One by One in the Darkness (3 page)

One day when Helen wasn’t around, Kate had asked Granny, ‘What’s wrong with Uncle Peter?’

‘Two things,’ she said. ‘He thinks too much, and then he drinks too much.’

‘Why?’ said Kate. She hadn’t understood what Granny meant. Granny laughed. ‘It would take a wiser woman than me to answer that.’

‘Well, I don’t like it,’ Kate said, and now it was Granny Kate who asked, ‘Why?’

‘I don’t know,’ Kate said. ‘It’s just scary to hear him shouting, or to see him not able to walk properly. It’s horrible.’

And when she said that, Granny had looked sad. She was quiet for a minute and then she told Kate to remember that a person might do bad things but that that didn’t mean they were a bad person, and that there was no badness in Uncle Peter. The way he was made her sad and the whole family too, but the person it hurt most of all was Uncle Peter himself. ‘You mustn’t be afraid of him. You should feel sorry for him.’

‘I do. I feel sorry for you too.’ And then Granny Kate laughed.

‘Oh, I’ll manage,’ she said, ‘I’ll survive.’

Uncle Peter didn’t have one special job that he did all the time, like Daddy or Uncle Brian. He worked on and off at different things, fishing, or clearing drains with a rented digger or cutting back the hedges or digging holes in the road. Sometimes he went on the dole and stayed at home. He helped Granny Kate mind the baby when Uncle Brian was off in the bread van and Aunt Lucy was in the cigarette factory; sometimes he’d be doing the washing up when you went in, or taking the laundry down off the clothes airer on the scullery ceiling. Their daddy and Uncle Brian also did housework now and then, because there had been no girls in the family, and Granny Kate had made them do things when they were children because she didn’t like housework herself. She didn’t much care if people thought it was odd. ‘If there’s an hour you could spend either reading a book or washing the floor, I know which I’d rather do,’ she said.

‘There’s a Shirley Temple film on the telly this afternoon,’ Una said to Kate. ‘
The Good Ship Lollipop
.’

‘Don’t tell me you want to be sitting in watching television on a nice day like this,’ Aunt Lucy said. ‘It’d be far better for you to be outside playing.’

‘Shirley Temple’s a pain, anyway,’ Johnny said, just to annoy Una, because he knew she liked her. Una was Kate’s friend as well as her cousin: they sat beside each other at school. Johnny was a year older than Helen, who was in the same class as Declan.

‘I could take you out in the boat,’ Uncle Peter said. ‘It’s a good calm day for it, but I don’t know that I’d have room for the lot of you.’ Sally wanted to stay at home with Granny, which pleased Helen. She always felt responsible for looking after Sally and Kate, and she would enjoy being out in the boat more if she didn’t have Sally to worry about. Una said that she would stay at home too, and watch the film, and Uncle Peter said that he could manage the four who still wanted to go with him.

The blue wooden boat was pulled up into the reeds. ‘Get you in first, Johnny and Declan, and one of youse can start bailing her,’ Uncle Peter said. The bailer was an old paint tin lying in about four inches of water at the bottom of the boat. Uncle Peter
lifted Helen and Kate in, then pushed the boat hard and climbed in himself, as it slid out into the lough. Kate liked that moment, because it was frightening. She always thought for a split second that the boat was going to tip over or sink. The difference between standing firm on the shore one minute, and then feeling the boat tremble uncertainly beneath you the next was exciting. Within seconds, though, you got used to being on the water, as the boat steadied itself. Uncle Peter began to row with long, even strokes. There was a green scum of algae at the edge of the shore, but the water was clearer further out. The sky was bare and blue, but for a few high strands of fine clouds. Kate took off her cardigan, because of the sticky, prickly heat of the day, then turned in the boat to look back at Uncle Brian’s house. It was strange to see from an unfamiliar angle a place you knew so well, and she wasn’t quite sure that she liked it. When Helen said that you could see their own house too, she didn’t want to look at it.

‘Will you take us to one of the islands?’ Johnny said. ‘Ah, do,’ he went on, when Uncle Peter didn’t say ‘No’ straight off, and the others noticed this too, and joined in with the pleading. ‘It’s the breeding time,’ he said. ‘The chicks is hatching now, the birds’ll go wild if you go out there.’

