There was hardly time to think after Serena landed, never mind feel sorry for myself. Everything to do with a baby took so long, especially at Johns Farm. The fire had to be stoked for night-time to heat the bottles and to boil the nappies. I tried to feed her myself but I had no milk to speak of so I gave up and anyway Bridie loved bottle-feeding her; that way we could share her.
I was in love again, totally smitten with Serena’s tiny fingers and her soft-as-silk hair. I couldn’t stop kissing her. My mother came to call. It was the first time she had crossed the threshold of Johns Farm for years.
– John tells me it’s a girl you have? Better luck next time.
John Johns’s mood and mind seemed changed with Serena’s arrival. He had been lifted the night she was born. The RUC figured that errant Paddies might be afoot in the terrible rain and had set up a checkpoint. He had nearly ploughed straight into them with their one stupid torch and they had taken exception and he spent the night in Carncloon Barracks.
He looked stricken by the fact that she had arrived in his absence and he kept telling Bridie over and over how I must go to hospital anyway, how the baby should be checked out. But the district midwife had already been and said that I was fine to stay put. Popping out babies was a young woman’s job and I’d done it well. She hadn’t seen me wailing like a banshee. He peered in at Serena where we’d put her to nap outside in her pram wrapped up in a green blanket against the frost, just touching her chest with his fingers as if she was made of glass.
– I like her name.
– Serena Bridget suits her, I think?
– Serena Bridget Johns. Yes, that suits her fine!
Until that moment I hadn’t even thought about her surname, I was such an eejit! The next day, he came into the Lower Room when I was settling her for bed. It was the first time he had set foot inside it since I had come to live there. He made it look small. I didn’t like him standing between me and the door.
– Is she alright?
– She’s fine!
– I’ll leave you in peace … unless … could I hold her?
– Surely! Take her!
John gathered her up and a smile broke across his face, the like of which I would never be able to describe. It was as if he knew her and she knew him, as if he had been waiting for her all his life. He was so beautiful and with my baby in his arms he looked like an angel when he tipped his lips to her little, dark head and kissed her over and over again, lost to her, lost to himself, oblivious to me as ever. He was a man in love.
He came in every night, smiling, happy, wanting to hold ‘his girl’. I could give him nothing but Serena could give him everything. He changed nappies, his big fingers struggling at first with the pins. He brushed her hair and wrapped her up in her blanket so he could sit with her in his arms and admire her. Her eyes shone up at him. Clever girl, he was all hers.
He was still a switch in my day, but for a different reason, a reason that made me hate myself. I’d be happily chatting and laughing with Bridie and Serena but if I clocked him even looking at us through the window I bolted for the Lower Room, like a mink in a drain. I wanted to keep Serena from him. It was mean like Mammy was mean and I didn’t want to own up to a single drop of her poison. If he ever figured out what I was doing he couldn’t have guessed at why. I was jealous of their love. I couldn’t have been greener if I was the grass on the other side of the fence. Bridie knew, though. I couldn’t hide anything from her. When she questions me I try to explain that he’s not keen on seeing me about the place. He banished me. I’m just doing as I’m told, I tell her, trying not to make it sound like a whine. I’m the eternally innocent party. She doesn’t buy it for a second.
The world outside the street at Johns Farm – my family, the gossip from Carncloon, the Troubles – all faded as if a bulletproof bubble had settled over the little house. Life became about what Serena had eaten, what she’d drunk, what she’d tried to say. Thank God, she was proving interesting; she had to fill the lives of three love-struck adults. John Johns turned into the Good Provider and I had to let him even though it killed me. Did Serena need anything? Anything at all, name it and it would be hers? He bought her clothes in Woolworths when he was in Strabane. She had frocks of every colour and every single colour suited her. Oh, she was perfect!
She slept in with me; I bolstered her with pillows against the back wall in the Lower Room so I could feel her breathing, perching on the edge in case I harmed her. I was so tired but I could hardly bear to sleep in case I missed one tiny yawn. I fought the idea of a cot, a cot right beside the bed would have been too far. She was all I had to call my own, I would not risk her being beyond an arm’s-length away.
