The Rising of Bella Casey Page 12

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I didn’t want to come.’

  She stretched out her hand to touch his cheek, but he drew back. If she touched him again, he would surely bawl.

  ‘Oh let him be, Bel,’ the Bugler said. ‘There’s no pleasing him.’

  When they arrived at the beach, he wandered away almost at once while the Bugler and Bella sat on a bench on the promenade. He would not be a witness to any more of their canoodling, Nick whispering in her ear or pressing his hand on her thigh. The tide was almost as far out as England. He sloshed through puddles. His boots were letting in and he could feel the damp seeping into his soles. It was too cold to go paddling barefoot as Bella had promised. And there were no donkey rides either.

  ‘Oh,’ she lamented, ‘it’s out of season.’

  Her every promise dwindled into falsity.

  He stood on the dappled shore, with the seagulls crying out their grievances and even the sea seemingly withdrawing from him and felt solitary and disowned. The courting couple were like distant smudges on the promenade but no matter how far he travelled he couldn’t create enough distance to reduce them to nothing. He squatted by some rocks and felt low, as beadily evil as the slimy ochre wrack at his feet. A crab scuttled from its hiding place, cocky in its ox-blood armour. He saw red. He reached for a large flat stone, smooth and silvered, and so heavy it took two hands to lift it. He raised it high, and brought it down. Once, twice. He heard the crack of the creature’s carapace and the sudden collapse of its claws.

  ‘That’s for you, Bugler Beaver!’ he muttered. ‘Damn you!’

  The oath satisfied him.

  When he lifted his eyes, a shadow had fallen between him and the weakling sun. He shielded his eyes with his hand to escape the glare and in the dark cave his fingers made he could see that it was Bella. Had she heard? He didn’t care.

  ‘Come along now,’ she said and offered him her hand. But he wouldn’t take it.

  The next day the Bugler was gone, posted with his regiment to Aldershot.

  A week after her wedding, the little gate of Hawthorn Terrace squealed, serving as a herald of Bella’s approach.

  ‘What is it now?’ Ma muttered to herself as she went to the door.

  That was the way of it once Bella had taken up with the Bugler, her every appearance was twinned with trouble. Bella brushed past his mother and made her way into the front room, sinking gratefully into the sofa. She moved heavily these days as if she were carrying the weight of the world. It was only when she was with Nick – her Nick, how her lips pressed on the possessive – that she was gay, as if she had found with him the girl she had never been.

  ‘What is it, Bella? What?’ Ma repeated, all panicky.

  ‘I was called in by the Reverend Leeper,’ Bella began.

  ‘What has he done to you?’ his mother demanded.

  Bella hesitated, bit her lip.

  ‘What in God’s name is it?’

  ‘There was a meeting of the Guardians. The Reverend led the charge, berating me for my ‘atrocious’ record-keeping, my ‘waywardness’ with fees pending, my ‘flagrant shortcomings’ in discipline. As if it were a court martial. He made me stand the whole time, despite my encumbrance.’

  Encumbrance – he pondered on these words.

  ‘He said I was unfit, morally unfit to teach. Stamp that on her papers, he said.’

  ‘So they have let you go?’

  Bella nodded miserably.

  ‘Didn’t I tell you,’ Ma said, ‘that you’d sup sorrow the day you took up with that Beaver?’

  He was sent to help Bella fetch her things on her last day at the school. He knew his way around; he’d spent two years in this room looking up to her. Now he felt quite the big boy marching down the backstairs and into the basement hallway outside the schoolroom door. But there was no one to lord it over – Bella’s infants had been released for the last time and she was dolefully moving around the room righting the slates and gathering the chalk.

  ‘Oh,’ she said looking up finally after he’d been standing there for several minutes. He liked to watch her and her unknowing; it was the only way these days he could steal a march on the bloody Bugler. ‘It’s you.’

  She hazarded a weak smile. For the first time in his life he felt pity for her, though he didn’t know why. Pity sits uneasily in a child and he railed against it.

  ‘What do you want me to do?’ he asked.

  ‘Gather those books on my desk and I’ll fetch a box for you to stow them in,’ she said.

