Authors: Coral Atkinson
‘It’s private,’ said Huia.
‘Come,’ said Geoffrey, ‘whatever you want to say can be
said before Miss Percival. She’s family and a close friend.’
Huia felt as if her mouth were on a gathering thread that was pulled tight, leaving only a tiny ‘o’. Then, as if the taut thread were suddenly snipped, the words came tumbling out.
‘I want us to get married.’
‘Married!’ said Sybil.
Geoffrey said nothing.
‘I love you and I think you love me and …’
‘I’m afraid, Huia, you’re greatly mistaken.’
‘Mistaken?’ said Huia. ‘So I’m bloody mistaken. And … I suppose I’m mistaken about what you said about me being a water fairy, about what beautiful eyes I’ve got. You’ll say it’s just a lie, all just made up. And what happened at the pools. I suppose you’ll say I’m bloody mistaken about that too. Say it: say that never happened. Say it! Say it!’
‘Huia! Huia!’ said Geoffrey, catching her arms. ‘Calm down.’
‘Why? Why bloody why should I calm down? I suppose you don’t want a scene, not in front of her. You want her to think you’re all right and proper. Your la-di-da dead wife’s sister; I suppose she’s here to marry you. Is that it? Well she can’t, she can’t. You’ve got to marry me, ’cause it’s me, me, and not her. It’s me that’s having the baby.’
‘So,’ said Sybil, straightening her pens and ruler on the table. She had just come back from putting a weeping and slightly hysterical Huia to bed in the hotel across the road. She had seen that the girl had a copper hot-water bottle for her feet and a drink of warm milk before she had left her for the night and returned to Geoffrey’s. Sybil was good in a crisis. She had learnt from the various tragedies and difficulties of her life that in spite of what one thinks, it is possible to keep functioning when all the interior supports of existence seem destroyed.
‘So?’ she said again. ‘What’s going to happen?’
Geoffrey was sitting in an armchair, Champ on his knee. He was rubbing the dog’s ears obsessively. The Waterford brandy decanter was at his elbow and a tumbler beside it.
‘Pay her off, I suppose,’ said Geoffrey. ‘See that she and the child are properly provided for.’
‘A large cheque — you think that will solve everything?’ said Sybil.
‘For God’s sake, Sybil. I feel utterly damned; the only appealing course is putting a bullet in my brain but I doubt you’d find that a superior solution.’
‘True,’ said Sybil.
‘What am I to do? I’m ashamed, mortified, humiliated. I would have done anything to spare you having to witness this. The whole thing is a nightmare. An appalling mistake. I’ve been through hell over Vanessa and then when I went upcountry with Huia and her father I began feeling better and, well, this happened. At the time it seemed like something quite separate, a million miles from morality, repercussions or ordinary life. It was only afterwards that I began to feel culpable. I suppose I sent her the gloves to appease the guilt. Make an end to it.’
The gloves, Geoffrey thought, remembering the downy softness of the suede as he held them in his hands. He had bought them feeling laden with dread. The previous night he’d had a dream. He was on the beach with Huia, watching her cook breakfast.
‘See what I brought you,’ Huia had said, reaching into her saddlebag.
She pulled out her paisley shawl. Geoffrey parted the fabric. Deep in the folds was a baby.
‘He’s for you,’ Huia said, passing the bundle into Geoffrey’s arms. Geoffrey looked at the infant’s face and as he did so the plump, pastel-tinted skin began to wither. The features
dissolved into a bleached white object that might have been a scrap of paper or a sun-whitened bone.
Geoffrey had woken shaking. He hadn’t thought of Huia being pregnant: now he was sure of it. Of course he could deny responsibility, say the girl was a wanton young thing — maybe she was, and yet there was a perfect irony about her pregnancy to him, a sort of symmetry of fate, that rendered such denial impossible. When married to Vanessa he had always thought how much he would have liked them to have a baby, but it had never happened. Now this wild Maori girl, for whom he cared nothing, was carrying his child. He, Geoffrey Hastings, gentle-man: father of a bastard and, just to make it even more mortifying and humiliating, a part-native bastard at that. Of course illegitimacy happened all the time. Didn’t they say the Prince of Wales himself had had suits more than once and society looked the other way? Just keep it quiet, keep it dark. It wasn’t so dreadful, really. The thing was to be generous, honourable, pay the girl off. He wouldn’t even have to see her — just instruct a solicitor. And yet … the gloves had been a sop to panic, an appeasement of guilt, an offering to ensure the premonition was false.
