Chapter Twelve

HELEN, Sally and Kate arrived home from school at half-past four. This evening, as always, the first thing they did was to change out of their school uniforms, and put on jumpers and jeans. When they came downstairs again, their mother had a dinner of pork chops, mashed potatoes and peas ready for them. By the time this was finished, it was almost half-past five. Together with their parents, they watched the local news on television, and then at six, the international news from the BBC. Helen only watched the first quarter of an hour of this: by six-fifteen she was at her desk, preparing to start her homework.
 Because their mother set such store by education, each of the three sisters had a proper place to study, unlike some of their friends at school, who had to do their homework at the kitchen table, or in a living room where the television was always on. Helen had a desk in her bedroom; Kate had a table in the bed-room she shared with Sally, and Sally did her homework in the parlour. When Helen went off to university in Belfast the following year, Sally would do her homework where Helen now worked.
 Helen’s desk was beside a window which looked out on the back of the house; and in the spring and autumn it was a great distraction to her. She could see the field behind the house and the lough in the distance, and what she could see beyond that depended on the weather: sometimes the houses on the far shore would stand out, vivid and white; sometimes mist and rain would lock everything in greyness, and the shore, even the lough itself, would be obscured. Often when she should have been working her mind would wander, and she would day-dream, gazing out at the sky, or at the cattle walking slowly through the field. It was a strange and, Helen realised, an unfair thing that she was always treated as the paragon of the Quinn family, for Kate was every bit as bright as her elder sister. She was that rare thing: a studious rebel, and her powers of concentration were [151] far superior to Helen’s. Kate worked with her back to the window and a lamp on her desk. She completed her homework in half the time it took Helen, and spent the rest of the evening watching television, leafing through the fashion magazines she bought with her pocket money; or locked in the bathroom conditioning her hair, or giving herself face-packs. With Helen it was pure will, and no matter how much she did, she never felt that it was enough. She was a straight A student: but then so was Kate.
 From six-fifteen until seven-fifteen this evening, she worked on an essay about first-person narrative in Great Expectations. From seven-fifteen until eight o’clock, she read a chapter of La maison de Claudine, looking up in her dictionary the French words she didn’t understand, and copying them into her vocabulary notebook. At eight o’clock, she went down to the kitchen and made a cup of tea. She took it back up to her room, switched on the radio, and twiddled with the dial until she found some music she liked. As she sat listening to it, she let her mind wander around the day’s events. She realised how tired she was, but she still had her History homework to do.
 This afternoon, she had had to go and see the headmistress, Sister Benedict, in her office, to discuss the choices she had made on her UCCA form. All the girls in her year had to do this, and lots of them dreaded it because the nun could be harsh, scolding them for vanity in applying to do subjects for which they had no hope of being accepted. Sometimes people would be castigated for the exact opposite, for not being sufficiently ambitious, for not fulfilling their potential.
 ‘Maybe she’ll try to coax you into being a nun,’ Kate had said to Helen on the bus to school that morning, and Helen had snorted with laughter at the idea of it. ‘You never know,’ Kate said. ‘I don’t think anyone’s ever going to waste their time trying to persuade me. The thought of it! Living in a big house with a pack of other women and all of them dressed exactly the same as me, and no men allowed. No chance!’
 Helen had been working in the library when one of her class-mates came and said that Sister Benedict wanted to see her. To reach the headmistress’s office required Helen to walk almost the full length of the school, along wood-panelled corridors, past [152] coloured-plaster statues on plinths, with posies of flowers before them, past closed doors from behind which came the sound of singing, or chanted verbs, or the solitary voice of a teacher explaining something to her class. Once, when Granny Kate had visited the school, she had remarked, ‘You’d nearly think a place like this ought to be more untidy than it is, with a couple of hundred girls in it, five days a week’ Helen agreed, as she noted the neat cloakrooms, the posters pinned up along the corridors, the carefully tended plants on the window-sills. There was a smell of warm apple pie coming from the Domestic Science kitchens. That was probably Kate’s class: she’d had with her on the bus this morning the old Kimberly biscuit tin in which she carried her apron and the covered dish in which she would bring home the fruits of her labours. Kate had insisted on doing Domestic Science 0 level, because she wanted to study Needle-work. She had had a difficult time persuading Sister Benedict to allow her to do this. Far from encouraging home-making skills in her pupils, the nun regarded it as a course of study suitable only for those who weren’t bright enough to do an extra science subject. She’d wanted Kate to do Physics. But whatever Kate’s skill was at Needlework, she was a hopeless cook. God, the thing she’d brought home last week! Kate had claimed it was a steamed suet pudding. Helen had seen her down at the back of the bus, trying to get some of the boys from the Academy to taste it, as a dare.
