Part One

—1—

There are important things to remember. All the time, though, the remembering and the importance changes. Depending. Depending where you are, who you’re with. Why.

I used to think sleeping with men was very important. I used to say to myself: Well now, when I’ve done that, that will be really something.

I used to think growing up would be important. I’d think: When I’m twenty, life will seem very solid. Life will be like a library, or a church. Full of shades and subtleties and things stacked away, neat and jumbled, both.

I used to think church one of the most important things. God was enormous and took up most of the sky and shouted. God sat over the altar in church and watched you. Church made your face change, made it stiff and long. It made women whisper and your stepmother very tetchy if you asked to borrow her handkerchief.

I used to think my stepmother terribly important. I used to lie awake at night and swear by the Holy God and Sweet Jesus and Dear Our Lady, that I would leave home, run away, hide. I would hope and think of my stepmother wandering the whole earth looking for me, begging me to return. People would say, Well if you’d been nicer to her you know…

I used to think what people said was important. I used to ask friends, ‘What does Valerie really think of me?’ I used to cry and say, ‘Nobody really likes me’ and wait for all the girls to come and hug me and say, ‘We do, we do.’

Later on I used to think what men said was important. I used to spend hours thinking about what they might or might not say.

I used to feel a fool, a failure, a factory reject if they didn’t say, ‘You’re the greatest, the most beautiful, the sexiest girl we’ve ever met.’

I used to think being a wife, a Mrs, vastly important. Perhaps so important that you didn’t think about it too much—all effort was bent towards it, like rivers and streams move towards the sea, quickly or slowly, naturally.

I never thought jobs were that important. Jobs were for important people—like men, so’s they could bring home fur coats and delicatessen food to their wives and talk about difficult things at dinner parties. I thought, Jobs, oh well, jobs.

I never thought money important. Money was a huge safe that men had the key to and you just had to get a man and then you got the money. Some men got a lot, some a little; you just had to choose the right man. First there were fathers, and then there were boyfriends, and then there were lovers, and then you thought, Well then there’ll be husbands. Certainly money wasn’t important.

You start off I suppose thinking you yourself the most important thing in the whole world. You get given a big breast and you suck it right into your face and hold it with your baby hands and you’re satisfied.

Then your parents become important. They watch you, and you them. They give a little and then stop and then give a little more. It’s not like the breast. You don’t feel that full, that satisfied, ever again.

You get cranky and you always stay that way because once you knew what enough really was, so you carry that idea round in your head, but you never get it again. Really you never learn how to get it again.

But. You’ve got your mother and your father. They’re very careful of you. They know about your disappointment and they try to help you. They’ve been through it. You don’t realize that till much later—you think they’re just dog-in-the-mangers. Meaners.

My mother died when I was four. I think that must have been quite important. I didn’t have the breast then and I didn’t have her. When I was nine my father brought in another mother. That’s what he said. Inside myself I said: No, that’s a stepmother, that’s different.

—2—

I was nearly expelled from my boarding school once for writing: My stepmother is a devasting bitch in a copybook. The nun who found it first corrected the spelling to devastating and then she told me quietly, little knives jumping from her eyes, to follow her to the Mistress of Studies’ room. The Mistress of Studies wasn’t there so the nun told me to go to the dormitory, collect my black veil and do an hour’s penance in the chapel, kneeling on my bare knees with my arms outstretched, like Jesus, in front of the altar. I thumped up to the dormitory and charged back and knelt with a clattering vengeance on the chapel floor. After a while I thought ‘Well at least Jesus had nails supporting his arms—and my knees hurt,’ and I began to cry, but softly so the nun wouldn’t hear and be proud of herself.

I remember the morning my real mother died. Our house was a very old house with tiny stairways, full of dark corners and cupboards that opened suddenly, pouring out their blackness.

The main stairs went from the hallway up to a landing where I slept, then the hallway turned past a high coloured-glass window up to another landing and flowed into a long passage. My mother’s bedroom was at the end of the passage. She’d been sick for a long time. Her room was always dark and she lay very still in her bed. Strangers came in and out of our house, doctors and nurses. My mother was very yellow and when she held my hand I thought her bones were like eggshells.

It was about six o’clock one morning. I could hear the door of my mother’s room opening and my father’s voice calling, softly, but urgently, like electricity: ‘Nurse Sheenan, Nurse Sheenan.’ I crept out onto the stairs and looked up the passage. It was freezing cold and I was holding a teddy and a doll. My father saw me and put his hands to his lips and said ‘Shh.’ The night nurse, Nurse Sheenan, came crackling up the passage then in her stiff white apron with a navy blue cardigan over it. I went back to my room and cried and cried and held the teddy and doll and kept saying to them something like: ‘Not to worry, not to worry.’

I could hear my father’s heavy feet going down the stairs and him ringing the doctor, speaking very quietly in this new voice. The day nurse had just arrived and all the grown-ups were walking around and going up and down the stairs and closing the bedroom door after them. They forgot about me but I knew already.

Finally my father came in and picked me up in his arms and carried me down to my mother’s room and I wasn’t frightened because it wasn’t my mother on the bed but a lady from a holy picture because the nurses had dressed her in a nun’s habit and put rosary beads and a crucifix in her stiff yellow fingers.

All the next day people came to the house and one of the nurses gave me my lunch and she made custard that was all lumps and I began to cry then because all the people coming into the house were crying; the stairs were full of their shoes and boots going up and down, and on top, this sort of sighing and crying like a wind.

The day after my mother was buried my father sat up all night in the kitchen and drank and shouted things out into the blackness of the backyard. He broke some plates and cups and banged his fists on the kitchen table. That’s when I first saw pain. I saw the madness of pain, how it bunches behind the eyes and in the throat and chest and how it must be annihilated or killed or thrown against something—killed, or it will kill you.

The next morning my father was very quiet. His chin was stuck with a piece of cotton wool where he’d cut himself shaving and his breath smelt of mouthwash. He took me away for two weeks’ holiday. We stayed in a very damp hotel somewhere in the West. I never told him I’d seen him with his pain. Never talked about it, and don’t even now.

My stepmother used to get me to try to talk about my real mother. She did that when she first came. I would just say, ‘Oh I don’t remember her at all.’

She would come in wearing her hat and her coat trimmed with imitation fur, and her high heels. She always smelt of powder. A sticky, pink smell. Even her breath smelt like that. She was always trying to kiss me then; I’d hold my breath and stiffen my back to get away from that smell.

I used to wonder how my father could share the same bedroom with her, even the same bed. I found them once in the same bed. It was a few weeks after they got married. I pretended to be sleepwalking because I wanted to get my father to come and tell me stories and put me back to bed. I came into their room and saw their bodies and the bedclothes all bunched up and the room smelled funny, musty. I bumped into a chair and my father turned round and saw me at the end of the bed and I could see his face floating and hers floating, and my father carried me back to bed but he didn’t stay; he didn’t even wait till I was back to sleep; he crept out and back to her and the musty bedroom.

They married the day I was nine. They had a small wedding in the local church. She was dressed in a turquoise suit and a hat with a veil over her eyes and nose. My father wore his dark pinstriped suit. I didn’t speak to her the whole day and just said goodbye to my father when the taxi came to take them to the airport. They went to Majorca for two weeks. That was her idea.

It was also her idea that I go to boarding school. Right up to the day I was dispatched, with new uniform and brand new trunk, my father was quiet about it.

She said I was getting out of control, that I was with grown-ups too much or else running round on my own. She said I was more like a boy than a girl—that was to him. Once she said to one of her friends, ‘She’s like a little wild animal.’ I heard her.

She just wanted the house to herself, and my father to herself. She was always crooking his arm and rubbing his ear and smiling cracking-powder smiles.

Everything was a smile. She’d throw out your jeans that you’d had for two summers and say, ‘But they were rather old weren’t they?’ She’d pull at your dress at one of their damn cocktail parties (she said my father had become a terrible recluse), and she’d say, ‘Tsch, tsch, Liz is such a tomboy, everything always torn.’ Then she’d smile at her friends.

She didn’t smile when I took two dresses her sister had sent for me from America and burnt them in the rubbish incinerator the gardener had set up in the backyard. She’d wanted to take me out in one of the dresses for Sunday lunch at one of the big hotels along the seafront.

She came and found me with bits of red taffeta and chiffon and blue nylon gently floating round the yard, a smell of burning rubber filling the garden. She screamed with rage and pulled me by the hair into my father’s study holding a bit of the dress in one hand and shouting at him, her words battering his face, and he just said, ‘Now, now,’ and I knew then I wouldn’t get punished but that she’d never forgive me either for not being the kind of daughter she wanted. She wanted someone to dress up like a doll, who would simper and trail round her friends’ houses, particularly her new friends, friends of my father’s.

Even when I did become a model and a doll, later, she wasn’t happy; she felt I was a kind of tart or something.

I feel sorry for her now. She never had a daughter of her own and she couldn’t accept me, nor me her, and my father just sat in the middle writing his books.

She was the sort of person whose accent changed completely when they were in a temper. ‘Your temper will be the death of you,’ she’d say to me and bang the table, and maybe I’d say nothing or maybe something like, ‘Good, I’m looking forward to being dead,’ and then she’d be round the table and pulling my hair and shouting, ‘Ya common little hussy.’

She used to have a saying for every situation: Once bitten, twice shy. You’ll be better before you’re twice married. Neither a borrower nor a lender be. Blah blah blah. I think she must have had a book of sayings like this. I used to imagine her sitting up at night memorizing them.

