‘Oh, love,’ she said on the Saturday after the sexton had spoken to me. ‘The tablet’s only a stone. It’s silly to go gazing at it.’
I knew it was and yet it was hard to prevent myself. The more I gazed at it the more I felt I might learn about her: I didn’t know if I was getting her right. I was afraid even to begin to imagine her death because I thought I might be doing wrong to have her dying from some cause that wasn’t the correct one. It seemed insulting to her memory not to get that perfectly correct.
‘You mustn’t want too much,’ she said to me on that Saturday afternoon. ‘It’s as well you’ve finished with the tablet on the wall. Death doesn’t matter, you know.’
I never went back to the Protestant church. I remember what my mother had said about the quality of English goods, and how cars assembled in England were twice the ones assembled in Dublin. I looked at the map of England in my atlas and there was Dorset. She’d been travelling, maybe staying in a house near by, and had died somehow: she was right, it didn’t matter.
Tremlett Hall was by a river in the country, with Virginia creeper all over it, with long corridors and suits of armour in the hall, and a fireplace in the hall also. In
My brothers went to work in the garage, first Brian and then Liam. Effie went to Cork, to the commercial college. The boys at the Christian Brothers’ began to whistle at Kitty and sometimes would give me notes to pass on to her. Even when other people were there I could feel Elvira’s nearness, even her breath sometimes, and certainly the warmth of her hands. When Brother Cahey hit me one day she cheered me up. When my father came back from Macklin’s in time for his Saturday tea her presence made it easier. The garage I hated, where I was certain now I would one day lift paraffin cans from one corner to another, was lightened by her. She was in Mrs Driscoll’s vegetable shop when I bought cabbage and potatoes for my mother. She was there while I waited for the Vista to open, and when I walked through the animals on a fair-day. In the stony field the sunshine made her earrings glitter. It danced over a brooch she had not had when first I imagined her, a brooch with a scarlet jewel, in the shape of a spider. Mist caught in her hair, wind ruffled the skirts of her old-fashioned dress. She wore gloves when it was cold, and a green cloak that wrapped itself all around her. In spring she often carried daffodils, and once – one Sunday in June – she carried a little dog, a grey cairn that afterwards became part of her, like her earrings and her brooch.
I grew up but she was always eighteen, as petrified as her tablet on the wall. In the bedroom which I shared with Brian and Liam I came, in time, to take her dragon’s brooch from her throat and to take her earrings from her pale ears and to lift her dress from her body. Her limbs were warm, and her smile was always there. Her slender fingers traced caresses on my cheeks. I told her that I loved her, as the people told one another in the Vista.
‘You know why they’re afraid of you?’ she said one day in the field by the wood. ‘You know why they hope that God will look after you?’
I had to think about it but I could come to no conclusion on my own, without her prompting. I think I wouldn’t have dared; I’d have been frightened of whatever there was.
‘You know what happens,’ she said, ‘when your uncle stays in Cork on a Saturday night? You know what happened once when your father came back from Macklin’s too late for his meal, in the middle of the night?’
I knew before she told me. I guessed, but I wouldn’t have if she hadn’t been there. I made her tell me, listening to her quiet voice. My Uncle Jack went after women as well as greyhounds in Cork. It was his weakness, like going to Macklin’s was my father’s. And the two weaknesses had once combined, one Saturday night a long time ago, when my uncle hadn’t gone to Cork and my father was a long time in Macklin’s. I was the child of my Uncle Jack and my mother, born of his weakness and my mother’s anger as she waited for the red bleariness of my father to return, footless in the middle of the night. It was why my father called my uncle a hypocrite. It was maybe why my uncle was always looking at the ground, and why he assisted Father Kiberd in the rectory and in the Church of the Holy Assumption. I was their sin, growing in front of them, for God to look after.
‘They have made you,’ Elvira said. ‘The three of them have made you what you are.’
I imagined my father returning that night from Macklin’s, stumbling on the stairs, and haste being made by my uncle to hide himself. In these images it was always my uncle who was anxious and in a hurry: my mother kept saying it didn’t matter, pressing him back on to the pillows, wanting him to be found there.
My father was like a madman in the bedroom then, wild in his crumpled Saturday clothes. He struck at both of them, his befuddled eyes tormented while my mother screamed. She went back through all the years of their marriage, accusing him of cruelty and neglect. My uncle wept. ‘I’m no more than an animal to you,’ my mother screamed, half-naked between the two of them. ‘I cook and clean and have children for you. You give me thanks by going out to Macklin’s.’ Brian was in the room, attracted by the noise. He stood by the open door, five years old, telling them to be quiet because they were waking the others.
‘Don’t ever tell a soul,’ Brian would have said, years afterwards, retailing that scene for Liam and Effie and Kitty, letting them guess the truth. He had been sent back to bed, and my uncle had gone to his own bed, and in the morning there had begun the pretending that none of it had happened. There was confession and penance, and extra hours spent in Macklin’s. There were my mother’s prayers that I would not be born, and my uncle’s prayers, and my father’s bitterness when the prayers weren’t answered.
On the evening of the day that Elvira shared all that with me I watched them as we ate in the kitchen, my father’s hands still smeared with oil, his fingernails in mourning, my uncle’s eyes bent over his fried eggs. My brothers and sisters talked about events that had taken place in the town; my mother listened without interest, her large round face seeming stupid to me now. It was a cause for celebration that I was outside the family circle. I was glad not to be part of the house and the garage, and not to be part of the town with its statue and its shops and its twenty-nine public houses. I belonged with a figment of my imagination: an English ghost who had acquired a dog, whose lips were soft, whose limbs were warm, Elvira Tremlett, who lay beneath the Protestant church.
‘Oh, love,’ I said in the kitchen, ‘thank you.’
The conversation ceased, my father’s head turned sharply. Brian and Liam looked at me, so did Effie and Kitty. My mother had a piece of fried bread on a fork, on the way to her mouth. She returned it to her plate. There was grease at the corner of her lips, a little shiny stream from some previous mouthful, running down to her chin. My uncle pushed his knife and fork together and stared at them.
I felt them believing with finality now, with proof, that I was not sane. I was fifteen years old, a boy who was backward in his ways, who was all of a sudden addressing someone who wasn’t in the room.
My father cut himself a slice of bread, moving the bread-saw slowly through the loaf. My brothers were as
