Inch Levels (15 page)

Patrick and Margaret studied her across the expanse of table; Cassie leaned against the sink, watching them, watching her.

How her father must have seen in her mother a second, magical chance: Sarah had no doubts about that; her memories were too clean and clear. And how betrayed he must have felt when she died, from causes mysterious, neglected. How the family were observed now, and pitied: a certain amount could be done for poor Brendan and his motherless daughter; help given, up to a point, on the farm. These were specific troubles, and they could be remedied; it was the unspecified that caused trouble. ‘Don’t be telling her too much,’ Brendan told Sarah, when Isobel came visiting. ‘Don’t be letting on.’ Letting on about what? ‘Just don’t be letting on.’ Sarah took to keeping her cards close to her chest, holding Isobel, holding everyone, at arm’s length.

God knows what people thought. Sarah had traced and imagined it all.

‘And that’s when Cassie came to live with us.’

The children’s eyes swivelled to Cassie, who had turned again to the sink.

For this was the solution found – rapidly – for Brendan’s pressing domestic problems. A girl picked, plucked from the county home at Lifford: a parentless girl of fourteen or so. A bit simple, they said – but a good girl, no trouble at all. Clean and quiet; not much talk out of her. She could run the kitchen, at least; she had a good touch, a dab hand; she made the lightest, the flakiest pastry. Cassie came to the farm: for Sarah, a strange presence at first, but one who she became fond of, grew to depend on, grew to love, in time.

‘Is she a bit simple?’ said Isobel.

‘Not as simple as you.’

But, all water off a duck’s back, for Isobel.

And for Brendan: an answer to a prayer on the domestic front.

All this Sarah knew.

Later, another photograph was arranged, to hang beside that stern earlier photograph on the wall. Brendan arranged a family photograph of the three of them, taken in a studio in Derry and hung on the kitchen wall. A little less stiff, perhaps, than that earlier one – though not by much: in this photograph he was seated stiffly on a heavy mahogany chair, against a pale backdrop, and staring – a look of belligerence, almost – into the camera; Sarah herself smiled self-consciously; Cassie, in her Sunday best, broad-shouldered and broad-faced, sweet-faced, looked into the distance.

*

‘Smile now,’ the photographer commanded. ‘Like this,’ he said, and he smiled, exposing yellowing teeth. His smile faded as he glanced and then looked for a beat, two beats, at the hot scene before him: at Brendan, scratchy and reddening on this summer day in thick wool, his Sunday suit; at Sarah and Cassie in hats and Sunday best too; at the heavy, black mahogany chair that formed the empty centre of this family group. ‘I need,’ he paused and rubbed his jaw, assessing what he needed, blinking a little at the challenge ahead of him. ‘I need –’

They had taken the bus into Derry on this August afternoon for the express purpose of having a family photograph taken; braved the covert looks and (more usually) stares of their fellow passengers; elbowed their way through the Saturday shoppers to the photographic studio on Waterloo Street. ‘Like this,’ the photographer said again, pleadingly this time, and now Sarah tried to oblige. Not very successfully: the photographer’s tired face fell a little in disappointment. The small room was sweltering. She pulled a wider smile and he straightened up and brushed his hands down the front of his shirt. ‘That’s more like it.’

But it was an embarrassing episode. At any rate, embarrassing for her. For her father too, probably. The photographer, fifty-ish and stout, had no idea how to handle Cassie. I ought to be used to it by now, she thought, the way that some people can’t manage Cassie. In their usual place, among their usual people – the shopkeepers, the neighbours and farmers – folk usually could muddle through: she was one of their own, after a manner of speaking, and they were used to her odd ways: the way she avoided catching anyone’s eye, avoided conversation, avoided company. The photographer, though: he was unused to all of this – and his way of managing her was the especially embarrassing way: by treating her, behaving around her, speaking to her as though she was a toddling infant; and how to organise a family photograph when one of its subjects wouldn’t or couldn’t look at the camera? I don’t know, Sarah thought: I don’t bloody well know.

