The Rising of Bella Casey (24 page)
Read The Rising of Bella Casey Online
Authors: Mary Morrissy
He took to staying out himself. He’d rather walk the streets, than witness this last of Bella’s diminishments. He’d have traded the haughty Duchess of the tenements any day for this new abjection, the impoverishment of her spirit. Dammit, though, he missed Fitzgibbon Street, those rancid rooms, that rancorous wit. But there was another reason he was avoiding
home. She was a certain fresh-faced girl by the name of Máire Keating whom he’d met at the Laurence O’Toole drama club. She was twenty-two, with chestnut hair and hazel eyes which she hid under a broad-brimmed hat. There was always a ruffle at her full white throat, a sprig on her pert lapel, a fragrance of lavender dabbed behind her ears. She was a school teacher and a Catholic, so he couldn’t bring her back to Abercorn Road. It would have broken his Ma’s heart; another Casey son gone bad. Máire was a lovely thing, well brought-up,
respectable
. What would she make of Bella’s hungry horde? He did not want her to see them, this shameful secret of his. But that was the least of it. How could he bring Máire face-to-face with Bella? It would have been like holding up a mirror. Here is what you were; this is what you could have been …
That looking-glass gaze was what decided him to finish her off. The candour of reflection. It was no easy task. He’d had to resort to all the Lazarus tricks of fiction to craft that final scene, and all sorts of stagecraft to populate it. Bella had been alone when she died. Unlike her other mortifications, there were no witnesses on that infant dawn when she slipped away, so he’d
had
to invent. He’d cast his mind back to another day altogether, a day of beginnings. The day when Susan was born, when he’d crawled out from under Bella’s birth-bed and saw her stretched out, the globe of her breast on show, the sheets in a bloody tangle and he’d thought she
was
dead. He
remembered the minutes slowing to the dead march of his own heartbeat, the whole world seeming to stop. The loss of her had been his childhood’s most haunted dread; now he enacted it on the page.
He ranged her children all around because he couldn’t bear to think of Bella alone. He summoned them from the night he clobbered Beaver with the candlestick. He remembered young James coming to his door, tears drying to grime on his cheeks, so terrified he could barely get the words out.
He’s going to kill her, he’s going to kill her
. Valentine and John, still babies then, hiccoughing with fright when he arrived – he drafted them in too, then added the shivering girls as part of the general squalor around Bella’s death-bed. What did it matter if it wasn’t fact? It was true, wasn’t it? She had died as she had lived, a condemned woman.
The light has changed. The sky has turned bronze after the sudden vehemence of a hail shower. The 4.45 train rumbles by on its way to the station; is that Eileen’s Ford he hears, back from an outing with the children? They have three evacuees staying with them, bright cheeky kids from London, who will scamper up the stairs, hallooing, and disperse the mood of the silent house. He sets down his pages. If there’s a heaven, and god knows he doesn’t believe there to be, he wants it to exist if only for Bella’s sake. Who deserved an after-life more than she did? He laughs at himself. A Paradise specially constructed
for his sister – now
there
was an imaginative perversity. In the meantime, this will have to do, he thinks, an immortality of sorts. Bella as glorious failure – in life and on the page.
He rises and pads blindly downstairs and into the kitchen. He stoops over the Belfast sink, deep as a trough, and turns on the tap. Cupping his fingers under the cold flow he splashes his face; it brings no relief. His eyes protest; if they could speak, they would scream. When he straightens he is assailed by a lurid crimson bloom. A blood-shot vision and no wonder after what he’s done. But no, it’s only the roses waving stalkily, the garden’s velvety roar. Steady, he tells himself. It’s a mercy
killing
. He has put Bella out of
his
misery. He retraces his steps, up the stairs and into his study. The return room. He puts his spectacles back on, extricates the page from the typewriter and begins to read.
