‘Can you see that girl? Can you imagine men putting a human head in a tin box and sending it through the post? Can you imagine her receiving it? The severed head of the man she loved?’
‘Sure, isn’t there stuff like that in the papers the whole time?’ one of the children suggested.
She agreed that that was so. ‘I’ve had a good life in this town,’ she added, and the children looked at her as if she’d suddenly turned mad.
‘I’m getting out of it,’ one of them said after a pause. ‘Back of beyond, miss.’
She began at the beginning. She tried to get into the children’s minds an image of a baby sleeping while violence and death took place on the Cork road. She described her Aunt Emmeline’s house in North Street, the neat feminine house it had been, her aunt’s cat, Diggory, the small sitting-room, her aunt’s maid, Meta. She spoke of her own very fair hair and her thin face, and the heavy old-fashioned clothes she’d worn in those days. She spoke of the piety of Geraldine Carey, and the grain merchant’s tired face. The friendship they offered her was like Penelope Vade proclaiming peace in the city where her husband had been killed; it was a gesture, too.
‘His house would smell of roses on a summer’s day. She’d carry his meals to him, coming out of the shadows of her kitchen. As if in mourning, the blue blinds darkened the drawing-room. It was they who bore the tragedy, not I.’
She described Mr Purce’s face and his grating voice. She tried to make of him a figure they could see among the houses and shops that were familiar to them: the hard black hat, the walking-stick poking away litter. He had done his best to rescue her, acting according to his beliefs. He wanted her not to forget, not realizing that there was nothing for her to remember.
‘But I tried to imagine,’ she said, ‘as I am asking you to imagine now: my mother and father shot dead on the Cork road, and Mr Devereux and Geraldine Carey as two monstrous people, and arms being blown off soldiers, and vengeance breeding vengeance.’
A child raised a hand and asked to leave the room. Attracta gave permission and awaited the child’s return before proceeding. She filled the time in by describing things that had changed in the town, the falling to pieces of O’Mara’s Picture House, the closing of the tannery in 1938. When the child came back she told of Mr Purce’s death, how he’d said she was not fit to teach Protestant children.
‘I tried to imagine a night I’d heard about,’ she said, ‘when Mr Devereux’s men found a man in Madden’s public house whom they said had betrayed them, and how they took him out to Cedarstrand and hanged him in a barn. Were they pleased after they’d done that? Did they light cigarettes, saying the man was better dead? One of those other men must have gone to a post office with the wrapped biscuit-box. He must have watched it being weighed and paid the postage. Did he say to himself he was exceptional to have hoodwinked a post-office clerk?’
Obediently listening in their rows of worn desks, the children wondered what on earth all this was about. No geography or history lesson had ever been so bewildering; those who found arithmetic difficult would have settled for attempting to understand it now. They watched the lined face of their teacher, still thin as she’d said it had been in childhood, the fair hair grey now. The mouth twitched and rapidly moved, seeming sometimes to quiver as if it struggled against tears. What on earth had this person called Penelope Vade to do with anything?
‘She died believing that hell had come already. She’d lost all faith in human life, and who can blame her? She might have stayed in Haslemere, like anyone else would have. Was she right to go to the city where her husband had been murdered, to show its other victims that her spirit had not been wholly crushed?’
No one answered, and Attracta was aware of the children’s startled gaze. But the startled gaze was a natural reaction. She said to herself that it didn’t matter.
‘My story is one with hers,’ she said. ‘Horror stories, with different endings only. I think of her now and I can see quite clearly the flat she lived in in Belfast. I can see the details, correctly or not I’ve no idea. Wallpaper with a pattern of brownish-purple flowers on it, gaunt furniture casting shadows, a tea-caddy on the hired television set. I drag my body across the floors of two rooms, over a carpet that smells of dust and cigarette ash, over rugs and cool linoleum. I reach up in the kitchen, a hand on the edge of the sink: one by one I eat the aspirins until the bottle’s empty.’
There was a silence. Feet were shuffled in the schoolroom. No one spoke.
‘If only she had known,’ Attracta said, ‘that there was still a faith she might have had, that God does not forever withhold His mercy. Will those same men who exacted that vengeance on her one day keep bees and budgerigars? Will they serve in shops, and be kind to the blind and the deaf? Will they garden in the evenings and be good fathers? It is not impossible. Oh, can’t you see,’ she cried, ‘what happened in this town? Here, at the back of beyond. Can’t you appreciate it? And can’t you see her lying there, mice nibbling her dried blood?’
The children still were quiet, their faces still not registering the comment she wished to make. It was because she’d been clumsy, she thought. All she’d meant to tell them was never to despair. All she had meant to do was to prepare them for a future that looked grim. She had been happy, she said again. The conversation of Mr Purce had been full of the truth but it hadn’t made sense because the years had turned the truth around.
To the children she appeared to be talking now to herself. She was old, a few of them silently considered; that was it. She didn’t appear to understand that almost every day there was the kind of vengeance she spoke of reported on the television. Bloodshed was wholesale, girls were tarred and left for dead, children no older than they were armed with guns.
‘I only hope,’ they heard her saying, ‘she knows that strangers mourn her.’
Another silence lingered awkwardly and then she nodded at a particular child and the child rose and rang a hand-bell. The children filed away, well-mannered and docile as she had taught them to be. She watched them in the playground, standing in twos and threes, talking about her. It had meant nothing when she’d said that people change. The gleam of hope she’d offered had been too slight to be of use, irrelevant in the horror they took for granted, as part of life. Yet she could not help still believing that it mattered when monsters did not remain monsters for ever. It wasn’t much to put against the last bleak moments of Penelope Vade, but it was something for all that. She wished she could have made her point.
Twenty minutes later, when the children returned to the schoolroom, her voice no longer quivered, nor did it seem to struggle against tears. The older children learnt about agriculture in Sweden, the younger ones about the Pyrenees, the youngest that Munster had six counties. The day came to an end at three o’clock and when all the children had gone Attracta locked the schoolroom and walked to the house she had inherited in North Street.
A week later Archdeacon Flower’s successor came to, see her, his visit interrupting further violence on the television news. He beat about the bush while he nibbled biscuits and drank cups of tea by the fire; then he suggested that perhaps she should consider retiring one of these days. She was over sixty, he pointed out with his
