Chapter Nine
WEDNESDAY

SHE’d ALWAYS been fond of flowers and plants, but after Charlie was killed it became an obsession; the only thing in which she could become completely absorbed, often the only thing that made any sense to her. She grew sweet pea on a trellis and in a shaded part of the garden she grew red tulips clouded in forget-me-not. Under the windows she grew night-scented stock, and from the hearts of the white-and-purple stars the rich scent reeked at dusk. At Easter the house would be golden with the daffodils she put everywhere in vases and jugs and jars, their trumpets blasting the dim air; and no matter how many she cut more remained, heaving and sinking in thick waves of yellow and green on the deep bank where they grew. Every autumn she grew hyacinths in water. As the days grew shorter she watched the white roots creep down and the green shoots push up and then in the dull light of the year’s end, the extraordinary flowers would burst out, and drench the rooms with their perfume. She made a garden of her husband’s grave. She didn’t know how to pray for him, so she cultivated roses on the earth that sheltered his body, and said to him in her heart, ‘This is for you, Charlie.’ Her daughters teased her about her mania, but she only smiled. She knew they understood. It made her able to bear time, because it hooked her into the circle of the seasons, and time would otherwise have been a horrible straight line, a straight, merciless journey at speed towards death. Instead of which, she had pulled Charlie back into the circle and back into her life, in a way which she wordlessly comprehended, and which offered to her the nearest approximation she would ever have to comfort or consolation.
 She was sitting in the conservatory her daughters had had made for her on her sixtieth birthday. She’d been there yesterday morning trying to come to terms with Cate’s news when Sally came to talk to her, and she’d insisted that they go to the kitchen, in case there should be hard words spoken that would poison [106] the air and then she wouldn’t be able to sit amongst the flowers ever again without being assailed by unpleasant memories. The flowers were important because things meant nothing to her, they never had, not since she was a small child. She wasn’t sentimental about any thing. Not long after she was married, the Foreign Missions made an appeal for women to donate their wedding dresses to be sent for women in Africa to use. She’d gone straight home from church and got hers ready to be dispatched, but Charlie had done all in his power to talk her out of it, and they reached a compromise of sorts when she said she’d give the dress, but keep the veil and the tiara of paste stones she’d worn with it.
 After he died, they’d found in his wardrobe a cache of memorabilia she hadn’t known existed: a programme from a dinner dance they’d been to in Halls Hotel in Antrim in 1962, one of Cate’s copy books from when she was in primary four, Christmas and birthday cards the girls had made for him when they were little, and a solemn letter Helen had written him when she was ten and Charlie had been in hospital with gallstones, telling him not to worry about the cattle ‘because Uncle Peter and I are looking after them until you are well again’. Once they’d looked at them, she’d wanted to throw all these things away, but the girls were upset at the very idea. She couldn’t see any point in keeping them, so the sisters had amicably divided the material amongst themselves.
 Yes, she’d kept the tiara to placate Charlie, but it never meant anything to her. She let the children use it to play at dressing up as princesses, and in due course it became battered, the veil was faded and torn. Cate had come across it one day when she was about sixteen, and pounced on it. ‘Oh Mammy, will you lend me this to wear when I get married?’ she asked, cramming it on to her head; and they had all laughed to see it, even Charlie, because she had looked so funny, with her bright face under the broken crown of false stones.
 It was a disappointment to her that none of the three had married. When they were growing up she’d always taken it for granted that they would: well, maybe not Sally, but probably Helen, and certainly Cate. It wasn’t likely that it would happen now. People said times had changed, but Cate would find that [107] they hadn’t changed that much, people would still look down on her because she had a baby on her own. It was still a rare man who would take another man’s child on board; and then if they didn’t get on together, that would be the first thing he would cast up to her.
 ‘I never wanted you to go to London!’ she’d cried to Cate on Monday. ‘I knew it would end in trouble.’ Both Sally and Cate had stared at her mystified. ‘I think you’re missing the point, Mammy,’ Sally had replied. But the point was, that Emily had always felt afraid when she thought of Cate’s life in England. There was no logic to this, when she reasoned it out, for Cate was, and had always been, open to the point of transparency. If she had something to hide, would she have urged her mother so frequently to go and visit her? The invitations were never accepted, but Sally and Helen went to stay with Cate, and they, together with Michael and Rosemary, encountered only the kindness, luxury and generosity that were the essence of Cate. But once, when she was home for a holiday, Emily had gone into Cate’s room and suddenly she understood what it was that troubled her. She looked at the big black Filofax on the dressing table, the glass dish full of rings and gold chains, the neat row of marvellous shoes over by the window: the sophistication of Cate’s possessions made Emily see her not just as a daughter, but as a woman; a woman leading a woman’s life in a vast, anonymous city, and she realised that it was the thought of that that had unconsciously frightened her.