‘Will you not smile?’ the photographer coaxed; and now he appealed to Sarah herself. ‘Will she not smile? Can you get her to smile?’ Sarah smiled even wider, she smiled for two – but she could see that Cassie looked trapped, cornered; smiling was the last thing she would ever do. And then the photographer decided to take matters into his own hands, to organise them, to make a success of this stiff, stilted tableau. ‘This way!’ he said, ‘I need you turned around,’ for Cassie was angled now into the corner, into the wall. ‘This way!’ he said again with a sort of dreadful jollity, and then he took – grasped, really – Cassie by both elbows and began to manoeuvre her into position as though she was a piece of heavy furniture, to be slotted or managed.

Sarah watched this as though from across a suddenly opening gulf in the floor of this hot studio; Brendan too watched, seemed frozen. Cassie might scream, she might bawl: she could not bear to be touched; there was no way of knowing how she would react to being hauled around. Instead, mercifully, she froze – as though, it seemed to Sarah, she suddenly
was
a piece of furniture – and seemed to bow to this handling. He moved her around, then, to the left, out from the wall, towards the mahogany chair. ‘There!’ he said again. ‘That’s lovely now. And your da there, and you,’ he pointed at Sarah and then at the floor, ‘you just there.’

They came to, and moved, taking their places: Brendan seated on the heavy mahogany chair, the girls on either side. The mahogany chair was, they knew, the photographer’s pride and joy: most of the people in the area who could afford to have a family portrait taken – not many – came to this man, and the mahogany chair therefore featured on many a local wall. ‘And now smile,’ the photographer instructed again, looking up and nodding and smiling himself with relief. ‘Nice big smiles,’ he said.

The photograph was taken, and they thanked him and left, bursting from the airless studio and onto the street. They walked across Waterloo Place, each taking long breaths of air. Sarah tried to lower her shoulders, to wash away the tension. Brendan – for this was the next stage in this exhausting afternoon – was taking them for tea and buns in the Golden Teapot: and so they took their places in the windows of the cafe, and had their tea, their buns and watched the crowds milling outside. ‘That wasn’t too bad, was it?’ Brendan said, and he looked at them with sudden, unfamiliar appeal. Cassie, seemingly utterly concentrated on the jammy bun before her, said nothing; Sarah nodded and smiled again, the muscles in her face tired and aching from the efforts of the previous half-hour. ‘It was nice,’ she said, and she smiled and smiled, and Brendan looked down and in silence addressed his own jammy bum. There was a lump in Sarah’s throat as she looked at them: at the table, the tea cups and buns, at the street scene outside. There seemed an embargo on every word, on everything she might have said.

Then Cassie looked up and popped the tension. ‘It was nice,’ she said and now she smiled at last, the unfamiliarity, the tension of the photographic studio suddenly sloughed off. ‘And these are nice buns,’ she said. ‘Thank you.’ And now Brendan seemed to smile a proper smile, a normal smile, and he sat back with relief into the red plush material of the seat. The tears were very near, but Sarah had her own bun on which to focus, her own tea to stir; and the tears to manage, and the pressure in her throat: they passed.

The photograph arrived a fortnight later, neatly parcelled, silver framed and tied with brown twine.

‘It’s nice,’ said Isobel.

There they were in their Sunday best: Brendan smiling in the chair and Sarah smiling a little madly; and Cassie, her chin tucked well in, looking off to one side.

‘You’ve a nice smile,’ said Isobel.

The photograph was hung on the kitchen wall; and never referred to again. For a long time, Sarah wondered about it: about its very existence, about Brendan’s motivations for summoning it into being. It could not have been commissioned for the usual reason that people commission such items: to place on a wall in order to demonstrate familial togetherness and normality – because people seldom came to visit, no, they never came to visit, except for Father Lynch, and even he had his visits rationed. And besides, the family had already had a branch lopped off: why, she thought, why frame the reminder, the remainder, the stump of it, and hang it on the kitchen wall?

Eventually – at last she thought she might understand why her father had arranged the taking of the photograph. It was his gesture to Cassie: a sort of groping towards a declaration of love, of tenderness, of gratitude, of familial unity. Wordless – naturally – but at least well framed. It was not such an amazing, unexpected message to try to deliver: and maybe, she thought with pain, maybe it says more about me that it’s taken so long for the idea to occur. She wondered, then, if Cassie had ever come to the same conclusion.

