Antarctica (10 page)

‘What would I do that for?’ he says.

‘And you’re supposed to be the one with all the brains,’ I say. ‘Gobshite.’

I walk across the floor and tap Sarah Combs on the back. I tap a rib. She turns, her wide patent belt gleaming in the light that is spilling from the globe above our heads.

‘Excuse me,’ I say, like I’m going to ask her the time.

‘Tee-hee,’ she says, looking down at me. Her eyeballs are cracked like the teapot on our dresser.

‘I want to dance with Daddy.’

At the word ‘Daddy’ her face changes and she loosens her grip on my father. I take over. The man on the stage is blowing his trumpet now. My father holds my hand tight, like a punishment. I can see my mother on the bench, reaching into her bag for a hanky. Then she goes to the Ladies. There’s a feeling like hatred all around Da. I get the feeling he’s helpless, but I don’t care. For the first time in my life I have some power. I can butt in and take over, rescue and be rescued.

There’s a general hullabaloo towards midnight. Everybody’s out on the floor, knees buckling, handbags swinging. The Nerves Moran counts down the seconds to the New Year and then there’s kissing and hugging. Strange men squeeze me, kiss me like they’re thirsty and I’m water.

My parents do not kiss. In all my life, back as far as I remember, I have never seen them touch. Once I took a friend upstairs to show her the house.

‘This is Mammy’s room, and this is Daddy’s room,’ I said.

‘Your parents don’t sleep in the same bed?’ she said in a voice of pure amazement. And that was when I suspected that our family wasn’t normal.

The band picks up the pace. Oh hokey, hokey, pokey!

‘Work off them turkey dinners, shake off them plum puddings!’ shouts The Nerves Moran and even the
ballroom
show-offs give up on their figures of eight and do the twist and jive around, and I shimmy around and knock my backside against the mart fella’s backside and wind up swinging with a stranger.

Everybody stands for the national anthem. Da is wiping his forehead with a handkerchief and Seamus is panting because he’s not used to the exercise. The lights come up and nothing is the same. People are red-faced and sweaty; everything’s back to normal. The
auctioneer
takes over the microphone and thanks a whole lot of different people, and then they auction off a Charolais calf and a goat and batches of tea and sugar and buns and jam, plum puddings and mince pies. There’s
pebbles
where the goat stood and I wonder who’ll clean it up. Not until the very last does the raffle take place. The auctioneer holds out the cardboard box of stubs to the blonde.

‘Dig deep,’ he says. ‘No peeping. First prize a bottle of whiskey.’

She takes her time, lapping up the attention.

‘Come on,’ he says, ‘good girl, it’s not the sweepstakes.’

She hands him the ticket.

‘It’s a – What colour is that would ya say, Jimmy? It’s a
salmon-coloured ticket, number seven hundred and twenty-five. Seven two five. Serial number 3
X
429
H
. I’ll give ye that again.’

It’s not mine, but I’m close. I don’t want the whiskey anyhow; it’d be kept for the pet lambs. I’d rather the box of Afternoon Tea biscuits that’s coming up next. There’s a general shuffle, a search in handbags, arse pockets. The auctioneer calls out the numbers a few times and it looks like he’ll have to draw again when Mammy rises from her seat. Head held high, she walks in a straight line across the floor. A space opens in the crowd; people step aside to let her pass. Her new high-heeled shoes say clippety-clippety on the slippy floor and her red skirt is flaring. I have never seen her do this. Usually she’s too shy, gives me the tickets, and I run up and collect the prize.

‘Do ya like a drop of the booze, do ya, missus?’ The Nerves Moran asks, reading her ticket. ‘Sure wouldn’t it keep ya warm on a night like tonight. No woman needs a man if she has a drop of Power’s. Isn’t that right? Seven twenty-five, that’s the one.’

My mother is standing there in her elegant clothes and it’s all wrong. She doesn’t belong up there.

‘Let’s check the serial numbers now,’ he says, drawing it out. ‘I’m sorry, missus, wrong serial number. The hubby may keep you warm again tonight. Back to the old reliable.’