 And then there was Helen. Unlike Cate, she was completely dismissive of the idea of marriage, so much so that Emily found it hurtful. She remembered how at Young Michael’s wedding (and what a deal of coaxing there’d been to get Helen to go to it!) Rosemary had said, half as a joke, ‘And what about you, Helen, when are you going to give us a big day?’ Certainly it was tactless, and Helen had a right to be annoyed, but her icy dismissal of the whole idea was so complete, so final, that Emily had been shocked and saddened by it. She couldn’t understand why Helen would feel this way, given that she’d grown up in a house where there was a happy marriage. It wasn’t as if Helen had seen her and Charlie fighting all the time, or Charlie drinking the stars out of the sky, the way some men did. She would have [108] to ask Helen, but she was too afraid. She didn’t like to admit that she was intimidated by her own daughter, but it was true. Sometimes when Cate came home she would feel a little strange with her at first, because she was beautiful. She looked like one of the models in that magazine she worked for, but her personality broke through the gloss almost at once. Within ten minutes of coming into the house she would have kicked off her shoes, she’d be looking in the cake tin, she’d be letting the cats into the kitchen to play with them, she’d be driving you mad and making you laugh the way she did when she was ten. But Helen was different, and always had been.
 Cate had given her more worry than Helen and Sally put together, and look at the pickle she’d landed herself in now, and at her age, too. When Cate was a teenager Emily’s biggest fear had been that Cate might get pregnant. She remembered lying in bed at night listening to the sound of the rain and the wind, Charlie snoring away beside her, but she wouldn’t close an eye until she heard some old car rattle up to the house, and then the back door would open, and the longer the interval was between the car pulling up and the door opening the more anxious she would be. Then she would hear Cate tiptoe up the stairs, home from the dance that, more often than not, she’d argued about with Emily until she’d been granted grudging permission to attend it. She hadn’t liked some of the boys Cate had gone about with in those days, they were a bit wild, and she worried even more about the ones she didn’t know. Then once, in the middle of an argument she’d lost her temper and said, ‘What if you get into trouble and have a baby, what then? That’ll be your life ruined; and all your education lost.’
 ‘My education?’ Cate said. ‘What about me? What about the baby? Is that the only thing that matters in life, education? And anyway, how can you say that to me? Everybody’s always making me out to be far worse than I am.’ She was crying by this stage,’and Emily ended up apologising to her, but there was a coolness between them for a long time after that. Cate had felt deeply-insulted and hurt by what her mother had said.
 They’d never had any trouble with Helen going out to dances, because she’d never looked to go, she’d only ever attended to her school books. Emily had never seen anybody who studied [109]
 as hard as Helen, and now she thought that perhaps she and Charlie should have tried to persuade her to go out more, although at the time she had been glad. She used to say that if the three of them had been like Cate she would have been at her wits’ end with them. Oh it was all very well that Helen had a good job and money and a house, she’d made it to the top of the tree, but the price had been too high. She’d always been deeply serious, even when she was a child, yet Emily had never thought she would grow up to be so cold and formidable. Once, when they were all at the convent, Sister Benedict had said to Emily, ‘Helen is, if anything, too much of a paragon. Kate is an imp, but she is also one of the most likeable girls in this school. And Sally does what she’s told.’
 She had never wanted daughters anyway: did they know that? Of course she’d never told them, but she read somewhere that children could pick up and understand far more than you would ever imagine in a house, even when they were tiny. She’d felt guilty at her own disappointment when Helen had been born, healthy and safe but not the son for whom she had longed. Charlie didn’t care, in fact he’d been delighted. He said he didn’t understand all the fuss about having boys. ‘It’s not as if we’re royalty,’ he’d said, ‘and by the time she’s grown up, women will be less put down than they are now.’ All the Quinns had been delighted with Helen, because Charlie had had no sisters, and Brian’s and Lucy’s first child had been a boy too, so a girl was a great novelty in the family. Maybe that was why Helen and Cate had been closer to Charlie, right from the start. Helen was always so self-possessed, unlike Cate, who from day one had yowled and cried freely for whatever she needed or wanted, who had learnt how to charm people from before she could walk. ‘She has me wound round her wee finger,’ Charlie used to say, as if nothing could give him greater contentment.
 And then when Emily was pregnant for the third time she’d been afraid that if it was another girl, she wouldn’t be able to love it at all. The irony was, that she ended up closer to Sally than to either of the others. All the nurses in the hospital had remarked how much the new baby resembled Emily; and then she’d been weak and frail right from the start, so that she needed her mother in a way that perhaps Helen and Cate had not. Was [110] it that she had known then that Sally would be her last child, and that the idea of a son was just a dream to be forgotten? From the very beginning they’d clung to each other, literally clung, Sally holding her skirt, holding her hand, always sitting beside her and pressing up close, as if she wanted to be absorbed back into Emily, as if she wanted to become her. And then the terrible days when she started school. Helen had gone off calmly when her time had come, and Cate, bored at home without her elder sister, had clamoured to be allowed to go too. But Sally had screamed and clutched the bannisters every morning for the first six weeks. It was Charlie who’d prised her fingers away and carried her, roaring, with her fists flailing, to the car where Helen and Cate were waiting, bemused and mildly entertained by the spectacle their little sister offered. Emily herself had lain on her bed and wept as the car drove off. The house was empty, and silent without the children; she’d hated it, and she kept Sally home on the slightest pretext, for the merest sniffle or ache.
