One by One in the Darkness (9 page)

‘But this is the spooky part,’ she went on. ‘One night, a few years after we were married, I was sitting combing my hair in front of the big mirror that’s in the back room of this house to this very day, when Francis came into the room and stood behind me. I looked at his reflection, and only then did I realise that it was him: the very same man I’d seen in the mirror at midnight, on Halloween, years earlier.’ Una gave a little scream.

‘You’ll have these children up half the night with bad dreams,’ Aunt Lucy said.

Granny Kate looked surprised. ‘But it’s a lovely story,’ she said. ‘I mean, it wasn’t as if he was dead at the time: not that that would have scared me. I’d never have been frightened of Francis, living or dead. After he’d gone I used to think how lovely it would be to look up and see him standing there before me again, for I missed him sorely.’ Aunt Lucy shoved a bowl of monkey nuts under Una’s nose. ‘Eat these,’ she said, ‘and put the ghosts out of your head.’ But it wouldn’t have been Halloween if Granny hadn’t given you a good fright: it was as much a part of the celebrations as having brack to eat, or making your own false face.

For the pattern of their lives was as predictable as the seasons.
The regular round of necessity was broken by celebrations and feasts: Christmas, Easter, family birthdays. The scope of their lives was tiny but it was profound, and to them, it was immense. The physical bounds of their world were confined to little more than a few fields and houses, but they knew these places with the deep, unconscious knowledge that a bird or a fox might have for it’s habitat. The idea of home was something they lived so completely that they would have been at a loss to define it. But they would have known to be inadequate such phrases as: ‘It’s where you’re from,’ ‘It’s the place you live,’ ‘It’s where your family are.’

And yet for all this they knew that their lives, so complete in themselves, were off centre in relation to the society beyond those few fields and houses. They recognised this most acutely every July, when they were often taken to the Antrim coast for the day, and as they went through Ballymena and Broughshane, they would see all the Union Jacks flying at the houses, and the red, white and blue bunting across the streets. They thought that the Orange arches which spanned the roads in the towns were ugly, and creepy, too, with their strange symbols: a ladder, a set square and compass, a five-pointed star. They knew that they weren’t supposed to be able to understand what these things meant; and they knew, too, without having to be told that the motto painted on the arches: ‘Welcome here, Brethren!’ didn’t include the Quinn family.

They would see photographs of the Orange marches in the newspapers, or they would see reports on television, but they never, in all their childhood, actually saw an Orange march taking place, for their parents always made a point of staying at home on that day, complaining bitterly that you were made a prisoner in your own home whether you liked it or not. It wasn’t even so much that it would never have occurred to the children to ask to be taken along to see one: they just knew that it wasn’t for them: they weren’t particularly interested, and they knew that they weren’t wanted there. For the most part, they didn’t even think about it, for their lives were complete as they were.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas, there were two fixed events in their calendar: one was a visit to Miss Regan, the woman their mother had lived with when she was teaching in
Belfast. The other was a visit to Granny Kelly in Ballymena. On the first Saturday in December they set out, potatoes and turf in the boot, on the back window a tray of eggs and a Christmas cake their mother had baked. She had a Christmas present for Miss Regan too, a gift set of lily of the valley soap and talc, wrapped in paper printed with poinsettias. She never agonised over what she would buy her friend, as she did when she was trying to choose a gift for Granny Kelly.

There was always something embarrassing and exciting about the moment when they arrived. Miss Regan’s tiny, cluttered parlour could barely contain the fuss, for Emily and Miss Regan would both keep talking at the same time, and they both cried a little bit, even though they pretended not to, and wiped the tears away almost before they had come. Even after all these years, Miss Regan still was amazed at the fact of Emily’s life now, and the children, and how tall they’d grown since last she saw them, were a particular source of wonder.

