The Rising of Bella Casey (19 page)

Nick halted in his tracks. Then he began to circle the table so that Bella was forced on the move. He prowled around once, then twice the perimeter of the table, stalking her. Then suddenly he stopped, his bleary gaze settling on the candlestick. He swiped it up and came at her again brandishing it over his head like a sabre.

‘Please Nick, please, don’t hit me again. Please …’

At which point the door to the street burst open and Jack stood there with James at his side. The boy must have gone for his uncle when all the time Bella had thought him safely in bed. She didn’t know which shamed her more – that his father had frightened the boy so that he’d gone looking for help, or that Jack was standing there in the doorway witnessing her pleadings.

‘I told you Uncle Jack, he’s nearly murdering her …’ James said.

On hearing the childish voice, Nick paused in his assault, frozen in an attitude of battle and Jack, seizing the opportunity, swung a frenzied fist at him and sent him sprawling.

‘Take that, you bloody villain,’ he said so quietly it came out conversational.

He wrenched the candlestick from Nick’s grasp and brought it down on his head felling him completely. From nowhere a stray memory came to Bella of a small boy smashing a crab to pulp on the strand in Bray.

T
he whole house was up by now – and half the street as well, probably. Bella had often heard marital disharmony in other houses late at night like this; now it seemed, despite her best efforts, the Beavers were at the one level with their neighbours. Susan, flitting about in her chemise was trying to quieten Valentine and Baby John, both wide-eyed at the bloody spectacle. Babsie hadn’t even had a chance to take off her coat. Armed with a bottle of iodine, she was tending Bella’s
bleeding
brow. Bella’s fissured tooth throbbed, but there was nothing Babsie could do for that. James set to and rebuilt the fire in the grate. Jack, meanwhile, was out in the yard, dishing out some stern words to Nick who had come to and sat cowed in a corner like a schoolroom dunce.

‘You’ll have no more gyp from him tonight,’ Jack said when he
came back in. ‘Leave him out there till he sobers up.’

What would the neighbours make of that? Nick corralled in the yard with his birds until morning.

‘This is what he’s reduced you to, Bella,’ Jack said, and with those doubtful words of benediction, he left her to the disarray.

‘Maybe he needs spectacles,’ Susan said as she viewed her father through the window of the scullery. ‘Remember when he mistook Babsie for a man that time?’

Even now, after seeing Nick carted out feet first into the yard and dumped there like a bag of meal, Susan was too sheltered to see what was before her eyes. And the worst of it was, Bella thought, it was she who had schooled her daughter in this foolish optimism.

‘Didn’t Uncle Jack see a surgeon about his eyes? Maybe he could help?’ Susan persisted.

And to humour her, Bella agreed.

She let some days pass before she could face calling around to Abercorn Road. Jack was sitting huddled by the fire, poring over a journal which he clapped shut as soon as he saw her.

‘Bella,’ he declared a shade too brightly, ‘what brings you here at this hour?’

She sat down beside him on the sorry sofa, and glimpsed the title of his pamphlet.
The Irish Peasant.

‘What’s that you’re hiding?’

‘Not hiding,’ he replied, ‘it’s something I wrote, my first
publication. About Augustine Birrell and the hames he’s trying to make of our schools.’

‘Show me so,’ she said.

He handed it over. She began to read his piece about the Chief Secretary. ‘And though our poor children – the Hope of the Nation – will have to herd together in dismal places which a short-sighted yet well-meaning Government calls schools – though their tender and quick-witted minds be de-Irished and stupefied by a system which a paternal Government calls education; though they are taught to admire and revere the things of Europe, Asia, Africa, America, Australia and especially England; while their own
country
is to them bare of all useful and inspiring memories – her
history
unknown, her language unspoken, her music unheard, her achievements despised and her character unloved …’

Bella halted there for she could read no more of this sedition, its ill-tempered tone and the division the author tried to sow between Ireland and the Crown.

‘Can’t you manage any more?’ Jack asked with a curl to his lip. ‘I suppose
Elizabeth The Exile of Siberia
is more your style now, or some other penny dreadful.’

‘I haven’t lost my mind, you know,’ Bella snapped.

‘Unlike the Bugler Beaver.’

‘It’s about him I’ve come. Susan thinks he needs eye glasses.’

‘Oh Bella,’ Jack said with feeling, ‘it’s not his eyes are the trouble.’

‘No, no really … hear me out.’

‘That man has brought you down,’ he said. ‘Ruined every fine thing in you.’

He talked of her as if she was already dead.

‘No, Jack, you are mistaken. It wasn’t Nick who brought me down.’

