And it is Sunday morning and her husband wants her to lie in the bed with him.
‘It’s the drink talking,’ Kathleen says. ‘Sure and you came in late last night.’ The sheet, raw against her cheek, needs washing, but each wash day that comes around the mist has descended, bowling in from the Black Mountain, and she will decide to leave them for another time.
He pulls her against him, and deep in his chest she hears the rattle of his sob. ‘What’s a man to do?’ he says. ‘For a while I forgot.’ His hand runs up the length of her thigh and there was a time when she would have welcomed it, the two of them making boys together.
‘I can’t forget,’ she says, ‘not for a moment. I haven’t slept the past week.’
‘Kathleen, I know that,’ he says, and she feels the agonised clench of his fingers beneath her ribcage before he releases her.
‘There’s Daniel’s breakfast to be got.’ She is easing herself out of the bed, holding the wall for support. A narrow room in the thin house, two up, two down, and cheek by jowl with all the others in Gay Street that runs off Sandy Row.
‘You’re going to do it then?’ he says, his voice quiet now.
‘Get his breakfast, yes of course. You don’t want the boy to go hungry.’
‘The other thing? That you talked about. The idea that you had the other night?’
Kathleen turns to face her husband as she draws on her petticoat, takes a print dress from its hanger and slips it over her head, before choosing her best cardigan, a mauve one knitted in blackberry stitch. Oh yes, and it reminds her of the times when she and the boy took a bucket and walked in the fields beyond the city belt, finding blackberries wild on the bramble, the luscious squelch of the juice running down their chins, the way the kid scrambled laughing amongst the vines as if he didn’t feel the thorns because he wanted to please her. Showing off a bit, she supposed at the time, but what did it matter, happy as a thimbleful of sunshine. That was him, her little Albert, with the blue cotton hat that she’d sewn herself pulled over his hair, black and glossy like the ripe berries, his skin the colour of milk, and now he is a grown man on the other side of the world, gone off to make his fortune. Some fortune.
‘Boil me a mug of water and I’ll take to the whiskers,’ says Bert.
‘You’re coming with me then?’
‘Aye. Get the boy ready.’ He sees the expression on her face. ‘He’ll have to get used to it, it’s been in the newspaper. It was spoken of in the hotel last night.’
‘How?’ she asks. ‘In what manner did they speak of it?’ She hasn’t shown her face in the street these past few days. The disgrace scorches her cheeks.
‘They shook my hand. They said they were way sorry about it all.’
‘But what did they say about young Albert?’
‘A good lad, that’s what they said. Your boy wouldn’t stop a snail on its morning walk. We know that, that’s what they said.’
‘We will have to tell Daniel, then. And him only ten. His brother, the murderer.’
‘You don’t believe that.’
‘That’s what they believe in New Zealand. The judge has put on the black hat. To hang him by the neck until he’s dead.’
‘I’ll see to that,’ he says, ‘while you’re putting out the breakfast. I’ll speak to Daniel.’
And, for a moment, it doesn’t seem so terrible, now that she and her husband are together on this. There is hope in the air, and when she glimpses the light outside she sees that it is a blue morning, a torrent of sunlight flooding across the houses below Boyne Bridge.
Kathleen takes out the fat pad of paper she has been hiding in the lower drawer of the tallboy. The pages are flimsy, etched with faint blue lines. The pad has cost her a whole shilling, the price of a steak. It is a big hope that it might be filled with names but it’s worth a try. Anything is worth it, and the three of them, she, her husband and Daniel, the small boy born late to them, all that remain of their family, are off to St George’s where they will stand at the door after morning service and hold out this pad of paper to the members of the congregation as they file past, full of the blood of Christ, and ask for their mercy, ask them to sign the petition she has written out, imploring the faraway Government of New Zealand that the life of her son might be spared. She imagines the names, soaring across the pages: there are forty lines to a page and fifty sheets of paper. God willing, she will need more pads, and they will starve rather than go without all the paper that might be needed.