  She went to the teacher’s press, fishing out the key from her school ma’am’s skirts and lodging it in the cupboard’s scrolled escutcheon. Suddenly there was a commotion upstairs.

  ‘Did you leave the street door open?’ she demanded.

  She made for the stairs but she had to fall back. Two men in caps were on their way down, manoeuvring a harmonium. The reverend was hovering behind them issuing directions.

  ‘Keep it straight, now, men. Easy now, easy. Be gentle with her.’

  Bella had to press herself against the wall to let them pass as they man-handled the instrument through the doorway of the schoolroom.

  ‘Gift of Miss Eliza Griffin and the ladies of Zion Road,’ the reverend said to Bella. ‘Our Miss Blennerhassett has come with a dowry!’

  ‘Miss Blennerhassett?’ Bella asked.

  ‘Our new teacher, Mrs Beaver!’ he said. ‘Your replacement.’

  Bella stared after him. Once the men were inside, the reverend shut the schoolroom door with a resounding thud.

  ‘You see how it is for me, Jack,’ she said. ‘Banished from the garden.’

  The first he knew about the baby was when Doctor Sloper was called. When the birth pangs started. There was an awful flurry to summon him a full three weeks early.

  ‘So much for the teacher’s calculations,’ his Ma said.

  ‘That’s Nature for you,’ the doctor replied. ‘The apple decides when it will fall from the tree.’

  Still he didn’t understand. He thought Bella just plain sick. He sneaked into his mother’s room and lodged himself under the bed. This was where he retreated when there was too much female commotion. It was darkly soothing under there, away from the glare of light and the blare of rows. But within moments, that was where Bella was led, doctor on one side, his mother on the other, and he found himself trapped, unseen witness to Bella’s undoing. He lay on the floor, transfixed, watching the mattress ticking bulge and writhe over his head. The springs protested. The bed frame seemed to cringe. He tried to gag himself when Bella hollered and groaned. Over and over she cried out, pleading, beseeching, one name on her lips. Nick, Nick, Nick. It was as if murder were afoot, as if she was at the wrong end of a terrible beating. His mother was in and out, flustered and full of grievance.

  ‘The cheek of that medic charging a fee,’ she complained when there was a break in hostilities, ‘when I’m doing most of the work, running here and yon boiling India rubber gloves not once but twice over, as if the place was a sty!’

  ‘It’s the modern way, Mother,’ he heard Bella say wearily but with a hint of admonition. ‘Better than depending on a nosey old handywoman with a so-called lucky hand.’

  He was relieved. That sounded more like the old Bella. But then the assault resumed. He clapped his hands over his ears as Bella wept and railed. Later, much later, he would wonder if Bella had spent the rage of a lifetime in that one long afternoon.

  ‘Come on, Mrs Beaver, push,’ Dr Sloper urged. ‘It’s crowning.’

  As if a coronation were in progress. From under the bed, he couldn’t work out what side the doctor was on. Was he with the assailants or agin them? And what was his mother doing, standing idly by? He would show them! But just as he was about to make himself known, a new cry joined the fray. Thin, feline, maligned. The doctor rushed from the room bearing the cry away – was he a ventriloquist? – with his mother following hot on his heels. He could see the pattern of their feet beneath the satin hem o
f the blankets. Gingerly he edged out from his cave, then knelt, peering up over the parapet of the high-built bed. Bella lay there, head averted, eyes closed, her hair a matted nest. Her nightie had been rent above. Her breast showed, cupped in lace trim. The shift’s nether end was swaddled round her thighs; the sheets were bloodied. What had they done to her? He backed away from the bed. Oh Bella! Was she dead? He felt the weight of every mean thought he had held against her, as if his thoughts had had the power to kill. At the threshold he reversed into his mother, bustling her way in.

  ‘Where have you been?’ she demanded, thinking he had come in from the street. ‘Run along now, there’s nothing here a boy should see.’

  ‘Is Bella alright?’ he asked, heart in his mouth.

  ‘Bella,’ she said, ‘has made her bed.’

  ‘Is she dead?’

  ‘Don’t talk nonsense, child, of course she’s not dead. She’s just had a baby, is all.’

  The first he knew.