 Sister Benedict’s office, when Helen went into it, was noticeably warmer than the corridor outside. It was a classic autumn day in Northern Ireland. Beyond the window, leaves were streaming down from the trees in a strong wind, and heavy rain poured down the glass. Sister Benedict, who had been staring at this, turned when Helen came into the room. The nun was wearing a thick black cardigan over her habit. She had spent over twenty years in Africa, and had never been able to get used to the Irish climate again. Every child in the school knew of this foible. ‘Isn’t it terribly cold, girls?’ she would say when she passed them in the corridor, tapping the radiators to make sure they were switched on. She used to complain about draughts, and was at loggerheads with the vice principal, Sister Philomena, who was forever opening doors and windows, and who was as [153] obsessed with fresh air as Sister Benedict was with warmth. But then, the two nuns were frequently at odds over many things, and the temperature of the school was one of their least significant points of difference.
 Although it was Sister Benedict who, as principal, finally assessed and signed the university application forms, it was Sister Philomena, the form teacher of the final-year class, who helped the girls to fill in the forms correctly. A few years ago, she had poured scorn on the pupils who put ‘British’ in the space where they were to put their nationality, and instructed them to change it to ‘Irish’. This had not gone down at all well in the home of one girl, whose father was a policeman. He made a special visit to the school to express his displeasure to Sister Benedict, who had, in turn, so rumour had it, given Sister Philomena a ferocious lecture about what she had done. Ever since then, when they came to the section of the form dealing with nationality, Sister Philomena told the girls to ask their parents what they should put there; and ever since then, the pupils had been divided in their allegiance, admiring and supporting either one nun or the other.
 In their free time, the girls would sometimes argue about this. Although the school was completely Catholic, there were still sharp divisions of political opinion within it. Girls like Brian’s and Lucy’s daughter Una liked Sister Philomena. Because she had grown up in Derry, they said, she understood how Catholics were discriminated against in Northern Ireland; unlike Sister Benedict, who was from the Republic. If you told Sister Philomena your father or brother had been pulled out of their car and beaten up at an army checkpoint in the middle of the night, she’d be angry and sympathise with you; she wouldn’t automatically assume that they must have done something to bring it upon themselves. Girls such as the policeman’s younger daughter, who was in Helen’s class, or another pupil who had an uncle an Alliance MP, resented the pep talks Sister Philomena used to give them: ‘This is your society, and don’t you forget it. You have as much right to be in it as anyone else, and I want you all to get out there and claim the place that’s waiting for you, the place you deserve.”Does she really think we need to be told all that?’ they would say with disdain. They complained that Sister [154] Philomena was always bringing politics into education; Sister Philomena’s supporters maintained that education was already a political issue in Northern Ireland, and that it was Sister Benedict who was at fault, for trying to deny or ignore this.
 Helen’s position was unusual, in that she thought Sister Philomena was right, but she liked Sister Benedict best. It made her sad to see how Sister Benedict would unwittingly annoy or alienate some of the girls, and it had happened again that very morning at assembly, when she led them in a prayer for a soldier who had been shot during the night. ‘Bloody bitch,’ a girl near Helen hissed, folding her arms sullenly. When Sister Philomena took assembly, she would pray ‘for peace in Northern Ireland, and for all the victims of the Troubles’, to which no one ever seemed to object.
