Academy Street (3 page)

Aunt Maud blows her nose into her handkerchief.
Evelyn goes around the table with
the teapot, then whispers something to Aunt Maud.

‘She told Evelyn where to get the linen table-cloth to put on the table for the meal,’
Aunt Maud says. ‘Isn’t that right, Evelyn?’

Evelyn nods and sniffs. ‘She did. Only a few days ago. She told me which drawer it
was in.’

Tess is watching her father. He takes a drink of tea and swallows. All the time he
is looking down. She can see the bones in his face moving under his skin.

‘She was a fine woman,’ the priest says. ‘A fine woman.’

‘She even told us which dress to lay her out in—her new blue dress,’ Evelyn says.

Tess’s heart nearly stops. She understands what that means; her mother is lying in
her coffin in her new blue dress. The one she got in Briggs’ that day that Tess got
her dress, the one she is wearing now. Carefully, she leaves the cake plate up on
the sideboard and walks out of the dining room on shaky legs. She climbs the stairs.
The sun is flooding in through the stained-glass window, like yesterday. She hurries
past, to the upstairs landing and down along the corridor to her parents’ room. The
door is closed. She stands for a moment, then turns the handle and walks in. It is
dark. The drapes have not been opened. There is a bad smell, like when a mouse dies
under the floorboards. She runs and drags open the drapes on one of the windows.
The mirror is still covered with the black cloth. On the dressing table there is
a photograph of her father and mother on their wedding day. She
looks at it. Her
father might get a new wife now. She might get a new mother. There is another photograph
of her mother in a nurse’s uniform when she was young and working in a hospital down
in Cork. She opens the top drawer, lifts out a red cloth box, checks her mother’s
brooches, her locket, her hat pins. Nothing is missing. She opens the wardrobe door
and gets a terrible fright. For a second she thinks there are people in funeral clothes
standing inside the wardrobe. She pushes at the coats and the dresses but there are
too many and she is too small and they fall back in her way again. She pulls and
drags on the hems of the dresses and skirts, bringing them towards the light. She
is almost crying. There is no blue dress. Her mother is wearing it in the coffin.
Then she remembers that her mother is no longer in the chapel. She is down in the
ground now. Or up in Heaven.

In the dark she is counting sheep, like Claire told her to do. It is no good, she
cannot sleep. She starts to count all the days since she was born, but it is too
hard. She tries to remember every single day, every single minute with her mother.
Suddenly, there is a loud bang. She sits up, terrified. She hears dogs barking in
the distance. Maeve does not stir in her bed across the room. Then everything is
silent again. She listens out for sounds in the house. A big bright moon is shining
into the room, making everything white, even the floor-boards.
Mellow the moonlight.
When the woman comes on the wireless singing this song, her mother sings along.
There’s
a form at the casement, a form of her true love. And he whispered
with face bent,
I’m waiting for you love.
Tess meant to ask her mother what a casement was, and a
form. Her mother said there is a man in the moon and Tess kneels up on her bed now
and looks out the window, turning her head this way and that, trying to make out
his face.

In the morning before it is fully bright she wakes up. She listens out for Oliver.
And then she remembers and a sick feeling comes over her. Early each morning last
summer the little birds used to sing, huddled together under the roof above her window.
Now they are all gone, their wings and tiny hearts are grown up. She closes her eyes,
tries to go back to sleep. The house is so quiet she thinks everyone might be gone
and she is the only one left. She pulls the blankets up to her chin to keep out the
cold.

She sits up, looks across at Maeve sleeping. She gets out of bed and runs over to
the big window, hardly feeling the floor under her. The sky is grey and low, everything
still asleep. She looks out across the lawn, then far off over the fields. Her father
is coming over a hill, in his long coat, with a gun on his shoulder. He is carrying
dead rabbits. He comes nearer and nearer. She has never seen him like this, so lonely.

2

THEY ARE RUNNING down the road to Glynns’. Running, she feels free. In her bare legs,
in the rush of air, she feels strong and free. She keeps up with Maeve, happy, almost
dancing, almost forgetting what has happened. The door opens and Mrs Glynn walks
out with Oliver in her arms. They run to him, cooing, and take him into their own
arms. Inside, they sit on a rug and eat bread and jam and play with Oliver until
they all grow tired and quiet.

