The Friday Tree
- Chapter 1: The Plot
- Chapter 2: Rose
- Chapter 3: Smoke
- Chapter 4: The Men
- Chapter 5: Miss Chalk
- Chapter 6: George
- Chapter 7: Cannonball
- Chapter 8: A Sky Full of Starlings
- Chapter 9: Children of Other Lands
- Chapter 10: Isle Lecale
- Chapter 11: The Point
- Chapter 13: On Broadway
- Chapter 14: Truce
- Chapter 15: Under the Tree
- Chapter 16: The Princess Victoria
- Chapter 17: Imbolc
- Chapter 18: Naming the Fields
- Chapter 19: The Easter House
- Chapter 20: Dreaming Straight
- Chapter 21: Wild Frontiers
- Chapter 22: Brigid of the Flowers
- Chapter 23:âA Whistling Woman
- Chapter 24: The Churn Rock
- Chapter 25: Angel
- Chapter 26: Brother and Sister
- Interview with the Author
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names,
characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the
author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons,
living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
Published 2014
by Ward River Press
123 Grange Hill, Baldoyle
Dublin 13, Ireland
www.wardriverpress.com
© Sophia Hillan 2014
Copyright for typesetting, layout, design, ebook
© Poolbeg Press Ltd
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978-1-78199-146-6
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photography, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition, including this condition, being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
www.wardriverpress.com
About the Author
Former Associate Director of Queen's University Belfast Institute of Irish Studies, Sophia Hillan returned to her first love, writing fiction, in 1999, when she was runner-up in the Royal Society of Literature’s first VS Pritchett Memorial Prize. Her short story “The Cocktail Hour”
was subsequently published in David Marcus’s first
Faber Book of Best New Irish Short Stories
,
and another short story, “Roses”,
was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in 2007. In 2011 she received high praise for
May, Lou and Cass
,
the untold true story of Jane Austen’s nieces in Ireland. She lives in a hollow at the bottom of a hill, in a house filled with light and many, many books.
To the memory of David Marcus
“Come, we will go forth together into the wide world.”
Grimms' Household Tales
: “Brother and Sister”
Chapter 1: The Plot
“
Elle est absolument pure
,” said Francis and, although she did not understand, Brigid laughed.
It was late summer, a bright day, the smell of cut grass stronger than the lingering must of the sun-curtain at the front door. Outside, the sky, moving across the top of the house in stripes of white and blue, led to seven trees at the back of the plot. Seven trees and seven days bounded the map of their lives and on this morning, given what had been happening, it seemed necessary to both children to find something to make them laugh.
Brigid and Francis Arthur lived in a time when men of a certain standing wore dark suits and hats, their wives soft wool with a single strand of pearls, and families aspired to modest comfort, to a house like the Arthurs’ house, at the edge of the town, minutes from fields and the dark blue hill they called the Black Mountain. Brigid and Francis had careful parents, and Isobel, the girl, who was not a girl at all. Relatives and friends visited, the children spent a month each summer by the sea, their birthdays brought toys and handsome books. In the five and eleven years that Brigid and Francis had, respectively, lived, they had never known deprivation, until the night in August 1955 when their parents left them.
On that summer night, the children asleep, their parents crept away, instructing their taxi-driver to let the silent car roll down
the passage slope, out on to the quiet road and, only then, out of earshot of their sleeping children, to start the engine and allow the headlamps to sweep ahead and show the way. As the light travelled across their darkened ceilings, the children turned, shuddered as if cold, then settled back into quiet sleep. Yet, when they woke, Brigid was conscious of emptiness in the morning and Francis, through the blinds, saw the pale beginning of the end of summer.
They asked questions that morning and all that day of Isobel who, without apparent interest or information, told them that their parents would not be long, and that they had no need to worry. Yet, when that day became night and their parents did not return, and another night and day passed, then another – when, slowly and inexplicably, days and nights accumulated, until their parents had been away for over a week, then the children’s questions lessened and, finally, they ceased.