‘So what’s so wrong with an offer of money? I’ll ensure the child’s provided for and let that be an end of it.’
‘Nothing’s ever that simple; everything’s attached to everything else; there are always consequences, good and bad.’
‘You sound like a Methodist preacher.’
‘I suppose I do,’ said Sybil, drawing something on the blotting paper with her silver propelling pencil. ‘Did you love Miss Bluett?’
‘Good Lord, no. You’ve seen her. She’s a rough, brash, part-Maori, ill-educated daughter of the bush. How could I love her? We belong in different worlds. Can you imagine introducing Huia to my family in County Kildare? They’d disinherit me on the spot, think I’d gone totally native.’
‘But surely things are different out here in the colonies?’ said Sybil. ‘Think of young Arthur Pascoe, gloriously happy up there on the goldfields with his demimonde bride; a mixed marriage too, with her being a Catholic. I don’t see him fretting because the family in Ireland disapprove.’
Arthur, who was known to both Sybil and Geoffrey, was the brother of Sybil’s former pupil and recent travelling companion Claire.
‘No comparison,’ said Geoffrey. ‘The Pascoes’ is a love match if ever I’ve seen one. The new Mrs Pascoe may not be a Protestant and certainly doesn’t come from the top drawer, but she’s still a fine young woman, and a handsome one.’
‘Miss Bluett’s an exceptionally pretty girl too,’ said Sybil.
‘Granted,’ said Geoffrey. ‘If she wasn’t, none of this would have happened. I don’t know why it is that our eyes and our bodies play these tricks: beauty and a whiff of danger, such irresistible fuel for desire. I knew Huia was a temptation from the first time she came here beseeching me to take her photograph.’
‘You didn’t take it?’
‘No, though that would have been a lot better than what I did do. Poor Huia. And you, Sybil, you must think I’m some sort of Dr Faustus, debauching innocent maidens.’
‘I don’t think any such thing,’ said Sybil, ‘and my impression is that she may well be more knowing than you imagine. But I do feel sorry for her. She’s everything you say but she’s also frightened, unloved and, from what I can make out, a motherless child. And if I’m not mistaken, she’s rather brave.’
‘Right again,’ said Geoffrey.
There was silence, except for the slight hiss of the fire as the salt from the driftwood burned, and the sound of Geoffrey swallowing brandy.
When Sybil and Vanessa were children they had lived in a house with a garden that stretched to the main Dublin-Galway
railway line. Of course they were prohibited from leaving the property, but despite this they would sometimes climb over the stone wall that separated their garden from the track. It was a different world altogether, a world of nettles and old man’s beard. In the weeds near the track there was a rotten cabin-trunk that the two little girls would sit on as the train went past. At first the noise was faint; gradually it grew louder and louder. There was always the toot at the crossing and then the overwhelming chaos of smoke, steam and rushing air as the train thundered alongside them. The gentle afternoon, yellow with sunshine or opaque rain, would suddenly be torn apart. Many years later, on the other side of the world in Geoffrey’s drawing room, Sybil thought of the Galway train and the unexpected, fearful brutality as it passed.
‘What am I to do, Sybil?’ said Geoffrey.
‘I can tell you what the Church or society says, but you know all that already. Beyond that only you can decide.’
‘Tell me what you think yourself.’
Sybil stood up, went to the window and plucked at the lace curtain. ‘Marry her,’ she said.
‘For heaven’s sake, Sybil, don’t be absurd,’ said Geoffrey angrily. ‘Even if I was prepared to make the girl my wife, which I’m not, I couldn’t besmirch Vanessa’s memory like that. I still feel married to your sister. And as for Huia, I certainly don’t love her. I’m not sure I even like her.’
‘Pity her, then,’ said Sybil, her voice uncertain and her eyes starred with tears. ‘It’s another kind of love.’