She dons her hat, a blue felt with a pheasant feather tucked in the ribbon, and pulls on her coat, for autumn is on them now, the sly sun now slinking between the clouds, but it has no warmth. Her husband is dressed in his white shirt and good suit that has seen better days, but what would he wear but that, for church, and on the days of the Orange Parade. She braces her shoulders as they step out along Sandy Row, tilts her chin up, eyes ahead. Clodagh calls out, ‘Good morning to you, Kathleen, good morning, Bert, and how is the wee man today?’
Kathleen stiffens, but it is Daniel her neighbour is asking after. He has been home from school the past week with a cold while she is away at work in Jennymount Mill, where every weekday she smooths out the beautiful flax cloth cascading out of the big machine, its surface texture riffled like cream half churned. She is ashamed to have thought the worst of her neighbour, who keeps an eye on the boy so that Kathleen doesn’t miss a day’s work. There are plenty more lining up for the jobs, and the industry is going out the way of the tide. Clodagh has stiffened with age in the years they have lived in Sandy Row, her joints thick with rheumatism, the feet so swollen and crusty, the skin so split, she wears slippers all day.
‘He is very much recovered thank you, Clodagh. And yourself?’
Clodagh folds her hands over her large waist. ‘I’d like to be getting along to my own church today, but I can’t make it. Will you say one for me, Kathleen?’
And before she can stop herself, Kathleen’s face is streaming with tears. Bert takes her arm as if to move her along.
‘It’s all right, let her have her cry,’ Clodagh says, nodding her head. ‘We’ve heard about your troubles. We know about the young one that went over the sea. He was a good lad. I remember wee Albert, he’d go a message for me without asking for a penny.’
There is no time like the present, and Kathleen opens her purse, pulling out the pad and the pencil. Across the first page she has written the words: A petition to the Government of New Zealand to have mercy on our son Albert Black and not to send him to the gallows.
‘Would you be willing to put your name here, Clodagh?’ she asks.
And in a minute, there it is, the first name, Clodagh McGuire, Sandy Row, Belfast.
But there is more, for Clodagh puts her hand in the pocket of her vast apron. ‘I’d been watching out for you, Kathleen,’ she says, and takes out a coin that she presses into the palm of Kathleen’s hand. ‘It’s the lucky coin that Uncle Niall brought back from the Somme. It was a new penny when he first got it, with a glow like firelight dancing on its face, he told me, he knew it had to be a lucky one. May it keep you safe.’
Kathleen stares at the polished penny, and it still has that deep, dark glow upon it, as Clodagh says, its date 1916, the same year as the Battle of the Somme. It bears the words King Edward, King of England and Defender of the Faith. 1916. That battle when two thousand and more men from the 36th Ulster Division walked into the blinding death of enemy gunfire, and another five thousand wounded and the men who came back never the same. Thousands of houses in the Shankill where the women waited with dread for the postman’s knock and the pale buff-coloured envelope bearing the news. Whole families of boys gone at once. And yet they were proud, proud to be Protestant Ulstermen, wearing their Orange sashes on the Twelfth.
‘Thank you,’ Kathleen whispers, the words stuck in her throat. For it was not just the Orange men who had fallen but men from the Falls as well. Brothers in arms. Perhaps things will be all right after all.
Her husband is beckoning her, impatient now. Young Daniel hurries on ahead, jumping puddles as if he hadn’t a care in the world. Kathleen thinks to herself that whatever his father said to him hasn’t sunk in. He is still a child and already the memory of his brother is blurring. They hurry along towards the town, past the terraced houses, the barbers’ shops, the grocers’, the haberdashery with a mannequin posed in the window, chaste in a loose dress that drops beneath the knee, the hardware shops, the pubs. Many pubs, closed for Sunday, just the proprietors sweeping the fronts where the cigarette butts landed, and a rising smell of spew on account of patrons who hadn’t held their beer, and then they cross Boyne Bridge. But the penny which Kathleen still clasps reminds her of the Twelfth, and the last time young Albert was there for the Parade.
She hears again the skirl of bagpipes, the flutes and the drums, sees the arches erected over the streets, hung with orange bunting and flags of the Empire. Perhaps it was this that had driven him away, she thinks. On the day of that last Parade he seemed to have lost some of the Ulster spirit, as if he wanted to break away, be his own self. Could he be right, that the difference between the two faiths is not as important as they have been taught all those years?
