No Peace for Amelia (13 page)

T
hough she was conscious at the time, Amelia never could recall how she got home that day. She
certainly
didn’t travel under her own steam. Dorothea
arranged
it all, she knew that, and somebody drove them to Casimir Road, but she couldn’t even tell afterwards if they went by motor car or in a horse-drawn vehicle.

She remembered standing on the doorstep, supported by Dorothea’s friendly arm, and she noticed particularly that the irises had faded. The daffodils had died off earlier in the week, after their last splurge of golden glory on Easter Day, but this was the first time that she noticed the irises, the
remains
of the flowers hanging like shameful and sickly rags on watery green stems. When Mary Ann opened the door, Amelia broke out of Dorothea’s encircling arm and stepped forward. Mary Ann’s arms went around her.

‘What ails you, my pet lamb?’ said Mary Ann. ‘What’s the matter at all?’

‘Oh, Mary Ann, look at the irises!’ Amelia said, in a strange, sad voice. ‘They’re all dead and faded and
withered
away.’

Mary Ann expressed no surprise at this, though of course she was deeply surprised that Amelia should make such an apparently irrelevant remark.

‘That’s right, pet, they’ve had it and no doubt about it,’ she agreed, still holding Amelia in both her arms. She looked around Amelia then, to Dorothea, who still stood on the doorstep.

‘Frederick,’ Dorothea mouthed. ‘Dead.’

Mary Ann nodded. She had thought as much, as soon as she had seen Amelia’s face waxen with grief, though her eyes were dry.

Between them, Dorothea and Mary Ann got Amelia upstairs and into bed with a hot water bottle and an extra blanket, and Mary Ann closed the curtains she had flung open that morning with such vigour and relief.

‘I didn’t mean to forget him, Mary Ann,’ Amelia
murmured
from under the blankets. ‘I wouldn’t ever have preferred anyone else, not really.’

‘No, no, of course you wouldn’t. Your best beau.’

‘Only I hadn’t heard from him for ages.’

‘Hush, lovey, don’t talk now.’

‘But how could I hear from him, if he was already …?’

‘Hush, now, hush.’

‘Oh, Mary Ann, I thought maybe he’d forgotten about me. On Easter Monday, you remember the day of the
picnic, I felt so close to him. Almost as if he was there with us. I thought this meant a letter must be on its way. I was sure on Tuesday there’d be one. And then, the GPO was all in turmoil, and so I wondered then if that was why I hadn’t heard.’

‘Amelia, go to sleep now. We’ll talk later. I promise you.’

Amelia turned over with a sigh and her two friends left the room.

Dorothea explained to Mary Ann on the landing that it was all just a rumour at this stage, but she had a pretty shrewd idea it was true, and Lucinda wasn’t at school, which seemed to confirm it.

Mary Ann nodded.

‘Will you go for her mother?’ she asked.

‘Yes, of course. My brother will take me. He’s still
outside
in the car.’

Mary Ann gave directions to Dorothea and saw her off. Then she went in to Amelia’s grandmother, who sat solemnly waiting to hear what was amiss, for she had heard unusual sounds in the hall, and the unsteady voice of her grand-daughter bewailing the withering of the irises in the narrow border under the bay window in the little front garden. The bulbs had faded quickly this year, forced beyond their maturity by the unexpected warm spell.

She nodded when Mary Ann gave her the news.

‘Ah, men and their wars,’ she said, unsurprised.

‘It’s a very wicked thing, Ma’am,’ agreed Mary Ann
piously
, well aware of the old lady’s view of war-making.

‘But he was a brave and honourable young man. We mustn’t forget that.’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Mary Ann mournfully.

‘But misguided.’

‘Indeed, Ma’am.’

‘And your brother is also most misguided, Mary Ann. Though I am sure he is an honourable boy too.’

Mary Ann looked up, startled.

‘I am a light sleeper,’ said the grandmother. ‘And I
noticed
my son’s greatcoat missing from the hallstand this morning.’

Mary Ann had the grace to blush a deep, deep plum red.

‘Such foolishness, and at such a cost,’ went on old Mrs Pim.

Mary Ann looked ready to argue, but dared not.

‘I think they will have to surrender now soon, Mary Ann.’

‘Yes, Ma’am,’ said Mary Ann again, regarding her
toecaps
. ‘They are to surrender today.’

