One by One in the Darkness (13 page)

The conditions had been hard, though, there was no denying that: forty children to a class was nothing unusual. Sometimes you had had to share a classroom with another teacher, and then the lessons had to be carefully co-ordinated, so that one group wouldn’t unduly disturb the other. Sally was shocked when Emily said she hadn’t even had a chair, there hadn’t been the space for it: there had just been a teacher’s table pushed up hard against the wall. It meant that she’d been on her feet from the first bell of the day to the last. Often at the end of the week it was as much as she could do to drag herself into the city centre on a Friday afternoon and take the bus to Ballymena. Like most of the passengers, she usually fell asleep as they drove through
the countryside. No wonder she’d been so reluctant to hand her wages straight over to her mother!

Sometimes it made her sad that the children she taught had such a tough future ahead of them. Emily might regret their lack of ambition, but at other times she would think it a blessing that they didn’t have high aspirations that would only be frustrated. When she asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up most of the boys said, ‘I want to drive a horse for Wordie, Miss,’ meaning Wordie Cowan, the brewer. The girls didn’t even have the prospect of the linen mills where their mothers worked, for by the nineteen fifties, even these were being closed down. On the buses Emily shrank from sitting beside the mill workers for fear that the long white threads that clung to their clothes would attach themselves to her own coat or dress. She felt guilty, though, about drawing back from these weary women, whose own mothers brought the women’s children to school every day, and placed them in Emily’s care. As far as the unemployed fathers were concerned, the big shipyards and the other heavy industries of Belfast might as well have been on the moon for all the chance they or their sons had of getting a job there, because they were Catholics. Only the most gifted, the most determined and the most hard working had even the slimmest chance of making out well in the world: and yet education was their hope.

During the course of the first autumn term, Agnes’s brother Paul started to take an interest in her. He’d drive up to Belfast in his father’s black Zephyr, and take her to the cinema, or dancing in the Floral Hall on the rare weekends she stayed in Belfast. She realised afterwards that she hadn’t really been interested in him, he was as skinny as Agnes herself, and it was the attention he paid her that was flattering. She told her mother and aunt about him, not even thinking why: she’d have been shocked if anyone said she was boasting, but that was exactly what it was. She only realised how foolish she’d been when she proudly showed them the crystal necklace he gave her that Christmas. She remembered how her mother had held it up against the light, admiring it’s sparkle, and suddenly her aunt said, ‘He must mean business, Emily.’ She had a cold, strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that.’
she said, reaching out her hands for the beads which felt to her now like morsels of ice. ‘He has plenty of money, I’m sure as far as he’s concerned it’s just an ordinary wee Christmas present,’ which somehow didn’t add up with the triumph with which she’d first shown them the necklace some moments earlier. Her mother and aunt smiled, and her aunt said, ‘Oh, go away on out of that!’ Emily put the beads back in their box.

So when she started going out with Charlie a couple of months later, she didn’t let on to her family. Funnily enough, she met him through Agnes too. Agnes had an uncle who was a priest on the Missions in Nigeria, and when he was at home for a holiday, Agnes’s family held a big barn dance to raise money for him to take back to his parish.

All through their married life, Charlie would tease her because she couldn’t remember the exact moment they met. But Agnes had dragged her around the dance that night presenting her to so many of her friends from home, that the moment when she said, ‘Emily, this is Charlie Quinn,’ became lost immediately in a blur of similar introductions. What Emily did remember was the end of the night, when she was saying goodbye to Charlie. ‘The next time you’re up in Belfast, come and see me,’ she said. ‘I’d like that. Agnes knows where I am.’ He’d looked surprised, as well he might have done, for it must have looked terribly forward. But she was willing to risk having him think badly of her if that was necessary, if the alternative was not seeing him again because she’d stood too much on her dignity. At some point in the evening, after that initial introduction, they’d ended up together again, sitting on a bale of straw, drinking Coca-Cola, and talking. It made her realise how little she cared for Paul. What had mattered was not Paul himself, but that her mother would be impressed with the gifts he gave her, that Miss Regan would notice and admire the fine car in which he came to collect Emily, what mattered were the lunches, the dances, the trips to the cinema, but Paul himself didn’t matter at all.