 Helen was surprised at how fond she was of Sister Benedict. If she’d been her contemporary, she thought, she’d probably _ have been her best friend. She wasn’t like the other nuns. For one thing, she was incredibly untidy, as Helen herself was, and she knew how Sister Benedict struggled for that perfect order which came so naturally to the others: most of the time, she didn’t achieve it. She started to rummage now on a desk piled high with books and papers. ‘I know your forms are here, Helen, I saw them a moment ago.’ While she searched, Helen looked around the office, at the magnolia walls hung with a photograph of the Pope, a reproduction of Fra Angelico’s Annunciation, and a slender crucifix. She looked, too, at the nun whose life was a mystery to Helen.
 The girls in Helen’s class had once calculated that if Sister Benedict had been to university in Dublin for four years, in Africa for twenty years and in Northern Ireland for ten, then she must have been at least in her early fifties, although you’d never have guessed it from looking at her. They knew that she had grown up on a farm in Tipperary, and that she had been the eldest of six children.
 When Helen was in fifth form, there had been a one-day retreat organised for the senior girls on the theme of the Missions. Two priests, home from Tanzania, had come to talk to them about the work they did, showed them slides; and Sister Benedict had been obliged to give a testimony of her own vocation. She had told [155] them how happy she’d been the day she made her final vows, and described saying goodbye to her parents before she left for Kenya, knowing in her heart that she would probably never see them again ‘in this world’, was how she’d put it. It almost turned Helen against her, to hear her calmly describe how she’d received a telegram, telling of her father’s death. ‘I knew it was God’s will’ seemed an inadequate response to Helen; there must have been an underlying coldness there.
 They were given an hour that afternoon to pray or to read their Bibles, and Helen had been sitting on a stone bench in the convent garden, her shut Bible on her knees, when Sister Benedict came up and sat beside her.
 ‘Are you enjoying hearing the priests talk about the Missions?’ she asked.
 ‘It’s interesting,’ Helen said, with polite diplomacy.
 ‘I’ll be so glad when it’s over,’ the nun said frankly, stirring the gravel on the path with the toe of her shoe. ‘I hate it, it makes me feel ... homesick, looking at the slides, or even just hearing about it. It’s strange, I feel the way so many of the Irish sisters used to feel when they were out there, a terrible sense of yearning to be somewhere else. And anyway, I don’t like the way the idea of the Missions is presented here. There’s still this “pennies for the black babies” mentality; this idea that we do something for them. The people I knew in Kenya gave me more in twenty years than I could have given them in twenty lifetimes. But I was deceiving myself at some level. I liked to think I was doing God’s will, but it happened to coincide exactly with what I wanted to do, so it made it easy for me to see it in such noble terms. My vows were never a problem to me. Poverty: we’d had so little in material terms when I was a child, and there’d been no want of happiness in the house for it. It never grieved me not to get married and have a family of my own. When God gave me my vocation, he also gave me the gift of a celibate heart.’
 Helen felt uncomfortable when she heard Sister Benedict talk in this way. It made her seem distant, and jarred with the image she had previously formed of her. It wasn’t that she thought the nun was insincere, but she spoke of a reality which Helen had not experienced, and with which she could not empathise. [156]
 ‘My problem, I now see, was obedience. The day I was told I was being sent to Northern Ireland was the hardest day of my life. Harder, even, I think, than when my father died.’ Her words were more broken now, there were long pauses between the sentences. ‘I remember leaving the mission station. I remember saying goodbye to my friends. We flew from Nairobi to London. I had my rosary beads in my pocket, and throughout the flight I kept putting them through my fingers saying on each bead, “Thy will, not mine, 0 Lord, Thy will, not mine.” I kept saying it, when we changed planes at Heathrow. We landed in Northern Ireland; it was a day in winter. I remember the physical shock of the cold when I walked across the tarmac, I remember the rain beating into me and I thought “How am I going to live here?” ‘ She laughed. ‘When we got to the convent, there was a bowl of fruit in the parlour: small, faded-looking fruit; and it somehow got fixed in my mind, this is what you’ve come to. I’ve never been able to forget the fruit. I … I even thought about leaving the Order and going away again, as a development worker, but I knew that that was just the Devil trying to under-mine my vocation. Because I never stopped believing in that, whatever else, and no matter how hard it became. Every morning, when I was in Kenya, I used to thank God for my vocation. Here, I pray that I’ll be able to fulfil it.’