After drinking three glasses of white lemonade, Helen had to go to the toilet, and as she stood washing her hands at the basin she looked out of the window across the rows and rows of chimney pots and slate roofs, slicked with rain, under a low grey sky. She wondered how her mother had lived there, when she thought of the fields, the wide sky and the light at home. She thought she would feel suffocated to live where all the houses were jammed together in rows, and opened out directly on to the street, without so much as a little square of grass in front of them. And yet how her mother had loved it, for she still spoke of the year when she had been a teacher as a special time, a time when she’d been happy. Helen tried to imagine her mother as a much younger woman, but when she tried to picture her as someone who wasn’t her mother, she drew a blank: she found she didn’t like the idea. She dried her hands on the towel, and hurried back downstairs again.

Her parents and Miss Regan were talking about politics and civil rights when she went back into the room. All the grown-ups she knew talked about little else these days: except for Uncle Peter. There was an air of defiant excitement about them when they spoke of these things, something she wasn’t used to seeing in her family or her teacher or anyone she knew.

When their father had finished his tea, he took the children into the city centre, leaving Emily to spend some hours with her friend. He took them to see Santa in the Co-Op and did some shopping until such time as their mother came into the town and met up with them at a time and place they had arranged earlier. In Cornmarket, they saw a man wearing a thing like a large black-plastic bib, with ‘What does it profit a man if he gains the whole world, but loses his soul?’ printed on it in bold white letters. The man was shouting about God and Jesus and sin and salvation, and Kate made her mind up that she wanted to see one of the leaflets he was distributing to the passers-by. When her parents weren’t looking, she took one. ‘Here, Sally, put this in your pocket for me,’ she said, stuffing it into Sally’s anorak before her little sister could say anything. And it was there that their mother found it when she went to look for Sally’s mittens a while later. ‘What’s this?’ she said, smoothing out the folded sheet, and the children pressed round to see, as they hadn’t had a chance to look at it so far.

The leaflet showed a crude drawing of an enormous bottle, to which many tiny figures, some on their knees and struggling, were bound by chains. ‘Are you a slave to the evil of alcohol?’ was printed under it, in heavy type, and then there was a text, sprinkled with quotations from the Bible. Sally looked from her mother to her father, her mouth slightly open, a furtive look on her face. Charlie started to laugh so much, that people around looked at them.

‘Now I hope you’ll pay heed to that, Sally,’ he said, ‘for your mammy and me have had enough of you reeling in night after night, taking the two sides of the road with you.’ Sally, who didn’t know what he was talking about, smiled cautiously, and looked even more guilty.

When they went to see Granny Kelly, a few days before Christmas, it was a different type of outing altogether. They had to get dressed up in their Sunday clothes, and as they waited for their father to get the car ready, Helen noticed how her mother, standing over by the window, was twisting the rings on her fingers, a sullen, unhappy look in her eyes. Their daddy came back into the house.

‘Are you right?’

‘I want to change my skirt,’ she said, moving to the door.

He smiled and said wearily, ‘Your skirt’s grand, you look lovely in it. There’s no need to change.’

‘Ach, I don’t know, I don’t feel right in it.’

‘Put on your green one, then.’

Perhaps their parents didn’t realise that the children’s sensibilities were delicately tuned to emotional falseness, and so they registered the contrast between this, the tense atmosphere in the car and the apparent delight displayed on their arrival in Ballymena. Granny Kelly herself, wreathed in smiles, came out to the door to welcome them, and led them into a parlour which looked warmer than usual, because of the glittering Christmas tree and the foil streamers. Uncle Michael, Aunt Rosemary and the cousins were there, and a casual observer might have been fooled. But the children noticed how their daddy and Uncle Michael both talked more loudly than usual, and that although their mother smiled and smiled, it never went beyond her mouth, never reached her eyes. When she laughed, it was forced and nervous, not the full, unbuttoned laughter they would hear at home. The children sat neatly on the sofa, sucking pink wafer biscuits and sipping weak tea, and noticing far more than the adults in the room would ever have believed.

After all the chit-chat died down the conversation turned, inevitably, to civil rights, and the marches which had been taking place during the autumn.

‘Bloody head-cases, so they are,’ Uncle Michael said.

‘You think so?’ This was the children’s mother, and the tone of her voice had changed, but Uncle Michael either didn’t notice, or didn’t care. He gave a little laugh and shook his head as if it were all such nonsense it was hardly worth talking about.

