The Rising of Bella Casey (9 page)

Seán lifts his hands from the keys and rips the sheets
unmercifully
from the mulish typewriter. Half the page stays on the roller forming a jagged horizon, the other comes away in his hand. He crumples it into a ball and flings it at the wicker
waste basket, narrowly missing it. He takes his glasses off and snaps them shut. With that gesture, he is back in the world again. A strange slippage occurs when he writes. It’s not that he’s unaware of the passing of time. From his desk he can hear the mantel clock, its ticking magnified in the silence of the deserted flat. It isn’t that time slows up, exactly, but that the light of other days seems to creep in, making the present seem odd, dislocated. He is five floors up. He can distantly hear the sound of children, playing in the park opposite. At his window there is a wan sky aching to be blue and a weak sun,
tumorous
behind cloud. Inside, though, the airless gloom of the past holds sway as if what he’s written has bled not onto the page, but into the very room, fogging and clouding it. He cannot shake it off, the spell of it.

He is trying to write the story of his life, a portrait of the artist as a young man. But before the artist, there was the child, the father of the man. Long before he had been Seán O’Casey, scribe and playwright, he had been Jack Casey, the boy with two mothers. There was the woman who had borne him, who had, as far as he was concerned, blown the very life into him; her sheer will-power had sustained him as if the cord between them had never been severed. And then there was Bella. All airiness and wingéd ambition set beside his mother’s defiant certainties. What a beauty she had been! Something marbled about her skin; her scent, the cool blue of lavender. He can see her, in his mind’s eye, heading off to
the teaching academy; dove-grey skirt, crimson cape, brooch at her laced throat, and his childish heart agape.
That
Bella cannot be resurrected. When he tries to call her up, it is the wretched Mrs Beaver who appears, the charwoman with the ruined hands, her palm always outstretched for coin, as if every penny
weighed
.

Raising Bella is like trying to polish silver. He rubs and buffs and polishes but what he comes away with is grime. He remembers as a child watching his mother buffing the tea
service
in the good room in Dorset Street. Once a month she would fish these yokes out of the sideboard in the front room and go through the sacred ritual. Exotic as chalices, they were, and twice as ceremonial. Were they even meant to be used, he wonders now. He remembers only one occasion. The chief cook and bottle-washer of the teaching academy was coming to visit, to discuss Bella going on to be a teacher. What a
palaver
that was – you’d swear it was the Queen of Sheba deigning to call. Bella had talked his mother into serving a silver tea. As three-year-old Jack Casey, still in petticoats, he had imagined the tea itself would sparkle. He was crushed to discover that the tea was the same tobacco hue as always.

The silver service was the stuff of treasure. Buried treasure, mind you. Never on show, pushed to the back of the sideboard. Exposure, his mother said, led to tarnishing.

Cleaning it was a filthy job. Swathed in a butcher’s apron, his mother would set to, hands mittened in newsprint, face
clenched in sour disdain. She muttered to herself as she worked – a kind of peeved narration; was that where his
writing
started? – as if she could bully a shine from the duck-billed jug or the urn-like sugar bowl. Whether it was her words or her sweat, the end result was a surface so high it would give you back your own reflection, though the teapot’s belly was more fun-palace mirror than candid looking-glass.

It is one of his few memories of the large corner house on Dorset Street, three storeys of high ceilings and draughty landings. Any other impressions of it came through Bella.
Fifteen
years older than him, she seemed to have lived a lifetime before he came along. She would talk of their first home as if it were some kind of Elysium.

‘Pappie was the named leaseholder there, you know,’ she would declare as if this gave his poor Da some elevated rank. He could have told her that a leaseholder was no more than a jumped-up servant enslaved to a greedy landlord.

The provenance of the silver service was a matter of complicated pride. ‘Oh yes,’ she would say, ‘it was a wedding gift from the Archer side of the family.’ His mother’s people from Chambers Street, more prosperous than the Caseys, were prone to looking down their noses. That must be where Bella got the notions of grandeur. He remembered some years ago dining at Lady Astor’s and thinking how Bella would have loved it. It was a snazzy affair where the food was borne in on enormous silver platters. He’d contemplated nicking one
in Bella’s memory. She’d always considered him light-fingered and the idea of posthumously proving her right appealed to him. (He was light-fingered though not in the way she’d
suspected
; he was a pick-pocket of the imagination.) How he’d have smuggled it out would have been another question. His greatcoat had been taken by a wing-collared flunkey at the door and he’d have needed a satchel to stow one of these monsters away.

