Shamrock Green (41 page)

‘Is Algie Pauline's boy?'

‘Nup.'

‘Whose boy is he then?'

‘Nobody's boy. His own boy,' said Maeve.

‘What age is he?'

Maeve shrugged. ‘Ten or eleven.'

‘Who pays for his keep?'

‘Fran does. Fran did.'

The room was wreathed in smoke from the coal fire, for the chimney had not been properly cleaned yet. The paraffin stove on which Sylvie cooked gave off a rancid odour and Sean, growing larger every day, had filled his nappy only minutes before and was having it changed. His wails grew louder and more petulant, for he did not take kindly to being turned on his back like a turtle and having his bottom wiped. Sylvie raised her voice. ‘Why did Fran do that?'

‘Hmm?'

The novelty of having a half-brother had almost worn off and although Maeve was still loving and considerate towards Sean she had lost interest in the sordid mechanics of child-rearing. She was lying on the bed reading a tattered copy of the
Irish Times
and at that moment looked less like a girl on the threshold of womanhood than a gawky half-grown boy.

‘Maeve?'

‘Whaa-at?' She rustled the newspaper irritably.

‘Why did Fran take in those children?'

‘I don't know, do I?' Maeve said. ‘Why don't you ask Pauline?'

The question was perfectly reasonable but Sylvie had no ready answer.

She lifted Sean from the mat on the floor and dropped the cloth into the bowl. He was naked save for a neatly pinned napkin and in the wand of sunlight from the window reminded her of one of the cherubs in an Italian painting she had seen in Glasgow when she was a schoolgirl. His hair had already begun to thicken and curl and he snatched at the mischievous sunlight as if it had been put there just for his benefit.

‘Pauline knows everythin',' Maeve said. ‘All you have to do is ask her.'

‘Perhaps I will,' Sylvie said. ‘Perhaps I will at that.'

She was reluctant to communicate with the woman in the ground-floor apartment, though, for she resented Pauline Rafferty's position as counsellor, arbitrator and rent-collector. It seemed to Sylvie that she, a proper landlady who had once managed a proper hotel, should be given her place and that it was up to Pauline to ask for her help rather than the other way around.

Pauline was smart in some ways, naïve in others. She seemed blissfully unaware of the irony of the situation, that both she and Sylvie had been Francis Hagarty's lovers and were stuck together in the same house now that Fran was gone. Sylvie suspected that there might be more of Fran's ‘wives' and children running around Dublin, but she had no intention of asking Pauline to confirm her suspicions. She wanted Fran and all Fran stood for to drift off into the mists of time and leave her with Sean and her memories and none of the guilt, pain and responsibility that being one of Fran's ‘wives' had entailed.

Unfortunately, Pauline refused to accept that Fran was really dead and Sylvie didn't have the heart to force the truth upon her. ‘'Merica. Fran's in America,' Pauline would say. ‘He always comes back. He gives me money, an' then he comes back.' Meanwhile, she continued to stand by the door of her apartment every Friday night and count the shillings that the tenants put into her hand and, so Maeve told her, record the amounts in a skinny black notebook. Sylvie found it difficult to believe that the swaying creature in the hall below was numerate and literate enough to keep an account book but that, so Maeve told her, was just snobbery on her part.

Although she had been a dozen years in the city, Sylvie did not know Dublin well. She had seldom ventured far from Sperryhead except to window-shop in Grafton Street, take a turn around the park with Gowry or visit one of the theatres. She had no real sense of the city's nuances and distinctions. She regarded Dublin as the Dublin that came to her door, a town peopled by the commercials, priests and rebels. She had turned a blind eye to the rest, to Dublin's coarseness and delicacy, its pace and pulse and vigour. Now that Gowry was dead, and she was sure that he was, she had every excuse for returning to Glasgow but she wouldn't capitulate and kow-tow to fate. For Maeve's sake, she would stick it out in Dublin.

May gave way to June. The sun lay like a waxy ball in the sky over the mountains and the evenings were wonderfully long. It was breathlessly hot and stifling, though, and from her window Sylvie would look down into the street at the women seated on the pavements while their men sheltered in McKinstry's cool, brown interior and little girls trotted to and fro carrying jugs of porter – just toddlers some of them, hardly bigger than the jugs they carried – and the children all barefoot to save on shoes and the boys, most of them, stripped down to their trousers, bare-bellied and bare-chested.