Geoffrey looked at Sybil, her nose red, her face shiny and wet. It was her eyes that held his attention. Such a clear, honest, intelligent brown gaze. He thought of the line:
The
truth
in
her
eyes
ever
dawning.
Diverted for a moment, Geoffrey wondered why Sybil wasn’t already married and felt a stab of irrational jealousy at
the thought of her as wife to another man. He had only once seen Sybil weep before and he wondered at her tears. Who were they for? Himself? Huia? Or could it be that by following conscience and advising him to marry Huia, Sybil was denying herself a potential life with him? That she might hold such a notion hadn’t occurred to him before.
I must be a fool, thought Sybil, looking out as a horse and dray passed on the street; already thirty, an old maid in the eyes of the world, advising the only man I’ve ever loved to marry someone else.
‘I suspect your conscience will never leave you in peace if you don’t marry her,’ she said.
‘You’re being preposterous, Sybil. You know I’d never have a happy day if I did,’ said Geoffrey.
Neither would I, thought Sybil as she let the lace curtain drop.
H
anging on the petticoats of Europe is Ireland, ruled and abused by Britain for hundreds of years. The old Gaelic chiefs, the native nobles, were replaced for the most part by English and Scottish soldiers and adventurers. Descendants of these men still hold the power and own the great estates, prizes of war wrested from enemies now long dead. The children of the defeated Irish survive as best they can.
By the 1880s things are changing. The fields and little towns of Ireland are restless, the words Home Rule on every tongue. Tenants and small farmers have had enough. They form a new society: the Land League. Men outside public houses speak behind their hands; nods and winks and secrets are exchanged. Landlords are targeted, crops destroyed, cattle mutilated, boycotts and worse. Ireland is discontented, aggressive and mutinous. It is a time of war. Land war. ‘The country is ungovernable,’ the British say.
The old remember the great potato famine of the 1840s, when folk fell down famished in the lanes, when mouths were stuffed with grass to still agonies of hunger. Thousands died; thousands emigrated. Crops have failed in other years since. Families without food or money to pay their rent are still being evicted, forced out on the hillside or the roads.
In the big houses, and the not-so-big, the gentry still sit in their morning rooms. They go up to Dublin for the season, or to London. Feathers flutter amid the coiled locks on female heads; dress swords brush shapely male thighs as bows and curtsies are made to the Lord Lieutenant or, better still, the Queen herself. In the country there are parties and dances and hunts. There are always horses: owning a stud is a fine hobby for a gentleman.
Colonel Fitzgibbon has such a stud in Meath, and another in County Dublin. He has trainers and grooms and stablehands working for him, along with the usual cook, housekeeper, butlers, maids, gardeners and their assistants. And there is a ten-year-old orphan, PJ. Not even the colonel — if he ever thought about it, which he doesn’t — knows if PJ is actually employed on the estate, though the boy lives and works there. Anyone can tell you that.
T
he blackberries among the castle ruins were the biggest PJ had ever seen. Huge gobs of fruit dark as bruises. The boy was famished. He clawed at the brambles, tearing off handfuls of the berries and slamming fistfuls of the purplish mush into his mouth.
Hunger was a constant in PJ’s life; ever since Mick Sullivan was killed PJ had been starving. Mick had been PJ’s friend and protector. The others who worked at the horse stud at Kinross House were well aware that anyone who raised a hand to the boy or shoved him about would catch it from Sullivan. It was Sullivan who had originally found PJ, in one of the loose boxes eating the hot meal intended for the horses. It was Sullivan who had kept the child alive with potatoes and heels of bread filched from the kitchen. And it was Sullivan who, months later, brought PJ up to the house to eat with the rest of the staff.
‘And who gave you permission, Mr Lord Bountiful Sullivan, to start inviting every corner boy in the parish to dinner?’ Miss Hill, the housekeeper, asked the first time she’d caught PJ sitting down to eat with the other servants.
‘Doesn’t the boy work here?’ said Sullivan.
‘Since when?’ said Miss Hill, fiddling with the cameo brooch she wore at her collar.
No one could say for certain. It had been winter when the boy was found in the stables. Since then he had attached himself to Sullivan, always at his elbow, ready to run a message, hold a bridle or carry a bale of straw.
