Light A Penny Candle (21 page)

David Gray was forbidden to come near the house again by Tony. There had been great threats about how the Grays would react if they had been told the circumstances. Joannie spent what she always called the worst hours of her life begging Tony to believe that it would not help if Mummy were informed. Mummy went mad over things, and she would never go to Dublin for the day and shop again if she was given a confused account. Tony had said, ‘In Mummy’s bedroom, of all places, of all places. On Mummy’s bed.’

Aisling only heard it in fits and starts. She had called round to the Murrays’ as arranged at seven that evening when the picnic should have been finished and shortly before Joannie’s mother was meant to return from Dublin. Instead of exciting details and perhaps a glimpse of David fleeing into the distance … Joannie sat red-faced at the kitchen table with Tony. Lord, he must have seem them coming back from the picnic. Oh Lord, what a desperate bit of luck. Joannie sounded funny and distant.

‘Oh Aisling, it’s not such a good time, I’m having this sort of chat with Tony. …’

‘Sure. …’ Aisling was puzzled. But she took the message. ‘Hallo Tony, you back for a holiday?’

‘Sort of,’ Tony grunted. He was the one of the family she knew least. He was the eldest, nearly twenty-eight
now
. He seemed to have got good-looking since she had seen him some months ago, or maybe he was good-looking because he was obviously in a very bad temper. People got good-looking when their eyes flashed and their jaws got grim. Aisling had discovered this from reading and from the films.

‘Right, I’ll be off, will you come round to my place later or … what?’ she asked Joannie.

‘Aren’t you going to ask her how she feels, or was the whole school in on this?’ Tony enquired.

‘Yeah, sure, that’s what I came round for, to know are you all right? Maybe it’s flu, Sister Catherine was. …’

‘I’ll see you tomorrow,’ Joannie said.

‘Right,’ Aisling said huffily, and swung out. Next day at school, Joannie, still red-eyed, had given substance to the belief that she hadn’t been well. In fact, Sister Catherine was moved to wonder should she have taken another day to make sure she had recovered. Apparently she was saved by the skin of her teeth; Tony had seen sense, she had promised not to get involved with anyone, least of all the Grays. She had tried to explain to Tony that they were doing nothing only fooling around, but he had got into a worse humour at everything she said.

‘And were you only fooling around?’ Aisling asked eagerly. Joannie was distant.

‘That’s not the point, the point is that he came back.’ She had a look of such disappointment on her face that Aisling decided not to pursue the technical details, they could wait.

‘Why did he come back anyway?’ she asked.

‘He’s got fed up of Limerick, he came back to ask Mummy could he start working in our business here, you know take over himself sort of. He says he knows everything, and he got restless yesterday and drove back to talk to Mummy about it. Oh dear God, why couldn’t he have got restless today instead of yesterday? Tell me God, why did you let him get restless yesterday?’

‘I suppose to prevent you from committing a mortal sin,’ Aisling said seriously. When you thought about it, God was very devious.

Tony Murray moved back to Kilgarret that autumn. It seemed to take him a long time to forget what he regarded as a great transgression, and a sign of his little sister’s weak moral character. Since Aisling had cunningly been freed from any complicity in what had happened, she was not regarded with suspicion and she could come and go as she wished. Aisling wondered would Sean have felt the same and been so difficult about it if he had been alive. But then the thought of being with anyone on Mam and Dad’s bed was so unlikely, and the house being empty ever was so unlikely, you couldn’t really compare it. Anyway, the thought of going all the way seemed even less likely than ever now that Joannie, who would have been her only companion in that field, was virtually under lock and key.

The nuns had given Mam and Dad the depressing opinion that Aisling was not of a scholarly frame of mind.
Like
Maureen, she would probably be more successful in work where no great further study was required.

‘Don’t ever let Maureen know they said that about it not being a studying kind of a life,’ Mam had said. ‘The poor girl is demented by all those books on anatomy and physiology. She’d go up to the school and go for them if she were to know that. …’

Aisling didn’t mind one way or the other. The school suggested that she went to the local commercial college also run by their nuns. Here she could learn shorthand, typing, commercial English and book-keeping. It sounded better than going back to do the sixth year and study for her Leaving Certificate. Joannie was leaving anyway and going to a school in France for a year. It wasn’t a finishing school, it was a French convent where they would learn to speak French perfectly, and do sewing and cooking. Tony had been very keen on the idea and Mrs Murray thought it seemed sensible too. It would make a lady out of her. Mam had smiled when Aisling had told her that.

