Academy Street Page 4

  In the darkness her eye is caught by something bright and shiny on the floor, a coin maybe. She steps inside and as she runs towards it she hits off the corner of the work bench. She cries out. Ow. She holds her side and rubs her hip and, when she looks at Mike, the tears come.

  ‘Aw, now, come here to me, a stór.’ He kneels beside her. He puts an arm around her and makes a pitying sound with his tongue. ‘Where’s it sore?’ he asks.

  She mumbles through the tears, and keeps rubbing her side. He gets up and goes to where his old coat hangs from a nail and comes back with two toffees. ‘Now,’ he says. ‘Here. Eat this and you’ll be better in no time. Sure, you’ll be better before you get married!’ He takes the paper off and her mouth starts to water. As soon as she tastes the toffee she smiles.

  ‘Now! What did I tell you, what did I tell you! Of course, now you’ll have to marry me!’

  It was a game he used to play with herself and Maeve when they were small. Whenever they fell or cut themselves or got upset he’d say, ‘You’ll be better before you get married.’ She would wipe away the tears and say, ‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.’

  ‘I’m going to marry you when I grow up, Mike.’

  It is the look on his face that tells her he has heard her. She has heard herself too. The sound has come out of her mouth, the words are working. They look at each other. He bites his bottom lip. She holds her breath.

  ‘Well, are you now, Missy!’ he says, smiling. ‘Are you indeed! And who says I’ll have you? Hmm? Who says I’ll marry you!?’

  ‘I say.’

  ‘Sure, I might be long married by then. I might have a wife of me own by the time you grow up,’ he says. ‘Mmm… Unless you marry me now.’ And he turns and looks around. ‘Where’s the broom at all?’

  She had forgotten that part of the wedding game, that the bride and groom have to step over the broom to get married. He walks into the darkness and brings out an old yard brush.

  ‘Now, Missy, I think we’re all set. Except for the priest!’ He goes outside and lays the brush flat on the gravel. Then he whistles and Captain appears and he says, Sit, and Captain sits still and obedient.

  Mike comes and gives her his arm. Through the open door she walks beside him into the winter sun. Captain is there, waiting. Mike begins to hum. She looks up at the sky and hums too and then Mike hums louder as he skips along, almost dancing, with her arm through his. And then they stand before Captain, and Mike tells her what to do, what to say, when to jump over the broom.

  ‘And you, too,’ she says. ‘You’ve to jump over the broom too, or else you’re not married.’

  ‘Oh, I’ll jump, I’ll jump, to be sure.’

  ‘And then will we go and live in your house in Connemara?’

  ‘We will. We’ll go and live in Connemara.’

  And so, standing side by side, they begin. He takes her hand, and bows and says, ‘Miss Teresa Lohan, do you take me, Michael Joseph Connolly, to be your husband, for better, for worse, in sickness and in health, all the days of our lives?’

  Captain cocks his head and whines and she laughs and says, ‘I do,’ and jumps over the broom. And then it is her turn.

  ‘Will you, do you, Mike Jophus Connolly take me Tess Lohan as your wife?’

  ‘I do.’

  He jumps over the broom to her side, and puts his hand in his pocket and brings out hay seeds and chaff and tosses them over their heads. And just as he takes her two hands in his and begins to dance her around the yard, Claire walks out of the house onto the front step and sees them and smiles and comes towards them. Tess waves, calls out, and Claire begins to run, the morning sun on her back.

  3

  AND THEN, WHEN Tess is ten, there is a real wedding in the house. It is summer again, after a long winter when animals died in the fields and snow fell in May, and Oliver came home. There is something about each day now that she holds dear. Oliver’s return for one thing, and something she noticed on those winter nights when she would kneel on her bed and melt a peep-hole on the frozen window pane and view everything under snow—the lawn and the trees, the walls and barns and outhouses—all still and beautiful in the moonlight: the feeling that she has grown older and stronger, and safer, and the world has survived and become a little lovelier.

  On the morning of Evelyn’s wedding Denis drives them all to the church in the new Hillman Minx saloon her father bought that spring. Maeve, who is home from boarding school for the holidays, and Tess are wearing new frocks. In the chapel there are bog asphodels on the altar. The bridegroom sits in the first pew with his brother. It is only the second time that Tess has seen him and he seems to her almost as old as her father.