As there were so many little dresses and Babygros and terry nappies, I felt I had to take over washing the clothes from Bridie. I’ve never seen a woman move aside so quickly. The laundry included John Johns’s stuff and my heart lurched when I knew I’d have to deal with them and where they had been. I grabbed everything he owned and submerged the lot in Daz as if they were contaminated. I left them there ’til I figured they were clean and I couldn’t smell his mossy smell and rinsed them all out in the big water barrels in the scullery. There wasn’t a pair of man’s pyjamas – brazen. And I had looked for them, Yes Siree Bob!
Drying weather doesn’t come along too often in a Northern Irish winter. The clothes had to be hung above the rack on the range and turned and turned like Mammy had turned her underpinnings. Usually John grabbed his clean stuff from there but he’d been so busy, it built up and had to be shifted so I took a deep breath and packed it all under one arm. Is it strange to be afraid to go into someone’s bedroom when that someone is the man who can call himself your husband?
I had never been in the Upper Room. It ran parallel to mine with just the kitchen to divide us. Standing in it would make me feel like the total stranger I was. Man up, Mary! You’ve wrung out his undercrackers, you can put them in a drawer. I reached out and turned the handle and stepped in.
The room was immaculate. A fire was set in the grate of an old black fireplace that had a bit of gold paint outlining it. The brass bed was neat, one of Bridie’s brightest patchwork quilts pulled tight across it. I slipped my hand under it, past the wool blanket to the sheet. Did John Johns know about undoing a girl? Did he know about kissing way south of the border properly in bandit country? Probably not; probably it was just something they did in France where it was warmer.
I blinked the thought away to see that the whole back wall was a bookcase! The joy hit me full in the face. It was like being back in the utter peace of the convent reference library, breathing in the smell of paper that had been through a thousand hands and minds.
I read the spines in the gloom. There were books on horticulture, design, some on photography, Thomas Hardy, Frank O’Connor, Henry Fielding, Patrick Kavanagh, Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, Shakespeare, Wilfred Owens, somebody called Rimbaud stood just by Seamus Heaney. Where would I start? I would start with Heaney, my old friend from school. I pulled it from the shelf and sat down on the bed which let me know it was made of springs. On the inside front cover it said To John from Father Pat O’Connell on the occasion of your 16th birthday. Father Pat’s boy was emerging from the shadows.
– I thought you weren’t going to be my wife?
– Jesus! John! You scared the life out of me! Where did you come from?
– That’s a strange question to ask a man when you have evidence in your hand?
– Oh! I meant, now, now? I wasn’t expecting you back and this stuff needed putting away. I didn’t mean to pry …
– I know you’re not prying; you’ve had months to pry if you were remotely interested in me.
– I’m not interested in you and you’re not interested in me, remember?
The black eyes narrowed. He couldn’t argue that the stand-off had been instigated by him, so he left. I’d just dropped my shoulders and sat back down on the bed when he reappeared in the doorway to scare me afresh. Jesus, how did he do that in a house where every bloody floorboard creaked? I shot off the bed like I’d been electrocuted!
– You’re welcome to borrow a book if you want, Mary. After all, what’s mine is yours!
He could even make letting me read sound like something I might have to pay for, somehow. I put Heaney back on the shelf, he was the O-level me. Walter Macken, Sean O’Casey, some American novels – The Great Gatsby, To Kill a Mockingbird, some Steinbecks – all sat happily cheek by jowl; none of those had been on the syllabus. I pulled out T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets; it had been on the reading list for A-level English. Footfalls echo in the memory/down the passage which we did not take/ towards the door we never opened/ into the rose-garden. I would carry it to the Lower Room and soak up the words from better, brighter lives, like a blood-starved tick.
It was him who sent for Auntie Eileen when Serena was about six months old and still not christened. He’d mentioned it to me, made it sound like my duty as a good Catholic mother and wife, and I’d walked straight out of the half-door with her in my arms. He needed reminding that she was mine but he wanted his name branded on her. He knew that I wouldn’t be bold enough to call her Serena Rattigan and damn every pious hypocrite in St Bede’s. I just didn’t want it to happen yet.
She was already reaching out for him; her little face lit up brighter for him than it ever did for me. I didn’t want to lose another crumb of her. Auntie Eileen and Bernie showed up one day with a mission and a fresh cream sponge. She knew all my weaknesses. I knew she’d do anything if John Johns asked her, even if it was slipping a set of reins over my head.