Bella loved to inventory the treasures of No 85 – the veined fireplace in the front drawing room, the leafed
mahogany
dining table, the Chapell piano. A memory comes to him of pewter-coloured light, a high window, a brocade drape. He can feel the furry flock of it against his cheek. Or is that Bella’s dress, made of some purple stuff? She is at the piano, her hands travelling languidly over the keys like a woman in a Vermeer. She hummed when she played as if enraptured by some secret music in her head rather than the embroidered pages in front of her, while he squatted at her puckered hem, working the brassy foot pedals with his dimpled hands. A tiny puppet master, fingers in the dirt.

She was sister first, then nurse and teacher. When he and his brothers came down with scarlatina, it was Bella who ferried broth to them. The boys were pitched into the one room so as they would all come down with the dose at once. Enforced infection. Bella was the only one of them free of contagion.
She’d had scarlatina as a child, though it was difficult for him to imagine that she had once been as poxed as they were. He remembered laying his fevered head on her breast and hearing through the pin-tucking of her bodice a silvery ticking. He imagined
this
was the sound of Bella’s heart. It was only afterwards he realized it was her teacher’s pin watch with the upside-down face he’d heard.

The watch marked time in the infant school. Muzzled light of a basement room with the mottled wainscot and the row of hooks for the children’s coats, fumes from the fire’s pot belly. Bella’s drawings on the wall – A is for Apple, B is for Ball – her mottoes on the board –
A soft answer turneth away wrath.
She passed between the rows of desks, a rustle of skirts
fine-dusted
with chalk, the pointer in her hand, though he never saw her use it. In that, she was like his father who had never raised a hand in anger. As a boy, he was parent-proud of Bella. His sister, the Teacher. Even when the other children teased him he didn’t care. He nursed a kind of devotion for her then, heart-scalding and helpless, that shamed him now as a greying man because it smacked of unrequited love. Made him out to be a fool. He shook himself; he would not dwell on it. Back to the fumy schoolroom … the reverend who taught Bible enters the class. Long string of misery he was. The plangent song of tables ceases. Bella raises her hands, palms up, and thirty smocked infants shuffle to their feet.

‘Good morning, Reverend Leeper.’ Greetings chanted as mournfully as evensong.

Bella constantly deferred to him. It was yes Reverend Leeper and no, Reverend Leeper, and three bags full, as she scurried to do his bidding. Maybe she nursed a fancy for him, because he was always complimenting her, making the
children
complicit in his flattery.

‘Aren’t you the lucky pupils to have such an accomplished teacher as Miss Casey?’ or ‘Miss Casey has done a fine job teaching you your hymns.’

Bella would blush and shake her head as if they were a courting couple. If only she had chosen someone like him … instead of the bloody Bugler, strutting about with his peacock swagger and a great welcome for himself. No, no, he wouldn’t squander his time on that waster …

He sits, scowling, before the empty typewriter, fingering the pages, snagged and wrinkled by the force with which he’s whipped them from the roller. When had it become so hard? It was not the first time he’d written about Bella. He’d put magpie variations of her in his plays. Dressed her up as flighty Nora Clitheroe, the nervous new bride in
The Plough and the Stars
and dressed her down for earnest Mary Boyle in
Juno and the Paycock
. He had used her prim righteousness – and those challenging breasts – for Susie Monican in
The Silver Tassie
. Her unaccountable heart he’d given to Minnie Powell.
But he wasn’t writing for the stage now. There was no wand of drama, no costume of disguise to depend on. Now he was reduced to the facts of life and feet of clay.

A memory comes of Bella in her righteous prime. Remember that business with the dog when she was flinty as an
executioner
? His brother, Isaac, had picked up the mongrel, a stray he called Joxer. Wouldn’t the squireens in the dreaming spires just love it that a dog was behind one of his best characters? Joxer, the man, followed Captain Boyle around as slavishly as that dim, faithful mutt had shadowed Isaac. Isaac was his favourite brother, five years and two dead boys between them. They would go off down by the canal and spend hours
throwing
sticks for the dog. The creature must have been the runt of the litter, God knows, for he was a low-slung creature like a baby carriage with bockety wheels.