 Even now Sally was still slighter and frailer than her sisters, but there was a strength in her that Emily, who had thought she knew her youngest daughter to the depths of her soul, hadn’t realised existed. She’d seen it first when Charlie was killed, not so much in the immediate aftermath, but in the weeks and months that followed, when other people thought she was probably beginning to ‘get over’ what had happened (as if she ever could!). Sally had known instinctively what she needed then, she’d known the times when Emily was truly helpless with grief, and then she’d cooked for her and looked after her. But she’d also known the times when Emily needed firmness, needed to be pushed. Then Sally would ask her mother to make scones or to let down the hem on a skirt for her, or insist on some other domestic chore that was exactly the distraction Emily needed. Sometimes Sally listened to her far into the night as she talked about Charlie, Charlie, Charlie. Sometimes she told her sharply that there was no point in wallowing in grief, ordered her to talk about something else; and all this tenderness and sharpness was administered with an exact, even eerie, knowledge of what sort of treatment Emily needed at any given moment.
 But although she knew this side of Sally existed, Emily had been taken aback by her assertiveness on Monday, when Cate [111] told them she was going to have a baby, issuing commands, packing Cate off to Belfast the next day and then going to work on Emily to win her round. It was the first major disagreement she’d had with Sally in her life. Even in the smallest things they were usually in accord, agreeing so easily on such matters as what colour to decorate the spare bedroom, so that any dissent was only initial, was like the hesitancy you might have in your own mind between the leaf green and the shell pink. It wasn’t like two people discussing something, it was like one mind thinking aloud, debating with itself until it reached a decision as to what it liked best.
 Emily had slept badly on Monday night, not because she was lying awake thinking about Cate, but because she found herself thinking about her own life and the course it had taken, thinking about her childhood in particular with an attention to detail she rarely allowed herself.
 She couldn’t remember her father’s face properly, and that had always troubled her, puzzled her too, because she could remember other aspects of him so clearly: the tweed waistcoat that smelt of tobacco when you pressed your face into it, the bloodstone ring, the clip of his fountain pen in the breast pocket of his jacket. Images unfolded in her mind like flowers. She was sitting on his knee by the hearth and he showed her pictures in the embers of the fire: a man walking along a road, a cat washing itself, a house in a forest. She was sitting in class in the white school where he was headmaster. They had put their heads on their folded arms to rest, and she could hear the soothing drone of children in the next room reciting their tables: ‘Two ones are two, two twos are four, two threes are six, two fours are eight ...’ and the sound was like a warm rug wrapped around her. After it rained, there was a rich smell of earth and vegetation. Her father took her to the beach, and they walked along the pale sand. They collected shells in a tin bucket, and he told her that all the seas were one sea, that one ocean merged imperceptibly into the next. The sea at the top of the world was cold, there were polar bears there, and icebergs; but the ocean in the tropics was warm and blue and there was coral there, and marvellous coloured fish. And then, later, she came to understand that time was like the ocean, in that all the things that had happened in [112] the past were linked in an extraordinarily simple way. History was no more than the effect of one day following another, one day following another, spooling back from the present to a time when women wore odd hooped skirts and bonnets that hid their faces, back to a time when men killed each other with swords and thought the world was flat, back to a time when people lived in caves.
 And then one morning her mother came to her bed and shook her out of her sleep; shook her out of the warm, happy dream that had been her life up until that moment, and told her that her daddy was dead, her daddy had gone to Heaven. She never saw him again.
 Later that morning, she and Michael were driven through a landscape locked in a drizzling mist to stay in Ballymena with their mother’s sister. They spent three days there, finding it impossible to play, as they were commanded to, in the high, dusty rooms where the light was grey and the only books avail-able were heavy and huge, with close dark type and no pictures. Michael cried for his parents, cried for boredom, cried for fear; and Emily made desultory, big-sisterly attempts to comfort him, telling him that they’d soon be going home.
 But when they were taken back to be with their mother, she was busy packing. ‘It’s not our house,’ she explained briefly. ‘We have to make way for the new teacher who’ll be taking over your daddy’s job.’ Until she saw their mother efficiently breaking it up into its component parts, she hadn’t thought of their home as being made of a series of independent objects. She’d thought that the dresser and the long pale table could exist only in relation to each other as a part of their kitchen, and it unsettled her to see her mother coolly decide to sell the one, and take the other with them when they left. There wouldn’t be room in their aunt’s house for all their things, and their mother expected them to understand this and to co-operate, not to be sentimental and selfish; so there was a tremendous fight over Emily’s bucket of shells, a fight that began with a request, moved to coaxing, insistence, tears, shrieks, and ended with a full-blown tantrum, Emily kicking the bucket to the far side of the room and screaming that if she couldn’t have the shells, she didn’t want anything ever again. [113]
 In the years that followed, this rage would occasionally make itself felt. Her spirit was broken by the time she was twelve, but spirits, whether those of a child or a society, never break cleanly, and the people who didn’t understand this were shocked when the dull, quiet girl, so eager to please, suddenly displayed a violent temper. They thought these two sides of her were at odds; couldn’t understand that the malevolence was the logical corollary to the obsequiousness. One day followed another, and the image of the man she’d loved, who’d made his handkerchief into a mouse to make her laugh, who’d walked with her on the beach, and explained things to her, was replaced with a myth, a distant figure frowning in a picture frame, whom she could honour only by becoming a teacher, like him, and all her memories became like dreams.
 ‘Nobody asked me if I wanted to be a teacher,’ she would say to her daughters, years later. ‘I was put to it. It would never have crossed Mammy’s mind to ask me if I might have preferred to do something else. But I was lucky, I liked it more than I expected I would.’