‘I am glad to hear it. But it will not go well with them,’ said the old lady. ‘Your brother is well out of it. I take it he is in a safe place?’

‘I think so, Ma’am.’

‘Well, we must pray about it, Mary Ann.’

‘Oh yes, Ma’am.’

‘Go on about your business so, my dear. Maybe you should look in on Amelia again.’

‘No, Ma’am,’ said Mary Ann. ‘I have work to do in the kitchen.’

Amelia’s grandmother looked at Mary Ann in
astonishment
for a moment, taken aback by such rudeness. Then she realised what the servant girl meant.

‘Very well. I’ll go and sit with her myself,’ she said, and rose up out of her chair with the crinkling sound that her stiff, old-fashioned skirts always made.

When Amelia awoke, later that afternoon, in a room hazy with curtained sunshine, her grandmother sat in a low chair near her bed.

‘Grandmama, oh Grandmama,’ said Amelia with a sigh.

Her grandmother put a hand over Amelia’s, where it lay white against the white counterpane. Amelia sighed, drew her hand out from under her grandmother’s, and turned to look at the wall.

Those were the last words she spoke for several days.

T
he headline was perfectly clear. In fact it almost screamed at Mary Ann: THREE REBELS SHOT. She looked at the thick black strokes the letters made on the paper, and she swayed with fear. It had happened as her brother had predicted. Once the Volunteers
surrendered
, the leaders would be hanged or shot, he had said. She had thought perhaps he was being over-dramatic. She had hoped that maybe the English would think them all just a bunch of rowdies and let them off with a bit of penal servitude. But she had reckoned without the
European
war. The English couldn’t afford to let rebellion in Ireland go unpunished while they were at war with
Germany
. These troublesome Irish would have to be taught a lesson. And now here it was, barely a fortnight after the surrender, the first executions, just as Patrick had feared. Mary Ann still hadn’t heard from him, and she was
worried
sick about him. Tommy O’Rourke said he had left
him outside a particular pub in Ashbourne, where he had requested to be put down, and he hadn’t seen or heard from him since.

With a heavy heart, she went on to read the body of the newspaper article. It said that Thomas Clarke, Pádraic Pearse and Tomás MacDonagh had been
court-martialled
and shot the previous day, at dawn, in the courtyard of Kilmainham Gaol. It went on to mention other leaders of the Rising – Ceannt, McDermott,
Plunkett
, Connolly, and Casement. It didn’t mention Thomas Ashe or Eamon de Valera. And it didn’t say anything about executing any more leaders. She knew Pearse and Clarke had been right at the heart of the Rising. Maybe they would stop at that now – make an example of the most central men, and just imprison the rest. They couldn’t shoot the lot of them.

Mary Ann read the papers more avidly now even than she had done before the Rising, and she read them openly. Apart from Amelia’s grandmother’s revelation that she had had a shrewd idea what had been going on, on that night when Patrick had lain in the garden shed, nobody had mentioned her brother, but there was a tacit acknowledgement in the household that Mary Ann had a personal interest in what was happening, and when the family had finished with their newspapers, they would pass them on to Mary Ann.

The people of Dublin were satisfied by those first
executions
. They thought it was good enough for those
crazy rebels who had brought destruction to the centre of their city. They were delighted when they saw young hooligans being marched off to the docks to be shipped away to England, to prison camps. Well rid of them, they said they were, and smirked.

Mary Ann would read accounts of what was
happening
out of the papers to Amelia in the afternoons, when she had a lull in her work, and Amelia would sit dreamily and listen to her. Mary Ann commented on every story, blessing herself sometimes, exclaiming, crumpling up the paper with anger and frustration, on occasion, but Amelia just sat and listened. She hadn’t said another word since the day Dorothea had brought her home from school, and she hadn’t eaten very much either. Her mother was distracted with worry about her, but her grandmother said she was just grieving, and it was
perfectly
natural, and she would be all right.

‘But it’s not perfectly natural just to sit still all day, Grandmama, and say nothing,’ Amelia’s mother insisted. ‘It’s natural to cry and wail and wring one’s hands.’

‘On the contrary,’ said the grandmother with dignity, and said no more.