One day, Joxer went off on an adventure of his own and bit a child on Fontenoy Street. The irate father of the child came to the house to complain, accompanied by the hapless dog who had led him straight to their door. Bella answered and showed Mr Kirwan into the front room where his father was permanently stationed. He was sick then. In his memory, his father would always be ailing. Some words were exchanged and Mr Kirwan exited. When he was gone, his father ordered Isaac to fetch a sack from the coal hole.

‘Now, you know what you have to do.’

Snivelling, Isaac scooped up the luckless Joxer.

‘Bella, go with him. See that he does as he’s bid. And take Jack with you,’ Da ordered.

He had no idea what was in store. They all set off, Joxer tripping busily at his feet. When they got to the bank of the Royal and turned down on to the towpath, Isaac halted.

‘Ah Bella, don’t make me do it, please don’t make me do it.’

‘Say goodbye to Joxer, now, there’s a good lad, and let’s get this business over with, Isaac,’ she said.

Isaac gave the dog a hug then bundled him into the bag. Bella lifted two large stones that lay in the scuffed grass near the bank. While Isaac held Joxer, wriggling in his hessian shroud, Bella loaded the stones into the bag and tied the knot fiercely.

‘Please Bella,’ Isaac begged.

‘It’s not up to me to grant a reprieve.’

How stern she was then about her father’s business. Isaac handed the struggling bag over and Bella slung it into the scummy water. Joxer set up a terrible yelping. They could hear his muffled death-throes as the bag sank into the dark.

‘Why are we leaving Joxer in the water?’ he asked.

‘Because Joxer has done a bad thing and must be punished,’ Bella said.

Then his father died, or they took him off. That’s how he remembered it. He was sent off to Mrs Tancred’s at the end and was having a high old time, so death was preceded by
spoiling. Mrs Tancred had eggs every second day and bought him a hap’worth bag of aniseed balls at the dairy. But while he was away, they’d made his father disappear and in his place a waxwork was lying stiff on a bed of satin as if some ghastly trick had been played. When the time came to screw down the coffin lid, he was fetched in from the street where he was admiring the black-plumed horses and the crested carriage.

‘Time to pay your last respects to your father, now,’ Mrs Tancred said, catching him roughly by the arm and dragging him inside. She prodded him forward.

‘I don’t want to go near it,’ he said. This thing in the box was not his father. He made to run, but Mrs Tancred caught him in her ample grasp; gone now the dispenser of sweetness. He fought against her.

‘Put him down, Mrs Tancred, if you please,’ Bella said quietly.

‘I don’t want to, Bella,’ he said, catching a hold of her
mourning
skirts.

‘You don’t have to,’ she said. ‘Just touch the side of the coffin so, and that’ll be your goodbye. And I’ll give your poor Pappie a last kiss from you.’

She brushed her lips on his forehead; then she bent over the open casket. That’s when she became father and mother to him.

He plays with his spectacles but doesn’t put them on. Without them, everything softens, mystifies. Out of the mist, she comes
to him, cycling on a Shamrock Cycle, bought new from the factory. A gleaming black frame and shiny silver wheels that make a ticking sound. She pedals fiercely, her brow knotted, her skirts as ballast. She comes to a halt before him with a squeal of brakes, her booted toe decorously set on the kerb. She taught him to cycle on the footpath outside Innisfallen Parade. The bike was much too big for him and he had to stand up on the pedals while she steered from behind, her hand on the saddle springs.

‘Don’t let go,’ he cries into the wind, as he wobbles and weaves, his sticky hands trying to find purchase in the rubber stocks of the handlebars.

‘Look ahead of you,’ she admonishes, ‘look where you’re going!’

He puts his glasses back on, settling them on the bridge of his nose, just in time to avoid the fall.

The Queen’s Jubilee was Bella’s idea.

‘Jack would love the spectacle, Mother,’ she said, ‘and isn’t it history in the making?’