 She remembered how Cate had remarked once that it was only when you lived away from Northern Ireland that you realised, on returning, how deeply divided a society it was, and how strange the effect of that could be. As an example, she’d cited the time when Sally had absent-mindedly answered a hair-dresser’s stock question ‘Where are you going for your holidays this summer?’ with the word ‘Italy’, and how she’d seen the woman’s face change colour in the mirror. She continued to snip in silence for a few moments more, then said, ‘Will you be staying in the Vatican?’
 ‘Actually, no,’ Sally replied. ‘I’m going to Rimini.’
 The whole family had fallen about and laughed till they wept when Sally told them this; and thinking of it helped Emily to understand the point Cate was making. But when she was growing up, it had seemed completely natural that she should go to the local convent school, and after that to a Catholic teacher training college, and on leaving, teach in a Catholic school. Even though her daughters were old enough to remember Northern Ireland before the Troubles started in the late sixties, they’d only been children then, and couldn’t have been aware of just how [114] difficult it had been for Catholics at that time. Emily herself, as a young adult in the fifties, had only vaguely understood it. She remembered sitting in the garden of her aunt’s house in Ballymena on a warm summer evening, listening to the sound of a flute band practising in the distant streets for the Twelfth celebrations. She listened idly first, just thinking how tinny it was, what poor music, but then she began to think about why they were playing, and as the flutes gave way to the harsh clatter of the big drums, she realised that those people hated her, hated her, and would give her and her family no quarter. And she felt not just the mild fear that was so habitual that she took it for granted, but also a bitter anger. Her mother had come into the garden at that moment and Emily had said furiously, ‘Why do we have to listen to that? Why do we have to put up with it?’ and her mother had looked at her with incomprehension. It was, until the time she met Charlie and Brian, her moment of greatest political awareness, but she wouldn’t have been able then to define it thus.
 At that time ‘politics’ meant Stormont, meant a Protestant government for a Protestant people, so if you happened to be a Catholic, the message was clear. You just worked as hard as possible within the tiny scope that was allowed to you, and that in itself was so time consuming and difficult that few, and certainly not Emily, had the insight or the necessary energy to begin even to think of how things ought to be, or might be, changed. Education was the only hope, it was like a rope that you struggled to cling to, in the hope of puffing yourself up to a position less disadvantaged than the one in which you started out. Keep your head down, look to your own, and don’t expect too much in any case: nobody ever said those words explicitly to her, but then nobody needed to, because the world around her wordlessly insisted on this every single day of her life.
 She felt ashamed now of her lack of awareness; but then it was only fair to remember that her sense of personal dispossession had been so intense that it perhaps would have been asking too much of her when she was a young girl to unravel the strands of her own unhappiness, to identify and name each cause in turn. Sometimes she remembered what her father had told her about time and the ocean; and the sense of dislocation [115] from her life with him was so great that she couldn’t believe nothing separated her from the past but that simple chain of one day following another, one day following another. The loss of her father, which brought with it the end of her childhood, left in her life a terrible wound which nothing could heal until the moment she walked through the door of a Belfast primary school as a trainee teacher. Lying in bed now, over forty years later, the names and faces of the children came back to her: Martin and Bernadette and Mary and Henry and Joe, with their open faces and harsh accents, their freckles and their scabby knees, their short trousers and cotton dresses: they were lovely children. They gave her more than they ever knew, for they gave her not a path back into her childhood, because that couldn’t be done, but a way of building on the happiness of those early years in a way she would never have thought possible.
 Ballymena was a quiet country market town, and although Emily hadn’t enjoyed growing up there, she’d become used to its air of Presbyterian rectitude, its rain and Sunday silences. She hadn’t expected to like Belfast, because on the occasional visits she’d made there it had seemed to her a loud, grimy, ugly place. When she went there to attend the teacher training college she found that even if these impressions were accurate, they were irrelevant. It might be an ugly city but it had a beautiful position, tucked between the mountains and the sea. The rows and rows of terraced red-brick houses, with the mills, the yellow gantries of the shipyards, the spires of the churches, and the bare slopes of the Black Mountain together gave the city its atmosphere. The air was smoky, and when she woke in the morning, she could hear the clang and rumble of trolley buses going up and down the Falls Road. She didn’t tell her mother, but she decided that when she was qualified, she would do her best to find a job in Belfast, rather than go back to Ballymena as was expected of her.
 She blossomed at the training college, and made friends there, which she hadn’t done in Ballymena because she’d been made to feel that her aunt was doing a great favour in allowing them to live in her house, and that to start bringing other little girls in would be pushing her hospitality to its limits. In her first term she made friends with a woman called Agnes Bell, whose father owned a pub near Randalstown. Angular Aggie, they called her, [116] because she stayed skinny no matter how much she ate. ‘Amn’t I a fierce rickle of bones?’ she used to say plaintively, nipping at the flesh on her legs and arms. For all that, she loved clothes, and they’d often gone shopping together in the city centre. Because her father was so well off, Agnes could afford wonderful suits and dresses out of places like The Bank Buildings and Robinson and Cleaver’s which were far beyond Emily’s reach, even after she was qualified and earning a good wage.
