The bed was uncomfortable and the nylon sheets, she felt, had not been used for years. They must have been from the time of the guest-house; they had a thin, almost slippery feel. The mattress sagged. She was so tired that she had gone to sleep as soon as she lay down, but she woke an hour or two later, unsure where she was, reaching out for a light, unable to think what house she was in, and feeling a strange, hard thirst. Then she remembered where she was and how she had got here. She put her head on the pillow and wondered how she had let this happen. Earlier on, it had seemed a good idea to come and spend the night here, but she had not bargained for being wide awake like this, the light from Tuskar through the curtains flitting across the wall over her bed, and a smell of must and damp in the room.
She got out of bed and made her way to the kitchen. She filled a mug of water and brought it back to the bedroom. The lino in the room was torn, some of the wallpaper had peeled, the paint on the ceiling was flaking, and the presence of the shiny modern radiator made the room seem even more dingy and depressing. When she pulled the old candlewick bedspread back, she found that the blankets were stained. She didn’t feel tired or sleepy. She shivered. The smell seemed sharper now, and sour, and it was the smell more than anything which brought her back to the time she and Declan had lived in this house.
This had been her room, Declan’s the one behind. But after a while his bed had been moved in here. She remembered the hammering apart of the iron bed and the feeling as they stood and watched that they were causing all this trouble.
Declan was afraid. He was afraid of the black clocks which darted awkwardly across the floor, afraid that if you stepped on one of them all the bloody insides would be on your feet. He was afraid of the dark and the cold and of his grandparents’ movements upstairs which seemed to echo in the rooms below. And Helen knew that there was another fear, which was never mentioned in all that time: the fear that their parents would never come back, that they would both be left here, and that these days and nights – Helen was eleven then, Declan eight – would become their lives, rather than an interlude which would soon come to an end.
Helen remembered how it began. It must have been just after Christmas, maybe early January, and it was her last year at primary school. She remembered the day when she arrived home, dropped her schoolbag inside the door and found her parents in the back room, standing in a pose she had never seen them in before. They were both looking into the mirror which was over the fireplace, and when they saw her coming into the room they did not turn. Her mother spoke. It was a new voice, soft, with a tone of entreaty.
‘Helen,’ she said, ‘your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests.’
She looked at the two of them as they stared at her and at each other, as though any second now the mirror would flash and take a photograph of them. In her memory, these moments – her father’s slow smile, her mother’s gende tone – were mixed up with their wedding photograph, taken in Lafayette’s in Dublin. She was sure that the scene in front of the mirror could have lasted only a few minutes, maybe less even, enough for a glance from each of them and a sentence – ‘Helen, your father is going to have to go to Dublin for tests’ – and maybe nothing more. In any case, it was the last memory she ever had of seeing her father. She knew she must have seen him later that evening and perhaps the next day, but she had no memory, absolutely none, of seeing him again.
Her only other memory of that day was of Sister Columb from St John’s arriving and standing in the hallway, refusing to come in. Helen remembered whispering and half-talk in the hallway and then the nun departing.
‘The nuns in St John’s are going to knock on the tabernacle tonight,’ her mother said.
Who did she say this to? And then, Helen remembered, someone had asked what this meant and her mother had explained that it was something which the nuns hardly ever did, but one of them would approach the altar and knock on the tabernacle, and that would be a special way of asking God for a favour.
Her next memory of that evening was the clearest of all. She was upstairs in her bedroom when Declan came in. He told her that their mother was going to Dublin as well.
‘What’s going to happen to us?’ she asked.
‘We’re going to Granny’s. We have to pack. She says you’re to pack warm things.’
She went downstairs. Her mother was in the kitchen.
‘How long are we going for? What are we going to do about school?’
‘Your father’s sick,’ her mother said.
‘I thought you said that he was going to Dublin for tests.’
‘There’s a suitcase under my bed. You can use that,’ her mother said. ‘Bring all your schoolbooks.’
She wondered had this really happened, the nonanswers to questions, the sense of her mother as being utterly remote, lost to her. In the morning Aidan Larkin, who was in Fianna Fail with her father, drove them to Cush. Dr Flood, later, was going to drive her parents to Dublin. Her mother and father must have been in the house that morning, and must have spoken to her and to Declan, but she had no memory of it, just the car journey and the arrival. Her grandparents in Cush had no telephone, so she had no idea how they had been alerted to the imminent arrival of the two children. Nonetheless, Helen and Declan were expected in this house they had come to previously only on summer Sundays, or in the early summer when the guest-house was not full. Helen had no memory of ever visiting the house before in the winter. This, then, was the first time she noticed the patches of damp on the walls and the smell of damp which was everywhere except the kitchen, and the draughts which came under doors and the fierce wind which came in from the sea.