T
he first night home in Abercorn Road, Bella lay wakeful well into the night, gazing at the moon. Clouds scudded across its face so that it seemed to frown as if the very heavens
disapproved
. But the rest of the household slumbered not noticing the recrimination of the elements. It was an odd sensation to lie so close to Mother that she could almost hear her heartbeat, though when she turned on her side it was her own pulse she could hear and it disturbed her. For it was just one more thing she had no dominion over. She watched Mother’s stony profile hoping that she might, in sleep, steal from her some glimmer of forgiving softness. But even in slumber, her mother did not seem to yield. Bella felt the leaden weight of her years, and the downward spiral of her circumstances like a clock running down, that had brought her back to the beginning again, but in such a
reduced state. As the moon turned its eyelid down, Bella thought this must be what it is like to be dead, to have already entered the Great Silence.
But if her spirit was restless, her body was like as a corpse on a slab. As if an unseen hand, dispassionate as a coroner, had stripped her, bared her breast, her Mount of Venus, her very liver and lights, in search of the root of her ruin. That God was
ever-watchful
, she had always believed. Now she felt another presence, this one with a voice. Perhaps it was the voice of her conscience, so long dimmed in service to a respectable life. Bella Casey – for this is how the voice spoke as if she were starting out again – this is your epitaph. That you ruined a life in return for your own ruined life. An eye for an eye.
Even now, months after his death, the thought of Nick made her wither. Regret was too polite a word for it, too lady-like a sentiment. She could dispense with such refined feelings now for she did not merit them. She might as well have laced his porter with arsenic. Had she done so, at least he would have had a quick, intoxicated death, as opposed to the tormented end he had, straining after phantoms. There was no chance, either, of expiating her sin. Who was there left to tell? She envied those Catholics their weekly jaunt to the confessional. If she could only whisper her crime into the velvet darkness … but of, course there was always a clergyman present. And Bella would not confide in any clergyman. The Romanists talked of a place called Purgatory
where sinners gathered awaiting a final verdict and from which they might be rescued by indulgences paid by the living. Bella had always found the idea repugnant, worse even, idolatrous. For how can a soul be
bough
t into the light? That is in the Lord’s
dispensation
, and His alone. But now if she could only believe that there was such a place for her, she would have gladly embraced it. She would have settled for anywhere that was not the eternal fires of Hell. Unless, of course, she was in Hell already. For surely it was the devil’s own revenge that not only had she destroyed Nick with her false heart, but she had engendered in her children the possibility of repeating his madness. And how many years of reprieve could she expect for herself, before the dread syph would show itself again? She was on borrowed time, living in her own epilogue. I can’t go on, she thought. But she did.
When she went to rouse the boys in the morning, Jack opened a sticky eye and cast her a baleful glance. This had been his
kingdom
, now it was strewn with bodies more like a pauper’s ward than a parlour. There was a smell of stale breath exhaled and foetid socks and damp overcoats used to supplement the
bedding
. Mother was already up with the kettle boiling and a
bleary-eyed
Mick soon joined her. There wasn’t space for all of them to eat in the kitchen so Bella brought the boys their bread and scrape to them where they lay. James had his downed and was up and dressed and gone in the space of five minutes as if he couldn’t wait to get away. She did not know if it was shame or pride that
made him so keen to escape. Of all her boys, he was the one who kept himself and his thoughts private from her.
Babsie busied herself with the tea and light-hearted banter with Mick, or as much banter as he could stand with a pounding head. The two of them stepped out together, he already late for his nine o’clock start at the GPO, and she hurrying off to pick up her union relief. Only Susan slept on, blissfully it seemed, as if their contingency was no longer a concern of hers.
Before she sent him off to school, she took Baby John into the yard and splashed water on his face from the tap. It was only a lick and a promise given the upheaval of the night before. They met Mrs Shields from downstairs dragging her own son to the tap on the same mission.
‘Bella,’ she said and nodded warily.
