The Friday Tree (43 page)

“Yes,” said Mr Doughty, drily. “I’m sure.”

“I think he really did,” said Francis, his brow furrowing. “But Isobel’s brother had run here too, and when he found out George was in the town, he set out to find him. George was sure he meant to kill him, in case he told on the others. He tried, and then George had to get away.”

“George?” said Mr Doughty, and now he did sound surprised.

“George Bailey,” said Francis, almost with impatience. “Brigid calls him that.”

“It’s his name,” said Brigid indignantly. “And, as well, nobody was supposed to know about George. It was meant to be a secret.”

Francis looked at her and sighed. “Brigid,” he said, “I’ve thought about this. We have to let Mr Doughty know what happened, especially if George didn’t do anything.”

“He didn’t,” said Mr Doughty. “You needn’t worry: you’ve broken no confidence. I did know there was a man those fellows were after, but I didn’t know why, and you’ve helped me with another bit of the jigsaw.”

What jigsaw, thought Brigid.

“I still would have liked to talk to him, though,” said Mr Doughty, thoughtfully. “Perhaps, when we are in the plot, you can fill in a few more of the details, Francis.”

Francis looked uncertain, and silence fell.

“You needn’t be afraid, son,” said Mr Doughty. “If he is the man I think, then we know he was in the clear and, as I told you, he’s well gone by now.”

Brigid felt first relief, then sadness. Well gone meant she would never see George Bailey again.

“Well, now,” said Mr Doughty, “this will never get the work done. Mrs Arthur, you have two fine children there, and you can be proud of them.”

“Thank you, Mr Doughty,” said their mother, and she placed a hand on each of their shoulders.

“I’ll see you all later on,” he said and, with a wave of his hand he walked thoughtfully away.

“Goodbye, Mr Doughty,” they called together, as he lifted his hand in farewell.

Francis said: “Till this afternoon!” He was no longer flushed, and his head was high.

“And rock cakes, Mr Doughty!” added Brigid, to be sure of his return.

She made to lift her hand to wave, and remembered that she was still holding Dicky.

While their mother stood at the door, Brigid followed Francis into the kitchen, and Francis opened Dicky’s cage. He held out his hands, and Brigid carefully opened hers. Dicky lay in her hand and, as they looked, he opened his black eye.

“Hello, Dicky,” said Francis, softly, but Dicky said nothing. “Are you sure he spoke that time, Brigid?”

“I am sure,” said Brigid. “He said: ‘Hello, Dicky’.”

“Well, he’s not saying anything now,” said Francis. “Maybe he’s still concussed. Give him over to me. I’ll tell him about Suez. That’ll bring him round.”

“Tell me, too,” said Brigid, opening her hands, “because I don’t know what that was all about, and I’d like to know why you never told me you knew George Bailey.”

In the end, Francis did not tell her any of it that day because, at the moment of passing to him, Dicky suddenly moved his head, spread his left wing, pushed away from Brigid’s hand and flew out of her palm. Awkwardly at first, then with growing assurance, he circled the room, past the ceiling light, round and round.

“Francis! Close the windows,” Brigid cried. “He’ll get out again. Francis!”

Francis, his eyes alight, shook his head. “He won’t,” he said. “He won’t go far, will you, Dicky?”

And Dicky, as if in reply, called back from the ceiling, “
Hello, Dicky! Hello, Dicky!
”

Brigid clasped Francis in delight. “I told you, Francis,” she cried. “I told you!”

Francis held out his arms to Brigid, as if they were about to dance, and swung her round, Dicky circling above them. “
Absolument pure
,” he said, and lifted her up, swinging her high above his head, as if she too were a bird; and she spread her arms wide, like feathered wings. “
Absolument pure
,” he said again, and Brigid, spinning in the air, laughed aloud.

Acknowledgements

This book has been a long while in the making. Thirty-odd years ago, before circumstance took me into the academic world, David Marcus awarded me a prize at Listowel, published my work in
New Irish Writing
and shortlisted me for a Hennessy award. Ten years ago, he suggested that I write a novel. That tireless champion of Irish writing accepted no excuses. It took some years, and was set aside many times, but it was written, and David was its first reader. In sadness at his final illness and death, I set the novel aside once more.

Just last year, I went back to
The Friday Tree
and gave it to my agent, Paul Feldstein. Paul took over, submitting it to Poolbeg, the very firm, founded by David Marcus with Philip McDermott in 1976, which had published my work on Michael McLaverty over twenty years ago. That fact was unknown to Poolbeg’s present dynamic leader, Paula Campbell, when she accepted it as the first title in the exciting launch of Ward River Press, and she and her marvellous team set to work. I cannot adequately thank Paul Feldstein and Paula Campbell for their immediate faith in the novel. I thank with admiration my meticulous editor at Poolbeg, Gaye Shortland, for her patience, humour and unwavering focus; and I want to mention also those first careful and helpfully critical readers, my daughter Judith and my friends Bernadette McLean and Paul Shevlin; and, always, my son John who, however much he has to do himself, takes time to keep me calm.

In addition to David Marcus, to whom the book is dedicated, I must express my gratitude to my other early mentors, no longer here, who set me on my way in the writing of fiction: Sam Hanna Bell, author of
December Bride
, who awarded me a prize for the first story I wrote; Michael McLaverty, one of our greats, who told me I could do it; and another, whom McLaverty famously fostered, Seamus Heaney, for a lifetime’s friendship and inspiration.

To two other QUB mentors, Professors John Cronin and Ronnie Buchanan, I owe much for their continued friendship and advice; and to two extraordinary women writers, Jennifer Johnston and Edna O’Brien, both of whom are still at the height of their powers, and took time to encourage me by reading and commenting on early work, I extend my gratitude.