But far from putting them off, this only made the islands more attractive. Uncle Peter shrugged. ‘All right,’ he said, ‘only youse are to behave and not stand on the nests or be frightened or anything.’

The islands were not far off the shore, in fact the alternative to landing on them and what Uncle Peter had intended when they set out would have been to row out past them, out of the bay. They were small islands, narrow and flat, with a few scrubby trees and bushes growing on them. As Uncle Peter directed the boat towards the largest of the islands, she saw why he had said they weren’t to be frightened, and hoped she would be able to stay brave, for the gulls heard the boat approaching and flew up in fear and anger, to protect the chicks. They strafed the boat the way she had seen a blackbird go for one of Granny Kate’s cats once, when the cat was sitting with it’s paws folded beside a fledgling that had fallen out of it’s nest. The blackbird had dive-bombed the cat again and again, coming within inches of it’s
ears, and all the time making a racket that Granny Kate said would have raised the dead. Kate knew to look at Helen that she was frightened too, but Helen would be brave, even if Kate weakened and shrieked as the fat white birds dipped low and angry around them.

She shaded her eyes against the sun that flashed on the water, and looked up. Hundreds of gulls were flying around high above them. She’d seen this before, but from a distance, when her father would look out of the window and say, there must be someone out on the islands. She wondered if he would notice it today, and if he would ever guess who it was that was out there.

The boat juddered as it got into shallow water, and Uncle Peter told them to sit where they were until he had it properly beached and tied up. He lifted them out in turn, saying, ‘Mind what I said now, mind you don’t hurt anything.’

Kate had never imagined how careful they would have to be, for there were nests everywhere, crude, flat nests, she thought, not like the small, tight nest a songbird would make for itself with straw and mud and moss. The gulls’ nests were just flat upon the ground, and there were so many of them you had to be careful where you walked. Uncle Peter kept warning them, Johnny and Kate in particular, to go easy. Some of the eggs had already hatched, but the fluffy brown chicks didn’t interest her as much as the dark wet stunned-looking ones that weren’t long enough out of the egg to have dried out and found their feet. Strangest of all were the eggs that were only partly hatched, so that when you leaned low over them you could see a tiny hole, a crack, and you knew that the bird was working away inside to free itself. Kate wondered what it would be like to be in an egg: shut up in a tiny space barely bigger than yourself, knowing nothing but that you had to tap and tap and tap until you broke into the light and fell out, uncoiling yourself. She imagined darkness and heat in the egg, and was so lost in this thought that when Helen touched her arm, she jumped.

‘We won’t tell anybody about this, Kate, all right?’

‘We can tell Daddy, can’t we?’ she said.

‘Oh yes, it doesn’t matter if we tell Daddy,’ Helen replied. ‘I mean other people. People in school. We can tell them about the island, but I don’t want to tell them about the birds.’

‘All right,’ Kate said. She glanced over at Uncle Peter, who was leaning against a tree and smoking a cigarette. Soon he would lift them back into the boat and row them away from the island. The gulls would all fly back to their chicks. They’d take Sally back home across the fields and have their dinner: chicken, and then tinned peaches with the ice cream they’d got in McGovern’s on the way home from Mass. They’d get their school bags ready for the morning; and in the evening they’d have to go to bed early, so that they wouldn’t sleep in the next day. And some night again when she was lying in the dark, waiting to fall asleep, she would hear Uncle Peter shouting, out there in the night. She would make herself think of the day he’d taken them out to the island and showed them the gulls’ nests, and she’d try not to be frightened any more.

Over the years, the kitchen was the only room in the house which had not undergone significant change. Lino had given way to thick carpet in the bathroom; the red brocade curtains in the parlour had been replaced with pale blinds; the bedrooms had lost their austerity and become chintzy and floral sprigged. They’d had a conservatory built at the side of the house for their mother; they’d had central heating installed. Only the kitchen was left untouched, and that was deliberate. Their father, who had been happy with other changes made, had always held out over that. ‘To tell you the truth, I can’t see anything wrong with it the way it is,’ he’d say to any suggestion proffered; and after he died, neither the sisters nor their mother desired to make any change to the room: they wanted it to remain as he had known it.