‘I mean, how do you think it’s going to end? O’Neill has offered them a few odds and ends to keep them quiet, and of course that’s got the other side’s backs up. Do these People’s Democracy crowd think the ones up in Stormont are going to turn round and say, “God, right enough, there is people in this country that have damn all and we’re doing less than nothing to help them; we’d better start giving them jobs and houses and whatever else they want”?’

‘So are people to just sit there like wee mice, and not even ask for what’s their due?’

Uncle Michael shook his head again. ‘It’ll end in a bloodbath,’ he said. ‘The other side are going to resent the least thing that’s given. They have the power, and they’re not just going to let it be taken away from them. Mark my words: a bloodbath, and the people will have brought it upon themselves.’

‘It’s not a question of one side or the other,’ their father began, and he said something about socialism, but their grandmother interrupted him.

‘Communists, more like,’ she said. ‘It’s the students I feel most angry about. Look at the chance they’ve been given. If they would sit in the universities and study and work hard, they’d have nothing to complain about, they’d get on in life, get jobs and money; but oh no, they have to be out about the country marching and protesting. The university should just close their doors on them, should boot them out and take in students who are prepared to stick to their books and work.’

‘Well now, I’m afraid I can’t agree with you at all there, Mrs Kelly,’ their father said, and they knew this time that he wasn’t going to allow himself to be interrupted or talked down. ‘I was on the march in Deny in October, the one that was disrupted, and I met some of the students there, and I can tell you that I thought them admirable people. They’re not involved in this for themselves. They’re concerned about the people in this country who haven’t had their chances, and who aren’t going to be helped in any way unless somebody makes a stand and gets things moving, unless the people who do have something begin to speak out for those who have nothing.’

‘It’s up to every person to look out for himself,’ Granny said, and Uncle Michael nodded at this. ‘I hate to have to say it about my own people, but the Catholics in this country are a feckless, lazy bunch. Given them an opportunity, and they’ll turn their backs on it and walk away.’

The children could see their parents were angered by this, but they didn’t realise that it was because their father thought what she said was meant to be a slight against their mother; and their mother took it for a veiled insult against her husband’s family.

‘The next march there is,’ their mother said, ‘I’ll be on it.’
Everyone in the room looked at her in surprise. ‘And I’ll take the children too.’

When they got into the car to go home, a short while later, Kate said, ‘It’s good to have that out of the way, isn’t it? Now we can settle down and begin to enjoy Christmas.’

‘Oh, Kate,’ their mother said, and they thought she was going to laugh; but she started to cry instead.

But she kept her word. When the civil rights march from Belfast to Deny took place some two weeks later, it was Emily who insisted that the whole family go to cheer them on. They had to stand and wait for a long time in the raw air; and when at last the students did appear, led by a tired-looking man shouting into a loud hailer, the children felt a sharp mixture of fear and excitement, which was new to them, but which they were to experience many times in the coming years. Helen’s father bent down and whispered in her ear, ‘You’re looking at history.’ But Helen realised this without having to be told. That night she listened to her mother telling Granny Kate how the person leading the march had shouted ‘One man’ and everybody else had shouted ‘One vote,’ ‘One family,’ ‘One house.’ ‘There was a policeman standing right at my elbow,’ she said to Granny, ‘and I didn’t give two hoots, I just shouted back with the rest of them.’ Helen remembered how her mother had looked, standing on the grass verge by the side of the road, with Sally clutching a fistful of her skirt as usual. Her face was red with the cold, but when she shouted the slogans, she’d lost her usual timidity and shyness. Helen knew to look at her how serious all this was: something important had changed.

Just after Cate had left the house that morning to drive to Belfast, she’d met Brian on the road, walking towards her. She stopped the car and rolled down the window.

‘I’ve a bit of news for you,’ she said, and watched his smile fade with apprehension. ‘I’m going to have a baby.’

‘Christ Almighty!’ Cate smiled foolishly in spite of herself, and drummed her fingers on the steering wheel, while Brian stood looking at her for some moments.

