Friends Indeed Page 3

  She walked to the window and stood looking at the barren and untended rear garden. She had no interest in the outdoors or in growing things.

  'Your father, I hope, will have explained to you that the social position of this family has changed.' She didn't turn around and spoke as if she'd rehearsed. 'Every employer has a right to establish rules for her household. That is why I've engaged Mary as more than a housekeeper. Because your father insists on giving work to the Rooneys I've allotted Mary the task of helping them to rid themselves of their former habits, low way of thinking and familiar way of speaking to their mistress and master.'

  She straightened the edges of the curtain but didn't turn. 'You will have to marry, Alicia, and must be prepared. There's a lot Mary can teach you.'

  'I don't doubt it,' I said. My mother would ignore my irony, I knew, just as I would ignore her talk of marrying me off.

  'Even the wisest and best of us have something to learn.' Mary Connor's voice was close behind me. She'd moved from the door without me hearing a sound. 'The happiness of society arises from each of us keeping to our station, and being contented with it.'

  I turned and stared at her and she met my gaze, her skinny neck extending like a voracious chicken's as she looked up at me. I wanted to ask her what she knew of happiness, or contentment for that matter, but perhaps fortunately my father came through the door just then.

  'Your trunks are gone upstairs, Allie.' He looked from me to my mother, the appeasing smile back on his face. Mary Connor, without a word, sidled round him and out of the room. I knew she'd gone to inspect my trunks.

  'I want Sarah to help me unpack.' Even to my own ears I sounded childish and petulant.

  My father, with an instinct born of experience, picked up the mood between my mother and me.

  'Go on up and see your room, Allie,' he coaxed, 'it's as fine as anything you'll have seen in Paris.'

  The bedroom I'd been given was high and narrow with a window overlooking the front garden and the road. Mary Connor had opened the largest of my trunks. She didn't turn when I came in.

  'You don't need to trouble yourself with my unpacking,' I said.

  Even then she didn't immediately turn round. When she did, finally, her face was alight with spite. 'You cannot do it yourself and Sarah Rooney has other duties,' she said. 'Best to get things sorted out now. I run an orderly household.'

  'I'd like to be alone in my room for a while.' I held the door open.

  I thought she wouldn't go but she did, gliding silently past me, not even the bunch of keys hanging from her waist making a sound.

  The new bedroom was nothing like my old one over the pub in Broadstone. It held none of my belongings from that room either. Not even my beloved picture of the Bazaar at Suez, whose candlelit shadows and dark faces had terrified my childish imagination.

  I longed for it now, and almost wept.

  My new bed was narrow and covered with a lace counterpane. There was a wardrobe, large and with a mirror fitted inside the door, as well as a washstand, chest of drawers and a chair which in France would have been called a chauffeuse and put in front of a fire. It was low and uncomfortable-looking but must have been fashionable in Dublin or my mother wouldn't have bought it.

  I was hungry and tired and in no mood to do further battle with either Mary Connor or my mother. I slid open the sash window and let the warm air gust gently about me. The view was good and the scene lively enough.

  The Beggars Bush Barracks stood almost directly opposite, with soldiers in red and blue uniforms coming and going between granite gateposts. Carriages and a milk cart with churns rattled over the crushed stone surface of the road between, avoiding places where deep holes were filled with loose metal. Servant women with baskets walked in the direction of Baggot Street, the skirts of their faded dresses turning up swirls of dust as they went.

  I would have turned away and lain on the bed awhile if Sarah had not just then come running round the side of the house. She unrolled her sleeves as she went, the shortness of the skirts swinging about her ankles marking her out as a servant. I called to her as she started to cross the road but she didn't hear me and kept going until she reached the barracks' gates. She stopped and spoke briefly to a sentry before slipping inside.

  I was trying to follow her disappearing figure across the barrack square when my mother and Mary Connor came into the room behind me. Albert slithered into the room after them. He jumped onto the bed and lay watching me while my mother plucked a green satin dress from the top of a trunk and held it against her.