‘He’s a willing enough little blighter. Quite useful, really,’ said Frazer, the English trainer, breaking off a corner of bread and dropping it in the gravy on his plate. ‘Seems only right he gets a square meal in return.’
‘If you say so, Mr Frazer,’ said Miss Hill. ‘I suppose exceptions can be made.’ The housekeeper was soft in the head when it came to the trainer. Didn’t they all know it?
‘Sure, PJ’s the divil of a hard worker, just as Mr Frazer says,’ said Mick. ‘He deserves his whack.’
‘I hardly think it’s your place, Mick Sullivan, to be deciding who eats here,’ said Miss Hill. ‘If Mr Frazer’s of the opinion that the child’s worth feeding it’s another matter. But remember, the boy’s your responsibility, Sullivan — make no mistake about that.’
That was three years ago. Now when PJ tried to sneak in for a meal the older lads frequently chased him off before he even made it through the stone archway into the kitchen garden. With Sullivan’s death, an invisible sheltering wall around PJ had suddenly collapsed.
‘Want some grub?’ Cain, one of the teenage grooms, would shout, holding out a bacon-rasher rind or a boiled potato. ‘Come on, take it.’
PJ knew that this was more bait than charity but his hunger was so intense that he’d lunge forward in an attempt to get the food.
‘Jump!’ Cain said, raising his arm further above PJ’s head. ‘Higher now — can’t yiz do better than that?’
PJ increased his efforts while Cain laughed.
Food was not the only means the lads used to make PJ’s life
miserable. ‘Look at here,’ one of them would bellow, and as soon as PJ turned, a stone or piece of dung would hit him full in the face. ‘Cry baby cry, stick a finger in yer eye!’ they’d shout as PJ’s eyes filled with tears.
Worse was when they started on about Mick. ‘Where’s yer grand Fenian joxer now?’ or ‘Tiddley tum, a bullet up his bum!’ the voices called after PJ in the stable yard or lane. Incensed, PJ would turn and, arms flailing, charge his tormentors. The youths, laughing at the ten-year-old’s furious response, would catch his whirling body and drag him face down along the muddied track to dump him in the horse trough or toss him into a patch of nettles.
PJ had loved Sullivan and his death was a grief that bore down on the boy, tainting everything with darkness. Of course neither the Royal Irish Constabulary nor the other workers knew that PJ had been part of the Fenian arms raid the night Sullivan was killed. Sunk in grief, PJ’s enthusiasm for work waned, and days and months passed with the boy skulking among the ruins of the old castle or wandering desolate about the boreens and hedges.
Sundays were what kept PJ going: on that day he walked the miles to Kingstown to share a tea of boiled eggs and soda bread with Mick Sullivan’s widowed mother. He never told her how bad things were, but now that she had gone, he wished he had. Some months previous, PJ had been sitting in Molly Sullivan’s kitchen fiddling with the pins in the faded pincushion. Molly was at the other side of the table altering one of Mick’s old jackets to give the boy.
‘You know, PJ, that I’m a nurse. That I go out and look after them sick ones.’
‘Haven’t you told me that?’
‘It’s like this, PJ. The gentleman I look after has a notion to leave Sandycove and go back to where he came from in the
King’s County. Says he wants to die at Killeigh, where he can see them Slieve Bloom Mountains.’
‘And yiz are going, going with him?’
‘Ah PJ, I have no choice. Isn’t it my bread and butter?’
‘But I can still come Sunday to this there King’s County?’
‘God love you and aren’t I heart-scalded to say it, but it’s too far, too far to walk. It’s way down the country, right in the middle of Ireland, near Tullamore where the Grand Canal goes.’
‘Would yiz let me come with you, Mrs Sullivan?’
‘Sure, I would if I could. But the Hamiltons want a nurse not a mammy. Better to stay where you are at Kinross House, with a roof over your head and food on the table. And it won’t be forever. Haven’t the doctors said poor Mr Hamilton won’t last the season? I’m off on Tuesday and I’ll be back before the year closes in.’
PJ had just worked his way down one branch of the blackberries and was about to start on another when he heard them calling. He ran towards a rotting, upturned cart, hoping to hide as Cain and O’Toole came into view.
