The Rising of Bella Casey (21 page)

There. The deed is done. He feels like a monster. His eyelids are on fire, the skin there craggy and folded like an elephant’s jowl, a sticky yellow ooze snagged between what’s left of his lashes. The old trouble with his eyes. He wants to rub them, strip away the layers of burning skin. He unhooks the rickety arms of his spectacles and lays them down on the scratched desk. Without them, what he has written is reduced to
hieroglyphic
waves.

The light in the upstairs room is brassy, autumn desperate in her late charms. His divan beckons but to stretch on it now would chime too much with the death-bed. There is no
getting
away from it. The incriminating scene may be an
incomprehensible
blur on the page lolling in the typewriter roller, but the memory of the moment is as sharp as pain. Now, as then, he cannot bear Bella’s life, or her living of it. It has made a coward of him. He has just hurried her towards her end. He has played the magisterial god and chopped a decade from her sentence. With one stroke of his gavel, he has rendered Bella dead – again. It is a damnable business, this scribbling.
Sometimes
he longs to be the man whose only writing duty is the paper dart for the milkman –
two pints please.
He stares down at his assassin hands. They are strange to him, as if they belong to someone else.

Poor Bella. He cannot break the habit of appending the
impoverished
title. She seemed to attract misfortune, courted it,
you could say. As soon as he thinks this, he berates himself. Blaming the poor for their condition, Comrade Casey? A nice how-do-you do! For a brief spell she’d played the bright scholar with her parcel of books, then the strict school ma’am ruling by arched eyebrow, before falling for the soldier, full of strange oaths. Oh and fall was the word for it. Once she’d met Beaver, Bella’s life had been all fall. Trouble was that his sister’s romance with destitution had demanded witness. His. He’d felt the burden of that witness. Too often he’d found himself playing walk-on parts in her mortification. Even with Beaver out of the way, committed. Committed indeed – the treachery of language!

The eviction was the beginning of it. No sooner was Beaver incarcerated in the Richmond than the notice was posted. It was he who’d brought Bella’s attention to it. It had been
plastered
overnight on the front door in Rutland Place and was there when he’d come to call. He was allowed to visit Bella now since Beaver wasn’t master of his own wits, let alone lord of this household. He felt a vague twinge of guilt. What kind of puerile superstition was that? As if their damned falling-out over the Boers had hastened the Bugler’s decline. As if words of his had the power to madden! No, Beaver was a fool,
wrong-headed
, a bully who reached for boycott when he was outdone in argument. A pox on him!

He had just lifted the knocker on Bella’s door when he
saw the notice to quit.
This is to declare
… the proclamation of money-grubbers. His heart sank. He left the knocker fall heavily. The sound echoed in the rinsed early morning. The dawn-bleached street had not yet properly awoken.
Red-brick
snoozed, curtains drawn on bleary windows. As he stood there waiting for an answer, he remembered the
Sundays
he’d spent here as a boy, he and his brothers gathered around the piano in full-throated song while Bella
accompanied
. Even Ma had joined in then, when all was
sweet-seeming
domesticity.

Bella, with tumbledown hair and still in her nightgown, came to the door. He pointed wordlessly to the notice. She
scrabbled
at it desperately while looking furtively up and down the street for fear of prying neighbours. But it was a futile task. Jamie, the landlord, had used horse-glue. Anyway, even if she had managed to remove that one, there were two more pasted to the window panes.

The eviction was inevitable, any fool could have seen that. Any fool but Bella. The bully Beaver had at least provided; the madman Beaver couldn’t. Babsie’s pittance from the box
factory
was all that stood between Bella and penury. He’d heard Jamie making his threats.

‘Eleven weeks Mrs Beaver and it’s marked down agin you in black and white,’ the creeping money-grubber had said.

‘My husband . .,’ Bella began, but Jamie waved her off.

‘Everyone has a hard luck story,’ he said.

No such thing as an hour of need with those boyos.
Fumbling
in the greasy till.

