Light A Penny Candle (27 page)

Elizabeth hopped quickly into bed and held the sheets around her chin in an exaggerated imitation of someone shivering.

‘I knew you’d try to have your way with me and make me come in and warm you up,’ Johnny laughed pleasantly, still turning the pages of the paper.

Elizabeth felt her neck and face go scarlet. ‘No, of course I didn’t, I wasn’t. …’

He stood up and yawned. ‘I’m only teasing you, sweetheart,’ he said. He bent and gave her a kiss on the cheek. ‘Here, have a look at this and become informed about the world.’

Grateful to have something to do while her embarrassed flushes died down, Elizabeth turned on her side away from him and tried to take in something, anything, on the sports page which was what she had opened. …

She heard the creak of his bed, and again, relief mixed with a curious sense of defeat swept over her. Naturally, of course, it would be ridiculous to
want
to make love, suppose she became pregnant, suppose it hurt and she were to bleed all over the hotel bed, suppose she wasn’t able to do it, suppose he then turned aside and refused to have anything to do with her, which is what the nuns had told them in Kilgarret? If a man is allowed to have his way with a girl he will not respect her, he will have nothing more to do with her, he would not like his own sisters to behave in this way. …

‘Shall I put the light out or do you want to finish the paper?’

She looked at him and smiled.

‘No, I’m so tired, I can’t really understand it, I think I’ll stop fighting it and go to sleep. …’

He put his hand out of his bed and reached for hers. She gave it to him.

‘You’re a great little companion, it’s been a smashing trip. Night love.’ He turned out the light and turned over in his bed. Elizabeth heard eleven o’clock strike, and midnight, on the town hall clock, and some time before one
the
storm rattled against the windows so much that it woke Johnny from his even sleep.

‘Hey, are you awake?’ he asked.

‘Yes, it’s a horrible storm.’

‘Are you frightened of it?’

‘No, not at all. No. Of course not.’

‘Pity,’ he yawned, ‘I hoped you were. I’m terrified of it, of course.’

‘Silly,’ she giggled.

He lit a match to look at his watch. ‘Oh, that’s great, hours more sleep.’

‘Yes,’ said Elizabeth. She could hear him sitting up, and swinging his legs out of bed. He leaned over and held her hand.

‘Are you all right?’ he asked.

‘Oh yes,’ she said in a little squeak. In the dark he stood up; she felt him sit on her bed. Her heart was nearly coming through her rib cage.

‘Give me a little hug,’ he said. She reached up and found him without seeing him. He held her very tightly.

‘I’m very fond of you, you’re a lovely little girl,’ he said. She said nothing. ‘Very fond of you.’ He was stroking her hair and her back, in long strokes. She felt very safe. ‘And you’re very very lovely.’ She clung to him even more tightly, he was moving her gently back on the pillow; soon she would be lying down.

‘I’m not very. …’

‘We won’t do anything unless you want to … if you want to we can do anything. …’

‘You see. …’

‘You’re very, very lovely.’ He stroked on and on and she couldn’t really find the right words. ‘I’d like to be very, very close to you.’

‘But you see. …’

‘There’ll be no problem about that, I’ll take great care. …’

‘But I never. …’

‘I know, I know, I’ll be very gentle … but only if you want to.’ Silence. He stroked her and held her to him. ‘Do you want to love me, Elizabeth, do you want to be very close to me …?’

‘Yes,’ she said.

He was gentle, and it didn’t matter that she didn’t know what to do, he knew enough it seemed. It didn’t hurt so much as it was uncomfortable. It wasn’t all those piercing pains you heard about in giggled conversations, and it certainly wasn’t all that soaring joy either, but Johnny seemed very happy. He lay on her, his head on her breasts and his arms around her.

‘You’re a lovely little girl, Elizabeth, you made me very happy.’

She held him in the dark, she pulled the covers over him and she heard the town hall clock strike two. She must have missed three, but she heard it again at four o’clock, and she thought of Aisling and how they had wondered which of them would be the first to Do It, and now Elizabeth had won. Or perhaps she hadn’t won. After all, she didn’t think she was going to write and describe this.
It
was too important, you couldn’t put it on paper, it would sound disloyal and cheap. Instead of love, which is what it was.