*

Help me, Cassie thought: help me, help me. The man was pulling and grabbing and tugging; smile, smile smile. I need Sarah to help me, I need someone to help me. But Sarah can’t help; and Brendan is about to burst; I can feel it in the air. All the way on the bus he has been about to burst. He wants this to happen and he doesn’t want it to happen; he wants someone to be here who can’t be, who’ll never be here again. Tears stung her eyes, but, but – he wants this to happen, he wants this to happen for me, and I can’t cry. She took a breath and held her breath and allowed the man to pull her round, to drag her across the carpet to the chair sitting in the middle of the floor. There, stand there and smile, smile, smile. I can’t smile, this is all I can do. It’s all I can do. Brendan said we could go for tea after this: I’ll have tea and something sweet, with a crunchy sugar topping, or smooth white icing, and split and filled with blackcurrant jam. The Golden Teapot, Brendan had said: we’ll go to the Golden Teapot; they say it’s nice, and we’ll have a nice tea to ourselves. Smile, smile, smile, but I can’t smile. Brendan is too sad, Sarah is too sad, for me to smile. To smile would be a sin. I can’t smile.

*

Her father had wanted so much for her. Sarah knew this. Brendan’s hunger for success, for education: these had been undiminished by time – and his clever daughter should have all that he had been denied, should win scholarships and attend the University, should have every opportunity to absorb the marvellous world.

She should be a credit to her mother’s memory.

But he came to his senses in the end.

Brendan did not at first reckon with the scarcity of money, or scholarships, of opportunity – but yes, he came to his senses in the end. And more embittered, and more extreme, blaming now the British for his woes and the woes of his country: the British, who still clung to their little harbour in this far corner of Ireland. She remembered how he clung to this idea, as the only certainty in an uncertain world. When they left, life would be better: he knew this.

But they would never leave, not really. And he knew this too.

Well, they gave up on their little harbour, at least. Brendan made sure of witnessing their final departure, in the autumn of the year before the war began: he made sure the two girls did, too.

*

The spring of 1938. Sarah stood with Cassie on the crest of the hill and looked out over Lough Swilly. The fort at Dunree loomed.
Powerful
, she heard a woman murmur, meaning dramatic – and powerful it was: the engineers who built the fort and harbour here (to keep Napoleon at bay, she knew this from her history lessons) surely had an eye for drama, for power: the weathered grey buildings perching at the end of a high promontory, water stretching on either side. The lough narrow and silvery – sleek, she thought now, like a fish, like a seal – and flat calm on this windless day, with the peak of Inch Island amid its flatlands far away to the south, the open Atlantic to the north. As she watched, a cormorant glided, landed on the surface of the water with a brief flap of wings and an explosion of ripples, dived, vanished, reappeared far away. On the opposite shore, the hills were blue-grey and indistinct in the misty air. Cassie took her hand – and Sarah turned, smiled at her. ‘Isn’t it good, Cassie?’ Cassie nodded.

Sarah’s stomach rumbled: ages since their early breakfast, and then the roads were full and slow, the whole county seemed to have turned out to see this sight. But they were here at last; she could wait a little longer for her sandwiches; and she looked around at the crowd gathered all around her, gathered wherever they could get a good view. They were massed on the hill around them; massed on the curving shingle beach at its foot; massed, precariously, on the ledges and rocks below the battlements of the fort itself.

And what a crowd. There were people here from all the neighbouring districts; even a scattering of families come by bus from Derry. ‘To bear witness,’ the same woman said, sounding important. But it was odd: it seemed now that there would be little by way of public ceremony – yet the local schools were closed, all of them; and there were announcements from the altar the previous Sunday, and the one before that and the one before that too. The day of the handover was given, and the time; clear enough what Father Lynch expected people to do. ‘This is a moment of
history
,’ he’d said from the altar. ‘The British are giving up. They’re going home.’ They were surrendering their last toehold in Ireland – and there certainly was excitement in the air, a giddiness that she could feel just by standing here, taking it all in.

Sarah was conscious of a little confusion too: the British
weren’t
surrendering their last foothold in Ireland, were they? They were just there, just down the road. But she knew to hold her tongue, to keep her expression neutral.