Maeve was among them, prominent because of her height, racing about, chasing and being chased, skipping rope. Her breasts had developed enough to have shape and mobility and the older boys eyed her with sly speculation, her hair and breasts bouncing and her long gawky body going up and down, up and down, nimble as an antelope or a kangaroo as she hopped across the rope.

In slanting sunlight, in the dust between the tenements, Sylvie almost expected to catch sight of Fran strolling out of the twilight in his long black overcoat, or Gowry, her lovely, unappreciated Gowry, jaunty in khaki, marching home from war. Then she was smitten by loneliness and a sudden longing to be at one with the women below, part of the texture of this funny, fair, furious city.

Sean was fast asleep in his basket, dew on his brow, eyelids flickering as if he were dreaming of things too remote to be other than dreams. She got up from the chair by the window and went to the fire, hardly a fire at all, just a bridge of ash and a frail finger of smoke. She gave it a stir with an iron poker then plucked her shawl from the hook and went down the spiral staircase into the street.

Pauline was seated on the top step. She wore a dirty white dress and was barefoot and bare-legged. Sylvie saw then what Fran had found attractive in the girl, a fey quality, but sexual too, and slightly cruel.

‘Hoh!' Pauline said, glancing round.

‘Hoh yourself!' said Sylvie, and sat down.

*   *   *

The letter was typed on brittle brown paper and headed War Information Office. It was signed by the Hon. Secretary, Catherine M. McPhail.

It said:

In addition to information which you may have received from the Department of War I have to report that it is believed that your husband, Private G. McCulloch, 2
nd
Battalion, Sperryhead Rifles, was one of a party on detachment to a position near Heuvert and did not return from a night attack upon a German emplacement in a sector where casualties were abnormally heavy.

As you will appreciate identification is no easy matter and so far it has not been possible to obtain eye-witness confirmation through the Red Cross Society, although it appears that a body bearing resemblances to your husband was brought in and buried in a grave close to the aforementioned town along with thirty-seven other men, the site being marked with boards. So far, however, it has not been possible to obtain entry to company or battalion records or receive final confirmation from the surviving officer, Lieutenant A. J. Soames. Consequently your application for a pension form claim is being held pending further enquiry.

I am afraid, however, that there is little room for hope that your husband is alive and I therefore offer you my sincere sympathy.

‘What a bugger,' Pauline said when Sylvie showed her the letter. ‘Sure an' they'll not be givin' away their money without a fight. Is there nobody you could drop a line to, somebody who knew him, a chum in the ranks?'

Sylvie shook her head. ‘Gowry wasn't the sort to make chums.'

‘What about this fellah, this Soames?'

‘I wouldn't know where to find him,' said Sylvie. ‘In any case, I imagine he'll be far too busy to answer letters from strangers.'

‘Maybe Dad's a prisoner,' Maeve said. ‘Maybe he has magnesia.'

‘Amnesia,' Sylvie said. ‘I doubt it.'

‘Amnesia,' Maeve went on, ‘an' can't remember who we are or where he comes from. Maybe when the war's over he'll come home, see us on the street an' there'll be a flash an'—'

‘How can he come home if he can't remember where home is?' Pauline put in. ‘I think the Germans'll have him.'

‘Red Cross,' said Maeve. ‘Best bet.'

‘Well, you'll not be gettin' a penny out o' them miserable beggars at the War Department until you find out for sure he's dead,' said Pauline.

‘If he isn't dead' – Sylvie smoothed the paper with the palm of her hand – ‘shouldn't I still be receiving my share of his pay?'

‘No pay an' no pension,' Maeve said. ‘That's how the government's payin' for the war, Mam, by starvin' the widows an' orphans. By Gad, we could all be dead an' gone before we get a penny piece out of them.'

‘He's gone away – like Fran,' Pauline said.

Maeve tilted her head and rolled her eyes towards the ceiling.

‘Aye,' she said, ‘maybe my dad's hidin' in 'Merica too.'

‘Maeve' – Sylvie raised an admonitory finger – ‘enough.'

‘If only we'd written to Daddy,' Maeve said, ‘we'd have his letters to tell us who to write to now.'

‘What?' Pauline said, frowning. ‘Didn't you write to him?'

