Fallen (30 page)

‘I wish I was like you, ready for anything.'

‘What are you waiting for, permission? You won't get it. Believe me, our society has more murderous concerns than deciding whether or not to let a young lady take a job in a shop.'

‘Don't mock.' I groaned and buried my face in his shoulder. ‘When you say it – you make everything seem easy. As if nothing matters but what you want.'

‘It would be a good time for a person to disappear,' he said.

‘Don't.' I was thinking of Matt. How his departure would make mine more difficult. But, if I stayed, I'd have to pretend that none of this had happened. I'd have to unlearn all I'd learned. And Eva. What lay ahead for her, what might she need from me?

Hubie stroked my arm, quite roughly at first, but then he slowed, his touch lighter, questioning. ‘I forget where I am sometimes. Have I ruined you?'

I laughed. Then I stopped laughing.

He patted my shoulder, alarmed. ‘There,' he said. ‘There.' Threads of flame in his eyes. His missing, ghostly fingers quickened on my skin.

He'd got it wrong. He thought I was crying for lost innocence, or virtue, words without colour, muscle or sinew. Words that would never bleed. I was crying because there could be no more pretence. The people who had died were dead. Every morning that I woke, I could get up or not, eat or not, admire the day or not, and it would still be true. Liam would never come home. There are things that can never be undone, thresholds to be crossed in one direction only.

I dreamed I was an island, a stony beach. The sea rose and showed itself, then sank back, sighing. It pushed at the shingle, the land a wheel it wanted to turn. It sucked the shore, shrugged and turned away, biding its time.

In that grey moment before day begins, when light is still a veil you could part with your hands and pass through, I woke, tasting salt. The air was autumnal, heavy with bonfires. But there'd been no summer yet. A stair creaked and I was wide awake, rigid with fear. Someone creeping in? No, the house settled.

There was no one there, but soon enough, too soon, there would be. I moved closer to Hubie, laid my body against his. He stirred. I closed my eyes and let my body do the seeing, felt his skin bloom and come alive against mine. ‘If there was no light, ever again,' I said, ‘would time stop?'

He rolled over. ‘We wouldn't know what time was.'

I moved under the sheet so that we were length to length. I wanted the cup of his shoulder to fit my palm like a warm egg. The fan of his ribs, the taut button of nipple springing to my mouth, the feel of his hair when I spread it the wrong way with my fingers.

I couldn't imagine returning to a life without these strange, delirious nights, or quite believe that other people lived them too. How does no one blush when they use their hands to prepare food, write letters, open doors? How do they hide their wild undernature, their inventive nocturnal selves, put on their clothes and go out about their business?

Liam wrote that he started each day wondering if he'd see
its end.
Our days lie ahead of us, already formed, waiting for us to do their living for them. Our lives live us, I think, rather than the other way around. War is the life that has chosen me. It was always waiting for me to step into it, like a pair of new boots, tight fitting. Or a skin. Once you put it on, you'll never get it off
.

This was a different kind of choosing, a new learning, savouring the mysteries of something as everyday as skin, its changing textures and appetites, its conflicted nature bringing us together and holding us apart at one and the same time.

After a while I got up and opened the shutters. I wanted to see Hubie's face. Outside, the morning was greasy and dense, yet I could see blue in it, as through a thick veil. There was a sour black smell.

‘The fires must still be burning,' he said. ‘Come back to bed.'

A person could lose herself in the flaring petals of his irises, intricate layers of jewelled colour, every shade of green and gold and brown, the dark well of his pupils.

‘Say you'll come away with me, when this is over. If you stay, you'll squander your life on what other people want from you.'

‘And if I go? Wouldn't I be giving it to you?'

‘I'd hope not.' He gathered my hair and rolled it around his hand, like a bandage, held it at the back of my head so I had to face him. ‘We could have a life of our very own making. Think of it, Katie. A place where people make special shoes and walk out on fresh snow. Where you can pace out a stretch of land and call it yours, so long as you're willing to work it.'

He was a stranger.

He was another self.

He was so close. It wasn't close enough. Every hollow in me ached for him to fill it.

He saw and said things other people never would.

It could be a life's work, learning to see what's right in front of you. You'd need companions who took you seriously.

On the windowsill, Paschal hopped up and down and pointed. He jumped to the bed and back again, chattering.

I went to see. Through the murky light, two figures holding hands moved slowly under a sky like a bruise, like spirits crossing from one world to the next through fire. A child skipped along beside them, her hands free, in the pattern of a hopscotch. Two feet, one foot, two feet. Hop, hop, hop.

My heart kicked. ‘It's Dote and May – and Tishy. They've come back.' A stab of loss, then panic: we'd be discovered.

Someone stepped out from under a tree, one of the neighbours. Dote and May stopped to talk. Tishy went to the edge of the canal and threw something into the water.

I hurried into my skirt and blouse, dragged a brush through my hair at the mirror. Hubie stood behind me. ‘You look fine.' Our reflected eyes met. I couldn't prevent my mouth from curving into a smile that lifted my chin and squared my shoulders so that I stood taller. Looking at him gave me such satisfaction. If time pinned this exact moment, fixed it like a moth to a frame, our privacy unbroken, I'd be left leaning into him forever, my spine dissolving, his face looking at mine, taking me in, the two of us wide open to each other. It was enough.

