Miss Purdy's Class (34 page)

Christie was sitting by the fire, hands over his face. Joey could see that he was coiled like a spring. Christie spoke through his fingers.

‘I’ve got to, Shiv. You know I’ve got to. It’s the only thing left.’

‘Don’t bring one of them!’ She was sobbing. ‘They’ll see into my blackened soul, sure they will! I can’t stand it!’

But Christie was not to be budged. ‘God knows he’s had little comfort in his life. And he was a right enough old fella.’

Siobhan sprang up suddenly. Joey caught a glimpse of her white thighs before her skirt fell over them again.

‘I tell you, Christie O’Brien, you bring a priest to this house and I’m parting company with you – for good. I’ll not stop here a moment longer.’

Christie snatched his hands from his face and stood up, so toweringly angry that at that moment he seemed to Joey twice his normal height.

‘Have you forgotten I’d still be training to be a priest myself had it not been for you? For your carrying on with Sean Flaherty? Did you forget I ran away from the seminary for you? For
you
, you selfish bitch. Don’t you think I mightn’t rather be back there now than rotting here in this filth and squalor? You never think of anyone but yourself, do you?’

‘You
hated
the seminary!’ Her voice rose. ‘You never wanted the priesthood and you know it – baptizing brats all your life in some God-forsaken country! Don’t you bring that down on my head! It wasn’t you wanted to go – you had no will of your own when Mammy was at you all the time. Sure, couldn’t one of her sons bring blessings on the family – be a priest and join the missions? Well, Paddy and Donal weren’t fit for it, were they? Mine wasn’t the only bastard baby on the farm, don’t forget!’

‘Keep your voice down!’ Christie shouted. ‘Will you have some respect for a dying man?’

‘I’ll not stay, I tell ye, Christie. I’ll go from you!’

‘Will you? Will you now?’ Joey had never seen Christie so angry. He was quivering, his face pushed right up close to Siobhan’s. It was as if she had twisted at something deep inside him. ‘And where will you go, Shiv? On the road? Selling yourself along the way? Or back in the spike bedding down with whores and drunks?’

There was a long silence. The two stood with their eyes burning into each other’s in the firelight as if neither could let go. At last Siobhan looked down.

‘The
rest
of the whores and drunks, you mean, Christie.’ Her voice was low, and filled with an ache of shame. ‘For that’s what I am and in your heart you know it.’

She sank to the floor, as if all her energy had gone.

‘Do what you like,’ she said pitifully.

Christie went to the door. Before going out he turned and said quietly, ‘He deserves to have the Church at the end.’

John went over to Siobhan.

‘I’ve got some biscuits,’ he said sweetly to her. They’d bought broken biscuits in the Bull Ring.

‘Have you, John?’ There was a deadness to her voice. She stared into the fire. John laid the food they had brought beside her like an offering.

‘Did you bring me a drop of anything, darlin’?’ Her tone was wheedling now. Joey, crouched at the edge of the hearth, felt himself tighten inside. He hadn’t seen John buy anything, but he hated it when she even asked. He didn’t know why John did it, making trouble. He might offer to go out again, down to the Outdoor to fetch it for her . . .

‘No, Shiv. Sorry,’ John said abjectly. ‘We didn’t make very much today.’

‘Never mind.’ Her voice was sad, but she patted John’s arm. ‘You’re sweet to me, John, so you are. Come here and give me a kiss.’

John didn’t move any closer. He froze, kneeling bent over the bag of potatoes they had bought. Instead, Siobhan had to move, leaning over to kiss his cheek. Then she looked into his face. John looked woodenly back.

‘Sure, you’re a funny one. D’you not want me, John? D’ye not need a woman?’

John stood up. ‘I’m going to get some water.’

The potatoes were boiling over on the fire when they heard footsteps in the hall. Siobhan froze.

‘In here, Father,’ they heard. ‘I’ll just get us a light.’

‘There’s a powerful smell on him, all right,’ a voice said.

As the door swung open, Joey saw that Christie was accompanied by a thin, dark-haired man in glasses.

‘He was very bad when we woke this morning.’ Christie spoke in a low voice, as if not wanting to wake Micky up. ‘But he’s holding on. Pass us a candle, John.’ The priest squatted down by Micky’s body. Joey saw him react, just a fraction, to the pungent stench.