The sea was just twenty or thirty yards away, but in all those months – from January to June – she caught sight of it maybe once or twice from the clifftop: this turbulence below them, the waves crashing hard against the cliff-face. Her grandparents, she remembered, behaved as though it were not there. In all the years her grandmother had been in Cush, she had hardly ever been on the strand. They paid no attention to the sea, and Helen and Declan learned to pay no attention to it either.
The first dispute arose over food. Declan would eat only sliced bread, it had become a sort of joke in the family. But there was no sliced bread in Cush, only brown bread and soda bread that her grandmother made, and loaves of white bread with a hard crust which they bought in Blackwater. There were other things which Declan wouldn’t eat – cabbage or turnips, carrots or onions, eggs or cheese. He was obsessive about this, carefully finding out about each meal, or possible visits to other houses, and making sure that the food would be to his taste, and making himself pleasant in every other matter, and always getting his way.
On Sunday visits to Cush their mother packed sandwiches for Declan, and during longer visits she brought and cooked their own food. But Declan knew that their grandmother disapproved of this.
‘You don’t eat because you like the food, you eat to live, that’s why you eat,’ was one of her sayings.
As they drove from Enniscorthy to Cush, Helen knew that Declan thought only about food, and what was going to happen. The first dinner in the middle of the day was a stew; her grandmother served out four plates of stew with a big ladle and then put a plate of potatoes in the middle of the table. Her grandfather took off his cap and sat down and blessed himself. Helen made a sign to Declan to say nothing, do nothing. She peeled two potatoes for him and he mashed them up and slowly began to eat them. But he didn’t touch the stew. Her grandfather read the Irish Independent and said very little. Her grandmother busded about – she seldom sat at the table – and when, that first day, she went out into the yard, Helen took Declan’s plate and scraped the stew into the bucket of waste her grandmother kept for the hens. She put the plate back in front of Declan; he sat there amazed, trying not to smile. Neither of their grandparents noticed anything.
When teatime came, Helen helped her grandmother set the table. For tea there was brown bread, thick slices of white bread and boiled eggs. Declan came into the kitchen as the eggs were being taken from the boiling water.
‘These eggs now are fresh,’ his grandmother said, ‘not like the ones you get in the town.’
‘Yuck,’ Declan said.
‘Declan doesn’t eat eggs,’ Helen said.
‘I never heard worse,’ her grandmother said. ‘The things your mother has to put up with. She’s too soft.’
And so the battle began, the battle that raged daily, Declan filling his pockets with crusts, Helen reaching for the waste bucket, and days when there was no way out, when Declan put the onions and the carrots or the cabbage and the turnips to one side of the plate and refused to eat them, and their grandmother insisted that he stay at the table until he had them eaten, only to relent as soon as he started to cry.
‘He can’t eat them, Granny, he’ll get sick,’ Helen would say.
‘Stop giving back-answers, Helen.’
‘I’m not giving back-answers.’
As soon as her grandmother began to talk about sending them to the two-teacher school in Blackwater, Helen set up a classroom at the kitchen table and for much of the day, in between meals, she and Declan worked at their schoolbooks, Helen playing the role of teacher. They discovered school as a way of excluding their grandmother, until she put a paraffin heater into the dining-room for them so that she could listen to the radio in peace. They did algebra or Irish or decimal points at the times of the day when she was most likely to hover around them; often they did the same exercises over and over, pretending this required total concentration and not looking up if their grandmother came into the room. They opened Declan’s books at random and went through lessons he had done long before, or began entirely new ones without fully understanding them or finishing them. When they were bored, they laughed and whispered and played cards.
Their mother wrote short letters to their grandmother saying there was no news and mentioning tests and prayers and hoping that Helen and Declan were not too much of a burden on her. Their mother was staying in Rathmines with her cousin, one of the Bolgers of Bree, and his wife, and they too sent their regards. There was no mention of their father.
Helen and Declan found a box of games under one of the beds and amused themselves in the long, dark evenings playing Ludo and Snakes and Ladders. Helen found boots she could wear and went often with her grandfather to fetch the cows for milking or to open and close gates for him. Declan had no boots; he hated the muck of the yard and the lane, he seldom went out and often in the afternoon, in the clammy heat of the parlour, he became tired and irritable. Alone together in these first months, they never mentioned home or their mother or their father, or how long they would be here. They worked out strategies to get them through the day without confrontation.
Slowly, their grandmother began to treat Helen as an adult and Declan as a child, although Helen and Declan continued to treat each other as equals, even if Helen remained in the role of protector. In the first week or so, Helen had an argument with her grandfather; it was the only time he said much during their entire stay in the house. He was reading something in the newspaper about Fianna Fail – he himself was a member of Fine Gael, which was strong in Blackwater – and he turned to Helen and her grandmother and said, ‘They’re only a shower of gangsters, bloody gun-runners. Liam Cosgrave will put manners on the whole lot of them.’