Faith or not, they have arrived at the door of St George’s Church. It isn’t her own St Anne’s, but because of the war and the restoration (and here she pauses to shudder; even now, all these years later, the memory of the Blitz scalds her brain), it is a church that comforts her, with its sandstone exterior and Corinthian portico, and inside it the tiny jewel-like stained-glass windows and ancient paintings. The walk along High Street always makes her think of the River Farset that flows under the pavement, the water completely shrouded on its journey towards the junction with the River Lagan. She has never seen this river, it was covered over long before she was born, but just the idea of it there in the dark beneath her feet makes her imagine things that lie below the surface, things that people know and don’t know about each other. She will see now what her own people have to say about the plight that has befallen her family.
At the door they are met by a vestryman she knows slightly from earlier services. ‘Mr Russell, a word if I might,’ she says. And she tells him of their trouble and what she has planned. If the minister approves, she would like it announced that she will be standing at the door collecting signatures to send to the New Zealand High Commissioner in London, appealing for clemency for her son who, so far as she knows, has never done a worse thing in his life than lose his father’s prize marley up until the day he acted to protect himself from a violent attacker. This is what Albert told her in his first letter from the prison after he was arrested, and she prays to God that this is the truth he has told her.
The vestryman says that he will have a word, and it is all a little unusual but a mother’s affection and wish to protect her child is a very Christian attitude, so he will put her case to the minister and it might well be that her petition will get the church’s blessing. As she kneels at the communion rail, she thinks that the minister pauses for a longer moment than usual, murmuring the familiar words the body of Christ. She lets the wafer rest on her tongue, swallows, and then, after the cup has been passed, rises unsteadily to her feet and makes her way back to her pew. The church seats five hundred and today it appears full.
Then the minister addresses the congregation and, in a blur, she hears him speak her and her husband’s name, and more than that, speak well of their son who had gone to seek the new world and found himself betrayed by it.
At the door, she and her husband stand side by side, and Daniel, looking like one of the choirboys, with his white shirt collar and scrubbed face, stands beside them. He knows, after all, she thinks. She can see it now, the startled child’s expression, wide-eyed and growing serious. Kathleen holds out the pad with the pencil attached by a string.
‘Mrs Black, a sad thing, we’ve read it in the newspaper. Terrible, what they do out there, New Zealand’s a savage place,’ a woman says, taking the pad from her. Soon the congregation is queuing up, so that the minister is getting lost among them as he stands to shake hands with the departing flock.
‘You need to get more pads,’ a man says. ‘I’m going out to Antrim tomorrow, to the market at Ballylagan. Sure and I can gather some signatures there. I’ll pick up a pad at the stationer’s on my way out.’
‘The market, that’s the story,’ another says.
And before they know it, the pad is full and promises are being made, and someone has put in a pound for the purchase of more pads and pencils.
When they get home and Bert puts the kettle on, because he can see that his wife has started something and needs all the help she can get, she counts the signatures. Over four hundred, and the minister’s signed too, as well as Mr Russell the vestryman. She counts out money that has been pushed into her hand: there are twenty-two pounds.
‘Perhaps I could go to New Zealand after all,’ she says, wistful. ‘Not that it would take me far.’ And besides, she knows that it is a country where she is not wanted, a place where Albert should never have gone.
‘You should have a rest,’ Bert says.
‘Well, no,’ she says, ‘because I’ve decided to write to the Queen. I’m going to ask her, mother to mother, to exercise the royal prerogative of mercy.’
‘You can’t do that,’ he says. ‘The Queen has enough troubles of her own right now.’
‘Her sister? Poor girl. But that’s all fixed now that Margaret’s said she won’t marry Townsend.’ The princess had renounced marriage to her lover just days earlier.
‘Only because the Archbishop of Canterbury came down so hard on her. There are a lot of people who feel very upset with the Queen and her lot.’
‘All the more reason for her to show some mercy to our boy.’ Kathleen’s face is set with determination. ‘It will show she has a heart.’
‘I’d be surprised if she got to see the letter.’
‘Bert, we can’t give up now. You’re not giving up our boy, are you?’
‘No, of course not,’ he says, his anguish raw again. ‘Write the letter, Kathleen.’