‘No, not often,' said Sylvie.

‘Tell the truth,' said Maeve. ‘I wrote to him an' there was never the scrape of a pen back. I reckon he was mad at all of us 'cause of Fran. I mean, you can't hardly blame him.'

‘I've got letters,' Pauline said.

‘Letters? What letters?' said Sylvie.

‘All sorts o' letters,' Pauline said. ‘In a box downstairs.'

‘Fran's letters, you mean?' said Maeve.

‘Fran used to take them out o' his pockets. He carried a lot o' paper stuff in his pockets, Fran. He'd pull out the box, drop the stuff into it an' put it back.'

‘Back where?' Sylvie said.

‘Back downstairs.'

Mother and daughter glanced at each other. Friend though she had become these past few weeks, Pauline could still be infuriatingly vague. Maeve perched on a stool, heels propped on the hood of the fireplace, her calves kippered by smoke. She spread her knees and expertly brought the stool to rest on the floor. ‘Letters from Fran? May we see them, Pauline?'

‘What for?'

‘To see if he ever had anythin' to say about us.'

‘He never did,' said Pauline. ‘They're mostly business.'

Maeve smiled her most winning smile. ‘Pleeee-ease.'

‘It's a fair big box,' Pauline said. ‘He wrote a lot.'

‘I'll bet he did,' said Maeve.

*   *   *

The small plywood chest that Algie lugged up from the cellar had
Ceylon Tea
stencilled on one side and, oddly,
Jesus is Lord
on the other. It was filled with bills, paid and unpaid, a great many grubby
billets-doux
from anonymous women, several letters from a Seamus O'Doyle in Chicago, more from a Peter Blanchard in Philadelphia, and a series of complaints from the editors of journals and newspapers, some of which had been crumpled up then smoothed out again.

The papers had been tossed casually into the box on top of more solid objects and among the oddments that Maeve and Algie unearthed were an old meerschaum pipe carved in the likeness of Wolfe Tone, a tarnished medallion of John the Almsgiver, a big rosette of faded green flannel and a dented pewter tankard with
Oliver Francis Hagarty, 1896
engraved on the base. Why Pauline hadn't raided the box for items to sell or pawn was a mystery, but while Fran had been alive there had been no real scarcity of money and, like every other thing in this queer household, the stuff in the tea-chest had been his property.

Sylvie experienced a certain distaste at sifting through the correspondence, scanning the love letters and the letters of commitment and conspiracy that Fran's short, sad life had engendered.

Head inside the chest, Maeve said, ‘Look at this.' She emerged with a batch of letters in buff-coloured envelopes. ‘Recognise the handwriting, Mam?'

Sylvie took the letters and held them up to the light.

‘Dad's,' Maeve said. ‘Those letters are from Daddy.'

‘Yes,' Sylvie said, heart sinking. ‘I do believe they are.'

‘Why would Daddy be writing to Fran?'

Pauline was standing by the table on which Fran's scrappy history had been spread. She had put the baby down but two of the younger children clung to her skirts. They were quite different, each from the other, the boy with the crisp, curly black hair of a Celt, the girl with hair as fair and fine as a Nordic princess's. Pauline had adopted a vague, far-away air that suggested less innocence than indifference. Sylvie slit the seal on the first of the letters with her thumbnail, dropped the page into her hand and scanned it.

‘What does it say, Mam? Why did Daddy write to Fran?'

‘It isn't addressed to Fran,' said Sylvie. ‘It's addressed to us.'

‘Us?' Maeve said. ‘Daddy wrote to us?'

Sylvie groped behind her, found a chair and sank down on to it.

‘Gowry didn't – he didn't abandon us. He wrote to us from Fermoy.' She fanned out the letters. ‘Five, six times. He told us where he was and what he was doing and that – that he loved us.' She was conscious of Pauline swaying on the edge of her vision. ‘I thought Gowry didn't care, and all along…'

‘Give me that.' Maeve snatched the letter from her mother's hand. ‘Did you know about this, Pauline? Did you know Fran had stolen our letters, my letters from my daddy?' Pauline crooned and swayed in time to music that only she could hear.
‘He stole our letters, Mam,'
Maeve cried. Algie stopped rooting in the box and looked up, and the smaller children clung more tightly to their mother's skirt. ‘Fran stole our letters. Why, why would he do that?'