Just when her thoughts start to come against her and she remembers why she is here,
there is a knock on the door. A family of tinkers stands outside. Maeve and Tess
gather close to Mrs Glynn. ‘God bless this house and all in it,’ the tinker woman
says in a rough voice. She has a baby in her arms and three or four children beside
her. A girl of about Tess’s age is chewing the ends of her hair. She stops chewing
and looks at
Tess in a way that makes Tess look away. Out on the road the tinker
man and three older boys wait with the donkey and cart. Tess recognises the tinker
man. He came to the school one day and cleaned out the lavatories. The tinker woman
holds out an empty tin can now, begging for milk or anything they can spare. Her
big brown face and her rough voice and all the wild children frighten Tess and she
cannot wait for them to go away again.

She stands at the window and watches them crowd onto the cart and squat down. As
they pull away it starts to rain. The girl is behind, facing back, and she catches
Tess’s eye again and stares at her. Tess feels cold and strange. She is afraid the
girl will put a spell on her. She thinks the tinker girl knows something about her,
something that Tess herself does not know. The girl straightens up. Her eyes lock
onto Tess’s. Slowly, she sticks out her tongue. Tess’s heart almost stops. It is
meant for her and her alone. She is doomed, cursed. The cart rounds a bend and disappears
out of sight.

The next evening Aunt Maud comes and brings Oliver away. They have packed up all
his things. Tess watches as their uncle Frank’s car drives away. She walks around
the house, trying to find a place that will make her feel right again. She goes to
all her favourite rooms, to the space under the back stairs, the orchard. But happiness
does not return. Nothing will do away with this feeling she is carrying inside her,
like a bad secret.

Her older sisters, Evelyn and Claire, do not return to
boarding school. On their
first morning back at national school Claire walks Tess and Maeve to the end of the
avenue. They have mutton sandwiches and shop cake, left over from the funeral, for
their lunches. They walk along the road to the end of their father’s farm. Tess grows
nervous; she is not sure they will be safe venturing this far from home. She looks
into a field where the cattle are butting heads and jumping on each other’s backs.

In the school yard the children form a circle around herself and Maeve and for a
little while she feels special. Is your mammy dead? they ask. She wonders if there
is a way people can tell now. ‘Did ye touch her—was she as cold as marble? Where’s
she buried?’ one of the big boys asks. Kildoon, Maeve says. ‘That’s where Seán Blake’s
granny is buried. Her grave was robbed,’ he says. ‘They dug up her coffin and took
the rings off her fingers and the pennies off her eyes.’ He looks straight at Tess.
Then the bell rings.

She is allowed to sit with Maeve in the senior classroom today. Before the lesson
begins Mr Clarke the headmaster picks up an egg from his desk and turns his back
on the children and cracks it open. He throws back his head and swallows the raw
egg in one gulp. A rainbow appears in the sky and he writes the seven colours on
the blackboard and raps his cane as the children chant out the words. She sits close
to Maeve, their arms touching. She is stiff with fear. She cannot read so she tries
hard to remember the colours.
Red, orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet
,
she calls, flinching at each rap of the cane.

On the way home they pass the tinkers’ camp at the Black Bend. The dogs start to
bark. The trees are leaning low and dark, but she can see the tents and the fires
and children crying and running around in their bare feet. A man is sitting on an
upside-down bucket, hammering a tin can. There are rags drying on bushes, and a horse
and a donkey tied to a tree. ‘Hurry on,’ Maeve says in a low voice and they walk
quickly. Then Tess sees the girl from the day before, standing outside a tent. She
looks smaller, paler. The girl sees Tess too. Tess has the feeling that they know
each other, or that they are somehow close, the way sisters are close, and that the
girl understands this too. She wants to smile, to show that they are friends. Then
she does something—she sticks her tongue out at the tinker girl, just like the girl
did yesterday. The girl frowns and looks sad and Tess feels bad. Her heart feels
sick.
It was only a game
, she wants to say. But the girl is turning away. She lifts
the flap of the tent and enters.

