The Butterfly Cabinet (25 page)

We invited Julia to live with us; it seemed the dutiful thing to do.

“Do you think a person can decide to die?” she asked me. “I am quite certain that is what happened with Mother. Once Father passed away, she lost all heart. Her health had never been good, but when he went, she no longer had the will to carry on.”

She told me something of what had occurred in the weeks after Father’s death: Mother’s inability to take anything but toast and water and the habitual salicin for the pains in her joints; her refusal to see visitors or leave the house; her insistence that the coals be wrapped in paper before being placed carefully on the fire so as not to jangle her too-jangled nerves; the long dark story of her declining health. And all the time Julia was telling me, I could not help but see the people on the other side of the partition wall, doing the same things in exactly the same way. I do not know if a person can die of a broken heart, but certainly they can die of self-starvation. It must have been one of the few decisions Mother made for herself in life.

My maternal grandfather was an elder of the Scottish Free Church. He wrote a letter to the
Witness
in 1853 in support of the Reverend Mr. Begg, calling for the overthrowing of the Catholic college of Maynooth, insisting that only true Protestants should be sent to Parliament. Julia found the cutting among Mother’s things, wrapped in muslin, smelling of lavender to keep away moths. Such talk of fire and brimstone and the sulfurous fires of hell conserved in scented fabric. What would he say if he could see me now? He would be turning in his roomy graveled grave. And be unsurprised that I ended here; evidence, he would no doubt say, that if one sleeps with the devil one will rise with horns. I never met him. Mother never spoke to him after she married Father, and she never spoke of him to me, but I cannot help but feel that I have inherited something of his direct opinions. There is much to be said for a vision of the world in black and white: it is so much safer than having to consider shades and variations of color and tone; it is a kind of protection against overexposure to too much pigment.

Mother never told me a single intimate thing, nothing that I could form into an impression of her as anything other than a permanent invalid. There was some link missing between us, something she saw in me that made her want to keep her distance.
The little I know of her life before marriage I have learned from Julia, to whom she spoke freely after Father died. She must have had some spirit at a time, for she told Julia that she had married Father against her own father’s will. He had made a match for her with another young man, one which she had entertained for a while. Then she met Father, at that time a brilliant young theology teacher of the Free Church College at Aberdeen, but when he came out in defense of Samuel Davidson, who stated, among other things, that the Pentateuch was not written by Moses, he immediately set himself up in opposition to her father. I can see why that would have ended any contemplation of a marriage in my grandfather’s mind. Clearly there was no place for “private interpretation” in his worship. My father had a dictum: “Docility is our first duty,” he used to say, “and freedom of thought is the next.” I sometimes find it difficult to reconcile the two, but it was behind his philosophy always.

Unusually among his peers, Father encouraged us to read all kinds of academic literature, including (to the shock of many of his friends) Mr. Darwin and Professor Huxley and Professor Newman. He had no difficulty, he said, in reconciling the concept of evolution with his faith: it was neither shock nor contradiction to him to believe that God could create species that were capable of self-development.

“Let Man’s mistaken vanity, his foolish contempt for the material world, impel him to struggle as he will, he strives in vain to break through the ties which hold him to matter and the lower forms of life.” How can such words by Professor Huxley, once read, ever be forgotten? No woman who has writhed in the agony of childbirth would dispute our link to the animal world. A rational mind is of little value when one is laid helpless with pain on one’s back, ankles shackled in stirrups, having lost control of bladder, bowel, reason. We are at our most primitive in bringing forth children.

Julia and I had an hour of Bible reading every day. I was entranced by the Psalms, the surprise of the vitriol in them: “The wicked go astray from the womb. They are wayward as soon as they are born, speaking lies. Their poison is like the poison of a snake; like a deaf cobra that stops its ear, which doesn’t listen to the voice of charmers, no matter how skillful the charmer may be.” Is there redemption to be found, then, in the voices of charmers? Can a person be saved through words? Is this my deliverance, this little book that the priest has left for me?