  'What a pity your figure is so childlike,' she shook a regretful head, 'I might have had my dressmaker copy a couple of them if your gowns were more . . . womanly.' She dropped the dress on the floor. 'Let's see, Mary, what other delights my daughter has brought with her from France.'

  With sly speed Mary Connor's sparrow hands buried themselves in the trunk. She didn't say a word and a fury, born of exhaustion and misery and fear for the future, took a sudden hold of me.

  I grabbed the lid of the trunk and held it poised to drop. 'If you don't remove your hands they'll be severed at the wrists.' I was shrill and knew I was close to hysteria.

  The housekeeper looked up at me. There was no fear in her, nor apology, but she was wise enough to take her hands out of my clothing.

  ‘I’ll come back another time,' she said.

  'Stay where you are, Mary.' My mother's lips were white. 'Alicia will apologise.'

  'I'll do no such thing.'

  My mother, shaking, stepped closer to me. I was shaking too. I hadn't wanted things to go this far. I wanted to say I was sorry, that my mother and the housekeeper could have the trunks and everything in them, that I was really too tired to care. But I didn't, because I did care. Not about the trunks, or what was in them, but about being in the power of my mother and her housekeeper.

  'I can't compel you and your father, I know, will not compel you.' My mother picked up the cat. She seemed calmer and I relaxed a little.

  I should have known better. I should have remembered the unpredictability of her temper. But I’d forgotten because I'd been away from her and living with normal people. I'd forgotten how lunatic she could be and so I stood, frozen and immobile, as she did what I should have foreseen she would do.

  In a sudden frenzy of abandon she threw the cat from her and began to hurl boots, dresses, shawls about the room, tearing a bonnet apart when she came to it. She threw a jewel box so hard it crashed against the wall and burst open and spewed the contents as far as my feet.

  'You will not,' she stopped, panting, 'display to that low and wretched Sarah Rooney what this family's money had bought for you.'

  'In the name of God Almighty what's going on here?' My father, in the doorway, smelled of whiskey, a drink he said steadied his nerves. He turned on me.

  'Couldn't you have kept the peace for one hour at least? Couldn't you have let things be?'

  I said nothing because anything I said would have been

  wrong. I'd always been the source of trouble between my parents.

  Mary Connor stood on the chauffeuse and closed the window.

  'Come away, Harriet.' There was resignation in the slump of my father's round shoulders. 'Come away and lie down.'

  'That's where your money went, Leonard.' My mother kicked at a pile of clothing. 'Into silks and feathers for the strumpet we spawned. You thought you were buying yourself a lady when you sent her to Paris but you've wasted your money. Our money. She's not a lady and nothing will ever make her one, in the same way that nothing will ever make a gentleman of you. You're coarse and insignificant and I am damned, damned, damned to be forever by your side.'

  She closed her eyes. The chignon had come loose and there were lines to the side of her mouth which had not been there before.

  'I rue, every day, the hour that my father made me marry you.'

  'I know that, Harriet,' my father said quietly, 'I know that.'

  This seemed to please
my mother. She opened her eyes and went to the mirror where, with the utmost concentration, she gathered her hair into place.

  My father, in the same quiet tone, said, 'The table is laid for the breakfast. The child has only just arrived home and is tired.'

  'Child?' My mother, critically examining her reflection, gave a short laugh. 'There's no child here. There's a brazen young woman who thinks she can do as she likes and defy her mother. I will not have it. Tell her, Leonard, that she must obey.'

  I could take no more. 'Mary Connor may do what she likes with my clothes.'

  I stepped over my strewn possessions and left the room. I knew what my father would say. He would tell me to obey. I would always be sacrificed to his need to please my mother.

  Bess Rooney was in the kitchen wearing a large white cap and apron.

  'Where did that Mary Connor come from? Where did my mother get her?'

  I started to shake again and to pace touching things as I went: an oil lamp, a copper pot, silver laid out for cleaning, a jug of fresh milk. I stopped.

  'Can I have some milk, Bess, please?' I sat edgily at the scrubbed, wooden table while she poured it for me. 'Was it Mary Connor decided you should wear that thing on your hair?'