After a bit I used to chant them with her; as soon as she’d said the first word, I’d know which saying it was going to be and I’d sing-song it out: ‘Every cloud has a silver lining you know dear.’ She’d just look at me and then go on with whatever she was doing.

She was always doing something. Not like my father did things, slowly and carefully, word upon word of some paper for the University. No, she’d rush at things the way hens do. She’d go scatter-legged at something and knock it down and then pick it all up and start pulling at something else halfway through the first thing.

She was forever pulling at me. Before I started boarding school she pulled me into town, into tailors and hatters and cobblers. We had to go four times for fittings to the drapers who supplied the school uniform.

There were two navy serge dresses for Sundays, two mustard-coloured gymslips for every day, and two navy divided skirts for sport.

The shop smelt of deep layers of thick cloth and tweed and fluff and huge wooden counters greasy with years of polish and elbows and hands and people leaning to look at materials.

The fitters were very white-faced women in dark blue dresses. You had to stand like a rag doll while they pinched in a little bit here and a little bit there and said, ‘Ach, she’ll grow into it.’ It was a conspiracy between them and her. It was like getting frocks from your cousins that weren’t meant for you at all but just hand-me-downs and you longed for something for yourself as you were there and then.

I cried at night and thought, I’m going to boarding school because nobody here loves me.

—3—

Jack Hickey was the first person to whom I said, ‘I love you.’ We’d gone for a ride on our bikes through this new housing estate that was striding with concrete legs over the green fields of last year. Jack Hickey and I sat down on a tree trunk and he pulled out a fag and his red hair was thick and strong in the evening sun.

I said, ‘I love you.’ It sort of plopped out. We were both very surprised, I think, and didn’t say anything else that evening. Two days before I was due to go back to school Jack Hickey asked me to go to a party with him. We danced a lot together on particularly the slow numbers and then we went outside and gave each other harsh kisses and he tried to stick his tongue into my mouth and nearly made me sick.

Jack Hickey’s people were Protestants. We were Catholics. The Hickeys lived up the road. His father and mother used to shout at each other in front of the children and anyone else who used to be around and one day his little sister peed on the carpet, just took down her little nylon panties and peed and Jack Hickey’s parents just laughed big cigarette laughs and went on talking.

They used to have drinks any time of the day or night, and the front door was always open; you could walk right into the parents’ bedroom and see the bed unmade in the middle of the day. Jack Hickey’s mother used to bathe at all times of day and then walk round with just a towel.

Protestants, I thought, are like that. Protestants are a bit funny. On Sunday not one of them got up early or put on special Sunday clothes or went to church or anything. Sunday was ‘lie-in’ day for the Hickeys and they wouldn’t get up till midday and then they’d all cook a meal together and sit around in the afternoon reading the Sunday papers.

My stepmother said Mrs Hickey was ‘a bit loud’ for her taste but my father said it was nice for me to have friends. He meant Protestant friends. He wanted me to grow up non-sectarian.

When I went back to boarding school for the summer term that year I told one of the girls that I was in love with a Protestant and we were going to marry. The news went round the school in two hours. All through evening prayers there were whispers behind me and this girl passed me a note that said ‘Ye’ll both burn in hell fire.’

Nobody talked about anything else at school but boys. Mrs Hickey once said it was no wonder, a hundred or so girls, cooped up like that nine months out of twelve and the only male around being a decrepit and banjaxed old gardener. I thought that very daring—to even think that lack of the opposite sex would be a real problem for us.

Coming back after the holidays everyone would go through torments trying to invent boys they’d kissed, boys they’d gone on midnight walks with, boys who’d pinched and squeezed and hugged. (Everyone thought, or half thought, the other person’s stories true so made up even more elaborate ones to out-tell them.) Jack Hickey was the first boyfriend I had and I was sixteen and I thought kissing was pretty awful.

The first few days of term all the older girls would be gathering into little knots in the dormitory or out on the playing fields. They’d be twisting their fingers through their hair and saying, ‘God he was gaaawrgeous,’ and, ‘Listen, wait till I tell ya,’ and they’d be describing their dresses and how they flashed a smile at him from across the room and how they had the last ‘and longest and slowest dance together and… ’

Then there’d be all the rules you’d have to learn. Like when he first came over to ask you to dance you’d have to get deep into conversation with the girl beside you and only answer his request for the next dance please after a few minutes. You’d turn and look him up and down—from under your lashes of course—and say, ‘Excuse me for just a minute’ to the girl you’d been talking to and swan off with him, barely touching him, barely answering his questions.

Once you’d hooked him you’d never turn up on time for a date but leave him standing by the Pillar, or outside the Stella, for at least fifteen minutes.

You wouldn’t talk too much but you’d listen to him and say ‘Really?’ a lot and never argue.

You wouldn’t let him kiss you the first time he tried; if you did he’d think you were ‘easy game’. The game was anything but easy. That you learnt quickly.

Some of the girls used to sneak ‘home’ clothes into school. (We were supposed to come back in our uniforms and leave all our holiday gear behind.) They’d dress up at night and show us, and then the clothes would be laid out under the mattress for fear the nuns would find them and confiscate them.

Then there’d be the letters. Every morning at breakfast three girls would be appointed to hand out the letters. The more letters you got from people the more loved you were—QED. But if you got letters from boys then you were the cat’s pyjamas.

The girls handing out the letters would go from table to table and everybody would be praying for a letter—any letter. Maybe a girl would pass one right by you to the girl beside you and you’d want to get up and pull her hair because she’d be torturing you, pretending there was a letter for you.

I was fighting with a girl up in the bathrooms one day and she said, ‘You and your Protestant boyfriend, and he doesn’t even write you a letter!’ I took a bucket of water and threw it at her and most of it missed and went arcing out into the corridor and the nun came in and sent me to bed without any supper.

One girl was found writing passionate love letters to herself. She was taken away from school by her parents that week. We all said, ‘God, the poor thing’ and thanked God it wasn’t us because all of us had planned the same thing many a time.

Boys and clothes and pimples and Evelyn Home were a tide you couldn’t swim against. Your best friend would start getting letters and go all dreamy and say ‘Tom, oh Tom’ in the middle of the night, pretending she was asleep, and you’d be half laughing at her and half embarrassed.

But she’d have a picture of him in her prayer book and make up poems to him and cut out pictures of clothes from fashion magazines and write ‘Mrs Tom O’Hara’ in her copybook and push it over to you saying, ‘How do you think it looks?’

Finally I decided. I sat up one night under the bedclothes with a torch and wrote a letter to Jack Hickey. I said I was having a grand time and how was he. I said I hoped his parents were well and his little sister. I said we were just about to go into our Annual Retreat, and then crossed that out as he wouldn’t know what it meant, being a Protestant. I said, ‘It would be lovely to get a letter from you if you had a mo. Bye for now, Liz.’

In the morning the letter looked rather forlorn and silly but I gave it to one of the day-girls anyway with a bar of chocolate if she’d post it and keep her mouth buttoned. She couldn’t have told anyone anyway without committing a sin. The next day we were going into our Annual Retreat.

The Annual Retreat was when all of us, nuns and pupils, kept silent for three whole days and three whole nights. We kept silent in order to contemplate, meditate, think about our past sins and make resolutions (usually impossible ones) for the future. We were supposed to think about God and sin and the devil and the saints. We didn’t have any classes and we all went round trying to look very solemn and holy.

In fact, during retreats we all went mad on sex. You couldn’t think about anything else. We’d be in a turmoil reading the holy books the nuns gave us to uplift our minds and trying to glean information on the forbidden subject from the Legion of Mary Handbook for Young Ladies.

Priests would come in from outside Orders to give us the retreat. A different priest every year. We’d have talks from them in the school chapel about four times a day and then confessions and rosary and Mass and Benediction and night devotions. A veritable orgy of religion.

One priest who came was called Father Moriarty and he was from Limerick and he used to sail on the Shannon with his rich parishioners. He was young and tanned and all the girls were dying with love for Father Moriarty.

Father Moriarty was all for modern Catholicism. He had all the nuns in a flat spin when he asked for a blackboard and chalk to be brought into the chapel. In the chapel Sister! Then he came sweeping in for his evening talk. The evening talks were just for the senior girls and they were always to do with sex.

Well this evening Father Moriarty came in and whipped off his black soutane and stood there under the sacristy light in white shirt and black trousers and said, ‘Tonight I’m going to discuss some of the problems attached to the sexual act. First VD.’ I thought VD meant Veni Domine, Lord come, like in the hymn books, but there was a great shhing in the chapel and every girl was convinced that Father Moriarty was talking directly to her and we followed his every word and complex diagrams with intense concentration.

Valerie was the envy of the whole school because she asked for a ‘special talk’ with Father Moriarty as she had ‘A Problem’. He’d said he would be available to each and all of us during the entire retreat period. Valerie was taken down to his room while he was having breakfast. She said two sisters from the kitchen waited on him the whole time and the breakfast he got would have fed eight of us—porridge and cream, bacon and eggs and toast—and he told her, ‘Help yourself,’ and handed her his side plate but her hands were shaking so much that she dropped the egg in the sugar bowl and he laughed and said, ‘Not to worry,’ and pinched her cheek and she nearly fainted, she said.

Valerie had wanted to know if French kissing was a sin. A mortal sin. (Mortal sins meant you went to hell and burnt and burnt for ever and ever.) Father Moriarty had told us that you could get this VD thing from kissing and everyone was terrified and thinking: When did I last kiss a boy?

