Chapter Four

AT TWO o’clock every Friday afternoon Miss Wilson would take a key and unlock the glass-fronted press at the back of the classroom, where the library books were kept, and they would all read for an hour. In the press there was also an exercise book covered in brown wrapping paper, and when you took a book out you had to write down in it the title and your own name; then when you gave the book back Miss Wilson would put a red tick beside your name. Usually it was the best hour of the week, but there was this problem: before you gave the book back, you had to write a composition about what you’d just read. This was to stop messers like Willy Larkin, or Helen’s cousin Declan, from getting a book out one Friday and pretending to read it, then giving it back next week and getting another one out, just for the look of it. The problem with this rule was that last week Helen had made a bad choice, by taking out a book of stories about the Wild West, which had turned out to be really boring. It was the cover that had attracted her: it had a picture of a woman wearing a white buckskin jacket and skirt, with boots and a hat like a cowboy. Helen had read three of the stories, but she had only liked one of them, and she wasn’t interested in trying to read any of the others. She wondered if Miss Wilson expected her to write a composition about every story in the whole book. Helen turned to the list of contents and counted how many stories there were. Twelve. She saw Miss Wilson looking at her, so she leaned over the book and pretended to read.
 The story Helen had liked was about Annie Oakley, who had shot quail to feed her little brothers and sisters because they had had no grown-ups to look after them. Little Sure Shot, they’d called her. She was so good at shooting things that she’d joined a kind of circus with Buffalo Bill, and became famous and rich and made lots of money for her family. It was well seen Little Sure Shot had no mammy or daddy: it was as much as Helen [32] dared do to look at her daddy’s shotgun. He kept it on a pair of hooks, high up in the cloakroom, where only he could reach it. There were three dangerous things about which their mother frequently warned them: the lough, the hay baler, and the shot-gun. But what if Helen had had to use the gun? What if some-thing terrible happened to their mammy and daddy, and she had to look after her sisters completely: would she be able to go out to the lough shore and shoot ducks so that herself and Kate and Sally would have something to eat? She couldn’t imagine it. There probably wouldn’t be any point, anyway, Sally would never eat a wild duck; it was a day’s work for Mammy to get her to eat anything other than fish fingers and mashed potatoes. Maybe Annie Oakley had never shot the quail either: maybe it was all just a story somebody had made up.
 Daddy hardly ever went shooting now. He was too old for it, he said, he’d rather be in his warm bed on a winter’s morning than out standing in the rain and the cold by the lough shore. Uncle Brian still went out though. Even he was careful about his gun: he kept it locked away in a cupboard under the stairs, and in Uncle Brian’s house they usually weren’t careful about anything. The last time Helen had been over there, the baby had been sitting on the floor playing with a tin opener, and she’d wondered that nobody thought anything odd about this or took the tin opener off the baby until after it had cut its finger.
 Auntie Rosemary had said a funny thing a while back about Aunt Lucy. She’d said it to Uncle Michael and Helen had over-heard her, but she hadn’t been able to understand what it meant. She’d repeated it to her parents that night at teatime, hoping they’d explain, flinging the remark out as a statement rather than a question.
 ‘Auntie Rosemary says that if it hadn’t been for the shotgun Aunt Lucy would never have married Uncle Brian.’
 At first, her parents hadn’t said anything. They’d just stared at her, and then her daddy had whispered, ‘Merciful God!’ Her mammy went bright pink and started to shout. ‘What sort of thing is that to say? Don’t let me ever hear talk like that from you again, Helen!’ But her daddy had quickly interrupted her. ‘Don’t go blaming the innocent child, Emily; he’d said. ‘Put the [33] blame where it’s due.’ Their mammy stopped talking and looked at her plate. Now it was really interesting.
 ‘What did Auntie Rosemary mean?’ Kate piped up.
