One by One in the Darkness (4 page)

‘It’s only me,’ Brian said, as she unlocked the back door for
him. They’d long since given up the habit of leaving the door on the latch during the day. Their mother was anxious unlocking it unless she knew for sure who was on the other side, and at night even Helen was afraid when the doorbell rang late and unexpected.

‘Hello, Brian, how are you keeping? Take a seat there.’

‘Thanks, Helen, not so bad, and yourself? It was Katie I called to say hello to, is she out at Mass yet?’

‘No, she’s upstairs, but I think she’ll be down in a minute or two,’ Helen said, getting an ashtray for Brian and offering tea. The kitchen was full of a deep golden light now, every mote of dust showing clear as it floated and fell. Helen talked to her uncle in a desultory way about Cate’s return, and the weather, but they soon fell into a silence that wasn’t altogether comfortable. Whenever possible now, she avoided being alone with Brian. She remembered sitting with him on the kitchen sofa at three o’clock in the morning during her father’s wake, drinking neat whiskey, neither of them speaking. He’d looked suddenly older when his brother was killed: until then, Helen had thought it was a cliché to talk about people ageing overnight.

‘It was my fault,’ he’d said abruptly, lifting his gaze from the floor tiles and looking Helen hard in the eye. ‘It was me they wanted. I’m to blame.’

‘You’re never to say that again, Brian. It’s not true and you know it.’ He’d passed his hands over his eyes and looked away. How had he known what she was thinking? He’d never repeated those words to her but since then the idea had always lain between them like a coiled snake, making a distance, a coolness, a fear that had never been there before. She lost Brian too, that night: she did to some degree hold him responsible, and that he also blamed himself was of no real help to her.

Helen was glad now when Cate appeared, in black leggings and an oversized tee-shirt, her long straight hair pulled back into a pony tail. ‘Fit and well you’re looking, Katie,’ Brian said, which Helen thought was flattering of him, as Cate actually looked frail and wan. She watched her sister as Cate, beaming, chatted to their uncle.

‘Will you come over and see us sometime, Katie?’ Brian said
wistfully, and Cate bit her lip the way she’d done when she was little and was told to do something she didn’t want to do.

‘Oh, Brian,’ she said, ‘I don’t know if I can.’

‘It would be great for Lucy,’ he said, coaxing.

‘I will, I’ll come. But maybe not for a while. Maybe I’ll come with Sally?’

‘And your mammy, too,’ Brian said. ‘We’ll make a night of it, I’ll get Una to take a race over from Magherafelt.’

‘I’d love to see Una,’ Cate said. There was the sound of a car pulling up at the front of the house, and Brian at once stood up to leave. ‘That’s Mammy and Sally now, won’t you wait to see them?’ Cate said, but he waved his hand.

‘Ah, sure your mammy’s tired looking at me, I’m in and out of this house far more than I should be, since I can’t sit at peace in my own. Tell her I was asking for her, Sally too,’ and as they heard the key turn in the front door, he slipped out by the back.

‘You’ll have had your fill of relatives by tonight, Cate,’ Sally said when she heard Brian had been there. ‘You know Uncle Michael and Aunt Rosemary are coming over this afternoon to see you, don’t you?’

‘At least you’ll get that visit out of the way near the start of your time,’ Helen said. ‘You’ll be hearing all about the christening. Can you believe they called the baby Michael, too?’

‘There’s no sense in it,’ said their mother. ‘Three people in the same family all with the same name: four if you count my father. It’s so confusing, isn’t it? The son got called Wee Michael and then he was Young Michael; now they talk about Baby Michael and Daddy Michael, until you haven’t a clue who’s who. Talk about carrying on the family name! I never heard such a load of nonsense, you’d think they were royalty or something.’

‘Or one of those people in the American Mid West that call themselves things like Wilbur E. Hackensack IV,’ Helen said.

‘We all got asked to the christening,’ Sally said. ‘It was more like a wedding, with printed invitations and a meal in the Adair Arms.’

‘And do you know what Aunt Rosemary did at it, Cate? She was sitting beside Sally and when the meat was served she turns to her and says, “I’m afraid this piece of beef is rather fatty, and the doctor told me that under absolutely no circumstances should
I eat fatty meat. Would you ever mind changing with me?” And poor Sally had to hand over her dinner.’