‘Jack Lynch is not a gangster or a gun-runner,’ Helen said.
‘The rest of them, then,’ her grandfather said. ‘And I’d string Charlie Haughey up. He’s a feckin’ gangster.’
‘Oh, language now,’ her grandmother said.
‘But Jack Lynch is the leader,’ Helen said.
‘Oh, I know who you’ve been listening to,’ her grandfather said. ‘Did we ever think that Lily would have a little Fianna Fáiler for a daughter?’
‘And the Irish Independent is only Fine Gael propaganda,’ Helen said.
‘Propaganda? Where did you learn that word?’
‘Oh, Helen knows all the words,’ her grandmother said.
‘It’s saying your prayers you should be,’ her grandfather said and went back to reading the paper.
‘Good girl, you stand up to him now,’ her grandmother said later when he had left the room.
From then on, her grandfather let her watch the news on television and, after a few weeks, one Saturday night Helen realised that she was going to be allowed to watch The Late Late Show, which her mother and father had never permitted her to watch at home, except for the night when Lieutenant Gerard from The Fugitive was a guest on the show and she was called downstairs. Now in Cush she sat on one of the armchairs in the kitchen and wondered if they had forgotten about her as the news ended and then the break for advertisements ended and the music for the show began and Gay Byrne appeared.
‘If something comes on that’s not fit for her now,’ her grandmother said, ‘she’ll go to bed.’
Helen remembered the slow preparations for the programme, her grandmother making sure that all the housework was done. Tea things and biscuits were set out on a tray, the kettle filled to be put on a hotplate during the second break. Her grandmother loved the programme, and, Helen realised, loved having Helen to discuss the guests and the controversies in the days that followed. Her grandfather, on the other hand, disliked it and muttered to himself when something was said of which he disapproved.
During that season, Helen remembered, hardly a Saturday night passed without a group of women wanting rights, or a priest in dispute with the hierarchy, appearing on the programme.
‘Oh, look who it is now, look at her, look at her hair!’ her grandmother would shout at a woman who appeared on the panel.
Her grandmother commented throughout, but her comments mostly took the form of exclamations of shock or wonder at what was being said, and on the personal appearance of guests. But sometimes, with extraordinary vehemence, when women’s rights or politics were being discussed she would bang her fist against the armchair and shout her total agreement with an opinion being expressed. ‘She’s right, she’s absolutely right!’ she would roar.
She hated breaks for music and the appearance of writers or film stars or English people. They told too many funny stories; she wanted argument, not amusement. But she remained silent and tense when religion was discussed, watching some nun or priest or concerned layperson out of the side of her eyes. Once or twice, during these discussions, her grandfather threatened to turn the television off, but he never did so. All three stayed up until the end of the show, and it often went on until close to midnight, as an ex-nun cast doubt on the power of the Pope, or a student leader denounced the Irish bishops or the education system. Contraception and divorce were discussed regularly; her grandparents watched in embarrassed silence, but the only time when they threatened to send Helen to bed was when a woman on the show pointed out that most Irish couples had never seen one another naked, even people who’d been married for years.
‘Oh, Lord bless us and save us!’ her grandmother said.
The item on The Late Late Show which unsetded them most, however, was not about sex or religion. It was when an American woman, middle-aged, with permed hair, and glasses, wearing a red dress, appeared on the show. She could, she claimed, make contact with the dead. She did not use the word ‘dead’, but talked about people who had passed away, people on the ‘other side’. Gay Byrne asked her questions as though he believed her.
‘Did you ever hear such nonsense?’ her grandmother asked. ‘Did you ever hear worse?’
The woman stood in front of the live audience with Gay Byrne beside her. She held a microphone and pointed at individuals in the audience.
‘Yes, that woman there,’ she said. ‘I’m getting very strong messages for you. You have only one sister, is that right?’
The woman in the audience nodded.
‘And she’s been ill, hasn’t she?’
The woman nodded again.
‘The message is confused now, but are you twins or very close in age?’
‘We’re very close in age.’
‘But when you were children, you are the one who was ill, right?’
‘Yes, that’s right.’
‘Could this be your mother, dear, could this be your mother? I know that she wants to protect you and she’s worried about your sister, but things are better now, and she’s watching over you both.’
There was silence in the kitchen as Helen and her grandparents watched the television. The woman on The Late Late Show moved on to someone else.
‘I’m getting strong signals again,’ she said to a woman. ‘Did you have a little boy who was killed or died as a baby?’
