Rose of Tralee (3 page)

He pulled Caitlin into a sitting position and realised that a good deal of her pallor was due to the bag of flour, which had tipped most of its contents over her as she fell, and indeed, a second later she sneezed several times, very loudly, before pulling herself out of his arms and getting waveringly to her
feet. ‘I went crash-bang-wallop,’ she said breezily. ‘The shelf breaked in me hands, so it did. Will – will Mammy be cross?’

‘She will so,’ Colm said thoughtlessly, then saw Caitlin’s mouth begin to turn down at the corners and repented of his cruelty. ‘Ah, it’s all right, alanna, for I’ll not breathe a word to the mammy; you were doin’ your best to help,’ he said reassuringly. ‘Now just you sit in the chair be the fireside whiles I clear this mess away, then we’ll go off to deliver the washin’ an’ no one the wiser.’

He shovelled the flour back into its sack, hoping that the next time his mother came to need some she would not notice what a deal of dust had somehow got mixed with the topmost couple of inches, then began to tidy the other things. What a blessing she’d not actually broken anything, he thought, returning things to their proper places and giving a quick look back over his shoulder to see what the spalpeen was doing now. With Caitlin you could never be sure. But she was kneeling on the floor and dusting flour off the lower shelf with an old rag, clearly intent on making amends for her accident. As it was, Mammy would not scold for a mishap – and besides, with luck she need never find out.

‘All done,’ Colm said presently, returning to the washstand to heave the slop bucket up in one hand and the empty one with the other. ‘Come on, Caitlin, we’ll deal wit’ the water first.’

Caitlin got to her feet and as she stood up Colm noticed the state of her for the first time. Oh Mary, Mother of Jesus, the kid was covered in flour; it mingled with the dirt of a day’s play and gave her a terrifying appearance! Sighing, he stood his buckets down and reached for the floor brush, then led Caitlin
back into the pantry cupboard. He might as well brush her down where all the worst mess had been, then brush all the mess between the boards.

Twenty minutes later he and Caitlin set off at last, Caitlin looking suspiciously pale still, though Colm comforted himself with the thought that she looked pale because he was not used to seeing her so clean. He had brushed her hair, retied the piece of orange string which kept it out of her eyes, washed her face, hands and all the leg you could see under her skirt, then got rid of the evidence to the best of his ability. So now he took her hand, picked up the buckets and set off down the stairs.

The tap was inside the house, towards the back – a huge luxury in a city where a great many houses had no piped water indoors at all – and the slops were emptied down a rainwater grid. Colm performed both his tasks with Caitlin trotting beside him, then headed for the stairs once more, the buckets full. They would need the water later for making the tea, washing up the crocks and for their own ablutions at bedtime. Mammy liked to have her buckets full and provided he gave the slop bucket a good swill she would not object to it being filled instead of the big blue-and-white enamel one with the fitting lid, which he did not feel capable of carrying down as well as the other two.

Carefully, Colm carried out his tasks, then trudged up the stairs again, deposited the full buckets and picked up the basket of linen. ‘One more trip, Cait,’ he said happily. ‘Then we’ll come home an’ light the fire an’ get the spuds on before Mammy gets home.’

‘An’ . . . an’ you won’t tell the mammy about her cupboard, will you, Colm?’ Caitlin said in her most wheedling and soulful tone. ‘’Cos I does hate it when
the mammy’s cross, so I does.’

Colm laughed and rumpled her dark curls. ‘I’ll not say a word,’ he promised cheerfully. ‘And now let’s put our best foot forward so’s we’re home the sooner.’

All the way to St Stephen’s Green Street South Colm thought about his mother and how hard she worked to keep the family. He admitted, grudgingly, that he supposed his father worked hard too – but he was so far away. Diggin’ ditches in England, Colm thought sourly. Drinkin’ ale, fightin’, havin’ a fine old time. He sent money home, Colm knew that, but it wasn’t the same. Mammy slaved at her cleanin’ jobs, so she did, and brought home washin’ and cooked them good meals, took them out for days, gave him money for the penny rush at the picture house on Saturday mornings and for a tram ride from time to time, or a new second-hand pair of trousers from the market, so’s he was as smart as his pals. And in his turn, Colm did his best for the mammy. He did girls’ work around the house, he looked after his little sister, he ran messages and when he earned money, he handed it to his mammy without a second thought. She loved him and he loved her, he reasoned, and since she was good to him, he must be good, in his turn, to her. But for some reason best known to herself she still got very excited when their daddy came home, which was usually only once or twice a year. And after she’d put out the best food for their daddy she changed into her smartest clothes and the pair of ’em went off out together, and there had been times when his daddy came home the worse for drink, singin’ an’ shoutin’ an’ fallin’ about. Doing the things, in fact, which his mammy thought dreadful in other women’s
husbands but apparently accepted in her own – ‘Because,’ she explained, ‘your daddy’s far from home so much. When he’s back wit’ us sure an’ hasn’t he the reason for gettin’ a bit over-excited?’