Was French kissing a mortal sin or not? Valerie in her excitement couldn’t quite remember. The priest had said it depended on what it meant in the whole context of the relationship, and she didn’t know what context meant. We told her it meant the whole works, the situation. The priest said it might lead to sinning, it might lead to all sorts of things, but it wasn’t necessarily a sin on its own.

The next day I waited for an hour to go to confession. Most of us went to confession at least twice a day that retreat. We’d be kneeling in the chapel benches and no one would dare sit up and some of the girls would be crying and pushing their rosary beads round and round and saying ‘Oh God’ under their breath so’s you knew they were grappling with a terrible moral problem. The longer you stayed in the confessional the higher your credit rating went.

I got up to go into the confession box and the missal fell out of my hands and holy pictures scattered and I gave a little ‘Oh’ and the priest opened his green curtain and looked out and said, ‘Take your time,’ and the pictures were sticking to my hands and I couldn’t get a grip on them, and I was sweating because it was a terrible thing for a priest to see your face before you went into confession; they were never supposed to know who told them what sins. One of the nuns once told us a story of a French priest who died at the scaffold rather than tell somebody’s sins.

I put my lips right up near the grill and started whispering, ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned . . .’ and then I nearly dropped out of my standing because his two eyes were wide open and looking back at me, and usually the priest would just turn his ear to the black grill and you’d pour your sins through to him, like molasses into a funnel.

Father Moriarty just smiled and said, ‘Okay now, have you any problems?’ He didn’t want to hear the sins at all. Just problems. So I told him about Jack Hickey, about him being a Protestant and the way he pushed his tongue in and asked, ‘Was that French kissing, Father?’

He said, ‘It could be the start of French kissing.’

‘Was it sinful?’

Then he said, ‘Did you feel his thing stiffening up against you as he kissed you?’

‘Whaaat?’ I said, nervous.

‘His penis,’ he said. ‘Did you feel it stiffening up when he kissed you?’

And I got up and ran out of the box and down the chapel, the tears pouring down my face and it was the talk of the school for days. Everyone thought I’d done some really terrible sin.

—4—

There was a rule in school you learned to live by. The rule was: You live by, for, and through your emotions. School was weeping over boys, and crying at the Stations of the Cross for poor Jesus hanging up between the thieves. School was begging God to forgive the sins of the whole world if you gave up Marietta biscuits for a whole week and wore your vest every day. School was falling madly in love with other girls and falling out again with a white face, red eyes and loss of appetite. School was standing on your bed trying to have a look at your legs in the six-inch mirror and doing novenas to Saint Theresa to make them look like Marlene Dietrich’s. School was hearing of President Kennedy’s death and howling your eyes out and trying to get a look at Paris Match and the blood on Jackie Kennedy’s costume and saying, ‘God, how AWWWful’ and never asking why was it done but just sloshing around in the gasps and gawps of a street crowd at a car accident.

School was a continuation of, and a preparation for, our future—the future of nice middle class ladies who, having had hundreds of pounds spent on their education, would never be expected to do anything except marry, or maybe become a nun, but hardly have a career. Hardly.

Everyone accepted that somebody like Geraldine Doyle might have a career. She was odd. She was very good at maths and washed her hair with detergent and played the cello. She killed herself last year. She was found in her flat having spent two years teaching maths in a girls’ secondary school. She put her head, detergent-washed hair and all, in the gas oven, and turned it on.

Our last year at school we were allowed to wear our home clothes on weekends and school holidays.

The first night back after the holidays we’d all be up in the dormitory, our cases balanced up on our beds, our cubicle curtains drawn back and our clothes laid out.

Valerie came in wearing knee-high leather boots, and everything you had then looked tatty and worn out and you wanted to kill your parents for only letting you take what you had taken. She let me try the boots on and I stroked the soft leather against my legs and wanted the boots so much that it hurt like a knife twisting inside. That’s what it was then the whole time: I want, want, want—at night in bed thinking about the other girls’ clothes; wondering what they’d all wear next weekend; pleased to think that Margaret Daly looked a right eejit in a long kilt and white blouse and wondering how Elaine Mullen always looked so neat; squeezing the cheeks of your bottom together in bed to stiffen it and make it look pert like Hayley Mills’. Lying so tense and wondering, whispers like bats over the partition walls: Mary … are you awake? Listen, wait till I tell ya…

The first Sunday back that term somebody spilt nail varnish over Valerie’s angora twin set. The girl, Margaret Daly, cried out like she’d been stabbed and was mopping at the nail varnish like it was a bleeding wound. Valerie took the twin set and tossed it into a corner. ‘I’ll send it home to Mammy for one of the kids,’ she said.

God I’d love it, you thought, tarnished and all.

But you wouldn’t say that. Sit mum and pretend that it was the only thing in the world to do with angora twin sets that had nail varnish on them.

We’d spent the whole of that morning up in the dormitory, swapping clothes with smiles, and jumping in and out of each other’s cubicles and envying and wanting so that the air was electric blue and we were all laughing and saying how grand the other one looked, and how that little jumper looks far better on you than it does on me and not meaning a word of it.

Friendships that year became very fragile, brittle things. Everyone wanted Valerie to be her friend. Valerie was the apex, the pinnacle of our desires. Valerie had long legs and Valerie had masses of boyfriends—none of whom she gave a damn for; Valerie was as good as gold in class and all the teachers thought she was adorable and Valerie wrote poems about the teachers after class and passed them round her friends. They would have made the teachers’ hair go quite white.

The juniors would send Valerie letters. Valerie, I love you. She’d show them to her cronies at recreation and everyone would laugh and roll about and put their hands to their mouths, keeping an eye on Valerie at the same time.

That was the same term we had the woman from the Dorothy Grey cosmetics group come and give us a talk on how to make ladies of ourselves.

She was terribly slim, like a doll, and wore a light green wool top and matching skirt. She spoke so carefully that the tip of her nose moved with her lips.

She said it was a woman’s duty, her responsibility, to make the very best of herself. She said that nobody liked an ugly woman, a fat woman, a spotty woman. She said there was no need to be any of these things—with constant care and attention every woman could look attractive.

She said we must regard our faces as blank boards and etch in our beauty like an artist does a painting.

I thought of us all etching and scratching and squeezing for the rest of our lives. A long time.

She told us the kind of things a woman must never do in front of her husband. (Valerie said, ‘What about in front of her lover?’ but so quietly only those of us near her caught it. We giggled: Lovers indeed.) The cosmetic lady said a woman must never pluck her eyebrows, or cut her toenails, or shave her legs, in her husband’s presence.

One of the vulgar day-girls said, ‘What about picking her nose?’

For a minute a wave nearly engulfed us all; we were hanging on the edge of a swinging, tumultuous cliff, but the cosmetic lady gave a brief, flicking smile like a snake’s tongue in the girl’s direction, and carried on.

We sat on the edges of our chairs, listening and twisting our hair round our fingers and wanting and promising ourselves with fierce promises that we would be beautiful and we wouldn’t ever cut our toenails or shave our legs in front of our husbands. Not ever.

The cosmetic lady tried to persuade the nuns to take some samples of goods for us but the nuns said: No thank you.

Enough was enough.

We could never have enough of husbands and along with husbands came babies. We were all going to have babies. If anyone’s parents came visiting to the school with one of the girls’ baby brothers or baby sisters, we would all stand around and say, ‘Ahh, the little dote.’ But really husbands were more important than babies. Anyone could have babies—you had to work to have a husband. Somebody told us that in Dublin there were three girls for every one man and we thought, ‘Jesus!’

On a little shelf outside the chapel at school there was a box for Black Babies. If you gave the nun in charge of chapel half-a-crown then you ‘bought’ yourself a Black Baby. I bought one and I called her Josephine Agnes. You could call them anything you liked as long as the name was a saint’s name. Then the nun would write up your name and the baby’s name: Elizabeth O’Sullivan (in the nuns’ italic handwriting) has adopted (in print) Baby Josephine Agnes (written in the nuns’ slanting hand again). Your half-a-crown was sent to the missions in Africa and the nuns there called one of their new converts Josephine Agnes. Babies were that simple.

Josephine was the name of Napoleon’s wife and at home in my father’s study I’d read a book about her. She was rather daring but the history teacher just went on and on about Napoleon and batons in people’s haversacks and dates of battles that you couldn’t remember. I tried to tell her about the book on Josephine and she just said, ‘My dear child, I think you will find you have quite enough to do without frittering away your time reading irrelevant books on obscure females in history.’ She said, ‘Mmm’ when I couldn’t remember the dates again.

Another female in our history was Marie Antoinette. She was very beautiful and the horrible revolutionaries chopped her head off, but at least she’d been able to say, ‘Let them eat cake’ when the people of Paris were starving for lack of a piece of bread. We thought that was marvellous.

We also thought Africa was marvellous. We learnt a bit about it in history; that’s why we adopted Black Babies, because we knew they were having a terrible time out in the jungle being pagans and everything, and white men went out to ‘darkest’ Africa and helped the ‘natives’ and the ‘savages’, and we had a picture in our history reader of how they got put in big stewing pots for their pains, and black fellows with very long legs and mad eyes danced around them. The white ones kept their hard hats on even in the stewpots.

A nun from one of the missions made a visit to the school one day and we all vowed we’d go to Africa. I was going to go and work in a leper colony and I asked the nurse to let me work in the school infirmary so’s I’d get used to looking at horrible deformities, but there was only gravel in people’s knees, and cold sores on people’s lips.