  The wedding breakfast is held at Easterfield. The guests sit at the long table in the dining room. The rations have ended and there is a great spread of food and more talk and laughter in the house than Tess can ever remember. Your mother would be very proud today, someone tells Evelyn. Tess has not given much thought to her mother in recent times. Her face is fading from memory. She tries to picture her mother in these rooms, touching and dusting things, curtains, cushions, softly closing doors. She glances around the room. A feeling sometimes rises in her: the sense of things being alive. When she walks into the coach-house or the cow-house she has the feeling of having just interrupted something. Lately the thought that all the things around her, the things that matter, and move her—the trees and fields and animals—have their own lives, their own thoughts, has planted itself in her. If a thing has a life, she thinks, then it has a memory. Memories and traces of her mother must linger all over the house—in rooms and halls and landings. The dent of her feet on a rug. On a cup, the mark of her hand. She wonders if on certain warm nights, when the whole house is sleeping, her mother’s soothing self returns, or memories of her return, bringing comfort to things, and promise for their patient waiting. Outside too, the small yard, the fowl-house—do they miss her? Does the laurel tree remember sheltering her? Tess looks down at her hands. Even as she has these thoughts she knows they are not something she will ever put into words.

  After Evelyn’s marriage Miss Tannian comes more often, bringing cakes and tarts she has baked, sometimes arriving just before teatime so that she has to be invited to eat with them. She cuts up Oliver’s food and butters his bread and tries to wipe his face, before he bats her away. Everyone grows nervous. Tess feels sorry for her. Her father says nothing but frowns often and one evening before they’re finished he rises suddenly from the table and storms outside. Later, when Miss Tannian is leaving, Tess sees him cross the courtyard and stand talking to her. Miss Tannian looks flustered and lowers her head and seems to shrink and slide into her car. Many weeks pass before she returns and when she has finished testing the hens for pin-feathers she does not linger or enter the house. She rarely visits after that. Once, her father asks, ‘When was Rose here last?’

  It is June and she is in her last week of 6th class, the end of her time in national school. She and Oliver walk home, down the avenue and into the yard. There are men gathered around the old well in the corner. Years ago, long before Tess was born, the well was covered with a flagstone, for fear that the old women from the village who came for water would fall in. For as long as Tess remembers her family has gotten their
drinking water from the village pump. On summer evenings the older boys and girls of the village gather there, giddy and tense, something in the air always. One evening her father came over the road and hunted herself and Claire home. ‘Get home out of that, ye.’ His face was red with rage. He did not want them mixing. Now the flagstone is pulled away. He will sink his own pump and men have come to take a sample from the well for testing.

  Mike Connolly is holding the end of a rope that snakes down into the darkness. The men edge closer. Her father calls Denis’s name. Then he waits. And again, Denis. A strange quiet falls on them. Mike Connolly leans over and peers in. She feels fear gathering in the men, a holding of breaths. And then there’s a stirring, a shifting of feet and bodies. ‘He’s coming,’ her father calls. Her father is so full of anger or irritation always, but now his face is open and bright and his voice is full of relief and for the first time she understands something about his life as a father. She moves closer, sees that there are stone steps descending inside the well and, as she gazes down, Denis begins to appear out of the darkness. Step by step he climbs, his black head and white face and long thin body rising up out of the well until, pale and dazed, he surfaces and blinks in the sunlight. Mike Connolly puts out a hand and Denis takes it and steps over the edge onto the gravel. He passes a water bottle to one of the men, his hand shaking. Then, without a word, he turns and crosses the yard.

  In September Tess will go, along with Maeve, to the convent boarding school in a town twenty miles away. In the weeks before, preparations are made and new clothes are bought. She has the feeling that these are her last days. She walks around the house and yard, uneasy. She would like her father to notice her, to acknowledge that she is leaving. Just once, she would like to please him.

  At the school she is accompanied everywhere by the peal of bells, the smell of wax and the echo of her feet on polished floors. A feeling of melancholy registers when the strains of hymn-singing waft out from the chapel. In the classroom teachers in gowns stand on the raised dais, and some, with just a word or a hand on a book, hint of things to come, of a wider world that gives her a feeling of lift and light and promise. At night in the dormitory the sound of forty sleeping girls commingles with thoughts of home and Oliver and Claire and her father, and Denis, in his silence. Some nights she cries. She would like to have taken them all with her, make them all fit into her new world. So this is homesickness, she thinks. But there is something about the pitch of her pain that is not all terrible. There is something true and clear and cleansing about it that makes her want to endure it. It is a test, a wall she must break through. She takes comfort in knowing that Maeve is there, that somewhere in the building there is one who shares her blood and knows everything of her life before now.

  She is fond of all subjects, except Mathematics—algebra, trigonometry with its baffling formulae—and does well in her exams. But she is wary, watchful all the time. Only in English class when the teacher recites Wordsworth or John Donne does she briefly forget where she is, carried by sound and image to far-away villages and rivers, and cathedrals rising to meet the heavens. At these moments she has the feeling that there is something at hand, that she is coming close to something she cannot quite reach, but which she knows is right and beautiful. She does not like to speak in class and on the rare occasions when she is required to answer a question or recite a poem her insides contract, and she is rigid with fear that she will say something foolish and shame herself. When it is her turn to read, the teachers merely nod to her. She is certain that not one of them knows her name.