Sally smiled. ‘I didn’t really mind so much,’ she said.

‘Well, I’d have bloody minded,’ said Helen, who had been telling the story. ‘If she didn’t want the fat, all she had to do was cut it off and leave it. I saw the two plates and the only difference was that Sally’s bit of beef was bigger. She’s as bad as ever she was about her health. She’s got one of those designer allergies now; I don’t remember what it is she pretends she can’t eat.’

‘Those allergies are very real,’ Cate protested, but Helen waved her hand dismissively.

‘Hers isn’t. She’s as healthy as a clam. Honest, Cate, it’s a kind of hobby for her.’

‘She told me,’ their mother said, ‘that the only vegetables she could eat were pimentos and aubergines.’

‘I rest my case,’ Helen said.

‘I felt like saying to her: “Aren’t you lucky this has only come on you now, and not thirty years ago, when you couldn’t have found an aubergine in Ballymena for love nor money?”’

Cate chuckled. ‘God, you shouldn’t have told me all this. If she starts to talk about her diet this afternoon, I’m not going to be able to keep a straight face.’

They arrived not long after lunch, Uncle Michael all nerves, Aunt Rosemary all effusiveness; and were ushered into the parlour rather than into the kitchen. There’d always been a tension in their relations with their mother’s family, quite unlike their free and easy attitude to their father’s people. Even as small children they’d known it, long before they could understand or articulate it, picking up the unease amongst the adults as horses and dogs can sense the coming of an earthquake. It was all like a foolish game, Helen now thought, a game in which their stakes had increased over the years as the sisters made good in the world. Aunt Rosemary was particularly fascinated by Cate, whom she wrongly believed to have changed out of all recognition, for Cate had never been as flighty or lazy as Rosemary had once thought her. She’d gone to London with her husband for a short holiday the previous year, and had made a point of arranging to see Cate, who knew instinctively what was required of her: tea at the Ritz, a guided tour of the shops in Bond Street
and Knightsbridge, assistance in obtaining tickets for a Lloyd Webber musical. As soon as they got back to Ireland, Rosemary had phoned Cate’s mother to say what a wonderful time they’d had.

‘You must be so proud, with two such successful daughters,’ she said, but their mother replied sharply, ‘I’m proud of all three of them.’ That was another difference now: how their mother’s attitude had gone from timidity when she was with her family and resentment when she was away from them; to indifference when they were absent, and confidence when they were there. It was her brother and his wife who didn’t know fully how to handle the changed situation. Now it was their turn to feel ill at ease and to shift uncertainly on the sofa. Helen pitied them too the horrible stale, sweet sherry that their teetotal mother kept in the parlour sideboard from one year’s end to the next, and which she offered to them in mercifully tiny glasses.

As had been predicted, much of the talk was about Young Michael and Baby Michael, while Helen looked coolly at her uncle, who was frequently referred to behind his back as Oul’ Michael. He’d recently retired from his job with an insurance firm; and Helen remembered how her father used to call him teasingly ‘a good overcoat man’. But although they’d never been comfortable with each other, there was no real malice in his attitude towards his brother-in-law. On the contrary, it was he who had insisted on maintaining as good a link as possible with the family in Ballymena. ‘Blood’s thicker than water,’ Helen had heard her father saying for years before she understood what it meant. Michael stared at the carpet, while his wife prattled on beside him; and Helen could find it in her heart to feel sorry for her prosperous, red-faced uncle.

Looking across the room, she noticed that Cate was also paying scant attention to the conversation around her. She had accepted but not drunk a glass of sherry, and now she was gazing into it, frowning, which, together with being withdrawn in company, was most uncharacteristic of Cate. Helen wondered vaguely how long she was going to wait before breaking her news to the family; and in thinking this, she realised how completely she’d guessed Cate’s secret. It couldn’t remain a secret now for too much longer.