Hot with denial, she almost divulged the secret she swore she’d never tell a living soul. How sweet it would have been to set aside Jack’s certainties and clear Nick’s name once and for all. But she couldn’t for then she would have to admit to a lifetime of deceit and subterfuge.

‘So what I saw the other night, that was a thing of nothing, was it?’

‘He’s not a well man,’ Bella said, trying to appeal to Jack’s better nature.

‘That may well be so,’ he conceded, ‘but a pair of spectacles won’t cure him.’

‘What am I to do?’ she all but wailed and did not give a fig what he thought of her. He had seen her at her lowest, a
whimpering
wreck and her children goggle-eyed with terror, so it was only a little further to give into despair in front of him. Was that what he was waiting to hear – this final abject admission? Was that what unfroze his heart that day?

‘I’ll look after it,’ Jack said, ‘but we’ll be taking him to no eye doctor.’

They led Nick, one on each arm to a certain Dr Leavitt’s rooms
on Merrion Square. Nick was docile enough. He’d got it into his head that he was being presented to some high muckety-muck to receive a medal so when Dr Leavitt showed them into his well-appointed rooms – the oak desk, framed certificates of his prowess on the wall and an air of gloomy learning about it – Nick stood squarely and saluted. The doctor cannily enough took in the situation immediately.

‘At ease, soldier,’ he commanded.

Nick sat between them as the doctor did his examination. He shone a light into his eyes and tapped his chest.

‘What year is it?’ the doctor demanded.

‘1889, Sir,’ Nick said. The year they were married, Bella thought.

‘And where are we, good man?’

‘South Camp, Aldershot, sir.’

‘Very good,’ Dr Leavitt said, ‘and why are we here?’

‘I am the best shot in the regiment and I’m about to receive my prize plus a good conduct badge.’

Dr Leavitt stroked his bushy grey beard, tinted here and there with the russet of his youth. He was completely bald on top and so the whiskers were like ebullient compensation.

‘And this lady, my good man, who is she?’

Nick turned his head and looked quizzically at Bella. What he saw was a patchwork of his own handiwork – a yellowed eye, a cracked tooth.

‘Some doxy, sir, if you’ll pardon me. Camp is full of them.’

Bella flinched. This was more cruel a blow than any inflicted
by his fists. It was as if he saw through her at that moment, saw through all her pretences, as if each swipe he’d taken at her had been a righteous retribution for her ancient deception of him.

‘I shall have to conduct a further examination,’ Dr Leavitt said. ‘Of an intimate nature. Would you both kindly wait outside?’

Nick looked at her with childish panic.

‘He’s not good with strangers,’ Bella said.

‘It’s quite alright, Mrs Beaver. I have the measure of him.’

Jack opened the door and she stepped out into the hallway with him.

‘What’s all that in aid of, do you think?’ she asked Jack once the door was shut on them. She found herself looking to him to have the answers, in the same way he had once looked to her.

‘He’s checking out his privates, Bella,’ Jack said.

Before she had time to reply to this lewd candour, Dr Leavitt opened the door and ushered them back into the room of scrolls.

‘Do yourself up, soldier,’ he said to Nick.

‘Take him out, Mr Casey, would you?’ he said to Jack.

‘Beaver,’ Jack said in a clipped manner to Nick, ‘this way.’

He had to direct Nick out for he had trouble negotiating rooms with which he was unfamiliar. He found it hard to find the exit.

‘You do know what’s happening to your husband, Mrs Beaver,’ Dr Leavitt said when the door had closed behind them.

Bella shook her head.

‘He’s going mad. I was going to say quietly, but by the looks of you, he’s quiet no longer.’

She blushed as if some terrible secret had been revealed, but it was written on her face.

‘He has the general paralysis of the insane, the GPI, we call it.’

‘Insane?’ she repeated dully.

‘He was a soldiering man, your husband, was he not?’

‘Yes, the King’s First Liverpools,’ she replied, feeling a debt to be as proud of Nick’s position as he once had been.

‘I see,’ the doctor said.

‘I thought it was just the drink and maybe some trouble with his eyes. If I could only wean him off the whiskey, he might be more quiescent. It makes him agitated, you see, more prone to …’

‘I’m afraid, Mrs Beaver,’ the doctor interrupted, ‘we cannot blame the demon drink for his condition. It goes a long way back, to his youth, if you know what I mean.’

But still she did not know what he was driving at. For the first time in her life Bella felt stupid and knew what it must be like to be the dullard in the classroom.

‘You have children, Mrs Beaver?’

‘Yes, five living.’

‘And dead?’

‘Just the one, our Nicholas, he died of the convulsions.’’

‘I see … convulsions, you say?’