 Helen tried to focus her attention on what Sister Benedict was saying to her. ‘These are your forms, aren’t they? You’re doing French, English and History, I see.’ Helen nodded. ‘I see you’ve applied to read Law at Queen’s for your first choice. Law! That’s impressive.’
 ‘My parents aren’t very happy about it,’ Helen blurted out, in spite of herself. She hadn’t wanted to say this.
 ‘Aren’t they? Why not? Do they think you won’t get the grades? Your teachers have nothing but praise. I see here that you did exceptionally well in your mock A levels last year. Why aren’t your parents happy?’
 ‘I … I think it’s a bit hard for them to believe, the idea of their daughter doing Law. It seems over-ambitious. I’m the first person in my family to go to university, and I think they find it hard to get used to that, no matter what I’m planning to study.’
 ‘What would they like you to do?’ [157]
 ‘They’d like me to go to St Mary’s and be a primary school teacher.’ Sister Benedict raised her eyebrows. ‘My mother was a teacher,’ Helen added, but still the nun didn’t respond, which made Helen anxious. ‘I mean, she trained to be a teacher, but she only worked at it for a year or so, then she got married and stopped.’ Sister Benedict was looking at her very hard now, but Helen had nothing left to say. She looked helplessly towards the window, which was still streaming with rain.
 ‘Have you ever heard that there is nothing more important to children than what their parents have not been?’
 ‘No, Sister.’ She didn’t know what further comment she could make about this.
 ‘And why Law?’
 ‘We need our Catholic lawyers in this society,’ Helen said, and Sister Benedict looked up sharply at her. She thought Helen was being sarcastic, repeating the words Sister Philomena was constantly repeating to them: ‘Our educated Catholics have a role to play in this society. We need our Catholic teachers and doctors and nurses and lawyers.’ Helen felt confused now.
 Sister Benedict stared at her for a few moments. ‘Well,’ she said eventually, ‘if the educated Catholic middle class in Northern Ireland was bigger, it probably would make a difference, but I dare say not the difference you or indeed others have in mind.’
 ‘I’ve thought a lot about this, and I know what I’m doing. I don’t want to do Law just for the status or the money, really I don’t.’
 ‘I’m glad to hear it,’ Sister Benedict said drily. ‘But you still haven’t answered my question. Why Law?’
 ‘Because I want to do something worthwhile with my education; I want to help people. The way things operate here is deeply unfair, and I want to make a difference.’
 ‘But you won’t.’ The nun pounced so quickly with her reply that Helen felt she had been set up, manipulated into saying just the thing that would allow Sister Benedict to contradict her. ‘Believe me, Helen, you can throw your life away if you want, but it won’t make any difference to anyone except yourself.’ Helen tried to speak, but Sister Benedict wouldn’t permit her to do so, raising her hand and continuing to talk. [158]
 ‘You want to defend people who’ve been unjustly accused. Fine. But tell me this, how will you feel defending people who really have done terrible things, who’ve planted bombs or shot men in front of their families? What even makes you so sure that you’ll get into the line of work that appeals to you; that you won’t end up specialising in tax law or conveyancing? Anyone else would be consoled by their salary, but you won’t, you’re too austere. Money’ll only make it worse. Sometimes I think idealism is one of the most dangerous forces there is. I saw it myself when I was in Africa, time and time again. Girls like you, they were good-hearted, unselfish girls, but their minds were shut; it was a disaster. They went out there thinking they were going to help people,’ her voice heavy with sarcastic emphasis now, ‘they were going to change things. And instead what happened was they hurt others, and they hurt themselves. Look at me,’ she said. ‘I wanted to be a missionary, and look how I ended up, sitting here in mid Ulster, arguing with you.’ The nun gestured to the window, where the rain was still pouring down.
 ‘I don’t want to go to Africa,’ Helen said. ‘I just want to go to university in Belfast.’