Mother did not fraternise with Mrs Shields on account of the Sacred Heart lamp she had installed in the hall with the
ever-present
light afore it. Mick used to joke he wouldn’t have a word said against the said lamp for it had lit his staggers home many’s the night. For her part, Mrs Shields objected to the Union flag Mother had hung out to mark the king’s coronation. But Bella was grateful for Mrs Shields’ measured salute, comparing it to the reception in Fitzgibbon Street where there would have been some smart remark to the tune of wasn’t it a marvel how Protestants had to wash just like the rest of us. But Bella determined not to dwell on such thoughts. She was away from the tenements now.
*
She shook Susan from her slumber for she would not have her act the sleeping princess while she was under Mother’s roof. Time enough for that when she was married to her Mr Elliott. She dispatched her off to escort Valentine and Baby John to school, admonishing them not to reveal to anyone where they’d moved in case they might be tempted to boast, as boys will, of the high excitement of being on the run. She could certainly trust Susan in this, for as she’d proved, dissembling about her circumstances had become second nature to her in their courtship. She had never once brought Reggie Elliott back to Fitzgibbon Street. She had pretended she was still living in Rutland Place and so when they stepped out, it was back to there that he would walk her and she had to linger by their old door until he went.
‘No good will come of such deception,’ Bella had warned her. But Susan had long since stopped heeding her advice, or taking any responsibility for their plight.
That was clear from the day she had arrived home from the Misses Carolan, announcing that she had thrown aside the job. The very job Bella had had to go begging for. She remembered the
humiliation
of having to don her best, which wasn’t up to much these days, and throwing herself on the mercy of Clarrie Hamilton. Bella had let her friendship with Clarrie lapse; in Bella’s mind she was too closely associated with the snaring of Nick.
‘As I live and breathe, if it isn’t Bella Beaver,’ Clarrie had cried
as soon as Bella had pushed open the weighted door of the shop which gave off a merry tinkle.
She came out from behind the counter and eyed Bella up and down, hands on hips. Then she embraced her warmly. Bella’s hat got squashed in the encounter and she fished it from her head. She had thought it would be bad form to go hatless to a
millliner’s
, regardless of her mission.
‘I swear, Bella Beaver, if that isn’t the self-same hat you bought off me in Mrs Falix’s,’ Clarrie had said unabashedly. ‘How’s that dashing husband of yours?’
‘My Nick is dead,’ Bella declared in a forthright fashion.
‘Oh Bella,’ she said, ‘I’m frightful sorry to hear that and him still in his prime. What was it took him?’
‘Tuberculosis,’ Bella said. How quickly the falsehoods sprang to her lips. Followed hot on the heels by a sneaking admiration for the perverted audacity of it. Wasn’t it a strange state of affairs when she considered consumption the lesser of two evils?
Clarrie put her hand up to her mouth.
‘It’s the reason that I’m here,’ Bella began, dropping her voice though there was no one to hear bar the mirrors ranged about and the preening headgear – large brimmed hats with lacy falls and garlanded with florets of sateen, pearls and cameos, even plover feathers.
Clarrie took a step backwards and Bella could already see a creeping reservation, whether that was owing to the talk of
tuberculosis
or the fact that she knew something would be required
of her. Before Clarrie could fend her off, Bella plunged into her story. ‘You could say we’ve fallen on hard times with Nick gone and all. And our Susan, she’s had her full schooling behind her. She’s a bright girl, Clarrie, wait till you see her, very pretty and she has a beautiful hand. She’d be most presentable in the shop. She even has a little French …’
‘Oh Bella,’ Clarrie had said again, pityingly. ‘The Misses
Carolan
do all the vetting for the floor staff. It’s in their gift alone.’
She sighed as heavily as Bella did. Then Clarrie brightened.
‘Is your Susan any good with a needle, by any chance?’ she asked. ‘We have a couple of girls who do the trimmings …’
Bella remembered the swell of charity she felt for Clarrie in that moment, though it was Clarrie who was dispensing the charity.
‘It wouldn’t be much, mind you,’ she had said. ‘And your Susan might find it a bit …’
‘We’re desperate, Clarrie,’ Bella interjected for she didn’t want Clarrie to talk herself out of the proposition. ‘Anything, anything … she’d be glad of.’