He was there, too, the day the bailiffs came. Three gruff fellas did the dirty work, making a funeral pyre of Bella’s
possessions
on the street. How unprepossessing they seemed when piled out on the kerb. The sofa, a ragged beast upended. The wash-stand was forlorn, the fender bled rust-red in the rain. The dresser, once the bulwark of the house, seemed
defenceless
, the butter-box with the velvet seat, an abdicated throne, the tapestry screen, agape. Bella’s pots and pans, thrifty on the stove, seemed patched and poor on the pavement. The beloved piano, stricken. Her bedstead – wretched source of her downfall – was like a ruined ship run aground.

He had stayed on guard with James and Valentine, while Bella took Susan and the baby and went hunting for
somewhere
they could lay their heads. Why she brought Susan along, he couldn’t fathom. On Bella’s say-so, the girl had been treated like a veiled novice. Another of Bella’s vanities, that took on the hue of delusion. He could have told her that Susan’s well-tended air, her neat bonnet and smart coat would be an obstacle on the mean streets where they would be forced to look for lodgings. The girl would be taken for the District Nurse, or, worse, the lady from the Cruelty Society and be distrusted
instanter
. And should she open her mouth, she would add to the suspicion that she was on some ‘official’
mission, for the girl had been encouraged in an accent. But he said nothing. Bella would only get uppity and accuse him of trying to peddle his ruffian politics.

She found a two-pair front room in a tenement on Fitzgibbon Street. The gable of the house was propped up by two great shafts of timber set in a field of rubble where its neighbour had once stood before it had collapsed. Truly, they were living in the ruins of Empire.

‘The place is full of RCs,’ Bella said as they stepped over the threshold. ‘Who else would live in such parlous disarray?’

His argument, if he’d voiced it, would have been why should
anyone
be forced to live like this. It made his bile rise, not just for Bella’s sake, but for the whole damned human race.

The walls were peeling – in places near the double
windows
, the plaster had come right away showing the pitiful
skeleton
of the house. Laths like fragile bones, innards of
crumbling
shale. The only clue to the room’s former grandeur was in the ceiling rose. Centre-stage in the high-browed room. The floorboards creaked, the windows shivered. The lock on the door was gammy from too many forced entrances.

He watched as Bella and the girls scoured the floor – the place was crawling – and threw down rugs and pushed the sofa into familiar territory before the stove. Bella set the wash-stand behind the door. Here they would have to wash themselves and all they owned. The drop-leaf mahogany table
that had come from Dorset Street, well-scored and
scorch-ringed
now, stood in front of the dresser, in a vain attempt to recreate the vintage comforts of Rutland Place. She ordered the piano to be placed in the Alcove Right. It might have looked the worse for wear out on the street, but in
this
room it seemed positively grand, as did Bella, though to her
detriment
. A tenement was no place for remnant respectability. The stage was set.

The boys slept top to tail on the one mattress in the Alcove Left. Bella and the girls shared the bed of shame. She had strung up a curtain around the girls’ bedding – to preserve modesty, she told him, though in this squalid crush, how could anyone hold on to a modicum of dignity? He said as much, couldn’t stop himself.

‘Dignity,’ Bella said, ‘comes from within.’

Her pious certitudes infuriated him.

‘It’s slums like this that lost me my faith in god and man,’ he said.

‘Don’t go conjoining our situation with any of your
newfangled
notions,’ Bella said sharply, ‘for I won’t have you
spouting
Darwin at me, who would have us all on the one level as chimpanzees.’

But looking at this crowded room – with the howls of
children
off-stage, the bellowing of husbands, the clatter of boots in rooms bereft of furniture and draperies – he thought the monkey in the jungle had a better situation.

The commode, as Bella termed it for she refused to call it the slop bucket, was housed behind the tapestry screen, once a proud appurtenance of the parlour. Susan was aghast at the lack of a lavatory.

‘Nothing lah-di-da like that here, young Miss,’ said Mr
Pilgrim
, the landlord’s agent – a vile breed. ‘You brings your own slops to the yard and the dung dodgers come twice a week.’

‘It’ll only be for a short while, Susie,’ Bella said trying to quell alarm with falsehood. Was it to comfort the girl, or
herself
? But Susan refused to go when anyone else was in the room. So it became the drill for them all to be banished to the hallway while she attended to her duties. Visitors included. The neighbours found their exile hilarious and who would blame them? At first, they put it down to some Protestant practice of the Beavers.