 ‘But that’s the point, you could go anywhere, do anything you wanted.’ The nun was almost pleading with her now. ‘I don’t want to see you throwing your life away, staying in this – this horrible place.’
 Helen flinched at this last phrase, as if she’d been struck in the face. ‘I like it here,’ she said. ‘This is where I’m from. This is my home.’
 Again Sister Benedict sat looking at her for a moment without speaking, then picked up a silver fountain pen, uncapped it, signed Helen’s form, blotted the ink, and slid the application into a blue card folder. Speaking quietly, as though she were making a great effort to do so, she said, ‘I know you’re going to do very well in your exams. Tell your parents I said that if you get accepted for Law at Queen’s, and I’ve no doubt but that you will, I’m sure you’ll have no trouble with your studies there.’ She picked up another form. ‘When you go back to the library, will you send Nora Bradley down to me?’
 She didn’t look up again as Helen left the office, and it was all Helen could do not to slam the door hard behind her in anger. [159]
 It hadn’t even been a proper row, she thought, as she went back through the school. When she’d argued with her mother about the same thing a few days earlier, she’d actually found it satisfying, because for the first time ever they’d argued as equals, as two women. She had understood that her mother had been judging Helen’s future in terms of the failures and shortcomings of her own life, and Helen had forced her to admit that she really didn’t regret the choices she’d made. ‘Let me make my own mistakes,’ Helen had pleaded in the end, while her mother kept saying, ‘I’m afraid for you. I don’t know how to explain it, but I’m afraid for you.’ Remembering Granny Kelly, Helen had felt a pity for her mother far removed from the resentment she now nursed towards Sister Benedict. She remembered how at assembly a few days earlier the nun had read out the part from the Bible about how when you were young you walked where you wished, but when you were old you would stretch out your arms and another would bind you and take you where you would not want to be. She’d noticed how Sister Benedict’s voice had caught as she said these words. Well, that was her problem, Helen thought. She’d had her life, and if she regretted what she’d done with it, that was her affair; it was no reason for her to meddle in Helen’s plans, and spoil her life too.
 When she went back to the library, she nodded to Nora Brad-ley, who left the room as Helen sat down and tried to settle to her work again. But her concentration had been broken, and she sat looking out of the window with all her books spread open and disregarded, until Sister Philomena came over and sat down beside her.
 ‘How’s Helen?’ she said.
 ‘All right,’ Helen said.
 ‘How did you get on downstairs?’
 ‘I got my forms signed.’
 ‘That’s good. Put it out of your mind now.’ Helen nodded. ‘How are things at home?’
 ‘All right.’
 ‘You had an uncle died a while ago, didn’t you?’ Helen nodded again.
 Late one evening some six weeks earlier, the phone had rung at home. Helen answered: it was Brian. He told her he was [160] calling from the local hospital. He’d been out for a drink with Peter earlier that evening, and Peter had collapsed in the pub. He was in intensive care; the doctors said he had had a heart attack, and had a fifty-fifty chance of recovery. But from the moment Brian told her that, Helen insisted to her family that there was no hope. ‘He never looked after himself, never ate properly. He has no resources; nothing to fall back on,’ she said. Within three days, the doctors were saying the same thing; within five, Peter was dead.
 The last time she saw him, he’d been asleep. She had sat for over an hour by his bed just watching him, and would have stayed longer, had she not been asked to leave. ‘There’s not much point, anyway, is there?’ the nurse had said, and Helen hadn’t even bothered to contradict her. If this woman couldn’t see that the past hour could have been precious to Helen, that it might have been one of the most important hours in her life, there was no point in trying to explain to her, for she wouldn’t understand. It was good that he had been sleeping, because they had nothing more to say to each other. Words would have been a burden. It was enough to be with him, and to watch him. She had remembered how, when they were children and they were out in the car with their father, often he would point to a group of men working at the side of the road, trimming hedges or cleaning drains; and he’d say, ‘Look, there’s Uncle Peter!’ And then he’d pump the car horn as he drove past, and Peter would look up and see them all waving frantically out of the car windows at him. His face would light up and he’d raise his arm; he’d stand like that with his hand held high in the air until they could no longer see him.