My mother turns and walks clippety-clippety back down the slippy floor, with everybody knowing she
thought she’d won when she didn’t win. And suddenly she is no longer walking, but running, running down in the bright white light, past the cloakroom, towards the door, her hair flailing out like a horse’s tail behind her.

Out in the car park snow has accumulated on the trampled grass, the evergreen shelter beds, but the
tarmac
is wet and shiny in the headlights of cars leaving. Thick, unwavering moonlight shines steadily down on the earth. Ma, Seamus and me sit into the car, shivering, waiting for Da. We can’t turn on the engine to heat the car because Da has the keys. My feet are cold as stones. A cloud of greasy steam rises from the open hatch of the chip van, a fat brown sausage painted on the chrome. All around us people are leaving, waving, calling out ‘Goodnight!’ and ‘Happy New Year!’ They’re collecting their chips and driving off.

The chip van has closed its hatch and the car park is empty when Da comes out. He gets into the driver’s seat, the ignition catches, a splutter, and then we’re off, climbing the hill outside the village, winding around the narrow roads towards home.

‘That wasn’t a bad band,’ Da says.

Mammy says nothing.

‘I said, there was a bit of life in that band.’ Louder this time.

Still Mammy says nothing.

My father begins to sing ‘Far Away in Australia’. He always sings when he’s angry, lets on he’s in a good humour when he’s raging. The lights of the town are
behind us now. These roads are dark. We pass houses with lighted candles in the windows, bulbs blinking on Christmas trees, sheets of newspaper held down on the windscreens of parked cars. Da stops singing before the end of the song.

‘Did you see aer a nice little thing in the hall, Seamus?’

‘Nothing I’d be mad about.’

‘That blonde was a nice bit of stuff.’

I think about the mart, all the men at the rails bidding for heifers and ewes. I think about Sarah Combs and how she always smells of grassy perfume when we go to her house.

The chestnut tree’s boughs at the end of our lane are caked with snow. Da stops the car and we roll back a bit until he puts his foot on the brake. He is waiting for Mammy to get out and open the gates.

Mammy doesn’t move.

‘Have you got a pain?’ he says to her.

She looks straight ahead.

‘Is that door stuck or what?’ he says.

‘Open it yourself.’

He reaches across her and opens her door, but she slams it shut.

‘Get out there and open that gate!’ he barks at me.

Something tells me I should not move.

‘Seamus!’ he shouts. ‘Seamus!’

There’s not a budge out of any of us.

‘By Jeeesus!’ he says.

I am afraid. Outside, one corner of my
THIS WAY
SANTA
sign has come loose; the soggy cardboard flaps in the wind. Da turns to my mother, his voice filled with venom.

‘And you walking up in your finery in front of all the neighbours, thinking you won first prize in the raffle.’ He laughs and opens his door. ‘Running like a tinker out of the hall.’

He gets out and there’s rage in his walk, as if he’s walking on hot coals. He sings: ‘Far Away in Australia!’ He is reaching up, taking the wire off the gate, when a gust of wind blows his hat off. The gates swing open. He stoops to retrieve his hat, but the wind nudges it further from his reach. He takes another few steps and stoops again to retrieve it, but again it is blown just out of his reach. I think of Santa Claus using the same wrapping paper as us, and suddenly I understand. There is only one obvious explanation.

My father is getting smaller. It feels as if the trees are moving, the chestnut tree whose green hands shelter us in summer is backing away. Then I realise it’s the car. We are rolling, sliding backwards. No handbrake and I am not out there putting the stone behind the wheel. And that is when Mammy gets behind the wheel. She slides over into my father’s seat, the driver’s seat, and puts her foot on the brake. We stop going backwards. She revs up the engine and puts the car in gear. The gear-box grinds – she hasn’t the clutch in far enough – but then there’s a splutter and we’re moving. Mammy is taking us forward, past the Santa sign, past my father, who has
stopped singing, through the open gates. She drives us through the snow-covered woods. I can smell the pines. When I look back, my father is standing there watching our tail-lights. The snow is falling on him, on his bare head, on the hat that he is holding in his hands.