At two o’clock every Friday afternoon Miss Wilson would take a key and unlock the glass-fronted press at the back of the classroom, where the library books were kept, and they would all read for an hour. In the press there was also an exercise book covered in brown wrapping paper, and when you took a book out you had to write down in it the title and your own name; then when you gave the book back Miss Wilson would put a red tick beside your name. Usually it was the best hour of the week, but there was this problem: before you gave the book back, you had to write a composition about what you’d just read. This was to stop messers like Willy Larkin, or Helen’s cousin Declan, from getting a book out one Friday and pretending to read it, then giving it back next week and getting another one out, just for the look of it. The problem with this rule was that last week Helen had made a bad choice, by taking out a book of stories about the Wild West, which had turned out to be really boring. It was the cover that had attracted her: it had a picture of a woman wearing a white buckskin jacket and skirt, with boots and a hat like a cowboy. Helen had read three of the stories, but she had only liked one of them, and she wasn’t interested in trying to read any of the others. She wondered if Miss Wilson expected her to write a composition about every story in the whole book. Helen turned to the list of contents and counted how many stories there were. Twelve. She saw Miss Wilson looking at her, so she leaned over the book and pretended to read.

The story Helen had liked was about Annie Oakley, who had shot quail to feed her little brothers and sisters because they had had no grown-ups to look after them. Little Sure Shot, they’d called her. She was so good at shooting things that she’d joined a kind of circus with Buffalo Bill, and became famous and rich and made lots of money for her family. It was well seen Little Sure Shot had no mammy or daddy: it was as much as Helen
dared do to look at her daddy’s shotgun. He kept it on a pair of hooks, high up in the cloakroom, where only he could reach it. There were three dangerous things about which their mother frequently warned them: the lough, the hay baler, and the shotgun. But what if Helen had had to use the gun? What if something terrible happened to their mammy and daddy, and she had to look after her sisters completely: would she be able to go out to the lough shore and shoot ducks so that herself and Kate and Sally would have something to eat? She couldn’t imagine it. There probably wouldn’t be any point, anyway, Sally would never eat a wild duck; it was a day’s work for Mammy to get her to eat anything other than fish fingers and mashed potatoes. Maybe Annie Oakley had never shot the quail either: maybe it was all just a story somebody had made up.

Daddy hardly ever went shooting now. He was too old for it, he said, he’d rather be in his warm bed on a winter’s morning than out standing in the rain and the cold by the lough shore. Uncle Brian still went out though. Even he was careful about his gun: he kept it locked away in a cupboard under the stairs, and in Uncle Brian’s house they usually weren’t careful about anything. The last time Helen had been over there, the baby had been sitting on the floor playing with a tin opener, and she’d wondered that nobody thought anything odd about this or took the tin opener off the baby until after it had cut it’s finger.

Auntie Rosemary had said a funny thing a while back about Aunt Lucy. She’d said it to Uncle Michael and Helen had overheard her, but she hadn’t been able to understand what it meant. She’d repeated it to her parents that night at teatime, hoping they’d explain, flinging the remark out as a statement rather than a question.

‘Auntie Rosemary says that if it hadn’t been for the shotgun Aunt Lucy would never have married Uncle Brian.’

At first, her parents hadn’t said anything. They’d just stared at her, and then her daddy had whispered, ‘Merciful God!’ Her mammy went bright pink and started to shout. ‘What sort of thing is that to say? Don’t let me ever hear talk like that from you again, Helen!’ But her daddy had quickly interrupted her. ‘Don’t go blaming the innocent child, Emily,’ he’d said. ‘Put the
blame where it’s due.’ Their mammy stopped talking and looked at her plate. Now it was really interesting.

‘What did Auntie Rosemary mean?’ Kate piped up.

‘I don’t know,’ their mammy said, but they knew this wasn’t true. Their daddy had passed his hands wearily over his eyes. ‘I know what she meant,’ he said. Their daddy always told the truth, and he often explained things. ‘What she meant was something very unkind and uncharitable, and if I told you what it meant, I’d be doing something unkind too. You must promise not to ask about this again, and you must promise above all never to say anything about it to Uncle Brian or Auntie Lucy. Promise?’

They promised.

Then their mammy had said, ‘Sorry,’ to their daddy, and he’d shook his head and said, ‘It’s not your fault any more than the child’s. Let’s just forget all about it.’