Sometimes, while she lived through these silent days, Amelia would practise on her mother’s typewriter, which she hadn’t touched for some time. She copied out poems – love poems, sonnets, war poems – which gave her plenty of practice at carriage returns and capital
letters
, and she carried her pale, wobbly, oddly spaced and
occasionally misspelt versions of the poems around with her sometimes, and read them to herself and smiled a small, secret, wan smile. Mary Ann observed this
behaviour
, but she passed no remarks. She shared Amelia’s grandmother’s conviction that Amelia was all right, really.

A day or two later, more men were shot, and a few people started to get a little uneasy. And then more were shot after that again, and so it went on, day after day, story after story of penal servitude, deportation, and
execution
, one execution after another, till there were
sixteen
dead, and thousands in prison. By now the people were beginning to get rather restive. They didn’t like the idea of so many secret courts martial and executions
announced
only after they had happened. And when they read that James Connolly had to be tied to a chair to face the firing squad, because he was already badly wounded, they started to murmur. The murmuring grew till it reached a loud hum, and people who only last week had been jeering the fighters were beginning to feel sorry for them and to shake their fists instead at
soldiers
of the Crown in the streets.

Mary Ann just hoped that Patrick had been rounded up and interned in a prison camp in England. She had an idea that he would be safer over there. Anyone they
deported
wouldn’t be shot at least. 

O
ne day, Amelia had a visitor. It was Mary Ann who opened the door to him, and she was very taken aback, for there stood on the doorstep the very image of Frederick Goodbody, as she had last seen him, and standing there as he had done that day, and in the same uniform. He swept his hat off as soon as she appeared at the door, with just the gesture Frederick had used, and held it politely over his heart. He stood between Mary Ann and the sun, with the result that though she could see the outline of his stance clearly, dark against the
sunlight
, she couldn’t make out the details of his face, and his whole figure gave off a ghostly aura of flickering light and shadow.

When he spoke, Mary Ann knew it wasn’t Frederick, nor his ghost for that matter. He had a soft country
accent
, quite unlike Frederick’s crisp tones.

‘I’ve come to see a Miss Amelia Pim,’ he said. ‘Is
this the right house?’

‘Indeed it is,’ said Mary Ann and flung the door wider in a gesture of welcome, for she felt this was a visitor that would do Amelia good. In spite of feelings running high in the town, she hadn’t the least desire to shake her fist at this man, or to spit insults in his face, just because he wore the king’s uniform.

She thought for a moment about ushering the soldier into the drawing room as she had done with Frederick the day he had called to say goodbye, but she
remembered
the awkwardness that had arisen on that occasion, so she said, rather brazenly: ‘She’s down in the kitchen with me at the moment, actually. Would you mind if I showed you in there, as the other rooms are engaged? We’re very informal here,’ she added, by way of excuse for this unconventional suggestion.

The soldier didn’t look in the least put out.

‘The kitchen would be lovely,’ he said. ‘I like to be close to the kettle myself.’

So Mary Ann stepped ahead of the soldier and put her head around the kitchen door.

‘Visitor for you, Amelia,’ she said, cheerily. She always addressed Amelia as if she expected to receive an
answer
, as if she wouldn’t give in that Amelia had
withdrawn
into herself for a while.

Amelia shook her head vehemently, but Mary Ann
ignored
this signal. She looked back over her shoulder and gestured to the man to come on in.

The soldier came down the single step leading from the hall to the kitchen and followed Mary Ann into the kitchen. Amelia put her hand to her mouth when she saw the man in Frederick’s uniform. The man came into the kitchen and pulled a chair out for himself.

‘May I, Miss Pim?’ he said, and sat down without
waiting
for an answer.

Amelia stared at him, her green eyes brimming with enquiry, but still she didn’t speak.

‘You’ll have a cup of tea,’ announced Mary Ann, and it was an announcement, not a question.

‘I will,’ said the soldier, and laid his hat between
himself
and Amelia on the table.

‘Sure, we all will.’ Mary Ann was babbling, but not nervously; rather it was as if she was perfectly at ease with this man, whoever he was.

‘Grand,’ said the man.

Amelia still said nothing, but her silence didn’t seem to disconcert the visitor at all.

‘I have come from the house of friends of yours, Miss Pim,’ said the soldier. ‘The Goodbody family.’

At the name Goodbody, Amelia went rigid, and she turned her eyes away from the man with a quick flicker of green.

‘They are in great sorrow,’ said the soldier simply.

‘Sure it’s dreadful, dreadful,’ said Mary Ann, almost to herself, bustling with the tea things.

