The Soldier's Song (8 page)

That summer, when their father had sent them down to stay with him for the first time, it was like heaven on earth. A whole month in the country. Joe hated it; after the noise of the city, the endless silence and the vast open sky frightened him. But Stephen was in his element. His grandfather had taught him to hunt and fish, to read the weather and find his way by the stars, to row a boat, and a thousand other smaller things. But the one thing he had taught him above all was the power of nature. He’d always said, you can read the weather, but you can’t change it. Stephen couldn’t help thinking that he was an old man then and he was older now, and it would have been cold in that cottage these last few weeks.

The last few yards were badly iced, and Stephen had to grab onto the door handle to keep his balance. When he went inside he found Colonel Downing’s orderly hunched over his desk in a greatcoat and fingerless gloves. He looked up beseechingly at the blast of freezing air and Stephen obligingly closed the door and kicked the snow off his boots.

‘I believe he wants to see me.’

‘Yes. Lieutenant Ryan. Just a minute, sir.’ If the orderly knew what this was about he knew better than to give it away. It was impossible to get anything from his inscrutable face as he went and knocked at the inner door. Then he deliberately averted his eyes as he held open the door and Stephen marched past him, stamped and saluted.

Downing’s office was much warmer than his orderly’s. A wave of dry heat washed over Stephen as he stood at attention, making his cheeks burn after so long in the cold. There was the strong smell of paraffin from the little heater by the desk, and undertones of beeswax and stale sweat. Downing was working at his desk and his face was beet red as he looked up.

‘You wanted to see me, sir?’

‘Yes, Ryan, I did. Please, sit down, sit down. That will be all, Higgins.’ The colonel waited until the door closed again, ‘I’m afraid I’ve got some rather bad news for you, lieutenant. There’s no easy way to say it: We received a telegram this afternoon. It’s about your father.’

‘My father, sir?’

His father, not his grandfather? His father, whom he’d seen at Christmas? Who’d fairly beamed when he saw his son in his uniform, and whom they’d carried down the stairs on a chair so he could share their dinner and nod off over a glass of stout afterwards. But then, he didn’t need to hear the rest. There had been something a bit false about Christmas. Something had been lost – there was no more raving about the Kaiser, no fire left in him at all. He was no weight at all to carry down the stairs, and he had hardly touched his Christmas goose, or even his stout. When he nodded off at the table, it wasn’t because he’d eaten his fill; it was because he’d used up all his strength just getting through the day.

Stephen listened to Colonel Downing’s sympathetic voice but didn’t hear the words. He accepted the glass of brandy that was offered, and then the colonel’s handshake and the car that took him to the station. When he finally came to himself he was on the train to Dublin. It seemed like only yesterday that he’d been on the same train, looking out at the same ghostly night landscape, the same frozen tracery of icy tree branches flashing in the lights. It was more boisterous then. Standing room only, the train packed full of men going home for Christmas. In the corridors they were singing a raucous mixture of carols, marching songs and the filthy ditties they had taught each other in the barracks. Now it was silent. He had the compartment to himself and only his own reflection in the dark glass for company.

It was when he got down from the train that he realized how overwhelmed he was. Other hands had pushed him this far, but now he stood alone on the empty platform with his valise at his feet. What did he do now? How did he get out of here? He felt the upset rising in his chest and had to take a deep breath and master it, push it down. He had to take control. Move. Do something.

It was a half-hour’s walk to his house, but it was dark and the quays would be icy. Hang the expense. He took a cab and closed his eyes to the bumping, the sounds and the lights of the city. When it shuddered to a halt he walked the last few yards down the empty street. He recognized his house, but it had never felt quite like this before. For the first time it felt as if he was going instead of coming – that this wasn’t his home any more.