 ‘I don’t know,’ their mammy said, but they knew this wasn’t true. Their daddy had passed his hands wearily over his eyes. ‘I know what she meant,’ he said. Their daddy always told the truth, and he often explained things. ‘What she meant was some-thing very unkind and uncharitable, and if I told you what it meant, I’d be doing something unkind too. You must promise not to ask about this again, and you must promise above all never to say anything about it to Uncle Brian or Auntie Lucy. Promise?’
 They promised.
 Then their mammy had said, ‘Sorry’ to their daddy, and he’d shook his head and said, ‘It’s not your fault any more than the child’s. Let’s just forget all about it.’
 But Kate was bold. One day after that when Aunt Lucy was sitting plucking a mallard Helen heard Kate ask, ‘Before you married Uncle Brian, did you know he liked shooting things?’ She stopped working for a moment and looked puzzled. ‘I don’t rightly remember. I suppose I knew most men in the country went shooting then. I don’t think I thought too much about it; it didn’t bother me one way or the other.’ Helen trod hard on Kate’s toe under the table. Kate scowled at her and pulled her foot away, but she didn’t ask any more questions.
 The wind blew the rain hard against the windows of the classroom. Nights like this were good to go out shooting, their daddy said, and it was good weather for the men to catch eels. The best time of all for that was a stormy night in November. Sometimes their daddy would go over to Uncle Brian’s house for a tea of fried eels, because their mammy wouldn’t cook them. She said they stank you out of house and home for a week, and that if you’d given her a thousand pounds into her hand, she wouldn’t have been able to skin an eel. Her daddy didn’t mind: he said eels were probably something you had to be reared to, otherwise you wouldn’t like them.
 She turned the pages of her book again. Annie Oakley. Big Chief Sitting Bull. Davy Crockett. Willy Larkin wasn’t concentrating [34 on his book either. Suddenly he leaned over and whispered, ‘Why has Davy Crockett got three ears?’
 ‘Why?’
 ‘Because he’s got a right ear and a left ear and a wild frontier.’ ‘Willy and Helen, what are you tittering about?’
 ‘Nothing, Miss.’ They pretended to be interested in their books again. Helen sneaked a look at the watch she’d been given last Christmas. Twenty more minutes to go.
 She was looking forward to the weekend, because their daddy was taking them into Ballymena to buy new water boots. They’d probably have to call and see Granny Kelly too: that wouldn’t be so nice, especially if Uncle Michael was there. She wondered if Sally would be well enough to go with them tomorrow, because she’d had one of her nosebleeds this morning. Helen had been called out of class to go and comfort her. Sally’s teacher had made her lie on the floor and had put the cold iron key of the school gate on the back of her neck. Sally had made a big fuss about it, but the bleeding had stopped, and she’d looked better when Helen saw her again at lunchtime.
 She wished that the bell would ring so that they could go home, although usually she liked school. She was the best in the class, Miss Wilson said; she got the best marks in everything and she had the neatest handwriting. The only thing she wasn’t very good at was spelling. Up at the front of the classroom there was a poster covered with lots of small pieces of paper, and at the top Miss Wilson had written in big letters ‘Our First Day With Ink’. From where she sat, Helen could pick out her own work, blotless and exact. Over by the window was the nature table. There was a bird’s nest on it, and the broken shells of a black-bird’s eggs that someone had found. There was a wasp’s nest too, and then jam-jars with twigs in them, and a label glued on each to say what the twigs were: horse-chestnut, hips, haws, hazel, snow-berries. The fruits were all wrinkled because the nature table was beside a radiator. On the window-sills were pots of geraniums and busy Lizzies. At breaktime every day when the children were drinking their milk Miss Wilson had some tea. Between break and lunch she would leave the tea pot aside, and then as soon as the bell went for lunch and they’d [35] finished saying the Angelus, she’d pour the cold tea into the flower pots, until it seeped out into the saucers.