But Kate was bold. One day after that when Aunt Lucy was sitting plucking a mallard Helen heard Kate ask, ‘Before you married Uncle Brian, did you know he liked shooting things?’ She stopped working for a moment and looked puzzled. ‘I don’t rightly remember. I suppose I knew most men in the country went shooting then. I don’t think I thought too much about it; it didn’t bother me one way or the other.’ Helen trod hard on Kate’s toe under the table. Kate scowled at her and pulled her foot away, but she didn’t ask any more questions.

The wind blew the rain hard against the windows of the classroom. Nights like this were good to go out shooting, their daddy said, and it was good weather for the men to catch eels. The best time of all for that was a stormy night in November. Sometimes their daddy would go over to Uncle Brian’s house for a tea of fried eels, because their mammy wouldn’t cook them. She said they stank you out of house and home for a week, and that if you’d given her a thousand pounds into her hand, she wouldn’t have been able to skin an eel. Her daddy didn’t mind: he said eels were probably something you had to be reared to, otherwise you wouldn’t like them.

She turned the pages of her book again. Annie Oakley. Big Chief Sitting Bull. Davy Crockett. Willy Larkin wasn’t concentrating
on his book either. Suddenly he leaned over and whispered, ‘Why has Davy Crockett got three ears?’

‘Why?’

‘Because he’s got a right ear and a left ear and a wild frontier.’

‘Willy and Helen, what are you tittering about?’

‘Nothing, Miss.’ They pretended to be interested in their books again. Helen sneaked a look at the watch she’d been given last Christmas. Twenty more minutes to go.

She was looking forward to the weekend, because their daddy was taking them into Ballymena to buy new water boots. They’d probably have to call and see Granny Kelly too: that wouldn’t be so nice, especially if Uncle Michael was there. She wondered if Sally would be well enough to go with them tomorrow, because she’d had one of her nosebleeds this morning. Helen had been called out of class to go and comfort her. Sally’s teacher had made her lie on the floor and had put the cold iron key of the school gate on the back of her neck. Sally had made a big fuss about it, but the bleeding had stopped, and she’d looked better when Helen saw her again at lunchtime.

She wished that the bell would ring so that they could go home, although usually she liked school. She was the best in the class, Miss Wilson said; she got the best marks in everything and she had the neatest handwriting. The only thing she wasn’t very good at was spelling. Up at the front of the classroom there was a poster covered with lots of small pieces of paper, and at the top Miss Wilson had written in big letters ‘Our First Day With Ink’. From where she sat, Helen could pick out her own work, blotless and exact. Over by the window was the nature table. There was a bird’s nest on it, and the broken shells of a blackbird’s eggs that someone had found. There was a wasp’s nest too, and then jam-jars with twigs in them, and a label glued on each to say what the twigs were: horse-chestnut, hips, haws, hazel, snow-berries. The fruits were all wrinkled because the nature table was beside a radiator. On the window-sills were pots of geraniums and busy Lizzies. At breaktime every day when the children were drinking their milk Miss Wilson had some tea. Between break and lunch she would leave the tea pot aside, and then as soon as the bell went for lunch and they’d
finished saying the Angelus, she’d pour the cold tea into the flower pots, until it seeped out into the saucers.

At last! One of the bigger boys or girls was ringing a handbell down the corridor, and everybody in Helen’s class got up from their desks. They packed their books into their bags and put their chairs upside-down on their desks. The board was wiped clean while Colette and Anthony brushed the floor, because it was their turn to do it. They all gabbled a quick prayer to their guardian angel to look after them when they were on the way home from school; then ran out to the cloakroom to change their shoes and put on their coats.

The next morning, when they were getting ready to go into Ballymena, Helen said to her mammy flat out, ‘I don’t like going to see Granny Kelly.’ Their mammy, who was wiping Sally’s face with a damp flannel, pretended to be shocked. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say, Helen.’

‘Well, you don’t like it, do you? You hardly ever come with us. It’s always Daddy who takes us to see her. Why don’t you come with us today?’

‘Oh, I can’t go to Ballymena,’ she said, uncurling Sally’s fists and wiping the palms. ‘I have too much to do; I have to mind the house.’ Sally was whinging because she didn’t want to go either, she wanted to stay with Mammy.

In the car on the way there Helen sat in the front because she was the eldest, and as they drove along she tried her father with the same remark. ‘I don’t like visiting Granny Kelly.’

