One by One in the Darkness (18 page)

Helen tried to focus her attention on what Sister Benedict was saying to her. ‘These are your forms, aren’t they? You’re doing French, English and History, I see.’ Helen nodded. ‘I see you’ve applied to read Law at Queen’s for your first choice. Law! That’s impressive.’

‘My parents aren’t very happy about it,’ Helen blurted out, in spite of herself. She hadn’t wanted to say this.

‘Aren’t they? Why not? Do they think you won’t get the grades? Your teachers have nothing but praise. I see here that you did exceptionally well in your mock A levels last year. Why aren’t your parents happy?’

‘I … I think it’s a bit hard for them to believe, the idea of their daughter doing Law. It seems over-ambitious. I’m the first person in my family to go to university, and I think they find it hard to get used to that, no matter what I’m planning to study.’

‘What would they like you to do?’

‘They’d like me to go to St Mary’s and be a primary school teacher.’ Sister Benedict raised her eyebrows. ‘My mother was a teacher,’ Helen added, but still the nun didn’t respond, which made Helen anxious. ‘I mean, she trained to be a teacher, but she only worked at it for a year or so, then she got married and stopped.’ Sister Benedict was looking at her very hard now, but Helen had nothing left to say. She looked helplessly towards the window, which was still streaming with rain.

‘Have you ever heard that there is nothing more important to children than what their parents have
not
been?’

‘No, Sister.’ She didn’t know what further comment she could make about this.

‘And why Law?’

‘We need our Catholic lawyers in this society,’ Helen said, and Sister Benedict looked up sharply at her. She thought Helen was being sarcastic, repeating the words Sister Philomena was constantly repeating to them: ‘Our educated Catholics have a role to play in this society. We need our Catholic teachers and doctors and nurses and lawyers.’ Helen felt confused now.

Sister Benedict stared at her for a few moments. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘if the educated Catholic middle class in Northern Ireland was bigger, it probably would make a difference, but I dare say not the difference you or indeed others have in mind.’

‘I’ve thought a lot about this, and I know what I’m doing. I don’t want to do Law just for the status or the money, really I don’t.’

‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Sister Benedict said drily. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question. Why Law?’

‘Because I want to do something worthwhile with my education; I want to help people. The way things operate here is deeply unfair, and I want to make a difference.’

‘But you won’t.’ The nun pounced so quickly with her reply that Helen felt she had been set up, manipulated into saying just the thing that would allow Sister Benedict to contradict her. ‘Believe me, Helen, you can throw your life away if you want, but it won’t make any difference to anyone except yourself.’ Helen tried to speak, but Sister Benedict wouldn’t permit her to do so, raising her hand and continuing to talk.

‘You want to defend people who’ve been unjustly accused. Fine. But tell me this, how will you feel defending people who really have done terrible things, who’ve planted bombs or shot men in front of their families? What even makes you so sure that you’ll get into the line of work that appeals to you; that you won’t end up specialising in tax law or conveyancing? Anyone else would be consoled by their salary, but you won’t, you’re too austere. Money’ll only make it worse. Sometimes I think idealism is one of the most dangerous forces there is. I saw it myself when I was in Africa, time and time again. Girls like you, they were good-hearted, unselfish girls, but their minds were shut; it was a disaster. They went out there thinking they were going to
help
people,’ her voice heavy with sarcastic emphasis now, ‘they were going to
change
things. And instead what happened was they hurt others, and they hurt themselves. Look at me,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be a missionary, and look how I ended up, sitting here in mid Ulster, arguing with you.’ The nun gestured to the window, where the rain was still pouring down.

‘I don’t want to go to Africa,’ Helen said. ‘I just want to go to university in Belfast.’

‘But that’s the point, you could go anywhere, do anything you wanted.’ The nun was almost pleading with her now. ‘I don’t want to see you throwing your life away, staying in this – this horrible place.’

Helen flinched at this last phrase, as if she’d been struck in the face. ‘I like it here.’ she said. ‘This is where I’m from. This is my home.’

