Friends Indeed Read online

  'That's hard to believe.'

  'You haven't seen her she's very down in herself not the friend you knew at all.' My mother picked up her beads. 'The girl Mary Connor engaged in your place is so slow I spend my time finishing what she starts.' She sniffed and said, without looking at me, 'Allie needs taking out of herself.'

  'I'll go over to see her,' I said. A plan had been growing in my head while my mother spoke. 'There's someone I might take with me to see her…'

  My mother cut me short. 'Do what you can Sarah do what you can.' She got up to peer out of the window. 'The evening's are getting dark quicker and quicker the winter'll be here before we know it.' She turned to me. 'Organise your own life while you're at it.'

  'I'll do that too,' I said.

  My plan had to do with getting Allie to meet with Dr Daniel Casey. There were several reasons for this. The first was practical. If Allie was as worn and morose as my mother said she was then a doctor should see her. Dr Casey might be a good person to tell her how to get out of herself Also: though Allie might have been blind to the fact it was clear to me that Daniel Casey liked her. He listened when she spoke. He had asked after her every time he came to see Mary Ann.

  For a while I'd thought his interest had to do with Allie's very good way with Mary Ann. She'd endless and gentle patience with my sister, applying poultices and sponging her with a feathery touch. She'd known before anyone else did when her temperature began to rise. She claimed her skill was due to the nursing methods taught by one of the French nuns. But it was clear to me, and to Dr Casey, that much of what she did came naturally.

  Nursing skills apart, I could see that Daniel Casey liked Allie. It was in his face every time he looked at her. He was no oil painting, God knows, and although she was not much enamoured of doctors on account of the odious Dr McDermott, he would be someone for Allie to talk to, about his time in Paris if nothing else.

  She would be safe with him. He was a good and gentle man. He was close to her in age. She might even grow fond of him and, since her parents were set on a doctor for her, they might approve her keeping company with him. They could hardly disapprove. Or so I thought.

  I went to the dispensary in Eccles Street that very day. Dr Casey was there, even paler than when I'd last seen him, working as if he thought his energy alone would cure ill-health and disease. I explained about Allie, telling him of her parents' plan to marry her to Dr McDermott. I told him how, for more than three weeks, she'd been a prisoner and unable to stir out of her parents' house. He listened carefully and quietly. At one point he went to the window and stood with his back to me.

  'Her father mentioned McDermott at your sister's funeral,' he said. 'I thought Allie was in agreement with the arrangement.'

  I roundly disabused him of this notion and said I thought Allie needed company and taking out of herself. He agreed immediately then, saying he would help in any way he could. I told him my plan and he thought it a good one. I think he would have agreed to anything which ensured he would meet Allie again. I went home and wrote her a letter.

  My dearest Allie, I began,

  You cannot allow yourself be made a prisoner in your own home. You cannot allow yourself be lost to a morose sadness either. You're not friendless, as you well know. You're not without resources of character and courage either. Use both, as you've done so often done in the past, and get yourself out of that house to meet me in St Mary's Church at two o'clock in the afternoon this day week. I will wait however long it takes you to get there. Until the church closes if necessary. But I will expect you at two o'clock. I have things to tell you that I cannot tell anyone else. Come for my sake if not for your own.

  The last line was in the nature of a bait. Allie had always hated me to have secrets from her.

  I sealed the envelope with sealing wax. I didn't trust my mother not to read it and didn't want her alarmed. I gave it to her when she left for Haddington Road the next day.

  Not for a minute did I doubt that Allie would come to the church to meet me. Or that Dr Daniel Casey would come along on the same day, 'accidentally' meet us in the street afterwards. That meeting was as far as I was prepared to take my matchmaking activities. I knew Allie well: she would run hard and fast from Daniel Casey if she sensed in him a need for more than friendship. Even to win her friendship he would have to be subtle.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Sarah

  Allie, for all my confidence in her, didn't come to meet me that Thursday. It took her another full week to break free from the prison her parents had made for her in the Haddington Road house. When we did at last meet she'd become a pale, brown- clad shadow of her former self.

  The week that led up to our meeting was not an easy one for her. I heard all about it from my mother. The final straw, she said had been yet another dinner with Dr Maurice McDermott. Allie had been rude and sullen throughout the meal. The next morning she'd thrown a grand-scale temper tantrum.

  'I gave thanks to God and His Blessed Mother when I heard the roars of rage coming from her room,' my mother admitted, 'the poor child had been more dead than alive until then and not even able to leave the house with her walking boots locked up in Mary Connor's bedroom.' She took a breath. 'She told Leonard and her mother that she was going to take herself into the November streets in her petticoats and bare feet if they didn't stop treating her like a dog.'

  'She got the boots back then?'

  'She did and Leonard seems inclined to give her a bit of her own way she gave me a letter for you.' My mother handed me a creamy-coloured envelope. 'Don't go pushing her too far to do things Sarah she's in a delicate state.'

  My dear friend, Allie's letter began,

  I've taken steps to change the situation in this house and will definitely be meeting you on Thursday of this week.