‘Well,’ he said eventually, ‘as the old saying goes, these things happen in the best-regulated families. How’s your mammy taking it?’

‘Much as you’d expect.’

‘These things sort themselves out in time,’ he said, after another pause. ‘I’ll call up and see her later this morning.’

‘Oh, I think I’d give her a wee while yet,’ Cate said hastily. ‘I’m clearing out myself for a night, to stay with Helen and give Mammy a chance to think it through.’

‘It’s as bad as that?’

‘I suppose so,’ Cate replied, suddenly miserable. Brian leaned towards her. ‘Ach, daughter, this is the worst bit. I mind the time … I mind …’ He looked away. ‘Your mammy’ll come round to it. It’s always a shock at first, so it is.’

‘You’re telling me.’ He told her to look after herself. As she drove away she realised that she felt brighter for having spoken to him, without being able to explain to herself exactly why that should be.

For a moment she even wondered if she felt well enough to head off somewhere for the day; maybe to County Down, that would be good, ending up in Belfast just in time for Helen’s arrival home from work. But she dismissed the idea in the very moment it came to her. She’d slept badly the night before; perhaps she’d need to take a nap for an hour or two in Helen’s place this afternoon. On top of that, she still felt wretched with
morning sickness. That at least was one of the benefits of having told her family what had happened: she would no longer have to go through the charade of having to pretend to be well when she felt terrible. God, but Sally was decent! She’d come tapping on Cate’s bedroom door this morning with tea and toast. Having that before she got out of bed had been a good help, as opposed to coming downstairs on an empty stomach and trying not to gag when her mother asked her would she like some scrambled egg. She’d always been great, Sally, and Cate felt guilty now for having taken her so much for granted in the past. The way she’d handed over her car keys, too, without making a big deal about it.

But that was nothing new either. Often, when Cate was home for a week in the summer, she’d go out for the day with her mother and Sally in Sally’s car. They always liked to go to such places as the Glens of Antrim or the Giant’s Causeway, somewhere you could see magnificent scenery. They would have a picnic, or Cate would treat them to lunch in a hotel. But Sally realised (although she didn’t pretend to understand) that Cate liked to go to other places too. ‘The keys are there,’ she would say, nodding towards where they hung, near the stove. ‘Off you go, if you want.’

And off Cate did go, many times, driving for hours through the countryside alone, trying to fathom Northern Ireland in a way which wasn’t, if you still lived there, necessary. Or advisable, she thought. Or possible, even.

Swatragh and Draperstown; Magherafelt and Toome; Plumbridge and Castledawson: her family couldn’t understand her interest in these places. She drove through pinched villages where the edges of the footpaths were painted red, white and blue, where there were Orange Lodges and locked churches; through more prosperous towns with their memorials from the Great War and their baskets of lobelia and fuchsia hanging from brackets from the street lamps, with their Tidy Town awards on burnished plaques and their proper shopfronts. She drove through villages where unemployed men stood on street corners and dragged on cigarettes, or ambled up and down between the chip shop and the bookie’s, past walls which bore Republican graffiti or incongruously glamorous advertisements on huge hoardings. She saw Planter towns that had had the heart bombed
out of them; ‘Business as Usual’ signs pasted on the chipboard nailed over the broken windows of The Northern Bank and Williamson’s Hardware. Now and then she would see a Mission tent, or a temporary road sign indicating the way to a ‘Scripture Summer Camp’. She drove along narrow roads between shaggy wet hedges of hawthorn and beech. Once, somewhere in South Derry, she saw a field where a few pale cattle stood up to their knees in nettles and scutchgrass before a ruined building with ‘
INLA
rule’ painted on it in crude white letters. The cattle stared at her mildly as she passed by.

She saw signposts for places which had once held no particular significance but whose names were now tainted by the memory of things which had been done there: Claudy, Enniskillen, Ballykelly. She drove and drove and drove under grey skies and soft clouds. The towns and fields slipped past her until she felt that she was watching a film, and then she realised that if she had been asked to pick a single word to sum up her feelings towards Northern Ireland she would be at a complete loss, so much so that she didn’t even know whether a negative or a positive word would have been more apt.