‘No,’ the woman said.
‘I’m getting strong signals. Did you have a brother who died young?’
‘Yes, I did,’ the woman said.
‘And he’s still watching over you and he knows that you’re a very strong person and you’ve just moved house, have you?’
‘Yes,’ the woman said.
‘And is your mother living with you?’
‘No, she was, but she’s not now.’
‘Well, he’s worried about her, he thinks the change is for the best, but he’s worried about her. I think you might know what he means by that.’
The woman nodded.
‘Now I have to talk to somebody else. There’s something important. Is there somebody called Grace here?’
There was no response.
‘Is there somebody called Grace? Maybe even a surname?’
A hand went up. ‘Grace is my surname,’ a man said.
‘And your first name?’
‘Jack.’
‘Jack,’ the woman said, ‘I think you’re about to make a big decision. Now it’s somebody very close to you. Jack, the ties are very close between this person and you. It’s someone you think about every day, a few times a day. You know who it is, I think?’
Jack nodded.
‘She says you mustn’t go. That’s the message, it’s very clear. But there’s something else as well, there’s a relationship that’s very important for you. You’re unsure about it, but she wants to give it her blessing, and she says she still loves you and is protecting you and guarding you.’
When the break for advertisements came, Helen’s grandmother did not move from the chair. She motioned Helen to turn down the sound.
‘I wonder if you can write to that woman.’
‘Enclose a postal order, I’d say,’ her grandfather said.
‘Who would you like to get in touch with, Granny?’
‘Oh, Helen, I’d love to get in touch with my sister Statia, and I’d a brother Daniel who died of TB. I’d love to hear from them, no matter what it was, even if it was just a message. And it must be terrible hard for that American woman, having that power.’
‘She’s making all that up,’ Helen’s grandfather said.
‘No,’ her grandmother said, ‘she has the power, I’d know by her. And did you see that man’s face? It must have been his wife that was getting in touch with him. I’d give anything now to talk to Statia.’
Around that time, maybe a week or two later, Declan began to have nightmares. The first night Helen could not think what the sound was. She woke and tried to go back to sleep, but the noise persisted, and then she heard her grandmother moving in the room above and coming down the stairs. As though alert to her movements, Declan began to scream, and Helen jumped out of bed and ran into his room. He had sounded as though someone were attacking him.
They woke him, but he could not come out of the dream. He continued to scream and cry, even when they brought him into the kitchen and gave him a drink of milk and offered him a biscuit. He was frightened by something, and did not fully recognise either of them, and then slowly he began to calm down, but he said nothing, stared ahead of him, or at the light, and for a while they were unsure whether he was still living in his dream. And then he was fine again, but he would not go back to his room until the light was left on.
The nightmares changed him; during the day he became withdrawn, and often, as they went through a lesson or played cards, he became forgetful and distant and she would remind him where he was and that became a joke between them. But the dream did not stop, although some nights he would sleep soundly. On the other nights, as soon as his shouting began, both Helen and her grandmother would run to him and always – it was the same each time – it would take five or ten minutes to calm him down and bring him back to the world they lived in.
His grandmother wondered if he had worms or if he might be sickening for something, and she brought him to the doctor in Blackwater. He refused to go into the surgery unless Helen came as well. She watched the doctor examine him, check his tongue and tonsils and the whites of his eyes, listen to his breathing through a stethoscope. The doctor asked him if he was afraid of anything and he said no.
‘And so what are your dreams about?’
Declan looked at the doctor and thought for a while.
‘If I think about it too much, it’ll come back,’ he said.
‘But just tell me what it is.’
‘I’m small, I’m tiny, like the smallest things, and everything is huge and I’m floating.’
‘You mean everything else is huge.’
‘Yes.’
‘And is that frightening?’
‘Yes.’
‘And he won’t eat,’ his grandmother interrupted. ‘I can’t get him to eat.’
‘Oh, he’s well nourished,’ the doctor said. ‘I wouldn’t worry about that.’
Declan was still staring ahead, thinking. ‘I kind of forget the dream after I’ve had it,’ he said.
The doctor said that Declan should move his bed into the room with Helen and maybe he’d feel safer then. ‘A lot of boys have nightmares for a while like that and they just go away.’ He pinched Declan’s cheek.
Helen watched the post. The postman came at eleven. He delivered the newspaper as well, and if there was no post he dropped the newspaper in the door, but if there was post he knocked on the door and handed the letters to her grandmother. Her mother’s letters were short and vague; she used the same words each time. Helen wondered if her father were really having tests, why the tests could not be over, why they did not produce results.