But Colm didn’t excuse him, not in his heart. Sean O’Neill was over six foot tall and strong with it, and sometimes Colm thought that his daddy didn’t understand why he did so much around the house for his mammy, why he took Caitlin with him whenever he went out. Sean thought he had fathered a milksop and sometimes he showed it in a sneering sort of way, which made Colm long to rush at him and batter him. Only Sean was hugely strong – if any battering were done, it would be done by his father, Colm realised regretfully.

Not that Sean had shown the slightest sign of attacking his son. It was just the look in his eye sometimes, particularly when Mammy got up to clear away the tea-things or the dinner-plates and Colm jumped up too, and wiped whilst she washed, or poured the tea from the tin teapot into the cream-and-blue pottery cups which the mammy had saved up to buy from the market stall in Francis Street. Then Sean would lean back in his chair and whistle a tune, or pick Caitlin up and put her on his knee and tell her stories of life in England. Colm tried not to listen, but sometimes he couldn’t help it, and it was from these stories that he’d got the impression that his father had a high old time when he crossed the water.

And his mammy was so wonderful! She was no taller than Colm himself, and thin as the long pole which lifted their washing line up high in the courtyard at the back of the house, yet she was strong enough to scrub all the floors in the Merrill House and the O’Grady house and the Thompson house,
then bring a mound of washing home and iron it with the flat-irons which he or she heated by the fire until they reached a sufficient temperature to press without burning. And she almost never got cross, no matter what went wrong. Colm knew that other fellers had mammies who roared with rage, used a stick on their kids, wept and bellowed when something happened to vex them, but his mammy said the best thing was to ‘count to ten’, and she did just that. When the milk burned, when the spuds went to mush, when Caitlin dropped her cup and it smashed into a thousand pieces, when Colm played late and forgot a message, it was always the same. Mammy would sigh, smile, count to ten and then say lovingly that sure an’ wasn’t it just the sort of t’ing which had happened to her once, long ago? ‘No one’s to blame,’ she would say comfortably. ‘We’ll put it down to experience, so we shall.’

Sean O’Neill wasn’t home long enough to get aggravated with his son and daughter, Colm told himself, but once or twice his daddy had slapped him across the legs and wagged a reproving finger at Caitlin, which just showed, Colm thought, that given a bit more time his daddy would be like most of the daddies he knew – he’d beat his kids and his wife, and make their lives a misery, given the time to do it in.

But Mammy couldn’t – or wouldn’t – see it. When they’d been out for the afternoon, perhaps, and had a fish and chip supper, she would squeeze onto the same chair as Sean’s and he would put an arm round her and pull her close. And Colm would have to go to bed in the next room while they were like that – he hated doing it, hated leaving them, but he didn’t have a choice. Mammy would smile and say, ‘Bedtime,
Colm me boy’ and he would be on his feet and half way out of the door before he’d thought of one little excuse.

Colm slept in a cupboard of a room next to the living kitchen. It was a snug, windowless little place, with his bed, a chair, a holy picture and a row of hooks to hang his clothes on. He loved having his own little space, except when his daddy was home. Then he envied Caitlin, who had a cot next to mammy’s big bed, and could keep an eye on their parents all night if she wanted. Only she would be sound asleep really, Colm knew that, and come to think of it, judging by the way his mammy snuggled up to his daddy in the fireside chair, perhaps he did not much want to share their room, either. You’d have thought they were like the young lovers who hid in the doorways on Grafton Street to carry on when respectable people had gone to bed and not two old people, long married.

‘Are we nearly there, Colm?’ Caitlin said, bringing Colm back to earth once more. ‘Will we go in, eh? Will the lady gi’s a piece of soda bread or some liquorice sticks?’

You had to admit that for a young ’un, Caitlin had a way with her, Colm told himself as they rounded the corner into St Stephen’s Green. Only twice could he remember being given anything by the important people his mammy worked for and each time it had been because of Caitlin’s undoubted charm. But it didn’t do to get hopeful; better to expect nothing and be pleased if you got something, he thought, and answered accordingly, ‘I don’t know, alanna, but when we got the bread and the liquorice we went into the house to fetch Mammy out, didn’t we? This time we’re only deliverin’, which isn’t the same.’

