The Butterfly Cabinet (24 page)

So I headed off up the steps to the town hall, and her at my heels, and in we went, not daring to look at each other now, for fear we’d turn tail and run, and we paid our shilling and we handed over our coats and our shoes to the cloakroom girl, as if roller-skating on a Saturday night was the most natural thing in the world to us. We picked up the metal skates and we buckled the leather straps on our feet. I kept my head down and didn’t dare look up at her or glance around to see who was watching us. When I had the objects on my feet, I stood up and leaned forward and grabbed a hold of the rail, and she stood up too, and I reached out my hand to her and I said, trying to keep the shake out of my voice, “Are you ready?” and she nodded, and took my hand. Then away we went, the pair of us, me holding on to the rail, her grabbing me by the elbow, hobbling and wobbling and terrified out of our wits, and all the young ones looking over at us, us in our homemade Butterick-pattern dresses, neither of us as slim as we would have liked. We were disastrous at the start, like two newborn calves trying to find our feet, but after a bit we got better at it and learned how to keep steady, and learn the weight of ourselves, and to lean forward instead of back, and how to keep going and get up a bit of speed, and we let go of each other’s hands, then, for we were making each other worse wobbling and screeching. Then we were going round, none too steady, but going round all the same, and staying upright to the sound of the band playing “The Music Goes Round and Round,” and outside the
sea going in and out, and inside the town hall, the sweat tripping us. We laughed till our sides were sore, laughed at the notion of us and what Bella’s man would say if he saw us, and what your mother would say, and us supposed to be at the pictures, and us like two dervishes, going round and round the polished wooden floor in the red-brick town hall. And I think, maybe, that’s what dying will be like. Frightening at first, and unbalancing, but once you get the hang of it, a hell of a ride.

There are families that misfortune seems to follow, Anna, and ours is one of them. Daddy’s family came east from Derryveagh in the 1840s. He told me the story. His father, my grandfather, arrived at his sister’s cabin one day and found the door and windows walled up from the inside. He shouted in at his sister and her husband, began to claw the mud out from the door, but his sister shouted out to him to for God’s sake turn away. They had the cholera and there was nothing that could be done for them except to lie down together. He kept on clawing at the mud at the door and they kept on shouting out to him to go away and take his weans as far as he could, and in the end he sat down on the stoop, his nails full of muck, and cried every tear in his head while the two of them cried on the inside. He stayed there and talked in to them for three days, with the corncrakes calling out in the long grass, until his people stopped calling out. Then he got up and went home and gathered his family and carried them east and never went back. He came here with hardly a word of English and got work at the curing station in Portballintrae. In my head, I’ve walked every step of that road with him.

I’m the last of the McGlades, as far as I know. Charlie never came back from Canada, not even for Mammy’s funeral. We lost track of each other. Maybe he married, I don’t know. He set off one morning for Derry, took a lift where he got it and walked the rest; sold his gold watch, which he’d won at the swimming match on the strand; stepped up onto the
SS Mongolian
and never got off
it till he landed in Halifax, Canada. He wrote that as soon as he had the money gathered, he’d send for us both, me and Mammy. He said we’d ride on a carriage and wear green feathers in our hats and no one would ever look down their noses at us. He said that in Canada, if you worked hard enough, you could be anyone. It wasn’t like here, where the more you did, the more was expected of you, and no thanks for it either. “Go on oul’ horse and you’ll get grass,” Peig used to say. “That’s the most any of us can hope for in this place.”

Charlie told us what we wanted to hear and we swallowed it whole. He sent a photograph a newsman had taken of him and the men he worked with on a Canadian railway line. You could see Charlie, clear as day, standing in a drain under the tracks in a dirty shirt and overalls, the point of his pick resting in the ground, his boots and trousers from below the knee soaking wet. In the picture, there wasn’t one man smiling. What with that, and the stories that came back from other people, we soon knew what no one wanted to say: that he’d swapped one country of depression and poverty for another.

