One by One in the Darkness (16 page)

Cate was standing at the back wall of the classroom now. ‘Sally,’ she said, ‘do you blame Brian for what happened to Daddy?’

‘No,’ Sally said immediately; and then after a moment, ‘Well, maybe sometimes, yes.’ And then: ‘Ach, I don’t know. Does it matter?’

‘I’d have thought so.’

‘To Brian?’

‘No, to you. I’d have thought it would be important to you to know exactly what you felt about something like that.’

Sally narrowed her eyes and looked at her sister. ‘Can I remind you of something, Cate? In this society it’s the people who aren’t confused, it’s the people who know exactly what they think and feel about things who are the most dangerous. As regards Brian, I might blame him more if it wasn’t that he blames himself so much. He talks to me about it from time to time. I asked him not to mention it to Mammy any more, because it only upsets her. Less than a month ago he was still on at the same old thing, “If only I’d got back to the house a few minutes earlier.” But I said to him, what odds would it have made? They’d just have killed the two of them, and Lucy would be left today the same as Mammy, and where would that have got any of us? It’s a waste of emotional energy, but he can’t seem to stop it. And he’d had his doubts for a long time before Daddy was killed. I remember years ago you’d have heard him talking about a thing being an “act of war”. If you said about the IRA having done something he’d have answered you at once about things the British army had done, or the British government. And he still is a Republican, he always will be; it’s too deep with him for that ever to change. But there are things he can’t stomach now, things he won’t defend. Cate, he saw what they did, and Lucy did, too. You saw for yourself last night the effect it’s had.’

On Wednesday evening, Sally and Cate had gone with their mother to visit Brian. It was a smaller event than Brian had hoped for at the start of the week: they didn’t have time to invite Una over, for it was Sally who had called and suggested they go that very evening, partly as a way of distracting both Cate and her mother from Cate’s news.

Cate had thought she understood what had happened to Brian’s house, and that was why she had refused to go there since the killing. She was afraid of what she might imagine lying on the uneven red tiles where, as children, they’d crouched at Halloween to crack nuts with a hammer. Finally, she’d let herself be persuaded by Sally’s and Brian’s pleading: ‘It’s different now.’

But it was the difference that was the problem; the room so utterly changed that only the familiar view from the window of hedges and sky proved that it was indeed the place Cate
remembered. She’d stared around at the sterility, the newness of everything: the stripped pine units, the vinyl flooring, the high-backed chairs where Brian and Lucy sat looking ill at ease, no longer completely at home in their own kitchen.

‘I suppose it needed done anyway,’ Lucy said, and Brian mumbled, ‘Ach, it was grand the way it was, but what can you do?’

What indeed? The changes meant that Cate didn’t imagine her father lying murdered on the floor, as she had feared, but it also meant that she couldn’t imagine the nut-cracking either. She had always thought of her childhood not principally in terms of time, but as a place to which she could always return. Now that was over. What was the word Lucy had used two years ago? ‘Desecrated’. That was it. ‘The place is desecrated.’

Sally was still talking. ‘It’s the likes of Aunt Rosemary who annoy me far more than Brian,’ she insisted. ‘She isn’t even trying to understand what’s happening here, and at some deep level, I don’t think she really cares, so long as her nice cosy middle-class life goes on the same as it’s always done. She thinks things are better in Northern Ireland than they were twenty-five years ago, because now there’s a Marks and Spencer’s in Ballymena.’ Cate laughed. ‘I’m not joking,’ Sally said. ‘I don’t think she’d even want peace here if it meant a significant change in the material quality of her life. “If people would just stay out of trouble, if they would only get themselves jobs and work and not even think about politics,”’ Sally mimicked. ‘She’s the last person I know who’ll still say, “One side’s as bad as another.” Christ, what a country.’ She looked around the room and laughed. ‘I’d better watch what I say, I’m usually on my best behaviour in here.’

‘Anyway,’ she went on, ‘you never told me how you got on with Helen the other day. I didn’t like to ask in front of Mammy.’