IX

Dear Elizabeth,
That was a great book altogether, you always find marvellous presents, you have so much imagination. I’m sending you this scarf … it’s awful I know, but Kilgarret’s a far cry from London and you know there’s nothing to buy here. Mam and Daddy loved the book too, they said you were very clever to find all those old pictures of Ireland in one book. I love the old ones, when Dunlaoghaire was still Kingstown … a lot of people, like the Grays and those, still call it Kingstown of course.

Honestly, there’s not much to say about the way things are. You’d have to come over yourself and see. I don’t
feel
nineteen. I always thought that when I’d be nineteen I’d be different, I’d be a different shape, my face would be thinner and more knowing. I thought I’d have a different life … and know a lot different people than when I was young. But it all seems to be more of the same thing.

Well, I suppose I have changed a bit. I can’t stand that Ned Barrett near me. I think I’ve practised all he knows anyway and I’ll have to find someone who knows a bit more. From my desk here in the office I can see the bus come in, and twice a day I look at it hopefully in case somebody exciting will step off and book into the hotel. Isn’t that pathetic for a grown-up woman in the middle of the twentieth century? Do you remember this time five years ago when we were fourteen and I got my period on my birthday and you didn’t, and we thought you were abnormal and Mam had to sort us out? I don’t know that being over-normal has done me any good. I wish you’d tell me something about your own life and who you practise on and everything. I feel it would be hard to talk to you. Mam says that’s ridiculous, it would take five minutes and we’d be cackling like young geese the way we used to.

It all seems a long time ago. Thanks again for the book. Joannie says the plates in it are so nice I could have them framed but I don’t think so, it’s nicer as a book. I hope it didn’t cost a lot of money. The scarf seems a mean kind of present.

Love from Aisling

Dear Aisling,
I loved the scarf. No, I’m not being polite. Mr Worsky said it made me look very glamorous when I wore it this morning in the shop. I never thought of
getting
anything red because my face gets so red when I blush I thought the two would clash. Perhaps I blush less nowadays. Anyway it looks super, and I wore it under a cream coloured blouse and I thought I looked
très snob
.

Yes, it is hard isn’t it, the letters? I don’t suppose either of us really believes that the other would be interested in long details of what goes on each day. I am interested because I know Kilgarret and even though it’s so long I can still remember it … and whose shop was next to whose shop. I don’t know where your office is. Is it in the eyrie beside Aunt Eileen? It can’t be, you wouldn’t be able to see the bus from there, so where is it? I didn’t know your friend Joannie Murray was back. I thought she was at a finishing school abroad. You don’t mention Donal. Does that mean he’s well again? You don’t tell me anything about Maureen’s baby, you just said it was a boy. You’re an aunt.

Really, I’d tell you about things here, but you don’t know Mr Worsky or his lady friend, who now asks me to call her Anna, even though she’s about seventy, or Johnny Stone who’s the nice partner now of Mr Worsky. He’s wonderful fun. And since you never even met Father, I can’t tell you about this simply awful woman who has designs on him. I’d love Father to get married of course, but this woman is the end. Father can’t bear her and he doesn’t know how to get her out of the bridge circle.

And Mother’s letters sound a bit funny from time to time. She writes a lot, but odd kinds of things, all about the past. She even forgot my birthday. I’m not complaining, but it does seem odd, I mean, she has only one daughter. Aunt Eileen never forgets and she has five children and a grandchild.

College is smashing at the moment too. We have a lot of classes out in the open because of the weather … and it’s so marvellous to go into a park, twelve of us with easels and all our stuff and set up like real artists to paint a view or a clump of trees. The others are very easy-going. I do have friends, like Kate and Edward and Lionel … I’m sure I’ve mentioned them to you in letters. Sometimes they have parties in Kate’s flat. She has a whole three-room flat of her own, because her parents are dead and her guardian thinks that this is what people should have. Imagine!

But I don’t go to many of the things people organise in college. I find the dances a bit dreary. I prefer just talking to people and about things I’m interested in, I suppose. I remember Aunt Eileen once told me that we have to pretend to be interested in some things out of kindness to other people. I do that with Father and Mother so I’m nor going to do it in my own life as well.

I spend a lot of time in Mr Worsky’s shop I suppose. I drop in after college, or I go down there on my bike after Father’s supper. Now that Johnny is a partner there’s a lot of changes and little
improvements
, and sometimes there are four of us because Mr Worsky’s friend Anna (aged seventy I swear) joins in. It’s a bit like a family I should imagine, and yet none of us is related to any of the others. Isn’t that odd?