‘That’s why I was sent to the convent in Liverpool, and look what happened to me. And that’s why poor Violet was sent there too. Ladies indeed.’

‘You’re much more of a lady than Elizabeth’s mother,’ said Aisling loyally.

Mam was pleased but she pretended not to be. ‘We don’t know what’s going on in Violet’s mind,’ she said.

‘Well, at least you didn’t break up your marriage and go off and live with someone in sin and pretend it was all Dad’s fault.’

‘No,’ Mam said thoughtfully, ‘at least I didn’t do that.’

Dad wasn’t pleased that the nuns had said Aisling was not academic. He had been in a bad humour anyway and the news made him worse. While the door was still open Aisling heard him complaining bitterly.

‘Fine lot of children we reared. The one couldn’t wait to go and throw his life away for the British, another is meant to be in a job that doesn’t need much brain work. We were told at the time that it was the devil and all getting her into that hospital.’

‘Will you stop that…’ Mam interrupted.

‘I will not stop. I’ve Eamonn standing like a corner boy in the shop with a crowd of thick louts in and out looking for him, Donal is so sickly the Lord knows what we’ll make out of him, Niamh is a spoiled madam and the only one we had any hopes for, those bloody nuns say, “she’s not academic, she’s not the studying type”. Well what was she with them all those bloody years for …?’

‘Sean.’ Mam’s voice was stronger.

‘Now, what are you putting on that face for? Things are not all right. What are you and I breaking our backsides working for, what’s the whole thing for, Eileen, if the children aren’t going to get on, and do better than we did and …?’ Dad’s voice was a bit shaky but he shouted. ‘I mean if there’s any purpose in the whole thing isn’t it that the children will do well …?’ Aisling didn’t hear what Mam said because Mam had banged the door shut very firmly.

*

Elizabeth wrote when she heard that Aisling was going to the commercial college. She said she had a memory of it being a second-best sort of place.

… I know I sound preachy, but is there any point in going there if it’s not the place that will give you the qualifications? Yes, I can hear Sister Catherine’s voice too, but they’re right. It’s something like having the right clothes and implements to climb a mountain. And isn’t life like a rotten mountain most of the time? I think you should go back to the convent and do the awful old stuff and get your Leaving Certificate, and then go to the commercial college, because once you had the exam, you’d be safe. Or that’s what I think.

Aisling had thought about it. In a way Elizabeth was right. In a way it would be marvellous to cock a snook at the nuns, to put her finger to her nose and say, I got my Leaving and you told my Dad I was an ignoramus. … Yes, in a way. But it would be so hard, and she was miles behind, miles. And she couldn’t bear being with all those creepy ones who were brainy and who would think she had ideas above her station. And she’d look so silly crawling back and saying that she had been wrong not to have worked harder. It would be admitting that all her antics up to now had only been an act. No. She was going to go to the commercial school. She would get a good job from there, she’d do the kind of work she liked doing, not learning rivers and kinds of soil and trade winds in
geography
, and all the terms of the treaties and the lists of the penal laws, and all the endless, endless things in history.

At least typing and book-keeping would be new, and shorthand, and she would start equal to everyone else, and this time she would work and come out top of the whole year… then she’d get herself a great job with maybe a bank manager or open an insurance office. And then that yellow-faced Sister Catherine with her thin whining voice wouldn’t be able to make sarcastic remarks, and Dad wouldn’t feel that it hadn’t been worthwhile to have her, and Mam would be delighted and say that Aisling had great spirit, and Elizabeth would write one of her letters and say she had been all wrong, that Aisling had done the right thing.

Aisling wished that Elizabeth were here. It was silly to have a best friend miles away in England studying in a blue bedroom instead of here in Kilgarret where she should be.

There were bridge classes two nights a week in the old WVS Hall. The fee of one and sixpence a night meant that only respectable people would attend, and it included tea and biscuits. Elizabeth enrolled Father and herself as soon as she saw the poster.

‘I don’t want to learn to play bridge,’ said Father.

‘Neither do I, but we’d better. Let’s look on it as some kind of survival raft.’ After four lessons, they began to enjoy it.

One night as they walked home together, he said, ‘Once you realise that none of it means what it says, it’s quite interesting.’

‘How do you mean?’ Elizabeth was thinking about Aunt Eileen. She hadn’t told her about the proposed bridge classes when last she wrote. Aunt Eileen would have approved of her being kind to Father but only wealthy Protestant people like the Grays played it in Kilgarret.