  'Drink the milk and be still and I'll answer your questions one at a time.' Bess shook her head. 'I don't know where your mother's housekeeper came from though it was nowhere good Cork maybe or Kerry.' Bess had an aversion to anywhere more than five miles outside Dublin, 'and you're right it was her decided I should wear the cap.' She gave the snort that was her way of laughing. 'It's a small thing wearing a cap and not worth arguing over,' she sighed. 'Judging by the sounds I heard coming from upstairs you've not learned the wisdom of a bit of silence yet Allie Buckley.'

  'Are you saying that nothing in life is worth arguing over?'

  I sipped the milk. It was warm, not long milked from the cow.

  'You'll have to decide that for yourself.'

  Bess went to a cooking range that was twice the size of the one we'd had in the Broadstone. When she opened the oven the smells of the breakfast she'd prepared made me weak with hunger.

  'Can I eat here, now?' I asked.

  'You've no self-control none at all you're like a child still.' Bess shook her head and came to the table and cut me some bread,which she buttered. She made bread better than any baker.

  'That's all you'll get by the time you've changed your clothes the breakfast will be on the table.'

  'Where's Sarah?'

  'Outside.' She waved a vague hand. 'What happened upstairs?'

  While I told her she didn't interrupt and she didn't once stop working; making butter balls, heating plates, boiling water. Bess was uneasy.

  I've wondered manys a time myself where the Connor woman came from,' she said, 'whether she was born or made but she's here and you might as well get used to her and keep out of her way.' She took a breath. 'Keep out of your mother's way as well.' She stood looking at me. 'You were scrawny when you left but you've grown up fast and you're nearly a woman. The air must be healthy enough in France.'

  'I saw Sarah crossing the road,' I said. 'She went into the barracks.'

  'You've no business here in the kitchen.' Bess turned away and filled the teapot with boiling water from the kettle on the range. 'You should be above stairs picking up your clothes and dressing yourself for the breakfast.' She put a tray on the table. 'I'll be serving it any minute now.'

  'You won't be serving anything until Sarah gets back.' I was not going to be put off so easily. 'What's she doing in the barracks?'

  'Holy Mother of God why can't you let it go I've enough to contend with . . .' Bess crossed herself and her lips moved and she began to pray. Bess prayed a lot. 'Sarah's gone for provisions.'

  She was lying.

  'She's meeting a soldier, isn't she?' The idea made me feel ill. I'd lost Sarah to a soldier, that was why she hadn't answered my letters. 'She's got a soldier lover. That's it, Bess, isn't it?'

  I got up from the table then sat down again. My legs were hollow. If it was true that my friend had a lover then she would have no time for me. I'd seen too often how women forsook women friends when they fell in love with a man, even the best of women.

  'She's gone to see him . . .' I stared at Bess. Dublin without Sarah would be unimaginable. Sarah was Dublin, for me.

  Sitting there, gazing at her mother, I remembered a summer's day ten years before when Sarah and I had gone walking across the city in search of Sandymount Strand. The idea had been Sarah's and we'd gone after school.

  'Your mother won't miss you and mine won't worry,' she assured me. We put our books in one bag and took turns carrying it, me trotting by her side, two of my steps matching every one of hers. But at nine years old we'd no idea of distances, nor of direction. By six o'clock we were lost, standing on a bridge close to where the river wound past the train sheds of a great railway station.

  'There's no station like this in Sandymount.' I'd never before been so tired, nor so hungry. But I wasn't frightened, yet.

  'How much money have you?' Sarah asked. I always had money.

  'I've sixpence,' I said.

  'We'll buy bread and milk and keep on looking.' Sarah squinted down the river. 'I can see the sea from here.'

  'I can't.' I squinted too. 'I think we should get a horsecar at the station and go home. My father will pay.'

  'If that's what you want,' Sarah sniffed but it was what she wanted too.

  It was my idea to walk through the sheds. We went slowly, the adventure gone out of the day and the sheds, all around, looming dirty, mostly empty and dark.