As she drove to Belfast this morning, she remembered how, during these summer drives, she would sometimes fantasise about moving back to the north to live there, particularly when she saw a house which took her fancy: always a magnificent stone house with ivy growing on it, maybe with a garden running down to a river, the whole thing surrounded by lime trees and oaks. She’d look at a high distant window and imagine herself standing there, looking out from another life. But it didn’t amount to anything, this fantasy; she would do as much if she were on holiday in the Cotswolds or in Tuscany, and build a vague life for herself around some house or market or town half-glimpsed and as quickly forgotten, both the fact of the place and the thought it had stirred.

Once, during one of her summer drives, she had stopped to buy some petrol in a village in Fermanagh, and she’d been particularly taken with the place. It had been a bright morning and she remembered flowers and an air of quiet prosperity, neat shops, outside one of which bunches of carrots hung with their leafy tops intact. She thought that this looked like the kind of
place to which so many of the people she knew in London would like to move, and it belied the idea many of them would have had of life in Northern Ireland. But later that day, while she was listening to the car radio, she heard a report which said that a man of twenty, an RUC reservist, had been shot dead while working in his father’s vegetable shop in that same village. And although she didn’t want to pass through the place again when she was driving home that evening, she had no choice. By then the weather had broken; and the plastic tape which the police had tied to lamp-posts to cordon off the area flapped and strained in the strong wind and rain. An army checkpoint had been set up and every car was being stopped and the whole thing was ghastly and depressing. She thought of the young man dead and felt ashamed of her own easy sentimentality earlier in the day.

But she was careful never to talk to her family, especially to her mother, about the idea of her moving back to the north, for she was afraid that it might be taken seriously.

Past Antrim, she turned on the car radio and listened to the news headlines. A man had been shot in his home in North Belfast during the night. A few more bleak items followed, and then the weather forecast, which said that it would be ‘mild and fair’, although Cate could already see dark clouds gathering. Once when she was home she’d remarked to Helen that she thought the forecasts were often inaccurate in Northern Ireland. ‘It’s probably deliberate,’ Helen had replied. ‘If they read out the average day’s news here and then said at the end of it, “Oh, and by the way, it’s going to bucket rain for the next twenty-four hours,” it might be more than people could take.’

She switched off the radio again and slotted in a cassette, but as she approached Belfast and the traffic got heavier and more complicated she turned the music off too, the better to concentrate. Lorries thundered past on either side of her. ‘Ulster still needs Jesus’, it said in large letters on the side of a church. Far in the distance to her left she could see a cemetery and beyond that Belfast Lough. She drove on, down past the docks and the yellow gantries. She rather liked seeing this part of the city, although she never day-dreamed about living in Belfast. She drove over the Westlink to reach Helen’s office, and it took all of her skill to negotiate her way. She’d driven this in the past,
but had asked Sally to talk her through it again that morning before she left the house. She almost missed her turning and ended up on the road to Dublin. The part of the lower Falls where Helen had her office always reminded Cate more of her mother than of her sister, although it had changed a lot since the time she had lived and taught there. Cate was never comfortable in this part of town; she always felt nervous and conspicuous and was afraid that something would happen there. Knowing that this was a prejudice didn’t help her greatly.

She hadn’t been to Helen’s office before, but had little difficulty finding it. A green door beside an off-licence (‘Handy at the end of a long day,’ Helen used to remark laconically) opened on to a narrow flight of stairs, once she had rung the bell and the buzzer had sounded. At the top of the stairs she turned right into a tiny room where a young man and a woman with a baby were sitting forlornly on a couple of worn-out chairs. The walls were covered in beauty board, and a spider plant was expiring in the corner. Cate could see now what Helen meant about the off licence. The offices in which Cate worked in London were actually quite functional and drab, given the glamorous image of the magazine; but this was something else. A door on the far side of the room opened and a man in his early forties came out. ‘Now, Mr and Mrs …’ he started to say, and then he noticed Cate. ‘Oh, hello, Helen said you would be calling,’ he said, and ushered her through to his office. ‘I’ll see you in a minute,’ he threw over his shoulder as an afterthought to the waiting couple, and closed the door. The office was perhaps slightly bigger than the waiting room, but looked smaller because of the buff folders which were everywhere: two desks were piled high with them, they were heaped on the window-sill, piled on a chair, scattered across the floor. It was like something out of Dickens, Cate thought, and it shocked her to think of her sister spending her working life in such a place.