A special debt of thanks is due to Jim Fitzpatrick, Chairman of the
Irish News
, for kind permission to quote from contemporary accounts published in that most valuable resource, and to Libraries NI for permission to make copies from its newspaper archive.

Interview with the Author

How did you come to write the book?

It was suggested to me ten years ago by David Marcus, whom Seamus Heaney named for his encouragement of writers “the Blessed Marcus”. It took me a while to do as David asked, because I was at the time still involved in the academic world and the writing of literary criticism but, gradually, over the next few years, with many stops and starts, it was completed. Again, as Seamus Heaney also wisely pointed out, the important thing with writing is “getting started, keeping going – and getting started again”. I think the starting again is the hardest, and perhaps the most important.

Where did the idea come from?

I grew up in Northern Ireland, and after some years working and living in Dublin from the mid-1970s until the early 1980s, returned to live in Belfast, where I have my home today. With the distance that living away from the place of birth brings, I grew increasingly aware of something subconsciously absorbed, a sense that the trouble we had experienced in the North in the late 1960s had not, as newspapers and television seemed to be telling us, suddenly burst upon an unsuspecting, peaceful and law-abiding society. The 1950s in the North was quiet only on the surface. A visit to Belfast’s excellent Newspaper Library confirmed that there was a prolonged bombing campaign by the IRA in the mid-1950s, starting in England and then moving to the North; while at the same time, long before the well-known Garvaghy Road incidents, 12,000 Orangemen repeatedly insisted on their right to walk, on what was at the time described as a “hot Twelfth”, through a largely nationalist area in County Down. Everything was in place, ready to erupt, long before 1968.

Why did you decide to write about 1955–1956 rather than the other years leading up to 1968?

I think things are at their most interesting, historically and imaginatively, before the defining moments have taken place. In 1955, for example, the Suez crisis had not yet happened, and the Hungarian revolution had not taken place. There was still a sense that the Second World War, still comparatively recent in the minds of people, would serve as a reminder that something so horrific must never happen again. In Belfast, because there had been the Blitz in 1941, bombed-out buildings still stood as a kind of warning. I stop the novel before the imminent crises I allude to, at home and around the world, become too serious to be dismissed. I suppose I wanted to suggest – within the fictional world I had created – that the desire for peace might yet prevail.

Apart from documented political events, to what extent are the events in the novel based on reality?

The tragedy of the foundering of the
Princess Victoria
in January 1953 did happen, with the loss of many lives. Davy Crockett, or rather the actor who played him in the Disney film, did visit Robbs’ department store in Belfast in April 1956 – a fact which was not revealed to me or my siblings at the time, or we would certainly have clamoured to be there. He was, in fact, delayed by some hours, according to contemporary newspaper reports, firstly because Customs at the border were suspicious of his eighteenth-century musket, and then because some Queen’s University students tried to kidnap him as a rag stunt. There was indeed a riot when he did not turn up, and it interests me to consider that the very children who may have been there would have been just the age to become the students who demonstrated and marched in 1968 at the outset of the real eruption of what became known as “the Troubles”.

Why did you use these real events?

I hoped they would root the novel in reality, and allow me to let my imagination move round the margins.

What is the significance of the title?

I really did believe the seven trees at the back of our house were the shapes and colours of the days of the week. I later discovered I was not the only one, by any means, to ascribe colours and shapes to the days of the week. Nobody else agrees with my colours and shapes, however, which just goes to show how wrong people can be!

Why the epigraph from the Brothers Grimm?

The tales of the Brothers Grimm come from folktales which, as we know, are often terrifying. They did not sweeten their tales for children, and the originals of the stories – as documented, for example, in Iona and Peter Opie’s
The Classic Fairy Tales
–
are grim indeed: children, abandoned or betrayed by those who have charge of them, have to face the world early, and learn not only the virtues of courage and honesty, but also, all too often, the arts of cunning and duplicity. For Brigid and Francis, though they have good, caring parents and some kindly relatives and friends, the world beyond these is far from safe. There is always, in their experience, a distance between adults and children, as in the world of the Grimms. School, in particular, is not child-friendly, and there is no gradual introduction as happens today. The children go from the cocoon of home and family into an alien world, where they are expected to be little adults in training, and to act accordingly. Like the children in the Grimms’ story, they decide to look out for one another, and, like the children in the Grimms’ story, when they do go forth into the wide world, it is the smaller, apparently weaker sister who adapts more quickly to the requirements of a fairly ruthless society, while the older brother is shown to be unexpectedly vulnerable.

Would you like to take a trip back to 1955?

I would: though it might be a mistake. It could be like the scene in Thornton Wilder’s
Our Town
,
where the recently dead Emily is offered the chance to return for one day to any day she likes from her life. She is warned, however, not to choose an important day. Not heeding the warning, she selects a birthday. The intensity of the emotion she feels overwhelms her, and she sees why she was warned to choose a day of no significance, because that, however insignificant, would in itself be so hard to bear that she might not be able to cope. A day of any importance, as she discovers, is so intolerable that she begs to leave. If I did go back, therefore, it would have to be the dullest day imaginable.

You have published in the creative field before, mainly with the short story. Beyond that, your writing has been in the field of non-fiction, often academic. Are there great differences in approach?

The main difference is that in fiction, creative speculation is not only allowed, but is necessary. In non-fiction, as in the historical and literary research I carried out for my book on Jane Austen’s nieces in Ireland,
May, Lou and Cass
,
there is no room for speculation. It is essential to keep to recoverable fact. In the case of that book, however, the facts were so extraordinary that there was no room or need for speculation. The training of the academic, all the same, is very valuable for a fiction-writer. Any historical references must be checked carefully, and though the imagination may be at play, there must still be geographical and historical consistency.