That was when the threshold was crossed, when Bella had become poor. Not when all their belongings were piled high on the street, or even the move to Fitzgibbon Street, but there in the plush splendour of the Misses Carolan’s. It was the weak supplication in her voice, her cloying gratitude and the first frank admission of their circumstances to an outsider. And now, all of that gone, for nothing, thrown over on a whim.
‘After all this time, I’m still doing beads and fancies,’ Susan wailed.
Bella’s blood boiled. Was there ever a girl as fickle? Or so wilful. Or contrary. Though she knew from whom all these traits had come.
‘You left because of that!’ Bella couldn’t hold the reprimand out of her voice while counting pennies in her head.
‘It isn’t fair,’ she had said, ‘
your
Miss Hamilton gave me to believe that I might hope to serve in the shop one day, but look at me, there’s not a budge and others have been put out front instead of me.’
Bella noticed how suddenly Clarrie had become her personal creature and was tarred with the same brush as herself – holding out the promise of better.
‘Anyway,’ Susan said with a toss of her head, ‘I don’t need that old job anymore. Hasn’t Reggie asked me to marry him?’
Bella had felt a seize of dread. It was the queer way Susan announced it. Shouldn’t the news of her engagement have been foremost?
‘It’s not a matter of necessity, is it?’ She had had to ask. She would not be in the dark ever again through her own timidity.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, you know, Susan, sometimes a girl can …’
‘Mother!’ Susan had cried full of righteous indignation. ‘What do you take me for?’
Susan had looked at her with such malice, it should have
wounded her. But she didn’t care, so flooded was she with relief that there was no blot on Susan’s character and that shortly, God forgive her, she would be off Bella’s hands.
But they couldn’t live off the promise of a marriage. Bella had scavenged through her things, trying to find pawn value in the most meagre of her belongings until her eye lit on the Cadby. Her neighbours on Fitzgibbon Street had thought the piano the personification of her pretensions and she wouldn’t give them cannon balls to fire at her by playing nocturnes or gavottes in their hearing. She had not played it since that Sunday afternoon when Nick had done his worst to her. If she had struck the keys, she feared they would only release a piercing scream that would tell of what had been done there. Every time she looked at it, she saw not only that vile scene replayed over, but a repository of her own shaming guilt of what she had done to Nick.
‘Think how much it’ll fetch,’ she had said to Babsie, hoping her new pragmatism would appeal to the most sensible of her children.
Babsie looked at her with frank dismay.
‘But, Mam, it’s your pride and joy.’
‘Pride and joy will not keep us from the poorhouse,’ she said firmly.
But the selling of the Cadby had only bought parole and Bella knew it was only a matter of time before she would have to throw herself once more on Mother’s mercy. For where in the city could
she have found a cheaper, meaner home than Fitzgibbon Street?
With all the children gone, the emptied house seemed to tick with grateful silence, aided by the mantel clock in the parlour. Then the general routine reasserted itself. His lordship, Jack Casey, stayed abed till mid-morning sometimes or at least until the parlour fire had warmed the place up. He would sit enthroned while Mother ferried in his tea and and toasted slices on the flames for him. Then she went about her chores in the kitchen. Bella came upon her washing up and suddenly saw how aged she had become, the evidence of those years apparent in her mother’s craggy cheeks and the whorls of her elbows. It was as if this change had
happened
in the interval between Bella going into the parlour and stepping back into the kitchen. Mother rubbed a speck of soap from her eyelid with the back of her newly ancient hand – or was it a tear?
‘Oh, Bella,’ she sighed.
Bella wasn’t even sure whether Mother knew she was standing there. But then she turned to face her and she said it again.
‘Oh, Bella.’
All their battles had come to this. Bella had conquered her, not with her achievements as she’d imagined in her youth, but with her failure. She fled into the parlour and wept noisily. Jack came upon her in this state.
‘So,’ he intoned, pompous as a magistrate, ‘this is how it ends, Bella.’
She felt a surge of revolt. He was the only one who could summon up rage in her with his pronouncements, and this one in particular, for he spoke as if she were already dead and buried.