 At last! One of the bigger boys or girls was ringing a handbell down the corridor, and everybody in Helen’s class got up from their desks. They packed their books into their bags and put their chairs upside-down on their desks. The board was wiped clean while Colette and Anthony brushed the floor, because it was their turn to do it. They all gabbled a quick prayer to their guardian angel to look after them when they were on the way home from school; then ran out to the cloakroom to change their shoes and put on their coats.
 The next morning, when they were getting ready to go into Ballymena, Helen said to her mammy flat out, ‘I don’t like going to see Granny Kelly.’ Their mammy, who was wiping Sally’s face with a damp flannel, pretended to be shocked. ‘That’s a terrible thing to say, Helen.’
 ‘Well, you don’t like it, do you? You hardly ever come with us. It’s always Daddy who takes us to see her. Why don’t you come with us today?’
 ‘Oh, I can’t go to Ballymena,’ she said, uncurling Sally’s fists and wiping the palms. ‘I have too much to do; I have to mind the house.’ Sally was whinging because she didn’t want to go either, she wanted to stay with Mammy.
 In the car on the way there Helen sat in the front because she was the eldest, and as they drove along she tried her father with the same remark. ‘I don’t like visiting Granny Kelly.’
 ‘Neither do I; he said.
 ‘Why?’ she asked, and he thought for a moment before replying. ‘Because she doesn’t like me. Your granny was cross with me for marrying your mammy. Mammy had been to the college in Belfast and worked hard and got all the exams to be a teacher, like her daddy had been, and Granny Kelly wanted that more than anything else in the world. And then as soon as your mammy got out of the college she met me and wanted to get married.’
 ‘Couldn’t she have done both? Worked and still got married?’
 ‘Then who would have looked after you when you came along?’ [36]
 Helen thought about this. Aunt Lucy was still working in the cigarette factory, but then she had Granny Kate to look after the baby and mind the house until Johnny and Declan and Una got home from school. ‘I don’t suppose Granny Kelly could have come and lived with us and looked after us,’ she said uncertainly.
 ‘What do you think?’ her daddy said, looking at her sideways. ‘Would you have liked that?’
 ‘Oh, I like things just as they are,’ Helen said quickly, and her daddy laughed.
 ‘So do I,’ he said.
 Helen often used to think how, if one of her grannies had died before she had known them, she would have been left with a very limited idea of what a granny was. If she had known only Granny Kelly, she would have thought that all grannies were sad and forbidding, that they dressed only in black and lived sunk in deep chairs in dank parlours. If she’d only had Granny Kate to go by, she’d have thought a granny was someone who liked big hats and bright clothes, who always had a book or a magazine propped behind the taps of the kitchen sink when she was peeling potatoes, who couldn’t pass a pram without stop-ping to admire the baby in it, and who had a fat, juicy laugh, so loud you could hear it through thick walls and closed doors.
 Granny Kelly lived in a grey-painted terraced house with huge bay windows, not far from the centre of Ballymena. It was Auntie Rosemary who opened the door and led them into the dim parlour, where Granny Kelly was sitting. Helen felt a pain in her tummy, the sort you got when the teacher asked you a question and you didn’t know the answer, and you knew she was going to be cross, because you should have known. She sat down on the sofa between Kate and Sally. One reason they didn’t like visiting Granny Kelly was that it was so boring. Usually their cousins were out when they called, and they weren’t as much fun as Uncle Brian’s family anyway. They had no garden, no dogs or cats, and the television was never turned on when they were there. Very occasionally Kate or Helen would be called upon to recite a poem they had learnt at school, or to play something on the tinny piano, but in general, all they had to do was sit for an hour like pins in paper and behave themselves. Sometimes as she talked to their father Granny Kelly would stare [37] hard at one of the girls, as if she didn’t know who you were, and she was trying to find out by looking at you hard, from your shoes to your hair-ribbons. Helen hated this, for by the time Granny Kelly turned her stare upon one of the others, Helen would feel guilty of all sorts of things she hadn’t done. She’d feel her face go red, and she would want to say, ‘It wasn’t me,’ even though nobody had accused her of anything.