No, it would never be enough; it was only a beginning. Already, satisfaction turned towards wanting. ‘Don't look at me like that when they come in. They'll know.'

He kissed the top of my head. ‘Think about what I said. We'll talk, later.'

I splashed myself with Dote's cologne and followed him downstairs. We heard the gate, the sound of feet crunching
broken glass. They'd have news we might not want to hear. War was the same story told over and over, only the names would change. I wondered was love like that. I'd never know if I walked away from it.

Hubie opened the door and went down the steps. I disliked the sight of his back moving away from me. How could I let him go? Beyond him, across the road, the canal was full, full as I felt, brimming and ready to spill. The air smouldered, hard to breathe. Chunks of charred matter and singed paper a black snow falling. So many disembodied words flying free, they made my head swim. I plucked a tattered scrap from the air. It turned to dust and soot in my palm. Imagine manuscripts, like Dote's, all the years of work and thought and dedication lost. Imagine all the proofs of your existence gone – who you were, everything you'd ever done, or planned to do. Everything lost, everything starting again.

A breeze sounded in my ear,
choose
. Somewhere, someone wept, as well someone should. I wished for rain, to wash away the smoke and murderous grime of the coming day. Going down the steps after him, I breasted the smutty fog as swans breast water. There was the full span of my foot, there my weight and there the solid ground.

This is a work of fiction, and its main characters and their predicaments are wholly imagined. But it is set in a very particular time and place, against the backdrop of two great conflicts, and I have relied on many sources, published and unpublished, to help me depict its settings and atmospheres. Vera Brittain's books are an essential resource for anyone interested in the Great War, and in particular its effect on soldiers' families.
Letters from a Lost Generation
was invaluable to me in trying to think my way into the mindset of a soldier. The scene in which the Crilly family receives Liam's personal effects has its origins in Brittain's account of Roland Leighton's effects, although she is far more eloquent and expository than I am. Other sources on the Great War that I have found useful include Myles Dungan's
Irish Voices from the Great War
, Correlli Barnett's
The Great War
, Robert Graves's
Goodbye to All That
and
The Ways of War
by Tom Kettle and Mary Sheehy Kettle. The exemplary
firstworldwar.com
was invaluable.

James Stephens's
The Insurrection in Dublin
is a contemporaneous account of the Easter Rising by an eyewitness; other first-hand accounts are contained in Roger McHugh's
Dublin 1916
and Alfred Fannin's
Letters from Dublin, Easter 1916
, among others. Max Caulfield's
The Easter Rebellion
remains one of the most vivid fact-based accounts, while Charles Townshend's more recent
Easter 1916
:
The Irish Rebellion
is authoritative and comprehensive.

Sean J. Murphy's article ‘The Gardiner Family, Dublin, and Mountjoy, County Tyrone', available on his website, provided the basis for the lecture Katie and Bill attend in the Mansion House.

Two evocative books that helped me to think about Dublin's atmospheres during this period are
Dublin 1911
, edited by Catriona Crowe, and Christiaan Corlett's
Darkest Dublin
.

Anne Enright saved this novel from the shredder not once but twice. Blame her. A residency at the Centre Culturel Irlandais in Paris turned it inside out and lit it from the inside. Huge thanks to everyone there, especially Sheila Pratschke; and to Gail Ritchie, fellow resident, with whom I shared many adventures in Paris graveyards and late-night conversations about dead soldiers and history's many forms of amnesia. A bursary from the Arts Council/An Chomhairle Ealaíon arrived at a crucial moment: many thanks to them.

Thanks to members of writing groups past and present for their patient encouragement, and to the loyal readers of early drafts: Sheila Barret, Celia de Fréine, Catherine Dunne, Simon and Vanessa Robinson. Also to participants at the ‘Women, War and Letters' conference in the University of Limerick in 2012, and in particular its organizers, Tina O'Toole and Meg Harper. Anna South gave generous and practical advice when I needed it.

For information, books, sources and enthusiasm, I am indebted to: Robert Towers and Mary Fitzgerald, Dermot and Maura Hourihane, Davis Coakley, Ronan Fanning, Tony Farmar, Kate Lochrin, Martina Devlin, Luz Mar Gonzalez Arias, Sheila McGilligan and Ann Marie Hourihane. For help with sources: the Royal College of Physicians of Ireland, the Research Reading Room at Dublin City Library and Archive (Pearse Street), the National Library of Ireland, the National Museum of Ireland at Collins Barracks (especially Enda Greenan), the Imperial War Museum (London) and Gerard Whelan at the Royal Dublin Society Library and Archives.
Pearse Quinlan at Mr Fax was an indefatigable supplier of paper and toner at crucial moments.

Thanks to everyone at Penguin Ireland, especially Brendan Barrington, who put manners on it as only he can. Also to Donna Poppy for her keen eye and attention to detail.

It can't be easy to live with someone who's hatching a novel. Simon, Zita, Emma, Nessa, Peter, Eoghan and Ryan did so with grace and good humour, and Isabella arrived just in time to help us see it off.