not a vacant chair that was not decorated
with a child, or evidence of one. To think was nigh on
impossible
with an audience dumbly eyeing him as if he were a
forbidding
master, his nose forever in a book. That was Bella’s constant complaint. As if reading were an indulgence and her need, obscurely, made into his doing. At night when they all bedded down together, the humid crush of small bodies was suffocating. The boys snuffled in their sleep like little animals suckling at an empty tit, they tossed and turned. He could not shut out their vivid nightmare cries.

He had not bargained for the venom in his heart when he saw his mother trying to divide her widow’s mite like the loaves and bloody fishes. The kitchen turned into a souper’s queue. All those mouths to feed. Like birds with gaping beaks. Bella’s youngest, John, could speak testaments with his hollow eyes. Had she trained the child to look like that? His eyes yawning at each morsel. If a crumb were to drop, he swore the boy might go scurrying after it on all fours.

Bella tried to appease by exiling Valentine and John to the street during the day. For play, she said, but what capacity did those poor children have for play? It was only show, anyway, like Bella doing mathematical conjuring so that he and his mother might not notice that where there once had been three, there were eight now. She had turned home into a tenement and made them all the poorer for it.

If her children were quiescent, Bella’s own need turned
voracious. Like a near-drowned fly in a jar of water, she flapped against the bowl of her confinement. When she was in the
tenements
, she would stoop to neither charity nor mendicancy. But now she preyed on all of them, him, his mother, did the rounds of Mick and Tom. A penny for this, sixpence for that. She wheedled and cajoled. Like a madam in a brothel selling her children’s
urgencies
as forfeits for small change. The boys’ schooling, the
youngest’s
snotty nose, a piece of baffety for a wedding dress, if you don’t mind, for the Lady Susan. Suddenly, after years of stubborn resistance, Bella surrendered. She stuck her hand out, hardly even resorting to words. She seemed all want. Wanton want. Even her pride, foolish and all as he had thought it, deserted her. Whatever obstinacy had fuelled her on Fitzgibbon Street, seemed to gutter and go out once in the bosom of her family. As if the only flame that had animated her was opposition. Against her neighbours, against the world on account of Beaver, as if the lifetime she’d spent defending him had exhausted her. (Can a life be lived like that, galvanised by trying to prove the contrary true?) And with the Beaver gone, there was no fight left in her.