‘Neither do I,’ he said.

‘Why?’ she asked, and he thought for a moment before replying. ‘Because she doesn’t like me. Your granny was cross with me for marrying your mammy. Mammy had been to the college in Belfast and worked hard and got all the exams to be a teacher, like her daddy had been, and Granny Kelly wanted that more than anything else in the world. And then as soon as your mammy got out of the college she met me and wanted to get married.’

‘Couldn’t she have done both? Worked and still got married?’

‘Then who would have looked after you when you came along?’

Helen thought about this. Aunt Lucy was still working in the cigarette factory, but then she had Granny Kate to look after the baby and mind the house until Johnny and Declan and Una got home from school. ‘I don’t suppose Granny Kelly could have come and lived with us and looked after us,’ she said uncertainly.

‘What do you think?’ her daddy said, looking at her sideways. ‘Would you have liked that?’

‘Oh, I like things just as they are,’ Helen said quickly, and her daddy laughed.

‘So do I,’ he said.

Helen often used to think how, if one of her grannies had died before she had known them, she would have been left with a very limited idea of what a granny was. If she had known only Granny Kelly, she would have thought that all grannies were sad and forbidding, that they dressed only in black and lived sunk in deep chairs in dank parlours. If she’d only had Granny Kate to go by, she’d have thought a granny was someone who liked big hats and bright clothes, who always had a book or a magazine propped behind the taps of the kitchen sink when she was peeling potatoes, who couldn’t pass a pram without stopping to admire the baby in it, and who had a fat, juicy laugh, so loud you could hear it through thick walls and closed doors.

Granny Kelly lived in a grey-painted terraced house with huge bay windows, not far from the centre of Ballymena. It was Auntie Rosemary who opened the door and led them into the dim parlour, where Granny Kelly was sitting. Helen felt a pain in her tummy, the sort you got when the teacher asked you a question and you didn’t know the answer, and you knew she was going to be cross, because you should have known. She sat down on the sofa between Kate and Sally. One reason they didn’t like visiting Granny Kelly was that it was so boring. Usually their cousins were out when they called, and they weren’t as much fun as Uncle Brian’s family anyway. They had no garden, no dogs or cats, and the television was never turned on when they were there. Very occasionally Kate or Helen would be called upon to recite a poem they had learnt at school, or to play something on the tinny piano, but in general, all they had to do was sit for an hour like pins in paper and behave themselves. Sometimes as she talked to their father Granny Kelly would stare
hard at one of the girls, as if she didn’t know who you were, and she was trying to find out by looking at you hard, from your shoes to your hair-ribbons. Helen hated this, for by the time Granny Kelly turned her stare upon one of the others, Helen would feel guilty of all sorts of things she hadn’t done. She’d feel her face go red, and she would want to say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ even though nobody had accused her of anything.

Auntie Rosemary sat a few moments and then went off to the kitchen. No sooner had she gone out than Uncle Michael came in. ‘Hello, Charlie, hello, girls. Emily didn’t come with you? Ah well. How’s Kate? How’s Sally? Well, Helen, how many slaps did you get at school this week?’

‘None,’ she said sullenly.

‘Helen’s a good scholar,’ her father said, smiling at her. Uncle Michael made the same silly joke every time she saw him. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ he went on. Helen knew the answer to this, but she wasn’t quite sure how you said the word.

‘I’m going to be an e-… an e-…’

‘An eejit? Sure you’re that already,’ he interrupted her, and burst out with laughter at his own joke. Even Granny gave a nasty little smile. The feeling in the pit of Helen’s stomach was worse now, but she was angry, too.

‘Someone who goes to Egypt,’ she said, as coldly as she could, ‘and looks for mummies.’

‘Sure your mammy’s at home in the house,’ he said, pretending to be baffled, and giving Granny Kelly a wink. ‘What do you want to go off to Egypt for?’

‘Not mammies,
mummies
,’ said Kate, who always stuck up for Helen. ‘They’re people that have been dead for thousands of years, and they’re all wrapped up in bandages, and they have lovely jewellery and some of them have a thing on them like a false face only it’s made out of solid gold. Isn’t that right, Helen?’