 She quarrelled with her mother over her first pay packet, something she never forgot and for which she never forgave her mother because it spoiled the long-awaited delight of having her own money that she had earned for herself. Michael was still at school, and she accepted that she would have to contribute substantially, but her mother thought that what she offered wasn’t enough. More than that, she said that if Emily had any sense of gratitude for everything that had been done for her, and the education she had been given, she would hand over her pay packet unopened every Friday night, and let her mother decide how much should go to the family, and how much Emily should be given for, as her mother put it, ‘her own amusement’. The ‘amusement’ included lodging in Miss Regan’s tiny red-brick house near Clonard, and Emily’s mother did regard that as a luxury which could have been done without if Emily had had the decency to look for a job in Ballymena, so that she could live at home again. ‘No chance,’ Emily had said to Agnes, and the two of them had danced round the room when they both got jobs in the same school in the lower Falls, where Emily had done her teaching practice. She’d needed good clothes too, nothing as classy as the things Agnes wore, but more and better than her mother realised, because it was important for teachers to be well turned out then. Everyone expected it, even the children, and you wouldn’t have been respected if you were scruffy.
 Her daughters thought that the life she’d lived then had been a terrible hardship, although it hadn’t seemed so bad to her. ‘How did you stand it at all?’ they used to ask, but she’d actually enjoyed much of it, and she enjoyed telling her daughters about her life at that time. She described to them the frugal room she’d had in Miss Regan’s house, Miss Regan who couldn’t cook, whose fried eggs were always burnt on the bottom and raw on [117] the top, whose sausages always split in the pan, whose steak suet pudding defied description. They used to go to Clonard Women’s Confraternity together once a week (‘Talk about high living!’ Helen said). Sometimes to treat Miss Regan and to spare herself Emily would tell her not to cook a dinner and they had fish and chips instead, which Emily paid for. Even now, after all those years, Emily remembered how much she had enjoyed those evenings, and if ever anyone passed her on the street eating chips the smell of the vinegar and the fried potatoes brought back to her how much it had meant to her to sit in the minuscule parlour; and the fire in the hearth, Miss Regan’s huge, kind eyes, the sound of the buses and the sound of the rain, the street lights dappling against the pulled blinds. She didn’t try too hard to explain to the girls why she’d felt so contented then, because she’d have had to explain how cold her own home life had been, and even though she knew they knew about that, she would have felt disloyal. Sitting in the parlour in Belfast there’d been a cosiness, an easiness, that she had never felt in her own family home.
 Emily still wasn’t convinced that teaching was an easier job now than then. ‘It was a real profession in my day,’ she used to say to Sally, ‘you were well regarded and society backed you up.’ The children then would never have turned the word on you; Emily could scarcely believe some of the stories she heard now, of even very small children swearing and shouting at their teachers.
 The conditions had been hard, though, there was no denying that: forty children to a class was nothing unusual. Sometimes you had had to share a classroom with another teacher, and then the lessons had to be carefully co-ordinated, so that one group wouldn’t unduly disturb the other. Sally was shocked when Emily said she hadn’t even had a chair, there hadn’t been the space for it: there had just been a teacher’s table pushed up hard against the wall. It meant that she’d been on her feet from the first bell of the day to the last. Often at the end of the week it was as much as she could do to drag herself into the city centre on a Friday afternoon and take the bus to Ballymena. Like most of the passengers, she usually fell asleep as they drove through [118] the countryside. No wonder she’d been so reluctant to hand her wages straight over to her mother!
 Sometimes it made her sad that the children she taught had such a tough future ahead of them. Emily might regret their lack of ambition, but at other times she would think it a blessing that they didn’t have high aspirations that would only be frustrated. When she asked them what they wanted to do when they grew up most of the boys said, ‘I want to drive a horse for Wordie, Miss,’ meaning Wordie Cowan, the brewer. The girls didn’t even have the prospect of the linen mills where their mothers worked, for by the nineteen fifties, even these were being closed down. On the buses Emily shrank from sitting beside the mill workers for fear that the long white threads that clung to their clothes would attach themselves to her own coat or dress. She felt guilty, though, about drawing back from these weary women, whose own mothers brought the women’s children to school every day, and placed them in Emily’s care. As far as the unemployed fathers were concerned, the big shipyards and the other heavy industries of Belfast might as well have been on the moon for all the chance they or their sons had of getting a job there, because they were Catholics. Only the most gifted, the most determined and the most hard working had even the slimmest chance of making out well in the world: and yet education was their hope.
 During the course of the first autumn term, Agnes’s brother Paul started to take an interest in her. He’d drive up to Belfast in his father’s black Zephyr, and take her to the cinema, or dancing in the Floral Hall on the rare weekends she stayed in Belfast. She realised afterwards that she hadn’t really been interested in him, he was as skinny as Agnes herself, and it was the attention he paid her that was flattering. She told her mother and aunt about him, not even thinking why: she’d have been shocked if anyone said she was boasting, but that was exactly what it was. She only realised how foolish she’d been when she proudly showed them the crystal necklace he gave her that Christmas. She remembered how her mother had held it up against the light, admiring its sparkle, and suddenly her aunt said, ‘He must mean business, Emily.’ She had a, cold, strange feeling in the pit of her stomach. ‘Oh, I don’t know about that,’ [119] she said, reaching out her hands for the beads which felt to her now like morsels of ice. ‘He has plenty of money, I’m sure as far as he’s concerned it’s just an ordinary wee Christmas present,’ which somehow didn’t add up with the triumph with which she’d first shown them the necklace some moments earlier. Her mother and aunt smiled, and her aunt said, ‘Oh, go away on out of that!’ Emily put the beads back in their box.