On the tenth morning, as they sat at the silent breakfast table, Francis reached across and opened the cage where his budgerigar lived. “Hello, Dicky,” he said, as he stroked the bird’s head. Dicky put his head on one side and looked hard at Francis; yet, as always, and despite the hopeful persistence of Francis, he said nothing. Isobel put before the children bacon and toast, for which both of them said, “Thank you, Isobel,” and Isobel did not reply. She opened the window a little further as if it, too, had given offence, took up a basket of damp clothes, slanted it against her hip and walked away through the kitchen towards the back door.
It was then that Francis, twisting round from the budgerigar’s cage, looked at the cold bacon and the hard and curling toast, checked to see that Isobel had gone, and reached to the sideboard for the bottle of brown sauce. “
Elle est absolument pure,
” he read aloud, and Brigid laughed.
Suddenly, before their eyes, in a flash of green and white, with a black, dismissive glance, and a purposeful pointing of his long tail, Dicky leapt from his cage and flew through the open window, flapping, then soaring through the summer morning.
Francis, in delighted surprise, said once more, “
Absolument pure
,” then, stopping as if to listen, he pushed back his chair, stood up, listened again, took Brigid’s hand, drew her after him through the kitchen doorway, through the shaft of light motes in the hall, beating past the front-door curtain and, jumping with her down the two steps from the small front garden, lifted her up to stand on the gate pillar. Then he stopped, and Brigid could hear the pounding of his heart.
“What are we looking for, Francis?” she asked. “Dicky? Is Dicky here? Would he go out on to the road?”
“Oh, no,” said Francis, shading his eyes against the light. “Dicky’s up at the back of the plot. He’ll wait for us.”
The plot, the large field of vegetables behind their house, was out of bounds to them. Yet, if Dicky was there, he was near enough home to be safe. Still, that did not tell Brigid why they had left their breakfast.
“Why are we out here, then, Francis?”
Francis, scanning the horizon, said: “I’m sure I heard a car door slam. Someone is coming.”
Brigid’s stomach jumped, turned over, jumped again. “Mama and Daddy?” she said.
Francis’ face closed, his cheekbones suddenly sharp. “I doubt it,” he said. “But it could be Rose.”
Brigid’s stomach sat empty, a flat balloon. “Rose,” she said, thoughtfully. “Will she take care of us till Mama comes back? Not just Isobel?”
“Maybe,” said Francis. “That could be the plan.”
“Francis?”
“What?”
“I hate Isobel. She hates me back.”
“Why don’t you kill her then?” said a languid voice behind them. “By the way, I can see your pants.”
Scrabbling at her dress, and so ripping it, Brigid looked down to see the next-door boy, their sometime friend.
“I hate you, too, Ned Silver,” said Brigid.
“Hello, Ned,” said Francis, without surprise. “You don’t have a pair of binoculars about you, do you?”
“No,” said Ned.
“I do.” Out of somewhere came a deep, male voice. “What are you looking for?”
“Uncle Conor!” cried Brigid and Francis together, turning round just as Ned squeezed himself through a gap in the hedge between their front gardens. “Where did you come from?”
The man at the gate looked at them from sleepy eyes, one eyebrow slightly raised, one corner of his mouth turned up as in a private joke. One hand out as though to break her fall, he leaned into the pillar where Brigid stood. Brigid looked at the hand. It was square and strong. Her father’s hands were narrow, the fingers long. Her father himself was narrow and long. Uncle Conor was high and broad, his shoulders wide.
“From nowhere,” said their visitor. “Is your Aunt Rose here?”
Francis had opened his mouth to reply, when Isobel appeared through the summer curtain, red and angry.
“Get down from that, this minute, before I tell your mother!” Her voice was a hiss.
Brigid wanted to say, ‘How can you, when she is not here?’ but, hearing the hiss, she said nothing.
Francis, just as silent, reached to lift her down but, before he could, Uncle Conor scooped her up. He smelled of tobacco and tweed. One strand of his hair fell forward as he swung her to the ground and, when he smiled at her, she saw a crooked tooth at the side, which she had never noticed before. She was not sure she quite liked it.
“Don’t be cross, Isobel,” he said. “She’s my best girl, and he’s my best boy. Aren’t you, children?”
They nodded, carefully, and then saw Isobel had become soft at his words, not like Isobel at all. Practised, they waited for her to come back to herself. In a few seconds, she turned to them and, hands on hips, eyes narrowed where Uncle Conor could not see, she said: “What were you doing, anyway, you villains?”