Again Sister Benedict sat looking at her for a moment without speaking, then picked up a silver fountain pen, uncapped it, signed Helen’s form, blotted the ink, and slid the application into a blue card folder. Speaking quietly, as though she were making a great effort to do so, she said, ‘I know you’re going to do very well in your exams. Tell your parents I said that if you get accepted for Law at Queen’s, and I’ve no doubt but that you will, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble with your studies there.’ She picked up another form. ‘When you go back to the library, will you send Nora Bradley down to me?’

She didn’t look up again as Helen left the office, and it was all Helen could do not to slam the door hard behind her in anger.
It hadn’t even been a proper row, she thought, as she went back through the school. When she’d argued with her mother about the same thing a few days earlier, she’d actually found it satisfying, because for the first time ever they’d argued as equals, as two women. She had understood that her mother had been judging Helen’s future in terms of the failures and shortcomings of her own life, and Helen had forced her to admit that she really didn’t regret the choices she’d made. ‘Let me make my own mistakes,’ Helen had pleaded in the end, while her mother kept saying, ‘I’m afraid for you. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m afraid for you.’ Remembering Granny Kelly, Helen had felt a pity for her mother far removed from the resentment she now nursed towards Sister Benedict. She remembered how at assembly a few days earlier the nun had read out the part from the Bible about how when you were young you walked where you wished, but when you were old you would stretch out your arms and another would bind you and take you where you would not want to be. She’d noticed how Sister Benedict’s voice had caught as she said these words. Well, that was her problem, Helen thought. She’d had her life, and if she regretted what she’d done with it, that was her affair; it was no reason for her to meddle in Helen’s plans, and spoil her life too.

When she went back to the library, she nodded to Nora Bradley, who left the room as Helen sat down and tried to settle to her work again. But her concentration had been broken, and she sat looking out of the window with all her books spread open and disregarded, until Sister Philomena came over and sat down beside her.

‘How’s Helen?’ she said.

‘All right,’ Helen said.

‘How did you get on downstairs?’

‘I got my forms signed.’

‘That’s good. Put it out of your mind now.’ Helen nodded. ‘How are things at home?’

‘All right.’

‘You had an uncle died a while ago, didn’t you?’ Helen nodded again.

Late one evening some six weeks earlier, the phone had rung at home. Helen answered: it was Brian. He told her he was
calling from the local hospital. He’d been out for a drink with Peter earlier that evening, and Peter had collapsed in the pub. He was in intensive care; the doctors said he had had a heart attack, and had a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. But from the moment Brian told her that, Helen insisted to her family that there was no hope. ‘He never looked after himself, never ate properly. He has no resources; nothing to fall back on,’ she said. Within three days, the doctors were saying the same thing; within five, Peter was dead.

The last time she saw him, he’d been asleep. She had sat for over an hour by his bed just watching him, and would have stayed longer, had she not been asked to leave. ‘There’s not much point, anyway, is there?’ the nurse had said, and Helen hadn’t even bothered to contradict her. If this woman couldn’t see that the past hour could have been precious to Helen, that it might have been one of the most important hours in her life, there was no point in trying to explain to her, for she wouldn’t understand. It was good that he had been sleeping, because they had nothing more to say to each other. Words would have been a burden. It was enough to be with him, and to watch him. She had remembered how, when they were children and they were out in the car with their father, often he would point to a group of men working at the side of the road, trimming hedges or cleaning drains; and he’d say, ‘Look, there’s Uncle Peter!’ And then he’d pump the car horn as he drove past, and Peter would look up and see them all waving frantically out of the car windows at him. His face would light up and he’d raise his arm; he’d stand like that with his hand held high in the air until they could no longer see him.

She remembered going into the back scullery at Brian’s house and seeing Peter standing by a sink full of soapy water, whistling to himself as he stacked the clean, thick plates in the rack on the drainingboard. She remembered how he used to take them out in his boat, remembered the day he’d rowed them to the island and they’d seen the sun flash on the water, seen him leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette, while the damp chicks struggled to be born.