  Baby Susan was a full three months old before the Bugler got his furlough. Bella was determined to meet him off the HMS Violet due at the North Wall.

  ‘His first sight of home should be his wife and child,’ she declared.

  ‘Can I come?’ he asked.

  ‘Well, I don’t know,’ Bella said, ‘not if you’re going to behave the way you did in Bray, all sullen and sulky when Nick was only being nice to you.’

  He coloured at the injustice of the accusation. Wasn’t it Bella who had behaved badly, carrying on with ‘her Nick’? But he wanted to see the spectacle of a big ship coming in to dock and the drama of someone he knew disembarking, even if it was only the Bugler Beaver.

  ‘Well?’ Bella demanded.

  ‘I’ll keep an eye on the babby for you,’ he said but he would make no pledges as regards the Bugler.

  It was like her wedding day again, with all the preparations she went in for. Would she wear her white calico blouse with the lace trim, or her brown dimity skirt? Her best linen petticoat, certainly, and her good paisley shawl and her wedding hat, with the feather. For luck, she said. The hat was like a remnant crown, for the rest of Bella was strange to him now. Once he had come upon her and was aghast to see the baby’s greedy mouth grazing against his sister’s teat, red-raw and flayed looking. How had she become this farmyard creature, more animal than woman? He blamed the Bugler; this was his doing.

  It was a humid July day and the streets seemed clamorous and full of threat.

  ‘Will Nick recognise me, do you think?’ Bella asked as the Violet came into view, belching a black cloud. It was a curious question. Why wouldn’t the Bugler recognise her?

  ‘Absence can wither what was once fair,’ she said, answering her own question.

  A crowd had gathered on the cobbled quay. A bustling crew of hectoring painted women.

  ‘Gladnecks all,’ Bella muttered, ‘on the lookout for an officer.’

  There was a couple of rough-looking men, brawny sailor types with bulging arms who lumbered about officiously pushing the women back and clipping the ears of urchins who looked intent on picking pockets. Bella clutched Susan tighter to her bosom, all of a jitter. Echoing her fright, little Susan woke and set up an awful racket, waving her fists in the air, her face screwed up in rancorous distaste, bawling all the while. The ship’s claxon wailed and the avaricious throng of women surged forward, as the gangplank was laid down. Bella was so taken up trying to hush Susan that the Bugler came upon them unawares, Bella in preoccupied disarray and the baby overwrought.

  ‘What’s all this commotion, little girlie?’ the Bugler asked, parting Bella’s shawl and peering in at the child. The baby, on hearing a man’s voice, stalled in her protests.

  ‘What do you think, Nick?’ Bella asked, full of trepidation. Since when had Bella become so timid?

  ‘She has her mother’s eyes and colouring, I see, and not much from the Beavers,’ the Bugler said.

  ‘Oh, but Nick, she has your nature,’ Bella said.

  ‘Loud and likes her grub, is it?’ the Bugler said then pulled her to him. ‘Take off that ould hat, would you, Bella for I can’t get at you with the white feather in the way.’

  He looked away as the Bugler enveloped her in scarlet.

  They sat in the parlour, all formal as if the Bugler and Bella were official visitors, while his mother clattered about in the kitchen making the dinner.

  ‘There’s a deal of pot-walloping going on,’ the Bugler said as the ill-tempered symphony continued. Bella rose and went into the kitchen, but Ma batted away her offers of help.

  ‘No,’ she insisted, ‘you must be with your husband.’

  They ate their dinner off the stiff white cloth brought out for the occasion. The house had been cleaned from stem to stern. His mother had surrendered her bed to the Bugler and Bella and dressed it with new linens but she was huffy with him all the same.

  ‘And tell me, Nicholas,’ she went on as they sat over the remains of the dinner – oh, she had put on a right show – a hock of meat, potatoes and a dish of curly kale – ‘what are your intentions? For Bella here has a child to rear.’

  ‘Well, Mrs C, I’m signed up till ’93,’ the Bugler said with a laugh in his voice for even when he was being serious there was a jocund air about him. ‘And if I stay the course, I’ll be honourably discharged and then I’ll be back to look after my two girls.’

  He winked broadly at Bella. As if some secret joke had passed between them.