I imagined myself slim, green-eyed and white-coated with a stethoscope round my neck, the lepers holding out their stumps of limbs in grateful praise as I walked amongst them. There’d be a lone (young, tanned, handsome, intelligent, etc. etc.) priest there also, and we’d altruistically give up our lives and fight the jungle and the disease and the devil together.

I’d pinch myself at night in bed to see how much pain I could stand, because you’d have to be like iron to take Africa. I’d lie on the lino floor with my nightie off and clamp my mouth to stop my teeth chattering and think: If I died now how tragic it would be…

I’d imagine all the girls round my bed, my body laid out, a little smile on my dead face. All the girls would be weeping and Valerie would be crying loudest and throwing herself across my body. My father and stepmother would be led in by one of the nuns and she’d stand back and my father would have big tears pouring down his face, and he’d pick me up and push past my stepmother, saying in a choked voice, ‘Oh Lizzie, my little child, I’ve come to take you home for the last time,’ and then the girls would really shriek with crying and a big sobbing procession would go down through the town to the train bound for Dublin.

—5—

At school we were the Nice Girls.

Nice Girls didn’t do things like that, or that.

Nice Girls didn’t swear or dog-ear their copybooks or write ‘Dev is a Pig’ on their history readers.

Nice Girls always cleaned their nails before Mass and their teeth before sleep and ate up all their green veg—even leeks and cabbage. Nice Girls never whistled, nor did they sing or shout at the top of their voices even if they were at the far end of the hockey field.

Nice Girls didn’t run down the school corridors, or skid round corners or roll the sleeves of their blouses up or the tops of their knee socks down. Nice girls always curtsied to the head nun, offered to carry the teachers’ books and stood back, flat against the wall, when a group of nuns and visitors passed by.

Nice Girls kept their uniforms and their bodies without blemish and their desks in the study room exquisitely tidy. Nice Girls didn’t argue with the teachers or the nuns—even if the latter happened to assert that the sun spun continuously round the earth. Nice Girls didn’t tell tales but they always owned up if they’d done something wrong and even offered to clean up other people’s wrongs—if they were really nice girls.

If Nice Girls were asked what they wanted to be by grown-ups they’d say, ‘The Mother of a Family,’ as if it were a religion; if they were asked by nuns, they’d say, ‘A nun.’

Nice Girls were unobtrusive. A Nice Girl didn’t smell or raise her voice, or argue, or fight, or hit people over the head for calling her father a Blueshirt.

Nice Girls gave up all sport once they were sixteen except some polite tennis. They also gave up science and took up domestic because the science teacher had brought in a rabbit for dissection, and Nice Girls cried and tried to make themselves sick in the lav and had to be calmed down by the school nurse.

Nice Girls kept diaries and made resolutions which they used to cry over, and all went into town to the funeral of the history teacher when she died even though they’d made her life a living hell, and they all screwed up their tiny handkerchiefs into little balls and the women in the town thought they looked awfully pathetic and sweet.

Nice Girls were the first into bras, the first to wear deodorants, the first to wear nylons, and the first to start washing their knickers every night and sleeping in them to make them dry for the morning.

Nice Girls wept when they read Little Women, and their reading careers stopped there.

Nice Girls talked about boys most of the time and how to hook, hoodwink, capture, delight, enslave and enthrall members of that curious race.

We were all supposed to be Nice Girls.

—6—

Every Saturday and Sunday we had what was known as ‘The Parlour’. That is, between the hours of 2.00 p.m. on Saturday and 6.00 p.m. on Sunday, the girls of St Margaret’s Boarding School were available for visits.

Not just anyone was allowed to visit—only parents, aged relatives, and friends from religious orders, i.e. nuns or priests. The relatives had to be old, otherwise you could have boyfriends turning up on Saturday or Sunday saying, ‘I’m Miss O’Brien’s first cousin and I’d like to take her out for the day.’ Oh, anything could have happened. So, the relatives had to be old. Presumably old ones wouldn’t try anything.

One Sunday I was reading a novel about the French Revolution. The study room looked as if it were smoking, with gentle streams of sunlight dropped through the high windows. The man in the novel was being taken on the back of a tumbril to have his aristocratic head severed from his neck, but he was going to escape; you didn’t know how.

The sister’s hand on my shoulder made me jump. ‘You’re wanted in the Parlour,’ she whispered, that special nun whisper that would carry for miles.

I walked up the study behind the sister. (The sisters worked in the kitchen and on the farm and at reception. They were the country girls, the poor ones, whose fathers couldn’t afford big dowries or expensive educations, so they just crept into the religious orders and looked after the other nuns, the rich ones. The rich nuns were called ‘Ma’am’ and they did the teaching.)

Once I got out of the study I belted up to the dormitory and flick-brushed my hair and scrabbled through my locker for the one pair of tights Mary (which is what I now call my stepmother as Valerie said it is more sophisticated) had bought me before coming back. They were smelly so I flung them back, did a quick lick over the eyebrows like some actress in some film, and then I was running back down the stairs, down the long corridors, skidding round the corners, not stopping for nuns or anyone and feeling the ‘Tschs’ and the sighs following me, catching in my way like little twigs when you’re running through a forest, today not minding them, and coming to the door of the Parlour and suddenly stopping – thinking, Who can it be? Nobody ever comes to visit me in the Parlour.

I was thinking, I’ll go back and find the sister and ask her to describe the visitor to me, when the door of the Parlour swung open and the nun smiled—‘Ah! Here she is!’ I stood there feeling stripped naked, the faces smiling before me.

They were the Hickeys. Mr and Mrs and Jack. Mrs Hickey was smoking and laughing at something the nun had said. The smoke was filling the tiny room with its polished table, parquet floor, overstuffed armchairs (with linen doilies on the arms and back to stop the upholstery getting soiled), The Messenger and The Life of St Theresa on the table and a bowl of flowers—waxy-looking flowers.

‘Hello then Lizzie,’ Mrs Hickey said. I cleared my throat and said, ‘Hello.’

‘So,’ Mrs Hickey said, pleased with herself, her smoke billowing round her, ‘So where, Sister, do you think would be the best place to go?’ You could see the nun wincing. She was supposed to be called ‘Ma’am’. She’d surely take it out on me later.

Mrs Hickey didn’t seem to notice. The nun looked smaller, paler, under the bright battery of questions.

‘The Abbey ruins are said to make a nice trip,’ said the nun. (She had to say, ‘are said to’, because the nuns never went out, so she was just passing on advice she’d been given by some other visitors.)

‘Oh ruins indeed,’ said Mrs Hickey with a bouncing laugh, and you thought the nun might crack in two under the weight and sharpness of it. She pressed her lips together. Her hands were under her habit, clenching. You felt sure they must have been clenching.

Outside the sun was so bright. You felt like a worm coming out from under a stone, soft and white.

Jack was wearing his cricket whites and a purple blazer. They’d picked him up at his school on the way down. He said hello, but looked cross and scuffed pebbles as you walked to the car.

You wondered, So will it always be like this? One week they say, ‘I love you’, and there are kisses and odd rushing feelings, then a month later there’s a silence, a coldness, and they don’t look at you. It’s like being a child again. You thought being sixteen would be so much better. One minute they pat you on the head, they laugh at you, they say, ‘Oh now, listen to the funny child.’ Then their faces go sour, like old green apples. They say, ‘Oh get along with you now, off you go to the nursery,’ or, ‘Off you go to bed.’ You think, Perhaps men will be like parents: difficult to please, difficult to understand, difficult to follow because they’re busy or talking to someone or just about to dash off to the College, darling. Yes. You think men are bound to be like that.

‘It’s so bloody antediluvian, Char,’ Mrs Hickey was saying, linking her husband’s arm; the two of them were laughing, but he said, ‘Wait till we get out of earshot, Vera.’ You felt a bit of a fool. Being in a place they thought so odd.

We got into their car. An old Peugeot saloon with brown leather seats, the upholstery done like thick sausages. It was like their house, full of old Sunday papers and empty bottles and cigarette packs squashed flat.

Jack and I sat in the back. We were careful not to touch each other. He looked out the window and whistled through his teeth. Mr Hickey said, ‘Why don’t we go and knock up old Foster for a couple of jars?’ and Mrs Hickey said, ‘Why not?’ and she lit up more cigarettes and offered us one. I said, ‘I don’t indulge thanks’ and Mrs Hickey thought that was the funniest thing she’d ever heard, and I laughed a bit, just to be polite; it’s always difficult to laugh so much when you’ve started the joke. Jack smoked.

Jack said, ‘Thanks for your letter.’ I said, ‘Oh not at all, it was just for something to do really.’ I thought, Sweet Jesus let him keep his voice down. I could hear Mrs Hickey’s laugh. ‘Oh love letters is it?’

Jack just went on looking out of the window. So, I thought, no more letters.

Then Mr Hickey turned on the radio. It was Top of the Pops. Jack and I hummed the tunes, looking out the windows. He laughed; he said I’d got the words wrong, but at least it was better than trying to talk. Every time we went round corners I could see him without turning my head round and actually staring.

The part of the country we were driving through was very nice. It was full of small lakes, grey ones with reeds like little crowds round the edges, bending. It had boggy ground and rivers connecting the lakes so the road seemed a very definite sort of hardness and blackness in the midst of the bogs and the wetness. The country is quite flat and if you go very fast it looks like streaming greens and browns—soft. But if you go slowly you can see all the holes and hillocks and bits of rock barely covered with moss and different grasses and then it’s a wild endless rug of colours and textures.