‘Helen had to go down to the Crumlin Road to see someone this morning. She left this for you,’ Owen said, opening a drawer and taking out a key, which he handed to her. Cate had only met Owen a couple of times before, but he was always very friendly towards her. ‘More than he is to me,’ Sally had once said grumpily. ‘He wouldn’t give me the light of day if he could
help it. I’m just a wee primary school teacher; what is there to be gained by knowing the likes of me?’

‘My wife Mary was showing me that interview you did with Robert De Niro last month,’ Owen went on. ‘Very impressive!’

‘Oh, that.’ Cate said. ‘You know how it is, these things always sound much more exciting than they actually are. De Niro’s notoriously difficult to interview.’

‘Ah, go on out of that, don’t try to tell me that meeting film stars is less glamorous than this,’ and Cate, glancing around at the worn carpet, the dingy filing cabinets and the buff folders, took his point, and made no such denial. Owen followed her glance, and picked up a folder from the desk. ‘Helen was reading a thing out to me the other day about what they call the paperless office, and saying “Why can’t we have one of those?” We had a good laugh about it.’

Cate forced a smile. ‘Be sure and thank Helen for me,’ she said, ‘and tell her I’ll see her this evening. I won’t take up any more of your time; I know you have people waiting.’

‘They’re well used to it,’ Owen said, as he crossed to the door. ‘If you’re around later in the week, give us a ring. Mary would love to have you over for an evening.’ Cate gave him one of her marvellous smiles, and fled. When she got into the car she realised that she felt miserable again. Everything around her looked bleak, and she couldn’t find it in herself to rise above it. She wasn’t usually like this, she thought, as she turned on the ignition.

Her spirits didn’t lift when she pulled up outside Helen’s house a short while later, with it’s stark garden adorned by a lone tree in a tub. It depressed her to think of her sister driving over every evening from that office, that horrible office, to this place, which was so wrong for her. Even Helen hadn’t been able to stand up to social pressure, even she conformed. She wasn’t like Owen who threw himself blindly and shamelessly into the quest for social approval like an otter leaping into a river; nor like Cate herself, whose very career and standing with her colleagues depended upon her ability to read the signs of the times more quickly and fluently than most, and to endorse them with enthusiasm. Helen should have stayed in Andersonstown, where she’d been living when she first started to work with Owen,
Cate thought. She’d liked it there, but the pressure to conform had been too much, even for an idealist like Helen. Cate let herself into the house and found no comfort in the bare hall and the chilly sitting room. She stood for a few moments trying to decide what changes were needed: a stronger, warmer colour for the walls, to begin with. The room was big, it could take it. Maybe some sort of urn over in that corner, or there needed to be more focus on the fireplace … This was a habit of Cate’s, she couldn’t help doing it, even in houses more successfully furnished than this. She did it to other women too, assessing their clothes, their hair, their make-up, professionally, but not unkindly, she liked to think.

As it was now, the most striking feature of the room was a large framed photograph of Helen and her father on the lawn at Queen’s, Helen in her academic gown with her scroll in her hands. She and her father were smiling at each other in such a way that the picture would have appealed even to someone who had met neither of the people in it: the affection between them lifted it above the usual run of graduation photographs. Staring hard at Helen’s image, Cate remembered the words her cousin Una had used when she collected Cate at the airport that night two years ago. ‘Helen’s just gone to pieces,’ was how she’d put it, when Cate asked after her mother and sisters, and when Cate saw Helen, later that night and in the following days, the phrase had come back to her as being horrifyingly accurate.