 So when she started going out with Charlie a couple of months later, she didn’t let on to her family. Funnily enough, she met him through Agnes too. Agnes had an uncle who was a priest on the Missions in Nigeria, and when he was at home for a holiday, Agnes’s family held a big barn dance to raise money for him to take back to his parish.
 All through their married life, Charlie would tease her because she couldn’t remember the exact moment they met. But Agnes had dragged her around the dance that night presenting her to so many of her friends from home, that the moment when she said, ‘Emily, this is Charlie Quinn,’ became lost immediately in a blur of similar introductions. What Emily did remember was the end of the night, when she was saying goodbye to Charlie. ‘The next time you’re up in Belfast, come and see me,’ she said. ‘I’d like that. Agnes knows where I am.’ He’d looked surprised, as well he might have done, for it must have looked terribly forward. But she was willing to risk having him think badly of her if that was necessary, if the alternative was not seeing him again because she’d stood too much on her dignity. At some point in the evening, after that initial introduction, they’d ended up together again, sitting on a bale of straw, drinking Coca-Cola, and talking. It made her realise how little she cared for Paul. What had mattered was not Paul himself, but that her mother would be impressed with the gifts he gave her, that Miss Regan would notice and admire the fine car in which he came to collect Emily, what mattered were the lunches, the dances, the trips to the cinema, but Paul himself didn’t matter at all.
 When Charlie did come to Belfast and started taking her out, it was Charlie himself Miss Regan commented on, not his possessions. ‘He’s a lovely big fella, Emily,’ she said over their usual breakfast of burnt toast and gluey porridge the morning after she met him. Agnes proved to be a good friend, too, telling [120] Emily not to worry about Paul. ‘I’ve told him already he’s out of the picture.’ Later in the spring she asked Emily if she’d mentioned Charlie to her family.
 Emily said that she hadn’t. ‘Well, I would, if I were you, because they’re going to get a right shock when you tell them you’re getting married, and it turns out to be to some person they’ve never heard tell of.’ Emily didn’t reply, but she took the advice offered. Her mother didn’t seem to notice, though, particularly when she found out how small and poor a farm he had. Emily insisted on this point, and her mother, she realised a long time afterwards, misunderstood this, took it as an indication that she wasn’t, couldn’t be, serious about him. Oh, she’d thought her own mother so cold in comparison with Charlie’s mother when she met her, and there couldn’t have been a clearer display of the difference than when they decided to get married: Emily’s mother’s anger and tears; Charlie’s mother’s tears and delight. ‘Of course they’re delighted,’ Emily’s mother said, ‘they have all to gain and nothing to lose from this. What will you do about your career? I can’t believe you’re just going to throw it away like this.’
 The worst thing was, her mother had a point here, something which Emily herself had thought about without resolving the problem. At the end of her first year’s teaching, they took the children on a trip to Groomsport in County Down for the day. The only photographs she had from her time as a teacher were some pictures one of the other teachers took with a Box Brownie on that day, and every so often she would take them out and look at them. The children had been so excited: it was such a big treat then to go to the sea. The night before, Charlie had asked her to marry him, and she’d said yes. Sitting on the beach, she realised that she’d always thought that someday she probably would get married, but not for a long time. If she went to live in the country, she would have to give up her job in Belfast, but if she was married, it would be hard, maybe impossible, for her to find another job there. It wasn’t seen as right for women to go on working when they were married, they were supposed to stay at home and look after their own children. It was so unfair that she couldn’t have both, she thought, as she watched the children run and scream on the beach. Even Agnes, [121] when she asked her later, wasn’t able to offer her much comfort: they both remembered from the training college stories they heard about women who went for job interviews and who put their engagement rings in their pockets before they went in. But they always got found out, they never got the jobs, and were called deceitful and sly for having tried to hide their intentions.
 A week after Emily told her mother she was engaged, her mother sent her a letter cut out from The Irish News. Emily had seen letters like this before, but coming in the post to her, with no accompanying note from her mother, it had seemed like a poison-pen letter directed to her personally, and the words burned into her mind:

 Sir,
 One notes with sorrow the growing number of girls who, on marrying, selfishly retain their jobs in our Catholic schools, thereby denying employment to unmarried girls who need teaching posts, and, more importantly, to men, many of whom may have wives and children of their own to support. To see such a lack of understanding of their own Christian vocation as wives and mothers makes one wonder if closer attention needs to be paid to the type of girl who is selected to be trained as teachers. Are girls so ignorant of the role God has ordained for them the sort of people to whom we should be entrusting the care of our children?
 Yours, etc.,
 Patrick Gallagher

 She’d responded by tearing the cutting to shreds, and posting it back to her mother, again without a covering letter. Things went from bad to worse after that. Emily became increasingly bloody-minded: she would admit that now. So she couldn’t have both her husband and her job. So be it: she chose to marry. So her expensive education would be wasted: was that not the fault of society, for not letting her use it? Why blame Emily? She made her mother admit without difficulty that it was to give it up for so little that was shocking to her. If Emily had decided to marry Paul, who would inherit his father’s pub and house, that would have been a different matter. Education used as bait to get a [122] good catch was, evidently, not a waste of years of study in the way marrying someone with no money was.