  The boys had been walking behind us for several minutes before Sarah turned to look at them. A mangy dog sloped at their heels.

  'Are ye following us?' Her height always made Sarah brave.

  'We are,' the boys surrounded us quickly. There wasn't another person in sight.

  'What's in the bag?' demanded the boy who'd spoken, a fellow of about thirteen with a pale face and a nose that came down to his mouth.

  'None of your business,' Sarah said.

  'Books,' I said, hurriedly, 'school books.'

  'They'd be worth money . . .' One of the other boys poked at the bag with a stick. You could tell he was the kind liked to torture cats.

  'You'd better let us pass,' said Sarah, 'or my father'll have the police after the lot of you.'

  The third boy laughed. 'Your father isn't here.' The cap over his eyes didn't hide their hard glitter. He terrified me, but having Sarah by my side gave me courage.

  'Take the bag,' I handed it to him, 'and let us pass, please.'

  'Say please again,’ he sneered.

  'You have no manners,' I said.

  I was a small girl and he was a big boy and it was easy for him to knock me to the ground. I lay there on my back, stunned. I was struggling to sit when Sarah grabbed the bag, swung it at the boys and raced, like a loose horse, through the gap as they parted. The boys, as one and screaming curses, took after her.

  I stood alone between the dark sheds, bereft and crying out for Sarah. She'd left me alone and that was all I could think about. When she returned, in a matter of minutes, with a man in uniform I was not mollified.

  'You left me,' I sobbed.

  'I went for help,' she said. 'I saw this man in the distance.' She held up the bag. 'I have our books too.'

  We were put in a horsecar and sent home and soundly punished by my father and by Sarah's mother. But it was days before I could forgive Sarah for deserting me.

  'I went for help,' she protested, over and over.

  'You left me,' I said, and turned my back on her.

  The days which followed were the most miserable in my life till then. My mother's cruelties and moods were frivolities compared to what I saw as Sarah's betrayal.

  'I'd never leave you.' Sarah stood crying in my path as I came out of school two days later. 'You're dearer to me than my own sister. It was fear for you gave me the courage to s
wing the books and run for the porter.'

  'I wish I'd been the one to save you.' I hugged her, contrite and understanding.

  'You tried, by giving them over the bag,' Sarah took my hand and, in the way of small girls, we pledged undying loyalty. 'I'll always be your friend,' she said, 'even when we're grown women.”

  'Me too,' I said, 'me too.'

  Remembering, I wanted Sarah to come through the kitchen door and tell me again she would always be my friend. But there was only Bess, spreading her hands on the table and studying them as she said, 'Sarah doesn't tell me her business these days.'

  Her hands were raw and sinewy, the knuckles like doorknobs, fingers moving across the table, gathering breadcrumbs as she went on. 'You're not children any longer you and my Sarah nor even young girls.' She took a deep breath. 'You'll have to be strong Allie and put childish things behind you.' She put a hand over mine and I knew she wasn't going to tell me about Sarah. 'You must pray to the Lord Jesus and His Holy Mother to guide you through what's ahead.'

  'I'd benefit more from earthly guidance.' I decided to get information of another kind from her. 'You've always known my mother's mind, Bess, and my father's too. I know they want me to marry, my mother has said so and my father has alluded to it . . .' I took a breath. 'Have they decided who it is I must marry?'

  'It's not for me to say.'

  'It's not for you to remain silent. I'm alone. There's no one else to tell me, to help me.' The sound of my father's voice, then of a closing door, came from upstairs. 'Tell me, Bess, if you have the courage.'

  'Courage? Courage is what we use to get us through our daily lives and we use all we have of it for that.' She put a hand on my head. 'It takes courage to accept your lot and courage to live it and I would not be courageous if I told you who the man is your parents want you to marry.' She got up from the table. 'I would be foolish and I'm many things Allie Buckley but a fool is not one of them.'

  'You are a fool, Bess Rooney, if you think that I'm going to marry a man I don't know. I've decided,' I stood too and faced her, 'that I’ll never marry. What I've seen of the state hasn't impressed me a great deal.'