It is difficult to reconcile that rebellious impulse of Mother’s with the mother I knew, but it must have been there, under the folds of silk and lace. No one can change that much. Perhaps that is the reason they made no real opposition to the union between Edward and me. From Free Church to Catholic is something of a leap, it is true. “But for all that,” said my father, “we are all dissenters, and I would rather see my grandchildren reared in some faith than in none at all.” Or perhaps it was a relief, to have me off their hands. They never seemed to know how to deal with me. The rules that applied to Julia did not apply to me.

Julia loved Oranmore, threw herself wholeheartedly into the entire romantic ideal of Ireland. Edward told her that the partition walls had originally been constructed of peat, for heat retention, and later lined with brick. She was delighted with the idea, and never once complained of the cold thereafter. It was exactly the kind of thing one would dismiss as nonsense in Ireland only to discover that it was true. I never fully inhabited Oranmore the way I had Priorwood. Perhaps that is true of any house one comes to as an adult: it does not occupy a person, nor a person it, in the way of one’s childhood home, where one knows every creak on the stair, every knot in the breakfast table, the exact and velvety smell of the drapes in a closed-up room. Children see more than adults. As grown men and women we are too engrossed in what we say to one another, in what the next move is; we are not enough in the
present. Children carry a superior knowledge: they are closer to the roots of things, of what is implied and not said. They can sniff out decay, taste treachery before it comes. Perhaps that is why Charlotte never trusted me. Perhaps she knew all along what was coming. Perhaps, for her, it was simply a matter of waiting.

Julia was fascinated by the stories of banshees and fairies. If I ever lost her, I knew she could be found in the kitchen, prattling to the servants and keeping them back from their work. Every season of the year is marked in a bizarre mixture of the pagan and the Christian, which the priest tolerates, if not openly encourages. There is an excuse for everything: the fire not being lit, or the cows not being milked, or the corn not taken in, or the sheets not going out, and inevitably it is to do with a saint or a fairy or a goblin and the terrible tragedy that will befall us all if their demands are not respected.

Not long after Julia came to live with us, early September, the afternoon mild, midges as thick as rain under the holly and around the late fuchsia, infesting the house with tiny V-winged dots, Edward announced that an outing was what was needed: a spot of blackberrying and a picnic to the standing stone at Carnalridge. The boys were delighted, of course, as was Julia. She had been talking to the servants and had a mind to photograph the White Wife. And on the way, Edward said, we would stop by the Mass rock, much overgrown now, but that Julia had expressed an interest in seeing. Edward described to Julia how the people would arrive there in their dozens with bundles of straw on which to kneel, and how the priest would stand with his back to the congregation, reciting the Mass, with lookouts posted on the outlying land. Julia was suitably impressed, admired the landscape, the bravery of the people who, despite fear of capture, turned out every week to worship their god. I never once pointed out the irony—that in all likelihood it was Edward’s ancestors who were complicit in the oppression of his adopted faith. Edward
had embraced Catholicism wholeheartedly, as if three hundred years of Protestantism had been a short deviation in the otherwise straight road of his family’s religious history.

“There is nothing like the threat of opposition to bring out religious zeal,” said Julia, and despite myself, I smiled at her. I had not realized she possessed any perspicuity at all.

Julia wanted to see the prayer tree too, which Peig had told her about. She made us smile with her poor attempt to mimic the accent. “It’s where you go when there’s something that you wish for, and the tradition is that in order for your prayers to be heard, you must leave a clootie, something precious to yourself—not valuable, you understand, but personal.”

It was an extraordinary sight: a hawthorn tree by the well at the Strand Head, the worst place for a tree, battered mercilessly by the wind, entirely devoid of leaves or haws, even in May, but in their place budded tattered red ribbons, sorry scraps of clothes, shreds of paper, pieces of crockery gouged into the trunk. Where the bark had partly closed over these odd articles of faith they looked like they might have grown there, strange dark tumors in the flesh of the tree, each one of them fixed there by a prayer and the fervent, frantic wishing for something. All the debris from other people’s lives, fluttering in the sea breeze, exposed in the desperation of love and wishing. Prayer: the universal poultice. Apply it to all fears and ills and it works not at all on the object but has a miraculous effect on they who offer it up. I think it is one of the most hopeless and most moving sights I have ever witnessed.