The Fosters, who we are going to see, are Protestants like the Hickeys. They’re the same Protestants who came to Ireland in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and were given, or ‘bought up’ (they paid almost nothing) huge tracts of land, the best land in the soft green heart of the country. Some were given the land as a reward for fighting the King of England’s wars, or the Queen of England’s—something like that. The Irish peasants were shoved out to boggy land where they could only grow spuds and scratch around for a living. The Irish were always fighting each other so they never got time to get organized and fight the English off their land.

At school we had three main things against Protestants. They had taken the land off our ancestors; they didn’t believe that the Virgin Mary was God’s mother or in the miracles at Lourdes or anything else for that matter; and they weren’t Catholics.

My father knew a lot of Protestants because most of the other professors and lecturers at his University were Protestants and it was even supposed to be a mortal sin for Catholics to go to his University, though many of them did anyway.

I once asked my father if it was true that all Protestants would burn in hell and he said, ‘Ah go on with all that rubbish, who’s telling ye that?’ I was sent out of history class for a whole week then because I said my father had told me that blaming the Prods for everything, and saying they’d burn in hell, was a lot of rubbish.

The Fosters were rich Protestants. They had a big farm and then a business in Dublin as well. Mr Foster was always flying to London for working trips. He’d fly to London on business the way most people would take a bus from Sandymount to town. He used to come and visit my father sometimes when he was in Dublin and they’d take the bottle of port or wine into my father’s study and talk about the times when the Protestants had all the big country houses. Mr Foster was a sort of amateur historian on Protestant history in Ireland.

The Fosters’ house is an old Georgian one. Its left wing is completely covered in Virginia Creeper that moves like a lake the whole time, whispering. Inside there are long stone passages where the centre is worn down from thousands and thousands of footsteps of maids and manservants and butlers walking, running, scurrying, to answer the bell-pull of the lord and lady of the manor. There are huge fireplaces where you put logs the size of six-year-old children and they don’t stick out.

The house is full of smells and sighs and echoes. There are rooms that are quite empty. There’s one room where the boards groan as you walk in and a wooden rocking horse stands in the centre. The Fosters spend most of their time in the drawing room. The rest of the rooms huddle around with their memories. Once there were tutors, and governesses, and children exploring, and aunts.

Mary, my stepmother, my father and I once visited the Fosters on a Sunday. Mary said, ‘For heaven’s sake, why don’t you get in some central heating, let off the east wing during the summer and get fitted carpets for the bedrooms you use and the lounge?’ The Fosters looked at her and nobody said anything. Mrs Foster looked as if she’d been asked: Why don’t you buy yourself a nice see-through blouse and miniskirt instead of that old tweed suit? But nobody said anything. Mr Foster went Hmph, and sort of grinned and said to his wife, ‘Well now, what about another cup of tea, uh?’

Today anyway we drove up the long avenue, the trees nudging each other as we passed by.

Mr Foster appeared in the hall door and about five dogs came barking and jumping over the gravel. The Hickeys shook his hand and then Mrs Hickey drew me forward and said, ‘This is Miles O’Sullivan’s daughter, you remember her of course?’ Mr Foster put a hand on each of my shoulders and said, ‘My, my.’ He didn’t say, ‘How you’ve grown,’ but it was the same thing, the way he looked and was surprised.

It was only then that I realized I was still in my navy blue school uniform. Socks too, and oh, I wished for the tights even though they had been a bit smelly. I wanted to be gone, away, dead. Jack looked so casual in his cricket gear—damn men, it was always easier for them, always.

Mr Foster kept saying, ‘Well now, what a nice surprise,’ and he walked into the house and we all followed and he shouted for his wife: ‘Visitors, darling.’

Mrs Foster is like a hungry cat. She’s so thin and nervy. She dives at words and people and conversations as if they were the first and last she’d ever get. She was wearing this sort of long dress which Valerie told me later was a housecoat.

‘Come in, come in,’ she said with a screeching smile on her face. She darted at each one of us and then darted at the door and shrieked, ‘Dora! Bring four more cups.’

‘Vera, how are you?’ she said to Mrs Hickey, her head on one side like a thrush. She said it as if she expected something awful to have happened to Mrs Hickey.

Mrs Hickey was saying, ‘Oh fine thanks’ and fishing in her bag for her lighter and trying to catch Mr Hickey’s eye so he’d get her a light.

Mrs Foster jumped up (‘Oh how stupid of me’) and she turned to her son who was watching everything with the amused, and I thought entirely faked, tolerance of a twenty-year-old.

The son was called Alec. He was reading History and Philosophy at Trinity. Before that he’d been educated at a public school in England. He seemed the epitome of education and sophistication and maleness. Everything we as ‘Nice Girls’ had been told to long and look for. Jack suddenly looked gauche and awkward. The Protestants in England give themselves a much better education, I thought to myself.

Alec nodded as we were introduced and his hair slid forward on his forehead as he did so, so he had to flip his head back. You knew he’d practised that.

Mrs Foster stood for a minute, perplexed, almost as if she’d forgotten who she was. Then she said, ‘Ah yes, and this is Pepita,’ and her hand fluttered towards Pepita. Pepita was Alec’s girlfriend and she was also at Trinity, reading English Lit. She said, ‘Helleow’ and smiled without opening her lips. I thought she was beautiful—all legs, like a foal. She had her legs curled up under her and she made the battered old armchair look comfortable, attractive. She was one of those kinds of people.

‘What’ll we all have to drink then?’ Mr Foster shouted, and stood by the sideboard, rubbing his hands like a butcher. The Hickeys said they’d have gin and tonics, and Jack said he’d have a beer, and I said a gin and tonic because I’d had one before at a wedding. The others already had drinks. We all got big thick glasses full of gin and tonic and the ice clinked, and the drinks sparkled blue.

Pepita said, ‘Would you like some music?’ to nobody in particular, and walked over to the record player and sank down onto her knees and slicked her index finger over the record sleeves. I thought she looked like a little child; she did everything so gently, so humbly, people must have wanted to protect her, particularly men. She put on a John McCormack record and his thick voice filled the room: ‘Drink to me only with thine eyes …’

I thought of an article I’d read somewhere about what prisoners feel like during their first week or so out of prison; how apart and different and somehow undefined they think they are. That’s how I felt out of boarding school. I thought if my head were shaved it would make no difference. Everyone else seemed so sure of themselves. They talked, laughed, made jokes, chose records, just walked about the room. You felt yourself to be all corners and your words came out heavy and blunt like unrisen bread. The older ones, particularly the older women, ones like Pepita, they’d always look better, you thought, always look at ease.

Dora, this very cross maid, came in, and then banged out, with the tea things. Little cucumber sandwiches, cakes, shortbread—you’d almost die for one of them when you got back to school but everyone else seemed so disinterested; you were determined not to be different. At least as little different as possible. Not to fall on the plate and gobble them and run out to the garden like a dog does and finish them all up, nervously looking over your shoulder.

The gin was beginning to give me a tight feeling above the bridge of my nose; my eyes felt bulgy and slightly sensitive.

Alec said, ‘Would you like to go and look at the horses?’ and got up to walk out.

I said, ‘Oh yes’ and jumped up because I’d been dying to see the horses all afternoon but you couldn’t ask. I knocked over Mrs Hickey’s glass of gin and somebody said, ‘Aha, tiddly again,’ and Mrs Foster shouted ‘Dora!’ and I just stood looking at the gin on the carpet and Mrs Hickey smiled and patted my hand and Alec said, ‘Oh come on. Who cares about the bloody carpet?’

Alec, Jack and I walked out into the sunlight across the cobbled yard to the stables. Pepita stayed behind.

I had cousins in Dublin who had horses and last summer I’d gone over to their house quite a lot at weekends and we used to go riding in the park in the evening and the cold air would be like hands pulling at your cheeks, pony hooves stamping a cross pattern on the ground; your body and your mind would be like a streamer, all in one concentration of movement.

The Fosters had six horses and two ponies. Two of the horses they didn’t own but just stabled for this English businessman who used to come over and hunt during the Irish hunting season.

We looked into each loose box and the horses shuffled around and blew down their noses at us and twitched their ears, and the groom called Alec ‘Master Alec’ and wore old-fashioned riding breeches and leather leggings, polished like a stone in a brown pool. Ancient.

Alec asked if we’d like to go for a ride; Jack said he didn’t mind and I said I’d love to. So Alec said to the groom, ‘Bailey, saddle up the mare and the gelding will you?’ and went off to get me a pair of his sister’s jodhpurs.

Alec took a big strong bay horse, Jack took Alec’s roan gelding and I took his sister’s Connemara mare. The mare was cream with a deep brown-black mane and tail. We rode out under the arch, across the paddock and then swung down along the avenue. Alec was very casual, twisting round in his saddle, the reins in one hand his other hand resting on his horse’s broad hindquarters; Jack was very stiff, holding the reins high; I could feel the mare’s warmth beneath me and her delicate stepping and I thought, May this go on for ever and ever.

That year we were having an Indian summer. It was late September and the sun still had a golden softening warmth in it. The slanting winds and rain hadn’t begun yet.

Alec broke into a trot and then a canter and the mare pricked her ears forward and followed and I could see Jack still stiff and bumping along, his horse uncomfortable. Then we were galloping, the horses exciting each other, and you were in control and yet not in control, and you tore the air apart in front of you like ripping silk.

