an elderly nun, or the inability of some family to buy Lacy’s more expensive First Communion dresses. I often felt, listening at mealtimes, that I was scarcely there. I didn’t belong and I sensed it was my fault; I felt I was a burden, being unpromising at school, unable to hold out hopes for the future. I felt I was a disgrace to them and might even become a person who was only fit to lift cans of paraffin about in the garage. I thought I could see that in my father’s eyes, and in my uncle’s sometimes, and in my mother’s. A kind of shame it was, peering back at me.
I turned to Elvira Tremlett because everything about her was quiet. ‘You great damn clown,’ my mother would shout angrily at my father. He’d smile in the kitchen, smelling like a brewery, as she used to say. ‘Mind that bloody tongue of yours,’ he’d retort, and then he’d eye my uncle in a belligerent manner. ‘Jeez, will you look at the cut of him?’ he’d roar, laughing and throwing his head about. My uncle would usually be sitting in front of the range, a little to one side so as not to be in the way of my mother while she cooked. He’d been reading the
It was always like that when he’d been in Macklin’s on a Saturday evening and returned in time for his meal. My mother would slap the plates on to the table, my father would sing in order to annoy her. I used to feel that my uncle and my mother were allied on these occasions, just as she and my father were allied when my uncle spent a Saturday night in Cork after the greyhound racing. I much preferred it when my father didn’t come back until some time in the middle of the night. ‘Will you look at His Nibs?’ he’d say in the kitchen, drawing attention to me. ‘Haven’t you a word in you, boy? Bedad, that fellow’ll never make a lawyer.’ He’d explode with laughter and then he’d tell Kitty that she was looking great and could marry the crowned King of England if she wanted to. He’d say to Effie she was getting fat with the toffees she ate; he’d tell my brothers they were lazy.
They didn’t mind his talk the way I did; even Kitty’s embarrassment used to evaporate quite quickly because for some reason she was fond of him. Effie was fond of my uncle, and my brothers of my mother. Yet in spite of all this family feeling, whenever there was quarrelling between our parents, or an atmosphere after my uncle had spent a night away, my brothers used to say the three of them would drive you mad. ‘Wouldn’t it make you sick, listening to it?’ Brian would say in our bedroom, saying it to Liam. Then they’d laugh because they couldn’t be bothered to concern themselves too much with other people’s quarrels, or with atmospheres.
The fact was, my brothers and sisters were all part of it, whatever it was – the house, the garage, the family we were – and they could take everything in their stride. They were the same as our parents and our uncle, and Elvira Tremlett was different. She was a bit like Myrna Loy, whom I had seen in the Vista, in
‘What do you want?’ the sexton of the Protestant church said to me one Saturday afternoon. ‘What’re you doing here?’
He was an old, hunched man in black clothes. He had rheumy eyes, very red and bloody at the rims. It was said in the town that he gave his wife an awful time.
‘It isn’t your church,’ he said.
I nodded, not wanting to speak to him. He said:
‘It’s a sin for you to be coming into a Protestant church. Are you wanting to be a Protestant, is that it?’ He was laughing at me, even though his lips weren’t smiling. He looked as if he’d never smiled in his life.
I shook my head at him, hoping he might think I was dumb.
‘Stay if you want to,’ he said, surprising me, even though I’d seen him coming to the conclusion that I wasn’t going to commit some act of vandalism. I think he might even have decided to be pleased because a Catholic boy had chosen to wander among the pews and brasses of his church. He hobbled away to the vestry, breathing noisily because of his bent condition.
Several months before that Saturday I had wandered into the church for the first time. It was different from the Church of the Holy Assumption. It had a different smell, a smell that might have come from mothballs or from the tidy stacks of hymn-books and prayer-books, whereas the Church of the Holy Assumption smelt of people and candles. It was cosier, much smaller, with dark-coloured panelling and pews, and stained-glass windows that seemed old, and no cross on the altar. There were flags and banners that were covered with dust, all faded and in shreds, and a Bible spread out on the wings of an eagle.
The old sexton came back. I could feel him watching me as I read the tablets on the walls, moving from one to the next, pretending that each of them interested me. I might have asked him: I might have smiled at him and timidly inquired about Elvira Tremlett because I knew he was old enough to remember. But I didn’t. I walked slowly up a side-aisle, away from the altar, to the back of the church. I wanted to linger there in the shadows, but I could feel his rheumy eyes on my back, wondering about me. As I slipped away from the church, down the short path that led through black iron gates to the street at the top of the hill, I knew that I would never return to the place.
‘Well, it doesn’t matter,’ she said. ‘You don’t have to go back. There’s nothing to go back for.’
I knew that was true. It was silly to keep on calling in at the Protestant church.
‘It’s curiosity that sends you there,’ she said. ‘You’re much too curious.’
I knew I was: she had made me understand that. I was curious and my family weren’t.
She smiled her slow smile, and her eyes filled with it. Her eyes were brown, the same colour as her long hair. I loved it when she smiled. I loved watching her fingers playing with the daisies in her lap, I loved her old- fashioned clothes, and her shoes and her two elaborate earrings. She laughed once when I asked her if they were gold. She’d never been rich, she said.
There was a place, a small field with boulders in it, hidden on the edge of a wood. I had gone there the first time, after I’d been in the Protestant church. What had happened was that in the church I had noticed the tablet on the wall, the left wall as you faced the altar, the last tablet on it, in dull grey marble.Near by this StoneLies Interred the Bodyof Miss Elvira TremlettDaughter of Wm. Tremlettof Tremlett Hallin the County of Dorset.She Departed this Life30 August 1873Aged 18.
Why should an English girl die in our town? Had she been passing through? Had she died of poisoning? Had someone shot her? Eighteen was young to die.
On that day, the first day I read her tablet, I had walked from the Protestant church to the field beside the wood, I often went there because it was a lonely place, away from the town and from people. I sat on a boulder and felt hot sun on my face and head, and on my heck and the backs of my hands. I began to imagine her, Elvira Tremlett of Tremlett Hall in the county of Dorset, England. I gave her her long hair and her smile and her elaborate earrings, and I felt I was giving her gifts. I gave her her clothes, wondering if I had got them right. Her fingers were delicate as straws, lacing together the first of her daisy-chains. Her voice hadn’t the edge that Myrna Loy’s had, her neck was more elegant.