Thinking of him puts me in mind of the game we used to play, me and Charlie, called Running Like McCartney. Cruel, when I think of it now, but the young have a different word for “cruel”: they call it fun. Oul’ Harry McCartney lost both his eyes one night in the sand hills when the poteen still he was working on exploded in his face. He knew everybody by their step, or by their voice if they were walking on the strand. We met him one day, me and Charlie, when we were down looking for plovers’ eggs. A gust of wind caught McCartney’s peaked cap and sent it flying down the strand and he set off after it, his two hands stretched out in the wind, calling his cap like it was a dog that might come back to him. Charlie got it for him, put it back in his hand, and he said, “Thanks, young McGlade,” and we watched him stagger on up toward the holy well. And then Charlie said, “What would that be
like, do you think? Running blind?” and he took off with his two eyes tight shut and his hands stuck out in front of him toward the Barmouth. The game was, you had to keep the sun on your face and the winner was the one who kept their eyes shut the longest and whose tracks in the sand were the straightest. Charlie loved it; he said you could be anywhere doing anything with your eyes shut, you could be anyone in the whole world, and it was only when you opened them again that you came back into yourself. I never won; I didn’t like the sensation much, of not knowing where I was going, what I was running into. I didn’t like the dark.

The papers are always full of pictures in the summer months of returned Yankees, all of them in sharp suits and with haircuts like film stars. So-and-so pictured with his brother after fifty years apart. But no one ever came knocking to me, no long-lost relations looking for their ancestors’ birthplace. The last letter I got from him was after Mammy died. He was moving, he said, to a place called Calgary. I’ll never forget that: the way it sounded like Calvary and how I didn’t like the idea of him going to a place with a name like that. He’d write, he said, with a new address, and maybe, he said, I’d come over to visit him. But he never wrote, or if he did, I never got it, and I never went and that was that.

All I knew about it was what Bella told me from the cowboy books she read. Bella was a shockin’ woman for the library. She couldn’t get enough of the cowboys. She had me tormented, trailing down to the reading rooms with her, picking ones out. I had no interest in them at all, but she could read a book standing at the sink, one hand sunk into the water scraping the spuds, the other hand turning a page, and you’d say something to her about the length the girls were all wearing their dresses, or wasn’t it shockin’ the price of flour, and she’d be away, out over the prairies, reins in her hand, the wind in her hair, and you’d have lost her for the time being.

She was a great friend to me. There was only one time I felt
anything other than love for her. I called for her, as usual, one Friday, to walk down to the harbor and get a bit of fish for the dinner and instead of her being ready at the door, she called me into the kitchen to a stranger: a lovely tall dark-haired girl with eyes black and wide like Bella’s. Bella took her by the elbow and she said, “Maddie, this is my Stella,” and I knew then she was the baby she’d left behind in Dublin all those years ago. The girl was getting married and she’d asked the Salvationists to find her mother. And I was jealous because I knew I’d never be able to stand with my hand on Owen’s arm and say, “This is my son.”

Can I ask you something, Anna? When your baby’s here, will you bring her to me? I’d like to hold her. I’d like to put my hands on her in a way I never did with Owen or Conor. I never acknowledged them—not to anyone, not out loud—and I’m sorry for that. I’d like to hold her in my arms and announce to the world my claim to her.

Thursday 24 November 1892

Our wedding anniversary: twelve years; nine children; one dead. I have matched the queen, child for child. We had an inspection by the visiting justices, who seemed pleased to see that all was as it should be: grim and inhospitable. Julia writes to say she would visit. She says she knows my fangs are all display and she wants to know the truth. I cannot bear to have Julia near me. She is a lightweight. She always will be. I do not want to see her need of me.

Four years ago on our anniversary, Edward bought me Caesar. A cross of an English draft mare and a thoroughbred, at sixteen hands high he is faster and lighter than any other horse I have ever hunted. The day of one of Julia’s idiotic bazaars, when the grounds were invaded by dozens of ladies in urgent need of bead-embroidered footstool covers and weak tea from a refreshment tent, I took him out onto the path around the castle. I had never dared try a horse on it before: it is steep and rough and narrow; there are points along it where nothing but air separates the rider from a drop of thirty feet or more onto the rocks; but something about those ladies in their gloves and their pinched mouths made
me desperate to try it. It was utterly exhilarating, and worth every sideways glance I earned for it. Caesar was a champion. We made it the whole way around from the start of the path at the Crescent, past Little Ringan and the Gentlemen’s Bathing Place at Port-na-happle, where there were several bathers in the water, past the Berrins and the salmon fishery, down past the well at the Strand Head. There is no feeling that can compare to a full gallop on the strand, sand and water flying at Caesar’s heels, the clouds scudding by overhead. At the Barmouth we rose a flock of sanderlings, so comic on the shoreline as they ran in and out, trying to catch the tide, but in the air as they appeared above us, breathtaking, a sudden silvering, a shot of happiness.