‘You get a halfpenny or an apple or somethin’ good for goin’ messages,’ Caitlin pointed out. ‘That’s why you do it; you telled me so last time. Isn’t that why you’re after goin’ round to Mrs Gillis to see if she wants messages runnin’?’

‘It’s because she’s old and can’t go for herself . . . but you’re right, I’d not be so prompt if she didn’t give me somethin’ for me trouble,’ Colm admitted. ‘I’d still go, though, even wit’out the pennies. Mrs Gillis is nice.’

‘Yes, I love her, so I do,’ Caitlin said cheerfully. ‘Is that the house?’

‘You’ve got a memory like a bloody elephant,’ Colm said, then clapped a hand to his mouth. He was forgetting his own vow not to say anything in front of Caitlin that one did not want repeated. ‘Sorry, Cait, that was a bad word. You didn’t hear it; right?’

‘Sure I didn’t. Which house is it, Colly? If it’s a house wit’ kids in they might be makin’ treacle toffee!’

The incident of the treacle toffee had happened a year previously, but like most nice events it had clearly stayed in Caitlin’s memory. Possibly she had not included it in the recollections of things given at big houses because the giver had been a child, but although Colm had not forgotten it, he knew they were not revisiting that house today. ‘The toffee was give by the kids of the woman on Lower Bagot,’ he said regretfully. ‘I dunno if they’s kids here. Come on, it’s this house, but we go round the back, same’s Mammy does.’

There was a narrow passageway down the side of the house and they turned into this, crossed the courtyard where the dustbins were kept and knocked loudly on the back door, which was half open
because, Colm assumed, of the heat of the day. Through it they could see a very large and splendid room with red tiles on the floor and a big wooden table almost the length of the whole room. There was a huge oven, an open fire, shelves and shelves filled with exciting-looking kitchen equipment – Colm knew it was kitchen equipment because Mammy had told him so – and a very large fat woman hovering over the long table, which was laid with a great many dishes and pans and trays of food. The woman had her hair wrapped in a white cloth and a white apron covered her person ... and her face was scarlet from the heat and from bending, so that two trickles of sweat ran down her cheeks and joined into a little stream under the fat pile of her chins. She heard their knock and glanced up, then straightened and shouted to someone out of sight: ‘Door, Biddy! Delivery, be the looks of it.’

There was a rustling sound and a girl not a lot older than Colm appeared in the doorway. She, too, wore a white apron, but it was speckled and stained with dirt, and the hair which straggled out from under her white cap was greasy and unkempt. She had a thin face, reddened now by the heat, and she held a bowl in the curve of her arm and a big wooden spoon in her hand, but she smiled pleasantly enough at the two children hovering on the doorstep. ‘Yes?’ she asked, half turning away from them to stand the bowl down on the edge of the table.

‘Laundry, Miss,’ Colm said promptly. ‘Me Mammy’s Mrs O’Neill, she said to bring it over for her.’

‘Oh ...’ The girl turned and said to the fat woman, ‘It’s the washin’, cook. You know, the staff tablecloths an’ sheets that O’Neill took a couple o’ days gone.’

‘Right. Tek it in, then,’ the cook said abstractedly. She sighed. ‘Sure and isn’t it just my luck that everyone’s comin’ to the door an’ me wit’ a dinner party for two dozen to get ready?’

‘Thanks,’ the girl said to Colm, holding out a hand.

But Colm had delivered too many parcels to great houses to allow her so much as to touch it until he’d had his mammy’s money. ‘There’s money to be paid, Miss,’ he said politely, therefore. ‘Me mammy said there was money owin’ and I was to fetch it.’

‘Bloomin’ blood out of a stone some of ’em would ask for,’ the cook said in a goaded voice. ‘We’ll pay your mammy tomorrer, sonny, or the day after that. Tek it in, Bid, and get on wit’ beatin’ that batter.’

Biddy looked hunted and Colm hung onto his parcel harder than ever. He knew the quality, so he did! They would mean to pay, his mother had explained many times, but you could fall between two stools, with the mistress thinking the maid had paid and the maid assuming that the mistress had done so. Accordingly he stood his ground. One and ninepence was nothing to these people, but it was a great deal to the O’Neills, and a poor sort of son he’d be if he meekly handed his mammy’s work over without first getting his money!