‘There’s the bloody little bugger,’ shouted Cain.
‘Yeer wanted, PJ.’
‘And yeer in trouble,’ said Cain, smiling slightly.
PJ stumbled on a stone projecting through the grass. O’Toole gave a flying leap and landed on top of him.
‘So the little gurrier has a notion to be off,’ said Cain. ‘Sure we can’t have him escaping now, can we, O’Toole?’
‘Jaysis, we cannot,’ said O’Toole, standing up and yanking the lad to his feet. ‘Have yiz got something for the restraining-like?’
‘I have now,’ said Cain, pulling some string out of his jacket pocket.
Good God, thought Frazer, as PJ, his mouth and chin
stained purple, appeared in the stable yard, pushed along by Cain and O’Toole. Something certainly needed to be done about the boy; he’d become a damned nuisance. Never seemed to be about when there was work to be done, spent his time getting into fist fights with the older lads or sneaking about the place. Little wonder the colonel said to get rid of him: no gentleman would welcome his guests being confronted in the shrubbery or on the drive by glimpses of this filthy child with his torn clothing and bleeding feet. The boy was a helpful enough little tyke when Sullivan was alive but since then he’d gone to pieces. And now there was this bloody business of Kitty Flynn.
‘Well,’ said Frazer to PJ, ‘and what have you to say for yourself?’
‘What about, mister?’ said PJ, glancing up at Frazer and then looking at his own feet.
‘Ah, don’t give me that, lad,’ said Frazer, flicking the riding crop he held across the palm of his hand.
‘Sure, I don’t rightly know what yiz are talking about.’
‘Kitty Flynn,’ said Frazer. ‘Mrs Fitzgibbon’s maid.’
‘I’m not after knowing which wan she is, mister.’
‘Two pup Titty,’ said Cain, describing large breasts with his hands and smirking.
‘That’s enough bloody guff from you, Cain,’ said Frazer. ‘Well, just to jog your memory, PJ, Kitty Flynn has complained to the housekeeper that she is being spied on in her bedroom. And O’Toole and Cain here say they’ve seen you up there peeping.’
‘I never,’ said PJ.
‘Dirty little liar,’ said O’Toole. ‘It was Tuesday night, sure to God, and Cain and I had just come out to see to Juno’s foal and we saw yiz up there where the roof dips, squinting in under the shutters. And hasn’t Titty — just a slip of the tongue, Mr Frazer — hasn’t Kitty herself said she saw you?’
‘She said she saw an eye, though it beats me how she did if the shutters were closed,’ said Frazer.
‘Them shutters are broken a bit at the side,’ said Cain.
‘And how do you know that?’ said Frazer. ‘You’d need pretty good sight, my lad, to see a break in the shutter four floors up.’
‘Just speculation-like,’ said Cain, realising his mistake and beginning to panic.
‘Was it indeed?’ said Frazer.
‘Jaysis, Mr Frazer, I swear to God I didn’t do it,’ said PJ.
‘Maybe not,’ said Frazer, looking at the child and then at Cain and O’Toole. ‘And what have you two got to say?’
‘Haven’t we been after telling yiz, Mr Frazer, we were with Juno and the foal?’
‘Frankly,’ said Frazer, ‘I don’t bloody believe you. But you can have the benefit of doubt this time. But rest assured I’ll leather the daylights out of the lot of you if anything like this comes to my ears again. Do you hear that?’
‘We do, Mr Frazer,’ said O’Toole and Cain together.
‘And PJ, there’s something else,’ said Frazer.
‘I’ve done nothing, mister.’
‘We’ll let that rest, lad, but we’ve decided you can’t stay here any longer. You’re too young, you’re not pulling your weight and the colonel won’t have it.’
PJ looked at where he was moving one naked foot through the crescent of mud that separated the cobbles.
‘I’m told your parents died and you’ve no other family. Is that right?’ continued Frazer.
‘’Tis,’ said PJ.
‘Well, don’t worry, lad, we’ll find a home for you somewhere.’
A home. PJ didn’t say anything but he knew what that meant. It would be the Union workhouse in Dunhinch, as sure
as eggs. And if there was one place in all Ireland he wasn’t going to, that was it.