  She grows to love the school chapel with its sanctuary lamp and stained-glass windows. On Sundays and holy days—All Souls, Holy Week, Pentecost—the priest reads from the Scriptures, the Psalms, with a lilting voice, the Latin words pouring over her, more easily understood now. Dominus vobiscum. Et cum spiritu tuo. The swing of the thurible at Benediction and the smell of incense, the peal of little bells. But it is the choir—the clear pristine voices and the sombre notes rising from the organ—that stirs something deep in her. Panis Angelicus. Tantum Ergo. O Salutaris Hostia.

  In her second year her Latin teacher falls ill and a new teacher, Mr Brown, temporarily takes her place. He is tall, grey-haired and does not wear the black gown that the other teachers wear. Though he lives in the town, he speaks with a scholarly accent—perhaps even English. His voice is soft. She notices the kind way he has of listening—how, when a girl is answering a question he does not look directly at her, but yet fully attends. One day at the end of class he singles Tess out and asks her to wait back.

  She stands before him.

  ‘I see that you’re from my part of the county, Miss Lohan,’ he says. ‘On the school roll, your address caught my eye.’

  Her heart takes fright. A raft of fears passes through her: he knows her father; her father has not paid the school fees; she is here under false pretences. She is an imposter.

  He looks out over his glasses at her, and waits. She does not know what he expects. He sits back, takes off his glasses.

  ‘I was born in Easterfield House,’ he says, and pauses. ‘I lived there until I was eight. My family sold the place, and then a few years later your father bought the house and some of the land.’

  She is lost for words. She has never given thought to Easterfield’s past. She cannot conceive of this man in its rooms, its beds, running through the fields.

  ‘How is the old house?’ He is smiling, as if asking after a relative.

  ‘It’s good, sir.’

  ‘Does the roof still leak? Every so often rainwater would collect in the valley and burst through the ceiling.’

  ‘Yes, sir, that happened once, when I was small. The ceilings upstairs were ruined. I don’t remember it, but the stains are still there.’

  ‘And your father farms the land? Livestock?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And you have brothers and sisters? A brother, who will inherit the place perhaps?’

  ‘Yes, sir. Denis, my older brother.’

  He looks at her for what seems a long time. She thinks he is about to announce a visit to Easterfield. He will take her in his car tomorrow and they will arrive, with no forewarning. She starts to panic.

  ‘It is quite something, coming on you like this.’ He looks away and is quiet for a moment. ‘Do you know of Easterfield’s history? Do you know when the house was built?’

  ‘Yes, sir. My old teacher said it was built in 1678.’

  She remembers the day in 5th class when Mr Clarke stopped in the middle of a History lesson and told her to stand and tell the class about Easterfield. She was mortified. Her father had bought the house and a hundred acres in 1911, she said in a low voice, and her parents got married in 1925. She did not say that her mother had once told her that the house had three hundred and sixty-five windows, a window for every day of the year. It was not true; she counted them once and got only thirty-seven. ‘We have an orchard, and two stairs,’ she said, and could think of no more.

  ‘Is that it? Is that all you know? Sit down, Tess Lohan,’ Mr Clarke said, and then looked around the class before continuing.

  ‘Easterfield House and estate was owned by the Cannon family from 1678 until the 1800s. King Charles the Second granted them five hundred acres. The house was closed
up in the 1830s but was reopened as a famine hospital to treat the sick and the starving during the 1840s. The locals.’ He paused, and looked into individual children’s eyes. Tess had feared he would alight on her again.

  Now, Mr Brown reaches into his bag, brings out a book.

  ‘You know then that the house was used as a hospital during the Famine?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’

  ‘And that hundreds of patients died there? I only discovered this myself relatively recently. A few years ago I compiled a history of all the big houses and estates in the area. I was quite shocked by what I found out about Easterfield. The unclaimed corpses were buried on the land. In the ditches, down in the quarry, under trees—the groves of oak and beech—anywhere. Places that I remember, where I’d played… They threw lime on the bodies to prevent the stench.’

  He grows thoughtful. ‘My family did not come into possession of Easterfield until some time later. They were, I believe, kind to the tenants.’

  Tess nods. All she wants now is to leave. He hands her the book. ‘Perhaps you’d like to borrow this. Bring it back tomorrow.’

  Later, in bed, she remembers talk at school and at the village pump about local people who claimed to have heard the cries of the dead when they passed Easterfield at night. She remembers the rope swing that Denis hung from a tree above the quarry for herself and Oliver, and their laughter as they swung out high over the rocks. In her mind she moves through the farm, remembering each field, each copse of trees. She sees the boughs, bare in winter. She feels a chill and pulls the bedclothes tight around her and tries to sleep.