He stopped in the darkened hallway and tried to breathe in some sense of the place. Small things seemed familiar; the crooked dowel in the banister, the spidery cracks in the ceiling. There was a light burning in the kitchen and the dimmer glow of candles from the front parlour. His father would be laid out in there, pennies on his eyes, his hands crossed on his chest. Stephen averted his eyes as he passed. He didn’t want to see that, not yet.

Joe wasn’t in the kitchen. Instead he found three women; a coven of black shawls keeping the death watch. He recognized Mrs Byrne from next door, but the others were strangers to him. They might as easily have been her sisters or supplied by the undertaker. They were made for this job: the same lined faces, the same steel-grey hair. There was a kettle steaming on the stove and the acrid smell of tobacco in the air.

‘Oh, there you are, son! God love you! Are you after coming up from the camp? You must be half dead with the cold.’

He felt the weight come off his shoulders as they pulled him in, sat him down, fed him tea and cake. His annoyance that they should be there, strangers in his house, gave way to relief that they had everything in hand. He had not been sure where to begin, what to do. Where did you start? Gradually, he found himself coming to grips with it. The three women tried to be kind: they told him his father had had a lovely death, very peaceful in the end. He smiled and nodded, but didn’t make any reply. How could they say that? How was death lovely? Then with hardly a pause, they turned to the practicalities. His brother was at the undertakers, sorting out the carriage for tomorrow. He’d already seen to the church, and food for afterwards. And he’d organized a hall just over the river. Very good, his brother. Oh, and the priest had been and said some lovely things about his father. He’d been a good man all his life; he had no fear of being left in purgatory. Would Stephen like to see him?

This stopped the teacup halfway to his lips. What was he afraid of? He was no stranger to death; he’d seen his mother laid out in the same parlour. But that was when he was young and didn’t understand. He’d thought she was sleeping. That’s what his father had told him; she’s gone to sleep in heaven. Now he knew what death was, he didn’t want to face the finality. But he would have to do it sooner or later and he’d rather get it out of the way. He set down the teacup and, with the eyes of the women on him, he walked down the hall to the front parlour.

The room had been cleaned, dusted, tidied and a space cleared for the coffin to lie on its bier. There was room for precious little else, and the candles that burned at the head and feet made the space seem even smaller, gleaming in the glass of the cabinet by the window and throwing long shadows that flickered across the ceiling.

He stood alone with his hands clasped and his back to the door. He wasn’t praying. He didn’t much believe in it, and he didn’t think the rote-learned prayers he knew would do much good. Instead, he looked down at his father and thought about him. He looked more solid in death than he had at the end of his life. His face was pale and his cheeks were sunken but there was some form under the waxy skin that had been harder to see before. It was as if death had solidified his spirit, gathered it together and set it at rest inside his frame. Stephen looked from his face down to the fingers with the rosary beads twined around them. Good fingers, long and strong. All his life he’d worked with his hands. But what had they brought him? Nothing – only hardship and misery. A wife who died before her time, and two sons who could do nothing but fight with one another. And then to live the last year in such pain and to die in the dead of winter, in the cold and the dark. Maybe it was peaceful after all. Maybe he was glad to be out of it.

Stephen heard the front door open and Joe’s heavy tread go down the hallway to the kitchen. He would have to see him soon and face the recriminating look. While you were away playing soldiers . . . He didn’t want to hear it. It was no good wishing to change anything. What was done was done. But if he could wish to see it different, he would wish he’d stayed in college, just for his father’s sake. He’d wish his father another few months of life – just long enough to see him graduate. That would have been one bright thing in his life. That would have made him proud.

He reached out and touched the fingers, feeling the waxy cold skin and the harder texture of the rosary. Then he turned and went down to the kitchen to face his brother.

The smell of incense and candle wax. The freezing church echoing with Latin prayers and incantations. Stephen watched the priest sprinkling the coffin with holy water, thinking he looked a bit like a Roman emperor with his robes and his hooked nose and his purple veiny face. He was nearly finished. With slow, deliberate movements, he clasped his hands, bowed his head and advanced on the front pew.