On the avenue they kick at the fallen leaves. A black car drives out of the yard
towards them. It is Miss Tannian. She rolls down the window, smiles, asks about their
day. She is wearing red lipstick. Tess can feel the eyes of her father and Mike Connolly
from over the wall in the potato field, watching. Denis is bending over the pit
in the corner of the field. He is as tall as her father now, but thinner.

‘That one is after Dadda,’ Evelyn says before the men come in to their dinner. ‘And
Mother not cold in her grave.’ They are talking about Miss Tannian.

‘Don’t be daft,’ Claire says. ‘She only came to take the blood and check for reactors.’

‘Reactors, my eye! Did you see the get-up of her—in the costume and lipstick? And
she’s no spring chicken either, let me tell you.’

Once, last summer, they had to lock up the hens in the hen-house for testing. It
was a big job. Her mother held up each hen and Miss Tannian drew out blood in a little
syringe and squirted it into small bottles to take away. Then her mother opened the
hatch at the bottom of the hen-house door and flung the hen out into the yard. Rhode
Island Reds and Leghorns. Leghorns are the best for laying, her mother said.

‘Anyway, doesn’t she know well Dadda is only after burying his wife?’ Claire said.

‘Mark my words—that one is setting her cap at him. She’s after this place. Herself
and her cocked nose.’

After the dinner Tess goes out to the back hall, past the tap room and the apple
room. She is searching again. She wants to leave down this secret weight, everything
she is carrying in her heart. She thinks of the tinker girl inside her tent, and
she knows, somehow, that the girl is thinking of her too at this moment. She goes
to the dark space under the back stairs, where the incubator stands empty now. In
spring the eggs hatched out there under a Tilley lamp. She loved the warmth and the
glow of the red lamp. There, she was happy. Every day Evelyn or Claire or her mother
turned the eggs over carefully. Then, one morning, a miracle—two yellow chicks had
broken through during the night, and were staggering
around on thin shaky legs. One
day, she stood looking in at the eggs. She had a sudden longing to climb in, fold
herself up, lie down under the lovely warm light. Then her mother appeared and leaned
in and picked up an egg. She held it up to the window-light. ‘Tess,’ she whispered.
‘Come, look at the little birdie inside!’ Tess moved close against her mother’s body.
For a moment she pressed her face against her mother’s stomach and closed her eyes
and kissed it, and breathed in her smell and she could taste her mother in the smell.
When she drew away, her mother was holding the egg up to the light and Tess saw a
shadow, the shape of a tiny sleeping bird, inside the shell. She could not speak.
Her mother smiled and stroked her head and her heart filled up. Together they stood
in a stream of light watching the shadow and then her mother placed the egg back
on the straw. She picked up another egg and held it up to the light and frowned,
and sighed.

‘What’s wrong, Momma?’ Tess asked.

‘No birdie here, sweetheart, no birdie here,’ she said sadly. ‘This one’s a glugger.’
She threw it in a bucket for the pigs’ feed, and when it burst a terrible rotten
smell filled the air.

Two strange men come to the house and fumigate her mother’s and father’s room. They
are all tested, even Mike Connolly. That night in bed she remembers Miss Tannian—they
have forgotten to test Miss Tannian. She might be their new mother. She does not
want a new mother. She misses Oliver. He has come only once since Aunt Maud took
him away. Claire made a lovely currant cake for the visit. He had a frown, a new
little
wrinkle on his forehead. He had looked at Maeve’s face, then at Tess’s, and
back at Maeve’s again. They kept smiling and flapping at him but he wasn’t sure who
they were any more. Suddenly Tess misses her mother like never before. It is like
a huge wave flowing over her. She misses her mother for herself, and for Oliver too.
He does not remember, or understand, why everything is different now. It hurts her
heart to think of his small head waking up in Aunt Maud’s house, in a room full of
cousins and different walls, different voices. A different mother. She thinks of
him waking, looking up at the ceiling, or out at the rain. His little heart jumping
when a door bangs or a strange face appears, looking in at him through the bars of
his cot. That evening of the visit she could not eat the currant cake. It would not
go down her throat.