One day – she could not remember what month it was – a letter came from her mother which her grandmother did not show her and which later, when Helen asked about it, her grandmother told her did not arrive. Helen was sure it had been delivered and searched with her eyes over the mantelpiece where the letters were kept, but it was not there. Her grandmother knew how to hide things. And the next day she heard her grandmother whispering to Mrs Furlong, and she felt she understood the reason for the whispering: there was something in the letter which she could not be told.
In all the months in Cush – by this time, she was sure, they had been there for three or four months – Helen and Declan had never discussed how long they would be there or what was happening to them, but as soon as Declan brought up the subject they could not stop discussing it.
‘Hellie,’ he began one day over lessons in the parlour. ‘I want to go home.’
‘Ssh,’ she said. ‘She’ll hear you.’
‘I don’t think they’re in Dublin at all. I think they’re in England or America.’
‘Don’t be silly.’
‘Why has she never come down here?’
‘Because she’s visiting him in hospital.’
‘Why has she not come even once?’
‘Because we’re all right here.’
‘We’re not all right.’
Helen told him nothing about the letter. She tried to talk him out of his new idea, but it became an obsession.
‘I saw a programme about it on the television,’ he said. ‘The father and mother left their children behind.’
‘Behind where?’
‘In an orphanage.’
‘This is not an orphanage.’
‘What will happen when she needs the rooms for summer visitors?’
‘They’ll be back by then.’
‘They’re in England.’
‘Declan, they’re not.’
‘How do you know?’
It was around the same period she heard the word ‘cancer’ for the first time. Her grandmother was talking to Mrs Furlong in the hallway and did not know that Helen was listening on the other side of the door.
‘When they opened him up, they found that he was riddled with cancer,’ she said.
Helen knew that if she asked a question she would get no answer. One day, when her grandmother had gone into Blackwater, she searched for missing letters, but she could not find any.
By now, Declan was consumed by the possibility of escaping.
‘You could get a job in Dublin,’ he said. ‘We’d be much better off.’
‘Where?’
‘In Dunnes Stores, that’s where you can work if you leave school.’
‘I’m not even twelve.’
‘How would they know?’
In the days that followed she looked at herself carefully when she was in the bathroom. She remembered the opening of the novel Desirée, where the heroine had placed handkerchiefs inside her blouse to look like breasts. Helen was tall for her age, and she wondered, if she claimed to be fourteen, would she be believed?
Something changed in the house as the days grew longer. Their grandmother’s softening attitude towards them, the length of Mrs Furlong’s visits, a long visit from Father Griffin, the curate in Blackwater, all convinced Helen that it was her father who was riddled with cancer, and this must mean that he was dying, or maybe needed another operation which would take longer. Although she and Declan talked about escaping and going to Dublin and Helen finding a job and a flat and Declan going to school, Helen always treated it like a game, a fantasy. Declan, however, took it seriously. He worked out plans.
‘Declan, you’ve hardly even been in Dublin,’ she said.
‘I was loads of times. I know Henry Street and Moore Street.’
‘But only for a day,’ she said.
One evening, he came to her in her bedroom with an old brown leather wallet which was full of twenty-pound notes.
‘Where did you get it?’ she asked.
‘He keeps it in the kitchen press in a hole,’ Declan said.
‘Leave it back.’
‘We can use it when we escape. Now you know where it is.’
‘Leave it back.’
Their father died in Dublin on 11 June. This seemed strange to her and even now, twenty years later, as she lay in bed in this house, wide awake, her grandmother upstairs asleep and Declan in hospital in Dublin, she had no memory of that early summer in Cush, of May passing into June. Some things, however, were still sharp in her memory: the changed atmosphere in the house, at least two other letters arriving and not being mentioned, the smell of damp and paraffin. Years afterwards, she realised that her childhood ended in those few weeks, even though she did not have her first period until six months later.
She knew something had happened on that morning: early, it must have been around eight o’clock, a man arrived, she saw him passing by the window; he spoke to her grandparents and then he left. And then, not long afterwards, Father Griffin from Blackwater arrived. She decided to stay in bed until he had gone, and told herself it was still possible that something else, or nothing much, had happened. She lay there and waited. Declan was fast asleep in the other bed.
After a while she heard her grandmother tiptoeing across the parlour. She opened the door to the bedroom quietly and told Helen in a whisper to dress as quickly as she could.
When Helen came out of the bedroom her grandmother was standing by the window.
‘Helen, we’ve bad news now; your father died last night at eleven o’clock. He died very peacefully. We’ll all have to look after your mother now. You and Declan are going to go into Enniscorthy with Father Griffin.’
‘Where are we going?’
‘I’ve got clean clothes out for you. Mrs Byrne of the Square is going to look after you and Declan.’