It is customary for the Porters to send a postcard to say when they will be arriving. Betty waits. Each time the dog barks she finds herself going to the window at the foot of the stairs, looking out through the maidenhair fern to see if the postman is cycling up the avenue. It is almost June. The chill has slackened off; plums are getting plumper on the trees. The Porters will soon come, demanding strange foods, fresh handkerchiefs,
hot-water
bottles, ice.

Louisa, Betty’s sister, went away to England when she was young and married Stanley Porter, a salesman who fell for her, he said, because of the way her hair fell down her back. Louisa always had beautiful hair. When they were young, Betty brushed it every night, one hundred strokes, and secured the gold braid with a piece of satin ribbon.

Betty’s own hair is, and always has been, an
unremarkable
brown. Her hands were always her best feature, white, lady-like hands that played the organ on Sundays. Now, after years of work, her hands are ruined, the skin on her palms is hard and masculine, the knuckles enlarged; her mother’s wedding band cannot be removed.

Betty lives in the homestead, the big house, as it is called. It once belonged to a Protestant landlord who sold up and moved away after a childless marriage ended. The Land Commission, who bought the estate, knocked down the three-storey section of the house and sold the remaining two-storey servants’ quarters and the surrounding seventy acres to Betty’s father for a small sum when he married. The house looks too small for the garden and too close to the yard, but its
ivy-covered
walls look handsome nonetheless. The granite archway leads to a yard with stables, a barn and lofty sheds, coach houses, kennels and a spout-house. There’s a fine walled orchard at the back in which the landlord grazed an Angus bull to keep the children out, seeing as he had none of his own. The place has a history, a past. People said Parnell had a tooth pulled in the parlour. The big kitchen has a barred window, an Aga and the deal table Betty scrubs on Saturdays. The white, marble fireplace in the parlour suits the mahogany furniture. A staircase curves on to a well-lighted landing with oak doors opening into three large bedrooms overlooking the yard, and a bathroom Betty had plumbed in when her father became ill.

Betty, too, had wanted to go to England, but she stayed back to keep house. Their mother died suddenly when Betty and Louisa were small. She went out to gather wood one afternoon and dropped dead coming back through the meadow. It seemed natural for Betty, being the eldest, to step into her mother’s shoes and
mind her father, a humoursome man given to violent fits of temper. She hadn’t an easy life. There were cattle to be herded and tested, pigs to fatten, turkeys to be sent off on the train to Dublin before Christmas. They cut the meadow in summer and harvested a field of oats in autumn.

Her father gave instructions and did less and less, paid a man to come in and do the hardest work. He
criticised
the veterinary bills, insulted the priest who came to anoint him when he was ill, belittled Betty’s cooking and claimed that nothing was as it should have been. Nothing was the way it used to be, he meant. He hated change. Towards the end he’d put on his black overcoat and walk the fields, seeing how tall the grass was in the meadow, counting the grains of corn on the stalks, noting the thinness of a cow or the rust on a gate. Then he would come inside just before dark and say, ‘Not much time left. Not much time.’

‘Don’t be morbid,’ Betty used to answer, and
continued
on; but last winter her father took to his bed, and for the three days preceding his death he lay there roaring and kicking his feet, calling for ‘Buttermilk! Buttermilk!’ When he died on a Tuesday night, by willing himself to die, Betty was more relieved than sorry.

Betty kept track of Louisa’s progress through the years; her wedding, which she did not attend, the birth of her children, one boy and one girl, what Louisa had wanted. She sent a fruit cake through the post every Christmas, home-made fudge at Easter, and remembered
the children’s birthdays, put pound notes she could not spare in cards.

Betty had been too busy for marriage. She had once walked out with a young Protestant man named Cyril Dawe her father disapproved of. Nothing ever came of it. The time for marriage and children passed for Betty. She became used to attending to her father’s needs in the big house, quelling his temper, making his strong tea, ironing his shirts and polishing his good shoes on a Saturday night.

After his death she managed to live by renting out the land and cautiously spending the savings her father had left in the Allied Irish Bank. She was fifty years old. The house was hers, but a clause was put in her father’s will that gave Louisa right of residence for the duration of her lifetime. Her father had always favoured Louisa. She had given him the admiration he needed, whereas Betty only fed and clothed and pacified him.