‘Well when you say two spades, it doesn’t mean that you have two spades. In fact it needn’t mean any spades at all. It’s just a code. It’s a way of telling your partner you have a fairly reasonable hand in most things. …’ Father was what might even be called animated. Elizabeth was about to tuck her hand into his arm, but she held back. If she did it once, then Father would expect her to be that kind of person always. They didn’t touch each other. They were managing very well on this formal level. Better keep it like that.

‘I know what you mean,’ she said seriously, ‘but then I think a lot of conversations become like that as you get older. Sort of code, not saying what you mean, and hoping everyone else knows the rules.’

Mother did write quite a lot as it turned out. Elizabeth had expected the rare and rushed notes which had come with a leaden sense of duty around them all the time she had been in Kilgarret. She didn’t write much about life now with Harry, nor did she enquire about life in Clarence
Gardens
. Instead she talked of the old days, as if Elizabeth was a contemporary who might remember them with her. She talked about how they had been to tennis parties when she was young, parties where sometimes ten servants stood around with glasses of home-made lemonade which were poured from big glass jugs. Ten servants, standing all afternoon in the heat, while little madams and little masters flung their racquets on the ground or their sweaters and expected them to be picked up.

Elizabeth read these letters carefully. She didn’t know whether Mother sounded wistful for those days, or if she was condemning their selfishness. Eventually she decided that Mother was belatedly trying to tell her something about her life, so perhaps the best thing to do was to reply in the same way, in generalities, telling little anecdotes. Elizabeth discussed the school and compared it to the convent in Ireland; she wrote about the odd people they met at bridge evenings; she sometimes enquired whether there was some way she didn’t know of to make a cake without the fruit all sinking to the bottom, or how to let down a skirt without the hem looking awful. Mother sent her a cookery book eagerly and told her about putting a ribbon or a braid around the edge of the skirt and seemed very pleased to have been asked. Elizabeth tried to think of some household query each week.

She thought that Mother was lonely, she knew that Father was lonely, she felt that Aisling would have nothing to say to her these days and only wrote when Aunt Eileen wrote. She worried that Aunt Eileen was too busy and was
only
making up nice things to ask like she made up for Mother. She knew that Monica Hart thought she was a boring swot nowadays, no fun, and no use as a decoy for the various young men, since she insisted on staying at home and studying.

And she didn’t even have the satisfaction of being a brilliant scholar after all this work. She just managed to keep at the top section of her form. Nobody considered her an outstanding pupil, it took her longer than it took the bright girls to understand what was being explained, but she worried at it like a dog at a bone. She would stand shyly beside the mathematics teacher who would look at her with exasperation.

‘I’ve been explaining this all week and you kept nodding, why didn’t you say you didn’t understand …?’ Then the explanation, quick and often impatient, but usually kind. It wasn’t usual to find a sixteen-year-old who would stand humbly after school, hair falling over her face, and admit that she wanted to understand complicated things but couldn’t. The teachers usually had the world neatly divided: either they understood and could do it and were a reward to you, or they didn’t and never would and idled their way through the school years. Elizabeth fell into neither category.

The art master, Mr Brace, had a lot of time for her. She had been taught nothing at that school in Ireland, he told the other teachers in the staff room. He had asked her what she had done in art class and apparently it had only been pictures of the Virgin Mary, or scenes illustrating the
mysteries
of the rosary. The other teachers shook their heads absently. Irish convents were indeed full of all kinds of mysteries, but then Mr Brace with his liking for beer at lunchtime was not to be relied on for a factual description. The girls in the school called him Beer-Belly-Brace behind his back and complained to each other that he had smelly breath, but Elizabeth liked him. He explained things to her easily, as if she were on his own level. He used to ask her more and more questions about the convent school. His first wife had been a Roman Catholic but she had never mentioned the mysteries of the rosary. She, in turn, had never thought of perspective before Mr Brace explained it to her, and she flushed happily when he held up her still life as the best in the group. She even enjoyed his history of art classes, which none of the others even listened to. When he held up reproductions of the Old Masters, partly obscured by his dirty thumb-nail, she would look with interest at the picture rather than at Mr Brace’s stomach or finger-nails and she would try to imagine a world of castles and palaces and people with strange closed faces because they were princes. She was very familiar with the Madonna pictures but wondered why they hadn’t painted any of Our Lady of Lourdes; the school in Kilgarret had been full of Lourdes pictures.