Helen felt a sudden surge of happiness that they were leaving here and would never have to come back, but she quickly felt guilty for thinking about herself like this when her father had just died. She tried not to think at all. She went into the kitchen, where Father Griffin was drinking tea.
‘We’ll all kneel down and say a prayer for his soul,’ her grandmother said.
Father Griffin led a decade of the Rosary. He said the words of the prayers slowly and deliberately and when he came to the Hail Holy Queen he recited the prayer as though the words were new to him: ‘To Thee do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.’ Softly, quiedy, Helen began to cry, and her grandmother came over and knelt beside her until the prayers ended.
They sat and drank more tea in silence; her grandmother made toast and aired clothes.
‘Why isn’t Declan up?’ Helen asked.
‘Oh, I let him sleep, Helen. It’ll be time enough for him when we’re packed to go.’
‘Have you not told him?’
‘We’ll let him sleep.’
‘He’ll be awake.’
As Helen was packing their schoolbooks in the parlour, Declan called her. ‘What are you doing?’ he asked.
‘I’m packing. We’re going to Enniscorthy.’
When he looked at her from the bed, she thought that he knew, but she was not sure.
‘How are we getting there?’
‘Father Griffin.’
He looked at her again and nodded. He got out of the bed and stood on the floor in his pyjamas.
‘I want to pack my own schoolbag,’ he said.
Somewhere on the road between The Ballagh and Enniscorthy, with Father Griffin driving and Helen in the front seat, she realised that Declan didn’t know their father was dead.
‘Are Daddy and Mammy already back from Dublin?’ he asked.
Even now, twenty years later, as she lay between the sticky nylon sheets with her hands behind her head, staring at the ceiling as the lighthouse flashed on and off, Helen could still feel the terror in the car as neither she nor Father Griffin answered the question. She expected Declan to ask again, but he sat back and said nothing and they drove on towards the town.
Helen desperately did not want to go to Mrs Byrne’s house in the Square. Declan was friendly with the two boys, it would be easy for him, but she had no friends there and knew that Mrs Byrne would treat her like a child. Mrs Byrne was like all the shopkeepers’ wives in the town: they were always watching everything, always on the lookout, even their smiles were sharp, and she did not want to be under the control of Mrs Byrne or any other Mrs in the town.
They drove past Donoghue’s Garage in silence and crossed the bridge and drove up Casde Hill. Helen was determined not to go into Mrs Byrne’s house.
When Father Griffin double-parked in the Square and left them alone in the car, Declan asked her nothing and she told him nothing. Mrs Byrne came out, all smiles. She opened the driver’s door and put her head into the back of the car.
‘Now, Declan,’ she said, ‘when Thomas and Francis come home for their dinner, maybe they’ll both take the afternoon off so you can play upstairs.’
Helen got out of the car and stood beside Mrs Byrne. ‘My granny says I’m to go up home and have the place tidy for Mammy.’
‘Helen, I’m sure some of the neighbours will do that.’
‘Granny said I was to go and Father Griffin was to drive me up and Declan was to stay with you.’
Father Griffin stood there listening carefully. Helen knew that she had sounded too sure of herself for him to disagree. He was a mild man, uncomfortable now and anxious to get away since his car was blocking the traffic.
‘So,’ Helen said, ‘if you could take Declan’s things and then we’ll see you later.’ She was trying to sound brisk, like somebody from the television.
‘Hold on a minute,’ Father Griffin said, ‘and I’ll park.’
Declan took his bag from the boot and they stood outside Byrne’s shop waiting for Father Griffin.
‘Isn’t your grandmother very good?’ Mrs Byrne said to Helen.
‘She’s marvellous,’ Helen said.
Mrs Byrne looked up and down the street. ‘Your poor mammy now will be glad to see you,’ she said.
‘I’ll go and wait in the car,’ Helen said, and she walked across the Square to where Father Griffin had parked. As he left the driver’s seat, she opened the passenger’s door.
‘Will you be all right here?’ he asked.
‘Yes, perfect,’ she said confidently.
She watched him walk across the Square and go into Byrnes’ with Declan and Mrs Byrne. She knew what he was doing: he was telling Declan that his father was dead. She wondered why he was taking so long. Two passers-by saw her in the car and came over. She rolled down the window.
‘Are you waiting for your mammy?’ they asked.
‘No,’ she said. ‘No, I’m not.’
‘Is she still in Dublin, the poor thing?’
‘Yes,’ Helen said. She was trying to sound grand, as though used to being accosted by people like this.
‘Well, we’re very sorry for your trouble.’
‘Thank you.’ She knitted her brow and rolled up the window.
When Father Griffin came out of Byrnes’, he walked with his head down, hunched.
‘I’m not sure that we can leave you up there on your own,’ he said. ‘Mrs Byrne wants you to come back in.’