When June passes without word from the Porters, Betty becomes uneasy. She pictures the lettuce and the scallions rotting in the vegetable patch, toys with the notion of renting a guest house by the sea, of going off to Ballymoney or Cahore Point; but in her heart she knows she won’t. She never goes anywhere. All she ever does is cook and clean and milk the cow she keeps for the house, attends mass on Sundays. But she likes it this way, likes having the house to herself, knowing things are as she left them.

An overwhelming sense of freedom has accompanied
the days since her father’s death. She pulls weeds, keeps the gardens tidy, goes out with the secateurs on
Saturdays
to cut flowers for the altar. She does the things she never had time to do before: she crochets, blues the lace curtains, replaces the bulb in the Sacred Heart lamp, scrapes the moss off the horse trough and paints the archway gate. She can make jam later on when the fruit ripens. She can pit the potatoes and pickle the tomatoes in the greenhouse. Nothing, really, will go to waste if the Porters do not come. She is getting used to this idea of living through the summer alone, is humming a tune softly and weighing candied peel on the scales, when the postman wheels the bicycle up to the door.

‘They’re coming on the ninth off the evening ferry, Miss Elizabeth,’ he says. ‘They’re coming as far as Enniscorthy on the bus. You’ll have to send a car.’ He puts the card on the dresser and slides the kettle over on the hot plate to make himself some tea. ‘Not a bad day.’

Betty nods. She has only four days to get the house ready. They could have given her more notice. It seems strange, their not bringing the car, Stanley’s big company car that he always takes such pride in.

The next morning she throws out her father’s old vests she’s used as dusters, carries the empty stout bottles up the wood and dumps them under the bushes. She takes out rugs and beats them with more vigour than is necessary, raises a flurry of dust. She hides old bedspreads at the back of the wardrobe, turns the mattresses and puts the good sheets on the beds. She always
keeps good bed-linen in case she’ll get sick and she wouldn’t want the doctor or the priest saying her sheets are patched. She takes all the cracked and chipped plates off the dresser and arranges the good willow-pattern dinner set on the shelves. She orders bags of flour and sugar and wheaten meal from the grocer, gets down on her knees and polishes the floor until it shines.

They arrive in the avenue on a hot Friday evening. Betty takes off her apron when the taxi beeps the horn and rushes out into the avenue to greet them.

‘Oh Betty!’ Louisa says, as if she’s surprised to see her there.

She embraces Louisa, who looks as young as ever in her white summer two-piece, her hair hanging in gold waves down her back. Her bare arms are brown with the sun.

Her son, Edward, has grown tall and lanky, a hidden young man who prefers to stay indoors; he extends a cold palm, which Betty shakes. There is little feeling in his handshake. The girl, Ruth, skips down to the old
tennis
court without so much as a word of hello.

‘Come back here and kiss your Aunt Betty!’ Louisa screams.

‘Where’s Stanley?’

‘Oh he’s busy, had to work, you know,’ Louisa says. ‘He may follow on later.’

‘Well, you’re looking great, as usual.’

Louisa’s prominent white teeth are too plentiful for her smile. She accepts but does not return the
compliment
.
The taxi-man is taking suitcases off the roof-rack. There is an awful lot of luggage. They’ve brought a black Labrador and books and pillows and wellingtons, a flute, raincoats, a chessboard and woolly jumpers.

‘We brought cheese,’ Louisa says, and hands Betty a slab of pungent Cheddar.

‘How thoughtful,’ Betty says, and sniffs it.

Louisa stands at the front gates and gazes out towards Mount Leinster with its ever-lighted mast, and the lush deciduous forest in the valley.

‘Oh, Betty,’ she says, ‘it’s so lovely to be home.’

‘Come on in.’

Betty has the table set; two kettles stand boiling on the Aga, their spouts expelling pouty little breaths of steam. A pool of evening sunlight falls through the barred
window
over the cold roast chickens and potato salad.

‘Poor Coventry was put in a cage for the entire
journey
,’ Louisa says, referring to the dog. He has slumped down in front of the dresser and Betty has to slide him across the lino to get the cupboard doors open.