I turned round just in time to see Jack careering over his horse’s head. He’d put the horse at a fallen tree; the horse just stopped dead in front of it, and Jack carried on and landed on the ground like a bag of potatoes. ‘Damn and bloody damn’ said Jack and you wanted to laugh but didn’t. He was brushing the leaves off and there was a bright green stain down his cricket whites, like green blood.

Jack said he’d had enough. He said he was going to walk back to the house and he’d see us there later. He climbed back up on his horse again and then Alec shouted, ‘Okay, c’mon,’ to me and we galloped off away into the wet reds and browns of the Foster woods.

We stopped finally by an old gate lodge at the edge of the woods. There was a river running below. The lodge was covered in ivy, the windows under fronds of greenery, buried like a Yorkshire terrier’s eyes.

‘Why don’t we get down?’ Alec said. ‘Come and have a look inside. It’s my sort of private den since I was a kid.’

I got down. My legs felt funny, the ground swaying slightly. I hadn’t ridden for weeks. We looped the horses’ reins over a gatepost. Alec said, ‘They won’t go away.’

Alec opened the door, pushing it back stiffly. ‘As the spider said to the fly, “Won’t you come into my parlour?”’ he said, and stood back and I went in.

It was very dark inside; the ivy kept the light out. A dark, dank smell. In one corner was an old sofa, the other a desk, then an old record player, some books, a kitchen dresser.

Alec banged down into the sofa. ‘Whaddya think of it?’ he said. ‘Mmm, it’s lovely,’ I said. ‘It must have been very nice to have somewhere to be on your own when you were a child.’ It sounded prim even as I said it. He laughed. ‘Even better now.’ He had one arm along the back of the sofa. ‘Come along then, sit down, relax.’ He said the words like orders. I knew I was going to sit down. I felt powerless suddenly, goggle-eyed, like a rabbit in front of a ferret.

I didn’t dare look at Alec. I wished I’d never come in here. I sat on the edge of the sofa without letting my back touch the sofa back where Alec’s hand lay.

‘I’m not going to eat you, you know,’ Alec said, and he laughed a smug laugh.

‘I know,’ I said. I know, I thought. I know he’s going to try it.

I don’t want it. Yet I do. It’s some sort of recognition, isn’t it? But I’m scared. It will be something to tell them at school. But I’m scared. I want to go back.

‘Don’t you think we’d better go back?’ I said. I thought: For God’s sake, my voice sounds ludicrous.

‘No hurry,’ said Alec. ‘No hurry at all.’ He brought his hand down from the back of the sofa. Started tickling the back of my neck. Then stretching his fingers up through my hair so I got goose pimples all over. Then he jerked round and pushed me back against the sofa and I could feel his face and his hair in my eyes and his teeth were hurting my lip and his hands were scrabbling in my clothes and he was saying, or sort of groaning, ‘Hold me, hold me’ and he jammed his knee up between my legs and then I just bit his tongue as hard as I could.

‘You little—’ He jumped up and stood looking at me and was yelling, ‘You bloody little Catholic virgin!’ and he was panting and I thought, He’s going to punch me, really punch me in the face, but he just stood there: ‘Rubbish … schoolgirl … virgin … whore … kid…’ and he was shouting the words and I thought he looked ugly and cruel and I felt awful and yet I felt: Well it’s better than that … but than what?

Alec slammed outside and took a few mouthfuls of water from the river and flattened his hair down and I came out after him, very quiet, and I got back up onto the mare.

We rode back to the house. All the warmth and strength seemed to have left the sky. It seemed the colours were stretched thinly, the sky itself deflated like an old polythene bag.

Alec said nothing. He didn’t ask me not to tell anyone what had happened. He didn’t have to. He knew I’d failed, not him. There were certain rules. If you broke them you took the broken pieces away with you and they clattered around inside your head: Fraud … fraud… fraud.

—7—

The nuns said: ‘Your body is the temple of the Holy Ghost, the Third Person of the Blessed Trinity. You must always therefore treat it with loving respect.’

The woman from Dorothy Grey said: ‘You must regard your face as a blank board and etch in beauty like an artist … everyone can be beautiful.’

The nuns said: ‘Your body is the source of many temptations to sin. Your mouth can eat too much and drink too much; your eyes can see, read, watch, evil things; your hands can make mischief: idle hands for the devil’s work; your legs can lead you into occasions of mortal sin …’

The song said: ‘My face is my fortune, sir.’

The girl in the magazine said: ‘You too can have a body like mine if you use this super lotion’; ‘Watch out for the New You when you wear Sparklelight’; ‘Make yourself this fabulous sexy dress’.

The nuns said: ‘The love between a man and his wife is a very beautiful thing. But sex. Sex is dirty. Sex is sinful. Sex is spitting in the face of God . . . Girls, the switching off of the ignition key can be the start of a mortal sin. Girls, girls, we must always be chaste, pure …’

The young girl in the love comic said: ‘His first kiss sent a quivering passion through my body. I could feel the texture of his hands, strong yet bony, through the thin stuff of my dress ... I thought he must hear my heart pounding—to me it sounded like the thunder of the gods …’

The nuns said: ‘God made you. God loves you. God will forgive you. God has punished you. God is watching you. God is testing you.’

The magazine said: ‘Test whether you are really in love’ (it gave you twenty questions to fill in with a choice of three each time). ‘Do you feel your heart skipping a beat whenever you hear his name mentioned? Do you blush constantly? Would you mind if your best friend told you she’d been asked by him to go to a party? Have you lost your appetite?’

The nuns said: ‘Come along then, eat up, otherwise you won’t grow up to be a big, strong girl.’

The book said: ‘Today’s girl is tall and slim; she moves with the sleek elegance of the greyhound and the casual grace of the wild animal.’

The nuns said: ‘If it weren’t for our souls we’d be just like wild animals.’

The comic said: ‘They ran into the bedroom and fell on each other like animals …’

The nuns said: ‘We want you to grow up to be the handmaids of Christ.’

The magazine said: ‘It is still every young girl’s dream to grow up and be the mother of a family. It’s the most natural thing in the world.’

The boy said: ‘I want to grow up and be a soldier, and boss people around, like my Dad does.’

The girl said: ‘When I grow up I’m going to have a house with three bedrooms, and twenty dresses, and a husband as rich as rich as …’

The girl in the film said: ‘More than anything else in the world I want to be your wife. I want to give you my whole self … my all …’

The hymn said: ‘All I have I give Thee, give Thyself to me …’

The song said: ‘All you need is love, love, love. Love is all you need.’

The advertisement said: ‘Feeling depressed? What you need is a course of these revolutionary, new, extra, extra strong vitamin tablets.’

Your stepmother said: ‘What you need is a haircut and some new clothes.’

The nuns said: ‘What you need is the strong hand of discipline all your life.’

Your father said: ‘I’m sure I don’t know what you need.’

The advertisements said: ‘You need this and that and the other and then you’ll be different, younger, sexier, sleeker, thinner, fatter, glossier, posher …’

The man in the comic said to the bookish girl: ‘What you need, my dear girl, is a man.’

You said: ‘What I need … is … is …’

So it goes on.

—8—

My second last term at school I fell in love. The girl was called Ann. She was from Mullingar. She was called Ann because her father had wanted a boy and was going to call him Dan. When a girl arrived they called her Ann. A compensation.

Ann’s father was a big cattle farmer. She had two brothers and five sisters. They used to all come and visit her; the father red-faced and always looking angry, though it may have been fear that made him look like that. The children sat in the back of the big black Mercedes and looked out. Ann’s father was in with all the big Fianna Fáil men in the country. That’s how he made his money.

He always called his wife Mrs Gilligan as if they were strangers. He’d say, ‘Well now, Mrs Gilligan …’

The Gilligans wanted their children to ‘have a bit of class’. That’s why they sent Ann to the boarding school. They wanted Ann to be ‘a lady’, a nice, well-brought-up young lady. That’s what our school was supposed to do to people.

Ann talked with a very soft, flat accent, the way people from Mullingar do. She was fat and had curly hair. Her mother wanted tall blonde children. The Gilligan children were all fat, and freckly, and curly-haired. Her mother wouldn’t give her sweets or cakes. She’d met a woman at the Irish Countrywomen’s Association Annual General Meeting in Dublin who’d told her the best thing for making your fat, curly children look like sleek ones, was to give them carrot juice and cabbage juice and never give them any cakes.

Ann was tormented by the other girls saying, ‘Ah now, beef to the heels like a Mullingar heifer.’ The heifers in Mullingar are supposed to be some of the plumpest in the country.

I bought Ann cakes. I asked my stepmother to send me my post office savings, which had been accumulating towards a record player. I watched her as she sat on my bed in the dormitory and ate through the sweets and cakes, methodically, inexorably. I’d panic in the night wondering where I’d get more money for more sweets and cakes.

I planned to run away from school with Ann. The two of us with our overcoats on over our nightdresses would hitch-hike up the Dublin road at two o’clock in the morning, tell the man we were maids up at the convent, and the nuns had given us such a brutal time that we’d run away. He’d give us a fiver and we’d take the Liverpool boat and get jobs in England.

Ann said I had lovely legs. She looked up from a Woman’s Own with a half-finished cream slice in her hand. She was reading out a diet: ‘Discover the new slim you’. She said, ‘You’re lucky, you’ve got lovely legs.’ I felt luckier than luck itself.

I looked at my legs as soon as she’d gone. I looked at the other girls’ legs. Were mine nicer? Were theirs nicer? Whose were the nicest legs? Ann said, ‘Valerie has the nicest legs of all of us.’ I prayed Valerie would have an accident with her nice legs.