‘Oh, Mummy is very particular. Everything will have to be spick and span for her.’
‘But you can’t be on your own in the house.’
‘No; I’ll call on Mrs Russell, she’s the one who’s closest to Mummy, and she’ll come in with me.’
She pretended that she was a Protestant girl being driven to Lymington House by this slow country priest. She knitted her brow again. Father Griffin started the car. She wondered what had happened with Declan, what he was doing now.
‘Are you sure you’ll be all right?’ Father Griffin asked her.
‘Perfectly sure, father, Perfectly sure. I’ll go in and then I’ll call on Mrs Russell.’
He drove along John Street and then up Davitt Avenue.
‘You can leave me here, father, and we’re very grateful to you.’
He drove her to the house. She did not want him to know that she would have to climb in the kitchen window. She would have tried anything to make him drive away.
‘I’ll take my case from the boot,’ she said nonchalantly. ‘I left it open. It’s better to reverse back down, father, easier than trying to turn here.’
She closed the door of the car and fetched her case and waved at him casually as she opened the garden gate. She walked around the side of the house without looking behind. She stood the case up, using it to reach the ledge of the kitchen window, and then levered herself up until she was able to kneel on the ledge. The clasp on the lock had been broken for years. She pulled the bottom part of the window up with all her strength. It opened just enough for her to lean in on to the draining board beside the sink, and edge her way into the kitchen. As soon as she stood up, she did not wait to close the window but went and opened the front door and found Father Griffin, as she expected, still sitting in his car looking at the house. With her right hand, she motioned him imperiously to go. She shut the door again and put her back to it, and closed her eyes. When she went into the front room and looked out of the window, she saw that he was already reversing the car; he was on his way. Now she had the house to herself.
She listened: there was no sound at all. She had never noticed silence before. It was five months since she had been in this house. She looked around the room, touched the cold tiles of the fireplace, sat on one of the armchairs. She walked into the back room and opened the curtains. It was the stillness which surprised her, the emptiness. She had thought about these rooms so much in Cush, she now expected them to come to life for her, but they did nothing. She opened the back door and collected the suitcase from under the kitchen window; she came back in and closed it. She sat in the back room and thought about Mrs Byrne’s big living-room over the shop, and everybody being nice to her because her father had died, and she shivered.
She was glad she had come back here. When she put her hand on the kitchen door handle, she had realised that her father’s hand would have touched it too, his fingerprints or the print of the palm of his hand had probably – no, definitely – been left there. His hand was dead now, lying cold in his coffin. And this house, every inch of it, had his traces imprinted on it: the chair where he sat, the cups and glasses he used must still have some trace of him, the knives and forks he touched, in all the years he would have touched every one of them. She went to the front door and touched the handle and lock that he must have touched.
Upstairs, in her parents’ bedroom, his suits and jackets and trousers and shirts and ties lay in the wardrobe. She opened the wardrobe and touched one of the suits and it swayed on its hanger. When she pushed the hangers along, she found a pair of braces that he must not have worn for years. She ran her fingers along them and then recoiled, putting all the hangers back evenly in place.
She went to the window and looked across the valley at the Turret Rocks and Vinegar Hill, and then down into the street, at the carefully tended front lawns bordered with flower-beds. There was no one on the street. The neighbours must have not seen her arriving or they would have come to knock on the door immediately.
Her father’s shoes under the bed surprised her more than anything. They needed polish on the toes, and the laces on one of them were somewhat frayed. More than anything else in the room, they suggested her father’s presence rather than his absence, as though he could arrive at any moment to sit on the bed and slip them on, and lean over to tie up the laces.
On the back of the door was her mother’s dressinggown and behind it hung two ironed white shirts. She took one of them down and held it up against her and looked in the mirror. She put her feet into his shoes, which were much too big for her. She opened the wardrobe again and found a dark grey suit. She put it on the bed and went through the ties, searching for one which was dark but not too dark, with dots or stripes. She put a few ties against the suit, as she had observed her mother do, to see if they matched, and eventually chose one with grey and white stripes on black. She opened a drawer and found a white vest and white underpants and in another drawer she found a pair of socks.
She laid the suit full-length on the bed. She put the shirt inside the jacket and stuffed the sleeves of the shirt into its arms, and opened the buttons of the shirt and put the vest inside, and then closed up the buttons. She put the tie around her own neck, as if it were her school tie, and tied a knot in it and placed it inside the collar of her father’s shirt and tightened it. Then she put the underpants inside the trousers and laid the trousers out, tying up the buttons of the fly, and tucking the shirt into the trousers. She found the socks and put one inside each shoe and placed the shoes at the bottom of the trouser legs, but they didn’t look right.