 ‘She’ll come round to me in time,’ Charlie said, with endearing optimism. She never did.
 And Sally knew her mother so well that it was just this point she had worked round to yesterday when she argued Cate’s case. Poor Cate this, it had been, poor Cate that: to begin, her main concern had been to urge compassion. Cate must surely feel bad about what had happened, Sally argued. So what were they, her family, to do? Force her to feel more miserable still? What end would that serve, but to drive her away. Cate only had her family now. This man, whoever he was, had evidently walked away from the situation: were they to reject her too?
 ‘And don’t forget,’ she’d said more than once, ‘it’s a baby we’re talking about, your grandchild, my niece.’
 ‘I never wanted a grandchild in these circumstances,’ she’d said, and was surprised at the vehemence with which Sally had rounded on her.
 ‘And do you think Cate wanted this? I’m sure Cate would have wanted to get married before she had children, but it hasn’t worked out that way, and no one needs reminding of the pity of that less than Cate.’
 Sally was right. You couldn’t always choose what happened in life, but you were free to decide whether or not you thought something was worthy of regrets. ‘If you regret things that don’t merit it, you give them more power, more dignity than they deserve,’ she thought. Sally had pressed on, though, pushing the issue to consequences that Emily might have allowed her mind to flit around, but which it was unbearable to hear spoken aloud. Once she knew the baby was on the way, what could Cate have done about it? Plenty. It would have been easy for Cate to have had an abortion in London, Sally said bluntly, and none of us would have been any the wiser. Is that what you really would have liked? she asked, as Emily howled and wept. No not that, never that. Well then, Sally said. But by having the baby, would she, Cate, be setting up a circle which, she, Emily, would be forever forcing her to square?
 It was just this dilemma that Sally was asking Emily to spare Cate. Emily had thought that once she’d married Charlie, her [123] mother would bow to the inevitable and accept him; but she didn’t, and there was nothing Emily could do to change this. If her mother had decided not to accept that Emily had made a good marriage, that was her choice. After a few years, Emily had stopped trying to win her round: she seldom went to visit her: it was always Charlie who took the children to Ballymena to visit their grandmother, insisting that he would never be the cause of a total breakdown in communication between Emily and her family. ‘Life’s too short,’ he kept saying. ‘She won’t always be there, and then you’ll feel bad about it.’
 ‘I feel bad about it already,’ Emily had always replied to him. Believing that she was right and her mother was wrong was no proof against guilt. ‘It was like walking around for thirty years with a nail in the sole of your shoe,’ she used to tell Sally.
 A few years after her mother died, which happened when the girls were still at school, Emily dreamt one night that she was with her family on a raft which was drifting down a river. Only Emily was awake: her daughters, husband, brother and mother were all curled up sleeping, and as she watched them, she was aware of all the things about them which she didn’t like, which annoyed her. Her mother’s rejection of Charlie. Helen’s untidiness, her sarcasm. Cate, in the dream, was wearing her school uniform. Her nails and lips were crimson, and Emily thought bitterly about the rows they had had about make-up and dances and clothes. She looked at Charlie and remembered how angry she’d been when she found out that he’d been giving money to Peter, money they could well have been doing with for their daughters. Long-forgotten incidents, some serious, some trivial, crowded in on her as she stared at her sleeping family with vexation and resentment.
 Suddenly, she became aware of the distant roar of water: aware of what it meant too. The raft was headed for a waterfall. They were all going to drown, and the raft drifted on inexorably. There was nothing she could do to avert disaster.
 How different everything looked in the light of this knowledge! It was laughably foolish to get upset about Cate’s lipstick. Charlie’s largesse to his brother became a virtue rather than a flaw, but most significant of all, her attitude to her mother was transformed by the spirit of compassion and forgiveness she felt [124] now towards her doomed family. She couldn’t change the fact of things but she could change how she saw them, and in that way she could determine the effect they had on her. This knowledge was the nearest she ever came to a reconciliation with her mother, but she found she couldn’t talk to anyone about what she had learnt, not even to Charlie. All she could do was try to tell her daughters that it was important to know what mattered in life and what didn’t, and that often it was the things you wouldn’t have expected that mattered the most, and that a great deal didn’t matter at all.
 She passed her hands over her eyes. It all seemed so long ago, because now everything was different. Against the dream of the raft she had to set another dream, one which had troubled her, night after night, which gave her no peace.
 She was standing in Lucy’s kitchen, and at her feet was a long thing over which someone had thrown a check table cloth. There were two feet sticking out at one end, wearing a pair of boots she’d helped Charlie to choose in a shop in Antrim. The other end of the cloth was dark and wet; there was a stench of blood and excrement. At the far side of the room, a young man was cowering: eighteen, nineteen years old at the most, a skinny, shivering boy in jeans and a tee-shirt, with ugly tattoos on his forearms. His face was red and distorted because he was crying. ‘Please, Missus,’ he kept saying to Emily, ‘please, Missus, I’m sorry for what I did, I’m sorry, so I am, please, Missus ...’ She stood staring at him until he was crying so hard that he could no longer make himself understood. Then Emily spoke, quietly, distinctly.
 ‘I will never forgive you,’ she said.
 Oh she couldn’t tell even her own daughters what it was like to wake from a dream like that and know it was the truth, to know that your heart had been forced shut. To be a woman in her late sixties, to have prayed to God every day of her life, and to be left so that she could feel no compassion, no mercy, only bitterness and hate, was a kind of horror she had never imagined.