  *

  The Bugler’s military regalia was all laid out in his mother’s room. His scarlet coat with the crescent epaulettes, his trousers with the red piping, his cocky Glengarry.

  ‘Try it on there, Sonny,’ the Bugler said, planting the hat on his head. He marched around the house, making battle sounds – the cannon’s roar – and miming the beat of a drum. He slung the dress coat around his shoulders – it bore the Bugler’s smell, the sweet tang of drink, the musty whiff of tobacco – and he inhaled and puffed out his chest. Was this how the Bugler felt when he strutted about? The gold trim and the brass buttons – is that what had dazzled Bella?

  ‘I’m going to be a soldier,’ he declared one evening to his mother, after showing his friend, Georgie Ecret his new props, a far cry from the usual run of play – sticks and stones.

  ‘Not while I have breath in me,’ Ma said. ‘Haven’t I already lost two sons to the forces?’

  ‘Isn’t it a right and sacred thing to serve?’ Bella said.

  ‘Is that so, now?’ Ma said.

  ‘Without the army, we’d all be flooded out with Fenians,’ Bella went on.

  ‘It isn’t Fenians that Mick and Tom are fighting beyond in England.’

  ‘My Nick says that it doesn’t matter where you serve, so long as you’re faithful to the Queen and honour the flag.’

  ‘Isn’t that a grand speech, altogether,’ Ma said with her hands on her hips. He looked from one to the other, perplexed by all the aggravation. What was it all about?

  The Bugler’s leaves followed the same pattern as the first, he and Bella playing husband and wifey in the parlour while his mother retreated to the kitchen. Ma’s chorus of resentments echoed his own. Yon Beaver had no manners, she would start, uses the saucer to drink his tea; treats the place like a barracks, sprawling around, expecting to be waited upon hand and foot; spends more time in the company of bowsies in wine lodges than with his lawful wife and child.

  Bella would counter with her own litany. Her Nick was petrified of breaking the good china cups with the rose pattern, that was all. He was happy to pull his weight, but every time her Nick offered to set the fire, or bring the coal in from the yard, he would be batted off and told to sit, sit, wasn’t he the visitor? And was it any wonder he preferred the rough company of the tavern? He wasn’t treated like an interloper there.

  It would have taken the wisdom of Solomon to fathom the truth between the warring women and he was an eleven-year-old boy. All he knew was that when the Bugler packed his kit
bag to return to Aldershot, the only one to shed salt tears was Bella.

  In the wake of his departure, Bella would sit at the pianola and play. If he closed his eyes, he could imagine them back in a time when there had been harmony, and not the stormy brew that now pervaded. The Aeolian had been left behind by the last tenant. It had once been cherished, but the ivories were yellowing and when you opened the door where the scrolls should have been, it was empty.

  Bella would try her hand at a Beethoven sonata or a Boccherini minuet. He’d thought the music might soothe, but Bella’s playing seemed to fuel his mother’s ire.

  ‘You won’t have much leisure for the piano after you’ve borne the Bugler five or six more,’ Ma would say.

  Bella would stop playing and close the lid quietly as if she wanted to trap his mother’s future for her in the darkness.

  ‘Aren’t you awful quick,’ Bella lamented, ‘to write me off completely?’

  He was attending St Barnabas’ now, a far cry from the order and calm of Bella’s realm. The boys were a rowdy lot; there was a constant undertow of shuffling and spitting and the classroom was closer to the barred cages of the Zoological Gardens. Master Hogan was the ringmaster of the circus, more interested in wielding the leather and making entries in the Punishment Book than in educating.

  ‘Casey,’ he would bark – no first names here. ‘Take up where Ecret left off.’

  He hated reading aloud. He had to strain to keep the lines from running into one another. The Master took his poor sight for stupidity.

  ‘Next,’ Master Hogan would bark before he could stumble through two consecutive sentences. ‘And you, Casey – out on the line!’

  He came home daily with burning palms. He’d learn whole passages by heart from the anthology so that he might be prepared when next he was asked, but Master Hogan skipped about the book, so he could never be sure what chapter the Master might land on. He often feigned illness so that his mother would keep him back from school, pretending that his eyes were worse than they were.