Stephen steeled himself. This was the part he hated: the condolences.

‘I’m very sorry for your trouble, boys,’ the priest murmured in wearily sympathetic tones, shaking first Joe’s hand, then Stephen’s. The long line was already forming down the side aisle, faces full of regret, ready to shuffle past and whisper variations on the formula:

‘I’m sorry for your trouble.’

‘I’m terrible sorry.’

‘He was a good man.’

Stephen shook their hands, one after the other. Most of them were strangers to him, and the few he did remember had grown old since he last saw them. He mumbled the platitudes, listening to Joe following him like an echo.

‘Thank you.’

‘Thanks very much.’

‘You’re very kind.’

He felt his attention wandering. He wondered about his men, about what they might be doing. Rifle drills, marching. He could see their faces and he knew their looks and their weaknesses. He knew them better than most of these people. Then he found himself looking into the face of Billy Standing, who wore such a woebegone look of regret that it was almost comical.

‘Hello, Billy. Thanks for coming.’

‘Of course. The least I could do.’

Another couple of barely familiar faces, and suddenly he was holding the hand of Lillian Bryce.

‘My deepest sympathy, Mr Ryan,’ she murmured, and he was so flustered that he couldn’t even get out the stock reply before she had passed on to his brother.

At last the stream of mourners trickled out and the funeral continued in its course. Shouldering the angular weight of the coffin out into the snow. Stephen no longer thought of it as containing his father; it was just a symbol, just something that had to be there. They picked their way after the hearse, sliding on the treacherous cobbles. The cold weather thinned the crowd from the church, so only a handful stood around the open grave, like a dark scar in the white earth. It lent some urgency to the priest, too. With his surplice flapping and blowing up into his face and flurries of snow whirling over the polished wood of the coffin, he pronounced the final words hastily, shook hands once more, and was gone. Stephen sighed when it was over and the others started to leave. He stayed hunched against the cold until he thought everybody was gone, but when he turned around there was Billy, leaning on his cane and with the collar of his astrakhan coat turned up around his ears.

‘How are you holding up, Stephen?’

‘I’ve been better. I suppose I’m glad it’s over.’

Billy nodded and briskly rubbed his gloved hands together. ‘What do you say to a cab? This is no weather to be walking anywhere.’

He was glad to sit in the back of the cab, feeling as if he had survived an ordeal, as if ordinary life was now slowly starting again. Billy watched him, trying to gauge his mood, but without much success. His face was closed and yet he seemed to be taking an interest in his surroundings, watching the people they passed, the children playing in the snow, old women carrying bundles of firewood.

‘Was that Lillian Bryce I saw in the church?’ Billy asked at last.

‘Yes.’

A flicker of interest. Perhaps even a hint of self-consciousness. Was that embarrassment colouring his cheeks, or just the cold?

‘Rather good of her to come.’

‘Yes, it was. She’s a nice girl.’

A smile, no doubt about it. Billy’s face broke into a broad grin.

‘You sly old dog!’

‘Shut up, Billy!’

In this weather, the small fireplace couldn’t hope to heat the big room in Liberty Hall. Frost spangled the inside of the window panes and the normally gloomy space was bathed in white light reflected from the snow in Beresford Place. The few remaining mourners gathered in knots around the room, still in their overcoats. Stephen stood apart from them, staring out of the window at the icicles hanging from the iron lattice of the railway bridge. Billy had brought him sandwiches and a bottle of stout from the trestle table near the fireplace, and he ate mechanically.

‘I agree with you entirely!’ he heard Billy say from somewhere over near the fireplace, ‘But I really do believe that Home Rule is the best we can hope for at this stage. You see, you have to be realistic. It’s all very well looking for complete independence for Ireland, but is that a practical proposition? I mean, particularly with this war on. Do you really think that Britain would allow it so close to home? What do you think that would say to the colonies, to India in particular?’