Cate covered her eyes with her hands. ‘God, it was dire!’ she said. The image was still fixed in her mind of Helen’s arrival home. She had rung the bell, because Cate had the keys; and the way she’d leapt up, alarmed at it’s soft chime, meant Cate couldn’t deny to herself how anxious she was about the encounter. But even dire things had their funny side, and when she did open the door the sight of Helen standing there in a navy Alexon suit and cream blouse, a briefcase in one hand and two boxed
pizzas held gingerly aloft in the other, did to some extent take the sting out of the moment.

‘What did she say to you?’ Sally asked.

‘Not much,’ Cate replied. ‘That was the problem.’ She’d strongly suspected that Helen was thinking things which, if she uttered them, would be so hurtful that Cate would never be able to forgive or forget them, that their relationship would be damaged beyond repair. ‘Only a member of your own family really knows how to hurt you,’ someone had once remarked to her, and she remembered how strong an impression this had made on her; a truth she had never before recognised. Oh Helen could have broken her that evening, could have made her weep, made her hate herself; but she didn’t and Cate couldn’t understand why. Helen remained inscrutable, and when Cate blurted out something about knowing it was an embarrassment to the family, and mentioned Rosemary, a smile had actually flickered around Helen’s lips. ‘Don’t you worry about Auntie Rosemary,’ she said. ‘If there’s any trouble, you leave Auntie Rosemary to me.’

She asked about the father of Cate’s child, and bizarrely, Cate thought, one of the first things she wanted to know was whether or not she had any photographs of him.

‘I think so,’ Cate said, which strictly wasn’t the truth, for she knew that she did. Back in London she had a small album which contained photos she’d taken at a picnic they’d made on Hampstead Heath one day in winter. It had been her idea; he’d thought it foolish at first but she’d won him round, choosing a day which was cold but with a bright sun and hard, clear skies. She’d brought hot wine in a flask and she’d pestered him all afternoon, taking photographs; once or twice asking passers-by to take pictures of them together. He’d got into the swing of it all quickly. They’d eaten the fruit and bread she’d brought with her and he said it was great, that winter picnics were as good an idea as winter holidays. But she remembered how, when she was unpacking the picnic basket alone that evening in her kitchen, she’d caught herself thinking, yes, it had been good, it had been fun, it would have been worth doing even if … if what? She pulled herself up short. He was just a man she liked, that was all, there was nothing behind it; why shouldn’t she go
to a park and drink wine and laugh and take photographs with someone she liked?

‘Yes,’ she said, ‘I think I have some photos somewhere,’ and she knew that someday she would show her child those photos of a man laughing on a park bench, a man raising his glass to the camera, a man looking out from behind a tree; and she would say, ‘That is your father.’ And that would be all she would have to show. The child would gaze at the pictures, would drink them in with it’s eyes, would engage in the impossible task of trying to know this man. And the child would ask passionately the questions which Helen had asked, with seeming dispassion: what is his name? Where is he from? What does he do? Helen left pauses between the questions, and showed no reaction to the answers. How did they meet? Did he know Cate was pregnant? What about the legal side of things, did she need any help with that? Would they keep up contact after the child was born? As the questions became more sensitive Helen’s manner of asking became more gentle, so that Cate felt she could evade them if she wished, that were she simply to shrug and refuse to answer Helen would pass on without comment or surprise. She couldn’t help fearing that all this was just a trick, even a professional trick from her legal work, a way of softening Cate up and making her relax so that her harsh accusations, when she did finally unleash them, would have a more devastating effect. But when, after a very long pause, Helen finally drew the conversation to a close it was in sorrow and not in anger.

‘Imagine,’ she said, in a voice so low Cate could scarcely hear her. ‘Imagine never having had a father.’

As Cate now explained to Sally, this was all somehow infinitely worse than the row she had been expecting.

‘I worry about Helen,’ Sally said. ‘Her work’s getting in on her at the moment, if you ask me; but you know what she’s like, you daren’t say a word. As far as you’re concerned, though, I wouldn’t take too much notice. She’ll come round in due course, Mammy too. As for me, I’m delighted already.’

‘I know you love children,’ Cate replied; and Sally didn’t know how to respond to this remark. To say how much she felt the family needed something like this would have been to point up how haunted and threatened she had felt herself to be over the
past two years. She glanced around the classroom uneasily, not liking to remember a strange incident which had taken place there about six months earlier. The children had been sitting at their tables one morning drawing pictures with thick crayons, and Sally had been going from one to another, admiring their work and helping them when necessary. Straightening up from one child’s desk, she saw a van stop at the school gates. The man in it, whom she didn’t recognise, got out and ran across the playground towards the door of the school. Something closed in her heart. ‘This is it,’ she thought.