The kitchen was the biggest room in the house; and was dominated by a stove, on either side of which was an old-fashioned built-in press, of cream-coloured wood, with strong shelves, and thick ribbed glass in the cupboard doors. The press on one side of the stove held crockery and food; the other press held books, ornaments, and the framed photograph of their father which Cate had noticed the day she arrived home. Against the wall farthest from the window was a comfortable old sofa; over by the window itself there was a huge deal table and some straight-backed chairs. Helen was sitting on one of these chairs, drinking tea and gazing out at a stretch of grass, where a few ducks were struggling along in blustery sunshine. They’d had the birds for their father, who liked duck eggs, and after he died, their mother and Sally hadn’t the heart to get rid of them, so the ducks continued to wander around the farmyard for no real reason. Because nothing had changed there was something timeless about the kitchen, and Helen liked that. In her rare moments of nostalgia she could sit there and half-close her eyes and imagine that it was twenty, twenty-five years ago, that if she were to go over to Uncle Brian’s house now she would find it, too, as it was
in the past; that if she listened at the kitchen door there she would hear voices: Granny Kate and Uncle Peter, and the voices of children, one of whom was herself. But she could never make the illusion last as long as she desired, and was conscious only too soon of how things had changed.

Brian and Lucy hadn’t bothered doing anything with their house for years and years: the only room they had changed was the kitchen. About a year earlier they had had it completely modernised: the stove ripped out, fitted pine units installed, a vinyl floor covering laid over the red quarry tiles. Sally and their mother had gone over to see it one evening when it was all finished. Sally told Helen that their mother had baked a cake to take with her and had steeled herself before she left, but that she and Lucy had both cried and that their mother had kissed Lucy and told her that she’d done the right thing, because life had to go on. Helen had been invited over too, but she didn’t go: she never went to Brian’s and Lucy’s house now.

She set great store by this hour on a Sunday morning when her mother and Sally were out at Mass and she had the house to herself, although strictly speaking, she wasn’t alone today: Cate was still there. She told Sally she wouldn’t be going out this morning as she didn’t feel very well; and so far she hadn’t ventured downstairs at all. Had she been well, she would certainly have gone to Mass: she always did when she was at home, and there was, for Helen, something about that which didn’t add up. After Cate moved to England, Helen suspected for a long time that she only went to Mass when she came home to save face and not hurt her parents; that she probably hadn’t been across the threshold of a church since she arrived in London. But then Helen had gone to visit her sister, and had been surprised to learn that not only was Cate a regular churchgoer, but that she even had a religious picture hanging in her apartment: a classy reproduction icon, to be sure, rather than a cheap, kitsch print. It was clear, however, that it was important to Cate, and that she didn’t have the picture just for show.

But by her own admission, Cate’s religion was a ramshackle thing, a mixture of hope, dread, superstition and doubt; upon which she depended to an extraordinary degree: or so it appeared to Helen. Sally, on the other hand, had a faith which, like much
else in her life, ran in a straight and unfractured line direct from her childhood. For Helen herself, her main regret on this subject was the hurt she had caused her father; for he had had a faith which she respected, seeing in it both dignity and integrity, although it was a faith she could not share. She stopped going to Mass not long after she started university, and he had been deeply aggrieved. Was this the end result of all her study and learning? He argued and pleaded with her through that first autumn term, but when Christmas came and still she refused to go to church with the rest of the family he realised how serious she was about it. ‘You’re a grown woman now,’ he said to her that Christmas Eve. ‘We’ve done what we can for you; you’re free now to live your own life as you see fit.’ He never mentioned the subject to her again, never tried to coax or persuade her. But many years later, after he was dead, they found a little notebook in which he wrote down every month the intentions for which he particularly wanted to pray, and from which it was clear that he had constantly hoped for two things: that there would be peace in Northern Ireland, and that Helen would return to the Church. Had it been anyone else, even in her own family, who had written that, Helen would have been livid.