At his wake, she’d outraged her mother by saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be giving him a Catholic funeral.’

‘What do you mean: that we should give him a Protestant one instead?’

‘Maybe we shouldn’t have anything. I mean, nothing religious. We should just bury him.’ Her mother actually laughed at this, which annoyed Helen, so that she went on, ‘He didn’t believe in any of it, he thought it was all nonsense.’ She said it loud enough so that the priest, who was sitting near by, would be bound to hear her. Her father gently hushed her. ‘You can’t have a proper funeral without prayers,’ he said, stroking her hand to comfort her.

A week after the funeral, Helen went over to Brian’s house one afternoon. There was no one there but Granny Kate, who was sitting in the dim kitchen, two black plastic bags tied closed with orange twine on the floor beside her.

‘What’s in the bin liners, Granny?’

‘Them’s Peter’s clothes,’ she replied. ‘I have to get Brian to get rid of them for me. I went through them all; there wasn’t a stitch that was fit to give to a charity, so there wasn’t. I told Brian to keep his watch; and there’s a lighter I’m going to give your daddy. Brian’s children bought it for him for Christmas and I told Peter not to use it out of the house, for he’d be sure to lose it. I’d forgotten it was there until I saw it in the back of the drawer. It’s all there is to give your daddy as a souvenir. There was never a man had as little.’ Helen stared at the black plastic bags. As though she could read her thoughts, Granny Kate said, ‘As far as the world was concerned, he had nothing and he was nothing, but he was a good man. I loved him.’

‘Do you know what I think?’ Helen turned to Sister Philomena, whose presence she had almost forgotten. ‘I think you’re working too hard. Maybe I’ll have a word with your teachers and see about them letting you off homework for a while. Perhaps you need to take a few days off school completely.’ This alarmed Helen.

‘Oh I couldn’t do that, I’d fall behind with my work. I can’t risk losing any time at all.’

‘But you’re well ahead as it is, and the exams aren’t for months yet. What if you push yourself so hard that you fall ill? Then you’ll have to take time off, and just think how much you’ll miss then.’

Helen insisted again that she could cope with her studies. A bell rang in the distance. ‘I have to go now, Sister, I have a class.’

Sitting listening to the radio at home that night, she knew Sister Philomena was right. She felt worn out, weary in a way she shouldn’t have been at her age; and she’d felt like this for years now. Both at home and at school she was constantly being told how important her education was, that she owed it to herself, to her family, to society, to work as hard as she possibly could, and she had done so. But now everybody was getting uneasy with the results, they were backing off, telling her to ease up. But as far as she was concerned, it was too late. The damage had been done.

The music on the radio came to an end, and was followed by the news. They gave the name of the soldier who had been shot the previous night, and for whom Sister Benedict had prayed at assembly. The soldier was twenty years old. Helen thought of his family. Like Sister Benedict, they would think of Northern Ireland as a horrible place. She’d not told the truth today, things at home were tense at times. Uncle Brian sold copies of
Republican News
outside the chapel in Timinstown after Mass every Sunday, and their father had argued with him about this. She heard the sound of the bathroom door opening, and the loud sucking noise of the water draining out of the bath. There was a strong, sudden blast of honeysuckle perfume throughout the house. Maybe Kate was right to want to go away. Maybe Helen would regret it if she stayed here.

She switched off the radio, and turned her attention again to her books. Only her History homework remained.

‘Describe and assess the circumstances which led to the Partition of Northern Ireland.’

Helen looked up as Owen came into the room. ‘Guess who’s coming in to see us this afternoon?’ He stared at her blankly. ‘Maguire’s mammy,’ she said, and Owen put his head in his hands.

‘Ah Christ, no, not again,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing we can do for her, nothing we can say that I haven’t said a dozen times already. Do I ever need this on a Friday afternoon?’

‘I’ll see her if you like. I can actually take this sort of thing better on a Friday than on a Monday morning.’

‘No, I’ll do it, you can’t handle something like this.’ He immediately realised he’d made a mistake, and tried to mollify Helen, whose face had darkened.