 She had confided only in Father Johnston, the young curate who had anointed Charlie, and she’d talked to him, oddly enough, because she believed he wouldn’t be able to understand. He came to see her frequently after the killing. They sat facing [125] each other across the kitchen table. Sometimes there would be long silences in which neither of them spoke. She turned away from him, looked out of the window at the winter sky, the bare trees, the grey waters of the lough.
 ‘The world’s empty to me without my husband,’ she said to this young man, who’d probably never known what it was to take a girl in his arms and kiss her, much less share his life with someone for almost forty years. ‘I can’t forgive them for what they did, Father. I’ll tell you more than that: I don’t want to be able to forgive them either.’
 ‘Mrs Quinn,’ the curate said, and the tone of his voice made her turn towards him again. ‘I saw what they did to your husband. If somebody did that to my father, I wouldn’t be able to forgive them either. I think the best I could manage would be to pray that someday I might be able to want to forgive them.’ They sat in silence again for some moments. ‘I hope you don’t mind that I come to see you so often,’ he said, and Emily had realised then that it was as much to console himself as to console her that he came to her house. ‘I go to see the other Mrs Quinn too, but that’s different, being there ...’ His voice trailed away, and he dropped his eyes, embarrassed, realising he had said too much. Brian had told her that he had heard the priest being sick out in the yard after what he’d seen in the house.
 ‘You’re always welcome here, Father,’ Emily said. He smiled timidly at her, and she thought of how she had longed for a son. She called him ‘Father’ but she thought of him as a child.
 He’d have been little more than a baby when the Troubles started, for it was twenty-five years ago now. When she was at school, she’d read about the Thirty Years War, and she remembered asking the teacher how there could have been such a thing. ‘Did they fight battles every single day for the whole of the thirty years, Miss, or did they stop for a rest every year or so?’ The teacher had said that she didn’t know.
 Not long before Cate came home, Sally had taken Emily into Ballymena to do some shopping. They went into the Skandia to have their lunch, and at a nearby table they saw Mrs Larkin. Emily said hello to her, and they exchanged a few words; but during their meal, she found that she couldn’t help looking over at Mrs Larkin. A wee woman in a grey coat, you’d never have [126] picked her out in a crowd, you’d never have been able to guess all she’d been through: how she stayed closed in her bedroom for months after Tony died; how she wouldn’t utter a word, as if she had been struck dumb; how she’d been in and out of the mental hospital for years after that, until gradually she began to speak a little, to live again a little. At Charlie’s wake she’d gripped Emily’s hand and said, ‘If people tell you you’ll get over it, Mrs Quinn, don’t believe them, because it isn’t true.’ There’d been well over three thousand people killed since the start of the Troubles, and every single one of them had parents or husbands and wives and children whose lives had been wrecked. It would be written about in the paper for two days, but as soon as the funeral was over it was as if that was the end, when it was really only the beginning.
 Look at Lucy: poor Lucy, who had always been so relaxed, so easygoing. She’d been on tranquillisers and sleeping tablets for months after she saw Charlie being killed. They’d had a big security light installed in the yard, that switched itself on when anybody came near the house; and bolts and double locks fitted on the doors. It was like Fort Knox when you went over to see Brian and Lucy now, you could hear the keys rattling as they let you in; and still Lucy was living on her nerves.
 Nobody could fathom the suffering the Troubles had brought people, and all the terrible things that had happened. When Sally came in a moment later with a cup of tea and some biscuits for Emily, it somehow confirmed this: Sally going over to the window and saying wasn’t that a lovely chaffinch on the tree there; asking Emily if she was warm enough; admiring the Dutch fern Helen had bought for her a couple of weeks ago: this affectionate ordinariness was the dearest thing in life for Emily, and that was what had been destroyed: Charlie should have been there with them.
 Sally turned away from the plants and sat down opposite her mother. ‘Well, have you had a reasonable afternoon? Did you have a good think about things?’
 ‘Ah, my mind’s been all over the place. I was thinking about your daddy.’
 ‘And about Cate?’
 ‘I thought about all of you.’ [127]
 Sally paused. ‘And Cate?’ she persisted gently.
 It was some moments before Emily spoke. ‘What I know, Sally, is this,’ she said at last. ‘The next time Cate comes home from England for a holiday, she won’t be on her own. She’ll have a wee baby with her. And I can make the pair of them welcome, or I can always be reminding Cate, even without saying anything directly to her, how bad a show it is for the child to have no father. And I could go on doing that until the child itself is old enough to know what’s going on. But where would that get any of us? It’s what your daddy was always saying, life’s too short for that sort of thing. And yet it is a bad show, Sally, what’s happened. I won’t be able to feel the way I ought to or indeed want to for a while yet. And you and Cate are going to have to bear with me on that. I know what’s required of me, but it’ll take time. Cate will have to be told that.’
 Sally smiled. ‘This is as much as I ever expected you to be able to say at this stage; in fact I think it’s great you’re already this far forward. You’re right, too, Cate will have to have this explained to her.’
 They heard the sound of a car puffing up outside the house. ‘That’ll be her now. Stay there, I’ll let her in, and I’ll send her in to you, and you can tell her about it yourself, right now.’ [128]