When Charlie did come to Belfast and started taking her out, it was Charlie himself Miss Regan commented on, not his possessions. ‘He’s a lovely big fella, Emily,’ she said over their usual breakfast of burnt toast and gluey porridge the morning after she met him. Agnes proved to be a good friend, too, telling
Emily not to worry about Paul. ‘I’ve told him already he’s out of the picture.’ Later in the spring she asked Emily if she’d mentioned Charlie to her family.

Emily said that she hadn’t. ‘Well, I would, if I were you, because they’re going to get a right shock when you tell them you’re getting married, and it turns out to be to some person they’ve never heard tell of.’ Emily didn’t reply, but she took the advice offered. Her mother didn’t seem to notice, though, particularly when she found out how small and poor a farm he had. Emily insisted on this point, and her mother, she realised a long time afterwards, misunderstood this, took it as an indication that she wasn’t, couldn’t be, serious about him. Oh, she’d thought her own mother so cold in comparison with Charlie’s mother when she met her, and there couldn’t have been a clearer display of the difference than when they decided to get married: Emily’s mother’s anger and tears; Charlie’s mother’s tears and delight. Of course they’re delighted,’ Emily’s mother said, ‘they have all to gain and nothing to lose from this. What will you do about your career? I can’t believe you’re just going to throw it away like this.’

The worst thing was, her mother had a point here, something which Emily herself had thought about without resolving the problem. At the end of her first year’s teaching, they took the children on a trip to Groomsport in County Down for the day. The only photographs she had from her time as a teacher were some pictures one of the other teachers took with a Box Brownie on that day, and every so often she would take them out and look at them. The children had been so excited: it was such a big treat then to go to the sea. The night before, Charlie had asked her to marry him, and she’d said yes. Sitting on the beach, she realised that she’d always thought that someday she probably would get married, but not for a long time. If she went to live in the country, she would have to give up her job in Belfast, but if she was married, it would be hard, maybe impossible, for her to find another job there. It wasn’t seen as right for women to go on working when they were married, they were supposed to stay at home and look after their own children. It was so unfair that she couldn’t have both, she thought, as she watched the children run and scream on the beach. Even Agnes,
when she asked her later, wasn’t able to offer her much comfort: they both remembered from the training college stories they heard about women who went for job interviews and who put their engagement rings in their pockets before they went in. But they always got found out, they never got the jobs, and were called deceitful and sly for having tried to hide their intentions.

A week after Emily told her mother she was engaged, her mother sent her a letter cut out from
The Irish News
. Emily had seen letters like this before, but coming in the post to her, with no accompanying note from her mother, it had seemed like a poison-pen letter directed to her personally, and the words burned into her mind:

She’d responded by tearing the cutting to shreds, and posting it back to her mother, again without a covering letter. Things went from bad to worse after that. Emily became increasingly bloody-minded: she would admit that now. So she couldn’t have both her husband and her job. So be it: she chose to marry. So her expensive education would be wasted: was that not the fault of society, for not letting her use it? Why blame Emily? She made her mother admit without difficulty that it was to give it up for so little that was shocking to her. If Emily had decided to marry Paul, who would inherit his father’s pub and house, that would have been a different matter. Education used as bait to get a
good catch was, evidently, not a waste of years of study in the way marrying someone with no money was.

‘She’ll come round to me in time,’ Charlie said, with endearing optimism. She never did.