 Auntie Rosemary sat a few moments and then went off to the kitchen. No sooner had she gone out than Uncle Michael came in. ‘Hello, Charlie, hello, girls. Emily didn’t come with you? Ah well. How’s Kate? How’s Sally? Well, Helen, how many slaps did you get at school this week?’
 ‘None,’ she said sullenly.
 ‘Helen’s a good scholar,’ her father said, smiling at her. Uncle Michael made the same silly joke every time she saw him. ‘What are you going to be when you grow up?’ he went on. Helen knew the answer to this, but she wasn’t quite sure how you said the word.
 ‘I’m going to be an e- ... an e- ...’
 ‘An eejit? Sure you’re that already,’ he interrupted her, and burst out with laughter at his own joke. Even Granny gave a nasty little smile. The feeling in the pit of Helen’s stomach was worse now, but she was angry, too.
 ‘Someone who goes to Egypt,’ she said, as coldly as she could, ‘and looks for mummies.’
 ‘Sure your mammy’s at home in the house,’ he said, pretending to be baffled, and giving Granny Kelly a wink. ‘What do you want to go off to Egypt for?’
 ‘Not mammies, mummies,’ said Kate, who always stuck up for Helen. ‘They’re people that have been dead for thousands of years, and they’re all wrapped up in bandages, and they have lovely jewellery and some of them have a thing on them like a false face only it’s made out of solid gold. Isn’t that right, Helen?’
 ‘Yes,’ said Helen faintly, sorry now she’d ever brought up the subject. She should have said she wanted to be a teacher, then they’d have left her alone.
 ‘Helen’s going to do great things altogether,’ said her father, smiling proudly at her.
 ‘Oh, she’ll put all that nonsense out of her head as soon as she [38] grows up,’ Granny Kelly said. ‘First man looks twice at her, be he selling blades on a street corner, she’ll be off after him, and you’ll hear no more talk of her great ideas, you mark my words.’
 Nobody said anything for a moment then: their father looked stunned and Sally whimpered into the silence because she knew something was wrong. At the sound of the tea tray tinkling in the hall, Uncle Michael leapt up to open the door for Aunt Rosemary.
 There was a mug for Sally in with the cups and saucers, because the last time they’d been there, she had spilt her tea in her lap. Kate helped her little sister, unfolding a paper napkin for her while the plates of tomato and cheese sandwiches circulated. Tea in Granny Kelly’s house didn’t count as real food, it was just another exercise to make sure you knew the rules, and that you kept them, too. You had to have a respectable number of sandwiches before you could have something sweet, and then you had to choose the most unappealing biscuit on the plate, unless urged to go for something nicer (which you almost never were). Helen dreaded being given no option but to eat a piece of Aunt Rosemary’s seed cake ever since the day Kate had remarked that not only did it look like it had mouse shit in it, it tasted like it too. But her luck was in today, for when the plate came to them there was one pink wafer left, which Kate took, and some Rich Tea biscuits, which Helen was content enough to accept.
 As the adults chatted, more warily now, Helen gazed around the room. Even though there was a fire burning in the grate, the parlour always felt cold, perhaps because there were so many glass things in it: a glass-topped table with a biscuit-coloured linen runner on it; a china cabinet containing ornaments and the tea sets people had given Uncle Michael and Auntie Rosemary when they had got married, and a glass vase, which never had flowers in it. Over the fire there hung a framed picture of Grandad Kelly, and even though he had died ever such a long time ago, when their mammy was herself a child, his presence hung over the family in a way Helen couldn’t fully understand, because he was seldom spoken of. She couldn’t help imagining he must have been a rather terrifying person, if only because he’d been married to Granny Kelly. Her idea of her other grandfather [39] was completely different, perhaps because she could faintly remember him, or because Granny Kate was always talking about him, telling them funny stories and then the tears would stand in her eyes, even while she was laughing and saying things like ‘God, but there wasn’t an ounce of harm in Francis, so there wasn’t!’ She used to wonder how her mother had borne her father’s death, because the very worst thing Helen could imagine was losing either of her parents. Once she’d asked her mother about it, very timidly, and she’d looked so sad when she said, ‘Oh yes, Helen, it was terrible. It made all the difference to me, all the difference in the world.’