I said Ann had lovely hair. I used to set her hair: twenty-five curlers and twenty-five hairpins and twenty clips. Ann had a hairdryer so’s she could make her curly hair look sleek. Her mother would allow her things like that, but not sweets or cakes. Anything, darling, as long as it made her look sleeker.

We used to spend hours trying to make our hair look sleek.

I stole two eggs from the kitchen. The magazine said, ‘You should feed your hair just like you feed your stomach.’ They showed a picture of a girl cracking an egg over her head. We cracked eggs on our heads, on our hair. The magazine didn’t say what to do next. Mine went like scrambled eggs because I ran the hot tap on it and the water was nearly boiling and I burnt my scalp and had a big mess of sticky egg on it.

We pierced our ears. One of the magazines said if you rubbed some pure alcohol on the lobe of the ear and then quickly jabbed with a very sharp, sterilized needle, having placed a clean cork behind the lobe to be pierced, it would not be painful.

The only alcohol we could think of in the school was the altar wine that was to be turned into the blood of Jesus Christ during Mass, so we thought it must be ‘pure alcohol’. The altar boy brought us a cupful for five shillings. Ann crept into my cubicle after lights out. We had a torch. I’d laid out the needle, the cork and the altar wine and a piece of cotton wool on my bedside locker. It looked quite professional. I’d run the needle under the hot tap during evening break.

I was to be done first. Ann said that would be the best. I held the torch in one hand and a little circular mirror that magnified your face in the other.

Ann dipped the cotton wool in the wine. She rubbed it on my right ear lobe. I felt some of the wine dribbling down my neck, cold like a little worm. Ann pushed the cork behind my ear and fixed the ear lobe over it. Then she said, ‘Right?’ and jabbed with the needle. Ahh! I stiffened all over; I thought she’d driven the needle into my eardrum.

‘Shh’, she whispered, ‘shh,’ – slightly petulant. She was the occupied surgeon. Then jab, again. Then jab, jab, jab. My scalp was lifting off, the torch shaking, my eyes burning with tears.

‘There,’ said Ann finally, leaning back, turning the mirror. ‘Look!’ I looked and the needle was sticking right through and then into the cork; my ear was an impaled animal, helpless.

‘We’ll have to turn the needle round a few times,’ Ann hissed, ‘to make the hole bigger.’ She turned it. It was like the dentist tapping a tune on a raw tooth.

She did the second one. Then we put in golden safety pins as we had no earrings. You had to do that to keep the holes open. I took three aspirin. I said to Ann she’d have to wait for hers till tomorrow. I lay on my back, my ears gripping together: one ear, one feeling of pain.

The next day I kept my hair down over my ears and screamed out loud when I caught the comb in one of the pins when I was combing my hair. We got one of the day-girls to buy a pair of earrings for two shillings. We got Valerie to do Ann’s ears for her. I couldn’t do it.

Then we tried to make our bosoms bigger. We saw an ad for this suction tube thing a woman was holding over one of them to make it bigger. You saw a picture of her: Before and After. After she had a big bosom, like two mountains. Ann said perhaps the suction plunger for clearing the sink would do the trick.

I knelt over Ann, wielding the plunger. After a bit of fiddling about we finally got it to grip the right breast. But then, panic. We couldn’t get it off. I was frantically pulling, Ann was screaming and her chest was pulled up like a chicken’s when it’s being plucked and Doreen, this girl from the North of Ireland, came in and said, ‘Ye pair of bloody eejits, have ye no sinse at all?’ She rubbed soap round the edge of the plunger and it slipped off. Ann was left with a big red mark round her breast for days—like a target board.

We went on diets together. We set up rigorous schedules for face-cleansing, muscle-toning, hair-conditioning. They’d last less than a week. We went on fruit-eating binges. We went on programmes of squeezing every blackhead in sight and then went on programmes of diligently avoiding even touching them.

We went on walks together. We marched down through the school woods, our coats buttoned against the March winds, chanting Hamlet at the top of our voices. We knew the whole of the ‘Ode to the West Wind’ by heart, and great chunks of Paradise Lost. We gabbled out precis of Irish poems that we’d carefully memorized from our Irish readers. We reeled off Dates of Importance in Irish History, carefully memorized from our history readers. We shouted Caesar’s wars to the wind.

We played at being in love together. We pretended Ann was going on a long journey. She was my husband. She was going to Russia. As a spy. We were hugging each other. Kissing each other. Saying, ‘My dearest, my darling, I love you, I love you, I always, always will …’

We pretended we were in a film. Ann was the shy, little, poor girl and I was a Man of the World. I was Gregory Peck. I’d take her for a walk, pointing out the trees and flowers. She’d be surprised, awestruck; such knowledge, such sophistication. She’d be humble, prostrate. I’d sweep her in my arms and hold her tightly. I’d protect her from the nasty, horrid world. I’d make her mine.

We gave each other holy pictures for our missals: ‘To Dearest Liz, In Rem. of our becoming BFs, God Bless You, Ann.’ BFs meant Best Friends. Everyone had a BF. Everyone’s missal had holy pictures from different BFs at different times.

One night I wrote Ann a poem. It was about mountains and rivers and rushing waters and her eyes and her hair. It was about her ‘silken tresses balanced atop those luminous orbs of wisdom, thine eyes.’ It was beautiful, I thought. My heart. Ann’s desire.

Valerie found the poem. She read it out to three girls. I could hear them from my cubicle. They were laughing like hyenas. Ha, ha, ha.

I ran out of my cubicle and down the dormitory and one of them saw me and said, ‘Oh Jesus, there’s Elizabeth, she must have heard us.’ I ran on and down to the hockey field and cried till my eyes felt like holes in the wind and my head was the size of the sky.

Ann laughing with Valerie at the poem. My love. I could hear their laughs creaking.

I took the holy pictures and the letters Ann had written to me. I took a rag doll she’d given me for putting my nightdress in, and a handkerchief with ‘L’ embroidered crookedly in the corner. I put them all in a cardboard box with ‘Heinz meanz Beanz’ printed on each side. I left them outside her cubicle door with a note saying, ‘I never want to talk to you again, Elizabeth.’

I went back into my own cubicle. I got into bed and pulled the sheets over my head. The lights went out. I was lying on my back. I ran my hands up and down my body, under my nightdress.

I felt my nipples, stiffening and standing. I ran my tongue over my lips. I was thinking: one day I’ll have a man and he’ll be doing this to me; my man will be doing this to me every night and my body will be all white and fiery and he’ll be stroking and petting; I never thought of what I’d be doing to him. But I could feel what my own body would be like, so running, so smooth.

I thought: Ann. Ann and her friends. Her BFs. They can all go to hell for all I care. Soon I’ll have a man and I’ll be with him and he’ll be protecting me from their eyes and their laughs.

I didn’t know then about the grappling, the bargaining, the closed eyes, the thrusting, the after-sleep, the mouth open and the snores, your own eyes black in the night’s blackness, drowning.

—9—

‘Women,’ said the man from the Department of Education, ‘form a vital part of the Civil Service. They hold down jobs in every rung and sector.’

I had visions of hundreds of grey-bunned, twin-setted and pearled spinsters clinging desperately to a swaying ladder. The man from the Department of Education was not there to stimulate our imaginations, however; he had come as part of the Mistress of Studies’ Career Guidance Programme.

The Mistress of Studies had gone to one of the English convents for her Easter holidays. (Because the nuns weren’t allowed outside the convents, in the sense of staying with relatives, or visiting hotels, they had to holiday in other convents. ‘Jaysus,’ we’d say, ‘The Poor Things.’) But the Mistress of Studies had discovered that the English nuns had a fully fledged Career Guidance Programme going for their girls. (They even had some talks on Marriage and Family Planning. But that wasn’t to be for the Irish girls.) She came back from her holidays having had her very first swim in a swimming pool, and determined that St Margaret’s Boarding School for Young Ladies would have a Career Guidance Programme. Our year was the first year to benefit from such twentieth-century thinking.

The man from the Department of Education made an inauspicious start. He wore a dark grey suit that was far too long in the crotch. He had horn-rimmed glasses that he kept pushing up his nose—a nervous tick. He was like someone who’d spent a long time in a dark room and only crept out occasionally.

He intoned the salary scales and increments women could get in the Department of Education. His face almost warmed as he moved up the year-by-year increases. We, I seem to remember, remained unmoved.

He had tea with the teachers in the school refectory and folded his thin-sliced bread back on itself and dipped it in his tea. We looked on, horrified, fascinated at his vulgarity. He took out a packet of Woodbines and lit one up—‘Hope you don’t mind, Sister?’ to the nun—and blew smoke everywhere. He went off then in his battered Fiat leaving six neat piles of leaflets about all the things women could do in the Irish Civil Service. The leaflets went yellow and dusty in the Assembly Hall bookstand.

It was our last term at school.

We had our Leaving Certificate examinations to take at the end, 10 June. We knew the sun would shine as it always did during exam times. We would feel very important. Surprised at how quickly we’d become the serious seniors we’d gawped at only such a short time ago. The juniors would be extra nice to us, offering to do all sorts of favours. The teachers would be solicitous: ‘How did you do? What was the Lit paper like? Which question did you answer first?’ and so on. The nuns would whisper, ‘I’m saying a special novena to St Joseph for you dear,’ and would let us sleep in on Sunday morning.