‘Is it like our Rosary?’ one of the neighbours asked him, a raddled woman with a drinker’s face, built solid as a street post box. Mrs Madigan, she was, though he didn’t know her by name then. ‘Or is it the indulgences, with all the travelling in and out youse are doing?’

The denizens of Fitzgibbon Street didn’t beat around the bush. When they were curious, they asked, when they had something to say, they told you. Living cheek-by-jowl removed the niceties.

‘No,’ he said trying to make light of it. ‘Nothing like that. Just
taking the air, don’t you know!’

‘Watch out, so, for the air out here’ll kill you,’ she said. They followed the pathway of her laughter as she lumbered up two flights of stairs.

The lobby of Fitzgibbon Street was the front stage of the house. A constant traffic of cargo and humanity passed through trailing fumes and odours in its wake. It was impossible to do anything and be unobserved, someone always hovering in the wings. It didn’t take long for the entire house to be privy to Susan’s lavatorial excursions. When any of the ragged children saw Bella’s brood gathered in the hall, they would holler out to all and sundry. ‘Susan Beaver’s on the throne!’

He was their only visitor. His mother kept away. Wouldn’t lower herself, she said. But it was Bella’s lowering Ma couldn’t stomach. Bella came to them instead, bringing her dirty
laundry
, another matter of principle.

‘I will not hang Beaver smalls out on their communal lines,’ she declared. ‘Even the most ragged shirt or threadbare skirt is likely to end up in their baskets. As for the girls’ dainties, who knows what greasy paws of theirs might defile them?’

Everything in Fitzgibbon Street was
theirs
.

He did what he could. He couldn’t offer money even though he’d got himself work on the railways. Casual labour, they called it, though there was nothing casual about it. His bones ached;
his hands were nicked and scarred. He wielded hammer and axe from dawn till dusk. It brought in measly spoils but at least it spared him having to doff the cap to some well-heeled boss. The gang he slaved with were like dumb animals, workhorses, silent for the most part, who lived blindly from one pay day to the next and poured the proceeds down their gullets. But they didn’t trouble him with small-talk.

It was a paradox, but the mindless work freed his mind for his real vocation – writing. Articles and pamphlets and the like, just now, but he nursed ambitions he didn’t talk about, so delicate did they seem, not robust enough for scrutiny.
Particularly
not Bella’s. She would not approve. In this alone, he was still the awed and craven boy. Once he’d shown her an article he’d written. ‘Sound the Loud Trumpet’, it was, a
broadside
against the education system. Proud as a new parent, he’d handed it over, but she’d baulked after a few paragraphs.
Hardship
had mildewed her mind, and made her touchy with it. She seemed to take all of his propositions to heart. As if it were prim and proper Bella Casey and not the damned Chief Secretary Augustine Birrell he was having a go at. Still, he tried to help.

When he called to Fitzgibbon Street, he would set young Valentine mathematical problems for which he’d offer a small reward. It was a nod to the hours Bella had spent with him when he was at the same age poring over
Tennyson
and Wordsworth, though he had done such exercises
for love, not reward.

‘Would you not consider going back to the teaching, Bella?’ he asked her, while Valentine laboured over his sums. ‘You could start again.’

‘From a place like this?’ she said.

‘Wouldn’t you have somewhere to live, like the grand
quarters
you had in Dominick Street? And a fine salary and your children at their books instead of out slaving for the Bosses?’

She flinched, as well she might. She had just taken her eldest, James, out of school to be apprenticed to Swan’s, the printers on Dame Street. Boy came home flecked with silver shavings but was paid in lowly coppers. He remembered the schemozzle when his mother had sent him out to work at fourteen. How Bella had berated her loudly, calling up the memory of his dead Da as ammunition. But she had been Miss Casey in spirit then: bright, indignant, full of mettle. First, the hardening of the heart, then the dimming of the intellect.

‘I’m too long out of the teaching,’ she said, ‘too much water under the bridge entirely.’