‘Put your crayons down,’ she said to the children. ‘Fold your arms, put your head on your arms and close your eyes.’ It was a wholly inadequate response, she realised, but even afterwards, she couldn’t think of what she should have done instead. She stood there looking at the door, waiting for the man to burst in. But nothing happened, and nothing happened; the children fidgeted and some of them peeped through their eyelids and they shifted uneasily on their low chairs, because they could sense Sally’s anxiety. And then suddenly through the window she saw the man again, running away from the school now, through the steady rain … the rain!

Sally started to laugh, a shrill, edgy laugh with no mirth in it. All the children sat up now, and opened their eyes. ‘Stand up,’ she said to them. ‘We’re going to sing a song.’ She started them off, her own voice quavering and unsteady, ‘Head and shoulders, knees and toes, knees and toes,’ and the children joined in. Their off-key mewing voices calmed her as they did the actions, pointing to the parts of their body in turn as they named them: ‘Ears and eyes and teeth and nose.’ And then they stopped singing, and the bell rang for break; she let them out of the classroom and locked the door behind them, and she sat down at her desk, put her head on her folded arms and wept uncontrollably.

She cried because she might not have been wrong. Over the past twenty-odd years, all kinds of people had been killed or maimed. Many of them might have thought that the tasks in which they were engaged would have nullified their risk of danger, but they would have been wrong. Bricklayers and binmen on their tea break had been shot. They’d killed a man
driving a school bus full of children; opened fire on supporters at a football match; and shot people sitting in a bookie’s watching horse racing on television. Men lying in bed asleep beside their wives or girlfriends had been woken up and murdered. At each new variation, Sally had shared in the shock of those around her. To kill the members of a showband! How could anyone go into a church and start shooting at the congregation? And yet each event seemed to be no preparation, no warning for the next. Until someone attacked mourners at a funeral, and threw hand grenades at them, it seemed impossible that this should ever happen. So no one had ever gone into a primary school in Northern Ireland and opened fire on a gaggle of five-year-olds and their female teacher: what did that prove? Nothing, Sally thought. Just because a thing hasn’t happened doesn’t mean that it never will.

It would have upset her too much to try to explain all of this to Cate; possibly it would have upset Cate too, and there was no point in that. Sally looked at her sister, who was standing at the window. Cate also wanted to explain something to Sally, but didn’t know how to go about it without revealing more than she wished. She was afraid that underneath it all even Sally disapproved of her having a baby without her being married, without her being in a long-term relationship, in fact without now being in any relationship at all. She found it slightly alarming that Sally’s attitudes could have become so tolerant, so liberal, without Cate having been aware of it. She’d always taken it for granted that her family thought it was only a matter of time before she, Cate, met someone with whom she would want to spend the rest of her life. Cate, too, had expected that for many years, and had been increasingly dismayed as, time and again, things fell apart. Worst of all, she couldn’t understand why. It wasn’t that she was attracted to men who were violent or cruel and with whom a relationship was inevitably doomed. No matter how good things were, there was always a nagging voice in the back of her mind saying that it wasn’t good enough. No matter how much she loved someone, she would inevitably find herself lying awake in the middle of the night, unable to avoid the thought that something was missing. Enlightenment, when it finally came, was abrupt and painful.

She’d been having lunch in a restaurant with a man whom she’d been seeing for about six months, chatting to him about Sally, from whom she’d had a letter that morning, when suddenly the man interrupted her. ‘Cate, I can’t tell you how sick I am of hearing you go on and on about your bloody family. Do you ever think of anything else?’

Cate stared him hard in the face, then apologised with icy formality. ‘Don’t worry, you won’t have to listen to me going on about my bloody family in future, I can promise you that.’ He knew what he’d said had been thoughtless and he retracted it at once, but the damage had been done, and more than he could realise. Unwittingly, he’d gone straight to the root of the problem, like the doctor who asks, mildly, ‘Does it hurt if I touch you here?’ whereupon the patient shrieks and all but passes out. It wasn’t just that the man had slighted her family: Cate was shocked to realise that the point he made was valid.