Sometimes she felt that this hour on a Sunday morning was the only time when she could – what? Think straight? Could she even do that now? In the past, she would have said that it was the only time that she knew any peace, when she could truly relax. But that wasn’t true any more either, except in so far as the pace of her life slowed down sufficiently at the weekends for her not to be in such strict control of her own thoughts, as she was during the week. She was able to let her mind off the leash, as though it were a dog, but the difficulty was that she no longer knew how the dog would behave, whether it might not turn on her and savage her. Maybe David was right. ‘You work too hard, that’s the problem with you,’ he said. ‘The eighties are over, Helen. It’s not cool to be a workaholic any longer.’ But there must be more to it than that. She’d worked every bit as hard five years ago, but she’d been able then to spend her Sunday mornings thinking about movies she wanted to see or the book she was reading at any particular time, or even about work itself and the cases upon which she was engaged, with a cooler eye and
more detachment than was possible when she was in Belfast. Now the thoughts that pressed in on her were the sort of things that you expected when you woke at the hour of the wolf, when your mental resistance was down and you couldn’t get back to sleep again: thoughts of failure and inadequacy, of past wrongs that could never be righted; and knowing that many of them were trivial and that she was seeing them out of all proportion was no help against them. She’d said to Cate that her trips home at the weekend had been a safety valve, but it wasn’t true: it was more of an entry into a danger zone, as though there were a hairline crack in her otherwise steely self-containment, and to go home was to push against that crack with her fingers and feel it yield and fear that some day it would split open completely. She realised this more fully today than ever before, and it frightened her. She got up from the chair and tried to distract herself.

The tea she was drinking had gone cold, so she threw it out and made a fresh pot. Some of the interior-décor magazines Cate had brought home were sitting on the press, and she lifted them on to her lap and started to leaf through them, but soon became bored. She’d taken no great interest in furnishing the house she’d bought in Belfast, a place to which she felt no particular attachment. She’d needed a roof over her head, there was no more to it than that; and if anyone ever spoke to her using the word ‘home’, her thoughts instinctively turned to her family home in the country, even though it was years since she had lived there, and she would probably never live there again. She’d bought furniture and curtains in the same frame of mind in which most people bought pints of milk and loaves of bread: she needed them. She bought clothes with the same consideration of necessity rather than pleasure, something about which Cate had nagged her for years. She gave Helen gifts of clothes, blouses and scarves much more glamorous and luxurious than anything Helen would ever have bought for herself. They’d actually had a row about it the last time Helen was over in London. Cate had tried to persuade her to go to one of those agencies where they tell you what colours suited you and what sort of clothes you ought to wear, an idea Helen had dismissed with a contempt she at once saw was excessive. ‘You know I only can wear a
particular type of thing because of my job,’ she said, to soften the rejection, but Cate was having none of it. ‘That’s all the more reason why you should enjoy your clothes off duty, rather than just lie around in jeans and a jumper all the time. Hell, it’s only a bit of fun, I’m not saying these things are the be-all and the end-all in life.’ But Helen still refused.

It was only now, when her life had shrunk to little more than duty, coldly and honourably fulfilled, that she understood what Cate meant. She knew that her sister had been watching her since they were children; had watched her austerity close around her like a sheet of ice. Cate herself was proof of the validity of her own argument. Certainly there were women who didn’t add up to much more than their jacket and lipstick, but Cate wasn’t one of them. Helen could see why people gravitated to Cate, why they liked her, but also why they shied away from Helen and found her intimidating. Cate was on the side of life, and it was painful to Helen to have to admit that that was not true of herself.

On the Saturday evening Cate had picked up one of the magazines and riffled through it, saying, ‘Oh, there’s a letter here I saw the other day and I must read it to you. I laughed out loud when I saw it. Here we are: “Dear Décor Help-Desk, I have a needlework box with straight legs. It looks very pretty, but lately it occurred to me that it would look even nicer with cabriole legs. Can you tell me the address of a stockist, and perhaps a craftsman in my area who could do the necessary work?”’ Cate had thrown the magazine aside and chuckled, while their mother said, ‘Isn’t it extraordinary how little some people have to trouble them in life?’

‘I can see Aunt Rosemary writing a letter like that,’ Sally said, ‘or at least finding nothing odd in it.’