‘I don’t want you to give her a bollocking: though God knows I feel like doing it myself at times, and I don’t know how someone like you would be able to resist it.’

‘It’s her son who’s on trial, she isn’t,’ Helen said, not meeting his eyes. She picked up a file, glanced at it and put it to one side. Owen ran his hands through his hair.

‘Why doesn’t that fucker own up to his ma and put us all out of our misery? He must think she wouldn’t be able to handle it yet. I suppose she’ll come round to it in time.’

‘She’s going to have to,’ Helen said. She still didn’t look at him. There was a long silence.

‘Helen,’ Owen said eventually, ‘I’d really appreciate it if you could see Mrs Maguire when she comes in this afternoon.’

Helen raised her head. ‘Fine,’ she said. ‘I’ll do that.’

And then she said, ‘Thanks,’ and then, ‘Sorry.’ Owen shook his head and smiled.

‘Christ, you’re a funny woman.’

‘Are you only noticing that now?’

She was glad of the banter. She felt sorry for having picked Owen up so sharply a few moments earlier, for what he’d said was uncharacteristic. She liked working with him, and always
considered she’d been lucky to be taken on in a firm where there was a certain amount of work on terrorist cases. Although there were enormous quantities of legal work in Northern Ireland at the time she graduated from university, there was also tremendous competition. She’d dreaded ending up doing nothing but family law, as was the fate of quite a few of the women with whom she’d studied. She told Owen from the start what interested her most, and although his firm didn’t get an enormous quantity of that kind of case, over the years what they did get he gave to her; and he did it without making a big deal about it, or suggesting that he was doing her some kind of favour. But what Helen also noticed and appreciated was that he discreetly began to withhold such work from her after her father was killed. It was never said that he was doing it to spare her feelings, and there was always a plausible reason as to why he should deal primarily with any particular case, rather than Helen. She was grateful for his sensitivity in this matter, and there’d been an unspoken agreement, too, that she would someday begin to take on such cases again. But when the Oliver Maguire job had come in, it had been at a time when Owen was very busy and Helen had suddenly little on hand.

‘Listen, we’ll do this the two of us, all right?’ Owen had said. ‘It’s a bit heavy duty.’

Helen had nodded, and silently vowed that it would be a point of honour for her to see this one through.

But when she turned her attention again to her work this morning, she noticed that Owen did not do likewise, which was most unusual. He flicked through papers, sighed, rattled boxes of paper-clips, and by all this she knew he wanted to talk, so she met his eye, and looked at him quizzically.

‘This is just a job,’ he said immediately, apropos of nothing that Helen could see. ‘Never forget that it’s only work. It’s how you earn your keep; how you put a roof over your head and a bit of food on the table.’ Helen struggled to suppress a smile, for the phrases he used, with their suggestion of survival and necessity, didn’t square with the high style in which he actually lived. She thought of his elegant house, in a quiet street off the Malone Road, and the extravagant dinners he occasionally gave there for his friends. Unlike some people she knew working in law in
Northern Ireland and in spite of what he had just said, Owen wasn’t just interested in the money he made, although what he did earn he enjoyed. He saw her smiling, and he smiled too.

‘Do you ever regret getting into this line of business?’

‘Sometimes,’ she said, and she wondered if he would ever know how much it took for her to admit even that, even to him.

‘I think we all probably do. What I regret most is not being able to handle things better, deal with them in the way I ought to.’ She could see now how tremendously ill at ease he was: he was circling towards the heart of the matter, and she would have tried to help him to it, if she had had any idea what it was.

‘I’m not sure I understand.’ Frowning, he picked up a stapler from the desk, and started to click it open and shut. She wondered if he’d made some serious error of judgement in a recent case, or if he was maybe more worried about Oliver Maguire than she had realised.

Not looking at her now, he said, ‘I feel bad about … about the shit I put up with sometimes. I shouldn’t do it. I feel ashamed of it now.’

Helen didn’t say anything, but waited until he was ready to continue.