The image of baby Nicholas came to her mind, his sudden, awful end.

‘And you, Mrs Beaver, are you quite well? Enjoy good health, do you?’

It seemed a queer thing for him to be making small talk about her health.

‘No sores. Rashes? Complaints?’ he queried. ‘I mean, besides the obvious …’

Her broken features kept on intruding.

‘I don’t understand, Dr Leavitt, what has my health got to do with Nick?’

‘Quite a deal, my dear,’ he said.

The endearment caught her off guard so out of place was it.

‘Listen to me, Mrs Beaver,’ he said, leaning low over the desk like a conspirator. ‘There is only one thing to be done here. You must certify your husband, sign the papers and have him
committed
.’

‘The asylum?’

‘Exactly so, Mrs Beaver,’ he said rising from behind the desk and leaning his hands on the green leather inset with the gold trim. It was a beautiful piece with scrolled legs and brass detail. ‘The Richmond is the only place for him.’

‘Oh, I couldn’t do that. Couldn’t you give him something to calm his nerves?’

‘It’s gone beyond that now,’ the doctor said. ‘He is a danger to himself and to others. Certify him, Mrs Beaver, there’s nothing else for it.’

He opened the door for her and stood sentry by it as she passed out.

Nick and Jack were waiting in the hall. Bella walked ahead
with Nick, steering him towards the hall door. Blessedly, he’d forgotten about the medal he was expecting to receive; otherwise, there might have been an unholy row for he could not bear to be denied even in the smallest things. The only medal that was handed over was the silver for the doctor’s fee. She heard Jack and the doctor talking in low tones together, man to man, as she made her way out with Nick on her arm.

‘Is it a case of whores-de-combat?’ she heard Jack ask.

She turned her head in time to see the doctor nod.

Then, only then did she understand. Like Alfie Baxter coming slowly to his alphabet. It was the pox Nick had. The French
disease
, the syph. Whatever you called it, the shame of it was just the same. The plague caught from street girls who sold their wares to all-comers, who didn’t give a fig for keeping clean or
changing
their drawers. She’d known Nick was no saint when he was a young man. And being away from home for months on end, he might have given in to temptations but he’d been out of
uniform
nigh on fifteen years, so why was the affliction only
showing
itself now? Unless … unless. Previously unimagined scenes began playing in her head. Unless when she was sitting at home nursing his children, he had still been lording it about with
floozies
. Was that it? And then she thought of baby Nicholas. Was that why he had succumbed? Why else did Dr Leavitt enquire? Did his father bring home some germ, a maggot picked up from a judy, that made her little boy sicken and fail? Bella had never
felt such fury. She wanted to tear Nick’s eyes out; to beat him bloody with her bare hands. She caught him bruisingly by the arm, just as he had often done with her. But when she raised her fist, she met not the proud swank of the Bugler Beaver, but the trusting eye and shambling mien of a madman, a helpless
creature
who couldn’t tell his daughter from a soldier, who thought the doctor an awarding general, who could no longer find his own way home unaided. She let her hand fall and turned to Jack.

‘Can you arrange it?’

‘The clutchers, is it?’

She did not want the children – or the neighbours, indeed – to witness their father’s incarceration. Or to know the awful truth of what it was that ailed him. So some days later when she’d signed the necessaries she brought Nick around to Abercorn Road so that he could be taken from a place where no one knew him.

‘We’re going round to Mother’s,’ she said to Nick,’ for a nice little visit. We haven’t been in ages.’

‘I’ll have to wear my scarlets so,’ Nick replied, ‘for I’m sure she don’t approve of me.’

He was lost somewhere in the folds of time, as if they were a courting couple and he was still waiting for Mother’s blessing, a blessing that would never come. Nothing would do him, though, but to don his uniform with the encrusted breastplate and the barley-twisted bugle cord. He wore his railway twills below so that he seemed a centaur, half-man half-beast, ill-fittingly put
together. Bella had held the younger ones back from school so they could bid him goodbye. She’d told them their father was bound for the Blind Asylum. The subterfuge – no, she thought, the lies in which she had become so adept – was primarily for Susan’s sake, who still nursed fond feelings for Nick despite the evidence before her eyes. James and Valentine did not think to question Bella’s story either. Only Babsie remained sceptical.

‘Will it cure him of the drink where he’s going?’ she asked.

When the time came Susan marshalled the boys into a row and Nick walked jaggedly before them as if inspecting a
miniature
parade.

‘Your father’s going away for a little while, to get his eyes fixed up,’ Bella announced.

Nick shook their hands gravely, the man as trusting as the
children
, and all recognising the solemnity of the occasion without properly understanding it.