‘I was able to bring them some news of their son’s last
hours, and I think it did them good to hear it. It helps to know the facts, even if they are hard to bear. I think it is better than to be wondering always.’ The man’s country tones were soothing, and he spoke quietly and directly.

Amelia still didn’t look at him, but you could tell from the way she held herself that she was listening. Her
listening
was almost audible in the room.

The soldier started his story, quite formally, with the pertinent facts: ‘Our regiment was the Dublin Fusiliers. We were with the eighth battalion of the Sixteenth Irish Division.’

Amelia knew all this. She had written to Frederick, hadn’t she. But there was something soothing about his manner of telling it. He sounded like an old storyteller starting a story with a conventional beginning, or an
advocate
laying the facts before a magistrate. Her body slackened a little, as she relaxed into what he had to say.

‘We were on a march, a long, agonising march it was.’

Amelia remembered the boots that didn’t fit properly, and her anxieties about socks. It all seemed very far away now, and almost trivial.

Quietly, as if not to break a spell, Mary Ann served the tea.

‘We marched along what they call the
allées
pavées
. That means avenues, paved avenues. And they were really like avenues, with trees on either side. Long, long stretches of tree-lined roadway, paved with hard stone,
and everywhere the land very flat and laid out like a chessboard all around us. The only mountains they have there are slag heaps. It’s a coal-mining area, the north of France.’

Amelia could see these weird avenues stretching for miles through the flat countryside, and peopled by the struggling army, dragging themselves dispiritedly along and wishing for a stream to bathe their aching feet.

‘Do you mind if I smoke?’ asked the soldier suddenly, in a different voice, not his story-telling one. He pushed his empty teacup aside and took a pipe and a tobacco pouch out of his pocket, and a small pen-knife.

‘I like the smell of a pipe, myself,’ said Mary Ann. ‘Do you mind, Amelia?’

Amelia shook her head.

The soldier put the pipe, cold and empty, between his teeth, while he opened the tobacco pouch and took out a small plug of tobacco, hard and black and fibrous. He pared at the wedge of tobacco with the pen-knife,
releasing
the sweet aroma into the air. Deftly, he caught the tobacco parings in the hollow of his left hand, while he continued to pare with his right. When he had
gathered
a sufficient harvest, he folded up the penknife neatly, and laid it on the table. Then he started to finger the fibres that nestled in his hand, rubbing them over and over again between his fingers and occasionally
lifting
the golden strands up out of his hand, as if to let the light through them, as a woman making pastry lifts the
dough mixture as she rubs it, to work air into it and make it light. The rubbed tobacco cupped in his hand was flecked with sunshine and bore no resemblance to the dense chunk from which he had pared it.

All the time the soldier worked at the tobacco he kept the pipe between his teeth and so didn’t speak. Amelia turned her eyes upon him, to see what the cause of the silence was, and she watched this operation with
interest
, for her father didn’t smoke and she had never seen this done at such close quarters before. Now he lifted the precious golden handful to his nose and gave a satisfied sniff.

‘I always think it’s almost a shame to smoke it,’ he said with a smile, but he started to pack the bowl of his pipe with it all the same. ‘Tobacco is like coffee. Never quite as good when used as it is when you smell it. One – no, two – of life’s little disappointments.’

Amelia smiled at him for the first time. She was warming to him, as he had intended she would.

He pushed the tobacco down with the flat end of the penknife and pressed more on top of it, working it down well until he had used it all up and the pipe was almost full. Then he sniffed the tobacco again and laid the pipe down without lighting it. It was as if he was drawing the maximum pleasure from the pipe by prolonging the anticipation.

Then he continued with the story as if there had been no interruption:

‘We were at a place called Hulloch, near Noeux-
les-Mines.
Did I mention that it was a coal-mining area? That’s what
les mines
means, I believe, in French. I was sorry to hear that. I thought it such a pretty name, till I knew what it meant. Ugly countryside. Anyway, it was at Hulloch that it happened. We were gassed, you see. Dreadful. Not many survived that. Young Goodbody went down. I saw him myself. He put his arms out, as if he was swimming, and then he just sank, in a little heap. It was all over quite quickly.’

‘Oh!’ said Amelia, her hand to her mouth again, and tears swimming in her eyes.

The soldier looked at her and picked up his pipe and fondled it.

‘I thought you would like to know that, my dear.’