 His teaching certificate, with an impressive red seal on it, hung in an alcove, and his books, which no one ever read now, were locked in a glass-fronted bookcase. He’d been the headmaster in a little school up near Ballycastle, and on the mantelpiece was the handbell he’d used to ring, to call the children back from the playground when it was time for lessons again. Helen didn’t even like to look at the bell, because it reminded her of the uproar there’d been one day when Kate picked it up and rang it. First, there’d been the hard metal clang of the bell, shockingly loud in the dim room, then Granny Kelly’s cold fury at such a piece of boldness, then Kate crying with shame and hurt at the scolding she got, then Helen crying because Kate cried and Sally starting to howl, and their father putting his head in his hands: oh, that was the most horrible thing to remember! She looked away quickly from the bell, back at the picture of Grandad Kelly which hung over the fire. He didn’t look stern or forbidding in the picture, but puzzled, quizzical.
 Once, when they were on holiday at Portrush, their daddy had driven them round the coast to see Grandad Kelly’s school. Tucked away in a green fold of the hills, it was a white-washed building with a blue door and high windows. Beside the school was the teacher’s cottage, where their mammy had lived when she was small, with her parents and Uncle Michael. It was a lovely place, Helen thought: there were sheep in the fields and drystone walls, and all along the roadside there were hedges of wild fuchsia, purple and dark red. The sea crashed in the distance, and the wind had been blowing.
 It was strange to think of the brightness there’d been there [40] when you were sitting now in a chilly, dim parlour. A small lamp was lit on a table beside Granny Kelly, and the only other light in the room was whatever managed to seep in through the long cream blinds which were drawn against the sky. Granny Kelly had to sit in the dark all the time because she had bad eyes, and suddenly Helen thought how horrible that must be for her. No wonder she was grumpy. If Helen was old and stiff and had to wear black clothes all the time and sit in the dark, she would probably be irritable too. That was what Granny Kate was always saying, that you could never really know what it was like to be another person, and because of that, it was wrong for you to judge them. Only God could judge, because only God could see into people’s hearts.
 But what a relief it was when their father looked at his watch and stood up! Then, their goodbyes made, they stepped into the street, and it was as if they’d been in the house for a week, rather than an hour or so. Even though it was a day in winter and it was starting to rain out of a cloudy sky, it still seemed bright and fresh to be out in the air again.
 They got their wellingtons: black ones for Helen and Kate, red ones for Sally, their daddy and the shop assistant anxiously pressing the toes of each in turn to make sure that the fit was right. Kate would have liked to have red wellies too, but they didn’t have them in her size. They did some other bits and pieces of shopping, and then he took them into a cafe and bought them sausage and chips and a bottle of Fanta each, while he had some more tea and a piece of apple pie, and smoked a cigarette. He looked much happier than he had done earlier.
 ‘I hope I’m not like Granny Kelly when I get old,’ Kate said, shaking the ketchup bottle over her chips.
 ‘Oh, there’ll be no fear of that,’ their daddy said. ‘You’ll be like your Granny Kate, you’re as like as two peas in a pod, so you are.’
 Kate beamed. ‘Helen’ll be like Granny Kelly, then,’ she said impishly.
 ‘I will not!’ Helen protested, but their daddy just smiled. ‘Ah, Helen’ll be her own woman, won’t you, love?’
 After that he bought them a comic each, and a quarter of sweets that were weighed out for them from glass jars: Clove [41]