– Well?
– Well what?
– Why hasn’t this gorgeous girl been christened yet?
– What’s the rush? Why is everyone so desperate to toe the party line?
– Everyone isn’t! But you have to get her christened at some stage and there’s never any better time than the present. Here, take another slice of cream cake and cheer yourself up – you’ve a face on you that could turn an Orange Order parade!
Bridie cut me another slab of sponge and I rammed it into my mouth. I noticed she was very quiet on the subject of going back to the chapel and swearing more lies. But then she was carrying the secret of an unconsummated marriage without a single stumble; this was small beans.
The sick fluttering around my heart didn’t stop as Eileen ran through the really important stuff of what I would wear, where she’d get the white robe for Serena, who would I like for godparents. Had I ever managed to get back in touch with that mad pal of mine, Lizzie Magee? Would John be able to stretch to a sandwich tea after in the parish hall or would we just come home and make tea? Why hadn’t she asked him when the two of them were scheming behind my back? I swallowed my cake and hoped it would choke me. It didn’t.
– We’ll come home and make tea, I manage.
– Great! I’ve booked it for Sunday! It’ll be a blast! says my faithful aunt.
I didn’t sleep on the Saturday night. I lay beside the little innocent bundle of Serena snuffling beside me. I was going to let Father O’Brien, the big fat liar, anoint her head with holy oil and swear that she would be a follower of the Catholic faith. Kathleen and Matthew were standing up as godparents after Auntie Eileen had refused to renounce the World, the Flesh and the Devil. Why would I give up the good stuff? she’d asked, lighting a fag.
In the end, I got up and went out to get a better look at the moon that was shining through the curtains. It hung, a glorious silver ball between the shadows of the big sycamores at the entrance to the river field. The leaves shivered alongside me and the soil was cold and dense beneath my bare feet. The Cloon was flowing fast, washing the stones smooth by the bend. Nothing was stirring on the air except my breath. It was as if I had the whole world to myself. What if I slipped into the river and let it carry me away from Johns Farm? It was only the thought of my girl that made me turn back and get to my bed.
In the morning, I walked out with Serena draped in her long white lace dress. She was a picture and a half. Auntie Eileen had done her proud; it was a confection all its own. I kept my eyes on my girl’s face for the journey up the lane, past The Hill, past my father who was standing by the door of the chapel, past my mother who was already ensconced in the front pew. I had a crick in my neck after the whole hour of the Mass but when I left my daughter was a Catholic and everyone seemed happier, especially John. He took her from my arms as I stepped out of the door and into the bright June sunshine.
She was official, she was free of Original Sin, it was safe for her to die because she would float straight up to Heaven. I had handed her over to Jesus. I had sworn to keep her on the straight and narrow path of a religious upbringing. Me, the woman who fell off the path at the first hurdle. I had named her Serena Bridget Johns when she wasn’t a Johns, but then her stand-in father wasn’t a Johns either; he was an O’Connell, son of Father Pat. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree. I had married into the Church.
I’m not mad, I thought to myself, every other person around here with a head is. I’m doing alright. Kathleen was all teary; Matthew was so chuffed he couldn’t speak. Daddy came over and shook my hand like I’d run a race and won. I wiped the feel of his lovely old calloused palm on the side of my jacket before I gave in and smiled. I’d never be done missing him.
John Johns spun Serena around in the air and the lace flew round her like flower petals. Auntie Eileen and Bridie were debating whether or not to put tomatoes in the ham sandwiches, a life-and-death decision. Things were going to settle down to what passed for normal in County Tyrone, whether I liked it or not.
No one asked me if I was happy, if I was coping alright. I looked up at the sky and for the first time in a long time I didn’t want to float up, up and away. I wanted to stay right here until Serena was old enough to come with me. Mammy walked over, reeking of elastic and disapproval.
– There was hardly a need for such a flashy christening robe, given the unfortunate circumstances, she says. You just can’t seem to learn decency, Mary Rattigan.
I’d always have her to keep me firmly on the ground. She’d drive stakes through my feet if that’s what it took.