Amelia kept her hand over her mouth, and the tears that had been in her eyes a moment ago were now
trickling
down her cheeks and over the back of her hand.

The soldier passed no remarks on this.

He went on: ‘There’s no use pretending it’s a pleasant death, but it’s probably better than spending months in those awful rat-infested trenches, up to your ankles in muck and then getting your head blown off when you are ordered to go over the top.’

Amelia’s tears came faster.

‘I was lucky. Got my mask on in time. My lungs were damaged, though, quite badly. That’s why I’m home now. Shouldn’t be smoking of course.’ And as if he had
just remembered this, he put the pipe, unsmoked, back into his pocket.

‘I’m very sorry,’ he said, in a softer voice. ‘War is a wicked thing, my dear. Very wicked and evil.’

Amelia took her hand from her mouth, swallowed hard, and said: ‘Yes; yes it is. Thank you for coming.’

Mary Ann gasped. Amelia had spoken at last. First came tears, then words.

‘Did Frederick’s family send you?’ Amelia went on. Her voice was not much above a whisper.

‘Oh no, no. Frederick did.’

‘
Frederick
did?’

‘In a manner of speaking. Forgive me. I don’t mean to be flippant. We were friends, Fred and I. We each
promised
that if we survived the other, we would visit each other’s families and girls.’

‘Did Frederick say I was his girl?’ Amelia ventured with a blush.

At this the soldier laughed aloud: ‘He didn’t need to tell me! He never stopped talking about you, morning, noon and night. Amelia this and Amelia that. He carried your letter about with him, in his pocket, till it was
crumpled
and worn and nearly in shreds, and that little token you sent him, whatever it was. It was completely in shreds, that. A pressed flower, was it? Anyway, it was just a little rag of fibres, like my tobacco here, but it was there, tucked into the letter and taken out and mulled over and tucked away again, several times a day.’

At this point, the soldier stood up to go. He took his pipe out of his pocket, and held it in his left hand. Then he delved into the pocket again, and took out something small and bright and round and laid it on the table.
Amelia
thought for a moment it was a sovereign.

‘I thought you might like to keep this. A button off his tunic. It’s not much. Not like a lock of hair or a
photograph
. But it’s something of a keepsake anyway.’

Amelia picked up the little bright button and held it for a moment in her fingers. It was still warm from the soldier’s pocket, round and bright and warm, like a tiny sun. Then she dropped it into her own pocket and said: ‘Thank you again,’ and stood up to say goodbye.

Just then Edmund came clattering into the kitchen,
demanding
tea for his grandmother. He stopped short when he saw the soldier.

‘There are no guns here now!’ he said defiantly. ‘We are pacifists in this house.’

‘Indeed and I’m sure you are,’ said the soldier. ‘And look, I haven’t got my gun with me either.’

Edmund looked at him suspiciously, but the soldier held out his hands for inspection.

‘Well,’ said Edmund. ‘You have a pipe. That’s almost as bad. Pipes aren’t allowed either.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said the soldier seriously, ‘but as you see, I haven’t smoked it, so maybe you’ll let me off this time.’

‘All right so,’ said Edmund grandly.

Amelia accompanied her guest to the door. As she shook hands with him, she asked: ‘One more thing. I
forgot
to ask. When did this happen?’

‘Oh, it was let me see, three weeks ago, maybe, or four? I was shipped home immediately. There were so few of us left, they said it would be simplest to send us home to recuperate.’

‘How recently? Since Easter?’

‘At Easter, in fact. It was a Monday. Easter Monday that would have been, I suppose.’

The soldier bowed to Amelia and strode down the path. At the gate, he stopped and put the pipe in his mouth. He cupped his hand around it, and with a few short puffs he lit it. He turned then and raised his hand. Then he was gone. Amelia hadn’t thought to ask his name.

She slid her hand into her pocket and fingered the button. She looked at the flowerbed. Somebody – Papa, she supposed – had dead-headed the daffodils and irises and tied the stems back neatly with string. The tulips were almost in bloom now, little red and yellow heads like small light bulbs struggling to see out of the wide blue-green foliage.

Amelia closed the front door and put her head around the drawing room door.

‘Mary Ann’s just making a fresh pot, Grandmama,’ she said matter-of-factly. ‘It’ll be along directly.’

Grandmama nodded. ‘Thank you, Amelia,’ she said, and looked not in the least surpised that Amelia had spoken.