The priest took a little bottle from his pocket. He tipped it up, then touched Micky’s forehead. He hesitated and reached down for Micky’s wrist. Then he looked solemnly up at Christie.

‘He’s gone.’

‘Has he?’ Christie sounded startled. ‘It must have been just in the past few minutes.’

‘Well, he’s dead, sure enough.’ The priest murmured some words which Joey couldn’t understand. Christie was standing with his hands clasped. He said, ‘Amen’, and made the sign of the cross. Joey heard Siobhan say ‘Amen’ very quietly as well.

The priest stood up and looked round, and Siobhan shrank closer to the wall.

‘What is this place? Sure, you’re not living here?’ His tone was gentle. Joey did not feel afraid of him. ‘Have you all nowhere else to go?’

‘We haven’t,’ Christie pleaded. ‘We’ve no other home. When my sister and I came over we were on the road, dossing down in the spikes – we were separated and she was in with all kinds of people . . . It’s not good for her, Father. We’re getting along nicely enough here if we’re left alone. Please don’t tell anyone we’re living here, will you?’ Joey almost thought Christie was going to kneel down in front of the man he sounded so desperate.

The priest nodded, seeming to agree. ‘Where’re you from back home?’

‘Tipperary, Father.’

‘My grandmother’s country. Myself I’m from County Mayo.’

‘Are you, Father?’ Joey could hear Christie’s nervousness in the quick way he spoke, the way he wasn’t really listening to what the man was saying. ‘I wouldn’t have come bothering you if it wasn’t for Micky there.’

The priest was silent and seemed to be thinking. After a moment he nodded.

‘I can think of a couple of fellas I can get to help move him out of here. They’ve a handcart – we can keep it quiet. God knows, you’ll not be wanting to live with this any longer.’

‘Tonight?’

‘I’ll see what I can do. He’s no family that you know of?’

‘No, Father. Not over here.’

‘Will we move him out of the room? The smell on him’s terrible.’

Between them, they lugged Micky’s body into the hall. Once the priest had gone, Christie brought a can of water and he and Siobhan scrubbed with a rag at the stain on the floor where Micky had lain.

A couple of hours later, when they’d eaten the thin stew, they heard movements at the back of the house. Everyone tensed. The tiles in the hall clinked and rattled. Christie went to the door.

‘Don’t trouble – it’s only myself.’ Joey heard the priest’s voice and followed Christie curiously.

Two strapping men were squeezed into the hall by the back door. They touched their caps, saying, ‘Evening to you,’ and looked round bewildered. ‘You can smell the fella, anyway,’ one said.

Joey heard the priest say to Christie, ‘They won’t say anything. We’ve a handcart out at the front.’

The two men hauled Micky up, taking an arm and leg each.

‘God now, he’s a weight,’ one of them groaned. And they took Micky away. Christie followed them out. Joey went back into the room.

Siobhan seemed to uncurl, as if a great danger had passed. ‘God rest him,’ she said tenderly. ‘That was a hard life he lived.’

Thirty

‘Lance? The least you could do is answer me – I said d’you want it boiled or poached?’

Millie’s complaining voice drifted to Gwen through her bedroom door, mingled with the smell of toast. Gwen heard a brief, languid reply from Lance. She frequently felt an urge to get hold of Lance and give him a good shaking. Compared with Daniel’s burning, physical energy, he was like a soggy dishcloth. No wonder Millie was turning into such a nag!

Turning over onto her stomach in the warm bed, Gwen decided to stay there a while longer. It was Saturday. There was no hurry: Daniel was away. At the thought of him she felt a kind of inner lurch, her whole body seeming to long for him, like a deep hunger. Sometimes she could scarcely believe herself: she had given herself to a man without being married! And her life was caught up in politics which she knew it was wisest on the whole to keep quiet about.

And there was Edwin. For a moment the shimmering bubble of joy and excitement in which she existed was ruptured, leaving her with a terrible sense of doubt. Every week brought a more angry and insistent letter from her mother, ordering her to come home. And, of course, many of the things she said were true. Whatever had Edwin done to deserve this? Even his letters had begun to sound a little put out, but Gwen knew Edwin well enough to realize that he would blithely assume everything was all right.

She made herself think about all the happiest times she could remember with Edwin: walks in the Malverns, moments when he had come smiling into her classroom in Worcester, how pleased she had been to see him. She
had
loved him, surely? But then she thought of Daniel and the effect he had on her. With Daniel she was
alive
: with him she flew instead of merely walking. It was as if he set something free in her, and it was inconceivable that she could forget it and go back to what she had been, even though she felt less safe with Daniel, less sure.