‘You know that Law Society do I was at a couple of weeks ago? Something happened at that, and it’s been eating away at me ever since. Towards the end of the night, I was in a group with a few people, none of whom I know well. We’d all had a good bit to drink over the evening, and then of course – well, I was going to say, the masks started to slip, but it wasn’t that. That makes it sound like they couldn’t help what they were doing, but they could. What they did was deliberate. I could see them looking at me from time to time, they would say things that were getting close to the bone, and then look to see how I was taking it. And then suddenly, I felt afraid, really afraid; and they could see it. And then they knew they had me where they wanted me. “Boys, boys!” one of them says at once. “Wait till I tell you this one,” and he starts to tell a story about when he was at some college or other in the nineteen fifties, and about a teacher he had, that was in the Β Specials. An announcement was made that they were going to admit Catholics to the college for the first time. So the man who was telling the story says
about how he went up to your man’s office late that evening and he’s standing there in his full uniform, boots, holster, gun, the works. He’s near foaming at the mouth with rage, and he says, “Do you know what this means? I’ll tell you what it means. It means I’ll have to teach them by day and shoot them by night!” And of course at that they all start to laugh fit to piss themselves. But I didn’t laugh. I said nothing; a minute or two later I walked away and not one says to me, “You’re going.”’

Again there was silence for a few moments; then Owen said, ‘It frightened me, Helen. I mean, this is 1994; and that they could still do that to me, and that I could still let them away with it … I couldn’t sleep when I went home, it scared me that much. And I was angry too, of course; more angry with myself than anything. I didn’t even tell Mary, I was ashamed of what she would think of me.’

‘I hope you don’t think you’re the only person this has happened to. I bet this sort of thing goes on all the time amongst people we know, and everybody’s too embarrassed to talk about it. But things like this are a matter of bad manners as much as bigotry. When someone sets out for no good reason to try to humiliate you or make you feel ill at ease in a social setting, you’re often so taken aback that you don’t know how to respond; and it’s hard to be able to put them down without sinking to their level. You probably did as much as any of us would have done. If I were you, I’d put it out of my mind.’

‘It’s been eating into me for days. This has been a hell of a hard week.’

‘Tell me about it,’ said Helen.

She said much the same thing later that day to David, who phoned her shortly after lunch. ‘Thank God it’s Friday, and all that.’ Owen was out of the office at that stage, so she told David about Cate, and how her family had reacted to the news. ‘Tomorrow’s her last full day at home, so I’ll go down this evening. I’m looking forward to spending some time with them all. How about you?’

‘Well, Steve isn’t coming back. Or rather, he is back, but just to work his notice and then to prepare to move back to London. I’m surprised you haven’t heard us shouting at each other; you don’t live that far away. He told me he hadn’t realised how hard
it would be to settle into such a small, closed society, and that I hadn’t done anything like enough to help him. I told him that this was neither fair nor true, and he knew it. And then your name was mentioned and, I’m afraid, it all turned a bit nasty and went past the point of no return.’

Helen was at a loss to know how she should respond to this. ‘You don’t sound too miserable about it, anyway,’ was all she could think to say.

‘It’s been on the cards for such a long time now, that it’s something of a relief to all concerned that it’s finally happened.’

After she’d promised to see him some time the following week and hung up, Helen mulled over what David had said to her. He was probably right that the split had been a foregone conclusion, but that wouldn’t necessarily make it any easier, now that it had happened. She admitted to herself a sneaking relief that Steve wouldn’t be around in the future, as she’d never felt completely at ease with him. It hadn’t struck her until now that he might have found her friendship with David intrusive, and if that was the point he was now making, she still didn’t believe that it was a valid one.

She remembered a conversation which had taken place between them not long after Steve had moved to Belfast. David hadn’t even been in the room at the time, he’d been off in the kitchen preparing a meal for them; and Steve had inexorably brought up the subject of her job.

‘So you work with terrorists?’ he’d said.

‘Some of the time.’

‘What are IRA men like?’

‘Probably not as unlike the Loyalist terrorists as they’d like to think,’ but Helen had known, even as she said this, that it wouldn’t get her off the hook.