‘Any beetroot, Aunt Elizabeth?’ Edward asks.

Betty has taken great care washing the lettuce but now finds herself hoping an earwig won’t crawl out of the salad bowl. Her eyesight isn’t what it used to be. She scalds the teapot and cuts a loaf of brown bread into thin, dainty slices.

‘I need the toilet!’ Ruth announces.

‘Take your elbows off the table,’ Louisa instructs, and removes a hair from the butter dish.

There is too much pepper in the salad dressing and the rhubarb tart could have used more sugar, but all that’s left is a few potato skins, chicken bones, greasy dishes.

When evening falls, Louisa says she’d like to sleep with Betty.

‘It’ll be like old times,’ she says. ‘You can brush my hair.’

She has developed an English accent, which Betty doesn’t care for. Betty does not want Louisa in her bed. She likes being sprawled out on her double mattress, waking and sleeping when she feels like it, but she can’t say no. She puts Edward in her father’s room and Ruth in the other and helps Louisa drag her luggage up the stairs.

Louisa pours two measures of duty-free vodka into glasses and talks about the improvements she has made to the house in England Betty has never seen. She describes the satin floor-length curtains in the living room, which cost £25 a yard, the velvet headboards, the dishwasher that sterilises the dishes and the tumble dryer that means she doesn’t have to race out to the line every time a drop of rain falls.

‘No wonder Stanley’s working,’ Betty says, and sips the vodka. She doesn’t care for the taste; it reminds her of the holy water she drank as a child, thinking it would cure her stomach aches.

‘Don’t you miss Daddy?’ Louisa says suddenly. ‘He always had such a warm welcome for us.’

Betty gives her a straight look, feels the ache in her arms after the four days’ work.

‘Oh. I don’t mean you –’

‘I know what you mean,’ Betty says. ‘No, I don’t really miss him. He was so contrary towards the end. Going out to the fields and talking about death. But then, you brought out the sweeter side of him.’

Her father used to hold Louisa in a tight embrace when she arrived home, then stood back to look at her. He used to tell Betty to keep fig rolls in the house because she had a taste for figs. Nothing was ever too good for Louisa.

Now she unpacks her clothes, holding them up for Betty to admire. There’s a linen dress with pink
butterflies
swooping towards the tail, a glittery scarf, a burgundy lace slip, a cashmere jacket, leather peep-toe shoes. She takes the cap off a bottle of American perfume and holds it out for Betty to sniff, but she does not spray a sample on her wrist. Louisa’s clothes have the luxurious feel of money. The hems are deep, the linings satin, her shoes have leather insoles. She takes a covetous pride in her belongings, but then Louisa has always been the fashionable one.

Before she went to England Louisa got a job
housekeeping
for a rich woman in Killiney. Once, Betty took the train to Dublin to spend a day with her. When Louisa saw her at Heuston station with her country suit and her brown handbag, she whipped the handbag from her hands, fast as greased lightning, and said,
‘Where do you think you’re going with that old thing?’ and pushed it down in her shopping bag.

Now she sits at the dressing table, singing an old Latin hymn while Betty brushes her hair. Betty listens to her girlish voice and, catching a glimpse of their reflection in the mirror, realises that nobody would ever suspect they were sisters. Louisa with her gold hair and emerald earrings, looking so much younger than her years: Betty with her brown hair and her man’s hands and the age showing so plainly on her face.

‘Chalk and cheese’ was the phrase their mother used.

Edward wants a poached egg for breakfast. He sits at the head of the table and waits for it to be put in front of him. Betty stands at the Aga stirring porridge while Louisa, still in her nightdress, looks into the cupboards, inspecting their contents, seeing what there is to eat.

‘I’m starving!’ Ruth says. She’s plump for a girl of her age.

None of them do anything simply or quietly; they don’t mind taking up space, asking for more of this or that. On those rare occasions when Betty goes into anyone’s house, she is thankful for what she gets and washes the dishes afterwards; but the Porters act like they own the place.

Louisa makes cheese on toast for Ruth but eats little herself. She just pushes her eggs around her plate with a fork and sips her tea.

‘You’re miles away,’ Betty says.