She went downstairs and picked a pile of books from the bookcase in the front room and brought them upstairs. She placed books on either side of the shoes, and, on realising that she needed more, she went downstairs and carried up another armful. She propped the shoes, the toes facing upwards, between the books.
She looked at the figure on the bed and decided he needed something else. She went downstairs to the press under the stairs where the coats were kept and she found a cap hanging on a hook. She found a small pillow in her bedroom and brought it into her parents’ room. She put the pillow resting against her parents’ pillows, close to the neck of the shirt; she placed the cap over the pillow, as though her father had fallen asleep with his cap on his face. And then she stood back and watched.
She closed the wardrobe door and the drawers, and then left the room and stood out on the landing with her eyes shut. Slowly, she walked back into the bedroom. It was the shoes that made the difference, made it seem that he was lying there asleep and she could come and lie beside him. She placed herself on her mother’s side of the bed, carefully and gingerly so as not to disturb him. She reached out and held the hand that should be there at the end of the right-hand sleeve of the jacket. She reached over and lifted the cap and kissed where his mouth should be. She snuggled up against him.
By the time she heard them, Mrs Morrissey and Mrs Maher were already in the hall. She realised she would have to move very fast and very quiedy, but she knew that if they came upstairs now she would be caught and it would be impossible to explain. She reached for the shoes and put them on the floor, leaning over the figure she had made of her father. Without making a sound, she bundled up the suit and shirt and tie and underwear and socks. She placed the books on the floor and took the clothes and the pillow and the cap and moved slowly towards her own room, knowing that the creaking floorboards would soon alert the two women downstairs to her presence. She did not have time to smooth the bedspread or check the room.
‘Oh Jesus, Mary and Joseph, is there someone upstairs?’ Mrs Morrissey shouted.
Helen shoved the clothes under her own bed and sprang to attention, calling over the bannisters.
‘It’s me! It’s Helen!’
‘Helen!’ Mrs Maher shouted. ‘You’re after giving us a terrible fright. What are you doing here in the name of God? What are you doing here? You’re meant to be down in Mrs Byrne’s.’
‘My granny said I was to come up here,’ Helen said, and then rushed into her parents’ bedroom to check that she had left nothing important on the bed. She smoothed out the bedspread and went back to the landing and walked downstairs.
‘Well,’ Mrs Maher said, ‘you gave us a fright.’ She had put white plastic bags full of large sliced pans on the kitchen table, and other bags on the draining board and the kitchen floor.
‘You shouldn’t be here on your own,’ Mrs Morrissey said. ‘If your mammy heard you were here on your own!’
‘That’s what my granny said, I was to come here,’ Helen said.
‘Well, I’ll get Jim to drive you down to Mai Byrne’s. Isn’t Declan down there?’
‘But they’re all boys down there,’ Helen said. ‘They’ll just tease me. I can’t go down there.’
‘Isn’t she very precocious! Isn’t she a little lady!’ Mrs Maher said.
For the next two hours, Helen worked with them, buttering the bread, making ham sandwiches, chicken sandwiches, salad sandwiches for people who would come back to the house after the removal of her father’s remains.
‘There’ll be a big crowd tonight,’ Mrs Maher said. ‘And an even bigger crowd tomorrow. The whole of Fianna Fail in the county Wexford will be there.’
Mrs Maher and Mrs Morrissey talked while they worked, but Helen only half listened to them. She wondered was her father in his coffin yet, and did they open the coffin again, or was it closed now for ever? She wondered if they covered his feet, or left them bare.
As each pile of sandwiches was made, it was placed back into the greaseproof wrapping paper to keep the bread fresh. Mrs Maher held a cigarette between her lips while she worked. Each time the ash grew long, Helen watched to see if it would fall into one of the sandwiches, but she always tipped it into the sink before it fell.
Mrs Morrissey hoovered the downstairs rooms. After a while, when she knew that they were both busy, Helen slipped upstairs to her room and found the underpants, the vest and the socks and put them back into the drawers where they had been. She checked downstairs again by looking over the bannisters and, when she was sure that she would remain undisturbed, she disentangled the rest of the clothes, untying the tie and putting the shirt back on its hanger. Her mother would believe, she thought, that it had wrinkled because it had been unused there so long. As she left it on the back of the door, she tried to crease the other shirt which hung there too. She put the suit back in the wardrobe and closed the wardrobe door. She flushed the toilet before she went back downstairs. She had forgotten the tie, but she knew she would be able to deal with that later.
She carried on helping their two neighbours make the sandwiches. When they were finished, Mrs Morrissey said, she could come over to their house and have her dinner and wait for her mammy to come. It would be quiet, Mrs Morrissey said, and it was a sad day and she’d have to look after her mother.