Love and thank you again for the scarf. It makes me look jaunty. That’s what Johnny Stone said.

Elizabeth

EILEEN ALWAYS REMINDED
the family of Elizabeth’s birthday each May. She even organised separate birthday cards so that Eamonn, Donal and Niamh could sign them. This year Eamonn had mutinied.

‘Mam, I’m far too old now to be sending silly cards with flowers and horseshoes on them to some woman in England that I can hardly remember.’

‘Elizabeth White was reared in this house with you for five years like a sister, and you’ll remember her as long as I say so,’ said Eileen sharply.

‘But Mam, she’s gone for years and years. I was only a child when she was here. I’m grown-up now, she’ll think I’m sweet on her or something. It’s ludicrous.’

‘I buy the card, I post it. I remember the date. I’m asking you to put your great ham hand around a pen and write two lines and your thick, ignorant signature,’ snapped Eileen.

‘It’s just sentimentality,’ grumbled Eamonn. ‘If anyone knew this here, I’d be the laughing stock of the town.’

Donal wrote a long piece about how much he had liked
the
book of watercolours that Elizabeth had sent. He wrote so much that Eileen had to get him an extra piece of paper to add to the card. Niamh wrote a long garbled and almost unfathomable account of school life, studded with characters of whom Elizabeth would never have heard, nuns who were new to the school, friends who had been toddlers when Elizabeth left. Maureen wrote a lengthy description of Baby Brendan, or Brendan Og as he was called in that household to distinguish him from his dadda. Peggy put her name on a card and Eileen wrote a long letter describing the changes and the happenings in the small town. It was Eileen who told Elizabeth about Aisling’s new office – just inside the door, a smart raised area where she was away from the herd but still part of it enough to join in if she wanted to. Eileen explained that Joannie Murray had come back from her finishing school and was waiting to go to Dublin for this marvellous job in a wine importer’s. Because she was a lady of leisure, she used to come into O’Connor’s Hardware and try to distract Aisling. But Eileen wrote with pride that Elizabeth would be glad to know that Miss O’Connor, as she was now called in the shop, had explained that work was work, and indeed young Joannie Murray’s brother Tony had come into the shop one day and said the very same thing.

It was Eileen who explained that they didn’t see too much of Maureen and Brendan and little Brendan Og because the Daly family were very possessive and liked to be in charge. Eileen said that this would sort itself out
later
… there were a lot of old women in that family, aunts and cousins, and the trouble was they hadn’t half enough to do just looking after hens and turkeys so they wanted to own the new arrival body and soul. It would all change when Brendan Daly’s other brothers and sisters married and had children, which would take the pressure off Maureen,

Eileen wrote that Donal’s chest was still weak, that he had to be very careful of himself, not to get overtired or to catch a chill, but that thank God he was far better than they could ever have hoped at times and he was a grand, handsome fifteen-year-old. He was tall too, nearly as tall as Elizabeth had been when she had gone back to England when she was fifteen. He could reach to the top shelf of the bookcase in the sitting room without standing on his toes. Eileen wrote that Peggy was walking out with a very nice fellow called Christy O’Brien. He worked on a farm out near Brendan Daly’s father’s place. Eileen half hoped for Peggy’s sake that a match would be made – Peggy was in her thirties and hadn’t had any great chances – but selfishly she hoped that the Christy fellow would tire of her which would mean that Peggy would stay.

Elizabeth thought to herself sometimes that if she had to rely on Aisling as an informant about Kilgarret she might well believe that all life had ceased there the day she left.

The nuns had been wrong, Elizabeth discovered to her great relief. Johnny
did
still respect her afterwards. Not only did he respect her, he seemed to like her a lot more,
and
she felt grown-up and proud and confident with him. When they had driven back to London, still through sheets of rain, he seemed more cheerful and happy than ever. Watching his face as he drove, Elizabeth wondered how he could talk so easily and lightly about the funny old farmer who had let him shoot the rabbits, about the way they were going to have a bandage up the inside of the van to stop it leaking, and what Mr Worsky would say about the treasures they had ferried back. Elizabeth knew he must be thinking all the time about their making love and thought he was very cool and calm to be able to talk about other things. She was relieved at this too and talked cheerfully in return rather than dwelling on the events of the night before. This pleased him she could see, and from time to time he pattered her hand and said, ‘You are a little darling, you know?’