We’d have our supper separately from the rest of the school in a room off the kitchen. The ‘leavers’ ate there every year. It was a privilege. It was supposed to help us relax before the following day’s ordeal. We scraped each other’s nerves and rattled each other’s confidence and barked, like gladiators. ‘God I can’t remember a thing … Ooh I wish I’d worked harder at Irish … Ah no, really, I’m sure you’ll do very well … really …’

After the exams everything for me was a blank. I’d got over loving Ann Gilligan. I could even talk to her without blushing. I’d become Valerie’s friend. We went round together being very brittle and cutting.

I thought I might be a very brainy Hayley Mills. I’d pretend I was in a film and flick my hair walking down the corridor and ridge my forehead to show I wasn’t just a Pretty Face. Valerie said we should go to Dublin when we left and get a flat and invite fellas in for drinks and things. We said that was the thing.

I got a letter from Jack Hickey. I thought it was a slightly stupid letter, awkward. I didn’t say that to anyone. Valerie said, ‘He sounds gorgeous. Protestants are terrible rude you know’ and gave me an elbow in the ribs and we laughed and all I could see was Jack Hickey in his cricket whites.

I didn’t write back immediately. Valerie said, ‘You mustn’t make a fool of yourself, throwing yourself at him. Keep him guessing.’ So, I thought: Let him wait, let’s see if he’s really in love, let’s see if he writes again.

He didn’t write again. After six weeks I didn’t know what the next step was so I didn’t write either. I was the one guessing.

Then we had our career guidance talks.

The Mistress of Studies had fixed Saturday afternoons as the most appropriate time for us to peruse our future careers. The Saturday afternoon following the visit from the man from the Department of Education, a man came who’d been cured at Lourdes. Nobody seemed quite sure what kind of career he might advise us to adopt (other than a general increase in holiness, etc.), but the Mistress of Studies had been given his name by one of the nuns in Dublin when she’d written asking for speakers for her Career Guidance Programme. So he was invited.

The man was rather fat and red-faced. He’d been dying of TB, tuberculosis. He stood on the podium, refusing the comfort of a chair; he was that holy. He occasionally sipped from a carafe of water that the nuns had provided. The carafe of water had been taken from one of the parlours and it was placed on a square table that had a crimson plush tablecloth down to the ground. The table had a matching chair that also stood on the wooden podium.

The man described how the doctors had given up all hope, and how he had only a few months to live and how his sister, who was a most holy woman (a spinster, who’d given up her life to look after her ageing parents and now her dying brother), had secretly saved up for a ticket to Lourdes for the two of them. How she arranged it all and then told him.

He told us how he woke up from his drugged state on the aeroplane and he thought he was winging his way to heaven and that the Aer Lingus air hostess was an angel. The nun was smiling, and nodding, and smoothing her habit down with her hands.

The man said, ‘When you are first wheeled out into the main square at Lourdes you feel quite self-conscious but soon you relax as there are hundreds of other people in wheelchairs, on stretchers, on crutches.

‘Then,’ he said, ‘my turn came to go into the baths.’ I’d thought that the sick people were wheeled under a mountain spring, where Bernadette the little peasant girl had seen a vision of the Virgin Mary, and fresh mountain water ran over you and your wounds and then you jumped up and threw away your crutches shouting ‘Hallelujah’ and your crutches wobbled on top of a huge pile of other crutches and wheelchairs and stretchers that people had discarded after a touch of the miracle water.

But no. The man said the baths were quite old, scabrous sort of baths. You didn’t even get clean water, you were just slipped in after hundreds of other pilgrims with all their diseases. He said, ‘That’s a miracle in itself, the way nobody gets a disease from that water.’ (You thought: That’ll be something to tell the Hickeys, next time they laugh about Lourdes.)

He said, ‘The water was freezing. I thought my last hour had come, that my poor diseased, battered body would never stand the shock of the cold, old, water. I clung to my sister’s hand.’

Two weeks later the doctors in the Lourdes hospital confirmed that he was cured. There was no sign of TB on his X-ray. He said he still didn’t have a certificate because it took a whole team of brilliant doctors months and months of investigation before they proclaimed a Miracle. It was very difficult to get them to agree that a Real Miracle had taken place. Very difficult. Lourdes wasn’t all holy water and leaping cripples. Oh no. A very serious, difficult business.

I wished somebody I knew would get terribly sick so’s I could take them to Lourdes.

After the man with TB, we had a visit from an ‘Old Girl’. Old Girls were past pupils of the school. There was a special section about them in the School Annual, the Old Girls’ section: who was having a baby, and who’d got married, and who’d won an award for this or that. Mostly about babies and marriages though.

This Old Girl was called Oonagh. She’d been working for the United Nations for three years.

She said she got paid ninety dollars a week and we all gasped. She was a secretary to some big shot in the U.N. Secretariat. She told us about having to go out to dinner a lot with visiting dignitaries to New York’s poshest restaurants.

She said, ‘The United Nations is the most important institution in the history of mankind for keeping the peace. Without it there would be another World War. Nobody wants another World War do they?’ she shouted rhetorically from the platform, her dyed New York blonde hair stiff round her pinky-white face.

We said, ‘Oh no,’ in great and solemn unison. But really I think we would have quite liked one. Grown-ups were always saying, ‘Oh that was before the War,’ or, ‘Well that was during the War, wasn’t it?’ Or the really old ones would say, ‘Now which war do you mean?’ They’d turn to you, very patronizing, and say, ‘But of course you wouldn’t remember that.’ They were very proud of their damned wars as far as we could see.

Anyway it was just around the time of the trouble in the Congo and this Oonagh girl told us that the United Nations was keeping the peace there. We knew some Irish soldiers had gone out and we were told that a few of them had been eaten. We all called each other ‘Big Ballubas’ that term, as an insult. We didn’t argue with the girl about the peace because we only got the papers once a week and nobody in school ever discussed politics.

So we listened to Oonagh very respectfully, and felt sorry for her. You could tell she was going to be a spinster with her soft mohair top and expensive silk scarf. We weren’t fooled by all the talk of dinners, and ninety dollars a week, and wars.

Then we had a woman and a man from a theatre troupe. We liked them. The nuns got very agitated. The Mistress of Studies had thought they were opera singers from the Gaiety Theatre but they just sang sparkly songs from the twenties and said, ‘Darlings, life in the theatre is hell, but it gets into your blood —like a drug.’

The woman had masses of powder on, and very red lipstick. Her hair was dyed black and she smoked king-size cigarettes in this long black holder non-stop. She was called Maureen and the man was called Brendan. Maureen did most of the talking and Brendan smiled at her and burst out laughing and pointed his finger at her and covered his mouth with his hands and his two eyebrows went up in a point into his forehead.

Maureen told us she peed on the stage her first night in her first public pantomime; she was a fairy. She said she nearly died of shame. She wore masses of rings. She did a quick rendition of Lady Macbeth trying to rub the blood off her hands after she’d murdered the king, because we were doing Macbeth for our exams. The rings clicked as she rubbed her hands: ‘What, what, will these little hands ne’er come clean …’ She looked tormented. Then she recited Padraic Pearse’s poem: ‘I do not grudge them, Lord I do not grudge …’ Pearse had written the poem for his mother the night before the British executed him. The nuns thought that was beautifully done.

Then we had a woman who ran a secretarial college in Dublin. It was called Miss Lavelle’s Finishing School. The name was painted up in gold lettering over the door. (Inside, though, there was nothing but desks that had grime and sweat from hundreds of elbows and hands and fingers and old grey typewriters that had to be crashed at to get up any speed or make a carbon copy. That you learnt about much—years—later.)

Miss Lavelle said, ‘Every young lady now needs to have some skill she can fall back on if times get hard.’ Times getting hard meant being widowed—suddenly, tragically, poetically. Left with three young children to feed and clothe.

Miss Lavelle said her girls did very well for themselves. She said they had good jobs in the Civil Service and one of them was a personal secretary to a bank manager. One had even started up a little business of her own.

Besides typing and shorthand, Miss Lavelle said she also taught elocution, English Literature, simple mathematics and deportment. She said she was sure that Young Ladies like ourselves, with the lovely education the holy nuns had given us and all, wouldn’t need such things.

We sat through each visit, sometimes amused, sometimes amazed, sometimes plain bored. We never felt involved. These were visitors from another world. We thought: Soon we’re going to leave school. We’ll be free, free to do anything. Free to stay in bed all day. Free to drink coffee till four in the morning. Free to wear what we like.

We thought: We have no intention of signing up with some lower-class little secretarial school. No, not on your life. Jobs—ha! We were going to be free for a bit and then we were going to be married. (Apart from Geraldine Doyle who was potty anyway.) We were all going to have smart husbands who would have smart jobs and lots of money. We were going to have tiny button-nosed children in perpetually clean dresses. This was our

pre-destined destiny. Secretaries, United Nations, Big Shots—ha!

Some girls would go to University. Perhaps three or four every year. This was because ours was a posh school and there was a tradition of a few professional career girls and blue stockings emerging annually. That was what the tradition was.

But soon there would be the Last Day of Term. We would all cry and think we were terribly old and feel a bit frightened. We would give our cubicles to our friends in the year below us, and pictures of Marilyn Monroe and Russ Conway to the juniors. Our parents would come in their cars and pick us up. We would be strained and pale after our long two weeks of exams. We would hug each other and shake hands with the nuns and accept their kisses on our cheeks. The school would sing ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and we would cry and the other girls would cry and even some of the nuns would shed a tear into their big white handkerchiefs with numbers in the corners.

Our parents would take us home. On the way many of us would stop for roast beef dinners in hotels. A celebration.