‘But no, tell me.’

She shrugged. ‘They’re sort of ordinary, most of them,’ she said, hoping to dampen his interest with the force of sheer boredom.

Steve didn’t reply immediately, but stared hard at her for a few moments and then said, ‘I don’t know how you bring yourself to sit in the same room as people like that, much less defend them.’

‘No, you don’t know, and I’ll tell you more than that: you
won’t ever know,’ she’d snapped back, surprised at her own asperity.

‘Sort of chilly in here, isn’t it?’ David had said, when he came into the room a few moments later, carrying a salad bowl, to find his lover and his best friend glowering at each other. ‘Should I maybe switch on the central heating, or are the pair of you going to be sensible?’

Remembering this, Helen reflected that she’d really told Steve the truth about the paramilitaries: for the most part they did strike her as ordinary. There were only a few who really stood out in her mind. There’d been a man called Devine, the only person she’d come across who struck her as an out-and-out psychopath, someone who loved killing for it’s own sake. Even if things had been peaceful in Northern Ireland, she suspected that he would have been in jail for murder anyway. As Owen had put it, ‘Instead of shooting policemen and soldiers it would have been women, kids, dogs, mice, Christ knows what, so long as he was killing. The Troubles is only an excuse.’

It had been an excuse, too, for Malachy Mulholland and people like him; hoods who would have been involved in robbery and thieving to line their own pockets no matter what was happening in the country. Mulholland had been mixed up with the IRA, but in the long run they had no time for people like him, and considered them more trouble than they were worth. A few years after Helen had met him, the IRA killed him, for, they said, ‘drug dealing and other anti-social activities’.

The paramilitaries didn’t much like people like Tom Kelly either, and avoided them if at all possible. Kelly had killed an RUC man, pushing past the man’s wife, who had opened the door of their house; and shooting the policeman as he sat on the sofa watching television. But the policeman’s five-year-old daughter had been in the room and saw everything. When Kelly was arrested and charged, he broke down and wept and made a full confession. He said he couldn’t live with himself because of the child; that he wouldn’t have done it if he’d known she’d be there; that he could never, no matter how long he lived, forget the sound of her screams as he ran out of the house.

But for the most part, the men she came across struck her as neither particularly tender-hearted nor particularly vicious. They
had squared their own consciences about what they were doing. Often they had strong political motivation, particularly once they had done a stint in prison, where they had ample time to discuss and argue about such things amongst themselves. Often they came out more committed to what they were doing than they had been when they went in. It was important to them to do their time in jail with as good a grace as possible, seeing it as a part of the sacrifices they had to make for what they referred to as ‘The Cause’. In themselves they were, as Helen had said to Steve, mostly ordinary, and it was an important distinction to her whether they were from the country or the city. Being from the country herself she tended to find it easier to get on with the men whose background was similar to her own. Often she found the Belfast men too streetwise, too boisterous; and it was a distinction the men also observed in themselves, tending to make friends amongst their peers, and not feeling wholly at ease with those from a different background.

So they, for the most part, had thought through what they were doing, and knew what they felt about it. But what about Helen? Often her attitudes were inconsistent, perhaps even hypocritical, she had to admit to herself. Take her old school friend, Willy Larkin. She would often see him when she was down home at the weekend. He’d wave as he drove past in a tractor, or she might meet him in the shop at Timinstown. He’d be there with his two kids, with their open, genial faces, so like his own, he’d have his papers and his fags and a bag of sweets stuffed in his jacket pocket; and for a few moments he and Helen would chat to each other, they’d ask after each other’s mothers, and she always felt the better for having seen him. But while she was talking to him, it was never in her mind that he’d done time for being in the IRA and possessing explosives; and if she did think of it afterwards, she tried not to think too deeply about where those explosives might have ended up had Willy not been caught. And if she was prepared to turn a blind eye and hold her mind back from certain things like a dog gripped by the collar, was that not, particularly in the light of what had happened to her father, the deepest hypocrisy?