Anyone with wit knows that ladies are more skillful riders than men: we cannot rely on brute strength or on spurring the horse; we control our beasts with the touch of a hand, a shift in the seat, then fly at a hedge with full speed and a prayer. I do not hunt for conversation; I care little for the pedigree of the hounds, and less for the fox, so long as they go. My aim was always to stay in the same field with the hounds all the way. And Caesar was unbeatable. He went at the solid stone wall of the old deer park at Ballintoy without a second’s pause, all six feet of it, and we sailed over it together. He tore through the gorse above Whitepark Bay, leaped a cart road that crossed our path near the Croaghs in one long bound that left many another horse stranded. That is what I hunt for: the soar of feeling; the moment of suspension over a hedge, the flight before the descent; the wish that that sensation could endure. Nothing beautiful lasts.

Edward and I had a game. It began at breakfast one morning, not long after we were married. I wanted the newspaper, for the dates of the hunt, and Edward had his paper knife ready on the breakfast table but had not yet cut it.

“What would you be,” he said, eyeing the advertisements on the front, “if you had to find yourself a job?” And he handed it to me.

There was demand, it seemed, for a Smart Girl to become a draper’s assistant and I said I thought I would be well suited to the position, since I was, as was required, a good sewer, and felt I could take charge of books and could without much difficulty provide the necessary three references. Edward guffawed; I feigned offense and handed him back the paper with the challenge to find himself a position. He said the Cape Mounted Riflemen would suit him well since they wanted hardy youths who were accustomed to horses, cattle and agricultural pursuits, and would pay him between five and six shillings a day to be shot at, which seemed a reasonable price. I said he could not go, since they required only single men, and his eyes softened and he said: “I am shackled, it is true. I must bear it with patience.”

I threw a mushroom, which he dodged skillfully as evidence of how he might cheat the cannonballs. It became our game over the Saturday morning paper. We were, in turn, the sole agent in Ireland for Richardson’s bone compound, dentist to the working classes between the hours of nine and ten
A.M
., a steamboat captain for the
Brittanic,
a plumber (with the most improved sanitary goods on sale), a magnetist, a manufacturer of oil for lamps, a coachman (Protestant, married, teetotaller), a useful companion and lady’s help (Edward), and once, famously, I was a harness horse for a dog cart, entirely free from vice and with a good mouth. The game always ended in the same way: in a kiss between the two newly hired workers. I do not recall when it was we stopped playing it. When the children became too numerous—after Charlotte was born, perhaps. We were engaged in it one April morning when Hill brought in the post, including a black-bordered telegram.

In the end it was Mother who outlived Father, but only by a matter of months. Father became ill with a tumor on his neck. He was referred to a London doctor, who rejected the idea of surgery and undertook to remove the offending tissue over a period of weeks, first by blistering the skin with nitric acid and
then by lacerating and applying a plaster to the flesh on a daily basis until the whole became infected and could be cut out. He suffered weeks of pain in our house in London, to where Julia had been removed to nurse him and Mother, only to be told at the end that the cancer was in his blood and could not be cured. The dreadful procedure was agonizing and seemed to have accelerated the disease; he died within a matter of weeks. Within six months Mother too was dead.

I never liked our London house, a semidetached villa in Richmond. I could not shake off my sense of its attachment to the house next door, that the layout of our neighbors’ house formed a perfect symmetry with our own, as if the architect had merely erected a great mirror on the partition wall to replicate everything exactly: their drawing room adjacent to ours; their kitchen; their bedrooms; the reflected gabled stairway. It made the experience of staying there feel unreal, as if one of us, our neighbors or ourselves, were living a parallel life that held no real substance, was a mere facsimile of the other. The difficulty was in deciding which was real: their existence or ours. When our house was quiet, late in the evening, one could sometimes hear a foot upon their stairs, the creak of a door on their side, the echoes of quietened ablutions. I could never shake off the feeling that the house had been mysteriously butterflied, like those paintings of exotically colored flowers and birds that the children sometimes make with Julia on folded paper: abstract, unreal, but perfectly proportioned. I was happy to leave it on the morning of my marriage to Edward, and I never went back.