‘I’ll always be back, you dafty, you know that,’ he said, with his easy grin, after returning from a trip away without telling her.

She’d reproached him gently. ‘It’s not very nice of you – just going off without a word. How do I know where you are or when you’re coming back?’

There – she was getting just like Millie! She’d seen it even at the time and stopped immediately. A nagging housewife was not what she wanted to be. It would just have been nice to feel as if he considered her feelings, that was all. But she’d told herself she was being trivial and little-woman-ish.
Bourgeois
. There were such big things to consider – the class struggle, the revolution. Where were her feelings in all that?

There was nothing to hurry for so she took a long bath. Their landlady was less of a tartar about hot water than Ariadne had been, but the chance of a hot bath was still rare because of the temperamental nature of the boiler. The pipes groaned loudly as the water ran in. Lying in the bath, she thought guiltily about Ariadne. She’d promised to go and see her and so far she hadn’t. In fact, she rather missed Ariadne hovering about when she came into the house, filled with some emotion or other and fussing over her. That’s what she’d do today – go and see Ariadne.

‘Oh!’ Ariadne gave a great cry on opening the door, as if Gwen was a long-lost relative returned from years in the goldfields. She laid her hand on her heart and closed her eyes for a moment. As usual her eyelashes were laden with mascara.

‘My dear, how
very
nice to see you. I thought you’d deserted me for ever, like that
dreadful
Mr Purvis.’

She led Gwen along the hall, tottering on her heels, as ever. She was wearing a deep purple frock, with fussy frills round the neck. The house felt chilly after the warm afternoon outside and held its usual dubious cooking smells, but there was a new, sickly aroma mingled with them. Ariadne was clearly aware of it. She paused, holding up one ring-encrusted finger.

‘
That
,’ she said accusingly, ‘is Miss Hines. Simply
douses
herself in it. I hope you’re going to have a cup of tea with me? I can’t begin to tell you how much you’re missed in this house, Gwen dear.’

‘That’d be nice,’ Gwen said, remembering that tea was the one reasonably safe item in Ariadne’s culinary repertoire.

Ariadne settled Gwen in the back room, where she had so often taken meals with Harold Purvis. As usual, there was a newspaper laid open on the table. Gwen eyed it while she waited. A photograph in the middle showed a truck with a tent-like contraption on the back. ‘Travelling gas chambers,’ the caption said. ‘Training for gas attacks.’ The report beside it said that the whole of Spain was cut off from telephonic communication, for what were believed to be ‘serious political reasons’.

Ariadne carried in tea and arrowroot biscuits and one cream horn on a plate. ‘I was going to treat myself, but you must share it with me.’

‘Oh no, Ariadne, you have it. The biscuits will do me very well.’

Ariadne beamed at her. ‘You always were such a polite girl. Not like
that
one.’ She rolled her eyes ceilingwards. ‘Proper little piece she is. Calls herself a secretary, but all she is really is a little typist from the pool. And the way she walks! You’ve never seen anything like it!’

‘Does she have a lot of admirers?’ Gwen asked, nibbling one of the musty biscuits.

Ariadne gave a fastidious shudder. ‘I don’t like to think about it. None that are allowed in here, I know that much.’

Gwen thought of herself and Daniel creeping up the stairs past Millie’s landlady. She realized Ariadne was looking at her intently.

‘Forgive me for saying so, dear, but you don’t look quite as . . . well,
feminine
as you did.’ She eyed Gwen’s old navy skirt and unadorned hair. ‘I don’t like to pry, but is everything all right? Your fiancé? And your wedding plans?’

‘Yes thanks, Ariadne.’ Gwen smiled, but a blush seeped into her cheeks. She had been on the point of talking about Daniel. He was so much a part of her life now that it seemed normal to her. But of course she couldn’t! Ariadne still thought she was engaged to Edwin. And, she remembered with another jolt,
Edwin
still thought of her as engaged to Edwin as well.

‘I’m doing very well,’ she said hurriedly. ‘I’m enjoying my job, and I’ve grown ever so fond of some of the children. Coming here has really made me realize how much I like being a teacher. Anyway,’ she added, ‘what happened to Mr Purvis in the end? Do you hear from him?’