 She remembered going into the back scullery at Brian’s house and seeing Peter standing by a sink full of soapy water, whistling to himself as he stacked the clean, thick plates in the rack on the drainingboard. She remembered how he used to take them out in his boat, remembered the day he’d rowed them to the island and they’d seen the sun flash on the water, seen him leaning against a tree smoking a cigarette, while the damp chicks struggled to be born.
 At his wake, she’d outraged her mother by saying, ‘Maybe we shouldn’t be giving him a Catholic funeral.’ [161]
 ‘What do you mean: that we should give him a Protestant one instead?’
 ‘Maybe we shouldn’t have anything. I mean, nothing religious. We should just bury him.’ Her mother actually laughed at this, which annoyed Helen, so that she went on, ‘He didn’t believe in any of it, he thought it was all nonsense.’ She said it loud enough so that the priest, who was sitting near by, would be bound to hear her. Her father gently hushed her. ‘You can’t have a proper funeral without prayers,’ he said, stroking her hand to comfort her.
 A week after the funeral, Helen went over to Brian’s house one afternoon. There was no one there but Granny Kate, who was sitting in the dim kitchen, two black plastic bags tied closed with orange twine on the floor beside her.
 ‘What’s in the bin liners, Granny?’
 ‘Them’s Peter’s clothes,’ she replied. ‘I have to get Brian to get rid of them for me. I went through them all; there wasn’t a stitch that was fit to give to a charity, so there wasn’t. I told Brian to keep his watch; and there’s a lighter I’m going to give your daddy. Brian’s children bought it for him for Christmas and I told Peter not to use it out of the house, for he’d be sure to lose it. I’d forgotten it was there until I saw it in the back of the drawer. It’s all there is to give your daddy as a souvenir. There was never a man had as little.’ Helen stared at the black plastic bags. As though she could read her thoughts, Granny Kate said, ‘As far as the world was concerned, he had nothing and he was nothing, but he was a good man. I loved him.’
 ‘Do you know what I think?’ Helen turned to Sister Philomena, whose presence she had almost forgotten. ‘I think you’re working too hard. Maybe I’ll have a word with your teachers and see about them letting you off homework for a while. Perhaps you need to take a few days off school completely.’ This alarmed Helen.
 ‘Oh I couldn’t do that, I’d fall behind with my work. I can’t risk losing any time at all.’
 ‘But you’re well ahead as it is, and the exams aren’t for months yet. What if you push yourself so hard that you fall ill? Then you’ll have to take time off, and just think how much you’ll miss then.’ [162]
 Helen insisted again that she could cope with her studies. A bell rang in the distance. ‘I have to go now, Sister, I have a class.’
 Sitting listening to the radio at home that night, she knew Sister Philomena was right. She felt worn out, weary in a way she shouldn’t have been at her age; and she’d felt like this for years now. Both at home and at school she was constantly being told how important her education was, that she owed it to her-self, to her family, to society, to work as hard as she possibly could, and she had done so. But now everybody was getting uneasy with the results, they were backing off, telling her to ease up. But as far as she was concerned, it was too late. The damage had been done.
 The music on the radio came to an end, and was followed by the news. They gave the name of the soldier who had been shot the previous night, and for whom Sister Benedict had prayed at assembly. The soldier was twenty years old. Helen thought of his family. Like Sister Benedict, they would think of Northern Ireland as a horrible place. She’d not told the truth today, things at home were tense at times. Uncle Brian sold copies of Republican News outside the chapel in Timinstown after Mass every Sunday, and their father had argued with him about this. She heard the sound of the bathroom door opening, and the loud sucking noise of the water draining out of the bath. There was a strong, sudden blast of honeysuckle perfume throughout the house. Maybe Kate was right to want to go away. Maybe Helen would regret it if she stayed here.
 She switched off the radio, and turned her attention again to her books. Only her History homework remained.
 ‘Describe and assess the circumstances which led to the Partition of Northern Ireland.’ [163]