The boys had all brought something to leave and when Julia had helped them tie their scraps to the tree, I saw her pull a ribbon from her own hair, reach over and knot it to a battered branch.

“What did you wish for?” I asked her. “A happy marriage? Or a new photographic exhibition?”

She eyed my stomach, swelling for the sixth time. “A girl,” she said, and smiled. “It would do you good, Harriet.” And off she
went, chasing Morris and Gabriel around the tree. Sometimes, I think Julia truly felt she had wished Charlotte into being that day. Perhaps she did. Who is to say where the personality of a child comes from? And Charlotte was trying; perhaps Julia did have some part to play in her character.

Death is so very straightforward when compared with the complexities of living. I did not go to Charlotte’s funeral. Her body was coffined after the inquest, and the coffin left in the hall, covered in a black velvet pall, bordered in white cambric, until the burial ground in Bushmills was got ready. The funeral was a small and lonely affair: I watched them leave from the drawing room window, the attendant in a white sash, carrying a staff tied with a love ribbon, the horses bearing white plumes. Edward did not give notice of the arrangements. We had no strength for the platitudes of our neighbors, no patience for the hordes of curious tenants who would, no doubt, have turned out en masse to gawk and stare and reputedly pay their respects. And, since death has been decreed to be a strictly male affair, there was no question of the attendance of any of the female members of the household. So there were no mourners but Edward and Harry, home from school, a special dispensation for a dead sister. Harry favors Edward: he will always try to do the right thing. And everything was properly done; Edward saw to that.

If I had been asked before I would have said that grief was a question of sadness, a matter involving tears. I did not know anything of the horror involved, the nagging nausea at the neck of the stomach, like an early pregnancy. I did not know that it was looking around at everyone and everything important in one’s life with the horrifying knowledge that there was more pain to come: that every one of them has the potential to cause agony; that despite one’s very best efforts, one had laid oneself open to loss.

1 FEBRUARY 1969

It’s good to see you, Anna. I’ve missed you. But you’re wise to stay in when the weather’s the way it’s been. Bitter cold; British Summer Time doesn’t seem to be having any effect. And you’ve picked a good day to come. “Every day after Brigid’s Day,” Peig used to say, “is longer than the one before by the length of a rooster’s step.” Spring is on its way, the lightening of the days. Have you ever made a St. Brigid’s cross, Anna? The one Brigid’s Eve we were all at the castle together, I taught the weans the way Mammy had taught me. You start with a straight reed. Then you pinch a second one in the middle and bend it around the first one, to the right. Then you turn it, against the clock, as it were, and you pinch another one and you bend it over to the right and you keep doing that, again and again, holding the whole thing tight in the middle until it’s all finished. You can’t use reeds that are too fresh and that have too much spring in them; it’s better to cut them a day or two before. But they can’t be too dry either, or they’ll not bend but break. You need to be able to feel the sap in them. I always thought it was an odd, lopsided thing, the St. Brigid’s cross, the way the top never met the bottom and the right never met the left and the rushes all ended in different lengths. But the middle,
the very center of it, is always the same. As if that was the whole point of it: like you needed the rushes to frame what had always been there, what you couldn’t see without them: a perfect square of air. Within fourteen days of making it, Charlotte was dead.

Daddy used to lay people out. It’s a strange thing when you think of it. I asked Mammy how it’d started, and she said his father used to do it, so I suppose people just kept on coming to the house. The knock would come to the window in the middle of the night sometimes, and he’d speak out to whoever it was, and sigh, and get up. At the door he’d shake the relative’s hand and say, “Sorry for your trouble,” and then he’d lift the old canvas bag from beside the hearth and set off. I didn’t think much of it before, but when I saw little Charlotte, lying on the mistress’s bed, her lips blue, a strange mark on her throat, I thought of him and of all the dead bodies he had touched, gently massaged into a thing a grieving family could look on. And I wished, not for the first or the last time, that he could be there again.