  I must say, Sarah, that you took long enough to write to me. I've been very low in myself and you're the only real friend I have in this cold and darkening city. It's hard for me to understand why I had to wait WEEKS for some word from you. I suppose you're very taken up with your soldier friend. I would never have left you so alone for so long.

  Still, you've written now and your letter helped me gather myself together. I've a great deal to tell you, and to hear from you too, I hope.

  She didn't sound low to me. She sounded bad-tempered and lively enough.

  It was cold and windy when I set out to meet her. I didn't have the money for an omnibus. I'd got two days' cleaning during the week but had taken the Paris shawl out of the pawn with one day's money and given my mother the rest. I'd said nothing yet to my mother, or to my father, about Beezy Ryan's offer.

  St Mary's Church in Haddington Road was said to be the richest parish in the city of Dublin. It certainly had the appearance of wealth about it, down to there being a carpet on the stone steps leading to the door.

  I slipped into a pew just inside to wait for Allie. I'd never known her to be on time for anything in her life. From there I would have a clear view of everyone who came and went. I had fine views too of the wintry sun pouring through the saintly, stained glass windows and of the vaulted, and very grand, ceilings. The dark wood pews, shining the whole way up to the altar, gave off a suffocating smell of polish. I wondered how at home God felt there.

  St Mary's parishioners were altogether different to the people who prayed in the pro-Cathedral alongside my mother. Some of those in the pro-Cathedral were lucky to have the clothes they knelt in.

  Here they seemed to dress to impress God.

  There was the woman in green who came bustling up the aisle wearing a short, loose paletot of velvet edged all round with fur. She sat while she prayed, her back rigid as a board. Another woman, who was older and knelt, wore a round-shaped bonnet with black, blue and gold tinted feathers. She frowned at my grey wool cape and uncovered head.

  When I smiled, to reassure her I wasn't the Devil, she hurried out of the church with her head averted.

  'Why've you got that lunatic expression
on your face?' Allie slipped into the pew on the other side of me.

  'That's a smile.' I stared at her. I couldn't help it.

  'A smile?' She looked at me in her turn. 'It's more like the expression of a cat watching a bird in a cage.' She turned to gaze about the church and shivered. 'It's cold in here. Do you have any money?' She had the grace to look embarrassed when she asked this.

  'I've got no real work yet.' I shook my head, still staring at

  her.

  She looked as unwell as anyone could look and still be walking around. Her face was chalky white and her eyes had circles under them as dark as their own brown colour. She was wafer-thin, wrapped in a brown cloak which seemed too heavy for her frame and was so disagreeable looking it might have been borrowed from Mary Connor.

  'I'm sorry, Sarah, I should never have asked you for money,' she slumped against the back of the pew. 'I thought we might go to a tea-house, somewhere warm. I've no money, none at all. My father won't allow me to have any.'

  'What's happened to you, Allie?' I took her in my arms then and she began to cry, weakly, as if she hadn't the energy to sob wholeheartedly. She was no weight at all in my arms.

  'I've been filled with a terrible despair about myself, about my life. Everything seemed to me to be over, as if anything good which might happen to me had already happened. All I could see and think about was that my life had been taken from me by my parents and given into the control of Mary Connor and that wretched McDermott man.'

  She sat up straight and moved away from me. She brushed the tears from her face with small, hard gestures.

  'I've allowed myself to wallow in this mood for weeks now. I've been feeling friendless, though I knew I had you. I've allowed myself be crushed under the weight of my parents' determination that I should marry. I could have borne it all if I hadn't felt so useless, that I had no function on earth and never would have.'

  She took a deep breath, then sat on her hands and began to rock back and forth. 'Then your letter arrived.' She turned to me. 'I read what you wrote, three, maybe four times and my courage began to come back to me. I saw that my return from Paris and Mary Ann's death and the idea of marriage to that man had driven me to a kind of madness. I could see that I'd lost myself but just as clearly saw that I would have to find myself again.'

  She took her hands from under her and hugged herself to keep warm. 'If I have to leave my parents' house and make my own way in the world I will do it, rather than marry and have my liberty taken from me by that man. Or any other.'

  'Have you told your parents as much?'

  'There's no telling them anything. You know that.' She was sharp, definitely coming back to her old self. 'Still, it's true that it's an ill wind doesn't blow some good.' Her face, smiling at me, was now less wasted-looking. 'The weeks alone in that house gave me time to reflect and I've decided to put my life to some good use. Solitude and idleness don't suit me and the idea of marriage appeals not at all. I'm on earth for a reason, I know it. There's a calling for me and I'm going to pursue it.'

  'What calling? What is it you want to do?' I spoke slowly, hoping to calm her down. I'd heard Allie like this before, lit up and on fire with an idea.

  It was in exactly such a mood that she'd once taken stout from her father's public house and given it to boys guarding cattle for the drovers. The boys, who were poor and had empty stomachs, had become spifflicated. The whole thing had ended in a near stampede. Allie had been eight years old at the time.

  Now, nearly twelve years later, she stared with a great, silent ferocity at the bright, glass saints in the windows. She'd always been dissatisfied, never content to accept what life threw up. I put the question again. She raised her eyebrows at me.