And Sally knew her mother so well that it was just this point she had worked round to yesterday when she argued Cate’s case. Poor Cate this, it had been, poor Cate that: to begin, her main concern had been to urge compassion. Cate must surely feel bad about what had happened, Sally argued. So what were they, her family, to do? Force her to feel more miserable still? What end would that serve, but to drive her away. Cate only had her family now. This man, whoever he was, had evidently walked away from the situation: were they to reject her too?

‘And don’t forget,’ she’d said more than once, ‘it’s a baby we’re talking about, your grandchild, my niece.’

‘I never wanted a grandchild in these circumstances,’ she’d said, and was surprised at the vehemence with which Sally had rounded on her.

‘And do you think Cate wanted this? I’m sure Cate would have wanted to get married before she had children, but it hasn’t worked out that way, and no one needs reminding of the pity of that less than Cate.’

Sally was right. You couldn’t always choose what happened in life, but you
were
free to decide whether or not you thought something was worthy of regrets. ‘If you regret things that don’t merit it, you give them more power, more dignity than they deserve,’ she thought. Sally had pressed on, though, pushing the issue to consequences that Emily might have allowed her mind to flit around, but which it was unbearable to hear spoken aloud. Once she knew the baby was on the way, what could Cate have done about it? Plenty. It would have been easy for Cate to have had an abortion in London, Sally said bluntly, and none of us would have been any the wiser. Is that what you really would have liked? she asked, as Emily howled and wept. No not that, never that. Well then, Sally said. But by having the baby, would she, Cate, be setting up a circle which, she, Emily, would be forever forcing her to square?

It was just this dilemma that Sally was asking Emily to spare Cate. Emily had thought that once she’d married Charlie, her
mother would bow to the inevitable and accept him; but she didn’t, and there was nothing Emily could do to change this. If her mother had decided not to accept that Emily had made a good marriage, that was her choice. After a few years, Emily had stopped trying to win her round: she seldom went to visit her: it was always Charlie who took the children to Ballymena to visit their grandmother, insisting that he would never be the cause of a total breakdown in communication between Emily and her family. ‘Life’s too short,’ he kept saying. ‘She won’t always be there, and then you’ll feel bad about it.’

‘I feel bad about it already,’ Emily had always replied to him. Believing that she was right and her mother was wrong was no proof against guilt. ‘It was like walking around for thirty years with a nail in the sole of your shoe,’ she used to tell Sally.

A few years after her mother died, which happened when the girls were still at school, Emily dreamt one night that she was with her family on a raft which was drifting down a river. Only Emily was awake: her daughters, husband, brother and mother were all curled up sleeping, and as she watched them, she was aware of all the things about them which she didn’t like, which annoyed her. Her mother’s rejection of Charlie. Helen’s untidiness, her sarcasm. Cate, in the dream, was wearing her school uniform. Her nails and lips were crimson, and Emily thought bitterly about the rows they had had about make-up and dances and clothes. She looked at Charlie and remembered how angry she’d been when she found out that he’d been giving money to Peter, money they could well have been doing with for their daughters. Long-forgotten incidents, some serious, some trivial, crowded in on her as she stared at her sleeping family with vexation and resentment.

Suddenly, she became aware of the distant roar of water: aware of what it meant too. The raft was headed for a waterfall. They were all going to drown, and the raft drifted on inexorably. There was nothing she could do to avert disaster.

How different everything looked in the light of this knowledge! It was laughably foolish to get upset about Cate’s lipstick. Charlie’s largesse to his brother became a virtue rather than a flaw, but most significant of all, her attitude to her mother was transformed by the spirit of compassion and forgiveness she felt
now towards her doomed family. She couldn’t change the fact of things but she could change how she saw them, and in that way she could determine the effect they had on her. This knowledge was the nearest she ever came to a reconciliation with her mother, but she found she couldn’t talk to anyone about what she had learnt, not even to Charlie. All she could do was try to tell her daughters that it was important to know what mattered in life and what didn’t, and that often it was the things you wouldn’t have expected that mattered the most, and that a great deal didn’t matter at all.