Helen had said nothing, but she’d thought about Sarah Maguire, whose youngest son, Oliver, she was defending on charges of shooting a taxi driver. She was probably only in her mid fifties, but looked much older. She thought of her careworn face, her timid, pleading manner: Mrs Maguire probably wouldn’t have been able to begin to imagine a life where she would have the luxury to think about a thing like that.

For some time now Helen had been hearing movements
upstairs. There were footsteps on the stairs, and then the kitchen door opened. Over her nightdress, Cate was wearing a fluffy white bathrobe edged in white satin.

‘How are you feeling?’

‘Not great.’

‘Mammy’ll be disappointed. I know she’s planning to make you a fry when she gets back from Mass. She bought the sodas and rashers specially.’

Cate grimaced and swore gently. ‘Can I have a cup of that tea?’ she asked, nipping across the cold tiles in her bare feet and taking the heel of a white loaf out of the bread bin. ‘This’ll do me nicely.’ Helen looked at her shrewdly as she passed her the tea, and Cate noticed the look. ‘Cheers, Helen, I’ll go and get dressed,’ she said as she scampered back across the floor. ‘I’m fine, really.’ Helen listened to her footsteps as she went back up to her room.

Crossing to the press, Helen picked up the photo of her father and looked at it closely. In her sitting room in Belfast she had a framed photograph of herself and her father standing on the lawn at Queen’s on her graduation day. How proud he’d been! She’d been the first person in her family to go to university, and in her excellent results and the speed with which she’d subsequently risen in her profession she’d far surpassed her parents’ hopes or expectations. She held the photograph tightly. It was black and white, and her father was a young, smiling man in it. It was only a snapshot, but captured his kindliness. He’d had the same brown eyes as his father and both his brothers. She could see why her mother liked that particular photograph so much.

The last weekend Helen saw her father, she’d been having trouble with her car. It had developed a tendency to stall when she slowed down, but she was too busy at work to take time off and get something done about it. ‘Why don’t you take my car to Belfast for the week,’ he’d said, ‘and I’ll limp into Antrim with yours and get it fixed for you.’

‘Oh thanks, Daddy,’ she’d said, ‘you don’t know what a help that would be to me. You restore my faith in men.’ She meant it as a joke, but unusually, he took it quite seriously and replied, ‘Well, there can’t be much right with the men that’s going now
to make a fine woman like you say a thing like that.’ The remark hurt her, as suddenly and abruptly as if he had reached out and pressed his fingers on an old wound which she had long since believed to be healed, but which his touch revealed to be as raw and painful as a fresh cut. The sudden tears that came to her eyes embarrassed her. He saw this, and for her sake pretended not to notice. ‘Don’t you worry, Helen, I’ll get it seen to and paid for,’ he said, ‘and we can get it all settled between us when you’re home next weekend.’

But before the week was out, he had been killed.

She set the photograph down, and from the shelf above lifted down a black book with
The People’s Missal
stamped on the cover in gold. The letters were faint now, rubbed away through use, and when she opened the book a piece of brittle white palm fell out of it. The book was stuffed with memorial cards: old, dark ones, dense with print, and more modern ones which were brightly coloured. They’d put the missal for safe keeping up beside the other books which had belonged to her father. She glanced along the titles:
Flora and Fauna of Northern Ireland, Field
Guide to the Birds of Lough Neagh, Monuments of Pre-Christian
Ireland, Celtic Heritage
. The fiction was on the shelf above:
Call
My Brother Back
by Michael McLaverty, Alexander Irvine’s
My
Lady of the Chimney Corner
, and collections of short stories by Liam O’Flaherty and Frank O’Connor. There were some of Granny Kate’s books mixed in with them:
Gone with the Wind
and
Rebecca
. They’d been passed along to their father after Granny Kate died because no one in Brian’s house had been a reader, and it had seemed right that any stray books in the family as a whole should ultimately make their way to their father. Even when she was at university she hadn’t met anybody who loved books and cherished them as much as her father had done. When she was still a child, Helen remembered her father taking her along to hear Seamus Heaney read in Magherafelt. When was that? Sometime in the early seventies, it must have been. He’d bought at that reading one of the several collections of Heaney’s poems which he owned, and as Helen reached up to lift down a copy of
North
, she noticed a figure standing at the kitchen window.