  'You think this is a whim, a caprice brought on by my time alone, don't you?' she said.

  'I don't know what it is.' I was beginning to feel the cold in the church myself and wanted to go.

  Her face, watching me, was trying not to be too hopeful. She needed me to believe in her. She had no one else.

  'I don't think it's a whim,' I amended, 'and I'll support you, whatever you do. But I'd like to know what this calling is.'

  'I've decided to become a doctor.'

  'A doctor . . .'

  I'd been wrong. It was a whim, a fancy. She'd been too alone for too long. If she'd announced herself recruited for active service with the Fenians I'd have been less surprised.

  'There are no women doctors, Allie. You won't be allowed to study.'

  'There are women doctors in America. I've heard there are some in England too. It's true that they're few, very, very few, and that the universities don't want women students. It's for all of these reasons,' she leaned forward, 'that I've decided to begin by becoming a nurse.'

  'A nurse . . .'

  'Can you do anything but repeat what I say?' she snapped. 'I'm going to care for the sick, in one role or the other.'

  Two women turned at her raised voice, so stiffly I thought they would topple from their seats. I leaned closer to Allie and spoke in a whisper.

  'Nurses do little more than scrub floors and wash bed linen and in between times act as servants to the doctor. Is that what you call a calling? Of course,' my whisper became a hiss, 'you could improve the quality of their dying by speaking French to the mortally ill.'

  'You said you'd support me.' Allie didn't even try to whisper. The women made loud, reproving noises and bustled in their seats. 'I'm sorry I told you. I won't speak of it again. I know my parents will oppose me, that I will have a hard time convincing my father it's what's best for me. I didn't think I would have to convince you.”

  'A doctor seems impossible and a nurse's job hard and dangerous and menial,' I said. 'You could do so many things, Allie, with your education and your father's money behind you.'

  'I could marry, as he wants me to,' Allie said.

  We were silent for a while after that, which must have pleased the praying ladies. I was silent because I'd just realised that I believed, in my deep heart and along with her parents and everyone else, that Allie was destined for a good marriage and the life of a lady.

  I was shocked at myself, and ashamed.

  'I'm sorry,' I said, 'you must do what is best for you yourself with your life.'

  'I will.' Allie changed the subject. 'What news have you?'

  I talked to her about Jimmy, about how he wanted to meet my family and how I couldn't risk it. I told her we saw each other as often as we could. I didn't tell her about the afternoons in the boarding-house room by Kingsbridge Station.

  'Is there anything else?' she probed. 'You said you'd things to tell me.'

  I told her about Beezy's offer of work and warned her not to tell my mother. None of it satisfied her. She went on probing; she'd always known when I was keeping a secret from her.

  I stood. The days were short; it would be getting dark, Daniel Casey would be waiting. By now I was half hoping he might not be: Allie was likely to hurl questions at him about nursing and make demands on him that he help her, which wasn't at all what I had in mind when I arranged to bring them together.

  'You've been too much in that house,' I said, 'you need a walk, even a short one.'

  She followed me from the church willingly enough but stopped when we got to the porch. 'There's something I want you to do for me.' She pulled a small, embroidered bag from under her cloak. 'Will you take these to the pawnshop?' When I hesitated she closed my fingers around the bag. 'Please, Sarah, please do it for me. All that's in there are a pendant and a pearl choker I'll never wear again. Get what you can . . .'

  'Alfie may not give me their true value,' I warned her as I put the bag into my skirt pocket. 'He doesn't have much call to deal in jewellery.'

  'When you've got no money even a little is welcome.' Allie said this as if she understood poverty. Which of course she didn't.

  It was almost three o'clock when we left the church. I'd arranged to meet Daniel Casey on the hour at Mount Street Bridge. If we to
ok the short cut by the canal we could still be there on time.

  The day had become damp as well as cold and the people in the streets were hurried and ill-humoured. It was as if, after the long, hot summer, they were still finding it difficult to adjust to the grey and dark of winter. I was myself. But it is true about an ill wind: the misery in the streets made it easy to persuade Allie along the canal towpath for our walk.

  She regretted it almost at once. 'The water's too still,' she shivered, 'and there's something dead in there.'

  'If it's dead it can't hurt us,' I tried to keep her moving. The canal had its bad days and this was one of them.

  'It's moving,' Allie said.

  The dead thing was a pig carcass. Dead pigs in that stretch of canal weren't unusual. Like others before him this lad had no doubt escaped from the nearby cottages at Powers Court. The people who lived there reared and sold pigs. The movement Allie had seen was the mass of flies and other parasites attaching to it. I felt sick.

  'Oh, Holy God.' I walked quickly, my hand over my mouth, afraid I was going to vomit. Allie had to run to keep up with me.

  'It's dead,' she reassured me, holding my arm, 'it can't hurt you.'

  I didn't find this at all funny. I was so intent on keeping my eyes off the pig that I all but fell into the water when I collided with a man with a stick.

  'Jesus Christ Almighty!' He roared and waved the blackthorn as we untangled ourselves. 'Isn't it enough that I've lost my pig! Do you want me to drown with him?'