PJ’s father had been a day labourer, a spalpeen. He was away a lot, walking the neighbouring parishes carrying a shovel to dig potatoes, clear a ditch, make a trench. Sometimes there was work, sometimes there wasn’t. PJ’s parents lived in a cabin in a field. Once it had been a cow byre. There were no windows, and an opening in the thatched roof served for a chimney.
It was not the cabin that PJ liked to remember but the field outside full of cows. Every night just before sleep PJ would will himself back into that field with its thick smell of cattle. He would go back to a May afternoon when he was three or four years old. The sun was bright on the land and the field glowed green. PJ was lying on the ground. There were tiny blue flowers in clumps in the grass and he was looking at them very close up. His mother was making a daisy chain for him to wear. PJ wished he could remember his mother’s face or her hair, but he couldn’t. All that memory brought back to him were her pink hands holding the flowers and the way her little fingernail, which was very long, split the stems. Both of PJ’s parents had nails like that. They used them to peel potatoes when they ate them by the fire.
PJ tried not to think about the other memories: of his mother, of her crying out with birthing pains from the dark floor, or of all the babies that had died. He remembered being sent out to fetch Mrs Dempsey to bring a new baby into the world, and Father McMahon who gave the baptism and the last rites to help the little one out. PJ could hardly recall his father at all, except at the end. The last year the family had spent together was the worst. PJ’s father was out of work, an ill man coughing blood on the hay that served for bedding. ‘Destroyed,’ was what he said, and none could contradict him.
PJ and his mother would scour the fields for any forgotten potatoes but pickings were few. People nearby gave what they
could — a turnip maybe, or a handful of oatmeal — but neighbours had little enough themselves.
It was early summer, the hardest time: the old potatoes long exhausted, the new far off. There was nothing to eat except the turf to stuff in your mouth when the hunger became unbearable.
‘The Union,’ PJ’s mother had said. ‘We’re going to the Union.’
‘Union?’ said PJ. ‘What’s the Union?’
‘Won’t you find out soon enough,’ said his mother, her eyes laden with tears.
When they climbed the stile by the gate PJ’s father put his arms around his wife’s waist, too weak to help himself over. He began to cough. Blood splattered the dandelion flowers.
They walked into the village, past the barracks of the Royal Irish Constabulary, the forge, the public house, the pump and the green. People they knew turned away as if to spare them shame. They walked past the rows of cottages and out of the village on the other side. PJ felt ill. The world of trees and grass fluttered oddly in the boy’s vision. His body ached. They walked for what seemed like a long way. And they stopped often, slumping against the hedgerows. Walking was hard work on an empty belly.
The Dunhinch workhouse rose up suddenly out of the fields, a small flock of heavy grey beasts. A group of two-storey, rectangular, stone buildings grouped around their own small church.
‘The Union,’ PJ’s mother had said.
‘The place of no return,’ said his father.
‘Hold your whist,’ said his mother. ‘At least there’ll be eats. Think of that, PJ — and there’ll be doctors for your da and won’t they give him medicines to make him well.’
‘A coffin, more like,’ said PJ’s father. ‘That’s all I’ll be
getting. To think I’ve brought yiz to this.’
‘There’s no thinking about it,’ said PJ’s mother as she took her son by one hand and her husband by the other.
At the Dunhinch workhouse there were no seasons, no passage of time, or so it seemed. PJ had no idea how long he stayed. The family had been parted as soon as they were admitted and PJ never saw his parents again. Afterwards all he could remember was the muffled crying from the rows of boys on the low platforms of the long dormitory where he slept, the enforced silences, the loneliness. The loneliness was the worst.
It could have been a month — or a year — later when they told him his father was dead. And then again on another night, the housekeeper took PJ into her room at the end of the dormitory and said his mother, too, had gone ‘to be with her maker’. When PJ began to weep the housekeeper gave him a broken biscuit from a tin she kept on the mantelpiece. It was such an unimaginable treat PJ wasn’t able to put the biscuit in his mouth. His hands shook and his throat seemed closed over. All he wanted was his mother. His mother, sitting on the grass surrounded by tiny blue flowers, a daisy chain in her hands.